But then they are on her block. And Rio sees her house. The gold star for her sister, Rachel, still hangs with sad pride in the window. A gold star for Rachel, and a blue one for Rio.
“I’ll just go knock,” Rio says, heart in her throat. She climbs the porch stairs, leaving Jenou on the walkway. She starts to knock, but that seems crazy: this is home. This is her home.
She opens
the door and yells, “Anybody home?”
“So, Captain, what the hell are you going to do now?” Newly minted Brigadier General Herkemeier is grinning—not something he typically does much of. And instead of his habit of obsessively straightening his trouser creases he now obsessively touches the star on his shoulder.
Rainy smiles back at him. She has not gone home, she is still in Germany, wrapping up prisoner interrogations and filing reports. VE Day has come and gone, and she’s been waiting on orders to take transport for the Pacific. She’s fantasized about walking in unannounced on Aryeh somewhere out in the Pacific and acting like it’s no big deal.
Plus, if she’s in uniform she can make him salute her. She loves her big brother. She idolizes her big brother. But over the years he has at times behaved like . . . a big brother. So just a teensy, tiny bit of revenge . . .
“I assumed I’d be taking a crash course in Japanese,” Rainy says.
Herkemeier sits forward suddenly. “Good God, you don’t know! Where have you been all morning?”
“Sleeping after staying up half the night going over—”
“Rainy. The air corps has dropped some kind of new bomb on a Japanese city called Hiroshima. It’s called an atom bomb. One bomb annihilated the entire city.”
“Good lord!”
“Even the Japs can’t take that kind of punishment. It’s a matter of weeks, maybe even days.”
“Huh.” Rainy frowns and sinks back into her seat. This leaves her with no idea at all what comes next.
“Listen, Rainy,” Herkemeier says, tugging at the crease in his trousers. “You know the army will be drawn down fast. I will happily move heaven and earth to keep you, but the truth is we are shifting to an army of occupation. And the word is that army intelligence will be cut way back.”
“But we’ll still need intel!”
“Oh, spies are always with us. There were spies in the Old Testament. Joshua had spies! But the whole spying business is going to be turned over to a civilian agency built on the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services. Bill Donovan’s outfit.”
“Wild Bill?”
“Have you ever met him?” Herkemeier asks a bit too casually.
“No,” Rainy says, and her radar is definitely alert.
“Well, he’s really only a civilian, poor fellow, but he’s likely to be running the espionage world. And . . .”
“Do not tease me, Jon.”
He laughs. “He wants to meet you.”
35
FRANGIE MARR, RIO RICHLIN, JENOU CASTAIN, AND RAINY SCHULTERMAN—ROY J. AND LUCILLE A. CARVER COLLEGE OF MEDICINE, IOWA CITY, IOWA, 1964
“I can’t believe you guys came,” Frangie says.
“Like we would miss this?” Jenou says.
“But the airfare and the time . . . ,” Frangie protests.
At age thirty-nine, Frangie Marr is still tiny. A bit rounder than she had once been, but giving birth to three children will do things to a woman’s body. The black robe and mortarboard hat are not exactly flattering, but they have certainly raised grins from her old army buddies.
“Airfare.” Rio snorts dismissively. “Jenou’s richer than God, and I just grabbed a MAC flight.”