"Jesus! ” Bitter said.
“When Jamison and I stole the Ford,” Whittaker said, “and Colonel Stevens caught us, Dick told him it was part of the agent training program. I don’t think we could get away with that one again.”
“Normally, I would deliver a lecture reminding you to tell the admiral nothing you don’t absolutely have to,” Canidy said. “The only reason you’re not getting it is that you haven’t been here long enough to learn anything.”
Bitter looked at Whittaker.
“Welcome to the other side of the looking glass, Ed,” Whittaker said.
“I’ll be damned,” Bitter said.
“Are you going to tell him about our agent-in-place at Fersfield?” Whittaker asked.
Canidy smiled.
“I don’t think so,” Canidy said. “Let’s see if he can guess.”
Shaved and in a freshly pressed uniform, Bitter stood an hour later in the entrance foyer of Whitbey House. He had still not quite made up his mind whether his leg was being pulled, either about illegal Packards or stolen Fords, or whether or not Canidy—and by contagion the others—was a little paranoid about being spied upon by the French and the English as well as the Germans.
But there was undoubtedly a Packard, a custom-bodied, right-hand-drive, 1939 Packard. The driver’s compartment was canvas-roofed, and the front fenders held spare tires. It was the kind of car that belonged at a mansion like Whitbey House, and it now seemed credible that the duchess had hidden it, that Jamison had found it, and that Canidy had appropriated it for his own use.
U.S.ARMY was lettered on the passenger compartment door, and numbers that probably were indeed Whittaker’s serial number were neatly lettered on the hood. A strip of white paint edged the lower fenders, and the headlights were blacked out except for a one-inch strip. People grudgingly conceded Whittaker’s contention that neither a British policeman nor an American MP was likely to stop this car and demand its papers.
Sergeant Agnes Draper stepped out from behind the wheel and walked up the shallow stairs to the door.
“Good morning, Commander,” she said. “Let me have your bag, sir.”
“I can handle the bag, thank you,” Bitter said.
She walked ahead of him to the car and opened the door for him. He wondered if she knew that the car was illegal. He put his small bag on the thickly carpeted floor and stepped in. She closed the door, then got behind the wheel.
On the way to London, Sergeant Draper told him that High Wycombe had been a girls’ school before requisitioning. Then she delivered sort of a travelogue on the villages they passed through.
>
Bitter was having trouble dealing with Sergeant Draper. He had always had trouble dealing with enlisted men on a personal basis, and it was worse when the enlisted man was a woman. He remembered the soft warmth of her hip against his in the Dorchester bar. And, he thought a little bitterly, Canidy’s refusal to treat her as an officer is supposed to treat an enlisted man/woman made things even more difficult.
To put her at ease, he asked the ritual questions: Where was she from? And did she like the service?
She told him that she was from the country—“actually not far from Whitbey House”—and that she “rather liked the service now” but that “before Elizabeth arranged to have me transferred, it was bloody rotten.”
After a moment, Bitter realized that Sergeant Draper was referring to Captain the Duchess Stanfield by her first name.
“You customarily refer to the captain by her first name, do you?” he blurted without thinking.
She turned and smiled at him.
“Only among friends, of course,” she said.
She had a very nice smile. And really nice boobs.
Goddamn it, he thought, I wish she was an enlisted man. I could damned well tell an enlisted man that enlisted men don’t call officers by their first names, and that friendship—of the kind she meant—between officers and enlisted men is against the customs of the service.
VIII
Chapter ONE
Supreme Headquarters