Freddy Janos had learned about the effect of his large, sad, dark eyes on women when he was fifteen. At fifteen, he was already nearly six feet tall and pushing one hundred eighty pounds. He had been accepted as a "protege" piano student at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. He had still spoken with something of an accent then, his father having brought them from Budapest to accept an appointment as concertmaster of the Cleveland Symphony only four years before.
Arrangements had been made for him to stay with friends of the family in a large and comfortable apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River. The friends had also been Hungarians and musicians, and it was their custom to hold Sunday-afternoon musicales, in the European manner, sometimes trios, sometimes quartets, sometimes quintets; and he was naturally asked to play when a piano was required.
After one musicale, Mrs. Lizbeth Vernon, the lady in 6-B, one floor up, a tall, lithe woman of thirty-four, whom he had noticed smiling softly at him when he played, came to him and told him how much she had enjoyed his playing.
And she went on to say that sometime when he had a few minutes, she hoped he would drop by her apartment and see if her piano was in tune. She had just had it tuned, but it didn't sound right, and she wanted a second opinion before she called Steinway & Sons and complained.
When he went to her apartment the next day after school, Lizbeth Vernon answered the door in a thin silk robe and told him that she had been under the sunlamp and hoped he wasn't embarrassed. Lizbeth also told him that she thought he was lonely, that she had seen it in his eyes, and that she understood his loneliness, because her husband, a regional manager for Merrill Lynch, the stockbrokers, was on the road from Monday to Thursday, so she was lonely herself.
There were a couple of awkward moments that afternoon, after Lizbeth learned that not only was he only fifteen but that he had never been with a woman before.
"Jesus Christ," Lizbeth said, horrified, as they lay sated in the biggest bed he had ever seen.
But she quickly recovered.
"Well, I'll say this," Lizbeth said, laughing deep in her throat as she grabbed him, "you are big for your age. And you are a protege, aren't you?"
And Lizbeth told him that what had "driven me crazy" from the first moment she'd seen him was his eyes.
That had been, from beginning to end, a fine relationship. And it had lasted long after his "protege" status had ended. Two years at Juilliard had convinced everybody, his father included, that despite his "early promise," he just didn't have what it would take to become a concert pianist.
He had often come down to Manhattan to visit Lizbeth--when her husband was out of town over a weekend, when Freddy had been at Yale, working toward a degree in European history with a minor in Slavic languages--and there'd been harsh words between them only twice: once when she had come
to New Haven to surprise him and had found him in bed with a red-haired, white-skinned, Irish Sarah Lawrence student who had amazingly freckled breasts; and the other, in January 1942, when he had told her that he was going to enlist rather than wait until he graduated the following June.
Lizbeth had told him--actually screamed at him--that he was going to regret it when he woke up and found out what the Army was all about. If he had any sense at all, he would at least stay in school until he graduated and could get an officer's commission.
The Army had sent him to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for basic training, and then to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for tank training. He had loved all of it, even basic training. There was something about it that had made him feel for the first time in his life--out of bed--like a man. Piano proteges play pianos, not baseball or football, and as lousy as the Yale football team was, there had been no place on it for someone even of his size who had never handled a football.
He had made expert with the Garand rifle in basic training, the first firearm he had ever touched, and to his great delight and satisfaction had proven to be just as skilled firing the 75mm tube on the M4A3 tank on the ranges at Knox.
His record, education, and physical condition quickly got him into Officer Candidate School, and he was the Honor Graduate of his class of "ninety-day wonders."
But instead of being ordered to a tank company. Second Lieutenant Ferenc Janos was ordered to the 576the Military, Government Detachment at Port Benjamin Harrison, at Indianapolis, Indiana. There, a very military lieutenant colonel who four months before had never worn a uniform crisply informed him he was an officer now, and the Army made the decision about officer asignments.
He spoke Hungarian and Croatian and German, and his services would be required to govern a defeated Germany and/or a defeated Hungary.
He had been compiling a list--because of his musical background--of German, Austrian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Moravian, and Yugoslavian church organs of historical and/or cultural importance when he had seen a notice on the bulletin board at Fort Benjamin Harrison that applications from officers speaking any of a list of foreign languages would be accepted for an unspecified assignment involving "great personal risk."
The lieutenant colonel who had told him that the Army made the decisions about officer assignment now told him that his application "bordered on the disloyal" and that he felt he should tell him that he would do everything in his power to have the application disapproved.
Two weeks later, Freddy Janos had found himself reporting to a requisitioned estate in Virginia, known as OSS Virginia Station. As far as Freddy Janos was concerned, it was even better than Forts Dix and Knox. Here he was taught really fascinating things, such as how to blow up bridges, and parachute from airplanes, and kill people with your bare hands.
And then, just before he was to go back to Hungary, he broke his goddamned ankle.
"Hey, Freddy!" an officer called in disgust from across the room.
"Jesus Christ!"
It took Freddy Janos just a moment to understand the nature of the complaint.
Lost in thought, wallowing in self-pity over his enforced celibacy, he had without thinking gone from Gershwin to Prokofiev. He listened to what his subconscious had selected for him to play. He smiled. It was the Sonatina in G Minor, Opus 54, Number Two, from "Visions Fugitives." Very appropriate.
"You just ain't got no couth, Sanderson," Freddy called back, and then segued into "I'm Gonna Buy a Paper Doll."
He smiled at the two women leaning on the piano.
And then he looked beyond them to the bar. Captain the Duchess Stanfield was walking up to it, and she was not alone.