Pickering reached into his uniform jacket pocket and handed Stecker a copy of his orders.
"I’mawed, too," Stecker said, after he read them.
"You don’t have to be awed, but I thought I should show them to you."
"What do you want with me?" Stecker asked, as he handed the orders back. "You didn’t come from Washington to see me?"
"To tell you the truth, it wasn’t until that self-important young man told me that General Davies was not available that I remembered that Doc Mclnerney told me you were out here someplace."
"You’ve seen Doc?"
"Sure have. And I got another interesting bit of information from him. Our boys are roommates at Pensacola."
"I’ll be damned!" Stecker said. "How about that?"
"It would seem, Dutch, that we’re getting to be a pair of old men, old enough to have kids who rate salutes."
"I don’t know about you, Captain," Stecker said dryly, "but I still feel pretty spry. Too spry to be sitting behind a desk."
"They don’t want us for anything else, Dutch," Pickering said. "Mac made that painfully clear to me. We’re relics from another time, another war."
"How’d you wind up in the Navy? Or is that one of those questions I’m not supposed to ask?"
"I tried to come back in the Corps. I went to see Mac. He made it pretty plain that I would be of no use to the Corps. Then Frank Knox offered me a job working for him, as sort of a glorified gofer, and I took it. I jumped at it."
"FrankKnox? The one I think of nearly reverently as Secretary Knox?"
"You’d like him, Dutch. He was a sergeant in the Rough Riders. Good man."
"And you’re out here for him?"
"Yeah. I’ll tell you about it over lunch. Let’s go over to the Coronado Beach Hotel. They generally have nice lunches."
"They generally have great lunches, and everybody knows about them, and you need a reservation. I don’t think we could get in. We could eat at the club here."
"Indulge me, Dutch," Pickering said. "It isn’t only the food I’m thinking of."
"You want to see somebody else?"
"I’m about to appoint you-I’d really rather have gotten into all this over lunch-the Secretary of the Navy’s Special Representative to See that Carlson’s Raiders Get What They Want. You know about the Raiders?"
"I’m already the General’s man who does that," Stecker said. "Is that why you’re here?"
Pickering nodded. "So much the better, then. The Navy brass are as curious as a bunch of old maids about what I’m doing here. It will get back to them that I had lunch in the Coronado with you. It might come in handy for them to remember you have friends in very high places when you’re asking for something outrageous for the Raiders."
Stecker looked at Pickering for a moment, until he concluded that Pickering was both serious and right.
"OK. But first we have to get from here to the hotel, and my car may not start. Bad battery, I think. I had to push it off this morning."
"The Admiral’s aide met my plane and graciously gave me the use of the Admiral’s car for as long as I need it," Pickering said.
"And then we have to get in the dining room."
"I think I can handle that," Pickering said. "Can I have your sergeant make a call for me?"
"Sure," Stecker said, and called the sergeant into the office.
"Yes, Sir?"
"Sergeant," Pickering said, "would you call the dining room at the Coronado Beach for me, please? Tell the maitre d’ that Captain Stecker and myself are on the way over there, and that I would like a private table overlooking the pool. My name is Fleming Pickering."
"Aye, aye, Sir," the sergeant said. "A private table, Sir?"
"They’ll know what I mean, Sergeant," Pickering said. "They’ll move other tables away from mine, so that other people won’t be able to hear what Captain Stecker and I are talking about."
"Why is this making me nervous?" Stecker asked.
"I have no idea," Pickering said. "Maybe because you’re getting old, Dutch."
"If there are any calls for me, Sergeant, tell them that I went off with Captain Pickering of Secretary Knox’s office, and you have no idea where I went or when I’ll be back."
Pickering chuckled. "You’re a quick learner, Dutch, aren’t you?"
"For an old man," Stecker said.
(Five)
United States Naval Hospital
San Diego, California
1515 Hours 2 February 1942
"Tell me, Sergeant," the Navy doctor, a full commander, said to Staff Sergeant Joseph L. Howard, "do you suffer from syphilis?"
"No, Sir."
"How about gonorrhea?" Commander Nettleton asked.
"No, Sir."
Commander K. J. Nettleton, MC, USN, was a career naval officer. In his fifteen years of service, he had discussed venereal disease with maybe fifteen thousand Navy and Marine Corps enlisted men. In his experience, it was seldom possible to judge from an enlisted man’s appearance whether he had been diving the salami into seas of spirochetes or not.
He had treated angelic-looking boys who-as their advanced state of social disease clearly proved-had been sowing their seed in any cavity that could be induced to hold still for twenty seconds. And he’d treated leather-skinned chief bosun’s mates and mastery gunnery sergeants who had not strayed from the marital bed in twenty years, yet were hysterically convinced that a little urethral drip was God finally making them pay for a single indiscretion two decades ago in Gitmo or Shanghai or Newport.
But it was also Dr. Nettleton’s experience that when regular sailors and Marines-sergeants and petty officers on their second or third or fourth hitch-contracted a venereal disease somewhere along the line, they tried to get their hands on their medical records so they could remove and destroy that portion dealing with their venereal history. They had learned how the services subtly and cruelly treated men with social diseases.
His experience told him that’s what he had at hand, in the person of Staff Sergeant Joseph Howard, USMC. Sergeant Howard was taking a pre-commissioning physical. That meant he had applied for a commission. An Officer Selection Board was likely to turn down an applicant who had a history of VD, even one who was obviously a good Marine. You didn’t get to wear staff sergeant’s chevrons as young as this kid was without being one hell of a Marine-and one who looked like he belonged on a recruiting poster.
"Sergeant," he said, "if anyone was to hear what I am about to say, I would deny it."
"Sir?" Howard asked, confused.
"There are ways to handle difficult situations, " Commander Nettleton said. "But destroying your records is not one of them. Now, what did you have, and when did you have it?"
"Sir, if you mean syphilis or the clap, I never did."
Nettleton fixed Howard with an icy glare.
You dumb sonofabitch, I just told you I’d fix it!
"Never?"
"No, Sir," Howard replied, both confused and righteously indignant.
I’ll be damned, I think he’s telling the truth.’
‘Then how do you explain the absence of the results of your Wassermann test in this otherwise complete stack of reports?"
Staff Sergeant Howard did not reply.