A cold voice replied, “This is Colonel Lundstrom, Special Investigations. Get your fat ass out of the sack and be in the guardroom in administration in two minutes.”
Before Kuhn could say so much as, “Yes, Colonel,” the phone clicked.
As Kuhn tugged on his shirt and trousers, fingers fumbling, he was sure that SI had discovered a discrepancy in his mess fund. He didn’t make administration in two minutes, but he did make it in five, dishevelled and apprehensive. To Kuhn, Lundstrom’s face looked forbidding and bleak as the glaciers at Thule, Greenland, or the tundras of Alaska, or some other Air Force Siberia,
Lundstrom looked at him. Kuhn started to apologize, but Lundstrom said, “This one of your men?” He indicated Cusack.
“Why, yes, sir. I don’t know his name but he is one of my men. On the swing shift, I think.”
“Was he on duty Friday morning between midnight and oh-eight-hundred?”
“Well, I’m not sure, sir. No, sir, I don’t think that’s his night.”
Cusack spoke. “Sir, it isn’t my regular night, but I swapped with one of the other men so I could have Saturday night off. Sergeant Ciocci said I could.”
“Ciocci’s on duty now,” said Kuhn. “He can tell us.” For the first time Kuhn noticed the open suitcase. “Say, those look like my thermos bottles.”
Until that moment, Phil Cusack had not been sure what crime the Air Police lieutenant, and later all this brass, believed he had committed. All he knew for certain was that one of the most exciting, fascinating evenings of his life had suddenly changed into incomprehensible horror and disaster. But now he was certain that Stan Smith had been stealing mess hall equipment, and specifically these thermos bottles, and that he, Cusack, was suspected. He didn’t want to get Stan in trouble, but he didn’t want to go to the federal pen, either. He said, his words directed at Lundstrom, “Sir, I didn’t steal those thermos bottles. Honest I didn’t.”
“Well, they look exactly like the thermos bottles we send out with the flight lunches,” said Captain Kuhn. “Same color, same size. Colonel, I think you’ve really got something here.”
“I doubt it,” said Lundstrom.
“If there’s any shortage in my equipment there’s been pilfering, that’s what. A man can’t watch everything.”
“Just keep quiet a minute, Captain,” said Lundstrom. He picked up one of the bottles and looked at it closely. On its base was stamped, “Made in U.S.A.” He lifted the suitcase, and inspected its workmanship. The suitcase was new, unscuffed, of top-grade leather, hand-finished, and unquestionably expensive. It was a very unusual piece of luggage. Pressed into the leather Lundstrom saw a name, Brno. “B-r-n-o,” Lundstrom spelled it out. “Ever hear of it? What’s it stand for?”
“B-r-n-o,” Jesse repeated. “Maybe it’s the initials of the manufacturer.” He tried pronouncing it. “Brno,” he said, and repeated, “Brno,” and magically the sound opened a door deep in his memory, and he knew the answer. “Brno isn’t the name of the manufacturer,” he said. “Brno is a town in Czechoslovakia. I’ve seen it—from twenty-five thousand feet. It’s on a river. We used to use it as a check point on some of our long strikes.”
Lundstrom’s fingers were gripping the edge of the suitcase as if it were a throat. “They do make nice leather goods in Czechoslovakia, don’t they?” he said, and looked at Cusack in an entirely different manner.
“Yes,” Jesse said. “Nice leather goods, but they haven’t sold any in this country in a long, long time.”
Cusack didn’t understand what these officers were talking about, but he didn’t like the way they stared at him, like he was a poison snake and smelled bad to boot. He didn’t like the way that major’s one eye bored into him. Once before, in a bar in Morgantown, he had seen two cops look at a man like that. The man had killed another cop. Cusack remembered, in detail, what the two cops had done to the man before they carried him away. “Colonel, sir,” Cusack said to Lundstrom, “if it’s thermos bottles you’re after, I can take you to a whole lot of ’em.”
Lundstrom was puzzled. This interrogation was making less and less sense. “Where?” he asked.
“Right in my room, sir. My roommate always keeps thermos bottles in his closet.” The fear that he might be accusing Stan of something he hadn’t done at all hit him. He added, “You see, he drinks a lot of coffee.”
“Remember the Cottontails,” Jesse said.
“Do you think—”
“Perfectly possible. They’re certainly the right size.”
“All right, Cusack,” said the colonel, “where are you billeted?”
“In Barracks Thirty-seven, sir.”
“Where’s your roommate now?”
“At the mess hall, sir. Working. You see, it was him who wanted me to swap shifts. Usually he’s off Friday and Saturday nights, but this week he wanted Thursday night off—that’s really the graveyard shift Friday morning—and I swapped.”
Lundstrom drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He didn’t, by any chance, have that green-and-white Chevvy Thursday night, did he?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Cusack said. “You see, it belongs to his girl. Betty Jo isn’t my girl. She’s Stan’s. It just so happens that she couldn’t find me a date tonight, and I was over at her house, and she asked me—”
“Never mind,” said Lundstrom. “Let’s go over to Thirty-seven. You come with me, Major Price. And you, Fischer. The rest of you stay here. We don’t want any mob scene.”
They drove in Lundstrom’s staff sedan to the barracks. One airman was awake. Clad in pajama bottoms, and probably suffering from insomnia, he was reading through a stack of magazines in the recreation room. He glanced up, curiously, as Cusack led them upstairs. He started to ask a question, noted the colonel’s eagles, and decided against it. With brass prowling around, it was best to keep your nose in a magazine and hope that the flap was none of your concern.
The closet of Cusack’s roommate, Colonel Lundstrom noted, was immaculate, everything there and everything in its place, as a good soldier’s should be. Dress shirts and jackets were clean and properly hung, chevrons neatly sewed. Trousers properly pressed. The shoes on the floor gleamed and were aligned straight as a squad at right dress. In a corner, behind the shoes and hidden by the shadow of the trousers, stood two thermos bottles. They should not have been there.
Lundstrom said, “There they are.”
Cusack looked and said, “Say, there were five this morning.”
Lundstrom leaned over and picked up one of the bottles. He cradled it gingerly, like a man holding a new-born baby for the first time, in both hands. It was quite heavy, about as heavy as if filled with liquid. He shook it gently close to his ear. Nobody heard any liquid slosh around.
Fischer said, “Don’t try to open it, sir. It could be booby-trapped. Let me take it over to ordnance and go into it from the rear. I had a course in stuff like this. Anti-sabotage.”
“You take this one, I’ll keep the other,” said Lundstrom.
Fischer took the bottle. He understood that the colonel was keeping the other in case something happened to this one, and to him. Fischer said, “I’ll do it as fast as I can, sir, with safety. Then I’ll come back.”
“Okay, Lieutenant,” Lundstrom said. “Don’t trip. Take it easy.”
Jesse looked at his watch: 0415. Between 0530 and six o’clock, he guessed, the flight line would send over to the mess hall for box lunches for twelve morning missions. “How long will it take?” he asked.
Fischer was already out of the door. He turned and said, “Thirty to forty-five minutes, I hope.”
After Fischer was gone Lundstrom turned to Cusack. “All right,” he said, “sit down there on the bed and tell me everything you know about your roommate—what’s his name?”