"No," he said.
"I often think about it," she said.
"I don't know what you're talking about," McCoy said.
Fuck you, lady. You get to screw old McCoy just once. I'm not about to start up anything with you again!
"Don't you really?" Ellen asked, and then sat forward on the seat to give the driver instructions: "Stay on Pennsylvania," she ordered. "It's faster this time of day."
"Yes, ma'am," the driver said.
When she slid back against the seat, her hand went under the skirt of McCoy's tunic and closed around his erection.
"Liar," she said softly.
"For God's sake," he said, pushing her hand away.
"Pity there's not more time, isn't it? But you won't be gone all that long, will you?"
At least with her, I know what she's after. It's not like with Pick's rich-bitch friend.
And thirty minutes in the sack with the old vacuum cleaner, and I won't even be able to remember Miss Ernestine Sage's name, much less remember what she looked like.
"No," he said. "A couple of weeks, is all. No more than three."
"That'll give us both something to look forward to, won't it?" Ellen Feller said.
McCoy reached out for her hand and put it back under the skirt of his blouse.
Chapter Fifteen
(One)
The Madison Suite
The Lafayette Hotel, Washington, D.C.
1410 Hours, 7 December 1941
Until this week, airplanes for Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, USMCR, had been something like taxi cabs. They were there. When you needed to go somewhere you got in one and it took you.
That changed. The Navy medico (more properly, flight surgeon, which Pickering thought had a nice aeronautical ring to it) told him that he met the physical standards laid down for Naval aviators. General McInemey's senior aide-de-camp, himself a dashing Naval aviator with wings of gold, then explained that while there might officially be, say, fifty would-be birdmen in any course of Primary Flight Instruction at the Pensacola Naval Air Station (Flight training for Marine aviators is conducted by the U.S. Navy. Marine aviators wear the same gold wings as Naval aviators), that was something of a fiction. More than the prescribed number were routinely ordered to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Experience had taught that a number of students would quickly prove themselves incapable of learning how to fly. By sending extras, the Corps wound up with the desired number after the inept had bilged out.
General Mclnerney was in a position to have Pickering sent as a member of the supernumeraries. Pickering knew his mother would have a fit when she heard that he was to become an aviator, which was a problem that would be a bit difficult to handle. On the other hand, there was a positive appeal about the prospect of swapping the slush-filled streets of Washington for the white sandy beaches of Pensacola.
On the way home from Anacostia Naval Air Station in McCoy's LaSalle on Friday evening, he stopped at a bookstore, asked for books on aviation (starting with the theory of flight), and bought half a dozen that looked promising.
He was now reading one of them, one with a lot of drawings. The others, stacked up beside his chair, waited for his attention. A small table beside him held a silver pot of coffee. He was attired for a more primitive means of transportation than he was reading about: A tweed jacket with leather patches over the elbows; a plaid cotton shirt open at the collar; a pair of pink breeches; and a pair of Hailey Smythe riding boots, which rested on a pillow (to preserve the furniture) on the coffee table before him.
He had spent the morning in Virginia aboard a horse. Sort of a fox hunt without either the fox or the ceremony that went with a hunt. Just half a dozen riders riding about the countryside, jumping fences of opportunity.
They were going to sit around in the afternoon and get smashed. Rather nobly, he thought, he had pleaded the press of duty and returned to the hotel to read the airplane books.
The telephone rang, and he looked around for it, a look of annoyance crossing his face as he spotted it, ten feet out of reach. It had taken him some effort to reach his present comfortable position, with his feet just so, and his back just so, and with The Miracle of Flight propped up just so on his belly.
He had just begun to grasp the notion that aircraft are lifted into the air because there is less pressure on the upper (curved, and thus longer) portion of a wing than there is on the bottom (flat, and thus shorter) portion of a wing. As the wing moves through the air, it simply follows the path of least resistance, upward, and hauls the airplane along with it. He wasn't entirely sure he fully understood this. He was sure, however, that he didn't want to chat just now with whomever was on the phone, especially since he had to get up to go answer it.
"Yes?" he snapped impatiently, "what is it?"
Oh, shit! It's probably General Mclnerney. And I was supposed to have answered that, "Lieutenant Pickering speaking."
"Pick?"
It was a female. And a half-second later, he knew which one.
"Hello, Ernie," he said.
"Are you alone? Can you talk?" Ernestine Sage said.
"You have interrupted a splendid orgy, but what's on your mind?"
"I want to talk to you," Ernie Sage said.
"Then talk," he said. "Just make it quick."
"I'll be right up," Ernie Sage said.
"You're here?" he asked, genuinely surprised. "In the hotel?"
"I just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I'd just pop in," she said, and the phone went dead.
Between the time she hung up and the time he answered her knock at the door, he had considered the possibilities: Certainly this had to do with Ken McCoy. But what would bring Ernie all the way to Washington except true love? And the possibility, not as astonishing when there was time to think it over, that Ernie was in the family way. Could she be sure, so soon? To the best of his recollection, it took several months to be sure about that. It hadn't been that long since he had seen Juliet kissing Romeo in the Grand Central Oyster Bar.
"Hi," Ernie said, when he opened the door. "Don't you look horsey?"
For the first time in a long time, Pickering looked at her as a female, and not as part of the woodwork.
Damned good-looking, he judged. Marvelous knockers. They had obviously grown a good deal since (he now remembered with somewhat startling clarity) he had last seen them, looking down her bathing suit in Boca Raton. He and Ernie must have been thirteen or fourteen at the time. "Come into my den, as the spider said to the fly." "You're a hard man to find," she said. "I called your mother, or tried to, and they said she was in Hawaii. So I called your grandfather, and he told me where you were."
"Why do I suspect that you weren't suddenly overcome with an irresistible urge to see me?" Pickering asked. She looked into his face. "Where is he?" she asked.
"Where's who?"
"Come on, Pick," she said.
"Ken, you mean?"
"Where is he?"
"In Hawaii, too, come to think of it," Pick said.
"Oh, hell," she said.
"Not to worry," he said. "He will be back."
She looked at his face.
"That's important to you, isn't it?" Pickering asked.
"Don't be a shit about this, Pick, please," Ernie Sage said.
"Okay," he said. "It will be an effort, obviously."
"Do you have something I could have to drink?"
He gestured to the bar.
"Help yourself," he said.
She walked to the bar and made herself a Scotch.
"You want one?" she asked.
"I want one, but… oh, what the hell. Yes, please."
She made him a drink, handed it to him, and then sat down on a couch and stirred the ice cubes in her glass with her index finger.