When Doug was around it was not that Sabrina was not herself, just that she was somehow more herself. The pair were not lovers, or Judy did not think they were. It was not really a sexual thing; not yet, nor perhaps would it be in future. No, the pair of them sparked off each other, not opposites attracting so much as alternately repelling and attracting each other. They would be completely at cross-purposes and the next moment, utterly at one, although never for very long.
“Sam says the guys from Columbia won’t put up more than seed-corn money to rebuild The Troubadour unless he signs over future royalties and somebody else guarantees the loan?” Judy put to her friend, softly without a hint of concern despite the angst roiling in the pit of her stomach.
“How does Sam feel about that?” Sabrina answered a question with another.
“Sam says it is only money,” Judy sighed. “And he wouldn’t be around now if Doug hadn’t shot that biker.”
Sabrina nodded.
“That’s pretty much the way I see it, too,” she whispered.
Tabatha stirred and both women instantly turned their heads to the basket on the table and held their breath.
“That’s what I reckoned,” Judy grimaced, meeting her best friend’s eye. “I guessed that was why Doug was coming over today.”
Sabrina nodded.
“Gretsky’s isn’t worth that much but the land we’re standing on is prime real estate,” she explained, telling Judy what she already knew. “Doug’s had the papers drawn up. I’ll sign on the dotted line and we’ll have the collateral we need to start rebuilding the club. Doug, Me, Sam and you will each own one fourth of the New Troubadour at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard!”
Judy’s mouth opened in surprise.
It had never occurred to her that she would be so intimately tied into ‘the business’.
She would have started asking questions if Tabatha had not chosen that moment to bawl for her motherly attentions.
Chapter 66
DEFCON 2: code name ‘COCKED PISTOL’ requiring the armed forces of the United States of America to come to six hours notice to wage nuclear war. All around him the Headquarters of Strategic Air Command was readying for war and incredibly, unbelievably, Major Nathan Zabriski was standing outside the door of an Air Force shrink!
He knocked at the door.
“Come!”
Nathan was a little surprised to be confronted by a slim, middle-aged, greying woman dressed in a dark civilian trouser suit.
“I’m Professor Caroline Konstantis from the School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. Or rather, I was a fellow at that august institution until October 27th nineteen sixty-two. I hold the honorary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Air Force but I very rarely wear the uniform; it makes me look old and very severe.”
The woman stuck out her right hand.
Nathan Zabriski had opened his mouth to speak but the civilian spoke again before he could form a sensible reply.
“What on earth is going on around here?” She demanded ruefully. “Just after I arrived on the base alarms started going off and I was marched into this dreadful little cupboard?”
The man looked around for the first time.
The ‘dreadful little cupboard’ was in fact a regular interview room attached to the Personnel Wing of the Headquarters. Windowless, equipped with four hard chairs, a utilitarian table on which a black Bakelite telephone handset rested, and lit with two overhead, part-shaded lights, ‘dreadful’ did the environment an injustice.
Nathan blinked, collected his faculties.
“The alert level has been raised to one level short of war, Ma’am,” he reported. ‘I don’t know the whole story but the USS Enterprise and the USS Long Beach were attacked with nuclear weapons several hours ago somewhere south of Malta in the Central Mediterranean. There’s some suggestion that there have been other ‘nuclear incidents’ in the Mediterranean but that intelligence is way above my pay grade.”
“Oh,” Professor Konstantis digested this news with a mildly vexed forbearance. “Are we about to retaliate?”
“I don’t know, Ma’am.”
The man and the woman had shaken hands perfunctorily.
“Let’s sit down,” Caroline Konstantis decided.
To the man’s surprise the woman sat in one of the chairs on his side of the desk.
“From my colleagues’ reports of their sessions with you I recollect that while you were in captivity on Malta,” she began as they settled, “you were befriended by a young Maltese woman?”
“Marija Calleja,” Nathan muttered, sitting stiffly upright in his chair. Prior to today he had attended four ‘sessions’ with senior Air Force shrinks. The idiots had wanted him to talk about the night of the Cuban Missiles War and the Malta nightmare, to externalise his existential angst about the way he and his dead comrades of the 100th Bomb Group had been duped into attacking a ‘friendly power’. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about or to re-live any of it. “Miss Calleja was appointed by the British as a sort of independent person, you know, like the Swiss Red Cross, to make sure no harm came to any of us although, I can’t remember a single incident of anybody on Malta threatening any of us. As for us being in ‘captivity’, when the Brits found out we’d been as betrayed as they had been, well, once they’d stopped being angry they were sort of sorry for us. I think at the beginning some of the guys thought the Brits would take us out and shoot us all, but once Marija appeared we stopped worrying about that stuff.”
“Do you think about her a lot, Nathan?”
“I guess I do,” he confessed, not quite sure how the woman had broken down his defenses so easily or so completely.
“Have you tried to get back in contact with her?”
“No, she was crazy about this guy she’d been writing to half her life who was on a destroyer headed for Malta.” Nathan had re-ordered his wits. “The other doctors wrote down what I said and took lots of notes?”
“I’m not like other doctors,” the woman shrugged. “If a big bomb drops anywhere near the base how much would we know about it?”
“Nothing, probably.”
Caroline Konstantis nodded.
“My colleagues tell me that you are dead set on returning to flying duties, Nathan?”
“That would be correct, Ma’am.”
“Why?”
“Er, I don’t understand?”
“You’ve flown and survived two suicide missions, Major Zabriski,” the woman put to him, frowning. “What do you think you have to prove?”
“I bombed our allies…”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“My goddam mother shot the British Prime Minister and tried to murder the President!”
“Nobody thinks that was your fault, either. In this country, thank God, we don’t hold the child responsible for the sins of the father, or in this case, the mother. Goodness gracious, General LeMay personally welcomed you back onto American soil and has repeatedly, publicly and privately described you and your comrades in the Bloody 100th as ‘heroes’! I ask again; what do you think you have to prove?”
Nathan bristled with indignation.
“Being heroic in the wrong cause doesn’t cut it!”
The woman contemplated this, nodding slowly.