Ernestine Sage McCoy spoke to the woman who had come to the door in the wall-in what sounded to Pickering like fluent Japanese-and very quickly, before McCoy had fin-ished making Pickering a drink, a plate of hors d'oeuvres appeared.
"Welcome to our home, General," McCoy said, touch-ing his glass to Pickering's.
"General is a long time ago, Ken," Pickering said. "What I am now is a figurehead. You know what a figure-head is? The wooden-headed figure on the bow of a ship?"
There was dutiful laughter.
Not only dutiful, but strained.
Neither one of them is in a laughing mood.
Christ, I must have walked in here just before she was going to throw a frying pan at him. I wonder what the hell he did?
Or what she did?
Pickering relayed the love of his wife, and told her that Patricia, the last time he heard, had been going to have din-ner with her father and mother in New York, and Ernie said" to give Patricia their love when he got home.
"How long are you going to stay in Japan, General?" Ken McCoy asked.
"Three or four days, no more."
This was followed by a painful silence.
Pickering searched his mind for something to say, and found it:
"I thought I'd look around," he said, and added, "The last time I was here, I arrived five days before the war was over."
"I remember," McCoy said.
"Five days before the war was over?"
"Right."
"I never heard that story," Ernie said.
"You said," McCoy said, and for the first time there was a suggestion of a smile on his face, "that it was the first time El Supremo ever asked for an OSS intel report."
"First and only," Pickering said.
`Tell me about it," Ernie said.
At least it will break the silence.
"Major McCoy and I were on Okinawa," Pickering be-gan.
And the first word out of your mouth is a disaster, re-minding him, reminding them, that he was busted back to captain after the war.
"... and Sid Huff..."
"Who?"
"MacArthur's aide."
"He still is," Ernie said.
"So I heard," Pickering said. "Anyway, Sid showed up on
Okinawa, from Manila, where El Supremo was at the time. He announced that MacArthur wanted me to go in on the first plane. Of course, he couldn't phrase it that simply...."
" `General,'" McCoy said, accurately mimicking Huff's somewhat pompous manner of speech, " `it is the Supreme Commander's desire that you proceed to Tokyo with the initial party...'"
"Very good, Ken," Pickering said, chuckling.
"What happened, sweetheart," McCoy said, "is that El Supremo originally intended to send Huff, but changed his mind at the last minute and told him to ask the Boss here..."
Sweetheart? That means he's in the doghouse. I wonder what he did. Or she thinks he did.
"Darling, let him tell the story."
Darling? That doesn't sound like a grossly annoyed wife.
"He won't tell all of it, baby," McCoy said. "Huff couldn't make up his mind whether he was unhappy at being denied the chance to be on the first plane to land in Japan, or happy. There was a lot of talk that the Japs were out of control, and the first Americans to land might get their heads chopped off. In that case, Huff figured better that the Boss's head roll..."
Sweetheart? Darling? Baby? These two aren't fighting, at least with each other. What the hell is going on?
"I will give Colonel Huff the benefit of the doubt that he was disappointed at being denied the chance to be on that C-46," Pickering said.
"What's a C-46?"
"Curtiss Commando. Two-engine transport," McCoy replied.
"But what C-46?"
"I don't remember the date, exactly, but it was after we dropped the second atomic bomb, and the Emperor de-cided to surrender, August fifteenth, `forty-five, I think."
"15 August 1945," McCoy confirmed.
"My husband remembers every date he's ever heard, ex-cept two," Ernie said, smiling at McCoy. "Our anniversary and my birthday."
Whatever he did, he's apparently forgiven.
"So on the twenty-sixth, I remember that date, it had been decided to send in one airplane, to Atsugi, on the twenty-eighth, to get the lay of the land," Pickering went on. "I thought about going, but decided against it. There were better-qualified people than me who should have gone."
" `General, it is the Supreme Commander's desire that you proceed to Tokyo with the initial party...'" McCoy parroted again.
"So I went," Pickering said. "We left Okinawa at oh dark hundred..."
"Oh four hundred," McCoy corrected.
"And flew into Atsugui, where the Japs met us with bowed heads."
"I would have guessed there was a fifty-fifty chance that something would happen," McCoy said.
"Proving, of course, that K. McCoy, the perfect intelli-gence officer, has in fact made a bad guess at least once," Pickering said, chuckling. "Absolutely nothing happened. I got in a car-an old English limousine, not a Rolls, some-thing else-and a Jap drove me to the Imperial Hotel, where I reserved a wing for Major McCoy and other de-serving OSS types, soon to arrive from Okinawa...."
McCoy and his wife exchanged glances.
What the hell did I say to cause that?
What the hell is going on?
To hell with it. All they can do is tell me to butt out!
"Will somebody please tell me what's going on here? What's wrong?"
"Sir?" McCoy asked.
Too innocently.
Pickering looked at Ernie. She looked close to tears.
"What's up, honey?" Pickering asked, gently.
She looked between Pickering and her husband for a moment.
"They're throwing us out of the goddamned Corps, Un-cle Flem," she said. "That's what's up."
I can't have heard that right.
"I didn't get that, honey," he said.
"They're throwing us out of the goddamned Marine Corps," Ernie said, clearly. "We're being shipped home. They're taking Ken's commission."
"What the hell happened?" Pickering asked.
"He wrote a report that nobody liked," she said. "And re-fused to change it."
"A report on what?"
"He won't tell me," she said. "But I know it's about Ko-rea."
Pickering looked at McCoy.
"They're throwing you out of the Marine Corps? You're not talking about a court-martial?"
"I'm talking about a TWX from Eighth and Eye," Ernie said.
A TWX was a teletype message. Eighth and Eye meant Headquarters, United States Marine Corps, which is at Eighth and I Streets in Washington, D.C.
"A TWX saying what?" Pickering asked.
" `You are relieved of your present duties and reassigned to Camp Pendleton, California, effective immediately. You are being involuntarily released from active duty as cap-tain, USMCR, effective 1 July 1950, and are advised that an evaluation of your records is under way to determine in which enlisted grade you may elect to enlist, if that is your desire, following your separation. I have the goddamned thing committed to memory."
"This is hard to believe," Pickering said.
"Isn't it?" she said, bitterly.
"I shouldn't have to say this," Pickering said, "but what-ever I can do to help, I'll do."
He said it first to Ernie, then looked at McCoy. McCoy looked at him, but it was impossible to read what the look meant.