Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Comment: publishers@cox.net

Go to Chapter:  
 1    2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25  
26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44  

Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

24.

April 1945

The geography of their new common world quickly defined itself. Corie worked at a secret installation somewhere in the vast tangle of Navy facilities along the coastline. Sometimes she was gone for days at a time, other times she had time off to go shopping or lie around her apartment doing her nails and listening to show tunes while sipping cold juleps.

He worked regular hours, starting at seven and ending at four-thirty, with an hour off for lunch. His time was regulated by the blare of production whistles in the shipyards along the harbor line and the repair facilities near the Presidio. San Francisco had become the war, and the war had become San Francisco. It wasn’t like that for those less in less cushy luck that were fighting and dying on remote, sun-baked atolls in the Pacific. Same went for the Allied occupiers mopping up the ruins of Germany with its Werewolf teenagers, its fanatical Nazi sympathizers, and its secret Alpine redoubts. Tim had seen enough of war and was content to be part of this city that daily grew a little more assured of victory. Already the flags of peace flew as the city girded herself for the founding of the United Nations.

Then there was the roommate, who was intriguing in her own right.

Holding hands one evening, Tim and Corie wandered into the mausoleal halls of the Hotel Auger. They walked up the stairs, through the French doors, and into the upper lobby where the concierge desk dominated the landscape. At the moment the lobby was dim, the concierge desk empty, and only a green-shaded banker’s lamp lit by the switchboard to indicate that someone was on duty and available if needed—probably Li Wong, the enigmatic functionary whose family had served Anna Auger since the 1800s.

Corie put a finger over her lips to shush him and towed him along down a hall to the left. This was until now forbidden territory to Tim, and he felt faintly uneasy. It had been made clear in his official briefing that the Hotel Auger had a private wing that was off limits to all military residents using the facility as a BOQ. The private wing, in whose bottom story the rarely seen Anna herself still resided, housed longstanding residents, most of them elderly and wealthy with Auger connections dating back into the previous century. Their privacy was sacred, as was their right to quiet and respect. Somehow, Corie had become insinuated into this private world in which hospital equipment sat in shadowy hallway corners, and private duty nurses came and went at all hours. “We have to be very quiet,” Corie whispered as she towed him up a back stairway. The stairs were wood, the walls white, the Fire Department markings very institutional. “They’re all old and confined to their beds,” she whispered. “It’s great. Nobody bothers us.”

Us? He wondered. She had a key, with which she unlocked one of the heavy double doors with frosted glass that overlooked each floor. He caught a glimpse outside, through the hall window, and recognized his own window a few yards distant.

She pulled him into the hallway on her floor and locked the heavy door behind her. She strode out with her arms spread as if drawing a picture. “It’s a cross shape. There are twelve apartments—three to each arm of the cross. We got lucky and wound up in an end unit—with an extra room.”

Before he could ask any questions, she shushed him again with a finger on her lips. “Not supposed to be here with you,” she whispered. She knocked softly on a door and then put her palms and one ear against the door to listen. Delicately, she knocked again and listened. “I think she’s home,” she said, and unlocked the door. Shushing him yet again, she pushed the door open, sidled inside, and beckoned for him to follow.

Once he was in and she closed the door, she wiped imaginary sweat from her forehead with her wrist. “Whew!” She pressed her hands against his shoulders to suggest he stay by the door. “Meg!” she called out. “Meg?”

An attractive young dark-haired woman appeared. She strode toward them down a small shadowy corridor. She held a cigarette in one hand and wore a thick dark blue bathrobe. She had a bath towel wrapped around her head, and from the frizzy stray wisps of black hair visible where the towel folds crossed over her damp forehead, Tim guessed she had just taken a bath. With her free hand, she flicked open a pair of pink-rimmed glasses and put them on. She stared at Tim through round lenses with frank, penetrating curiosity, then at Corie. “Friend?”

For a second, it seemed to Tim that time stood still as the two women regarded each other with telegrams of information flickering between their eyes, a hooded semaphore of past conversations and agreements, while traffic noise drifted easily up through an open window along with a timeless breeze of citrus blossoms.

“Not foe, for sure,” Corie said wringing her hands slightly.

“I’m Meg,” the woman said, shifting the cigarette to her left hand and sticking out her right. She had a small hand, as did Corie, but Meg’s fingers were fleshier and she wore dark-red, richly glossy red nail polish. Meg had a slight foreign accent Tim couldn’t place. “Tim,” he said, shaking her hand.

“Is it okay if I show Tim around?” Corie said with a subservience that surprised Tim.

Meg turned regally, holding up her cigarette with two fingers so the smoke would trail behind her. “Go right ahead, kids. Make yourselves at home. Show him my room while I stop at the ladies’ to finish my nails.”

“Thanks,” Corie said looking visibly relieved and more relaxed. She took Tim’s hand. “Come on, I’ll take you on the grand tour. It’s free and lasts all of two minutes.”

Their two-bedroom apartment had a small entrance hallway with closets at either end. Slightly off to one side was the entrance into the kitchen, a small crow’s nest affair with a pair of windows overlooking the city and the harbor in a spectacular view. The bathroom was on the right, where Meg sat in steamy isolation, looking up like a towel-clad polar bear disturbed in its ruminations. After a brief glance, Corie pulled the door shut and led Tim to the other side of the kitchen, where a hallway led down to a window facing into a tree crown. On either side of the hallway were two doors. Corie opened the first door and let him look into a shadowy world of old heavy ornate oak furniture, glass buffet windows behind which pewter and china gleamed with borrowed light. “Meg’s room,” she said, pulling the door closed. She pushed him gently on. “My room,” she said, pulling the next door open. Tim glimpsed a lighter, airier room—a curious mix in which baby blue bed clothes, fluffy pillows, and stuffed animals mingled with bomber ornaments on the walls, a helmet and a pistol in its web holster, combat boots sagging in the middle of the floor, and a collection of award plaques with military signature blocks. That door was pulled closed just as quickly in his face, and she guided him to the living room at the end of the hall, a small enclosure that made a kidney-shaped turn to the right with two more windows, all three windows losing their views in tree crowns through which street lamps from the next block dimly cast their glow. “Our little home,” she said “Ain’t it divine?”

He nodded appreciatively, looking up and around while she took his jacket. “It beats my little cell.”

“Can I get you a beer?”

“Sure, if you are having one.”

“I was going to make a martini for myself,” she admitted.

“Then I’ll have one too.”

He waited alone, sitting on a couch over a coffee table, while she went to the kitchen. He heard a mixer whir. He heard the bathroom door open, and a long whispered conversation ensue in serious tones with many exclamation marks in it. Each woman took her turn at remarking at some unidentifiable outrage with a slight yelp. Then, after about five minutes, he heard them laugh, and he heard the snick of a long-handled cocktail spoon in a glass, and the rattle of tumbling ice cubes. He sat uncomfortably, not wanting to listen in to their conversation, so he diverted his attentions to vague sounds of wind, plumbing, and echoes of the night through open windows in this old structure?

“Here we go,” Corie said brightly, bringing a pair of martinis professionally mixed, with tiny lemon curls on each glass. “I didn’t tell you that I helped out in the family bar.”

He was glad not to have to sit waiting any longer and laughed. “No.” He took the glass. “Thanks. Hmm, feels nice and cold.”

“We have ice cubes,” she said. Not everyone did. She sat down on the couch, a discreet distance away—just far enough, if he became so bold later, to put a hand around her back and pull her close. It was up to her, he felt, and he let her define the program for the evening. He was taking it day by day as they’d agreed, flowing with it, accepting whatever came next even if that included the end of the friendship.

“Thanks,” Meg said coming in holding her own martini.

“I made enough for the three of us,” Corie explained to Tim. He noticed she always seemed to become a little bit defensive in Meg’s presence.

Meg was a bit more solid than the wiry Corie. Meg still wore the turban and robe, but was barefoot and bare-legged as she straddled a stuffed chair opposite them. Both women were about the same height—about 5’6 to Tim’s six feet tall. Corie sat on the edge of the couch for some time, while Meg sat back, modestly pushing the heavy robe down to cover as much of her legs as she could, down to mid-calf. Meg looked directly into Tim’s eyes and said: “Forgive me, but I’ve taken off my makeup for the day.”

“I don’t mind a bit,” Tim assured her. “You look just fine to me.” She looked Mexican but then maybe not, yet still faintly exotic somehow.

They all laughed, and the atmosphere mellowed even more as they raised their glasses in a toast. Corie rose and turned down the light, so that the room was dim and cozy. Meg lit a cigarette and with the same match lit a candle that lay flickering in an apricot-colored dish on the coffee table. Some time later, after much small talk, Corie mixed another set of martinis. Tim began to feel warm and loosened his collar. Corie leaned over and undid his tie, taking a good long minute to yank on both ends playfully until they were even on his stomach. As she did so, she diddled his stomach with little-kid fingers, tickling him, and when he looked down she brought her finger up to touch his nose gently. He wasn’t fast enough—nor trying—to catch her hand, which she pulled away.

Meg sat enthroned in her turban and blew smoke to one side. “My roommate needs constant supervision.”

“That’s why you’re here,” Tim said.

“That’s right. You better watch out, Tim, because we know you live over there and we are going to supervise you too.”

“I need two supervisors, huh?”

“Two attractive young women,” Meg said, “you should be so lucky.”

“That’s right,” Corie said, “we could be two fat old sergeants with beard shadows and big sticks.” She held her hands up like bear claws and made grunting noises.

Meg laughed. “Corie, sweetheart, you are too much.” She flicked her cigarette ash into the candle. “I worry about you in those giant planes. It’s a wonder you can reach the controls.”

Corie squared her shoulders. “They do what I tell them.”

Tim chipped at the ice a bit more on the roommate, and asked if she were military. Meg shook her head and picked and speck of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. “Civilian,” she answered, “State Department.” He got the sense she was a strong, self-assured dynamo, a fortress not to be meddled with, and he found himself echoing a tiny bit of Corie’s deference in addition to his natural politeness. Meg sensed his thoughts all at once on several levels. Like a clairvoyant, she said in a low, nurturing voice: “You don’t smoke and my cigarette is bothering you.” She slid two of the windows open, admitting a night breeze. He heard again the soothing sounds of traffic, the faint chuckle of a radio playing boogie-woogie music, the distant talk of ships’ fog horns as they negotiated the defensive minefields off the coast. Sensing his curiosity, she added to her explanation: “We’re getting ready for the President and a lot of dignitaries to come out here for the opening of the U.N., and I have certain things to do in helping out with that.” Sensing his further question, she added: “Corie and I happen to be friends and this was a good opportunity to set up shop together. I’m sorry it’s so small and we’re all jammed in on top of each other. As a Navy man you’re used to close quarters.”

“Not in quite a while,” he said. “Say, this is a lovely little city. It’s a wonder they can jam so many people and ships in here. No wonder we’re like sardines everywhere we turn.”

“One gets used to it,” Meg said with a sigh. “I’m going to turn in, Corie honey. Treat our friend nice and don’t embarrass me, huh?”

“I’ll do my best,” Corie said folding her hands piously on her knees and looking utterly insincere. “See you in the morning.”

The two women adjourned for ten minutes in the kitchen, in the bathroom, and in Meg’s bedroom for whispering and more rustling sounds as if they were folding bed sheets. Maybe Corie was helping Meg make her bed, Tim thought. He was feeling a bit tired now with the martinis in him, and was actually beginning to think about heading home. That meant sneaking back down the stairs, maybe out in to the courtyard, and then pretending to have come in from outside somewhere. Back to his cold lone little room where moonlight gleamed on the floor boards and the steam heater sighed under the window.

Corie came back in about fifteen minutes and said down closer to him. “We’re alone!” She looked at him closely. “Are you still awake?”

“Sorry. I was lost in thought. Things always have to be complicated.”

She looked into her glass. “Oh-oh. I think it’s time for another.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Oh come on. Join me. You can just sip a little.” She giggled. “I can usually drink men under the table. I must have an extra-big liver.” She filled her cheeks with air and raised her hands as if holding an enormous gut ten times her actual girth. Her eyes rolled as she uttered a phht noise.

“I don’t think you’ll ever be fat,” he said. Impulsively, before he thought about it, he reached out toward her, and she was ready, leaning toward him. They had been brushing their bodies close together for several days now at every opportunity, courting, hinting, insinuating.

“At last, we are alone,” she whispered.

It was awkward sitting on the couch but they managed to kiss and hold each other. Gradually, they eased into more comfortable positions—she curled up beside him, he sprawling toward her with his legs scissored half under the coffee table. She lay with her back against the cushions and welcomed his hand as it roamed along the flat of her belly. Dutifully, she pushed his hand away several times in the dance that said she was a good girl, and then as her breath came more rapidly her hand failed in its defensive measures and lay guardingly on his wrist as he explored more territory: the silky skin along her back, the hard cones of a brassiere capturing small breasts, the bony hollows of her neck bones. He pulled her down on him, and she lay on top of him, tongue against tongue, slender body draped over his while he clutched her shoulder blades in his palms. He became aroused. The third martinis were forgotten as they embraced and kissed long and passionately. He heard a clock ticking, wind sighing, trees rustling, light rain falling and rattling on leaves. He heard her breath coming in hungry gasps, heard his own aroused wheezing, heard their faint moaning as they worked one another’s pent-up desires.

“Oh my God,” she said, holding her hair. “Stop!”

He lay back weakly and looked up at her. “I can’t stop and I can’t go on.”

They spoke in soft tones and stopped once or twice to listen in case Meg scolded.

“I’ll have to help you,” she said, planting a controlling little kiss on the tip of his nose. “You are a very skillful kisser.”

“I’m just a modest little fellow with no special talent.”

“Liar.” She kissed him again.

“Either I have been out of it too long, or you are too seductive for words.”

“Swell my head, go ahead.” She kissed each of his cheeks.

They lay looking at each other. Her eyes were blue and filled with stray starlight or streetlight, whatever it was. Her lips had a wry quality, but her eyes were earnest. It was a confusing message. He found himself wanting to fall into some kind of heavy thing with her, but she had warned him off. What could he do if not fall in love with her? If he could not say “I am in love with you” (and certainly it was premature for such serious talk) then what? “I am in adoration with you”? “I am in lust with you”? “I am in desire with you”? “I am in attraction with you”? “I am seriously blue-balled girl-next-door nuts about you”?

“I had better weigh anchor and shove off,” he said, struggling to rise.

She pushed him down. “Not so fast.” She giggled. “I got you up here, and now I’m not letting you go. Seriously, they have a private security guard who patrols every hour below. You’re going to have to spend the night here on the couch and I’ll help you sneak out in the morning.” She planted one more kiss on his lips, a dry one, and sat up. She stretched and yawned. “I think I’m going to sleep very soundly.”

And they both did, he on the couch, she in her bedroom.

Disaster struck in the form of a notice, unceremoniously delivered to Tim at work from the Naval Housing Office. It was hard to find living space anywhere in the small, crowded city. Foreign diplomats were everywhere—men in turbans and women with strange accents—practically falling out of the walls. Tim read with bulging eyes and throbbing temple arteries that he was instructed to immediately vacate his quarters in the Hotel Auger and report to the V/BOQ at the Presidio for a room. Stepping into Teague’s office, he closed the door, waving the sheet of paper. “I’m being bounced out of my quarters.”

Teague looked up with a cold grin. “You look pale as a sheet of paper.”

Tim sat down heavily, thinking to himself, you sacred cow, you can sit there with that hideous little grin while you live with your wife and kids in a nice home on Navy property. “I was hoping you could help somehow.”

“So I understand you’re being trumped by some Charlie Chan types. The Housing Office routinely copied me and your chain of command.”

“What a let-down,” Tim said thickly.

“This United Nations comedy will be over in two months or so,” Teague said, calmly working on. He was one of those gray bureaucrats who had ice water in their veins. He sat with his hands on a large open ledger, pencil in one hand and eraser in the other, checking for errors in the petty cash accounting of some WREN. He wasn’t mean about it, though. Good man to work for, just cold and annoying in the service of his chain of command.

“Nothing you can do to help?”

“Sorry.” Teague put his pencil and eraser down and rubbed his eyes.

Tim thought glumly that by then, perhaps, Corie would be gone, or he might be transplanted elsewhere. Anything was possible, as this forcefully reminded him.

“These foreign honchos will be gone in a month or two and we can all get back to normal,” Teague said. He added, in a slightly different perspective on the same galaxy of uncertainties that everyone lived with: “Who knows, the war might be over in a half a year or a year, and we can all go home.” The unspoken question was if there really was a Fortress Japan that must be taken inch by bleeding inch.

“Thank you,” Tim said angrily, getting up and leaving the room.

Stan Kehoe wasn’t much help either, though he tried. “Jeez, Tim, if only I’d known. It’s all so sudden. Say, you want to double up with me? I can toss a sleeping bag on the floor for you.”

Tim laughed, clapping his friend on the shoulder. “Thanks, bud, that’s very kind of you. If I wanted to be in the submarine service I would have signed up for the extra pay. No, I’ll just take my medicine and check in at the flea hotel and then look for something a little better.”

“We could have some dandy parties,” Stan said.

“That’s one of the things I’m afraid of.”

Tim was even more amazed that afternoon when he left early at three p.m. to pack his things and catch a taxi over to the V/BOQ.

Three men in overalls were busy working in his room. A fourth man in a business suit was with them, a civilian who had cop written all over him. “You the owner of this room?” the man asked from behind glittering little round lenses.

“The former owner,” Tim said, dusting off the gold-braided sleeves of his dark navy-blue uniform jacket.

The plump cop, who looked as though he couldn’t run a block without falling down unconscious, wiped sweat from his forehead with a large white handkerchief. “I’m going to give you a piece of advice, admiral.”

“Lieutenant Commander,” Tim said.

“Napoleon, for all I care. You are not to speak to anyone about our being here today, do you understand?” He waved a billfold that identified him as Howard Lemon, FBI. He stepped close and shook the billfold offensively in Tim’s face. “I said, do you understand, or do need listening lessons?”

Tim must have looked as if he were about to belt Howard Lemon. Howard Lemon, for his turn, pulled back one side of his ugly gray-green flannel suit jacket to expose his rumpled pinstriped shirt, with a sweat-stained armpit and below that a deadly looking .38 revolver. “Don’t fuck with me, admiral. I don’t have time.”

“I’ll come back when you’re gone and remove my things.”

“No.” Howard Lemon stuck a tobacco-stained finger in his face. “Get your crap out of here right now and don’t come back.”

In one of the most angry and humiliated moments of his life, Tim packed his sea bag, slamming in his shoes, his books, the whole bit. Already he’d picked up more than he could get in the bag, so he threw the bag unceremoniously out onto the carpeted hallway. As he stormed about, stumbling over the three men in overalls who measured, who drilled holes, who strung wire that they pulled off a roll in a leather bag filled with electrical equipment, he noticed that Corie’s window was dark as if nobody was home. Tim gathered the rest of his things including the stack of library books in a cardboard grocery box. As he walked out with the box under his arm, it was all he could do to restrain himself from saying something more to Lemon. Why bother? He could only let his mouth get him in trouble at this point. If Lemney would come to his rescue, he might even wangle an apology from this flatfoot. But what he most wanted was his room back because it put him next to Corie.

He put the sea bag and the cardboard box by the lift and pressed the button. The stodgy, slow metal box was in service elsewhere in the bowels of the Hotel Auger and would predictably be a few minutes in coming. Impulsively, he walked down the hall and tried the door marked Private. It was locked. Dispirited, he returned to the lift just in time to open the door, push his bag and the box inside with his foot, and leave his little world behind.

“Welcome, Sir,” said the sergeant in the V/BOQ at the Presidio. “Have we met before?”

Tim had recovered somewhat from his shock and displeasure by now. He’d begun looking at all that could go right. For one thing, maybe Lemney and Teague could get him his room back after the politicians had all left. For another thing, maybe it was the incentive to spur him into looking for something slightly farther out of town, totally on the economy, and so what if he had to pay a little extra beyond the housing allowance the Navy paid. Perhaps, even, it might be a place Corie would enjoy visiting. The possibilities were intriguing. But for tonight he was just angry and miserable. It was worst because he’d been unable to reach Corie at her office, and she wasn’t home at the hotel.

The sergeant smiled innocently, elderly man that he was, rubbing gnarled fingers over the linen that smelled of soap and cigarette ashes.

“Yeah,” Tim said reluctantly, “I checked in here a few weeks ago when I first got into town.”

The sergeant leaned forward with a big grin that Tim at first took for insolence, but it was a gesture of sympathy. The sergeant whispered: “We’re getting lots in here like yourself, Sir. Don’t feel bad. Them foreigners is taking all the good spots from here to Berkeley. If you ask me, they should put them all up at Alcatraz.” He laughed, a series of snorts and snuffles through congested sinuses, and Tim managed to smile darkly as he signed the register again.

What a miserable place. He trudged up a flight of polished granite stairs, down echoing hallways with rusting lockers on either side. The place smelled of old mops and institutional cleansers, and a flock of black housekeeping yeomen sang and talked loudly while whiling their work hours away under glaring yellow overhead light bulbs. The place was smelly, noisy, drafty, and depressing. Tim was not much more cheered when he opened the door of his room and found himself in a slant-ceiling enclosure under the roof pitch. It had two small windows you could open by standing on a chair under the roof. It had a sink with working hot and cold water taps—he tested—and a little mirror with one corner missing. There was a small desk, a chair, a night table with Quartermaster storage labels stuck to one side, and a regulation steel-spring cot with a rolled up mattress at one end. Tim yanked the neatly folded, starchy sheet loose that bound the mattress like a seaweed sushi wrapper, and the mattress limply flopped open. Inside were a too-thin pillow with a lump in one corner, and a meager square of starchy linen. He had two scratchy blue-gray Navy blankets, and a cheery little booklet titled “Let’s Win The War—and Keep This Room Tidy!”

Tim sat on the edge of the bed, held his head in his hands, and started to laugh. The laughter pealed from him loudly, like crying, and he shook his head repeatedly. “No, no, no...this can’t be!”