it smelled of freshly sawed lumber.
Fine led Canidy to his spartan quarters—two small rooms, with the studs exposed, and a shared bathroom with a tin-walled shower—and told him to make himself comfortable.
“Close and lock the door, please, Stan,” Canidy said, then reached into his tunic and took from it a tiny American flag on an eight-inch pole. He waved it at Fine.
“In case you miss the symbolism,” he said, “I’m waving the flag at you.”
“I don’t think I’m going to like this,” Fine said, laughing.
“You always carry a flag around?”
“No,” Canidy said. “I stole this one from your group commander’s desk while he left me to check out my orders.”
Fine smiled. “They apparently checked out,” he said. “What do they say?”
Canidy handed him the orders.
“They don’t say much, do they?” Fine said when he had read them. “Except that whatever you’re doing has the approval of the Air Corps. And that it’s secret. I used to be in the motion-picture business, you remember, and this has all the earmarks of a Grade B adventure thriller. A mysterious officer appears, carrying secret orders. Are you now going to ask me to volunteer for a secret, dangerous mission, from which there is virtually no chance of returning alive?”
“I’d say the chances are sixty-forty,” Canidy said, “that you’ll get back all right.”
Fine looked at him long enough to see that he was serious.
“I’ll be damned!” he said.
“There’s a mission, a long-distance flight, that we would like you to undertake,” Canidy said.
“We?” Fine asked. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“I can’t tell you that yet,” Canidy said.
“Hey, come on!”
Canidy shrugged and smiled.
“Well, let’s see, Dick,” Fine said. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Colonel Donovan, would it?”
“Colonel who?” Canidy asked innocently.
“And you are also forbidden to tell me where I would be going, or for how long, or why. Right?”
“How long will it take you to pack?” Canidy asked.
“That would depend on where I would be going, and how long I would be gone. Will I need my fur coat or short sleeves?”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t leave anything behind.”
“I’m usually not much of a drinker,” Fine said. “And taking a drink right now probably isn’t very bright, but I’m going to have one anyway. Scotch all right with you?”
“I’m driving, thank you just the same,” Canidy said.
Fine took a bottle of Scotch from a shelf in his closet and poured two inches of it into a water glass.
“And if I tell you ‘Thanks, but no thanks’?” he asked.
“They wouldn’t have sent me after you,” Canidy said, “if they didn’t need you.”
Saying that seemed to embarrass him, Fine saw, although Canidy tried to cover it by waving the little American flag again.
I don’t know why I am surprised about this, Fine thought. I should have known that sooner or later the service would require me to do what it wants me to do, as opposed to indulging me in the acting out of my personal fantasies.
On December 9, 1941, Stanley S. Fine, Vice President for Legal Affairs, Continental Motion Picture Studios, Inc., who had been in New York on business when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, took the train to Washington to see Greg Armstrong, a friend from law school who had given up corporate law to serve his country in uniform.
When he found Greg, who was working in one of the temporary buildings—from the First World War—near the Smithsonian Institution, he quickly saw that his friend thought Stanley Fine had gone off the deep end. Even though Greg professed to understand why Fine wanted to come into the service, and even why Fine wanted to fly, it was clear that Greg thought that flying was the last thing Stanley should be doing. But still, he went through the motions.
“There’s two ways you can handle the flying thing, Stanley,” he said. “You can apply to one of the aviation cadet selection boards. If you’ve got a pilot’s license—what did you say you have?”
“I’ve got a commercial pilot’s certificate with five hundred ten hours, and an instrument ticket, single-engine land.”
“Okay. What I’m saying is that you can certainly get into the aviation cadet program. Which means after you got your wings, you would be either a flight officer or a second lieutenant. Or, Stanley, you can go in the service as a lawyer. With your years of practice, you can start out as a captain.”
“I don’t want to be a lawyer.”
“Hear me out. You’re a captain. I can have that paperwork for you in two weeks. You