wouldn’t meet my eyes. The waitress gave me a nasty look, though, like I was the one who’d made the girl miserable. She had mousy brown hair and acne, and I sat wondering what the hell old man Collins had been thinking.
“What’s your name?” I asked her, finally.
“Emily,” she said.
“You have a job, Emily?”
“I was in the steno pool at Collins.” She sneaked a quick glance at my face.
“You were?”
“I was fired after . . . ” She took a long time swallowing a bite of her sandwich. “They let me go when I got in trouble.”
“Is that so.”
She looked me square in the face now, puzzled. “Uh-huh.”
“Girly, they can’t fire you.”
“Sure they can.” Her eyes were wet and her voice quavering but she wasn’t giving in to it yet. “It’s in the employee manual, about moral turpitude.”
“Doesn’t mean a damned thing. You’ve got the great man over a barrel.”
So I laid it out for poor Emily: in a couple of days she was to call Mr. Collins’s personal secretary, Miss Grau, and tell her that a man named Hiram Fish has been pestering her, trying to find out where she’d been and why she wasn’t employed by the company any more.
“Who’s this man Fish?”
“Someone Mrs. Collins uses to keep up on Mr. Collins’s comings and goings.”
“And what does Miss Grau do after I tell her this?”
“Miss Grau gets you your job back, with a raise if you look like you’re not sure you want it back.”
“I’m not sure I do,” she said, but I noticed she was eating the second half of her grilled cheese with gusto.
“A job at Beechcraft or Cessna, then. Listen, you think all he owes you is a trip to KC and a grilled cheese sandwich? Take it from me, a lot of girls have been in your situation, and some of them ended up better off than others.”
I didn’t give two shits about the dim bulb across the booth from me, but I got a hell of a kick out of fucking with my employer and her impregnator, Everett Collins. Aviation pioneer, friend to Wiley Post and Lucky Lindy, founder of one of the nation’s biggest aircraft plants, a bigger man himself than anyone in Wichita had ever thought about being. He’d been my childhood hero, which may go some way to explaining the depth of my current contempt for the man.
TWO
RUTH SNYDER’S PRETTY ANKLES
IF YOU ARE a reasonably competent and ambitious individual with a bit of initiative and creativity, and a willingness to look at strict regulations as loose guidelines to be skirted when necessary or convenient, there is no better job for you than Master Sergeant in the United States Army Quartermaster Corps.
I volunteered in December of ’41, and like everybody else my motives at that time were strictly patriotic, although a certain desire to escape the wife and hometown for a while did play a minor role. My wife Sally was all for it, and proud as hell of me. The objection came from Everett Collins; back then Collins was less of a lunatic, and I was actually touched at his concern for me, though I see it in retrospect as petulance at the loss of a useful subordinate.
Getting assigned to the QM Corps was the single best stroke of luck in my life. At first I objected to it because of the fact that the Corps kept its men behind the lines; I wanted to kill Nazis with my bare hands or, failing that, a rifle. But before long I started getting reports back from the front, and I realized that my job as Quartermaster was probably going to keep me alive for the duration.
By the time I was reassigned to Rome from London I was an old hand at thievery and black marketeering, and I had some small experience as a pimp as well, though the possibilities there far exceeded what I could accomplish in old Blighty, where the systems of local vice remained more or less intact during the conflict; Rome’s had been shattered by the war and the fall of the fascists.
And now I was back in my hometown, with a wife who looked like a movie star and a job that entailed more boozing and carousing than actual work. What the hell was the matter with me that I was missing the excitement and danger of the war? Granted, the dangers I’d faced were nothing compared to those experienced by the troops at the front, but