uniform. There were silver pilot’s wings on the breast of his green blouse. He was checked out (qualified to fly) in fighter, bomber, and transport aircraft. Beneath the wings were ribbons representing the award of the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, several lesser awards for valor, and brightly colored ribbons indicating that he had had overseas service in both the European and Pacific Theaters of Operation.
At the moment, Captain James M. B. Whittaker, Harvard University ’39, was solemnly considering what he believed to be irrefutable evidence that he was a miserable, amoral, good-for-nothing sonofabitch.
This solemn consideration sometimes came upon him when he’d taken a drink or two more than he should have. When he had a load on (and he had been drinking, more or less steadily, for the last three days), truth raised its ugly head, and he could see things with a painful clarity.
He had started drinking before he’d boarded the MATS (Military Air Transport Service) C-54 at London’s Croydon Airfield.
Taking leave of Liz Stanfield had been very painful. He loved Liz and she loved him, and there were certain problems with that. For one thing, Captain Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, the Duchess of Stanfield, WRAC (Women’s Royal Army Corps), a pale-skinned, splendidly bosomed, lithe woman in her middle thirties, was not really free to love him. There was a husband, Wing Commander the Duke Stanfield, RAF. He was down somewhere, “missing in action, ” the poor sonofabitch.
Only a miserable, amoral, good-for-nothing sonofabitch, such as himself, Capt. Whittaker reasoned, would carry on the way he had with a married woman whose husband was missing in action, and a fellow airman to boot. That was really low and rotten.
And it wasn’t as if he was free, either. He was in love himself. Her name was Cynthia Chenowith, and he had loved her from the time he was thirteen and she was eighteen, and he had gotten a look at her naked breast as she hauled herself out of his uncle Chesty’s swimming pool at the winter place in Palm Beach.
It didn’t matter that Cynthia professed not to love him (that was the age difference, he had concluded): He loved her. And a man who loves a woman with his entire soul, who wants to spend the rest of his life with her, caring for her, making babies, is not supposed to go around fucking married women. Unless, of course, he is a miserable, good-for -nothing sonofabitch.
Capt. Whittaker had had the foresight to bring with him on the MATS C-54 three quart bottles of single-malt Scotch whiskey. Half of one had gotten him to Casablanca, and the other half had sustained him from Casablanca to Cairo.
Since he had been in Cairo, he’d worked his way through all of the second bottle and one quarter of the third. The airplane was broken. The pilot had told Capt. Whittaker, as a courtesy to a fellow flyer, that he’d lost oil pressure on Number Three and had no intention of taking off again until they had replaced—rather than repaired— the faulty pump. One was being flown in from England. When it had been installed, they would continue on their flight, which would ultimately terminate in Brisbane, Australia.
Until the airplane was repaired, there was a good deal to see and do in Cairo.
Madame Jeanine d’Autrey-Lascal—who was thirty, tall for a French woman, blond, blue-eyed, and who saw no need to wear a brassiere—leaned close to Capt. Whittaker and laid her hand on his.
Madame d’Autrey-Lascal had been left behind in Cairo when her husband, who had been managing director of the Banc d’Egypte et Nord Afrique, had gone off to fight with the Free French under General Charles de Gaulle. She had been in the bank lobby when Capt. Whittaker had appeared to change money and to see if the bank, with which his family’s firm had had a long relationship, could do something about getting him into a decent hotel. He had spent the previous night in the transient officers’ quarters at the airfield and really didn’t want to do that again.
They had been introduced quite properly, after which it had seemed to Madame d’Autrey-Lascal simply the courteous thing to do to offer to drive him to Shepheard’s Hotel. The bank would call in as many favors as it could to get him accommodation in Shepheard’s. No promises. The place was always jammed.
The assistant manager who greeted them said that he would try to find something. No promises. But perhaps if the Captain would