She handed the pad to him. He tore a copy of the citation off and handed it to her.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the MP said. “This is a really nice set of wheels.”
“Thank you,” Marjorie said. She put the citation in the envelope and got out of the car and walked into the redbrick building housing Headquarters XVIII Airborne Corps & Fort Bragg.
There was a sign on the wall in the corridor of the second floor:Hours of AGO Card Issuance 1030-1200 and 1500-1630
She looked at her watch. It was quarter past nine.
She sat down to wait.
At 1125 Mrs. Marjorie B. Portet, dependent wife of First Lieutenant Jacques Portet, now possessed of an AGO card attesting to that status, got back in the Jaguar, drove back to the Dependent Services building, presented the AGO card and $1.25, and was issued two stickers, with blue printing, reading “Fort Bragg NC 56787.”
She applied them to the front and rear bumpers of the Jaguar before driving away.
And I’ll bet, she thought, that he’ll be pacing up and down in front of the SWC headquarters building, wondering where the hell I have been, how it could take all that time to get a couple of lousy stickers for the car.
Jack had said he would try to “break ground” at Rucker with the L-23 at half past seven. That would put him into Pope at about 9:30, give or take ten minutes. Figure ten minutes to tie it down, and another ten or fifteen minutes to get from Pope to the SWC, he had arrived at 10:00, certainly no later than 10:15, which meant he would have been waiting for her more than an hour. And no one knew where she was.
Johnny Oliver would have the keys to their new apartment. They would take a quick look at it to see how big it was, and then go to a furniture store and buy at least enough—a refrigerator, a kitchen table and chairs, a small television set, and, of course, a bed—to spend their first night together in their very own home/apartment/love nest.
The apartment would be furnished slowly. As soon as she could get to The Farm, she could have her pick of the furniture in The Barn, or, for that matter, within reason, in The House.
The Farm, in Virginia, outside Washington, had been in the Bellmon family for four generations, and The House was furnished with the best of a century’s accumulation of furniture. The Barn held the less desirable pieces, including, she thought she remembered, some really beautiful pieces of Philippine Mahogany acquired when then Lieutenant Colonel Porterman K. Waterford had been assigned to the 26th Cavalry outside Manila before the Second World War.
And then, of course, there would be wedding presents. They had been married so suddenly there had been no time for that, but she knew they would start coming almost immediately.
And Hanni, Jack’s stepmother, had said she was going to ship all the furniture in their house in the Congo to the United States, and it was far more than enough to furnish the house they were going to build or buy in Ocean Reef.
But it would be a nice memory for later, to remember their first night together, when she’d driven up from Rucker, and Jack had flown up, and they’d bought their first furniture together.
Jack was not pacing up and down in front of the SWC headquarters building, nor anywhere in sight.
There was a sergeant on duty in the lobby of the building, charged with keeping unauthorized visitors out.
“Sergeant, I’m Mrs. Portet,” Marjorie said. “I wonder if there are any messages for me?”
“You want to spell that for me, please?”
“Pee Oh Are Tee Eee Tee.”
“Oh, you mean, Portet.”
“Why not?”
The sergeant stiffened.
Brigadier General Paul R. Hanrahan, the commanding general of the John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare, was marching purposefully across the lobby, trailed by his aide-de-camp, Captain Stefan Zabrewski.
He changed course when he saw Marjorie.
“We were getting a little worried, Margie,” he said. “We expected you early this morning. What are you doing here? Why didn’t you go to the house?”
“I was supposed to meet Jack here, Uncle Red,” she said.
“What was the message, Ski?” Hanrahan asked.
“There was a delay at Rucker, sir,” Zabrewski boomed. “He’ll let us know when he has an ETA.”
“Sorry, honey,” Hanrahan said. “Why don’t you go over to the house? I’ll have messages forwarded there, and Patricia’s worried about you.”