CHAPTER ▪ SEVEN
BEARDSLEY HALL WAS SWARMING with Norwegian officials and all sorts of soldiers, sailors, and probably a few doctors and lawyers. Indian chiefs I wasn’t so sure about. Events were moving kind of fast, and I wanted to slow down and think things through. I went out a rear entrance, crossed a patio, and walked into the gardens. I knew I was no Einstein, but I did know how to think about things. Slowly. Thoroughly. Quietly.
“Billy! Billy!” Kaz jogged to catch up with me, or at least jogged a few steps. He wasn’t the most athletic guy around. He puffed like he had just run a mile, and pushed up the heavy glasses that had slid down his nose. I could tell by the look on his face that quiet was not going to be in the cards.
“Billy, this has been most exhilarating, yes?”
“Did you expect something else?”
“Ah! A question. That is exactly what I mean. You are full of questions, why is that?”
I thought about that for a minute as we walked along a garden path, framed by red roses on both sides. Red petals carpeted the ground, like velvet drops of blood. I did like asking questions. Asking questions meant that there might be an answer, and that gave me hope. When you ran out of questions, the case was hopeless, and you just plain ran out of everything.
“Questions are a dime a dozen, Kaz. Answers are what interest me. What’s so exhilarating for you?”
“You. Your approach to things. Very direct. Even more American than any other American I’ve met. You are unafraid to go to the heart of the matter, no matter how, how . . . inappropriate it may be. Very un-European. I think it puts people off balance.”
“Good way to get a reaction.”
“If you can tell the difference between shock and guilt, Billy.”
Guilt. I turned down a path in the garden, white roses hanging damp and heavy from thick shoots spiked with sharp thorns. Guilt will out, Dad used to say. Guilt will out, except if you’re dealing with a crazy person. Normal people just couldn’t keep guilt from showing, and all you had to do was know where to look for it. That was the hard part.
“Guilt has its own special look and sound.”
“Sound? What do you mean?”
“A catch in the voice, an uplift in tone. You can hear it all the time if you listen. It doesn’t even have to do with crime. It can be emotional.”
“How so?” Kaz asked, not quite believing me.
I stopped and looked at him. Well, he asked. “I heard it in your voice the other night. About your parents, and the suite at the Dorchester.”
“What? Am I guilty of a crime?” I could hear the defensiveness creep into his voice.
“You’re there, and they’re not. It was their place, and now it’s yours. Any normal person would feel guilty, can’t be helped. I’m sorry, Kaz.”
Sorry for his parents, sorry for telling him. He was silent for a minute, then turned and started walking again, watching the ground.
“No, no, you are right. Sometimes I feel like an impostor there. But it is all I have left.” He shrugged sadly. “I just never thought of it as guilt.”
I put my hand on his shoulder, gave a little squeeze, and let it drop.
“People don’t usually think about these things, Kaz. They feel them, act on them, but hardly ever think about them. There’s no reason to; it’s a part of you. A wife will stab her husband one day and honestly think that he said something that made her mad, so she knifed him. Maybe he’s been screwing around and it finally got to her, but she never admitted it to herself. She never thought through the little clues that she found, but they were there, eating at her. So one day he complains that the roast is burnt, and she puts the carving knife in his back.”
“Are these the things a Boston detective thinks about on a case? Self-deception, guilt, the knife in the back?”
“Cops always look for things that are out of place. Very little things, which sometimes lead to bigger things, like why a knife in the back.”
“So how do you look for these little things?”
It was like asking how you breathed or woke up in the morning. It was what a cop learned to do first thing, at least in my family. To look, really look, at every little thing.
“What do you look for when you walk into a room?” I asked him.
“A beautiful woman,” he smiled. “Books on the shelf, artwork . . . anything else would not be very interesting. Although a bar would attract my attention.”
“I like your approach, Kaz; it’s better than most. A cop will check the exits, look to see if anyone is carrying a hidden weapon, and sniff out any tension in the air automatically, just like you would scan the bookshelf for a rare book. Without even thinking about it.”
Kaz nodded thoughtfully. I could see him taking this in, comparing it with his experience.
“Sometimes you can feel something under the surface, something wrong. You can’t be sure what it is. Everything looks normal, but you just get a feeling that something is out of place, that all the little things don’t add up.”
“What do you do when you feel that?”
An obvious question. It was easy for me to talk about Kaz’s family, tell him what was going on inside his head. But it wasn’t that easy to even think about the first time I came up against that question, saw just what Dad had always told me about. One night, just after I got home off duty, Basher McGee came by the house, tipped his hat to Mom, and headed upstairs with Dad to the den. They shut the door, just like always, but their talk was loud, angry, and not contained by the thin plasterboard walls. Nothing understandable, except that the undercurrent of brewing trouble that Basher always brought with him had boiled over, and neither man was giving an inch.
Then there was silence. The house seemed empty, waiting for the sound of their anger to fill it again. I could hear Mom turn the faucet off in the kitchen as she stood in front of the sink, worried more by the quiet than the yelling. The upstairs door slammed open, bouncing off the wall and almost smacking Basher on the rebound as he crossed the threshold.
“You take it, you’re one of us, no better!” he yelled as he clomped down the stairs, tipped his cap again to Mom just as nice as you please, and let himself out the back door. I started to walk upstairs, but Mom put her hand on my arm. I shook it off, and didn’t look at her, embarrassed at how Basher had behaved toward Dad in his own house, embarrassed at shaking off the hand of my own mother. I gripped the banister and headed up toward the den.
The door was still open. Dad held a small box in his hand, the lamp-light just behind him lighting one side of his face and leaving the other in shadow. The box was wrapped in plain paper, tied by twine tightly knotted. His hand fell to his side, and he tossed the box into the waste-basket next to his desk. I didn’t move a muscle. He sat down at his desk, didn’t say a thing, just stared at the wall. I tried to move, to walk up to him, to go through that doorway and tell him I’d do anything he needed me to do.
I didn’t. I just stood there. He never looked over at me, and finally I walked to my room, shut the door, flopped down on my bed, picked up the latest issue of True Detective from my nightstand, and lost myself in the fiction, dreaming of blazing away at bad guys and watching them roll down the stairs.
“Billy? What do you do when guilt shows itself?” Kaz asked, reframing the question as if I hadn’t understood it properly.
“Run. Duck. Draw your piece, do something, anything. But don’t just stand there.”
A stray stone had found its way out of the flower beds and onto the soft grass path. I kicked at it, sending it back where it belonged, with a clump of grass and torn roots for company.
“Billy, you must teach me how to see and understand these things, to help you find the spy.”
I could see Kaz was all worked up. He was almost like a kid brother, jumping up and down and begging his older brother to take him wherever he was going. Like Danny always did, and I had hardly ever said no to him.
“Why do you want to know all this? Aren’t you already involved in looking for the spy? You know all about everything at HQ.”
Kaz took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and shook his head. “All I do is read and translate reports and talk to other officers who read and translate other reports. I am sure it is very important work, but it is not getting us any closer to finding this spy. And it is not very exciting,” he added a little sheepishly as he put his glasses back on.
“Asking a lot of dumb questions isn’t very exciting, Kaz. Ask questions, rile people up, watch things, think about things, then go back and ask more questions. That’s it. Not really exciting at all.”
“I do find my work not very stimulating, Billy, but it is not really excitement I am seeking. It is . . . revenge. If I could fight, I would, but with my heart, this is as close as I can get. If I can help to uncover a spy, that would be enough. I would feel as if I had done the right thing for the memory of my family.”
I didn’t get this little guy. He had bad health, good money, a great hotel room and a beautiful girlfriend. If I had that deal, the last thing I’d be doing would be hunting around for a German needle in a Norwegian haystack. But he was probably going to try on his own anyway, so I fig-ured I might as well take him on and make sure he didn’t mess things up for me.
“OK, Kaz. You’re on. Just watch what I do and keep your eyes open.”
“Excellent! What do we do first?”
I looked at him and wondered how much I could trust him. Was he really an eager beaver? Or was he watching me for somebody else? The thought had even occurred to me that I couldn’t rule out Kaz as a suspect. How did we know he was really who he said he was? Maybe the Nazis were holding his family hostage? Maybe he was the “Prodigal Son?” Maybe I was Sam Spade, but I doubted it. Occupational hazard of being a cop. Everyone’s a suspect.
“Go find out where Knut Birkeland is, then come get me. We’ll have a chat with him. I’ll be out here.”
Kaz threw me a mock salute and went off to find Birkeland. I kept walking through the gardens as the sun tried to break through the steel gray clouds. I was thinking about little things and trying to add them up so they made sense. I decided I was a couple of sums short of an equation and stopped to smell the roses, just like they always said you should. I reached out to pull a flower closer to sniff it. It smelled like raspberries and perfume on a beautiful woman’s neck. I let go and a thorn caught my fingertip, leaving a slit on my right index finger, and spraying tiny flecks of blood on the blooms beneath it.
About a half hour later Kaz and I were sitting in Knut Birkeland’s office on the third floor, where most of the government offices were. There were stacks of papers everywhere. Birkeland looked as disheveled as his room. He pushed aside the open books and folders in front of him, leaned his heavy frame back in his chair, and raised his bushy black eyebrows.
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” There was gruff suspicion in his voice.
“I just wanted to apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to upset people at lunch by asking about the gold.” I put on my meekest voice and enjoyed the look on Kaz’s face. He’d obviously hoped I’d pull out some brass knuckles.
“Well, it doesn’t bother me, but I don’t like it being brought up in front of the king. This is a very delicate time.” He stared at me with those dark eyes, and didn’t even try to hide the fact that it really did bother him.
“You mean because of the pending appointment of a senior adviser?”
“You ask a lot of questions, young man, especially for someone who just apologized for it.”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s just that I was a policeman before the war, and it seems that asking questions is a hard habit to break. I don’t even realize I’m doing it.” He seemed to accept my humble apology, and relaxed a bit.
“Well, no matter. I have nothing to hide. I didn’t take any gold, and I do want the position of senior adviser. If only to keep it from Skak!” He punctuated that statement by pounding his fist on the desk. I could tell he wouldn’t mind the next question at all.
“What’s wrong with Vidar Skak?”
“He’s a coward and a liar! He claims two cases of gold coins went missing while they were in my possession, with no other proof than his own books! He never spent a night standing guard in the snow over that gold or bent his back loading case after case onboard a ship with German planes dropping bombs all around!”
“Why would he blame you for the missing gold? What has he to gain?” asked Kaz, taking on some of the questioning himself.
“Gain? Why the senior adviser job, that’s all! Can’t you see that? If he discredits me in the king’s eyes, then the job is his, and the worse for Norway.” Birkeland’s eyes slid sideways, as if envisioning a dark future with Vidar Skak whispering in the king’s ear.
“Seems to me he just wants to fight back against the Germans.” I congratulated myself on avoiding a direct question.
“Neither of you strike me as fools,” Birkeland said. “You can see that Skak wants to use the Underground Army to support his own aims. The more glory for him, the better. He can be a hero in Norway after the war, when we lay wreaths on the monuments to the dead.”
“There’ll be plenty of death to go around before this war is over. Sacrifice can’t be avoided.” Geez, I sounded like Harding.
“Skak is willing to accept the sacrifices of others. He has lost nothing himself. I’ve had to watch newsreels of my own fishing boats being destroyed by the commandos, some of them Norwegian! I have a fishing fleet in Nordland, and when the commandos destroy one of those fish oil-processing plants to keep the Germans from producing nitroglycerin, my boats go up in flames. I’m watching my own business, which I’ve built for twenty years with my bare hands, go up in smoke. But, by God, I’ll put the torch to the whole damn thing myself if it will keep the underground from going into battle! We would gain nothing, and the reprisals would be terrible.”
The wind went out of him and he sank back into his chair. “Terrible,” he repeated quietly. “Let the British destroy our industry if it will hurt the Nazis. But let our people live.”
We left soon after that. On the theory that a guy who would rather see his own property destroyed than lose innocent lives would make a lousy candidate for a thief or traitor, I decided it was time to move on to greener pastures. I said as much to Kaz as we walked to our rooms, and to my surprise he responded like a cynical desk sergeant.
“How do we know he really owns a fishing fleet, and that it’s being destroyed in commando raids?” Ah, cynicism, the first dawning sign of a rookie cop learning the ropes.
“All right, let’s think it through. Skak and the king would know. Hard to believe he could be lying about it.”
“Yes, but the key point is his willingness to sacrifice his fortune. We have no confirmation of that.”
I thought about that for a minute. It seemed harmless enough, and who knew what the little guy might find out?
“OK Kaz, here’s your first assignment. Ask around and see if anybody else knows about it. Ask the Three Musketeers. That Rolf guy is with the commandos; he might know. Just act like you’re interested.”
“I will be the soul of unoffending curiosity.”
“Just remember the cat. He didn’t offend anyone either.”
I left Kaz to his junior G-man investigation and went up to my room on the top floor. I was tired, the alcohol drifting through my system and weighing down my eyelids, making me think about catching a few z’s before the evening festivities. The king had invited our group to some sort of state dinner he was throwing in the main ballroom. It sounded boring, and I knew I needed my beauty sleep so I wouldn’t nod off during the third speech.
Evidently, all the big rooms were taken. Mine had a double bed, a bureau, one straight-back chair, and an armoire, with just enough space to walk around the bed if you kept your elbows tucked in. The furniture looked a little worse for wear, the kind of stuff that was too sturdy to throw out but too scruffy to show off. The room did have its own bathroom, and I liked that, a step up from the attic of the Dorchester. Kaz had told me a lot of these old castles and mansions never got around to upgrading the plumbing, but that the Beardsleys were very modern for their day, and each room had hot and cold running water and the usual facilities. I kicked off my shoes, tossed my jacket onto the chair, loosened my tie, and closed my eyes for about a half hour. Catnaps and spy chasing are my specialties.
I woke up two hours later from a dead sleep. It had only been a few days since that flight across the Atlantic, and I guess I wasn’t over it yet. I yawned, stretched, and decided I had time for a soak in a nice hot tub before dinner. Maybe it would wake me up and help me decide what to do next. Always thinking of the war effort, that’s me. I turned on the hot water and was greeted by clanging and thumps as the pipes summoned up the strength to deliver a lukewarm trickle of water. I was familiar with the sounds of overtaxed plumbing from my parents’ house. Everyone probably had the same bright idea I had—take a nice hot bath before dinner. I tried the cold water. Plenty of that. I soaked my feet in the tub, washed up in the sink, and cursed the plumbing that had robbed me of a plan.
Jolted awake by the cold water, I went downstairs and joined the crowd gathered in the ballroom. Two long tables took up half the room. Chandeliers lit the room and candles burned along the length of the tables, their light reflecting off the gleaming silver. I had thought lunch was fancy, but this was hoity-toity. There was the head table with seats on one side, and another table at a right angle to it with seats along both sides. There were little cards with names to let you know where to sit. I didn’t bother looking for mine up at the head table. I was down at the end, surrounded by names I didn’t know. Harding and Cosgrove had seats at the head table, along with Daphne and Baron Piotr Augustus Kazimierz. I guess that showed me. I was fingering my place card when Kaz came over. He was wearing a British dress uniform with a gleaming leather belt and a big grin. He handed me a glass of champagne.
“Rank, royalty, and beauty all at one table, Billy. I will be certain to come down here to visit you!”
“I’m sure the other peasants will be honored, Baron.” We clinked glasses and drank. The room was filling up with all sorts of uniforms. Mostly British types with “Norway” on the red shoulder flash. A few naval officers and a couple of old Home Guard officers and their wives, from the local village, probably. Harding and I were the only Americans.
Daphne entered, and the room fell silent. In the midst of browns, dark blues, and khakis, she was dressed in a bright green gown that was like a shimmering fountain of color, sparkling off the candlelight in the room. It was tight and low cut, and she wore a matching short jacket that accentuated the whiteness of her bare skin.
“I marvel every time I see her,” Kaz whispered reverently as several senior offices elbowed each other on their way to greet her.
“Shouldn’t you go rescue the fair damsel from that mob?” She was now being besieged by Norwegians and Englishmen, including a Home Guard captain who was going to be sleeping on the couch tonight by the look on his wife’s face.
“No, certainly not! That dress was her doing, and she’ll have to put up with it. Let’s go talk to Rolf Kayser.”
We found Rolf hoisting drinks with his musketeer pals. Rolf was big, muscular, and about six feet tall, square jawed and tanned, probably as much from the wind off the Norwegian coast as the sun. His hair was dark brown and so were his eyes, deep set beneath bushy eyebrows. He stood still, as if he were conserving energy for what lay ahead, watching everyone move around him. Standing next to Jens Iversen, he looked immense, a giant oak tree rooted to the spot. Jens, barely up to Rolf’s shoulder, looked like he was using up his energy all at once, shifting back and forth on his heels, turning this way and that, surveying the room, pointing out the top brass as they filtered in. Arnesen stood with one hand in his pocket, a drink in the other, watching both his friends with a calm smile, obviously enjoying their company. They were an unlikely trio, of different sizes and shapes, but thrown together by chance and now good pals with the king, all in top posts. Security chief, commando leader, brigade commander. Kaz introduced me to Rolf and we grabbed some fresh champagne as another white-coated enlisted man came by with a tray.
“Fortell meg, Løytnant Boyle,” Rolf asked, “is the American Army involved with this ultimatum about the underground? I understand you met with Knut Birkeland this afternoon.” News traveled fast. I guess this guy hadn’t taken a nap today.
“Not at all. Just chatting with Mr. Birkeland. I was very curious about how he got that gold out of Norway. Quite an accomplishment, for all of you.”
“We only helped a little, really,” said Anders Arnesen. “Just some heavy lifting aboard the Glasgow. There were many Norwegians who did much more, at greater risk.”
“Well, Rolf did almost get himself killed,” chimed in Jens Iversen, and they all laughed at what seemed to be an inside joke. He waved his hands to get the others to stop laughing.
“When we were loading cases of gold coin on board from a fishing ship, the rope slipped and the cases nearly knocked his brains out. They broke open and Rolf was buried in gold coins, very hilarious!”
“Druknet i gull!” said Arnesen, and they all laughed again. I didn’t ask; it was obviously an inside joke.
“Well, it wasn’t funny to me at the time,” Rolf said with a smile, “especially with Tysk bombers coming after us, but it is a good story. I just wish I still had my souvenir.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kaz.
“One coin got stuck in the folds of my uniform somehow. When I changed later that night it rolled out.” He looked at us somewhat sheepishly. “I thought it would make a good souvenir. What difference would one gold coin make? Well, after we got to England it began to bother me. Finally, I decided to give it back. I was going to send it to the king on his birthday, hoping that he would appreciate it and not be angry.”
“Was he?” I asked.
“It was stolen from my barracks locker before I could give it to him. I told him about it though, and he wasn’t too hard on me.”
“It probably helped that you told him right after a very successful commando raid,” said Jens with a grin, looking up at his friend. Jens spoke in bursts of energy, his eyes always moving, watching everyone in the room. Rolf looked like he could stand in one place all day while Jens danced around him. Anders was right in the middle, of average height and weight, but he carried himself with the self-assured authority of a professional soldier.
After a little more chitchat the group broke up and we headed to our seats. Vidar Skak came in and stopped to talk with Rolf and Major Cosgrove, pointedly turning his back on Birkeland, who was standing nearby. I bet their place cards weren’t next to each other.
I sat with the Home Guard officers and wives and spent most of my time listening to complaints about the Americans overrunning their village. A newly arrived division had just been based nearby, and to listen to this group they were all girl-crazy cowboys who should never have been let off the base. They were probably right but I said nice things about my countrymen anyway.
The food was bland—more fish and boiled potatoes. Servers brought out plates with the fish already doled out, still piping hot. Bowls of potatoes and turnips appeared, followed by brussels sprouts and cabbage. There was food rationing here and it probably wasn’t easy to put on a feed like this, but the local victory gardens must have been overflowing with brussels sprouts.
“Used to love them,” said a woman next to me as she passed the bowl, “on Sundays, with a nice roast beef. But every day, it does wear one down.”
A basket of bread came from the other direction, but no butter. Even gold couldn’t buy butter with U-boats sinking freighters every day in the Atlantic. The speeches were thankfully short, and there were enough toasts to Allied unity to keep my wineglass permanently in motion.
“To the Americans,” a Home Guard colonel opposite me said, offering a toast to our group at the end of the table. “May they arrive in sufficient numbers to defeat Jerry, but not so many as to take up all the room in the village pub!”
“Hear, hear,” went around the table, and the colonel winked at me, having his bit of fun. He was gray at the temples, and by the lines around his eyes, over fifty.
“Oh dear, Maurice,” his wife said, “what terrible manners! Please excuse my husband, Lieutenant, he had to wait fifteen minutes for his pint recently and hasn’t been the same since.”
“That’s all right, ma’am, I understand it must be difficult having so many GIs around. If I remember my history lessons, we had the same problem in Boston a while ago, until the redcoats left.”
“Touché,” said the colonel. “I deserved that. Don’t think we don’t appreciate America coming into the war, we do. It’s just that, for my generation, having gone through the First World War, and now this, it’s all so damned repetitive. And here we are, too old to serve. . . .”
“The Home Guard is service, and important service too,” his wife said. “Why, after Dunkirk, you were all that was left to stand up to the Germans if they invaded. And a good account you would have given of yourselves, all of you!”
There was silence around the table, and I watched their faces. Older men, lost in memories of battles past and opportunities lost to prove themselves once again. Maurice patted his wife’s hand, and she placed her other hand on top of his and squeezed. There were a lot of jokes about the Home Guard, old men drilling with broomsticks, and all that. Looking at them, I had no doubt that these gray-haired, middle-aged retreads would have gone down fighting if it had come to that. It must be hard keeping their spirits up when the U. S. Army showed up, rich in supplies, arms, cash, and optimism, eliminating the very need for a local guard just by their presence. And not understanding how close things had been for them. I raised my glass.
“To the Home Guard,” I said, surprised at the lump I felt in my throat.
“To the Home Guard,” came back at me from up and down the table, and I watched the colonel puff out his chest a bit as he raised his glass and basked in the smile his wife gave him, her moist eyes lingering a little as she watched him.
I realized the talk about Americans all around me was uneasy. I was one of the thousands from across the sea, easy with money, informal beyond the bounds of their polite society, a threat and a salvation wrapped up in one. Their young men were spread out across the globe, fighting in North Africa, in the jungles of Burma, sitting in German POW camps, and we were here, well fed and feeling our oats. They scrimped along with food rationing while your typical U.S. Army base probably threw away more than their whole village ate every day. I wondered how we’d react if the tables were turned.
After that toast, the mood lightened a bit. We talked about the last war, in which all of them had fought, and this war, in which their sons were fighting now and, for some, in which their daughters were taking part, too. The colonel and his wife had lost their oldest son on the Hood, sunk last year by the Bismarck. Their youngest was a pilot in the RAF.
“Fourteen hundred men on the Hood, including Michael,” said the colonel. “Only three were picked up out of the water.”
“At least you sank the Bismarck,” I said, offering what feeble comfort I could.
“I didn’t mind hearing that news, not at all,” the colonel said, taking his wife’s hand.
“What was it, Maurice?” she said. “Over two thousand on the Bismarck , and only a hundred survived. The numbers of war are so horrible. We say two ships sank, but that’s over three thousand men as well.”
The table fell silent.
“They are more than numbers.”
“Your Highness!” None of us had noticed the king standing just behind me, making his way down the table to greet his guests. Everyone started to rise.
“No, please, stay seated,” King Haakon said, gesturing with his arms, palms down, for everyone to stay in their seats. “I am sorry for your loss, for all the deaths in this war. There are no words worthy of such a loss.”
“God bless you, Your Highness,” said the colonel’s wife. The king walked around the table and stood at her side, reaching down from his height to take her hand.
“No, I ask God to bless you.”
I had never thought much about what it took to be a king. Guess I thought it was all giving orders. Shows what I know.
I had another glass of wine and was feeling a little tipsy when the king finished making his rounds and left the room, which I took to mean I could, too. I said my good nights to the Home Guard group and not for the first time wondered what Uncle Dan would say if he saw me now. The party was beginning to break up, and people were starting to file out. I noticed Daphne at the head table, a shock of green surrounded by brown and khaki. Cosgrove arose and intercepted me as I made for the door. For a big guy with a gimpy leg, he could move pretty fast when he wanted to.
“Lieutenant Boyle, I must ask for your assistance. It seems we are a bit short of Home Guard chaps for the exercise tomorrow. We need a few more fellows to fire off some blank rounds at the Norwegians and play the Huns. You’ve been volunteered!” I looked over at Harding, still sitting at the head table just outside the crush of men around Daphne, and he raised his glass with a smile. Thanks a lot.
“I guess so, Major. What do I do?”
“Be at the main entrance at 0600 hours, and you’ll be driven to the exercise area. The baron is going as well, and Mr. Birkeland has offered to lend a hand. They both think it will be great fun!”
Kaz would.
“And wear something more suitable for the field. It’s bound to be muddy out there.”
He was off, leaving me wondering why all armies seemed to start things before the sun came up, and wishing I had something besides my one dress uniform with me. I walked down the hall and up the stairs to my room, each step increasing the pounding in my skull. Too many damn toasts.
Minutes after I made it to my room there was a knock on the door. An enlisted man stood outside, a pile of clothes and boots weighing him down.
“Mr. Birkeland’s compliments, sir. He thought you might prefer to wear these tomorrow.” He handed me a brown wool British battle jacket, trousers, and boots. “Let me know if the size isn’t right,” he said as he went down the hall to knock on the door to Kaz’s room. The duds were fine, which was more than I could say for my head.