(One)
Washington, D.C.
19 December 1941
As his taxi drove past the White House, Fleming Pickering, a tall, handsome, superbly tailored man in his early forties, noticed steel-helmeted soldiers, armed with rifles, bayonets fixed, guarding the gates.
He wondered if they were really necessary. Was there a real threat to the security of either the President or the building itself? Or were these guards being used for a little domestic propaganda, a symbol that the nation had been at war for not quite two weeks, and that the White House was now the headquarters of the Commander in Chief?
Certainly, he reasoned, even before what the President had so eloquently dubbed “a day that will live in infamy,” the Secret Service and the White House police must have had contingency plans to protect the President in case of war. These would have called for more sophisticated measures than the posting of a corporal’s guard of riflemen at the White House gates.
Fleming Pickering, Chairman of the Board of the Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation, was not an admirer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States. This was not to say that he did not respect him. Roosevelt was, he acknowledged, both a brilliant man and a consummate master of the art of molding public opinion.
Roosevelt had managed to garner public support for policies—Lend-Lease in particular—that were, in Pickering’s judgment, not only disastrous and probably illegal, but which had, in the end, on the day of infamy, brought the United States into a war it probably could have stayed out of, and which it was pathetically ill-prepared to fight.
Fleming Pickering was considerably more aware than most Americans of what an absolute disaster Pearl Harbor had been. He and his wife had been in Honolulu when the Japanese struck. They had witnessed the burning and sinking battleships at the Navy Base, and the twisted, smoldering carnage at Hickam Field.
Despite his personal misgivings about Roosevelt, less than an hour after the last Japanese aircraft had left, as he watched the rescue and salvage operations, he had understood that the time to protest and oppose the President had passed, that it was clearly his—and everyone’s—duty to rally around the Commander in Chief and make what contribution he could to the war effort.
Fleming Pickering had come to Washington to offer his services.
He had two additional thoughts as the taxi drove down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House.
First, a feeling of sympathy for the soldiers standing there in the freezing cold in their steel helmets. A tin pot is a miserable sonofabitch to have to wear when it’s cold and snowing and the wind is blowing. He knew that from experience. Corporal Fleming Pickering, USMC, had worn one in the trenches in France in 1918.
And second, that with a little bit of luck, when the American people learned the hard way what that sonofabitch in the White House had gotten them into, he could be voted out of office in 1944. If there was still something called the United States of America in 1944.
The taxi, a DeSoto sedan painted yellow, turned off Pennsylvania Avenue, made a sharp U-turn, and pulled to the curb before the marquee of the Foster Lafayette Hotel. A doorman in a heavy overcoat liberally adorned with golden cords trotted out from the protection of his glass-walled guard post and pulled open the door.
“Well, hello, Mr. Pickering,” he said, with a genuine smile. “It’s nice to see you, Sir.”
“Hello, Ken,” Pickering said, offering his hand. “What do you think of the weather?”
Once out of the cab, he turned and handed the driver several dollar bills, indicating with his hand that he didn’t want any change, and then walked quickly into the hotel and across the lobby to the reception desk.
There was a line, and he took his place in it. Four people were ahead of him. Finally it was his turn.
“May I help you, Sir?” the desk clerk asked, making it immediately plain to Fleming Pickering that the clerk had no idea who he was.
“My name is Fleming Pickering,” he said. “I need a place to stay for a couple of days, maybe a week.”
“Have you a reservation, Sir?”
Pickering shook his head. The desk clerk raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
“Without a reservation, Sir…”
“Is Mr. Telford in the house?”
“Why, yes, Sir, I believe he is.”
“I wonder if you could tell him I’m here, please?”
Max Telford, resident manager of the Foster Lafayette Hotel, a short, pudgy, balding man wearing a frock coat, striped trousers, and a wing collar, appeared a moment later.
“We didn’t expect you, Mr. Pickering,” he said, offering his hand. “But you’re very welcome, nonetheless.”
“How are you, Max?” Pickering said, smiling. “I gather the house is full.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“What am I to do?” Pickering said. “I need a place to stay. Is there some Democrat we can evict?”
Telford chuckled. “I don’t think we’ll have to go that far. There’s always room for you here, Mr. Pickering.”
“Is Mrs. Fowler in town?”
“No, Sir. I believe she’s in Florida.”
“Then why don’t I impose on the Senator?”
“I’m sure the Senator would be delighted,” Telford said. He turned and took a key from the rack of cubbyholes. “I’ll take you up.”
“I know how to find it. Come up in a while, and we’ll have a little liquid cheer.”
“Why don’t I send up a tray of hors d’oeuvres?”
“That would be nice. Give me fifteen minutes to take a shower. Thank you, Max.”
Pickering took the key and walked to the bank of elevators.
Max Telford turned to the desk clerk.
“I know you haven’t been with us long, Mr. Denny, but you do know, don’t you, who owns this inn?”
“Yes, Sir. Mr. Foster. Mr. Andrew Foster.”
“And you know that there are forty-one other Foster Hotels?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Well, for your general information, as you begin what we both hope will be a long and happy career with Foster Hotels, I think I should tell you that Mr. Andrew Foster has one child, a daughter, and that she is married to the chairman of the board of the Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation.”
“The gentleman to whom you just gave the key to Senator Fowler’s suite?” Mr. Denny asked, but it was more of a pained realization than a question.
“Correct. Mr. Fleming Pickering. Mr. Pickering and Senator Fowler are very close.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Telford, I just didn’t know.”
“That’s why I’m telling you. There is one more thing. Until last week, we had a young Marine officer, a second lieutenant, in the house. His name is Malcolm Pickering. If he should ever appear at the desk here, looking for a room, which is a good possibility, I suggest that it would behoove you to treat him with the same consideration with which you would treat Mr. Foster himself; he is Mr. Foster’s grandson, his only grandchild, and the heir apparent to the throne.”
“I take your point, Sir,” Mr. Denny said.
“Don’t look so stricken,” Telford said. “They’re all very nice people. The boy, they call him ‘Pick,’ worked two summers for me. Once as a sous-chef at the Foster Park in New York, and the other time as the bell captain at the Andrew Foster in San Francisco.”
(Two)
Washington, D.C.
1735 Hours 19 December 1941
When Senator Richardson S. Fowler walked in, Fleming Pickering was sitting on the wide, leather-upholstered sill of a window in the Senator’s sitting room. A glass of whiskey was in Pickering’s hand.
Senator Fowler’s suite was six rooms on the corner of the eighth floor of the Foster Lafayette, overlooking the White House, which was almost directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the hotel.
“I had them let me in,” Fleming Pickering said. “I hope you don’t mind. The house is full.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” Senator Fowler said automatically, and then, with real feeling, “Jesus, Flem, it’s good to see you!”
Senator Fowler was more than a decade older than Fleming Pickering. He was getting portly, and his jowls were starting to grow rosy and to sag.
He looks more and more like a politician, Flem Pickering thought, aware that it was unkind. Years ago, as a very young man, Pickering had heard and immediately adopted as part of his personal philosophy an old and probably banal observation that to have friends, one must permit them to have one serious flaw. So far as Pickering was concerned, Richardson Fowler’s flaw was that he was a politician, the Junior Senator from the Great State of California.
Flem Pickering had a habit of picking up trite and banal phrases and adopting them as his own, ofttimes verbatim, sometimes revising them. So far as he was concerned, Richardson Fowler was the exception to a phrase he had lifted from Will Rogers and altered. Will Rogers said he had never met a man he didn’t like. Pickering’s version was that—Richardson Fowler excepted—he had never met a politician he had liked.
He had tried and failed to understand what drove Fowler to seek public office. It certainly wasn’t that he needed the work. Richardson Fowler had inherited from his father the San Francisco Courier-Herald, nine smaller newspapers, and six radio stations. His wife and her brother owned, it was said, more or less accurately, two square blocks of downtown San Francisco, plus several million acres of timberland in Washington and Oregon.
If Fowler was consumed by some desire to do good, to lead people in this direction or that, it seemed to Pickering that the newspapers and the radio stations gave Fowler the means to accomplish it. He didn’t have to run for office—with all that meant—for the privilege of coming east to the hot, muggy, provincial, small Southern town that was the nation’s capital, to consort with a depressing collection of failed lawyers and other scoundrels.
But, oh, Flem Pickering, he thought, what a hypocrite you are! Right now you are delighted to have access to a man with the political clout you pretend to scorn.
Senator Fowler dropped his heavy, battered, well-filled briefcase at his feet and crossed the room to Pickering. They shook hands, and then the Senator put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders and hugged him.
“I was worried about you, you bastard,” he said. “You and Patricia. She here with you?”
“She’s in San Francisco,” Pickering said. “She’s fine.”
“And Pick?”
“He’s at Pensacola, learning how to fly,” Pickering said. “I thought you knew.”
“I knew he was going down there,” the Senator said. “I had dinner with him, oh, six days, a week ago. But he never came to say good-bye to me.”
There was disappointment, perhaps even a little resentment, in his voice. Senator Fowler had known Pick Pickering from the day he was born.
“If you were a second lieutenant and they gave you two days off, would you spend them seeing an aging uncle-politician, or trying to get laid?” Pickering asked with a smile.
The Senator snorted a laugh. “Well, he could have tried to squeeze in fifteen minutes for me between jumps,” he said. He turned and walked to an antique sideboard loaded with whiskey bottles. “I have been thinking about having one of these for the last two hours. You all right?”
Flem Pickering raised his nearly full glass to show that he was.
Senator Fowler half-filled a glass with Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch, added one ice cube, and then sprayed soda into it from a wire-wrapped soda bottle.
“This stuff,” the Senator said, raising his glass, “is already getting in short supply. Goddamn German submarines.”
“I have four hundred and eleven cases,” Fleming Pickering said. “If you treat me right, I might put a case or two aside for you.”
Fowler, smiling, looked at him curiously.
“Off the Princess, the Destiny, and the Enterprise,” Pickering explained.
The Pacific Princess, 51,000 tons, a sleek, fast passenger liner, was the flagship of the Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation. The Pacific Destiny and the Pacific Enterprise, 44,500 tons each, were sister ships, slightly smaller and slower, but, some said, more luxurious.
“Is that why you’re here?” Senator Fowler asked. “The Navy after them again? Flem…”
Pickering held up his hand to shut him off.
“I sold them,” he said.
“When rape is inevitable, etcetera, etcetera?” Fowler asked.
“No,” Pickering said. “I think I could have won that one in the courts. The Navy could have commandeered them, but they couldn’t have forced me to sell them.”
Senator Fowler did not agree, but he didn’t say so.
“And it wasn’t patriotism, either,” Pickering said. “More like enlightened self-interest.”
“Oh?”
“Or a vision of the future,” Pickering said.
“Now you’ve lost me,” Senator Fowler confessed.
“We came home from Hawaii via Seattle,” Pickering said, pausing to sip at his drink. “On the Destiny. We averaged twenty-seven knots for the trip. It took us one hundred twenty hours—”
“Fast crossing,” Fowler interrupted, doing some quick, rough arithmetic. “Five and a half days.”
“Uh-huh,” Pickering said, “testing the notion that a fast passenger liner can run away from submarines.”
“Not proving the theory? You made it.”
“The theory presumes that submarines are not sitting ahead of you, waiting for you to come into range,” Pickering said. “And there may not have been any Japanese submarines around.”
“OK,” Senator Fowler agreed. “Theory.”
“While we were in Seattle, I drove past the Boeing plant. Long lines of huge, four-engine airplanes, B-17s, capable of making it nonstop to Hawaii in eleven, twelve hours.”
“Uh-huh,” Fowler agreed. He had flown in the B-17 and was impressed with it. “That airplane may just get our chestnuts out of the fire in this war.”
Pickering went off at a tangent.
“You heard, Dick, that some military moron had all the B-17s in Hawaii lined up in rows for the convenience of the Japanese?”
Fowler shook his head in disbelief or disgust or both. “There, and in the Philippines,” he said. “Christ, they really caught us with our pants down.”
“I talked to an Army Air Corps pilot in the bar of the hotel,” Pickering said. “He said a flight of B-17s from the States arrived while the raid was going on. And with no ammunition for their machine guns.”
“I heard that, too.”
“Anyway,” Pickering said, “looking at those B-17s in Seattle, it occurred to me that they could more or less easily be modified to carry passengers, and that, presuming we win this war, that’s the way the public is going to want to cross oceans in the future. Twelve hours to Hawaii beats five or six days all to hell.”
“Out of school—this is classified—Howard Hughes proposes to build an airplane—out of plywood, no less—that will carry four hundred soldiers across the Atlantic.”
“Then you understand what I’m saying. The day of the passenger liner, I’m afraid, is over. And since the Navy was making a decent offer for my ships, I decided to take it.”
“A decent offer?”
“They’re spending the taxpayers’ money, not their own. A very decent offer.”
“All of them?”
“Just the liners. I’m keeping the cargo ships, and I will not sell them to the Navy. If the Navy tries to make me sell them, I’ll take them to the Supreme Court, and win. Anyway, that’s where I got all the Scotch. I can also make you a very good deal on some monogrammed sterling silver flatware from the first-class dining rooms.”
Fowler chuckled. “I’m surprised the Navy let you keep that.”
“So am I,” Pickering said.
“What are you going to do with all that money?” Fowler asked.
“Get rid of it, quickly, before that sonofabitch across the street thinks of some way to tax me out of it,” Pickering said.
“You are speaking, Sir,” Fowler said, mockingly sonorous, “of your President and the Commander in Chief.”
“You bet I am,” Pickering said. “I told my broker to buy into Boeing, Douglas, and whatever airlines he can find. I think I’d like to own an airline.”
“And when Pick comes home from the war, he can run it?”
Pickering met his eyes. “Sure. Why not? I don’t intend to dwell on the other possibility.”
“I don’t know why I feel awkward saying this,” Senator Fowler said, “but I pray for him, Flem.”
“Thank you,” Pickering said. “So do I.”
“So what are you doing in Washington?” Fowler said, to change the subject.
“You know a lawyer named Bill Donovan? Wall Street?”
“Sure.”
“You know what he’s doing these days?”
“Where did you think he’s getting the money to do it?” He examined his now-empty glass. “I’m going to build another one of these. You want one?”
“Please, Dick.”
“You think you’d make a good spy?” Senator Fowler asked.
“No.”
“Then why are you going to see Donovan?”
“He called me. Once before December seventh, and twice since. Once when Patricia and I were still in Honolulu, and the second the day before yesterday, in Frisco. He got me the priority to fly in here.”
“Do you know what he’s doing?”
“I figured you would.”
Fowler grunted as he refilled their glasses. He handed Pickering his drink, and then went on, “Right now, he’s the Coordinator of Information. For a dollar a year. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s idea.”
“That sounds like a propaganda outfit.”
“I think maybe it’s supposed to. He’s got Robert Sherwood, the playwright, and some other people like that, who will do propaganda. They’ve moved into the National Institutes of Health building. But there’s another angle to it, an intelligence angle. He’s gathered together a group of experts—he’s got nine or ten, and he’s shooting for a dozen, and this is probably what he has in mind for you—who are going to collect all the information generated by all the intelligence services, you know, the Army’s G-2, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the State Department, everybody, and try to make some overall, global sense out of it. For presentation to the President.”
“I don’t think I understand,” Pickering confessed.
“Donovan makes the point, and I think he’s right, that the service intelligence operations are too parochial, that they have blinders on them like a carriage horse. They see the war only from the viewpoint of the Navy or the Army or whatever.”
The Senator looked at Pickering to see if he was getting through. Pickering made a “come on, tell me more” gesture with his hand.
“OK. Let’s say the Navy finds out, as they did, that the Germans had established a weather station and aerial navigation facilities in Greenland. The Navy solution to the problem would be to send a battleship to blow it up—”
“Where would they get one? The Navy’s fresh out of battleships. The Japanese used them for target practice.”
“You want to hear this or not?”
“Sorry.”
“You’re going to have to learn to curb your lip, Flem, if you’re going to go to work for Bill Donovan. Or anywhere else in the government.”
“What happened to free speech?”
“It went out the same window with Franklin Roosevelt’s pledge that our boys would never fight on foreign soil,” the Senator said.
“I’m not working for him yet,” Pickering said.
Smiling, Senator Fowler shook his head, and then went on, “As I was saying, if Navy Intelligence finds something, they propose a Navy solution. If the Army Air Corps had found out about the Germans on Greenland, they would have proposed sending bombers to eliminate them. Am I getting through to you?”
Pickering nodded.
“The idea is that Donovan’s people—his ‘twelve disciples,’ as they’re called—will get intelligence information from every source, evaluate it, and make a strategic recommendation. In other words, after the Navy found the Greenland Germans, Donovan’s people might have recommended sending Army Air Corps bombers.”
“That sounds like a good idea.”
“It is, but I don’t think it will work.”
“Why not?”
“Interservice rivalry, primarily. And that now includes J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Until Bill Donovan showed up, Edgar thought that if war came, the FBI would be in charge of intelligence, period. Edgar is a very dangerous man if crossed.”
“The story I got was that Donovan got Hoover his job, running the FBI.”
“That was yesterday. In Washington, the question is, ‘What have you done for me today, and what can you do for me tomorrow?’ Anyway, the facts are that everybody has drawn their knives to cut Donovan’s throat. I’m betting on Donovan, but I’ve been wrong before.”
“Really?” Pickering teased.
“That’s what you’d be getting into if you went to work for him, Flem. When do you see him?”
“He wanted me to have dinner with him tonight, but I wasn’t in the mood. I told him I would come to his office in the morning.”
“Boy, have you got a lot to learn!” Fowler said.
“Meaning I should have shown up, grateful for the privilege of a free meal from the great man?”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“Fuck him,” Fleming Pickering said. “So far as I’m concerned, Bill Donovan is just one more overpaid ambulance chaser.”
“You’d better hope he doesn’t know you think that.”
“He already does. I already told him.”
“You did?” Senator Fowler asked, deciding as he spoke that it was probably true.
“He represented us before the International Maritime Court when a Pacific & Orient tanker rammed our Hawaiian Trader. You wouldn’t believe the bill that sonofabitch sent me.”
“I hope you paid it,” Fowler said wryly.
“I did,” Pickering said, “but not before I called him up and told him what I thought of it. And him.”
“Oh, Christ, Flem, you’re something!” Fowler said, laughing.
“I couldn’t get near the club car, much less the dining car, on the train from New York,” Pickering said. “All I’ve had to eat all day is a roll on the airplane and some hors d’oeuvres. I’m starving. You have any plans for dinner?”
Fowler shook his head no.
“Until you graced me with your presence, I was going to take my shoes off, collapse on the couch, and get something from room service.”
There was a knock at the door. It was Max Telford.
“Come on in, Max,” Pickering called. “The Senator was just extolling the virtues of your room service.”
“I’ve got someone with me,” Telford said, and a very large, very black man, in the traditional chef’s uniform of starched white hat and jacket and striped gray trousers, pushed a rolling cart loaded with silver food warmers into the room.
“Hello, Jefferson,” Pickering said, as he crossed the room to him and offered his hand. “How the hell are you? I thought you were in New York.”
“No, Sir. I’ve been here about three months,” the chef said. “I heard you were in the house, and thought maybe you’d like something more than crackers and cheese to munch on.”
“Great, I’m starving. Do you know the Senator?”
“I know who the Senator is,” Jefferson Dittler said.
“Dick, Jefferson Dittler. Jefferson succeeded where Patricia failed; he got Pick to wash dishes.”
“Lots of dishes,” Dittler laughed. “Then I taught him a little about cooking.”
“Oh, I’ve heard about you,” Senator Fowler said, shaking hands. “You’re the fellow who taught Pick how to make hollan-daise in a Waring Blender.”
“That was supposed to be a professional secret,” Dittler said.
“Well, Pick betrayed your confidence,” Fowler said. “He taught that trick to my wife.”
“He’s a nice boy,” Dittler said.
Pickering turned from the array of bottles and handed Dittler a glass dark with whiskey. “That’s that awful fermented corn you like, distilled in a moldy old barrel in some Kentucky holler.”
“That’s why it’s so good,” Dittler said. “The moldy old barrel’s the secret.” He raised his glass. “To Pick. May God be with him.”
“Here, here,” Senator Fowler said.
Fleming Pickering started lifting the silver food covers.
“Very nice,” he said. “One more proof that someone of my superior intelligence knows how to raise children for fun and profit. Jefferson never did this sort of thing for me before Pick worked for him.”
“He’s a nice boy,” Jefferson Dittler repeated, and then, his tone suggesting it was something he desperately wanted to believe, “Smart as a whip. He’ll be all right in the Marines.”
(Three)
Building “F”
Anacostia Naval Air Station
Washington, D.C.
20 December 1941
The interview between Mr. Fleming Pickering, Chairman of the Board of the Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation, and Colonel William J. Donovan, the Coordinator of Information to the President of the United States, did not go well.
For one thing, when Mr. Pickering was not in Colonel Donovan’s outer office at the agreed-upon time, 9:45 A.M., Colonel Donovan went to his next appointment. This required Mr. Pickering, who arrived at 9:51 A.M., to cool his heels for more than an hour with an old copy of Time magazine. Mr. Pickering was not used to cooling his heels in anyone’s office, and he was more than a little annoyed.
More importantly, Mr. Pickering quickly learned that Colonel Donovan did not intend for him to become one of the twelve disciples that Senator Fowler had mentioned, but rather that he would be an adviser to one of the disciples—should he “come aboard.”
That disciple was named. Mr. Pickering knew him, both personally and professionally. He was a banker, and Pickering was willing to acknowledge that Donovan’s man had a certain degree of expertise in international finance, which was certainly closely connected with international maritime commerce.
But the United States was not about to consider opening new and profitable shipping channels. Victory, in Fleming Pickering’s judgment, was going to go to whichever of the warring powers could transport previously undreamed of tonnages of military equipment, damn the cost, to any number of obscure ports, under the most difficult conditions. In that connection there were two problems, as Pickering saw the situation.
First, there was the actual safe passage of the vessels—getting them past enemy surface and submersible warships. That was obviously going to be the Navy’s problem. The second problem, equally important to the execution of a war, was cargo handling and refueling facilities at the destination ports. A ship’s cargo was useless unless it could be unloaded. A ship itself was useless if its fuel bunkers were dry.
Carrying the war to the enemy, Pickering knew, meant the interdiction of the enemy’s sea passages, and denying to him ports through which his land and air forces had to be supplied.
If the President was going to get evaluations of the maritime situation, it seemed perfectly clear to Fleming Pickering that it should come from someone expert in the nuts and bolts, someone who could make judgments based on his own experience with ships and ports, not someone whose experience was limited to the bottom line on a profit-and-loss statement, or whose sea experience was limited to crossing the Atlantic in a first-class cabin on the Queen Mary or some other luxury liner.
Someone like him, for example.
This was not overwhelmingly modest, he realized, but neither was it a manifestation of a runaway ego. When Fleming Pickering stepped aboard a P&FE ship—or, for that matter, ships of a dozen other lines—he was addressed as “Captain” and given the privilege of the bridge.
It was not simply a courtesy given to a wealthy shipowner. When Fleming Pickering had come home from France in 1918, he had almost immediately married. Then, to the horror of his new in-laws, he’d shipped out as an apprentice seaman aboard a P&FE freighter. As his father and grandfather had done before him, he had worked his way up in the deck department, ultimately sitting for his master’s ticket, any tonnage, any ocean, a week before his twenty-sixth birthday.
He had been relief master on board the Pacific Vagabond, five days out of Auckland for Manila, when the radio operator had brought to the bridge the message that his father had suffered a coronary thrombosis and that in a special session of the stockholders (that is to say, his mother), he had been elected Chairman of the Board of the Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation.
Pickering tried to make this point to Colonel Donovan and failed. He was not particularly surprised when Donovan politely told him, in effect, to take the offer of a job as adviser to the disciple or go fuck himself. The disciple was one of Donovan’s Wall Street cronies; Pickering would have been surprised if Donovan had accepted the wisdom of his arguments.
And, he was honest enough to admit, he would have been disappointed if he had. He didn’t want to fight the war from behind a goddamned desk in Sodom on Potomac.
“General McInerney will see you now, Mr. Pickering,” the impeccably shorn, shined, and erect Marine lieutenant said. “Will you come with me, please, Sir?”
Brigadier General D. G. McInerney, USMC, got to his feet and came around from behind his desk as Fleming Pickering was shown into his office. He was a stocky, barrel-chested man wearing Naval Aviator’s wings on the breast of his heavily beribboned uniform tunic.
“Why, Corporal Pickering,” he said. “My, how you’ve aged!”
“Hello, you baldheaded old bastard,” Pickering replied. “How the hell are you?”
General McInerney’s intended handshake degenerated into an affectionate hug. The two men, who had become friends in their teens, beamed happily at each other.
“It’s a little early, but what the hell,” General McInerney said. “Charlie, get a bottle of the good booze and a couple of glasses.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” his aide-de-camp replied. Although he was a little taken aback by the unaccustomed display of affection, and it was the first time he had ever heard anyone refer to General McInerney as a “baldheaded old bastard,” he was not totally surprised. Until a week ago, General McInerney’s “temporary junior aide” had been a second lieutenant fresh from Quantico, whom General McInerney had arranged to get in the flight-training program at Pensacola.
His name was Malcolm Pickering, and this was obviously his father. The General had told him that they had served together in France in the First World War.
“Pick’s a nice boy, Flem,” General McInerney said, as he waved Pickering into one end of a rather battered couch and sat down on the other end. “I was tempted to keep him.”
“I’m grateful to you for all you did for him, Doc,” Pickering said.
“Hell,” McInerney said, depreciatingly, “the Corps needs pilots more than it needs club officers, and that’s what those paper pushers in personnel were going to do with him.”
“Well, I’m grateful nonetheless,” Pickering said.
“I got one for you,” McInerney said. “I called down there to make sure they weren’t going to make him a club officer down there, and you know who his roommate is? Jack Stecker’s boy. He just graduated from West Point.”
Fleming Pickering had no idea what McInerney was talking about, and it showed on his face.
“Jack Stecker?” McInerney went on. “Buck sergeant? Got the Medal at Belleau Wood?”
The Medal was the Medal of Honor, often erroneously called the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor in action.
“Oh, yeah, the skinny guy. Pennsylvania Dutchman. No middle name,” Pickering remembered.
“Right,” McInerney chuckled, “Jack NMI Stecker.”
“I always wondered what had happened to him,” Pickering said. “He was one hard-nosed sonofabitch.”
The description was a compliment.
The aide handed each of them a glass of whiskey.
“Mud in your eye,” McInerney said, raising his glass and then draining it.
“Belleau Wood,” Pickering said dryly, before he emptied his glass.
“Jack stayed in the Corps,” McInerney went on. “They wanted to send him to Annapolis. Christ, he wasn’t any older than we were, he could have graduated with a regular commission when he was twenty-three or twenty-four, but he wanted to get married, so he turned it down. Until last summer he was a master gunnery sergeant at Quantico.”
“Was?”
“They made him a captain; he’s at Diego.”
“And now our kids are second lieutenants! Christ, we’re getting old, Doc.”
“Jack had two boys. The older one went to Annapolis. He was an ensign on the Arizona. He was KIA on December 7.”
“Oh, Christ!”
The two men looked at each other a moment, eyes locked, and then McInerney shrugged and Pickering threw up his hands helplessly.
“So what brings you to Washington, Flem?” McInerney asked, changing the subject. “I thought you hated the place.”
“I do. And with rare exceptions, everyone in it. I’m looking for a job.”
“Oh?”
“I just saw Colonel William J. Donovan,” Pickering said. “He sent for me.”
“Then I guess you know what he’s up to.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“Out of school, he’s giving the Commandant a fit.”
“Oh? How so?”
“The scuttlebutt going around is that Roosevelt wants to commission Donovan a brigadier general in the Corps.”
“But he was in the Army,” Pickering protested.
“Yeah, I know. The President is very impressed, or so I hear, with the British commandos. You know, hit-and-run raids. He wants American commandos, and he thinks they belong in the Corps. I hope to hell it’s not true.”
“It sounds idiotic to me,” Pickering said.
“Tell your important friends. Senator Fowler, for example.”
“I will.”
“Just don’t quote me.”
“Don’t be silly, Doc.”
“You were about to tell me, I think, what you’re going to do for Donovan.”
“Nothing. I decided I didn’t want to work for him. Or maybe vice versa. Anyway, I’m not going to work for him.”
“Won’t you have enough to do running your company? Hell, transportation is going to win—or lose—this war.”
“I sold the passenger ships, at least the larger ones, to the Navy,” Pickering replied. “And the freighters and tankers will probably go on long-term charter to either the Navy or the Maritime Administration—the ones that aren’t already, that is. There’s not a hell of a lot for me to do.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Strange, General, that you should ask that question,” Pickering said.
“What’s on your mind, Flem?” McInerney asked, a hint of suspicion in his voice.
“How about ‘Once a Marine, always a Marine’?”
McInerney looked at him with disbelief and uneasiness in his eyes.
“Flem, you’re not talking about you coming back in the Corps, are you? Are you serious?”
“Yes, I am, and yes, I am,” Pickering said. “Why is that so—to judge from the look in your eyes and your tone of voice—incredible?”
“Come on, Flem,” McInerney said. “You’ve been out of the Corps since 1919—and then, forgive me, you were a corporal.”
“There should be some job where I could be useful,” Pickering said. “Christ, I’ve been running eighty-one ships. And their crews. And all the shore facilities.”
“I’m sure the Navy would love to commission someone with your kind of experience. Or, for that matter, the Transportation Corps of the Army.”
“I don’t want to be a goddamn sailor.”
“Think it through,” McInerney said. “Flem, I’m telling you the way it is.”
“So tell me. I’m apparently a little dense.”
“Your experience, your shipping business experience, is in what I think of as Base Logistics. Moving large amounts of heavy cargo by sea from one place to another. The Navy does that for the Marine Corps.”
“It occurred to me that I could be one hell of a division supply officer, division quartermaster, whatever they call it.”
“That calls for a lieutenant colonel, maybe a full colonel. If there was strong resistance among the palace guard to commissioning people—Marines, like Jack Stecker, a master gunnery sergeant—as captains, what makes you think they’d commission a civilian, a former corporal, as a lieutenant colonel?”
“I’m willing to start at the bottom. I don’t have to be a lieutenant colonel.”
McInerney laughed. “I think you really believe that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“As a major? A captain? That your idea of starting at the bottom?”
“Why not?”
“Flem, when was the last time someone told you what to do, gave you an order?”
“Well, just for the sake of argument, I think I can still take orders, but I have the feeling that I’m just wasting my breath.”
“You want the truth from me, old buddy, or bullshit from some paper pusher?”
“That would depend on what the bullshit was.”
“‘Why, we would love to have you, Mr. Pickering,’ followed by an assignment as, say, a major, and deputy assistant maintenance officer for mess-kit rehabilitation at Barstow, or some other supply depot. Where you would do a hell of a job rehabilitating mess kits, and be an all-around pain in the ass the rest of the time. You want to march off to war again, Flem, and that’s just not going to happen. Unless, of course, you go to the Navy. They really would love to have you.”
“Fuck the Navy,” Fleming Pickering said.
He stood up. General McInerney eyed him warily.
“I suppose I’ve made a real fool of myself, haven’t I, Doc?” Pickering said calmly.
“No, not at all. I’m just sorry things are…the way things are.”
“Well, I’ve kept my master’s ticket up. And I still own some ships. Taking a ship to sea is better than being…what did you say, ‘a deputy assistant mess-kit-repair officer’?”
“Yes, of course it is. But I keep saying, and you keep ignoring, that the Navy would love to have you.”
“And I keep saying, and you keep ignoring, ‘Fuck the Navy.’”
McInerney laughed.
“Have it your way, Flem. But they are on our side in this war.”
“Well, then, God help us. I was at Pearl Harbor.”
“Is it fair to blame Pearl Harbor on the Navy?”
“On who, then?” Fleming Pickering said, and put out his hand. “Thank you for seeing me, Doc. And for doing what you did for Pick.”
“If you were twenty-one, I’d get you in flight school, too. No thanks required. Keep in touch, Flem.”
(Four)
The Foster Lafayette Hotel
Washington, D.C.
20 December 1941
“Thank you very much,” Fleming Pickering said politely, then took the receiver from his ear and placed it, with elaborate care, in its base. It was one of two telephones on the coffee table in the sitting room of Senator Richardson Fowler’s suite.
Then he said, quite clearly, “Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch!”
Transcontinental and Western Airlines had just told him that even though he already had his ticket for a flight between New York and San Francisco, with intermediate stops at Chicago and Denver, he could not be boarded without a priority. He had explained to them that he had come from San Francisco with a priority and was simply trying to get home, and that he had presumed that the priority which had brought him to Washington also applied to his return trip. TWA had told him that was not the case; he would need another priority to do so.
Fleming Pickering considered his predicament and swore again.
“That goddamned sonofabitch!”
He was referring to Colonel William J. Donovan, Coordinator of Information to the President of the United States. This was his fault. Donovan should have arranged for him to get home, gotten him a priority to do so. While he didn’t think it was likely the ambulance-chasing sonofabitch was vindictive enough to have canceled his return-trip priority after their unpleasant encounter that morning, it was possible. And whether he had canceled the priority or simply neglected to arrange for one, what this meant for Fleming Pickering was that unless he wanted to spend four days crossing the country by train—and they probably passed out compartments on the train to people with priorities, which might well mean sitting up in a coach all the way across the country—he was going to have to call the bastard up and politely beg him to get him a priority to go home.
There was no question in Pickering’s mind that Donovan would get him a priority, and no question either that Donovan would take the opportunity to remind Pickering that priorities were intended for people who were making a contribution to the war effort, not for people who placed their own desires and ambitions above the common good, by, for example, declining to serve with the Office of the Coordinator of Information.
Then Fleming Pickering had another thought: Richardson Fowler could probably get him a priority. Dick was a politician. Whatever law the politicians wrote, or whatever they authorized some agency of the government to implement—such as setting up an air-travel priority system—those bastards would take care of themselves first.
The thought passed through his mind, and was quickly dismissed, that perhaps he was being a horse’s ass, that he was not working for the government and therefore had no right to a priority, and that getting one through Fowler’s political influence would deprive of a seat some brave soldier en route to battle the Treacherous Jap. He was not going to California to lie on the beach. He still had a shipping company to run; coming here had taken him away from that.
There came a knock at the door. Pickering looked at it, and then at his watch. It was probably Dick Fowler. But why would Fowler knock?
“Come!”
It was Max Telford.
“Hello, Max, what’s up?”
“I have a somewhat delicate matter I thought I should bring to your attention,” Telford said.
“Will it wait until I pour us a drink? I’ve had a bad day and desperately need one.”
“I could use a little taste myself,” Telford said. “Thank you.”
“Scotch?”
“Please.”
When Pickering handed him his drink, Telford handed him a woman’s red leather wallet.
“What’s this?”
“It belongs to Miss Ernestine Sage,” Telford said.
Ernestine “Ernie” Sage was the daughter of Patricia Pickering’s college roommate.
“Where’d you get it?” Pickering asked.
“Miss Sage left it behind when she left the inn. The wallet and some other things.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“She was not registered, Mr. Pickering,” Telford said carefully.
“She was here with Pick?” Fleming Pickering’s eyes lit up. He liked Ernie Sage, and there had been more than a tiny seed of hope in the jokes over the years, as Ernie and Pick had been growing up, that they could be paired off permanently. Still, it was a dumb thing for Pick to do. Ernest Sage, Ernie’s father, was Chairman of the Board of American Personal Pharmaceuticals. And he routinely stayed in the Foster Lafayette. Pick should have known she would be recognized.
“With Pick’s friend,” Telford said. “Lieutenant McCoy.”
“I know him,” Pickering said, without thinking. “He’s a nice kid.”
Pick and McCoy had gone through the Officer Candidate School at the Marine base at Quantico together. They had nothing in common. McCoy had been a corporal in the peacetime Marine Corps, and what he had, he had earned himself. But Pickering had not been surprised when he’d met McCoy and seen the affection between him and his son. Doc McInerney and Flem Pickering had become lifelong friends in the Corps in France, despite a wide disparity in backgrounds.
“Then you know he was wounded,” Telford said.
“No. I hadn’t heard about that.”
“I don’t have all the details,” Telford said. “I didn’t want to pry, but McCoy is apparently some sort of officer courier. He was in the Pacific when the war started, and Pick got one of those ‘missing and presumed dead’ telegrams. He was pretty shook up about it. And then McCoy called from the West Coast and said he was back. Anyway, Pick came to me and said that McCoy was on his way to Washington, and if there was ever a time a Foster hotel should offer its very best, it was now, to McCoy. And his lady friend. And that all charges should be put on his account.”
“And the lady friend turned out to be Ernestine Sage?”
“Yes, Sir. I recognized her immediately, but I don’t know if she knows I knew who she is.”
“And they were here for a while? Lots of room service?”
“Yes. That’s a nice way to put it.”
“Andrew Foster once told me that so far as he’s concerned, he’s prepared to offer accommodations to two female elephants in heat, plus a bull elephant, just as long as they pay the bill and don’t soil the carpets,” Pickering said. “So what’s the problem?”
Telford laughed. “He told me a variant of that philosophy. It was two swans in heat, so long as they paid the bill and didn’t flap their wings and lay eggs in the elevators.”
Pickering chuckled, and then repeated, “So what’s the problem? I’d rather my wife didn’t hear about this, but so far as I’m concerned, whatever Ernie Sage did in here with Lieutenant McCoy is their business and no one else’s.”
“The problem is how to return Miss Sage’s property to her,” Telford said. “The only address I have for either of them is the one on her driver’s license. That’s in Bernardsville, New Jersey. Her parents’ home, I think.”
“Telford, your discretion is in keeping with the highest traditions of the innkeeping trade,” Pickering said, meaning it. “If Ernest Sage found out—or even suspected—that his only child, his precious little Ernie, was shacked up with a Marine officer in a hotel in Washington, there would be hell to pay. Let me think.”
He did just that, as he took a deep pull at his drink.
“Ernie works for an advertising agency in New York,” he said, after a moment. “J. Walter Thompson. It’s on Madison Avenue. Check the phone book. Send it to her there, special delivery, and put Pick’s address on it as the return address.”
“All I have for that would be ‘Pensacola, Florida.’”
“Add ‘Student, Flight Training Program, U.S. Navy Air Station,’” Pickering said.
“I’m glad I brought this to your attention,” Telford said.
“So am I. You about ready for another of these?”
“No, thank you.”
The door opened and Senator Richardson Fowler walked in. There was someone with him, a stocky, well-dressed man in his sixties. He stopped inside the door, took gold-rimmed pince-nez from a vest pocket, polished them quickly with a handkerchief, and then put them on his nose.
“Good evening, Mr. Secretary,” Telford said. “It’s nice to see you, Sir.”
“Hello, Telford, how are you?” said Secretary of the Navy Frank W. Knox.
“Fine, and on my out, Sir,” Telford said. “Is there anything I can send up?”
“All we want right now is a drink, Max, thanks,” Fowler said. He waited until Telford had left, closing the door behind him, and then went on, “Frank told me at lunch, to my surprise, that you two don’t know each other.”
“Only by reputation,” Pickering said, crossing the room to Knox and giving him his hand.
“I was about to say just that,” Knox said. “How do you do, Pickering?”
The two examined each other with unabashed curiosity.
“Scotch for you, Frank?” Senator Fowler asked, looking over his shoulder from the array of bottles.
“Please,” Knox said absently, and then, “Dick tells me you’re going to work for Bill Donovan.”
“That didn’t work out,” Pickering said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Knox said.
“Why should you be sorry?”
“It takes away an argument I was going to use on you.”
“What argument was that?”
Senator Fowler knew Frank Knox almost as well as he knew Fleming Pickering. Sensing that their first meeting already showed signs of becoming confrontational, he hurried over with the drinks.
“You all right, Flem?”
“Oh, I think I might have another. You can’t fly on six or seven wings, you know.” He walked to the array of liquor.
“I gather your meeting with Bill Donovan was not entirely successful?” Fowler asked.
“No, it wasn’t,” Pickering replied.
“You want to tell me why?”
“Well, aside from the fact that we don’t like each other, which is always a problem if you’re going to work for somebody, you were wrong about his wanting to make me one of his twelve disciples. What he had in mind was my being a minor saint—Saint Fleming the Humble—to one of his Wall Street moneymen.”
“You have been at the sauce, haven’t you?”
“It is a blow to the masculine ego, especially in these times of near-hysterical patriotism, for an ex-Marine to be told, ‘No, thanks, the Corps can’t use you.’ I have had a drink or five. Guilty, Your Senatorship.”
“I don’t think I understand you,” Fowler said.
“After I saw Donovan, I tried to enlist, and was turned down.”
“You were a Marine?” Knox asked.
“I was,” Pickering said, “but, as the General reminded me, only a corporal.”
“Both Napoleon and Hitler were only corporals,” said Frank Knox. “I, on the other hand, was a sergeant.”
Pickering looked at the dignified Secretary of the Navy, saw the twinkle in his eyes, and smiled.
“Were you really?”
“First United States Volunteer Cavalry, Sir,” Knox said. “I charged up Kettle Hill with Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.”
“The good cousin,” Pickering said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Knox said. “Franklin grows on you.”
“I will refrain from saying, Mr. Secretary, how that man grows on me.”
Knox chuckled. “The Marine Corps turned you down, did they?”
“Politely, but firmly.”
“The Marine Corps is part of the Navy. I’m Secretary of the Navy. Are you a bartering man, Pickering?”
“I’ll always listen to an offer.”
Knox nodded, and paused thoughtfully before going on.
“The reason I was sorry to hear that you’re not going to be working for Bill Donovan, Pickering, is that I came here with the intention of making this argument to you: Since you will be working for Donovan, you will not be able to run the Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping fleet, so you might as well sell it to the Navy.”
“Since Fowler apparently has been doing a lot of talking about me,” Pickering replied, not pleasantly, “I’m surprised he didn’t tell you I told him I have no intention of selling any more of my ships. To the Navy, or anyone else.”
“Oh, he told me that,” Knox said. “I came here to try to get you to change your mind.”
“Then I’m afraid you’re on a wild-goose chase.”
“You haven’t even heard my arguments.”
Pickering shrugged.
“We’re desperate for shipping,” Knox said.
“My ships will haul anything the Navy wants hauled, anywhere the Navy wants it hauled.”
“There are those who believe the maritime unions may cause trouble when there are inevitable losses to submarines and surface raiders.”
“My crews will sail my ships anywhere I tell them to sail them,” Pickering said.
“There are those who believe the solution to that problem, which I consider more real than you do, is to send them to sea with Navy crews.”
“Then they’re fools,” Pickering said.
“Indeed?” Knox asked icily.
“Pacific & Far Eastern doesn’t have a third mate, or a second assistant engineer, who is not qualified to sail as master, or chief engineer,” Pickering said. “Which is good for the country. My junior officers are going to be the masters and chief engineers of the ships—the vast fleets of cargo ships—we’re going to have to build for this war, and my ordinary and able-bodied seamen and my engine room wipers are going to be the junior officers and assistant engineers. You can’t teach real, as opposed to Navy, seamanship in ten or twelve weeks at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. If somebody is telling you that you can, you had better get a new adviser.”
“What’s the difference between Navy seamanship, Flem, and ‘real’ seamanship?” Fowler asked.
“It takes three or four Navy sailors to do what one able-bodied seaman is expected to do on a merchantman,” Pickering replied. “A merchant seaman does what he sees has to be done, based on a good deal of time at sea. A Navy sailor is trained not to blow his nose until someone tells him to. And then they send a chief petty officer to make sure he blows it in the prescribed manner.”
“You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of the U.S. Navy,” Knox said sharply.
“Not if what happened at Pearl Harbor is any indication of the way they think. I was there, Mr. Knox.”
Knox glowered at him; Fowler saw the Secretary’s jowls working.
“There are those,” Knox said after a long pause, “who advise me that the Navy should stop trying to reason with you and simply seize your vessels under the President’s emergency powers.”
“I’ll take you to the Supreme Court and win. You can force me—not that you would have to—to have my ships carry what you want, wherever you want it carried, but you can not seize them.”
“A couple of minutes ago, the thought entered my head that I might be able to resolve this difference reasonably by offering you a commission in the Marine Corps, say, as a colonel. That now seems rather silly, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t think silly is the word,” Pickering said nastily. “Insulting would seem to fit. To both the Corps and me.”
“Flem!” Senator Fowler protested.
“It’s all right, Dick,” Knox said, waving his hand to shut him off. “And I don’t suppose saying to you, Pickering, that your country needs your vessels would have much effect on you, would it?”
“My ships are at my country’s disposal,” Pickering said evenly. “But what I am not going to do is turn them over to the Navy so the Navy can do to them what it did to the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.”
“That’s an insult,” Knox said, “to the courageous men at Pearl Harbor, many of whom gave their lives.”
“No, it’s not,” Pickering said. “I’m not talking about courage. I’m talking about stupidity. If I had your job, Mr. Secretary, I would fire every admiral who was anywhere near Pearl Harbor. Fire them, hell, stand them in front of a firing squad for gross dereliction of duty. Pearl Harbor should not have happened. That’s a fact, and you can’t hide it behind a chorus of patriotic outrage that someone would dare sink our fleet.”
“I’m ultimately responsible for whatever happens to the Navy,” Knox said.
“If you really believe that, then maybe you should consider resigning to set an example.”
“Now goddamn it, Flem!” Senator Fowler exploded. “That’s going too goddamned far. You owe Frank an apology!”
“Not if he really believes that, he doesn’t,” Knox said. He leaned over and set his glass on the coffee table. “Thank you for the drink, Dick. And for the chance to meet Mr. Pickering.”
“Frank!”
“It’s been very interesting,” the Secretary of the Navy said. “If not very fruitful.”
“Frank, Flem’s had a couple too many,” Senator Fowler said.
“He looks like the kind of man who can handle his liquor,” Knox said. “Anyway, in vino veritas.” He walked to the door and opened it, and then half-turned around. “Mr. Pickering, I offered my resignation to the President on December seventh. He put it to me that his accepting it would not be in the best interests of the country, and he therefore declined to do so.”
And then he went through the door and closed it after him.
Fleming Pickering and Richardson Fowler looked at each other. Pickering saw anger in his old friend’s eyes.
There was a momentary urge to apologize, but then Fleming Pickering decided against it. He had, he realized, said nothing that he had not meant.