As commander of all U.S. forces in Europe Gen. Douglas Freeman left Brussels with four F-18 fighters escorting him on the first leg of his circuitous ten-thousand-mile journey to Korea via a U.S. stopover where he would secretly consult with the president at Camp David, Freeman’s look-alike, seconded from the Fifth Canadian Army’s entertainment battalion, left the icy barrens of Newfoundland for the flight across the pole to Brussels’ NATO headquarters.
David Brentwood and Lili were in the Brussels gallery, admiring the Rubens, which, along with other masterpieces, had been relegated to a rather poky basement of the museum because of the possibility of Soviet rocket salvos.
He admired Lili’s knowledge of Rubens and other painters — Caravaggio, Bernini, Berckhuide, and Hals — he’d never heard of. Her mention of them made him feel “provincial,” as his sister, Lana, and probably Melissa would have teasingly called him. He even felt prudish in front of Rubens’s voluptuous women, whereas Lili talked about them at a deeper level with such affection and knowledge of detail that it was clear she had been nurtured by such paintings and felt a need for them, as much a part of her life as baseball was to him. His older brother, Robert, had written home in much the same vein about his fiancée, Rosemary, who taught Shakespeare.
It made David feel slightly inferior to Lili, despite the fact that he was older. But she had none of the pomposity of some of the self-proclaimed aficionados of art who flaunted their disdain for the neophyte.
He tried to understand the paintings, but at heart displayed more curiosity about how they were done than what they depicted. But Lili put him at ease, telling him he shouldn’t even try to explain them. “It is better to feel them, David,” she advised, happy with the joy of showing her handsome young American the best of her culture. “Do you feel them?” she asked.
He thought for a moment. “I suppose so. They look warm—”
“Yes!” she said triumphantly, squeezing his hand in delight. “Rubens always makes it come alive so.” She glanced about the basement gallery. “Of course, they are not in a very nice setting, and the light is not good.”
“It’s fine,” David assured her. “Makes them seem cozier.”
She didn’t understand the word. He explained by pulling her closer to him, to the stern disapproval of the security guard, and David felt the happiest he’d been since — he couldn’t remember when. He told Lili. She said nothing, putting her head on his shoulder as they sat in silence on the bench in front of a Vermeer, each lost in one another until reluctantly David reminded her they must soon head for the train station.
“If only we could stay,” she said, sighing. “Forever.”
“We will,” he said. Perhaps, he thought, remembering his mother’s time-honored adage, God did work in mysterious ways. Perhaps Lili would take away the pain of losing Melissa.
“A penny for your thoughts?” said Lili, looking up at him.
“What — oh. I was thinking we’d better be going or the mad sergeant will have me down as AWOL.” David stood up, searching for change in his pocket. “Which reminds me, I forgot to make that call. There a phone somewhere?”
“You can call from the station.”
“All right.”
As he waited for the British captain to answer, David realized that any line in NATO HQ might well be tapped by anyone from NATO’s own intelligence to a SPETS undercover operative, and so he spoke to the British captain in deliberately vague terms about hearing news from a sergeant that perhaps HQ Brussels should know about.
“Oh?” said the captain, his tone clearly one of interest. “Then I think perhaps you’d better give us a verbal if you don’t mind. Don’t worry about your train. We’ll lay on a driver to fetch you from the station and you can catch up with the train around Ezemaal. It has to stop at a few places to pick up more wounded anyway.”
“I thought the line had been cut,” replied David. “By SPETS or—”
“Yes, it was, but our erstwhile Belgian Railway chaps have put it right again. Don’t worry, Lieutenant — I promise you you’ll catch up with your girl.” David looked unhappily out of the phone booth at Lili. “Okay,” he told the captain. “But can you send your driver right away?”
As he left the phone booth, David saw the sergeant, rheumy-eyed, looking as if he was drunk, giving Lili a flower, a single red rose. Where the hell had he got that? David walked up and, nodding curtly to the sergeant, turned to Lili and told her HQ wanted to see him again. “Oh no—” she said, the disappointment in her eyes making him wish his conscience had never prompted him to make the call about the sergeant’s big mouth being a walking security risk.
“I won’t be long,” David assured her.
“Been a naughty boy?” said the sergeant, his breath reeking of beer. How the hell the man had become a military policeman, David couldn’t fathom, and no longer cared much if he showed his disapproval of the sergeant’s behavior. The Englishman’s eyes narrowed. “What’s up with you, Yank? Look like you’ve lost your virginity.”
“I have to report back to HQ.”
“Joining it, are you?”
“Joining what?” David parried.
“Bloody ‘ush-’ush brigade?” spat out the sergeant.
David turned to Lili. “You okay?”
“Course she’ll be okay, you bloody twit!” said the sergeant, lifting his head so fast as he spoke, he almost lost his balance. “She’ll have a bloody trainful of wounded coming south from Hasselt. She’ll have her hands full, mate.” He winked lewdly at Brentwood. “If you get my meaning!”
“For two bits I’d punch you out,” said David, taking a step forward.
“Bloody try!” snarled the sergeant. “C’mon, bloody try.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Don’t say—”the sergeant slurred contemptuously. “ ‘S’at a fact, Yank? And what’re you?”
Ignoring him, David turned back to Lili. “Won’t be long,” he said, taking her hand for a moment, squeezing it reassuringly. She was holding the rose limply by her side in her left hand. Where in the hell, David wondered again, did the crazy sergeant manage to find a rose in the middle of winter — in a war? The sergeant no doubt knew the black market in the Belgian capital.
“See you at Ezemaal,” he told Lili, and gave her a peck on the cheek.
As he walked down the platform toward the entrance, he passed a long line of Belgian reserve medical corps moving collapsed their hospital bunks into the first four carriages, French reinforcements and an American engineer company bound for the front being informed that they’d have to vacate the first four cars and move back to the rear of the train to leave enough room for the wounded who would be coming down from Hasselt.
When David turned at the entrance, he looked back in Lili’s direction, but she’d disappeared among the troops.
The sergeant slouched into the phone booth, noisily inserting francs into the slot. The voice on the other end was friendly, almost desperately chipper “Hello, Captain Smythe here.”
The military sergeant identified himself.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“He’s passed with flying colors, sir. I’ve done everything to goad him. Insulted his piece of skirt. No go. Bit annoyed, mind — but held himself in check. Lots of self-discipline.”
The sergeant could hear the captain exhale. “Pity he declined then, Sergeant. Just the kind of man we need.”
“You going to have another crack at him, sir?” asked the sergeant.
“Yes. But I doubt he’ll change his mind. Still — I appreciate what you’ve done, Sergeant. Let’s know if you have any other chaps you think could do the job.”
“Will do. Sorry he didn’t turn out, sir. Thought he was made of sterner stuff. Maybe we could take another run at him in a month or so?”
“I doubt it, Sergeant. Especially given young Miss Malmédy. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, sir.” It took the sergeant a second to remember “Malmédy” was Lili’s last name. No flies on the SAS.
Captain Smythe’s prognosis was borne out by David Brentwood. Upon arriving at HQ, Brentwood was clearly anxious to rejoin Lili after telling Smythe, albeit reluctantly, that in his opinion, the sergeant who had accompanied him to the SAS interview was a serious security risk, having blabbed something on the way out about an SAS attack against the Arabs.
Smythe thanked him and asked, “I don’t suppose you’ve changed your mind — about joining the team?”
“No, sir. I haven’t.”
Typical Brits, thought David. Always making it sound like they were merely asking you to join a cricket club. One British officer he remembered insisted on referring to the whole war as the “unpleasantness.”
“Very good, Brentwood,” Smythe reacted heartily. “Don’t mean to press you.”
Like hell, thought David, who, before he left, turned to Smythe. “Sir — I’ve heard quite a few rumors about some kind of action in the Middle East — against the Arabs. No specific targets — until the sergeant, that is.”
Smythe took his pipe out of his pocket, turning it upside-down, smacking it hard against the heel of his boot, then blowing through it, little pieces of charcoal flying out into the wastepaper basket. “Well, of course, it’s hardly news — I mean, the possibility of us going into the Gulf, with Iraq threatening to go to war again with Iran. If that happened, it’s possible, of course, we’d have to put pay to that chappie in Baghdad. We simply cannot tolerate disruption of oil supplies.”
Smythe seemed to Brentwood far too unconcerned about the voluble sergeant mouthing off about an Allied attack against the Arabs. The British captain put his arm around David’s shoulder as he escorted him toward the door. Momentarily it made David wince, but the Englishman’s gesture was purely that of a comrade — or was it? he wondered. Or was he worrying about nothing? Again he realized how badly his whole sense of his own self — the confidence of his own masculinity and of the world around him — had been shattered by the nerve-pounding experiences of Pyongyang and Stadthagen. It was something he couldn’t explain to anyone who hadn’t been through it. War, he had once thought, was supposed to clarify conflicts — the enemy was there, you were here. But war had only made his life, at least his inner life, extraordinarily more complex. He felt at war with himself-—his psyche a battlefront, never clearly defined and as changeable as any free-floating anxiety, constantly shifting in its attempt to escape a flak of uncertainty.
“Truth is,” Smythe assured him, “we’ve been feeding the sergeant a lot of ‘cockamamy’ plans. He’s known as ‘Flapper Lips’ around here, you know. Anyway, point is, everyone expects NATO to hit if the Iraqis and Iranians become difficult. So we might as well plant a few fake rumors about the actual targets to give us cover.”
Cover for what? David wondered, but knew better than to ask. If he wasn’t willing to volunteer for the “team,” he had no right to know. Besides, he understood the general strategy well enough. The allies were simply going to have to punch out the Iraqis a la Desert Storm if they threatened to stop the oil. You’d have to go in and kill them to go on killing elsewhere. It was necessary and mad — like the sergeant.
“Thank you for coming, Lieutenant,” said Smythe graciously.
“No problem, sir.”
“Ta ta.”
Outside the HQ, David waited impatiently for the Humvee from the transport pool to arrive.
The train had left fifteen minutes ago, and car traffic, he knew, would be slow due to the endless convoys heading east to Liege and on to the front. The driver was a British corporal, and David asked him if he thought they could get to Ezemaal in forty minutes.
“Dunno about that, Lieutenant,” said the cockney, shaking his head morosely. “Bit of a squeeze.”
“There’s a ten in it for you if you can,” David promised him.
“Marks or dollars, sir?”
“Fussy, aren’t you?”
“Begging the lieutenant’s pardon. Not fussy, sir. Practical. Dollar’s worth more right now.”
“Dollars,” said David.
“Right you are, sir,” said the driver, his mood suddenly upbeat as he rushed a yellow traffic light, an MP whistling and waving his baton to no effect. The driver was correct, thought David. You had to be practical. Look after yourself. No one else would.
“What does ‘ta ta’ mean?” David asked the corporal as the Humvee weaved its way through the Brussels traffic past the high gables of the Grand Place. “I guess it means good-bye, right?”
“Sort of,” commented the corporal, turning sharply into one of the fashionable redbrick alleys leading from the Grand Place. “Not good-bye exactly — more like till we meet again.”
“Hmm,” mused David. “I don’t think so.”
Once on the highway heading eastward toward Liege, the corporal drove dangerously. “Get out of the bloody way!” he shouted, looking in the rearview, shaking his head at Brentwood. “Women drivers!”
David wondered if Lili drove. Melissa did.