"Are you really?"
"Yes, I am," Charity said.
"Does that mean you're not?"
"I am accused," the Duchess said, "of being the resident spy for the Imperial General Staff. There is a grain of truth in the accusation. But I know about this."
"I really am cleared," Charity said.
"Am I going to have to get Jamison up here to confirm that?"
"He'd love that, dressed as you are." The Duchess chuckled.
"We'd better not" Charity Hoche was obviously telling the truth.
"Probably because of his father," the Duchess said.
"Or maybe just because he's Dick's good buddy, and Dick just uses that for an excuse, whenever Doug goes off on a mission. Eighth Air Force tells us. And they tell us when he comes back. TWX to Berkeley Square with info copy here. He flew a mission today. He made it back, but his executive officer was killed. I saw the TWX just before you got here. Under the circumstances, I don't think he's out... how did you put it?... 'spreading pollen."" "Thank you," Charity said, almost solemnly.
"You want the bubble bath?" the Duchess asked.
"What I would really like is a drink," Charity said, suddenly standing up and reaching for the flexible-pipe showerhead to rinse herself off.
"I'll save the bubble bath for sometime when it'll be useful."
"That I can offer," the Duchess said.
"We have a nice bar here, and sometimes even a piano player."
[THREE]
Lieutenant Ferenc "Freddy" Janos, the piano player, was a very large man.
Which was, he thought, the reason he had broken his ankle. If one was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, one could not expect to be lowered to the ground by parachute as gently as could someone who weighed, say, one hundred sixty pounds.
And it wasn't really that bad. The doctor had, perhaps predictably, told him that it "could have been a lot worse." It had hurt like hell on the drop zone, and while the medics, heaving with the exertion, had carried him to the ambulance.
But once they'd gotten a cast on it, there had been virtually no pain. A maddening itch under the cast, but no pain.
And the X rays had shown a simple fracture of one of the major bones; he'd been told that "knitting, for someone of your age and physical condition," would be rapid. It was an inconvenience, nothing more. It had, of course, kept him from going operational. The bad landing and the resulting broken ankle had taken him off the team. He had been replaced by a lieutenant flown hastily from the United States.
Going operational would have to wait until they took the cast off--in three days; today was Tuesday, and the cast would come off on Friday--and probably for a couple of weeks after that; a week to become intimate with a new team, and however long it took after that to schedule and arrange for a mission.
The major problem that faced It. Ferenc "Freddy" Janos, as he saw it, was arranging to get laid between the time the cast came off and the time he went operational. That would require getting to London, and that was going to pose
a problem, for the OSS did not like its people going into London once they had been made privy to a certain level of classified operational information.
He had been made privy to that level of classified information two days before the bad landing. It had then been intended that the men on his team parachute into Yugoslavia three days later. They had been taught--and had committed to memory in case the drop had not gone as planned--several alternate means to establish contact with the guerrilla forces of Colonel Draza Mihajlovic.
This information was quite sensitive, and those in possession of it could not be trusted to go off and tie one on in London, or for that matter, anywhere off the Whithey House estate. FreddyJanos understood the reasoning, for lives were literally at stake, and he was perfectly willing to grant that liquor loosened tongues, especially his. But he thought it would b
e a truly unfortunate circumstance if he had to jump in Yugoslavia following a long period of enforced celibacy. God alone knew how he could get his ashes hauled in Yugoslavia.
It wasn't that there were not a number of females here at Whithey House-including two leaning on the piano at that moment as he played--who could with relatively little effort be enticed into his room. But he had what he thought of as his standards. For one thing, he did not think officers should make the beast with two backs with enlisted women.
This belief had not come from The Officer's Guide, which had euphemistically dealt with the subject, but from It. Janos's own experience as an enlisted man. He had been enraged when he had suspected that his officers were dazzling enlisted women into their beds with their exalted position, and he was unwilling to enrage the enlisted men here by doing the same thing himself. He had even gone further than that. He had had a word with several officers about the matter; he had let them know their behavior displeased him, and that when he was displeased, he sometimes had trouble keeping his displeasure nonviolent.
There were three American female officers and one British at Whithey House, but the American WACs did not measure up to Freddy Janos's standard for a bed partner, and the British officer, Captain the Duchess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Stanneld, WRAC, whom Freddy Janos would have loved to know much better, had proven to be the exception to the rule that upper-class women, when he looked at them with his large, sad, dark eyes, usually wished to comfort him with all the means at their disposal.