Page 128

Canidy sipped at his liquor. And wished that Ann were here. It would have been nice to spend what was certain to be Jimmy’s last night on the town with the four of them together.

And then his eyebrows went up and he smiled mischievously.

"Stanley,” he said,“there is a damsel yonder trying desperately to attract your attention.”

“I know,” Fine said. “I’m doing my best to pretend I don’t see her.”

“You don’t want to be nice to the damsel, Stan?” Canidy asked.

“For God’s sake, ignore her,” Fine said.

Canidy raised his hand over his head and waved.

The woman across the room was a tall, slender woman with silver-gray hair combed upward under her Red Cross uniform cap. She pointed, signifying she was trying to attract Fine’s attention. Canidy nodded and beamed happily at her and pushed Fine’s shoulder.

“I think she wants to say hello to you, Stan,” Canidy said innocently.

“You sonofabitch,” Fine said, and turned toward the woman. “Oh, my God,” he said. “Here she comes.”

Fulmar and Canidy laughed.

“You’ll stop laughing, Eric,” Fine said,“when she sinks her fangs into you.”

It had been inevitable that Stanley S. Fine would become a regular at the Dorchester bar. He had been temporarily housed at the hotel on his arrival in London, and when quarters were found, they were shabby and a long Underground ride across London. With a good deal less embarrassment than he had expected, he took over the apartment Continental Motion Picture Studios maintained in London for traveling stars and executives. It was at Park Lane and Aldford Street, two blocks from the Dorchester.

He found that he missed the people he knew in the motion picture industry, and it was at the Dorchester that people in the industry were billeted when they came to London.

Another Dorchester bar regular was the woman now marching across the room. Fine privately thought of Eleanor Redmon as “the Scorpion.” She was a Red Cross girl, although that description was not precise. Eleanor Redmon was some sort of executive within the Red Cross organization, holding a position too exalted to require her personally to pass out coffee and doughnuts to the boys. For another, the Scorpion was no longer a girl.

She was, in fact, forty. She was from Duluth, Minnesota, where she had been left widowed, childless, and well-off shortly after the war began. Volunteering for the Red Cross seemed to be just the thing.

Her position carried with it enough assimilated rank for her to have a room at the Dorchester, and she spread enough cash around so that the room became a suite. She quickly got in the habit of dropping into the bar at cocktail time or after dinner with one or more of the prettier young Red Cross girls. They naturally attracted the handsome and dashing young pilots.

Eleanor Redmon had decided to cultivate Stanley S. Fine when she noticed the warm affection people had for him—people whom she had only previously seen on the silver screen.

It wasn’t difficult. All she had had to do was save a place for him at her table. And the results had been more than worth the effort: Soon, the Scorpion was able to write home that Major David Niven and Private Peter Ustinov had sat at “her” table in the Dorchester bar at the same time, and that her new friend, Captain Stanley S. Fine, who had been a vice president of Continental Studios, had had to lend them the money to pay their bill.

For his part, Stanley S. Fine watched with morbid fascination the Scorpion arrange her nightly intrigues in the bar. Young officers who came to the Scorpion’s table wondering how they would separate the blonde from the old broad frequently woke up the next morning with the old broad beside them in the old broad’s bed.

To Fine, whom she regarded as a decadent (and thus understanding) “movie person,” she frankly admitted that she found boys who wore officer’s uniforms and pilot’s wings—boys who were not old enough to vote— irresistible

He saw, too, how skillfully she charmed the middle-aged senior officers who frequented the Dorchester bar. To a man, they stoutly defended her when it was hinted that her interest in peach-skinned young officers was more than motherliness.

As the Scorpion, smiling broadly, reached the table, Fine saw that she was on her fifth or sixth Scotch, and thus likely to be both horny and bitchy.

With a little bit of luck, he thought, she might go after Canidy.

“Hello, Stanley!” she cried. “Introduce me to your friends!”

By friends, Fine understood, she meant Fulmar. Whittaker was obviously taken; and Canidy, wearing the uniform of a field-grade officer assigned to SHAEF and looking very tired, did not appear boyish. Fulmar, on the other hand, with his parachutist’s wings and shiny boots and Silver Star, did.

“Captain Stanfield, Major Canidy, Captain Whittaker, Lieutenant Fulmar, may I present Miss Redmon?”

“I’m very happy to meet you all,” the Scorpion said.

“Are you really going to sink your fangs into him?” Canidy asked.

“Jesus Christ!” Fine said.