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Colonel Mortimer Cohen walked up to the table where Cronley was sitting with Dunwiddie, Ostrowski, Hessinger, and Ziegler. Everyone at the table started to get to their feet. Cohen waved them back down, and slipped into a chair.
“Who are they?” he asked, indicating Dunwiddie and Hessinger.
“Colonel Cohen, this is Captain Chauncey Dunwiddie, my deputy. If you call him ‘Chauncey,’ he will tear your arms off. And Friedrich Hessinger, my chief of staff.”
“Jesus, Jim!” Dunwiddie complained. Then he said, “How do you do, sir?”
Cohen extended his hand to both men.
“Why do I think you’re a coreligionist, Friedrich?” Cohen asked.
“I’m Jewish, if that’s what you mean.”
“Born here, or in the land of the free and home of the brave?”
“Here, sir.”
“And may I hazard the guess you were CIC before Super Spook here seduced you into the DCI?”
“Yes, sir.”
“‘Super Spook’?” Cronley asked. “I thought you were Super Spook, Colonel Cohen.”
“That was before Mr. Justice Jackson dubbed you that.”
“You heard about that, did you?”
“I’m in the CIC, we know everything. Chauncey, I trust the quarters Mr. Justice Jackson asked General Kegley to get you to house your people sent to protect Chief Judge Biddle and himself are adequate?”
“Jesus, you do know everything!” Cronley said.
“Very nice, sir,” Tiny said. “A twenty-eight-room fenced-in mansion that had been home to a Gauleiter who is now in the Justice compound prison awaiting trial. It had been reserved for an incoming brigadier general.”
“Haverty, Richard C.,” Cohen said. “As he’s to be General Kegley’s deputy, I’m sure they’ll find suitable accommodations for him.”
At that moment, just about simultaneously, a waiter and Janice Johansen walked up to the table.
“Ah, Miss Johansen,” Colonel Cohen said. “Why do I think I’m not going to be able to have the private conversation I had hoped to have with these gentlemen?”
“Maybe you’re clairvoyant,” she said. “I’m not leaving until somebody tells me what’s the skinny on Bonehead Moriarty getting shot in the Compound.”
“None of us know what you’re talking about,” Dunwiddie said.
“Oh, come on, Tiny,” Janice said.
“We can’t talk about that in here, Janice,” Cronley said. “So what I suggest we do is give the waiter our order and have it delivered to the Duchess Suite.”
“You’re really going to tell her, Captain Death Wish?” Dunwiddie asked.
“You’re really going to have to learn, Captain Dumb-Dumb, who you can trust and who you can’t. Janice, for example, falls in the former category. Everybody drinking beer?”
[TWO]
“Curiosity overwhelms me,” Cohen said, indicating a man in triangled ODs who had a Thompson submachine gun in his lap. “Why do you have an armed guard in your bedroom?”
“Because there’s a SIGABA system in the closet, and General Greene would order my castration if he learned I’d left it unguarded,” Cronley replied. “As soon as the waiter shows up with the beer and then leaves, I’ll show it to you.”
“On that subject,” Hessinger said, “Miss Miller called from the Mansion just before you showed up. She suggests we put the SIGABA in her room there.”
