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She put her hand on his arm and turned.
“Good night, everybody!” she cried.
It pleased her, Fine saw, to have the world know that she had sunk her stinger into the plumpest baby rabbit of them all.
“Do you think there will be anything left?” Canidy asked. “By that, I mean, when she has sucked him dry, will she also eat the empty shell?”
“It was pretty bad with his mother, Dick,” Fine said.
“I was afraid it would be,” Canidy said. “Going to see her was not a good idea.”
“I’m not sure his going with the Scorpion is such a good idea, either,” Fine said.
“Well, you know what Benjamin Franklin said about older women,” Canidy said. " ’They don’t yell, they don’t swell, and they’re grateful as hell.’”
Fine laughed. “Franklin didn’t say that.”
“What is it you ambulance-chasers say? ‘Or words to that effect’?”
Fine chuckled again.
“I was going to run her off,” Canidy said. “But then I had a sudden insight. I think she’s just what he needs tonight. Now, what can I do for you?”
“What?”
“I hate to send any of my loyal legion into the mouth of death without getting them a farewell live-today-for-tomorrow-we-die piece of ass. How does yonder redhead strike your fancy?”
Fine laughed. “I’m going to the U.S. Embassy in Bern,” he said.
“First,” Canidy said.
Fine smiled.
“Thank you, sir, but no thank you, sir. I am one of the few surviving members of that rara avis,‘faithful husband.’”
Canidy chuckled. “Is that what love is, Stanley, not wanting to fuck anybody else?”
Fine sensed that it was a serious question.
“You can look, but not touch,” he said. “They call it fidelity.”
“Then I must have caught it,” Canidy said.
“Maybe you’re coming down with a cold,” Fine said.
“Screw you,” Canidy said fondly.
Chapter FOUR
Fersfield Army Air Corps Station
Bedfordshire, England
29 January 1943
Lt. Commander Edwin W. Bitter was torn between annoyance and pleasure when he saw the Packard limousine bouncing directly across the airfield— rather than taking the access road or even the taxiway—toward the ancient B-17. He could see Sergeant Agnes Draper behind the wheel. That was fine. But there were two others in the backseat, two officers with the golden United States eagle on their caps. One of them was almost certainly Canidy, and the other more than likely Stanley S. Fine.
He’d suspected Canidy would show up, and that he would probably bring Fine with him. Fine was, after all, a former B-17 squadron commander with far more time in seventeens than either Joe Kennedy or Dolan. He was even, Bitter recalled now, a rated Instructor Pilot.
