The Brass Chills Read online

“I hope you sent that suit to the cleaners!”

  After that I tried to explain a lot of other places: Army, Marines, Air Corps. Besides being thirty-eight, it turned out I had something laughingly referred to as a murmur.

  “Probably brought on by a prohibition stomach,” one army doctor said.

  When it became apparent that I wasn’t going to be accepted, Rozzi decided to make a hero of me. She gave parties and told everybody how wonderful I was, having tried so hard to get me the service. Everybody said I was wonderful. Then they would say that Errol Flynn, or someone like that, ought to enlist. He’s a big strong guy. Of course all of Rozzi’s friends had important jobs in the field of public morale.

  There wasn’t anything I could do: Weeks went by. Awful weeks. Manila, Hong Kong, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Malaya. Only Russia holding any hope for our side. At home, everyone saying, where is our navy?

  I was to find out. The phone rang in my office one morning.

  “Mr. Wells?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Commander Sullivan here.”

  “Who?” I had forgotten all about my first recruiting officer. There had been so many since. He recalled himself to me. “Oh, hello,” I said.

  “You still interested in active service, Mr. Wells?”

  “You’re damn right I am, Commander.”

  “Could you come see me?”

  “Sure. When?”

  “Now,” he said.

  I glanced at the pile of work on my desk. “Fifteen minutes,” I said.

  IV

  There was another officer in Sullivan’s cubicle when I got there, a lieutenant about my age. He had red hair, an outdoor face, and gray eyes that looked at me so intently I had the feeling he was reading the manufacturer’s label on the inside of my shirtband.

  “Lieutenant Bradley, Mr. Wells,” Sullivan said.

  “Hello,” I said. This Bradley reminded me some of Spencer Tracy.

  “Glad to know you, Mr. Wells,” Bradley said, His voice was pleasant. “Commander Sullivan’s been telling me about you.”

  “I don’t know what he has to tell,” I said.

  “I told him I thought you’d make a good public-relations officer,” Sullivan said.

  “Sit behind a desk and dish out tripe? Nothing doing,” I said. “I thought you understood that, Commander.”

  “I do,” he said. “If you’d care to be sworn in, Mr. Wells, I think we can give you an immediate assignment.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I explained I wasn’t interested in desk work. If it’s that kind of an assignment.”

  “Mercy,” said Bradley, his gray eyes twinkling, “when you sign up in the Navy, Mr. Wells, you can’t pick your jobs. The commander wouldn’t have sent for you if he didn’t feel you could be specially useful.”

  I looked at those two. Sullivan was fat and not very impressive. But Bradley was something else again. The iron hand in the velvet glove. I had a feeling he would have understood those kids in Sullivan’s office that first day. As a matter of fact, I wondered if he wasn’t one of them, grown up. I made my decision.

  “I’m in your hands, gentlemen,” I said.

  It took quite a while. I was given forms to fill out, applying for a specialist’s commission. I was a little bewildered by that. Eventually I was sworn in. Then I was shuttled back to Sullivan. The commander’s face was stern. “You have about five hours in which to wind up your affairs, Mr. Wells. You will take your orders from Lieutenant Bradley. And I want to impress on you the necessity for the strictest secrecy. You are not to tell your friends that you are leaving the country. You are not to …”

  “Leaving the country!”

  “I believe you said something about wanting action, Mr. Wells,” Bradley said with a grin.

  I swallowed hard. “It suits me,” I said.

  “You’ll have a lot of things to do,” Bradley said. “Perhaps we can talk in the process.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  I’ve heard that phrase used before, “wind up your affairs.” It doesn’t sound complicated. You just wind ’em up. But did you ever try it? Clothes I didn’t need and might never need again, unpaid bills, the studio to notify. What would I do with my car? Should I get in touch with Rozzi? That dinner date for next Friday. Bradley helped me get my feet on the ground.

  “Haven’t you some friend you could trust to handle things for you?” he asked.

  There was Bob Duell. He thought I was kidding when I phoned. He finally got it through his head I wasn’t and said he’d be right over. I sat down with a pad and pencil and started to make lists. Bradley, a stubby black pipe going nicely, stood by the window looking at my swimming pool.

  Would two months’ pay satisfy the servants?

  “You’d better know what you’re up against, Mr. Wells,” Bradley said, when I took time off to smoke a cigarette.

  “My name is Chris,” I told him. “I don’t know much about navy etiquette, but …”

  “Chris it is,” he said. “Mine’s Luke. I’d just as soon you forgot it. Most people call me Red.”

  “Well, what are we up against, Red?” I asked.

  He told me. As I listened I could feel the blood begin to pound inside me. I thought, okay, chum, you asked for it. You wanted me to take your turn at bat and now you’re up there.

  “The whole problem of the war in the East is getting bases from which to attack. There are no lines of defense, no stationary battle fronts.”

  “There’s Singapore,” I said.

  He gave me a funny look. “I wouldn’t count on it, Chris. Nor the Indies, nor any other key place you’ve heard of.”

  At the time I thought he was a cockeyed pessimist, but I didn’t say anything. I knew, like everyone else, that the British would never lose Singapore. What a laugh!

  “When those places are gone,” Bradley said in his quiet voice, “our boats are going to have to travel about eight thousand miles for repairs. It is not, to put it mildly, practical. We must have repair bases we can use in the theater of war or throw up the sponge.” He tamped down the tobacco in his pipe and looked at me. I kept buttoned up. I’m a good listener.

  “There are thousands of islands in the southwest Pacific. Some of them just coral reefs, some of them a little bigger. You and I are going to one of those bigger ones. We’re going there in the dark, thousands of miles without convoy, after we’re well underway. With us are going some three hundred shipyard workers who’ve volunteered for the job. We’re going to repair and refit submarines — if we get there. Repair and refit them right under the nose of the enemy. We’ll work by night; and work like ants, underground, in the daytime. It’s going to be our job to keep our undersea boats in trim to attack and attack and attack the enemy fleet. Do you get the picture, Chris?”

  “Not really,” I said. “God, what a job!”

  “On the island we’re going to,” Bradley said, “are a few native fishermen, a few whites, a handful of marines to give us so-called protection. No planes. No antiaircraft. There’ll be a naval officer in charge, but the real boss will be a master shipwright from our navy yard at Portsmouth. My job is intelligence, to see that nothing gets out, that not one careless misstep is taken. It’s your job to act as liaison officer between the three groups on the island: the Navy, the workers, and the local population. You will clear all complaints, deal with all problems of morale, And you will keep your eyes and ears open as you’ve never kept them open before.”

  “And if the Japs spot our island?”

  His smile was grim. “Did you ever hanker to be a sideshow freak, Chris? I understand they parade the prisoners in cages for the Tokyo folks. And when they get tired of that, they use ’em for bayonet practice.” The way he said it brought little beads of sweat out on my forehead.

  “My pal!” I said.

  “You asked me,” he said, his smile gone.

  V

  Bob Duell turned up. I couldn’t tell him anything except that I
was in the Navy now. We spent a couple of hectic hours making more lists of things to be done. I had decided not to phone Rosalind or go to see her. It would be painful. She would call up everybody with any influence in Hollywood and insist they get me out of it. I wrote her a note instead. Bob agreed to deliver it and hold her hand for a while till she got over it.

  At five that afternoon I locked the front door and, figuratively, threw the key away. Bob was to put my belongings in storage. I went with Bradley to his hotel, where he changed into civilian clothes. He still hadn’t told me how we would reach our ship.

  At six we tossed our duffel bags into a station wagon, driven by a civilian who I guessed was a navy man from the crisp salute he gave us, and started places. I had thought of a pier somewhere, with a white navy launch and a lot of admirals standing around. Maybe even people waving goodbye. That didn’t happen.

  It seemed to me we drove for hours. Bradley sat slumped in the seat next to me, smoking his pipe. We didn’t talk. I guessed we were both thinking along the same lines.

  “What did you do before you got into this, Red?” I asked Bradley at one point.

  The question brought him back from somewhere. “Me? I’m a policeman,” he said.

  “Detective?” I asked. I don’t know why I was surprised. I guess I’d seen too many dumb cops in the movies.

  “Homicide Division in New York City,” he said. “But I’ve held a reserve commission for some time, so here I am.”

  It was comforting information. A good practical background for intelligence work.

  Just when I was sure we were headed for Alaska, the station wagon turned off the main highway and we began bumping along a sandy road. It was a dark, moonless night. There were no houses along the road we drove. Suddenly, strong and fresh, I smelled salt air. Our back wheels churned on the sand of a beach.

  “They should be along here somewhere, sir,” the driver said. He did some kind of off-and-on business with his headlights. Instantly we saw the circular beam of a flashlight. It went out as quickly as it had shown.

  “That’s us,” Bradley said.

  We got out of our wagon and shouldered our duffel bags.

  “Good-bye,” Bradley said to the driver.

  “Good-bye, sir. The best of luck.”

  “Thanks,” Bradley said. He started off across the beach. The wagon turned around. All at once I began to feel ants crawling in my stomach. I hurried after Bradley. The flash showed, quite near. A moment later we came up to a sailor standing by a beached dingy.

  “Lieutenant Bradley?”

  “That’s right. And this is Mr. Wells.”

  “If you’ll get in the stern of the dingy, sir, I’ll shove off.”

  I clambered into the boat, and everything went wrong inside me. I had just stepped off America! You won’t come back, Chris. You won’t step on America again. I saw the tail-light of the station wagon down the road. I never wanted to be anywhere so much in my life as I wanted to be in that car. This was all a lot of heroic nonsense! I should be back at World Wide. There were a million guys better equipped than me. God damn it, I didn’t want to go!

  A firm, cool hand closed over my wrist. “Better sit down, Chris, or you’ll take a ducking.” I couldn’t see Bradley’s face, but I knew that he knew what had swept over me as I stood there watching that red spark disappear.

  I sat down, cold, miserable, feeling like a heel. “I trust we’re not going to row to Tokyo,” I said. My voice sounded like a hen cackling.

  “Boat just around the point, sir,” said the sailor. He gave a last shove, and then climbed to the center seat and took up his oars. A rhythmic rattling of the oarlocks began. I could feel Bradley’s shoulder against mine. He was breathing slowly, steadily. I had to say something.

  “This is not the high moment of my life,” I said.

  Bradley chuckled. “I was just wondering how to tell you that’s my stomach flopping in the bottom of the boat,” he said.

  The kind of leaders I wrote about for the movies always flourished a sword and said, “On, ye noble English!” or “Buck up, old chap, it’s for the U.SA.!” But Bradley was the humanest guy I ever knew. He got scared like anybody else, and he’d admit it. There was just one thing that set him apart; hesitation wasn’t in him. He could look at danger, know everything that it implied for him, and walk straight toward it. You can follow a guy like that right down into hell because you know he feels the same way you do.

  “Blinker gun off the port bow, sir,” the sailor said.

  Blinker gun! I remember I grabbed hold of the side of the boat for dear life. Then I saw a light flicking on and off. I found out afterward that a blinker gun is a light set in a long tube so that it is visible only in the direction it’s aimed. It has a stock, just like a rifle, so that the signaler can aim it.

  Following the blinker we pulled up alongside a trim PT boat. A voice hailed us.

  “Lieutenant Bradley and Mr. Wells here,” Bradley said.

  “Ensign Tabor here, sir. Come aboard.” A couple of sailors gave us a hand up with our bags and ourselves. Ensign Tabor saluted. “You’re our full quota, sir. We’ll make for the ship at once. The others are in the stern cabin.”

  The others were a half-dozen civilians, all a little green around the gills. Bradley explained they’d been taking men aboard the ship for three days, from a dozen different points to avoid anything that looked like an embarkation of workers. As a matter of fact, most of them had come from New England and the Great Lakes area so there would be no large group of west-coast workers suddenly absent from their posts.

  Bradley introduced himself and me to the men. He had to raise his voice over the hum of the PT’s motors. We were moving.

  There were a couple of feeble “hi’s.” I knew how they felt. Then an inner cabin opened, and a man came out. He was a grizzled, red-faced, lantern-jawed guy of about fifty with the coldest pair of blue eyes I ever saw.

  “You’ll be Bradley and Wells,” he said. “I’m Mr. Quartermayne.” The way he said “Quartermayne,” I knew he had come from the Boston area. You can’t mistake that “a.”

  “Glad to know you,” Bradley said. “Chris, Mr. Quartermayne is the master shipwright who’s going to run this little show of ours.”

  Quartermayne held out his hand and I took it. For a minute I thought I was in for a Mack Sennett pratt-fall. All it needed was a sound-effects man to make the noise of shattering bones.

  Then something happened to Mr. Quartermayne’s face. Wrinkles appeared at the corners of his eyes, fine-spun as spider webs, and the blue eyes were no longer cold.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I don’t know about navy regulations, but what do you say to a hooker of rye?”

  “Mr. Quartermayne,” I said, “I love you.”

  Quartermayne went back into the inner cabin and returned with two quarts of bonded whisky. He wasn’t fooling. He handed one bottle to the men; the other he opened for the three of us. We didn’t stand on ceremony. We drank out of the bottle, wiped off the neck, and passed it on.

  “I guess maybe we’ve all got a slight case of brass chills,” Quartermayne said. He saw the question in my eyes. “You get it from inhaling the gases from a smelting furnace,” he said. “You shake so it loosens the rivets right out of your bed! Milk and pepper’s the cure.”

  Milk and pepper wasn’t going to cure any of us of the kind of shakes we had that night.

  VI

  It took us about an hour to get to the Ship. It was a good job of navigation, because you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, and the Ship showed no lights. Ensign Tabor brought the PT boat alongside; there were voices from the deck above, and then we began climbing up the side, hand over hand. Somebody grabbed me and pulled me onto the deck. Seconds later the PT boat roared away. I heard bells. The deck of the Ship was vibrating under my feet.

  A seaman bumped into me. “Mr. Wells, sir?”

  “That’s right.”

  “If you follow me, sir, I�
�ll show you to your quarters.”

  It was so dark I had actually to put my hand on his shoulder to be sure I didn’t break my neck. It was just as dark when we stepped inside off the deck, but with the door closed behind us the seaman produced a torch.

  “This way, sir.”

  There were red bulbs glowing over various exits. That was all. My seaman stopped outside a cabin door and knocked. Somebody called out from inside and the seaman opened the door. In here there was a light, but I thought I was stepping into an opium den, it was so thick with smoke. The cabin porthole was blacked over and closed tight.

  A man lay in one of the bunks, reading a book. He wore a pair of blue jeans and a blue cotton workshirt. He couldn’t have been over twenty-six or -seven. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes as he squinted at me through the smoke, but he had a mass of shaggy blond hair. The floor around the side of the bunk was littered with cigarette butts. I couldn’t help seeing the title of the book, and somehow it made me want to laugh. The Economic Consequences of the Second World War.

  “Mr. Wells … Mr. Regan,” said the seaman, and left us. Regan carefully marked the place in his book and put it down. But he didn’t get up out of the bunk. He stretched his long, lean body, sinuous as a cat’s.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said. I looked around for a place to put my things. My eyes watered from the smoke.

  “We have class consciousness on our little excursion,” Regan said. “I’m leaderman of the foundry crew, so I get a top-deck cabin. But you rate me, brother, so you can have the choice of closet hooks and bunks. We cannot disturb the functionings of the social order.”

  I sat down on the opposite bunk and lit a cigarette. I decided it was better than just inhaling stale smoke. The Ship was definitely underway.

  Regan chuckled.

  “And see! she stirs!

  She starts — she moves — she seems to feel

  The thrill of life along her keel … ”

  Then he said: “What happened to you, brother? Did you hear a band? At your age you ought to know better. Or are you protecting your interests in dear old Standard Oil?”

  “There’s only one thing I hate worse than a social snob,” I said.