Chapter 17; Barbarossa
Musical Theme; Roads to Moscow by Al Stewart
In the morning, everyone got a nice breakfast. General Guderian raised her gauntleted hand, and the Corps headed East toward Warsaw. She wondered how she could find an interpreter until the General who didn’t exist explained to her that Father James, actually, knew a little Polish, rather in the way that Saul Bellow writes a little English. Our General pushed on, pausing only to visit a few more German pubs, give away a great number of catalogs, and then press on.
She was well received in Poland, a country she thought was ‘a pretty nice place’. The Polish people, who ought by reputation to have been offended by the alley cat, were very nice to her. The General who was not really a General and actually didn’t exist led them relentlessly to the east south east, which eventually took them to Oswiecim, also known as Auschwitz. The ladies dressed in black, and the Polish soldiers of the security detail put on black arm bands. They saw the place where four million people had been murdered. Marcie said, “They had Mozart. And they did this. Why did they, how could they?” She cried, and she was not acting.
Newspapers around the world made a headline of “Why did they, how could they?” Many of them quoted Will, who had said, “Humanity is not going to make it. There is one threshold of being able to destroy, and another one to being able to see that destruction is not a good idea. We will be lost between them.”
General Guderian roused her troops. They headed north north east to take Warsaw. On the way, she stopped to praise towns and villages, Poland and Eastern Europe generally. Solidarity had been a big part of taking down the Soviet Union, something that had been one of the moral duties of mankind. The Polish people had suffered as much as anyone under fascism and communism.
Yes, dear reader, she did indeed get some of these ideas from Will, and Father James. But they were right. She was right. When the cows get counted on judgment day, (not to say your author thinks there will actually be a judgment day, or that cows will be counted at that time), what will matter is whether you are right. It does not matter if you get your ideas from Aristotle or your humble author, or anyone in between. What does matter is if you do the right thing. Whether God or anyone else ever sums up your balance sheet, you will know. You did a pretty good job of living your life according to the virtues, or you wasted it. And now we get back to the entertainment you bought this book for.
General Guderian boldly headed for Warsaw as fast as the governor on her bus would allow. If she had known how to disable it she might have done so. She raised her mailed fist, actually white patent leather, and demanded the most of her troops, which, at the particular time, meant drinking their coffee. Eisenhower’s broad front strategy be damned, General Guderian knew how it should have been done. You send Patton up the coast with the throttles wide open. You put the US and British Navies on the left flank, and Montgomery on the right flank, and you go straight to Berlin and trash the place. You have no worries about your supply line, because the two most powerful navies in the world destroy everything from a battleship to a guy with a .22 in a rowboat. Unfortunately, Eisenhower had nothing like our diminutive General’s strategic vision.
The General realized that her catalog ammunition would be ineffective in Poland, where, for the most part, it would not be understood anyway. She saved it for later battles, and took Poland with her familiar strategy of making friends. She was photographed with everyone on her line of advance. Her partisans took out the opposition before she even got there. Her Air Force had to come in with printers and paper. Catalogs became hard to get. You had to come to the bus and say “May I have a catalog?” She believed in spreading things like pix wide and thin. Her concept was that if you gave someone 100 pictures, he would probably give away a few and keep most of them. If you gave 10 fans 10 pics each and asked them to pass them around, they would be gone in a minute or two. If you gave someone two pics, one would inevitably be given away.
When she got to Warsaw, she was handing out pix personally. She wrote M on so many pix, she could hardly hold on to the pen. Poquita called ahead, and got a thousand T shirts printed with Marcie Della and Aurora on them. Anyone who said they would do the deal was given a T shirt. You were supposed to give out 100 pix, and fill 10 trash bags with litter. You got yourself photographed with Marcie, and you kept the T shirt. Lots of the pix were actually passed out, and public works said most of the trash bags had indeed gone to the curb full of litter. Poland had a right to be proud.
Aurora was printing a Russian catalog by the time our little General crossed the border in her relentless drive to Moscow. She armed her partisans with twenty thousand T shirts, two million pix, and a quarter of a million trash bags. She humiliated Napoleon and the German Generals, taking Moscow in a day. She just knew the garbage guys would work a Saturday afternoon to take bags away, and she was right. She did pay a little bitty bonus, and that might have helped. Moscow was ‘Simply Awesome’ She gave away a million catalogs in a single day. She toured the Kremlin, of course. It was still chilly in Moscow, and she wore almost the whole line of sweaters, wool skirts, tights, and so on. She had lots of Phillipa boots, and never went anywhere without them. The Army took responsibility for her safety. Anyone who had tried to harm her would have been lucky to get run over with a tank, because if he somehow had gotten past the Army, the Maffia would have killed him in some really nasty way.
The city turned out for her. Sidewalks were swept clean, alleys were cleared. Marcie and Teresa zipped around the city, which was on its best behavior. They were given so much caviar that they had to master the art of slipping it to the Army guys who were always around. Fortunately for that effort, there were lots of big Russian soldiers who could eat any amount of caviar and drink any amount of vodka, no problem.
They wore 100 outfits a day. In order to satisfy the need to be able to say that Marcie ate here, she had to order any number of lunches and dinners. She signed the posters, and the Army guys got most of the food, and not infrequently, a little more.
The time came for them to go up to Scandinavia. They took the ground route up through St. Petersburg and into Finland. The weather got nasty, so they went back south, and the Lear plucked them out of a military airport. Nobody else was flying, but if you could get permission to use military tar macadam, there was nothing about bad weather. The rule in Russia was that if some guy with stars on his shoulders said it was all right, you could do anything you wanted to do. He did, and they could. They took off in nearly zero visibility and headed south, where it got a lot better. Perhaps they got a little help from someone who could detect a mouse on the ground from 165 miles up. They went to Turkey and refueled. From there, they went over the southern part of Russia, northern China, and on to Japan. They had two pilots, both of them former Navy fighter jocks. There are two ways people react to putting a jet fighter on a carrier at night in a heavy sea. The reasonable people get out and go to psychotherapy for PTSD or something. The guys in the cockpit were from the other group, the ones who wanted to fly tomorrow night. One of their forbears, a Marine, actually, had gotten on the tail of a Japanese Zero in WWII to get the Zero off his wingman. The Zero pilot knew he was out of ammo, so he kept on the wingman. The Marine whipped his Jug up, and slammed it down on the Zero. The Jug being heavier and more solidly built, he won the mid air collision. The
Zero went into the sea. The Marine and his wingman made it back to the airfield, and the Marine went on to sire a son, who was the Captain of the Lear.
Will went up to the cockpit. The co pilot gave up his seat and nodded to Will. Will sat down. Brian Torres smiled. “John Riggs told me he is going to qualify you for the seven three.”
“We might do that.”
“Well, you should. Even when it does not need to be a pilot, if you are one, it all goes smoother. You can sign documents and all. You don’t need to actually fly. Take her?”
“Yeah.”
“Course to waypoint 4 at 32. We’re going to refuel at 4. Check your radar.”
“No radar contact within 100 miles, Sir.”
“Nobody in his right mind is flying tonight.”
“We’re out of the ice, though. Maybe someone going south.”
“You have to look, because they might be.”
“Even a goose could take us down.”
“You have to think like that. Will, we hear you have, uh, the thing on your shoulder.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny.” His thumb was up.
“Oh, yeah. It doesn’t matter anyway.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Will, you really should get a license. John Riggs can get you all the way on the seven three, and then you can fly all these two engine boats, and it wouldn’t be hard to upgrade to where you could fly the C-5A or Fat Albert.”
“Thing is, Brian, everyone has something they want me to do. I can’t do all those things. What I really want to do is go to the house in Italy with my wife, and just live.”
“Well, then finish this job and leave. I neither know nor want to know what you need to do for Washington, but sooner or later they must be willing to let you go.”
“I suppose they are.”
Will gave up his seat, and Jim Reed took over. Will went aft, and got in a sleeping berth. Chrissie came and got in with him. They went to sleep, and almost did not awake as the plane landed several times to refuel.
They certainly did awake when they got to Tokyo. They got on the bus, Will cringing a little at the anime on it, but it was Japan, after all, and they liked that stuff. This bus was bigger and heavier than the other in spite of having to work in narrow, heavily trafficked streets. It was jammed with catalogs in English and Japanese. Will soon learned that there was no need to worry about those, because you could climb over them to take a nap, wake up and find them gone. Will shot the girls running around acting out of hand in tea gardens. It was undignified by Japanese standards, but the people did not seem to mind Marcie and Teresa doing it. Marcie, especially, seemed to be expected to be a bad girl, and that was part of what they liked about her. She did not disappoint them. As best as Will could work it out, a Japanese lady could dress in Aurora, behave completely correctly, and acquire a slight naughtiness that was very appealing without her having to do anything actually wrong. Our little darling, of course, didn’t worry about slight implications of naughtiness. Japan not being full of Southern Baptists, not quite.
Teresa was held to a tighter standard. Will kept her within the rules Bob had heard, and she was limited to being silly and perhaps a little bit badly behaved. She longed for the chance to be a bad girl like Marcie, but that was out of the question. Will knew that would happen when she went to college, and Bob probably knew that, too, but it was not going to happen on Will’s watch.
Even Will was not quite prepared for how concentrated Tokyo is. A little piece of land that in West Texas would be worth $10 and $100 in Dallas, $1000 in San Francisco, and $10,000 in Manhattan might be worth $100,000 in Tokyo.
Something else that blew his doors off was that where one might have thought you would find English speaking people in Tokyo, in fact it was hard to find someone who didn’t speak English, and have a favorite American baseball team. A ride in an elevator or subway car might involve being pushed up against people you didn’t know. Will’s size made him funny. People would giggle and call him things like Mr. Big Guy, not in an insulting way, but kind of like he was an elephant. A nice animal that was just so very big.
Shooting in most of Tokyo was not very feasible. There just wasn’t space. Giving out catalogs was easy. It seemed like everyone knew what they were and had been hoping to get one. Will finally figured out that the easiest way to pass them out was to stack them at a news stand on the sidewalk and run before the riot.
The best Will could make of it was that whatever social mistakes he made were all right because he was trying to be polite and didn’t know how. Teresa was fine because she was a young American and of course did not know how to behave. Marcie, after all, was the most beautiful woman in the world, and she was badly behaved, but she was supposed to be, so that, too was all right.
Will was often surrounded by pretty girls who wanted to know how to get started in modeling. He called in about this problem, to Ken Burns at Aurora.
“Will, you guys are really tearing it up over there. We’re very happy with all you are doing.”
“Thanks, Ken. I’ve got an idea I want to brainstorm with you.”
“Please do.”
“Pretty girls are all over me here.”
“Oh, that’s a bad problem.”
“They want to be models, and lots of them have the looks, and probably the poise and all.”
“I have Marcie and Teresa, and I’m sure you could get on the phone and call in a battalion of models. What do I want them for?”
“My idea is, we do another special catalog. This one features Japanese girls. Send me a truck full of stuff that will fit the little cuties, and we shoot them with Marcie, individually, whatever. In the back of the catalog, we have a little bio of each of them. We don’t pay them or charge them. Contact info for their agents. Probably there is an agency that will sign them in bulk, sight unseen, and whoever gets an inquiry, they will know how to look out for her.”
“Phillipa, I’m sure, will go you the shoes, probably you just put in a line that the shoes in this catalog can be found on Phillipa.com. Or you can sell them. Phillipa is very reasonable.”
“This sounds real good, Will. Let me get to legal and see what we can do.”
Ken sent a contract by email later. It essentially asked the girls to sign away all rights to the pix except that they would be posted on a page on Aurora’s site if the model wanted them to be. Aurora might, if it liked, allow other pix to be put there, too. This would allow the girls to refer to an on line portfolio, and potential customers could look at it any time. There was also a little pamphlet on security that reminded the girls that not everyone on the net was nice, and provided some ways for them to check out people who said they were doing fashion work. In case of suspicious activity, Aurora or Phillipa would know if someone was in the industry or not, and if it came to it, Will could refer the question to General Barnes, who had contacts in almost every law enforcement or intelligence agency in the world. You might have thought it would be impossible for him to call North Korean Intelligence, but in that you would have been mistaken. He could get to the chief in five minutes. The mere fact that our politicians are hissing at each other does not mean you are not calling me to do me a favor. The fact that we are not friends does not mean you are not going to do something in my interest. Perhaps you want to do something bad to someone neither of us likes, and the best way is to give me some information. Your call will be answered. The PLO, IRA, and other folks the American people think we never speak to can call The Agency for Cats and Dogs, and do so often.
Close behind the paperwork was a big truck full of clothes. The next day, Will had a different answer for the hopeful models. They could get a free intro course from Marcie Della, and probably be in the catalog. They would get on the website, and maybe get a career started. It was tough, and most girls didn’t make it, but here was a lottery ticket. Of course, they all wanted in. Will took 16 of them with Marcie down to the harbor to see if they could find some ambiance. They did, but the harbor area was not very good for high heeled shoes. They did get some good shots, with Marcie leading her covey around. They were walking along the edge of a dock when there was a sudden yelp and a splash. Will put down the camera. “Nobody goes in the water. Man overboard!”
He went over the edge and down to some pilings and joists. He held a grungy, rusty steel cable with one hand, and reached out to the flailing hand of the girl with the other. He pulled her up out of the water and pushed her up onto the gravel lot. A deckhand from the freighter tied up near them took her in, and put her in a shower. His shipmate used a long handled boat hook to pull her purse out. Marcie went for dry clothes for her, and Will went aboard the freighter and spread her stuff out on a galley table to drain. Most of it had not gotten wet.
Marcie returned with dry clothes for the girl who had taken the unscheduled bath. One of the girls brought Will his camera. Marcie went and got the truck, and had it brought it down to the dock. The covey and Marcie all changed into bikinis and posed, surrounding the seaman who had taken the girl to the shower, and she, herself, leaning against him, and looking very happy.
When the pic went in the catalog, the caption, written by Will, said nothing at all about Will going down on the pilings, and implied the seaman had done something heroic. Apparently he had done something that worked out, anyway, because our quail left the covey, explaining that she was marrying a merchant seaman, and would not be able to pursue a modeling career. Will pulled in one of his reserve quail, because his lucky numbers were powers of two. The Captain of the freighter invited them aboard to shoot, and Marcie brought her covey in lots of cute little outfits, and they ran around being pretty girls having fun. They had none of the refined skills of Marcie, who could model 40 dresses in an hour and had done so. They got to see the top team crank out the work, with Marcie going from pose to pose and Will shooting them. A few of them understood Marcie doing a pose for a second, confident that Will would nail it, and moving on.
Ken got Glenn on a long term contract, and sent him back to the tour, letting Will know that he was going to need some training, if Will would do it. Poquita navigated to the East South East, and Will recruited another covey every day or two. Marcie had shot the list, and was just wearing her favorite stuff. Teresa had to leave to get in school in time. Father James stayed, because Will wanted his help on sharpening his Italian. They sat together in the bus whenever it was underway, quietly speaking Italian.
Chrissie sat near them pretty often, wondering how much better Will thought his Italian could be. She could speak Italian, but Will sounded like a literature professor. Yet he was asking Father James esoteric questions about Italian grammar and pronunciation that Chrissie could not understand.
Glenn caught up with the bus the next day. He seemed younger than Chrissie remembered, maybe not even 25. He had long conversations with Will about how to control cameras that were meant to do the job on their own, f stops, shutter speeds, the manipulation of digital images, and such things. She heard Will talking about putting his finger in front of the lens and locking the brightness, in order to intentionally wash out part of the image. Once, they were talking about taking an image through 4 different digital editing programs to get a certain effect. Who would even think of using 4 programs on the same image? It came to her. A professional photographer who would do whatever he had to do to get the pic. The same kind of guy who would stand on a tank in the middle of a battle to get a pic.
Later they were talking about models. Will was talking about telling Marcie to “Do something interesting.”
“She knows what I mean. I want a little bit of literary content. Maybe she looks into the distance, as if she just saw something. Being Marcie, she can come up with 100 things to do. Maybe she has to re-buckle her sandal. There might be something in the carpet she needs to look at. She rubs the window with her finger. She fiddles with the cables on the stereo. She organizes the DVDs. She takes a ballpoint pen apart and looks at it to see why it isn’t working. Probably I end up putting it back together because she doesn’t know how, but.”
“She does something that tells a story like a magazine illustration.”
“Yeah. Best one she ever did, she is in a businesschick outfit, and she has a legal pad in front of her with circles drawn by a pen that didn’t write, and she has the pen in her hand, looking at it like how is she going to punish this thing.”
“Sounds like a good pic.”
Will started looking for it.
“I’m not sure you can call them business chicks, though.”
“I am. This country stood up to the Nazis, the Soviet Union and all sorts of other oppressors. If we knuckle under to the ‘politically correct’ we don’t count for much. I’ll take on any of those punks mano a mano any time, any place. If they think they can take away the First Amendment, they will fight me over that.”
Chrissie giggled. “Will does have opinions.”
Will spun the laptop. “Here is that pic.”
The pic showed Marcie really irritated at the pen that did not write. She wore a wool jacket and skirt you might have been able to find on sale for about the price of a load of gravel for a slam banger. Her blouse was raw silk, her stockings had an embroidery pattern on them. Her shoes, of course, were Phillipa. Her earrings were gold and transparent rubies. Not terribly expensive by the standards of a girl who has her own 737.
“Nice. She looks like she’s really mad about that pen not working.”
“We went through the drawer hoping to find one that didn’t work so we could make the circles on the pad where she tried to get it to write.”
“She could be an actress.”
“A great one.”
“Why not, then?”
“It’s what I say. Model when you’re 15, act before you’re 30. Never look back.”
“They don’t listen?”
“Glenn, nobody ever listens to good advice.”
“So then, what happens?”
“A lot of them act sensible, and a lot of them snort coke and meth and die young.”
“Are we responsible for that?”
“To discourage it. If we can’t, then we can’t.”
“What should we do with a model with a drug habit?”
“Shoot her if she can work. Tell her she should stop, if you like talking to the wall. Go to her funeral if you think there is any point in that. There are a lot of people who are better off being poor. Especially when they are young. Chrissie and I will be all right being rich. We’ll invite our friends over, go out on the Med with our boat, smell the flowers and look at the fishes in our ponds. If you turn out to be able, you will bring Teresa or someone over and shoot her in our yard. We’ll sit on the deck with a few shots of Jack and talk about photography.”
“It won’t spoil you.”
“No. We are going to like it, but it isn’t going to spoil us.”
* * *
They arrived at a hotel, and went in. They slept, and then showered and dressed, and had breakfast in the hotel. They went out to the street, just getting an idea of the weather and the light. One of the bell boys had catalogs, and he got some pretty good tips handing them out. Will was surrounded by pretty girls. He signed up 16 of them, and called them to conference in the hotel in one hour, everyone needed a parent’s signature on the contract, and do expect Poquita to check, and do not expect her to forget.
Poquita did indeed check, and everyone was all right. She explained how the covey worked, and that Marcie would for sure be photographed with each of them. That they would all get a page on the web site with their pix, and a little bio. That they would all get in the catalog and their little bios would be there, too.
Kitty prowled in with his lioness. They were seated. Glenn sat next to them, and so did Marcie. “Girls, we are going to go out to the big truck out there, and you can wear anything you like on the racks. Please leave things in order. I would like to see it a little neater than the last covey left it. These two guys here who are not talking are our security detail. If they tell you to do something, do it. Otherwise, we are expecting you to do what Marcie says. She’s not real hard to work for. We’re going down to the park at the end of the street and do a little modeling.”
Marcie took her covey into the truck and they all dressed up in Aurora with, of course Phillipa shoes. Out they came, much as they had gone in, but dressed nicely, and the better for a little lip gloss and eye shadow. There may be nothing a girl enjoys more than looking good and being noticed looking good, unless it’s, uh, well, of course there is that.
The covey, under the watchful eye of Marcie, went down the street to the park, with their photographers and the silent guys. Japan takes a different view about firearms than Texas. In Texas, you’re not really OK unless you have at least one, and preferably 10 or so. In Japan, guns are considered really scary, even though it’s motor vehicles that kill people. Despite this belief, the two guys who had not much to say had them, and so did the General who was not really a General, and didn’t actually exist. These three gentlemen didn’t expect any trouble, but they understood the possibility that evil would rear its ugly head, which would of course be shot to hell.
The covey played around in the park for a while, documented by Glenn and Will on virtual film. They went back to the hotel and had a snack and the girls got shot with Marcie. Lots of posters got printed and signed. Poquita gave the girls their web page addresses, and uploaded everything. Each of them received a little letter from Will about how she was a nice young lady, and he had the highest hopes for her future career. The letters were varied a bit by Will, and some more by Poquita, so that they did not seem to be the same letter. They did the rest of Japan in a similar matter, and went north to take care of unfinished business.