The Typist by Michael Knight

Author:Michael Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2010-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Bunny’s Cadillac was parked out front when we returned. I wanted to make a quick getaway but I knew that would look suspicious, so I followed Arthur inside and we found his mother in the kitchen, peering over the shoulder of her cook, supervising dinner preparations the way her husband managed battle plans. Arthur was still buoyant from the afternoon, running on excitedly about the movie and what a good time he’d had, not a word about Namiki. After a few minutes, Mrs. Bunny dismissed me and I told Arthur I’d see him next week, relief flooding through me like we’d pulled off a crime.

On my way out, Bunny called to me from down the hall. He was reclined on a sofa in a sitting room, feet on the floor, head and shoulders propped on a nest of pillows, an unlit pipe jutting from the corner of his mouth like a sarcastic remark. He was scratching notes on a yellow legal pad. All around him, the floor was littered with files.

“Nice day?” he said.

“Yessir.”

“Good movie?”

“Yessir.”

“Listen,” he said, and I worried for a moment that the tentacles of his influence ran so deep he’d already heard about Namiki, but all he said was, “What’s Alabama gonna do this season? I saw in the paper where they lost to Tulane. That’s quite an upset.”

“They’ll be all right, sir. They’ve got Harry Gilmer.”

He drummed his pencil on the pad. “Let me ask you something. What’s your opinion of morale in my command? Seems to me morale has fallen off a little since the summer.”

As far as I knew, morale was fine and I wondered if his concern didn’t stem from the way the press had been treating him, if the morale in question might be his own. But I wasn’t about to tell him that.

“No matter,” he said. “I’ve got an idea that just might help right the ship.”

“Is that so, sir?”

“Were you aware that Bill Bertelli is attached to the Second Marines?”

“Bullet Bill, sir? The fullback?”

“Not just any fullback. He was a two-time All-American at Holy Cross.”

“He’s here in Japan, sir?”

“He is indeed. And not just him. Calvin Thomas is a coreman at the field hospital in Yokohama, and Marty Vaughn is a cook on the Bonhomme Richard, just off the coast.”

I knew the names. Thomas had been voted MVP of the Rose Bowl in 1939 and Vaughn had been tackle at Ole Miss. I’d heard his number called a hundred times over the radio when they were playing Alabama.

“By my count, there are at least fifteen men with real college football experience stationed in the Pacific. And I’ve hardly begun to look. There’s no telling who I’ll turn up. It strikes me as a serious oversight to have such talent handy and not make something of it. I think we need a football game.”

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