Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(34)

After class she is called to Captain Herkemeier’s office.

“Sergeant Schulterman, reporting as ordered.”

Herkemeier comes around the desk to shake her hand. “Congratulations on the stripes, Schulterman.”

“Sir, I have a suspicion that I owe these to you.”

“You have a suspicious mind, Sergeant,” he says. “Take a seat.”

She does, and in unconscious imitation of him, tugs at the crease in her uniform pants to keep it straight and sharp.

“I’ll get right to it. There’s a critical need for German translators in the field.”

“In what field, sir?”

He doesn’t answer directly. “We’ve spent the last year in America training, preparing, manufacturing. We’ve killed a few Japs, but we haven’t so much as laid a finger on the Krauts. That’s about to end.”

Rainy’s smile is slow and predatory. “I’m pleased to hear it, sir.”

Herkemeier nods. “Schulterman, you’re a damned good student. Should you complete this course, you’ll graduate either first or second, and at that point there will be two options open to you: you can either attend officer candidate school and be commissioned a second lieutenant, probably find yourself as an S2 at the battalion level in a stateside or rear unit that doesn’t need a damned S2, and by the end of the war be wearing captain’s bars. Or you can remain in enlisted rank and most likely end up staying stateside in a vital staff job. Or maybe teaching others like yourself.”

“Sir, I sense the suggestion of a third option.”

He nods and looks dubious. “Yes. As I said, the need for translators is acute. You could ship out at your present rank to a line company and—”

“I’ll take that road, sir.”

“Would you mind very much if I finished what I was saying?”

“No, sir.”

“Those would be your options, all other things being equal. But frankly there’s a problem with you going to officer school. A troubling fact has come to my attention. It is of no concern to me, and I have not forwarded this piece of information up the chain of command. But it could, if it became more widely known, abort your career in army intelligence.”

Rainy is baffled. She frowns, searching her memory, trying to figure out what Herkemeier can possibly be referring to.

“Rainy, what does your father do for a living?”

“My father, sir? He delivers milk in New York City.”

“Yes, he does,” Herkemeier says. “He is also a numbers runner for the Genovese crime organization.”

Rainy stares. And while she stares, her mind frantically shifts through all she has seen and heard from her father about his life, his work. A numbers runner? Gambling is illegal, though many people indulge. A numbers runner is a person who takes bets on slips of paper, collects them, and brings them to the central booking office, which tracks winners and losers. He collects from the losers and pays the winners.

Her father? A numbers runner?

Milk delivery. Door to door. A perfect cover for a numbers runner.

In her mind she compares what she knows of the family’s finances against what she believes she knows of the likely income of even a successful and industrious delivery man. Her memory illuminates photos of the annual family vacation, the necklace her mother wears on special occasions, the one her father dismisses as “nothing but paste, really,” but that glitters like real diamonds. She considers the lessons the family has always been willing to pay for—violin, piano, languages. The books. The food.

Rainy feels honor compels her to protest. But honor is not analysis.

“Sir, I was not aware.”

“You don’t dispute it?”

“I neither endorse nor dispute, Captain. I don’t know. But I believe it is possible, and I do not believe you would have confronted me unless you felt the evidence was compelling.”

“You are not cleared to see the actual evidence,” he says. Then he lifts a sheet of paper from his desk, forms it into a funnel, takes a lighter from his pocket, and sets the paper afire.

They watch it burn, and when it is almost entirely consumed, Herkemeier drops the last of it in his metal trash can.

“The FBI of course has a copy, and in time it may surface. If you were stationed here in the States, that might spell trouble. You might be busted out of MI and sent to a different duty. You might end up a clerk in some backwater. I think that would be a hell of a waste of a damned good mind, an army intelligence mind.”

“Sir.” She can’t manage another word just then because her throat is a lump and her heart is pounding and her mind is filling with black anger.

“Half the people here, and more than half of the women, want a nice soft billet far from the shooting. Now, you? I think you want to cause damage to this country’s enemies. Am I mistaken?”

“Sir, you are not,” Rainy says tersely.

Herkemeier straightens his tie, straightens the collar, and leans forward. “I don’t think we win this war with protocols, Rainy. I think we win this war by ruthlessly applying a single unifying principal: killing Germans by any and all means necessary. So I don’t really give much of a damn what sex you are, or whether your father is a petty crook.”

That phrase, “petty crook,” feels too harsh, too final. She loves her father; he is and will always be a great man to her, but that’s not the issue now—that is for another time.