The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [149]
This, now, was not funny. Not after the recreation tent and the flowers and Kerrigan. Until this little episode, he could consider the General's antics as pranks that spewed out of twisted and intense hungers. It had been in a way like the probing banter between friends. But this was vicious. And frightening, a little. With all his concerns, with all the pressures upon him, Cummings had had time to concoct these schemes, release a little of the greater frustration he was feeling.
And that basically was what their relationship had always been, Hearn understood at this moment. He had been the pet, the dog, to the master, coddled and curried, thrown sweetmeats until he had had the presumption to bite the master once. And since then he had been tormented with the particular absorbed sadism that most men could generate only toward an animal. He was a diversion for the General, and he resented it deeply with a cold speechless anger that came to some extent from the knowledge that he had acquiesced in the dog-role, had even had the dog's dreams, carefully submerged, of someday equaling the master. And Cummings had probably understood even that, had been amused.
He remembered a story Cummings had told him about an employee in the War Department who had been discharged after some Communist documents had been planted in his desk.
"I'm surprised it worked," Hearn had said. "You say everybody knew the man was harmless."
"Those things always work, Robert. You can't begin to imagine how effective the Big Lie is. Your average man never dares suspect that the men in power have all the nasty impulses he has, except they're more effective about carrying them out. Besides, there's never a man who can swear to his own innocence. We're all guilty, that's the truth. This particular fellow began to wonder if perhaps he had belonged to the party. Why do you think Hitler was able to stay unmolested so long? The diplomat mentality at its poorest just couldn't believe that he wasn't playing the old game with some new wrinkles. It took an outside observer like you or me to see that he was the interpreter of twentieth-century man."
Certainly Cummings would have been perfectly capable of planting those documents if he had thought it necessary. Just as he had finagled the whisky label. And he was not going to become a chess piece for the General to direct. No doubt Cummings saw him now as a diversion.
Hearn stared around the tent. It would be a pleasure to wait for the General and tell him that he had brought back the supplies successfully, but it was a tainted pleasure and Cummings would be quite aware of it. "Had to extend yourself a bit, didn't you, Robert?" he might say. Hearn lit a cigarette, and walked over to the wastebasket to drop the match.
There it was, that instinctive reaction, don't drop a match on the General's floor. He paused. There was a limit to how far he could let the General prod him.
The clean floor. If you looked at it clearly without the aura of military mumbo-jumbo, it became absurd, perverted, a revolting idea.
He dropped the match near the General's foot locker, and then with his heart beating stupidly, he threw his cigarette carefully onto the middle of the General's spotless floor, ground his heel down brutally upon it, and stood looking at it with amazement and a troubled pride.
Let Cummings see that. Let him.
In the G-1 tent the air had become stifling by midday. Major Binner wiped his steel-rimmed glasses, coughed dolefully, and removed a trickle of sweat from the corner of his neat temple. "This is a serious thing, Sergeant," he said quietly.
"Yes, sir, I know."
Major Binner glanced at the General for a moment. Then he drummed on his desk and looked at the enlisted man who was standing at attention before him. A few steps away, near one of the corner poles, Cummings paced a small circle back and forth.
"If you give us the facts, Sergeant Lanning, it will have a very important bearing on your court-martial," Binner said.
"Major, I don't know what to tell you," Lanning protested. He was a short rather stocky man with blond hair and pale-blue eyes.