Brother Endicott

The man stared at the paper in his typewriter with the bleak look of a rain-soaked spectator at a dull football game, and then ripped it out of the machine. He lit a cigarette, put another sheet of paper in the wringer, and began a letter to his publisher, without salutation: "Why you imbeciles have to have a manuscript three months ahead of publication is, by God ——" And out came that sheet. Somewhere a clock began striking three, but it was drowned out by a sudden upsurge of Paris night noises.

The street noises of Paris, staccato, profundo, momentary and prolonged, go on all through the summer night, as if hostile hosts were fiercely taking, losing and regaining desperately disputed corners, especially the bloody angle of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue de Castiglione, just beneath the windows of the writer's hotel room. Presently he heard the jubilant coming of the Americans, late but indomitable, sleepless but ever fresh, moving in, like the taxis of the Marne, from the Right Bank and the Left, shouting, laughing, amiably cursing, as they enveloped and captured the lobby of the hotel. They loudly occupied corridors and rooms, leaving the King's English sprawled and bleeding on the barricades of night. A detachment of foot cavalry trooped past the writer's door, one of the men singing Louise in a bad imitation of Chevalier.

American reinforcements kept on arriving at the hotel, and below his window the writer heard a young feminine voice crying, "For God's sake, Mother, why not? S'only three o'clock!" Her mother's voice cried back at her, "Your father's dead and so am I — that's why not." There was no report from the father, and the writer visualized him lying on the sidewalk, his wallet deflated, a spent and valiant victim of the battle of Paris. The writer emptied a clogged ashtray into a metal wastebasket, switched off the lights in the sitting room of his suite and sprawled on one of the twin beds in the other room. "It may be the Fourth of July to everybody else," he said aloud, as if talking to someone he didn't like, "but it's just two weeks past deadline to me." He turned over the phrase, "The 14th of Deadline," decided there was nothing in it, and was about to take off his right shoe when he heard a knock at the door. He looked at his wristwatch; it was a few minutes past three o'clock.

The late caller was a young woman he had never seen before. She murmured something that sounded like, "My husband — I thought maybe ——" and he stood aside to let her in, apologizing for his shirt-sleeves.

"I was afraid it was the fellas looking for a tenor," he said. "I'm a baritone myself, but out of practice and not in the mood." He put the lights on again in the sitting room, waved casually at a chair and, just as casually, she sat in it. "Voici le salon, as they call it," he said. "Makes it sound very proper. What can I do for you? My name's Guy Farland."

"I know," she said. "I've heard you typing at night before. I asked at the desk once, and they said you were here. My name is Marie Endicott."

He reached for his tie and jacket, but she said, with a faint smile, "Ne vous dérangez pas. It's too warm."

"Before we get around to your problem," he said, "how about a drink?" He moved to a table containing bottles and glasses and an ice bucket. She nodded when he put his hand on the Scotch bottle. "Not too strong, please," she said. "A lot of soda."

"I mix drinks my own way," he told her, "and I'm said to be good at it. Besides, this is my castle." He took her in as he fixed the highball, figured that she was not more than 23 and that she had had quite a few drinks already, rather desperate ones, which she hadn't enjoyed much. He set her drink down on a table beside her chair. "If I were a younger writer I would say, 'She looked like a chic Luna moth in her light-green evening gown, as she stood there clutching a dainty evening bag.' But you weren't clutching it, just holding it," he said. "And I'm a middle-aged writer, not a young one," he added.

She picked up her drink but didn't taste it. "I've read your Lost Corner four times," she said. He went back to mix himself a drink, saying, "It isn't quite that good. I'm trying to finish another book, but you can't think against this goddamn racket. I had got used to the Paris taxi horns and their silence makes me edgy. They have cut out the best part of the noise and left in the worst."

"The goddamn motorcycles," she said tonelessly. He sat down, and they both listened to the tumult outside the window for a moment.

"The noise has loused me up — I choose the precise word for it," he said. "It would certainly rain in Verlaine's heart if he could hear it." She was looking at him as though he were an actor in a spotlight, and he responded with a performance. "I was thinking how silent Paris must have been the night François Villon vanished into immortality through the snows of yesteryear. If your husband has vanished, maybe I can help you find him. I'm a husband myself, and I know where they go. On the Fourth of July, of course, it's a little harder, especially in a foreign country." He had left the door to the suite ajar, and they could hear the male quartet somewhere down the hall dwelling liquidly on The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.

"Edward isn't lost," she said. "He's the bass. Edward Francis Endicott." She seemed to add a trace of bitters to the name. "Wisconsin Alpha. They're in Rip Morgan's room, with a couple of Americans they picked up at this night club. Edward and Rip insisted on singing On, Wisconsin — I don't know why we weren't put out — and these strange men knew the (continued on page 104) Brother Endicott (continued from page 100) words and joined in, but they are from Illinois, and so then they all sang Loyal to You, Illinois. Our honeymoon has been like that ever since Edward ran into Rip Morgan in Rome." She gave the word "honeymoon" a tart inflection.

The quartet down the hall now had Dear Old Girl in full swing, and Farland got up and closed the door. "They sound a little order than juniors or seniors," he said, coming back to his chair. She took a long swallow of her drink and set the glass down.

"Edward will be 46 next week," she said, in the tone of a patient on a psychiatrist's couch, and Farland leaned back for the flow he felt was coming. "He still wears his fraternity pin. He wore it on his pajamas on our wedding night. It's the Nelson Merit Pin. He got it one year for being the biggest Boopa Doopa Chi in the whole damn country. He has a smaller one, too. Fraternity is his life. Maybe you've heard of Endicott Emblems, Incorporated. Well, he's the president. They make fraternity pins, and signet rings, and everything. He goes around all the time, even over here, with his right hand out like this." She separated the thumb and little finger of her right hand from the other fingers. "He gives everybody the grip, in the American Express and at the Embassy, and everywhere he sees an American man. I don't know much about fraternities. I thought it was something men got over, like football practice. I went to Smith." Farland noticed that she kept glancing over her right shoulder at the door.

"Brother Endicott won't break in on us," he said reassuringly. "Quartets never notice that wives are missing. As for my wife, she's in Italy."

"I knew she wasn't here," Marie Endicott said, and Farland followed her gaze about the room, which must have revealed instantly to his visitor the lack of a woman's touch. There were books and papers on the floor, and that unmistakable masculine rearrangement of chairs and lamps which a man finds comfortable and a woman intolerable. "Nancy is going to pick up our daughters in Italy – we have two. They are coming over on one of the Export ships because they wanted to see Gibraltar. I don't work at night when Nancy's here. Wives don't think it's healthy."

"Ellen Morgan went to bed," said the girl, "and Edward thinks I'm in bed, too." She took several long swallows of her drink this time and sat forward in her chair. "The reason I'm here, the thing is," she began, with a flash of firmness, and then leaned back with a helpless flutter of her left hand. Farland gave her a cigarette and held a match for her.

"Don't get a blockage," he said easily. "I'm the one with the blockage, I was thinking of throwing the heroine of my novel out of a window, but you can't do that in novels, only in real life." The girl wasn't listening.

"Edward can't stand any foreign country," she said," because it isn't God's country, and they don't use God's money, and you can't get God's martinis, or God's anything." Her eyes drifted toward an unopened bottle of bourbon on the table. "Or God's whiskey," she said. "Bourbon is God's whiskey, you know."

"He must have trouble getting God's ice, too," Farland put in, "especially at this hour."

"They don't supply soap at most French hotels," she went on. "In the hotel in Le Havre he called downstairs and said, 'Some of you cave dwellers come up here with some soap and make it snappy. Endicott wants soap.' He speaks of himself in the third person a lot of the time. He doesn't know any French except combien and trop cher and encore la même chose and où est le cabinet? He calls terraces sit-downs, and he's terrible when a dinner check runs into four figures, like 3800 francs. He says, 'Pas si goddamn vite' to taxi drivers. He learned what he calls doughboy French from his brother Harry. Harry is much older. He was in the First World War. You know doughboy French? 'Restez ici a minute. Je retourner après cet guy partirs.' " She drank some more and went back to brother Harry. "Harry thinks he's dying," she said. "He thinks he's dying of everything, but there isn't anything the matter with him. He ought to go to a psychiatrist, and he actually did once, but the doctor said something like, 'If you're not sick, and you think you're sick. you're sick.' And Harry slammed out of his office."

"Nice slamming," Farland said. "I think I would have, too."

The girl in the green dress took in a long sad breath and exhaled slowly. "Harry carries a little mirror, like a woman, and keeps looking at his mouth, even in public," she said. "He thinks there's something the matter with his uvula."

"I'm sorry you told me that," Farland said. "It is the only part of my body I have never been conscious of. Can you die of uvulitis or something?"

"Harry and his wife were over here," the girl continued, "but they flew back last week, thank God. He suddenly got the idea in the middle of the night that his doctor had secretly called Irene and told her he was dying – Harry, I mean. 'This is my last vacation,' he screamed, waking Irene up. She thought he had lost his mind in his sleep. 'I'm not going to die in Naples or any other foreign city!' he yelled. 'I'm going to die in Buffalo!' We live in Milwaukee. It isn't far enough from Buffalo."

"You were just about to tell me why you came here. I don't mean to Europe, I mean to my chambers, tonight – this morning," Farland said, but she postponed the reason for her call with a wave of her hand. He sat back and let her flow on. "Edward is a collector," she said. "Big heavy things, like goalposts. He's football-crazy, too. I thought he was really crazy once when we were having a cocktail and he lifted his glass and said, 'Here's to Crazy Legs!' That's Roy Hirsch," she explained. "One of the Wisconsin gridiron immortals. He also drinks to the Horse. That's Ameche. He's immortal, too."

"I'm trying to figure out what you saw in Edward Endicott," Farland said, a flick of impatience in his tone. "It's supposed to be a human mystery, I know, but there's usually a clue of some kind."

She gestured with her hand again and frowned. "He has more drums than anybody else in the world," she went on. "He began collecting them when he was a little boy, and now he has African drums and Maori drums and some from the Civil War and one from the Revolution. He even has a drum that was used in the road company of The Emperor Jones, and one of the 40 or 50 that were used in Valencia during a big production number at the Casino de Paris in 1925, I think it was." She shuddered slightly, as if she heard all the Endicott drums approaching. "Is collecting goalposts Freudian?" she asked.

Farland decided to think that over while he freshened the drinks. "I don't think so," he said. "Goalposts are trophies, a sign your side won. The Indians had it worked out better, of course. Scalping the captain of the losing team would be much simpler. Where does he keep the goalposts?"

"In the attic," she said, "except for the one in the guest room. It belonged to Southern Cal. or SMU, or somebody we didn't expect to beat and did." She managed a small evil inflection on "we."

"All right, let's have it," Farland said. "Why did you come here tonight? All this is overture, I can tell that."

She sat forward suddenly again. "Tom will be here, I mean right here, in your suite, in a few minutes," she said, hurriedly. "He sent me a message by a waiter at the night club, while Edward was trying to get the little French orchestra to play Back in Your Own Backyard. Tom must have followed me there. I had to think quick, and all I could think of was your room, because you're always up late."

Farland got up and put on his tie and (continued on page 172) Brother Endicott (Continued from page 104)coat. "I ought to look more de rigueur for Tom," he said. "You're not constructing this very well. You don't just hit your readers with a character named Tom. They have a right to know who he is and what he wants."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I mean about asking him to come here. He's awfully difficult, but at least he isn't predictable. He loves to sweep everything off the mantelpiece when he's mad, but he doesn't use a straight razor and strop it all the time, like Edward. Tom and I were engaged for years, but he didn't want to get married until he got through his Army service, so we broke up about that. Everybody else got married and went to camp with their husbands. They had four million babies last year, the American girls."

"American girls often marry someone they can't stand to spite someone they can," he said. "That's a pretty rough generalization, but I haven't got time to polish it up. Is that where Brother Endicott came in?"

"I don't really know what state Tom is in," she said. "He just got out of the service, and I was afraid he would follow me here. It's a long story about how I met Edward. I wanted to come back to Paris. You see, I had spent my junior year here, and I loved Paris. Of course, my mother went completely to pieces. I had a job in New York, but every evening when I got home, mother was waiting for me. Sometimes crocked. She always wanted to have a little talk. We had more little talks than all the mothers and daughters in the world. I was going crazy, and then I met Edward. He seemed so strong and silent and –" She groped for a word and came up with "attentive." Farland gave her another cigarette. "He wasn't really strong and silent. He was just on the wagon. Tom hadn't written for months, and I thought maybe he had another girl, and Edward promised to bring me to Paris, and so – I don't know."

"Paris seems to be full of American girls who are hiding out from their mothers," he said. This caused a flash of lightning in her eyes.

"Mother belongs to the damn Lost Generation," she said. "The trouble with the Lost Generation is it didn't get lost enough. All the damn lost mothers had only one child," she went on, warming to what was apparently a familiar thesis. "They all think their daughters are weak enough to do the things they thought they were strong enough to do. So we have to pay for what they did. I'm glad I missed the 1920s. God!"

"They've stopped singing," Farland said. "They must be taking a whiskey break. How do I fit into this – for Tom, I mean? I don't want to be knocked cold when he gets here. I seem to be in the middle."

As if it were an entrance cue, there were two sharp raps on the door. Farland hurried out and opened it. A tall young man breezed past him and into the sitting room. "Are you all right?" he demanded of the girl.

"No," Farland said. "Do you want a drink?"

"This is Mr. Farland, Mr. Gregg," said Mrs. Endicott. Mr. Gregg scowled at his host. "I don't get this," he said. "What is that baboon doing now? Could I have a straight Scotch?" Farland put some Scotch and ice in a glass and gave it to him.

"They're probably running out of whiskey," the girl said. "I don't want Edward to find me gone."

"He might as well get used to it," said Tom. He began pacing. "I was hanging around out front when you left the hotel," he said, "and I followed you to that night club. It cost me five bucks for one drink, five bucks and taxi fare to write that note." He suddenly pulled the girl up out of her chair and into his arms.

"This is pretty damned unplanned," Farland said.

"I got to have half an hour with Marie. We've got to settle some things," Tom said peremptorily. "I'm sorry I was so abrupt." He held out the hand that swept things off mantelpieces. He had a quick, firm grip. "I haven't got any plans, except to get her away from that monkey," he said.

"The law is on his side, of course," Farland put in, "and the Church and all that sort of thing." The girl had freed herself and sat down again, and Tom resumed his pacing.

"Do you know the grip?" Farland asked her suddenly. "I think it may be mine. Don't hit me," he said to the young man.

"Tom threw his pledge pin across the room at a chapter meeting, I think they call it," the girl said.

"Somebody said something," Tom snarled. Farland nodded. "People have a way of doing that," he said. "Human failing." He held out his right hand to the girl and she gave him the grip. "Now I do this," he said, pressing her wrist.

"And I do this," she said, returning the pressure. Each then pressed the other's thumb.

"Don't you wiggle your ears, for crissake?" Tom snarled.

"Brother Endicott," Farland sighed, "shake hands with Brother Farland. Pennsylvania Gamma." He picked up the unopened bottle of bourbon and the ice bucket. "I think I can promise you your half hour undisturbed," he said. "God's whiskey and the grip ought to do it, and besides, I know the words of Back in Your Own Backyard. I also know the Darling song."

"God!" said Marie Endicott.

Tom stopped pacing and looked at Farland. "Damned white of you," he said, "but I don't know why you're doing it."

"Lady in distress," Farland said. "Cry for help in the night. I don't know much about drums, but I can talk about Brother Hunk Elliot."

"Ohio Gamma," said Mrs. Endicott bleakly. "Greatest by God halfback that ever lugged a football, even if he did beat Wisconsin three straight years. Crazy Legs and the Horse don't belong to Boopa Doopa Chi, so they don't rate with Brother Elliot."

"The protocol of fraternity is extremely complicated and uninteresting," Farland said.

"Nuts," snapped Tom. who had begun to crack his knuckles. "Why doesn't that goddamn racket stop?" He suddenly leaped at the open window of the salon and shouted into the night, "Cut down that goddamn noise!"

"Do you want everybody in here?" the girl asked nervously.

"I don't see why I shouldn't go down there myself and bust him a couple," he said. "I don't see why you had to marry him anyway. Nobody in her right mind would marry a man old enough to be her father, and live in Milwaukee." He whirled and stared at Farland. "I don't see what you're getting out of this," he said, "acting like her fairy godfather or somebody."

"I——" Farland began, but Mrs. Endicott cut in on him. There was a new storm in her eyes. "He's done more for me in one night than you have in two years!" she said. "You never wrote, and when you did, nobody could read it, the way you write. How do I know who you were running around with in Tacoma? You're not really in love with me, you just want something somebody else has got." Farland tried to get in on it again, but Tom Gregg gave him a little push and turned to the girl again.

"It wasn't Tacoma," he said. "You didn't even bother to find out what camp I was at."

"Seattle, then," she said. "Fort Lawton. And everybody else got married. I know 10 girls who went to camp with their husbands, and three of them were in Tacoma."

"We couldn't get married on nothing," he said. "I happen to have a job now, a good job."

"Everybody else got married on nothing," she said.

"I'm not everybody else!" he yelled. "I'm not just anybody else, either. 'Miss Withrow, I want you to meet Mr. Endicott.' 'How do you do, Miss With-row. Will you marry me?' 'Sure, why not? I think I'm engaged to a guy named Tacoma or something, but that's OK.'"

"I'll hit you, I really will!" cried the former Miss Withrow.

Farland hastily put the bottle and the ice bucket on the floor and stepped between them. "I'm not anybody's fairy godfather," he said. "I'm just an innocent bystander. I was about to go to bed when all this hell broke loose, and I'll be goddamned if I'm going down to that room and sing with a lot of big fat emblem-makers if you're going to spend your time fighting." His voice was pitched even louder than theirs. The telephone rang. Farland picked up the receiver and listened for three seconds to a voice on the other end speaking in French. "It's the Fourth of July!" he yelled, and slammed down the receiver.

"I'm sorry about this," Tom said. "I'm willing to talk it over rationally if she is. I got to fly back to work day after tomorrow."

"Oh, sure," said Marie.

"I don't usually lose my temper," Farland apologized, "but I'm stuck in a book I'm writing, and it makes me jumpy." He picked up the bottle and the ice bucket again. "I'll give you until four o'clock," he said. "I'll knock four times, with an interval after the third."

"You probably haven't got your key," Marie said. She spied it, put it in Farland's pocket, and kissed him on the forehead.

"Do you have to keep doing that?" Tom shouted.

"I haven't been doing that," Marie said.

"Please!" Farland said. "I'm tossing her aside like a broken doll, anyway." He grinned. "How in hell can I open this door with my arms loaded?" Marie crossed over and opened the door for him. "For God's sake, don't kiss me again," he whispered, "and stop fighting and get something worked out." He raised his voice and spoke to both of them. "Goodnight," he said, "and shut up." He stepped out into the hall and the girl in the green dress quietly closed the door after him...

A short, heavy-set man in his middle 40s opened the door, and seemed to block the way aggressively until he caught sight of the American face of the visitor and the things he was carrying. "I heard the Yankee Doodle sounds," Farland told him, and introduced himself. "I thought maybe you needed reinforcements from SOS." The room exploded into American sounds, as if the newcomer had dropped a lighted match in a box of fireworks. Somebody took the bourbon from him and somebody else the ice bucket. "My God, it's real ice!" someone said, and "Brother, you've saved our lives!"

"An American shouldn't spend this night alone," Farland said above the hubbub. The biggest man in the room, who wore no coat or tie, but on whose vest a fraternity pin gleamed, held out his hand in three parts. Farland gave him the full-dress grip. "Ed Endicott, Wisconsin Alpha!" bawled the big man.

"Pennsylvania Gamma," Farland said.

"For crissake, it's a small world!" Endicott said. "Rip, shake hands with Brother Farland, give him the old grip. Brother Morgan and I belong to the same chapter. Wisconsin Alpha has two national presidents to its credit," he told Farland, "and I was one of them, if I do say so myself. These other poor guys took the wrong pins, but they're OK." He managed somehow to get his right arm around the shoulders of both the other men in the room. "This is Sam Winterhorn, Phi Gam from Illinois, and this is Red Perry, also Illini – Red's a Phi Psi. Maybe you heard us doing Fiji Honeymoon and When DKE Has Gone to Hell. Put 'er there again, fella."

Farland was glad when he was finally given a glass to hold instead of a man's right hand. "Here's to all the brothers, whatever sky's above 'em," Endicott said, clinking his glass against Farland's. He took a great gulp of his drink, and it seemed to Farland that his face brightened like a full moon coming out from behind a cloud. "Endicott is a curly wolf this night, Guy, and you can write that home to your loved ones!" he roared. "Endicott is going to shake hands with the pearly fingered dawn this day. Endicott is going to ring all the bells and blow all the whistles in hell. Any frog that don't like it can bury his head in the Tooleries." Farland managed to get out part of a word, but Brother Endicott trampled on it. "The girls have gone to bed," he said. "Wish you could meet Marie, but we'll be around a couple more days. Marie's Eastern women's college, but Brenda – that's my first wife – was a Kappa. So's Ellen Morgan, Rip's wife. Brenda hated drums. I got the greatest little drum collection in the world, Guy. Once, when a gang of us got up a storm in my house – this was six-seven years ago – damned if Brenda didn't call the cops! One of them turned out to be real mean with the sticks, but the other guy was a surly bastard. I tried to give him the grip, and he got sore as hell. Don't ever try to give a cop the grip, Guy. They think you're queer. Sons of bitches never get through high school."

Farland put on his fixed grin as Endicott rambled on, moving among the disarranged chairs like a truck. He paused in front of one in which Brother Morgan now lay back relaxed, with his eyes closed. "Judas Priest, our tenor's conking out," he said.

" 'Way," mumbled Morgan sleepily.

"Let him sleep," said the man named Perry. "What the hell, we still got a quartet. Anyway, what good's a sleepy tenor unless you're doing Sleepy Time Gal?"

"Sleepy Time Gal!" bawled Endicott, and he suddenly started in the middle of the old song, biting a great hunk out of the lyric. The phone rang, and Endicott smote the night with a bathroom word and jerked up the receiver. "Yeah?" he began, truculently and, as the voice at the other end began protesting in French, he said to the revelers, "It's one of them quoi-quois." He winked heavily at Farland and addressed the transmitter. "Parlez-vous la langue de Dieu?" he asked. Farland realized he had been rehearsing the question quite a while. "Bien, then," Endicott went on. "You people ought to be celebrating, too. If we hadn't let Lafayette fight on our side, he would have gone to the goddamn guillotine. The way it was, even Napoleon didn't dare lay a hand on him. They cut the heads off Rabelais and Danton, but they couldn't touch Lafayette, and that's on account of the good old 13 States." The person at the other end had apparently hung up, but Endicott went on with his act. "Get yourselves a bottle of grenadine and a pack of cubebs and raise a little hell for Lafayette," he said, and hung up.

"Not Rabelais," Farland couldn't help saying. "Robespierre."

"Or old Roquefort!" Endicott bawled. "They all sound like cheese to me, rich old framboise, and they all look alike. Let's hit the Darling song again."

They got through Three O'Clock in the Morning and Linger Awhile and Over There and Yankee Doodle Dandy and You're the B-E-S-T Best and by that time it was ten minutes after four. "Don't keep looking at your Benrus," Endicott told Farland. "Nobody's going anywhere. What the hell, we've got all day." Rip Morgan's troubled unconscious greeted this with a faint moaning sound. Farland's tone grew firm and terminal, and the Illinois men joined him and began the final round of handshakes. Farland picked up the ice bucket, which had been empty for some time now, and started for the door.

"We'll all meet in the bar downstairs at six," Endicott commanded. "Be there!" The three departing Americans said they would be there, but none of them meant it. "I'm going to stay stiff till they pour me on the plane," Endicott went on. Farland's hand felt full of fingers after he had shaken hands again with the Illinois men and they had gone. Brother Endicott, he felt sure, would have his hands full for at least 15 minutes, putting Brother Morgan to bed ...

Farland rapped on the door of his suite three times, paused, then rapped again. There was no response, and he unlocked the door and went in. All the lights in the sitting room were out except one, and he turned it off and began undressing before he reached the bedroom. The battle of the Paris night still went on, and it seemed louder than ever. Farland put on the bottom of his pajamas, couldn't find the top, said, "The hell with it," and went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. "Everything happens to you," he sneered at the man in the mirror. "What's the matter, don't you know how to duck anymore?"

He was about to throw himself on his bed when he noticed the note on his pillow. It read simply "You are the B-E-S-T Best" and it was signed, obviously in Mrs. Endicott's handwriting, "Tom and Marie." In spite of the noise and his still tingling right hand, Farland fell asleep. When he woke up, he picked up the telephone and called the renseignement desk. He looked at his watch. It was 9:35. "I want to get a plane out of here for Rome this afternoon," he said when the information desk answered. "One seat. And I don't care what line. There is just one thing. It has got to leave before six o'clock."