She looked at me across the little round, black table. "Mr. Tompkins," she said, "I have no way of telling whether you are telling the truth or not. Frankly, if General Donovan was in town I wouldn't bother him, but Colonel McIntosh is—you know—one of the Chicago McIntoshes. You never heard of him? Nobody else did either but here he is with a British accent and if you can make the grade with him it won't worry me."
I ordered another round of drinks.
"Tell me, Dorothy," I said, "not that it's any of my business, except that I was a friend of your husband's, don't you feel any special regret that he's probably gone west?"
She took a man-sized swallow of her old-fashioned. "Not particularly," she admitted. "In a general, normal sort of way, I'm sorry, of course. He was nice even if we didn't get on very well. But we had almost no interests in common and when we broke up it was for keeps. He was kind, and on the whole, decent, but God! so stuffy and boring to live with. Day after day, Hartford, Connecticut, writing and yessing, living by minutes and dying by inches. He rather liked it. I couldn't understand it. So you can see why I can't pretend to be prostrated. And perhaps he isn't dead at all."
I nodded. "He's dead if that's the way you feel about him," I said. "He told me that his wife was a lovely girl with a mole on her hip and the hell of a temper. He said it was like being married to a circus acrobat or an opera singer—exciting but not happy. He said you had a habit of—" I stopped in the nick of time.
"Oh, he did, did he?" she snapped. "Well, Mr. Tompkins, I don't suppose he ever told you that he snored or that—"
"Skip it, please," I calmed her. "It's your marriage, not mine. I told you these things so you'd know I was really sent to you by Frank. Now you fix it so I can talk to McIntosh."
"I will," she replied.
It was the epitaph on ten years of marriage. I knew when I was licked. Dorothy was what she had been when I had picked her out of Middletown—as inaccessible as the root of a Greek aorist or as a book of curiosa in a Carnegie library. She had not shown a trace of recognizing Frank Jacklin inside the body of Winnie Tompkins, even though my morning calisthenics were reducing my circumference. I was licked. I was no Faustus to woo this Marguerite, especially when she obviously had someone else on the string. The Master of the Rat Race obviously meant me to play the hand he had dealt me, and no Joker. By Godfrey, it would go hard with Dorothy's boss when I came to grips with him. All the Navy men who had been hitched by Washington would applaud me—Marty Donnell who had been sent out against the "Nagato" with the wrong size shells for his guns; Abie Roseman, who had been cashiered because he had refused to okay a travel order for the Admiral's sweetie; Julius Winterbottom, who had died on the "Lexington"—and all the gobs who had died. Well, win or lose, I'd give the F.B.I. a run for its money and what could they do to me? Damn it! I was a civilian—one of the guys that paid their salaries!
Colonel Ivor McIntosh of the Chicago McIntoshes was one of those who had been born with a platinum spoon and a broad "A" in his mouth. His face bore the marks of years of application to the more expensive tables, cellars and bedrooms. His uniform was in the U.S. Army but definitely not of it—having a Savile Row touch that suggested the Guards. He was, he told me, in charge of the O.S.S. "until Bill gets back," and what could he do for me?