Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [150]
He shook his head. With that gesture, he gave up a plan which he had been secretly harboring for a week. There was a chaplain on the Pluto; he had passed his office; but Willie knew now that he was not going to hunt up the chaplain and tell him the story of the water famine. “You may not be much,” he said aloud to his mirror image, “but you don’t have to go weeping to anybody on the Pluto. You’re Lieutenant Keith of the Caine.”
CHAPTER 23
Court-Martial of Stilwell
“Mistuh Keith, exec want to see you, sub.”
“Okay, Rasselas.” Willie reluctantly dropped on his desk the nine mildewed letters from May that had just come in the mailbags from the Pluto, and went to the exec’s room.
“Things are closing in, Willie.” Maryk handed him a long typed letter on Red Cross stationery. Willie read it, squatting on the coaming of the doorway. He felt sick, as though he himself were trapped. “Captain seen it?”
Maryk nodded. “Summary court-martial for Stilwell day after tomorrow. You’re going to be the recorder.”
“The what?”
“Recorder.”
“What’s that?”
The exec shook his head and grinned. “Don’t you know any Navy regulations? Get out Courts and Boards and get hot on summary court-martials.”
“What do you think will happen to Stilwell?”
“Well, that’s up to Keefer, Harding, and Paynter. They’re the court.”
“Well, then, he’ll be okay.”
“Maybe,” Maryk said dryly.
A couple of hours later Rasselas went searching the ship for the communicator and found him flat on his face on the flying bridge, asleep in the sun. Jellybelly’s ragged copy of Courts and Boards lay open on the deck beside him, the pages flapping in the breeze. “Suh, Mistuh Keith, suh. Cap’n wants you, suh.”
“Oh, God. Thanks, Rasselas.”
Queeg looked up from his jigsaw puzzle with a remarkably pleasant, youthful smile when Willie came into his cabin. It brought back forcibly to Willie how much he had liked Queeg at their first handshake so long, long ago.
“Well, Mr. Keith, here’s something for you.” Queeg took several clipped sheets from an overflowing wire basket and gave them to the communicator. They were Willie’s appointment to lieutenant junior grade. Queeg stood, and offered his hand. “Congratulations, Lieutenant.”
Willie had been comforting himself for months with a dark fantasy. He had resolved that if ever a moment came when Queeg offered to shake hands with him, he would refuse. With that one gesture he would tell the captain once for all what the world of gentlemen, in the person of Willie Keith, thought of people like Queeg. Now it had suddenly come, the chance to make the daydream real-but the sad fact is, Willie meekly took the captain’s hand and said, “Thank you, sir.”
“Not at all, Willie. We have our little differences, naturally, but as an officer you measure up very well-very well, on the whole. Now then. All set to be recorder at the court-martial?”
“Well, sir, I’ve been boning up on this Courts and Boards-seems I’m a combination prosecutor and legal adviser-”
“Yes, well, don’t let all that legal gobbledygook throw you. I’ve been a recorder five, six times and the last thing I know anything about-or want to know anything about-is law. The important thing is to have a yeoman who’s on the ball and gets the whole thing typed up right, according to the form in the book. Porteous knows his stuff, so you’ll be okay. Just bear down on him and make sure he dots the i’s and crosses the t’s. Stilwell’s going to get a bad-conduct discharge and I want to be damn sure it sticks.”
Willie blurted in plain puzzlement, “How do you know what he’s going to get, sir?”
“Hell, he’s guilty, isn’t he? A fraud like that calls for the stiffest sentence a summary court can give, which is a BCD.”
“Sir, it’s just that-well, it sure looks as though