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the war, Captain Leets. Some of us—you, me—must do the little jobs, the boring jobs in safe offices five hundred miles from the front.”
    Leets sighed. “Sir, it’s not a question of—”
    “I shall tell you what it’s a question of. It’s a question of maturity. You had your time playing Indian, so did I. All over now. We’re desk chaps, you and I. See that attractive girl. Enjoy the flicks. Do your job. Thank God you didn’t get your nose or jaw shot off. Rejoice in the coming Triumph of Our Way of Life. The war’s almost over. Weeks, months perhaps. Unless a rocket lands on your skull, you’ve made it. See that girl. Her name—”
    “Susan. I don’t. See her, that is. Anymore.”
    “Pity. But the town’s full of them. Find another.”
    “Sir. A few words from you and—”
    “You mad fool. Go back to guns, to blueprints. Forget murder plots, assassinations. It’s London, February, 1945, not Chicago, 1926.”
    Leets couldn’t afford anger and anyway wasn’t sure he had the strength; and he knew the Brits hated scenes. It’s what they hated most about Americans. And what he needed he’d have to get from Tony Outhwaithe sooner or later, one way or the other, for in this town Tony knew all the right ears to whisper into. If Tony’d frozen him, then only Tony could unfreeze him.
    “Major Outhwaithe,” Leets began again, in a voice he imagined was sweet with reason, “I’d merely like an opportunity to locate additional intelligence. I need more evidence than a Wehrmacht Transpo Command order, even a damned strange one. I need access to other sources, other distributions. The archives, the reading lists. Your technical people. The—”
    “Leets, old man, I’m quite busy. We all are, except you. You’re becoming dreadful, you and that bratty boy of yours. You’re turning into Jews, with your own private patch of persecution, as though the war was a special theater for you and you alone. Who chose you, old man? Eh? Who chose you?”
    Leets had no answer. The British major glared at him, ginger moustache bristling. The eyes were cold as dead glass.
    “Be off!” He flicked insolently with his wrist, Noel Coward in the khaki of King and country, and brushed Leets, the bug, out.
    Leets found himself exiled into the streets, disappointed. He stood a second on the pavement in front ofthe Baker Street headquarters, a nondescript joint called St. Michael House, No. 82. He was one American among crowds of the brutes on the sidewalks of the old city, all of them healthy, shoving, yakky types, many squiring girls. It was chilly and gray—typical London midwinter—but the fresh American flesh seemed to warm the old city’s streets and fill them with human color and motion. Next to the ruddy Yanks, the Brits were pale and thin, but not too many of them were in evidence. Whose city was this, anyway? Leets felt as if he were lost in a football crowd—Homecoming perhaps, some kind of rite. Everybody seemed happy, pink, party-bound. London was a party if you were American, had reasonable chances at survival and pounds in your pocket.
    Triumph was in the air, self-congratulation. The soon-to-come victory would be moral as well as tactical. A way of life, a civilization, had been tested and vindicated. Looking about, Leets saw how glad these guys all were to be American, and how glad, in turn, the pale girls were to have latched onto them. The war was almost all gone. It was feeble and far off. Only the bomber crews, by their paradoxical youth, called it up. They were all over the place now, Eighth Air Force teen-agers, in for a desperate day or two between missions, recognizable by their three gunner’s chevrons on their Air Corps sleeves, unable yet to shave, toting guidebooks and cameras and asking stupid questions in loud voices. They were too young to be scared, Leets thought.
    He shivered, pulling his coat tighter. Not a Chicago winter, but cold, just the same. It had the subsidiaryeffect of drying