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He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes, then looked blankly around his quarters at the barracks. The decor was spartan: an unadorned steel bed and matching desk, with a single, mismatched chair, and the neglected look of a motel that rented rooms by the hour. A grimy window, flanked by dusty, nondescript curtains, looked out on the parade grounds, several floors below. Jack’s valise stood on a folding stand in the corner by the bathroom. “Well,” he said, after several seconds of blank staring, “there is always the lounge.”
The officers’ lounge was on the top story, a wood-paneled room with a magnificent fireplace in which a fire crackled merrily. Tobacco smoke filled the air; folding chairs and card tables filled the floor. Leave it to the army to fuck things up, Jack thought.
He worked his way through the crowd to the bar. Attracting the bartender’s attention was difficult until Jack thought to produce a 20£ note, which caught her attention.
Drink in hand, he moved away from the bar and looked over the crowd for a familiar face. Some of Roth’s officers were gathered around a pool table, and Jack started threading his way over to them before stopping suddenly enough that beer slopped over the edge of his glass.
“That was close,” he muttered, turning away and finding an unoccupied table. He downed half of his beer and leaned back in his chair. Most of the patrons were strangers, but a few faces were vaguely familiar. At a table off to the right sat a figure whose back looked suspiciously like Wiltshire; Jack turned his own chair to the left.
“You look lonely, sailor,” said a feminine voice, and looking up Jack saw a woman in a low-cut, brilliantly blue dress, her dark hair up in an elegant knot and a cigarette in her hand. “Mind if I sit down?”
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