Catch-22(174)

“Or do you?” said the colonel.

“That’s a very serious crime you’ve committed, Father,” said the major.

“What crime?”

“We don’t know yet,” said the colonel. “But we’re going to find out. And we sure know it’s very serious.”

The car swung off the road at Group Headquarters with a squeal of tires, slackening speed only slightly, and continued around past the parking lot to the back of the building. The three officers and the chaplain got out. In single file, they ushered him down a wobbly flight of wooden stairs leading to the basement and led him into a damp, gloomy room with a low cement ceiling and unfinished stone walls. There were cobwebs in all the corners. A huge centipede blew across the floor to the shelter of a water pipe. They sat the chaplain in a hard, straight-backed chair that stood behind a small, bare table.

“Please make yourself comfortable, Chaplain,” invited the colonel cordially, switching on a blinding spotlight and shooting it squarely into the chaplain’s face. He placed a set of brass knuckles and a box of wooden matches on the table. “We want you to relax.”

The chaplain’s eyes bugged out incredulously. His teeth chattered and his limbs felt utterly without strength. He was powerless. They might do whatever they wished to him, he realized; these brutal men might beat him to death right there in the basement, and no one would intervene to save him, no one, perhaps, but the devout and sympathetic major with the sharp face, who set a water tap dripping loudly into a sink and returned to the table to lay a length of heavy rubber hose down beside the brass knuckles.

“Everything’s going to be all right, Chaplain,” the major said encouragingly. “You’ve got nothing to be afraid of if you’re not guilty. What are you so afraid of? You’re not guilty, are you?”

“Sure he’s guilty,” said the colonel. “Guilty as hell.”

“Guilty of what?” implored the chaplain, feeling more and more bewildered and not knowing which of the men to appeal to for mercy. The third officer wore no insignia and lurked in silence off to the side. “What did I do?”

“That’s just what we’re going to find out,” answered the colonel, and he shoved a pad and pencil across the table to the chaplain. “Write your name for us, will you? In your own handwriting.”

“My own handwriting?”

“That’s right. Anywhere on the page.” When the chaplain had finished, the colonel took the pad back and held it up alongside a sheet of paper he removed from a folder. “See?” he said to the major, who had come to his side and was peering solemnly over his shoulder.

“They’re not the same, are they?” the major admitted.

“I told you he did it.”

“Did what?” asked the chaplain.

“Chaplain, this comes as a great shock to me,” the major accused in a tone of heavy lamentation.

“What does?”

“I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in you.”

“For what?” persisted the chaplain more frantically. “What have I done?”

“For this,” replied the major, and, with an air of disillusioned disgust, tossed down on the table the pad on which the chaplain had signed his name. “This isn’t your handwriting.”

The chaplain blinked rapidly with amazement. “But of course it’s my handwriting.”

“No it isn’t, Chaplain. You’re lying again.”

“But I just wrote it!” the chaplain cried in exasperation. “You saw me write it.”

“That’s just it,” the major answered bitterly. “I saw you write it. You can’t deny that you did write it. A person who’ll lie about his own handwriting will lie about anything.”

“But who lied about my own handwriting?” demanded the chaplain, forgetting his fear in the wave of anger and indignation that welled up inside him suddenly. “Are you crazy or something? What are you both talking about?”

“We asked you to write your name in your own handwriting. And you didn’t do it.”

“But of course I did. In whose handwriting did I write it if not my own?”

“In somebody else’s.”

“Whose?”

“That’s just what we’re going to find out,” threatened the colonel.

“Talk, Chaplain.”

The chaplain looked from one to the other of the two men with rising doubt and hysteria. “That handwriting is mine,” he maintained passionately. “Where else is my handwriting, if that isn’t it?”

“Right here,” answered the colonel. And looking very superior, he tossed down on the table a photostatic copy of a piece of V mail in which everything but the salutation “Dear Mary” had been blocked out and on which the censoring officer had written, “I long for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.” The colonel smiled scornfully as he watched the chaplain’s face turn crimson. “Well, Chaplain? Do you know who wrote that?”