Catch-22(26)

“Yes, very glad,” Yossarian assured him. “The two girls sell it all on the black market and use the money to buy flashy costume jewelry and cheap perfume.”

Milo perked up. “Costume jewelry!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know that. How much are they paying for cheap perfume?”

“The old man uses his share to buy raw whiskey and dirty pictures. He’s a lecher.”

“A lecher?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Is there much of a market in Rome for dirty pictures?” Milo asked.

“You’d be surprised. Take Aarfy, for instance. Knowing him, you’d never suspect, would you?”

“That he’s a lecher?”

“No, that he’s a navigator. You know Captain Aardvaark, don’t you? He’s that nice guy who came up to you your first day in the squadron and said, Aardvaark’s my name, and navigation is my game.’ He wore a pipe in his face and probably asked you what college you went to. Do you know him?”

Milo was paying no attention. “Let me be your partner,” he blurted out imploringly.

Yossarian turned him down, even though he had no doubt that the truckloads of fruit would be theirs to dispose of any way they saw fit once Yossarian had requisitioned them from the mess hall with Doc Daneeka’s letter. Milo was crestfallen, but from that moment on he trusted Yossarian with every secret but one, reasoning shrewdly that anyone who would not steal from the country he loved would not steal from anybody. Milo trusted Yossarian with every secret but the location of the holes in the hills in which he began burying his money once he returned from Smyrna with his planeload of figs and learned from Yossarian that a C.I.D. man had come to the hospital. To Milo, who had been gullible enough to volunteer for it, the position of mess officer was a sacred trust.

“I didn’t even realize we weren’t serving enough prunes,” he had admitted that first day. “I suppose it’s because I’m still so new. I’ll raise the question with my first chef.”

Yossarian eyed him sharply. “What first chef?” he demanded. “You don’t have a first chef.”

“Corporal Snark,” Milo explained, looking away a little guiltily. “He’s the only chef I have, so he really is my first chef, although I hope to move him over to the administrative side. Corporal Snark tends to be a little too creative, I feel. He thinks being a mess sergeant is some sort of art form and is always complaining about having to prostitute his talents. Nobody is asking him to do any such thing! Incidentally, do you happen to know why he was busted to private and is only a corporal now?”

“Yes,” said Yossarian. “He poisoned the squadron.”

Milo went pale again. “He did what?”

“He mashed hundreds of cakes of GI soap into the sweet potatoes just to show that people have the taste of Philistines and don’t know the difference between good and bad. Every man in the squadron was sick. Missions were canceled.”

“Well!” Milo exclaimed, with thin-lipped disapproval. “He certainly found out how wrong he was, didn’t he?”

“On the contrary,” Yossarian corrected. “He found out how right he was. We packed it away by the plateful and clamored for more. We all knew we were sick, but we had no idea we’d been poisoned.”

Milo sniffed in consternation twice, like a shaggy brown hare. “In that case, I certainly do want to get him over to the administrative side. I don’t want anything like that happening while I’m in charge. You see,” he confided earnestly, “what I hope to do is give the men in this squadron the best meals in the whole world. That’s really something to shoot at, isn’t it? If a mess officer aims at anything less, it seems to me, he has no right being mess officer. Don’t you agree?”

Yossarian turned slowly to gaze at Milo with probing distrust. He saw a simple, sincere face that was incapable of subtlety or guile, an honest, frank face with disunited large eyes, rusty hair, black eyebrows and an unfortunate reddish-brown mustache. Milo had a long, thin nose with sniffing, damp nostrils heading sharply off to the right, always pointing away from where the rest of him was looking. It was the face of a man of hardened integrity who could no more consciously violate the moral principles on which his virtue rested than he could transform himself into a despicable toad. One of these moral principles was that it was never a sin to charge as much as the traffic would bear. He was capable of mighty paroxysms of righteous indignation, and he was indignant as could be when he learned that a C.I.D. man was in the area looking for him.