MASH 14 MASH goes to Moscow (25 page)

“The truth of the matter, Dago Red,” Mary said, “is that I’m coming to you in your official capacity.”

“I see,” the archbishop said. “What has Hawkeye done now?”

“He and Trapper John are en route to Paris,” Mary said, “with a young opera singer.”

“Uh oh,” the archbishop said.

“An
ugly
young opera singer,” Mary clarified. “As a matter of fact, one of the ugliest young women I have ever seen, opera singer or not.”

“I don’t quite understand,” the archbishop said.

“Neither do I,” Mary said, and started to sniffle. “In all the long years of our marriage, this is the first thing he’s ever done—evil, mad, or otherwise—that I haven’t understood.”

“Well, Mary,” the archbishop said, “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, but as it happens,
Pancho
and I were just about to leave for Paris. Boris is in some sort of trouble
…”

“He is?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this, Mary,” the archbishop said, “but I’m afraid he’s finally gone too far.”

“How do you mean?”

“Do you remember when the Russians made him a ‘Hero of Soviet Labor’?”

“Yes, of course. I don’t think I ever heard such language as I did when Boris found out the medal was only brass.”

“Well, apparently the President has found out why they gave it to him,” the archbishop said. “And he doesn’t like it one little bit. You know how You-know-who feels about you-know-what. Thinking about it is one thing; doing what Boris does about it is another.”

“I don’t quite understand,” Mary said.

“Well, he called up over here, Mary. I won’t go into all the details of the conversation, but I’ll tell you exactly what he said at the end.”

“What was that?”

“He said, ‘I’m telling you, speaking both as your President and a Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher, Archbishop, it’s your clear patriotic duty to see that that oversexed ape goes to Moscow and behaves himself this time.”

“Oh, my!” Mary said. “You’ll never guess who was just here!”

“I give up,” the archbishop said.

“Senator George H. Kamikaze and
Shur
-lee
Strydent
! They wanted to take my Benjamin and Lucinda’s Trapper John to Paris with them.”

“
Shur
-lee
Strydent
, the one who makes one weep when she sings ‘Jesus Loves Me’? That
Shur
-lee
Strydent
?”

“That’s the one,” Mary said. “Oh, Dago Red, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know, Mary,” the archbishop said, “but I’m on my way to Paris, and I’ll get to the bottom of it or my name isn’t Dago Red Mulcahy!”

“Thank you,” Mary said.

“My pleasure,” the archbishop said, and hung up. He turned to Monsignor
Pancho
de Malaga y de Villa. “
Pancho
, when they talked about hair shirts and crosses to bear in the seminary, I never thought they would be anything like this!”

FROM DEPARTMENT OF STATE

WASHINGTON
DC

TO
US EMBASSY

MOSCOW
USSR

FOLLOWING PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM PRESIDENT OF THE
US
TO CHAIRMAN OF THE SUPREME SOVIET TO
BE DELIVERED, IMMEDIATELY:

JUST THOUGHT YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW THAT YOU, LIKE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, CAN TRUST ME WHEN
I
SAY SOMETHING OR MAKE A PROMISE. MY PERSONAL
REPRESENTATIVE, THE HONORABLE SENATOR GEORGE H. KAMIKAZE, HAS JUST SENT WORD THAT HE, SHUR-LEE STRYDENT, AND FIFTY POUNDS OF MY HOME-
GROWN BOILED PEANUTS ARE PRESENTLY EN ROUTE
TO PARIS, FRANCE, WHERE THEY WILL BE JOINED BY BORIS ALEXANDROVICH KORSKY-RIMSAKOV AND FLY ON TO MOSCOW. WHAT FURTHER PROOF DO YOU NEED THAT
I’M
SOMEBODY WHO CAN BE TRUSTED? YOU-ALL COME TO SEE US.

END PERSONAL MESSAGE.

A half hour before Mary Pierce telephoned the archbishop in his Vatican apartment, Monsignor de Malaga y de Villa had been faced with a moral dilemma. The Archbishop was a man of simple taste who disliked public displays of respect to him personally and who was actually uncomfortable when confronted with the (he felt) rather ostentatious prerogatives of someone holding his high rank in the church hierarchy de jure and de facto (the rumors of his close personal friendship with the Pope were quite true).

Archbishop Mulcahy had “suggested” (which was his way of giving orders) that the cardinal archbishop of Paris “not be bothered” with the news that he was coming to town. If the cardinal archbishop knew Archbishop Mulcahy was coming to town, the train would be met by an official delegation of high-ranking prelates and an official limousine.

What the archbishop wanted to do was simply arrive anonymously and with no fanfare whatever and proceed, probably by the Metro, which is what they call the subway in Paris, to Boris Alexandrovich
Korsky-Rimsakov’s
apartment. In the archbishop’s mind, a position the Monsignor both understood and felt great sympathy for, he was not functioning as a high-ranking prelate of the church, but simply as a priest, paying an unannounced pastoral call on one of his flock who he knew was in difficulty.

The archbishop had often confessed that he would have been much happier had he never been called to high rank, that the happiest period of his priesthood had been the time he had been Chaplain (Captain) Mulcahy, U.S. Army, assigned to the 4077th M*A*S*H in Korea. There he had been able to function as a priest, bringing moral and spiritual guidance to a group of people he had truly loved, even though only a small percentage of them happened to be of the Roman Catholic persuasion.

The monsignor understood all this, and he knew how much pleasure it gave the archbishop to be able to rush to the assistance of one of “the old 4077th M*A*S*H gang,” as the archbishop thought of it.

The problem was that bitter experience had taught the monsignor that too often when the archbishop dropped in unexpectedly on “the old 4077th M*A*S*H gang” certain members of that “gang” (in particular, Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov) were engaged in certain activities with members of the opposite sex, which the archbishop would really rather not know about. In deference to the archbishop, of course, Mr. Korsky-Rimsakov and the others would cease and desist such activities if they knew His Eminence was going to appear.

“Anything Dago Red wants,” as Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov so often said, “Dago Red gets.”

Monsignor de Malaga y de Villa also knew, again from painful experience, that when the singer was gathered together with Colonel Horsey de la Chevaux, Dr.
Theosophilis
Mullins Yancey, and His Royal Highness Sheikh Abdullah of Abzug, it followed as the day follows the night that the premises would be literally inundated with members of the opposite sex whose morals would make them unlikely candidates for Holy Orders.

All it would take, the monsignor knew, to have the girls sent back whence they came was a telephone call announcing the archbishop’s arrival. One little telephone call, and that motley crew of sinners, as the monsignor thought of them, would be sitting around Boris’s apartment, wholly sober, fully clothed, and engaged in innocent little games, the stakes for which were wooden matches.

Unfortunately, if Colonel de la Chevaux were informed that the archbishop was coming, he regarded it as his special privilege to ease the archbishop’s burdens. This translated to a fleet of limousines at the railroad station, an eight-room suite at the Ritz, and the like. So it was with His Royal Highness Sheikh Abdullah. As a token of his respect for the man he had dubbed El
Doog
Nehtaeh
, he would dispatch to meet the archbishop the same fleet of limousines, plus his bodyguard, and a brass band to accompany the procession to the Ritz, the whole of which hostelry he would engage for the length of the archbishop’s stay.

His only hope was to speak with Prince Hassan. Prince Hassan, despite his own low morals, could be counted upon to understand the archbishop’s position. And so, although he knew he was going against the archbishop’s wishes, Monsignor de Malaga y de Villa had telephoned the Royal
Hussidic
Embassy, which was located in the Hotel Continental, just across from the
Tuileries
Gardens.

And so it came to pass that when the archbishop, dressed as a simple priest and carrying his own rather battered overnight case, descended from the second-class railroad car which had carried him from Rome, he almost immediately recognized a familiar face.

It was a round little face, with a moustache and a small pointy beard and dark sunglasses, surmounting a round little body (five feet by four feet) wrapped in gold brocade robes. Behind it, in silver brocade robes, stood five six-foot-three gentlemen in dark glasses, each robe bulging suspiciously as if it concealed, for example, a submachine gun.

“Why, Prince Hassan!” the archbishop said. “What a pleasant coincidence!”

“Isn’t it?” the prince said. “How nice to see you, Your Eminence!”

“Whatever are you doing here in the
Gare
de
l’est
?” the archbishop said, shaking the Prince’s hand. “You remember Monsignor de Malaga y de Villa, of course?”

“How nice to see you, Monsignor,” the prince said. “Isn’t this an interesting coincidence?”

“You were saying what you were doing here?” the archbishop said.

“Oh, we just stopped in for a moment to watch the locomotives,” Prince Hassan said. “Can we drop you anywhere?”

“We wouldn’t want to put you out,” the archbishop said. “We’ll just take the Metro and be on our way.”

“By another strange coincidence,” the prince said, “now that we’ve seen the locomotives, we’re on our way to
Orly
. By a strange coincidence, Drs. Pierce and McIntyre are about to land. Isn’t that a strange coincidence?”

“Yes, it is,” the archbishop said, looking strangely at the monsignor.

‘And there’s a radiotelephone in the car,” the prince said, “so we can call the maestro and let him know that we coincidentally bumped into each other.”

“That would be nice,” the archbishop said. “As
a
matter of fact, that’s why I came to Paris, to see Boris.”

“Isn’t that an interesting coincidence?” the prince said.

FROM THE COMRADE COMMISSAR OF FOREIGN RELATIONS

THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW, USSR

TO
THE COMRADE AMBASSADOR

EMBASSY OF THE
USSR

PARIS, FRANCE

THE COMRADE CHAIRMAN OF THE SUPREME SOVIET IS IN RECEIPT OF A TELETYPE MESSAGE ALLEGEDLY SENT BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE IMPERIALIST CAPITALIST U S OF A IN WHICH IT IS ALLEGED THAT AN INDIVIDUAL PURPORTING TO BE SENATOR GEORGE
H.
KAMIKAZE IS EN ROUTE TO PARIS, FRANCE, WITH FIFTY POUNDS OF BOILED PEANUTS AND AN INDIVIDUAL IDENTIFIED AS SHUR-LEE STRYDENT, SEX, OCCUPATION, AND PURPOSE UNSPECIFIED.
IT
IS FURTHER ALLEGED THAT THE INDIVIDUAL PURPORTING TO BE A
US
SENATOR WILL MEET WITH BORIS ALEXANDROVICH KORSKY-RIMSAKOV AND THEN BRING HIM TO MOSCOW.