Free Scruffy - A Diversion by Paul Gallico Page A

frequenting the same bar at the same hour for years.
    Lovejoy had already turned away when Ramirez spoke to the sun-tanned area that was the back of the Gunner’s neck between the collar and his tunic and his Artilleryman’s cap.
    “Would you care to have a drink, Sergeant?” he asked politely enough.
    Lovejoy, who was neither a sergeant nor a bombardier but a plain gunner, turned slowly and examined Ramirez, becoming aware of him as for the first time, and was not pleased with what he saw. He came close to articulating his thoughts, which were, “ Cor, what rock did you crawl out from under?”
    He didn’t like civilians anyway and was particularly hostile to any type who tried to curry favour with him miscalling his rank, or rather lack of rank.
    He hesitated, but for only a moment. The hesitation had been caused by the fact that he was thirsty, he was alone, pay day was two days away, and a free drink was a free drink. But as he looked Ramirez up and down he was unable to keep his lip from curling or the expression upon his face as of one looking at a toad. It was an expression which Gunner Lovejoy reserved in general for civilians, but this man in addition to being non-military actually resembled that unhappy amphibian.
    Lovejoy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and replied, “I never drink with civilians,” turned his back, pulled his last half-crown from his pocket, slapped it on to the bar and said, “Another of the same, Joe,” and thereby drove another nail into what might become the coffin of the British Empire.
    That day Alfonso T. Ramirez, having been almost run down and killed and then laughed at by the rich daughter of the English—had now been spurned by the poorest of the same nation and the lowest in grade of service. The little mouth again formed into a small and angry “o” and he turned, went out of the bar and set off to keep his appointment with the ultimate encounter of the day.
    Mr. Ramirez, who was some forty years of age and an expert employed in the Optical Repairs Department of the Navy Yard, where he engaged upon the finest and most delicate precision work on range-finders, telescopes, etc., was the possessor of two secrets, one of them safely and securely buried, the other unfortunately somewhat more vulnerable.
    The one that was to remain secure from prying eyes, even through the most severe wartime security check, had to do with his middle initial. Alfonso T. Ramirez was his name, and if you asked him what the “T” stood for he would have told you Tomaso for good St. Thomas, and so indeed it was inscribed upon his birth certificate. For Ramirez was a Gibraltarian born and bred upon the Rock from a line of Gibraltarians. At some time in the past, of course, the Ramirez’s must have moved to the Rock from the Spanish mainland, but they had been Gibraltarians for generations and had assimilated all characteristics of that curiously hybrid people, as well as embracing British customs, drinks, licensing laws, police and their singular way of driving on the left-hand side of the road.
    And such a one was Alfonso T. Ramirez. His well-kept secret was that the “T” actually didn’t stand for Tomaso, but for Treugang, a name as German as the Niebelungenring. And at heart Mr. Ramirez was a Nazi.
    On his mother’s side there had been a great great grandmother, a von Waltz, from Koenigsberg in East Prussia and this had led his mother secretly to christen him Alfonso Treugang Ramirez, though officially as a good Catholic she had endowed him with the middle name of a saint. But outside of Ramirez’s home no one ever knew of this, for then Ramirez was ashamed of the name and hated it, and eventually it was dropped.
    But in his middle life with the rise of Hitler to power and the propaganda attendant upon the theory of the master race, Ramirez had reason to remember that there was German blood in his veins and quite suddenly to become secretly and vengefully proud of it.
    No blame