” Who cares what Cotton has to say?”

” Yea, but he’s a captain.”

” Okay, so what?”

” Who just happens to be sharing Maloney’s foxhole, private Miller.”

With that another couple of salvos came screw-winding, screw-screaming in, with the first one landing so close that Miller’s head felt twice its size for a moment before blackness and a throbbing silence took over.

– And now, ladies and gentlemen I would like to introduce you to my distinguished guest, the novelist Mr Ernest Hemingway.

- Good evening, Mr Hemingway.

- Good evening, Pat, and please call me Ernie.

The young Ernie Miller went across to the large brown bakelite radio, with a dramatic fork of lightning zigzagging its way across the speaker, and turned-up the volume.

- Mr Hemingway, Ernie, perhaps you might tell our listeners why you’re here in Kansas City?

-Well, Pat, I’m on my way back to Key West from New York.

- Not the most direct route?

- No, you’re right there, Pat. No, I’ve been in New York promoting my new book, Death in the Afternoon.

- Yes, and a wonderful book, too, ladies and gentlemen, and well worth the two dollars.

- Thought I’d drive across to Chicago and catch-up with my sisters and kid brother, with it being so close to Christmas, and then head home via Kansas City where I once worked as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star; and maybe look up a few old friends.

-We are indeed proud here in Kansas City of that connection. Do we know any of your friends?

-Theo Brumback, and Wilson Hicks? Good men. The three of us made a pact in 1917 to join the Red Cross as ambulance drivers. And we did too.

- That must have been quite an experience?

- Indeed.

- Perhaps you might like to tell us about being an ambulance driver before we talk about your new book?

- It would be a pleasure.

- Fine. But before we do let me remind the listeners they are listening to KCR here in Kansas City, and that our special guest today is the novelist, Ernest Hemingway…

So absorbed was young Ernie with the radio interview that he didn’t hear the 1926 Oldsmobile pull up outside, or hear the two men get out and enter the store. Only when the door slammed shut did Ernie look up.

” Good evening, gentlemen, what can I get you?”

The younger of the two men, no older than nineteen, and dressed in scruffy jeans and a cracked leather jerkin turned to his older companion – who was almost invisible beneath a large overcoat – and spoke to him in an uneven, broken toothed, sucking kind of way.