Captain Kidd /

It's WWII'and Captain Roland Kahn's assignment in General George Patton's Third Army Corps is at the very least eccentric. Eccentric? Of course. It's Charyn country, after all. Rollie walks the General's bull terrier and steals wine for the General's table. But he also writes the General's letters and provides the kind of sage counsel ``Two-gun George'' needs to stay out of trouble. The General loves him. Margaret Young, the redheaded Red Cross doughnut girl, loves him, too. Almost everybody loves Rollie except Supply Sergeant Romulus Rivers, who not only hates him but gets him shipped home for liebfraumilch-stealing. Stateside, Rollie enters his family's department-store business and turns it into a smashing success. He does this by underselling Macy's and Gimbel's. Which he can do only because of an arrangement he has with ex-Sergeant Booker Bell, who provides him with merchandise stolen from Macy's and Gimbel's. So thriving a business does this become that rival gangsters muscle in on Booker. Pretty soon they eliminate him. Not long after that, the eliminators are eliminated. Meanwhile, Rollie has married and fathered a son, while continuing to pine for his Red Cross doughnut dolly, who has fallen in love with a reptilian ex-Nazi. A lot of other things happen that can happen only in a Charyn-scape, but at the end Rollie does seem at peace. Or maybe he's just worn to a frazzle. The Isaac Sidel saga (Citizen Sidel, 1998, etc.) is on hold, but the world of Rollie Kahn is no less kaleidoscopic. And it's dollars to (Red Cross) doughnuts that you have to be a little crazy to feel at home in it.