The Winds of War

Chapter 1

Commander Victor Henry rode a taxicab home from the Navy Building on Constitution Avenue, in a gusty gray March rainstorm that matched his mood. In his War Plans cubbyhole that afternoon, he had received an unexpected word from on high which, to his seasoned appraisal, had probably blown a well-planned career to rags. Now he had to consult his wife about an urgent decision; yet he did not altogether trust her opinions.

At forty-five, Rhoda Henry remained a singularly attractive woman, but she was rather a crab. This colored her judgment, and it was a fault he found hard to forgive her. She had married him with her eyes open. During an incandescent courtship, they had talked frankly about the military life. Rhoda Grover had declared that all the drawbacks — the separations, the lack of a real place to live and of a normal family existence, the long slow climb through a system, the need to be humble to other men’s wives when the men were a notch higher — that none of these things would trouble her, because she loved him, and because the Navy was a career of honor. So she had said in 1915, when the World War was on, and uniforms had a glow. This was 1939, and she had long since forgotten those words.

He had warned her that the climb would be hard. Victor Henry was not of a Navy family. On every rung of the slippery career ladder, the sons and grandsons of admirals had been jostling him. Yet everyone in the Navy who knew Pug Henry called him a comer. Until now his rise had been steady.

The letter that first got him into the Naval Academy, written to his congressman while in high school, can be adduced here to characterize the man. He showed his form early.

With much the same directness, Henry had won his wife five years later, though she was a couple of inches taller than he, and though her prosperous parents had looked for a better match than a squat Navy fullback from California, of no means or family. Courting Rhoda, he had come out of his single-minded shell of ambition to show such tenderness, humor, considerateness, and dash. After a month or two Rhoda had lost any inclination to say no. Mundane details like height differences had faded from sight.

Still, over the long pull it may not be too good for a pretty woman to look down at her husband. Tall men tend to make plays for her, regarding the couple as slightly comic. Though a very proper woman, Rhoda had a weakness for this sort of thing — up to a point short of trouble — and even coyly provoked it. Henry’s reputation as a bleak hard-fibered individual discouraged the men from ever getting out of hand. He was very much Rhoda’s master. Still, this physical detail was a continuing nag.

The real shadow on this couple was that Commander Henry thought Rhoda had welshed on their courtship understanding. She did what had to be done as a Navy wife, but she was free, loud, and frequent in her complaints. She could crab for months on end in a place she disliked, such as Manila. Wherever she was, she tended to fret about the heat, or the cold, or the rain, or the dry spell, or servants, or taxi drivers, or shop clerks, or seamstresses, or hairdressers. To hear Rhoda Henry’s daily chatter, her life passed in combat with an incompetent world and a malignant climate. It was only female talk, and not in the least uncommon. But talk, not sex, constitutes most of the intercourse between a man and his wife. Henry detested idle whining. More and more, silence was the response he had come to use; it dampened the noise.

On the other hand, Rhoda was two things he thought a wife should be: a seductive woman, and an adroit homemaker. In all their married years, there had been few times when he had not desired her; and in all those years, for all their moving about, wherever they landed, Rhoda had provided a house or an apartment where the coffee was hot, the food appetizing, the rooms well-furnished and always clean, the beds properly made, and fresh flowers in sight. She had fetching little ways, and when her spirits were good she could be very sweet and agreeable. Most women, from the little Victor Henry knew of the sex, were vain clacking slatterns, with less to redeem them than Rhoda had. His long-standing opinion was that, for all her drawbacks, he had a good wife, as wives went. That was a closed question.

But heading home after a day’s work, he never knew ahead of time whether he would encounter Rhoda the charmer or Rhoda the crab. At a crucial moment like this, it could make a great difference. In her down moods, her judgments were snappish and often silly.

Coming into the house, he heard her singing in the glassed-in heated porch off the living room where they usually had drinks before dinner. He found her arranging tall stalks of orange gladiolus in an oxblood vase from Manila. She was wearing a beige silky dress cinched in by a black patent-leather belt with a large silver buckle. Her dark hair fell in waves behind her ears; this was a fashion in 1939 even for mature women. Her welcoming glance was affectionate and gay. Just to see her so made him feel better, and this had been going on all his life.

“Oh, HI there. Why on EARTH didn’t you warn me Kip Tollever was coming? He sent these, and LUCKILY he called too. I was slopping around this house like a SCRUBWOMAN.” Rhoda in casual talk used the swooping high notes of smart Washington women. She had a dulcet, rather husky voice, and these zoomed words of hers gave what she said enormous emphasis and some illusion of sparkle. “He said he might be slightly late. Let’s have a short one, Pug, okay? The fixings are all there. I’m PARCHED.”

Henry walked to the wheeled bar and began to mix martinis. “I asked Kip to stop by so I could talk to him. It’s not a social visit.”

“Oh? Am I supposed to make myself scarce?” She gave him a sweet smile.

“No, no.”

“Good. I like Kip. Why, I was flabbergasted to hear his voice. I thought he was still stuck in Berlin.”

“He’s been detached.”

“So he told me. Who relieved him, do you know?”

“Nobody has. The assistant attaché for air took over temporarily.” Victor Henry handed her a cocktail. He sank in a brown wicker armchair, put his feet up on the ottoman, and drank, gloom enveloping him again.

Rhoda was used to her husband’s silences. She had taken in his bad humor at a glance. Victor Henry held himself very straight except in moments of trial and tension. Then he tended to fall into a crouch, as though he were still playing football. He had entered the room hunched, and even in the armchair, with his feet up, his shoulders were bent. Dark straight hair hung down his forehead. At forty-nine, he had almost no gray hairs, and his charcoal slacks, brown sports jacket, and red bow tie were clothes for a younger man. It was his small vanity, when not in uniform, to dress youthfully; an athletic body helped him carry it off. Rhoda saw in the lines around his greenish brown eyes that he was tired and deeply worried. Possibly from long years of peering out to sea, Henry’s eyes were permanently marked with what looked like laugh lines. Strangers mistook him for a genial man.

“Got a dividend there?” he said at last.

She poured the watery drink for him.

“Thanks. Say, incidentally, you know that memorandum on the battleships that I wrote?”

“Oh, yes. Was there a backlash? You were concerned, I know.”

“I got called down to the CNO’s office.”

“My God. To see Preble?”

“Preble himself. I hadn’t seen him since the old days on the California. He’s gotten fat.”

Henry told her about his talk with the Chief of Naval operations. Rhoda’s face took on a hard, sullen, puzzled look. “Oh, I see. That’s why you asked Kip over.”

“Exactly. What do you think about my taking this attaché job?”

“Since when do you have any choice?”

“He gave me the impression that I did. That if I didn’t want it, I’d go to a battlewagon next, as an exec.”

“Good Lord, Pug, that’s more like it!”

“You’d prefer that I go back to sea?”

“I’d prefer? What difference has that ever made?”

“All the same, I’d like to hear what you’d prefer.”

Rhoda hesitated, sizing him up with a slanted glance. “Well — naturally I’d adore going to Germany. It would be much more fun for me than sitting here alone while you steam around Hawaii in the New Mexico or whatever. It’s the loveliest country in Europe. The people are so friendly. German was my major, you know, aeons ago.”

“I know,” Victor Henry said, smiling, if faintly and wryly, for the first time since arriving home. “You were very good at German.” Some of the early hot moments of their honeymoon had occurred while they stumbled through Heine’s love poetry aloud together.

Rhoda returned an arch glance redolent of married sex. “Well, all right, you. All I mean is, if you must leave Washington — I suppose the Nazis are kind of ugly and ridiculous. But Madge Knudsen went there for the Olympics. She keeps saying it’s still wonderful, and so cheap, with those tourist marks they give you.”

“Yes, no doubt we’d have a gay whirl. The question is, Rhoda, whether this isn’t a total disaster. Two shore assignments in a row, you understand, at this stage—”

“Oh, Pug, you’ll get your four stripes. I know you will. And you’ll get your battleship command too, in due course. My God, with your gunnery pennants, your letter of commendation — Pug, suppose CNO’s right? Maybe a war is about to pop over there. Then it would be in important job, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s just sales talk.” Pug got up and helped himself to cheese. “He says the President wants top men in Berlin now as military attachés. Well, okay, I’ll believe that. He also says it won’t hurt my career. That’s what I can’t believe. First thing any selection board looks for — or will ever look for — in a man’s record is blue water, and lots of it.”

“Pug, are you sure Kip won’t stay to dinner? There’s plenty of food. Warren’s going to New York.”

“No, Kip’s on his way to a party at the German embassy. And why the hell is Warren going to New York? He’s been home all of three days.”

“Ask him,” Rhoda said.

The slam of the front door and the quick firm steps were unmistakable Warren sounds. He entered the porch greeting them with a wave of two squash rackets in a fist. “Hi.”

In an old gray sweater and slacks, his tanned lean face glowing from the exercise, his hair tousled, a cigarette slanting from his thin mouth, he looked much like the lad who, on graduating from the Academy, had vanished from their lives. Pug was still not used to the way Warren had filled out on shipboard food. The boyish weediness was changing into a tall solid look. A sprinkle of premature gray in his dark hair had startled his parents on his return. Victor Henry envied Warren the deep sunburn which bespoke a destroyer bridge, tennis, green Oahu hills, and above all, duty at sea thousands of miles from Constitution Avenue. He said, “You’re off to New York, I hear.”

“Yes, Dad. Is that okay? My exec just blew into town. We’re going up there to see some shows. He’s a real Idaho farmer. Never been to New York.”

Commander Henry made a grouchy sound. It was no bad thing for Warren to be friendly with his executive officer. What bothered the father was thoughts of a woman who might be waiting in New York. A top student at the Academy, Warren had almost ruined his record with excessive frenching-out. He had ended with a bad back attributed by himself to a wrestling injury; by other reports, to an escapade involving an older woman and a midnight car crash. The parents had never raised the topic of the woman, partly from bashfulness — they were both prudish churchgoers, ill at ease with such a topic — and partly from a strong sense that they would get nowhere with Warren.

The door chimes rang. A gray-headed houseman in a white coat passed through the living room. Rhoda stood up, touching her hair and sliding slim hands over her silk-clad hips. “Remember Kip Tollever, Warren? That’s probably Kip.”

“Why, sure. That tall lieutenant commander who lived next door in Manila. Where’s he stationed now?”

“He’s just finished a tour as naval attaché in Berlin,” Victor Henry said.

Warren made a comic grimace, and dropped his voice. “Jehosephat, Dad. How did he ever get stuck with that? Cookie pusher in an embassy!”

Rhoda looked at her husband, whose face remained impassive.

“Commander Tollever, ma’am,” said the houseman at the doorway.

“Hello, Rhoda!” Tollever marched in with long arms outstretched, in a flawlessly cut evening uniform: blue mess jacket with medals and gold buttons, a black tie, a stiff snowy shirt. “My lord, woman! You look ten years younger than you did in the Philippines.”

“Oh, you,” she said, eyes gleaming, as he lightly kissed her cheek.

“Hi, Pug.” Smoothing one manicured hand over heavy wavy hair just turning gray, Tollever stared at the son. “Now for crying out loud, which boy is this?”

Warren held out his hand. “Hello, sir. Guess.”

“Aha. It’s Warren. Byron had a different grin. And red hair, come to think of it.”

“Right you are, sir.”

“Rusty Traynor told me you’re serving in the Monaghan. What’s Byron doing?”

Rhoda chirruped after a slight silence, “Oh, Byron’s our romantic dreamer, Kip. He’s studying fine arts in Italy. And you should see Madeline! All grown up.”

Warren said, “Excuse me, sir,” and went out.

“Fine arts! Italy!” One heavy eyebrow went up in Tollever’s gaunt handsome face, and his cobalt-blue eyes widened. “Well, that is romantic. Say, Pug, since when do you indulge?” Tollever inquired, accepting a martini and seeing Henry refill his own glass.

“Why, hell, Kip, I was drinking in Manila. Plenty.”

“Were you? I forget. I just remember what a roaring teetotaler you were in the Academy. No tobacco either.”

“Well, I fell from grace long ago.”

Victor Henry had started to drink and smoke on the death of an infant girl, and had not returned to the abstinences his strict Methodist father had taught him. It was a topic he did not enjoy exploring.

With a slight smile, Tollever said, “Do you play cards on Sunday now, too?”

“No, I still hold to that bit of foolishness.”

“Don’t call it foolishness, Pug.”

Commander Tollever began to talk about the post of naval attaché in Berlin. “You’ll love Germany,” were his first words on the topic. “And so will Rhoda. You’d be crazy not to grab the chance.”

Resting his elbows on the arms of his chair, legs neatly crossed, he clipped out his words with all the old articulate crispness; still one of the handsomest men in Pug’s class, and one of the unluckiest. Two years out of the Academy, while officer of the deck of a destroyer, Tollever had rammed a submarine at night in a rainsquall, during a fleet exercise. The submarine had surfaced without warning a hundred yards in front of him. It had scarcely been his fault, nobody had been hurt, and the general court-martial had merely given him a letter of reprimand. But that letter had festered in his promotion jacket, sapping his career. He drank two martinis in about fifteen minutes, as he talked.

When Victor Henry probed a bit about the Nazis and how to deal with them, Kip Tollever sat up very erect, his curled fingers stiffened as he gestured, and his tone grew firm. The National Socialists were in, he said, and the other German parties were out, just as in the United States the Democrats were in and the Republicans out. That was the one way to look at it. The Germans admired the United States, and desperately wanted our friendship. Pug would find the latch off, and the channels of information open, if he simply treated these people as human beings. The press coverage of the new Germany was distorted. When Pug got to know the newspapermen, he would understand why — disgruntled pinkos and drunks, most of them.

“Hitler’s a damned remarkable man,” said Tollever, poised on his elbows, one scrubbed hand to his chin, one negligently dangling, his face flushed bright pink. “I’m not saying that he, or Göring, or any of that bunch, wouldn’t murder their own grandmothers to increase their power or to advance the interests of Germany. But that’s politics in Europe nowadays. We Americans are far too naïve. The Soviet Union is the one big reality Europe lives with, Pug — that Slav horde, seething in the east. We can hardly picture that feeling, but for them it’s political bedrock. The Communist International is not playing mah-jongg, you know, those Bolos are out to rule Europe by fraud or force or both. Hitler isn’t about to let them. That’s the root of the matter. The Germans do things in politics that we wouldn’t — like this stuff with the Jews — but that’s just a passing phase, and anyway, it’s not your business. Remember that. Your job is military information. You can get a hell of a lot of that from these people. They’re proud of what they’re accomplishing, and not at all bashful about showing off, and I mean they’ll give you the real dope.”

Rhoda asked questions about the Jews, as Pug Henry mixed more martinis. Tollever assured her that the newspaper stories were exaggerated. The worst thing had been the so-called Crystal Night when Nazi toughs had smashed department store windows and set fire to some synagogues. Even that the Jews had brought on themselves, by murdering a German embassy official in Paris. As an embassy official himself, Tollever said, he took rather a dim view of that! He and his wife had gone to the theatre that very night, and on the way home had seen a lot of broken glass along the Kurfürstendamm, and the glow of a couple of distant fires. The account in Time had made it seem that Germany was ablaze from end to end, and that the Jews were being slaughtered en masse. There had been conflicting reports, but so far as he knew not one of them had really been physically harmed. A big fine had been put on them for the death of the official, a billion marks or something. Hitler did believe in strong medicine. “Now as to the President’s recalling our ambassador, that was a superfluous gesture, utterly superfluous,” Tollever said. “It only made things worse for the Jews, and it completely fouled up our embassy’s workings. There’s just no common sense here in Washington about Germany.”

Drinking two more martinis, the erect warrior began dissolving into a gossipy, slouched Navy insider, reminiscing about parties, weekends, hunting trips, and the like; about the potato soup he had drunk with Luftwaffe officers in the dawn, while recovering from a drinking bout after a Party rally; about the famous actors and politicians who had befriended him. Great fun and high living went with an attaché’s job, he chuckled, if one played one’s cards right. Moreover, you were supposed to do those things, so as to dig up information. It was dream duty. A man was entitled to get whatever he could out of the Navy! He had sat in a front seat, watching history unfold, and he had had a glorious time besides. “I tell you, you’ll love it, Pug. It’s the most interesting post in Europe nowadays. The Nazis are a mixed crowd, actually. Some are brilliant, but between you and me, some are pretty crude and vulgar. The professional military crowd sort of looks down on them. But hell, how do we feel about our own politicians? Hitler’s in the saddle and nobody’s arguing about that. He is boss man, and I kid you not. So lay off that topic and you’ll do fine, because really you can’t beat these people for hospitality. In a way they’re a lot like us, you know, more so than the French or even the Limeys. They’ll turn themselves inside out for an American naval officer.” A strange smile, rueful and somewhat beaten, appeared on his face as he glanced from Rhoda to Pug. “Especially a man like you. They’ll know all about you long before you get there. Now if this is off the reservation say so, but how on earth did a gunnery redhot like you come up for this job?”

“Stuck my neck out,” Pug growled. “You know the work I did on the magnetic torpedo exploder, when I was at BuOrd—”

“Hell, yes. And the letter of commendation you got? I sure do.”

“Well, I’ve watched torpedo developments since. Part of my job in War Plans is monitoring the latest intelligence on armor and armaments. The Japs are making some mighty healthy torpedoes, Kip. I got out the old slide rule one night and ran the figures, and the way I read them our battlewagons are falling below the safety margin. I wrote a report recommending that the blisters be thickened and raised on the Maryland and New Mexico classes. Today CNO called me down to his office. My report’s turned into a hot potato. BuShips and BuOrd are blaming each other, memos are flying like fur, the blisters are going to be thickened and raised, and—”

“And by God, Pug, you’ve got yourself another letter of commendation. Well done!” Tollever’s brilliant blue eyes glistened, and he wet his lips.

“I’ve got myself orders to Berlin,” Victor Henry said. “Unless I can talk my way out of it. CNO says the White House has decided it’s a crucial post now.”

“It is, Pug, it is.”

“Well, maybe so, but hell’s bells, Kip, you’re wonderful at that sort of thing. I’m not. I’m a grease monkey. I don’t belong there. I had the misfortune to call attention to myself, that’s all, when the boss man was looking for someone. And I happen to know some German. Now I’m in a crack.”

Tollever glanced at his watch. “Well, don’t pass this up. That’s my advice to you as an old friend. Hitler is very, very important, and something’s going to blow in Europe. I’m overdue at the embassy.”

Victor Henry walked him outside to his shiny gray Mercedes. Tollever’s gait was shaky, but he spoke with calm clarity. “Pug, if you do go, call me. I’ll give you a book full of phone numbers of the right men to talk to. In fact—” A twisted grin came and went on his face. “No, the numbers of the little fräuleins would be wasted on you, wouldn’t they? Well, I’ve always admired the hell out of you.” He clapped Henry’s shoulder. “God, I’m looking forward to this party! I haven’t drunk a decent glass of Moselle since I left Berlin.”

Reentering the house, Victor Henry almost stumbled over a suitcase and a hatbox. His daughter stood at the foyer mirror in a green wool suit, putting on a close-fitting hat. Rhoda was watching her, and Warren waited, trenchcoat slung on his shoulder, holding his old pigskin valise. “What’s this, Madeline? Where are you going?”

She smiled at him, opening wide dark eyes. “Oh, didn’t Mom tell you? Warren’s taking me to New York.”

Pug looked dourly at Rhoda, who said, “Anything wrong with that, dear? Warren’s lined up extra tickets for the shows. She loves the theatre and there’s precious little in Washington.”

“But has college closed down? Is this the Easter vacation?”

The daughter said, “I’m caught up in my work. It’s only for two days, and I don’t have any tests.”

“And where would you stay?”

Warren put in, “There’s this Hotel Barbizon for women.”

“I don’t like this,” Victor Henry said.

Madeline glanced at him with melting appeal. Nineteen and slight, with Rhoda’s skin and a pert figure, she oddly resembled her father, in the deep-set brown eyes and the determined air. She tried wrinkling her small nose at him. Often that made him laugh, and won her point. This time his face did not change. Madeline glanced at her mother and then at Warren for support, but it was not forthcoming. A little smile curved Madeline’s mouth, more ominous perhaps than a rebellious tantrum; a smile of indulgence. She took off her hat. “Well, okay! That’s that. Warren, I hope you can get rid of those extra tickets. When’s dinner?”

“Any time,” Rhoda said.

Warren donned his trench coat and picked up the suitcase. “Say, incidentally, Dad, did I mention that a couple of months ago my exec put in for flight training? I sent in one of the forms too, just for the hell of it. Well, Chet was snooping around BuNav today. It seems we both have a chance.”

“Flight training?” Rhoda looked unhappy. “You mean you’re becoming a carrier pilot? Just like that? Without consulting your father?”

“Why, Mom, it’s just something else to qualify in. I think it makes sense. Doesn’t it, sir?”

Commander Henry said, “Yes, indeed. The future of this here Navy might just belong to the brown shoes.”

“I don’t know about that, but Pensacola ought to be interesting, if I don’t bilge out the first week. Back Friday. Sorry, Madeline.”

She said, “Nice try. Have fun.”

He kissed his mother, and left.

Pug Henry consumed vichyssoise, London broil, and strawberry tart in grim abstracted silence. Kip Tollever’s enthusiasm for the mediocre spying job had only deepened Henry’s distaste. Madeline’s itch to avoid schoolwork was a steady annoyance. But topping all was Warren’s casually dropped news; Pug was both proud and alarmed. Carrier aviation was the riskiest duty in the Navy, though officers even his own age were now applying for Pensacola, so as to get into the flattops. A devoted battleship man, Henry wondered all through the meal whether Warren hadn’t hit on something, whether a request for flight training might not be a respectable if desperate way to dodge Berlin.

Madeline kept a cheerful face, making talk with her mother about the student radio station at George Washington University, her main interest there. The houseman, an old Irishman who also did the gardening in warm weather, walked softly in the candlelit dining room, furnished with Rhoda’s family antiques. Rhoda contributed money to the household costs so that they could live in this style in Washington, among her old friends. While Victor Henry did not like it, he had not argued. A commander’s salary was modest, and Rhoda was used to this better life.

Madeline excused herself early, kissing her father on the forehead. The sombre quiet during dessert was unbroken except by the hushed footfalls of the manservant. Rhoda said nothing, waiting out her husband’s mood. When he cleared his throat and said it might be nice to have brandy and coffee on the porch, she smiled pleasantly. “Yes, let’s, Pug.”

The houseman set the silver tray there, turning up the red flickering light in the artificial fireplace. She waited until her husband was settled in his favorite chair, drinking coffee and sipping brandy. Then she said, “By the bye, there’s a letter from Byron.”

“What? He actually remembered we’re alive? Is he all right?”

They had not heard from him in months. Henry had had many a nightmare of his son dead in an Italian ditch in a smoking automobile, or otherwise killed or injured. But since the last letter he had not mentioned Byron.

“He’s all right. He’s in Siena. He’s given up his studies in Florence. Says he got bored with fine arts.”

“I couldn’t be less surprised. Siena. That’s still Italy, isn’t it?”

“Yes, near Florence. In the Tuscan hills. He goes on and on about the Tuscan hills. He seems to be interested in a girl.”

“A girl, eh? What kind of girl? Eyetalian?”

“No, no. A New York girl. Natalie Jastrow. He says she has a famous uncle.”

“I see. And who’s her uncle?”

“He’s an author. He lives in Siena. Dr. Aaron Jastrow. He once taught history at Yale, Briny says.”

“Where’s the letter?”

“On the telephone table.”

He returned in a few minutes with the letter, and with a thick book in a black dust jacket, marked with a white crucifix and a blue Star of David. “That’s who the uncle is.”

“Oh, yes. A Jew’s Jesus. That thing. Some club sent it. Did you ever read it?”

“I read it twice. It’s excellent.” Henry scanned his son’s letter in yellow lamplight. “Well. This business is kind of far along.”

“She does sound attractive,” Rhoda said. “But he’s had other nine-day wonders.”

Commander Henry tossed the letter on the coffee table and poured more brandy for himself. “I’ll read it through later. Longest letter he’s ever written. Is there anything important in it?”

“He wants to stay on in Italy.”

“Indeed? How does he propose to live?”

“He has some kind of research job with Dr. Jastrow. The girl works there, too. He thinks he can get by on what he earns, plus the few dollars from my mother’s trust.”

“Really?” Henry peered at her. “If Byron Henry is talking about supporting himself, that’s the biggest news about him since you had him.” He drank his coffee and brandy, and stood up, retrieving the letter with a swipe of his hand.

“Now don’t take on, Pug. Byron’s a strange fish, but there’s a lot of brains underneath.”

“I have some work to do.”

Henry went to his den and smoked a cigar, reading Byron’s letter twice through with care. The den was a converted maid’s room. On the ground floor a large handsome study looked out on the garden through French windows. That room in theory was his. It was so attractive that Rhoda sometimes liked to receive visitors there, and was given to nagging at her husband when he left papers and books around. After a few months of this Henry had put bookshelves, a cot, and a tiny secondhand desk in the narrow maid’s room, had moved into it, and was content enough with this small space. He had done with less in a destroyer cabin.

When the cigar was burned out, Henry went to his old portable typewriter. With his hands on the keys he paused, contemplating three pictures in a leather frame on the desk: Warren, in uniform and bristle-headed, a stern boyish candidate for flag rank; Madeline, at seventeen much, much younger than she seemed now; Byron, in the center, with the defiant large mouth, the half-closed analytic eyes, the thick full hair, the somewhat sloping face peculiarly mingling softness and obstinate will. Byron owed his looks to neither parent. He was his strange self.

Rhoda liked to sleep late, but her husband woke her the following morning at eight o’clock, handing her his letter to Byron and a cup of hot coffee. She sat up with grouchy abrupt gestures, read the letter through as she sipped, and passed it back to him without a word.

“Do you want to add anything?”

“No.” Her face was set. She had worked her eyebrows a bit over Pug’s passage on women and marriage.

“Don’t you approve of it?”

“Letters like that don’t change things,” Rhoda said with deep sure female contempt.

“Shouldn’t I send it?”

“I don’t care.”

He put the envelope in his breast pocket. “I see Admiral Preble at ten o’clock this morning. Have you any second thoughts?”

“Pug, will you please do exactly as you choose?” Rhoda said in a pained bored tone. She sank down into the bedclothes as he left.

The Chief of Naval Operations did not appear surprised when Pug said he would take the post. At dawn Henry had awakened with an overmastering sense that he could not duck the assignment, and with this, he had stopped thinking about it. Preble told him to get ready in a hurry. His orders to Berlin were already cut.

Chapter 2

Byron Henry’s encounter with Natalie Jastrow two months earlier had been much in character. He had drifted into it.

Unlike his father, Byron had always been directionless. Growing-up, he had dodged the Sea Scouts, Severn Academy, and anything else pointing to a naval career. Yet he had no ideas for any other career. His marks were usually poor, and he developed early a remarkable capacity for doing absolutely nothing. In fits of resolve he had shown himself able to win a few A’s, or put together a radio set that worked, or rescue an old car from a junkyard and make it run, or repair a collapsed oil heater. In this knack for machinery he took after his father and grandfather.

But he became bored with such tinkering. He did too poorly in mathematics to think of engineering.

He might have been an athlete. He was agile, and sturdier than he looked, but he disliked the regimens and teamwork of school athletics, and he loved cigarettes and beer, though the gallons of beer he drank did not add a millimeter to his waistline. At Columbia College (where he was admitted because he charmed an interviewer, scored well on the intelligence test, and wasn’t a New Yorker) he barely avoided expulsion for bad grades. What he enjoyed was taking his ease at his fraternity house, or playing cards and pool, or reading old novels over and over, or talking about girls and fooling with them. He did find in fencing a sport suited to his independent temper and his wiry body. Had he trained more he might have been an intercollegiate finalist at the épée. But it was a bore to train, and it interfered with his idleness.

In his junior year he elected a course in fine arts, which athletes took because, so the report ran, nobody ever failed it. However, at mid-semester, Byron Henry managed to fail. He had done no work and cut half the classes. Still, the F startled him. He went to see the professor and told him so. The professor, a mild bald little lover of the Italian Renaissance, with green spectacles and hairy ears, took a liking to him. A couple of remarks Byron made on Leonardo and Botticelli showed that, in the few sessions he had attended, he had learned something, unlike the rest of the hulking somnolent class. They became friends. It was the first intellectual friendship in Byron Henry’s life. He became an enthusiast for the Renaissance, slavishly echoing the professor’s ideas, and he finished college in ablaze of B pluses, cured of beer guzzling and afire to teach fine arts. One year of graduate work at the University of Florence for a Master of Arts degree; that had been the plan.

But a few months in Florence cooled Byron. One rainy November night, in his squalid rented room overlooking the muddy Arno, sick of the smells of garlic and bad plumbing, and of living alone among foreigners, he wrote his friend that Italian painting was garish, saccharine, and boring with its everlasting madonnas, babes, saints, halos, crucifixions, resurrections, green dead Saviors, flying bearded Jehovahs, and the rest; that he much preferred moderns like Miró and Klee; and that anyway, painting was just interior decoration, which didn’t really interest him. He scrawled several pages in this cornered-rat vein, mailed them off, and then went vagabonding around Europe, forsaking his classes and his hope of a graduate degree.

When he got back to Florence, he found a cheering letter from the professor.

That was how Byron happened to call on Dr. Jastrow. He took a bus to Siena, a three-hour run up a rutted scary mountain road. Twice before he had visited the bizarre little town, all red towers and battlements and narrow crooked streets, set around a gaudy zebra-striped cathedral, on a hilltop amid rolling green and brown Tuscan vineyards. Its main claim to fame, aside from the quasi-Byzantine church art he had studied there, was a peculiar annual horse race called the Palio, which he had heard about but never seen.

At first glance, the girl at the wheel of the old blue convertible made no strong impression on him: an oval face, dark enough so that he first took her for an Italian, dark hair, enormous sunglasses, a pink sweater over an open white shirt. Beside her sat a blond man covering a yawn with a long white hand.

“Hi! Byron Henry?”

“Yes.”

“Hop in the back. I’m Natalie Jastrow. This is Leslie Slote. He works in our embassy in Paris, and he’s visiting my uncle.”

Byron did not much impress the girl either. What Natalie Jastrow saw through the dark glasses was a slender lounger, obviously American, with red glints in his heavy brown hair; he was propped against the wall of the Hotel Continental in the sun, smoking a cigarette, his legs loosely crossed. The light gray jacket, dark slacks, and maroon tie were faintly dandyish. The forehead under the hair was wide, the long slanting jaws narrow, the face pallid. He looked like what he was — a collegiate drone, a rather handsome one. Natalie had brushed these off by the dozen in earlier years.

As they wound through narrow canyons of crooked ancient red-brown houses and drove out into the countryside, Byron idly asked Slote about his embassy work. The Foreign Service man told him he was posted in the political section and was studying Russian and Polish, hoping for an assignment to Moscow or Warsaw. Sitting in the car, Slote appeared very tall; later Byron saw that he himself was taller than Slote; the Foreign Service officer had a long trunk but medium-size legs. Slote’s thick blond hair grew to a peak over a high forehead and narrow pinkish face; the light blue eyes behind rimless glasses were alert and penetrating, and his thin lips were compressed as though with habitual resolve. All the time they drove, he held a large black pipe in his hand or in his mouth, not smoking it. It occurred to Byron that the Foreign Service might be a pleasant career, offering travel, adventure, and encounters with important people. But when Slote mentioned that he was a Rhodes Scholar, Byron decided not to pursue the topic.

Jastrow lived in a yellow stucco villa on a steep hillside, with a fine view of the cathedral and Siena’s red towers and tile roofs. It was a drive of about twenty minutes from town. Byron hurried after the girl and Slote through a terraced flowering garden full of black-stained plaster statues.

“Well, there you are!” The voice was high, authoritative, and impatient, with a faint foreign note in the pronouncing of the r’s.

Two sights struck Byron as they entered a long beamed living room: a painting of a red-robed Saint Francis with arms outstretched, on a background of gold, taking up a good part of one wall, and far down the long sitting room on a red silk couch, a bearded little man in a light gray suit, who looked at his watch, stood, and came toward them coughing.

“This is Byron Henry, Aaron,” the girl said.

Jastrow took Byron’s hand in two dry little paws and peered up at him with prominent wavering eyes. Jastrow’s head was large, his shoulders slight; he had aging freckled skin, light straight hair, and a heavy nose reddened by a cold. The neatly trimmed beard was all gray. “Columbia ’38, is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, well, come along.” He went off down the room, buttoning the flapping folds of his double-breasted suit. “Come here, Byron.” Plucking the stopper out of a heavy crystal decanter, he carefully poured amber wine into four glasses. “Come Leslie, Natalie. We don’t take wine during the day, Byron, but this is an occasion.” He held up his glass. “To Mr. Byron Henry, eminent hater of the Italian Renaissance.”

Byron laughed. “Is that what Dr. Milano wrote? I’ll drink to that.”

Jastrow took one sip, put down his glass, and looked at his watch. Seeing the professor wanted to get at his lunch, Byron tossed off the sherry like a shot of rye. Jastrow exclaimed with a delighted smile, “Ah! One, two, three. Good lad. Come along, Natalie. Leslie, take your glass to the table.”

It was a spare lunch: nothing but vegetables with white rice, then cheese and fruit. The service was on fine old china, maroon and gold. A small, gray-headed Italian woman passed the food. The tall dining room windows stood open to the garden, the view of Siena, and a flood of pale sunshine. Gusts of cool air came in as they ate.

When they first sat, the girl said, “What have you got against the Italian Renaissance, Byron?”

“That’s a long story.”

“Tell us,” said Jastrow in a classroom voice, laying a thumb across his smiling mouth.

Byron hesitated. Jastrow and the Rhodes Scholar made him uneasy. The girl disconcerted him more. Removing her glasses, she had disclosed big slanted dark eyes, gleaming with bold intelligence. She had a soft large mouth, painted a bit too orange, in a bony face. Natalie was regarding him with a satiric look, as though she had already concluded that he was a fool; and Byron was not fool enough to miss that.

“Maybe I’ve had too much of it,” he said. “I started out fascinated. I’m ending up snowed under and bored. I realize much of the art is brilliant, but there’s a lot of overrated garbage amid the works of genius. My main objection is that I can’t take the mixture of paganism and Christianity. I don’t believe David looked like Apollo, or Moses like Jupiter, or Mary like every Renaissance artist’s mistress with a borrowed baby on her lap. Maybe they couldn’t help showing Bible Jews as local Italians or pseudo-Greeks, but—” Byron dried up for a moment, seeing his listeners’ amused looks. “Look, I’m not saying any of this is important criticism. I guess it just shows I got into the wrong field. But what has any of it to do with Christianity? That’s what sticks in my craw. Supposing Christ came back to earth and visited the Uffizi, or Saint Peter’s? The Christ of your book, Dr. Jastrow, the poor idealistic Jewish preacher from the back hills? That’s the Lord I grew up with. My father’s a religious man; we had to read a chapter of the Bible every morning at home. Why, Christ wouldn’t even suspect the stuff related to himself and his teachings.” Natalie Jastrow was regarding him with an almost motherly smile. He said brusquely to her, “Okay. You asked me what I had against the Italian Renaissance. I’ve told you.”

“Well, it’s a point of view,” she said.

Eyes twinkling behind his glasses, Slote lit his pipe, and said between puffs, “Don’t fold up, Byron, there are others who have taken your position. A good name for it is Protestantism.”

“Byron’s main point is accurate.” Dr. Jastrow sounded kindly, dancing his little fingers together. “The Italian Renaissance was a great blossoming of art and ideas, Byron, that occurred when paganism and the Hebrew spirit — in its Christian expression — briefly fertilized instead of fighting each other. It was a hybrid growth, true, but some hybrids are stronger than either parent, you know. Witness the mule.”

“Yes, sir,” said Byron, “and mules are sterile.”

Amused surprise flashed on Natalie Jastrow’s face, and her enormous dark eyes flickered to Leslie Slote, and back to Byron.

“Well said. Just so.” Jastrow nodded in a pleased way. “The Renaissance indeed couldn’t reproduce itself, and it died off, while the pagan and Hebrew spirits went their separate immortal ways. But that mule’s bones are now one of mankind’s richest deposits of cultural achievement, Byron, whatever your momentary disgust from overexposure.”

Byron shrugged. Leslie Slote said, “Is your father a clergyman?”

“His father’s a naval officer,” said Jastrow.

“Really? What branch?”

Byron said, “Well, right now he’s in War Plans.”

“My goodness! War Plans?” Dr. Jastrow pretended a comic flutter. “I didn’t know that. Is it as ominous as it sounds?”

“Sir, every country draws up theoretical war plans in peacetime.”

“Does your father think a war is imminent?”

“I got my last letter from him in November. He said nothing about a war.”

The other three exchanged odd glances. Slote said, “Would he, in casual correspondence?”

“He might have asked me to come home. He didn’t.”

“Interesting,” said Dr. Jastrow, with a little complacent grin at Slote, rubbing his tiny hands.

“As a matter of fact, I think there’s going to be a war,” Byron said. This caused a silence of a second or two, and more glances.

Jastrow said, “Really? Why?”

“Well, I just toured Germany. You see nothing but uniforms, parades, drills, brass bands. Anywhere you drive, you end up passing army trucks full of troops, and railroad cars loaded with artillery and tanks. Trains sometimes a couple of miles long.”

“But, Byron, it was with just such displays that Hitler won Austria and the Sudetenland,” said Jastrow, “and he never fired a shot.”

Natalie said to Byron, “Leslie thinks my uncle should go home. We’ve had a running argument for three days.”

“I see.”

Jastrow was peeling a pear with elderly deliberate gestures, using an ivory-handled knife. “Yes, Byron, I’m being mulish.” The use of the word was accidental, for he grinned and added, “Being a hybrid of sorts myself, I guess. This is a comfortable house, it’s the only home I have now, and my work is going well. Moving would cost me half a year. If I tried to sell the house, I couldn’t find an Italian to offer me five cents on the dollar. They’ve been dealing for many centuries with foreigners who’ve had to cut and run. They’d skin me alive. I was aware of all this when I bought the villa. I expect to end my days here.”

“Not this fall at the hands of the Nazis, I trust,” Slote said.

“Oh, hell, Slote,” Natalie broke in, slicing a flat hand downward through the air. “Since when does the Foreign Service have such a distinguished record for foresight? Since Munich? Since Austria? Since the Rhineland? Weren’t you surprised every time?”

Byron listened with interest to this exchange. The others seemed to have forgotten he was at the table.

“Hitler has been making irrational moves with catastrophic possibilities,” Slote retorted. “Anybody can pull a gun in the street and shoot four people down before the cops come and stop him. Until now that’s been Hitler’s so-called foreign policy brilliance in a nutshell. The surprise of an outlaw running wild. That game’s played out. The others are aroused now. They’ll stop him in Poland.”

Jastrow ate a piece of pear, and began to talk in a rhythmic mellifluous way, something between meditating aloud and lecturing in a classroom. “Leslie, if Hitler were the Kaiser, or a man like the Charles the Twelfth, I admit I’d be worried. But he’s far more competent than you think. Fortunately the old ruling class is destroyed. They unleashed the World War with their dry-rotted incompetence, those preening, posturing, sleek royalties and politicians of 1914, those bemedalled womanizers and sodomites out of Proust. They never dreamed that the old manners, the old paperwork, the old protocol, were done for, and that industrialized warfare would shatter the old system like a boot kicked through a dollhouse. So they went to the trash heap, and new leadership came up out of the sewers, where realism runs and change often starts. The early Christians haunted the sewers and catacombs of Rome, you know,” Jastrow said to Byron Henry, clearly relishing a fresh audience.

“Yes, sir, I learned about that.”

“Of course you did. Well, Hitler’s a vagabond, Mussolini’s a vagabond, and Stalin’s a jailbird. These are new, tough, able, and clever men, straight up from the sewers. Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He made it all up, Leslie, you realize — the Jesuitical secret party, the coarse slogans for the masses and the contempt for their intelligence and memory, the fanatic language, the strident dogmas, the Moslem religiosity in politics, the crude pageantry, the total cynicism of tactics, it’s all Leninism. Hitler is a Leninist, Mussolini is a Leninist. The talk of anti-communism and pro-communism is for fools and children.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Aaron—”

“Just a moment, now! Lenin was all prudence and caution in foreign affairs, and that is my whole point. Glory, and honor, and all those tinselly illusions of the old system that led to wars, were to Lenin the merest eyewash. So it is to Hitler. He has never moved when he couldn’t get away with it. The outlaw running wild with a gun is the exact effect he wishes to create. I’m surprised that you’re taken in. He is really a very, very prudent man. If he can make it in Poland without war, he’ll do it. Otherwise he’ll not move. Not now. Perhaps in ten years, when he’s built Germany up enough. I shall be very content to live another ten years.”

Slote pulled at his moustache with lean nervous fingers. “You really lose me, Aaron. Can you be serious? Hitler a Leninist! That’s a coffeehouse paradox, and you know it. The Russian Revolution is a radical change in history. The abolition of private property has created a new world. You may like it or detest it, but it’s new. Hitler’s socialism was a sham to get a mob of gangsters into power. He’s frozen the German economy just as it was, smashed the labor unions, lengthened the working hours, cut the pay, and kept all the old rich crowd on top, the Krupps and Thyssens, the men who gave him the money to run for office. The big Nazis live like barons, like sultans. The concentration camps are for anybody who still wants the socialist part of National Socialism. Don’t you know that? The 1934 purge was nothing but a showdown between the socialist element of the Nazi Party, and the army generals and rich conservatives. Hitler shot his old Party friends like partridges. That you rely on this man’s prudence for your safety, and for Natalie’s, strikes me as grotesque.”

“Does it?” Jastrow glanced at his watch and sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m impressed with Hitler’s ability to use socialist prattle when necessary, and then discard it. He uses doctrines as he uses money, to get things done. They’re expendable. He uses racism because that’s the pure distillate of German romantic egotism, just as Lenin used utopian Marxism because it appealed to Russia’s messianic streak. Hitler means to hammer out a united Europe. If a nonsense jumble of racist bunkum, socialist promises, brass bands, parades, uniforms, and weepy songs is what welds Germans into a blunt instrument, he gives them that. The Germans are stolid, clever, brutal, and docile, and they will vigorously execute any command barked at them with a loud enough voice. He understands them, and he may just succeed. A unified Europe must come. The medieval jigsaw of nations is obsolete. The balance of power is dangerous foolishness in the industrial age. It must all be thrown out. Somebody has to be ruthless enough to do it, since the peoples with their ancient hatreds will never do it themselves. It’s only Napoleon’s original vision, but he was a century ahead of his time. The old crowd was still strong enough to catch and put him in a crate to die. But there’s nobody to cage Hitler.”

Byron blurted, “Dr. Jastrow, when I was in Germany I saw the signs on park benches and in trolley cars about the Jews. I saw burnt-out synagogues.”

“Yes?”

They all looked at him. He went on, “I’m surprised you talk as calmly about Hitler as you do. Being Jewish, I mean.”

Dr. Jastrow smiled a slow, acid smile, showing little yellowish teeth with one gold crown. He stroked his beard and spoke deliberately, the classroom note strong. “Well! Your surprise doesn’t surprise me. Young people — young Americans especially — aren’t aware that the tolerance for Jews in Europe is only fifty to a hundred years old and that it’s never gone deep. It didn’t touch Poland, where I was born. Even in the west — what about the Dreyfus case? No, no. In that respect Hitler represents only a return to normalcy for Europe, after the brief glow of liberalism. The hostility simply moved from the church to the anti-Semitic parties, because the French Revolution changed Europe from a religious to a political continent. If Hitler does win out, the Jews will fall back to the second-class status they always had under the kings and the popes. Well, we survived seventeen centuries of that. We have a lot of wisdom and doctrine for coping with it.”

Slote shook his head. “You love to spin such talk, I know, but I wish you would do it on the next boat home.”

“But I’m quite serious, Leslie,” Jastrow said with a faintly puckish smile. “You rang wild alarms when Mussolini passed the anti-Jewish laws. They proved a joke.”

“They’re on the books, if the Germans ever press him to use them.”

“The Italians loathe and fear the Germans to a man. Even if by some mischance there is a war, Italy won’t fight. Siena may well be as safe a place as any.”

“I doubt that Natalie’s parents think so.”

“She can go home tomorrow. Perhaps she finds Siena slightly more attractive than Miami Beach.”

“I’m thinking of going,” the girl said. “But not because I’m afraid of war or of Hitler. There are things that bother me more.”

“I daresay,” Jastrow said.

Slote’s face turned astonishingly red. His pipe lay smoking on an ashtray, and he was playing with a yellow pencil he had taken from a pocket, turning it in one fist. The pencil stopped turning.

Jastrow stood. “Byron, come along.”

They left the girl and the scarlet-faced man at the table, glowering at each other.

Books filled the shelves of a small wood-panelled library, and stood in piles on the desk and on the floor. Over a marble fireplace a stiff Sienese madonna and child hung, blue and pink on gold; a tiny painting in a large gilded frame. “Berenson says it’s a Duccio,” Jastrow observed, with a little wave at the painting, “and that’s enough for me. It’s not authenticated. Now then. You sit there, in the light, so that I can see you. Just put those magazines on the floor. Good. Is that a comfortable chair? Fine.” He sighed and laid a thumb against his lower lip. “Now, Byron, why didn’t you go to the Naval Academy? Aren’t you proud of your father?”

Byron sat up in his chair. “I think my father may be Chief of Naval Operations one day.”

“Isn’t he worth emulating?”

“My brother Warren’s doing that. I’m just not interested.”

“Dr. Milano wrote that you took a naval reserve course and obtained a commission.”

“It made my father feel good.”

“And you’ve had no second thoughts about the Navy? It’s not too late yet.”

Byron shook his head, smiling. Jastrow lit a cigarette, studying Byron’s face. The young man said, “Do you really like living in Italy, sir?”

“Well, I was ordered to a warm climate. I did first visit Florida, Arizona, southern California, and the French Riviera.” The professor spoke these place-names with an irony that wrote them off, one by one, as ridiculous or disagreeable. “Italy is beautiful, quiet, and cheap.”

“You don’t mind making your home in a Fascist country?”

Jastrow’s smile was indulgent. “There are good and bad things in all political systems.”

“How did you ever come to write A Jew’s Jesus, sir? Did you write it here?”

“Oh, no, but it got me here.” Jastrow spoke somewhat smugly. “I was using the Bible in a course on ancient history, you see. And as a boy in Poland I’d been a Talmud scholar, so in teaching the New Testament I tended to stress the rabbinic sources that Jesus and Paul used. This novelty seemed to fascinate Yale juniors. I cobbled up a book, with the working title Talmudic Themes in Early Christianity, and then at the last minute I thought of A Jew’s Jesus. The Book-of-the-Month Club selected it.” Jastrow made a soft gesture with both hands all around the room, smiling. “And here I am. The club payment bought this place. Now then, Byron, what are your plans? Are you going to return to the United States?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t be more up in the air.”

“Do you want a job?”

Byron was taken aback. “Well, I guess maybe I do, sir.”

Jastrow ambled to his desk and searched through a pile of books, taking off his glasses and holding the titles very close to his face. “I had a fine researcher, a boy from Yale, but his parents called him home, afraid of a war — ah, here we are. Can I interest you, for twenty dollars a week, in the Emperor Constantine? This is a good general biography to start with.”

“Sir, I’ve flunked more history courses—”

“I see. You don’t want the job.”

The young man took the thick book and turned it dubiously in his hands. “No. I’ll try it. Thank you.”

“Oh, you will, will you? When you say you have no aptitude? Why?”

“Well, for the money, and to be around you.” This was true enough, though it omitted a third good reason: Natalie Jastrow.

Jastrow looked stern, and then burst out laughing. “We’ll give it a try.”

The letter his parents received from him some time later about the girl — which elicited Victor Henry’s strong answer — was unintentionally misleading. There was a love affair going on, but Natalie’s lover was Leslie Slote. His letters came two or three times a week: long fat white Foreign Service envelopes, addressed in an elongated stiff hand, in brown ink, with stamps stuck over the government frank. Byron hated the sight of them.

He was spending hours every day with her in the huge second-floor room that was Jastrow’s main library. Her desk was there. She answered letters, typed manuscripts, and with the Italian woman managed the household. Byron worked at the long library table, reading up on Constantine, checking facts, and drawing maps of the emperor’s military campaigns. Whenever he raised his eyes he saw the smooth face bent over the desk, the shapely bones highlighted by sunshine, or on dark days by a lamp. There was also the ever-present view of her long pretty legs in a sheen of silk. Natalie dressed in dun wool, and was all business with him; she used almost no paint once Slote left, combed her hair back in a heavy bun, and talked to Byron with offhand dryness. Still, his infatuation took quick root and grew rankly.

She was the first American girl he had spoken to in months; and they were thrown together for many hours a day, just the two of them in the book-lined room. This was reason enough for him to feel attracted to her. But she impressed him, too. Natalie Jastrow talked to her famous uncle as to a mental equal. Her range of knowledge and ideas humiliated Byron, and yet there was nothing bookish about her. Girls in his experience were lightweights, fools for a smile and a bit of flattery. They had doted on him at college, and in Florence too. Byron was something of an Adonis, indolent and not hotly interested; and unlike Warren, he had absorbed some of his father’s straitlaced ideas. He thought Natalie was a dark jewel of intellect and loveliness, blazing away all unnoticed here in the Italian back hills. As for her indifference to him, it seemed in order. He had no thought of trying to break it down.

He did things he had never done before. He stole a little pale blue handkerchief of hers and sat at night in his hotel room in town, sniffing it. Once he ate half a cake she had left on her desk, because it bore the mark of her teeth. When she missed the cake, he calmly lied about it. Altogether he was in a bad way. Natalie Jastrow seemed to sense nothing of this. Byron had a hard shell of inscrutability, grown in boyhood to protect his laziness and school failures from his exacting father.

They chatted a lot, of course, and sometimes drove out in the hills for a picnic lunch, when she would slightly warm to him over a bottle of wine, treating him more like a younger brother. He soon got at the main facts of her romance. She had gone to the Sorbonne for graduate work in sociology. Jastrow had written about her to Slote, a former pupil. A fulminating love affair had ensued, and Natalie had stormily quit Paris, and lived for a while with her parents in Florida. Then she had come back to Europe to work for her uncle; also, Byron surmised, to be near Slote for another try. The Rhodes Scholar had now received orders to Warsaw, and Natalie was planning to visit him there in July while Jastrow took his summer holiday in the Greek islands.

On one of their picnics, as he poured the last of the wine into her glass, Byron ventured a direct probe. “Natalie, do you like your job?”

She sat on a blanket, hugging her legs in a heavy checked skirt, looking out over a valley of brown wintry vineyards. With an arch questioning look, cocking her head, she said, “Oh, it’s a job. Why?”

“It seems to me you’re wasting away here.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Byron. You do peculiar things when you’re in love.” His response to this was a dull unfocussed expression. She went on: “That’s one thing. Besides, frankly, I think Aaron’s rather wonderful. Don’t you? Horribly crotchety and self-preoccupied and all that, but this Constantine book is good. My father is a warm, clever, goodhearted man, but he’s the president of his temple and he manufactures sweaters. Aaron’s a famous author, and he’s my uncle. I suppose I bask in his glory. What’s wrong with that? And I certainly enjoy typing the new pages, just watching the way his mind works. It’s an excellent mind and his style is admirable.” She gave him another quizzical look. “Now why you’re doing this, I’m far less sure.”

“Me?” Byron said. “I’m broke.”

Early in March Jastrow accepted an offer from an American magazine for an article about the upcoming Palio races. It meant he would have to put off his trip to Greece, for the race was run in July and again in August; but the fee was too absurdly fat, he said, to decline. If Natalie would watch the races and do the research, he told her, he would give her half the money. Natalie jumped at this, not perceiving — so Byron thought — that her uncle was trying to stop, or at least delay, her trip to Warsaw. Jastrow had once flatly said that Natalie’s pursuit of Slote was unladylike conduct and bad tactics. Byron had gathered that Slote did not want to marry Natalie, and he could see why. For a Foreign Service man, a Jewish wife at this time would be disastrous; though Byron thought that in Slote’s place he would cheerfully give up the Foreign Service for her.

Natalie wrote to Slote that same day, postponing her trip until after the August Palio. Watching her bang out the letter, Byron tried to keep joy off his face. She might go, he was thinking, and then again she might not! Maybe a war would come along meantime and stop her. Byron hoped that Hitler, if he was going to invade Poland, would do it soon.

When she finished, he went to the same typewriter and rattled off the famous letter to his parents. He intended to write one sheet, and wrote seven. It was his first letter to them in months. He had no idea that he was picturing himself as an infatuated young man. He was, he thought, just describing his job, his employer, and the charming girl he worked with. And so Pug Henry got needlessly worked up, and wrote the solemn reply, which startled and amused Byron when it came; for he was no more thinking of marrying Natalie Jastrow than of turning Mohammedan. He was just head over ears in love, with a young woman as near as his hand and as remote as a star; and for the moment it was enough to be where she was. He wrote again to set his father straight, but this letter arrived in Washington after the Henrys had left for Germany.

Chapter 3

In all her years as a Navy wife, Rhoda had never become reconciled to packing and moving. She could do it well enough, compiling long lists, remembering tiny details, waking in the middle of the night to scrawl notes, but she became a termagant. The angry voice rang in the house from dawn to midnight. Pug spent the days in the Office of Naval Intelligence, boning up on Germany, and ate most of his meals at the Army and Navy Club. Still, on the short notice given her, Rhoda accomplished everything: stored the furniture, closed the house and put it up for rent, paid the bills, packed her clothes and Pug’s heavy double wardrobe of civilian dress and uniforms, and moved Madeline to the home of her sister.

The gold letters B R E M E N stretched across the curved black stern of the steamship, high over the cobbled waterfront street. Above the letters, an immense red flag rippled in the cool fishy breeze off the Hudson, showing at its center a big black swastika circled in white.

“Glory be, it all really exists,” Madeline said to Warren as she got out of the taxicab.

“What really exists?” Warren said.

“Oh, this whole Hitler business. The Nazis, the Sieg Heils, the book burnings — when you read about it in the papers, it all seems too ridiculous and crazy to be real. But there’s the swastika.”

Victor Henry glanced up at the Nazi flag, wrinkling his whole face. Rhoda was briskly giving the porter orders about the luggage. “I had to get special permission to ride this bucket. Let’s hope the German language practice proves to be worth it. Come aboard with us and have a look at the ship.”

In a first-class stateroom panelled in gloomy carved wood, they sat making melancholy small talk amid piled suitcases and trunks, until Rhoda restlessly jumped up and took Warren with her for a walk around the Bremen. Madeline chose the moment to jolt her father with the news that she wanted to drop out of college. The prospect of living with her dull aunt and duller uncle and twin cousins for two years was unbearable, she said.

“But what can you do? Two years of college, and you keep failing courses,” Victor Henry said. “You can’t just lie around and read Vogue till you get married.”

“I’d find a job, Dad. I can work. I’m just bored at school. I hate studying. I always have. I’m not like you, or Warren. I’m more like Byron, I guess. I can’t help it.”

“I never liked studying,” Commander Henry returned. “Nobody does. You do what you must, and get it done.”

Perched on the edge of a deep armchair, the girl said with her most winning smile, “Please! Let me take just one year off. I’ll prove I can do it. There are lots of jobs for girls at the radio networks in New York. If I don’t make good, I promise I’ll trot back to college, and -”

“What! New York? Nineteen, and alone in New York? Are you nuts?”

“Let me just try it this summer.”

“No. You’ll go with Aunt Augusta to Newport, the way it’s been planned. You’ve always enjoyed Newport.”

“For a week, yes. A whole summer will be a perishing bore.”

“That’s where you’ll go. In the fall I’ll expect regular letters from you, reporting improved performance in college.”

Madeline, slumping back in the armchair, bit noisily into an apple from a heaping bon voyage basket of fresh fruit, sent by Kip Tollever. Staring straight ahead, except for brief mutinous glares at her father, she gnawed at the apple until her mother and brother returned. Pug did his best to ignore the glares, reading a book on German steel-making. He did not like parting from his daughter on such terms, but her proposal seemed to him unthinkable.

The Bremen sailed at noon. As Warren and Madeline left the pier, a band thumped out a merry German waltz. They took a taxi uptown, saying little to each other. Henry had set the uncommunicative pattern of the family; the children, after romping and chattering through their early years, had from adolescence onward lived separate, largely undiscussed lives. Warren dropped Madeline at Radio City, not inquiring what she intended to do there. They agreed to meet for dinner, go to a show, and take a midnight train to Washington.

Madeline poked here and there in the huge lobby of the RCA building, gawking at the Sert murals and ceiling paintings. She found herself at the bank of elevators for NBC entertainers and employees. Many of these people, she noticed, showed no pass to the uniformed page, but smiled, waved, or just walked busily past the roped entrance. She sailed past too, trying to look twenty-five and employed. Squinting at her, the page held out an arresting hand. She dived into a crowded elevator.

For an hour she wandered the inner halls of the broadcasting company, relishing the thick maroon carpets, the immense round black pillars, the passing trucks of spotlights and broadcast equipment, the flashing red lights outside of studios, the pretty girls and handsome young men hurrying in and out of doors. She came on the employment office and hung outside, peering through the open double doors like a child at a candy counter. Then she left and spent the day shopping in department stores.

As for Warren, the taxi took him a few blocks further uptown. In Rumpelmayer’s, he met a good-looking woman of thirty or so with large sad eyes, a cloud of ash-blonde hair, and a clever soulful way of talking about novels, paintings, and music, subjects which did not greatly interest him. His majors had been history and the sciences. After an early lunch, he spent the day with her in a hotel bedroom. That did interest him.

When he dined with his sister that evening, Madeline helped herself to a cigarette from his pack on the table, and lit and smoked it inexpertly. Her defiant, self-satisfied, somewhat pathetic air made Warren laugh. “When the cat’s away, hey?” he said.

“Oh, I’ve been smoking for years,” Madeline said.

The three blasts of the ship’s horn, the pier girders moving outside the porthole, the band far below crashing out “The Star-Spangled Banner,” touched a spring in Rhoda. She turned to her husband with a smile such as he had not seen on her face for weeks, threw her arms around him, and gave him an aroused kiss, opening her soft familiar lips.

“Well! We made it, Pug, didn’t we? Off to Deutschland. Second honeymoon and all that! Mmm!”

This mild pulse of sex in his hitherto preoccupied and cross wife was like a birthday present to the monogamous Pug. It augured well for the crossing, and possibly for the entire sojourn in Berlin. He pulled her close.

“Well!” Rhoda broke free, with a husky laugh and shiny eyes. “Not so fast, young fellow. I want a drink, that’s what I want, and I don’t care if the sun isn’t over the yardarm. And I know just what I want. Champagne cocktail, or two, or three.”

“Sure. Let’s have it right here. I’ll order a bottle.”

“Nothing doing, Pug. This will be a nice long crossing. We’re getting out of here and going to the bar.”

The ship was clearing the dock and hooting tugs were turning it south, as the deck started to vibrate underfoot.

A crowd of tired-looking jocund voyagers already filled the bar, making a great noise.

“I thought there was a war scare,” Rhoda said. “Nobody here seems to be worried.”

They found two stools at the bar. Rhoda said, holding up her champagne cocktail, “Well, to whom?”

“The kids,” Pug said.

“Ah, yes. Our abandoned nestlings. All right, to the kids.” As she polished off the champagne, Rhoda talked excitedly about the fine accommodations of the Bremen. She felt very adventurous, she said, sailing on a German ship these days. “Pug, I wonder if there are any Nazis right here in this bar?” she prattled.

The fat red-faced man sitting next to Rhoda shifted his glance to her. He wore a feathered green hat and he was drinking from a stein.

“Let’s take a walk on deck,” Pug said. “See the Statue of Liberty.”

“No, sir. I want another drink. I’ve seen the Statue of Liberty.”

Pug made a slight peremptory move of a thumb, and Rhoda got off the stool. When anything touched his Navy work, Pug could treat her like a deckhand. He held open a door for her, and in a whipping wind they walked to the stern, where gulls swooped and screeched, and passengers clustered at the rails, watching the Manhattan buildings drift past in brown haze.

Pug said quietly, leaning on a patch of clear rail, “Look, unless we’re in the open air like this, you can assume anything we say on this ship will be recorded, one way or another. At the bar, at the table, or even in our stateroom. Have you thought of that?”

“Well, sort of, but — in our stateroom too! Really?”

Pug nodded.

Rhoda looked thoughtful, then burst out laughing. “You mean — you don’t mean day and night? Pug? Always?”

“That’s what this job is. If they didn’t do it, they’d be sloppy. The Germans aren’t a sloppy people.”

Her mouth curled in female amusement. “Well, then, mister, keep your DISTANCE on this boat, that’s all I can say.”

“It’ll be no different in Berlin.”

“Won’t we have our own house?”

He shrugged. “Kip says you get used to it and don’t think about it. I mean the loss of privacy. You’re just a fish in a glass bowl and that’s that. You can never stop thinking about what you say or do, however.”

“Honestly.” A peculiar look, half-vexed, half-titillated, was on her face. “I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of that. Well! They say love will find a way, but — oh hell. It really couldn’t be less important, could it? Can I have my other drink?”

An engraved card, slid under their cabin door shortly before dinner, invited them to the captain’s table. They debated whether Pug should wear a uniform, and decided against it. The guess turned out to be correct. A German submarine officer at the table, a man as short and as taciturn as Victor Henry, wore a brown business suit. The captain, a paunchy stiff man in gold-buttoned blue, heavily joshed the ladies in slow English or clear German, blue eyes twinkling in his weathered fat face. Now and then he flicked a finger, and a steward in full dress jumped to his side. The captain would crackle a few words, and off the steward would bustle with a terrified face, gesturing at the waiters, long tailcoat flapping. The food was abundant and exquisite, the bowl of white and purple orchids spectacular. The parade of wines worried Pug, for when Rhoda was excited she could drink too much. But she ate heartily, drank normally, and delighted the captain by bantering with him in fluent German.

The submarine man’s wife sat on Henry’s left, a blonde in green low-cut chiffon that lavishly showed big creamy breasts. Pug surprised her into warm laughter by asking if she had ever worked in films. At his right sat a small girl in gray tweed, the daughter of Alistair Tudsbury. Tudsbury was the only real celebrity at the table, a British broadcaster and correspondent, about six feet two, with a big belly, a huge brown moustache, bulging eyes, a heavy veined nose, thick glasses, bearish eyebrows, booming voice, and an enormous appetite. He had arrived at the table laughing, and laughed at whatever was said to him, at almost everything he said himself. He was a very ugly man and his clothes did little to mitigate the ugliness: a brown fuzzy suit, a Tattersall shirt and a copious bow tie. He smoked cigarettes, tiny in his sausage-fat fingers; one expected a pipe or a long black cigar, but the cigarette was always smoldering in his hand, except when he was plying a knife and fork.

For all the forced badinage, it was an awkward meal. Nobody mentioned politics, war, or the Nazis. Even books and plays were risky. In long silences, the slow-rolling ship squeaked and groaned. Victor Henry and the submariner exchanged several appraising glances, but no words. Pug tried once or twice to amuse Tudsbury’s daughter at his right, eliciting only a shy smile. Over the dessert, turning from the blonde — who kept telling him how good his German was — he made one more effort. “I suppose you’re on vacation from school?”

“Well, sort of permanently. I’m twenty-eight.”

“You are? Hm! Sorry. I thought you were about in my daughter’s class. She’s nineteen.” The Tudsbury girl said nothing, so he kept talking. “I hope you took my stupidity as a compliment. Don’t women like to be thought younger than they are?”

“Oh, many people make that mistake, Commander. It comes of my travelling with my father. His eyes are not very good. I help him with his work.”

“That must be interesting.”

“Depending on the subject matter. Nowadays it’s sort of a broken record. Will the little tramp go, or won’t he?”

She took a sip of wine. Commander Henry was brought up short. The “little tramp” was Charlie Chaplin, of course, and by ready transfer, Hitler. She was saying that Tudsbury’s one topic was whether Hitler would start a war. By not dropping her voice, by using a phrase which a German ear would be unlikely to catch, by keeping her face placid, she had managed not only to touch the forbidden subject, but to express a world of contempt, at the captain’s table on the Bremen, for the dictator of Germany.

Half a dozen early-morning walkers were swinging along, looking preoccupied and virtuous, when Pug Henry came out on the cool sunlit deck, after a happy night second honeymooning. He had calculated that five turns would make a mile, and he meant to do fifteen or twenty turns. Rounding the bow to the port side he saw, far down the long deck, the Tudsbury girl coming toward him, pumping her arms and rolling her hips. She wore the same gray suit. “Good morning.” They passed each other with nods and smiles, then on the other side of the ship repeated this ritual. At the third encounter he said, reversing his direction, “Let me join you.”

“Oh, thank you, yes. I feel stupid, preparing to smile forty feet away.”

“Doesn’t your father like to walk before breakfast?”

“He hates all forms of exercise. He’s strong as a bull and nothing he does makes much difference. Anyway right now poor Talky has a touch of gout. It’s his curse.”

“Talky?”

Pamela Tudsbury laughed. “His middle name is Talcott. Since schoolboy days, he’s been ‘Talky’ to his friends. Guess why!” She was moving quite fast. In flat shoes she was very short. She glanced up at him. “Commander, where’s your wife? Also not a walker?”

“Late sleeper. Not that she’ll walk to the corner drugstore if she can drive or hail a cab. Well, what does your father really think? Will the little tramp go?”

She laughed, a keen look brightening her eyes, evidently pleased that he remembered. “He’s come out boldly to the effect that time will tell.”

“What do you think?”

“Me? I just type what he thinks. On a special portable with oversize print.” She gestured at three deep-breathing German matrons in tailored suits marching by. “I know that I feel queer sailing on a ship of theirs.”

“Didn’t your father just publish a book? I seem to remember reviews.”

“Yes. Just a paste-up of his broadcasts, really.”

“I’d like to read it. Writers awe me. I have a tough time putting one word down after another.”

“I saw a copy in the ship’s library. He sent me there to check,” she said, with a grin that reminded him of Madeline, catching him in self-importance or pretense. He wished Warren could meet this girl or one like her. Last night he had not paid her much mind, with the busty, half-naked, talkative blonde there. But now, especially with the fresh coloring of the morning sea air, he thought she had an English lady’s face, a heart-shaped face from a Gainsborough or a Romney: thin lips, expressive green-gray eyes set wide apart, fine straight nose, heavy brown hair. The skin of her hands and face was pearl-smooth. Just the girl for Warren, pretty and keen.

“You’re going around again? I get off here,” she said, stopping at a double door. “If you do read his book again, Commander Henry, carry it under your arm. He’ll fall in love with you. It’ll make his trip.”

“How can he care? Why, he’s famous.”

“He cares. God, how they care.” With a clumsy little wave, she went inside.

After breakfasting alone, Pug went to the library. Nobody was there but a boyish steward. The shelves held many German volumes on the World War. Pug glanced at one titled U-Boats: 1914-18, and settled into a leather armchair to scan the discussion of American destroyer tactics. Soon he heard the scratch of a pen. At a small desk almost within his reach, the German submarine man sat with his bristly head bent, writing. Pug had not seen him come in.

Grobke smiled, and pointed his pen at the U-boat book. “Recalling old times?”

“Well, I was in destroyers.”

“And I was down below. Maybe this is not the first time our paths cross.” Grobke spoke English with a slight, not unpleasant Teutonic accent.

“Possibly not.”

“When Pug put the U-boat volume on the shelf and took down the Tudsbury book, Grobke remarked, “Perhaps we could have a drink before dinner and compare notes on the Atlantic in 1918?”

“I’d enjoy that.”

Pug intended to read Tudsbury in a deck chair for a while and then go below to work. He had brought weighty books on German industry, politics, and history, and meant to grind through the lot on the way to his post. Intelligence manuals and handbooks were all right, but he was a digger. He liked to search out the extra detail in the extra-discouraging looking fat volume. Surprising things were recorded, but patient alert eyes were in perpetual short supply.

The bow wave was boiling away, a V of white foam on the blue sunlit sea, and the Bremen was rolling like a battleship. Wind from the northwest, Pug estimated, glancing up at the thin smoke from the stacks, and at the sea; wind speed fifteen knots, ship’s speed eighteen, number four sea on the port quarter, rain and high winds far ahead under the cumulo-nimbus. Nostalgia swept over him. Four years since he had served at sea; eleven since he had had a command! He stood by the forward rail, leaning against a lifeboat davit, sniffing the sea air. Four unmistakable Jews walked by in jolly conversation, two middle-aged couples in fine sports clothes. They went out of sight around the deckhouse. He was still looking after them when he heard Tudsbury blare, “Hello there, Commander. I hear you were out walking my Pam at the crack of dawn.”

“Hello. Did you see those people who just went by?”

“Yes. There’s no understanding Jews. I say, is that my book? How touching. How far have you got?”

“I just drew it from the library.”

Tudsbury’s moustache drooped sadly. “What! You didn’t buy it? Damn all libraries. Now you’ll read it and I won’t gain a penny by it.” He bellowed a laugh and rested one green-stockinged leg on the rail. He was wearing a baggy pepper-and-salt golfing outfit and a green tam o’shanter. “It’s a bad book, really a fake, but it’s selling in your country, luckily for me. If you didn’t happen to hear my drivelling on the air in the past year or two, there are a couple of interesting paragraphs. Footnotes to history. My thing on Hitler’s entry into Vienna is actually not too awful. Quite a time we’re living in, Commander.”

He talked about the German take-over of Austria, sounding much as he did on the air: positive, informed, full of scorn for democratic politicians, and cheerfully ominous. Tudsbury’s special note was that the world would very likely go up in flames, but that it might prove a good show. “Can you picture the bizarre and horrible triumph that we let him get away with, dear fellow? I saw it all. Something straight out of Plutarch, that was! A zero of a man, with no schooling, of no known family — at twenty a dropped-out student, a drifter and a failure — five years a dirty, seedy tramp in a Vienna doss house — did you know that Henry? Do you know that for five years this Führer was what you call a Bowery bum, sharing a vile room with other assorted flotsam, eating in soup kitchens, and not because there was a depression — Vienna was fat and prosperous then — but because he was a dreamy, lazy, incompetent misfit? That house painter story is hogwash. He sold a few hand-painted postcards, but to the age of twenty-six he was a sidewalk-wandering vagrant, and then for four years a soldier in the German army, a lance corporal, a messenger-runner, a low job for a man of even minimum intelligence, and at thirty he was lying broke, discharged, and gassed in an army hospital. That is the background of the Führer.

“And then -” The ship’s horn blasted, drowning out Tudsbury’s voice, which was beginning to roll in his broadcasting style. He winced, laughed, and went on: “And then, what happened? Why, then this same ugly, sickly, uncouth, prejudiced, benighted, half-mad little wretch leaped out of his hospital bed, and went careering in ten years straight to the top of a German nation thirsting for a return match. The man was a foreigner, Henry! He was an Austrian. They had to fake up a citizenship proceeding for him, so he could run against Hindenburg! And I myself watched this man ride in triumph through the streets of Vienna, where he had sold postcards and gone hungry, the sole heir to the combined thrones of the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns.” Victor Henry smiled, and Tudsbury’s impassioned popeyed stare gave way to a loud guffaw. “A-hawr, hawr, hawr! I suppose it is rather funny when you think about it. But this grotesque fantasy happens to be the central truth of our age.”

Henry was smiling because much of this tirade was in Tudsbury’s book, almost word for word. “Well, it’s the old story of the stitch in time,” he said. “Your politicos could have got the weird little bastard with no trouble early on, but they didn’t. Now they have problems. Incidentally, where are you headed? Berlin, too?”

Tudsbury nodded. “Our Berlin man’s prostate chose an awkward time to act up. A-hawr-hawr! Dr. Goebbels said I could come along and fill in. Amazement! I’ve been persona non grata in the Third Reich since Munich. No doubt I’ll be kicked out on my big arse in a few weeks. For some reason the Jerries are being kind to Englishmen this month. Probably so we’ll hold still while they roll over the Poles. And we will, we will. The Tories are all polite gray worms. Aristocratic funks, Lloyd George called them. Except for Churchill, who’s quite out of it.”

The American commander and the U-boat man took to meeting in the bar each evening before dinner. Henry figured that it was his job to pump Grobke, as it might well the German’s to work on him. Grobke was a thorough professional, an engineering expert, and a real seafarer. He talked freely about the machinery in the present U-boats, and even confessed to problems with torpedoes, a topic Henry was well versed in, though he discussed it cautiously. In Grobke’s harassed disdain for politicians, he seemed like any American naval man. A satiric look came on his face when he spoke of the Nazis, and he said things that caused his wife, when she was with them, to give him warning glances.

“Alistair Tudsbury said to Pug one evening, as they sat on a couch in the main saloon watching the dancing, “You’ve been fraternizing with Jerry.”

“In the line of business. I doubt Grobke’s a Nazi.”

“Oh, those U-boat fellows are all right, as much as any Germans are.”

“You don’t like the Germans.”

“Well, let’s talk about that after you’ve been there a month. Assuming I haven’t been booted out.”

“Of course I don’t blame you. They gave your people hell.”

“No worse than we gave them. We won, you know.” After a pause he said, “My eyes were spoiled at Amiens, when we broke through with the tanks. I commanded a tank battalion, and was gassed. It was worth it, all in all, to see Jerry on the run. It was a long time coming.”

The captain of the Bremen, at the moment, was dancing with Rhoda. He had long capering legs, strange in a stout man. Rhoda was radiating enjoyment. Pug was glad of this. Night after night she had been dancing with a very tall officer, a blond-eagle type, all clicking bows and glittering blue eyes, who held her a bit too close. Pug had said something about it, and Rhoda had countered with a brief snarl about his spending the trip with his nose in books, and he had let it drop. She was being so complaisant, on the whole, that he only wanted to keep things so.

The captain brought her back. Pamela Tudsbury returned from a listless effort to follow the flailing prances of an American college boy. She said, “I shall get myself a cane and a white wig. They look so shattered if I refuse, but I really can hardly dance, and as for the Lindy Hop—”

The music struck up again, and Rhoda’s tall young officer approached in spotless white and gold. An irritated look crossed Pug’s face. The captain saw it, and under the loud music, as the officer drew near, he muttered half a dozen words. The young man stopped, faded back, and darted out of the saloon. Pug never saw him again.

Rhoda, smiling and about to rise, was baffled by the young German’s peculiar exit.

“Dance, Rhoda?” Pug got to his feet. “What?” she said crossly. “No, thanks.”

Pug extended a hand to the Tudsbury girl. “Pamela?”

She hesitated. “You don’t do the Lindy Hop?” Pug burst out laughing. “Well, one never knows with Americans.”

She danced in a heavy, inexperienced way. Pug liked her gentle manner, her helpless smile when she trod on his foot. “You can’t be enjoying this,” she said.

“I am. Do you think you’ll be going back to the United States?

“If Father gets thrown out of Germany, which seems inevitable, I suppose we will. Why?”

“I have a son about your age with quite a fine record, and unlike me, tall and very handsome.”

Pamela made a face. “A Navy man? Never. A girl in every port.”

At the captain’s table, on the last night, there were white orchids at every lady’s place; and under these, white gold compacts. Champagne went round, and the topic of international politics finally surfaced. Everybody agreed that in this day and age war was a silly, wasteful way of settling differences, especially among advanced nations like England, France, and Germany. “We’re all of the same stock, all north Europeans,” Tudsbury said. “It’s a sad thing when brothers fall out.”

The captain nodded happily. “Exactly what I say. If we could only stick together, there would never be another war. The Bolsheviks would never move against so much power. And who else wants war?” All through the saloon people were wearing paper hats and tossing streamers, and Pug observed that the four Jews, whose table was not far away, were having as gay a time as everybody else, under the polite ministrations of smiling German waiters. The captain followed Henry’s glance, and a genial superior grin relaxed his stern fat face. “You see, Commander? They are as welcome aboard the Bremen as anybody else, and get the same service. The exaggerations on that subject are fantastic.” He turned to Tudsbury. “Between us, aren’t you journalists a wee bit responsible for making matters worse?”

“Well, Captain,” Tudsbury said, “journalism always looks for a theme, you know. One of the novel things about your government, to people outside Germany, is its policy toward the Jews. And so it keeps turning up.”

Tudsbury is not entirely wrong, Captain,” Grobke broke in, draining his wineglass. “Outsiders think of nothing but the Jews nowadays when Germany is mentioned. That policy has been mishandled. I’ve said so many times. That and plenty of other things.” He turned to Henry. “Still, they’re so unimportant, Victor, compared to what the Führer has achieved: Germany has come back to life. That’s God’s truth. The people have work, they have food and houses, and they have spirit. What Hitler has done for our youth alone is just incredible.” (The captain’s eyes lit up and he emphatically nodded, exclaiming, “Ja, Ja!”) Under the Weimar they were rioting, they were becoming Communists, they were going in for sex perversions and drugs, it was just horrible. Now they’re working, or training, or serving, all of them. They’re happy! My crews are happy. You can’t imagine what navy morale was like under the Republic — I tell you what,” He struck the table. “You come visit our squadron, at the sub base in Swinemünde. You do that! You’re a man that can look at a navy yard or a ship’s crew and see what’s going on! It’ll open your eyes. Will you?”

Henry took a moment to reply, with everybody at the table turning expectantly to him. An invitation like this, if accepted, made mandatory a similar offer to the German naval attaché in Washington. Did the Navy want to trade glimpses of submarine bases with the Nazi regime? The decision was beyond Pug’s power. He had to report the invitation to Washington and act on the dictated answer.

He said, “I’d like that. Perhaps we can work it out.”

“Say yes. Forget the formalities!” Grobke waved both arms in the air. “It’s a personal invitation from me to you, from one seaman to another. The U-boat command gets damn small budgets, and we’re pretty independent chaps. You can visit us with no strings. I’ll see to that.”

“This invitation wouldn’t include me, would it?” Tudsbury said.

Grobke hesitated, then laughed. “Why not? Come along, Tudsbury. The more the British know about what we’ve got, the less likely anybody is to make a hasty mistake.”

“Well, here may be an important little step for peace,” said the captain, “transacted at my table! I feel honored, and we will have more champagne on it at once.”

And so the diners at the captain’s table on the Bremen all drank to peace a few minutes before midnight, as the great liner slowed, approaching the shore lights of Nazi Germany.

In bright sunshine, the Bremen moved like a train between low green banks of a wide river. Pug was at the rail of the sun deck, taking his old pleasure in the sight of land after a voyage. Rhoda was below in her usual fit of the snarls and the snaps. When they travelled together, Rhoda in deep martyrdom did the packing. Pug was an old hand at packing for himself, but Rhoda claimed she could never find anything he put away.

“Oh, yes, the country is charming to look at,” said Tudsbury, who had sauntered up and commenced a discourse on the scenery. “You’ll see many a pretty north German town between Bremerhaven and Berlin. The heavy half-timbered kind of thing, that looks so much like English Tudor. The fact is Germany and England have strong resemblances and links. You know of course that the Kaiser was Queen Victoria’s grandson, that our royal family for a long time spoke only German? And yet on the whole the Jerries are stranger to us than Eskimos.” He boomed a laugh and went on, sweeping a fat hand toward the shore: “Yes, here the Germans sit at the heart of Europe, Henry, these perplexing first cousins of ours simmering and grumbling away, and every now and then they spill over in all directions, with a hideous roar. Out they pour from these lovely little towns, these fairy-tale landscapes, these clean handsome cities — wait till you see Cologne, Nuremberg, Munich, even Berlin and Hamburg — out they bubble, I say, these polite blue-eyed music lovers, ravening for blood. It gets a bit unnerving. And now here’s Hitler, bringing them to a boil again. You Americans may have to lend more of a hand than you did last time. We’re fairly worn out with them, you know, we and the French.”

It had not escaped Henry that Tudsbury’s talk, one way or another, usually came back to the theme of the United States fighting Germany.

“That might not be in the cards, Tudsbury. We’ve got the Japanese on our hands. They’re carving up China and they’ve got a first-class fighting navy, growing every month. If they make the Pacific a Japanese lake and proceed to do what they want on the Asian mainland, the world will be theirs in fifty years.”

Tudsbury said, sticking his tongue out of a corner of his smiling mouth, “The Yellow Peril.”

“It’s a question of facts and numbers,” Henry said. “How many people are there in all of Europe? Couple of hundred million? Japan is now well on the way to ruling one billion people. They’re as industrious as the Germans or more so. They came out of paper houses and silk kimonos in a couple of generations to defeat Russia. They’re amazing. Compared to what faces us in Asia, this Hitler strikes us as just more of the same old runty cat-dog fight in the back yard.”

Tudsbury peered at him, with a reluctant nod. “Possibly you underestimate the Germans.”

“Maybe you overestimate them. Why the devil didn’t you and the French go in when they occupied the Rhineland? They broke a treaty. You could have walked in there at that point and hung Hitler, with not much more trouble than raiding a girls’ dormitory.”

“Ah, the wisdom of hindsight,” Tudsbury said. “Don’t ask me to defend our politicians. It’s been a radical breakdown, a total failure of sense and nerve. I was talking and writing in 1936 the way you are now. At Munich I was close to suicide. I covered the whole thing. Czechoslovakia! Germany’s gut. Fifty crack divisions, spoiling for a scrap. The second biggest arms factory in the world. Russia and France ready at last to stand up and fight. All this, six months ago! And an Englishman, an Englishman, goes crawling across Europe to Hitler and hands him Czechoslovakia!” Tudsbury laughed mechanically and puffed at a cigarette made ragged by the breeze. “I don’t know. Maybe democracy isn’t for the industrial age. If it’s to survive, I think the Americans will have to put up the show.”

“Why? Why do you keep saying that? On paper you and the French still have the Germans badly licked. Don’t you realize that? Manpower, firepower, steel, oil, coal, industrial plant, any way you add it up, They’ve got a small temporary lead in the air, but they’ve also got the Soviet Union at their backs. It’s not the walkover it was last year and two years ago, but you still figure to win.”

“Alas, they’ve got the leadership.”

A strong hand clapped Henry’s shoulder, and a voice tinged with irony said, “Heil Hitler!” Ernst Grobke stood there in a worn, creased navy uniform; with it he had put on a severe face and an erect posture. “Well, gentlemen, here we are. Victor, in case I don’t see you again in the confusion, where do I get in touch with you? The embassy?”

“Sure. Office of the Naval Attaché.”

“Ah!” said Tudsbury. “Our little trip to Swinemünde? So glad you haven’t forgotten.”

“I’ll do my best to include you,” said Grobke coldly. He shook hands with both of them, bowing and clicking his heels, and he left.

“Come say good-bye to Pamela,” Tudsbury said. “She’s below, packing.”

“I’ll do that.” Pug walked down the deck with the correspondent, who limped on a cane. “I have notions of matching her up with a son of mine.”

“Oh, have you?” Tudsbury gave him a waggish glance through his thick spectacles. “I warn you, she’s a handful.”

“What? Why, I’ve never met a gentler or pleasanter girl.”

“Still waters,” said Tudsbury. “I warn you.”

Chapter 4

The Henrys had only just arrived in Berlin when they were invited to meet Hitler. It was a rare piece of luck, the embassy people told them. Chancellery receptions big enough to include military attachés were none too common. The Führer was staying away from Berlin in order to damp down the war talk, but a visit of the Bulgarian prime minister had brought him back to the capital.

While Commander Henry studied the protocol of Nazi receptions in moments snatched from his piled-up office work, Rhoda flew into a two-day frenzy over her clothing, and over her hair, which she asserted had been ruined forever by the imbecile hairdresser of the Adlon Hotel (Pug thought the hair looked more or less the same as always.) She had brought no dresses in the least suitable for a formal afternoon reception in the spring. Why hadn’t somebody warned her? Three hours before the event Rhoda was still whirling in an embassy car from one Berlin dress shop to another. She burst into their hotel room clad in a pink silk suit with gold buttons and a gold net blouse. “How’s this?” she barked. “Sally Forrest says Hitler likes pink.”

“Perfect!” Her husband thought the suit was terrible, and decidedly big on Rhoda, but it was no time for truthtelling. “Gad, where did you ever find it?”

Outside the hotel, long vertical red banners of almost transparent cheesecloth, with the black swastika in a white circle at their center, were swaying all along the breezy street, alternated with gaudy Bulgarian flags. The way to the chancellery was lined with more flags, a river of fluttering red, interspersed with dozens of Nazi standards in the style of Roman legion emblems — long poles topped by stylized gilt eagles perching on wreathed swastikas — and underneath, in place of the Roman SPQR, the letters NSDAP.

“What on earth does NSDAP stand for?” Rhoda said, peering out of the window of the embassy car at the multitudinous gilded poles.

“National Socialist German Workers Party,” said Pug.

“Is that the name of the Nazis? How funny. Sounds sort of Commie when you spell it all out.”

Pug said, “Sure. Hitler got in on a red-hot radical program.”

“Did he? I never knew that. I thought he was against all that stuff. Well, it couldn’t be more confusing, I mean European politics, but I do think all this is terribly exciting. Makes Washington seem dull and tame, doesn’t it?”

When Victor Henry first came into Hitler’s new chancellery, he was incongruously reminded of Radio City Music Hall in New York. The opulent stretch of carpet, the long line of waiting people, the high ceiling, the great expanses of shiny marble, the inordinate length and height of the huge space, the gaudily uniformed men ushering the guests along, all added up to much the same theatrical, vulgar, strained effort to be grand; but this was the seat of a major government, not a movie house. It seemed peculiar. An officer in blue took his name, and the slow-moving line carried the couple toward the Führer, far down the hall. The SS guards were alike as chorus boys with their black-and-silver uniforms, black boots, square shoulders, blond waved hair, white teeth, bronzed skin, and blue eyes. Some shepherded the guests with careful smiles, others stood along the walls, blank-faced and stiff.

Hitler was no taller than Henry himself; a small man with a prison haircut, leaning forward and bowing as he shook hands, his head to one side, hair falling on his forehead. This was Henry’s flash impression, as he caught his first full-length look at the Führer beside the burly much-medalled Bulgarian, but in another moment it changed. Hitler had a remarkable smile. His downcurved mouth was rigid and tense, his eyes sternly self-confident, but when he smiled this fanatic look vanished; the whole face brightened up, showing a strong hint of humor, and a curious, almost boyish, shyness. Sometimes he held a guest’s hand and conversed. When he was particularly amused he laughed and made an odd sudden move with his right knee: he lifted it and jerked it a little inward.

His greeting to the two American couples ahead of the Henrys was casual. He did not smile, and his restless eyes wandered away from them and back again as he shook hands.

A protocol officer in a sky-blue, gold-crusted foreign service uniform intoned in German:

“The naval attaché to the embassy of the United States of America, Commander Victor Henry!”

The hand of the Führer was dry, rough, and it seemed a bit swollen. The clasp was firm as he scanned Henry’s face. Seen this close the deep-sunk eyes were pale blue, puffy, and somewhat glassy. Hitler appeared fatigued; his pasty face had streaks of sunburn on his forehead, nose and cheekbones, as though he had been persuaded to leave his desk in Berchtesgaden and come outside for a few hours. To be looking into this famous face with its hanging hair, thrusting nose, zealot’s remote eyes, and small moustache was the strangest sensation of Henry’s life.

Hitler said, “Willkommen in Deutschland,” and dropped his hand.

Surprised that Hitler should be aware of his recent arrival, Pug stammered, “Danke, Herr Reichskanzler.”

“Frau Henry!” Rhoda, her eyes gleaming, shook hands with Adolf Hitler. He said, in German, “I hope you are comfortable in Berlin.” His voice was low, almost folksy; another surprise to Henry, who had only heard him shouting hoarsely on the radio or in the newsreels.

“Well, Herr Reichskanzler, to tell the truth I’ve just begun looking for a house,” Rhoda said breathlessly, too overcome to make a polite reply and move on.

“You will have no difficulty.” Hitler’s eyes softened and warmed at her clear German speech. Evidently he found Rhoda pretty. He kept her hand, faintly smiling.

“But there are so many charming neighborhoods in Berlin that I’m bewildered. That’s the real problem.”

This pleased or amused Hitler. He laughed, kicked his knee inward, and turning to an aide behind him, said a few words. The aide bowed. Hitler held out his hand to the next guest. The Henrys moved on to the Bulgarian.

The reception did not last long. Colonel Forrest, the military attaché, a fat Army Air officer from Idaho who had been in Germany for two years, introduced the Henrys to foreign attachés and Nazi leaders, including Goebbels and Ribbentrop, who looked just like their newsreel pictures, but oddly diminished. These two, with their perfunctory fast handshakes, made Henry feel like the small fry he was; Hitler had not done that. Pug kept trying to watch Hitler. The Führer wore black trousers, a gray double-breasted coat with an eagle emblem on one arm, and a small Iron Cross on his left breast. By American styles the clothes were cut much too full. This gave the leader of Germany the appearance of wearing secondhand, ill-fitting garments. Hitler from moment to moment looked restless, tired, or bored, or else he flashed into winning charm. He was seldom still. He shifted his feet, turned his head here and there, clasped his hands before him, folded them, gestured with them, spoke absently to most people and intensely to a few, and every so often did the little knee kick. Once Pug saw him eating small iced cakes from a plate, shoving them toward his mouth with snatching greedy fingers while he talked to a bemedalled visitor. Shortly thereafter he left, and the gathering started to disperse.

It was drizzling outside; the massed red flags were drooping, and from the helmets of the erect guards water ran unheeded down their faces. The women clustered in the entrance while Pug, Colonel Forrest, and the chargé d’affaires went out to hail the embassy cars. The chargé, a moustached man with a pale clever face full of wrinkles, and a weary air, ran the embassy. After the Crystal Night, President Roosevelt had recalled the ambassador, and not yet sent him back. Everybody in the embassy disliked this policy. It cut the Americans off from some official channels, and hampered their ability to conduct even the business of interceding for Jews. The staff thought the President had made a political gesture toward the New York Jews that, in Germany, seemed ineffectual and laughable.

The chargé said to Henry, “Well, what did you think of the Führer?”

“I was impressed. He knew I’d just arrived.”

“Really? Well, now you’ve seen German thoroughness. Somebody checked, and briefed him.”

“But he remembered. In that long line.”

The chargé smiled. “Politician’s memory.”

Colonel Forrest rubbed his broad flat nose, smashed years ago in a plane crash, and said to the chargé, “The Führer had quite a chat with Mrs. Henry. What was that about, Pug?”

“Nothing. Just a word or two about house-hunting.”

“You have a beautiful wife,” the chargé said. “Hitler likes pretty women. And that’s quite a striking suit she’s wearing. They say Hitler likes pink.”

Two days later, Henry was working at the embassy at a morning pile of mail, in an office not unlike his old cubicle in War Plans — small, crowded with steel files, and with technical books and reports. This one had a window, and the view of Hitler’s chancellery slightly jarred him each morning when he got there. His yeoman buzzed from a tiny anteroom smelling of mimeograph ink, cigarette smoke, and overbrewed coffee, like yeomen’s anterooms everywhere.

“Mrs. Henry, sir.”

It was early for Rhoda to be up. She said grumpily that a man named Knödler, a renting agent for furnished homes, had sent his card to their hotel room, with a note saying he had been advised they were looking for a house. He was waiting in the lobby for an answer.

“Well, what can you lose?” Henry said. “Go and look at his houses.”

“It seems so odd. You don’t suppose Hitler sent him?”

Pug laughed. “Maybe his aide did.”

Rhoda called back at three-thirty in the afternoon. He had just returned from lunch. “Yes?” he yawned. “What now?” The long heavy wine-bibbing meal of the diplomats was still too much for him.

“There’s this wonderful house in the Grunewald section, right on a lake. It even has a tennis court! The price is ridiculously cheap, it doesn’t come to a hundred dollars a month. Can you come right away and look at it?”

Pug went. It was a heavily built gray stone mansion roofed in red tile, set amid tall old trees on a smooth lawn sloping to the water’s edge. The tennis court was in back, beside a formal garden with flower beds in bloom around a marble fountain swarming with large goldfish. Inside the house were Oriental carpets, large gilt-framed old paintings, a walnut dining table with sixteen blue silk-upholstered chairs, and a long living room cluttered with elegant French pieces. The place had five upstairs bedrooms and three marbled baths.

The agent, a plump matter-of-fact man of thirty or so, with straight brown hair and rimless glasses, might have been an American real estate broker. Indeed he said that his brother was a realtor in Chicago and that he had once worked in his office. Pug asked him why the price was so low. The agent cheerfully explained in good English that the owner, Herr Rosenthal, was a Jewish manufacturer, and that the house was vacant because of a new ruling affecting Jews. So he badly needed a tenant.

“What’s this new ruling?” Henry asked.

“I’m not too clear on it. Something related to their owning real estate.” Knödler spoke in an entirely offhand tone, as though he were discussing a zoning regulation in Chicago.

“Does this man know you’re offering the house to us, and at what price?” Pug said.

“Naturally.”

“When can I meet him?”

“Any time you say.”

Next day Pug used his lunch hour for an appointment with the owner. After introducing them in the doorway of the house, the agent went and sat in his car. Herr Rosenthal, a gray-headed, paunchy, highly dignified individual, clad in a dark suit of excellent English cut, invited Henry inside.

“It’s a beautiful house,” Henry said in German.

Rosenthal glanced around with wistful affection, gestured to a chair, and sat down. “Thank you. We’re fond it, and have spent a lot of time and money on it.”

“Mrs. Henry and I feel awkward about leasing the place.”

“Why?” The Jew looked surprised. “You’re desirable tenants. If a lower rent would help -”

“Good lord, no! It’s an incredibly low rent. But will you actually receive the money?”

“Of course. Who else? It’s my house.” Rosenthal spoke firmly and proudly. “With the agent’s commission deducted, and certain municipal fees, I’ll receive every penny.”

Pug pointed a thumb at the front door. “Knödler told me that some new ruling compels you to rent it.”

“That won’t affect you as tenant. I assure you. Are you thinking of a two-year lease? I myself would prefer that.”

“But what’s this ruling?”

Though they were alone in an unoccupied house, Rosenthal glanced over one shoulder and then the other, and dropped his voice. “Well — it’s an emergency decree, you understand: I am sure it will eventually be cancelled. In fact I have been assured of that by people in high places. Meantime this property can be placed under a trusteeship and sold at any time without my consent. However, if there’s a tenant in residence with diplomatic immunity, that can’t be done.” Rosenthal smiled. “Hence the modest rent, Herr Commandant! You see, I’m not hiding anything.”

“May I ask you a question? Why don’t you sell out and leave Germany?”

The Jew blinked. His face remained debonair and imposing. “My family has a business here more than one hundred years old. We refine sugar. My children are at school in England, but my wife and I are comfortable enough in Berlin. We are both native Berliners.” He sighed, looked around at the snug rosewood-panelled library in which they sat, and went on: “Things are not as bad as they were in 1938. That was the worst. If there is no war, they’ll improve quickly. I’ve been told this seriously by some high officials. Old friends of mine.” Rosenthal hesitated and added, “The Führer has done remarkable things for the country. It would be foolish to deny that. I have lived through other bad times. I was shot through a lung in Belgium in 1914. A man goes through a lot in a lifetime.” He spread his hands in a graceful resigned gesture.

Victor Henry said, “Well, Mrs. Henry loves the house, but I don’t want to take advantage of anybody’s misfortune.”

“You’ll be doing just the opposite. You know that now. Two years?”

“How about one year, with an option to renew?”

At once Rosenthal stood and held out his hand. Henry rose and shook it. “We should have a drink on it perhaps,” said Rosenthal, “but we emptied the liquor closet when we left. Liquor doesn’t last long in a vacant house.”

It felt odd the first night, sleeping in the Rosenthals’ broad soft bed with its exquisite French petit-point footboard and headboard. But within a few days, the Henrys were at home in the mansion and busy with a new life. From an employment agency suggested by the agent came a maid, a cook, and a houseman-chauffeur, all first-rate servants, and — Henry assumed — all planted informers. He checked the electric wiring of the house for listening devices. The German equipment and circuits were strange to him, and he found nothing. Still, he and Rhoda walked on the lawn to discuss touchy matters.

A whirling couple of weeks passed. They saw Hitler once more at an opera gala, this time at a distance, up in a crimson damask-lined box. His white tie and tails were again too big, emphasizing his Charlie Chaplin air of a dressed-up vagrant, despite his severe stiff saluting and the cheers and applause of beautiful women and important-looking men, all stretching their necks to stare worshipfully.

At two receptions arranged for the Henrys, one at the home of the chargé and one at Colonel Forrest’s house, they met many foreign diplomats and prominent German industrialists, artists, politicians, and military men. Rhoda made a quick hit. Notwithstanding her panic before the chancellery reception, she had brought a large costly wardrobe. She sparkled in her new clothes. Her German kept improving. She liked Berlin and its people. The Germans sensed this and warmed to her, though some embassy people who detested the regime were taken aback by her cordiality to Nazis. Pug was something of a bear at these parties, standing silent unless spoken to. But Rhoda’s success covered for him.

Rhoda was not blind to the Nazi abuses. After her first walk in the Tiergarten, she refused to go back. It was far more clean, pretty, and charming than any American public park, she admitted, but the signs on the benches, JUDEN VERBOTEN, were nauseating. Seeing similar signs in restaurant windows, she would recoil and demand to go elsewhere. When Pug told her of his interview with Rosenthal, she had a deep attack of the blues: she wanted to forgo the house and even talked of getting out of Germany. “Why, imagine! Renting out that beautiful house for a song, just to keep it from being sold over his head — to some fat Nazi, no doubt, lying in wait to pick it off cheap. How horrible.” But she agreed that they had better take it. They had to live somewhere, and the house was divine.

Day by day, she reacted less to such things, seeing how commonplace they were in Berlin, and how much taken for granted. When Sally Forrest, who loathed the Nazis, took her to lunch at a restaurant where a window placard announced that Jews were not served, it seemed silly to protest. Soon she ate in such places without a second thought. In time, the Tiergarten became her favorite place for a Sunday stroll. But she insisted that anti-Semitism was a blot on an otherwise exciting, lovely land. She would say so to prominent Nazis. Some stiffened, others tolerantly smirked. A few hinted that the problem would straighten out in time. “I’m an American to the bone, going back six generations,” she would say, “and I’ll never see eye to eye with you on this business of the Jews. It’s absolutely awful.”

Most Germans seemed resigned to this independent, outspoken manner of American women and the way their husbands tolerated it; they regarded it as a national oddity.

Victor Henry stayed off the Jewish topic. Nazi Germany was a big, not readily digestible lump of new life. Most foreigners were strongly for or against the Nazis. The correspondents, as Kip Tollever had observed, hated them to a man. Within the embassy view varied. According to some, Hitler was the greatest menace to America since 1776. He would stop at nothing less than world rule, and the day he was strong enough, he would attack the United States. Others saw him as a benefactor, the only bulwark in Europe against communism. The democracies had shown themselves impotent against the spread of Bolshevist parties, they said. Hitler fought totalitarian fire with hotter and strong fire.

These judgments, either way, stood on slender bases of knowledge. Pressing his new acquaintances for facts, Victor Henry got vehement opinions and gestures. Statistics abounded in sheaves of analyses and reports, but too much of this stuff also came down to guesses, propaganda, and questionable paid intelligence. He tried to study German history late at night and found it a muddy tangle going back more than a thousand years. In it he could find no pattern and no guide at all to the problems of 1939. Just to figure out where the Nazis had come from, and what the secret was of Hitler’s hold on the Germans, seemed a task beyond him and beyond anybody he talked to; even the outlandish question of German anti-Semitism had a dozen different explanations, depending on which of any twelve Foreign Service men you asked. Commander Henry decided that he would grope uselessly if he tried to fathom these major matters in a hurry. Military capacity was something he knew about; it was a narrow but decisive aspect of Hitler’s Third Empire. Was Nazi Germany as strong as the ever-marching columns in the streets, and the throngs of uniforms in cafés, suggested? Was it all a show, no more substantial than the transparent red cheesecloth of the towering swastika banners? Deciding to take nothing for granted and to marshal facts for himself, Victor Henry dug into the job of penetrating this one puzzle.

Meanwhile Rhoda adapted merrily to diplomatic life. As she got used to her staff and to Berlin customs, her dinner parties increased in size. She invited the Grobkes to a big one that included the chargé d’affaires, a French film actress, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and a dour, stout German general named Armin von Roon, with a particularly hooked nose and an exceedingly stiff carriage. Rhoda knew none of these people well. General von Roon, for instance, she had met at Colonel Forrest’s house; and because someone had told her that he stood high in the Wehrmacht and was considered brilliant, she had made up to him. She had a gift for charming in a momentary encounter. She always looked elegant, she could be amusing or sexy without forcing either note, and she made one feel that it would be pleasant to know her better. People tended to accept her invitations.

The company was above the level of Grobke and his wife. They were dazzled and flattered, and the presence of Room all but froze them with awe. Grobke whispered to Victor Henry at one point that Roon was the real brain in Supreme Headquarters. So Pug tried to talk to Roon about the war, and found that he spoke astonishing good English. But he would utter only frosty generalities, which made the attaché think the better of him, though it yielded nothing to report.

Before the evening was out Grobke, full of wine and brandy, took Victor Henry aside and told him that the captain of the Swinemünde navy yard was making stupid difficulties, but that he was going to push the visit through, “and I’ll get your English friend in too. God damn it. I said I would and I will. These shore-based bastards just live to create trouble.”

The Henrys received one cheerless letter from Madeline, written when she arrived in Newport for the summer. Warren, as usual, did not write at all. Early in July the letter Byron had written his father at last caught up with him:

Chapter 5

Since the fourteenth century — so Byron had learned — nothing much had happened in Siena besides the Palios. A rich city-state of the Middle Ages, the military rival of Florence, Siena in 1348 had been isolated by the Black Death, and frozen in its present form as by a spell. A few art lovers now drifted here to admire the fourteenth-century paintings and architecture. The world at large flocked to Siena twice a year to watch the mad horse races, and otherwise let the bypassed town, a living scene out of an old tapestry, molder in the Tuscan sunshine.

In nine years of living just outside Siena, Aaron Jastrow had never attended a Palio. When Byron asked why, Jastrow held forth on the cruel public games of Roman the forerunners of all these burlesque races of the Middle Ages. The Palio had happened to survive in mountain-locked Siena, he said, like a dinosaur in the Lost World. “Some medieval towns raced donkeys or buffaloes,” he said. “In papal Rome, they raced Jews. I’m not exactly afraid I’ll be pressed into service if a horse should break its leg. I’m just not very interested.” Moreover, his friend the archbishop had told him long ago that elderly people avoided the Palio, because of the risk of being trampled.

But now there was the article to write. Jastrow obtained tickets for both runnings, and sent Byron and Natalie to research in the town while he read books on the subject.

They first learned that the race was a contest among Siena’s neighborhoods or parishes. Each district, called a contrada, comprised a few square blocks of old houses. All of Siena contained but two and a half square miles and some thirty thousand people. But these little wards — there were seventeen, and ten competed each year — took their boundaries, their loyalties, their colors, their emblems, with inconceivable seriousness. They bore curious names like Oca, Bruco, Torre, Tartuca, Nicchio (Goose, Caterpillar, Tower, Tortoise, Seashell). Each ward had its flag, its anthems, its separate churches, and even a sort of capital hall.

Byron and Natalie spent days walking through the angular streets. When an occasional old omnibus snorted by, they had to flatten against the high red-brown walls for their lives; there were no sidewalks, and the somnolent, deserted streets were hardly wider than the bus. Maps in hand, the pair visited the tiny districts one by one, trying to pin down the background of the Palio. They found out about alliances and hatreds going back hundreds of years. Panther was friendly to Giraffe, Tortoise loathed Snail, and so forth, in a tangle of emotions, very real and current.

They came to realize too that the famous race itself was just a crooked farce, and that everybody knew it. The contrade owned no horses. A few days before each race, animals from the nearby countryside were brought into town, and the competing districts drew lots for them. The same stolid durable nags came back year after year, shuffling from one neighborhood to another by the luck of the draw.

What then made a race of it? Bribing the jockeys, doping the animals, conspiring to block the best horses or injure their riders: only such devices turned the Palio into a murky contest of a sort. The largest, richest neighborhoods therefore tended to win; but the outcome was unpredictable, because a poor, small district might put on a desperate surge. It might squander funds in bribes, pledge future alliances, swear to future treacheries, just to win a banner to bear off to its hall. For that was what the “Palio” itself was: a banner painted with a picture of the Virgin. Like all medieval races, this one was run on sacred days; it was a manifestazione in honor of the Virgin. Hence her portrait graced the prize, and faded Palios by the dozens hung in the contrada halls.

After a while, even Jastrow became interested too, in an ironic way. The crookedness, he said, was obviously the soul of the thing; old European skulduggery, bribes and counterbribes, doublecross and triplecross, sudden reversals of old alliances, secret temporary patching up of ancient enmities, convoluted chicanery in the dark — all leading at last to the horse race, when all the shadowy corruption was put to explosive proof in red sunset light.

“Why, this article will write itself,” he said cheerfully one day at lunch. “These Sienese have evolved willy-nilly a grotesque little parody of European nationalism. The archbishop told me that a woman from the Panther neighborhood who marries a Caterpillar or a Tower man will go back to have her babies in a house on a Panther street to make sure they’ll be Panthers. Patriotism! And of course, the insane explosion every summer is the key. All this obsolete mummery — Snails, Giraffes, what have you — would have died out centuries ago, except for the lovely colorful outbursts of excitement, treachery, and violence in the races. The Palio is war.”

“You ought to go over to town, sir,” Byron said. “They’re laying the track. Hundreds of truckloads of this golden-red earth, all around the Piazza del Campo.”

“Yes,” Natalie said, “the way they’re decorating up the streets is quite amazing. And wherever you look the flag-wavers are practicing -”

“I’m taking off two whole workdays for the races themselves. That’s plenty,” Jastrow said severely.

“You know what?’ Byron said. “This whole thing is utterly idiotic.”

Natalie looked at him with startled, excited eyes, touching a handkerchief to her sweaty forehead. It was the day of the first Palio, and they stood on the balcony of the archbishop’s palace, watching the parade. The great façade of the cathedral gave a bit of shade at one end of the balcony, where Jastrow in his big yellow Panama hat and white suit stood talking with the archbishop. Byron and Natalie were crowded among privileged onlookers at the other end, in the hot sun. Even in her sleeveless light pink linen dress, the girl was perspiring, and a seersucker jacket and silk tie were making Byron acutely uncomfortable.

Below, the Caterpillar marchers in green and yellow costumes — puffed sleeves and trunks, colored hose, feathered hats — were leaving the thronged cathedral square, waving great banners to cheers and applause from the crowd; and the red-and-black Owl company was coming in, repeating the same flag stunts: intertwining whorls, two flags flung pole and all in the air crisscrossing, flag-wavers leaping over each other’s poles while keeping their banners in fluid motion.

“Idiotic?” Natalie said. “I was just deciding it’s rather magical.”

“What is? They do the same things over and over. We’ve been here for hours. There’s still the Porcupine, the Eagle, the Giraffe, and the Forest to come and show off with their flags. I’m roasting.”

“Ah, Byron, it’s the liquid flow of color, don’t you see, and the faces of these young men. So help me, these people look more natural in medieval togs than in their workaday clothes. Don’t they? Look at those long straight noses, those deep-set sad big eyes! Maybe they’re really a remnant of the Etruscans, as they claim.”

“Six months of work,” Byron said. “Special buildings and churches for Unicorns, Porcupines, and Giraffes. Thousands of costumes, a whole week of nothing but ceremonies, general marching hither and yon, trumpeting and drumming and trial runs, and all for one crooked race of decrepit nags. In honor of the Virgin, no less.”

“Oh, beautiful,” Natalie exclaimed, as two Owl flags flew high in the air in crossing arcs, and the wavers caught them and whirled red-and-black arabesques to the applause of the crowd.

Byron went on, mopping his face, “I was in the Goose church today. They brought the horse right inside, up to the very altar to be blessed. I didn’t believe the books, but I saw it happen. The priest laid a crucifix on its nose. The horse had more sense than the people. He didn’t misbehave, but I guess that finished the Palio for me.”

Natalie glanced at him, amused. “Poor Briny. Italian Christianity really troubles your soul, doesn’t it? Leslie was right, you’re simply a Protestant.”

“Does a horse belong in a church?” Byron said.

The sun was low when the parade ended. In the short walk from the cathedral to the Piazza del Campo, Jastrow grew nervous. A thick crowd jostled down the narrow street, all in good humor, but shouting, gesturing, and hurrying between the high red-brown stone walls of the old palazzos. More than once the little professor stumbled and tottered. He clung to Byron’s arm. “Do you mind? I’ve always had a slight fear of crowds. People mean no harm, but somehow they don’t notice me.” They halted in a crush at a low arch and slowly squeezed through.

“Good gracious,” Jastrow said as they emerged on the earth of the race track. “The piazza’s transformed!”

“They’ve been working on it for weeks,” Byron said. “I told you.”

Siena’s main piazza was one of the sights of Italy. The forgotten town planners of the Middle Ages had designed a memorably beautiful open space, hemmed in by a semi-circular sweep of reddish palazzos and the imposing, almost straight façade of the fourteenth-century town hall; all overarched by the blue sky of Tuscany, and pierced heavenward by the red stone bell tower of the town hall, more than three hundred fifty feet high. All year round the vast shell-shaped space was empty except for market stalls and scattered foot traffic; and the ancient buildings that ringed it seemed abandoned or asleep.

Today, in the golden light of a late afternoon sun, it was a sea for people, surging and roaring inside a ring of wooden barriers. Between these barriers and the palazzo walls lay a track of earth, and against the walls were steep banks of temporary benches. Faces crowded at every window of every building around the piazza; flags and rich hangings decorated the palazzos. The benches were jammed; all the roofs were jammed; the great central space looked full, and yet from half a dozen narrow streets people were streaming across the track and jamming themselves in. The parade was now going around the track of earth, and all the contrade at once were doing the flag whorls, the flings, the arabesques to continuous plaudits of the throng and the cacophonous blare of many brass bands.

Byron led the way to their seats, still holding Jastrow’s thin arm. “Well, hasn’t the archbishop done us proud!” said the professor, as they settled on a narrow, splintery plank, directly below the judges’ stand. “One couldn’t have a better view of the thing.” He laughed without reason, obviously feeling better out of the press of bodies.

“See the mattresses?” said Natalie gaily. “There they are, down at the corners.”

“Oh, yes. My lord, what an extraordinary business.”

The noise of the crowd rose into a general cheer. A wooden cart, drawn by four white Tuscan oxen with giant curved horns, was entering the track surrounded by marchers in rich costume. On a tall pole in the cart swayed the Palio. “Why, it’s an Assumption,” said Jastrow, peering through small binoculars at the narrow painted cloth. “Naïve, but not bad at all.”

Around the piazza the cart slowly rolled, with helmeted policemen behind it driving the crowd from the track, while sweepers cleared up papers and trash. By now the paved square was one dense mass of white shirts, colored dresses, and dark heads, bringing out the half-moon shape of the track, and its danger. The red palazzos sloped downward to the town hall, where a straight street sliced off the broad curve. Heavy mattresses padded the outer barriers at these sharply cut corners. Even at the trial runs, Byron and Natalie had seen horses thud against the mattresses and knock their jockeys senseless.

The sunset light on the façade of the Palazzo Pubblico, the town hall, was deepening to a blood color. The rest of the piazza was in shadow, and a heavy bell was tolling in the tower. From the town hall a long fanfare sounded. The crowd fell quiet. Trumpets struck up the old Palio march that had been echoing all week in Siena’s streets. Out of the palazzo courtyard trotted the caparisoned racehorses with their flamboyantly costumed jockeys.

Natalie Jastrow’s fingers slid into Byron’s and clasped them, and for a moment she put her cheek, cool, bony, and yet soft, against his. “Idiotic. Briny?” she murmured.

He was too delighted with the contact to answer.

The starting line was directly in front of them, and behind them, above the judges’ stand, the Palio hung on its pole, stirring in a cool breeze blowing across the great amphitheatre. An ancient contraption of wood and rope controlled the start. To line up the dancing, overwrought animals inside the ropes proved almost impossible. The harried creatures capered in and out, they turned, reared, stumbled, and broke away twice in false starts. At last the ten horses went thudding off in a pack, with the jockeys clubbing wildly at the creatures and at each other. A yell rose above the steady roar, as two horses went down at the first set of mattresses. After that Byron lost track of the race. While he watched an unconscious jockey being dragged off the dirt, another wild yell of the crowd told of more mishaps, which he couldn’t see. The pack came racing by in a club-waving dirt-flying jumble, strung out over five or six lengths. A riderless horse galloped well up among them, dripping foam, its reins dangling.

“Can a riderless horse win?” Jastrow shouted at Byron.

A man in the row below him turned up a fat warty red face with pointed moustaches and popping yellow eyes. “Si, si. Riderless is scosso, meestair, scosso. Viva Bruco! Scosso!”

When the pack came past the judges’ box a second time, the riderless horse was clearly in the lead, and Byron could see its Caterpillar colors and emblems.

“Scosso!” the warty red face turned and bellowed happily at Dr. Jastrow, exhaling heavy odors of garlic and wine, and two fists waved at him. “See, Meestair? Whoo! Bruco! Cater-peel-air, meestair!”

“Yes, indeed, just so,” said Jastrow, shrinking a bit against Byron.

The noise in the piazza swelled to a general mad scream as the horses went round for the third and last time, with the surviving jockeys frantically beating their nags to make them overtake the riderless Bruco horse. They came past the finish in a shower of dirt, a maze of bobbing straining heads and flailing jockeys’ arms. The riderless horse, its eyes rolling redly, was still barely in front.

“Bruco!” screamed the warty man, leaping a couple of feet in the air. “Scosso! Scosso! Ha ha!” He turned to Jastrow with a maniacal laugh, and vividly gestured that the horse was drugged by pumping a huge imaginary hypodermic needle into his arm. “Bravissimo! WHOO!” He clattered down the narrow aisle to the track, ran on to the dirt, and vanished in the swarm boiling out of the seats and over the barriers. The track was full on the instant with people milling, yelling, waving arms, jumping and beating their breasts. Here and there in the mob were the bobbing plumed heads of the horses. On the track before the judges’ stand, a dozen white-shirted young men were beating an unhelmeted jockey, on his knees in the dirt, holding up both arms in a plea for mercy. They jockey’s face was welling bright blood.

“My Lord, what’s going on there?” Jastrow quavered.

“Somebody failed to doublecross,” Byron said, “or else he triplecrossed.”

“I suppose” — Jastrow put a trembling hand to his beard — “this is the part the archbishop warned us about. “Perhaps we had better leave, and—”

Byron slammed an arm across his chest. “Not now. Sit right where you are, sir, and don’t move. You too, Natalie.”

A squad of young men, with yellow-and-green Caterpillar scarves around their necks, came driving through the mob straight for the judges’ stand. They trampled up the benches past Jastrow, led by a pallid youngster streaming blood from his forehead. Byron held two protecting arms in front of the girl and Jastrow as the bloody-faced one seized the pole. The whole squad roared, cheered, and came thundering back down the benches with the banner.

“Now!” Byron took the hands of the other two. “Come.”

The excited Sienese, as well as the tourists, were prudently making way for the triumphant Caterpillars. Moving right behind them, with one arm around the girl and another around Jastrow, Byron got through the archway into the main lower street of the town. But here the mob eddied in behind the Palio and its triumphant escort and engulfed them, crushing uphill toward the cathedral.

“Oh, Lord,” Natalie said. “We’re in for it now. Hang on to Aaron.”

“Dear me. I’m afraid I didn’t bargain for this,” gasped Jastrow, fumbling at his hat and his glasses with one free hand. The other was pinned in Byron’s grip. “My feet are scarcely touching the ground, Byron.”

“That’s okay. Don’t fight them, sir, just go along. At the first side street this jam will ease up. Take it easy -”

A convulsive, panicky surge of the crowd at this moment tore the professor out of Byron’s grasp. Behind them sounded the clatter of hoofs on stone, wild neighs and whinnies, and shouts of alarm. The crowd melted around Byron and Natalie, fleeing from a plunging horse. It was the winner, the Caterpillar animal. A brawny young man in green and yellow, his wig awry and sliding, was desperately trying to control the animal, but as it reared again, a flailing front hoof caught him full in the face. He fell bloodied to the ground, and the horse was free. It danced, reared, and screamed, plunging forward, and the crowd shrank away. As Byron pulled Natalie into a doorway out of the retreating mob, Aaron Jastrow emerged in the clear street without his glasses, stumbled, and fell in the horse’s path.

Without a word to Natalie, Byron ran out into the street and snatched Jastrow’s big yellow hat off his head. He waved the hat in the horse’s face, crouching, watching the hoofs. The creature neighed wildly, shied against a palazzo wall, stumbled and lost its footing, then recovered and reared, flailing its forelegs at Byron, who waved the hat again, staying watchfully just out of range. The horse pranced about on two legs, rolling bloodshot mad eyes, foaming at the mouth. Half a dozen men in Caterpillar costumes now came running up the street, and four of them seized the reins, dragged the horse down, and began to quiet him. The others picked up their injured comrade. People from the crowd darted out and helped Jastrow get up. Natalie ran to his side. Men surrounded Byron, slapping his shoulder and shouting in Italian as he made his way to Jastrow. “Here’s your hat, sir.”

“Oh, thank you, Byron. My glasses, you haven’t seen them, have you? I suppose they’re shattered. Well, I have another pair at the villa.” The professor was blinking blindly, but he acted rather excited and cheerful. “Goodness, what a commotion. What happened? I was pushed down, I guess. I heard a horse clattering about, but I couldn’t see a thing.”

“He’s all right,” Natalie said to Byron, with a look straight into his eyes such as she had never before given him. “Thanks.”

“Dr. Jastrow, if you’re not too shaken up,” Byron said, taking his arm again, “we should go to the Caterpillar church for the thanksgiving service.”

“Oh, not at all,” Jastrow laughed. The moment of action seemed to have cleared his nerves. “In for a penny, in for a pound. I find all this rather exhilarating. On we go. Just hang on to me a little better, Byron. You were a bit derelict there for a minute.”

A week or so later, Natalie and Byron were at work in the library, with a summer thunderstorm beating outside at the darkened windows. Byron, happening to look up from a map when lightning flashed, saw Natalie staring at him, her face sombre in the lamplight.

“Byron, have you ever been to Warsaw?”

“No. Why?”

“Would you like to come there with me?”

With great willpower, choking back his joy, Byron summoned up the opaque dull look with which he had resisted twenty years of his father’s probing: “What would be the point?”

“Well, it’s probably worth seeing, don’t you think? Slote even says it’s rather old-world and gay. The thing is, Aaron’s getting difficult about my trip. You know that. I could just tell him to go to hell, but I’d rather not.”

Byron had heard the discussions. In the aftermath of the Palio, on learning how close he had come to getting injured or killed, Jastrow was having a spell of nerves. The American consul in Florence had come up after the Palio for a visit; following that, Jastrow’s glum mood had worsened. He kept insisting that the Foreign Service was getting worried over the Polish situation, and that Natalie’s proposed trip was now too risky.

Byron said, “Would my going make a difference?”

“Yes. You know what Aaron calls you behind your back now? That golden lad. He can’t get over what you did at the Palio.”

“You exaggerated it.”

“I did not. You showed striking presence of mind. I was impressed, and so was Aaron when he found out. The horse might have killed him. If I can tell him you’re coming, I bet he’ll stop grumbling.”

“Your friend Slote might take a dim view of my showing up with you.”

Natalie said with a grim little smile, “I’ll handle Leslie Slote. All right?”

“I’ll think about it,” Byron said.

“If you need money, I’ll be glad to lend you some.”

“Oh, I’ve got money. As a matter of fact, Natalie, there’s not all that much to think about. I guess I’ll come along. With Jastrow off in Greece, this will be a dismal place.”

“Bless your heart.” She gave him a delighted smile. “We’ll have fun. I’ll see to that.”

“What happens after Warsaw?” Byron said. “Will you come back here?”

“I guess so, if the consul doesn’t persuade Aaron to go home meantime. He’s really working on him. And you, Briny?”

“Well, maybe I will too,” Byron said. “I’m at loose ends.”

That night at dinner, when he heard the news, Dr. Jastrow ordered up a bottle of champagne. “Byron, I can’t tell you what a load you’ve taken off my mind! This headstrong girl doesn’t know how wild and backward Poland is. I do. From what my relatives write me, it hasn’t improved one iota since I left there forty-five years ago. And the situation really is unstable. The villain with the moustache is making nasty noises, and we must look for the worst. However, there’s bound to be some warning. My mind is much more at ease now. You’re a capable young man.”

“You talk as though I were some kind of idiot,” Natalie said, sipping champagne.

“You are a girl. It’s something you have trouble remembering. You were that way as a child, climbing trees and fighting boys. Well, I’ll be here alone, then. But I won’t mind that.”

“Won’t you be in Greece, sir?” Byron said.

“I’m not so sure.” Jastrow smiled at their puzzled looks. “It’s some clumsiness about my passport. I let it lapse, and not being native-born, but naturalized through my father’s naturalization, it turns out there’s a bit of red tape involved in renewing it. Especially since I haven’t been back in nine years. The problem may or may not be unraveled by the end of August. If it isn’t I’ll just take the trip next spring.”

“That’s something you should certainly straighten out,” Byron said.

“Oh, of course. These things used to be simple, the consul says. But since the flood of refugees from Hitler began, the rules have tightened up. Well, Briny, so you and Natalie will be off to Warsaw in a few weeks! I couldn’t be more pleased, and I’m sure she can use a chaperone.”

“Go climb a tree, Aaron,” Natalie said, turning pink, and her uncle laughed at her, his first wholehearted laugh in a week.

“I hope you’ll manage to meet my cousin Berel,” Jastrow said to Byron. “I haven’t seen him since I left Poland, but we’ve usually exchanged three or four letters a year. Presence of mind has always been his strong point, too.

Chapter 6

Pamela drove Commander Henry and her father to Swinemünde. The train would have been faster, but Henry wanted to see the countryside and the small towns, and the Englishman was more than agreeable. One could almost get to like Germans, he said, if one stayed out of the cities.

Pug was appalled at the girl’s driving. She chauffeured the rented Mercedes around Berlin in docile conformity to the lights and the speed laws, but once on the autobahn she rocketed the needle to one hundred fifty kilometers an hour. Tudsbury chatted over the wind roar, paying little attention to the scenery blurring past.

He now thought there might be no war. The British were dealing seriously at last with the Russians about a military alliance. They were starting to turn out airplanes so much faster that regaining air parity, which they had lost in 1936, was in sight. Their pledge to Poland showed Hitler that this time Chamberlain meant business. The Nazi Party in Danzig had quieted down. Mussolini had flatly told Hitler (so Tudsbury’s inside information had it) that he was not ready to fight. The correspondent foresaw a respite of two or three years, during which the alarmed democracies would rearm faster than the Germans possibly could. The cornered dictator would eventually either fail, or start a war and be crushed, or very likely get assassinated.

“I can’t understand why somebody hasn’t shot him long ago, the way he shows himself. He bears a charm,” Tudsbury shouted, as the car careered out on the two-lane road to pass a long line of thundering trucks full of new gray-painted army tanks. Pug Henry clutched at an armrest, for another truck was approaching head on, swelling like a balloon; it went by in a howl and a screech half a second after Pamela whisked into her own lane between two trucks, brushing hair off her forehead with one relaxed little hand. “But the charm is based on success. It may lapse once he stops moving ahead. He’s murdered a lot of people on the way up. They all have relatives.”

Commander Grobke came to meet them at the base gate in a small car, which Tudsbury could barely squeeze into. Pamela roared off to a hotel, and Grobke took the two men for a long tour, by car and on foot, through the Swinemünde yard. It was a gray afternoon, with low black clouds threatening rain. The dank east wind off the Baltic felt pleasantly cool after the sultriness of Berlin. The flat, sandy, bleak seacoast base was much like New London, Victor Henry thought. If one ignored flags and signs, in fact, the naval facilities of big powers were hard to tell apart. They were all in the same business, imitating the British navy, which had first brought the industrial age to war at sea. The low black U-boats tied in clusters to the long piers or resting on blocks in dry docks; the smell of tar, hot metal, and seawater: the slow clank and screech of overhead cranes; the blaze of welding torches, the rattle of riveters; the flat or curved sections of steel, painted with yellow or red primer, swinging through the air: the gigantic open sheds; the mounds of piping, cables, timbers, and oil drums; the swarms of grease-blackened cheerful men in dirty coveralls, goggles, and hard hats; the half-finished hulls propped with timbers on rails slanting into dirty water — he might have been in Japan, France, Italy, or the United States. The differences that counted, the crucial numbers and performance characteristics, were not discernible.

He could see that the Germans were not changing the classic double hull of a submarine, and that, like the Americans, they were doing more welding. He would have liked to apply his pocket tape measure to a steel pressure hull section. The plate seemed thinner than in American submarines. If this were so, U-boats could probably not dive quite as deep, unless the Germans had developed a remarkably strong new alloy. But on such a visit one used one’s eye, not a camera or a tape measure.

A low sun broke out under the gray clouds, and the car cast an elongated shadow when Grobke stopped near the entrance gate at a dry dock where a U-boat rested on blocks. From one side of the dock a gangway with rails, and from the other a precarious long plank, slanted down to the submarine’s deck.

“Well, that’s the tour,” said Grobke. “This is my flagship. Since I cannot have you aboard, Tudsbury, much as I would like to, I suppose we all part company here.”

Henry picked up his cue from the German’s smile. “Look, let’s not stand on ceremony. If I can come aboard, I’ll come and Tudsbury won’t.”

“Good God, yes” said the Englishman. “I’ve no business here anyway.”

The U-boat commander spread his hands. “I don’t want to drive a wedge in Anglo-American friendship.”

A whistle blasted as they spoke, and workmen came trooping off the boats and docks, and out of the sheds. The road to the gate was soon thronged with them. They came boiling out of the U-boat, up the gangway. “The old navy yard hazard,” Henry said. “Run for your life at five o’clock, or they’ll trample you to death.”

Grobke laughed. “All civilians are the same.”

Tudsbury said, “Well, in my next broadcast I’ll have to say that the U-boat command is humming like damn all. I hope they’ll take notice in London.”

“Just tell them what you saw.” Grobke shook his hand through the car window. “We want to be friends. We know you have the greatest navy in the world. These silly little boats can do a lot of damage for their size, that’s all. One of my officers will drive you to your hotel.”

Since workmen were jamming the gangway, Grobke grinned at Henry, and pointed a thumb toward the plank on the other side of the dock. Pug nodded. The German with a gesture invited him to go first. It was a very long drop, something like seventy feet, to the greasy puddles in the concrete dock. Pug made his way around the rim and walked down the shaky paint-spotted plank, trying to look easier than he felt. Stolid eyes of side boys in white watched from below. As he set foot on deck, they snapped to attention. Grobke stepped off the rattling plank with a laugh. “Well done, for two old blokes.”

U-46 looked much like an American submarine, but the cleanliness, polish, and order were unusual. A United States ship in dry dock, with civilian workmen aboard, soon became squalid and dirty. No doubt Grobke had ordered a cleanup for the American visitor, which Pug appreciated, being himself a spit-and-polish tyrant. Even so, he had to admire the German display. The diesels looked as though they had never turned over, their red paint and brass fittings were unsullied by a grease spot, and the batteries seemed fresh from the factory. The sailors were starched pretty fellows, almost a crew for a nautical musical comedy. As for the U-boat design, when you took the essential spaces and machines of a war vessel and stuffed them into the sausage casing of one long tube, the result was the same in any country: change the instrument legends to English, move the captain’s cabin from port to starboard, add two feet to the wardroom, alter a few valve installations, and you were in the Grayling.

“Smells pretty good,” he said, as they passed the tiny galley, where cooks in white were preparing dinner and somehow managing to perspire neatly.

Grobke looked at him over his shoulder. “You wouldn’t care to eat aboard? It’s awfully cramped, but these chaps don’t eat too badly.’

Pug had a dinner appointment with the Tudsburys, but he said at once, “I’d be delighted.”

So he dined elbow to elbow with the captain and officers of the U-boat in the narrow wardroom. He enjoyed it. He was more at home here than in his silk-walled dining room in Berlin. The four young officers were thin-lipped, ruddy, blond, shy; like Americans in their features, but with a different look around the eyes, more intense and wary. They sat silent at first, but soon warmed to the American’s compliments about the boat, and the joking of Grobke, who got into an excellent mood over the food and wine, Stories passed about the stupidity and laziness of navy yard workmen. One of Pug’s best yarns, an incident of crossed-up toilet plumbing on the West Virginia brought uproarious laughter. He had noticed before the German taste for bathroom humor. The officers told tales which they considered comic, of their early training: first about the cleaning of latrines, then of electric shocks to which they had had to submit without flinching while their reactions were filmed; exposure to cold and heat past the point of collapse; knee bends until they dropped; the “Valley of Death” cross-country run up and down hillsides, wearing seventy-pound loads and gas masks. An officer emerged the better, they said, from such ordeals. Only Grobke disagreed. That Prussian sadism was old-fashioned, he asserted. In war at sea, initiative was more important than the blind submission that the ordeals implanted. “The Americans have the right idea,” he said, either because he sensed that Pug was shocked, or out of maverick conviction. They feasted on cabbage soup, boiled fresh salmon, roast pork, potato dumplings, and gooseberry torten. Obviously Grobke had ordered up this banquet on the chance that Pug might stay.

Streaks of red sunset showed through the black rain when Henry and Grobke left the submarine. On the dock some crewmen, naked except for trunks, were wrestling inside a cheering circle, on gray mats laid over the crane tracks. Henry had seen everywhere this love of young Germans for hard horseplay. They were like healthy pups, and these U-boat men looked stronger and healthier than American sailors.

“So, Henry, I suppose you join your English friend now?”

“Not if you have any better ideas.”

The German slapped him on the shoulder. “Good! Come along.”

They drove out through the gate. “Damn quiet after five o’clock,” said Pug.

“Oh, yes. Dead. Always.”

Pug lit a cigarette. “I understand the British are working two and three shifts now in their yards.”

Grobke gave him an odd look. “I guess they make up for lost time.”

A couple of miles from the base, amid green fields near the water, they drove into rows of wooden cottages. “Here’s where my daughter lives,” Grobke said, ringing a doorbell. A fresh-faced young blonde woman opened the door. Three children, recognizing Grobke’s ring, ran and pounced on the paper-wrapped hard candies he handed out. The husband was at sea on maneuvers. On an upright piano in the tiny parlor stood his picture: young, long-jawed, blond, stern. “It’s good Paul is at sea,” Grobke said. “He thinks I spoil the kids,” and he proceeded to toss them and romp with them until they lost their bashfulness in the presence of the American, and ran around laughing and shrieking. The mother tried to press coffee and cake on the guests, but Grobke stopped her.

“The commander is busy. I just wanted to see the children. Now we go.”

As they got into the car, looking back at a window where three little faces peered out at him, he said: It’s not much of a house. Not like your mansion in the Grunewald! It’s just a cracker box. The German pay scale isn’t like the American. I thought you’d be interested to see how they live. He’s a good U-boat officer and they’re happy. He’ll have a command in two years. Right away if there’s war. But there won’t be war. Not now.”

“I hope not.”

“I know. There is not going to be war over Poland. So? Back to Swinemünde?”

“I guess so.”

As they drove into the small coastal town, Pug said, “Say, I could stand a beer. How about you? Is there a good place?”

“Now you’re talking! There’s nothing fancy, not in this boring town, but I can take you where the officers hang out. Isn’t Tudsbury expecting you?”

“He’ll survive.”

“Yes. Englishmen are good at that.” Grobke laughed with transparent pleasure at keeping the American naval attaché from the famous correspondent.

Young men in turtleneck sweaters and rough jackets sat at long tables in the dark, smoky, timbered cellar, bellowing a song to concertina accompaniment played by a strolling fat man in a leather apron. “Jesus Christ, I have drunk a lot of beer in this place, Henry,” said Grobke. They sat at a small side table under an amber lamp. Pug showed him pictures of Warren, Byron, and Madeline. After a couple of beers, he told of his worry over Warren’s involvement with an older woman. Grobke chuckled. “Well, things I did when I was a young buck! The main this is, he’ll be an aviator. Not as good as a submariner, but the next best thing, ha ha! He looks like a smart lad. He’ll settle down.”

Pug joined in a song he recognized. He had no ear and sang badly off-key. This struck Grobke as hilarious. “I swear to God, Victor,” he said, wiping his eyes after a fit of laughter, “could anything be crazier than all this talk of war? I tell you, if you left it to the navy fellows on both sides it could never happen. We’re all decent fellows, we understand each other, we all want the same things out of life. It’s the politicians. Hitler is a great man and Roosevelt is a great man, but they’ve both been getting some damn lousy advice. But there’s one good thing. Adolf Hitler is smarter than all the politicians. There’s not going to be any war over Poland.” He drained his thick glass stein and banged it to attract a passing barmaid. “Geben Sie gut Acht auf den Osten,” he said, winking and dropping his voice. “Watch the east! There’s something doing in the east.”

The barmaid clacked on the table two foaming steins from clusters in her hands. Grobke drank and passed the back of his hand over his mouth. “Suppose I tell you that I heard the Führer himself address the senior U-boat command and tell them there would be no war? You want to report that back to Washington? Go ahead, it happens to be true. You think he’ll start a war against England with seventy-four operational U-boats? When we have three hundred, that’ll be a different story, and then England will think twice about making trouble. And in eighteen months, that’s exactly what we’ll have. Meantime watch the east.”

“Watch the east?” Victor Henry said in a wondering tone.

“Aha, you’re a little curious? I have a brother in the foreign ministry. Watch the east! We’re not going to be fighting, Henry, not this year, I promise you. So what the hell? We live one year at a time, no? Come on, I have a tin ear like you, but we’ll sing!”

Victor Henry sat with his old portable typewriter on his knees, in the rosewood-panelled library. The magnificent antique desk was too high for comfortable typing; and anyway, the machine scratched the red leather top. It was not yet four in the morning, but the stars were gone, blue day showed in the garden, and birds sang. White paper, yellow paper, and carbons lay raggedly around him. The room was cloudy with smoke. He had been typing since midnight. He stopped, yawning. In the kitchen he found a cold chicken breast, which he ate with a glass of milk while he heated a third pot of coffee. He returned to the library, gathered up the top pages of his report to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and began reading.

The next five pages contained ten-year figures — contradicting many intelligence reports he had read — of German factory production, of the expansion of industry, and of the output of machines and materials. He drew heavily on his own reading and inquiries. He presented comparisons of French, British, and German gross national products and of strength on land, sea, and in the air, during this decade. These numbers indicated — as he marshalled them — that Germany remained inferior in every aspect of war-making, except for her air force; and that she was not pushing her industrial plant very hard to catch up. Contrary to popular opinion all over the world, there was no feverish piling of arms. This emerged by a comparison of plant capacity and output figures. He described in passing the desolate peace that fell over the Swinemünde navy yard at the usual quitting time. There was not even a second shift for constructing U-boats, the key to German sea warfare. He argued that the edge in the air would rapidly melt away with the present British speedup in making airplanes and buying them from the United States. As to land war, the swarming uniforms in the city streets were quite a show; but the figures proved that France alone could put a larger, longer trained, and better equipped army in the field.

On a U-boat, passing through the squadron’s tiny flag office, he had seen scrawled on the outside of a mimeographed report some figures and abbreviations that he thought meant: operational, 51 — at sea, 6; in port, 40; overhaul, 5. These figures met the intelligence evaluations of the British and the French. Grobke had claimed seventy-four operational boats, a predictable overestimate when talking big to a foreign intelligence officer. But even exaggerating, Grobke had not gone as high as a hundred. Fifty U-boats were almost certainly the undersea strength of Nazi Germany, give or take five, with perhaps only thirteen under construction. In 1918 alone Germany had lost more than a hundred U-boats.

Then came the crucial paragraph, which he had typed with many pauses, and which he anxiously read over and over.

What follows gets into prognostication, and so may be judged frivolous or journalistic. However, the impression that this observer has formed points so strongly to a single possibility, that it seems necessary to record the judgment. All the evidence indicates to me that Adolf Hitler is at this time negotiating a military alliance with the Soviet Union.

Arguing in support of his idea, Victor Henry alluded to the Rapallo Treaty of 1922, when the Bolsheviks and the Germans had stunned a European economic conference by suddenly going off and making a separate deal of broad scope. He pointed out that the present German ambassador in Moscow, Schulenburg, was a Rapallo man. Litvinov, Russia’s Jewish pro-Western foreign minister, had recently fallen. Hitler in two speeches had left out his usual attacks on Bolshevism. A Russo-German trade agreement had been in the news, but suddenly the papers had dropped all mention of it. He cited, too, the remark of a man high in the U-boat command, “Watch the east. Something’s happening in the east. I have a brother in the foreign ministry.” And he cited Hitler’s pledge to the U-boat officers that there would be no war over Poland.

None of this, he acknowledged, added up to hard intelligence, nor did it impress the professionals at the embassy. There were always, they said, rumors of theatrical surprises. They insisted on sticking to basic facts. The Nazi movement was built on fear and hate of Bolshevism and a pledge to destroy it. The whole theme of Mein Kampf was conquest of “living room” for Germany in the southeast provinces of Russia. A military reconciliation between the two systems was unthinkable. Hitler would never propose it. If he did, Stalin, assuming that it was a trick, would never accept it. The words Henry had encountered most often were “fantasy” and “melodrama.”

He maintained, nevertheless, that the move not only made sense, but was inevitable. Hitler was far out on a limb in his threats against Poland. A dictator could not back down. Yet his combat readiness for a world war was marginal. Probably to avoid alarming the people, he had not even put his country on a war production basis, contrary to all the lurid blustering propaganda of “cannon instead of butter.” Despite this tough talk of Nazi politicians and newspapers, the man in the street did not want a war, and Hitler knew that. A Russian alliance was a way out of the dilemma. If Russia gave the Germans a free hand in Poland, the English guarantee would become meaningless. Neither the French nor the British could possibly come to Poland’s aid in time to avert a quick conquest. Therefore the Poles would not fight. They would yield the city of Danzig and the extraterritorial road across the Polish corridor, which was all Hitler was demanding. Maybe later, as in the case of Czechoslovakia, he would move in and take the rest of Poland, but not now.

Victor Henry argued that the sudden reversal of alliances was an old European stratagem, especially characteristic of German and Russian diplomacy. He cited many instances, fresh from his heavy history reading. He pointed out that Hitler himself had come to power in the first place through a sharp reversal of political lines, a deal with his worst enemy Franz von Papen.

Fully clothed, he fell asleep on the red leather couch, with the report and two carbon copies tucked inside his shirt, after shredding the sheets of carbon paper into the wastebasket. His slumber was restless and brief. When his eyes popped wide open again, the sun was sending weak red rays through the treetops. He showered, dressed, read the report again, and walked five miles from the Grunewald to the Wilhelmstrasse, turning the document over in his mind. Compared to Tollever’s reports, which he had studied, it was a presumptuous discussion of grand strategy, far beyond his competence and his position: the sort of “Drew Pearson column” against which the Chief of Naval Operations himself had warned him. On the other hand, it seemed to him factual. He had already sent in a number of technical reports like Kip’s papers. He intended to write one on Swinemünde. Combat Readiness of Nazi German was a jump into the dark.

In War College seminars, instructors had poked fun at “global masterminding” by officers below flag rank. The question was, now that the paper was written, should he send it or forget it? Pug Henry had written and destroyed many such documents. He had a tendency to reach beyond routine. The result could be good or disastrous. His unsolicited memorandum on battleship blisters had knocked him out of overdue sea duty and landed him in Berlin. That report, at least, had been within his professional sphere as an ordnance man. In diplomacy and grand strategy he was a naïve newcomer. Colonel Forrest knew Germany well and he had waved aside Henry’s suggestion as nonsense. Pug had ventured to talk to the chargé d’affaires, whose only comment had a subtle smile.

A Foreign Service courier was flying to England at 10 A.M., to board the New York-bound Queen Mary. The document could be on CNO’s desk in a week.

Henry arrived at the embassy still undecided, with not much more than a half hour in which to make up his mind. Except for Rhoda, there was nobody whose advice he could ask. Rhoda liked to sleep late. If he called her now, he would probably wake her, and even then could scarcely describe the report on the German telephone. But would Rhoda in any case offer a judgment worth having. He thought not. It was up to him — the courier, or the burn basket.

He sat at his desk in the high-ceilinged, cluttered office sipping coffee, looking out across Hermann Göring Strasse at Hitler’s monumental new chancellery of pink marble. The sentry guards were changing: eight helmeted black-clad heavy SS men marching up, eight others marching away to a drum and fife. Through the open windows he heard the ritual orders in shrill German, the squeal of the fife, the scraping tramp of the big black boots.

Victor Henry decided that his job was intelligence, and that for better or worse this report told truly what he had seen so far in Nazi Germany. He hunted up the courier and gave him the document for urgent delivery to the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Admiral Preble read Combat Readiness of Nazi Germany a week later, and sent one page of extracts to the President. The Nazi-Soviet pact broke on the world on the twenty-second of August, as one of the most stunning surprises in all history. On the twenty-fourth Preble received the page back in an envelope from the White House. The President had scrawled at the bottom, in strong thick pen strokes in black ink:

Chapter 7

The announcement of the pact shrieked at Byron and Natalie from the news placards in the Rome airport. They had set out from Siena before dawn in an old Renault, and while the whole world was chattering about the astounding news, they had innocently driven down along the Apennines in golden Italian sunlight amid old mountain towns, wild airy gorges and green valleys where peasants worked their fields. With Natalie Jastrow at his side for a three-week journey that was only starting, Byron was in the highest of spirits, until he saw the bulletins.

He had never found a European airport so busy or so noisy. Gesticulating travellers were besieging the reservation desks. Nearly everybody was either walking fast or running, and sweaty porters wheeling heaps of luggage were snarling at passengers and at each other. The loudspeaker never stopped its thunderous echoing drivel. At the first kiosk, he bought a sheaf of papers. The Italian papers shrilled that this great diplomatic coup by the Axis had ended the war danger. The headlines of the Paris and London newspapers were big, black, and frightened. The German press giggled coarse delight in tall red block letters. The front page of a Swiss newspaper caricatured Hitler and Göring in Russian blouses and fur hats, squatting and kicking out their boots, to the music of a concertina played by Stalin in an SS uniform. Across a Belgian front page, the stark headline was

In a crowded, buzzing airport restaurant, while they ate a hasty lunch of cannelloni and cold white wine, Natalie astonished him by talking of going on. To proceed into a country that might soon be invaded by Germans struck Byron as almost mad.

But Natalie argued that the tourists milling in the airport were mere sheep. If a sudden political change could panic them, they had no right to be in Europe. She had stayed in Paris through the Munich crisis. Half of her American friends had fled, and later had straggled back — those who had not felt too silly. There was always less danger than most people thought. Even in a war, an American passport spelled safety. She wanted to see Poland. She wanted to see Leslie Slote and had given her promise. She would be in and out of Poland in three weeks. The world wasn’t going to end in three weeks.

It did not cheer Byron to perceive how much she wanted to rejoin Slote. Since the Palio, he had hoped that she was warming to himself. The girl had been downright affectionate during the second Palio, which they had watched without Jastrow, and at one point in the evening — when they were well into a third bottle of Soave at dinner after the race — she had remarked that it was too bad he wasn’t a few years older, and a Jew. “My mother would take to you, Briny,” she had said. “My troubles would be over. You have good manners. You must have lovely parents. Leslie Slote is nothing but an ambitious, self-centered dog. I’m not even sure he loves me. He and I just fell in a hole.”

But now she was on her way to her lover, and a political explosion that had staggered Europe made no difference to her.

By now he knew something of her rash streak. Climbing on mountainsides or ruins, Natalie Jastrow took unladylike chances. She leaped gaps, she teetered along narrow ledges, she scrambled up bare rocks, careless alike of her modesty and her neck. She was a strong, surefooted girl, and a little too pleased with herself about it.

He sat slouched in his chair, contemplating her across the red and white checked cloth, the dirty dishes, the empty wineglasses. The Alitalia plane was departing for Zagreb on the first leg of their flight in little more than an hour. She stared back, her lips pushed out in a wry pout. Her dark gray travelling suit was sharply tailored over her pretty bosom. She wore a black crushable hat and a white shirt. Her ringless fingers beat on the cloth. “Look,” she said, “I can well understand that for you it’s no longer a gay excursion. So I’ll go on by myself.”

“I suggest you telephone Slote first. Ask him if you should come.”

Natalie drummed her fingers. “Nonsense, I’ll never get a call through to Warsaw today.”

“Try.”

“All right,” she snapped. “Where are the damned telephones?”

The long-distance office was mobbed. Two switchboard girls were shouting, plugging, unplugging, scrawling, waving their hands, and wiping sweat from their brows. Byron cut through the crowd, pulling Natalie by the hand. When she gave the operator a number in Warsaw, the girl’s sad huge brown eyes widened. “Signorina — Warsaw? Why don’t you ask me to ring President Roosevelt? It’s twelve hours’ delay to Warsaw.”

“That’s the number of the American embassy there,” Byron said, smiling at her, “and it’s life and death.”

He had an odd, thin-lipped smile, half-melancholy, half-gay, and the Italian girl warmed to it as to an offered bunch of violets. “American embassy? I can try.”

She plugged, rang, argued in German and Italian, made faces at the mouthpiece, and argued some more. “Urgent, emergency,” she kept shouting. This went on for ten minutes or more, while Byron smoked and Natalie paced and kept looking at her watch. With a surprised look, the operator all at once nodded violently, pointing to a booth. Natalie stayed inside a long time, and came out red-faced and scowling. “We were cut off before we finished. I’m choking to death. Let’s get some air.” Byron brought her out into the terminal. “He got angry with me. He told me I was insane. The diplomats are burning papers… . It was an awfully good connection. He might have been around the corner.”

“I’m sorry. Natalie, but it’s what I expected.”

“He said I should get the hell out of Italy and go straight home, with or without Aaron. Is that what you’d have told me?” She turned on him. “I’m so hot! Buy me lemonade or something.”

They sat at a little table outside an airport café. She said, “Let’s see the plane tickets.”

“I’m sure we can get refunds.” He handed her the envelope.

She extracted her ticket and gave the envelope back. “You get a refund. They burned papers before Munich, too. England and France will fold up now just the way they did then. Imagine a world war over Danzig! Who the hell knows where Danzig is? Who cares?”

“Natalie. That embassy will be swamped. You won’t see much of him.”

“Well, if he’s too busy for me, I’ll do my sightseeing alone. My family lived in Warsaw for years. I still have relatives there. I want to see it. I’m on my way and I’m not turning back.” The girl looked in her pocketbook mirror and jammed her hat further down on her head. “It must be about time for me to check in.”

He held out his hand. “Give me the ticket. I’ll check both of us in while you have your lemonade.”

She brightened, but looked suspicious. “Are you sure you want to go? You needn’t, honestly. I’m releasing you. Don’t come. I don’t want you. Tell Aaron I said that.

“Oh shut up, Natalie. Let’s have the ticket.”

She gave him a playful smile, clutching the green and yellow ticket to her bosom. “Well! Listen to Briny Henry being masterful. The thing is, darling, if anything does go wrong, I don’t ever want to feel I dragged you into trouble.” This was the first time Natalie Jastrow had — however casually — used a term of endearment to him. Byron stood up and pulled the ticket from her gloved hand.

The scheduled eight-hour trip lasted a day and a half. No connections worked. Their baggage vanished. They spent the night on benches in the Budapest terminal. At Warsaw, they were the only foreigners arriving at the small field in the nearly empty, rusty, shabby LOT plane, which turned right around and took off jam-packed with people fleeing Poland. Disconsolate travellers crowded the fence and watched it go.

A beefy young Pole in an olive uniform, speaking broken French, asked the two Americans many hostile questions and seemed to regard them as spies or lunatics. He confiscated their passports, muttered with other officials, told them to wait, and disappeared. They were famished, but the throng of refugees in the canteen, mostly Germans, sitting on luggage, squatting on the floor, or crowding every bench and chair, had long since eaten up all the food. Byron pounced on a couple of seats vacated for a moment. Bottles of warm Polish beer stood in the center of the table, with an opener and some glasses, so they drank warm beer and paid the waiter who came swooping down. Then Byron found a telephone and talked the waiter into calling the embassy. Slote was shocked to hear his voice. He appeared at the airport within the hour, chewing nervously on his cold pipe, in a shiny blue Chevrolet that prompted stares. Out came not only the passports, with various entry documents badly printed in purple ink on crude paper, but their luggage too, mysteriously rescued from the Balkans. They piled into the embassy car and set off for the city.

Natalie looked trim and pert after a last grooming in the ladies’ lounge — the size of a telephone booth, she said, with one cold water tap, and no seat on the single toilet bowl. “Does this continue, Leslie?” she said. “I mean, this is the airport of the capital of Poland! The further east we’ve come, the smaller the airports have gotten, the more loused-up the schedules, the worse the airplanes, the surlier the officials, the cruder the johns, and the rougher the toilet paper. I’m not sure my bottom would survive a trip to Russia.”

“Well, eastern Europe is another world, Natalie. And you’re seeing it at a bad time. This little airport’s usually deserted and half asleep. However” — he jabbed the stem of his pipe toward her — “if you choose to go on a trip during a time of general mobilization -”

“Here it comes, Briny,” she said, her eyes full of amusement.

Slote reached a caressing hand, with a large blue-gemmed college ring, to her face. The easy intimate gesture hurt Byron’s eyes, signalling the end of his exclusive (if unheated) possession of the girl’s company. He slumped glumly in the back seat. I’m thrilled to see you, though you’re stark mad,” Slote said. “Things are looking much better tonight. England finally signed her guarantee to Poland, just today. The betting was that the pact with Russia would make her crawfish. Nothing of the sort. There’s reliable word from Sweden that Hitler’s calling off his invasion. The English knocked his breath out, that’s unmistakable.”

“Where are you putting us? A place with bathtubs, I hope.”

“It’s no problem. In the past three days the hotels have emptied. The Europeiski has some luxurious rooms, quite Western, really, and at Eastern prices. Don’t figure on staying long. The situation can still turn sour overnight.”

“I thought maybe a week,” Natalie said. “Then Byron and I can fly or drive down to Cracow and visit Medzice, and then fly on back to Rome.”

“Great bloody Christ, what are you talking about? Medzice! Just forget it, Natalie!”

“Why should I? Uncle Aaron said I should visit the family in Medzice. That’s where we’re all from. My gosh, this is flat country. Flat as a table.”

They were driving through fields of sweet-smelling grain, interspersed with pastures where cows and horses grazed. Far, far ahead on the level plain, the buildings of Warsaw dimly rose.

“Exactly, and that’s Poland’s curse. It’s a soccer field, a hundred thousand square miles in size. Fine for invasions. Even the low mountains along the south have nice wide easy passes. Half a million German soldiers are in Czechoslovakia at this moment, poised at the Jablunka pass, forty miles from Medzice. Now do you understand?”

Natalie made a face at him.

Warsaw was much calmer than Rome. In lamplit twilight, well-dressed crowds, heavily sprinkled with uniforms, were happily promenading on the broad avenues, eating ice cream, smoking, chatting. The green parks were thronged with jocund children. Bright red buses went by with side placards advertising a movie; the name SHIRLEY TEMPLE stood out from Polish words. Splashy billboards touted German toothpastes, radios, and hair tonic. The long rows of four-story gray or brown buildings, the boulevards running into great squares flamboyant with statues, bordered by baroque official buildings or palaces, the electric signs beginning to flash and dance — all this made Byron think of Paris and London. It was strange to find such a metropolis at the end of the primitive air journey. The Europeiski Hotel had a lobby as ornate as any he had seen, with a massive brown-and-white marble staircase jutting down to the front door.

Natalie went up in the elevator. Slote detained Byron by touching his arm, then lit his pipe with harried flaming puffs. To Byron, seeing him after a lapse of many months, the Foreign Service man appeared impossibly old for Natalie: bespectacled, baggy-eyed, with marked lines in his lean sallow cheeks. A double-breasted chalk-striped dark suit emphasized his stodgy mature air, and he appeared shorter than Byron remembered.

“I wish I had time to buy you a drink,” Slote said. “I’d like to talk to you. This Cracow trip is dangerous nonsense. I’m going to get you air reservations out of here as soon as I can. They must be booked solid for a week, but the embassy has some pull. If it takes both of us to put her bodily on a plane back to Rome, it’s got to be done. Don’t tell her tonight, though. She’ll become unmanageable.”

“Okay. You know her better than I do.”

Slote shook his head, laughing. “I wonder, at this point. I ought to be deeply touched by this cuckoo visit — and I am, of course I am — but Natalie Jastrow is too much for almost anybody. See you at dinner. The embassy’s a madhouse. If I can’t get away, I’ll telephone.”

Byron sat for a while in his cavernous gloomy room with tall windows facing the Bristol Hotel, wondering what the hell he was doing in Poland. He picked up the antique ivory-handled telephone, and with some haggling in German managed to get connected to Natalie’s room.

“Hello. Are you in the bathtub yet?”

“Well, I’m glad you can’t see me. What’s up?”

“I’m beat. You have dinner with Slote. I’m going to bed.”

“Stop that rubbish. You’re dining with us, Briny. Come and fetch me at nine, do you hear? Leslie has booked me into Paderewski’s suite, or something. It’s fantastic. I’ve got a full-length mirror here, held by two big brown wooden angels.”

“This way,” Slote said. “Our table’s ready.”

An orchestra in gold-frogged red coats was thumping old jazz tunes in the main dining room of the Bristol, which for size, silk hangings, white linen, gilt-and-crystal chandeliers, obsequiousness of waiters, fine dress of the thronging customers, and ineptness on the dance floor, might have been in any first-class hotel in Europe. Certainly there was no trace of a war scare.

“Sorry I’m late. It’s the Jews,” Slote apologized when they sat down. “They’re storming the embassy. We’ve all become visa officers, right on up to Biddle. Christ knows I don’t blame them. If they can show a relative, a friend, a letter, anything, we process them. A New York telephone book, today in Warsaw, is worth a hundred zlotys, that’s about twenty dollars.”

“That puzzled me,” Natalie said. “I understood Warsaw was full Jews. I’ve seen very few so far.”

“Oh, they’re here, all right. A third of this city’s Jewish.” At this point, a tailcoated, bowing headwaiter brought a menu, and Slote had a long colloquy with him in Polish. Natalie listened with an admiring, envious look.

“Les, was it very hard to learn? One day I’ll try,” she said as the waiter left. “My folks used to talk Polish when they didn’t want me to understand. I’m haunted by a sense of being back in my childhood, and yet this is such a foreign place! It’s all very singular.”

“They ate amazingly good smoked salmon, a strange egg dish, and tough roast meat. Slote kept tossing off brown Polish vodka in a thimble-size glass, while the others drank good French wine.

“Leslie, you’re going to be stone drunk.” Natalie sounded more jovial than disapproving.

“There’s so little in every glass,” Slote said, pouring more from the bottle. “I’ve had a very hard day. Even without you turning up, you fool.”

They smiled at each other. Byron wished he had gone to bed. Slote looked at him and with a polite effort resumed talking. “Hm, yes. It’s a historical puzzle, really, how three and a half million Jews came to settle in Poland. It’s such an anarchic country. You’d think they’d have chosen a more stable place. I have a theory. I sort of wonder what Aaron would make of it.”

“What’s your theory about us Polish Jews, Leslie?” Natalie said with a grin.

“That the anarchy was the inducement. Imagine a government of nearly a thousand barons, any one of whom could veto any legislation. That’s the way they stumbled along here for centuries. No wonder Poland kept getting partitioned! Well, as long as the Jews could work things out with each individual nobleman they could at least live and farm and work. No royal oppression to fear.”

“Not bad,” said Natalie. “But in point of fact, didn’t the Polish kings welcome them in with special protective laws? When Spain expelled them and the Holy Church was having one of its bad spasms of hounding and massacring the Jews? That’s as I recall it.”

“I haven’t studied the thing,” Slote said, “but the Poles eventually took to doing that too.”

“That’s why I was born on Long Island,” said Natalie. “My grandfather got out, and a good thing.”

“What military shape are the Poles in?” Byron asked Slote. “Will they give Hitler a fight, if it comes to that?”

“A fight?” Slote sucked on his pipe, looking up into the air. His tone turned measured and professional. “Why, ask any one of them, and he’ll probably tell you they’ll defeat the Germans. After all, they defeated them in 1410! These are strange people, Byron. They can be brilliant, talking about politics and history, yet they don’t give a damn that Germany is now an industrial giant, while Poland remains all farms and Jews and castles and mazurkas. Maybe they’re right. Maybe the Polish fighting spirit will scatter the stupid unwilling cattle of Hitler. That’s the Poles in uniform, more men than Hitler’s got. A highly questionable figure, but in this country, any statistics—”

“Say, isn’t that ‘Stardust’?” Natalie put in. “It sounds a bit like ‘Stardust.’ Dance with me.”

Byron thought Slote looked more like her uncle than her sweetheart, steering her clumsily around the floor. But Natalie’s clinging attitude, closed eyes, and touching cheek weren’t the ways of a niece. They exchanged a few laughing words, then Natalie said something that made Slote look serious and shake his head. They argued as they danced.

“I’ll find him without you,” Natalie was saying as they came back to the table.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you find him. I said if you’re going to talk to him about going to Medzice—”

“Just forget it. Forget I mentioned it.”

Natalie glowered at the meat on her plate. Slote took two more shots of vodka. To lighten the atmosphere, Byron asked Slote about the workings of the embassy. Looking relieved, Slote turned on the measured voice. The alcohol hadn’t blurred his brain; it made him talkative. He sketched the organization and said that he was in the political section, but that since his arrival, he had been preoccupied with the flood of emigrants, as had everybody else.

“Were you fellows surprised by the pact?”

“Naturally. Even the Poles were struck dumb, and their history they’ve seen everything. But nobody can predict Hitler. That’s his genius, if you want to call it that. He does have an instinct for the breathtaking.”

The cloud was clearing from Natalie’s face. “Leslie, why did Stalin go along?”

“Honey, that’s perfectly simple. Hitler offered him a piece of cake on a gold platter, and he simply said, ‘Yes, thank you!’ Stalin’s completely turned the tables on England and France now. They froze him out of Munich. In effect, they handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler and said, ‘Here, boy, leave us alone and go smash Russia.’ Now Stalin’s done a Munich in reverse. ‘No, no, here, boy, take Poland, and go and smash the West.’” With little rapid puffs of blue smoke, clearly enjoying the chance to expound, Slote went on, “Lord, how the British have been asking for this! An alliance with Russia was their one chance to stop Germany. They had years in which to do it. All of Stalin’s fear of Germany and the Nazis was on their side. And what did they do? Dawdle, fuss, flirt with Hitler, and give away Czechoslovakia. Finally, finally, they sent some minor politicians on a slow boat to see Stalin. When Hitler decided to gamble on this alliance, he shot his foreign minister to Moscow on a special plane, with powers to sign a deal. And that’s why we’re within inches of a world war.”

“Is it going to come?” Natalie asked.

“Why, I thought you and Aaron were the authorities for the view that it won’t.”

“I’m not ready to panic. It just seems to me that Hitler will get what he wants, as usual.”

Slote’s face turned pinched and sombre. He pulled at the pipe, sucking in his pallid cheeks. “No. The Poles now have the signed British guarantee. Very gallant; very irrational, very belated, and probably futile. To that extent we’re back in 1914. Poland can plunge the world in by standing firm. It’s all up to Hitler. If he wants to arm some more first, the crisis will subside, and that seems to be in the wind at the moment. But for all we know, he’s already given the order to march. That’s why I’m being such a pill about Medzice. Down there, in the next two weeks, you have a fifty-fifty chance of being captured by German soldiers. I do think that’s a bit risky, dear.”

After dinner Slote drove them to another part of town: street after street of old brick houses of three and four stories, with shops everywhere at ground level. Here indeed were Jews by the thousands, strolling on the sidewalks through narrow cobbled streets, looking out of windows, sitting in shop doorways. On the street corners knots of bearded men argued with loud voices and sweeping gestures, as on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many of the men wore kaftans, or else the boots, blouses and caps of the countryside. There were men in ankle-length black coats and black hats, and a few youngsters in army uniforms. There were some prosperous people, too, smooth-shaven men wearing bowlers and well-groomed women looking much like the Warsaw Gentiles around the Europeiski. Children darted about at their street games, boys in caps and short trousers and girls in neat colored frocks, and their mothers gossiped as they watched them.

I thought you said they were all storming the embassy,” Byron remarked to Slote.

“There are three hundred and fifty thousand of them, Byron. Maybe one in a hundred has foresight. That puts three or four thousand hammering at our doors. The rest believe what they want to believe and vaguely hope for the best. The government keeps telling everybody there won’t be a war.”

Natalie was looking around with an absent, pleased expression at the horse-drawn wagons and handcarts in the streets, and at an old trolley car clanking by. “My parents described all this to me when I was a child,” she said. “It seems not to have changed.” People stopped and looked after the embassy car as it passed. Once Slote halted to ask directions. The Jews came clustering around, but gave only vague cautious answers in Polish. “Let me try,” Natalie said, and she began to talk Yiddish, causing an astonished outbreak of laughter, followed by a burst of warm, friendly talk. A chubby boy in a ragged cap volunteered to run ahead of the car and show the way. They set off after him.

“Well done,” Slote said.

“I can hack out Yiddish after a fashion, if I must,” Natalie said. “Aaron’s a master of it, though he never utters a Yiddish word.”

Natalie and Slote got out at a gray brick apartment building with tall narrow windows, and ornate iron door, and window boxes of blooming geraniums. It overlooked a small green park, where Jews congregated on the benches and around a gushing fountain in noisy numbers. Curious children ran from the park to ring Byron in the American car. Under their merry stares, as they freely discussed him and the machine, Byron felt somewhat like an ape behind glass. The faces of the Jewish children were full of life and mischief, but they offered no discourtesy, and gave him shy smiles. He wished he had gifts for them. He took his fountain pen from his pocket, and through the open window offered it to a black-haired girl in a lilac dress with white lace cuffs and collar. The girl hung back, blinking wary dark brown eyes. The other children encouraged her with shouts and giggles. At last she took the pen, her little cool fingers brushing his hand for a moment, and ran lightly away.

“Well, wouldn’t you know. He’s not there,” Natalie said, returning to the car with Slote a few minutes later. “Gone to Medzice for his son’s wedding, with the whole family. Just my luck. Aaron told me he deals in mushrooms, but can that be such a good business? He’s evidently well off.”

“Unusually so.” Slote was starting the car. “This must the best apartment house around here.”

The little girl in lilac reappeared, leading her parents, the father in a knee-length gray frock coat and a wide-brimmed gray hat, the mother kerchiefed, wearing a German-tailored brown suit, and carrying a baby in a pink blanket.

“He’s thanking you,” Slote said to Byron, as the father gravely spoke in Polish through the window, holding the fountain pen, “and he says it’s much too expensive, and please take it back.”

“Tell him the American fell in love with his daughter. She’s the most beautiful girl in the world, and she must keep it.”

The father and mother laughed when Slote translated. The little girl shrank against her mother’s skirt and shot Byron an ardent look. The mother undid from her lapel a gold brooch with purple stones, and pressed it on Natalie, who tried to decline it, speaking in Yiddish. Again, this caused surprise and a cascade of jocund talk, the upshot of which was that she had to keep the brooch. The little girl kept the pen, and they drove off to shouted farewells.

“Well, I wasn’t on a looting expedition,” Natalie said. “Here, Byron. It’s beautiful. Give it to your girlfriend, or your sister, or your mother.”

“Keep it, it’s yours,” he said rudely. “I could consider staying in Warsaw and waiting for that girl to grow up.”

“Not with those parents,” Slote said. “She’s for a rabbi.”

“Steer clear of Jewish girls anyway, they’re bad joss,” Natalie said.

“Amen,” said Slote.

“Natalie was pinning the brooch on her jacket. “I guess I’ll see Berel in Medzice, then. Too bad, Aaron said he was very clever, and could show me things in Warsaw that nobody else could. They used to study the Talmud together, though Berel was much younger.”

At the mention of Medzice, Slote despairingly shook his head.

Chapter 8

Natalie telephoned Byron in his room at seven o’clock one morning, after they had stayed up till well past three, touring nightclubs with Slote; dismal Polish imitations of Paris dives. In a nervously merry mood, she had pushed them on from one club to another, ignoring Slote’s show of collapsing fatigue.

“Hi, Briny, are you dead?” From her chipper note, she might have had ten hours’ sleep. “This is playing sort of dirty, but I have two seats on the plane to Cracow, and it leaves at eleven. I bought them yesterday. If you’d rather sleep and just stay here, okay. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

Half awake, Byron said, “What? Slote’s got us on the plane to Rome tomorrow, Natalie, and those reservations are mighty hard to come by.”

“I know. I’ll leave him a note. Maybe I’ll phone him from the airport. If you come, we won’t have to return to Warsaw at all. We’ll go straight on to Rome from Cracow, Saturday or Sunday, after I visit my family.”

“Have you got reservations from there?”

“No. But Cracow’s a hub. There are half a dozen ways to get out. We’ll buy our tickets — plane or train or bus — as soon as we arrive there. Well? Byron! Have you fallen back asleep?”

“I’m thinking.” Byron was weighing the advantage of leaving Warsaw and Slote, against these harebrained travel arrangements. The war crisis seemed to be abating. The Poles in the nightclubs had acted gay and carefree, though Slote had remarked on the absence of foreigners, especially Germans. The streets were as calm as ever, and there were no visible preparations for war. Byron had taken to gauging the state of the crisis by the tone of Radio Warsaw. He now knew a few key words and phrases about the crisis, and much could sometimes be surmised from the shaky or relieved accents of the newscasters. In the United States, announcers in a time of crisis tended to use sonorous doom-filled voices, to thrill their listeners. The Polish broadcasters, nearer the action, were less bent on being dramatic. In the past day or two they had not sounded quite so worried.

He said, “Have you heard any news?”

“I just got BBC on shortwave. Same bulletins as last night. Henderson’s talking to Hitler.”

“Natalie. This would be a damned wild excursion.”

“Why? I’ll probably never have another chance to see where my parents were born. I’m here now. Leslie himself said last night that the worst seems to be over, that they’ve agreed to negotiate. Anyway, you don’t have to come. I mean that. It’ll be a bore for you, slogging around in the Polish countryside.”

“Well. I’ll have breakfast with you.”

Byron packed fast. The more time he spent with Natalie Jastrow the more she puzzled him. Her relationship with Leslie Slote now baffled him too. If they were spending time in bed together — and he had to assume that this was part of her purpose in coming to Warsaw, if not all of it — they were finding odd hurried occasions for this, or taking pains to mislead him. Night after night Slote had said his farewells in the hotel lobby. She treated Slote, when they were together, with the loving warmth of a fiancée, yet when Byron tried to withdraw from their company — for dinner, for a concert or the theatre, even for a tour of the embassy — she made him come along. It had crossed his mind, of course, that she might be using him — perhaps had even asked him along to Warsaw — to provoke Slote. If so, the tactic was failing. The Foreign Service man was cordial to Byron and appeared to take his tagging along entirely for granted. But it was hard to tell anything about Slote, except that he was weary, swamped with work, and very concerned about Natalie’s presence in Poland.

There had been more to her persistence in the journey — that was becoming clear to Byron — than desire for her lover. The Jewish streets of Warsaw fascinated her. No matter where they started an evening, they ended in those narrow byways. She had even dragged Byron (Slote had begged off) to a performance of O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! at a little Yiddish theatre in a back alley, with a stage not twenty feet wide and a ragged curtain. For him, it was a bizarre and tedious experience. But the mixture of apple-pie American characters and stylized Jewish emoting in that shabby hall had much amused and moved her. “That was me, I guess,” she had said, coming out of the theatre into the warm night, in the muddy alley bordered with sagging half-timbered houses. “That exact strange mixture. I never quite understood that, and I’m still sorting it out. It’s disconcerting but exciting. Like seeing myself for the first time in a home movie.” Evidently this same fascination was drawing her to Medzice.

She was waiting for him in the restaurant. Somewhere she had bought a Polish dress, a bright flowery print with an open neck, and she had combed her heavy hair forward covering much of her forehead in an outdated American style, as the Warsaw women did.

“Will I get by? I’m so bored with all these stares, as though I had horns.”

“So long as you’ve got your passport handy, okay. Don’t go too native.”

“Oh sure, and there’s always this.” At her feet was a blue suede sack with drawstrings. “Suit, shirt, hat, stockings, girdle. I can go into a ladies’ room anytime and emerge a complete Amerikanka, full of indignation and waving dollars. Are you coming? No, of course.”

“Yes. My bag’s in the lobby.”

“Honestly? You’re as goofy as I am, Briny.” She looked at him from under her eyebrows, with a slow blink of her dark eyes, and Byron thought of the little ghetto girl in the lilac dress. “Tell me, don’t you like Slote a little better now?”

“I don’t dislike him. I’m sorry for him at the moment, he’s certainly in over his head.” The waitress put down plates of food. He said, “Well, you ordered for both of us. Fine. There’s nothing like this Polish ham.”

She said, “I’m even beginning to feel slightly guilty here, eating ham. Imagine! Natalie cut and ate the thick pink meat with no visible remorse.

“I don’t know anything about your religion,” Byron said.

“Neither do I, and it’s hardly my religion. I dropped it before I was eleven years old — temple, Hebrew classes, everything. It grieved my father: he’s a Zionist, an officer in the temple, and all that. But our rabbi was such a boring dunce, Briny! And my father simply couldn’t answer my questions. He’s not an intellectual like Aaron, he’s a businessman. When I was eleven I’d read more books than he had.”

“But he just allowed you to drop it?” Byron said. “Like that? My father wouldn’t have, that’s for sure.”

“Possibly military men are different,” Natalie said with a skeptical smile. “Most fathers can’t do much with daughters. Anyway, I was an only child, and very good, on the whole. I just wouldn’t keep up flummery that made no sense to me. Well!” She set her knife and fork down. “Coffee and then on to Medzice. Correct?”

“I’m with you.”

A rickety taxi, with thick surgical tape crisscrossing the cracked yellow windows, brought them to the airport. The lone aircraft on the sunny field looked so rusty and patched that Byron thought it might be a wreck; but as they arrived, people came out on the grass and began boarding it.

“I don’t know,” Byron said as he paid the cab driver. “Do you suppose it will leave the ground? Maybe we should have this fellow wait.” Natalie laughed and went to telephone Slote; but he was not in his apartment, nor at the embassy. The terminal was still crowded with Germans, though so few seemed left in Warsaw. Only Poles, and a few Jews, boarded the Cracow plane and took the awkward iron seats.

The plane did leave the ground, with bumps and shudders that slightly parted the metal floor plates, affording a view underfoot of green fields and admitting a jet of warm air that billowed Natalie’s skirt. She tucked it under her thighs and fell asleep. After a half hour or so the plane dived, slamming down to a stop near a barn in an open field, amid tall grass and wild flowers. Byron thought it was a forced landing, but several passengers took their valises and got off. Another hop of about an hour brought them to Cracow, the plane passing from green flatlands to low mountains, part forested, part farmed, all checkered with fields of yellow, black, and purple.

The Cracow terminal was a wooden hut inside a wire fence. Byron was glad to leave the plane, which reeked of hot iron and gasoline, and to walk out on a sunny breezy field as fragrant as a flower garden. On either side of the tarred landing strip, kerchiefed peasant women were mowing hay in the sunshine. There were no taxis in sight, and only one mud-caked green bus. Some passengers, met by their relatives, climbed into heavy horse-drawn wagons and went creaking off.

“Any idea how we get to Cracow?” Byron said.

“That bus must go there,” Natalie said.

A brown-bearded Jew standing alone and erect at the gate, in a long dark coat and a wide flat dark hat, drew near, touching his hat with his hand. “You excuse? Americans? Jastrow?”

Natalie regarded him dubiously. “Why, yes. You’re not Berel?”

“Yes, yes. Jochanan Berel Jastrow.” He broke into a broad smile. “You excuse, poor English. Speak you Dytsche? Français?”

“Français, un peu,” and she switched into French. “How did you know we’d be on this plane? Well! Byron, this is Uncle Aaron’s cousin, my father’s cousin. Byron Henry is a good friend of mine, Berel.”

The two men shook hands, and the Jew smoothed his long gray-flecked brown beard, scanning Byron’s face. Berel Jastrow had a broad nose, heavy eyebrows, and surprisingly blue deep-set eyes with an almost Tartar slant. His glance was incisive. Byron felt that Jastrow classed him in a second or two as a Gentile, though probably a friendly one. “Enchanté,” Jastrow said.

He led them to a rust-pitted car on the other side of the shed. The driver was a scrawny man in a light sweater and a skullcap, with a little bright red beard. After a parley in Yiddish they set off. Natalie explained to Byron that they were going straight to Medzice. The Jastrow family was agog to see her, and Cracow was twenty miles the other way. They regarded it as a wonderful omen that the American cousin was falling on them from the skies the day before the wedding. Natalie had telegraphed to Jochanan Jastrow, Medzice, saying she expected to arrive today. But she had not mentioned the plane, scarcely expecting that the wire would reach him.

“Mais pourquoi pas? La Pologne n’est pas l’Afrique,” Berel interjected, brightly following Natalie’s English. “C’est un pays tout à fait moderne et civilisé.”

Byron found it decidedly peculiar to hear clear good French spoken by this figure out of a ghetto painting or play. Jastrow told him he would arrange for their return to Rome the day after tomorrow; he had good connections in Cracow, and getting train or air tickets would be no problem at all.

Swerving to avoid the worst holes, the car bounced along a bad tar road. They drove through tiny villages of straw-thatched log houses, painted with strips of blue between the logs. The driver had to maneuver around pigs, chickens, and cattle wandering in the road. Many of the houses were weathered gray, sagging, or toppling; some had no windows; but nearly all had new, or freshly varnished, doors. Close to each village, on a rise of ground, stood a church of wood. In the sun-flooded fields women and men toiled with hand implements or horse-drawn plows. The car passed massive wagons of hand-hewn wood pulled by muscular, resigned horses, and driven by muscular, resigned women and men, their sex indistinguishable except for marks like kerchiefs and beards. No tractor or automobile or any other machine appeared along the way until they came to Oswiecim, a medium-sized railroad town of brick buildings and ide streets, cut in two by a muddy river. Here the car stopped in the main square at the telephone exchange, and Natalie got out with Berel to phone Slote.

Byron strolled around the square in the hot sun, attracting covert looks from the townspeople. He bought ice cream, and the shopgirl took his money without a word. Oswiecim was nothing like Warsaw: a flat town of low, drab buildings, with an air of back-country dislike of strangers. Byron was glad to leave it. Natalie told him as they drove out into level green fields, on a dirt road along the river, that Slote, furious and alarmed, had said uncomplimentary things about Byron’s intelligence, though she had tried to take all the blame on herself. “I think he’s got a case of nerves,” she said. “You don’t suppose he’s afraid of the Germans?”

“Look, it was an unceremonious way to leave him.”

She said, with an odd little glance at Byron, “It wasn’t all that unceremonious. We were together till dawn, you know, talking. He ought to be tired of me.”

“What? I saw you turn in at three.”

“Oh, yes, but then he rang me from the lobby, said he was too exhausted to sleep, or something, and I came down and we went out again.”

“I see. You must be really beat.”

“Strangely enough I feel wonderful. The nap on the plane, and now all this sweet country air! Poland smells delicious. I never read that in a book.”

“Poland a foist-class country.” Berel spoke up in English, stroking his beard. “Strong pipple. Hitler a big bluff. No war.”

Byron’s stay in Medzice remained in his memory forever after as something like a trip to the moon. Though the usual church stood on the usual knoll, the villagers were almost all Jews. Medzice was a cluster of houses on crooked narrow dirt or cobbled streets, some log, some plastered, a few of brick, sloping down toward a flat green meadow and the winding river. About a mile beyond the town, a roofless great house in the style of a French château lay ruined on the riverbank. The noble family was extinct, the house was a casualty of the World War, but the village survived.

The Jastrows and their relatives seemed to comprise half of Medzice. They swarmed on Natalie and Byron and marched them joyously from home to home. The dark interiors were all much the same: tiny rooms, enormous stoves, heavy polished Victorian furniture, lace curtains, each house seething underfoot with children ranging from crawlers to adolescents. Wine, cake, tea, hard candies, vodka, and fish appeared on table after table. There was no polite way to refuse. After a while Byron was physically uncomfortable, because there was never a toilet pause. In all the hours that this was going on, he never understood a word that anybody said. It seemed to him that all the Jews talked continuously and simultaneously. Natalie chattered away with these bearded men in dark blouses, breeches, and heavy boots, these unpainted work-worn women in plain dresses that reached their ankles. They all appeared enthralled by her. Outside each house a crowd gathered, joining the conversation through the windows. The visit of the two Americans was obviously one of the grandest events in Medzice since the war.

What a world! No sidewalks, no shops, no movie houses, no garages, no cars, no bicycles, no streetlights, no hydrants, no billboards; not a sound, not a sight to connect the town with the twentieth century, except a string of telegraph poles stretching along the river. Yet Natalie Jastrow was only one generation removed from this place. Dr. Aaron Jastrow, the author of A Jew’s Jesus, the full professor of history at Yale, the urbane friend of the archbishop of Siena, had lived here until his fifteenth year, and had looked like one of these pale, skinny, studious boys in big black skullcaps and ear curls! Byron could not imagine what these people made of him, but they were fully as cordial to him as to Natalie, substituting smiles and gestures for the talk with which they flooded her. (The next day Natalie told him that she had identified him as her protector, an American naval officer sent along by Uncle Aaron. They had accepted this without question, since anything Americans did was equally unlikely and shocking and marvelous.)

The sleeping arrangements that night were as novel as everything else. Byron was quartered at the home of the rabbi. This was the outcome of a tremendous argument in which half the population participated, including at one point the village priest, a brown-bearded man who, except for his bare head and black robe, rather resembled Berel, and whose sudden appearance on the scene sobered everybody. The parleying language shifted to Polish, then to German, which Byron well understood. The priest wanted to extend his hospitality to the Gentile American. Berel managed, with a timely word of help in German from Byron, to deflect this offer. When the priest left, both Berel and Byron became the center of jubilant triumph, and the American was borne off to the rabbi’s brick house by an escort of singing, hand-clapping yeshiva boys, led by the bridegroom himself, a pale lad of eighteen or so with a wispy goatee.

Here the rabbi and his wife tried to give him their own bed, but since it was obviously exactly that, the only large bed in the house, a black four-poster piled with huge pillows, Byron wouldn’t have it. This caused another grand parley in Yiddish. The house had a second bedroom containing two beds, and a plank and mattress stretched across two chairs. In this room there were already five tittering girls, who, as the discussion went on, began blushing and roaring with laughter. The idea seemed to be to put Byron into one of those beds. Evidently no decent solution could be hammered out. He ended up sleeping on the floor of the main room, a sort of parlor and dining room combined lined with giant leather-bound books. The rabbi gave him a feather mattress to lie on, and as six of the boys from the Cracow yeshiva shared the floor with him on similar mattresses, he did not feel ill-treated. Indeed, he slept better on the floor of the rabbi’s house in Medzice than he had in Warsaw’s Europeiski Hotel. He found the feather mattress lulling.

He spent much of the next day walking with Natalie around the town and in the fields and along the river, past an old cemetery to the ruined great house. The preparations for the wedding were going forward, so today the family let the visitors amuse themselves. The muddy narrow streets of Medzice — it had rained hard during the night, and the rattling on the rabbi’s roof had increased Byron’s sense of snugness — were filled with an autumnal fragrance of hay and ripening fruit, made more tangy by the smells of the free-roaming ducks, chickens, goats, and calves. Some of the fowl were encountering tragedy, happily strutting in the morning sunshine one moment, and the next swooped down upon by laughing children and carried off squawking and flapping to be slaughtered. In the fields beyond the outlying houses and barns — mostly one-room log structures with heavy yellow thatch roofs — cows and horses grazed in tall waving grass spotted with wild flowers. Water bugs skated on the surface of the slow-moving brown river. Fish jumped and splashed, but nobody was fishing.

Natalie told him she had stayed up half the night talking to the family. Most of what she had heard was news to her. Her father had tended to reminisce more about Warsaw than about his birthplace, and as a child she had been bored by the little she had heard, since she had only wanted to be a true-blue American. In the village, Uncle Aaron and her father were the legendary ones who had made an American success. Aaron Jastrow was variously thought be a great surgeon, an astronomer, and a cancer specialist; “professor” had ambiguous meanings in Polish and Yiddish. Nobody but Berel knew that he had written a famous book about Jesus, and Natalie gathered that Aaron’s cousin was at some pains to keep the achievement quiet. Berel (this was a familiar name for Jochanan, his real name) was the local success. He had begun trading in mushrooms while still student in Cracow, had branched into other exports, and had prospered enough to move his family to Warsaw; but he had sent his son back to the Cracow yeshiva, and had found the boy a bride in Medzice among the second cousins. The numerous Jastrows, like the rest of the villagers, lived by farming and by selling dairy products in the markets of Oswiecim and Cracow.

Clambering around the ruined great house, Natalie went exploring out of sight, broke through some rotten flooring, and fell ten or twelve feet. Byron heard the splintering noise, her shriek, and the thud. He hurried to find her. She lay sprawled like a broken doll, her skirt up around her gartered white thighs. She had landed on dirt and thick grass; whatever the floor here had been, probably parquet or marble, nothing was left of it. Byron pulled down her skirt and lifted her to a sitting position. She was conscious but stunned, and greenish pale. In a minute or two her color returned, and life and amusement flowed back into her eyes. She shook her head. “Ye gods, I really saw stars, Byron. I thought I’d broken my silly neck.” She put her head on his shoulder. “Glory, what a scare. I’m all right, help me up.”

She limped; her left knee bothered her, she said. She took his arm with an abashed grin and leaned on him. Byron had tried to keep her from climbing the decayed staircase, and her grin was her only apology, but it was enough. He was worried by the injury, and still angry over her casual disclosure that she had been with Slote until dawn the day before. However, to have this girl leaning on him, in a sunlit orchard full of apple scent by a river, seemed to Byron almost all the pleasure he wanted in the world. Just holding her like this was sweeter than any delight any other girl had ever given him. Whatever it was that made a girl desirable — the enigmatic look in the eyes, the soft curve of a cheek, the shape of a mouth, the sudden charm of a smile, the swell of breasts and hips under a dress, the smoothness of skin — Natalie Jastrow for Byron was all composed of these lovely glints, all incandescent with them. That she stemmed from the strange Jews of Medzice, that she was, by all evidence, the mistress of a dour man ten years older than himself, that she was only a solid and human girl — indeed very heavy leaning on him and limping — with a stubborn streak and some unattractive, almost coarse tomboy bravado: all these drawbacks just made her Natalie Jastrow, instead of the perfect girl he had been dreaming about since his twelfth year. The perfect girl had in fact been a blonde, and something of a sex fiend, like the dream girls of most boys. She was gone now, and this prickly Jewish brunette held her place. And here they were alone on a riverbank in south Poland, in golden sunshine, a mile from any house, amid apple trees laden with ripe fruit.

“This will be slow work, getting back,” she said.

“I can try to carry you.”

“What, a horse like me? You’d rupture yourself. I’m fine if I keep my weight off it. It’s just such a bore.”

“I’m not bored,” said Byron.

They passed an old abandoned scow half full of water. “Let’s use this,” he said, tipping it to empty it out.

Natalie appreciatively watched him heave up the scow unaided. “No oars,” she said.

“We can float downstream.”

He guided the scow with a long rough plank that lay in it, using the plank as a rudder and as a pole. The river was very sluggish, almost oily, calm and brown. Natalie sat on the bow edge of the scow, facing Byron, her shoes in the seeping water. She said as they floated past the cemetery, “That’s where all my ancestors are, I guess. The ones that aren’t buried in Palestine.”

“Or Egypt or Mesopotamia,” Byron said.

Natalie shuddered. “I don’t know. It’s a godforsaken place, Briny.”

“Medzice?”

“Poland. I’m glad Grandma and Grandpa got the hell out of here.”

He banked the scow near the village. She climbed out and walked slowly, not limping. There was no doctor here, she said, and she didn’t want to generate a crisis around the injured American cousin. She would have her knee taped in Cracow tomorrow. None of the villagers noticed anything the matter with her.

Byron tried to find out the war crisis news. There was one working radio in Medzice, and several broken-down ones. The priest had the working radio. The rabbi told Byron, in Yiddish tortured into a barely comprehensible kind of German, that the last broadcast from Warsaw had been encouraging: the Prime Minister of England had gone to his country home for the weekend, and the crisis seemed to be passing. “Henderson, Henderson,” the rabbi said. “Henderson talked to Hitler.” And he winked shrewdly, rubbing one hand over the other to pantomime a money deal.

The wedding made Byron wish over and over that he were a writer and could record it; a Jew, and could comprehend it. The mixture of solemnity and boisterousness baffled him. In his training, decorousness was the essence of a wedding, except for the shoes-and–rice moment at the very end, but the Medzice Jews — though arrayed in their best, the women in velvet dresses and the men in black satin coats or formal city clothes — did not seem to know what decorum was. They crowded, they chattered, they burst into song; they surrounded the veiled, silent, seated bride and discussed her vehemently; they danced, they marched here and there in the houses and in the streets, performing strange little rites; one and then another stood on a chair to speak or to sing and the guests wildly laughed and wildly cried. The pallid bridegroom, in a white robe and a black hat, looked on the verge of fainting. Byron accidentally learned, by offering him a plate of cakes at the long men’s table where the American visitor sat in a place of honor beside the groom, that the weedy boy had been fasting for twenty-four hours, and still was, while everybody around him continuously ate and drank with vast appetite.

Byron, eating and drinking with the rest, and feeling very good indeed, was not sure for hours whether the marriage ceremony had or had not taken place. But near midnight a sudden gravity fell on the guests. In a courtyard, with the bright moon and a blaze of stars overhead, in a series of stern and impressive acts — including solemn incantations over silver goblets of wine and the lighting of long tapers — the bride and groom were brought together for a ring ceremony and a kiss, much as in a Christian union, under a hand-held canopy of purple velvet. Then the groom ground a wineglass to bits under his heel, and jubilation broke out that made everything before it seem staid and pale.

Byron almost became the hero of the evening by putting on a black skullcap and dancing with the yeshiva boys, since there was no dancing with the girls. All the guests gathered to clap and cheer, Natalie in the forefront, her face ablaze with fun. Her knee healed or forgotten, she joined in the girls’ dances; and so she danced, and Byron danced, inside the house and outside, far into the morning hours. Byron scarcely remembered leaving the bride’s home and falling asleep on the feather mattress on the floor of the rabbi’s house.

But there he was when a hand shook him and he opened his eyes. Berel Jastrow was bending over him, and it took Byron a moment or two to recall where he was and who this man was, with the clever, anxious blue eyes and the long gray-streaked brown beard. All around him the yeshiva boys were sitting up and rubbing their eyes, or dressing. The girls were hurrying here and there in their nightclothes. It was hot, and the sun was shining into the room from a clear blue sky.

“Yes? What is it?” he said.

“Der Deutsch,” the Jew said. “Les Allemandes.”

“Huh? What?”

“De Chormans.”

“Byron sat up, his voice faltering. “Oh, the Germans? What about them?”

“Dey comink.”

Chapter 9 — World Empire Lost by General Armin von Roon (adapted from his Land, Sea, and Air Operations of World War II) English Translation by Victor Henry

Chapter 10

The New York Times, raising its voice to suit the occasion in its eight-column once-in-a-generation italic headlines, topped the sprawl of newspapers on the desk under Hugh Cleveland’s stocking feet. The other papers had headlines far larger and blacker than the Time’s genteel bellow. Tilted back in his shirt-sleeves in a swivel chair, a phone cradled between his head and left shoulder, Cleveland was making quick red crayon marks on a sheaf of yellow typing paper and sipping coffee as he talked. Eight years in the broadcasting business had made him deft at such juggling. Though he looked the picture of busy contentment, his voice was angry. His morning show, called Who’s in Town, featured interviews with celebrities passing through New York. The war crisis, suddenly roaring into the Columbia Broadcasting System, had snatched off Cleveland’s secretary to the newsroom for emergency service, and he was protesting to the personnel office, or trying to. He still could not get through to the manager.

A short girl in a flat black straw hat appeared in the open doorway. Behind her, in the big central offices of CBS News, the hubbub over the war news was still rising. Secretaries were rattling at typewriters or scampering with papers, messenger boys ran with coffee and sandwiches, knots of men in shirt-sleeves gathered at the chattering teletypes, and everybody appeared to be either shouting, or smoking, or both.

“Mr. Cleveland?” The girl’s voice was sweet but shaky. Her awed round eyes made her look about sixteen.

Cleveland put his hand on the mouthpiece of his telephone. “Yes?”

“The personnel office sent me up to you.”

“You? How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

Cleveland appeared skeptical, but he hung up the telephone. “What’s your name?”

“Madeline Henry.”

Cleveland sighed. “Well, okay, Madeline. If you’re in the pool, you must know the ropes. So take off that cartwheel and get started, okay? First get me another cup of coffee and a chicken sandwich, please. Then there’s tomorrow’s script” — he rapped the yellow sheets — “to be typed over.”

Madeline could bluff no further. She was in New York to buy clothes. The outbreak of the war had prompted her to walk into CBS to see if extra girls were needed. In the employment office a harried woman wearing yellow paper cuffs had thrust a slip at her, after a few questions about her schooling, and sent her up to Cleveland. “Talk to him. If he likes you, we may take you on. He’s screaming for a girl and we’ve got nobody to spare.”

Stepping just inside the door and planting her legs apart, taking off her hat and clutching it, Madeline confessed that nobody had hired her yet; that she was visiting New York, lived in Washington, had to go back to school, detested the thought of it, feared her father too much to do anything else, and had just walked into CBS on an impulse. He listened, smiling and surveying her with eyes half-closed. She wore a sleeveless red cotton frock and she had excellent color from a sailing weekend.

‘Well, Madeline, what does it add up to? Do you want the job or not?”

“I was thinking — could I come back in a week or so?”

His pleasant look faded. He picked up the telephone. “Get me Personnel again. Yes, you come back sometime, Madeline.”

She said, “I’ll fetch you your coffee and sandwich right now. I can do that. I’ll type your script today, too. Couldn’t I work for you for three weeks? I don’t have to go back to school until the twenty-second. My father will kill me when he finds out, but I don’t care.”

“Where’s your father? In Washington?”

“He’s in Berlin. He’s the naval attaché there.”

“What?” Hugh Cleveland hung up the telephone and took his feet off the desk. “Your father is our naval attaché in Nazi Germany?”

“That’s right.”

“Imagine that. So! You’re a Navy junior.” He threw a five-dollar bill on the desk. “All right. Get me the sandwich, Madeline, please. White meat, lettuce, pepper, mayonnaise. Black coffee. Then we’ll talk some more. Buy yourself a sandwich too.”

“Yes, Mr. Cleveland.”

Holding the bill, Madeline rushed into the outer hall and stood there dazed. Having heard the Who’s in Town program a few times, she had at once recognized Cleveland’s peculiarly warm rich voice; a real broadcaster, with his own program, and all at once she was working for him. That was wartime for you! A girl swishing by with a bag of food told her where to buy sandwiches. But twenty chattering girls swarmed at the takeout counter of the luncheonette off the lobby. She went out on Madison Avenue and stood blinking in the warm sunshine. The New York scene was normal. Crowds marched on the sidewalks; cars and buses streamed both ways in a stench of fumes; people carried packages into and out of stores and looked in windows. The only novelty was that the news vendors with fresh stacks of afternoon papers were crying war. Madeline ran to the big drugstore across the street, where the soda fountain was jammed with secretaries and shoppers, talking and laughing over bowls of chili or soup. The usual sort of people were wandering through the aisles, buying toothpaste, lotions, aspirin, candy, and cheap clocks. A fat old blonde woman in an apron and cap quickly made up her sandwiches.

“Well, honey, who’s going to win the war?” she said sociably as she peppered the chicken.

“Let’s just hope Hitler doesn’t,” Madeline said.

“Yes, isn’t he something? Sieg Heil! Ha, ha. I think the man’s crazy. I’ve always said so, and this proves it.” She handed Madeline the sandwiches. “Well, honey, so long as we keep out of it, what do we care who wins?”

Madeline bought an evening paper that offered gigantic headlines but no fresh news. Just to scan such a dramatic front page was novel fun. Though the war was happening so far away, Madeline felt a springtime quickening in her veins. A scent of freedom, of new action, rose from the headlines. The President had announced at once, very firmly, that America was staying out of it. But things were going to be mighty different from now on. That was inevitable! All her thoughts were about the letter she would write to her father, if only she could get this job.

Cleveland, feet on his desk again, a flirtatious smirk on his face, was telephoning. He nodded at Madeline and — as he went on coaxing some girl, in his warmly rumbling voice, to meet him at Toots Shor’s restaurant — he wolfed the sandwich.

“Why don’t you eat the other one?” Madeline said. “I’m not hungry.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to rob you.” He hung up and unwrapped her sandwich. “Ordinarily I don’t eat much during the day but with all this war talk -” He took a great bite and went on talking. “Thanks. I swear I’m as hungry as I get at funerals. Ever notice how famished you get at a funeral, Madeline? It’s the sheer delight of being alive, I guess, while this other poor joker’s just been buried in a dirty hole. Now listen, you want to work for me for three weeks, is that it? That’ll be fine. It’ll give me a chance to look over what’s around in Personnel.” He flourished a brown envelope at her. “Now then. Gary Cooper is at the St. Regis, Room 641. This is a sample Who’s in Town script. Take it to him. We may get him for Thursday.”

“Gary COOPER? You mean the MOVIE star?” Madeline in astonishment zoomed words like her mother.

“Who else? He may ask you questions about the show and about me. So listen and get this rundown in your head. We work without an audience in a little studio, very relaxed. It’s a room with armchairs, books, and a rug, really nice, like a library in a home. It’s the same room Mrs. Roosevelt uses for her show. We can do the script in extra big type, if he needs that. He can take five minutes or fifteen. The whole show runs an hour and a half. I started this show in Los Angeles back in ‘34 and did it there for three years. I called it Over the Coffee then. Maybe he heard it. Of course he may be too busy to go into all that. Anyway, act as though you’ve been with the show for a while.”

Too dazzled, and excited to talk, Madeline held out her hand for the envelope. Cleveland gave it to her, saying, “All set? Anchors aweigh. For Christ’s sake, don’t ask him for his autograph. Telephone me if there’s any holdup. Don’t fail to reappear.”

Madeline blurted, “You must have had some very stupid girls working for you,” and hurried out.

A maid opened the door of the hotel suite where Gary Cooper in a gray suit, sat eating lunch at a wheeled table. The star rose, immensely tall and slim, smiling down at Madeline. He put on black-rimmed glasses, glanced over the script as he drank coffee, and asked questions. He was all business, the farthest thing from a bashful cowboy; he had the manner of an admiral. When she mentioned the Over the Coffee show he brightened. “Yes, I remember that.” Almost at once, it seemed, she was out on the sunny street again, overwrought, thrilled to her bones. “England mobilizes! Hitler smashes into Poland!” the news vendor at the corner hoarsely chanted.

“Bless your little heart,” Cleveland said as she came into the office. He was banging rapidly at a typewriter. “Cooper just called. He likes the idea and he’s in.” Ripping the yellow sheet out of the machine, he clipped it with others. “He remarked on what a nice girl you were. What did you say to him?”

“Hardly anything.”

“Well, you did a good job. I’m off to interview him now. There’s tomorrow’s script. Do a smooth copy of the red-checked pages, then get the whole thing to mimeo instanter. Room 3094.” Cleveland stepped into his shoes, straightened his tie, and threw on a rust-colored sports jacket. He scratched his heavy blond hair, and grinned at her, raising thick humorously arched eyebrows. She felt she would do anything for him. He was charming, she decided, rather than actually handsome. There was something infectiously jovial about him, a spark of devilish amusement in his lively blue eyes. She was a bit disappointed to see, when he stood up, that though he could not be more than thirty-one or so, his stomach bulged. But it didn’t matter.

He paused at the door. “Do you mind working nights? You’ll get paid overtime. If you come back here around eight-thirty tonight, you’ll find Thursday’s rough on my desk, with the Cooper spot.”

“Mr. Cleveland, I haven’t been hired yet.”

“You have been. I just talked to Mrs. Hennessy. After you get that script to mimeo, go down and fill out your papers.”

Madeline toiled for five hours to finish the script. She turned it in, messy though her work was, hoping it would not end her radio career then and there. At the employment office she learned she was starting at thirty-five dollars a week. It seemed a fortune. She took her aching back to the drugstore, made a quick dinner of a chocolate drink and a bacon and tomato sandwich, and walked back to CBS. Over the tall black Madison Avenue buildings, checkered with gold-lit windows, a misty full moon floated in a. sunset sky. This day when Hitler’s war began was turning out the most delightful in Madeline Henry’s life.

On Cleveland’s desk the interview with Garry Cooper now lay, a mass of crude typing, quick scrawls and red crayon cuts. The note clipped to it said: Try to copy it all over tonight. See you around ten. Madeline groaned; she was terribly tired.

She put in a call to Warren at the bachelor officers’ quarters of the Pensacola flying school. He wasn’t there, but an operator with a Southern accent like a vaudeville imitation offered to track him down. In the smoky newsroom, girls kept crisscrossing with long teletype strips or paper cups of coffee, men were talking loud and fast, and the typewriter din never stopped. Through the open door Madeline heard contradictory rumors: Poland was already collapsing, Hitler was on his way to Warsaw, Mussolini was flying to Berlin, the French were pressing England for another Munich deal, Hitler was offering to visit Chamberlain.

The telephone rang at ten o’clock and there was Warren on the line, with music and laughter in the background. He was at the beach club, he said, at a moonlight dance on a terrace lined with palm trees. He had just met a marvelous girl, the daughter of a congressman. Madeline told about the CBS job, and he seemed amused and impressed.

“Say, I’ve heard Who’s in Town,” he said. “This fellow Hugh Cleveland has an interesting voice. What’s he like?”

“Oh, very nice. Do you think it’s all right? Will Dad be furious?”

“Matty, you’ll be back at school in three weeks, before he even knows about it. Where will you stay?… Oh, yes, that’s an all-women hotel, I know that one. Ha! Little Madeline on the town.”

“You don’t object?”

“Me? Why, I think it’s fine. Just be a good girl, and all that. What’s the word at CBS, Madeline? Is the war on? The scuttlebutt down here is that England is chickening out.”

“Nothing but rumors here too, a dozen an hour. Is your date really the daughter of a congressman?”

“You bet, and she is a dish.”

“Tough life you’re leading. How’s the flying coming?”

“I ground-looped on my second solo landing, but don’t write Dad that. I’m doing much better now. It’s great.”

“Good, you’re still here,” Cleveland said, walking into the office a few minutes after this conversation. With him was a tall beauty in a black straw hat much wider than Madeline’s, and a gray silk dress. Her gardenia perfume was too strong for the small office. Cleveland glanced at Madeline’s typed pages. “Need a little practice, eh?”

“I warm up as I go along.” Her voice trembled. She cleared her throat.

“Let’s hope so. Now look, do you by any chance know of an admiral named Preble? Is he some high mucky-muck?”

“Preble? Do you mean Stewart Preble?”

“Stewart Preble, exactly. Who is he?”

“Why, he’s the Chief of Naval Operations.”

“That’s a big job, eh?”

Madeline was used to civilian ignorance of the armed forces, but this shocked her. “Mr. Cleveland, there’s nobody higher in the United States Navy.”

“Fine. Then he’s our boy. I just found out he’s at the Warwick. We keep tabs on the big hotels, Madeline. Now let’s get off a letter to him.” He leaned on the edge of the desk and started to dictate. The yawning beauty crossed glorious legs, lit a cigarette, and leafed the Hollywood Reporter. Madeline desperately tried to keep up, but had to plead with him to go slower.

“Don’t you know shorthand?”

“I can learn it quickly enough.”

Cleveland glanced at his watch and at the beauty, who drooped her eyelids contemptuously at Madeline. Madeline felt like a worm. Cleveland rumpled his hair and shook his head. “Look, you know these Navy characters. Write him a letter, that’s all. Invite him to come on the Thursday morning show. Mention Gary Cooper, if you want to. Sign my name, and take it over to the Warwick. Can you do that?

“Certainly.”

“Fine. Wendy and I want to catch a ten o’clock movie. She plays a bit in it. Say, this Preble fellow, does he know your father? How about that, Wendy? This kid’s father is our Navy Attaché in Berlin.”

Wendy yawned.

“Madeline said coldly, “Admiral Preble knows my father.”

“Well, how about mentioning that, then?” He gave her his persuasive impish smile. “I’d really like to get him, Madeline. Admirals and generals are usually crappy guests. Too cautious and stiff to say anything interesting. But there’s a war on, so for the moment, they’re hot. See you in the morning. I go on at nine, you know, so get here not later than eight.”

As he had told Madeline, Warren was dancing away this first night of the war in moonlight, with a congressman’s pretty daughter.

The moon floats out in space, some thirty diameters of the earth away, shining on the just and the unjust as the cloud cover allows. It had lent dim but helpful light to columns of young Germans in gray uniforms, miles and miles long, trudging across the Polish border. Now Europe had rolled into the sun giving the Germans better illumination to get on with the work, and the same moon was bathing the Gulf of Mexico, and the terrace of Pensacola’s Harbor View Club. The German General Staff had carefully planned on the moonlight, but the silver glow fell on Warren Henry and Janice Lacouture by a pleasant chance.

Everyone said it was the best club dance in years. The big headlines, the excited radio broadcasts, had created a pleasurable stir in flat quiet Pensacola. The student aviators felt more important and the girls found them more glamorous; war was in the air, and however remote the combat, these were warriors. The talk about the German attack soon gave way to homier topics, however: the horse show, the new base commander, recent flying accidents, recent romances. Der Führer, for these happy people, remained the queer hoarse German of the newsreels, with the wild gestures and the funny moustache, who had managed to start up a European mess, but who could scarcely menace the United States just yet.

Lieutenant (junior grade) Henry took a different view. The invasion really interested him, and that was how he first caught the interest of Janice Lacouture. At the Academy he had excelled on the subject of the World War. They sat in a far corner of the terrace in the moonlight soon after they met, and instead of talking aviation or making a pass at her, this student pilot told her about the Schlieffen Plan to capture Paris — and the way von Moltke had fatally tampered with it; about the feat of German railroading that had made the Tannenberg victory possible; about the strategic parallels of 1914 and 1939. He had begun with the usual aviator chitchat, which after years of Pensacola dating stupefied Janice. But once they began on the war and she allowed her own knowledge of history and politics to show, he turned serious. It had been an exciting talk, the sort in which lovers sometimes discover each other without speaking a romantic word.

Despite the big Lacouture nose, a mark of French ancestry, and rather irregular front teeth, Janice was one of the belles of Pensacola. Her mouth, skin, and hazel eyes were lovely; her figure so striking that all men automatically stared at her as at a fire. She was tall, blonde, with a soft purring voice, and a very lively manner. Her family owned the largest house in the club estates. The Lacoutures were solidly rich, from two generations in the timbering that destroyed the Gulf pine forests for hundreds of miles, and turned northern Florida into a sandy insect-swarming waste. Her father was a wonder in somnolent and self-satisfied Pensacola, the first Lacouture who had ever bestirred himself in politics.

In Washington, Janice had grown up farseeing and sober. She had majored in economics and American history at George Washington University, and she was about to start law school. She wanted to marry a public man; a congressman, a senator, a governor; with luck, why not a future president? This was hard on the young men who fell for her beauty and chic. Janice was out for big game, and she acquired a reputation for frostiness which amused her. The last thing she had expected was to meet anybody worth knowing during her enforced summer in Pensacola. And of all people, a naval aviator! Nevertheless there was something different about Warren Henry. He was oddly appealing, with those penetrating eyes, bony ramshackle frame, gray-sprinkled hair, and easy smile, with its hint of shrewdness and immorality. He acted as though he knew women far too well for an Annapolis honor student. This did not trouble her; it added tang to Warren.

They stopped talking after a while and danced close-hugged in the moonlight. The Pensacola onlookers began inquiring about the background of the lieutenant junior grade with the scar; for Warren’s ground loop had given him a forehead wound requiring nine stitches. The naval aviators told each other with envy who the Lacouture girl was.

When Warren returned to the bachelor officers’ quarters he found two telephone messages from Mrs. Tarrasch. This was his Baltimore divorcée; the woman of thirty for whom he had risked expulsion from the Academy; the woman with whom he had spent the afternoon in bed the day his parents had sailed off to Germany. In his third Academy year, he had come upon her as the lady hostess in a tearoom. Responding to a bold remark, she had agreed to see him after the restaurant closed. She was a clever woman, with a hard-luck story about two beastly husbands; she was a reader, a lover of the arts, and hungrily passionate. Warren had grown attached to her, and briefly even thought of marrying her, when she had roused his jealousy by going off with an older man for a weekend. Byron had talked him out of that, rendering him the greatest service in the power of a brother. Helene Tarrasch wasn’t a bad woman, simply a lonely one. If young officer candidates are to be kept by law from marrying, then the lively ones will find one or another Mrs. Tarrasch. Warren’s worst mistake had been asking her to come to Pensacola, but he had been three years at sea. Now she was installed at the San Carlos Hotel as the receptionist in the main dining room.

But how obsolete she suddenly was! Not only because of Janice Lacouture; Hitler’s invasion of Poland had given the future a shape. Warren believed the United States would be at war within a year. The prospect glittered. He would be at war within a year. He might get killed. But he was going to fly in this war and if God allowed, he was going to get a good war record. Warren believed in God, but thought he must be much more broad-minded than the preachers made him out. A Being who could create something as marvellous as sex was not likely to be priggish about it; Warren was fond of saying that God had clearly given a man balls not for beauty but for use. Sitting in his bleakly furnished room with the old-fashioned high ceiling, trying to ignore his room-mate’s snores, Lieutenant Henry looked out of the window at the quiet moonlit lawn in front of the BOQ and allowed his mind to run to golden postwar fantasies.

Politics attracted him. His avid history study had taught him that politicians were the leaders, military men only the mechanics, of war. Warren had closely observed politicians visiting the Academy and the fleet. Some were impressive men like his father, but more were glad-handers with worried eyes, phony smiles, and soft bellies. His father’s ambition, he knew, was flag rank in the Navy. Warren wanted that, but why not dream of more? Janice Lacouture had brains. She had everything. A single day had transformed Warren Henry’s life. In the morning the war had opened up the future; in the evening the perfect partner for that future had come out of nowhere.

He did a strange thing. He walked to the window, and looking out at the moon, he whispered a prayer. His youthful marching to church with his father had taken that much hold. “Let me have her, and let me pass this course and be a good naval aviator. I don’t ask you to let me live, I know that’s up to me, and the numbers, but if I do live and get through the war, then” — he smiled at the dark star-splashed sky — “well, then we’ll see. All right?” Warren was charming God.

He went to bed without telephoning Mrs. Tarrasch. She was always ready for a call from him. But now she seemed to him like somebody he had known in high school.

Shortly before six in the morning a ring from the embassy woke Victory Henry. The chargé was summoning an urgent staff meeting on the outbreak of the war.

Rhoda muttered and turned, throwing a naked white arm over her eyes. From a crack in the curtains a narrow sunbeam crossed the bed and dust motes danced in the wan light as Pug threw back the covers. Hitler was having good weather for the kickoff, Pug sleepily thought; just the bastard’s luck! The invasion news was no great surprise. Since the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Polish crisis had been skidding downhill. At the big Argentine embassy supper the night before, everybody had noticed the absence of German military men and Foreign Office people, and had talked of war. One American correspondent had told Pug flatly that the invasion was on for three o’clock in the morning; that man had had the dope! The world had crossed a red line in time, and Victor Henry jumped out of bed to go to work in a new era. It wasn’t his war, the one he had been training for all his life; not yet. But he was fairly sure it would be. Despite the absence of surprise, he was excited and moved.

In the library he switched on the radio, which seemed to take a long time to warm up, and opened the french windows. Birds sang in the sunny garden, whence a mild breeze, passing through a red-flowering shrub at the window, brought in a heavy sweet odor. The radio hummed and crackled and an announcer came on, not sounding much different than any Berlin announcer had during the past week, when the air had been full of the “incredible atrocities” perpetrated against Germans in Poland: rape, murder, disemboweling of pregnant women, cutting off of children’s hands and feet. In fact, after this long diet of gruesome bosh, the news that the war had started seemed almost tame. The voice was just as strident, just as full of righteousness, describing the Führer’s decision to march, as it had been in denouncing the atrocities.

The account of a Polish attack at Gleiwitz to capture a German radio station — the outrage which, according to the broadcast, had sent the Wehrmacht rolling two million strong into Poland “in self-defense” — was narrated with the same matter-of-fact briskness as the report of the plunge of the Germans across Polish soil, and of the surprise collapse of the Polish border divisions. Obviously an invasion of this magnitude had been laid on for a month or more and had been surging irreversibly toward Poland for days; the Polish “attack” was a silly hoax for childish minds. Victor Henry was getting used to Berlin Radio’s foggy mixture of facts and lies, but the contempt of the Nazis for the intelligence of the Germans could still surprise him. The propaganda had certainly achieved one aim — to muffle the impact of the new war.

Rhoda came yawning in, tying her negligee, and cocking her head at the radio. “Well! So he really went and did it. Isn’t that something!”

“Sorry it woke you. I tried to keep it low.”

“Oh, the telephone woke me. Was it the embassy?” Pug nodded. “I thought so. Well, I guess I should be up for this. We’re not going to get in it, are we?”

“Most unlikely. I’m not even sure England and France will go to bat.”

“How about the children, Pug?”

“Well, Warren and Madeline are no problem. The word is that Italy won’t fight, so Byron should be okay, too.”

Rhoda sighed, and yawned. “Hitler’s a very strange person. I’ve decided that. What a way to act! I liked his handshake, sort of direct and manly like an American’s, and that charming bashful little smile. But he had strange eyes, you know? Remote, and sort of veiled. Say, what happens to our dinner for that tycoon from Colorado? What’s his name? Will that be off?”

“Dr. Kirby. He may not get here now, Rhoda.”

“Dear, please find out. I have guests coming, and extra help and food, you know.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Rhoda said slowly, “World War Two… You know, Time has been writing about ‘World War Two’ for months. It always seemed so unreal, somehow. Now here it is, but it still has a funny ring.”

“You’ll soon get used to it.”

“Oh, no doubt. It’s on now. I’m supposed to have lunch with Sally Forrest. I’d better find out if that’s still on. What a mess! And my hair appointment — oh, no, that’s tomorrow. Or is it? I don’t function this time of the morning.”

Because of the early meeting, Pug gave up his cherished five-mile morning walk to the embassy, and drove there. Berlin was, if anything, quieter than usual. There was a Sunday morning look to the tree-lined avenues in mid-city, a slackening of auto traffic, a scarcity of people on the sidewalks. All the shops were open. Small trucks with machine guns at the ready, manned by helmeted soldiers, stood at some intersections, and along the walls of public buildings workmen were piling sandbags. But it was all a desultory business. The coffee shops were full of breakfasters, and in the Tiergarten the early morning strollers — nannies, children, elderly people — were out as usual for the fine weather, with the vendors of toy balloons and ice cream. Loudspeakers everywhere were blatting the news, and an unusual number airplanes went humming across the sky. The Berliners kept looking at the sky and then at each other with cynical sad grins. He remembered pictures of the happy cheering Berliners crowding Unter den Linden at the start of the last war. Clearly the Germans were going into this one in a different mood.

The embassy was a maelstrom of scared tourists and would-be refugees, mainly old Jews. In the chargé’s large quiet office the staff meeting was sombre and short. No special instructions from Washington had yet come in. Mimeographed sheets of wartime regulations were passed around. The chargé urged on everyone special care to preserve a correct tone of neutrality. If England and France came in, the embassy would probably look out for their people caught in Germany; a lot of lives might depend on appropriate American conduct at this touchy moment toward the truculent Germans. After the meeting Victory Henry attacked an in-tray stuffed with paper in his office, telling his yeoman to try and track down Dr. Palmer Kirby, the electrical engineer from Colorado who bore a “very important” designation from the Bureau of Ordnance.

Alistair Tudsbury telephoned. “Hullo! Would you like to hear the bad man explain all to the Reichstag? I can get you in to the press box. This is my last story from Berlin. I have my marching papers and should have left days ago, but got a medical delay. I owe you something for that glimpse of Swinemünde.

“You don’t owe me anything, but I’ll sure come.”

“Good. He speaks at three. Pam will call for you at two. We’re packing up like mad. I hope we don’t get interned. It’s this German food that’s given me the gout.”

The yeoman came in and laid a telegram on the desk.

“Tudsbury, can’t I take you and Pamela to lunch?”

“No, no. No time. Many thanks. After this little unpleasantness, maybe. In 1949 or thereabouts.”

Pug laughed. “Ten years? You’re a pessimist.”

He opened the telegram, and got a bad shock. DO YOU KNOW WHEREABOUTS YOUR SON BYRON AND MY NIECE NATALIE PLEASE WIRE OR CALL. It was signed: AARON JASTROW, with an address and telephone number in Siena.

Pug rang for the yeoman and handed the telegram. Try to get through to Siena, to this man. Also wire him: NO KNOWLEDGE. PLEASE WIRE LAST KNOWN WHEREABOUTS.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

He decided not to tell Rhoda. Trying to go back to work he found himself unable to comprehend the substance of simple letters. He gave up, and looked out of the window at the Berliners going their ways in bright sunshine. Open trucks full of soldiers in gray were snorting along the street in a long procession. The soldiers looked bored. A small silver blimp came floating across the clear blue sky, towing a sign advertising Odol toothpaste. He swallowed his worry as best he could, and attacked his in-basket again.

The telephone rang as he was leaving the office for lunch. He heard multilingual jabber and then a cultured American voice with a faint accent, “Commander Henry? Aaron Jastrow. It’s very good of you to call.”

“Dr. Jastrow, I thought I’d better tell you immediately that I don’t know where Byron and your niece are. I had no idea they weren’t in Siena with you.”

“Well, I hesitated to wire you, but I thought you could help locate them. Two weeks ago they went to Warsaw.”

“Warsaw!”

“Yes, to visit a friend in our embassy there.”

“I’ll get on it right away. Our embassy, you said?”

“Yes. The second secretary, Leslie Slote, is a former pupil of mine, a brilliant fellow. I imagine he and Natalie will get married one day.” Pug scrawled the name. Jastrow coughed. “Excuse me. It was a risky trip to make, I guess, but they did set out before the pact. She’s twenty-seven and has quite a will of her own. Byron volunteered to go with her. That’s really why I refuse to worry. He’s a very capable young man.”

Victory Henry, dazed by the news, still found pleasure in this good word for Byron. Over the years he had not heard many. “Thanks. I’ll wire you when I find out something. And if you get any word, let me know.”

Jastrow coughed again. “Sorry. I have a touch of bronchitis. I remember the last war so well, Commander! It really wasn’t long ago, was it? All this is giving me a strange, terribly sad feeling. Almost despairing. I hope we’ll meet one day. It would give me pleasure to know Byron’s father. He worships you.”

The long table in Horcher’s restaurant was a listening post, an information exchange, and a clearing house for little diplomatic deals. Today, the cheery clink of silverware in the crowded restaurant, the smell of roast meats, the loud animated talk, were much the same; but at this special table there were changes. Several attachés had put on their uniforms. The Pole — a big cheerful purple-faced man with great moustaches, who usually outdrank everybody — was gone. The Englishman was missing. The French attaché, in heavy gold braid, gloomed in his usual place. The comical Dane, senior among them, white-haired and fat, still wore his white linen suit; but he was stiff and quiet. The talk was constrained. Warsaw Radio claimed the Germans were being thrown back, but nobody could confirm that. On the contrary, the flashes from their capitals echoed German boasts: victory everywhere, hundreds of Polish planes smashed on the ground, whole armies surrounded. Pug ate little and left early.

Pamela Tudsbury leaned against the iron grillwork in front of the embassy, near the line of sad-looking Jews that stretched around the block. She wore the gray suit of their morning walk on the Bremen. “Well,” he said, as they walked side by side, “so the little tramp went.”

She gave him a surprised, flattered look. “Didn’t he ever! Here’s our car. Directly after the speech we’re off. We’re flying to Copenhagen at six, and lucky to have the seats. They’re like diamonds.”

She drove the car in nervous zigzags through side streets to get around a long convoy of tanks on a main boulevard.

“Well, I’m sorry to see you and your dad go,” Pug said. “I’ll sure miss your fireball style at the wheel. Where to next?”

“My guess is back to the USA. The governor’s well liked there, and it’ll be the number one spot, actually, with Berlin shut down.”

“Pamela, don’t you have a young man in London, or several, who object to your being so much on the move?” The girl — that was how he thought of her, which showed his own age — looked flushed and sparkling-eyed. The driving gestures of her small white hands were swift, sharp and well controlled. She diffused an agreeable light peppery scent, like carnations.

“Oh, not at the moment, Commander. And the governor does need me since his eyes have got so bad. I like to travel, so I’m happy enough to — bless my soul. Look to your left. Don’t be obvious about it.”

Beside them, halted at the traffic light, Hermann Göring sat at the wheel of an open red two-seater, looking imperious and enormous. He wore a tan double-breasted business suit, with the flaring lapels that all his clothes displayed. The broad brim of his Panama hat was snapped down to the side and back, in an out-of-date, somewhat gangsterish American style. The fat man’s swollen beringed fingers drummed the steering wheel, and he chewed at his very long upper lip.

The light changed. As the red car darted forward, the policeman saluted, and Göring laughed and waved his hand.

“How easy it would have been to shoot him,” Pamela said.

Pug said, “The Nazis puzzle me. Their security precautions are mighty loose. Even around Hitler. After all, they’ve murdered a lot of people.”

“The Germans adore them. The governor got in trouble over one of his broadcasts from a Party Day in Nuremberg. He said anybody could kill Hitler, and the free way he moved around showed how solidly the Germans were for him. Somehow this annoyed them.”

“Pamela, I have a son I hope you’ll meet when you’re Stateside.” He told her about Warren.

The girl listened with a crooked smile. “You’ve already mentioned him. Sounds too tall for me. What’s he actually like? Is he like you?”

“Not in the least. He’s personable, sharp as a tack, and very attractive to the ladies.”

“Indeed. Don’t you have another son?”

“Yes. I have another son.” He hesitated, and then he briefly told Pamela what he had not yet told his wife — that Byron was somewhere in Poland in the path of the German invasion, accompanying a Jewish girl in love with another man. Pug said Byron had a cat’s way of getting out of trouble, but he expected to owe a few more gray hairs to his son before this episode was over.

“He sounds like the one I might enjoy meeting.”

“He’s too young for you.”

“Well, maybe not. I never do hit it quite right. There’s the governor.” Tudsbury stood on a corner, waving. His handshake was violent. He wore tweed far too heavy for the weather, and a green velour hat.

“Hello there, my dear fellow! Come along. Pam, be back at this corner at four and wait, won’t you? This won’t be one of his three-hour harangues. The bad man hasn’t had much sleep lately.”

A young German in a business suit met them, clicked his heels at Pug, and took them past SS men, along corridors and up staircases, to the crowded little press balcony of the Kroll Opera House, which the Nazis used for Reichstag meetings. The stylized gold eagle perched on a wreathed swastika behind the podium, with gold rays shooting out to cover the whole wall, had a colossal look in photographs, but before one’s eyes it was just garish and vulgar — a backdrop well suited to an opera house. This air of theatrical impermanence, of hastily contrived show, was a Nazi trademark. The new Reichstag, still under construction, was dully massive, to suit Hitler’s taste, and the heavy Doric colonnades were obviously of stone, but the building made Pug think of a cardboard film setting.

Like most Americans, he could not yet take the Nazis, or indeed the Germans, very seriously. He thought they worked with fantastic industry at kidding themselves. Germany was an unstable old-new country, with heavy baroque charm in some places, and Pittsburgh-like splotches of heavy industry in others; and with a surface smear of huffing, puffing political pageantry that strove to instill terror and came out funny. So it struck him. Individually the Germans were remarkably like Americans; he thought it curious that both peoples had the eagle for their national emblem. The Germans were the same sort of businesslike go-getters: direct, roughly humorous, and usually reliable and able. Commander Henry felt more at home with them in these points, than with the slower British or the devious talkative French. But in a mass they seemed to become ugly gullible strangers with a truculent streak; and if one talked politics to an individual German, he tended to turn into such a stranger, a sneering belligerent Mr. Hyde. They were a baffling lot. In a demoralized Europe, Pug, knew, the German hordes of marching men, well drilled and well equipped, could do a lot of damage; and they had slapped together a big air force in a hurry. He could well believe that they were now rolling over the Poles.

The deputies were streaming to their seats. Most of them wore uniforms, confusing in their variety of color and braid, alike mainly in the belts and boots. It was easy to pick out the military men by their professional bearing. The uniformed Party officials looked like any other politicians — jovial, relaxed, mostly grizzled or bald — stuffed into splashy costumes; and they obviously took Teutonic pleasure in the strut and the pomp, however uncomfortable jackboots might be on their flat feet, and gun belts on their bulging paunches. But today these professional Nazis, for all their warlike masquerade, looked less jaunty than usual. A subdued atmosphere pervaded the chamber.

Göring appeared. Victor Henry had heard of the fat man’s quick costume changes; now he saw one. In a sky-blue heavily medalled uniform with flaring buff lapels, Göring crossed the stage and stood with feet spread apart, hands on belted hips, talking gravely with a deferential knot of generals and Party men. After a while he took his place in the Speaker’s chair. Then Hitler simply walked in, holding the manuscript of his speech in a red leather folder. There was no heavy theatricalism, as in his Party rally entrances. All the deputies stood and applauded, and the guards came to attention. He sat in a front platform row among the generals and cabinet men, crossing and uncrossing his legs during Göring’s brief solemn introduction.

Henry thought the Führer spoke badly. He was gray with fatigue. The speech rehashed the iniquity of the Versailles Treaty, the mistreatment of Germany by the other powers, his unending efforts for peace, and the bloody belligerence of the Poles. It was almost all in the first person and it was full of strange pessimism. He spoke of falling in battle and of the men who were to succeed him, Göring and Hess. He shouted that 1918 would not recur, that this time Germany would triumph or go down fighting. He was extremely hoarse. He took awhile to work up to the flamboyant gestures; but at last he was doing them all. Tudsbury whispered to Henry once, “Damn good handwork today,” but Pug thought it was absurd vaudeville.

Nevertheless, this time Hitler impressed him. Bad as he was performing, the man was a blast of willpower. All the Germans sat with the round eyes and tense faces of children watching a magician. The proud cynical face of Göring, as he sat perched above and behind Hitler, wore exactly the same rapt, awestruck look.

But the Führer himself was a bit rattled, Pug thought, by the gravity of what he was saying. The speech sounded like the hasty product of a few sleepless hours, intensely personal, probably all the truer for being produced under such pressure. This whining, blustering “I — I — I” apologia must be one of the oddest state documents in the history of warfare.

The Führer’s face remained a comic one to Pug’s American eyes: the long straight thrusting nose, a right triangle of flesh sticking out of a white jowly face, under a falling lock of black hair, over the clown moustache. He wore a field-gray coat today — his “old soldier’s coat,” he said in his speech — and it was a decidedly poor fit. But the puffy glaring eyes, the taut downcurved mouth, the commanding arm sweeps, were formidable. This queer upstart from the Vienna gutters had really done it, Henry thought. He had climbed to the combined thrones, in Tudsbury’s phrase, of the Hohenzollerns and the Holy Roman Emperors, to try to reverse the outcome of the last war; and now he was giving the word. The little tramp was going! Pug kept thinking of Byron, somewhere in Poland, a speck of unimportance in this big show.

When they emerged on the street in balmy sunshine, Tudsbury said, “Well, what did you think?”

“I don’t think he’s quite big enough.”

Tudsbury stopped in his tracked and peered at him. “Let me tell you, he’s big. That’s the mistake we’ve all made over here for much too long.”

“He has to lick the world,” Pug said. “What’ll he do it with?”

“Eighty million armed and ravening Germans.”

“That’s just talk. You and the French have him outmanned and outgunned.”

“The French,” Tudsbury said. He added in a pleasanter tone, “There comes Pam. Let us drive you back to the embassy.”

“I’ll walk.”

The car stopped under a waving red swastika banner. Tudsbury shook hands, blinking at Henry through glasses like bottle bottoms.

“We’ll put up a show, Henry, but we may need help. Stopping this fellow will be a job. And you know it must be done.”

“Tell them that in Washington.”

“Don’t you think I will? You tell them, too.”

Henry said through the car window, “Good-bye, Pam. Happy landings.”

She put out a cold white hand, with a melancholy smile. “I hope you’ll see your son soon. I have a feeling you will.” The Mercedes drove off. Lighting a cigarette, Pug caught on his hand the faint carnation scent.

A big lean man in a pepper-and-salt suit, with a soft hat on his knees, was sitting in Henry’s outer office. Henry did not realize how big he was until he stood up; he was six feet three or so, and he stooped and looked a little ashamed of his height, like many overgrown men. “Commander Henry? I’m Palmer Kirby,” he said. “If you’re busy just throw me out.”

“Not at all. Welcome. How’d you get here?”

“Well, it took some doing. I had to dodge around through Belgium and Norway. Some planes are flying, some aren’t.” Kirby had an awkward manner, and somewhat rustic western speech. His pale face was pitted, as though he had once been a bad acne sufferer. He had a long nose and a large loose mouth; altogether an ugly man, with clever wrinkled eyes and a sad look.

The yeoman said, “Commander, sir, couple of priority message on your desk.”

“Very well. Come in, Dr. Kirby.” Pug sized him up with relief as a serious fellow out to get a job done; not the troublesome sort who wanted women, a good time, and an introduction to high-placed Nazis. A dinner and some industrial contacts would take care of Palmer Kirby.

This dispatch, in teletyped strips on a gray department blank, gave Henry an evil qualm. In the afternoon bulletins, Berlin Radio was claiming a victorious thrust toward Cracow after a violent air bombardment. The other message, a slip of the chargé d’affaires’ office stationery, was an unsigned scrawled sentence: Please see me at once.

Kirby said he would be glad to wait. Victor Henry walked down the hall to the richly furnished suite of the ambassador where the chargé had held the staff meeting.

The chargé looked at him over his half-moon glasses and waved at an armchair. “So you were at the Reichstag, eh? I heard part of it. How did it strike you?”

“The man’s punch-drunk.”

The chargé looked surprised and thoughtful. “That’s an odd reaction. It’s true he’s had quite a week. Incredible stamina, though. He undoubtedly wrote every word of that harangue. Rather effective, I thought. What was the mood there?”

“Not happy.”

“No, they have their misgivings this time around, don’t they? Strange atmosphere in this city.” The chargé took off his glasses and leaned back in his large, leather-covered chair, resting the back of head on interlaced fingers. “You’re wanted in Washington.”

“Sec Nav?” Pug blurted.

“No. State Department, German desk. You’re to proceed to Washington by fastest available transportation, civilian or military, highest priority, prepared to stay not more than one week in Washington, and then return to your post here. No other instructions. Nothing in writing. That’s it.”

For twenty-five years Victor Henry had not made a move like this without papers from the Navy Department, orders stenciled and mimeographed with a whole sheaf of copies to be left at stops on the way. Even his vacations had been “leaves” ordered by the Navy. The State Department had no jurisdiction over him. Still, an attaché had a queer shadowy status. His mind moved at once to executing the assignment. “If I have nothing in writing, how do I get air priorities?”

“You’ll get them. How soon can you go?”

Commander Henry stared at the chargé, and then tried a smile. The chargé smiled back. Henry said, “This is somewhat unusual.”

“You sent in an intelligence report, I’m given to understand, on the combat readiness of Nazi Germany?”

“I did.”

“That may have something to do with it. In any case, the idea seems to be that you pack a toothbrush and leave.”

“You mean today? Tonight?”

“Yes.”

Pug stood. “Right. What’s the late word on England and France?”

“Chamberlain’s addressing Parliament tonight. My guess is the war will be on before you get back.”

“Maybe it’ll be over.”

“In Poland, possibly.” The chargé smiled, and seemed taken aback when Henry failed to be amused.

The commander found Dr. Kirby, long legs sprawled, reading a German industrial journal and smoking a pipe, which, with black-rimmed glasses, much enhanced his professorial look. “I’ll have to turn you over to Colonel Forrest, our military attaché, Dr. Kirby,” he said. “Sorry the Navy can’t do the courtesies. I’ll be leaving town for a week.”

“Right.”

“Can you give me an idea of what you’re after?”

Dr. Kirby took from his breast pocket a typewritten sheet.

“Well, no problem here,” Pug said, scanning it. “I know most of these people. I imagine Colonel Forrest does, too. Now, Mrs. Henry has a dinner laid on for you, Thursday evening. As a matter of fact” — Henry tapped the sheet — “Dr. Witten will be one of the guests.”

“Won’t your wife prefer to call it off? I’m not really much on dinner parties.”

“Neither am I, but a German’s a different person in his office than he is at a table after a few glasses of wine. Not a setup, you understand, but different. So dinners are useful.”

Kirby smiled, uncovering large yellow teeth and quite changing his expression to a humorous, coarse, tough look. He flourished the trade journal. “They don’t seem to be setups, any way you look at them.”

“Yes and no. I’ve just come from the Reichstag. They’ve sure been a setup for this character Hitler. Well, let me take you across the hall to Colonel Forrest. It may be he and Sally will host the dinner. We’ll see.”

Driving home through the quiet Berlin streets Pug thought less about the summons to Washington than of the immediate problem — Rhoda and how to handle her, and whether to disclose that Byron was missing. The trip to the United States might well prove a waste of time; to speculate on the reason for it was silly. He had been on such expeditions before. Somebody high up wanted certain answers in a hurry — answers that perhaps did not exist — and started burning up the wires. Once he had flown three thousand miles during a fleet exercise only to find, on his arrival aboard the “Blue” flagship in Mindanao, that his services were no longer required, because the battle problem had moved past the gunnery scoring.

She was not at home. By the time she got back, he was strapping shut his suitcases. “NOW what on earth?” she said breezily. Her hair was whirled and curled. They had been invited to an opera party that evening.

“Come out in the garden.”

He told her, when they were well away from the house, about the strange Washington summons.

“Oh, lord. For how long?”

“Not more than a week. If the Clippers keep flying I should be back by the fifteenth.”

“When do you go? First thing tomorrow?”

“Well, by luck, they’ve got me on a plane to Rotterdam at eight tonight.”

“Tonight!” Vexation distorted Rhoda’s face. “You mean we don’t even get to go to the opera? Oh, damn. And what about the Kirby fellow? Is that on or off? How can I entertain a person I haven’t even met? What an aggravating mess!”

Pug said the Forrests would be co-hosting the Kirby dinner, and that the opera might not be on. I saw Frau Witten at the hairdresser’s. They’re planning a marvelous supper, but naturally I won’t be there. I’m not going to the opera unescorted. Oh, hell. And suppose England and France declare war? How about that, hey? That’s going to be just peachy, me stranded alone in Berlin in the middle of a world war!”

“Rhoda, I’ll get back in any case via Lisbon or Copenhagen. Don’t worry. I’d like you to go ahead with the Kirby thing. BuOrd wants the red carpet out for him.”

They were sitting on a marble bench beside the little fountain, where fat red fish disported in the late sunshine. Rhoda looked around at the close-clipped lawn, and said in a calmer tone, “All right. I’ve been planning cocktails out here. Those musicians who played at Peggy’s tea are coming. It’ll be nice at that. Sorry you’ll miss it.”

“Bill Forrest said nobody in this world puts on dinners like you.”

Rhoda laughed. “Oh, well. A week goes by fast. Berlin’s interesting now.” A pair of black-and-yellow birds darted past them, swooped to a nearby tree, and perched caroling. “Honestly, though, would you believe there’s a war on?”

“It’s just starting.”

“I know. Well, you’ll see Madeline, anyway. And be sure to telephone Warren, that rascal never writes. I’m glad Byron’s up in the Italian hills. He’ll be all right, unless he shows up married to that Jewish girl. But he won’t. Byron seems much crazier than he is.” She put her hand in her husband’s. “Inherits it from his mother, no doubt. Sorry I threw my little fit, dear. You know me.”

Clasping her hand tight, Victor Henry decided not to upset Rhoda further with the news of Byron’s disappearance. She could do nothing about it, after all, but fret vainly; and he guessed that whatever pickle Byron was in, he would get himself out of it. That had been the boy’s history.

Pug flew off on schedule that evening to Rotterdam. Tempelhof Airport was transformed. The shops were dark. All the ticket counters save Lufthansa were shut down. On the field, the usual traffic of European airliners had vanished, and squat Luftwaffe interceptors stood in grim shadowy rows. But from the air, Berlin still blazed with all its electric lights, as in peacetime. He was pleased that Rhoda had decided to dress up and go to Der Rosenkavalier, since Frau Witten had found a tall handsome Luftwaffe colonel to escort her.

Chapter 11

Byron was changing a tire by the roadside when he was strafed. He and Natalie were out of Cracow and heading for Warsaw in the rust-pitted Fiat taxi, together with Berel Jastrow, the bridal couple, the bearded little driver, and his inconveniently fat wife.

Cracow on the morning of the invasion had smoked and flamed here and there, but the picturesque city had not been much damaged by the first German bombardment. Byron and Natalie had had a good if hurried look at its splendid churches and castles and its magnificent old square like Saint Mark’s in Venice, as they drove around in cheery sunshine trying to find a way out. The populace was not in panic. The Germans were more than fifty miles away. Still, crowds moved briskly in the streets, and the railroad station was mobbed. Berel Jastrow somehow obtained two tickets to Warsaw. Byron and Natalie would not use them, hard as Berel tried to persuade them to, so he shipped off his wife and twelve-year-old daughter. Then he adroitly took them to one office after another, through little streets and unused doors and gates, seeking to send them safely away. He seemed to know everybody, and he went at the job with assurance, but he couldn’t get Byron and Natalie out. Air traffic was finished. The Rumanian border was reported closed. Trains were still departing at unpredictable times, eastward toward Russia and north to Warsaw, with people hanging from windows and clinging to the locomotives. Otherwise there were the roads.

The bearded taxi driver Yankel and his wife, poor relatives of Berel, were willing to go anywhere. Berel had managed to get him an official paper, exempting the cab from being commandeered; but Yankel had small faith that it would work for long. The wife insisted on driving to her flat first, picking up all the food she had, her bedding, and her kitchenware, and roping them onto the car top. Berel thought the Americans should head for their embassy in Warsaw, three hundred kilometers away, rather than chance a dash to the border in the path of the German army. So this odd party set forth: seven of them jammed in an ancient rusty Fiat, with mattresses flapping on the roof, and copper pots rhythmically banging.

They stopped at night in a town where Jastrow knew some Jews. They ate well, slept on the floor, and were off again at dawn. They found the narrow tarred roads filling with people on foot and horse-drawn wagons laden with children, furniture, squawking geese, and the like. Some peasants drove along donkeys piled with household goods, or a few mooing cows. Marching soldiers now and then forced the car off the road. A troop of cavalry trotted by on gigantic dappled horses. The dusty riders chatted as they rode, strapping fellows with helmets and sabers glittering in the morning sun. They laughed, flashing white teeth, twirling their moustaches, glancing down with good-humored disdain at the straggling refugees. One company of foot soldiers went by singing. The clear weather, the smell of the ripening corn, made the travellers feel good, though the sun as it climbed got too hot. There were no combatants in sight on the long black straight road through yellow fields when a lone airplane dived from the sky, following the line of the road and making a hard stuttering noise. It flew so low that Byron could see the painted numbers, the black crosses, the swastika, the clumsy fixed wheels. The bullets fell on people, horses, and the household goods and children in the carts. Byron felt a burning and stinging in one ear. He was not aware of toppling into the dirt.

He heard a child crying, opened his eyes, and sat up. The blood on his clothes surprised him — big bright red stains; and he felt a warm trickle on his face. Natalie kneeled beside him, sponging his head with a sodden red handkerchief. He remembered the airplane. Across the road the crying girl clutched a man’s leg, looking down at a woman lying in the road. Between sobs she screamed a few Polish words over and over. The man, a blond barefoot Pole in ragged clothes, was patting the child’s head.

“What’s that, what’s she saying?”

“Are you all right, Byron? How do you feel?”

“Sort of dizzy. What’s that little girl saying?”

Natalie looked strange. Her nose seemed pinched and long, her hair was in disorder, her face was livid and dirty, and her lipstick was cracked. She had a little of Byron’s blood smeared on her forehead. “I don’t know. She’s hysterical.”

Berel stood beside Natalie, stroking his beard. He said in French, “She keeps saying, ‘Mama looks so ugly.’”

Byron got to his feet, propping one hand against the car’s hot fender. His knees felt watery. “I think I’m okay. What does the wound look like?”

Natalie said, “I don’t know, your hair is so thick. But it’s bleeding a lot. We’d better get you to a hospital and have it stitched.”

The driver, hastily tightening the bolts of the jacked-up wheel, smiled at Byron. Sweat rolled off his pallid nose and forehead into his beard. His wife and the bridal couple stood in the shade of the car, a look of shock on their faces, fazing at the sky, at the road, and at the crying girl. All down the road, wounded horses were plunging and screaming, and fowls from overturned carts were scampering helter-skelter, chased by children making a great noise. People were bending over the wounded or lifting them into carts, with much excited shouting in Polish. The sun burned down white-hot from a clear sky.

Byron walked uncertainly to the crying girl, followed by Natalie and Jastrow. The mother lay on her back. She had caught a bullet straight in the face. The big red hole was an especially bad sight because her fixed eyes were undamaged. Berel spoke to the father, who had a stupid gentle face and a bushy yellow moustache. The man shrugged, holding the little girl close. Yankel’s wife came and offered a red apple to the child, whose sobbing almost at once died away. She took the apple and bit it. The man sat by his dead wife, folding his dusty bare feet, and began to mutter, crossing himself, his shoes dangling around his neck.

Natalie helped Byron, who was very dizzy, into the car. They drove on; Jastrow said there was a good-sized town three miles away, where they could tell the authorities about the wounded on the highway. The bride, who out of her wedding clothes was just a freckled girl with thick glasses, started to cry, and cried all the way to the town, repulsing her wan-faced husband and burying her face in the huge bosom of the driver’s wife.

The town was undamaged, and the hospital, a small brown brick building beside a church, was quiet and cool inside. Several nurses and nuns went off in a truck after Jastrow told his story. Byron was led to a white-painted room full of surgical equipment and buzzing flies. A fat old doctor in a white jacket and patched canvas trousers sewed up his head. The shaving of the hair around the wound hurt worse than the actual stitching. He suggested to Natalie, when he came out, that she get her knee taped, for she was limping again.

“Oh, hell,” Natalie said. “Let’s go. We can still reach Warsaw tonight, Yankel says. I’ll get it fixed there.”

What with the tablespoon of pain-killer the doctor had given him, general weariness, and the aftermath of shock, Byron dozed. He did not know how much time had passed when he woke. On a broad cobbled square near a red brick railway station, two soldiers, rifles in hand, had halted the car. The station and a freight train were on fire; flame and black smoke billowed from their windows. Several buildings around the square were smashed or damaged; two were in flames. People were crowding around shops, passing out merchandise, carrying it off. Byron realized with surprise that this was looting. Across the square, men were pumping water at the burning railroad station from horse-drawn fire engines, such as Byron had not seen except in old silent movies. A crowd was watching all this as it would any peacetime excitement.

“What is it?” Byron said.

One of the soldiers, a big young blond fellow with a square red face marred by boils, walked around to the driver’s window. A conversation ensued in Polish between the soldier, Yankel, and Jastrow. The soldier kept smiling with peculiar unpleasant gentleness, as though at children he disliked. His scrawny companion came and looked through the yellow glass, coughing continually over a cigarette. He spoke to the big one, addressing him repeatedly as Casimir. Byron knew by now that Zhid was a Polish epithet for “Jew”; Zhid was occurring often in this talk. Casimir addressed the driver again, and once reached in and gave his beard a caress, and then a yank, apparently displeased with his answers.

Jastrow muttered something to Natalie in Yiddish, glancing at Byron. “What is it?” Byron said.

Natalie murmured, “There are good Poles and bad Poles, he says. These are bad.”

Casimir gestured with his gun for everybody to get out.

Jastrow said to Byron, “Dey take our automobile.”

Byron had a rotten headache. His ear had been nicked by the bullet, and this raw patch burned and throbbed, hurting him more than the stitched head wound. He had vague cramps, having eaten old scraps and drunk dirty water in the past two days, and he was still doped by the medicine. He had seldom felt worse. “I’ll try talking to Redface, he seems to be in charge,” he said, and he got out of the car.

“Look,” he said, approaching the soldiers, “I’m an American naval officer, and I’m returning to the embassy in Warsaw, where they’re expecting us. The American girl” — he indicated Natalie — “is my fiancée, and we’ve been visiting her family. These people are her family.”

The soldiers wrinkled their faces at the sound of English, and at the sight of Byron’s thick blood-stained bandage. “Amerikanetz?” the big one said.

Jastrow, at the car window, translated Byron’s words.

Casimir scratched his chin, looking Byron up and down. The condescending smile made its reappearance. He spoke to Jastrow, who translated shakily into French, “He says no American Navy officer would ever marry a Jew. He doesn’t believe you.”

“Tell him if we’re not in Warsaw by tonight the American ambassador will take action to find us. And if he’s in doubt, let’s go to a telephone and call the embassy.”

“Passport,” Casimir said to Byron, after Jastrow translated. Byron produced it. The soldier peered at the green cover, the English words, the photograph, and at Byron’s face. He spoke to his coughing companion and started to walk off, beckoning to Byron.

“Briny, don’t go away,” Natalie said.

“I’ll be back. Keep everybody quiet.”

The smaller soldier leaned against the car fender and lit another cigarette, hacking horrible and grinning at Natalie.

Byron followed Casimir down a side street, into a two-story stone building festooned outside with official bulletins and placards. They walked past rooms full of files, counters, and desks to a frosted glass door at the end of the hall. Casimir went inside, and after about ten minutes poked his head out and beckoned to the American.

A pudgy man in a gray uniform, smoking a cigarette in an amber holder, sat behind the big desk at the window; an officer to judge by his colored tabs and brass ornaments. The passport was open before the man. He sipped tea from a glass as he glanced at it, and tea dripped on Byron’s picture. In the narrow grimy room, metal files and bookshelves were shoved in a corner, with dirty legal tomes tumbled about.

The officer asked him if he spoke German. That was the language they used, though both were bad at it. He made Byron tell his story again and asked him how an American naval officer happened to be mixed up with Jews, and how he came to be wandering around Poland in wartime. When his cigarette was consumed to the last quarter inch, he lit another. He queried Byron hard about the head injury, and smiled sourly, raising his eyebrows at the account of strafing on the highway. Even if this were all true, he commented, Byron had been acting foolishly and could easily get himself shot. He wrote down Byron’s answers with a scratchy pen, in long silent pauses between the questions; then clipped the scrawled sheets to the passport, and dropped them into a wire basket full of papers.

“Come back tomorrow afternoon at five o’clock.”

“I can’t. I’m expected in Warsaw tonight.”

The officer shrugged.

Byron wished his temples would stop throbbing. It was hard to think, especially in German, and his vision was blurry, too. “May I ask who you are, and by what right you take my passport, and by what right this soldier tried to take our car?”

The unpleasant smile that Casimir had displayed — Casimir stood by the desk all through the interview with a wooden look — now appeared on the officer’s face. “Never mind who I am. We have to make sure who you are.”

“Then telephone the American embassy and ask for Leslie Slote, the political secretary. That won’t take long.”

The officer drank off his cold tea and began signing papers with a mutter in Polish to Casimir, who took Byron’s arm, pushed him out of the room, and led him back to the car.

The station and freight cars were pouring steamy white smoke, and a smell of wet burned wood filled the street. The looting was over. Policemen stood in front of the wrecked shops. The faces of the three women looked out tensely through the yellowed car glass at Byron. Casimir spoke to his companion, who caused the bride to shrink from the window by knocking on the glass and winking at her; then they went off.

Byron told Natalie what had happened and she recounted it in Yiddish to the others. Jastrow said they could stay the night in the home of a friend in this town. When Byron got in behind the wheel, Yankel seemed glad to retire to the back seat beside his wife.

Following Berel’s directions, Byron maneuvered to a crossroad. A large arrow pointing left, down a road through fields stacked with corn sheaves, read: WARSAW, 95 KS. Jastrow told him to turn right, along a road which led past small houses toward an unpainted wooden church. Byron, however, shifted gears and swooped left, driving out into the fields. “That’s a bad outfit back there,” he said to Natalie. “We’d better keep going.”

Natalie exclaimed, “Byron, stop, don’t be crazy! You can’t drive around among these people without your passport.”

“Ask Berel what he thinks.”

There was colloquy in Yiddish. “He says it’s much too dangerous for you. Go back.”

“Why? If we run into any trouble, I’ll say I lost the passport in a bombardment. I’ve got this hole in my head.” Byron had the accelerator pressed to the floor, and the overloaded bumping old Fiat was doing its best speed, about thirty miles an hour. Overhead the pots were making a great din, and Byron had to shout. “Ask him if it isn’t safest for you for the rest to get the hell out of here.”

He felt a touch on his shoulder and glanced around. Berel Jastrow’s bearded face was fatigued and ashen, and he was nodding.

It took them two days to go the ninety-five kilometers. While it was happening it seemed to Byron a saga that he would be telling his grandchildren, if he lived through it. But so much happened afterward to him that his five-day drive from Cracow to Warsaw soon became a garbled fading memory. The breakdown of the water pump that halted them for half a day on a deserted back road in a forest, until Byron, tinkering with it in a daze of illness, to his astonishment got it to work; the leak in the gas tank that compelled them to take great risks to buy more; the disappearance of the hysterical bride from the hayfield where they spent one night, and the long search for her (she had wandered to another farm, and fallen asleep in a barn); the two blood-caked boys they found asleep by the roadside, who had a confused story of falling out of a truck and who rode the last thirty kilometers to Warsaw sitting on wooden slats on the sizzling hood of the Fiat — all this dimmed. But he always remembered how ungodly sick to the stomach he was, and the horrible embarrassment of his frequent excursions in to the bushes; Natalie’s unshakable good cheer as she got hungrier, dirtier, and wearier; and above all, never to be forgotten, he remembered the hole in his breast pocket where the passport had been, which seemed to throb more than the gashes in his ear and his scalp, because he now knew that there were Polish officers capable of ordering him taken out and shot, and soldiers capable of doing it. Following Jastrow’s directions, he wound and doubled on stony, muddy roads to avoid towns, though it lengthened the journey and played hell with the disintegrating car.

They arrived in the outskirts of Warsaw in the chill dawn, crawling among hundreds of horse-drawn wagons. All across the stubbled fields, women, children, and bent graybeards were digging trenches and putting up tank barriers of tangled iron girders. The buildings cluttered against the pink northeast horizon looked like the heavenly Jerusalem. The driver’s immense wife, squeezed against Natalie for days and nights in an intimacy the girl had never known with another human being, smelling more and more like an overheated cow, embraced Natalie and kissed and hugged her. It took three more hours before the boys jumped off the hood and ran away down a side street. “Go ahead, go in quickly,” the mushroom dealer said to Natalie in Yiddish, stepping out of the car to kiss her. “Come and see me later if you can.”

When Byron said good-bye, Berel Jastrow would not let his hand go. He clasped it in both his hands, looking earnestly into the young man’s face. “Merci. Mille fois merci. Tousand times tank you. America save Poland, yes Byron? Save de vorld.”

Byron laughed. “That’s a big order, but I’ll pass it on, Berel.”

“What did he say?” Berel asked Natalie, still holding Byron’s hand. When she told him Berel laughed too, and then astonished Byron by giving him a bear hug and a brief scratchy kiss.

A lone marine stood watch at the closed gates. Gray sandbags lined the yellow stucco walls, ugly X-shaped wooden braces disfigured the windows, and on the red tile roof an enormous American flag had been painted. All this was strange, but strangest was the absence of the long line of people. Nobody but the marine stood outside. The United States embassy was no longer a haven or an escape hatch.

The guard’s clean-scraped pink suspicious face brightened when he heard them talk. “Yes, ma’am, Mr. Slote sure is here. He’s in charge now.” He pulled a telephone from a metal box fastened on the gate, regarding them curiously. Natalie put her hands to her tumbled hair, Byron rubbed his heavy growth of red bristles, and they both laughed. Slote came running down the broad stairway under the embassy medallion. “Hello! God, am I ever glad to see you two!” He threw an arm around Natalie and kissed her cheek, staring the while at Byron’s dirty blood-stained head bandage. “What the devil? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. What’s the news? Are the French and British fighting?”

“Have you been that out of touch? They declared war Sunday, after fussing at Hitler for three days to be nice and back his army out of Poland. I’m not aware that they’ve done anything since but drop leaflets.”

Over a wonderful breakfast of ham and eggs, the first hot food they had eaten in days, they described their journey. Byron could feel his racked insides taking a happy grip on this solid boyhood fare and calming down. He and Natalie ate from trays on the ambassador’s broad desk. Washington had ordered the ambassador and most of the staff out of Poland when the air bombing began; as the only bachelor on the number three level, Slote had been picked to stay. The diplomat was appalled at Byron’s tale of abandoning his passport. “Ye gods, man, in a country at war! It’s a marvel you weren’t caught and jailed or shot. That you’re a German agent would be far more plausible than the real reason you’ve been wandering around. You two are an incredible pair. Incredibly lucky too.”

“And incredibly filthy,” Natalie said. “What do we do now?”

“Well, you’re just in it, my love. There’s no getting out of Poland at the moment. The Germans are overrunning the countryside, bombing and blasting. We have to find you places to stay in Warsaw until, well, until the situation clarifies itself one way or another. Meantime you’ll have to dodge bombs like the rest of us.” Slote shook his head at Byron. “Your father’s been worrying about you. I’ll have to cable him. We still have communication via Stockholm. He’ll let A.J. know that Natalie’s at least found and alive.”

“I am dying for a bath,” Natalie said.

Slote scratched his head, then took keys from his pocket and slid them across the desk. “I’ve moved in here. Take my apartment. It’s on the ground floor, which is the safest, and there’s a good deep cellar. When I was there last the water was still running and we had electricity.”

“What about Byron?”

Byron said, “I’ll go to the Methodist House.”

“It’s been hit,” Slote said. “We had to get everybody out, day before yesterday.”

“Do you mind,” Natalie said, “if he stays with me?”

Both men showed surprise and embarrassment, and Byron said, “I think my mother would object.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Byron. With all the running into the bushes you and I have been doing and whatnot, I don’t know what secrets we have from each other.” She turned to Slote. “He’s like a loyal kid brother, sort of.”

“Don’t you believe her,” Byron said wearily. “I’m a hot-blooded beast. Is there a YMCA?”

“Look, I don’t mind,” Slote said, with obvious lack of enthusiasm. “There’s a sofa in the sitting room. It’s up to Natalie.”

She scooped up the keys. “I intend to bathe and then sleep for several days — between bombings. How will we ever get out of Poland, Leslie?”

Slote shrugged, cleared his throat, and laughed. “Who knows? Hitler says if the Poles don’t surrender, Warsaw will be levelled. The Poles claim they’ve thrown the Wehrmacht back and are advancing into Germany. It’s probably nonsense. Stockholm Radio says the Nazis have broken through everywhere and will surround Warsaw in a week The Swedes and the Swiss here are trying to negotiate a safe-conduct for foreign neutrals through the German lines. That’s how we’ll all probably leave. Till that comes through, the safest place in Poland is right here.”

“Well then, we did the sensible thing, coming to Warsaw,” Natalie said.

“You’re the soul of prudence altogether, Natalie.”

As the trolleybus wound off into the smaller residential streets, Byron and Natalie saw more damage than they had in Cracow — burned-out or smashed houses, bomb holes in the pavement, an occasional rubble-filled street roped off — but by and large Warsaw looked much as it had in peacetime, less than a week ago, though now seemingly in a bygone age. The threatened German obliteration was not yet happening, if it ever would. The other passengers paid no attention to Byron’s bandage or growth of beard. Several of them were bandaged and most of the men were bristly. A thick human smell choked the car.

Natalie said when they got out, “Ah — air! No doubt we smell just like that, or worse. I must bathe at once or I’ll go mad. Somehow on the road I didn’t care. Now I can’t stand myself another minute.”

Slivers of sunlight through the closed shutters made Slote’s flat an oasis of peaceful half-gloom. Books lining the sitting room gave it a dusty library smell. Natalie flipped switches, obviously quite at home in the place. “Want to wash up first?” she said. “Once I get in that tub there’ll be no moving me for hours. There’s only cold water. I’m going to boil up some hot. But I don’t know. Maybe you should find a hospital, first thing, and get your head examined.”

After the phrase was out of her mouth, it struck them both as funny. They laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop laughing. “Well, while we still both stink,” Natalie gasped, “come here.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him. “You damned fool, abandoning your passport to protect some dopey Jews.”

“My head’s all right,” Byron said. The touch of the girl’s mouth on his was like birdsong, like flowers, exhausted and filthy though they both were. “I’ll clean up while you boil your water.”

As he shaved she kept coming into the bathroom emptying steaming kettles into the cracked yellow tub, humming a polonaise of Chopin. The music had introduced the noon news broadcast, in which Byron had understood only a few place-names: towns and cities more than halfway in from the western and southern borders toward Warsaw.

“My God, how pale you are, Briny,” she said, inspecting his clean-shaven face nicked here and there by the cold-water shave, “and how young! I keep forgetting. You’re just a boy.”

“Oh, don’t exaggerate. I’ve already flunked out of graduate school,” Byron said. “Isn’t that a mature thing to do?”

“Get out of here. I’m diving into that tub.”

An unmistakable wailing scream sounded outside about half an hour later. Byron, on the sofa, dozing over an old issue of Time, snapped awake and took binoculars from his suitcase. Scarlet-faced and dripping, Natalie emerged from the bathroom swathed in Slote’s white terry-cloth robe. “Do we have to go to the cellar?”

“I’ll have a look.”

The street was deserted: no cars, no people. Byron scanned the heavens from the doorway with his naked eye, and after a moment saw the airplanes. Sailing forth from a white cloud, they moved slowly across the sky through a scattering of black puffs. He heard grumbling muffled thumps far away, like thunder without reverberations. As he stepped out on the sidewalk, binoculars to his eyes, a whistle shrieked. Down the street a little man in a white helmet and white armband was waving angrily at him. He dropped back into the doorway, and found the planes with the glasses: black machines, bigger than the one that had wounded him, with a different thick shape but painted with the same crosses and swastikas. The fuselages were very long; in the rainbow-rimmed field of the glasses they looked a bit like small flying freight cars.

Natalie was combing her hair by candlelight at a hallway mirror. The electricity was off. “Well? Is that bombing?”

“It’s bombing. They’re not headed this way, the planes I saw.”

“Well, I don’t think I’d better get back in the tub.”

The thumps became louder. They sat on the sofa, smoking cigarettes and looking at each other.

Natalie said in a shaky voice, “It’s sort of like a summer electric storm coming toward you. I didn’t picture it like this.”

A distant whistling noise became louder, and a sudden crash jarred the room. Glass broke somewhere, a lot of glass. The girl uttered a small shriek, but sat still and straight. Two more close explosions came, one right after the other. Through the shutters harsh noises echoed from the street: shouts and screams, and the grumble of falling brick walls.

“Briny, shall we run for the cellar?”

“Better sit tight.”

“Okay.”

That was the worst of it. The thumps went on for a while, some distant and faint some closer; but there were no more explosions that could be felt in the air, in the floor, in the teeth. They died off. In the street outside bells clanged, running feet trampled on the cobblestones, men yelled. Byron pulled aside curtains, opened a window, and blinked in the strong sunshine at the sight of two smashed burning houses down the street. People were milling around scattered chunks of masonry and flaming wreckage, carrying pails of water into the tall thick red flames.

Natalie stood beside him, gnawing her lips. “Those horrible German bastards. Oh my God, Briny, look. Look!” Men were starting to carry limp figures out of the clouds of smoke. One tall man in a black rubber coat held a child dangling in each arm. “Can’t we help? Can’t we do something?

“There must be volunteer squads, Natalie, that neutrals can work in. Nursing, rescue, cleanup. I’ll find out.”

“I can’t watch this.” She turned away. Barefoot, a couple of inches lower without her heels, wrapped in the oversize robe, the eyes in her upturned unpainted face shiny with tears, Natalie Jastrow looked younger and much less formidable that usual. “It was so close. They may kill both of us.”

“We probably should dive for the cellar next time we hear the siren. Now we know.”

“I got you into it. That keeps eating at me. Your parents in Berlin must be sick with worry about you, and—”

“My people are Navy. It’s all in the day’s work. As for me, I’m having fun.”

“Fun?” She scowled at him. “What the devil? Don’t talk like a child.”

“Natalie, I’ve never had a more exciting time, that’s all. I don’t believe I’m going to get killed. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”

“Byron, hundreds of people have probably died out there in the last half hour! Didn’t you see the kids they pulled out of the building?”

“I saw them. Look, all I meant was—” Byron hesitated because what he had meant was that he was having fun.

“It’s just such a stupid, callous thing to say. Something a German might say.” She hitched the robe around her closer. “Fun! Leslie thinks I’m screwy. You’re really peculiar.”

With an unfriendly headshake at him, she stalked to the bathroom.

Chapter 12

Coming back to Washington from Berlin jolted Pug, as had his return in 1931 from Manila to a country sunk in the Great Depression. This time what struck him was not change, but the absence of it. After the blaring pageantry and war fevers of Nazi Germany, it was a bit like coming out of a theatre showing a Technicolor movie into a gray quiet street. Even Rotterdam and Lisbon had been agog with war reverberations. Here, where the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument shimmered in the Ninety-degree heat, people were plodding apathetically about their business. The roaring invasion of Poland, already looking like one of the historic conquests of all time, was as remote from this city as a volcanic eruption on Mars.

He sat in the dining room of the Army and Navy Club, breakfasting on kippers and scrambled eggs. His arrival the day before had proved a puzzling letdown. The man in the German section of the State Department to whom he had reported — a very minor personage, to judge by his small office, shoddy furniture, and lack of a window — had told him to expect a call in the morning; nothing more.

“Well, well, our cookie-pushing friend!”

“Where’s your striped pants, Pug?”

Grinning down at him were three classmates: Digger Brown, Paul Munson, and Harry Warendorf. Though Pug had not encountered any one of them for years, they joined him and began exchanging jokes and gossip as though they say each other every day. He looked at them with interest, and they at him, for gain of fat and loss of hair. Munson had learned to fly way back in 1921, and now he was air operations officer of the Saratoga. Digger Brown, Pug’s old room-mate, had an assured if pasty look. Well he might, the first officer of the class to make exec of a battle ship! Warendorf, the brain of the three, was a hard-luck man like Tollever. Following orders of his commodore, he had piled a destroyer on the rocks off the California coast in a fog with half a dozen others. He had fallen into minesweepers, and there he was still.

Under the rough banter about his pink-tea job, they were curious and respectful. They asked remarkably naïve questions about the European war. All of them assumed that the Nazis were twice as strong in the field as they were and that the Allies were all but impotent. It struck Pug again how little Americans knew of Europe for all the flood of lurid newspaper and magazine stories about the Nazis; and how little most men ever knew beyond their constricted specialties.

“Why the hell are the Germans running away with it in Poland, Pug, if all this is so?” Warendorf said. They had been listening, attentive but unconvinced, to his estimate of the opposed forces.

“That’s anybody’s guess. I’d say surprise, superior matériel on the spot, concentration of force, better field leadership, better political leadership, better training, a professional war plan, and probably a lot of interior rot, confusion, and treason behind the Polish lines. Also the French and British seem to be sitting on their duffs through the best strategic opportunity against Hitler they’ll ever have. You can’t win a game if you don’t get out on the field.”

A page boy called him to the telephone. Briskly, an unfamiliar voice said, “Commander Henry? Welcome to these peaceful shores. I’m Carton. Captain Russell Carton. I think we were briefly at the War College together, fighting the Japs on a linoleum checkerboard floor.”

“That’s right, Captain, 1937. The Japs beat the hell out of us, as I recall.” Pug did his best to suppress the astonishment in his tones. Russell Carton was the name of President Roosevelt’s naval aide.

The voice chuckled. “I hope you’ve forgotten that I was the admiral who blew the engagement. When shall I pick you up? Our appointment’s at noon.”

“How far do we have to go?”

“Just around the corner. The White House. You’re seeing the President… . Hello? Are you there?”

“Yes, sir. Seeing the President, you said. Do I get a briefing on this?”

“Not that I know of. Wear dress whites. Suppose I pick you up at eleven-thirty.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

He went back to his table and ordered more coffee. The others asked no questions. He kept his face blank, but it was hard to fool these old friends. They knew it was odd that he was back from Berlin so soon. They probably guessed that he had received a startling call. That didn’t matter. Munson said, “Pug, don’t you have a boy in Pensacola? I’m flying down there day after tomorrow to drop some pearls of wisdom about carrier landings. Come along.”

“If I can, Paul. I’ll call you.”

Pug was sorry when they left. The shoptalk about a combat exercise they were planning had brought back the smell of machinery, of sea air, of coffee on the bridge. Their gossip of recent promotions and assignments, their excitement over the quickening world events and the improving chances for action and glory — this was his element, and he had been out of it too long. He got a haircut, brilliantly shined his own shoes, put a fresh, white cover on his cap, donned his whites and ribbons, and sat in the lobby for an eternally long forty-five minutes, puzzling over the imminent encounter with Franklin Roosevelt, and dreading it. He had met him before.

A sailor came through the revolving door and called his name. He rode the few blocks to the White House in a gray Navy Chevrolet, dazedly trying to keep up chitchat with Captain Carton, a beefy man with a crushing handgrip on whose right shoulder blue-and-gold “loafer’s loops” blazed. This marked him as a presidential aide, to those who knew; otherwise staff aiguillettes belonged on the left shoulder. Pug kept step with the captain through the broad public rooms of the White House, along corridors, up staircases. “Here we are,” Carton said, leading him into a small room. “Wait a moment.” The moment lasted twenty-seven minutes. Pug Henry looked at old sea-battle engravings on the wall, and out of the window; he paced, sat in a heavy brown leather chair, and paced again.

He was wondering whether the President would remember him, and hoping he wouldn’t. In 1918, as a very cocky Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt had crossed to Europe on a destroyer. The wardroom officers, including Ensign Henry, had snickered at the enormously tall, very handsome young man with the famous family name, who made a great show of using nautical terms and bounding up ladders like a sea dog, while dressed in outlandish costumes that he kept changing. He was a charmer, the officers agreed, but a lightweight, almost a phony, spoiled by an easy rich man’s life. He wore pince-nez glasses in imitation of his great relative, President Teddy Roosevelt, and he also imitated his booming manly manner; but a prissy Harvard accent made this heartiness somewhat ridiculous.

One morning Ensign Henry had done his usual workout on the forecastle, churning up a good sweat. Because there was a water shortage, he had hosed himself down from a saltwater riser on the well deck. Unfortunately the ship was pitching steeply. The hose had gotten away from him and spouted down into the hatchway to the wardroom, just as Roosevelt was coming topside in a gold-buttoned blazer, white flannel trousers, and straw hat. The costume had been wrecked, and Pug had endured a fierce chewing out by his captain and the dripping Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

A door opened. “All right. Come on in, Pug,” Captain Carton said.

The President waved at him from behind the desk. “Hello there! Glad to see you!” The warm commanding aristocratic voice, so recognizable from radio broadcasts, jarred Pug with its very familiarity. He got a confused impression of a grand beautiful curved yellow room cluttered with books and pictures. A gray-faced man in a gray suit slouched in an armchair near the President. Franklin Roosevelt held out a hand: “Drop your bonnet on the desk, Commander, and have a chair. How about some lunch? I’m just having a bite.” A tray with half-eaten scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee stood on a serving table by the President’s swivel chair. He was in shirt-sleeves and wore no tie. Pug had not seen him, except in newsreels and photographs, in more than twenty years. His high coloring was unchanged and he was the same towering man, gone gray-headed, much older and very much heavier; and though he had the unmistakable lordly look of a person in great office, a trace remained in the upthrust big jaw of the youthful conceit that had made the ensigns on the Davey snicker. His eyes were sunken, but very bright and keen.

“By the way, this is the Secretary of Commerce, Harry Hopkins.”

The gray-faced man gave Henry a brief winning smile, with a light tired gesture that made a handshake unnecessary.

The President looked archly at Victor Henry, his big heavy head cocked to one side. “Well, Pug, have you learned yet how to hang onto a saltwater hose at sea?”

“Oh, gawd, sir.” Pug put a hand to his face in mock despair. “I’ve heard about your memory, but I hoped you’d forgotten that.”

“Ha, ha, ha!” The President threw his head back. “Harry, this young fellow absolutely ruined the best blue serge blazer and straw hat I ever owned, back in 1918. Thought I’d forget that, did you? Not on your life. Now that I’m Commander-in-Chief of the United States Navy, Pug Henry, what have you got to say for yourself?

“Mr. President, the quality of mercy is mightiest in the mightiest.”

“Oh, ho! Very good. Very good. Quick thinking, Pug.” He glanced at Hopkins. “Ha, ha, ha! I’m a Shakespeare lover myself. Well said. You’re forgiven.”

Roosevelt’s face turned serious. He glanced at Captain Carton, who still stood at attention near the desk. The aide made a smiling excuse and left the room. The President ate a forkful of eggs and poured himself coffee. “What’s going on over there in Germany, Pug?”

How to field such a facetious question? Victor Henry took the President’s tone. “I guess there’s a war on of sorts, sir.”

“Of sorts? Seems to me a fairly honest-to-goodness war. Tell me about it from your end.”

Victor Henry described as well as he could the peculiar atmosphere in Berlin, the playing down of the war by the Nazis, the taciturn calm of the Berliners. He mentioned the blimp towing a toothpaste advertisement over the German capital on the first day of the war — the President grunted at that and glanced toward Hopkins — and the pictures in the latest Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung which he had picked up in Lisbon, showing happy German crowds basking at the seashore and frolicking in folk dances on village greens. The President kept looking at Hopkins, who had what Victor Henry thought of as a banana face: long, meager, and curved. Hopkins appeared sick, possibly feverish, but his eyes were thoughtful and electrically alive.

Roosevelt said, “Do you suppose he’ll offer peace when he finishes with Poland? Especially if he’s as unprepared as you say?”

“What would he have to lose, Mr. President? The way things look now, it might work.”

President shook his head. “You don’t know the British. Not that they’re any better prepared.”

“I’ll admit I don’t, sir.”

For the first time, Hopkins spoke, in a soft voice. “How well do you know the Germans?”

“Not at all well, Mr. Secretary. They’re hard people to make out. But in the end there’s only one thing you have to know about the Germans.”

“Yes? What’s that?”

“How to lick them.”

The President laughed, the hearty guffaw of a man who loved life and welcomed any chance to laugh. “A warmonger, eh? Are you suggesting, Pug, that we ought to get into it?”

“Negative in the strongest terms, Mr. President. Not unless and until we have to.”

“Oh, we’ll have to,” Roosevelt said, hunching over to sip coffee.

This struck Victor Henry as the most amazing indiscretion he had heard in his lifetime. He could hardly believe the big man in shirt-sleeves had said the words. The newspapers and magazines were full of the President’s ringing declarations that America would stay out of the war. Roosevelt went blandly on with a compliment about Combat Readiness of Nazi Germany, which he said he had read with great interest. His next questions showed that he had retained little of the analysis. His grasp of the important strategic facts about Germany was not much better than Harry Warendorf’s or Digger Brown’s, and his queries were like theirs, even to the inevitable “What’s Hitler really like? Have you talked to him?” Pug described Hitler’s war speech in the Reichstag. Franklin Roosevelt exhibited a lively interest in this, asking how Hitler used his voice and hands, and what he did when he paused.

“I’m told,” Roosevelt said, “that they type his speeches on a special machine with perfectly enormous letters, so he won’t have to wear glasses.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, sir.”

“Yes, I got that from a pretty reliable source. Führer type, they call it.” Roosevelt sighed, turned his chair away from the food, and lit a cigarette. “There’s no substitute for being in a place yourself, Pug, seeing it with your own eyes, getting the feel. That’s what’s missing in this job.”

“Well, Mr. President, in the end it all boils down to cold facts and figures.”

“True, but too often all that depends on who writes those reports. Now that was a fine report of yours. How did you really foresee he’d make a pact with Stalin? Everybody here was stupefied.”

“I guess mathematically somebody somewhere was bound to make that wild guess, Mr. President. It happened to be me.”

“No, no. That was a well-reasoned report. Actually, we did have some warning here, Pug. There was a leak in one German embassy — never mind where — and our State Department had predictions of that pact. Trouble was, nobody here was much inclined to believe them.” He looked at Hopkins, with a touch of mischief. “That’s always the problem with intelligence, isn’t it, Pug? All kinds of strange information will come in, but then—”

The President all of a sudden appeared to run out of conversation. He looked tired, bored, and withdrawn, puffing at a cigarette in a long holder. Victor Henry would have been glad to leave, but he thought the President should dismiss him. He was feeling a bit firmer about the meeting now. Franklin Roosevelt had the manner, after all, of a fleet commander relaxing over lunch, and Pug was used to the imperious ways of admirals. Apparently he had crossed the Atlantic in wartime to kill an off-hour for the President.

Hopkins glanced at his watch. “Mr. President, the Secretary and Senator Pittman will be on their way over now.”

“Already? The embargo business? Well, Pug.” Henry jumped up, and took his cap. “Thank you for coming by. This has been grand. Now if there’s anything else you think I should know, just anything that strikes you as significant or interesting, how about dropping me a line? I’ll be glad to hear from you. I mean that.”

At this grotesque proposal for bypassing the chain of command, which ran counter to Henry’s quarter century of naval training and experience, he could only blink and nod. The President caught his expression. “Nothing official, of course,” he said quickly. “Whatever you do, don’t send me more reports! But now that we’ve gotten acquainted again, why not stay in touch? I liked that thing you wrote. I could just see that submarine base emptying out at five o’clock. It said an awful lot about Nazi Germany. Sometimes one little thing like that — or what a loaf bread costs, or the jokes people are repeating, or like that advertising blimp over Berlin — such things can sometimes suggest more than a report umpteen pages long. Of course, one needs the official reports, too. But I get enough of those, heaven knows!”

Franklin Roosevelt gave Commander Henry the hard look of a boss who has issued an order and wants to know if it’s understood.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Henry said.

“And, oh, by the way, here’s a suggestion that’s just come to my desk, Pug, for helping the Allies. Of course we’re absolutely neutral in this foreign war, but still -” The President broke into a sly grin. His tired eyes sparkled as he glanced here and there on his cluttered desk, and took up a paper. “Here we are. We offer to buy the Queen Mary and the Normandie, and we use them for evacuating Americans from Europe. There are thousands stranded, as you know. What do you think? It would give the Allies a pile of much needed dollars, and we’d have the ships. They’re fine luxury liners. How about it?”

Victor Henry looked from Hopkins to the President. Evidently this was a serious question. They were both waiting for his answer. “Mr. President, I’d say those ships are major war assets and they’d be insane to sell them. They’re magnificent troop transports. They’re the fastest vessels for their tonnage of anything afloat, they can outrun any submarine at cruising speed, they hardly have to zigzag they’re so fast, and with the interiors stripped their carrying capacity is gigantic.”

The President said dryly to Hopkins, “Is that what the Navy replied?”

“I’d have to check, Mr. President. I think their response went mainly to the question of where the money’d come from.”

Franklin Roosevelt cocked his head thoughtfully, and smiling at Victor Henry, held out a long arm for a handshake. “Do you know why I didn’t make more of a fuss about those clothes? Because your skipper said you were one of the best ensigns he’d ever seen. Keep in touch, now.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Well, how did it go?” The President’s aide was smoking a cigar in the anteroom. He rose, knocking off the ash.

“All right, I suppose.”

“It must have. You were scheduled for ten minutes. You were in there almost forty.”

“Forty! It went fast. What now?”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t have very specific instructions. Do I go straight back to Berlin, or what?”

“What did the President say?”

“It was a pretty definite good-bye, I thought.”

Captain Carton smiled. “Well, I guess you’re all through. Maybe you should check in with CNO. You’re not scheduled here again.” He reached into a breast pocket. “One good thing. This came to my office a little while ago, from the State Department.”

It was an official dispatch envelope. Henry ripped it open and read the flimsy pink message form:

Victory Henry disappointed Hugh Cleveland when he walked into the broadcaster’s office; just a squat, broad-shouldered, ordinary-looking man of about fifty, in a brown suit and a red bow tie, standing at the receptionist’s desk. The genial, somewhat watchful look on his weathered face was not sophisticated at all. As Cleveland sized up people — having interviewed streams of them — this might be a professional ballplayer turned manager, a lumberman, maybe an engineer; apple-pie American, fairly intelligent, far from formidable. But he knew Madeline feared and admired her father, and day by day he was thinking more highly of the young girl’s judgment, so he took a respectful tone.

“Commander Henry? It’s a pleasure. I’m Hugh Cleveland.”

“Hello. Hope I’m not busting in on anything. I thought I’d just drop by and have a look-see.”

“Glad you did. Madeline’s timing the script. Come this way.” They walked along the cork floor of a corridor walled with green soundproofing slabs. “She was amazed. Thought you were in Germany.”

“For the moment I’m here.”

In a swishing charcoal pleated skirt and gray blouse, Madeline came scampering out of a door marked NO ADMITTANCE, and kissed him. “Gosh, Dad, what a surprise. Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s dandy.” He narrowed his eyes at her. She looked a lot more mature, and brilliantly excited. He said, “If you’re busy, I can leave, and talk to you later.”

Cleveland put in, “No, no, Commander. Please come in and watch. I’m about to interview Edna May Pelham.”

“Oh? The General’s Lady? I read it on the plane. Pretty good yarn.”

In the small studio, decorated like a library with fake wood panelling and fake books, Cleveland said to the sharp-faced, white-haired authoress, “Here’s another admirer of the book, Miss Pelham. Commander Henry is the American naval attaché in Berlin.”

“You don’t say! Hi there.” The woman waved her pince-nez at him. “Are we going to stay out of this idiotic war, Commander?”

“I hope so.”

“So do I. My hopes would be considerably higher if that man in the White House would drop dead.”

Pug sat to one side in an armchair while they read through the script. The authoress, passing vinegary judgments on current literature, said that one famous author was obscene, another sloppy, a third superficial. His mind wandered to his meeting yesterday with “that man in the White House.” It seemed to him that he had been summoned on a haphazard impulse; that he had spent a couple of thousand dollars of public money on a round trip from Germany for pointless small talk over scrambled eggs. The morning paper showed that yesterday had been a crowded, portentous day for the President. The leading story, spread over many columns, was Roosevelt Proclaims Limited National Emergency. Three other headlines on the front page began FDR or President; he had reorganized two major government boards; he had lifted the sugar quota; he had met with congressional leaders on revision of the Neutrality Act. All these things had been done by the ruddy man in shirt-sleeves who never moved from behind his desk, but whose manner was so bouncy you forgot he was helpless in his chair. Pug wanted to believe that he himself might have said one thing, made one comment, that by illuminating the President’s mind, had justified the whole trip. But he could not. His comments on Germany, like his original report, had rolled off the President, who mainly had sparked at details of Hitler’s oratorical technique and touches of local Berlin color. The President’s request for gossipy letters still struck him as devious, if not pointless. In the first few minutes Victor Henry had been attracted by President Roosevelt’s warmth and good humor, by his remarkable memory and his ready laughter. But thinking back on it all, Commander Henry wasn’t sure the President would have behaved much differently to a man who had come to the office to shine his shoes.

“Fourteen minutes and twenty seconds, Mr. Cleveland.” Madeline’s speaker-distorted voice roused him.

“That’s fine. Ready to record, Miss Pelham?”

“No. All this about Hemingway is far too kind. I’d like about half an hour with this script. And I’d like some strong tea, with lemon.”

“Yes, ma’am. Hear that, Madeline? Get it.”

Cleveland invited the naval officer to his office, where Pug accepted a cigar. The young broadcaster displeased him by hitching a leg over the arm of his chair. Pug had used considerable severity to cure Byron of that habit. “Sir, you can be proud of Madeline. She’s an unusual girl.”

“Unusual in what way?”

“Well, let’s see. She understands things the first time you tell them to her. Or if she doesn’t, she asks questions. If you send her to fetch something or do something, she fetches it or she does it. She never has a long story about it. I haven’t heard her whine yet. She isn’t afraid of people. She can talk straight to anybody without being fresh. She’s reliable. Are reliable people common in the Navy? In this business they’re about as common as giant pandas. Especially girls. I’ve had my share of lemons here. I understand that you want her to go back to school, and that she’ll have to quit next week. I’m very sorry about that.”

“The girl’s nineteen.”

“She’s better than women of twenty-five and thirty who’ve worked for me. Cleveland smiled. This easy mannered fellow had an infectious grin and an automatic warmth, Pug thought, that in a trivial way was like the President’s. Some people had it, some didn’t. He himself had none of it. In the Navy the quality was not overly admired. The name for it was “grease.” Men who possessed it had a way of climbing fast; they also had a way of relying upon it, till they got too greasy and slipped.

“I wish she’d show some of these 4.0 qualities at school. I don’t appreciate the idea of a nineteen-year-old girl loose in New York.”

“Well, sir, I don’t mean to argue with you, but Washington’s no convent either. It’s a question of upbringing and character. Madeline is a superior, trustworthy girl.”

Pug uttered a noncommittal grunt.

“Sir, how about coming on our show? We’d be honored to have you.”

“As a guest? You’re kidding. I’m nobody.”

“America’s naval attaché in Nazi Germany is certainly somebody. You could strike a blow for preparedness, or a two-ocean Navy. We just had Admiral Preble on the show.”

“Yes, I know. That’s how I found out what my little girl’s doing these days.”

“Would you consider it, sir?”

“Not on your life.” The sudden frost in Pug’s tone rose not only from the desire to be final, but the suspicion that the praise of Madeline had been a way of greasing him.”

“No harm in asking, I hope,” Cleveland grinned, running a hand through his heavy blonde hair. He had a pink barbershop sunburn and looked well in a collegiate jacket and slacks, though Victor Henry thought his argyle socks were too much. He did not like Cleveland, but he could see that Madeline would relish working for such a Broadwayish fellow.

Later Madeline showed her father around the studios. Certain corridors were like passageways in the bowels of a ship, all jammed with electronic gear and thousands of bunched colored wires. These interested Pug. He would have enjoyed seeing the controlling diagrams and learning how radio amusement was pumped out of this nerve center all over the country. The performing studios, with their giant cardboard settings of aspirin bottles, toothpaste tubes, and gasoline pumps, their blinking red lights, posturing singers, giggling audiences, grimacing and prancing funny men, not only seemed tawdry and silly in themselves, but doubly so with Poland under attack. Here, at the heart of the American communications machine, the Hitler war seemed to mean little more than a skirmish among Zulus.

“Madeline, what attracts you in all this balderdash?” They were leaving the rehearsal of a comedy program, where the star, wearing a fireman’s hat, was spraying the bandleader, the girl singer, and the audience with seltzer bottles.

“That man may not amuse you, Dad, but millions of people are mad for him. He makes fifteen thousand dollars a week.”

“That’s kind of obscene right there. It’s more than a rear admiral makes in a year.”

“Dad, in two weeks I’ve met the most marvelous people. I met Gary Cooper. Just today I spent two hours with Miss Pelham. Do you know that I had lunch with the Chief of Naval Operations? Me?”

“So I heard. What’s this fellow Cleveland like?”

“He’s brilliant.”

“Is he married?”

“He has a wife and three children.”

“When does your school start?”

“Dad, do I have to go back?”

“When did we discuss any other plan?”

“I’ll be so miserable. I feel as though I’ve joined the Navy. I want to stay in.”

He cut her off with a cold look.

They went back to her little partitioned cubicle outside Cleveland’s office. Smoking one cigarette and then another, Pug silently sat in an armchair and watched her work. He noted her neat files, her checkoff lists, her crisp manner on the telephone, her little handmade wall chart of guests invited or scheduled in September, and of celebrities due in New York. He noted how absorbed she was. In their walk around CBS she had asked only perfunctory questions about the family and none on Germany; she hadn’t even asked him what Hitler was really like.

He cleared his throat. “Say, incidentally, Madeline, I’m going out to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to have dinner aboard the Colorado. Digger Brown’s the executive officer. You know, Freddy Brown’s father. Like to come along? What’s the matter? Why the face?”

Madeline sighed. “Oh, I’ll come, Dad. After all, I see you so seldom. I’ll meet you at five or so -”

“Got something else planned?”

“‘Well, I didn’t know you were about to fall out of the sky. I was going to dinner and the theatre with the kids.”

“What kids?”

“You know. Just kids I’ve met at CBS. A couple of writers, musicians, an actress, some other new girls like me. There are eight of us, sort of a gang.”

“I daresay there’ll be some bright-eyed ensigns in the junior mess.”

“Yes, exactly. Ensigns.”

“Look, I don’t want to drag you anywhere.”

“It’s just that you’ll end up talking to Commander Brown, Dad, and I’ll spend another evening with ensigns. Can’t we have breakfast tomorrow? I’ll come to your hotel.”

“That’ll be fine. These kids of yours, I’d think the young men would be these show business fellows, pretty flimsy characters.”

“Honestly, you’re wrong. They’re serious and intelligent.”

“I think it’s damn peculiar that you’ve fallen into this. It’s the furthest thing from your mother’s interests or mine.”

Madeline looked aslant at him. “Oh? Didn’t Mother ever tell you that she wanted to be an actress? That she spent a whole summer as a dancer in a travelling musical show?”

“Sure. She was seventeen. It was an escapade.”

“Yes? Well, once when we were up in an attic, it must have been at the Nag’s Head house, she came on the parasol she had used in her solo dance. An old crinkled orange paper parasol. Well, right there in that dirty attic Mama kicked off her shoes, opened the parasol, picked up her skirt, and did the whole dance for me. And she sang a song. ‘Ching-ching-challa-wa China Girl.’ I must have been twelve, but I still remember. She kicked clear to the ceiling, Mama did. God, was I ever shocked.”

“Oh, yes, ‘Ching-ching-challa-wa China Girl’!” said Pug. “She did it for me too, long long ago. Before we were married, in fact. Well, I’m off to the Colorado. Tomorrow after breakfast I fly down to Pensacola to see Warren. Next day I return to Berlin, if I can firm up my air tickets.”

She left her desk and put her arms around him. She smelled sweet and alluring, and her face shone with youth, health, and happiness. “Please, Dad. Let me work. Please.”

“I’ll write or cable you from Berlin. I’ll have to discuss it with Ching-ching-challa-wa China Girl.”

The harbor smell in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the destroyers nesting in a row with red truck lights burning, the Colorado lit up from stem to stern, its great main battery guns askew for bore sighting — these things gave Victor Henry the sense of peace that other men get by retiring to their dens with a cigar and a drink.

If he had a home in the world it was a battleship. Put together at different times and places of different steel plates and machines, embodied in many forms under many different names, a battleship was always thing: the strongest kind of warship afloat. This meant a thousand ever-changing specifications of size, design, propulsion, armor, armament, interior communication, interior supply systems; a thousand rituals and disciplines binding the crew, from the captain to the youngest striker, into one dependable corporate will and intelligence. In this sense there had been battleships in the days of Phoenicia and Rome, and there would always be battleships — a living peak of human knowledge and craft, a floating engineering structure dedicated to one aim: the control of the sea. It was the only thing to which Victor Henry had ever given himself whole; more than to his family, much more than to the sprawling abstraction called the Navy. He was a battleship man.

With other top men, he had gone to a battleship straight from the Academy in 1913. He had served time in smaller ships, too. But he was marked battleship, and he had kept coming back to them. His shining service achievement was winning the “meatball pennant,” the fleet gunnery competition, two years in a row as gunnery officer of the West Virginia. His improvised system for speeding sixteen-inch shells from the magazines to the turrets had become standard Navy doctrine. All he wanted in this life was to be executive officer of a battleship, then a captain, then an admiral with a BatDiv flag. He could see no further. He thought a BatDiv flag was as fine a thing as being a president, a king, or a pope. And he reflected, as he followed the erect quick-marching gangway messenger down the spotless white passageway to the senior officers’ mess, that every month he spent in Berlin was cutting the ground from under his hopes.

Digger Brown had been exec of the Colorado only six weeks. Sitting at the head of the table, Digger was making too many jokes, Pug thought so as to put himself at ease with the ship’s lieutenant commanders and two-stripers. That was all right. Digger was a big fellow and could turn on impressive anger at will. Pug’s style was more of a monotone. His own sense of humor, such as it was, went to jabbing ironies. As an executive officer — if he ever achieved it — he planned to be taciturn and short. They would call him a dull sour son of a bitch. One had plenty of time to warm up and make friends, but the job had to be done right from the hour one reported aboard. It was a sad fact of life that everybody, himself included, jumped to it when the boss was a son of a bitch, especially a knowledgeable son of a bitch. In the West Virginia he had been a hated man until that first meatball pennant had broken out at the yardarm. Thereafter he had been the ship’s most popular officer.

The immediate target of Digger’s raillery was his communications officer, a lean morose-looking Southerner. Recently the Colorado had received a new powerful voice radio transmitter which bounced waves off the Heaviside layer at a shallow angle. If atmospheric conditions were right, one could talk directly to a ship in European waters. Digger had chatted with his brother, the engineering officer in the Marblehead, now anchored off Lisbon. The communications officer had since been romancing an old girlfriend in Barcelona via the Marblehead radio room. Digger had found this out three days ago, and was still milking it for jokes.

Pug said, “Say, how well did this thing work, Digger? Could you understand Tom?”

“Oh, five by five. Amazing.”

“D’you suppose I could talk to Rhoda in Berlin?” It occurred to Pug that this was a chance to tell her about Madeline, and perhaps reach a decision.

The communications officer, glad of an opportunity to stop the baiting, said at once, “Captain, I know we can raise Marblehead tonight. It ought to be simple to patch in the long-distance line from Lisbon to Berlin.”

“It’ll be what — two or three o’clock in the morning there?” Brown said.

“Two, sir.”

“Want to break in on Rhoda’s beauty sleep, Pug?”

“I think so.”

The lieutenant carefully rolled his napkin in a monogrammed ring, and left.

The talk turned to Germany and the war. These battleship officers, like most people, were callowly inclined to admire and overestimate the Nazi war machine. One fresh-faced lieutenant said that he hoped the Navy was doing more work on landing craft than he’d been able to read about. If we got into the war, he said, landing would be almost the whole Navy problem, because Germany would probably control the entire coastline of Europe by then.

Digger Brown brought his guest to the executive officer’s quarters for coffee, ordering around his Filipino steward and lolling on the handsome blue leather couch with casual pride of office. They gossiped about their classmates: a couple of juicy divorces, a premature death, a brilliant leader turned alcoholic. Digger bemoaned his burdens as a battleship exec. His captain had gotten where he was with sheer luck, charm, and a marvellous wife — that was all; his ship-handling was going to give Digger a heart attack. The ship was slack from top to bottom; he had made himself unpopular by instituting a stiff program of drills; and so forth. Pug thought that for an old friend Digger was showing off too much. He mentioned that he had come back from Berlin to talk to the President. Digger’s face changed. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “Remember that phone call you had at the Army and Navy Club? I told the fellows, I bet that’s from the White House. You’re flying high, fella.”

Having taken the wind out of Digger’s sails, Victor Henry was content to say nothing more. Digger waited, stuffed his pipe, lit it, then said, “What’s Roosevelt really like, Pug?”

Henry said something banal about the President’s charm and magnetism.

There was a knock on the door and the communications officer came in. “We raised the Marblehead, no strain, sir. It took all this time to get through to Berlin. What was that number again?” Pug told him. “Yes, sir, that checks. The number doesn’t answer.”

The eyes of Digger Brown and Victor Henry met for a moment. Brown said, “At two in the morning? Better try again. Sounds like a foul-up.”

“We put it through three times, sir.”

“She might have gone out of town,” Henry said. “Don’t bother anymore. Thanks.”

The lieutenant left. Digger puffed thoughtfully at his pipe.

“Also, she cuts off the phone in the bedroom at night,” Henry said. “I forgot that. She may not hear the ringing in the library if the door’s closed.”

“Oh, I see,” Digger said. He puffed again, and neither said anything for a while.

“Well. Guess I’ll make tracks.” Victor Henry stood up.

The executive officer accompanied him to the gangway, looking proudly around at the vast main deck, the towering guns, the flawlessly uniformed watch. “Shipshape enough topside,” he said. “That’s the least I demand. Well, good luck on the firing line, Pug. Give my love to Rhoda.”

“If she’s still there, I will.”

They both laughed.

“Hello, Dad!” When Paul Munson’s plane landed, Warren was waiting at the Pensacola airfield in a helmet and flying jacket. The son’s handgrip, quick and firm, expressed all Warren’s pride in what he was doing. His deeply tanned face radiated exaltation.

“Say, where do you get this outdoors glow?” Pug said. He deliberately ignored the scar on his son’s forehead. “I thought they’d make you sweat in ground school here. I expected you to look like something from under a rock.”

Warren laughed. “Well, I had a couple of chances to go deep-sea fishing out in the Gulf. I tan fast.”

Driving his father to the BOQ, he never stopped talking. The flight school was in a buzz, he said. The day after Hitler invaded Poland, Washington had ordered the number of students tripled and the year-long course cut to six months. The school was “telescoping the syllabus.” In the old course a man qualified in big slow patrol planes, then in scout planes, and then, if he were good enough, went on into Squadron Five for fighter training. Now the pilots would be put on patrol, scout, or fighter tracks at once, and would stay in them. The lists would be posted in the morning. He was dying to make Squadron Five. Warren got all this out before he remembered to ask his father about the family.

“Ye gods, Briny’s in Warsaw? Why, the Germans are bombing the hell out of that town.”

“I know,” Pug said. “I stopped worrying about Byron long ago. He’ll crawl out of the rubble with somebody’s gold watch.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Chased a girl there.”

“Really? Bully for him. What kind of girl?”

“A Jewish Phi Bete from Radcliffe.”

“You’re kidding. Briny?”

“That’s right.”

With an eloquent look, surprised and ruefully impressed, Warren changed the subject.

The audience at Paul Munson’s lecture was surprisingly big. There must have been more than two hundred student aviators in khaki, youngsters with crew cuts and rugged clever faces, jammed into a small lecture hall. Like most naval men, Paul was a bumbling speaker, but the students sat on the edges of their chairs, because he was telling them how to avoid killing themselves. With slides and diagrams, with much technical jargon and an occasional heavy bloodthirsty joke, he described the worst hazards of carrier landings, the life-or-death last moments of the approach, the procedure after cracking up, and such cheerful matters. The students laughed at the jokes about their own possible deaths. The strong male smell of a locker room rose from the packed bodies. Pug’s eye fell on Warren, sitting in a row across the aisle from him, erect and attentive, just one more close-cropped head in the crowd. He thought of Byron in Warsaw under the German bombs. It was going to be a tough ten years, he thought, for men with grown sons.

Warren told him after the lecture that Congressman Isaac Lacouture, the man who had taken him deep-sea fishing, had invited them to dinner at the beach club. Lacouture was president of the club, and before running for Congress, had been chairman of the Gulf Lumber and Paper Company, the biggest firm in Pensacola. “He’s anxious to meet you,” Warren said as they walked back to the BOQ.

“Why?”

“He’s very interested in the war and in Germany. His opinions are kind of strong.”

“Why has he taken such a shine to you?”

“Well, sir, this daughter of his, Janice, and I have sort of hit it off.” With an easy knowing grin, Warren parted from him in the lobby.

At his first sight of Janice Lacouture, Victor Henry decided against talking to Warren about Pamela Tudsbury. What chance had the slight English girl in her mousy suits against this magnetic blonde whose long legs dazzled at every turn and flip of her skirt, this assured radiant tall American girl with the princess-like air, and the lovely face only slightly marred by crooked teeth? She was another, early Rhoda, swathed in cloudy pink, all composed of sweet scent, sexual allure, and girlish grace. The slang was changed, the skirt hem higher. This girl looked and acted brainier. She greeted Pug with just enough deference to acknowledge that he was Warren’s father, and just enough sparkle to hint that he was no old fud for all that, but an attractive man himself. A girl who could do that in half a minute of talk, with a flash of the eyes and a smile, was a powerhouse, and so much, thought Pug, for his inept matchmaking notions.

A stiff wind was blowing from the water. Waves broke over the club terrace and splattered heavy spray on the glass wall of the dining room, making the candlelit Lacouture dinner seem the cozier. Victor Henry never did get it clear who all the ten people at table were, though one was the beribboned commandant of the naval air station. The person who mattered, it was soon obvious, was Congressman Isaac Lacouture, a small man with thick white hair, a florid face, and a way of half sticking out his tongue when he smiled, with an air of sly profundity.

“How long are you going to be here, Commander Henry?” Lacouture called down the long table, as green-coated waiters passed two large baked fish on silver platters. “You might like to come out and spend a day fishing, if the weatherman will turn off this willawa. Your boy caught these two kingfish with me.”

Pug said that he had to return to New York in the morning to get his plane for Lisbon.

Lacouture said, “Well, at that I suppose I’ll be hurrying up to Washington myself for this special session. Say, how about that? What do you think of revising the Neutrality Act? How bad is the situation, actually? You should know.”

“Congressman, I think Poland’s going to fall fast, if you call that bad.”

“Oh, hell, the Allies are counting on that! The European mind works in subtle ways. The President has sort of a European mind himself, you know. That mixture of Dutch and English is really the key to understanding him.” Lacouture smiled, protruding his tongue. “I’ve done a lot of business with the Dutch, they’re very big in the hardwoods trade, and I tell you they are tricky boys. The gloomier things look in the next few weeks, why the easier it’ll be for Roosevelt to jam anything he wants through Congress. Right?”

“Have you talked to Hitler, Commander Henry? What is he really like?” said Mrs. Lacouture, a thin faded woman, with a placating smile and a sweet tone that suggested her social life consisted mainly of softening her husband’s impact, or trying to.

Lacouture said as though she had addressed him, “Oh, this Hitler is some kind of moonstruck demagogue. We all know that. But for years the Allies could have cleaned up him and his Nazis with ease, yet they just sat there. So it’s their mess, not ours. Any day now we’ll be hearing about the Germans raping nuns and boiling soldiers’ corpses down for soap. British intelligence started both those yarns in 1916, you know. We’ve got the documentary evidence on that. How about it, Commander Henry? You’ve been living among the Germans. Are they really these savage Huns the New York papers make them out to be?”

All the faces at the table turned to Pug. “The Germans aren’t easy to understand,” he said slowly. “My wife likes them more than I do. I don’t admire their treatment of Jews.”

Congressman Lacouture held up two large hands. “Unpardonable! The New York press is quite understandable on that basis.”

Warren said firmly from the middle of the table, “I don’t see how the President’s revision would weaken our neutrality, sir. Cash and carry simply means anybody can come and buy stuff who has the ships to haul it off and the money to pay for it, Anybody, Hitler included.”

Lacouture smiled at him. “The administration would be proud of you, my boy. That’s the line. Except we all know that the Allies have the ships and the money, and the Germans have neither. So this would put our factories into the war on the Allied side.”

“But nobody ever stopped Hitler from building a merchant marine,” Warren promptly came back. “Piling up tanks, subs, and dive bombers instead was his idea. All aggressive weapons. Isn’t that his tough luck?”

“Warren’s absolutely right,” Janice said.

Lacouture sat back in his chair, staring at his daughter, who smiled back impudently.

“What both of you kids don’t or won’t understand,” Lacouture said, “is that this proposal is the camel’s nose under the tent flap. Of course it seems fair. Of course it does. That’s the beauty of the package. That’s the Roosevelt mind at work. But let’s not be children. He isn’t calling a special session to help Nazi Germany! He thinks he’s got a mission to save the world from Hitler. He’s been talking this way since 1937. He’s cracked on the subject. Now I say Adolf Hitler’s neither the foul fiend nor the Antichrist. That’s all poppycock. He’s just another European politician, a little more dirty and extreme than the rest. The way for us to save the world is to stay out of it. The citadel of sanity!” He rapped out the phrase and looked around the table, as though half expecting applause. “That’s what we have to be. The Atlantic and Pacific are our walls. Broad, stout walls. The citadel of sanity! If we get in it we’ll go bankrupt like the others and lose a couple of million of our finest young men. The whole world will sink into barbarism or communism, which aren’t so very different. The Russians will be the only winners.”

A small bald man with a hearing aid, seated across the table from Pug, said, “Damn right.”

Lacouture inclined his head at him. “You and I realize that, Ralph, but it’s amazing how few intelligent people do, as yet. The citadel of sanity. Ready to pick up the pieces when it’s over and rebuild a decent world. That’s the goal. I’m going back to Washington to fight like an alligator for it, believe you me. I’ll be marked mud among a lot of my Democratic colleagues, but on this one I go my own way.”

When dinner ended, Janice and Warren left the club together, not waiting for coffee, and not troubling to explain. The girl smiled roguishly, waved a hand, and disappeared in a whirl of silky legs and pink chiffon. Warren halted long enough to make an early morning tennis date with his father. Victor Henry found himself isolated with Lacouture over rich cigars, coffee, and brandy in a corner of a lounge, in red leather armchairs. The congressman rambled about the charms of life in Pensacola — the duck-hunting, the game-fishing, the rear-round good weather, and the swiftly advancing prosperity. The war would make it a real boomtown, he said, between the expansion of the Navy air base and the spurt in the lumber trade. “Creosoted telephone poles. You take that one item, Commander. Our company’s had some unbelievable orders, just in the last week, from North Africa, Japan, and France. The whole world’s stringing wires all of a sudden. It’s an indication.”

He tried to persuade Henry to stay over one day. A ship carrying mahogany was due in from Dutch Guiana at noon. It would dump the logs in the harbor, and lumber workers would lash them into rafts and tow them up the bayou. “It’s quite a sight,” he said.

“Well, I’ve got this chance to fly back to New York with an old buddy. I’d better go.”

“And from there to Berlin, via Lisbon?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Not much chance of our paths crossing then, in the near future,” Lacouture said. “Your wife’s a Grover, isn’t she? Hamilton Grover up in Washington is a friend of mine; we have lunch at the Metropolitan Club about once a month. Pug nodded. Hamilton Grover was the wealthiest of the cousins, rather beyond Rhoda’s orbit.

“And you’re a Henry. Not one of those Virginia Henrys that go back to old Patrick?”

Henry laughed, shaking his head. “I doubt it. I’m from California.”

“Yes, so Warren told me. I mean originally.”

“Well, my great-grandfather came west before the gold rush. We’re not sure from where. My grandfather died young and we never got the story straight.”

“You’re probably Scotch-Irish.”

“Well, no, sort of mixed. My grandmother was French and English.”

“That so? We’ve got some French in our family ourselves. Not a bad thing, hey? Gives the men that certain touch in l’amour.” Lacouture uttered a hearty coarse laugh, the get-together noise of American men. “Quite a boy, your Warren.”

“Well, thanks. Your girl is beyond words.”

Lacouture sighed deeply. “A girl’s a problem. Warren tells me you have one, so you know. They’ll fool you every time. We weren’t as lucky as you, we have no boys. All Warren wants to do is fly airplanes the rest of his life for the Navy, right?”

“Well, those wings of gold look awfully big to him now, Congressman.”

Lacouture puffed at his cigar. “I liked the way he talked up at dinner. Of course he’s naïve about foreign affairs. You learn a lot about the outside world in the lumber business.” Lacouture swirled the large brandy snifter. “No doubt you’re glad to see Warren carrying on the Navy tradition. Wouldn’t want to see him shift over into business, or anything like that.” The congressman smiled, showing his tongue and good but crooked teeth like his daughter’s.

“Warren goes his own way, Congressman.”

“I’m not so sure. He thinks the world of his dad.”

The talk was getting awkward for Victor Henry. He had married a girl much better off than himself, and he had doubts about such a course in life. Nor did he especially like Janice Lacouture. Once the incandescence died down, she would be as tough as her father, who was already and openly weighing the notion of swallowing Warren. He said, “Well, until the war ends he’s in, and that’s that.”

“Of course. But that may not be for long, you know. If we can just stay out, it’ll be over in a year or so. Maybe less. As soon as the Allies are positive they can’t suck us in, they’ll make the best deal they can get. They’d be nuts to try anything else. Well, I’ve enjoyed visiting with you, Commander. What the hell? No sense trying to anticipate what the kids nowadays will do anyway. Is there? It’s a different world than when you and I grew up.”

“That’s for sure.”

Next morning, promptly at six-thirty, Warren appeared in his father’s room. Not saying much, and rubbing his bloodshot and baggy eyes, he drank the orange juice and coffee brought by the steward. A strong wind still blew outside, and he and his father wore sweaters as they volleyed and began to play. Pug ran up three games. The balls soared erratically here and there.

“Have a good time last night?” Pug called, as Warren knocked one flying over the fence, and the wind bore it up on the roof of a nearby cottage.

Warren laughed, stripped his sweater off, and won the next five games, regaining his fast drive and his mid-court smash. The father was a plugging, solid player with an iron backhand, but he had to conserve his breath.

“Goddamn it, Warren if you’ve got a point won, win it,” he gasped. The son had passed up an easy kill to hit the ball where Pug could reach it.

“The wind took it, Dad.”

“The hell it did.”

Now Pug threw off his sweater, answered several of his son’s smashes, caught his second wind, and drew even. “Whew! I’ve got to quit. Ground school,” Warren called, mopping his face with a towel. “You’ve really kept your game up, Dad.”

“Well, in Berlin we lucked into a house with a court. You’ve played better.”

Warren came to the net. He was pouring sweat, his eyes were clear, and he looked eager and happy. “You had more sleep.”

“Quite a girl, that Janice.”

“She’s got a head on her shoulders, Dad. She knows a hell of a lot of history.” The father gave him a quizzical look. They both burst out laughing. “All the same it’s true. She does know history.”

“What did you cover last night? The Hundred Years’ War?” Warren guffawed, swishing his racket sharply. Pug said, “Her father figures to make a lumberman of you.”

“He’s a kidder. I’ll ship out in March, and probably that’ll be that.”

Outside the ground school building, a wooden bulletin board was almost hidden by students clustering around in noisy excitement. Warren said, “Assignments,” and dove among them. In a moment his arm in a white sweater thrust above the heads. “Eeyow!” Warren exulted all the way back to the BOQ; he was in Squadron Five, and some of the hottest student pilots had not made it. He had done something right, despite his one ground loop! His father listened, smiling and nodding, remembering the day at Annapolis when he had drawn his first battleship duty.

He said at last, “You told your mother in Washington that it’s just something else to qualify in.”

The son looked a bit abashed, then laughed. “I hadn’t flown then, Dad. There’s nothing like flying. It’s hard to talk about, but there’s absolutely nothing like it. Nothing!”

“Well, we both have to get cleaned up. Guess we’d better say good-bye here.” They stood in the square dingy lobby of the BOQ.

Warren glanced at his watch. “Gosh, already? I guess so. Say, write me about Briny from Berlin, will you? As soon as you get some real dope.”

“Good enough.”

“And don’t worry about Madeline, Dad. She’ll be fine in New York.”

“I haven’t decided to let her stay in New York.”

“Why sure, I know.” Warren’s grin was disingenuous.

He obviously thought his father had already lost that point.

They shook hands. Then Warren did something that embarrassed them both. He threw an arm around his father’s shoulder. “I feel mixed up. I’m damn sorry to see you go, and I’ve never been happier in my life.”

“Take it easy,” Pug said. “That girl’s fine, but the hell with the lumber business. The Navy needs officers.”

Paul Munson, recovering from a hard night’s drinking with some old friends on the Pensacola staff, said little until his plane finished its climb and levelled off, heading northeast over Georgia. “By the way,” he shouted above the engine roar into his face mike, “How’d your boy do in those squadron assignments?”

Pug held up five fingers.”

Munson slapped his shoulder. “Outstanding. My boy washed out of there last year. It’s a tough school. Don’t you have another boy? What about him?”

“Naval ROTC.”

“Oh? Guess they’ll call him up any day. Think he’ll fly?”

Victor Henry looked out of the window at the green fields, and a wandering brown river far below.

“He’ll never work that hard.”

Chapter 13

From the German viewpoint, the invasion of Poland was proceeding merrily. The arrows and the pins on the military maps were closing in day by day, from all directions, on Warsaw and Byron Henry.

All over Poland, lines of helmeted dusty Germans, miles and miles of them, walked along or rode in trucks, cars, or on horses. Tanks and motorized guns clanked with them, or rattled nearby on railroad cars. It was all going slowly and tediously, and on the whole peacefully. This outdoors mass adventure, though not precisely a picnic — ten thousand Germans were killed along the way — was far from wholly disagreeable. After each day’s advance the horde ate in the fields or on the roadside, and camped under the stars or tented in black rain, peeved at the discomforts but enjoying good simple things: hard exercise, fresh air, food, drink, grumbling, jokes, comradeship, and sweet sleep.

The Poles, of course, kept shooting at them. This had been planned for. The Germans returned the fire, laying down studied bombardments according to grids on maps. Howitzers flamed with satisfying roars and recoils, everybody moved fast and worked up a sweat, officers shouted orders and encouragement, some fellows got killed or hurt but most did not, trees burned, village houses crumbled, and after a while the shooting died off and the invasion trudged ahead.

The front was a moving political edge; the Germans were forcing their national will on the Poles. As at a weather front the squall line of violence was at the edge of change. The thin destructive squall churned across the flat green landscape, leaving a streaked mess behind. Even so, even in this combat zone there was mostly peace right there at the line. For every hour of firing there were many hours of camping, machine repairing, and trudging through green fields and scorched villages. But this ceased to be so when the wavering line of the front took the form of a circle shrinking in toward the city of Warsaw. As the target narrowed, the firing grew hotter, more frequent, and more concentrated.

The invaders were a new generation of German soldiers who had never faced hostile bullets, though some of their senior officers had fought in the last war. At any one place where the invasion jumped off, there were only a few hundred scared young Germans crossing a border and expecting to get shot at. But they were backed by swarms of more armed youths, marching along German roads toward Poland on a neat schedule, and that was reassuring to know. Pulling down the Polish border barriers in the gray dawn light, overpowering the few guards, setting foot on the foreign roads they had been watching through field glasses — all that was exhilarating. But once the Polish border garrisons opened fire there was much halting, panicking, running away, and stalled confusion. Luckily for the Germans, the Poles were even more panicked and confused, with the added disability of acting on the spur of the moment. World War II started in a messy amateurish style. But the Germans, however terrorized each individual may have been, were at least moving according to plan. They had more guns at key points, more ammunition, and a clearer idea of where and when to fire. They had, in fact, achieved surprise.

If two men are standing and amiably chatting and one suddenly punches the other’s belly and kicks his groin, the chances are that even if the other recovers to defend himself, he will be badly beaten up, because the first man has achieved surprise. There is no book on the military art that does not urge the advantage of this. It may not seem quite decent, but that is no concern of the military art. Possibly the Poles should not have been surprised, in view of the Germans’ open threats and preparations, but they were. Their political leaders probably hoped the German menaces were bluster. Their generals probably thought their own armies were ready. A lot of wrong guessing goes with the start of a war.

The German plan for conquering Poland, Case White, provided the scenario for what ensued. They had many such plans, like Case Green, the invasion of Czechoslovakia (which they never had to use), and Case Yellow, the attack on France. Color-coded master plans for smashing other counties, far in advance of any quarrel with them, were a modern military innovation of the Germans. All advanced nations came to imitate this doctrine. The United States, for instance, by 1939 had a Plan Orange for fighting Japan, and even a Plan Red for fighting England; and it finally entered the war under Plan Rainbow Five.

Historians still argue, and will long argue, the genesis of the German General Staff, which originated this new line of conduct in human affairs. Some say the German genius produced the General Staff as a reflex of the humiliations inflicted by Napoleon; others assert that a flat country with many hostile borders, in an industrial age, had to develop such schemes to survive. In any case, it was certainly the Germans who first mastered industrial warfare and taught it to the nations: total war — the advance marshaling of railroads, factories, modern communications, and the entire population of a land into one centrally controlled system for destroying its neighbors, should the need or impulse arise.

This German system was well tested in the First World War, in which, geographically, they quit while they were well ahead. When they asked for an armistice, after four years of battling bigger forces on many fronts, they stood everywhere deep in foreign territory; only their big 1918 attack had failed, and their resources were running low. Thereafter, despite their surrender and through all political changes, they continued to work up their “Cases.” Twenty-one years later, Case White paid off, quickly frightening a nation of forty million, with an army of a million and a half or more, into obeying the Germans. That, according to Napoleon, is the whole of war — to frighten the foe into doing your will.

The Germans invading Poland made mistakes, they sometimes broke and ran under fire, they disobeyed orders, they refused to advance against tough positions, they misreported gains, and exaggerated reports of the fire they were facing, to excuse retreat. They were ordinary young men. But there were good leaders and stout fellows among them, and the Germans are an obedient, strong-willed people. The Poles did all these wrong things too, and the weight of fire, surprise, numbers, and Case White was all with the Germans. So the invasion went well.

Soon the new companies of tanks — the panzers that became so famous — began to risk long trips into enemy ground far ahead of the front. This was a classic military blunder. The foe closes in behind a company that has ventured too far ahead of its line, pinches it off, and wipes it out. This was precisely what the Russians did several years later to the famous panzers, whereupon their fame dimmed. But now they were a surprise. In their debut against a scared, ill-organized, smaller and weaker foe, on level country in perfect weather, they shone. They proceeded slowly, at only five or ten miles an hour, more like moving lines of large iron bugs than the dashing red arrows of the maps in popular books and magazines. But they looked scary to the Polish soldiers and civilians, and indeed they were lethal enough, these green machines crawling down the roads, out of the forests, and over the ripe grain, firing big shells. From the pellucid September sky, slow clumsy little planes called Stukas kept diving and shooting at soldiers, or children, or animals, or women, whoever happened to be on the roads, to add to the bloodshed and horrid noise. The tanks and Stukas killed many Poles and scared immense masses of them into quitting what looked like a useless fight.

This was the blitzkrieg, the lightning war. It was halted at Warsaw. The fact was not much stressed at the time. The Germans had to inflict on the city an old-fashioned, horse-drawn, Napoleonic bombardment, while the panzer machines limped into the repair shops, low on gasoline and breaking down in large numbers. They had done their work. The Polish armies had been sliced and frightened into fragments. Allied and American newspapers were writing terrified accounts of blitzkrieg, “the new form of warfare.”

But the panzers arrived at Warsaw on the ninth of September. On the tenth the German supreme commander was writing in his battle diary that the war was over. On the seventeenth Warsaw still stood. All available Luftwaffe were making unopposed runs over the city, dumping bombs and hurrying back to Germany for more bombs. Horses were dragging more and more howitzers from Prussia and Pomerania to ring the city and fire shells inside. And still Radio Warsaw played the Polonaise.

Leslie Slote, heading the American embassy’s skeleton staff in Warsaw, was an able and exceptionally clever man, but at the moment he was in the wrong job, because he was a coward. He did not look or act like one. At Yale he had been on the track team, and this token of manliness — which he had carefully selected, knowing the Rhodes requirements — together with his work on the college newspaper, his Phi Beta Kappa key, and his friendships with certain useful professors had won him the scholarship hands down. He had been one of the few popular Americans at Oxford; in the Foreign Service they talked of him as an outstanding officer in his age group. Well aware of his problem, he would never have gone knowingly into a situation requiring physical courage. He had thought much about this hole in his makeup, and he had theories about it, centered on an oversolicitous mother and some childhood accidents. The theories didn’t change anything, but they served to contain the weakness in his own mind as a misfortune like a polio limp, rather than as a blight which could corrode his self-respect. Slote had a high regard for himself, his powers, and his future. Bad luck had now put him in a spot where all his broad political knowledge, all his gifts of analysis, humor, and foreign tongues were of little avail compared to the simple capacity to be brave. That, he lacked.

He hid the lack with an inner struggle that was showing at the surface only in absentmindedness, continuous headaches, irritability, and a tendency to laugh for no reason. When the ambassador had asked him to stay on, he had burst out laughing. Since the first word that the Germans were coming, and especially since the first air bombs had fallen on Warsaw, he had been in a black panic, hungering for word that he and the other Americans could leave. He had bandages on several fingers where he had bitten his nails raw. And then the ambassador had asked him to stay on in this horror! The shrill laugh had welled up out of him. With a quizzical look the ambassador had let it pass. Most of the people in Warsaw had reacted well to the air attacks, swinging over to almost lighthearted determination and stoicism, once the first bombs failed to kill them. But for Slote the hell went on and on. Every sounding of an air raid alarm all but deprived him of the ability to think. Down into the thick-walled embassy cellar he would dart with everybody else, ahead of most, and invariably he would stay down until the all clear sounded. In a way, being in charge was a help. It looked proper for him to move out of his apartment into the embassy, to stay there, and to set an example of strict compliance with air raid rules. Nobody guessed his trouble.

Dawn of September the seventeenth found him at the big desk, a smoking pipe clenched in his teeth, carefully redrafting his latest dispatch to the State Department on the condition of the embassy and of the hundred or so Americans trapped in Warsaw. He was trying to retain all the urgency and gravity of the message, while editing out traces of his private hysteria. It was a hairline to walk, the dispatches, and he could not tell whether the American government had any idea of the plight of its nationals in the Polish capital.

“Come in,” he called to a knock at the door.

“It’s broad daylight outside,” Byron Henry said hoarsely as he walked in. “Shall I open the curtains?”

“Anything going on out there?” Slote rubbed his eyes.

“Nothing unusual.”

“Okay, let’s have some daylight,” Slote laughed. They both pulled back the heavy black curtains, admitting pallid sunshine in broken patterns through the diagonally crossed timbers in the windows. “What about the water, Byron?”

“I brought it.”

With the curtains open, one could hear the dull far-off thumps of German artillery. Slote would have preferred to leave the curtains closed for a while longer, shutting out these daytime noises of gray, broken, burning Warsaw. The quiet of the black-curtained room lit by a desk lamp might be illusory, a false conjuring up of peaceful student days, but he found it comforting. He peered between the timbers. “Such smoke! Are there that many fires?”

“God, yes. The sky was terrific until the dawn came up. Didn’t you see it? All red and smoky wherever you looked. Dante’s Inferno. And these big orange star shells popping all over, way high up, and slowly floating down. Quite a sight! Over on Walewskaya they’re still trying to put out two huge fires with shovels and sand. It’s the water problem that’s going to lick them, more than anything.”

“They should have accepted the German offer yesterday,” Slote said. “They’d have had at least half a city left. There’s no future in this. How on earth did you fetch the water? Did you manage to find some gasoline, after all?”

Byron shook his head, yawned, and dropped on the long brown leather couch. His sweater and slacks were covered with brick dust and soot, his long shaggy hair was in a tangle, and his eyes glowed dully in purple rings. “Not a chance. From now on we can forget about the truck. I saw fire engines stalled in the middle of the street. Gasoline’s finished in this town. I just scouted around till I found a cart and a horse. It took me most of the night.” He grinned at Slote, his lower lip pulled in with exhaustion. The Government of the United States owes me one hundred seventy-five dollars. The hardest part was getting the boiler off the truck and onto the cart. But this peasant who sold me the cart helped me. It was part of the deal. A little sawed-off fellow with a beard, but strong. Jesus!”

“You’ll get paid, of course. Talk to Ben.”

“Can I stretch out here for a minute?”

“Don’t you want breakfast?”

“I’m not sure I have the energy to chew. I just need a half hour or so. It’s quiet in here. That cellar is a mad-house.” Byron put up his feet and collapsed on the leather cushions, a meager long dirty figure. “There’s no water at the opera house corner anymore,” he said, closing his eyes. “I had to go clear over to the pumping station. It’s a slow horse and it sure doesn’t like pulling an iron boiler full of sloshing water.”

“Thank you, Byron. You’re being a great help.”

“Me and Gunga Din. ‘You may talk of gin and beer,’“ Byron mumbled into his elbow, “‘when you’re quartered safe out ‘ere’ — where’s Natalie? At the hospital?”

“I daresay.”

Byron fell asleep. The telephone rang harshly but he didn’t stir. The mayor’s office was calling; Mayor Starzynski was on his way to the embassy to discuss with the American chargé a sudden development of the highest urgency. Excited, Slote phoned the marine sentry at the gate to admit the mayor. This must be news: safe-conduct for foreigners out of Warsaw, or perhaps imminent surrender! Nothing but surrender made sense now. He thought of waking Byron and asking him to leave the office, but decided to wait. The mayor might not arrive for a while. This grimy kid needed sleep.

Water had become a problem all through Warsaw; and in the embassy, with seventy people under one roof and more coming, it was — or might have been — an alarming, a disastrous problem. But from the day the water main had broken, Byron Henry had started supplying water, though nobody had asked him to. While Slote had been on the telephone to the mayor’s office twenty times on that first wretched day — demanding immediate water delivery for Americans in his charge and swift repair of the main, Byron had gone out in the embassy’s Ford pickup truck, and had retrieved from the cellar of a bombed-out house a rusty broken little boiler. Somewhere he had obtained soldering tools to patch it up, and now he was using it as a makeshift tank to bring water to the embassy. What would have happened otherwise there was no telling. The main was still broken, mains were broken everywhere now, and the city government was overburdened supplying just the hospitals and the fire fighters from tank trucks.

Day after day, as a matter of course, Byron fetched water, through bombardment and air attack, joking about his own terror, and often arriving much filthier than he was now, having dived into some rubble pile at the “whiffling” sound of a howitzer shell sailing through the air. Slote had never heard this “whiffling,” as many people described it and never wanted to. Despite these scares, Byron Henry actually seemed to be enjoying himself in the siege. This state of mind Slote regarded as stupider than his own, and not particularly admirable. His fear at least was rational. Natalie had told him of Byron’s remark that he was having fun. The boy was a neurotic, Slote thought; the excessively bland good nature was a mask. But his water-carrying was an undeniable blessing.

Slote was also grateful to Henry, in an obscurer way, for keeping Natalie Jastrow occupied when she wasn’t at the hospital. Natalie was the one person in Warsaw capable of penetrating to his secret fear. So far he was sure she had not, simply through not being around him enough. The girl’s presence in Warsaw, a haunting burden, gave him pangs of hatred for her. As it was, she plagued him with guilt and anxiety by existing, by not vanishing from the earth. He had a wild physical craving for this dark-haired strong-willed Jewess, but he didn’t want to marry her. A smooth hand at managing romantic liaisons, he had never before come up against such an iron girl. She had broken off their sexual relations in Paris and had never resumed them; she had told him half a dozen times to let her alone and forget her — the one thing he could not do. Why in the devil’s name, then, had she thrust herself on him in this evil hour, in this holocaust, in a city shuddering under bombs and shells, where he was saddled with the heaviest responsibility of his life and yet felt befogged and castrated by fear? He dreaded exposure of his fear to Natalie more than anything, except getting hurt. He thought now that if they escaped with their lives, he would summon his willpower to cut this dragging business off. She might have the power to set him in a blaze, but she was impossibly obstinate and exotic, totally wrong for his career and for him. Meantime he owed this dirty slumbering youth thanks for keeping her out of his way.

Mayor Starzynski arrived shortly in an old limousine, a thickset moustached man wearing a green knitted vest with his unpressed floppy black suit. His shoes were caked with red mud. He had a flushed, excited, almost happy air, this man at the head of a perishing city, whose broadcasts were doing more than anything else to keep Warsaw fighting. He could hardly be sleeping two hours a night. The whole burden of the city was on him. Everybody from the diplomatic corps to the firemen on the streets and the hospital doctors were bypassing the slovenly municipal bureaucracy and appealing straight to the mayor for their needs. Yet he looked fresh and combative, the hero of the hour, and also the target of all the bitter jokes. The new heavy bombs dropped by the German planes in recent days were “Starzynski cabbages,” the antitank steel spikes were “Starzynski toothpicks.”

“Who is that?” the mayor said, pointing a fat thumb at the couch.

“Just a boy. Dead to the world. He doesn’t understand Polish. I can send him out.”

“Never mind, never mind.” Starzynski waved both hands high and sat in the chair to which Slote gestured. He rested his thick hands on his knees and blew out a long breath, looked around at the large well-furnished room, and ran his fingers along the polished desk. “Well. You seem in good condition here. Is there anything we can do for you? Are your people all right?”

“We’re fine. We’re consumed with admiration for the Varsovians.”

“Yes? The Germans have a bone in their throat, eh? We drove them back in the north last night. Berlin Radio says it’s over. We’ll see.” The mayor was red with pride. “Our forces are only twelve miles away this morning from a join-up with the Modlin garrison! Then the world will see something! We’ll have a battle line again, not a siege.”

“That’s wonderful news, Your Honor.” Slote ran his fingers caressingly over the warm bowl of his pipe, and tried to smile with a gladness he did not feel.

“Yes, but the other news is not so good.” The mayor paused, looked Slote in the face, and said dramatically, “The Russians have marched. The Soviet Union invaded our country at dawn. They are pouring over the border by the millions! Their excuse is that they want to protect their nationals in Poland from the Germans. It’s a crude disgusting lie, of course, but the Russians never change. They have already taken Tarnopol and Baranowicze, and Rowne will fall in an hour, if it hasn’t already fallen. We have no forces in the east. We have been sacrificing everything to hold off the Germans in the west, waiting for the Allies to march. And now the Russians are coming. There is nothing to oppose them between the border and Warsaw.”

Slote burst out laughing.

The mayor stared at him, eyes bulging. “What is the matter, sir? Don’t you believe me? I tell you the Russians have pounced on Poland from the rear in her agony. It is a historic treachery. I have a message for your President!” He pulled a paper from his breast pocket, unfolded it, and slapped it on the desk before Slote. “If you have suggestions on the phrasing they will be welcome, but the highest speed is now a matter of life and death.”

Slote could scarcely translate mentally the Polish words on the gray official paper. All he could think of was the Soviet tanks and soldiers approaching Warsaw. He could see the crawling machines and the Slavic faces. Perhaps they were coming to claim their part of the evil bargain, nothing more. Perhaps they would engage the Germans in battle and turn Warsaw into Armageddon. Perhaps they would bring up the famed Russian artillery and help the Germans pulverize the Polish capital twice as fast. This news seemed to him the authentic end of the world, and he was not aware of laughing. He peered at the paper swimming before his eyes. “I understand the situation is extraordinary,” he managed to say, surprising himself with his own reasonable glibness, “but a communication from the head of a municipality to a head of government is awkward. An approach from President Moscicki, or Marshal Smidgly-Rudz, somebody in the national government, might prove more fruitful.”

“But sir, our national government has crossed the border into Rumania. They are probably under house arrest by now, and the Germans will have them by the neck before the week is out. There’s only Warsaw, but we are unafraid and we are fighting on. We want to know what we can hope for.”

Slote got hold of himself and scanned the dispatch: familiar, pathetic rhetoric of appeal, like all the messages from Radio Warsaw to France and England during the past weeks. In fact the mayor was talking very much in his broadcasting style. “I’m not sure how fast I can get this out, sir. Lately I’ve been encountering twelve-hour delays and more via Stockholm.”

“I guarantee you immediate transmission. You can send this in plain language. Let the whole world know,” the mayor shouted, waving a fist, “that the people of Warsaw are fighting on despite the Russian treachery and that we are calling on the great American President for a word of hope. If he speaks the Allies will listen. They’ll march before it’s too late. The Germans can still be smashed from behind. All their power is in Poland. The Allies can roar to Berlin in two weeks. Let the President only speak, and they will march!”

“We can encode it very rapidly, Your Honor. I think that’s more prudent. We’ll be ready to transmit in half an hour.”

In a more businesslike tone Starzynski said, “Call my office, and we will arrange direct voice communication for you with Stockholm or Berne.” He stood up and glanced around the room. “A peaceful oasis. The Luftwaffe respects the American flag. Very wise of them. How soundly the boy sleeps.”

“He’s exhausted. Mr. Mayor, how about the evacuation of neutrals? Did you discuss that with the Germans yesterday?”

“It was not the moment. They came under a flag of truce to ask for our surrender. General Dzuma wouldn’t accept the message. The German officers wouldn’t discuss any other subject. They said they would reduce us to rubble!” The mayor’s voice rose to broadcasting pitch. “They’re dropping leaflets all over the city this morning with the same threat, but where are the ‘swarms of airplanes’ and the ‘hurricanes of shells’ they talk about? The Germans are already throwing at us everything they’ve got. They have nothing to add but words. They’ve been doing their worst for two weeks, and here we are still! Let President Roosevelt only speak out, and civilization can still see a historic victory on the Vistula.” His voice dropped; the exalted glow left his face. “I did mention the problem of the neutrals. Their emissary indicated that something would be worked out soon.” The mayor gave Slote a cool look and added, with a smile that twisted his moustache, “We don’t expect you to stay on and share our fate.”

“You understand that we have nineteen women here,” Slote said, feeling under the weight of this smile a need to apologize.

“Men, women, what’s the difference? You’re neutral.” The mayor held out his hand. “Please send the message. I must broadcast it eventually. I want to give your great President the courtesy of a period for private consideration of his reply.”

Slote grasped his hand. “We Americans here are awed by the stand of Warsaw, of that I can assure you. We will never forget it, and when we get home we will tell the story.”

The mayor seemed moved. “Yes? The Germans are not supermen, you see. Warsaw has already taught that to the world. Some Germans are personally fine people, but as a nation they are swine. It is a matter of deep national immaturity and feelings of inferiority. A very complex question. They have the machines, the railroads, the factories, but we are not afraid of them. All we ask is a chance to keep fighting them.”

“I will certainly convey that to my government.”

“We need help. I am going from here to dig a trench.” The mayor theatrically showed his blistered palms, and left.

Slote scrawled at his desk for several minutes, then summoned a coding clerk.

“Byron, wake up!” He shook Byron’s shoulder, smearing his hand with brick dust. “Come on, get up. All hell is breaking loose.” Byron turned over and opened dull eyes. “The Russians are coming. God knows when they’ll be here. They invaded Poland this morning. Go and call Natalie.”

With an elastic movement, Byron came erect and awake. “The Russians? Holy cow. This thing is getting interesting.”

“Interesting? Byron, look, Warsaw will probably become the no-man’s-land between the German and Russian armies. The city can be blown to atoms! Get Natalie and tell her she’s to come here and stay here. Working in a belligerent’s hospital is damned questionable anyway, and now -”

Slote walked to the door, putting a fist holding the pipe distractedly to his head. “What a mess. So much to do.”

Byron yawned and rose. “But what’s the rush? How far is the Russian border from here, two or three hundred kilometers? Their army can’t possibly get to Warsaw for a week.”

Slote laughed. It had not occurred to him that the Russian armies needed several days to advance three hundred kilometers, but it was true, and very obvious. He took out his pouch and packed the pipe slowly to calm himself, saying, “Of course, but the point is, this development changes everything. There’s never any predicting what the Russians or the Germans will do next. There may be dogfights over Warsaw today. The Germans may decide on half an hour’s notice to let the neutrals out of here.”

“Well, I’ll try to get her, but you know Natalie.”

“Please tell Natalie it’s not a message from me,” Slote said in a tight ragged tone, his hand on the doorknob, his head pounding, “but an official notice from the United States Government. We can no longer be responsible for the safety of anybody outside the four walls of this building. If we suddenly get packed out of here under a flag of truce — and it can happen any time — and she isn’t around, I can’t delay five minutes. We’ll go, and she’ll be the only foreigner left in Warsaw, and if by some freak she survives the bombs and the Nazis she can write a book. Tell her that, will you?” He closed the door hard.

By now Byron knew the route to the hospital well. It went through a part of the town which the Germans had been pounding hard. Sooty heaps of rubble pockmarked the way; there were craters in the streets, broken sewer pipes, torn cable conduits, downed telephone poles, uprooted trees, and endless piles of broken glass, masonry, wood, and rubbish. Children played on the heaps and in the mined buildings. Women were washing clothes in the open, or cooking over pale fires of splintered wood in the bright sunshine. Work gangs were digging in the fallen houses, clearing twisted wires from the street, and shovelling and bulldozing debris. Almost everybody appeared cheerful and matter-of-fact; that was the remarkable thing, though Byron was getting used to it. He passed no funerals or other traces of the dead. Leaping, climbing, laughing in the destroyed houses, the children seemed to be finding war an amusing novelty, and school was evidently out. Here and there black-shawled women sat with bowed heads on chairs or stones. Some bared breasts to sucking babies. Many people with blank faces wandered amid the rubble and stared, or fumbled to find things. No fires were burning. The destruction was capricious. One block would be undamaged; the next half razed, as though an airplane had dumped all its bombs at once. Over jagged slanting half-walls, rooms like stage settings hung in the air, their different wallpapers or paint colorfully and pathetically exposed. Byron saw a broken piano hanging half out of one room.

He made his way through the entrance hall of the hospital. Here Warsaw’s surprisingly cheerful air gave way to a pitiful and disgusting scene. Wounded people were piled and crowded helter-skelter along the marble floor awaiting help; mostly in rags, all dirty, green-pale, groaning or crying or in a faint, men and women, Poles and Jews, blood-smeared, unbandaged, with clothing ripped, with faces torn open, with arms and legs gashed, with an occasional red stump of limb blown away and terrible white bone showing. The children were piled separately in a big anteroom, where a sad chorus of wailing and screaming rose, mingled with some incongruous laughter. Byron hurried past the door and down the curving stone staircase, into a long low basement area much warmer than the floor above; here the stink of faultily burning oilstoves was even stronger than the smells of medicine.

“Is he crazy?” Natalie exclaimed. “How can I leave? I just came on duty. Look!” She swept her arm around at the women in the jammed-together beds, moaning and shrieking in Polish, at others sitting up dolefully on beds or low stools, with fat white breasts and brown nipples bared to infants, at the three pallid sweating doctors moving from bed to bed, at the hastening nurses, some in soiled blood-stained white dresses like herself, with hair bound in white cloths, some in dark gray nun’s habits. “There are five of us down here and we counted eighty-two women this morning! It’s the only maternity ward left in Warsaw now. The Germans bombed out Saint Catherine’s last night. They say it was unspeakably horrible, pregnant women running around on fire, newborn babies burning up -”

“The point is, Natalie, with the Russians coming -”

“I heard you! They’re hundreds of miles away, aren’t they? Go away Briny, I have to work.”

A stoop-shouldered doctor with a big nose, a square red beard, and sad filmed eyes was walking past. He asked Natalie in German what the problem was, and she told him.

“Go, by all means go,” he said, in an exhausted voice. “Don’t be foolish, you must leave with the other Americans. If the embassy sends for you, you must obey.”

“Oh, the embassy! Nobody says we’re leaving yet. This young man can come and fetch me in five minutes if they do.”

“No, no, that’s a risk you can’t take. You’re not a Pole, you’re not supposed to risk your life. And you’re Jewish, you’re Jewish.” The doctor put his hand to her head and pulled off the white cloth. Her loose hair fell thick, curling, dark. “You must go home.”

Tears ran out of Natalie’s eyes and down her face. “The woman with the twins is hemorrhaging. Did you see her yet? And the baby with the bad foot -” she gestured jerkily at a bed nearby.

“They’re all on the list. Go back to the embassy right away. Thank you. You’ve helped us. Have a safe journey.” The doctor shuffled away.

She turned on Byron. “Leslie Slote is a selfish bastard. He just doesn’t want to have me on his mind. One thing less to think about.” Suddenly she raised her skirt to her hips. The gesture gave Byron a shocking little thrill, though in point of fact the heavy gray bloomers coming down to her knees were considerably less sexy than the white skirt. She must have gotten those gruesome bloomers from the nuns, he thought. “Here,” she said pulling a thick wallet from her bloomers and dropping the skirt. “I’ll go back to the goddamn embassy. But just in case, I want you to go and find Berel, and give him this. It’s all my American money. Will you do that for me?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me, Briny,” Natalie said, “are you still having fun?”

He looked around at the noisy, crowded evil-smelling ward, where the Polish women were helplessly bringing new life into a city which was being dynamited to death by the Germans, going through unpostponable birth pangs with the best care the dying city could give them. “More fun than a barrel of monkeys. Be careful going back to the embassy, will you? There’s a big burning church on Franzuski and they’ve got the street blocked off. Go around by the museum.”

“All right. You’ll probably find Berel in that gray building, you know, where the Jewish council works. He’s on the food committee or something.”

“I guess I’ll find him.”

Byron came out in a back alley where two men were loading dead people from the hospital onto a two-wheeled cart, much like the one he had bought to carry the water. Bodies lay on the cobblestones, and one man wearing a red-smeared white oilcloth apron was taking them up one by one in his arms and thrusting them at the other man, who stacked them in the cart — large rigid horrors with open mouths and fixed eyes — like dead fish in a market. The man tossed up the light body of a scrawny old woman, whose gray pubic hair showed through the pink rag still hanging on her.

Hurrying down Marshal Pilsudski Boulevard toward the Jewish section he heard the thumping of heavy guns, and nearby explosions like the blasting at a building site. Byron muttered routine curses at the Germans. He had spent a week in Germany after defecting from the University of Florence. They had seemed odd but no more so than the Italians; foreigners, but human enough, with a boisterous sense of fun and very polite manners. Yet here they were, surrounding the Polish capital, pounding it with explosives and flying steel, breaking the water mains, killing the children, turning living people into stiff glassy-eyed dead stacked garbage to be carted away and disposed of. It was really the most amazing outrage. To call it “war” was not to make it any more understandable.

This peculiar and horrible state of affairs in which he accidentally found himself was nevertheless far more colorful and interesting than “peace,” as Byron remembered it. Delivering water to the United States embassy was the most satisfying thing he had done in his life. He loved the job. He was willing to be killed doing it. But the odds were all with him. This was the novel thing he was finding out. Most of the people in Warsaw were still alive and unhurt and going about their business. The city was far from destroyed or even half-destroyed. As he made his way to Nareiskaya district he passed through many a block of brown three-story houses which stood undamaged, peaceful, and quiet, looking exactly as they had before the German attack.

But in the Jewish quarter itself there were no such undamaged blocks. It was one broad smoky ruin. Clearly the Germans were raining extra shells and bombs on this district — a pointless course, since the Jews of Warsaw could not compel the surrender of the city. Such a deluge of fire and explosion concentrated on the city’s vitals — power, water, transport, bridges — instead of on the Jews, could break Warsaw much faster. The bombardment of the Nareiskaya was an irrational wasteful assault by a powerful army against sad unarmed paupers.

The JUDEN VERBOTEN signs Byron had seen on park benches in Germany had been too bizarre to seem real. This bombardment of the Nareiskaya district first drove home to him the queer fact that the Germans really had murder in their hearts for these people. Trolley cars lay on their sides, burned out. Swollen dead horses stank in the streets, in clouds of fat black flies that sometimes settled stickily on Byron’s hands and face. There were dead cats and dogs, too, and a lot of dead rats scattered in the gutter. He saw only one human body, an old man crumpled in a doorway. He had noticed before how quick the Jews were to remove their dead, and how they treated the corpses with respect, covering the loaded carts with cloths and following them in silent mournful straggles through the streets.

But despite the smashing up of the houses, the continuing fires, the smoke, the rubble, this quarter still abounded in eager crowded life. On one corner, outside a ruined schoolhouse, boys in skullcaps sat with their bearded teacher on the sidewalk chanting over enormous books; some of the boys were not much larger than the books. Kiosks were still festooned with dozens of different newspapers and journals printed in heavy Hebrew lettering. He heard someone in a house practicing on a violin. The vendors of wilted vegetables and spotted stunted fruit, of tinned food and old clothes, stood along the sidewalks or pushed their creaky handcarts amid crowds of people. Work gangs were clearing rubble from bombed houses off the streets and the sidewalks. There were plenty of hands for the work. Byron wondered at this, for in the past weeks Jewish men and boys — perhaps because they were so recognizable — had seemed to erupt all over Warsaw, digging trenches, fighting fires, repairing mains. One bent old graybeard in skullcap and kaftan, wielding a shovel in a trench, gave a Jewish look to a whole work force. Nevertheless they did appear to be pitching in everywhere.

Berel Jastrow was not in the council building. Wandering through crowded, dark, dingy corridors lit only by flickering thick candles, Byron chanced on a man whom he had once seen conferring with Berel, a little, neat, bearded Jew with a glass eye that gave him a walleyed stare. Talking a mishmash of German and Yiddish, the man conveyed that Berel was inspecting the community kitchens. Byron set out to hunt him down, and came on him in a huge Romanesque synagogue of gray stone, undamaged except for a broken stone Star of David in a round glassless window. Jastrow stood in a low hot anteroom where people were lined up for a strong-smelling stew ladled out by kerchiefed perspiring women from tubs on wood-burning stoves.

“The Russians!” Berel stroked his beard. “This is definite?”

“Your mayor came to the embassy with the news.”

“Let us go outside.”

They talked out in the street, well away from the food queue. The raggedly dressed people in line stared at them and tried to hear the conversation, even cupping hands to ears. “I must report this to the central committee,” Berel said. “It may be good news. Who knows? Suppose the two robbers cut each other’s throats? Such things have happened. The Russians could be messengers of God.”

He was taken aback when Byron offered him Natalie’s wallet. “But what is she thinking?” he said. “I have money. I have dollars. She may need that herself. She isn’t out of Warsaw yet.”

Byron was embarrassed. It had not occurred to him that Jastrow might be offended, but now the reaction seemed natural. He said the Americans expected to leave Warsaw soon under a flag of truce.

“So. We won’t see you or Natalie again?”

“Possibly not.”

“Ah. Well, if the Germans let all you Americans out together, she should be safe. She told me an American passport says nothing about religion. Tell her I thank her, and I’ll put the money in the food fund. Tell her — Vorsicht!”

A shell whistled down and exploded some distance away, making Byron’s ears ache. Berel spoke hurriedly. “So, they are coming back to this neighborhood again. They shell by a system, the Germans. Yesterday was Yom Kippur, and all day the shells fell on us, they never stopped. Now, you will be seeing Arele?” He smiled wryly at Byron’s blank look. “Dr. Aaron Jastrow” he said, mimicking English pronunciation.

“I guess so.”

“Tell him,” Berel said, “Lekh lekha. Can you remember that? It’s two simple Hebrew words. Lekh lekha,”

“Lekh lekha,” Byron said.

“Very good. You’re a fine Hebrew student.”

“What does it mean?”

“Get out.” Berel gave a worn white card to Byron.

“Now, will you do me a favor? This is a man in New Jersey, an importer. He sent a bank draft in August for a large shipment of mushrooms. It came too late. I destroyed draft, so there’s no problem, but — what are you smiling at?”

“Well, you have so much to worry about. And yet you think of this.”

Jastrow shrugged. “This is my business. The Germans, they’ll either come in, or they won’t. After all, they’re not lions and tigers. They’re people. They’ll take our money. It’ll be a very bad time, but a war always ends. Listen, if the Russians come they’ll take our money, too. So” — he held out his hand to Byron — “so, God bless you, and—”

Byron heard the noise of a shell very close, the unmistakable sloppy whir and whistle. It went splintering through the synagogue roof. The stunning explosion came a second or two later, giving him a chance to clap his hands over his ears and fall to the ground. Strangely, it did not blow out the front wall, and this was what saved the people on the line. Fragments of the roof went flying through the air, raining in a clatter on the street and on nearby buildings. Then, even as he and Jastrow stood, they saw the whole façade of the synagogue come sliding down like a descending curtain, disintegrating as it went with a rumble and a gathering crash. By now the queue of people had run out of danger. White dust boiled up, and through this cloud, which the breeze thinned at once, Byron could the marble pillars and carved wooden doors of the holy ark untouched on the far wall, looking naked and out of place in the pale smoky sunshine.

Berel slapped him sharply on the shoulder. “Go, go! Don’t stay here. Go now. I have to help.”

Jewish men and boys were already groping into the new ruin, where many little fires were flickering. Little as he knew of Judaism, Byron understood that they meant to save the scrolls.

“All right, I’m going back to Natalie.”

“Good. Thank you, thank you. A safe journey to both of you.”

Byron left at a trot. The uncovering of the holy ark to the sunshine had shocked him like a piece of powerful music. Jogging back through the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, he saw these smashed rows of gray and brown houses, these cobbled streets and dirt alleys, these shabby courtyards and mews hung with drying laundry, these crowds of orderly Jews in beards and broad hats, these dark-eyed cheerful children playing under the bombs, these dogged tired street vendors with their carts and baskets, these kiosks laden with newspapers, magazines, feuilletons, and paperbound books, this smoke-filtered sunshine, these overturned trolleys, these dead horses — he saw all this in superbright detail, each picture printing itself on his mind as though he were a painter.

Without surprise or fear, he noticed thick V’s of German planes soaring out of the north. The sight had grown ordinary. He continued to trot, a little faster, through the emptying shell-pitted streets toward the embassy. People around him glanced at the sky and took shelter. The first waves were Stukas, diving down and spitting out black smoke, and Byron heard the irritated answering rattle of the weak rooftop machine guns of the Poles. One plane dove toward the street where he was running. He jumped into a doorway. Bullets went chattering down along the cobblestones, with a great whing-whang of ricochets. He watched the plane zoom away, then he trotted on, muttering the usual obscenities about the Germans.

Byron was developing a sense of invulnerability to the worst the Germans could do. To him they were contemptible bungling butchers. He was sure that the United States was going to rise in its wrath in short order, cross the Atlantic and knock the hell out of them, if the British and the French really proved too decayed or too scared to do it. The events around him must be making gigantic headlines in America, he thought. He would have been stupefied to know that the Polish war, its outcome clear, was already slipping to the back pages of United States papers, and that people were ignoring even the supposed “great debate” in the Senate over revising the Neutrality Act, because of the tight National League pennant race.

He loped through the embassy gate very much out of breath. The marine sentry gave him a salute and a familiar grin. Inside, in the big dining room darkened by window braces and blackout curtains, some fifty or so Americans caught in Warsaw were lunching at long trestle tables lit by oil lamps, making a loud clatter. Slote sat with Natalie, a small dark man named Mark Hartley, and some others at the ambassador’s polished dining table. Panting from the long run, Byron told Natalie about his meeting with Berel. He did not mention the destroyed synagogue.

“Thanks, Briny! God help them all. Sit down and eat something. We have marvellous breaded veal cutlets, by some miracle.”

Slote said, “Did you come here through the streets during this air attack?”

“He has duck feathers for brains,” Natalie said, giving Byron an affectionate look.

“Byron is all right,” Hartley said. He was a fourth at bridge with Natalie, Byron, and Slote, when they whiled away long night hours in the cellar. Mark Hartley’s name had once been Marvin Horowitz, and he liked to joke about the change. He was a New Yorker in the importing business.

Byron took an empty seat beside Natalie and helped himself to a cutlet. It had a rather gamy, sticky taste, but after a week of canned sprats and sausages it seemed delicious, and he was famished. He downed it and forked another onto his plate. Slote smiled at him, and glanced around with satisfaction at the Americans happily consuming the cutlets. “By the way, does anybody here object to eating horsemeat?”

“I most certainly do,” said Natalie.

“Well, that’s too bad. You’ve just eaten it.”

Natalie said, “Aagh!” and choked into her napkin. “My God. Horse! I could kill you. Why didn’t you warn me?”

“You need nourishment. We all do. There’s no telling what’s going to become of us, and I had the chance to buy up this lot and I did. You’ve been dining on one of the great breeds of Poland. The mayor ordered the slaughter of a thousand of them yesterday. We were lucky get a share.”

Mark Hartley took another cutlet from the platter. Natalie said, “Mark! How can you? Horse!”

He shrugged. “We got to eat. I’ve eaten worse meat in kosher restaurants.”

“Well, I don’t claim to be religious, but I draw the line at horses. I’d as soon eat a dog.”

Byron pushed away his plate. The awareness of horseflesh heavy in his stomach, the gluey taste of horse in his mouth, the remembered smell of fly-blown dead horses on the Jewish streets, blended in his consciousness as one thing — war.

Chapter 14

Four days later, early in the morning Natalie came scampering out into the embassy back yard hair and skirt flying, and pounced on Byron, who was burning passport blanks and visa application files. The embassy had hundreds of the maroon passport booklets, which went up slowly and smokily; in German hands they could be used for smuggling spies and saboteurs into the United States. The stacks and stacks of visa requests, because they identified Jews, were also high on the burn-list. Byron had given up riffling through the files for the American currency often clipped to application forms. His job was to reduce the stuff to ashes as fast as he could; he was burning money and didn’t care.

“Hurry. Come with me.” Natalie’s voice had a cheerful, excited ring.

“Where?”

“Just come.”

In a chauffeured black limousine at the front gate, Slote sat next to a plump, pink, gray-headed man. “Hi there, Byron!” Slote too sounded surprisingly cheerful. “This is the Swedish ambassador. Byron Henry’s father is our naval attaché in Berlin, Ambassador. It might be well to take him along, don’t you think?”

The ambassador rubbed the side of his bulbous nose with a small neat hand, and gave Byron a wise look. “Very much so. Yes indeed. And he should perhaps take notes.”

“Just what I thought. Hop in, Byron.”

A blood transfusion could not have changed Slote more. Byron had talked to him an hour earlier; the familiar gray, dour, slumped Slote, who had been glooming around the embassy, talking medicines, snapping short answers, and spending hours locked in his office. Ever since a bomb had fallen on the building next door, killing ten Poles, Slote had been like that. Byron figured the responsibility was wearing the chargé down. But now his face had color, his eyes were bright, and the very plume of blue smoke from his pipe looked jaunty.

As Byron got into the back seal, Natalie blurted to the ambassador, “Can I come along? Byron and I are travelling together.”

With an annoyed grimace, Slote shook his head. The ambassador looked her up and down, with masculine amusement. Natalie wore a green silk dress and an old pink sweater, an atrocious getup pulled from her suitcase without thought. It made her look vulgarly sexy. “But, my dear, wouldn’t you be frightened?”

“Of what?”

“The sounds of guns. We’re going to inspect the safe-conduct exit route.” The ambassador’s slow British speech was almost perfect. His small pink hand, resting on the open window, was manicured to a gleam, siege or no siege. “We may come rather close to the front.”

“I’ve heard guns.”

The ambassador smiled at Byron. “Well, shall we have your friend along?” He moved to make room for her beside him as he spoke. Slote said nothing, but gnawed his pipe in an annoyed way.

The car started off on a rough, zigzag ride toward the river. Warsaw had been crumpling in the past four days. A strong wind was blowing away the smoke, and beautiful morning sunshine gave a mocking look to the streets. But smashed buildings met the eye everywhere. Thousands of windows had been blown out and patched with bright yellow plywood. Warsaw was becoming a place of smoke, broken masonry, and yellow patches. The sidewalks and gutters were broken and cratered, and spiky tank traps and barricades cluttered main intersections. Glowering nervous soldiers at these intersections stopped the car with raised machine guns, their fingers at the triggers. Few other people were in sight. Far off cannon drummed and thumped. Each time that a soldier lowered his gun and waved them on, Slote laughed boisterously.

“What I find so incredible,” he said, as they came to a long stone bridge over the Vistula, crowded with carts, trucks, and bicycles, “is that this thing is still standing at all. Haven’t the Germans been bombarding it for two weeks?”

“Well, you see, they are just not quite as devastating as they would have us believe,” the Swedish ambassador said. “Nor as accurate.”

The car drove out on the bridge, over the broad brown river serenely flowing between Warsaw and its eastern suburb, Praha, a place of low houses and green woods. Behind them in the sunshine, under a soft smoky blue sky, Warsaw at this distance looked surprisingly unharmed: a broad metropolis with wide avenues, baroque church domes, tall factory chimneys, and many climbing columns of black smoke. It might almost have been a manufacturing city on a busy day in peacetime, except for the yellow fires billowing up here and there, the flashes like summer lightning all around the horizon, and the distant whumping of the artillery. Several busloads of singing and joking soldiers went past the car. Some waved at Natalie and shouted. Many soldiers were also heading the same way on bicycles.

“Where are they all going?” Natalie said.

“Why, to the front,” said the ambassador. “It’s quite a war. They leave their guns and go home for lunch or dinner, or perhaps to sleep with their wives, and then they take a bus to the front again and shoot at the Germans. Madrid was rather like this when I was there during the Civil War.”

“How far do we go?” Slote said. Here over the river the gun booms from Praha were louder.

The ambassador pursed his lips. “I’m not sure. We have to look for a schoolhouse with a stone goose in the front yard, a hundred yards or so past a wayside shrine.”

On the other side of the river, they found a scene of ruin. Broken houses, burned tree trunks, and fallen trees lined the narrow tarred road, which was so torn up by shell-fire that the car had to detour time and again on dirt tracks. A camouflaged heavy Polish gun in the woods suddenly went off as the limousine bumped along one of these paths. The driver swerved and brushed a tree, the passengers leaped in their seats. “My God!” Slote said. The car steadied up and drove on through the wooded flat land of Praha. They passed a house with its roof ablaze, and the family outside dolefully watching. Loud explosions went off around them, two or three a minute. Sometimes they saw flames from gun mouths in the woods, though the guns themselves were invisible. Sometimes through the trees they could observe Polish gun crews feverishly moving about. It was all novel and exciting, at least to Byron, and they seemed to be enjoying this wartime sightseeing in perfect safety, despite the unpleasant bumping along grass and dirt to avoid the shell holes. But then a German shell burst near the car, throwing up a geyser of dirt which rattled and tinkled on the limousine roof.

Slote said, “Christ Almighty! We’re at the front right now!”

“Yes, the schoolhouse must be right past that next curve,” the ambassador said. But past the curve they saw only four log houses around a dirt courtyard, where several pigs trotted here and there, bewildered by the gun noise. Beyond, the straight tar road continued into leafy woods and smoke, and visibility ceased.

Slote said, “Please stop the car.”

The ambassador glanced over his shoulder at him, rubbed his nose with a pink hand, and spoke to the driver. The car pulled to the side of the road.

“I didn’t in the least understand from you,” Slote said, gesturing with the pipe clutched in a fist, “that we were going into the actual zone of fire. Are you sure that we haven’t missed a turn, and that we aren’t behind the German lines right now?”

The ambassador pushed out his lips. I don’t believe we’ve come more than three miles from the bridge.”

Slote burst out laughing, and jerked the pipe at Natalie and Byron. “These young people are my responsibility. I can’t expose them in this way.”

Two loads of soldiers came along in lumbering old street buses with route numbers still displayed in front and faded movie advertisements on their sides. The soldiers were singing, and some waved out of the window at the halted limousine, or gave good-humored yells in Polish.

“Clearly we’re not yet behind the German lines,” said the ambassador.

“Nevertheless we’ll have to take these civilians back to Warsaw,” Slote said. “I’m sorry you and I misunderstood each other.”

Natalie exclaimed, “But why? There’s no reason on earth to take us back. I’m perfectly all right.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t time.” The ambassador deliberately scratched his eyebrow. “The cease-fire will probably come within the hour. As soon as we get back, I’ll have to start assembling my party.”

“So will I. But it’s up to the Poles and the Germans, after all, to ensure that the neutrals cross the lines safely.”

The ambassador glanced at his watch. “Colonel Rakowski asked that we come out and view the route ahead of time. I really do think we’d better go on.” Two heavy guns went off in the woods — RRUMPH RRUMPH! — one to the left, one to the right. The chauffeur whirred the ignition.

“Just a moment!” The driver turned around and looked at Slote, who had gone dead pale, his mouth working. “Ambassador, I must insist that you at least take us back to the bridge first. Perhaps there we can hitch a ride on a truck or bus.”

“But my dear sir, you should see the route, too. Our parties may get separated later in the woods.”

A peculiar feeling knotted Byron’s stomach. The ambassador’s faultless manners did not obscure what was happening, and Slote represented the United States. He said, “Leslie, I think you’re dead right about Natalie. Why not take her into one of those log houses and wait? I can go on with the ambassador and get the information, if you like.”

The ambassador at once said cheerfully, “Excellent idea! We can go and return in ten or fifteen minutes, I’m sure.”

Slote opened the car door and got out. “Come on, Natalie. We’ll wait in the one with the green blinds, Ambassador. I saw a woman at the windows.”

Natalie stayed in her seat, looking from Slote to the ambassador, her mouth pulled down unpleasantly. The ambassador said to her in a stiff European tone, “My dear, please do as you are told.”

Jumping out, she slammed the door and ran toward the house. Slote hurried after her, shouting. The limousine shot forward in a rattle of pebbles. The haze ahead thinned as they drove into it. About half a mile further along they came upon the shrine, a luridly colored wooden Jesus on a gilt cross in a sheltering frame; and not far beyond that was the schoolhouse. Several soldiers, smoking and talking, lounged in front of it around a stone goose bordered with red flowers. Byron thought that if Leslie Slote could have held on only three or four more minutes, he would have been all right. That one bad moment in the limousine, when the dirt hit the roof, had been unlucky for him.

Colonel Rakowski hailed the Swedish ambassador with a shout and a hug. He seemed in unrealistically good spirits, Byron thought, and indeed all the staff officers looked too chipper, considering the bad news that shrieked from the military map of the front on the wall: a crude thick red crayon circle, completely ringing Warsaw. On other walls of the schoolhouse, bright kindergarten pictures hung. Rakowski, an enormous man with pointed blonde moustaches, and a big nose empurpled by good living, led the visitors out a back door, and along a leaf-carpeted path to a concrete gun emplacement, where grimy, whiskered men stripped to the waist were piling shells. Motioning the visitors to come on up, the colonel climbed the shallow cement slope and mounted the sandbags. Byron followed the ambassador. A forested plain lay before them, dipping toward the east, with a scattering of houses and farms, and three widely separated church spires. Puffs of smoke out there, Byron realized, came from German artillery.

Panting from the little climb, the ambassador and the officer talked volubly, gesturing at the church spires. The ambassador scrawled notes and translated bits to Byron. On the terms of the cease-fire, he said, the neutral refugees would cross unescorted from the Polish to the German lines, heading for the farthest church, where Wehrmacht trucks would meet them. Colonel Rakowski feared that some refugees might wander on the poorly marked dirt roads, head for the wrong church, and find themselves between two fires when the truce — for which the Germans were granting only two hours — was ended. So he had asked the Swedish ambassador to come out and study the route beforehand.

“He says,” the ambassador observed to Byron, closing his notebook, “that the best view is from that observation tower. You can make out the different roads, all the way to the Kantorovicz church.”

Byron looked at the spindly wooden tower erected close by in the school’s play yard. A narrow ladder led to a square metal shielded platform, where he could see the helmet of a soldier. “Well, I’ll go up, okay? Maybe I can make a sketch.”

“The colonel says the tower has been drawing quite a bit of fire.”

Byron managed a grin.

With a paternal smile the ambassador handed him the notebook and pen. Byron trotted to the ladder and went up, shaking the frail tower as he climbed. Here was a perfect view of the terrain. He could see all the roads, all the turnoffs of the brown zigzags across no-man’s-land, to the far church. The soldier on watch glanced away from his binoculars to gawk, as the young American in an open shirt and loose gray sweater sketched the roads in the ambassador’s notebook, struggling with the pages as they flapped in the wind, marking all the wrong turns with X’s, and crudely picturing the three churches in relation to the route. The soldier nodded when Byron showed him the sketch, and slapped his shoulder. “Ho kay,” he said, with a grin of pride at his mastery of Americanese.

Natalie leaned in the open doorway of the cottage, arms folded, as the limousine drew up. She hurried to the car, followed in a moment by Slote, who first said good-bye at the door to a kerchiefed old woman in heavy boots. As the car drove back toward Warsaw, the ambassador recounted their visit to the front including Byron’s venture up the tower. Meantime Byron worked on the notebook in his lap.

“Think four copies is enough?” he said to the ambassador.

“Plenty, I should think. Thank you.” The ambassador took the notebook. “We may have time to run off some mimeograph copies. Very well done.”

Natalie clasped Byron’s hand and pulled it to her lap. She was sitting between him and Slote. She pressed his fingers, looking seriously at him, her dark eyes half-closed.

Through her light green dress, he felt the flesh of her thigh on the back of his hand and the ridge of a garter. Slote repeatedly glanced at the two hands clasped in the girl’s lap as he calmly smoked, looked out of the window, and chatted with the ambassador about assembling and transporting the refugees. A muscle in Slote’s jaw kept moving under the skin of his white face.

In the embassy all was scurry and noise. The mayor’s office had just sent word that the cease-fire was definite now for one o’clock. Polish army trucks would take the Americans to the departure point, and each person could bring one suitcase. The rush was on. The Americans still living outside the embassy were being summoned by telephone. A smell of burning paper filled the building, and fragments of black ash floated in the corridors.

Mark Hartley occupied the cot next to Byron’s in the cellar, and Byron found him sitting hunched beside a strapped-up suitcase, head in hands, a dead cigar protruding from his fingers. “Ready to go, Mark?”

Hartley uncovered a drawn face, the eyes frightened and bulging. “Horowitz is the name, Byron. Marvin Horowitz.”

“Nonsense, how will they know that?” Byron pulled from under the cot his old torn bag with the sprung hardware.

Hartley shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I must be crazy. I never once pictured that anything like this would happen. I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that Roosevelt would fly us out in Army planes. Something like that. I’ve never been so goddamned scared in my life. We’re going to the Germans. The Germans.”

“Put that in your bag,” Byron said, tossing a worn black book to him as he packed. “And cheer up. You’re an American. That’s all. An American named Hartley.”

“With a Horowitz face and a Horowitz nose. What’s this? The New Testament? What’s this for?”

Byron took the book, which had a gold cross stamped on the binding, and carefully tore out the flyleaf with his own name written on it. “Make a good Christian of you. Here, put it away. Don’t sit around and worry. Go help Rowlandson burn papers.”

“I wish I had my own Bible or prayer book,” Hartley said dully unstrapping his bag. “I haven’t been inside a synagogue since my bar mitzvah. An old smelly Hebrew teacher made me memorize a lot of gibberish. I did it to please my mother, but that was the end. I never went back once. Now I wish I remembered the prayers. Any prayers.” He glanced around at the bustling cellar. “So help me, this hole looks to me now like home sweet home. I’d give anything if I could just stay here. Do you think we’ll ever play bridge again one day, the four of us? In New York, maybe?”

“Sooner than you think.”

“From your mouth in God’s ears. That’s what my mother used to say.”

The army trucks came snorting and rattling up to the embassy at half past eleven; loose wobbly old machines so caked with mud and rust that their gray paint was scarcely discernible. At their arrival, more than a hundred Americans milling inside the fence on the lawn, set up a cheer and began singing “California Here I Come” and such ditties. The Poles of the staff, mostly girl secretaries, were sadly passing out coffee and cake.

“They make me feel ashamed,” Natalie said to Byron. Two of the Polish girls bearing trays had just gone by with fixed forced smiles and glistening eyes.

“What’s the alternative?” Byron, famished, bit into the coarse gray cake and made a face. It tasted of raw dough and paper ashes.

“There’s no alternative.”

Byron said, “Mark Hartley is scared stiff of the Germans. How about you?”

Natalie’s eyes flashed. “What can they do to me? I have an American passport. They don’t know I’m a Jew.”

“Well, don’t tell them. I mean don’t become all brave or defiant or anything, okay? The idea is just to get the hell out.”

“I’m not an imbecile, Byron.”

A Polish officer shouted, the gate opened, and the Americans began piling into the trucks. Some people were too old to climb up, some were trying to take extra luggage, the Polish drivers and officers were urgent and short-tempered, and nobody was in charge. Yelling, complaining, weeping, and fist-waving went on, but most of the people, hungry and uncomfortable though they were, felt so happy at starting out that they continued to sing and laugh. The trucks clanked off in single file. A black Chevrolet with American flags on its fenders brought up the rear, carrying Slote, his three highest-ranking assistants, and the wives of two of them. Outside the gate the Polish secretaries stood and waved, tears running down their faces. Byron and Natalie jolted along in a truck, clasping each other’s waists. Slote had offered her a place in the Chevrolet. She had shaken her head without a word.

The bombardment was going on as heavily as ever: the distant HRUMP! HRUMP! HRUMP! of the artillery, the blasting explosions of bombs from three small V’s of German planes passing slowly in the hazy midday sky, and the popping and stuttering of the Polish antiaircraft guns. The convoy crawled, stopped, and crawled through the shattered streets, the canyons of yellow-patched structures, careening up on sidewalks to avoid holes and tank traps, once backing out of a boulevard blocked by a newly fallen building.

At the bridge across the Vistula truck convoys flying various embassy flags were converging. The bridge was jammed to a standstill with refugee trucks. There were more than two thousand neutral nationals in Warsaw, and every one of them evidently meant to get out. Byron kept glancing at his watch. The traffic started to move again, but so slowly that he feared they might not reach the departure point by one o’clock. German shells kept whistling by, and splashes like geysers boiled up in the river, sometimes showering the bridge and the trucks. The Germans clearly thought it all in the game if they killed nine-tenths of the neutrals on the bridge, fifteen minutes before the ceasefire.

The convoys ended in a stupendous pileup at the schoolhouse with the stone goose. Colonel Rakowski and the Swedish ambassador stood together in the road, shouting instructions to each truckload of descending passengers and handing out mimeographed instruction sheets. With some pride of authorship, Byron noticed that whoever had traced his sketch on the stencil had faithfully copied it, even to his crude pictures of the three churches.

Guns in the woods all around the school were thundering away, but at five minutes to one the bombardment begin to fade down. At one o’clock the guns fell silent. The loudest noise was the chattering of refugees in many languages along both sides of the road. Byron could hear birds, too, and the strumming of grasshoppers. It struck him that the noise of grasshoppers was the most peaceful sound on earth. A loudspeaker bawled final instructions in one language after another. Groups of neutrals, picking up their suitcases, began to walk down the sloping road. Finally came the English in a heavy Polish accent, “Please keep together. Do not make wrong turns. The German command has stated it will accept no responsibility for anybody who is not at the Kantorovicz church by three o’clock. Therefore the Polish command can accept no such responsibility. It is an easy hour’s walk even for an old person. The enemy will undoubtedly recommence hostilities at three. We will return the heaviest possible fire at the first shot. Please, therefore, hurry. Good luck to you all. Long live America. Long live Poland.”

At this, the Americans took up their luggage and walked into no-man’s-land.

For two or three hundred yards it was no different than the rest of Praha, but then the asphalt road narrowed and trailed off into a dusty, rutted, one-lane cart track. They passed ruined houses. The barnyards had no animals except for an occasional abandoned chicken wandering and clucking; and some slinking jumpy cats. The road entered woods where sunlight slanted down in green-yellow bars through the leaves. The leader of the Americans, a tall gray Episcopalian minister in a black suit and turnaround collar, checked Byron’s sketch at each crossroad. This strange slow walk between two silent enemy armies took a full hour by Byron Henry’s watch. As he remembered it later, it was like a stroll in company in peacetime through a fragrant autumnal forest. Many fall flowers, blue and orange and white, dotted the dirt road and the woods; the birds chirped and twittered; and the wonderful song of the grasshoppers filled the air. He also remembered becoming very dry-mouthed and thirsty from tension, so thirsty that his legs felt weak. Two other memories stayed with him: the diplomats’ black cars going by, honking the walkers out of the road, with Slote laughing in the front seat and waving at him and Natalie; and then, near the end of the trek, at the bend of the road where the Kantorovicz church appeared, Mark Hartley coming up beside him, slipping his hand through his elbow, and saying, “My name is Mark Hartley, and oy, am I a good Christian!” — smiling at Byron, his face dust-caked and terror-stricken.

All at once, there were the German guns and the German gun crews in the woods. The howitzers were bigger than the Polish artillery pieces, with an appearance of better, newer engineering. Watching the walkers, the soldiers stood quietly at their weapons, in their neat field gray and formidable Wehrmacht helmets. Byron peered at the German soldiers with immense curiosity. The helmets gave them a beetling warrior look, but most of them were young and had the same German faces he had seen in Munich and Frankfurt. Many wore glasses. It was hard to believe that these were the villains who had been pouring flying steel and fire on Warsaw, setting pregnant women aflame, blowing children’s legs and hands off, and making a general shambles of a handsome metropolis. They were just young men in soldier suits and stern helmets, standing around in the shady woods amid the pleasant noises of birds and grasshoppers.

From the first, the Germans handled the refugees better than the Poles had. A mule-drawn water cart — a large olive-painted cylinder on wheels — stood by the road near the church, and soldiers waited with tin cups to herd the thirsty people into a queue. From the water tank, other soldiers guided them toward new clean gray trucks, with thick black deeply treaded tires, so different from the Poles’ dirty deteriorated machines. Wehrmacht officers in tailored long military coats and high peaked caps were talking amiably, though with marked condescension, to the arriving diplomats near a table by the roadside. As each national group came to the trucks, its ambassador or chargé gave a typed roster to a bespectacled soldier behind the desk. He called off names, and one by one the people entered the vehicles, which unlike the Polish trucks had wooden seats. The Poles had not troubled with rosters.

There was no bunching up, no disorder. Soldiers stood by with little stools to help up the elderly and to hand the few children to their mothers with a laugh and a playful little swing. At a field ambulance marked with a red cross, medical orderlies gave restoratives. Two soldiers with movie and still cameras roamed the scene, recording all this good treatment of the neutrals. The loading was not quite over when the guns near the church all at once shot off a salvo that made the ground shake. Byron’s watch read a minute past three o’clock.

“Poor Warsaw,” Natalie said.

“Don’t talk,” Mark Hartley said in a low hoarse voice.

“Don’t say anything till we’re out of this.” They sat with Byron on the last bench of a truck, from which they could look out.

Natalie said, “Look at Slote, will you? Taking a cigarette from a German, for crying out loud, and laughing! It’s just unbelievable. All these German officers with their long coats and pushed-up caps. There they are, just like their pictures.”

“Are you afraid?” Byron said.

“Not any more, now that it’s actually happening. I don’t know why. It’s sort of dreamlike.”

“Some dream,” Hartley said. “It should only be a dream. Jesus Christ. That officer with Slote is coming here.” Hartley gripped a hand on Byron’s knee.

The officer, a blond young man with a good-natured smile came straight to Byron, speaking with a pleasant accent, slowly and precisely. “Your chargé tells me that your father is American naval attaché in Berlin.”

“Yes, sir. He is.”

“I am a Berliner. My father is in the foreign ministry.” The officer fingered the binoculars around his neck. His manner seemed not very military and rather self-conscious. Byron thought he might be feeling compunction of a sort, and he liked the German better for that. “I believe I had the pleasure of meeting your parents in August at the Belgian embassy, and of dancing with your mother. What on earth have you been doing in Warschau?”

“I was sightseeing.”

“Well, you saw some unusual sights.”

“That I did.”

The officer laughed, and offered his hand to Byron. “Ernst Bayer,” he said, putting his heels together.

“Byron Henry. Hi.”

“Ah, yes. Henry. I remember the name. Well, you are comfortable? Can I offer you a ride in a staff car?”

“I’m fine. Where are we going?”

“Klovno. It’s the nearest working railroad junction, and there you will all transfer to a special train for Königsberg. It’s more than a three-hour trip. You might enjoy it more in an automobile.”

“Well, I’ve been travelling with these folks, you know. I’ll stay with them. Thanks a lot.” Byron spoke cordially, though this polite chitchat with a German felt exceedingly strange after all his anger at them.

Slote said to Natalie, “We can still make room for you in the Chevy. That wooden slat’s going to get kind of hard.”

She shook her head, looking darkly at the German.

“Give my best to your mother,” said the officer, with a casual glance at the girl and back at Byron. “She was really charming to me.”

“I sure will.”

Several guns fired in succession nearby, drowning out something the officer said. He grimaced. and smiled. “How are things in Warschau now? Very distressing?”

“Well, they seem to be hanging on pretty well.”

Half-addressing Natalie as well as Byron, Bayer said, “A bad business! The Polish government was completely irresponsible, running off into Rumania and leaving the country without leadership. Warschau should have been declared an open city two weeks ago. This destruction is pointless. It will cost a lot to repair. The mayor is very brave, and there is a lot of admiration here for him, but” — he shrugged — “what is there to do but finish it off? This will be over in a day or two.”

“It may take longer than that,” Byron said.

“You think so?” Bayer’s pleasant smile faded. He bowed slightly and walked off, toying with the glasses. Slote shook his head at Byron and followed the officer.

“Why the hell did you get him mad?” Hartley whispered.

“Oh, Christ. Blaming the Polish government for the siege!”

“He meant it,” Natalie said, in a wondering tone. “The man was absolutely sincere.”

With some shouting in German, snorting of motors, honking of horns, waving by the soldiers, the convoy departed from Kantorovicz, a hamlet of half a dozen wooden houses around the church, intact but abandoned. Since leaving the schoolhouse, the refugees had not seen a living Pole, nor a dead one. The trucks wound along one-lane dirt roads, passing burned-out barns, blown-apart houses, overturned windmills, broken churches, schoolhouses without windows or roofs, and much torn-up, shell-plowed ground and charred tree stumps. Still the scene was not at all like battlegrounds in movies and books of the last war: gray wastes of barren dead muck, tangles of barbed wire, dark zigzagging trenches. These fields and woods were green. Crops were still standing. Only the inhabitants were eerily absent. It was almost as though H. G. Wells’s invaders from Mars had passed through in their perambulating metal tripods, atomizing or eating the people and leaving only slight trails of their transit. The first Poles who came in sight, far behind the German lines, were an old man and his wife working in a field in late sunshine; they leaned on their implements and solemnly watched the trucks go by. As the trucks travelled farther from Warsaw, more peasants began to appear, going about their fieldwork or repairing damaged houses, either ignoring the trucks or watching their passage with blank faces. Nearly all were old people or children. In this back country, Byron saw no young men, and only two or three kerchiefed, skirted figures that from their slimness and supple movements might have been girls. Yet more striking, he saw not one horse. The horse, and the vehicles it pulled, were the trademark, the very life, of rural Poland. On the way from Cracow to Warsaw, there had been thousands of horses, clogging the roads, working in the fields, carrying soldiers, dragging heavy loads in the cities. Behind the German lines this animal seemed extinct.

The ride was too bumpy for conversation, and the refugees were still tired, and perhaps frightened by the deepening awareness of being in the hands of the Germans. Hardly a word was spoken in the first hour or so. They came out on a tarred road, narrow and primitive enough, but by comparison with the cart tracks of the back country, a glassy highway. The convoy stopped at a knoll of smooth green lawns and flower gardens topped by a brick-walled convent, and the word passed for women passengers to dismount and “refresh themselves.” The ladies happily went off, the men scattered among the trees or urinated by the roadside, and when the convoy rolled again everybody was much more cheerful.

Talk sprang up. Natalie brought back gossip from the ladies’ room. All the neutrals, she said, would be offered a choice of flying to Stockholm, or else of taking German trains to Berlin, and thence going out via Belgium, Holland, or Switzerland.

“You know,” the girl said, with a mild glint in her eye, “I’d sort of like to see Berlin myself.”

“Are you crazy?” said Hartley. “Are you absolutely crazy? You must be kidding. You go to Stockholm, baby, and you just pray they let you go to Stockholm. This girl has a screw loose,” Hartley said to Byron.

Byron said, “Berel’s message to A.J. goes for you, too. Lekh lekha.”

“Lekh lekha.” She smiled. Byron had told her about this. “Get out, eh? Well, maybe.”

“In the name of God,” Hartley muttered, “stop with the Hebrew.”

The ride stretched out to four and five hours of grinding through farmland and forests. All traces of war faded from the landscape. Houses, churches, whole towns were untouched. The inhabitants looked and acted as they had in the peacetime countryside. There were few young people, no horses, and very little cattle and poultry. In the towns a red swastika flag flew over the main square, either on a flagpole or from the town hall, and German soldiers stood sentry or patrolled on foot or on motorcycles. But the conquered land was at peace. The absence of livestock and young folks gave it a dead look, the peasants seemed somewhat more dour and sullen, perhaps, but life was going on exactly as before, except that the Germans were in charge.

The sun sank behind the distant flat horizon in a brief glow of pale orange. The trucks rolled on into the night. The passengers quieted. Natalie Jastrow put her head on Byron’s shoulder and took his hand in hers. They both dozed.

Commands shouted in German woke them. Lights blazed. They were in a square before a wide railroad station, and people were streaming down out of the lined-up trucks. The lower half-door of their truck was still closed, but two helmeted Germans came along and opened it with a clank. “Bitte raus! Alle im Wartesaal!” Their manner was brisk, not hostile, and they stood by to help down the women and old men. It was a cool moonlit night and Byron was glad to see darkness and stars overhead once more, instead of a smoke pall and a fiery glow.

The refugees gathered in a confused mass in the waiting room, still blinking at the light. Double doors opened at one end of the room, and soldiers shouting in German shepherded them through, bearing along Byron and Natalie. Byron carried their suitcases and Hartley clung like a child to his elbow. They entered a dining hall full of long plank tables on trestles, laden with food.

It was the most dazzling banquet that Byron had seen in his life — or so it seemed in the first thunderstruck seconds, famished as he was after the long ride and the three weeks of wretched food in besieged Warsaw. There were platters of smoking sausages and sauerkraut, there were many whole pink hams, there were mounds of boiled potatoes, piles of fried chicken, stacked loaves of fresh bread, pitchers of beer, immense whole yellow and orange cheeses. But it seemed a mockery, a cruel Nazi trick, a Barmecide feast, because the soldiers herded the neutrals along the walls away from the tables. There they stood, hundreds of them, staring at the distant food, and in the space between stood a few alert German soldiers with lowered tommy guns.

A voice spoke over a loudspeaker in clear conversational German: “Welcome! The German people are your hosts. We welcome the citizens of the neutral countries in peace and friendship. The German people seek peace with all nations. Relations with Poland have now been normalized. The treacherous Smidgly-Rudz regime, having met its just punishment, has ceased to exist. A new Poland will rise from its ashes, cleaned up and law-abiding, where everybody will work hard, and irresponsible politicians will no longer provoke disastrous foreign adventures. The Führer can now seriously pursue a peaceful settlement of all outstanding questions with Great Britain and France, and afterward Europe will enter on a new order of unparalleled mutual prosperity. Now we ask you to sit down and eat. Hearty appetite!”

A dozen smiling blonde girls in white waitress uniforms made their entrance, almost like a theatre chorus, carrying jugs of coffee and stacks of plates. The soldiers smiled and walked out of the space in front of the tables, making inviting hospitable motions with their lowered guns. There was an awkward, shocked moment. First one and then another refugee hesitantly stepped out of ranks to cross the space. Others followed them, a few sat on the low benches reaching for food, and a noisy break and rush began.

Like the rest, Byron, Natalie, and Hartley dived for places and gorged themselves on the richest, sweetest, most satisfying meal of their lives. Almost the best of it was the coffee — ersatz though it was — hot, all they wanted, poured again and again by willing cheery buxom girls. Over the loudspeaker, while they stuffed, came a cascade of brass band music — Strauss waltzes, marches, and jolly drinking songs. Many of the neutrals began singing and even the watching soldiers joined in.

Byron himself, relaxed by the beer and carried away by ecstasy of a full belly, the lift of the music, and the outburst of relieved high spirits all around him, swung his stein and sang:

and Mark Hartley sang right along too, though his eyes never ceased rolling at the German soldiers. Natalie, silent, regarded them both with a satirical motherly look.

Returning to the waiting room, stuffed and dizzy after this incredible, this visionary feast, they saw crudely lettered placards around the brown tile walls: BELGIEN, BULGARIEN, KANADA, NIEDERLANDE. They went and stood under the VEREINIGTE STAATEN sign. Laughing, chattering, the refugees sorted themselves out, gay as though returning from a picnic. Men in black uniforms entered the waiting room. Conversation died among the Americans and the cheery noise faded throughout the station.

Slote said soberly, “Listen, please, everybody. Those are the SS. I’ll do any talking to them that has to be done.”

The men in black fanned out, one to each group of neutrals. The one who headed for the Americans did not appear sinister. Except for the operatic black costume, with its silver double-lightning-flash insignia, he looked like an American himself, perhaps a young insurance salesman one might sit next to on a train or plane. He carried a black leather portfolio. Slote walked out to meet him. “I’m Leslie Slote, first secretary of the United States embassy and acting chargé d’affaires.”

The SS man bowed, heels together, both hands on the case. “You have a gentleman named Byron Henry in your party?” His English was smooth.

“This is Byron Henry,” Slote said.

Byron took a step forward.

“Your father represents the American Navy in Berlin?”

Byron nodded.

“This message is forwarded to you via the foreign ministry.” Byron put the yellow envelope in his breast pocket. “You may read it now, of course.”

“Thanks. I’ll look at it later.”

The SS man turned to Slote. “I am to collect the American passports.” His tone was brisk and cool, his blue eyes distant, almost unfocussed on the Foreign Service man. “Let me have them, please.”

Slote was very pale. “I’m reluctant to surrender them, for obvious reasons.”

“I assure you it is quite routine. They are to be processed on the train. They will be returned to you before you arrive in Königsberg.”

“Very well.” At a motion from Slote, an assistant gave him a thick red portfolio, which he handed to the man in black.

“Thank you. Now your roster, please.”

The assistant held out three clipped sheets. The SS man glanced through them, and then looked around. “No Negroes in your party, I see. How many Jews?”

Slote took a moment to reply. “I’m sorry, but in our passports we make no record of religious affiliation.”

“But you do have Jews.” The man spoke offhandedly, as though discussing doctors or carpenters.

“Even if there were Jews in the party, I would have to decline to answer. The policy of my country on religious groups is one of absolute equality of treatment.”

“But nobody is suggesting that there will be inequality of treatment. Who are these Jews, please?” Slote looked silently at him, touching his tongue to his lips. The SS officer said, “You have mentioned your government’s policy. We will respect it. The policy of my government is simply to maintain separate records where Jews are concerned. Nothing else is involved.”

Byron, a couple of paces forward from the group, wanted to see how Natalie and Hartley were behaving, but he knew it would be disastrous to glance at them.

Slote did look around at the whole party in a glance of caution, appeal, and great nervousness. But he produced a calm professional tone when he spoke. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know if anybody here is Jewish. I’m not personally interested, I haven’t asked, and I don’t have the information.”

“My instructions are to separate out the Jews,” said the officer, “and I must now do that.” He turned to the Americans and said, “Form a double line, alphabetically, please.” Nobody moved; they all looked to Slote. The SS man turned to him. “Your party is in the custody of the Wehrmacht, in a combat zone under strict martial law. I call this to your attention.”

Slote glanced out toward the waiting room, his face harried. In front of several parties — the Swiss, the Rumanian, the Hungarian, the Dutch — a few miserable Jews already stood separated, heads bowed, with their suitcases. “Look here, for your purposes you can assume we’re all Jews.” His voice was starting to shake. “What next?”

Byron heard a shrill woman’s voice behind him. “Now just a minute. What on earth do you mean by that, Mr. Slote? I’m certainly not a Jew and I won’t be classified or treated as one.”

Slote turned and said angrily, I mean that we all must be treated alike, Mrs. Young, that’s all. Please cooperate as I asked—”

“Nobody’s putting me down for a Jew,” said a man’s voice from a different direction. “I’m just not buying that either, Leslie. Sorry.”

Bryon recognized both voices. He turned around as the SS officer addressed the woman: “Yes, madam. Who are you, please?”

“Clara Young of Chicago, Illinois, and I’m not Jewish, you can be darn sure of that.” She was a dried-out little woman — of sixty or so, a bookkeeper in the American movie distributor’s office in Warsaw. She giggled, glancing here and there.

“Would you be kind enough to point out the Jews in your party, madam?”

“Oh, no, thank you mister. That’s your business, not mine.”

Byron expected that. He was more worried by the man, a retired Army officer named Tom Stanley, who had been selling heavy machinery to the Polish government. Stanley was given to saying that Hitler was a great man and that the Jews had brought all their trouble on themselves.

The SS man asked for Stanley’s name and then said to him in a cordial man-to-man way, “Who are the Jews here, please? Your party can’t leave until I know. You seem to understand this matter better than your chargé.”

Stanley, an old turkey-cock of a man with hanging jowls, a wattled throat, and a brush of gray hair, grew quite red and cleared his throat several times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his loud green-and-brown sports jacket. All the Americans were staring at him. “Well, I’ll tell you, friend, I’d like to cooperate, but so far as I know there aren’t any. Not in this party.”

The SS officer shrugged, ran his eyes over the group, and stopped at Mark Hartley. He flicked two fingers forward. “You. Yes, you, the one with the blue bow tie, step this way.” Again he flicked the fingers.

“Stay where you are,” Slote said to Hartley; then, to the officer, “I would like to have your name and rank. I protest this procedure, and I warn you that this incident will result in a written protest from my government if it continues.”

The SS officer gestured around the waiting room, and said in a reasonable tone, “The officials of all the other governments are cooperating. You see for yourself. This is nothing to protest. This is a simple matter of conforming to local regulations. What is your name, you there?”

“Mart Hartley.” The voice was steady enough, steadier than Slote’s.

“Mark Hartley, I see.” The SS man smiled a peculiar, chilling smile, his eyes wide and serious. It was the smile of the Polish soldier on the road to Warsaw, who had yanked the beard of the taxi driver. “Hartley,” he repeated. And under what name were you born?”

“That name.”

“Really! What were your parents?”

“Both Americans.”

“Jews?”

Byron said, “I happen to know him, sir, we’ve been going to church together all the time in Warsaw. He’s a Methodist like me.”

The tall silver-haired minister, standing near Clara Young ran his fingers inside his clerical collar. “I can vouch for that. I conducted services when Mr. Hartley was present. Mark is a devout Christian.”

The SS officer, with a disagreeable, puzzled grin, said to Slote, “This one is certainly Jewish. I think a little physical examination would -”

Slote broke in, “I would report that as personal violence. In America circumcision at birth is routine.”

“I’m circumcised,” said Byron.

“So am I,” said the old clergyman.

In the rest of the waiting room the process of sorting out the Jews was over. People were glancing at the Americans, pointing and whispering. The SS men were gathered at the entrance, all except a stout bald one with gold leaf in his black lapels, who now approached the American party, pulled aside the officer, and murmured with him, glancing at Hartley. The officer, without a word, pushed through to Hartley, took his suitcase and undid the straps.

Slote said sharply, “Hold on, sir, this is not a customs point, and there’s no reason to search personal belongings -” But the officer, down on one knee, already had the bag open and was rummaging in it, spilling its contents on the floor. He came on the New Testament, turned it over in his hands with an expression half-astounded, half-sneering, and brought it to his superior officer. The bald man examined it, handed it back, and threw his hands in the air. “So,” he said in German, “in a hundred Americans, maybe not one. Why not? Any Jew would have been an idiot to come to Warsaw this summer. Come. The train is being delayed.” He walked off.

The SS man tossed the black book with the gold cross in the open bag, and rudely gestured at Hartley to pick up his belongings, stepping over the pile as though it were garbage. Scanning the other faces in the group, he stepped up to Natalie Jastrow and gave her a long amused scrutiny.”

“Well, what are you looking at?” she said, and Byron’s heart sank.

“You’re very pretty.”

“Thank you.”

“Rather dark. Your ancestry?”

“I’m Italian.”

“What is your name?”

“Mona Lisa.”

“I see. You step forward.”

Natalie did not move.

The officer grunted and begun turning the pages of the roster.

Slote quickly said, “She’s my fiancée. We’ll be married next month.”

The bald officer shouted from the entrance and waved at the SS man, who roughly handed the roster to Slote. “Very well. You love your Jews. Why do you refuse to take in ours? We have swarms.” He turned to Byron. “You’re the son of a naval officer, and yet you lie about a Jew! That fellow is a Jew.”

“He’s not, honestly,” Byron said. “I think Mark sort of looks like Dr. Goebbels. You know short, dark, with a big nose.”

“Dr. Goebbels? So.” The SS man glared at Hartley and Natalie, broke into a nasty laugh, and walked off.

A loudspeaker called out in German, “All Jews to the restaurant. Everybody else to track seven and board the train.”

The refugees went crowding out to the dark tracks. The Jews, a forlorn little group, straggled back to the dining room, with men in black surrounding them.

Soldiers halted the crowd at the train to allow diplomats aboard first.

Slote muttered to Byron, “I’ll take a compartment. You’ll see me at the window. Bring Natalie and Mark, and by all means Reverend Glenville and his wife.”

Soon, through billowing steam, Byron could see the chargé waving from inside the dimly lit train. Byron came aboard with the four others, in a suffocating crush, and found the compartment.

“Thanks,” Hartley whispered when they were all seated and Slote had slid shut the door. “A million thanks. Thanks to all of you. God bless you.”

“Leslie Slote is the man,” said the minister. “You did nobly, Leslie.”

“Nobly,” said Natalie.

Slote looked at her with a hangdog smile, as though not sure she was serious. “Well, I was on pretty good ground. They tried to get that information from me at Kantorovicz, you know, and couldn’t. They got it from all the others. That’s why the separation went so fast here. But why the devil did you make that Mona Lisa joke?”

“It was very risky,” the minister said.

“Idiotic,” Hartley said. They were talking in whispers, though the corridor was buzzing with loud talk the stationary train was hissing and clanging, and a public address system outside was bellowing in German.

“How about Byron and Dr. Goebbels?” Natalie said with a grin. “That was pretty neat, I thought.”

“Neither of you seems to understand,” Hartley said, “that these are murderers. Murderers. You’re like kids, both of you.”

Reverend Glenville said, “I’m not willing to believe that, Mr. Hartley. I know the German people. They have had a cruel, unjust system imposed on them, and one day they’ll throw it off. At bottom they are good.”

“Well, Stockholm ahoy,” Natalie said. “I admit one thing. I’ve lost all curiosity about Berlin.”

“You’ve got to get your passport back first,” Hartley said. His jolly face was carved in a hundred lines and creases of tragic bitterness. He looked extraordinarily old, inhumanly old: the Wandering Jew, in an American sports jacket.

The train started with a wrenching clang. Byron now pulled out the yellow envelope. The message, on a Wehrmacht official form, had these few English words: GLAD YOU’RE OKAY. COME STRAIGHT TO BERLIN. DAD.

Chapter 15

The long string of cars squealed into the Friedrichstrasse terminal in clouds of white vapor, clanking, slowing. Rhoda clutched Victor Henry’s arm and jumped up and down, to the amusement of the uniformed foreign ministry man who had escorted them to meet the train from Königsberg. Pug observed his smile. “We haven’t seen our boy in over a year,” he shouted above the train noise.

“Ah? Well, then this is a great moment.”

The train stopped, and people came swarming out.

“My GOD!” exclaimed Rhoda. “Is THAT him coming down those steps? It CAN’T be him. He’s a SKELETON.”

“Where? Where?” Pug said.

“He disappeared. Somewhere over there. No, there he is!”

Byron’s chestnut hair was very long and curly, almost matted; the bones stood out in his pale face and his eyes looked bright and enormous. He was laughing and waving, but at first blink his father almost failed to recognize this long-jawed sharp-chinned young man with the shabby clothes and raffish air.

“It’s me. This is me,” he heard Byron yell. “Don’t you even know me, Dad?”

Pug plunged toward Byron, holding Rhoda’s hand. Byron, smelling of wine, embraced him in a tight, fierce, long hug, scratching his father’s face with a two-day growth of bristles. Then he hugged and kissed his mother.

“Gad, I’m reeling,” he said, in a swooping note like Rhoda’s but in a rough baritone voice. “They’ve been feeding us on this train like hogs going to market. I just finished a lunch with three different wines. Mom, you look beautiful. About twenty-five.”

“Well, you look ghastly. Why the devil were you running around in Poland?”

The foreign ministry man pulled at Byron’s elbow. “You do feel you have been treated well, Mr. Henry? Dr. Neustädter, foreign ministry,” he said, with a click of heels and a crinkly smile.

“Oh, hi. Oh, irreproachably, sir, irreproachably,” Byron said, laughing wildly. “That is, once we got out of Warsaw. In there it was kind of rough.”

“Ah, well, that’s war. We’d be pleased to have a little note from you about your treatment, at your convenience. My card.”

Leslie Slote, ashen and distraught, came up with two hands full of documents and introduced himself to Victor Henry. “I’d like to call on you at the embassy tomorrow, sir,” he said, “once I’ve straightened things out a bit.”

“Come in any time,” Pug Henry said.

“But let me tell you right now,” Slote said over his shoulder as he left, “that Byron’s been a real help.”

Dr. Neustädter politely emphasized that Byron could go off in his father’s custody now and pick up his documents some other time; or he himself could look after Byron’s papers and drop them at Commander Henry’s office. “After all,” Neustädter said, “when it’s a question of a son rejoining his parents, red tape becomes inhumane.”

Rhoda sat beside her son as they drove to Grunewald, happily clutching his arm while complaining how awful he looked. He was her secret favorite. Rhoda had thought of the name Byron at her first glimpse of her baby in the hospital: a scrawny infant, blinking big blue eyes in a red triangular face; clearly a boy, even in the rolls of baby flesh. She thought the child had a manly romantic look. She had hoped he would be an author or an actor; she had even unclenched his tiny red fists to look for the “writer’s triangles” which, she had read somewhere, one could see at birth in a baby’s palm wrinkles. Byron hadn’t turned out a writer, but he did actually have, she thought, a romantic streak. Secretly she sympathized with his refusal to consider a naval career, and even with his lazy school habits. She had never liked Pug’s nickname for the boy, Briny, with its smell of the sea, and it was years before she would use it. Byron’s switch to fine arts at Columbia, which had thrown Pug into black despondency, she had silently welcomed. Warren was a Henry: the plugger, the driver, the one who got things done, the A student, the one with his eye on flag rank and every step up toward it. Byron was like her, she thought, a person of fine quality, haunted and somewhat disabled by an unfulfilled dream.

She noticed the scar on his temple, touched it in alarm, and asked about it. He began narrating his odyssey from Cracow to Warsaw, interrupting himself now and then to exclaim at things he saw in the streets: red vertical swastika banners massed around a statue of Frederick the Great, a band of Hitler Youth marching past in their brown shirts, black neckerchiefs, and short black pants, nuns bicycling down the Friedrichstrasse, a band concert in a park, a turning merry-go-round. “It’s so peaceful, isn’t it? So goddamned peaceful! Dad, what’s happening in the war? Has Warsaw surrendered? Have the Allies gotten off their tails yet? The Germans are such liars, you never know.”

“Warsaw’s still holding out, but the war there is really over. There’s a lot of talk about peace in the west, too.”

“Honestly? Already? God, will you look at that café? Five-hundred Berliners if there’s one, eating pastry and drinking coffee, laughing, talking. Ah, to be a Berliner!

“Where was I? Oh yes. Well, anyway, at this point, see, the water pump gave out and the fan belt broke. The German planes never stopped going by overhead. The bride was having hysterics. We were twenty miles from the nearest town. There was a cluster of farmhouses about a mile down the road, but they’d been bombed to pieces, so—”

“Farmhouses?” Pug broke in alertly. “But the Germans keep claiming loud and clear that the Luftwaffe is attacking only military targets. That’s a big boast of theirs.”

Byron roared with laughter. “What? Dad, the military targets of the Germans include anything that moves, from a pig on up. I was a military target. There I was, above the ground and alive. I saw a thousand houses blown apart out in the countryside, far behind the front. The Luftwaffe is just practicing on them, getting ready for France and England.”

“You want to be careful how you talk here,” Rhoda said.

“We’re in the car. That’s safe, isn’t it?”

“Sure it is. Go on,” Pug said.

He was thinking that Byron’s story might turn into an intelligence report. The Germans were indignantly complaining about Polish atrocities, and publishing revolting photographs of mutilated “ethnic Germans” and Wehrmacht officers. By contrast, they offered photographic proof of happy captured Polish soldiers eating, drinking, and doing folk dances; pictures of Jews being fed at soup kitchens, waving at the cameras and smiling; and many photographs of German guns and trucks rolling past farmhouses and through untouched towns, with jovial Polish peasants cheering them. Byron’s tale cast an interesting light on all this.

On and on Byron talked. At the Grunewald house they went into the garden. “Hey, a tennis court! Great!” he exclaimed in the same manic tone. They sat in reclining chairs, drinks in their hands, as he described the siege of Warsaw with extraordinary clarity, picking out details that made them see and hear and even smell the whole thing — the dead horses on the streets, the tank traps and the menacing sentries at the corners, the unflushed toilets at the embassy when the water main broke, the gangs trying to put out roaring fires in a whole block of buildings with buckets of sand, the taste of horsemeat, the sound of artillery, the wounded piled in the hospital lobby, the façade of a synagogue slowly sliding down into the street, the embassy cellar with its rows of canvas cots, the eerie walk across no-man’s-land on a quiet dirt road dotted with autumn wild flowers. The blue-gray Berlin evening drew on, and still Byron talked, getting hoarse, drinking steadily, and losing no coherence or clarity. It was an astonishing performance. Again and again the parents looked at each other.

“I get famished just talking about it,” Byron said. He was describing the startling feast laid out by the Germans in the Klovno railroad station. “And there was another spread just like it when we got to Königsberg. They’ve been stuffing us ever since on the train. I don’t know where it all goes to. I think in Warsaw I must have digested the marrow out of my bones. They got hollow and they’re just now filling up again. Anyway, when and where and how do we eat?”

“You look like such a tramp, Byron,” Rhoda said. “Don’t you have any other clothes?”

“A whole big bag full. Mom. It’s in Warsaw, neatly labelled with my name. Probably it’s ashes by now.”

They went to a small dark little restaurant off the Kurfürstendamm. Byron laughed, pointing to the flyspecked curling cardboard sign in the window: THIS RESTAURANT DOES NOT SERVE JEWS. “Are there any left in Berlin to serve?”

“Well, you don’t see them around much,” Pug said. “They’re not allowed in the theatres and so forth. I guess they’re lying pretty low.”

“Ah, to be a Berliner,” Byron said. “Warsaw’s alive with Jews.”

He stopped talking when the soup came. Apparently his own voice had been keeping him awake, because between the soup and the meat course his head nodded and dropped on his chest. They had trouble rousing him.

“Let’s get him home,” Pug said, signalling to the waiter. “I was wondering how long he’d last.”

“Wha? Less not go home,” Byron said. “Less go to the theatre. The opera. Less have some civilized fun. Less do the town. Ah, to be a Berliner!”

Pug said, after they had put Byron to sleep and were strolling in the garden, “Quite a change in him.”

“It’s that girl,” Rhoda said.

“He didn’t say much about her.”

“That’s my point. He said nothing about her. Yet he went to Poland because of her, and got caught in Cracow on account of her. He lost his passport, for heaven’s sake, protecting her relatives. Why, he was talking to her uncle when that synagogue all but fell on top of him. Seems to me he did almost everything in Poland but become a Jew.” Pug looked coldly at her but she went on unheedingly, “Maybe you can find out something more about her from this man Slote. It’s a strange business, and she must be some girl.”

Topping the pile of letters on Pug’s desk the following morning was a pale green envelope, almost square, engraved in one corner: THE WHITE HOUSE. Inside he found on a single sheet, similarly engraved, a slanted scrawl in heavy pencil.

You were dead right again, old top. Treasury just now informs me the ambassadors got hopping mad at the very idea of our offering to buy their ocean liners. Can I borrow your crystal ball? Ha ha! Write me a letter whenever you get a chance, about your life in Berlin — what you and your wife do for fun, who your German friends are, what the people and the newspapers are saying, how the food is in the restaurants, just anything and everything that occurs to you. What does a loaf of bread cost in Germany today? Washington is still incredibly hot and muggy, though the leaves have started turning.

FDR

Pug put all other mail aside, and stared at the curious communication from the curious man whom he had once soaked with salt water, who was now his Commander-in-Chief, the creator of the New Deal (of which Pug disapproved), the man with perhaps the best-known name and face on earth except Hitler’s. The cheerful banal scribble was out of key with Roosevelt’s stature, but it very much fitted the cocky young man who had bounced around on the Davey in a blazer and straw hat. He pulled a yellow pad toward him and listed points for an informal letter about his life in Berlin, for obedience and quick action were Navy habits soaked into his bones. The yeoman’s buzzer rang. He flipped the key. “No calls, Whittle.”

“Aye aye, sir. There’s a Mister Slote asking to see you, but I can -”

“Slote? No, hold on. I’ll see Slote. Let us have coffee.” The Foreign Service man looked rested and fit, if a bit gaunt, in his freshly pressed tweed jacket and flannel trousers. “Quite a view,” Slote said. “Is that huge pink pile the new chancellery?”

“Yes. You can see them change the guard from here.”

“I don’t know that I’m interested in armed Germans on the move. I have the idea.”

Both men laughed. Over the coffee the commander told Slote something of Byron’s four-hour gush of narrative.

The diplomat listened with a wary look, running his fingers repeatedly over the rim of his lit pipe. “Did he mention anything about that unfortunate business in Praha?” Henry looked puzzled. “When we had a girl in the car, and found ourselves under German shellfire?”

“I don’t believe so. Was the girl Natalie Jastrow?”

“Yes. The incident involved the Swedish ambassador and an auto trip to the front lines.”

Pug thought a moment. Slote watched his face intently. “No. Not a word.”

With a heavy sigh, Slote brightened up. “Well, he exposed himself to direct enemy fire, while I had to take the girl out of the car and find shelter for her.” Slote baldly narrated his version of the episode. Then he described Byron’s water-hauling, his handiness in making repairs, his disregard of enemy planes and artillery shelling. “I’d be glad to put all this in a letter, if you wish,” Slote said.

“Yes, I’d like that,” Pug said with alacrity. “Now, tell me something about this Jastrow girl.”

“What would you like to know?”

Victor Henry shrugged. “Anything. My wife and I are slightly curious about this young female who got our boy into such a jam. What the hell was she doing in Warsaw, with all of Europe mobilizing, and why was he with her?”

Slote laughed wryly. “She came to see me. We’re old friends. I thought she was out of her mind to come. I did my best to stop her. This girl is a sort of lioness type, she does what she pleases and you just get out of the way. Her uncle didn’t want her to travel alone, what with all the war talk. Byron volunteered to go along. That’s as I understand it.”

“He went with her to Poland as a courtesy to Dr. Jastrow? Is that the size of it?”

“Maybe you’d better ask Byron.”

“Is she beautiful?”

Slote puffed thoughtfully, staring straight ahead. “In a way. Quite a brain, very educated.” Abruptly he looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ll write you that letter, and I’m going to mention your son in my official report.”

“Good. I’ll ask him about that incident in Praha.”

“Oh, no, there’s no need. It was just an instance of how he cooperated.”

“You’re not engaged to the Jastrow girl?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, I hate to get personal, but you’re much older than Byron, and quite different and I can’t picture a girl who bridges that gap.” Slote looked at him and said nothing. Pug went on, “Where is she now?”

“She went to Stockholm with most of our people. Good-bye, Commander Henry.”

Rhoda telephoned Pug around noon, breaking into his work on the letter to Roosevelt. “That boy’s slept fourteen hours,” she said. “I got worried and went in there, but he’s breathing like an infant, with a hand tucked under his cheek.”

“Well, let him sleep.”

“Doesn’t he have to report somewhere?”

“No. Sleep’s the best thing for him.”

Complying with the President’s orders to write chattily, Pug closed his letter with a short account of Byron’s adventures in Poland. Plans were growing in his mind for official use of his son’s experiences. He filed the letter for the diplomatic pouch, and went home uneasy at having bypassed the chain of command and wasted a workday. He did also feel vague pride in his direct contact with the President, but that was a human reaction. In his professional judgment, this contact was most likely a bad thing.

Byron was reclining in the garden, eating grapes from a bowl and reading a Superman comic book. Scattered on the grass beside him were perhaps two dozen more comic books, a patchwork of lurid covers. “Hi, Dad,” he said. “How about this treasure? Franz collects them.” (Franz was the butler.) “He says he’s been panhandling or buying them from tourists for years.”

Pug was stupefied at the sight. Comic books had been a cause of war in their household until Byron had gone off to Columbia. Pug had forbidden them, torn them up, burned them, fined Byron for possession of them. Nothing had helped. The boy had been like a dope fiend. With difficulty Pug refrained from saying something harsh. Byron was twenty-four. “How do you feel?”

“Hungry,” Byron said. “God, this is a great Superman. It makes me homesick, reading these things.”

Franz brought Pug a highball on a tray. Pug sat silently with it waiting for the butler to go. It took a while, because Franz wiped a glass-top table, cut some flowers, and fooled with a loose screen door to the tennis court. He had a way of lingering within earshot. Meanwhile, Byron read the Superman through, put it on the pile, and looked idly at his father.

Pug relaxed and sipped his drink. Franz was reentering the house. “Briny, that was quite a tale you told us yesterday.”

The son laughed. “I guess I got kind of carried away, seeing you and Mom again. Also Berlin had a funny effect on me.”

“You’ve had access to unusual information. I don’t know if there’s another American who went from Cracow to Warsaw after the war broke out.”

“Oh, I guess it’s all been in the papers and magazines.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. There’s a lot of arguing between the Germans and the Poles — the few Poles who got away and can still argue — about who’s committed what atrocities in Poland. An eyewitness account like yours would be an important document.”

Byron shrugged, picking up another comic book. “Possibly.”

“I want you to write it up. I’d like to forward your account to the Office of Naval Intelligence.”

“Gosh, Dad, aren’t you overestimating it?”

“No. I’d like you to get at it tonight.”

“I don’t have a typewriter,” Byron said with a yawn.

“There’s one in the library,” Pug said.

“Oh, that’s right, I saw it. Well, okay.”

With such casual assents, Byron had often dodged his homework in the past. But his father let it go. He was clinging to a belief that Byron had matured under the German bombing.

“That fellow Slote came by today. Said you helped out a lot in Warsaw. Brought water to the embassy, and such.”

“Well, yes. I got stuck with the water job.”

“Also there was an incident at the front line with the Swedish ambassador. You climbed a tower under German fire, while Slote had to hide this Jastrow girl in a farmhouse. It seems to be very much on his mind.”

Byron opened Horror Comics, with a cover picture of a grinning skeleton carrying a screaming half-naked girl up a stone staircase. “Oh yes. That was right before we crossed no-man’s-land. I made a sketch of the road.”

“Why does Slote dwell on it?”

“Well, it’s about the last thing that happened before we left Warsaw, so I guess it remained in his mind.”

“He intends to write me a letter of commendation about you.”

“He does? That’s fine. Has he got any word on Natalie?”

“Just that she’s gone to Stockholm. You’ll start on that report tonight?”

“Sure.”

Byron left the house after dinner and returned at two in the morning. Pug was awake, working in the library and worrying about his son, who blithely told him he had gone with other Americans to the opera. Under his arm Byron carried a new copy of Mein Kampf in English. Next day when Pug left the house Byron was up and dressed, lounging on the back porch in slacks and a sweater, drinking coffee and reading Mein Kampf. At seven in the evening the father found Byron in the same place, in the same chair, drinking a highball. He was well into the thick tome, which lay open on his lap. Rubbing bleary eyes, he gave his father a listless wave.

Pug said, “Did you start on that report?”

“I’ll get to it, Dad. Say, this is an interesting book. Did you read it?”

“I did, but I didn’t find it interesting. About fifty pages of those ravings give you the picture. I thought I should finish it, so I did, but it was like wading through mud.”

Byron shook his head. “Really amazing,” and turned the page.

He went out again at night, returned late, and fell asleep with his clothes on, an old habit that ground on Pug’s nerves. Byron woke around eleven, and found himself undressed and under the covers, his clothes draped on a chair, with a note propped on them: WRITE THAT GODDAMN REPORT.

He was idling along the Kurfürstendamm that afternoon, with Mein Kampf under his arm, when Leslie Slote went hurrying past him, halted, and turned. “Well, there you are! That’s luck. I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Are you coming back to the States with us or not? Our transportation’s set for Thursday.”

“I’m not sure. How about some coffee and pastry? Let’s be a couple of Berliners.”

Slote pursed his lips. “To tell the truth, I skipped lunch. All right. What the devil are you reading that monstrosity for?”

“I think it’s great.”

“Great! That’s an unusual comment.”

They sat at a table in an enormous sidewalk café, where potted flowering bushes broke up the expanse of tables and chairs, and a brass band played gay waltzes in the sunshine.

“God, this is the life,” Byron said, as they gave orders to a bowing smiling waiter. “Look at all these nice, polite, cordial, joking, happy Berliners, will you? Did you ever see a nicer city? So clean! All those fine statues and baroque buildings, like that marvellous opera, and all the spanking new modern ones, and all the gardens and trees — why, I’ve never seen such a green, clean city! Berlin’s almost like a city built in a forest. And all the canals, and the quaint little boats — did you see that tug that sort of tips its smokestack to get under the bridges? Completely charming. The only thing is, these pleasant folks have just been blowing the hell out of Poland, machine-gunning people from the sky — I’ve got the scar to prove it — pounding a city just as nice as Berlin to a horrible pulp. It’s a puzzle, you might say.”

Slote shook his head and smiled. “The contrast between the war front and the back area is always startling. No doubt Paris was as charming as ever while Napoleon was out doing his butcheries.”

“Slote, you can’t tell me the Germans aren’t strange.”

“Oh, yes, the Germans are strange.”

“Well, that’s why I’ve been reading this book, to try to figure them out. It’s their leader’s book. Now, it turns out this is the writing of an absolute nut. The Jews are secretly running the world, he says. That’s his whole message. They’re the capitalists, but they’re the Bolsheviks too, and they’re conspiring to destroy the German people, who by rights should really be running the world. Well, he’s going to become dictator, see, wipe out the Jews, crush France, and carve off half of Bolshevist Russia for more German living space. Have I got it right so far?”

“A bit simplified, but yes — pretty much.” Slote sounded amused but uneasy, glancing at the tables nearby.

“Okay. Now, all these nice Berliners like this guy. Right? They voted for him. They follow him. They salute him. They cheer him. Don’t they? How is that? Isn’t that very strange? How come he’s their leader? Haven’t they read this book? How come they didn’t put him in a padded cell? Don’t they have insane asylums? And who do they put in there, if not this guy?”

Slote, while stuffing his pipe, kept looking here and there at the people around them. Satisfied that nobody was eavesdropping, he said in a low tone, “Are you just discovering the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler?”

“I just got shot in the head by a German. That sort of called my attention to it.”

“Well, you won’t learn much from Mein Kampf. That’s just froth on top of the kettle.”

“Do you understand Hitler and the Germans?”

Slote lit his pipe and stared at the air for several seconds. Then he spoke, with a wry little smile of academic condescension. “I have an opinion, the result of a lot of study.”

“Can I hear it? I’m interested.”

“It’s a terribly long story, Byron, and quite involved.” Slote glanced around again. “Some other time and place I’ll be glad to, but -”

“Would you give me the names of books to read, then?”

“Are you serious? You’d let yourself in for some dull plodding.”

“I’ll read anything you tell me to.”

“Well, let me have your book.”

On the flyleaf of Mein Kampf, Slote listed authors and titles all the way down the page, in a neat slanted hand, in purple Polish ink. Running his eye down the list, Byron felt his heart sink at the unfamiliar array of Teutonic authors, each name followed by a heavy book title, some by two:

…Treitschke — Moeller van den Bruck — Fries — Menzel — Fichte — Schlegel — Arndt — Jahn — Rühs — Lagarde — Lanebehn — Spengler…

Among them, like black raisins in much gray dough, a few names from his contemporary civilization course at Columbia caught his eye: Luther — Kant — Hegel — Schopenhauer — Nietzsche. He remembered that course as a nuisance and a nightmare. He had passed with a D minus, after frantic all-night cramming of smudgy lecture notes from the fraternity files. Slote drew a heavy line, and added more books with equally forbidding authors’ names:

…Santayana — Mann — Veblen — Renan — Heine — Kolnai — Rauschning…

“Below the line are critics and analysts,” he remarked as he wrote. “Above are some German antecedents of Hitler. I think you must grasp these to grasp him.”

Byron said dolefully, “Really? The philosophers too? Hegel and Schopenhauer? Why? And Martin Luther, for pity’s sake?”

Contemplating the list with a certain arid satisfaction, Slote added a name or two as he pulled hard at his pipe, making the bowl hiss. “My view is that Hitler and the Nazis have grown out of the heart of German culture — a cancer, maybe, but a uniquely German phenomenon. Some very clever men have given me hell for holding this opinion.

They insist the same thing could have happened anywhere, given the same conditions: defeat in a major war, a harsh peace treaty, ruinous inflation, mass unemployment, communism on the march, anarchy in the streets — all leading to the rise of a demagogue, and a reign of terror. But I—”

The waiter was approaching. Slote shut up and said not a word while they were being served. Watching the waiter until he went out of sight, the Foreign Service man drank coffee and ate cake. Then he started again, almost in an undertone.

“But I don’t believe it. To me Nazism is unthinkable without its roots in German nineteenth-century thought: romanticism, idealism, nationalism, the whole outpouring. It’s in those books. If you’re not prepared to read every word of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, for instance, give up. It’s basic.” He shoved the book back to Byron, open at the flyleaf. “Well, there you are, for a starter.”

“Tacitus?” Byron said. “Why Tacitus? Isn’t he a Roman historian?”

“Yes. Do you know about Arminius, and the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Okay. In the year 9 A.D., Byron, a German war leader named Arminius stopped the Romans at the Rhine, once and for all, and so secured the barbarian sanctuary in the heart of Europe. It’s a key event in world history. It led finally to the fall of Rome. It’s affected all European politics and war to this hour. So I believe, and therefore I think you should read Tacitus’s account of the campaign. Either you go into these things, or you don’t.”

Byron kept nodding and nodding, his eyes narrowed and attentive. “You’ve read all these books? Every one?”

Slote regarded the younger man quizzically, gnawing his pipe. “I haven’t retained them as well as I should, but, yes, I have.”

“What you’re actually trying to tell me, I imagine, is to go peddle my papers, that this is a subject for Rhodes Scholars.”

“Not at all, but it is a hard subject. Now, Byron, I’m really overdue at the embassy. Are you or aren’t you coming with us? We fly to Oslo Thursday, and from there to London. Then we just take our chances — destroyer, freighter, ocean liner, maybe an airplane trip via Lisbon — whatever turns up.”

Byron said, “What are Natalie’s plans? She got kind of snappish with me toward the end, and wouldn’t talk much.”

Slote looked at his watch. “She was disagreeable and vague with me, too. I really don’t know.” He hesitated.

“I’ll tell you something else. You may not like it. You may not believe it. But it’s so, and possibly you’d be better off knowing it.”

“Go ahead.”

“I asked her about you, whether you planned to return to Siena. Her answer was, ‘Well, I hope not. I sincerely hope I never see Byron Henry again, and if you ever get a chance, please tell him so with my compliments.’ — You look surprised. Didn’t you have an argument before she left? I was positive you had.”

Byron, trying to compose his face, said, “Not exactly. She just seemed grouchy as hell.”

Slote said, “She was in a gruesome mood. Said she had a bad backache from all the train riding, for one thing. Very likely she meant nothing by it. I know she felt grateful to you. As indeed I do.”

Byron shook his head. “I can’t say I’ve ever understood her.”

Slote glanced at the check and said, tucking bright-colored marks under a saucer, “Well, look, Byron, there’s no time to discuss Natalie Jastrow. I’ll tell you this. I’ve had no peace of mind since the day I first met her two years ago, at a very stupid cocktail party on the Quai Voltaire.”

“Why don’t you marry her?” Byron said, as Slote started to rise.

The older man fell back in his chair, and looked at him for several seconds. “All right. I’m not at all sure I won’t, Byron, if she’ll have me.”

“Oh, she’ll have you. I’ll tell you what. I guess I’ll stay on here with my folks for a while. I won’t go to Oslo.”

Slote stood, holding out his hand. “I’ll give your passport and so forth to your father’s yeoman. Good luck.”

Byron said, shaking hands and gesturing at Mein Kampf, “I appreciate the lecture and the list.”

“Small return,” Slote said, “for services rendered.”

“Will you let me know,” Byron said, “if you get word before you leave Berlin about where Natalie went?”

Knocking out his pipe against his palm, Slote said, “Certainly,” and hurried off into the sidewalk crowd. Byron ordered more ersatz coffee and opened Mein Kampf, and the café band struck up a merry Austrian folk dance.

Chapter 16

During Victor Henry’s absence in the States, his wife had tangled herself in a romance; something she had not done in his much longer absences through almost twenty-five years. There was something liberating for her in the start of a war. She was forty-five. Suddenly the rules she had lived by so long seemed slightly out of date. The whole world was shaking itself loose from the past; why shouldn’t she, just a wee bit? Rhoda Henry did not articulate this argument. She felt it in her bones and acted on it.

Being an ex-beauty, and remaining pretty, she had always drawn and enjoyed the attention of men, so she had not lacked opportunities for affairs. But she had been as faithful to Pug Henry as he had been to her. She liked to go to church, her hymn-singing and prayers were heartfelt, she believed in God, she thought Jesus Christ was her Savior — if she had never gone deeply into the matter — and she was convinced in her soul that a married woman ought to be true and good. In the old Navy-wife pastime of ripping apart ladies who had not been true and good, she wielded well-honed claws.

Setting aside a trivial kiss here and there, only one episode in the dim past somewhat marred Rhoda’s otherwise perfect record. After an officers’ club dance in Manila, where she had soaked up too much champagne — Pug being out at sea in a fleet exercise — Kip Tollever had brought her home and had managed to get her dress off. Madeline, then a child troubled by bad dreams, had saved the situation by waking and starting to cry. By the time Madeline was comforted, Rhoda had sobered up. Relieved to be back from the brink, yet bearing Kip no malice, she had donned a proper housecoat and had amiably shooed him out of the house. That had been the end of it. No doubt Kip the next morning had been just as grateful to Madeline. Victor Henry was practically the last man in the Navy he wanted to risk angering.

Thereafter, Rhoda was always somewhat kittenish toward Tollever. Now and then she wondered what would have happened had Madeline not awakened. Would she really have gone through with it? How would she have felt? But she would never know; she did not intend to get that close to trouble again; the wine had been to blame. Still, there had been something titillating about being undressed by a man other than old Pug. Rhoda preserved the memory, though she buried it deep.

Dr. Palmer Kirby was a shy, serious, ugly man in his middle-fifties. After the dinner party for him, discussing the guests with Sally Forrest, Rhoda had dismissed him as “one of these ghastly BRAINS.” Just to be sociable, she had vainly tried her usual coquettish babble on Kirby over the cocktails. “Well, since friend husband’s away, Dr. Kirby, I’ve put you on my right, and we can make HAY while the sun shines.”

“Um. On your right. Thank you.”

That had almost been the end of it. Rhoda detested such heavy men. But he had happened to say at dinner that he was going next day to a factory in Brandenburg. Rhoda offered to drive him there, simply because she had long wanted to see the medieval town, and Kirby in a sense was her husband’s guest.

On the way they had a dull, decorous lunch at an inn. Over a bottle of Moselle, Kirby warmed up and started to talk about himself and his work. At an alert question she asked him — living with Pug, Rhoda had learned to follow technical talk — Palmer Kirby suddenly smiled. It seemed to her that she had not seen him smile before. His teeth were big, and the smile showed his gums. It was a coarse male smile of knowledge and appetite, far from disagreeable, but startling in the saturnine engineer.

“Do you really care, Mrs. Henry?” said Dr. Kirby. “I’d be glad to explain the whole business, but I have a horror of boring a beautiful woman.”

The smile, the words, the tone, all disclosed that the man had missed none of her coquetry; that on the contrary, he liked her. A bit flustered, she touched a hand to her hair, tucking the waves behind her small white ears. “I assure you, it all sounds fascinating. Just use words of one syllable as much as possible.”

“Okay, but you brought this on yourself.”

He told her all about magnetic amplifiers — “magamps,” he called them — devices for precise control of voltages and currents, especially in high power. Asking one adroit question after another, Rhoda soon drew out the key facts about him. At the California Institute of Technology he had written his doctoral thesis on electromagnetism. At forty he had decided to manufacture magnetic amplifiers on his own, instead of settling for an executive post at General Electric or Westinghouse, and security for life. The long struggle for financing had all but sunk him; it was just now paying off. War industries demanded magamps in quantity, and he was first in the field. He had come to Germany because the Germans were ahead of the United States in the quality of some components. He was studying their techniques and buying their nickel-alloy cores.

She also learned that he was a widower and a grandfather. He talked about his dead wife, and then they exchanged long confidences about their children’s faults and virtues. Like most men, Kirby loved to talk about himself, once over his shyness. His story of backbreaking money troubles and final big success so enthralled her that she forgot to be coy, and spoke pleasantly and to the point. Rhoda was most attractive, in fact, when she made the least effort to be. She was the kind of woman who can dazzle a man at first acquaintance by piling everything into the shop window: none of it forced or faked, but in sum nearly all she has to offer. Victor Henry had long since found that out. He had no complaints, though he had once imagined there must be much more. Palmer Kirby was hit hard by this maximum first impact. He ordered a second bottle of Moselle, and they got to Brandenburg almost an hour late. While he went about his business Rhoda strolled through the picturesque old town, guidebook in hand; and her mind unaccountably kept wandering to her little misconduct long ago with Kip Tollever. She was a bit dizzy from the Moselle, and it wore off slowly.

When they returned to Berlin toward evening, Kirby offered to take her to dinner and to the opera. It seemed quite natural to accept. Rhoda rushed home and began raking through her dresses and shoes, pushing her hair this way and that, wishing she could have gone to the hairdresser, hesitating over her perfumes. She was still at it when Kirby came to call for her. She kept him waiting for an hour. In girlhood she had always kept boys waiting. Pug had harshly cured her of the habit, for Navy social life began and ended by the clock, and he would not tolerate embarrassment by Rhoda. Keeping Palmer Kirby waiting while she fussed over herself was a delicious little nostalgic folly, a lovely childish self-indulgence, like eating a banana split. It almost made Rhoda feel nineteen again.

The mirror told her a different story, but even it seemed friendly to her that night: it showed shiny eyes, a pretty face, a firm figure in the sheer slip, and arms that were round and thin all the way up, instead of bagging above the elbow as so many women’s did. She sailed into the living room wearing the pink suit with gold buttons that she had bought to please Hitler. Kirby sat reading one of Pug’s technical journals. He took off big black-rimmed glasses and rose, exclaiming, “Well, don’t you look grand!”

“I’m awful,” she said, taking Kirby’s arm, “dawdling so long, but you brought it on yourself, asking the old girl out after a hard day.”

The opera was La Traviata, and they enjoyed discovering that they both had always loved it. Afterward, he proposed a glimpse of the notorious Berlin night life. It was nothing he’d ever do by himself, he said; still, Berlin night life was the talk of the world and if it wouldn’t offend Mrs. Henry, she might enjoy a peek at it.

Rhoda goggled at the notion. “Well, this seems to be my night to howl, doesn’t it? Thank you very much for a disreputable suggestion, which I hasten to accept. Let’s hope we don’t run into any of my friends.”

So it happened that when the telephone rang in the Henrys’ home at two in the morning — the long distance call from New York, via the U.S.S. Marblehead in Lisbon — there was nobody to answer. Rhoda was sipping champagne, watching a hefty blonde German girl fling her naked breasts about in blue smoky gloom, and glancing every now and then at Dr. Palmer Kirby’s long solemn face in thick-rimmed glasses, as he smoked a long pipe and observed the hard-working sweaty dancer with faint distaste. Rhoda was aroused and deliciously shocked. She had never before seen a nude dancing woman, except in paintings.

After that, until her husband returned, she spent a lot of time with Kirby. They went to the less frequented restaurants. In her own vocabulary, she never “did anything.” When Pug returned, the adventure stopped.

A farewell lunch at Wannsee for Palmer Kirby was Rhoda’s idea, but she got Sally Forrest to give the lunch, saying she had already sufficiently entertained this civilian visitor. If Sally Forrest detected an oddity in this she said nothing. With the end of the Polish war at hand — only Warsaw was still holding out — the two attachés felt able to take off some midday hours. Berlin wore a peacetime air, and there was even talk that rationing would soon be over. Byron drove them all out to the resort in an embassy car. Along the broad sandy beach on the Havel River people strolled in the sun or sat under broad gaily colored umbrellas, and a number of gymnasts braved the fall breezes to exercise in skimpy costumes.

In the luncheon the Forrests ordered, rationing was not much in evidence. The pasty margarine tasted as usual like axle grease, but they ate excellent turbot and good leg of lamb. Midway during the lunch a loudspeaker crackled and whined, and a voice spoke in firm clear German: “Attention! In the next few minutes you will hear a report of the highest importance to the fatherland.”

The identical words boomed all over the river resort. People stopped on the promenade to listen. On the beach the small figures of the gymnasts halted briefly in their tumbling or running. An excited murmur rose all through the elegant Kaiserpavillon restaurant.

“What do you suppose?” Sally Forrest said, as the music resumed, thin gentle Schubert on strings.

“Warsaw, I’d guess,” said her husband. “It must be over.”

Dr. Kirby said, “You don’t suppose there’s an armistice coming up? I’ve been hearing armistice talk all week.”

“Oh, wouldn’t that be marvellous,” Rhoda said, “and put an end to this stupid war before it really gets going.”

Byron said, “It’s been going.”

“Oh, of course,” said Rhoda with an apologetic smile, “they’d have to make some decent settlement of that hideous Polish business.”

“There’ll be no armistice,” said Pug.

The buzz of talk rose higher on the crowded terrace and in the dining room. The Germans, eyes bright and gestures animated, argued with each other, laughed, struck the table, and called from all sides for champagne. When the loudspeaker played the few bars of Liszt’s music that preceded the news, the noise began to die.

“Sondermeldung!” (Special bulletin!) At this announcement, an immediate total stillness blanketed the restaurant, except for a clink here and there. The loudspeaker randomly crackled; then a baritone voice spoke solemn brief words. “From Supreme Headquarters of the Führer. Warsaw has fallen.”

The whole restaurant rang with applause and cheers. Women jumped to their feet and danced. Men shook hands and hugged and kissed each other. Brass band music — first “Deutschland Uber Alles,” then the “Horst Wessel Lied” — came pouring out of the loudspeakers. To a man the diners in the Kaiserpavillon rose, all except the American party. On the beach, on the promenade, wherever the eye turned, the Germans stood still, most of them with arms thrust forward in the Nazi salute. In the dining room, about half were saluting and singing, a discordant swell of voices in the vulgar beery National Socialist anthem. Victor Henry’s skin prickled is he looked around, and he felt at this moment that the Germans under Adolf Hitler would take some beating. He then noticed something he had not seen for many, many years. His son sat still, face frozen, lips pressed in a line, white-knuckled hands clasped on the table. Byron had almost always taken pain and punishment dry-eyed since the age of five, but now he was crying.

The American party, sitting in a restaurant full of people on their feet, was getting hostile glares.

“Do they expect us to stand?” Sally Forrest said.

“I’m not standing,” Rhoda said.

Their waiter, a roly-poly man in black with very long straight blond hair, hitherto all genial expert service, stood bellowing with arm outstretched, visibly sneering at the Americans.

Byron saw none of this. Byron was seeing dead swollen horses in the gutter, yellow plywood patches on rows of broken buildings, a stone goose bordered with red flowers in a schoolyard, a little girl wearing a lilac dress taking a pen from him, orange starshells bursting in the night over church domes.

The song ended. The Germans applauded and cheered some more, and began toasted each other. The string orchestra switched to drinking songs, and the whole Kaiserpavillon went into a gay roar of

Byron cringed to hear it, and to recall that a full belly and a glass of beer had brought him to join German soldiers in this song, not six hours after he had escaped burning Warsaw.

At the Americans’ table the waiter started removing plates with a jerky clatter, spilling gravy and wine and jostling them with his elbows.

“Watch what you’re doing, please,” Colonel Forrest said. The waiter went on with his brusque sloppy clearing. Sally Forrest gave a little yelp as he struck her head with a plate.

Pug said to him, “Look. Call your headwaiter, please.

“Headwaiter? I am the headwaiter. I am your head.” The man laughed and walked off. Dirty dishes remained scattered on the table. Wet purple and brown messes stained the cloth.

Forrest said to Henry, “It might be smart to leave.”

“Oh, by all means,” Sally Forrest said. “Just pay, Bill, and we’ll go.” She picked up her purse.

“We haven’t had our dessert,” Pug Henry said.

“It might be an idea to knock that waiter on his backside,” Dr. Kirby said, his face disagreeably contorted.

“I volunteer,” said Bryon, and he started to get up.

“For God’s sake, boy!” Colonel Forrest pulled him back. “An incident is just what he wants, and what we can’t have.”

The waiter was striding past them to another table. Henry called, “I asked you to bring your headwaiter.”

“You’re in a hurry, honorable sir?” the waiter jeered. “Then you’d better leave. We’re very busy in this restaurant.” He turned a stout back on Henry and walked away.

“Stop! Turn around.”

Pug did not shout or bark. He used a dry sharp tone of command that cut through the restaurant gabble. The waiter stopped and turned. “Go call your headwaiter. Do it immediately.” He looked straight into the waiter’s eyes, his face serious and hard. The waiter’s glance shifted, and he walked off in another direction. The nearby diners were staring and muttering.

“I think we should go,” Sally Forrest said. “This isn’t worth the trouble.”

The waiter soon approached, followed by a tall, bald, long-faced man in a frock coat, who said with a busy, unfriendly air, “Yes? You have a complaint?”

“We’re a party of Americans, military attachés,” Pug said. “We didn’t rise for your anthem. We’re neutrals. This waiter chose to take offense.” He gestured at the table. “He’s been deliberately clumsy and dirty. He’s talked rudely. He’s jostled the ladies. His conduct has been swinish. Tell him to behave himself, and be good enough to let us have a clean cloth for our dessert.”

The expression of the headwaiter kept changing as Victor Henry rapped the sentences out. He hesitated under Henry’s direct gaze, looked around at the other diners, and all at once burst out in a howl of abuse at the waiter, flinging both arms in the air, his face purpling. After a short fierce tantrum, he turned to Pug Henry, bowed from the waist, and said coldly. “You will be properly served. My apologies.” And he bustled off.

Now a peculiar thing happened. The waiter reverted to his former manner without turning a hair, without a trace of surliness, resentment, or regret. The episode was obliterated; it had never happened. He cleared the dishes and spread a new cloth with deft speed. He smiled, he bowed, he made little jokes and considerate little noises. His face was blood red, otherwise he was in every respect the same charming, gemültich German waiter who had first greeted them. He took their dessert orders with chuckles and nods, with arch jests about calories, with solicitous suggestions of wine and liqueurs. He backed away smiling and bowing, and hastened out of sight.

“I’ll be damned,” said Colonel Forrest.

“We hadn’t had our dessert,” Pug said.

“Well done,” Kirby said to Pug Henry, with an odd glance at Rhoda. “Beautifully done.”

“Oh, Pug has a way about him,” Rhoda said, smiling brightly.

“Okay, Dad,” Byron said. Victor Henry shot him a quick look. It was the one remark that gratified him.

The Americans rushed uneasily through their desserts: all but Victor Henry, who was very deliberate about eating his tart and drinking his coffee. He unwrapped a cigar. The waiter jumped to light it for him. “Well, I guess we can shove off,” he said, puffing out a cloud of smoke. “Time’s a’wasting and the colonel and I are cheating the U.S. Government.”

That night after a late dinner, as they were having coffee on the terrace, Rhoda said, “I see you’ve brought home a pile of work. I thought we might see that new Emil Jannings movie. But I can get one of the girls to come along.”

“Go ahead. I’m no fan of Emil Jannings.”

Rhoda drank up her coffee and left the father and son sitting in the gloom.

“Briny, what about that report? How’s it coming?”

“The report? Oh, yes, the report.” Byron leaned forward in his chair, legs apart, elbows on knees, hands clasped. “Dad, I’d like to ask you something. What would you think of my joining the British navy? Or the RAF?”

Victor Henry blinked, and took a while to answer. “You want to fight the Germans, I take it?”

“I enjoyed myself in Warsaw. I felt useful.”

“Well, this is one hell of a change, coming from you. I thought a military career was o-u-t out.”

“This isn’t a career.”

Pug sat smoking and looking at his hands, crouching forward in his chair. Byron usually slouched back and extended his long legs, but now he was imitating his father. Their attitude looked comically alike. “Briny, I don’t think the Allies are going to make a deal with Hitler, but what if they do? A peace offensive’s coming up, that’s for sure. Suppose you join the British, possibly lose your citizenship — certainly create a peck of problems — and then the war’s off? There you’ll be, up to your neck in futile red tape. Why not hang on a while and see how the cat jumps?”

“I guess so.” Byron sighed, and slouched back in his chair.

Pug said, “I don’t like to discourage an admirable impulse. What might be a good idea right now is to ask for active duty in our Navy, and -”

“No, thanks.”

“Now hear me out, dammit. You’ve got your commission. The reserves who go out to sea now will draw the best duty if and when the action starts. You’ll have the jump on ninety-nine percent of the others. In wartime you’ll be the equal of any Academy man.”

“Meantime I’d be in for years. And then suppose the war ends?”

“You’re not doing anything else.”

“I wrote to Dr. Jastrow in Siena. I’m waiting to hear from him.”

The father dropped the subject.

Rhoda went to see the Emil Jannings movie, but first she did something else. She picked up Dr. Palmer Kirby at his hotel and drove him to Tempelhof airport. This was not necessary; cabs were available in Berlin. But she had offered to do this and Kirby had accepted. Perhaps there would have been no harm in telling her husband that she was giving the visitor this last courtesy; but she didn’t.

They hardly spoke in the car. She parked and went to the café lounge while he checked in. Had she encountered a friend, she would have needed an explanation on the spot and a story for her husband. But she had no such worry; she felt only a bittersweet excitement. What she was doing gave her not the slightest guilty feeling. She had no wrong intent. She liked Palmer Kirby. It was a long, long time since a man had seemed so attractive to her. He liked her, too. In fact, this was a genuine little wartime romance, so decorous as to be almost laughable; an unexpected flash of melancholy magic, which, would soon be over forever. It was not in the least like her aborted drunken peccadillo with Kip Tollever.

Well, I guess this is it,” Kirby said, falling in the chair opposite her in the gangling way which always struck her as boyish, for all his grizzled head and sharply lined face. They sat looking at each other until the drinks came.

“Your happiness,” he said.

“Oh, that. I’ve had that. It’s all in the past.” She sipped. “Did they give you the connection to Lisbon that you wanted?”

“Yes, but the Pan Am Clippers are jammed. I may be hung up in Lisbon for days.”

“Well, I wish I had that in prospect. I hear that’s becoming the gayest city in Europe.”

“Come along.”

“Oh, Palmer, don’t tease me. Dear me, I was supposed to call you Fred, wasn’t I? And now I find I’ve been thinking of you all along as Palmer. Fred — well, there are so many Freds. You don’t strike me as Fred.”

“That’s very strange.” He drank at his highball.

“What is?”

“Anne called me Palmer. She never would call me anything else.”

Rhoda twirled the stem of her daiquiri glass. “I wish I had known your wife.”

“You’d have become good friends.”

“Palmer, what do you think of Pug?”

“Hm. That’s a tough one.” The engineer pushed his lips out ruefully. “My first impression was that he was a misplaced and — frankly — rather narrow-minded sea dog. But I don’t know. He has a keen intellect. He’s terrifically on the ball. That was quite a job he did on that waiter. He’s a hard man to know, really.”

Rhoda laughed. How right you are. After all these years, I don’t know him too well myself. But I suspect Pug’s really something simple and almost obsolete, Palmer. He’s a patriot. He’s not the easiest person to live with. He’s so goldarned single-minded.”

“Is he a patriot, or is he a Navy career man? Those are two different things.”

Rhoda tilted her head and smiled. “I’m not actually sure.”

“Well, I’ve come to admire him, that much I know.” Kirby frowned at his big hands, clasped around the drink on the table. “See here, Rhoda, I’m really a proper fellow, all in all. Let me just say this. You’re a wonderful woman. I’ve been a sad dull man since Anne died, but you’ve made me feel very much alive again, and I’m grateful to you. Does this offend you?”

“Don’t be a fool. It pleases me very much, and you know it does.” Rhoda took a handkerchief from her purse. “However, it’s going to be a little hard on my contentment for a day or two. Oh, damn.”

“Why I should think it would add to your contentment.”

“Oh, shut up, Palmer. Thanks for the drink. You’d better go to your plane.”

“Look don’t be upset.”

She smiled at him, her eyes tearful. “Why everything’s fine, dear. You might write, just once in a while. Just a friendly little scribble, so I’ll know you’re alive and well. I’d like that.”

“Of course I will. I’ll write the day I get home.”

“Will you really! That’s fine.” She touched her eyes with her handkerchief and stood. “Good-bye.”

He said, getting to his feet, “They haven’t called my plane.”

“No? Well, my chauffeuring job is finished, and I’m leaving you here and now.” They walked out of the lounge and shook hands in the quiet terminal. War had all but shut down the airport; most of the counters were dark. Rhoda squeezed Dr. Kirby’s hand, and standing on tiptoe, kissed him once on the lips. This in a way was strangest of all, reaching up to kiss a man. She opened her mouth. After all, it was a farewell.

“Good-bye. Have a wonderful trip.” She hurried away and turned a corner without looking back. She saw enough of the Emil Jannings movie to be able to talk about it to Pug.

Byron at last wrote the report on his adventures in Poland. Victory Henry, suppressing his annoyance over the five vapid pages, spent an afternoon dictating to his yeoman everything he remembered of Byron’s tale. His son read the seventeen-page result next day with astonishment. “Ye gods, Dad, what a memory you have.”

“Take that and fix it any way you want. Just make sure it’s factually unchallengeable. Combine it with your thing and let me have it back by Friday.”

Victor Henry forwarded the patched report to the Office of Naval Intelligence, but forgot his idea of sending a copy to the President. The cool autumn days went by and Berlin began taking on an almost peacetime look and mood.” Byron lounged around the Grunewald house, knotting his forehead by the hour over one book after another from Leslie Slote’s list. Three or four times a week he played tennis with his father; he was much the better player, but Pug, a steely plodder at first, wore him down and beat him. With food, exercise, and sun, however, Byron lost his famished look, regained strength, and started winning, which pleased Pug as much as it did him.

One morning he walked into his father’s office at the embassy and saw sitting on the floor; carefully roped up and ticketed with a tag in his own handwriting, the large valise of suits, shoes, and shirts he had left behind in Warsaw. It was a shocking little clue to the efficiency of the Germans. But he was glad to have the clothes, for American styles were idolized in Germany. He blossomed out as a dandy. The German girls in the embassy looked after the slender young man whenever he walked down the hall, casually à la mode, with heavy red-glinting brown hair, a lean face, and large blue eyes that widened when he wistfully smiled. But he ignored their inviting glances. Byron pounced on the mail every morning, searching in vain for a letter from Siena.

When the Führer made his Reichstag speech offering peace to England and France, early in October, the propaganda ministry set aside a large block of seats in the front Opera House for foreign diplomats, and Pug took his son along. Living through the siege of Warsaw, and then reading Mein Kampf, Byron had come to think of Adolf Hitler as a historic monster — a Caligula, a Genghis Khan, an Ivan the Terrible — and Hitler standing at the podium surprised him: just a medium-size pudgy individual in a plain gray coat and black trousers, carrying a red portfolio. The man seemed to Byron a diminutive actor, weakly impersonating the grandiose and gruesome history-maker.

Hitler spoke this time in a reasonable, pedestrian tone, like an elder politician. In this sober style, the German leader began to utter such grotesque and laughable lies that Byron kept looking around for some amused reactions. But the Germans sat listening with serious faces. Even the diplomats gave way only here and there to a mouth twitch that might have been ironic.

A powerful Poland had attacked Germany, the little man in the gray coat said, and had attempted to destroy her. The brave Wehrmacht had not been caught unawares and had justly punished this insolent aggression. A campaign strictly limited to attack of military targets had brought quick total victory. The civilian population of Poland, on his personal orders, had not been molested, and had suffered no loss or injury, except in Warsaw. There again on his orders, the German commanders had pleaded with the authorities to evacuate their civilians, offering them safe-conduct. The Poles with criminal folly had insisted on holding defenseless women and children within the city.

To Byron, the brazenness of this assertion was stupefying. All the neutral diplomats had made desperate efforts for weeks to negotiate the evacuation of Warsaw’s women and children. The Germans had never even replied. It was not so much that Hitler was lying about this — Byron knew that the German nation was following a wild liar and had been for years, since Mein Kampf was full of obvious crazy lies — but that this lie was pointless, since the neutrals knew the facts and the world press had reported them. Why, then, was Hitler saying such vulnerable nonsense? The speech must be meant for the Germans; but in that case, he reflected — as Hitler went on to “offer an outstretched hand” to the British and the French — why was the speech so mild in style, and why were so many seats reserved for diplomats?

“Surely if forty-six million Englishmen can claim to rule over forty million square kilometers of the earth, then it cannot be wrong,” Hitler said in a docile, placating tone, holding up both hands, palms outward, “for eighty-two million Germans to ask to be allowed to till in peace eight hundred thousand kilometers of soil that are their own.” He was talking about his new order in central Europe, and the expanded Third Reich. The British and the French could have peace simply by accepting things as they now were, he said, adding a hint that it might be well if they also gave Germany back her old colonies. The Führer at the end fell into his old style, howling and sneering, shaking both fists in front of his face, pointing a fist and a finger straight upward, snapping his hands to his hips, as he pictured the horrors of a full-scale war, which he said he dreaded and which nobody could really win.

That night Pug Henry wrote in his intelligence report:

Pug told Byron to write down his impressions of the speech. Byron handed him half a typewritten page:

His father thought this was not bad, and included it in quotation marks as the comment of a youthful American spectator.

The din of the German radio and press in the next days was terrific. Italy and Japan had hailed the Führer as the greatest peacemaker of all time. A mighty popular surge for peace was sweeping the West and the United States. But “Churchillian” warmongers were trying to stamp out this warm response of the people to the Führer’s outstretched hand. If they succeeded, the most ghastly bloodbath of all time would follow, and history would know whom to blame. Pug gathered from neutral intelligence in Berlin that some Frenchmen wanted to make a deal and call off the war, but not because they took seriously anything Hitler had said. It was just a question of yielding to the facts or fighting on.

Into this confusing noise came an electric shock of news. A U-boat had sneaked into the British fleet anchorage in Scapa Flow at the northern tip of Scotland, had sunk the battleship Royal Oak, and had returned home safe!

News pictures showed the solemn fat-faced Führer shaking the hand of Lieutenant-Commander Prien, a nervous stiff young man with receding hair. The Nazi propaganda ministry foamed with ecstasy over the British Admiralty’s report that sadly praised Prien’s skill and daring. The writer was Churchill himself. Goebbels’s broadcasters said the sinking of the Royal Oak would prove a great boon to peace, since the Führer’s “outstretched hand” proposal would now receive more serious consideration.

A small reception was laid on for neutral military attachés to meet Prien. Victor Henry put his son’s name on the list, with the rank Ensign, USNR, and Byron received a card. The Henrys dined before the reception at the apartment of Commander Grobke, a small dark walk-up flat on the fourth floor of an old house with bay windows. Heavy thick furniture so cluttered the rooms that there was hardly space to move. The meal was salt fish and potatoes, but it was well cooked and Byron enjoyed it. He found the Grobkes disconcertingly normal, though he was prepared to detest them. When the talk got around to Byron’s experiences in Poland the woman listened with an unhappy, motherly look. “One never knows what to believe any more. Thank God it’s over, at least. Let there only be peace, real peace. We don’t want war. The last war ruined Germany. Another war will be the absolute end of our country.”

Rhoda said, “It’s so awful. Nobody in the world wants war, yet here we are in this mess.”

Grobke said to Victor Henry, “What do you think? Are the Allies going to discuss the Führer’s very reasonable offer?”

“Do you want me to be polite, or are you asking for information?”

“Don’t be polite, Henry. Not with me.”

“Okay. Germany can have peace if she gets rid of Hitler and his regime. You could even hang onto a lot of your gains. That gang has got to go.”

Grobke and his wife looked at each other in the candlelight. “Then it’s hopeless,” he said, playing with his empty wineglass. “If your people won’t understand one thing about Germany, we have to fight it out. You don’t know what this country was like in the 1920’s. I do. If the system had gone on another few years there would have been no navy, no economy, nothing. Germany would have fallen apart. This man stood up and put Germany back on the map. You have Roosevelt, we have him. Listen, Henry, I sat in a fancy club in New York and heard people call Roosevelt an insane socialist cripple. There are millions who hate him. Right? Now I’m not a Nazi, I’ve never said the Führer is a thousand percent right. But he’s a winner, damn it all. He gets things done, like Roosevelt. And you want us to get rid of him? First of all it isn’t possible. You know what the regime is. And if it were possible we wouldn’t do it. And yet there can be peace. It depends on one man, and he isn’t our Führer.”

“Who then?”

“Your President. The British and the French are beaten right now. Otherwise they’d have attacked in September. When will they ever have such a chance again? They’re holding out for only one reason — they feel America’s behind them. If your President says one word to them tomorrow — ‘I’m not helping you against Germany’ — this world war will be over before it starts, and we’ll all have a hundred years of prosperity. And I’ll tell you one more thing. That’s the only way your President can make sure Japan won’t jump on your back.”

It occurred to Victor Henry, not for the first time, that his meeting with Grobke on the Bremen had probably not been accidental. “I guess we’d better get on to that reception,” he said.

Lieutenant Commander Prien looked surprised and interested when Byron’s turn came in the reception line of floridly uniformed attachés. “You are young,” he said in German, scrutinizing Byron’s face and well-cut dark suit as they shook hands. “Are you a submariner?”

“No. Maybe I should be.”

Prien said with a charming grin, and sudden wholehearted warmth, “Ach, it’s the only service. But you have to be tough.”

Blue-uniformed sailors lined up the chairs for a lecture. Pug Henry was flabbergasted by the candor of the U-boat captain’s talk. It was no revelation that Prien had gone in on the surface at slack water, in the dark of the moon. That could be surmised. But Prien had no business exhibiting the Luftwaffe’s aerial photographs of the entrances and analyzing the obstacles. That was handing the British their corrective measures on a silver platter. It also disclosed technical news about German reconnaissance photography — scary news to be sure. This was urgent stuff for the next Pouch.

Byron listened as intently as his father. What fascinated him was the living detail. Prien spoke a clear slow German. He could follow every word. He could see the northern lights shimmering in the black night, silhouetting the U-boat, reflecting in purple and green sparkles on the wet forecastle, and worrying the captain half to death. He was mentally dazzled by the automobile headlights on the shore that suddenly flashed out of the gloom and caught the captain in the face. He saw the two dim gray battleships ahead, he heard the black hill waters of Scapa Flow lap on the U-boat hull as it slowed to fire four torpedoes. He almost shared the German’s disappointment when only one hit.

The most amazing and inspiring part of the tale came after that. Instead of fleeing, Prien had made a big slow circle on the surface, inside the Royal Navy’s main anchorage, to reload tubes; for the torpedo hit had failed to set off a general submarine alarm. It simply had not occurred to the British that there could be a U-boat inside Scapa Flow; on the Royal Oak they had taken the hit for an internal explosion. And so, by daring all, Prien had succeeded in shooting a second salvo of four torpedoes.

We got three hits that time,” Prien said. “The rest you know. We blew up the magazines, and the Royal Oak went down almost at once.”

He did not gloat. Nor did he express regret over the nine hundred British sailors. He had put his own life in hazard. The odds had been that he, and not they, would die in the night’s work — tangled in the nets, impaled on rocks, or blown to bits by a mine. So Byron thought. He had sailed out, done his duty, and come home. Here he was, a serious, clean-cut professional, alive to tell the tale. This was not Warsaw, and this was not strafing horses and children on country roads.

Pug Henry and his son drove slowly home through deserted streets in the blue-lit blackout. They did not talk. Byron said as the car turned into their street, “Dad, didn’t you ever consider submarines?”

The father shook his head. “They’re a strange breed, those fellows. And once you’re in the pigboats, you have a hell of a job ever getting out. This Prien’s a lot like our own Navy submariners. Now and then I almost forgot there that he was talking German.”

“Well, that’s what I’d have picked, I think,” Byron said, “if I’d gone in.”

The car drew up to the house. Pug Henry leaned an elbow on the wheel, and looked at his son with an acid grin in the faint glow of the dashboard. “You don’t get to sink a battleship every day.”

Byron scowled, and said with unusual sharpness, “Is that what you think appeals to me?”

“Look here,” Pug said, “the physical on submariners is a damn rigorous one, and they put you through a rough graduate school, but if you’re actually interested -”

“No thanks, Dad.” The young man laughed and tolerantly shook his head at his father’s persistence.

Victor Henry often tried to start the topic of submarines again, but never drew another glint of interest.

He spent a week with Byron touring shipyards and factories. The German attaché in the United States had asked for such a tour, so a return of the courtesy was automatic. Pug Henry enjoyed travelling with his son. Byron put up with inconvenience, he never got angry, he joked in annoying moments, and he rose to sudden emergencies: a plane over-booked, a train missed, luggage vanished, hotel reservations lost. Pug considered himself fast on his feet, but Byron, by using a certain easygoing charm, could get out of holes, track things down, and persuade desk clerks and ticket agents to exert themselves, better than his father. During lunches with factory owners, plant managers, and yard superintendents, Byron could sit for two hours looking pleasant without talking, and reply when spoken to with something short and apt.

“You seem to be enjoying this,” Pug remarked to Byron, as they drove back to the hotel in dark rain from a long tiring visit to the Krupp works in Essen.

“It’s interesting. Much more so than the cathedrals and the schlosses and the folk costumes,” Byron said. “This is the Germany to worry about.”

Pug nodded. “Right. The German industrial plant is the pistol Hitler is pointing at the world’s head. It bears study.”

“Pretty sizable pistol,” Byron said.

“Too sizable for comfort.”

“How does it compare to the Allies’, and to ours, Dad?”

A glass partition in the Krupp courtesy limousine separated them from the chauffeur, but Pug thought the man held his head at an attentive tilt.

“That’s the question. We’ve got the biggest industrial plant in the world, no doubt of that, but Hitler isn’t giving us a second thought right about now, because there’s no national will to use it as a pistol. Germany with her industrial setup can run the world, if nobody argues. The means and the will exist. Macedonia wasn’t very big when Alexander conquered the world. Brazil may be four times as big and have ten times the potential of Germany, but the payoff is on present capacity and will. On paper, as I keep insisting the French and the British combined still have these people licked. But on paper Primo Carnera had Joe Louis licked. Hitler’s gone to bat because he thinks he can take them. It’s the ultimate way to match industrial systems, but a bit chancy.”

“Then maybe this is what war is all about nowadays,” Byron said. “Industrial capacity.”

“Not entirely, but it’s vital.”

“Well, I’m certainly learning a lot.”

Pug smiled. Byron was spending his hotel evenings doggedly reading Hegel, usually falling asleep in an hour or so over the open book.

“How are you coming along on that Hegel fellow?”

“It’s just starting to clear up a bit. I can hardly believe it, but he seems crazier than Hitler. They taught me at Columbia that he’s a great philosopher.”

“Possibly he’s too deep for you.”

“Maybe so, but the trouble is, I think I understand him.”

The gray, dignified chauffeur gave Byron a hideous look as he opened the door for them at the hotel. Byron ran over in his mind what he had said, and decided to be more careful about calling Hitler crazy. He didn’t think the chauffeur was an offended Hegelian.

A letter arrived from Aaron Jastrow in a burst of airmail from the outside a few days after the British and French, to the great rage of the German radio, rejected the Führer’s outstretched band. Mail to the embassy was supposed to be uncensored, but nobody believed that. The letters came in sudden sackfuls two or three weeks apart. The red and green Italian airmail envelope was rubber-stamped all over, purple and black and red. Dr. Jastrow was still typing with a worn-out ribbon, perhaps even the same one. He was too absentminded and, Byron suspected, too inept mechanically to change a ribbon, and unless someone did it for him he would use the old one until the words on the page looked like spirit typing. Byron had to put the letter under a strong light to make it out.

When Byron got home that evening he took one look at his father, sitting in a lounge chair on the porch facing the garden, and backed away. Pug’s head was thrust forward and down, over a highball glass clenched in two hands. Byron went to his room and plugged at Hegel and his baffling “World Spirit” until dinner time.

Rhoda endured Victor Henry’s glowering silence at the table until the dessert came. “All right, Pug,” she said, digging into her ice cream, “what’s it all about?”

Pug gave her a heavy-lidded look. “Didn’t you read the letter?”

Byron thought his mother’s reaction was exceedingly peculiar. Her face stiffened, her eyes widened, her back straightened.

“Letter? What letter? From whom?”

“Get the letter on my dressing table for your mother, please,” Pug said to Byron.

“Well, goodness me,” Rhoda gasped, as she saw Byron trampling down the stairs with a pink envelope, “it’s only from Madeline.”

“Who did you think it was from?”

“Well, good lord, how was I to know? The Gestapo or somebody, from your manner. Honestly, Pug.” She scanned the letter. “So? What’s wrong with this? That’s quite a raise, twenty dollars a week.”

“Read the last page.”

“I am. Well! I see what you mean.”

“Nineteen years old,” Pug said. “An apartment of her own in New York! And I was the fusspot, about letting her leave school.”

“Pug, I merely said when you got here that the thing was done. She couldn’t have enrolled any more.”

“She damn well could have tried.”

“Anyway, Madeline will be all right. She’s a good girl. She’s as straitlaced as you.”

“It’s this war,” Pug said. “The world’s coming apart at the seams by the day. What can that girl do that’s worth fifty-five dollars a week? That’s what a senior grade lieutenant makes, after ten years in the service. It’s absurd.”

Rhoda said, “You’ve always babied Madeline. I think she’s showed you up, and that’s what really annoys you.”

“I wish I were back there. I’d have a damn good look around.”

Rhoda drummed the fingers of both hands on the table. “Do you want me to go home and be with her?”

“That would cost a fortune. It’s one thing when you travel on government allowance, but -” Pug turned to Byron. “You’ll be going back, won’t you? Maybe you could find a job in New York.”

“As a matter of fact, I wanted to talk about that. I got a letter too. From Dr. Jastrow. I’m going to Siena.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“Who says so?”

“I do.”

Silence.

Rhoda said, “That’s something we should all discuss, isn’t it, Briny?”

“Is that girl there?” Pug said.

“No.”

“She’s gone back to the States?”

“No. She’s trying to get there from England.”

“How do you propose to go?”

“Train. They’re running regularly to Milan and Florence.”

“And what will you use for money?”

“I have enough to get there. I saved nearly all I made.”

“And you’ll do what? Literary research up in an Italian mountain town, with a war on?”

“If I get called to active duty, I’ll go.”

“That’s damned bighearted, seeing that if you didn’t, the Navy would track you down and put you in the brig for a few years. Well, I’m proud of you, Briny. Do as you please.” Victor Henry coughed, rolled up his napkin, and left the table. Byron sat with his head thrust down and forward, his face white, the muscles in his jaw working.

Rhoda saw that talking to her son would be useless. She went upstairs to her dressing room, took out a letter she had put in a drawer beneath her underwear, read it once, then tore it into very small pieces.

Chapter 17 — Sitzkrieg

Chapter 18

Warren Henry and his fiancée Janice were set straight about Russia’s invasion of Finland by an unexpected person: Madeline’s new boyfriend, a trombone player and student of public affairs named Sewell Bozeman. Early in December the engaged couple came to New York and visited Madeline in her new apartment. Finding the boyfriend there was a surprise.

The news of her move to her own apartment had enraged Pug Henry, but had he known her reason, he would have been pleased. Madeline had come to despise the two girls with whom she had shared a flat. Both were having affairs — one with a joke writer, the other with an actor working as a bellhop. Madeline had found herself being asked to skulk around; stay out late, or remain in her room while one or another pair copulated. The walls in the shabby apartment were thin. She had no way of even pretending unawareness.

She was disgusted. Both girls had good jobs, both dressed with taste, both were college graduates. Yet they behaved like sluts, as Madeline understood the word. She was a Henry, with her father’s outlook. Give or take a few details of Methodist doctrine, Madeline believed in what she had learned at home and at church. Unmarried girls of good character didn’t sleep with men; to her, that was almost a law of nature. Men had more leeway; she knew, for instance, that Warren had been something of a hellion before his engagement. She liked Byron better because he seemed, in this respect, more like her upright father. To Madeline sex was a delightful matter of playing with fire, but enjoying the blaze from a safe distance, until she could leap into the hallowed white conflagration of a bridal night. She was a middle-class good girl, and not in the least ashamed of it. She thought her roommates were gross fools. As soon as Hugh Cleveland gave her a raise, she got out.

“I don’t know,” she said, stirring a pot over a tiny stove behind a screen, “maybe this dinner was a mistake. We all could have gone to a restaurant.”

She was addressing the boyfriend, Sewell Bozeman, called Bozey by the world. They had met at a party in September. Bozey was a thin, long, pale, tractable fellow with thick straight brown hair and thoughtful brown eyes that bulged behind rimless glasses. He always dressed in brown, in brown shoes, brown ties, and even brown shirts; he was always reading enormous brown books on economics and politics and had a generally brown outlook on life, believing that America was a doomed society, rapidly going under. Madeline found him a piquant and intriguing novelty. At the moment, he was setting her small dining table, wearing over his brown array the pink apron he had put on to peel onions for the stew.

“Well it’s not too late,” he said. “You can save the stew for another night, and we can take your brother and his girl to Julio’s.”

“No, I told Warren I was cooking the dinner. That girl’s rolling in money — she wouldn’t like an Italian dive. And they have to rush off to the theatre.” Madeline came out, patting her hot face with a handkerchief, and looked at the table. “That’s fine. Thanks, Bozey. I’m going to change.” She opened a closet door crusted with yellowing white paint and took out a dress and slip, glancing around the small room. With a three-sided bay window looking out to backyards and drying laundry, it was the whole apartment, except for the kitchenette and a tiny bath.

Large pieces of blue cloth lay on the threadbare divan under yellow paper patterns. “Darn it! That divan is such a rat’s nest. Maybe I’ll have time to finish cutting that dress, if I hurry.”

“I can finish cutting it,” Bozey said.

“Nonsense, Bozey, you can’t cut a dress. Don’t try.” A doorbell wheezily rang. “Well, the wine’s here already. That’s good.” She went to open the door. Warren and Janice walked in and surprised the tall popeyed man in his pink apron, holding shears in one hand and a sleeve pattern in the other. What with the smell of the hot stew, and Madeline in a housecoat with a dress and a lacy slip on her arm, it was a strikingly domestic scene.

“Oh, hi. You’re early. My gosh, Warren, you’re tan!” Madeline was so sure of her own rectitude that it didn’t occur to her to be embarrassed. “This is Sewell Bozeman, a friend of mine.”

Bozey waved the shears feebly at them; he was embarrassed, and in his fluster he started to cut a ragged blue rayon sleeve.

Madeline said, “Bozey, will you stop cutting that dress!”

She turned to Janice. “Imagine, he actually thinks he can do it.”

“It’s more than I can,” Janice Lacouture said, staring incredulously at Bozeman. Bozey dropped the shears and took off his apron with a giggle.

Warren said just to say something and cover his stupefaction, “Your dinner smells great, Madeline.”

After completing introductions, Madeline went off into what she called her boudoir, a grimy toilet about four feet square. “If you’d like to freshen up first—” she said to Janice as she opened the door, gesturing at the few cubic feet of yellow space crammed with rusty plumbing. “It’s a bit cozy in there for two.”

“Oh, no, no I’m just fine,” Janice exclaimed. “Go ahead.”

A halting conversation ensued while Bozey donned his jacket and tie. Soon Madeline put out her head and one naked shoulder and arm. “Bozey, I don’t want that beef stew to boil over. Turn down the gas.”

“Sure thing.”

As he went behind the screen, Janice Lacouture and Warren exchanged appalled looks. “Do you play with the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Bozeman?” Janice raised her voice.

“No, I’m with Ziggy Frechtel’s orchestra. We play the Feenamint Hour,” he called back. “I’m working on getting up my own band.” He returned and sat in an armchair, or rather lay in it, with his head propped against the back and the rest of him projecting forward and down, sloping to the floor. Warren, something of a sloucher himself regarded this spectacular slouch by the limp long brown bulging-eyed trombonist with incredulity. In a way the strangest feature was his costume. Warren had never in his life seen a brown tie on a brown shirt. Madeline issued from the bathroom smoothing her dress. “Oh, come on, Bozey, mix some drinks,” she carolled.

Bozey hauled himself erect and made drinks, talking on about the problems of assembling a band. A shy, awkward fellow, he honestly believed that the best way to put other people at their ease was to keep talking, and the one subject that usually occurred was him was himself. He disclosed that he was the son of a minister in Montana; that the local doctor had cured him of religion at sixteen, by feeding him the works of Ingersoll and Haeckel while treating him less successfully for thyroid trouble; and that in rebellion against his father he had taken up the trombone.

Soon he was on the topic of the war, which, he explained, was nothing but an imperialist struggle for markets. This was apropos of a remark by Warren that he was a naval fighter pilot in training. Bozey proceeded to set forth the Marxist analysis of war, beginning with the labor theory of value. Madeline meanwhile, finishing and serving up the dinner, was glad to let him entertain her company. She knew Bozey was talkative, but she found him interesting and she thought Warren and Janice might, too. They seemed oddly silent. Perhaps, she thought, they had just had a little spat.

Under capitalism, Bozey pointed out, workers never were paid what they really earned. The capitalist merely gave then the lowest wages possible. Since he owned the means of production, he had them at his mercy. Profit was the difference between what the worker produced and what he got. This had to lead to war sooner or later. In each country the capitalists piled up big surpluses because the workers weren’t paid enough to buy back what they produced. The capitalists, to realize their profits, had to sell off those surpluses in other countries. This struggle for foreign markets, when it got hot enough, inevitably turned into war. That was what was happening now.

“But Hitler has no surpluses,” Janice Lacouture mildly observed. An economics student she knew these Marxist bromides, but was willing to let the boyfriend, or lover — she wasn’t yet sure which — of Warren’s sister run on for a while. “Germany’s a land of shortages.”

“The war is a struggle for foreign markets, all the same,” Bozey insisted serenely, back in his deep slouch. “How about cameras, just at random? Germany still exports cameras.”

Warren said, “As I understand you, then, the Germans invaded Poland to sell Leicas.”

“Making jokes about economic laws is easy, but irrelevant.” Bozey smiled.

“I’m fairly serious,” Warren said. “Obviously Hitler’s reason for attacking Poland was conquest and loot, as in most wars.”

“Hitler is a figurehead,” said Bozey comfortably. “Have you ever heard of Fritz Thyssen? He and the Krupps and a few other German capitalists put him in power. They could put someone else in tomorrow if they chose, by making a few telephone calls. Of course there’s no reason why they should, he’s a useful and obedient lackey in their struggle for foreign markets.”

“What you’re saying is the straight Communist line, you know,” Janice said.

“Oh, Bozey’s a Communist,” Madeline said, emerging from behind the screen with a wooden bowl of salad. “Dinner’s ready. Will you dress the salad, Bozey?”

“Sure thing.” Bozey took the bowl to a rickety little side table, and made expert motions with oil, vinegar, and condiments.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Communist before,” Warren said, peering at the long brown man.

“My gosh, you haven’t?” said Madeline. “Why, the radio business swarms with them.”

“That’s a slight exaggeration,” Bozey said, rubbing garlic on the salad bowl, and filling the close, warm flat with the pungent aroma.

“Oh, come on, Bozey. Who isn’t a Communist in our crowd?”

“Well, Peter isn’t. I don’t think Myra is. Anyway, that’s just our gang.” He added to Warren, “It dates from the Spanish Civil War days. We put on all kinds of shows for the benefit of the Loyalists.” Bozey brought the salad bowl to the table, where the others were already seated. “Of course there’s just a few of us left now. A lot of the crowd dropped away after Stalin made the pact with Hitler. They had no fundamental convictions.”

“Didn’t that pact bother you?” Warren said.

“Bother me? Why? It was a wise move. The capitalist powers want to snuff out socialism in the Soviet Union. If they bleed themselves white beforehand, fighting each other, the final attack on socialism will be that much weaker. Stalin’s peace policy is very wise.”

Warren said, “Suppose Hitler polishes off England and France in a one-front war, and then turns and smashes Russia? That may well happen. Stalin could have made a deal with the Allies, and all of them together would have had a far better chance of stopping the Nazis.”

“But don’t you see, there’s no reason for a socialist country to take part in an imperialist struggle for foreign markets,” Bozey patiently explained to the benighted naval aviator. “Socialism doesn’t need foreign markets, since the worker gets all he creates.”

“Bozey, will you bring the stew?” Madeline said.

“Sure thing.”

Janice Lacouture said, speaking louder as he went behind the screen, “But surely you know that a Russian worker gets less than a worker in any capitalist country.”

“Of course. There are two reasons for that. Socialism triumphed first in a feudal country,” Bozey said, reappearing with the stew, “and had a big industrial gap to close. Also, because of the imperialist threat, socialism had to divert a lot of production to arms. When socialism triumphs everywhere, arms will become useless, and they’ll all be thrown in the sea.”

“But even if that happens, which I doubt, it seems to me,” said Janice, “that when the state owns the means of production, the workers will get less than if capitalists own them. You know how inefficient and tyrannical government bureaucracies are.”

“Yes,” interjected Madeline, “but as soon as socialism triumphs everywhere the state will wither away, because nobody will need a central government any more. Then the workers will get it all. Pass the wine around, Bozey.”

“Sure thing.”

Warren said to his sister, narrowing his eyes at her, “Do you believe that?”

“Well, that’s how the argument goes,” Madeline said, giggling. “Wouldn’t Dad die if he knew I’d made friends with Communists? For heaven’s sake don’t write and tell him.”

“Have no fear.” Warren turned to Bozey. “What about Finland?”

The Russian invasion of the tiny northern country was then about a week old, and already looking like a disaster.

“Okay. What about it?”

“Well, you know Russia claims that Finland attacked her, the way Hitler claimed Poland attacked Germany. Do you believe that?”

“It’s ridiculous to think that Poland attacked Germany,” Bozey said calmly, “but it’s highly likely that Finland attacked the Soviet Union. It was probably a provocation engineered by others to embroil socialism in the imperialist war.”

“The Soviet Union is fifty times as big as Finland,” Janice Lacouture said.

“I’m not saying the Finns did something wise,” said Bozey. “They were egged on into making a bad mistake. Anyway, Finland just used to be a duchy of Czarist Russia. It’s not an invasion exactly, it’s a rectification.”

“Oh, come on, Bozey,” Madeline said. “Stalin’s simply making hay while the sun shines, slamming his way in there to improve his strategic position against Germany.”

“Of course,” Warren said, “and that’s a damned prudent move in his situation, whatever the morality of it may be.”

Bozey smiled cunningly, his eyes starting from his head. “Well, it’s quite true he wasn’t born yesterday. The imperialists all lift up their hands in holy horror when a socialist government does something realistic. They think that’s their exclusive privilege.”

“Why do you suppose the invasion’s flopping on its face?” Warren said.

“Oh, do you believe the capitalist newspapers?” said Bozey, with a broad wink.

“You think the Russians are really winning?”

“Why, all this nonsense about the Finnish ski troops in white uniforms makes me ill,” Bozey said. “Don’t you suppose the Russians have skis and white uniforms too? But catch the New York Times saying so.”

“This is a lovely stew,” Janice said.

“I used too many cloves,” Madeline said, “Don’t bite into one.”

Warren and Janice left right after dinner to go to the theatre. He was on a seventy-two-hour pass from Pensacola, and Janice had come up from Washington to meet him; dinner with Madeline had been a last-minute arrangement by long-distance telephone. When they left, Madeline was cutting out her dress and Bozey was washing the dishes.

“What do I do now?” Warren said, out in the street. The theatre was only a few blocks away. It was snowing and cabs were unobtainable, so they walked. “Get myself a shotgun?”

“What for? To put Bozey out of his misery?”

“To get him to marry her, was my idea.”

Janice laughed, and hugged his arm. “There’s nothing doing between those two, honey.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Not a chance. That’s quite a gal, your little sister.”

“Jesus Christ, yes. The Red Flame of Manhattan. That’s a hell of a note. And I wrote my folks I was going to visit her. Now what do I say?”

“You just write your parents that everything’s peachy with her. Because it is.”

They walked with heads bent, the snow whirling on the wind into their faces.

“Why are you so quiet?” said Janice. “Don’t worry about your sister. Really, you don’t have to.”

“I’m thinking how this war’s blown our family apart. I mean, we used to scatter here and there,” Warren said.

“We’re a service family and we’re used to that, but it’s different now. I don’t feel there’s a base any more. And we’re all changing. I don’t know if we’ll ever pull back together again.”

“Sooner or later all families change and scatter,” said Janice Lacouture, “and out of the pieces new families start up. That’s how it goes, and a very lovely arrangement it is, too.” She put her face to his for a moment, and snowflakes fell on the two warm cheeks.

“The imperialist struggle for foreign markets,” said Warren. “Jehosephat! I hope she’s rid of that one by the time Dad gets back. Otherwise he’ll lay waste to Radio City.”

Chapter 19

“BYRON!”

Dr. Jastrow gasped out the name and stared. He sat as usual on the terrace, the blue blanket over his legs, the gray shawl around his shoulders, the writing board and yellow pad on his lap. A cold breeze blowing across the valley from Siena fluttered Jastrow’s pages. In the translucent air the red-walled town, with its black-and-white striped cathedral atop the vineyard-checkered hills, looked hauntingly like the medieval Siena in old frescoes.

“Hello, A.J.”

“Dear me, Byron! I declare I’ll be a week recovering from the start you’ve given me! We were talking about you only at breakfast. We were both absolutely certain you’d be in the States by now.”

“She’s here?”

“Of course. She’s up in the library.”

“Sir, will you excuse me?”

“Yes, go ahead, let me collect myself — oh, and Byron, tell Maria I’d like some strong tea right away.”

Byron took the center hall steps three at a time and walked into the library. She stood at the desk in a gray sweater, a black skirt, pale and wide-eyed. “It is, by God! It is you. Nobody else galumphs up those stairs like that.”

“It’s me.”

“Why the devil did you come back?”

“I have to make a living.”

“You’re an imbecile. Why didn’t you let us know you were coming?”

“Well, I thought I’d better just come.”

She approached him, stretched out a hand uncertainly, and put it to his face. The long fingers felt dry and cold. “Anyway, you look rested. You seem to have put on some weight.” She backed off awkwardly and abruptly. “I owe you an apology. I was feeling beastly that day in Königsberg, and if I was rude to you, I’m sorry.” She walked away from him and sank into her desk chair. “Well, we can use you here, but surprises like this are never pleasant. Don’t you know that yet?” As though he had returned from an errand in town, she resumed clattering at the typewriter.

That was all his welcome. Jastrow put him back to work, and within a few days the old routines were restored. It was as though the Polish experience had never occurred, as though neither of them had left the hilltop. The traces of the war in these quiet hills were few. Only sporadic shortages of gasoline created any difficulty. The Milan and Florence newspapers that reached them played down the war. Even on the BBC broadcasts there was little combat news. The Russian attack on Finland seemed as remote as a Chinese earthquake.

Because the buses had become unreliable, Dr. Jastrow gave Byron a lodging on the third floor of the villa: a cramped little maid’s room with cracking plaster walls, and a stained ceiling that leaked in hard rains. Natalie lived directly below Byron in a second-floor bedroom looking out on Siena. Her peculiar manner to him persisted. At mealtimes, and generally in Jastrow’s presence, she was distantly cordial. In the library she was almost uncivil, working away in long silences, and giving terse cool answers to questions. Byron had a modest opinion of himself and his attractions, and he took his treatment as probably his due, though he missed the comradeship of their days in Poland and wondered why she never talked about them. He thought he had probably annoyed her by following her here. He was with her again, and that was why he had come; so, for all the brusque treatment, he was as content as a dog reunited with an irritable master.

When Byron arrived in Siena, the Constantine book was on the shelf for the moment, in favor of an expanded magazine article, “The Last Palio,” In describing the race, Jastrow had evoked a gloom-filled image of Europe plunging again toward war. A piece startling in its foresight, it had arrived on the editor’s desk on the first of September, the day of the invasion. The magazine printed it, and Jastrow’s publisher cabled him a frantic request to work it up into a short book, preferably containing a note of optimism (however slight) on the outcome of the war. The cable mentioned a large advance against royalties. This was the task in hand.

In this brief book, Jastrow was striking an Olympian, farseeing, forgiving note. The Germans would probably be beaten to the ground again, he wrote; and even if they gained the rule of the earth, they would in the end be tamed and subdued by their subject peoples, as their ancestors, the Goths and Vandals, had been tamed to turn Christian. Fanatic or barbaric despotism had only its hour. It was a recurring human fever fated to cool and pass. Reason and freedom were what all human history eternally moved toward.

The Germans were the bad children of Europe, Jastrow argued: egotistic, willful, romantic, always poised to break up faltering patterns of order. Arminius had set the ax to the Pax Romana; Martin Luther had broken the back of the universal Church; now Hitler was challenging Europe’s unsteady regime of liberal capitalism, based on an obsolete patchwork structure of nations.

The “Palio” of Europe, wrote Jastrow, the contest of hot little nationalisms in a tiny crowded cockpit of a continent, a larger Siena with the sea for three walls and Asia for a fourth, was worn out. As Siena had only one water company and one power company, one telephone system and one mayor, instead of seventeen of these in the seventeen make-believe sovereignties called Goose, Caterpillar, Giraffe, and so forth, so Europe was ripe for the same commonsense unification. Hitler, a bad-boy genius, had perceived this. He was going about the breakup of the old order cruelly, wrongly, with Teutonic fury, but what mattered was that he was essentially correct. The Second World War was the last Palio. Europe would emerge less colorful but more of a rational and solid structure, whichever side won the idiotic and gory horse race. Perhaps this painful but healthy process would become global, and the whole earth would be unified at last. As for Hitler, the villain of the melodrama, he would either be hunted down and bloodily destroyed like Macbeth, or he would have his triumph and then he would fall or die. The stars would remain, so would the earth, so would the human quest for freedom, understanding, and love among brothers.

As he typed repeated drafts of these ideas, Byron wondered whether Jastrow would have written such a tolerant and hopeful book had he spent September under bombardment in Warsaw, instead of in his villa overlooking Siena. He thought “The Last Palio” was a lot of high-flown irrelevant gab. But he didn’t say so.

Letters were coming to Natalie from Leslie Slote, one or two a week. She seemed less excited over them than she had been in the spring, when she would rush oft to her bedroom to read them, and return looking sometimes radiant, sometimes tearful. Now she casually skimmed the single-space typed pages at her desk, then shoved them in a drawer. One rainy day she was reading such a letter when Byron, typing away at the Palio book, heard her say, “Good God!”

He looked up. “Something the matter?”

“No, no,” she said, very red in the face, waving an agitated hand and flipping over a page. “Sorry. It’s nothing at all.”

Byron resumed work, struggling with one of Jastrow’s bad sentences. The professor wrote in a spiky hurried hand, often leaving out letters or words. He seldom closed his s’s and o’s. It was anybody’s guess what words some of these strings of blue spikes represented. Natalie could puzzle them out, but Byron disliked her pained condescending way of doing it.

“Well!” Natalie sat back in her chair with a thump, staring at the letter. “Briny-”

“Yes?”

She hesitated, chewing her full lower lip. “Oh, hell, I can’t help it. I’ve got to tell someone, and you’re handy. Guess what I hold here in my hot little hand?” She rustled the pages.

“I see what you’re holding.”

“You only think you do.” She laughed in a wicked way. “I’m going to tell you. It’s a proposal of marriage from a gentleman named Leslie Manson Slote, Rhodes Scholar, rising diplomat, and elusive bachelor. And what do you think of that, Byron Henry?”

“Congratulations,” Byron said.

The buzzer on Natalie’s desk rang. “Oh, lord. Briny, please go and see what A.J. wants. I’m in a fog.” She tossed the letter on the desk and thrust long white hands in her hair.

Dr. Jastrow sat blanketed in the downstairs study on the chaise lounge by the fire, his usual place in rainy weather. Facing him in an armchair, a fat pale Italian official, in a green and yellow uniform and black half-boots, was drinking coffee. Byron had never seen the man or the uniform before.

“Oh, Byron, ask Natalie for my resident status file, will you? She knows where it is.” Jastrow turned to the official. “Will you want to see their papers too?”

“Not today, professore. Only yours.”

Natalie looked up with an embarrassed grin from rereading the letter. “Oh, hi. What’s doing?”

Byron told her. Her face sobering, she took a key from her purse and unlocked a small steel file by the desk. “Here.” She gave him a manila folder tied with red tape. “Does it look like trouble? Shall I come down?”

“Better wait till you’re asked.”

As he descended the stairs he heard laughter from the study, and rapid jovial talk. “Oh, thank you, Byron,” Jastrow said, breaking into English as he entered, “just leave it here on the table.” He resumed his anecdote in Italian about the donkey that had gotten into the grounds the previous week, laid waste to a vegetable patch, and chewed a whole chapter of manuscript. The official’s belted belly shook with laughter.

In the library Natalie was typing again. The Slote letter was out of sight.

“There doesn’t seem to be much of a problem,” Byron said.

“That’s good,” she said placidly.

At dinner that night Dr. Jastrow hardly spoke, ate less than usual, and drank two extra glasses of wine. In this household, where things were so monotonously the same day after day, night after night, the first extra glass was an event, the second a bombshell. Natalie finally said, “Aaron, what was that visit about today?”

Jastrow came out of an abstracted stare with a little headshake. “Strangely enough, Giuseppe again.”

Giuseppe was the assistant gardener, whom he had recently discharged: a scrawny, lazy, stupid old drunkard with wiry black hairs on his big knobby purple nose.

Giuseppe had left open the gate through which the donkey had entered. He was always committing such misdemeanors. Jastrow had lost his temper over the destroyed chapter and the ravaged vegetable beds, had been unable to write for two days, and had suffered bad indigestion.

“How does that officer know Giuseppe?” Byron said.

“That’s the odd part. He’s from the alien registration bureau in Florence, yet he mentioned Giuseppe’s nine children, the difficulty of finding work nowadays, and so forth. When I said I’d rehire him, that ended it. He just handed me the registration papers with a victorious grin.” Jastrow sighed and laid his napkin on the table. “I’ve put up with Giuseppe all these years, I really don’t mind. I’m rather tired. Tell Maria I’ll have my fruit and cheese in the study.”

Natalie said when the professor was gone, “Let’s bring the coffee to my room.”

“Sure. Great.”

Never before had she invited him there. Sometimes in his room above he could hear her moving about, a tantalizing, faint, lovely noise. He followed her upstairs with a jumping pulse.

“I live in a big candy box,” she said with a self-conscious look, opening a heavy door. “Aaron bought the place furnished, you know, and left it just the way the lady of the house had it. Ridiculous for me, but -”

She snapped on a light. It was an enormous room, painted pink, with pink and gilt furniture, pink painted cupids on a blue and gold ceiling; pink silk draperies; and a huge double bed covered in frilly pink satin. Dark Natalie, in the old brown wool dress she wore on chilly evenings, looked decidedly odd in this Watteau setting. But Byron found the contrast as exciting as everything else about her. She lit the log fire in the marble fireplace carved with Roman figures, and they sat in facing armchairs, taking coffee from the low table between them.

“Why do you suppose Aaron’s so upset?” Natalie said, settling comfortably in the large chair and pulling the long pleated skirt far down over her beautiful legs. “Giuseppe’s an old story. Actually it was a mistake to fire him. He knows all about the water connections and the electric lines, much more than Tomaso. And he’s really good at the topiary work, even if he is a dirty old drunk.”

“A.J. was coerced, Natalie.” She bit her lip, nodding. Byron added, “We’re at the mercy of these people, A.J. even more than you and me. He owns property, he’s stuck here.”

“Oh, the Italians are all right. They’re not Germans.”

“Mussolini’s no bargain. Berel gave A.J. the right advice. Get out!”

Natalie smiled: “Lekh lekha. My God, how far off that all seems. I wonder how he is.” Her smile faded. “I’ve shut Warsaw from my mind. Or tried to.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“How about you, Briny? Do you ever think about it?”

“Some. I keep dreaming about it.”

“Oh, God, so do I. That hospital. I go round and round in it, night after night -”

“When Warsaw fell,” Byron said, “it hit me hard.” He told Natalie about the Wannsee episode. At his description of the waiter’s sudden turnabout, she laughed bitterly.

“Your father sounds superb.”

“He’s all right.”

“He must think I’m a vampire who all but lured you to your death.”

“We haven’t talked about you.”

Sudden gloom shadowed Natalie’s face. She poured more coffee for both of them. “Stir the fire, Briny. I’m cold. Giuseppe’s brought in green wood, as usual.”

He made the fire flare, and threw on it a light log from a blighted tree, which quickly blazed. “Ah, that’s good!” She jumped up, turned off the electric chandelier, and stood by the fire, looking at the flames. “That moment in the railroad station,” she nervously burst out, “when they took away the Jews! I still can’t face it. That was one reason I was so nasty at Königsberg. I was in torture. I kept thinking that I could have done something. Suppose I’d stepped forward, said I was Jewish, forced the issue? Suppose we’d all created a scandal? It might have made a difference. But we calmly went to the train, and they trudged off the other way.”

Byron said, “We might have lost you and Mark Hartley. The thing was touch and go.”

“Yes, I know. Leslie prevented that. He stood his ground, at least, though he was shaking like a leaf: he did his plain duty. But those other ambassadors and chargés — well -”

Natalie had begun to pace. “And my family in Medzice! When I picture those kind, good people in the clutches of the Germans — but what’s the use? It’s futile, it’s sickening, to dwell on that.” She threw up her hand in a despairing gesture and dropped in her chair, sitting on her legs with her skirt spread over them. Nothing of her was visible in the firelight but her face and her tensely clasped hands. She stared at the fire. “Speaking of old Slote,” she said after a long pause, in an entirely different tone, “what d’you think of his proposal to make an honest woman of me?”

“I’m not surprised.”

“You’re not? I’m stunned. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

“He told me in Berlin he might marry you. He’d be crazy not to, if he could.”

“‘Well, he’s had that option open to him for a hell of a long time, dear.” She poured coffee and sipped, looking darkly at him over the rim of the cup, “Had a big discussion about me in Berlin, you two gentlemen, did you?”

“Not a big discussion. He mentioned that you were just as surly to him that last day in Königsberg as you’d been to me.”

“I was feeling absolutely horrible that day, Briny.”

“Well, that’s all right. I thought I might have offended you somehow, so I asked him.”

“This is getting interesting. What else did Slote say about me?”

The low, vibrant voice, the amused glinting of her eyes in the firelight, stirred Byron. “That you were no girl for me to get involved with, and that he hadn’t known an hour’s peace of mind since he first laid eyes on you.”

She uttered a low gloating laugh. “Two accurate statements, my pet. Tell me more.”

“That’s about it. It was the same conversation in which he gave me the reading list.”

“Yes, and wasn’t that pure Slote? Coming it over you with his book learning! An illuminating little incident, that. Didn’t he really tell you all about us? About him and me?”

Byron shook his head.

Natalie said, “You wouldn’t go and get us some brandy, would you? I think I’d like a little brandy.”

He raced down the stairs and up again, returning with a bottle and two shimmering snifters. Swirling the brandy round and round in her hands, looking into the balloon glass and rarely raising her eyes at him, Natalie broke loose with a surprising rush of words about her affair with Leslie Slote. It took her a long time. Byron said little, interrupting only to throw more wood on the fire. It was a familiar tale of a clever older man having fun with a girl and getting snared into a real passion. Resolving to marry him, she had made his life a misery. He didn’t want to marry her, she said, simply because she was Jewish and it would be awkward for his career. That was all his clouds of words had ever come to. At last, with this letter, after thirty months, she had him where she wanted him.

Byron hated every word of the story, yet he was fascinated, and grateful. The closemouthed girl was taking him into her life. These words, which couldn’t be unsaid, were ending the strange tension between them since Warsaw, their own little phony war — the long hostile silences in the library, her holing up in her room, her odd snappish condescension. As she talked, they were growing intimate as they never had become in a month of adventuring through Poland.

Everything about this girl interested him. If it was the account of her affair with another man, let it be that! At least Byron was talking about Natalie Jastrow with Natalie Jastrow, and this was what he had been starved for. He was hearing this sweet rough voice with its occasional New Yorkisms, and he could watch the play of her free gesturing hand in the firelight, the swoop and sudden stop in the air of flat palm and fingers, her visible signature.

Natalie Jastrow was the one person he had ever met who meant as much to him as his father did. In the same way, almost, he hungered to talk to his father, to listen to him, to be with him, even though he had to resist and withdraw, even though he knew that in almost every conversation he either offended or disappointed Victor Henry. His mother he took for granted, a warm presence, cloying in her affection, annoying in her kittenish changeability. His father was terrific, and in that way Natalie was terrific, entirely aside from being a tall dark girl whom he had hopelessly craved to see in his arms since the first hour they had met.

“Well, there you have it,” Natalie said. “This mess has been endless, but that’s the general idea. How about some more of Aaron’s brandy? Wouldn’t you like some? It’s awfully good brandy. Funny, I usually don’t care for it.”

Byron poured more for both of them, though his glass wasn’t empty.

“What I’ve been puzzling about all day,” she said after a sip, “is why Leslie is throwing in the towel now. The trouble is, I think I know.”

“He’s lonesome for you,” Byron said.

Natalie shook her head. “Leslie Slote behaved disgustingly on the Praha road. I despised him for it, and I let him know I did. That was the turnaround. He’s been chasing me ever since. I guess in a way I’ve been running, too. I haven’t even answered half his letters.”

Byron said, “You’ve always exaggerated that whole thing. All he did -”

“Shut up, Byron. Don’t be mealy-mouthed with me. All he did was turn yellow and use me as an excuse. He hid behind my skirts. The Swedish ambassador all but laughed in his face.” She tossed off most of her brandy. “Look, physical courage isn’t something you can help. It isn’t even important nowadays. You can be a world leader and a cringing sneak. That’s what Hitler probably is. Still, it happened. It happened. I’m not saying I won’t marry Leslie Slote because shellfire made him panic. After all, he behaved well enough at the railroad station. But I do say that’s why he’s proposing to me. This is his way of apologizing and being a man. It’s not quite the answer to my maidenly prayers.”

“It’s what you want.”

“Well, I don’t know. There are complications. There’s my family. My parents had wild fits when I told them I was in love with a Christian. My father took to his bed for a week, though that bit of melodrama left me unmoved. Well, now there’s that whole fight again. And Leslie’s proposal is odd. It’s not very specific as to time and place. If I wrote him back yes, he might well get on his bicycle again.”

“If he’s really that kind of fool, which I doubt very much,” Byron said, “you could just let him bicycle away.”

“Then there’s Aaron.”

“He’s not your problem. He ought to get out of Italy in any case.”

“He’s very reluctant to go.”

“Well, he survived while we were away.”

“Oh, that’s what you think. You should have seen the library and study when I got back. And he hadn’t written anything in weeks. Aaron should have gotten married ages ago. He didn’t, and he needs a lot of fussing and petting. He can’t even sharpen a pencil properly.”

Byron wondered whether Natalie’s irritable garrulity was due to the brandy. She was gesturing broadly, talking breathlessly, and her eyes were wild. “And there’s still another complication, you know. The biggest.”

“What’s that?”

She stared at him. “Don’t you know what it is, Briny? Haven’t you any idea? Not the faintest inkling? Come on now. Stop it.”

He said or rather stammered, because the sudden penetrating sexuality in Natalie Jastrow’s glance made him drunk, “I don’t think I do.”

“All right then, I’ll tell you. You’ve done it, you devil, and you know it. You’ve done what you’ve wanted to do from the first day you came here. I’m in love with you.” She peered at him, her eyes shining and enormous. “Ye gods, what a dumb stunned face. Don’t you believe me?”

Very hoarsely he said, “I just hope it’s true.”

He got out of his chair, and went to her. She jumped up and they embraced. “Oh God,” she said, clinging to him, and she kissed him and kissed him. “You have such a marvellous mouth,” she muttered. She thrust her hands in his hair, she caressed his face. “Such a nice smile. Such fine hands. I love to watch your hands. I love the way you move. You’re so sweet.” It was like a hundred daydreams Byron had had, but far more intense and confusing and delicious. She was rubbing against him in crude sensual delight, almost like a cat, the brown wool dress was scratchy in his hands. The perfume of her hair couldn’t be daydreamed, nor the moist warm sweet breath of her mouth. Above all gleamed the inconceivable wonder that this was happening. They stood embraced by the crackling flames, kissing, saying broken foolish sentences, whispering, laughing, kissing, and kissing again.

Natalie pulled away. She ran a few steps and faced him, her eyes blazing. “Well, all right. I had to do that or die.” I’ve never felt anything like this in my life, Byron, this maddening pull to you. I’ve been fighting it off and fighting it off because it’s no damn good, you know. You’re a boy. I won’t have it. Not a Christian. Not again. And besides -” She put both hands over her face. “Oh. Oh! Don’t look at me like that, Briny. Go out of my bedroom.” Byron turned to go, on legs almost caving under him. He wanted to please her.

She said in the next breath, “Christ, you’re a gentleman. It’s one of the unbelievable things about you. Would you rather stay? My darling, my love, I don’t want to put you out, I want to talk some more, but I want to make some sense, that’s all. And I don’t want to make any false moves. I’ll do anything you say. I absolutely adore you.”

He looked at her standing in the firelight in the long wool dress with her arms crossed, one leg out to a side, one hip thrust out, a typical Natalie pose. He was dazed with happiness beyond imagining, and flooded with gratitude for being alive. “Listen — would you think of marrying me?” Byron said.

Natalie’s eyes popped wide open and her mouth dropped. Byron could not help it; he burst out laughing at the comic change of her face, and that made her laugh crazily too. She came to him, almost flung herself at him, still laughing so uproariously that she could hardly manage to kiss him. “God in heaven,” she gasped, twining him in her arms, “you’re incredible. That’s two proposals in one day for la Jastrow! It never rains but it pours, eh?”

“I’m serious,” he said. “I don’t know why we’re laughing. I want to marry you. It’s always seemed preposterous but if you really do love me -”

“It is preposterous” — Natalie spoke with her lips to his cheek — preposterous beyond words, but where you’re concerned I appear to be quite mindless, and perhaps — well! Nobody can say you’re a beardless boy, anyway! Quite sandpapery, aren’t you?” She kissed him once more, hard, and loosened her arms. “The first idea was right. You leave. Good-night, darling. I know you’re serious, and I’m terribly touched. One thing we’ve got in this godforsaken place is time, all the time in the world.”

In the darkness, on his narrow bed in the tiny attic room, Byron lay wide awake. For a while he heard her moving about below, then the house was silent. He could still taste Natalie’s lips. His hands smelled of her perfume. Outside in the valley donkeys heehawed to each other across the echoing slopes, a misguided rooster hailed a dawn hours away, and dogs barked. There came a rush of wind and a long drumming of rain on the tiles, and after a while water dripped into the pail near his bed, under the worst leak. The rain passed, moonlight shafted faint and blue through the little round window, the pattering in the pail ceased, and still Byron lay with open eyes, trying to believe it, trying to separate his dreams and fantasies of half a year from the real hour when Natalie Jastrow had overwhelmed him with endearments. Now his feverish mind ran on what he must do next. The window was turning violet when he fell asleep in a jumble of ideas and resolves, ranging from medical school and short-story writing to the banking business in Washington. Some distant cousins of his mother did control a bank.

“Hi, Natalie.”

“Oh, hi there. Sleep well?”

It was almost eleven when he hurried into the library. Byron was a hardened slugabed, but he had not come down this late before. Three books lay open on Natalie’s desk, and she was typing away. She gave him one ardent glance and went on with her work. Byron found on his desk a mass of first-draft pages heavily scribbled with Jastrow’s corrections, to which was clipped a note in red crayon: Let me have this material a lunch, please.

“A.J. looked in here ten minutes ago,” Natalie said, “and made vile noises.”

Byron counted the pages. “He’s going to make viler ones at lunch. I’m sorry, but I didn’t close my eyes till dawn.”

“Didn’t you?” she said, with a secret little smile. “I slept exceedingly well.”

With a quick shuffling of papers and carbon he began to type, straining his eyes at Jastrow’s scrawl. A hand ran through his hair and rested warmly on his neck. “Let’s see.” She stood over him, looking down at him with affectionate amusement. Pinned on the old brown dress over her left breast was the gold brooch with purple stones from Warsaw. She had never before worn it. She glanced through the pages and took a few. “Poor Briny, why couldn’t you sleep? Never mind, type your head off, and so will I.”

They did not finish the work before lunch, but by then, as it turned out, Dr. Jastrow had other things on his mind. At noon, an enormous white Lancia rattled the gravel outside the villa. Byron and Natalie could hear the rich voice of Tom Searle and the warm hard laugh of his wife. Celebrated American actors, the Searles had been living off and on for fifteen years in a hilltop villa not far from Jastrows. The woman painted and gardened, while the man built brick walls and did the cooking. Endlessly they read old plays, new plays, and novels that might become plays. Other celebrities came to Siena just to see them. Through them Jastrow had met and entertained Maugham, Berenson, Gertrude Lawrence, and Picasso. A retired college professor would have been a minnow among these big fish; but the success of A Jew’s Jesus had put him fairly in their company. He loved being part of the celebrities’ group, though he grumbled about the interference with his work. He often drove down to Florence with the Searles to meet their friends, and Natalie and Byron thought the actors might be passing by now to fetch him off. But coming down for lunch, they found A.J. alone in the drawing room, sneezing, red-nosed, and waving an emptied sherry glass. He complained that they were late. In fact they were a bit early.

“The Searles are leaving,” he said when lunch was over, having sneezed and blown his nose all through the meal without uttering a word. “Just like that. They came to say good-bye.”

“Oh? Are they doing a new play?” said Natalie.

“They’re getting out. Lock, stock, and barrel. They’re moving every stick back to the States.”

“But doesn’t their lease run for how many more years? Five?”

“Seven. They’re abandoning the lease. They can’t afford to get stuck here, they say, if the war spreads.” Jastrow morosely fingered his beard. “That’s one difference between leasing and buying. You just walk away. You don’t bother your head about what happens to the place. I must say they urged me to lease. I should have listened to them. But the purchase price was so cheap!”

Byron said, “Well, sir, if you think there’s any danger, your skin comes first.”

“I have no such fears. Neither have they. For them it’s a matter of business. We’ll have our coffee in the lemon house.” With a peevish toss of his head, he lapsed into silence.

The lemon house, a long glassed-in structure with a dirt floor, full of small potted citrus trees, looked out on a grand panorama of the town and the rounded brown hills. Sheltered here from cold winds that swept up the ravine, the trees throve in the pouring sunlight, and all winter long blossomed and bore fruit. Jastrow believed, contrary to every medical opinion, that the sweet heavy scent of the orange and lemon blooms was good for the asthma that hit him when he was nervous or angry. Possibly because he believed this, it tended to work. His wheezing stopped while they drank their coffee. The warm sun cheered him up. He said, “I predict they’ll sneak back in short order with their tails between their legs, and three vans of furniture toiling up the hill. They remind me of the people who used to go fleeing off Martha’s Vineyard at the first news of a hurricane. I sat through four hurricanes and thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle.”

Natalie said after he left, “He’s badly shaken.”

“I hope he gets shaken loose from here.”

“Dear, this house will go to rack and ruin if A.J. leaves it.”

“So what?”

“You’ve never owned anything, have you, Briny? Or saved any money. Once you have, you may understand.”

“Look, Natalie, A.J. had a windfall late in life and got carried away and bought himself a big Italian villa for a song, in a lonesome mountain town. All right. Suppose he walks away now? If he offers it for sale he’ll get something for it. Otherwise he can return after the war and put it back in shape. Or he can just forget it, and let it fall down. Easy come, easy go.”

“You see things so simply,” she said.

They were sitting side by side on a white wicker couch. He started to put his arm around her. “Stop that,” she said, catching her breath and deflecting his arm. “That’s too simple, too. Listen carefully, Byron. How old are you? Are you twenty-five yet? I’m twenty-seven.”

“I’m old enough for you, Natalie.”

“Old enough for what? To sleep with me? Don’t talk rubbish. The question is, what are you doing with yourself? I can teach at a university anytime. I’ve got my M.A. thesis almost finished. What have you got? A smile that drives me mad and a handsome head of hair. You’re brave, you’re gentle, but you just drifted here. You only stayed because of me. You’re killing time and you’re trained for nothing.”

“Natalie, how would you like to be married to a banker?”

“A what? A banker?”

He told her about his relatives and their bank in Washington. Hands folded in her lap, she beamed at him, her face aglow in the sunshine. “How does that sound?” he said.

“Oh, fine,” she said. “You’re really facing up to life at last. A stern, serious business, isn’t it? Tell me one thing.”

“What?”

“Tell me when you decided you liked me.”

“Don’t you want to discuss this bank idea?”

“Of course, dear. All in good time. When was it?”

“All right, I’ll tell you. When you took off your sunglasses.”

“My sunglasses? When was that?”

“Why, that first day, when we came into the villa with Slote. Don’t you remember? You had these big dark glasses on in the car, but then you took them off, and I could see your eyes.”

“So?”

“You asked me when I fell in love with you. I’m telling you.”

“But it’s so absurd. Like everything else you say and do. What did you know about me? Anyhow, my eyes must have been totally bloodshot. I’d been up till four, having one hellish row with Leslie. You struck me as nothing at all, dear, so I didn’t give a damn. Now look, you don’t really want to be a banker, do you?”

He said with an abashed grin, “Well, I did think of one other thing. But don’t laugh at me.”

“I won’t.”

“I thought of the Foreign Service. It’s interesting and it’s serving the country.”

“You and Leslie in the same service,” she said. “That would be a hot one.” She took his hand in a maternal way that depressed Byron. “This isn’t much fun for you, Briny dear, all this serious talk.”

“That’s okay,” Byron said. “Let’s go right on with it.”

For a moment she sat pondering, holding his hand in her lap, as she had in the Swedish ambassador’s limousine. “I’d better tell you what I really think. The trouble is you are trained for something. You’re a naval officer.”

“That’s the one thing I’m not, and that I’ve made a career of not being.”

“You already have a commission.”

“I’m just a lowly reserve. That’s nothing.”

“If the war goes on, you’ll be called up. You’ll stay in for years. That’s what you’ll probably be in the end, from sheer inertia, and family custom, and the passing of time.”

“I can resign my reserve commission tomorrow. Shall I?”

“But suppose we get in the war? What then? Would you fight?”

“There’s nothing else to do then.”

She put her hand in his hair, and yanked it. “Yes, that’s how your mind works. Well, I love you for that, and for other things, but Byron, I’m not going to be the wife of a naval officer. I can’t think of a more ridiculous and awful existence for me. I wouldn’t marry a test pilot either, or an actor, don’t you understand?”

“It’s no issue I tell you, I’ll never be a naval officer — what the devil? Now what? Why are you crying?”

She dashed the sudden tears from her face with the back of her hand, smiling. “Oh, shut up. This is an insane conversation. The more I try to make sense, the wilder it all gets. All I know is that I’m crazy about you. If it’s a dead end, who cares? I obviously thrive on dead ends. No, not now, love, really, no -” She gasped the last words as he firmly took her in his arms.

There was nobody in sight. Beyond the glass there was only the panorama of hills and town, and inside the lemon house silence and the heavy sweet scent of the blossoms.

They kissed and kissed, touching and holding and gripping each other. Soon Natalie happened to glance up and there stood the gardener Giuseppe outside the glass, leaning on a wheelbarrow full of cuttings, watching. With a squinting inebriated leer, he wiped a sleeve of his sweater across his knobbed nose, and obscenely winked.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said, yanking angrily at her skirt. The gardener showed sparse foul teeth in a grin and trundled the wheelbarrow away. Byron sat flushed, dazed, and dishevelled, looking after him.

“Well, there goes our little secret, sweetheart. Kissing and smooching under glass. What’s happened to me? This whole thing is a plain brute attraction between two people isolated together too long.” She leaped to her feet and pulled at his hand. “But I love you. I can’t help it. I don’t want to help it. Oh, that son of a bitch Giuseppe! Come, let’s get back to the rock pile. We must.”

Jastrow called from his study as they came into the house, “Natalie, where is your letter? May I read it?”

“What letter, A.J.? I didn’t get any mail.”

“Are you sure? I have one from your mother. She says she’s written you another and much longer one. Come read this. It’s important.”

He waved a flimsy airmail sheet as Byron went upstairs.

There were only half a dozen lines in her mother’s neat featureless writing, a Manhattan public school script:

Natalie checked the mail piled on her desk in the library, but there was only one letter for her, from Slote. Looking up from his work, Byron saw her sombre expression. “What is it, Natalie?”

“It’s my father. I may have to leave.”

The letter from her mother arrived two days later. Meantime Natalie resumed a certain aloofness toward Byron, though she still wore the brooch, and looked at him with changed eyes.

She took the long and somewhat frantic account of her father’s heart attack to Jastrow, who was having his tea by the fire in the study, wrapped in a shawl. He shook his head sympathetically over it and handed it back to her. Gazing at the fire and sipping tea, he said, “You had better go.”

“Oh, I think so. I’m practically packed.”

“What was Louis’s trouble last time? Was it this bad?” The brothers were deeply estranged — Natalie did not know exactly why — and this breaking of their long tacit silence about her father gave her an awkward, unpleasant sensation.

“No, not really. The trouble was my announcement that I was in love with Leslie. Papa got awfully weak and had breathing difficulty and a blackout episode. But he wasn’t hospitalized that time.”

Jastrow pensively fingered his beard. “He’s only sixty-one. You know it gets to be suspenseful, Natalie, this question of whose heredity you’ve got. Our mother’s family mostly popped off in their fifties. But Father’s two brothers both made it past ninety and he reached eighty-eight. My teeth are like my father’s. I have excellent teeth. Louis always had a lot of trouble with his teeth, the way Mama did.” Jastrow became aware of the girl’s dark watchful regard. He made a little apologetic gesture with both hands. “You’re thinking what a self-centered old horror A.J. is.”

“But I wasn’t thinking that at all.”

Jastrow put on cotton gloves to poke at the fire and throw on a fresh log. He was vain about his small finely shaped hands. “You won’t come back. I know that. Life will get difficult here. Possibly I could go to New Mexico or Arizona. But they’re such dull, arid, zero-culture places! The thought of trying to write there!” He gave a deep sigh, almost a groan. “No doubt my books aren’t that important. Still, the work is what keeps me going.”

“Your books are important, A.J.”

“Are they? Why?”

Natalie sat leaning her chin on a fist, groping for an honest and precise answer. She said after a pause, “Of course they’re extremely readable, and often brilliant, but that’s not their distinction. Their originality lies in the spirit. The books are very Jewish. In a creditable, unsentimental way, in substance and in attitude. They’ve made me, at least, realize how very much Christendom owes this bizarre little folk we belong to. It’s surprising how much of that you’ve gotten even into the Constantine book.”

Her words had a remarkable effect on Aaron Jastrow. He smiled tremulously, his eyes misted, and he all at once did look strikingly Jewish — the mouth, the nose, the expression, the soft white hand at his beard, were all features of a hatless little rabbi. He spoke in a soft shaky voice. “Of course you know exactly what to say to please me.”

“That’s what I think, Aaron.”

“Well, bless you. I’ve evolved into a pagan, a materialist, and a hedonist — and I fell in love with the grandeur of Christianity and of Jesus long long ago — but none of that has made me less Jewish. Nobody else in the family will accept that, your father least of all. I’m so grateful that you can. I truly think that the books on Constantine and Luther will round out the picture. I want to get them done. In my way I’m bearing witness, as my rabbinic forebears did in theirs. Though no doubt they’d be horrified by me.” He studied her face. He smiled, and his eyes began to twinkle. “How long after you left would Byron remain? He gives me such a secure feeling, just by being here.”

“Give him a raise in salary. That’ll convince him more than anything. He’s never earned a penny before.”

Jastrow pursed his lips, rounded his-eyes, and tilted his head. Many years of living in Italy showed in the mannerism. “I have to watch my money now. We’ll see. My strong impression is, actually, that you’ll marry Leslie once you get back there, and — oh, stop blushing and looking so coy. Have I hit it?”

“Never mind, A.J.”

“I’m sure if Byron were aware of that, he’d be more likely to stay on.” Jastrow stroked his beard, smiling at her.

“Good God, Aaron! Do you expect me to tell Byron Henry I’m going to marry Slote, just to make him stay with you?”

“Why, my dear, whoever suggested such a thing? Wait — my point is -” Jastrow stretched out a hand and looked after her, utterly astonished at her abrupt walkout.

Chapter 20

“Holy cow!” Bryon exclaimed. “There’s my father, or his double.”

“Where?” said Natalie. Her flight was delayed, and they were drinking coffee in the Rome airport at a table outside a little café; the same café where they had lunched before setting off for Warsaw.

“Inside that ring of carabinieri over there.”

He pointed to a group of men leaving the terminal, escorted by six deferential police officers. Some of the party wore the green uniform of the foreign ministry; the rest were in civilian clothes. The military bearing of a short broad-shouldered man, in a pepper-and-salt suit and soft hat, had caught Byron’s eye. He stood, saying, “Can it be him? But why the devil didn’t he write or wire me that he was coming to Italy? I’ll take a look.”

“Briny!”

He was starting to lope away; he stopped short. “Yes?”

“If it is your father — I’m so tacky and sooty from that horrible train ride, and he’s obviously busy.” Natalie, usually so self-assured, suddenly looked confused and nervous, in an appealing, pathetic way. “I wasn’t expecting this. I’d rather meet him another time.”

“Well, let’s see if it’s him.”

Victory Henry heard the voice behind him just as the party reached the exit doors. “Dad! Dad! Wait up!”

Recognizing the voice, Pug turned, waved, and asked his escort from the ministry to wait for him. “D’addordo.” The Italian smiled and bowed, eyeing sharply the young man who was hurrying up. “I will see to your luggage, Commander, and meet you outside. There is plenty of time.”

The father and son clasped hands. “Well, how about this?” Victor Henry said, looking up at Byron’s face, with affection he usually concealed when less surprised.

“What’s up, Dad? Couldn’t you let me know you were coming?”

“It happened sudden-like. I intended to ring you tonight. What are you doing down here in Rome?”

“Natalie’s going home. Her father’s sick.”

“Oh? Has she left already?”

“No. That’s her, sitting over there.”

“That’s the famous Natalie Jastrow? The one in gray?”

“No, further over, in black. With the big hat.”

Victor Henry caught a new proprietary note in his son’s voice. The listless, hangdog air of his Berlin days had given way to a confident glance and a straighter back. “You’re looking mighty bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” Pug said.

“I feel marvellous.”

“I’d like to meet that girl.” The father suddenly strode toward her, so fast that Byron had to take a running step or two to catch up. There was no stopping him. They came and faced Natalie, who remained seated, hands clasped in her lap.

“Natalie, this is Dad.”

With such a flat introduction these two people, the opposed poles in Byron’s life, all at once confronted each other. Natalie offered her hand to Byron’s father, looked him in the eye, and waited for him to speak. At first sight Victor Henry was taken by this weary-looking travel-stained girl with the dark eyes and gaunt face. She was not the legendary adventurous Jewess he had built up in his imagination; she had an everyday American look; but withal there was a certain exotic aura, and a strong calm feminine presence. She must be feeling highly self-conscious, he thought, but there was no sign of it. In her slight smile as he took her hand, there was even a trace of reflected affection for Byron.

He said, “I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

She nodded her thanks. “I don’t know how bad it is. But they want me at home, and so I’m going.” Her low voice was sweet, yet as firm as her look.

“Are you coming back?”

“I’m not sure. Dr. Jastrow may be returning to the States too, you see.”

“He’d be well advised to do that fairly fast.”

Pug was looking keenly at her, and she was meeting his glance. When neither found more to say for the moment, it became a sort of staring contest. Soon Natalie smiled a broad, wry, puckish smile, as though to say “All right, you’re his father and I don’t blame you for trying to see what’s there. How do you like it?”

This disconcerted Victor Henry. He seldom lost such eye-to-eye confrontations, but this time he shifted his glance to Byron, who was watching with lively interest, struck by Natalie’s swift recovery of her poise. “Well, Briny,” he almost growled, “I ought to mosey along, and not keep that foreign ministry type waiting.”

“Right, Dad.”

Natalie said, “Byron told me that you became friendly with the Tudsburys in Berlin, Commander. I know Pamela.”

“You do?” Pug managed a smile. She was actually trying to put him at his ease with small talk, and he liked that.

“Yes, in Paris she and I used to date two fellows who shared the same flat. She’s lovely.”

“I agree, and very devoted to her father. Maniacal driver, though.”

“Oh, did you find that out? I once drove with her from Paris to Chartres, and almost walked back. She scared me senseless.”

“I’d guess it would take more than that to scare you.” Pug held out his hand. “I’m glad I met you, even in this accidental way, Natalie.” Awkwardly, in almost a mumble, he added “It explains a lot. Happy landings. Flying all the way?”

“I’ve got a seat on the Thursday Clipper out of Lisbon. I hope I don’t get bumped.”

“You shouldn’t. Things are quiet now. But you’re well out of this continent. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Commander Henry.”

Victor Henry abruptly walked off, with Byron hurrying at his elbow. “Briny, what about you, now? You’re staying on in Siena?”

“For the time being.”

“Do you know that Warren’s engaged?”

“Oh, it’s definite now?”

“Yes. They’ve set a date for May twentieth, after he finishes his carrier training. I hope you’ll count on getting back by then. You won’t see any more brothers’ weddings. I’m working on a leave for myself.”

“I’ll certainly try. How’s Mom?”

“Off her feed. Berlin’s getting her down.”

“I thought she liked it.”

“It’s becoming less likable.” They stopped at the terminal’s glass doors. “How long will you be in Rome?”

“If I can see you, Dad, I’ll just stay on till you’re free.”

“Well, fine. Check in at the embassy with Captain Kirkwood. He’s the naval attaché. Could be we’ll dine together tonight.”

“Great.”

“That’s some girl.”

Byron smiled uncertainly. “Could you really tell anything?”

“What you never said is that she’s so pretty.”

“What? I honestly don’t think she is. Not pretty, exactly. I’m nuts about her, as you well know, but—”

“She’s got eyes you could drown in. She’s stunning. However, what I wrote you about her long ago still goes. Even more so, now that I’ve seen her. She’s a grown-up woman.” He put his hand for a moment on Byron’s shoulder. “No offense.”

“I love her.”

“Well, we won’t settle that question here and now. Go back to her, she’s sitting there all alone. And call Kirkwood about tonight.”

“I will.”

Natalie’s face was tense and inquiring when Byron came back. He fell into the chair beside her. “Gad, that was a shock. I still can’t quite believe it. It all went so fast. He looks tired.”

“Do you know why he’s here?”

Byron shook his head slowly.

She said, “I didn’t picture him that way. He doesn’t look severe; on the contrary, almost genial. But then when he talks he’s scary.”

“He fell for you.”

“Byron, don’t talk rot. Look at me. A soot-covered slattern.”

“He said something sappy about your eyes.”

“I don’t believe it. What did he say?”

“I won’t tell you. It’s embarrassing. I never heard him say anything like it before. What luck! He likes you. Say, my brother’s getting married.”

“Oh? When?”

“In May. She’s the daughter of a congressman. She doesn’t seem all that concerned about marrying a naval officer! Let’s make it a double wedding.”

“Why not? You’ll be manager of a bank by then, no doubt.”

They were both smiling, but the unsettled questions between them put an edge in their tones. It was a relief when the droning loudspeaker announced her flight. Byron carried her hand luggage and some fragile gifts for her family into the mill of jabbering, weeping passengers and relatives at the gate. Natalie was clutching her ticket, and trying to understand the shouts of the uniformed attendants. He attempted to kiss her. But it wasn’t much of a kiss.

“I love you, Natalie,” he said.

She embraced him with one arm amid the jostling passengers, and spoke over the tumult. “It’s as well that I’m going home just now, I think. Meantime I met your father! That was something. He did like me? Really?”

“You bowled him over, I tell you. And why not?”

The crowd was starting to push through the gate.

“How will I ever carry all this stuff? Load me up, sweetheart.”

“Promise me you’ll cable if you decide not to come back,” Byron said, poking bundles into her arms and under them. “Because I’ll take the next plane home.”

“Yes, I’ll cable.”

“And promise that you’ll make no other decision, do nothing drastic, before you see me again.”

“Oh, Byron how young you are. All these damned words. Don’t you know how I love you?”

“Promise!”

Her dark eyes wet and huge, her hands and arms piled, the green and yellow ticket sticking out of her fingers, she shrugged, laughed, and said, “Oh, hell. It’s a promise, but you know what Lenin said. Promises like piecrusts are made to be broken. Good-bye, my darling, my sweet. Good-bye Byron.” Her voice rose as the press of passengers dragged her away.

After a couple of hours of troubled sleep at the hotel, Commander Henry put on a freshly pressed uniform, with shoes gleaming like black mirrors, and walked to the embassy. Under a low gray sky, in the rows of tables and chairs along the Via Veneto, only a few people were braving the December chill. The gasoline shortage had almost emptied the broad boulevard of traffic. Like Berlin, this capital city exuded penury and gloom.

Captain Kirkwood had left for the day. His yeoman handed Pug a long lumpy envelope. Two small objects clattered to the desk when he ripped it open: silver eagles on pins, the collar insignia of a captain.

Clipped to the note was a strip of gold braid, and the Alnav letter listing newly selected captains, on which Victor (none) Henry was ringed in heavy red lines.

The yeoman’s refreshing, freckled American face wore a wide grin. “Congratulations, Cap’n.”

“Thank you. Did my son call?”

“Yes, suh. He’s coming to dinner. That’s all arranged. Ah’ve got fresh coffee going, suh, if you’d like a cup in the cap’n’s office.”

“That’ll be fine.”

Sitting in the attaché’s swivel chair, Pug drank one cup after another of the rich Navy brew, delightful after months of the German ersatz stuff. He ranged on the desk before him the eagles, the Alnav, the strip of gold braid. His seamed pale face looked calm, almost bored, as he swung the chair idly, contemplating the tokens of his new rank; but he was stirred, exalted, and above all relieved.

He had long been dreading that the selection board, on this first round, might pass him over. Execs of battleships and cruisers, squadron commanders of submarines and destroyers, insiders in BuShips and BuOrd, could well crowd out an attaché. The big hurdle of the race for flag rank was early promotion to captain. The few officers who became admirals had to make captain on the wing. This early promotion, this small dry irrevocable statistic in the record, was his guerdon for a quarter of a century of getting things done. It was his first promotion in ten years, and it was the crucial one.

He wished he could share this cheering news at once with his restless wife. Perhaps when he got back to Berlin they could throw a wingding, he thought, for embassy people, correspondents, and friendly foreign attachés, and lighten the gloom lying heavy in the Jew’s mansion in Grunewald.

Natalie Jastrow popped back into his mind, displacing even the promotion. Since the chance encounter, he kept thinking of her. In those few minutes he had sensed the powerful, perhaps unbreakable, bond between his son and the girl. Yet how could that be? Young women like Natalie Jastrow, if they went outside their natural age bracket, tended to marry a man almost his own age rather than to reach down and cradle-snatch a stripling like Byron. Natalie was more mature and accomplished than Janice, who was marrying Byron’s older brother. It was mismatch enough for these reasons, and made him wonder about her sense and stability, but the Jewish problem loomed above all.

Victor Henry was no bigot, in his own best judgment. His narrowly bounded life had brought him into very little contact with Jews. He was an arid realist and the whole thing spelled trouble. If he were to have half-Jewish grandchildren, well, with such a mother they would probably be handsome and bright. But he thought his son was not man enough to handle the complications and might never be. The coolness and courage he had displayed in Warsaw were fine traits for an athletic or military career, but in daily life they meant little, compared to ambition, industry, and common sense.

“Mr. Gianelli is here, sir.” The yeoman’s voice spoke through the squawk box.

“Very well.” Victor Henry swept up the tokens and put them in a trouser pocket, not nearly as happy as he had once thought promotion to captain would make him.

The San Francisco banker had changed to an elegant double-breasted gray suit with bold chalk stripes and out-size British lapels. The interior of his green Rolls Royce smelled of a strong cologne. “I trust you enjoyed your nap as much as I did mine,” he said, lighting a very long cigar. All his gestures had the repose, and all of the details of his person — manicure, rings, shirt, tie — the sleekness, of secure wealth. Withal, he appeared stimulated and slightly nervous. “Now, I’ve already spoken to the foreign minister. You’ve met Count Ciano? Pug shook his head. “I’ve known him well for many years. He’s definitely coming to the reception, and from there will take me to the Palazzo Venezia. Now, what about you? What are your instructions?”

“To consider myself your aide as long as you’re in Italy and Germany, sir, and to make myself useful in any way you desire.”

“Do you understand Italian?”

“Poorly, to say the least. I can grope through a newspaper if I have to.”

“That’s a pity.” The banker smoked his cigar with calm relish, his drooping eyes sizing up Victor Henry. “Still, the President said there might be value in having you along at both interviews, if these heads of state will stand for it. Just another pair of eyes and ears. At Karinhall, of course, I can ask that you interpret for me. My German’s a bit weak. I think we’ll have to feel our way as we go. This whole errand is unusual and there’s no protocol for it. Ordinarily I’d be accompanied by our ambassador.”

“Suppose I just come along, then, as though it’s the natural thing, unless they stop me?”

The banker’s eyes closed for several seconds, then he nodded and opened them. “Ah, here’s the Forum. You’ve been in Rome before? We’re passing the Arch of Constantine. A lot of old history here! I suppose envoys came to Rome in those days on errands just as strange.”

Pug said, “This reception now, is it at your apartment?”

“Oh no, I keep just a very small flat off the Via Veneto. My uncle and two cousins are bankers here. It is at their town house, and the reception is for me. Let us just see how this goes. If, when we’re with Ciano, I touch my lapel so, you’ll excuse yourself. Otherwise come along, in the way you suggest.”

These arrangements proved needless because Mussolini himself dropped in on the party. About half an hour after the arrival of the Americans, a commotion started up at the doorway of the enormous marble-columned room, and Il Duce came walking bouncily in. He was not expected, judging by the excitement and confusion among the guests. Even Ciano, resplendent in green, white, and gold uniform, seemed taken aback. Mussolini was a surprisingly small man, shorter than Pug, dressed in a wrinkled tweed jacket, dark trousers, a sweater, and brown-and-white saddle shoes. It struck Pug at once that with this casual apparel Mussolini was underlining — perhaps for its eventual effect on the Germans — his contempt for Roosevelt’s informal messenger. Mussolini went to the buffet table, ate fruit, drank tea, and chatted jauntily with guests who crowded around. He moved through the room with a teacup, talking to one person and another. He glanced once at Luigi Gianelli as he passed close by, but otherwise he ignored the two Americans. In this setting Mussolini hardly resembled the chin-jutting imperial bully with the demonic glare. His prominent eyes had an Italian softness, his smile was wide, ironical, very worldly, and it seemed to Victor Henry that here was a smart little fellow who had gotten himself into the saddle and loved it, but whose bellicosity was a comedy. There was no comparing him with the ferocious Hitler.

Mussolini left the room while Pug was clumsily making talk with the banker’s aunt, a bejewelled, painted crone with a haughty manner, a peppermint breath and almost no hearing. Seeing the banker beckon to him and walk off after Ciano, Pug excused himself and followed. The three men went through tall carved wooden doors into a princely high-ceilinged library, lined with volumes bound in gold-stamped brown, scarlet or blue leather. Tall windows looked out over the city, which appeared so different from blacked-out Berlin, with electric lights twinkling and blazing in long crisscrossing lines and scattered clusters. Mussolini with a regal gesture invited them to sit. The banker came to the sofa beside him, while Ciano and Victor Henry faced them in armchairs. Mussolini coldly stared at Henry and turned the stare to Gianelli.

The look at once changed Pug’s impression of the Italian leader, and gave him a forcible sense that he was out of his depth and under suspicion. He felt junior and shaky, an ensign who had blundered into flag country. Ciano had given him no such feeling, and still didn’t, sitting there gorgeous and wary, the son-in-law waiting for the powerful old man to talk. At this close range Pug could see how white Mussolini’s fringe of hair was, how deep the creases of decision were folded in his face, how vivid were the large eyes, which now had an opaque glitter. This man could readily order a hundred murders, Pug decided, if he had to. He was an Italian ruler.

Pug could half follow the banker’s clear, measured Italian as he rapidly explained that Franklin Roosevelt, his treasured friend, had appointed the Berlin naval attaché as an aide for his few days in Europe; also that Henry would be acting as interpreter with Hitler. He said Henry could now remain or withdraw at Il Duce’s pleasure. Mussolini gave the attaché another glance, this time obviously weighing him as a Roosevelt appointee. His expression warmed.

“Do you speak Italian?” he said in good English, catching Henry unawares almost as though a statue had broken into speech.

“Excellency, I can follow it in a fashion. I can’t speak it. But then, I have nothing to say.”

Mussolini smiled, as Pug had seen him smile at people in the other room. “If we come to naval matters maybe we will talk English.”

He looked expectantly at the banker.

“Bene, Luigi?”

The banker talked for about a quarter of an hour. Since Pug already knew the substance, the banker did not altogether lose him. After some compliments, Gianelli said he was no diplomat and had neither the credentials nor the skill to discuss matters of state. He had come to put one question informally to Il Duce, on behalf of the President. Mr. Roosevelt had sent a private citizen who knew Il Duce, so that a negative reply would not affect formal relations between the United States and Italy. The President was alarmed by the drift toward catastrophe in Europe. If full-scale war broke out in the spring, horrors that nobody could foresee might engulf the whole world. Was it possible to do something, even at this late hour? Mr. Roosevelt had in mind a formal, urgent mission by a high United States diplomat, somebody on the order of Sumner Welles (Ciano, drumming the tips of his fingers together, looked up at the mention of the name), to visit all the chiefs of the warring states, perhaps late in January, to explore the possible terms of a general European settlement. Il Duce himself had made a last-minute call for a similar exploration on August 31, in vain. But if he would join the President now in bringing about such a settlement, he would hold a place in history as a savior of mankind.

Mussolini deliberated for a minute or so, his face heavy, his shoulders bowed, his look withdrawn, one hand fiddling with his tweed lapels. Then he said — as nearly as Pug could follow him — that the foreign policy of Italy rested on the Pact of Steel, the unshakable tie with Germany. Any attempt, any maneuver, any trick designed to split off Italy from this alliance would fail. A settlement in Europe was always possible. No one would welcome it more than he. As Mr. Roosevelt acknowledged, he himself had tried to the last to preserve the peace. But Hitler had offered a very reasonable settlement in October, and the Allies had spurned it. The American government in recent years had been openly hostile to Germany and Italy. Italy too had serious demands that had to be part of any settlement. These were not matters in Luigi’s province, Mussolini said, but he was stating them to clarify his very pessimistic feeling about a mission by Sumner Welles.

“You have put a question to me,” he concluded. “Now, Luigi, I will put a question to you.”

“Yes, Duce.”

“Does this initiative come from President Roosevelt, or is he acting at the request of the Allies?”

“Duce, the President has told us this is his own initiative.”

Ciano cleared his throat, leaned forward with his hands clasped, and said, “Do the British and French know and approve of this visit you are making?”

“No, Excellency. The President said that he would be making informal inquiries of the same nature, at this same time, in London and Paris.”

Mussolini said, “The newspapers have no information on any of this, is that correct?”

“What I have told you, Duce, is known outside this room only to the President and his Secretary of State. My trip is a matter of private business, of no interest to the press, and so it will remain forever.”

“I have stated my deep reservations,” said Mussolini, speaking slowly, in an extremely formal tone. “I have very little hope that such a mission would be to any useful purpose, in view of the maniacal hostility of the British and French ruling circles to the resurgent German nation and its great Führer. But I share Mr. Roosevelt’s sentiment about leaving no stone unturned.” He took a long portentous pause, then spoke with a decisive nod. “If the President sends Sumner Welles on such a mission, I will receive him.”

Gianelli’s fixed smile gave way to a real one of delight and pride. He gushed over Mussolini’s wise and great decision, and his joy at the prospect of Italy and the United States, his two mother countries, joining to rescue the world from tragedy. Mussolini nodded tolerantly, seeming to enjoy the flood of flattery, though he waved a deprecating hand to calm down the banker.

Victor Henry seized the first pause in the banker’s speech to put in, “Duce, may I ask whether Signor Gianelli is permitted to tell the Führer this? That you have consented receive a formal mission by Sumner Welles?”

Mussolini’s eyes sparked, as sometimes an admiral’s did when Victor Henry said something sharp. He looked to Ciano. The foreign minister said condescendingly in his perfect English, “The Führer will know long before you have a chance to tell him.”

“Okay,” said Henry.

Mussolini rose, took Gianelli’s elbow, and led him out through french doors to the balcony, letting a gust of cold air into the room.

Ciano smoothed his thick black hair with both white hands. “Well, Commander, what do you think of the great German naval victory in the south Atlantic?”

“I hadn’t heard of one.”

‘Really? It will be on Rome radio at seven o’clock. The battleship Graf Spee has caught a group of British cruisers and destroyers off Montevideo. The British have lost four or five ships and all the rest have been damaged. It’s a British disaster that changes the whole balance of force in the Atlantic.”

Victor Henry was shocked, but skeptical. “What happened to Graf Spee?”

“Minor hits that will be repaired overnight. Graf Spee was much heavier than anything it faced.”

“The British have acknowledged this?”

Count Ciano smiled. He was a good-looking young man, and obviously knew it; just a little too fat and proud, Pug thought, from living high on the hog. “No, but the British took a little while to acknowledge the sinking of the Royal Oak.”

The dinner celebrating Victor Henry’s promotion began in gloom, because of the Graf Spee news. The two attachés sat talking over highballs, waiting for Byron to show up.

Captain Kirkwood asserted that he believed the story; that in the twenty years since the war, a deep rot had eaten out the heart of England. Kirkwood looked like an Englishman himself — long-jawed, ruddy, and big-toothed — but he had little use for Great Britain. The British politicians had stalled and cringed in the face of Hitler’s rise, he declared, because they sensed their people no longer had a will to fight. The Limey navy was a shell. England and France were going to crumple under Hitler’s onslaught in the spring.

“It’s too bad, I suppose,” Kirkwood said. “One’s sentiments are with the Allies, naturally.” But the world moves on. After all, Hitler halted communism in its tracks. And don’t worry, once he takes the fight out of the Allies, he’ll settle Stalin’s hash. The Russians are putting on one stumblebum performance in Finland, aren’t they? They’ll be a walkover for the Wehrmacht. In the end we’ll have to make a deal with Hitler, that’s becoming obvious. He holds all the cards on this side of the water.”

“Hi, Dad.” Byron’s sports jacket and slacks were decidedly out of place in this old luxurious restaurant, where half the people wore evening dress.

Henry introduced him to the attaché. “Where have you been? You’re late.”

“I saw a movie, and then went to the YMCA to flake out for a little while.”

“Is that all you could find to do in Rome? See a movie? I wish I had a few free hours in this city.”

“Well, see, I was tired.” Byron appeared much more his old slack self.

The waiter now brought champagne and Kirkwood proposed a toast to Captain Victor Henry.

“Hey, Dad! Four stripes! Really?” Byron sprang to life, radiating surprised joy. He clasped his father’s hand and lifted a brimming glass. “Well, I’m sure glad I came to Rome, just for this. Say, I know one doesn’t mention such things, but the hell with it, doesn’t this put you way out front, Dad?”

Captain Kirkwood said, “He’s been out front all along. That’s what this means.”

“All it takes now is one false move,” said Pug dryly, shaking his head, “one piece of bad luck, one mislaid dispatch, one helmsman doping off on the midwatch. You’re out front till you retire.”

“What’s your situation, by the way, Byron?” Kirkwood said.

The young man hesitated.

“He’s ROTC,” Pug quickly said. “He’s got a yen for submarines. By the way, Briny, the New London sub school is doubling the enrollment in May and accepting reserves that can pass the physical.”

Kirkwood smiled, examining Byron with a shade of curiosity. “Now’s the time to get in on the ground floor, Byron. How’re your eyes? Got twenty-twenty vision?”

“My eyes are okay, but I have this job to do here.”

“What sort of job?”

“Historical research.”

Kirkwood’s face wrinkled.

Pug said, “He’s working for a famous author, Aaron Jastrow. You know, the one who wrote A Jew’s Jesus.”

“Oh, Jastrow, yes. That fellow up in Siena. I had lunch with him at the embassy once. Brilliant fellow. Having some trouble getting back home, isn’t he?”

Byron said, “He isn’t having trouble, sir, he just doesn’t want to leave.”

Kirkwood rubbed his chin. “Are you sure? Seems to me that’s why he was in Rome. There’s a foul-up in his papers. He was born in Russia or Lithuania or somewhere, and — whatever it is, I guess something can be worked out. Taught at Yale, didn’t he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, he ought to make tracks while he can. Those Germans are just over the Alps. Not to mention old Benito’s anti-Jew laws.”

Victor Henry was returning to Berlin that night by train, accompanying the banker. He said nothing about his mission in Rome to Kirkwood or his son, and they did not ask. After dinner Byron rode to the railroad station in the taxi with him, in a prolonged silence. Natalie Jastrow was a heavy invisible presence in the cab, and neither one would start the topic. Pug said as they drove into the brilliantly lit empty square before the terminal, “Briny, if the British really took that shellacking off Montevideo, we won’t stay out much longer. We can’t let the Germans close the Atlantic. That’s 1917 again. Why don’t you put in for sub school? It won’t start till May. By then Jastrow’ll be back in the States, if he isn’t simpleminded.”

“May’s a long way off.”

“Well, I’m not going to argue.” Pug got out of the cab. “Write to your mother a little more often. She’s not happy.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“Don’t miss Warren’s wedding.”

“I’ll try not to. Gosh, won’t that be something, if this family finally gets together again?”

“That’s why I want you there. It’ll be the last time in God knows how many years. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye. Listen, I’m real proud you made captain, Dad.”

Pug Henry gave his son a gloomy half-smile through the cab window and walked off to the train. And still not a word more had passed between them about the Jewish girl.

Chapter 21

So irascibly did Rhoda Henry greet her husband on his return that he began to think something might be wrong with her.

He had left her in a nervous slump. Everything was an aggravating mess, the fall weather in Berlin stank, life stank, she was bored, German efficiency was a fiction, nobody understood how to do anything right, and there was no service and no honesty anymore. She had “her pain,” an untreatable affliction that during previous slumps showed up in an arm and in her back and now was behind an ear. She feared cancer, but it didn’t really matter because everything good was all finished anyway. Rhoda had always come out of these sags before, and then could be contritely sweet. Pug had hoped when he suddenly left Berlin for Rome that he would find her better when he got back. She was worse.

She wanted to go with him to Karinhall. In his absence, an invitation engraved in gold on creamy thick stationery, addressed to Commander Victor Henry, had been delivered by a Luftwaffe staff officer. Pug hadn’t been home ten minutes when she brought it out wanting to know why she hadn’t been invited too. If he went to the Görings’ party at Karinhall and left her behind, she said, she could never face anybody in Berlin again.

Pug could not disclose that he was going along for state purposes, as a flunkey to an international financier. He couldn’t take her into the snow-covered garden to soothe her with hints of this; it was almost midnight, and she was wearing a cloudy blue negligee, in which indeed she looked very pretty.

“Listen, Rhoda, take my word for it that there are security reasons for all this.”

“Ha. Security reasons. That old chestnut, whenever you want to do anything your way.”

“I’d rather have you along. You know that.”

“Prove it. Call the protocol officer at the air ministry tomorrow. Or if you’re too bashful, I will.”

Pug was conducting this conversation in the library while glancing through piled-up mail. He put down the letters. After a minute of cold staring at his wife, he said, “Are you well?”

“I’m bored to death, otherwise I’m fine, why?”

“Have you been taking the iron pills?”

“Yes, but I don’t need pills. What I need is a little fun. Maybe I should go on a bender.”

“You’re not calling the air ministry! I hope that’s understood.”

Rhoda made a mutinous noise, and sat pouting.

“Hullo. Here’s a letter from that Kirby fellow. What’s he got to say for himself?”

“Read it. It’s as dull as he is. All about how glad he is to be home, and how good the skiing is around Denver, and how much he enjoyed our hospitality. Three pages of nothing.”

Pug tossed the letter unread on the routine pile.

“Honestly, you’re a riot, you’re so predictable, Pug. For twenty-five years whenever you’ve come home you’ve gone straight for the mail. What are you expecting, a letter from a lost love?”

He laughed, and shoved the letters aside. “Right you are. Let’s have a drink. Let’s have a couple of drinks. You look wonderful.”

“I do not. That goddamned hairdresser baked my hair into shredded wheat again. I’m tired. I’ve been waiting up to talk to you. You were two hours late.”

“There was trouble at the passport office.”

“I know. Well, I’m going to bed. Nothing to talk about since Karinhall is out. I even bought a sensational dress. I was going to show it to you, but to hell with it. I’ll send it back.”

“Keep it. You might just find a use for it pretty soon.”

“Oh? Expect to be invited to the Görings’ again?” She went out without staying for an answer.

Pug prepared a couple of highballs to toast the news of his promotion. When he got upstairs, her light was out — an old unpleasant marital signal. He wanted very much to spend the night with his wife. Moreover, he had been saving the story of his encounter with Natalie Jastrow for their bedroom talk. He drank both highballs himself, and slept on the sofa in the library.

The next day was brightened for him by the German announcement that the Graf Spee had heroically scuttled itself after its historic victory, and that its commanding officer had then nobly shot himself in a hotel room. He heard over the BBC that three much lighter British vessels had in fact beaten the German warship in a running sea fight and sent it limping into port before the scuttling. The German people didn’t hear a word of this, and they were baffled by the revelation that the victorious pocket battleship had elected to blow itself up. The Nazi propagandists did not bother to explain, smothering the story instead with a whooping account of a vast fictitious air victory; twenty-five British bombers shot down over Helgoland. Pug knew that the chances of his ever meeting Count Ciano again were remote, but he would have given much to chat with him again about the Graf Spee.

Also, when Rhoda learned of Pug’s promotion she came out of her blues as though by shock. Not another peep did she utter about Karinhall. She proceeded to give him the honeymoon treatment, and they had a happy week or so. His account of Natalie Jastrow fascinated and appalled her. “Sounds to me as though our only hope is that she’ll come to her senses and drop Briny,” she said.

Karinhall looked like a federal penitentiary built in the style of a hunting lodge. It sat in a game preserve about two hours’ drive from Berlin, a wilderness of small bare trees and green firs mantled in snow. Off the autobahn, the approach ran through heavy gates electrically controlled steel and concrete fences jagged with icicles, and a gauntlet of machine-gun-bearing Luftwaffe sentinels whose breaths smoked as they shouted challenges. Just as the car turned a corner and they caught a glimpse of the grandiose timber and stone building, a deer with big frightened eyes bounded across the road. The San Francisco banker no longer wore his automatic smile. His mouth was tightly pursed, and the soft brown Italian eyes were open wide and darting here and there, rather like the deer’s.

In the vaulted banquet room, amid a dazzling rush of uniformed Nazis and their white-shouldered women — some lovely, some grossly fat, all brilliantly gowned and heavily gemmed — Adolf Hitler was playing with the little Göring girl. A string orchestra lost in a corner of the marble-paved expanse was murmuring Mozart. Great logs flamed in a fireplace with a triangular stone pediment soaring to the ceiling, and on a carved heavy table stretching the entire length of the room an untouched banquet lay piles. Rich smells hung in the air: wood smoke, cigar smoke, roast meat, French perfume. The happy, excited crowd of eminent Germans were laughing, cooing, clapping hands, their eyes shining at their Leader in his plain field-gray coat and black trousers as he held the beautiful white-clad child in his arms, talking to her, teasing her with a cake. Göring and his statuesque wife, both ablaze in operatic finery and jewelry, the man more showy than the woman, stood near, beaming with soft affectionate pride. Suddenly the little girl kissed the Führer on his big pale nose, and he laughed and gave her the cake. A cheer went up, everybody applauded, and women wiped their eyes.

“The Führer is so wonderful,” said the Luftwaffe officer accompanying the two Americans, a small dark aviator wearing the diamond-studded cross of the Condor Legion. “Ach, if he could only marry! He loves children.”

And to Pug Henry, also, there was something appealing about Hitler: his shy smile acknowledging the applause, the jocular reluctance with which he handed the girl to her ecstatic mother, his wistful shrug as he slapped Göring’s back, like any bachelor congratulating a luckier man. At this moment Hitler had a naïve, almost mushy charm.

The Görings escorted Hitler to the table, and this signalled a general swarming toward the buffet. A troop of lackeys in blue and gold livery marched in, setting up gilt tables and chairs, helping the guests to food, pouring the wine, bowing and bowing. Guided by the Luftwaffe officer, he and Gianelli landed at a table with a banker named Wolf Stöller, who hailed the American financier as an old acquaintance: a slight Teuton in his fifties, with sandy hair plastered close to his head. The wife, an ashen-haired beauty, had eyes that glittered clear blue like the large diamonds on her neck, her arms, her fingers, and her ears.

By chance, Victor Henry had just written a short report on Stöller and knew a lot about him. Stöller’s bank was the chief conduit by which Göring was amassing his riches. Stöller’s specialty was acquiring Objekte, the term in German business jargon for Jewish-owned companies forced to the wall.

In the queer Germany of 1939, which Victor Henry was just beginning to understand, there was much stress on legality in looting the Jews. Outright confiscation or violence were rare. New codes of law dating from 1936 simply made it hard for them to do business; and month by month rulings came out making it ever harder. Jewish firms couldn’t get import or export licenses or raw materials. Their use of railroad and shipping was restricted. Conditions kept tightening until they had no course but to sell out. A market flourished in such Objekte, with many alert upper-class Germans bidding eagerly against each other. Wolf Stöller’s technique was to find and unite all the buyers interested in an Objekt, and to make a single very low offer. The owners had the choice of taking it or going bankrupt. Stöller’s group then divided up the firm in shares. Through Göring, Stöller had access to the Gestapo’s records, and was usually first on the scent of a major Jewish firm buckling to its knees. The big prizes Göring bought up himself — metal, banking, textiles — or took a large participation. Stöller’s bank got its broker’s fees and also its own participations in the Objekte.

All this Pug had learned from the American radio commentator in Berlin, Fred Fearing, who had been at some pains to dig it up. Fearing recounted it to him with deep anger, the more so as he couldn’t broadcast the story. The Germans claimed that any report of unfair treatment of the Jews was paid Allied propaganda. The Jewish laws aimed simply at restricting this minority, they said, to its due share in Germany’s economy.

Pug had more or less shut his mind to the Jewish problem, so as to focus on the military judgments which were his job. Jews had become all but invisible in Berlin, except in their special shopping hours, when, pallid and harried, they briefly filled the stores and then again faded from sight. The oppression was not a highly visible affair; Pug had never seen even the outside of a concentration camp. He had observed the signs on benches and restaurants, the white-faced worried wretches pulled off trains and airplanes, an occasional broken window or old charred synagogue, and once a bad business of a man beaten bloody in the zoo by three boys in Hitler youth uniforms, while the man’s wife wept and screamed and two policemen stood by laughing. But Fearing’s account was his first technical insight into German anti-Semitism. At bottom its purpose, in Fearing’s view, was just robbery, which was appalling but at least rational. Pug felt a qualm when Wolf Stöller with a cultured bow offered his hand, but of course he took it; and soon there they sat eating together and toasting each other in Moselle, Riesling, and champagne.

Stöller was a cordial, clever German, in every way indistinguishable from the hundreds that Victor Henry had met in the military and industrial worlds and at social gatherings. He spoke a fine English. His countenance was open and hearty. He made bright jokes, including bold pleasantries about Göring’s corpulence and theatrical uniforms. He expressed deep regard for the United States (he especially loved San Francisco) and melancholy regret that its relations with Germany were not better. In fact, could he not do something to improve them, he said, by inviting Gianelli and the Henrys for a weekend at his estate? It was no Karinhall, but he could promise them good company. Captain Henry might have the luck to shoot a deer. Game was outside the meat ration, and some venison might be very welcome to Mrs. Henry! The banker’s wife, touching Pug’s hand with her cool jewelled white fingers, crinkled her blue eyes at him in invitation. She had heard that Mrs. Henry was the most elegant and attractive wife in the American diplomatic mission, and she longed to meet her.

Gianelli declined; he had to start his return journey in the morning. Officially there was every reason for Victor Henry to accept. Part of his job was to penetrate influential levels of Germans. He had no stomach for Stöller, but it occurred to him that here was a chance to give Rhoda the kind of fun she complained of missing. There was no telling good Germans from bad Germans. Stöller conceivably might be working for Göring under duress, though his wife in consequence dripped diamonds. Pug said he would come. The look the Stöllers exchanged convinced him that none of this was casual. They were cultivating him.

Stöller took the two Americans on a tour of Karinhall. Again Pug had the feeling that Nazi grandeur usually woke in him: the Hollywood impression, the sense of ephemeral flamboyant make-believe, which persisted no matter how vast and solid the structures, how high the ceilings, how elaborate the decorations, how costly the art. The corridors and rooms of Karinhall seemed to go on for miles. Glass cases by the dozens displayed solid gold objects crusted with gems — vases, crosses, maces’ swords, busts, batons, medals, books, globes — tributes to the field marshal from steel corporations, cities, and foreign governments on his birthday, his wedding, the birth of a child, the return of the Condor Legion from Spain. Italian and Dutch old masters crowded the walls, interspersed with the vapid nudes of living Nazi-approved painters. Other rooms with nobody in them, almost as vast and ornate as the banquet hall, were hung with tapestries and flags, walled in wood, filled with statuary and jewelled suits of armor. Yet it all might almost have been papier-mâché and canvas. Even the food on the banquet table had looked like a Cecil B. De Mille feast, and the pink meat inside the pig might instead have been wax or plaster. But Victor Henry well knew that he was looking at an immense treasure, mostly booty collected through Dr. Stöller. Moral considerations aside, the vulgar edifice disappointed because Göring was supposed to stem from an aristocratic family. Even the admiring comments of Luigi Gianelli had a strong tinge of irony.

The Luftwaffe officer wearing the diamond cross caught up with them and whispered to Stöller.

“Ah, what a pity, now you must go,” said the German banker. “And you haven’t begun to see the wonders of Karinhall. Captain Henry, my office will make all the arrangements to bring you and your dear wife on Friday to Abendruh, though I fear it will look rather pitiful after this. We will telephone you tomorrow.”

Stöller accompanied the two Americans through more rooms and corridors, stopped at double doors of dark wood heavily carved with hunting scenes, and opened them on a timbered room with log-and-plaster walls, hung with antlers, stuffed heads, and animal hides. The dusty smell of the dead creatures was strong in the air. On either side of a roaring fire sat Ribbentrop and Göring. Hitler was not in the room. A long, crudely made wooden table and two low benches took up most of the floor space. Pug thought at once that this must be the main room of the old hunting lodge, around which the field marshal had constructed the banal palace. Here was the heart of Karinhall. Except for the glow from the fire, the room was dank, dark, and cold.

Göring lolled on a settee with one thick white leather-booted leg off the floor, sipping coffee from a gold demitasse — part of a gold service on a low inlaid marble table. He nodded and smiled familiarly at Gianelli. Diamond rings bulged on three of the fingers that held the cup. Ribbentrop stared at the ceiling, hands interlaced across his stomach. The German banker introduced Victor Henry, backed out of the room, and closed the door.

“You will have exactly seven minutes of the Führer’s time to state your business,” said Ribbentrop in German.

Gianelli stammered, “Excellency, permit me to reply in English. I am here in a private capacity, and I regard that much time as an extraordinary courtesy to my country and my President.”

Ribbentrop sat with a blank face, looking at the ceiling, so Victor Henry ventured to translate. The foreign minister cut him off with a snapped sentence in perfect Oxford accents, “I understand English.”

Göring said to Gianelli, “You are welcome to Karinhall, Luigi. I have tried to invite you more than once. But this time you have come a long way for a short interview.”

“May I say, Field Marshal,” the banker answered in broken German, “that I have seen millions of money made and lost in a conference lasting a few minutes, and that world peace is worth any effort however unpromising.”

“I am in complete agreement with that.” Göring motioned them to chairs placed near him.

Ribbentrop, seizing the arms of his chair and closing his eyes, burst out in high rapid tones, in German, “This visitation is another studied insult by your President to the German head of state. Whoever heard of sending a private citizen as an emissary in such matters? Between civilized countries the diplomatic structure is used. Germany did not withdraw its ambassador in Washington by choice. The United States first made the hostile gesture. The United States has allowed within its borders a boycott of German products and a campaign of hate propaganda against the German people. The United States has its so-called Neutrality Act in blatant favor of the aggressors in this conflict. Germany did not declare war on England and France. They declared war on Germany.”

The foreign minister stopped talking and sat with his eyes closed, the long-jawed haggard face immobile, some strands of the graying blond hair falling over his face. The California banker looked first at Göring, then at Victor Henry, clearly shaken. Göring poured himself more coffee.

Concentrating with all his might, Victor Henry translated the foreign minister’s tirade. Ribbentrop did not correct or interrupt him.

Gianelli started to talk, but Ribbentrop burst out again: “What purpose can be served by this maladroit approach, other than a further deliberate provocation, one more expression of your President’s highly dangerous contempt for the leader of a powerful nation of eighty million people?”

With a trembling wave of his hand at Henry to indicate that he understood, Gianelli said, “May I respectfully reply that—”

The bright blue eyes of Ribbentrop opened, closed again, and he said in still louder tones, “The willingness of the Führer to give you a hearing in these circumstances is a testimony to his desire for peace that history will someday record. This is the sole value this peculiar interview possesses.”

Göring said to the banker in a milder, but no more friendly tone, “What is your purpose here, Luigi?”

“Field Marshal, I am an informal messenger of my President to your Führer, and I have a single question to put to him, by my President’s instructions. To ask it, and to answer it, should take very little time. But by God’s grace it can lead to lasting historical results.” Victor Henry put this into German.

“What is the question?” Göring said.

The banker’s face was going yellow. “Field Marshal, by my President’s order, the question is for the Führer,” he said hoarsely in German.

“It is for the Führer to answer,” Göring said, “but obviously we are going to hear it anyway. What is the question?” He raised his voice, fixing his gaze on the banker.”

Gianelli turned away from Göring’s eyes, which were lazily hard, licked his lips, and said to Henry, “Captain, I beg you to confirm my instructions to the great field marshal.”

Victor Henry was rapidly calculating the situation, including the trace of physical danger which had shadowed his mind since passing through the outer fences of Karinhall. Göring, for all his gross jolly façade, was a tough and ugly brute. If this monstrously fat German, with the rouge-red face, thin scarlet lips, and small jewelled hands, wanted to harm them, diplomatic immunity was a frail shield here. But Pug judged that his talk was cat-and-mouse fooling to kill time. He translated the banker’s answer under the straight stare of Göring, and added, “I confirm that the instructions are to put the question directly to the Führer, as Herr Gianelli already has done to his good friend Il Duce in Italy, where in my presence Il Duce gave him a favorable response.”

“We know all that,” Ribbentrop said. “We know the question, too.” Göring blinked at Henry and the tension broke. The banker brushed his fingers across his brow. The silence lasted for perhaps a minute. Adolf Hitler, pulling a lock of hair across his forehead, came into the room through a side door hung with a tiger skin.

As quickly as the Americans, Göring and Ribbentrop rose, assuming very much the lackey look. Göring moved away from the comfortable settee to a chair, and Hitler took his place, gesturing to the others to sit. He did not shake hands. Seen at this close range the Führer looked healthy and calm, though too fat and puffy-eyed. His dark hair was clipped to the bone at the sides like a common soldier’s. Except for the famed moustache he had an ordinary face, the face of any small man of fifty or so walking by on a German city street. Compared to this man of the people, the other two Nazis seemed bedizened grotesques. His gray coat with the single Iron Cross over his left breast contrasted remarkably with Ribbentrop’s gold-braided dark blue uniform and the air marshal’s extravaganza of colors, gems, and medals.

Folding one hand over the other in his lap, he took in the Americans with a grave glance.

“Luigi Gianelli, American banker. Captain Victor Henry, United States naval attaché in Berlin,” said Ribbentrop, in a sarcastic tone emphasizing the unimportance of the visitors. “Extraordinary informal emissaries, Mein Führer, from the President of the United States.”

The banker cleared his throat, attempted an expression of gratitude for the interview in German, made a flustered apology, and shifted to English. The Führer, his gaze steady on the banker while Henry translated, kept shifting in his chair and crossing and un-crossing his ankles. With the same prologue on world peace that he had addressed to Mussolini, Gianelli put to the Führer the question about Sumner Welles. As it came out in English, a contemptuous smile appeared on Ribbentrop’s face. Upon Henry’s translation Hitler and Göring looked at each other, the Führer impassive, Göring hoisting his shoulders, waving his thick-gemmed hands, and shaking his head, as though to say, “That’s really it. Unbelievable!”

Hitler meditated. The glance of his sunken, pallid blue eyes was straight ahead and far away. A bitter little smile moved his moustache and his small mouth. He began to speak in quiet, very clear, Bavarian-accented German, “Your esteemed President, Herr Gianelli, seems to feel a remarkable sense of responsibility for the whole present of world history. It is all the more remarkable in that only the United States, among the great powers, failed to join the League of Nations, and in that your Congress and your people have repeatedly indicated that they want no foreign entanglements.

“In my speech of April twenty-ninth, mainly addressed to your President, I acknowledged that your country has more than twice the population of our little land, more than fifteen times the living space, and infinitely more mineral resources. Perhaps therefore your President feels that he must approach me from time to time with stern fatherly admonitions. But of course I am giving my life for the renascence of my people, and I cannot help seeing everything from that limited point of view.”

Victor Henry did his best to translate, his heart pounding, his mouth dry.

Hitler now began reminiscing garrulously about the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. He spoke at length and seemed to be enjoying himself, slowly waving his hands and using relaxed tones. The justifications were familiar stuff. He grew briefly loud and acid only over the British guarantee to Poland, which, he said, had encouraged a cruel reactionary regime to engage in atrocious measures against its German minority, in the illusion that it had become safe to do so. That was how the war had started. Since then England and France had over and over spurned his offers of a peace settlement and disarmament.

What more could he do, as a responsible head of state, than arm his country to defend itself against these two great military empires, who between them controlled three-fifths of the habitable surface of the earth and almost half its population?

German political aims were simple, open, moderate and unchanging, he went on. Five centuries before Columbus discovered America, there had been a German empire at the heart of Europe, its boundaries roughly fixed by geography and the reproductive vigor of the people. War had come over and over to this European heartland through the attempts of many powers to fragment the German folk. These attempts had often had temporary success. But the German nation, with its strong instinct for survival and growth, had time and again rallied and thrown off foreign encirclements and yokes. In this part of his talk Hitler made references to Bismarck, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Thirty Years’ War, which were beyond Victor Henry. He translated them word for word as best he could.

The Versailles Treaty, said the Führer, had simply been the latest of these foreign efforts to mutilate the German heartland. Because it had been historically unsound and unjust it was now dead. The Rhineland was German. So was Austria. So was the Sudetenland. So were Danzig and the Corridor. The manufactured monstrosity of Czechoslovakia, thrust like a spear into Germany’s vitals, had now become once again the traditional Bohemian protectorate of the Reich. This restoration of normal Germany was now complete. He had done it almost without bloodshed. But for the absurd British guarantee, it would have all been finished in peace; the question of Danzig and the Corridor had been practically settled in July. Even now nothing substantial stood in the way of lasting peace. The other side simply had to recognize this restored normality in central Europe, and return to Germany her colonial territories. For the Reich, like other great modern states, had natural right to the raw materials of the underdeveloped continents.

Victor Henry was deeply struck by Hitler’s steady manner, by his apparent moral conviction, by his identification of himself with the German nation — “… and so I restored the Rhineland to the Reich… and so I brought back Austria to its historical origins… and so I normalized the Bohemian plateau…” — and by his broad visions of history. The ranting demagogue of the Party rallies was obviously nothing but a public image, such as the Germans, in Hitler’s estimate, wanted. He radiated the personal force that Captain Henry had seen in only two or three admirals. As for the journalistic picture — the carpet-chewing hysterical Charlie Chaplin politician — Pug now felt that it was a distortion of small minds which had led the world into disaster.

“I share the President’s desire for peace,” Hitler was saying. He was starting to gesture now as in his speeches, though less broadly. His eyes had brightened astonishingly; Henry thought it must be an illusion, but they seemed to glow. “I hunger and yearn for peace. I was a simple soldier in the front lines for four years while he, as a rich and well-born man, had the privilege of serving as an Assistant Secretary of the Navy in a Washington office. I know war. I was born to create, not to destroy, and who can say how many years of life are left to me to fulfill my tasks of construction? But the British and French leaders call for the destruction of ‘Hitlerism’ “ — he brought out the foreign term with contempt-filled sarcasm — as their price for peace. I can almost understand their hatred for me. I have made Germany strong again, and that did not suit them. But this hate, if persisted in, will doom Europe, because I and the German people cannot be separated. We are one. This is a simple truth, though I fear the English will need a test of fire to prove it. I believe Germany has the strength to emerge victorious. If not, we will all go down together, and historical Europe as we know it will cease to exist.”

He paused, his face tightened and changed, and the pitch of his voice all at once began to rise. “How can they be so blind to realities? I achieved air parity in 1937. Since then I have never stopped building planes, planes, planes, U-boats, U-boats, U-boats!” He was screaming now, clenching his fists and waving his stiff outstretched arms. “I have piled bombs, bombs, bombs, tanks, tanks, tanks, to the sky! It has been a wasteful, staggering burden on my people, but what other language have great states ever understood? It is out of a sense of strength that I have offered peace. I have been rejected and scorned, and as the price of peace they have asked for my head. The German people only laugh at such pathetic nonsense!”

On the shouted litany of “planes… bombs… U-boats” he swept both fists down again and again to strike the floor, bending far over so that the famous black lock of hair tumbled in his face, giving him his more usual newsreel look of the street agitator; and the red face and screeching tones had indeed something of the carpet-chewer, after all. Suddenly, dramatically, as at a podium, he dropped into quiet controlled tones. “Let the test of fire come. I have done my utmost, and my conscience is clear before the bar of history.”

Hitler fell silent, then stood with an air of dismissal, his eyes burning and distant, his mouth a down-curved line.

“Mein Führer,” Göring said, lumbering to his feet, his boots creaking, “after this wonderfully clear presentation of the realities you offer no objection to this visit of Herr Sumner Welles, I take it, if the President persists.”

Hitler hesitated, appeared perplexed and gave an impatient shrug. “I have no wish to return discourtesy for discourtesy, and petty treatment for petty treatment. I would do anything for peace. But until the British will to destroy me is itself destroyed, the only road to peace is through German victory. Anything else is irrelevant. I will continue to hope with all my heart for a last-minute signal of sanity from the other side, before the holocaust explodes.”

In a worked-up manner, with no gesture of farewell, he strode out through the carved double door. Victor Henry glanced at his wristwatch. The Führer had spent an hour and ten minutes with them, and so far as Henry knew, President Roosevelt’s question remained unanswered. He could see on Gianelli’s pale, baffled face the same impression.

Göring and Ribbentrop looked at each other. The fat man said, “President Roosevelt has his reply. The Führer sees no hope in the Welles mission, but in his unending quest for a just peace he will not reject it.”

“That was not my understanding,” said Ribbentrop in a quick, strained voice. “He called the mission irrelevant.”

“If you want to press the Führer for clarification,” Göring said satirically to him, gesturing at the double doors, “go ahead. I understood him very well, and I think I know him.” He turned again to the banker and his voice moderated. “In informing your President of this meeting, tell him that I said the Führer will not refuse to receive Welles, but sees no hope in it — and neither do I — unless the British and the French drop their war aim of removing the Führer. That is no more possible than it is to move Mont Blanc. If they persist in it, the result will be a frightful battle in the West, ending in a total German victory after the death of millions.”

“That will be the result in any case,” said Ribbentrop, “and the die will be cast before Mr. Sumner Welles can arrange his papers and pack his belongings.”

Göring took each of the two Americans by an elbow and said with a total change to geniality that brought to Victor Henry’s mind the waiter at Wannsee, “Well, I hope you are not leaving so soon? We will have dancing a little later, and a bite of supper, and then some fine entertainers from Prague, artistic dancers.” He rolled his eyes in jocose suggestiveness.

“Your Excellency is marvellously hospitable,” Gianelli replied. “But a plane is waiting in Berlin to take me to Lisbon and connect with the Clipper.”

“Then I must let you go, but only if you promise to come to Karinhall again. I will walk out with you.”

Ribbentrop stood with his back to them, looking at the fire. When the banker hesitantly spoke a word of farewell, he grunted and hitched a shoulder. Arm in arm with Göring, the Americans walked down the corridors of Karinhall. The air minister smelled of some strong bath oil. His hand lightly tapped Victor Henry’s forearm. “Well, Captain Henry, you have been to Swinemünde and seen our U-boat setup. What is your opinion of our U-boat program?”

“Your industrial standards are as high as any in the world, Your Excellency. And with officers like Grobke and Prien you’re in good shape. The U-boats are already making quite a record in the Atlantic.”

“It’s only the beginning,” Göring said. “U-boats are coming off the ways now like sausages. I doubt that all of them will even see action. The air will decide this war fast. I hope your attaché for air, Colonel Powell, has been reporting the Luftwaffe’s strength accurately to your president. We have been very open with Powell, on my orders.”

“Indeed he has made reports. He’s very impressed.”

Göring looked pleased. “We have learned a lot from America. Curtis in particular has brilliant designers. Your Navy dive-bombing was carefully studied by us and the Stuka was the result.” He turned to the banker and speaking in slow, simple German, asked him questions about South American mining companies. They were walking through an empty ballroom with huge crystal-and-gilt chandeliers, and their clicking steps on the parquet floor echoed hollowly. The banker replied in easy German, which he had not displayed under pressure, and they talked finance all the way to the front doors. Guests walking in the halls stared at the sight of Göring between the two Americans. The banker’s man-of-the-world smile reappeared and color returned to his face.

It was snowing outside, and Göring stopped in the doorway to shake hands. Gianelli had so far recovered that he came out with something Victor Henry considered absolutely vital. Henry was trying to think of a way to hint it to him, when the banker said, shaking hands with the air minister in a light whirl of snow, “Excellency, I will have to tell the President that your foreign minister does not welcome the Welles mission and has stated the Führer does not.

Göring’s face toughened. “If Welles comes the Führer will see him. That is official.” Göring glanced up at the sky and walked through the snow with the two Americans to their car, as a Luftwaffe officer drove it up to the entrance. “Remember this. Germany is like all countries. Not everybody here wants peace. But I do.”

Victor Henry sat up most of the night writing his report, so it could go back to the President in the banker’s hands. It was a longhand account, poured out pell-mell. After a tale of the facts up to Göring’s last words in the snow, Victor Henry wrote:

The key question is, of course, whether or not a peace mission by Sumner Welles is now expected in the Third Reich. It seems inconceivable that in an interview with Hitler, Göring, and Ribbentrop, your emissary got no clear-cut answer. I believe that Sumner Welles will be received by Hitler. But I don’t think the mission will achieve anything, unless the Allies want to change their minds and accept some version of the “outstretched hand” formula.

None of the three men seemed to take the interview very seriously. They have bigger matters on their minds. We were a pair of nobodies. I would guess that Göring wanted it to take place, and that Hitler, being there in Karinhall anyway, didn’t mind. I got the feeling that he enjoyed sounding off to a pair of Americans who would report directly to you. All three men acted as though the offensive in the west is ready to roll. I don’t think they give a damn whether Welles comes or not. If the British are really as set on their terms as Hitler is on his, you’ll have all-out war in the spring. The parties are too far apart. Göring, it seems to me, is playing a side game by his peace talk. This man is the biggest thug in the Third Reich. He looks like a circus freak — the man is really disgustingly fat and dolled up — but he is the supreme realist in that crowd, and the unchallenged number two man. He has made a good thing out of Nazism, much more than the others. Mr. Gianelli will no doubt describe Karinhall to you. It’s vulgar but stupendous. Göring may be smart enough, even though he’s riding high, to figure that no string of luck lasts forever. If the offensive should happen to go sour, then the man who always wanted peace will be right there, weeping tears over the fallen Führer and happy to take on the job.

Ribbentrop can only be described — if you will forgive me, Mr. President — as the classic German son of a bitch. He is right out of the books with his arrogance, bad manners, obtuseness, obstinacy, and self-righteousness. I think this is his nature but I also believe he echoes how Hitler feels. This is just the old Navy business of the commanding officer being the impressive “old man,” while the exec is the mean crab doing his dirty work. Hitler unquestionably hates your guts and feels you’ve interfered and crossed him up far too much. He also feels fairly safe defying the USA because he knows how public opinion is divided.” All this Ribbentrop expressed for him in no uncertain terms, leaving the boss free to be the magnanimous German Napoleon and the savior of Europe.

Driving away from Karinhall I had a reaction like coming out of a trance. I began to remember things about Hitler that I really forgot while I was listening to him and translating his words: the ravings in Mein Kampf, the way he has broken his word time after time, his wild lies, the fact that he started this war, the gruesome bombing of Warsaw, and his persecution of the Jews. It’s a measure of his persuasiveness that I could forget such things for a while, facing the man who has done them. He’s a spellbinder. For big crowds I’ve heard him do coarse belligerent yelling, but in a room with a couple of nervous foreigners he can be — if it suits him — the reasonable, charming world leader. They say he can also throw a foaming rage; we saw just a hint of that, and I certainly believe it. But the picture of him as a ludicrous nut is a falsehood.

He never sounded more confident than when he said that he and the Germans are one. He simply knows this to be the truth. Take away his moustache, and he sort of looks like all the Germans rolled into one. He isn’t an aristocrat or a businessman, or an intellectual, or anything whatever except the German man in the street, somehow inspired.

It’s vital to understand this relationship between Hitler and the German people. The present aim of the Allies seems to be to pry the two apart. I have become convinced that it can’t be done. For better or worse, the Allies still have the choice of knuckling under to Hitler or beating the Germans. They had the same choice in 1936, when beating the Germans would have been a cinch. Nothing has changed, except that the Germans may now be invincible.

The glimpse of cross-purposes at the top may have showed a weakness of the Nazi structure, but if so it’s all internal politics, it has nothing to do with Hitler’s hold on the Germans. That includes Göring and Ribbentrop. When he entered the room they stood and cringed.

If Hitler were the half-crazy, half-comical gangster we’ve been reading about, this war would be a pushover, because running a war takes brains, steadiness, strategic vision, and skill. Unfortunately for the Allies, he is a very able man.

Chapter 22

Rhoda hugged and kissed Pug when he told her about the weekend. He didn’t mention Stöller’s part in what Fred Fearing called robbing the Jews. It wasn’t precisely that; it was a sort of legalized expropriation, and damned unsavory, but that was life in Nazi Germany. There was no point in making Rhoda share his uneasy feelings, when one reason for accepting Stöller’s hospitality was to give her a good time.

The chauffeur sent by Stöller drove past the colonnaded entrance to Abendruh and dropped them at a back door, where a maid conducted them two flights up narrow servants’ stairs. Pug wondered whether this was a calculated German insult. But the spacious, richly furnished bedroom and sitting room looked out on a fine snowy vista of lawn, firs, winding river, and thatched outbuildings; two servants came to help them dress; and the mystery of the back stairs cleared up when they went to dinner. The curving main staircase of Abendruh, two stories high, balustraded in red marble, had been entirely covered with a polished wooden slide. Guests in dinner clothes stood on the brink, the men laughing, the ladies giggling and shrieking. Down below other guests stood with the Stöllers, watching an elegantly dressed couple sliding down, the woman hysterical with laughter as her green silk dress pulled away from her gartered thighs.

“Oh my gawd, Pug, I’ll DIE!” chortled Rhoda. “I can’t POSSIBLY! I’ve practically NOTHING on underneath. Why don’t they WARN a girl!” But of course she made the slide, screaming with embarrassed delight, exposing her legs — which were very shapely — clear up to her lacy underwear. She arrived at the bottom scarlet-faced and convulsed, amid cheers and congratulations, to be welcomed by the hosts and introduced to fellow weekenders. It was a sure icebreaker, Victor Henry thought, if a trifle gross. The Germans certainly had the touch for these things.

Next day when he woke he found a green leather hunting costume laid out for him, complete with feathered hat, belt, and dagger. The men were a varied crowd: Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht officers, other bankers, the president of an electrical works, a prominent actor. Pug was the only foreigner. The jolly group took him warmly into their horseplay and joking, and then into the serious business of the hunt. Pug liked duck-hunting, but killing deer had never appealed to him. General Armin von Roon was in the party, and Pug lagged behind with the hook-nosed general, who remarked that to see a deer shot made him feel ill. In this meeting Roon was more loquacious than before. The forest was dank and cold, and like the others he had been drinking schnapps. They talked first about the United States, where as it turned out, Roon had attended the Army War College. Then the General discussed the Polish campaign, and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which he surprisingly called a disaster, because of all the ground Stalin had gained without firing a shot. His grasp of the field operations was masterly. His estimate of Hitler, Victor Henry thought, was cold-blooded and honest. Roon scarcely veiled his contempt for the master race theories of the Nazis, or for the Party itself, but he was making out a strong case for Hitler as a German leader, when shots rang out and a nearby hullabaloo drew them to join the party, ringed around a small deer lying dead !n blood-spattered snow. A ceremony ensued of horn-blowing and pushing a sprig of fir into the dead mouth over the bloody lolling tongue. Henry became separated from the general. That evening he looked for him before dinner, and was sorry to learn that Roon had been summoned back to Berlin.

After dinner, a string quartet played Beethoven in a cream-and-gold French music room, and a fat-bosomed famous soprano sang Schubert songs. The guests listened with more attention than Pug could muster; some, during the lieder, had tears in their eyes. Rhoda felt in her element, for in Washington she was a patroness of music. She sat beaming, whispering expert comments between numbers. Dancing followed, and one German after another danced with her. From the floor, she kept darting sparkling looks of gratitude at her husband, until Stöller took him in tow to a library, where the actor and Dr. Knopfmann, the head of the electrical works, sat over brandy.

As yet, on the weekend, Pug had not heard a word about the war. Conversation had stayed on personal chatter, business, or the arts.

“Ah, here is Captain Henry,” said the actor in a rich ringing voice. “What better authority do you want? Let’s put it to him.” A gray-moustached man with thick hair, he played emperors, generals, and older men in love with young women. Pug had seen his famous King Lear at the Schauspielhaus. His face just now was purple-red over his stiff collar and buckling starched shirt.

“It might embarrass him,” Dr. Knopfmann said.

“No war talk now. That’s out.” said Stöller. “This weekend is for pleasure.”

“I don’t mind,” Pug said, accepting brandy and settling in a leather chair. “What’s the question?”

“I create illusions for a living,” rumbled the actor, “and I believe illusions should be confined to the stage. And I say it is an illusion to hope that the United States will ever allow England to go down.”

“Oh, to hell with all that,” said the banker.

Dr. Knopfmann, a twinkling-eyed, round-faced man like the captain of the Bremen, but much shorter and fatter, said, “And I maintain that it isn’t 1917. The Americans pulled England’s chestnuts out of the fire once, and what did they get for it? A bellyful of ingratitude and repudiation. The Americans will accept the fait accompli. They are realists. Once Europe is normalized, we can have a hundred years of a firm Atlantic peace.”

“What do you say, Captain Henry?” the actor asked.

“The problem may never come up. You still have to lick England.”

None of the three men looked very pleased. The actor said, “Oh, I think we can assume that’s in the cards — providing the Americans don’t step in. That’s the whole argument.”

Stöller said, “Your President doesn’t try to hide his British sympathies, Victor, does he? Quite natural, in view of his Anglo-Dutch ancestry. But wouldn’t you say the people are against him, or at least sharply split?”

“Yes, but America is a strange country, Dr. Stöller. Public opinion can shift fast. Nobody should forget that, in dealing with us.”

The eyes of the Germans flickered at each other. Dr. Knopfmann said, “A shift in public opinion doesn’t just happen. It’s manufactured.”

“There’s the live nerve,” Stöller said. “And that’s what I’ve found difficult to convey even to the air marshal, who’s usually so hardheaded. Germans who haven’t been across the water are impossibly provincial about America. I’m sorry to say this goes for the Führer himself. I don’t believe he yet truly grasps the vast power of the American Jews. It’s a vital factor in the war picture.”

“Don’t exaggerate that factor,” Henry said. “You fellows tend to, and it’s a form of kidding yourselves.”

“My dear Victor, I’ve been in the United States nine times and I lived for a year in San Francisco: Who’s your Minister of the Treasury? The Jew Morgenthau. Who sits on your highest court, wielding the most influence? The Jew Frankfurter.”

He proceeded to reel off a list of Jewish officials in Washington, stale and boring to Pug from endless repetition in Nazi propaganda; and he made the usual assertion that the Jews had American finance, communications, justice, and even the Presidency in their pockets. Stöller delivered all this calmly and pleasantly. He kept repeating “der Jude, der Jude” without a sneer. There was no glare in his eyes, such as Pug had now and then observed when Rhoda challenged some vocal anti-Semite. The banker presented his statements as though they were the day’s stock market report.

“To begin with,” Pug replied, a bit wearily, “the Treasury post in our country has little power. It’s a minor political reward. Christians hold all the other cabinet posts. Financial power lies with the banks, the insurance companies, the oil, rail, lumber shipping, steel, and auto industries, and such. They’re wholly in Christian hands. Always have been.”

“Lehman is a banker,” said Dr. Knopfmann.

“Yes, he is. The famous exception.” Pug went on with his stock answers to stock anti-Semitism: the all but solid Christian ownership of newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, the Christian composition of Congress, the cabinet, and the executive branch, the eight Christian judges out of nine on the Supreme Court, the paramount White House influence of a Christian, Harry Hopkins, and the rest. On the faces of his hearers appeared the curious smirk of Germans when discussing Jews: condescending, facetious, and cold, with superior awareness of a very private inside joke.

Stöller said in a kindly tone, “That’s always the Jewish line, you know, how unimportant they are.”

“Would you recommend that we take away what businesses they do have? Make Objekte of them?”

Stöller looked surprised and laughed, not in the least offended. “You’re better informed than many Americans, Victor. It would be an excellent idea for the health of your economy. You’ll come to it sooner or later.”

“Is it your position,” the actor said earnestly, “that the Jewish question really has no bearing on America’s entry into the war?”

“I didn’t say that. Americans do react sharply to injustice and suffering.”

The smirk reappeared on the three faces, and Knopfmann said, “And your Negroes in the South?”

Pug paused” “It’s bad but it’s improving, and we don’t put them behind barbed wire.”

The actor said in a lowered voice, “That’s a political penalty. A Jew who behaves himself doesn’t go to a camp.”

Lighting a large cigar, his eyes on the match, Stöller said, “Victor speaks very diplomatically. But his connections are okay. One man who’s really in the picture is Congressman Ike Lacouture of Florida. He fought a great battle against revising the Neutrality Act.” With a sly glance at Pug, he added, “Practically in the family, isn’t he?”

This caught Pug off guild, but he said calmly, “You’re pretty well informed. That’s not exactly public knowledge.”

Stöller laughed. “The air minister knew about it. He told me. He admires Lacouture. What happened to the dance music? Ach, look at the time. How did it get to be half past one? There’s a little supper on, gentlemen, nothing elaborate—” He rose, puffing on the cigar. “The American Jews will make the greatest possible mistake, Victor, to drag in the United States. Lacouture is their friend if they’ll only listen to him. You know what the Führer said in his January speech — if they start another world war, that will be the end of them. He was in deadly earnest, I assure you.”

Aware that he was butting a stone wall, but unable to let these things pass, Pug said, “Peace or war isn’t up to the Jews. And you grossly misunderstand Lacouture.”

“Do I? But my dear Captain, what do you call the British guarantee to Poland? Politically and strategically it was frivolous, if not insane. All it did was bring in two big powers against Germany on the trivial issue of Danzig, which was what the Jews wanted. Churchill is a notorious Zionist. All this was clearly stated between the lines in Lacouture’s last speech. I tell you, men like him may still manage to restore the peace and incidentally to save the Jews from a very bad fate they seem determined to bring on themselves. Well how about an omelette and a glass of champagne?”

On Christmas Eve, Victor Henry left the embassy early to walk home. The weather was threatening, but he wanted air and exercise. Berlin was having a lugubrious Yuletide. The scrawny newspapers had no good war news, and the Russian attack on Finland was bringing little joy to Germans. The shop windows offered colorful cornucopias of appliances, clothing, toys, wines, and food, but people hurried sullenly along the cold windy streets under dark skies, hardly glancing at the mocking displays. None of the stuff was actually for sale. As Pug walked, evening fell and the blackout began. Hearing muffled Christmas songs from behind curtained windows, he could picture the Berliners sitting in dimly lit apartments in their overcoats around tinsel-draped fir trees, trying to make merry on watery beer, potatoes, and salt mackerel. At Abendruh, the Henrys had almost forgotten that there was a war on, if a dormant one, and that serious shortages existed. For Wolf Stöller there were no shortages.

Yielding to Rhoda’s urging, he had accepted an invitation to come back to Abendruh in January, though he had not enjoyed himself there. More and more, especially since his glimpse of the National Socialist leaders at Karinhall, he thought of the Germans as people he would one day have to fight. He felt hypocritical putting on the good fellow with them. But intelligence opportunities did exist at Stöller’s estate. Pug had sent home a five-page account just of his talk with General von Roon. By pretending he agreed at heart with Ike Lacouture — something Stöller already believed, because he wanted to — he could increase those opportunities. It meant being a liar, expressing ideas he thought pernicious, and abusing a man’s hospitality — a hell of a way to serve one’s country! But if Stöller was trying games with the American naval attaché, he had to take the risks. Victor Henry was mulling over all this as he strode along, muffled to his eyes against a sleety rain that was starting to fall, when out of the darkness a stooped figure approached and touched his arm.

“Captain Henry?”

“Who are you?”

“Rosenthal. You are living in my house.”

They were near a corner, and in the glow of the blue streetlight Pug saw that the Jew had lost a lot of weight; the skin of his face hung in folds, and his confident bearing had given way to a whipped and sickly look. It was a shocking change. Holding out his hand, Pug said, “Oh, yes. Hello.”

“Forgive me. My wife and I are going to be sent to Poland soon. Or at least we have heard such a rumor and we want to prepare, in case it’s true. We can’t take our things, and we were just wondering whether there are any articles in our home you and Mrs. Henry would care to buy. You could have anything you wished, and I could make you a very reasonable price.”

Pug had also heard vague stories of the “resettlement” of the Berlin Jews, a wholesale shipping-off to newly formed Polish ghettos, where conditions were, according to the reports you chose to believe, either moderately bad or fantastically horrible. It was disturbing to talk to a man actually menaced with this dark misty fate.

“You have a factory here,” he said. “Can’t your people keep an eye on your property until conditions get better?”

“The fact is I’ve sold my firm, so there’s nobody.”

Rosenthal held up the frayed lapels of his coat against the cutting sleet and wind.

“Did you sell out to the Stöller bank?”

The Jew’s face showed astonishment and timorous suspicion. “You know about these matters? Yes, the Stöller bank. I received a very fair price. Very fair.” The Jew permitted himself a single ironic glance into Henry’s eyes. “But the proceeds were tied up to settle other matters. My wife and I will be more comfortable in Poland with a little ready money. It always helps. So — perhaps the carpets — the plate, or some china?”

“Come along and talk it over with my wife. She makes all those decisions. Maybe you can have dinner with us.”

Rosenthal sadly smiled. “I don’t think so, but you’re very kind.”

Pug nodded, remembering his Gestapo-planted servants. “Herr Rosenthal, I have to repeat to you what I said when we rented your place. I don’t want to take advantage of your misfortune.”

“Captain Henry, you can’t possibly do me and my wife a greater kindness. I hope you will buy something.”

Rosenthal put a card in his hand and melted into the blackout. When Pug got home Rhoda was dressing for the chargé’s dinner, so there was no chance to talk about the offer.

The embassy’s Christmas party had none of the opulence of an Abendruh banquet but it was good enough. Nearly all the Americans left in Berlin were there, chatting over eggnogs and then assembling at three long tables for a meal of roast goose, pumpkin pie, fruit, cheese, and cakes, all from Denmark. Diplomatic import privileges made this possible, and the guests grew merry over the unaccustomed abundance. Victor Henry loved being back among American faces, American talk, offhand open manners, laughter from the diaphragm and not from the face muscles; not a bow or a clicked pair of heels, not a woman’s European smile, gleaming on and off like an electric sign.

But trouble broke out with Rhoda. He heard her raising her voice at Fred Fearing, who was sucking his corncob pipe and glaring at her far down the table. Pug called, “Hey, what’s it about, Fred?”

“The Wolf Stöllers Pug, the loveliest people your wife has ever met.”

I said the nicest Germans,” Rhoda shrilled, “and it’s quite true. You’re blindly prejudiced.”

“It’s time you went home, Rhoda,” Fearing said.

“And just what does that mean?” she snapped back, still much too loud. At Abendruh Rhoda had loosened up on her count of drinks, and tonight she appeared to be further along than usual. Her gestures were getting broad, she was holding her eyes half-closed, and her voice tones were going up into her nose.

“Well, kid, if you think people like Wolf Stöller and his wife are nice, you’ll believe next that Hitler just wants to reunite the German folk peacefully. About that time you need to go back for a while on American chow and the New York Times.”

“I just know that Germans are not monsters with horns and tails,” said Rhoda, “but ordinary people, however misguided. Or did one of your fräuleins show up in bed with cloven hoofs, dear?”

The crude jibe caused a silence. Fearing was an ugly fellow, tall, long-faced, curly-headed, with a narrow foxy nose; upright idealistic, full of rigid liberal ideas, and severe on injustice and political hypocrisy. But he had his human side. He had seduced the wife of his collaborator on a best seller about the Spanish Civil War. This lady he had recently parked in England with an infant daughter, and he was now — so the talk ran — making passes at every available German woman, and even some American wives. Rhoda had once half-seriously told Pug that she had had trouble with Freddy on the dance floor. All the same, Fred Fearing was a famous, able reporter. Because he detested the Nazis, he tried hard to be fair to them, and the propaganda ministry understood this. Most Americans got their picture of Nazi Germany at war from Fearing’s broadcasts.

Victor Henry said, as amiably as he could, to break the silence, “It might be easier to navigate in this country, Rhoda, if the bad ones would sprout horns or grow hair in their palms or something.”

“What Wolf Stöller has in his palms is blood, lots of it,” Fearing said, with a swift whiskeyed-up pugnacity. “He acts unaware of it. You and Rhoda encourage this slight color blindness, Pug, by acting the same way.”

“It’s Pug’s job to socialize with people like Stöller,” said the chargé mildly, from the head of the table. “I propose a moratorium tonight on discussing the Germans.”

Colonel Forrest was rubbing his broken nose, a mannerism that signalled an itch to argue, though his moon face remained placid. He put in, nasally, “Say, Freddy, I happen to think Hitler just wants to reorganize central Europe as a German sphere, peacefully if he can, and that he’ll call off the war if the Allies will agree. Think I should go home, too?”

Fearing emitted a column of blue smoke and red sparks from his pipe. “What about Mein Kampf, Bill?”

“Campaign document of a thirty-year-old hothead,” snapped the military attaché, “written eighteen years ago in jail. Now he’s the head of state. He’s never moved beyond his strength. Mein Kampf’s all about tearing off the southern half of Russia and making a German breadbasket of it. That’s an old Vienna coffeehouse fantasy. It went out of the window once and for all with the pact. The Jewish business is bad, but the man’s doing his job with the crude tools at hand. That unfortunately includes anti-Semitism. He didn’t invent it. It was big on the German scene before he was born.”

“Yes, time for you to go home,” said Fearing, gulping Moselle.

“Well, what’s your version?” Now plainly irritated, the military attaché put on an imitation of the broadcaster’s voice. “That Adolf Hitler the mad house painter is out to conquer the world?”

“Oh, hell, Hitler’s revolution doesn’t know where it’s going, Bill, any more than the French or Russian revolutions did,” exclaimed Fearing, with an exasperated wave of his corncob. “It’s just racing along the way those did and it’ll keep going and spreading till it’s stopped. Sure he moves peacefully where he can. Why not? Everywhere he’s pushed in there have been welcoming groups of leading citizens, or traitors, you might say. In Poland they swarmed. Why, you know that France and England have parties ready right this second to cooperate with him. He just has to strike hard enough in the west to knock out the ins and bring in the outs. He’s already got Stalin cravenly feeding him all the Russian oil and wheat he needs, in return for the few bones he threw him in the Baltic.”

With swinging theatrical gestures of the smoking pipe, Fearing went on, “By 1942, the way things are going, you may see a world in which Germany will control the industries of Europe, the raw materials of the Soviet Union and armies of England and France. Why, the French fleet would go over to him tomorrow if the right admiral sneezed. He’ll have a working deal with the Japs for exploiting Asia and the East Indies and ruling the Pacific and Indian oceans. Then what? Not to mention the network of dictatorships in South America, already in the Nazis’ pocket. You know, of course, Bill, that the United States Army is now two hundred thousand strong, and that Congress intends to cut it.”

“Well, I’m against that, of course,” said Colonel Forrest.

“I daresay! A new bloody dark age is threatening to engulf the whole world and Congress wants to cut down the Army!”

“An interesting vision,” smiled the chargé. “Slightly melodramatic.”

Rhoda Henry raised her wineglass, giggling noisily. “Lawks-a mercy me! I never heard such wild-eyed poppy-cock. Freddy, you’re the one who should go home. Merry Christmas.”

Fred Fearing’s face reddened. He looked up and down the table. “Pug Henry, I like you. I guess I’ll go for a walk.”

As the broadcaster strode away from the table, the chargé rose and hurried after him, but did not bring him back. The Henrys went home early. Pug had to hold up Rhoda as they left, because she was half-asleep, and unsteady at the knees.

The next pouch of Navy mail contained an Alnav listing changes of duty for most of the new captains. They were becoming execs of battleships, commanding officers of cruisers, chiefs of staff to admirals at sea. For Victor Henry there were no orders. He stared out of the window at Hitler’s chancellery, at the black-clad SS men letting snow pile on their helmets and shoulders like statues. Suddenly, he had had enough. He told his yeoman not to disturb him, and wrote three letters. The first expressed regret to the Stöllers that, due to unforeseen official problems, he and Rhoda would not be coming back to Abendruh. The second, two formal paragraphs to the Bureau of Personnel, requested transfer to sea duty. In the third, a long handwritten letter to Vice-Admiral Preble, Pug poured out his disgust with his assignment and his desire to go back to sea. He ended up:

A few days later another White House envelope came with a scrawl in black, thick, slanting pencil. The postmark showed that it had crossed his letter.

Victor Henry bought two of Rosenthal’s Oriental carpets and a set of English china that Rhoda particularly loved, at the prices the man named. His main motive was to cheer her up, and it worked; she gloated over the gains for weeks, and never tired of saying, truly enough, that the poor Jewish man’s thankfulness to her had been overwhelming. Pug also wrote the Stöllers about this time that, if the invitation held, he and Rhoda would come back to Abendruh after all. If his job was intelligence, he decided, he had better get on with it; moreover, the moral gap between him and Stöller seemed to have narrowed. Notwithstanding Rosenthal’s pathetic gratitude for the deal, his possessions were Objekte.

Chapter 23

Three letters came straggling in during the next few weeks. The first two were shallow awkward scrawls:

Natalie was enchanted with this imaginative little conceit, and read it over and over.

“Well, well,” Natalie said aloud, as tears sprang from her eyes and dropped on the flimsy airmail paper. “You miserable chestnut-haired devil.” She kissed the pages, smearing them orange-red. Then she looked at the date again — February 10, and this was April 9 — almost two months for an airmail letter! There was no point in answering, at that rate. He might be on his way back now.” But she seized a pad and began writing. She couldn’t help it.

Natalie’s father was listening to the radio in the garden. They had just eaten lunch and her mother had gone off to a committee meeting. As Natalie poured loving words on paper, a news broadcast came drifting in on the warm air through the open window. The announcer, with rich dramatic doom in his voice, spoke words that arrested her pen:

Putting aside the pad and pen, Natalie went to the window. Her father, sitting with his back to her in blazing sunshine, his grizzled head in a white cap tilted far to one side, was listening with motionless intensity to this shattering development.

“Paris. In an official communiqué, the French government announced that the Allies would rally to the cause of democratic Norway, and would meet the German onslaught quote with cold steel unquote. Pessimistic commentators pointed out that the fall of Norway and Denmark would put more than a thousand additional miles of European coastline in German hands and that this would mean the collapse of the British blockade.

“Berlin. The propaganda ministry has issued the following bulletin. Forestalling a British plan to seize Scandinavia and deny Germany access to Swedish iron ore and other raw materials, the German armed forces have peaceably taken Denmark under their protection and have arrived in Norway by sea and air, where the populace has enthusiastically welcomed them. Oslo is already in German hands, and the life of the capital is returning to normal. Scattered resistance by small British-bribed units has been crushed. The Führer has sent the following message of congratulations to…”

Natalie came out into the garden to talk to her father about the shocking news, and was surprised to find him sleeping through it, his head dropped on his chest. The radio was blaring; and her father usually hung on the news broadcasts. The shadow from his white linen cap obscured his face, but she could see a queer expression around his mouth. His upper teeth were protruding ludicrously over his lip. Natalie came to him, and touched his shoulder. “Pa?” He did not respond. He felt inert. She could see now that his upper plate had worked loose. “Pa!” As she shook him his head lolled and the cap fell off. She thrust her hand inside his loose flowered sport shirt; there was no heartbeat under the warm clammy skin. In the instant before she shrieked and ran inside to telephone the doctor, she saw on her dead father’s face a strong resemblance to Aaron Jastrow that in his lifetime she had never observed.

She walked through the next weeks in a fog of shocked grief. Natalie had stopped taking her father seriously at about the age of twelve; he was just a businessman, a sweater manufacturer, a temple president, and she was then already a brash intellectual snob. Since then she had become more and more aware of how her father’s sense of inferiority to Aaron Jastrow, and to his own daughter, permeated his life. Yet she was prostrated when he died. She could not eat. Even with drugs she could not sleep. Her mother, a conventional woman usually preoccupied with Hadassah meetings and charity fund-raising, for many years completely baffled by her daughter, pulled out of her own grief and tried in vain to comfort her. Natalie lay in her room on her bed, wailing and bawling, almost constantly at first, and in spells every day for weeks afterward. She suffered agonies of guilt for neglecting and despising her father. He had loved her and spoiled her. When she had told him she wanted to go to the Sorbonne for two years, that had been that. She had never even asked whether he could afford it. She had felled him with her bizarre misadventures and had experienced no remorse while he was alive. Now he was gone, and she was on her own, and it was too late. He was unreachable by love or regret.

The radio news — disaster on disaster in Norway, German drives succeeding, Allied landings failing, the remnants of the Norwegian army retreating into the mountains where the Germans were hunting them down — came to her as dim distant rumors. Reality was only her wet pillow, and the stream of middle-aged sunburned Jews paying condolence calls, and all the endless talk about money problems.

She was shocked back into her senses by two events, one on top of the other: Byron’s return from Europe, and the German attack on France.

Chapter 24 — Case Yellow (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

Chapter 25

Passing a newsstand on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, where a fresh stack of afternoon papers fluttered under a cobblestone, Janice Lacouture said to Madeline, “Oh gawd, there’s Daddy again, sounding off. Won’t your folks be impressed!” Madeline was helping her shop for her trousseau. Rhoda, Pug, and Byron were due at three o’clock in the Brooklyn Navy Yard aboard the cruiser Helena. Janice’s first encounter with Warren’s mother was much on her mind, far more so than the bad war news.

A rough May wind swooped along the avenue, whipping the girls’ skirts and hats. Madeline clutched a package with one hand and her hat with the other, peering at the two-column photograph of Congressman Isaac Lacouture on the Capitol steps, with three microphones thrust in his face. “He’s handsome, you know,” she said.

“I hope you’ll like him. He’s really an awfully smart man,” Janice said, pitching her voice above the wind. Actually the reporters have pushed him further than he ever intended to go. Now he’s way out on a limb.”

Madeline had redecorated the little flat. The walls were pale green, with cream-and-green flowered draperies. New Danish teak furniture, austere and slight, made the place seem roomier. Jonquils and irises in a bowl on the dining table touched the place with spring and youth, much as two girls did when they walked in. It was not a flat where one expected to find a Communist boyfriend. Indeed Madeline had long since discarded the poor popeyed trombone player in brown — something Janice had been relieved to learn. Her current boyfriend was a CBS lawyer, a staunch Roosevelt man and very bright, but going bald at twenty-six.

She called her telephone answering service, briskly jotted notes on a pad, and slammed the receiver down. “Rats. I can’t go with you to meet my folks, Janice, after all. Isn’t that a pain? Two of the amateurs have loused out. I have to spend the afternoon listening to replacements. Always something!” She was clearly quite pleased with herself at being kept so busy. “Now. Do you happen to know a man named Palmer Kirby? He’s at the Waldorf and he says he’s a friend of the family.” Janice shook her head.

Madeline rang him and liked his voice with his first words; it had a warm humorous resonance. “You are Rhoda Henry’s daughter? I saw your name in the book and took a chance.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Good. Your family was very hospitable to me in Berlin. Your mother wrote me they’d be arriving today. I just thought they might be tired and at a loose end, their first evening in New York. I’d like to take all of you to dinner.”

“That’s kind of you, but I don’t know their plans. They won’t arrive till one or so.”

“I see. Well, suppose I make the dinner reservations? If your folks can come, I’ll expect you all in my suite at six or so. If not, just give me a ring, or your mother can.”

“I guess so, sure. Thank you. Warren’s fiancée is visiting me, Mr. Kirby.”

“Ike Lacouture’s daughter? Excellent. By all means bring her.”

Off Madeline went, brimming with zest for existence, while Janice changed into warmer clothes for the Navy Yard.

Madeline was now the “program coordinator” of The Walter Field Amateur Hour. Walter Field, an old ham actor, had stumbled into great radio popularity with the hackneyed vaudeville formula of amateur entertainment.

Suddenly made rich, he had gone into a whirl of big real estate deals, and just as suddenly dropped dead. Hugh Cleveland had stepped in as master of ceremonies. Madeline still fetched chicken sandwiches and coffee for him, but she now also interviewed the amateurs. She remained Cleveland’s assistant for his morning show, and she was making more money than ever. For Madeline Henry, May 1940 was as jolly a month as she had ever lived.

In the Brooklyn Navy Yard the wind was stronger and colder. The cruiser was already tied up at the pier, fluttering a rainbow of signal flags strung down from the mast to stem and stern. Amid a swarm of waving shouting relatives on the pier, war refugees were streaming off the gangway. Janice found her way to the customs shed, where Rhoda stood by a heap of luggage, blowing her nose. The tall young blonde in a green wool suit and toque caught Rhoda’s eye.

“Well, isn’t this Janice? I’m Rhoda Henry,” she said, stepping forward. “The snapshots didn’t do you justice at ALL.”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Henry! Hello!” Rhoda’s willowy figure, modish straw hat, and fuchsia gloves and shoes surprised Janice. Warren’s father had struck Janice, during their brief meeting in Pensacola, as a coarse-grained weather-beaten man. By contrast Mrs. Henry seemed youthful, elegant, even sexy. This was true despite the woman’s reddened nose and frequent sneezing.

“Aren’t you CLEVER to wear that suit. I dressed for spring and it’s positively ARTIC here,” Rhoda said. “Where’s Madeline? Is she all right?”

Quickly Janice explained why the daughter hadn’t come.

“Well! Hasn’t Mad turned into the little career girl! My dear, I want to kiss you, but I daren’t. Don’t come near me. I’m virulent! I’ve got the cold of the ages. They should quarantine me. I’ll infect the nation. Well! How beautiful you are. You’re ravishing. Lucky Warren! How is he, anyway?”

“All right, I hope. He’s sweating out carrier landings, down off Puerto Rico somewhere.”

Victor Henry, looking more impressive than Janice remembered in a gold-buttoned blue bridge coat and gold-encrusted cap, came through the crowd with a surly-looking customs inspector. After a brusque greeting to Janice and an inquiry about Madeline, he wanted to know where Byron had gotten off to.

“Briny disappeared. He had to make a phone call,” the mother said.

As the inspector glanced through the luggage, Janice told the Henrys about Palmer Kirby’s invitation. Between sneezes, Rhoda said, “Well, of all things. His factory’s in Denver. What’s he doing here? I don’t think we can go, can we, Pug? Of course dinner at the Waldorf would be a lovely way to start life in the USA again. Take the taste of Berlin out of our mouths! Janice, you just can’t picture what Germany is like now. It’s gruesome. I’m cured. When I saw the Statue of Liberty I laughed and cried. Me for the USA hereafter, now and forever.”

“Matter of fact, I have to talk to Fred Kirby,” Pug said.

“Oh, Pug, it’s impossible, I have this filthy cold — and my HAIR!” Rhoda said. “What could I wear to the Waldorf, anyhow? Everything’s a mass of wrinkles, except what I’m standing up in. If I could only get my pink suit pressed — and if I could get to a hairdresser for a couple of hours—”

Byron come sauntering through the noisy crowd. “Hey, Janice! I’m Warren’s brother. I thought you’d be here.” He produced from his pocket a small box with a London label and gave it to her.

Janice opened it, and there lay a Victorian pin, a little golden elephant with red stones for eyes. “Good heavens!”

“Anybody who marries one of us needs the patience of an elephant,” said Byron.

“Ye gods, if that’s not the truth,” said Rhoda, laughing.

Janice gave Byron a slow female blink. He was even handsomer than Warren, she thought. His eyes had an eager aroused sparkle. She kissed him.

“…I have nothing to offer,” said the grainy strong singsong voice out of the radio, slurring the consonants almost like a drunken man, “but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

“Why, he’s a genius!” Rhoda exclaimed. She sat on the edge of a frail gilt chair in Kirby’s suite, champagne glass in hand, tears in her eyes. “Where has he been till now?”

Smearing caviar from a blue Russian-printed tin on a bit of toast, and carefully sprinkling onion shreds, Byron said, “He was running the British Navy when Prien got into Scapa Flow and sank the Royal Oak. And when the Germans crossed the Skagerrak to Norway.”

“Shut up and listen,” Victor Henry said.

Janice glanced from the son to the father, crossed her long, legs, and sipped champagne. Palmer Kirby’s eyes flickered appreciatively at her legs, which pleased her. He was an interesting-looking old dog.

“…You ask, what is our policy? I will say, it is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory — victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror… I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men…”

The speech ended. An American voice said with a cough and tremor, “You have just heard the newly appointed Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill.”

After a moment, Rhoda said, “That man will save civilization. We’re going to get in now. The Germans over-played their hand. We’ll never let them conquer England. There’s something strangely thick about the Germans, you know? One must observe them close up for a long time to understand that. Strangely thick.”

Victor Henry said to Dr. Kirby, glancing at his watch, “Quite a speech. Can we talk now for a few minutes?”

Kirby got to his feet and Rhoda smiled at him. “Champagne, caviar, and business as usual. That’s Pug.”

“We’re just waiting for Madeline,” Pug said.

“Come along,” Kirby said, walking into the bedroom.

“Say, Dad. I’m going to have to mosey along,” Byron said. “There’s this plane to Miami I have to catch. It leaves La Guardia in about an hour.”

“What! Dr. Kirby thinks you’re dining with him.”

“Well, see, I made the reservation before I knew about this dinner.”

“You’re not waiting till Madeline comes? You haven’t seen her in two years. She’s taking us all to her show after dinner.”

“I think I’d better go, Dad.”

Abruptly, Pug left the room.

“Briny, you’re impossible,” his mother said. “Couldn’t you have waited until tomorrow?”

“Mom, do you remember what it’s like to be in love?”

Rhoda surprised him and Janice Lacouture by turning blood red. “Me? My goodness, Byron, what a thing to say! Of course not, I’m a million years old.”

“Thank you for my marvellous pin.” Janice touched the elephant on her shoulder. “That must be some girl, in Miami.”

Byron’s blank narrow-eyed look dissolved in a charming smile and an admiring glance at her. “She’s all right.”

“Bring her to the wedding with you. Don’t forget.”

As Byron went to the door, Rhoda said, “You have a real talent for disappointing your father.”

“He’d be disappointed if I didn’t disappoint him. Good-bye, Mom.”

In the bedroom Dr. Kirby sat at a desk, checking off a stack of journals and mimeographed reports that Victor Henry had brought him from Germany. As he scribbled in a yellow notebook, the little desk shook and two reports slid to the floor. “They must rent this suite to midgets,” he said, continuing to write.

Victor Henry said, “Fred, are you working on a uranium bomb?”

Kirby’s hand paused. He turned, hanging one long loose arm over the back of his chair, and looked into Henry’s eyes. The silence and the steady look between the men lasted a long time.

“You can just tell me it’s none of my goddamn business, but” — Pug sat on the bed — “all that stuff there zeroes in on the uranium business. And some of the things I couldn’t get, like the graphite figures, why, the Germans told me flatly that they were classified because of the secret bomb aspects. The Germans are fond of talking very loosely about this terrible ultra-bomb they’re developing. That made me think there was nothing much to it. But that list of requests you sent gave me second thoughts.”

Kirby knocked out his pipe, stuffed it, and lit it. The process took a couple of minutes, during which he didn’t talk, but looked at Captain Henry. He said slowly, “I’m not a chemist, and this uranium thing is more a less a chemical engineering problems. Electricity does come into it for production techniques. A couple of months ago I was approached to be an industrial consultant.”

“What’s the status of the thing?”

“All theory. Years away from any serious effort.”

“Do you mind telling me about it?”

“Why not? It’s in the college physics books. Hell, it’s been in Time magazine. There’s this process, neutron bombardment. You expose one chemical substance and another to the emanation of radium, and see what happens. It’s been going on for years, in Europe and here. Well, these two Germans tried it on uranium oxide last year, and they produced barium. Now that’s transmutation of elements by atom-splitting. I guess you know about the fantastic charge of energy packed in the mass of the atom. You’ve heard about driving a steamship across the ocean on one lump of coal, if you could only harness the atomic energy in it, and so forth.” Victor Henry nodded. “Well, Pug, this was a hint that it might really be done with uranium. It was an atom-splitting process that put out far more energy than they’d used to cause it. These Germans discovered that by weighing the masses involved. They’d been an appreciable loss of mass. They published their finding, and the whole scientific community’s been in an uproar ever since.

“Okay, the next step is, there’s this rare hot isotope of uranium, U-235. This substance may turn out to have gigantic explosive powers, through a chain reaction that gives you a huge release of energy from mass. A handful maybe can blow up a city, that sort of talk. The nuclear boys say it may be practicable right now, if industry will just come up with enough pure U-235.”

Pug listened to all this with his mouth compressed, his body tensed forward. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he kept saying when Kirby puffed on his pipe. He pointed a stiff finger at the engineer. “Well, I follow all that. This is vital military intelligence.”

Kirby shook his head. “Hardly. It’s public knowledge. It may be a complete false alarm. These chemical engineers don’t guarantee anything. And what they want will take one hell of a big industrial effort to deliver. Maybe the stuff will explode, maybe it won’t. Maybe as soon as you have enough of it, it’ll all fly apart. Nobody knows. Five minutes of scratch pad work shows that you’re talking about an expenditure of many many millions of dollars. It could run up to a billion and then you could end up with a crock of horseshit. Congress is on an economy rampage. They’ve been refusing Roosevelt the money for a couple of hundred new airplanes.”

“I’ll ask you a couple of more questions. If I’m off base, tell me.”

“Shoot.”

“Where do you come into it?”

Kirby rubbed his pipe against his chin. “Okay, how do you separate out isotopes of a very rare metal in industrial quantities? One notion is to shoot it in the form of an ionized gas through a magnetic field. The lighter ions get deflected a tiny bit more, so you stream ‘em out and catch them. The whole game depends on the magnetic field being kept stable, because any wavering jumbles up the ion stream. Precise control of voltages is my business.”

“Uh-huh. Now. One last point. If an occasion arises, should I volunteer my valued opinion to the President that he should get off his ass about uranium?”

Kirby uttered a short baritone laugh. “The real question here is the Germans. How far along are they? This cuteness of theirs about pure graphite disturbs me. Graphite comes into the picture at a late stage. If Hitler gets uranium bombs first, Pug, and if they happen to work, that could prove disagreeable.”

A doorbell rang.

“I guess that’s your daughter,” Kirby said. “Let’s go down to dinner.”

Madeline arrived in a black tailored suit with a flaring jacket and a tight sheath skirt, dark hair swept up on her head. It was hard to think of her as only twenty. Possible she was putting on the young career woman a bit, but she did have to leave the table in the Empire Room twice, when the headwaiter came said with a bow that CBS was on the telephone. Victor Henry liked her confident, demure manner and her taciturnity. With alert eyes darting from face to face, she listened to the talk about Germany and about the wedding plans, and said almost nothing.

In the studio building, at the reception desk, a stiff, uniformed youngster awaited them. “Miss Henry’s party? This way, please.” He took them to a barren low-ceilinged green room where Hugh Cleveland and his staff sat around a table. Briskly cordial, Cleveland invited them to stay in the room till the show started. He was looking at the cards, memorizing spontaneous jokes he would make later, and discussing them with his gagman. After a while he snapped a rubber band around the cards and slipped them in his pocket. “Well, five minutes to go,” he said, turning to the visitors. “I hear this fellow Churchill gave a pretty good speech. Did you catch it?”

“Every word,” Rhoda said. “It was shattering. That speech will go down in history.”

“Quite a speech,” Pug said.

Madeline said, “Darn, and I was so busy I missed it.”

The show’s producer, who looked forty-five and dressed like a college boy, put a manicured hand to the back of his head. “It was fair. It needed cutting and punching up. Too much tutti-frutti. There was one good line about blood and sweat.”

“There was? How would that go with the butcher who plays the zither?” Cleveland said to the joke writer at his elbow, a melancholy young Jew who needed a haircut. “Could we throw in something about blood and sweat?”

The joke writer sadly shook his head. “Bad taste.”

“Don’t be silly, Herbie. Try to think of something. Captain Henry, how’s the war going? Will the Gamelin Plan stop the Krauts?”

“I don’t know what the Gamelin Plan is.”

Madeline put her guests in privileged seats on the stage of the studio, near the table where Cleveland interviewed the amateurs before a huge cardboard display extolling Morning Smile pink laxative salts. She posted herself in the glassed control booth. A large audience, which to Victor Henry seemed composed entirely of imbeciles, applauded the stumbling amateurs and roared at Cleveland’s jokes.

Cleveland ran the program with smooth foxy charm; Pug realized now that Madeline had latched herself to a comer. But the show disgusted him. One amateur identified himself as a line repairman. Cleveland remarked, “Well, haw haw, guess they could use you in France right about now.”

“France, Mr. Cleveland?”

“Sure. On that Maginot Line.”

He winked at the audience; they guffawed and clapped.

“Does this amuse you?” Pug said across Rhoda, in a low tone to Palmer Kirby.

“I never listen to the radio,” said the engineer. “It’s interesting. Like a visit to a madhouse.”

“That Cleveland’s cute, though.” Rhoda said.

Madeline came to them after the show, as the audience swarmed on stage around Hugh Cleveland seeking his autograph. “Damn, two of our best bits got cut off the air by news bulletins. They’re so high-handed, those news people!”

“What’s happening?” Victor Henry asked.

“Oh, it’s the war, naturally. Just more of the same. The Germans have overrun some new town, and the French are collapsing, and so on. Nothing very unexpected. Hugh will have a fit when he hears they cut the butcher with the zither.”

“Miss Henry?” A uniformed page approached her.

“Yes?”

“Urgent long-distance call, miss, in Mr. Cleveland’s office, for Miss Lacouture. From Puerto Rico.”

On the flying bridge of the fishing boat Blue Bird, rocking gently along at four knots in the Gulf Stream, Byron and Natalie lay in each other’s arms in the sun. Below, the jowly sunburned skipper yawned at the wheel over a can of beer, and the ship-to-shore telephone dimly crackled and gabbled. From long poles fixed in sockets at the empty fighting chairs, lines trailed in the water. Sunburned, all but naked in swimming suits, the lovers had forgotten the fish, the lines, and the skipper. They had forgotten death and they had forgotten war. They lay at center of a circle of dark blue calm water and light blue clear sky. It seemed the sun shone on them alone.

The deck echoed with loud rapping from below, four quick knocks like a Morse code V. “Hey, Mr. Henry! You awake?”

“Sure, what is it?” Byron called hoarsely, raising himself on an elbow.

They’re calling us from the beach. Your father wants you to come on in.”

“My father? Wrong boat. He’s in Washington.”

“Wait one — Hello, hello, Blue Bird calling Bill Thomas—” They heard the squawking of the ship-to-shore again. “Hey, Mr. Henry. Your father — is he a naval officer, a captain?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, the office has your girl’s mother on the telephone. Your father’s at her house and the message is to get back there pronto.”

Natalie sat up, her eyes wide and startled. Byron called, “Okay, let’s head back.”

“What on earth?” Natalie exclaimed.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

The boat, scoring a green-white circle on the dark sea, picked up speed and started to pitch. The wind tumbled Natalie’s long free black hair. She pulled a mirror from a straw basket. “My God, look at me. Look at that mouth. I look gnawed. As though the rats had been at me!” She put the back of her hand to her lips. “Well, no use trying to patch up this Gorgon’s head till we come in. What can your father want, Briny?”

“Why are you so alarmed? Probably he’s here with my mother, and she wants a look at you. I can’t blame her, the way I shot down here. If so, I’m going to tell them, Natalie.”

Her face turned anxious. She took his hand. “Angel, there’s some Jewish law about not getting married too soon after a parent dies. Possibly for as long as a year, and — good heavens! Don’t make such a face! I’m not going to observe that. But I can’t distress my mother at this point. I need some time to figure this out.”

“I don’t want you violating your religion, Natalie, but lord, that’s a blow.”

“Sweetie, I wasn’t planning on marrying you until about an hour ago.” She shook her head and ruefully laughed. “I feel weird. Almost disembodied. Too much sun, or maybe I’m just drunk on kisses. And now your father suddenly showing up! Isn’t it all like a fever dream?”

He put his arm around her shoulders, holding her close as the boat pitched and rocked more. “Not to me. It’s damned real, and the realest thing of all is that we’re getting married. Reality just seems to be starting.”

“Yes, no doubt. I certainly don’t look forward to writing to Leslie — Jehosephat, that scowl again! You put it on and off like a Hallowe’en mask, it’s unnerving — Briny, he came down to see me right after Papa died. He was remarkably helpful and kind. A new Slote, just a bit too late. He’s been writing to his university friends to find me a teaching job. I wish I knew what your father wanted! Don’t tell him about us, Byron. Not till I’ve talked to my mother.”

“You’d better talk to her right away, then. My father has a way of getting at the facts.”

“Oh! Oh!” She put both hands to her hair. “I’m so happy, and so confused, and so upset! I’m dizzy. I feel sixteen, which I’m not, God knows! Better for you if I were.”

When the Blue Bird drew closer in, Byron got the binoculars and scanned the ragged row of skyscraper hotels along the beach. “I thought so. There he is, waiting on the pier.”

Natalie, lounging in one of the chairs, sat bolt upright. “Oh, no. You’re sure?”

“Right there, pacing back and forth. I know that walk.”

She seized her basket and darted into the cabin, saying to the skipper, “Slow down, please.”

“Right, miss.” The bewhiskered man, with a grin, pulled back on the throttle.

She closed the little door to the forward cabin. Soon she emerged in a cotton skirt and white blouse, her black hair brushed gleaming and loose to her shoulders. “I’m seasick,” she said to Byron, wanly smiling. “Try putting on eyebrows and a mouth sometime in a rocking boat, in a hot little cabin. Whew! Am I green? I feel green.”

“You look wonderful.”

The boat was wallowing half a mile from the pier. Natalie could see the man in blue walking up and down. “Full steam ahead,” she said shakily. “Damn the torpedoes.”

Victor Henry, leaning down from the tar-smelling pier, held out a hand as the boat stopped. “Hello, Natalie. This is a helluva thing to do to you. Watch it, don’t step on that nail.”

Byron leaped ashore. “What’s up, Dad? Is everybody all right?”

“Have you two had lunch?” Pug said.

They looked at each other, and Natalie nervously laughed. “I did pack sandwiches. They’re in this basket. “

“We, well, I don’t know, we forgot.”

An amused look came and went in Victor Henry’s eyes, though his face remained stern. “Uh-huh. Well, the smells from that joint there” — he pointed with his thumb at a dilapidated clam bar on the pier — “have been driving me nuts, but I thought I’d wait for you. I haven’t eaten yet today.”

“Please come to my house. I’d love to fix you something.”

“Your mother was kind enough to give me orange juice and coffee. D’you mind if we go in here? These water-front places can be pretty good.”

They sat in a tiny plywood booth painted bright red. Byron and his father ordered clam chowder. “I’ve never learned to like that stuff,” Natalie said to the waiter. “Can I have a bacon and tomato sandwich?”

“Sure, miss.”

Victor Henry looked oddly at her. “What’s the matter?” she said.

“You’re not fussy about what you eat.”

She looked puzzled. “Oh. You mean the bacon? Not in the least, I’m afraid. Many Jews aren’t.”

“How about your mother?”

“Well, she has some vague and inconsistent scruples. I can never quite follow them.”

“We had quite a chat. She’s a clever woman, and holding up remarkably, after her loss. Well!” Pug put cigarettes and lighter on the table. “It looks like France is really folding, doesn’t it? Have you heard the radio this morning? In Paris they’re burning papers. The BEF is high-tailing it for the Channel, but it may already be too late. The Germans may actually bag the entire British regular army.”

“Good God,” Byron said. “If they do that the war’s over! How could this happen in three days?”

“Well, it has. While I was waiting for you I heard the President on my car radio, making an emergency address to a joint session of Congress. He’s asked them for fifty thousand airplanes a year.”

“Fifty thousand a year?” exclaimed Natalie. “Fifty thousand? Why, that’s just wild talk.”

“He said we’d have to build the factories to turn ‘em out, and then start making ‘em. In the mood I saw in Washington yesterday, he’s going to get the money, too. The panic is finally on, up there. They’ve come awake in a hurry.”

Byron said, “None of this can help England or France.”

“No. Not in this battle. What Congress is starting to think about is the prospect of us on our own, against Hitler and the Japanese. Now.” Pug lit a cigarette, and began ticking off points against spread stiff fingers. “Warren’s thirty-day leave has been cancelled. The wedding’s been moved up. Warren and Janice are getting married tomorrow. They’ll have a one-day honeymoon, and then he goes straight out to the Pacific Fleet. So. Number one: You’ve got to get to Pensacola by tomorrow at ten.”

With, a hesitant look at Natalie, who appeared dumbfounded. Byron said, “All right. I’ll be there.”

“Okay. Number two: If you want to get into that May 27 class at sub school, you’ve got to report to New London and take the physical by Saturday.”

“Can’t I take a physical at Pensacola?”

The father pursed his lips. “I never thought of that. Maybe I can get Red Tully to stretch a point. He’s already doing that, holding this place open for you. The applications are piling up now for that school.”

“May 27?” Natalie said to Byron. “That’s eleven days from now! Are you going to submarine school in eleven days?”

“I don’t know. It’s a possibility.”

She turned to his father. “How long is the school?”

“It’s three months.”

“What will become of him afterward?”

“My guess is he’ll go straight out to the fleet, like Warren. The new subs are just starting to come on the line.”

“Three months! And then you’d be gone!” Natalie exclaimed.

“Well, we’ll talk about all that,” Byron said. “Will you come with me to the wedding tomorrow?”

“Me? I don’t know. I wasn’t invited.”

“Janice asked me to bring you.”

“She did? When? You never told me that.”

Byron turned to his father, “Look, when does the submarine course after this one begin?”

“I don’t know. But the sooner you start, the better. It takes you thirteen more months at sea to get your dolphins. There’s nothing tougher than qualifying in submarines, Briny. A flier has an easier job.”

Byron took one of his father’s cigarettes, lit it, inhaled deeply, and said as he exhaled a gray cloud, “Natalie and I are getting married.”

With an appraising glance at Natalie, who was biting her lower lip. Victor Henry said. “I see. Well, that might or might not affect your admittance to the school. I hadn’t checked that point, not knowing of this development. In general, unmarried candidates get the preference in such situations. Still, maybe the thing to do—”

Natalie broke in, “Captain Henry, I realize it creates many difficulties. We only decided this morning. I myself don’t know when or how. It’s a fearful tangle.”

Looking at her from under his eyebrows as he ate, Pug nodded.

“There are no difficulties that can’t be overcome,” said Byron.

“Listen, darling,” Natalie said, “the last thing I’ll ever do is stop you from going to submarine school. My God, I was in Warsaw!”

Byron smoked, his face blank, his eyes narrowed at his father.

Victor Henry looked at his wristwatch and gathered up his cigarettes and lighter. “Well, that’s that. Great chowder. Hits the spot. Say, there’s a plane to Pensacola that I can still make this afternoon.”

“Why didn’t you just telephone all this?” Byron said. “It would have been simple enough. Why did you come here?”

Victor Henry waved the check and a ten-dollar bill at the waiter. “You took off like a rocket, Byron. I didn’t know your plans or your state of mind. I wasn’t even sure you’d agree to come to the wedding.”

“Why, I wouldn’t have heard of his staying away,” Natalie said.

“Well, I didn’t know that either. I thought I ought to be available to talk to both of you, and maybe answer questions, and use a little persuasion if necessary.” He added to Natalie, “Janice and Warren do expect you. That I can tell you.”

She put a hand to her forehead. “I just don’t know if I can come.”

“We’ll be there,” Byron said flatly. “Or at least I will. Does that take care of everything?”

Pug hesitated. “What about sub school? I told Red I’d call him today.”

‘If Captain Tully has to know today then I’m out. All right?”

Natalie struck the table with her fist. “Damn it, Byron. Don’t make decisions like that.”

“I don’t know any other way to make decisions.”

“You can talk to me. I’m involved.”

Victor Henry cleared his throat. “Well, I’ve spoken my piece and I’ll shove off. We can pick this topic up tomorrow.”

“Oh?” Byron’s tone was acid. “Then you don’t really have to call Captain Tully today, after all.”

Victor Henry’s face darkened. He leaned back in the hard seat. “See here, Byron. Hitler and the Germans are creating your problem. I’m not. I’m calling it to your attention.”

“Well, all this bad news from Europe may be highly exaggerated, and in any case, no American submarine will ever fail to sail because I’m not in it.”

“Oh, be quiet Briny,” Natalie said in a choked voice. “Let your father catch his plane.”

“Just keep remembering I didn’t start this war, Byron,” Victor Henry said, in almost the tone he had used on the waiter in Wannsee, picking his white cap off a peg while looking his son in the face. “I think you’d make a good submariner. They’re all a bunch of goofy individualists. On the other hand, I can’t hate you for wanting to marry this brilliant and beautiful young lady. And now I’m getting the hell out of here.” Victor Henry stood. “See you in church. Get there early, you’ll be best man. Wear your dark suit. Good-bye, Natalie. Sorry I broke up your day on the boat. Try to come to Pensacola.”

“Yes, sir.” A sad little smile lit her worried face. “Thank you.”

When he went out, she turned to Byron. “I have always loathed the smell of cooking fish. Let’s get out of here. I was half sick during all that. God knows how I’ve kept from shooting my cookies.”

Natalie strode seaward along the wharf, taking deep gulps of air, her skirt fluttering on her swinging hips, the thin blouse wind-flattened on her breasts, her long hair flying. Byron hurried after her. She stopped short at the end of the wharf, where two ragged Negro boys sat fishing, and turned on him, her arms folded.

“Why the devil did you treat your father like that?”

“Like what? I know why he came here, that’s all,” Byron returned with equal sharpness. He came to separate us.” His voice rang and twanged much like Victor Henry’s.

“Oh, take me home. Straight home. He was utterly right, you know. You’re blaming him for the way the war is going. That’s the essence of immaturity. I was embarrassed for you. I hated that feeling.”

They walked back up the pier to her father’s new blue Buick sedan, glittering and baking in the sun, giving off heat like a stove. “Open all the doors, please. Let some air blow through, or we’ll die in there!”

Byron said as he went from door to door, “I have never wanted anything before, not of life, not of him, not of anybody. Now I do.”

“Even if it’s true, you still have to look at reality, not throw tantrums.”

“He did quite a job on you,” said Byron. “He usually gets anything done that he intends to.”

They climbed into the car.

“That’s how much you know,” she said harshly, slamming her door as he whirred the motor. “I’m coming to Pensacola with you. All right? I love you. Now shut up and drive me home.”

Chapter 26

With a groan, to the clatter of an old tin alarm clock, Lieutenant (jg) Warren Henry woke at seven on his wedding day. Until four he had been in the sweet arms of his bride-to-be in a bedroom of the Calder Arms Hotel, some twenty miles from Pensacola. He stumbled to the shower and turned on the cold water in a gush. As the needling shock brought him to, he wearily wondered whether spending such a night before his wedding morning hadn’t been somewhat gross. Poor Janice had said she would have to start dressing and packing as soon as she got home. Yes, certainly gross, but ye gods! Warren laughed aloud, held up his face to the cold water, and started to sing. It was rough, after all — a rushed wedding, a one-night honeymoon, and then a separation of thousands of miles! Too much to ask of human nature. Anyway, it wasn’t the first time.

Still — Warren was drying himself with a big rough towel, and cheering up by the minute — there was such a thing as propriety. Such doings on the wedding eve were ill-timed. But it was rotten luck to be torn away from her like this. It was just one of those things, and Hitler’s invasion of France was the real cause, not any looseness in himself or Janice.

Truth to tell, the prospect of parting from Janice was not bothering Warren much. She would be coming along to Pearl Harbor in due course. The sudden orders to the Pacific had put him in an excited glow. Cramming in a premature night with Janice had been an impulse of this new bursting love of life he felt. He was rushing to fly a fighter plane from the U.S.S. Enterprise, because war threatened. It was a star-spangled destiny, a scary ride to the moon. For all his mental motions of regret at leaving Janice and remorse at having enjoyed her a little too soon and a little too much, Warren’s spirit was soaring. He called the mess steward, ordered double ham and eggs and a jug of coffee, and gaily set about dressing for his nuptials.

Byron, standing in the hall outside his brother’s room, smiled at a crude cartoon tacked to the door: Father Neptune, a lump throbbing on his pate, wrathfully rising from the sea ahead of an aircraft carrier, brandishing his trident at an airplane with dripping wheels, out of which the pilot leaned, saluting and shouting, “So sorry!”

“Come in!” Warren called to his knock.

“‘Wet Wheels’ Henry, I presume?” Byron quoted the cartoon caption.

“Briny! Hey! My Christ, how long has it been? Well, you look great! God, I’m glad you made it for the wedding.” Warren ordered more breakfast for his brother.

“Listen, you’ve got to tell me all about that wild trip of yours. I’m supposed to be the warrior, but Jesus, you’re the one who’s had the adventures. Why, you’ve been bombed and strafed by the Nazis! My buddies will sure want to talk to you.”

“Nothing heroic about getting in the way of a war, Warren.”

“Let’s hear about it. Sit down, we have a lot to catch up on.”

They talked over the food, over coffee, over cigars, and as Warren packed they kept talking, awkwardly at first, then loosening up. Each was taking the other’s measure. Warren was older, heavier in the face, more confident, more than ever on top of the world and ahead of his brother: so Byron felt. Those new gold wings on his white dress uniform seemed to Byron to spread a foot. About flying Warren was relaxed, humorous, and hard. He had mastered the machines and the lingo, and the jokes about his mishaps didn’t obscure the leap upward. He still spoke the words “naval aviator” with pride and awe. To Byron, his own close calls under fire had been stumblebum episodes, in no way comparable to Warren’s disciplined rise to fighter pilot.

For his part, Warren had last seen Byron setting off to Europe, a hangdog slouching youngster with a bad school record and not a few pimples, already cooling off about a career in fine arts. Byron’s skin now stretched brown and clear over a sharpened jaw; his eyes were deeper; he sat up straighter. Warren was used to the short haircuts and natural shoulder lines of the Navy. Byron’s padded dark Italian suit and mop of reddish hair gave him a dashing appearance that went with his saga of roaming in Poland under German bombs with a beautiful Jewess. Warren had never before envied his younger brother anything. He envied the red stitch-marked scar on his temple — his own scar was a mishap, not a war wound — and he even somewhat envied him the Jewess, sight unseen.

“What about Natalie, Byron? Did she come?”

“Sure. I parked her at Janice’s house. That was decent of Janice, telephoning her last night. Did Dad put her up to it?”

“He just said the girl wasn’t sure she was expected. Say, that thing’s serious, is it?” Warren paused, suitcase hanger in one hand and a uniform jacket in the other, and looked hard at his brother.

“We’re getting married.”

“You are? Good for you.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Sure. She sounds like a marvellous girl.”

“She is. I know the religious problem exists -”

Warren grinned and ducked his head to one side. “Ah, Byron, nowadays — does it really? If you wanted the ministry — or politics, say — you’d have to give it more thought. Christ, with the war on and the whole world coming apart, I say grab her. I look forward to meeting that girl. Isn’t she a Ph.D. or something?”

“She was going for an M.A. at the Sorbonne.”

“Brother! I’d be more scared of her than of a carrier landing at night in a line squall.”

Byron’s grin showed possessive pride. “I was around her six months, and never opened my mouth, hardly. Then she up and said she loved me. Im still trying to believe it.”

“Why not? You’ve gotten damned handsome my lad. You’ve lost that string-bean look. You marrying up now or after sub school?”

“Who the devil says I’m going to sub school? Don’t start that. I get enough from Dad.”

Warren deftly moved clothes from bureau to a foot locker. “But he’s right, Byron. You don’t want to wait till you get called up. If you do they’ll shove you around, rush you through, and you may not even draw the duty you want. You can pick your spot now and get decent training. Say, have you given naval aviation any thought? Why do you want to go crawling around at four knots, three hundred feet underwater, when you can fly? I get claustrophobia just thinking about subs. You might make a great flier. One thing you are is relaxed.”

“I got interested in subs.” Byron described Prien’s talk in Berlin on the sinking of the Royal Oak.

“That was a brave exploit!” said Warren. “A real score. Even Churchill admitted that. Very romantic. I guess that’s what attracts you. But this is an air war, Briny. Those Germans haven’t got that much of an edge on the ground. The papers keep talking panzers, panzers, but the French have more and better tanks than the Germans. They’re using them. They’ve been panicked by those Stukas, which just use our own dive-bombing tactics.”

“That’s what got me, a Stuka,” Byron said. “It didn’t look that scary. Fixed wheels, single engine, medium size, kind of slow and awkward.”

Tossing Byron a large gray book, Warren said with a grin, “Take a look through The Flight Jacket. I’m there in Squadron Five, tying on my solo flags. I’ve got to pay some bills, then we’re off to church.”

Byron was still looking through the yearbook when his brother returned.

“Holy cow, Warren, number one in ground school! How’d you do that and court Janice, too?”

“It took a toll.” Warren made an exhausted face, and they both laughed. “Bookwork is never too tough when you organize it.”

Byron held up the yearbook, pointing to a black-bordered page. “These fellows all got it?”

Warren’s face sobered, “Yep. Frank Monahan was my instructor, and a great flier.” He sighed and looked around the barren room, hands on hips. “Well, I’m not sorry to leave this room. Eleven months I’ve sweated in here.”

Pensacola might look small and sleepy, Warren said as they drove into town, but it had perfect climate, great water sports, fine fishing, good golf and riding clubs, and up-and-coming industries. This was the real Florida, not that Brooklyn with palm trees called Miami. These rural western countries were the place to get a political start. Congressman Lacouture had had no competition. He had recently decided to run for the Senate in the fall, and his chances were considered excellent. Warren said he and Janice might well come back here one day.

“When you retire?” Byron said. “That’s looking far ahead.”

“Possibly before then.” With a side glance, Warren took in Byron’s astonishment. “Listen, Briny, the day I soloed, President Roosevelt fired the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet. Some dispute over policy for the Asiatic Fleet. Made him ambassador to Turkestan, or something, but actually just kicked him out. CinCus himself! In the Navy you’re just a hired man, my lad, right on up that big climb through the bureaus and the shore stations and the sea billets. Right to the top. Don’t ever tell Dad I talked like this. Janice is an only child and the Lacouture firm does twenty million a year. Of course, as long as I can fly, that’s all I want to do.”

Inside the pink stone church topped by a square bell tower, two men in smocks were finishing up a huge flower display and an unseen organist was rippling a Back prelude. “Nobody can say I kept her waiting at the church,” Warren said. “Almost an hour to go. Well, we can talk. It’s cool in here.”

They sat halfway down the rows of empty purple-cushioned pews. The music, the odor of the flowers, the unmistakable childhood smell of church, hit Byron hard. He felt again what it was like to be a reverent boy, sitting or standing beside his father, joining in the hymns, or trying to follow the minister’s talk about the misty and wonderful Lord Jesus. Marrying Natalie, there would be no such wedding as this. What kind could they have? A church was altogether out of the question. What was it like to be married by a rabbi? They had not discussed that part at all. The two brothers sat side by side in a long silence. Warren was again regretting, in a fashion, last night’s indulgence, and making halfhearted pious resolves. The feelings of a bridegroom were coming over him.

“Briny, say something. I’m getting nervous. Who knows when we’ll have the chance to talk again?”

Byron wistfully smiled, and it struck Warren once more how good-looking his brother had become. “Long time since you and I went to church together.”

“Yes. Janice likes to go. I guess if these walls aren’t falling in on me now, there’s still hope for me. You know, Briny, all this may work out pretty well. If you do get into subs, you can put in for duty at Pearl. Maybe the four of us will end up there together for a couple of years. Wouldn’t that be fine?”

Natalie had often visited the homes of wealthy college friends, but she was not prepared for the Lacouture mansion, a rambling stone house on the bay, in a private section guarded by a mossy stucco wall, an iron-fenced entrance, and an iron-faced gatekeeper. Gentility, seclusion, exclusion, were all around her. The rooms upon rooms of antique furniture, Persian rugs, grandfather clocks, large oil portraits, heavy worn draperies, ironwork, gilt-framed big mirrors, old-fashioned photographs — the whole place unsettled her. Janice scampered to meet her in a fluttery pink housecoat, her blonde hair tumbling to her shoulders.

“Hi! So sweet of you to come on this short notice. Look at me. I didn’t sleep all night. I’m so tired I can’t see. I’ll never be ready. Let’s get you some breakfast.”

“Please, just put me in a corner somewhere till we go. I’m fine.”

Janice scanned her with weary but keen big hazel eyes. This happy girl, all pink and gold, made Natalie the more conscious of her own dark eyes, dark hair, wrinkled linen suit, and sad dowdy look.

“No wonder Byron fell for you. My God, you’re pretty. Come along.”

Janice took her to a breakfast alcove facing the water, where a maid brought her eggs and tea in old blue-and-white china on a silver tray. She ate and felt better, if no more at home. Outside, sailboats tacked here and there in the sunshine. Clocks struck nine in the house, one after other, bonging and chiming. She could hear excited voices upstairs.

She took the letter from her purse, where it had seemed a lump of lead all the way from Miami: five single-spaced pages so faintly typed that her eyes ached to read them. Obviously A.J. was not going to learn to change a typewriter ribbon till he died.

It was a long tale of woe. He had a fractured ankle. With a French art critic, an old friend, he had gone on a tour of cathedrals the week after Byron had left. At Orvieto, mounting a ladder to look at an inaccessible fresco, he had slipped and fallen to the stone floor. To make matters worse, there was his mixed-up citizenship problem, which for the first time he was taking seriously.

He had “derivative citizenship” from his father’s naturalization around 1900; but because of his long residence out of the country, difficulties had arisen. There seemed to be conflicting records of his age at the time of his father’s naturalization. The man in Rome, a decent enough person to talk to but an obsessive bureaucrat, had pressed searching questions and demanded more and more documents, and Aaron had left Rome in deep confusion. Aaron wrote:

During the spasm of alarm over Norway, he had once visited the Florence consulate. There a “shallow but seemingly affable crew-cut type, had conceded that these were all silly technicalities, that Dr. Jastrow was certainly an eminent and desirable person, and that the consular service would somehow solve the difficulty. Much relieved, Jastrow had gone off on the cathedral tour, fractured his ankle, and thus missed an appointment to return to the consulate two weeks later. The letter continued:

Jastrow wrote a touching paragraph about Natalie’s father. He blamed their estrangement on himself. The scholarly temperament was a self-absorbed one. He hoped that he could treat her as a daughter, though a father’s place could never really be filled. Then came the passage about Byron which had prevented Natalie from showing him the letter.

Have you seen Byron yet? I miss him. He has a curiously charming presence — triste, humorous, reserved, virile. I’ve never known a more winning boy, and I’ve known hundreds. A young fellow in his twenties shouldn’t seem a boy, but he does. An aureole of romance plays about him. Byron might be all right if he had any talent, or a vestige of drive.

Sometimes he shows doggedness: and he has a way of coming out with bright flashes. He said Hegel’s World Spirit was just God minus Christianity. That’s commonplace enough, but he added it was much easier to believe in God’s sacrificing Himself for mankind than in His groping to understand Himself through the unfolding of mankind’s stupidities. I rather liked that. Unhappily it was the one good thing amid many banalities such as, “This Nietzsche was just some kind of a nut,” and “Nobody would bother reading Fichte, if anybody could understand him.” If I’d marked Byron for our seminar on the Slote Reading List, he’d have made a C minus.

Often I came upon him reading your letters over and over in the lemon house. The poor lad has a terrible crush on you. Are you at all aware of that? I hope you won’t inadvertently hurt him, and I rather wonder at your writing him so often. For all my troubles, I’ve been a reasonably good boy, and stand on manuscript page 847 of Constantine.

A clock chiming the half hour brought Natalie back with a start from the terrace in Siena — where in her mind’s eye she could see A.J. sitting wrapped in his blue shawl, writing these words — to the Lacouture mansion on Pensacola Bay.

“Oh God,” she muttered, “oh my God.”

Feet trampled on a staircase; many voices called, laughed, chattered. The bride came sailing down the long dining room, wheat-colored hair beautifully coiffed and laced with pearls, cheeks pink with pleasure. “Well, I did it. Here we go.”

Natalie jumped to her feet, cramming A.J.’s pages into her purse. “Oh, you’re enchanting! You’re the loveliest sight!”

Janice pirouetted clear around on a toe. “Bless you.”

The white satin, clinging to flanks and breasts like creamy skin, rose demurely to cover her throat. She moved in a cloud of white lace. This blend of white chastity and crude fleshy allure was devastating; it shook Natalie with envy. The bride’s eye had an ironic gleam. After her wild pre-wedding night, Janice Lacouture felt approximately as virginal as Catherine of Russia. It didn’t bother her. Rather, it appealed to her sense of humor.

“Come,” she said. “You’ll ride with me.” She took the Jewish girl’s arm. “You know, if I weren’t marrying Warren Henry, I’d give you a run for that little Briny. He’s an Adonis, and so sweet. Those Henry men!”

Rhoda arrived at the hotel in a flurry, and frantically bathed and dressed, pulling cosmetics from one valise, underwear from another, her new Bergdorf Goodman frock from a third. Dr. Kirby had chartered a small plane and had flown down with her and Madeline. “He saved our LIVES!” trilled Rhoda dashing about in a sheer green slip. “The last plane we could get from New York didn’t leave us a MINUTE to finish shopping. Your daughter and I would have come to this wedding in OLD RAGS. This way, we had a whole extra afternoon and, Pug, you never SAW such fast shopping. Isn’t this a cunning number?” She held the green frock against her bosom. “Found it at the last second. Honestly, a small plane is such FUN. I slept most of the way, but when I was awake it was GREAT. You really know you’re flying.”

“Damn nice of him,” Pug said. “Is Fred that rich?”

“Well, of course, I wouldn’t hear of it, but then he said it was all charged to his company. He’s taking the plane on to Birmingham today. Anyway, I wasn’t going to argue too much, dear. It was a deliverance. Fasten me up in back. Pug did Briny really bring that Jewish girl here? Of all things. Why, I’ve never even laid eyes on her. She’ll have to sit with us, and everybody’ll think she’s part of the family.”

“Looks like she will be, Rhoda.”

“I don’t believe it. I just don’t. Why, how much older is she? Four years? That Briny! Just enjoys giving us heart failure. Always has, the monster. Pug, what’s taking you so long? My land, it’s hot here.”

“She’s two years older, and terrifically attractive.”

“Well, you’ve got me curious, I’ll say that. I pictured her as one of these tough Brooklyn chickens who shove past you in the New York department stores. Oh, stop fumbling, I’ll finish the top ones. Mercy, I’m roasting! I’m perspiring in RIVERS. This dress will be black through before we get to church.”

Natalie knew in thirty seconds that the handsome woman in green chiffon and rose-decorated white straw hat didn’t like her. The polite handshake outside the church, the prim smile, told all. Pug presented Natalie to Madeline as “Byron’s sidekick on the Polish jaunt,” obviously trying with this clumsy jocularity to make up for his wife’s freeze.

“Oh, yes, wow! Some adventure!” Madeline Henry smiled and looked Natalie over. Her pearl-gray shantung was the smartest outfit in sight. “I want to hear all that, some time. I still haven’t seen Briny, you know, and it’s been more than two years.”

“He shouldn’t have rushed down to Miami the way he did,” Natalie said, feeling her cheeks redden.

“Why not?” said Madeline, with a slow Byron-like grin. It was strange to see echoes of his traits in his family. Mrs. Henry held her head as Byron did, erect on a long neck. It made him seem more remote. He wasn’t just himself any more, her young companion of Jastrow’s library and of Poland, or even the son of a forbidding father, but part of a quite alien group.

The church was full. From the moment she went in, Natalie felt uncomfortable. Cathedrals gave her no uneasiness. They were just sights to see, and Roman Catholicism, though she could write a good paper about it, was like Mohammedanism, a complex closed-off structure. A Protestant church was the place of the other religion, the one she would be if she weren’t a Jew. Coming into one, she trod hostile territory. Rhoda didn’t make quite enough room for her in the pew, and Natalie had to push her a little, murmuring an excuse, to step clear of the aisle.

All around, women wore bright or pastel colors. Officers and air cadets in white and gold abounded. And Natalie stood at a May wedding in black linen, hastily selected out of a vague sense that she was still in mourning and didn’t belong here. People peered at her and whispered. It wasn’t her imagination: they did. How charming and fine the church was, with its dark carved wooden ceiling arching up from pink stone walls; and what stunning masses of flowers! How pleasant, comfortable, and normal to be born an Episcopalian or a Methodist, and how perfect to be married this way! Perhaps A.J. was right, and encouraging Byron had been irresponsible. Leslie Slote was an arid bookish pagan like herself, and they had even talked of being married by a judge.

The robed minister appeared, book in hand, and the ceremony began.

As the bride paced down the aisle on the congressman’s arm, moving like a big beautiful cat, Rhoda started to cry. Memories of Warren as a little boy, memories of her own wedding, of other weddings, of young men who had wanted to marry her, of herself — a mother before twenty of the baby who had grown into this handsome groom — flooded her mind: she bowed her head in the perky hat and brought out the handkerchief. For the moment she lost her awareness of the melancholy Jewish girl in black beside her, and even of Palmer Kirby towering above people three rows back. When Victor Henry softly took her hand, she clasped his and pressed it to her thigh. What fine sons they had, standing up there together!

And Pug stood slightly hunched almost at attention, his face sombre and rigid, wondering at the speed with which his life was going, and realizing again how little he allowed himself to think about Warren, because he had such inordinately high hopes for him.

Standing up beside his brother, Byron felt many eyes measuring and comparing them. Warren’s uniform, and the other uniforms in the church, troubled him. His Italian suit with its exaggerated lines, beside Warren’s naturally cut whites, seemed to Byron as soft and frivolous as a woman’s dress.

As Janice lifted her veil for the kiss, she and Warren exchanged a deep, knowing, intimately amused glance.

“How are you doing?” he murmured.

“Oh, still standing up. God knows how, you dog.”

And with the minister beaming on them, they embraced, kissed, and laughed, there in the church in each other’s arms, over the war-born joke that would last their whole lives and that nobody else would ever know.

Cars piled up in front of the beach club, only a few hundred yards from the Lacouture house, and a jocund crowd poured into the canopied entrance for the wedding brunch.

“I swear, I must be the only Jew in Pensacola,” Natalie said, hanging back a little on Byron’s arm. “When I walk through that door, I’m going to set off gongs.”

He burst out laughing. “It’s not quite that bad.”

She looked pleased at making him laugh. “Maybe not. I do think your mother might be a wee bit happier if a wall had fallen on me in Warsaw.”

At that moment, Rhoda, half a dozen paces behind them, was responding to a comment by a Washington cousin that Byron’s girl looked striking. “Yes, doesn’t she? So interesting. She might almost be an Armenian or an Arab. Byron met her in Italy.”

Champagne glass in hand, Byron firmly took Natalie around the wedding party from room to room, introducing her. “Don’t say I’m your fiancée,” Natalie ordered him at the start. “Let them think what they please, but don’t let’s get into all that.” She met Captain Henry’s father, an engineer retired from the lumber trade, a short withered upright man with thick white hair, who had travelled in from California and who looked as though he had worked hard all his life; and his surprisingly fat brother, who ran a soft-drink business in Seattle: and other Henrys; and a knot of Rhoda’s kin, Grovers of Washington. The clothes, the manners, the speech of the Washington relatives set them off not only from the California people, but even from Lacouture’s Pensacola friends, who by comparison seemed a Babbitty lot.

Janice and Warren came and stayed, joking, eating, drinking, and dancing. Nobody would have blamed them, in view of their limited time, for vanishing after a round of handshakes, but they evinced no impatience for the joys of their new state.

Warren asked Natalie to dance, and as soon as they were out on the floor, he said. “I told Byron this morning that I’m for you. That was sight unseen.”

“Do you always take such blind risks? A flier should be more prudent.”

“I know about what you did in Warsaw. That’s enough.”

“You’re cheering me up. I feel awfully out of place here.”

“You shouldn’t. Janice is as much for you as I am. Byron seems changed already,” Warren said. “There’s a lot to him, but nobody’s ever pressed the right button. I’ve always hoped that someday a girl would, and I think you’re the girl.”

Rhoda Henry swooped past, champagne glass in hand, and gathered them up to join a large family table by the window. Possibly because of the wine, she was acting more cordial to Natalie. At the table Lacouture was declaring, with relish for his own pat phrases, that the President’s request for fifty thousand airplanes a year was “politically hysterical, fiscally irresponsible, and industrially inconceivable.” Even the German air force didn’t have ten thousand planes all told; and it didn’t have a single bomber that could fly as far as Scotland, let alone across the Atlantic. A billion dollars! The interventionist press was whooping it up, naturally, but if the debate in Congress could go on for more than a week, the appropriation would be licked. “We have three thousand miles of good green water between us and Europe,” he said, “and that’s better protection for us than half a million airplanes. Roosevelt just wants new planes in a hurry to give to England and France. But he’ll never come out and say that. Our fearless leader is slightly deficient in candor.”

“You’re willing to see the British and French go down, then,” Pug Henry said.

“That’s how the question’s usually put,” said Lacouture. “Ask me if I’m willing to send three million American boys overseas against the Germans, so as to prop up the old status quo in Europe. Because that’s what this is all about, and don’t ever forget it.”

Palmer Kirby put in, “The British navy’s propping up our own status quo free of charge, Congressman. If the Nazis get hold of it, that’ll extend Hitler’s reach to Pensacola Bay.”

Lacouture said jovially, “Yes, I can just see the Rodney and the Nelson right out there, flying the swastika and shelling our poor old beach club.”

This raised a laugh among the assorted in-laws around the table, and Rhoda said” “What a charming thought.”

Victor Henry said, “This isn’t where they’ll come.”

“They’re not coming at all,” Lacouture said. “That’s New York Times stuff. If the British get in a jam, they’ll throw out Churchill and make a deal with Germany. But naturally they’ll hang on as long as they think there’s a chance that the Roosevelt administration, the British sympathizers, and the New York Jews will get us over there.”

“I’m from Denver,” said Kirby, and I’m Irish.” He and Victor Henry had glanced at Natalie when Lacouture mentioned the Jews.

“Well, error is contagious,” said the congressman with great good nature, “and it knows no boundaries.”

This easy amused war talk over turkey, roast beef, and champagne, by a broad picture windows looking out at beach umbrellas, white sand, and heeling sailboats, had been irritating Natalie extremely. Lacouture’s last sentence stung her to say in a loud voice, “I was in Warsaw during the siege.”

Lacouture calmly said, “That’s right, so you were. You and Byron. Pretty bad, was it?”

“The Germans bombed a defenseless city for three weeks. They knocked out all the hospitals but one, the one I worked in. The wounded were piled up in our entrance hall like logs. In one hospital a lot of pregnant women burned up.”

The table became a hole of quiet in the boisterous party. The congressman spun an empty champagne glass between two fingers. “That sort of thing has been going on in Europe for centuries, my dear. It’s exactly what I want to spare the American people.”

“Say, I heard a good one yesterday,” spoke up a jolly-faced man in steel-rimmed glasses, laughing. “Abey and his family, see, are driving down to Miami, and about Tampa they run out of gasoline. Well, they drive into this filling station, and this attendant says, ‘Juice?’ And old Abey he says, ‘Vell, vot if we are? Dunt ve get no gess?’”

The jolly man laughed again, and so did the others. Natalie could see he meant no harm; he was trying to ease the sober turn of the talk. Still she was very glad that Byron came up now and took her off to dance.

“How long does this go on?” she said. “Can we go outside? I don’t want to dance.”

“Good. I have to talk to you.”

They sat on the low wall of the terrace in blazing sun, by stairs leading to the white sand, not far from the picture window, behind which Lacouture was still holding forth, shaking his white-thatched head and waving an arm.

Byron leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers clasped together. “Darling, I think I’m getting organized here. I may as well fly up to New London today or tomorrow and take that physical, so that — what’s the matter?”

A spasm had crossed her face. “Nothing, go on. You’re flying to New London.”

“Only if you agree. I’ll do nothing that we don’t both concur on, from now on and forever.”

“All right.”

“Well, I take the physical. I also check the situation, and make very sure that a married applicant has a chance, and that if he’s admitted he gets to spend time with his wife. That takes care of our first few months, maybe our first year. I’ll eventually go to one submarine base or another, if I get through, and you’ll come along, the way Janice is doing. We all might end up a Pearl Harbor together. There’s a university in Hawaii. You might even teach there.”

“Goodness, you’ve been thinking with might and main, haven’t you?”

Victor Henry came through the doors to the terrace. Byron glanced up, and said coolly and distantly, “Hi, looking for me?”

“Hi. I understand you’re driving Madeline to the airport. Don’t leave without me. I just talked to Washington and I’ve got to scoot back. Your mother’s staying on.

“When’s the plane?” Natalie said.

“One-forty.”

“Can you lend me some money?” she said to Byron. “I think I’ll go to Washington on that plane.”

Pug said, “Oh? Glad to have your company,” and went back into the club.

“You’re going to Washington!” Byron said. “Why there, for crying out loud?”

She put a cupped palm to Byron’s face. “Something about Uncle Aaron’s citizenship. While you’re in New London, I can take care of it. My God, what’s the matter? You look as though you’ve been shot.”

“You’re mistaken. I’ll give you the fare.”

“Byron, listen, I do have to go there, and it would be plain silly to fly down to Miami and then right back up to Washington. Can’t you see that? It’s for a day or two at most.”

“I said I’d give you the fare.”

Natalie sighed heavily. “Darling, listen, I’ll show you Aaron’s letter. He asked me to talk to Leslie Slote about his passport problem, it’s beginning to worry him.” She opened her purse.

“What’s the point?” Byron stiffly stood up. “I believe you.”

Warren insisted on coming to the airport, though Pug tried to protest that the bridegroom surely had better things to do with his scanty time. “How do I know when I’ll see all of you again?” Warren kept saying. Rhoda and Janice got into the argument, and the upshot was that the Henrys plus the bride and Natalie all piled into Lacouture’s Cadillac.

Rhoda on the way out had snatched a bottle of champagne and some glasses. “This family has been GYPPED by this miserable, stupid war,” she declared, handing the glasses around as Byron started up the car. “The first time we’re all together in how many years? And we can’t even stay together for twelve hours! Well, I say, if it’s going to be a short reunion it’s damn well going to be a merry one. Somebody sing something!”

So they sang “Bell Bottom Trousers” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “I’ve Got Sixpence” and “Auld Lang Syne” as the Cadillac rolled toward the airport. Natalie, crowded between Rhoda and Madeline, tried to join in, but “Auld Lang Syne” was the only song she knew. Rhoda pressed a glass on her, and filled it until wine foamed over the girl’s fingers. “Oops, sorry, dear. Well, it’s a mercy your suit’s black,” she said, mopping at Natalie’s lap with her handkerchief. When the car drove through the airport entrance they were singing one Natalie had never even heard, a family favorite that Pug had brought from California:

And Rhoda Henry was crying into her champagne-soaked handkerchief, stating that there were tears of happiness over Warren’s wonderful marriage.