The Winds of War

Chapter 44 — Barbarossa (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

Chapter 45

June 22, 1941.

The players in our drama were now scattered around the earth. Their stage had become the planet, turning in the solar spotlight that illumined half the scene at a time, and that moved always from east to west.

At the first paling of dawn, six hundred miles to the west of Moscow, at exactly 3:15 A.M. by myriads of German wristwatches, German cannon began to flash and roar along a line a thousand miles long, from the icy Baltic to the warm Black Sea. At the same moment fleets of German planes, which had taken off some time earlier, crossed the borders and started bombing Soviet airfields, smashing up aircraft on the ground by the hundreds. The morning stars still twinkled over the roads, the rail lines, and the fragrant fields, when the armored columns and infantry divisions — multitudes upon multitudes of young healthy helmeted Teutons in gray battle rig — came rolling or walking toward the orange-streaked dark east, on the flat Polish plains that stretched toward Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.

A sad and shaken German ambassador told Foreign Minister Molotov in Moscow, shortly after sunrise, that since Russia was obviously about to attack Germany, the Leader had wisely ordered the Wehrmacht to strike first in self-defense. The oval gray slab of Molotov’s face, we are told, showed a very rare emotion — surprise. History also records that Molotov said, “Did we deserve this?” The German ambassador, his message delivered, slunk out of the room. He had worked all his life to restore the spirit of Rapallo, the firm alliance of Russia and Germany. Eventually Hitler had him shot.

Molotov’s surprise at the invasion was not unique. Stalin was surprised. Since his was the only word or attitude in Russia that mattered, the Red Army and the entire nation were surprised. The attack was an unprecedented tactical success, on a scale never approached before or since. Three and a half million armed men surprised four and a half million armed men. The Pearl Harbor surprise attack six months later involved, by contrast, only some thousands of combatants on each side.

Communist historians use events to prove their dogmas. This makes for good propaganda but bad record-keeping. Facts that are hard to fit into the party theories tend to slide into oblivion. Many facts of this most gigantic of land wars, which the Russians call Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, “The Great Patriotic War,” — “Second World War” is not a phrase they favor — may never be known. The Communist historians assert that Stalin was to blame for neglecting intelligence warnings, and that is why the German surprise attack was successful. It is a very simple way to look at the amazing occurrence. So far as it goes, it is true.

Sunlight touched the red Kremlin towers, visible from the windows of Leslie Slote’s flat, and fell on an opened letter from Natalie Henry in Rome, lying on his desk by the window.

Slote had gone to bed very late and he was still asleep. Natalie had sent him a joyous screed — for suddenly Aaron Jastrow had received his passport! He actually had it in his hand and they were getting ready to leave on a Finnish freighter sailing early in July; and going by ship would even enable Aaron to retrieve much of his library. Knowing nothing of Byron’s action at the White House, Natalie had written to thank Slote in effervescent pages. The astonished Foreign Service man, for in Italy he had felt he was encountering the cotton-padded stone wall that was a State Department specialty. In his answer, which lay unfinished beside her letter, he took modest credit for the success, and then explained at length why he thought the rumored impending invasion of Russia was a false alarm, and why he was sure the Red Army would crush a German attack if by chance one came. Trying to find gracious words about Natalie’s pregnancy, he had given up and gone to bed. By the time his alarm clock woke him, his letter was out of date; but he did not yet know it.

Peering out of the window, he saw the usual morning lights of Moscow: a hazy blue sky, men in caps and young women in shawls walking to work, a crowded rusty bus wobbling up a hill, old women standing in line at the milk store, more old women queueing at a bread store. The Kremlin loomed across the river, huge, massive, still, the walls dark red in the morning sun, the multiple gold domes gleaming on the cathedrals. There were no air raid alarms. There were as yet no loudspeaker or radio reports. It was a scene of tranquil peace. Stalin and Molotov were waiting a while before sharing their astonishment with the people they had led into this catastrophe. But at the front, several million Red Army men were already sharing it and trying to recover from it before the Germans could kill them all.

Knowing nothing of this, Slote went to the embassy with a light heart, hoping to dispose of some overdue work on this quiet Sunday. He found the building in a most unsabbathlike turmoil; and there he learned, with a qualm in his gut, that once again the Germans were coming.

The sunrise slid westward to Minsk. Its first rays along a broad silent street fell on a clean-shaven workingman in a cloth cap and a loose worn suit dusted all over with flour. Had Natalie Henry been walking this street, she could not possibly have recognized her relative, Berel Jastrow. Shorn of a beard, the broad flat Slavic face with its knobby peasant nose gave him a nondescript East European look, as did the shoddy clothing. He might have been a Pole, a Hungarian, or a Russian, and he knew the three languages well enough to pass as any of these. Though over fifty, Berel always walked fast, and this morning he walked faster. At the bakery, on a German shortwave radio he kept behind flour sacks, he had heard Dr. Goebbels from Berlin announce the attack, and in the distance, just after leaving work, he had heard a familiar noise: the thump of bombs. He was concerned, but not frightened.

Natalie Henry had encountered Berel as a devout prosperous merchant, the happy father of a bridegroom. Berel had another side. He had served on the eastern front in the Austrian army in the last war. He had been captured by the Russians, had escaped from a prison camp, and he made his way back through the forests to Austrian lines. In the turmoils of 1916 he had landed in a mixed German and Austrian unit. Early in his army service he had learned to bake and to cook, so as to avoid eating forbidden food. He had lived for months on bread, or roasted potatoes, or boiled cabbage, while cooking savory soups and stews which he would not touch. He knew army life, he could survive in a forest, and he knew how to get along with Germans, Russians, and a dozen minor Danubian nationalities. Anti-Semitism was the normal state of things to Berel Jastrow. It frightened him no more than war and he was just as practiced in dealing with it.

He turned off the main paved avenue, and walked a crooked way through dirt streets and alleys, past one-story wooden houses, to a courtyard where chickens strutted clucking in the mire, amid smells of breakfast, woodsmoke, and barnyard.

“You’ve finished work early,” said his daughter-in-law, stirring a pot on a wood-burning oven while holding a crying baby on one arm. She was visibly pregnant again; and with a kerchief on her cropped hair, and her face pinched and irritable, the bride of a year and a half looked fifteen years older. In a corner, her husband in a cap and sheepskin jacket murmured over a battered Talmud volume. His beard too was gone, and his hair cut short. Three beds, a table, three chairs, and a crib filled the tiny hot room. All four dwelled there. Berel’s wife and daughter had died in the winter of 1939 of the spotted fever that had swept bombed–out Warsaw. At that time the Germans had not gotten around to walling up the Jews; and using much of his stored money for bribes, Berel Jastrow had bought himself, his son, and his daughter-in-law out of the city, and had joined the trickle of refugees heading eastward to the Soviet Union through back roads and forests. The Russians were taking in these people and treating them better than the Germans had, though most had to go to lonely camps beyond the Urals. With this remnant of his family Berel had made his way to Minsk, where some relatives lived. Nearly all of the city’s bakers were off in the army, so the Minsk bureau for aliens had let him stay.

“I’m home early because the Germans are coming again.” Accepting a cup of tea from the daughter-in-law, Berel sank into a chair and smiled sadly at her stricken expression. “Didn’t you hear the bombs?”

“Bombs? What bombs?” His son closed the book and looked up with fright on his pale bony face. “We heard nothing. You mean they’re fighting the Russians now?”

“It just started. I heard it on the radio. The bombs must have come from airplanes. I suppose the Germans were bombing the railroad. The front is very far away.”

The woman said wearily, shushing the wailing baby as it pounded her with a little fist, “They won’t beat the Red Army so fast.”

The son stood. “Let’s leave in the clothes we’re wearing.”

“And go where?” his father said.

“East.”

Berel said, “Once we do, we may not be able to stop till we’re in Siberia.”

“Then let it be Siberia.”

“Siberia! God Almighty, Mendel, I don’t want to go to Siberia,” said the wife, patting the peevish baby.

“Do you remember how the Germans acted in Warsaw?” Mendel said. “They’re wild animals.”

“That was the first few weeks. They calmed down. We kept out of the way and we were all right, weren’t we?” the father said calmly. “Give me more tea, please. Everybody expected to be murdered. So? The typhus and the cold were worse than the Germans.”

“They killed a lot of people.”

“People who didn’t follow the rules. With the Germans, you have to follow the rules. And keep out of their sight.”

“Let’s leave today.”

“Let’s wait a week,” said the father. “They’re three hundred kilometers away. Maybe the Red Army will give them a good slap in the face. I know the manager in the railroad ticket office. If we want to, we can get out in a few hours. Siberia is far off, and it’s no place for a Jew.”

“You don’t think we should leave today?” said the son.

“No.”

“All right.” Mendel sat down and opened his book.

“I’m putting food on the table,” said his wife.

“Give me a cup of tea,” said her husband. “I’m not hungry. And make that baby stop crying, please.”

Clever though he was, Berel Jastrow was making a serious mistake. The Germans were jumping off nearer Minsk than any other Soviet city, bringing another surprise, compared with which even their invasion of Russia has since paled in the judgment of men.

Bright morning sunshine bathed the columns of soldiers that crawled like long gray worms on the broad green, earth of Soviet-occupied Poland. Behind the advancing soldiers, out of range of the fire flashes and smoke of the cannonading, certain small squads travelled, in different uniforms and under different orders. They were called Einsatzgruppen, Special Action Units, and they were something unparalleled in the experience of the human race. To place and understand the Special Action Units, one needs a brief clear picture of the invasion.

Much of the European continent in that area is a low-lying, soggy saucer almost like everglades, spreading over thousands of square miles. This big swamp, the Pripet Marshes, has always confronted western invaders of Russia. They have had to go south or north of it. Adolf Hitler’s generals, intending to break the Soviet state with one sharp blow in a few summer weeks, were hitting north and south of the great swamp at the same time.

But the Special Action Units had no military purpose. Their mission concerned the Jews. From the time of Catherine the Great, Russia had compelled its millions of Jews to live in the “Pale,” a borderland to the west, made up of districts taken in war from Poland and Turkey. The revolution had ended the Pale, but most of the Jews, impoverished and used to their towns and villages, had stayed where they were.

The border defense belt held by the Red Army, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, was therefore precisely where most of the Soviet Union’s Jews lived. The Special Action Units were travelling executioners, and their orders were to kill Russia’s Jews without warning and without regard to age or sex. These orders were unwritten; they came down from Adolf Hitler through Göring and Heydrich to the “Security Service,” Germany’s federal police, which organized the units. These squads had collateral orders to shoot summarily all commissars — political officers — of the Red Army. But these later orders were on paper.

There were four Special Action Units in all, placed to follow close on the three giant prongs of the German assault.

Army Group South, composed of Germans and Rumanians, was striking into the Ukraine, south of the marshes and along the Black Sea into the Crimea. With them came two Special Action Units, for here the Jewish settlement was dense.

Army Group Center was setting forth on the straight short road Napoleon took — Minsk, Smolensk, Vyazma, Borodino, Moscow. This road points north of the great swamp like an arrow for the capital. It passes between the headwaters of two rivers, one flowing north and the other south, the Dvina and the Dnieper. Military men call it the dry route and greatly favor it. With this main central thrust travelled another Special Action Unit.

Army Group North was driving up along the Baltic toward Leningrad, and a Special Action Unit followed close behind.

Counting officers and men, there were about three thousand of these travelling executioners all told in the four units. They were setting out to kill between three and four million people, which figured out to more than ten thousand murders for each man. It was clearly beyond them. The plan was to start the process, and then recruit native anti-Semites and German soldiers to complete the gruesome, unheard-of, but entirely real job they were setting out to do.

The Germans in the ranks of the Special Action Units were recruited mainly from the civil services: policemen, detectives, clerks, and the like. There were no lunatics or criminals among them. The officers were mostly lawyers, doctors, or businessmen, who through age or disability could not fight in the army. Many had high university degrees; one officer had been a theologian. Officers and men alike were good Germans, the sort of men who did not drive past red traffic lights, who liked opera and concerts, who read books, who wore ties and jackets, who had wives and children, who for the most part went to church and sang hymns, and who worked in little weekend gardens. Obedience was a German virtue. They had been recruited and ordered to kill these people. They had been told that the Jews were Germany’s enemies, and that the only way to deal with them was to kill every last one of them, down to the babes in arms and their mothers. This word came from above. A prime German virtue was to accept such words from above and carry them out.

Strangely, the Jews already in German hands, in the territories stretching west from the invasion line to the Atlantic Ocean, were not yet being killed en masse. Nor was a program even under way to kill them. A mistaken idea exists that the Germans began killing Jews as soon as Hitler took power in 1933. That is untrue. They robbed the Jews, as they later robbed all the peoples they conquered, but the extortion was usually done under expropriation rules. Jews were often insulted, sometimes beaten, sometimes tortured, sometimes done to death or worked to death. But as late as June 22, 1941, only a few concentration camps existed, and most of the inmates were German opponents of Hitler. The existence of camps filled the Jews with terror, but the Germans themselves were terrorized, too.

By June 1941 the European Jews were living a vile life and were yielding the last scraps of their property to the squeeze of German law. But they were living. “One can live under any law,” a German Jewish newspaper put it.

So it happened that a Jew was safer behind the German lines, just then, than ahead of them. The Warsaw Jews, for instance, had reorganized themselves under the draconic Nazi rules. Though overwork, starvation, and disease were taking a toll, they were in the main managing to survive. At this point the Jastrows would have been somewhat better off not to have left Warsaw.

But Berel Jastrow, astute as he was and schooled in living with anti-Semitism, had not anticipated the Special Action Units. They were something new.

Adolf Hitler had given the order for the Einsatzgruppen back in March, so they may not have been much in his mind on June 22. He was following the progress of the invasion in a map room, where the light remained cool and gray long after sunrise. Disliking sunshine, the Führer had ordered his eastern campaign headquarters, which he dubbed Wolfsschanze, to be built facing north. A rail spur in a forest of east Prussia, not far from the jump-off line of Army Group North, led to this “Wolf’s Lair,” a compound of concrete bunkers and wooden huts surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, and minefields. Wolfsschanze, in fact, singularly resembled a concentration camp.

At the elbow of General Jodl stood one of the youngest and newest of German generals, Armin von Roon. Hitler did not like Roon and showed his dislike by abruptness. Roon came from a titled family, and spoke a polished Berlin German that contrasted sharply with Hitler’s folksy, coarse Bavarian speech. His uniform, faultlessly tailored, contrasted too with Hitler’s oversize, baggy soldier’s coat. Above all, Roon had a beaked nose that looked a bit Jewish. But as a colonel in Operations, he had taken part in three elaborate Barbarossa war games. His memory was unusual; he knew to the hour the projected advances and had the picture of the thousand-mile-wide battlefield by heart. The Soviet Union was for Roon rather like a table model, spectacularly larger than the ones used in the games. The troops were men, instead of pinned and numbered flags, but the principles and the scenario were the same at least to start with. (At the Nuremberg trials, Roon denied knowledge of the Special Action Units, until confronted with the order to kill the commissars, counter-signed by him for the Operations Section. Then he recalled it, but pleaded ignorance of the Einsatzgruppen’s other purpose. The tribunal judged this farfetched, like some other points in Roon’s defense.)

Until three hours after sunup of the invasion day, Roon dodged the Leader’s harsh nagging questions about the trend of ground operations. Then he gave his judgment that things were going better than planned in the north; much better in the center; worse in the south. It proved an accurate estimate, and for a long period thereafter Hitler warmed to the beak-nosed general.

Here then was the laying down of the first cards in the giant poker hand. Hitler and his staff had guessed that the Russians would mass most strongly in the center, north of the Pripet River bogs, to shield their capital. But whoever had disposed of the Russian forces — Stalin, or his generals to whom he listened — had bet that the Germans would make their main drive south, to seize the Ukrainian farmlands and the Caucasus oil fields. Perhaps this judgment had come from reading Mein Kampf, in which Hitler openly called this seizure his life’s aim. At any rate, the largest mass of Russian defenders lay south of the marsh. Thus the battle line was unbalanced. The Germans found themselves slowed in the south, but punching through with surprising ease toward Moscow. The first big Russian city in their path was Minsk.

When the sun rose in Rome, Aaron Jastrow was already working at his desk in his suite in the Hotel Excelsior. By now Dr. Jastrow’s book on Constantine needed only four or five more chapters, and he was very happy with it. At precisely eight as usual, the unchanging waiter brought the unchanging breakfast. Jastrow finished it and was settling back at his desk when a bedroom door opened noisily, and Natalie waddled in, wearing a pink bathrobe. Pregnancy, besides making her shapeless, had hollowed her cheeks and her eyes, and exaggerated her full mouth. “My God, have you heard the latest?”

“Has something good happened?”

“That depends. The Germans have invaded Russia.”

“What! Are you sure?”

“It was just on the eight o’clock news.”

“Bless me.” Jastrow took off his glasses and rubbed them with a handkerchief. “Why, when did it start?”

“At dawn today.”

“Well, I declare! The villain with the moustache is really throwing himself into his part, isn’t he? A two-front war again!”

Natalie walked to the serving table on wheels that bore the breakfast remnants. “Would this coffee still be hot?”

“Yes, help yourself.”

“The doctor told me not to eat or drink before he examined me, but I can’t help it. I’m ravenous.” Natalie began to wolf a sweet roll with coffee. “You’d better call the ambassador.”

“I suppose so. But Russia’s very far off, and what difference can it make to us? It’s pleasant, really, to think of Hitler dwindling off into Russia. Shades of Napoleon, let us hope.”

“If Finland gets dragged in, the Vaasa won’t sail.”

“Dear me, yes. You’re completely right. Any news about Finland?”

“Not that I heard.” Dropping heavily into a chair, Natalie glanced around at the broad room, furnished with maroon plush chairs and sofas, gilt mirrors, and marble statues. “God, this suite is so oppressive. Just to get out of it will be so marvellous!”

“My dear, it’s spacious, and we’ve got it for the price of two small rooms.”

“I know, I know, but why not? The hotel’s empty, except for Germans. It’s giving me the creeps.”

“I imagine they’re in every hotel.”

Natalie said with a gloomy look, “No doubt. Yesterday I recognized a Gestapo man on the elevator. Byron and I saw him in Lisbon. I know he’s the same one. He has an odd scar like this” — she made an L in the air with one finger — “on his forehead.”

“Surely that’s a coincidence. Did he recognize you?”

“He gave me quite a stare.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Those men stare for a living. What did the doctor say yesterday, by the way? Everything normal?”

“Oh, yes.” She sounded uncertain. “He just wanted to see me once more. I’m going to bed now for a while.”

“To bed again?”

“He wants me to rest a lot. My appointment’s not till noon.”

“Well, all right. I do have this chapter just about ready for a smooth copy.”

“Aaron” — Natalie paused, chewing her underlip — “he doesn’t want me to type for a while. It tires my back. Just until this fatigue clears up.”

“I see.” Jastrow sighed, and glanced around the room. “I agree, this place is not very cheerful. When I think of my lovely house standing empty… Natalie, do you suppose this Russian war changes things at all? I mean—”

“Jesus Christ, Aaron,” Natalie snapped most disagreeably, “are you going to suggest you might still remain on the same continent with the Germans?”

“My dear” — Jastrow made a very Jewish gesture, a hunching of the shoulders and an upward wave of both hands — “don’t be so impatient with me. You were a baby in the last war, but to me so little time has elapsed between them! It’s just a continuation after a truce. Well, the talk we had then of the Huns spearing Belgian babies on bayonets and cutting off the breasts of the nuns! And then I spent a year in Munich with some truly wonderful people. There are Germans, and Germans — oh, gracious, did I tell you that there’s a letter from Byron?”

“What? Where?”

“The waiter left it in the hall, I think.”

She ran heavily out of the room, snatched the white envelope, took it to her bedroom, and read it panting. It was a dully written letter, with no news except that he had been detached from the S-45, to go to a new fleet submarine, the Tuna, in the Pacific, and that Lieutenant Aster had been ordered to an older boat, the Devilfish. But the words of love and loneliness were plentiful, if banal. She undressed, got into bed, and greedily read and reread the pages until the sentences lost meaning.

The Italian doctor had told her that the blood stains, only two or three small ones, might mean nothing, but that she had to rest, to be sure of keeping the baby. Natalie intended to spend the next two weeks in bed.

The line between night and day glided across the Atlantic Ocean, for the most part passing over fluffy cloud and empty wrinkling blue water; very rarely, over specks in orderly rows, and other specks randomly scattered. The orderly specks were convoys; the random specks, submarines trying to hunt them down or American ships trying to spot the submarines and warn the convoys. Bringing light and warmth indifferently to the hunters and the hunted in this far-flung three-way game, which the participants called the Battle of the Atlantic, the sunrise slid onto the next landmass, the New World.

Soon the windows of the CBS building in New York flamed with morning sun, but in the tomblike broadcasting floors there was only the same timeless electric light. The corridors and cubicles of the CBS news section, despite the early hour, were swarming and bustling. Hugh Cleveland, badly in need of a shave, sat at his old desk, scrawling on a yellow pad and puffing at a long cigar. He had not quit the Who’s in Town program, despite the popularity of the amateur hour. The news feature show would still be his bread and butter, he liked to say, when the amateur fad was forgotten. Out of the portable radio on his desk came the sonorous accents of Winston Churchill:

“No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have… I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding…. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught… the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts…”

His telephone began to ring. He tried to ignore it, then snatched it and snarled, “Goddamn it, I’m listening to Churchill…. Oh! Sorry, Chet. Listen, if you’re near a radio, turn the guy on. He is sensational!” Leaning back in his swivel chair, he cocked one ear toward the radio, holding the phone to the other.

“Behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I see that small group of villainous men who plan, organize, and launch this cataract of horrors upon mankind…”

“Chet, of course I thought of it. The minute the news broke, I sent a wire to the Russian consulate here. Naturally, I couldn’t get through on the telephone. About an hour ago, they finally called me. Madeline Henry’s gone over there, and they’ve promised they’ll send somebody back with her. No, I don’t know who, not yet. Hell, this morning their scrubwoman would be news!”

“Can you doubt what our policy will be? We have but one aim and one single, irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us — nothing…. Any man or state who fights against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe…

“The Russian danger is our danger, and the danger of the United States…”

Madeline scampered into the office, red-faced and shiny-eyed and wildly pantomimed at her boss.

“Hang on, Chet, she’s here.” Hand over the receiver, Cleveland said, “What luck?”

“I got the ambassador. He’s here in New York and I got him.”

“Holy Jesus! Are you kidding? The ambassador? What’s his name, Oumansky?”

“Oumansky.” She nodded excitedly. “He’s coming here at ten to nine. The consul’s bringing him.”

“Hey, Chet, listen, will you? That girl has got Ambassador Oumansky. I swear to Christ! Oumansky! Listen, I’ve got to get ready for him. Sure, sure. Thanks.” He slammed down the receiver. “How’d you do that, Madeline? Why isn’t he in Washington?” Churchill’s voice was rising in peroration. Cleveland snapped off the radio.

“Hugh, I asked to see the consul and told this beefy girl at the desk that I was from the Who’s in Town program. That’s all. Next thing I knew I was in this big office with a huge picture of Lenin staring down at me, and there was Ambassador Oumansky, and he said he’d come on the show. He’s a nice man, with wonderful manners.”

“Fantastic! Terrific! Marry me!” Cleveland looked at his watch and passed a hand over his bristly face. The Bolshie ambassador himself! What luck! He jumped up, pulled the small girl into his arms, and gave her a kiss.

Madeline broke free, blushing darkly, glancing over her shoulder at the open door, and straightening her dress.

“You’re a doll, Madeline. Now listen. While I clean up, how about drafting an intro and some questions and bringing them to me in the dressing room?”

The ambassador arrived promptly. Hugh Cleveland had not met a Russian Communist in his life, and he was amazed at Oumansky’s excellent clothes, natural bearing, and smooth English. The consul was even smoother. The two Russians settled themselves, perfectly at ease, at the microphones.

“Mr. Ambassador, it is a privilege for me, and for Who’s in Town, to welcome you at this historic moment -” Cleveland began, and got no further.

“Thank you very much. Since our two countries are now in a common struggle,” Oumansky said, “I welcome the opportunity to give the American people the assurance of my country’s fighting spirit on your popular program, Who’s in Town. Allow me to read from Mr. Molotov’s broadcast.”

The consul handed Oumansky a typewritten document, to the horror of Cleveland, whose iron rule it was to cut off prepared statements.

“Well, Mr. Ambassador, if I may simply say—”

“Thank you. For brevity I have abridged the speech, but here are significant portions of Foreign Minister Molotov’s exact words: ‘Without any claim having been presented to the Soviet Union, without a declaration of war, German troops attacked our country, and bombed from their airplanes our cities…’”

Cleveland held up a hand and tried to speak, but the ambassador rolled right on: “‘This unheard-of attack on our country is perfidy unparalleled in the history of civilized nations. It was perpetrated despite a treaty on non-aggression between the USSR and Germany, which the Soviet government has most faithfully abided by…’”

“Mr. Ambassador, about that treaty, if I may ask just one—”

“Excuse me, I shall continue, and perhaps if time permits we can have a discussion too,” Oumansky said with unruffled charm, and he went on reading sentences and paragraphs neatly underlined in purple ink. Cleveland made two more vain efforts to interrupt, which the ambassador pleasantly ignored, proceeding to the last lines on the last page:

“‘The entire responsibility for this predatory attack on the Soviet Union falls on the German Fascist rulers…

“‘The Soviet government has ordered our troops to drive the German troops from the territory of our country…

“‘Ours is a righteous cause. The enemy shall be defeated. Victory will be ours.’

“To these eloquent words,” said Oumansky, “I have little to add. I must return to my many official duties, and I thank you for this opportunity.”

He passed the paper to the consul, smiled at Cleveland, and moved as though to rise. Desperately, Cleveland stuck in, “Mr. Ambassador, I know how pressed you are in this tragic hour. I won’t detain you. Just tell me this. How will the American Communists react to the news? They’ve been violently advocating neutrality, you know. They campaigned tooth and nail against Lend-Lease. Are they going to make a fast about-face now?”

Oumansky sat back placidly. “Most certainly not. As you know, the working class all over the world is in its nature peace-loving. It has nothing to gain from war and everything to lose. The war began as a struggle between imperialistic powers, so the workers — as, for instance, the American Communist Party, as you just mentioned — opposed the war. But the Soviet Union has no empire and no colonies. It is simply a country of peasants and workers who want peace. In attacking us, the German Fascists threw off their mask and revealed themselves as the brutish common enemy of mankind. Therefore all peoples will now unite in solidarity to crush the German Fascist beasts. The American people too are a peace-loving people. The Soviet people will count on their support of our righteous battle.”

“Mr. Ambassador—”

“In this connection,” said Oumansky, “the historic British pledge of full support, which Mr. Churchill has just given, will be of decisive influence, since Winston Churchill is so justly admired in the United States for his heroic stand against Hitlerism. Good morning, and thank you very much.”

As Madeline escorted the Russians out of the studio, Cleveland was saying, looking after them with exasperation, “Who’s in Town has just brought you the exclusive first broadcast of the Russian ambassador to the United States, Mr. Constantine Oumansky, on the German invasion of the Soviet Union.” His voice shifted from dramatic resonance to oleaginous good cheer. “Well, folks, it’s sort of a big jump from invasions to the amazing new improved Fome-Brite, isn’t it? But life does go on. If dirt invades your kitchen, the new improved Fome-Brite is the modern way to fight back—”

The sunrise, coming to Chicago, was invisible; a thunderstorm was blanketing the city. Through dark pelting rain, Palmer Kirby was riding in a taxicab to a secret meeting of the President’s Uranium Committee, which was interviewing engineers from all over the country. The purpose of the committee was to find out, from the practical men who had to do it, whether enough U-235 could be produced within the predictable time span of the war — which was set at four or five more years — to make atomic bombs or power plants. Dr. Lawrence’s letter had asked him to bring a feasibility report on manufacturing certain giant electromagnets. The men were old friends; over the years Kirby had supplied the Nobel Prize winner with much specially built equipment for his cyclotron work.

Palmer Kirby worked on the borderline where commerce exploited science; he always referred to himself as a money-maker, but he had some scientific standing, because of his early work at the California Institute of Technology. Kirby knew what the giant electromagnets were for. His opinion on producing uranium for military purposes was definite. Not only could it be done; Kirby thought the Germans were well along to doing it. The invasion of Russia struck him as a scary corroboration of this.

Ordinary uranium looks like nickel. Chemically it is lively, but nothing can make it blow up. Its strange radioactivity will fog photographic plates; it may feel warmish; and very long exposure to it may give a human being slight burns. For better or worse, in the matter scattered through the universe, there is also a tiny trace of the stuff, chemically the same, but different in atomic structure: the explosive isotope U-235. We know all about this now, but in 1941 scientists only guessed that a U-235 bomb might work. It was all theory. The problem was first, to find out whether a controlled chain reaction of uranium fission was possible, or whether some unknown fact of nature would stop it; second — if the first answer was yes — to get enough pure uranium 235 to try exploding it; and third, if that worked, to produce enough of the stuff to cow the world. When he heard the news of Hitler’s attack on Russia, Kirby decided that the Germans must have succeeded at least with the first step.

From his narrow vantage point, he saw the entire war as a race between Germans and Americans to make uranium 235 explode. Everything else — submarine sinkings, land campaigns, air battles — more and more looked to him like vain blood-spillings, inconclusive obsolete gestures before this one big showdown. Hitler’s plunge into Russia, opening a second front and releasing England from near doom, struck him as a madman’s mistake — unless the Germans had successfully created a controlled chain reaction. If Hitler had uranium bombs or could count on having them within a year or two, the war was decided, and the Germans were simply making a gigantic slave raid in Russia, preparatory to assuming the rule of the earth.

From the information Kirby had, this appeared likely. It was the Germans who had discovered uranium fission. In 1939 they had set aside the whole Kaiser Wilhelm Institut to work on military use of the discovery. In conquered Norway, intelligence reported, they were making large amounts of heavy water. There was only one possible military use of heavy water, the queer substance with the doubled hydrogen nucleus — as a neutron slower in uranium fission.

The United States had no nuclear reactors, no technique for building one, no scientist who was sure a chain reaction could be created. In the whole country there were not forty pounds of uranium suitable for experiments; there was no setup for producing ordinary uranium in quantity, let alone the very rare isotope 235 that might blow up; and for all the meetings of the Uranium Committee and the whisperings among scientists, the government had not yet spent on this project one hundred thousands dollars in cash. Kirby estimated that by now the Germans, in their massive try for world empire, might have already spent, in the same effort, something like a billion dollars.

The Uranium Committee sat in a drab seminar room, warm and smoky despite the open windows and the continuing thunderstorm outside. Elementary equations from an undergraduate course were chalked on the small blackboard. Kirby knew everybody who sat around table except for two uniformed military visitors: an Army colonel and a Navy captain. The scientists were in shirt-sleeves, some with ties off and sleeves rolled up. Lyman Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards, was still chairman, and this further depressed Kirby. Briggs was a pleasant gray-haired bureau head to whom a thousand dollars was a spectacular Federal expenditure. He wore his coat and tie.

Dr. Lawrence gave Kirby a friendly wave and turned to the military men sitting beside him. “This is Dr. Kirby, president of Denver Electric Works — Colonel Thomas and Captain Kelleher.”

Kirby passed out copies of a mimeographed document and read the paper aloud, sometimes pausing for thunder crashes. The committee listened with narrow-eyed attention — all but Captain Kelleher, a bald chain smoker with a big double chin, who stared straight ahead in a slump, now and then scratching through his blue and gold uniform at one place on his chest. The Army colonel, a studious-looking small man with a bad cough, kept eating lozenges from a paper box, while he made shorthand notes on the margins of Kirby’s paper.

Kirby was replying to questions posed to him by Lawrence in the letter: could he manufacture these giant electric magnets, and if so, what would be the probable costs and production time? Lawrence’s idea — which he was pushing with the peculiar force and single-mindedness that made him loved or hated by other scientists — was to produce uranium 235 by separating a stream of ionized molecules of uranium in a magnetic field; a method Kirby had once described to Victor Henry. There already existed a laboratory tool, the mass spectrograph, that worked this way. Lawrence wanted to make giant mass spectrographs to get uranium 235 in sufficient quantities for war use. Nothing like it had ever been done. The whole notion required — among other things — monster electromagnets which would keep an unwavering field. The slightest voltage change would wash out the infinitesimal difference in the molecule paths of U-238 and U-235, on which the whole idea hung.

When Kirby named a feasible date for delivering the first magnets, and the range of prices he would charge, the committeemen started glancing at each other. He finished with a warning about supply problems requiring high priorities, and sat down. Lawrence was beaming at him through his round glasses.

“Well, that’s encouraging” Lyman Briggs said mildly, fingering his tie. “Of course, the price figures are still in the realm of pure fantasy.”

The Navy captain put in, “Dr. Kirby, we’ve had fellows from General Electric and Westinghouse report on this. They project twice as much time, more than twice as much money, and they shade those performance characteristics considerably.”

Palmer Kirby shrugged. “Could well be.”

“Why should we take your word on feasibility against theirs?” Colonel Thomas said hoarsely, shaking a lozenge out of his box.

Kirby said, “Colonel, I once worked at Westinghouse. They make everything that uses an electric current. I make custom-designed equipment, and I specialize in electromagnets. It’s a narrow specialty, but it’s mine. The Germans were way ahead of us at one point. I went to Germany. I studied their components and imported their nickel alloy cores. Westinghouse and General Electric don’t know that area of technology as I do. They don’t have to. For special jobs in electromagnetics I can outperform them. At least I’m claiming that I can, and I’m prepared to bid in these terms.”

When Palmer Kirby mentioned Germany, the glances went again around the table. The Navy captain spoke in a peevish voice. “Are the Germans still ahead of us?”

“On what, sir?”

“On anything. On making these bombs, to get down to the short hairs.”

Kirby puffed at his pipe. “Well, the self-confidence they’ve just showed isn’t encouraging.”

“I agree. Well, why don’t we get going then? All this committee seems to do is palaver.” Kelleher sat up straight up, glowering. “I’m not a scientist, and I can’t say I’ve taken much stock in these futuristic weapons, but by Christ if there’s anything in them let’s get cracking. Let’s go straight to the President and howl for money and action. I can assure you the Navy will back the committee.

Holding up a thin hand in dismay, Briggs said, “The President has more immediate things, Captain, requiring money and action.”

“I don’t agree,” Thomas said. “More immediate than these bombs?”

Briggs retorted, “It’s all pure theory, Colonel, years away from any possible practical result.”

Captain Kelleher slapped his hand on the table. “Look, let me ask a real dumb question. What’s Kirby talking about here? Is it the diffusion business, or the spectrograph business? Maybe I ought to know, but I don’t.”

“The spectrograph business,” Lawrence said in a fatherly tone.

“All right. Then, why don’t you just shoot the works on that? You’ve got a Nobel Prize. Why don’t you send the President a red-hot plain-language memo that he can grasp? Why do you keep fudging around on these other approaches?”

“Because if we guess wrong on the basic approach,” another scientist mildly observed, “we may lose several years.”

Kirby could not resist saying, “Or lose the whole race to the Germans.”

The discussion halted. The heavy drumming of the rain for a moment or two was the only sound. Briggs said, “Well! These things are still very iffy, as the President likes to say. We can’t be going off half-cocked in this business, that much is certain. In any case” — he turned to Kirby with an agreeable smile — “I don’t think we need to detain you. Your report has been very useful. Many thanks.”

Gathering up his papers, Kirby said, “Will you need me again, or do I go back to Denver?”

“Don’t rush off, Fred,” Lawrence said.

“Right. I’ll be at the Stevens.”

Kirby passed the morning in his hotel suite, listening to the radio bulletins and special reports on the invasion of Russia, and growing gloomier and gloomier. The incessant rain, with the sporadic lightning and thunder, reinforced his dark mood. He had not drunk before lunch in a long time, but he sent for a bottle of Scotch, and had it almost a third emptied when Lawrence called in high spirits. “Fred, you shone this morning. I thought we might manage lunch, but the committee’s sending out for coffee and sandwiches, and working straight on through. Meantime, something’s come up. Do you have a minute?”

“I’m just sitting here, listening to CBS broadcast the end of the world.”

Lawrence laughed. “It won’t end. We’ll beat the Germans to U-235, and that’s the key to this war. Their industrial base is far inferior to ours. But the committee will certainly have to change its ways. The procedure is incredibly cumbersome. This business right now, for instance. Intolerable! One interview at a time, for secrecy, tying all of us up for days on end! We need one knowledgeable man in constant liaison with business and industry, and we need him right away.” Lawrence paused, and added, “We’ve just been talking about you.”

“Me? No thanks.”

“Fred, you’re an engineer, you know business, and your grasp of the theory is adequate. That’s the desired combination, and it’s rare. Unfortunately, no job in the world is more important right now, and you know that.”

“But ye gods, who would I work for? And report to? Not the National Bureau of Standards, for God’s sake!”

“That point is wide open. For secrecy, you might just get a consultant post in the Navy. Captain Kelleher is full of fire to get going, which rather amuses me. Years ago, Fermi came to the Navy with this entire project outlined. They turned him away as a crackpot. The Navy turned away Enrico Fermi! Well Fred? Will you serve?”

After a pause, Kirby said, “Where would I be posted?”

“It would have to be in Washington.” Kirby was silent so long that Lawrence added, “Something wrong with going to Washington?”

“I didn’t say that, but if you want those electromagnets built—”

“That’s a year away, even assuming the approach is approved and the money is appropriated. This must be done now. What do you say?”

This was Lawrence in his urgent and imperious vein, which Kirby knew well. He considered Lawrence possibly the most brilliant man alive. Kirby was several years older than the Nobel Prize winner. He had given up a straight scientific career and gone into industry after his Ph.D., largely because of his encounters with Lawrence and a few other men much younger than himself and unreachably more brilliant. They had made him feel outclassed and deflated. To be urged now by this man to take a task of this importance was irresistible.

“I hope to hell I’m not offered the job,” he said. “If I am, I’ll accept.”

By the time the sun rose over San Francisco, the line between night and day had travelled halfway around the earth, and the invasion of the Soviet Union was half a day old. Masses of men had been killed, most of them Russians, and the Soviet air force had lost hundreds of airplanes — or perhaps more than a thousand; the disaster was already beyond precise documenting.

In the officers’ club at the Mare Island Navy Yard, at a window table in the sunshine, several submarine skippers were chatting about the invasion over ham and eggs. There was little dispute over the outcome. All agreed that the Soviet Union would be crushed; some gave the Red Army as long as six weeks, others foresaw the end in three weeks or ten days. These young professional officers were not a narrow-minded or prejudiced handful; their view was held in the armed forces of the United States right to the top. The wretched showing of the Red Army against Finland had confirmed the judgment that Communism, and Stalin’s bloody purges, had reduced Russia to a nation of no military account. American war plans, in June 1941, ignored the Soviet Union in estimating the world strategic picture.

The submariners at Mare Island, peacefully gossipping at breakfast about the spread of the holocaust on the other side of the world, were expressing only what the service as a whole believed.

The main topic of discussion was whether or not the Japanese would now strike; and if so, where. These few lieutenant commanders inclined to agree that so long as the President kept up his suicidal policy of letting them buy more and more oil and scrap-iron, the Japs would probably hold off. But the consensus lasted only until Branch Hoban of the Devilfish challenged it.

No skipper in the squadron had more prestige. Hoban’s high standing in his class, his chilling air of competence, his sharp bridge game, his golf shooting in the seventies, his ability to hold liquor, his beautiful wife, his own magazine-cover good looks, all added up to an almost suspiciously glamorous façade. But the façade was backed by performance. Under his command the Devilfish had earned three E’s in engineering and gunnery, and in fleet maneuvers in May he had sneaked the Devilfish inside a destroyer screen and hypothetically sunk a battleship. He was clearly a comer headed for flag rank. When Lieutenant Commander Hoban talked, others listened.

Hoban argued that the world situation was like a football game, and that in Asia, the Russian Siberian army was the player facing Japan. With this latest move, Hitler had sucked the Russian man back toward the other wing, to be held as Stalin’s last reserve. This was Japan’s big chance. The Nips now had a clear field to run the ball from China south to Singapore, the Celebes, and Java, cleaning up all the rich European possessions. If only they moved fast enough, they could go over the line before the United States could pull itself together and interfere. He broke off elaborating this favorite metaphor of servicemen and left the breakfast table when he saw his new executive officer motioning to him from the doorway.

Lieutenant Aster handed him a dispatch from Commander, Submarines Pacific: DEVILFISH OVERHAUL CANCELLED EXCEPTION REPAIRS VITAL OPERATIONAL READINESS X REPORT EARLIEST POSSIBLE DATE UNDERWAY MANILA.

“Well, well, back to base!” Hoban grinned, with a trace of high-strung eagerness. “Very well! So ComSubPac expects the kickoff too. Let’s see, today’s the twenty-second, eh? There’s that compressor and number four torpedo tube that have to be buttoned up. Obviously we don’t get the new motor generator, and all the job orders will have to wait till we get alongside in Manila. But that’s okay.” Holding the dispatch against the wall, he pencilled in neat print, Underway twenty-fourth 0700, and handed it to Aster. “Send that off operational priority.”

“Can we do it, sir?”

“Make the Captain of the Yard an information addressee. He’ll damn well get us out of here.”

“Aye aye, sir. We’ll be short an officer. Ensign Bulotti’s hospitalized for two weeks.”

“Damnation. That I forgot. Well, we sail with four officers, then. Stand watch-and-watch till we get to Pearl, and try to hook us a fresh ensign out of the sub pool there.”

“Captain, do you know anybody in ComSubPac Personnel?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well enough to swipe an ensign off new construction?”

To Aster’s saucy grin, Hoban returned a droll grimace. “Got someone in mind?”

“There’s this ensign, a shipmate of mine off the S-45 who’s just reported aboard the Tuna. It’s two whole months away from shakedown.”

“Is he a good officer?”

“Well, unfortunately he’s a sack rat and goof-off.”

“Then what do we want him for?”

“I can make him deliver. In a pinch he’s resourceful and courageous. His father’s a captain in War Plans, and his brother flies an SBD off the Enterprise.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad. What class is he?”

“He’s a reserve. Look, Captain,” Aster exclaimed, at Hoban’s wry expression, “the officer pool will be full of reserves. You’re not going to keep a whole wardroom of regulars. Not on the Devilfish. Byron stands a good watch, and I know him.”

“Byron?”

“His name’s Byron Henry. Briny, they call him.”

“Okay, maybe I’ll telephone Pearl. Kind of a dirty trick to play on this Briny, though, isn’t it? New construction, based in Pearl, is a lot better duty than going to Manila in the Devilfish.”

“Tough titty.”

Hoban looked curiously at his executive officer. He did not yet have Aster sized up. “Don’t you like him, Lady?”

Aster shrugged. “We’re short a watch stander.”

The Pacific showed no combative specks to the westward-moving sunrise. Early sunlight slanted into the hangar deck of the Enterprise, moored to buoys in Pearl Harbor, on disembowelled airplanes, half-assembled torpedoes, and all the vast clutter of the floating machine shop that this deck was in peacetime. Sailors in greasy dungarees and officers in khakis were at work everywhere. Through the steel hollow, smelling as all carriers do of gasoline, rubber, metal, and sea air, a boatswain’s pipe reverberated above the workaday noise, followed by a Southern voice loudspeaker, “Now hear this, Meeting of all officers in the wardroom in ten minutes.”

Warren Henry climbed out of the cockpit of an SBD, wiping his hands on a greasy cloth. He put on his khaki cap, saying to the sailors working with him, “That’s me. Wish me luck.”

When he arrived in the wardroom, officers in khaki shirts and black ties already filled the chairs and lined the sides. Amidships, against the forward bulkhead, stood the movie screen, and on the green baize of a nearby table a slide projector rested. The captain, a chubby man with thick prematurely gray hair, rose and strode before the screen as soon as he saw Warren. “Gentlemen, I guess you’ve all heard the news. I’ve been keeping track on the shortwave, and it seems clear already that Der Führer has caught Joe Stalin with his hammer and sickle down.” The officers tittered formally at the captain’s pleasantry. “Personally, I feel sorry for the Russian people, saddled with such lousy leadership. The few times I’ve encountered their navy officers, I’ve found them friendly and quite professional, though somewhat odd in their ways.”

The question is, how does this affect the mission of the Enterprise?”

Now, as many of us know, Lieutenant Henry of Scouter Squadron Six is something of a red-hot on military history. I’ve asked him to give us a short fill-in here, before we get on with the day’s work, so that — attention on deck!”

Rear Admiral Colton appeared through a doorway, and with the noisy scrape of scores of chairs, all the officers stood up. He was a barrel-chested man with a plump purplish face scarred by plane crashes, a naval aviator dating back to the Langley, now ComAirPac’s chief of staff. The captain conducted him to a leather armchair hastily vacated by his exec. Lighting an enormous black cigar, the admiral motioned at the officers to take their seats.

Standing before the screen, Warren started in the modest monotone of most Navy instructors, hands on hips, legs slightly apart. He made the conventional deprecatory joke about his ignorance, then went straight at the topic.

Okay. Now, naturally, our concern is the Japanese. In theory, there should be no battle problem here. We’re so much stronger than Japan in military potential that any Jap move to start a war looks suicidal. So you hear civilians say we’ll blow the little yellow bastards off the map in two weeks, and all that poppycock.” Some of the young officers were smiling; their smiles faded. Warren hooked a blue and yellow Hydrographic Office chart over the movie screen, and took up a pointer. “Here’s a chart of the Pacific. People shouldn’t talk about blowing anybody off the map without a map in front of them.” Warren’s pointer circled the French, Dutch, and British possessions in southeast Asia. “Oil, rubber, tin, rice — you name what Japan needs to be a leading world power, and there it sits. With what’s happened to the armed forces of the European empires since 1939, it’s almost up for grabs. And the first thing to notice is that it’s all in the Jap back yard. We have to steam for days, far past Japan, just to get there. The territory in dispute, in any Pacific war, will be ten thousand miles or more from San Francisco, and at some points only eight hundred miles from Tokyo.

“Well, so our government’s been trying to keep the Japs quiet by letting them buy from us all the steel, scrap iron, and oil they want, though of course the stuff goes straight into the stockpile they need to fight a war against us. Now, I have no opinion of that policy -”

“I sure have,” came a sarcastic gravelly growl from the admiral. The officers laughed and applauded. Colton went on, “It’s not fit for tender ears. Sooner or later they’ll come steaming east, burning Texaco oil and shooting pieces of old Buicks at us. Some policy! Go ahead, Lieutenant. Sorry.”

Quiet ensued as Warren took away the chart. A pallid slide flashed on the screen, a situation map of the Russo-Japanese war.

“Okay, a little ancient history now. Here’s Port Arthur,” Warren pointed, “tucked far into the Yellow Sea, behind Korea. Jap back yard again. Here’s where the Japs beat the Russians in 1905. Without a declaration of war, they made a sneak attack on the Czar’s navy, a night torpedo attack. The Russkis never recovered. The Nips landed and besieged this key ice-free port. When Port Arthur finally fell, that was it. The Czar accepted a negotiated peace with a primitive country, one-sixtieth the size of his own! It was as great a victory for the Japs as the American Revolution was for us.

“Now I personally think our history books don’t give that war enough play. That’s where modern Japanese history starts. Maybe that’s where all modern history starts. Because that’s where the colored man for the first time took on the white man and beat him.”

In one corner, near the serving pantry, the white-coated steward’s mates, all Filipino or Negro, were gathered. When the topic was not secret, they had the privilege of listening to officer lectures. Glances now wandered to them from all over the wardroom, in a sudden stillness. The Filipino faces were blank masks. The Negroes’ expressions were various and enigmatic; some of the younger ones tartly smiled. This awkward moment caught Warren unawares. The presence of the steward’s mates had been a matter of course to him, hardly noticed. He shook off the embarrassment and plowed on.

“Well, this was a hell of a feat, only half a century after Perry opened up the country. The Japs learned fast. They traded silk and art objects to the British for a modern steam navy. They hired the Germans to train them an army. Then they crossed to the mainland and licked Russia.

“But remember, Moscow was a whole continent away from Port Arthur. The only link was a railroad. Long supply lines licked the Czar. Long supply lines licked Cornwallis and long supply lines licked Napoleon in Russia. The further you have to go to fight, the more you thin out your strength just getting there and coming back.

“Incidentally, at the Naval War College, war games often start with a sneak attack by the Japs on us, right here in Pearl Harbor. That derives from the Port Arthur attack. The way the Japanese mind works, why shouldn’t they repeat a trick on the white devils that once paid off so well?

“Well, of course 1941 isn’t 1905. We’ve got search planes and radar. This time the Japs could get themselves royally clobbered. Still, the nature of this enemy is strange. You can’t rule that possibility out.

“But always remember his objective. When the Japs took on the Czar in 1904 they had no intention of marching to Moscow. Their objective was to grab off territory in their own back yard and hold it. That’s what they did, and they still hold it.

“If war breaks out in the Pacific, the Japs are not going to set forth to occupy Washington, D.C., and my guess is they won’t even menace Hawaii. They couldn’t care less. They’ll strike south for the big grab, and then they’ll dare us to come on, across a supply line ten thousand miles long, through their triple chain of fortified island airfields — the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas — and their surface and submarine fleets, operating close to home under an umbrella of land-based air.

“So I don’t exactly see us blowing them off the map in two weeks.”

Warren looked around at the more than a hundred sombre young faces.

“Peace in the Pacific once rested on a rickety three-legged stool. One leg was American naval power; the second, the European forces in southeast Asia; and the third, the Russian land power in Siberia.

“The European leg of the stool got knocked out in 1940 by the Germans. Yesterday, the Germans knocked out the Russian leg. Stalin’s not going into any Asian war — not now. So it’s all up to us, and with two legs out of the stool, I would say peace in the Pacific has fallen on its ass.”

Warren had been talking along very solemnly, flourishing his pointer. The joke brought surprised chuckles.

“As to Captain Nugent’s question, what does Hitler’s move mean to us, the answer therefore comes out loud and clear, when you look at the map. Der Führer has sounded general quarters for the Enterprise.”

Rear Admiral Colton was first on his feet to lead the applause. Clenching the cigar in his teeth, he pumped Warren’s hand.

Gliding across an imaginary line that splits the Pacific Ocean from the north to the south polar caps, the sunrise acquired a new label, June 23. Behind that line, June 22 had just dawned. This murky international convention, amid world chaos, still stood. For the globe still turned as always in the light of the sun, ninety million miles away in black space, and the tiny dwellers on the globe still had to agree, as they went about their mutual butcheries, on a way to tell the time.

The daylight slipped westward over the waters, over charming green island chains, once German colonies, all entrusted to Japan under her pledge not to fortify them — all fortified. Endeavoring to emulate the white man, Japan had studied European history in the matter of keeping such pledges.

Day came to the city of Tokyo, dotted with charming parks and temples and an imperial palace, but otherwise a flat sprawling slum of matchbox shacks and shabby Western buildings. Catching up with the white man in two generations had impoverished the Japanese; four years of the “China Incident” had drained them dry. Obedient to their leaders, they were bending to their tasks, eating prison fare, building war machines by borrowed blueprints with borrowed metals under borrowed technical advisers, desperately trading silk, cameras, and toys for oil to make the machines go. Ninety million of them toiled on four quake-ridden rocky islands full of slumbering volcanoes, an area no larger than California. Their chief natural resource was willpower. The rest of the world knew little more about them than what would be learned from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado.

They were puzzling people. Their Foreign Minister, a little moustached man named Matsuoka, American-educated and much travelled in Europe, gave the impression of being a lunatic, with his voluble, self-contradictory chatter, and his wild giggling, grinning and hissing, so different from the expected deportment of the Oriental. White diplomats guessed that his strange ways must be part of the Japanese character. Only later did it turn out that the Japanese also thought he was demented. Why the militarist cabinet entrusted him with mortally serious matters at this time remains a historical mystery, like the willingness of the Germans to follow Hitler, who in his writings and speeches always appeared to people of other countries an obvious maniac. It is not clear just how crazy Stalin was at this time, though most historians agree he later went stark mad. In any case, the deranged Matsuoka was in charge of Japan’s relations with the world, when the deranged Hitler attacked the deranged Stalin.

Japanese historians recount that Matsuoka obtained an urgent audience with the emperor and begged him to invade Siberia right away. But the army and navy leaders were cool to the idea. In 1939, the army had had a nasty unpublicized tangle with Stalin’s Siberian army, taking losses in the tens of thousands. They wanted to go south, where the Vichy French were impotent, the Dutch were cut off from home, and the beleaguered English could spare little force. Warren Henry’s amateur analysis on the Enterprise’s hangar deck had not been wrong on these main alternatives.

But Matsuoka insisted that by signing the Tripartite pact with Germany and Italy, Japan had pledged to help them if they were attacked; and the German invasion clearly had taken place to fend off a Russian attack. Morality therefore required Japan to invade Siberia at once. As for the nonaggression pact with Russia — which he had himself negotiated — Russia never kept pacts anyway. To attack right now was vital, before Russia collapsed, in order for the onslaught to appear honorable, and not just picking up pieces. Matsuoka called this position “moral diplomacy.”

One high-placed official is supposed to have commented quite seriously at this time that the foreign minister was insane; to which an elder statesman replied that insanity in Matsuoka would be an improvement. So much one can sift from the Japanese record.

The official secret decision was to “let the persimmon ripen on the tree” — that is, not to attack the Soviet Union until its defeat looked like more of a sure thing. For the China war went on and on, an endless bog, and the Japanese leaders were not eager to take on heavy new land operations. The thrust south looked like the easier option, if they had to fight. Planning for this was to proceed. Matsuoka was dismayed, and he soon fell from office.

At the time of sunrise in Tokyo, the sun had already been traversing Siberia for over three hours, starting at Bering Strait. Before bringing a second sunrise to the battlefront, it had eight more hours to travel, for the Soviet Union stretches halfway around the globe.

Amid the invasion rumors of May and June, a bitter story had swept through Europe, crossing the frontiers between German-held and free territory. A Berlin actress, the story went, resting after lovemaking with a Wehrmacht general, persuaded him to tell her about the coming invasion of Russia. He obligingly took down an atlas of the world and began, but she soon interrupted him:

“Liebchen, but what is that great big green space there all across the map?”

“Why that, Liebchen, as I told you, is the Soviet Union.”

“Ach so. And where did you say Germany was?”

The general showed her the narrow black blob in mid-Europe.

“Liebchen, the actress said pensively, “has the Führer seen this map?”

It was a good joke. But the nerve center of the Soviet Union was not in Vladiavostok, at the far eastern end of the green space. The sunrise of June 23, passing west of the Russian capital, shone out within the hour on German columns, twenty-five miles advanced toward Minsk and Moscow in one day, through the massed forces of the Red Army and its heaviest border defenses.

Chapter 46

Purple lightning cracked down the black sky, forking behind the Washington Monument in jagged streams. July on the Potomac was going out, as usual, in choking heat and wild thunderstorms. “There goes my walk home,” Victor Henry said. Through the open window, a tongue of cool air licked into the stifling, humid office, scattering heavy raindrops on the wall charts. It began to pour in the street, a thick hissing shower.

“Maybe it’ll break the heat wave,” Julius said. Julius was a chief yeoman who had worked with him in the Bureau of Ordnance, a fat placid man of fifty with a remarkable head for statistics.

“No such luck. The steam will be denser, that’s all.” Pug looked at his watch. “Hey, it’s after six. Ring my house, will you? Tell the cook dinner at seven.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Tightening his tie and slipping into a seersucker jacket, Pug scooped up papers from the desk. “I want to study these figures some more. They’re kind of incredible, Julius.”

With a shrug and wave of both hands, Julius said, “They’re as good as the premises you gave me to work from.”

“Jehosephat, if it comes to that many landing craft for the two oceans, how can we build anything else for the next three years?”

Julius gave him the slightly superior smile of an underling who, on a narrow topic, knows more than the boss. “We produce sixty million tons of steel a year, sir. But making all those hair dryers and refrigerators and forty different models of cars too — that’s the problem.”

Pug dove through the rain to a taxicab that drew up at the Navy Building. A very tall man got out, pulling a soft hat low on his head. “All yours — why, hello there.”

“Well, hi!” Pug pulled out his wallet and gave the taxi driver a bill saying, “Wait, please. — How long have you been in Washington, Kirby?

“About a month.”

“Come home with me for a drink. Better yet, join me for dinner.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think I can.”

“I’m alone,” said Victor Henry.

Kirby hesitated. “Where’s your wife?”

“Spending my money in New York. She saw off our daughter-in-law and grandson on a plane to Hawaii. Now she’s shopping for furniture and stuff. We bought a house.”

“Oh? Did she get the one on Foxhall Road?”

“That’s the one. How’d you know about it?”

“Well — I ran into Rhoda when she was house-hunting. You were out at sea, I guess. We had lunch and she showed me the place. I was all for it.”

“Got much to do?” Pug insisted. “I’ll wait for you.”

“As a matter of fact,” Kirby said abruptly, “I only have to pick up some papers. Let me dash in here for a minute. I’ll be glad to have that drink with you.”

Soon they sat together in the cab, moving slowly in the clogged rush-hour traffic of Constitution Avenue, in torrents of rain. “What are you doing in this dismal town?” Pug said.

“Oh, this and that.”

“U know what?” grinned Pug, stressing U for uranium.

Kirby glanced at the bald round head and red ears of the driver.

“Driver, turn on your radio,” Pug said. “Let’s catch the news.”

But the driver could only get jazz, buzzing with static.

“I don’t know what you hope to hear,” Kirby said, “except that the Germans are another fifty miles nearer Moscow.”

“Our department’s getting edgy about the Japs.”

“I can’t figure out the President’s order,” Kirby said. “Neither can the papers, it seems. Okay, he froze their credits. Does it or doesn’t it cut off their oil?”

“Sure it does. They can’t pay.”

“Doesn’t that force them to go to war?”

“Maybe. The President had to do something about this Vichy deal that puts Jap airfields and armies in Indo-China. Saigon’s a mighty handy jump-off point for Malaya and Java — and Australia, for that matter.”

Kirby deliberately packed his pipe. “How is Rhoda?”

“Snappish about various foul-ups in the new house. Otherwise fine.”

Through puffs of blue smoke, the scientist said, “What do we actually want of the Japs now?”

“To cease their aggression. Back up out of Indo-China. Get off the Chinese mainland. Call off that Manchukuo farce, and free Manchuria.”

“In other words,” said Kirby, “give up all hope of becoming a major power, and accept a military defeat which nobody’s inflicted on them.”

“We can lick them at sea.”

“Do we have an army to drive them out of Asia?”

“No.”

“Then don’t we have our gall, ordering them out?”

Pug looked at Kirby under thick eyebrows, his head down on his chest. The humidity was giving him a headache, and he was very tired. “Look, militarist fanatics have taken charge there, Kirby. You know that. Slant-eyed samurais with industrial armaments. If they ever break loose and win southeast Asia, you’ll have a yellow Germany in the Pacific, with unlimited manpower, and most of the oil and rubber in the world. We have to maneuver while we can, and fight if we must. The President’s freezing order is a maneuver. Maybe he’ll work out some deal with them.”

“Appeasement,” Kirby said.

“Exactly, appeasement. We’ve been appeasing them right along with the oil shipments. So far they haven’t attacked south and they haven’t hit Russia in the back. I think the president’s just feeling his way, day by day and week by week.”

“Why doesn’t he declare war on Germany?” Kirby said. “Why this interminable pussyfooting about convoys? Once Russia collapses, the last chance to stop Hitler will be gone.”

“I can tell you why Roosevelt doesn’t declare war on Germany, mister,” spoke up the taxi driver in a rough, good-humored Southern voice, not looking around.

“Oh? Why?” said Kirby.

“Because he’d be impeached if he tried, that’s why, mister. He knows goddamned well that the American people aren’t going to war to save the Jews. He glanced over his shoulder. Blue eyes twinkled in a friendly fat face, smiling jovially. “I have no prejudices. I’m not prejudiced against the Jews. But I’m not prejudiced for them, either. Not enough to send American boys to die for them. That’s not unreasonable, is it?”

“Maybe you’d better look where you’re driving,” said Pug.

The cabbie subsided.

“It’s a nice spot,” Kirby said. They were on the back porch and Pug was pouring martinis. The house stood on a little knoll, topping a smooth lawn and a ravine of wild woods. A fresh breeze smelling of wet leaves and earth cooled the porch.

“Rhoda likes it.”

They drank in silence.

“How about that cabbie?” said Kirby.

“Well, he said it straight out. It’s been said on the Senate floor often, in double-talk.”

Kirby emptied his glass, and Pug at once refilled it.

“Thanks, Pug. I’m having unusual feelings these days. I’m starting to suspect that the human race, as we know it, may not make it through the industrial revolution.”

“I’ve had a bad day myself,” Pug said, as the scientist lit his pipe.

“No,” Kirby said, slowly waving out the thick wooden match, “let me try to put this into words. It’s occurred to me that our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines. Possibly the Germans and the Japanese are really adapting better to the new environment. Their successes suggest that. Also the way their opponents keep stumbling and crumbling. We may be having a Darwinian change in society. Authoritarian rule may be best suited to urban machine life — armed bosses indifferent to mercy or probity, keeping order by terror, and ready to lie and kill as routine policy. After all, most of the machines aren’t a hundred years old. The airplane isn’t forty years old. And democracy’s still a fragile experiment.” Kirby paused to drain his glass. “You called the Japanese industrial samurais. That rang the bell. They’ve starved themselves, stripped their country, to build or buy machines, and they’ve jumped out of nowhere to center stage of history. The Nazi or samurai idea may just make more sense in a changed world, Pug. It this merely martini talk, and is there any left in that jug?”

“There’s plenty,” said Pug, pouring, “and more where it came from. I’m feeling better by the minute. It’s nice on this porch.”

“It’s marvellous,” said Palmer Kirby.

“Why don’t you stay for dinner?” Pug said. “What else do you have to do?”

“I don’t like to impose on you.”

“I’m having chops, potatoes, and a salad. It’s just putting on a couple more chops. Let me tell the cook.”

“All right, Pug. Thanks. I’ve done a lot of eating alone lately.”

“Be back in a minute,” said Victor Henry, taking the jug. He brought it back full and tinkling.

“I put off dinner,” he said. “Give us a chance to relax.”

“Suits me,” said Kirby, “though from the mood I’m in and the size of that jug, you may have to lead me to the dining room.”

“It’s not far,” Pug said, “and the furniture has few sharp edges.”

Kirby laughed. “You know, about the first thing your very sweet wife Rhoda said to me was that I drank too much. At the dinner she gave me in Berlin. You remember, when you had to fly back to see the President. I was in a bad mood, and I did swill a lot of wine fast. She brought me up short.”

“That was rude. The amount a man drinks is his own business,” said Pug. “Not to mention that on occasion my proud beauty has sort of a hollow leg herself.”

“Say, you mix a hell of a good martini, Pug.”

“Kirby, what you were saying before, you know, is only this wave-of-the-future stuff that the Lindberghs have been peddling.”

“Well, Lindy’s the type of the new man, isn’t he? Flying an ocean by himself in a single-motor plane! He pointed the way to much that’s happened since.”

“He’s not a liar and murderer.”

“Only the bosses need be, Henry. The rest, including the scientific and mechanical geniuses like Lindy, and the wheelhorses like me, merely have to obey. That’s obviously what’s been happening in Germany.”

“I’ll tell you, Kirby,” Pug said, swirling his glass and feeling very profound, “there’s nothing new about such leaders. Napoleon was one. He had his propaganda line, too, that weakened the foe before he fired a shot. Why, he was bringing liberty, equality, fraternity to all Europeans. So, he laid the continent waste and made it run with blood for a dozen years or so, until they got wise to him and caught him and marooned him on a rock.”

“You think that’ll happen to Hitler?”

“I hope so.”

“There’s a difference. Napoleon had no machines. If he had had airplanes, telephones, tanks, trucks, machine guns — the whole industrial apparatus — don’t you think he might have clamped a lasting tyranny on Europe?”

“I’m not sure. I happen to have a low opinion of Napoleon. Napoleon sold Jefferson nearly a million square miles of prime land, you know — our whole Middle West, from Louisiana to the Rockies and the Canadian border — for fifteen million dollars. Fifteen million! It figured out to four cents an acre for real estate like Iowa and Nebraska. And Minnesota, with all that iron ore. Colorado with its gold and silver. Oklahoma with its oil. I don’t see how anybody, even a Frenchman, can figure Napoleon as a genius. He was a bloodthirsty ass. If he’d sent just one of his smaller armies over here to protect that territory — just a couple of divisions to hold the Louisiana territory, instead of wandering around Europe slaughtering and looting — and a few thousand Frenchmen to colonize the land, there’s little doubt that France would be the world’s greatest power today. Instead of what she is, a raped old bag.”

“I can’t say that has occurred to me before,” Kirby said, smiling at the phrase. “It’s probably fallacious.”

“What’s happening with uranium?” Victor Henry said.

Kirby’s smile turned wary. “Is that why you’re plying me with martinis?”

“If martinis can loosen you up about uranium, let it happen first with an officer in War Plans, and thereafter don’t drink martinis.”

“Doesn’t War Plans have any information?”

“No. It’s still Jules Verne talk to us.”

“Unfortunately, it’s more than that.”

The rain was starting again, with a whistle of wind, a rumble of thunder, and a whoosh of raindrops through the porch screen. Pug dropped a canvas flap on the side, fastening it down as Kirby talked.

“The best present judgment Pug, is that the bomb can be built. It might take, with an all-out effort, two years or fifty years. Those are the brackets. But we’re not making an all-out effort. We’re making a good effort on the theory end, that’s all. Tremendous brains are at work, some of them driven from Europe by the Germans, for which we owe them cordial thanks. The big question is, how far ahead are the Germans by now? We aren’t even started. There’s no money available and no plan. Making uranium bombs will go in several stages, and some of us fear that the Germans have cracked stage one, which is to get enough of the isotope to start a controlled chain reaction.”

“What kind of weapon are we talking about here?” said Pug. “How powerful an explosive?”

Again, the answer is X. The power may be too much altogether. That is, the bomb may blow itself apart before it can really work. In theory one bomb might level New York City. Or even an area like Rhode Island. You’re dealing here with very large unknowns. There’s talk that it could start a process that could blow up the earth. The best men don’t take that too seriously. I frankly don’t know enough to be sure.”

“You’re talking about a pretty good bomb,” said Victor Henry.

“Hellooo!”

Rhoda Henry’s voice rang through the spacious house, and they heard heels clicking on the parquet floor. “Surprise! Anybody home? I’m DRENCHED. I’m a drowned RAT.”

“Hi! I’m out here,” Pug called, “and we’ve got company.”

“We have?”

“Hello, Rhoda,” said Kirby, standing.

“Oh my GAWD!” She froze in the doorway, staring. Rhoda’s purple hat dripped, she carried a sodden paper bundle, and her flowered silk dress clung wetly to her shoulders and bosom. Her face glistened with rain. Her eye makeup was blurred, her lipstick blotchy on pale lips. Wet strands of hair hung down her forehead and neck.

Pug said, “You finished up sort of fast in New York, didn’t you? I asked Fred Kirby in for a drink, because we happened -”

Rhoda vanished. Her scampering footsteps dwindled into the house and up a staircase.

“Dad, what a place! It’s a mansion!” Madeline walked through the doorway, as wet as her mother, shaking rain from her hair and laughing.

“Well, Matty! You too?”

“Look at me! Christ, did we catch it! No cabs in sight, and — hello, Dr. Kirby.”

“You’ll both get the flu,” Pug Henry said.

“If somebody gave me a martini,” said Madeline, eyeing the jug, “I might fight the infection off.” She explained, as her father poured the drink, that Hugh Cleveland had business at the War Department next morning. Rhoda had decided to come back to Washington with them. The girl took a quick practiced pull at the cocktail.

“Where’s your luggage?” Pug said. “Go put on dry clothes.”

“I dropped my stuff at the Willard, Dad.”

“What? Why? Here’s a whole big house at your disposal.”

“Yes. I came to have a look at it. Then I’ll go back to the hotel and change.”

“But why the devil are you staying at the hotel?”

“Oh, it’s simpler.” She glanced at her watch. “Christ, almost seven o’clock.”

Pug wrinkled his nose at his daughter, not caring much for her brassiness. But she looked pretty, despite her wet hair and wrinkled pink linen suit. Rhoda’s fear that Madeline would turn plain at twenty-one was proving flat wrong. “What’s the rush?”

“We’re having dinner with a big Army wheel, Dad, to try to sell him on a new program idea. Hugh visits a different military installation every week. We put on amateurs from the service, and do a tour of the base, and a pitch about preparedness. I suggested the idea, even the name. The Happy Hour. The network is wild about it.” She looked at the two middle-aged men, her eyes very bright, and held out her glass. “Can I have a little more? I’ll own stock in this thing if it goes through! Imagine! I actually will. Hugh Cleveland’s going to form a corporation and give me some stock. He promised me. How about that? Maybe I’ll be rich! Well, Dad?” she added with an arch giggle. “You look kind of sour.”

“To begin with,” Pug said, “come September we may not have an army. Don’t you read the papers?”

Madeline’s face fell. “You mean about the draft?”

“Yes. Right now it’s fifty-fifty or worse that congress won’t vote for renewal.”

“But that’s insane. Why, by September Hitler will probably have beaten Russia. How far is he from Moscow now? A hundred miles, or something?”

“I’m not saying the politicians make sense. I’m telling you the fact.”

“Christ, that would blow The Happy Hour sky high, wouldn’t it? Oh, well. We’ll see.” She stood, shaking out her skirt. “Ugh. I have rain trickling around inside, in odd little places. I’ll take a fast gander at the house. Then I’ll tool off.”

“I’ll show you around,” Pug said. “How about it, Kirby? Want to join the tour?”

“I guess I’ll leave,” said Kirby. “Rhoda’s back, and I don’t want to intrude, and besides I have a lot of—”

“You sit right down,” Victor Henry said, pushing Palmer Kirby into a wicker armchair. “Houses bore me too. Have one more shortie, and I’ll be joining you.”

“I’ve had plenty,” Kirby said, reaching for the jug.

Madeline went from room to room with her father, exclaiming with pleasure at what she saw. “Christ, look at the moldings in this dining room… Oh, Christ, what a stunning fireplace… Christ, look at the size of these closets!”

“Say, I’m no prude,” Pug remarked at last, “but what’s this ‘Christ, Christ,’ business? You sound like a deckhand.”

Rhoda called from her dressing room, “That’s right, Pug, tell her! I’ve never heard anything like it. You get more Christs from her in five minutes than in a church sermon an hour long. It’s so vulgar.”

Madeline said, “Sorry, it’s a habit I’ve caught from Hugh.”

“Oh, Pug” — Rhoda’s voice again, loudly casual — “where did you dig up Palmer Kirby? Did he telephone?”

“Just ran into him. He’s staying for dinner. Is that all right?”

“Why not? Madeline, you’re not really staying at the Willard, are you? It looks so PECULIAR, dear. Please go and bring your bags home.”

“Never mind, Mother. Bye-bye.”

Pug said, walking down the stairs with her, “We bought a big place just so you kids could stay here when you’re in town.”

She put a hand lightly on his arm and smiled. The condescension embarrassed him. “Really, Dad, I know what I’m doing. We’ll be up very late with the writers tonight.”

“This fellow Cleveland,” said Victor Henry with difficulty. “Is he okay?”

Her secure womanly smile broadened. “Daddy, if there were any hanky-panky going on, I’d be a lot sneakier, wouldn’t I? Honestly. Give me some credit.”

“Well, you’re grown-up. I know that. It just came on kind of fast.”

“Everything’s fine. I’m having the time of my life, and one day you’ll be real proud of me.”

“I’ll call a cab for you,” Pug muttered, but as he reached for the telephone in the marble-floored hallway, it rang. “Hello? Yes, speaking… yes, Admiral.” Madeline saw her father’s face settle into tough alert lines. “Aye aye, sir. Yes, will do. Good-bye, sir.”

Pug dialled Rhoda’s room on the intercom line. “Are you almost dressed?”

“Five minutes. Why?”

“I’ll tell you when you come down.”

He called for a taxicab. Madeline was used to asking no questions when Victor Henry’s face took on that look and he spoke in those tones. They returned to the porch, where Kirby lolled in the wicker armchair, smoking his pipe. Rhoda appeared almost at once in a swishy green dress, her hair smartly combed and curled, her face made up as for a dance.

“Well! Quick-change artistry,” Pug said.

“I hope so. When I got here I looked like the witch in Snow White.”

“Rhoda, I just got a call from Admiral King. He’s at the Department. I’ll ride downtown with Madeline. You go ahead and give Fred his dinner. Maybe I’ll get back in time for coffee, or something. Anyway, I’ll call you when I know what it’s all about.”

The taxi honked outside. Kirby offered to leave too. Victor Henry wouldn’t hear of it. He liked the scientist. He had invited him home partly for company, partly to pump him about uranium. Pug Henry no more imagined anything between this man and Rhoda than he suspected his wife of cannibalism. He prevailed on Kirby to stay, and left with his daughter.

When the outside door closed, Rhoda said brightly, “Well! How long has it been Palmer? An age.”

Kirby sat forward, hands on his knees. “Pug doesn’t know he’s put you in a spot. I’ll be going.”

Rhoda sat composed, legs crossed, arms folded, head atilt. “You’ll waste some good double lamb chops. Can’t you smell them? Dinner’s about ready.”

“Rhoda, I really believe you don’t feel in the least awkward.”

“Oh, Palmer, I take things as they come. I’m very glad to see you, actually. What brings you to Washington anyway?”

“A defense job, about which I can tell you nothing except that it’s going very badly.”

“You mean you’re living here?”

“I have an apartment in the Wardman Park.”

“Well, well. What about your factory?”

“I have excellent managers and foremen. I fly to Denver every two weeks or so. I just got back.” With a sarcastic, one-sided grin he added, “It’s disturbing how well things go on without me.”

“And how is that house of yours?”

“Fine. I didn’t sell it, and now I won’t.”

“Oh? And now, here you are. Funny.”

“‘Funny’ isn’t the word I would choose.”

Rhoda dropped her voice to a soft, intimate note. “Was my letter so very upsetting?”

“It was the worst blow I’ve had since my wife died.”

Rhoda blinked at his rough tone, and sighed. “I’m sorry.” She sat clasping and unclasping her fingers in her lap. Then she tossed head. “I’m trying to think how to tell this so I don’t come out a flibbertigibbet, but to hell with that. I sat next to the President at that White House dinner. He was nice to me. He liked me. He said wonderful things about Pug, about his future career. A divorced man is very handicapped in the service, especially when he’s in sight of flag rank. I’m very aware of that. I’ve seen how it works. And — well, so I did what I did. I’ve slept badly ever since, Palmer, and I’ve been an awful crab. But I’ve stuck to him, and I don’t intend to apologize.”

“Dinner, Miz Henry.” A gray-haired colored woman in a white smock appeared in the doorway, looking sad and reproachful.

“Oh dear. Oh yes. What time is it, Barbara?”

“It’s half past eight now, Miz Henry.”

“That’s awful. I never intended for you to remain this late. Palmer, you’re staying, of course. Just put it on the table, will you Barbara? Then you can go.”

By the time Rhoda Henry and Palmer Kirby had finished off the thick chops, a salad, and a bottle of wine, the tension between them was gone, and he was laughing at her droll stories of troubles with the new house. She was laughing too, though, as she said, at the time the mishaps had put her in wild rages.

“What would you say to another glass of St. Julien with the cheese, Palmer?”

“Rhoda, if he comes home and finds us cracking a second bottle, those eyebrows will go way up, so.”

“Oh, pshaw.” She began clearing dishes. “Many’s the second bottle he and I have cracked. And third ones, on occasion.” She paused, holding a stack of dishes. “I can’t tell you how good I feel. This couldn’t possibly have been planned. But there’s a great weight off my mind.”

Rhoda brought the coffee, and the second bottle, out to the back porch. The rain was over. Beyond the dim trees, in July twilight fading into darkness, a few stars showed.

“Ah! Isn’t this pleasant?” she said. “I think this porch is the reason I wanted the place. It makes me think of the house we had in Berlin.

“This is like a Berlin summer evening,” Kirby said. “The light that lingers on, the fresh smell of rained-on trees—”

She said, “You remember?”

“I have an excellent memory. A little too good.”

“I have a very handy one, Palmer. It tends to remember the good and forget the bad.”

“That is a female memory.” Dr. Kirby gulped his wine with an abrupt motion. “Now let me ask you something, Rhoda. This may really sound offensive. But we may never talk like this again. I’ve had a lot to drink. Much too much, no doubt. Your letter was a bad shock. I’ve thought and thought about this thing ever since. I believed you. I still do. But I have a question to ask you. How come?” After a marked silence, broken only by the chirping of birds, he said, “I’ve made you angry.”

“No.” Rhoda’s voice was throaty and calm. “Of course I know the answer you want — that you were irresistible and there’d never been anyone remotely like you. That’s true enough. Still. I’ve had plenty of chances, dear. And I don’t just mean drunken passes at the officers’ club. There have been times… but to be absolutely honest, these men have all been naval officers like Pug. That’s the circle I move in. Not one has measured up to him, or even come very close.” She was silent for a space. “Don’t take this wrong. I’m not blaming Pug for what happened this time. That would be too low. But he does shut me out so much! And from the moment the war started, that got much worse. Pug’s a fanatic, you know. Not about religion, or politics. About getting things done.”

“That’s an American trait,” said Palmer Kirby. “I’m the same kind of fanatic.”

“Ah, but in Berlin, whether you knew it or not, you were courting me. When Pug courted me, I fell in love with him, too.” She uttered a low chuckle, and added, “Let me say one thing more. Though you, of all people, might give me the horselaugh. I’m a good woman. At least I think I am. So, with one thing and another, there’s been no one else. Nor will there be. I’m a quiet grandma now. That’s that.”

They did not speak for a long time. In the darkness, they were two shadowy shapes, visible only by the dim reflection of unseen streetlamps on the leaves.

“Pug’s never called,” said Rhoda quietly.

The shape of Kirby emerged from the wicker chair, looming tall. “I’ll go now. The dinner was a success. I feel remarkably better. Thanks.”

She said, “Will I see you again?”

“Washington’s a pretty small town. Look at the way I bumped into Pug.”

“Can you find your way out, dear?”

“Certainly.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but to be frank, at the moment my eyes are messy.”

Palmer Kirby came to her, bowed over her hand, and kissed it. She put her other hand over his and gave it a soft lingering pressure.

“My,” she said. “So continental. And very sweet. Straight through the living room, darling, and turn left to the front door.”

Chapter 47

A week later, Victor Henry lay in the upper bunk of an officer’s cabin in the heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa, above a gently snoring colonel of the Army War plans Division. A hand on his shoulder and a whisper, “Captain Henry?” brought him awake. In the red glow from the corridor, he saw a sailor offering a dispatch board. Pug switched on his dim bunk light.

“What time is it?” Pug muttered, scribbling his initials on the flimsy sheet.

“0430, and the OOD says the captain’s gig is standing by for you, sir.”

Pug tried to pack quietly, but a squeaky metal drawer woke the colonel. “Hey, skipper, leaving me? Where are you off to?”

“The Augusta.”

“What?” The colonel yawned, and snuggled under his blanket. Even in midsummer, the morning air was cool in Nantucket Bay. “I thought that boat’s only for big brass and the President.”

“I guess the admiral decided he needs another typist.”

“Would that be Admiral King? The one who shaves with a blowtorch?”

Henry laughed politely. “Yes, that’s the one.”

“Well, good luck.”

A brisk wind was tumbling and scattering the fog in the twilit anchorage, and the choppy water tossed the slow-moving gig so that the bell clanged randomly and Henry had to brace himself on the dank leather seat. After a dull rocky ride the Augusta loomed ahead through the mist, a long dark unlit shape. The cruiser was not even showing anchor lights, a serious and strange peacetime violation. In the breaking fog the President’s yacht and the dunes of Martha’s Vineyard were barely visible. As Captain Henry mounted the cruiser’s ladder, a faint pink glow was appearing in the east. The cleanliness of the old vessel, the fresh smooth paint, the pale gleam of brightwork, the tense quiet gait of sailors in spotless uniforms, marked it as King’s flagship. Peculiar long ramps on the decks, and freshly welded handrails, were obvious special fittings for the crippled President.

Admiral King in starchy whites, lean legs crossed, sat in his high bridge chair querying the captain of the Augusta about arrangements for Roosevelt. He took no notice whatever of Henry’s arrival. The captain, a classmate of Pug, was answering up like a midshipman at an examination. When King dismissed him, he ventured a subdued “Hi, Pug,” before leaving his bridge.

“Henry, the President will want a word with you when he comes aboard.” Fitting a cigarette into a black filter holder, King turned cold eyes on Pug. “I just learned that, hence this transfer. We’ll be under way before you can get back to the Tuscaloosa. I trust you’re prepared with any reports or information he may desire.”

“I have my work papers here, Admiral.” Pug touched the dispatch case which, in the transit between cruisers, had not left his hand.

King, with chin high, looked down at Victor Henry through half-closed eyes, puffing at the cigarette. “As I told you last week, the President asked to have you along on this exercise. He didn’t mention that he wanted you at his beck and call, however. Are you by any chance a distant relative or an old family friend of Mr. Roosevelt?”

“No, Admiral.”

“Well — you might remember, when occasion offers, that you work for the United States Navy.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Virtually nobody saw the crippled man hoisted aboard. The ship’s company in dress whites was mustered on the long forecastle at attention under the main battery guns. No band played, no guns saluted. The yacht Potomac came along the port side, out of sight of Martha’s Vineyard. Sharp commands rang out, a boatswain’s pipe squealed, the Potomac churned away, and the President appeared in his wheelchair, pushed by a Navy captain, with an impressive following of civilians, admirals, and Army generals. As on a theatrical cue, the sun at that moment came out and sunlight shafted down the decks, illuminating the grinning, waving President. The white suit and floppy white hat, the high-spirited gestures, the cigarette holder cocked upward in the massive bespectacled face, were almost too Rooseveltian to be real. An actor would have come on so, and Pug thought FDR actually was putting on a little show for the crew, perhaps responding to the burst of sunshine. The wheelchair and its entourage passed across the castle and went out of sight.

At once the two cruisers weighed anchor and steamed out to sea, with a destroyer division screening ahead of them. The morning sun disappeared behind the clouds. In dreary gray North Atlantic weather, the formation plunged northeast at twenty-two knots, cutting across main ship lanes. Victor Henry walked the main deck for hours relishing the sea wind, the tall black waves, and the slow roll of iron plates under his feet. No summons came from the President. That scarcely surprised him. His chief in the War Plans Division was aboard the Tuscaloosa; they had intended to do a lot of work en route. Now when the two cruisers reached the rendezvous, they would need an all-night conference. The separation was probably pointless, but the President’s whim had to be endured.

He was finishing bacon and eggs next morning in the flag mess, when a steward’s mate handed him a sealed note on yellow scratch paper:

He folded the note carefully away in his pocket. Pug was preserving all these communications, trivial or not, for his grandchildren. At the stroke of ten he went to flag quarters. A rugged frozen-eyed marine came to robot attention outside the President’s suite.

“Hello there, Pug! Just in time for the news!” Roosevelt sat alone in an armchair at a green baize-covered table, on which a small portable radio was gabbling a commercial. Dark fatigue pockets under Roosevelt’s eyes showed through the pince-nez glasses, but the open shirt collar outside an old gray sweater gave him a relaxed look. He had cut himself shaving; a gash clotted with blood marred the big chin. His color was good, and he was snuffing with relish the wind that blew in through a scoop and mussed his thin gray hair.

He shook his head sadly at a Moscow admission that the Germans had driven far past Smolensk. Then the announcer said that President Roosevelt’s whereabouts were no longer a secret, and he perked up. FDR was vacationing aboard the Potomac, the announcer went on. Reporters had seen him on the afterdeck of the yacht at eight o’clock last evening, passing through the Cape Cod Canal. Roosevelt’s eyes darted cunningly at Captain Henry. His smile curved up, self-satisfied and wise. “Ha ha. And here I was at eight o’clock, out on the high seas. How d’you suppose I worked that one, Pug?”

“Pretty good deception, sir. Somebody in disguise on the yacht?”

“Darn right! Tom Wilson, the engineer. We got him a white suit and white hat. Well, that’s just grand. It worked!” He tuned down another commercial. “We didn’t want U-boats out gunning for Churchill and me. But I admit I get a kick out of giving the press the slip, Pug. They do make my life a misery.” Roosevelt was searching through piles of paper on the desk. “Ah. Here we are. Look this over, old fellow.” The typewritten document was headed “For The President — Top Secret, Two Copies Only.”

Turning up the radio again, the President slumped in his chair, and the mobile face went weary and grave as the announcer described a newspaper poll of the House of Representatives on the extension of the draft, predicting defeat of the bill by six to eight votes. “That is wrong,” the President interjected, his heavy black-ringed eyes on the radio, as though arguing with the announcer. In the next item, the German propaganda ministry ridiculed an accusation by world Jewish leaders of massacres of Jews taking place in German-held parts of the Soviet Union. The Jews were spreading Allied atrocity propaganda, the ministry said, and the Red Cross was free to come in at any time to verify the facts. “There’s another lie,” the President said, turning off the radio with a disgusted gesture. “Those Nazis are the most outrageous liars, really. The Red Cross can’t get in there at all. I think, and I certainly hope, those stories are terribly exaggerated. Our intelligence says they are. Still, where there’s smoke -” He took off his pince-nez, and rubbed his eyes hard with thumb and forefinger. “Pug, did your daughter-in-law ever get home with her uncle?”

“I understand they’re on their way, sir.”

“Good. Very good.” Roosevelt puffed out a long breath. “Quite a lad, that submariner of yours.”

“A presumptuous pup, I’m afraid.” Victor Henry was trying to read the document, which was explosive, while chatting with Roosevelt. It was hard because the pages were full of figures.

“I also have a son who’s an ensign, Pug. He’s aboard and I want you to meet him.”

“My pleasure, sir.”

Roosevelt lit a cigarette, coughing. “I received a copy of that Jewish statement. A delegation of some old good friends brought it to me. The way the Jews stick together is remarkable, Pug. But what’s one to do? Scolding the Germans is so humiliating, and so futile. I’ve exhausted that line long ago. We tried to get around the immigration laws, with this device and that, and we’ve had some luck, actually. But when I’ve got a Congress that’s ready to disband the Army, can you imagine my going to them with a bill to admit more Jews? I think we’ll beat them on the draft, but it’ll be close at best.”

While he was saying this, Franklin Roosevelt cleared a space on the table, took up two decks of cards, and meticulously laid out a complex solitaire game. He moved cards around in silence for a while, then said in a new cheerful tone, as the ship took a long roll, “By George, Pug, doesn’t it feel wonderful to be at sea again?”

“It sure does, Mr. President.”

“Many’s the time I’ve sailed in these waters. I could navigate this ship for them, honor bright!” He observed Pug turning over the last page. “Well? What do you think?”

“This is something for my chief, Mr. President.”

“Yes, but Kelly Turner’s over on the Tuscaloosa. Anyway, another squabble between the service heads is just what I don’t want.” The President smiled at him with flattering warmth. “Pug, you have a feeling for facts, and when you talk I understand you. Those are two uncommon virtues. So let’s have it. Take your time.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Pug flipped through the document again, making quick notes on a pad. The President, chain-lighting a cigarette, carefully put down card on card.

Nothing in the document surprised Henry. He had heard it all before, in arguments with Army war planners. But here the Army was taking its case to the President, either through Marshall, or by some devious route which the President in his usual fashion kept open. The document was a scorcher indeed; if it leaked to isolationist senators, it might well end Lend-Lease, kill Selective Service, and even start an impeachment drive. Hence he was taken aback to see that it existed at all.

Roosevelt had called for the preparation of a “Victory Program,” a fresh start to unlock the paralysis of Lend-Lease and war production. Half a dozen agencies had tangled themselves and the big industries into impotence — the Army and Navy Munitions Board, the War Resources Board, the Office of Emergency Management, the National Defense Advisory Commission, the Office of Production Management. Their heads were jockeying for presidential favor; all Washington was bewildered by the flood of new initials; shortages and bottlenecks were mounting; and actual munitions were being produced in a feeble trickle. To break this up, Roosevelt had ordered the armed forces to list everything they needed to win a global war, and work out new priorities from this master list.

For weeks planners like Victor Henry had been calculating possible American invasions of France, Africa, Germany, Italy, China, and Honshu, air strikes against industrial cities, and joint operations with the British and even the Russians. The Army and the Navy, not particularly trusting each other, were hardly communicating about the program. Each had prepared a draft, and each had of course called for the greatest possible share of manpower and industrial output. They had been at the greatest pains to keep the Victory Program secret and the papers few. The document now in Victor Henry’s hands was a sharp critique by the Army of the Navy’s demands.

“How about some orange juice?” the President said, as a steward entered with a pitcher on a tray. “Wouldn’t you like that? Felipe squeezes it fresh. He’s gotten hold of some glorious oranges.”

“Thank you, sir.” Pug sipped at a glass of foaming juice. “This thing needs a paper just as long in reply, Mr. President. Essentially, the Navy and the Army are just using two different crystal balls. That’s inevitable. The Army’s the big service, and it’s ultimately responsible for the security of the United States. No argument there. They figure they may have to fight the Axis single-handed, after Russia and England fold. That’s why they demand so much. They arrive at the army of nine million men by working backward from the total manpower of the United States. It’s the biggest force our country can field.”

“And we may well need it,” said the President.

“Yes, sir. It’s mainly on Lend-Lease that we see the thing differently. The Army says we want to give away too many arms and machines which the Germans may capture and use against us. But our contention is that even if the Soviet Union does go down soon, and the British too, a hell of a lot of Germans will have to die first to lick them. And every German who dies is one less German who’ll be shooting at us one day.

“I agree,” the President said, very flatly.

“Well, then, Mr. President, should we at any cost strengthen these people who are killing Germans right now? We can rebuild and replace lost materiel pretty fast, but it takes twenty years to raise a live Boche to replace a dead one.”

The President observed with a slight grin, “Well said. But Lend-Lease isn’t the only bone of contention here. I notice the Navy wants a pretty hefty share of our total steel production.”

“Mr. President” — Pug leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands outstretched, talking as forcefully as he could — “Hitler didn’t beat England last year because he couldn’t land the strongest army in the world on a coast a few miles away. He had all the ships he needed to carry them across. But he couldn’t dock them on the other side. Assault from the sea is a tough battle problem, Mr. President. They don’t come much tougher. It’s easy to put your men ashore, one place or another, but then how do you keep the defenders from wiping you out? Your men are stranded. The defenders have all the mobility, the numerical superiority, and the firepower. They can concentrate and crush you.” As Pug talked, the president was nodding, cigarette holder drooping between his teeth, eyes piercingly attentive. “Well, sir, the answer is special craft that can hit an open beach in large numbers. You throw a large force ashore, and keep it supplied and reinforced until it captures a harbor. Then you can pile in with your regular transports, your luxury liners too — if you’ve got ‘em — and your invasion’s on. But those landing craft, you need swarms of them, sir, of many different designs. This analysis has been assigned to me. It looks as though we’re going to have to manufacture something like a hundred thousand, all told.”

“A hundred thousand!” The president tossed his big head. “Why, all the shipyards in the United States couldn’t do that in ten years, Pug, even if they stopped doing everything else. You’re talking sheer nonsense. Everybody exaggerates his little specialty.” But Roosevelt was smiling in an excited way and his eyes were lighting up. He spoke of landing boats the Navy had used in the last war, when he was Assistant Secretary, and of the disastrous British landing at Gallipoli. Victor Henry took from his briefcase pictures of German invasion craft and of new models, and some designs for American boats. The President scanned these with zest. Different craft would perform different missions, Pug said, from a big landing ship to cross the ocean with a great load of tanks and trucks in its belly, to little amphibious tanks that could crawl out on land, chug back into the water, and maybe submerge. Roosevelt obviously loved all this. Under the spread of pictures and sketches lay his solitaire game, scattered and forgotten.

“Say, have you fellows ever thought of this?” The President seized a yellow ruled pad and sketched with crude black pencil strokes as he talked. “It’s an idea I had back in 1917, studying the Gallipoli reports. I sent it to BuShips, sketches and all, and never heard another word. I still say it has merit, though it hadn’t crossed my mind again until this minute. Look here, Pug.”

The drawing showed an oblong, flat-bottomed craft. Amidships on an arching frame, over the heads of crouched soldiers, an airplane engine whirled its big propeller in a screened housing. “I know there’s a stability question, with all that weight so high, but with a broad enough beam, and if you used aluminum — you see that boat could go right up on the beach, Pug, through marshes, anywhere. Underwater obstacles would be meaningless.” The President grinned down at his handiwork with approval, then scrawled at the bottom, FDR — on board USS Augusta, en route to meet Churchill, 7 August 1941. Here. Don’t bury it the way BuShips did! Look into it. Maybe it’s just a wild notion, but — Well! Will you look at Old Man Sunshine, pouring through that porthole at last!”

The President put on the white hat, and smoothly slid into his wheeled kitchen chair, pressing his hands on the table with almost simian strength to lift and move himself. Victor Henry opened a door to the sun deck. Roosevelt wheeled himself briskly across the gray-painted wooden ramps over the coaming. “Ah! Doesn’t this feel swell! Warm sun and ocean air. Just what the doctor ordered. Give me a hand, Pug.” The President eased himself into a blue leather reclining chair, in an angle of the deck structure sheltered from the wind. They were looking aft at the long gray guns and the foaming wake of the gently pitching cruiser. “I still say you’ll never find the shipyard or Navy Yard space for those landing craft, Pug. There are the merchant ships to build, the destroyer escorts, the carriers. You’re going to have to use factories where you can find them — on rivers and inland waterways — hundreds of little factories.” President Roosevelt cocked his head, staring out at the sea. “You know? This program could be a godsend to small business. Congress has given us all kinds of trouble about that. There’s a real thought. Money going out to small factories in many states — “ The president lit a cigarette, deftly cupping the match against the breeze. “Very good. Let me have your notes on that Army paper, Pug. Just write them up yourself, and give them to me today.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Now I’m extremely interested in that landing craft problem, but I don’t want you getting bogged down in it. Once the Victory Program is finished, let’s detach you from War Plans, and send you out to sea. You’re overdue.”

Victor Henry saw that he had scored with Roosevelt and that the moment was favorable. He said, “Well, Mr. President, for a long time I’ve been yearning for a battleship.”

“You think you can command one?”

Trying hard not to show emotion in face or voice, realizing that a lifetime might hang on the next few words, Henry said, “I think I can, sir.”

“Well, you’ve been delayed on the beach by unrewarding jobs. The Commander-in-Chief out to have a little say in this. Let’s get you command of a battleship.”

The President spoke lightly. But the ring in his cultured voice, the self-satisfied tilt of his head, the regal way he held the arms of his chair and smiled at Captain Henry, shoed his relish for power and his satisfaction in bestowing largesse.

“Thank you, Mr. President.’

“Now, Pug, you’ll find the Chief Yeoman Terry in the flag office. Will you tell him to come here?”

Dazed by the last turn of the conversation, Victor Henry walked back into the President’s suite, and interrupted a chat between General Marshall, Admiral King, Admiral Stark, and General Watson, sitting relaxed on a couch and armchairs in splendid uniforms. The four elderly awesome heads turned at him. Admiral King gave him a puzzled scowl. Pug crossed the room as fast as he could without running, and went out.

It was for this chat, lasting less than an hour, that Franklin Roosevelt had evidently summoned Victor Henry to the Augusta. Except at a distance, the Navy captain did not see the President again all the way to Newfoundland.

Pug no longer tried to fathom the President’s purposes. He did not feel flattered when Roosevelt summoned him, or put out when the President forgot he was alive. He was under no illusion that he held high place in the President’s esteem, or that anything he said or did influenced the course of history. The President used other obscure men. The identities and missions of some were fogged in secrecy. He himself knew of a marine colonel who ran presidential errands in Japan, China, and India; and an elderly Oregon lumberman, a friend of his own father, who specialty was buying up scarce war materials in South America, to deny them to the Germans. Pug counted himself among these small fry, and took the President’s use of him as the result of random impulse. Roosevelt liked him because he was knowledgeable, got things done, and kept his mouth shut. A lucky guess about the Nazi-Soviet pact had earned him more credit for acumen than he deserved. There was also the odd phrase Roosevelt had used: “When you talk, I understand you.”

Still, the President’s promise of a battleship command gave Victor Henry sleepless nights. Only two of his classmates had battleships. He went to the flag office and checked the Navy Register, to narrow down the possibilities. Of course, new construction — the North Carolina class or the Indiana class giants — was out of the question for him. He would get a modernized old ship. The deadline for delivering the Victory Program was less than a month off. Scanning the records, he noted that places might open up within a couple of months in the California or West Virginia. This was heady business for Captain Victor Henry, after thirty years in the Navy, checking over the battle ship roster to guess which one he might soon command!

He tried to crush down his elation. Henry admired the President, and had moments when he almost loved the gallant cripple with the big grin and the boundless appetite for work. But he did not understand Roosevelt or trust him; and he did not in the least share the unlimited devotion to this man of people like Harry Hopkins. Behind the warm jolly aristocratic surface, there loomed a grim ill-defined personality of distant visions and hard purpose, a tough son of a bitch to whom nobody meant very much, except perhaps his family; and maybe not they, either. It might be that Roosevelt would remember to get him a battleship command. It was equally likely that some new job would put the promise off until it faded. Roosevelt had taught Victor Henry what a great man was like; the captain thought time and again of the Bible’s warning, that the clay pot should keep its distance from the iron kettle.

Gray peace pervaded the wilderness-ringed Argentia Bay in Newfoundland, where the American ships anchored to await the arrival of Winston Churchill. Haze and mist blended all into gray: gray water, gray sky, gray air, gray hills with a tint of green. The monstrously shaped gray-painted iron ships, queer intruders from the twentieth century into the land of the Indians, floated in the haze like an ugly phantom vision of the future. Sailors and officers went about their chores as usual on these ships, amid pipings and loudspeaker squawks. But a primeval hush lay heavy in Argentia Bay, just outside the range of the normal ships’ noises.

At nine o’clock, three gray destroyers steamed into view, ahead of a battleship camouflaged in swirls and splotches of color like snakeskin. This was H.M.S. Prince of Wales, bigger than any other ship in sight, bearing the guns that had hit the Bismarck. As it steamed past the Augusta, a brass band on its decks shattered the hush with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Quiet fell. The band on the quarterdeck of the Augusta struck up “God Save the King.”

Pug Henry stood near the President, under the awning rigged at number-one turret, with admirals, generals, august civilians like Averell Harriman and Sumner Wells. Churchill was plain to see not five hundred yards away, in an odd blue costume, gesturing with a big cigar. The President towered over everybody, stiff on braced legs, in a neat brown suit, one hand holding his hat on his heart, the other clutching the arm of his son, an Air Corps officer who strongly resembled him. Roosevelt’s large pink face was self-consciously grave.

At this grand moment Pug Henry’s thoughts were prosaic. BuShips experts were disputing over camouflage patterns. Some liked this British tropical splashing, some preferred plain gray or blue horizontal bands. Pug had seen the mottled battleship through the mist before monochrome destroyers that were a mile closer. He intended to report this.

“God Save the King” ended. The President’s face relaxed. “Well! I’ve never heard ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ played better.” The men around him laughed politely at the presidential joke, and Roosevelt laughed too. The squeal of boatswains’ pipes broke up the dress parade on the cruiser’s deck.

Admiral King beckoned to Pug. “Take my barge over to the Prince of Wales, and put yourself at Mr. Harry Hopkins’s service. The President desires to talk with him before Churchill comes to call, so expedite.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Passing from the Augusta to the Prince of Wales in King’s barge, over a few hundred yards of still water, Victor Henry went from America to England and from peace to war. It was a shocking jump. King’s spick-and-span flagship belonged to a different world than the whipped British vessel, where the accommodation ladder was salt-crusted, the camouflage paint was peeling, even the main battery guns looked pitted and rusty. Pug was aghast to see cigarette butts and wastepaper in the scuppers, though droves of bluejackets were doing an animated scrub-down. On the superstructure raw steel patches were welded here and there — sticking plaster for wounds from the Bismarck’s salvos.

The officer of the deck had a neatly trimmed brown beard, hollow cheeks, and a charming smile. Pug envied the green tarnish on the gold braid of his cap. “Ah, yes, Captain Henry,” he said, smartly returning the salute in the different British palm-out style, “Mr. Hopkins has received the signal and is waiting for you in his cabin The quartermaster will escort you.”

Victor Henry followed the quartermaster through passageways hauntingly like those in American battleships, yet different in countless details: the signs, the fittings, the fire extinguishers, the shape of the watertight doors.

“Hello there, Pug.” Hopkins spoke as though he had not seen the Navy captain for a day or two, though their last encounter had been on the train to Hyde Park early in March, and meantime Hopkins had travelled to London and Moscow in a blaze of worldwide newspaper attention. “Am I riding over with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’s the President feeling?” Hopkins had two bags open on his bunk in a small cabin off the wardroom. In one he carefully placed papers, folders, and books; in the other he threw clothes, medicine bottles, and shoes as they came to hand. Hopkins looked thinner than before, a bent scarecrow with a gray double-breasted suit flapping loosely on him. In the long, curved, emaciated face, the clever, rather feminine eyes appeared enormous as a lemur’s. The sea voyage showed in his fresh color and bouncy movements.

“He’s having the time of his life, sir.”

“I can imagine. So’s Churchill. Churchill’s like a boy going on his first date. Well, it’s quite a historic moment, at that.” Hopkins pulled dirty shirts from a drawer and crammed them in the suitcase. “Almost forgot these. I left a few in the Kremlin and had to scrounge more in London.”

“Mr. Hopkins, what about the Russians? Will they hold?”

Hopkins paused, a stack of papers in his hand, and pursed his mouth before speaking decisively. “The Russians will hold. But it’ll be a near thing. They’ll need help.” He resumed his hurried packing. “When you fly from Archangel to Moscow, Pug, it takes hours and hours, over solid green forests and brown swamps. Often you don’t see a village from horizon to horizon. Hitler’s bitten off a big bite this time.” He was struggling with the clasp on his suitcase, and Pug gave him a hand. “Ah, thanks! What do you suppose Stalin wants from us most of all, Pug?”

“Airplanes,” Victor Henry said promptly. “‘Clouds of airplanes.’ Same as the French were yelling for last year.”

“Aluminum,” said Harry Hopkins. “Aluminum to build airplanes with. Well, let me correct that — his number one item was anti-aircraft guns. Next comes aluminum. Wants a lot of Army trucks, too. Stalin isn’t planning to get beaten in three weeks, or six weeks or three years.” Hopkins tidied the papers in the smaller case, and closed it. “Let’s go.”

The way led through the wardroom, stretching grandly the width of the vessel, furnished like a London club, with dark panelling, easy chairs, rows of novels and encyclopedias, and a bar. When the door to the Prime Minister’s cabin was opened by his valet, a strange sight greeted them. Winston Churchill, barefoot, was contemplating himself in a mirror in morning coat, tie, and yellow silk underdrawers. “Hello there, Harry.” He ignored Captain Henry, slewing a long cigar around in his mouth. “I’m not aware that His Majesty’s First Minister has ever before paid a call on the President of the United States at sea. I saw the President wearing a plain brown lounge suit. But he is the head of state. I am only a minister.” Churchill’s fat aged face was lit with puckish relish of the unique historical problem. “This looks odd, I know. My man of protocol wants me to wear the same old brass-buttoned jacket and cap. But it’s such an informal dress.”

“Prime Minister,” Hopkins said, “You do look more like a Former Naval Person in it.”

Churchill grinned at the whimsical name he used in messages to Roosevelt. He said to the valet, “Very well. The Trinity House uniform again.”

“This is Captain Victor Henry, Prime Minister, of Navy War Plans.”

Pulling down his eyebrows, Churchill said, “Hello there. Have you done anything about those landing craft?”

The eyes of Hopkins and Victor Henry met, and Churchill’s wide mouth wrinkled with gratification. Pug said, “I’m amazed that you remember me, Mr. Prime Minister. That’s part of my job now. The other day I talked with the President at length about landing craft.”

“Well? Is the United States going to build enough of them? A very large number will be called for.”

“We will, sir.”

“Have our people given you everything you’ve requested?”

“Their cooperation has been outstanding.”

“I think you’ll find,” Churchill rasped, as the valet helped him into enormous blue trousers, “that we simple islanders have hit on a design or two that may prove usable.” Churchill spoke slowly, lisping on his s’s in a tone that was almost a growl.

Hopkins said a word of farewell to Churchill, and they left. In the passageway, with an incredulous grin, Hopkins remarked, “We’ve been having ceremonial rehearsals for days, and yet he’s fussing to the last minute about what to wear! A very, very great man, all the same.”

As Hopkins shakily stepped aboard King’s barge from the accommodation ladder, the stern rose high on a swell, then dropped away from under him. He lost his balance and toppled into the arms of the coxswain, who said, “Ooops-a-daisy, sir.”

“Pug, I’ll never be a sailor.” Hopkins staggered inside, settling with a sigh on the cushions. I flopped on my face boarding the seaplane that flew me to the Soviet Union. That nearly ended my mission right there.” He glanced around at the flawlessly appointed barge. “Well, well. America! Peacetime! So you’re still in War Plans. You’ll attend the staff meetings then.”

“Some of them, yes, sir.”

“You might bear in mind what our friends will be after. It’s fairly clear to me, after five days at sea with the Prime Minister.” Hopkins held out one wasted hand and ticked off points on skeletal fingers. He seemed to be using Victor Henry as a sounding board to refresh his own mind for his meeting with the President, for he talked half to himself. “First they’ll press for an immediate declaration of war on Germany. They know they won’t get that. But it softens the ground for the second demand, the reason Winston Churchill has crossed the ocean. They want a warning by the United States to Japan that any move against the British in Asia means war with us. Their empire is mighty rickety at this point. They hope such a warning will shore it up. And they’ll press for big war supplies to their people in Egypt and the Middle East. Because if Hitler pokes down there and closes the canal, the Empire strangles. They’ll also try, subtly but hard — and I would too, in their place — for an understanding that in getting American aid they come ahead of Russia. Now is the time to bomb the hell out of Germany from the west, they’ll say, and build up for the final assault. Stuff we give Russia, it will be hinted, may be turned around and pointed against us in a few weeks.”

Victor Henry said, “The President isn’t thinking that way.”

“I hope not. If Hitler wins in Russia, he wins the world. If he loses in Russia he’s finished, even if the Japanese move. The fight over there is of inconceivable magnitude. There must be seven million men shooting at each other, Pug. Seven million or more.” Hopkins spoke the figures slowly, stretching out the wasted fingers of both hands. “The Russians have taken a shellacking so far, but they’re unafraid. They want to throw the Germans out. That’s the war now. That’s where the stuff should go now.”

“Then this conference is almost pointless,” said Pug. The barge was slowing and clanging as it drew near the Augusta.

“No, it’s a triumph,” Hopkins said. “The President of the United States and the British Prime Minister meeting face to face to discuss beating the Germans. The world will know that. That’s achievement enough for now.” Hopkins gave Victor Henry a sad smile, and a brilliantly intelligent light came into his large eyes. He pulled himself to his feet in the rocking boat. “Also, Pug, this is the changing of the guard.”

Winston Churchill came to the Augusta at eleven o’clock. Among the staff members with him, Captain Henry saw Lord Burne-Wilke, and a hallucinatory remembrance of Pamela Tudsbury in her blue WAAF uniform distracted him from the dramatic handshake of Roosevelt and Churchill at the gangway. They prolonged the clasp for the photographers, exchanging smiling words.

All morning, recollections of England and Pamela had been stirring Pug. The OOD’s very British greeting at the Prince of Wales ladder, the glimpses of London magazines in the wardroom, Winston Churchill’s voice with its thick s’s, had wakened his memory like a song or a perfume.

Göring’s 1940 air blitz on London already seemed part of another era,, almost another war. Standing well back in the rank of King’s staff officers, this short unknown Navy captain, whose face would be lost in the photographs, tried to shake irrelevancies from his brain and pay attention.

In an odd way the two leaders diminished each other. They were both Number One Men. But that was impossible. Who, then, was Number One? Roosevelt stood a full head taller, but he was pathetically braced on lifeless leg frames, clinging to his son’s arm, his full trousers drooped and flapping. Churchill, a bent Pickwick in blue uniform, looked up at him with majestic good humor, much older, more dignified, more assured. Yet there was a trace of deference about the Prime Minister. By a shade of a shade, Roosevelt looked like Number One. Maybe that was what Hopkins had meant by “the changing of the guard.”

The picture-taking stopped at an unseen signal, the handshake ended, and a wheelchair appeared. The erect front-page President became the cripple more familiar to Pug, hobbling a step or two and sinking with relief into the chair. The great men and their military chiefs left the quarterdeck.

The staffs got right to business and conferred all day. Victor Henry worked with the planners, on the level below the chiefs of staff and their deputies where Burne-Wilke operated, and of course far below the summit of the President, the Prime Minister, and their advisers. Familiar problems came up at once: excessive and contradictory requests from the British services, unreal plans, unfilled contracts, jumbled priorities, fouled communications. One cardinal point the planners hammered out fast. Building new ships to replace U-boat sinkings came first. No war materiel could be used against Hitler until it had crossed the ocean. This plain truth, so simple once agreed on, ran a red line across every request, every program, every projection. Steel, aluminum, rubber, valves, motors, machine tools, copper wire, all the thousand things of war, would go first to ships. This simple yardstick rapidly disclosed the poverty of the “arsenal of democracy,” and dictated — as a matter of frightening urgency — a gigantic job of building new steel mills, and plants to turn the steel into combat machines and tools.

Through all the talk of grand hypothetical plans — hundreds of ships, tens of thousands of airplanes and tanks, millions of men — one pathetic item kept recurring: an immediate need for a hundred fifty thousand rifles. If Russia collapsed, Hitler might try to wrap up the war with a Crete-like invasion of England from the air. Rifles for defending British airfields were lacking. The stupendous materiel figures for future joint invasions of North Africa or the French coast contrasted sadly with this plea for a hundred fifty thousand rifles now.

Next morning, boats from all over the sparkling bay came clustering to the Prince of Wales for church services. On the surrounding hills, in sunlight that seemed almost blinding after days of gray mist, the forests of larch and fir glowed a rich green.

An American destroyer slowly nosed its bridge alongside the battleship, exactly level with the main deck, and a gangplank was thrown across. Leaning on his son’s arm and on a cane, Franklin Roosevelt, in a blue suit and gray hat lurched out on the gangplank, laboriously hitching one leg forward from the hip, then the other. The bay was calm, but both ships were moving on long swells. With each step, the tall President tottered and swayed. Victor Henry, like all the Americans crowding the destroyer bridge, hardly breathed as Roosevelt painfully hobbled across the narrow unsteady planks. Photographers waiting on the Prince of Wales quarterdeck were staring at the President, but Pug observed that not one of them was shooting this momentous crippled walk.

He thought of Franklin Roosevelt as he had first known him — the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the athletic cocksure dandy, the obvious charmer and lady-killer, full of himself, on top of the world, bounding up and down a destroyer’s ladders and spouting salty lingo. The years had made of him this half-disabled gray man, heaving himself one agonized step at a time over a gangplank a few feet long; but here was enough willpower displayed, Pug thought, to win a world war. A ramp could have been jury-rigged and laid across with ease. Franklin Roosevelt might have wheeled over in comfort and with dignity. But in his piteous fashion he could walk; and to board a British battleship, at Winston Churchill’s invitation for church parade, he was walking.

His foot touched the deck of the Prince of Wales. Churchill saluted him and offered his hand. The brass band burst forth with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Roosevelt stood at attention, his chest heaving, his face stiff with strain. Then, escorted by Churchill, the President hitched and hobbled all the way across the deck, and sat. No wheelchair ever appeared.

As the sailors massed in ranks around the afterdeck sang “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” Winston Churchill kept wiping his eyes. The old hymns, roared by a thousand young male voices in the open air under the long guns, brought prickles to Victor Henry’s spine and tears to his eyes. Yet this exalting service made him uneasy, too.

Here they were, men of the American and the British navies, playing as comrades-in-arms. But it was a phony picture. The English were fighting, the Americans were not. The Prime Minister, with this church parade under the guns, was ingeniously working on the President’s feelings. Here was diamond cut diamond, will against will! Churchill was using everything he could, including Roosevelt’s supposed religious tendency, to move him. If Franklin Roosevelt could come away from this experience without giving a promise to declare war on Germany, or at least to lay down an ultimatum to Japan, he was a hard man; and the weeping old fat politician beside him was playing a damned hard game himself, for which Victor Henry admired him.

The British chaplain, his white and crimson vestments lapping in the wind, his thick gray hair blowing wildly, read the closing Royal Navy prayer: “…Preserve us from the dangers of the sea, and from the violence of the enemy; that we may be a security for such as pass upon the sea upon their lawful occasions… and that we may return in safety to enjoy the blessings of the land, with the fruits of our labors… and to praise and glorify Thy Holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord…”

A few British sailors cautiously moved out of ranks. One, then another, sneaked cameras from their blouses. When nobody stopped them, and the two leaders smiled and waved, a rush began. Cameras appeared by the dozens. The sailors swarmed into a laughing, cheering ring around the two men. Pug Henry, watching this unwonted disorder on a warship with mixed feelings of amusement and outrage, felt a touch on his elbows. It was Lord Burne-Wilke. “Hello there, my dear fellow. A word with you?”

Either the British worried less about fire than the Americans, or they had found a good way to fake wood panels. Burne-Wilke’s cabin had the dark, warm, comfortable look of a library den. “I say, Henry, what is your position on shipboard drinking? I have a fair bottle of sherry here.”

“I’m for it.’

“Good. You’re dry as a bone in your service, aren’t you? Yet last night the President served us an excellent wine.”

“The President is the source of all Navy regulations, sir, and can tailor them to his desires.”

“Ah? Jolly convenient.” Burne-Wilke lit a cigar, and they both sipped wine. “I suppose you know that this ship crossed the ocean without escort,” the air commodore resumed. “Our first night out of England, we ran into a whole gale. Our destroyers couldn’t maintain speed, so we zigzagged on alone.”

“Sir, I was appalled to hear about it.”

“Really? Rather sporting of the British Prime Minister, don’t you think, to give the Hun a fair shot at him on the open sea? Three thousand miles without air cover or surface escort, straight through the entire submarine fleet?”

“You had your good angels escorting you. That’s all I can say.”

“Oh, well, at any rate here we are. But it might be prudent not to overwork those good angels, what? Don’t you agree? On our way back, every U-boat in the Atlantic will certainly be on battle alert. We shall have to run the gamut.” Burne-Wilke paused, studying the ash on his cigar. “We’re stretched thin for escorts, you know. We’ve rounded up four destroyers. Admiral Pound would be happier with six.”

Victor Henry quickly said, “I’ll talk to Admiral King,”

“You understand that this cannot be a request from us. The Prime Minister would be downright annoyed. He’s hoping we’ll meet the Tirpitz and get into a running gun fight.”

“Let me start on this now, sir.” Pug drank up his sherry, and rose to his feet.

“Oh? Would you?” Burne-Wilke opened the cabin door. “Thanks awfully.”

On the afterdeck, the photographing was still going on. Officers with cameras were now shouldering sailors aside, as the two politicians cheerfully chatted. Behind them stood their glum chiefs of staff and civilian advisers. Hopkins, squinting out at the sunny water, wore a pained expression. The military men were talking together, except for Admiral King, who stood woodenly apart, his long nose pointing seaward, his face congealed in disapproval. Pug walked up to him, saluted, and in the fewest possible words recounted his talk with Burne-Wilke. The lines along King’s lean jaws deepened. He nodded twice and strolled away, without a word. He did not go anywhere. It was just a gesture of dismissal and a convincing one.

Amid much wining and dining, the conference went on for two more days. One night Churchill took the floor in the Augusta wardroom after dinner, and delivered a rolling, rich, apocalyptic word picture of how the war would go. Blockade, ever-growing air bombardment, and subversion would in time weaken the grip of Nazi claws on Europe. Russia and England would “close a ring” and slowly, inexorably tighten it. If the United States became a full-fledged ally, it would all go much faster, of course. No big invasion or long land campaign would be needed in the west. Landings of a few armored columns in the occupied countries would bring mass uprisings. Hitler’s black empire would suddenly collapse in rubble, blood, and flame. Franklin Roosevelt listened with bright-eyed smiling attention, saying nothing, and applauding with the rest.

On the last day of the conference, just before lunch, Admiral King sent for Pug. He found the admiral in undershirt and trousers in his cabin, drying face and ears with a towel. “Task Unit 26 point 3 point 1, consisting of two destroyers, the Mayrant and the Rhind, has been formed,” King said without a greeting. “It will escort the Prince of Wales to Iceland. You will embark on the Prince of Wales as liaison officer, disembark in Iceland, and return with our task unit.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“You’ll have no written orders. But we’re not in the kind of spot we were in last time. In confidence, we’ll soon be convoying all ships to Iceland. Maybe by next week. Hell our own marines are occupying the place now. The President’s even sending a young officer along as a naval aide to Churchill while he tours our Iceland base. Ensign Franklin D. Roosevelt, Junior.” King spoke the name with an expressionless face.

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, Henry, how are you at languages?”

“It’s a long time since I tried a new one, Admiral.”

“Well, a military supply mission will go to the Soviet Union in September. If Russia’s still in the war by then, that is. Mr. Hopkins has brought up your name. He appears impressed, and the President too, by your expertise in landing craft and so forth. Now your service record has been checked, and it seems you claim a ‘poor to fair’ knowledge of Russian. Hey? How is that? That’s very unusual.”

“Admiral, I put that down when I entered the Academy in 1911. It was true then. I don’t remember ten words now.” Henry explained the circumstances that had given him Russian-speaking chums in his Sonoma County boyhood.

“I see. Well, it’s there on the record. Upon returning from Iceland you will be detached from War Plans to prepare yourself, with an intensive refresher course in Russian, for a possible trip to the Soviet Union on special detached duty. You’ll have interpreters. But with even a smattering, your intelligence value will be greater.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

King put on his uniform jacket, stared at Victor Henry, and for the first time that Henry could recall, favored him with a smile. “On the record, incidentally I see you used to be a fair gunnery officer, too.”

“My one hope is to get back to that.”

“Have you heard that extension of the draft passed the House of Representatives an hour ago?”

“It did? Thank God.”

“By one vote.”

“What? One vote, sir?”

“One vote.”

“Whew! That’s not going to encourage the British, Admiral.”

“No, nor the President, but it’s how the American people feel right now. It may be suicidal, but there it is. Our job is to keep going anyway. Incidentally, Henry, I’ll soon be needing an operations officer on my staff. After your Russian errand, if it comes off, that’s an assignment you may get.”

Victor Henry kept his face rigid. “It would be an honor, Admiral.”

“I thought you might like it. I believe you’ll measure up,” King said, with an awkward trace of warmth.

Compared to a battleship command, it was a crushing prospect. Desperation forced Pug to say, “President Roosevelt may have other ideas. I just never know.”

“I mentioned this to the President. He said it sounded like the perfect spot for you.”

A verse from Psalms knifed into Pug’s mind: “Put not your trust in princes,”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

Within the hour, as Victor Henry was packing, a summons came from the President. The interview this time took but a minute or two. Roosevelt appeared fatigued and preoccupied, making quick pencilled notes on one document after another at the baize-covered table. Harry Hopkins was in the room, and beside him a tall handsome ensign, with a strong resemblance to the Assistant Secretary who in 1917 had bounded around the destroyer Davey.

The President introduced Franklin D. Roosevelt, Junior, to Pug, saying “You gentlemen will be travelling together. You should know each other.” As the ensign shook hands, the President gave Captain Henry a poignant man-to-man glance, as much as to say — “Keep an eye on him, and talk to him.”

This human touch half dissolved Victor Henry’s hard knot of mistrust for the President. Perhaps Roosevelt had turned off King with a pleasantry and still meant to give him the battle ship. The President’s bland manner in dismissing him was, as always, unfathomable.

To brass band anthems and booming gun salutes, in a brisk breeze smelling of green hills and gunpowder, the Prince of Wales left Argentia Bay. The great conference was over.

In the wardroom of the Prince of Wales, Victor Henry could sense the subtle gloom hanging over the ship. What the conference had accomplished to increase help for England remained undisclosed; and in itself this clearly struck the battleship’s officers as a bad sign. These men, veterans of two combat years, of air attacks and gun fights, had a subdued dismal air, despite the grandeur of their ship and the stuffy luxury of their wardroom. The predicament of England seemed soaked in their bones. They could not believe that Winston Churchill had risked the best ship in their strained navy, and his own life, only to return empty-handed. That wasn’t Winnie’s style. But vague hope, rather than real confidence, was the note in their conversation. Sitting in the lounge over a glass of port after dinner, Pug felt quite out of things, despite their politeness to him. It struck him that his presence embarrassed them. He went to bed early. Next day he toured the Prince of Wales from flying bridge to engine rooms, noting contrasts with American ships, above all the slovenly, overburdened, tense crew, so different from the scrubbed happy-go-lucky Augusta sailors.

Major-General Tillet came up to him after dinner that evening, and laid a lean hand on his shoulder. “Like to have a look at the submarine sighting chart, Henry? The Prime Minister thought you might. Quite a reception committee gathering out there.”

Pug had seen the forbidding old military historian here and there at the conference. Two nights ago, at a wardroom party for the American visitors, some junior British officers had started what they called a “rag,” marching in dressed in kilts or colored towels, bizarre wigs, and not much else; skirling bagpipes, setting off firecrackers, and goose-stepping over chairs and tables. After a while Major-General Tillet had stood up unsmiling — Pug thought, to put a stop to the horseplay — and had broken into a long, wild jig on a table, as the bagpipers marched around him and the whole mess applauded. Now he was as stiff as ever.

Red secrecy warnings blazed on the steel door that Tillet opened. Dressed in a one-piece garment like a mechanic’s coveralls, stooped and heavy-eyed, Churchill pondered a map of the Russian front all across one bulkhead. Opposite hung a chart of the Atlantic. Young officers worked over dispatches at a table in the middle of the room, in air thick with tobacco smoke.

“There,” said the Prime Minister to Tillet and Pug Henry, gesturing at the map of the Soviet Union with his cigar, “there is an awful unfolding picture.”

The crimson line of the front east of Smolensk showed two fresh bulges toward Moscow. Churchill coughed, and glanced at Henry. “Your President warned Stalin. I warned him even more explicitly, basing myself on very exact intelligence. Surely no government ever had less excuse to be surprised. In an evil hour, the heroic, unfortunate Russian people were led by a pack of outwitted bungling scoundrels.” The Prime Minister turned and walked to the other bulkhead, with the tottering step Victor Henry had observed in his London office. At Argentia Churchill had appeared strong, ruddy, springy, and altogether ten years younger. Now his cheeks were ashy, with red patches.

“Hullo. Don’t we have a development here?”

Little black coffin-shaped markers dotted the wide blue spaces, and an officer was putting up several more, in a cluster close to the battleship’s projected course. Farther on stood large clusters of red pins, with a few blue pins.

“This new U-boat group was sighted by an American patrol plane at twilight, sir,” said the officer.

“Ah, yes. So Admiral Pound advised me. I suppose we are evading?”

“We have altered course to north, sir.”

“Convoy H-67 is almost home, I see.”

“We will be pulling those pins tonight, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“That will be happy news.” Churchill harshly coughed, puffing at his cigar, and said to Pug Henry, “Well. We may have some sport for you yet. It won’t be as lively as a bomber ride over Berlin. Eh? Did you enjoy that, Captain?”

“It was a rare privilege, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“Any time. Any time at all.”

“Too much honor, sir. Once was plenty.”

Churchill uttered a hoarse chuckle. “I daresay. What is the film tonight, General Tillet?”

“Prime Minister, I believe it is Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, in Saps at Sea.”

“Saps at Sea, eh? Not inappropriate! The Surgeon-General has ordered me to remain in bed. He has also ordered me not to smoke. I shall attend Saps at Sea, and bring my cigars.”

Pug Henry’s enjoyment of Saps at Sea was shadowed by an awareness that at any moment the battle ship might run into a U-boat pack. Germany skippers were adept at sneaking past destroyer screens. But the film spun to the end uninterrupted. “A gay but inconsequent entertainment,” the Prime Minister remarked in a heavy, rheumy voice, as he plodded out.

Clement Attlee’s broadcast the next day packed the wardroom. Every officer not on watch, and all staff officers and war planners, gathered in the wardroom around one singularly ancient, crack-voiced radio. The battleship, plowing through a wild storm, rolled and pitched with slow long groans. For the American guest, it was a bad half hour. He saw perplexed looks, lengthening faces, and headshakes, as Attlee read off the “Atlantic Charter.” The high-flown language bespoke not a shred of increased American commitment. Abuse of Nazi tyranny, praise of “four freedoms,” dedication to a future of world peace and brotherhood, yes; more combat help for the British, flat zero. Some sentences about the free trade and independence for all peoples meant the end of the British Empire, if they meant anything.

Franklin Roosevelt was indeed a tough customer, thought Captain Henry, not especially surprised.

“Umph!” grunted Major-General Tillet in the silence after the radio was shut off. “I’d venture there was more to it than that. How about it Henry?”

All eyes turned on the American.

Pug saw no virtue in equivocating. “No, sir, I’d guess that was it.”

“Your President has now pledged in a joint communiqué to destroy Nazi tyranny,” Tillet said. “Doesn’t that mean you’re coming in, one way or another?”

“It means lend-Lease,” Pug said.

Questions shot at him from all sides.

“You’re not going to stand with us against Japan?”

“Not now.”

“But isn’t the Pacific your fight, pure and simple?”

“The President won’t give a warning to Japan. He can’t, without Congress behind him.”

“What’s the matter with your Congress?”

“That’s a good question, but day before yesterday, it came within one vote of practically dissolving the United States Army.”

“Don’t the congressmen know what’s happening in the world?”

“They vote their political hunches to protect their political hides.”

“Then what’s the matter with your people?”

“Our people are about where yours were at the time of the Munich pact.”

That caused a silence.

Tillet said, “We’re paying the price.”

“We’ll have to pay the price.”

“We had Chamberlain then for a leader, sir,” said a fresh-faced lieutenant. “You have Roosevelt.”

“The American people don’t want to fight Hitler, gentlemen,” said Pug. “It’s that simple, and Roosevelt can’t help that. They don’t want to fight anybody. Life is pleasant. The war’s a ball game they can watch. You’re the home team, because you talk our language. Hence Lend-Lease, and this Atlantic Charter. Lend-Lease is no sweat, it just means more jobs and money for everybody.”

An unusually steep roll brought a crash of crockery in the galley. The crossfire stopped. Victor Henry went to his cabin. Before disembarking in Iceland, he did not talk much more to the British officers.

Chapter 48

The Atlantic Charter, like the elephant, resembled a tree, a snake, a wall, or a rope, depending on where the blind took hold of it.

Axis propaganda jeered at its gassy rhetoric about freedom, cited enslaved India and Malaya, noted the cowardice of the degenerate Americans in evading any combat commitment, and concluded that it was all a big empty bluff, tricked out with the usual pious Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, to cover impotent hatred of the triumphant New World Order, which a thousand Atlantic Charters could no longer roll back.

In the United States, a howl went up that Roosevelt had secretly committed the country to go to war on England’s side. A cheer went up — not nearly so loud — for the most glorious document in man’s struggle toward the light since the Magna Carta.

British newspapers implied that much more than this fine charter had been wrought at Argentia Bay; but for the moment the rest had to be hushed up.

The Russians hailed the meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill on a battleship at sea as a triumph for all peace-loving peoples everywhere; hinting that, as was well known, a second front in Europe now was crucial, and the Atlantic Charter, failing to mention a plan for this, was somewhat disappointing.

No reaction was stronger or blinder than the one that swept the immured Jews in Minsk.

The Germans had confiscated their radios. The penalty for possessing one was death. A sixteen-year-old boy had heard the Russian broadcast imperfectly on a tiny receiving set rigged in his attic. He had joyously spread the story that Roosevelt had met Churchill, and that the United States was declaring war on Germany! The effect on the ghetto of this lie was so wonderful, so life-giving, that one may wonder whether falsehood may not sometimes be a necessary anodyne for souls in torment.

The spirit of the Minsk Jews had recently been shattered. They had resigned themselves, with the coming of the Germans, to be herded into a few square blocks, to be forced to register for work, to be arrested and maltreated, to endure hooligan raids and perhaps even shootings. This was a pogrom time. German pogroms could be expected to be very bad. But Jewry survived pogroms.

Then one night gray trucks had swarmed into the ghetto, and squads of Germans in unfamiliar dark uniforms had cleared out the dwellers along two main streets, house by house, loading the people into the vans — for resettlement, they announced. Some of the Germans were brutal, some polite, as they pushed and urged the people into the trucks. In other streets, behind barred doors, other Jews wondered and shivered. What had happened afterward according to reports brought by partisans who haunted the woods — was so hideous and unbelievable that the Minsk Jews were still trying numbly to come to grips with it. The gray vans had driven five miles away, to the woods outside a village. There in a moonlit ravine the Germans had ordered the people out of the trucks, had lined them up in groups, and had shot every last one — including the babies and the old people — and then had thrown them in a big hole already dug, and shovelled them over with sand.

Peasants who had dug the huge sandy hole had seen this horror with their own eyes; so the partisan report went. The Germans had rounded them up for the job, then had ordered them to go home, and not to linger or to talk about the excavation, on pain of being shot. A few had sneaked back through the trees, all the same, to see what the Germans were up to; and they had recounted to the partisans the massacre of the “Zhids” from the gray trucks.

To the Jews trapped in Minsk three hundred miles behind the German armies approaching Moscow this story was an unimaginable shock. The Germans were already shooting people for small offenses after swift crude trials. Bloated smelly bodies of such victims, and of captured partisans, hung in the public squares. Such things could be expected in wartime. But the sudden murder, evidently at random, of all the people who lived in two long streets — children, women, old people, everybody — exceeded their deepest fears of what even Germans could do. Either the story was a hysterical exaggeration, or if it were true — and the reports as they trickled in began to seem overwhelming — then the Germans were far worse than the most frightful rumors had ever pictured them.

Yet next day Minsk looked much the same, the sunflowers bloomed, the sun shone in a blue sky. Some buildings were ruined by bombs or fire, but most stood as before; German soldiers cruised the streets, already a common sight in their gray trucks and tanks marked with swastikas. The soldiers themselves looked entirely ordinary and human, lounging with their guns and squinting in the sunshine. Some even made jokes with passersby. Russians still walked everywhere, old neighbors of the Jews, and the same bells rang at the same hours. These streets were the scenes of the Jews’ lives, as familiar as faces at home. Only now all the houses in two streets stood quiet and empty.

Into this stunned moment, the news broke that Roosevelt and Churchill had met at sea and that America was entering the war. The word flew from house to house. People cried, laughed, caught up their children and danced them on their shoulders, kissed each other, and found wine or vodka to drink to President Roosevelt. One fact was graven in Europe’s memory: last time, the coming of the Americans had won the war. Happy arguments broke out. Would it take three months? Six months? However long it might take, there would be no more insane occurrences like the emptying of those two streets. The Germans would not dare now! The Germans were bad when they were on top, but how humble they could be when things turned around! They were all cowards. Now they would probably start being nice to the Jews, to avoid punishment by the Americans.

Berel Jastrow did not try to contradict the rumor, though he knew that it was untrue. At the bakery, he still kept his shortwave radio concealed. His papers allowed him to pass the ghetto boundaries, for the Germans needed bread and the Minsk bakers were fighting hundreds of miles away. At the underground meeting of Jewish leaders that night, in the boiler room of the hospital, Berel did report the accurate broadcast he had heard from Sweden. But he was a foreigner, and he was telling the committee what it did not want to hear. Somebody cut him short with the observation that he had probably been listening to the German-controlled Norwegian radio; and the excited planning continued for the armed uprising that would take place in Minsk, in cooperation with the partisans, as soon as the Americans landed in France.

A few days later Jastrow and his son, with the wife and baby, disappeared. They went silently in the night, asking nobody in the ghetto for permission or help, or for passwords to contact the partisans in the woods. The Jewish Board had some trouble with the Gestapo about the vanished Polish baker. But they pleaded that the Jastrows were refugees, for whom they couldn’t be responsible. The Germans had themselves issued Jastrow his special papers.

The three Polish Jews with their infant did not come back to Minsk. The ghetto people assumed they had been shot right away by the Wehrmacht forest patrols, as most Jews were who tried to slip from the town without partisan guidance. It was the German custom to throw fresh bodies from the forest into Jubilee Square, as a warning to the other Jews. But nobody saw, in these gruesome, stiff piles of dead unburied friends, the bodies of the Jastrows. That was the one reason for believing the Jastrows might still be alive somewhere.

In Rome the Germans were conducting themselves very well, at least within the purview of Natalie and her uncle. A certain arrogance toward the Italians had perhaps intensified with all the conquests, but that had always been the German demeanor. Ghastly rumors of Nazi treatment of Jews had been flying around Europe for years. To these were now added stories of the vilest atrocities against the captured hordes of Slav soldiers. Yet when Aaron Jastrow and his heavily pregnant niece dined in the hotel or some fine Roman restaurant, there would very likely be Germans at table on either side of them. Enough wine might spark a bit of Teutonic boisterousness; but to ascribe a capacity for mass murder to these well-dressed, carefully-mannered, good-looking people — so very much like Americans in some ways — passed all belief.

Jastrow at last was eager to go home. He had finished the first draft of his book on Constantine; he yearned to show it to his publisher, and then finish up the revisions in the Harvard Library’s Byzantine section. The Vatican Library was better, of course, and he had made charming friends there. But as shortages multiplied, Rome was getting drearier. Hitler’s triumphs in the Soviet Union were sending earthquake tremors through Italy and sinking the Italians in gloom. There was no real gladness even in the Fascist press, but rather some traces of alarm at these giant strides of the Führer over the last unsubdued reaches of Europe.

At any price, even in the best restaurants, Roman food was bad now, and getting worse. The heavy chalky bread was quite inedible; the new brown spaghetti tasted like mud; each month the cheese grew more rubbery; the cooking and salad oils left a loathsome aftertaste; and a bottle of decent table wine was hard to come by. Natalie obtained proper milk occasionally at the embassy; Italian expectant mothers had to drink the same blue slimy fluid that sad shrugging waiters served with the fake coffee.

So Dr. Jastrow was ready to go; but he was not scared. He had read so much history that the events of the hour seemed a banal repetition of old times. He had delayed and delayed leaving Italy, almost welcoming the difficulties with his papers, because in his heart he had thought the war was going to end soon. Even if the villain with the moustache (as he loved to call Hitler) won, it might not matter so much, providing the Nazis did not march into Italy. And why should they invade a grovelling satellite?

Germany might well be the new Byzantium, he liked to say over wine: a stable well-run tyranny, geared to run a thousand years, just as Hitler boasted. Byzantium had lasted almost that long, waxing and waning through the centuries as rivals grew strong or weak, pushing its borders out and shrinking them back much like Germany; but always hanging on, and often triumphing with its military advantages of tyranny, centrality, and interior lines. A nation’s history was formed by its geography, as another villainous tyrant, Napoleon, had long ago pointed out; and autocracy was the form of government most congenial to Europe anyway. As a Jew, Jastrow of course detested Hitler. But as a philosophical historian, he could place him, and even give him good marks for willpower and political skill. He quite disbelieved the atrocity stories; warmed-over British propaganda, he said, which he still remembered well from the last war.

Natalie, however, was getting scared. Ever since Finland’s entry into the war had stopped the freighter from sailing, she had sought another way out. They were still quite free to go. But now she had to deal with the Italian railroads, airlines, and emigration offices. Altogether, they made a soft fuzzy paralyzing snarl. The thought of confinement far from home, of feeding a newborn infant the rations of pinched Italy, began to alarm her as nothing had before. President Roosevelt was intervening more and more openly in the Atlantic; a sudden declaration of war by Hitler would undoubtedly drag along Mussolini, and she and her uncle would be interned as enemy aliens!

The worst stumbling block at this stage was a thing called an exit permit. Formerly it had given her no trouble at all. The yellow card stamped in purple cost a few lire, and could be purchased as soon as one had ship, train, or air tickets to show. But now an application caused hemming, hawing, and mighty searchings of bureaucratic hearts. Once, after several disappointments, Natalie did get hold of two plane seats to Lisbon, and rushed them to the emigration office. An official took the tickets and the passports from her, telling her to come back in four days.

On her return, the same stout and amiable official, breathing clouds of garlic, handed the passports back to her with a sigh. The military had requisitioned the two places on the airplane. The exit permits were therefore not granted he said, but in due course the fare money would be refunded.

The very next day she heard the first exultant BBC broadcast about the meeting in Newfoundland. The entry of the United States into the war sounded like an accomplished fact. Out of sheer despair she at once concocted a reckless scheme. She would play the card most likely to touch the Italian heart: her pregnancy. She was really having intermittent bleeding. The Americans she knew were sarcastic and skeptical about Roman doctors. They had told her of an obstetrician in Zurich, one Dr. Wundt, the best man outside the Nazi reach in Europe. She decided to request permission from Swiss authorities for a short medical visit: two weeks, ten days, whatever she could get. Pleading her bad condition, she would take her uncle along and so get exit permits. Once in Switzerland, they would by hook or by crook stay there until they obtained passage to the United States. Aaron Jastrow had a publisher in Zurich, and she knew Bunky Thurston had been transferred there from Lisbon. Once she thought of it, the idea seemed brilliant.

To her delight, Aaron after some argument agreed to play his part. He would leave his travelling library, his luggage, and all his work papers at the hotel; everything except the typed book itself which he would carry in one small valise with his clothing. If challenged, he would say he intended to work on the inky interlineated pages during the brief Zurich visit. If the Italians did not want Jastrow to leave for good — something Natalie now half-suspected — such a casual departure might deceive them. The Atlantic Charter broadcast had given Jastrow, too, a flicker of concern; that was why he consented.

The dodge worked like a charm. Natalie booked passage to Zurich and got the exit permits. A week later she and Dr. Jastrow flew to Switzerland. Everything was in order, except that he did not have formal permission from the Swiss, as she did to stay for ten days. The document issued to him simply stated that he was accompanying an invalid for her safety en route. When Natalie telephoned Bunky Thurston in Zurich about this, he said they had better leave it on that basis, and not push their luck further. He could take care of Aaron once they arrived.

The Zurich terminal was startling with its bustle, its clean glitter, its open shops crammed with splendid clothing, watches, porcelain, and jewelry, its heaped boxes of chocolates, exquisite pastries, and fresh fruit. Natalie ate a big yellow pear as she walked to Thurston’s car, uttering little moans of delight.

“Ah, this pear. This pear! My God,” she said, “what a filthy thing Fascism is. What a foul idiocy war is! Europe’s a rich continent. Why do the bloody fools lay it waste time after time? The Swiss are the only smart Europeans.”

“Yes, the Swiss are smart,” Thurston sighed, stroking the enormous moustache, which was as sleek and perfect as ever. The rest of his face had paled and aged as though he were ill. “How’s your submariner?”

“Who knows? Dashing around the Pacific. Have you ever witnessed a crazier wedding?” Natalie turned to Jastrow, her eyes all at once gone from dulled suffering to the old bright puckish gleam. “Bunky signed the marriage document. Do you like Zurich better than Lisbon, Bunky?”

“I don’t like to think of eighty million Germans seething just beyond the Alps. But at least they’re nice high Alps. Here we are, the red Citroen. The tragic refugee thing goes on here too, Natalie, but less visibly, less acutely. In Lisbon it was just too horrible.”

Aaron Jastrow said as they drove down the highway, “Will they send our passports to you at the consulate? “

“Maybe you’ll just pick them up when you go back.”

“But we’re not going back, darling,” Natalie said. “Aaron, give me your handkerchief, my face is all pear juice. I wish I could bathe in pear juice.”

“It’s my only handkerchief,” Jastrow said.

Thurston pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and passed it to her. “What do you mean, you’re not going back?”

“My uncle and I intend to hop the first train, plane, or goat cart out of here, so long as it heads for the good old USA. I couldn’t tell you that over the telephone, obviously. But it’s the whole point of this trip.”

“Natalie, it won’t work.”

“Why on earth not?”

“Aaron got through Swiss immigration on my parole. I must return him there. He has no transit visa.”

After a silence Dr. Jastrow said from the back seat, in a low sad voice, “I thought it was going too easily.”

“Bunky, wild horses can’t get me back to Rome,” Natalie said cheerfully. “I won’t have my baby there. That’s that. You have to figure out some way to clear Aaron, too. He’s here now. His passport is good as gold. I know you can solve this.”

Thurston ran a careful hand over the moustache as he drove. “Well, you’ve caught me unawares. Give me a little time.”

“I’ve got ten days,” Natalie said.

“There aren’t too many ways to travel out of Zurich now,” said Thurston. “I’ll look into this a bit.”

He left them outside Dr. Herman Wundt’s office, which was in an old four-story house decked with flower-filled window boxes, and took their suitcases off to the hotel. Jastrow dozed in an anteroom while Wundt examined Natalie.

After asking a few questions and noting the answers on a card, the bald freckled doctor, a gnome not as tall at her uncle, with big ears and darting little brown eyes probed, palpated, took specimens, and submitted Natalie to the usual indignities, and a couple of new painful ones with strange implements, all the while smiling and chatting in French. She lay on the table panting and exhausted under a sheet, her face sweating, all her lower body in an ache. The breeze brought a delicious scent of sweet peas from the window boxes.

“Very well, take a little rest.”

She heard him washing his hands. He returned with a notebook and sat beside her.

“You’re as strong as a horse, and you’re carrying that baby perfectly.”

“I had three bleeding episodes.”

“Yes. You mentioned that. When was the last one?”

“Let’s see. A month ago. Maybe a little more.”

“Well, you can wait around a day or so for the result of the smear, and the urine test, and so forth. I’m almost sure they’ll be negative, and Dr. Carona will deliver a fine baby for you. I know him well. He’s the best man in Rome.”

“Dr. Wundt, unless I go back to the States, I’d rather stay and have the baby here. I don’t want to return to Rome.”

“So? Why?”

“Because of the war. If the United States becomes involved, I’ll find myself on enemy soil with a newborn baby.”

“You say your husband is an American naval officer, in the Pacific Ocean?”

“Yes.”

“You’re too far away from him.”

Natalie sadly laughed. “I agree, but that’s done now.”

“What kind of name is that — Henry?”

“Oh, I guess it’s Scotch. Scotch-English.”

“And your maiden name is Jastrow, you said? Is that Scotch-English too?”

“It’s Polish.” After a pause, as the little brown eyes stared at her, she added, “Polish-Jewish.”

“And that gentleman outside, your uncle? Is he Polish-Jewish?”

“He’s a famous American writer.”

“Really? How exciting. Is he a Polish Jew?.

“He was born in Poland.”

“You can get dressed now. Then come into the other room, please.”

Dr. Wundt sat hunched in a swivel chair in his tiny office, smoking a cigar. The smoke wreathed up over wrinkled yellow diplomas on the walls, and a dusty engraving of the wounded lion of Lucerne. He rested the cigar in an ashtray, pressed his fingertips together, and put them to his mouth. The brown-patched old face stared blankly at her.

“Mrs. Henry, in the past few years — I have to be frank with you — pregnancy has been used and abused to death here to solve passport difficulties. The immigration authorities have become very hard. I am an alien myself, and my license can easily be revoked. Do I make myself clear?”

“But I’m having no passport difficulties,” Natalie replied calmly. “None at all. Do you think I can safely travel back to the United States? That’s all I want to know.”

The doctor hunched his shoulders, pursed his lips, and cocked his head like a bright dog, his eyes never leaving her. “By what means of transportation?”

“Airplane, I suppose.”

“What was Dr. Carona’s opinion?”

“I didn’t ask him. Despite what you say, I don’t have much confidence in him. That’s why I want to stay here if I can’t fly home.”

The old doctor’s eyes sparked and he spread his hands. “And that’s precisely where I can’t help you. The authorities will demand from me a written certificate that you’re unable to travel. Otherwise they won’t extend your stay. You’re quite able to fly back to Rome. About flying back to the United States” — he cocked his head again — “that is bound to be a rough long journey.”

Natalie kept an unruffled manner. “You mean I might lose the baby?”

“Not necessarily, but an expectant mother with a first baby should avoid such a strain. Your pregnancy history already is not one hundred percent.”

“Then why make me go back to Rome? The milk and the food are abominable. I don’t like the doctor there. He mishandled my bleeding.”

With a cold edge in his voice, the little doctor said, “Mrs. Henry, a flight to Rome is no problem for you, nothing to justify an extension of your stay. I’m very sorry. The authorities will ask me about your health, not about Roman milk or Dr. Carona.” He flipped open an appointment book and peered into it. “I will see you tomorrow at a quarter past five, and we will discuss your tests.”

At dinner with Thurston and her uncle that night, Natalie was quite blithe. The buoyant excitement of being out of Rome, and in a city at peace, overbore Wundt’s sourness; and she was cheered by the examination results. She was “strong as a horse,” the infant was kicking lustily inside her, and they had escaped from Fascist Italy. The rest would work out, she thought, especially since Thurston seemed in an optimistic mood. She decided not to quiz him, but let him talk when he was ready.

Meantime her common ground with him was Leslie Slote. She told droll anecdotes of her wretched Paris flat: the tiny stairwell elevator in which Slote got stuck and slept all one night, her Algerian landlord’s efforts to keep her from cooking, the one-eyed homosexual sculptor on the floor above who pestered Slote to pose for him. Aaron Jastrow had not heard these yarns of young love on the Left Bank. What with the richly satisfying dinner, the fine wine, and the view from the open-air terrace restaurant of Zurich ablaze with lights, his spirits also rose. He accepted a cigar from Thurston, though he had a bad cough.

“My lord. Havana!” Dr. Jastrow rolled the smoke on his tongue. “This takes me back ten years to the commons room. How gracious and easy and pleasant life seemed! Yet all the time the villain with the moustache was piling up his tanks and his cannon. Ah me. You’re very merry, Natalie.”

“I know. The wine, no doubt, and the lights. The lights! Bunky, electric light is the strongest enchantment there is. Live in a blackout for a few months and you’ll see! You know what Zurich reminds me of? Luna Park in Coney Island, when I was a little girl. You walked in a blaze of lights, millions and millions of yellow bulbs. The lights were more exciting than the rides and games. Switzerland’s amazing, isn’t it? A little dry diving bell of freedom in an ocean of horror. What an experience! I’ll never forget this.”

“You can understand why the Swiss have to be very, very careful,” Thurston said. “Otherwise they’d be swamped with refugees.”

Natalie and her uncle sobered at that last word, listening for what he would say next.

The consul smoothed his moustache with both palms. “Don’t forget there are more than four million Jews caught in Hitler’s Europe. And in all of Switzerland there are only four million people. So the Swiss have become almost as strict about Jews as our own State Department, but with infinitely more reason. They’ve got sixteen thousand square miles of land, much of it bare rock and snow. We’ve got three and a half million square miles. Compare population densities, and we’re a vast empty wilderness. We’re supposed to be the land of the free, the haven of outcasts. The Swiss make no such claim. Who should be taking in the Jews? Yet they are doing it, but carefully, and within limits. Moreover the Swiss depend on the Germans for fuel, for iron, for all trade, in and out. They’re in a closed ring. They’re free only as long as it suits the Nazis. I can’t take a high moral tone with the Swiss authorities about you. As an American official, I’m in a hell of a lousy position for moral tone.”

Jastrow said, “One can see that.”

“Nothing’s been decided in your case, you understand,” the consul said. “I’ve just been making, inquiries. A favorable solution is possible. Natalie, could you endure a long train trip?”

“I’m not sure. Why?”

“The only airline operating from Zurich to Lisbon is Lufthansa.”

Natalie felt a pang of alarm, but her tone was matter-of-fact. “I see. What about that Spanish flight?”

“You were misinformed. It shut down back in May. Lufthansa flies once a week, starting from Berlin and making every stop in between — Marseilles, Barcelona, Madrid. It’s a rotten flight. I’ve taken it going the other way. It’s usually crowded with Axis hotshots. Do you want to separate from your uncle and try Lufthansa? Your passport doesn’t say you’re Jewish. You’re Mrs. Byron Henry. Even the Germans have some tenderness for pregnant women. But, of course, for twenty hours or so you’d be in Nazi hands.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Train via Lyons, Nîmes, and Perpignan, sliding down the French coast, crossing the Pyrenees to Barcelona, and then, heaven help you, clear across Spain and Portugal to Lisbon. Mountains, tunnels, awful roadbeds, and God knows how many breakdowns, delays, and changes, with a long stretch through Vichy France. Maybe three, maybe six days en route.”

Natalie said, “I don’t think I should risk that,”

“I wouldn’t mind trying Lufthansa,” said Jastrow in a far-off voice, rolling the cigar in his fingers. “I still don’t believe, I truly don’t, that the Germans would molest me,”

Thurston shook his head. “Dr. Jastrow, she’s the wife of a Gentile naval officer. I think she’d be all right. Don’t you go on Lufthansa!”

“What I have to decide, then,” Natalie said, “is whether I chance Lufthansa alone, or take the train with Aaron.”

“You don’t have to decide anything yet. I’m telling you some of the things to think about.”

Natalie and her uncle filled the next day looking in shop windows, buying clothes, eating cream cakes, drinking real coffee, riding around in cabs, and luxuriating in the rich freedom of Switzerland, only a few hours by air from brown melancholy Rome. Toward evening she saw Dr. Wundt again. With a sad shrug, he told her that all her tests were negative.

“That’s all right. I may be able to stay, anyway,” she said. “My consul’s looking into it.”

“Ah, so?” the little doctor’s face brightened. “Perfect! Nothing would please me more. Let me book your lying-in right away, Mrs. Henry. The hospitals are crowded.”

“I’ll let you know in a day or two.”

“Excellent.”

In the morning she found a white hotel envelope slipped under the door: Hi. Things are cooking. Meet me at the lake front, both of you, four o’clock, at Zurich Pleasure Boats. Bunky.

When they arrived at the dock, the consul had already hired an open boat with an outboard motor, and was sitting in it, waiting. Without a word he helped them in, started the engine, and went puttering off from the shore. About a mile out he killed the motor, and they could hear a German waltz thumping brassily over the blue water from the band of an approaching excursion steamer.

“I’ve got quite a report for you,” Thurston said, and Natalie’s heart leaped at his happy grin. “I thought we’d better be by ourselves while we talk it out.”

“Is it all arranged?” Jastrow said, with an eagerness that struck his niece as childish.

Thurston smoothed a palm over his moustache. “Well, we’re not in bad shape.” The consul’s eyes twinkled at Natalie. “Say, I’ve been on the telephone and teletype to Rome. Your Byron outdid his Lisbon feat, didn’t he? Talking to President Roosevelt about your uncle’s passport! What sheer nerve! Sight unseen, nobody in Rome likes him.”

“I can imagine.”

“Yes, but your uncle’s file carries a big ‘presidential’ flag on it now, and that’s just fine. Now, Natalie, you’re set. I’ve put you on the waiting list at Lufthansa. The next two flights are booked, but you’ve got a reservation on the third. Immigration will extend your stay till then.”

“But by then I’ll be in my eighth month-”

Holding up a hand, Thurston said, “Lufthansa is sure you’ll get out sooner. Maybe next week. There are always cancellations, and you’re high on the list, because of your pregnancy.”

“What about Aaron?”

“Well, that’s a different story.”

“She’s the important one,” Jastrow said dramatically, “and what happens to me couldn’t matter less. I’ve lived my life.”

“Hold on, hold on.” Thurston smiled. “Good lord, Dr. Jastrow! Everything’s all right. You just can’t stay on in Switzerland with her. That’s out of the question. But you’re set, too. Rome’s in a big boil about you now. The ambassador is outraged. He says that if he has to, he’ll appoint you to his staff and send you home on a diplomatic priority. You’re returning to Rome, but he’ll assume responsibility for dealing with the Italians. We have a lot of Italian bigwigs in the States, Dr. Jastrow, and I promise you there will be no more trouble with your exit permit.”

“You do think that’s better for me than taking the train to Lisbon?” Jastrow’s question was rhetorical. He sounded pleased and relieved. “I’m quite willing to attempt that.”

“Great heavens, Dr. Jastrow. I wouldn’t do that myself. It’s a gruelling schedule, and I’m not even sure the connections are still available. But the main objection is, you’d be leaving Switzerland illegally. You mustn’t think of that. At all costs, now that you’re legal, stay legal.”

Jastrow turned to his niece. “Well, my dear! This sounds like a parting of the ways.”

Natalie did not reply. Flying in a German airliner, now that it was upon her, loomed as an ugly prospect. Also, she was nauseous from the rocking of the boat in the wash of the excursion steamer, which was passing close by with passengers idly looking down at them, and the bank blasting out “The Blue Danube.”

With a keen glance at her, Thurston said, “I know you’re set against returning to Rome, Natalie. But if you reconsider that, the ambassador will make the identical arrangements for you that he’s working on for your uncle. That’s what I’d recommend to you, myself.”

“Well, it all takes some mulling over, doesn’t it?” Natalie said. “Can we go back? I’m tired.”

“Of course.” Thurston at once yanked the cord on the flywheel, and the motor started up in a cloud of blue fumes.

“We’re so grateful to you,” Jastrow exclaimed over the noise. “You’ve done wonders.”

“That ‘presidential’ tag is a help,” Thurston said, steering across the spreading wake of the steamer, in jolts and bumps that were almost in time with “The Blue Danube.”

When Natalie came down to breakfast, her uncle was sitting at a window table of the restaurant in strong sunlight, sipping coffee.

“Hello there, lazybones,” he said. “I’ve been up for hours. I hope you’re hungry. They have the most exquisite Polish ham this morning. How would they get Polish ham? I suppose the Germans stole it, and they bought it for gold. It’s the best in the world.”

Natalie ordered coffee and a roll.

Jastrow bubbled on. “You’re not hungry? I was famished. Strange, isn’t it, how far one can come in a lifetime! When I lived in Medzice as a boy, I literally would have let myself be burned alive or shot rather than swallow a piece of ham. Those old taboos deprived us of such simple available pleasures.” He looked at his niece, who sat pallid, tense, and glum, with hands folded on her bulky stomach.

“You know, one of the prettiest sights on earth is a bowl full of fresh butter in morning sunshine. Look at that butter! Fragile and sweet as flowers. Be sure to try it. And this coffee is so very good! Natalie, my dear, I’ve slept on it, and I’ve quite made up my mind about what happens next.”

“Have you? That’s good. So have I.”

He said, “I’m going back to Rome. I would try Lufthansa, dear, I’m not afraid of the bogeyman. But I know I might clog your escape. That comes first. You absolutely must go your own way now. That’s my decision, and I’m afraid I’m going to be adamant about it. My dear, what are you staring at? Do I have egg on my chin?”

“No, but that’s precisely what I intended to tell you I would do.”

“Is it?” His face lit up in a gentle smile. “Thank heavens. I thought you’d put up a heroic argument for returning with me. No, it’s absurd for you to drag yourself back. As for me, I trust the ambassador, and anyway there’s no sense thrashing against one’s fate. Often fate knows best. I have a place on the afternoon plane to Rome. Going back seems to be as easy as sliding down a greased slope. Only the other direction is hard.”

Natalie sipped her coffee. Was this a game to cajole from her an offer to go back to Rome? She was, after long experience, wary of her uncle’s selfishness, sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose it makes sense, if you want to leave via Rome, to get there and line it up, the sooner the better. Are you sure you can manage?”

“If the ambassador himself is intervening, how can I muck it up? I have only one request. Will you take the manuscript? Even if I beat you home, I’d rather you guarded the book. I’ll have all the draft notes, you see. There’s two chances of preserving The Arch of Constantine instead of one.”

Now, for the first time, Natalie began to believe her uncle, and to allow herself some warmth toward him. “Well, Aaron, all right. This parting is going to feel very, very strange.”

“Natalie, I’ll be more relieved than you. I bear a burden of guilt about you at least as large as that baby you’ve got there. Someday you’ll know the measure of my gratitude.”

He put his weak, bony little hand on hers. “You’ve earned yourself — as our fathers quaintly put it — a large share in the world to come. If only it existed!”

So Aaron Jastrow went back docilely to Rome. His niece heard nothing for ten days, ten dreary days in which the comforts and rich food of the Swiss rapidly palled. Even an albatross around one’s neck, Natalie began to think, was company of a sort. She was terribly lonely. Bunky Thurston, carrying on a romance with the daughter of a refugee French novelist, had little time for her. The Swiss treated her, as they did all foreigners, with cool paid courtesy, as though the whole country were the grounds of a huge Class A hotel. The sad-eyed Jews in the shops, the streets, the excursion trains and boats, depressed her. A letter came at last, sprinkled with special-delivery stamps and censors’ markings.

The ambassador’s wife had written in an ornate finishing-school hand in green ink, with little circles over the i’s:

On this same morning, Bunky Thurston telephoned. Lufthansa had come across with an early reservation, as a special courtesy to him: one seat to Lisbon, September 17, four days off. No opening existed on Pan Am, he said, but they had put her high on the long Lisbon waiting list, and she would get any early vacancy.

“I’d suggest you go straight to the Lufthansa office on the Bahnhofstrasse, just two blocks down from the hotel, and grab yourself this ticket,” Thurston said. “There are various forms to fill out, which I can’t do for you, otherwise—”

“Wait, Bunky, wait.” Natalie was having trouble following him. She had awakened with a sore throat and a fever of over a hundred; she was groggy from the aspirins and depressed by her uncle’s letter, which had thrown her into a vortex of indecision. “I have a letter from Aaron. Can you spare a moment?”

“Shoot.”

She read him the letter.

“Well! They really got hot, didn’t they? Natalie, I can’t presume to make your decision. I know what Leslie Slote would say. Byron too.”

“I know. Play it safe, go straight back to Rome.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re wrong about Byron. Byron would tell me to get on Lufthansa.”

“Really? You know him better than I do. Whatever you decide, let me know if there’s any way I can help you,” Thurston said. “I hear Françoise honking. We’re spending a day in the country.”

Of all things, Natalie did not want to go back to Rome. It was the fixed idea she clung to. Heavily, dizzily, she dressed herself and set out to walk to Lufthansa. She kept swallowing, her throat rasping like sandpaper despite the aspirins. All the airline offices were in the same block. Air France, Pan American, and BOAC were closed and shuttered, the paint of their signs fading. The gilt of Lufthansa’s eagle, perched on a wreathed swastika, shone bright in the sun. The swastika made Natalie hesitate outside. Through the window she saw behind a bare counter in a hospital-clean office a tanned blonde girl in an azure and gold uniform, perfectly groomed, laughing with very white teeth. A tanned man in a checked sports jacket was laughing with her. Wall posters showed castles on river bluffs, and girls in Bavarian costume, and fat men drinking beer, and busts of Beethoven and Wagner hovering over a baroque opera house.

They saw her looking in at them, stopped laughing, and stared. Shivering a little from the fever, Natalie entered the Lufthansa office.

“Grüss Gott,” said the girl.

“Good afternoon,” Natalie said hoarsely. “The American consul, Bunker Thurston, has made a reservation for me to fly to Lisbon on the seventeenth.”

“Oh? Are you Mrs. Byron Henry?” The girl switched smoothly to clear English.

“Yes.”

“Fine. Your passport?”

“Do you have the reservation?”

“Yes. Let me have your passport, please.”

The girl held out a manicured, scrubbed hand. Natalie gave her the passport, and the girl handed her a long form printed on coarse green paper. “Fill this out, please.”

Natalie scanned the form. “My goodness. What a lot of questions for an airplane ride.”

“Wartime security regulations, Mrs. Henry. Both sides, please.”

The first page asked for a detailed accounting of the passenger’s travels in the past year. Natalie turned over the form. The first question at the top of the page was

A nerve spasm swept her. She wondered why Thurston had not warned her of the risky snag. Here was a quick decision to make! It was simple enough to write in “Methodist”; they had her mother’s maiden name in the passport, but “Greengold” wasn’t necessarily Jewish. How could they check? Yet, after Aaron’s troubles, what lists might she not be on? How could she be sure that the Königsberg incident had not been recorded? And what had happened to those Jewish neutrals at Königsberg whom the Germans had marched off? As these thoughts raced in her fevered mind, the baby gave a little jolt inside her.

The street outside seemed far away and inviting. Natalie’s head swam and her throat seemed to be choking shut with bits of gravel. She dropped the green form on the counter. The Lufthansa girl was starting to write a ticket, copying data from the passport. Natalie saw her glance in puzzlement at the form, then at the man in the sports jacket, who reached into a pocket and said to Natalie in German, “Do you need a pen?”

“Give me my passport, please,” she said.

The girl’s eyebrows arched. “Is there something wrong?”

Too rattled to think of a deft answer, Natalie blurted, “Americans don’t ask people’s religion for travel purposes, and don’t give their own.”

The man and girl exchanged a knowing look. The man said, if you want to leave that blank, it is up to you. It is quite all right, Mrs. Henry.”

They both smiled slow queer smiles, the smile of the SS officer in Königsberg.

“I’ll take my passport, please.”

“I have started to write your ticket,” said the girl. “It is very hard to get passage to Lisbon, Mrs. Henry.”

“My passport.”

The girl tossed the maroon booklet on the counter and turned her back.

Natalie left. Three doors down, the Swissair office was open. She went in, and booked a flight to Rome the following morning. It was as Aaron Jastrow had said. Going back was as easy as descending a greased slope.

Chapter 49 — The March on Moscow (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

The Geography of Barbarossa

In war, the event is all, and Germany lost the war. This has obscured her victories in the field. Her enemies never won such victories; they overwhelmed her in the end with numbers, and a cataract of machines.

Defeat also, quite naturally casts doubt on the conduct of the war by the loser. Thus we have wide agreement among military historians, regrettably including noted German generals like Guderian, Manstein, and Warlimont, that our plan for the invasion Russia was “vague” or “patched-up” or “without a strategic objective.” What is accomplished by this historical fouling of our own next, except a self-exculpation which should be beneath a soldier’s dignity? It is bad enough that we lost the war, and world empire, by a heartbreakingly slender margin. There is no reason to describe ourselves, in our greatest national effort, as unprofessional dolts into the bargain. Such lickspittle writing, catering to the prejudices of the victors, does honor to nobody and violates history.

I myself was detailed to temporary service on the planning staff of General Marcks, which in the fall and winter of 1940 worked out the original war games of the invasion of the Soviet Union and then drafted an operational proposal. I was therefore in the picture from the start. It was a bold conception, for the factors of space and time, for the numbers of men and quantities of supplies, and for the grandeur of the political stakes. In detail Barbarossa was almost too complicated to be grasped by any one human intelligence. Yet in overall vision, it was a simple plan. In this lay its merit and its strength. It was firmly rooted in geographic, economic, and military realities. Within the limits of risk inherent in all war, it was sound. Let the reader spend a moment of two studying the very simplified map I have prepared. Further on, in my operational narrative, there are more than forty situation maps from the archives. Here is the picture of the Barbarossa assault in a nutshell.

Line A was our main effort, or jump-off line in Poland. It was about five hundred miles long, running north and south from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains. (There was also a holding action our of Rumania, intended to safeguard the Ploesti oil fields.)

Line C was our goal. Almost two thousand miles long, it ran from Archangel, on the White Sea, south to Kazan and then along the Volga to the Caspian Sea. Its farthest objectives were about twelve hundred miles from the starting point.

Line B was as far as we got in December 1941. The line runs from Leningrad on the Gulf of Finland, down through Moscow to the Crimea on the Black Sea, falling just short of Rostov on the Don. It is nearly twelve hundred miles long, and more than six hundred miles from where we started. We were apparently stopped by the Russians, therefore, about halfway. But that is not really so. We were halted at the last moment, in the last ditch.

Chapter 50

A slim dark-haired girl walked out on the stage of the open-air theatre at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base, taking off sunglasses and blinking in the white glare of morning sun. The swish of her ice-cream pink dress, displaying silk-sheathed legs, brought glad whistles from the soldiers and sailors who filled every seat in the theatre and most of the folding chairs before the stage. Directly up front sat the governor of Hawaii, the admirals, the generals, and their ladies, and photographers were still blinking feeble blue flashes at them. It was just before eleven o’clock, somewhat early for staged fun, but this first Happy Hour broadcast was being aimed at the big night-time audiences along the Atlantic seaboard. Beyond the low stage, where the Navy band sat with brass instruments glinting in the sun, several moored battleships were visible towering in a gray double row.

At the microphone, the girl stood smiling till the good-humored commotion subsided. Then she held up a varnished board lettered in black: APPLAUSE. The audience responded with a heavy round of handclapping.

“Thank you, and hello. I’m Mr. Cleveland’s assistant, Madeline Henry.” A lone piercing wolf whistle sliced down from the topmost row, and laughter swept the stands. She wagged a finger. “And you watch yourself up there! I have two brothers sitting out here, a naval aviator and a submariner, and they’re both big and strong.” This brought more laughter and applause.

The audience was in a lively expectant mood. This debut of a major new radio program at the naval base had been stirring the somnolent territory for days. The island’s good white families, a bored lotus-eating little clique, had been vying to entertain Hugh Cleveland, and people had flown in from other islands to Oahu just to attend the parties. The Navy had even postponed a fleet drill simulating an enemy surprise attack, since it conflicted with the broadcast time. Front-page headlines in Honolulu papers about the show quite overshadowed the news of the encirclement of several Russian armies around Kiev.

In an awkward, halting manner that had a certain charm, Madeline described the rules of the new show. Only genuine fighting men could take part in the amateur contest. Every participant would receive a five-hundred dollar defense bond. The performer winning the most applause would get an extra prize: the sponsor would fly in his girl or his parents to visit him for a week. “Mr. Cleveland just hopes there won’t be too many winners with girls in Cape Town or Calcutta,” she said, drawing a laugh. “Well, I guess that’s about it. Now here’s the man you’re all waiting for — the star of the famous Amateur Hour and now of our new Happy Hour — my nice boss, Mr. Hugh Cleveland.” Walking to a seat near the band, she demurely sat down, tucking her skirt close to her legs.

Cheers greeted Cleveland as he walked to the microphone. “Okeybe-bedokey,” he drawled. This phrase, delivered in a cowboy twang, had become a sort of trademark for him, and it brought applause. “Maybe I ought to let Madeline Henry keep going. I’ve got the job, but she’s sure got the lines.” He wagged his eyebrows, and the audience laughed. “I’d better introduce her brothers, you’ll see just how big and strong they are. The naval aviator is Lieutenant Warren Henry of the Enterprise. Where are you, Warren?”

“Oh, Christ,” Warren said. “No. No.” He cringed down in his chair in a middle row.

“Stand up, you fool,” Janice hissed.

Warren got grimly to his feet, a long lean figure in white, and dropped at once, sinking far down.

“Welcome, Warren. And now here’s Byron Henry, of the Devilfish.”

Byron half rose, then sat down with an unpleasant mutter.

“Hi, Byron! Their father’s a battleship man, folks, so the family’s pretty well got the sea covered — the surface, the air, and the deeps. That’s the Henry family, and one reason our country remains strong and safe is that we have plenty of Henry families.” The governor and the admirals joined heartily in the handclapping. Slumped low, Byron made a gagging sound in his throat.

The first Happy Hour delighted the audience, and promised great popular success. Cleveland had been all over the United States; he could make folksy knowledgeable jokes about out-of-the-way places. Working without a script, holding prepared gags in his memory, he created the illusion of an easy, bright, small-town wit. What emerged above all was the reticent homesickness of the soldiers and sailors who performed. Their little acts resembled church social entertainment; the band played patriotic marches; it was an hour of sentimental Americana. Madeline’s awkwardness, as she introduced the acts and took some joshing, fitted the homey atmosphere.

Byron was not amused. He sat through the show in a slouch, his arms folded, looking vacantly at his shoe tips. Once Janice nudged her husband, narrowing her eyes and tilting her head at Byron. Warren pantomimed the bulge of a pregnant woman’s stomach.

After the show the stage was so crowded with the governor, his entourage, and the high brass, all ringing Cleveland, that the Henrys couldn’t mount the steps.

“Wouldn’t you know,” Byron said, Branch Hoban’s right in there.” The handsome skipper of his submarine, standing between two admirals, was shaking Cleveland’s hand, talking to him like an old friend.

“You having trouble with Branch Hoban?” Warren said. “He’s an okay guy, Briny.”

“He’s having trouble with me.”

“Hey, the big strong brothers! Come on up.” Cleveland saw them and beckoned, laughing. “Gad, Madeline’s one girl whose honor is safe, hey? Janice, the governor here has just invited me to lunch, and I’ve just turned him down. Told him you’re expecting me.”

Janice gasped, “No, please, you mustn’t do that.”

“You’re dead right about that,” Madeline laughed.

The governor smiled at her. “It’s all right. Hugh’s coming to Washington Place later. I didn’t realize Senator Lacouture’s daughter was lurking in our midst. We must have you to dinner soon.”

Janice took a bold chance. “Won’t you join us for lunch, Governor? We’re just having steaks and beer on the lawn, nothing much, but we’d love to have you.”

“Say, steaks and beer on the lawn sounds pretty good. Let me find my lady.”

Warren and Branch Hoban were exchanging cheerful insults about their nonexistent paunches, and about how old married they both looked. Byron stood by with blank face and dull eyes. He broke in, “Excuse me, Captain. My sister-in-law’s invited me to lunch. May I go?”

Warren said, “Hey! Don’t tell me junior’s in hack.”

“Oh, Briny and I have had a leetle disagreement. Sure, Briny, you have your lunch with Janice and Warren. Report aboard at fifteen hundred.”

“Aye aye, sir. Thank you, sir.” At Byron’s uncivil tone, Warren slightly shook his head.

Janice rode home in the governor’s limousine; Madeline and Byron went in Warren’s old station wagon. The double lei of pink and yellow flowers around the sister’s neck perfumed the air in the car. She said, gaily, “Well, well, just the three of us. When did this last happen?”

“Listen, Briny,” Warren said, “Branch Hoban’s an old pal of mine. What’s the beef? Maybe I can help.”

“I drew a sketch of an air compressor for my officers’ course book. He didn’t like it. He wants me to do it over. I won’t. I’m in hack until I do.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I think so myself.”

“I mean you’re being ridiculous.”

“Warren, on our way from San Francisco, an air compressor conked out because the oil pump froze. The chief was sick. I stripped down that compressor and got it going.”

“Three cheers, but did you draw a good sketch?”

“It was a lousy sketch, but I fixed that compressor.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“It’s the whole point.”

“No, the whole point is that Branch Hoban decides whether or not to recommend you for your dolphins.”

“I don’t care about getting dolphins.”

“The hell you don’t,” Warren said.

“Look, Warren, I was shanghaied aboard the Devilfish. I had orders to new construction, the Tuna, but my exec and Hoban pulled a fast one at ComSubPac. Moreover, it wasn’t my idea to go to submarine school in the first place. Dad shoved me in, mostly to keep me from marrying Natalie. That’s why she went to Italy. That’s why she’s still stuck there. My life is snafued beyond all measure because I went to sub school. God knows when I’ll see my wife again. And my baby, if I’ve got one. She’s having it on the other side of the world. That’s what’s on my mind, not dolphins.”

“You’re in the Navy now. Do you want to get beached?”

“Why not? The hours are better and the mail is more reliable.”

“Oh, horseshit. Pardon me, Mad.”

“Shucks, this is like old times. Anyhow, you should hear Hugh talk. Yikes!” she squealed, as Warren bounced off the highway onto grass, avoiding a rusty old green Buick cutting in front of him.

Warren said calmly, “These Kanaka drivers give you gray hairs.”

“There’s another fellow who leaves me cold, that Cleveland,” Byron said. “How did you get mixed up with him, Matty?”

“I’m not mixed up with him,” Madeline rapped out. “I work for him.”

Byron gave her an affectionate smile. “I know, sis.”

“He does a good job,” Warren said. “That show goes over.”

Byron said, “What? Why, the whole thing is so phony! He doesn’t make up those jokes, he’s got them memorized.”

“You’re dead right about that,” Madeline laughed.

“It’s obvious. He just puts on a big smooth empty act. He reminds me of Branch Hoban.”

“Branch is no phony,” said Warren. “He has a remarkable record, Briny. And you’d better make up your mind that he’s boss man on that submarine.”

“Sure he’s boss man, and sure he’s got a great record, and sure I’m in hack, but hell will freeze over before he gets another sketch of that air compressor. When I found out that Natalie had gone back to Italy to have her baby, I put in a request for transfer to the Atlantic. Our subs operate in and out of the Med and I might have a chance to see her, and maybe even to get her out. I told him all this. He lectured me about subordinating my personal life to the Navy! Well, I said I was putting the request in anyhow. He forwarded it — he had to forward it — ‘not recommending approval.’”

Warren said, his eyes on the road, “You’ve been aboard that boat three months. The usual tour is two years.”

“The usual ensign doesn’t have a pregnant wife stuck in Italy.”

“Don’t get me wrong, but that’s not the Navy’s fault.”

“I’m not blaming the Navy. I’m telling you why I’m not on fire to please Branch Hoban.

Madeline struck into this curt exchange with a laugh. “Say, do you guys know that Dad is studying Russian again, of all things?”

“Russian!” Warren exclaimed. “What for?”

“He’s going there. I don’t know when or how.” Madeline laughed. “Mom’s fit to be tied. He’s taking a crash course, ten hours a day. She never sees him. She sits around that big new house by herself, except when somebody shows up to play tennis with her or go to a movie.”

“Dad had better step on it,” Warren said, if he wants to beat the Germans into Moscow.”

Byron took Madeline’s lei and put it around his neck. “Boy, these are strong frangipani. God knows when we three will ever be together again like this. I’m in a mood, but I love you both. How’s the booze situation at your house, Warren?”

“Ninety-seven percent. We just topped off.”

“Great. I intend to burn you down to fifty percent.”

“By all means.”

Byron came on the latest airmail Time at Warren’s house, and read it in a deck chair among the multiple roots of a banyan tree, while Warren, Janice, and their guests grew gay on hors d’oeuvres and rum drinks. At sea for two weeks, he had heard only fragmentary news.

When the party reached the stage of hula dancing to the guitar music of the grinning houseboy, Warren began broiling steaks in billows of fragrant smoke. Meantime Hugh Cleveland and Madeline did a barefoot hula while the Navy people and islanders clapped and laughed, and a photographer from the society page snapped pictures. Byron sourly watched his sister’s white feet writhe in the grass, and her pink-sheathed bottom gyrate; and he wondered who was mad — he or this playful group. According to Time, the Germans were rolling through Russia exactly as they had through Poland two years before. It was the same month, September. The cheery German claims, backed by combat photographs, were most convincing. The pictures showed villages afire, skies aswarm with Luftwaffe, roads through cornfields jammed with refugees, and unshaven Russian prisoners behind barbed wire in sullen hordes. The scenes brought vividly back to Byron’s mind the days when he and Natalie had drawn together: the flight in the old automobile from Cracow to Warsaw, his wound, the child on the road crying over her mother’s smashed face, the orange flares, the whistling bombs, Natalie in the malodorous jammed hospital, the song of grasshoppers in no-man’s-land.

Carrying two plates of sliced steak and french fries, Warren came and sat down beside him on the grass. “Eat hearty, my lad.”

Byron said, “Thanks. Pretty grim issue of Time.”

“Hell, Briny, you knew the Germans would take the Russkis, didn’t you? The Russian’s a hardy soldier, but that Bolshevik government’s just a mess of crackpot politicians. Stalin shot half his officers in ‘38, including all the professionals left from the Czarist days. You can’t fight a war without career officers. That’s where the Germans have us all licked. That General Staff of theirs has been going for a hundred years. The day they lost the last war, why, they just started collecting maps and dope for fighting this one. That’s a savvy outfit. How about some wine? California Burgundy gets here in pretty fair shape.”

“Sure.”

Returning with a big purple bottle, Warren said, “Well, there’s one good thing. If Hitler does take Moscow, the Japs will jump north to grab their end of Siberia. That’ll give us a breather. Otherwise they’re a cinch to come south soon. Every day they’re getting lower on oil. We’re sure as hell not ready for them. We need a year just to harden the Philippines to where we can hold.”

Byron slapped the copy of Time. “Incidentally, did you read about your father-in-law’s latest speech? He wants to explore making a deal with the Germans.”

“I know. Well, he’s way off base on that. Hitler’s not making any deals, not while he’s winning so big. But eventually, Briny, the Krauts may be easier to come to terms with than the Japs. They’re white people.”

“True, except for starters we’d have to shoot our Jews.”

Warren slowly turned his bronzed face at his brother. An embarrassed smile played on his thin lips. “Even the Germans aren’t shooting their Jews, guy. I think their policy is disgusting, but—”

“You don’t know what they’re doing. I run into a stone wall when I try to tell people here what the Germans are like. Branch Hoban thinks this war is Saxon civilization against the rising tide of Asia, and the Russians count as Asia, and we and the British should wise up and make common cause with the Nazis in a hurry, because they’re fighting our battle, and it’s the white race’s last chance. He gets all this out of books by a nut called Homer Lea. He reads those books to pieces. The Valor of Ignorance is the main one, and The Day of the Saxon.”

“I’ve read Homer Lea,” said Warren, looking at his watch. “He’s a screwball, but pretty interesting — well, our friend Vic’s due for a bottle, but it’s a cinch Jan’s not going to abandon the governor.”

“I’ll feed the baby.”

“Do you like babies, or something?”

“I like this one.”

While Victor lay on his uncle’s lap drinking mild, Byron drank California Burgundy. Each finished his bottle at about the same time. He tucked the baby away in his side-porch crib, and returned to the lawn. The breeze had died, and it was very hot. The scent from the lemon trees filled Byron with melancholy. He lay face down under the banyan tree and fell asleep. When he woke, Lieutenant Aster, drink in hand, was shaking him.

“Blazes,” Byron said, sitting up, a stale taste of wind in his mouth, “I was supposed to report in at three, wasn’t I? Are you here to take me back in irons?”

“Amnesty. You’re out of hack,” Aster grinned, “and you’ve got twenty-four hours leave. This just came in on the harbor circuit from Rome, forwarded via Lisbon, Washington, and San Francisco.”

He handed a dispatch to Byron, who read it sitting cross-legged on the grass.

Byron bowed his head and put a hand over his face. Like his father, he had a simple religious streak; he muttered a prayer of thanks for the miracle of a boy, born from the wild lovemaking in Lisbon that had briefly joined two bodies, now almost as far apart as they could be on the planet. After a moment he looked up with a slow smile, his eyes glistening.

“How about that, Lady?”

“Congratulations, Briny.”

Byron got to his feet, looking around dazedly at the party. The radio was pouring out “Lovely Hula Hands,” Janice was wiggling barefoot with the captain of the Enterprise, the governor was dancing with Madeline, evincing pop-eyed pleasure at the play of her hips, and Hugh Cleveland was singing an obscene parody that brought barks of male laughter an delighted shrieks from the women. “I guess I’ll tell my brother and sister.”

Aster strolled beside him, rattling the ice in his glass. “Quite a wingding here. Isn’t that the governor? Your sister-in-law is sure nice. I hardly had my foot inside the door when she handed me a planter’s punch.”

“Janice is okay.”

“Is that her name, Janice? Pretty name. She’s about the best-looking white woman I’ve seen on this godforsaken island.”

“Easy, Lady.”

“Why, Briny, I admire her like a sunset, or the Washington Monument.”

“Say, Madeline -”

Hurrying past him toward the house behind Cleveland and the Hawaiian houseboy, Madeline flipped a hand at him. “Long-distance call from New York, honey. Our sponsor. Imagine!”

Byron told the news to Warren and Janice. Before he could stop her, Janice made a delighted announcement. The guests ringed him with alcoholic jokes, congratulations and questions, exclaiming over the odd fact that his wife was away oft in Italy. The society columnist of the Honolulu Star, a bony hawk-faced blonde named Petsy Peters, stood at Byron’s elbow, scribbling notes.

He went into the house after Madeline. He wanted to be the first to tell her. The telephone lay in its rack on a table in the hall. He heard a chuckle, and glancing down the zigzagging halls to the side-porch where the baby lay asleep, he saw Hugh Cleveland embracing Madeline, out of sight of the lawn. Cleveland was holding Byron’s sister with both hands by the rump. Her pink skirt was pulled up in back, exposing her thighs and underwear. She was clinging to him with obscene intimacy. Byron walked out of the house into the sunlight.

“I guess I’ll get back to the Devilfish,” he said to Warren.

“Why? I thought Branch gave you a twenty-four.”

“I want to write Natalie and the folks. Maybe shoot off a cable or two.”

“Briny, the governor’s just invited the whole crowd over to Washington Place for cocktails with Cleveland.”

“Cleveland’s in the house there kissing Madeline. I mean kissing her, and she’s going right along with it.”

“Is she?” the aviator said with a crooked grin. “I guess their sponsor liked the broadcast.”

Madeline came hurrying out of the house, her face alight, her hair disorderly, and ran to her brothers. Behind her Cleveland emerged, wiping his mouth with a kerchief. “Hey, guess what, fellows?” Madeline chirruped. “He talked to me, too. He said I sounded fine! But that’s nothing. We had a spot check rating of 23.5. That’s only four points less than Fred Allen — and on our very first show!”

Byron took the dispatch from his breast pocket showed it to his sister.

“Oh my! More good news! Say, Hugh, what do you know? Briny’s wife had her baby.”

“Hey! Congrats, papa!” He put out a hand that Byron ignored, but he took no offense. “Come on, Madeline, let’s tell the governor what Chet Fenton said.”

Byron, arms folded, glowered at their departing backs.

“Look, Briny,” his brother said, “you’re not going to make trouble, are you? You’ll embarrass Janice.”

“The grinning son of a bitch,” muttered Byron.

“Come off it. She’s over twenty-one.”

“He’s a married man. I’ll talk to Madeline, if you won’t. Depending on what she says, I may tell the bastard to keep his distance from her, if he doesn’t want the shit beaten out of him.”

Warren sized up his brother with amusement. “He’s got the weight on you, and he looks in good shape.”

“That’s just fine,” Byron said.

The radio began blaring the news signal. It was four o’clock and the governor had turned up the volume of the little portable sitting on the outdoor bar.

“Berlin. German Supreme Headquarters announces the capture of Kiev and claims the greatest victory in the war, and perhaps in the history of the world. According to German sources, four entire Russian armies, numbering almost a million men, have been surrounded and cut to pieces, and with the fall of Kiev all organized resistance in the vast pocket has come to an end. Radio Berlin proclaimed at midnight that, quote, ‘The Soviet Union no longer has a military capability, and the end of hostilities on the eastern front is in sight.’ More news in a moment. Now a word about Pepsi-Cola.”

The governor said, swishing his rum drink as merry girlish voices burst into a jingle, “Well, well. The Russkis would really seem to be on the run, hey?”

“Where is Kiev, Governor?” said Petsy Peters. “Is that where caviar comes from? I hope this doesn’t mean no more cavvy. There’s always the Persian, but that’s so expensive.”

“Kiev is in the north, I think,” the governor said. Frankly my Russian geography is not so hot.”

The Pepsi-Cola commercial ended. The announcer came on with drama in his voice:

“We interrupt this newscast for an urgent announcement by the Joint Army-Navy Command of the Hawaiian islands. SURPRISE ENEMY ATTACK ON HAWAII! This is a DRILL. A hostile fleet of battleships and carriers has been located approximately four hundred fifty miles northwest of Oahu. This is a DRILL.”

“Oh no!” Petsy Peters said. “Not again. Four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon! What a misery! Are they going to keep us off the streets again for hours and hours?”

The governor put his finger to his lips.

“All leaves and liberties are cancelled, and all military personnel will return to their units at once. This is a DRILL. We repeat, this a DRILL. Surprise enemy attack on Hawaii! All military personnel return to their units at once. Special permission is granted to the players of the baseball game between the Air Command and the Battleship Force to complete the ninth inning, and for spectators to remain at the game until then. Restrictions on civilian travel are not, repeat, not in force.”

“Well, thank goodness for that, at least,” said Petsy Peters.

“All ships in the area will report to force commanders readiness to sortie, but will not, repeat not, leave anchorages or moorings unless ordered. At 1830 target planes towing sleeves will simulate attack on Pearl Harbor. All ships and shore batteries will conduct tracking and aiming exercises but will not, repeat not, fire ammunition. Vessels in dry dock or alongside for repairs will proceed with maintenance work and are excused from this exercise. We repeat. Surprise attack on Hawaii. This is a DRILL. This announcement will be repeated.”

The governor snapped off the radio. “I wasn’t sure they’d still try to get it in today. It was originally scheduled for ten this morning, Hugh, but The Happy Hour conflicted.”

“Yes, sir, that was a real courtesy. My sponsor is writing letters of appreciation to the Army and the Navy.”

“That’s a fine idea.”

The general invitation for cocktails at Washington Place, the governor’s mansion, was called off. The party rapidly broke up. Soon only Cleveland, Madeline, Janice and the two submariners remained on the lawn amid the party debris, with the governor and his wife. Aster and Byron were in no hurry to leave because the Devilfish was in dry dock.

“Why not join us at Washington Place for a drink, Janice?” said the governor. “Hugh and Madeline are coming along.”

“Oh, not without a man, thank you, Governor,” Janice said.

“There’s an old Navy rule against sticking one’s neck out, Janice,” Lieutenant Aster spoke up, with a fetching grin. “But I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to see the inside of that mansion. I volunteer.”

Janice laughed. “Why, you’re on, Lieutenant. Give me three minutes, Governor.”

Byron separated Madeline from the others, saying he wanted to talk to her and would take her to Washington Place in Warren’s car.

“It’s wonderful news about your baby, Briny,” Madeline remarked, as they drove off.

Byron said, looking straight ahead at the road, “I went into the house before, looking for you. I saw you and Cleveland.”

After a pause filled with engine noise he glanced at her.

Her brows were contracted over wide dark eyes in a scowl, and she looked lovely, but tough. She very much resembled their father. “Is this why you offered to drive me to the governor’s place? To lecture me? Thanks, dear.”

“That’s a married man, Madeline. Mom and Dad would be damned upset at what I saw.”

“Don’t talk to me about upsetting Mom and Dad. I have yet to marry a Jew.”

Those were the last words spoken in the car until it drew up at Washington Place. Madeline opened the door. “I’m sorry, Briny. That was nasty. But didn’t you deserve it, accusing me of God knows what! I have nothing against Natalie. I like her.”

Byron reached across her legs and slammed the door shut. The glare on his white face was frightening. “One minute. You tell Hugh Cleveland — you be sure to tell him, Madeline — that if I ever find out he’s done anything to you, I’ll come after him, and I’ll put him in a hospital.

The girl’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, how dare you? You’re cruel and you have a dirty mind. Do you actually think I’d play around with a married man? Why, Happy Hour was my idea. I was so excited when Mr. Fenton told us about the rating, I’d have kissed anybody who was handy. You’re being horrible, Byron.” She took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped her eyes.

“All right. I didn’t want to make you cry.”

“Don’t you believe me?” Madeline spoke in soft and wistful tones, tearfully smiling. “My God, I thought we knew each other so well. We used to. I admit Hugh would sleep with me if he could. He’ll sleep with anybody, and I find that disgusting. He’s nothing but a whoremaster, and his wife’s the most miserable woman alive. I appreciate your concern for my honor. You’re very old-fashioned and sweet, like Dad. But don’t you worry about Madeline. Forgive me for that mean crack, darling. I’m awfully happy about the baby.” She kissed his cheek. He felt the tears on her skin. She got out of the car, twinkled her fingers at him, and ran into Washington Place.

When Byron got back to the naval base, target planes were coming in high over the harbor, towing long fluttering red sleeves, and on all the ships the gun crews were shouting, and slanting their weapons skyward; but there were no sounds of firing, and the excitement seemed forced and silly. The Devilfish, sitting high and dry on blocks, was deserted except for yard workmen and the watch. Byron took out of his desk drawer a writing pad, and the record of the fado song that he and Natalie had heard together in Lisbon. He put the record on the wardroom phonograph and started to write:

The hissing of the bad needle gave way to the guitar chords that opened the song. He put his head down on his arms. He wanted to picture his wife and the new baby, a boy who perhaps looked like Victor. But when he closed his eyes, what he saw was his sister’s uncovered thighs and garters.

Byron stopped the record and spent the next hour drawing a sketch of an air compressor. Working from memory, using different colored crayons and inks, he produced a picture accurate and clear enough to be printed in a manual. To this he clipped a letter he typed in the abandoned mildewy-smelling yeoman’s cubicle, formally requesting transfer to Atlantic duty. He added a scrawled pencil note on a chit:

Next morning Branch Hoban congratulated Byron on his sketch, explained with regret that he couldn’t spare an officer from the watch list, declared his conviction that Natalie and her baby were quite safe in Rome, and said he would forward the request, not recommending approval.

Chapter 51

Rhoda was startled by the bulk of the wax-sealed envelope from the State Department. Inside she found another fat envelope with pale blue Russian printing on the flap. The eleven-page typewritten letter it contained was much struck-over with pen and ink. Clipped to it, on a small sheet headed MEMORANDUM FROM ALISTAIR TUDSBURY, was a red-pencilled note in Pug’s firm slanted hand:

Victor Henry had arrived with the Harriman-Beaverbrook mission just as the Germans were starting their autumn smash toward Moscow. The panzer armies were breaking through less than a hundred miles away, but the Russians wined and dined their visitors, whirled them about the city in black limousines, took them to the ballet, and carried on long committee meetings, with no hint that anything was going wrong; though they did appear a bit brisk in laying on a farewell banquet less than a week after the guests had got there.

The Americans and the British understood that the Germans had been stopped east of Smolensk more than a month earlier in their central push, and had been pinned down there on the defensive ever since. In Moscow this halting of the Nazi hordes in the center was still talked of as a great feat of Soviet arms, a new “Miracle of the Marne.” Just as the French had stopped the Huns thirty miles from Paris in 1914 and snatched away their chance of quickly winning the war, so the Red Army had halted Hitler’s marauders, the assertion went, in their drive to seize Moscow before the winter set in. The Russians had even taken foreign correspondents to this central front, showing them recaptured villages, smashed Nazi tanks, and dead and captured Germans. Now the Germans claimed the march toward Moscow was rolling again, and the Russians were denying it. The fog of war effectively hid what was really happening.

Contrary to a notion popular at the time — a notion which has never quite died — the Wehrmacht was not a giant solid phalanx of tanks and armored cars, spitting flame and death as it clanked through whole nations. Hitler had a horse-drawn army. It was larger than Napoleon’s, but mainly it advanced into Russia as the Grande Armée had, by animal power and the march of men’s feet. He also had some armored divisions, spaced on the flanks of the three big groups invading the Soviet Union. The blitzkrieg worked so: the armored forces, the panzers, chugged ahead on either side of each attack front, slicing into the enemy lines, counting on surprise, terror, and punch to soften or panic the foe. The infantry came along between these two swathes as fast as it could, killing or capturing the forces which the panzer divisions had broken into or thinly encircled.

These armored divisions were a big success, and no doubt Hitler would have been glad to employ more of them. But he had started his war — as his generals had feebly grumbled — much too soon, only six years after he took power. He had not come near arming Germany to the full, though he had made frightening noises exactly as if he had, and Europe had believed him. He was therefore very low on panzer divisions, considering the vastness of the front.

In August, when his three-pronged attack had jabbed far into the Soviet Union, Hitler diverted the thin armored layers of the central formation north and south, to help wrap up the war on the flanks by taking Kiev and investing Leningrad. This done, the panzers were to come back on station and start driving again with the Center Group for the knockout blow on the capital. It was a move that military writers still argue about; but in any case, with the central armor thus peeled away, the infantry and horse-drawn artillery in the center perforce had to halt and dig in, to await the return of the panzers, the steel cutting edges, from their side excursions. This was the new “Miracle of the Marne.” The Russians were at first surprised, then immensely heartened, at this sudden stop of the huge force advancing on their capital; and disorganized though they were, they went over to counterattacks and won minor gains. The “Miracle” ceased at the end of September, when the panzer armies, back in their positions, and properly overhauled and gassed up, went slashing toward Moscow again, in two wide curving paths. That was when Harriman and Beaverbrook arrived, with the obscure Captain Henry in their train.

Chapter 52

The knot of Leslie Slote’s tie came lopsided twice in his shaky hurrying hands. He flung the tie in a corner, pulled another from his dresser, and managed a passable knot. He put on his jacket and sat in a heavy brown leather armchair to calm himself with a cigarette, flinging long legs on the ottoman. A German correspondent had abandoned this apartment on June 15, making a hasty deal with him. For Moscow, these were splendid digs: three rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, solid German furniture. Pamela Tudsbury liked the place and had cooked many a dinner here for Slote and some of their friends.

The English-speaking embassy people and correspondents — an isolated, gossipy little band — assumed that the British girl and the American Foreign Service officer were having an affair. So did Slote’s thickset Russian maid, Valya, who beamed on them and tiptoed about when Pamela was visiting. Slote yearned for such an affair. He had not gotten over the marriage of Natalie Jastrow, and nothing closed such an ego wound like a new romance. But Pam Tudsbury, whom he remembered from Paris as the warm-blooded girlfriend of Philip Rule — wild in her ways, candidly sensual, freshest and gayest when the dawn came up — brushed off his passes. She was in a gloomy state; she was being true, she said, to her fiancé, a missing RAF pilot. Pam’s skin was fair as in the Paris days, her heart-shaped face with its thin bow of a mouth still a flower of English prettiness. She wore tailored wool suits, flat shoes, and glasses; but inside that secretarial uniform glowed the girl who had whipped off her stockings and splashed barefoot in the fountain on a midsummer night with Phil Rule, holding her red silk dress at mid-thigh. She still owned that dress, and sometimes wore it.

Slote had patiently been taking Pamela’s company on her terms, biding his chances to improve them. But the arrival of Captain Victor Henry deprived him of Pamela on any terms. When he glimpsed Pam with Henry, Slote knew at once he was looking at a woman in love. So much for fidelity to the missing airman! As for Captain Henry, this stumpy, sallow, tired-looking fellow of fifty or so seemed to the Foreign Service officer almost a caricature of the anonymous military man: short on small talk, quick on professional matters, poker-faced, firm, and colorless. One couldn’t even tell whether Henry liked Pamela Tudsbury. He made no visible return of her unguarded deep glances. Slote failed to fathom the attraction this middle-aged dullard held for the young Englishwoman, and he never understood Natalie Jastrow’s infatuation with the man’s son, either.

Fate had served him a strange, indigestible dish, Leslie Slote thought — to be beaten out first by the son and then by the father; neither of them, in his own judgment, a worthy rival. Byron Henry at least was a handsome young devil, and had much changed Slote’s ideas of the susceptibility of clever women to surface charms. But there was nothing charming on the surface of Byron’s father. The best one could say for the man was that he still had his hair, thick and dark, and that his waist showed an effort to stay trim. But his age was evident in the weary wrinkled eyes, the gnarled hands, the seamed mouth, the deliberate movements.

Slote was about to meet Admiral Standley and Captain Henry at the Hotel National; he was going to interpret for them at the Kremlin banquet. This privilege did not, in prospect, make him happy. He was in a state of panicky foreboding.

During the first weeks of the invasion, Slote’s physical cowardice, which he lived with as other people lived with hay fever or high blood pressure, had not acted up. Slote was an admirer of Soviet Russia. He believed the news on the loudspeakers and argued that the German victory claims were propaganda. Six hundred miles, more than a hundred million Russians, and above all the great Red Army lay between him and the Germans. It was too far even for the Luftwaffe to fly. The barometer of his timidity read the Moscow climate as sunny and fair. The Muscovites — a peaceable, good-natured, rather shabby swarm of workingmen in caps, workingwomen in shawls, boys and girls in scarlet Young Communist neckerchiefs, all with flat calm Russian faces so much alike that they appeared to be one family of several million first cousins — placidly piled sandbags, taped windows, held anti-incendiary drills for air raids that didn’t come, and otherwise went about their business as before under blue skies, in warm sparkling weather. Silver barrage, balloons bobbed at their winches in open squares. Snouts of anti-aircraft guns appeared on the roofs of hotels and museums. Strapping red-cheeked young men wearing new uniforms and fine leather boots streamed to the railroad stations. Tanks, multi-wheeled trucks, and motor-driven big guns thumped and clanked along the boulevards day and night, all heading west. The theatres and cinemas stayed open. The ice cream of the street vendors was all rich as ever. The summer circus was playing to great crowds, for this year there was a dancing elephant as well as the bears. If one could trust one’s eyes and ears in Moscow, the Soviet Union had met the onslaught at its distant borders and dealt the Nazis their first big defeat, exactly as Radio Moscow claimed.

Then Minsk fell, then Smolensk, then Kiev — each Russian acknowledgment lagging a week or more behind the German crows of victory. Air raids started; the Luftwaffe had come into range. Nobody else in the embassy became as alarmed as Slote, because nobody else had counted much on the Russians. Moreover, nobody else had undergone the ordeal of Warsaw. Since May the ambassador had been storing food, fuel, and supplies in a large house thirty miles from the city, to sit out the on-coming siege. A few of the Americans, rubbed raw by the Russians’ difficult ways, even looked forward to seeing the Wehrmacht march into Red Square. At least after a few drinks they said so.

Slote had stopped arguing, having been proved so wrong about the Red Army. But he thought the complacency and indifference of the other Americans was almost insane. The air raids were getting worse as the Germans drew nearer. Moscow’s amazingly thick anti-aircraft barrage provided a comforting canopy of green, red, and yellow fireworks, mounting past searchlight beams in the black night. Yet bombs did fall. The terror of the siege guns was still to come. Even if he survived the siege, thought Slote, how safe would he be? By then Roosevelt’s blatant help to Nazism’s enemies might have provoked a triumphant Hitler to declare war. If Moscow fell, the Americans might all be taken to a ravine and shot like the Jews in Minsk. Then Adolf Hitler could apologize for the mistake, or deny that it had happened, or say the Russians had done it.

Berel Jastrow’s story filled Slote with horror. He had read the books about Germany on the list he had given Byron Henry, and many more. The Germans, in their naïve passion for obedience, their streaks of coarseness and brutality, their energy, their intelligence, their obsessive self-centeredness, their eternal grievance that the world was against them and doing them injustice, their romantic yearnings for new extremes of experience — this last trait bubbling up ad nauseam in the romantic philosophers, and nailed down by Goethe once and for all in the Faust image — these eighty million strangers in Europe seemed to Leslie Slote capable, once they abandoned their strict and docile conventions, of slaughtering any number of innocent people upon orders, cheerfully and with no sense of guilt, not in the least aware that they were “committing atrocities.” There was no striking bottom in the German spirit. That was the strange and fearful thing about them. They were like remote cold children, as docile and as cruel. Hitler’s dread secret was that he understood them. Other nations at war could be counted on to observe such rules as exchanging besieged or captured diplomats. In Slote’s frightened view, such diplomats could perhaps count on Hitler’s Germans not to eat them — little more.

The red light of the setting sun was fading outside his window. It was time to go and accompany Victor Henry to a night of sitting in the bull’s eye of the Moscow air target.

Not surprisingly, he found Captain Henry in Tudsbury’s suite. Despite the chill in the room, the naval officer lolled on a couch in his shirt-sleeves, smoking a cigar. Pamela was sewing at a crumpled blue coat with gold stripes, in the light of a red-shaded lamp atop an alabaster Venus.

“Hi there,” Henry said.

Pamela said, “Loose brass buttons. We don’t want them bouncing all over the Kremlin parquet floor. Have some Scotch and tap water, Leslie. Beaverbrook gave the governor a bottle.”

Glancing at his wristwatch, Slote sat himself on the edge of a chair. “No thanks. I hope you haven’t had much, Captain. When you start on a Russian dinner, the last thing you want in your system is alcohol.”

Henry grunted. “You’re telling me! I haven’t touched it.”

Pamela sewed, Victor Henry smoked, and the Foreign Service man felt he was very superfluous in the room. He looked at his watch once, twice, and coughed. “I said I’d meet the admiral in the lobby at six. It’s ten of. Suppose I look for him now. You’ll join us, Captain?”

“Sure,” Henry said.

“You seem so calm, Leslie,” Pam said. “If I were actually going into the Kremlin, I’d be vibrating.”

“Captain Henry seems pretty calm,” Slote said.

“Oh, him,” Pamela said. “He’s a robot. A mechanical man. Chug-chug! Choomp-choomp! Clank!”

“I need new batteries,” Henry said. “And possibly a valve job.”

The intimate teasing made Slote feel even more superfluous. “Well, in ten minutes then,” he said.

Pamela said, “Just two more buttons. Damn! That’s twice I’ve pricked my finger. I never could sew.”

Clumsy black limousines clustered before the hotel, a rare sight. Since the start of the war, the sparse auto traffic on Moscow’s wide boulevards and squares had been dwindling to nothing. Muscovites, taking evening strolls in their usual large numbers, glanced inquisitively at the machines, but did not stop to gawk. Chauffeurs and escorts in black caps and black leather jackets stood by the cars. The Americans called them “the YMCA boys”; they were secret police, and the people seemed loath to linger near them. But as the cars began to fill with well-dressed foreigners thronging out of the National’s narrow entrance, the pedestrians did form lines of quiet onlookers, peering with round friendly eyes at the clothes, faces, and shoes.

“How did you make out on those harbor charts?” said Admiral Standley to Henry, settling into the back seat and adjusting his hearing aid. He had once been Chief of Naval Operations, and the President had called him out of retirement for this mission. Slote could never make this shrivelled, leathery, bespectacled man, whose uniform displayed four rows of campaign ribbons, stop talking near NKVD agents, who undoubtedly knew English, though they never spoke it.

“I got nowhere,” Henry said. “As for operating codes and signals, forget it. Their fellow told me with a straight face that they had no such things, that they just communicated by Morse or flashing light, in plain language.”

“What tripe! Did you give them our stuff?”

“Well, I showed them our General Signal Book, and a few strip ciphers. I almost got into a wrestling match with this rear admiral, the small fat one. He started to put them away in his briefcase, but I retrieved them. I said no tickee no shirtee.”

“No! Did you really?” said the admiral. “Why, you may hang for that, Pug. We’re supposed to give, give, give, here. Why, you should just have handed over all our Navy’s code channels, and shaken hands, and toasted eternal brotherhood in vodka. I’m ashamed of you, Captain Henry, and goddamn glad you’re along.”

“We’re getting a quid pro quo for all we’re giving the Soviets,” Slote said. “They’re killing Germans for us.”

“They’re killing Germans so as not to get killed by Germans,” said the admiral. “They’re not doing it for us.”

Pug said to Slote, “Look here, Leslie, if we’re going to plan for convoys to Murmansk and Archangel, and for possible joint operations, we’ve got to swap hydrographic dope and operational codes. Hell, we’re not asking for secret combat channels. This is the stuff we need for seamanship and piloting.”

“Russians are obsessed with secrecy,” Slote said. “Be persistent and patient.”

The cars, having made a wide circuit of streets around the Kremlin, were stopping at a tall gateway under a red stone tower topped by a star.

“That won’t ,help,” said the admiral. “I think these birds just haven’t gotten the green light from Mr. Big and until they do, no dice.”

At this stream of slang, the NKVD escort turned and squinted narrow Tartar eyes at the admiral, before saying to Slote in Russian, with a polite smile, that they would stay in the car on passing through the gate. The limousines, checked one at a time by big, fierce-looking, gun-bearing sentries in faultless uniform, drove into the citadel, stopped at an inner gate for another check, then passed among bizarre old churches to a long building with a majestic stone façade.

The visitors, with Russian officers mingling among them, left the cars, mounted the steps, and stood talking outside the great closed doors, their breaths smoking in the chilly air. A light blue sky, puffy with pink sunset clouds, arched from wall to wall of the fortress. Suddenly the palace doors opened, and the foreigners were blinking at dazzling light from globed chandeliers in a very long high-ceilinged hall, ending in a cascade of vermilion carpet on a far-off white marble staircase. As they walked in, warm air enveloped them, a novelty in Moscow, where all building heat had been forbidden until mid-October. Inside, a musty smell of old stone walls and old furnishings was mixed with an almost flowery odor. White-gloved attendants in military livery helped the visitors off with their coats and hats. Along the mirrored walls, on dark tables, dozens of combs and brushes were neatly laid out.

“Thoughtful touch, this,” Victor Henry said to Slote, as they stood side by side, brushing their hair. “Say, what did the ambassador think of that stuff from Minsk? Did you get it to him?”

Slote nodded at Pug’s mirror image. “I wanted it to go to Secretary Hull, high priority. The ambassador quashed that. The stuff’s to be forwarded through channels to our east European desk.”

Pug wrinkled his nose. “That’ll be the end of it. Your department always drags its feet on the Jews. Better show the papers to some American newspaperman here.”

“The boss directly ordered me not to, in case it’s evaluated as fake atrocity propaganda.”

Young army officers, handsome clear-eyed giants in brown uniforms with scarlet collar tabs, appeared through side doors, and began shepherding the visitors toward the staircase. Walking beside Slote, Pug said, “Suppose I have Fred Fearing up for a drink, and he accidentally on purpose reads the material? A reporter will steal a scoop from his old blind grandmother, you know.”

“Are you suggesting that I disobey orders?”

“I don’t think that story should get buried.”

The admiral came and hooked elbows with them on the staircase, cackling, “Say, how’s this for socialist austerity? Can’t you just see ghosts of Czarist nobles and the beautiful ladies on this red carpet? This is right out of the movies.”

The company passed through a bleak modernist room full of desks with microphones, and the army officers explained that here the Supreme Soviet met. They straggled through one vast room after another, apparently unaltered since Czarist days, richly furnished in French or Italian or English styles, crammed with paintings and statuary, with no visible purpose except to overawe. The effect mounted of wasteful magnificence displayed helter-skelter with a heavy hand. In one room grander and richer than the rest, pillared in marble, with a vaulted gilt ceiling and red damask-covered walls, the company of about eighty men halted. The chamber seemed not at all crowded by them.

Mirrored doors opened and a party of Russian civilians came in, wearing unpressed flopping trousers and ill-fitting double-breasted jackets. Slote at once recognized several faces that lined Lenin’s tomb at the May Day parades: Molotov, Kaganovitch, Suslov, Mikoyan.

“Look at those guys come on, will you?” Victor Henry said. “They make you feel like the revolution happened last week.”

Slote gave him a quick glance. The apparition of these inelegant Communist bosses in the gorgeous Grand Palace had jarred him too, and the Navy man had crystallized this feeling in one sentence. Henry was sizing up the approaching Communists through half-closed eyes, as though he were peering at a horizon.

“That’s the Politburo, Captain,” Slote said. “Very big cheeses.”

Henry nodded. “They don’t look like big cheeses, do they?”

“Well, it’s those terrible clothes,” Slote said.

Introductions began. Liveried waiters passed with trays of vodka in little tulip-shaped glasses and plates of pastry sticks. Slote ate a stick, for research purposes; it was far too sugary. A little man walked alone into the room, smoking a cigarette. No ceremony was made of it, nobody stopped conversing, but the grand state chamber and all the people in it polarized toward this man, for he was Stalin. It was a matter of side-glances, of shoulders and faces turned, of small moves in the crowd, of a rounding of eyes. So Leslie Slote saw for the first time in the flesh the man whose busts, photographs, statues, and paintings filled the Soviet Union like images of Christ in a Catholic land.

The Communist dictator, a surprisingly short man with a small paunch, moved through the room shaking hands and chatting. The subtle focus travelled with him like a spotlight. He came to the two American naval officers, put out his hand to the admiral, and said, “Stalyin.” He looked like his pictures, except that his pallid skin was very coarse and pitted, as though he had once had bad acne. His slanted eyes, thick back-swept grizzled hair, and arching moustache and eyebrows, gave him a genial leonine look. Unlike the other Communists, he wore a uniform of simple beige cloth superbly tailored, with sharply creased trousers tucked into soft gleaming brown boots.

Leslie Slote made introductions. Captain Henry said in slow Russian, with a bad American accent, “Sir, I will tell this story to my grandchildren.”

Raising a thick eyebrow, Stalin said in a low pleasant voice, “Yes? Do you have any?”

“Two boys.”

“And your children? Do you have sons?” The dictator appeared diverted by Victor Henry’s slow, carefully drilled, mechanical speech.

“I have two, Mr. Chairman. My older son flies for the Navy. My younger one is in a submarine.”

Stalin looked at Victor Henry through cigarette smoke with vague interest.

Pug said, “Forgive my poor Russian. I had Russian playmates once. But that was long ago.”

“Where did you have Russian playmates?”

“I was born near the Russian River, in California. Some of those early families still remain there.”

Stalin smiled a real smile, showing tobacco stained teeth. “Ah, yes, yes. Fort Ross. Not many people know that we Russians settled California before you did. Maybe it’s time we claimed California back.”

“They say your policy is to fight on one front at a time, Comrade Chairman -”

With a smiling grunt, Stalin said, “Ha! Ochen horosho!” (“Very good”), struck Henry lightly on his shoulder, and walked on.

“Now what the hell was all that about California, Pug?” The admiral had been listening with a baffled look. “By thunder, you’ve really picked up that lingo.”

Victor Henry recounted the chat, and the admiral laughed out loud. “By God, write down every word of that, Pug. You hear? I intend to put it in my report. One fighting front at a time! Well done.”

“I must compliment you,” Slote said. “You spoke with presence of mind, and he enjoyed it.”

“He puts you at your ease,” Pug said. “I knew I was murdering the grammar, but he never let on. Did you see his hands? Beautifully manicured.”

“Say, I didn’t notice that,” said the admiral. “How about that, Slote? Lots of us decadent capitalists don’t bother with manicures, but the Head Red does. Makes you stop and think, hey?”

Slote hadn’t noticed the manicure, and was vexed at having missed the detail.

Soon the large company was moving again, this time into a stupendous banquet hall of white marble, red tapestries, and shiny parquet, where silver, gold, and glass glittered on the white cloths of many tables set amid green stone columns. One table on a dais stretched the length of the room, perhaps a hundred feet; the others stood perpendicular to the dais. Light flooded from the myriad frosted globes of two gigantic baroque gilt chandeliers, hanging from a high ceiling of vermilion and gold. More light blazed on the walls, in ornate gold sconces.

“Wow!” Pug said.

Leslie Slote stared around at the walls and ceiling. “It’s the Catherine the Great Room. I’ve seen it in paintings. There’s her crest, in those big medallions. She got some French or Italian architect in to gut this part of the palace, I believe, and do it over. It was her throne room.”

“Well, if this is their style of living, by God,” said the admiral, “they’ll make a Communist of me yet.”

“I wouldn’t be too surprised,” Slote replied, “if this is the first time the room has been used since the revolution.”

The menu, printed in Russian and English on thick creamy paper with a hammer and sickle gold crest, listed fish, soups, game, fowls, and roast meats, down the entire long page. Attendants began to bring the courses, while more attendants stood around with bottles of wine and vodka, springing to pour. The splendid great room, the massive array of brilliantly set tables, the multicolored uniforms of generals and admirals of three countries, the line of powerful men on the dais, with Stalin at a sharp focus even here, chatting left and right with Beaverbrook and Harriman, the lavish service, the river of wine, the gobs of caviar, the parade of rich fat foods on Czarist gold plate — all this overwhelmed Victor Henry with a reassuring sense of Russian resources, Russian strength, Russian largesse, Russian hospitality, and Russian self-confidence.

Slote had a different reaction. No doubt the Communist leaders were enjoying themselves and being hospitable, but in this vulgar outpouring, this choke of luxury, he sensed a note of crude Slav irony. Silent, unspoken, yet almost thunderous, was this message — “Very well, you of the West, these are the things that seem to make you happy, opulence and pleasure sweated out of others. See how well we do it too, if we choose! See how our old Russian regime did it, before we kicked them out! Can you match them? Tomorrow we’ll go back to the simple life we prefer, but since you come from the decadent West, first, let’s all get drunk together and gorge and swill. We Russians know how to live as well as you, and for the fun of it, we’ll even go you one better tonight. Let’s see who slides under the table first. VASHE ZDOROVYE!”

Vashe zdorovye! Toasts kept flaring up. Anybody apparently had the license to stand, hammer at a glass with his knife for attention, and bawl a toast. Men would leave their seats and cross the room to clink glasses when a toast complimented or pleased them. Stalin kept trotting here and there, glass in hand. It was all marvellously interesting to Slote, but it was rushing by too fast, and he was missing too much, interpreting between the American admiral and the short fat Russian admiral who had tried to keep their Navy codes. Sweat shining on his bright red face, the old Russian kept groaning, as he tossed down vodka and wine, that he was a very sick man, had not much time to live, and might as well enjoy himself. The American admiral said at one point, “What the hell, Slote, tell him he looks a lot better than I do, he looks fine.”

“Ah, but you see, tell him I am like the capitalistic system,” groaned the little admiral. “Healthy on the outside, rotten inside.”

Slote enjoyed translating this remark; but most of the admirals’ talk was vague maundering about their families.

He envied Victor Henry, quietly observing the scene and using all the tricks not to drink much. Slote’s ears began to hurt from the shouting of the two admirals over the rising noise of the feast. He was trying to eat a succulent roast quail in sour cream, served with a fine cold Crimean white wine, but the sharpening exchange kept him too busy. Why, the Russian insisted, why wouldn’t the mighty American Navy at least convoy Lend-Lease goods to England? Were they afraid of a few tin-plated U-boats? It was idiotic — his slamming fist made glasses jump — idiotic to manufacture war goods and ship them out just as target practice for Hitler’s torpedoes.

“Tell him we’ll be convoying any day,” snapped the American, “but unless he loosens up with some harbor data and operation signals, hell will freeze over before we convoy to Murmansk.”

The old Russian glared at the old American as Slote translated. Both officers gulped glasses of vodka and stopped talking. This respite allowed Slote to look around at the banquet, which was becoming very convivial indeed, with several heads down on tables and one bald Russian general staggering out, held up at the elbows by two attendants. The cessation of the shouts in his ears enabled him to hear another noise: muffled harsh thumps in an irregular pattern. Ba bromp! Bromp, bromp! His stomach suddenly felt cold. His eyes met Victor Henry’s.

“Gunfire,” he started to say, but the word stuck in his throat. He coughed. “Gunfire. Air raid.”

Henry nodded. “I’ll bet they have the heaviest A.A. in the world right on these grounds. Listen to that, through all those thick walls! Unreconstructed hell’s breaking loose.”

“The Germans would do very well,” Slote said with a little laugh, “if they scored a bomb hit here tonight.”

The thump of the guns came louder and thicker, and some banqueters were glancing uneasily at the walls. The old Russian admiral, slumped in his seat, scarlet face resting on his chest, was shooting ill-natured glances at the Americans. Now he pushed himself to his feet, clinked furiously at a water glass until he got some attention, then held up a brimming glass of yellow vodka. “If you please! I am sitting with representatives of the United States Navy, the most powerful Navy in the world. These brave men must be very unhappy that while all humanity is in mortal danger their ships ride at anchor gathering barnacles” — he turned to the American admiral with a sarcastic grin — “so I drink to the day when this strong Navy will get in the scrap and help destroy the Hitlerite rats, the common enemy of mankind.”

The toast left a silence. Slote translated it in a low rapid mutter. Military and civilian Russians at nearby tables shook their heads and exchanged troubled looks. The old man dropped heavily in his seat, glaring around with self-satisfaction.

The American admiral’s voice shook as he said to Slote, “If I reply you’ll have an international incident on your hands.”

Victor Henry said at once, “Admiral, shall I give it a try, with my lousy Russian?”

“It’s all yours, Pug.”

Leslie Slote reached to touch Henry’s arm. “See here, the other Russians didn’t like what he said, either — just a drop of vodka too much—”

“Okay.” Victor Henry rose, glass in hand. The subdued talk in the room faded down. The whumping of the anti-aircraft guns sounded louder, and glasses vibrated and tinkled with the concussions. The men at the head table, including Stalin, fastened intent eyes on the American. Henry brought out his response in slow, stumbling painful phrases in bad grammar:

“My chief tells me to respond for the United States Navy. It is true we are not fighting. I drink first to the wise peace policy of Marshal Stalin, who did not lead your country into the great war before you were attacked, and so gained time to prepare.” Slote was startled by the barbed aptness of the retort. “The wise peace policy of Comrade Stalin” was the Communist cliché for Stalin’s deal with Hitler. Henry went on, with groping pauses for words that left tense silence in the vast hall: “That is the policy of our President. If we are attacked we will fight. I hope as well as your people are fighting. Now as for,” he stopped to ask Slote for the Russian word — “barnacles. Any barnacles that get on our ships nowadays are barnacles that can swim very fast. Our ships are on the move. We don’t announce everything we do. Secrecy is another wise policy of both our countries. But let’s not keep so many secrets from each other that we can’t work together.

“Now, our Navy needs some” — again Henry asked Slote for a word — “some harbor data, weather codes, and so forth from you. We need them before we leave. Since this is a farewell banquet, I also drink to some fast action. Finally, I was a naval attaché in Berlin. I have now travelled from Hitler’s chancellery to the inside of the Kremlin. That is something Hitler will never do, and above all I drink to that.”

There was loud applause, a general raising of glasses, and shouts of “Your health! Fast action!” Slote reached up to stop Pug from drinking and pointed. Josef Stalin, glass in hand, was leaving his seat.

“Holy smoke, what’s the etiquette on this?” Henry said.

“I don’t know,” Slote said. “Don’t drink yet. By God, Captain Henry, that was rising to an occasion.”

Pug strode toward Stalin, with Slote hurrying behind him. The dictator said with an amiable grin, as they met near the dais and clinked glasses amid smiles and hand-clapping, “I thank you for that fine toast, and in response, you can keep California.”

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Pug said and they both drank. “That’s a good start, and can you do anything else for us?”

“Certainly. Fast action,” said Stalin, linking his arm in Pug’s. They were so close that Pug caught an odor of fish on Stalin’s breath. “American style. We Russians can sometimes do it too.” He walked toward the two admirals, and the old red-faced Russian stumbled to his feet and stood very erect. Stalin spoke to him in low rapid sentences. Slote, behind Victor Henry, caught only a few words, but the pop-eyed look of the admiral and Stalin’s tones were self-translating. The dictator turned to Victor Henry, beaming again. “Well, it is arranged about the weather codes and so forth. Tell your chief that we Russians do not intentionally embarrass our guests. Tell him I feel the American Navy will do historic things in this struggle, and will rule the ocean when peace comes.”

As Slote quickly translated, Admiral Standley stood, his thin withered lips quivering, and grasped the dictator’s hand. Stalin went back to the head table. The incident seemed to stay in his mind, because when he rose to make the last toast of the evening, to President Roosevelt, he returned to the theme. The interpreter was Oumansky, the ambassador to the United States, whose well-cut blue suit marked him off from the other Russians. His English was extremely smooth. “Comrade Stalin says President Roosevelt has the very difficult task of leading a country which is nonbelligerent, yet wants to do all it can to help the two great democracies of Europe in their fight against Fascism. Comrade Stalin says” — Oumansky paused and looked all around the wide room, in a silence no longer marred by gunfire — “may God help him in his most difficult task.”

This religious phrase brought a surprised stillness, then a surge of all the banqueters, glasses in hand, to their feet cheering, drinking, and applauding. Harriman heartily shook Stalin’s hand; the plethoric little Russian admiral grasped the hands of Slote, Henry, and Standley; and all over the room the banquet dissolved in great handshaking, backslapping, and embracing.

But the evening was not over. The Russians marched their guests through more empty splendid rooms to a movie theatre with about fifty soft low armchairs, each with a small table where attendants served cakes, fruits, sweets, and champagne. Here they showed a war movie and then a long musical, and Slote did something he would never have believed possible: in the heart of the Kremlin, he fell asleep. A swelling of finale music woke him seconds before the lights came on. He saw others starting awake in the glare, furtively rubbing their eyes. Stalin walked out springily with Beaverbrook and Harriman, both of whom had red eyes and suffering expressions. In a grand hall, under a vast painting of a battle in snow, he shook hands with all the guests, one by one.

Outside the Grand Palace the night was black, without stars, and the wind was cold and biting. The NKVD agents, leather collars turned up to their ears, blue flashlights in hand, looked sleepy, chilled, and bored, sorting the guests into their limousines.

“Say, how the devil can he drive so fast in this black out?” the admiral protested, as their car passed through the outer gate and speeded into an inky void. “Can Russians see like cats?” The car stopped in blackness, the escort guided the three Americans to a doorway, they passed inside, and found themselves in the small cold foyer of the Hotel National, where one dim lamp burned at the reception desk. The porter who had opened the door was muffled in a fur coat. The elevator stood open, dark, and abandoned. The admiral bade them good-night and plodded to the staircase.

“Come up for a minute,” Henry said to Leslie Slote.

“No thanks. I’ll grope my way to my apartment. It’s not far.”

Pug insisted, and Slote followed Henry up the gloomy staircase to his squalid little room on an areaway. “I don’t rate like Tudsbury,” he said.

“Tudsbury’s about the best propagandist the Soviet Union’s got,” Slote said, “and I guess they know it.”

Pug unlocked a suitcase, took a narrow dispatch case out, unlocked that, and glanced through papers.

“I hope you understand,” Slote said, “that those locks are meaningless. All the contents of that case have been photographed.”

“Yes,” Victor Henry said absently. He slipped a letter into his pocket. “Would you like a snooze? Please stick around for a while. Something may be doing.”

“Oh?” Out of his new and growing respect for Henry, Slote asked no questions, but stretched out on the hard narrow bed to a twang and squeak of springs. His head still reeled from the champagne that shadowy attendants had kept pouring at the movie. Next thing he knew, knocking woke him. Victor Henry was talking at the door to a man in a black leather coat. “Horosho, my gotovy,” he said in his atrocious accent. “Odnu minutu.” He closed the door. “Want to wash up or anything, Leslie? I’d like you to come with me.”

“Where to?”

“Back to the Kremlin. I have a letter from Harry Hopkins for the big cheese. I didn’t think I was going to get to hand it over in person, but maybe I am.”

“Good lord, does the ambassador know about this?”

“Yes. Admiral Standley brought him a note about it from the President. I gather he was annoyed, but he knows.”

Slote sat up. “Annoyed! I should think so. Mr. Hopkins has a way of doing these things. This is very outlandish, Captain Henry. Nobody should ever, ever see a head of state without going directly through the ambassador. How have you arranged this?”

“Me? I had nothing to do with it. I’m an errand boy. Hopkins wanted this letter to go to Stalin informally and privately or not at all. In my place you don’t argue with Harry Hopkins. I understand he talked to Oumansky. If it puts you in a false position, I guess I’ll go alone. There’ll be an interpreter.”

Calculating the angles in this astonishing business — mainly the angle of his own professional self-preservation — Slote began combing his hair at a yellowed wall mirror. “I’ll have to file a written report with the ambassador.”

“Sure.”

In a long, high-ceilinged, bleakly lit room lined with wall maps, Stalin sat at one end of a polished conference table, with many papers piled on a strip of green cloth before him. A stone ashtray at the dictator’s elbow brimmed with cigarette butts, suggesting that he had been steadily at work since the departure of the banquet guests. He now wore a rough khaki uniform which sagged and bulged, and he looked very weary. Pavlov, his usual English interpreter, sat beside him, a thin, pale, dark-haired young man with a clever, anxiously servile expression. There was nobody else in the big room. As the uniformed protocol officer ushered in the two Americans, Stalin rose, shook hands, with a silent gracious gesture waved them to chairs, and then sat down with an inquiring look at Captain Henry.

Henry handed him the letter and a round box wrapped in shiny blue paper. “Mr. Chairman, I’d better not inflict my bad Russian on you any longer,” he said in English, and Stalin carefully opened the White House envelope with a paper knife. Slote translated and Stalin replied in Russian, slightly inclining his head, “As you wish.” He passed to Pavlov the single handwritten pale green sheet, on which THE WHITE HOUSE was printed in an upper corner.

Pug said, as Stalin unwrapped the box, “And that is the special Virginia pipe tobacco Mr. Hopkins told you about that his son likes so much.” Pavlov translated this, and everything the American captain said thereafter, sometimes conveying Henry’s tone as well as a quick exact version of his words. Slote sat silent, nodding from time to time.

Stalin turned the round blue tin in his hands. “Mr. Hopkins is very thoughtful to remember our casual chat about pipe tobacco. Of course, we have plenty of good pipe tobacco in the Soviet Union.” He twisted open the tin with a quick wrench of strong hands and curiously inspected the heavy lead foil seal, before slashing it with a polished thumbnail and pulling a pipe from his pocket. “Now you can tell Mr. Hopkins that I tried his son’s tobacco.” Pug understood Stalin’s Russian in this small talk, but could not follow him after that.

Stalin stuffed the pipe, put a thick wooden match to it, and puffed fragrant blue smoke while Pavlov translated Hopkins’s letter aloud. After a meditative silence, the dictator turned veiled cold eyes on Victor Henry and proceeded to speak, pausing to let Pavlov catch up in English after three or four sentences. “That is a strange letter from Mr. Hopkins. We all know the United States manufactures millions of automobiles per year of many different models and types, including big luxurious, complicated machines such as Cadillacs and so forth. What is the problem with landing craft, then? Landing craft are armored lighters with small simple engines. Surely you can produce as many as you want to. Surely the British have plenty already. I cannot see this as a real obstacle to a second front in Europe now, as Mr. Hopkins states.”

Pug Henry pulled from his dispatch case sketches and production tables of landing craft. “Different types must be designed from scratch and manufactured, Mr. Chairman, to land against a solidly fortified coast. We expect mass production in mid-1942, at the latest. These papers may be of interest.”

Unexpectedly, in mid-translation, Stalin uttered a short harsh laugh and began to talk fast in Russian, straight at Victor Henry. Slote and Pavlov made quick notes, and when the dictator paused, Pavlov took over and spoke with much of Stalin’s hard sarcastic tone. “That is very fine! Mid-1942. Unfortunately, this is October 1941. If Mr. Hitler would only halt operations until mid-1942! But perhaps we cannot count on that. And what will happen meantime? I regard Mr. Harry Hopkins” — Stalin said Gospodin Garry Gopkins — “as a friend and a clever man. Doesn’t he know that any operation that the British can mount now — just a reconnaissance in force of a few divisions, if they can do no better — might decide the course of this war? The Germans have only very weak reserves, mere token forces, on the French coast. They are throwing everything into the battle on our front. Any action in the west might make them pause, and draw off just the decisive margin of strength here.”

Stalin doodled in red ink on a gray unlined pad during the interpretation, drawing a wolf.

Victor Henry said, “Mr. Chairman, I am instructed to answer any questions about the landing craft problem.”

Stalin used the back of his hand to shove aside the papers Pug Henry had laid before him. “Landing craft? But it is a question of will, not of landing craft. However, we will study the matter of landing craft. Of course, we have such machines too, for landing on defended coasts. Perhaps we can lend-lease some to the British. In 1915, when war equipment was more primitive than today, Mr. Churchill managed to put a big force ashore in Gallipoli, thousands of miles from England. Possibly he found the experience discouraging. But the Japanese have in recent years put ashore more than a million soldiers in China. Those men surely did not swim across, in such cold waters. So it is obviously a question of will, not of landing craft. I hope Mr. Hopkins will use his great influence to establish a second front now in Europe, because the outcome of the war against the Hitlerites may turn on that. I can say no more.”

The dictator finished the wolf in rapid strokes during the translation, and started another with bared fangs and a hanging tongue. He looked up at Henry with the oddly genial expression common in his photographs, and changed his tone. “Have you enjoyed your stay? Is there anything we can do for you?”

Victor Henry said, “Mr. Chairman, I have been a wartime military observer in Germany and in England. Mr. Hopkins asked me to go to the front here, if an opportunity arose, so as to bring him an eyewitness report.”

At the word “front,” Stalin shook his head. “No, no. We are obliged to guarantee the safety of our guests. That we cannot do, in the present stage of fighting. Mr. Hopkins would not forgive us if some misfortune befell you.”

“Mr. Hopkins has been unsparing of his own health, sir. It is wartime.”

An opaque wild look, almost the look in a gorilla’s eyes, came into Stalin’s gaze. “Well, you should understand that things are bad at the front. The Germans are breaking through again in force. We may soon see the worst hours for Russia since 1812. You will hear all the news tomorrow. That is why a second front now would earn for England the friendship of my people until the end of time.” He went back to work on the wolf.

Pug said soberly, “In view of this news, Mr. Chairman, I admire your cheerfulness of spirit at the banquet tonight.”

Stalin shrugged his broad sagging shoulders. “Wars are not won by gloom, nor by bad hospitality. Well if Mr. Hopkins wants you at the front, he must have good reasons. We will see what we can do. Give him my thanks for the letter and the tobacco. It is not bad tobacco, though I am used to my Russian tobacco. Please tell him my feelings about the second front. Perhaps your trip to our front could bring home the urgency. Mr. Hopkins is a good adviser to your great President, and as you are an emissary from him, I wish you well.”

Leaving the Kremlin and driving through the blackout, the two Americans said not a word. When the car stopped, Pug Henry spoke: “Well, I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I guess these fellows will take you home.”

“No, I’ll get out.” On the sidewalk, Slote touched Pug’s arm as the limousine drove off. “Let’s talk here. I was utterly shocked by this business of going to the front. If Mr. Hopkins knew of the catastrophic situation Stalin just admitted to” — the diplomat’s voice wavered and he cleared his throat — “he would surely withdraw those instructions.”

The night was ending, and though the icy street was still black, Pug could just see Slote’s pale face under his fur hat.

“I don’t agree with you on that. He’s a pretty tough customer, Hopkins.”

Slote persisted, “You won’t really get to the front, you know. They’ve just given some correspondents a tour. They kept them far behind the lines, feeding them caviar, quails, and champagne. Still, the Luftwaffe pulled an air raid on a village and almost nailed them.”

“Right, but that could happen to us here in Moscow, too.”

“But why go, for God’s sake?” Slote broke out in a ragged shrill tone. He lowered his voice. “At best you’ll see one tiny sector for a few hours. It’s foolhardy sightseeing. It’ll create endless trouble at the embassy, as well as for the Russians.”

Victor Henry chain-lit a cigarette. “Listen, if you can watch ten men under fire, you’ll learn a lot about an army’s morale in a few hours. Mr. Hopkins likes to call himself a glorified messenger boy. That’s an exaggeration, but I’m an unglorified one. Doing this job might give me the illusion that I’m earning my salary. Come upstairs for a nightcap. I have some good Scotch.”

“No, thank you. I’m going to write my report, and then try to get an hour’s sleep.”

“Well, cheer up. My own impression was that the big cheese was being affable, but that I won’t get to go.”

“That’s what I hope. No foreign military attaché has yet gone to the front, or near it. Good morning.”

During the talk the sky had turned violet, and Slote could see his way on the dead quiet streets. This was a relief, for he had more than once banged into lamp posts and fallen off curbs in the Moscow blackout. He had also been challenged at pistol-point by patrolmen. One walked toward him now in the gray dawn and gave him a suspicious squint, then passed on without a word.

In his flat Slote brewed coffee on the gas ring, and rapidly typed a long account of the banquet and the meeting with Stalin. When he had finished, he threw back the blackout curtains. The sun was shining. Staggering, bleary, he took a loose-leaf diary from a drawer and wrote briefly in it, ending with these words:

But the official report which I’ve just rattled off describes the meeting with Stalin in sufficient detail; and I’ll keep a copy in my files.

As for the Henrys, father and son, the puzzle is simply enough resolved after all. I saw the answer in the past few hours. They both have an instinct for action, and the presence of mind that goes with it. Byron displayed these traits in moments of physical danger. His father probably would too. But I’ve just seen him act in more sophisticated and subtle situations, requiring quick thinking, hardihood, and tact. It is not easy to keep one’s head in confronting a personage like Stalin, who has an aura like a large lump of radium, powerful, invisible, and poisonous. Victor Henry managed.

On reflection, I can understand why the ladies like such men. The man of action protects, feeds — and presumably fecundates, QED — more vigorously and reliably than the man of thought.

Possibly one can’t change one’s nature. Still one can perhaps learn and grow. Captain Henry suggested that I disregard orders and expose the Minsk documents to Fred Fearing or some newspaperman. Such an act goes entirely against my grain; and entirely for that reason, I intend to do it.

Chapter 53

Talky Tudsbury was having five o’clock tea alone in his hotel suite that day, with some light refreshment of sprats, cheese, sturgeon, black bread, and honey cakes, when Victor Henry came in and told him that he was going to the front. The correspondent got so excited that he stopped eating. “Good God, man, you are? With the Germans swarming in all over the place? It’s impossible. It’s just talk. Dear Christ, these Russians are good at putting you off with talk. You’ll never go.” He brushed up his moustaches and reached for more food.

“Well, maybe,” Pug said sinking into a chair and laying on his lap the briefcase stuffed with codes and harbor charts, which he had just collected at the navy ministry. He had had five or six hours’ broken sleep in four days. The room was jerking back and forth in his vision as he strove to stay awake. “But my clearance has just come in from pretty high up.”

Tudsbury was putting a chunk of bread heaped with sardines to his mouth. The morsel stopped in midair. He peered at Henry through his bottle-glass spectacles, and spoke in low quiet tones. “I’ll go with you.”

“The hell you will.”

“Victor, the correspondents went to the central front two weeks ago, when the Russians were counterattacking. The day they left, I had flu, with a sizzling temperature.” Tudsbury threw down the food, seized his cane, limped rapidly across the room, and began to put on a fur-lined coat and a fur hat. “Who’s handling this, Lozovsky? Can’t I just tell him you said I could come? I know them all and they love me. It’s up to you.”

Victor Henry did not want Tudsbury along, but he was exhausted and he was sure the Russians would refuse.

“Okay.”

“God bless you, dear fellow. Stay and finish my tea. Tell Pam I’ll be back before six, and she’s to retype my broadcast.”

“Where is she?”

“A letter came for her in the Foreign Office pouch. She went to get it.”

Pug fell asleep in the armchair where he sat. Cold fingers brushing his cheek woke him. “Hello there. Wouldn’t you rather lie down?” Pam stood over him, her face rosy from the frost, her eyes shining, wisps of brown hair showing under her gray lambskin hat.

“What? Oh!” He blinked and stretched. “What am I doing here? I guess I walked in and collapsed.”

“Where’s Talky?” She was talking off her hat and gloves. “Why did he leave his tea? That’s not like him.”

Sleep cleared from his brain like fog; he remembered his conversation with Tudsbury, and told her. Her face went stiff and strained. “The front? They’ll never let him go, but you? Victor, are you serious? Have you heard the BBC, or the Swedish radio?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I know better than to argue, but — I can tell you this, our embassy’s getting ready to be moved to the Urals or somewhere. By the bye, Ted’s all right.” She went to the desk, still in her fur coat, and picked up typed yellow sheets. “Oh, drat, another revision. Such niggling!”

By now Pug was used to her casual bombshells, but she dropped this one so swiftly that he wasn’t sure he had heard aright. “Pamela, what’s this? What about Ted?”

“He’s fine. Or safe, anyhow.”

“But where is he?”

“Oh, back in Blighty. Hardly the worse for wear, according to him. It seems he finally managed to escape — he and four French aviators — from a prison camp outside Strasbourg. He did have quite a few adventures in France and Belgium, straight out of the films. But he made it. I rather thought he would, sooner or later.” She sat down and took the cover off the typewriter.

“Good God, girl, that’s tremendous news.”

“Yes, isn’t it? You must read his letter. Seven pages, written on both sides, and quite amusing. He’s lost three stone, and he still has a bullet in his thigh — or, more accurately, in his behind. He’s quite chastened, he’ll take the desk job now — as soon as he can sit at a desk, he adds rather ruefully! And that means I’m to come straight home and marry him, of course.”

Pamela broke her offhand manner with a long glance at Victor Henry. She put on black-rimmed glasses. “I’d better get at this. And you obviously need some sleep.”

“No use. The mission’s leaving soon. I have to see them off. Pam, that’s splendid about Ted. I’m very glad and relieved.”

Rubbing her hands and blowing on them, she said, “Lord, it would be a relief at that, wouldn’t it? I mean to get away from Talky’s handwriting and his optimistic drivel.”

Tudsbury burst in on them a little later, his face aflame, his nose empurpled by the cold, just as Henry was putting on his bridge coat.

“Mojet byt! Qualified yes, by God! They’ll confirm it tomorrow, but Victor, I believe I’m going with you! — Pam, have you finished yet? It’s getting near that time. -The Narkomindel’s in mad confusion, Victor, the news from the front must be really bad, but God Almighty that clearance you’ve got, whatever it is, certainly is the secret password! Of course they adore me, and they know I’m entitled to a trip, but the look that came over Lozovsky’s face, when I said you insisted that I accompany you!”

“Oh, Talky!” Pamela stopped typing, and glared at him. “Victor didn’t insist at all He couldn’t have.”

“Pam, one has to bludgeon these people.” Tudsbury’s face creased in a tricky grin. “I said you two were old friends, in fact and that Victor rather liked you and wanted to oblige me. So please back my story if occasion arises.”

“You unscrupulous old horror,” Pamela said, her face mantling pink.

“Well, that’s true enough, as far as it goes,” Victor Henry said. “I have to get on to the airport now. Pamela’s got some great news, Talky.”

The intrusion of Tudsbury snagged the trip. The Narkomindel, the Foreign Office, hemmed, hawed, and stalled. Days went by. Pug remained stuck in Moscow with nothing to do. The ambassador and the attachés acted cool and distant, for Victor Henry was that plague of the Foreign Service, an interloper from Washington. Once he dropped in on Slote’s office and found the diplomat pale, harassed and given to pointless giggling.

“Say, what’s my daughter-in-law doing on your desk?” Pug said. Natalie smiled from a silver frame, looking younger and fatter, with her hair in an unbecoming knot.

“Oh! Yes, that’s Natalie,” Slote laughed. “D’you suppose Byron would mind? She gave it to me ages ago, and I’m still fond of her. What’s happened to your trip? You won’t have far to go, at the rate the Germans are coming on, hee hee.”

“God knows,” Pug said, thinking that this man was in bad shape. “Maybe it’s all off.”

The main trouble, it turned out, was Pamela. Her father had asked to bring her along, claiming helplessness without her. He had since withdrawn the request. But the Narkomindel had fed the three names into the great obscure machine that handled the matter, and there was no starting over. Lozovsky began to lose his genial humor when Pug appeared or telephoned. “My dear Captain Henry, you will hear when you will hear. There are other equally pressing problems in the Soviet Union just now.”

So Pug wandered the streets, observing the changes in Moscow. New red-and-black posters blazed appeals for volunteers, in the crude bold socialist imagery of muscular young workmen and peasant women brandishing bayonets at spiders, snakes, or hyenas with Hitler faces. Labor battalions shouldering spades and picks marched raggedly here and there; big trucks crammed with children crisscrossed the city; long queues stood at food shops, despite the heavy rain that persisted day after day. Soldiers and horse-drawn carts vanished from the streets. Under the sodden caps and wet shawls of street crowds, the swarm of white high-cheekboned faces wore a different look. The Slavic phlegm was giving way to knotted brows, inquiring glances, and a hurrying pace; Victor Henry thought that the approach of the Germans made the Muscovites look more like New Yorkers.

Lozovsky finally telephoned him at the hotel, his voice ringing cheerily. “Well, Captain, will tomorrow at dawn suit you? Kindly come here to the Narkomindel, wear warm clothing, a raincoat, and good boots, and be prepared to be out three or four days.”

“Right. Is the girl coming too?”

“Of course.” The Russian sounded surprised and a bit offended. “That was the problem. Really it was not easy to clear, though we wanted to make the exact arrangements you desired. Our Russian girls face combat conditions as a matter of course, but we know that foreign ladies are much less hardy. Still we all know Miss Tudsbury, she is attractive, and one understands such a devoted friendship. It is arranged.”

Victor Henry decided to ignore the jollying, even ribald tone, and not to try to rewrite this record. “I’m grateful, and I’ll be there.”

They drove southward from Moscow in the rain, and all morning ground along in a thunderous parade of army trucks, stopping only for a visit to an amazingly well camouflaged airfield for interceptors, in the woods just outside the capital. The little black automobile, a Russian M-1 that looked and sounded much like a 1930 Ford, made cramped quarters, especially with unexplained packages and boxes lining the floor. When they had gone about a hundred miles, their guide, a mild-faced, bespectacled tank colonel, with the odd name of Porphyry Amphiteatrov, suggested that they stop to eat lunch and stretch, their legs. That was when they first heard the German guns.

The driver, a burly silent soldier with a close-trimmed red beard, turned off to a side road lined with old trees. They wound among cleared fields and copses of birch, glimpsing two large white country houses in the distance, and entered a gloomy lane that came to a dead end in wild woods. Here they got out, and the colonel led them along a footpath to a small grassy mound under the trees where garlands of fresh flowers lay.

“Well, this was Tolstoy’s country estate, you know,” said Amphiteatrov. “It is called Yasnaya Polyana, and there is his grave. Since it was on the way, I thought you might be interested.”

Tudsbury stared at the low mound and spoke in a in a hushed way not usual for him. “The grave of Tolstoy? No tomb? No stone?”

“He ordered it so. ‘Put me in the earth,’ he said, ‘in the woods where I played Green Stick with my brother Nicholas when we were boys…’” Amphiteatrov’s bass voice sounded coarse and loud over the dripping of water through the yellow leaves.

Victor Henry cocked his head and glanced at the colonel, for he heard a new noise: soft irregular thumps, faint as the plop of the rain on the grass. The colonel nodded. “Well, when the wind is right, the sound carries quite far.”

“Ah, guns?” said Tudsbury, with a show of great calm.

“Yes, guns. Well, shall we have a bite? The house where he worked is interesting, but it is not open nowadays.”

The bearded driver brought the lunch to benches out of sight of the burial spot. They ate black bread, very garlicky sausages, and raw cucumbers, washed down with warm beer. Nobody spoke. The rain dripped, the army trucks murmured on the highway, and the distant guns thumped faintly. Pamela broke the silence. “Who put the flowers there?”

“The caretakers, I suppose,” said the colonel.

“The Germans must never get this far,” she said.

“Well, that’s a spiritual thought,” the colonel said. “I don’t think they will, but Yasnaya Polyana is not a strong point, and so the great Tolstoy must now take his chances with the rest of the Russians.” He smiled, suddenly showing red gums, and not looking mild at all. “Anyway, the Germans can’t kill him.”

Tudsbury said, “They should have read him a little more carefully.”

“We still have to prove that. But we will.”

The sun momentarily broke through and birds began to sing. Victor Henry and Pamela Tudsbury sat together on a bench, and light shafted theatrically through the yellow leaves, full on the girl. She wore gray slacks tucked into white fur snowboots, and a gray lamb coat and hat.

“Why are you staring at me, Victor?”

“Pam, I’ve never visited Tolstoy’s grave before, certainly not with you, but I swear I remember all this, and most of all the nice way you’ve got that hat tilted.” As her hand went up to her hat he added, “And I could have told you you’d lift that hand, and the sun would make your ring sparkle.”

She held out her fingers stiffly, looking at the diamond. “Ted and I had a bit of a spat about that. When he produced it. I wasn’t quite ready to wear it.”

The colonel called, “Well, Captain, I think we go on?”

Edging into the thickening traffic stream on the main road, the little black automobile rolled in the direction of the gunfire. Trucks filled the highway, one line moving toward the front, one returning. Whiskered men and stout sunburned women, working in fields between stretches of birch forest, paid no attention to the traffic. Children playing near the highway ignored the war vehicles too. In tiny villages, washing hung outside the log cabins and the wooden houses with gaily painted window frames. One odd observation forced itself on Victor Henry: the further one got from Moscow, the nearer to the front, the more normal and peaceful Russia appeared. The capital behind them was one vast apprehensive scurry. Directly outside it, battalions of women, boys, and scrawny men with glasses — clerks, journalists, and schoolteachers — had been frantically digging antitank ditches and planting concrete and steel obstacles in myriads. Beyond that belt of defense began tranquil forests and fields, with fall colors splashing the stretches of green conifer. Mainly the air raid shelters for trucks along the highway — cleared spaces in the woods, masked with cut evergreen boughs — showed there was an invasion on.

Toward evening the car rolled into a small town and stopped at a yellow frame house on a muddy square. Here red-cheeked children lined up at a pump with pails; smoke was rising from chimneys; other children were driving in goats and cows from broad fields, stretching far and flat under a purpling cloudy sky; and three burly old men were hammering and sawing at the raw frame of a new unfinished house. This was the strangest thing Pug saw all that day — these Russian ancients, building a house in the twilight, within earshot of German artillery much louder here than at the Tolstoy estate, with yellow flashes thick like summer lightning on the western horizon.

“Well, this is their home,” the tank colonel replied, when Victor Henry remarked on the sight, as they climbed out of the car. “Where should they go? We have the Germans stopped here. Of course, we took out the pregnant women and the mothers with babies long ago.”

In the warm little dining room of the house, now regiment headquarters, the visitors crowded around the table with the tank colonel, four officers of the regiment, and a General Yevlenko, who wore three khaki stars on his thick wide shoulders. He was the chief of staff of the army group in that sector, and Colonel Amphiteatrov told Victor Henry that he had just happened to be passing through the town. This huge man with fair hair, a bulbous peasant nose, and big smooth pink jaws, appeared to fill one end of the narrow smoky room. Much taken with Pamela, Yevlenko kept passing gallant compliments urging food and drink on her. His fleshy face at moments settled into an abstracted, stony, deeply sad and tired look; then it would kindle with jollity, though the eyes remained filmed by fatigue in sunken purple sockets.

A feast almost in Kremlin style appeared, on the yellow cloth, course by course, brought by soldiers: champagne, caviar, smoked fish, soup, fowls, steaks, and cream cakes. The mystery of this magnificent stunt was cleared up when Pug Henry glanced into the kitchen as one of the soldier-waiters opened and closed the door. The bearded driver of the M-1 automobile was sweating over the stove in a white apron. Pug had seen him carrying boxes from the car into the house. Evidently he was really a cook, and a superb one.

The general talked freely about the war, and the colonel translated. His army group was outnumbered in this sector and had far fewer tanks and guns than the Nazis. Still, they might yet surprise Fritz. They had to hold a line much too long for their strength, according to doctrine; but a good doctrine, like a good regiment, sometimes had to stretch.

The Germans were taking fearful losses. He reeled off many figures of tanks destroyed, guns captured, men killed. Any army could advance if its commanders were willing to leave blood smeared on each yard of earth gained. The Germans were getting white as turnips with the bloodletting. This drive was their last big effort to win the war before winter came.

“Will they take Moscow?” Tudsbury asked.

“Not from this direction,” retorted the general, “nor do I think they will from any other. But if they do take it, well, we’ll drive them out of Moscow, and then we’ll drive them out of our land. We are going to beat them. The Germans have no strategic policy. Their idea of a strategic policy is to kill, to loot, and to take slaves. In this day and age that is not a strategic policy. Furthermore, their resources are basically inferior to ours. Germany is a poor country. Finally, they overestimated themselves and they underrated us. According to V. I. Lenin, that is a very dangerous mistake in war. It is very dangerous in war, Lenin said, to think too much of yourself and too little of your opponent. The result can only be inaccurate plans and very unpleasant surprises, as, for example, defeat.”

Pamela said, “Still, they have come so far.”

The general turned a suddenly menacing, brutally tough, piteously exhausted, angry big face to her. His expression dissolved into a flirtatious smirk. “Yes, my dear girl, and I see that you mean that remark well and do not like what has happened any more than we do. Yes, the Nazis, through unparalleled perfidy, did achieve surprise. And there is another thing. They are cocky. Their tails are up. They are professional winners, having already won several campaigns, and driven the indomitable British into the sea, and so forth. They believe they are unbeatable. However, as they watch their comrades die like flies in Russia, I think they are starting to wonder. At first they would advance in column down our highways, not even bothering to guard their flanks. Lately they’ve grown more careful. Yes, Hitler trained them to maraud, kill, and loot, and those are old Teutonic customs, so they are good at it. We are a peace-loving people, and I suppose in a mental sense we were caught unprepared. So, as you say, they have come far. Now we have two jobs: to keep them from coming farther, and then to send them back where they came from, the ones we haven’t squashed into our mud.” He turned to Henry and Tudsbury. “We will do the job faster, naturally, if you help us with supplies, for we have lost a lot. But most of all, the opening of a front in western Europe can lead to the quick destruction of these rats. The English might be surprised to find they could march straight to Berlin once they set foot in France. I believe every German who can shoot a gun straight has been shipped here for this attack.”

“I never broadcast without advocating a second front now,” Tudsbury said.

The general nodded. “You are well known and esteemed as a fiend of the Soviet people.” He glanced at Victor Henry. “Well, and what are you interested in seeing Captain? Unfortunately, this far inland, we cannot show you very good naval maneuvers.”

“General, suppose — of course this is absurd, but — suppose my President could visit your front, in a cloak of invisibility from the fairy tales.”

“We have such stories,” Yevlenko said “but unfortunately no such cloaks.”

“What would you like him to see?”

The general glanced at the four officers sitting elbow to elbow at the table across from the visitors, smoking continuously, four kinky-haired pale Russians with shrewd, weary eyes, who looked like quadruplets in their identical brown tunics. None of them had as yet uttered a word.” Now he addressed them, and a colloquy in rapid Russian broke out. He turned back to Henry. “You put that well. It will be arranged. As the situation is a bit fluid, I suggest you make a start at dawn.” He said to Pamela, gesturing upward, “A bedroom has been cleared for you. The gentlemen will bunk with these officers.”

“Good heavens, a bedroom? I counted on sleeping on the floor or on the ground in my clothes,” Pamela said. “Anyway, I’m not at all sleepy yet.”

As the colonel translated, Yevlenko’s face lit up. “So? You talk like one of our Russian girls, not like a delicate Englishwoman.” Offering her his arm, he led them into the next room, where worn, inked-over maps hung on the walls, and the fusty house furniture was jumbled in with desks, stools, typewriters, and black twisting telephone cables. Soldiers pushed furniture, screeching here and there to clear a space around a shabby upright piano with bare wooden keys. An officer sat, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and thumped out “There’ll Always Be an England.” Pamela laughed when she recognized the tune, and stood and sang it. The general led applause and called for more champagne. The pianist began stumbling through “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” With an elegant low bow, General Yevlenko invited Pamela to dance. He towered head and shoulders above her, so they made a grotesque pair, two-stepping stiffly round and round the narrow clear space in heavy muddy boots, but his face shone with enjoyment. She danced with other officers, then with the general again, as the pianist ran through the few American tunes he knew and started over on “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Everybody in the room quaffed much champagne and vodka. In the doorway soldiers crowded, watching with round gay eyes the foreign lady in gray pants dancing and drinking with the officers. Pug knew that she hated to dance, especially with strangers; he recalled almost the first words he had heard Pamela utter, on the Bremen in the dim far past of peacetime: “I shall get myself a cane and a white wig.” But she made a game show.

The pianist began playing Russian music — which he did much better — and Pamela sank into a chair while the officers danced alone or with each other. The laughing and the handclapping grew louder. One handsome young soldier with a week’s growth of beard burst into the room and did a bravura solo, bounding, squatting, pirouetting, then acknowledging applause with the bow of a professional ballet artist. The general lumbered to his feet and began to dance by himself; he too twirled, jumped, then folded his arms and squatted, kicking his feet and hoarsely shouting, “Skoreye! Skoreye! Faster! Faster!” His heavy steps shook the floor. The soldiers broke into the room to ring him and to cheer; the room reeked of men’s dirty bodies, of smoke, of alcohol, yet pressed beside Pamela, Victor Henry could faintly smell her carnation perfume too. When General Yevlenko finished with a shout and jumped up panting, the men roared and clapped, and Pamela came and kissed his perspiring big red face and he heartily kissed her mouth, causing laughter and more roars; and that was the end. The general left. The soldiers pushed the furniture back as it had been. The visitors went to sleep.

Chapter 54

At dawn, it was raining hard. Children and animals floundered in the dim violet light all over the square, and trucks splashed, skidded and spun their wheels, throwing up curtains of muck. The back seat of the car was roomier, since many of the packages had been eaten or drunk up. Victor Henry thought of complimenting the master chef at the wheel, but decided against it. Pamela, squeezed between her father and Pug, had managed a touch of lipstick and eye makeup. In these surroundings she looked like a movie star visiting the troops, Pug thought.

“Well, we go,” said Colonel Amphiteatrov. “In this weather we will go slower, and not so far.” The car bumped and slid about a hundred yards, then sank and stalled.”

“Well, I hope we will go farther than this,” said the colonel. Soldiers in greatcoats surrounded the car. With shouting and shoving they got it to move. The wheels hit solider ground and the car went splashing, rocking, and slewing out of the town. After a run on asphalted highway through the fields, they took a narrow mud road into a forest. The chef drove well (or the chauffeur cooked well — Pug never did find out the truth), and he kept the car going through terrible ruts, mounds, and holes, for perhaps twenty minutes. Then the car stopped dead. Pug got out with the driver and the colonel. The hubs of the rear wheels were buried in ropy red mud. It was still raining heavily. They were stuck in wild woods, so quiet that rain hitting the hot hood made a hiss.

“I suppose he has a shovel,” Pug said.

“Yes, I suppose so.” The colonel was looking around. He walked off into the woods some yards ahead — to relieve himself, Pug imagined, before getting to work. Pug heard voices, then hoarse engine snorts. The bushes began to move. Out of the shrubbery a light tank appeared, covered with boughs, its cannon pointed at Pug. Behind it walked the colonel and three muddy men in greatcoats. The American had been looking straight at the mottled, camouflaged cannon, yet had not noticed it until it started toward him. The tank chugged out of the trees, swerved, and backed on the road. Soldiers quickly attached a chain and the car was pulled loose in a moment, with the passengers inside. Then the bough-festooned turret opened, and two bristly, boyish Slav heads poked out. Pamela jumped from the car, splashed and stumbled to the tank, and kissed the tankists, to their embarrassed pleasure. The turret closed, the tank backed into the wood to its former place, and the black automobile went lurching on into the forest. Thus they were bogged and rescued several times, and so discovered that the wet silent forest was swarming with the Red Army.

They arrived at a washout that severed the road like a creek in flood. The gully’s sides bore gouge marks of caterpillar treads and thick truck tires, but obviously the auto could not struggle across. Here soldiers emerged from the woods and laid split logs across the gash, smooth side up, lashing them together into a shaky but adequate bridge. This was a sizable crew, and their leader, a fat squinting lieutenant invited the party to stop and refresh themselves. There was no way of telling him from his men, except that he gave the orders and they obeyed. They were all dressed alike and they were all a red earth color. He led the visitors through the trees and down into an icy, mucky dugout roofed with timbers, and so masked by brush and shrubs that Victor Henry did not see an entrance until the officer began to sink into the earth. The dugout was an underground cabin of tarred logs, crisscrossed with telephone cables, lit by an oil lamp and heated by an old open iron stove burning chopped branches. The officer, squinting proudly at a brass samovar on the raw plank table, offered them tea. While water boiled, a soldier conducted the men to a latrine so primitive and foul — though Tudsbury and the Russians happily used it — that Pug went stumbling off into the trees, only to be halted by a sentry who appeared like a forest spirit. While the American attended to nature, the soldier stood guard, observing with some interest how a foreigner did it. Returning to the dugout, Pug encountered three big blank-faced Russians, marching with bayonets around Pamela, who looked vaguely embarrassed and amused.

Before they left, the lieutenant showed Pug and Tudsbury through the soldiers’ dugouts, obviously proud of the men’s workmanship. These freshly dug puddle-filled holes in the damp earth, smelling like graves, did have timbered roofs that might survive a shell hit, and the mud-caked, unshaven soldiers, crouched in their greatcoats in the gloom, appeared content enough to smoke and talk and wait for orders here. Pug saw some feeding themselves with torn chunks of gray bread and dollops of stew from a muddy tureen lugged by two muddy soldiers. Munching on their bread dragging at their cigarettes, these men placidly stared at the visitors, and slowly moved their heads to watch them walk through the trenches. Health-looking, well-nourished, they seemed as much at home in the red earth as earthworms, and they seemed almost as tough, abundant, and simple a form of life. Here Victor first got an ineradicable feeling that Yevlenko had told truth: that the Germans might gain the biggest victories, but that the Red Army would in time drive them out.

“Ye gods,” Tudsbury managed to mutter on the way back to the car, “Belgium in 1915 was nothing like this. They live like animals.”

“They can,” Henry replied, and said no more, for Amphiteatrov’s eye was on them in these brief asides.

“Well, we are not really far from our destination,” the Russian said, wiping rain from his face and helping Pamela into the back seat. “If not for the mud, we would have been there now.”

“The car bumped and slopped out of the woods. Cleared fields stretched for miles ahead, flat as a table, under gray low clouds. “There’s where we’re going.” Amphiteatrov pointed straight ahead to a distant line of forest. They came to a crossroads of mud churned up like water at a boil, and though the road ahead looked good, the driver slithered the car sharp right.

“Why don’t we drive straight on?” Pamela said. “Doesn’t the rod go through?”

“Oh, yes. It goes through. It’s mined. This whole area” — the colonel’s arm swept around the quiet stubbly fields — “is mined.”

Pug said, somewhat chilled, “Nice to know these things when you start out.”

Amphiteatrov gave him his infrequent wolfish, red-gummed smile, and wiped a clear drop from his thin bluish nose. “Well, yes, Captain. Your tourist guide in these parts should really know what is what. Otherwise your health could be affected.”

They jolted along the soupy track in rain that made it soupier, but in time the car sank with all four wheels into the mire, and halted amid long rows of yellow stubble stretching out of sight. No rescuers appeared; they could not have, without rising from the earth, but Pug half thought they might. The driver shovelled the wheels clear and laid planks to the back tires. When the passengers got out to lighten the car, Amphiteatrov warned them to stay in the road, for mines were planted everywhere under the stubble. Showering muck and splinters all over them, the car lurched free. On they went.

Pug gave up trying to guess the direction. They never passed a road marker or signpost. The low gray clouds showed no sun patch. In the forest of the earthworm soldiers, the artillery thumps had been fainter than in the village. Here they were considerably louder. But zigzags in the front line could cause that. Obviously they had stopped going west, because westward were the Germans. The car appeared to be meandering five miles or so behind the fire zone.

“Here we will go a bit out of the way,” the tank colonel said at another crossroads, “but you will see something interesting.” They entered fields where tall yellow-green stalks of grain stood unharvested and rotting. After a mile or so Amphiteatrov told the driver to stop. “Perhaps you won’t mind stretching your legs,” he said. “You all have nice thick boots.” He gave Pamela an odd look. “But you might find this walk boring. Perhaps you will stay with the driver here?”

“I’ll come, unless you tell me to stay.”

“Very well. Come.”

They went pushing in among the stalks. The wet quiet field of overripe grain smelled sweet, almost like an orchard. But the visitors, squelching along behind Amphiteatrov in a file, soon glanced at each other in revulsion as a rotten stench hit their noses. They broke into a clear space and saw why. They were looking at a battlefield.

In every direction, the grain was crushed flat in crisscrossing swathes of brown muck. Random patches of stalks still stood; and amid the long brown slashes and the green-yellow clumps, damaged tanks lay scattered on their sides, or turned clear over, or canted, their camouflage paint blistered and burned black, their caterpillar tracks torn, their armor plate blown open. Seven of the tanks bore German markings; two were light Russian T-26 tanks, such as Pug had often seen moving through Moscow. The stink rose from German corpses, sprawled in green forms here and there on the ground, and others slumped in blown-open tanks. Their dead purple faces were bloated disgustingly and covered with fat black flies, but one could see they had been youngsters. Pamela turned pale and clapped a handkerchief to her face.

“Well, I am sorry,” said the colonel, an ugly gleam lighting his face. “This happened only day before yesterday. These Fritzes were probing and got caught. Their comrades went away from here and wouldn’t stop to dig graves, being in a slight hurry.”

Helmets, papers, and broken bottles were littered among the tanks and the corpses, and the oddest sight was a mess of women’s underwear — pink, blue, and white drawers and petticoats — heaped soiled and sodden in the mud near an overturned tank. Pamela, eyebrows rising over the handkerchief, pointed to these.

“Well, funny, isn’t it? I suppose Fritz stole those from a village. The Germans steal everything they can lay their hands on. That is why they have come into our country, after — to steal. We had a tough tank fight around Vyazma a month ago. One tank we blew up had a large fine marble clock in it, and also a dead pig. The fire ruined that pig. That was a pity. It was a very good pig. Well, I thought this night interest you.”

Pictures of hocked-out panzers were common in Moscow, but before this Victor Henry had seen actual German tanks only in Berlin, clanking down boulevards lined with red swastika flags, to the blare of brass-band marches over the loudspeakers and the hurrahs of crowds giving Nazi salutes; or else massed factory-fresh on trains of flat cars chugging to the front. Seeing a few broken and overturned in a desolate Russian cornfield two thousand miles from Berlin, with their crewmen rotting beside them in the mud, was a hard jolt. He said to the tank colonel, “Aren’t these Mark Threes? How could your T-26’s knock them out? They don’t fire a shell that can penetrate the Mark Three.”

Amphiteatrov grinned. “Well, very good. For a seaman you know a bit about tank warfare. But you had better ask the battalion commander who won this battle, so let us be on our way.”

They backtracked to the crossroads, headed toward the forest, and arrived at what looked like an open-air machine shop for tank repairs, in a village of a dozen or so thatched log cabins straggling along the road through wild woods. Detached caterpillar tracks stretched long and straight on the ground under the trees; bogie wheels were off; guns were off; and on every side men in black or blue coveralls hammered, filed, greased, and welded, shouting in Russian and laughing at each other. Strolling down the street in an olive-colored greatcoat too large for him, a short, hook-nosed, swarthy officer broke into a trot when he saw the black automobile. He saluted the colonel, then the two embraced and kissed. Introducing the visitors, Amphiteatrov said, “Major Kaplan, I showed our friends those busted German tanks out there. Our American Navy friend asked a real tankist’s question. He asked, how could T-26’s knock out Panzer Mark Threes?”

The battalion commander grinned from ear to ear, clapped Victor Henry on the back, and said in Russian, “Good, come this way.” Beyond the last cabin, he led them into the woods, past two lines of light tanks ranged under the trees and draped with camouflage netting over their own green-and-sand blotches. “Here we are,” he said proudly. “This is how we knocked out the Mark Threes.”

Dispersed in the thickets, all but invisible under branches and nets, five armored monsters thrust heavy square turrets with giant guns high in the air. Tudsbury’s mouth fell open, as he stared up at them. He nervously brushed his moustaches with a knuckle. “My God! What are these things?”

“Our newest Russian tank,” said Amphiteatrov. “General Yevlenko thought it might interest President Roosevelt.”

“Fantastic!” said Talky. “Why, I’d heard you had these monsters, but — What do they weigh? A hundred tons? Look at that gun!”

The Russians smiled at each other. Amphiteatrov said, “It’s a good tank.”

Tudsbury asked if they might climb inside one and to Pug’s surprise the colonel agreed. Young tankists helped the lame fat Englishman to the hatch, as Pug scrambled up. Inside the command turret, despite the clutter of machinery and instruments and the bulky gun breech, there was a lot of elbowroom. This machine smelled startlingly like a new car; Pug guessed this came from the heavy leather seats for the gunner and the commander. He knew very little about tanks, but the workmanship of the raw metal interior seemed good, despite some crude instrument brackets and wiring. The dials, valves, and controls had an old-fashioned German look.

“Great God, Henry, it’s a land battleship,” Tudsbury said. “When I think of the tiny tin cans we rode in! Why, the best German tanks today are eggshells to this. Bloody eggshells! What a surprise!”

When they climbed out, soldiers were clustering around the tank, perhaps a hundred or more, with others coming through the trees. On the flat hull stood Pamela, embarrassed and amused under the male stares. Bundled in mud-caked lambskin, Pamela was not a glamorous object, but her presence seemed to thrill and hypnotize the tankists. A pale moonfaced officer with glasses and long yellow teeth stood beside her. Major Kaplan introduced him as the political officer. “The commissar would like to present all of you to the troops,” said Amphiteatrov to Victor Henry, “as he feels this is a serious occasion that can be used to bolster their fighting spirit.”

“By all means,” Victor Henry said.

He could understand only fragments of the strident quick-tumbling harangue of the moonfaced commissar, but the earnest tones, the waving fist, the Communist slogans, the innocent, attentive faces of the handsome young tankists, made a clear enough picture. The commissar’s speech was half a revivalist sermon and half a football coach’s pep talk. Suddenly the soldiers applauded, and Amphiteatrov began to translate, in bursts of three or four sentences at a time, during which the moon face beamed at him:

“In the name of the Red Army, I now welcome the American naval captain, Genry, the British war correspondent, Tudsbury, and especially the brave English newspaperwoman, Pamela, to our front. It is always good for a fighting man’s morale to see a pretty face.” (Laughter among the men.) “But we have no evil thoughts, Miss Tudsbury, we think only of our own little sweethearts back home, naturally. Besides, you father has wisely come along to protect you from the romantic and virile young Russian tankists.” (Laughter and handclaps.) “You have showed us that the British and American peoples have not forgotten us in our struggle against the Fascist hyenas.

Comrade Stalin has said that the side which has more petroleum engines will win this war. Why is the petroleum engine so important? Because petroleum is the biggest source of energy today, and energy wins wars. We tankists know that! Hitler and the Germans thought they would make a lot of petroleum engines in a hurry, put them in tanks and aircraft, and steal a march on the world. Hitler even hoped that certain ruling circles in America and England would help him once he decided to attack the peaceful Soviet people. Well, he miscalculated. These two great nations have formed an unshakable front with the Soviet peoples. That is what the presence of our visitors shows us. We three countries possess many more petroleum engines than the Germans, and since we can manufacture still more engines faster than they can, because we have much larger industries, we will win this war.

“We will win it faster if our fiends will hasten to send us plentiful war supplies, because the Nazi bandits will not quit until we have killed a great many of them. Above all, we will win much faster if our British allies will open a second front at once and kill some German soldiers too. Certain people think it is impossible to beat Germans. So let me ask this battalion: have you fought Germans?”

Twilight had fallen during the harangue, and Pug could barely see the nearest soldiers’ faces. A roar came from the darkness: “DA!”

“Have you beaten them?”

“DA!”

“Are you afraid of Germans?”

“NYET!” — and barking male laughter.

“Do you think the British should be afraid to open a second front against them?”

“NYET!” — and more laughter, and another bellow, a college cheer, in Russian, “Second front now! Second front now!”

“Thank you, my comrades. And now to dinner, and then back to our tanks, in which we have won many victories and will win more, for our socialist motherland, our sweethearts, our mothers, our wives, and our children, and for Comrade Stalin!”

A tremendous college cheer in the gloom: “WE SERVE THE SOVIET UNION!”

“The meeting is over,” hoarsely cried the commissar, as the moon rose over the trees.

Pug came awake from restless sleep on a straw pallet, on the dirt floor of a log cabin. Beside him in blackness Talky Tudsbury liquidly snored. Groping for a cigarette and lighting it, he saw Pamela as the match flared upright on the only bed, her back to the plastered log wall, her eyes glittering. “Pam?”

“Hello there. I still feel as though we’re bumping and sliding in mud. D’you suppose if I stepped outside, a sentry would shoot me?”

“Let’s try. I’ll step out first. If I get shot, you go back to bed.”

“Oh, that’s a fine plan. Thank you.”

Pug pulled on the cigarette, and in the red glow Pamela came over and clasped hands. Moving along the rough wall, Pug found the door and opened a blue rectangle in the dark. “I’ll be damned. Moon. Stars.”

A high moon, partly veiled by swift-rolling clouds, dusted the thatched huts and the rutted empty road blue-gray. Across the road in the woods, soldiers were sadly singing to an accordion. Victor Henry and Pamela Tudsbury sat down on a rough bench, hands clasped, huddling close in the frigid wind which blew straight up the road.

Underfoot the mud was ridged hard.

“Dear God,” Pamela said, “it’s a long long way to Tipperary, isn’t it?”

“Washington, D.C.’s even further.”

“Thanks for bringing me out, Victor. I was sitting there not daring to move. I love the smell of the countryside, but lord, that wind cuts you!”

Yellow flashes ran along the sky and loud thumps followed fast. Pamela winced against him, with a little gasp, “Oh, oh! Look at that. Talky was a pig to drag me out here, wasn’t he? Of course it suits him. He dictated two hours by candlelight tonight, and he couldn’t have written a line himself. It’s quite a story, I’ll say that. Are those tanks as startling as he claims? He says in his last sentence that if the Soviet Union can mass-produce them, the war’s as good as over.”

“Well, that’s journalism. Size isn’t everything. Any tank, no matter how big, can be an incinerator for crews if it’s built wrong. How maneuverable is it? How vulnerable is it? The Germans’ll find the weak spots. They’ll rush out a new gun that can penetrate these things. They’re good at that. Still, it’s quite a tank.”

“Count on you!” Pamela laughed. “I think that was why I couldn’t sleep. I had this vision of the war coming to a sudden end. It was such a weird, dazzling idea! The Germans beaten, Hitler dead or locked up, the lights going on again in London, the big cleanup, and then life continuing the way it used to be! All because of these monster tanks rolling by the thousands to Berlin — my God, those guns do sound close.”

“It’s a pipe dream,” Victor Henry said. “The Germans are winning. We’re pretty close to Moscow here, Pam.”

After a silence she said, looking up at the moon and stars and then at Pug’s shadowy face, “When you just said those tanks couldn’t end the war, do you know what? I felt relieved. Relieved! What kind of mad reaction was that?”

“Well, the war’s something different, while it lasts.” Victor Henry gestured at the angry yellow flare-ups on the black western clouds. “The expensive fireworks — the travel to strange places -”

“The interesting company,” Pamela said.

“Yes, Pam. The interesting company.”

The accordion was playing alone now, a plaintive tune like a lullaby, half drowned by the cracking and sighing of trees in the wind.

“What is that sensation of sudden remembering supposed to mean?” she said. “The sort of thing you felt yesterday at the Tolstoy place?”

Pug said, “Isn’t it a kind of short circuit in the brain? Some irrelevant stimulus triggers off the sense of recognition when it shouldn’t. So I once read.”

“On the Bremen, the second day out,” said Pamela, “I was walking the deck in the morning. And so were you, going the other way. We passed each other twice. It was getting silly. I decided to ask you, next time we passed, to walk with me. And I suddenly knew you’d ask me. I knew the exact words you’d use. You used them. I made a remark about your wife as though I were acting a play, and your answer came like the next line in the play, all old and familiar. I’ve never forgotten that.”

A tall soldier, muffed in his greatcoat, trudged by with smoking breath, the unsheathed bayonet of his rifle glinting in the moonlight. He stopped to glance at them, and passed on.

“Where are we heading tomorrow, Victor?”

“I’m going into the front line. You and Talky will stay in a town several miles back. Up front one sometimes has to make a dash for it, the colonel says, and of course Talky can’t do that.”

“Why must you go?”

“Well, Amphiteatrov offered. It’ll be informative.”

“This is the flight to Berlin again.”

“No. I’ll be on the ground all the way, on friendly territory. Quite a difference.”

“How long will you be gone from us?”

“Just a few hours.”

A green radiance blinded them, a sudden blaze filling the heavens. Pamela uttered a cry. As their pupils adjusted to the shock they saw four smoky green lights floating very slowly down below the thickening clouds, and heard the thrum of engines. The sentry had darted off the road. The village showed no sign of life: a tiny sleeping Russian hamlet of thatched huts in the woods on a mud road, like a hundred others, with a stage-setting appearance in the artificial glare. All the tanks under repair had been camouflaged.

“You look ghastly,” Pam said.

“You should see yourself. They’re searching for this tank battalion.”

The lights sank earthward. One turned orange and went out. The airplane sounds faded away. Pug glanced at his watch. “I used to think the Russians were nutty on camouflage, but it has its points.” He stiffly rose and opened the cabin door. “We’d better try to sleep.”

Pamela put a hand out, palm up to the black sky. The clouds were blotting out the moon and stars. “I thought I felt something.” She held her hand toward Pug. In the fight of the last falling flare he could see, melting on her palm, a fat snowflake.

Chapter 55

The car crossed a white bare plain in a steady snowfall in leaden light. Pug could see no road by which the driver guided the jolting, sliding, shaking machine. What about mines? Trusting that Amphiteatrov had no more appetite than he to get blown up, Pug said nothing. In about an hour an onion-top belfry of yellow brick loomed ahead through the veil of snow. They entered a town where soldiers milled and army trucks lurched on mud streets between unpainted wood houses. From some trucks the livid, bloody, bandaged faces of soldiers peered sadly. Villagers, mostly snow-flecked old women and boys, stood in front of the houses, dourly watching the traffic go by.

At the steps of the yellow brick church, Pug parted company with the others. A political officer in a belted white leather coat, with the slanted eyes of a Tartar and a little beard like Lenin’s, came to take him off in a small British jeep. Talky Tudsbury happily said in Russian, pointing to the trademark, “Ah, so British aid has reached the front at last!” The political officer replied in ragged English that it required men and gunfire, not automobiles, to stop Germans, and that the British vehicles were not strong enough for heavy duty.

Pamela gave Victor Henry a serious wide-eyed stare. Despite the wear and soil of travel she looked charming, and the lambskin hat was tilted jauntily on her head. “Watch yourself,” was all she said.

The jeep went west, out of the tumultuous town and into a snow-laden quiet forest. They appeared to be heading straight for the front, yet the only gunfire thumps came from the left, to the south. Pug thought the snow might be muffling the sound up ahead. He saw many newly splintered trees, and bomb craters lined with fresh snow. The Germans had been shelling the day before, the commissar said, trying in vain to draw the fire of Russian batteries hidden in the woods. The jeep bounced past some of these batteries: big horse-drawn howitzers, tended by weary-looking bewhiskered soldiers amid evergreens and piles of shells at the ready.

They came to a line of crude trenches through the smashed fallen trees, with high earthworks sugared by snow. These were dummy dugouts, the commissar said, deliberately made highly visible. They had taken much of the shellfire yesterday. The real trenches, a couple of hundred yards further on, had escaped. Dug along a riverbank, their log tops level with the ground and snowed over, the actual trenches were totally invisible. The commissar parked the jeep among trees, and he and Victor Henry crawled the rest of the way through the brush. “The less movement the Fritzes can observe, the better,” said the Russian.

Here, down in a deep muddy hole — a machine-gun post manned by three soldiers — Victor Henry peered through a gun slit piled with sandbags and saw Germans. They were working in plain view across the river with earthmoving machines, pontoons, rubber boats, and trucks. Some dug with shovels; some patrolled with light machine guns in hand. Unlike the Russians, concealed like wild creatures in the earth, the Germans were making no effort to hide themselves or what they were doing. Except for the helmets, guns, and long gray coats, they might have been a big crew on a peacetime construction job. Through binoculars handed him by a soldier — German binoculars — Victor Henry could see the eyeglasses and frost-purpled cheeks and noses of Hitler’s chilled men. “You could shoot them like birds,” he said in Russian. It was as close as he could come to the American idiom, “they’re sitting ducks.”

The soldier grunted. “Yes, and give away our position, and start them shelling us! No thanks, Gospodin American.”

“If they ever get that bridge finished,” said the commissar, “and start coming across, that’ll be time enough to shoot a big dose down their throats.”

“That’s what we’re waiting for,” said a pipe-smoking soldier with heavy drooping moustaches, who appeared to be in command of this hole in the ground.

Pug said, “Do you really think you can hold out if they get across?”

The three soldiers rolled their eyes at each other, weighing this question asked in bad Russian by a foreigner. Their mouths set sourly. Here, for the first time, in sight of the Germans, Victor Henry detected fear on Red Army faces. “Well, if it comes to that,” said the pipe smoker, “every man has his time. A Russian soldier knows how to die.”

The political officer said briskly, “A soldier’s duty is to live, comrade, not to die — to live and fight. They won’t get across. Our big guns are trained on this crossing, and as soon as they’ve wasted all the time it takes to build a bridge, and they start across, we’ll blast these Hitlerite rats! Eh, Polikov? How about it?”

“That’s right,” said a bristle-faced soldier with a runny nose, crouched on the earth in a corner blowing on his red hands. “That’s exactly right, Comrade political Officer.”

Crawling through bushes or darting from tree to tree, Victor Henry and the commissar made their way along the dugouts, pillboxes, trenches, and one-man posts of the thinly held line. A battalion of nine hundred men was covering five miles of the river here, the commissar said, to deny the Germans access to an important road. “This campaign is simply a race,” he panted, as they crawled between dugouts. “The Germans are trying to beat Father Frost into Moscow. That’s the plain fact of it. They are pouring out their lifeblood to do it. But never fear, Father Frost is an old friend of Russia. He’ll freeze them dead in the ice. You’ll see, they’ll never make it.”

The commissar was evidently on a morale-stiffening mission. Here and there, where they found a jolly leader in a trench, the men seemed ready for the fight, but elsewhere fatalism darkened their eyes, slumped their shoulders, and showed in dirty weapons, disarrayed uniforms, and garbage-strewn holes. The commissar harangued them, exploiting the strange presence of an American to buck them up, but for the most part the hairy-faced Slavs stared at Henry with sarcastic incredulity as though to say — “If you’re really an American, why are you so stupid as to come here yourself? We have no choice, worse luck.”

The Germans were in view all along the river, methodically and calmly preparing to cross. Their businesslike air was more intimidating, Pug thought, than volleys of bullets. Their numbers were alarming, too; where did they all come from?

The commissar and Victor Henry emerged from one of the largest dugouts and lay on their elbows in the snow. “Well, I have finished my tour of this part of the line, Captain. Perhaps you will rejoin your party now.”

“I’m ready.”

With a grim little smile, the commissar stumbled to his feet. “Keep in the shadows of the trees.”

When they got back to the jeep, Pug said, “How far are we from Moscow here?”

“Oh, quite far enough.” The commissar whirred the noisy engine. “I hope you saw what you wanted to see.”

“I saw a lot,” Victor Henry said.

The commissar turned his Lenin-like face at the American, appraising him with suspicious eyes. “It is not easy to understand the front just by looking at it.”

“I understand that you need a second front.”

The commissar uttered a brutal grunt. “Then you understand the main thing. But even without the second front, if we must, Captain Genry, we ourselves will smash this plague of German cockroaches.”

By the time they reached the central square of the town, the snowfall had stopped and patches of fast-moving blue showed through the clouds. The wind was bitter cold. The tangle of trucks, wagons, horses, and soldiers was worse than before. Vehement Russian cursing and arguing filled the air. The old women and the wrinkle-faced boys still watched the disorder with round sad eyes. In a big jam of vehicles around two fallen horses and an overturned ammunition wagon, the jeep encountered the black automobile. Talky Tudsbury, in great spirits, stood near forty yelling soldiers and officers, watching the horses kick and struggle in tangled traces, while other soldiers gathered up long coppery shells that had spilled from burst boxes and lay-softly gleaming in the snow. “Hello there! Back already? What a mess! It’s a wonder the whole wagon didn’t go up with a bang, what? And leave a hole a hundred feet across.”

“Where’s Pamela?”

Tudsbury flipped a thumb over his shoulder. “Back at the church. An artillery spotter is stationed in the belfry. There’s supposed to be a great view, but I couldn’t climb the damned tower. She’s up there making some notes. How are things at the front? You’ve got to give me the whole picture. Brrr! What frost, eh? Do you suppose Jerry is starting to feel it in his balls a bit? Hullo, they’ve got the horses up.”

Amphiteatrov said he was taking Tudsbury to see a downed Junker 88 in the nearby field. Pug told him that he had seen plenty of Junker 88’s; he would join Pam in the church and wait for them. Amphiteatrov made an annoyed face. “All right, but please remain there, Captain. We’ll come back in twenty minutes or less.”

Pug said good-bye to the bearded commissar, who was sitting at the wheel of the jeep, bellowing at a scrawny soldier who clutched a live white goose. The soldier was coarsely shouting back, and the goose turned its orange beak and little eyes from one to the other as though trying to learn its fate. Making his way around the traffic tangle, Pug walked to the church on crunching squeaking dry snow. Freedom from the escort — even for a few minutes — felt strange and good. Inside the church, a strange unchurchlike miasma of medicine and disinfectant filled the air; peeling frescoes of blue big-eyed saints looked down from grimy walls, at bandaged soldiers who lay on straw mats smoking, talking to each other, or sadly staring. The narrow stone staircase spiralling up the inside of the belfry with no handholds made Pug queasy, but up he went, edging along the rough wall, to a wooden platform level with big rusty bells, where wind gusted through four open brick arches. Here he caught his breath, and mounted a shaky wooden ladder.

“Victor!” As he emerged on the topmost brick walk, Pam waved and called to him.

Seen this close, the bulging onion dome was a crude job of tin sheets nailed rustily on a curving frame. Squared around it was a yellow brick walk and parapet, where Pamela crouched in a corner, out of the whistling wind. The artillery spotter, shapeless and faceless in an ankle-length brown coat, mittens, goggles, and fastened-down thick earflaps, manned giant binoculars on a tripod, pointed west. A fat black tomcat beside Pamela crouched over a bowl of soup, lapping, shaking its big head in distaste, and lapping again. Pamela and the spotter were laughing at the cat. “Too much pepper, kitty?” Pamela’s gay flirtatious look showed she clearly was enjoying herself. Below, the bare plain stretched far east and south to distant forests, and west and north to the black wriggling river and sparse woods. Straight downward the town, a clot of life, made thin noise in an empty white flat world.

“Vy Amerikansky offitzer?” The spotter showed fine teeth in the hairy uncovered patch of his face.

“Da.”

“Posmotritye?” The mittened hand tapped the binoculars.

“Videte nemtzi?” Pug said (“Can you see Germans?”)

“Slishkom m’nogo.” (“Too many.”)

“Odin slishkom m’nogo,” Pug said. (“One is too many!”)

With a grim nod and chuckle the spotter stepped away from the binoculars. Pug’s eyes were watering from the wind; he put them to the eyepieces and the Germans on the riverbank leaped into sight, blurry and small, still at the same work.

“Doesn’t it give you an eerie feeling?” Pam said, stroking the cat. “They’re so calm about it.”

Victor Henry went to a corner of the brick parapet and surveyed the snowy vista through all points of the compass, hands jammed in his blue coat. The spotter, turning the binoculars from south to north, made a slow sweep along the river, talking into a battered telephone on a long black wire that dangled over the parapet.

“Kitty, don’t forget behind the ears.” The cat was washing itself, and Pamela scratched its head.

Pug told her about his trip, meanwhile scanning the horizon round and round as though he were on a flying bridge. An odd movement in the distant snowy forest caught his notice. With his back to the spotter, he peered intently eastward, shielding his eyes with one chapped red hand. “Pass me those.” She handed him small field glasses, in an open case beside the binocular stand. One quick look, and Pug tapped the spotter’s shoulder and pointed. Swinging the large binoculars halfway round on the tripod, the spotter started with surprise, pulled off goggles and cap, and looked again. He had a lot of curly blond hair and freckles, and he was only eighteen or twenty. Snatching up the telephone, he jiggled the hook, talked, jiggled some more, and gestured anger at no answer. Pulling on his cap, he went trampling down the ladder.

“What is it?” Pamela said.

“Take a look.”

Pamela saw through the big eyepieces of the spotter’s instrument a column of machines coming out of the woods.

“Tanks?”

“Some are trucks and armored personnel cars. But yes, it’s a tank unit.” Victor Henry, glasses to his eyes, talked as though he were watching a parade.

“Aren’t they Russians?”

“No.”

“But that’s the direction we came from.”

“Yes.”

They looked each other in the eyes. Her red-cheeked face showed fear, but also a trace of nervous gaiety. “Then aren’t we in a pickle? Shouldn’t we get down out of here and find Amphiteatrov?”

To the naked eye the armored column was like a black worm on the broad white earth, five or six miles away. Pug stared eastward, thinking. The possibilities of this sudden turn were too disagreeable to be put into words. He felt a flash of anger at Tudsbury’s selfish dragging of his daughter into hazard. Of course, nobody had planned on being surprised in the rear by Germans; but there they were! If the worst came to the worst, he felt he could handle himself with German captors, though there might be ugly moments with soldiers before he could talk to an officer. But the Tudsburys were enemies.

“I’ll tell you, Pam,” he said, watching the worm pull clear of the forest and move sluggishly toward the town, leaving a black trail behind, “the colonel knows where we are now. Let’s stick here for a while.”

“All right. How in God’s name did the Germans get around back there?”

“Amphiteatrov said there was trouble to the south. They must have broken across the river and hooked through the woods. It’s not a large unit, it’s a probe.”

The top of the ladder danced and banged under a heavy tread. The blond youngster came up, seized a stadimeter, pointed it at the Germans, and slid a vernier back and forth. Hastily flattening out a small black and white grid map on one knee, he barked numbers into the telephone: “Five point six! One two four! R seven M twelve! That’s right! That’s right!” Animated and cheery now, he grinned at the visitors. “Our batteries are training on them. When they’re good and close, we’ll blow them to bits. So maybe you’ll see something yet.” He put on his goggles, changing back from a bright-eyed boy into a faceless grim spotter.

Victor Henry said, “They’re watching across the river for your batteries to fire.”

The spotter clumsily waved both heavy-clad arms. “Good, but we can’t let those bastards take the town from the rear, can we?”

“I hear airplanes.” Pug turned his glasses westward to the sky. “Samalyutti!”

“Da!” Swivelling and tilting the binoculars upward, the spotter began to shout into the phone.

“Airplanes too?” Pamela’s voice trembled. “Well, I’m more used to them.”

“That’s the German drill,” said Victor Henry. “Tanks and planes together.”

The oncoming planes, three Stukas, were growing bigger in Pug’s glasses. The spotter switched his binoculars to the tanks again, and began cheering. Pug looked in that direction. “Holy cow! Now I call this military observing, Pam.” Tanks in another column were coming out of the woods about halfway between the Germans and the town, moving on a course almost at right angles to the panzer track. He handed her the glasses and squinted toward the airplanes.

“Oh! Oh!” Pamela exclaimed. “Ours?”

“Da!” cried the spotter, grinning at her. “Nashi! Nashi!”

A hand struck her shoulder and knocked her to her hands and knees. “They’re starting their dive,” Victor Henry said. “Crawl up close to the dome and lie still.” He was on his knees beside her. His cap had fallen off and rolled away, and he brushed black hair from his eyes to watch the planes. They tilted over and dove. When they were not much higher than the belfry, bombs fell out of them. With a mingled engine roar and wind screech, they zoomed by. Pug could see the black crosses, the swastikas, the yellowish plexiglass cockpits. All around the church the bombs began exploding. The belfry shook. Flame, dirt, and smoke roared up beyond the parapet, but Pug remained clearheaded enough to note that the flying was ragged. The three ungainly black machines almost collided as they climbed and turned to dive again in a reckless tangle. The Luftwaffe had either lost most of its veteran pilots by now, he thought, or they were not flying on this sector of the front. Anti-aircraft guns were starting to pop and rattle in the town.

Pamela’s hand sought his. She was crouched behind him, against the dome.

“Just lie low, this will be over soon.” As Pug said this he saw one of the Stukas separating from the others and diving straight for the belfry. He shouted to the spotter, but the airplane noise, the chatter of A.A. guns, the clamor and cries from the town below, and the roar of the wind, quite drowned his voice. Tracers made a red dotted line to the belfry across the gray sky. The tin dome began to sing to rhythmically striking bullets. Victor Henry roughly pushed Pamela flat and threw himself on top of her. The plane stretched into a sizable black machine approaching through the air. Watching over his shoulder to the last, Victor Henry saw the pilot dimly behind his plexiglass, an unhelmeted young blond fellow with a toothy grin. He thought the youngster was going to crash into the dome, and as he winced, he felt something rip at his left shoulder. The airplane scream and roar and whiz mounted, went past, and diminished. The zinging and rattling of bullets stopped.

Pug stood, feeling his shoulder. His sleeve was torn open at the very top and the shoulder board was dangling, but there was no blood. The spotter was lying on the bricks beside the overturned binoculars. Bombs were exploding below; the other two planes were still whistling and roaring over the town; one plane was smoking badly. Blood was pooling under the spotter’s head, and with horror Pug perceived white broken bone of the skull showing through the torn shot-away cap, under blond hair and thick-moving red and gray ooze. Pug went to the spotter and cautiously moved his goggles. The blue eyes were open, fixed and empty. The head wound was catastrophic. Picking up the telephone, Pug jiggled the hook till somebody answered. He shouted in Russian, “I am the American visitor up here. You understand?”

He saw the smoking plane, which was trying to climb, burst into flames and fall. “Da! Where is Konstantin? The voice sounded exhilarated.

“Airplane killed him.”

“All right. Somebody else will come.”

Pamela had crawled beside the spotter and was looking at the dead face and smashed head. “Oh, my God, my God,” she sobbed, head in hand.

The two surviving planes were climbing out of sight. Smoke rose from fires in the town, smelling of burning hay. To the east, the two tank unit tracks had almost joined in a black V, miles long, across the plain. Pug righted the binoculars. Through smoke billowing in the line of vision, he saw the tanks milling in a wild little yellow-flashing vortex on the broad white plain. Five of the KV monsters bulged among lighter Russian tanks. Several German tanks were on fire and their crewmen were running here and there in the snow like ants. Some German tanks and trucks were heading back to the woods. Pug saw only one light Russian tank giving off black smoke. But even as he watched, a KV burst into violent, beautiful purple-orange flame, casting a vivid pool of color on the snow. Meantime the rest of the German tanks began turning away.

“Kitty! Oh, Christ, Christ, no, stop it!” Pam snatched up the cat, which was crouching over the dead man. She came to Pug, her tearstained face gaunt and stunned, holding the creature in her arms. Its nose and whiskers were bloody and its tongue flickered. “It’s not the animal’s fault,’ she choked.

“The Russians are winning out there,” Victor Henry said.

She was staring at him with blank shocked round eyes, clutching the black cat close to her. Her hand went to the rip at his shoulder. “Dearest, are you hurt?”

“No. Not at all. It went right on through.”

“Thank God! Thank God!”

The ladder jumped and rapped, and Colonel Amphiteatrov’s face, excited and red, showed at the top. “Well, you’re all right. Well, I’m glad. Many people killed. Quick! Both of you. Come along, please.” Then his eye fell on the body lying in blood. “Agh!”

“We were strafed,” Pug said. “He’s dead.”

The colonel shook his head and sank out of sight saying, “Well, please, come quickly.”

“Go first, Pam.”

Pamela looked at the dead spotter lying on the bricks in snow and blood, and then at the tin dome, and out at the tank fight, and the black V gouged in the landscape. “It seems I’ve been up here for a week. I can’t get down the ladder with the cat. We mustn’t leave it here.”

“Give the cat to me.”

Tucking the animal inside his bridge coat, steadying it with one arm, Victor Henry awkwardly followed her down the ladder and the spiral stairs. Once the cat squirmed, bit, and scratched, and he almost fell. He turned the cat loose outside the church, but the clanking vehicles or the rolling smoke alarmed the animal and it ran back in and vanished among the wounded.

Through the open door of the black automobile Tudsbury waved his cane at them. “Hello! There’s a monstrous tank battle going on just outside the town! They say there’s at least a hundred tanks swirling around, an utter inferno, happening right this minute. Hello, you’ve torn your coat, do you know that?”

“Yes, I know.” Though drained of spirit, Victor Henry was able to smile at the gap between journalism and war, as he detached his shoulder board and dropped it in his pocket. The reality of the two small groups of tanks banging away out there on the snowy plain seemed so pale and small-scale compared to Tudsbury’s description.

“We had a view of it,” he said. Pamela got into the car and sank into a corner of the back seat, closing her eyes.

“Did you? Well, Pam ought to be a help on this story! I say, Pam, you’re all right, aren’t you?”

“I’m splendid, Talky, thank you,” Pam said, faintly but clearly.

Pug said to the colonel, “We saw the Germans starting to run.”

“Good. Well, Kaplan’s battalion got the word from down south. That is a good battalion.” Amphiteatrov slammed the car door. “Make yourselves comfortable please. We are going to drive straight back to Moscow now.”

“Oh no!” Tudsbury’s fat face wrinkled up like an infant’s. “I want to have a look when the fight’s over. I want to interview the tank crews.”

Amphiteatrov turned and faced them, and showed his gums and teeth without smiling. Behind him through the frosted windshield they could vaguely see on the main street of the town smoke, fire, a plunging horse, soldiers running, and green army trucks in a slow-moving jam. “Well, there has been a very big breakthrough in the north. Moscow is in danger. Well, all foreign missions will be evacuated to the Caucasus. We must skedaddle.” He brought out the awkward slang word humorlessly, and turned to the driver. “Nu, skoro!”

Under the blanket stretched across the passengers’ legs, Pamela Tudsbury’s gloved hand groped to Victor Henry’s hand. She pulled off her glove, twined her cold fingers in his, and pressed her face against the torn shoulder of his bridge coat. His chapped hand tightened on hers.

Chapter 56

Leslie Slote heard footfalls in the dark, as he sat in an overcoat and fur hat, working by the light of a kerosene lamp. His desk overflowing with papers and reports stood directly under the grand unlit chandelier in the marble-pillared great hall of Spaso House, the ambassador’s Moscow residence.

“Who’s there?” The nervous strident words reverberated in the empty halls. He recognized the white Navy cap, white scarf, and brass buttons, before he could make out the face. “Ye gods, Captain Henry, why didn’t they take you straight to the Kazan Station? Maybe you can still make it. You’ve got to get out of Moscow tonight!”

“I’ve been to the station. The train to Kuibyshev had left.” Pug brushed snow from his shoulders. “The air raid held us up outside the city.”

Slote looked at his wristwatch in great agitation. “But — that’s terrible! God knows when there’ll be another train to Kuibyshev — if ever. Don’t you know that one German armored column’s already passed by to the north and is cutting down behind the city? And they say another pincer is heading up from Kaluga. One doesn’t know what to believe any more, but it’s at least conceivable that in the next twenty-four hours we may be entirely surrounded. It begins to smell like Warsaw all over again. Slote gaily laughed. “Sorry there are no chairs, a party of mad Georgian workmen came in and covered and stacked all the furniture — oh, there’s a stool after all, do sit down—”

Pug said, “That’s more than I know, about the German pincers, and I’ve just come from the Narkomindel.” He sat down without opening his coat. It was almost as cold and dark in Spaso House as in the snowstorm outside.

“Did you suppose they’d tell you anything? I got this straight from the Swedish ambassador, I assure you, at nine o’clock tonight in the dining room at the Kazan Station, when I was seeing off the staff. My God, that station was a spectacle to remember! One bomb hit would have wiped out all the foreign correspondents and nine-tenths of the diplomats in Russia — and a healthy chunk of the Soviet bureaucracy too.”

“Have all the typewriters been stowed? I have to write a report.”

“There are typewriters in Colonel Yeaton’s office. I have a skeleton staff, and we’re to keep things going somehow until the chargé gets organized in Kuibyshev.” Slote gave this answer with absentminded calm, then jumped at a muffled sound from outside. “Was that a bomb? You have no time to write reports, Captain. It’s really my responsibility to see that you leave Moscow at once, and I must insist that somehow—”

Pug held up a hand. “The Nark’s making arrangements. There are other stragglers like me. I have to check back in at eleven in the morning.”

“Oh! Well, if the Narkomindel’s assumed responsibility, that’s that,” Slote giggled.

Victor Henry looked narrowly at him. “How come you got stuck with this duty again? It seems kind of thick, after Warsaw.”

“I volunteered. You look skeptical. I truly did. After all, I’ve been through the drill. I wasn’t too proud of the job I did in Warsaw and I thought perhaps I could redeem myself this time.”

“Why, Byron told me you did a helluva job in Warsaw, Leslie.”

“Did he? Byron’s a gentleman. A knight, almost. Which reminds me, an enormous pouch came in from Stockholm the day you left? There was stuff from Rome. Would you like to see a picture of your new grandson?” Fussing through papers on his desk, he pulled a photograph from a wrinkled envelope. “There he is. Don’t you think he’s handsome?”

The lamplight carved deep black marks in the naval officer’s face as he read the writing on the back of the snapshot, For old Slote — Louis Henry, aged 11 days, with circus fat lady, then contemplated the photograph. A plump, hollow-eyed Natalie in a loose robe held a baby that looked startlingly like Byron as an infant. The triangular face, the large serious eyes, the comically determined look, the fine blond hair — they were the same; Louis was another print of the template that had molded his son. He was much more of a Henry than Janice’s boy. Victor Henry cleared his choked-up throat. “Not bad. Natalie’s right, she’s gotten fat.”

“Hasn’t she though? Too much bed rest, she says. I’ll bet the baby will be as clever as it’s handsome. It looks clever.” Victor Henry sat staring at the snapshot. Slote added, “Would you care to keep that?”

Henry at once extended it to him. “No, certainly not. She sent it to you.”

“I’ll only lose it, Captain Henry. I have a better picture of Natalie.”

“Are you sure? All right.” Victor Henry tried to express in an awkward smile the gratitude for which he could find no words. Carefully he put the print in an inner pocket.

“What about the Tudsburys?” Slote asked. “Are they stuck in Moscow too?”

“I left Talky trying to wangle a ride to Archangel for himself and Pam. The Russians are flying out some RAF pilot instructors. I’m sure he’ll get on that plane.”

“Good. Did you run into any trouble at the front? What an idiocy, dragging a girl out there!”

“Well, we heard some firing, and saw some Germans. I’d better get at this report. If Talky does fly out, I want to give him a copy to forward via London.”

“Let me have a copy too, won’t you? And another to go in the next pouch. If there is one.”

“You’re a pessimist, Slote.”

“I’m a realist. I was in Warsaw. I know what the Germans can do.”

“Do you know what the Russians can do?”

“I thought I did. I was the Red Army’s biggest booster in the embassy, until -” Slote shrugged and turned to his desk, blowing his nose. “The only thing that really gets me is this stink of burning paper. My God, how it brings back Warsaw! The embassy absolutely reeks. We were burning and burning today, until the minute they all left. And there’s still a ton that I’ve somehow got to get burned in the morning.”

“All Moscow stinks of it,” Pug said. “It’s the damnedest thing to drive through a snowstorm and smell burned paper. The city’s one unholy mess, Slote. Have you seen all the barbed wire and tangled steel girders blocking the bridges? And good Lord, the mob at that railway station! The traffic jams heading east with headlights blazing, blackout be damned! I didn’t know there were that many trucks and cars in the whole Soviet Union. All piled with mattresses and old people and babies and what-all. And with those blue A.A. searchlights still swinging overhead — God knows why — and the snow and the wind, I tell you it’s a real end-of-the-world feeling.”

Slote chuckled. “Yes, isn’t it? This exodus began the day you left. It’s been snowballing. A convoy of government big shots left yesterday in a line of honking black limousines. Gad, you should have seen the faces of the people along the streets! I’m sure that triggered this panic. However, I give Stalin credit. He’s staying on to the last, and that takes courage, because when Hitler catches Stalin, he’ll just hang him like a dog in Red Square. And he’ll drag Lenin’s mummy out of the tomb too, and string it up alongside to crumble in the wind. Oh, there’ll be stirring things to see and record here, for whoever survives to tell it all.”

Victor Henry rose. “Do you know there’s no sentry at the door? I just walked in.”

“That’s impossible. We’re guarded night and day by a soldier assigned by the Narkomindel.”

“There’s nobody there.”

Slote opened and closed his mouth twice. “Are you positive? Why, we could be sacked by looters! It’s getting near the end when soldiers leave their posts. I must call the Narkomindel. If I can get the operator to answer!” He jumped up and disappeared in the gloom.

Victor Henry groped to the military attaché’s office. There he struck matches, and found and lit two kerosene lamps. In their bleak yellow-green glow he surveyed the office. Bits of black ash flecked the floor and every surface. BURN — URGENT was scrawled in red crayon on manila folders topping heaps of reports, files, and loose papers piled on the floor and in the leather armchair. Emptied drawers and files stood open; a swivel chair was overturned; the place looked as though it had been robbed. On the desk, on a typewriter with bunched tangled keys, a message was propped, printed in block letters on torn cardboard: IMPERATIVE — BURN TONIGHT CONTENTS SECOND BROWN LOCKED FILE. (L. SLOTE HAS COMBINATION.) Pug cleared the desk, untangled the typewriter keys and stood the lamps on either side of the machine. He found paper, carbons, and onionskin paper in a drawer.

His stiff cold fingers struck wrong keys. Typing in a bridge coat was clumsy and difficult. The slow clicks of the machine echoed hollowly in the deserted embassy. One lamp began to smoke. He fiddled with the wick until it burned clear.

The typewriter was clicking fast now. It was almost one o’clock. Victory Henry still had to return to the hotel and pack. He chewed another “polar bear,” the Russian chocolate candy, for energy, and began banging out the tale of his journey. Electricity all at once lit up the room, but he left the kerosene lamps burning and typed on. In about half an hour the lights flickered, burned orange, dimmed, and pulsed, and went out. Still he typed ahead. He was describing the interior of the KV tank when Slote came in saying, “You’re really going at it.”

“You’re working late yourself.”

“I’m getting to the bottom of the pile.” Slote dropped on the desk a brown envelope sealed with wax. “By the way, that came in the pouch, too. Care for some coffee?”

“You bet. Thanks.”

Pug stretched and walked up and down the room, beating his arms and stamping his feet, before he broke the seal of the envelope. There were two letters inside, one from the White House and one from the Bureau of Personnel. He hesitated, then opened the White House letter; a few sentences in Harry Hopkins’s dashed-off slanting hand filled a page:

The other envelope contained a Navy letter form in telegraphic style:

In bald trite Navy jargon on a flimsy yellow sheet, here was command of a battleship. And what a battleship! The California, the old Prune Barge, a ship in which he had served twice, as an ensign and as a lieutenant commander, which he knew well and loved; the ship named for his own home state, launched in 1818 and completely modernized.

Captain of the California!

Pug Henry’s first reaction was orderly and calculating. Evidently Admiral King’s staff was a trap he had escaped. In his class only Warendorf, Munson and Brown had battleships, and Robinson had the Saratoga. His strange “gray office boy” service to the President had proved a career shortcut after all, and flag rank was suddenly and brightly back in sight.

He thought of Rhoda, because she had sweated out with him the twenty-seven-year wait for this bit of yellow tissue paper; and of Pamela, because he wanted to share his excitement right now. But he was not even sure that he would see her again in Moscow. They had parted at the railroad station with a strong handclasp, as Talky Tudsbury pleaded with the RAF pilots to take him along and simultaneously blustered at a Narkomindel man who was trying to lead him off.

Leslie Slote walked in, carrying two glass tumblers of black coffee. “Anything good?”

“New orders. Command of the California.”

“Oh? What is that?”

“A battleship.”

“A battleship?” Slote sipped coffee, looking doubtful. “Is that what you wanted next?”

“Well, it’s a change.”

“I should think you’d find it somewhat confining and — well, routine, after the sort of thing you’ve been doing. Not many naval officers — in fact not many Americans — have talked to Stalin face to face.”

“Leslie, I’m not entirely unhappy with these orders.”

“Oh! Well, then, I gather congratulations are in order. How are you coming with that report? I’m almost ready to turn in.”

“Couple of hours to go.”

“You won’t get much sleep.” Slote went out shaking his head.

Victor Henry sat drinking coffee, meditating on the little rectangle of yellow paper, the sudden irreversible verdict on his life. He could ask for no better judgment. This was the blue ribbon, the A-plus, the gold medal of naval service. Yet a nag in his spirit shadowed the marvellous news. What was it? Between sips of coffee, probing his own heart, Pug found out something surprising about himself.

After more than twenty-five years, he had slightly outgrown his career drive. He was interested in the war. At War Plans he had been waging a vigilant fight to keep priorities high for the landing craft program. “Pug’s girlfriend Elsie” was no joke; but now he could no longer carry on that fight. Mike Drayton would take over. Mike was an excellent officer, a commander with a solid background in BuShips and an extraordinary knowledge of the country’s industries. But he was not pugnacious and he lacked rank. “Elsie” was going to lose ground.

That could not last. One day the crunch would come — Henry was sure of this from his operational studies — and landing craft would shoot to the top of the priority list, and a frantic scramble would ensue to get them made. The war effort might suffer; conceivably a marginal landing operation would fail, with bad loss of life. But it was absurd, Pug thought, to feel the weight of the war on his shoulders, and to become as obsessed by “Elsie” as he had once been by his own career. That was swinging to the other extreme. The war was bigger than anybody; he was a small replaceable cog. One way or another, sooner or later, the United States would produce enough landing craft to beat Hitler. Meantime he had to go to his battleship.

Taking a lamp to a globe standing in the corner, he used thumb and forefinger to step off the distance from Moscow to Pearl Harbor. He found it made surprisingly little difference whether he travelled east or west; the two places were at opposite ends of the earth. But which direction would offer less delay and hazard? Westward lay all the good fast transportation, across the Atlantic and the United States, and then the Pan Am hop from San Francisco to Honolulu. Duck soup! Unfortunately, in that direction the fiery barrier of the war now made Europe impassable from Spitzbergen to Sicily, and from Moscow to the English Channel. Tenuous lanes through the fire remained: the North Sea convoy run, and a chancy air connection between Stockholm and London. In theory, if he could get to Stockholm, he could even pass via Berlin and Madrid to Lisbon; but Captain Victor Henry had no intention of setting foot in Germany or German-dominated soil on his way to take command of the California. His coarsely insulting last remark to Wolf Stöller about Göring undoubtedly was on the record. The Germans, now so close to world victory, might enjoy laying hands on Victor Henry.

Well then, eastward? Slow uncertain Russian trains, jammed already with fugitives from the German attack; occasional, even more uncertain Russian planes. But the way was peaceful and a bit shorter, especially from Kuibyshev, five hundred miles nearer Pearl Harbor. Yes, he thought, he had better start arranging now with the distraught Russians to make his way around the world eastward.

“You look like a mad conqueror,” he heard Slote say.

“Huh?”

“Gloating over the globe by lamplight. You just need the little black moustache.” The Foreign Service officer leaned in the doorway, running a finger along his smoking pipe. “We have a visitor out here.”

By the desk under the chandelier, a Russian soldier stood slapping snow from his long khaki coat. He took off his peaked army cap to shake it by an earflap, and Pug was startled to recognize Jochanan Jastrow. The man’s hair was clipped short now; he had a scraggly growth of brown beard flecked with gray, and he looked very coarse and dirty. He explained in German, answering Slote’s questions, that in order to get warm clothes and some legal papers, he passed himself off as a soldier from a routed unit. The Moscow authorities were collecting such refugees and stragglers and forming them into emergency work battalions, with few questions asked. He had had a set of false papers; a police inspector in an air raid shelter had queried him and picked them up, but he had managed to escape from the man. More forged papers could be bought — there was a regular market for them — but he preferred army identification right now.

“In this country, sir,” he said, “a person who doesn’t have papers is worse off than a dog or a pig. A dog or a pig can eat sleep without papers. A man can’t. After a while maybe there will be a change for the better in the war, and I can find my family.”

“Where are they?” Slote said.

“With the partisans, near Smolensk. My son’s wife got sick and I left them there.”

Pug said, “You’re not planning to go back through the German lines?”

Natalie’s relative gave him a strange crooked smile. One side of the bearded mouth curled upward, uncovering white teeth, while the other side remained fixed and grim. “Russia is a very big country, Captain Henry, full of woods. For their own safety the Germans stick close to the main roads. I have already passed through the lines. Thousands of people have done it.” He turned to Leslie Slote. “So. But I heard all the foreigners are leaving Moscow. I wanted to find out what happened to the documents I gave you.”

The Foreign Service officer and Victor Henry looked at each other, with much the same expressions of hesitation and embarrassment. “Well, I showed the documents to an important American newspaperman,” Slote said. “He sent a long story to the United States but I’m afraid it ended up as a little item in the back pages. You see, there have been so many stories of German atrocities! “

“Stories like this?” exclaimed Jastrow, his bristly face showing anger and disappointment. “Children, mothers, old people? In their homes, not doing anything, taken out in the middle of the night to a hole dug in the woods and shot to death?”

“Most horrible. Perhaps the army commander in the Minsk area was an insanely fanatical Nazi.”

“But the shooters were not soldiers. I told you that. They had different uniforms. And here in Moscow, people from the Ukraine and from up north are telling the same stories. This thing is happening all over, sir, not just in Minsk. Please forgive me, but why did you not give those documents to your ambassador? I am sure he would have sent them to President Roosevelt.”

“I did bring your papers to his attention. I’m sorry to say that our intelligence people questioned their authenticity.”

“What? But sir, that is incredible! I can bring you ten people tomorrow who will tell such stories, and give affidavits. Some of them are eyewitnesses who escaped from the very trucks the Germans used, and—”

In a tone of driven exasperation, Slote broke in, “Look here my dear chap, I’m one man almost alone now” — he gestured at his piled-up disk — “responsible for all my country’s affairs in Moscow. I really think I have done my best for you. In showing your documents to a newspaperman after our intelligence people had questioned them, I violated instructions. I received a serious reprimand. In fact, I took this dirty job of staying on in Moscow mainly to put myself right. Your story is ghastly, and I myself am unhappily inclined to believe it, but it’s only a small part of this hideous war. Moscow may fall in the next seventy-two hours, and that’s my main business now. I’m sorry.”

Jastrow took the outburst without blinking and answered in a quiet, dogged tone, “I am very sorry about the reprimand. However, if President Roosevelt could only find out about this crazy slaughter of innocent people, he would put a stop to it. He is the only man in the whole world who can do it.” Jastrow turned to Victor Henry. “Do you know of any other way, Captain, that the story could possibly be told to President Roosevelt?”

Pug was already picturing himself writing a letter to the President. He had seen several stories like Jastrow’s in print, and even more gruesome official reports about German slaughter of Russian partisans and villagers. Such a letter would be futile; worse than futile — unprofessional. It would be nagging the President about things he suspected or knew. He, Victor Henry, was a naval officer, on temporary detached duty in the Soviet Union for Lend-Lease matters. Such a letter would be the sort of impertinence Byron had offered at the President’s table; but Byron at least had been a youngster concerned about his own wife.

Victor Henry answered Jastrow by turning his hands upward.

With a melancholy nod, Jastrow said, “Naturally, it is outside your province. Have you had news of Natalie? Have she and Aaron gone home yet?”

Pug pulled the snapshot from his breast pocket. “This picture was taken several weeks ago. Maybe by now they’re out. I expect so.”

Holding the picture to the light, Jastrow’s face broke into an incongruously warm and gentle beam. “Why, it is a small Byron. God bless him and keep him safe from harm.” Peering at Victor Henry, whose eyes misted at these few sentimental words in German, he handed back the photograph. “Well, you gentlemen have been gracious to me. I have done the best I could to tell you what happened in Minsk. Maybe my documents will reach the right person one day. They are true, and I pray God somebody soon finds a way to tell President Roosevelt what is happening. He must rescue the Jews out of the Germans’ claws. Only he can do it.”

With this Jochanan Jastrow gave them his mirthless crooked smile and faded into the darkness outside the small glow of the kerosene lamp.

When his alarm clock woke him after an hour or two of exhausted slumber, Pug scarcely remembered writing the letter which lay on the desk beside the clock, scrawled on two sheets of Hotel National paper. The tiny barren room was freezing cold, though the windows were sealed shut. He threw on a heavy woollen bathrobe he had bought in London, and an extra pair of warm socks, and sat at the desk to reread the letter.

In this fresh look after a sleep, the letter struck him most forcibly as an ill-considered communication, for which the right place was the wastebasket. The first two paragraphs were innocuous; but the President’s sharp eye would at once detect that they were padding. The rest, the meat of the letter, was superfluous and even offensive. He was advising the President to go over the heads of everybody in the State Department, including his own ambassador in the Soviet Union, to demand a look at some documents. The odds against Roosevelt’s actually doing this were prohibitive; and his opinion of Victor Henry would certainly drop. He would at once recall that Henry had a Jewish daughter-in-law, about whom there had been trouble. And Pug did not even know that the documents were authentic. Jastrow might have been sent by the NKVD, as Tudsbury thought, to plant the material for American consumption. The man seemed genuine, but that proved nothing.

In his career Henry had drafted dozens of wrongly conceived letters to get a problem out of his system, and then had discarded the letters. He had a hard editorial eye, and an unerring sense of professional self-preservation. He threw the letter face down on the desk as a heavy rapping came at the door. There stood Alistair Tudsbury, leaning on his cane in the doorway, enormous and red-faced in an astrakhan hat and a long brown fur coat. “Thank God you’re here, old friend.” The correspondent limped to an armchair and sat in a dusty shaft of sunlight, stretching out his bad leg. “Sorry to crash in on you like this, but — I say, you’re all right, aren’t you?”

“Oh yes. I’m just great.” Pug was rubbing his face hard with both hands. “I was up all night writing a report. What’s doing?”

The correspondent’s bulging eyes probed at him. “This is going to be difficult, but here it is straight” Are you and Pamela lovers?”

“What!” Pug was too startled, and too tired, to be either angry or amused. “Why, no! Of course not.”

“Well, funnily enough, I didn’t think you were. That makes it all the more awkward and baffling. Pamela has just told me flatly that she’s not returning to London unless you’re going there! If you’re off to Kuibyshev, she means to tag along and work for the British embassy or something. Now this is wild nonsense!” Tudsbury burst out, banging the cane on the floor. “To begin with, I know the Nark won’t have it. But she’s turned to stone. There’s no reasoning with her. And those RAF fellows are flying off at noon, and they’ve got space for both of us.”

“Where is she now?”

“Why, she’s gone out for a stroll in Red Square, of all things! Can you imagine? Won’t even pack, you see. Victor, I’m not coming the indignant father on you, you do realize that, don’t you?” Talky Tudsbury appeared in a manic state of verbosity, even for him. “This would be a most absurd stance for me to take. Hell, I’ve done exactly as I pleased in these little matters myself all my life. She’d laugh in my face if I tried to talk morality to her. But what about common sense? You don’t want her trailing after you, a happily married man, do you? It’s so embarrassing! In any case, what about Ted Gallard? Why, she told me to tell him it was all off! When I said I’d do nothing of the sort, she sat down and scribbled a letter for him and threw it in my bag. I tell you I’m having the devil of a time with Pam.”

Putting a hand to his brow, Victor Henry said in weary tones, yet with a glad surge at heart, “Well, take my word for it, I’m utterly amazed.”

“I was sure you would be. I’ve told her till I’m blue in the face that it’s no go, that you’re a straitlaced old-fashioned man, the soul of honor, devoted to your wife, and all that sort of thing. Well, the minx simply agrees and says that’s why she likes you. Quite unreachable! Victor, surely it’s dangerous and silly for a British girl to go rattling aimlessly around in Moscow, with the Huns closing in on all sides.”

“Yes, it is. Why don’t you go to Kuibyshev with her, Talky? Every foreign correspondent in Russia was on that train, except you.”

“They’re all idiots. Getting news right here in Moscow was hard enough. What the devil will they find to write about in that mudhole on the Volga? They’ll just drink themselves into cirrhosis of the liver and play poker until their eyes give out. Mine are bad enough. I’m skedaddling. If the Russkis hold Moscow, I’ll come back. I hope and believe they will, but if they don’t, it’s all over. England’s at the end of her rope, you know that. We’ll all throw in our hands. It’ll be the great world shift, and your FDR with his brilliant sense of timing can then face a whole globe armed against him.”

Victor Henry stumbled to the yellowed mirror and rubbed his bristly chin. “I’d better talk to Pamela.”

“Please, dear fellow, please. And hurry!”

Pug came outside to fresh snow, bright sunshine, and a ragged burst of Russian song by male voices. A formation of old men and boys, shouldering picks and shovels and lustily shouting a marching tune, was following an army sergeant down Maneznaya Square. The rest of the Muscovites appeared to be trudging normally about their business, bundled up and shawled as usual, but the sidewalk crowds were much thinner. Perhaps, thought Pug, all the rats had now left and these were the real people of Moscow.

He walked up to Red Square, past an enormous poster of the embattled motherland, embodied as a shouting robust woman brandishing a sword and a red flag and smaller posters of rats, spiders, and snakes with Hitler faces being bayonetted by angry handsome Russian soldiers or squashed under Red Army tanks. The square was deserted: white thick snow almost unmarked by footprints carpeted the great expanse. In front of the Lenin tomb outside the Kremlin wall its red marble hidden by layers of snow-crusted sandbags, two soldiers stood as usual like clothed statues, but there was no line of visitors. Far on the other side, Victor Henry saw a small bulky figure in gray walking alone past Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Even at this distance he recognized the swingy gait of the Bremen deck and the way she moved her arms. He headed toward her, his overshoes sinking deep in snow speckled black with paper ash. She saw him and waved. Hurrying to meet him across the snow, she threw herself in his arms and kissed him as she had on his return from the flight to Berlin. Her breath was fragrant and warm. “Damn! The governor went and told you.”

“That’s right.”

“Are you exhausted? I know you were up all night. There are benches by the cathedral. What are your plans? Are you all set for Kuibyshev? Or will you go to London?”

They were walking arm in arm, fingers clasped. “Neither. Sudden change. I’ve gotten orders, Pam. They were waiting for me here. I’m going to command a battleship, the California.”

She stopped and pulled on his elbow to swing him toward her, clasped both his arms, and looked in his face with wide glistening eyes. “Command a battleship!”

“Not bad, eh!” he said like a schoolboy.

“My God, smashing! You’re bound to be an admiral after that, aren’t you? Oh, how happy your wife will be!” Pamela said this with unselfconscious pleasure and resumed walking. “I wish we had a bottle of that sticky Georgian champagne, right here and now. Well! That’s absolutely wonderful. Where’s the California based? Do you know?”

“Pearl Harbor.” She glanced inquiringly at him. “Oahu. The Hawaiian Islands.”

“Oh. Hawaii. All right. We’ll start plotting to get me to Hawaii. No doubt there’s a British consulate there, or some kind of military liaison. There has to be.”

“Aren’t you on leave from the Air Force? Won’t you have to go back on duty if Talky returns to London?”

“My love, let me take care of all that. I’m very, very good at getting what I want.”

“I believe that.”

She laughed. They brushed snow from a bench outside the rail of the bizarre cathedral. Its colored domes shaped like onions and pineapples were half-hidden, like the red stars on the Kremlin towers, under drapings of thick gray canvas. “When do you leave for Hawaii, and how do you get there?”

“I’ll leave as soon as I can, and go via Siberia, Japan, and the Philippines.” He clasped her hands as they sat down. “Now, Pam, listen—”

“Are you going to lecture me? Don’t bother, please, Victor. It won’t work.”

“You mentioned my wife. She’ll probably come to Pearl.”

“I should think she would.”

“Then what have you in mind, exactly?”

“Why, love, since you ask me, I have in mind that you and I deceive her, decently, carefully, and kindly, until you’re tired of me. Then I will go home.”

This blunt declaration shook Victor Henry. It was so novel, so outside the set rules of his existence, that he only replied with clumsy stiffness, “I don’t understand that kind of arrangement.”

“I know, darling, I know it must seem shocking and immoral to you. You’re a dear nice man. Nevertheless I don’t know what else to propose. I love you. That is unchangeable. I’m happy with you, and not happy otherwise. I don’t propose to be separated from you any more for long stretches of time. Not until you yourself dismiss me. So you’ll have to put up with this bargain. It’s not a bad one, really.”

“No, it isn’t a bad bargain, but you won’t keep it.”

Pamela’s face showed surprise; then into her eyes came an amused glow, and her lips curved in a mature clever smile. “You’re not so dumb.”

“I’m not in the least dumb, Pamela. The Navy doesn’t give battleships to dumbbells.”

A line of olive-painted trucks marked with large red stars came roaring up into the square, rolling past the red brick museum and the shuttered GUM building, and pulled up side by side facing the Lenin tomb.

We’re in a time bind here,” Pug went on, raising his voice. “For the moment I’ll put Rhoda aside, and just talk about you -”

She interrupted him. “Victor, love, I know you’re faithful to your wife. I’ve always feared you’d think me a pushing slut. But what else can I do? The time has come, that’s all. Ever since I was forced to tell Talky this morning, I’ve been flooded with joy.”

Henry sat leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped, his eyes half closed in the sun glare off the snow, looking at her. Soldiers began piling out of the trucks. Obviously new recruits, they were lining up in ragged ranks in the snow under the barking of sergeants in ankle length coats, while rifles were passed and handed out. After a long pause Henry said, in a matter-of-fact way, “I know this kind of chance won’t roll around again in my life.”

“It won’t, Victor. It won’t!” Her face shone with excitement. “People to whom it happens even once are very lucky. That’s why I must go with you. It’s a mischance that you can’t marry me, but we must accept that and go on from there.”

“I didn’t say I can’t marry you,” Henry said. She looked astounded. “Let’s be clear. If I love you enough to have an affair with you behind my wife’s back, then I love you enough to ask her for a divorce. To me the injury is the same. I don’t understand the decent kindly deception you talked about. There’s a right name for that and I don’t like it. But all this is breaking too fast, Pam, and meantime you have to leave Moscow. The only place to go is London. That’s common sense.”

“I won’t marry Ted. Don’t argue,” she said in a hardened tone as he started to talk. “I know it’s a beastly decision, but it’s taken. That’s flat. I didn’t know about your battleship. That’s thrilling and grand, though it complicates things. I can’t make you take me along across Siberia, of course, but you had better forbid me right now, or I’ll manage to get to Hawaii myself and much sooner than you’d believe possible.”

“Doesn’t it even bother you that you’re needed in England?”

“Now you listen to me, Victor. There’s no angle of this that I haven’t contemplated very, very thoroughly and long. I wasn’t thinking of much else on that four-day auto ride, if you want to know. If I leave old England in the lurch, it will be because something stronger calls me, and I’ll do it.”

This was direct language that Victor Henry understood. Pamela’s gray coat collar and gray wool hat half hid her face, which was pink with cold; her nose was red. She was just another shapelessly bundled-up young woman, but all at once Victor Henry felt a stab of sexual hunger for her, and a pulse of hope that there might conceivably be a new life in store for him with this young woman, and her alone, in all the world. He was overwhelmed, at least for the moment, by the way she had pitched everything on this one toss.

“Okay. Then let’s get down to realities,” he said gently, glancing at his watch. “You’ve got to make a move today, in a couple of hours. And I have to attend to this little matter of going around to the other side of the world to take command of my ship.”

Pamela smiled beautifully, after listening with a formidable frown. “What a nuisance I must be, suddenly draping myself around your neck at this moment of your life. Do you really love me?”

“Yes, I love you,” Pug said without difficulty and quite sincerely, since it was the fact of the matter.

“You’re sure, are you? Say it just once more.”

“I love you.”

Pamela heaved a thoughtful sigh, looking down at her hands, “Well! All right. What move shall I make today, then?”

“Go back with Talky to London. You have no choice, so go quietly. I’ll write you or cable you.”

“When?”

“When I can. When I know.”

They sat in silence. The Kremlin wall, painted to look like a row of apartment houses, echoed the shouts of the sergeants and the metallic clash of rifle bolts, as the recruits clumsily did some elementary drill.

“Well, that will be a communication to look forward to,” Pamela said lightly. “Can’t you give me some hint of its contents now?”

“No.”

For some reason this pleased her, or seemed to. She put a hand to his face and smiled at him, her eyes full of naked love. “Okay. I’ll wait.” Her hand slipped down to the ripped shoulder of his coat. “Oh, I wanted to mend that.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s after ten, Pam.”

“Then I must get cracking. Oh dear, I honestly don’t want to travel away from you again.” They rose and began walking arm in arm. Among the recruits they were walking past stood Berel Jastrow, newly shaved. He looked older so, with his scraped skin hanging in reddened folds. He saw Victor Henry, and for a moment put his right hand over his heart. The naval officer took off his hat as though to wipe his brow, and put it back on.

“Who is he?” Pamela said, alertly watching. “Oh! Isn’t that the man who burst into Slote’s dinner?”

“Yes,” Victor Henry said. “My relative from Minsk. That’s him. Don’t look around at him or anything.”

In the unlit hallway outside her suite, Pamela unbuttoned her own coat and then unbuttoned Victor Henry’s bridge coat, looking into his eye. She pressed herself hard to him, and they embraced and kissed. She whispered, “You’d better write me or cable me to come. Oh God, how I love you! Will you drive with us to the airport? Will you stay with me every second to the last?”

“Yes, of course I’ll stay with you.”

She dashed tears from her face with the back of her hand, then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Oh, how glad I am that I dug in my nasty little hoofs!”

Tudsbury came limping eagerly toward the door as she opened it. “Well? Well? What’s the verdict?”

“I was being silly,” Pamela said. “I’m going home with you.”

Tudsbury looked from her face to Henry’s, for the tone was sharply ironic.

“Is she going with me, Victor?”

“She just said she was.”

“Gad, what a relief! Well, all’s well that ends well, and say, I was about to come looking for you. The RAF lads are being flown out half an hour earlier. There’s a rumor that a German column’s breaking through toward the airport and that it may be under shellfire soon. The Nark says it’s a damned lie, but the boys had rather not take a chance.”

“I can pack in ten minutes.” Pamela strode toward her room, adding to Pug, “Come with me, love.”

Victor Henry saw Tudsbury’s eyes flash and a lewd smile curl the thick lips under his moustache. Well, Pamela was human, Pug thought, for all her strength. She couldn’t resist exploding the possessive endearment like a firecracker in her father’s face. He said, “Wait. There’s a report Talky must take to London for me. I’ll be right back.”

“What do you think, Talky?” Pug heard her say gaily as he went out. “Victor’s got himself a battleship command, no less, and he’s off to Pearl Harbor. That’s in Hawaii!”

He returned shortly, breathing hard from the run up and down the hotel staircase, and handed a manila envelope, stapled shut, to Tudsbury. “Give this to Captain Kyser, the naval attaché at our embassy, hand to hand. All right?”

“Of course. Top secret?” Tudsbury asked with relish.

“Well — be careful with it. It’s for the next Washington pouch.”

“When I travel, this case never leaves my hand,” Tudsbury said, “not even when I sleep. So rest easy.”

He slipped into a brown leather dispatch case Pug’s envelope, which contained two other envelopes, sealed. One was the long typed report for Harry Hopkins, and the other was the letter to the President about the Jews of Minsk.

Chapter 57 — The Pearl Harbor Catastrophe (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

Chapter 58

A sense of lost time haunted Victor Henry as he sat on the back lawn of the Army and Navy Club in Manila at three o’clock in the morning, listening to a broadcast of a football game going on eleven thousand miles away. Overhead, as always on Army-Navy game night, Orion sprawled brilliantly across half the heavens. On the roads outside Moscow the constellation had blazed brightly, too, but far down toward the southern horizon.

Pug sat on the grass amid a crowd of officers from both services, and a sprinkling of their Filipino girlfriends. Wives had long since been sent home. The old smells of Army-Navy night — fresh-cut lawn grass, frangipani, rum, women’s perfume, and the rank smell of harbor water — the paper lanterns, too, the heat, the sweaty feeling even in a cotton shirt and slacks, the old inter-service jokes and insults, — all pulled him back in spirit a dozen years. Life in Manila was amazingly unchanged. The jumpy overwrought embassy people in Tokyo had been speculating that there might be no Army-Navy game, that either the Japanese would go to war by Thanksgiving, or at least the American armed forces would be on full alert. Yet there stood the same old display board, with the flat white football that would slide back and forth on a string across the painted gridiron. There were the mascot animals — Army mule in a brown blanket, Navy goat in a blue one — tethered and waiting for the comic moments. It might just as well be sleepy 1928, Pug thought. Only the floodlights blazing across the bay at the Cavite Navy Yard for all-night repair work suggested that it was November 1941, and that the Navy was slightly bestirring itself for an emergency.

The loudspeakers bellowed above the chatter on the lawn, and the radio reception tonight was better than in some years. This game still had its old ritual fascination for Pug; he was following it tensely, smoking a cigar. Once his nostalgia had been keen for the tough youthful combat on the grass, the slamming of bodies, the tricky drilled plays, above all for the rare moments of breaking free and sprinting down the field, dodging one man and another with the stands around him a roaring sea of voices. Nothing in his life had since been quite like it. But long ago that nostalgia had departed; those grooves of memory had worn out. To think that lads much younger than his own two sons were out on that chilly field in Philadelphia now, made Victor Henry feel that he had led a very long, multilayered, existence, and was now almost a living mummy.

“Pug! I heard you were here.” A hand lightly touched his shoulder. His classmate Walter Tully, bald as an egg and deeply tanned, smiled down at him; Tully had left the submarine school to take command of the undersea squadron at Manila. He gestured at a crowded table near the display board. “Come and sit with us.”

“Maybe at the half, Red.” It was decidedly an anachronism, but everybody still used the nickname. “It’s more like the old days, sitting on the grass.”

“You’re dead right. Well, I’ll join you.”

“Now you’re talking. Sit you down.”

Tully had played Academy football too, and he listened to the broadcast as intently as Pug. After a while the white football slid all the way for an Army run to a touchdown. Amid yells, cheers, and groans, a young lieutenant unloosed the mule, jumped on its back, and galloped around the lawn.

“Oh, hell,” Pug exclaimed.

Tully shook his head. “We’re going to lose this one, old buddy. They’ve got a fine backfield. We could use Pug Henry in there.”

“Ha! Fifteen-yard penalty for illegal use of wheelchairs. Say, ed, you’re the original Simon Legree, aren’t you?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean sending the Devilfish out on exercises the night of the Army-Navy game. What’s the matter, you think there’s a war threatening or something?”

Tully grinned at the heavily ironic tone. “It was Branch Hoban’s idea. They’re going alongside for two weeks starting today — they’re due in at noon — and he wanted to get in some drills. You’ll see plenty of Byron.”

“I’ll only be here till the Clipper leaves.”

“Yes, I hear tell you’ve got the California. That’s just great, Pug.”

The game resumed. After some dull skirmishing the white ball-shape shot far across the board; Navy had intercepted a pass and run it deep into Army territory. Pug and Tully got to their feet and joined in the Navy yells of “Beat Army! Goal! Goal!” while an ensign happily paraded the goat around. The half ended right after the touchdown. Cheerily Red Tully ordered drinks from a passing steward. “Let’s stay here on the grass, Pug. Tell me about Rooshia.”

His happy grin changed to a tough sober look as Victor Henry described the tank battle he had observed and the October 16 panic in Moscow. “Jesus, you’ve really been in there! I envy you. And here we sit, fat, dumb, and happy. They told me you flew here via Tokyo.”

“That’s right.”

“What’s the straight dope, Pug? Are those bastards really going to fight? We’re getting some scary alerts here, but at this point we’re kind of numb.”

“Well, our people there are worried. The ambassador talked to me at length about Japanese psychology. They’re a very strange nation, he said, and hara-kiri is a way of life to them. The odds don’t matter much. They’re capable of executing a suicidal plan suddenly, and he fears they will.”

Tully glanced around at the nearby couples on the grass or on folding chairs, and dropped his voice. “That checks out. Admiral Hart received a straight war warning today, Pug. But we’ve been hearing nervous chatter from Washington, on and off, all summer and fall. In July when they landed in Indo-China and Roosevelt shut off their oil, we all thought, here goes! The squadron ran dawn and dusk GQ’s for a week, till it got kind of silly. Should I start that up again?”

Pug gestured his puzzlement with turned-up palms. “Look, I talked to some businessmen one night at a dinner party in the embassy, Americans, British, and one Jap, a big-time shipbuilder. The Jap said the straight word, right from the Imperial Court, is that war with the USA is unthinkable. Everybody there agreed. So — you pays your money and you takes your choice.”

“Well, all I know is, if they do go, we’re in big trouble. The state of readiness in the Philippines is appalling. The people themselves don’t want to fight the Japs. That’s my opinion. The submarine force is so short of everything — torpedoes, spare parts, watch officers, what have you — that it’s simply pitiful. Speaking of which, when did you see Byron last?”

“I guess about six months ago. Why?”

“Well, he has more damn brass! He walked into my office the other day and asked for a transfer to the Atlantic command. His own skipper had turned him down and Byron was trying to go over his head. I sure ate him out about that. I told him, Pug — I said this, word for word — that if he weren’t your son I’d have kicked his ass out of my office.”

Victor Henry said with forced calm, “His wife and baby are in Italy. He’s worried about them.”

“We’re all separated from our kinfolk, Pug. It just isn’t in the cards to transfer him. I’m trying to comb submarine officers out of tenders and destroyers. I’d do anything within reason for a son of yours, but—”

“Don’t put it that way. Byron’s just another officer. If you can’t do it, you can’t.”

“Okay. I’m glad you said that.”

“Still, his family problem is serious. If it’s possible, transfer him.”

“There’s this little problem of the Japs, too.”

“No argument.” Victor Henry was taking some pains to keep his tone light and friendly. A crowd roar poured from the loud speakers, and he said with relief, “Okay! Second half.”

When the game ended, many people were stretched out asleep on the grass, under a paling sky streaked with red. White-coated boys were still passing drinks and huddled Navy officers were bawling “Anchors Aweigh,” for their team had won. Pug declined Captain Tully’s invitation to breakfast and went up to his room for a nap.

He had stayed in a room like it — perhaps in this very one — on first reporting to Manila, before Rhoda had arrived with the children to set up housekeeping. High-ceilinged, dingy, dusty, with featureless old club furniture and a big perpetually turning and droning fan, the room hit Pug again with a strong sense of lost time and vanished days. He turned the fan up high, stripped to undershorts, opened the french windows looking out over the bay, and sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the day brighten over the broad blue harbor and the busy traffic of ships. He was not sleepy. He sat so for more than an hour, scarcely moving, while gathering sweat trickled down his naked skin.

Thinking of what?

Seeing pictures generated by his return to Manila. Pictures of himself and Byron under a poinciana tree at the white house on Harrison Boulevard, working on French verbs; the boy’s thin face wrinkling, silent tears falling at his father’s roared exasperation. Of Warren winning a history medal, an English medal, and a baseball award at the high school; of Madeline, fairylike in a gossamer white frock, wearing a gold paper crown at her eighth birthday party.

Pictures of Rhoda crabbing about the heat and the boredom, getting drunk night after night in this club, falling on her face at the Christmas dance; of the quarrel that put an end to her drinking, when he coldly talked divorce. The smell of the club’s lawns and halls, and of the spicy Manila air, gave him the illusion that all this was going on now, instead of belonging to a past more than a dozen years dead.

Pictures of Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square. Of the dreary mud streets of Kuibyshev, the all-night poker games, the visits to farm communes, the stagnant slow passing of time while he waited for train tickets; then the two-week rail ride across Siberia; the beautiful Siberian girls selling fruits, flat circular bread, sausage, and hot chickpeas at tiny wooden stations; the single track of the railroad stretching backward from the last car, a dark straight line through a pink snow desert, pointing straight at a setting sun that flattened like a football as it sank to the horizon; the long stops, the wooden benches in the “hard” coach, the onion breaths and body smells of the local travellers, some white, some Mongol, in queer fur hats; the awesome three-day forest stretches; the ugly miles on miles of huts in Tokyo; the wretchedness of the Japanese, the hate you could feel in the back of your neck on the street, the war weariness and poverty so much worse even than Berlin; the half-dozen letters to Pamela Tudsbury he had drafted and torn up.

Through all these strange scenes Victor Henry had preserved a happy sense that he was moving toward a new life, a fulfilled life he had almost despaired of, a life delayed, postponed, almost lost, but now within grasp. When he thought of Rhoda it was usually as the effervescent Washington girl he had courted. He could understand falling in love with that girl and marrying her. The present-day Rhoda he pictured with detachment, almost as though she were somebody else’s wife, with dl her faults and all her charms seen clear. To divorce her would be cruel and shocking. How had she offended? She had been giving him an arid, half-empty existence — he now knew that — but she had been doing her best. Yet the decision evidently lay between being kind to Rhoda and seizing this new life.

He had written the letters to Pamela as he had written the one about the Minsk massacre — to get a problem on paper for a clear look at it. By the time he arrived in Tokyo, he had decided that letters were too wordy and too slow-travelling. He had to send one of two cables — COME, or DON’T COME. Pamela needed no more than that. And he had concluded that Pamela was wiser than he, that the first step should indeed be a love affair in which they could test out this passion or infatuation before wounding Rhoda; for it might never come to that. In bald fact the prescription was a shackup. Victor Henry had to face the novel notion — for him — that in some circumstances a shackup might be the best of several difficult courses.

In Tokyo he had actually hesitated outside a cable office, on the point of cabling: COME. But he had walked away. Even if it were the best course, he could not yet picture himself bringing it off; could not imagine conducting a hole-in-corner affair, even if with Pamela it did not seem a squalid or immoral idea. It was not his style. He would botch it, he felt, and weaken or tarnish his work as the new captain of the California. So he had arrived still undecided in Manila.

And in Manila, for the first time since his talk with Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square, an awareness of his wife Rhoda began to overtake him and the reality of Pamela to fade. Manila was saturated with Rhoda, the good memories and the bad memories alike, and with his own hardened identity. Red Tully, his classmate, a bald commander of all the submarines of the Asiatic Fleet; the Army-Navy game, in which he had last played twenty-eight years ago, when Pamela had been an infant a few months old; the dozens of young Navy lieutenants on the club lawn, with girlfriends Pamela’s age — these were the realities now. The wild Siberian scenery was a fading patchwork of mental snapshots. So was the incandescent half-hour on Red Square.

Was it really in the cards for him to start over, to have new babies learning to talk, little boys playing on grass, a little girl twining aims around his neck? Manila above all recalled to Pug the pleasure he had taken in his children. Those days he looked back on as the sweetest and best in his life. To do it all once again with Pamela would be a resurrection, a true second life. But could a rigid, crusty man like himself do it? He had been hard enough on his kids in his thirties.

He was very tired, and sleep at last overtook him in the chair, as it had in the Tudsburys’ suite in the Hotel National. But this time no cold caressing fingers woke him. His inner clock, which seldom failed, snapped him awake in time to drive out to Cavite and watch the Devilfish arrive.

Byron was standing on the forecastle with the anchor detail, in khakis and a lifejacket, but Pug failed to recognize him. Byron sang out, as the Devilfish nosed alongside the pier, “Holy smoke, it’s my father. You Dad! Dad!” Then Pug perceived that the slim figure with both hands in his back pockets had a familiar stance, and that his son’s voice was issuing from the lean face with the curly red beard. Byron leaped to the dock while the vessel was still warping in, threw his arms around Victor Henry, and hugged him hard. Kissing that scratchy hairy face was a bizarre sensation for Pug.

“Hi, Briny. Why the foliage?”

“Captain Hoban can’t stand beards. I plan to grow one to my knees. God, this is a monumental surprise, Dad.” From the bridge an officer shouted impatiently through a megaphone. Jumping back on the moving forecastle like a goat, Byron called to his father, “I’ll spend the day with you. Hey, Mom wrote me you’re going to command the California! That’s fabulous!”

When the vessel was secured alongside, the Devilfish officers warmly invited Victor Henry to lunch at a house in the suburbs which they had rented. Pug caught a discouraging look from Byron, and declined.

“I live aboard the submarine,” Byron said. They were driving back to Manila in the gray Navy car Pug had drawn from the pool. “I’m not in that setup.”

“Why not? Sounds like a good thing.”

“Oh, neat. Cook, butler, two houseboys, gardener, five acres, a swimming pool, and all for peanuts when they split up the cost. I’ve been there for dinner. They have these girls come in, you know, and stay overnight — different ones, secretaries, nurses, and whatnot — and whoop it up and all that.”

“Well? Just the deal for a young stud, I should think.”

“What did you do, Dad, when you were away from Mom?”

“Think I’d tell you?” Pug glanced at Byron. The bearded face was serious. “Well, I did a lot of agonized looking, Briny. But don’t act holier-than-thou, whatever you do.”

“I don’t feel holier than thou. My wife’s in Italy. That’s that. They can do as they please.”

“What’s the latest word on her?”

“She’s flying to Lisbon on the fifteenth. I’ve got a picture of the kid. Wait till you see him! It’s incredible how much he looks like my baby pictures.”

Pug had been poring over the snapshot in his wallet for two months, but he decided not to mention it. The inscription to Slote was an awkward detail.

“God, it’s rotten, being this far apart,” Byron exclaimed. “Can you picture it, Dad? Your wife with a baby you’ve never even seen, on the other side of the earth — no telephone, a letter now and then getting through by luck? It’s hell. And the worst of it is, she almost got out through Switzerland. She panicked at taking a German airplane. She was sick, and alone, and I can’t blame her. But she’d be home by now, if there’d been any other way to go. The Germans! The goddamned Germans.” After a silence he said with self-conscious chattiness, “Hot here, isn’t it?”

“I’d forgotten how hot, Briny.”

“I guess it was pretty cold in Russia.”

“Well, it’s freezing in Tokyo, too.”

“Say, what’s Tokyo like? Quaint and pretty, and all that?”

“Ugliest city in the world,” Pug said, glad for a distracting subject. “Pathetic. A flat shantytown stretching as far as the eye can see. Downtown a few tall modern buildings and electric signs, and crowds of little Japanese running around. Most of the people wear Western clothes, but the cloth looks to be made of old blotters. You see a few women dressed Japanese doll-style, and some temples and pagodas, sort of like in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It’s not especially Oriental, it’s poor and shabby, and it smells from end to end of sewage and bad fish. Biggest disappointment of all my travelling years, Tokyo. Moreover, the hostility to white men is thick enough to cut with a knife.”

“D’you think they’ll start a war?”

“Well, that’s the big question.” Victor Henry’s fingers drummed the steering wheel. “I have a book on their Shinto religion you’d better read. It’s an eye-opener. The ambassador gave it to me. Here are people, Briny, who in the twentieth century believe — at least some do — that their king’s descended from a sun god, and that their empire goes straight back two thousand six hundred years. Before the continents broke apart, the story goes, Japan was the highest point on earth. So she’s the center of the world, the divine nation, and her mission is to bring world peace by conquering everybody else — you’re smiling, but you’d better read this book, boy. Under the religious gibberish it’s exactly like Nazi or Communist propaganda, this idea of one crowd destined to take over the world by force. God knows why this idea has broken out in different forms and keeps spreading. It’s like a mental leprosy. Say, how hungry are you? Let’s look at the old house before lunch.”

Byron’s smile, framed in the neatly trimmed red beard, looked odd but no less charming. “Why, sure, Dad. I’ve never done that. I don’t know why.”

As they drove along Harrison Boulevard and approached the house, Byron exclaimed, “Ye gods, is that it? Someone went and painted it yellow.”

“That’s it.” Pug parked the car across the street and they got out. The unpleasant mustardy color surprised him too. It was all over the low stone wall and the wrought-iron fence, as well as the house — a sun-faded old paint job, already peeling. On the lawn lay a tumbled-over tricycle, a big red ball, a baby carriage, and plastic toys.

“But the trees are so much taller and thicker,” Byron said, peering through the fence, “yet the house seems to have shrunk. See, here’s where Warren threw the can of red paint at me. How about that? There’s still a mark.”

Byron rubbed his shoe over the dim red splash on the paving stone. “I had a bad time here, all in all. Warren laying my head open, and then the jaundice -”

“Yes, and that truck hitting you on your bicycle. I wouldn’t think you’d remember it pleasantly.”

Byron pointed. “That’s where we used to sit, right there under that tree, when you’d tutor me. Remember, Dad? Look how thick that trunk is now!”

“Oh, you recall that? I wouldn’t think that would be a pleasant memory either.”

“What not? I missed all that school. You had to do it.”

“But I was a lousy tutor. Maybe your mother should have taken it on. But in the morning she liked to sleep late, and in the afternoon, well, she was either shopping or getting her hair done, you know, or fixing herself up for some party. For all the times I lost my temper, I apologize.”

Byron gave his father a peculiar glance through half-closed eyes and scratched his beard. “I didn’t mind.”

“Sometimes you cried. Yet you didn’t cry when you got hit by the truck. Pain never made you cry.”

“Well, when you put on that angry voice, it scared me. But it was all right. I liked studying with you. I understood you.”

“Anyway, you got good marks that year.”

“Best I ever got.”

They looked through the fence without talking for a couple of long minutes. “Well, now we’ve seen the place,” Pug said. “How about lunch?”

“You know something?” Byron’s gaze was still on the house. “Except for the three days I had in Lisbon with Natalie, I was happier here than I’ve ever been in my life, before or since. I loved this house.”

“That’s the worst of a service career,” Pug said. “You never strike roots. You raise a family of tumbleweeds.”

The crab cocktail at the Army and Navy Club was still served with the same bland red sauce in the same long-stemmed cups, with one purposeless green leaf sticking up in the crabmeat. The roast beef from the steam table was lukewarm and overdone, much as it had been in 1928. Even the faces of the people eating lunch seemed the same — all but Byron’s. The thin little boy who had eaten with such exasperating slowness was now a bearded tall young man. He still ate too slowly; Pug finished his meat first, though he was doing nearly all the talking.

He wanted to probe Byron a bit about Pamela, and about Jochanan Jastrow. He described Jastrow’s sudden incursion into Slote’s Moscow flat, and his spectral reappearance in Spaso House out of a snowstorm. Byron exploded in anger when his father mentioned Tudsbury’s refusal to use the Minsk documents, and his guess that Jastrow might be an NKVD emissary. “What? Was he serious? Why, he’s either a hypocrite or an idiot! What he said about people not wanting to help the Jews is true, God knows. Hitler paralyzed the world for years by playing on that chord. But nobody can talk to Berel for five minutes without realizing that he’s a remarkable man. And dead on the level, too.”

“You believe the story about the massacre?”

“Why not? Aren’t the Germans capable of it? If Hitler gave the order, then it happened.”

“I wasn’t that sure myself, Byron, but I wrote to the President about it.”

Byron stared openmouthed, then spoke in a low incredulous tone. “You did what, Dad?”

“Well, those documents got shunted aside in the embassy as probable fakes. I thought they deserved more investigation than that. It was an impulse — probably a stupid one — but I did it.”

Byron Henry reached out, covered his father’s hand, and pressed it. The bearded face took on an affectionate glow. “All I can say is, well done.”

“No. I believe it was a futile gesture, and those are never well done. But it’s past. Incidentally, have you ever met Tudsbury’s daughter? Natalie mentioned in the Rome airport that she knew her.”

“You mean Pamela? I met her once in Washington. Why?”

“Well, the Tudsburys and I travelled in the combat area together. She struck me as an unusually brave and hardy sort. She endured a lot and always remained agreeable and well-groomed. Never whined or crabbed.”

“Oh, Pam Tudsbury’s the original endurer, from what Natalie says. They’re not too unlike in that way, but otherwise they sure are. Natalie told me a lot about her. In Paris Pamela was a hellion.”

“Really?”

“Yes, she had this Hemingwayish boyfriend who used to room with Leslie Slote. She and this character raised Cain all over Gay Paree. Then he dropped her and she went into a bad spin. I’m ready for some dessert, Dad. You too?”

“Sure.” Victor Henry could not help persisting. “How — a spin?”

“Oh, can’t you imagine? Sleeping around, trying to drink up all the wine in Paris, driving like a maniac. She wrapped a car around a tree outside Marseilles and almost killed this French writer she was with. What’s the matter? You look upset.”

“That’s an upsetting story. She seems a fine girl. I’ll be here a week,” Pug said abruptly, “unless the Clipper changes its schedule. Can we get in some tennis?”

“Sure, but I’m not in shape, the way I was in Berlin.”

“Nor am I.”

They played early in the mornings to dodge the heat and after showering they would breakfast together. Victor Henry did not mention Pamela again. At night, lying awake in warm humid darkness under the moaning fan, he would think of ways to reopen the subject. But facing his son at the breakfast table, he couldn’t do it. He could guess what Byron would think of a romance between his staid father and Pamela Tudsbury. It would strike the youngster as a pure middle-aged aberration — disconcerting, shabby, and pathetic. Victor Henry now had spells of seeing it the same way.

One day Branch Hoban prevailed upon him to visit the house in Pasay for lunch. Byron mulishly would not join them. Pug took a long swim in a pool ringed by flowering trees, and enjoyed a superb curry lunch; and after a nap he beat Lieutenant Aster at tennis. It was altogether a satisfying afternoon. Before he left, over rum drinks on a terrace looking out on the garden, Hoban and Aster talked reassuringly about Byron. They both considered him a natural submarine man; only the military bone, they said, seemed to be missing in him. Transfer to the Atlantic was his obsession, but Hoban tolerantly pointed out to the father that it was impossible. The squadron was far under complement now, and the Devilfish could not put to sea if it lost one watch office. Byron had to make up his mind that the Devilfish was his ship.

Victor Henry brought up this topic at what he hoped was a good time — just before breakfast next morning after their game and shower, when they were having coffee on the lawn. On other days Byron had been in the highest spirits over this early cup of coffee. As casually as possible, Pug remarked, “Incidentally, Byron, you said Natalie’s flying to Lisbon — when? The fifteenth of this month?”

“That’s right, the fifteenth.”

“Do you think she’ll make it this time?”

“God, yes. She’d better! They’ve got every possible official assurance and high priority.”

“Well now, the fifteenth isn’t very far off, is it? This transfer request of yours -” Victor Henry hesitated, for a look came over Byron’s face which he knew only too well: sullen, vacuous, remote, and introverted. “Isn’t it something you can table, at least until then?”

“Table it? It’s tabled. Don’t worry. I’ve been turned down by Hoban, Tully, and Admiral Hart’s personnel officer. What more do you want?”

“I mean in your own mind, Briny.”

“Listen. I’m assuming she’ll get home with the baby. Otherwise I’d probably desert and go fetch her out. But I still want to be transferred. I want to see them. I want to be near them. I’ve never seen my own son! I’ve spent the sum total of three days with my wife since we got married.”

“There’s another side to it. Your squadron is desperate for watch officers, we’re in a war alert, and -”

Byron broke in, “Look, what is this, Dad? I haven’t asked you to go to Tully and use your influence with him, have I?”

“I’m sure glad you haven’t. Red Tully can’t do the impossible, Byron. He stretched a point, taking you into that May class, but that was different -”

Byron broke in, “Jesus, yes, and I’m eternally grateful to both of you. That’s why my son was born in Italy, and that’s why I’m separated from my wife by the whole wide earth.”

“Maybe we’d better drop it,” said Victor Henry.

“That’s a fine idea, Dad.”

Byron turned genial again over the bacon and eggs, but Victor Henry felt that in the short bitter exchange he had lost all the ground he had been gaining with his son.

Yet Byron could not have been more amiable when he saw his father off on the Clipper next day. On the pier he threw his arms around Pug. Impulsively Pug said, as the beard scratched his lips, “Is Natalie going to like all this shrubbery?”

It was a pleasure to hear Byron laugh. “Don’t worry. The day I leave the Devilfish, off it comes.”

“Well, then — I guess this is it, Byron.”

“The tumbleweeds blowing apart,” Byron said.

“That’s exactly right. The tumbleweeds blowing apart.”

“Well, you’ll be seeing Warren and Janice in a few days, anyhow. That’s great. Give them my love.”

The loudspeaker called for passengers to board the huge flying boat.

Victor Henry looked in his son’s eyes and said with great difficulty, “Look, I pray for Natalie and your boy.”

Byron’s eyes were steady and inscrutable.

“I’m sure you do, Dad. Thanks.”

When the Clipper wheeled away for the long takeoff the son still stood on the pier, hands thrust in his back pockets, watching.

The Japanese fleet at that moment was well on its way to Hawaii. The Kurile Islands, a chain of volcanic rocks more than seven hundred miles long loosely linking Japan and Siberia, had made a good secret rendezvous. Japan’s six aircraft carriers had met in a setting of black snow-patched island crags, flecked with the gnarled vegetation that can survive in high winds and long freezes. Through rain and sleet, their fliers had practiced shallow torpedo runs while battleships, cruisers, oilers, and supply ships came straggling in. Nobody knew of this gathering armada except the men in the ships and a few of Japan’s leaders. When the force set out eastward, only a few flag officers had been told where they were going, and why.

They had no set day or hour to attack. They were not sure the attack would go. The fleet was sailing in case the Washington talks broke down. Japanese peace envoys were trying to work out a modus vivendi, a “way of living,” a sort of cease-fire in the Pacific before the guns could go off. The Japanese modus vivendi called for the United States to resume sending oil and scrap iron, and to recognize Japan’s right to rule East Asia and colonize China. If the Americans granted this, the fleet on signal would turn back.

But the modus vivendi of the United States called for the Japanese to abandon the Chinese war and get off the southeast Asian mainland, in return for normal economic relations. The Japanese leaders had already decided that if this was the last word, they would fight. In that case, on signal, the timing of an enormous simultaneous assault, planned to burst out of Japan like red rays all over the South Pacific, would be locked on to one irrevocably appointed hour: the time for a surprise air strike against Hawaii.

The three strong points held by the white race in the South Pacific were Pearl Harbor, Manila, and Singapore. The plan was to knock out United States air and sea power at Pearl Harbor from the air; to capture Singapore by seaborne assault; to land troops in the Philippines and take Manila, and then to sweep up the chips in the East Indies; and thereafter to use these new resources for a strong drive to finish China, while beating off Anglo-American counterattacks. The ultimate gamble was that Germany would either win the big fratricidal white man’s war that was giving Japan her chance, or would so use up American and British strength that Japan would in the end keep what she had seized, no matter what happened to Germany.

The Japanese leaders, including the emperor, doubted that this risky plan would come off, but they thought they had no choice. Japan’s predicament was much like Germany’s before the attack on the Soviet Union. Both countries, in the hands of their militarists, had started wars they couldn’t finish. As time ran out and supplies dwindled, both turned to strike elsewhere, hoping to mend their fortunes.

Three reasons were forcing the Japanese to a showdown now. Their oil was running out. The weather would soon turn bad for military operations. And the white men, alarmed at last, were strengthening their three bastions every week with more and more planes, warships, anti-aircraft guns, tanks, and fortifications. Japan’s temporary advantage in the South Pacific and East Asia was melting away. Unless President Roosevelt suddenly relented in Washington, she had to go, or give up her drive for empire.

And so, on the day before the Army-Navy game, the armada had sortied into the black stormy waters off the Kuriles, and set out for Hawaii.

And as the Japanese task force steamed east, a much smaller American task force sortied from Pearl Harbor, headed west. Admiral William Halsey was taking twelve marine fighter planes to Wake Island in the Enterprise. Japan had long since illegally fortified every island and atoll it held on trust in the Pacific. Time after time, President Roosevelt had failed to get money out of Congress for counter-fortifying American islands. Now, at the end of November 1941, the funds had come through. The work was being wildly rushed. At Wake it was half-finished, but the atoll still had no air defense.

The second day out, on a sunny crystalline morning, Warren Henry returned from the dawn search and came slanting around to land on the Enterprise. The deck rose up at Warren, the hook caught the number two cable, his stomach thrust hard against the safety belt, and he was down and stopped among deck force sailors in brilliant red, green, and yellow jumpers, doing their frantic gesticulating dance around landed planes. Warm sea air eddied in from his rear gunner’s open canopy. Disconnecting belts and cables, gathering up his charts and log sheets, Warren awkwardly climbed out into the brisk wind over the deck, as another scout plane roared in and jerked to a stop.

The landing officer shouted at him, holding his paddles on either side of his mouth, “Hi. All pilots to Scouting Six ready room at 0900.”

“What’s up?”

“The old man wants a word with you all.”

“The captain?”

“Halsey.”

“Christ.”

In the ready room the deep comfortable chairs were already full, and pilots in khakis, or flying suits and yellow lifejackets, lined the bulkheads. Halsey entered with the ship’s captain and the squadron commanders, and stood in front of the scored plexiglass panels up forward, where orange grease marks showed search patterns and assignments. Warren was only a few feet from him. Seen this close, Halsey’s face looked patchy and aged, and now and then he grimaced, showing his teeth in a nervous tic.

The squadron commander waved a green mimeographed sheet. “Okay, now all you fellows received and discussed this yesterday, but the admiral has asked me to read it again, out loud.

The captain stepped back among the squadron commanders behind the admiral. Halsey squinted around the room, contracting his flaring gray eyebrows. “Thank you, skipper. I’m told there were questions yesterday. I’m here to accommodate you, gentlemen.”

Not a word or a raised hand.

Admiral Halsey involuntarily grimaced, glancing over his shoulder at the ship’s captain and the squadron commanders. He addressed the pilots again. “Cat got your tongue?” This raised an uneasy titter. “I’m reliably informed that someone said this paper gave every one of you carte blanche to put the United States of America into the world war. Now would the brave soul who said that care to stand?”

Warren Henry took a step forward from the bulkhead. Faces turned to him.

“What’s your name?”

“Lieutenant Warren Henry, sir.”

“Henry?” Halsey looked a shade less grim. “Are you related to Captain Victor Henry?”

“He’s my father, sir.”

“Well, he’s a fine officer. Now then. You think this order permits you to plunge the country into war, do you?”

“Sir, I added yesterday that I was all for it.”

“You’re all for it, hey? Why? What are you, one of these bloodthirsty killer types?” The admiral raised his outthrust jaw.

“Admiral, I think we’re in the war now, but fighting with both hands tied behind us.”

Halsey’s face twitched and he motioned Warren to step back. Clasping his hands behind his back the admiral said in harsh tones: “Gentlemen, this force stripped for action weeks ago. There’s nothing loose, dispensable, or inflammable left aboard the Enterprise that I know about, except the wardroom piano. I made that exception myself. Now, our mission is secret. There will be no vessels of the United States or of friendly powers in our path. They have been warned away. Ships we encounter will belong to the enemy. Unless we shoot first, we may never have a chance to shoot. Therefore, this force will shoot first and argue afterwards. The responsibility is mine — Questions?”

He slowly looked around at the young sober faces. “Good day, then, and good hunting.”

Later, Warren’s wing mate, lying naked on the top bunk, said, “Well, give him one thing. He’s a fighting son of a bitch.”

“Or trigger-happy old nut,” said Warren, rinsing lather from his razor. “Depending on events.”

On the day that the Japanese steaming east and Halsey’s ships steaming west made their closest approach, Warren Henry flew the northern search pattern, more than two hundred miles straight toward the Japanese fleet. The Japanese routinely sent a scout plane due south about the same distance. But in the broad Pacific Ocean the game was still blindman’s buff. Hundreds of unsearched miles of water stretched between the two scouting planes at their far reach, and the two forces passed in peace.

The light was failing over Guam. From the window of the descending Clipper, Victor Henry glimpsed in the sunset glow the island’s mountain ridges and broken sea cliffs to the south, levelling northward to a jungle checkered with terraced fields. The shadowy light flattened perspectives; Guam was like a painted island on a Japanese screen. Sharp on the red horizon jutted the black lump of Rota, an island held by the Japanese.

The passengers were standing in a sweaty weary cluster outside the immigration shed in the twilight, when a gray car drove up, fluttering on its front fenders an American flag and a starry blue jack.

“Captain Henry?” The white-clad marine officer saluted and handed him an envelope, confidently picking out the Navy four-striper in a seersucker suit from among the ferry pilots and civilians. “Compliments of the governor, sir.”

The note was scrawled on cream-colored stationery crested in gold:

Pug smiled at the tired joke about his minor Sabbath abstinence. “NG, Lieutenant. Sorry. By the time I check through here, go to the hotel, and get cleaned up and whatnot, it’ll be way past the governor’s dinner hour.”

“No, sir. Let me expedite this. The governor said I’m to bring you out to the palace, bags and all. He’ll give you a room to freshen up in.”

The gold loops on the starchy, white shoulder of the governor’s aide conjured away difficulties. Victor Henry was entering the governor’s car within five minutes, leaving the other Clipper passengers behind, enviously staring.

Driving across the island in gathering darkness on a narrow winding tarred road, the lieutenant skillfully avoided some potholes but struck others with bone-jarring jolts.

“You folks short of road repair equipment?” Pug asked.

“Sir, the governor’s been cadging money from public works for gun emplacements and pillboxes. He says maybe he’ll hang for it, but his first duty is not to patch roads but to defend this island. Insofar as it can be defended.”

The headlights shone on green jungle and a few tilled fields most of the way. “Well, here’s the metropolis at last, sir.”

The car passed down a paved block of shuttered shops, and dimly lit bars with names like Sloppy Joe’s and The Bucket of Blood. Here lonesome-looking sailors meandered on the sidewalk, some with giggling brown girls in flimsy dresses. The car emerged on a broad, handsomely gardened square, formed by four stone structures in antique Spanish style: a cathedral, a long barracks, an immense jail, and an ornate building that the lieutenant called the Governor’s Palace.

Kip Tollever waved as Victor Henry mounted a broad staircase to the palace terrace. Wearing stiffly starched whites, he sat in a large carved Spanish armchair, in yellow light cast by a wrought-iron chandelier. Natives in shirt-sleeves and trousers stood before him.

“Sit you down, Pug!” He motioned at a chair beside him. “Welcome aboard. This won’t take long. Go ahead, Salas. What about the schoolchildren? Have they been drilling every day?”

It was a conference on defense preparations. Tollever addressed the Guamanians in English or Spanish, with condescending kindness. One or two spoke a queer dialect that the others translated. The men were taller than Filipinos, and very good-looking.

“Well, Pug Henry!” The governor lightly slapped his guest’s knee as the natives bowed and went off down the stairs. “Quite a surprise, seeing your name on the Clipper passenger list! That’s always the big news item on this island, you know. Kate used to fall on the list like a love letter twice a week, when she was still here. Well! What’s your pleasure? A drink, then a shower? Come on, let’s have just one. Where have you been? What brings you to our island paradise?”

They drank excellent rum punches there on the terrace, in tall curiously carved green glasses, and Pug talked about his travels. Tollever seemed far more interested in the Russian war than in Japan. His response to Pug’s remark that he had spent four days in Tokyo was, “Oh, really? Say, incidentally, you’ll stay overnight, won’t you? I’ll assign a boy to look after you. You’ll be very comfortable.”

“Well, Kip, thanks. I’d better bed down in the Pan Am Hotel. Takeoff depends on weather, and I don’t want to get left by that Clipper.”

“No problem.” Kip’s voice rang with magisterial authority. “They won’t leave without you. I’ll see to that.”

Pug found the palace depressing, for all the handsomely tiled spaces and rich dark furniture. Under the slow-turning fan, the bed in his room was covered in gold-and-silver brocade. New nickel plumbing in the vast bathroom gushed wonderful hot water. But the silence! The Guamanian stewards in their snowy mess jackets stole around like spirits. He and the governor seemed to be the only white men here, for the marine lieutenant had driven off to the bars. From the other end of the palace, Pug could hear the clink of silver and china as he dressed.

In a sombrely magnificent Spanish dining room, at one end of a long gleaming black table, the two Americans ate a dinner made up wholly of frozen or canned stores from home. Kip Tollever maintained his gubernatorial dignity through the first course or two, asking polite questions about his old friends in Berlin and about the situation in Manila. But as he drank glass after glass of wine, the façade cracked, then fell apart. Soon he was expressing friendly envy of Pug and admitting that his assignment was dismal. The younger officers could go to The Bucket of Blood, or drink and play cards at the club. The governor had to sit it out alone in the palace. He slept badly. He missed his wife. But of course the women had had to go. If the Japs moved, Guam could not be held for a week. At Saipan and Tinian, a half hour away by air, Jap bombers lined the new air strips and big troop transports swung to their anchors. Guam had no military airfield.

As dessert was being served, four young officers in white appeared, led by the marine aide-de-camp.

“Well, well, here’s company,” said the governor. “These tender lads come in every night after dinner, Pug, and I educate them in the subtler mysteries of hearts. What do you say? Care for a game, or would you rather just shoot the breeze?”

Pug saw the youngsters’ faces light up at the mention of an alternative. Shading his voice toward lack of enthusiasm, he said, “Why, let’s play, I guess.”

The governor of Guam looked irresolutely from his visitor to the young officers. He held himself very straight, talking to his juniors; the thick gray hair, lean long-jawed face, and bright blue eyes should have made him formidable. Yet he seemed only tired and sad, hesitating over this small choice between habit and courtesy. The hearts game evidently was the high moment in the governor’s isolated days.

“Oh, what the hell,” Tollever said. “I don’t get to see a classmate very often, especially such a distinguished one. You young studs run along and amuse yourselves. See you tomorrow, same time.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said the marine officer, trying to sound disappointed. The four young officers vanished in a rapid tattoo of heels on tile.

Captain Tollever and Captain Henry sat long over brandy. What did Pug really think, Kip asked; would the Japs go, or was this buildup at Saipan just a bluff for the Washington talks? He had once served as attaché in Tokyo, but the Japs were an enigma to him. The wrong people had gotten in the saddle, that was the trouble. The army had gained the power to confirm or veto the minister of war. That meant the army brass could overthrow any cabinet it didn’t like. Ever since then Japan had been going hell-bent for conquest; but would they really attack the United States? Some Japanese he had known had been the finest imaginable people, friendly to the United States and very worried about their militarists; on the other hand, Clipper travellers had been telling him blood-freezing stories of Japanese cruelties in China, especially toward white people who fell into their hands.

“And have you ever read about what the Jap army did, Pug, when they captured Nanking in ‘37? We were so steamed up about their sinking the Panay, we hardly paid attention. Why, they ran amuck. They raped twenty thousand Chinese women, so help me, and butchered most of ‘em afterward. I mean butchered — just that. Women’s thighs, heads, and tits, for God’s sake, were strewn in the streets! This is the truth, Pug. And they tied Chinamen together by the hundreds and mowed ‘em down with machine guns. They hunted kids in the street and shot ‘em like rabbits. They murdered maybe two hundred thousand civilians in a few days. All this is in official reports, Pug. It happened. I’ve had occasion to check into the facts, being somewhat personally interested, as you might say. And here I sit,” he went on, sloshing his fourth or fifth brandy into a shimmering balloon glass and rolling white eyeballs at his old classmate, “here I sit, with no aircraft, no warships, no ground troops, just a few sailors and a few marines. The Navy should order me to evacuate, but oh no, the politicians wouldn’t stand for that! The same politicians who refused to vote the money to fortify the island. No, here we’ll sit till they come. The fleet will never get here in time to save us.

“Pug, remember what the Lucky Bag said about me when we graduated? ‘Any one of Kip Tollever’s classmates would like to be in his shoes today, and even more, thirty years from today.’ Funny, isn’t it? Isn’t that the biggest laugh of all time? Come on, let’s have one more and listen to the midnight news from Tokyo.”

In the wood-panelled library, the governor manipulated the dials of a Navy receiver: a big black machine seven feet high that winked red, green, and yellow lights and emitted whistles and moans. A Japanese woman’s voice came through clearly. After recounting gigantic German victories around Moscow and predicting the early surrender of the Soviet Union, the voice went on in tones of glee to report a great uproar in the United States over the unmasking of Franklin Roosevelt’s secret war plans. The Chicago Tribune had obtained a document known as the Victory Program — Victor Henry sat up as the dulcet voice drawled “Vic-to-ly Plo-glam” — calling for an army of eight million men, a defensive war against Japan, and an all-out air attack on Germany from bases in England, to be followed by invasion of Europe in 1943. The newspaper, she announced, had patriotically printed the whole plan!

Roosevelt’s devilish schemes to drag America into war on the side of the colonialist plutocracies were now exposed; so the woman said. The American people were rising in anger. Congressmen were calling for impeachment of the White House deceiver. The White House was maintaining shameful silence, but the fairness and peaceful intent of the latest Japanese proposals — especially in the light of this secret warmongering Roosevelt plot — were being hailed throughout the United States. On and on the woman went, reading whole passages of the document from the Tribune. Pug recognized them. Some sentences were his own.

“What do you make of that, Pug? It’s a lot of poppycock, isn’t it?” Tollever yawned. “Some reporter got hold of a contingency staff study maybe, and blew it way up.”

“Sure. What else?”

Pug felt sick to the heart. If this could happen, the United States was infected bone-deep with decay. The Japs could grab the East Indies, even the Philippines: America would not fight. This betrayal of the highest national secret in a newspaper was a collapse of honor, it seemed to him, unlike anything in history. The only relieving aspect was that so bald and amazing was the treason, the Germans and the Japanese could probably not bring themselves to believe it, though of course they would make heavy propaganda of it.

“Time for me to go to bed.” Victor Henry shook his head and stood up.

“Hell, no, Pug. Sit down. How about an omelette, or something? My chef makes fine omelettes. In a half hour we’ll get the 8 A.M. news from San Francisco. This beast picks it up like it was next door. Let’s see if there’s anything to all this Chicago Tribune business. It’s always fun, checking Tokyo against San Francisco.”

Pug insisted on going back to the Pan American Hotel. The sense of doom enveloping him was thick enough without the added black misery emanating like a smell from the trapped governor of Guam, the faded hotshot of his Naval Academy class, maundering over his brandy. Tollever ordered up the omelettes all the same, and kept Victor Henry for another hour, talking about the old days in Manila when they had been next-door neighbors. His dread of loneliness was stark and terrible.

Sadly Tollever went at last to a telephone and summoned the marine officer, who arrived in the car in a few minutes. Four Guamanian stewards busied themselves with Pug’s valise and two handbags.

From the top of the palace stairway, Kip raised his voice. “Say, how about giving Kate a ring from Pearl? She’s back in our house in La Jolla. Tell her you saw me and that everything’s fine. She’s very interested in the Guam schools, you know. Tell her the enrollment’s way up for next term. And, you know, tell her I love her and all that stuff.”

“I sure will, Kip.”

“And say, you give my love to Rhoda, too. Will you? Of all the Navy wives I knew, she was the prettiest and the best — excepting my Kate, naturally.”

“I’ll tell her you said that, Kip,” Pug replied, chilled by Tollever’s use of the past tense about himself.

“Good hunting with the California, Pug.” Tollever stood watching as the car left, a white straight mark in the warm night.

The Clipper took off from Guam at dawn.

Chapter 59

On the day that Victor Henry left Manila, the Japanese embassy in Rome gave an unexpected party for Japanese and American newspaper correspondents. The purpose seemed to be a show of cordiality to counteract all the war talk. A New York Times man asked Natalie to come along. She had never before left her baby in the evening; none of her clothes fitted her; and she did not like the man much. But she accepted, and hastily got a seamstress to let out her largest dress. On leaving the hotel she gave to a motherly chambermaid an enormous list of written instructions for bathing and feeding him, which made the woman smile. The rumors of war in the Pacific were eating away Natalie’s nerves, and she hoped to learn something concrete at the party.

She came back with a strange tale. Among the American guests had been Herb Rose, a film distributor who maintained his office in Rome. Herb had somewhat enlivened the cold, stiff, pointless party by speaking Japanese; it turned out that he had managed a similar office in Tokyo. Herb was a tall good-looking California Jew, who used the best Roman tailors, conversed easily in Italian, and seemed a most urbane man until he started talking English. Then he sounded all show business: wise-cracking, sharp, and a bit crude.

This Herb Rose, who was booked to leave for Lisbon on the same plane as Natalie and her uncle, had approached her at the party and walked her off to a corner. In a few quiet nervous sentences, he had told her to go to Saint Peter’s with her uncle the following morning at nine o’clock, and stand near Michelangelo’s Pietà statue. They would be offered a chance to get out of Italy fast, he said, via Palestine. War between America and Japan was coming in days or hours, Herb believed; he was departing that way himself and forgoing the Lisbon plane ticket. He would tell her no more. He begged her to drop the subject and not to discuss it inside the walls of the hotel. When she returned from the party she recounted all this to her uncle, while walking on the Via Veneto in a cold drizzle. Aaron’s reaction was skeptical, but he agreed that they had better go to Saint Peter’s.

He was in a testy mood next morning. He liked to rise at dawn and work till eleven. Sleep put an edge on his mind, he claimed, that lasted only a few hours, and to spend a morning on such a farfetched errand was a great waste. Also, the chill damp in the unheated hotel had given him a fresh cold. Hands jammed in his overcoat pockets, blue muffler wound around his neck, head drooping in a rain-stiffened old gray felt hat, he walked draggily beside his niece down the Via Veneto to the taxi stand, like a child being marched to school. “Palestine!” he grumbled. “Why, that’s a more dangerous place than Italy.”

“Not according to Herb. He says the thing is to get out of here at once, by hook or by crook. Herb thinks the whole world will be at war practically overnight, and then we’ll never get out.”

“But Herbert’s leaving illegally, isn’t he? His exit visa is for Lisbon, not Palestine. Now that’s risky. When you’re in a touch-and-go situation like this, the first principle is not to give the authorities the slightest excuse” — Jastrow waved a stiff admonitory finger — “to act against you. Obey orders, keep your papers straight, your head down, your spirits up, and your money in cash. That is our old race wisdom. And above all, stay within the law.” He sneezed several times, and wiped his nose and eyes. “I have always abominated the weather of Rome. I think this is a wild goose chase. Palestine! You’d be getting even further from Byron, and I from civilization. It’s a hellhole, Natalie, a desert full of flies, Arabs, and disease. Angry Arabs, who periodically riot and murder. I planned a trip there when I was writing the Paul book. But I cancelled out once I’d made a few inquiries. I went to Greece instead.”

There was a long queue at the taxi stand, and few taxis; they did not reach Saint Peter’s until after nine. As they hurried out of the sunshine into the cathedral, the temperature dropped several degrees. Jastrow sneezed, wound the muffler tighter around his neck, and turned up his collar. Saint Peter’s was quiet, almost empty, and very gloomy. Here and there black-shawled women prayed by pale flickering candles, groups of schoolchildren followed vergers, and tourist parties listened to guides, but these were all lost in the grand expanse.

“My least favorite among Italian cathedrals,” said Jastrow. “The Empire State Building of the Renaissance, intended to overpower and stupefy. Well, but there’s the Pietà, and that is lovely.”

They walked to the statue. A German female guide stood beside it, earnestly lecturing to a dozen or so camera-bearing Teutons, most of whom were reading guidebooks as she talked instead of looking at the Pietà, as though to make sure the woman was giving them full value.

“Ah, but what a lovely work this is after all, Natalie,” Jastrow said, as the Germans moved on, “this poor dead adolescent Christ, draped on the knees of a Madonna hardly older than himself. Both of them are so soft, so fluid, so young in flesh! How did he do it with stone? Of course it’s not the Moses, is it? Nothing touches that. We must go and look at the Moses again before we leave Rome. Don’t let me forget.”

“Would you call that a Jew’s Jesus, Dr. Jastrow?” said a voice in German. The man who spoke was of medium height, rather stout, about thirty, wearing an old tweed jacket over a red sweater, with a Leica dangling from his neck. He had been in the group with the guide and he was lingering behind. He took a book from under his arm, an old British edition of A Jew’s Jesus in a tattered dust jacket. With a grin he showed Jastrow the author’s photograph on the back.

“Please,” said Jastrow, peering curiously at the man. “That picture gives me the horrors. I’ve since disintegrated beyond recognition.”

“Obviously not, since I recognized you from it. I’m Avram Rabinovitz. Mrs. Henry, how do you do?” He spoke clear English now, in an unfamiliar, somewhat harsh accent. Natalie nervously nodded at him. He went on, “I’m glad you’ve come. I asked Mr. Rose what other American Jews were left in Rome. It was a great surprise to learn that Dr. Aaron Jastrow was here.”

“Where did you pick up that copy?” Jastrow’s tone was arch. Any hint of admiration warmed him.

“Here in a secondhand store for foreign books. I’d read the work long ago. It’s outstanding. Come, let’s walk around the cathedral, shall we? I’ve never seen it. I’m sailing from Naples on the flood tide tomorrow at four. Are you coming?”

“You’re sailing? Are you a ship’s captain?” Natalie asked.

The man momentarily smiled, but looked serious again as he spoke, and rather formidable. His pudgy face was Slavic rather than Semitic, with clever narrow eyes and thick curly fair hair growing low on his forehead. “Not exactly. I have chartered the vessel. This won’t be a Cunard voyage. The ship is an old one, and it’s small, and it’s been transporting hides, fats, horses, and such things along the Mediterranean coast. So the smell is interesting. But it’ll take us there.”

Natalie said, “How long a voyage will it be?”

“Well, that depends. The quota for the year was used up long ago, so the way may be roundabout.”

“What quota?” Jastrow said.

The question seemed to surprise Rabinovitz. “Why, the British allow only a very small number of Jews into Palestine every year, Professor, so as not to get the Arabs too angry. Didn’t you know that? So it creates a problem. I want to be frank about that. Depending on the current situation, we may sail straight to Palestine anyway, or we may go to Turkey, and then proceed overland — Syria, Lebanon, and through the mountains into the Galilee.”

“You’re talking about an illegal entry, then.” Jastrow sounded severe.

“If it can be illegal for a Jew to go home, yes. We don’t think so. In any case, there’s no choice for my passengers. They’re refugees from the Germans, and all other countries have barred the doors to them, including your United States. They can’t just lie down and die.”

“That isn’t our situation,” Jastrow said, “and what you’re proposing is unsafe.”

“Professor, you’re not safe here.”

“What organization are you with? And what would you charge?”

“My organization? That’s a long story. We move Jews out of Europe. As for paying — well, one can talk about that. You can ask Mr. Rose. That’s secondary, though we can always use money. I came to Rome in fact for money. That’s how I met Mr. Rose.”

“And once we get to Palestine — then what?”

Rabinovitz gave him a warm, agreeable look. “Well, why not just stay? We would be honored to have a great Jewish historian among us.”

Natalie put in, “I have a two-month-old infant.”

“Yes, so Mr. Rose said.”

“Could a small baby make that trip?”

Halting at the main altar, Rabinovitz stared in admiration at the twisted pillars. “This cathedral is so rich and beautiful. It’s overwhelming, isn’t it? Such a gigantic human effort, just to honor one poor Jew executed by the Romans. And now this building dominates all Rome. I guess we should feel flattered.” He looked straight in Natalie’s eyes in a forceful way. “Well, Mrs. Henry, haven’t you heard the stories coming from Poland and Russia? Maybe you should take some risk to get your baby out of Europe.”

Aaron Jastrow said benignly, “One hears all kinds of stories in wartime.”

“Mr. Rabinovitz, we’re leaving in less than two weeks,” Natalie said. “We have all our tickets, all our documents. We were at tremendous pains to get them. We’re flying home.”

Rabinovitz put a hand to his face and his head swayed.

“Are you all right?” Natalie touched his arm.

He uncovered a knotted brow, and smiled painfully. “I have a headache, but that is all right. Look, Mr. Herbert Rose had an airplane ticket too, and he’s coming to Naples with me. If you join us, you’ll be welcome. What more can I say?”

“Even if we did want to consider this drastic move, we couldn’t get our exit visas changed,” Jastrow said.

“Nobody will have an exit visa. You will just come aboard to pay a visit. The ship will leave, and you will forget to go ashore.”

“If one thing went wrong, we’d never get out of Italy,” Jastrow persisted, “until the war ended.”

Rabinovitz glanced at his watch. “Let’s be honest. I’m not sure you will get out anyway, Dr. Jastrow. Mr. Rose told me about the difficulties you’ve been having. I don’t think they’re accidental. I’m afraid you’re what some people call a ‘blue chip’” — he used the American slang haltingly — “and that’s your real problem. The Italians can trade you someday for a lot of ‘white chips,’ so something can always go wrong at the last minute when it’s time to leave. Well, meeting you was a great honor. If you come along we’ll talk some more. I have many questions about your book. Your Jesus had very little to do with this, did he?” He swung both his hands around at the cathedral.

“He’s a Jew’s Jesus,” said Jastrow. “That was my point.”

“Then tell me one thing,” said Rabinovitz. “These Europeans worship a poor murdered Jew, the young Talmud scholar you wrote about so well — to them he’s the Lord God — and yet they go right on murdering Jews. How does a historian explain that?”

In a comfortable, ironic, classroom tone, most incongruous in the circumstances, Jastrow replied, “Well, you must remember they’re still mostly Norse and Latin pagans at heart. They’ve always chafed under their Jewish Lord’s Talmudic morals, and possibly they take out their irritation on his coreligionists.”

“Now that explanation hadn’t occurred to me,” Rabinovitz said. “It’s a theory you should write up. Well, let us leave it this way. You want to think it over, I’m sure. Mr. Rose will telephone you tonight at six o’clock and ask you whether you want the tickets for the opera. Tell him yes or no, and that will be that.”

“Good,” Natalie said. “We’re deeply grateful to you.”

“For what? My job is moving Jews to Palestine. Is your baby a girl or a boy?”

“Boy. But he’s only half-Jewish.”

With his crafty grin, and an abrupt handwave of farewell, Rabinovitz said, “Never mind, we’ll take him. We need boys,” and he walked rapidly away. As his plump figure merged into a tourist group leaving Saint Peter’s, Natalie and her uncle looked at each other in puzzlement.

It’s freezing in here,” said Dr. Jastrow, “and very depressing. Let’s go outside.”

They strolled in the sunshine of the great piazza for a while, talking the thing over. Aaron tended to dismiss the idea out of hand, but Natalie wanted to give it thought and perhaps discuss it with Rose. The fact that he was going troubled her. Jastrow pointed out that Rose was not as secure as they were. If war should break out between the United States and Italy — and that was the threat in the Japanese crisis — they had the ambassador’s promise of seats on the diplomatic train, with the newspaper correspondents and the embassy staff. Rose had no such assurance. Earlier in the year, the embassy had given him warning after warning to leave. He had chosen to stay at his own risk, and now he had to face the consequences. If he wanted to chance an illegal exit, that did not mean they needed to.

At the hotel, Natalie found the baby awake and fretful. He seemed a frail small creature indeed to expose to a sea voyage uncertain even in its destination, let alone its legalities; a voyage in a crowded old tub — no doubt with marginal food, water, sanitation, and medical service — that might lead to a rough trip through mountains; the goal, a primitive and unstable land. One look at her baby, in fact, settled Natalie’s mind.

Rose called promptly at six. “Well, do you want the opera tickets?” His voice on the telephone was friendly and, it seemed, anxious.

Natalie said, “I think we’ll skip it, Herb. But thank your friend who offered them.”

“You’re making a mistake. Natalie,” Rose said. “I think this is the last performance. You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Good luck, kid. I’m certainly going.”

Janice Henry left her house and drove toward Pearl City in a cool morning echoing with distant church bells. Vic had wakened her at seven o’clock, coughing fearfully; he had a fever of almost 105. Yawning on the telephone, the doctor had prescribed an alcohol rub to bring the baby’s temperature down, but there was no rubbing alcohol in the house. So she had given the fiery, sweat-soaked little boy his cough medicine, and set out for town, leaving him with the Chinese maid.

From the crest of the hill, under a white sun just climbing up from the ocean rim, the harbor wore a Sabbath morning mist: a scattering of cruisers, oilers, and tenders, clusters of gray destroyers and minesweepers, nests of black submarines. Off Ford Island, the battle ships stood in two majestic lines with white sun-awnings already rigged; and on the airfield nearby dozens of planes touched wings in still rows. Scarcely anybody was moving on the ships, the docks, or the airfield. Nor was any large vessel under way to ruffle the glassy harbor. Only a few church party boats, with tiny sailors in whites, cut little foamy V’s on the green still water.

Janice got out of the car to look for her husband’s ship. To her disappointment, the Enterprise was not only absent from the harbor, it was nowhere in sight on the sea. She had been counting on a Sunday morning return. She took binoculars from the glove compartment and scanned the horizon. Nothing: just one old four-piper poking around, hull down. Tuesday would be two weeks that Warren had been gone; and now here she was with a sick baby on her hands, and a hangover. What a life! What a bore!

She had gone to the Officers’ Club dance the night before out of loneliness and boredom, accepting the invitation of a lieutenant she had dated long ago, a Pensacola washout who now served on Cincpac’s staff. Vic had had a cough for days, but his temperature had remained normal. Of course she would never have stayed out until after three, cavorting and boozing, had she known he would turn so sick. Still, she felt guilty, irritated, and bored to the bone with this idiotic existence.

Since her return from Washington, she had been growing more and more bored, realizing that she had married not a dashing rake after all, but a professional navy fanatic, who made marvellous love to her now and then and otherwise almost ignored her. Lovemaking at best took up very little time. What an end of Janice Lacouture — at twenty-three, a Navy baby-sitter! She had taken a half-day coding job at Cincpac to avoid being evacuated with the service wives, but that was dull drudgery too. Janice had spells of deep rebellion, but so far she had said nothing to Warren. She was afraid of him. But sooner or later, Janice meant to have it out, even if divorce ensued. A small general store in a green wooden shack at a crossroads stood open, with two fat Japanese children playing on the rickety porch. That was lucky; it stocked a strange jumble of things, and she might not have to drive clear into town. As she went in, she heard gunfire pop over the harbor, as it had been popping for months off and on in target practice.

The storekeeper, a black-haired little Japanese in a flowered sport shirt, stood behind his counter drinking tea. On shelves within reach of his arms, goods were neatly stacked: canned food, drugs, pans, brooms, candy, toys, soda pop, and magazines. He bobbed his head, smiling, under hanging strips of dried fish. “Lubbing acoho? Ess, ma’am.” He went through the green curtain behind him. The gunfire sounded heavier and louder, and planes thrummed overhead. A funny time for a drill, she thought, Sunday morning before colors; but maybe that was the idea.

Going to the doorway, Janice spotted the planes flying quite high, lots of them, in close order toward the harbor, amid a very heavy peppering of black puffs. She went to her car for the binoculars. At first she saw only blue sky and clouds of black smoke, then three planes flew into the field of vision in a shining silvery triangle. On their wings were solid orange-red circles. Stupefied, she followed their flight with the glasses.

“Ess, ma’am? Many pranes! Big, big drir!” The store keeper stood beside her, offering her the package with a toothy smile that almost shut his eyes. His children stood behind him on the porch, pointing at the sky and chattering in shrill Japanese.

Janice stared at him. Nearly everybody in the Navy disliked the Hawaiian Japanese and assumed they were spies. She had caught the feeling. Now here was this Jap grinning at her, and overhead Jap planes were actually flying! Flying over Hawaii! What could it mean? The nerve of these Japs! She took the package and abruptly, rudely offered him the binoculars. The man bobbed his head and peered upward at the planes, now beginning to peel off and dive, one by one, glinting silver amid the thickening black puffs. With a queer noise in his throat, he pulled himself erect and held out the binoculars to her, regarding her with a blank face, his slant eyes like black glass. More than the unreal, startling sight of the orange-marked planes, the look on his face told Janice Henry what was happening in Pearl Harbor. She snatched the binoculars, jumped into her car, slammed the door, and whirred the ignition. He hammered on the door, holding out his hand, palm up, and shouting. She had not paid him. Janice was an honest young lady, but now with a pulse of pleasurable childish excitement she shouted harshly — using the sailor epithet for the first time in her life — “Fuck you!” and shot off up the road.

That was how the war came to Janice Henry, and that was the story she told down the years after a few drinks in suitable company, usually to laughter and applause.

Accelerator to the floor, she careered and screeched uphill and around curves to the top of the ridge, jammed on the brakes, and leaped out into roadside grass. She was all alone here. Below, silver planes were flitting and diving about the peaceful Navy base, where the morning mist still lay pearly pink around the ships. Columns of water were shooting up, a couple of ships were on fire, and here and there guns were flashing pale yellow. But it still looked much more like a drill than like war.

Then she saw a very strange and shocking sight. A battleship vanished! One instant the vessel stood in the outer row and the next second nothing was there but a big red ball surrounded by black and yellow smoke. A cracking explosion hit and hurt her ears; the pressure wave struck her face like an errant warm breeze; and the ball of smoke and red fire climbed high into the air on a pillar of lighter smoke, and exploded again, in a beautiful giant burst of orange and purple, with another delayed BOOM! The vanished battleship dimly appeared again in the binoculars, a vast broken twisted wreck all on fire, sinking at a slant. Men were running around and jumping overboard, and some with their white suits on fire were moving in and out of the smoke, silently screaming. It looked like a movie, exciting and unreal, but now Janice Henry began to grow horrified. Here was one battleship actually sinking before her eyes, and the whole thing had scarcely been going on ten minutes! She saw more planes coming in overhead. Bombs began to explode in the hills. Remembering her baby, she ran to the car, backed it squealing onto the road, and raced home.

The Chinese maid sat in an armchair, dressed for church, hat on her knee, glumly leafing through the missal. “The baby’s asleep,” she said in clear English; she was island-born and convent-raised. “The Gillettes never even came. They forgot me. So I’ll have to go to ten o’clock mass. Please telephone Mrs. Fenney.”

“Anna May, don’t you know that the Japanese are attacking us?”

“What?”

“Yes! Can’t you hear the guns, the explosions?” Janice gestured nervously toward the window. “Turn on the radio. You’ll hear plenty! Jap planes are all over the harbor. They’ve already hit a battleship.”

Victor lay on his back, still doped by the cough syrup, breathing loud and fast. Janice stripped the hot, flushed little body. From the radio came the sliding twangs of Hawaiian guitars and a woman’s voice singing “Lovely Hula Hands.” As Janice sponged the infant an announcer gibbered cheerfully about Cashmere Bouquet Soap, and another Hawaiian melody began. The maid came to the doorway. “You sure about the war, ‘Mis’ Henry? There’s nothing on the radio. I think maybe you just saw a drill.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! A drill! How stupid do you think I am? I saw a battleship blow up, I tell you! I saw a hundred Jap planes, maybe more! They’re all asleep or out of their minds at that radio station. Here — please give him the aspirin. He feels a lot cooler. I’ll try to call the Fenneys.”

But the line was dead. She jiggled and jiggled the hook to no avail.

“Sheep dip — the tar that causes tobacco harshness, Lucky Strike is the only cigarette from which every trace of sheep dip has been removed,” said a rich, happy male voice. “Smoke Luckies, they’re kind to your throat—”

Janice spun the dial to another station and got organ music. “Good God! What’s the matter with them?”

The maid leaned with arms crossed in the doorway, regarding Janice with quizzical slanted eyes as she twisted the dial, hunting in vain for news.

“Why, they’re all insane! Sailors are burning up and drowning out there! What’s that? Who’s there? Is that the Gillettes?” She heard tires rattling the driveway gravel. A fist banged at the door and the bell chimed. The maid stared at her mistress, unmoving. Janice ran to the door and opened it. Bloody-faced, Warren Henry stumbled inside, in heavy flying boots, a zipper suit, and a bloodied yellow lifejacket. “Hi, have you got twenty bucks?”

“My God, Warren!”

“Go ahead, pay off the cab, Jan.” His voice was hoarse and tight.” Anna May, get out some bandages, will you?”

The taxi driver, a hatchet-faced old white man, said, “Lady, I’m entitled to fifty. I heard the Japs have already landed at Kahuku Point. I got my own family to worry about -”

She gave him two bills. “Twenty is what my husband said.”

“I’m getting on the first boat out of here,” said the driver, pocketing the bills, “if I have to shoot my way aboard. Every white person in Hawaii will be butchered. That’s Roosevelt for you.”

In the kitchen, Warren sat bare-chested. The maid was dabbing antiseptic on his blood-dripping upper left arm.

“I’ll do that,” Janice said, taking the sponge and bottle. “Make sure Victor’s all right.”

Warren gritted his teeth as Janice worked on a raw wound two inches long. “Jan, what’s wrong with Vic?”

“Oh, a fever. A cough. Darling, what in God’s name happened to you?”

“I got shot down. Those bastards killed my radioman. Light me a cigarette, will you? Our squadron flew patrol ahead of the Enterprise and ran into them — hey, easy with the iodine, that’s plenty — How about these goddamned Japs?”

“Honey, you’ve got to go to the hospital. This has to be stitched up.”

“No, no. The hospital will be jammed. That’s one reason I came here. And I wanted to be sure you and Vic were okay. I’m going to Ford Island, find out what’s happening and maybe get a plane. Those Jap carriers haven’t gone far. We’ll be counterattacking, that’s for sure, and I’m not missing that. Just bandage it up, Jan, and then dress this nick in my ear. That’s what’s dripped most of this gore all over me.”

Janice was dizzied to have Warren suddenly back, literally fallen out of the sky, half-naked, bloody, returned from battle. She felt deep happy stirrings as she rubbed his skin, smelled his sweat and blood, and bound up his wounds. He talked on at a great rate, all charged up. “God, it was weird — I thought those A.A. bursts were target practice, of course. We could see them forty miles away. There was a hell of a lot of smoke coming off the island, too. I talked to my wing mate about it. We both figured they were burning sugarcane. We never did spot the Japs until six of them jumped us out of the sun. That was the last I saw of Bill Plantz. I still don’t know what happened to him, all I was doing from then on was trying to stay alive. The way those fellows came diving — zowie -”

“Hold still, honey.”

“Sorry. I tell you, it was rough, Jan. The SBD’s a good dive bomber, but these Jap Zeroes! The speed they’ve got, the maneuverability! They can turn inside you — whoosh! It’s no contest. They do acrobatics like birds. You can’t shake them and you can’t hold them in your sights. The pilots are hot, let me tell you. I don’t know if the F4F’s a match for them, but one thing’s sure, an SBD against Zeroes is simply a dead pigeon. All I could do was keep turning and turning to evade. They got De Lashmutt right away. He almost broke my eardrums with a horrible scream on the intercom. And then he yelled, ‘Mr. Henry, I’m pouring blood, I’m dying,’ and he moaned and that was all. There was nothing I could do. They kept coming at me. They were so eager, one of them finally overshot, and hung for a second or two, in my sights, turning. I let go with my fifties and I could swear he started smoking, but I can’t claim anything. I lost sight of him. Tracers started from three sides, right past my windows, these big pink streaks, zing, zing, zing — and then, goddamn it, our own A.A. opened up! Why the hell they shot at me I’ll never know, the silly sons of bitches — maybe they were gunning for the Japs and missing — but the flak was bursting all around me. I still don’t know whether they got me, or one of the Japs did. All I know is my gas tank caught fire. Poor De Lashmutt, I yelled and yelled at him, till the flames were coming up around the cockpit, but he didn’t answer, he certainly was dead. So I popped the canopy and jumped. I didn’t even see where I was until the parachute opened, I just saw water. I was out over Honolulu Harbor, but the wind took me inshore. I almost got hung up in a palm tree in a little park oft Dillingham Boulevard; then I cleared it and got down. I grabbed that cab, but I had a time with that fellow. He saw the chute draped all over the tree, he saw me unbuckling he stopped to watch and he still wanted fifty dollars to take me home. A patriot, that one!”

“I’ve got the bleeding sort of under control, sweetie. Just sit quiet, will you?”

“Good girl. One thing I want to do before this day’s out is get at a typewriter. I may file the first combat report of this war on Zeroes. Hey? How about that?… You should see the sights downtown!” Warren crookedly grinned at his wife. “People out in pajamas, nightgowns, or less, yelling, running around gawking at the sky. Old people, kids, mothers with babies. Damn fools, when A.A. shrapnel was raining all over the place! The only safe place was inside. I saw this beautiful Chinese girl — Anna May reminds me of her — go galloping across Dillingham Boulevard in nothing but a bra and pink panties, and I mean small transparent panties — really a sight -”

“You would notice something like that,” said Janice. “No doubt you’d notice it if your arm had been shot clean off.” With his good arm, Warren gave her a rough intimate caress, and she slapped his hand. “All right! I’ve got this wound plastered down. Maybe it’ll hold for a while. Your ear is all right too. I still think you should see a doctor at the Naval Air Station.”

“If there’s time, if there’s time.” Grimacing as he moved the arm, Warren put on his shirt and sweater and zipped up the suit. “I’ll have a look at Vic. Get out the car.”

He emerged from the house a few moments later and opened the car door. “Why, the son of a gun’s sleeping peacefully. He feels cool and he looks like he’s grown twice as big.”

“Maybe the fever broke.” Janice paused, hand on the gearshift. The car radio was broadcasting an appeal from the governor to keep calm, with assurances that fleet damage was slight and that the attackers had all been driven off. “Warren, that cab driver said the Japs were landing at Kahuku. Do you suppose there’s any danger of that, and -”

“No, no, get started. Landing? How the hell could they keep a beachhead supplied from four thousand miles away? You’ll hear all kinds of crazy scuttlebutt. This was a hit-and-run raid. Christ, the high brass on this rock must be cutting their collective throats about now. Of all the sucker plays, a Sunday morning sneak attack! Why, it’s been a routine battle problem for years.”

On the ridge sightseers stood in the grass beside parked cars, chattering and pointing. Heavy black smoke boiled up out of the anchorage and mushroomed over the sky, darkening the sun to a pale ball. Janice stopped the car. Through the windshield, Warren swept the harbor with the binoculars.

“Good God, Jan, Ford Island’s a junkyard! I don’t see one undamaged plane. But there must be many left in the hangars. Lord, and there’s a battlewagon capsized. I’ll bet a thousand guys are caught inside that — hey! Jesus Christ! Are they coming back?”

All over the harbor guns began rattling and flaming, and black A.A. balls blossomed again in the blue. Warren peered skyward. “I’ll be goddamned. There they are. How about that? Those sons of bitching Japs are sure betting everything on this one, Janice! Well, that means the carriers are still in range anyway, waiting to recover them. Great! Move over. I’m driving.”

Speeding made Janice nervous when she wasn’t at the wheel, and Warren knew it, but he whistled down to Pearl City like an escaping bank bandit. After a few moments of fright, his wife began to enjoy the breakneck ride. Everything was different on this side of time, the side after the Japs attacked; more adventurous, almost more fun. How handsome Warren looked, how competent, how desirable, handling the wheel with a relaxed touch of his unhurt arm, puffing a cigarette in his taut mouth, watching the road through narrow eyes! Her boredom and irritability were gone and forgotten. The black puffballs were far thicker than before, and through the windshield they saw one Japanese plane after another burst into flames and fall. Each time Warren cheered.

The fleet landing was a mess and a horror. Sailors with blistered faces and hands, with skin hanging in yellow or black scorched pieces from bloody flesh, were being helped out of whaleboats or lifted off in stretchers and loaded onto hospital trucks by men in red-smeared whites. Wounded and unwounded alike were bawling obscenities, unmindful of the women crowding the landing and gnawing their fingers as they scanned the faces of the hurt men; unmindful too of the children who played and joked around the women’s skirts — those not old enough to stare with round eyes at the burned sailors. The coxswain of a whaleboat full of sheeted bodies was trying to come alongside, and a fat old chief in khaki kept cursing at him and waving him off. Over all this noise rolled the massive thumping and cracking of guns, the wail of sirens, the blasts of ships’ horns, and the roar of airplanes, for the second attack was now in full swing. There was a heavy smell of firecrackers in the air, mingled with a sour stink from the black oil burning on the water all around Ford Island and sending up clouds of thick smoke. Hands on hips, cigarette dangling from his mouth, Warren Henry calmly surveyed the terrible and spectacular scene.

Janice said, in shaken tones, “I don’t know how you’ll ever get across.”

He nodded absently, then strode to the end of the landing to a long canopied boat. Janice hurried after him. “Coxswain, whose barge is this?”

The immaculate sailor at the tiller flipped a hand to a white hat perfectly squared on his close-cropped head. Big-jawed, bronzed, and tall, he eyed Warren’s gory life-jacket curiously, and drawled, “Suh, this is Admiral Radburn’s barge.”

“Is the admiral on the beach?”

“Yes, suh.”

“Do you know how long he’ll be?”

“Negative, suh, he just told me to wait.”

Glancing back at the milling boats along the landing, Warren said, “Well, look, here’s how it is. I’m Lieutenant Henry, off the Enterprise. I’m a dive bomber pilot.”

“Yes, suh?”

“I flew in this morning, just when the attack started. The Japs shot me down. I have to find another plane and get into this fight, so how’s for taking me over to Ford Island?”

The coxswain hesitated, then straightened up and saluted. “Come aboard, suh. The important thing is to get those sons of bitches. Excuse me, ma’am.”

“Oh, quite all right,” Janice laughed. “I want him to get those sons of bitches too.”

Hair stirring in the wind, bloody lifejacket dangling open, Warren stood in the stern sheets, hands on hips, smiling at her as the barge pulled away.

“Get them!” she called. “And come back to me.”

“Roger. Don’t drive back till these bastards quit, or you may get strafed. Be seeing you.”

He ducked as a red and yellow Japanese plane passed right over his head, not twenty feet in the air, its motor noisily coughing and missing; then it turned sharply and flew away across the channel, over the capsized crimson hull of a battleship. Warren straightened, still grinning. Janice watched the admiral’s beautiful barge, all new gray paint, shiny brass, snowy curtains and cordwork, carry her bloodstained husband away to the flaming smoky mid-harbor island that was the Navy’s airfield. He waved and she wildly waved back. She was horror-stricken by what she had seen at the fleet landing, yet never had she felt so aroused, so full of life, so plain damn good, and so much in love.

An Army spokesman came on the automobile radio as she drove home, urging calm, warning against sabotage, and assuring the people that the second attack had been turned back with little further damage to the fleet, and at fearful cost to the Japanese. All-clear sirens were wailing over the island. She found the maid in an armchair listening to the radio, which was playing Hawaiian music again.

“Victor’s been very quiet, Missus Henry,” she said. “Not a sound. Isn’t it terrible about the war? But we’ll beat them.”

“Sheep dip — the tar that causes tobacco harshness,” said the jolly voice. “Lucky Strike is the only cigarette from which every trace of sheep dip—”

In his bedroom Victor coughed, a deep harsh cough like a man. “Why, there he goes now,” Janice said.

“The very first time, ma’am, since he got his medicine. I’ve been listening.”

Janice’s watch read eight minutes to ten. “Well, it’s been about two hours. I guess that’s all the medicine’s good for, I’ll give him more.” The baby still felt cool. He took the spoonful of brown syrup without opening his eyes, sighed, and turned over. Janice sank in a chair, perspiring and spent, thinking that a war had begun and the Pacific fleet had been smashed between her baby’s two doses of cough medicine.

Chapter 60

The sun poked up over the horizon, painting a red flush on the Clipper’s wing. Wide awake, Victor Henry watched the brightening disk rise free of the ocean. The flying boat’s engines changed pitch, rasping at his nerves. Since he had said good-bye to Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square in the snow, he had been shaken up in trains, planes, boats, trucks, jeeps, sleighs, and even oxcarts. He thought his bones would vibrate aboard the California for a month. Forty-eight hours, two more fifteen-hundred-mile hops, and if nothing went wrong the trek halfway round the earth would be over.

The sun moved sidewise. The turn was so shallow that he felt no tilt in his seat. A pink ray shot across his lap from the opposite side of the plane. Pug left his seat and walked forward into the galley, where the steward was scrambling eggs. “I’d like to talk to Ed Connelly if he’s free.”

The steward smiled, gesturing at the door marked FLIGHT DECK. The naval officer and the Clipper captain had been eating meals together and sharing rooms at the island hotels. In the dial-filled cockpit the engines sounded much louder, and beyond the plexiglass the void purple sea and clear blue sky stretched all around. The captain, a beefy freckled man in shirt-sleeves and headphones, looked oddly at Pug Henry.

“Morning, Ed. Why are we heading back?”

Connelly passed him a radio message, hand-printed in red ink on a yellow form.

“How about that?’ The captain removed the sponge-rubber headphones and rubbed his curly red hair. “Do you suppose it’s for real?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Victor Henry.

“I’m damned. I honestly never thought they’d go. Attacking Pearl! They’ll get creamed.”

“Let’s hope so. But what’s the point of turning back, Ed?”

“I guess they might be hitting Midway, too.”

“Well, they might be hitting Wake, for that matter.”

“I’ve talked to Wake. All quiet.”

Victor Henry returned to his seat, agitated though far from astonished. Here it was at last, he thought: an attempted sneak attack on Pearl, in the midst of a war scare. The uninventive Asiatics had elected to try the Port Arthur trick again, after all. But surely this time they were running their heads into a noose! The United States in 1941 wasn’t Czarist Russia in 1904. One phrase in Cincpac’s message nagged at him: This is no drill. That was silly, to a fleet on war alert! Some low-level communicator must have tacked that one on.

A calm sunburned marine in a jeep, naked except for shorts, socks, and boots, waited for him at the landing. The marine commander had put his forces on combat alert and wanted to see Captain Henry. They drove along the beach road in blazing sunlight and choking coral dust, then turned off into the brush. Combat alert had not changed the look of Wake in the past hours: three flat sandy peaceful islands in a horseshoe shape around emerald shallows, ringed by the wide sea, alive with myriads of birds — for it had been a sanctuary — and bustling with the bulldozers and trucks of civilian construction gangs. The queer hump-backed island rats hopped like tiny kangaroos out of the jeep’s path, and brilliantly colored birds rose from the brush in chirping clouds.

Perfectly camouflaged by scrub, the command post was sunk far down in coral sand. When Victor Henry faced the marine colonel in this deep timbered hole, saw the radio gear and crude furniture and smelled perking coffee and freshly dug soil, the war with Japan became a fact for him. The dugout did not have the graveyard-muck odor of the Russian trenches; it was roasting hot and dry, not freezing cold and wet: the men frantically working on the telephone lines and the overhead beams were not frostbitten, pale, bundled-up Slavs, but sunburned, heavily sweating Americans in shorts. Yet here, where the roar of the Pacific dimly sounded, these Americans — like the Russians outside Moscow — were going into the ground to await attack. The United States was in.

The colonel, a mild-faced scrawny man with whom Pug had dined the night before gave him an envelope to take to Cincpac. “Put it in the admiral’s hand yourself, Captain. Please! It’s a list of my worst shortages. We can make a fight of it here. Maybe we can hold out till we’re relieved, if he’ll send us that stuff. Radar gear for Wake is sitting right now on the dock in Hawaii. It’s been there for a month. For God’s sake, ask him to put it on a destroyer or better yet a bomber, and rush it here. I’m blind without radar. I can’t send fighters on patrols, I have too few. I’m twenty feet above the ocean at my highest point, and I only gain a few more feet with my water tower. We’ll probably end up eating fish and rice behind barbed wire anyway, but at least we can make the bastards work to take the place.”

Pug got back to the hotel just ahead of a rain squall. The Clipper passengers were sitting down to lunch when blasts shook the floor, rattled the dishes, and sent broken windowpanes slinking to the tiles. Amid shouts and cries the passengers jumped for the windows. Fat cigar-shaped airplanes, with orange circles painted on their flamboyant jungle camouflage, were flashing past in the rain; Pug noted their twin engines and twin tails. Smoke and fire were already rising from the airfield across the lagoon, and more explosions, bigger flames, heavier smoke came fast. Pug had often seen bombing, but this attack, destroying an American installation with impunity, still outraged and numbed him.

The marauding bombers, blurry in the rain, kept crisscrossing the islands and the lagoon with thunderous engine roars, meeting only meager bursts of fire. Soon a line of bombers came winging straight for the Pan American compound, and this was what Victor Henry was fearing. An attack on the Clipper might strand him and paralyze his war career before it started. There was no way off Wake Island, except aboard that huge inviting silvery target. Savage explosions and crashes burst around them as the planes bombed and machine-gunned the hotel, the Pan Am repair shops, the dock, and the radio tower. A gasoline dump close by went up in a colossal sheet of white flame, climbing to the sky with a terrific howl. The passengers dove under tables or huddled in corners, but Victor Henry still crouched at the window beside the pilot, watching. They saw spurts of water approach the flying boat. They saw pieces of the Clipper go flying.

When the bomber sounds faded, Pug followed the pilot out onto the pier at a run. Like a clothed ape, Ed Connelly clambered over the slippery flying boat in the rain, making it rock and slosh. “Pug, so help me God, I think we can still fly! They didn’t hole the tanks or the engines. At least I don’t think they did. I’m hauling my passengers the hell out of here now, and I’ll argue with Hawaii later.”

The passengers eagerly scrambled aboard. The Clipper took off, and it flew. Below, smashed airplanes flamed and all three islands poured smoke. Pug could see little figures looking up at the departing Clipper. Some waved.

Even in the dead of night, nine hours later, Midway was not hard to find. The pilot called Victor Henry to the cockpit to show him the star of flame far ahead on the black sea. “Christ, these Japs had the thing all lined up, didn’t they?” he said. “They hit everywhere at once. I heard over the radio they’re already in Malaya, Thailand, Hong Kong, they’re bombing Singapore—”

“Can we land, Ed?”

“We’ve got to try. I can’t raise them. All the navigation lights are out. Midway has a lot of underground tanks, and if we can just get down, we can fuel. Soooo — here goes.”

The flying boat dropped low over dark waters, lit only by the glare from blazing hangars and buildings. On slapping into the sea, it hit something solid with a frightening clang, but slowed and floated undamaged. The airfields of Midway, they soon learned, had been shelled by a Japanese cruiser and a destroyer. An exhilarated mob of almost naked fire fighters was flooding the blazes with chemicals and water, generating giant billows of acrid red smoke. Victor Henry found his way to the commandant’s office and tried to get news of the Pearl Harbor attack. The lieutenant on duty was obsequious and vague. The commandant was out inspecting the island’s air defenses, he said, and he had no authority to show top secret dispatches, but he could tell the captain that the Navy had shot down a mess of Japanese planes.

“How about the California? I’m going there to take command of her.”

The lieutenant looked impressed. “Oh, really, sir? The California? I’m sure she’s all right, sir. I don’t recall any word about the California.”

This news enabled Victor Henry to sleep a little, though he tossed and muttered all night and got up well before dawn to pace the cool hotel veranda. The goony birds of Midway, big hook-beaked creatures which he had heard about but never seen, were out by the dozens, walking the gray dunes. He saw them clumsily fly, and land, and tumble on their heads. He watched a pair do a ridiculous mating dance on the beach as the sun came up, plopping their feet like a drunken old farm couple. Ordinarily Victor Henry would have seized the chance to inspect Midway, for it was a big installation, but today nothing could draw him out of sight of the flying boat, rising and falling on the swells and bumping the dock with dull booms.

The four hours to Hawaii seemed like forty. Instead of melting away at its usual rate, time froze. Pug asked the steward for cards and played solitaire, but forgot he was playing. He just sat, enduring the passage of time like the grind of a dentist’s drill, until at last the steward came and spoke to him, smiling. “Captain Connelly would like you to come up forward, sir.”

Ahead, through the plexiglass, the green sunny humps of the Hawaiian Islands were showing over the horizon.

“Nice?” said the pilot.

“Prettiest sight I’ve seen,” said Pug, “since my wife had a girl baby.”

“Stick around, and we’ll take a look at the fleet.”

Nobody aboard the Clipper knew what to expect. The rumors on Midway had varied from disaster to victory, with graphic details both ways. The Clipper came in from the north over the harbor and hooked around to descend. In these two passes, Victor Henry was struck sick by what his disbelieving eyes saw. All along the east side of Ford Island the battleships of the Pacific Fleet lay careened, broken, overturned, in the disorder of a child’s toys in a bath. Hickam Field and the Navy’s air base were broad dumps of blackened airplane fragments and collapsed burned hangar skeletons. Some dry docks held shattered tumbled-over ships. Pug desperately tried to pick out the California in the hideous smoky panorama. But at this altitude the ships with basket masts looked alike. Some of the inboard vessels appeared just slightly damaged. If only one was the California!

“My God,” Connelly said, looking around at Pug, his face drawn, “what a shambles!”

Speechless, Victor Henry nodded and sat on a folding seat, as the flying boat swooped low past a smashed gutted battleship with tripod masts, sunk to the level of its guns and resting on the bottom at a crazy angle. The Clipper threw up a curtain of spray that wiped out the heart-rending sight.

Journey’s end.

Passing several clanging, speeding Navy ambulances, Pug went from the customs sled at the Pan Am landing straight to the Cincpac building, where officers and sailors busily swarmed. They all wore unsure scared expressions, like people after a bad earthquake. A very handsome ensign in whites, at a desk that barred access to Cincpac’s inner offices, looked incredulously at Pug who wore wrinkled slacks and a seersucker jacket. “The admiral? You mean Cincpac, sir? Admiral Kimmel?”

“That’s right,” Pug said.

“Sir, you don’t really expect to see Admiral Kimmel today, do you? Shall I try his Assistant Chief of Staff?”

“Give the admiral a message, please. I’m Captain Victor Henry. I’ve just come in on the Clipper with a personal letter for him from the marine commandant on Wake Island.”

The very handsome ensign gestured wearily at a chair and picked up a telephone. “You may have to wait all day, or a week, sir. You know what the situation is.”

“I have the general picture.”

A minute or so later, a pretty woman in a tailored blue suit looked through the double doors. “Captain Henry? This way, sir.”

The ensign stared at Victor Henry walking past him, as though the captain had sprouted another head. Along the corridor, the offices of Cincpac’s senior staff stood open, and the sound of excited talk and typewriter clatter drifted out. A marine rigidly saluted before high doors decorated with four gold stars and a Navy seal, and labelled in gold COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, PACIFIC FLEET. They passed into a wood-panelled anteroom. The woman opened a heavy polished mahogany door.

“Admiral, here’s Captain Henry.”

“Hey, Pug! Great day, how long has it been?” Kimmel waved cheerily from the window, where he stood gazing out at the anchorage. He was dressed in faultless gold-buttoned whites, and looked tanned, fit, and altogether splendid, though much older and quite bald. “Have I seen you since you worked for me on the Maryland?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“Well, the years are dealing kindly with you! Sit you down, sit you down. Been flying high, haven’t you? Observing in Roosia, and all that, eh? They shook hands. Kimmel’s voice was as hearty and winning as ever. This was an outstanding officer, Pug thought, who had been marked for success all the way and had gone all the way. Now, after twenty-years of war exercises and drills against Orange, the fleet he commanded lay in sight beyond the window, wrecked in port, by the Orange team in one quick real action. He appeared remarkably chipper, but for his eyes, which were reddened and somewhat unfocussed.

“I know how little time you have, sir.” Pug drew out of his breast pocket the letter from Wake Island.

“Not at all. It’s nice to see an old familiar face. You were a good gunnery officer, Pug. A good officer all around. Cigarette?” Kimmel offered him the pack, and lit one for himself. “Let’s see. Don’t you have a couple of boys in the service now?”

“Yes sir. One flies an SBD off the Enterprise, and -”

“Well fine! They didn’t get the Enterprise or any other carrier, Pug, because the carriers at least followed my orders and were on one hundred percent alert. And the other lad?”

“He’s aboard the Devilfish in Manila.”

“Manila, eh? They haven’t hit the fleet at Manila yet, though I understand they’ve bombed the airfields. Tommy Hart’s got some warning now, and he’ll have no excuse. I only hope the Army Air people in Manila aren’t as totally asleep as they were here! The Army was and is completely responsible for the safety of these islands and of this anchorage, Pug, including the definite responsibility of air patrol and radar search. Nothing on God’s earth could be clearer than the way that is spelled out in the islands’ defense instructions. The documents leave no doubt about that, fortunately. Well you have something from Wake, don’t you? Let’s have a look-see. Were you there when they hit?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How bad was it? As bad as this?”

“Well, I’d say about two dozen bombers worked us over. Mainly they went after planes and air installations, Admiral. No ships were there to get bombed.”

Cincpac shot a glance at Victor Henry, as though suspecting irony in his words. “Say, weren’t you supposed to relieve Chip Wallenstone in the California?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kimmel shook his head, and started to read the letter.

Pug ventured to say, “How did the California make out Admiral?”

“Why, don’t you know?”

“No, sir. I came straight here from the Clipper.”

Not looking up, in the brisk tone of a report, Kimmel said, “She took two torpedoes to port and several bomb hits and near misses. One bomb penetrated below decks and the explosion started a big fire. She’s down by the bow, Pug, and sinking. They’re still counter-flooding, so she may not capsize. She’s electric drive, and the preliminary estimate” — he pulled toward him a sheet on his desk and peered at it — “a year and a half out of action, possibly two. That’s top secret of course. We’re releasing no damage information.”

Cincpac finished the letter from Wake in a heavy silence, and tossed it on the desk.

Victor Henry’s voice trembled and he swallowed in mid-sentence. “Admiral, if I broke a lot of asses, including my own — ah, is there a chance I could put her back on the line in six months?”

“Go out and see for yourself. It’s hopeless, Pug. A salvage officer will relieve Chip.” The tone was sympathetic, but Victor Henry felt it did Cincpac good to give someone else catastrophic news.

“Well, that’s that, then, I guess.”

“You’ll get another command.”

“The only thing is, Admiral, there aren’t that many available battleships. Not any more.”

Again, the quick suspicious glance. It was hard to say anything in this context without seeming to needle the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Kimmel made a curt gesture at the letter Pug had brought. “Now there’s a problem for you. Do we relieve Wake or not? It means exposing a carrier. We can’t go in without air cover. He’s asking for a pile of things I can’t give him, for the simple reason that the Russians and the British have got the stuff. Mr. Roosevelt was a great Navy President until the European fracas started, Pug, but at that point he took his eye off the ball. Our real enemy’s always been right here, here in the Pacific. This ocean is our nation’s number one security problem. That’s what he forgot. We never had the wherewithal to conduct proper patrols. I didn’t want to rely on the Army, God knows, but equipment only has so much life in it, and what would we have had to fight the war with if we’d used up our planes in patrolling? Washington’s been crying wolf about the Japs for a year. We’ve had so many full alerts and air raid drills and surprise attack exercises and all, nobody can count them, but — well, the milk is spilled, the horse is stolen, but I think it’s pretty clear that the President got too damned interested in the wrong enemy, the wrong ocean, and the wrong war.”

It gave Victor Henry a strange sensation, after Berlin and London and Moscow, and now this staggering personal disappointment, to hear from Admiral Kimmel the old unchanged Navy verbiage about the importance of the Pacific: “Well, Admiral, I know how busy you are,” he said, though in fact he was struck by the quiet at the heart of the cataclysm, and by Kimmel’s willingness to chat with a mere captain he did not know very well. Cincpac acted almost as lonesome as Kip Tollever had.

“Yes, well, I do have a thing or two on my mind, and you’ve got to go about your business too. Nice seeing you, Pug,” said Admiral Kimmel, in a sudden tone of dismissal.

Janice answered Pug’s telephone call and warmly urged him to come and stay at the house. Pug wanted a place where he could drop his bags, and get into uniform to go to the California. He drove out in a Navy car, took suitable if brief delight in his grandson, and accepted Janice’s commiseration over his ship with a grunt. She offered to get his whites quickly pressed by the maid. In the spare room he opened his suitcase to pull out the crumpled uniform, and his letter to Pamela Tudsbury fell to the floor.

In a dressing gown he glanced through the letter, which he had written during the long hop from Guam to Wake Island. It embarrassed him as one of his old love letters to Rhoda might have. There wasn’t much love in this one, mostly a reasoned and accurate case for his living out his life as it was. The whole business with the English girl — romance, flirtation, love affair, whatever it had been — had begun to seem so far away after his stops in Manila and Guam, so dated, so unlike him, so utterly outside realities and possibilities! Pamela was a beautiful young woman, but odd. The best proof of her oddness was her very infatuation with him, a grizzled United States Navy workhorse with whom she had been thrown together a few times. Dour and repressed though he was, she had ignited a flash of romance in him in those last turbulent hours in Moscow. He had allowed himself to hope for a new life, and to half believe in it, in his elation over his orders to the California.

And now — how finished it all was! California, Pamela, the Pacific Fleet, the honor of the United States, and — God alone knew — any hope for the civilized world.

A knock at the door; the voice of the Chinese maid: “Your uniform, Captain?”

“Thank you. Ah, that’s a fine job, I appreciate it.”

He did not tear the letter up. He did not think he could write a better one. The situation of a man past fifty declining a young woman’s love was awkward and ridiculous, and no words could help much. He slipped the envelope into his pocket. When he passed a mailbox on his way to the Navy Yard, he stopped and mailed it. The clank of the box was a sad sound in a sad day for Captain Victor Henry.

Sadder yet was the trip to the California, through foul-smelling water so coated with black oil that the motor launch cut no wake, but chugged slimily along in smoky air, thumping like an icebreaker through a floating mass of black-smeared garbage and debris. The launch passed all along Battleship Row, for the California lay nearest the channel entrance. One by one Pug contemplated these gargantuan gray vessels he knew so well — he had served in several — fire-blackened, down by the head, down by the stern, sitting on the bottom, listing, or turned turtle. Grief and pain tore at him.

He was a battleship man. Long, long ago he had passed up flight school. Navy air had seemed to him fine for reconnaissance, bombing support, and torpedo attacks, but not for the main striking arm. He had argued with the fly-fly boys that when war came, the thin-skinned carriers would lurk far from the action and would fuss at each other with bombings and dogfights, while the battleships with their big rifles came to grips and slugged it out for command of the sea. The fliers had asserted that one aerial bomb or torpedo could sink a battleship. He had retorted that a sixteen-inch steel plate wasn’t exactly porcelain, and that a hundred guns firing at once might slightly mar the aim of a pilot flying a little tin crate.

His natural conservative streak had been reinforced by his football experience. To him, carriers had been the fancy-Dan team with tricky runners and razzle-dazzle passers; battlewagons, the heavy solid team of chargers, who piled up the yardage straight through the line. These tough ground gainers usually became the champions. So he had thought — making the mistake of his life. He had been as wrong as a man could be, in the one crucial judgment of his profession.

Other battleship men might still find excuses for these tragic slaughtered dinosaurs that the launch was passing. For Pug Henry, facts governed. Each of these vessels was a grand engineering marvel, a floating colossus as cunningly put together as a lady’s watch, capable of pulverizing a city. All true, all true. But if caught unawares, they could be knocked out by little tin flying crates. The evidence was before his eyes. The twenty-year argument was over.

The setting sun cast a rosy glow on the canted superstructure of the California. She listed about seven degrees to port, spouting thick streams of filthy water in rhythmic pumped spurts. The smoke-streaked, flame-blistered, oil-smeared steel wall, leaning far over Pug’s head as the motor launch drew up to the accommodation ladder, gave him a dizzy, doomed feeling. The climb up the canted and partly submerged ladder was dizzying, too.

What an arrival! In bad moments in Kuibyshev, on Siberian trains, in Tokyo streets, in the Manila Club, Pug had cheered himself with pictures of his reception aboard this ship: side boys in white saluting, honor guard on parade, boatswain’s pipe trilling, commanding officers shaking hands at the gangway, a sweet triumphant tour of a great ship shined up to holiday beauty and brilliance for the eye of a new captain. Often he had played a minor part in such rituals. But to be the star, the center, the incoming “old man”! It was worth a lifetime of the toughest drudgery.

And now this!

A vile corrupt stink hit Victor Henry in the face as he stepped on the sloping quarterdeck of the California, and said, “Request permission to come aboard, sir.”

“Permission granted, sir.” The OOD’s salute was smart, his sunburned boyish face attractive. He wore grease-streaked khakis, with gloves and a spyglass. Five corpses lay on the quarterdeck, under sheets stained with water and oil, their soggy black shoes projecting, their noses poking up the cloth, water trickling from them down the slanted deck toward the OOD’s stand. The smell came partly from them, but it was a compound of reeks — seeping smoke, gasoline fumes from the pumps, burnt oil, burnt food, burnt paper, burnt flesh, rotted food, broken waste lines, a rancid-mildewy effluvium of disaster, of a great machine built to house human beings, broken and disintegrating. Unshaven sailors and officers in dirty clothing wandered about. Above the filth and mess and tangled hoses and scattered shells and ammo boxes on the main deck, the superstructure jutted into the sunset sky, massive, clean, and undamaged. The long fourteen-inch guns were trained neatly fore and aft, newly and smoothly painted gray, tampions in place, turrets unscathed. The ship bristled with A.A. guns. The old Prune Barge was tantalizingly alive and afloat — wounded, but still mighty, still grandiose.

“I’m Captain Victor Henry.”

“Yes, sir? Oh! Yes, sir! Captain Wallenstone’s been expecting you for quite a while.” He snapped his fingers at a messenger in whites, and said with a winning sad grin, “It’s awful that you should find the ship like this, sir. Benson, tell the C.O. that Captain Henry is here.”

“One moment. Where’s Your C.O.?”

“Sir, he’s with the salvage officers down in the forward engine room.”

“I know the way.”

Walking familiar decks and passageways that were weird in their fixed slant, climbing down tipped ladders, choking on smoke, gasoline, and oil fumes, and a gruesome smell of rotting meat, penetrating ever deeper into gloom and stench, realizing that these fume-filled spaces were explosive traps, Victor Henry got himself down to the forward engine room, where four officers huddled on a high catwalk, playing powerful hand-lights on a sheet of oil-covered water. By an optical illusion, the water half-drowning the engines appeared slanted, rather than the listing bulkheads.

With little ceremony, Victor Henry joined in the engineering talk about saving the ship. The quantity of water flooding through the torpedo holes was more than the pumps could throw out, so the ship was slowly settling. It was that simple. Pug asked about more pumps, about pumping by tugs and auxiliary vessels; but all over the anchorage the cry was for pumps. No more pumping was to be had, not in time to keep the battleship off the mud. Captain Wallenstone, haggard and untidy in greasy khakis and looking about sixty years old, reeled off sad answers to Pug’s other ideas. Patching the holes would take months of underwater work. They stretched over a dozen frames. Sealing off the damaged spaces by sending in divers and closing them off one by one could not be done in time. In short, the California, though not yet on the bottom, was done for. The talk was about cofferdams and cement patches, about a complete refitting in the States, about return to service in 1943 or 1944.

Wallenstone took Victor Henry up to his cabin. It was a blessed thing to smell fresh air again streaming in through windward portholes, and to see the evening star bright in the apple-green sky. The commanding officer’s quarters were intact, spacious, shipshape, glamorous, and beautiful, on this battleship sinking uncontrollably to the bottom. A Filipino steward brought them coffee, which they had to hold on their laps, for it would have slid off the tilted tables. Mournfully, the captain told Pug his experiences of the Japanese attack. Pug had never encountered this officer before, but Wallenstone appeared to know a lot about him. He asked Victor Henry what President Roosevelt was really like, and whether he thought the Russians could hold out much longer against the Germans.

“Oh, by the way,” he said, as he started to accompany Pug out, “quite a bit of mail accumulated here for you. I’m not sure that” — he opened and closed desk drawers — “yes, here it is, all together.”

Victor Henry tucked the bulky envelope under his arm and picked his way with the captain across the cluttered, stinking main deck in the twilight.

“You wouldn’t believe what this ship looked like two days ago.” The captain shook his head sadly, pitching his voice above the whine and thud of the pumps and the metallic hammering everywhere. “We had the word from Manila to expect you. I ran off a captain’s inspection on Saturday. I was at it for five hours. What a job they’d done! You could have eaten your dinner off the engine room deck. It gleamed. She was the smartest ship in this man’s Navy, Henry, and she had the finest crew that ever — oh well, what’s the use? What’s the use?”

At the quarterdeck the bodies were gone. The captain looked around and said, “Well, they took those poor devils away. That’s the worst of it. At the last muster forty-seven were still missing. They’re down below, Henry, all drowned. Oh, God! These salvage fellows say this ship will come back and fight one day, but God knows! And God knows where I’ll be then! Who would think the sons of bitches could sneak all the way to Hawaii undetected? Who’d think they’d be screwy enough to try? Where was our air cover?”

“Is that the Enterprise?” Pug pointed at a black rectangular shape moving down channel, showing no lights. Wallenstone peered at the silhouette. “Yes. Thank Christ she wasn’t in port Sunday morning.”

“My son’s a flier on board her. Maybe I’ll get to see him. First time in a long while.”

“Say! That should cheer you up some. If anything can. I know how you must feel. All I can say is, I’m sorry, Henry. Sorry as a human being can be.”

Captain Wallenstone held out his hand. Victor hesitated.

In that tiny pause, he thought that if this man had been wiser than all the rest, had held the ship in readiness condition Zed or even Yoke — after all, he too had received a war warning — and had ordered a dawn air alert, the California might be the most famous battleship in the Navy now, afloat and ready to fight. Wallenstone then would be a national hero with a clear red carpet to the office of Chief of Naval Operations, and he would be turning over a fighting command to his relief. Instead, he was one of eight battleship captains conferring with salvage officers and saying how unfortunate it all was; and he was offering a handshake to the man who would never relieve him, because he had let the enemy sink his ship.

But could he, Pug Henry, have done any better? A battleship captain who roused his crew for dawn general quarters in port, while half a dozen other battleships slept, would have been a ridiculous eccentric. The entire fleet from Cincpac down had been dreaming. That was the main and forever unchangeable fact of history. The sinking of the California was a tiny footnote nobody would ever pay attention to.

He shook Wallenstone’s hand, saluted the colors, and made his way down the ladder — which leaned nauseatingly over the water — to the luxurious and unharmed captain’s gig that the OOD had summoned. The gig ran darkened to the landing. In the dim dashboard light of the car, Pug glanced over the envelopes of his piled-up mail; official stuff for the most part, with a couple of letters from Rhoda and one from Madeline. He did not open any of them.

“Dad!” Warren not only was at home, he had already changed into slacks and a flowered loose-hanging shirt. He came lunging into the living room, and threw an arm around his father, holding the other stiff at his side. One ear was plastered with surgical tape. “Well, you finally made it! Some haul, clear from Moscow! How are you, Dad?”

“I’ve just visited the California.”

“Oh, Jesus. Bourbon and water?”

“Not that much water, and damned rich on the bourbon. What happened to your arm?”

“Jan told you about how I ran into those Japs, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t tell me you were wounded.”

“It’s just a few stitches. I’m still flying, that’s the main thing. Come, it’s cooler out here, Dad.”

In the shadowy screened porch, Pug bitterly described the California’s state. Warren was scornful. The battleship Navy had been a lot of sleepy fat cats primed for defeat, he said; obsessed by promotions and competition scores, ignorant of the air, and forever drilling to fight the Battle of Jutland against the Japs. But the Japs had grasped naval aviation and had made a slick opening play. “We’ll get ‘em,” he said, “but it’ll be a long hard pull, and the naval aviators’ll do it. Not the battlewagons, Dad.”

“Seems to me a few airplanes got caught on the ground,” Pug growled, feeling the bourbon comforting and radiant inside him.

“Sure, I admit that. This whole base was all unbuttoned. Dad, I’ll tell you one thing, if Halsey had been Cincpac, none of it would have happened. He’s been so ready and eager for war, his tongue’s been hanging out. He’d have kept this goddamn fleet in condition Zed, and on dawn and dusk GQ’s for a year. He’d have run patrols till the planes fell apart. He’d have been the most hated son of a bitch in Hawaii, but by God, when they came he’d have been waiting for ‘em! Why, we stripped ship in November. We’ve run darkened ever since, with warheads in our torpedoes, and bombs in the planes, and depth charges on ready. Of course he does go galloping about like an old mule with a bee up its ass.”

Warren described Halsey’s futile dart south of Oahu looking for Japanese carriers. The direction had seemed dead wrong to Warren Henry and the other fliers. The only place for the Japs to be lurking was north, where they could dash straight for home after the strike. But Halsey — so they later learned — had received a direction-finder report of heavy radio signalling to the south, so southward he had roared, launching all his torpedo planes and dive bombers. For hours the planes had scoured over empty seas, till the Enterprise had sheepishly summoned them back. The report had been the commonest of direction-finder errors, a reciprocal bearing. The Japs had lain in the exact opposite direction-north. By then, of course, catching up with them had been hopeless.

His father grunted incredulously. “Is that what happened? God Almighty, that’s nearly as stupid as the battleship performance.”

“Well, yes, somebody on that big staff should have thought of the reciprocal bearing. But nobody’s head was too clear, and I don’t know — it was one carrier against four or five, anyway. Maybe it was for the best. At least he did try to find a fight. Listen, Dad, our own A.A. shot down many of our planes, and they sure peppered me. It was just a historic snafu all around. Tell me, how’s Briny? Did you see him in Manila?”

The bourbon helped Victor Henry’s sickened spirit, but talking to Warren was better medicine. Slanting light from the living room on his son showed him changed: older, more relaxed, rather hard-bitten, the dangling cigarette almost a part of his features. He had fought with the enemy and survived. That edge was in his bearing, though he deferred carefully to Pug.

“I’ll tell you, Dad,” he said, bringing him a refill from the other room, “I’m not saying this wasn’t a defeat. It was the worst defeat in our history. The Navy will be a hundred years living down the shame of it. But by God, the Congress voted for war today with one dissenting vote! Only one! Think what else could have accomplished that? The Japs were stupid not to move south and dare Roosevelt to come on. He’d have been in trouble.” Warren took a deep drink of bourbon. “What’s more, operationally they blew this attack. They had us flattened with the first wave. All they did the second time was paste the wagons some more and bomb a few smaller ships. What good was that? Our oil farm was sitting behind the sub base, wide open. Dozens of fat round juicy targets you couldn’t miss with your hat. Why, if they’d gotten the oil — and nothing could have stopped them — we’d be evacuating Hawaii right now. The fleet couldn’t have operated from here. We’d be staging a Dunkirk across two thousand five hundred miles of ocean. Moreover, they never hit the subs. They’ll regret that! They never touched our repair shops -”

“I’m convinced,” Pug said. “I’m sure that Jap admiral is committing hara-kiri right now over his disgraceful failure.”

“I said it was a defeat, Dad.” Warren, unoffended, came back sharply but pleasantly. “I say they achieved surprise at high political cost, and then failed to exploit it. Say, it’s another quarter of an hour to dinner. How about one more shortie?”

Pug wanted to examine his mail, but Warren’s acumen was rejoicing his heavy heart, and the strong drink was working wonders. “Well, very short.”

He told Warren about his meeting with Admiral Kimmel. The young aviator flipped a hand at the complaint of too much war material going to Europe. “Jesus, him too? Just a feeble excuse. It’s got to cost several million lives to stop the Germans. Whose lives? Could be ours! The Russians made one deal with Hitler, and they could make another one. The Communists signed a separate peace in 1917, you know. It was the first thing Lenin did on taking over. The whole game here is to keep the Soviet Union fighting. That’s so obvious!”

“You know, you ought to go over in your spare time, Warren, and straighten out Cincpac.”

“I’d be glad to, but I’ll have to move fast to catch him while he’s Cincpac.”

“Oh? You got some inside scoop?”

“Dad, the President isn’t going to resign, and somebody’s head’s got to roll.”

“Dinner, fellas,” Janice’s voice called.

“The only thing is,” Warren said, as they walked in, “those Russians are going to exact payment for all those lives one day. They’ll get to annex Poland, or Czechoslovakia, or some damn thing. But that’s fair enough, maybe. Russia keeps swallowing and then puking up Poland every half century or so. What was it like in Moscow anyway, Dad? What are the Russkis like? How much did you see?”

Pug talked straight through dinner about his adventures in Russia. Janice had provided several bottles of red wine. It wasn’t very good wine, and he wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but tonight he poured down glass after glass, thinking that red wine was really remarkably fine stuff. Continuous talking, another unusual thing for him, eased his heart.

Janice asked questions about Pam Tudsbury, which led him to relate his experiences in England too, and his flight over Berlin. Warren pressed his father for details of the bomb racks and release mechanisms, but Pug could tell him nothing. Warren interrupted Pug’s flow of words to describe his run-in with the Bureau of Ordnance over the bombing assembly of his plane, and the improved rack he had manufactured in the shipfitter’s shop, which the Bureau was now grudgingly examining for possible use in all planes. Pug tried to keep surprise and pride out of his face, saying, “You’ll get no thanks from anybody, boy. Especially if it works! Just a reputation as a troublemaker.”

“I’ll get what I want — bombs that fall straight and hit.”

Over brandy, back on the dark screened porch, Pug, now fairly close to being drunk, asked his son what he thought he should do, with the California command gone. It was an honest question. His son impressed him, and he thought Warren might give him good advice.

Warren laughed and said, “Dad, learn to fly.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.”

“Well, seriously, you’d better go back to Cincpac’s staff tomorrow and pound desks till you get a command. They probably believe that you draw a lot of water with the President. You’ll get what you ask for. But you have to move fast. If Mr. Roosevelt remembers that you’re on the loose again, he’ll send you on some other mission. Although I don’t know, it must be very interesting work, at that.”

“Warren, I hope you believe me — thanks, thanks, boy, just a little more, this is damn good brandy — nearly everything I’ve been doing in the past two years has given me a swift pain in the ass. I don’t know why Mr. Roosevelt chose in his wisdom to make a sort of high-octane errand boy out of me. I’ve talked to great men face to face, and that’s a privilege, sure. If I were planning to write a book or go into politics, or something along that line, it would be dandy. But the bloom soon comes off the rose. You’re a zero to these people. It’s in their manner. You have to watch every sentence you utter and keep your eyes and ears peeled for every move, every word, every tone of some bird who may go down in history, but he’s just another man, basically, and maybe even a big criminal, like Stalin or Hitler. I think you have to have a taste for associating with great men. There are people who do, God knows, who crave it, but I’m not one of them. I never want to get out of sight of ships and the water again, and I never want to see the inside of another embassy.”

“How did it ever start, Dad? Here, have some more.”

“No, no, Warren, I’m feeling no pain at all as it is. Well, okay, just wet the bottom of the glass — thanks, boy. How did it start? Well -”

Pug recounted his prediction of the Nazi-Soviet pact, his visits to the President, his assembling of the planes for England, and his reports from Berlin. He felt he was getting loose-tongued. “Well, that’s the idea. I’ve never discussed these things before with anybody, Warren. Not even your mother. You strike me now as a thoroughgoing professional officer. It does my heart good and it gives me pleasure to confide a little in you. Also I’m drunk as a fiddler.”

Warren grinned. “Ha! You haven’t told me a thing. That story about the planes for England cropped up in Time a couple of months ago.”

“I’m well aware of that,” said his father, “but I wasn’t the one who spilled the beans. You didn’t see my name in that story.”

“I sure didn’t. Dad, don’t you know why the President likes you? You’ve a keen mind, you get things done, you don’t talk — a rare enough combination — and added to all that, you don’t want the job. He must be up to his nates in these people you describe who keep shoving to get near him. He must find you refreshing as well as useful. There can’t be many patriots in Washington.”

“Well, that’s an interesting thought. I don’t know why you’re buttering me up, but thanks for calling me a patriot with a keen mind. I do try to be as keen as the next guy, Warren. Possibly I was a wee bit mistaken in that small dispute about carriers versus battleships. If I’d been ordered to the Enterprise, for instance, instead of the California — which might well have been, had I ever learned to fly — I would have a command right now, instead of a skinful of booze. Thanks, Warren. Thanks for everything, and God bless you. Sorry I did so much talking. Tomorrow I want to hear all about your tangle with the Zeroes. Now if my legs will support me, I think I’ll go to bed.”

He did not stir till noon. Janice was out on the lawn, playing with the baby on a blanket, when her father-in-law emerged yawning on the screen porch in a white silk kimono, carrying a manila envelope.

“Hi, Dad,” she called. “How about some breakfast?”

He sat in a wicker chair. “You mean lunch. No thanks, I’m still off schedule from the travelling. Your maid’s bringing me coffee. I’ll have a look at my mail, then mosey down to Cincpac.”

A few minutes later Janice heard a loud clink. Victor Henry sat upright staring at a letter in his lap, his hand still on the coffee cup he had set down so hard.

“What’s the matter, Dad?”

“Eh? What? Nothing.”

“Bad news from home?”

“That coffee’s mighty hot. I burned my tongue. It’s nothing. Where’s Warren, by the way?”

“Went to the ship. He expects to be back for dinner, but I guess we can never be sure about anything anymore.”

“That’s exactly right.”

His voice and his manner were strained and queer, she thought. Covertly she watched him read and reread two handwritten letters, looking from one to the other, leaving a pile of office mail unopened.

“Say, Jan.” He stood, stuffing the mail back in the big envelope.

“Yes, Dad. You’re sure you won’t eat something?”

“No, no. I don’t want to eat. I’m a little tireder than I figured. I may even crawl back in the sack for a bit.”

When night fell, his bedroom door was still shut. Warren came home after seven. Janice told him what had been happening. He cautiously rapped at his father’s door.

“Dad?”

Rapping louder, he tried the knob and went into the black room. Soon he came out with an empty brandy bottle. The cork and foil lay in his palm. “It was a fresh bottle, Janice. He opened it and drank it all.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s just out. Out cold.”

“Maybe you should look at his mail.”

Warren gave her a frigid glare, lighting a cigarette.

“Listen,” she said with mixed timidity and desperation, “those letters, whatever they were, upset him. You’d better find out what the trouble is.”

“If he wants me to know, he’ll tell me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Eat my dinner.”

Warren did not speak again until he finished his meat. He sat silent, looking straight ahead when food was not before him. “Dad’s taking the California thing hard,” he finally said. “That’s the whole trouble.”

“Well, I hope that’s all.”

He said, “Did you listen to the evening news?”

“No.”

“Big air strike on Manila. They made a mess of the Cavite Navy Yard. That’s all the news Washington put out. But the communicator on the Enterprise told me two submarines were bombed and one was sunk. That one was the Devilfish.”

“Oh God, no!”

“And there’s no word on survivors.”

“Maybe it’s a mistaken report.”

“Maybe.”

“Warren, I feel in my bones that Byron is all right.”

His chilly grim face looked much like his father’s. “That’s comforting. Till we get some more definite information.”

Chapter 61

To military specialists, “Clark Field” is the name of a United States defeat as grave as Pearl Harbor. With this catastrophe at the main Army airfield on Luzon, the Philippines lost their air cover; the Asiatic Fleet had to flee south; and the rich south sea islands and archipelagoes were laid bare at a stroke for conquest. There has never been a rational explanation for what happened there. Yet Congress did not investigate it. Nobody was relieved. History still ignores Clark Field, and remembers Pearl Harbor. Clark Field was half a day late for immortality. Two great disasters five thousand miles apart in one day are boring, and like any good editor, history has cut the repetition.

Clark Field occurred half a day later than Pearl Harbor because the Japanese could not, for all their clever planning, arrange for the dawn to come up everywhere at once. They gave up hope of surprising the Philippines, for the sunrise took five hours to traverse the bulge of ocean from Hawaii. Their bombers waited for good weather in starting from Formosa, and droned straight in over the main island of Luzon just before high noon, expecting alert and violent opposition. The ground observers, on a war footing after the Pearl Harbor news, sent a spate of reports to the command center, tracking the attackers from the coast all the way to their objective. They got there unopposed, nevertheless, and found the fighters and bombers of the Far East Air Force — a formidable armada, built up in recent weeks as the hard core of resistance to Japan — lined up on the ground. This ignominious occurrence remains unaccounted for. It was the Japanese, this time, who were surprised, very pleasantly so. They laid utter waste to General Douglas MacArthur’s air force, and flew away. Thus ended, in a quarter of an hour, any hope of stopping the Japanese in the south seas. No course remained for the American forces there but last-ditch stands and surrenders.

The Japanese at once set about to cash in on this startling success. Step one was to make Manila Bay uninhabitable for the United States Navy. Two days after Clark Field a horde of bombers came in and carefully, painstakingly destroyed the Cavite Naval Base at their leisure, having no air defenders to worry about. The Devilfish and Byron Henry were at dead center of this attack.

When the attack actually began, Byron was ashore with a working party, drawing torpedoes. The terrifying wail of the siren broke out not far from the big open shed of the torpedo shop. The overhead crane clattered to a halt. The echoing clanks and squeals of repair machinery quieted down. Chiefs, torpedomen, and machinists’ mates in greasy dungarees trotted away from their benches and lathes to take battle stations.

Byron’s party had four torpedoes in the truck. He decided to load two more before leaving. His orders called for six, and false alarms had been plentiful ever since Clark Field. But with the overhead crane shut down, it was slow work moving an assembled Mark 14 torpedo, a ton and a half of steel cylinder packed with explosives, propellant and motor. The sweating Devilfish sailors were rigging one to the guy chains of a small cherry-picker crane when Byron’s leading torpedoman glanced out at the sky. “Mr. Henry, here they come.”

Hansen had the best eyes on the Devilfish. It took Byron half a minute to discern the neat V of silvery specks shining in the blue, far higher than the German planes he had seen over Poland. The old Warsaw feeling overwhelmed him — the fear, the exhilaration, the call to look sharp and act fast.

“God, yes, fifty or sixty of ‘em,” he said.

“I counted fifty-seven. They’re headed this way sir. Target angle zero.”

“So I see. Well, let’s hurry.”

The sailor at the wheel of the cherry picker began gunning the motor, tightening the chains on the torpedo.

“Hold it!” Byron exclaimed, hearing a distant explosion. More CRUMPS! sounded closer. The cement floor trembled. Now for the first time since Warsaw Byron’s ears caught a familiar noise — a high whistle ascending in pitch and getting louder.

“Take cover!”

The sailors dove under the truck and a heavy worktable nearby. An explosion blasted close to the shed, then a cataract of noise burst all around, the floor shook and heaved, and Byron too threw himself under the table onto rough cement coated with sandy grease. Quarters were narrow here and his face was jammed against somebody’s scratchy dungarees. Byron had never endured a bombing like this. Over and over he winced and gritted his teeth at the cracking blasts that shook the ground. It seemed to him a fifty-fifty chance that he would get killed in the next minute. But at last the noise lessened as the bombing moved along to another part of the base. He crawled free and ran outside. Flame and smoke were billowing around and walls were starting to crash down. The serene blue sky was flecked with A.A. bursting impotently far below the bombers, which were quite visible through the smoke. The Devilfish sailors came huddling around Byron, brushing themselves off and staring at the fires.

“Hey, Mr. Henry, it looks kind of bad, don’t it?”

“Are we going back aboard?”

“Should we finish loading the fish?”

“Wait.”

Byron hurried through the smoky shed to see the situation on the other side. Hansen came with him. Hansen was an old able submariner, a fat Swede from Oregon more than six feet tall, with a bushy blond beard and a belt pulled tight under a bulging paunch. Hansen had failed to make chief because once in Honolulu he had resisted arrest by three marine shore patrol men, had given one a brain concussion, and had broken another’s arm. He liked Byron and had taught him a lot without seeming to; and Byron had grown his beard partly in sympathy with Hansen, because the captain had been harrying the stubborn Swede to trim or remove it.

On the other side of the torpedo shop, large fires also roared and crackled, fanned by a sea wind. In the street a bomb had blown a large crater; water as shooting up out of a broken main, and fat blue sparks were flashing among the torn and twisted underground cables. Three heavy Navy trucks stood halted by the smoking pit, and their Filipino drivers, chattering in Tagalog, were peering down into the hole.

Byron shouted above the chaotic din, “Looks like we’re stuck, maybe, Hansen. What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Henry. If these trucks would move clear we could probably get out by doubling back around the Commandancia.”

One of the drivers called to Byron, “Say, can we drive through this shop? There a way through to wharf?”

Byron shook his head and raised his voice over the shrieking siren and the yells of fire fighters dragging hoses along the street. “All blocked on that side! Solid fire, and some walls down!”

Squinting up at the wind-driven smoke and flame, Hansen said, “Mr. Henry, the fire’s gonna spread to this shop and all these fish are gonna go.” Byron understood the pain in the torpedoman’s voice. Without torpedoes, what good was a submarine squadron? The shortage was already well known and acute.

He said, “Well, if you could operate that overhead crane, maybe we could still pull out a few.”

Hansen scratched his balding head. “Mr. Henry, I’m not a crane man.”

Standing by the flooding crater was a lean civilian in overalls and a brown hard hat. He said, “I’m a crane operator. What’s your problem?”

Byron turned to the Filipino driver. “Will you guys give us a hand? We want to move some torpedoes out of here.”

After a rapid exchange in Tagalog with the other drivers, the Filipino exclaimed, “Okay! Where we go?”

“Come on,” Byron said to the civilian. “In this shop. It’s an overhead crane.”

“I know, sonny.”

In the bay off Sangley Point, meanwhile, a gray speedboat swooped alongside the Devilfish, which was under way, fleeing the Navy Yard and heading for the submarine base at Bataan. It was Red Tully’s speedboat, and he was bringing the skipper of the Devilfish back from the base. Branch Hoban jumped from the speedboat to the forecastle of his vessel, as Captain Tully yelled up at the bridge through a megaphone, “Ahoy the Devilfish! What about Seadragon and Sealion?”

Lieutenant Aster cupped his hands around his mouth. “They were all right when we left, sir. But they’re stuck alongside. No power.”

“Oh, Christ. Tell Branch to lie off here. I’ll go have a look.”

“Shall we pull the plug, sir?”

“Not unless you’re attacked.”

Hoban arrived on the bridge as the speedboat thrummed away. “Lady, what about Briny and the working party?”

Aster gestured back toward the Navy Yard, which appeared solidly afire under towering pillars of smoke. “They never showed. I figured I’d better get away alongside, Captain.”

“Damn right. Glad one of us was aboard.”

In a short time the speedboat returned. The coxswain swerved it alongside and Tully came aboard the Devilfish white-faced and hoarse. “Bad business. They got straddled with bombs. I think the Sealion’s a goner — she’s on fire, her after engine room’s flooded, and she’s sinking fast.”

“Yea gods,” Hoban said. “We were outboard of her.”

“I know. Damn lucky.”

“The Pigeon’s trying to tow the Seadragon clear. Better go back in there, Branch, and see if you can help.

“Aye aye, sir.”

A sooty motor whaleboat was puttering toward the Devilfish. “Who’s this now?” Tully said.

Hoban shaded his eyes. “Say, Lady, is that Pierce?”

“Yes, it’s Pierce, sir,” Lieutenant Aster said, glancing through binoculars.

Sailors ran out on the forecastle to help the young seaman scramble aboard. He came to the bridge, his eyes showing white and his mouth red as a minstrel’s in a soot-covered face. “Captain, Mr. Henry sent me to tell you, the working party’s all right.”

“Well, thank God! Where are they?”

“They’re taking torpedoes out of the shop.”

Tully exclaimed, “The torpedo shop? You mean it’s still standing?”

“Yes, sir. The fire sort of blew away in another direction, so Mr. Henry and Hansen got these trucks and -”

“You come with me,” Tully said. “Branch, I’m going back in there.”

But when the squadron commander and the sailor reached the blazing Navy Yard, there was no way to get to the torpedo shop. Fallen buildings and smoking debris blocked every route into the wharf area. Tully circled in vain through drifting smoke in a commandeered jeep, avoiding bomb craters, rubble, and careering, screaming ambulances. “Captain Tully, sir, I think I see them trucks,” said Pierce. He pointed to a grassy area on the other side of a small bridge crowded with cars, ambulances, and foot traffic. “See? Over there by the water tower.”

“The big gray ones?”

“Yes, sir. I think that’s them, sir.”

Tully pulled the jeep out of the road and shouldered his way over the bridge. He found Byron Henry sitting on top of heaped torpedoes in a truck, drinking a Coca-Cola. Byron was almost unrecognizable, for his hands, face, and beard were sooty. The three trucks were full of torpedoes, and two cherry-picker crane trucks held more. A small Army truck was piled high with stencilled crates and boxes. The Filipino drivers sat on the grass, eating sandwiches and cracking jokes in Tagalog. The Devilfish working party lay sprawled in exhausted attitudes, all except Hansen, who sat smoking a pipe with his back to a huge tire of the truck on which Byron perched.

“Hello there, Byron,” Tully called.

Byron turned around and tried to jump up, but it was hard to do on the heap of long cylinders. “Oh, good afternoon, sir.”

“How many did you get?”

“Twenty-six, sir. Then we had to leave. The fire was closing in.”

“I see you scooped up a truckload of spare parts, too.”

“That was Hansen’s idea, sir.”

“Who’s Hansen?”

Byron indicated the torpedoman, who had leaped to his feet on recognizing Captain Tully.

“What’s your rating?”

“Torpedoman first class, sir.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. You’re a chief torpedoman.”

Hansen’s beard opened in an ecstatic smile, and his eyes gleamed at Ensign Henry. Tully looked around at the trove of rescued torpedoes. “You got exploders?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, good. Suppose you drive this haul around to Mariveles.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“I’ll want a report on this, Byron, with the names, and ratings of your working party and of these drivers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any chance of getting more fish out of there?”

“Depends on what the fire leaves, sir. The shop hadn’t caught when we left, but now — I don’t know.”

“All right. I’ll see about that. You get going.”

Next morning Byron presented himself to Captain Tully. The squadron commander was working at a desk in a Quonset hut on the beach at Mariveles Harbor, a deep cove in the mountainous Bataan peninsula. Behind Tully’s tanned hairless pate a large blue and yellow chart of Manila Bay covered most of the plasterboard wall. Byron handed him a two-page report: Tully glanced through it and said, “Pretty skimpy document.”

“It has the facts, Captain, and all the names and ratings.”

Tully nodded and dropped the sheets in a basket. “Branch told me you’re allergic to paperwork.”

“It’s not my strong point, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Now, did he tell you what I want you for?”

“Just something about salvage, sir.”

“Byron, the Japs are bound to land soon. We probably can’t hold Manila, but as long as MacArthur hangs on to Bataan, the squadron can go on operating out of Mariveles. This is a hell of a lot closer to Japan than any other sub base we’ve got now, or will have for a good long while.” Tully stood, and gestured at the wall. “So — the idea is to clean out Cavite, what’s left of it, and Manila, of every single item we can use, and fetch it here. You seem to have a sort of scavenger instinct. Tully laughed, and Byron responded with a polite smile. “You’ll work on this until the Devilfish goes out on operations. Lieutenant Commander Percifield is in charge, and you’ll report to him now over at Admiral Hart’s headquarters in Manila. He’s expecting you.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“While you’re there, look in on Admiral Hart. He’s an old submariner, you know. I told him about those torpedoes. He appreciated it and is writing a letter of commendation.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Oh, and incidentally, I’ve written your father about your exploit, though Lord knows when and how it’ll catch up with him.” Tully irresolutely took off his glasses, looked at the erect impassive ensign, and swivelled to and fro.

“Now, Byron, do you still want to go to the Atlantic? With all hell busting loose out here?”

“Yes, sir. I do want that.”

“You do? When there’s only our squadron now to oppose the Japs on the sea? When this is where the fighting is?”

Byron did not reply.

“As for your wife and baby in Italy, that’s unfortunate, but you know, she’ll be an enemy alien now.”

“Sir, we’re not at war with Italy. Not yet.”

“Oh, that’s inevitable. Hitler’s scheduled to make this big speech today, you know. Everybody expects him to declare war, and old Musso will just follow suit, p.d.q. Your wife will be interned, but that’s no cause for alarm. After a while she’ll be exchanged. The Italians are civilized people. I’m sure she’ll be all right.”

“Captain Tully, my wife’s Jewish.”

The squadron commander looked surprised, and turned a bit red. He avoided Byron’s eye. “Well now, that I didn’t know.”

“My captain knows. I’ve told him. The Italians — and what’s more to the point, the Germans — will class my baby son as Jewish, too.”

Blowing out a long audible breath, “Tully said, “Okay. That’s a problem. I still don’t see what you can do about it. Our submarine operations in the Atlantic will be minor for a long, long time. Here’s where we need you.” He looked up at the ensign, who stood at attention, blank-faced. “However, Byron, I’m going to send a dispatch, recommending your transfer to Submarine Force Atlantic — as and when the Devilfish gets a replacement for you. Not before.”

Byron Henry showed no sign of the relief that filled him.

“Thank you, Captain Tully.”

The squadron commander opened a desk drawer. “One more thing. Your commanding officer concurs in this, so congratulations.”

He laid on the desk before Byron a gold pin, the dolphins of a submariner.

Chapter 62 — War with the United States (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

Chapter 63

The door stood open to Natalie’s bedroom, and Hitler’s screeching woke the baby. In the sitting room Natalie had the radio turned low, but at the Führer’s sudden shriek — “ROOSEVELT!” — she and Aaron looked at each other in alarm, and Louis began sobbing.

“He is a maniac, after all.” Slumped in an armchair in a bathrobe and muffler, his sunken red-shadowed eyes watering, Aaron Jastrow shook his head and lifted a trembling teacup to his mouth, as Hitler went on with his hoarse bellows, sneers, whispers, and yells. “Extremely clever, persuasive, and forceful, but a maniac. I confess I never grasped it before. I thought he playacted.”

With a faintly contemptuous glance at her uncle, Natalie went to the baby.

The Führer’s speech, starting with the usual complaints of injustices endured by Germany and himself, had worked up to the naming of the one supreme war criminal responsible for all the bloodshed and misery that he, the Führer, had worked so hard to avert, the insane hypocrite who had sold out his country and himself to the Jews, thwarted Germany at every turn, and loosed destruction on mankind. After a strangely long pause, came the wild scream that woke the child: “Rooo-ss-felt!”

And this bitter hate-filled animal cry somehow woke Aaron Jastrow, too.

In recent years, Jastrow had listened to few Hitler speeches. They bored him. He was a historian, and history’s pages were crowded with such flamboyant tyrants who had strutted their brief seasons, done their damage, built their grandiose monuments, and passed away. So it would be with Hitler, he had once written after a visit to Germany, in a cool meditative essay in Harper’s entitled “Der Führer: Thoughts Before Midnight.”

In this essay, Jastrow had pigeonholed the Nazi boilup with other brief violent mass upheavals which through the ages had come and gone. Sometimes they changed the order of things, like the Crusades and the French Revolution; sometimes they left only destruction, like the flash-flood massacres of Alaric and Tamerlane. Perhaps this weirdly glorified little beggar had something to contribute to the world. His call for a new unified order in Europe made a certain sense. He might start a world war; he might win it or he might lose it; but in any case he would at last die, and the world would wag on.

God — Jastrow used the term with arch irony to denote the blind drift of events — like a good roadside juggler, did his act with whatever objects came to his hand. If Hitler triumphed and brought a tyrannic German unity to Europe, or even to the whole earth, lasting a century or two, perhaps that meant he had been needed at this time on our tiny earth. What happened, after all, was only what had to happen. There were no dice in heaven. The human spirit in its unending quest for freedom would either soften and tame its Teuton masters at last, or would crack the prison of tyranny, as a grass blade cracks a concrete pavement.

Having thus boxed the German dictator away in some neat paragraphs, Aaron Jastrow had mentally shelved the man. Hitler broke from Aaron Jastrow’s mental box on this day, with his scream of Roosevelt’s name.

As the dictator went on with his long, almost raving, yet mordant comparison between Roosevelt and himself — he the poor son of struggling parents, Roosevelt the pampered only child of a millionaire; he the common soldier of the First World War, enduring rain and gunfire and muck for four years, Roosevelt the highborn insider, enjoying a safe cushy desk job in the Navy Department; he the gassed veteran, lying penniless in a hospital, Roosevelt the tricky postwar financial speculator doubling his inherited wealth; he the restorer and rebuilder of a defeated, prostrate nation, Roosevelt the economic tinkerer, the wrecker of a rich country with his crackpot New Deal schemes; he the valiant righter of old wrongs, the messianic unifier of Europe, Roosevelt the master war criminal, seeking to stave off the future and preserve the world hegemony of the Jews — listening to this ferocious, crazed, queerly coherent fantasy, Aaron Jastrow wavered in his philosophic stance, and finally became scared.

The Italians had already cancelled the exit visas of Americans. The chargé had told Jastrow that this was just a precautionary move, and that they should still plan to leave on the fifteenth if meantime war was not declared. For days Jastrow had slept and eaten little. Now Hitler’s speech, as he listened, seemed to be clanging shut an iron door.

“Well?” Natalie said, carrying in the blanket-wrapped squalling baby. “Is there any hope?”

“He hasn’t declared war yet. Not in so many words.”

In an absent practiced way, without much effort at modesty, she opened her sweater, suit jacket, and blouse, flashed a white breast, and drew the brown sweater over the baby. “Why is it so much colder in this room? It’s icy, and the more -”

Jastrow put a finger to his lips. Hitler was whipping himself up to a crescendo. His audience, hushed for a long time, broke out in applause, cheers, and roars of “Sieg Heil!”

“Now what was that, Aaron?”

Jastrow raised his voice over the raucous noises of the crowd. “I’m afraid that was it. He said he’s called in the United States diplomats and given them their papers. That started the cheering.”

“Well, all I can say is, I couldn’t be less surprised.” Natalie stroked the baby’s cheek with a finger, and dolefully smiled as it quieted and began sucking. “You’re just hungry, monkey, aren’t you?”

Her uncle said, “Mussolini still has to talk. We’ll know in another hour or so.”

“Oh, Aaron, what choice has he?”

He shut off the radio. “Well, that’s that. I believe I’ll have a glass of sherry. You, too?”

“No, no. I’d better keep my wits about me today, what’s left of them.”

Jastrow poured and gulped a glassful, then took another, and shrank in his armchair, sipping it, looking vacantly around at the high long frigid room piled with suitcases and wooden boxes. The hotel was silent and the street outside was silent.

“Don’t despair, Natalie. In 1939 Il Duce did manage to squirm out of it, you know. He’s no use to Hitler militarily.

The Italians are sick and sour and beaten. If he declares war against the United States, he might be assassinated, and Hitler surely doesn’t want that. Besides, he’s wily. He may well find some weaseling formula, and we may yet be on that plane on the fifteenth.”

“Oh, Aaron, quit it, for God’s sake. He’ll declare war.”

Jastrow sighed heavily. “I suppose so. Natalie, I’m sorry, deeply and tragically sorry.”

She held up a hand, palm out. “No, no. Don’t. What’s the use?”

“Let me have my say. I simply can’t bear the way I’ve involved you and your baby. I’ve never -”

“Aaron, I did it myself. Don’t rake it over now. Don’t. I can’t stand that.”

A long silence, except for the baby making loud sucking noises. Jastrow sipped the sherry, glancing at his niece with a hangdog expression. I might telephone the embassy, my dear, and ask if there are any plans afoot for the diplomatic train.”

“That’s a good idea, if you can get through. Otherwise we’d better go there.”

“I’m planning to,” Jastrow said, “in any case.” He made the call, but the embassy lines were busy. Pouring more sherry, he spoke slowly, coughing now and then. “One thing wrong with being a historian is the way it distorts one’s view of the present. I seem to see current events through the wrong end of a telescope. The figures look small and comical. The happenings seem so trivial, so repetitious, so banal! I can read the past fairly well, I think, and I also have some clarity about the future. Only in the present am I so dense. Hitler and Mussolini don’t have the resources to last, my dear. This gaudy shabby militaristic madhouse in central Europe will fall. Russia and America are awesome, and between them they will crush Nazism. The only question is how soon. Well, I’d better dress.”

“Yes, do that Aaron.”

“I’ll just finish my wine first.”

Natalie impatiently arose and took the baby into the bedroom to avoid a row with her uncle. She had no store of kindness left for this garrulous, vain, cranky old man, whose Olympian irony and willfully blinkered optimism had mired her and her baby in this peril; though in the end — she always came back to this — she herself was most responsible.

Natalie Henry had thought and thought about her predicament until she could no longer bear the self-probing. Where had she committed the fatal stupidity? In coming back? In marrying Byron? In not taking the German plane out of Zurich? In not following Herb Rose to the Palestine ship? No, something deep was wrong with her; she was in some ultimate sense, for all her apparent cleverness, a terrible fool. She was nothing and nobody; she had no real identity; all her life she had been floating like dandelion fuzz on the wind. She was “Jewish,” but the label meant nothing to her beyond the trouble it caused. She had had her first love affair with an intellectual heathen Gentile. She had married a Christian without giving the clash of backgrounds much thought; his youth and lack of learning had bothered her more. What a queer, random, disjointed chain of happenings had created this sleepy blue-eyed little living thing at her breast!

In the past weeks, Natalie had started dreaming at night that none of it had happened. In these dreams time reeled back, sometimes to Paris, sometimes to college, most often to her childhood on Long Island. Relief and joy would fill her in her sleep at finding that she was out of the nightmare; cold sinking sadness would follow when she woke to discover that the wrong side of the dream-line was the real side. But at least on this side the baby dwelled.

The baby was becoming her anchor to life. At the moment the most real thing on earth was the warm little mouth at her chest: alive, sweet, and sublimely good. Beyond it — in the hotel suite, in Rome, in Europe — all was squalor, danger, uncertainty, and darkening horizons. The diplomatic train was the very last chance. Natalie tucked the infant away when he dropped asleep, and dressed to go to the embassy.

“Ah, my dear, you look very well.” In the sitting room Aaron now reclined rather grandly on a couch, in the handsome blue cape that the Searles had given him for his sixty-second birthday, his best dark suit and a large bow tie. He was still drinking sherry.

“Balderdash. If I ever get home safe, one of my first orders of business will be to burn this damned dress, and I’ll never wear brown again.”

Waving his half-full glass at her with stiff jauntiness, Aaron laughed merrily. “It’s grand that you’ve kept your sense of humor,” he said, although Natalie had been quite serious. “Sit down, my dear. Don’t pace.”

“Aren’t we going to the embassy?” She perched on the arm of a couch.

“Tell me, Natalie, did you ever meet Father Enrico Spanelli?”

“That Vatican librarian? No.”

He gave her the squinting teasing smile that appeared in late evenings when he had taken too much brandy. “But I thought we all had dinner one evening together.”

“We were supposed to. Louis got sick.”

“Oh yes. I remember now. Well, Enrico is coming in a little while to drive us to the Piazza Venezia. He knows all the newspapermen, and we’ll hear and see Mussolini from the press section.”

“What! Good Lord, I don’t want to go there with the baby in that Fascist mob! What about -”

Jastrow held up a cautionary hand and began scrawling on a pad, talking at the same time. “Well, my dear, it’s visible history. Since we’re in a tight spot, we may as well have the good of it.”

The sheet he passed to her read: If it’s war he’ll take us straight to the embassy. That’s the idea. We’ll be out of the hotel, where we might be picked up.

She wrote underneath, Why do you trust him? They did not know for certain that microphones had been planted in their suite, but they sometimes wrote notes as a precaution.

Jastrow blinked at her, took off his glasses, and polished them with a handkerchief. This was his unconscious signal, long familiar to Natalie, of a harangue. Softly he said, “Natalie, do you know that I am a Catholic?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Ah, then you don’t know. I thought perhaps you were being tactful, all these years. Well, it’s quite true.”

Aaron often made odd remarks over brandy or wine, but he had never said anything this strange. Puzzled and disconcerted, Natalie shrugged, “What am I supposed to say? Are you serious?”

“Oh, very. It’s the family skeleton, my dear. I’m a bit surprised that they never told you. I converted when I was twenty-three.” He gave her a red-eyed, twisted, sheepish grin, scratching his beard. “It never took. I fear I’m the wrong blood type for that or any religion. At the time the act was sincere.”

Aaron now told her about a Radcliffe girl whom he had tutored in history and aesthetics, a girl of a wealthy Catholic family. After a stormy year and a half the love affair had collapsed. He had left Cambridge and finished up his doctorate at Yale, to put behind him the girl and his memories.

His conversion had been a very private matter. He had been discreet and stealthy about taking instruction, for many Jewish friends in Boston had been kind to him and he did not want to upset or argue with them. By the time he departed from Harvard, he had decided that the conversion was a mistake, having painfully worked his way to the skeptical naturalism that was his settled view. Thereafter, whenever the question of his religion came up, he had mentioned his self-evident Jewish origin and said no more. He had done nothing further about the Catholic episode; he had simply let it lapse from his life.

But he had made one bad mistake, very early in the affair. He had discussed it with his family. “That I’ve always regretted,” he said gloomily. “It probably shortened my father’s life — my mother by then was dead — and your parents certainly never got over the shock. We were estranged for good, though I once told your father that that phase was over, that I considered myself a non-practicing Jew and nothing else. It didn’t help. They dropped me.

“When the Book-of-the-Month Club chose A Jew’s Jesus, Louis did write me a stiff letter. His rabbi wanted me to come and lecture at his temple. He phrased it so that I could hardly accept. I thought his letter was cruel. I replied very warmly, but I declined. That was that. I never saw either of them again. I’ve only discussed this with one other person besides yourself in more than thirty years, Natalie, and that other person is Enrico Spanelli.

“I told him in September, when I was turned back from Switzerland. I thought it might prove useful. He’s an excellent fellow and a fine classical scholar, though rather weak on early Byzantium. Well, he has been marvellously sympathetic. He never argued my religious position, but simply wrote to the United States for verification. He’s got the documents, and I have copies. So — we have friends in the Vatican, my dear, I hope we won’t need them, but it is a sort of insurance.”

Natalie, who could think only of the possible effect on her baby, was pleased and amazed. This was like finding a forgotten rusty key to a dungeon cell. Aaron’s youthful religious flip-flops were his own business; but the technicality might indeed bring help and refuge, or even escape in an emergency! This disclosure also explained, at long last, her parents’ peculiarly strained and glum attitude about Aaron. Deep down, she herself felt a small involuntary stirring of disdain for her uncle.

She said, “Why, Aaron, I’m gasping a bit, but I think it’s most amazingly clever of you to have stopped being a Jew more than forty years ago. What foresight!”

“Oh, I’m still a Jew. Don’t make that mistake. So was Paul after his conversion, you know. You’re not disgusted with me, then, as your parents were? How nice.”

A satirical smile wrinkled her mouth. “A Jew’s Jesus, indeed. You fraud.”

“He was a Jew’s Jesus.” Aaron Jastrow straightened up inside the heavy cape and raised a bearded proud chin. “I insist on that. The book is the fruit of a bitter wrestle with myself. I was frankly swept away by the whole opulent Christian structure of thought and art that I discovered in college, all built on what that Palestinian fellow called a murdered Jew. We Jews pretend that structure doesn’t exist, Natalie — that is, Jews like your parents and mine do — but that won’t wash, you know. It’s there. In the end I probed past the religious metaphors and came to grips with Jesus as he was, trying to grasp the historical reality. That was the essence of my wrestle for a year. I found an extraordinarily winning and magnetic personality, a talented and tragic poor relative of mine, who lived in Palestine in olden days. So the book really -”

The telephone rang. “Ah,” Jastrow said, pushing himself out of his chair, “that’s bound to be Enrico. Get the baby, dear.”

Natalie hesitated, then said, “All right. Let’s go.”

At the wheel of a rusty, faded little car outside the hotel, a man wearing a clerical hat, and an overcoat with a ratty fur collar, waved a smoking cigarette at them in a thick peasant hand. “Professore!” The librarian-priest had a face strangely like Mussolini’s — prominent brown eyes, big curved jaw, and wide fleshy mouth. But rimless glasses and a sweet placid expression under the flat black hat, as well as his indoor pallor, much reduced the ominous resemblance. “You look tired, Professore,” he said, after greeting Natalie in charming Roman Italian, and admiring the heavily wrapped, almost invisible baby. The car started with rheumatic wheezings.

“I’ve not slept well.”

The priest’s glance was mild and kind. “I understand. As you requested, I’ve made inquiries about your taking refuge in the Vatican. It’s not impossible, but the concordat pathetically limits our freedom of action. I would offer you one word of caution. Such exceptional expedients can have negative results. One calls attention to oneself. One becomes a special case.” He drove carefully down the almost deserted boulevard and turned into a street where people were crowding toward the Piazza Venezia, with placards swaying above their heads.

“The trouble is,” said Jastrow, “I already am one.”

The priest pursed his lips and tilted his head in a most Italian way. “True. Well, your cloudy nationality might be an advantage. If you are actually stateless, then clearly you are not an enemy alien.” Spanelli glanced around at Natalie with dropping eyes. “This is not true of your niece, naturally. One assumes your embassy will somehow provide for her—”

“Father, pardon me. Whoever gives me refuge must take her in too.”

The priest pursed his lips again and was silent. The crowd thickened as they neared the piazza: quiet sad-looking people in shabby winter clothes. The blackshirts carrying the placards were trying to hold up their chins and glare like Il Duce.

“These signs are viler than usual,” Jastrow said. Beside the car, a fat red-faced blackshirt marched with a crude cartoon of Mrs. Roosevelt sitting on a chamber pot, squawking obscenities about her husband. Ahead of the car, on another sign, a bag of money with a Roosevelt grin walked on crutches, smoking a cigarette in an uptilted holder.

“When the pot boils, the scum comes to the surface,” said the priest.

He slipped the car through narrow side streets, parked in a rubbish-filled archway, and guided them down an alley into the Piazza Venezia. The thronged square was surprisingly still. People stood around saying nothing, or chatting in low tones. The sky was gray, the wind strong and cold. Flag-bearing schoolchildren were huddled in front of the balcony in a docile mass, not laughing or playing pranks, just holding their flapping flags up and fidgeting.

The priest brought Jastrow and Natalie into a roped-off section near the balcony, where photographers clustered with reporters, including a few Americans, as well as the grinning happy Japanese correspondents Natalie had met at the party. Somebody produced a folding chair for her. She sat holding the sleeping baby tightly in her lap, now and then shuddering, though she wore a heavy sweater under her coat. The raw wind seemed to cut through to her skin.

They waited a long time before Mussolini suddenly stepped out on the balcony and raised a hand in salute. A crowd roar cascaded and re-echoed in the square: “Duce! Duce! Duce!” It was a strange effect, since all the people were looking up silently, with blank or hostile faces, at the tubby figure in the gold-eagled, tasselled black hat, and the black and gold jacket, a get-up more like an opera costume than a uniform. Under the balcony, a few blackshirts were diligently manufacturing the cheers, huddled around microphones. A tall man in the uniform of the German Foreign Service appeared next, with a Japanese in a cutaway coat and high hat. They flanked the dictator, who was even smaller than the Oriental; and Mussolini looked as though he were between guards come to arrest him. The blackshirts quit their noise and turned their oval, sallow faces up at the balcony; a pack of waiters and barbers, Natalie thought, in sloppy pseudomilitary masquerade.

The brief speech was belligerent, the tone as belligerent, the gestures were very familiar and very belligerent but it all came out ridiculous. The sound did not fit the gestures. Mussolini flailed his fist when he dropped his voice, and shouted fiercely some innocuous prepositions and conjunctions, and at the most inappropriate points he grinned. The old puffy dictator, already defeated in Greece and shorn of much of his North African empire, seemed to be having a highly irrelevant good time, as he declared war on the United States of America. While the blackshirts at random moments cheered and shouted “Doo-chay!” the crowd began to leave. Mussolini bellowed his last sentences at thousands of departing backs — an incredible sight in this dictatorship — an old ham actor scorned by the audience: “Italians, once more arise and, be worthy of this historic hour. We shall WIN!” And again he smiled.

To blackshirt cheers, the three figures on the balcony withdrew; Mussolini came out twice to bow, but the mob was dispersing as though a cloudburst had started.

The little knot of Americans stayed together, talking excitedly in low tense tones. Though the thing was no surprise, it felt strange now that it had happened; they stood on the soil of an enemy country. The debate among the correspondents, who kept glancing at policemen hovering nearby, was whether to go to their offices to clear out their desks, or head straight for the embassy. Several decided for the office first, arguing that once in the embassy they might be holed up for a long time, perhaps even until the diplomatic train left.

This put Aaron Jastrow in mind of his manuscript. He asked Father Spanelli to take them to the hotel before going on to the embassy. The priest was agreeable, and Natalie did not argue. She was in a shocked state. The baby was beginning to cry, and she thought of picking up some diapers and supplies for him. They returned to the car and drove to the Excelsior, but the priest suddenly braked, a block from the hotel; and he pointed through the windshield at two police cars pulled into the entrance driveway. Turning large, moist, worried brown eyes at Aaron Jastrow, he said, “Of course the manuscript is precious, Professore. Still, all things considered, had you not better go to your embassy first? If the worst comes to the worst, I can get your manuscript for you.”

“The embassy, the embassy,” Natalie said. “He’s right. The embassy.”

Jastrow nodded sadly.

But again, a couple of blocks from the embassy, Spanelli halted the car. A cordon of police and soldiers stood in front of the building. Across the street a small crowd of spectators stood waiting for some melodramatic occurrence. At the moment, from this distance, all looked quiet.

“Let us walk,” said the priest. “You should pass through that line with no trouble, but let us see.”

Natalie was sitting in back of the car. Jastrow turned to her and put a comforting hand over hers. His face was settling into a stony, weary, defiant expression. “Come, my dear. There’s not much choice now.”

They walked up the side of the street where the spectators were standing. On the edge of the crowd they encountered the Times man who had taken Natalie to the Japanese party. He was frightened and bitter; he urged them not to try to crash the cordon. The United Press correspondent had just attempted it, not five minutes earlier; he had been stopped at the gate, and after some argument a police car had appeared and had carried him off.

“But how can that be? That is not civilized, that is senseless,” exclaimed Father Spanelli. “We have many correspondents in the United States. It is idiotic behavior. It will be corrected.”

“When?” said the Times man. “And what will happen to Phil meantime? I’ve heard disagreeable things about your secret service.”

Holding her baby close, fighting off a feeling of sinking in black waters, a feeling like the worst of bad dreams, Natalie said, “What now, Aaron?”

“We must try to go through. What else is there?” He turned to the priest. “Or — Enrico, can we go to the Vatican now? Is there any point to that?”

The priest spread his hands. “No, no, not now. Don’t think of it. Nothing is arranged. It might be the worst of things to do. Given some time, something may be worked out. Surely not now.”

“Jesus Christ, there you are,” said a coarse American voice. “We’re all in big trouble, kids, and you’d better come with me.”

Natalie looked around into the worried, handsome, very Jewish face of Herbert Rose.

For a long while after that, the overpowering actuality was the smell of fish in the truck that was taking them to Naples, so strong that Natalie breathed in little gasps. The two drivers were Neapolitans whose business was bringing fresh fish to Rome. Rabinovitz had hired the truck to transport a replacement part for the ship’s old generator; a burnt-out armature had delayed the sailing.

Gray-faced with migraine, the stocky Palestinian now crouched swaying on the floor of the truck beside the burlap-wrapped armature, eyes closed, knees hugged in his arms. He had spent two days and nights hunting for the armature in Naples and Salerno, and then had tracked down a used one in Rome. He had brought Herbert Rose along to help him bargain for it. When Rose had first brought Jastrow and Natalie to the truck, parked on a side street near the embassy, the Palestinian had talked volubly, though he had since lapsed into this stupor; and the story he had then told had convinced Natalie to climb into the truck with her baby. After a few last agonized words with Father Spanelli about the manuscript, Aaron had followed her.

This was the Palestinian’s story. He had gone to the Excelsior at Herb Rose’s urging, to offer Jastrow and Natalie a last chance to join them. There in Aaron Jastrow’s suite he had found two Germans waiting. Well-dressed, well-spoken men, they had invited him inside and closed the door. When asked about Dr. Jastrow they had begun questioning him in a tough manner, without identifying themselves. Rabinovitz had backed out as soon as he could, and to his relief they had simply let him go.

During the first hour or so of the bouncing rattling ride in this dark, malodorous truck, Jastrow vainly talked over all the possible benign explanations for the presence of Germans in his hotel suite. It was almost a monologue, for Natalie was still dumb with alarm, Rabinovitz appeared sunk in pain, and Herbert Rose was bored. Obviously the men were Gestapo agents, Rose said, come to pick up the “blue chip,” and there was nothing more to discuss. But Dr. Jastrow was having second thoughts about this precipitate decision to go with Rabinovitz, and he was having them aloud. Finally, diffidently, he mentioned the diplomatic train as a possibility that still existed. This roused Natalie to say, “You can go back to Rome, Aaron, and try to get on that train. I won’t. Good luck.” Then Jastrow gave up, curled himself in a corner in his thick cape, and went to sleep.

The fish truck was not halted on the way to Naples. A familiar sight on the highway, it was a perfect cover for these enemy fugitives. When it reached the port city, night had fallen. As it slowly made its way through blacked-out streets toward the waterfront, policemen repeatedly challenged the drivers, but a word or two brought laughter and permission to go on. Natalie heard all this through a fog of tension and fatigue. The sense of everyday reality had quite left her. She was riding the whirlwind.

The truck stopped. A sharp rapping scared her, and one of the drivers said in hoarse Neapolitan accents, “Wake up, friends. We’re here.”

They descended from the truck to a wharf, where the sea breeze was an intensely sweet relief. In the cloudy night, the vessel alongside the wharf was a shadowy shape, where shadowy people walked back and forth. It appeared no larger to Natalie than a New York harbor sightseeing boat.

Dr. Jastrow said to Rabinovitz, “When will you sail? Immediately?”

With a grunt, Rabinovitz said, “No such luck. We must install this unit and test it. That’ll take time. Come aboard, and we’ll find a comfortable place for you.” He gestured at the narrow railed gangway.

“What’s the name of this boat?” Natalie asked.

“Oh, it has had many names. It’s old. Now it’s called the Redeemer. It’s Turkish registry, and once you’re aboard you will be secure. The harbor master and the Turkish consul here have an excellent understanding.”

Holding her baby close, Natalie said to Aaron Jastrow, “I’m beginning to feel like a Jew.”

He smiled sourly. “Oh? And I’ve never stopped feeling like one. I thought I’d gotten away from it. Obviously I haven’t. Come along, this is the way now.” Aaron set foot on the gangway first. She followed him, clutching her baby son in both arms, and Rabinovitz plodded up behind them. As Natalie set foot on the deck, the Palestinian touched her arm. In the gloom she could see him wearily smile. “Well, relax now, Mrs. Henry. You’re in Turkey. That’s a start.”

Chapter 64

Janice was awakened by the sound of a shower starting full force. Her luminous bed clock read five minutes past five. She showered too, put on a housecoat, and combed her hair. In the living room Victor Henry sat buttoned up in white and gold, reading Navy correspondence by lamplight. His close-shaved face was ashen, which she more or less expected, after his dispatching a quart of brandy and passing sixteen hours in a stupor. Pencilling a note on a letter, he cleared his throat and said placidly, “Good morning, Jan. Did I disturb you? Sorry.”

“Morning, Dad. No, Vic often gets me up around now. Is it too early for some bacon and eggs?”

“Matter of fact, that sounds pretty good. Warren get back last night?”

“Yes. He’s in there.” Janice wanted to tell him about the loss of the Devilfish, but he scared her, sitting there livid and cool in his starched uniform. He would find out, she thought, soon enough. She made coffee, fed the baby, and started breakfast. As usual, the smell of frying bacon brought Warren out, humming and brushing his hair, dressed in a khaki uniform. He grinned at his father, and Janice realized that he was putting on an act and would not disclose the Devilfish news. “Hi, Dad. How’re you doing?”

“Not badly — all things considered.” Brushing a fist against his forehead, Pug smiled ruefully. “I seem to have slept around the clock.”

“Yes. Well, travel will do that to a fellow.”

“Exactly. Funny effect travel has. Did I empty the bottle?”

Warren laughed. “Bone dry.”

“I only remember drinking the first half.”

“Dad, it was just what the doctor ordered. How about a hair of the dog?”

Pug raised a hand. “That’s the road to perdition. This coffee’s excellent.”

Pouring himself a cup, Warren said, “You picked a good day to sleep through. Lots of news, none of it good.”

“For instance?”

“Hitler and Mussolini declared war on us.”

“They did? Then the lineup’s complete. They’re fools, making it easier for the President. Is that the worst of it?”

“Before you sacked out, had you heard about the Prince of Wales and the Repulse? The Japs got them both off Singapore.”

“What!”

“Air attack. Battleships versus airplanes again, Dad, and they sank ‘em both.”

“God in heaven, Warren, they got the Prince of Wales? Did the British confirm that?”

“And the Repulse. Churchill admitted it. The Limeys are through in this ocean, right at the start. Australia’s naked. Looks like it’s all up to us out here.”

Victor Henry half buried his face in a hand. That great ship in its splashy camouflage, he thought, that dark elegant wardroom, those tired, gallant officers and sailors, that deck where Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had sung hymns under the guns — gone, gone, sunk in the far Pacific! He said in a low mournful tone, “The changing of the guard.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Have they hit the Philippines yet?”

Warren took a moment to sip coffee. He knew little about Clark Field; the American command in Luzon was muffling information that might panic the people. Even the official account of the Cavite raid had been skimpy. He had picked up the

Devilfish

news from a secret dispatch, and he was hoping the report might prove wrong; or if not, that a later dispatch would at least show Byron among the survivors.

“Well, they sort of plastered Cavite.”

“Oh, they did?”

“Yes.”

Staring at his son, Pug said, “Any dope?”

“Not much. They apparently went for the shore installations.”

“The Devilfish was alongside.”

“So you told me.”

Warren was relieved when Janice called them to the table. Pug picked at the food. It was embarrassing, with son and daughter-in-law eating heartily, but his throat was almost shut, and he had to force down the mouthfuls he ate.

“What’s the plan of the day, Dad?” Warren said, as lack of talk grew awkward.

“Huh? Oh, I thought I might scare up a tennis game at the club.”

“Tennis? Are you serious?”

“Why not? Start getting back in some kind of shape.”

“What about going down to Cincpac Personnel?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Warren, I’ve been wondering about that. At this point a thousand officers are looking for new assignments. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry of the battleship force must be warming chairs down at Personnel. The Navy will find work for me in due course, and maybe at this point I’d just better take what comes.”

“You’re dead wrong.” In his life Warren had never heard his father talk this way, and he reacted immediately and forcibly. “You’ve had a bad break, but you’re not Tom, Dick, or Harry. You’re entitled to the best ship command they’ve got left in this fleet. You’ve already lost a day. The Navy’s not going to come looking for you, Dad. You play tennis for a few days and you’ll end up back in War Plans. Is that what you want?”

Warren’s energetic tone and thinking, so much like his own younger self, drew a smile from Pug. “Jan, hand me the Cincpac roster. It’s there on top of that pile of mail.”

She passed him the mimeographed sheets and he leafed through them. “Hm. Interesting. ‘Personnel Section — Captain Theodore Prentice Larkin, II.’”

“Know him?” Warren asked.

“Jocko Larkin? Biggest boozer in my Academy class. I pulled him out of the Severn once when he fell off a sailboat dead drunk. Quite a wingding — Thanksgiving, I think — and I was the only sober one aboard. I didn’t drink then.”

“Dad, our squadron’s got an officers’ meeting at 0700. I’ll drop you off at Cincpac. Let’s go.”

“Well, okay. Jocko sure won’t throw me out.”

At the overlook point where Janice had watched the Japanese onslaught, Warren halted the car. The sun had not yet risen. In the grayish-pink morning light far down in the harbor, there lay the incredible picture: seven United States battleships in a double row, canted, sunk, or turned turtle. Smoke rising from the wrecks still drifted heavily over the black flat oily water.

Bitterly Victor Henry muttered, looking out through the windshield, “The game board after the game.”

“After the first move,” Warren retorted. “Have you heard what Halsey said when they told him aboard the Enterprise about the attack? ‘Before we’re through with them, the Japanese Language will be spoken only in hell!’’”

With a cynical grunt Pug asked, “Did that impress you?”

“It gave the crew a big charge. Everyone was quoting it.”

“Yes. Good talk for sailors. Beating the Japanese now is a tough battle problem. Especially with a bigger war on our hands in Europe.”

“Dad, we ought to do it handily, with the stuff we’ve got building.”

“Pug said, “Maybe. Meantime we’re in for a rugged couple of years. How much stomach do the people back home have for defeat? Because they’re going to take plenty in this ocean. Maybe they’ll pressure the President to quit and make a deal. They don’t really give a damn about Asia, they never have.”

Warren started the car. His father’s low mood disturbed him. “They won’t quit. Not now. Not after this. Let’s get you down to Cincpac.”

He drove in his usual breakneck fashion. His father appeared to take no notice. Neither spoke. In this lame silence they arrived at the Cincpac building and pulled into a parking space.

“Well!” Pug Henry roused himself from a listless abstraction. “Here we are. Now, what about you? Will I be seeing you again?”

“Why, I hope so. Sometime during this war.”

“I mean tonight.”

“It’s hard to say. We were supposed to sortie yesterday. Maybe we will today. There’s a rather headless feeling in this fleet.”

“I completely understand. I feel sort of headless myself.”

“It’s still there on your shoulders, Dad.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to give an emphatic nod.”

This made Warren laugh. It was more like his father. “Don’t take no from Captain Larkin, now. Better keep these car keys, in case I do leave.”

“Right. And in case you do — good luck and good hunting, Warren.”

The father and son looked each other in the face, and parted without more words. Victor Henry went straight to the Cincpac communications office and looked through the dispatches. In the long garbled battle report of the evening before about Cavite, he saw the Devilfish listed as sunk.

He went to Jocko Larkin’s office to wait. It was a quarter to seven, and nobody was there yet, not even the yeoman. Pug unceremoniously took a lounge chair in the inner office; Larkin would have done the same in an office of his. The large wide-windowed room had a panoramic view — the sunny sugarcane slopes, the blue ocean beyond the anchorage, and the hideous black-coated harbor, with its grotesque fringe of defeat and damage.

Victor Henry felt ill: nauseous, chilly, yet greasily perspiring. Consuming a bottle of brandy in a few hours had done this, of course; but after the letters from Rhoda and Madeline, the only safe immediate recourse had been oblivion. The news that the Devilfish was lost had struck an almost numb man, scarcely surprising him. As soon as he had heard of the Cavite attack, he had half expected evil tidings about his son. When things went bad, his long experience told him, they went very bad; and he seemed to be falling into a gulf of bad luck without a bottom.

But there was always a bottom to hit; meantime, he groggily thought the main thing was to hold himself together. He did not know, after all, that Byron was really dead or injured. The Devilfish might not even be sunk. An excited first report was unreliable. The idea was to brace himself and hang on to hope until the straight word came.

On his wife and his daughter, however, the straight word was in. Rhoda wanted to divorce him and marry Fred Kirby; and his daughter had entangled herself with her employer, had probably been committing adultery, and it all might be in the newspapers any day. These were unchangeable facts, however hard to grasp. He had to absorb them and somehow act on them.

Far from harboring any relieved notion that he might be free for Pamela Tudsbury, Pug now first understood how hopeless his romance with the English girl had been, and what a strong bond tied him to his wife. That Rhoda did not feel this tie too — that she could write and mail such a letter with her usual breezy exclamation marks and underlinings, cheerily blaming herself and her long dislike of a Navy wife’s existence, praising Pug up almost as a saint, yet telling him that after more than twenty-five years she wanted out, to go to another man — this was a stab from which it would be difficult to recover. He felt it in his gut, a throbbing, weakening wound. Rhoda’s letter was coy about the big question: exactly what had been going on between her and Fred Kirby? Here Victor Henry was torn two ways: by his hard good judgment, which told him that of course his wife had been opening naked thighs to the other man, probably for a long time; and by his love for his wife and his own self-love, which protested that such a thing was impossible. He clung to the dim fact — it was a fact — that Rhoda hadn’t said it in so many words.

Because what Victor Henry now wanted was to get her back. He felt himself desperately in love with Rhoda. Much of this was injured ego — he well understood that — but not all. She was half of him, for better or worse; the weld was a quarter of a century old; she was irreplaceable in his life, with her arms, her mouth, her eyes, her sweet particular graces and ways; she was beautiful, desirable, and above all capable of surprising him. It had taken a nasty shock to drive these blunt truths home. He would have to court this woman again! He could not greatly blame her for the affair; he had already decided that in a brandy-soaked fog before passing out. How close had he not come to writing exactly the same kind of letter? Nor, strangely, did he have strong feelings about Fred Kirby. The thing had happened to those two people, much as it had to him and Pamela; only Rhoda had gone over the edge. The pictures in his mind made him sick with revulsion; but in cold honesty he had to look at the event in this rational way.

Rage at Madeline’s boss perhaps did him some good. One reason for surmounting this crisis was to seek out and confront Hugh Cleveland. Regret cut at Pug for his softness in letting her stay in New York. At least he could have tried to order her back to Washington; she might have gone. Now this celebrated swine’s wife was threatening to sue him for divorce, naming his twenty-one-year-old assistant — unjustly, Madeline swore in a long vehement paragraph, but that was hard to swallow. Unlike Rhoda’s letter, Madeline’s was no bombshell. What could have been more predictable for a girl adrift alone in New York; if not with Cleveland, then with some other man? Madeline had been shot down like a dove flying over a rifle range.

“Pug! I tried all yesterday afternoon to find you. Where the hell were you hiding!”

Jocko Larkin came striding in, a scarlet-faced freckled fat four-striper indistinguishable from twenty others. He closed his door, tossed his cap on a hook, and said into his squawk box, “No calls, Amory.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Well!” Larkin sat back in his swivel chair, gat hands locked behind his head, surveying his classmate with a penetrating eye. “Good to see you. That’s hell about the California. She’d have had a great skipper.”

“Well, Jocko, I’d say my misfortune’s lost in the shuffle.”

“Pug, who gave you my message? I left it at half a dozen places.”

“What message? Nobody. I came here to see you.”

“What about?”

“Orders.”

“That’s what I wanted to see you about.” Larkin looked over his shoulder, though nobody else was in the room, and turned off his intercom. “Pug, Admiral Kimmel is going to be relieved. At his own request.” Jocko almost whispered this, adding with a sarcastic little grin, “Like Louis the Sixteenth had himself shortened by a head, at his own request. His successor will be Admiral Pye — for how long, we don’t know, but Pye wants to start shaking up the staff. Let’s face it, something smells here. Luckily, the personnel section has nothing to do with war alerts. It didn’t happen on my watch. But it happened. Admiral Pye wants you for Operations — now hold it, Pug!” Jocko Larkin held up a hand as Victor Henry violently shook his head. “Let me give you my judgment. This is as great a break as a man in our class can have. Just remember there are six Iowa class battleships building now, due for commissioning in twelve to twenty months. The greatest warships in the world. You’ll probably get one after this.”

“Jocko, give me a ship.”

“I’m telling you, you’ll undoubtedly get one.”

“Now. Not in 1943.”

“No can do, Pug. Listen to me. You don’t say no to Cincpac! Operations is a marvellous opening for you.”

“Where’s Admiral Pye’s office?” Henry got to his feet.

“Sit down, Pug.” Larkin rose too, and they stood glaring at each other. Larkin said, “You son of a bitch, you never could play football or tennis, and you can’t think straight either.”

“I can swim pretty good.”

Larkin looked nonplussed, then he burst out laughing. “Oh, sit down, Pug.”

“Do I get a ship?”

“Sit down.”

Pug sat.

“What’s the matter, Pug? You look green around the gills, and you don’t act right. Is everything okay?”

“I drank too much brandy last night.”

“You did? You?”

“I didn’t like losing the California.”

“I see. How’s Rhoda?”

“Just fine.” Victor Henry thought he brought the words out calmly, but Larkin raised his eyebrows. Folding fat fingers over his white-clad paunch, Larkin stared thoughtfully at Henry.

“Let’s see. You have a boy on the Enterprise, don’t you? Is he all right?”

“He’s fine. I have a submariner, too. He’s on the Devilfish. Or was.”

“The Devilfish, eh?” Larkin’s calm tone was very forced.

“Yes.”

Opening a folder on his desk, Larkin studied several sheets clipped inside. “The Northampton might conceivably be available. I say might. Most likely not.”

“The Northampton? God love you, Jocko, that’s about the heaviest thing we’ve got left here.”

“Pug, I don’t care. A cruiser command doesn’t compare to Cincpac’s Deputy Chief for Operations. You know that! Tim Saunders came out of that job last year with two stars, junior as hell. Even if I could get you the Northampton, you’d be making the mistake of your life.”

“You don’t know the mistakes I’ve made. Now you listen to me, Jocko. I’ve shuffled all the high-strategy paper I ever want to in this Navy. Four years in War Plans, nearly three years in Europe. I’m not bucking for two stars, not any more. I’m a sailor and a gunner, and there’s a war on.” Victor Henry swept an arm at the window and the shattered battle fleet. “If you can’t find me anything else, I’ll take a squadron of minesweepers. Okay? I want to go to sea.”

“I hear you, loud and clear.” Heaving a sigh that turned into a groan, Jocko Larkin said, “One more flap I’ll have with the admiral, that’s all.”

“The hell with that. I want him to know this is my doing, Where is he?”

“Listen, Pug, if you talk to the admiral the way you’ve been talking to me, you’ll get sent to the States on a medical. You look like death warmed over, and you’re acting shell-shocked. I’ll see what I can do here. Get some sleep, lay off the brandy, and whatever’s bothering you, put it on ice. I’ll try to find something.”

“Thanks, Jocko. If you want to call me, I’ll be at my son’s house.” He gave Larkin the number.

As they shook hands over the table, Captain Larkin said with odd softness, “When you write Rhoda, give her my love.”

It was nearly lunchtime when Victor Henry finished writing this letter, and the officers’ club lounge was becoming crowded and noisy. He read the letter twice, thinking how meager and stiff it was, but he decided against rewriting it. The substance was there. One could revise some letters a hundred times without improving them. The letter he had posted to Pamela Tudsbury (how long ago that seemed!) had been more clumsy and barren than most of the discarded ones. He sealed the envelope.

“Say, Pug!” Jocko Larkin, walking past with three younger officers, halted, and told them to go ahead and secure a table. “I’ve been trying to call you. Do you know about the Devilfish?”

“No.” Pug’s heart thumped heavily. “What about it?”

“Well, it was the Sealion that was sunk at Cavite. The follow-up report came in a little while ago. The Devilfish was undamaged.”

“Really?” Pug had to clear his throat twice. “That’s definite, now?”

“Couldn’t be more definite. The dispatch says the Devilfish report was erroneous.”

“I see. I’m sorry about the Sealion, but you’re a bearer of good news. Thanks.”

“My other news isn’t so hot, Pug. The thing we talked about — I’m trying but that looks like a pipe dream.”

“Well, you warned me. It’s all right.”

“I’m still scratching around for something, though. Join us for lunch.”

“Another time, Jocko.”

Dropping the letter in the club mailbox, Pug went out into the sunshine. A stone had rolled off his heart; Byron was all right! And one way or another, Jocko would get him out to sea. Strolling aimlessly through the Navy Yard, digesting these sharp turns of fortune, he arrived at the waterfront. There alongside the fuel dock with thick oil hoses pulsing, was the Northampton.

On leaving Larkin’s office, Pug had fought off a temptation to visit the cruiser, deciding that it might be a jinx to set foot on board before knowing his orders. Now it didn’t matter. He thought of mounting the gangway and having a look around. But what for? He had served a year and a half in a sister ship, the Chester. These were handsome vessels, he thought, strolling along the dock beside the bustling Northampton, which was loading ammunition and frozen food stores as well as fuel for battle patrol — handsome vessels, but half-breed bastards, spawned by a sickly cross of politics and warship-building.

The Washington Treaty, which Pug considered a preposterous folly, had bound the United States back in 1922 to limit its cruisers to less than ten thousand tons, and to guns of eight-inch caliber. There had been no limit on length. These hybrids were the result-overblown destroyers, with the length of battleships but a quarter the weight of metal, with slender beams, light armor, and medium punch. Their mission was to act as scouts and merchant raiders, and to fight enemy cruisers. Any one of Japan’s ten battleships could blow the Northampton out of the water; nor could she survive a torpedoing, except with perfect damage control. After the California, the Northampton was a relatively shrunken affair.

Still, Pug thought, he would have been glad enough to get her. It was exciting to see the cruiser taking on beans, bullets, and oil for a combat mission. Jocko was right, Operations was the inside track. But, for the good of his soul right now, Pug felt he needed to be loading beans, bullets, and oil on his own ship.

He drove back to the house. On the desk in his bedroom, a handwritten note was clipped to a wrinkled Western Union cable:

He opened the cable.

He sat nodding grimly as he read it. Rhoda to the life! He could hear her telephoning it: “Am UTTERLY horrified, FRIGHTFULLY worried about you, DESPERATELY ashamed of that RIDICULOUS, IDIOTIC letter. Worst POSSIBLE timing…” Pug suspected it was a bone to the dog. He knew Rhoda’s bursts of contrition. She was never so sweet as immediately after some disgusting behavior. This saving grace had gotten her over many rough spots; and her impulse in sending the cable might well have been sincere. But the process of repair would be long, if indeed it was even beginning. Their marriage now was a salvage job like the California. He did not know what to reply, so he tossed the cable into the desk drawer, beside the letter for which it apologized.

That night at dinner, Pug drank a lot of wine, and a lot of brandy afterward. Janice kept pouring, and he gratefully accepted. He knew he would not sleep otherwise. The alcohol worked; he scarcely remembered turning in. At four in the morning, he snapped wide awake, and it occurred to him that he might as well watch the sortie of the Enterprise. He dressed quietly, closed the outside door without a sound, and drove to the overlook point.

The darkness was merciful to Pearl Harbor. The smashed battleships were invisible. Overhead a clear starry black sky arched, with Orion setting in the west, and Venus sparkling in the east, high above a narrow streak of red. Only the faintest smell of smoke on the sea breeze hinted at the gigantic scene of disaster below. But the dawn brightened, light stole over the harbor, and soon the destruction and the shame were unveiled once more. At first the battleships were merely vague shapes; but even before all the stars were gone, one could see the Pacific Battle Force, a crazy dim double line of sunken hulks along Ford Island — and first in the line, the U.S.S. California.

Victor Henry turned his face from the hideous sight to the indigo arch of the sky, where Venus and the brightest stars still burned: Sirius, Capella, Procyon, the old navigation aids. The familiar religious awe came over him, the sense of a Presence above this pitiful little earth. He could almost picture God the Father looking down with sad wonder at this mischief. In a world so rich and lovely, could his children find nothing better to do than to dig iron from the ground and work it into vast grotesque engines for blowing each other up? Yet this madness was the way of the world. He had given all his working years to it. Now he was about to risk his very life at it. Why?

Because the others did it, he thought. Because Abel’s next-door neighbor was Cain. Because with all its rotten spots, the United States of America was not only his homeland but the hope of the world. Because if America’s enemies dug up iron and made deadly engines of it, America had to do the same, and do it better, or die. Maybe the vicious circle would end with this first real world war. Maybe it would end with Christ’s second coming. Maybe it would never end.

But he was living in 1941. Below in the brightening dawn lay his own sunken ship and his own destroyed fleet. The professional sailors and fliers who had done this thing, and done a damned smart job of it, had obeyed orders of politicians working with Hitler. Until the life was beaten out of that monster, the world could not move an inch toward a more sane existence. There was nothing to do now but win the war. So Victor Henry meditated as the Enterprise moved down channel in the sunrise and out to sea under the escort of destroyers and cruisers, taking his firstborn son into battle.

Back at the house, he found Janice all dressed. “Hi. Going somewhere?” he said. “I thought you’d still be asleep.”

“Oh, it’s Vic’s cough. It hangs on and on. I’m taking him to the clinic down at the base for a checkup. You just missed a call from Captain Larkin.”

“Jocko? This early?”

“Yes. He left a message for you. He said, ‘She’s all yours.’”

Victor Henry dropped in a chair, with a blankly startled look.

“Good news, I hope?” Janice asked. “He said you’d understand.”

“‘She’s all yours’? That’s the whole message?

“That’s it. He said he wouldn’t be in his office till noon, but he thought you’d want to know right away.”

“I see. Well, it’s pretty fair news. Is the coffee on?”

“Yes. Anna May will make you breakfast.”

“No, no, coffee’s all I want, thanks. Look Janice you’ll be passing by Western Union. Can you send Rhoda a cable for me?”

“Sure.”

Victor Henry reached for the memo pad by the telephone and scrawled: LETTER COMING AM FINE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT.

Glancing at the little sheet he handed her, Janice curved her mouth in an indulgent female grin.

“What’s the matter with that?” Pug said.

“How about ‘Love’?”

“By all means. Thanks, Jan. You add that.”

When she left with the baby, he was on the telephone, trying to reach Commander, Cruisers Pacific. He responded to her farewell wave with a bleak preoccupied smile. Janice thought, closing the door on him, that nothing could be more like her austere, remote father-in-law than the little business of the cable. You had to remind this man that he loved his wife.