The Winds of War

Chapter 27

As France was caving in, people began at last to perceive that a main turn of mankind’s destiny now hung on flying machines. Of these there were only a few thousand on the planet. The propeller warplanes of 1940 were modestly destructive, compared to aircraft men have built since. But they could shoot each other down, and unopposed, they could set fire to cities far behind battle lines. Massive bombing of cities from the air had, for some years after the First World War, been considered war’s ultimate and unthinkable horror. But by 1940, the Germans had not only thought of it, but had twice done it: in the Spanish Civil War and in Poland. The Japanese, too, had bombed China’s cities from the air. Evidently the ultimate horror was quite thinkable, though the civilized term for it, strategic bombing, was not yet in vogue. The leaders of England therefore had to face a bitter decision: whether to send their few precious planes to fight over France against the Germans, or hold them back to defend the homeland’s cities and shores.

The French had even fewer planes. In the years before the war, instead of constructing an air fleet, the French had built their Maginot Line. Their military thinkers had argued that aircraft were the scouts and stinging insects of war, useful, annoying, hurtful, but incapable of forcing a decision. As the French state, under the punch of German dive bombers, flew to pieces like a Limoges vase hit by a bullet, its premier issued a sudden frantic public appeal to President Roosevelt to send “clouds of airplanes.” But there were no clouds to send. Maybe the French premier did not know what a paltry air force America had, or that even then, no fighter plane in existence could travel more than a couple of hundred miles. The level of information among French politicians at the time was low.

Meantime, over the fields of Belgium and France, British pilots had learned something important. They could knock down German flying machines. They knocked down many; but many British planes fell too. As the Battle of France went on, the French implored their retreating allies to throw in all their aircraft. This the British did not do. Their air commander, Dowding, told Winston Churchill that twenty-five squadrons had to be kept intact to save England, and Churchill listened to him. The French collapse thus became foredoomed, if it had ever been anything else.

At the height of the debacle, on June 9, in a letter to old General Smuts, Winston Churchill explained himself. The military sage had reproved him for failing to observe a first principle of war: Concentrate everything at the decisive point. Churchill pointed out that with the short-ranged fighter planes then in the air on both sides, the side that fought nearer its airdromes had a big advantage. “The classical principles are in this case modified by the actual quantitative data,” he wrote. “I see only one way through now, to wit, that Hitler should attack this country, and in so doing break his air weapon. If this happens, he will be left to face the winter with Europe writhing under his heel, and probably with the United States against him after the presidential election is over.”

Winston Churchill, today an idealized hero of history, was in his time variously considered a bombastic blunderer, an unstable politician, an intermittently inspired orator, a reckless self-dramatizer, a voluminous able writer in an old-fashioned vein, and a warmongering drunkard. Through most of his long life he cut an antic, brilliant, occasionally absurd figure in British affairs. He never won the trust of the people until 1940, when he was sixty-six years old, and before the war ended they dismissed him. But in his hour he grasped the nature of Hitler, and sensed the way to beat him: that is, by holding fast and pushing him to the assault of the whole world, the morbid German dream of rule or ruin, of dominion or Götterdämmerung. He read his man and he read the strategic situation, and with the words of his mouth he inspired the British people to share his vision. By keeping back the twenty-five squadrons from the lost Battle of France, he acted toughly, wisely, and ungallantly; and he turned the war to the course that ended five long years later, when Hitler killed himself and Nazi Germany fell apart. This deed put Winston Churchill in the company of the rare saviors of countries, and perhaps of civilizations.

With France and the Low Countries overrun, and the Germans at the Channel, England now lay within range of the Luftwaffe’s fighter planes. The United States was safe from air attack in 1940, but the onrolling conquest of Europe by the Germans, combined with the growing menace of Japan, posed a danger to the future safety of the United States. The question arose: if selling warplanes to the British would enable them to go on knocking down German aircraft, killing German pilots, and wrecking German bomber factories, might not that be, for American security, the best possible use of the aging craft while new, bigger, and stronger machines were built in the inaccessible sanctuary across the ocean?

The answer, from the United States Navy, the Army, the War Department, the Congress, the press, and the public, was a roaring NO! Franklin Roosevelt wanted to help the British, but he had to reckon with that great American NO. Churchill, with the power of a wartime chief of state, had not sent planes to France, because the survival of England depended on them. Roosevelt, presiding over a wealthy huge land at peace, could not even sell planes to England without risking impeachment.

It was a shock for Victor Henry to see Franklin Roosevelt out from behind the desk in a wheelchair. The shirt-sleeved President was massive and powerful-looking down to the waist; below that, thin seersucker trousers hung pitifully baggy and loose on his fleshless thigh bones and slack lower legs. The crippled man was looking at a painting propped on a chair. Beside him stood the Vice Chief of Naval Operations for Air, whom Victor Henry knew well: a spare withered little naval aviator, one of the surviving pioneers, with a lipless mouth, a scarred red face, and ferocious tangled white eyebrows.

“Hello there!” The President gave Victor Henry a hearty handshake, his grip warm and damp. It was a steamy day, and though the windows of the old study were open, the room was oppressively hot. “You know Captain Henry, of course, Admiral? His boy’s just gotten his wings at Pensacola. How about this picture. Pug? Like it?”

Inside the heavy ornate gold frame, a British man-o’-war under full sail tossed on high seas beneath a storm-wracked sky and a lurid moon. “It’s fine, Mr. President. Of course, I’m a sucker for sea scenes.”

“So am I, but d’you know he’s got the rigging wrong?” The President accurately pointed out the flaws, with great relish for his own expertise. “Now how about that. Pug? All the man had to do was paint a sailing ship — that was his whole job — and he got the rigging wrong! It’s positively unbelievable what people will do wrong given half a chance. Well, that thing’s not going to hang in here.”

During all this, the admiral was training his eyebrows like weapons at Victor Henry. Years ago, in the Bureau of Ordnance, they had violently disagreed over the deck plating on the new carriers. Junior though he was, Henry had carried his point, because of his knowledge of metallurgy. The President now turned his chair away from the painting, and glanced at a silver clock on his desk shaped like a ship’s wheel. “Admiral, what about it? Are we going to put Pug Henry to work on that little thing? Will he do?”

“Well, if you assigned Pug Henry to paint a square-rigger. Mr. President,” the admiral replied nasally, with a none too kind look at Pug, “you might not recognize it, but he’d get the rigging right. As I say, a naval aviator would be a far more logical choice, sir, but -” He gestured reluctant submission, with an upward chop of a hand.

The President said, “We went through all that. Pug, I assume somebody competent is tending shop for you in Berlin?”

“Yes, sir.”

Roosevelt gave the admiral a glance which was a command. Picking his white hat off a couch, the admiral said, “Henry, see me at my office tomorrow at eight.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Victor Henry was left alone with the President of the United States. Roosevelt sighed, smoothed his thin rumpled gray hair, and rolled himself to his desk. Victor Henry now noticed that the President did not use an ordinary invalid’s wheelchair, but an odd piece of gear, a sort of kitchen chair on wheels, in and out of which he could easily slide himself. “Golly, the sun’s going down, and it’s still sweltering in here.” Roosevelt sounded suddenly weary, as he contemplated papers piled on the desk. “Isn’t it about time for a drink? Would you like a martini? I’m supposed to mix a passable martini.”

“Nothing better, sir.”

The President pressed a buzzer. A grizzled tall Negro in a gray gabardine jacket appeared and deftly gathered papers and folders out of various trays, while Roosevelt pulled wrinkled papers from one pocket and another, made quick penciled notes, jabbed papers on a spike and threw others in a tray. “Let’s go,” he said to the valet. “Come along, Pug.”

All down one long hall, and in the elevator, and down another hall, the President glanced at papers and scrawled notes, puffing at the cigarette holder in his teeth. His gusto for the work was evident, despite the heavy purple fatigue smudges under his eyes and the occasional deep coughs racking his chest. They arrived in a small dowdy sitting room hung with sea paintings. “That thing isn’t going to end up in here either,” said the President. “It’s going in the cellar.” He handed all the papers to the valet, who wheeled a chromium-stripped bar beside his chair and left.

“Well, how was the wedding, Pug? Did your boy get himself a pretty bride?” said the President in chatty and warm, if faintly lordly tones, measuring out gin and vermouth like an apothecary. Henry thought that perhaps the cultured accent made him sound more patronizing than he intended to be. Roosevelt wanted to know about the Lacouture house, and wryly laughed at Victor Henry’s account of his argument with the congressman. “Well, that’s what we’re up against here. And Ike Lacouture’s an intelligent man. Some of them are just contrary and obstinate. If we get Lacouture in the Senate, he’ll give us real trouble.”

A very tall woman in a blue-and-white dress came in, followed by a small black dog. “Just in time! Hello there, doggie!” exclaimed the President, scratching the Scottie’s head as it trotted up to him and put its paws on the wheelchair. “This is the famous Pug Henry, dear.”

“Oh? What a pleasure.” Mrs. Roosevelt looked worn but energetic: an imposing, rather ugly woman of middle age with fine skin, a wealth of soft hair, and a smile that was gentle and sweet, despite the protruding teeth stressed in all the caricatures. She firmly shook hands, surveying Pug with the astute cool eyes of a flag officer.

“The Secret Service has an unkind name for my dog,” Roosevelt said, handing his wife a martini. “They call him The Informer. They say he gives away where I am. As though there were only one little black Scottie in the world. Eh, Fala?”

“What do you think of the way the war’s going, Captain?” said Mrs. Roosevelt straight off, sitting in an armchair and holding the drink in her lap.

“It’s very bad, ma’am, obviously.”

Roosevelt said, “Are you surprised?”

Pug took a while to answer. “Well, sir, in Berlin they were mighty sure that the western campaign would be short. Way back in January, all their government war contracts had a terminal date of July first. They thought it would all be over by then and they’d be demobilizing.”

Roosevelt’s eyes widened. “That fact was never brought to my attention. That’s extremely interesting.”

Mrs. Roosevelt said, “Meantime, are they suffering hardships?”

Victor Henry described the “birthday present for the Führer" drive, collecting household tin, copper, and bronze; the newsreel of Göring adding busts of himself and Hitler to a mountain of pots, pans, and irons, and washtubs; the death penalty announced for collectors caught taking anything for their own use: the slogan, One pan per house; ten thousand tons for the Führer. He talked of snowbound Berlin, the lack of fuel, the food rationing, the rule that a spoiled frozen potato had to be bought with each good one. It was against the law, except for foreigners and sick people, to hail a taxi in Berlin. Russian food deliveries were coming in slowly, if at all, so the Nazis were wrapping butter from Czechoslovakia in Russian-printed packages to foster the feeling of Soviet support. The “wartime beer,” a uniform brew reduced in hops and alcohol content, was undrinkable, but the Berliners drank it.

“They’ve got a ‘wartime soap’ too,” Pug said. “Einheitsseife! When you get into a crowded German train it’s not much in evidence.”

Roosevelt burst out laughing. “Germans are getting a bit ripe, eh? I love that. Einheitsseife!”

Pug told jokes circulating in Berlin. In line with the war effort speedup, the Führer had announced that the period of pregnancy henceforth would be three months. Hitler and Göring, passing through conquered Poland, had stopped at a wayside shrine. Pointing to the crucified Christ, Hitler asked Göring whether he thought that would be their final fate. “Mein Führer, we are perfectly safe,” Göring said. When we are through there will be no wood or iron left in Germany.”

Roosevelt guffawed at the jokes and said that there were far worse ones circulating about himself. He asked animated questions about Hitler’s mannerisms in the meeting at Karinhall.

Mrs. Roosevelt interjected in a sharp serious tone, “Captain, do you think that Mr. Hitler is a madman?”

“Ma’am, he gave the clearest rundown on the history of Central Europe I’ve ever heard. He did it off the cuff, just rambling along. You might think his version entirely cockeyed, but it all meshed together and ticked, like a watch.”

“Or like a time bomb.” said the President.

Pug smiled at the quick grim joke, and nodded. “This is an excellent martini, Mr. President. It sort of tastes like it isn’t there. Just a cold cloud.”

Roosevelt’s eyebrows went up in pride and delight. “You’ve described the perfect martini! Thank you.”

“You’ve made his evening,” said Mrs. Roosevelt.

Roosevelt said, “Well, my dear, even the Republicans could agree that as a President, I’m a good bartender.”

It wasn’t much of a jape, but it was a presidential one, so Pug Henry laughed. The drink, the coziness of the room, the presence of the wife and the dog, and the President’s naïve pleasure in his trivial skill, made him feel strangely at home. The little black dog was the homiest touch; it sat worshipping the crippled President with a bright stare, now and then running a red tongue over its nose or shifting its look inquiringly to Pug.

Sipping his martini, his pose in the wheelchair as relaxed as before, but the patrician tones subtly hardening for business, Roosevelt said, “Do you think the British will hold out, Pug, if the French collapse?”

“I don’t know much about the British, sir.”

“Would you like to go there for a spell as a naval observer? Possibly after you’ve had a month or so back in Berlin?”

Hoping that Franklin Roosevelt was in as pleasant a mood as he seemed, Victor Henry took a plunge. “Mr. President, any chance of my not going back to Berlin?”

Roosevelt looked at the naval captain for an uncomfortable five or ten seconds, coughing hard. His face sobered into the tired gravity of the portraits that hung in post offices and naval stations.

“You go back there, Pug.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“I know you’re a seafaring man. You’ll get your sea command.”

“Yes. Mr. President.”

“I’d be interested in your impressions of London.”

“I’ll go to London, sir, if that’s your desire.”

“How about another martini?”

“Thank you, sir, I’m fine.”

“There’s the whole question of helping the British, you see, Pug.” The President rattled the frosty shaker and poured. “No sense sending them destroyers and planes if the Germans are going to end up using them against us.”

Mrs. Roosevelt said with a silvery ring in her voice, “Franklin, you know you’re going to help the British.”

The President grinned and stroked the Scottie’s head. Over his face came the look of complacent, devilish slyness with which he had suggested buying the Allied ocean liners — eyebrows raised — eyes looking sidewise at Pug, mouth corners pulled far up. “Captain Henry here doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be in charge of getting rid of those old, useless, surplus Navy dive bombers. We badly need a housecleaning there! No sense having a lot of extra planes cluttering up our training stations. Eh, Captain? Very untidy. Not shipshape.”

“Is that definite at last? How wonderful,” said Mrs. Roosevelt.

“Yes. Naturally the aviators didn’t want a ‘black shoe’ to handle it.” Roosevelt used the slang with self-conscious pleasure. “So naturally I picked one. Aviators all stick together and they don’t like to part with planes. Pug will pry the machines loose. Of course it may be the end of me if word gets out. That’ll solve the third-term question! Eh? What’s your guess on that one. Pug? Is that man in the White House going to break George Washington’s rule and try for a third term? Everybody seems to know the answer but me.”

Victor Henry said, “Sir, what I know is that for the next four years this country is going to need a strong Commander-in-Chief.”

Roosevelt’s mobile pink face turned grave and tired again, and he coughed, glancing at his wife. He pressed a buzzer. “Somebody the people aren’t bored with, Pug. A politician exhausts his welcome after a while. Like an actor who’s been on too long. The good will ebbs away and he loses his audience.” A Navy lieutenant in dress blues with gold shoulder loops appeared in the doorway. Roosevelt offered his hand to Victor Henry. “That Sumner Welles thing didn’t come to anything, Pug, but our conscience is clear. We made the effort. You were very helpful.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Welles wasn’t as impressed with Hitler as you evidently were.”

“Sir, he’s more used to being around great men.”

A peculiar flash, not wholly pleasant, came and went in the President’s tired eyes. “Good-bye, Pug.”

A crashing thunderstorm, with thick rain hissing down from skies black as night, stopped Victor Henry from leaving the White House. He waited for a letup in a crowded open doorway marked PRESS, where a cool damp wind brought in a smell of rainy grass and flowers. All at once a heavy hand thwacked his shoulder.

“I say, Henry, you’ve got yourself another stripe!” Alistair Tudsbury, swelling in green gabardine, leaning on a cane, his moustached face purpler than before around the nose and on the cheeks, beamed down at him through thick glasses.

“Hello there, Tudsbury!”

“Why aren’t you in Berlin, old cock? And how’s that magnificent wife of yours?”

As he spoke, a small black British car pulled up to the entrance in the streaming rain and honked. “That’s Pamela. What are you doing now? Why not come along with us? There’s a little reception at the British embassy, just cocktails and such. You’ll meet some chaps you ought to know.”

“I haven’t been asked.”

“You just have been. What’s the matter, don’t you like Pam? There she sits. Come along now.” Tudsbury propelled Henry by the elbow out into the rain.

“Of course I like Pamela,” Henry managed to say as the father opened the car door and thrust him in.

“Pam. look who I bagged outside the press room!”

“Why, how wonderful!” She took a hand off the wheel and clasped Pug’s, smiling familiarly as though not a week had passed since their parting in Berlin. A small diamond sparkled on her left hand, which before had been bare of rings. “Tell me about your family,” she said as she drove out of the White House grounds, raising her voice over the slap of the wipers and the drumming of the rain. “Is your wife well? And what happened to that boy of yours who was caught in Poland? Is he safe?”

“My wife’s fine, and so’s Byron. Did I mention to you the name of the girl he travelled with to Poland?”

“I don’t believe you did.”

“It’s Natalie Jastrow.”

“Natalie! Natalie Jastrow? Really?”

“Knows you, she says.”

Pamela gave Henry a quizzical little glance. “Oh, yes. She was visiting a chap in your embassy in Warsaw, I should think. Leslie Slote.”

“Exactly. She went to see this fellow Slote. Now she and my son intend to get married. Or so they say.”

“Oh? Bless me. Well, Natalie’s quite a girl,” said Pamela, looking straight ahead.

“How do you mean that?”

“I mean she’s extraordinary. Intelligence, looks.” Pamela paused. “Willpower.”

“A handful, you mean,” Pug said, remembering that Tudsbury had used the word to describe Pamela.

“She’s lovely, actually. And ten times more organized than I’ll ever be.”

“Leslie Slote’s coming to this party,” Tudsbury said.

“I know,” Pamela said. “Phil Rule told me.”

The conversation died there, in a sudden cold quiet. When the traffic halted at the next red light, Pamela shyly reached out two fingers to touch the shoulder board of Henry’s white uniform. “What does one call you now? Commodore?”

“Captain, captain,” boomed Tudsbury from the rear seat. “Four American stripes. Anybody knows that. And mind your protocol. This man’s becoming the Colonel House of this war.”

“Oh, sure,” Pug said. “An embassy paper-shuffler, you mean. The lowest form of animal life. Or vegetable, more exactly.”

Pamela drove skillfully through the swarming traffic of Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. As they came to the embassy, the rain was dwindling. Late sunlight shafted under the black clouds, lighting up the pink banks of blooming rhododendron, the line of wet automobiles, and the stream of guests mounting the steps. Pamela’s streaking arrival and skidding halt drew glares from several Washington policemen, but nothing more.

“Well, well, sunshine after the storm,” said Tudsbury.

“A good omen for poor old England, eh? What’s the news, Henry? Did you hear anything special at the White House? Jerry is really riding hell for leather to the sea, isn’t he? The teletype says he’s knocked the French Ninth Army apart. I do think he’s going to cut the Allied line right in two. I told you in Berlin that the French wouldn’t fight.”

“They’re supposed to be counterattacking around Soissons,” Pug said.

Tudsbury made a skeptical face. As they went inside and fell into the long reception line extending up a majestic stairway, he said, “The bizarre thing to me is the lack of noise over Germany’s invasion of Belgium and Holland. The world just yawns. This shows how far we’ve regressed in twenty-five years. Why, in the last war the rape of Belgium was an earth-shaking outrage. One now starts by assuming total infamy and barbarity in the Germans. That gives them quite an edge, you know. Our side doesn’t have that freedom of action in the least.”

At the head of the wide red-carpeted stairs, the guest of honor, a skinny, ruddy man of fifty or so, in a perfectly cut double-breasted black suit with huge lapels, stood with the ambassador, shaking people’s hands under a large painting of the King and Queen, and now and then nervously touching his wavy blond hair.

“How are you, Pam? Hullo there, Talky,” he said.

“Lord Burne-Wilke, Captain Victor Henry,” Tudsbury said. Pamela walked on, disappearing into the crowd.

Duncan Burne-Wilke offered Pug a delicate-looking but hard hand, smoothing his hair with the other.

“Burne-Wilke is here to try to scare up any old useless aeroplanes you happen to have lying around,” said Tudsbury.

“Yes, best prices offered,” said the ruddy man, briefly smiling at the American, then shaking hands with somebody else.

Tudsbury limped with Pug through two large smoky reception rooms, introducing him to many people. In the second room, couples shuffled in a corner to the thin music of three musicians. The women at the party were elegantly clad, some were beautiful: men and women alike appeared merry. It struck Victor Henry as an incongruous scene, considering the war news. He said so to Tudsbury.

“Ah well, Henry, pulling long faces won’t kill any Germans, you know. Making friends with the Americans may. Where’s Pam? Let’s sit for a moment, I’ve been on my feet for hours.”

They came upon Pamela drinking at a large round table with Leslie Slote and Natalie Jastrow. Natalie wore the same black suit; so far as Pug knew she had come to Washington in the clothes she stood up in, with no luggage but a blue leather sack. She gave him a haggard smile, saying, “Small world.”

Pamela said to her father, “Governor, this is Natalie Jastrow. The girl who went tootling around Poland with Captain Henry’s son.”

Slote said, rising and shaking hands with Tudsbury, “Talky, you may be the man to settle the argument. What do you think the chances are that Italy will jump into the war now?”

“It’s too soon. Mussolini will wait until France has all but stopped twitching. Why do you ask?”

Natalie said, “I’ve got an old uncle in Siena, and somebody should go and fetch him out. There’s nobody in the family but me to do it.”

Slote said, “And I tell you, Aaron Jastrow’s quite capable of getting himself out.”

“Aaron Jastrow?” said Tudsbury with an inquisitive lilt. “A Jew’s Jesus? Is he your uncle? What’s the story?”

“Will you dance with me?” Pamela said to Pug, jumping up.

“Why, sure.” Knowing how much she disliked dancing, he was puzzled, but he took her hand and they made their way through the jam toward the musicians.

She said as he took her in his arms, “Thanks. Phil Rule was coming to the table. I’ve had enough of him.”

“Who is Phil Rule?”

“Oh — he was the man in my life for a long time. Far too long. I met him in Paris. He was rooming with Leslie Slote. He’d been at Oxford when Leslie was a Rhodes Scholar. Phil’s a correspondent, and an excellent one, but a monster. They’re much alike, a pair of regular rips.”

“Really? Slote’s the brainy quiet type, I thought.”

Pamela’s thin lips twisted in a smile. “Don’t you know they can be the worst? They have pressure-cooker souls, those fellows.” They danced in silence for a while; she was as clumsy as ever. She spoke up cheerily. “I’m engaged to be married.”

“I noticed your ring.”

“Well, it was a good job I didn’t wait for that Navy flier son of yours, wasn’t it?”

“You didn’t give me any encouragement, or I might have worked on it.”

Pamela laughed. “Fat lot of difference that would have made. And Natalie really has your other boy, has she? Well, that’s the end of the available Henrys, then. I made my move in good time.”

“Who is he, Pamela?”

“Let’s see. Ted’s rather hard to describe. Teddy Gallard. From an old Northamptonshire family. He’s nice-looking and rather a lamb, and a bit mad. He’s an actor, but he hadn’t got too far when he joined the RAF. He’s only twenty-eight. That makes him fairly ancient for flying.

He’s in France with a Hurricane squadron.”

After another silence Pug said, “I thought you didn’t like to dance. Especially with Americans.”

“I don’t. But you’re so easy to dance with and so tolerant. The young ones are now doing an insane thing called the shag. One or two have got hold of me and fairly shagged my teeth loose.”

“Well, my style is straight 1914.”

“Possibly that was my year. Or should have been. Oh dear,” she said, as the music changed tempo and some of the younger couples began hopping up and down, “here’s a shag now.”

They walked off the dance floor to a purple plush settee in the foyer, where they sat under a bright bad painting of Queen Mary. Pamela asked for a cigarette and took several puffs, leaning an elbow on her knee. Her low-cut dress of rust-colored lace partly showed a small smooth white bosom; her hair, which on the Bremen had been pulled back in a thick bun, hung to her shoulders now in glossy brown waves.

“I have a yen to go home and enlist in the WAAFs.” He said nothing. She cocked her head sideways. “What do you think?”

“Me? I approve.”

“Really? It’s rank disloyalty, isn’t it? Talky’s doing a vital service to England here.”

“He can get another secretary. Your lucky RAF man is there.”

She colored at the word lucky, “It’s not that simple. Talky’s eyes do get tired. He likes to dictate and to have things read to him. He keeps weird hours, works in the bathtub, and so forth.”

“Then he’ll have to indulge his eccentricities a bit less.”

“But is it right just to abandon him?”

“He’s your father, Pamela, not your son.”

Pamela’s eyes glistened at him.

“Well, if i actually do it, we shall have Tudsbury in Lear, for a week or two. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child!’ — I think the governor will rather enjoy throwing himself into the part at that. Perhaps we should return to him now, Captain Henry.”

He said as they stood and walked to the main reception room, “Why not call me Pug, by the way? Everybody does who knows me.”

“Yes, I heard your wife call you that. What does it mean?”

“Well, at the Naval Academy, anybody named Henry usually gets called Patrick, the way a Rhodes gets labelled Dusty. But there was a ‘Patrick’ Henry in the class above me, and I was a freshman boxer, so I got tagged Pug.”

“You boxed?” Her glance travelled across his shoulders and arms. “Do you still?”

He grinned. “Kind of strenuous. Tennis is my game, when I can get around to it.”

“Oh? I play fair tennis.”

“Well, good. If I ever get to London, maybe we can have a game.”

“Are you -” She hesitated. “Is there any chance of your coming to London?”

“It’s not impossible. There they are, way down there,” Pug said. “Gosh, this room’s mobbed.”

“Natalie seems miserable,” Pamela said.

Pug said, “She just lost her father.”

“Oh? I didn’t know that. Well, she’s grown more attractive, that’s sure. Definitely marrying your boy, is she?”

“It seems so. Maybe you can give me advice on that one. I feel she’s too old for him, too smart for him, and just about everything else is wrong with it, except that they’re crazy about each other. Which is something, but not everything.”

“Maybe it won’t come off. There’s many a slip,” Pamela said.

“You never have met Byron. You’d see in a minute what I mean, if you did. He’s really still a baby.”

She mischievously glanced at him and tapped his arm. “You do sound fatherly at that.”

Tudsbury and Slote were in a lusty argument, with Natalie looking sombrely from one to the other.

“I’m not talking about anything he owes England. That’s beside the point,” Tudsbury said striking his empty glass on the table. “It’s his responsibility to the American people as their leader to ring the alarm and get them cracking, if they’re to save their own hides.”

“What about the Chicago quarantine speech?” Slote said. “That was over two years ago, and he’s still trying to live down the warmonger charges. A leader can’t dash ahead around the bend and out of sight. The people still haven’t gotten over their disgust with the First World War. Now here’s another one, brought on by stupid French and British policy. It’s not the time for singing ‘Over There,’ Talky. It just won’t work.”

“And while Roosevelt watches his timing,” said Tudsbury, “Hitler will take half the world. Pamela, be a love and get me another drink. My leg’s killing me.”

“All right.” Pamela docilely walked to the bar.

Tudsbury turned to Henry, “You know the Nazis. Can Roosevelt afford to wait?”

“What choice has he? A few months ago Congress was fighting him just on selling you guns.”

“A few months ago,” Tudsbury said, “Hitler wasn’t overrunning Belgium, Holland, and France, and directly facing you across the water.”

“Lot of water,” said Pug.

Slote slowly beat two fingers with one, like a professor. Talky, let’s review the ABC’s. The old regimes are simply not competent for the industrial age. They’re dead scripts, molted skins. Europe’s made a start on replacing them by a lot of wholesale murder — the usual European approach to problems, and that’s all the First World War was about — and then by resorting to tyrannies of the left or the right. France has simply stagnated and rotted. England’s played its same old upper-crust butterfly comedy, while soothing the workers with gin and the dole. Meantime Roosevelt has absorbed the world revolt into legislation. He has made America the only viable modern free country. It was a stupendous achievement, a peaceful revolution that’s gutted Marxian theory. Nobody wholly grasps that yet. They’ll be writing books about it in the year 2000. Because of it, America’s the power reserve of free mankind. Roosevelt knows that and moves slowly. It’s the last reserve available, ‘the last best hope.’”

Tudsbury was screwing all his heavy features into a mask of disagreement. “Wait, wait, wait. To begin with, none of the New Deal issued from this great revolutionary’s brain. The ideas flooded into Washington with the new people when the administration changed. They were quite derivative ideas, mostly copied from us decadent butterflies. We were a good deal ahead of you in social legislation. — Ah, thank you, Pam. — Now this slow moving can be good politics, but in war it’s a tactic of disaster. Fighting Germany one at a time, we’ll just go down one at a time. Which would be a rather silly end to the English-speaking peoples.”

“We have theatre tickets. Come and have dinner with us,” Slote said, standing and stretching out a hand to Natalie, who rose too. “We’re going to L’Escargot.”

“Thank you. We’re dining with Lord Burne-Wilke. And hoping to inveigle Pug Henry into joining us.”

Slote bought Natalie as luxurious a dinner as Washington offered, with champagne; took her to a musical comedy at the National Theatre; and brought her back to his apartment, hoping for the best. In a common enough masculine way, he thought that if all went well he could win her back in one night. She had once been his slave; how could such a feeling disappear? At first she had seemed just another conquest. He had long planned a prudent marriage in his thirties to some girl of a rich or well-connected family, after he had had his fun. Natalie Jastrow now put him in a fever that burned up all prudent calculations. Leslie Slote had never wanted anything in his life as he wanted Natalie Jastrow. Her distracted lean look of the moment was peculiarly enticing. He was quite willing to marry her, or to do anything else, to have her again.

He opened his apartment door and snapped on lights. “Ye gods, a quarter to one. Long show. How about a drink?”

“I don’t know. If I’m to search around tomorrow in New York courthouses for Aaron’s documents, I’d better get to bed.”

“Let me see his letter again, Natalie. You mix us a couple of shorties.”

“All right.”

Removing his shoes, jacket, and tie, Slote sank in an armchair, donned black-rimmed glasses, and studied the letter. He took one book after another from the wall — heavy green government tomes, and drank, and read. The ice in both drinks tinkled in the silence.

“Come here.” he said.

Natalie sat on the arm of the couch, under the light. Slote showed her, in a book, State Department rules for naturalized citizens living abroad more than five years. They forfeited citizenship, but the book listed seven exceptions. Some seemed to fit Aaron Jastrow’s case — as when health was a reason for staying abroad, or when a man past sixty and retired had maintained his ties with the United States.

“Aaron’s in hot water on two counts,” Slote said. “There’s this joker about his father’s naturalization. If Aaron actually wasn’t a minor at the time, even by a week or a day, he isn’t an American, technically, and never has been one. But even if he was, he has the five-year problem. I mentioned this to him once, you know. I said he should go back to the United States and stay a few months. I’d just seen too many passport messes crop up on this point, ever since the Nazis took over Germany.” Slote picked up the glasses, went to his kitchenette, and mixed more drinks, continuing to talk. “Aaron’s been a fool. But he’s far from unique. It’s unbelievable how careless and stupid Americans can be about citizenship. In Warsaw a dozen of these foul-ups turned up every week. The best thing now — by far — is to get the Secretary of State to drop a word to Rome. The day that word arrives Aaron will be in the clear.” Padding to the couch in his stocking feet, he handed her a drink and sat beside her. “But trying to unravel any technical problem, however small, through channels scares me. There’s a monumental jam of cases from Europe. It could take Aaron eighteen months. I therefore don’t think there’s much point in your digging around in Bronx courthouses for his alien registration and his father’s naturalization records. Not yet. After all, Aaron’s a distinguished man of letters. I’m hoping the Secretary will shake his head in amusement at the folly of absentminded professors, and shoot off a letter to Rome. I’ll get on this first thing in the morning. He’s a thorough gentleman. It ought to work.”

Natalie stared at him.

He said, “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing.” The girl drank off half her drink, all at once. “It certainly helps to know a man who knows a man, doesn’t it? Well! If I’m to hang around Washington till the end of the week, we’ll have to get me a hotel room, Leslie. I’m certainly not going to stay here after tonight. I feel damned odd even about that. I can still try a few of the hotels.”

“Go ahead. I was on the phone for an hour. Washington in May is impossible. There are four conventions in town.”

“If Byron finds out, God help me.”

“Won’t he believe that I slept on the couch?”

“He’ll have to, if he finds out. Leslie, will you get me permission to go to Italy?”

He compressed his mouth and shook his head. “I told you, the Department’s advising Americans to leave Italy.”

“If I don’t go, Aaron won’t come home.”

“Why? A broken ankle isn’t disabling.”

“He just will never pull himself together and leave. You know that. He’ll dawdle and potter and hope for the best.”

Slote said with a shrug, “I don’t think you want to go there to help Aaron. Not really. You’re just running away, Natalie. Running away, because you’re in way over your with your submarine boy, and shattered by losing your father, and actually don’t know what on earth to do next with yourself.”

“Aren’t you clever!” Natalie clinked the half-full glass down on the table. “I leave in the morning, Slote, if I have to stay at the YWCA. But I’ll make your breakfast first. Do you still eat your eggs turned over and fried to leather?”

“I’ve changed very little, altogether, darling.”

“Good-night.” She closed the bedroom door hard.

Half an hour later Slote, dressed in pajamas and a robe, tapped at the door.

“Yes?” Natalie’s voice was not unfriendly.

“Open up.”

Her faintly smiling face was pink and oily, and over a nightgown she had bought that afternoon she wore a floppy blue robe of his. “Hi. Something on your mind?”

“Care for a nightcap?”

She hesitated. “Oh, why not? I’m wide awake.”

Humming happily, Leslie Slote went to the kitchen and emerged almost immediately with two very dark highballs. Natalie sat on the couch, arms folded, face shiny in the lamplight.

“Thanks. Sit down, Leslie. Stop pacing. That was a mean crack about Byron.”

“Wasn’t it the truth, Natalie?”

“All right. If we’re playing the truth game, isn’t it simpler today than it was a year ago for a Foreign Service officer to have a Jewish wife, since the Nazis are now beyond the pale?”

Slote’s cheery look faded abruptly. “That never once occurred to me.”

“It didn’t have to occur to you. Now listen, dear. You can feed me stiff highballs and play ‘This Can’t Be Love’ on the phonograph, and all that, but do you really want me to invite you into the bedroom? Honestly, it would be a sluttish thing to do. I don’t feel like it. I’m in love with somebody else.”

He sighed and shook his head. “You’re too damned explicit, Natalie. You always have been. It’s coarse, in a girl.”

“You said that the first time I proposed, sweetie.” Natalie stood, sipping her highball. “My goodness, what a rich drink. I do believe you’re nothing but a wolf.” She was scanning the books. “What can I read? Ah, Graham Wallas. The very man. I’ll be asleep in half an hour.”

He stood and took her by the shoulders. “I love you, I’ll love you forever, and I’ll try every way I can to get you back.”

“Fair enough. Leslie, I must go to Italy to get Aaron out. Honestly! I feel horrible about my father. He was worrying over Aaron the very day he died. Maybe this is irrational expiation, but I’ve got to bring Aaron home safe.”

“I’ll arrange it, if it’s arrangeable.”

“Now you’re talking. Thanks. Good-night.” She kissed him lightly, went to the bedroom, and closed the door. He did not rap again, though he read for a long time and had more drinks.

Chapter 28

The Vice Chief of Naval Operations for Air was drinking coffee with a blond man in a blue Royal Air Force uniform. It was Lord Burne-Wilke; he nodded at Victor Henry, with a faint smile. During their long convivial dinner with the Tudsburys, Burne-Wilke had said not a word to Pug about this meeting.

“Good morning, Henry. I understand you know the Air Commodore.” The admiral worked his eyebrows at Pug.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Have a cup of coffee.” The wiry old man bounced away from his desk to a map of the United States on the wall. “And let’s get at it. Here, here, and here” — his bony finger jumped to Pensacola, St. Louis, and Chicago — “we’ve got fifty-three old-type scout bombers, SBU-1’s and 2’s, that have been declared surplus. We want to get them back to Chance-Vought, in Stratford, Connecticut — that’s the manufacturer — and get all U.S. Navy markings and special equipment removed. Our British friends will then pick ‘em up as is, and fly ‘em to a carrier that’s standing by in Halifax. That’s the picture. For obvious reasons” — the admiral contracted his brows fiercely at Pug — “involving the Neutrality Act, this is a touchy business. So the idea is to get this done without leaving a conspicuous trail of blood, guts, and feathers. You can have a plane to take you around and you should get at it today.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“We have sixty pilots on hand and waiting,” said Lord Burne-Wilke. “How soon d’you suppose you could have the planes, Captain Henry?”

Victor Henry studied the map, then turned to the Englishman, “Day after tomorrow, sir, late afternoon? Would that be convenient? It’ll take some time to get off those markings.”

The Englishman gave him a stare, and then smiled at the Vice Chief of Naval Operations. The admiral remained impassive. “Day after tomorrow?” said Lord Burne-Wilke.

“Yes, sir. The stragglers, if any, could come along on the deck of the next available cargo ship.”

“Actually, we were thinking in terms of a week from now,” said Lord Burne-Wilke. “We’ve given some of the fliers leave. It would require a bit of rounding up. How about Wednesday morning? That gives you and us four days.”

“Very well, sir.”

Burne-Wilke said to the admiral, “You do think that’s feasible?”

“He says so.”

“Well, then, I had better get right at this.”

As the door closed, the admiral glared at Victor Henry, with a tinge of humor showing. “Day after tomorrow, hey?”

“Admiral, I didn’t think those pilots were really on hand and waiting.”

The two men exchanged a look of insiders’ amusement. The foreigner had demanded fast action; the U.S. Navy had offered him faster action than he could handle: very satisfying, and needing no words. “Well, Wednesday’s cutting it close enough. Let’s have some fresh coffee, hey? Now, this whole thing is a subterfuge.” The admiral pressed a buzzer. “I suppose you grasp that. The boss man wants it, so that’s that. There are a few things you’d better understand, however.”

Showing a new grudging cordiality toward Victor Henry, the admiral explained that the President had elicited from the Attorney General — “probably by twisting his arm pretty damn hard” — the scheme and the ruling for selling these planes to England despite the Neutrality Act. First, the Navy was declaring the aircraft surplus. Second, Chance-Vought was accepting them for a trade-in on new F-4-U’s, at a good high price. Chance-Vought could afford to do this, because it was turning around and selling the old planes to England at a profit. The catch was that the delivery of the F-4-U’s lay far in the future. Undoubtedly President Roosevelt was evading the spirit of the Neutrality Law and the will of Congress, by allowing these planes out of the country now. The Army in particular would raise a howl. It was very short of aircraft, and had a standing request in to the Navy for surplus flying machines of any description.

“Now, Henry, there’s no question here, and no hope, of concealment in the long run. But if it were announced in advance, there’d be a big storm on the front pages. It might not go through, which would be too bad. Any Germans that the Limeys knock down with those old SBU’s we won’t have to fight later. We’re not going to stay out of this brawl. The boss man’s idea is to get it done and then take what comes. The way the war news is breaking, it may not cause a whisper, after the fact. I hope not. However” — the admiral paused, squinting at Victor Henry over the rim of his coffee cup — “this does involve a chance of congressional investigation. Somebody like you could end up a goat. The President thought you could get the job done, and I concurred, but this is a volunteer job. Strictly volunteer.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said Pug. “I’d better get at it.”

Three days before the start of the submarine course, Byron was sitting in a squalid furnished room over a Chinese laundry in New London, looking through the formidable reading list when the postman rang. Natalie’s large hurried Special Delivery scrawl on the thick envelope promised bad news. Slumped in a ragged armchair amid smells of soap and hot starch from below, Byron read her shocking letter over and over. He was glancing through Aaron’s faintly typed sheets when the telephone jarred him.

“Ensign Henry? Chief Schmidt, commandant’s office. Your father’s here. He’s gone with Captain Tully to inspect the Tambor over at Electric Boat. If you want to join them they’re at Pier Six, the commandant says.”

“Thank you.”

Sore at being followed even here by his father, hot to vent his anger and disappointment, Byron took ten minutes to dress and leave.

Victor Henry, meanwhile, walking through the new submarine with his classmate, was in high good humor, though red-eyed with lack of sleep. The scout bomber job was done. It had taken a lot of work and travel. A dozen aircraft had been in repair shops, the pilots had been scattered over the countryside, and there was no sense of urgency anywhere. Getting all-night work on the disabled planes, dragging those pilots out of their wives’ arms or from their fishing trips had been a struggle. Some commandants had asked rough questions. Jiggs Parker at Great Lakes Air Station, another classmate of his, had put up a fight to get a written record of the transfer, until Pug had told an outright lie about new top-secret equipment to be tested on the planes, which might be expended in the process. Jiggs had eyed him for a long silent minute, and then given in. Well, white lies were part of security, Victor Henry thought, and Jiggs knew that.

Byron caught up with his father and the commandant in the forward torpedo room of the Tambor, inspecting the new firing mechanisms. “Hello, Dad. What brings you here?”

The harsh voice, the look on Byron’s face, told Pug something serious was wrong. “Happened to be not far from here, so I thought I’d mosey over. You met Byron yet, Red?”

“Not yet. I know he passed the physical and he’s in the new class.” Captain Tully offered his hand. “Welcome aboard, Byron. You’re in for a rough couple of months.”

“I’ll try to survive, sir.”

At the almost contemptuous words, Red Tully’s eyes shifted disapprovingly to the father. Byron followed along on the tour without another word, his countenance white and angry.

“Say, what the devil’s the matter with you?” Victor Henry snapped as he and his son came out of the conning tower on the breezy slippery black deck, leaving Captain Tully below talking to the skipper. “You’d do well to watch your tone toward your superiors. You’re in the Navy now.”

“I know I’m in the Navy. Read this.”

Pug saw Natalie’s name on the envelope Byron thrust out. “Isn’t it personal?”

Still Byron offered the letter. Victor Henry held the flapping pages in both hands and read them there on the submarine deck. His face was flushed as he handed them back to his son. “Quite a girl. I’ve said that before.”

“If anything happens to her over there, I’ll hold you responsible, Dad, and I’ll never forget it.”

Pug frowned at his son. “That’s unreasonable. She’s gone to Italy because of her uncle.”

“No. You scared her off by saying I might not get admitted here if I were married. It wasn’t true. A lot of the students are married men. If you hadn’t come to Miami I might be one by now.”

“Well, if I misled her, I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure of the criteria, I thought that for hazardous duty they preferred single men, and for all I know, they do, and simply can’t get enough. Anyway, this is what you should be doing. She’s dead right about that, and I give her credit for realizing it. Possibly I should have butted out, but the decisions you’re making now will shape your whole life, and I wanted to help.”

It was a wordy speech for Victor Henry, and he spoke without his usual firmness, disturbed by his son’s fixed hostile expression. He felt guilty, an unfamiliar sensation: guilty of interfering in his son’s life and possibly of driving off the girl. Even if Natalie had been wrong for Byron, her sudden flight was a blow that he could feel almost as his son did. Suppose she had been the best thing in the world for the drifting youngster? Suppose, despite all good fatherly intentions, her being Jewish had made a difference?

Byron’s answer was as sharp and short as his father’s had been apologetic and strung-out. “Yes, you helped. She’s gone. I’ll never forget, dad.”

Red Tully emerged from the conning tower, looked and waved. “Hey, Pug? Ready to go ashore?”

Victor Henry said rapidly to his son, “You’re in this now, Briny. It’s the toughest school in the Navy. What’s past is past.”

Byron said, “Let’s get off this thing,” and he walked toward the gangway.

On a hot beautiful evening early in June, when the newspaper headlines were roaring of the British evacuation from Dunkirk, and Churchill on the radio was promising to fight to the end, on the beaches, in the streets, and in the hills, Victor Henry left for Europe. Rhoda stayed behind, because of the worsening of the war, to make a home for Madeline in New York. Pug had suggested this and Rhoda had rather enthusiastically agreed. Madeline, a busy and happy young woman, put up no objections.

Pug found it surprisingly easy to get a plane ticket at that time into the warring continent, as Natalie had. The hard thing was to get out.

Chapter 29

Natalie tried for five days to fly from Lisbon to Rome. She finally obtained a plane ticket, but at the last minute it was voided when a large party of boisterous, laughing German army officers, obviously full of lunch and wine, streamed through the gate, leaving twenty excluded passengers looking at each other. This soured her on the airlines. Railroad passage across collapsing France was far too risky. She booked passage on a Greek freighter bound for Naples. The wretched voyage took a week. She shared a hot tiny cabin with a horde of black roaches and a withered Greek woman smelling of liniment; and she scarcely left it, humid as it was, because on deck and in passageways the ship’s officers and rough crewmen gave her disquieting looks. She could scarcely eat the food. The pitching and rolling kept her awake at night. En route, her portable radio squawked the BBC stories of the French government’s flight from Paris, of Italy’s jump into the war, and of Roosevelt’s words, “The hand that held the dagger, has stuck it into the back of its neighbor.” Natalie arrived in Italy nervous and exhausted, with a strong feeling that she had better get Aaron out of Siena at once, forgetting books, clothes, furniture — everything except the manuscript.

But once on dry land, after a decent meal or two with good wine, and a long luxurious night’s sleep in a large soft hotel bed, she wondered at her own panic. Neither in Naples nor in Rome was there much sign that Italy was at war. The summer flowers spilled purple and red over stucco walls in bright sunshine, and in crowded streets the Italians went their lively ways as usual. Jocular, sunburned young soldiers had always abounded in Italian trains and cafés. They appeared as unbuttoned and placid as ever.

After the long, hot, filthy train ride to Siena, her first distant glimpse of the old town, rising out of the vine-covered round hills, gave her a stifled bored feeling, almost as Miami streets did. “God, who ever thought I’d come back here?” she said to herself. The hills outside the town already showed the veiled dusty green of midsummer. In Siena nothing had changed. The after-lunch deadness lay on the town; scarcely a dog moved in the empty red streets in the sun. It took her half an hour to find a working taxicab.

Aaron, in his broad-brimmed white hat and yellow Palm Beach summer suit, sat in his old place in the shade of the big elm, reading a book. Beyond him, over the ravine, the black-and-white cathedral towered above the red-roofed town. “Natalie! You made it! Splendid.” He came stumping toward her on a cane, with one foot in a metal-framed cast. “I called and called for a taxicab, but when it was time for my nap none had come. I did have a wonderful nap. — Come inside, my dear, you’ll want some refreshment. Giuseppe will see to your things.”

The house looked the same, though the heavy foyer furniture now wore its green chintz slipcovers. In his study, the pile of manuscript, the pile of notes, the array of reference books, were all in the same places. His writing board lay on the desk, with the yellow pages of his day’s work clipped to it, awaiting morning revision.

“Why, Aaron, you haven’t even begun to pack!”

“We’ll talk about it over tea.” he said, with an embarrassed smile. “I suppose you’d like to have a wash first?”

“But what’s the situation, Uncle Aaron? Haven’t you heard from Rome? Didn’t word come from Washington?”

“Word came from Washington. That was fine of Leslie.” He sank into a chair. “I really can’t stand on this ankle yet for more than a few minutes. I stupidly fell again when it was almost healed. What a nuisance I am! But anyway, I reached page 967 today, and I do think it’s goodish. Now go and have a wash. Natalie, you look positively boiled, and you’re caked with dust.”

The young consul in Florence received her affably, rising from behind a heavy carved black desk to escort her to a chair. The room reeked of the rum-flavored tobacco he was smoking in a curved rough briar pipe. The Sherlock Holmes prop looked odd in his small hand. He had a pink-and-white face, gentle bright blue eyes, and a childish thin mouth with the lower lip pulled in as though at some permanent grievance. His blond hair was thick, short, and straight. His gray silk suit, pinned white collar, and blue tie were elegant and neat. His desk nameplate read AUGUST VAN WINAKER II.

He said in a quavering voice, clearing it of hoarseness as he talked, “Well! The eminent author’s niece, eh? What a pleasure. I’m sorry I couldn’t see you this morning, but I was just up to my ears.”

“Perfectly all right.” Natalie said.

He waved his little hand loosely. “People have been scurrying home in droves, you see, and just dumping everything on the consulate. There’s an awful lot of commerce still going on, and I’m stuck with the paperwork. I’m becoming a sort of broker and business agent for any number of American companies — unpaid, of course. I was in the most unbelievable snarl this morning over — of all things — a truckload of insecticide! Can you bear it? And, of course, there still are Americans in Florence. The screwier they are, the longer they stay.” He giggled and rubbed his back hair. “The trouble I’ve been having with these two girls, room-mates, from California, I can’t mention names, but one of them is from a rich Pasadena oil family. Well! She’s gotten herself engaged to this slick little Florentine sheik, who calls himself an actor but actually is nothing but an overgrown grocery boy. Well, this oily charmer has gone and gotten her room-mate pregnant, my dear! The three of them have been having all-night brawls, the police have been in, and — oh, well. You don’t get rich in this work, but there’s never a dull moment.” He poured water from a tall bottle into a heavy cut-glass goblet, and drank. “Excuse me. Would you like some Evian water?”

“No, thank you.”

“I have to drink an awful lot of it. Some stupid kidney thing. Somehow it gets worse in the spring. I actually think Italian weather leaves a lot to be desired, don’t you? Well! His inquiring bland look seemed to add — “What can I do for you?”

Natalie told him about the new wrinkle in Jastrow’s situation. The day Italy had entered the war, a man from the Italian security police had visited Jastrow and warned him that as a stateless person of Polish origin, he was confined to Siena until further notice. She mentioned, as cordially as she could, that the OVRA undoubtedly knew this fact from intercepting Van Winaker’s letter.

“Oh, my God, how perfectly awful,” gasped the consul. Is that what’s happened? You’re quite right, I didn’t have a thinking cap on when I wrote that letter. Frankly, Natalie — if I may call you that — I was floored when your name came in today. I figured you’d have come and by now and taken your troublesome uncle home. He has been a trial, you know. Well! This is a pretty kettle of fish. I thought the visa solved everything and that I’d seen the last of the Jastrow case.”

“What do we do now?” Natalie said.

“I’m blessed if I know, just offhand,” said Van Winaker, running his fingers through his hair upward from the back of his neck.

“May I make a suggestion?” Natalie spoke softly and sweetly. “Just renew his passport, Mr. Van Winaker. That would stop the statelessness business. They couldn’t hold him back then.”

Van Winaker drank more Evian water. “Oh, Natalie, that’s so easy to say! People don’t see the screaming directives we get, warning us against abuse of the passport system. People don’t see departmental circulars about consuls who’ve been recalled and whose careers have gone poof! because they were loose about these things. Congress makes the immigration laws, Natalie. The Consular Service doesn’t. We’re simply sworn to uphold them.”

“Mr. Van Winaker, the Secretary of State himself wants Aaron cleared. You know that.”

“Let’s get one thing straight.” Van Winaker held up a stiff finger, his round blue eyes gone sober. He puffed his pipe and waved it at her. “I have had no instructions from the Secretary. I’m extremely glad we’re doing this face to face, Natalie, instead of on paper. He couldn’t go on record as intervening for one individual against another in matters involving equal treatment under law.” The eyes relaxed in a sly twinkle. “I did hear from Rome, between you and me, that his office asked us to expedite your uncle’s departure. I was stretching way over backwards, honestly, issuing that visa, jumping him to the head of a list of hundreds and hundreds of names.” Van Winaker knocked his pipe into a thick copper tray, and went on in a different, gossipy tone. “Actually, I think time will solve your uncle’s problem. The French are already asking for an armistice. The British won’t fight on very long.” They’d be mad to try. If they do, the Luftwaffe will pound them to a jelly in short order. No, I fear me this round goes to Fritz. No doubt they’ll have another go twenty years hence, when I devoutly hope to be out to pasture.”

“But we can’t count on the war ending,” Natalie expostulated.

“Oh, I think you can. I expect peace by July first, if not sooner, Natalie. Then these wartime exit regulations will lapse and your uncle can just pick up and go home. Actually, this gives him the leisure to sort and crate his books. He seemed so concerned about his books.”

“I want to take Uncle Aaron home tomorrow, and abandon books and everything. Please give him the passport.”

“My dear, the contradiction in dates is right there in your uncle’s expired book. It’s incredible how those things used to slip through, but I’ve seen a hundred such cases if I’ve seen one. People used to be mighty careless! Now that it’s been detected and made a matter of record, he has no more claim to American citizenship, technically speaking, than Hitler does. I couldn’t be sorrier, but it’s my duty to tell you the law.”

This man was getting on Natalie’s nerves. The use of Hitler’s name disgusted her. “It strikes me that your duty is to help us, and that you’re not really doing it.”

He opened his eyes very wide, blinked, drank more Evian, and slowly stuffed his pipe, staring at the tobacco. “I have a suggestion. It’s off the record, but I think it’ll work.”

“Tell me, by all means.”

He pushed his hair straight up. “Just go.”

She stared at him.

“I mean that! He’s got his visa. You’ve got your passport. Hop a bus or train, or hire a car, and scoot to Naples. Ignore the confinement to Siena. The Italians are so sloppy! Get on the first boat and just leave. You won’t be stopped. Nobody’s watching your uncle.”

“But won’t they ask for an exit permit?”

“It’s a trivial formality, dear. Say you lost it! Fumbling for it, you happen to take out a few thousand lire and put it on the table.” He blinked humorously. “Customs of the country, you know.”

Natalie felt her self-control giving way. Now the man was advising them to bribe an official, to risk arrest and imprisonment in a Fascist country. Her voice rose to shrillness. “I think I’d rather go to Rome and tell the Consul General that you’re thwarting the desire of the Secretary of State.”

The consul drew himself up, smoothed his hair with both hands, put them on the table, and said slowly and primly, “That is certainly your privilege. I’m prepared to take the consequences of that, but not of breaking the law. As it happens, I’m exceptionally busy, several other people are waiting, so -”

Natalie understood now how her uncle had fallen foul of this man. With a quick change to a placating smile, she said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been travelling for two straight weeks, I’ve just lost my father, and I’m not in the best of shape. My uncle’s disabled and I’m very troubled about him.”

At once the consul responded to the new manner. “I entirely understand, Natalie. Tell you what, I’ll comb his file again.” Maybe I’ll come up with something. Believe me, I’d like nothing better than to see him go.”

“You will try to find a way to give him a passport?”

“Or to get him out. That’s all you want, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll give it my serious attention. That’s a promise. Come back in a week.”

Chapter 30 — Eagle and Sea Lion (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

Chapter 31

Silvery fat barrage balloons, shining in the cloudless sky ahead of the plane before land came in view, gave the approach to the British Isles a carnival touch. The land looked very peaceful in the fine August weather. Automobiles and lorries crawled on narrow roads through rolling yellow-and-green patchwork fields marked off by dark hedgerows. Tiny sheep were grazing; farmers like little animated dolls were reaping corn. The plane passed over towns and cities clustered around gray spired cathedrals, and again over streams, woods, moors, and intensely green hedge-bounded fields, the pleasant England of the picture books, the paintings, and the poems.

This was the end of a tedious week-long journey for Pug via Zurich, Madrid, Lisbon, and Dublin. It had begun with the arrival in Berlin of a wax-sealed envelope in the pouch from Washington, hand-addressed in red ink: Top Secret — Captain Victor Henry only. Inside he had found a sealed letter from the White House.

Pug had had mixed feelings about these chattily phrased instructions. Any excuse to leave Berlin was welcome. The red-ink blare and boasts in the meager newspapers were becoming intolerable; so were the happy triumphant Germans in government offices, chortling about the pleasant postwar life that would start in a month or so; so were the women strolling the tree-lined boulevards, looking slyly complacent in French silks and cosmetics. Pug even felt guilty eating the plunder in the improved restaurant menus: Polish hams, Danish butter, and French veal and wine. The gleeful voices of the radio announcers, claiming staggering destruction of British airplanes and almost no Luftwaffe losses, rasped his nerves as he sat alone in the evenings in the Grunewald mansion looted from a vanished Jew. An order to leave all this behind was a boon. But the letter dismayed him, too. He had not walked the deck of a ship now in the line of duty for more than four years, and this shore-bound status appeared to be hardening.

Walking home that afternoon he passed the rusting olive-painted Flakturm, and like nothing else it made him realize how glad how glad he would be to get out of Berlin. People no longer gawked at the high tower bristling at the top with guns, as they had when the girder frame and the thick armor plates had been going up. Guesses and rumors about it had run fast and wild for weeks. Now the story was out. It was an A.A. platform for shooting at low-flying bombers. No high building could get in the lines of fire, for it rose far above the tallest rooftops in Berlin, a crude eyesore. So far the few English raiders had hugged maximum altitude, but the Germans seemed to think of everything. This gigantic drab iron growth, over the playing children and elderly strollers in the pretty Tiergarten, seemed to Victor Henry to epitomize the Nazi regime.

The lonely cavernous house got on his nerves that evening as his quiet-stepping Gestapo butler served him pork chops from Denmark at one end of the long bare dining table. Pug decided that if he had to come back he would take a room at the Adlon. He packed suits and uniforms, the great weariness of an attaché’s existence: morning dress blues, dress whites, evening uniform, khakis, street clothes, civilian dinner jacket. He wrote to Rhoda, Warren, and Byron, and went to sleep thinking of his wife, and thinking, too, that in London he would probably see Pamela Tudsbury. The next day, Pug’s assistant attaché, a handsome commander who spoke perfect German, said he would be glad to take over his duties and appointments. He happened to be a relative of Wendell Willkie. Since the Republican convention, he had become popular with the Germans. “I guess I’ll have to hang around this weekend, eh?” he said. “Too bad. I was going out to Abendruh with the Wolf Stöllers. They’ve been awfully kind to me lately. They said Göring might be there.”

“Go by all means,” said Pug. “You might pick up some dope about how the Luftwaffe’s really doing. Tell your wife to take along a pair of heavy bloomers.” He enjoyed leaving the attaché staring at him, mystified and offended.

And so he had departed from Berlin.

“How the devil do you keep looking so fit?” he said to Blinker Vance, the naval attaché who met him at the London airport. After a quarter of a century, Vance still batted his eyes as he talked, just as he had at Annapolis, putting the plebe Victor Henry on report for a smudged white shoe. Vance wore a fawn-colored sports jacket of London cut, and gray trousers. His face was dried and lined, but he still had the flat waist of a second classman.

“Well, Pug; it’s pretty good tennis weather. I’ve been getting in a couple of hours every day.”

“Really? Great war you’ve got here.”

“Oh, the war. It’s going on up there somewhere, to the south.” Vance vaguely waved a hand up at pellucid heavens. “We do get some air raid warnings, but so far the Germans haven’t dropped anything on London. You see contrails once in a while, then you know the fighters are mixing it up close by. Otherwise you listen to the BBC for the knockdown reports. Damn strange war, a sort of airplane numbers game.”

Having just toured bombed areas in France and the Low Countries, Henry was struck by the serene, undamaged look of London, the density of the auto traffic, and the cheery briskness of the well-dressed sidewalk crowds. The endless shop windows crammed with good things surprised him. Berlin, even with its infusion of loot, was by comparison a bleak military compound.

Vance drove Victor Henry to a London apartment off Grosvenor Square, kept by the Navy for visiting senior officers: a dark flat on an areaway, with a kitchen full of empty beer and whiskey bottles, a dining room, a small sitting room, and three bedrooms along a hall. “I guess you’ll be a bit crowded here.” Vance said, glancing around at the luggage and scattered clothes of two other occupants in the apartment.

“Be glad of the company.”

Blinker grimaced, winked his eyes, and said tentatively, “Pug, I didn’t know you’d become one of these boffins.”

“Boffins?”

“Scientific red-hots. That’s what they call ‘em here. The word is you came for a look-see at the newest stuff, with a green light from way high up.”

Victor Henry said, unstrapping his bags, “Really?”

The attaché grinned at his taciturnity. “You’ll hear from the Limeys next. This is the end of the line for me — until I can be of service to you, one way or another.”

The loud coarse ring of a London telephone, quite different in rhythm and sound from the Berlin double buzz, startled Pug out of a nap. A slit of sunlight gleamed through drawn brown curtains.

“Captain Henry? Major-General Tillet here, Office of Military History.” The voice was high, crisp, and very British. “I’m just driving down to Portsmouth tomorrow. Possibly drop in on a Chain Home station. You wouldn’t care to come along?”

Pug had never heard the expression Chain Home. “That’ll be fine, General. Thank you.”

“Oh, really? Jolly good!” Tillet sounded delighted, as though he had suggested something boring and Pug had been unexpectedly gracious. “Suppose I pick you up at five, and we avoid the morning traffic. You might take along a shaving kit and a shirt.”

Pug heard whiskeyish laughter in the next bedroom, the boom of a man and the tinkling of a young woman. It was six o’clock. He turned on the radio and dressed. A mild Schubert trio ended, one he had often heard on the Berlin station, and news came on. In a calm, almost desultory voice, the broadcaster told of a massive air battle that had been raging all afternoon. The RAF had shot down more than a hundred German planes, and had lost twenty-five. Half the British pilots had safely parachuted. The fight was continuing, the announcer said. If there were any truth in this almost ludicrously understated bulletin, Pug thought, an astonishing victory was shaping up, high and invisible in the sky, while the Londoners went about their business.

He found Pamela Tudsbury’s number in the telephone book and called her. A different girl answered, with a charming voice that became more charming when Victor Henry identified himself. Pamela was a WAAF now, she told him, working at a headquarters outside London. She gave him another number to call. He tried it, and there Pamela was.

“Captain Henry! You’re here! Oh, wonderful! Well, you picked the right day to arrive, didn’t you?”

“Is it really going well, Pam?”

“Haven’t you heard the evening news?”

“I’m not used to believing the radio.”

She gave an exhilarated laugh. “Oh, to be sure. The Berlin radio. My God, it’s nice to talk to you. Well, it’s all quite true. We’ve mauled them today. But they’re still coming. I have to go back on duty in an hour. I’m just snatching a bite to eat. I heard one officer say it was the turning point of the war. By the way, if inspection tours are in order for you, you might bear in mind that I’m working at Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group.”

“Will do. How’s your fiancé?”

“Oh, Ted? Fit as a flea. He’s on the ground at the moment. He’s had a busy day! Poor fellow, old man of the squadron, just turned twenty-nine. Look here, any chance that we can see you? Ted’s squadron gets its spell off ops next week. We’ll undoubtedly come down to London together. How long will you be here?”

“Well, next week I should still be around.”

“Oh, lovely. Let me have your number then, and I’ll call you. I’m so glad you’re here.”

He went out for a walk. London wore a golden light that evening, the light of a low sun shining through clear air. He zigzagged at random down crooked streets, along elegant rows of town houses, and through a green park where swans glided on calm water. He came to Trafalgar Square, and walked on through the Whitehall government buildings and along the Thames to Westminster Bridge.

Out to the middle of the bridge he strolled, and stood there, looking at the untouched famous old city stretching on both sides of the river.

London’s top-heavy red buses and scuttling black little taxis streamed across the bridge amid an abundant flow of private cars. Berlin’s sparse traffic had been mostly government or army machines. London was a civilian city still, he thought, for all the uniforms. It had no Flakturm. The British seemed to have produced their navy and their RAF from the mere table scraps of the prosperity still visibly spread here. Now these table-scrap forces had to hold the line. His job was to make a guess whether they would: also, to see whether their new electronic stuff was really advanced. Looking at this pacific and rich scene, he doubted it.

He dined alone in a small restaurant, on good red roast beef such as one could only dream of in Berlin. The apartment was dark and silent when he returned. He went to bed after listening to the news. The claimed box score for the day was now a hundred thirty German planes down, forty-nine British. Could it be true?

The small bald moustached general, in perfectly tailored khakis smoked a stubby pipe as he drove, a severe look his foxy much-wrinkled face. It had occurred to Victor Henry, after the phone conversation, that he might be E. J. Tillet, the military author, whose books he admired. And so he was; Tillet more or less resembled his book-jacket pictures, though in those the man had looked twenty years younger. Pug was not inclined to start a conversation with this forbidding pundit. Tillet said almost nothing as he spun his little Vauxhall along highways and down back roads. By the sun, Pug saw they were moving straight south. The further south they went, the more warlike the country looked. Signposts were gone, place names painted out, and some towns seemed deserted. Great loops of barbed steel rods over-arched the unmarked roads. Tillet said, pointing, “To stop glider landings,” and shut up again. Victor Henry finally tired of the silence and the beautiful rolling scenery. He said, “I guess the Germans took a bad beating yesterday.”

Tillet puffed until his pipe glowed and crackled. Victor Henry thought he wasn’t going to reply. Then he burst out, “I told Hitler the range of the Messerschmitt 109 was far too short. He agreed with me and said he’d take it up with Göring. But the thing got lost in the Luftwaffe bureaucracy. It’s a great mistake to think dictators are all-powerful! They’re hobbled by their paper shufflers, like all politicians. More so, in a way. Everybody lies to them, out of fear or sycophancy. Adolf Hitler walks in a web of flattery and phony figures. He does an amazing job, considering. He’s got a nose for facts. That’s his mark of genius. You’ve met him, of course?”

“Once or twice.”

“I had several sessions with him. He’s a great admirer of mine, or so he says. His grasp is quick and deep. The gifted amateur is often like that. I said Göring was making the same mistake with his fighter planes — designing them for ground support — that the French were making with their tanks. You don’t have to give a ground support machine much range, because the fuel trucks are always close at hand to fill them up. Those French tanks were superb fighting machines, and they had thousands of them. But the wretched things could only run fifty, sixty miles at a crack. Guderian drove two hundred miles a day. Some difference! The French never could get it into their heads that tanks should mass and operate independently. God knows Fuller, de Gaulle, and I tried hard enough to explain it to them.”

The car was bumping along a muddy detour past concrete dragons’ teeth and a stone wall, ringed in barbed wire, that blocked the highway. Masked workmen were raising clouds of gray dust with pneumatic hammers and drills.

“There’s foolishness for you.” Tillet pointed at the tank trap with his pipe. “Intended to halt invaders. What this rubbish actually would do is reduce the maneuverability of our reserve to zero. Happily Brooke’s taken charge now. He’s cleaning all this out.”

Pug said, “General Alan Brooke, is that?”

“Yes, our best man, a genius in the field. He managed the Dunkirk retreat. I was with his headquarters. I saw him demoralized only once. Headquarters was shifting from Armentières to Lille.” Tillet knocked out his pipe in a dashboard tray and shifted his cold gray eyes to Pug. “The roads were crammed with refugees. Our command cars could hardly move. The Armentières lunatic asylum had been bombed. All the boobies had got out. There must have been two thousand of them all over the road, in loose brown corduroy pajamas, moping, drooling, and giggling. They swarmed around our car, and looked into the windows, dripping saliva, making silly faces, waggling their hands. Alan turned to me. ‘It’s a rout, Ted,’ he said. We’re lost, you know, the whole BEF’s lost. We’ve lost damned war.’ That’s when I said, ‘Never mind, Alan. There are a lot more lunatics on the German side of the hill, including the boss.’ Well, that made him laugh, for first time in days. After that he became himself again. A word in season, the Good Book says.”

“Do you think Hitler’s crazy?” Henry said.

Tillet chewed at his pipe, eyes on the road. “He’s a split personality. Half the time he’s a reasonable, astute politician. When he’s beyond his depth he gets mystical, and silly. He informed me that the English Channel was just another river obstacle, and if he wanted to cross, why, the Luftwaffe would simply operate as artillery, and the navy as engineers. Childish. All in all, I rather like the fellow. There’s an odd pathos about him. He seems sincere, and lonely. Of course, there’s nothing for it now but to finish him off. — Hullo, we almost missed the turn. Let’s have a look at the airfield.”

This was Pug’s first look at a scene in England that resembled beaten Poland and France. Bent blackened girders hung crazily over wrecked aircraft in the hangars. Burned-out planes stood in sooty skeletal rows on the field, where bulldozers were grinding around rubble heaps and cratered runways. “Jerry did quite a job here,” said Tillet cheerfully. “Caught us napping.” The ruined airfield lay amid grassy fields dotted with wild flowers, where herds of brown cattle grazed and lowed. Away from the burned buildings, the air smelled like a garden. Tillet said as they drove off, “Göring’s just starting to make sense, going for the airfields and plane factories. He’s wasted a whole bloody month bombing harbors and pottering about after convoys. He’s only got till the equinox, the damned fool — the Channel’s impassable after about September the fifteenth. His mission is mastery of the air, not blockade. Define your mission!” he snapped at Victor Henry like a schoolmaster. “Define your mission! And stick to it!”

Tillet cited Waterloo, lost for want of a few handfuls of nails and a dozen hammers, because a general forgot his mission. Marshal Ney’s premature cavalry charge against Wellington’s center, he said, surprised and overran the British batteries, gaining a golden chance to spike the guns. But nobody had thought of bringing along hammers and nails. “Had they spiked those guns,” said Tillet through his teeth — puffing angrily at his clenched pipe, chopping a hand on the steering wheel. and getting very worked up and red-faced — “had Marshal Ney remembered what the hell his charge was all about, had one Frenchman among those five thousand thought about his mission, we’d be living in a different world. With our artillery silenced, the next cavalry charge would have broken Wellington’s center. We’d have had a French-dominated Europe for the next hundred and fifty years, instead of a vacuum into which the German came boiling up. We fought the Kaiser in 1914 and we’re fighting Adolf right now because that ass Ney forgot his mission at Waterloo — if he ever knew it.”

“For want of a nail the kingdom was lost,” said Pug.

“Damned right!’

“I don’t know much about Waterloo, but I never heard that version. I just remember Blücher and his Prussians showing up at sunset and saving the day.”

“Wouldn’t have been worth a tinker’s dam if Ney had fetched along his hammers and nails. By sunset Wellington would have been in full flight. Napoleon had routed Blücher three days earlier. He’d have done it again with ease.”

The car went over the crest of a hill. Ahead, beyond green empty pastureland, lay the blue Channel, shining in the sun, and a hairline of French coast all along the horizon. They got out and stood amid high grass and red poppies blowing in a cool sea breeze. After an impressive silence, broken only by birdsong, Tillet said, “Well, there you are. You’re looking at Hitler’s France.”

Turn by turn they scanned the coast through a telescope Tillet brought out of the car’s trunk. Small images of houses and ships shimmered on the far shore.

“That’s as close as Jerry’s ever come,” Tillet said. Close enough, too.”

“The Germans took all the neutral attachés on a tour of France not long ago,” Pug said. “Brought us clear to the coast. The poppies are growing over there, too. We saw your chalk cliffs, and the Maginot Line guns they were pointing at you. Now I’m looking down the wrong end of those guns.”

Tillet said, “They’re no problem. They lob a few shells over for terror, but they fall in the fields. Nobody’s terrorized.”

Running westward along the coast, they passed through silent boarded-up villages, thickly tangled with barbed wire. Camouflaged pillboxes stood thick along the hills and in the towns. Pug saw a children’s merry-go-round with the snouts of cannon peeking from under the platform of painted horses. Along the flat stony beaches, jagged iron rods spiked up, festooned with wire. As waves rose and fell, queerly shaped tangles of pipe poked above the water.

Pug said, “Well, you’re not exactly unprepared.”

“Yes. Adolf was decent enough to give us a breather, and we’ve used it. Those pipes out beyond the waterline are just the old Greek fire idea. We set the sea ablaze with petroleum, and fry the Germans we don’t drown.”

Barrage balloons came in sight over the hills to the west. “Ah. Here we are.” Tillet pulled up under a spreading old tree. “Portsmouth has two possible restaurants, but the city’s taken a pasting. They may be short of crockery. I have some sandwiches and coffee in the boot.”

“Perfect.”

Pug trotted up and down the road, restoring circulation to his numb heavy legs, then sat beside Tillet under the tree. They ate the lunch wordlessly. Tillet appeared to have no small talk whatever. Pug did not mind, being more or less like that himself. “Look there.” Tillet said, gesturing with the last of his sandwich. In the blue sky a patch of orange was flowering over the city, a barrage balloon on fire. “They’re back today, after all. More coffee?”

“No thanks.”

“Now, what’s the damned fool doing hitting poor Portsmouth again? Yesterday he was going inland where he should be.” Tillet deftly packed the lunch things and got his binoculars. The air vibrated with the distant thump of A.A. firing and the hum of planes. “Shall we get along down there? I imagine it’s a feint. It doesn’t look like much of a show.”

“Right.”

Climbing in the car, Pug paused, and scanned the sky high to the east. “Look there, General.”

Tillet squinted skyward, saw nothing, and used his binoculars. His eyes widened. “Yes. That’s more like it.” He passed the binoculars to Victor Henry. The binoculars resolved the gray moving dot into swarms of airplanes moving north in tight V’s across the cloudless blue.

“Heinkels, a lot of 109’s, and some 110’s,” Pug said. “More than a hundred of them.”

“No Stukas? They’re sitting birds. Our pilots say it’s hardly sporting to go after them.”

“I don’t see any crooked wings up there. But they’re pretty far off.”

“Care to join our observer corps, Captain Henry?” Tillet’s voice to him was slightly more cordial.

More barrage balloons over Portsmouth burst into flame and went writhing lazily down in black smoke. Fires were burning on the docks: white smoke trails crisscrossed the blue sky. The car passed a black plane nose down, burning in a grassy field, its markings hidden by flames. By the time they reached Portsmouth, fire fighters were streaming water on the blazes, and people were out in the streets gawking. Though buildings were smashed and burning and rubble heaps blocked many streets, the town did not look anything like Rotterdam, or even some of the badly hit French towns.

“Care to inspect the damage? You’re welcome to, but it’s a dreary sight. I’m thinking we might go straight on to the Chain Home station. Since Jerry does seem to be coming over today, you might find it interesting.”

“Sure thing.”

They had the ferry to themselves. The old wooden boat rolled nauseatingly on the little stretch of open water to the Isle of Wight.

“People forget how choppy this Channel is,” said Tillet, clinging to a stanchion and raising his voice above the wind and the engine thump. “If the Germans do cross, they may arrive too seasick to fight. It’s a factor.”

An olive-painted military car awaited them at the landing. They drove across the bucolic island passing one mansion after another shuttered and dead amid rolling wide lawns and shrubbery sprouting and flowering rankly.

They saw no other car on their way to a cluster of iron and wooden huts around steel towers thrusting toward the sky, a grim blotch on the green holiday island.

A tubby man with a scarlet face, the group captain in charge of the station, offered them tea in his little office, chatting about the raid on Portsmouth. He also mentioned with some pride a large sea bass which he had hauled from the surf at dawn. “Well, shall we have a look at how things are going? There’s rather a large attack been laid on today, I believe.”

Victor Henry’s first glimpse of British radar scopes at Ventnor, in a small stuffy room lit by one red light and foul with smoke, was a deep shock. He listened intently to the talk of the pale, slender man in gray tweed called Dr. Cantwell, a civilian scientist, as they inspected the scopes. But the sharp green pips were news enough. The British were miles ahead of the United States. They had mastered techniques that American experts had told him were twenty years off.

The RAF could measure the range and bearing of a ship down to a hundred yards of less, and read the result off a scope at sight. They could do the same to a single incoming airplane, or count a horde of airplanes, and give the altitude too. These instruments were marvels compared to the stuff that he had seen tested on the New York last year and that the Navy had ordered in large quantities. Pug Henry had two immediate thoughts: that the United States Navy had to get hold of this equipment; and that the British were far better prepared for war than the world knew. He admired the quiet sense of drama with which General Tillet had bowled him over. That was well done. But it all hung on the fact that they had these remarkable radars. Here was a moment of confrontation between America and England masked in a casual visit, in an offhand atmosphere, in a smoky, dim little room smelling of electric machinery, on a playground island deserted by the rich, facing the displaced Maginot Line guns.

“We have nothing like this,” he said.

“Mm?” said Dr. Cantwell, lighting a cigarette. “Are you sure? They’re pretty far along at MIT, we understand, with this sort of thing.”

“I know what we’ve got.” Pug saw on General Tillet’s face, in the red light, the shadowy gleam that comes of drawing a good hand of cards: a deepening of lines, a brightening of eyes, nothing more. “How the devil do you obtain such a sharp beam? I pressed our boys on this. The answer was that it was a question of stepping down to shorter and shorter wavelengths. Beyond a certain point you can’t do that, they say, and still get the power to shoot out the pulses to any distance.”

The scientist nodded, his eyes almost shut, his face as blank as possible. But he too, Pug thought, was a happy man.

“Mm, yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it?” he mumbled. “But they’ll certainly get around to the answer. It’s a question of tube design, circuitry, and so forth. Our cavity magnetron does a pretty good job, at that. We’re not entirely displeased with it.”

“Cavity magnetron?”

“Yes. Cavity magnetron. One gets rid of the grid in a vacuum tube, you see, and one controls current flow with an external magnetic field. That allows for the more powerful pulses. It takes a bit of designing, but your people will certainly work it up in due course.”

“No doubt. Got any cavity magnetrons for sale?”

Both Tillet and Dr. Cantwell burst out laughing, and even the enlisted men at their scopes turned around and smiled.

The scarlet-faced group captain peered at a scope where a boyish operator was chattering into a headphone. “Hullo, looks like we have another circus heading this way. Forming up over Le Havre again. A couple of dozen would you say, Stebbins?”

“Thirty-seven, sir.”

Excitement thickened in the dark room as reports came from several scopes. A young duty officer wearing headphones strolled from scope to scope, making notes on a clipboard, talking to the operators. To Pug Henry’s eye this was smooth expert work, like the controlled tumult in a submarine conning tower during an attack run.

General Tillet said, “I take it you think rather well of our cavity magnetron.”

“It’s a major breakthrough. General.”

“Hm. Yaas. Strange, isn’t it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.”

“Pretty useful toys,” said Pug, watching the duty officer write down the ranges and bearings that the radar operators were barking. “Exact intelligence of the enemy’s location and movements, without disclosing your own.”

“Well, of course. We’re damned grateful to our boffins. A few Englishmen did stay awake while our politicians kicked away air parity and all the rest of our military posture. Well, now that you’ve had a look, would you just as soon pop back to London? I thought we might have to stay here a day or two to see action, but Jerry’s been obliging. We can break our trip overnight at some decent hotel, then whip up to London. A couple of people there would like a word with you.”

Outside 10 Downing Street a single helmeted bobby paced in the morning sun, watched by a few sightseers on the opposite sidewalk. Remembering the grim arrays of SS men in front of Hitler’s marble chancellery, Victor Henry smiled at this one unarmed Englishman guarding the Prime minister’s old row house. Tillet brought him in, introduced him to a male secretary in a morning coat, and left. The secretary led him up a wide stairway lined with portraits — Pug recognized Disraeli, Gladstone, and Ramsay MacDonald — and left him waiting in a broad room full of beautiful old furniture and splendid paintings. Perched on a petit-point sofa, all alone, Pug had plenty of time to grow nervous before the secretary returned to fetch him.

In a small hot cluttered room that smelled of old books and dead cigars, the corpulent old Prime Minister stood near the window, one hand on his hip, looking down at a spread of photographs on his desk. He was very short and very stooped, with graceful little hands and feet; he bulged in the middle, and tapered upward and downward like Tweedledum. As he turned and went to meet Victor Henry, his walk was slow and heavy. With a word of welcome he shook hands and motioned Pug to a seat. The secretary left. Churchill sat in his armchair, put a hand on one arm, leaned back, and contemplated the American naval captain with filmy eyes. The big ruddy face, flecked and spotted with age, looked severe and suspicious. He puffed at the stump of his cigar, and slowly rumbled, “We’re going to win, you know.”

“I’m becoming convinced of that, Mr. Prime Minister,” Victor Henry said, trying to control his constricted throat and bring out normal tones.

Churchill put on half-moon glasses, took up a paper and glanced at it, then peered over the rims at Henry. “Your post is naval attaché in Berlin. Your President has sent you here to have a look at our RDF, a subject in which you have special knowledge. He reposes much confidence in your judgment.”

Churchill said this with a faint sarcastic note suggesting that he knew Pug was one more pair of eyes sent by Roosevelt to see how the British were taking the German air onslaught: also, that he did not mind the scrutiny a bit.

“Yes, sir. We call it radar.”

“What do you think of my stuff, now that you’ve seen it?”

“The United States could use it.”

Churchill uttered a pleased grunt. “Really? I haven’t had an opinion quite like that from an American before. Yet some of your best people here have visited Chain Home stations.”

“Maybe they don’t know what we’ve got. I do.”

“Well, then, I suggest you report to your President that we simple British have somehow got hold of something he can use.”

“I’ve done so.”

“Good! Now have a look at these.”

From under the outspread pile of photographs, the Prime Minister drew several charts and passed them to the American. He dropped his gnawed stub into a shiny brass jar of sand, and lit a fresh cigar, which trembled in his mouth.

The colored curves and columns of the charts showed destroyer and merchant ship losses, the rate of new construction, the increase of Nazi-held European coastline, and the rising graph of U-boat sinkings. It was an alarming picture. Puffing clouds of blue and gray smoke. Churchill said that the fifty old destroyers were the only warships that he would ever ask of the President. His own new construction would fill the gap by March. It was a question of holding open the convoy lines and beating off invasion during these next eight months.

Every day danger mounted, he said, but the deal was bogging down. Roosevelt wanted to announce the lease of Caribbean naval bases on British islands as a trade for the destroyers. But Parliament would be touchy about bartering British soil for ships. Moreover, the President wanted a written guarantee that if the Nazis invaded and won, the British fleet would not yield to the Germans or scuttle itself, but would steam to American ports. “It is a possibility that I won’t discuss, let alone publicly record,” Churchill growled. “The German fleet has had considerable practice in scuttling and surrendering. We have had none.”

Churchill added — with a crafty grin that reminded Pug a bit of Franklin Roosevelt — that giving fifty warships to one side in a war perhaps was not a wholly friendly act toward the other side. Some of the President’s advisers feared Hitler might declare war on the United States. That was another difficulty.

“There’s not much danger of that,” Victor Henry said.

“No, not much hope of that,” Churchill said, “I quite agree.” His eyes under twisted brows looked impish as a comedian’s. Victor Henry felt that the Prime Minister had paid him the compliment of stating his entire war policy in one wily joke.

“Here’s that bad man’s invasion fleet. Landing craft department,” Churchill went on, scooping up and handing him a sheaf of photographs showing various oddly shaped boats, some viewed in clusters from the air, some photographed close on. “A raggle-taggle he’s still scraping together. Mostly the prahms they use in inland waterways. Such cockleshells will ease the task of drowning Germans, as we devoutly hope to do to the lot of them. I should like you to tell your President that now is the time to get to work on landing craft. We shall have to go back to France and we shall need a lot of these. We have got some fairly advanced types, based on designs I made back in 1917. Look at them, while you’re here. We shall want a real Henry Ford effort.”

Victor Henry couldn’t help staring in wonder at this slumping, smoke-wreathed puddle of an old man, fiddling with the thick gold chain across his big black-clad belly, who with three or four combat divisions, with almost no guns or tanks left after Dunkirk, with his back to the wall before a threatened onslaught of Hitler’s hundred and twenty divisions, was talking of invading Europe.

Churchill stared back, his broad lower lip thrust out. “Oh, I assure you we shall do it. Bomber Command is growing by leaps and bounds. We shall one day bomb them till the rubble jumps, and invasion will administer the coup de grâce. But we shall need those landing craft.” He paused, threw his head back, and glared at Henry. “In fact, we are prepared now to raid Berlin in force, if he dares to bomb London. Should that occur while you’re still here, and if you don’t consider it foolhardy nonsense, you might go along to see how it’s done.” The pugnacious look faded, the wrinkled eyes blinked comically over the spectacles, and he spoke in slow jocular lisping rhythms. “Mind you, I don’t suggest you return to your duty post by parachute. It would save time, but might be considered irregular by the Germans, who are sticklers for form.”

Pug thought it was extremely foolhardy nonsense, but he said at once, “I’d be honored, of course.”

“Well, well. Probably out of the question. But it would be fun, wouldn’t it?” Churchill painfully pushed himself out of his chair, and Pug jumped up. “I trust General Tillet is taking good care of you? You are to see everything here that you’ve a mind to, good or bad.”

“He’s been perfect, sir.”

“Tillet is very good. His views on Gallipoli I regard as slightly unsound, since he makes me out at once a Cyrano, a jackass, and a poltroon.” He held out his hand. “I suppose you’ve seen a bit of Hitler. What do you think of him?”

“Very able, unfortunately.”

“He is a most wicked man. The German badly wants tradition and authority, or this black face out of the forest appears. Had we restored the Hohenzollerns in 1919, Hitler might still be a ragged tramp, muttering to himself in a squalid Vienna doss house. Now, alas, we must be at considerable trouble to destroy him. And we shall.” Churchill shook hands at the desk. “You were in War Plans and you may be again. I recommend that you obtain all our latest stuff on landing craft. Ask Tillet.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We shall require great swarms of the things. Great… swarms!” Churchill swept his arms wide, and Victor saw in his mind’s eye thousands of landing craft crawling toward a beach in a gray dawn.

“Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister.”

General Tillet was waiting in his car. They went to a room in the Admiralty where huge wall charts showed the disposition of the fleet. In the blue spaces of the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean, the little pins looked sparse and lonesome, but the sowing around the home islands bristled thick. Pins in a thin line marked the great-circle convoy path across the Atlantic; Tillet traced this line with his pipe. “There’s the problem. We breathe through that tube. If Jerry can cut it, we’ve bought it. Obviously we can use some old destroyers you’ve got lying around from the last war, not doing much of anything.”

“Yes, so the Prime Minister said. But there’s a political problem, General. Either Hitler’s a menace to the United States, in which case we need everything we’ve got and a lot more, or he isn’t, and in that case why should we let you have part of our Navy to fight him? I’m just giving you the isolationist argument.”

“Mm, yaas. Of course we hope you’ll think of common traditions and all that, and the advantage of keeping us alive, and the possibility that the Germans and Japanese, dominating Europe and Asia and the oceans, might prove more disagreeable over the years than we’ve been. Now I’m still to show you those landing craft we’ve got up in Bristol, and Fighter Command in Stanmore -”

“If I can, I’d also like to visit Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group.”

Tillet blinked at him. “Number Eleven? Jolly good idea. Take a bit of arrangement but I believe we can lay it on.”

Chapter 32

Victor Henry sat in the lobby of the Savoy, waiting for Pamela and her fighter pilot. Uniforms thronged past, with only a sprinkling of dinner jackets on white-headed or bald men. The young women, in colorful thin summer finery, looked like a stream of excited amorous angels. On the brink of being invaded by Hitler’s hordes, England was the gayest place he had ever seen.

This was nothing like the glum hedonism of the French in May, going down with knives and forks in their hands. Wherever the American had visited in a hard-driving week — and by now this included shipyards, navy and air bases, factories, government offices, and army maneuvers — he had noted the resolute, cheerful spirit, borne out by the rise in production figures. The British were beginning to turn out tanks, planes, guns, and ships as never before. They now claimed to be making airplanes faster than the Germans were knocking them down. The problem was getting to be fighter pilots. If the figures given him were true, they had started with somewhat more than a thousand seasoned men. Combat attrition was taking a steep toll, and to send green replacements into the skies was fruitless. They could kill no Germans and the Germans could kill them. England had to sweat out 1940 with the fighter pilots on hand. But how fast was the Luftwaffe losing its own trained pilots? That was the key, Tillet said; and the hope was that Göring was already throwing everything in. If so, and if the British could hold on, there would come a crack in Luftwaffe performance. The signal, said Tillet, might be a shift to terror bombing of the cities.

“Here we are, late as hell.” chirped Pamela, floating up to him in a mauve silk dress. Pamela’s flier was short, swarthy, broad-nosed, and rather stout, and his thick wavy black hair badly needed cutting. Except for the creased blue uniform, Flight Lieutenant Gallard looked like a young lawyer, or businessman rather than an actor, though his brilliant blue eyes, sunken with fatigue, had a dramatic sparkle.

Diamonds glittered in Pamela’s ears. Her hair was done up in a makeshift way. Pug thought she had probably emerged from bed rather than a beauty parlor; and fair enough in the time and place! The notion gave him a pang of desire to be young and in combat. Their table was waiting in the crowded grillroom. They ordered drinks.

“Orange squash,” said Flight Lieutenant Gallard.

“Two dry martinis. One orange squash. Very good, sir,” purred the silver-haired waiter, with a low bow.

Gallard gave Victor Henry a fetching grin, showing perfect teeth; it made him seem more of an actor. The fingers of his left hand were beating a brisk tattoo on the starched cloth. “That’s the devil of an order, isn’t it, in the Savoy?”

Pamela said to Pug, “I’m told he used to drink like a proper sponge, but he went on orange squash the day we declared war.”

Pug said, “My son’s a Navy flier. I wish he’d go on orange squash.”

“It’s not a bad idea. This business up there,” Gallard raised a thumb toward the ceiling — “happens fast. You’ve got to look sharp so as to see the other fellow before he sees you. You have to react fast when you do see him, and then you have to make one quick decision after another. Things get mixed up and keep changing every second. You have to fly that plane for dear life. Now, some of the lads thrive on drink, they say it blows off their steam. I need all my steam for that work.”

“There’s a lot I’d like to ask you,” said Victor Henry. “But probably this is your night to forget about the air war.”

“Oh?” Gallard gave Pug a long inquiring look then glanced at Pamela. “Not a bit. Fire away.”

“How good are they?”

“The Jerries are fine pilots and ruddy good shots. Our newspaper talk about how easy they are makes us a little sick.”

“And their planes?”

“The 109’s a fine machine, but the Spitfire’s a good match for it. The Hurricane’s quite a bit slower; fortunately it’s much more maneuverable. Their twin-engine 110 is an inferior machine, seems to handle very stiffly. The bombers of course are sitting birds, if you can get at them.”

“How’s RAF morale?”

Gallard flipped a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with swift gestures of one hand. “I’d say it’s very high. But not the way the papers tell it. Not that dashing patriotic business. I can remember the first time I fought over England, when those dots appeared in the sky just where Fighter Control said they were, I had a bit of that feeling, I thought, ‘Why, damn their eyes, they’re really trying it, and what the hell are they doing flying over my country? Let’s shoot the bloody bastards down!’ But right away I became damn busy trying not to get shot down myself. That’s how it’s been ever since.” He smoked in silence, his eyes wide and far away, his fingers dancing and dancing. He shifted in the chair, as though it were too hard. “It’s a job, and we’re trying to do our best. It’s a lot more fighting than we had over France. You can tell your son, Captain, that fear’s a big factor, especially as the thing goes on and on. The main thing is learning to live with it. Some chaps simply can’t. We call it LMF, lack of moral fibre. The brute fact is that as range decreases, accuracy increases. You’ve got to close the range. There’s nothing to do about that old truth of warfare. But there’s always the chap who opens up and blazes away from afar, you know, and runs out of bullets and heads for home. And there’s the one who somehow always loses the bird he’s after in the clouds, or who never finds the foe and aborts the mission. One soon knows who they are. Nobody blames them. After a while they’re posted out.” He fell silent again, looking down at the smoking cigarette in his clasped hands, obviously absorbed in memory. He shifted in the chair again, and glanced up from Victor Henry to Pamela, who was watching his face tensely. “Well, the long and the short of it is, it’s us against the Jerries, Captain Henry, and that’s exciting. We’re flying these machines that can cross all of England in half an hour. Excellent gun platforms. Best in the world. We’re doing what very few men can do or ever have done. Or perhaps will ever do again.” He looked around at the elegant grillroom full of well-dressed women and uniformed men, and said with an uncivilized grin, the whites showing around his eyeballs, “If excelling interests you, there it is” — he made the thumb gesture — “up there.”

“Your orange squash, sir,” said the waiter, bowing.

“And just in time,” said Gallard. “I’m talking too much.”

Pug raised his glass to Gallard. “Thanks. Good luck and good hunting.”

Gallard grinned, drank, and moved restlessly in the chair. “I was an actor of sorts, you know. Give me a cue and I rant away. What does your son fly?”

“SBD, the Douglas Dauntless,” said Pug. “He’s a carrier pilot.”

Gallard slowly nodded, increasing the speed of his finger tattoo. “Dive bomber.”

“Yes.”

“We still argue a lot about that. The Jerries copied it from your navy. Our command will have no part of it. The pilot’s in trouble, we say, in that straight predictable path. Our chaps have got a lot of victories against the Stukas. But then again, providing they get all the way down, they do lay those bombs in just where they’re supposed to go. Anyhow, my hat’s off to those carrier fellows, landing on a tiny wobbly patch at sea. I come home to broad immovable mother earth, for whom I’m developing quite an affection.”

“Ah, I have a rival,” said Pamela. “I’m glad she’s so old and so flat.”

Gallard smiled at her, raising his eyebrows. “Yes, you’ve rather got her there, haven’t you Pam?”

During the meal, he described in detail to Victor Henry the way fighter tactics were evolving on both sides. Gallard got very caught up in this, swooping both palms to show maneuvers, pouring out a rapid fire of technical language. For the first time he seemed to relax, sitting easily in his chair, grinning with enthusiastic excitement. What he was saying was vital intelligence and Pug wanted to remember as much as possible; he drank very little of the Burgundy he had ordered with the roast beef. Pamela at last complained that she was drinking up the bottle by herself.

“I need all my steam, too,” Pug said. “More than Ted does.”

“I’m tired of abstemious heroes. I shall find myself a cowardly sot.”

Gallard was having his second helping of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding — he was eating enormously, saying that he had lost almost a stone in three weeks and proposed to make it up in three days — when the headwaiter came to him with a written note. Gallard crumpled it up, wiped a napkin across his mouth, and excused himself. He returned in a few minutes, smiled at them, and resumed eating.

“Pam, there’s been a change,” he abruptly said when his plate was empty. “Our squadron’s rest off ops is cancelled. We’ll get it when the weather’s a little cooler.” He smiled at Victor Henry and drummed ten fingers on the table. “I don’t mind. One gets fidgety, knowing the thing’s still going on full blast and one’s out of it.”

In the silence at the little table, Victor Henry thought that the ominousness of this summons went much beyond the riskiness of recalling and sending up a fatigued, edgy pilot. It signalled that the RAF was coming to the end of its rope.

Pamela said, “When do you have to go back? Tomorrow?”

“Oh, I’m supposed to be on my way now, but I was damned well going to enjoy this company, and my beef.”

“I shall drive you to Biggin Hill.”

“Well, actually, they’re digging the chaps out of various pubs and places of lesser repute, Pam. We’ll be going up together. Those of us they can find.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be cracking off soon, but the evening’s young. No reason for you not to go on to that Noel Coward show. I’ve heard it’s very funny.”

Quickly Pug said, “I think now’s the time for me to leave you both.”

The RAF pilot looked him straight in the eye. “Why? Don’t you think you could bear Pamela’s drunken chatter for another little while? Don’t go. Here she is all tarted up for the first time in weeks.”

“All right,” Pug said, “I think I can bear it.”

The pilot and the girl stood. Pamela said, “So soon? Well, we shall have a nice long stroll through the lobby.”

As Pug got up and offered his hand, Ted Gallard said, “Good luck to you, Captain Henry, and to that son of yours in the Dauntless dive bomber. Tell him I recommend orange squash. Come and see us at Biggin Hill aerodrome.”

Left alone at the table, Pug sat and wiped his right hand with a napkin. Gallard’s palm had been very wet.

He did visit Ted Gallard’s squadron, one afternoon a few days later. Biggin Hill lay southeast of London, squarely in the path of incoming German bombers from the nearest airfield across the Channel. The Luftwaffe was persisting in a fierce effort to knock out Biggin Hill, and the aerodrome was a melancholy scene: wrecked aircraft, burned-out roofless hangars, smashed runways, everywhere the inevitable stinks of burned wood, broken drains, blown-up earth, and smashed plaster. But bulldozers were snorting here and there, patching the runways, and a couple of planes landed as Pug arrived. On stubby fighters dispersed all over the field, mechanics in coveralls were climbing and tinkering, with much loud cheerful profanity. The aerodrome was very much in business.

Gallard looked very worn, yet happier than he had been in the Savoy Grill. In the dispersal hut he introduced Pug Henry to a dozen or so hollow-eyed dishevelled lads in wrinkled uniforms, fleece-lined boots and yellow life jackets, lounging about on chairs and iron cots, either bare-headed or with narrow blue caps tilted over one eye. The arrival of an American Navy captain in mufti dried up the talk, and for a while the radio played jazz in the awkward silence. Then one pink-cheeked flier, who looked as though he had never shaved, offered Pug a mug of bitter tea, with a friendly insult about the uselessness of navies. He had been shot down by a British destroyer in the Channel, he said, and so might be slightly prejudiced. Pug said that speaking for the honor of navies, he regretted the idiocy; but as a friend of England, he approved the marksmanship.

That brought a laugh, and they began talking about flying again, self-consciously for a while, but then forgetting the visitor. Some of the slang baffled him, but the picture was clear enough: everlasting alert, almost no sleep, too many airplanes lost in accidents as well as combat, far too many German fighters, and desperate, proud, nervous high spirits in the much reduced squadron. Pug gathered that almost half the pilots that had started the war were dead.

When the six o’clock news came on, the talk stopped and all huddled around the radio. It had been a day of minor combat, but again the Luftwaffe had come off second best in planes shot down, at a rate of about three to two.

The fliers made thumbs-up gestures to each other, boyishly grinning.

“They’re fine lads,” Gallard said, walking Victor Henry back to his car. “Of course, for your benefit they cut the talk about girls. I’m the middle-aged man of the squadron, and I get left out of it too, pretty much. When they’re not flying, these chaps have the most amazing experiences.”

He gave Pug a knowing grin. “One wonders how they manage to climb into their cockpits, but they do, they do.”

“It’s a good time to be alive and young,” Pug said.

“Yes. You asked me about morale. Now you’ve seen it.” At the car, as they shook hands, Gallard said diffidently. “I owe you thanks.”

“You do? Whatever for?”

“Pamela’s coming back to England. She told me that when they met you by chance in Washington, she was trying to make up her mind. She decided to ask you about it, and was much impressed by what you said.”

“Well, Im flattered. I believe I was right. I’m sure her father’s surviving nicely without her.”

“Talky? He’ll survive us all.”

“It’s not going well,” General Tillet said, maneuvering his car through a beetle-cluster of wet black taxicabs at Marble Arch. The weather had lapsed into rain and fog; pearl-gray murk veiled a warm, sticky, unwarlike London. Umbrella humps crowded the sidewalks. The tall red omnibuses glistened wetly; so did the rubber ponchos of the bobbies. The miraculous summer weather had given the air battle an exalting radiance, but today London wore a dreary peace morning face.

“The spirit at Biggin Hill is damned good,” Pug said.

“Oh, were you there? Yes, no question about spirit! It’s arithmetic that’s bad. Maybe the Fat Boy’s getting low on fighter pilots, too. We are, that’s flat. Perilously low. One doesn’t know the situation on the other side of the hill. One hangs on and hopes.”

The rain trailed off as they drove. After a while the sun hazily shone out on wet endless rows of identical grimy red houses, and sunlight shafted into the car. Tillet said, “Well, our meteorology blokes are on top of their job. They said the bad weather wouldn’t hold, and that Jerry would probably be flying today. Strange, the only decent English summer in a century, and it comes along in the year the Hun attacks from the sky.”

“Is that a good or bad break?”

“It’s to his advantage for locating his target and dropping his bombs. But our interceptors have a better chance of finding him and shooting him down. Given the choice, our chaps would have asked for clear skies.”

He talked of Napoleon’s luck with weather, and cited battles of Charles XII and Wallenstein that had turned on freak storms. Pug enjoyed Tillet’s erudition. He was in no position to challenge any of it, and wondered who was. Tillet appeared to have total knowledge of every battle ever fought, and he could get as annoyed with Xerxes or Caesar for tactical stupidity, as he was with Hermann Göring. About an hour later they came to a town, drove along a canal of very dirty water, and turned off to a compound of sooty buildings surrounded by a high wire fence. A soldier at the gate saluted and let them pass. Pug said, “Where are we?”

“Uxbridge. I believe you wanted to have a look at Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group,” said Tillet.

“Oh, yes.” In three weeks, Tillet had never once mentioned the request and Victor Henry had never repeated it.

A flight lieutenant with a pleasant chubby round face met them. He was a lord, but Tillet clicked the long name out too crisply for Pug to catch it. His lordship conducted them out of the bright sunshine, down and down a long turning stairway into the ground. “One rather expects to encounter a white rabbit, doesn’t one, Captain?” he fluted in Oxonian tones. “Hurrying by consulting its pocket watch, and all that. Nothing here that interesting, I’m afraid.”

They entered a shallow balcony in a small strange theatre. In place of the stage and curtain stood a black wall full of columns of electric bulbs, white except for a single line of red lamps near the top. At the side of the wall was a column of RAF terms for stages of readiness. On the floor below, twenty or so girls in uniform, some wearing headphones on long lines, worked around a large-scale table map of southern England. On either wall, in glassed boxes like radio control booths, men with headphones scrawled at desks. The place had an underground, earth-and-cement smell, and it was quiet and cool.

“Burne-Wilke, here’s your American visitor,” said Tillet.

The blond officer sitting in the middle of the balcony turned, smiling. “Hullo there! Frightfully glad to hear you were coming. Here, sit by me, won’t you?” He shook hands with them. “Nothing much doing yet, but there will be soon. The bad weather’s drifting clear of the Channel, and Jerry’s getting airborne.” Burne-Wilke rubbed his bony pink chin with one hand, giving Pug a quizzical glance. “I say, those aeroplanes you rounded up have proven ever so useful.”

“They can’t play in this league,” Pug said.

“They’re excellent on patrol. They’ve done some smart punishing of invasion barges. The pilots are keen on them.”

Burne-Wilke looked him in the eye. “See here, could you have produced those planes in two days?”

Pug only grinned.

Burne-Wilke shook his head and caressed his wavy hair. “I was sorely tempted to take you up. But you struck me as a chap who might just bring it off, and then we’d have looked proper fools. Hullo, there’s a mutual friend. Didn’t I first meet you with the Tudsburys, in a sweaty Washington receiving line?”

Pamela was walking in to take the place of another girl. She looked up, threw Victor Henry a smile, then got to work, and did not glance his way again.

“This is all fairly clear, isn’t it?” said Burne-Wilke, gesturing toward the map and the wall. “Fighter Command at Stanmore is responsible for air defense, but it lets each group run its own show. Our beat is southeast England. It’s the hot spot, closest to the Germans, and London’s here.” He swept one lean arm toward the wall, straight up and down. “Those six columns of lamps stand for our group’s six fighter control stations. Each vertical row of lights stands for one fighter squadron. All in all, twenty-two squadrons. In theory, we dispose of more than five hundred fighter pilots.” Burne-Wilke wrinkled his lips. “In theory. Just now we’re borrowing pilots from other groups. Even so, we’re way under. However…” He gestured toward the bottom part of the black wall, where white lights burned in a ragged pattern. “Going up the wall, you step up in readiness, till you get to AIRBORN, ENEMY IN SIGHT, and of course ENGAGED. That’s the red row of lamps. Our six substations talk to us and to the pilots. Here we put together the whole picture. If things warm up enough, the air vice-marshal may come in and run the show. — Oh, yes. Those poor devils under glass on the left collect reports from our ground observer corps, on the right from our anti-aircraft. So all the information about German planes in our air will show up here fairly fast.”

Pug was not quite as surprised as he had been at Ventnor. He knew of the system’s existence; but this close view awed him. “Sir, aren’t you talking about a couple of hundred thousand miles of telephone cable? Thousands of lines, a forest of equipment? When did all this spring into being?”

“Oh, we had the plan two years ago. The politicians were aghast at the money, and balked. Right after Munich we got our budget. It’s an ill wind, eh? Hullo, here we go. I believe Jerry’s on his way.”

On the black wall, white lights were starting to jump upward. The young lord at Burne-Wilke’s elbow gave him a telephone. Burne-Wilke talked brisk RAF abracadabra, his eyes moving from the wall to the map table. Then he handed back the telephone. “Yes. Chain Home at Ventnor now reports several attacks forming up or orbiting. Two of them are forty-plus, one sixty-plus.”

Tillet said, “Göring’s been an abysmal donkey, hasn’t he, not to knock out our Chain Home stations? It will prove his historic mistake.”

“Oh, he has tried,” Burne-Wilke said. “It isn’t so easy. Unless one hits a steel tower dead on and blows it to bits, it just whips about like a palm tree in a storm, then steadies down.”

“Well, he should have gone on trying.”

White lights kept moving up the board. An air of business was settling over the operations room, but nobody moved in an excited way, and the hum of voices was low. The air vice-marshal appeared, a spare stern sparse-moustached man, with a sort of family resemblance to General Tillet. He ignored the visitors for a while as he paced, then said hello to Tillet with a surprising warm smile that made him look kind and harmless.

The first lights that leaped to red were in the column of the Biggin Hill control station. Victor Henry saw Pamela glance up at these lights. On the table, where she busily continued to lay arrows and numbered discs with the other girls, a clear picture was forming of four flights of attackers, moving over southern England on different courses. The reports of the telephone talkers on the floor merged into a steady subdued buzz. There was not much chatting in the balcony. Henry sat overwhelmed with spectator-sport fascination, as one by one the red lamps began to come on. Within twenty minutes or so, half the squadrons on the board were blinking red.

“That’s about it,” Burne-Wilke said offhandedly, breaking away from giving rapid orders. “We’ve got almost two hundred planes engaged. The others stand by to cover, when these land to refuel and rearm.”

“Have you ever had red lights across the board?”

Burne-Wilke wrinkled his mouth. “Now and then. It’s not the situation of choice. We have to call on other fighter groups then to cover for us, and just now there’s not much in reserve.”

Far away and high in the blue sky, thought Pug, forcing himself to picture it, planes were now darting and twisting in and out of clouds in a machine joust to the death of German kids and British kids. Youngsters like Warren and Byron. Pamela’s pudgy actor, cold sober on orange squash, up there in his yellow life jacket, flying at several hundred miles an hour, watching his rearview mirror for a square white nose, or squirting his guns at an onrushing airplane with a black cross on it.

Two of the Biggin Hill lights moved up to white: RETURNING BASE.

“These things seldom last longer than an hour or so from the time Jerry starts,” said Burne-Wilke. “He runs dry rather fast and has to head back. They keep falling in the sea like exhausted bats. Prisoners say that the Luftwaffe has given the Channel an impolite name — roughly equivalent to your American ‘shit creek.’”

Within a few minutes, the red lights blinked off one by one. The air marshal left. Below, the girls began clearing markers off the table. Lord Burne-Wilke spoke on the telephone, collecting reports. He put slender, hairy hands over his face and rubbed hard, then turned to Pug, his eyes reddened. “Wouldn’t you like to say hello to Pamela Tudsbury?”

“Very much. How did it go?”

With a weary shrug, Burne-Wilke said, “One can’t stop every bomber. I’m afraid quite a number got through and did their work. Often once the fires are out, things don’t look so bad. We lost a number of planes. So did they. The count takes a day or so to firm up. I think we did all right.”

As Pug went out with the young lord, leaving Tillet conversing with the slumped senior officer, he glanced back at the theatre. On the wall, all lights were burning at or near bottom again. The room was very quiet, the earth smell strong. The staircase to the surface seemed very long and steep. Pug felt drained of energy, though he had done nothing but sit and watch. He puffed and panted and was glad to see the daylight. Pamela stood in the sun outside in a blue uniform. “Well, you made it, but not on the best day. Ted’s down.” Her voice was calm, even chatty, but she gave his hand a nervous squeeze in two ice-cold hands.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. He may have parachuted, but his plane dove into the sea. Two of his squadron mates reported it. He’s down.” She clung to his hand, looking into his face with glistening eyes.

“Pam, as you’ve said, they often climb out of the water, and go right back to work.”

“Oh, certainly. Leave that to Ted. I’ve asked for a special pass. I think I shall come to London this evening. Would you buy me a dinner?”

A week passed, and another, and Gallard did not return. Pamela came several times to London. Once Victor Henry remarked that she appeared to be fighting the war only when it suited her. “I am behaving shockingly,” she said, “using every trick I know, presuming on everybody’s sympathy and good nature, and pushing them all much too far. I shall soon be confined to camp until further notice. By then you’ll be gone. Meantime you’re here.”

It became a settled thing among the Americans that Pug Henry had found himself a young WAAF. To cheer her up, he took her often to Fred Fearing’s apartment on Belgrave Square, the center for the partying American-British crowd. Shortly after the Christmas night row with Rhoda, the Germans had expelled Fearing for telling the truth about some bomb damage in Hamburg. Fearing was having such a good time with the London girls that, as he put it, he often arrived at the broadcasting studio on his hands and knees. His thrilling and touching word pictures of England at war were stirring up so much sympathy in the United States that isolationists were claiming he was obviously in the pay of the British.

The second time Victor Henry brought Pamela to the apartment, Fearing remarked, catching Pug alone for a moment in the hallway, “Aren’t you the sly one, Reverend Henry? She’s small, but saucy.”

“She’s the daughter of a guy I know.”

“Of course. Talky Tudsbury. Old pal of mine, too.”

“Yes. That’s who she is. Her fiancé’s an RAF pilot missing in action.”

Fearing’s big knobby face lit in an innocent smile. “Just so. She might enjoy a little consolation.”

Pug looked up at him. The correspondent was over six feet tall, and heavily built. “How would you enjoy getting knocked on your ass?”

Fearing’s smile went away. “You mean it, Pug?”

“I mean it.”

“Just asking. What do you hear from Rhoda?”

“She misses me, New York stinks, she’s bored, and the weather is unbearably hot.”

“Situation normal. Good old Rhoda.”

The other men who drifted in and out of the apartment, usually with a woman, usually more or less drunk — observers from the Army and the Air Corps, correspondents, film actors, businessmen — danced or bantered with Pamela, but otherwise let her alone, assuming she was Victor Henry’s doxy.

Once, early in September, when they were having a drink in her apartment and joking about this, Pug said, “‘Lechery, lechery — still wars and lechery — nothing else holds fashion.’“

She widened her eyes at him. “Why, bless me. He’s a Shakespeare scholar, too.”

“Aside from Western stories, Pamela, practically the only things I read for recreation are the Bible and Shakespeare,” Pug said, rather solemnly. “It’s always time well spent. You can get through a lot of Shakespeare in a Navy career.”

“Well, there’s precious little lechery around here,” said Pamela. “If people only knew.”

“Are you complaining, my girl?”

“Certainly not, you leathery old gentleman. I can’t imagine how your wife endures you.”

“Well, I’m good, patient, uncomplaining company.”

“God love you, you are that.”

At this point the air raid sirens started their eerie moaning and wailing — a heart-stopping noise no matter how often Pug heard it.

“My God!” said Pamela. “There they come! This is it. Where on earth is Fighter Command?” She stood with Victor Henry on the little balcony outside her living room, still holding her highball glass, staring at arrays of bombers in wide ragged Vs as they sailed through a bright blue sky, starkly visible in yellowing late sunlight. Anti-aircraft bursts all around and through the formations looked like white and black powder puffs, and seemed to be having no more effect.

“Tangling with the fighter escort further south, I’d guess.” Victor Henry’s voice shook. The number of bombers staggered him. The mass of machines was coning on like the invaders in a futuristic movie, filling the air with a throbbing angry hum as of a billion bees. The pop and thump of scattered anti-aircraft guns made a pitiful counterpoint. One V-wave passed: in the azure distance several more appeared, swelling to unbelievable width and numbers as they drew over the city. The bombers were not very high, and the A.A. seemed to be exploding dead inside the Vs, but on they thrummed. The muffled thunder of bomb hits boomed over the city, and pale flame and smoke began billowing up in the sunshine.

Pug said, “Looks like they’re starting on the docks.”

“Shall I get you another drink? I must, I must have one.” She took his glass and hurried inside.

More bombers kept appearing from the southeast. Pug wondered whether General Tillet could be right; was this a sign of weakening, a play of Göring’s last card? Some show of weakness! Yet a heavy toll of German fighter escorts must be paying for the incredibly serene overflight of these bomber waves. The British fighters could knock these big slow machines down like tin ducks. They had proved that long ago, yet on the bombers came, sailing unscathed across London’s sky from horizon to horizon, an awesome pageant of flying machinery.

She brought the drinks and peered at the sky. “Why, God help us, there’s more of them!”

She leaned against the rail, touching shoulders. He put arm around her and she nestled against him. So they stood together, watching the Luftwaffe start its effort to bomb London to its knees. It was the seventh of September.

Along the river more and bigger fires shot skyward in great billows of dirty smoke. Elsewhere in the city random small blazes were flaring up from badly aimed bombs.

After the first shock, there was not much terror in the sight. The noise was far off, the patches of fires meager and dispersed in the red and gray expanse of untouched buildings. London was a very, very large city. The Fat Boy’s big try was not making much of a dent after all. Only along the burning Thames embankment was there a look of damage. So it seemed, in the view from Pamela’s balcony of the first all-out Valhalla attack.

So it seemed too in Soho, where they went to dine after the all clear. The Londoners thronging the sidewalk looked excited, undismayed, even elated. Strangers talked to each other, laughed, and pointed thumbs up. The traffic flowed thick as ever. There was no trace of damage on the street. Distant clangs of fire engines and a heavy smokiness overhead remained the only traces, in this part of town, of Göring’s tremendous attempt. Queues even stood as usual outside the movie houses, and the stage box offices were briskly selling tickets too.

When they walked in twilight down toward the Thames, after an excellent Italian dinner, the picture began to change. The smell of smoke grew stronger; flickering red and yellow light gave the low clouds, thickened by ever-billowing smoke, a look of inferno. The crowds in the street grew denser. It became an effort to push through. The people here were more silent and grave. Henry and Pamela came to roped-off streets where amid noise and steam, shouting firemen dragged hoses toward blackened buildings and streamed water at tongues of fire licking out of the windows. Pamela skirted through alleys and side streets till they emerged on the riverbank into a mob of onlookers.

Here an oppressive stench of burning fouled the air, and the river breeze brought gusts of fiery heat in the warm summer night. A low moon shone dirty red through the rolling smoke. Reflections of the fires on the other bank flickered in the black water. The bridge was slowly disgorging a swarm of refugees, some with carts, baby carriages, and wheelchairs, a poor shabby lot for the most part, many workmen in caps, and a horde of ill-dressed children who alone kept their gaiety, running here and there as they came.

Victor Henry looked up at the sky. Above rifts in the smoke, the stars shimmered.

“It’s a very clear night, you know,” he said. “These fires are a beacon they can see for a hundred miles. They may come back.”

Pamela said coldly and abruptly, “I must return to Uxbridge. I’m beginning to feel rotten.” She looked down at her flimsy gray dress. “But I seem to be slightly out of uniform.”

The sirens began their hideous screaming just as Pug and Pamela found a taxicab, many blocks from the river. “Come along,” said the wizened little driver, touching his cap. “Business as usual, wot? And to ‘ell with ‘itler!”

Victor Henry watched the start of the night raid from the balcony while she changed. His senses were sharpened by the destruction, the excitement, the peculiar beauty of the fire panorama and the swaying blue-white searchlight beams, the thick thrumming of the bomber motors, and the thump-thump of the anti-aircraft, which was just starting up. Pamela Tudsbury, coming out on the gloomy moonlit balcony in her WAAF uniform, appeared to him the most desirable young female on God’s earth. She looked shorter because of the low-heeled shoes, but the severe garb made her small figure all the sweeter. So he thought.

“They’re here?” she said.

“Arriving.”

Again she leaned her shoulder to his. Again he held her with one encircling arm. “Damn, the bastards just can’t miss,” he said, “with those fires to guide them.”

“Berlin can catch fire, too.” Pamela suddenly looked about as ugly as she could: a grim, nasty face with hate scored on it in the red paint of her mouth.

New fires sprang up along the river, and spread and ran into the big fire. More blazes flared out of the darkness far from the Thames. Still, most of the vast city remained black and still. A tiny bomber came toppling down through the smoky sky, burning like a candlewick, transfixed by two crossing searchlights.

“Oh God, they got him. They got one. Get more of them. Please.”

And in short order two more bombers fell — one plunging straight down in a blaze like a meteor, the other circling and spiralling black smoke until it exploded in midair like a distant firecracker. In a moment they heard the sharp pop.

“Ah, lovely. Lovely!”

The telephone rang.

“Well!” she laughed harshly. “Uxbridge, no doubt screaming for their little fugitive from duty. Possibly inviting me to a court-martial.”

She returned after a moment with a puzzled face. “It seems to be for you.”

“Who?”

“Wouldn’t say. Sounded important and impatient.”

General Tillet said, “Ah. Henry. Jolly good. Your friend Fearing suggested I try you here. Ah, you do recall, don’t you, when you paid a little morning call a couple of weeks ago on a portly old gentleman, he mentioned that you might want to go along on a little expedition that was in the works? A trip to familiar foreign scenes?”

A tingle ran down Victor Henry’s spine. “I remember.”

“Well, the trip seems to be on. I’m to meet you tonight when this nuisance stops, to give you the details, if you’re interested. — I say, are you there, Henry?”

“Yes. General. Will you be going on the trip?”

“Me? Good God, dear chap, no. I’m a timid old fellow, quite unsuited for the rigors of travel. Besides, I haven’t been asked.”

“When is the trip?”

“I gather they’ll be leaving tomorrow, some time.”

“Can I call you back?”

“I’m supposed to pass your answer along within the hour.”

“I’ll call you back very soon.”

“Jolly good.”

“Tell me this. Do you think I should go?”

“Why, since you ask, I think you’d be insane. Damned hot where they’re going. Worst time of year. You have to be very fond of that kind of scenery. Can’t say I am.”

“Are you at the same number?”

“No.” Tillet gave him another number. “I’m sitting here and waiting.”

As he came out on the balcony, she turned to him, her face alight. “They’ve got two more. Our night fighters must be up. At least we’re getting some of our own back.”

Pug peered out at the fantastic show — the fires, the searchlight beams, the sky-climbing pillars of red and yellow smoke over the lampless city. “I gave you some good advice in Washington. Or you thought it was good advice.”

“Yes, indeed.” Her eyes searched his. “Who telephoned you?”

“Come inside. I’ll take that drink now.”

They sat in two armchairs near the open french windows to the balcony. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, holding the glass in his cupped hands. “Pamela, the RAF will be bombing Berlin tomorrow night and it seems I’m invited along as an observer.”

The girl’s face in the shadowy light went taut. She took her lower lip in her teeth, and looked at him so. It was not an attractive expression. Her eyes were round as an owl’s. “I see. Shall you go?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. I think it’s a goddamned idiotic notion, and General Tillet agrees, but meantime he’s reported the invitation. I’ve got to accept it or duck it.”

“Strange they’d ask you. You’re not Air Force.”

“Your Prime Minister mentioned it in passing when I saw him. He apparently has a good memory.”

“Do you want my opinion?”

“That’s what I’m asking for.”

“Decline. Quickly, firmly, and finally.”

“All right, why?”

“It’s not your business. It’s especially not the business of America’s naval attaché in Berlin.”

“True.”

“Your chances of returning are something like three out of five. It’s miserably unfair to your wife.”

“That was my first thought.” Pug paused, looking out of the balcony doors. In the night the A.A. snapped and thumped, and searchlights swayed blue fingers across the blackness. “Still, your Prime Minister thinks there’d be some purpose in my going.”

Pamela Tudsbury flipped her hand in a quick irritated gesture. “Oh, rot. Winnie is a perpetual undergraduate about combat. He probably wishes he could go himself, and imagines everyone’s like him. He got himself unnecessarily captured in South Africa long ago. Why, in May and June he flew over to France time after time, got in the hair of the generals, and skittered around the front making a frightful nuisance of himself. He’s a great man, but that’s one of his many weaknesses.”

Victor Henry lit a cigarette and took deep puffs, turning the match packet round and round in his fingers. “Well, I’m supposed to call General Tillet pretty damn quick. I’d better do that.” He reached for the telephone.

She said quickly, “Wait a minute. What are you going to say?”

“I’m going to accept.”

Pamela drew a sharp noisy breath, and said, “Why did you ask my opinion, then?”

“I thought you might voice a good objection that hadn’t occurred to me.”

“You gave the best objection yourself, it’s idiotic.”

“I’m not positive. My job is intelligence. This is an extraordinary opportunity. There’s also a taunt in it, Pamela. The U.S. Navy’s out of the war, and I’m here to see how you’re taking it. Question, how will I take it? It’s hard to duck that one.”

“You’re reading too much into it. What would your President say to this? Did he send you here to risk getting killed?”

“After the fact he’d congratulate me.”

“If you returned to be congratulated.”

As he reached for the telephone again, Pamela Tudsbury said, “I shall wind up with Fred Fearing. Or his equivalent.” That stopped the motion of Pug’s arm. She said, “I’m in dead earnest. I miss Ted horribly. I shall not be able to endure missing you. I’m much more attached to you than you realize. And I’m not at all moral, you know. You have very wrong ideas about me.”

The seams in his face were sharp and deep as he peered at the angry girl. The thumping of his heart made speech difficult. “It isn’t very moral to hit below the belt, I’ll say that.”

“You don’t understand me. Not in the least. On the Bremen you took me for a schoolgirl, and you’ve never really changed. Your wife has somehow kept you remarkably innocent for twenty-five years.”

Victor Henry said, “Pam, I honestly don’t think I was born to be shot down over Berlin in a British bomber. I’ll see you when I get back.”

He telephoned Tillet, while the girl stared at him with wide angry eyes. “Ass!” she said. “Ass!”

Chapter 33

A youngster in greasy coveralls poked his head through the open door. “Sir, the briefing’s begun in B flight crew room.”

“Coming,” said Pug, struggling with unfamiliar tubes, clasps, and straps. The flying suit was too big. It had not been laundered or otherwise cleaned in a long time, and smelled of stale sweat, grease, and tobacco. Quickly Pug pulled on three pairs of socks and thrust his feet into fleece-lined boots, also too big.

“What do I do with these?” Pug gestured at the raincoat and tweed suit he had folded on a chair.

“They’ll be right there when you get back, sir.”

Their eyes met. In that glance was complete mutual recognition that, for no very good reason, Pug was going out to risk death. The young man looked sorry for him, and also wryly amused at the Yank officer’s predicament. Pug said, “What’s your name?”

“Aircraftsman Horton, sir.”

“Well, Aircraftsman Horton, we seem to be about the same size. If I forget to pick up that suit or something, it’s yours.”

“Why, thank you, sir.” The young man’s grin became broad and sincere. “That’s very fine tweed.”

Several dozen men in flying clothes slouched in the room, their pallid faces attentive to the wing commander who motioned the American to a chair. He was talking about the primary and secondary targets in Berlin, using a long pointer at a gray, grainy aerial picture of the German capital blown up on a large screen. Victor Henry had driven or walked past both targets often. One was a power plant, the other the main gasworks of Berlin. It made him feel decidedly odd to discern, in the Grunewald area, the lake beside which the Rosenthal house stood.

“All right, let’s have the opposition map.”

Another slide of Berlin flashed on the screen, marked with red and orange symbols, and the officer discussed anti-aircraft positions and searchlight belts. The fliers listened to the dull droning voice raptly.

“Lights.”

Bare lamps in the ceiling blazed up. The bomber crews blinked and shifted in their chairs. Rolled up, the screen uncovered a green-and-brown map of Europe, and over it a sign in large red block letters: IT IS BETTER TO KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND LET PEOPLE THINK YOU’RE A FOOL, THAN TO OPEN IT AND REMOVE ALL DOUBT.

“All right, that’s about it. Berlin will be on the alert after all the stuff they’ve been dumping on London, so look alive.” The wing commander leaned his pointer against the wall, put hands on hips, and changed to an offhand tone: “Remember to be careful of the moon. Don’t fly directly into it, you’ll look like a cat on a Christmas card. When you’ve done your stuff, get your photographs, shove the nose down, and pedal home downhill as fast as you can. Keep your pistols loaded and have those photo-flash bombs handy. Work fast, the flak will be heavy. Incidentally, our American observer will be flying in F for Freddie. He’s Admiral Victor Henry, one of the least prudent officers in the United States Navy.”

Faces turned to Pug, who cleared his throat. “Sir, maybe I’ll be entitled to the field promotion when I get back, but I’m only Captain Henry.”

“The promotion stands for this mission,” said the wing commander with a laugh. “You deserve it!”

He went out. After a silence a boy’s voice behind Pug piped, “Anybody who’d go on a ruddy mission like this when he ruddy well doesn’t have to, should be in a ruddy loony bin.”

A short skinny flier with heavy, crinkling black hair and bloodshot little eyes approached him, holding out a paper box crudely tied with red ribbon. “Admiral, a little token of welcome from the squadron.”

Pug opened the box and took out a roll of toilet paper. He glanced around at the expectant white amused faces. “I’m touched. But I don’t think I’ll be needing this, inasmuch as I’m already scared shitless.”

He got a good laugh. The little flier offered his hand. “Come along with me, Admiral. I’m Peters, the sergeant navigator of F for Freddie.” He took him to a row of lockers and gave the American his parachute, showing him how to clip it to his chest. He also handed him a paper sack with his ration.

“Now you don’t wear your chute. That’s a good chute. You just stow it where it’ll be handy in a hurry. It’s hard enough moving around inside the Wimpy, you’ll find, without that thing on. Now you’ll want to meet the pilots. They’re Flight Lieutenant Killian and Sergeant Pilot Johnson. Tiny, we call the sergeant.”

He conducted Victor Henry to a small room where the two pilots were studying and marking up maps of Berlin. The lieutenant, who had the furrowed brow and neat little moustache of an assistant bank manager, was using a magnifying glass. Sergeant Tiny Johnson, booted feet on the desk, was holding the map up and glaring at it. “Hullo! Brassed off, I am, Admiral,” he said, when Peters introduced Victor Henry. “Ruddy well brassed off.” He was a large fellow with a ham face and thick lips.

“Pack it up, Tiny,” said the first pilot.

“Brassed off, I say. A nine-hour sweat just for us. While those twerps in all the other squadrons go for a quick one on the Channel coast to hit the invasion barges, and then home for tea, mother. I’ve been over Berlin. I don’t like it.”

“You’ve never stopped boasting about being over Berlin,” said the skipper, drawing lines on the map.

“Rottenest moment of my life,” said the sergeant, with a rolling side glance at Victor Henry. “Ruddiest thickest flak you ever saw. Masses of searchlights turning the night into day.” He got up yawning. “Brassed off, that’s what I am, mates. Brassed off. You’re a brave man, Admiral.”

He went out.

“Tiny’s a good pilot,” said the first pilot in upper-class tones, tucking the map into a canvas pouch. “He does talk a lot.”

The six men of the F for Freddie crew gathered under a naked light in a hallway for a last word from Flight Lieutenant Killian, reading notes on a clipboard. Aside from the theatrical-looking flying suits and life vests, they seemed like any half-dozen young men off any London street. The wireless operator was thin and somewhat ratty; the rear gunner was a fresh-faced boy — almost a child, thought Pug thought — on his first operational flight; the pimply front gunner vulgarly worked chewing gum in long jaws. Only their nervy, apprehensive, adventurous, and cheerful look was unusual.

The warm night was studded with summer stars: Vega, Deneb, Altair, Arcturus — the old navigation aids reliably twinkling away. The senior pilot went aboard the plane. The crew lounged on the grass nearby.

“F for Freddie,” said the sergeant pilot, giving the fuselage a loud affectionate slap. “Been through many a long sweat, Admiral.”

This was how Pug found out that a Wellington bomber had a skin of fabric. The slapped cloth sounded just like what it was. He was used to his Navy’s metal aircraft. It never occurred to him that the British could use fabric planes as attack bombers, and this piece of intelligence had not come his way, for he was not an aviator. Victor Henry could still have walked away from the flight, but he felt as compelled to enter this cloth plane and fly over Berlin as a murderer is to climb a gallows to be hanged. In the sweet-smelling quiet night, plaintive birdsongs rose here and there, richly warbling and rolling.

“Ever heard nightingales before?” said Tiny Johnson.

“No, I never have.”

“Well, Admiral, you’re hearing nightingales.”

Far down the field, one plane after another coughed and began to roar, shooting out flames in the darkness. A truck rolled up to F for Freddie. A mechanic plugged a cable into its fuselage. The motors caught and turned over, spitting smoke and fire, as other planes trundled to a dimly lit runway and thundered up and away into gauzy blue moonlight. Soon only F for Freddie was left, its crew still lying on the grass, its spinning motors cherry red. All at once the engines shut off.

Pug heard nightingales again.

“Eh? What now?” said Tiny. “Don’t tell me we’ve been scrubbed, due to some splendid, lovely engine trouble?”

Mechanics came trotting out and worked rapidly on one engine, with many a vile cheerful curse, their tools clanking musically in the open air. Twenty minutes after the other planes left, F for Freddie took off and flew out over the North Sea.

After what seemed a half hour of bumping through cold air in a dark shaking machine, Pug glanced at his watch. Only seven minutes had gone by. The crew did not talk. The intercom crackled and buzzed — the helmet, unlike the rest of his clothing, was too tight and hurt his ears — but once the plane left the coast on course, the pilots and navigator shut up. Victor Henry’s perspiration from the heavy suit cooled and dried, chilling him. His watch crawled through twenty more minutes as he sat there. The lieutenant gestured to him to look through the plexiglass blister where the navigator had been taking star sights, and then to stretch out prone in the nose bubble, the bombardier position. Pug did these things, but there was nothing to see but black water, bright moon, and jewelled stars.

“Keep that light down, navigator,” the lieutenant croaked.

The sergeant who had given Pug the toilet paper was marking a chart on a tiny fold-down wooden slat, and trying to squelch the dim beam of an amber flashlight with his fingers. Crouching beside him, watching him struggle with star tables, star sight forms, dividers, ruler, and flashlight, Pug wondered what kind of navigational fix he possibly come up with. The youngster gave him a grin. Pug took the flashlight from his hands and shielded the beam to strike just the chart. Peters gestured gratitude and Pug squatted there, cramped in the space behind the two pilots, until the navigator had finished his work. The American had imagined that the long-range British bomber would be as big as an airliner, with a control cabin offering ample elbow room. In fact five men crowded within inches of each other — the two pilots, the front gunner, the navigator, and the wireless operator. Pug could just see the gunner in the forward bubble, in faint moonlight. The others were faces floating in the row of dials.

Stumbling, crouching, grasping at guy wires, Pug dragged his parachute down the black fuselage to the bubble where the rear gunner sat. The hatless boy, his bushy hair falling in his face, gave him a thumbs-up and a pathetic smile. This was a hell of a lonely, shaky, frigid place to be riding Pug thought. The bomber’s tail was whipping and bouncing badly. He tried to yell over the noise and motor roars, then made a hopeless gesture. The boy nodded, and proudly operated his power turret for him. Pug groped to a clear space in the fuselage, and squatted on his parachute, hugging his knees. There was nothing to do. It was getting colder and colder. He took something from his ration bag — when he put it in his mouth, he tasted chocolate — and sucked it. He dozed.

Garbled voices in his ear woke him. His nose was numb, his cheeks felt frostbitten, and he was shivering. A hand in the dark tugged him forward. He stumbled after the vague figure toward the cockpit glow. Suddenly it was light as day in the plane. The plane slanted and dived, and Pug Henry fell, bruising his forehead on a metal box. Rearing up on his hands and knees, he saw the bright light go out, come on and go out again as though snapped off. The plane made sickening turns one way and another while he crawled forward.

Tiny Johnson, gripping the controls, turned around, and Pug saw his lips move against the microphone. “Okay, Admiral?” The voice gargled in the intercom. “Just passing the coast searchlight belt.”

“Okay,” Henry said.

The helmeted lieutenant threw a tight grim glance over his shoulder at Henry, then stared ahead into the night.

Tiny waved a gloved hand at a fixture labelled OXYGEN. “Plug in, and come and have a look.”

Sucking on rubber-tasting enriched air, Pug crawled into the bombardier position.

Instead of sparkling sea he saw land grayed over by moonlight. The searchlight beams waved behind them. Straight below, tiny yellow lights winked. Red and orange balls came floating slowly and gently up from these lights, speeding and getting bigger as they rose. A few burst and showered red streaks and sparks. Several balls passed ahead of the plane and on either side of it, flashing upward in blurry streaks of color.

The voice of Tiny said, “Coast flak was heavier last time.”

Just as he said this something purple-white and painfully brilliant exploded in Victor Henry’s face. Blackness ensued, then a dance of green circles. Pug Henry lay with his face pressed to cold plexiglass, sucking on the oxygen tube, stunned and blind.

A hand grasped his. The voice of Peters, the navigator, rattled in his ear. “That was a magnesium flash shell. Ruddy close, Admiral. Are you all right?”

“I can’t see.”

“It’ll take a while. Sit up, sir.”

The plane ground ahead, the blindness persisted and persisted, then the green circles jerked in a brightening red mist. A picture gradually faded in like a movie scene: faces lit by dials and the gunner in moonlight. Until his vision returned, Victor Henry spent nasty minutes wondering whether it would. Ahead he saw clouds, the first of this trip, billowing up under the moon.

The navigator spoke. “Should be seeing beams and flak now.”

“Nothing,” said Lieutenant Killian. “Black night.”

“I’ve got Berlin bearing dead ahead at thirty miles, sir.”

“Something’s wrong. Probably your wind drift again.”

“D.F. bearings check out, sir.”

“Well, damn it, Peters, that doesn’t put Berlin up ahead.” The skipper sounded annoyed but unworried. “It looks like solid forest down there, clear across the horizon. Featureless and black.”

Tiny Johnson observed bitterly that on his last raid almost half of the of the planes had failed altogether to find Berlin, and that none of Bomber Command’s official navigational procedures were worth a shit. He added that he was brassed off.

The piping voice of the rear gunner broke in to report searchlights far astern, off to the right. At almost the same time, the pilots saw, and pointed out to Victor Henry, a large fire on the horizon ahead: a yellow blotch flickering on the moonlit plain. After some crisp talk on the intercom, Lieutenant Killian swung the plane around and headed for the searchlights; as for the fire, his guess was another bomber had overshot the mark and then gone ahead and bombed the wrong target. “That’s Berlin,” he soon said, pointing a mittened hand at the lights. “All kinds of fireworks shooting off. Well done, Reynolds. How goes it back there?”

The high strained voice of the real gunner replied, “Oh, I’m fine, sir. This operational stuff’s the real thing, isn’t it?”

As they neared Berlin, the nose gunner was silhouetted black by exploding balls and streaks of color, and fanning rays of blue light. Tiny’s voice in the intercom rasped, “Those poor bastards who got there first are catching the heat blisters.”

The lieutenant’s voice came, easy and slow: “It looks worse than it is, Admiral. The stuff spreads apart once you’re in it. The sky’s a roomy place, actually.”

F for Freddie went sailing into the beautiful, terrible display, and as the captain had said, it thinned out. The searchlight beams scattered and ran down to the left and right. The streaks and balls of flak left great holes of darkness through which the plane bored smoothly ahead. The captain and the navigator talked rapidly in fliers’ jargon.

“See that fire off there, Admiral? Some other chaps have pretty well clobbered the primary target,” said Killian.

“Or at least dropped a lot of bombs in the vicinity,” Tiny said. “I can’t make out a damned thing for the smoke.”

The view below was half moonlit clouds, half black city flickering with anti-aircraft flashes. Pug Henry saw a peculiar high column of flickers — the Flakturm, that must be — and, in another direction, an irregular blob of fire and smoke enveloping buildings and smokestacks, near the river curling silver through Berlin. The black puffs and fiery streaks of the flak slid past F for Freddie but the plane plowed ahead as though protected by a charm. The captain said, “Well, I’m going for secondary. Course, navigator.”

Shortly thereafter the motor noise ceased. The nose of the plane dipped way down. The sudden quiet was a big surprise.

“Gliding approach, Admiral,” the captain’s voice garbled. “They control their lights and flak with listening devices. Navigator’s got to take your place now.”

The plane whiffled earthward. Pug made his way to the rear gunner, who was looking down with saucer eyes in a pallid baby face at the moonlit German capital, and at the anti-aircraft winking like fireflies. A rush of icy air and a roar followed the captain’s order, “Open bomb bay.” Into the plane a strong acrid smell poured, and Pug had a mental flash of gunnery exercises on a sunny blue sea near green islands. Off Manila or over Berlin, cordite smelled the same. The navigator kept talking in a drilled cheerful tone: “Left, left… too much… right… dead on… no, left, left… smack on. Smack on. Smack on. There!”

The plane jumped. Pug saw the bombs raggedly fall away behind them, a string of black tumbling sticks. The airplane slanted up, the motors came bellowing on, and they climbed.

Below, a string of small red explosions appeared alongside the buildings and the huge fat gas-storage tower. Pug thought the bombs had missed. Then, in the blink of an eye, yellow-white flame with a green core came blasting and billowing up from the ground, almost to the height of the climbing plane, but well behind. In the gigantic flare, the city of Berlin was suddenly starkly visible, spread out below like a picture postcard printed with too much yellow ink — the Kurfürstendamm, Unter den Linden, the Brandenburg Gate, the Tiergarten, the river, the bridges, the Flakturm, the chancellery, the Opera — clear, sharp, close, undamaged, peculiarly yellow.

The cheers in the intercom hurt his ears. He seized his microphone and gave a rebel yell.

As he did so, F for Freddie was transfixed by half a dozen searchlights that swung and stopped. In the gunner’s bubble, all was blue radiance. The boy looked horror-stricken at Pug and suddenly started to scream in fright, his eyes tight shut, his mouth wide open. There was so much noise that Pug could hardly hear him. It looked like a painted scream, and in the blue light the boy’s tongue and gums were black. The plane seemed to have landed on a shining blue pyramid. The motors howled, the machine lurched, dived, sidestepped, but the pyramid stayed locked under it. Pug seized the gun mount with arms to steady himself. The gunner fell against the mount, knocking the microphone away from his open mouth. His clamber ceased in the intercom, and Pug heard Lieutenant Killian and Tiny talking in brisk controlled voices. A mass of orange and red balls lazily left the ground and floated up directly at F for Freddie. They came faster. They burst all around, a shower of fire, a barrage of explosions. Pug felt a hard thump, heard the motor change sound, heard a fearful whistling. Icy air blasted at him. Fragments rattled all over the plane, and F for Freddie heeled over in a curving dive. Victor Henry believed that he was going to die. The plane shrieked and visibly shuddered, diving steeply. Both pilots were shouting now, not in panic but to make themselves heard, and through the frail plexiglass bubble Henry stared at the fabric wings, waiting for them to break off, flutter away and signal the end of his life.

All at once the screeching, whistling blue pyramid turned black. The dizzying swoops and slips stopped, the plane flew straight. Pug caught a whiff of vomit. The gunner had fainted, and the puke was dribbling from his mouth in the moonlight and rolling down his chest: chocolate, coffee, bits of orange. The boy had eaten his whole ration. Out of the left leg of his flying suit black blood welled.

Pug tried the intercom, but the crackling in his ears had stopped. The system was dead. The stricken plane lurched on in a tumult of wind roars and howls. He went forward, clutching the guy ropes, and ran head-on into a figure who shouted that he was Peters. Pug screamed in his ear that Reynolds was wounded, and moved on to the cockpit, passing a ragged flapping hole in the starboard fuselage through which he could see the stars. Mechanically he noted the form of the Dipper. They were heading west, back to England.

In the cockpit the pilots sat as before, busy at their controls. Tiny shouted, “Ah, Admiral. We’re going home to tea. To hell with ruddy pictures. You’ll tell them you saw that gas plant go up, won’t you?”

“Damn right I will. How’s the airplane?”

“The port engine was hit, but it’s still pulling. Heading back over land, in case we have to come down. Looks like we can make it, unless that engine completely packs up.”

“Your rear gunner’s got a leg wound. Navigator’s back there with him.”

The swinging searchlights of the outer belt loomed ahead, probing the clouds, but F for Freddie climbed into the overcast undetected. Tiny bellowed at Victor Henry, his big blue eyes rolling, both hands on the wheel, “Ruddy asinine way to make a living, isn’t it, Admiral? Brassed off, I am. Should have joined the ruddy navy!”

Pulling off his helmet, Lieutenant Killian turned over control to Tiny, and wiped his face with a big white handkerchief no whiter than his skin. He gave the American a tired smile, his forehead a mass of wrinkled lines.

“It may be close at that, Admiral. We’re having a bit of trouble holding altitude. How’s your French?”

Chapter 34

Pamela had remained in London. She knew it was a night bombing mission and she knew the distances. It was not hard to calculate when Victor Henry would be getting back. At ten in the morning she went to his flat — it had no other occupant for the moment — and persuaded the charwoman to let her in. She sat in the dowdy living room, trying to read a newspaper, but actually only counting the minutes and praying that he was still alive.

Pug Henry had entered her life at a dark time. Her parents had been divorced before she was fourteen. Her mother had remarried, made a new life, and shut her out. Alistair Tudsbury had deposited her in schools while he travelled. She had grown up well-mannered, attractive, but almost wild, and had had several love affairs before she was out of her teens. In her early twenties she had met Philip Rule, a tall golden-haired newspaper correspondent, who had for a while shared Leslie Slote’s flat in Paris. An ice-cold man with beguiling ways, a rich flow of clever and corrupt tastes, Rule had bit by bit destroyed her ambition, her self-confidence, and almost her will to live. She had fought off suicidal depression by breaking off with him at last and going to work as her father’s slave; and as such, she had encountered Victor and Rhoda Henry on the Bremen.

She had never met a man quite like Commander Henry: taciturn, apparently an old-fashioned narrow professional, yet incisive and engaging. She had found him attractive from the start, and had come to like him more and more. Aboard ship, such attractions take on an unreal intensity, but usually fade fast on dry land. For Pamela the feeling had only grown stronger on seeing him again in Berlin. There she had sensed that Pug was beginning to like her, too. But the start of the war had broken their contact, except for the momentary encounter in Washington.

When Victor Henry arrived in London, Pamela had been quite ready to marry the fighter pilot; and this visit of the older man who had been something like a shipboard crush had not changed that. But since then Gallard had vanished, and she had had two weeks with Pug. In wartime, as on board ship, relationships deepen fast. Nothing had yet happened between them. He had awkwardly put an arm around her while watching the German bombers come in; that was all. But Pamela now thought that, whatever the views and scruples of this very married man, she could go to bed with him if she pleased, and when she pleased.

Still, Pam had no intention of enticing Captain Henry into what he termed a “shack-up.” Blinker Vance, in Henry’s disapproving view, was shacked up with Lady Maude Northwood, though the shack was one of the most elegant flats in Mayfair and Lady Maude, if somewhat horse-faced, was a clever and charming woman. Pamela didn’t in the least believe in Victor Henry’s morality. She thought it was a crust of cramping nonsense that stopped her from giving the lonely man and herself pleasure. But that was how he was. She was determined above all things not to upset or repel him; rather, to let matters take their course.

Almost exactly at noon the key turned in the lock. As Pug let himself in, he could hear the noonday news broadcast echoing in the flat. He called, “Hello, who’s here?”

Steps clicked in the living room. The girl struck him like a blue projectile. “Oh, my God, you came back.”

“What the devil?” Victor Henry managed to say between kisses. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m absent without leave. I shall be court-martialled and shot. I should have sat here for a week. Your charwoman let me in. Ahhh!” With growls of pleasure, she kissed him again and again. Disorganized enough before this surprise, Pug dazedly kissed her back, not quite believing what was happening. Pam said, “Good heavens, Captain Henry, you do reek of rum.”

“That’s the debriefing. They give you a big breakfast and lots of rum and you talk.” He had difficulty getting this out, because Pamela kept kissing him. Dead on his feet as he was, he nevertheless began on instinct to respond to this eager aroused girl clinging to him. He realized foggily, as he pulled her close and returned her kisses, that at this rate he was soon going to take her to bed. He was caught by surprise and had no impulse to stop, strange and dreamlike as it all was. He was hours away from a brush with death, and still numb and stunned. “Well, how about this?” he said hoarsely. “The conquering hero’s reward, hey?”

She was covering his face with soft slow kisses. She leaned back in his arms, looking into his eyes. “Just so. Exactly.”

“Well, I didn’t do a goddamned thing except take up space, burn up gasoline, and get in everybody’s way. However, thank you, Pam. You’re beautiful and sweet, and this welcome makes me feel great.”

His evident exhaustion, his clumsy moves, his comical indecisiveness about what to do next with this unfamiliar female body in his arms, caused a wave of deep tenderness to go through her. “You look absolutely drained,” she said, stepping free. “Totally wrung out. Was it very bad?”

“It was long.”

“Want a drink? Some food?”

“A drink, I guess. I feel okay, but I’d better get some sleep.”

“So I figured.” She led him to the darkened bedroom. The bed was turned down, his pajamas laid out. She took her time about mixing the drink, and when she came back to the bedroom he was asleep. On the floor, uncharacteristically dumped, lay the tweed suit that Aircraftsman had missed out on.

The hand on his shoulder was gently persistent. “Captain Henry! It’s five o’clock. You’ve had a call from the embassy.”

He opened his eyes. “What? What embassy?”

It took him a few seconds to recollect where he was, and why Pamela Tudsbury was standing over him in uniform, with a smile so intimate and bright. In his dream he had been back in F for Freddie, fumbling and fumbling for a cloth to wipe the vomit off the poor rear gunner; the hallucinatory stench was still in his nostrils. He sat up and sniffed. A delicious odor of broiling meat floated through the open door, erasing the dream smell. “What’s that?”

“I thought you’d be hungry by now.”

“But where’d you get food? There’s nothing in that icebox but beer and club soda.”

“Went out and bought it.”

He tried to shock himself awake with a cold shower, but still had a feeling, as he shaved and dressed, of stumbling through dreams within dreams. He could not get used to the wonder of being alive in normal circumstances. A dim recollection of Pamela’s ardent welcome added to that wonder.

“What the Sam Hill!” he said. “Where and how did you get all this?”

The salads, the bowl of fruit, the long bread, and the bottle of red wine made an attractive clutter on the small table. She was humming in the kitchen. She said, entering with steaks on two plates, “Oh, I’m a London alley cat, I know where to forage. Sit down and get at this. The oven’s really not very good, but I’ve done my best.”

He cut into the meat and took a hot mouthful. The bread broke soft and crusty; the heavy wine was delicious. Pug Henry fell to with the gusto of a boy home from tobogganing. Pamela cut herself a piece of steak and ate it, not taking her eyes off Victor Henry as he wolfed the food. “Well,” she said. “Rather hungry at that, weren’t you?”

“Why, this is marvellous. It’s the best meat, the best wine, the best bread I’ve ever eaten.”

“You exaggerate, but I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I’m trying to make up for the stupid way I acted before you left.”

“Pam, I’m glad I went. That was the right decision.”

“Oh, now that you’re back, there’s no argument. My apologies.”

Victor Henry put down his knife and fork. All his senses were new-edged. To his eyes, Pamela Tudsbury’s face radiated remarkable beauty and sweetness. He experienced a pleasant quake in all his nerves, remembering vividly their stunning kisses at the door.

“You’re forgiven.”

“Good.” She drank wine, looking at him over the edge of the glass. “Do you know that I fell for you on the Bremen? Did you have any inkling of it? In Berlin I was hard put to it not to try my luck with you. But I knew it was impossible. You’re so devoted to your wife.”

“Yes indeed,” Pug said. “Rock of Gibraltar. I guess I’m dumb, but I hadn’t the slightest notion of that, Pamela.”

“Well, it’s true. I’d been in rotten shape for a couple of years. It did me good to be able to like a man so much. I proceeded to go mad over Ted shortly thereafter.” A shadow of sadness flickered across her face. “When you opened the door a few hours ago, I came close to believing in God. There’s strawberry tart for dessert.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding. I passed a pastrycook’s and the tarts looked good.”

He reached out and took her slim wrist. Her skin felt as sweet to his blunt fingers as her lips had felt on his mouth. “Pam, I’ve developed a high regard for a London alley cat, myself.”

“I’m glad. I should be sorry to think that my great passion was totally unrequited. If you’ll unhand me, I’ll serve your strawberry tart and coffee. It’s getting on for six. Captain Vance was most insistent that you be at the embassy by six-thirty.”

“What will you do? Go back to Uxbridge?”

“What will you do? That’s what matters.”

“First I have to find out what Blinker wants.”

“Shall I wait for your call at my flat?”

“Yes, Pam. Please do that.”

They parted on the sidewalk. He kept glancing back over his shoulder at the dwindling figure in blue, marching among the pedestrians with that odd swing he had first noticed on the Bremen just another perky little WAAF among the thousands in London.

He felt reborn. He smiled at people he passed on the street, and they smiled back. The young girls appeared seductive as starlets; the older women were full of grace. The men were all great good fellows, the slope-shouldered pale clerks with briefcases and bowler hats no less than the passing soldiers, the withered gray men, and the purple-faced fat men in tweed. They all had the stuff that he had seen at the Biggin Hill dispersal hut and in F for Freddie. They were Englishmen, the happy breed. The sunlight dappling the leaves in Grosvenor Square was golden, the leaves were fresh green, and the sky was the blue of a WAAF uniform. What a world! What an idiocy in these Europeans to dump fire and explosives on each other’s habitations, built with such hard work! All things were washed clean, or at least he was seeing them with a child’s clear inquisitive eye — a shiny automobile, a shop-window dummy, a box of red geraniums on a windowsill. He noticed that the sidewalk gave off tiny sparkles in the late sunlight.

The American flag fluttering from the second story of the embassy struck Pug with a pang of pride. Its red, white, and blue seemed so rich, its slow waving so full of majesty, that a sixty-piece orchestra might have been playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”; but there was no orchestra in the square, only discordant loud traffic noise. He sat on a bench for a moment looking at the flag, suffused with zest for life and a burning wish to live a long time yet in this radiant world through which he had been walking blind as a bat. This grim stocky obscure American Navy captain sat bemused on a London park bench, undergoing an exaltation for which he finally found the name. At first he had thought his exhilarated mood was the snapback from the bombing mission, the plain joy of being alive after brushing death in a diving plane, in a whirl of blue cones and exploding colored balls. But it was something more. Nothing like this had happened to him in twenty-five years, and he had not expected it ever to happen again, so recognizing it had taken him this long. Nothing could be simpler. He had fallen in love.

A black Cadillac pulled up at the embassy door and discharged an admiral whom Pug recognized, two Army generals, and Blinker Vance. Pug hastened across the street.

“Hey, Pug!” Admiral Benton offered a fat hand. This holy terror, his old boss at War Plans, was a short rotund man with a shiny round face and a bald round head. Pug liked him, despite his short temper, because he was a smart and driving worker, wasted no words, admitted ignorance, and took blame when the blame was his. He was a gunnery expert too, the Navy’s best. His weakness was opinionated political theorizing; he thought the New Deal was a Communist plot.

Blinker Vance brought the four men to a quiet second-floor conference room panelled in cherry wood. He left. They sat themselves at one end of a long polished table with twenty chairs upholstered in blue leather. Admiral Benton took the head, with the two generals on either side of him and Pug below the younger-looking one. “Now, goddamn it, Pug,” Benton began, “the ambassador says if he’d known about this observer flight of yours, he’d have stopped you. He’s dead right. We don’t want to give the Army and its Air Corps” — he gestured at the other men — “the idea that the Navy trains goofy dare-devils.” Benton sounded very pleased with Pug. “These gentlemen and I have been waiting for you to get back from that blamed fool excursion. This is General Anderson and General Fitzgerald here is Army Air Corps.” Benton glanced at the others. “Well, shall we get at it?”

General Fitzgerald, who sat beside Pug, danced long lean fingers together. He had wavy blond hair and a handsome thin face; he might have been an artist or an actor, except for the stone-hard look in his pale blue eyes. “Admiral, I’d like to hear about the captain’s bomber ride myself.”

“So would I,” said Anderson. Victor Henry now recognized him as Train Anderson, a West Point football star of around 1910. Anderson was heavy and jowly, and his thin hair was smoothed tight on a pink scalp.

Victor Henry narrated his bomber adventure in a matter-of-fact way.

“Great!” Benton burst out when Pug came to the explosion of the gasworks.

The three senior officers listened tensely to the account of his return trip in a damaged aircraft; the jettisoning of all removable weight to maintain altitude; the final thirty miles flown at a few hundred feet. When Pug finished, Train Anderson lit a cigar and leaned back on a thick elbow. “Quite a yarn, Captain. It amounted to a token bombing though, didn’t it? Berlin sounds untouched, compared to this place. “You’ve been to the docks, I presume?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We toured them today. The Germans are making mincemeat of the area. At this rate, in a week London will cease to be a port. Then what happens? Famine? Plague?”

“That’s a big dock area,” Pug said. “Their repair and fire-fighting crews are good, General. Things look worse than they are.”

The Air Corps general laced his fingers daintily together. “Have you been in the public shelters, Henry? We visited one during a raid. Nothing but a shallow cement hole. A hit would have killed everybody. All stinking of unwashed bodies and urine, all jammed with nervous jittery old folks and crying kids. Big crayon scrawl on the ceiling, “This is a Jew War. We visited the underground, too, last night. A mob of people sleeping on the tracks and the platforms, a sanitation nightmare, a setup for an outbreak of typhus.”

“Sickness and casualties are running far under their estimates, sir,” Pug said, “There are thousands of empty hospital beds.”

“So this man Vance told us,” put in Anderson. “Well, they’ll fill ‘em. Now, Captain Henry, you’ve been an observer here, and you’ve been sending optimistic reports to the President recommending all-out assistance.”

“Not wholly optimistic, sir, but recommending full assistance, yes.”

“Possibly you’re a bit out of touch with what’s happening on the other side of the water. So let me read you something. It’s from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a red-hot New Deal paper.” He took out his wallet, unfolded a neatly cut newspaper clipping, and intoned through his nose:

“That’s a Roosevelt supporter talking,” observed Anderson, puffing violently on the cigar. “Now, we’re proceeding from here to a dinner at the Army and Navy Club, in half an hour or so, with some British generals and admirals. We already have the list of the war materials they want. It would strip our armed forces clean. We have to make cabled recommendations to the President within five days. He’s already let them have — in addition to these fifty warships — virtually all our seventy-five-millimeter field guns, several squadrons of naval aircraft, half a million rifles, millions of rounds of ammunition—”

“He hasn’t given ‘em away, General,” Benton observed. “The Limeys have paid cash on the barrelhead.”

“Yes, luckily the Neutrality Act compels that, but still it was a goddamned lie to call the stuff surplus. Surplus! We don’t have any surplus! You know that. Fifty destroyers! All this without any authorization from Congress. All things we’re short of. And now Congress is passing a draft law. Our boys will be drilling with broomsticks! There’s going to be an accounting one day, you know. If the British fold and this stuff winds up in German hands — a possibility to be reckoned with — the accounting will not be far off. All who have taken part in these transactions, or even advocated them” — here General Anderson turned a belligerent face at Victor Henry — “I warn you, stand a good chance of hanging from lamp posts on Constitution Avenue.”

After a silence, Admiral Benton said mildly, folding his hands over his stomach, “Well, Pug, I’ve told these gentlemen that I know you, and that any dope you put out is reliable. We’ve got a big responsibility. We’ve been handed one hell of a hot potato. So get down to the short hairs. What makes you think the British will keep fighting, after the way the French folded? No horseshit now.”

“All right, Admiral.”

To begin, with, Victor Henry said, the British had made better use than the French of the time between the wars. He described their scientific advances, the strength and disposition of the battle fleet, the fighter control system he had seen at Uxbridge, the figures of German and British plane losses, the morale of the fliers, the preparations along the invasion beaches, the Chain Home stations, the production of aircraft. Fitzgerald listened with his eyes closed, his head flung back, his fingers dancing. Benton stared gravely at Pug, pulling at an ear as he had in War Plans meetings. Train Anderson, wreathing himself in smoke, also looked hard at Pug, though the glare was fading to a frigid calculating expression.

Pug gave as sober and clear an account as he could, but it was an effort. As he plodded through his military facts, Pamela Tudsbury shimmered in his mind’s eye, shifting with afterimages of the flight over Berlin. He felt in an undisciplined mood and was hard put to it to keep a respectful tone.

“Now wait, Pug, this RDF you’re so hot on,” Benton interposed, “that’s nothing but radar, isn’t it? We’ve got radar. You were with me aboard the New York for the tests.”

“We haven’t got this kind of radar, sir.” Victor Henry described in detail the cavity magnetron. The senior officers began glancing at each other. He added, “And they’ve even started installing the stuff in their night fighters.”

General Fitzgerald sat straight up. “Airborne radar? What about the weight problem?”

“They’ve licked it.”

“Then they’ve developed something new.”

“They have, General.”

Fitzgerald turned a serious gaze on Train Anderson, who stubbed out his cigar, observing to the admiral, “Well, I’ll say this, your man makes out a case, at least. We’ve got to come across anyhow, since that’s what Mr. Big wants. What we can do is exercise tight control item by item, and that by God we will do. And get trade-offs like that cavity thing, wherever possible.” He regarded Henry through half-shut eyes. “Very well. Suppose they do hold out? Suppose Hitler doesn’t invade? What’s their future? What’s their plan? What can they do against a man who controls all Europe?”

“Well, I can give you the official line,” Victor Henry said. “I’ve heard it often enough. Hold him back in 1940. Pass him in air power in 1941, with British and American production. Shoot the Luftwaffe out of the skies in 1942 and 1943. Bomb their cities and factories to bits if they don’t surrender. Invade and conquer in 1944.”

“With what? Ten or fifteen divisions against two hundred?”

“Actually, General, I think the idea is simpler. Hang on until we get in.”

“Now you’re talking. But then what?”

General Fitzgerald said very quietly, “Why, then we pound Germany from the air, Train, with the bomber fleet we’re building. A few months of that, and we land to accept the surrender, if anyone’s alive to crawl out of the rubble.”

Raising an eyebrow at Victor Henry, Admiral Benton said, “How’s that sound, Pug?”

Victor Henry hesitated to answer.

“You’re dubious?” General Fitzgerald observed amiably.

“General, I’ve just been out pounding Germany from the air. Twenty-four bombers went on the mission. Fifteen returned. Of those, four didn’t bomb the right target. Navigation was off, they had operational troubles, there were German decoy fires, and so forth. Two didn’t bomb any target. They got lost, wandered around in the dark, then dropped their bombs in the ocean and homed back on the BBC. In one mission they lost a third of the attacking force.”

“This business is in its infancy,” smiled Fitzgerald. “Twenty-four bombers. Suppose there’d been a thousand, with much heavier payloads? And at that, they did get the gasworks.”

“Yes, sir. They got the gasworks.”

“How do you think it’s going to go?” General Anderson said brusquely to Henry.

“Sir, I think sooner or later a couple of million men will have to land in France and fight the German army.”

With an unpleasant grunt, Train Anderson touched his left shoulder. “Land in France, hey? I landed in France in 1918. I got a German bullet through my shoulder in the Argonne. I don’t know what that accomplished. Do you?”

Victor Henry did not answer.

“Okay.” Train Anderson rose. “Let’s be on our way, gentlemen. Our British cousins await us.”

“I’ll be right along,” Benton said. When the Army men were gone he slapped Victor Henry’s shoulder. “Well done. These Limeys are holding the fort for us. We’ve got to help ‘em. But Jesus God, they’re not bashful in their requests! The big crunch comes when they run out of dollars. They can’t even pay for this list of stuff, without selling their last holdings in America. What comes next? It beats me. The boss man will have to figure a way to give ‘em the stuff. He’s a slippery customer and I guess he will. Say, that reminds me—” He reached into a breast pocket and brought out a letter. Victory Henry, in his wife’s small handwriting, was the only address on the envelope, which was much thicker than usual.

“Thank you, Admiral.”

The admiral was fumbling in his pockets. “No, there’s something else. Damn, I couldn’t have — no, here we are. Whew! That’s a relief.”

It was a White House envelope. Pug slipped both letters into his pocket.

“Say, Pug, for a gunnery officer you’ve painted yourself into a peculiar corner. That screwball socialist in the White House thinks a lot of you, which may or may not be a good thing. I’d better mosey along. Rhoda sounded fine when I talked to her, only a little sad.” Benton sighed and stood. “They have to put up with a lot, the gals. Good thing she didn’t know about that bomber ride. Now that you’re back I sort of envy you. But me, I’m absurdly fond of my ass, Pug. I’m not getting it shot off except in the line of duty. I command that thought to you hereafter.”

Blinker Vance took off big black-rimmed glasses and stepped out from behind his desk to throw an arm around Pug. “Say, I want to hear all about that joyride one of these days. How did it go with the big brass?”

“All right.”

“Good. There’s a dispatch here for you from BuPers.” He peeled a tissue off a clipboard hung on the wall, and handed it to Pug.

Vance said, “Glad you’ll be getting out of Berlin?”

“Overjoyed.”

“Thought you’d be. Transportation tells me they’ve got priority to Lisbon available on the fourteenth.”

“Grab it.”

“Right.” With a knowing little smile, Vance added, “Say, maybe you and that nice little Tudsbury girl can have a dinner with me and Lady Maude tomorrow night.”

Several times Blinker had asked Victor Henry to join them for dinner. Pug knew and liked Blinker’s wife and six children. Avoiding a censorious tone, he had declined the invitations. Victor Henry knew how common these things were — “Wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion” — but he had not felt like endorsing Blinker’s shack-up. Vance now was renewing the bid, and his smile was reminding Pug that on telephoning the flat, he found Pamela there.

“I’ll let you know, Blinker. I’ll call you later.”

“Fine!” Vance’s grin broadened at not being turned down. “Lady Maude will be charmed, and my God, Pug, she has a fabulous wine cellar.”

Victor Henry returned to the bench in Grosvenor Square. The sun still shone, the flag still waved. But it was just a sticky London evening like any other. The strange brightness was out of the air.

The President’s hasty penciled scrawl was on a yellow legal sheet this time.

Pug stuffed the vigorous scrawl in his pocket like any other note, and opened his wife’s letter. It was a strange one.

She had just turned on the radio, she wrote, heard an old record of “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” and burst out crying. She reminisced about their honeymoon, when they had danced so often to that song; about his long absence in 1918; about their good times in Manila and in Panama. With Palmer Kirby, who now kept a small office in New York, she had just driven up to New London to visit Byron — a glorious two-day trip through the autumn foliage of Connecticut. Red Tully had told her that Byron was lazy in his written work, but very good in the simulator and in submarine drills. She had asked Byron about the Jewish girl.

The way he changed the subject, I think maybe all that is over. He got a peculiar look on his face, but said nary a word. Wouldn’t that be a relief!

You know that Janice is pregnant, don’t you? You must have heard from them. Those kids didn’t waste much time, hey? Like father like son, is all I can say! But the thought of being a GRANDMOTHER!!! In a way I’m happy, but in another way it seems like the end of the world! It would have helped a lot if you’d been here when I first got the news. It sure threw me into a spin. I’m not sure I’ve pulled out of it yet, but I’m trying.

Let me give you a piece of advice. The sooner you can come home, the better. I’m all right, but at the moment I really use a HUSBAND around.

He walked to his flat and telephoned Pamela. “Oh, my dear,” she said, “I’m so glad you called. In another quarter of an hour I’d have been gone. I talked to Uxbridge. They’re being very broad-minded. If I come back tonight, all is forgiven. They’re short-handed and they expect heavy raids. I must, I really must, go back right away.”

“Of course you must. You’re lucky you’re not getting shot for desertion,” Pug said, as lightly as he could.

“I’m not the first offender at Uxbridge,” she laughed. “A WAAF has a certain emotional rope to use up, you know. But this time I’ve really done it.”

He said, “I’m ever so grateful to you.”

“You’re grateful?” she said. “Oh, God, don’t you know that you’ve pulled me through a very bad time? I shall get another special pass in a week, at most. Can we see each other then?”

“Pam, I’m leaving day after tomorrow. Going back to Berlin for about a month or six weeks, and then home… . Hello? Pamela?”

“I’m still here. You’re going day after tomorrow?”

“My orders were waiting at the embassy.”

After a long pause, in which he heard her breathing, she said, “You wouldn’t want me to desert for two more days and take what comes. Would you? I’ll do it.”

“It’s no way to win a war, Pam.”

“No, it isn’t, Captain. Well. This is an unexpected good-bye, then. But good-bye it is.”

“Our paths will cross again.”

“Oh, no doubt. But I firmly believe that Ted’s alive and is coming back. I may well be a wife next time we meet. And that will be far more proper and easy all around. All the same, today was one of the happiest of my life, and that’s unchangeable now.”

Victor Henry was finding it difficult to go on talking. The sad, kind tones of this young voice he loved were choking his throat; and there were no words available to his rusty tongue to tell Pamela what he felt. “I’ll never forget, Pamela,” he said awkwardly, clearing his throat. “I’ll never forget one minute of it.”

“Won’t you? Good. Neither will I. Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime, don’t they? I think they do. Well! Good-bye, Captain Henry, and safe journeyings. I hope you find all well at home.”

“Good-bye, Pam. I hope Ted makes it.”

Her voice broke a little. “Somebody’s coming for me. Good-bye.”

Fatigued but tensely awake, Victor Henry changed to civilian clothes and drifted to Fred Fearing’s noisy air hot apartment. A bomb bursting close by earlier in the week had blown in all the windows, which were blocked now with brown plywood. Fearing’s broadcast, describing his feelings under a shower of glass, had been a great success.

“Where’s la Tudsbury?” said Fearing, handing Henry a cupful of punch made of gin and some canned juice.

“Fighting Germans.”

“Good show!” The broadcaster did a vaudeville burlesque of the British accent.

Pug sat in a corner of a dusty plush sofa under a plywood panel, watching the drinking and dancing, and wondering why he had come here. He saw a tall young girl in a tailored red suit, with long black hair combed behind her ears, give him one glance, then another. With an uncertain smile, at once bold and wistful, the girl approached. “Hello there. Would you like more punch? You look important and lonesome.”

“I couldn’t be less important. I’d like company more than punch. Please join me.”

The girl promptly sat and crossed magnificent silk-shod legs. She was prettier than Pamela, and no more than twenty. “Let me guess. You’re a general. Air Corps. They tend to be younger.”

“I’m just a Navy captain, a long, long way from home.”

“I’m Lucy Somerville. My mother would spank me for speaking first to a strange man. But everything’s different in the war, isn’t it?”

“I’m Captain Victor Henry.”

“Captain Victor Henry. Sounds so American.” She looked at him with impudent eyes. “I like Americans.”

“I guess you’re meeting quite a few.”

“Oh, heaps. One nicer than the other.” She laughed. “The bombing’s perfectly horrible, but it is exciting, isn’t it? Life’s never been so exciting. One never knows whether one will be able to get home at night. It makes things interesting. I know girls who take their makeup and pajamas along when they go out in the evening. And dear old Mums can’t say a word!”

The girl’s roguish, inviting glance told him that here probably was a random flare of passion for the taking. Wartime London was the place, he thought; “nothing else holds fashion!” But this girl was Madeline’s age, and meant nothing to him; and he had just said a stodgy, cold, miserable good-bye to Pamela Tudsbury. He avoided her dancing eyes, and said something dull about the evening news. In a minute or so a strapping Army lieutenant approached and offered Lucy Somerville a drink, and she jumped up and was gone. Soon after, Pug left.

Alone in the flat, he listened to a Churchill speech and went to bed. The last thing he did before turning out the light was to reread Rhoda’s nostalgic, sentimental, and troubled letter. Something shadowy and unpleasant was there between the lines. He guessed she might be having difficulties with Madeline, though the letter did not mention the daughter’s name. There was no point in dwelling on it, he thought. He would be home in a couple of months. He fell asleep.

Rhoda had slept with Dr. Kirby on the trip to Connecticut. That was the shadowy and unpleasant thing Pug half-discerned. Proverbially the cuckold is the last to know his disgrace; no suspicion crossed his mind, though Rhoda’s words were incautious and revealing.

War not only forces intense new relationships; it puts old ones to the breaking stress. On the very day this paragon of faithfulness — as his Navy friends regarded him — had received his wife’s letter, he had not made love to Pamela Tudsbury, mainly because the girl had decided not to bring him to it. Rhoda had fallen on the way back from New London. It had been unplanned and unforeseen. She would have recoiled from a cold-blooded copulation. The back windows of the little tourist house, where she and Kirby had stopped for tea, looked out on a charming pond where swans moved among pink lily pads in a gray drizzle. Except for the old lady who served them, they were alone in this quiet relaxing place. The visit to Byron had gone well and the countryside was beautiful. They intended to halt for an hour, then drive on to New York. They talked of their first lunch outside Berlin, of the farewell at Tempelhof Airport, of their mutual delight at seeing each other in the Waldorf. The time flowed by, their tone grew more intimate. Then Palmer Kirby said, “How wonderfully cozy this place is! Too bad we can’t stay here.”

And Rhoda Henry murmured, hardly believing that she was releasing the words from her mouth, “Maybe we could.”

“Maybe we could!” Three words, and a life pattern and a character dissolved. The old lady gave them a bedroom, asking no questions. Everything followed: undressing with a stranger, casting aside with her underclothes her modesty and her much-treasured rectitude, yielding to a torrent of novel sensations. To be taken by this large demanding man left her throbbing with animal pleasure. All her thoughts since then went back to that point in time, and there halted. Like a declaration of war, it drew a line across the past and started another era. The oddest aspect of this new life was that it was so much like the old one. Rhoda felt she had not really changed. She even still loved Pug. She was trying to digest all this puzzlement when she wrote to her husband. She did have twinges of conscience, but she was surprised to find how bearable these were.

In New York, Rhoda and Kirby heard in the bright afternoon sunshine the Churchill broadcast which Pug had listened to late at night. Rhoda had chosen well the apartment for Madeline and herself. It faced south, across low brownstones. Sunshine poured in all day through white-draped windows, into a broad living room furnished and decorated in white, peach, and apple green. Photographs of Victor Henry and the boys stood in green frames on a white piano. Few visitors failed to comment on the genteel cheerfulness of the place.

“He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame, until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe… .”

Puffing at his pipe, Kirby slouched in an armchair and stared at the radio. “Marvellous phrasemaker, that man.”

“Do you think they’ll actually hold off the Germans, Palmer?”

“What does Pug say?”

“He wrote a pessimistic letter when he first arrived there. He hasn’t written again.”

“Odd. He’s been there a while.”

“Well, I tell myself if anything had happened to him I’d have heard. I do worry.”

“Naturally.”

The speech ended. She saw him glance at the watch on his hairy wrist. “When does your plane go?”

“Oh, not for a couple of hours.” He turned off the radio, strolled to the windows, and looked out. “This is not a bad view. Radio City, the Empire State Building. Pity that apartment house blocks out the river.”

“I know what you’d like right now,” she said.

“What?”

“Some tea. It’s that time.” Answering his sudden coarse grin with a half-coy, half-brazen smile, she hurriedly added, “I really mean tea, Mr. Palmer Kirby.”

“My favorite drink, tea. Lately, anyway.”

“Don’t be horrible, you! Well? Shall I make some?”

“Of course. I’d love tea.”

“I suppose I should swear off it, since it was my downfall. Of all things.” She walked toward the kitchen with a sexy sway. “If only I could plead having been drunk, but I was sober as a minister’s wife.”

He came to the kitchen and watched her prepare the tea. Palmer Kirby liked to watch her move around, and his eyes on her made Rhoda feel young and fetching. They sat at a low table in the sunshine and she decorously poured tea and passed him buttered bread. The picture could not have been more placid and respectable.

“Almost as good as the tea at Mrs. Murchison’s guesthouse,” Kirby said. “Almost.”

“Now never mind! How long will you be in Denver?”

“Only overnight. Then I have to come to Washington. Our board’s going to meet with some British scientists. From the advance papers, they’ve got some remarkable stuff. I’m sure they’re surprising the Germans.”

“So! You’ll be in Washington next.”

“Yes. Got a good reason to go to Washington?”

“Oh, dear, Palmer, don’t you realize I know everybody in that town? Absolutely everybody. And anybody I don’t know, Pug knows.”

He said after a glum pause, “It’s not very satisfactory, is it? I don’t see myself as a homewrecker. Especially of a military man serving abroad.”

“Look, dear, I don’t see myself as a scarlet woman. I’ve been to church both Sundays since. I don’t feel guilty, but I do feel mighty curious, I’ll tell you that.” She poured more tea for him. “It must be the war, Palmer. I don’t know. With Hitler bestriding Europe and London burning to the ground, all the old ideas seem, I don’t know, TRIVIAL or something. I mean compared to what’s real at the moment — the swans out in back at Mrs. Murchison’s place — those sweet pink lily pads, the rain, the gray cat — the tea, those funny doughy cakes — and you and me. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”

“I didn’t tell you why I’m going to Denver.”

“No.”

“There’s a buyer for my house. Wants to pay a tremendous price. I’ve told you about the house.”

“Yes, it sounds heavenly. Do you really want to let it go?”

“I rattle around in it. I’ve been thinking, and it comes to this. Most of my friends are in Denver. The house is perfect to live in, to entertain in, to have my children and the grandchildren for visits. If I had a wife, I wouldn’t sell it.” He stopped, looking at her now with serious, large brown eyes filled with worried shyness. The look was itself a proposal of marriage. “What do you think, Rhoda?”

“Oh, Palmer! Oh, heavenly days!” Rhoda’s eyes brimmed. She was not totally astonished, but the relief was beyond description. This resolved the puzzlement. It had not been a crazy slip, after all, like that foolishness with Kip Tollever, but a grand passion. Grand passions were different.

He said, “That can’t really be news to you. We wouldn’t have stayed at Mrs. Murchison’s if I hadn’t felt this way.”

“Well! Oh, my lord. I’m proud and happy that you should think of me like that. Of course I am, But — Palmer!” She swept her hand almost gaily at the photographs on the piano.

“I have friends who’ve married again in their fifties, Rhoda. After divorces, some of them, and some are blissfully happy.”

Rhoda sighed, dashed her fingers to her eyes, and smiled at him. “Is it that you want to make an honest woman of me? That’s terribly gallant, but unnecessary.”

Palmer Kirby leaned forward earnestly, tightening his large loose mouth. “Pug Henry is an admirable man. It didn’t happen because you’re a bad woman. There was a rift in your marriage before we met. There had to be.”

In a very shaky voice, Rhoda said, “Before I ever knew him, Pug was a Navy fullback. I saw him play in two Army-Navy games. I had a boyfriend who loved those games — let me talk, Palmer, maybe I’ll collect myself. He was an aggressive, exciting player, this husky little fellow darting all over the field. Then, my stars, he BURST on me in Washington. The actual Pug Henry, whose picture had been in the papers and all that. The war was on. He looked dashing in blue and gold, I must say! Well, great heavens, he courted the way he played football. And he was very funny in those days. Pug has a droll wit, you know, when he bothers to use it. Well, all the boys I went with were just from the old Washington crowd, all going to the same schools, all cut out by the same cookie cutter, you might say. Pug was something different. He still is. For one thing, he’s a very serious Christian, and you can bet that took a lot of getting used to! I mean right from the start it was a complicated thing. I mean it didn’t seem to interfere at all with his ROMANCING, if I make myself clear, and yet — well, Pug is altogether unusual and wonderful. I’ll always say that. I must bore Pug. I know he loves me, but — the thing is, he is so Navy! Why, that man left me standing at my wedding reception, Palmer, for half an hour, while he drove his commanding officer to catch a train back to Norfolk! That’s Victor Henry for you. But in twenty-five years — oh dear, now for the very first time I suddenly feel very, very wretched.”

Rhoda cried into her handkerchief, her shoulders shaking. He came and sat beside her. When she calmed down, she looked at him and said, “You go along to Denver, but ask yourself this. I’ve done this to Pug. Wouldn’t you be thinking forever and a day, if by some wild chance you got what you’re asking for, that I’d do it to you? Of course you would. Why not?”

He stood. “I’ll keep that appointment in Denver, Rhoda. But I don’t think I’ll sell the house.”

“Oh, sell it! As far as I’m concerned, you go right ahead and sell that house, Palmer. I only think you yourself might regret it one day.”

“Good-bye, Rhoda. I’ll telephone you from Washington. Sorry I missed Madeline this time. Give her my best.” He said, glancing at the photographs on the piano, “I think your kids would like me. Even that strange Byron fellow.”

“How could they fail to? That isn’t the problem.” She walked with him to the door. He kissed her like a husband going off on a trip.

Chapter 35

September was crisping the Berlin air and yellowing the leaves when Pug got back. Compared to London under the blitz, the city looked at peace. Fewer uniforms were in sight, and almost no trucks or tanks. After beating France, Hitler had partially demobilized to free workers for the farms and factories. His remaining soldiers were not loafing around Berlin. Either they were poised for invasion on the coast, or they garrisoned France and Poland, or they guarded a thin prudent line facing the Soviet Union. Only the air war showed its traces: round blue-gray snouts of flak guns poking above autumn leaves, flaxen-haired German children in a public square gawking at a downed Wellington. The sight of the forlorn British bomber — a twin of F for Freddie — with its red, white, and blue bull’s-eye, gave Pug a sad twinge. He tried and failed to see the wrecked gasworks. Scowling Luftwaffe guards and wooden street barriers cordoned off the disaster. Göring had long ago announced that if a single British bomb ever fell on Berlin, the German people could call him Meyer. The evidence of Meyer’s shortcomings was off limits.

But Pug wondered how many Germans would have gone there anyway to look. These were weird people. In Lisbon, when he boarded the Lufthansa plane, Germany had then and there smitten him: the spotless interior, the heel-clicking steward, the fast service of food and drink, the harsh barking loudspeaker, and his seatmate, a fat bespectacled blond doctor who clinked wineglasses with him and spoke warmly of the United States and of his sister in Milwaukee. The doctor expressed confidence that America and Germany would always be friends. Hitler and Roosevelt were equally great men and they both wanted peace. He deplored the ruthless of murder of Berlin civilians by British bombers, as contrasted to the Luftwaffe’s strict concentration on military targets. The RAF, he pointed out, painted the underside of their planes with a remarkable black varnish that rendered them invisible at night, and constantly changed altitude so that the A.A. batteries had trouble finding the range. That was how they had sneaked by. But these petty unfair tricks would avail them nothing. German science would find the answer in a week or two. The war was really over and won. The Luftwaffe was invincible. The British criminals responsible for dropping bombs on women and little children would soon have to face the bar of justice.

This man was exactly like a London music-hall burlesque German, complete to the squinting smile and the rolls of fat on his neck. Pug got tired of him. He said dryly that he had just come from London and that the Luftwaffe was getting beaten over England. The man at once froze, turned his back on Pug, and ostentatiously flourished an Italian newspaper with lurid pictures of London on fire.

Then when Pug first returned to the Grunewald house, the art museum director who lived next door, a vastly learned little dark man named Dr. Baltzer, rushed over, dragging a game leg, to offer his neighbor a drink and to chat about the imminent British collapse. Besides being obliging neighbors, the Baltzers had invited the Henrys to many interesting exhibitions and parties. Mrs. Baltzer had become Rhoda’s closest German fiend. Tactfully, Pug tried to tell his neighbor that the war wasn’t going quite the way Goebbels’s newspapers and broadcasts pictured it. At the first hint that the RAF was holding its own, the little art expert bristled and went limping out, forgetting his offer to give Pug a drink. And this was a man who had hinted many times that the Nazis were vulgar ruffians and that Hitler was a calamity.

This was what now made Berlin completely intolerable. The Germans had balled themselves into one tight fist. The little tramp had his “one Reich, one people, one leader,” that he had so long screeched for. Victor Henry, a man of discipline, understood and admired the stiff, obedient efficiency of these people, but their mindless shutting out of facts disgusted him. It was not only stupid, not only shameless; it was bad war-making. The “estimate of the situation” — a phrase borrowed by the Navy from Prussian military doctrine — had to start from the facts.

When Ernst Grobke telephoned to invite him to lunch shortly after his return, he accepted gladly. Grobke was one of the few German military men he knew who seemed to retain some common sense amid the Nazi delirium. In a restaurant crowded with uniformed Party officials and high military brass, the submariner griped openly about the war, especially the way Göring had botched the battle of Britain. From time to time he narrowed his eyes and glanced over one shoulder and the other, an automatic gesture in Germany when talking war or politics.

“We’ll still win,” he said. “They’ll try all the dumb alternatives and then they’ll get around to it.

“To what?” Pug said.

“Blockade, of course. The old English weapon turned against them. They can’t blockade us. We’ve got the whole European coast open from the Baltic all the way around to Turkey. Even Napoleon never had that. But England’s got a negative balance of food and fuel that has to choke her to death. If Göring had just knocked out harbors this summer and sunk ships — adding that to the tremendous score our U-boat and magnetic mines have been piling up — England would already be making approaches through the Swiss and the Swedes.” He calmly lifted both hands upward. “No alternative! We’re sinking them all across the Atlantic. They don’t have the strength to convoy. If they did, our new tactics and torpedoes would still lick them. Mind you, we started way under strength on U-boats, Victor. But finally Dönitz convinced Raeder, and Raeder convinced the Führer. After Poland, when England turned down the peace offer, we started laying keels by the dozens. They begin coming off the ways next January. An improved type, a beauty. Then — four, five months, half a million tons sunk a month, and phfft! — Churchill kaput.

You disagree?” Grobke grinned at him. The small U-boat man wore a well-tailored purplish tweed suit and a clashing yellow bow tie. His face glowed with sunburned confident good health. “Come on. You don’t have to sympathize. We all know your President’s sentiments, hm? But you understand the sea and you know the situation.”

Pug regarded Grobke wryly. He rather agreed with this estimate. “Well, if Göring really will switch to blockade, and if you do have a big new fleet of ‘em coming along — but that’s a couple of big ifs.”

“You doubt my word?”

“I wouldn’t blame you for expanding a bit.’

“You’re all right, Victor.” Grobke laughed. “Goddamn. But I don’t have to expand. You’ll see, beginning in January.”

“Then it may get down to whether we come in.”

The U-boat man stopped laughing. “Yes. That’s the question. But now your President sneaks a few old airplanes and ships to England, and he can’t even face your Congress with that. Do you think your people will go for sending out American warships to be sunk by U-boats? Roosevelt is a tough guy, but he is afraid of your people.”

“Well! Ernst Grobke and Victor Henry! The two sea dogs, deciding the war.”

The banker Wolf Stöller was bowing over them, thin sandy hair plastered down, cigarette holder sticking out of his smile. “Victor, that is a beautiful new suit. Savile Row?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“Unmistakable. Well, it will be a pleasure to start ordering clothes there again. There are no tailors like the British. I say, how far along are you gentlemen? Come and join us. Just a few pleasant chaps at our table.”

“No thank you, Herr Stöller,” Pug said. “I must get back to my office quickly.”

“Of course. I say, Ernst, did you tell Captain Henry you’re coming to Abendruh this weekend? Victor’s an old Abendruh visitor, you know. By Jove! Why don’t you come along this time, Victor? Twice lately you’ve said no, but I’m not proud. You and your old friend Ernst can tell each other big sea lies all weekend! Do say yes. There will be just two or three other splendid fellows. And some lovely ladies, not all of them attached.”

Under Victor Henry’s quick glance, Grobke smiled unnaturally and said, “Well, that’s not a bad idea, is it?”

“All right,” said the American. It was quite clear to him now what was going on and why Grobke had called him. “Thank you very much.”

“Grand. Ripping. See you on Friday,” said the banker, clapping Victor Henry on the shoulder.

After this, the talk of the two naval officers was lame and sparse. Ernst Grobke busied himself with his food, not looking much at Pug.

That same afternoon, to Victor Henry’s surprise, his yeoman rang him and said Natalie Jastrow was on the line from Siena.

“Jehosephat! Put her on.”

“Hello? Hello? What happened? I was calling Captain Henry in Berlin.” The girl’s voice was muffled and burbling.

“Here I am, Natalie.”

“Oh, hello! Is Byron all right?”

“He’s fine.”

“Oh, what a relief!” The interference on the line stopped. Natalie’s voice came clear. “I haven’t had a single letter from him since I left. I sent a cable and got no answer. I know how impossible the mail is nowadays, but still I’ve begun to worry.”

“Natalie, he hasn’t had any letters from you. He wrote me that. And I’m sure he didn’t get your cable. But he’s in good shape.”

“Why, I’ve been writing once a week. How aggravating that is! I miss him so. How’s he doing in submarine school?”

Outside Victor Henry’s window, the guard was changing at the chancellery, with rhythmic boot-thumpings and brisk German barks. Natalie’s telephone voice stirred an ache in him. The New York accent was different from Pamela’s, but it was a young low girlish voice like hers.

“Scraping by, I gather.”

Her laugh, too, was much like Pamela’s, husky and slightly mocking. “That sounds right.”

“Natalie, he expected you back long before this.”

“I know. There were problems, but they’re straightened out. Be sure to tell him I’m fine. Siena’s quite charming in wartime, and very peaceful. It’s sort of like sinking back into the Middle Ages. Byron’s got three months to go, hasn’t he?

“He finishes in December, if they don’t throw him out sooner.”

Again the laugh. “They won’t. Briny is actually very surefooted, you know. I’ll be back by December. Please write and tell him that. Maybe a letter from you will get through.

“It will. I’ll write today.”

It was a small gathering at Abendruh, with no staircase slide. Pug was sorry that Ernst Grobke didn’t see the crude elaborate joke, so much to the Teutonic taste. The submariner obviously was ill at ease, and could have used the icebreaker. The other men were a Luftwaffe general and a high official in the foreign ministry, company far above Grobke. The five pretty ladies were not wives. Mrs. Stöller was absent.

Victor Henry sized all this up as an orgy in the making, to get him to talk about the British. After dinner, somewhat to his surprise, they went to a wood-panelled room where musical instruments were ready, and Stöller, the Luftwaffe general, the man from the foreign ministry, and a redheaded lady played quartets. In Pug’s previous visits, the banker had shown no musical skill, but Stöller played violin quite well. The Luftwaffe general, a very tall dark cadaverous man with sickly hollow eyes, bowed and swayed over the cello, drawing forth luscious sounds. Pug had seen this man once before, at a distance at Karinhall in full uniform; he had looked far more formidable then than he did now in his dinner jacket and monocle. The musicians made mistakes, stopped a couple of times, joked swiftly, and took up the music once more. The foreign ministry man on the second violin, a roly-poly Bavarian with a drooping yellow moustache, was a superb fiddler. It was the best amateur music Pug had ever heard. Grobke sat with the submissiveness of most Germans in the presence of art, drinking a lot of brandy and stifling yawns. After a couple of hours of this, the ladies abruptly said good-night and left. If there had been a signal, Pug missed it.

“Perhaps we might have a nightcap outside,” said the banker to Pug, putting his violin carefully in its case. “The evening is warm. Do you like the tone of my Stradivarius? I wish I were worthy to play it.”

The broad stone terrace looked out on a formal garden, a darkly splashing fountain, and the river; beyond that, forest. A smudged orange moon in its last quarter was rising over the trees. In the light of reddish-yellow flares on long iron poles, shadows danced on the house and the flagstone floor. The five men sat, and a butler passed drinks. Melodious birds sang in the quiet night, reminding Pug of the nightingales at the British bomber base. “Victor, if you care to talk about England,” said Stöller from the depths of an easy chair, his face in black shadow, “we would of course be interested.”

Pug forced a jocular tone. “You mean I have to admit I’ve been in England?”

The banker heavily took up the note. “Ha, ha. Unless you want to get our intelligence people in bad trouble, you’d better.” After everybody else laughed, he said, “If you prefer, we’ll drop the subject here and now for the weekend. Our hospitality hasn’t got — how do you say it in English?” — he switched from the German they were all speaking — “‘strings tied to it.’ But you’re in an unusual position, having travelled between the capitals.”

“Well, if you want me to say you’ve shot the RAF out of the sky and the British will quit next week, it might be better to drop it now.”

In a gloomy bass voice, the long shadowy form of the general spoke. “We know we haven’t shot the RAF out of the sky.”

“Speak freely. General Jagow is my oldest friend,” said Stöller. “We were schoolboys together. And Dr. Meusse” — he waved an arm at the foreign ministry man, and a long skeletal shadow arm leaped on the wall — “goes back almost that far.”

“We say in the Luftwaffe,” put in the general, “the red flag is up. That means we all talk straight. We say what we think about the Führer, about Göring, about anything and anybody. And we say the goddamnedest things, I tell you.”

“Okay, I like those ground rules,” said Victor Henry. “Fire away.”

“Would an invasion succeed?” spoke up Dr. Meusse.

“What invasion? Can your navy get you across?”

“Why not?” said General Jagow in calm professional tones. “Through a corridor barricaded on both sides by mine belts, and cordoned off by U-boats, under an umbrella of Luftwaffe? Is it so much to ask of the Grand Fleet?”

Pug glanced at Grobke, who sat glumly swirling brandy in a bell glass. “You’ve got a U-boat man here. Ask him about the cordons and the mine belts.”

With an impatient gesture that flicked brandy into the air, Grobke said, in thick tones, “Very difficult, possibly suicidal, and worst of all, entirely unnecessary.”

General Jagow leaned toward Grobke his monocle glittering in the flare light, his face stiff with anger.

Pug exclaimed, “Red flag’s up.”

“So it is,” Jagow said, with an unforgiving glare at the submariner, who slouched down in darkness.

“I agree with him,” Pug said. “Part of a landing force might get through — not saying in what shape. There’s still the invasion beaches — which I’ve seen close on. Which I personally would hate to approach from seaward.”

“Clearing beach obstacles is a technical task,” Jagow said, with a swift return to offhand tones. “We have special sappers well trained for that.”

“General our Marine Corps has been studying and rehearsing beach assaults intensively for years. It’s the toughest attack problem in the book. I don’t believe the Wehrmacht ever thought about it until a few weeks ago.”

“German military ingenuity is not negligible,” said Dr. Meusse.

“No argument,” said Victor Henry.

Jagow said, “Of course we can’t land without wastage. We would take big but endurable losses. Once we obtained a solid lodgment, you might see Churchill fall. The Luftwaffe would fight for the beachhead to the last plane. But I believe the RAF would run out of planes first.”

Victor Henry made no comment.

“What is the bombing of London doing to British morale?” Stöller asked.

“You’re making Churchill’s job easier. They’re fighting mad now. Knocking hell out of London won’t win the war. Not in my judgment. Not to mention that bombers can fly east as well as west.”

The general and the banker looked at each other. The general’s voice was sepulchral. “Would it surprise you if some people here agreed with you?”

“Churchill cleverly provoked the Führer by bombing Berlin on the twenty-sixth,” said Stöller. “We had to hit back, for morale reasons. The trick worked, but the British people must now pay. There’s no political alternative but a big reprisal.”

“Let’s be honest,” said Dr. Meusse. “Field Marshal Göring wanted to go after London and try to end it.”

Jagow shook his head. “He knew it was too soon. We all did. It was those six days of bad weather that saved the RAF. We needed another week against those airfields. But in the long run it will all be the same.”

Stöller said, “They’re a brave people. I hate to see them prolong the agony.”

“They don’t seem to mind,” Victor Henry said. “By and large, they’re having a good time. They think they’re going to win.”

“There is the weakness,” said Dr. Meusse, pulling on his moustache. “National megalomania. When a people loses touch with reality, it is finished.”

Stöller lit a thick cigar. “Absolutely. The course of this war is fixed now by statistics. That is my department. Would you care to hear them?”

“Gladly. Especially if you’ll give away some secrets,” said Victor Henry, evoking friendly laughter from all the Germans except Grobke. The submariner was sunk in gloom or sleep.

“No secrets,” said Stöller. “The financial stuff may be a little new to you. But take my word for it, my figures are right.”

“I’m sure of that.”

“Good. England lives at the end of — how would you put it — a revolving bucket chain of ships. She always has. This time the buckets are being shot off the chain faster than she can replace them. She started the war with about twenty million tons of shipping. Her own, and what she could scrape up elsewhere. That tonnage is disappearing fast. The rate now is — what’s the latest?” He spoke condescendingly to Grobke.

The submariner covered a yawn. “That figure is secret. Victor must have a damn good idea from what he heard in London.”

Pug said, “I have.”

“All right. Then you know the curve is upward. Nothing else matters in this war. England will soon run out of fuel and food, and that will be that. When her machines stop and her planes are grounded, and her people are clamoring for food, Churchill will fall. There’s no way out.”

“Isn’t there? My country has a lot of fuel and food — and steel and shipyards too — and we’re open for business.”

The banker coldly smiled. “Yes, but your Neutrality Act requires that England pay cash for everything. Cash and carry. That is the one sensible thing your people learned from the last war, when England repudiated her war debts. Roosevelt, Willkie, it doesn’t matter now. There isn’t a chance — you bear me out on this, Victor — that your Congress will ever make another war loan to England. Will they?”

“No.”

“All right. Then she is kaput. She started the war with about five billions in foreign exchange. Our intelligence is she’s already spent more than four. The planes and supplies and ships she needs right now to keep going will wipe out the last billion or so like a snowball on a hot stove. By December the British Empire will be broke. Bankrupt! You see, dear fellow, they got into a war they couldn’t fight and couldn’t pay for. That is the simple fact. And it was the political genius of the Führer, Victor — whatever you think of him — to foresee this, through all the fog of the future. Just as he foresaw that the French wouldn’t fight. Such leadership brings victory.” Stöller leaned forward, with a disdainful hand-wave. “Yes, Churchill’s words are very eloquent, very touching, very spiritual. But he was England’s worst Chancellor of the Exchequer. He hasn’t the slightest notion of logistical or financial realities. Never has had. His pretty literary soap bubbles are all going to pop. Then there will be peace.”

Dr. Meusse put in, “We are sinking ships now at a rate we never reached until the best months of 1917. Do you know that?”

“I know that,” said Captain Henry. “And as I said to Ernst the other day, that’s when we came in.”

The silence on the terrace lasted a long time. Then Wolf Stöller said, “And that is the world tragedy that must not occur now, Victor — Germany and America, the two great anti-Bolshevik powers, going to war. The only victor will be Stalin.”

The voice of Grobke, coarse and fuddled, issued from the depths of his chair. “It won’t happen. It’ll all be over too fast. Wait till January, when we get ourselves some U-boats.”

The weekend proved cold, dull, rainy, and — for Pug — very heavy on music and culture. The five ladies, all in their thirties, all mechanically flirtatious, were available for talks, for walks, for dancing; and when the rain briefly stopped, for tennis. Pug assumed they were available for the night, too. He had trouble telling them apart.

Ernst Grobke slept a lot and left early on Sunday. The other three men had been indifferent to the submariner, though markedly warm and agreeable to Victor Henry. Obviously Grobke had served his purpose. Obviously his telephone call and the encounter with Stöller in the restaurant had been arranged. These big shots were incapable of carrying further a pretense of cordiality to a German four-striper.

Pug was asked, and he answered, many more questions about his trip to England. Except for one probe by the gaunt Luftwaffe man about the radar stations — which Pug answered with a blank, stupid look — there was no effort to pump hard intelligence out of him.

Rather, there seemed to be an effort to pump him full of German politics, philosophy, and poetry. These three old comrades were nightly fond of intellectual talk, and kept pressing on Henry books from Stöller’s library that came up in conversation. He tried to read them at bedtime. After fifteen minutes, night after night, he fell into deep restful slumber. Germany’s strange literature usually had that effect on Victor Henry. He had long since given up trying understand the fantastic seriousness with which Germans took themselves, their “world-historical” position, and every twist and turn of their murky history since Charlemagne. From a military standpoint, all this river of ink about German destiny, German culture, German spirituality, Germanophilism, pan-Germanism, and the rest, kept underlining one fact. Here was an industrial people of eighty million that had spent a century uniting itself, talking to itself, rolling up its sleeves to lick the world, and convincing itself that God would hold Germany’s coat and cheer it on. That was worth bearing in mind.

The sun broke through late Sunday when they were having cocktails on the terrace. Stöller offered to show Victor Henry his prize pigs, and walked him a long way down to the pens. Here amid a great stink, the host told Henry the pedigrees of several remarkably large hairy porkers, lying in muck and hungrily grunting. As they strolled, back, the banker said, “Have you been badly bored, Victor?”

“Why, not in the least,” Pug lied.

“I know it’s been a different sort of weekend. Meusse and Jagow are very spiritual fellows. We have been pals forever. Jagow was my first real contact with Göring. Before that I was very close to von Papen, who as you know was the Nazi’s’ biggest opponent, until he himself in 1933 saw where destiny was pointing. He actually made Hitler chancellor.” Stöller idly struck at purple flowering thistles with his heavy black stick, knocking off their heads. The broken flowers gave off a fresh rank smell. Jagow thinks the world of you.”

“He plays a hell of a cello,” said Pug, “for a fly-fly boy.”

“Yes. He is brilliant. But he is not well. Victor, he especially appreciates your willingness to talk about England. Most friendly of you.”

“I haven’t revealed anything. Not intentionally.”

Stöller laughed. “You’re an honorable servant of your government. Still your observations have been illuminating. What strikes all of us is your sense of honor. Honor is everything to a German.”

Flattery made Pug Henry uncomfortable. He met it as usual with silence and a dulled look.

“If there’s anything that General Jagow could do for you, I know it would give him pleasure.”

“That’s very kind, but not that I know of.”

“Installations you might care to visit?”

“Well, our air attaché would jump at such an invitation.”

“As you wish. Jagow would take a more personal interest in you.”

“There’s one thing, a bit out of the ordinary. An RAF pilot, a good friend of mine, went down in the Channel several weeks ago. Your people might have picked him up.”

With a wave of the knobby stick, Stöller said, “That should be simple to find out. Give Jagow this pilot’s name, rank, and so forth. You’ll have your answer shortly.”

“I’ll be much obliged.”

“If your friend is a prisoner, you might even be able to visit him.”

“That would be great.”

Wolf Stöller called him early in October, when Victor Henry had almost forgotten the strange weekend. “Your man is alive.”

“Who is?”

Stöller reeled off Gallard’s name, rank, and serial number. “He is in France, still in a hospital but in good condition. General Jagow invites you, as his personal guest, to visit Luftwaffe Headquarters close by. You are invited as a friend, not as an American attaché. This telephone call is the only communication there will be. No reciprocity is necessary.”

After a moment Pug said, “Well, that’s good news. The general is mighty kind.”

“As I told you, you made a hit with him.”

“I’ll have to call you back.”

“Of course.”

The chargé d’affaires, when Pug told him about this, drooped his eyes almost shut, leaned back in his chair, and ran his thumb back and forth on his moustache. “The Luftwaffe man wants something of you.”

“Naturally.”

“Well, you have my approval. Why not jump at it? You might learn something, and you’ll see this flier. Who is he?”

“Well — he’s engaged to the daughter of a friend of mine.” The chargé’s eyes opened a little wider and he stroked his moustache. Pug felt pressed to add something. “Alistair Tudsbury’s daughter, in fact.”

“Oh, he’s Pam’s fiancé, is he? Lucky boy. Well, by all means go ahead and see how Pam Tudsbury’s fiancé is,” said the chargé, with a wisp of irony that did not escape, and that irritated, Victory Henry.

The weather was bad. Pug went to Lille by train. Rail travel was surprisingly back to normal in German-ruled Europe. The train left on time and roared through tranquil rainy autumn landscapes. Germany, Belgium, and northern France looked all alike in October mist and drizzle, one large flat plain of farms, evergreens, and yellowing trees. The cities looked alike too, hodgepodges of ornate venerable buildings at the center, rimmed by severe modern structures; some were untouched by the war, some were scarred and blotched with rubble. In the crowded restaurant car, amiably chatting Germans, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Belgians, a few with wives, wined and dined amid rich good smells and a cheery clatter. Uniformed Wehrmacht officers, at a table apart, glanced with contempt at the civilians and gave the scurrying waiters curt commands. Otherwise it was business as usual under the New Order, except for the absence of Jews. The Jews had been the busiest travellers in Europe, but on this train none were to be seen. In the Berlin-Lille express, the Third Reich looked a good bet to last a thousand years, by right of natural superiority and the ability to run things. Trains headed the other way, jammed with cheerful young troops, gave Victor Henry his first solid hint that the invasion — if it had ever been on — might be off.

An emissary of General Jagow, a rigid thin lieutenant with extra gold braid on a shoulder, a splotch of ribbons, and a twitching eye muscle, met the American naval officer at the station, drove him to a grimy stone building with a façade of wet statues in the middle of Lille, and left him in a cheerless, windowless little office containing an ink-stained desk and two chairs. The dusty yellow walls had clean squares and oblongs where pictures of French officials had been removed. Behind the desk was a bright new red, white, and black swastika flag, and the popular picture of Hitler in his soldier’s coat, cowlick falling over one eye, a photo crudely touched up to make him look younger. The room had the loudest-ticking pendulum wall clock Pug had ever heard; its face was green and faded with age.

The door opened. A helmeted German soldier with a submachine gun tramped in, wheeled at the desk, and crashed his boots to stiff attention. Gallard followed him, his right arm in a sling, his face puffy, discolored, and bandaged, and behind him came the lieutenant with the twitching eye. The pilot wore his flying suit, in which large rips were crudely patched up.

“Hello, Ted,” said Victor Henry.

Gallard said, with a look of extreme surprise, “Hello there!” A dressing on his lower lip and chin muffled his speech.

In quick precise German, the lieutenant told Captain Henry that, since British airmen were honor bound by their orders to seize every chance to escape, General Jagow could not — to his regret — omit the precaution of an armed guard. There was no time limit. The soldier would not interfere. He had no knowledge of English. He was instructed to shoot at the first move to escape, so the lieutenant begged the gentlemen to avoid any gestures that might confuse him. As to the content of the interview, the general left it wholly to the honor of Captain Henry. If there were no questions, he would now withdraw.

“How do I let you know when we’re through?” Pug jerked a thumb at the blank-faced soldier. “If I get up and walk toward the door, for instance, that might confuse him.”

“Very true.” The lieutenant inclined his head and his eye twitched. “Then kindly raise the telephone for a few moments and replace it in the cradle. I will then return. Permit me to mention that the general hopes you will join him for lunch at advance headquarters, a drive of forty kilometers from here.”

As the door closed, Pug pulled out his cigarettes, and lit one for the pilot.

“Ah! God bless you.” Gallard inhaled the smoke as a man emerging from under water gulps air. “Does Pam know? Did anybody see me parachute?”

“One of your mates claimed he had. She’s sure you’re alive.”

“Good. Now you can tell her.”

“That’ll be a rare pleasure.”

The wall clock ticked very loudly. Flicking the cigarette clumsily with his left hand, Gallard glanced at the guard, who stood like a post, machine gun slanted in his white-knuckled hands. The beetling line of the German helmet gave the farm-boy face a stern, statuesque look.

“Puts a bit of a chill on the small talk, eh?”

“He’s rather a ripe one.” Pug said.

The guard, staring straight ahead, was giving off a corrupt unwashed smell in the close little room, though his face was clean enough.

“Rather. I say, this is the surprise of my life. I thought I was in for a rough grilling, or maybe for getting whisked to Germany. They never told me a thing, except that I’d get shot if I misbehaved. You must have good friends in the Luftwaffe.”

“What do you want me to tell Pamela?”

“Will you be seeing her?”

“I don’t think so. I’m going back to Washington shortly. I can wire or write her.”

“There’s so much to tell. First of all, I’m all right, more or less. Some burns around the face and neck.” He lifted the slung arm. “Luckily the bullet only broke the bone, didn’t shatter it. I can’t fault the medical attention. The food’s been bloody awful — moldy black bread, vile margarine with a petroleum aftertaste, soup full of rotten potatoes. The other day it mysteriously improved. Just in my ward. Last night we had a really passable stew, though it might have been Lille cats and dogs. Tasted good. I suppose all that was apropos of your little visit. I’m terribly grateful to you. Really, it’s splendid that you’ve managed to do this, Captain Henry. How is Pam? Tell me about her. When did you last see her? How did she look?”

“I saw her several times after you disappeared. She’d come down to London, and I’d take her to dinner and to cheerful places. For a while she was peaky and wouldn’t eat. But she was coming around. Practically the last thing she told me was that she expected you back. That she was going to wait for you and marry you.”

The pilot’s eyes grew moist. “She’s a marvellous girl, Pamela.” He looked around at the guard. “Say, he does smell bad, doesn’t he?” Watching the soldier’s dull unchanging face, he said in an offhand tone, “Will you look at that face? Explains a lot, doesn’t it? Eighty million docile dangerous swine like this fellow. No wonder Hitler’s their leader.” There was not a flicker in the soldier’s eyes. “I really don’t think he understands English.”

“Don’t count on it,” said Pug, dry and fast.

“Well, tell her I admit she was right. When I get back I’ll take the headquarters job. That’s where I belong.” He shook his head. “Silly clot that I am. These Jerries were ahead of me and below, Me-110’s, three sitters — a great chance. But I missed my shot, didn’t pull up in time, dove right down between them, and next thing I knew I felt a slam on the shoulder, just like a very hard punch. My engine caught fire. I pulled back hard on my stick and by God it was loose as a broken neck. I looked around and saw I had no tail section. Shot clean off. Well, I released the hood and the harness pin, and crawled out of there. I don’t even remember getting burned, but the flames got to my face, mostly around the mouth. I only felt it when the salt water stung. Gallard sighed and glanced around the room, his dejected eyes coming to rest on the rigid malodorous soldier. “And here I am. What’s happening in the war? The Hun doctors say it’s practically over. Of course that’s a lie.”

Victor Henry made his account as cheerful as possible. The pilot nodded and brightened. “That’s more like it.”

The clock ticked. The soldier startled them by contorting his face and sneezing twice. Tears ran down his face, but he stood rigid as before.

“Ruddy idiotic,” said Gallard, “that you’ll walk out of here to lunch with a Luftwaffe general, and I’ll still be a prisoner at gunpoint. I suppose you’d better be cracking off.”

“No hurry. Take a few cigarettes. I’d give you the pack, but Rosebud might think it was funny business and get confused.”

“Ha! Rosebud is good. Damned thoughtful of you, sir.” Gallard pulled out several cigarettes, and then impulsively extended the pack toward the soldier. The German’s eyes shifted down and up, and he briefly shook his head like a horse driving off flies.

Gallard chain-lit a cigarette. “Look here, I don’t know how you’ve managed this, but thank you. Thank you! It’s helped more than you can guess.”

“Well, it was mainly luck, but I’m glad I tracked you down.”

With a distorted grin — the left side of Gallard’s bandaged mouth seemed frozen — the pilot said, “Of course Pam thinks you can do anything.”

Pug glanced up at the old clock. The numbers were too faded to read, but the hands were almost closed at noon. “I guess I’d better not keep the general waiting.”

“Certainly not, sir.” The pilot looked at the guard and added, “Anyway, while I’ll never forget Rosebud, he’s making me ill.”

The clock pock-pocked a dozen times while Victor Henry held the telephone receiver up off the hook. He replaced it.

“Tell Pam I’ll be seeing her,” said Gallard, in firm tones implying an intention to escape.

“Be careful.”

“Trust me for that. I’ve got a lot to live for, you know. You’re elected to be best man, if you’re within a thousand miles.”

“If I am, I’ll come.”

Driving through Lille, Pug marked again, as he had in the restaurant car, how German de had serenely settled in. In the drizzly gray streets and boulevards of this large industrial town, the French were going about their business, directed by French policemen, driving French cars with French license plates, amid French shops and billboards. Only here and there an official poster in heavy black German type, a sign on a street or over a building entrance often containing the word VERBOTEN — and the jarring sight of German soldiers cruising in army cars, reminded one that Hitler was the master of Lille. No doubt the city was being politely and methodically plundered. Pug had heard about the techniques: the worthless occupation currency with which the Germans bought up most things, and the meaningless custody receipts given by outright looters. But the process was nowhere visible. The busy pedestrians of Lille looked glum, but Victor Henry had never seen the French when they were not looking glum. Here, as on the train, the New Order appeared good for a thousand years.

In a tall Luftwaffe cap, shiny black boots, and a slick blue-gray military raincoat to his ankles, the cello player looked taller, leaner, and considerably fiercer. The lieutenant’s slavish bows and heel clicks, the scrambling obsequiousness of everybody at headquarters, amply showed that Jagow was most high brass. He offered Victor Henry his choice of a decent lunch at a “rather comfortable” château nearby, commandeered by the Luftwaffe, or a mere bite here at the airfield. Nodding approval of Pug’s preference, he doffed his raincoat, dropping it from his shoulders without looking around at the lieutenant who caught it.

On a cloth-covered table in an inner office, the general and his guest ate soup, trout, veal, cheese, and fruit, all served up in gold-trimmed china by gliding, smiling French waiters, with three superb wines. General Jagow picked at the food and hardly tasted the wine. Recognizing the cyanosed pallor of heart trouble, Victor Henry made no comment. He was hungry and dug in heartily while the general smoked cigarettes and talked, in a clipped exact German which his lieutenant evidently had been imitating. Often he interrupted himself to cover his mouth and cough carefully.

The United States Navy, Jagow said, was the only military machine in the world professionally comparable to the German army. He had visited it as an observer in the thirties, and had brought back to Göring the dive-bombing idea. So the Luftwaffe had developed the Stuka. “Whether you approve or not,” he said with a tired smile, “the success of our blitzkrieg owes a sizable debt to your Navy.”

“Well, maybe we’ll take that bow after the war, General.”

The American Army, Jagow went on with a wry nod at Pug’s irony, was in no way comparable. The doctrine and practice, like that of all modern armies, derived from German General Staff concepts. But he had noticed an amateurishness, a lack of spirit in the maneuvers, and the numbers were pitiful. Essentially, the United States was a great sea power, he said, linking the two world oceans. The state of the armed forces reflected that geopolitical fact.

That started him on Spengler, who he said had failed, like all too many Germans, to understand the United States. That was the fallacy in The Decline of the West. The United States was white Christian Europe again, given a second chance on a rich virgin continent. America allied to a modernized orderly Europe could bring on a vast rebirth of the West, a new golden age. At least this was what Pug made out of the general’s cloudy high-flown talk, so much like the evening conversations at Abendruh.

Over the coffee — terrible stuff tasting like burned walnut shells — Jagow said, “Would you care to have a look at the aerodrome? The weather is rather disagreeable.”

“I’d like that very much, if one of your aides can spare the time.”

The weary smile reappeared. “I finished my work on this campaign long ago. The rest is up to the field commanders. I am at your disposal.”

They drove around the aerodrome in a small closed car, full of the sulphurous fumes of German gasoline. In wan sunlight, from holes of bright blue opening in the low overcast sky, stubby Messerschmitt 109’s stood half-concealed in dispersal bunkers, their painted crosses and swastikas much the worse for wear. It was just like a British fighter base: repair shops, hangars, dispersal huts, crisscrossing air strips, set among peaceful farms, and rolling pastures where herds of cows grazed. Fading signs in French showed that this was an expanded base of the defeated French air force. Most of the buildings were raw new structures of wood or cement. Cracked old landing strips stood beside broad fresh ones like autobahns.

“You’ve done all this since June?” said Pug. “Pretty good.”

Jagow for a moment looked like a flattered old man, showing his sparse teeth in a pleased soft grin. “You have the professional eye. The Western newspaper smart alecks want to know why the Luftwaffe waited six precious weeks before commencing the attack. What do they know about logistics?”

While Hitler left the operation of the air force strictly to Göring, said the general, he had insisted on one point which showed his military genius. After the conquest of the Low Countries and northern France, advanced air bases had had to be set up on his orders. Only then would he allow the Luftwaffe to strike at England. Advanced bases would double or triple German air power. The same plane could make two or three times as many attacks in the same number of hours, and on these shortened runs kilograms of bombs could replace kilograms of gasoline.

“The simplest strategic thinking,” said Jagow, “and the soundest.”

They visited a dispersal hut, where worn-looking German youngsters, strangely like the RAF fighter pilots, lounged in flying suits, ready to go. But when they saw Jagow they sprang to attention as the British pilots never had. The hut was more roughly built, and the plump simpering pinup girls on the wooden walls, next to mimeographed watch notices and regulations, offered doughy German sexiness rather than the bony Anglo-American variety. Otherwise it was all the same, including the mildewy smell of bedding and flying clothes.

As Jagow’s car drove along the field, an air raid siren went off. Pilots came scrambling out of their huts. “Stop the car,” he said to the driver, adding to Victor Henry, “A nuisance raid, high level. A sound tactic, we must respond and it throws our pilots off balance. But the British pay with a lot of bombers. Flimsy planes, poorly armed. Shall we get out and watch?”

Messerschmitt after Messerschmitt wheeled into position and roared off, a steady stream of steep-climbing fighters.

“To me this is a depressing sight,” said Jagow, hugging his lean body in the shiny long coat with both arms, as though chilled. “Germans fighting Englishmen. Diamond cut diamond. It is civil war in the West, plain suicidal foolishness. The English could have a decent honorable peace tomorrow. That bulldog Churchill is counting on one thing and one thing only — American help.”

“General, he’s counting on the courage of his people and the quality of his air force.”

“Captain Henry, if Roosevelt cut off all help and told Churchill he wanted to mediate a peace, how long would this war go on?”

“But that’s impossible.”

“Very true, because your President is surrounded by Morgenthaus, Frankfurters, and Lehmans.” General Jagow held up a long skinny hand in a long gray glove as Pug started to protest. “I am not a Nazi. I came into the Luftwaffe from the army. Don’t ever think anti-Semitism is a German problem. All over Europe the attitude toward the Jews is exactly the same. The Führer has been realistic in spelling it out, that’s all. Some of his Party followers have committed silly excesses. But you can’t indict a whole people for the crudeness of a few. Those American Jews around Roosevelt make the same mistake that our Nazi fanatics do.”

“General Jagow,” Pug broke in earnestly, “you can’t make a greater mistake than to believe that the Jews are behind our hostility to Hitler’s regime.” He was hoping to penetrate this hardened German obsession just once. Jagow was unusually intelligent. “A lot of our people deeply admire the Germans. I do. But some things Hitler has done are unforgivable to any American.”

“Things Hitler has done!” Jagow sighed, his eyes heavy and sad. “Let me tell you something that may amaze you, Captain. When we took Poland, it was we Germans who stopped the Poles from murdering the Jews. They took our arrival as a signal to let loose. It was like open season on Jews! The atrocities were unbelievable. Yes, our Wehrmacht had to step in and shield the Jews from the Poles.” The general coughed hard. “I am not pretending we love the Jews. I don’t claim they should love us. I actually understand the Morgenthaus. But they’re tragically wrong. The United States must not allow a war to the death between England and Germany. We are all one civilization. We are the West. If we fight it out among ourselves we’ll go down before Asiatic Bolshevism. There will be barbaric darkness for a thousand years.”

Jagow fell silent, his hollow, somewhat feverish eyes boring at Pug. Then he put out a long stiff finger.

“If there were only a few strong advisers to give your President this viewpoint. But those advisers who aren’t Jewish are of British descent. It’s a damnable situation. We’ll beat the British, Captain Henry. We have the power. We never intended to fight them. The Führer could have built a thousand submarines and strangled England in three months. He never emphasized U-boats, you know that. What do we gain by such a victory? We only crush our finest natural ally.”

“Well, General, you attacked Poland when she was England’s ally. You made the deal with Stalin. Those things are done.”

“They were forced on us.” Behind a gloved hand, Jagow coughed long and genteelly. “We are a strange people, Captain Henry, hard for others to understand. We are very serious, very naïve. Always we are reaching for the stars. To others we seem insensitive and arrogant. Our English cousins are every bit as arrogant, I assure you. Ah, but what a manner they cultivated. They despise their Jews. They keep them out of the clubs where power is concentrated, and the banks, and all vital positions. But they act politely to them. We admitted the Jews to all our very highest circles, until they swarmed in and threatened to take over entirely. But we showed our feelings. That’s the difference. The German is all feeling, all Faustian striving. Appeal to his honor, and he will march or fly or sail to his death with a happy song. That is our naïveté, yes, our primitivism. But it is a healthy thing. America too has its naïveté, the primitive realism of the frontier, the cowboys.

“What does it all add up to? We need friends in the United States to explain that there are two sides to this war, and that the only solution is peace in the West, unity in the West, an alliance in the West that can control the world. — Ah, look there. The British marksmanship is rather hard on the French livestock, but that’s about all.”

On a distant hill, huge inverted pyramids of dirt splashed high in the air amid flame and smoke, and cows galloped clumsily around. The general glanced at his watch. “I have a little conference at headquarters. If you can stay for dinner, there is a very pleasant restaurant in Lille—”

“I have to return to Berlin, General. I can’t express my gratitude, but -”

Up went the glove. “Please. To talk to an American, a professional military man, who shows some understanding of our situation, is literally good for my health.”

Messerschmitts were landing in the rain when Jagow turned Victor Henry over to his lieutenant at the entrance to the headquarters building.

“If we can be of further service in the matter of Flight Lieutenant Gallard, let us know,” Jagow said, stripping off a glove to offer a damp cold hand. “Auf Wiedersehen, Captain Henry. If I have been of any small service, all I ask is this. Wherever duty takes you, remember there are two sides to the war, and that on both sides there are men of honor.”

The ornately molded and carved ceilings in Wolf Stöller’s bank seemed forty feet high. A few clerks worked silently behind the grilles. The footsteps of the two men on the red marble floor echoed and re-echoed under the high vault, like the tramp of a platoon. “It is a little gloomy here now,” said Stöller, “but very private. This way, Victor.”

They passed through a sizable conference room into a small richly furnished office, with a blaze of paintings crowding the walls; little though he knew, Henry recognized two Picassos and a Renoir.

“So, you go so soon,” Stöller said, gesturing to a heavy maroon-leather couch, “Did you expect this?”

“Well, I thought my relief would be along in a couple of weeks. But when I got back from Lille, here he was, waiting.”

“Of course you are anxious to be reunited with your very beautiful wife.”

Victor Henry said, with a glance at the larger Picasso, a gruesomely distorted woman in flaring colors, “I thought modern art was frowned on in the Third Reich.”

Stöller smiled. “It has not gone down in value. The field marshal has one of the great collections of the world. He is a very civilized man. He knows these things will change.”

“They will?”

“Most assuredly, once the war is over. We are a nation under siege, Victor. Nerves get frayed, a mood of extremism prevails. That will die away. Europe will be a wonderful place to live. Germany will be the pleasantest place of all. What do you say to a glass of sherry?”

“That’ll be fine. Thanks.”

Stöller poured from a heavy crystal decanter. “What do we drink to? I daresay you won’t drink to the victory of Germany.”

With a tart grin Pug said, “We’re neutral, you know.”

“Ah, yes. Ah, Victor, if only you were! How gladly we would settle for that. Well, to an honorable peace?”

“Sure. To an honorable peace.”

They drank.

“Passable?”

“Fine. I’m no expert on wines.”

“It’s supposed to be the best sherry in Europe.”

“It’s certainly very good.”

The banker settled in an armchair and lit a long cigar. In the light of the floor lamp his scalp glistened pink through his thin flat hair. “Your little trip to Lille was a success, hm?”

“Yes, I’m obliged to you and the general.”

“Please. By the ordinary rules, such a thing would be not only unusual but utterly impossible. Among men of honor, there are special rules.” Stöller heaved an audible sigh. “Well, Victor, I didn’t ask you to give me some time just to offer you sherry.”

“I didn’t suppose so.”

“You’re a military man. There are special conversations that sometimes have to be forgotten, obliterated without a trace. In German we have a special phrase for these most delicate matters. ‘Under four eyes.’”

“I’ve heard the phrase.”

“What transpires next is under four eyes.”

Victor Henry, intensely curious at this point, felt there was nothing to do but let the banker talk on. What might be coming next, he could not imagine; his best guess was a wispy peace feeler at second hand from Göring, to convey to the President.

“You had a conversation with Gregor Jagow about the course of the war. About the tragic absurdity of this fratricidal conflict between Germany and England.”

Pug nodded.

“Did his ideas make sense to you?”

“Frankly, we don’t study geopolitics in the Navy. At least we don’t call it that. So I’m not up on Spengler and so forth.”

“You’re an American pragmatist,” said Stöller with a smile.

“I’m a gunnery expert misplaced in diplomacy, and hoping the hell to get out of it.”

“I believe you. The man of honor wants to serve in the field.”

“I’d like to do what I’m trained for.”

“You do agree that American help, and expectation of far greater help, is what is keeping England in the war?”

“Partly. They just don’t feel like quitting. They think they’ll win.”

“With American help.”

“Well, they think they’ll get it.”

“Then what stands between the whole Western world and an honorable peace — which you and I just drank to — is Churchill’s reliance on help from Roosevelt.”

Pug took a few moments to answer. “Maybe, but what’s an honorable peace? Churchill would want to depose Hitler. Hitler would want to depose Churchill. Both those gentlemen are equally firmly in the saddle, and both really represent the national will. So there you are.”

“You are going back to serve as naval aide to President Roosevelt.” Stöller said this with a slight interrogative note.

Pug’s face registered no surprise. “I’m going back to the Bureau of Personnel for reassignment.”

The banker’s smile was tolerant and assured. “Well, our intelligence usually gets these things right. Now, Victor, let me have my say, and don’t break in until I’ve finished. That’s all I ask. All right?”

“All right.”

The banker puffed twice at his cigar. “Men of honor talk among themselves, Victor, in a special language. I’m addressing you now in that vocabulary. These are matters of incredible delicacy. In the end, beneath the words there must be a spiritual kinship. With you, Gregor Jagow and I have felt that kinship. You have been impeccably correct, but unlike so many people at the American embassy, you don’t regard Germans as cannibals. You have treated us as human beings like yourself. So did your delightful and beautiful wife. It has been noticed, I assure you. That you sympathize with England is only natural. I do myself. I love England. I spent two years at Oxford.

“Now, you heard what Gregor said about the Jewish influence around your President. I know you have to deny it, but it is a very serious fact of this war. We must live with it and do what we can about it.”

Pug tried to speak. Stöller held up a rigid palm. “You said you would hear me out, Victor. In the circumstances, we need friends in Washington. Not to use undue influence, as the Jews do so shamelessly. Simply to present the other side. Roosevelt is a man of very broad vision. He can be made to see that American interest requires a swift honorable peace in the West. For one thing, only such a development can free him to handle Japan. Do you suppose we give a damn about Japan? That new pact is all comedy to keep the Russians worried and quiet.

“Now, Victor — and remember this is under four eyes — we do have such friends. Not many. A few. Patriotic Americans, who see the realities of the war instead of the propaganda of the Jews — and of Churchill who is just an adventurous megalomaniac and has never been anything else. We hope you’ll be another such friend.”

Victor Henry regretted that he had drunk up the glass sherry rather fast. The conversation was taking a turn which needed sharp handling. He leaned forward.

“Let me go on,” said the banker, waving the cigar at him. “You know of my connection with Hermann Göring. To me he is a great figure of European history. His practical grasp of affairs and his energy still astound me. The Führer — well, the Führer is different, he operates on a plane above all of us, a plane of prophecy, of grand dreams. The engineer at the throttle is Göring. Nothing in Germany escapes him. Nothing happens that he does not approve and know about. You Americans with your Puritan bias think him a bit of a sultan. But we Germans love opera and opulence. It’s a weakness. The field marshal knows that and plays to it. Of course, he thoroughly enjoys himself too. Why not? His zest for life is Faustian, Rabelaisian.

“Victor, Hermann Göring has established in Switzerland some anonymous, untraceable bank accounts. His resources are enormous. These bank accounts, after the war, will be rewards of Germany’s honorable friends, who have said the right word in the right place for her when it mattered. It is nothing like espionage, where you pay some sneaking wretch for papers or information he hands over. This is simple gratitude among men of honor, a sharing of benefits in the day of victory. If our friends want the accounts, they will be there. If they don’t -” Stöller shrugged and sat back. “I’ve said my piece, Victor. And after you’ve said yours, this conversation will be as if it never existed.”

It was one of the few occasions in Victor Henry’s life when he was taken totally by surprise.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “Extremely interesting.” After a measurable pause he went on, “Well! First, please tell me, if you can, what made you, or General Jagow, or Field Marshal Göring, think that I might be receptive to this approach. That’s highly important to me, and to this whole matter, I assure you.”

My dear chap, the Washington picture is vital, and you’re en route to Washington. The day American supplies to England are shut off, we’ve won the war. We’ve got it won now, really, but England is just hanging on, hoping for she doesn’t know what. She’ll be flat broke in three or four months, and if your Neutrality Act holds, that’s the end. Now Victor, the field marshal remembers your interesting visit with the banker Gianelli. His purpose now is exactly what Roosevelt’s was then, to avoid further useless bloodshed. He thinks you can help, and General Jagow is confident that you will.” Stöller gave Pug his most ingratiating smile, crinkling his eyes almost shut. “As for me, I know your exquisite wife is a very sympathetic and friendly woman. My guess is that she has always reflected your real feelings, more than your correct words. I trust I’m right.”

Victor Henry nodded. “I see. That’s a clear answer, Herr Stöller. Here’s mine, under four eyes. Please tell Field Marshal Göring, for me, to stick his Swiss bank account up his fat ass.”

Blue smoke wreathed around Stöller’s shocked face. His eyes went wide and glassy, his face became dark red from his striped collar to his hair, and his scalp reddened too. His teeth showed in an ugly smile. “I remind you, Captain Henry,” he said in a new slow singsong tone, “that you have not left the Third Reich yet. You are still in Berlin. Field Marshal Hermann Göring is second here only to the Führer.”

“I’m an officer in the United States Navy. Unless I misunderstood you, or you want to withdraw it” — Victor Henry’s voice hardened almost to a bark — “you’ve asked me, in his name, to commit treason for money.”

The banker’s nasty smile faded. In a placating tone, with a soft look, spreading out his hands, he said, “My dear Victor, how can you take it in that way? I beg you, think! The highest officers in the American armed forces blatantly and openly advocate help for England all the time. What I asked of you was just to present both sides, when the occasion arose, for the sake of American security and for peace.”

“Yes, as a man of honor. I heard you. I really believe you mean it. General Jagow said you Germans were a difficult people to understand. That is the truth. Im giving up. My assignment here is over.” Victor Henry knew he had hit too hard, but he had reacted as he did in a ball game, on instinct and impulse. He stood, and the banker got to his feet too.

“See here, old top,” Stöller said gently, “we Germans are at war, surrounded by foes. If the United States is ever in such a situation — and history takes strange turns — you may one day make an approach like this to a man you respect and find it as difficult as I have. I think your response has been naïve and wrong. Your phrasing was coarse. Still, the spiritual quality was there. It was an honorable reaction. I have absolutely no hard feelings. I trust you have none. I place a high value on your goodwill, Victor. And we did have good times at Abendruh, didn’t we?”

Smiling, Stöller held out his smooth thin clean hand. Pug turned on his heel and walked out of the room. Out of the loudly echoing bank he walked, nodding at the door attendant’s deep bow. In the warm sunlit Berlin evening, on the sidewalk outside, beautiful German children surrounded a one-legged man on a crutch, who was selling paper dolls that danced on strings. Victor Henry walked several blocks at a pace that made his heart pound. The first new thought that came to him was that, with his grossly insulting words and acts, he might have murdered Ted Gallard.

Chapter 36 — The Garden Rose (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

Chapter 37

Travelling to his new post in mid-January, Leslie Slote found himself stalled in Lisbon by a shortage of Lufthansa accommodations to Berlin. He checked into the Palace Hotel in Estoril, Lisbon’s palm-lined seaside resort, where diplomats, wealthy refugees, Gestapo, and other foreign agents congregated. He thought he might pick up some information there while he waited for an air reservation to open up. Actually, he found Estoril in January an exceedingly chilly and boring place. The German abounded, but they kept in aloof clusters, regarding other people with supercilious eyes.

He sat in the crowded lobby of the hotel one afternoon gnawing at his pipe, and reading in a Swiss newspaper about British successes against the Italians in Abyssinia and North Africa, faint rays in the gloom. The neutral newspaper had been hard to come by. Fascist and Nazi journals now blanketed Portuguese newsstands, with a few scrawny, disgustingly servile periodicals from Vichy France. British and American publications had vanished. It was a fair barometric reading of the way the war was going, at least in the judgment of Portugal’s rulers. A year ago, on Lisbon newsstands, papers of both sides had been equally available.

“Meestair Slote! Meestair Leslie Slote!”

He jumped up and followed the small pink-cheeked page to a telephone near the reception desk.

“Leslie? Hello, it’s Bunky. How goes it by the old seaside?”

Bunker Wendell Thurston, Jr., had attended the Foreign Service school with Slote, and now held the post of second secretary in the American legation in Lisbon.

“Mighty dully, Bunky. What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing much.” Thurston sounded amused. “It’s just that you’ve spoken to me now and then, I believe, about a girl named Natalie Jastrow.”

Slote said sharply, “Yes, I have. What about her?”

“A girl by that name is sitting across the desk from me.”

“Who is? Natalie?”

“Like to talk to her? When I told her you were here she jumped a foot.”

“Christ, yes.”

Natalie came on the phone laughing, and Slote’s heart throbbed at the familiar lovely sound. “Hello, old Slote,” she said.

“Natalie! This is so staggering, and wonderful. What are you doing here?”

“Well, how about you?” Natalie said. “I’m as surprised as you are. Why aren’t you in Moscow?”

“I got hung up, in Washington and then here. Is Aaron with you?”

“I wish he were. He’s in Siena.”

“What! Aren’t you on your way back to the States?”

Natalie took a moment to answer. “Yes and no. Leslie, as long as you’re here, can I see you for a while?”

“Naturally! Wonderful! Immediately! I’ll come in to the legation.”

“Wait, wait. You’re at the palace Hotel, aren’t you? I’ll come out and meet you. I’d rather do that.”

Bunky Thurston came on the line. “Look, Leslie, I’ll put her on the bus. She’ll arrive in half an hour or so. If I may, I’ll join you two in the Palace lobby at five.”

She still had a fondness for big dark hats. He could see her through the dusty bus window, moving down the aisle in a jam of descending passengers. She ran to him, threw her arms around him, and kissed his cheek. “Hi! I’m freezing. I could have worn my ratty beaver coat, but who’d think it would be this cold and gray in Lisbon? Brrr! It’s even colder out here by the sea, isn’t it?” She clapped her hand to her hat as the wind flapped it. “Let’s look at you. Well! No change. If anything, you look rested.”

She said all this very fast, her eyes wide and shiny, her manner peculiarly excited. The old spell worked at once. In the months since he had last seen Natalie, Slote had started up a romance with a girl from Kansas named Nora Jamison. Nora was tall, brunette, and dark-eyed like this one, but otherwise as different as a doe from a bobcat: even-tempered, affectionate, bright enough to be in her third year as a senator’s secretary, and pretty enough to play leads with a semiprofessional Washington theatre group. Her father was a rich farmer; she drove a Buick convertible. She was altogether a find, and Slote was thinking seriously of marrying her on his return from Moscow. Nora worshipped him, and she was better looking than Natalie Jastrow and much easier to manage. But this Jewish girl in the big hat put her arm around him and brushed his face with her lips; he experienced a stabbing remembrance of what her love was like, and the snare closed on him again.

He said, “Well, you know how I admire you, but you do look slightly beat up.”

“Do I ever! I’ve had hell’s own time getting here. Let’s get out of this wind. Where’s the Palace Hotel? I’ve been to Estoril twice, but I forget.”

He said, taking her arm and starting to walk, “It isn’t far. What’s the story? Why didn’t Aaron come? What are you doing here?”

“Byron’s arriving tomorrow on a submarine.” He halted in astonishment. She looked up at him, hugged his arm, and laughed, her face alive with joy. “That’s it. That’s why I’m here.”

“He made it through that school?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I thought he might find it too much work.”

“He squeaked by. This is his first long cruise. The sub’s stopping here, just for a few days. I suppose you think I’m rattlebrained, but he wrote me to come and meet him, and here I am.”

“Nothing you do really surprises me, sweetie. I’m the man you came to visit in Warsaw in August ‘39.”

Again she squeezed his arm, laughing. “So I did. Quite an excursion that turned out to be, hey! My God, it’s cold here! It’s a wonder all these palm trees don’t turn brown and die. You know, I’ve been through Lisbon twice before, Slote, and each time I’ve been utterly miserable. It feels very strange to be happy here.”

He asked her about Aaron Jastrow’s situation. Natalie said the impact of the note from the Secretary of State’s office had somehow been frittered away. The fact that Jastrow’s lapsed passport showed a questionable naturalization had fogged his case. Van Winaker, the young consul in Florence, had dawdled for almost a month, promising action and never getting around to it; then he had fallen ill and gone for a cure in France, and several more weeks had slipped by. Now Van Winaker was corresponding with the Department on how to deal with the matter. She had his firm promise that, one way or another, he would work it out. The worst of it was, she declared, that Aaron himself really was in no hurry to leave his villa, now that it seemed just a matter of unraveling a little more red tape. He half welcomed every new delay, though he went through the motions of being vexed…This was what was defeating her. He would not fight, would not put any pressure on the consul to settle the thing. He was writing serenely away at his Constantine book, keeping to all his little routines and rituals, drinking coffee in the lemon house, taking his walks at sunset, rising before dawn to sit blanketed on the terrace and watch the sun come up. He believed that the Battle of Britain had decided the war, that Hitler had made his bid and failed, and that a negotiated peace would soon emerge.

“I suppose I made a mistake, after all, going back to Italy,” she said, as they walked into the hotel. “With me around he’s perfectly comfortable and not inclined to budge.”

Slote said, “I think you were right to return. He’s in more danger than he realizes, and needs a hard push. Maybe you and I together can shake him free.”

“But you’re going to Moscow.”

“I have thirty days, and I’ve only used up ten. Perhaps I’ll go back to Rome with you. I know several people in that embassy.”

“That would be marvelous!” Natalie halted in the middle of the pillared lobby. “Where’s the bar?”

“It’s down at that end and it’s very dismal and beery. It’s virtually Gestapo headquarters. Why? Would you like a drink?”

“I’d just as lief have tea, Leslie.” Her manner was evasive. “I haven’t eaten all day. I was just wondering where the bar was.”

He took her to a long, narrow public room full of people in sofas and armchairs drinking tea or cocktails. Walking down the smoky room behind the headwaiter, they heard conversations in many languages: German was the commonest, and only one little group was talking English.

“League of Nations here,” Natalie said, as the waiter bowed them into a dark corner with a sofa and two chairs, “except that so many look Jewish.”

“A lot of them are,” Slote said dolefully. “Too many of them are.”

Natalie devoured a whole plate of sugared cakes with her tea. “I shouldn’t do this, but I’m famished. I’m big as a house. I’ve gained ten pounds in six months at the villa. I just eat and eat.”

“Possibly I’m prejudiced, but I think you look like the goddess of love, if a bit travel-worn.”

“Yes, you mean these hefty Venus de Milo hips, hey?” She darted a pleased look at him. “I hope Byron likes hips. I’ve sure got ‘em.”

“I hadn’t noticed your hips, but I assure you Byron will like them. Not that I really think you’re worried. There’s Bunky Thurston.” Slote waved as a little man at the doorway far down the room came toward them. “Bunky’s a prince of a fellow.”

“He has the world’s most impressive moustache,” Natalie said.

“It’s quite a moustache,” Slote said.

The moustache approached, a heavy rounded tawny brush with every hair gleaming in place, attached to a pleasant pink moon face set on a slight body dressed in natty gray flannel.

Slote said, “Hi, Bunky. You’re late for tea” but just in time for a drink.”

With a loud sigh, Thurston sat. “Thanks. I’ll have a double Canadian Club and water. What foul weather. The chill gets in your bones. Natalie, here’s that list I promised you.” He handed her a folded mimeographed sheet. “I’m afraid you’ll agree that it kills the notion. Now, I couldn’t track down Commander Bathurst, but I left word everywhere. I’m sure he’ll call me here within the hour.”

Slote glanced inquisitively at the paper in Natalie’s hand. It was a list of documents required for a marriage of foreigners in Portugal, and there were nine items. Avidly studying the sheet, Natalie drooped her shoulders and glanced from Slote to Thurston. “Why, getting all this stuff together would take months!”

“I’ve seen it done in one month,” Thurston said, “but six to eight weeks is more usual. The Portuguese government doesn’t especially want foreigners to get married here. I’m not sure why. In peacetime we send people over to Gibraltar, where you go through like greased lightning. But the Rock is shut up tight now.”

“Thinking of getting married?” Slote said to Natalie.

She colored at the dry tone. “That was one of many things Byron wrote about. I thought I might as well check. It’s obviously impossible, not that I thought it was such a hot idea anyway.”

“Who’s Commander Bathurst?” Slote said.

Thurston said, “Our naval attaché. He’ll know exactly when the submarine’s arriving.” He tossed off half his whiskey when the waiter set it before him, and carefully smoothed down his moustache with two forefingers, looking around the room with a bitter expression. “God, Lisbon gives me the creeps. Forty thousand desperate people trying to get out of the net. I’ve seen most of the faces in this room at our legation.” Thurston turned to Slote. “This isn’t what you and I bargained for when we went to Foreign Service school.”

“Bunky, you’d better get rid of that Quaker conscience, or you really will crack up. Remember that it isn’t us who’s doing it. It’s the Germans.”

“Not entirely. I never thought much about our immigration laws until this thing started. They’re pernicious and idiotic.” Bunky Thurston drank again and coughed, empurpling his face. “Forty thousand people. Forty thousand! Suppose we admitted them all? What difference would forty thousand people make, for God’s sake, in the wastes of Montana or North Dakota? They’d be a blessing!”

“They wouldn’t go there. They’d huddle in the big cities where there’s still an unemployment problem.”

Thurston struck the table with a fist. “Now don’t give me that stale drivel, Leslie. It’s enough that I have to parrot it all day myself. They’d go anywhere. You know that. They’d sign papers to live out their lives in Death Valley. Our law’s inhuman. Wasn’t America started as sanctuary from European oppression?”

Slote took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and glanced warily at the people nearest them, four elderly men arguing in French. “Well I’m not going to defend the law, but how do you draw the line? Or do you have unrestricted migration? Do you let in everybody who wants to come?

You’d empty southern and eastern Europe. They’d flood our economy, starve, ferment, and boil up in a revolution. What about the Orientals? Do you break the dike to the west? In ten years the United States would be a big Chinese suburb.”

Natalie said with a gesture at the room, “He’s talking about these few people in Lisbon who have escaped the Germans. That’s all.”

“Tried to escape,” said Thurston “The Germans can take Portugal overnight.”

“And I’m talking about the arguments that arise in Congress when you try to alter the law,” Slote said, “especially in favor of Jews.” Nobody wants any more competition from them; they’re too energetic and smart. That’s the fact of it, Natalie, like it or not.

“We could give refuge to all the Jews in Europe, all five million of them. We’d only be a lot better off,” Thurston said. “Remember your Ruskin? ‘Wealth is life,’ he said. And if that’s a bit too simple, it’s certainly true that wealth is brains.” He leaned toward Natalie, lowering his voice. “If you want to see the head of the Gestapo in Portugal, he’s just walking in, and with him is the German ambassador. Charming man, the ambassador. My wife really likes him.”

Natalie stared. “Is he the one with the scar?”

“No, I don’t know who that one is, though I’ve seen him around. I’m sure he’s Gestapo too. The ambassador’s the one in the gray suit.”

The three men sat not far from them, and the headwaiter fluttered and grinned eagerly, taking their orders.

“They look so ordinary,” Natalie said.

“The Germans are quite ordinary,” Slote said. “It’s a little scary, in fact, how much like Americans they are.”

Gloomily, Natalie said. “Those people at the table next to them are obviously Jews. Drinking and laughing, side by side with the Gestapo. Eerie.”

Thurston said, “I know them. They bought their way out of Belgium, and they still don’t believe they can’t buy their way into the United States. Most of the Jews here have been stripped penniless, but there are a handful of those. They’re in the casino night after night, whooping it up. Fish in the net, jumping and flopping, still enjoying the water while they can.” Thurston finished his drink, smoothed his moustache, and waved his glass at the waiter. “I want another. I’ve had some awful interviews today. Lisbon is a very sad and horrible place right now. My request for a transfer is in. The question is whether I’ll wait. I may just quit the service. I’ve never realized before how nice it is to have a wealthy father.”

Slote said to Natalie, “Am I taking you to dinner?”

“Please, I’d love that.”

“How about you, Bunky? Will you join us? Let’s all go upstairs to my suite for a while. I want to change my shirt, and all that.”

“No, I have a dinner appointment. I’ll sit here and have my drink with Natalie. I left word for Bathurst to page me here.”

Slote stood up. “Well, thanks for all you’ve done.”

“I can do wonders for people who don’t need help.”

Slote told Natalie the number of his suite, and left. Later she found a pencilled note stuck in his doorjamb: N — door’s open. She walked into a very large living room, looking out onto the purple sea beyond a long iron-railed balcony. Old heavy gilt and green furniture, gold cloth draperies, gilded mirrors, and large dark old paintings filled the room. Slote sang in a remote gushing shower. She yelled through an open bedroom door, “Hey! I’m here.”

The water shut off, and he soon appeared in a plaid robe, towelling his head. “How about these digs? Fit for a rajah, what? The legation had it reserved for some petroleum big shot and he didn’t show. I’ve got it for a week.”

“It’s fine.” She dropped heavily in a chair.

“What’s the matter?”

“Bathurst finally called. Briny’s sub has been re-routed to Gibraltar. It won’t come to Lisbon at all. No explanation, that’s just how it is.

“I see. Well, too bad. Maybe you can get to see him in Gibraltar.”

Thurston doesn’t think so, but he’s going to the embassy tomorrow morning, first thing, to find out. He’s being very kind. Especially since it’s obvious he thinks I’m a damned fool. No doubt you do, too.” She looked up at him with a defiant scowl that was familiar and took off her hat, and tossed her hair. “What had you told him about Briny, anyway? And about me? He seemed to know quite a bit.”

“Oh, we had too much wine one night and I cried on his shoulder about my tragic love life. I was very nice about Byron, I assure you, considering.”

She said with a trace of malice, “Yes, I’ll bet. Say, this is quite a layout at that. It’ll bankrupt you.”

“Not in the few days I’ll be here.”

“Me, I’ve dropped my bags in a flea trap back in town, sharing a room with a poor old Jewish lady from Rotterdam, whose husband got pulled off the train in Paris. I haven’t had a shower since Sunday.”

“Look, why not move in here? There’s an extra room for a maid. I’ll sleep in there. Look at that bed. A football field. It’s yours.”

“Nothing doing. Listen, Slote, if I can get to Gibraltar I’ll marry Byron. That’s what he wants.” Slote, combing his hair at a mirror framed by trumpeting gilded cherubs, stopped and gave her a pained skeptical look. She went on nervously, “I know it sounds harum-scarum and wild.” Her eyes suddenly shone, and she laughed. “But in point of fact, I want to do it myself.”

“Well, I suppose I should congratulate you, Natalie. God knows I wish you well.”

“Oh, I know you do, Slote. Don’t bother telling me how bizarre all this is. Some things are just inevitable. I love Byron.”

“Well, the place is at your disposal, anyway. They eat dinner late here. Take a shower.”

“And climb into the same old underwear?” Natalie shook her head, looking thoughtful. “I noticed a shop downstairs. Let me see what Lisbon can offer a big heifer like me.”

She came back shortly, carrying a box and looking sly. “Did you mean that invitation? I bought a pile of stuff. They had all these things from Seville, cheap and just yummy. Byron’s eyes will pop out of his head, if he ever shows up.”

“Are you low on money now?”

“My dear, I’m still rolling in it. That’s one thing about sitting on that Siena hill, with nothing to spend it on! Aaron pays me like clockwork and it just accumulates. Really, may I stay? I hate the idea of going back to town tonight. That poor old woman gives me the horrors.”

“I said the place is yours.”

“I can’t register.”

“Don’t worry.”

“All right.” She paused at the bedroom door and turned, holding the box in both arms. Her intense dark glance shook the diplomat. “People wouldn’t understand about us, would they, Slote?”

“There’s nothing to understand about me. You’re the puzzle.”

“You didn’t used to think I was puzzling.”

“I thought I had you figured out. I’m paying a steep price for oversimplifying.”

“You were an egotistical fool. I am very fond of you.”

“Thanks, Jastrow. Go take your goddamned shower.”

Next morning a buzzing at the suite door woke Slote. Tying on a robe, he came yawning out of the tiny maid’s room, and blinked. There in a blaze of sunshine sat Natalie in a dazzling white wool dress with a broad red gold-buckled belt, watching a waiter fuss over a breakfast on a wheeled table. “Oh, hi,” she said, smiling brightly and touching her carefully coiffed hair. “I didn’t know whether you wanted to get up. I ordered eggs for you, just in case. Everything’s so cheap and plentiful here!”

“I’ll brush my teeth and join you. You’re all spiffed up! How long have you been awake?”

“Hours and hours. I’m supposed to wait for Byron in the bar here at eleven o’clock today. That was the plan.”

Slote rubbed his eyes and peered at her. “What’s the matter with you? His sub’s en route to Gibraltar.”

“That’s what that man Bathurst said. Suppose he’s mistaken?”

“Natalie, he’s the naval attaché.”

“I know that.”

Shaking his head, Slote signed for the breakfast and the room. Soon he returned in a shirt, slacks, and sandals and found her eating with appetite. She grinned at him. “Forgive me for being a pig, dear. What a difference sunlight makes, and coffee! I feel marvellous.”

He sat down and cut into a ripe Spanish melon. “Sweetie, do you honestly expect Byron Henry to materialize in the bar of this hotel at eleven o’clock? Just on your sheer willpower?”

“Well, Navy signals get crossed up like any others, don’t they? I’m going to be there.”

“It’s just irrational, but suit yourself.”

“Do you like my dress? I bought it yesterday, right out of the window of that shop.”

“Very becoming.”

She kept glancing at her watch. “Well, wish me luck,” she said at last dropping her napkin on the table. “I’m off.”

“Do you intend to sit in the bar all day, like patience on a monument?”

“Don’t be cross with me, Leslie.”

“I’m not. I’d just like to plan the time.”

“Well, obviously, if he hasn’t showed by noon or thereabouts, the next thing is to find out how I get to Gibraltar.”

“I’ll call Bunky on that, and I’ll come down at noon.”

“Will you, please? Thanks, Leslie, thanks for everything. That bed’s wonderful; I haven’t slept so well in months.”

She could not quite keep the mischief out of her face as she said this and left with a nonchalant wave. Clearly, thought Slote, she was relishing his discomfiture. The tables were turned, and he had to endure it until he could turn them again.

He judged his chance was now at hand. Leslie Slote intended to take every possible advantage of this encounter. He could not understand Natalie’s resolve to squander herself on Byron Henry. He had made a fearful mistake in his early treatment of this magnificent girl, and now he wanted to retrieve it. Slote knew how a divorced man must feel, finding himself thrown together with an ex-wife he still loved. Between them stood a barrier of old quarrels and new proprieties — it had effectively kept him out of the big bed last night — but beneath all that lay a deep bond. If it had not been for Natalie’s fortuitous passion for the strange skinny Henry kid, he believed, they would by now be back together, very likely married. And he honestly thought he was more worthy of her and better suited to her.

Natalie might thrash about here in Lisbon for a while, he calculated; her willpower was formidable; but Gibraltar was probably impossible to get to. She would have to go back to Italy. He would accompany her to Siena, pry Aaron Jastrow loose, and send them both home. If necessary, he would wire Washington for a travel time extension. If he could not win Natalie back during all this, he sadly overestimated himself and the tie between them. He had been her first lover, after all. Slote believed that no woman ever really forgot the first man who had had her, ever got him quite out of her system.

He finished his breakfast at leisure, then telephoned Thurston. “Morning, Bunky. What did you find out about Natalie’s going to Gibraltar?”

“Forget it, Les. That submarine’s here.”

Slote had seldom heard worse news, but he suppressed any emotion in his voice. “It is? How come?”

“I don’t know. It came in at dawn. It’s tied up down at the river, near the customhouse.”

“Then what on earth was Bathurst talking about?”

“He’s mighty puzzled, and he’s going down there later to talk to the skipper. That submarine had orders to go to Gibraltar.”

“How long will it be here?”

“The original schedule called for three days.” Thurston’s voice turned puckish. “Tough luck, Les. Fantastic girl. I’d sweat out the three days and then see.”

In self-defense Slote said calmly, “Yes, she’s all right, but she used to be a lot prettier.” He dressed and hurried downstairs. In the dark bar there were only a handful of Germans, who turned suspicious faces to him. He went striding through the lobby.

“Here, Slote! Look behind you!” Natalie’s voice rang like joyous bells.

Half screened by potted palms, she sat on a green plush sofa with Byron. Before them on a coffee table, beside an open dispatch case, lay a pile of documents. The girl’s cheeks flamed, her eyes were gleaming, her whole face brilliantly animated. Byron Henry jumped up to shake hands. He appeared just the same, even to the tweed jacket in which Slote had seen him for the first time slouched against a wall in Siena.

Slote said, “Well, hello there! Did Natalie tell you we had some very wrong information?”

Byron laughed. “It wasn’t wrong, exactly, but anyway, here we are.” His glance swept the lobby. “Say, this place has a queer smell of Berlin. Isn’t it full of Germans?”

“They swarm, darling. Don’t say anything about anything.” Excitedly shuffling the documents. Natalie pulled at Byron’s hand. “I can’t find your certificate of residence.”

“It’s clipped with yours.”

“Then he’s got everything,” Natalie exclaimed to Slote. “Everything! All by the regulations, translated into Portuguese, notarized, and the notary seals authenticated by Portuguese consuls. The works.” As Byron dropped beside her, she put her hand in his thick hair and gave his head a yank. “I thought you were lousy at paperwork, you devil. How in God’s name did you manage this?”

Slote said, “Are you really sure everything’s there? I’ve never seen regulations as tough as these. Suppose I check that stuff over for you.”

“Oh, please, Leslie? Would you?” Natalie said, making room on the sofa and handing him the documents and the sheet Thurston had given her. Red ink check marks ran down the side of the page.

“How’d you assemble all this?” Slote said, starting to examine the papers.

Byron explained that as soon as he had learned of the scheduled cruise to Lisbon, he had obtained an emergency four-day pass, and had flown to Washington to find out at the Portuguese embassy what the marriage regulations were. The naval attaché there, Captain D’Esaguy, had turned out to be a friend of his from Berlin; the captain had been his tennis doubles partner for a while, playing against his father and the Swedish attaché. D’Esaguy had gone right to work. “It’s surprising what those fellows can accomplish in a few days when they want to,” Byron said. “I rounded up some of the papers, but the Portuguese consuls themselves did the hardest ones.”

“That’s the Foreign Service everywhere,” said Slote, methodically turning over one paper after another and glancing at the check list. “The wheels either turn glacially, or so fast you can’t see them whiz — well, Byron, I honestly think you, or this Portuguese navy captain, or both of you, did it. Everything seems to be here.”

“What now?” Natalie said.

“Will you marry me?” Byron said, very solemnly.

Natalie said, “I sure will, by God.”

They burst out laughing. With a melancholy chuckle, Slote slipped the papers into the folder which Byron had labelled in neat red block letter: MARRIAGE. “Suppose I telephone Thurston and ask him what you do next? Thurston’s my friend here in the legation, Byron.”

Byron Henry slowly, gratefully smiled, and Slote could not but see how appealing the smile was. “Thanks a lot. Will you? I’m not thinking too clearly at the moment.”

“No? On the whole, I’d say you’re doing all right.”

Returning a few minutes later, he saw them holding hands on the sofa, looking adoringly at each other and both talking at once. He hesitated, then approached them. “Sorry. Problems.”

Natalie looked up at him, startled and frowning. “What now?”

“Well, Bunky’s bowled over by what you’ve done, Byron, just impressed as hell. He’s at your service and wants to help. But he doesn’t know what he can do about that twelve-day requirement for posting banns. Then there’s the foreign Office’s authentication of the consuls’ signatures.

He says that usually takes a week. So -” Slote shrugged, and dropped the folder on the table.

“Right. D’Esaguy mentioned both those points,” Byron said. “He thought they could be gotten around. I stopped off at the navy ministry on the way here this morning and gave his uncle a letter. His uncle’s a commodore, or something. He was awfully nice to me, but he only speaks Portuguese. I think he’s working on those snags. I’m supposed to go back to the ministry at one o’clock. Could Mr. Thurston meet us there? That might be a real help.”

Slote looked from Byron to Natalie, whose mouth was twitching in amusement. She still held Byron’s hand in her lap. “I’ll call back and ask him. You’ve certainly been forehanded.”

“Well, I sort of wanted this to come off.”

With some stupefaction, Bunker Thurston agreed over the telephone to meet them at the navy building at one.

“Say, Leslie, I thought you called this ensign of hers a sluggard and a featherhead. He’s organized this thing like a blitzkrieg.”

“Surprised me.”

“You have my sympathies.”

“Oh, shut up, Bunky. I’ll see you at one.”

“You’re coming too?”

“Yes, oh yes.”

“You’re a glutton for punishment.”

A tall man in Navy dress blues leaned on the fender of an automobile outside the hotel, smoking a very black, very fat cigar. “Hey, Briny! Is the exercise on?”

“It’s on.” Byron introduced him to Natalie and Slote as Lieutenant Aster, his executive officer. Aster took in the girl with a keen, rather greedy glance of pale small blue eyes. He was broader and heavier than Byron, with thick wavy blond hair growing to a peak on his forehead, and a long face that looked genial because the corners of his mouth turned up. But it was a tight tough mouth. “Say, Natalie, that picture of you that Briny keeps mooning over doesn’t do you justice. Hop in everybody. I phoned the skipper, Briny, and told him you’d made contact. You’re off the watch list while we’re here.”

“Great, Lady. Thanks.”

Not sure she had heard this right, Natalie said, “Lady?”

The executive officer’s smile was a bit weary. “That happened to me in my plebe year at the Academy. With a name like Aster, I guess it had to. My name’s Carter, Natalie, and by all means use it.”

Driving into the city, the two submariners described how the S-45, a hundred fifty miles out of Lisbon, had in fact been ordered to Gibraltar. The captain, who knew about Byron’s plans, had expressed his regrets but altered course to the south. Within an hour reports came in to the captain that the number two main engine was down, the forward battery was throwing excessive hydrogen, and an evaporator had salted up, and a general plague of malfunctions was breaking out in the old boat, necessitating an emergency call in Lisbon for two or three days of alongside repairs. Aster, who brought in the reports, gave his opinion, which was backed by the Chief of the Boat, that it might be hazardous to proceed to Gibraltar. All this was done with a straight face, and with a straight face the captain accepted the executive officer’s recommendation and turned back to Lisbon.

“How can you possibly get away with that?” said Slote. “Won’t you all be court-martialled?”

“Nobody was lying.” Aster said with an innocent smile. “We have the engine records to prove it. These old S-boats gasp and flounder along, and at practically any moment you could justify an order to abandon ship. Coming into Lisbon was highly commendable prudence.”

Natalie said to Byron, “And you submerge in an old wreck like that?”

“Well, the S-45 has made four thousand, seven hundred and twenty-three dives Natalie. It should be good for a few more.”

“Diving is nothing,” said Lady Aster. “You pull the plug and she goes down; you blow air and she pops up. It’s going from one place to another that’s kind of a strain on the old hulk. But we manage. By the way everybody’s invited aboard after the ceremony.”

“Me? On a submarine?” Natalie tucked her skirt close around her thighs.

“The captain wants to congratulate you. He was pretty nice about coming in to Lisbon, you know.”

“We’ll see,” Natalie said. “Slote! Are you trying to maim us all?”

“Sorry, that truck came out of nowhere,” said Slote, pulling the car back on the bumpy road. He was driving too fast.

Shaking hands in the sunshine outside the navy ministry, Bunker Thurston gave Ensign Henry a prolonged curious scrutiny. “I’m glad to meet a fellow with such a knack for getting things done.”

“This thing’s not done yet, by a long shot, sir. Thanks for offering to help out.”

“Well, come along, and let’s see what happens. You’ve got some strong pull on your side. D’Esaguy seems to be something like a deputy chief of naval operations.”

Judging by the number of anterooms and armed guards outside his office, the size of the room, the magnificence of the furniture, and the effulgence of his gold braid and combat ribbons, D’Esaguy certainly held some exalted post. He was a short dark man, with an elongated stern Latin face, and heavy hair graying at the sides. He held himself, and shook hands, and gestured as he welcomed them, with noble grace; and to Natalie he made a deep bow, his black eyes showing a spark of admiration. He turned businesslike and rattled rapidly to Thurston in Portuguese.

“He says these things take time,” Thurston reported. “He would like to invite us all to lunch.”

Byron glanced at Natalie, and said, “That’s very cordial of him. Does he know we only have three days?”

“I’m not sure you ought to press him,” Thurston muttered.

“Please tell him what I said.”

“Okay.”

The Portuguese officer listened gravely to Thurston. His eyes were on Byron. A wrinkle of his mouth, a flash of fun in the somber face, acknowledged the impatience of a young lover. He turned and rapped an order to an assistant only slightly less crusted with gold braid than himself, who sat at a small desk. The assistant jumped up and went out. After a minute of heavy silence he returned with a bouquet of red roses. He gave these to D’Esaguy, who handed them to Natalie Jastrow with a bow and a few charmingly spoken words.

Thurston translated, “The dew will not dry on these roses before you are married.”

“Good God. How beautiful. Thank you!” Natalie’s voice trembled. She stood holding the roses, looking around at the men, blushing. “You know, I’m beginning to believe it! For the very first time.”

“The exercise is on, lady,” said Lieutenant Aster. “Cancel now, if you’re ever going to.”

“Cancel?” She took Byron’s arm. “Nonsense. Commence firing!”

“Hey, a Navy wife,” said Lieutenant Aster.

D’Esaguy, trying alertly to follow this chatter, asked Thurston to translate. He burst out laughing, took Natalie’s hand, and kissed it.

“Come,” he said in English. “A leetle luncheon.”

The lunch was long and excellent, in a restaurant with a lordly view, much like a San Francisco panorama, of the Lisbon hills and the broad sparkling river. The commodore seemed in no hurry at all. Thurston kept checking his watch, knowing that most government offices would shut by four-thirty or five. At three D’Esaguy said casually that perhaps they might see now how the little business was coming along. In an enormous black Mercedes limousine they commenced a whirling tour of office buildings. Thurston tried to explain what was happening, but after a while he gave up, because he wasn’t sure. Sometimes the commodore descended for a few minutes by himself, sometimes he took the couple along to sign a ledger or a document, with Thurston accompanying them. An official invariably waited at the door to greet them and to lead them past crowded anterooms into dusty old inner offices, where fat pallid old department heads got awkwardly out of their chairs to bow to D’Esaguy.

About two hours later they arrived at an office familiar to Thurston, where civil marriages were registered. It was closed for the day and the blinds were drawn. As the black limousine came to a stop, one blind went up and the door opened. A huge old woman in a brown smock, with visible chin whiskers, led them through dark empty rooms to an inner office where a chandelier blazed. At an ancient desk, fussing with papers, sat a dark frog-faced man with gold-rimmed glasses, several gold teeth, and three thick gold rings. He smiled at them and spoke to Thurston in Portuguese. Thurston translated his questions; the man scratched with a blotchy pen on many of Byron’s documents and kept stamping them. Natalie, Byron, and the two witnesses — Aster and Slote — signed and signed. After a while the man stood, and with a lewd gold-flecked smile held out his hand to Natalie and then to Byron, saying brokenly, “Good luck for you.”

“What’s this now?” Natalie said.

“Why, you’re married,” Thurston said. “Congratulations.”

“We are? Already? When did we get married? I missed it.”

“At one point there, where you both signed the green book. That was it.”

“I haven’t the faintest recollection.”

Byron said, “Nor have I. However, I’ll take your word for it. Let’s have that ring, Lady.”

Aster put it in his hand. He slipped the yellow band on Natalie’s finger, swept her into his arms, and kissed her. Meantime Thurston told D’Esaguy how the couple had missed the moment of marriage, and the Portuguese officer laughed. He laughed again when Thurston explained the American custom of kissing the bride. Natalie said that D’Esaguy must kiss her first. With marked pleasure, the old aristocrat executed the privilege on her lips. Then he left, after courtly handshakes all around, as Byron gathered up his sheaf of documents and paid the fees.

Slote was the last to kiss her. Natalie hesitated, looking into his eyes, and said, “Well, old Slote, I seem to have done it, don’t I? Wish me well.”

“Oh, I do, I do, Jastrow. You know that.”

She gave him a cool brief kiss on the mouth, putting her free hand on his neck.

When they emerged into the late golden sunshine, the black limousine was gone. The office door closed behind them and Slote felt something loose and grainy thrust in his hand. It was rice. Lieutenant Aster grinned a strange cold thin-lipped grin at him and winked a sharp blue eye. At a signal from Aster, the three men pelted the couple.

Natalie, brushing rice from her dress, wiped her eyes with a knuckle. “Well, that certainly makes it official! Now what happens?”

“If you don’t know,” said Lady Aster, “Byron’s got a lot of fast explaining to do.”

Natalie choked and turned brick red. “My God, Briny, who is this character?”

“Lady’s spent too much time submerged,” said Byron. “He has trouble raising his mind to sea level.”

“Marriage is holy and beautiful,” said Lady Aster. “But before you hop to it, how about visiting the old S-45 for a minute? The skipper’s sort of expecting us.”

“Of course, of course,” Natalie said hurriedly. “I want to see the S-45. I’m dying to. By all means.”

“Have you any idea where you’ll go after that?” Leslie Slote dryly put in.

Byron said, “Well, I figured there’d be a place — a hotel, something.”

“Lisbon’s jammed to bursting,” said Slote.

“My God, so it is. I never gave it a thought,” Natalie said.

“Why not take my place?” said Leslie Slote. “That’s a honeymoon suite, if ever I saw one.”

Natalie looked very surprised and glanced at Byron. “That’s sweet of you, Slote, but I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“We’ll find something,” Byron said, shaking his head.

“Oh, but his place is out of the Arabian Nights,” said Natalie, adding very casually, “I had a drink there last night. Would you do such a thing for us, old Slote?”

“Leslie can stay with me,” Thurston said. “No problem at all. Pick me up at the legation, Les. I have to rush there now.”

“It’s all set,” said Slote. “While you two visit the submarine, I’ll go to the hotel and clear out.”

“Bless you. Thank you. My bags,” said Natalie distractedly, “they’re in Mrs. Rosen’s room. Maybe I should get them! No, I have things to throw in. I’ll get ‘em later. Thanks, Slote. And you too, Bunky. Thanks for everything.”

Slote signalled at a passing taxicab. “Good luck.”

Natalie was astonished at the small size of the submarine, at its ugliness, and at its rustiness. “Good heavens!” she shouted over the clanks and squeals of the crane moving overhead, as they got out of the cab. “Is that the S-45? Briny, honestly, don’t you get claustrophobia when you dive in that thing?”

“He’s never stayed awake long enough to find out,” said Aster. They were walking toward a gangway that was only a couple of planks nailed together. Sailors lounged on the low flat black forecastle, staring at the girl in white, with an armful of roses. “One day when we’re submerged he’ll open his eyes and begin screaming.”

“I don’t mind anything but the low company,” said Byron, “and the body odors. It’s especially marked among the senior officers. When I sleep I don’t notice it.”

A young tousle-headed sailor at the gangway, wearing a gun slung low on his hip, saluted Aster, gave Natalie a yearning respectful glance, and said, “Cap’n wants you-all to wait for him on the dock, sir.”

“Very well.”

Soon a figure in a blue uniform, with the gold stripes of a lieutenant, emerged from the rust-streaked black sail — the housing that rose amidships over the conning tower — and crossed the gangplank to the dock. The captain was shaped rather like his submarine, clumsily thick in the middle and tapering abruptly to either end. He had big brown eyes, a broad nose, and a surprisingly boyish face.

“Captain Caruso, this is my wife,” said Byron, jolting Natalie with the word.

Caruso took her hand in a white fat paw. “Well congratulations! Byron’s a good lad, in his short conscious intervals.”

“Do you really sleep that much?” Natalie laughed at Byron.

“It’s pure slander. I seldom close my eyes on this boat,” said Byron, “except to meditate on my folly in going to sub school. That I admit I do very frequently.”

“Eighteen hours at a stretch, he can meditate,” said Aster. “That’s solid gold meditating.”

Two sailors in dungarees came up out of an open hatch on the forecastle and crossed the gangway, one carrying a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, the other a tray of water glasses.

“Ah, here we go. Navy Regs don’t allow us to consume spirituous liquors on board, Mrs. Henry,” said the captain, and again she felt the little joyous jolt. He popped the cork and ceremoniously poured as the sailor held out one glass after another.

“To your happiness,” he shouted, as the crane went by overhead with a wild clanging. “To you, God bless you,” yelled Natalie, “for bringing him here.”

“To number two engine,” bellowed Lady Aster, “to the evaporators, the exhaust system, and the forward battery. Never has there been such a massive breakdown on a naval vessel.”

Byron silently lifted his glass to his captain and executive officer.

They drank. The crane rumbled away.

“Captain,” said Lady Aster, as Caruso refilled the glasses, “do you think that picture in Byron’s room does Natalie justice?”

“Not in the least,” said the captain, looking at her with liquid woman-loving Italian eyes. “It doesn’t begin to.”

“That’s how I feel. Now that you’ve actually seen her, sir, don’t you agree with me that what has to be done in Lisbon may take at least five days?”

“Three,” snapped Captain Caruso, the dreamy look vanishing. “Exactly seventy-two hours.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And you’d better produce some damned convincing malfunction reports, Lady.” The captain tossed off his wine and smiled at Natalie. “Now, can I offer you the hospitality of the boat for a little while?”

She followed the officers into the rusty sail and down a hatch. The ladder was cold and greasy, with narrow slippery rungs that caught at Natalie’s high heels. She had to lower herself through a second round hatch and down another ladder into a tiny room full of machinery strongly conscious of her exposed legs and glad that they were pretty and that her skirt was narrow.

“This is the control room,” Byron said, helping her down. “Up above was the conning tower.”

Natalie looked around at solemn-faced sailors in dungarees, and at the valves, knobs, dials, handles, big wheels, twisted cables, and panels of lights filling all the green-painted bulkheads. Despite a humming exhaust blower, the close, warm air smelled sourly of machinery, cooking, old cigars, and unwashed men. “Briny, do you really know what all these things are?”

“He’s learning,” said Lady Aster. “Between hibernations.”

They stepped through an open watertight door to the tiny wardroom, where Natalie met two more young officers. On the table stood a heart-shaped white cake, iced in blue with a submarine, cupids, and Mr. and Mrs. Byron Henry. She squeezed herself into the place of honor at the head of the table, opposite the captain. Byron and Lady Aster sat crouched against the bulkhead, to avoid a bunk folded back over their heads. Somebody produced a sword, Natalie cut up the cake, and the captain sent what was left to the crew’s quarters. The two glasses of champagne were going to Natalie’s head. She was half-dizzy anyway from the rush of events and the longing that blazed at her from the young men’s eyes. Over the coffee and cake she laughed and laughed at Lady Aster’s jokes, and decided that the old submarine, for all its cramped squalor, its reek of machinery and male bodies, was a mighty jolly vessel. Byron looked more desirable to her by the minute, and she kissed him often.

Before they left the S-45, Byron took his bride to a tiny cabin and showed her the narrow black aperture near the deck beneath two other bunks, where he slept. “I ask you,” he said, “would anybody spend extra time in that morgue slot through choice?”

“The alternative might be more frightful,” said Lady Aster, over Natalie’s shoulder. “Like staying awake.”

When Natalie and Byron came out on deck into cool fresh air, crewmen on the forecastle waved and cheered. Natalie waved back and some bold sailors whistled. The taxicab, called by the gangway watch for them, started off with a great clatter. The driver jammed on his brakes, jumped out, and soon Natalie and Byron heard him cursing in Portuguese as he threw aside shoes and tin cans. The crew laughed and yelled until the cab drove away.

“I daresay poor Slote’s left the hotel by now.” Natalie snuggled against her husband. “We’ll collect my bags and go there, right? Wait till you see it. It was terrible of me to jump at it like that, but honestly, Briny, it’s the royal suite.”

In Natalie’s room, in a boardinghouse on a side street, an old woman snored in an iron bed. “Well, Slote’s place must be better than this.” Byron whispered, glancing at the cracked ceiling and at the roaches on the peeling wallpaper, scurrying to hide from the electric light. Natalie swiftly gathered her things and left a note with her key on the table. At the door she turned to look at Mrs. Rosen, lying on her back, jaw hanging open, gray hair tumbled on the pillow. What kind of wedding night had Mrs. Rosen had, she thought, with the husband whose silver-framed face smiled brownly on her bedside table, her one memento of the wretched man dragged off a French train by Germans? Natalie shivered and closed the door.

The desk clerk at the Palace Hotel evidently had been informed and tipped by Slote, for he yielded up the key to Byron with a greasy grin. The newlyweds had to give him their passports. Natalie felt a touch of fear, handing over the maroon American booklet that set her off from Lisbon’s forty thousand other Jews.

“I just thought of something,” she said in the elevator. “How did you register?”

“Mr. and Mrs., naturally. Big thrill.”

“I’m still Natalie Jastrow on that passport.”

“So you are.” The elevator stopped. He took her arm. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“But maybe you should go back and explain.”

“Let them ask a question first.”

As the bellboy opened the door to the suite, Natalie felt herself whisked off her feet. “Oh, Byron, stop this nonsense. I’m monstrously heavy. You’ll slip a disk.” But she clung to his neck with one hand and clutched her skirt with other, excited by his surprising lean strength.

“Hey!” he said, carrying her inside. “I see what you meant. Royal suite is right.”

When he put her down she darted ahead into the room. Natalie had a slight nag of worry about the negligee she had left hanging in Slote’s bathroom, and new sexy underwear in a bureau drawer. It might take some explaining! But all the stuff was gone — where, she had no idea. She was puzzling over this when Byron appeared in the french window of the bedroom, on the balcony. “This is great out here, all right. Cold as hell, though. Fabulous string of lights along the water. Did you notice the champagne? And the lilies?”

“Lilies?”

“In there.”

In a corner of the living room, beside champagne in a silver cooler on a marble table, stood a bouquet of red and white calla lilies, and beside them Slote’s small white card, with no writing. The doorbell rang. A bellboy gave Natalie a box from the lingerie shop. She hurried into the bedroom and opened it. There lay the underclothes Slote had cleared out, a many-colored froth of silk and lace.

“What’s that?” Byron said from the balcony.

“Oh, some stuff I bought in a lobby shop,” Natalie said airily. “I guess Slote told them I’d be here.” She picked up a peach nightgown, and with mock witchery draped it against her bosom. “Not bad for an academic type, hey?”

Then she saw a note in Slote’s handwriting, lying under the silks. Byron started to come in. She ran for the French door and shut it on him. “Give me a minute. Open the champagne.”

The note read: Wear the gray, Jastrow. You always looked angelic in gray. Confidential communication, to be destroyed. Yours till death. Slote.

The words brought a mist to Natalie’s eyes. She tore the note to bits and dropped them in a wastebasket. In the next room she heard a cork pop. She pulled from the box the gray silk nightdress laced and trimmed in black, and quite forgot Leslie Slote, as she speedily showered and perfumed herself. She emerged from the bedroom brushing her long black hair down on her shoulders. Byron seized her….

…Wine, lilies, and roses; the dark sea rolling beyond the windows under a round moon; young lovers separated for half a year, joined on a knife-edge of geography between war and peace, suddenly married, far from home; isolated, making love on a broad hospitable bed, performing secret rites as old as time, but forever fresh and sweet between young lovers, the best moments human existence offers — such was their wedding night. The human predicament sometimes seems a gloomy tapestry with an indistinct, baffling design that swirls around and inward to brilliant naked lovers. The Bible starts with this centerpiece. Most of the old stories end with the lovers married, retiring to their sacred nakedness. But for Byron and Natalie, their story was just beginning.

The lavish pulses and streams of love died into the warm deep sleep of exhausted lovers: Mr. and Mrs. Byron Henry, Americans, slumbering in wedlock in the Palace Hotel outside Lisbon, on a January night of 1941, one of the more than two thousand nights of the Second World War, when so much of mankind slept so badly.

Chapter 38

Natalie opened her eyes, awakened by the warbling and chirping of birds. Byron sat beside her, smoking. A cool breeze was blowing from an open door to the balcony. In a pink-streaked sky, the wan moon and one star hung low over the choppy sea.

“Hi. Listen to those birds! How long have you been awake, Byron?”

“Not long, but I’m really wide awake. Wide awake and still trying to believe it.”

She sat up. The bedclothes slipped from her breasts as she kissed him softly, sighing with satiated pleasure. “Gosh, that air’s icy, isn’t it?”

“I can close the door.”

“No, no, the sea smell is lovely.” She pulled the blanket to her neck, nestling beside him. After a silence she said, “Byron, how does a submarine work?”

He glanced down at her. His arm was around her. Caressing her shoulder. “Are you kidding?”

“No. Is it hard to explain?”

“Not at all, but why talk about that?”

“Because I want to know.”

“Well, it’s a hell of a topic to take up with a beautiful naked girl, but okay. I’ll tell you how a submarine works. To begin with, it’s built so that it just about floats when ballasted. So when you flood the diving tanks with a few tons of seawater you go right down, and when you blow the water out with compressed air, you pop up again. You begin with marginal buoyancy, and by changing the water ballast you become a rock or a cork as desired. That’s the general idea. The details are numerous and dull.”

“Well, is it safe? How much have I got to worry about?”

“Less than if I were a New York traffic cop.”

“You get hazardous duty pay.”

“That’s because civilians, like congressmen and you, yourself, have the illusion that it’s scary and risky to dive a boat under the water. No submariner will ever argue Congress out of that.”

“But when you go deep, isn’t there quite a risk of being crushed?”

“No. A sub’s just a long watertight steel tube, braced to hold off sea pressure. That’s the inner hull. It’s the real ship. The outside you see is just a skin for tanks, open at the bottom. The water sloshes in and out. The inner hull has a test pressure depth. You never submerge near that. Nobody to this day knows how deep the old S-45 can go. We ride on a thick cushion of safety.”

“Submarines have been lost.”

“So have ocean liners and sailing yachts. When men are trapped in a hull on the ocean bottom, tapping out Morse code, it makes a good story, but it’s only happened a couple of time. Even then there are ways of escaping, and we’re all trained in them.”

But when you flood the boat to go down, can’t the flooding get out of hand? Don’t smile darling. It’s all a mystery to somebody like me.”

“I smile because you ask good questions. But as I told you, the main tanks are outside the real hull. They’re just stuck on. When they flood, you’re awash, waterlogged. For diving there’s a small sealed tank inside, the negative tank. It can hold about twelve tons of seawater. Flood negative and down you go fast. When you’re at the depth you want, you blow negative, and there you are, hanging. You spread your bow planes, and you’re sort of like a fat airplane, flying slowly through thick air. Submariners are picked men, and great guys, darling, and all seventy-five of them dearly want nothing to go wrong! There are no slobs on a submarine. That’s the truth about submarines, and this is one peculiar conversation to be having in bed with a new wife.”

Natalie yawned. “You’re making me feel better. That rusty little boat scared me.”

“The new fleet submarines are luxury liners compared to the S-45,” Byron said. “I’ll go to one of those next.”

She yawned again, as a patch of pink light appeared on the wall. “Bless my soul, is that the sun? Where did the night go? Draw the curtains.”

Byron walked naked to the windows and closed the heavy draperies. As he returned to her in the gloom, she thought with piercing pleasure how handsome he was — a sculpted male figure — alive, warm, and brown.

He settled beside her. She leaned over him and gave him a kiss. When the young husband strongly pulled her close she pretended for a moment to fight him off, but she couldn’t choke down her welling joyous laughter. As the sun rose outside the screening curtains on another day of war, Byron and Natalie Henry went back to lovemaking.

They breakfasted at noon in the sunny sitting room, where the air was heavy with the scent of roses. Their breakfast was oysters, steak, and red wine; Natalie ordered it, saying it was precisely what she wanted, and Byron called it a perfect menu. They ate in dressing gowns, not talking much, looking deep in each other’s eyes, sometimes laughing at a foolish word or at nothing at all. They were radiant with shared, gratified desire.

Then she said, “Byron, exactly how much time do we have?”

“Well, seventy-two hours from the time we came alongside would be half past two. Thursday.”

Some of the pure gladness in her eyes dimmed. “Hm. That soon? Short honeymoon.”

“This isn’t our honeymoon. I’m entitled to twenty days leave. I reported straight to the S-45 from sub school. I’ll take those twenty days once you’re back home. When will that be?”

She leaned her head on her hand. “Oh, dear. Must I start thinking?”

“Look, Natalie. Why not send Aaron a wire that we’re married, and go straight home?”

“I can’t do that.”

“I don’t want you going back to Italy.”

Natalie raised her eyebrows at his flat tone. “But I have to.”

“No, you don’t. Aaron’s too cute,” Byron said. “Here, let’s finish this wine. As long as you or I or somebody will do the correspondence and dig in the library and keep after the kitchen, the gardeners, and the plumbers, he won’t leave that house. It’s that simple. He loves it, and he doesn’t scare easily. He’s a tough little bird, Uncle Aaron, under the helplessness and the head colds. What d’you suppose he’d do if you sent him that wire?”

Natalie hesitated. “Try to get me to change my mind. If that failed, make a real effort to leave.”

“Then it’s the best favor you can do him.”

“No. He’d make a mess of it. He’s not good with officials, and the stupider they are the worse he gets. He could really trap himself. Leslie Slote and I together can get him on his way in short order, and this time we’ll do it.”

“Slote? Slote’s en route to Moscow.”

“He’s offered to stop off in Rome and Siena first. He’s very devoted to Aaron.”

“I know who he’s devoted to.”

Natalie said softly with a poignant look, “Jealous of Leslie Slote, Briny?”

“All right. Sixty days.”

“What, dear?”

“Go back there for two months. No more. That should be plenty. If Aaron’s not out by April first or before, it’ll be his own doing, and you come home. Book your own transportation, right now.”

Natalie’s wide mouth curved wryly. “I see. Are you giving me orders, Byron?”

“Yes.”

She rested her chin on her palm, contemplating him with surprised eyes. “You know, that feels pretty good, being ordered around. I can’t say why. Possibly the delicious novelty will wear off. Anyway, lord and master, I’ll do as you say. Sixty days.”

“All right,” Byron said. “Let’s get dressed and see Lisbon.”

“I’ve seen Lisbon,” said Natalie, “but I’m all in favor of coming up for air.”

Dropping the key at the desk, Byron asked for their passports. With a heavy-lidded look, the swarthy short clerk disappeared through a door.

“Look at those fellows,” Byron said. Half a dozen Germans, in belted black raincoats despite the sunshine, were talking together near the lobby entrance, looking hard at everybody who came in and went out. “They might as well be wearing boots and swastikas. What is it about them? Those raincoats? The big brims on the hats? The bronze sunburns? How do they have time for sunbathing?”

“I recognize them with the back of my neck. It crawls,” Natalie said.

The desk clerk emerged from the door, busily shuffling papers. “Sorry, passports not ready yet.”

“I need mine!” Natalie’s tone was strident.

The clerk barely lifted his eyes at her. “Maybe this afternoon, madame,” he said, turning his back.

After the languors of the bedroom, the cold sunny outdoors felt bracing. Byron hired a taxi to drive them into and around Lisbon. The city was no Rome or Paris for sights, but the rows of pastel-colored houses — green, pink, blue — perched along the hills above a broad river made a pretty picture. Byron enjoyed himself, and he thought his bride was having fun too; she clung to his arm and smiled, saying little. The peculiar mixture of Moorish and Gothic styles in the churches, and in the great fortress commanding the city’s highest hill, brought back to Byron his dead-and-gone fine arts drudgery. They left the cab to descend arm in arm the steep, narrow, extremely small streets of the Alfama, where ragged children swarmed in and out of cracking crazy houses hundreds of years old, and open shops the size of telephone booths sold fish, bread, and meat scraps. It was a long wandering walk.

“Where did the cab promise to meet us?” Natalie spoke up in a strained tone, as they traversed an alley where the stinks made them gasp.

“Everything all right?” he said.

She wearily smiled. “At the risk of sounding like every stupid woman tourist in the world, my feet hurt.”

“Why, let’s go back. I’ve had plenty of this.”

“Do you mind?”

She said not a word as they drove along the river road back to the hotel. When he took her hand it was clammy. Entering the hotel, she pulled at his elbow. “Don’t forget — passports.”

It proved unnecessary. With the key, the desk clerk, showing large yellow false teeth in an empty grin, handed him two maroon booklets. Natalie snatched hers and riffled through it as they walked to the elevator.

“Okay?” he said.

“Seems to be. But I’ll bet anything the Gestapo’s photographed it, and yours too.”

“Well, it’s probably routine in this hotel. I don’t think the Portuguese are denying the Germans much nowadays. But what do you care?”

When she went into the bedroom of the suite to put away her coat and hat, Byron followed, took her in his arms, and kissed her. She responded, she held him close, but her manner was apathetic. He leaned back with a questioning look.

“Sorry, she said. “I have a thundering headache. Burgundy for breakfast may not be just the thing, after all. Luckily I have some high-powered pills for this. Just let me take one.”

Soon she came back from the bathroom smiling. “Okay. Proceed.”

He said, “It couldn’t work that fast.”

“Oh, it will. Don’t worry.”

They kissed, they lay on the bed, Byron was on fire to make love and tried to please her, but it was as though a spring had broken in Natalie. She whispered endearments and tried to be loving. After a while he sat up, and gently raised her. “All right. What is it?”

She crouched against the head of the bed, hugging her knees. “Nothing, nothing! What am I doing wrong? Maybe I’m a little tired. The headache’s not gone yet.”

“Natalie.” He took her hand, kissed it, and looked straight into her eyes.

“O)h, I guess nobody can experience such joy without paying. That’s all. If you must know, I’ve been in a black hole all afternoon. It started when we didn’t get our passports back, and those Germans were standing there in the lobby. I got this horrible sinking feeling. All the time we were sightseeing, I was having panicky fantasies. The hotel would keep stalling about my passport, and you’d sail away in the submarine, and here I’d be, just one more Jew stuck in Lisbon without papers.”

“Natalie, you never turned a hair all through Poland. You’ve got your passport back now.”

“I know. It’s sheer nonsense, just nervous depletion, too many wonderful things happening too fast. I’ll get over it.”

He caressed her hair. “You fooled me. I thought you were enjoying Lisbon.”

“I loathe Lisbon, Briny. I always have. I swear to God, whatever else happens, I’ll regret to my dying day that we married and spent our wedding night here. It’s a sad, painful city. You see it with different eyes, I know. You keep saying it looks like San Francisco. But San Francisco isn’t full of Jews fleeing the Germans. The Inquisition didn’t baptize Jews by force in San Francisco, and burn the ones who objected, and take away all the children to raise them as Christians. Do you know that little tidbit of history? It happened here.”

Byron’s face was serious, his eyes narrowed. “Maybe I read it once.”

“Maybe? If you had, how could you forget? Anybody’s blood should run cold at such cruelty. But somehow what’s happened to Jews in Europe over the centuries is just a matter of course. What was Bunky’s pretty phrase? Fish in a net.”

Byron said, “Natalie, I’ll do anything you want about the religion. I’ve always been prepared for that. Would you want me to become Jewish?”

“Are you insane?” She turned her head sharply to him and her eyes had an angry shine. She had looked like this in Königsberg, giving him a rude abrupt good-bye. “Why did you insist on getting married? That’s what’s eating me. Just tell me that. We could have made love, you know that, all you wanted. I feel tied to you now with a rope of raw nerves. I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t know when I’ll ever see you again. I only know you’re sailing away Thursday in that damned submarine. Why don’t we tear up those Portuguese documents? Let everything be as it was. My God, if we ever find ourselves in a human situation, and if we still care, we can get properly married. This was a farce.”

“No, it wasn’t. It’s the only thing I’ve wanted since I was born. Now I’ve got it. We’re not tearing up any papers. You’re my wife.”

“But God in heaven, why have you gone to all this trouble? Why have you put yourself in this mess?”

“Well, it’s like this, Natalie. Married officers get extra allowances.”

She stared at him. Her taut face relaxed, she slowly, reluctantly smiled, and thrust both her hands in his hair. “I see! Well, that makes a lot of sense, Briny. You should have told me sooner. I can understand greed.”

Mouth to mouth, they fell back on the bed, and the lovemaking started to go better, but the telephone rang. It rang and rang and rang, and the kisses had to stop. Byron sighed, “Could be the S-45,” and picked up the receiver. “Yes? Oh, hello. Right. That’s thoughtful of you. Nine o’clock? Wait.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Thurston apologizes for intruding. He and Slote thought we might conceivably want to have dinner in a special place. Best food in Lisbon, best singer in Portugal.”

“Good heavens. Old Slote is uncovering a masochistic streak.”

“Yes or no?”

“As you wish.”

Byron said, “They mean to be nice. Why not? We have to eat. Get away from the black raincoats.”

He accepted, hung up, and took her in his arms.

The restaurant was a brick-walled low room, illuminated only by table candles and the logs blazing in an arched fireplace. Jews, many in sleek dinner clothes, filled half the tables. Two large British parties side by side made most of the noise in the sedate place. Directly in front of the fire a table for six stood empty, longingly eyed by customers clustering in a small bar. The four Americans sat at another favored table near the fire. Over Portuguese white wine, Bunky Thurston and the newlyweds soon grew merry. Not Slote: he drank a lot but hardly spoke or smiled. The firelight glittered on his square glasses, and even in that rosy light his face looked ashen. “I don’t know if you youngsters are interested in the war, by the way,” Thurston said over the meat. “Remember the war? There’s news.”

“If the news is good I’m interested,” Natalie said. “Only if it’s good.”

“Well, the British have captured Tobruk.”

Natalie said, “Is Tobruk important?”

Byron exclaimed, “Important! It’s the best harbor between Egypt and Tunis. That’s mighty good news.”

“Right,” Thurston said. “They’re really roaring across North Africa now. Makes the whole war look different.”

Slote broke his silence to say hoarsely, “They’re fighting Italians.” He cleared his throat and went on, “Byron, did you actually read the list of books I gave you in Berlin? Natalie says you did.”

“Whatever I could find in English, yes. Maybe seven or eight out of ten.”

The diplomat shook his head. “Extraordinary heroism.”

“I don’t claim I understood them all,” Byron said. “Sometimes my eyes just passed over words. But I plowed on through.”

“What books?” Thurston said.

“My darling here became slightly curious about Germans,” said Natalie, “after a Luftwaffe pilot almost shot his head off. He wanted to know a little more them. Slote gave him a general syllabus of German nineteenth-century romanticism, nationalism, and idealism.”

“Never dreaming he’d do anything about it,” Slote said, turning his blank firelit glasses toward her.

“I had all this time in Siena last year,” Byron said. “And I was interested.”

“What did you find out?” said Thurston, refilling Byron’s glass. “You couldn’t get me to read German philosophy if the alternative were a firing squad.”

“Mainly that Hitler’s always been in the German bloodstream,” Byron said, “and sooner or later had to break out. That’s what Leslie told me in Berlin. He gave me the list to back up his view. I think he pretty well proved it. I used to think the Nazis had swarmed up out of the sewers and were something novel. But all their ideas, all their slogans, and practically everything they’re doing is in the old books. That thing’s been brewing in Germany for a hundred years.”

“For longer than that,” Slote said. “You’ve done your homework well, Byron. A-plus.”

“Oh, balderdash!” Natalie exclaimed. “A-plus for what? Repeating a tired cliché? It’s only novel to Byron because American education is so shallow and because he probably didn’t absorb any he got.”

“Not much,” Byron said. “Mostly I played cards and ping-pong.”

“Well, it’s very evident.” His bride’s tone was sharp. “Or you wouldn’t have gone boring through that one-sided list of his like a blind bookworm, just to give him the chance to patronize you.”

“I deny the patronizing and the one-sidedness,” said Slote. “Not that it matters, Jastrow — I guess I’ll have to call you Henry now — but I think I covered the field, and I admire your hubby for tackling the job so earnestly.”

“The whole thesis is banal and phony,” Natalie said, “this idea that the Nazis are a culmination of German thought and culture. Hitler got his racism from Gobineau, a Frenchman, his Teutonic superiority from Chamberlain, an Englishman, and his Jew-baiting from Lueger, a Viennese political thug. The only German thinker you can actually link straight to Hitler is Richard Wagner. He was another mad Jew-hating socialist, and Wagner’s writings are all over Mein Kampf. But Nietzsche broke with Wagner over that malignant foolishness. Nobody takes Wagner seriously as a thinker, anyway. His music disgusts me too, though that’s neither here nor there. I know you’ve read more in this field than I have, Slote, and I can’t imagine why you gave Byron such a dreary loaded list. Probably just to scare him off with big names. But as you ought to know, he doesn’t scare.”

“I’m aware of that,” Slote said. Abruptly he splashed wine into his glass, filling it to the brim, and emptied it without pausing for breath.

“Your veal’s getting cold,” Byron said to his bride. This unexpected edgy clash between Natalie and her ex-lover was threatening to get out of hand.

She tossed her head at him and impatiently cut a bit of meat, talking as she ate. “We created Hitler, more than anybody. We Americans. Mainly by not joining the League, and then by passing the insane Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, during a deep depression, knocking over Europe’s economy like a row of dominoes. After Smoot-Hawley the German banks closed right and left. The Germans were starving and rioting. Hitler promised them jobs, law and order, and revenge for the last war. And he promised to crush the Communists. The Germans swallowed his revolution to fend off a Communist one. He’s kept his promises, and he’s held the Germans in line with terror, and that’s the long and short of it. Why, there isn’t a German in a thousand who’s read those books, Briny. It’s all a thick cloud of university gas. Hitler’s a product of American isolation and British and French cowardice, not of the ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche.”

“University gas is good, my dear,” Slote said, “and I’ll accept it.” He touched his spread fingertips together, slouched in his chair, regarding her with a peculiar smile at once superior and frustrated. “In the sense that in any time and place the writings of the philosophers are a kind of exhaust has of the evolving social machinery — a point that Hegel more or less makes, and that Marx took and vulgarized. But you can recover from an analysis of the gas what the engine must be like and how it works. And the ideas may be powerful and true, no matter how produced. German romanticism is a terribly important and powerful critique of the way the West lives, Jastrow. It faces all the nasty weaknesses.”

“Such as?” Her tone was mean and abrupt.

A rush of argument broke from Slote, as though he wanted to conquer her with words in Byron’s presence, if he could do nothing else. He began stabbing one finger in the air, like exclamation points to his sentences. “Such as, my dear, that Christianity is dead and rotting since Galileo cut its throat. Such as, that the ideas of the French and American revolutions are thin fairy tales about human nature. Such as, that the author of the Declaration of Independence owned Negro slaves. Such as, that the champions of liberty, equality, and fraternity ended up chopping off the heads of helpless women, and each other’s heads. The German has a very clear eye for such points, Natalie. He saw through the rot of Imperial Rome and smashed it, he saw through the rot of the Catholic Church and broke its back, and now he thinks Christian industrial democracy is a rotting sham, and he proposes to take over by force. His teachers have been telling him for a century that his turn is coming, and that cruelty and bloodshed are God’s footprints in history. That’s what’s in the books I listed for Byron, poured out in great detail. It’s a valid list. There was another strain in Germany, to be sure, a commonsense liberal humanist tendency linked with the West. The ‘good Germany!’ I know all about it, Natalie. Most of its leaders went over to Bismarck, and nearly all the rest followed the Kaiser. When his time came, Hitler had a waltz. Now listen!”

In a solemn tone, like a priest chanting a mass, beating time in the air with a stiff finger, Slote quoted “‘The German revolution will not prove any milder or gentler because it was preceded by the Critique of Kant, by the Transcendental Idealism of Fichte. These doctrines seemed to develop revolutionary forces that only await their time to break forth. Christianity subdued the brutal warrior passion of the Germans, but it could not quench it. When the cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then will break forth again the frantic Berserker rage. The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries. Thor with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals.’”

Slote made an awkward, weak gesture with a fist to represent a hammerblow, and went on: “‘Smile not at the dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and the other philosophers. Smile not at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the region of intellect. The thought precedes the deed as the lightning the thunder. German thunder is of true German character. It is not very nimble, but rumbles along somewhat slowly. But come it will, and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world’s history, then know that at last the German thunderbolt has fallen.’

“Heine — the Jew who composed the greatest German poetry, and who fell in love with German philosophy — Heine wrote that,” Slote said in a quieter tone. “He wrote that a hundred and six years ago.”

Behind him chairs rasped, and a party in evening clothes, cheerily chattering in German, flanked by three bobbing ducking waiters, came to the big table by the fire. Slote was jostled; glancing over his shoulder, he looked straight into the face of the Gestapo chief, who amiably smiled and bowed. With him was the man with the scarred forehead they had seen in the hotel, and another German with a shaved head, and three giggling Portuguese women in bright evening dresses.

“End of philosophy seminar,” muttered Bunky Thurston.

“Why?” said Byron.

“Because for one thing,” Natalie snapped, “I’m bored with it.”

As the Germans sat down, conversation died throughout the restaurant. The Jews were looking warily toward them. In the lull, only the boisterous and oblivious British parties sounded louder.

“Who are those English people?” Natalie said to Thurston.

“Expatriates, living here because it’s cheap and there’s no rationing. Also, I guess, because it’s out of range Luftwaffe bombs,” Thurston said. “The British embassy staff isn’t crazy about them.”

“That’s a remarkable quote from Heine,” Byron to Slote.

“I wrote a paper on Hegel and Heine at Oxford.” Slote smiled thinly. “Heine was fascinated by Hegel for a long time, then repudiated him. I translated that passage for an epigraph. The rhetoric is rather purple. So is Jeremiah’s. Jewish prophets have one vein.”

As they were drinking coffee, a pink spotlight clove the dark room, striking a gray curtain on a little platform. Bunky Thurston said, “Here he comes. He’s the best of the fado singers.”

“The best of what?” Byron said. A pale dark-eyed young man, in a black cloak with thick fringes, stepped through the curtain holding an onion-shaped guitar.

“Fado singers. Fate songs. Very pathetic, very Portuguese.”

At the first chords that the young man struck — sharp sad chords, in a hammering rhythm — the room grew still. He sang in a clear high florid voice, looking around with his black eves, his high bulging forehead pink in the spotlight. Natalie murmured to Thurston, “What song is that?”

“That’s an old one, the fado of the students.”

“What do the words mean?”

“Oh, the words never amount to anything. Just a sentence or two. That one says, ‘Close your eyes. Life simpler with your eyes closed.’”

The glance of the newlyweds met. Byron put his hand over Natalie’s.

The young man sang several songs, with strange moments of speeding up, slowing down, sobbing, and trilling; these evidently were the essence of fado, because when he performed such flourishes in the middle of a song, the Portuguese in the room applauded and sometimes cheered.

“Lovely,” Natalie murmured to Bunky Thurston when a song ended. “Thank you.”

He smoothed his moustache with both hands. “I thought you’d find it agreeable. It’s something different.”

“Spieler! Können Sie ‘O Sole Mio’ singen?” The shaven-headed German was addressing the singer. He sat only a few feet from the platform.

Smiling uneasily, the singer replied in Portuguese, gesturing at his oddly shaped guitar, that he only performed fado songs. In a jolly tone, the German told him to sing “O Sole Mio” anyway. Again the young man made helpless gestures, shaking his head. The German pointed a smoking cigar at him, and shouted something in Portuguese that brought dead quiet in the restaurant, even among the British, and froze the faces of the three women at his table. With a piteous look around at the audience, the young performer began to do “O Sole Mio,” very badly. The German leaned back, beating time in the air with his cigar. A thick pall fell in the restaurant.

Natalie said to Thurston, “Let’s leave now.”

“I’m for that.”

The singer was still stumbling through the Italian song as they walked out. On the counter at the entrance, under a picture of him, phonograph records in paper slipcovers were piled. “If that first song is there,” Natalie said to Byron, “buy me a record.”

He bought two.

The streetlights outside were brighter than the illumination in the restaurant, and the wind was cutting. Leslie Slote, tying a muffler around his neck, said to Byron, “When do you leave?”

“Not till day after tomorrow.”

“Years hence, the way I’m counting time,” said Natalie with a note of defiance, hugging her husband’s arm.

“Well, Natalie, shall I try to get us on a plane to Rome Saturday?”

“Oh, wait. Maybe he won’t leave. I can always hope.”

“Of course.” Slote held out his hand to Byron. “If I don’t see you again, congratulations, and good luck, and smooth sailing.”

“Thanks. And thanks for that suite. It was brash of us to put you out of it.” “My dear fellow,” said Slote, “it was quite wasted on me.”

All her limbs jerking, Natalie woke from a nightmare of Gestapo men knocking at the door. She heard real knocking in the darkness. She lay still, hoping that a trace of the nightmare was hovering in her fogged brain, and that the knocking would stop. It did not. She looked at her luminous watch and touched Byron’s warm hairy leg.

“Byron! Byron!”

He raised himself on an elbow, then sat up straight. “What time is it?”

“Quarter to two.”

The knocking became faster and louder. Byron jumped from the bed and slipped into a robe.

“Briny, be careful about letting anyone in! First make sure who it is.”

Natalie left the warm nest of the bed and was putting on a negligee, shivering in the chilly night air, when Byron opened the bedroom door. “It’s only Aster, so don’t be scared.”

“What does he want?”

“That’s what I’m finding out.”

The door shut. Natalie went and leaned her ear against it, and heard Tobruk mentioned. Humiliated at having to eavesdrop, she rattled the knob and went in. The two young men rose from the sofa where they sat hunched in talk. Lieutenant Aster, in a blue and gold uniform and white peaked cap, was eating an apple.

“Hi, Natalie. This is one terrible thing to do, breaking in on honeymooners,” he said cheerily. “Talk about extrahazardous duty!”

“What’s the matter?”

Byron said, “Change of orders, nothing serious or urgent, no sweat.”

“Right. Matter of fact I was just shoving off.” Lieutenant Aster dropped the apple core in a tray. “I have to round up some crew members that had overnights. It’s going to be an interesting tour of Estoril and Lisbon after dark. See you, Byron.”

With a grin at her, and a brief tip of his rakishly tilted hat, the lieutenant left.

“Well? Tell me.” Natalie confronted her husband, arms folded.

Byron went to the red marble fireplace and touched a match to papers under a pile of kindling and logs. “The S-45 leaves this morning.”

“This very morning, eh? Too bad. Where to?”

“I don’t know. The fall of Tobruk has changed the mission — which to tell you the truth, I never exactly knew in the first place. Something about surveying submarine facilities in the Mediterranean.”

“Well. All right. I guess I asked for this. My entire married life — as it may yet turn out — cut short by one-third.”

“Natalie, our married life starts when you get back from Italy.” He put his arm around her and they stood watching the fire brighten. “It’s going to be very long, happy, and fruitful. I plan on six kids.”

This made the young wife laugh through her gloom and put a hand to his face. “Oh lord. Six! I’ll never last the course. Jiminy, that fire feels marvellous. Did we finish the wine before we went to sleep? Look and see.” He brought a glass of wine and lit a cigarette for her. “Briny, one thing you should know. Back in November, Aaron was so sick he thought he might die. I had to take him to a specialist in Rome. It was a kidney stone. He lay in the Excelsior for two weeks, really in torture. Finally it cleared up, but one night, when he was very low, Aaron told me that he’d left everything he has to me. And he told me what it added up to. I was amazed.” She smiled at him, sipping her wine. Byron looked at her with slitted eyes. “I guess he’s sort of a miser, like most bachelors. That’s one reason he moved to Italy. He can live handsomely there on very little. Aaron’s actually kept nearly all the money he made on A Jew’s Jesus, and it brings in more every year. The book on Paul earned quite a bit too. And before that he’d saved a lot of his professor’s salary. Living in Italy, he hasn’t even paid taxes. Aside from the value of his house, Aaron’s worth more than a hundred thousand dollars. He lives just on his interest. The money is invested back in New York. I had no idea of any of this. Not the slightest. That he would leave anything to me never crossed my mind. Nevertheless, that’s how things stand.” Natalie took Byron’s chin in her hand and pushed it this way and that. “What are you looking so grim about? I’m telling you you’ve married an heiress.”

Byron poked a fallen red coal back into the fire. “Damn. He’s really cute, cuter than I thought.”

“Are you being fair? Especially with your plan for six kids?”

“Possibly not.” Byron shrugged. “Do you have enough money to get home with? You’re coming home in two months, no matter what.”

“I know. I agreed to that. I have plenty. Whew, that fire’s beginning to scorch.” She reclined on a couch before the blaze. The negligee fell away, and the light played warmly on her smooth legs. “Briny does your family know you intended to get married?”

“No. No sense making trouble when I wasn’t sure it would come off. I did write Warren.”

“Is he still in Hawaii?”

“Yes. He and Janice love it. I think you and I may well land there. The Navy keeps beefing up the Pacific Fleet. Warren thinks we’ll be fighting Japan soon. That’s the feeling all through the Navy.”

“Not Germany?”

“No. It may sound strange to you, sitting here, but our people still don’t get excited about Hitler. A few newspapers and magazines froth around, but that’s about it.”

He sat on the floor at her feet, looking at the fire, resting his head against her soft uncovered thigh. She caressed his hair. “Exactly when do you leave, and how?”

“Lady’s going to come back for me at six.”

“Six? Why, that’s hours and hours. Big big chunk of our marriage left to enjoy. Of course you have to pack.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Can I go with you to the boat?”

“I don’t see why not.”

With a deep sigh, Natalie said, “Why are you sitting on the floor? Come here.”

There was no dawn. The sky turned paler and paler until it was light gray. Mist and drizzle hid the sea. Lieutenant Aster picked them up in a rattling little French car; the back seat was packed with four glum sailors smelling of alcohol and vomit. He drove with one hand, leaning far out to work a broken windshield wiper, keeping the accelerator on the floor. The foggy road along the river was empty, and they reached Lisbon quickly.

The submarine was dwarfed by a very rusty tramp steamer berthed directly ahead, with an enormous Stars and Stripes painted on its side, an American flag flying, and the name Yankee Belle stencilled in great drippy white letters on bow and stern. Its grotesquely cut-up shape and crude rivetted plating looked foreign, and thirty or forty years old. It rode so high in the water that much of its propeller and mossy red bottom showed. Jews lined the quay in the drizzle, waiting quietly to go aboard, most of them with cardboard suitcases, cloth bundles, and frayed clothes. The children — there were quite a number — stood silent, clinging to their parents. At a table by the gangway, two uniformed Portuguese officials, under umbrellas held by assistants, were inspecting and stamping papers. Policemen in rubber capes paced up and down the queue. The rail of the ship was black with passengers staring at the quay and the Lisbon hills, as freed prisoners look back at the jail to savor their liberty.

“When did that ocean greyhound show up?” Byron said.

“Yesterday morning. It’s an old Polish bucket, and the crew are mostly Greeks and Turks,” Aster said. “I’ve tried talking to them. The pleasanter ones seem to be professional cutthroats. I gather the Jews will be packed in like sardines in five-decker bunks, for which they’ll pay the price of deluxe suites on the Queen Mary. These fellows laughed like hell about that.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Well, we cast off at O715. Good-bye, Natalie, and good luck. You were a beautiful bride, and now you’re a beautiful Navy wife.”

The exec stepped aboard, smartly returning the salute of the gangway watch. On the dock near the gangway, unmindful of the rain beginning to fall, a sailor was hugging and kissing a dumpy Portuguese trollop dressed in red satin. Byron held out his arms to his wife, with a glance at the sailor and a grin. She embraced him. “You fool. Your trouble is, you went and married the creature.”

“I was drunk,” Byron said. He kissed her again and again.

“A boatswain’s whistle blew on the submarine, and a loudspeaker croaked, “Now station the special sea details.”

“Well, I guess this is it,” he said. “So long.”

Natalie was managing not to cry; she even smiled. “Getting married was the right idea, my love. I mean that. It was an inspiration and I adore you for it. I feel very married. I love you and I’m happy.

“I love you.”

Byron went aboard the submarine, saluting as he stepped on deck. In the thickening drizzle, her raincoat pulled close, her breath smoking in the damp frigid air, Natalie stood on the dock, smelling wharfside odors — tar, machinery, fish, the sea — hearing the bleak cry of the gulls, and feeling for the first time what she had gotten herself into. She was a Navy wife all right!

Three men in black trench coats and oversized fedora hats came strolling along the quay, calmly inspecting the refugees, who either tried to ignore them or peered at them in horror. Women pulled their children closer. The men halted near the gangway, one pulled papers from a black portfolio, and they all began talking to the officials at the table. Meanwhile on the submarine sailors in pea coats pulled in the gangplank. The boatswain’s whistle blew; the loudspeaker squawked. Appearing on the narrow little bridge in foul-weather clothes the captain and Lieutenant Aster waved. “Good-bye, Natalie,” Captain Caruso called. She did not see Byron come out on the forecastle, but after a while noticed him standing near the anchor among the sailors, in a khaki uniform and a brown windbreaker, hands in his back pockets, trousers flapping in the breeze. It was the first time she had ever seen Byron in a uniform; it made him seem different, remote, and older. Aster was shouting orders through a megaphone. Colored signal flaps ran up. The sailors hauled in the lines. Byron walked along the forecastle and stood opposite his bride, almost close enough to reach out and clasp hands. She blew him a kiss. His face under the peaked khaki cap was businesslike and calm. A foghorn blasted. The submarine fell away from the dock and black water opened between them.

“You come home, now,” he shouted.

“I will. Oh, I swear I will.”

“I’ll be waiting. Two months!”

He went to his duty station. With a swish of water from the propellers, the low black submarine dimmed away into the drizzle.

Craaa! Craaa! Craaa! Mournfully screeching, the gulls wheeled and followed the fading wake.

Natalie hurried up the quay, past the Gestapo men, past the line of escaping Jews, whose eyes were all fixed in one direction — the gangway table they still had to pass, where the Portuguese officials and the three Germans were comparing papers and laughing together. Natalie’s hand sweatily clutched the American passport in her pocket.

“Hello, old Slote,” she said, when she found a telephone and managed to make the connection. “This is Mrs. Byron Henry. Are you interested in buying me a breakfast? I seem to be free. Then let’s push on to Italy, dear, and get Aaron out. I have to go home.”

Chapter 39

In Washington Victor Henry was reassigned to War Plans. He did not hear from Roosevelt at all. People said the President was unaccountable, and from firsthand knowledge, the naval captain was beginning to believe it. But he was untroubled by the assignment, though he had craved and expected sea duty.

More than anything else — more than the gray hairs beginning to show at his temples, more than the sharper lines on his forehead and around his mouth, more than his calmer pace on the tennis court — his contentment with still another desk job showed how Victor Henry was changing.

Washington in January 1941, after London and Berlin, struck him as a depressing panorama of arguments, parties, boozing, confusion, lethargy, and luxury, ominously like Paris before the fall. It took him a long time to get used to brilliantly lit streets, rivers of cars, rich overabundant food, and ignorant indifference to the war. The military men and their wives, when Pug talked to them, discussed only the hairline advantages that the distant explosions might bring in their own tiny lives. Navy classmates of his caliber were stepping into the major sea commands that led to flag rank. He knew he was regarded as a hard-luck guy, a comer sunk by bureaucratic mischance. But he had almost stopped caring. He cared about the war; and he cared about the future of the United States, which looked dark to him.

The Navy was as preoccupied as ever by Japan. Every decision of the President to strengthen the Atlantic Fleet caused angry buzzes and knowing headshakes in the Department, and at the Army and Navy Club. When he tried to talk about the Germans, his friends tended to regard him askance; a bypassed crank, their amused glances almost said, trying to inflate his importance by exaggerating minor matters he happened to know about. The roaring debate over Lend-Lease, in Congress and the newspapers, seemed to him a farrago of illogic and irrelevance. It suited Hitler’s book at the moment not to declare war on the United States — that was all. It apparently suited the American people in turn to fake neutrality while commencing a sluggish, grudging effort on the British side, arguing every inch of the way. These two simple facts were being lost in the storm of words.

Pug Henry was content in the War Plans Division because here he worked in another world, a secret, very small world of hard-boiled reality. Early in January, with a few other officers in War Plans, he had begun “conversations” with British military men. In theory, Lord Burne-Wilke and his delegation were in Washington on vague missions of observing or purchase. Supposedly the talks were low-level explorations binding on nobody, and supposedly the President, the Army Chief of Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations took no cognizance of them. In fact, by the first of March these conferences were finishing up a written war operations plan on a world scale. The assumption was that Japan would sooner or later attack, and the key decision of the agreement lay in two words: “Germany first.” It heartened Victor Henry that the American Army and Air Corps planners concurred in this, and also, to his considerable surprise and pleasure, Admiral Benton and two other naval colleagues who had thought the war through — unlike the rest of the Navy, still rolling along in the greased grooves of the old drills and war games against “Orange,” the code name for Japan.

It was clear to Pug Henry that if Japan entered the war, with her annual steel production of only a few million tons, she could not hold out long if Germany were beaten. But if the Germans knocked out the British and got the fleet, they could go on to conquer whole continents, getting stronger as they went, whatever happened to Japan.

From his conversations at the Army and Navy Club he knew that this “Germany first” decision would, if it came out, create a fearsome howl. He was one of a handful of Americans — perhaps less than twenty, from the President downward — who knew about it. This was a peculiar way to run national affairs, perhaps; but to his amazement, which never quite faded, this was how things were going. To be part of this crucial anonymous work satisfied him.

It was passing strange to arrive in the morning at the drab little offices in a remote wing of the old Navy Building, and sit down with the British for another day of work on global combat plans, after reading in the morning papers, or hearing on the radio, yesterday’s shrill Lend-Lease argument in Congress. Pug could not get over the cool dissembling of the few high officials who knew of the “conversations.” He kept wondering about a form of government which required such deviousness in its chiefs, and such soothing, cajoling fibs to get its legislators to act sensibly. Once the planners, weary after a hammering day, sat in their shirt-sleeves around a radio, listening to General Marshall testify before a Senate committee. They heard this Army Chief of Staff, whose frosty remote uprightness made Henry think of George Washington, assure the senators that no intention existed for America to enter the war, and that at present there was no need for any large buildup of its armed forces. The planners had just been discussing an allocation of troops based on an American army of five million in 1943, a projection of which Marshall was well aware.

“I don’t know,” Pug remarked to Burne-Wilke, “Maybe the only thing you can say for democracy is that all the other forms of government are even worse.”

“Worse for what?” was the air commodore’s acid reply. “If other forms are better for winning wars, no other virtue counts.”

Pug got along well with Burne-Wilke, who had fully grasped the landing craft problem. Among the planners, a labored joke was spreading about Captain Henry’s girlfriend, “Elsie”; this was in fact a play on l.c. (landing craft), which he kept stressing as the limiting factor of operations in all theatres. Pug had worked up formulas converting any troop movement across water into types and quantities of landing craft, and these formulas threw cold water on many an ambitious and plausible plan. Somebody would usually say, “Pug’s girl Elsie acting up again”; and Burne-Wilke always supported his insistence on the bottleneck.

Henry seldom encountered Pamela Tudsbury, whom the air commodore had brought along as his typist-aide. Tucked in an office in the British Purchasing Mission, she evidently worked like a dog, for her face was always haggard. A glad shock had coursed through him when he first saw Pamela, standing at Burne-Wilke’s elbows, regarding him with glowing eyes. She had not written that she was coming. They met for a drink just once. Pug amplified all he could on his letter about the meeting with Ted Gallard. She looked extremely young to him; and his gust of infatuation with this girl after the bombing mission seemed, in the bustling Willard bar in Washington, a distant and hardly believable episode. Yet the hour with her was warmly pleasurable. Any day thereafter when he saw her was a good day for him. He left these encounters to chance. He did not telephone her, nor ask her to meet him again; and while she always acted glad to see him, she made no move to do so more often.

As a college boy thinks about fame, and an exile about going home, this Navy captain of forty-nine once in a while mused on what a romance with the young English-woman might be like; but it was the merest daydreaming. He remained devoted to his wife, in his fashion. Rhoda had received her husband back with a puzzling mixture of moods — demonstrative affection, and even lust, alternating with spells of heavy gloom, coldness, and loud irascibility over her move back to Washington from New York.

She levelled off to a low-temperature detachment, busying herself with Bundles for Britain and her old-time music committees, and making numerous trips to New York for one reason or another. She sometimes mentioned Palmer Kirby, now one of the chairmen of Bundles for Britain, in a most casual way. Rhoda went to church with Pug and sang the hymns, and relayed gossip about unfaithful Navy wives, all exactly as before. She was plainly disappointed when Pug went back to War Plans instead of getting a command at sea. But they settled back into their old routines, and Pug soon was too preoccupied to worry much about Rhoda’s moods, which had always been jagged.

News about their children intermittently drew them together. Byron’s offhand letter about his hasty marriage in Lisbon was a shock. They talked for days about it, worrying, agonizing, comforting each other, before resigning themselves to live with the fact. Warren as usual sent the good news. His wife was returning to Washington to have her baby, and he had been promoted to lieutenant.

Pug turned fifty on a Sunday early in March. He sat in church beside his wife trying, as he listened to the choir sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” to shake off a sense that he had missed all the right turns in life. He counted his blessings. His wife was still beautiful, still capable of love; if she had failings, what woman didn’t? His two sons were naval officers, his daughter was self-supporting and clever. Perhaps his career had gone off the rails, but he was serving in a post where he was doing some good. He could not really complain.

Rhoda, as she sat there beside him, was thinking mainly about the fact that her husband, for the first time since his return from abroad, would soon be meeting Palmer Kirby face to face.

A snowstorm clogged the capital on the night of Rhoda’s dinner party. By quarter past seven her guests, including Kirby, had straggled in, brushing and stamping off snow, but the dinner was still stalled. Pug was missing.

In the cramped hot kitchen of an elegant little furnished house on Tracy Place, rented from a millionaire who was now the ambassador to Brazil, Rhoda made a last-minute check of the dinner and found all in order: soup hot, ducks tender, vegetables on the boil, cook snarling over the delay. She sailed out to her guests after a scowl in the hallway mirror and a touch at her hairdo. Rhoda wore a silvery dress molded to her figure; her color was high, her eyes bright with nervous excitement. In the living room, Kirby and Pamela Tudsbury were talking on the big couch, Madeline and Janice had their heads together in a corner, and on facing settees before a log fire, Alistair Tudsbury and Lord Burne-Wilke were chatting with the recently elected Senator Lacouture and his wife. It was a hodgepodge company, but since it was for a hurried dinner before a Bundles for Britain concert, she was not too concerned. Pug’s meeting with Kirby was the chief thing on her mind.

“We’ll wait ten more minutes.” Rhoda sat herself beside the scientist. “Then we’ll have to eat. I’m on the committee.”

“Where is Captain Henry?” Pamela said calmly. Her mauve dress came to a halter around her neck, leaving her slim shoulders naked; her tawny hair was piled high on her head. Rhoda remembered Pamela Tudsbury as a mousy girl, but this was no mouse; Rhoda recognized Kirby’s expression of lazy genial appetite.

“I’m blessed if I can say. Military secrecy covers a multitude of sins, doesn’t it?” Rhoda laughed. “Let’s hope he’s working on defense, and not a blonde.”

“I very much doubt that it’s a blonde,” said Pamela. “Not Captain Henry.”

“Oh, these goody-goody ones are the worst, my dear. That’s a divine dress.”

“So you like it? Thank you.” Pamela adjusted the skirt. “I feel all got up for a pantomime, almost. I’ve been in uniform day and night for weeks.”

“Does Lord Burne-Wilke drive you that hard?”

“Oh no, Mrs. Henry. There really are masses of things to do. I feel so lucky at being in Washington, that I guess I work off my guilt with the late hours.”

“The Waring Hotel then would be the best bet, Pamela?” Kirby’s tone took up the conversation Rhoda had broken into.

“If they’ve repaired the bomb damage. By now, they should have. The Germans went after Buckingham Palace very hard, and the whole neighborhood took quite a beating, but that was back in October.”

“I’ll shoot a cable to the Waring tomorrow.”

“Why, Palmer, are you going to London?” said Rhoda.

Kirby turned to her, crossing his long legs. “It appears so.”

“Isn’t that something new?”

“It’s been in the works for a while.”

“London! How adventurous.” Rhoda laughed, covering her surprise.

Mrs. Lacouture’s voice rose above the talk. “Janice, should you be drinking all those martinis?”

“Oh, Mother,” said Janice, as the white-coated old Filipino, a retired Navy steward hired by Rhoda for the evening, shakily filled the glass in her outstretched hand.

“That baby will be born with an olive in its mouth,” remarked the senator. The two Englishmen laughed heartily, and Lacouture’s pink face wrinkled up with self-satisfaction.

“So, you did see Byron,” Janice said to Madeline. “When was this?”

“A couple of weeks ago. His submarine put in at the Brooklyn Navy Yard overnight. He took me to dinner.”

“How was he?”

“He’s — I don’t know — more distant. Almost chilly. I don’t think he likes the Navy much.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like being married much,” Janice said. “I never heard of anything so peculiar! A couple of days of whoop-de-do in Lisbon, and back she goes to Italy, and off he chugs in his little S-boat. Why on earth did they bother to get married?”

“Well, possibly a Jewish girl would insist,” Madeline said in arch tones.

Janice laughed shortly. “That may well be. I’ll say this, she’s a mighty bright and pretty one.” She grimaced, moving her large stomach under her flowing green gown, trying to get more comfortable. “Ugh, what a bloated cow I am. This is what it all leads to, honey. Never forget it. And how’s your love life?”

“Oh dear. Well -” Madeline glanced toward her mother. “You remember that trombone player? With the big sad eyes, the one who dressed all in brown?”

“That Communist? Oh, Madeline, don’t tell me -”

“Oh, no, no. Bozey was an utter drip. But I went with him to this peace rally at Madison Square Garden. It was really something, jam-packed, and this gigantic red, white, and blue sign stretching clear across the Garden — THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING” — Madeline waved her hands far apart — “and all these Loyalist Spain songs, and these mass chants they do, and novelists and poets and college professors making red-hot antiwar speeches and whatnot. Well, there was this other fellow in our box. He writes horror programs. He’s very successful, he makes about five hundred dollars a week, and he’s handsome, but he’s another Communist.” Madeline sneezed, blew her nose, and looked slyly at Janice. “What do you think would jolt my family more, Byron’s Jewish girl or a Communist? Bob comes from Minnesota, he’s a Swede at least. He’s awfully nice.”

Janice said, “What about that boss of yours?”

“Hugh Cleveland? What about him?”

The two young women regarded each other. Wry knowing wrinkles turned up the corners of Janice’s mouth.

Madeline colored under the rouge and powder on her pallid face. “Yes? Why the grin, Janice?” She drank most of her martini.

“Oh, I don’t know. You keep taking up with one impossible fellow after another.”

“If you mean am I lying in wait for Mr. Cleveland,” Madeline said with her father’s briskness, “you’re about as wrong as you can be. He’s a paunchy pink-haired, freckled man, ten years older than I am, and personally I regard him as a snake.”

“Snakes have the power to hypnotize, dear.”

“Yes, rabbits and birds. I’m neither.”

Rhoda went to a small Chinese Chippendale desk answer the telephone. “Oh, hello there,” she said. “Where are you?… Oh, my gawd… of course… yes, naturally. Okay. I’ll leave your ticket at the box office. Yes, yes, they’ve been here for hours. Right. Bye, dear.”

She hung up, and fluttered her long pale hands at the company. “Well, let’s drink up. Pug sends apologies. He’s at the White House and he doesn’t know when he can get away.”

In Washington, when the absent diner is at the White House, the empty chair is not an embarrassment. Quite the contrary. Nobody asked what Victor Henry was doing at the executive mansion, or indeed commented on Rhoda’s words. She put Burne-Wilke on her right and the senator on her left, saying, “After all these years protocol still baffles me. How do you choose between a United States Senator and a British lord? I’m favoring our foreign guest, Senator.”

“Absolutely proper,” said Lacouture.

Alistair Tudsbury said, “Lord Burne-Wilke will gladly yield you his seat on this occasion, Senator, if he can take yours when Lend-Lease comes to a vote.”

“Oh, done, done,” exclaimed the air commodore, whose bemedalled dress uniform dazzled Rhoda.

Everyone laughed, Tudsbury loudest of all. “Haw haw haw!” The correspondent’s belly shook under a vast expanse of wrinkled waistcoat, spanned by an enormous suspension of gold chain. Rhoda said, “Well, what good spirits! I was half afraid our English friends would eat Senator Lacouture alive.”

The senator wrinkled his eyes. “You British aren’t that hard up for meat yet, are you?” He added after the laugh, “No, seriously, Rhoda, I’m glad you brought us together. Maybe I’ve convinced our friends that I’m not a Nazi-lover, but just one fellow out of ninety-six, with my own point of view. I certainly don’t go for this talk of Senator Wheeler’s, that Lend-Lease will plow under every fourth American boy. That’s way out of bounds. But if Roosevelt wants to send England arms free of charge, why the devil doesn’t he come out and say so, instead of giving us all this Lend-Lease baloney? It insults our intelligence.”

“I went to a peace rally in New York,” Madeline piped up. “One speaker told a good story. A tramp stops a rich man on the street. ‘Please, mister, give me a quarter, I’m starving,’ he says. The rich man says, ‘My dear fellow, I can’t give you a quarter. I can lend you or lease you a quarter.’”

Senator Lacouture burst out laughing. “By God, I’ll work that into my next speech.”

From across the table, Palmer Kirby said, “Are you sure you want to draw on a Communist source?”

“Was that one of those Commie meetings? Well, a story’s a story.”

“It’s so crazy,” said Janice. “I got stuck in a taxi on Pennsylvania Avenue this afternoon, in front of the White House. We just couldn’t move. The newsreel people were there taking pictures of the pickets. Communists with signs marching round and round in a circle, chanting, ‘The Yanks are not coming,’ and next to them a mob of women kneeling and praying right there on the sidewalk in the snow, The Christian Mothers of America. They’ll pray there round the clock, my driver said, until Lend-Lease is defeated or vetoed. Honestly! Coming from Hawaii, I get the feeling the country’s going mad.”

“It just shows how broad the opposition to this is,” said the senator. “Cuts across all lines.”

“On the contrary,” put in Kirby, “both extremes seem to be against helping England, while the mass in the middle is for it.”

Senator Lacouture waved a flat hand in the air. “No, sir. I’ve been a middle-of-the-roader all my life. You should hear some of the quiet talk in the Senate dining room. I tell you, if they didn’t have to worry about big-city Jews — and I don’t blame the Jews for feeling as they do, but this issue can’t be decided on any parochial basis — there’d be twenty more votes on my side of the fence right now. I still think they’ll end there. The nose count changes every day. If the ground swell continues for another week, we’ll lick this thing.”

The street door opened and closed. Victor Henry into the dining room, brushing flakes of snow from his blue bridge coat. “Apologies to all hands,” he said, doffing the coat. “No, no, don’t get up, I’ll just join you, and change my duds later.”

But the men were all standing. Victor Henry walked around the table for handshakes, and came last to Palmer Kirby. “Hello,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Sure has. Too long.”

Only Rhoda knew the scientist well enough to note that his smile was awkward and artificial. At this moment, which she had been dreading for a couple of weeks, Rhoda had a surprising sensation — pleasure and pride that two such men loved her. She felt no trace of guilt as her lover clasped hands with her husband of twenty-five years. Kirby was more than a head taller than Captain Henry, and in the columnar black and white of full dress he was a magnificent fellow. Yet Pug was impressive too: erect, short, thickset, his tired eyes in deep sockets very shrewd and alive, his whole bearing charged with energy — her own husband, just back from the White House. Rhoda felt lucky, beautiful, desired, pleasantly confused, and quite safe. It was actually one of the nicest moments in her life, and it went off like a dream. Pug took his seat and began eating shrimp cocktail.

“Say, it’s a bit late for this,” he remarked to Kirby, “but I sure want to thank you for driving Rhoda up from New York last summer to see Byron at sub school. That was a long way.”

Kirby spread his big hands. “Why, it was great to get a look at a submarine base. Your friend Captain Tully really gave us the ten-dollar tour.”

“Red Tully is 4.0,” Pug said. “I sort of suspect he nudged Byron through that school. However, I’ve asked no questions.”

It was exciting as a play for Rhoda, that the two men were actually talking straight off about that fateful trip. She said gaily, “Oh, Pug, you’re always selling poor Briny short. Red told us he was the champion of his class in the training tank. Caught on to the lung right away, and did his escape perfectly the first time cool as a fish. Why, when we were there they had him instructing in the tank.”

“That’s self-preservation, not work. Briny’s always been good at that.”

“That’s a talent, too,” said Pamela Tudsbury.

Pug looked at her with a trace of special warmth. “Well, Pamela, one can’t get far without it, that’s true. But it’s the talent of a turtle.”

“Honestly! Did you ever?” Rhoda said to Lord Burne-Wilke. “What a father.”

Mrs. Lacouture uttered a little shriek. The old steward was offering soup to Lord Burne-Wilke, and distracted by the Englishman’s medals, he was tilting the tray. The open soup tureen went slipping toward Rhoda, and her silver dress was seconds away from ruin. But as the tureen came sliding off the tray, Rhoda, who had a watchful eye for servants, plucked it out of the air, and with the quick controlled movements of a cat in trouble, set it on the table, not spilling a drop.

Pug called out over the gasps and laughter, “Well done.”

“Self-preservation runs in the family,” Rhoda said. Amid louder laughter, Alistair Tudsbury started a round of applause.

“By God! Never have I seen anything so neat,” exclaimed Senator Lacouture.

Everybody had a joke or a compliment for Rhoda. She became exhilarated. Rhoda loved to entertain. She had the ability to nail down details beforehand, and then breeze airily through the evening. Rhoda told stories of mishaps at dinner parties in Berlin, and began to reminisce with sharp satire about the Nazis. Forgotten was her former friendliness to the Germans; she was now the Bundles for Britain lady, partisan to the core. Palmer Kirby, getting over his stiffness in Pug’s presence, threw in his experiences at a Nuremberg Parteitag. Pug offered an account of the slide at Abendruh, making the women giggle. Then Lord Burne-Wilke gave jocular anecdotes about the arrogance of captured Luftwaffe pilots.

Senator Lacouture interrupted him. “Lord Burne-Wilke, were you people ever really in trouble last year?”

“Oh, rather.” The air commodore told of the dwindling of planes and pilots through July and August, of the week in September when the count of pilots fell below the survival minimum, of the desperate pessimism in the RAF all through October, with London burning, civilians dying in large numbers, no night fighters available, and the Luftwaffe still coming on and on, setting fire to residential districts and bombing and spreading the fires, trying to break the city’s spirit.

Lacouture probed with more questions, his pink face growing sober. The RAF, the air commodore said, was anticipating a new, larger onslaught in the spring and summer. The submarine sinkings, at their present rate, might ground the British planes for lack of fuel. An invasion would then be in the cards. “Mind you, we hope to weather all this,” he said, “but this time, Hitler may have the wherewithal. He’s expanded his armed forces massively. We haven’t been idle either. But unfortunately a lot of our stuff is ending up these days at the bottom of the Atlantic.”

Lacouture’s fingers were rolling little balls of bread. He looked straight at the air commodore. “Well,” he said, “nobody’s comparing the British and the Nazis as people, as civilizations. You people have been fine, and I’ll tell you, possibly we should be hearing a bit more of this stuff up on the hill.”

Lord Burne-Wilke, with a humble little bow that made the party laugh, said, “I’m available.”

While the others had dessert, Victor Henry changed into his dress uniform. The guests were wrapping up to brave the snow when he rejoined them. He helped Pamela Tudsbury into her coat, scenting perfume that stirred his memory.

She said over her shoulder, “There’s news of Ted.”

For a moment Victor Henry didn’t understand. On the Bremen she had slipped across the joke about Hitler in just that swift quiet way. “Oh? Really? Good or bad?”

“Won’t you telephone me?”

“Yes.”

“Do. Please do. Do.”

The party separated into three cars, with Pug driving the British guests. He said to the air commodore, as they stopped on Massachusetts Avenue at a red light that made a cherry-colored halo in the falling snow, “You scored some points with Senator Lacouture.”

“Words over wine,” said the air commodore, shrugging.

“Well! Nobody’s seen Constitution Hall looking like this before,” Rhoda said, “or ever will again, maybe. It’s fantastic.”

Every seat was filled. All the men in the orchestra, and many up the long side slopes wore full dress suits or gold-crusted military uniforms. The women made a sea of uncovered skin, bright colors, and winking gems. Great American and British flags draped the stage. Rhoda had taken for herself two boxes nearest to the President’s. The Lacoutures with Janice, the air commodore, and Alistair Tudsbury were ensconced in the choicer one, and she and Pamela sat at the rail in the other, with Pug and Kirby behind them, and Madeline in the rear.

A commotion arose in the aisle behind them among police guards and latecomers. A murmur washed across the auditorium, and the Vice President and his wife stepped into the presidential box, into a blue-white spotlight. The audience stood and applauded. Henry Wallace responded with a self-conscious smile and a brief wave. He looked like an intelligent farmer, unhappily wearing full dress for some anniversary. The orchestra struck up “The Star Spangled Banner,” and then “God Save the King.” The British anthem, with the nearness of Pamela Tudsbury’s bare white shoulders, awakened the London days and nights in Victor Henry’s mind. As the audience settled in its seats and the violins began the slow introduction of a Haydn symphony, Pug’s thoughts wandered through the blitz, the bombing run over Berlin, the German capital showing yellow in the night under the flare of the exploding gas, Pamela flinging herself at him as he came into his apartment. The music broke into a dancing allegro and brought him back to the present. Pug studied the profile of his wife, sitting in her usual concertgoing pose — back straight, hands folded in lap, head tilted to suggest attentive pleasure. He thought how charming she could be and how splendidly she had carried off the dinner. A wisp of guilt touched him for the affection he felt for Pamela Tudsbury. Victor Henry was inexpert at self-excuse, having done too few things in his life of which he disapproved.

Rhoda herself couldn’t have been more at ease. The music of Haydn delighted her. She loved being highly visible in her new silver dress in a box so near the Vice President. She was pleased that the concert was a sellout. She looked forward to the supper-dance afterward. All this splendid fun was actually work in the noblest of causes, and her name stood high on the committee list. How could things be better? Only Palmer Kirby’s news that he was going to England troubled her a bit. She meant to ask him more questions about that.

No doubt Dr. Kirby had his thoughts, and Pamela hers. The two intruders on the long marriage, with the husband and wife, looked much like dozens of other foursomes in boxes along both sides of the cavernous hall: attractive people, elegantly clad, calmly listening to music. Kirby was sitting behind Rhoda, Pug in back of Pamela Tudsbury. A stranger might have guessed that the tall people were one pair, the short ones another, except that the smaller woman seemed young for the naval officer with the weathered face and heavy eyebrows.

During the intermission crush, Victor Henry and Dr. Kirby were left together by the ladies in an overheated lobby foul with smoke. Pug said, “How’s for a breath of air? Looks like the snow’s stopped.”

“You’re on.”

Chauffeurs were stamping by their limousines on the fresh snow. It was bitter cold. A few young music lovers from the rearmost seats, in sweaters and parkas, chatted with smoking breaths on the slushy steps of the hall.

Pug said, “Anything very new on uranium?”

The scientist looked at him with head aslant. “What’s uranium?”

“Are you that far along?” Pug grinned.

Kirby slowly shook his head making a discouraged mouth.

“Are the Germans going to beat us to it?”

The answer was a shrug.

“As you know, I’m in War Plans,” Victor Henry said curtly. “I’m pushing you on this because we ought to have the dope, and we can’t get it. If this other thing is really in the works, maybe we’re just playing tic-tac-toe in our shop.”

Kirby stuffed his pipe and lit it. “You’re not playing tic-tac-toe. It’s not that close. Not on our side.”

“Could we be doing more about it?”

“One hell of a lot more. I’m going to England on this. They’re apparently far ahead of us.”

“They’ve been ahead on other things,” Pug said. “That’s something nobody mentions in this brainless Lend-Lease dogfight. We have to be goddamned glad we’ve got British scientists on our side, and we better break our necks to keep them there.”

“I tend to agree. But we’re ahead of them in many things too.” Kirby puffed his pipe, squinting at Pug. “Are you happy to be home?”

“Happy?” Pug scooped up snow and packed a snowball. The crunching snow in his warm hands always gave him an agreeable flash of childhood. “I’m too busy to think about it. Yes, I guess I’m happy.” He pegged the snowball over the cars into the empty street. “Rhoda was sick of Berlin, and being there by myself was certainly grim.”

“She’s a superb hostess, Rhoda,” said Kirby. “I’ve never attended better dinner parties than hers. That was something, the way she rescued that tureen.” The pipe in his teeth, Kirby uttered a harsh laugh. “Really something.”

“Among her other talents,” said Pug, “Rhoda’s always been a born juggler.”

Kirby wrinkled his whole face. “It’s pretty sharp out here at that, eh? Let’s go back.”

At the top of the stairs they encountered Madeline hurrying out, her white fox coat wrapped close around her long dress, a red shawl on her hair tied under her chin.

“Where are you off to?” her father said.

“I told Mom I wouldn’t be able to stay through. Mr. Cleveland’s back from Quantico. I have to see him.”

“Will you come to the dance afterward?”

Madeline sneezed. “I’m not sure, Dad.”

“Take care of that cold. You look fierce.”

The two men went inside. Madeline clung to the rail, hastening down the slippery steps.

A waiter with a sandwich and a double martini on a tray was knocking at the door of Hugh Cleveland’s suite when Madeline got there. The rich familiar voice sounded peevish. “It’s open, it’s open, come on in.”

Her employer, wearing an unbecoming purple silk robe, sat with his stocking feet up on an imitation antique desk, talking into a telephone and making pencil notes on a racing form. “What about Hialeah?” he was saying. “Got anything good there for tomorrow?” He waved at her, putting his hand for a moment over the mouthpiece. “Hey Matty! I thought you weren’t going to make it. Sign that. Give him a buck.”

The waiter, a small dull-eyed youngster, hovered in the room staring with a vacuous grin as Cleveland talked to the bookmaker. “Mr. Cleveland, I just want to tell you I’m a big fan of yours,” he blurted when Cleveland hung up. “I really think you’re terrific. So does my whole family. We never miss the amateur hour.”

“Thanks,” Cleveland rumbled with a heavy-lidded look, fingering his sandy hair. “Want anything, Matty?”

“A drink, thanks. I’ve got a cold.”

“Bring her another double,” said Cleveland, with a sudden charming smile at the waiter. “And get me three Havana cigars. Monte Cristos, if there are any. See how fast you can do it.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Cleveland.”

“How was Quantico?” Madeline threw her coat on a chair and sat down, blowing her nose.

“The stage’ll work fine. The commandant’s all excited. He thinks it’s a wonderful recruiting stunt.” Yawning, Cleveland lit a cigar and explained the arrangements for the broadcast that he had made with the commandant. “He showed me all over the camp. I saw a real combat exercise. Jesus, those marines shoot live ammunition over each other’s heads! I’ll be deaf for a week,” he said, rubbing his ears. “I guess they won’t put you through that.”

“Me? Am I going there?”

“Sure. Tomorrow.”

“What for?”

“Screen the performers, get the personal stuff on them, and all that. They’ve already got an amateur thing going there, it turns out. They call it the Happy Hour.”

Madeline said, “The Happy Hour’s an old custom all through the service.”

“Really? It was news to me. Anyhow, that makes it a cinch.” He described the arrangements for her interview at Quantico.

The doorbell rang. Blowing her nose, Madeline went to answer it. “I think I’ve got a fever. I don’t want to go and interview a lot of marines.”

A girl with dyed black hair stood simpering in the doorway, in a yellow coat and yellow snow boots, showing stained teeth in a thickly painted mouth. Her smile faded when Madeline opened the door.

“I was looking for Mr. Hugh Cleveland.”

“Right here, baby.” he called.

The girl came into the suite with uncertain steps, peering from Cleveland to Madeline.

“What is this?” she said.

“Wait in there,” he said, indicating the bedroom with his thumb. “I’ll be along.”

The girl closed the bedroom door behind her. Ignoring Cleveland’s embarrassed grin, Madeline snatched her coat and jerked on one sleeve and the other. “Good-night. I’ll talk to you tomorrow..”

“You’ve got a drink coming.”

“I don’t want it. I want to get to bed. I’m shivering.”

Cleveland came padding to her in stocking feet and put his hand on her forehead. She pushed it away.

“You have no fever.”

“Don’t touch me, please.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I just don’t like to be touched.”

The waiter knocked at the door and came in. “Double martini, sir and the Monte Cristos.”

“Great. Thanks.” Cleveland offered the tray to Madeline when the waiter left. “Here. Take off your coat and drink up.”

Both hands jammed in her coat pockets, Madeline said, “It’s not fair to keep a prostitute waiting. All she has to sell is time.”

Hugh Cleveland slowly grinned, putting down the tray. “Why, Madeline Henry.”

“I’m sorry. I feel extremely lousy. Good-night.”

Cleveland strode to the bedroom. A murmur of voices, and the girl, tucking money in a shiny yellow purse, emerged from the room. She gave Madeline a tough unpleasant sad glance and left the suite.

“Sit down and have your drink. Here’s all the dope on Quantico” — he flourished a manila envelope — “and who to see, and the list of the performers. If you’re still not feeling well tomorrow just call me, and I’ll have Nat or Arnold come down and take over.”

“Oh, I guess I’ll manage.” Madeline sat, throwing her coat back on her shoulders, and drank.

“How are your folks?”

“Fine.”

“Any interesting guests at dinner?”

“Alistair Tudsbury, for one.”

“Tudsbury! Say, there’s genius. There’s a man I’d like to meet. He’s got style, Tudsbury, and a superb radio voice. But he’d never come on Who’s in Town. Who else?”

“Air Commodore Burne-Wilke, of the RAF.”

“Is an air commodore somebody?”

“From what my father says, he more or less ran the Battle of Britain.”

Wrinkling his nose, Cleveland put his feet on the desk again. “Hmmm. Not bad. The Battle of Britain’s awfully tired, though, isn’t it? I don’t know if he’d mean anything today, Matty. The audience has had the Battle of Britain up to here.”

“I wouldn’t dream of asking him.”

“I would.” Hands clasped, two fingers pressed judiciously to his chin, Cleveland shook his head. “No. Dated. I say balls to the Battle of Britain.”

“There was Senator Lacouture.”

Her employer’s thick sandy eyebrows rose. “Now, he’s hot. That’s right, isn’t he an in-law of yours, or something?”

“His daughter married my brother.”

“The one on the submarine?”

“No. The aviator.”

“What do you think? Would Lacouture come to New York?”

“For the chance to attack Lend-Lease, I think he’d go to Seattle.”

“Well, Lend-Lease is front-page. Not that one person in forty knows what it’s all about. Let’s get Lacouture. Do you mind talking to him?”

“No.” Madeline finished her drink and stood.

“Fine. Set him up for Monday if you can. We’re kind of blah on Monday.”

Madeline tapped the envelope in her hand, regarding it absently. The drink was making her feel better. “There’s Happy Hours at all the Navy bases, you know,” she said. “Practically on every ship. Probably in the Army camps, too. Couldn’t you do another show like this every now and then? It’s something different.”

Cleveland shook his head. “It’s a one-shot, Matty. Just a novelty. The regular amateurs are the meat and potatoes.”

“If we get in the war,” Madeline said, “they’ll be drafting talented people, won’t they? There’ll be camps over the country.”

“Well, could be.” With his most engaging smile, he waved a thumb at the bedroom door. “Sorry about her, kid. I thought you weren’t coming tonight.”

“It doesn’t make the slightest difference to me, I assure you.”

“You really disapprove of me. I know you do. The way my wife does. You’ve had a good upbringing.”

“I hope so.”

“Well, see, I wasn’t that fortunate.”

“Good-night, Hugh.”

“Say, listen.” With an amused genial squint, Cleveland scratched his head. “There might be something in that Happy Hour thing at that, if we do get in the war. It might be a series in itself. Start a file on Wartime Ideas, Matty. Type up a memo on that and stash it away.”

“All right.”

“Your father’s an insider. Does he think we’ll get in war?”

“He thinks we’re in it.”

Cleveland stretched and yawned. “Really? But the war’s sort of petering out, isn’t it? Nothing’s happening, except for the messing around in Greece and Africa.”

“The Germans are sinking a couple of hundred tons a month in the Atlantic.”

“Is that a lot? It’s all relative, I’d imagine. I guess Hitler’s got it won, though.” Cleveland yawned again. “All right, Matty. See you back in New York.”

When the girl had gone. Cleveland picked up the telephone, yawning and yawning. “Bell captain… Cleveland. Oh, is that you, Eddy? Fine. Listen, Eddy, she looked all right but I was busy. I sent her down to the bar for a while. Black hair, yellow coat, yellow purse. Thanks, Eddy.”

The slow movement of a Brahms symphony was putting Victor Henry in a doze, when a tap and a whisper roused him. “Captain Henry?” The girl usher appeared excited and awed. “The White House is on the telephone for you.”

He spoke a few words in his wife’s ear and departed. During applause after the symphony, Rhoda said, looking around at his still empty chair, “Pug’s evidently gone back to the White House.”

“Man’s life isn’t his own, is it?” Kirby said.

“When has it ever been?”

Pamela said, “Will he rejoin you at the dance?”

Rhoda made a helpless gesture.

An hour or so later, Victor Henry stood at the entrance to the grand ballroom of the Shoreham, glumly surveying the scene: the brilliantly dressed dancers crowding the floor; the stage festooned with American flags and Union Jacks; the huge spangled letters, BUNDLES FOR BRITAIN, arching over the brassy orchestra; and the long jolly queues at two enormous buffets laden with meats, salads, cheeses, and cakes. The naval aide at the White House had just told him, among other things, of thirty thousand tons sunk in the North Atlantic in the past two days.

Alistair Tudsbury came capering past him, with a blonde lady of forty or so quite naked from the bosom up except for a diamond necklace. The correspondent’s gold-chained paunch kept the lady at some distance, but her spirits seemed no less hilarious for that. He dragged his bad leg a bit as he danced, obviously determined to ignore it.

“Ah, there, Pug! You’re glaring like Savonarola, dear boy.”

“I’m looking for Rhoda.”

“She’s down at the other end. You know Irina Balsey?”

“Hello, Irina.” The blonde lady giggled, waving fingers at Henry. “Did Pamela come to the dance?”

“She went back to the office. The little prig’s doing the overworked patriot.”

Tudsbury twirled the blonde away with vigor ill-suited to his size and lameness. Crossing the dance floor, Henry saw his wife at a little round side table with Palmer Kirby.

“Hello, dear!” she called. “So you escaped! Get yourself a plate and join us. The veal is marvellous.”

“I’ll bring you some,” said Kirby, hastily rising. “Sit down, Pug,”

“No, no, Fred. I have to run along.”

“Oh, dear,” Rhoda said. “You’re not staying at all?”

“No. I just came to tell you I’ll be gone overnight, and possibly longer. I’m heading home to pack a bag, and then I’ll be off.”

Palmer Kirby said to him with a stiff smile, “Sorry you can’t stay. It’s a fine party.”

“Make the best of it. You won’t find such in London.”

“Oh, damn,” Rhoda said.

Pug bent over his wife and kissed her cheek. “Sorry, darling. Enjoy the dance.” The figure in blue disappeared among the dancers.

Rhoda and Palmer Kirby sat without speaking. The music jazzily blared. Dancers moved past them, sometimes calling to Rhoda, “Lovely party, dear. Marvellous.” She was smiling and waving in response when Kirby pushed aside his half-full plate of cooling food. “Well, I leave for New York at seven tomorrow, myself. I’d better turn in. It was an excellent dinner, and a fine concert. Thanks, Rhoda.”

“Palmer, I just have to stay another half your or so.” Kirby’s face was set, his large brown eyes distant and melancholy. Rhoda said, “Well, will I see you again before you go to London?”

“I’m afraid not.”

With an alert searching look at him, she deliberately wiped her mouth with a napkin. “I’ll walk out with you.”

In the crowded lobby, Rhoda stopped at a full-length mirror. Primping her hair, glancing at Kirby now and then in the glass, she spoke in a tone of the most careless chit-chat. “I’m sorry. I meant to tell Pug as soon as he got back. But he had so much to do, with his new job. And he was so relieved to be home. I just couldn’t, that’s all.”

Kirby nodded, with a cold expression.

She went on, “All right. Then along came this awful jolt, Byron marrying this girl in Lisbon. It took both of us days and days to simmer down. And hard upon that Janice arrived, all pregnant and whatnot. I mean, this close prospect of becoming grandparents, for the first time — you’ve just got to let me pick my moment, dear. It won’t be easy at best.”

“Rhoda, you and Pug have many things that bind you together. I fully realize it.”

She turned and looked in his eyes, then went back to her primping. “Don’t we?”

He said, frowning at her image in the mirror, “I’ve been very uncomfortable tonight. I really want to get married again, Rhoda. I’ve never felt that more strongly than I did at your dinner table.”

“Palmer, don’t give me an ultimatum, for heaven’s sake. I can’t be rushed.” Rhoda faced him, speaking rapidly, shifting her eyes around the lobby, and smiling at a woman who swished by in trailing orange satin. “Or rather, do just as you please, dear. Bring back an English wife, why don’t you? You’ll find dozens of fine women there eager to adore you, and delighted to come to America.”

“I won’t bring home an English wife.” He took her hand, glancing up and down her body with a sudden smile. “My God, how pretty you look tonight! And what a fine dinner you put on, and what a grand success this dance is! You’re quite a manager. My guess is I won’t get back till May. That should be plenty of time, Rhoda. You know it should be. Good-bye.”

Rhoda went back to the dance, much relieved. That last moment had cleared the air. At least until May, she could go on juggling.

Wearing owlish black-rimmed spectacles, Pamela Tudsbury clattered away at a typewriter, in her mauve evening dress and fancy hairdo. A desk lamp lit the machine; the rest of the shabby, windowless little office was in half-darkness. A knock came on the door. “Bless my soul, that was quick!” She opened the door to Victor Henry, in a brown felt hat and brown topcoat, carrying a canvas overnight bag. She walked to a silex steaming on a small table amid piled papers, pamphlets, and technical books. “Black you drink it, with sugar, as I recall.”

“Good memory.”

She poured two cups of coffee and settled into the swivel chair by the typewriter. They sipped, regarding each other in the lamplight.

“You look absurd,” Pug Henry said.

“Oh, I know, but he wants it by eight in the morning.”

She took off the glasses and rubbed her eyes. “It was either get up at five, or finish it tonight. I wasn’t sleepy, and I hadn’t the faintest desire either to dance or to stuff myself.”

“What are you working on?”

She hesitated, then smiled. “I daresay you know a lot more about it than I do. The annex on landing craft.”

“Oh, yes. That one. Quite a document, eh?”

“It seems like sheer fantasy. Can the United States really develop all those designs and build those thousands of machines by 1943?”

“We can, but I have no reason to think we will. That isn’t an operation order. It’s a plan.”

He relished being alone with her in this tiny, dreary, dimly lit office. Pamela’s formal half-nudity had a keener if incongruous sweetness here: a bunch of violets as it were, on a pile of mimeographed memoranda. He said gruffly, “Well, what’s the dope on Ted Gallard?”

I received a letter from his squadron commander only yesterday. It’s quite a long story. The nub of it is that three RAF prisoners in his hospital escaped, made their way to the coast, and got picked up and brought home. Teddy was supposed to break out with them. But after your visit he got a room of his own and special surveillance. So he couldn’t. They think that by now he’s been shipped to Germany and put in a camp for RAF prisoners. That’s the story. He’ll be well treated, simply because we’re holding so many Luftwaffe pilots. Still, you can see why I’ve no particular desire just now to go to posh supper-dances.”

Victory Henry glanced at the wall clock. “It was my doing, then, that he couldn’t get out.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it’s a fact. I hesitated before talking to the Luftwaffe about him, you know. I figured it would call attention to him and give him a special status. I wasn’t sure whether that would be good or bad. Sometimes it’s best to leave things as they fall.”

“But I asked you to find out what you could about him.”

“Yes, you did.”

“You relieved me of a couple of months of agonizing.”

He said, “Anyway, it’s done. And now you know he’s still alive. That’s something. I’m very glad to hear it, Pam. Well — I guess I’ll go along.”

“Where to?”

With a surprised grin, he said, “You know better than that.”

“You can always just shut me up. You’re not leaving the country?”

He pointed at the small suitcase. “Hardly.”

“Because we’re finishing up here very soon,” she said, “and in that case I might not see you for a long while.”

Pug leaned forward, elbows on knees, clasping his hands. He felt little hesitation in confiding to her things he never told his wife. Pamela was, after all, almost as much of an insider as he was. “The President’s had a bad sinus condition for weeks, Pam. Lately he’s been running a fever. This Lend-Lease hubbub isn’t helping any. He’s taking the train to Hyde Park to rest up for a few days, strictly on the q.t. I’m to ride with him. It’s a big surprise. I thought, and sort of hoped, he’d forgotten me.”

She laughed. “You’re not very forgettable. You’re a legend in Bomber Command, you know. The American naval officer who rode a Wellington into the Berlin flak for the fun of it.”

“That’s a laugh,” said Pug. “I was crouching on the deck the whole time with my eyes tight shut and my fingers in my ears. I still shudder to think what would have happened if I’d been shot down and survived. The U.S. naval attaché to Berlin, riding over Germany in a British bomber! Lord almighty, you were angry at me for going.”

“I certainly was.”

Pug stood, buttoning his coat. “Thanks for the coffee. I’ve been yearning for coffee ever since I had to skip it to put on my monkey suit.”

“It was a splendid dinner. Your wife’s wonderful, Victor. She manages things so well. The way she picked that bowl out of the air, like a conjurer! And she’s so beautiful.”

“Rhoda’s all right. Nobody has to sell Rhoda to me.”

Pamela put on her glasses and ran a sheet of paper into the typewriter.

“Good-bye, then,” Pug said, adding awkwardly, “and maybe I’ll see you before you go back home.”

“That would be nice.” She was peering at scribbled papers beside the typewriter. “I’ve missed you terribly, you know. More so here than in London.”

Pamela slipped these words out in the quiet manner peculiar to her. Victor Henry had his hand on the doorknob. He paused, and cleared his throat. “Well — that’s Rhoda’s complaint. I get buried in what I’m doing.”

“Oh, I realize that.” She looked up at him with eyes glistening roundly through the lenses. “Well? You don’t want to keep the President waiting, Captain Henry.”

Chapter 40

In the dark quiet railroad station, two Secret Service men lifted the President from the limousine and set him on his feet. He towered over them in a velvet-collared coat, his big-brimmed soft gray hat pulled low on his head and flapping in the icy wind. Holding one man’s arm, leaning on a cane, he lurched and hobbled toward a railed ramp, where he drew on gloves and hauled himself up into the rear car, jerking his legs along. Victor Henry, many yards away, could see the huge shoulders heaving under the overcoat. A tall woman with a nodding brown feather in her hat and a fluttering paper in her hand scampered up and touched Victor Henry’s arm. You’re to go in the President’s car, Captain.

Climbing the ramp, Pug realized why the President had put on gloves. The steel rails were so cold, the skin of his hands stuck to them. A steward led Victor Henry past a pantry where another steward was rattling ice in a cocktail shaker. “You be stayin’ in heah, suh. When you ready, de President invite you join him.”

The room was an ordinary Pullman sleeper compartment. The strong train smell was the same. The green upholstery was dusty and worn. Victor Henry hung coat and cap in a tiny closet, brushed his hair, cleaned his nails, and gave a flick of a paper towel to his highly polished shoes. The train started in a slow glide, with no jolt and no noise.

“Sit down, sit down, Pug!” The President waved from a lounge chair. “What’ll you have? Whiskey sours are on the menu, because Harry drinks them all night long, but we can fix up almost anything.”

“Whiskey sour will be fine, Mr. President. Thank you.”

Harry Hopkins, slouching on a green sofa, said, “Hello, Captain.”

Though Roosevelt was supposed to be ill, Hopkins looked the worse of the two: lean, sunken-chested, gray of skin. The President’s color was high, perhaps feverish, his black-rimmed eyes were very bright, and a perky red bow tie went well with the gay relaxed look of his massive face. He bulked huge in the chair, thou his legs showed so pitifully skeletal though the trousers. It crossed Pug’s mind that Washington and Lincoln too had been oversized men.

“How are you on poetry, Pug?” said the President, in the cultured accents that always sounded a bit affected to the Navy man. “Do you know that poem that ends, ‘There isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, no matter where it’s going?’ Golly that’s the way I feel. Just getting on this train has made me feel one hundred percent better.” The President put the back of his hand to his mouth, and harshly coughed. “Well, ninety percent. If this were a ship, it would be one hundred percent.”

“I prefer a ship too, sir.”

“The old grievance, eh, sailor?”

“No, sir, truly not. I’m quite happy in War Plans.”

“Are you? Well, I’m glad to hear it. Of course, I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re cooking up with those British fellows.”

“So I understand, sir.”

Eyebrows mischievously arched, the President went on, “No, not the foggiest. When your draft that the Secretary of War got yesterday bounces back to Lord Burne-Wilke, and he sees corrections in what looks like my handwriting, that will be an accidental resemblance.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Yes, indeed. On the very first page of the forwarding letter, if you recall, there’s a sentence that begins, ‘When the United States enters the war.’ Somebody, with a handwriting just like mine, has crossed out that perfectly terrible clause, and written instead, ‘In the event that the United States is compelled to enter the war.’ Small but important change!” A steward passed a tray of drinks. The President took a tall glass of orange juice. “Doctor’s orders. Lots and lots of fruit juice. Harry, do you have that thing with you?”

“Right here, Mr. President.”

“Well, let’s get at it. I want to have a snack, and then try to sleep a little. How do you sleep on trains, Pug?”

“Fine, sir, if I can just get the heat right. Usually I roast or freeze.”

The President threw his head back. “Ha, ha! By George, I’ll tell you a state secret — the President of the United States has the same trouble! They’re building a special armored car for me now. I told them, I said, I don’t care about anything else, but that heating system had better work! Harry, let’s get in our order for a snack.” He glanced at his watch. “Are you hungry, Pug? I am. I’ll tell you another state secret. The food at the White House leaves something to be desired. Tell them I want sturgeon and eggs, Harry. I’ve been thinking of sturgeon and eggs for days.”

Hopkins went forward.

The President’s car, so far as Pug could tell, was a regular Pullman lounge car, rearranged to look like a living room. He had expected something more imposing. Roosevelt leaned one elbow on the chair arm, and rested a hand on his knee, looking out of the window in a calm majestic manner. “I really am feeling better by the minute. I can’t tell you how I love being away from the telephone. How are your boys? The naval aviator, and that young submariner?”

Victor Henry knew that Roosevelt liked to display his memory, but it still surprised and impressed him. “They’re fine, sir, but how do you remember?”

The President said with almost boyish gratification, “Oh, a politician has to borrow the virtues of the elephant, Pug. The memory, the thick hide, and of course that long inquisitive nose! Ha ha ha!”

Hopkins returned to the sofa, stooping with fatigue, zipped open his portfolio, and handed Captain Henry a document three pages long with one dark facsimile page attached. “Take a look at this.”

Pug read the first page with skepticism that shifted to amazement while the train wheels gently clack-clacked. He leafed through the sheets and looked from Hopkins to the President, not inclined to speak first. What he held in his hands was a summary from Army intelligence sources of a startling German operation order, purportedly slipped to a civilian in the American embassy in Berlin by anti-Nazi Wehrmacht officers. Pug knew the man well, but his intelligence function was a complete surprise.

Franklin Roosevelt said. “Think it’s genuine?”

“Well, sir, that photostat of the first page does look like the German military documents I’ve seen. The headings are right, the look of the typeface, the paragraphing, and so forth.”

“What about the content?”

“Well, if that’s genuine, Mr. President, it’s one incredible intelligence break.”

The President smiled, with fatigued tolerance for a minor person’s naïveté. “If is the longest two-letter word in the language.”

Hopkins said hoarsely, “Do the contents seem authentic to you?”

“I can’t say, sir. I don’t know Russian geography that well, to begin with.

“Our Army people find it plausible,” Hopkins said.

“Why would anybody fake a staggering document like that, Captain? A complete operation order for the invasion of the Soviet Union, in such massive detail?”

Pug thought it over, and spoke carefully. “Well, sir, for one thing, they might be hoping to prod the Soviet Union to mobilize, and so kick off a two-front war. In that case, the army might depose or kill Hitler. Then again, it could be a plant by German intelligence, to see how much we pass on to the Russians. The possibilities are many.”

“That’s the trouble,” said the President, yawning. “Our ambassador in Russia has begged us not to transmit this thing. He says Moscow is flooded with such stuff. The Russians assume it all emanates from British intelligence to start trouble between Stalin and Hitler, so as to get the Germans off England’s back.” The President coughed heavily for almost a minute. He sat back in his chair, catching his breath, looking out at streetlamps of a small town sliding past. He suddenly appeared very bored.

Harry Hopkins leaned forward, balancing the drink in both hands. “There’s a question about giving this document to the Russian ambassador here in Washington, Pug. Any comment?”

Pug hesitated; a political problem like this was not in his reach. President Roosevelt said, with a trace of annoyance, “Come on, Pug.”

“I’m for doing it.”

“Why?” said Hopkins.

“What’s there to lose, sir? If this thing turns out to be the McCoy, we’ll have scored a big point with the Russkis. If it’s a phony, well, so what? They can’t be any more suspicious of us than they are.”

The weary tension of Harry Hopkins’s face dissolved in a warm, gentle smile. “I think that’s a remarkable astute answer,” he said, “since it’s what I said myself.” He took the document from Pug and zipped it into the briefcase.

“I’m more than ready to eat that sturgeon and eggs,” said Franklin Roosevelt, “if it’s cooked.”

“Let me go and check, Mr. President.” Hopkins jumped to his feet.

Tossing on the narrow bunk, Pug sweated and froze in the compartment for an hour or so, fiddling with the heat controls in vain. He settled down to freeze, since he slept better in cold air. The slow, even motion of the train began to lull him.

Rap, rap. “Suh? The President like to speak to you. You want a robe, suh? The President say not to bother dressing. Just come to his room.”

“Thanks, I have one.”

Pug passed shivering from his cold compartment to the President’s bedroom, which was far too hot. The famous big-chinned face of Franklin Roosevelt, with the pince-nez glasses and jaunty cigarette holder, looked very strange on a slumped large body in blue pajamas and coffee-stained gray sweater. The President’s thin hair was rumpled, his eyes bleary. He looked like so many old men look in bed: defenseless, shabby, and sad, his personality and dignity stripped from him. There was a smell of medicine in the room. The picture disturbed Victor Henry because the President appeared so vulnerable, unwell, and unimportant; and also because he was only seven or eight years older than Pug, yet seemed decrepit. The blue blanket was piled with papers. He was making pencil notes on a sheaf in his hand.

“Pug, did I break in on your beauty rest?”

“Not at all, sir.”

“Sit down for a moment, old top.” The President removed his glasses with a pinch of two fingers, and vigorously massaged his eyes. On the bedside table several medicine bottles tinkled as the train clacked over a bumpy rail. “Lord, how my eyes itch,” he said. “Do yours? Nothing seems to help. And it’s always worse when I get these sinus attacks.” He clipped papers and dropped them in the blanket. “Something I’ve promised myself to do — if I ever find the time, Pug, — is to write out a memorandum of the things that come to me in just one day. Any day at random, any twenty-four-hour period. You’d be amazed.” He slapped at the papers. “It would be a valuable sidelight on history, wouldn’t it? For instance. Just take tonight’s laundry that I’ve been doing. Vichy France seems about to sign a full alliance with Hitler. Threaten to cut off their food and starve them out? That’s what the British advise. Give them even more food, bribe them to hold out against Hitler? Our ambassador’s idea. But when we send the French more food, the Germans simply swallow up more of what the French produce. So where are you? — Now. Here.” He picked up a clipped document. “The Japanese foreign minister is meeting with Hitler. You’ve read about that. What are they up to? Shall we move the Asiatic fleet from Manila to Singapore, to make them think twice about jumping on the French and Dutch East Indies? That’s the British idea. Or shall we pull everything in the Pacific all the way back to the west coast, for prudence’s sake? That what my Chief of Naval Operations wants. I’d like your opinion on that, by the way. Here’s another touchy item — the Azores. Grab them before Hitler invades Portugal and takes them himself? Or if we grab them, will that make him invade Portugal?”

The President flipped through more papers as though they were butcher and grocer bills. “Oh yes, Selective Service. This is bad. From Stimson. The authorizing bill will run out in a few months. We have to start new legislation rolling now. But after the Lend-Lease battle, Congress will be in no mood to extend the draft. And if they don’t we’ll be militarily helpless. –Morgenthau. Treasury is bedeviling me to freeze all the funds of Germany and Italy here, but State says no, we’ve got four times as much invested in those countries as they’ve got with us. –Morgenthau again. The British agreed to sell all their investments here to give us their remaining dollars, and Morgenthau told Congress they would, and now the British are dragging their feet. There’s ever so much more. That’s part of one day’s basketful, old chap. I mean, a historian would certainly find a cross section like that interesting, wouldn’t he? I had a check made on the papers of Wilson and Lincoln. Nothing like it ever turned up. I am definitely going to do it one day.”

Roosevelt coughed long and hard, closing his eyes, wincing, and putting a hand to his back. The gesture threw him off balance in the swaying train, and the large body began to topple over like a tipped barrel. Victor Henry jumped to steady his shoulder, but the President’s long powerful arm had caught an edge of the bed. “Thanks, Pug. This train isn’t supposed to go more than thirty-five miles an hour. They’re shading it up there.” He rubbed his back. “I get a stabbing pain when I cough, but Doc McIntyre assures me it’s a pulled muscle. Just so it isn’t pleurisy! I really can’t afford pleurisy right now. I’d better have more of that cough medicine. Would you hand me that spoon and that bottle with the red stuff? Thank you, old fellow.” The President took a spoonful of the medicine, making a face. Tilting his large head to one side in the way all the nightclub clowns imitated, Roosevelt fixed the Navy captain with a sharp look from bloodshot eyes. “Pug, the U-boats keep working westward with this new wolf-pack tactic. The sinkings are outrunning the combined capacity of our yards plus the British yards to build new bottoms. You’re aware of that.”

“I’ve been hearing plenty about it at our conferences, sir.”

“You accept the British figures of sinkings?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. President.”

“So do I. The minute Lend-Lease passes, we’ll be sending out a vast shipment of stuff. Now, none of that stuff must land on the ocean floor instead of in England. That’s terribly important.”

Roosevelt’s offhand remark about Lend-Lease surprised Victor Henry, who was deeply worried, as the British were, about the violent debate in the Senate. “You think Lend-Lease will pass, sir?”

“Oh, the bill will pass,” said the President absently. “But then what? Seventy ships are standing by now to be loaded. This shipment simply cannot be scattered and sunk by the U-boats, Pug. The British need the stuff. They need even more the morale boost of seeing it arrive. The problem is getting it through as far as Iceland. From there the British can simply convoy them, but not from here to Iceland. They’re simply stretched to the breaking point. Well? What do we do?

Victor Henry said uncomfortably, under the President’s questioning gaze, “Convoy, sir?”

The President heavily shook his head. “You know the answer on that, Pug, as of this moment.”

In the Lend-Lease fight, the issue of convoying was red-hot. The Lacouture group was screaming that if Lend-Lease passed, the warmongers would next demand to convoy the ships that carried the supplies and that convoy meant immediate war with Germany. The President was publicly insisting that American policy would not change in the Atlantic: “neutrality patrol,” not convoy.

Roosevelt’s grim flushed face creased in the sly mischievous look that was becoming familiar to Pug. “I’ve been thinking, however. Suppose a squadron of destroyers went out on an exercise? Not convoying, you understand. Not convoying at all. Just practicing convoy procedures. Just professional drill, you might say. The Navy is always drilling, isn’t it? That’s your job. Well, suppose they chose to travel with these vessels — strictly for drill purposes, you understand — just this once? And to avoid difficulties and complications, suppose all this were done highly informally, with no written orders or records? Don’t suppose the U-boats might be a bit discouraged to see sixteen or so Benson-class United States destroyers out there screening those ships?”

“Discouraged, yes. Still, what happens will depend their instructions, Mr. President.”

“They’ve got instructions not to tangle with our warships,” Roosevelt said, sounding and looking very hard. “That’s obvious.”

Victor Henry’s pulse was quickening. “They’ve never encountered our destroyers in a convoy screen, sir. Suppose a U-boat closes and fires a torpedo?”

“I don’t believe it will happen,” Roosevelt said shortly. “The ships may never even be sighted by the Germans before the British take over the convoy. The North Atlantic weather’s atrocious now. And most of the U-boat action is still on the other side of Iceland.” He was fitting a cigarette in his holder as he spoke. Victor Henry swiftly snapped his lighter and offered a flame. “Thanks. This is against doctor’s orders, but I need a smoke. Pug, I want this thing done, and I’m thinking you might handle it and go out with the destroyers.”

Captain Henry swallowed his astonishment and said, “Aye aye, sir.”

“It’s very much like that airplane transfer, which you handled so well. Everything depends on doing it in the calmest, quietest, most unobtrusive way. The point is to make no records, and above all no history, but simply to get those ships silent and safe as far as Iceland. Can it be done?”

The Navy captain sat hunched for perhaps a minute, looking at the President. “Yes, sir.”

“With an absolute minimum of people in the know? I haven’t even discussed this thing with Harry Hopkins.”

“Admiral Stark and Admiral King would have to know, of course, sir. And Commander, Support Force, and the officer in tactical command of the screen. Everybody else in the exercise will just obey orders.”

Roosevelt laughed and puffed at his cigarette. “Well! If you can keep it down to three admirals and one other officer, that will be swell. But a lot of personnel will take part in this exercise. There’ll be talk.”

Victor Henry said stonily, “Not very much.” Franklin Roosevelt raised his bushy eyebrows. “Mr. President, what do we do if a U-boat does attack? I agree it’s unlikely. But suppose it happens?”

Roosevelt regarded him through wreathing cigarette smoke. “This is gamble that it won’t happen.”

“I know that sir.”

“You understand that a combat incident destroys the whole purpose,” the President said, “and you know the other implications.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now tell me,” said the President, in a much milder manner, “What do you honestly think of the idea? It’s my own. If you think it’s bad, say so, but tell me why.”

Sitting forward hunched, elbows on his knees, ticking off points with an index finger against his other hand, Victor Henry said, “Well, sir — to begin with, those U-boat fellows may never see us, as you say. If they do, they’ll be surprised. They’ll radio for instructions. We may run into a trigger-happy type, but I doubt it. I know those German submariners. They’re excellent professional officers. This is a policy decision that will have to go up to Hitler. That’ll take time. I think the ships will get through without incident, Mr. President.”

“Grand!”

“But it’ll only work once. It’s a policy surprise. It’s too risky to repeat.”

Roosevelt sighed and nodded. “That’s it. The whole situation is terrible, and some kind of risk has to be taken. The British say that before the next big convoy goes, they’ll have many damaged destroyers back in action. We’re also giving the Canadians some coast guard cutters — in confidence, Pug — to help close this gap to Iceland. It’s this first Lend-Lease shipment that is crucial.” The President gathered up the papers stacked around on his blanket. “Would you put these in that case?”

As Victor Henry was closing the dispatch case the President said through a yawn, using both arms to ease himself down into the bed, “How have those conferences with the British been going?”

“Excellently, on the whole, Mr. President.”

The President yawned again. “It was so important to start this pattern of joint staff work. I’m very happy about it.” He snapped off his bed lamp, leaving the room dimly lit by recessed lights in the walls. “They’ve been giving you some trouble about Singapore, haven’t they?

“Actually we just put that issue aside, sir. There was no resolving it.”

“You can turn out the lights, Pug. The button’s by the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

One blue light, and the President’s cigarette end, still glowed in the darkness. His voice came weary and muffled from the bed. “We’ll run into that time and again. They want to hold onto their empire, naturally. But the job is to beat Hitler. Those are different undertakings. They’ll insist to the end that they’re one and the same. Well — we’ll chat again about that exercise in the morning, Pug.” The President used his trick word with sardonic relish.

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And when you come back from that little sea jaunt — which you ought to enjoy, for a change, — I want you and your wife and family to come to dinner with us. Just a little quiet dinner. Mrs. Roosevelt often speaks of you .”

“Thank you, Mr. President. I’m very honored.”

“Good-night, old top.”

The red cigarette end went out in an ashtray. As Victor Henry put his hand on the doorknob, the President suddenly said, “Pug, the best men I have around me keep urging me to declare war. They say it’s inevitable, and that it’s the only way to unite the people and get them to put their backs into the war effort. I suppose you agree with them?”

The Navy captain said after a pause, looking at the bulky shadow in blue light, “Yes, Mr. President, I do.”

“It’s a bad thing to go to war,” said the President. “A very bad thing. If the moment is coming, it isn’t here. Meantime I shall just have to go on being called a warmonger, a coward, and a shillyshallyer, all rolled in one. That’s how I earn my salary. Get a good rest, Pug.”

Chapter 41 — The Negative Front (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

Chapter 42

Lend-Lease passed the Senate by sixty votes to thirty-one. Few Americans followed the debate more keenly than Pug Henry. In the visitor’s gallery of the Senate, hand cupped to his ear because of the bad acoustics, he absorbed a new knowledge of how his own government worked. More and more he admired Franklin Roosevelt’s ability to drive this balky team. After weeks of wild controversy, the vote itself went smooth as oil. The last excitement lay in the crushing of trick amendments. Two to one, the Senate voted in Lend-Lease, while the country and the press barely paid attention. The debate had bored them into indifference.

Yet this vote struck Pug Henry as the key world event since Hitler’s smash into Poland. Here in the yeas of sixty elderly voices the tide might be starting to turn. The President at last had the means to put the United States on a war footing, long before the people were ready to fight. The new factories that must now rise to make Lend-Lease planes and guns, would in time arm the American forces that so far existed only on paper.

That same day he was ordered to fly down to the Norfolk Navy Yard and report to Admiral Ernest King, a dragon he had not met before. King had his flag in the Texas.

Texas was the first battleship to which Pug had ever reported, shortly after the World War, on just such a raw and blowy March day as this, in this same Navy Yard, and possibly at this same pier. With one stack gone, and tripod instead of basket mast, Texas looked much different than in the old coal-burning days. Pug noted in the paint and brightwork topside an arid sepulchral cleanliness. The gangway watch, and the sailors working around the old gun turrets, were starched and scrubbed as surgeons. Outside the four-starred door to flag quarters a glittery-eyed marine presented arms like a clock striking.

King sat behind a desk, showing blue sleeves stiff to the elbow with gold. The bare office was warmed only by a framed picture of Admiral Mayo on the bulkhead. King had a long, thin, deeply scored red face with high cheekbones, a narrow shiny pate, and a sharp nose. Behind him hung a chart of the Atlantic, with bold black letters in one corner, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, ATLANTIC FLEET. He motioned Victor Henry to a seat, tilted back his chin, and eyed him.

“I received a telephone call from the Chief of Naval Operations yesterday,” he commenced in a sandy voice, “that one Captain Victor Henry of War Plans would report to me directly from the President of the United States.”

Henry bobbed his head as though he were an ensign.

Silence, and the hum of ventilators. “Well? State your business.”

The captain told Admiral King what Franklin Roosevelt desired. The admiral calmly smoked a cigarette in a holder, eyes boring at Henry. Then Pug described his plan for executing the President’s desires. He talked for six or seven minutes. King’s long, weathered face remained immobile and faintly incredulous.

“So! You’re prepared to get the United States of America into this war all by yourself, are you, Captain?” said Ernest King at last, with frigid sarcasm. “Well, that’s one way for an obscure person to go down in history.”

“Admiral, it’s the President’s judgment that this exercise will go off without incident.”

“So you said. Well, suppose his judgment’s wrong? Suppose a U-boat fires a fish at you? What then?”

“If we’re fired on, sir, why, I propose to fire back. That won’t start a war unless Hitler wants war.”

Ernest King nodded peevishly. “Hell, we’re in this war anyway. It doesn’t matter too much when or how the whistle blows. The Japanese are going to kick off against us when it suits them and the Germans. Probably when it least suits us. I agree with Mr. Roosevelt that it very likely won’t happen now. But how about the battle cruisers? Hey? Thought about them? The Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau? They’ve picked off more than a hundred thousand tons in the past month.”

“Yes, sir. I hope the Catalinas will warn us if they’re around, so we can evade.”

Admiral King said, “That’s a big ocean out there. The air patrol can easily miss them.”

“Well, then, the cruisers can miss us too, Admiral.”

After another pause, looking Victor Henry over like a dog he was considering buying, King picked up the telephone. “Get me Admiral Bristol. — Henry, you have nothing in writing?”

“No, sir.”

“Very well. You will discontinue all references to the President.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Hello? Admiral, I’m sending to your office” — King glanced at a scrap of paper on his desk — “Captain Victor Henry, a special observer from War Plans. Captain Henry will visit Desron Eight and conduct surprise drills, inspections, and maneuvers, to test combat readiness. He is to be regarded as my assistant chief of staff, with appropriate authority… . Affirmative. He will be in your office within the hour. Thank you.”

Hanging up, King folded bony hands over his flat stomach and, staring at Victor Henry, he spoke in formal drone. “Captain, I desire that you now form out of Desron Eight an antisubmarine screen, and proceed to sea to conduct realistic tests and drills. This includes forming up screens on cooperative merchant vessels which you may encounter. You will of course avoid provoking belligerent vessels that may sight you. I desire you to keep security at a maximum and paperwork at a minimum. For that reason my instructions are verbal. You’ll conduct yourself similarly.”

“Understood, Admiral.”

A chilly smile moved one side of Ernest King’s mouth, and he reverted to his natural voice. “Perfect horseshit, but that’s the story. In the event of an incident, it will be a hanging for all hands. That will be all.”

Even in the North Atlantic in March, even in a destroyer, even on such risky and peculiar business, going back to sea was a tonic. Pug paced the bridge of U.S.S. Plunkett all day, a happy man, and slept in the sea cabin by the chart house.

On clear nights, no matter how cold the wind and how rough the sea, he spent hours after dinner alone on the flying bridge. The broad dark ocean, the streaming pure air, the crowded stars arching overhead, always made him feel what the Bible called the spirit of God hovering on the face of the waters. Down the years even more than his childhood Bible training this religious awe inspired by nights at sea had kept Captain Henry a believer. He spoke of this to nobody, not to ministers who were his old friends; he would have felt embarrassed and mawkish, for he was not sure how seriously even they took the Lord. On this voyage the Almighty was there for Victor Henry as always in the black starry universe, a presence actual and lovable, if disturbingly unpredictable.

Officially Pug was an observer of the “exercise,” and he kept to that role, leaving operations to the commander of the destroyer screen. He interfered once. On the second day after the join-up off Newfoundland, the long ragged columns of merchant ships, stretching across the horizon, plowed into a snowstorm. Lookouts were coming off their posts almost too stiff to move, and covered with icicles. Plunging up and down over huge black waves, ships a mile apart were losing sight of each other. After reports of minor collisions and near-misses in the zigzags, Pug called into his sea cabin Commander Baldwin, who headed the screen, and the British liaison officer.

“I’ve been figuring,” he said, pointing to a chart, and hanging on to his gyrating chair. “We can gain an advance of half a day by proceeding on a straight course. Now maybe there are U-boats out there in all that stuff, and then again, maybe there aren’t. If they’re going to try to penetrate a screen of fifteen American destroyers, well, with seventy-one juicy crawling targets, zigzagging won’t help much. Let’s head straight for Point Baker, turn over this hot potato, and skedaddle.”

Mopping snow from red eyebrows under an iced-up parka hood, Commander Baldwin grinned. “Concur, Captain.”

Pug said to the British signal officer, a little quiet man who had come in from the stormy bridge smoking a pipe upside down, “Give your commodore a flag hoist: DISCONTINUE ZIGZAGGING.”

Day after day, Victor Henry and Commander Baldwin ate breakfast from trays in the sea cabin, reviewing courses of action in case of a German attack. Each morning the screen conducted combat drills, in a ragged style that enraged Pug. He was tempted to take over and work these units hard; but to maintain the dull calm of the operation was paramount, so he did nothing. Unmolested, the first Lend-Lease convoy steamed straight eastward. About half the time bad weather shrouded the ships. On the crystalline days and bright moonlit nights Victor Henry remained clothed and awake, drank gallons of coffee, and smoked his throat raw, now and then dozing in the captain’s chair. Whether U-boats saw the convoy and laid low because of the American destroyers fanned ahead of it, or whether it got through undetected, Victor Henry never knew. They arrived at Point Baker, a dot of latitude and longitude on the wide empty sea, without a single episode of alarm.

A feeble yellow sun was just rising. The convoy began steaming in a pattern ten miles square, in a ring of desolate ice-flecked black water and pearly sky, waiting for the British. Victor Henry stood on the flying bridge peering eastward, hoping that the Plunkett’s navigator knew his job. Since the return from Berlin, he had never felt so well. He had read a lot of Shakespeare in his mildewed seagoing volume, and had caught up on a footlocker full of paperwork, and slept and slept, his body responding in the old way to the rocking of a destroyer. After three hours, the first hulls began to show above the horizon, due east: destroyers, frigates, and corvettes came on, the leading ship began to blink a yellow light. A signalman rushed up to the flying bridge, bringing a pencilled scrawl: THANKS YANKS X CUPBOARD IS BARE.

Pug grunted. “Send him EAT HEARTY — X-RAY — MORE COMING — X-RAY — and sign it MOTHER HUBBARD.”

The grinning sailor said, “Aye aye, sir,” and trampled down the ladder.

“As an observer,” Pug called to Commander Baldwin on the bridge below, “I would now be pleased to observe how fast your signal gang can hoist REVERSE COURSE, MAKE 32 KNOTS.”

When the Plunkett tied up in the Norfolk Navy Yard, Victor Henry went straight to flag quarters on the Texas. Admiral King listened to his report with the face of scrawny sandstone pharaoh, showing a human reaction only when Pug mentioned the poor performance of the destroyers. The pharaoh face then became slightly unpleasant. “I am aware of the low level of preparedness in the fleet, and have instituted corrective programs. Now then. Oh what basis, Captain, did the President choose you for this mission?”

“When I was naval attaché in Germany, sir, he happened to use me on jobs involving high security. I suppose this fell into that category.”

“Will you report back to him?”

“Yes, sir.” Victor Henry jumped to his feet as the admiral walked to a map of the world, newly hung on the bulkhead opposite his desk in place of the photograph of Admiral Mayo.

“I suppose while out at sea you’ve gotten the news? You know that the Germans blitzed Yugoslavia in one week? That Greece has surrendered” — the admiral ran a bony finger along Adriatic and Mediterranean coastlines hatched in angry fresh red ink — “that this fellow Rommel has knocked the British clear back into Egypt, and is massing to drive on the Suez Canal? That the big British force trapped in Greece will be lucky to pull off another Dunkirk? That the Arabs are rising to throw the British out of the Middle East? That Iraq’s already ordered them out and asked the Germans in?”

“Yes, sir. We got most of that. It’s been a bad few weeks.”

“Depends on the viewpoint. For the Germans it’s been a fine few weeks. In a month or so, they’ve tipped the world balance. My considered judgment is that this war’s almost over. There seems to be very little awareness of that here. When the Germans take the canal, master the Middle East, and close the Mediterranean, the British Empire lines will be severed. That’s the ball game. There will be no viable military force left in all of Asia between Hitler and the Japs. India and China will fall to them.” Admiral King swept bony fingers across the Eurasian landmass. “Solid dictator-ruled, from Antwerp to Tokyo, and from the Arctic Circle to the equator. Did you hear about that neutrality deal between the Soviets and the Japs?”

“No, sir. I missed that one.”

“Well, they signed a pact — oh, a couple of weeks ago, this was — agreeing to lay off each other for the time being. The press here almost ignored it, but that’s terrific news. It secures the Jap rear” — he waved toward Siberia — “and turns them loose to pick up all these big marbles.” The gnarled hand jumped south and ran over Indo-China, the East Indies, Malaya, and the Philippines; it paused, and one stiff finger glided to the Hawaiian Islands.

Admiral King stared sourly from the map to Victor Henry and strode back to his desk. “Now, of course the President has to make the political judgments. He’s an outstanding politician and a great Navy President. Possibly his judgment is correct, that politically he can’t do any more now than extend our patrol area. Maybe politically he has to chop hairs about ‘patrolling’ versus ‘convoying.’ But it’s just as belligerent for us to patrol, and broadcast the positions of German U-boars and raiders, as it is to convoy. Just as belligerent, but weak and futile. The British haven’t enough ships as it is to keep the Mediterranean open and cut this fellow Rommel’s supply lines. If we took over convoying, they might have a chance to stay in the game. My opinion hasn’t been asked by the President. You seem to be in his entourage. You might find a moment to make these points.” Ernest king sat, hands folded on the desk, and looked at the captain for a silent minute. “That might be, by sheer accident, the best contribution you ever make to the security of the United States.”

“Henry! Hey, Henry!”

Byron groaned, went rigid as a stretching cat, and opened one eye. Lieutenant Caruso and the other officers on the S-45 were used to this waking pattern of Ensign Henry. Until he went rigid there was no rousing him. It sometimes took violent shaking of the limp form.

“Huh?”

“Your father is here.”

“What?” Byron fluttered his eyes and reared up on an elbow. He now occupied the middle bunk of three. “You’re kidding, skipper. My father?”

“He’s in the wardroom. Care to join us?”

In his underwear, unshaven, mussed, and blinking, Byron stumbled to the doorway of the tiny wardroom. Holy cow. You really are here.”

“You heard your commanding officer say I was.” Immaculate in dress blues, Victor Henry frowned at his son over a coffee cup.

“They’ll tell me anything on this boat to get me out of my bunk. They’re all fiends.”

“What the devil are you doing in the sack at noon?”

“I had the midwatch. Excuse me, sir, for coming out like this. Be right back.” Byron quickly reappeared in a freshly starched khaki uniform, groomed and shaved. Victor Henry was alone. “Gosh, Dad, it’s good to see you.”

“Briny, a midwatch isn’t major surgery. You’re not supposed to take to your bed to recover.”

“Sir, I had it two nights in a row.” He poured for his father and himself. “Say, this is a real surprise. Mom said you were somewhere at sea. Have you been detached from War Plans, Dad?”

“No, this was a temporary thing. I’m heading back now. I was visiting the Texas. I saw the S-45 on the roster and thought I’d look in.” Victor Henry scanned his son’s thin face. “Well? How goes it?”

“Oh, first-rate. Swell bunch of guys on this boat. The skipper is 4.0, and the exec, I’d really like you to meet him. Lieutenant Aster. He was a witness at my wedding.”

Byron grinned the old half-melancholy, half-amused grin that never failed to charm Pug Henry, and most other people. “I’m glad to see you. I’m lonesome.”

“What’s your wife’s situation? Is she on her way home yet?”

Byron gave his father a veiled glance that hinted at his standing grudge about Natalie. But he was in a good mood and responded amiably. “I don’t know. We got in this morning from maneuvers. The yeoman just went for the mail.”

Pug put down his cup. “Incidentally, will your boat be in port on the twenty-sixth?”

“I can find out. Why?”

“Nothing much. Just if you are, and if you can get overnight leave, you’re invited to dinner at the White House.”

Byron’s deep-set eyes opened wide. “Cut it out, Dad.”

“Your mother and Madeline, too. I don’t guess Warren can fly in from Pearl Harbor. But if you’re around, you might as well come. Something to tell your children about.”

“Dad, how do we rate?”

Victor Henry shrugged. “Oh, a carrot for the donkey. Your mother doesn’t know about it yet.”

“No? Dinner at the White House! Mom will go clear through the overhead.”

Lieutenant Aster, carrying a basket of mail, poked his head into the wardroom. “Briny, Carson’s got a fistful of letters for you at the gangway.”

“Hey. Good enough. This is my exec, Dad, Lieutenant Carter Aster. Be right back.” Byron vanished.

Seating himself at the narrow wardroom table and slitting envelopes with an Indian paper cutter, Aster said, “Excuse me, sir. Priority mail.”

“Go ahead.” Victor Henry studied the blond officer as he attacked the letters. One could sometimes guess, by the way a young man went at papers or a book, the kind of officer he was. Aster traversed the pile fast, scribbling a note here and a checkmark there. He looked good. He pushed the basket aside and poured coffee for himself when Henry held up a hand to decline.

“Lieutenant, you were a witness at Briny’s wedding?”

“Yes, sir. She’s a wonderful girl.”

“How’s Briny doing?”

Aster’s jolly reminiscent smile disappeared. The mouth became a slash of tight lips. “In his work?”

“Yes, let me have it straight.”

“Well, we all like him. There’s something about Briny, I guess you know that. But for submarines… don’t get the idea that he can’t measure up. He can, but he won’t bother. Briny just slides along the bottom edge of tolerable performance.”

Victor Henry was not surprised; still, the words hurt. “People run true to form, I guess.”

“He’s way behind on his officer qualification book. Now he knows his way round the boat, sir, he know the engines, the compressed air system, the batteries, all that. He stands a good diving watch. He has a knack for trimming the boat and keeping her at the depth the captain wants. But when it comes to writing reports on time, or even logs, keeping track of records and dispatches and the crew’s training books — an officer’s main work — forget it.” Aster looked Byron’s father in the eye. “The skipper sometimes talks of beaching him.”

Victor Henry said sadly, “That bad?”

“In a way he’s kind of nuts, too.”

“How, nuts?”

“Well, like last week, we had this surprise inspector aboard. We fired this dummy torpedo and surfaced to recover it. We hadn’t tried a recovery for a long time. It was a rough sea, raining, cold as hell. The torpedo detail was out there trying to retrieve the thing. It was bobbing up and down, banging and crashing against the hull, and we were rolling like mad, and the sailors were slipping around with lifelines tied to them. It was awful. They messed about for an hour and couldn’t hook that fish. I was sure somebody would get drowned or crushed. The inspector got tired and went below. The skipper was exploding. The deck gang was soaked and frozen and falling all over itself. Well, as you know, a dummy warhead’s hollow, and the fish floats straight up and down. Briny was the officer on that detail. Suddenly he took the hook, stuck it in his lifeline, and by Christ if he didn’t go and jump on that torpedo! He timed it so right, it looked easy. He hung on, with these icy waves breaking over him, riding that yellow steel dummy head like a goddamn bronco. He secured the hook and then got knocked off. Well, we hauled him in half-dead and then we hoisted the fish aboard. The skipper filled him full of medicinal brandy. He slept eighteen hours and was fine.”

Victor Henry said, clearing his throat, “He took a stupid chance.”

“Sir, I’d like to have him on any boat I ever command. But I’d expect to wear out two pairs of heavy shoes, kicking his ass for him.”

“If the occasion arises, let me buy you the brogans, lieutenant,” said Pug.

“She’s pregnant!” Byron catapulted into the little wardroom, arresting himself by grabbing the doorway. “Natalie’s pregnant, Dad.” He brandished torn-open letters.

“How about that? Hey, Lady, how about that? Boy, I feel strange.”

“Fast work,” said Aster. “You better get that gal home for sure, now. Pleasure to meet you, Captain. Excuse me.”

The executive officer slid out from behind the table with his mail basket.

“Any news on her coming home?” Victor Henry asked.

“She says Leslie Slote really built a fire under the consuls this time. She and Jastrow should be on their way by — well, maybe by now! She’d better be, or I’ll desert and go fetch her, Dad. My kid’s going to be born in the United States.”

“That’s great news, Briny. Great.” Victor Henry stood, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder. “I’ve got a plane to catch. You’ll find out about the twenty-sixth, won’t you? And let me know.”

“The what? Oh, yes.” Byron was sitting with his chin on both fists, reading a closely written airmail sheet, his face lit up with happiness. “That dinner. Yes, sir, I’ll telephone you or something.”

“I’m sure you have a load of paperwork, after your maneuvers. Get at it, boy.”

“Oh, sure,” said Byron. “So long, Dad.”

“I’m happy about your wife, Byron.”

Again the veiled glance, again the amiable tone. “Thanks.”

Rhoda was in bad turmoil. Palmer Kirby had returned from England in April, while Pug was at sea. The cherry blossoms were early that year; and in Virginia and North Carolina, where they went on a four-day drive like a honeymoon, the countryside was flooded with fragrant blossoms. Rhoda came back to Washington committed in the strongest terms to leave her husband and to marry Kirby.

The decision seemed clear, simple, and natural to Rhoda in the bedrooms of wayside hotels, and on long walks amid the peach and plum blossoms of the southland. But when Kirby went happily off to Denver to put the big old house in order for a new life, leaving her in a home full of Henry photographs and mementos, the simplicity of the vision, and some of its charm, started to fade.

Rhoda’s inexperience was misleading her. An investment of more than twenty-five years of love and intimacy — even if it has gone slightly sour — usually should not be liquidated. Its equivalent in romance, in thrills, or even money, can seldom be recovered. So hardheaded bad women tend to decide. Rhoda’s trouble was that, in her own mind, she was still a good woman caught up in a grand passion which consumed all moral law. One misstep during her husband’s long absence in Germany — at an age when many men and women make missteps — had led to another and another. Her desire to keep her good opinion of herself had completed her confusion.

She still liked — perhaps loved — and also feared Pug, but his career was a growing disappointment. For a while she had hoped that his “in” with President Roosevelt might lead to big things, but that was not happening. Some of her friends were preening over their husbands’ new commands: battleships, destroyer flotillas, cruisers. The rivalry of Digger Brown, Paul Munson, and Harry Warendorf was exactly paralleled among their ladies. Rhoda Henry was becoming the wife of a man bogged in twilit shore jobs after more than twenty years of racing along with the front-runners. Evidently Pug didn’t have it. This was bitter medicine for Rhoda. She had always hoped that he would someday become at least a Deputy Chief of Naval Operations. After all, she had preferred him to fellows who had once gone on to careers like bank president, steel executive, army general. (These men had not necessarily proposed; if she had dated and kissed them, she considered them possibilities sacrificed for Pug.) Now it seemed he might not even make rear admiral. Certainly that limited goal was receding with every month he spent in a Navy Department cubicle while his competitors accumulated command time at sea. With such thoughts Rhoda Henry was working herself up to tell Pug that she had fallen in love with another man. But she did not look forward with dewy pleasure to this, and she teetered, ready to be pushed either way.

She missed his return from the convoy trip. He had not telephoned from Norfolk, for he knew that she liked to sleep late. Arriving by airplane in Washington, he found the house empty, cook off, Rhoda out, mail overflowing his desk, no coffee. He couldn’t blame anybody, but it was a cold homecoming

At the War Plans office, by chance, he encountered Pamela Tudsbury. She had not gone back to England with Burne-Wilke. Secretaries cleared for Very Secret were rare, so the British Purchasing Council had requisitioned her for a while. Spry, springy, refreshingly unmilitary in a yellow and green cotton frock, Pamela greeted him with the warmth he had not found at home. He asked her to lunch with him in the Navy cafeteria. During the quarter hour it took to bolt a sandwich, pie and coffee, Pamela spoke of her unhappiness at being left behind by Burne-Wilke. “I want to be there now,” she said, eyes somewhat moist. “Not that I really think the end is at hand, as some do. But in the wee hours, one does begin to picture how one accommodates to German military police and street signs. It’s a nightmare that now and then gets terribly real.” She shook her head and smiled. “Of course it’s darkest before the dawn. You poor man. You’ve got a splendid color. The sea so obviously agrees with you. You look ten years younger. I hope it lasts, or that you get back to sea.”

“Well, I’ve tried to walk a lot and play tennis. It isn’t the same.”

“Of course not.”

He asked her for further news of Ted Gallard, but there was none. They parted with a casual good-bye. All the rest of the day plowing through the mound of accumulated paper, Victor Henry felt much better.

Rhoda was waiting for him at home in a bright red dress, with ice and drink mixes ready, and cheese and crackers out. Her manner and conversation stuck him as strange. She gabbled about houses. She was so eager to talk, so voluble, that he had no chance at first to tell her of the White House invitation. Early that afternoon, finding Pug’s note on her dressing table she had rushed with an agent and visited three. All her suppressed guilt feelings focussed on the house business. If only she could convince Pug that she had been diligently looking at houses, she felt her tracks would be covered. This made no sense. She was planning to break the news to him. She acted on nervous instinct, triggered by the short scrawl in Pug’s handwriting: He’s back. Man the bar.

Pug was uninterested in a verbose account of faults in houses he had never seen. But he put up with it. Next, Rhoda chattered on that sore topic, recent promotions: that utter fool, chaser, and drunk, Chipper Pennington, had gotten the Helena; and did Pug know that even Bill Foley was now commanding a destroyer squadron at Pearl Harbor? Pug broke in on Rhoda’s flow of words — this was at dinner, over the meat — to tell her of the President’s invitation. Her mouth fell open. “Pug! Really?” She asked many questions, worried out loud over what she would wear, and gloated about how Annette Pennington and Tammy would feel when they heard this!

It was a bad performance. He was seeing her at her very worst — worse than her worst, for she had never been quite so demoralized, though she looked extremely pretty and her wonderful skin glowed smooth as ever. Pug found himself looking at his wife detachedly, as he judged professional matters. Few wives in their forties can weather such a scrutiny.

That night Victor Henry recognized familiar signals he was not, for the time being, welcome in her bedroom. He did not know why; but he had long ago decided that Rhoda was entitled to these spells, physical or mental, though it seemed too bad after his six weeks at sea. It took him a long time to fall asleep. He kept thinking of the callous happy-go-lucky mood he had found in the capital, the sense that by passing the Lend-Lease Bill, America had done its bit to stamp out Nazism. Nobody appeared to care how much stuff was actually being produced and shipped. The figures at War Plans had appalled him. Conflicting boards and agencies, contradictory directives, overlapping commands by the Air Corps, the Navy, the Army, and the British had overwhelmed the program. Under an amazing welter of meetings, talks, and mimeographed releases, Lend-Lease was paralyzed.

He kept thinking, too, of the contrasts between his wife and the English girl. At last he got up and swallowed a stiff drink of bourbon like a pill.

Pug cheered up later in the week, as most people did, when Hitler’s deputy Führer, the black-browed fanatic Rudolf Hess, made a solo flight to Scotland, landed by parachute, and demanded to see Winston Churchill. For a day or two it seemed that Germany might be cracking. But the Nazis at once announced that Hess, through heroic overwork, had gone off his head. The British said little publicly. Pug heard from Pamela, who had it from the embassy, that in fact Hess, mad as a hatter, was shut up in a sanatorium, drivelling peace plans.

Certainly in the war news there was no sign of German weakness. They were bagging hordes of British prisoners and mountains of arms in Greece, sinking ships in the Atlantic at a great rate, showering London and Liverpool with fire-bombings worse than any during the 1940 blitz, laying siege to Tobruk, and launching a breathtaking air-borne invasion of Crete, over the heads of the British Mediterranean fleet. This outpouring of military energy to all points of the compass, this lava flow of violence, was awesome. In the face of it, Vichy France was folding up and negotiating a deal with the Nazis that would hand over North Africa to them, and perhaps the strong French fleet too. This was a brutal bloody nose for American diplomats trying to hold France neutral, and keep the Germans out of the African bulge at French Dakar, which dominated the whole south Atlantic.

The Nazis appeared unstoppable. The entrenched, heavily armed British on Crete claimed to be butchering the sky invaders. But floating to earth dead or alive in parachute harnesses, crashing in gliders, on the airborne multitudes came. The confident British communiqués grew vaguer. Somehow, they conceded, the Germans at incredible cost had managed to capture one airfield; then one more. It soon became clear that Hitler as doing a new thing in Crete, taking a strong island from the air without sea power, in fact in the teeth of sea power. This was threatening news for England. Aside from the heavy defeat itself, Crete began to look like a dress rehearsal for the end.

And still the United States did nothing. In the inner War Plans circles, a split was widening between the Army and the Navy. Victor Henry’s section wanted strong fast moves in the North Atlantic to save England: convoys, the occupation of Iceland, shipment of all possible arms. But the Army, which now gave England only three months before collapse, preferred a move into Brazil and the Azores, to fact the expected Nazi thrust in the south Atlantic from Dakar. Between these two plans, the President was stalling and hesitating.

Then came the scarifying news that the Bismarck, a new German battleship, had blown up England’s mighty war vessel, the Hood, off Greenland, with a single salvo at thirteen miles, and vanished into the north Atlantic mists! This jolted the country out of its Maytime languor. The President announced a major radio address. Speculation about the speech filled the press and radio. Would he proclaim the start of convoying? Would he ask Congress to declare war? The brawny feat of the Bismarck seemed to show Hitler achieving mastery of the oceans as well the land and the air. The shift of the power balance in the Atlantic was suddenly self-evident and frightful.

Rhoda’s reaction to all this heavy news was loud frantic fretting that the White House would call off the dinner invitation, after she had told all her friends about it. FDR was probably getting ready to go to war. How could he bother with a social dinner, especially with unimportant people like themselves? Victor Henry, to secure some peace, checked with the President’s naval aide. The invitation to the White House stood.

“What do you think, Dad? Will the Limeys get the Bismarck?”

Perched on the edge of the bathtub, Byron observed that Victor Henry still liked to rest one leg on the tub as he shaved. Nor had Pug’s shaving motions ever changed, the successive scrape of cheeks, shin, and neck then the scowl to stretch his upper lip. Byron had sat exactly so as a child countless times, talking to his dad.

“Well, Briny, they claim the Prince of Wales winged her off Greenland there. But those Germans have fine damage control. I’ve been aboard the Bismarck. She’s a floating steel honeycomb. If they were hit they probably just buttoned up the flooded compartments and lit out for home. The British are throwing everything into their search. To hell with convoys, to hell with the Mediterranean! They know where she’s heading — the French coast, as fast as she can skedaddle — and they know the speed she can make. Aircraft ought to find her. Unless” — he rinsed his razor and shook it — “unless the Bismarck is undamaged. In which case heaven keep any convoys she runs across. With that fire control she displayed, she’ll pick off forty ships in half an hour.”

“I wish I were out there,” said Byron, “in that search.”

“Do you?” Pug gave his son a pleased look. Where Byron saw much the same father, Victor Henry saw a pallid, melancholy, thin-faced little boy transformed into a spruce six-foot ensign in blue and gold. Pug wiped his face with a wet towel. “What time is it? Let’s make tracks.”

Byron followed him into his dressing room. “Say, Dad, you’re pretty close to the President, aren’t you?”

Buttoning his dress shirt, Pug said, “Close? Nobody’s really close to Mr. Roosevelt, that I can see. Except maybe this Harry Hopkins.”

Byron crouched on a stool, watching his father dress. “I got two more letters from Natalie yesterday. She’s stuck, after all.”

Pug frowned at the mirror over his bureau. “Now what?”

“Same thing, Dad, this balled-up foolishness about when her uncle’s father was naturalized. He just can’t get that passport renewed. One official makes promises, and the next one fudges on them. The thing goes round and round.”

“Tell your wife to come home, and let him sweat it out.”

“Let me finish, Dad.” Byron waved both hands. “It was all set, they’d even bought steamship tickets. Some formality of approval from Washington just never through. Natalie had to turn back the boat tickets. Dad, they’re ringed by Germans now. Germans in France, Yugoslavia, Greece, North Africa, and for that matter all through Italy. They’re a couple of Jews.”

“I’m aware of that,” said Victor Henry.

Rhoda’s voice called from the bedroom, “Pug, will you come here? I’m going out of my MIND.”

He found her glaring at the full-length closet mirror, in a tight blue silk dress, the back of which hung open, displaying underwear and an expanse of rosy skin. “Hook me up. Look how my stomach is bulging,” she said. “Now why is that? The stupid dress didn’t look the least bit like this in the store. It looked fine.”

“You’re not bulging,” said Victor Henry, trying to fix the snaps despite the poor light on her back. “You look very pretty.”

“Oh, Pug, for God’s sake. I’m bulging a FOOT. I look six months pregnant. I’m horrible. And I’m wearing my tightest girdle. Oh, what’ll I do?”

Her husband finished closing the snaps and left her. Rhoda looked much the same as always, and was making much the usual evening-dress noises. Her laments and queries were rhetorical, and best ignored.

Byron still crouched on the stool. “Dad, I thought you might mention this thing to the President.”

Victor Henry’s response was quick and curt. “That’s an unreasonable notion.”

Heavy silence. Byron slumped down, elbows on knees, hands clasped. Pug was jarred by the hostility, almost the hatred on his son’s face.

“Byron, I don’t think your wife’s uncle’s citizenship mess is a suitable problem to submit to the President of the United States. That’s all.”

“Oh, I knew you wouldn’t do it. You’re sore at me for marrying a Jew, you always have been, and you don’t care what happens to her.”

Rhoda marched in, pulling on gloves. “For heaven’s sake, what are you two jawing about? Pug, will you put on your jacket and come along?”

On the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the white House, the Henrys passed several dozen pickets, marching with antiwar signs in a ragged oval, and chanting, “The Yanks are not coming!” Near them a handful of men sauntered in sandwich boards that read: THE AMERICAN PEACE MOBILIZATION IS A COMMUNIST FRONT. Two yawning policemen kept watch on this tranquil agitation.

“Good evening.”

A tall Negro in a colorful uniform opened the door, sounding — at least to Rhoda — like the basso in The Magic Flute. The Henrys stepped from a warm May night, sweet with the scent of the White House lawns and flowers, into a broad dazzling marble-floored foyer. A middle-aged man in a dinner jacket stood by the Presidential seal inlaid in brass in the floor. He introduced himself as the chief usher. Mrs. Henry, you will be sitting on the President’s left,” he said, glancing at a large card. “You see, Crown Princess Marta of Norway is a houseguest. She will sit on his right.”

“Oh, yes, yes, oh my. Princess Marta? Well, she ranks me all right,” said Rhoda with a nervous giggle.

“I guess we’re early,” Victor Henry said.

“Not at all. Please come this way.” He left them in the large public room called the Red Room, saying they would go upstairs soon.

“Oh, dear, think of Warren missing all this!” Rhoda peered at the paintings of Presidents hung near the high ceilings, and the elegant red-upholstered furniture. “Him, with his love of American history.”

“That’s just it,” Madeline said, looking around with bright-snapping eyes. She wore a long-sleeved black silk dress buttoned to the throat, quite a contrast to her mother’s bared arms and bosom. “It’s like walking into a history book.”

“I wonder if it’s okay to smoke,” Byron said.

“No, no, don’t,” his mother said.

Pug said, “Why not? There are ashtrays all around. This is a house. You know what the White House is really like?” He too was nervous, and talking to cover it. “Commandants quarters on a base. The big fancy house with stewards that the boss man gets to live in. This one is the biggest and fanciest. Just the cumshaw of becoming Number One.”

“But the thought of actually keeping house here!” said Rhoda. Despite themselves they were all speaking in unnatural voices, hushed or too loud. Even with an army of servants, I’d go mad. I can’t imagine how she does it, especially traipsing around the country the way she does. Byron, watch those ashes, for heaven’s sake.”

“May I present Mr. Sumner Welles?” The chief usher led in a bald lean gloomy man. “And I believe we can go upstairs now,” he added, as the Undersecretary of State shook hands with the Henrys.

An elevator took them up. Behind his desk at one end of an enormous yellow room hung with sea paintings sat the President, rattling a cocktail shaker.

“Hello there, just in time for the first round!” he called, with a big grin lighting up the jowly pink face. His voice had a clear virile ring. He wore a black tie and dinner jacket with a soft white shirt; and when Pug leaned across the desk to take drinks, he noticed the brown trousers of a business suit. “I hope Mrs. Henry likes Orange Blossoms, Pug. That’s what I’m mixing. Good evening, Sumner.” Would you prefer something else? I make a fair martini, you know.

“Thank you, sir. That looks just right.”

In the center of the room at the mantel, Eleanor Roosevelt stood drinking cocktails with a tall black-haired woman and a sharp-faced, aged little man. On either side of them warm breezes stirred the lace curtains of open windows, bringing in a heavy sweet smell of flowers. The usher introduced the Henrys to Mrs. Roosevelt, to Princess Marta, and to Mr. Somerset Maugham. When Rhoda heard the author’s name, her stiff manner broke. “Oh my! Mr. Maugham! What a surprise. This may be very bad form, but I’ve read all your books and I love them.”

The author exhaled cigarette smoke and stammered, “That — that’s charming of you,” moving only his thin scowling lips, his aged filmy eyes remaining cold and steady.

“Well, we’re all here. Why don’t we sit?” The President’s wife moved a chair near the desk, and the men at once did the same, all except for Somerset Maugham, who sat in a chair Byron put down.

“Anything very new on the Bismarck, Sumner?” said the President.

“Not since about five o’clock, sir.”

“Oh, I’ve talked to Averell in London since then. The connection was abominable, but I gathered there was no real news. What do you say, Pug? Will they get her?”

“It’s a tough exercise, Mr. President. Mighty big ocean, mighty bad weather.”

“You should know,” said Franklin Roosevelt slyly.

“But if they winged her, as they claim,” Pug went on, “they ought to catch her.”

“Oh, they hit the Bismarck. Their cruisers followed a trail of oil far into the fog. That’s straight from Churchill. Harriman’s his houseguest.”

Rhoda was trying not to stare at Crown Princess Marta, who, she thought, held a cocktail glass like a scepter. Unconsciously imitating her posture, Rhoda decided that her skin was almost as good as Marta’s, though the princess was younger and had such rich black hair, done up in a funny way. Contemplating royalty, she lost track of the war talk, and was a little startled when everybody rose. They left the President and followed Mrs. Roosevelt to the elevator. When they arrived in the dining room, there sat Franklin Roosevelt, already whisked to his place at the head of the table. Here too, strong flower scent drifted through the open windows, mingling with the smell of a big silver bowl of carnations, the table centerpiece.

“Well, I had a good day!” the President exclaimed as they sat down, with the obvious intent of putting everybody at ease. “The Ford Company finally promised Bill Knudsen to make Liberators in their huge new plant. We’ve been sweating over that one. The business people seem to be waking up at last.” He started on his soup, and everyone else began to eat. “We want to put out five hundred heavy bombers a month by next fall, and this will do it. Mr. Maugham, there’s good news to pass on! By next fall, we’ll be making five hundred heavy bombers a month. That’s hard intelligence.”

“Mr. President, the — hard intelligence is” — Maugham’s stammer caught everybody’s attention, so they hung on his words — “that you s-say you’ll be making them.”

The President was smiling before the author got the words out; then he roared with laughter. This houseguest was privileged to make jokes, Pug saw.

“Mr. Maugham was a British spy in the last war, Pug,” Roosevelt said across the table. “Why, he even wrote a spy novel. Ashenden. Watch out what you say here. It’ll get right back to Churchill.”

“M-Mr. President, you know a houseguest would never do that. I am not a f-f-ferret now, I assure you, but a lower form of life. A-a-a sponge.”

Mrs. Roosevelt said cheerily, amid the laughter, “What else happened, Franklin, to make it a good day?”

“Why the fellows finally finished the umpteenth draft of my big speech. It looks pretty good, pretty good. So I let them have coffee and sandwiches, and now they’re locked up downstairs doing draft umpteen-plus-one. What’s the betting now, Sumner? Am I going to ask for war, or proclaim convoying, or what? Why, the suspense is even getting me.” The President laughed and added, “Mr. Maugham, as a great writer have you no ideas for my speech? War? Convoy? Or some real new inspiration?”

“Mr. President, you r-remember your Oliver Twist? ‘Please, sir, I w-want some more’?”

“Of course,” said the President, his close-set clever eyes twinkling in anticipation of a joke.

“Well, p-please, sir,” said the author with a dead serious face, “I w-want some w-war.”

The whole table broke into laughter. “Ha ha ha! Spoken like a true British agent!” said the President, gaining another general laugh.

Uniformed waiters cleared the table for the next course. Franklin Roosevelt took obvious pleasure in slicing the saddle of lamb. Rhoda Henry ventured to remark, “My goodness, I wish Pug could carve like that!”

“Oh, I’m sure he can.” Arching his thick grizzled eyebrows with self-satisfaction, the President swept the knife artistically through the meat. “I do like a slice of lamb, though, don’t you Rhoda? Not a steak, and not a shaving, either. The secret is a sharp knife and a firm hand.”

Victor Henry was answering Mrs. Roosevelt’s questions about Nazi Germany, raising his voice because she had said she was rather deaf.

“What’s that Pug?” the President said, cocking an ear as he sliced meat. “Am I missing something good?”

“I was saying, sir, that when I left Germany, their industrial effort was just getting into high gear.”

“You don’t say. They scored pretty well in low gear, then.”

“Well, Mr. President, as it turned out, the others had been doing even less.”

Roosevelt faced Maugham, on the other side of the crown princess. “Captain Henry was in the intelligence business too, Willie. He was naval attaché in Berlin. He predicted that pact between Hitler and Stalin before it happened. All the clever diplomats, generals, and columnists were caught flat-footed, but not Pug. What’s your prediction now, Pug? How about all that massing of troops in the east? Will Hitler attack Russia?” The President’s quick wily glance told Pug that he was thinking of the document they had discussed on the train.

“Mr. President, after that piece of luck, I hocked my crystal ball and threw away the ticket.”

Maugham wagged a knobby tobacco-stained finger. “C-captain, don’t ever admit to luck, in our r-racket.”

“What do you think, Sumner?” the President said.

“If one studies Mein Kampf,” said Welles in undertaker tones, “the attack is inevitable, sooner or later.”

“How long ago did he write that book? Twenty years ago?” said Franklin Roosevelt, his powerful voice reminding Rhoda very strongly of his radio manner. “I’d hate to be bound by anything I said or wrote way back then.”

Mrs. Roosevelt said, “Mr. Maugham — if Germany attacks the Soviet Union, will England help Russia, or leave Stalin to stew in his own juice?”

The author looked at the President’s wife for several seconds. A heavy silence enveloped the table. “I-I can’t really say.”

“You know, Willis,” said the President, “a lot of folks here don’t believe the story that Rudolf Hess is crazy. They say that he was sent over to advise your people of the coming attack on Russia, and to get a hands-off agreement, in return for a promise to help you keep the Empire.”

“That very plan is in Mein Kampf.” Mrs. Roosevelt spoke out like a schoolteacher.

Somerset Maugham, caught in the cross-fire of crisp words from the President and his wife, spread his hands, crouching in his chair, looking small, old, and tired.

“Sumner, do you suppose we could explain it to the American people,” said Roosevelt, “if the British did not help Russia?”

“I think that would finish off aid to England, Mr. President,” said Sumner Welles. “If Hitler is a menace to mankind, that’s one thing. If he’s just a menace to the British Empire, that’s something very different.”

With a brief look at the British author, the President said in a much lighter tone, “Well! Shall I slice some more lamb?”

“I will thank you for some, Mr. President,” spoke up the crown princess. “Of course, Hitler may be massing his troops in the east precisely because he intends to invade England.” The princess talked precise English with a Scandinavian lilt. She was making a tactful cover, Pug thought, for the awkward moment with Maugham. She had not previously said anything. “You know every time Hitler starts a new campaign, Stalin pinches off something here and something there. This may be show of force to keep him out of the Rumanian oil fields.”

“That too, is possible,” said Sumner Welles.

“European politics can be such a miserable tangle,” said Mrs. Roosevelt.

“But it all boils down to Hitler’s impulses nowadays,” said the President. “Pity we must live in the same century with that strange creature. Say, we have here two men who talked at length face to face with the fellow. Let’s take a Gallup poll. Sumner, do you think Hitler is a madman?”

“I looked hard for such evidence, Mr. President. But as I reported, I found him a cool, very knowledgeable, very skilled advocate, with great dignity and — I’m afraid — considerable charm.”

“How about you, Pug?”

“Mr. President, don’t misunderstand me. But to me, so far, all heads of state are more alike than they are different.”

Roosevelt looked taken aback, then he threw his head back and guffawed, and so the others laughed. “Well! That’s something! At my own table, I’ve been compared to Hitler! Pug, you’d better talk your way out of that one fast.”

“But it’s the truth. He has a very powerful presence, sir, face to face — though I hate to admit it — with an incredible memory, and a remarkable ability to marshal a lot of facts as he talks. In his public speeches he often raves like a complete nut. But I think when he does that, he’s just giving the Germans what they want. That impressed me, too. His ability to act such different parts.”

Roosevelt was slightly smiling now. “Yes, Pug, that would be part of the job. The fellow is able, of course. Or he wouldn’t be giving us all this trouble.”

Rhoda blurted, “Pug, when on earth did you have a talk with Hitler? That’s news to me.” The artless injured-wife tone made the President laugh, and laughter swept the table. She turned on Roosevelt. “Honestly, he’s always been closemouthed, but to keep something like that from me!”

“You didn’t need to know,” Pug said across the table.

“C-captain Henry,” said Somerset Maugham, leaning forward, “I bow to a p-p-professional.”

The conversation broke into little amused colloquies. Roosevelt said to Rhoda Henry, “My dear, you couldn’t have paid your husband a handsomer compliment in public.”

“I didn’t intend to. Imagine! He’s just a sphinx, that man.” She darted a tender look at Pug. She was feeling very kindly toward him, and indeed to all the world, having enjoyed a moment of spontaneous success at the Presidential table.

“Pug is a fine officer,” said the President, “and I expect great things of him.”

Rhoda felt warm excitement. “I always have, Mr. President.”

“Not everybody deserves such a beautiful wife,” Roosevelt said, with a decidedly human glance at her that took in her décolletage, “but he does, Rhoda.”

With the oldest instinct in the world, blushing, Rhoda Henry looked toward Mrs. Roosevelt, who was deep in conversation with Sumner Welles. It flashed through Rhoda’s mind that there was a tall woman who married a very tall man. But Pug at least could walk. Life balanced out in strange ways, Rhoda thought; the heady situation was making her philosophical.

Madeline and Byron sat on opposite sides of the table, she between Maugham and Welles, Byron between the crown princess and a deaf, very old lady in purple named Delano. This lady had said nothing all evening; a relative, obviously, living at the White House and interested mainly in the food. Madeline was speaking first to the Undersecretary of State and then to the famous author, her face alive, flushed, and gay, her gestures quick. Maugham offered to come on Cleveland’s interview program, when she told him what she did. He said candidly that his mission was British propaganda, so why not? She was entranced.

Byron throughout the dinner sat silent, collected, withdrawn. Victor Henry saw Roosevelt looking quizzically at him. The President loved to charm everybody and to have only cheerful faces around him. Pug kept glancing at his son, hoping to catch his eye and signal him to perk up.

Over the ice cream, the President said in a moment’s lull, “We haven’t heard from our submariner here. Byron, you’re a natural for the silent service. Ha ha.” The young officer gave him a melancholy smile. “How’s the morale in your outfit?”

“Good, Mr. President.”

“Are you ready to go to war, as Mr. Maugham seems to desire?”

“Personally, sir, I’m more than ready.”

Well, that’s the spirit.”

Victor Henry interposed, “Byron was visiting a friend in Poland when the war began. He was strafed by a Luftwaffe plane and wounded.”

“I see,” said the President, giving Byron an attentive stare. “Well, you have a motive then for wanting to fight Germans.”

“That’s not it so much, Mr. President. The thing is that my wife is trapped in Italy.”

Franklin Roosevelt appeared startled. “Trapped? How, trapped?” The rich voice went flat.

Everybody at the table looked at Byron. The atmosphere was thick with curiosity.

“Her uncle is Dr. Aaron Jastrow, Mr. President, the author of A Jew’s Jesus. He’s had some trouble about his passport. He can’t come home. He’s old and not well, and she won’t abandon him.” Byron spoke as flatly as the President, getting out each word very distinctly.

Mrs. Roosevelt put in with a smile, “Why, Franklin, we both read A Jew’s Jesus. Don’t you remember? You liked it very much indeed.”

“Dr. Jastrow taught at Yale for years, Mrs. Roosevelt,” Byron said. “He’s lived here almost all his life. It’s just some crazy red tape. Meantime there they are.”

“A Jew’s Jesus is a good book,” said the President, bored and stern. “Sumner, couldn’t you have somebody look into this?”

“Certainly, Mr. President.”

“And let me know what you find out.”

“I will, sir.”

Franklin Roosevelt resumed eating his ice cream. Nobody spoke. Perhaps eight or ten seconds ticked by, but at that table, in that company, it was a long time. Everybody appeared bent on eating dessert, and the spoons clinked and scraped.

“Speaking of that book,” the President’s wife said with a bright smile, looking up, “I have just been reading the most extraordinary little volume -”

The door to the hallway opened, and a pale moustached Navy commander entered, carrying a brown envelope. “I beg your pardon, Mr. President.”

“Yes, yes. Let me have it.” The commander went out.

The tearing envelope made a noisy rasp. Yellow strips like telegram tape were pasted on the white sheet the President unfolded.

“Well!” Franklin Roosevelt looked around, his face all at once charged with teasing relish. “May I relay a bit of news?” He took a dramatic pause. “It seems they’ve got the Bismarck!”

“Ah!” The crown princess bounced in her chair, clapping like a girl, amid an excited babble.

The President raised his hand. “Wait, wait. I don’t want to be overoptimistic or premature. What it says is, airplanes from the Ark Royal have caught up with her and put several torpedoes in her. They must have hit her steering gear, because when night fell she was trailing thick oil and steaming slowly west — the wrong way. The entire fleet is closing in and some units now have her in sight.”

“Does it give a position, Mr. President?” said Victor Henry.

The President read off a latitude and longitude.

“Okay. That’s a thousand miles from Brest,” said Pug. “Well outside the Luftwaffe air umbrella. They’ve got her.”

President Roosevelt turned to a servant. “Fill the glasses, please.”

Several waiters sprang to obey him. Silence enveloped the table.

The President lifted his glass. “The British Navy,” he said.

“The British Navy,” the company said in chorus, and all drank.

Somerset Maugham blinked his lizard eyes many times.

Next morning, long after Victor Henry had gone to work, when the maid came to remove the breakfast things, Rhoda asked her for pen and paper. She wrote a short note in bed:

She sealed it up at once, dressed quickly, and went out in the rain and mailed it herself.

That same dark and muggy morning, shortly before noon, a buzzer sounded on the desk of Victor Henry’s office. He sat in his shirt-sleeves working by electric light.

“Yes?” he growled into the intercom. He had left word that he would take no calls. The head of War Plans wanted, by the end of the week, a study of merchant shipping requirements for the next four years.

“Excuse me, sir. The office of Mr. Sumner Welles is calling, sir.”

“Sumner Welles, hey? Okay, I’ll talk to Sumner Welles.”

Welles’s secretary had a sweet sexy Southern voice. “Oh, Captain Henry. Oh, suh, the Undersecretary is most anxious to see you today, if you happen to be free.”

Glancing at his desk clock and deciding to skip lunch, Pug said, “I can come over right now.”

“Oh, that will be fahn, suh, just fahn. In about fifteen minutes?”

When he arrived at Welles’s office, the warm sexy voice turned out to belong to a fat old fright, sixty or so, in a seersucker dress.

“Mah, you got here fast, Captain. Now, the Undersecretary is with Secretary Hull just now. He says do you mind talking to Mr. Whitman? Mr. Whitman has all the details.”

“Yes, I’ll talk to Mr. Whitman.”

She led him from the spacious and splendid offices of Sumner Welles to a much smaller and more ordinary office without a window. The projecting sign over the doorway indicated a minor official in European Affairs. Aloysius R. Whitman was a thick-haired man in his late forties, indistinguishable from ten thousand other denizens of Washington offices, except for his somewhat horsy clothes, an unusually florid face, and an unusually bright smile. Several prints of horses livened the walls of the small office. “The Undersecretary sends his thanks to you, Captain, for interrupting a busy schedule to come over.”

He gestured at a chair. “Cigarette?”

“Thanks.”

The two men smoked and regarded each other.

“Wretched weather,” said Whitman.

“The worst,” said Pug.

“Well, now. The business of Dr. Aaron Jastrow’s passport,” Whitman said genially. “It’s no problem whatever, as it turns out. The authorization was sent out a while ago. It may have been delayed en route, the way things often are nowadays. At any rate it’s all set. We double-checked by cable with Rome. Dr. Jastrow can have his passport any time he’ll come down from Siena to pick it up, and has been so informed. It’s all locked up.”

“Good. That was fast work.”

“As I say, there was no work to do. It had already been taken care of.”

“Well, my son will be mighty glad to hear about this.”

“Oh yes. About your son.” Whitman uttered a laugh. He rose, hands jammed in the patch pockets of his green and brown jacket, and leaned casually on the edge of his desk near Pug, as though to make the chat less official. “I hope you’ll take this in the right spirit. The Undersecretary was disconcerted to have this thing raised at the President’s dinner table.”

“Naturally. I was mighty jarred myself. So was my wife. I chewed Byron out afterward, gave him holy hell, but the thing was done.”

“I’m awfully glad you feel that way. Suppose you just drop a little note to the President, sort of apologizing for your son’s rather touching gaffe, and mentioning that you’ve learned the matter was all taken care of long ago?”

“An unsolicited letter from me to the President?”

“You’re on very good terms with the President. You just dined with him.”

“But he asked for a report from Mr. Welles.”

The captain and the State Department man looked each other in the eye. Whitman gave him the brightest of smiles and paced the little office. “We went to a rather dramatic effort this morning, Captain, just to make sure young Mrs. Henry could get home. Literally thousands of these cases of Jewish refugees come to us, all the time. The pressure is enormous. It’s absolutely unbelievable. Now the problem in your family is settled. We hoped you’d be more appreciative.”

Rightly or wrongly, Henry sensed an unpleasant nuance in the way the man said “your family,” and he broke in, “Natalie and her uncle aren’t Jewish refugees, they’re a couple of Americans.”

“There was some question, Captain — apparently a very serious question — as to whether Aaron Jastrow was technically an American. Now we’ve cleared it up. In return I really think you should write that letter.”

“I’d like to oblige you, but as I say, I wasn’t asked to address the President on this subject.” Pug got to his feet. “Is there something else?”

Whitman confronted him, hands in jacket pockets. “Let me be frank. The Undersecretary wants a report from me, for him to forward to the President. But just a word from you would conclude the matter. So -”

“I’ll tell you, Mr. Whitman, I might even write it, if I could find out why a distinguished man like Jastrow got stopped by a technicality when he wanted to come home. That’s certainly what the President wants to know. But I can’t give him the answer. Can you?” Whitman looked at Victor Henry with a blank face. “Okay. Maybe somebody in your section can. Whoever was responsible had better try to explain.”

“Captain Henry, the Undersecretary of State may find your refusal hard to understand.”

“Why should he? He’s not asking me to write this letter. You are.”

Pulling hairy hands from his pockets, Whitman chopped both of them in the air with a gesture that was both a plea and a threat. He suddenly looked weary and disagreeable. “It’s a direct suggestion of the State Department.”

“I work for the Navy Department,” said Pug. “And I have to get back on the job. Many thanks.”

He walked out, telephoned the Norfolk Navy Yard from a booth in the lobby, and sent a message to Byron on the S-45. His son called him at his office late in the afternoon.

“Eeyow!” shouted Byron, hurting his father’s ear. “No kidding, Dad! Do you believe it this time?”

“Yes.”

“God, how marvellous. Now if she can only get on a plane or a boat! But she’ll do it. She can do anything. Dad, I’m so happy! Hey! Be honest now. Was I right to talk to the President, or was I wrong? She’s coming home, Dad!”

“You had one hell of a nerve. Now I’m goddamned busy and I hope you are. Get back to work.”

Chapter 43

“…Therefore I have tonight issued a proclamation that an UNLIMITED national emergency exists, and requires the strengthening of our defenses to the extreme limit of our national power and authority…”

“Okay!” exclaimed Pug Henry, sitting up, striking a fist into a palm, and staring at the radio. “There he goes!”

Roosevelt’s rich voice, which in broadcasting always took on a theatrical ring and swing, rose now to a note of passion.

“I repeat the words of the signers of the Declaration of Independence — that little band of patriots, fighting long ago against overwhelming odds, but certain, as we are, of ultimate victory: ‘With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’”

After a moment of crackling static, the announcer sounded awed: “You have been listening to an address by the President of the United States, speaking from the East Room of the White House in Washington.”

That’s terrific! It’s far more than I expected.” Pug snapped the radio off. “He finally did it!”

Rhoda said, “He did? Funny. I thought he just pussy-footed around.”

“Pussy-footed! Weren’t you listening? ‘We are placing our armed forces in position… we will use them to repel attack… an unlimited national emergency exists…’”

“What does all that mean?” Rhoda yawned and stretched on the chaise lounge, kicking her legs. One pink-feathered mule dropped off her naked foot. “Is it the same as war?”

“Next thing to it. We convoy right away. And that’s just for starters.”

“Makes me wonder,” said Rhoda, flipping the negligee over her legs, “whether we should pursue those houses any further.”

“Why not?”

“They’ll surely give you a sea command if we go to war, Pug.”

“Who knows? In any case, we need a place to hang our hats.”

“I suppose so. Have you thought any more about which house you’d want?”

Pug grimaced. Here was an old dilemma. Twice before they had bought a bigger house in Washington than he could afford, with Rhoda’s money.

“I like the N street house.”

“But, dear, that means no guest room, and precious little entertaining.”

“Look, if your heart is set on Foxhall Road, okay.”

“We’ll see, honey. I’ll look again at both of them.” Rhoda rose, stretching and smiling. “It’s that time. Coming to bed?”

“Be right up.” Pug opened a briefcase.

Rhoda swished out, purring, “Bring me a bourbon-and-water when you come.”

Pug did not know why he was back in her good graces, or why he had fallen out in the first place. He was too preoccupied to dwell on that. His arithmetic on merchant shipping was obsolete if the United States was about to convoy. Transfers of ownership and other roundabout tricks could be dropped. It was a whole new situation now, and Pug thought the decision to convoy would galvanize the country. He made two bourbon-and-waters, nice and rich, and went upstairs humming.

The yeoman’s voice on the intercom was apologetic. “Sir, beg your pardon. Will you talk to Mr. Alistair Tudsbury?” Victory Henry, sweating in shirt-sleeves over papers laid out on every inch of his desk, as trying — at the urgent demand of the office of the Chief of Naval Operations — to bring up to date before nightfall the operation plan filed months earlier, for combined American and British convoying.

“What? Yes, put him on…. Hello? Henry speaking.”

“Am I disturbing you, dear boy? That’s quite a bark.”

“No, not at all. What’s up?”

“What do you make of the President’s press conference?”

“I didn’t know he’d had one.”

“You are busy. Ask your office to get you the afternoon papers.”

“Wait a minute. They should be here.”

Pug’s yeoman brought in two newspapers smelling of fresh ink. The headlines were huge:

and

Skimming the stories, Pug saw that Franklin Roosevelt had blankly taken back his whole radio speech, claiming the reporters had misunderstood it. There would be no stepped-up United States action in the Atlantic, north or south. He had never suggested that. Patrolling, not convoying, would go on as before. No Army troops or marines would be sent to Iceland or anywhere else. All he had been trying to do was warn the nation that great danger existed.

Tudsbury, who could hear the pages turning, said, “Well? Tell me something encouraging.”

“I thought I understood Franklin Roosevelt,” Pug Henry muttered.

Tudsbury said, “What’s that? Victor, our people have been ringing church bells and dancing in the streets over last night’s speech. Now I have to broadcast and tell about this press conference.”

“I don’t envy you.”

“Can you come over for a drink?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Please try. Pam’s leaving.”

“What?”

“She’s going home, leaving on a boat tonight. She’s been pestering them for weeks to let her return to Blighty.”

“Let me call you back.”

He told his yeoman to telephone an old shipmate of his, Captain Feller, at the office of the Chief of Naval Operations.

“Hello, Soapy? Pug. Say, have you seen the papers about that press conference?… Yes, I quite agree. Well, now, next question. This Convoy Annex Four. Do you still want it by tonight?… Now, Soapy, that’s a rude suggestion, and it’s an awfully bulky annex. Moreover I hope we’ll use it one day… . Okay. Thanks.”

Pug hit the buzzer. “Call Tudsbury. I’m coming over.”

“The funny part is,” Pug said to Tudsbury, Rhoda said he pussy footed around. I was taken in.”

“Maybe it needs a woman to follow that devious mind,” said the correspondent. “Pam, where are your manners? Pug’s here to say good-bye to you. Come in and have your drink.”

“In a minute. My things are all in a slop.” They could see Pamela moving in the corridor, carrying clothes, books, and valises here and there. They sat in the small living room of Tudsbury’s apartment off Connecticut Avenue, hot and airless despite open windows through which afternoon traffic noise and sunlight came streaming.

Tudsbury, sprawling on a sofa in a massively wrinkled Palm Beach suit, with one thick leg up, heaved sigh. “I shall be alone again. There’s a girl who is all self, self, self.”

“Family trait,” called the dulcet voice from out of sight.

“Shut up. Please, Pug, give me something comforting to say in this bloody broadcast.”

“I can’t think of a thing.”

Tudsbury took a large drink of neat whiskey and heavily shook his head. “What’s happened to Franklin Roosevelt? The Atlantic convoy route is the jugular vein of civilization. The Huns are sawing at it with a razor. He knows the tonnage figures of the past three months. He knows that with Crete and the Balkans mopped up, the Luftwaffe will come back at us, double its size of last year and howling with victory. What the devil?”

“I’ll have my drink now,” said Pamela, striding in. “Don’t you think you should be going, governor?”

He held his tumbler out to her. “One more. I have never been more reluctant to face a microphone. I have stage fright. My tongue will cleave to the roof of my mouth.

“Oh yes. Just as it’s doing now.” Pamela took his glass and Pug’s to the small wheeled bar.

“Put in more ice. I’ve caught that decadent American habit. Pug, the Empire’s finished. We’re nothing but an outpost of forty millions, with a strong navy and a plucky air force. Why, man, we’re your Hawaii in the Atlantic, many times as big and powerful and crucial. Oh, I could make one hell of a broadcast about how preposterous your policy is!”

“Thanks, Pam,” Pug said. “I agree with you, Tudsbury. So does the Secretary of the Army. So does Harry Hopkins. They’ve both made speeches urging convoy now. I have no defense of the President’s policy. It’s a disaster. Cheers.”

“Cheers. Yes, and it’s your disaster. This is a contest now between Germany and the United States. If you lose, God help you and all mankind. We were too slow, too stupid, and too late. But in the end we did our best. You’re doing nothing, in the last inning.” He swallowed his drink and pulled himself to his feet. “We expected more from the United States Navy, anyhow. I’ll tell you that.”

“The United States Navy is ready,” Pug shot back. “I’ve been working like a bastard all day on a general operation order for convoy. When I saw those headlines, it was like my desk blowing up in my face.”

“Good God, man, can I say that? Can I say that the Navy, before this press conference, was preparing to start convoying?”

“Are you crazy? I’ll shoot you if you do.”

“I don’t have to quote you. Please.”

Pug shook his head.

“Can I say your Navy is ready to go over to convoy on a twenty-four hours’ notice? Is that true?”

“Why, of course it’s true. We’re out there now. We’ve got the depth charges on ready. All we have to do is uncover and train out the guns.”

Tudsbury’s bulging eyes were alive now and agleam. Pug, I want to say that.”

“Say what?”

“That the United States Navy is ready to go over to convoy and expects to do it soon.”

Pug hesitated only a second or two. “Oh, what the hell. Sure, say it! You can hear that from anybody in the service from CNO down. Who doesn’t know that?”

“The British, that’s who. You’ve saved me.” Tudsbury rounded on his daughter. “And you told me not to telephone him, you stupid baggage! Blazes, I’m late.” The fat man lumbered out.

Pug said to Pamela, “That isn’t news.”

“Oh, he has to work himself up. He’ll make it sound like something. He’s rather clutching at straws.”

She sat with her back to the window. The sun in her brown hair made an aureole around her pallid sad face.

“Why did you tell him not to phone me?”

She looked embarrassed. “I know how hard you’re working.”

“Not that hard.”

“I meant to ring you before I left.” She glanced down at her intertwined fingers, and reached him a mimeographed document from the coffee table. “Have you seen this?”

It was the British War Office’s instructions to civilians for dealing with German invaders. Pug said, leafing through it, “I read a lot of this stuff last fall. It’s pretty nightmarish, when you start picturing the Germans driving through Kent and marching up Trafalgar Square. It won’t happen though.”

“Are you sure? After that press conference?”

Pug turned up both hands.

Pamela said, “They’ve updated that manual since last year. It’s calmer, and a lot more realistic. And therefore somehow more depressing. I can just see it all happening. After Crete, I really do think it may.”

“You’re brave to go back, then.”

“Not in the least. I can’t stand it here. I choke on your steaks and your ice cream. I feel so bloody guilty.” Pamela wrung her fingers in her lap. “I just can’t wait to go. There’s this girl in the office — would you like another drink? no? — well, the fool’s gone dotty over a married man. An American. And she has a fiancé in the RAF. She has nobody to talk to. She pours it all out to me. I have to live with all this maudlin agonizing, day in, day out. It’s wearing me down.”

“What does this American do?”

“That would be telling.” With a little twist of her mouth she added, “He’s a civilian. I can’t imagine what she sees in him. I once met him. A big thin flabby chap with glasses, a paunch, and a high giggle.”

They sat in silence. Pug rattled the ice in his glass, round and round.

“Funny, there’s this fellow I know,” he spoke up. “Navy fellow. Take him, now. He’s been married for a quarter of a century, fine grown family, all that. Well, over in Europe, he ran into this girl. On the boat actually, and a few times after that. He can’t get her out of his mind. He never does anything about it. His wife is all right, there’s nothing wrong with her. Still, he keeps dreaming about this girl. All he does is dream. He wouldn’t hurt his wife for the world. He loves his grown kids. Look at him, and you’d call him the soberest of sober citizens. He has never had anything to do with another woman since he got married. He wouldn’t know how to go about it, and isn’t about to try. And that’s the story of this fellow. Just as silly as this girlfriend of your, except that he doesn’t talk about it. There are millions of such people.”

Pamela Tudsbury said, “A naval officer, you say?”

“Yes, he’s a naval officer.”

“Sounds like somebody I might like.” The girl’s voice was grainy and kind.

Through the automobile noises outside, a vague sweeter sound drew nearer, and defined itself as a hand organ.

“Oh listen!” Pam jumped up and went to the window. “When did you last hear one of those?”

“A few of them wander around Washington all the time.” He was at her side, looking down five stories to the organ grinder, who was almost hidden in a crowding circle of children. She slipped her hand in his and leaned her head against his shoulder. “Let’s go down and watch the monkey. There must be one.”

“Sure.”

“First let me kiss you good-bye. On the street, I can’t.”

She put her thin arms around him and kissed his mouth. Far below, the music of the hurdy-gurdy thumped and jangled. “What is that song?” she said, the breath of her mouth warm on his lips. “I don’t recognize it. It’s a little like Handel’s Messiah.”

“It’s called ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas.’”

“How moving.”

“I love you,” said Victor Henry, considerably surprising himself.

She caressed his face, her eyes looking deep into his. “I love you. Come.”

On the street, in the hot late sunshine the children were squealing and shouting as a monkey on the end of a light chain, with a red hat stuck fast on its head, turned somersaults. The hurdy-gurdy was still grinding the same song. The animal ran to Victor Henry, and balancing itself with its long curled tail, took off the hat and held it out. He dropped in a quarter. Taking the coin and biting it, the monkey tipped the hat, somersaulted back to his master, and dropped the coin in a box. It sat on the organ, grinning, chattering, and rapidly tipping the hat.

“If that critter could be taught to salute,” said Victor Henry, “he might have a hell of a naval career.”

Pamela looked up in his face and seized his hand. “You’re doing as much as anybody I know — anybody, anybody — about this accursed war.”

“Well, Pam, have a safe trip home.” He kissed her hand and walked rapidly off, leaving her among the laughing children. Behind him the barrel organ wheezily started again on “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”

A couple of days later, Victor Henry received an order to escort to the Memorial Day parade the oldest naval survivor of the Civil War. This struck him as strange, but he pushed aside a mound of work to obey. He picked the man up at a veterans’ home, and drove with him to the reviewing stand on Pennsylvania Avenue. The man wore a threadbare uniform like an old play costume, and the dim eyes in his bony, withered caved-in face were cunningly alert.

President Roosevelt’s white linen suit and white straw hat glared in the bright sun, as he sat in his open car beside the stand. He gave the tottering ancient a strong handshake and bellowed at the box of his hearing aid, “Well, well! You look better than I do, old top. I bet you feel better.”

“I don’t have your worries,” quavered the veteran. The President threw his head back and laughed.

“How would you like to watch the parade with me?”

“Better than — hee hee — marching in it.”

“Come along. Come on, Pug, you sit with me too.”

The veteran soon fell asleep in the sunshine, and not even the booming and crashing of the brass bands could wake him. Roosevelt saluted, waved, put his straw hat over his heart when a flag went by, and smiled obligingly for the newsreel men and photographers crowding around the slumbering veteran beside the President.

“The Navy’s my favorite,” he said to Victor Henry, as blue Annapolis ranks swung by with set young faces under the tall hats. “They march better than those West Point cadets. Don’t ever tell any Army men I said so! Say, Pug, incidentally, whom can I send over to London to head up our convoy command?” Pug sat dumbstruck. Ever since the press conference, the President had been sticking firmly to his no-convoy stance. “Well? Don’t you know of anybody? We’ll call him a ‘special naval observer,’ of course, or something, until we get things started.”

The President’s voice did not carry over the blaring brasses to the chauffeur, nor to his naval aide in front, nor to the Secret Service men flanking the automobile.

“Sir, are we going to convoy?”

“You know perfectly well we will. We’ve got to.”

“When, Mr. President?”

The President smiled wearily at Pug’s bitter emphasis. He fumbled in his pocket. “I had an interesting chat with General Marshall this morning. This was the upshot.”

He showed Victory Henry a chit of paper scrawled with his own handwriting:

Victor Henry read these frustrating figures while American flags streamed past him and the marine band blared out “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Meanwhile Roosevelt was searching through more chits. He handed another to Pug, while taking the salute of the marine formation as it stalked splendidly past. This was another handwriting, in green ink, with the last line ringed in red:

“I’ll take that,” Roosevelt said, retrieving the chit. “Those are the figures, Pug for the day after my speech.”

“Convoying would be a Navy job, sir. We’re all ready.”

“If we get into war,” said the President through a broad smile and a wave at schoolchildren cheering him “- and convoying just might do it — Hitler will at once walk into French West Africa. He’ll have the Luftwaffe at Dakar, where they can jump over to Brazil. He’ll put new submarine pens there, too. The Azores will be in his palm. The people who are screaming for convoy now just ignore these things. Also the brute fact the eighty-two percent, eighty-two percent of our people don’t want to go to war. Eighty-two percent.

The navy veteran was sitting up now, blinking, and working his bony jaws and loose sunken mouth. “My, this is a fine parade. I still remember marching past President Lincoln,” he said reedily. “There he stood, the President himself, all in black.” The old man peered at the President. “And you’re all in white. And you’re sitting, hee hee.”

Victor Henry shrank with embarrassment. Roosevelt laughed gaily, “Well, there you are. Every President does things a little differently.” He lit a cigarette in his long holder, and puffed. Boy Scouts in a brown mass went stepping by, with heads and bright eyes turned toward the President. He waved his hat at them. “So far this year, Pug, we’ve produced twenty percent more automobiles than we made last year. And Congress wouldn’t dream of giving me the power to stop it. Well? What about London? You didn’t suggest anybody.”

Victor Henry diffidently named three well-known rear admirals.

“I know them,” the President nodded. The fact is, I was thinking of you.”

“It wouldn’t work, Mr. President. Our man’s opposite number in the Royal Navy will have flag rank.”

“Oh, that could be fixed up. We could make you an admiral temporarily.”

From the surprise, and perhaps a little form the beating sun overhead, Pug felt dizzy. “Mr. President, as you know, I just go where I’m ordered.”

“Now, Pug, none of that. Frankly, I like you right where you are. Deciding who gets what weapons and supplies is a big job. I’m glad you’re working on it, because you have sense. But think about London.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Pug returned the veteran to his nursing home, and went back to a piled-up desk. He got through a high heap of work and walked home, to give himself a chance to think. The city lay in holiday quiet. Connecticut Avenue was almost empty, the evening air was sweet and clear.

Think about London!

Young couples on the benches in Dupont Circle turned and laughed, looking after the stocky man in Navy whites, striding along and humming a tune that had been popular before some of them were born.

“Hey, what the Sam Hill?” Pug exclaimed, as he entered the living room. “Champagne? And why are you gussied up like that? Whose birthday is it?”

“Whose birthday, you old fool?” Rhoda stood, splendid in a pink silk frock, her eyes glittering with tears. “Don’t you know? Can’t you guess?”

I suppose I’m fouled up on my dates.”

“It’s Victor Henry’s birthday, that’s whose birthday it is.”

“Are you potted? Mine’s in March.”

“Oh, God, how dense the man is. Pug, at four o’clock this afternoon, Janice had a boy! You’re a grandfather, you poor man, and his name is Victor Henry. And I’m a doddering old grandmother. And I love it. I love it! Oh, Pug!”

Rhoda threw herself in his arms.

They talked about the great event over the champagne, downing a whole bottle much too fast. Janice and her baby were in fine shape. The little elephant weighed nine and a half whole pounds! Rhoda had raced up to the naval hospital for a look at him in the glass cage. “He’s the image of you, Pug,” she said. “A small pink copy.”

“Poor kid,” said Pug. “He’ll have no luck with the women.”

“I like that!” exclaimed Rhoda, archly giggling. “Didn’t you have marvellous luck? Anyway, Janice and the baby are coming to stay with us. She doesn’t want to take him back to Hawaii for a while. So that makes the house decision urgent. Now, Pug, just today I got that old lady in Foxhall Road to come down another five thousand! I say let’s grab it. That glorious lawn, those fine old elms! Sweetie, let’s enjoy these coming years, let’s wither in style, side by side, Grandma and Grandpa Henry. And let’s always have lots of spare room for the grandchildren. Don’t you think so?”

Victor Henry stared at his wife for such a long time that she began to feel odd. He heaved a deep sigh and made a curious upward gesture with both palms.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Grandma. I couldn’t agree with you more. The time has come. Let’s go to Foxhall road by all means. And there we’ll wither, side by side. Well said.”

“Oh, how marvellous! I love you. I’ll call the Charleroi Agency in the morning. Now let me see what’s happened to the dinner.” She hurried out, slim silky hips swaying.

Pug Henry upended the champagne bottle over his glass, but only a drop or two ran out, as he sang softly:

Three weeks later the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.