Winds of War (130 page)

“Yes, it is. Why don’t you go to Kuibyshev with her, Talky? Every foreign correspondent in Russia was on that train, except you.”

“They’re all idiots. Getting news right here in Moscow was hard enough. What the devil will they find to write about in that mudhole on the Volga? They’ll just drink themselves into cirrhosis of the liver and play poker until their eyes give out. Mine are bad enough. I’m skedaddling. If the Russkis hold Moscow, I’ll come back. I hope and believe they will, but if they don’t, it’s all over. England’s at the end of her rope, you know that. We’ll all throw in our hands. It’ll be the great world shift, and your FDR with his brilliant sense of timing can then face a whole globe armed against him.”

Victor Henry stumbled to the yellowed mirror and rubbed his bristly chin. “I’d better talk to Pamela.”

“Please, dear fellow, please. And hurry!”

* * *

Pug came outside to fresh snow, bright sunshine, and a ragged burst of Russian song by male voices. A formation of old men and boys, shouldering picks and shovels and lustily shouting a marching tune, was following an army sergeant down Maneznaya Square. The rest of the Muscovites appeared to be trudging normally about their business, bundled up and shawled as usual, but the sidewalk crowds were much thinner. Perhaps, thought Pug, all the rats had now left and these were the real people of Moscow.

He walked up to Red Square, past an enormous poster of the embattled motherland, embodied as a shouting robust woman brandishing a sword and a red flag and smaller posters of rats, spiders, and snakes with Hitler faces being bayonetted by angry handsome Russian soldiers or squashed under Red Army tanks. The square was deserted: white thick snow almost unmarked by footprints carpeted the great expanse. In front of the Lenin tomb outside the Kremlin wall its red marble hidden by layers of snow-crusted sandbags, two soldiers stood as usual like clothed statues, but there was no line of visitors. Far on the other side, Victor Henry saw a small bulky figure in gray walking alone past Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Even at this distance he recognized the swingy gait of the
Bremen
deck and the way she moved her arms. He headed toward her, his overshoes sinking deep in snow speckled black with paper ash. She saw him and waved. Hurrying to meet him across the snow, she threw herself in his arms and kissed him as she had on his return from the flight to Berlin. Her breath was fragrant and warm. “Damn! The governor went and told you.”

“That’s right.”

“Are you exhausted? I know you were up all night. There are benches by the cathedral. What are your plans? Are you all set for Kuibyshev? Or will you go to London?”

They were walking arm in arm, fingers clasped. “Neither. Sudden change. I’ve gotten orders, Pam. They were waiting for me here. I’m going to command a battleship, the
California
.”

She stopped and pulled on his elbow to swing him toward her, clasped both his arms, and looked in his face with wide glistening eyes. “Command a
battleship
!”

“Not bad, eh!” he said like a schoolboy.

“My God, smashing! You’re bound to be an admiral after that, aren’t you? Oh, how happy your wife will be!” Pamela said this with unselfconscious pleasure and resumed walking. “I wish we had a bottle of that sticky Georgian champagne, right here and now. Well! That’s absolutely wonderful. Where’s the
California
based? Do you know?”

“Pearl Harbor.” She glanced inquiringly at him. “Oahu. The Hawaiian Islands.”

“Oh. Hawaii. All right. We’ll start plotting to get me to Hawaii. No doubt there’s a British consulate there, or some kind of military liaison. There has to be.”

“Aren’t you on leave from the Air Force? Won’t you have to go back on duty if Talky returns to London?”

“My love, let me take care of all that. I’m very, very good at getting what I want.”

“I believe that.”

She laughed. They brushed snow from a bench outside the rail of the bizarre cathedral. Its colored domes shaped like onions and pineapples were half-hidden, like the red stars on the Kremlin towers, under drapings of thick gray canvas. “When do you leave for Hawaii, and how do you get there?”

“I’ll leave as soon as I can, and go via Siberia, Japan, and the Philippines.” He clasped her hands as they sat down. “Now, Pam, listen –”

“Are you going to lecture me? Don’t bother, please, Victor. It won’t work.”

“You mentioned my wife. She’ll probably come to Pearl.”

“I should think she would.”

“Then what have you in mind, exactly?”

“Why, love, since you ask me, I have in mind that you and I deceive her, decently, carefully, and kindly, until you’re tired of me. Then I will go home.”

This blunt declaration shook Victor Henry. It was so novel, so outside the set rules of his existence, that he only replied with clumsy stiffness, “I don’t understand that kind of arrangement.”

“I know, darling, I know it must seem shocking and immoral to you. You’re a dear nice man. Nevertheless I don’t know what else to propose. I love you. That is unchangeable. I’m happy with you, and not happy otherwise. I
don’t
propose to be separated from you any more for long stretches of time. Not until you yourself dismiss me. So you’ll have to put up with this bargain. It’s not a bad one, really.”

“No, it isn’t a bad bargain, but you won’t keep it.”

Pamela’s face showed surprise; then into her eyes came an amused glow, and her lips curved in a mature clever smile. “You’re not so dumb.”

“I’m not in the least dumb, Pamela. The Navy doesn’t give battleships to dumbbells.”

A line of olive-painted trucks marked with large red stars came roaring up into the square, rolling past the red brick museum and the shuttered GUM building, and pulled up side by side facing the Lenin tomb.

We’re in a time bind here,” Pug went on, raising his voice. “For the moment I’ll put Rhoda aside, and just talk about you -”

She interrupted him. “Victor, love, I know you’re faithful to your wife. I’ve always feared you’d think me a pushing slut. But what else can I do? The time has come, that’s all. Ever since I was forced to tell Talky this morning, I’ve been flooded with joy.”

Henry sat leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped, his eyes half closed in the sun glare off the snow, looking at her. Soldiers began piling out of the trucks. Obviously new recruits, they were lining up in ragged ranks in the snow under the barking of sergeants in ankle length coats, while rifles were passed and handed out. After a long pause Henry said, in a matter-of-fact way, “I know this kind of chance won’t roll around again in my life.”

“It won’t, Victor. It won’t!” Her face shone with excitement. “People to whom it happens even once are very lucky. That’s why I must go with you. It’s a mischance that you can’t marry me, but we must accept that and go on from there.”

“I didn’t say I can’t marry you,” Henry said. She looked astounded. “Let’s be clear. If I love you enough to have an affair with you behind my wife’s back, then I love you enough to ask her for a divorce. To me the injury is the same. I don’t understand the decent kindly deception you talked about. There’s a right name for that and I don’t like it. But all this is breaking too fast, Pam, and meantime you have to leave Moscow. The only place to go is London. That’s common sense.”

“I won’t marry Ted. Don’t argue,” she said in a hardened tone as he started to talk. “I know it’s a beastly decision, but it’s taken. That’s flat. I didn’t know about your battleship. That’s thrilling and grand, though it complicates things. I can’t make you take me along across Siberia, of course, but you had better forbid me right now, or I’ll manage to get to Hawaii myself and much sooner than you’d believe possible.”

“Doesn’t it even bother you that you’re needed in England?”

“Now you listen to me, Victor. There’s no angle of this that I haven’t contemplated very, very thoroughly and long. I wasn’t thinking of much else on that four-day auto ride, if you want to know. If I leave old England in the lurch, it will be because something stronger calls me, and I’ll do it.”

This was direct language that Victor Henry understood. Pamela’s gray coat collar and gray wool hat half hid her face, which was pink with cold; her nose was red. She was just another shapelessly bundled-up young woman, but all at once Victor Henry felt a stab of sexual hunger for her, and a pulse of hope that there might conceivably be a new life in store for him with this young woman, and her alone, in all the world. He was overwhelmed, at least for the moment, by the way she had pitched everything on this one toss.

“Okay. Then let’s get down to realities,” he said gently, glancing at his watch. “You’ve got to make a move today, in a couple of hours. And I have to attend to this little matter of going around to the other side of the world to take command of my ship.”

Pamela smiled beautifully, after listening with a formidable frown. “What a nuisance I must be, suddenly draping myself around your neck at this moment of your life. Do you really love me?”

“Yes, I love you,” Pug said without difficulty and quite sincerely, since it was the fact of the matter.

“You’re sure, are you? Say it just once more.”

“I love you.”

Pamela heaved a thoughtful sigh, looking down at her hands, “Well! All right. What move shall I make today, then?”

“Go back with Talky to London. You have no choice, so go quietly. I’ll write you or cable you.”

“When?”

“When I can. When I know.”

They sat in silence. The Kremlin wall, painted to look like a row of apartment houses, echoed the shouts of the sergeants and the metallic clash of rifle bolts, as the recruits clumsily did some elementary drill.

“Well, that will be a communication to look forward to,” Pamela said lightly. “Can’t you give me some hint of its contents now?”

“No.”

For some reason this pleased her, or seemed to. She put a hand to his face and smiled at him, her eyes full of naked love. “Okay. I’ll wait.” Her hand slipped down to the ripped shoulder of his coat. “Oh, I wanted to mend that.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s after ten, Pam.”

“Then I must get cracking. Oh dear, I honestly don’t want to travel away from you again.” They rose and began walking arm in arm. Among the recruits they were walking past stood Berel Jastrow, newly shaved. He looked older so, with his scraped skin hanging in reddened folds. He saw Victor Henry, and for a moment put his right hand over his heart. The naval officer took off his hat as though to wipe his brow, and put it back on.

“Who is he?” Pamela said, alertly watching. “Oh! Isn’t that the man who burst into Slote’s dinner?”

“Yes,” Victor Henry said. “My relative from Minsk. That’s him. Don’t look around at him or anything.”

In the unlit hallway outside her suite, Pamela unbuttoned her own coat and then unbuttoned Victor Henry’s bridge coat, looking into his eye. She pressed herself hard to him, and they embraced and kissed. She whispered, “You’d better write me or cable me to come. Oh God, how I love you! Will you drive with us to the airport? Will you stay with me every second to the last?”

“Yes, of course I’ll stay with you.”

She dashed tears from her face with the back of her hand, then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Oh, how glad I am that I dug in my nasty little hoofs!”

Tudsbury came limping eagerly toward the door as she opened it. “Well? Well? What’s the verdict?”

“I was being silly,” Pamela said. “I’m going home with you.”

Tudsbury looked from her face to Henry’s, for the tone was sharply ironic.

“Is she going with me, Victor?”

“She just said she was.”

“Gad, what a relief! Well, all’s well that ends well, and say, I was about to come looking for you. The RAF lads are being flown out half an hour earlier. There’s a rumor that a German column’s breaking through toward the airport and that it may be under shellfire soon. The Nark says it’s a damned lie, but the boys had rather not take a chance.”

“I can pack in ten minutes.” Pamela strode toward her room, adding to Pug, “Come with me, love.”

Victor Henry saw Tudsbury’s eyes flash and a lewd smile curl the thick lips under his moustache. Well, Pamela was human, Pug thought, for all her strength. She couldn’t resist exploding the possessive endearment like a firecracker in her father’s face. He said, “Wait. There’s a report Talky must take to London for me. I’ll be right back.”

“What do you think, Talky?” Pug heard her say gaily as he went out. “Victor’s got himself a battleship command, no less, and he’s off to Pearl Harbor. That’s in Hawaii!”

He returned shortly, breathing hard from the run up and down the hotel staircase, and handed a manila envelope, stapled shut, to Tudsbury. “Give this to Captain Kyser, the naval attaché at our embassy, hand to hand. All right?”

“Of course. Top secret?” Tudsbury asked with relish.

“Well – be careful with it. It’s for the next Washington pouch.”

“When I travel, this case never leaves my hand,” Tudsbury said, “not even when I sleep. So rest easy.”

He slipped into a brown leather dispatch case Pug’s envelope, which contained two other envelopes, sealed. One was the long typed report for Harry Hopkins, and the other was the letter to the President about the Jews of Minsk.

* * *

Chapter 57 - The Pearl Harbor Catastrophe

(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

The Bouleversement

One week in May 1940 sufficed to upset a balance of power in Europe that had lasted for centuries; and one week in December 1941 sufficed to decide the outcome of World War II and the future global balance of power.

On December 4, our Army Group Center was driving through blizzards into the outskirts of Moscow, and from Leningrad to the Crimea Bolshevik, Russia was tottering. The French Empire was long since finished. The British Empire too was finished, though the British Isles still hung feebly on, more and more starved by our ever-expanding U-boat arm. No other power stood between us and world empire except America, which was too weakened by soft living and internal strife to make war. Its industrial plant, half paralyzed by strikes, was still geared to producing luxuries and fripperies. Its military strength lay in an obsolescent navy centered around battleships, riskily based in Hawaii in order to overawe the Japanese, and quite impotent to affect the world-historical German victory that loomed.