Winds of War (21 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aye aye, sir.”

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

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

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

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

“Warsaw!”

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

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

“Yes. The second secretary, Leslie Slote, is a former pupil of mine, a brilliant fellow. I imagine he and Natalie will get married one day.” Pug scrawled the name. Jastrow coughed. “Excuse me. It was a risky trip to make, I guess, but they did set out before the pact. She’s twenty-seven and has quite a will of her own. Byron volunteered to go with her. That’s really why I refuse to worry. He’s a very capable young man.”

Victory Henry, dazed by the news, still found pleasure in this good word for Byron. Over the years he had not heard many. “Thanks. I’ll wire you when I find out something. And if you get any word, let me know.”

Jastrow coughed again. “Sorry. I have a touch of bronchitis. I remember the last war so well, Commander! It really wasn’t long ago, was it? All this is giving me a strange, terribly sad feeling. Almost despairing. I hope we’ll meet one day. It would give me pleasure to know Byron’s father. He worships you.”

The long table in Horcher’s restaurant was a listening post, an information exchange, and a clearing house for little diplomatic deals. Today, the cheery clink of silverware in the crowded restaurant, the smell of roast meats, the loud animated talk, were much the same; but at this special table there were changes. Several attachés had put on their uniforms. The Pole – a big cheerful purple-faced man with great moustaches, who usually outdrank everybody – was gone. The Englishman was missing. The French attaché, in heavy gold braid, gloomed in his usual place. The comical Dane, senior among them, white-haired and fat, still wore his white linen suit; but he was stiff and quiet. The talk was constrained. Warsaw Radio claimed the Germans were being thrown back, but nobody could confirm that. On the contrary, the flashes from their capitals echoed German boasts: victory everywhere, hundreds of Polish planes smashed on the ground, whole armies surrounded. Pug ate little and left early.

Pamela Tudsbury leaned against the iron grillwork in front of the embassy, near the line of sad-looking Jews that stretched around the block. She wore the gray suit of their morning walk on the
Bremen
. “Well,” he said, as they walked side by side, “so the little tramp went.”

She gave him a surprised, flattered look. “Didn’t he ever! Here’s our car. Directly after the speech we’re off. We’re flying to Copenhagen at six, and lucky to have the seats. They’re like diamonds.”

She drove the car in nervous zigzags through side streets to get around a long convoy of tanks on a main boulevard.

“Well, I’m sorry to see you and your dad go,” Pug said. “I’ll sure miss your fireball style at the wheel. Where to next?”

“My guess is back to the USA. The governor’s well liked there, and it’ll be the number one spot, actually, with Berlin shut down.”

“Pamela, don’t you have a young man in London, or several, who object to your being so much on the move?” The girl – that was how he thought of her, which showed his own age – looked flushed and sparkling-eyed. The driving gestures of her small white hands were swift, sharp and well controlled. She diffused an agreeable light peppery scent, like carnations.

“Oh, not at the moment, Commander. And the governor does need me since his eyes have got so bad. I like to travel, so I’m happy enough to – bless my soul. Look to your left. Don’t be obvious about it.”

Beside them, halted at the traffic light, Hermann Göring sat at the wheel of an open red two-seater, looking imperious and enormous. He wore a tan double-breasted business suit, with the flaring lapels that all his clothes displayed. The broad brim of his Panama hat was snapped down to the side and back, in an out-of-date, somewhat gangsterish American style. The fat man’s swollen beringed fingers drummed the steering wheel, and he chewed at his very long upper lip.

The light changed. As the red car darted forward, the policeman saluted, and Göring laughed and waved his hand.

“How easy it would have been to shoot him,” Pamela said.

Pug said, “The Nazis puzzle me. Their security precautions are mighty loose. Even around Hitler. After all, they’ve murdered a lot of people.”

“The Germans adore them. The governor got in trouble over one of his broadcasts from a Party Day in Nuremberg. He said anybody could kill Hitler, and the free way he moved around showed how solidly the Germans were for him. Somehow this annoyed them.”

“Pamela, I have a son I hope you’ll meet when you’re Stateside.” He told her about Warren.

The girl listened with a crooked smile. “You’ve already mentioned him. Sounds too tall for me. What’s he actually like? Is he like you?”

“Not in the least. He’s personable, sharp as a tack, and very attractive to the ladies.”

“Indeed. Don’t you have another son?”

“Yes. I have another son.” He hesitated, and then he briefly told Pamela what he had not yet told his wife – that Byron was somewhere in Poland in the path of the German invasion, accompanying a Jewish girl in love with another man. Pug said Byron had a cat’s way of getting out of trouble, but he expected to owe a few more gray hairs to his son before this episode was over.

“He sounds like the one I might enjoy meeting.”

“He’s too young for you.”

“Well, maybe not. I never do hit it quite right. There’s the governor.” Tudsbury stood on a corner, waving. His handshake was violent. He wore tweed far too heavy for the weather, and a green velour hat.

“Hello there, my dear fellow! Come along. Pam, be back at this corner at four and wait, won’t you? This won’t be one of his three-hour harangues. The bad man hasn’t had much sleep lately.”

A young German in a business suit met them, clicked his heels at Pug, and took them past SS men, along corridors and up staircases, to the crowded little press balcony of the Kroll Opera House, which the Nazis used for Reichstag meetings. The stylized gold eagle perched on a wreathed swastika behind the podium, with gold rays shooting out to cover the whole wall, had a colossal look in photographs, but before one’s eyes it was just garish and vulgar – a backdrop well suited to an opera house. This air of theatrical impermanence, of hastily contrived show, was a Nazi trademark. The new Reichstag, still under construction, was dully massive, to suit Hitler’s taste, and the heavy Doric colonnades were obviously of stone, but the building made Pug think of a cardboard film setting.

Like most Americans, he could not yet take the Nazis, or indeed the Germans, very seriously. He thought they worked with fantastic industry at kidding themselves. Germany was an unstable old-new country, with heavy baroque charm in some places, and Pittsburgh-like splotches of heavy industry in others; and with a surface smear of huffing, puffing political pageantry that strove to instill terror and came out funny. So it struck him. Individually the Germans were remarkably like Americans; he thought it curious that both peoples had the eagle for their national emblem. The Germans were the same sort of businesslike go-getters: direct, roughly humorous, and usually reliable and able. Commander Henry felt more at home with them in these points, than with the slower British or the devious talkative French. But in a mass they seemed to become ugly gullible strangers with a truculent streak; and if one talked politics to an individual German, he tended to turn into such a stranger, a sneering belligerent Mr. Hyde. They were a baffling lot. In a demoralized Europe, Pug, knew, the German hordes of marching men, well drilled and well equipped, could do a lot of damage; and they had slapped together a big air force in a hurry. He could well believe that they were now rolling over the Poles.

The deputies were streaming to their seats. Most of them wore uniforms, confusing in their variety of color and braid, alike mainly in the belts and boots. It was easy to pick out the military men by their professional bearing. The uniformed Party officials looked like any other politicians – jovial, relaxed, mostly grizzled or bald – stuffed into splashy costumes; and they obviously took Teutonic pleasure in the strut and the pomp, however uncomfortable jackboots might be on their flat feet, and gun belts on their bulging paunches. But today these professional Nazis, for all their warlike masquerade, looked less jaunty than usual. A subdued atmosphere pervaded the chamber.

Göring appeared. Victor Henry had heard of the fat man’s quick costume changes; now he saw one. In a sky-blue heavily medalled uniform with flaring buff lapels, Göring crossed the stage and stood with feet spread apart, hands on belted hips, talking gravely with a deferential knot of generals and Party men. After a while he took his place in the Speaker’s chair. Then Hitler simply walked in, holding the manuscript of his speech in a red leather folder. There was no heavy theatricalism, as in his Party rally entrances. All the deputies stood and applauded, and the guards came to attention. He sat in a front platform row among the generals and cabinet men, crossing and uncrossing his legs during Göring’s brief solemn introduction.

Henry thought the Führer spoke badly. He was gray with fatigue. The speech rehashed the iniquity of the Versailles Treaty, the mistreatment of Germany by the other powers, his unending efforts for peace, and the bloody belligerence of the Poles. It was almost all in the first person and it was full of strange pessimism. He spoke of falling in battle and of the men who were to succeed him, Göring and Hess. He shouted that 1918 would not recur, that this time Germany would triumph or go down fighting. He was extremely hoarse. He took awhile to work up to the flamboyant gestures; but at last he was doing them all. Tudsbury whispered to Henry once, “Damn good handwork today,” but Pug thought it was absurd vaudeville.

Nevertheless, this time Hitler impressed him. Bad as he was performing, the man was a blast of willpower. All the Germans sat with the round eyes and tense faces of children watching a magician. The proud cynical face of Göring, as he sat perched above and behind Hitler, wore exactly the same rapt, awestruck look.

But the Führer himself was a bit rattled, Pug thought, by the gravity of what he was saying. The speech sounded like the hasty product of a few sleepless hours, intensely personal, probably all the truer for being produced under such pressure. This whining, blustering “I – I – I” apologia must be one of the oddest state documents in the history of warfare.

The Führer’s face remained a comic one to Pug’s American eyes: the long straight thrusting nose, a right triangle of flesh sticking out of a white jowly face, under a falling lock of black hair, over the clown moustache. He wore a field-gray coat today – his “old soldier’s coat,” he said in his speech – and it was a decidedly poor fit. But the puffy glaring eyes, the taut downcurved mouth, the commanding arm sweeps, were formidable. This queer upstart from the Vienna gutters had really done it, Henry thought. He had climbed to the combined thrones, in Tudsbury’s phrase, of the Hohenzollerns and the Holy Roman Emperors, to try to reverse the outcome of the last war; and now he was giving the word. The little tramp was going! Pug kept thinking of Byron, somewhere in Poland, a speck of unimportance in this big show.

When they emerged on the street in balmy sunshine, Tudsbury said, “Well, what did you think?”