Winds of War (36 page)

Pug said, after they had put Byron to sleep and were strolling in the garden, “Quite a change in him.”

“It’s that girl,” Rhoda said.

“He didn’t say much about her.”

“That’s my point. He said nothing about her. Yet he went to Poland because of her, and got caught in Cracow on account of her. He lost his passport, for heaven’s sake, protecting her relatives. Why, he was talking to her uncle when that synagogue all but fell on top of him. Seems to me he did almost everything in Poland but become a Jew.” Pug looked coldly at her but she went on unheedingly, “Maybe you can find out something more about her from this man Slote. It’s a strange business, and she must be some girl.”

* * *

Topping the pile of letters on Pug’s desk the following morning was a pale green envelope, almost square, engraved in one corner: THE WHITE HOUSE. Inside he found on a single sheet, similarly engraved, a slanted scrawl in heavy pencil.

You were dead right again, old top. Treasury just now informs me the ambassadors got hopping mad at the very idea of our offering to buy their ocean liners. Can I borrow your crystal ball? Ha ha! Write me a letter whenever you get a chance, about your life in Berlin - what you and your wife do for fun, who your German friends are, what the people and the newspapers are saying, how the food is in the restaurants, just anything and everything that occurs to you. What does a loaf of bread cost in Germany today? Washington is still incredibly hot and muggy, though the leaves have started turning
.

FDR

Pug put all other mail aside, and stared at the curious communication from the curious man whom he had once soaked with salt water, who was now his Commander-in-Chief, the creator of the New Deal (of which Pug disapproved), the man with perhaps the best-known name and face on earth except Hitler’s. The cheerful banal scribble was out of key with Roosevelt’s stature, but it very much fitted the cocky young man who had bounced around on the
Davey
in a blazer and straw hat. He pulled a yellow pad toward him and listed points for an informal letter about his life in Berlin, for obedience and quick action were Navy habits soaked into his bones. The yeoman’s buzzer rang. He flipped the key. “No calls, Whittle.”

“Aye aye, sir. There’s a Mister Slote asking to see you, but I can -”

“Slote? No, hold on. I’ll see Slote. Let us have coffee.” The Foreign Service man looked rested and fit, if a bit gaunt, in his freshly pressed tweed jacket and flannel trousers. “Quite a view,” Slote said. “Is that huge pink pile the new chancellery?”

“Yes. You can see them change the guard from here.”

“I don’t know that I’m interested in armed Germans on the move. I have the idea.”

Both men laughed. Over the coffee the commander told Slote something of Byron’s four-hour gush of narrative.

The diplomat listened with a wary look, running his fingers repeatedly over the rim of his lit pipe. “Did he mention anything about that unfortunate business in Praha?” Henry looked puzzled. “When we had a girl in the car, and found ourselves under German shellfire?”

“I don’t believe so. Was the girl Natalie Jastrow?”

“Yes. The incident involved the Swedish ambassador and an auto trip to the front lines.”

Pug thought a moment. Slote watched his face intently. “No. Not a word.”

With a heavy sigh, Slote brightened up. “Well, he exposed himself to direct enemy fire, while I had to take the girl out of the car and find shelter for her.” Slote baldly narrated his version of the episode. Then he described Byron’s water-hauling, his handiness in making repairs, his disregard of enemy planes and artillery shelling. “I’d be glad to put all this in a letter, if you wish,” Slote said.

“Yes, I’d like that,” Pug said with alacrity. “Now, tell me something about this Jastrow girl.”

“What would you like to know?”

Victor Henry shrugged. “Anything. My wife and I are slightly curious about this young female who got our boy into such a jam. What the hell was she doing in Warsaw, with all of Europe mobilizing, and why was he with her?”

Slote laughed wryly. “She came to see me. We’re old friends. I thought she was out of her mind to come. I did my best to stop her. This girl is a sort of lioness type, she does what she pleases and you just get out of the way. Her uncle didn’t want her to travel alone, what with all the war talk. Byron volunteered to go along. That’s as I understand it.”

“He went with her to Poland as a courtesy to Dr. Jastrow? Is that the size of it?”

“Maybe you’d better ask Byron.”

“Is she beautiful?”

Slote puffed thoughtfully, staring straight ahead. “In a way. Quite a brain, very educated.” Abruptly he looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ll write you that letter, and I’m going to mention your son in my official report.”

“Good. I’ll ask him about that incident in Praha.”

“Oh, no, there’s no need. It was just an instance of how he cooperated.”

“You’re not engaged to the Jastrow girl?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, I hate to get personal, but you’re much older than Byron, and quite different and I can’t picture a girl who bridges that gap.” Slote looked at him and said nothing. Pug went on, “Where is she now?”

“She went to Stockholm with most of our people. Good-bye, Commander Henry.”

Rhoda telephoned Pug around noon, breaking into his work on the letter to Roosevelt. “That boy’s slept fourteen hours,” she said. “I got worried and went in there, but he’s breathing like an infant, with a hand tucked under his cheek.”

“Well, let him sleep.”

“Doesn’t he have to report somewhere?”

“No. Sleep’s the best thing for him.”

Complying with the President’s orders to write chattily, Pug closed his letter with a short account of Byron’s adventures in Poland. Plans were growing in his mind for official use of his son’s experiences. He filed the letter for the diplomatic pouch, and went home uneasy at having bypassed the chain of command and wasted a workday. He did also feel vague pride in his direct contact with the President, but that was a human reaction. In his professional judgment, this contact was most likely a bad thing.

Byron was reclining in the garden, eating grapes from a bowl and reading a Superman comic book. Scattered on the grass beside him were perhaps two dozen more comic books, a patchwork of lurid covers. “Hi, Dad,” he said. “How about this treasure? Franz collects them.” (Franz was the butler.) “He says he’s been panhandling or buying them from tourists for years.”

Pug was stupefied at the sight. Comic books had been a cause of war in their household until Byron had gone off to Columbia. Pug had forbidden them, torn them up, burned them, fined Byron for possession of them. Nothing had helped. The boy had been like a dope fiend. With difficulty Pug refrained from saying something harsh. Byron was twenty-four. “How do you feel?”

“Hungry,” Byron said. “God, this is a great Superman. It makes me homesick, reading these things.”

Franz brought Pug a highball on a tray. Pug sat silently with it waiting for the butler to go. It took a while, because Franz wiped a glass-top table, cut some flowers, and fooled with a loose screen door to the tennis court. He had a way of lingering within earshot. Meanwhile, Byron read the Superman through, put it on the pile, and looked idly at his father.

Pug relaxed and sipped his drink. Franz was reentering the house. “Briny, that was quite a tale you told us yesterday.”

The son laughed. “I guess I got kind of carried away, seeing you and Mom again. Also Berlin had a funny effect on me.”

“You’ve had access to unusual information. I don’t know if there’s another American who went from Cracow to Warsaw after the war broke out.”

“Oh, I guess it’s all been in the papers and magazines.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. There’s a lot of arguing between the Germans and the Poles - the few Poles who got away and can still argue - about who’s committed what atrocities in Poland. An eyewitness account like yours would be an important document.”

Byron shrugged, picking up another comic book. “Possibly.”

“I want you to write it up. I’d like to forward your account to the Office of Naval Intelligence.”

“Gosh, Dad, aren’t you overestimating it?”

“No. I’d like you to get at it tonight.”

“I don’t have a typewriter,” Byron said with a yawn.

“There’s one in the library,” Pug said.

“Oh, that’s right, I saw it. Well, okay.”

With such casual assents, Byron had often dodged his homework in the past. But his father let it go. He was clinging to a belief that Byron had matured under the German bombing.

“That fellow Slote came by today. Said you helped out a lot in Warsaw. Brought water to the embassy, and such.”

“Well, yes. I got stuck with the water job.”

“Also there was an incident at the front line with the Swedish ambassador. You climbed a tower under German fire, while Slote had to hide this Jastrow girl in a farmhouse. It seems to be very much on his mind.”

Byron opened
Horror Comics
, with a cover picture of a grinning skeleton carrying a screaming half-naked girl up a stone staircase. “Oh yes. That was right before we crossed no-man’s-land. I made a sketch of the road.”

“Why does Slote dwell on it?”

“Well, it’s about the last thing that happened before we left Warsaw, so I guess it remained in his mind.”

“He intends to write me a letter of commendation about you.”

“He does? That’s fine. Has he got any word on Natalie?”

“Just that she’s gone to Stockholm. You’ll start on that report tonight?”

“Sure.”

Byron left the house after dinner and returned at two in the morning. Pug was awake, working in the library and worrying about his son, who blithely told him he had gone with other Americans to the opera. Under his arm Byron carried a new copy of
Mein Kampf
in English. Next day when Pug left the house Byron was up and dressed, lounging on the back porch in slacks and a sweater, drinking coffee and reading
Mein Kampf
. At seven in the evening the father found Byron in the same place, in the same chair, drinking a highball. He was well into the thick tome, which lay open on his lap. Rubbing bleary eyes, he gave his father a listless wave.

Pug said, “Did you start on that report?”

“I’ll get to it, Dad. Say, this is an interesting book. Did you read it?”

“I did, but I didn’t find it interesting. About fifty pages of those ravings give you the picture. I thought I should finish it, so I did, but it was like wading through mud.”

Byron shook his head. “Really amazing,” and turned the page.

He went out again at night, returned late, and fell asleep with his clothes on, an old habit that ground on Pug’s nerves. Byron woke around eleven, and found himself undressed and under the covers, his clothes draped on a chair, with a note propped on them: WRITE THAT GODDAMN REPORT.

* * *

He was idling along the Kurfürstendamm that afternoon, with
Mein Kampf
under his arm, when Leslie Slote went hurrying past him, halted, and turned. “Well, there you are! That’s luck. I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Are you coming back to the States with us or not? Our transportation’s set for Thursday.”

“I’m not sure. How about some coffee and pastry? Let’s be a couple of Berliners.”

Slote pursed his lips. “To tell the truth, I skipped lunch. All right. What the devil are you reading that monstrosity for?”

“I think it’s great.”

“Great! That’s an unusual comment.”

They sat at a table in an enormous sidewalk café, where potted flowering bushes broke up the expanse of tables and chairs, and a brass band played gay waltzes in the sunshine.

“God, this is the life,” Byron said, as they gave orders to a bowing smiling waiter. “Look at all these nice, polite, cordial, joking, happy Berliners, will you? Did you ever see a nicer city? So clean! All those fine statues and baroque buildings, like that marvellous opera, and all the spanking new modern ones, and all the gardens and trees - why, I’ve never seen such a green, clean city! Berlin’s almost like a city built in a forest. And all the canals, and the quaint little boats - did you see that tug that sort of tips its smokestack to get under the bridges? Completely charming. The only thing is, these pleasant folks have just been blowing the hell out of Poland, machine-gunning people from the sky - I’ve got the scar to prove it – pounding a city just as nice as Berlin to a horrible pulp. It’s a puzzle, you might say.”

Slote shook his head and smiled. “The contrast between the war front and the back area is always startling. No doubt Paris was as charming as ever while Napoleon was out doing his butcheries.”

“Slote, you can’t tell me the Germans aren’t strange.”

“Oh, yes, the Germans are strange.”

“Well, that’s why I’ve been reading this book, to try to figure them out. It’s their leader’s book. Now, it turns out this is the writing of an absolute nut. The Jews are secretly running the world, he says. That’s his whole message. They’re the capitalists, but they’re the Bolsheviks too, and they’re conspiring to destroy the German people, who by rights should really be running the world. Well, he’s going to become dictator, see, wipe out the Jews, crush France, and carve off half of Bolshevist Russia for more German living space. Have I got it right so far?”

“A bit simplified, but yes - pretty much.” Slote sounded amused but uneasy, glancing at the tables nearby.

“Okay. Now, all these nice Berliners like this guy. Right? They voted for him. They follow him. They salute him. They cheer him. Don’t they? How is that? Isn’t that very strange? How come he’s their leader? Haven’t they read this book? How come they didn’t put him in a padded cell? Don’t they have insane asylums? And who do they put in there, if not this guy?”

Slote, while stuffing his pipe, kept looking here and there at the people around them. Satisfied that nobody was eavesdropping, he said in a low tone, “Are you just discovering the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler?”

“I just got shot in the head by a German. That sort of called my attention to it.”