Winds of War (61 page)

“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.”