Winds of War (76 page)

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.”