Winds of War (84 page)

“Leslie can stay with me,” Thurston said. “No problem at all. Pick me up at the legation, Les. I have to rush there now.”

“It’s all set,” said Slote. “While you two visit the submarine, I’ll go to the hotel and clear out.”

“Bless you. Thank you. My bags,” said Natalie distractedly, “they’re in Mrs. Rosen’s room. Maybe I should get them! No, I have things to throw in. I’ll get ‘em later. Thanks, Slote. And you too, Bunky. Thanks for everything.”

Slote signalled at a passing taxicab. “Good luck.”

* * *

Natalie was astonished at the small size of the submarine, at its ugliness, and at its rustiness. “Good heavens!” she shouted over the clanks and squeals of the crane moving overhead, as they got out of the cab. “Is
that
the
S-45?
Briny, honestly, don’t you get claustrophobia when you dive in that thing?”

“He’s never stayed awake long enough to find out,” said Aster. They were walking toward a gangway that was only a couple of planks nailed together. Sailors lounged on the low flat black forecastle, staring at the girl in white, with an armful of roses. “One day when we’re submerged he’ll open his eyes and begin screaming.”

“I don’t mind anything but the low company,” said Byron, “and the body odors. It’s especially marked among the senior officers. When I sleep I don’t notice it.”

A young tousle-headed sailor at the gangway, wearing a gun slung low on his hip, saluted Aster, gave Natalie a yearning respectful glance, and said, “Cap’n wants you-all to wait for him on the dock, sir.”

“Very well.”

Soon a figure in a blue uniform, with the gold stripes of a lieutenant, emerged from the rust-streaked black sail – the housing that rose amidships over the conning tower – and crossed the gangplank to the dock. The captain was shaped rather like his submarine, clumsily thick in the middle and tapering abruptly to either end. He had big brown eyes, a broad nose, and a surprisingly boyish face.

“Captain Caruso, this is my wife,” said Byron, jolting Natalie with the word.

Caruso took her hand in a white fat paw. “Well congratulations! Byron’s a good lad, in his short conscious intervals.”

“Do you really sleep that much?” Natalie laughed at Byron.

“It’s pure slander. I seldom close my eyes on this boat,” said Byron, “except to meditate on my folly in going to sub school. That I admit I do very frequently.”

“Eighteen hours at a stretch, he can meditate,” said Aster. “That’s solid gold meditating.”

Two sailors in dungarees came up out of an open hatch on the forecastle and crossed the gangway, one carrying a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, the other a tray of water glasses.

“Ah, here we go. Navy Regs don’t allow us to consume spirituous liquors on board, Mrs. Henry,” said the captain, and again she felt the little joyous jolt. He popped the cork and ceremoniously poured as the sailor held out one glass after another.

“To your happiness,” he shouted, as the crane went by overhead with a wild clanging. “To you, God bless you,” yelled Natalie, “for bringing him here.”

“To number two engine,” bellowed Lady Aster, “to the evaporators, the exhaust system, and the forward battery. Never has there been such a massive breakdown on a naval vessel.”

Byron silently lifted his glass to his captain and executive officer.

They drank. The crane rumbled away.

“Captain,” said Lady Aster, as Caruso refilled the glasses, “do you think that picture in Byron’s room does Natalie justice?”

“Not in the least,” said the captain, looking at her with liquid woman-loving Italian eyes. “It doesn’t begin to.”

“That’s how I feel. Now that you’ve actually seen her, sir, don’t you agree with me that what has to be done in Lisbon may take at least five days?”

“Three,” snapped Captain Caruso, the dreamy look vanishing. “Exactly seventy-two hours.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And you’d better produce some damned convincing malfunction reports, Lady.” The captain tossed off his wine and smiled at Natalie. “Now, can I offer you the hospitality of the boat for a little while?”

She followed the officers into the rusty sail and down a hatch. The ladder was cold and greasy, with narrow slippery rungs that caught at Natalie’s high heels. She had to lower herself through a second round hatch and down another ladder into a tiny room full of machinery strongly conscious of her exposed legs and glad that they were pretty and that her skirt was narrow.

“This is the control room,” Byron said, helping her down. “Up above was the conning tower.”

Natalie looked around at solemn-faced sailors in dungarees, and at the valves, knobs, dials, handles, big wheels, twisted cables, and panels of lights filling all the green-painted bulkheads. Despite a humming exhaust blower, the close, warm air smelled sourly of machinery, cooking, old cigars, and unwashed men. “Briny, do you really know what all these things are?”

“He’s learning,” said Lady Aster. “Between hibernations.”

They stepped through an open watertight door to the tiny wardroom, where Natalie met two more young officers. On the table stood a heart-shaped white cake, iced in blue with a submarine, cupids, and Mr. and Mrs. Byron Henry. She squeezed herself into the place of honor at the head of the table, opposite the captain. Byron and Lady Aster sat crouched against the bulkhead, to avoid a bunk folded back over their heads. Somebody produced a sword, Natalie cut up the cake, and the captain sent what was left to the crew’s quarters. The two glasses of champagne were going to Natalie’s head. She was half-dizzy anyway from the rush of events and the longing that blazed at her from the young men’s eyes. Over the coffee and cake she laughed and laughed at Lady Aster’s jokes, and decided that the old submarine, for all its cramped squalor, its reek of machinery and male bodies, was a mighty jolly vessel. Byron looked more desirable to her by the minute, and she kissed him often.

Before they left the
S-45
, Byron took his bride to a tiny cabin and showed her the narrow black aperture near the deck beneath two other bunks, where he slept. “I ask you,” he said, “would anybody spend extra time in that morgue slot through choice?”

“The alternative might be more frightful,” said Lady Aster, over Natalie’s shoulder. “Like staying awake.”

When Natalie and Byron came out on deck into cool fresh air, crewmen on the forecastle waved and cheered. Natalie waved back and some bold sailors whistled. The taxicab, called by the gangway watch for them, started off with a great clatter. The driver jammed on his brakes, jumped out, and soon Natalie and Byron heard him cursing in Portuguese as he threw aside shoes and tin cans. The crew laughed and yelled until the cab drove away.

“I daresay poor Slote’s left the hotel by now.” Natalie snuggled against her husband. “We’ll collect my bags and go there, right? Wait till you see it. It was terrible of me to jump at it like that, but honestly, Briny, it’s the royal suite.”

In Natalie’s room, in a boardinghouse on a side street, an old woman snored in an iron bed. “Well, Slote’s place must be better than this.” Byron whispered, glancing at the cracked ceiling and at the roaches on the peeling wallpaper, scurrying to hide from the electric light. Natalie swiftly gathered her things and left a note with her key on the table. At the door she turned to look at Mrs. Rosen, lying on her back, jaw hanging open, gray hair tumbled on the pillow. What kind of wedding night had Mrs. Rosen had, she thought, with the husband whose silver-framed face smiled brownly on her bedside table, her one memento of the wretched man dragged off a French train by Germans? Natalie shivered and closed the door.

The desk clerk at the Palace Hotel evidently had been informed and tipped by Slote, for he yielded up the key to Byron with a greasy grin. The newlyweds had to give him their passports. Natalie felt a touch of fear, handing over the maroon American booklet that set her off from Lisbon’s forty thousand other Jews.

“I just thought of something,” she said in the elevator. “How did you register?”

“Mr. and Mrs., naturally. Big thrill.”

“I’m still Natalie Jastrow on that passport.”

“So you are.” The elevator stopped. He took her arm. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“But maybe you should go back and explain.”

“Let them ask a question first.”

As the bellboy opened the door to the suite, Natalie felt herself whisked off her feet. “Oh, Byron, stop this nonsense. I’m monstrously heavy. You’ll slip a disk.” But she clung to his neck with one hand and clutched her skirt with other, excited by his surprising lean strength.

“Hey!” he said, carrying her inside. “I see what you meant. Royal suite is right.”

When he put her down she darted ahead into the room. Natalie had a slight nag of worry about the negligee she had left hanging in Slote’s bathroom, and new sexy underwear in a bureau drawer. It might take some explaining! But all the stuff was gone - where, she had no idea. She was puzzling over this when Byron appeared in the french window of the bedroom, on the balcony. “This is great out here, all right. Cold as hell, though. Fabulous string of lights along the water. Did you notice the champagne? And the lilies?”

“Lilies?”

“In there.”

In a corner of the living room, beside champagne in a silver cooler on a marble table, stood a bouquet of red and white calla lilies, and beside them Slote’s small white card, with no writing. The doorbell rang. A bellboy gave Natalie a box from the lingerie shop. She hurried into the bedroom and opened it. There lay the underclothes Slote had cleared out, a many-colored froth of silk and lace.

“What’s that?” Byron said from the balcony.

“Oh, some stuff I bought in a lobby shop,” Natalie said airily. “I guess Slote told them I’d be here.” She picked up a peach nightgown, and with mock witchery draped it against her bosom. “Not bad for an academic type, hey?”

Then she saw a note in Slote’s handwriting, lying under the silks. Byron started to come in. She ran for the French door and shut it on him. “Give me a minute. Open the champagne.”

The note read:
Wear the gray, Jastrow. You always looked angelic in gray. Confidential communication, to be destroyed. Yours till death. Slote.

The words brought a mist to Natalie’s eyes. She tore the note to bits and dropped them in a wastebasket. In the next room she heard a cork pop. She pulled from the box the gray silk nightdress laced and trimmed in black, and quite forgot Leslie Slote, as she speedily showered and perfumed herself. She emerged from the bedroom brushing her long black hair down on her shoulders. Byron seized her. . . .

. . . Wine, lilies, and roses; the dark sea rolling beyond the windows under a round moon; young lovers separated for half a year, joined on a knife-edge of geography between war and peace, suddenly married, far from home; isolated, making love on a broad hospitable bed, performing secret rites as old as time, but forever fresh and sweet between young lovers, the best moments human existence offers - such was their wedding night. The human predicament sometimes seems a gloomy tapestry with an indistinct, baffling design that swirls around and inward to brilliant naked lovers. The Bible starts with this centerpiece. Most of the old stories end with the lovers married, retiring to their sacred nakedness. But for Byron and Natalie, their story was just beginning.

The lavish pulses and streams of love died into the warm deep sleep of exhausted lovers: Mr. and Mrs. Byron Henry, Americans, slumbering in wedlock in the Palace Hotel outside Lisbon, on a January night of 1941, one of the more than two thousand nights of the Second World War, when so much of mankind slept so badly.

Chapter 38

Natalie opened her eyes, awakened by the warbling and chirping of birds. Byron sat beside her, smoking. A cool breeze was blowing from an open door to the balcony. In a pink-streaked sky, the wan moon and one star hung low over the choppy sea.

“Hi. Listen to those birds! How long have you been awake, Byron?”

“Not long, but I’m really wide awake. Wide awake and still trying to believe it.”

She sat up. The bedclothes slipped from her breasts as she kissed him softly, sighing with satiated pleasure. “Gosh, that air’s icy, isn’t it?”

“I can close the door.”

“No, no, the sea smell is lovely.” She pulled the blanket to her neck, nestling beside him. After a silence she said, “Byron, how does a submarine work?”

He glanced down at her. His arm was around her. Caressing her shoulder. “Are you kidding?”

“No. Is it hard to explain?”

“Not at all, but why talk about that?”

“Because I want to know.”

“Well, it’s a hell of a topic to take up with a beautiful naked girl, but okay. I’ll tell you how a submarine works. To begin with, it’s built so that it just about floats when ballasted. So when you flood the diving tanks with a few tons of seawater you go right down, and when you blow the water out with compressed air, you pop up again. You begin with marginal buoyancy, and by changing the water ballast you become a rock or a cork as desired. That’s the general idea. The details are numerous and dull.”

“Well, is it safe? How much have I got to worry about?”

“Less than if I were a New York traffic cop.”

“You get hazardous duty pay.”

“That’s because civilians, like congressmen and you, yourself, have the illusion that it’s scary and risky to dive a boat under the water. No submariner will ever argue Congress out of that.”

“But when you go deep, isn’t there quite a risk of being crushed?”

“No. A sub’s just a long watertight steel tube, braced to hold off sea pressure. That’s the inner hull. It’s the real ship. The outside you see is just a skin for tanks, open at the bottom. The water sloshes in and out. The inner hull has a test pressure depth. You never submerge near that. Nobody to this day knows how deep the old
S-45
can go. We ride on a thick cushion of safety.”

“Submarines have been lost.”

“So have ocean liners and sailing yachts. When men are trapped in a hull on the ocean bottom, tapping out Morse code, it makes a good story, but it’s only happened a couple of time. Even then there are ways of escaping, and we’re all trained in them.”