by Herman Wouk
“Well, I’ll leave you two lovebirds together,” Van Winaker said with a jolly wink. “I’m sure you have lots to talk about.”
“I have only come for a moment,” Ascher said, “and I beg you to join us.”
Wagging a finger at him Van Winaker replied in sing-song, “Ah-ah. Two’s company, thre-e-e’s a crow-w-wd, ta-ta,” and he danced out, gaily winking.
Dr. Ascher sat down heavily in the chair Slote offered him. “Thank you. We are going to America earlier than planned. In fact, next Thursday. This has involved the hurried execution of some complicated international contracts. That is why I was seeing Mr. Van Winaker.”
“Has Augie been helpful?”
“Oh, yes.” The look from under Dr. Ascher’s heavy gray eyebrows was veiled. “Most helpful. Well!” Ascher looked hard at Slote, with eyes sunk in terrible dark hollows. “I seldom ask a personal favor of any man. Yet I’ve come to ask such a favor of you, sir, though I hardly know you.”
“Please!” Slote returned.
“We leave only eight days from now. If my daughter Selma should happen to telephone you during this time, I ask you not to see her.” Slote quailed before the stern face of the old Jew. “Is that a very difficult request?”
“I happen to be hard pressed with work, Dr. Ascher. I couldn’t see her anyway.”
Painfully, Dr. Ascher rose, holding out his hand.
“I wish you happiness in the United States,” Slote said.
Ascher shook his head. “It has taken me sixteen years to feel at home in Bern. Now I’m going to Baltimore, a place I don’t know at all, and I’m seventy-three. Still, Selma comes first. She is a brilliant and good girl, though all girls are difficult at times. Since my son is an old bachelor, her future is the only future I have. Good-bye, sir.”
Slote went back to work. He had the Vichy France assignment in the legation. A treaty was in the works for continuing three-way trade, despite the war, between Switzerland, the United States, and occupied France. For their own practical reasons, the Germans were allowing this. But it was tricky business, and a mountain of paper had accumulated. Slote was pushing through a draft for a meeting that afternoon when his telephone rang.
“Mr. Leslie Slote?” The aged high voice was very British. “Treville Britten here. We met at the home of the Aschers.”
“Of course. How are you?”
“Splendid. We had some interesting talk that evening, didn’t we? Ah, Winston Churchill will broadcast tonight, you know, and ah, my daughter Nancy and I thought if you cared to join us for dinner — it’s frugal vegetarian fare, but Nancy does it rather well. We might listen to Churchill together. Discuss the new developments.”
“I’d be charmed,” said Slote, thinking that few invitations could be less attractive, “except that I must work straight through the night, pretty near.”
The hemming and hawing ceased. “Mr. Slote, I’m not going to take no for an answer.”
Slote caught a professional hardening of the elderly voice that was a signal. This was a British Foreign Service man, after all. “How nice of you to insist.”
“Pension Gafen, 19 Tellenstrasse, apartment 3A. About seven.”
Perhaps there were two gray Fiat roadsters like Selma Ascher’s in Bern, Slote thought that evening, seeing the car parked in front of the pension, a dismal-looking house in a dilapidated part of Bern. Question: did his promise to Selma’s father bind him not to go up to the flat and see? Doing rapid mental casuistry, he mounted the stairs two at a time. Selma had not telephoned him. He wasn’t sure that she was in the Britten apartment. He had accepted the dinner invitation in good faith. In short, the worried old Jewish father be damned! For all Slote intended to do, Selma Ascher would leave Bern virgo intacta.
There she was in a dowdy blue frock, little more than a housedress, with her hair carelessly pinned up. She had a tired unhappy air, and her greeting was anything but flirtatious; offhand, rather, and faintly resentful. She and the English girl worked in the kitchen while, in a small musty study crammed with old books and magazines, Britten poured very stiff whiskeys. “How fortunate that alcohol is a vegetable product, what? If it were distilled from animal corpses, all my principles would have to give way. Hee hee.” Slote felt Britten had made this joke and giggled this way a thousand times.
The old man was eager to talk about Singapore. Once the Japanese had landed in Malaya, he explained, the obvious strategy had been to lure them all the way south with a fighting retreat, to within range of Singapore’s terrible guns. The news meantime had been depressing, but now the turnabout was surely at hand. Winnie obviously had something exciting to impart tonight about Singapore. “The will not to believe,” thought Slote; what an egregious example was here! Even the BBC was broadly hinting that Singapore was falling. Yet Britten’s crack-voiced optimism was utterly unfeigned.
It was a strained, impoverished meal. The four people crowded the small table. The peculiar mock-meat puddings and stews that the daughter served were insipid stuff. Selma ate little, scarcely looking up, her face sullen and withdrawn. They were starting on a dessert of very tart stewed rhubarb when Churchill’s cadences began to roll out of the shortwave radio. For a long time in his sombre talk he did not mention Singapore. Britten conveyed to Slote, with reassuring winks and gestures, that all this was quite in line with his prediction. The great disclosure was coming.
Churchill paused, and took an audible breath.
And now, I have heavy news. Singapore has fallen. That mighty bastion of Empire, which held out so long against insuperable odds, has honorably surrendered to spare its civilian population from further useless slaughter…
The old man’s wrinkled face wilted into a pained smile, getting redder and redder, his watery eyes taking on a queer gleam. They listened in silence to the very end of the speech:
…and so let us go on, into the storm, and through the storm.
Shakily Britten reached over and turned off the radio. “Well! Bit mistaken on that one, wasn’t I?”
“Oh, the Empire’s gone,” said his daughter with vinegary satisfaction. “High time we all faced that, Father. Especially Winnie. What an obsolete romantic!”
“Just so. Night falls. A new world order cometh.” Britten’s voice fell into the rhythms of Churchill, a reedy grotesque echo. “The Hun will join hands with the Mongol. The Slav, the born helot, will serve new masters. Christianity and humanism are dead creeds. The thousand-year night of technological barbarism descends. Well, we English fought the good fight. I have lived my life. You young people have my sympathy.”
He was so obviously distraught that Slote and Selma left almost at once. On the staircase she said, “Is it really that bad, the fall of Singapore?”
“Well, to him it’s the end of the world. It may spell the end of the British Empire. The war will go on.”
On the street she seized his hand, twining the fingers in hers. “Come into my car.”
She drove to a busy boulevard and parked at the curb with the motor running. “Father Martin gave me a message for you. Here are his exact words. ’It is arranged. Wait for a visitor in your flat at six o’clock Sunday evening.“
Immensely surprised, Slote said, “I thought he didn’t want you involved.”
“He was at the house last night. Papa told him we’d be gone by next Thursday. I suppose he decided that I’m a safe messenger, since I’ll be gone so soon.”
“I’m sorry you had to disobey your father.”
“Did you mind Nancy’s horrible food?”
“It was worth it.”
She stared at him and turned off the motor. “I suppose you had an affair with this Natalie girl?”
“Of course I did. I told you that.”
“Not in so many words. You were very diplomatic. Do you imagine you could possibly have had an affair with me?”
“I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.”
“Why not? I thought I was like her. How am I different? Not sexually exciting?�
��
“This is a stupid conversation, Selma. Thanks for the message.”
“I can’t forgive my father for going to you. It’s so humiliating!”
“He shouldn’t have told you.”
“I got it out of him. We had some bitter words. Well, you’re quite right, this is a stupid conversation. Good-bye.” She started the motor, and held out her hand.
“Ye gods, Selma, your circulation must be bad. Your hands are always icy.”
“Nobody but you has ever mentioned that. Well — what do the English say? ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ “ She leaned to him and kissed him hard on the mouth. The sweetness of it shook Slote deeply. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “There! Since you find me so exciting, remember me a little. I’ll remember you always.”
“And I you.”
She shook her head. “No, you won’t. You’ve had so many adventures! You’ll have so many more! I’ve had my one, my very little one. I hope that you get your Natalie back. She’d be happier with you than with that Navy fellow”— Selma’s expression turned darkly mischievous —“as long as she insists on having a Gentile husband.”
Slote opened the car door.
“Leslie, I don’t know what your business with Father Martin is,” Selma exclaimed, “but take care! I have never seen a more frightened person.”
Nobody came to Slote’s flat on Sunday evening. The front page of the Zurich Tageblatt, lying on his desk Monday morning, had a spread of Japanese photographs about the Singapore victory, furnished by the German news service: the surrender ceremony, the hordes of British troops sitting on the earth in a prison compound, the celebration in Tokyo. The story about Father Martin was so short that Slote almost missed it, but there it was at the bottom of the page. The truck driver, who claimed that his brakes had failed, was being held for questioning. The priest was dead, crushed.
A Jew’s Journey
(excerpt from Aaron Jastrows manuscript)
APRIL23, 1942.
American bombers have raided Tokyo!
My pulse races as it once did when, an immigrant in love with everything American, infected with baseball fever, I saw Babe Ruth hit a home run. For me America is the Babe Ruth of the nations. I unashamedly confess it. And the Babe has come out of his slump and “hit one over the fence”!
Strange, how Allied airplane bombs infallibly fall on churches, schools, and hospitals; what a triumph of military imprecision! If Berlin radio speaks the truth — and why should Germans lie, pray? — the RAF has by now flattened nearly all institutions of worship, learning, and healing in Germany, while unerringly missing all other targets. Now we are told that Tokyo was unscathed in the raid except for a great number of schools, hospitals, and temples demolished by the barbarous Americans. Most extraordinary.
My niece calls this “Doolittle raid” (an intrepid Army Air Corps colonel of that name led the attack) just a stunt, a token bombing. It will make no difference to the war; so she says. What she did, when the news came through on the BBC, was to entrust her baby to the cook, rush down to the Excelsior Hotel where our fellow journalists are housed, and there get joyously drunk with them. They are drunk nearly all the time, but I have not seen Natalie inebriated in years. I must say that when her chief local admirer, a banal-minded Associated Press reporter, brought her back, she was full of amusing raillery, though scarcely able to walk straight.
Her mood was so gay, in fact, that I was tempted to disclose then and there the grave secret I have been harboring for two weeks, not even entrusting it to these pages. But I refrained. She has suffered enough on my account. Time enough to reveal this bombshell when the fuse has burned down to the danger point. This it may never do.
The departure date of the American internees in Siena has been fixed for the first week in May. We are to proceed to Naples or Lisbon, embark in a Swedish luxury liner, and sail for home. On the first of April (I remember noting that it was April Fool’s Day!) my old friend, the Siena chief of police, paid me a visit. With many a Tuscan sigh and shrug and circumlocution, he hinted that for us there might be a hitch. He would not elaborate.
Detailed word came within a few days, in a letter from our embassy in Rome. The nub of the matter is this: the Nazis claim that three Italian journalists, interned in Rio de Janeiro and awaiting trial as German agents in disguise, are in fact bona fide journalists, barbarously detained by the Brazilian authorities at Allied instigation. In retaliation, since the Germans can lay their hands on few Brazilians, they have asked the Italians to detain three Americans so as to force our State Department to persuade Brazil to set these men free. It is just crude Teutonism, of course, a game to recover clumsy spies who got themselves caught. Unhappily, the three hostages, if it comes to that, may be myself, my niece, and her baby, since our “journalist” credentials are marginal, to say the least. The international dickering has, in fact, already begun, and we are among those marked for possible detention. So the embassy has disclosed.
But that it will happen is unlikely. Brazil will probably bow to the intercession of our State Department. Then again, our friend and rescuer, Dr. Werner Beck, is moving heaven and earth to get us released, or at the very least, to designate three other Americans from the list for the retaliation, if it comes to that. Probably I should not let him do this, but I have learned already to turn feral in wartime. Sauve qui peut is the cry.
I have concealed this news from Natalie. Her dread of the Germans and what they may do to her baby borders on the psychotic. As for me, I am not alarmed. I would just as lief work on here to the last, and — when the worst befalls and however it befalls — have my ashes scattered in the garden. For one way or another, my time of ash is not far off. I cannot say how I know this. My health is fair. Nevertheless I do know it. It neither frightens nor saddens me. It strengthens my resolve to wring all the work I can out of the passing days, and finish my Luther.
For Natalie’s sake, however, I must do all I can to ensure that we will go. Upon completing my morning’s work, I shall go and have a word with the archbishop. He is not without influence in the Italian Foreign Ministry. The time has come to pull every string, and turn over every stone.
20
THE red beard scratched and tickled Janice Henry’s cheek. She hugged Byron a shade tighter than family affection called for, thinking that he had been out on that submarine a pretty long time. Too, though incest was as far from her thoughts as parricide, she did feel — she always had — a mild fugitive attraction to Warren’s younger brother. She didn’t mind the rum reek on his breath, nor the grease streaks on his rumpled khakis, for she knew that he had come straight from the victory celebration of the Devilfish. A double frangipani lei, heavily and sweetly odorous, dangled around his sunburned throat.
“Well!” She touched the beard. “Are you going to keep that?”
“Why not?” He took off the lei and hung it around her neck.
Flustered, sniffing at the flowers, she said, “I feel so dumb about your phone call. You and he do sound alike, you know.”
Janice had begun blurting a sexy wife-to-husband greeting on hearing his voice. “Look, it’s Byron,” he had interrupted, and after an embarrassed pause they had both roared with laughter.
Byron shyly grinned. “Expecting Warren, were you?”
“Well, the scuttlebutt is that Halsey’s due back with the carriers.”
“Minus the Lex, I hear.”
“Minus the Lex.” She shook her head sadly. “Sunk in the Coral Sea. That’s definite.”
“Where’s my nephew?”
“In the nursery. Bathed, fed, sleepy, smelling like a rose.”
“More than you can say for me, I guess.” Byron did, in fact, smell rather gamy. “We just piled off the boat and started celebrating — hi, Vic. Holy cow, Janice,” Byron called from the nursery, “he’s gigantic.”
“Don’t rouse him. He’ll give us no peace.”
Byron strolled into the kitchen after a while and dropped on a c
hair. “Marvelous kid,” he said, with a faraway look. He sounded doleful.
Janice crouched at the stove in an apron, a shirt, and shorts, the pink lei hanging loose. She pushed heavy yellow hair away from her face. “Sorry I’m such a mess. Seems I never dress up any more. Warren’s so seldom home.”
“I’d call Washington,” Byron said, “but it’s midnight there. I’ll call in the morning. Natalie and my kid are interned in Italy, I suppose you know that.”
“Briny, they’re out.”
“What! They are?” Byron sprang joyfully to his feet. “Jan! How do you know?”
“I talked to my father in Washington — oh, three, four days ago. He’s been keeping after the State Department about it.”
“But, was he positive?”
“Yes, there’s this Swedish liner en route from Lisbon with the interned Americans. She’s aboard with her baby.”
“Fantastic!” He seized Janice and hugged and kissed her. “Maybe I’ll telephone him.”
“He’s left there. He’s a brigadier general, assigned to MacArthur’s staff in Australia. You can talk to him when he passes through here, probably Saturday.”
“Oh, Lord, how I’ve waited for this news!”
“I’ll bet. Some reunion coming up, eh?” Her grin was sly as he released her. “How much time did you two have on your honeymoon, three days?”
“Less. Dunno about the reunion, though.” He dropped in the chair again. “Aster wants me to stick with the Devilfish. Most of our squadron’s been pulled back off patrol. That’s damned unusual. There’s a smell around the sub base. Something brewing.”
She gave him a worried glance. “Yes? At Cincpac, too.”
“Aster heard that the Japs are going to try to take the Hawaiian Islands. Biggest battle of the war coming up. No time for me to leave, that’s his argument.”
“Don’t you have orders to SubLant?”
“He has to detach me. I could stay aboard for the battle, if there’s one imminent. Maybe I ought to, I don’t know.”