The expression of the headwaiter kept changing as Victor Henry rapped the sentences out. He hesitated under Henry's direct gaze, looked around at the other diners, and all at once burst out in a howl of abuse at the waiter, flinging both arms in the air, his face purpling. After a short fierce tantrum, he turned to Pug Henry, bowed from the waist, and said coldly, 'You will be properly served. My apologies." And he bustled off.
Now a peculiar thing happened. The waiter reverted to his former manner without turning a hair, without a trace of surliness, resentment, or regret. The episode was obliterated; it had never happened. He cleared the dishes and spread a new cloth with deft speed. He smiled, he bowed, he made little jokes and considerate little noises. His face was blood red, otherwise he was in every respect the same charming, gemutlich German waiter who had first greeted them. He took their dessert orders with chuckles and nods, with arch jests about calories, with solicitous suggestions of wine and liqueurs. He backed away smiling and bowing, and hastened out of sight.
"I'll be damned," said Colonel Forrest.
"We hadn't had our dessert," Pug said.
"Well done," Kirby said to Pug Henry, with an odd glance at Rhoda.
"Beautifully done."
9fOb, Pug has a way about him," Rhoda said, smiling brightly.
"Okay, Dad," Byron said. Victor Henry shot him a quick look. It was the one remark that gratified him.
The Americans rushed uneasily through their desserts: all but Victor Henry, who was very deliberate about eating his tart and drinking his coffee. He unwrapped a cigar. The waiter jumped to light it for him.
"Well, I guess we can shove off," he said, puffing out a cloud of smoke. "Time's a'wasting, and the colonel and I are cheating the U.S.
Government." That night after a late dinner, as they were having coffee on the terrace, Rhoda said, 'I see you've brought home a pile of work. I thought we might see that new Emil Jennings movie. But I can get one of the girls to come along." 'Go ahead. I'm no fan of Emil jannings."
Rhoda drank up her coffee and left the father and son sitting in the gloom.
"Briny, what about that report? How's it coming?"
"The report? Oh, yes, the report." Byron leaned forward in his chair, legs apart, elbows on knees, hands clasped. "Dad, I'd like to ask you something. What would you think of my joining the British navy? Or the marines.
Victor Henry blinked, and took a while to answer. "You want to fight the Germans, I take it?"
"I enjoyed myself in Warsaw. I felt useful." "Well, this is one hell of a change, coming from you. I thought a military career was o-u-t out."
'This isn't a career."
Pug sat smoking and looking at his hands, crouching forward in his chair. Byron usually slouched back and extended his long legs, but now he was imitating his father. Their attitudes looked comically alike.
"Briny, I don't think the Allies are going to make a deal with Hitler, but what if t do? A peace offensive's coming up, that's for sure.
Suppose you join the British, possibly lose your citizenship-certainly create a peck of problens-and then the war's off?
There you'll be, up to your neck in futile red tape. Why not hang on a while and see how the cat jumps?"
"I guess so." Byron sighed, and slouched back in his chair.
Pug said, "I don't like to discourage an admirable impulse. What might be a good idea right now is to ask for active duty in our Navy, and-"
"No, thanks." "Now hear me out, dammit. You've got your commission. The reserves who go out to sea now will draw the best duty if and when the action starts. You'll have the jump on ninety-nine percent of the otbersIn wartime you'll be the equal of any Academy man."
'Meantime I'd be in for years. And then suppose the war ends?"
"You're not doing anything else."
"I wrote to Dr. Jastrow in Siena. I'm waiting to hear from him."
The father dropped the subject.
Rhoda went to see the Emil jannings movie, but first she did something else. She picked up Dr. Palmer Kirby at his hotel and drove him to Tempelhof airport. This was not necessary; cabs were available in Berlin. But she had offered to do this and Kirby had accepted.
Perhaps there would have been no harm in telling her husband that she was giving the visitor this last courtesy; but she didn't.
They hardly spoke in the car. She parked and went to the cafe lounge while he checked in. Had she encountered a friend, she would have needed an explanation on the spot and a story for her husband.
But she had no such worry; she felt only a bittersweet excitement.
What she was doing gave her not the slightest guilty feeling. She had no wrong intent.
She liked Palmer Kirby. It was a long, long time since a man had seemed so attractive to her. He liked her, too. In fact, this was a genuine little wartime romance, so decorous as to be almost laughable; an unexpected flash of melancholy magic, which would soon be over forever. It was not in the least like her aborted drunken peccadillo with Kip Tollever.
"Well, I guess this is it," Kirby said, falling in the chair opposite her in the gangling way which always struck her as boyish, for all his grizzled head and sharply lined face. They sat looking at each other until the drinks came.
"Your happiness," he said.
'Oh, that. I've had that. it's all in the past." She sipped.
'Did they give you the connection to Lisbon that you wanted?"
'Yes, but the Pan Am Clippers are jammed. I may be hung up in lisbon for days." "Well, I wish I had that in prospect. I hear that's becoming the gayest city in Europe."
"Come along."
"Oh, Palmer, don't tease me. Dear me, I was supposed to call you Fred, wasn't I? And now I find I've been thinking of you all along as Palmer. Fred-well, there are so many Freds. You don't strike me as Fred."
"That's very strange." He drank at his highball.
What is?"
"Anne called me Palmer. She never would call me anything else."
Rhoda twirled the stem of her daiquiri glass. "I wish I had known your wife."
"You'd have become good friends."
"Palmer, what do you think of Pug?"
"Hell. That's a tough one." The engineer pushed his lips out ruefully.
"My first impression was that he was a misplaced and-frankly-rather narrow-minded sea dog. But I don't know. He has a keen intellect. He's terrifically on the ball. That was quite a job he did on that waiter. He's a hard man to know, really."
Rhoda laughed. "How right you are. After all these years, I don't know him too well myself. But I suspect Pug's really something simple and almost obsolete, Palmer. He's a patriot. He's not the easiest person to live with. He's so goldamed single-minded." "Is he a patriot, or is he a Navy career man? Those are two different things."
Rhoda tilted her head and smiled. "I'm not actually sure."
"Well, I've come to admire him, that much I know." Kirby frowned at his big hands, clasped around the drink on the table. 'See here, Rhoda, I'm really a proper fellow, all in all. Let me just say this.
You're a wonderful woman. I've been a sad dull man since Anne died, but you've made me feel very much alive again, and I'm grateful to you.
Does this offend you?"
"Don't be a fool. It pleases me very much, and you know it does."
Rhoda took a handkerchief from her purse. "However, it's going to be a little hard on my contentment for a day or two. Oh, damn." "Why?
I should think it would, add to your contentment." "Oh, shut up, Palmer. Thanks for the drink. You'd better go to your plane."
"Look, don't be upset."
She smiled at him, her eyes tearful. 'y everything's fine, dear.
You might write, just once in a while. Just a friendly little scribble, so I'll know you're alive and well. I'd like that."
"Of course I will. I'll write the day I get home."
"Will you really? That's fine." She touched her eyes with her handkerchief and stood. "good-bye."
&n
bsp; He said, getting to his feet, "They haven't called my plane."
"No? Well, my chauffeuring job is finished, and I'm leaving you here and now." They walked out of the lounge and shook hands in the quiet terminal. War had all but shut down the airport; most of the counters were dark. Rhoda squeezed Dr. Kirby's hand, and standing on tiptoe, kissed him once on the lips. This in a way was strangest of all, reaching up to kiss a man. She opened her mouth. After all, it was a farewell.
'Good-bye. Have a wonderful trip." She hurried away and turned a corner without looking back. She saw enough of the Emil jannings movie to be able to talk about it to Pug.
Byron at last wrote the report on his adventures in Poland.
Victor Henry, suppressing his annoyance over the five vapid pages, spent an afternoon dictating to his yeoman everything he remembered of Byron's tale. His son read the seventeen-page result next day with astonishment.
"Ye gods, Dad, what a memory you have." 'Take that and fix it any way you want. Just make sure it's factually unchallengeable. Combine it with your thing and let me have it back by Friday." Victor Henry forwarded the patched report to the Office of Naval Intelligence, but forgot his idea of sending a copy to the President. The cool autumn days went by and Berlin began taking on an almost peacetime look and mood. Byron lounged around the Grunewald house, knotting his forehead by the hour over one book after another from Leslie Slote's list.
Three or four times a week he played tennis with his father; he was much the better player, but Pug, a steely plodder at first, wore him down and beat him. With food, exercise, and sun, however, Byron lost his shed look, regained strength, and started winning, which pleased Pug as much as it did him.
One morning he walked into his father's office at the embassy and saw sitting on the floor, carefully roped up and ticketed with a tag in his own handwriting, the large valise of suits, shoes, and shirts he had left behind in Warsaw. It was a shocking little clue to the efficiency of the Germans. But he was glad to have the clothes, for American styles were idolized in Germany. He blossomed out as a dandy.
The German girls in the embassy looked after the slender young man whenever he walked down the hall, casually A la mode, with heavy red-glinting brown hair, a lean face, and large blue eyes that widened when he wistfully smiled.
But he ignored their inviting glances. Byron pounced on the mail every morning, searching in vain for a letter from Siena.
When the Fuhrer made his Reichstag speech offering peace to England and France, early in October, the propaganda ministry set aside a large block of seats in the Kroll Opera House for foreign diplomats, and Pug took his son along. living through the siege of Warsaw, and then reading Mein Kampf, Byron had come to think of Adolf Hitler as a historic monster-a Caligula, a Genghis Khan, an Ivan the Terrible-and Hitler standing at the podium surprised him: just a medium-size pudgy individual in a plain gray coat and black trousers, carrying a red portfolio.
The man seemed to Byron a diminutive actor, weakly impersonating the grandiose and gruesome history-maker.
Hitler spoke this time in a reasonable, pedestrian tone, like an elderly politician. In this sober style, the German leader began to utter such grotesque and laughable lies that Byron kept looking around for some amused reactions. But the Germans sat listening with serious faces. Even the diplomats gave way only here and there to a mouth twitch that might have been ironic.
A powerful Poland had attacked Germany, the little man in the gray coat said, and had attempted to destroy her. The brave Wehrmacht had not been caught unawares and had justly punished this insolent aggression. A campaign strictly limited to attack of military targets had brought quick total victory. The civilian population of Poland, on his personal orders, had not when molested, and had suffered no loss or injury, except in Warsaw. There again on his orders, the German commanders had pleaded with,the authorities to evacuate their civilians, offering them safeconduct The Poles with criminal folly had insisted on holding defenseless women and children within the city.
To Byron, the brazenness of this assertion was stupefying. All the neutral diplomats had made desperate efforts for weeks to negotiate the evacuation of Warsaw's women and children. The Germans had never even replied. It was not so much that Hitler was lying about this-Byron knew that the German nation was following a wild liar and had been for years, since Mein Kampf was full of obvious crazy lies-but that this lie was pointless, since the neutrals knew the facts and the world press had reported them. Why, then, was Hitler saying such vulnerable nonsense? The speech must be meant for the Germans; but in that case, he reflected-as Hitler went on to "offer an outstretched hand!" to the British and the French-why was the speech so mild in style, and why were so many seats reserved for diplomats?
"Surely if forty-six million Englishmen can claim to rule over forty million square kilometers of the earth, then it cannot be wrong," Hitler said in a docile, placating tone, holding up both hands, pahns outward, "for eighty-two million Germans to ask to be allowed to till in peace eight hundred thousand kilometers of soil that are Mstorically their own." He was talking about his new order in central Europe, and the expanded Third Reich. The British and the French could have peace simply by accepting things as they now were, he said, adding a hint that it might be well if they also gave Germany back her old colonies.
The Fuhrer at the end fell into his old style, howling and sneering, shaking both fists in front of his face, pointing a fist and a finger straight upward, snapping his hands to his hips, as he pictured the horrors of a full-scale war, which he said he dreaded and which nobody could really win.
That night Pug Henry wrote in his intelligence report:...
Hitler looks very well. He obviously has first-rate powers of recuperation. Maybe licking Poland toned up his system a bit. Anyway, the haggardness is gone, his color is excellent, he isn't stooping, his voice is clear, not harsh, and-at least in this speech-very pleasant, and his walk is springy and quick. It would be a grave mistake to hope for a physical breakdown in this min.
The speech was a lot of the same old stuff, with some remarkable whoppers, even for the Fuhrer, about who started the Polish war and about the sterling conduct of the Germans toward civilians. This tommyrot was certainly for internal consumption. His German listeners appeared to be swallowing it, though it's very hard to discern what Germans really think.
'The radio tonight is making a great to-do about the 'outstretched hand' peace proposal. Well evidently be hearing 'outstretched hand" from now on, possibly to the end of the war, even if it's ten years hence.
The offer may have been authentic. If the Allies accept, Germany gets her half of Poland for the price of a quick cheap campaign, and her preWorld War colonies, no doubt as a reward for the faultless chivalry of her aimed forces. Hitler has never been bashful about making the most outrageous proposals. They've been accepted, too. So why not try another one?
At the very least, if he gets the truce and the conference he suggests, the British and French publics will undoubtedly relax and slack off. The Germans can use the breather to get their half-hearted industrial effort rolling for the showdown. On every count this was a clever speech by a leader who is riding high and seems to have the magic touch. The only fault I can find is a dull and boring delivery, but that too may have been calculated. Hitler today was the judicious European politician, not the roaring Aryan firebrand. Among his other talents he is a gifted vaudevillian.
Pug told Byron to write down his impressions of the speech. Byron handed in half a written page: My outstanding impression was the way Adolf Hitler follows out what he wrote in Mein Kampf. He says there, in his section on war propaganda, that the masses are 'feminine," acting on feeling and sentiment, and that whatever you tell them must be addressed to the dullest ignoramus among them, in order to reach and convince the broadest possible audience. This speech was full of lies that ought to annoy a halfeducated German boy of ten, and the peace proposals amounted to a total German grab. Maybe Hitler judges oth
er countries by his own; otherwise I can't understand the speech. I only today what utter contempt Hitler has for the Germans. He regards them as bottomlessly naive and stupid. They follow him and love him. Who am I to say he's wrong?
His father thought this was not bad, and included it in quotation marks as the comment of a youth American spectator.
The din of the German radio and press in the next days was terrific.
Italy and japan had hailed the Fuhrer as the greatest peacemaker of all time. A mighty popular surge for peace was sweeping the West and the United States. But "Churchillian" warmongers were trying to stamp out this warm response of the peoples to the Fuhrer's outstretched hand. If they succeeded, the most ghastly bloodbath of all time would follow, and history would know whom to blame. Pug gathered from neutral intellience in Berlin that some Frenchmen wanted to make a deal and call off the war, but not because they took seriously anything Hitler had said.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 32