by Peter Quinn
Gresser served tea. The attaché spoke of his hope their countries wouldn’t be adversaries again. He recognized Germany’s claim on territorial adjustments to the Versailles Treaty. “But all this saber rattling is putting everyone on edge.”
“Wanton aggression must be strongly opposed,” Canaris said. “The security of Europe depends on it. Your government must face up to that.”
“Come, Admiral, I’d hardly call the Czechs ‘wanton aggressors. ’”
“Neither would I.”
The attaché stared at the tea leaves in the bottom of his cup, as if the meaning of Canaris’s implicit criticism of his own government might be found there. After an unnatural pause, he described a motor trip he’d taken on the new autobahn, the wonders of its broad lanes, no lights or crossways or local traffic. He had an Englishman’s love of monologue as well as a talent for it. Canaris was delighted to be relieved of the burden of conversation. They parted with an amicable handshake.
Canaris finished up his work and prepared to leave. The nap hadn’t done much to relieve his sluggishness, and the reminiscences of the Dresden, of what seemed a lost, irretrievable innocence, left him nostalgic. He’d served on the Dresden in a different time, a different world, when the sea and its endless horizons encouraged dreams and illusions that duty and the war obliterated.
He remembered one time in particular, during the last full summer of peace, in 1913.The Dresden had been temporarily relieved from South American patrol and sent on a goodwill call to the city of Baltimore, for the occasion of the American Independence Day. Passing up an invitation to visit Washington, D.C., Canaris and another officer took a train to New York on a three-day leave. After some stretches of open country, the rail corridor they rode through became thick with an impressive array of bustling warehouses and smoke-belching factories. They were quite prepared to dislike New York, a town of legendary political corruption, filled with lumpen Irish and the dregs of Naples and the Polish shtetls. But as the train sped across a great marsh, and the tops of the city’s tallest buildings could be seen twinkling magically, like the evening star, in the purple gloaming, Canaris felt a sense of excited anticipation.
The train plunged into a tunnel and emerged a short while later in the great steel and glass-covered cavern of Pennsylvania Station. The German deputy vice-consul of New York was there to meet them. He led them to a broad traffic-choked avenue ablaze with electric lights and into a waiting automobile. After they checked into their hotel in an area every bit as bustling as that around the station, the deputy vice-consul escorted them to an outdoor Italian restaurant where a tan-skinned cantatrice sang about love and broken hearts. In the morning they visited the zoo in the Bronx, the thinly populated northern part of the city. Later, they toured the metropolitan art museum and went to the top of the newly opened Woolworth Building, traveling everywhere on the city’s efficient train and tram system. The deputy vice-consul was a man in his mid-thirties, a florid and rotund Bavarian, who seemed as inured to New York as any native. That night, in the intermission of the play he took them to—a comedy they barely understood but that drew incessant laughter from the audience—he flirted with several women. He consorted with every cab driver and doorman as though they were mates of long acquaintance.
The manager of the hotel was waiting for them when they came back. He was the grandson of a Berlin composer, a Jew, and welcomed them warmly. He opened a bottle of fine Riesling, and when that was gone, brought out a bottle of American whiskey, which had a coarse, smoky taste. Canaris’s companion excused himself, explaining that they had to catch a train early the next morning back to Baltimore. Canaris followed him out but didn’t return to their room. He needed some fresh air. He rode the elevator to the hotel’s roof garden, where he drank wine at the bar and stared at a lovely girl in a violet hat and dress who sat between her parents beneath a lattice entwined with paper flowers. The parents didn’t seem to notice him, but the girl did. She smiled at him.
The warm night air and the flow of the wine fermented silly, evanescent thoughts. He would propose to the girl. Their wedding night would be in this very hotel, her in the bed in frilly white undergarments, waiting for him as he packed away his uniform in the bottom of their traveling trunk, where it wouldn’t be discovered until decades later when a grandchild went rummaging about in the attic of their house. He would seek employment in the tumultuous commerce that drove the city, import-export perhaps, and assume the same style as the deputy vice-consul, the unguarded bonhomie. The girl and her parents left. She looked over her shoulder at him as she went out. A look of desire. In the distance, beyond the roof garden, the broad, well-lit, heavily trafficked avenues stretched north, toward the great open space of America.
He drank more wine. How easy this city had it. Berlin had been raised to greatness not by the River Spree or the luck of geography, but by struggle, battle, the concentrated willpower and firepower of a state with enemies on every side. New York was handed greatness, wide river, deep, capacious harbor, the ocean at its door. Soldiers were nowhere to be seen. There was no rival military power for a radius of three thousand miles. Even the police lacked any sense of military bearing—fat, slovenly Irish peasants who strutted about with the gait of a farmer taking a cow to market.
The sharp, unceasing pain in his head the next morning was made all the worse by the unrelenting cacophony of the New York streets. He couldn’t remember the face of the girl at whom he had stared so intently. He boarded the train to Baltimore. The Dresden sailed that evening. When the war came, and she went to the bottom, he made his epic, dangerous journey back to the Fatherland, took the assignments that were given to him without protest or complaint, even desk work in Berlin, sitting bolt upright, mind harnessed to the iron coulter of military paperwork.
Occasionally, as he did now, he recalled his visit to New York. The roof garden. That girl. Her look. Violet. Memories that grew fainter. Besides, the city he visited had long since disappeared. Like the rest of America, New York had fallen on hard times. Unemployment rampant. The busy gaiety of the city gone. Streets overrun by competing mobs of gangsters who fought gun battles for control. The chaos that democracy inevitably brought. But there’d been a moment when it enticed him, possibilities never pursued that now seemed only wild fantasies.
WALL STREET, NEW YORK
The sustained buzz of the intercom drew Donovan’s attention from the nagging pain behind his knee. His secretary had probably been pushing the button for some time. He put the switch in the “on” position and bent close. “Yes.”
“Colonel Donovan, sorry to interrupt, but I have John Foster Dulles’s secretary on the line, and she wants to change your luncheon appointment from the River Club to the dining room at the law offices of Sullivan & Cromwell. Mr. Dulles’s back is bothering him and he’d appreciate not having to travel uptown.”
“Fine.”
“And she wants to know if you mind that District Attorney Dewey will be joining you.”
The constriction behind his knee became almost unbearable. “Oh, Christ.”
“Does that mean you don’t wish Mr. Dewey included?”
“No, no, I’m sorry, my leg is acting up, that’s all. Include Mr. Dewey by all means.”
“Shall I bring you some aspirin?”
“That’s not necessary. It’ll pass. It always does.”
Then again, Donovan thought, aspirin might lessen the headache that sometimes followed John Foster Dulles’s ponderous monologues. Dulles had brought Tom Dewey with him before, obviously convinced that the Racket Buster was his great white hope for putting a Republican in the White House and elevating himself to Secretary of State, a position held by his grandfather and uncle. Dewey and Dulles together would make for a grimly serious lunchtime. “On second thought,” he said, “yes, please bring the aspirin.”
The ache settled into a concentrated throb. Standing usually helped. This time it only made it worse. “A phantom pain,” the doctor said. “The bull
et shattered all the nerves and blood vessels. You couldn’t have any sensation there.”
Couldn’t, but did.
Donovan sat down again and drove his knuckles into where the throbbing had intensified. Years ago, he’d rubbed a spot nearby and felt something sharp. It turned out to be a sliver of shrapnel that had worked its way to the surface a full decade after it had entered. The common phenomenon of wounds working beneath the skin, invisible, but still there, still capable of making their presence felt. He could never remember when exactly he’d been hit by shrapnel, but it had to have been soon after he crouched on the lip of the shallow trench the men had dug, stood, and blew his whistle.
Ahead, behind a shroud of fog, the furious syncopation of the German machine guns seems to come from all sides. As he turns to look behind, the impact of a bullet knocks him flat. Stunned for a moment, he struggles to his feet. Sergeant Kane is struck by a burst of machine gun fire that shreds the lower part of his face. Tumbling backwards, Kane drags them both into the trench they’d just left.
The heaving of the ground brings him to his senses. The high, thin, hysterical shriek of the German 210 millimeter shells inches closer, finding the right range. At the far end of the trench, three soldiers huddle close to the earth. They’re too scared to be embarrassed at having failed to follow the others out of the trench. The dirt streaked across their faces can’t disguise or diminish their terror. They’re the three youngest men in the unit, boys really. “Are you all right, Major Donovan?” one of them calls. His hands are cupped together like a football coach calling across the field to one of his players.
Another shell hits, closer than before. Amid a gray, grizzled crimson-flecked shower of dirt and pulverized flesh, a perfectly butchered human leg, puttee and laces still in place, bone as white as soap, lands next to him. He’s sure that the severed limb belongs to the boy who’d yelled over a moment before. He looks at where they’d been. Two were gone. Obliterated. The third, the youngest, is missing his legs but still alive. He’s shouting, “O shit! O shit!” A soldier reappears through the mist. He thinks at first it’s a German stormtrooper come to finish the job. He gropes for his revolver, barely getting it out of its holster when he realizes the soldier is one of his own boys, returned to carry him to safety. They just make it out before the next shell hits. He stays where he is for the next five hours, in shivering agony, refusing to be evacuated or to order a retreat. The Germans are waiting for that. The instant a withdrawal begins they’ll throw in their reserves and turn it into a rout.
When a stretcher finally arrives, one of the bearers is Tommy Scanlon, who’d been with the 1st Battalion of the 69th since those early days at Camp Mills. He’s been among the hardest to win over, a Hell’s Kitchen brat resentful of the commanding officer with an Irish name but Brooks Brothers breeches and Ivy League manners. Scanlon hadn’t changed his attitude until the Ourcq. The battalion had been cut to pieces and he went wild, shooting three German prisoners. After he took away Scanlon’s pistol but didn’t report him, Scanlon conferred on him the nickname “Wild Bill” Donovan, a misnomer if there’d ever been one, since he’d been in charge of calming the men after they’d lost 66 officers and 1,750 soldiers in the fighting at the Ourcq, almost two thirds of the regiment’s original 3,000 men.
“Well, Major, guess the krauts won’t be satisfied till they done us all in.”
Scanlon holds a corner of the blanket that they’re using as a makeshift stretcher. His face is directly above. He’s always thought of Scanlon as a grown man. Suddenly it’s obvious: He’s just a kid. A kid in the wrong place. There isn’t time to reply before a bullet strikes Scanlon just beneath the rim of his helmet, one neat hole in the head, dead. The others drop the blanket. His bullet-broken knee takes the brunt of the fall. His howl is swallowed by another round of mortar shells. Scanlon is crumpled next to him, eyes bulging with fatal surprise. The day he accepts the Congressional Medal of Honor, he thinks of Scanlon’s expression. He deposits it at the 69th Armory as a memorial to Scanlon and “our brave and unforgotten dead.”
Unforgotten by whom? Who remembered Scanlon? When it’s over, people can’t forget the war fast enough.
His secretary entered with a bottle of aspirin and a glass of water on a teak tray. She rested the tray on his desk along with a folder containing the morning mail. “They want to make you a star.”
“Who wants to make me a star?’
“Warner Brothers. It’s the first letter.”
He took the folder to the window and stood while he read. The pain ebbed slightly. Addressed to “Colonel William J. Donovan,” the letter was a follow-up to a phone call from a studio executive informing him that Warner Bros. was considering a film about the wartime exploits of the 69th Regiment: “As the distinguished commander of that outfit, as well as the most highly decorated American officer in the Great War and winner of the Medal of Honor, you, Colonel Donovan, would be prominently featured.” The letter asked his technical assistance in developing the idea. “While we are only in the initial stages, we are hopeful this project will be brought to completion.”
Till now, films about the war had been scant. America had its fill of Over There. The Depression concentrated attention Over Here, Over Here. The second page contained some preliminary information intended, the executive wrote, “to convey the seriousness with which we approach the project.” Academy Award-winning screenwriter Norman Reilly Raine and director William Keighley, the team responsible for the current Warner Bros. hit The Adventures of Robin Hood, were being considered for the film.
There was no mention of who’d be cast in the movie, and Donovan knew there was no telling. With God, said Saint Augustine, all things were possible. How much more so with Hollywood, where no truth, physical, spiritual, or historical, would be allowed to stand in the way of box-office success? Who’d be cast as Father Duffy, the regimental chaplain, a restless intellectual dismissed from his post at the archdiocesan seminary for his theological explorations, and a priest utterly unjudgmental of the moral failings of the troops he ministered to? Probably be reduced to a pious silhouette. Pat O’Brien, perhaps? All Quiet on the Western Front meets Boys Town, another Warner Bros. hit. James Cagney as William Donovan? Or Errol Flynn? Or borrow Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy from MGM?
“How about your autograph?” His secretary returned with another folder that contained the letters he’d dictated to her first thing that morning.
“You mean my signature.” Sitting behind his desk, he scribbled his name at the bottom of each.
“No, your autograph. Looks like you’re on your way to stardom.” She had come to work for him after his defeat in the 1932 New York gubernatorial election with the caveat that her true profession was acting. As soon as she landed a role, she’d be gone. That was six years ago. She took the folder back to her desk, closing the door harder than usual.
He switched on the intercom. “Anything comes of this movie business, I’ll see to it that the Warner Brothers are alerted to your theatrical aspirations.”
“Abilities.”
“You know what I mean.”
“My aspirations are to the legitimate stage, not an assembly line in some Hollywood movie factory in hopes of becoming ‘The loftiest star of unascended heaven; pinnacled dim in the intense inane.’”
“Shakespeare?”
“Shelley.” A sharp crack signaled she’d switched off the intercom.
If truly disinterested, she was in a small, ever-dwindling minority. Donovan saw it on his travels. The lure was everywhere: the spectacle and stars of filmdom, an outsized, nonstop rebuttal of all the quotidian misery and ordinary squalor that had overwhelmed the country. A few nights earlier, the day after his wife left on a trip to California, he went for a walk and was halfway across town when it began to rain, a convenient excuse to duck into a movie theater. He hardly cared what was playing as long as it offered some diversion from worrying about his wife’s long spells of paralyzing sadness. He caught the
second feature, Racket Busters, a low-budget Warner Bros. picture with Humphrey Bogart in his usual role as a villain and George Brent as an honest trucker trying to resist the grip of the mob.
It proved diverting enough, though the suave George Brent seemed particularly unconvincing as a truck driver. The chief racket buster, played by Walter Abel, embodied yet another tribute to the growing fame of the real-life nemesis of the mob, Tom Dewey, the man who’d nailed Lucky Luciano, broken up a string of rackets, and was hot on the tail of the Tammany Tiger and its corrupt politicians.
Donovan was struck by how the audience clapped at the end, applause directed not to the actors on the screen but to the boy wonder from Owosso, Michigan, the crusader who’d inspired anti-corruption drives across America. The year before, it seemed as if Dewey were ready to lay down the mantle of special prosecutor in charge of breaking the hold of the rackets on businesses and entire industries for a lucrative position in private practice. Foster Dulles crowed loudly about how he’d hooked Dewey for Sullivan & Cromwell with an offer of $150,000 a year. But Dewey changed his mind and announced he was running for D.A. His work wasn’t done. Crooks, grafters, and murderers still abounded. The decisive victory had yet to be won. His picture seemed to be everywhere, his voice, too, in thundering radio addresses. It was said you could tell where he was from several blocks away by the intensity of the flash bulbs.
Dewey was easier to admire, Donovan came to realize, than to be around. Cocky and aloof, he wore a dismissive smirk that followed the thin horizontal line of his mustache. “Bill,” Dewey said when Dulles introduced him to Donovan, “if I ever run for governor of New York, I don’t intend to get trounced the way you were.” Now it seemed likely he’d not only have his shot at governor but even higher.