“Only when he is not interfering in Irish matters.”
A brief nod, a concession to my point after he had made the point that he knew all about me. From Claus perhaps.
“Our dashing Reichsmarschal thinks he can eliminate the RAF in four days. Would you agree?”
“Hardly. They have some new planes which I am told are excellent.”
“The Spitfire especially,” he said.
“And some excellent tracking systems.”
“Radar.”
“And some quite able leaders.”
“Dowding, Leigh-Mallory, and Park.”
“The Abwehr is well-informed, Admiral. I presume that your dashing Reichsmarschal has this information and the Führer too.”
“Both have elements of it. They will never be able say they weren’t warned. However, they simply do not believe it.”
“Ah … do you want them to fail, Herr Admiral?”
“I know that they will fail, Herr Ambassador.”
“They will never reach the defense lines the English have established.”
His frosty blue eyes twinkled.
“They will never test the possibility that those lines do not exist.”
“And then?”
“Russia of course. It will be a great disaster for Germany. We will lose this war for the same reason we lost in 1918, not enough manpower Too many of our young men died. Our enemies were exhausted too. Then the Americans arrived with many more young men … Does your experience in America in these recent years lead you to believe that they will arrive again?”
“It is a complicated question, but the answer is ‘yes.’”
“Then”—he sighed—“the thousand-year Reich will not last five years.”
“You do not sound unhappy about that, Admiral, not as unhappy as you probably were when the Royal Navy sank the Dresden off the coast of Chile in the last war.”
Again the frosty eyes twinkled.
“The captain of the ship did manage to escape,” I added. “A very clever man.”
“August 13,” he said, “is Eagle Day, the day when the Reichsmarschal begins to destroy the RAF. We will see what will happen when the Stukas encounter the Spitfires.”
“Is the Stuka commander here today?” I asked.
He glanced around the room.
“Ah yes, he is the handsome younger officer close to our dashing Reichsmarschal, though not so close as to pick up any of his germs.”
“I have a personal message to deliver to him that has nothing to do with the matters of our conversation.”
I don’t know why I said that. It was an impulsive, illconsidered example of Irish romantic folly. Now I would have to act on it.
“It is well that you deliver it to him today. His life expectancy cannot be great. God grant that he survives. He is a good man even if he still lives in the world of the Flying Circus. Germany will need men like him after the disaster is finished.”
“The Secret Germany?”
“Ja, Ja, Herr Ridgewood.” He smiled slightly. “The Secret Germany.”
“You will, of course,” I continued to be reckless, “intercept my dispatches to Dublin.”
“That is one of the services the Abwehr provides to the thousand-year Reich. In your case we have no one on our staff who can translate your lovely Irish language and cannot afford to search for someone who could. I would imagine that our English counterparts will not have that trouble.”
“How very interesting, Herr Admiral.”
“I too have found this conversation very interesting, Herr Ambassador. Perhaps you will have time to visit my home out in Gruenwald. We could discuss German literature, at which I hear you are an expert.”
“I am only a student, Herr Admiral.”
“And we also share a distaste for thousand-year champagne. I will be in touch with you.”
We bowed politely to one another and parted.
He had told me in effect that he knew what I was doing and that I could continue to do it. No, he wanted me to continue. He wanted his information shared with the Foreign Office in London. I would be a go-between for him and Winston.
I tried to clear my head for my meeting with Paul von Richthofen. Pure arrogant folly on my part.
“Herr General,” I touched his arm, distracting him from his careful attention to the words of the intoxicated Reichsmarschal.
He turned around in some surprise.
“Tim Ridgewood, I’m a friend of Claus Stauffenberg.”
He was about my height and had the same kind of tight wavy hair as mine, though blond, the tense, alert posture of a professional athlete or fighter pilot, and the broad smile of the natural leader.
“Ja, ja, Herr Ridgewood. Paul Richthofen. Claus has spoken often about you and praises you greatly. Also my wife, Frau Richthofen. I was hoping to meet the new Irish ambassador.” He gestured towards my green cummerbund. “I did not want to seem forward.”
“I especially want to congratulate you on your marriage and to wish you and Annalise all possible happiness and a long life together.”
A happy flush formed on his face. Now he looked liked the descendent of a Viking who had learned how to play Irish football.
“Thank you very much, Tim,” he said. “My wife is an astonishing woman, beautiful, intelligent, and often very comical. I am a most fortunate man. After this little affair with England about which the Führer has just spoken, we must all of us have dinner at our home in Wannsee, Claus and Nina, Annalise and I, and the ambassador of Ireland. Perhaps in a green suit.”
“And wearing a leprechaun hat … Give my very best to Frau Richthofen and, Paul, be careful.”
“Ja, ja, Tim, thank you very much.”
I turned away to leave him to his slobbering boss, a man who probably knew a little about the Spitfires and had not warned Paul about them.
Well, I’d done my Christian duty to be a good sport and in thoroughly Irish style, a loser being gracious to a winner after a rugby match. I wished I felt better about it.
I rode back to the embassy and drank a large glass of the Irish whiskey, of which my predecessor had left a supply that might survive the thousand-year Reich.
As the Galway woman had insisted, I said the Rosary every day before sleeping. That night I prayed for Paul von Richthofen and fell asleep with the Rosary still in my fingers. I repeated it the next morning, just in case God and the Blessed Mother had any doubts about my sincerity.
13
“THE RAF did win that battle, didn’t they?” Nuala Anne asked me the following morning in my office, after she had read the most recent segment of Timmy’s diary.
She was dressed in shorts and an exercise bra for her daily struggle in our little gym room. I had already taken the beasts for their run and performed my workout requirement and hence was filled with a sense of virtue, distantly related perhaps to that which Timmy had experienced that dreadful day in 1940.
“‘They did indeed. On ‘Eagle Day’ they gave the Luftwaffe a bloody nose from which it never recovered. The battle went on till October, when the Germans switched to night bombing of English cities. The RAF lost some nine hundred planes and about four hundred pilots out of approximately three thousand. The Luftwaffe lost over two thousand planes. Some of the experts after the war said that if the Germans had sustained their attacks, they would have won. But Hitler and Goering needed the planes and the pilots for their attack on Russia in the spring.”
“Three thousand men stopped the Glorious Führer and his dashing Reichsmarschal?”
“That’s why Churchill said that never before had so many owed so much to so few.”
“Your man Timmy is having a great time for himself, isn’t he now?”
“And feeling very pleased with himself for his generosity of spirit.”
“Give over, Dermot Michael Coyne! Would you have been so generous if someone had taken me away before you worked up enough nerve?”
“I would have killed him.”
&n
bsp; “No you wouldn’t. You’d be after dying of a broken heart.”
“’Tis true.”
“It would make a great film, wouldn’t it?”
“Film” is pronounced “filum” just as my nephew Colm’s name is pronounced “Colum.” Don’t ask me why.
“We’ll have to see how it ends. What if they all die? We know Claus died and the Herr Admiral. And Hitler and the rest.
“WELL, certainly your man didn’t die or he would not have written his memoirs.”
“’Tis true.”
“And those funny old planes, whatever do you call them?”
“Stukas. Goering pulled them out early. The Spitfires were shooting them down in large numbers every day.”
“I wonder if she loved him at all, at all.”
“He sounded like a nice man.”
“Lots of charm like Timmy. But I can’t see your man hanging around someone like what’s his name?”
“Reichsmarschal Hermann Goering.”
“We got him at the end, didn’t we?”
I didn’t point out that Ireland had nothing to do with getting him.
“He was convicted at the war crimes trial and killed himself the day he was to be hung.”
“He wasn’t any less dead … Do you think Timmy went to Germany to have another chance to marry Annalise?”
“And to see Claus again?” I suggested.
“And to help kill the Antichrist?”
“Your man,” I suggested, “is like our friend Des. He was looking for adventure. Maybe he encountered more than he expected.”
“And lived to write this … and married someone.”
“Who maybe settled him down?”
She thought about that.
“I don’t think the Galway woman settled his father down.”
“You probably have the right of it, Nuala Anne … What do we do next?”
“Well, first of all you talk to Jennifer Doolin and set up a time and a place for an interview.”
“By myself?”
“She wouldn’t feel free to talk to me about her brother, not at all, at all.”
I didn’t argue. I never did with Nuala’s decisions in these matters. She would make the point that it was obviously the right decision and didn’t require an argument.
“And second of all?”
“Haven’t I been thinking that we need a day of swimming?”
When we had married and moved into our house on Sheffield Avenue, we had not sold my studio apartment in the John Hancock Center. It was, I argued, appreciating every month, and it gave us a getaway place when we wanted to get away, and a swimming pool. And, I hadn’t added, a site for intense romance, free from dogs and children, subjects which had yet to enter my romantic imagination.
“At my apartment?”
“Well, where else do we have a pool?”
We hadn’t been there since the presence of Patjo in my wife’s body had become evident, almost a year ago.
“It wouldn’t be daycent!”
It was apparently decent at Grand Beach, but what did I know.
“’Tis a ded friggin’ bril idea!” I agreed.
So I called Grace Doolin and reported that we thought we were making progress and that we had begun to suspect that Des was still alive.
“Why hasn’t he been in touch with us then?” she said with passive aggressive asperity in her voice.
“Perhaps he cannot, for one reason or another.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me. I knew we should have forbidden him to attend Loyola Academy. The Jesuits ruined him. We should have insisted on New Trier and then Notre Dame, just as we did for Jenny.”
She was not particularly happy about my request for an interview with Jenny, but she acceded to it with very little grace. A handsome, pleasant woman, Grace Doolin would make herself old long before her time.
Jenny phoned us a half hour later. She would be in Chicago on Saturday to take some of her friends from Seattle shopping at the Water Tower and the Mag Mile and could easily escape for lunch. I proposed Rosebud on Rush Street at noon. If our promising spring weather continued we could eat outdoors. She accepted my invitation with what I could call guarded enthusiasm.
Our “getaways” had acquired a certain ritual through the years of our marriage. In midafternoon on Friday we’d go to the studio and engage in some preliminary activity, including some moderate lovemaking, a swim, and dinner at either Tru or the Four Seasons. We would not talk about any work we were doing and maintain only minimum essential contact with home—which meant a call every two hours or so to calm down the “hellions” who are usually pretty well behaved in our absence, even Socra Marie. The next day, we talked, read, swam, and made love, much more than just moderately. If weather permitted we might walk along the lakefront. Sometimes Nuala did a “little shopping” in the Water Tower. We ordered pizza in at the end of the day, drank red wine (Barolo preferred) and enjoyed quietly the rejuvenation of our love. Before going to bed we said the Rosary (as Timmy had done in his flat in the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin) praying for all married people, especially those who could not take a day off or could and would not (intention furnished by me wife). The next morning we ate breakfast in the Coffee Shop at the Ritz-Carlton and then went home to the hellions, whom we were already beginning to miss.
This time, herself went home, and I walked down to the river and back before my lunch with Jenny Doolin. At the first sign of a real spring day, the Mag Mile and environs erupt with women in spring dresses. It would have been a perfect day for me wife to sashay down the street in various kinds of light blue dresses. For meself, despite an interlude of intense sexual play the sights on the street were exciting, though I was careful not to stare—too obviously.
God had done a marvelous job in designing women and matching them with spring.
Exhausted from my exertions and feeling the heat and my old age and telling myself that I was a dirty old man, I sank into an umbrella-protected chair on Superior Street and tried to recoup my resources by sipping slowly on a spice-soaked iced tea. I had promised Jenny that she could recognize me by my old Golden Dome windbreaker and a stack of my wife’s disks on the table.
“Mr. Coyne,” a gentle voice said. “I don’t mean to wake you up.”
“Mr. Coyne is my grandfather,” I said as I opened my eyes, “I’m Dermot and I was only resting my eyes a bit.”
I jumped out of my chair, as my mother had taught me to and grinned my best Irish grin.
“I’m Jenny,” she said shyly, a trim young woman, below medium height with the darkest brown eyes in all the world and short brown hair, a tentative smile that would break many a young man’s heart, and an aura of fragile strength. Her thin beige dress revealed a figure that would contribute to the heartbreak. You wanted to take care of Jenny Doolin and yet you were quite certain that in her own low-key way, she could take care of herself.
She was surprised that I had attended the Golden Dome, even more surprised that I had quit the football team and left the school, well, flunked out because of poor grades.
“You must not have studied very hard, Dermot.”
“Quite the contrary, I studied very hard and learned a lot. Unfortunately, none of it was in my assigned courses. Then I went to Marquette for two years and didn’t graduate there either. My family bought me a seat on the Board of Trade where I was also a failure. Next I made a couple of million by mistake, retired, sold my seat, turned my money over to a wise investor, went to Europe, encountered my wife in a pub in Dublin, married her, and we have four children, whom she calls with some exaggeration, hellions.”
I showed her my wallet picture of the five of them.
“Nuala Anne,” she said with an approving smile. “Your good luck continues, Dermot.”
“If she were present, I’d disagree. She sent some of her disks.”
“Which she autographed! Isn’t that sweet? … glad I can talk to you alone, because I’d be intimidated if she were her
e. Still next time, when Des comes home, I’d love to meet her.”
OK, this lovely little woman had won me over completely with a few sentences. She’d also confirmed me wife’s instincts.
“He’s coming home, is he?”
“Of course he’s coming home. My parents don’t think so anymore, but they’ve never understood Des. I try to tell them that he’s up to something special and he’ll come home when he’s finished and explain everything.”
Her faith was absolute and simple. No doubts, no questions, like an elderly nun’s faith in Jesus.
“As me wife would say, Jenny Doolin, I think you have the right of it.”
“You can take notes if you want,” she said shyly.
“I have a photographic memory, Jenny. You’d think I should have done well in school, but I didn’t know then that I had such a blessing. It gets me in trouble with Nuala Anne, because I remember exactly what she has said.”
“And she tells you that you should listen to what she means, not what she said.”
“And yourself not even knowing her personally,” I replied, liking this quiet young woman more and more. “So you admire your brother? The only one in the family that does?”
“I think Dad does too, but once Mom makes up her mind, he doesn’t argue. Her brother went to a Jesuit high school in New York and to Fordham and then spent a year as a novice. When he left the novitiate, he started to drift and has been drifting ever since, in and out of work, in and out of marriage. So it’s the fault of the Jesuits. She’s afraid that the same thing will happen to Des, know what I mean?”
So that’s the family dynamics.
“Is Des at all like his uncle?”
“I certainly don’t think so. Uncle Joe is a dreamy sort of man, not much energy or enthusiasm. Des is bundle of enthusiasm and energy, too much maybe, but not passive aggressive. Uncle Joe could never figure out what to do next, Des always knew the next and the next after next. Mom sees only two men who look kind of alike and won’t settle down with the right kind of young woman.”
“Do you agree that Des should settle down?”
“When he’s ready and poor Mom won’t like her because she won’t be a creep like Mattie … I shouldn’t have said that. Mattie is fine for Conor. Des would never marry someone like her.”
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