by Herman Wouk
Victor Henry decided that his job was intelligence, and that for better or worse this report told truly what he had seen so far in Nazi Germany. He hunted up the courier and gave him the document for urgent delivery to the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Admiral Preble read Combat Readiness of Nazi Germany a week later, and sent one page of extracts to the President. The Nazi-Soviet pact broke on the world on the twenty-second of August, as one of the most stunning surprises in all history. On the twenty-fourth Preble received the page back in an envelope from the White House. The President had scrawled at the bottom, in strong thick pen strokes in black ink:
Let me have V. Henry’s service record.
FDR
7
THE announcement of the pact shrieked at Byron and Natalie from the news placards in the Rome airport. They had set out from Siena before dawn in an old Renault, and while the whole world was chattering about the astounding news, they had innocently driven down along the Apennines in golden Italian sunlight, amid old mountain towns, wild airy gorges, and green valleys where peasants worked their fields. With Natalie Jastrow at his side for a three-week journey that was only starting, Byron was in the highest of spirits, until he saw the bulletins.
He had never found a European airport so busy or so noisy. Gesticulating travellers were besieging the reservation desks, nearly everybody was either walking fast or running, and sweaty porters wheeling heaps of luggage were snarling at passengers and at each other. The loudspeaker never stopped its thunderous echoing drivel. At the first kiosk, he bought a sheaf of papers. The Italian papers shrilled that this great diplomatic coup by the Axis had ended the war danger. The headlines of the Paris and London newspapers were big, black, and frightened. The German press giggled coarse delight in tall red block letters. The front page of a Swiss newspaper caricatured Hitler and Göring in Russian blouses and fur hats, squatting and kicking out their boots, to the music of a concertina played by Stalin in an SS uniform. Across a Belgian front page, the stark headline was
1914?
In a crowded, buzzing airport restaurant, while they ate a hasty lunch of cannelloni and cold white wine, Natalie astonished him by talking of going on. To proceed into a country that might soon be invaded by Germans struck Byron as almost mad.
But Natalie argued that the tourists milling in the airport were mere sheep. If a sudden political change could panic them, they had no right to be in Europe. She had stayed in Paris through the Munich crisis. Half of her American friends had fled, and later had straggled back—those who had not felt too silly. There was always less danger than most people thought. Even in a war, an American passport spelled safety. She wanted to see Poland. She wanted to see Leslie Slote and had given him her promise. She would be in and out of Poland in three weeks. The world wasn’t going to end in three weeks.
It did not cheer Byron to perceive how much she really wanted to rejoin Slote. Since the Palio, he had hoped that she was warming to himself. The girl had been downright affectionate during the second Palio, which they had watched without Jastrow, and at one point in the evening—when they were well into a third bottle of Soave at dinner after the race—she had remarked that it was too bad he wasn’t a few years older, and a Jew. “My mother would take to you, Briny,” she had said. “My troubles would be over. You have good manners. You must have lovely parents. Leslie Slote is nothing but an ambitious, self-centered dog. I’m not even sure he loves me. He and I just fell in a hole.”
But now she was on her way to her lover, and a political explosion that had staggered Europe made no difference to her.
By now he knew something of her rash streak. Climbing on mountainsides or ruins, Natalie Jastrow took unladylike chances. She leaped gaps, she teetered along narrow ledges, she scrambled up bare rocks, careless alike of her modesty and her neck. She was a strong, surefooted girl, and a little too pleased with herself about it.
He sat slouched in his chair, contemplating her across the red and white checked cloth, the dirty dishes, the empty wineglasses. The Alitalia plane was departing for Zagreb on the first leg of their flight in little more than an hour. She stared back, her lips pushed out in a wry pout. Her dark gray travelling suit was sharply tailored over her pretty bosom. She wore a black crushable hat and a white shirt. Her ring-less fingers beat on the cloth. “Look,” she said, “I can well understand that for you it’s no longer a gay excursion. So I’ll go on by myself.”
“I suggest you telephone Slote first. Ask him if you should come.”
Natalie drummed her fingers. “Nonsense, I’ll never get a call through to Warsaw today.”
“Try.”
“All right,” she snapped. “Where are the damned telephones?”
The long-distance office was mobbed. Two switchboard girls were shouting, plugging, unplugging, scrawling, waving their hands, and wiping sweat from their brows. Byron cut through the crowd, pulling Natalie by the hand. When she gave the operator a number in Warsaw, the girl’s sad huge brown eyes widened. “Signorina—Warsaw? Why don’t you ask me to ring President Roosevelt? It’s twelve hours’ delay to Warsaw.”
“That’s the number of the American embassy there,” Byron said, smiling at her, “and it’s life and death.”
He had an odd thin-lipped smile, half-melancholy, half-gay, and the Italian girl warmed to it as to an offered bunch of violets. “American embassy? I can try.”
She plugged, rang, argued in German and Italian, made faces at the mouthpiece, and argued some more. “Urgent, emergency,” she kept shouting. This went on for ten minutes or more, while Byron smoked and Natalie paced and kept looking at her watch. With a surprised look, the operator all at once nodded violently, pointing to a booth. Natalie stayed inside a long time, and came out red-faced and scowling. “We were cut off before we finished. I’m choking to death. Let’s get some air.” Byron brought her out into the terminal. “He got angry with me. He told me I was insane. The diplomats are burning their papers…. It was an awfully good connection. He might have been around the corner.”
“I’m sorry, Natalie, but it’s what I expected.”
“He said I should get the hell out of Italy and go straight home, with or without Aaron. Is that what you’d have told me?” She turned on him. “I’m so hot! Buy me a lemonade or something.”
They sat at a little table outside an airport café. She said, “Let’s see the plane tickets.”
“I’m sure we can get refunds.” He handed her the envelope.
She extracted her ticket and gave the envelope back. “You get a refund. They burned papers before Munich too. England and France will fold up now just the way they did then. Imagine a world war over Danzig! Who the hell knows where Danzig is? Who cares?”
“Natalie, that embassy will be swamped. You won’t see much of him.”
“Well, if he’s too busy for me, I’ll do my sightseeing alone. My family lived in Warsaw for years. I still have relatives there. I want to see it. I’m on my way and I’m not turning back.” The girl looked in her pocketbook mirror and jammed her hat further down on her head. “It must be about time for me to check in.”
He held out his hand. “Give me the ticket. I’ll check both of us in while you have your lemonade.”
She brightened, but looked suspicious. “Are you sure you want to go? You needn’t, honestly. I’m releasing you. Don’t come. I don’t want you. Tell Aaron I said that.”
“Oh shut up, Natalie. Let’s have the ticket.”
She gave him a playful smile, clutching the green and yellow ticket to her bosom. “Well! Listen to Briny Henry being masterful. The thing is, darling, if anything does go wrong, I don’t ever want to feel I dragged you into trouble.”
This was the first time Natalie Jastrow had—however casually—used a term of endearment to him. Byron stood up and pulled the ticket from her gloved hand.
The scheduled eight-hour trip lasted a day and a half. No connections worked. Their baggage vanished. They spent the nig
ht on benches in the Budapest terminal. At Warsaw, they were the only foreigners arriving at the small field in the nearly empty, rusty, shabby LOT plane, which turned right around and took off jam-packed with people fleeing Poland. Disconsolate travellers crowded the fence and watched it go.
A beefy young Pole in an olive uniform, speaking broken French, asked the two Americans many hostile questions and seemed to regard them as spies or lunatics. He confiscated their passports, muttered with other officials, told them to wait, and disappeared. They were famished, but the throng of refugees in the canteen, mostly Germans, sitting on luggage, squatting on the floor, or crowding every bench and chair, had long since eaten up all the food. Byron pounced on a couple of seats vacated for a moment. Bottles of warm Polish beer stood in the center of the table, with an opener and some glasses, so they drank warm beer and paid the waiter who came swooping down. Then Byron found a telephone and talked the waiter into calling the embassy. Slote was shocked to hear his voice. He appeared at the airport within the hour, chewing nervously on his cold pipe, in a shiny blue Chevrolet that prompted stares. Out came not only the passports, with various entry documents badly printed in purple ink on crude paper, but their luggage too, mysteriously rescued from the Balkans. They piled into the embassy car and set off for the city.
Natalie looked trim and pert after a last grooming in the ladies’ lounge—the size of a telephone booth, she said, with one cold water tap, and no seat on the single toilet bowl. “Does this continue, Leslie?” she said. “I mean, this is the airport of the capital of Poland! The further east we’ve come, the smaller the airports have gotten, the more loused-up the schedules, the worse the airplanes, the surlier the officials, the cruder the Johns, and the rougher the toilet paper. I’m not sure my bottom would survive a trip to Russia.”
“Well, eastern Europe is another world, Natalie. And you’re seeing it at a bad time. This little airport’s usually deserted and half asleep. However”—he jabbed the stem of his pipe toward her—“if you choose to go on a pleasure trip during a time of general mobilization—”
“Here it comes, Briny,” she said, her eyes full of dark amusement.
Slote reached a caressing hand, with a large blue-gemmed college ring, to her face. The easy intimate gesture hurt Byron’s eyes, signalling the end of his exclusive (if unheated) possession of the girl’s company. He slumped glumly in the back seat. “I’m thrilled to see you, darling, though you’re stark mad,” Slote said. “Things are looking much better tonight. England finally signed her guarantee to Poland, just today. The betting was that the pact with Russia would make her crawfish. Nothing of the sort. There’s reliable word from Sweden that Hitler’s calling off his invasion. The English knocked his breath out, that’s unmistakable.”
“Where are you putting us? A place with bathtubs, I hope.”
“It’s no problem. In the past three days the hotels have emptied. The Europeiski has some luxurious rooms, quite Western, really, and at Eastern prices. Don’t figure on staying long. The situation can still turn sour overnight.”
“I thought maybe a week,” Natalie said. “Then Byron and I can fly or drive down to Cracow and visit Medzice, and then fly on back to Rome.”
“Great bloody Christ, what are you talking about? Medzice! Just forget it, Natalie!”
“Why should I? Uncle Aaron said I should visit the family in Medzice. That’s where we’re all from. My gosh, this is flat country. Flat as a table.”
They were driving through fields of sweet-smelling ripe grain, interspersed with pastures where cows and horses grazed. Far, far ahead on the level plain, the buildings of Warsaw dimly rose.
“Exactly, and that’s Poland’s curse. It’s a soccer field, a hundred thousand square miles in size. Fine for invasions. Even the low mountains along the south have nice wide easy passes. Half a million German soldiers are in Czechoslovakia at this moment, poised at the Jablunka pass, forty miles from Medzice. Now do you understand?”
Natalie made a face at him.
Warsaw was much calmer than Rome. In lamplit twilight, well-dressed crowds, heavily sprinkled with uniforms, were happily promenading on the broad avenues, eating ice cream, smoking, chatting. The green parks were thronged with jocund children. Bright red buses went by with side placards advertising a movie; the name SHIRLEY TEMPLE stood out from Polish words. Splashy billboards touted German toothpastes, radios, and hair tonic. The long rows of four-story gray or brown buildings, the boulevards running into great squares flamboyant with statues, bordered by baroque official buildings or palaces, the electric signs beginning to flash and dance—all this made Byron think of Paris and London. It was strange to find such a metropolis at the end of the primitive air journey. The Europeiski Hotel had a lobby as ornate as any he had seen, with a massive brown-and-white marble staircase jutting down to the front door.
Natalie went up in the elevator. Slote detained Byron by touching his arm, then lit his pipe with harried flaming puffs. To Byron, seeing him after a lapse of many months, the Foreign Service man appeared impossibly old for Natalie: bespectacled, baggy-eyed, with marked lines in his lean sallow cheeks. A double-breasted chalk-striped dark suit emphasized his stodgy mature air, and he appeared shorter than Byron remembered.
“I wish I had time to buy you a drink,” Slote said. “I’d like to talk to you. This Cracow trip is dangerous nonsense. I’m going to get you air reservations out of here as soon as I can. They must be booked solid for a week, but the embassy has some pull. If it takes both of us to put her bodily on a plane back to Rome, it’s got to be done. Don’t tell her tonight, though. She’ll become unmanageable.”
“Okay. You know her better than I do.”
Slote shook his head, laughing. “I wonder, at this point. I ought to be deeply touched by this cuckoo visit—and I am, I am, of course I am—but Natalie Jastrow is too much for almost anybody. See you at dinner. The embassy’s a madhouse. If I can’t get away, I’ll telephone.”
Byron sat for a while in his cavernous gloomy room with tall windows facing the Bristol Hotel, wondering what the hell he was doing in Poland. He picked up the antique ivory-handled telephone, and with some haggling in German managed to get connected to Natalie’s room.
“Hello. Are you in the bathtub yet?”
“Well, I’m glad you can’t see me. What’s up?”
“I’m beat. You have dinner with Slote. I’m going to bed.”
“Stop that rubbish. You’re dining with us, Briny. You come and fetch me at nine, do you hear? Leslie has booked me into Paderewski’s suite, or something. It’s fantastic. I’ve got a full-length mirror here, held up by two big brown wooden angels.”
“This way,” Slote said. “Our table’s ready.”
An orchestra in gold-frogged red coats was thumping old jazz tunes in the main dining room of the Bristol, which for size, silk hangings, white linen, gilt-and-crystal chandeliers, obsequiousness of waiters, fine dress of the thronging customers, and ineptness on the dance floor, might have been in any first-class hotel in Europe. Certainly there was no trace of a war scare.
“Sorry I’m late. It’s the Jews,” Slote apologized when they sat down. “They’re storming the embassy. We’ve all become visa officers, right on up to Biddle. Christ knows I don’t blame them. If they can show a relative, a friend, a letter, anything, we process them. A New York telephone book, today in Warsaw, is worth a hundred zlotys, that’s about twenty dollars.”
“That puzzled me,” Natalie said. “I understood Warsaw was full of Jews. I’ve seen very few so far.”
“Oh, they’re here, all right. A third of this city’s Jewish.” At this point a tailcoated, bowing headwaiter brought a menu, and Slote had a long colloquy with him in Polish. Natalie listened with an admiring, envious look.
“Les, was it very hard to learn? One day I’ll try,” she said as the waiter left. “My folks used to talk Polish when they didn’t want me to understand. I’m haunted by a sense of being back in my childhood, a
nd yet this is such a foreign place! It’s all very singular.”
They ate amazingly good smoked salmon, a strange egg dish, and tough roast meat. Slote kept tossing off brown Polish vodka in a thimble-size glass, while the others drank good French wine.
“Leslie, you’re going to be stone drunk.” Natalie sounded more jovial than disapproving.
“There’s so little in every glass,” Slote said, pouring more from the bottle. “I’ve had a very hard day. Even without you turning up, you fool.”
They smiled at each other. Byron wished he had gone to bed. Slote looked at him and with a polite effort resumed talking. “Hm, yes. It’s a historical puzzle, really, how three and a half million Jews came to settle in Poland. It’s such an anarchic country. You’d think they’d have chosen a more stable place. I have a theory. I sort of wonder what Aaron would make of it.”
“What’s your theory about us Polish Jews, Leslie?” Natalie said with a grin.
“That the anarchy was the inducement. Imagine a government of nearly a thousand barons, any one of whom could veto any legislation. That’s the way they stumbled along here for centuries. No wonder Poland kept getting partitioned! Well, as long as the Jews could work things out with each individual nobleman they could at least live and farm and work. No royal oppression to fear.”
“Not bad,” said Natalie. “But in point of fact, didn’t the Polish kings welcome them in with special protective laws? When Spain expelled them and the Holy Church was having one of its bad spasms of hounding and massacring the Jews? That’s as I recall it.”
“I haven’t studied the thing,” Slote said, “but the Poles eventually took to doing that too.”