French Betrayal (Reich Triumphant Book 1)

by Vincent Dugan

  His father patted Ianu’s hand. “Liviu does not like being opposed.” He smiled. “Thirty years ago he asked me to join his business, a partner. He shook his head. “I am not that sort of man. I prefer family, Liviu is about control, money and with his daughters gone.” He shrugged. “Your brother is learning that.” He squeezed Ianu’s hand. “That is why Liviu wants you here, it is another chance for him to train a son he could not produce.”

  Ianu squinted. “Nelu is unhappy?” His brother had always spoken brightly of working with their uncle, yet he had not been present to greet the family.

  “Liviu demands much. You think I am difficult?” He looked at Ianu who could not help but smile. “I have children, little ones still. Liviu wants to control them, make them like him, which is why his daughters are gone; they preferred marriage to any man to remaining with their father.” He grimaced. “Manu will be next, I see how Liviu watches him.”

  “Manu will never listen, he is too wild, too independent.”

  “You know your brother well; Liviu does not. It will be an interesting battle.”

  Ianu dropped his hand to his side. “I want to stay,” he said. “Letcani is where my friends are.”

  Saloman swayed. “It is safer in the village, Iasi is dangerous.”

  “There are thieves, pickpockets -.”

  Saloman cut off his son. “No, no, not that.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “The Iron Guard.”

  “The Iron Guard,” Ianu repeated. “They are no match for the army, Milosh -.”

  “Milosh is part of the army. Soldiers believe they can defeat anyone but they will never protect us, not the Jews.”

  Ianu did not argue, knowing he had made a mistake in mentioning Milosh. His father leaned in close to the window, breathing heavily. Ianu headed upstairs to his room, passing the window where his uncle sat, a wisp of smoke marking his presence. He found Manu resting; he was tired from the darkness and the long journey. There were enough rooms in Liviu’s house to have their own rooms, but in Russia Liviu and Saloman had shared a room into their adulthood, and if it was enough for them then Ianu and Manu could share the room.

  Lying on the stiff mattress Ianu could not sleep, the room cold and the blankets offering little warmth. Then there were the unfamiliar sounds of the city; people talking, the occasional automobile rumbling by and the clapping of horse hooves on the brick roads. Finally the excitement of the day and the cold subsided, he fell asleep.

  Ianu was awakened by a burst of sound followed by light piercing the window; the flickering revealing several fires outside Liviu’s home. He blinked, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness he slid off the bed. Manu remained asleep, breathing steady and undisturbed. For all of his wildness when awake, Ianu’s younger brother was a heavy sleeper.

  Ianu padded to the window, a creaky affair with a lead lined glass and a mesh intended to keep out insects during the roasting summers. He watched figures rushing along the street, masses of men waving bottles, some singing, others cursing and tossing objects into the roaring fires, each new piece of tinder producing a shower of sparks. Beyond the men and fire, Ianu noticed the source of the fire, a house, nearly as large as Liviu’s, its door open, windows broken, men carrying furniture from inside. A group of women watched at a distance, wailing at the men burning the furniture, but their cries were ignored. They next tried with their fists, the men laughing at the weak blows before continuing their work. Ianu watched, first intrigued then dismayed and frightened. This was the Iron Guard, the Rumanian fascist movement, the bloodthirsty men who attacked Jews in the street without suffering arrest.

  Frozen at the window, Ianu strained to see whether the guard had attacked other houses. He slipped from the room and avoided the creaking stairs so as not to wake the rest of his family; he slid down the bannister and hopped off at the landing. The noise from the street was louder on the first floor, and penetrated even the lead glass windows. Ianu halted at the parlor doorway, spotting his father and uncle watching the events in the street.

  “It is bad,” Liviu said. “The police are demanding more and more bribes to keep the guard away.” He pointed to the house being emptied. “They refused to pay.”

  “The police do nothing.”

  “They do nothing because they agree with the Iron Guard. Money will convince them to disagree because feeding their families right now is more important than stomping on the faces of Jews.”

  “What will you do?” Saloman asked. “You cannot pay forever.”

  “Sell,” Liviu said. “But not sell.” Saloman turned, eying his brother as if he had lost his mind. Liviu explained. “There is a broker in Bucharest who works for the Ministry of Industry and purchases Jewish properties for money and sends it to Switzerland. Not much money but he keeps the owner running the business, protects them as his own.”

  Saloman stiffened, the fires outside lighting up his face. “That is why you want Ianu here.”

  “Ianu could work for me. They need us to run the barges, the Rumanians know nothing.”

  Ianu felt weak in the knees.

  “What about the rest of us?” Saloman demanded. “Manu and Joni? They cannot work for you because they cannot be safe here.”

  Liviu gripped his older brother’s shoulder. “You are safe for now in your village, these people mainly attack the cities. They hate the urban Jew and you do not have enough to tempt them.” He lowered his head. “You may have to close the store. I don’t think anyone would want to buy it.”

  “Close the store,” Ianu’s father sputtered.

  “They will close it for you,” Liviu warned. “They have done it here, marching outside Jewish stores and blocking anyone who wanted to enter. Some have died.”

  “Can we leave?” His brother asked. “We left Russia. We can go elsewhere, where there is no Iron Guard.”

  Ianu heard his uncle chuckle. “Go where? Back to Russia? To Poland? They don’t want us; no one wants us.”

  “America,” Saloman said. “Palestine? If we sell all we have we can buy tickets on a boat. There is enough money for all of us to leave.”

  Liviu shook his head. “Father always said you were a dreamer.” He snorted. “America? What do you know of America? They don’t want us either, we cannot go to America, and we cannot go anywhere. We must remain here and work with these people.”

  “They want to kill us, not work with us.”

  “They will be gone soon,” Liviu declared, dipping his head close to his brother and forced Ianu to take a few steps into the parlor to overhear their words.

  “– they have been running supplies down the river,” Liviu was saying. “From Constanta to the border, east toward Russia.”

  “The border?”

  “Tanks and trucks and horses.”

  “The Nazis,” Saloman hissed. “They are here.”

  Ianu felt numb. Milosh had talked about German soldiers training the Rumanian Army but the men Liviu spoke of did not sound like trainers.

  “- and war will halt this,” Liviu said with confidence, motioning toward the street outside. “Iasi is an important city, the river is an important river and my barges are important for the war.”

  Ianu backed cautiously from the parlor, his uncle’s words frightening him. After struggling up the stairs, legs weak, mind swimming, Ianu could not sleep. He remained at the window and watched the Iron Guard empty the house across from his uncle’s. The women inside disappearing to a fate he did not want to imagine. As the fires burned outside he shivered, sensing their vulnerability. Listening to his brother’s heavy breathing he suddenly wished he was like Manu and Joni, too young to understand the world around them. The fires would eventually burn out and Ianu would drift to sleep; it would be one of the last peaceful nights he would spend.

  14

  February 2, 1940

  Thursday night poker at the press club was a closed table. Located at the southwest tip of Washington D.C., the ornate room in the nondescript building boasted on Thursda
y nights a talented collection of national reporters from all areas of journalism. Bryce Poppins was the senior member of the club and the only surviving charter member of the Thursday night gathering, which began during the Theodore Roosevelt Administration. A man of excessive appetites, Poppins was the foremost Supreme Court correspondent, having covered the institution for nearly forty years. Some said his columns in Cissy Patterson’s Washington Star – also carried in her brother’s, Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, had brought a sudden end to FDR’s ill-fated Supreme Court packing plan.

  At five foot eight and bearing over two hundred and fifty pounds on his frame, Poppins was the antithesis of the stereotypical jocular fat man. As serious about his poker as he was with the inviolability of the constitution, he ran the Thursday gathering with the efficiency of a Prussian general. Seated in the chair that faced the famous painting of Henry Clay debating the 1850 Compromise in the Senate, he enforced the table’s rules: no slow play, no pot splashing, no talking during a hand unless it was professional, no leaving the table except during designated breaks, no hats, no imported cigars, no vodka as he was fervently anti-communist and wanted none of his money helping the murderous Bolshies, no early departure, and the list went on and on, which annoyed some players but never caused any to leave. The Thursday night club, all six hours of it, provided more sources of information than a dozen Irish politicians on a bender.

  Seated beside Poppins and facing a reproduction of the painting of Ivan the Terrible grasping his dying son in his arm after striking him down, was Trumbull Lyman, the premiere foreign correspondent, the man of a hundred countries, and according to legend, a hundred languages. As undersized as Poppins was oversized, Lyman barely registered five foot five and a hundred pounds. He required a cushion to reach the table, which broke one of Poppins rules about outside furniture in the room in order. Green eyed with a head of hair that was suspiciously thick for a man in his fifties, Lyman was the best card player at the table. Part of his success was his talent as a raconteur, mixing stories of international intrigue with his own escapes from certain death.

  While waiting for another twist or turn in Lyman’s adventure, players allowed full houses to go unbid while small pairs produced outsized bets almost as if the player was matching Lyman’s daring with their own bluff and bombast. Experienced players knew when to back away; the more outrageous the story, the likelier that the little man held a good hand. Newer players, rare as they were at the closed table, learned the hard way.

  The third player and newest player, who still took his lumps from Lyman, was Artimus Sloane, the theatre and movie critic who could make Hollywood and Broadway shudder in their boots. Sloane was the youngest of the group, just over forty in a crowd averaging nearly fifty five. Sloane replaced Canton Fife, the Times’ theatre critic who died unexpectedly when an overhead light struck him while he was walking on the stage of an off Broadway production of Macbeth. Theatre pros mumbled about the curse associated with “that play.” The more cynical recalled the presence of director Anderson Smith in the overhead lights during the accident. Smith was the target of several scathing reviews from Fife, the critic’s death unmourned in the Smith household. There was no scandal much less an arrest, Broadway circling the wagons for one of their own, and a lack of grief for a man who made them all miserable.

  Sloane did not fit the mold of critic, instead he was mercurial producing vicious reviews one day and soothing the next. Some suggested he was on the take, the only one of the group who owned a Georgetown home. His pans focused on small plays while he offered positive reviews of expensive extravaganzas. The rumors were never raised around the table, as his colleagues were happy to take Sloane’s money without questioning its origin. Sitting beside the critic was Murat Halstead III the pure political reporter whose family pedigree reached back to ante bellum times. His grandfather had attended the Democrats’ 1860 convention in Charleston when the party chose war over peace, while his father attended the 1896 convention and enjoyed William Jennings Bryan’s stem winding Cross of Gold speech. The current Halstead would be attending his eighth and last Democrat convention in 1940, thus ending the family tradition as he was barren.

  A competent card player, Halstead claimed to have broken even during his two decades in the room. No one disputed his calculations as they had watched him fold hand after hand through the years. His conservative card play was the opposite of his political views. A full-fledged New Dealer, who believed FDR had not went far enough, Halstead had been pushing a third term since late 1938. Coincidentally enough from his position on the table, Halstead could see David’s painting of a dead Marat slumped in his bathtub, the iconic image of the French Revolution.

  Beside Halstead and across from Poppins was the political mirror image of the political reporter. Westbrook Pegler was the only member to have served in two different positions at the table, sportswriter and political columnist. A self-made man, Pegler had followed in his father’s footsteps as a reporter. His first break came during the Great War writing dispatches from the front. His words had irritated the Navy and General Pershing, and after the war he was relegated to the meaningless title of sports editor for United Press, where his main task was composing a weekly sports column. From there he wrote for the Chicago Tribune where his column was syndicated by Colonel McCormick’s media empire. The Depression was good to Pegler with Scripps Howard guaranteeing him fifty thousand a year. His salary was ten times the wage of the average American who read his columns.

  Pegler was one to excite controversy without regard to popular sensibilities; his column defiantly titled Fair Enough. He earned nationwide attention by defending the lynching of two white murderers. His defense of mob justice offended just the right people while making him an even greater sensation. His rise to national prominence was aided by his counterpart on the Scripps Howard opinion page, Heywood Broun. Already famous before Pegler arrived on the scene, Brown irritated his bosses by forming a writers’ guild. Brown was not at the table, he had taken the path most traveled in the 1930s toward European socialism.

  In his columns Pegler panned the foreign dignitaries at George V’s funeral, panned the British for mourning, and even panned the king’s decision to die during the beastly English winter. During his reporting on the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Pegler’s columns from Germany labeled Hitler as “the former house painter” and declared the games as “of secondary importance” to the strutting dictator. He then went on to compare the Nazis to the Klan and Al Capone, thus strengthening his reputation for toughness and truth without regard to party or beliefs. The same did not transfer to the Thursday night club. Pegler’s poker playing was average, more of a card handler than a bettor or bluffer, he did not always judge his opponent’s hand, leading to more than one long night at the table.

  There was an empty seat between Pegler and Tolliver Brooks, the man who replaced him as sports reporter. The seat had been occupied by the business reporter in the group, Cranstadt Fillmore, but death had overtaken him and the group had yet to choose a replacement. While replacing Pegler, who reported on football and baseball, Brooks preferred the fringe sports of golf and tennis, a change from Pegler’s emphasis on the “hard” sports. An athlete himself in the Olympic tradition, Brooks had won a bronze medal in steeplechase in both 1920 and 1924. He was also a scratch golfer, though his Georgian roots meant there were few places to play. His destitute state was known more for lynching and Ty Cobb than a precise game such as golf.

  Another empty seat bookended Brooks and rounded out the table. It was saved for agricultural reporter Simms Bucknell who had missed the game for a Chicago conference. Poppins was strict about attendance, especially after Bucknell had claimed large winnings. He was to attend the next week to offer everyone the chance to recoup their losses, but for Poppins assignment editors took precedent over the game. His job required him to be in Washington from October to July, the Supreme Court term, but even when the justices fled the capital’s heat Poppins rem
ained. He did not like travel, as he never learned to drive, and the world outside the United States was considered inferior at all levels.

  This evening, the first Thursday of February 1940, had its share of news and conversation to spice up what had been a poor hour of poker, with the best hand being a trio of fours by Lyman. Play had begun promptly at eight, another of Poppins rules, with the Supreme Court reporter dealing five card draw. As usual Sloane was quick off the draw as he chattered about the hot stove league with Pegler and Brooks. Lyman, a sport bettor was always looking for an inside tip, was the first to pop the question. “Who have you got?” He asked.

  Brooks deferred, only the gambling hungry Brits bet on golf or tennis. “The Yankees,” Pegler grumbled. “Wouldn’t count out the Tigers or White Sox.”

  “What about the Browns?” This was Sloane, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Only if we go to war and all of the best players are drafted to fight.”

  Sloane turned to Lyman. “Is Roosevelt going to send our boys over to Europe to fight the Germans?” He pronounced the president’s name based on its Dutch origin, emphasizing the “oo” rather than the “oe.”

  Lyman took two cards, then bet eight dollars. “Where would he send them? The French will not fight and the Brits are divided.”

  Lyman eyed the other columnist. “What about it Peg?”

  Pegler folded his hand. “Roosevelt hates the Germans,” he revealed. “He will get us over there no matter what.”

  Poppins folded, and snorted as he slid his cards into the muck. “Of course he will start a war, that’s how they get around the constitution. Look at Wilson. Took over the railroads, banned booze, arrested people for disagreeing, and fucked this country up good just so he could fight the Germans.”

  Sloane won the hand by default, his eight dollar bet frightening off the others. It was his fourth of five. The deal moved around to Brooks, who offered his own take on the international situation. “They cancelled the Olympics,” he declared, as he distributed the cards around the table. “Means I can’t travel to Europe.” He eyed his cards, frowned and folded.