"Oh, for crying out loud, Byron. With all the running into the bushes you and I have been doing and whatnot, I don't know what secrets we have from each other." She turned to Slote. "He's like a loyal kid brother, sort of."
"Don't you believe her," Byron said wearily. "I'm a hot-blooded beast.
Is there a Y.M.C.A?" "Look, I don't mind," Slote said, with obvious lack of enthusiasm.
"There's a sofa in the sitting room. It's up to Natalie."
She scooped up the keys. "I intend to bathe and then sleep for several days-between bombings. How will we ever get out of Poland, Leslie?"
Slote shrugged, cleared his throat, and laughed. "Who knows?
Hitler says if the Poles don't surrender, Warsaw will be levelled.
The Poles claim they've thrown the Wehrmacht back and are advancing into Germany.
It's probably nonsense. Stockholm Radio says the Nazis have broken through everywhere and will surround Warsaw in a week. The Swedes and the Swiss here are trying to negotiate a safe-conduct for foreign neutrals through the German lines. That's how we'll all probably leave. Till that comes through, the safest place in Poland is right here."
"Well then, we did the sensible thing, coming to Warsaw," Natalie said.
"You're the soul of prudence altogether, Natalie." As the trolleybus wound off into the smaller residential streets, Byron and Natalie saw more damage than they had in Cracow-burned-out or smashed houses, bomb holes in the pavemen an occasional rubble-filled street roped off-but by and large Warsaw looked much as it had in peacetime, less than a week ago, though now seemingly in a bygone age. The threatened German obliteration was not yet happening, if it ever would.
The other passengers paid no attention to Byron's bandage or growth of beard. Several of them were bandaged and most of the men were bristly.
A thick human smell choked the car.
Natalie said when they got off, "Ah-air! No doubt we smell just like that, or worse. I must bathe at once or ".U go mad. Somehow on the road I didn't care. Now I can't stand myself another minute."
Slivers of sunlight through the closed shutters made Slote's flat an oasis of peaceful half-gloom. Books lining the sitting room gave it a dusty library smell. Natalie flipped switches, obviously quite at home in the place. 'Want to wash up first?" she said. 'Once I get in that tub there'll be no moving me for hours. There's only cold water.
I'm going to boil up some hot. But I don't know. Maybe you should find a hospital, first thing, and get your head examined."
After the phrase was out of her mouth it struck them both as funny.
They laughed and laughed and couldn't stop laughing. "Well, while we still both stink," Natalie gasped, 'come here." She threw her arms around him and kissed him. "You damned fool, abandoning your passport to protect some dopey Jews."
" My head's all right," Byron said. The touch of the girl's mouth on his was like birdsong, like flowers, exhausted and filthy though they both were. 'I'll clean up while you boil your water."
As he shaved she kept coming into the bathroom emptying steaming kettles into the cracked yellow tub, humming a polonaise of Chopin.
The music had introduced the noon news broadcast, in which Byron had understood only a few place-names: towns and cities more than halfway in from the western and southern borders toward Warsaw.
"My God, how pale you are, Briny," she said, inspecting his cleanshaven face, nicked here and there by the cold-water shave, "and how Young! I keep forgetting. You're just a boy."
'Oh, don't exaggerate. I've already flunked out of graduate school," Byron said. 'Isn't that a mature thing to do?" "Get out of here. I'm diving into that tub."
An unmistakable wailing scream sounded outside about half an hour later. Byron, on the sofa, dozing over an old issue of Time, snapped awake and took binoculars from his suitcase. Scarlet-faced and dripping, Natalie emerged from the bathroom, swathed in Slote's white terry-doth robe.
'Do we have to go to the cellar?" "I'll have a look." The street was deserted: no cars, no people. Byron scanned the heavens from the doorway with his naked eye, and after a moment saw the airplanes.
Sailing forth from a white cloud, they moved slowly across the sky through a scattering of black puffs. He heard grumbling muffled thumps far away, like thunder without reverberations. As he stepped out on the sidewalk, binoculars to his eyes, a whistle shrieked. Down the street a little man in a white helmet and white arm. band was waving angrily at him. He dropped back into the doorway, and found the planes with the glasses: black machines, bigger than the one that had wounded him, with a different thick shape but painted with the same crosses and swastikas. The fuselages were very long; in the rainbow-rimmed field of the glasses they looked a bit like small flying freight cars.
Natalie was combing her hair by candlelight at a hallway mirror.
The electricity was off. "Well? Is that bombing?" "It's bombing.
They're not headed this way, the planes I saw."
"Well, I don't think I'd better get back in the tub."
The thumps became louder. They sat on the sofa, smoking cigarettes and looking at each other.
Natalie said in a shaky voice, "It's sort of like a summer electric storm coming toward you. I didn't picture it like this."
A distant whistling noise became louder, and a sudden crash jarred the room. Glass broke somewhere, a lot of glass. The girl uttered a small shriek, but sat still and straight. Two more close explosions came, one right after the other. Through the abutters harsh noises echoed from the street: shouts and screams, and the grumble of falling brick walls.
"Briny, shall we run for the cellar?"
"Better sit tight."
"Okay."
That was the worst of it. The thumps went on for a while, some distant and faint, some closer; but there were no more explosions that could be felt in the air, in the floor, in the teeth. They died off.
In the street outside bells clanged, running feet trampled on the cobblestones, men yelled. Byron pulled aside curtains, opened a window, and blinked in the strong sunshine at the sight of two smashed burning houses down the street. People were milling around scattered chunks of masonry and flaming wreckage, carrying pails of water into the tall thick red flames.
Natalie stood beside him, gnawing her lips. 'Those horrible German bastards. Oh my God, Briny, look. Look!" Men were starting to carry limp figures out of the clouds of smoke. One tall man in a black rubber coat held a child dangling in each arm. "Can't we help? Can't we do something?"
"There must be volunteer squads, Natalie, that neutrals can work in. Nursing, rescue, cleanup. I'll find out."
"I can't watch this." She turned away. Barefoot, a couple of inches lower without her heels, wrapped in the oversize robe, the eyes in her upturned unpainted face shiny with tears, Natalie Jastrow looked younger and much less formidable than usual. "It was so close. They may kill both of us."
"We probably should dive for the cellar next time we hear the siren.
Now we know."
"I got you into it. That keeps eating at me. Your parents in Berlin must be sick with worry about you, and-"
"My people are Navy.
It's all in the day's work. As for me, I'm having fun." "Fun?"
She scowled at him- 'What the devil? Don't talk like a child."
"Natalie, I've never had a more exciting time, that's all. I don't believe I'm going to get killed. I wouldn't have missed this for anything."
"Byron, hundreds of people have probably died out there in the last half hour! Didn't you see the kids they pulled out of the building?"
"I saw them. Look all I meant was-" Byron hesitated because what he had meant was that he was having fun.
"it's just such a stupid, callous thing to say. Something a German might say." She hitched the robe around her closer. "Fun Leslie thinks I'm screwy. You're really peculiar."
With an unfriendly headshake at him, she stalked to the bathroom.
omiNG back to Washington from Be
rlin jolted Pug, as had his reC Turn in 1931 from Manila to a country sunk in the Great Depression.
This time what struck him was not change, but the absence of it.
After the blaring pageantry and war fevers of Nazi Germany, it was a bit like coming out of a theatre showing a technicolor movie into a gray quiet street. Even Rotterdam and Lisbon had been agog with war reverberations. Here, where the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument shimmered in ninety-degree heat, people were plodding apathetically about their business. The roaring invasion of Poland, already looking like one of the historic conquests of all time, was as remote from this city as a volcanic eruption on Mars.
He sat in the dining room of the Arzny and Navy Club, breakfasting on Kippers and scrambled eggs. His arrival the day before had proved a puzzling letdown. The man in the German section of the State Department to whom he had reported-a very minor personage, to judge by his small office, shoddy furniture, and lack of a window-had told him to expect a call in the morning; nothing more.
"Well, well, our cookie-pushing friend!" "There's your striped pants, Pug?"
Grinning down at him were three classmates: Digger Brown, Paul Munson, and Harry Warendorf. Though Pug had not encountered any one of them for years, they joined him and began exchanging jokes and gossip as though they saw each other every day. He looked at them with interest, and they at him, for gain of fat and loss of hair. Munson had learned to fly way back in 1921, and now he was air operations officer of the Saratoga. Digger Brown, Pug's old room-mate, had an assured if pasty look. Well he might, the first officer of the class to make exec of a battleship! Warendorf, the brain of the three, was a hard-luck man like Tollever.
Following orders of his commodore, he had piled a destroyer on the rocks off the California coast in a fog, with half a dozen others. He had fallen into minesweepers, and there he was still.
Under the rough banter about his pink-tea job, they were curious and respectful. They asked remarkably naive questions about the European war. All of them assumed that the Nazis were twice as strong in the field as they were and that the Allies were all but impotent.
It struck Pug again how little Americans knew of Europe, for all the flood of lurid newspaper and magazine stories about the Nazis; and how little most men ever knew beyond their constricted specialties.
'y the hell are the Germans running away with it in Poland, Pug, if all this is so?" Warendorf said. They had been listening, attentive but unconvinced, to his estimate of the opposed forces.
"That's anybody's guess. I'd say surprise, superior materiel on the spot, concentration of force, better field leadership, better political leadership, better training, a professional war plan, and probably a lot of interior rot, confusion, and treason behind the Polish lines. Also the French and British seem to be sitting on their dulls through the best strategic opportunity against Hitler they'll ever have. You can't win a game if you don't get out on the field."
A page boy called him to the telephone.
"Commander Henry? Welcome to these peaceful shores. I'm Carton.
Captain Russell Carton. I think we were briefly at the War College togather, fighting the japs on a linoleum checkerboard floor."
'That's right, Captain, 1937. The japs beat hell out of us, as I recall." Pug did his best to suppress the astonishment in his voice.
Russell Carton was the name of President Roosevelt's naval aide.
The voice chuckled. "I hope you've forgotten that I was the admiral who blew the engagement. When shall I pick you up? Our appointment's at noon." "How far do we have to go?"
"Just around the corner. The White House. You're seeing the President.... Hello? Are you there?"
"Yes, sir. Seeing the President, you said. Do I get a briefing on this?"
"Not that I know of. Wear, dress whites. Suppose I pick you up at eleven-thirty." "Aye aye, sir."
He went back to his table and ordered more coffee. The others asked no questions. He kept his face blank but it was hard to fool these old friends. They knew it was strange that he was back from Berlin so soon.
They probably guessed that he had received a startling call. That didn't matter. Munson said, "Pug, don't you have a boy in Pensacola?
I'm flying down there day after tomorrow to drop some pearls of wisdom about carrier landings. Come along."
"If I can, Paul. I'll call you."
Pug was sorry when they left. The shoptalk about a combat exercise they were planning had brought back the smell of machinery, of sea air, of coffee on the bridge. Their gossip of recent promotions and assignments, their excitement over the quickening world events and the improving chances for action and glory-this was his element, and he had been out of it too long. He got a haircut, brilliantly shined his own shoes, put a fresh white cover on his cap, donned his whites and ribbons, and sat in the lobby for an eternally long forty-five minutes, puzzling over the imminent encounter with Franklin Roosevelt, and dreading it. He had met him before.
A sailor came through the revolving door and called his name. He rode the few blocks to the White House in a gray Navy Chevrolet, dazedly trying to keep up chitchat with Captain Carton, a beefy man with a crushing handgrip on whose right shoulder blue-and-gold 'loafer's loops' blazed. This marked him as a presidential aide, to those who knew; otherwise staff aiguillettes belonged on the left shoulder. Pug kept step with the captain through the broad public rooms of the Mute House, along corridors, up staircases. 'Here we are," Carton said, leading him into a small room. "Wait a moment."
The moment lasted twenty-seven minutes.
Pug Henry looked at old sea-battle engravings on the wall, and out of the window; he paced, sat in a heavy brown leather chair, and paced again.
He was wondering whether the President would remember him, and hoping he wouldn't. In 1918, as a very cocky Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt had crossed to Europe on a destroyer. The wardroom officers, including Ensign Henry, had snickered at the enormously tall, very handsome young man with the famous family name, who made a great show of using nautical terms and bounding up ladders like a seadog, while dressed in outlandish costumes that he kept changing. He was a charmer, the officers agreed, but a lightweight, almost a phony, spoiled by an easy rich man's life. He wore pince-nez glasses in imitation of his great relative, President Teddy Roosevelt, and he also imitated his booming manly manner; but a prissy Harvard accent mac e t s ness somewhat ridiculous.
One morning Ensign Henry had done his usual workout on the forecastle, churning up a good sweat. Because there was a water shortage, he had hosed himself down from a saltwater riser on the well deck. Unfortunately the ship was pitching steeply. The hose had gotten away from him and spouted down into the hatchway to the wardroom, just as Roosevelt was coming topside in a gold-buttoned blazer, white flannel trousers, and straw hat. The costume had been wrecked, and Pug had endured a fierce chewing out by his captain and the dripping Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
A door opened. "All right. Come on in, Pug," Captain Carton said.
The President waved at him from behind the desk. 'Hello there!
Glad to see you!" The warm commanding aristocratic voice, so recognizable from radio broadcasts, jarred Pug with its very familiarity. He got a confused impression of a grand beautiful curved yellow room cluttered with books and pictures. A gray-faced man in a gray suit slouched in an armchair near the President. Franklin Roosevelt held out a hand: 'Dmp your bonnet on the desk, Commander, and have a chair. How about some lunch? I'm just having a bite." A tray with half-eaten scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee stood on a little serving table by the President's smivel chair. He was in shirt-deeves and wore no tie. Pug had not seen him, except in newsreels and photographs, in more than twenty years. His high coloring was unchanged, and he was the same towering man, gone gray-headed, much older and very much heavier; and though he had the unmistakable lordly look of a person in great office, a trace remained in the up-thrust big jaw of the youthful conceit that had made the ensig
ns on the Davey snicker. His eyes were sunken, but very bright and keen.
"Thank you, Mr. President. I've eaten."
"By the way, this is the Secretary of Commerce, Harry Hopkins."
The gray-faced man gave Henry a brief winnin smile, with a light tired gesture that made a handshake unnecessary. 9
The President looked archly at Victor Henry, his big heavy head cocked to one side. "Well, Pug, have you learned yet how to hang onto a saltwater hose at sea?"
"Oh, gawd, sir." Pug put a hand to his face in mock despair.
"I've heard about your memory, but I hoped you'd forgotten that."
"Ha, ha, ha!" The President threw his head back. 'Harry, this young fellow absolutely ruined the best blue serge blazer and straw hat I ever owned, back in 1918. Thought I'd forget that, did you? Not on your life.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 20
