Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War

by The Winds Of War(Lit)

  Natalie Jastrow was a heavy invisible presence in the cab, and neither one would start the topic. Pug said as they drove into the brilliantly lit empty square before the terminal, "Briny, if the British really took that shellacking off Montevideo, we won't stay out much longer.

  We can't let the Germans close the Atlantic. That's 1917 again.

  Why don't you put in for sub school? It won't start till May. By then Jastro'll be back in the States, if he isn't simpleminded."

  May's a long way off." "Well, I'm not going to argue." Pug got out of the cab. "Write to your mother a little more often. She's not happy."

  "Okay, Dad."

  "Don't miss Warren's wedding."

  "I'll try not to. Gosh, won't that be something, if this family finally gets together again?"

  "That's why I want you there. It'll be the last time in God knows how many years. Good-bye."

  "Good-bye. Listen, I'm real proud you made captain, Dad."

  Pug Henry gave his son a gloomy half-smile through the cab window and walked off to the train. And still not a word more had passed between them about the Jewish girl.

  So irascibly did Rhoda Henry greet her husband on his return that he began to think something might be wrong with her.

  the fall weather in Berlin stank, life stank, she was bored, German efficiency was a fiction, nobody understood how to do anything right, and there was no Service and no honesty an ore.

  She had "her pain," Yin an untreatable affliction that during previous Slumps had showed up in an arm and in her back, and now was behind an ear. She feared cancer, but it didn't really matter because everything good was all finished anyway.

  Rhoda had always come out of these sags before, and then could be contritely sweet. Pug had hoped when he suddenly left Berlin for Rome that he would find her better when he got back. She was worse.

  She wanted to go with him to Karinhall. In his absence an invitation engraved in gold on creamy thick stationery, addressed to Commander Victor Henry, had been delivered by a Luftwaffe staff officer. Pug hadn't been home ten minutes when she brought it out wanting to know why she hadn't been invited too. If he went to the Goerings' party at Karinhall and left her behind, she said, she could never face anybody in Berlin again.

  Pug could not disclose that he was going along for secret state purposes, as a flunkey to an international financier. He couldn't take her into the snow-covered garden to soothe her with hints of this; it was almost midnight, and she was wearing a cloudy blue negligee, in which, indeed, she looked very pretty.

  "Listen, Rhoda, take my word for it that there are security reasons for all this.

  "Ha. Security reasons. That old chestnut, whenever you want to do anything your way."

  "I'd rather have you along. You know that"

  "Prove it. Call the Protocol officer at the air ministry tomorrow. Or if You're too bashful, I will."

  Pug was conducting this conversation in the library, while glancing down the letter through piled-up mail. He put staring at his wife, he said, "Are you well?"

  "I'm bored to death, otherwise I'm fine, why?"

  "Have you been taking the iron pills?"

  "Yes, but I don't need pills. What I need is a little fun. Maybe I should go on a bender." "You're not calling the air ministry! I hope that's understood."

  Rhoda made a mutinous noise, and sat pouting.

  'Hullo. Here's a letter from that Kirby fellow. What's he got to say for himself?" "Read it. it's as dun as he is. All about how glad he is to be home, and how good the skiing is around Denver, and how much he enjoyed our hospitality. Three pages of nothing."

  Pug tossed the letter unread on the routine pile.

  'Honestly, you're a riot, you're so predictable, Pug. For twenty-five years whenever you've come home you've gone straight for the mail. What are you expecting, a letter from a lost love?"

  He laughed, and shoved the letters aside. "Right you are. Let's have a drink. Let's have a couple of drinks. You look wonderful." 'I do not. That goddamned hairdresser baked my hair into shredded wheat again. I'm tired. I've been waiting up to talk to you. You were two hours late." 'There was trouble at the passport office."

  "I know. Well, I'm going to bed. Nothing to talk about, since Karinhall is out. I even bought a sensational dress. I was going to show it to you, but to hell with it. I'll send it back."

  'Keep it. You might just find a use for it pretty soon."

  "Oh? Expect to be invited to the Goerings' again?" She went out without staying for an answer.

  Pug prepared a couple of highballs to toast the news of his promotion.

  When he got upstairs, her light was out-an old unpleasant marital signal.

  He wanted very much to spend the night with his wife. Moreover, he had been saving the story of his encounter with Natalie Jastrow for their bedroom talk. He drank both highballs himself, and slept on the sofa in the library.

  The next day was brightened for him by the German announcement that the Graf Spee had heroically scuttled itself after its historic victory, and that its commanding officer had then nobly shot himself in a hotel room. He heard over the BBC that three much lighter British vessels had in fact beaten the German warship in a running sea fight and sent it limping into port before the scuttling. The German people didn't hear a word rs. After a minute of cold of this, and they were baffled by the revelation that the victorious pocket battleship had elected to blow itself up. The Nazi propagandists did not bother to explain, smothering the story instead with a whooping account of a vast fictitious air victory: twenty-five British bombers shot down over Heligoland. Pug knew that the chances of his ever meeting Count Ciano again were remote, but he would have given much to chat with him again about the Graf Spee.

  , when Rhoda learned of Pug's promotion she came out of her blues as though by shock. Not another peep did she utter about Karinhall.

  She proceeded to give well the honeymoon treatment, and they had a happy week or so. His account of Natalie Jastrow fascinated and appalled her. "Sounds to me as though our only hope is that she'll come to her senses and drop Briny," she said.

  Karinhall looked like a federal penitentiary built in the style of a hunting lodge. It sat in a game preserve about two hours' drive from Berlin, a wilderness of small bare trees and green firs mantled in snow.

  Off the autobahn, the approach ran through heavy gates electrically controlled, steel and concrete fences jagged with icicles, and a gauntlet of machinegun-bearing Luftwaffe sentinels whose breaths smoked as they shouted challenges. just as the car turned a corner and they caught a glimpse of the grandiose timber and stone building, a deer with big frightened eyes bounded across the road. The San Francisco banker no longer wore his automatic smile. His mouth was tightly pursed, and the soft brown Italian eyes were open wide and darting here and there, rather like the deer's.

  In the vaulted banquet room, amid a dazzling crush of uniformed Nazis and their white-shouldered women-some lovely, some grossly fat, all briuiandy gowned and heavily gemmed-Adolf Hitler was playing with the little Goering girl. A string orchestra lost in a corner of the marble-paved expanse was murmurin Mozart. Great logs flamed in a fireplace with a triangular stone pediment soaring to the ceiling, and on a carved heavy table stretching the entire length of the room an untouched banquet lay piled. Rich smells hung in the air: wood smoke, cigar smoke, roast meat, French perfume. The happy, excited crowd of eminent Germans were laughing, cooing, clapping hands, their eyes shining at their Leader in his Plain field-gray coat and black trousers as he held the beautiful whiteclad child in his arms, talking to her, teasing her with a cake. Goering and his statuesque wife, both ablaze in operatic finery and jewelry, the man more showy than the woman, stood near, beaming with soft affectionate Pride. Suddenly the little girl kissed the Fuhrer on his big pale nose, and he laughed and gave her the cake. A cheer went up, everybody applauded, and women wiped their eyes.

  "The Fuhrer is so wonderful," said the Luftwaffe officer accompanying the two A
mericans, a small dark aviator wearing the diamond-studded cross of the Condor Legion. "Ach, if he could only marry! He loves children."

  And to Pug Henry, also, there was something appealing about Hitler: his shy smile acknowledging the applause, the jocular reluctance with which he handed the girl to her ecstatic mother, his wistful shrug as he slapped Goering's back, like any bachelor congratulating a luckier man.

  At this moment Hitler had a naive, almost mushy charm.

  The Goerings escorted Hitler to the table, and this signalled a general swarming toward the buffet. A troop of lackeys in blue and gold livery marched in, setting up gilt tables and chairs, helping the guests to food, pouring the wine, bowing and bowing. Guided by the Luftwaffe officer, he and Gianelb landed at a table with a banker named Wolf Stblier, who hailed the American financier as an old acquaintance: a slight Teuton in his fifties, with sandy hair plastered close to his head. The wife, an ashenhaired beauty, had eyes that glittered clear blue like the large diamonds on her neck, her arms, her fingers, and her ears.

  By chance, Victor Henry had just written a short report on Steller and knew a lot about him. Steller's bank was the chief conduit by which Goering was amassing his riches. Steller's specialty was acquiring Obiekte, the term in German business jargon for Jewish-owned companies forced to the wall.

  In the queer Germany of 1939, which Victor Henry was just beginning to understand, there was much stress on legality in looting the Jews.

  Outright confiscation or violence were rare. New codes of law dating from 1936 simply made it hard for them to do business; and month by month rulings came out making it ever harder. Jewish firms couldn't get import or export licenses or raw materials. Their use of railroads and shipping was restricted. Conditions kept tightening until they had no course but to sell out. A market flourished in such Obiekte, with many alert upperclass Germans bidding eagerly against each other. Wolf Steller's technique was to find and unite all the buyers interested in an Obiekt, and to make a single very low offer. The owners had the choice of taking it or going bankrupt. Steller's group then divided up the firm in shares. Tlrough Goering, Steller had access to the Gestapo's records, and was usually first on the scent of a major Jewish firm buckling to its knees. The big prizes Goering bought up himself-metal, banking, textiles-or took a large participation.

  Steller's bank got its broker's fees and also its own participations in the Obiekte.

  All this Pug had learned from the American radio commentator in Berlin, Fred Fearing, who had been at some pains to dig it up. Fearing recounted it to him with deep anger, the more so as he couldn't broadcast the story. The Germans claimed that any report of unfair treatment of the Jews was paid Allied propaganda. The Jewish laws aimed simply at restricting this minority, they said, to its due share in Germany's economy.

  Pug had more or less shut his mind to the Jewish problem, so as to focus on the military judgments which were his job. Jews had become all but invisible in Berlin, except in their special shopping hours, when, pamd and harried, they briefly filled the stores and then again faded from sight. The oppression was not a highly visible affair; Pug had never seen even the outside of a concentration camp. He had observed the signs on benches and restaurants, the white-faced worried wretches pulled off trains and airplanes, an occasional broken window or old charred synagogue, and once a bad business of a man beaten bloody in the zoo by three boys in Hitler Youth uniforms, while the man's wife wept and screamed and two policemen stood by laughing. But Fearing's account was his first technical insight into German anti-Semitism. At bottom its purpose, in Fearing's view, was just robbery, which was disgusting but at least rational. Pug felt a qualm when Wolf Steller with a cultured bow offered his hand, but of course he took it; and soon there they sat eating together and toasting each oerin Moselle, Riesling, and champagne.

  Steller was a cordial, clever German, in every way indistinguishable from the hundreds that Victor Henry had met in the military and industrial worlds and at social gatherings. He spoke a fine English. His countenance was open and hearty. He made bright jokes, including bold pleasantries about Goering's corpulence and theatrical uniforms. He expressed deep regard for the United States (he especially loved San Francisco) and melancholy regret that its relations with Germany were not better. In fact, could he not do something to improve them, he said, by inviting Gianelli and the Henrys for a weekend at his estate? It was no Karinhall, but he could promise them good company. Captain Henry might have the luck to shoot a deer.

  Game was outside the meat ration, and some venison might be very welcome to Mrs. Henry! The banker's wife, touching Pug's hand with her cool jewelled white fingers, crinkled her blue eyes at him in invitation.

  She had heard that Mrs. Henry was the most elegant and attractive wife in the American diplomatic mission, and she longed to meet her.

  Cianelli declined; he had to start his return journey in the morning.

  Officially there was every reason for Victor Henry to accept.

  Part of his job was to penetrate influential levels of Germans.

  He had no stomach for Steller, but it occurred to him that here was a chance to give Rhoda the kind of fun she complained of missing.

  There was no telling good Germans from bad Germans. Steller conceivably might be working for Goering under duress, though his wife in consequence dripped diamonds. Pug said he would come. The look the Stbllers exchanged convinced him that none of this was casual. They were cultivating him.

  Steller took the two Americans on a tour of Karinhall. Again Pug had the feeling that Nazi grandeur usually woke in him: the Hollywood impression, the sense of ephemeral, flamboyant make-believe, which persisted no matter how vast and solid the structures, how high the ceilings, how elaborate the decorations, how costly the art. The corridors and rooms of Karinhall seemed to go on for miles. Glass cases by the dozens displayed solid gold objects crusted with gems-vases, crosses, maces, swords, busts, batons, medals, books, globes-tributes to the field marshal from steel corporations, cities, and foreign governments on his birthday, his wedding, the birth of a child, the return of the Condor Legion from Spain. Italian and Dutch old masters crowded the walls, interspersed with the vapid calendar nudes of living Nazi-approved painters. Other reception rooms with nobody in them, almost as vast and ornate as the banquet hall, were hung with tapestries and flags, walled in wood, filled with statuary and jewelled suits of armor. Yet it all might almost have been papier-machae and canvas. Even the food on the banquet table had looked like a Cecil B. deMille feast, and the pink meat inside the roast pig might instead have been wax or plaster. But Victor Henry well knew that he was looking at an immense treasure, mostly booty collected through Dr.

  Steller. Moral considerations aside, the vulgar edifice disappointed Pug because Goering was supposed to stem from an aristocratic family.

  Even the admiring comments of Luigi Gianelli had a strong tinge of irony.

  The Luftwaffe officer wearing the diamond cross caught up with them and whispered to Steller.

  P)

  'Ah, what a pity, now you must go , said the German banker. "And you haven't begun to see the wonders of Karinhall. Captain Henry, my office will make all the arrangements to bring you and your dear wife on Friday to Abendruh, though I fear it will look rather pitiful after this.

  We will telephone you tomorrow. and Steller accompanied the two Americans through more rooms and corridors, stopped at double doors of dark wood heavily carved with hunting scenes, and opened them on a timbered room with log-and-plaster walls, hung with antlers, stuffed heads, and animal hides. The dusty smell of the dead creatures was strong in the air. On either side of a roaring fire sat Ribbentrop and Goering. Hitler was not in the room. A long, crudely made wooden table and two low benches took up most of the floor space. Pug thought at once that this must be the main room of the old hunting lodge, around which the field marshal had constructed the banal palace. Here was the heart of Karinhall- E-,ept for the glow from the fire, the room wa
s dank, dark, and cold.

  Goering lolled on a settee with one thick white leather-booted leg off the floor, sipping coffee from a gold demitasse-part of a gold service on a low inlaid marble table. He nodded and smiled familiarly at Cianelli.

  Diamond rings bulged on three of the five fingers that held the cup. Ribbentrop stared at the ceiling, hands interlaced across his stomach. The German banker introduced Victor Henry, backed out of the room, and closed the door.

  "You will have exactly seven Minutes of the Fijhre?s time to state your business," said Ribbentrop in German.

  Gianelli stammered, "Excellency, permit me to reply in English. I am here in a private capacity, and I regard that much time as an extraordinary courtesy to my country and my President."

  Ribbentrop sat with a blank face, looking at the ceiling, so Victor Henry ventured to translate. The foreign minister cut him off with a snapped sentence in perfect Oxford accents, "I understand English."