by Howard Fast
“I’ll be damned,” Joe said.
“Oh, come on down,” Sally said lightly. “I’ll help you carry your stuff into the house, because you might just strain yourself. Anyway, it’s getting dark.”
“You are something,” Joe said slowly. “You really are something.”
***
Barbara had purchased a compartment for herself on the Paris-Berlin express, determined to make productive use of the hours on the train. She had armed herself with a French-German dictionary, an English-German dictionary, a Berlin guidebook, a French translation of Scherber’s Rambles in Berlin, and a French translation of Mein Kampf. Since she had embarked on her journey without being possessed of a single phrase in the German language, she had little hope of any great progress, but since the French-German dictionary had an appendix that gave the modern equivalents of the confusing German Gothic letters, she hoped that she might at least progress to an easy reading of street and shop signs.
Actually, during the first two hours of the journey she did not even touch her books. Now that she had overcome her initial repugnance toward the idea of Germany and managed to put her trepidation in its proper place, fairly well convinced that she would face no real danger, the notion of a sort of secret mission into what she could only think of as “the lair of the beast” excited and fascinated her. Also, since she had been earning her living as a writer during the past several years, it was quite natural for her to think as a writer. Apparently, three publishers had asked to put her “Letters from Paris” into book form. How exciting it was to think of her name on the jacket of a book! And why hadn’t she insisted on knowing the names of the publishers? Why did she always think of the proper thing to do hours after the time for doing it? That, she decided, was a character defect that she would have to remedy. In any case, now that she had taken the bit in her teeth and was actually on the way to Germany, she could appreciate the value it would have to her as a writer. On the other hand, Hitler had already taken over Austria; Czechoslovakia had been handed to him through the infamous betrayal at Munich, and when she left Paris, the papers had been full of the possibility of a Nazi invasion of Poland—and speculation on whether this would mean another full-fledged European war. For the first time, Barbara decided, she would have to pay some attention to politics, more, much more, than the cursory attention she had given it in the past, and she would have to try to do what her left-wing friends in Paris called “thinking politically.” She didn’t have a very clear notion of what thinking politically meant exactly, but certainly she must read carefully whatever French or English newspaper would be available in Berlin.
She was so filled with ideas and plans that she failed to notice a man who had stopped in front of the corridor door of her compartment, even though she was staring out of the train window, in which his image was faintly reflected. Then she turned and saw him and realized that he had been standing there for at least a minute or two. He was a tall man in his mid-fifties, impeccably dressed in an English tweed jacket, blue worsted vest with brass buttons, white shirt, and striped tie—thus on his upper half, which Barbara could see through the door. He had a long, narrow face, iron gray hair, a thin, long nose, and dark, curious eyes. The door window was down about eight inches, and once he caught her attention, he spoke to Barbara in German.
“I’m afraid I don’t speak German,” Barbara replied in French.
“Ah, then you are French,” he said, speaking French easily, with only a slight accent.
“No, I’m an American.”
“But your French is faultless.”
“So is yours,” Barbara said, smiling.
“Ah, no. I have a clumsy accent, about which I can do absolutely nothing. Am I intruding? Do you have a bias against speaking to strangers on trains?”
“That depends on the strangers.”
“Ah, so. Of course. Yes, you are American. It becomes more noticeable when you smile. Europeans smile differently. May I come in, for a few minutes?”
Barbara said nothing, watching him thoughtfully.
“I am quite harmless. Let me introduce myself—Baron Franz Von Harbin. I am a refugee in the corridor. This wretched train has no club car, and my compartment is impossible. So until the dining car opens for dinner, I am exiled to the corridor, which is not only uncomfortable but boring.”
Why not? Barbara asked herself. On a train, nothing can happen, and while he does not look harmless by any means, he is certainly elegant, and a German who speaks French, which is a beginning. She was completely confident of her ability to discourage unwanted advances, and she did not mind the fact that he styled himself a baron. He might or might not be one. Titles were plentiful and fluid in Europe in the thirties.
He opened the door, and as if he read her mind, he reached into his pocket and handed her his card. Then he waited until she had read it before he seated himself facing her.
Staring at his card, Barbara said, “Your name appears very familiar, and I feel that I should recognize it, and I feel foolish that I don’t.”
“Why should you? I am not terribly important. I have served my government here and there, in an advisory capacity, but nothing of great importance. And you, madame?”
“Mademoiselle. My name is Barbara Lavette. I live in San Francisco.”
“How charming—that wonderful, beautiful city! But your French accent and your French name?”
“No connection. My grandfather came from France, and as for my French, well, I’ve been living in Paris for almost five years.” She paused, wondering how much information to impart, and decided that her best defense from here on was no defense at all, but simply to be herself, which she felt was the only role she was fit to play. “You’ve been to San Francisco?” she asked him.
“I certainly have. I was consul general there for two years, twenty-seven and twenty-eight. Of course, Lavette. He was the man who married the lovely Jean Seldon.” He clapped his hands together with pleasure. “What a small, delightful world! I entertained them. They are your father and mother?”
Barbara nodded.
“Yes. You do look like her. I entertained them at the consulate, and once I was at their home. Where was it—Russian Hill?”
“That’s right. Russian Hill.” Barbara was reassured, relaxed.
He switched to English. “Why don’t we talk in English. My accent is not great, but better in your own tongue, yes? Do you know, your father was planning a New York–Bremerhaven run for one of his ships. It never came about, but we discussed things like docking facilities at great length. And now you, here; what a pleasant occurrence!” He smiled at her. His smile made his otherwise stern and fixed face almost warm. “Don’t you think so?”
“I certainly do,” Barbara agreed. “But tell me, why was your own compartment impossible?”
“A sudden change in plans, and I booked too late to have a compartment for myself. I found myself sharing one with two Bavarian pigs.”
“Bavarian pigs? I don’t understand.”
“Shopkeepers. Munich shopkeepers, a very loathsome and crude form of humanity.”
“Oh? But,” Barbara said gently, “that doesn’t sound at all like a description of the master race.”
“Yes. Touché.” He appeared not at all disturbed. “The master race, as you put it, is by no means a homogeneous mass. I profess no disloyalty to the Führer by maintaining my own sense of discrimination and preference.” He pointed to the books on the seat beside her. “I see you have been reading Mein Kampf.”
“I bought it. I bought the whole pile to ease my way into Germany, but I haven’t cracked one yet.”
“You come as a tourist, if I may ask?”
“Oh, no,” Barbara said bluntly. “I would hardly choose Germany as a place for a holiday. I do a weekly story for a New York City magazine, and my editor decided that I should do a few from Berlin.”
; “May I ask what magazine?”
“Manhattan Magazine.”
“Ah, a very fine magazine, perhaps the best in the States. But of course, B.L., Barbara Lavette—you sign with only your initials.”
“Then you read Manhattan?”
“When I have the opportunity, certainly. It is witty, iconoclastic, and I enjoy the cartoons.”
Careful, Barbara said to herself, careful, my girl. He knows too much about too many things. “It’s also anti-Nazi,” Barbara said.
“Ah, so it is. Yes. But that is an affliction common to most American publications these days. However, if I remember your own writing, you don’t dwell on that.”
“The woman’s touch,” Barbara agreed. “I would be the world’s worst political commentator, so I confine myself to the civilized aspects of life.”
He looked at her keenly, smiling again, but thinly. “You interest me, Miss Lavette. One would take you, on the face of it, for a very average, very beautiful, American college girl. One would be mistaken, I think.”
“Yes. I left college five years ago.”
“Of course. And tell me, if you will, what will you write in your ‘Letters from Berlin’?”
“I haven’t the vaguest notion.”
“Then you must let me help you. I am prejudiced, being a Prussian, yet I regard Berlin as one of the most interesting cities in Europe, certainly the best organized and the most modern. Of course, much depends on how you approach it. You can approach it as a city of great avenues, of parks, gardens, lovely canals, splendid public buildings, theaters, libraries, museums, as the place of the Friedrich Wilhelm University, with its lineage of great teachers, such as Hegel, Schelling, Richter, the brothers Grimm, Helmholtz, Lipsius—the place where Schinkel created some of the noblest buildings in all of Europe. Or again, you can approach it with a closed mind and only distrust and hatred for people who attempt to right an old injustice.”
“Baron Von Harbin,” Barbara said, “I approach it only as an American traveling in Europe. If I knew what I was going to see, I would not have to go there, would I?”
“Excellent. Now tell me, where are you staying?”
“I have a reservation at the Esplanade.”
Harbin frowned and shook his head.
“I heard it was an excellent hotel.”
“So—yes and no. You must stay at the Adlon, on Unter den Linden. That’s the only place. Believe me.”
“But I have no reservation there.”
“Leave that to me.”
Barbara’s impulse was to tell him that she had no intention of changing her hotel at his insistence. She had never allowed herself to be dominated or directed by either the desires or directions of men, and she found this man repellent and in a strange way somewhat terrifying. It was not that she feared him, nor did she experience the slightest unease at being alone in the compartment with him. His manners were impeccable, even courtly, and his admiration for her was obvious. An American male, traveling alone, would have been playing every card of the game; Harbin gave her the impression that he valued her company and that any gesture beyond that would be obscene. At the same time, she had a sense of something totally alien, totally different, from anything she had ever encountered. A Frenchman would have been praising her looks, identifying her perfume, commenting on the cut of her dress, pulling his every trick out of the bag to charm her. Harbin made no attempt to charm her or to be charming; he was simply himself, and it was his self that she found terrifying without being able to define or identify the source of the terror. Still, she felt that the meeting was invaluable, that there was more to Harbin than he displayed, and that he was a key that could open many doors. What a coup it would be to step into the inner circles of the Nazis, to do an interview with Hitler, or even with Goring or Ribbentrop! She could see Frank Bradley reading her copy and whooping with delight.
So instead of telling Harbin that she had no intention of changing her hotel, she simply nodded and asked him why it had to be the Adlon.
“Because I think you should have the very best door into my city. You have never been to Berlin, but you will see that I am correct. Yes? And now, since I find you so delightful as a traveling companion, will you dine with me?”
Barbara said that she would.
***
John Whittier had been spending more and more time with Tom Lavette, pleased that now the once rather irresponsible young man had become a very serious and dependable banker. They lunched together at least once a week, and Whittier invited Tom to accompany him on a trip to Washington.
“If you’re not afraid to fly,” Whittier said. “I can’t spare the time for the train.”
Tom was very much afraid to fly. On the other hand, there was no one in his circle of acquaintances who had ever flown crosscountry, and if he made the trip, it would do wonders for his status as well as his self-esteem. And once the big, lumbering DC-3 was off the ground and into the air, circling over San Francisco Bay and then climbing to cross the coastal range, Tom’s nervousness disappeared. He felt a sense of validity, as if this were his proper inheritance. He did not often think of his father these days, nor had he seen him in years, yet he could not help recalling that it was Dan Lavette who had established the first passenger airline in California, Dan Lavette whose Ford Trimotors had given Californians their first taste of air travel.
“Look down from here, Thomas,” John Whittier said, inspired to what was for him almost a poetic flight of the imagination. “Take a good look at this California of ours.” It was in deference to Tom that he used the plural; he would have been more inclined to say this California of mine, which was the way he often thought of it. “There’s no other place like it on earth, and someday it’s going to be the center of the country, not geographically, but in every other way. This is where the power is—food, oil, lumber, and land, and the men who run California will damn well run the country. That’s something to think about, young fellow. We’ll be talking to Harry L. Hopkins tomorrow, and I’m going to bring you with me. God, I hate the ground Roosevelt walks on—or rides on. That crippled bastard doesn’t walk. You know, they hold him up when he speaks. He can’t even stand erect, and that’s where the malignancy of his nature comes from, but the fact remains that he is President, and now he needs us. That’s why Hopkins made this appointment. When we were fighting that bastard Harry Bridges five years ago, Roosevelt didn’t lift a finger to help, but he needs me now. He needs the ships, because there’s going to be a war, and we have the ships. I can remember the last war, Thomas. Do you know what happened to shipping rates?”
“I imagine they went up.”
“Doubled, tripled, quadrupled—no end to it. And it will happen again. Roosevelt thinks he can control it, but power is a slippery thing. There is no separation of money and power. Now this man Hitler—he’s not all bad, not by any means. Lindbergh found positive things in him and Goring, but the trouble is, he doesn’t know where to stop, and Roosevelt does nothing to calm him down. The point is, Thomas, that come what may, we function; the family functions, and the enterprise functions. Right now, in the eyes of the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Lamonts, the Vanderbilts, and the rest of them, we are Johnny-come-latelies. They still look upon the West Coast as a sort of colony. But they’ve had their day. If there’s going to be a war, we’ll come out of it a damn sight better than the eastern establishment. Now just when do you come into your control? When does your mother’s trust expire?”
“January 1940.”
“Half a year. That will give us time to plan and consolidate. What do you think of Martin Clancy?”
The question came unexpectedly. When Jean Lavette had given up the chairmanship of the board of the Seldon Bank, Alvin Sommers, the first vice president, had moved into her place. Martin Clancy, the second vice president, had moved into Summers’ position. Sommers had been sixty-five then; he was now se
venty. Clancy, six years younger, was a tight-mouthed, icy-eyed little man who had never displayed to Tom any trace of emotion, sentiment, or attachment to any living thing. His total attachment was to the bank.
“How do you mean that?” Tom asked Whittier.
“The way I put it. What do you think of him. Do you like him?”
“No one likes Clancy. But he does know banking.”
“Al Sommers is going to retire in September. Clancy wants to be chairman of the board. That’s been his dream all his life.”
“What do you think?” Tom asked diplomatically.
“I think no. I don’t like him. He started out as a little mick in the Tenderloin, and essentially this is what he remains. You will control the stock. I want you to assert yourself. Can you do it?”
“I think I can,” Tom replied, pleased and not a little amazed at his own self-assurance. Whittier’s frankness with him had helped build this assurance. He had never opened up quite in this manner before, never taken Tom so wholly into his confidence.
“I’ve been thinking about this consolidation for years,” Whittier told him. “There’s no doubt in my mind that once our interests are joined, we’ll hold the balance of power on the Coast. From there on, we’ll call the plays. I don’t know yet exactly how we’ll do it. That has to be worked out. But I want no slip-ups with Clancy. If he remains, it means only trouble. We want him out. Do you agree?”
“He’s been with the bank forty years,” Tom said slowly. “He’s sixty-eight or sixty-nine. We could put through a sixty-five-year-old retirement rule, which would make it a little less personal. I think I could manage that.”
“Only as chairman of the board. Do you think you can manage that?”
“If I have the votes, yes.”
“So it’s a question of Barbara. Between you, you’ll have 382,000 shares, seventy percent of the stock. What about Barbara?”
