A U.S. Marine sergeant was checking the arrivals. He directed her across the lobby to a small, fidgety man who seemed to be all potbelly and no chin.
“I’m Mrs. Conroy,” she told him.
He smiled in a way that left the corners of his mouth wet. “Welcome,” he said. “I’m George Langham.” She gave him a sharp stare. “Something’s wrong?” he asked.
“No. It’s just …” She felt more than cheated: betrayed. “You looked different over the phone,” she said.
“Yes? I was probably wearing my glasses.” He put them on. Now he looked even more like a frog. Her prince had turned into a frog. Fairy tales really do come true.
They went into the reception. Neither Senator Barber nor Harry had arrived yet, the frog said, but there was a large and hardworking bar. The frog got her a martini and introduced her to a tall, goodlooking Frenchman, who turned out to be a representative of the Vichy Government, doing some kind of liaison work with the Spanish Ministry of War. “I attend every reception at the American embassy,” he told her. “It is the sole place where one is given decent gin nowadays.”
“I thought all Frenchmen drank wine.”
He let his mouth droop. “Since 1940, for me, wine is not enough.”
“Were you in the fighting?”
“Yes and no. I commanded a regiment, but the Germans were too quick for us. They advanced at great speed and went between my regiment and the next formation. We pursued them but we could never catch them. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe damaged us every day. When the Armistice came my regiment had traveled nearly eight hundred kilometers without firing a single shot, except at enemy airplanes.” He sniffed his drink and widened his eyes in appreciation. “One cannot fight an enemy one cannot catch. The German army is extremely fast.”
It was a neat summary. Julie had the feeling he had delivered it many times before. They stood and looked at the crowd for a while. “How do you get along with the Germans now?” she asked.
“Reasonably well.”
“No goosestepping jackboots?”
“They leave us alone in Vichy. Up in the north of France it is different because England is so close, but once that situation comes to an end I think most of the German army will go home. Perhaps next year.”
Julie began to feel annoyed. This Frenchman was so enormously detached and objective, it was like talking to an insurance assessor. “What makes you so sure the British will give in?” she asked.
“Because they are very good historians and they know from past experience that they must have a powerful ally if they are to defeat Germany. There is only one possibility: Russia. But Germany will beat Russia. Then Hitler will turn back and confront Britain with the first truly united Europe since Charlemagne.”
“Churchill said they’ll never surrender.”
“Ah! That fatal word, ‘never.’ The first rule of politics is: ‘Never say never.’”
Julie was fed up with this professional survivor, but she was reluctant to leave him unmarked. “Listen, what about your Napoleon?” she demanded. “He ended up on his ass in the snow. So much for history.”
“Napoleon had no tanks, no trucks, no trains, no air force, no radio.” The Frenchman counted them off on his fingers and ended with his thumb raised. “Yet he reached Moscow. This German army overran France when the French army was by far the strongest in Europe. Much stronger than the Russian army is now. Do you see that man with the red hair?”
“You mean the guy talking to the crewcut in tweeds?”
“Yes. Swiss military attaché. The other man is with your embassy. According to that Swiss, it will take Germany a maximum of eight weeks, and a minimum of four, to bring Russia to her knees. The American estimates nine weeks and five.”
“What do you think?”
“Six weeks maximum.”
“Shit,” Julie said gloomily.
“Hitler will reap the wheat which Stalin has sowed,” the Frenchman said smoothly. “England will accept the inevitable, and life will return to normal once more. May I get you another drink?”
“You can go to hell.”
She walked away and left him unperturbed, sniffing his gin, and she got another drink by herself. The frog came over, looking depressed.
“Barber’s plane’s got engine trouble. He’s still in the Azores.”
“And Harry?”
He shrugged. “No news, I’m afraid.”
“Excuse me,” Julie said. “I think I see a friend.”
She took her drink to the ladies’ room and slumped in a chair. After a while she eased her shoes off. The wallpaper carried a repeating pattern of fat red roses. Everywhere she looked, roses. They climbed until they hit the ceiling and they dived until they hit the floor. Then they rebounded and climbed for the ceiling again. It was like being divebombed by florists. “Roses stink,” she said.
A toilet flushed, a cubicle opened, and a dumpy, middle-aged woman came out, smoothing her dress. “You talking about the wallpaper?” she said. “My husband chose it.” She began washing her hands.
“Then he stinks too.”
“That’s what I keep telling him. ‘Harry, you stink,’ I tell him. He never listens. Too busy choosing wallpaper, I guess.”
“My husband’s name is Harry, too.”
“Yeah? Does he stink?”
“Oh, he’s out in front. Harry stank for America in the Olympics.”
The other woman took a Scotch-and-water from a shelf. “Sounds like he trains real hard,” she said.
“He would’ve won,” Julie said, “only it was held in Berlin, and the krauts can out-stink the whole damn world when they try.”
“Yeah. I feel sorry for those poor bastards in Russia. We were in Warsaw when it got bombed, and friends of ours were in Rotterdam.”
“I saw what they did to Rotterdam. And to London.” They traded war stories for a couple of minutes. “You know, everybody out there seems to think Hitler’s going to smash Russia without even breaking sweat,” Julie said. “The only thing they’re arguing about is whether he’ll be in Moscow by Tuesday or Friday.”
“Right. I say to Harry: ‘When is someone going to stand up to the sonofabitch?,’ and Harry just smiles like daddy-knows-best and feeds me some dumb line about giving Hitler enough rope so he’ll hang himself.”
“That’s crap,” Julie said. “If we give him any more rope he’ll hang everyone he doesn’t like the look of.”
“You should tell Harry that.”
“Okay, I will,” Julie announced. “Lead me to him.” She put on her shoes.
“Okay.”
By now the reception was more crowded and much louder. They found her husband in the middle, a blue-suited, bun-faced man with hornrim glasses and a permanent smile. He was talking with two people: a man in U.S. naval uniform, and a middle-aged woman in a light oatmeal-tweed suit.
“Can it, Harry,” his wife interrupted. “You’re boring the pants off these folk and besides, my friend here has a question.”
He tightened his smile. “If it’s about Senator Barber, I’m afraid he’s been unavoidably delayed.”
“The hell with Senator Barber and his delays,” Julie said, “I want to know what’s holding up the rest of the U.S.A. When is America going to wake up and start fighting?”
“Well, the State Department keeps the entire European situation under constant review,” he replied with every appearance of sincerity, “and, given any significant shift of circumstances, the President will be advised accordingly without the slightest delay.”
“That’s a bullshit answer,” Julie snapped.
“It’s not even that,” the middle-aged woman said. “It’s no answer at all.”
“With respect—” Harry began.
“Oh, forget respect,” she said. “I write for Life magazine,” she told Julie, “and the people who read my stuff don’t want to fight another war. They’re just out of the Depression, they want to make some money, buy a new car, pay for their kids’ teeth
to be fixed. So there’s your answer.”
“Well … it’s just not good enough,” Julie said.
“Sweety, we give the Hitler war as much play as the traffic will bear,” said the woman from Life. “You can’t talk to folk who don’t want to listen.”
Julie stabbed the air with her finger. “But how in God’s name—”
“I think we should keep this thing in some kind of overall military perspective,” the naval officer broke in. “First off, our strategic response is very limited. We can hardly send a battleship to bombard Berlin.” Harry chuckled warmly. Julie glared. “Secondly,” the officer said, “this latest development vis-à-vis Russia is not necessarily entirely to our disadvantage. The Soviets have been meddling all over the world lately.”
“So you think the best solution is to let Hitler wipe them out?” Julie asked. The officer shrugged. “You callous bastard,” she said.
Nobody in the group spoke for a few seconds. They stood in stiff discomfort, while the abortive reception chattered and swigged all around them. Harry broke the silence with his easy, practiced chuckle. “These are mighty complex issues, folks,” he said. “I don’t think we should blame ourselves for not reaching total accord in the space of a few minutes. Furthermore, I’m sure that better men than us have got a pretty damn good grip on affairs. So … can I freshen up anyone’s drink?”
Julie walked away and found a marble pillar at the end of the bar to lean against. She felt angry and defeated. After a while the frog saw her and hurried over. “I was afraid you’d gone, Mrs. Conroy. We’ve just had a message from your husband. Unfortunately he’s not coming to Madrid. When his office heard about Senator Barber’s delay they sent him to Vienna instead.”
“Whoopee,” she said bleakly.
“Is there any kind of message you’d like me to send?”
“No. Yes. You could ask the barman to make me a double martini.”
She was working her way through the drink when the woman from Life came over. “I just discovered you’re Harry Conroy’s wife,” she said.
Julie nodded. “It’s an honorary position.”
“I met him on a plane, about a month ago … listen, I didn’t mean to be so hardnosed with you just now, but you’ve got to remember we don’t create the goddam news, we just cover it.”
“Sure, sure. It just makes me burn to think that Britain … Oh, I don’t know.”
The woman from Life took a handful of peanuts and began eating them one at a time. “Maybe it’s none of my business, honey, but you seem to be fighting everybody all on your own, too.”
Julie gave that a lot of thought. She took a drink and looked over the rim. The other woman was on the wrong side of forty. Her face looked as if it had seen a lot of human wreckage. And maybe some salvage too.
“Okay, since it’s so obvious,” Julie said. “This has been an especially bad day, and maybe I’ve had too much sauce, and Christ knows I didn’t actually want to meet my Harry, but still …” Her hand suddenly trembled; she put the glass down.
“Toss me a clean napkin,” the woman called to a barman, raising her open hand. She caught it, shook it open, gave it to Julie. “Ladies’ handkerchiefs are no dumb use to anyone,” she said. Julie used both hands to press the crisp white linen against her face. She pressed hard. It was as if all her self-control were disintegrating. She kept pressing, and braced her body against the pillar. Eventually the threat passed. She folded the napkin and sniffed hard. “Jesus,” she whispered. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“Out of the past, where they all come from.” The woman ate another peanut, slowly. “How long since you saw Harry?”
“Six months.” Julie picked up her glass, not to drink but to have something to hold. “Madrid was where I finally gave up on him, if you want the whole godawful story.”
“I’ll listen if you’ll talk.”
“Well … First of all, when we got married, I used to live somewhere central, Paris, Berlin, London, and wait for Harry to come home. Trouble was he didn’t come home very often. I’d see him once, maybe twice, in a month, then the phone would ring and … zip.”
“He’s a good newspaperman. Great reputation.”
“Oh, sure. Meanwhile I was living with the reputation and not the guy. So one day I got mad and decided we were going to live together if it meant hotels and suitcases for the rest of time. I called New York, they told me he was in Istanbul. Right, I flew to Istanbul. He’d gone to Budapest. I went to Budapest, he’d gone to Rome. I chased Harry to Rome, to Zurich, to Paris.”
“You could’ve cabled him to wait for you somewhere.”
“No, I had to catch him all by myself. I had to find him and grab him and say, ‘Okay, buster, from now on where you go, I go.’ It was crazy. Like a crusade.”
“What happened in Paris?”
“He wasn’t there. Nobody knew where he was. I called New York. They’d sent him to Madrid. The airline schedules were all fouled up by the war. It took me three days to get to Madrid. As I flew in, so Harry flew out.”
“To Paris?”
“Helsinki. I sat down and cried. End of story, close quotes. You asked for it, you got it. Just another crumpled page torn from life’s diary.”
“Why don’t you go back to the States?”
Julie bundled up the napkin and lobbed it over the bar. “My family didn’t approve of Harry. They said it would end in disaster.”
“Still, you might have to go back, sooner or later.”
“I can survive here. The agency sends me money.” Sometimes.
“I didn’t mean that. I meant suppose Hitler beats Russia, and Britain has to quit? Life in Europe could become very rough for someone with your opinions, even in Spain. Maybe especially in Spain.”
Julie hunched her shoulders and looked away. The crowd was thinning; people were glancing at watches, shaking hands, waving goodbye. There was an atmosphere of anticlimax: the Barber Beano had been a non-starter. “Maybe I should go to Russia and fight while there’s still time,” she said.
“From what I hear, Moscow’s in such a state of panic they wouldn’t know what to do if you turned up leading an armored brigade.” The last peanut had got eaten. She dusted her hands.
“Okay,” Julie said briskly, “then I’ll go to England and fight.”
“Have a good meal before you leave. They’re down to a ration of two ounces of butter, two ounces of cheese, 25-cents’-worth of meat. That’s per week. Just enough to make a light lunch for a Tennessee farmhand.”
“I don’t care. I’m sick of Madrid and I’m sick of waiting. Waiting for Harry, waiting for America, waiting for something worth waiting for.”
“Sweety,” said the woman from Life, “with what you’ve got, it’s a crime to wait. Don’t waste it on a war, for God’s sake. There’s always going to be wars. Go fall in love. It’s more laughs than getting bombed.”
“I just did,” Julie said.
“And?”
“He went to England.”
“What for?”
“Business.” Julie finished her drink. It tasted oily and unexciting. “That’s what he said, anyway. Business.”
“And what do you think?” They began to walk across the room.
“I think I ought to forget him.”
They reached the door before the other woman spoke. “You know, sometimes it’s a great relief to be old and leathery and past all that jazz.” She smiled: a brief gift of great sympathy. “You’re in a spot, aren’t you? I wish you all the luck. I think you may need it.”
“Me and the British both,” Julie said. “Who knows? If we pool our luck, maybe we’ll both win.”
Chapter 33
George Clark sat with his back to the window, looking like the man who inspired the bowler hat. His whole build, stocky and strong, led up to a head which was as round as a football and so powerfully muscled that his face, at rest, looked grim. That build, clothed in a very dark suit and a very white shirt with a clu
b tie of almost stifling restraint, demanded to be completed by a bowler hat.
Julie sat on a straightbacked chair and tried not to watch him reading her application form. She looked around the room: an official photograph of King George and Queen Elizabeth; two small potted shrubs (one not doing very well); a tiny model locomotive in a glass case; and a much-engraved silver cup, in need of polishing. Also, hanging behind the door, a bowler hat. He cleared his throat, and she leaned forward, eager to help. Her mouth still tasted of spearmint gum. She hoped she was now quite sober but she wasn’t absolutely sure of it.
Clark cleared his throat again. “Mrs. Conroy,” he said, “may I ask: why do you want to go to the United Kingdom?”
“To help you guys win the war.” The words came out promptly and confidently and they sounded exactly right.
“I see.” He scratched his left eyebrow while he looked again at her application form. “Yes. Mrs. Conroy … May I ask: how?”
Julie spread her hands. “Any way you like,” she said. “Just lead me to the action.”
“I see. You do realize, of course, that there’s actually not an awful lot of action in the United Kingdom at the moment.” He opened his eyes very wide.
“Sure. I mean, I wasn’t counting on becoming a Commando, exactly.”
“May I ask, Mrs. Conroy: what were you counting on becoming?”
“Like I said, whatever you need. I just want to—”
“Yes, indeed: to help. Please understand that your willingness and sincerity are not in doubt. Could you, for instance, be a nurse?”
“Sure. If necessary.” Julie forced a smile. She didn’t want to be a nurse.
“And have you any nursing qualifications?”
“No, but …” She cast around for a good, strong counterargument and found nothing. “I can learn,” she said.
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