Night Soldiers ns-1

by Alan Furst

  “Plans for the weekend, Bob?”

  “I’m going to the football game on Sunday. Giants versus Dodgers, at the Polo Grounds.”

  “Yes, well, enjoy yourself, but do make certain that finished copy is on my desk when I come in Monday. Okay? If that means a little elbow grease on the weekend, well …”

  “I’ll get it done, sir.”

  Mr. Drowne produced his usual departure sound-the sigh of the oft-betrayed man-then trudged off to his next victim.

  Out the window, the snow drifted down onto the Christmas shoppers hurrying along Lexington, carrying green and red parcels. The shop windows had wreaths and little silver bells on granular snow. Above the glass panel in front of his desk, the face of Bister rose slowly, like a sea monster. “Formulating, Bob?” His eyes glowed with spite.

  Eidenbaugh grabbed for a weapon, and Bister disappeared instantly with what could only be described as a chortle. He looked down at his hand and saw that he’d picked up the desktop name-plate that had been a gift from his parents on the occasion of his graduation from Columbia University, seven years earlier. ROBERT F. EIDENBAUGH, it said. Fitting, he thought, very fitting. An intended symbol of his success in times to come, it now mocked him and his too-long tenure as a copywriter. Bister was right. He wasn’t going up. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  His father had been a captain in the American Expeditionary Forces, arriving in France in 1917 and fighting in the battle of Chateau-Thierry. It had been a hellish experience, one he did not speak of easily. Yet he had fallen in love with France, and in 1921, when his oldest son was eight and the youngest three, he had taken the family off to live first in Paris, then in Lyons, finally settling, six months later, in a small rented villa on the outskirts of Toulon, the Mediterranean port just east of Marseilles. Arthur Eidenbaugh was a naval architect and was able to find a position-a minor one, initially, little more than a drafting clerk-with an engineering firm associated with the Toulon shipyards. Elva Eidenbaugh was formerly a schoolteacher from Wiscasset, Maine, and no stranger to hardship. She made the money stretch and set the tone of family life-which was to be a permanent adventure, with all setbacks perceived as challenges to character and sense of humor.

  They were a tight, sunny family, denying each other consolation as a matter of course. A bad cold or a bad mood simply made life difficult for everybody, so best take your lumps and move ahead, sympathy was not on the schedule. As for France, they attacked it, led in the charge by Mrs. Eidenbaugh. They made forays into boulangeries and patisseries, picnicked at the slightest provocation, and descended en masse on museums, carrying away every crumb of available culture. Mr. Eidenbaugh worked long hours, deflected credit to his French colleagues, and was soon enough raised to a position commensurate with his ability and education.

  As a family, they liked being different, enjoyed the notion of living abroad, and their cheerful optimism seemed to draw pleasant experiences their way. Robert could not remember a time when somebody or other-postman, merchant, parents’ acquaintance-wasn’t ruffling his hair. With his new position, Mr. Eidenbaugh was able to engage a maid to care for the children, and in this way they picked up the language naturally and effortlessly. At home, they spoke a curious mixture of French and English. “Where can I have put l’adresse?” his mother would say. “I’ve looked and looked, but it seems toute a fait perdue. “

  Robert went to French schools, learned the rudiments of soccer, dressed in a uniform of blue shorts and white shirt, and allowed the requisite Catholic instruction to roll effortlessly off his Presbyterian soul. Family roots went back into Scotland, Wales, and Germany, on both sides, with the first Eidenbaughs reaching America in the mid-nineteenth century and settling on the coastlines of southern New England, where they engaged themselves in the building of ships.

  In 1930, with the United States struggling in the Depression and Europe’s economy falling apart, Mr. Eidenbaugh’s firm won a large contract that called for the refitting of an entire naval battle group, a contract that was to support the firm throughout the early thirties. Thus, that same year, Robert was able to return to the United States to attend Columbia University, majoring in English literature with indifferent success. He was bright enough, but most of what he read seemed distant and remote and he had none of the scholar’s passions. On graduation, in June of 1934, he returned to France for two years, working at a succession of small jobs, first around Toulon, later in Paris. He translated business correspondence, taught at small private schools, fell in love with wearying frequency, skated on the edge of Parisian bohemian life, and took to smoking a large, curved pipe.

  In 1936, bored with aimlessness, he returned to New York and found a job with the J. Walter Thompson Company in the copy department. With war clearly on the way in Europe, the rest of the family returned in 1938, Arthur Eidenbaugh finding employment at a Boston firm of naval architects with long connection to French shipbuilding interests in Canada.

  On Sunday morning, Eidenbaugh met Andy Van Duyne for breakfast at a Schrafft’s on the Upper West Side. Surrounded by West End Avenue garment manufacturers taking their families out for brunch, they set to work demolishing a basket of soft yellow rolls. The basket was periodically replenished by stern Irish waitresses in black uniforms, who also kept their coffee cups full as they awaited their scrambled eggs.

  Andy Van Duyne was his single surviving friend from Columbia. His family owned a petrochemical brokerage associated with Standard Oil and had a season box for the Giants’ football games. Clients never seemed to use them, so Van Duyne and his friends had gotten into the habit of making a day of it on fall Sundays, starting with a late breakfast.

  Van Duyne looked like an owl, a tall, spindly one, squinting out at the world through round spectacles with thick lenses. At college, he’d been a reliable source for decent bootleg and the occasional real thing, smuggled in from Canada. His family’s vacation house on Long Island had a particularly private and convenient beach, it seemed, and, in return for looking the other way, they would at times discover the odd case left behind on the sand-clearly an appreciative offering. Van Duyne had gained some considerable prominence as a college prankster, using a rhinoceros-foot waste-paper basket he’d got hold of somewhere to make tracks in the snow leading up to the Central Park reservoir. This resulted only in a rather tentative news story, never really setting off the rhinoceros-in-the-drinking-water! panic he’d imagined, though there were some who swore they could taste it for weeks thereafter. Van Duyne had barely scraped through college and was now ensconced in an oakpaneled office at Morgan Guaranty, where he’d taken to reading Slade Rides to Laramie, holding the book on his lap, just below the edge of a polished antique desk.

  Robert Eidenbaugh and his friend shared a brotherhood of vocational anguish. Van Duyne had trust funds sufficient to fall into a sultan’s leisure, but, as he put it, “things aren’t done that way in my family.” Nonetheless, his restlessness led him to leaving peculiar telephone messages (call Mr. Lyon at Schuyler 8-3938-which of course turned out to be the Central Park Zoo) for his associates and, once, after a particularly arid day, distributing dry ice in the Morgan Guaranty urinals. He was becoming, he’d said, “rather too trying at the bank.” But, until Robert met him on Sunday morning, he had evidently seen no way through the briar patch of the Family Obligations.

  At Schrafft’s, however, his ears were bright red and he could barely sit still, buttering rolls and slurping coffee like a Chaplin machine gone mad. Robert honored his mood as long as he could, but at last curiosity forced him to pry. The answer surprised him. Van Duyne was evasive, and offered only a partial explanation.

  He was leaving Morgan, had been for weeks on the trail of something that-he could hardly believe it-had actually come from the family. They had taken pity on him at last and, when the proposition had been put, he’d leapt at the chance. “I’m too young to dry up and blow away,” he said when the eggs arrived, “and that’s an old Van Duyne tradition, unfortunately. We hav
e a tendency to molder.”

  Breakfast over, they walked through the stiff wind off the Hudson to Riverside Drive and there took a bus north toward the Polo Grounds. It was a bright, frigid day, December 7, and by the time they boarded the bus their eyes were teary from the cold. They got off at 145 th Street and walked east toward Coogan’s Bluff.

  From the point of view of the Giant fans, it wasn’t a very satisfying game. The packed crowds, wrapped up in overcoats and mufflers, their breaths visible in the winter air, groaned more than they cheered. Tuffy Leemans, the Giants’ fullback on offense and halfback on defense, their most productive running back, was having a difficult day with the Dodger defensive line, and the fleet Ward Cuff seemed unable to hold the forward passes thrown him. Meanwhile, Ace Parker, the Dodger tailback and safety, was on target all through the first quarter, while Pug Manders was ripping through large holes in the Giant defensive scheme. Late in the first quarter, with the score tied 7-7, a little after 2:00 P.M., Manders took Parker’s handoff on a spinner play and galloped twenty-nine yards to a Brooklyn first down at the Giant four-yard line. As the legion of Brooklyn fans made themselves heard, a static-punctuated announcement came from the loudspeaker system: “Attention, please. Attention. Here is an urgent message. Will Colonel William J. Donovan call Operator Nineteen in Washington, D.C.”

  The effect of the message on Van Duyne was extraordinary. He sat dead still in his seat, and for a moment Robert thought something was wrong with him. Then he scrabbled at the pocket of his fur-collared overcoat, produced a silver flask, and took an extended swig, passing the comfort on to Robert, who discovered himself with a mouthful of excellent Scotch whisky.

  “Well, what is it?” Robert said. “Have you bet the family bonds on the Giants?”

  Van Duyne shook his head.

  “Then what is it, Andy?”

  “I’m not sure. Something important, I’ll tell you that.”

  “The announcement?”

  “Yes.”

  Pug Manders crashed over the Giant middle guard for a touchdown. The Dodger fans roared their approval.

  “Now look here, Van Duyne, either tell me what’s going on or sit back and watch the game. I feel like a character in a Phillips Oppenheim novel.”

  Van Duyne swiveled toward him, oblivious to the crowd rising for the Dodger kickoff. “Robert, I may be able to do something for you, especially if it’s all gone mad in Europe-something to do with our being in the war, at last.”

  “Ah-ha!” Robert said. “You’re going to Canada to get into the fighting.”

  “No, it isn’t that. But how would you feel about leaving Thompson, doing something completely different?”

  Robert stared into his friend’s eyes through the thick spectacles and saw that he was serious. “No pranks?” he asked, always a little leery of Van Duyne’s elaborate ruses.

  “No pranks. On my honor.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m your man.”

  “It could be dangerous.”

  “No more so than Mr. Drowne.”

  “Not kidding, Bob.”

  “Nor am I,” he said. “Believe me, Andy, I’m ready for something-how did you put it? — ‘completely different.’ “

  “I can,” Van Duyne said, “pretty well promise you that.”MEMORANDUM"

  April 19, 1942

  TO: Lt. Col. H. V Rossell

  Office of the Coordinator of Information Room 29

  National Institute of Health Washington, D.C.

  FROM: Agatha Hamilton

  Office of Recruiting-COI 270 Madison Ave. New York, New York

  SUBJECT: Robert F. Eidenbaugh

  In an interview arranged by my friend, Mr. Carter Delius, Vice President for Personnel, the J. Walter Thompson Company, on March 30, I spent over two hours with Mr. L. L. Drowne, copy chief, in my capacity as Member of the Board, the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. I told Mr. Drowne that the hospital fund-raising committee was seeking a professional copywriter to aid in its fall campaign to build a new wing for the hospital. He mentioned several other candidates before the name of Mr. Eidenbaugh (hereafter RFE) was brought up. Mr. Drowne seems to like him well enough, though he does not believe that RFE will make much of a mark in advertising. Subject was described as “completely honest” and “extremely bright,” but “very much a self-starter.” My overall impression was that RFE’s heart isn’t much in the Thompson company-they like him, but are not really sure what to do with him.

  On April 3, as the parent of a prospective student, I visited the Brearley School and contrived to interview Mary Ellen Walker, RFE’s fiancee, who teaches Fourth Form (10 th grade) English and History and assists in the coaching of the field hockey team. I came on as quite the “Bolshy heiress,” though her sympathies clearly do not lie in this direction. She was very polite about it all, representing the school as “more than fair to all sorts of girls, from all sorts of families.” Appearing to be charmed by her (I was not, in fact), I asked a few personal questions. Miss Walker perceives RFE as brilliant and dashing, though not yet situated in a position appropriate to his abilities. I would guess that, following marriage, she has plans to situate him in the family business.

  An April 7 digest of reports (Attachment “A”) is enclosed, including credit reports from the following: Consolidated Edison, Chemical Bank and Trust, Sheffield Dairies, Joseph Silverman, D.D.S., and the 414 West 74 th Street Management Company. Also appended (Attachment “B”), RFE’s Columbia University transcript and letters of recommendation. (See esp. Professor Horace Newell, Department of English, who praises RFE’s intelligence and ability and mentions a tendency “to stay somewhat in the background.”)

  On April 14 RFE attended a party, given at my behest by Mrs. Cleveland Van Duyne, at her apartment at 1085 Park Avenue. I was accompanied by my friend, Mme. Maria de Vlaq, who reports that RFE’s French is “excellent,” “fluent” and “almost native.” My personal impression of RFE was of a man with a certain charm that comes naturally to him. I flirted with him a little and found him courteous and responsive, though without any interest in pressing his “advantage.” He is no snake in the grass. He does fade into the background, being slightly built and neither especially handsome nor unattractive. He is the sort of man who will be liked by all classes of people and who will not engender in others feelings of spite or envy. He drank moderately at the party, circulated well, and made no attempt to press himself forward. I represented myself as the wife of a man who was about to start a new advertising company and encouraged him strongly to become interested in the possibilities for his own career. He did, at last, agree to meet my “husband” for luncheon later in the week.

  The New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has, once again, been dragging its feet and is as unresponsive in this project as it has been in all others. No report from that office to date on RFE, but same will be forwarded once it arrives-if it ever does. Can’t Col. Donovan do something about this?

  On April 17 I telephoned RFE at his office in the guise of Mr. Hamilton’s secretary and arranged a lunch for the following Monday, April 20, at Luchow’s. According to the headwaiter, he asked for “Mr. Hamilton’s table” and waited twenty minutes before asking the headwaiter “if Mr. Hamilton had called.” (He had been given no “Hamilton” telephone number.) He was told that Mr. Hamilton had telephoned the restaurant, apologizing for the inconvenience and requesting that RFE meet him for lunch at the Coleman Hotel on East 23 rd Street and Fifth Avenue. On arriving at that location and discovering no such hotel, he consulted a telephone directory and proceeded to Coleman’s, a restaurant on East 25 th Street, where he asked for “Mr. Hamilton.” Informed that no such person was there, he made a telephone call (in all probability to his office, since “Hamilton’s secretary” had reached him there earlier), then ate lunch at the counter and left the restaurant, returning to work.

  My recommendation is to accept this candidate for furth
er COI screening.

  Signed: Agatha Hamilton

  COI-New York

  April 24, 1942P.S. Hub, my friend Maria de Vlaq is someone you might consider taking to lunch when you are next in New York. She is formerly the Countess Marensohn-Swedish nobility-divorced two years ago, and moves easily in society. She rides and shoots excellently, is lethally charming and of a rather daring disposition. She is of Belgian citizenship and descent, and I believe would be amenable to recruitment. Her connection to Belgian, German, and Swedish circles remains strong, and her relationship with her former husband, and his family, is cordial.P.S.S. Not to end on a sour note, but here it is April and there is only silence from Washington on my February vouchers. While it is the case that fortune has smiled on me in this world, I cannot by myself assume the cost of the war effort.

  In Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Colonel H. V. Rossell leaned his elbows on the scarred wooden desk and stared at the man seated on the other side. Eidenbaugh, Robert F. His fourteenth interview of the day. He knew that if he were charming and likable the candidate would be put at ease, and the consequent forthrightness would help in making a proper decision. But he simply hadn’t the strength for charm. He’d been working twenty-hour days since Pearl Harbor, and his initial burst of high-tension energy was long since dissipated. He was out of gas. What he really wanted to do was push his lips into an extended pout and make ishkabibble sounds by flapping them with his fingertips. That would prove everybody right. Since Colonel Donovan had persuaded Roosevelt that America needed an intelligence service, life had come to resemble a lunatic asylum. Rossell had some considerable experience in this work, a career in army intelligence going back ten years. As early as 1937-when war had seemed inevitable to him-he’d run small preparatory operations when his superiors would allow it, stockpiling European clothing, for instance, by purchasing it from incoming refugees, then storing it in a warehouse under squares of cardboard marked DO NOT CLEAN! Because of his foresight, agents going into Europe would, at least, not be dressed by Brooks Brothers.