“Here I am, Natalie.”
“Oh,
“He’s fine.”
“Oh, what a relief!” The interference on the line stopped. Natalie’s voice came clear. “I haven’t had a single letter from him since I left. I sent a cable and got no answer. I know how impossible the mail is nowadays, but still I’ve begun to worry.”
“Natalie, he hasn’t had any letters from you. He wrote me that. And I’m sure he didn’t get your cable. But he’s in good shape.”
“Why, I’ve been writing once a week. How aggravating that is! I miss him so. How’s he doing in submarine school?”
Outside Victor Henry’s window, the guard was changing at the chancellery, with rhythmic boot-thumpings and brisk German barks. Natalie’s telephone voice stirred an ache in him. The New York accent was different from Pamela’s, but it was a young low girlish voice like hers.
“Scraping by, I gather.”
Her laugh, too, was much like Pamela’s, husky and slightly mocking. “That sounds right.”
“Natalie, he expected you back long before this.”
“I know. There were problems, but they’re straightened out. Be sure to tell him I’m fine. Siena’s quite charming in wartime, and very peaceful. It’s sort of like sinking back into the Middle Ages. Byron’s got three months to go, hasn’t he?
“He finishes in December, if they don’t throw him out sooner.”
Again the laugh. “They won’t. Briny is actually very surefooted, you know. I’ll be back by December. Please write and tell him that. Maybe a letter from you will get through.
“It will. I’ll write today.”
It was a small gathering at Abendruh, with no staircase slide. Pug was sorry that Ernst Grobke didn’t see the crude elaborate joke, so much to the Teutonic taste. The submariner obviously was ill at ease, and could have used the icebreaker. The other men were a Luftwaffe general and a high official in the foreign ministry, company far above Grobke. The five pretty ladies were not wives. Mrs. Stoller was absent.
Victor Henry sized all this up as an orgy in the making, to get him to talk about the British. After dinner, somewhat to his surprise, they went to a wood-panelled room where musical instruments were ready, and Stoller, the Luftwaffe general, the man from the foreign ministry, and a redheaded lady played quartets. In Pug’s previous visits, the banker had shown no musical skill, but Stoller played violin quite well. The Luftwaffe general, a very tall dark cadaverous man with sickly hollow eyes, bowed and swayed over the cello, drawing forth luscious sounds. Pug had seen this man once before, at a distance at Karinhall in full uniform; he had looked far more formidable then than he did now in his dinner jacket and monocle. The musicians made mistakes, stopped a couple of times, joked swiftly, and took up the music once more. The foreign ministry man on the second violin, a roly-poly Bavarian with a drooping yellow moustache, was a superb fiddler. It was the best amateur music Pug had ever heard. Grobke sat with the submissiveness of most Germans in the presence of art, drinking a lot of brandy and stifling yawns. After a couple of hours of this, the ladies abruptly said good-night and left. If there had been a signal, Pug missed it.
“Perhaps we might have a nightcap outside,” said the banker to Pug, putting his violin carefully in its case. “The evening is warm. Do you like the tone of my Stradivarius? I wish I were worthy to play it.”
The broad stone terrace looked out on a formal garden, a darkly splashing fountain, and the river; beyond that, forest. A smudged orange moon in its last quarter was rising over the trees. In the light of reddish-yellow flares on long iron poles, shadows danced on the house and the flagstone floor. The five men sat, and a butler passed drinks. Melodious birds sang in the quiet night, reminding Pug of the nightingales at the British bomber base. “Victor, if you care to talk about England,” said Stoller from the depths of an easy chair, his face in black shadow, “we would of course be interested.”
Pug forced a jocular tone. “You mean I have to admit I’ve been in England?”
The banker heavily took up the note. “Ha, ha. Unless you want to get our intelligence people in bad trouble, you’d better.” After everybody else laughed, he said, “If you prefer, we’ll drop the subject here and now for the weekend. Our hospitality hasn’t got — how do you say it in English?” — he switched from the German they were all speaking — “‘strings tied to it.’ But you’re in an unusual position, having travelled between the capitals.”
“Well, if you want me to say you’ve shot the RAF out of the sky and the British will quit next week, it might be better to drop it now.”
In a gloomy bass voice, the long shadowy form of the general spoke. “We know we haven’t shot the RAF out of the sky.”
“Speak freely. General Jagow is my oldest friend,” said Stoller. “We were schoolboys together. And Dr. Meusse” — he waved an arm at the foreign ministry man, and a long skeletal shadow arm leaped on the wall — “goes back almost that far.”
“We say in the Luftwaffe,” put in the general, “the red flag is up. That means we all talk straight. We say what we think about the Fuhrer, about Goring, about anything and anybody. And we say the goddamnedest things, I tell you.”
“Okay, I like those ground rules,” said Victor Henry. “Fire away.”
“Would an invasion succeed?” spoke up Dr. Meusse.
“What invasion? Can your navy get you across?”
“Why not?” said General Jagow in calm professional tones. “Through a corridor barricaded on both sides by mine belts, and cordoned off by U-boats, under an umbrella of Luftwaffe? Is it so much to ask of the Grand Fleet?”
Pug glanced at Grobke, who sat glumly swirling brandy in a bell glass. “You’ve got a U-boat man here. Ask him about the cordons and the mine belts.”
With an impatient gesture that flicked brandy into the air, Grobke said, in thick tones, “Very difficult, possibly suicidal, and worst of all, entirely unnecessary.”
General Jagow leaned toward Grobke his monocle glittering in the flare light, his face stiff with anger.
Pug exclaimed, “Red flag’s up.”
“So it is,” Jagow said, with an unforgiving glare at the submariner, who slouched down in darkness.
“I agree with him,” Pug said. “Part of a landing force might get through — not saying in what shape. There’s still the invasion beaches — which I’ve seen close on. Which I personally would hate to approach from seaward.”
“Clearing beach obstacles is a technical task,” Jagow said, with a swift return to offhand tones. “We have special sappers well trained for that.”
“General our Marine Corps has been studying and rehearsing beach assaults intensively for years. It’s the toughest attack problem in the book. I don’t believe the Wehrmacht ever thought about it until a few weeks ago.”
“German military ingenuity is not negligible,” said Dr. Meusse.
“No argument,” said Victor Henry.
Jagow said, “Of course we can’t land without wastage. We would take big but endurable losses. Once we obtained a solid lodgment, you might see Churchill fall. The Luftwaffe would fight for the beachhead to the last plane. But I believe the RAF would run out of planes first.”
Victor Henry made no comment.
“What is the bombing of London doing to British morale?” Stoller asked.
“You’re making Churchill’s job easier. They’re fighting mad now. Knocking hell out of London won’t win the war. Not in my judgment. Not to mention that bombers can fly east as well as west.”
The general and the banker looked at each other. The general’s voice was sepulchral. “Would it surprise you if some people here agreed with you?”
“Churchill cleverly provoked the Fuhrer by bombing Berlin on the twenty-sixth,” said Stoller. “We had to hit back, for morale reasons. The trick worked, but the British people must now pay. There’s no political alternative but a big reprisal.”
“Let’s be honest,” said Dr. Meusse. “Field Marshal Goring wanted to go after London and try to end it.”
Jagow shook his head. “He knew it was too soon. We all did. It was those six days of bad weather that
