Travelling to his new post in mid-January, Leslie Slote found himself stalled in Lisbon by a shortage of Lufthansa accommodations to Berlin. He checked into the Palace Hotel in Estoril, Lisbon’s palm-lined seaside resort, where diplomats, wealthy refugees, Gestapo, and other foreign agents congregated. He thought he might pick up some information there while he waited for an air reservation to open up. Actually, he found Estoril in January an exceedingly chilly and boring place. The German abounded, but they kept in aloof clusters, regarding other people with supercilious eyes.
He sat in the crowded lobby of the hotel one afternoon gnawing at his pipe, and reading in a Swiss newspaper about British successes against the Italians in Abyssinia and North Africa, faint rays in the gloom. The neutral newspaper had been hard to come by. Fascist and Nazi journals now blanketed Portuguese newsstands, with a few scrawny, disgustingly servile periodicals from Vichy France. British and American publications had vanished. It was a fair barometric reading of the way the war was going, at least in the judgment of Portugal’s rulers. A year ago, on Lisbon newsstands, papers of both sides had been equally available.
“
He jumped up and followed the small pink-cheeked page to a telephone near the reception desk.
“Leslie? Hello, it’s Bunky. How goes it by the old seaside?”
Bunker Wendell Thurston, Jr., had attended the Foreign Service school with Slote, and now held the post of second secretary in the American legation in Lisbon.
“Mighty dully, Bunky. What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing much.” Thurston sounded amused. “It’s just that you’ve spoken to me now and then, I believe, about a girl named Natalie Jastrow.”
Slote said sharply, “Yes, I have. What about her?”
“A girl by that name is sitting across the desk from me.”
“
“Like to talk to her? When I told her you were here she jumped a foot.”
“Christ, yes.”
Natalie came on the phone laughing, and Slote’s heart throbbed at the familiar lovely sound. “Hello, old Slote,” she said.
“Natalie! This is so staggering, and wonderful. What are you doing here?”
“Well, how about you?” Natalie said. “I’m as surprised as you are. Why aren’t you in Moscow?”
“I got hung up, in Washington and then here. Is Aaron with you?”
“I wish he were. He’s in Siena.”
“What! Aren’t you on your way back to the States?”
Natalie took a moment to answer. “Yes and no. Leslie, as long as you’re here, can I see you for a while?”
“Naturally! Wonderful! Immediately! I’ll come in to the legation.”
“Wait, wait. You’re at the palace Hotel, aren’t you? I’ll come out and meet you. I’d rather do that.”
Bunky Thurston came on the line. “Look, Leslie, I’ll put her on the bus. She’ll arrive in half an hour or so. If I may, I’ll join you two in the Palace lobby at five.”
She still had a fondness for big dark hats. He could see her through the dusty bus window, moving down the aisle in a jam of descending passengers. She ran to him, threw her arms around him, and kissed his cheek. “Hi! I’m freezing. I could have worn my ratty beaver coat, but who’d think it would be this cold and gray in Lisbon? Brrr! It’s even colder out here by the sea, isn’t it?” She clapped her hand to her hat as the wind flapped it. “Let’s look at you. Well! No change. If anything, you look rested.”
She said all this very fast, her eyes wide and shiny, her manner peculiarly excited. The old spell worked at once. In the months since he had last seen Natalie, Slote had started up a romance with a girl from Kansas named Nora Jamison. Nora was tall, brunette, and dark-eyed like this one, but otherwise as different as a doe from a bobcat: even-tempered, affectionate, bright enough to be in her third year as a senator’s secretary, and pretty enough to play leads with a semiprofessional Washington theatre group. Her father was a rich farmer; she drove a Buick convertible. She was altogether a find, and Slote was thinking seriously of marrying her on his return from Moscow. Nora worshipped him, and she was better looking than Natalie Jastrow and much easier to manage. But this Jewish girl in the big hat put her arm around him and brushed his face with her lips; he experienced a stabbing remembrance of what her love was like, and the snare closed on him again.
He said, “Well, you know how I admire you, but you do look slightly beat up.”
“Do I ever! I’ve had hell’s own time getting here. Let’s get out of this wind. Where’s the Palace Hotel? I’ve been to Estoril twice, but I forget.”
He said, taking her arm and starting to walk, “It isn’t far. What’s the story? Why didn’t Aaron come? What are you doing here?”
“Byron’s arriving tomorrow on a submarine.” He halted in astonishment. She looked up at him, hugged his arm, and laughed, her face alive with joy. “That’s it. That’s why I’m here.”
“He made it through that school?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I thought he might find it too much work.”
“He squeaked by. This is his first long cruise. The sub’s stopping here, just for a few days. I suppose you think I’m rattlebrained, but he wrote me to come and meet him, and here I am.”
“Nothing you do really surprises me, sweetie. I’m the man you came to visit in Warsaw in August ‘39.”
Again she squeezed his arm, laughing. “So I did. Quite an excursion that turned out to be, hey! My God, it’s cold here! It’s a wonder all these palm trees don’t turn brown and die. You know, I’ve been through Lisbon twice before, Slote, and each time I’ve been utterly miserable. It feels very strange to be happy here.”
He asked her about Aaron Jastrow’s situation. Natalie said the impact of the note from the Secretary of State’s office had somehow been frittered away. The fact that Jastrow’s lapsed passport showed a questionable naturalization had fogged his case. Van Winaker, the young consul in Florence, had dawdled for almost a month, promising action and never getting around to it; then he had fallen ill and gone for a cure in France, and several more weeks had slipped by. Now Van Winaker was corresponding with the Department on how to deal with the matter. She had his firm promise that, one way or another, he would work it out. The worst of it was, she declared, that Aaron himself really was in no hurry to leave his villa, now that it seemed just a matter of unraveling a little more red tape. He half welcomed every new delay, though he went through the motions of being vexed…This was what was defeating her. He would not fight, would not put any pressure on the consul to settle the thing. He was writing serenely away at his Constantine book, keeping to all his little routines and rituals, drinking coffee in the lemon house, taking his walks at sunset, rising before dawn to sit blanketed on the terrace and watch the sun come up. He believed that the Battle of Britain had decided the war, that Hitler had made his bid and failed, and that a negotiated peace would soon emerge.
“I suppose I made a mistake, after all, going back to Italy,” she said, as they walked into the hotel. “With me around he’s perfectly comfortable and not inclined to budge.”
Slote said, “I think you were right to return. He’s in more danger than he realizes, and needs a hard push. Maybe you and I together can shake him free.”
“But you’re going to Moscow.”
“I have thirty days, and I’ve only used up ten. Perhaps I’ll go back to Rome with you. I know several people in that embassy.”
“That would be marvelous!” Natalie halted in the middle of the pillared lobby. “Where’s the bar?”
“It’s down at that end and it’s very dismal and beery. It’s virtually Gestapo headquarters. Why? Would you like a drink?”
“I’d just as lief have tea, Leslie.” Her manner was evasive. “I haven’t eaten all day. I was just wondering where the bar was.”
He took her to a long, narrow public room full of people in sofas and armchairs drinking tea or cocktails. Walking down the smoky room behind the headwaiter, they heard conversations in many languages: German was the commonest, and only one little group was talking English.
“League of Nations here,” Natalie said, as the waiter bowed them into a dark corner with a sofa and two
