Slote failed to fathom the attraction this middle-aged dullard held for the young Englishwoman, and he never understood Natalie Jastrow’s infatuation with the man’s son, either.
Fate had served him a strange, indigestible dish, Leslie Slote thought — to be beaten out first by the son and then by the father; neither of them, in his own judgment, a worthy rival. Byron Henry at least was a handsome young devil, and had much changed Slote’s ideas of the susceptibility of clever women to surface charms. But there was nothing charming on the surface of Byron’s father. The best one could say for the man was that he still had his hair, thick and dark, and that his waist showed an effort to stay trim. But his age was evident in the weary wrinkled eyes, the gnarled hands, the seamed mouth, the deliberate movements.
Slote was about to meet Admiral Standley and Captain Henry at the Hotel National; he was going to interpret for them at the Kremlin banquet. This privilege did not, in prospect, make him happy. He was in a state of panicky foreboding.
During the first weeks of the invasion, Slote’s physical cowardice, which he lived with as other people lived with hay fever or high blood pressure, had not acted up. Slote was an admirer of Soviet Russia. He believed the news on the loudspeakers and argued that the German victory claims were propaganda. Six hundred miles, more than a hundred million Russians, and above all the great Red Army lay between him and the Germans. It was too far even for the Luftwaffe to fly. The barometer of his timidity read the Moscow climate as sunny and fair. The Muscovites — a peaceable, good-natured, rather shabby swarm of workingmen in caps, workingwomen in shawls, boys and girls in scarlet Young Communist neckerchiefs, all with flat calm Russian faces so much alike that they appeared to be one family of several million first cousins — placidly piled sandbags, taped windows, held anti- incendiary drills for air raids that didn’t come, and otherwise went about their business as before under blue skies, in warm sparkling weather. Silver barrage, balloons bobbed at their winches in open squares. Snouts of anti-aircraft guns appeared on the roofs of hotels and museums. Strapping red-cheeked young men wearing new uniforms and fine leather boots streamed to the railroad stations. Tanks, multi-wheeled trucks, and motor-driven big guns thumped and clanked along the boulevards day and night, all heading west. The theatres and cinemas stayed open. The ice cream of the street vendors was all rich as ever. The summer circus was playing to great crowds, for this year there was a dancing elephant as well as the bears. If one could trust one’s eyes and ears in Moscow, the Soviet Union had met the onslaught at its distant borders and dealt the Nazis their first big defeat, exactly as Radio Moscow claimed.
Then Minsk fell, then Smolensk, then Kiev — each Russian acknowledgment lagging a week or more behind the German crows of victory. Air raids started; the Luftwaffe had come into range. Nobody else in the embassy became as alarmed as Slote, because nobody else had counted much on the Russians. Moreover, nobody else had undergone the ordeal of Warsaw. Since May the ambassador had been storing food, fuel, and supplies in a large house thirty miles from the city, to sit out the on-coming siege. A few of the Americans, rubbed raw by the Russians’ difficult ways, even looked forward to seeing the Wehrmacht march into Red Square. At least after a few drinks they said so.
Slote had stopped arguing, having been proved so wrong about the Red Army. But he thought the complacency and indifference of the other Americans was almost insane. The air raids were getting worse as the Germans drew nearer. Moscow’s amazingly thick anti-aircraft barrage provided a comforting canopy of green, red, and yellow fireworks, mounting past searchlight beams in the black night. Yet bombs did fall. The terror of the siege guns was still to come. Even if he survived the siege, thought Slote, how safe would he be? By then Roosevelt’s blatant help to Nazism’s enemies might have provoked a triumphant Hitler to declare war. If Moscow fell, the Americans might all be taken to a ravine and shot like the Jews in Minsk. Then Adolf Hitler could apologize for the mistake, or deny that it had happened, or say the Russians had done it.
Berel Jastrow’s story filled Slote with horror. He had read the books about Germany on the list he had given Byron Henry, and many more. The Germans, in their naive passion for obedience, their streaks of coarseness and brutality, their energy, their intelligence, their obsessive self-centeredness, their eternal grievance that the world was against them and doing them injustice, their romantic yearnings for new extremes of experience — this last trait bubbling up ad nauseam in the romantic philosophers, and nailed down by Goethe once and for all in the Faust image — these eighty million strangers in Europe seemed to Leslie Slote capable, once they abandoned their strict and docile conventions, of slaughtering any number of innocent people upon orders, cheerfully and with no sense of guilt, not in the least aware that they were “committing atrocities.” There was no striking bottom in the German spirit. That was the strange and fearful thing about them. They were like remote cold children, as docile and as cruel. Hitler’s dread secret was that he understood them. Other nations at war could be counted on to observe such rules as exchanging besieged or captured diplomats. In Slote’s frightened view, such diplomats could perhaps count on Hitler’s Germans not to eat them — little more.
The red light of the setting sun was fading outside his window. It was time to go and accompany Victor Henry to a night of sitting in the bull’s eye of the Moscow air target.
Not surprisingly, he found Captain Henry in Tudsbury’s suite. Despite the chill in the room, the naval officer lolled on a couch in his shirt-sleeves, smoking a cigar. Pamela was sewing at a crumpled blue coat with gold stripes, in the light of a red-shaded lamp atop an alabaster Venus.
“Hi there,” Henry said.
Pamela said, “Loose brass buttons. We don’t want them bouncing all over the Kremlin parquet floor. Have some Scotch and tap water, Leslie. Beaverbrook gave the governor a bottle.”
Glancing at his wristwatch, Slote sat himself on the edge of a chair. “No thanks. I hope you haven’t had much, Captain. When you start on a Russian dinner, the last thing you want in your system is alcohol.”
Henry grunted. “You’re telling me! I haven’t touched it.”
Pamela sewed, Victor Henry smoked, and the Foreign Service man felt he was very superfluous in the room. He looked at his watch once, twice, and coughed. “I said I’d meet the admiral in the lobby at six. It’s ten of. Suppose I look for him now. You’ll join us, Captain?”
“Sure,” Henry said.
“You seem so calm, Leslie,” Pam said. “If I were actually going into the Kremlin, I’d be vibrating.”
“Captain Henry seems pretty calm,” Slote said.
“Oh, him,” Pamela said. “He’s a robot. A mechanical man. Chug-chug! Choomp-choomp! Clank!”
“I need new batteries,” Henry said. “And possibly a valve job.”
The intimate teasing made Slote feel even more superfluous. “Well, in ten minutes then,” he said.
Pamela said, “Just two more buttons. Damn! That’s twice I’ve pricked my finger. I never could sew.”
Clumsy black limousines clustered before the hotel, a rare sight. Since the start of the war, the sparse auto traffic on Moscow’s wide boulevards and squares had been dwindling to nothing. Muscovites, taking evening strolls in their usual large numbers, glanced inquisitively at the machines, but did not stop to gawk. Chauffeurs and escorts in black caps and black leather jackets stood by the cars. The Americans called them “the YMCA boys”; they were secret police, and the people seemed loath to linger near them. But as the cars began to fill with well-dressed foreigners thronging out of the National’s narrow entrance, the pedestrians did form lines of quiet onlookers, peering with round friendly eyes at the clothes, faces, and shoes.
“How did you make out on those harbor charts?” said Admiral Standley to Henry, settling into the back seat and adjusting his hearing aid. He had once been Chief of Naval Operations, and the President had called him out of retirement for this mission. Slote could never make this shrivelled, leathery, bespectacled man, whose uniform displayed four rows of campaign ribbons, stop talking near NKVD agents, who undoubtedly knew English, though they never spoke it.
“I got nowhere,” Henry said. “As for operating codes and signals, forget it. Their fellow told me with a straight face that they had no such things, that they just communicated by Morse or flashing light, in plain language.”
“What tripe! Did you give them our stuff?”
“Well, I showed them our General Signal Book, and a few strip ciphers. I almost got into a wrestling match with this rear admiral, the small fat one. He started to put them away in his briefcase, but I retrieved them. I said no tickee no shirtee.”
“No! Did you really?” said the admiral. “Why, you may hang for that, Pug. We’re supposed to give, give, give, here. Why, you should just have handed over all our Navy’s code channels, and shaken hands, and toasted eternal brotherhood in vodka. I’m ashamed of you, Captain Henry, and goddamn glad you’re along.”
“We’re getting a quid pro quo for all we’re giving the Soviets,” Slote said. “They’re killing Germans for
