the flyleaf. “Well, there you are, for a starter.”
“Tacitus?” Byron said. “Why Tacitus? Isn’t he a Roman historian?”
“Yes. Do you know about Arminius, and the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Okay. In the year 9 A.D., Byron, a German war leader named Arminius stopped the Romans at the Rhine, once and for all, and so secured the barbarian sanctuary in the heart of Europe. It’s a key event in world history. It led finally to the fall of Rome. It’s affected all European politics and war to this hour. So I believe, and therefore I think you should read Tacitus’s account of the campaign. Either you go into these things, or you don’t.”
Byron kept nodding and nodding, his eyes narrowed and attentive. “You’ve read all these books? Every one?”
Slote regarded the younger man quizzically, gnawing his pipe. “I haven’t retained them as well as I should, but, yes, I have.”
“What you’re actually trying to tell me, I imagine, is to go peddle my papers, that this is a subject for Rhodes Scholars.”
“Not at all, but it is a hard subject. Now, Byron, I’m really overdue at the embassy. Are you or aren’t you coming with us? We fly to Oslo Thursday, and from there to London. Then we just take our chances — destroyer, freighter, ocean liner, maybe an airplane trip via Lisbon — whatever turns up.”
Byron said, “What are Natalie’s plans? She got kind of snappish with me toward the end, and wouldn’t talk much.”
Slote looked at his watch. “She was disagreeable and vague with me, too. I really don’t know.” He hesitated.
“I’ll tell you something else. You may not like it. You may not believe it. But it’s so, and possibly you’d be better off knowing it.”
“Go ahead.”
“I asked her about you, whether you planned to return to Siena. Her answer was, ‘Well, I hope not. I sincerely hope I never see Byron Henry again, and if you ever get a chance, please tell him so with my compliments.’ — You look surprised. Didn’t you have an argument before she left? I was positive you had.”
Byron, trying to compose his face, said, “Not exactly. She just seemed grouchy as hell.”
Slote said, “She was in a gruesome mood. Said she had a bad backache from all the train riding, for one thing. Very likely she meant nothing by it. I know she felt grateful to you. As indeed I do.”
Byron shook his head. “I can’t say I’ve ever understood her.”
Slote glanced at the check and said, tucking bright-colored marks under a saucer, “Well, look, Byron, there’s no time to discuss Natalie Jastrow. I’ll tell you this. I’ve had no peace of mind since the day I first met her two years ago, at a very stupid cocktail party on the Quai Voltaire.”
“Why don’t you marry her?” Byron said, as Slote started to rise.
The older man fell back in his chair, and looked at him for several seconds. “All right. I’m not at all sure I won’t, Byron, if she’ll have me.”
“Oh, she’ll have you. I’ll tell you what. I guess I’ll stay on here with my folks for a while. I won’t go to Oslo.”
Slote stood, holding out his hand. “I’ll give your passport and so forth to your father’s yeoman. Good luck.”
Byron said, shaking hands and gesturing at
“Small return,” Slote said, “for services rendered.”
“Will you let me know,” Byron said, “if you get word before you leave Berlin about where Natalie went?”
Knocking out his pipe against his palm, Slote said, “Certainly,” and hurried off into the sidewalk crowd. Byron ordered more ersatz coffee and opened
Chapter 16
During Victor Henry’s absence in the States, his wife had tangled herself in a romance; something she had not done in his much longer absences through almost twenty-five years. There was something liberating for her in the start of a war. She was forty-five. Suddenly the rules she had lived by so long seemed slightly out of date. The whole world was shaking itself loose from the past; why shouldn’t she, just a wee bit? Rhoda Henry did not articulate this argument. She felt it in her bones and acted on it.
Being an ex-beauty, and remaining pretty, she had always drawn and enjoyed the attention of men, so she had not lacked opportunities for affairs. But she had been as faithful to Pug Henry as he had been to her. She liked to go to church, her hymn-singing and prayers were heartfelt, she believed in God, she thought Jesus Christ was her Savior — if she had never gone deeply into the matter — and she was convinced in her soul that a married woman ought to be true and good. In the old Navy-wife pastime of ripping apart ladies who had not been true and good, she wielded well-honed claws.
Setting aside a trivial kiss here and there, only one episode in the dim past somewhat marred Rhoda’s otherwise perfect record. After an officers’ club dance in Manila, where she had soaked up too much champagne — Pug being out at sea in a fleet exercise — Kip Tollever had brought her home and had managed to get her dress off. Madeline, then a child troubled by bad dreams, had saved the situation by waking and starting to cry. By the time Madeline was comforted, Rhoda had sobered up. Relieved to be back from the brink, yet bearing Kip no malice, she had donned a proper housecoat and had amiably shooed him out of the house. That had been the end of it. No doubt Kip the next morning had been just as grateful to Madeline. Victor Henry was practically the last man in the Navy he wanted to risk angering.
Thereafter, Rhoda was always somewhat kittenish toward Tollever. Now and then she wondered what would have happened had Madeline not awakened. Would she really have gone through with it? How would she have felt? But she would never know; she did not intend to get that close to trouble again; the wine had been to blame. Still, there had been something titillating about being undressed by a man other than old Pug. Rhoda preserved the memory, though she buried it deep.
Dr. Palmer Kirby was a shy, serious, ugly man in his middle-fifties. After the dinner party for him, discussing the guests with Sally Forrest, Rhoda had dismissed him as “one of these ghastly BRAINS.” Just to be sociable, she had vainly tried her usual coquettish babble on Kirby over the cocktails. “Well, since friend husband’s away, Dr. Kirby, I’ve put you on my right, and we can make HAY while the sun shines.”
“Um. On your right. Thank you.”
That had almost been the end of it. Rhoda detested such heavy men. But he had happened to say at dinner that he was going next day to a factory in Brandenburg. Rhoda offered to drive him there, simply because she had long wanted to see the medieval town, and Kirby in a sense was her husband’s guest.
On the way they had a dull, decorous lunch at an inn. Over a bottle of Moselle, Kirby warmed up and started to talk about himself and his work. At an alert question she asked him — living with Pug, Rhoda had learned to follow technical talk — Palmer Kirby suddenly smiled. It seemed to her that she had not seen him smile before. His teeth were big, and the smile showed his gums. It was a coarse male smile of knowledge and appetite, far from disagreeable, but startling in the saturnine engineer.
“Do you really care, Mrs. Henry?” said Dr. Kirby. “I’d be glad to explain the whole business, but I have a horror of boring a beautiful woman.”
The smile, the words, the tone, all disclosed that the man had missed none of her coquetry; that on the contrary, he liked her. A bit flustered, she touched a hand to her hair, tucking the waves behind her small white ears. “I assure you, it all sounds fascinating. Just use words of one syllable as much as possible.”
“Okay, but you brought this on yourself.”
He told her all about magnetic amplifiers — “magamps,” he called them — devices for precise control of voltages and currents, especially in high power. Asking one adroit question after another, Rhoda soon drew out the key facts about him. At the California Institute of Technology he had written his doctoral thesis on
