account of a vast fictitious air victory; twenty-five British bombers shot down over Helgoland. Pug knew that the chances of his ever meeting Count Ciano again were remote, but he would have given much to chat with him again about the
Also, when Rhoda learned of Pug’s promotion she came out of her blues as though by shock. Not another peep did she utter about Karinhall. She proceeded to give him the honeymoon treatment, and they had a happy week or so. His account of Natalie Jastrow fascinated and appalled her. “Sounds to me as though our only hope is that she’ll come to her senses and drop Briny,” she said.
Karinhall looked like a federal penitentiary built in the style of a hunting lodge. It sat in a game preserve about two hours’ drive from Berlin, a wilderness of small bare trees and green firs mantled in snow. Off the autobahn, the approach ran through heavy gates electrically controlled steel and concrete fences jagged with icicles, and a gauntlet of machine-gun-bearing Luftwaffe sentinels whose breaths smoked as they shouted challenges. Just as the car turned a corner and they caught a glimpse of the grandiose timber and stone building, a deer with big frightened eyes bounded across the road. The San Francisco banker no longer wore his automatic smile. His mouth was tightly pursed, and the soft brown Italian eyes were open wide and darting here and there, rather like the deer’s.
In the vaulted banquet room, amid a dazzling rush of uniformed Nazis and their white-shouldered women — some lovely, some grossly fat, all brilliantly gowned and heavily gemmed — Adolf Hitler was playing with the little Goring girl. A string orchestra lost in a corner of the marble-paved expanse was murmuring Mozart. Great logs flamed in a fireplace with a triangular stone pediment soaring to the ceiling, and on a carved heavy table stretching the entire length of the room an untouched banquet lay piles. Rich smells hung in the air: wood smoke, cigar smoke, roast meat, French perfume. The happy, excited crowd of eminent Germans were laughing, cooing, clapping hands, their eyes shining at their Leader in his plain field-gray coat and black trousers as he held the beautiful white-clad child in his arms, talking to her, teasing her with a cake. Goring and his statuesque wife, both ablaze in operatic finery and jewelry, the man more showy than the woman, stood near, beaming with soft affectionate pride. Suddenly the little girl kissed the Fuhrer on his big pale nose, and he laughed and gave her the cake. A cheer went up, everybody applauded, and women wiped their eyes.
“The Fuhrer is so wonderful,” said the Luftwaffe officer accompanying the two Americans, a small dark aviator wearing the diamond-studded cross of the Condor Legion. “Ach, if he could only marry! He loves children.”
And to Pug Henry, also, there was something appealing about Hitler: his shy smile acknowledging the applause, the jocular reluctance with which he handed the girl to her ecstatic mother, his wistful shrug as he slapped Goring’s back, like any bachelor congratulating a luckier man. At this moment Hitler had a naive, almost mushy charm.
The Gorings escorted Hitler to the table, and this signalled a general swarming toward the buffet. A troop of lackeys in blue and gold livery marched in, setting up gilt tables and chairs, helping the guests to food, pouring the wine, bowing and bowing. Guided by the Luftwaffe officer, he and Gianelli landed at a table with a banker named Wolf Stoller, who hailed the American financier as an old acquaintance: a slight Teuton in his fifties, with sandy hair plastered close to his head. The wife, an ashen-haired beauty, had eyes that glittered clear blue like the large diamonds on her neck, her arms, her fingers, and her ears.
By chance, Victor Henry had just written a short report on Stoller and knew a lot about him. Stoller’s bank was the chief conduit by which Goring was amassing his riches. Stoller’s specialty was acquiring
In the queer Germany of 1939, which Victor Henry was just beginning to understand, there was much stress on legality in looting the Jews. Outright confiscation or violence were rare. New codes of law dating from 1936 simply made it hard for them to do business; and month by month rulings came out making it ever harder. Jewish firms couldn’t get import or export licenses or raw materials. Their use of railroad and shipping was restricted. Conditions kept tightening until they had no course but to sell out. A market flourished in such
All this Pug had learned from the American radio commentator in Berlin, Fred Fearing, who had been at some pains to dig it up. Fearing recounted it to him with deep anger, the more so as he couldn’t broadcast the story. The Germans claimed that any report of unfair treatment of the Jews was paid Allied propaganda. The Jewish laws aimed simply at restricting this minority, they said, to its due share in Germany’s economy.
Pug had more or less shut his mind to the Jewish problem, so as to focus on the military judgments which were his job. Jews had become all but invisible in Berlin, except in their special shopping hours, when, pallid and harried, they briefly filled the stores and then again faded from sight. The oppression was not a highly visible affair; Pug had never seen even the outside of a concentration camp. He had observed the signs on benches and restaurants, the white-faced worried wretches pulled off trains and airplanes, an occasional broken window or old charred synagogue, and once a bad business of a man beaten bloody in the zoo by three boys in Hitler youth uniforms, while the man’s wife wept and screamed and two policemen stood by laughing. But Fearing’s account was his first technical insight into German anti-Semitism. At bottom its purpose, in Fearing’s view, was just robbery, which was appalling but at least rational. Pug felt a qualm when Wolf Stoller with a cultured bow offered his hand, but of course he took it; and soon there they sat eating together and toasting each other in Moselle, Riesling, and champagne.
Stoller was a cordial, clever German, in every way indistinguishable from the hundreds that Victor Henry had met in the military and industrial worlds and at social gatherings. He spoke a fine English. His countenance was open and hearty. He made bright jokes, including bold pleasantries about Goring’s corpulence and theatrical uniforms. He expressed deep regard for the United States (he especially loved San Francisco) and melancholy regret that its relations with Germany were not better. In fact, could he not do something to improve them, he said, by inviting Gianelli and the Henrys for a weekend at his estate? It was no Karinhall, but he could promise them good company. Captain Henry might have the luck to shoot a deer. Game was outside the meat ration, and some venison might be very welcome to Mrs. Henry! The banker’s wife, touching Pug’s hand with her cool jewelled white fingers, crinkled her blue eyes at him in invitation. She had heard that Mrs. Henry was the most elegant and attractive wife in the American diplomatic mission, and she longed to meet her.
Gianelli declined; he had to start his return journey in the morning. Officially there was every reason for Victor Henry to accept. Part of his job was to penetrate influential levels of Germans. He had no stomach for Stoller, but it occurred to him that here was a chance to give Rhoda the kind of fun she complained of missing. There was no telling good Germans from bad Germans. Stoller conceivably might be working for Goring under duress, though his wife in consequence dripped diamonds. Pug said he would come. The look the Stollers exchanged convinced him that none of this was casual. They were cultivating him.
Stoller took the two Americans on a tour of Karinhall. Again Pug had the feeling that Nazi grandeur usually woke in him: the Hollywood impression, the sense of ephemeral flamboyant make-believe, which persisted no matter how vast and solid the structures, how high the ceilings, how elaborate the decorations, how costly the art. The corridors and rooms of Karinhall seemed to go on for miles. Glass cases by the dozens displayed solid gold objects crusted with gems — vases, crosses, maces’ swords, busts, batons, medals, books, globes — tributes to the field marshal from steel corporations, cities, and foreign governments on his birthday, his wedding, the birth of a child, the return of the Condor Legion from Spain. Italian and Dutch old masters crowded the walls, interspersed with the vapid nudes of living Nazi-approved painters. Other rooms with nobody in them, almost as vast and ornate as the banquet hall, were hung with tapestries and flags, walled in wood, filled with statuary and jewelled suits of armor. Yet it all might almost have been papier-mache and canvas. Even the food on the banquet table had looked like a Cecil B. De Mille feast, and the pink meat inside the pig might instead have been wax or plaster. But Victor Henry well knew that he was looking at an immense treasure, mostly booty collected through Dr. Stoller. Moral
