The Hour of the Cat (10 page)

 

 

His secretary entered with a bottle of aspirin and a glass of water on a teak tray. She rested the tray on his desk along with a folder containing the morning mail. “They want to make you a star.”

“Who wants to make me a star?'

“Warner Brothers. It's the first letter.”

He took the folder to the window and stood while he read. The pain ebbed slightly. Addressed to “Colonel William J. Donovan,” the letter was a follow-up to a phone call from a studio executive informing him that Warner Bros. was considering a film about the wartime exploits of the 69th Regiment: “As the distinguished commander of that outfit, as well as the most highly decorated American officer in the Great War and winner of the Medal of Honor, you, Colonel Donovan, would be prominently featured.” The letter asked his technical assistance in developing the idea. “While we are only in the initial stages, we are hopeful this project will be brought to completion.”

Till now, films about the war had been scant. America had its fill of O
ver There
. The Depression concentrated attention O
ver Here, Over Here.
The second page contained some preliminary information intended, the executive wrote, “to convey the seriousness with which we approach the project.” Academy Award-winning screenwriter Norman Reilly Raine and director William Keighley, the team responsible for the current Warner Bros. hit
The Adventures of Robin Hood,
were being considered for the film.

There was no mention of who'd be cast in the movie, and Donovan knew there was no telling. With God, said Saint Augustine, all things were possible. How much more so with Hollywood, where no truth, physical, spiritual, or historical, would be allowed to stand in the way of box-office success? Who'd be cast as Father Duffy, the regimental chaplain, a restless intellectual dismissed from his post at the archdiocesan seminary for his theological explorations, and a priest utterly unjudgmental of the moral failings of the troops he ministered to? Probably be reduced to a pious silhouette. Pat O'Brien, perhaps?
All Quiet on the Western Front
meets
Boys Town
, another Warner Bros. hit. James Cagney as William Donovan? Or Errol Flynn? Or borrow Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy from MGM?

“How about your autograph?” His secretary returned with another folder that contained the letters he'd dictated to her first thing that morning.

“You mean my signature.” Sitting behind his desk, he scribbled his name at the bottom of each.

“No, your
autograph
. Looks like you're on your way to stardom.” She had come to work for him after his defeat in the 1932 New York gubernatorial election with the caveat that her true profession was acting. As soon as she landed a role, she'd be gone. That was six years ago. She took the folder back to her desk, closing the door harder than usual.

He switched on the intercom. “Anything comes of this movie business, I'll see to it that the Warner Brothers are alerted to your theatrical aspirations.”

“You know what I mean.”

“My
aspirations
are to the legitimate stage, not an assembly line in some Hollywood movie factory in hopes of becoming ‘The loftiest star of unascended heaven; pinnacled dim in the intense inane.'”

“Shakespeare?”

“Shelley.” A sharp crack signaled she'd switched off the intercom.

If truly disinterested, she was in a small, ever-dwindling minority. Donovan saw it on his travels. The lure was everywhere: the spectacle and stars of filmdom, an outsized, nonstop rebuttal of all the quotidian misery and ordinary squalor that had overwhelmed the country. A few nights earlier, the day after his wife left on a trip to California, he went for a walk and was halfway across town when it began to rain, a convenient excuse to duck into a movie theater. He hardly cared what was playing as long as it offered some diversion from worrying about his wife's long spells of paralyzing sadness. He caught the second feature,
Racket Busters,
a low-budget Warner Bros. picture with Humphrey Bogart in his usual role as a villain and George Brent as an honest trucker trying to resist the grip of the mob.

It proved diverting enough, though the suave George Brent seemed particularly unconvincing as a truck driver. The chief racket buster, played by Walter Abel, embodied yet another tribute to the growing fame of the real-life nemesis of the mob, Tom Dewey, the man who'd nailed Lucky Luciano, broken up a string of rackets, and was hot on the tail of the Tammany Tiger and its corrupt politicians.

Donovan was struck by how the audience clapped at the end, applause directed not to the actors on the screen but to the boy wonder from Owosso, Michigan, the crusader who'd inspired anti-corruption drives across America. The year before, it seemed as if Dewey were ready to lay down the mantle of special prosecutor in charge of breaking the hold of the rackets on businesses and entire industries for a lucrative position in private practice. Foster Dulles crowed loudly about how he'd hooked Dewey for Sullivan & Cromwell with an offer of $150,000 a year. But Dewey changed his mind and announced he was running for D.A. His work wasn't done. Crooks, grafters, and murderers still abounded. The decisive victory had yet to be won. His picture seemed to be everywhere, his voice, too, in thundering radio addresses. It was said you could tell where he was from several blocks away by the intensity of the flash bulbs.

Dewey was easier to admire, Donovan came to realize, than to be around. Cocky and aloof, he wore a dismissive smirk that followed the thin horizontal line of his mustache. “Bill,” Dewey said when Dulles introduced him to Donovan, “if I ever run for governor of New York, I don't intend to get trounced the way you were.” Now it seemed likely he'd not only have his shot at governor but even higher.

“Tom is an authentic American hero,” Dulles said at that first meeting. “If anyone can end the long reign of Democratic misrule, it's he.
Vir horae.
The man of the hour!” He lifted his glass in a toast. Dewey held up his glass as well. A toast to himself. A full smile exposed the space between his front teeth and made his young face seem almost adolescent. His eyes glowed. With what? Ambition? Scotch? Amid the crowded, stuffy ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel, he remained cool and self-assured, off by himself, pinnacled on some dim and distant peak.

Donovan's secretary was in front of his desk. He hadn't heard her return. She placed a letter on his desk. It was postmarked London. “A Mr. Anderson is requesting a meeting with you. He claims you know him.” She left without another word, her pique unspoken but palpable.

He recognized the name immediately, though Anderson thought he wouldn't:
“Perhaps you don't remember me, but
. . .
”
It was either a typical example of British self-deprecation or more likely the reflexive cover of a professional intelligence officer, in which capacity he was serving when Donovan first met him, near the end of the war. The two weeks of instruction had come as a much-welcomed respite from the trenches. Though it was the early autumn of 1918 and the war's end was less than two months away, the Allies seemed a long way from decisive victory, with the Germans, sensing their backs were to the wall, still fighting like demons. The American officers were told they'd been selected for special training in “advanced field tactics.”

When they arrived at the chateau where they were quartered, it was revealed they'd been chosen for schooling by the intelligence service of the British Army. “The British are the best in the world at such things,” said the divisional commander, Douglas MacArthur, who made a brief appearance. “Consider yourselves honored.”

Major Ian Anderson was in charge. He instructed them not only in debriefing German prisoners, extracting valuable bits of truth from the deliberate lies and confused misreporting, but also in searching out the disgruntled prisoners who, with proper encouragement, would tell everything they knew and might even inform on their fellow prisoners and provide added information. “The whole genius of any proper intelligence operation,” he said, “is in spinning a web of relationships that gives you entry to the minds and souls of your opponents.” He made a point of eating each night with Donovan and bringing along a bottle of port, which his American companion never touched
.

On their last evening together, Anderson was blunt. “The Hindenburg Line is guarded on its flanks by the Michael, Wotan, Hermann and Kriemhilde lines, all of them baptized with good Wagnerian names and properly symbolic of the bloodbath that will occur when we storm them.” Anderson was sure the Allies would eventually triumph but less sure of what would follow. “Once upon a time, Donovan, I was a history professor by trade, and there's no greater barrier to ordinary human happiness than exposure to too much history. That's why you Americans are so optimistic. Europe has so much history crammed into so small a space, and you have so little in so large.”

Anderson finished the bottle of port that last evening. He recounted his experience at the Somme two years before, when he'd been shot and gassed. “It was done like an assembly line,” he said. “Row after row cut to pieces. Two hundred battalions, 100,000 men thrown against the German position. We weren't so much soldiers as part of a new manufacturing process, industrialized murder. 20,000 killed and 40,000 wounded that first day, ground up with machine guns and high explosives, hung up on barbed wire, smothered with gas.”

“Perhaps we've made war too terrible to fight.”

“History says otherwise.” Anderson slurred his words. “We've turned science to the service of mass murder. We've yet to see what final place it will lead us.”

In his letter, Anderson rambled on for several paragraphs about his present travels in Europe as a freelance journalist. Again, Donovan thought he was either being typically British, expressing the national passion for commenting on the manners and customs of the world, or reinforcing his false credentials. At last Anderson got to the point, or what he pretended was the point: “I would be grateful for the opportunity to interview you for an article I'm writing on the exploits of the American Expeditionary Force in the Great War.”

There'd always been something odd about Anderson, not merely eccentric, but an air of the mystical and exotic. Perhaps he'd been raised in India or some other part of the empire where he'd been touched by the beliefs of the East. It was known to happen among Brits far from home. Whatever Anderson's reason for coming, Donovan looked forward to seeing him again. They had the bond of having served together in the war, a tie that neither distance nor time could erase. He scribbled a note instructing his secretary to schedule a meeting the next month, when he returned from one of his periodic visits with the firm's banking and industrial clients in Chicago and Detroit, a solid corps of orthodox Republicans more eager to discuss politics than business, and how best to drive “that man”—some were so filled with loathing for Franklin Roosevelt they carefully avoided using his name—from the White House before he involved the country in another war; or used such a crisis to do the unthinkable, an act without precedent in the history of the Republic, and seek a third term.

Doctor I. is among the minority excluded from participation in the new Germany. A woman of delicate beauty, an accomplished medical specialist, former resident of a prestigious research institution as well as wife of a physician who is a decorated war veteran, Doctor I. is a Jew. Though living close to the bustle and excitement of Berlin, she rarely pays a visit to town. Instead, she spends most of her days in a villa, in the bosky suburb of Wannsee, where she and her husband reside. Even in private, she hesitates to criticize the actions of the National Socialist regime. “Germany is entitled to whatever form of government it wishes,” she says. Her only desire is to leave, which, she explains, has been temporarily complicated by her former political associations with the now-banned Communist Party. Strolling in her garden, amid the chill of an autumn-laden evening mist, she pulls her sweater close around her thin frame. “Ideally,” she says, “if things had turned out differently, I couldn't imagine leaving Berlin. But all I wish today is to go to a city such as New York and resume my research undisturbed.” Doctor I. shivers slightly and continues her walk, into the night, into the fog.

—IAN ANDERSON,
Travels in the New Germany

F
ACED WITH THE drudgery of reports and requisitions, Canaris grew drowsy. Lately, he'd found it easier to sleep in the day. The night before, Erika awoke and saw him sitting in the chair, staring at her. She sputtered a reproach.
Willi, come to bed. It's already so late.
He lay down beside her for what seemed an interminable time before he felt himself drifting off. He hoped he wouldn't have one of his nightmares and disturb her with his fitful muttering and crying.

He told Gresser to hold his calls. He pulled the curtains shut, the new ones issued in case of air raids, and lay on the couch. The breeze he'd felt during his walk on the Embankment pushed the curtains and momentarily held them apart. A shaft of light fell across his desk and touched the gold cigarette lighter Erika gave him for their first anniversary. Engraved beneath the date of their wedding was
Wie geht's?
A private joke.
How's it going?
That first night of their honeymoon, almost twenty years ago, in the old inn on the Baltic, they barely slept, talking and making love till dawn, and didn't leave their room until lunch the next day. The old waiter winked at them, said with a knowing grin,
Wie geht's?
They all laughed, even Erika, her face red with embarrassment.