Winds of War (51 page)

“Oh my gawd, Pug, I’ll DIE!” chortled Rhoda. “I can’t POSSIBLY! I’ve practically NOTHING on underneath. Why don’t they WARN a girl!” But of course she made the slide, screaming with embarrassed delight, exposing her legs - which were very shapely - clear up to her lacy underwear. She arrived at the bottom scarlet-faced and convulsed, amid cheers and congratulations, to be welcomed by the hosts and introduced to fellow weekenders. It was a sure icebreaker, Victor Henry thought, if a trifle gross. The Germans certainly had the touch for these things.

Next day when he woke he found a green leather hunting costume laid out for him, complete with feathered hat, belt, and dagger. The men were a varied crowd: Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht officers, other bankers, the president of an electrical works, a prominent actor. Pug was the only foreigner. The jolly group took him warmly into their horseplay and joking, and then into the serious business of the hunt. Pug liked duck-hunting, but killing deer had never appealed to him. General Armin von Roon was in the party, and Pug lagged behind with the hook-nosed general, who remarked that to see a deer shot made him feel ill. In this meeting Roon was more loquacious than before. The forest was dank and cold, and like the others he had been drinking schnapps. They talked first about the United States, where as it turned out, Roon had attended the Army War College. Then the General discussed the Polish campaign, and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which he surprisingly called a disaster, because of all the ground Stalin had gained without firing a shot. His grasp of the field operations was masterly. His estimate of Hitler, Victor Henry thought, was cold-blooded and honest. Roon scarcely veiled his contempt for the master race theories of the Nazis, or for the Party itself, but he was making out a strong case for Hitler as a German leader, when shots rang out and a nearby hullabaloo drew them to join the party, ringed around a small deer lying dead !n blood-spattered snow. A ceremony ensued of horn-blowing and pushing a sprig of fir into the dead mouth over the bloody lolling tongue. Henry became separated from the general. That evening he looked for him before dinner, and was sorry to learn that Roon had been summoned back to Berlin.

After dinner, a string quartet played Beethoven in a cream-and-gold French music room, and a fat-bosomed famous soprano sang Schubert songs. The guests listened with more attention than Pug could muster; some, during the lieder, had tears in their eyes. Rhoda felt in her element, for in Washington she was a patroness of music. She sat beaming, whispering expert comments between numbers. Dancing followed, and one German after another danced with her. From the floor, she kept darting sparkling looks of gratitude at her husband, until Stöller took him in tow to a library, where the actor and Dr. Knopfmann, the head of the electrical works, sat over brandy.

As yet, on the weekend, Pug had not heard a word about the war. Conversation had stayed on personal chatter, business, or the arts.

“Ah, here is Captain Henry,” said the actor in a rich ringing voice. “What better authority do you want? Let’s put it to him.” A gray-moustached man with thick hair, he played emperors, generals, and older men in love with young women. Pug had seen his famous King Lear at the Schauspielhaus. His face just now was purple-red over his stiff collar and buckling starched shirt.

“It might embarrass him,” Dr. Knopfmann said.

“No war talk now. That’s out.” said Stöller. “This weekend is for pleasure.”

“I don’t mind,” Pug said, accepting brandy and settling in a leather chair. “What’s the question?”

“I create illusions for a living,” rumbled the actor, “and I believe illusions should be confined to the stage. And I say it is an illusion to hope that the United States will ever allow England to go down.”

“Oh, to hell with all that,” said the banker.

Dr. Knopfmann, a twinkling-eyed, round-faced man like the captain of the
Bremen
, but much shorter and fatter, said, “And I maintain that it isn’t 1917. The Americans pulled England’s chestnuts out of the fire once, and what did they get for it? A bellyful of ingratitude and repudiation. The Americans will accept the
fait accompli
. They are realists. Once Europe is normalized, we can have a hundred years of a firm Atlantic peace.”

“What do you say, Captain Henry?” the actor asked.

“The problem may never come up. You still have to lick England.”

None of the three men looked very pleased. The actor said, “Oh, I think we can assume that’s in the cards - providing the Americans don’t step in. That’s the whole argument.”

Stöller said, “Your President doesn’t try to hide his British sympathies, Victor, does he? Quite natural, in view of his Anglo-Dutch ancestry. But wouldn’t you say the people are against him, or at least sharply split?”

“Yes, but America is a strange country, Dr. Stöller. Public opinion can shift fast. Nobody should forget that, in dealing with us.”

The eyes of the Germans flickered at each other. Dr. Knopfmann said, “A shift in public opinion doesn’t just happen. It’s manufactured.”

“There’s the live nerve,” Stöller said. “And that’s what I’ve found difficult to convey even to the air marshal, who’s usually so hardheaded. Germans who haven’t been across the water are impossibly provincial about America. I’m sorry to say this goes for the Führer himself. I don’t believe he yet truly grasps the vast power of the American Jews. It’s a vital factor in the war picture.”

“Don’t exaggerate that factor,” Henry said. “You fellows tend to, and it’s a form of kidding yourselves.”

“My dear Victor, I’ve been in the United States nine times and I lived for a year in San Francisco: Who’s your Minister of the Treasury? The Jew Morgenthau. Who sits on your highest court, wielding the most influence? The Jew Frankfurter.”

He proceeded to reel off a list of Jewish officials in Washington, stale and boring to Pug from endless repetition in Nazi propaganda; and he made the usual assertion that the Jews had American finance, communications, justice, and even the Presidency in their pockets. Stöller delivered all this calmly and pleasantly. He kept repeating “
der Jude, der Jude
” without a sneer. There was no glare in his eyes, such as Pug had now and then observed when Rhoda challenged some vocal anti-Semite. The banker presented his statements as though they were the day’s stock market report.

“To begin with,” Pug replied, a bit wearily, “the Treasury post in our country has little power. It’s a minor political reward. Christians hold all the other cabinet posts. Financial power lies with the banks, the insurance companies, the oil, rail, lumber shipping, steel, and auto industries, and such. They’re wholly in Christian hands. Always have been.”

“Lehman is a banker,” said Dr. Knopfmann.

“Yes, he is. The famous exception.” Pug went on with his stock answers to stock anti-Semitism: the all but solid Christian ownership of newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, the Christian composition of Congress, the cabinet, and the executive branch, the eight Christian judges out of nine on the Supreme Court, the paramount White House influence of a Christian, Harry Hopkins, and the rest. On the faces of his hearers appeared the curious smirk of Germans when discussing Jews: condescending, facetious, and cold, with superior awareness of a very private inside joke.

Stöller said in a kindly tone, “That’s always the Jewish line, you know, how unimportant they are.”

“Would you recommend that we take away what businesses they do have? Make
Objekte
of them?”

Stöller looked surprised and laughed, not in the least offended. “You’re better informed than many Americans, Victor. It would be an excellent idea for the health of your economy. You’ll come to it sooner or later.”

“Is it your position,” the actor said earnestly, “that the Jewish question really has no bearing on America’s entry into the war?”

“I didn’t say that. Americans do react sharply to injustice and suffering.”

The smirk reappeared on the three faces, and Knopfmann said, “And your Negroes in the South?”

Pug paused” “It’s bad but it’s improving, and we don’t put them behind barbed wire.”

The actor said in a lowered voice, “That’s a political penalty. A Jew who behaves himself doesn’t go to a camp.”

Lighting a large cigar, his eyes on the match, Stöller said, “Victor speaks very diplomatically. But his connections are okay. One man who’s really in the picture is Congressman Ike Lacouture of Florida. He fought a great battle against revising the Neutrality Act.” With a sly glance at Pug, he added, “Practically in the family, isn’t he?”

This caught Pug off guild, but he said calmly, “You’re pretty well informed. That’s not exactly public knowledge.”

Stöller laughed. “The air minister knew about it. He told me. He admires Lacouture. What happened to the dance music? Ach, look at the time. How did it get to be half past one? There’s a little supper on, gentlemen, nothing elaborate –” He rose, puffing on the cigar. “The American Jews will make the greatest possible mistake, Victor, to drag in the United States. Lacouture is their friend if they’ll only listen to him. You know what the Führer said in his January speech - if they start another world war, that will be the end of them. He was in deadly earnest, I assure you.”

Aware that he was butting a stone wall, but unable to let these things pass, Pug said, “Peace or war isn’t up to the Jews. And you grossly misunderstand Lacouture.”

“Do I? But my dear Captain, what do you call the British guarantee to Poland? Politically and strategically it was frivolous, if not insane. All it did was bring in two big powers against Germany on the trivial issue of Danzig, which was what the Jews wanted. Churchill is a notorious Zionist. All this was clearly stated between the lines in Lacouture’s last speech. I tell you, men like him may still manage to restore the peace and incidentally to save the Jews from a very bad fate they seem determined to bring on themselves. Well how about an omelette and a glass of champagne?”

* * *

On Christmas Eve, Victor Henry left the embassy early to walk home. The weather was threatening, but he wanted air and exercise. Berlin was having a lugubrious Yuletide. The scrawny newspapers had no good war news, and the Russian attack on Finland was bringing little joy to Germans. The shop windows offered colorful cornucopias of appliances, clothing, toys, wines, and food, but people hurried sullenly along the cold windy streets under dark skies, hardly glancing at the mocking displays. None of the stuff was actually for sale. As Pug walked, evening fell and the blackout began. Hearing muffled Christmas songs from behind curtained windows, he could picture the Berliners sitting in dimly lit apartments in their overcoats around tinsel-draped fir trees, trying to make merry on watery beer, potatoes, and salt mackerel. At Abendruh, the Henrys had almost forgotten that there was a war on, if a dormant one, and that serious shortages existed. For Wolf Stöller there were no shortages.

Yielding to Rhoda’s urging, he had accepted an invitation to come back to Abendruh in January, though he had not enjoyed himself there. More and more, especially since his glimpse of the National Socialist leaders at Karinhall, he thought of the Germans as people he would one day have to fight. He felt hypocritical putting on the good fellow with them. But intelligence opportunities did exist at Stöller’s estate. Pug had sent home a five-page account just of his talk with General von Roon. By pretending he agreed at heart with Ike Lacouture - something Stöller already believed, because he wanted to - he could increase those opportunities. It meant being a liar, expressing ideas he thought pernicious, and abusing a man’s hospitality - a hell of a way to serve one’s country! But if Stöller was trying games with the American naval attaché, he had to take the risks. Victor Henry was mulling over all this as he strode along, muffled to his eyes against a sleety rain that was starting to fall, when out of the darkness a stooped figure approached and touched his arm.

“Captain Henry?”

“Who are you?”

“Rosenthal. You are living in my house.”

They were near a corner, and in the glow of the blue streetlight Pug saw that the Jew had lost a lot of weight; the skin of his face hung in folds, and his confident bearing had given way to a whipped and sickly look. It was a shocking change. Holding out his hand, Pug said, “Oh, yes. Hello.”

“Forgive me. My wife and I are going to be sent to Poland soon. Or at least we have heard such a rumor and we want to prepare, in case it’s true. We can’t take our things, and we were just wondering whether there are any articles in our home you and Mrs. Henry would care to buy. You could have anything you wished, and I could make you a very reasonable price.”

Pug had also heard vague stories of the “resettlement” of the Berlin Jews, a wholesale shipping-off to newly formed Polish ghettos, where conditions were, according to the reports you chose to believe, either moderately bad or fantastically horrible. It was disturbing to talk to a man actually menaced with this dark misty fate.

“You have a factory here,” he said. “Can’t your people keep an eye on your property until conditions get better?”

“The fact is I’ve sold my firm, so there’s nobody.”

Rosenthal held up the frayed lapels of his coat against the cutting sleet and wind.

“Did you sell out to the Stöller bank?”

The Jew’s face showed astonishment and timorous suspicion. “You know about these matters? Yes, the Stöller bank. I received a very fair price. Very fair.” The Jew permitted himself a single ironic glance into Henry’s eyes. “But the proceeds were tied up to settle other matters. My wife and I will be more comfortable in Poland with a little ready money. It always helps. So - perhaps the carpets - the plate, or some china?”

“Come along and talk it over with my wife. She makes all those decisions. Maybe you can have dinner with us.”

Rosenthal sadly smiled. “I don’t think so, but you’re very kind.”

Pug nodded, remembering his Gestapo-planted servants. “Herr Rosenthal, I have to repeat to you what I said when we rented your place. I don’t want to take advantage of your misfortune.”