Winds of War (9 page)

“Nothing. Just a word or two about house-hunting.”

“You have a beautiful wife,” the chargé said. “Hitler likes pretty women. And that’s quite a striking suit she’s wearing. They say Hitler likes pink.”

* * *

Two days later, Henry was working at the embassy at a morning pile of mail, in an office not unlike his old cubicle in War Plans - small, crowded with steel files, and with technical books and reports. This one had a window, and the view of Hitler’s chancellery slightly jarred him each morning when he got there. His yeoman buzzed from a tiny anteroom smelling of mimeograph ink, cigarette smoke, and overbrewed coffee, like yeomen’s anterooms everywhere.

“Mrs. Henry, sir.”

It was early for Rhoda to be up. She said grumpily that a man named Knödler, a renting agent for furnished homes, had sent his card to their hotel room, with a note saying he had been advised they were looking for a house. He was waiting in the lobby for an answer.

“Well, what can you lose?” Henry said. “Go and look at his houses.”

“It seems so odd. You don’t suppose Hitler sent him?”

Pug laughed. “Maybe his aide did.”

Rhoda called back at three-thirty in the afternoon. He had just returned from lunch. “Yes?” he yawned. “What now?” The long heavy wine-bibbing meal of the diplomats was still too much for him.

“There’s this wonderful house in the Grunewald section, right on a lake. It even has a tennis court! The price is ridiculously cheap, it doesn’t come to a hundred dollars a month. Can you come right away and look at it?”

Pug went. It was a heavily built gray stone mansion roofed in red tile, set amid tall old trees on a smooth lawn sloping to the water’s edge. The tennis court was in back, beside a formal garden with flower beds in bloom around a marble fountain swarming with large goldfish. Inside the house were Oriental carpets, large gilt-framed old paintings, a walnut dining table with sixteen blue silk-upholstered chairs, and a long living room cluttered with elegant French pieces. The place had five upstairs bedrooms and three marbled baths.

The agent, a plump matter-of-fact man of thirty or so, with straight brown hair and rimless glasses, might have been an American real estate broker. Indeed he said that his brother was a realtor in Chicago and that he had once worked in his office. Pug asked him why the price was so low. The agent cheerfully explained in good English that the owner, Herr Rosenthal, was a Jewish manufacturer, and that the house was vacant because of a new ruling affecting Jews. So he badly needed a tenant.

“What’s this new ruling?” Henry asked.

“I’m not too clear on it. Something related to their owning real estate.” Knödler spoke in an entirely offhand tone, as though he were discussing a zoning regulation in Chicago.

“Does this man know you’re offering the house to us, and at what price?” Pug said.

“Naturally.”

“When can I meet him?”

“Any time you say.”

Next day Pug used his lunch hour for an appointment with the owner. After introducing them in the doorway of the house, the agent went and sat in his car. Herr Rosenthal, a gray-headed, paunchy, highly dignified individual, clad in a dark suit of excellent English cut, invited Henry inside.

“It’s a beautiful house,” Henry said in German.

Rosenthal glanced around with wistful affection, gestured to a chair, and sat down. “Thank you. We’re fond it, and have spent a lot of time and money on it.”

“Mrs. Henry and I feel awkward about leasing the place.”

“Why?” The Jew looked surprised. “You’re desirable tenants. If a lower rent would help -”

“Good lord, no! It’s an incredibly low rent. But will you actually receive the money?”

“Of course. Who else? It’s my house.” Rosenthal spoke firmly and proudly. “With the agent’s commission deducted, and certain municipal fees, I’ll receive every penny.”

Pug pointed a thumb at the front door. “Knödler told me that some new ruling compels you to rent it.”

“That won’t affect you as tenant. I assure you. Are you thinking of a two-year lease? I myself would prefer that.”

“But what’s this ruling?”

Though they were alone in an unoccupied house, Rosenthal glanced over one shoulder and then the other, and dropped his voice. “Well – it’s an emergency decree, you understand: I am sure it will eventually be cancelled. In fact I have been assured of that by people in high places. Meantime this property can be placed under a trusteeship and sold at any time without my consent. However, if there’s a tenant in residence with diplomatic immunity, that can’t be done.” Rosenthal smiled. “Hence the modest rent, Herr Commandant! You see, I’m not hiding anything.”

“May I ask you a question? Why don’t you sell out and leave Germany?”

The Jew blinked. His face remained debonair and imposing. “My family has a business here more than one hundred years old. We refine sugar. My children are at school in England, but my wife and I are comfortable enough in Berlin. We are both native Berliners.” He sighed, looked around at the snug rosewood-panelled library in which they sat, and went on: “Things are not as bad as they were in 1938. That was the worst. If there is no war, they’ll improve quickly. I’ve been told this seriously by some high officials. Old friends of mine.” Rosenthal hesitated and added, “The Führer has done remarkable things for the country. It would be foolish to deny that. I have lived through other bad times. I was shot through a lung in Belgium in 1914. A man goes through a lot in a lifetime.” He spread his hands in a graceful resigned gesture.

Victor Henry said, “Well, Mrs. Henry loves the house, but I don’t want to take advantage of anybody’s misfortune.”

“You’ll be doing just the opposite. You know that now. Two years?”

“How about one year, with an option to renew?”

At once Rosenthal stood and held out his hand. Henry rose and shook it. “We should have a drink on it perhaps,” said Rosenthal, “but we emptied the liquor closet when we left. Liquor doesn’t last long in a vacant house.”

It felt odd the first night, sleeping in the Rosenthals’ broad soft bed with its exquisite French petit-point footboard and headboard. But within a few days, the Henrys were at home in the mansion and busy with a new life. From an employment agency suggested by the agent came a maid, a cook, and a houseman-chauffeur, all first-rate servants, and – Henry assumed – all planted informers. He checked the electric wiring of the house for listening devices. The German equipment and circuits were strange to him, and he found nothing. Still, he and Rhoda walked on the lawn to discuss touchy matters.

A whirling couple of weeks passed. They saw Hitler once more at an opera gala, this time at a distance, up in a crimson damask-lined box. His white tie and tails were again too big, emphasizing his Charlie Chaplin air of a dressed-up vagrant, despite his severe stiff saluting and the cheers and applause of beautiful women and important-looking men, all stretching their necks to stare worshipfully.

At two receptions arranged for the Henrys, one at the home of the chargé and one at Colonel Forrest’s house, they met many foreign diplomats and prominent German industrialists, artists, politicians, and military men. Rhoda made a quick hit. Notwithstanding her panic before the chancellery reception, she had brought a large costly wardrobe. She sparkled in her new clothes. Her German kept improving. She liked Berlin and its people. The Germans sensed this and warmed to her, though some embassy people who detested the regime were taken aback by her cordiality to Nazis. Pug was something of a bear at these parties, standing silent unless spoken to. But Rhoda’s success covered for him.

Rhoda was not blind to the Nazi abuses. After her first walk in the Tiergarten, she refused to go back. It was far more clean, pretty, and charming than any American public park, she admitted, but the signs on the benches, JUDEN VERBOTEN, were nauseating. Seeing similar signs in restaurant windows, she would recoil and demand to go elsewhere. When Pug told her of his interview with Rosenthal, she had a deep attack of the blues: she wanted to forgo the house and even talked of getting out of Germany. “Why, imagine! Renting out that beautiful house for a song, just to keep it from being sold over his head – to some fat Nazi, no doubt, lying in wait to pick it off cheap. How horrible.” But she agreed that they had better take it. They had to live somewhere, and the house was divine.

Day by day, she reacted less to such things, seeing how commonplace they were in Berlin, and how much taken for granted. When Sally Forrest, who loathed the Nazis, took her to lunch at a restaurant where a window placard announced that Jews were not served, it seemed silly to protest. Soon she ate in such places without a second thought. In time, the Tiergarten became her favorite place for a Sunday stroll. But she insisted that anti-Semitism was a blot on an otherwise exciting, lovely land. She would say so to prominent Nazis. Some stiffened, others tolerantly smirked. A few hinted that the problem would straighten out in time. “I’m an American to the bone, going back six generations,” she would say, “and I’ll never see eye to eye with you on this business of the Jews. It’s absolutely awful.”

Most Germans seemed resigned to this independent, outspoken manner of American women and the way their husbands tolerated it; they regarded it as a national oddity.

Victor Henry stayed off the Jewish topic. Nazi Germany was a big, not readily digestible lump of new life. Most foreigners were strongly for or against the Nazis. The correspondents, as Kip Tollever had observed, hated them to a man. Within the embassy view varied. According to some, Hitler was the greatest menace to America since 1776. He would stop at nothing less than world rule, and the day he was strong enough, he would attack the United States. Others saw him as a benefactor, the only bulwark in Europe against communism. The democracies had shown themselves impotent against the spread of Bolshevist parties, they said. Hitler fought totalitarian fire with hotter and strong fire.

These judgments, either way, stood on slender bases of knowledge. Pressing his new acquaintances for facts, Victor Henry got vehement opinions and gestures. Statistics abounded in sheaves of analyses and reports, but too much of this stuff also came down to guesses, propaganda, and questionable paid intelligence. He tried to study German history late at night and found it a muddy tangle going back more than a thousand years. In it he could find no pattern and no guide at all to the problems of 1939. Just to figure out where the Nazis had come from, and what the secret was of Hitler’s hold on the Germans, seemed a task beyond him and beyond anybody he talked to; even the outlandish question of German anti-Semitism had a dozen different explanations, depending on which of any twelve Foreign Service men you asked. Commander Henry decided that he would grope uselessly if he tried to fathom these major matters in a hurry. Military capacity was something he knew about; it was a narrow but decisive aspect of Hitler’s Third Empire. Was Nazi Germany as strong as the ever-marching columns in the streets, and the throngs of uniforms in cafés, suggested? Was it all a show, no more substantial than the transparent red cheesecloth of the towering swastika banners? Deciding to take nothing for granted and to marshal facts for himself, Victor Henry dug into the job of penetrating this one puzzle.

Meanwhile Rhoda adapted merrily to diplomatic life. As she got used to her staff and to Berlin customs, her dinner parties increased in size. She invited the Grobkes to a big one that included the chargé d’affaires, a French film actress, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and a dour, stout German general named Armin von Roon, with a particularly hooked nose and an exceedingly stiff carriage. Rhoda knew none of these people well. General von Roon, for instance, she had met at Colonel Forrest’s house; and because someone had told her that he stood high in the Wehrmacht and was considered brilliant, she had made up to him. She had a gift for charming in a momentary encounter. She always looked elegant, she could be amusing or sexy without forcing either note, and she made one feel that it would be pleasant to know her better. People tended to accept her invitations.

The company was above the level of Grobke and his wife. They were dazzled and flattered, and the presence of Room all but froze them with awe. Grobke whispered to Victor Henry at one point that Roon was the real brain in Supreme Headquarters. So Pug tried to talk to Roon about the war, and found that he spoke astonishing good English. But he would utter only frosty generalities, which made the attaché think the better of him, though it yielded nothing to report.

Before the evening was out Grobke, full of wine and brandy, took Victor Henry aside and told him that the captain of the Swinemünde navy yard was making stupid difficulties, but that he was going to push the visit through, “and I’ll get your English friend in too. God damn it. I said I would and I will. These shore-based bastards just live to create trouble.”

The Henrys received one cheerless letter from Madeline, written when she arrived in Newport for the summer. Warren, as usual, did not write at all. Early in July the letter Byron had written his father at last caught up with him:

Dear Dad:

I received your letter and it threw me. I guess I gave you the wrong impression about this girl Natalie Jastrow. It’s fun to work with her, but she’s older than I am, and she was a junior Phi Bete at Radcliffe. Her best boyfriend is a Rhodes Scholar. I’m not in that league. However, I appreciate your good advice. She is really excellent company, and talking to her improves my mind. That should please you.

Dr. Jastrow has me researching the Emperor Constantine’s military campaigns. I took the job for the money, but I’m enjoying it. That whole period, when the world balance tips from paganism to Christianity, is really worth knowing, Dad. It has some parallels to our own day. I think you’ll like Dr. Jastrow’s new book. He’s just a scholar and wouldn’t know a torpedo boat from a medium tank, yet he has a way of grasping an ancient campaign and describing it to anybody can understand it and sort of picture what those times were like.