“You’re working late yourself.”
“I’m getting to the bottom of the pile.” Slote dropped on the desk a brown envelope sealed with wax. “By the way, that came in the pouch, too. Care for some coffee?”
“You bet. Thanks.”
Pug stretched and walked up and down the room, beating his arms and stamping his feet, before he broke the seal of the envelope. There were two letters inside, one from the White House and one from the Bureau of Personnel. He hesitated, then opened the White House letter; a few sentences in Harry Hopkins’s dashed-off slanting hand filled a page:
My dear Pug—
I want to congratulate you on your new assignment, and to convey the Boss’s good wishes. He is very preoccupied with the Japanese, who are beginning to get ugly, and of course we are all watching the Russian struggle with anxiety. I still think—and pray—they’ll hold. I hope my letter reached Stalin. He’s a land crab, and he’s got to be convinced that the Channel crossing is a major task, otherwise bad faith accusations will start to fly, to Hitler’s delight. There’s been an unfortunate upturn in submarine sinkings in the Atlantic, and the Germans are cutting loose in Africa, too. All in all the good cause seems to be heading into the storm. You’ll be missed in the gray fraternity of office boys.
Harry H.
The other envelope contained a Navy letter form in telegraphic style:
MAILGRAM
FROM: THE CHIEF OF PERSONNEL.
TO: VICTOR (NONE) HENRY, CAPTAIN, U.S.N.
DETACHED ONE NOVEMBER PRESENT DUTY X PROCEED FASTEST AVAILABLE TRANSPORTATION PEARL HARBOR X REPORT CALIFORNIA (BB 64) RELIEVE CO X SUBMIT VOUCHERS OF TRAVEL EXPENSES COMBAT FOR PEARL
In bald trite Navy jargon on a flimsy yellow sheet, here was command of a battleship. And what a battleship! The California, the old Prune Barge, a ship in which he had served twice, as an ensign and as a lieutenant commander, which he knew well and loved; the ship named for his own home state, launched in 1919 and completely modernized.
Captain of the California!
Pug Henry’s first reaction was orderly and calculating. Evidently Admiral King’s staff was a trap he had escaped. In his class only Warendorf, Munson, and Brown had battleships, and Robinson had the Saratoga. His strange “gray office boy” service to the President had proved a career shortcut after all, and flag rank was suddenly and brightly back in sight.
He thought of Rhoda, because she had sweated out with him the twenty-seven-year wait for this bit of yellow tissue paper; and of Pamela, because he wanted to share his excitement right now. But he was not even sure that he would see her again in Moscow. They had parted at the railroad station with a strong handclasp, as Talky Tudsbury pleaded with the RAF pilots to take him along and simultaneously blustered at a Narkomindel man who was trying to lead him off.
Leslie Slote walked in, carrying two glass tumblers of black coffee. “Anything good?”
“New orders. Command of the California.”
“Oh? What is that?”
“A battleship.”
“A battleship?” Slote sipped coffee, looking doubtful. “Is that what you wanted next?”
“Well, it’s a change.”
“I should think you’d find it somewhat confining and—well, routine, after the sort of thing you’ve been doing. Not many naval officers—in fact not many Americans—have talked to Stalin face to face.”
“Leslie, I’m not entirely unhappy with these orders.”
“Oh! Well, then, I gather congratulations are in order. How are you coming with that report? I’m almost ready to turn in.”
“Couple of hours to go.”
“You won’t get much sleep.” Slote went out shaking his head.
Victor Henry sat drinking coffee, meditating on this little rectangle of yellow paper, the sudden irreversible verdict on his life. He could ask for no better judgment. This was the blue ribbon, the A-plus, the gold medal of naval service. Yet a nag in his spirit shadowed the marvellous news. What was it? Between sips of coffee, probing his own heart, Pug found out something surprising about himself.
After more than twenty-five years, he had slightly outgrown his career drive. He was interested in the war. At War Plans, he had been waging a vigilant fight to keep priorities high for the landing craft program. “Pug’s girlfriend Elsie” was no joke; but now he could no longer carry on that fight. Mike Drayton would take over. Mike was an excellent officer, a commander with a solid background in BuShips and an extraordinary knowledge of the country’s industries. But he was not pugnacious and he lacked rank. “Elsie” was going to lose ground.
That could not last. One day the crunch would come—Henry was sure of this from his operational studies—and landing craft would shoot to the top of the priority list, and a frantic scramble would ensue to get them made. The war effort might suffer; conceivably a marginal landing operation would fail, with bad loss of life. But it was absurd, Pug thought, to feel the weight of the war on his shoulders, and to become as obsessed by “Elsie” as he had once been by his own career. That was swinging to the other extreme. The war was bigger than anybody; he was a small replaceable cog. One way or another, sooner or later, the United States would produce enough landing craft to beat Hitler. Meantime he had to go to his battleship.
Taking a lamp to a globe standing in the corner, he used thumb and forefinger to step off the distance from Moscow to Pearl Harbor. He found it made surprisingly little difference whether he travelled west or east; the two places were at opposite ends of the earth. But which direction would offer less delay and hazard? Westward lay all the good fast transportation, across the Atlantic and the United States, and then the Pan Am hop from San Francisco to Honolulu. Duck soup! Unfortunately, in that direction the fiery barrier of the war now made Europe impassable from Spitzbergen to Sicily, and from Moscow to the English Channel. Tenuous lanes through the fire remained: the North Sea convoy run, and a chancy air connection between Stockholm and London. In theory, if he could get to Stockholm, he could even pass via Berlin and Madrid to Lisbon; but Captain Victor Henry had no intention of setting foot in Germany or German-dominated soil on his way to take command of the California. His coarsely insulting last remark to Wolf Stôller about Göring undoubtedly was on the record. The Germans, now so close to world victory, might enjoy laying hands on Victor Henry.
Well then, eastward? Slow uncertain Russian trains, jammed already with fugitives from the German attack; occasional, even more uncertain Russian planes. But the way was peaceful and a bit shorter, especially from Kuibyshev, five hundred miles nearer Pearl Harbor. Yes, he thought, he had better start arranging now with the distraught Russians to make his way around the world eastward.
“You look like a mad conqueror,” he heard Slote say.
“Huh?”
“Gloating over the globe by lamplight. You just need the little black moustache.” The Foreign Service officer leaned in the doorway, running a finger along his smoking pipe. “We have a visitor out here.”
By the desk under the chandelier, a Russian soldier stood slapping snow from his long khaki coat. He took off his peaked army cap to shake it by an earflap, and Pug was startled to recognize Jochanan Jastrow. The man’s hair was clipped short now; he had a scraggly growth of brown beard flecked with gray, and he looked very coarse and dirty. He explained in German, answering Slote’s questions, that in order to get warm clothes and some legal papers, he had passed himself off as a soldier from a routed unit. The Moscow authorities were collecting such refugees and stragglers and forming them into emergency work battalions, with few questions asked. He had had a set of false papers; a police inspector in an air raid shelter had queried him and picked them up, but he had managed to escape from the man. More forged papers could be bought—there was a regular market for them—but he preferred army identification right now.
“In this country, sir,” he said, “a person who doesn’t have papers is worse off than a dog or a pig. A dog or a pig can eat and sleep wi
thout papers. A man can’t. After a while maybe there will be a change for the better in the war, and I can find my family.”
“Where are they?” Slote said.
“With the partisans, near Smolensk. My son’s wife got sick and I left them there.”
Pug said, “You’re not planning to go back through the German lines?”
Natalie’s relative gave him a strange crooked smile. One side of the bearded mouth curled upward, uncovering white teeth, while the other side remained fixed and grim. “Russia is a very big country, Captain Henry, full of woods. For their own safety the Germans stick close to the main roads. I have already passed through the lines. Thousands of people have done it.” He turned to Leslie Slote. “So. But I heard all the foreigners are leaving Moscow. I wanted to find out what happened to the documents I gave you.”
The Foreign Service officer and Victor Henry looked at each other, with much the same expressions of hesitation and embarrassment. “Well, I showed the documents to an important American newspaperman,” Slote said. “He sent a long story to the United States, but I’m afraid it ended up as a little item in the back pages. You see, there have been so many stories of German atrocities!”
“Stories like this?” exclaimed Jastrow, his bristly face showing anger and disappointment. “Children, mothers, old people? In their homes, not doing anything, taken out in the middle of the night to a hole dug in the woods and shot to death?”
“Most horrible. Perhaps the army commander in the Minsk area was an insanely fanatical Nazi.”
“But the shooters were not soldiers. I told you that. They had different uniforms. And here in Moscow, people from the Ukraine and from up north are telling the same stories. This thing is happening all over, sir, not just in Minsk. Please forgive me, but why did you not give those documents to your ambassador? I am sure he would have sent them to President Roosevelt.”
“I did bring your papers to his attention. I’m sorry to say that our intelligence people questioned their authenticity.”
“What? But sir, that is incredible! I can bring you ten people tomorrow who will tell such stories, and give affidavits. Some of them are eyewitnesses who escaped from the very trucks the Germans used, and—”
In a tone of driven exasperation, Slote broke in, “Look here, my dear chap, I’m one man almost alone now”—he gestured at his piled-up desk—“responsible for all my country’s affairs in Moscow. I really think I have done my best for you. In showing your documents to a newspaperman after our intelligence people had questioned them, I violated instructions. I received a serious reprimand. In fact, I took this dirty job of staying on in Moscow mainly to put myself right. Your story is ghastly, and I myself am unhappily inclined to believe it, but it’s only a small part of this hideous war. Moscow may fall in the next seventy-two hours, and that’s my main business now. I’m sorry.”
Jastrow took the outburst without blinking and answered in a quiet, dogged tone, “I am very sorry about the reprimand. However, if President Roosevelt could only find out about this crazy slaughter of innocent people, he would put a stop to it. He is the only man in the whole world who can do it.” Jastrow turned to Victor Henry. “Do you know of any other way, Captain, that the story could possibly be told to President Roosevelt?”
Pug was already picturing himself writing a letter to the President. He had seen several stories like Jastrow’s in print, and even more gruesome official reports about German slaughter of Russian partisans and villagers. Such a letter would be futile; worse than futile—unprofessional. It would be nagging the President about things he suspected or knew. He, Victor Henry, was a naval officer, on temporary detached duty in the Soviet Union for Lend-Lease matters. Such a letter would be the sort of impertinence Byron had offered at the President’s table; but Byron at least had been a youngster concerned about his own wife.
Victor Henry answered Jastrow by turning his hands upward.
With a melancholy nod, Jastrow said, “Naturally, it is outside your province. Have you had news of Natalie? Have she and Aaron gone home yet?”
Pug pulled the snapshot from his breast pocket. “This picture was taken several weeks ago. Maybe by now they’re out. I expect so.”
Holding the picture to the light, Jastrow’s face broke into an incongruously warm and gentle beam. “Why, it is a small Byron. God bless him and keep him safe from harm.” Peering at Victor Henry, whose eyes misted at these few sentimental words in German, he handed back the photograph. “Well, you gentlemen have been gracious to me. I have done the best I could to tell you what happened in Minsk. Maybe my documents will reach the right person one day. They are true, and I pray to God somebody soon finds a way to tell President Roosevelt what is happening. He must rescue the Jews out of the Germans’ claws. Only he can do it.”
With this Jochanan Jastrow gave them his mirthless crooked smile and faded into the darkness outside the small glow of the kerosene lamp.
When his alarm clock woke him after an hour or two of exhausted slumber, Pug scarcely remembered writing the letter which lay on the desk beside the clock, scrawled on two sheets of Hotel National paper. The tiny barren room was freezing cold, though the windows were sealed shut. He threw on a heavy woollen bathrobe he had bought in London, and an extra pair of warm socks, and sat at the desk to reread the letter.
My dear Mr. President:
Command of the California fulfills my life’s ambitions. I can only try to serve in a way that will justify this trust.
Mr. Hopkins is receiving a report on a visit I made at his request to the front outside Moscow. I put in all the trivial details which might not be worthy of your attention. My basic impression was confirmed that the Russians will probably hold the Germans and in time drive them out. But the cost will be terrible. Meantime they need and deserve all the aid we can send them, as quickly as possible. For our own selfish purposes, we can’t make better use of arms, because they are killing large numbers of Germans. I saw many of the dead ones.
I also take the liberty to mention that the embassy here has recently received documentary evidence of an almost incredible mass slaying of Jews outside the city of Minsk by some German paramilitary units. I remember your saying on the Augusta that scolding Hitler any further would be humiliating and futile. But in Europe, America is regarded as the last bastion of humanity; and you, Mr. President, are to these people the voice of the righteous God on earth. It’s a heavy burden, but nevertheless that is the fact.
I venture to suggest that you ask to see this material about Minsk yourself. The Germans will think twice about proceeding with such outrages if you denounce them to the world and back up your condemnation with documentary evidence. Also, world opinion might be turned once and for all against the Hitler government.
Respectfully yours,
Victor Henry, Captain, U.S.N.
In this fresh look after a sleep, the letter struck him most forcibly as an ill-considered communication, for which the right place was the wastebasket. The first two paragraphs were innocuous; but the President’s sharp eye would at once detect that they were padding. The rest, the meat of the letter, was superfluous and even offensive. He was advising the President to go over the heads of everybody in the State Department, including his own ambassador in the Soviet Union, to demand a look at some documents. The odds against Roosevelt’s actually doing this were prohibitive; and his opinion of Victor Henry would certainly drop. He would at once recall that Henry had a Jewish daughter-in-law, about whom there had been trouble. And Pug did not even know that the documents were authentic. Jastrow might have been sent by the NKVD, as Tudsbury thought, to plant the material for American consumption. The man seemed genuine, but that proved nothing.
In his career Henry had drafted dozens of wrongly conceived letters to get a problem out of his system, and then had discarded the letters. He had a hard editorial eye, and an unerring sense of professional self-preservation. He threw the letter face down on the desk as a heavy rapping came a
t the door. There stood Alistair Tudsbury, leaning on his cane in the doorway, enormous and red-faced in an astrakhan hat and a long brown fur coat. “Thank God you’re here, old friend.” The correspondent limped to an armchair and sat in a dusty shaft of sunlight, stretching out his bad leg. “Sorry to crash in on you like this, but—I say, you’re all right, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes. I’m just great.” Pug was rubbing his face hard with both hands. “I was up all night writing a report. What’s doing?”
The correspondent’s bulging eyes probed at him. “This is going to be difficult, but here it is straight. Are you and Pamela lovers?”
“What!” Pug was too startled, and too tired, to be either angry or amused. “Why, no! Of course not.”
“Well, funnily enough, I didn’t think you were. That makes it all the more awkward and baffling. Pamela has just told me flatly that she’s not returning to London unless you’re going there! If you’re off to Kuibyshev, she means to tag along and work for the British embassy or something. Now this is wild nonsense!” Tudsbury burst out, banging the cane on the floor. “To begin with, I know the Nark won’t have it. But she’s turned to stone. There’s no reasoning with her. And those RAF fellows are flying off at noon, and they’ve got space for both of us.”
“Where is she now?”
“Why, she’s gone out for a stroll in Red Square, of all things! Can you imagine? Won’t even pack, you see. Victor, I’m not coming the indignant father on you, you do realize that, don’t you?” Talky Tudsbury appeared in a manic state of verbosity, even for him. “That would be a most absurd stance for me to take. Hell, I’ve done exactly as I pleased in these little matters myself all my life. She’d laugh in my face if I tried to talk morality to her. But what about common sense? You don’t want her trailing after you, a happily married man, do you? It’s so embarrassing! In any case, what about Ted Gallard? Why, she told me to tell him it was all off! When I said I’d do nothing of the sort, she sat down and scribbled a letter for him and threw it in my bag. I tell you I’m having the devil of a time with Pam.”