The ambassador said, “I sympathize, but be sure to come to our party tonight, Pam. Best spot for watching the victory fireworks.”
In the car Pam asked Rule, “What victory?”
“Why, the Kursk salient. You know about it, surely.”
“Kursk didn’t get much play in the States. Sicily’s been the big story.”
“No doubt, typical Yank editing. Sicily! It toppled Mussolini, but militarily it was a sideshow. Kursk was the biggest tank battle of all time, Pamela, the true turn of the war.”
“Wasn’t it weeks ago, Phil?”
“The breakthrough, yes. The counterattack swept into Orel and Belgorod yesterday. Those were the key German strong points of the salient, and the backbone of Jerry’s line is broken at last. Stalin’s ordered the first victory salute of the war, a hundred and twenty artillery salvos. It’ll really be something.”
“Well, I’d better come to the party.”
“Why, you’ve got to.”
“I’m perishing for sleep, and I feel rotten.”
“Too bad. The Narkomindel’s taking out the foreign press on a tour of the battlefields tomorrow. We’ll be on the hop for a week. You can’t miss that, either.”
Pamela groaned.
“Incidentally, the whole Yank mission’s coming to the embassy to watch the fireworks, but Captain Henry won’t be there.”
“Oh, won’t he? You know him, then?”
“Of course. Short, athletic-looking, fifty or so. A bit dour, what? Doesn’t say much.”
“That’s the man. Is he the naval attaché?”
“No, that’s Captain Joyce. Henry does special military liaison. The inside word is that he’s Hopkins’s man in Moscow. Right now he’s off in Siberia.”
“Just as well.”
“Why?”
“Because I look like death.”
“Now, Pam, you look smashing.” He touched her arm.
She pulled it away. “How’s your wife?”
“Valentina? Fine, I guess. She’s out touring the front with her ballet group. She dances on flatcars, on the backs of trucks, on air strips, wherever she can do a leap without breaking an ankle.”
The suite at the Metropole was as Philip Rule had described it. The drawing room contained a grand piano, a vast Persian rug, and a cluttered array of very poor statues. Pamela said, peering into the bathroom, “Look at that tub! I shall be doing laps.”
“Do you want the suite?”
“Yes, whatever it costs.”
“I’ll arrange it. And if you’ll give me your papers, I’ll check you in at the Nark for the battlefield tour. Suppose I call for you at half past ten? The guns and fireworks go off at midnight.”
She was taking off her hat at a spotty mirror, and behind her he was frankly admiring her. Rule was going to fat, his blond hair was much thinner, his nose seemed bigger and broader. Except as a disagreeable memory, he meant nothing to her. Since the episode in the rainstorm on Christmas Eve in Singapore, she felt squeamish at being touched by him, that was all. She knew she still attracted him, but that was his problem, not hers. Kept at a distance, Philip Rule was quite tame, even helpful. She thought of his flowery eulogy for her father at the Alexandria cemetery: An Englishman’s Englishman, a reporter’s reporter, a bard with a press card, singing the dirge of Empire to the thrilling beat of a triumphal march.
She turned and with an effort gave him her hand. “You are kind, Phil. See you at ten-thirty.”
Pamela was used to being undressed by men’s glances, but a stripping by female eyes was a novelty. The Russian girls at the British embassy party stared her up and down, hair to shoes. She might have been a model, paid to go on display under hard scrutiny. There was no bitchiness in the looks, no deliberate rudeness, only intense wistful curiosity; and no wonder, considering their evening dresses; some long, some short, some flouncy, some tight, all atrociously cut and hideously colored.
Men soon surrounded Pam: Western correspondents, officers and diplomats relishing the sight of a chic woman from their world, and Russian officers in uniforms as smart as their women’s dresses were dowdy, silently gazing at Pamela as at an objet d’art worth millions. The long wood-panelled room was not at all crowded by the forty or fifty guests, many clustered at a silver punch bowl, others dancing to an American jazz record on a bared patch of parquet floor, the rest talking and laughing, glasses in hand.
A big handsome young Russian officer, strung with medals and very fresh-faced, broke through the circle around Pamela and asked her in stumbling English to dance. Liking his nerve and his smile, she nodded. He was a very bad dancer, like herself, but the delight on his healthy red face at holding the beautiful Englishwoman by the waist, at an extremely respectful distance, charmed her.
“What are you doing in the war?” she asked, straining her rusty Russian to compose the sentence.
“Ubivayu nemtsev!” he returned, then hesitantly translated, “I — killing Chormans.”
“I see. Lovely.”
He nodded with a savage grin, eyes and teeth gleaming.
Philip Rule waited at the edge of the dance floor with two glasses of punch. When the record ended the Russian gave up Pamela with a bow. “That’s one of their great tank commanders,” said Rule. “He fought at Kursk.”
“Really? He’s hardly more than a boy.”
“Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.”
Rule was slipping, thought Pamela. Five years ago he would not have uttered the bromide with an air of saying something clever. Another record began: “Lili Marlene.” They looked in each other’s eyes. For Pamela, this song meant North Africa, and the death of her father. Rule said, “Strange, isn’t it? The only decent war song of this whole bloody holocaust. A cheap weepy Hun ballad.” He took the glass from her hand. “What the hell, Pamela, let’s dance.”
“Oh, all right.”
To Pug Henry, who was just coming in with Ambassador Standley and an Air Corps general, “Lili Marlene” meant Pamela Tudsbury. The plaintive all-too-German melody had by some freak captured the bittersweet essence of fugitive wartime romance, the poignant sense of a fighting man’s lovemaking in the dark before going off to battle, the sort of lovemaking he and Pamela would never know. He heard the tinny phonograph bleating as he walked in.
Bugler, tonight don’t play the call to arms,
I want another evening with her charms.
Then we must say good-bye and part.
I’ll always keep you in my heart
With me, Lili Marlene, with me, Lili Marlene.
He was dumbfounded to come upon Pamela, of course. So the visa had gone through! Seeing her in Rule’s arms intensified the surprise. Pug quietly loathed the man because of the Singapore episode; his reaction was not exactly a jealous one, for he had given up his dreams of Pamela, but the sight disgusted as well as amazed him.
Noticing the squat figure in blue and gold go by, Pamela guessed he had seen her, and was passing on because she was dancing with Rule. God in heaven, she thought, why did he have to turn up like this? Why does it never go right with us? And since when has he become so gray? She broke away and hurried after Pug, but he and the tall Air Corps general went into the crowd at the punch bowl, which closed around them. She hesitated to elbow through, but was about to try when the lights blinked several times. “Five minutes to midnight,” the ambassador announced as the talk subsided. “We shall darken the room now, and open the curtains.”
Pamela was swept by the excited guests to a railed open window. The night was starry, and a blessedly cool breeze was blowing. She stood there boxed in by noisy chatterers, unable to move, looking across the river toward the black mass of the Kremlin.
“Hello, Pamela.” His voice, Victor Henry’s voice, spoke in the dark beside her.
Rockets shot up into the sky at that moment and burst in a great crimson glare. Guns thundered. The floor shook beneath them. The part
y crowd cheered. A volcanic barrage rose from all over the city, not of fireworks but of ammunition: star shells, signal rockets, crimson tracers, shells that burst dazzling yellow, a canopy of colored battlefield fire, making a din that all but drowned out the gargantuan booming of a hundred and twenty big guns.
“Hello, there. Remind you of anything?” she gasped to the shadowy figure at her side. So they had stood watching the firebombing of London in 1940, when for the first time he had put his arm around her.
“Yes. That wasn’t a victory display, though.”
BOOM… BOOM… BOOM…
The barrage was exploding and blazing all over the sky, eerily lighting up the river, the cathedral, and the Kremlin. He spoke again between the roars of the big guns. “I’m sorry about your father, Pam, terribly sorry. Did you get my letter?”
“No. Did you ever get any of mine?”
BOOM…
“Just one that you wrote to me in Washington, saying you’d become engaged. Are you married?”
“No. I wrote another letter, a long one, to the Northampton—”
BOOM…
“That one I never got.”
The salvos thundered on and on, and at last ceased. The eruption of fire died down, leaving puffs of black smoke spread across the stars. In the sudden quiet, a rattling and clattering started up on the embankment outside. “Great God, it’s shrapnel falling!” the ambassador’s voice rang out. “Away from the windows, everybody!”
When the lights came on, the Air Corps general, a tall lean man with wavy blond hair like Burne-Wilke’s, and an unpleasantly cold expression, stood at Pug’s elbow. “Lavish display of flak,” he said. “Pity they’re not that free with useful information.”
Pug introduced him to Pamela. The general all at once looked pleasanter. “Well! I was with Duncan Burne-Wilke three weeks ago in New Delhi. He’d just gotten word you were coming, and he was a very happy man. I now see why.”
She smiled. “Is he well?”
“Getting along. But that’s a thankless war theatre, the CBI. Pug, we’d better get back at those charts. I’ll make my farewells.”
“Yes, sir.”
The general went off. Pug said to her, “Sorry, I’ve got him on my hands, Pam. I’m pretty tied up. Business of getting new air routes for flying in Lend-Lease aircraft. Can we meet day after tomorrow, sometime?”
She told him about the Kursk tour. His face fell, and that slightly encouraged her. “A whole week, eh?” he said. “Too bad.”
“I saw your wife in Washington. You’ve heard from her?”
“Oh, yes, now and then. She seems to be fine. How’d she look?”
“Very well. She told me to tell you that Byron’s become the executive officer of his ship.”
“Exec!” He raised heavy brows. Like his hair they were grayer now, and his face was heavier. “That’s odd. He’s very junior, and he’s a reserve.”
“Your general looks ready to go.”
“So I see.”
His handshake was friendly. She wanted to grip hard, to say in an act what would not come in words. But in this botched meeting, even that much might seem offensive disloyalty to Burne-Wilke. Oh, fiasco, she thought; fiasco, fiasco, fiasco!
“Well, see you in a week,” he said. “If I’m not out of town again. So far I’ve nothing scheduled.”
“Yes, yes. We have worlds to talk about.”
“We do. Call me when you get back, Pam.”
She rang the American embassy a week later, minutes after she returned to the Metropole suite, which she had wastefully retained and paid for. She was sure he would be away again, that they would go on missing each other, that this Moscow side trip would end as a doomed waste of time and spirit. But he was there, and he sounded glad to hear from her.
“Hello, Pam. How did it go?”
“Horribly. It’s no good without Talky, Pug. What’s more, I’m sick to my soul of devastated cities, smashed-up tanks, and stinking German corpses lying about, I’m sick of photographs of Russian women and children strung up on gallows. I’m sick of this whole insane and vile war. When do we see each other?”
“How about tomorrow?”
“Hasn’t Philip Rule called you about tonight?”
“Rule?” His voice flattened. “No, he hasn’t.”
Hastily she said, “He will. His wife’s back. It’s her birthday, and he’s having a party for her here in my suite. It’s gigantic, and he got it for me, so I could hardly refuse. There’ll be correspondents, a few embassy people, her ballet friends, that sort of thing. I’ll gladly duck it if you’d rather not, and meet you somewhere else.”
“N.G., Pamela. The Red Army’s throwing a farewell banquet for my general. At the Metropole, in fact. We’ve got the agreement he came here to work out.”
“How marvelous.”
“That remains to be seen. Russian draftsmanship of an agreement can be surrealistic. Meantime there’s this eating and drinking brawl to celebrate, and I can’t possibly get out of it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Damn,” said Pamela. “Oh, bloody hell.”
He chuckled. “Pam, you do sound like a correspondent.”
“You don’t know how I can sound. All right, tomorrow, then.”
Rule’s wife was almost too beautiful to be real: a perfect oval face, enormous clear blue eyes, heavy yellow hair, exquisitely molded hands and arms. She sat in a corner, hardly speaking or moving, never smiling. The suite was crowded, the music was blasting away, the guests were drinking and eating and dancing, but there was no real merriment in any of it, perhaps because the birthday girl was so conspicuously glum.
Far from showing any ballet grace in their Western dancing, the Russians were elephantine. Pamela danced with a man she had once seen as the prince in Swan Lake. He had a faun’s face, a handsome shock of black hair and, even in his ill-fitting clothes, a superb physique; but he didn’t know the steps, and he kept apologizing in incomprehensible Russian. The whole party was going like that. Phil was throwing down vodka, dancing awkwardly with one girl after another, and forcing foolish laughter. Valentina was beginning to look as though she wished she were dead. Pamela could not fathom what was wrong. Some of the trouble might be Russian awkwardness at socializing with foreigners, but there must be a strain between Rule and his fairy-tale beauty that she didn’t know about.
Captain Joyce, the American naval attaché, a jolly Irishman with a knowing eye, asked Pamela to dance. Placing herself in his arms, she said, “Too bad Captain Henry is stuck downstairs.”
“Oh, you know Pug?” Joyce said.
“Quite well.” The knowing eye sparked at her. She added, “He and my father were good friends.”
“I see. Well, the man is terrific. He’s just pulled off a great feat.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“If you won’t put it in your paper.”
“I won’t.”
Speaking in Pamela’s ear over the music as they shuffled here and there, Joyce said that Ambassador Standley had been trying in vain for months to get action on the Siberian route for the Lend-Lease aircraft. In a previous visit to the Soviet Union to push the thing, General Fitzgerald too had accomplished nothing. This time Standley had turned the problem over to Pug, and an agreement was now in hand. It meant that instead of flying a tough route via South America and Africa with a lot of crack-ups, or coming crated on convoy vessels which the U-boats could sink, the aircraft would now funnel in directly over a safe straight route. Fewer delays, more deliveries, and a cooling of much ill feeling on both sides would result.
“Will the Russians keep their word?” asked Pamela, as the music paused and they walked to the refreshment table.
“Remains to be seen. Meantime, that’s a real love feast down below. Pug Henry is damn good at handling these tough ones.” Pamela refused vodka. Tossing down a sizable glassful, Joyce coughed and glanced at his watch. “Say, they should be starting to carry them out of that fracas downstairs roun
d about now. Why don’t I try to fetch Pug?”
“Oh, please. Please.”
About ten minutes passed. Then into the room burst four Red Army officers in full regalia, followed by Joyce, Pug Henry, and General Fitzgerald. One of the Russians was an enormous bald general with a blaze of decorations, and an artificial hand in a leather glove. The others were much younger, and they did not seem nearly as jolly as the general, who entered with a roar in Russian of “Happy Birthday!” He marched up to Rule’s wife, bowed over her hand, kissed her, and asked her to dance. Valentina smiled — for the first time, it seemed to Pamela, and it was like dawn over icy peaks —jumped up, and put herself in his arms.
“Recognize him?” Pug said to Pamela, as the pair went pounding out on the floor to “The Boogie-Woogie Washerwoman.”
“Isn’t he the one who gave us dinner in his field HQ, and then danced like mad?”
“Right. Yuri Yevlenko.”
“By God, he’s a live wire,” said Captain Joyce. “That squinty little officer with the scar must be his political aide. Or an NKVD man. He tried to stop him from coming up. Muttered about fraternizing with foreigners. You know what the general said? He said, ‘So? What can they do to me? Cut off my other hand?’ ”
…And the boogie-woogie washerwoman washes away…
“Seems to me,” Pug said to Pamela, “that we’ve heard that imbecile noise before. Dance?”
“Must we?”
“You’d rather not? Thank God.” He twined fingers in hers and led her to a small sofa. “They caught me at my white wine trick during the toasts. I had to switch back to vodka, and I’m reeling.”
As Yevlenko clomped eccentrically about with the beaming Valentina, some Russians were abandoning their wooden fox-trots for the Lindy Hop. It better suited their springy dancing muscles. Though nobody could mistake them for Americans, several were flailing expertly away.
Pamela said, “You look sober enough.” He sat erect in dress whites with bright gold buttons and shoulder-board stripes, and a rainbow bank of starred ribbons. The vodka had livened his eyes and heightened his color. Nothing had changed in fourteen months except for the grayed hair and added poundage. “By the way, your wife told me to admonish you about your weight.”