War and Remembrance (139 page)

KURZESTRASSE
,
P-I

THERESIENSTADT

SEPT.
7, 1943

DEAREST BYRON SPECIAL PRIVILEGE FOR “PROMINENTS” MONTHLY HUNDRED-WORD LETTER. LOUIS WONDERFUL. AARON ALL RIGHT. MY SPIRITS GOOD. YOUR LETTERS DELAYED BUT LOVELY TO HAVE. WRITE HERE. RED CROSS FOOD PACKAGES EXTREMELY DESIRABLE. DON’T WORRY. THERESIENSTADT SPECIAL HAVEN FOR PRIVILEGED WAR HEROES ARTISTS SCHOLARS ETC. WE HAVE GROUND-FLOOR SUNNY APARTMENT BEST HERE. AARON LIBRARIAN HEBRAIC COLLECTION. LOUIS KINDERGARTEN STAR ALSO CHIEF TROUBLEMAKER. MY WAR FACTORY WORK TAKES SKILL NOT BRAWN. LOVE YOU HEART SOUL. LIVE FOR DAY HOLD YOU IN ARMS. TELEPHONE MY MOTHER. LOVE LOVE NATALIE.

Byron glanced at his watch. “Would your father still be at the War Department?”

“He gave me a message for you. You’re to call a Mr. Sylvester Aherne at the State Department. The number’s by the telephone.”

Byron rang the operator and put in the call. Lunch on his return from a patrol had developed into a merry ritual: strong rum concoctions, a Chinese meal, a bowl of scarlet hibiscus on the table, a laughing exchange of anecdotes. But this time neither the drinks nor Janice’s tasty egg foo yong and pepper steak could lift the pall of the letter. Nor could Byron talk about the failed patrol. They ate glumly, and he leaped at the telephone when it rang.

Sylvester Aherne’s way of talking made Byron picture a little man in a pince-nez, pursing his mouth and dancing his fingers together. As Byron read the letter to him, Aherne said, “Hm!… Hmmmm! Hmm!…
Hmmm!
Well! Quite a ray of light, that — isn’t it? Reassuring, all in all. Very reassuring. Gives us something solid to work on. You must airmail a copy to us at once.”

“What do you know about my family, Mr. Aherne, and about Theresienstadt?”

Speaking with slow prim care, Aherne disclosed that some months ago Natalie and Jastrow had failed to check in with the Swiss in Paris, simply dropped from sight. Insistent inquiries by the Swiss, and by the American chargé in Baden-Baden, had brought no response as yet from the Germans. Now that State knew where they actually were, efforts on their behalf could be redoubled. Since hearing from Senator Lacouture, Aherne had been looking into the Theresienstadt situation. The Red Cross had no record of any releases from the model ghetto; but the Jastrow case was unique, he said, and — so he concluded with a high little giggle — he always preferred to be an optimist.

“Mr. Aherne, are my wife and baby safe in that place?”

“Considering that your wife is Jewish, Lieutenant, and that she was caught travelling illegally in German-occupied territory — for as you know, her journalist credentials were trumped up in Marseilles — she’s lucky to have landed there. And as she herself writes, at the moment all is well.”

“Can you switch me to another officer in your division, Mr. Leslie Slote?”

“Ah — Leslie Slote? Leslie resigned from the State Department, quite awhile ago.”

“Where can I reach him?”

“Sorry, I can’t say.”

Byron asked Janice to try to call his mother, who might know where Slote was; and he went back to the
Moray
in as low a frame of mind as he had ever been.

As soon as he left Janice began the beautifying routine that she had skipped for Byron’s visit. Whether the feeling between them would ever warm up again she could not tell, but she knew that right now she had to keep her distance. Janice was very sorry for Natalie. She had never intended to steal Byron from her. But what indeed if she did not come back? The
Theresienstadt letter struck Janice as ominous. She honestly wished Natalie would extricate herself and come home safely with the baby, but the chances seemed to be fading. Meantime, she enjoyed the cornucopia sense of pouring herself out to two men, each time the
Moray
made port. She preferred Byron on the whole; but Aster had his points, and he certainly deserved a good time when he returned from combat. Janice was, in fact, doing a very fair job of eating her cake and having it. She had given Byron his ritual lunch, and the next thing was the ritual rendezvous with Aster.

Byron found Aster waiting in the
Moray’s
wardroom, dressed for the beach and hollowly cheerful. “Well, Briny, the admiral was okay. All is forgiven. We get our Mark Eighteens, and a target ship for training runs. Two weeks for turnaround, and back to the Sea of Japan.” He made a bravura flourish with his cigar. “Tomorrow, captain’s inspection. Friday Admiral Nimitz comes aboard to give us a unit citation for the first patrol. Saturday, under way at 0600 for electric torpedo exercises. Questions?”

“Hell, yes, what about rest and recreation for the crew?”

“Coming to that. One week in drydock for the new sonar head, and repairs to the stern outer doors. Liberty for all hands. Three more days of training, and we’re off to Midway and La Perouse Strait.”

“One week for the men isn’t enough.”

“Yes, it is,” Aster snapped. “This crew has been hurt in its pride. It needs victories a lot more than R and R. Why are you so down in the mouth, anyway? How’s Janice?”

“She’s all right. Look, Captain, I thought we’d be getting a telephone line over from the dock today, but Hansen just told me no soap. Would you give her a ring while you’re ashore? Tell her to call me at the officers’ club about ten o’clock.”

“Will do,” Aster said with a strange grimace, and he left.

Byron assumed that Aster had a woman in Honolulu, but it had never once crossed his mind that the woman might be Janice. So far Aster had been playing along with Janice’s pretense, but not liking it much. He thought she was making a fool of her brother-in-law. Byron’s naïve obtuseness troubled him; couldn’t he sense what was going on? Aster saw nothing wrong in what he and Janice were doing. They were both free, and neither wanted marriage. He didn’t think that Byron would mind, but Janice claimed that he would be shocked and alienated, and she insisted on discretion. That was that. It was a subject they no longer talked about.

But he was in an evil mood and a lot of drinking did little to improve it. It grated on him when she telephoned the officers’ club at ten o’clock, sitting up on the bed naked, her skin still glistening with amorous perspiration.

“Hi, Briny. Leslie Slote will be waiting for your call in his office tomorrow afternoon at one,” she said with sweet calm, as though she sat at home
with knitting in her lap. “That’s seven in the morning our time, you know. Here’s the number.” She read it off a slip of paper.

“Did you talk to Slote?”

“No. Actually it was a Lieutenant Commander Anderson who tracked him down, and called me back. Do you know him? Simon Anderson. He seems to be living temporarily at your mother’s place. Something about a fire in his apartment house, and she’s putting him up for a couple of weeks.”

“Simon Anderson’s an old beau of Madeline’s.”

“Oh, well, maybe that explains it. Your mother wasn’t there. Madeline came on the line first, sounding all bubbly. She was about to go out for a job interview, so she put Anderson on.”

“Madeline’s back in Washington to stay, then?”

“She seems to be.”

“Why, that’s marvelous.”

“Will you come to lunch tomorrow, Briny?”

“No can do. Captain’s inspection.”

“Call me and tell me what Slote says.”

“I will.”

Aster had been around women; he had been in such a situation with the sweethearts of other men, and with a wife, too. He usually felt sympathy, tinged with contempt, for the poor fish on the other end of the line; but this was Byron Henry being taken in by Janice’s coy charade.

“Jesus Christ, Janice,” Aster said when she hung up, “are you still playing games with Byron, when Natalie’s in a goddamn concentration camp?”

“Oh, just shut up!” Aster had been peevish and difficult all evening. He had said nothing whatever about the patrol, and he had gotten quite drunk; the sex in consequence had been a sputtering business, and Janice was feeling testy herself. “I didn’t say she was in a concentration camp.”

“Sure you did. In Czechoslovakia, you said.”

“Look, you’re too smashed to know what I said. I’m sorry you had a disappointing patrol. The next one will be better. Suppose I just go home now?”

“Do as you please, baby.” Aster rolled on his side and went to sleep. After thinking it over, Janice did the same.

By the next morning a telephone had been rigged aboard the
Moray.
Byron got his call through to Leslie Slote, though it took several hours. The connection was a scratchy one, and when he finished reading Natalie’s letter there was such a long noisy pause that he asked, “Leslie, are you still there?”

“I’m here.” Slote uttered a sigh close to a groan. “What can I do for you, Byron? Or for her? What can anybody do? If you want my advice, just put all this from your mind.”

“How can I?”

“That’s up to you. Nobody knows much about that model ghetto. It does exist, and it may in fact prove a haven for her. I just can’t tell you. Send her the letters and Red Cross packages, and keep sinking Japs, that’s all. It doesn’t help to go out of your head.”

“I’m not going out of my head.”

“Good. Neither am I. I’m a new man. I’ve made five training parachute jumps. Five! Remember the incident on the Praha road?”

“What incident?” Byron asked, though he never talked to Slote without thinking of his cowardly collapse under fire outside Warsaw.

“You don’t recall? I’ll bet you do. Anyway, do you see me making parachute jumps?”

“I’m in submarines, Leslie, and I always hated the Navy.”

“Bah, you’re from a warrior family. I’m a diplomat, a linguist, altogether a bespectacled cream puff. I die forty deaths in every jump. Yet I enjoy myself in an eerie fashion.”

“Parachute jumps for what?”

“OSS. Intelligence. Fighting a war is the best way to forget what it’s all about, Byron. That’s a novel perception for me, and enormously illuminating.”

“Leslie, what are Natalie’s chances?”

Another very long scratchy pause.

“Leslie?”

“Byron, she’s in a damnable situation. She has been, ever since Aaron wouldn’t leave Italy in 1939. As you recall, I begged him to. You were sitting right there. They’ve done stupid and rash things, and now the fat’s in the fire. But she’s tough and strong and clever. Fight the war, Byron. Fight the war, and put your wife from your mind. Her, and all the other Jews. That’s what I’ve done. Fight the war, and forget what you can’t help. If you’re a praying man, pray. I wouldn’t talk like this if I were still employed at State, naturally. Good-bye.”

When the
Moray
sailed, there were more defections from the crew than there had been in all previous patrols put together: requests for transfers, sudden illnesses, even some AWOLs.

The sky over Midway was low and gray, the wind dankly cold. Fueling was almost complete. Hands jammed in his windbreaker pockets, Byron paced the deck in a strong stench of diesel oil, making a last topside inspection before the long pull to Japan. Each departure from Midway made him think long dark thoughts. Somewhere around here, on the ocean floor in a shattered airplane, his brother’s bones lay. Leaving Midway meant sallying forth from the last outpost, on the long lonely hunt. It meant calculation of distances, chances, fuel capacity, food stores; also of the state of nerves of the
captain and the crew. Aster emerged on the bridge in fresh khakis and overseas cap, with eyes cleared and color restored by a few sober days under way; very much the killer-captain, Byron thought, even laying it on a bit to cheer up his depressed and edgy sailors.

“Say, Briny, Mullen’s going with us, after all,” he called down to the forecastle.

“He is? What changed his mind?”

“I talked to him.”

Mullen was the
Moray’s
first-class yeoman. His orders to chiefs’ school had arrived, and he was due to fly back to the States from Midway. But like all submarine sailors, the
Moray
crew were a superstitious lot, and many of them believed that this yeoman was the ship’s good-luck charm, simply because his nickname was Horseshoes. The name had nothing to do with his luck; Mullen tended to losé at cards and dice, also to fall off ladders, get himself arrested by the shore patrol, and so on. Nevertheless, Horseshoes he was, so dubbed at boot camp years ago because he had won a horseshoe-pitching contest. Byron had overheard many foreboding comments by crewmen on the transfer of Mullen, but it jarred him that Aster had gone and worked the man over. He found Mullen thumping a typewriter in the tiny ship’s office, a cigar thrust in his round red face; if Byron was not mistaken, one of the captain’s Havanas. The tubby little sailor had been dressed in whites to go ashore, but he was wearing his washed-out dungarees again.

“What’s all this, Mullen?”

“Just thought I’d grab one more patrol on this hell ship, sir. The food is so lousy I’ll lose weight. The Stateside gals will like that.”

“If you want to get off, say so, and you’ll go.”

The yeoman took a long puff at the expensive cigar, and his genial face toughened. “Mr. Henry, I’d follow Captain Aster to hell. He’s the greatest skipper in SubPac, and now that we’ve got those Mark Eighteens, this is going to be the
Moray Marus
greatest patrol. I’m not about to miss it. Sir, where is Tarawa?”