War and Remembrance (146 page)

“Hullo! There’s Captain Henry.” This time it really was Granville Seaton, standing with some men and women in uniform. Seaton came and took his arm, with far more warmth than he had displayed in their journeying together. “What cheer, Captain? Wearing business, that truck route, what? You look fairly done up.”

“I’m all right.” Pug gestured in the direction of the Soviet embassy. “I just told Harry Hopkins your ideas about a new treaty.”

“You did? You actually did? Smashing!” Seaton hugged his arm close, exhaling a strong tobacco breath. “What was his reaction?”

“I can tell you the President’s reaction.” In his light-headedness Pug blurted this. His temples throbbed and his knees felt weak.

Seaton spoke intensely, his eyes searching Pug’s face. “Tell me, then.”

“The thing was discussed at the Moscow Conference of foreign ministers last month. The Russians stalled. That’s that. The President won’t thrust the United States into your old rivalries. He’s got a war to win and he needs Stalin.”

Seaton’s face fell into lines of sadness. “Then the Red Army will
never leave Persia. If what you say is accurate, Roosevelt’s pronouncing a long-range doom on all free men.”

Victor Henry shrugged. “I guess he figures on fighting one war at a time.”

“Victory is meaningless,” Seaton exclaimed, “except in its effect on the politics of the future. You people have yet to grasp that.”

“Well, if an initiative came from the Iranians that might be different. So Hopkins said.”

“The Iranians?” Seaton grimaced. “Forgive me, but Americans are tragically naïve about Asia and Asian affairs. The Iranians won’t take the initiative, for any number of reasons.”

“Seaton, do you know Lord Burne-Wilke?”

“The air vice marshal? Yes, they’ve brought him here on the Burma business. He’s over at the plenary session now.”

“I’m looking for his aide, a WAAF.”

“I say, Kate!” Seaton called and beckoned. A pretty woman in a WAAF uniform left the group he had been chatting with. “Captain Henry here is looking for the future Lady Burne-Wilke.”

Green eyes snapped in a snub-nosed face, giving Pug a quick pert inspection. “Ah, yes. Well, everything’s in such a muddle. She brought masses of maps and charts and whatnot. I think they installed her in the anteroom outside the office that Lord Gore is using.”

“I’ll take you there,” Seaton said.

Two desks jammed the little room on the second floor of the main building. At one of them a pink-faced officer with a bushy mustache was hammering at a typewriter. Yes, he said peevishly, the other desk had been shoved into the room for Burne-Wilke’s aide. She had worked at it for hours, but had left not long ago to shop at the Tehran bazaar. Seizing a scrap of paper on Pamela’s desk, Victor Henry scrawled,
Hi! I’m here, at the U.S. Army base officers’ quarters. Pug,
and jammed it on a spike. He asked Seaton as they walked outside, “Where’s this bazaar?”

“I don’t recommend that you go looking for her there.”

“Where is it?”

Seaton told him.

General Connolly’s driver took Pug into the old part of Tehran, and left him at the bazaar entrance. The exotic mob, the heavy smells, the foreign babble, the garish multitudinous signs in a strange alphabet, dizzied him. Peering past the stone arcades at the entrance, he saw crowded gloomy passageways of shops receding out of sight. Seaton was right. How could one find anybody here? Yet the conference was due to last only three days. This day was already melting away. Communication in this Asian city, especially amid the helter-skelter doings of an improvised conference, was
chancy. They might even miss each other entirely if he did not make an effort to find her. “The
future
Lady Burne-Wilke,” Seaton had called her. That was what mattered. Pug went plunging in to look for her.

He saw her almost at once, or thought he did. He was passing by shop after shop of tapestries and linens, when a narrow passageway opened off to the right, and glancing down it past the crowd of black-veiled women and burly men, through hanging leather coats and sheepskin rugs, he spotted a trim little figure in blue, wearing what looked like a WAAF cap. Shouting at her was hopeless, above the din of merchant cries and bargaining. Pug shouldered through the mob and came to a broader cross-gallery, the section of carpet dealers. She was not in sight. He set off in the direction she had been moving. In an hour of sweaty striding through the pungent, crowded, tumultuous labyrinth, he did not see her again.

Had he not been in a fever it would still have seemed dreamlike, this frustrated quest for her through a thronged maze. All too often he had had just such nightmares about Warren. Whether he was looking for him at a football game, or in a graduation crowd, or aboard an aircraft carrier, the dream was always the same: he would glimpse his son just once, or he would be told that Warren was close by, and he would pursue and pursue and never find him. As he tramped sweatily round and round the galleries, feeling ever lighter in the head and queerer about the knees, he came to realize that he was not behaving normally. He groped back to the entrance, bargained in sign language with a cab driver in a rusty red Packard touring car, and paid a crazy price for a ride to the Amirabad base.

The next clear thing that happened to Pug Henry was that somebody shook him and said, “Admiral King wants to see you.” He was lying clothed on a cot in the officers’ quarters, bathed in sweat.

“I’ll be with him in ten minutes,” Pug said through chattering teeth. He took a double dose of pills that were supposed to control the ailment, and a heavy slug of Old Crow; showered and rapidly dressed, and hurried through the starlit darkness in his heavy bridge coat to General Connolly’s residence. When he came into King’s suite, the admiral’s glowering glance changed to a look of concern. “Henry, get yourself to sick bay. You’re damned green around the gills.”

“I’m okay, Admiral.”

“Sure? Want a steak sandwich and a beer?” King gestured at a tray on the desk between piles of mimeographed documents.

“No, thank you, sir.”

“Well, I saw history made today.” King talked as he ate, in an unusually benign vein. “That’s more than Marshall and Arnold did. They missed the opening session, Henry. Fact! Our Army Chief of Staff and the boss of the Air Corps flew halfway around the world for this meeting with Stalin, then,
by God, they didn’t get the word, and tooled off sightseeing. Couldn’t be located. Ha ha ha! Isn’t
that
a snafu for the books?”

King emptied his glass of beer and complacently touched a napkin to his mouth. “Well,
I
was there. That Joe Stalin is one tough gent. Completely on top of things. Doesn’t miss a trick. He put a hell of a spoke in Churchill’s wheel today.
I
think all the talk about pooping around in the Mediterranean is finished, over, done with. It’s a new ball game.” King looked hard at him. “Now you’re supposed to know something about landing craft.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” Searching through piles of documents, King pulled several out as he talked. “Churchill turns purple, just talking to me about landing craft. I spoil his fun. We’ve got thirty percent of new construction allotted to the Pacific, and I have to be a son of a bitch about them, or they’d melt away in his wild invasion schemes.” He brandished a sheaf of documents. “Here’s a British op-plan for a landing on Rhodes, for instance, which I consider absolutely asinine. Churchill asserts that it’ll pull Turkey into the war, set the Balkans aflame, and blah blah blah. Now what I want you to do —”

General Connolly knocked, and entered in a heavy checkered bathrobe. “Admiral, Henry here has been invited to dinner by the Minister of the Imperial Court. This just arrived by hand. A car’s waiting.”

Connolly gave Pug a large cream-colored unsealed envelope.

“Who’s the Minister of the Imperial Court?” King asked Pug. “And how do
you
know him?”

“I don’t, Admiral.” A scrawled note clipped to the crested card explained the invitation; but he did not mention it to King.

Hi
—
I’m a houseguest here. Talky and the minister were old good friends. It was this or the
YWCA
for me. Do come. P.

“Hussein Ala is the second or third man in the government, Admiral,” said General Connolly. “Sort of a grand vizier. Better send Pug along. The Persians have peculiar ways of doing things.”

“Like the heathen Chinee,” said King. He threw the documents on the desk. “Okay, Henry, see me when you return. No matter what time.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The black Daimler driven by a silent man in black went twisting through the walls of old Tehran, and halted in a narrow moonlit street. The driver opened a small door in a wall; Victor Henry had to stoop to go through. He walked down into a lantern-lit garden spacious as the Soviet embassy, with fountains spouting sparkling waters, rivulets murmuring in canals among the towering trees and sculptured shrubbery, and at the other side of this opulent private park, many lighted windows showing. A man in a
long crimson garment, with enormous drooping black mustaches, bowed to Pug as he came in, and led him around the fountains and through the trees. In the foyer of the mansion Pug got a peripheral impression of inlaid wood walls, a high tiled ceiling, and rich tapestries and furniture. There stood Pamela in uniform. “Hi. Come and meet the minister. Duncan’s late for dinner. He’s staying at the officers’ club.”

The mustachioed man was helping Pug take off the bridge coat. Unable to find words for the joy he felt, Pug said, “This is somewhat unexpected.”

“Well, I got your note, and I wasn’t sure I’d see you otherwise. We’re flying back to New Delhi day after tomorrow. The minister was very sweet about inviting you. I told him a thing or two about you, of course.” She put her hand to his face, looking worried, and he saw the glitter of a large diamond. “Pug, are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

Despite a well-tailored dark British suit and pleasant clear English, it was a grand vizier who welcomed Pug in a magnificent sitting room: a commanding nose, wise brilliant brown eyes, thick silvering hair, a lordly bearing, an antique smooth manner. They settled in a cushioned alcove and the minister fell to talking business almost at once, while Pug and Pamela drank highballs. Lend-Lease, he said, had its very bad aspect for Iran. The American wages were causing a wild inflation: prices spiking, shortages mounting, goods vanishing into the warehouses of hoarders. The Russians were making matters worse. They occupied much of the best farming lands, and they were taking the produce. Tehran was not far from food riots. The Shah’s one hope lay in the generosity of the United States.

“Ah, but the United States is already feeding nearly the whole world,” Pamela remarked. “China, India, Russia. Even poor old England.” The sound of her voice speaking these simple words enthralled Pug. Her presence transformed time; every moment was a celebration, a drunkenness; this was his reaction to seeing her again, perhaps fevered but true.

“Even poor old England.” The minister nodded. His faint smile, the tilting of his head, conveyed ironic awareness of the dwindling of the British empire. “Yes, the United States is now the hope of mankind. There has never in history been a nation like America. But with your generous nature, Captain Henry, you must learn not to be too trusting. There truly are wolves in the woods.”

“And bears,” said Pug.

“Ah, just so.” Ala smiled the formal bright smile of a grand vizier. “Bears.”

Lord Burne-Wilke arrived, and they went in to dinner. Pug feared that he faced a heavy meal; but the fare was plain, though everything else was grand — the vaulted dining room, the long dark table polished to a mirror
shine, the hand-painted china, and what looked like platinum or white-gold plate. They had a clear soup, a chicken dish, and sherbet, and with the help of wine Pug managed to eat.

Burne-Wilke did most of the talking at first, in an autumnal vein. The conference had started very badly. Nobody was to blame. The world had come to a “discontinuity of history.” Those who knew what should be done lacked the power to do it. Those who had the power lacked the knowledge. Pug discerned in Burne-Wilke’s gloom the spoke that Stalin had put in Churchill’s wheel, to the glee of Ernest King.

The minister took up the theme and discoursed mellifluously on the ebb and flow of empires; the inevitable process by which conquerors became softened by their conquests, and dependent on their subjects to keep them in luxury, and so sooner or later fell to a new nation of hard rude fighters. The cycle had rolled on from Persepolis to the Tehran Conference. It would never end.

During all this Pug and Pamela sat silent opposite each other. Each time their eyes met it was a thrill for him. He thought she was tightly controlling her eyes and her face, as he was; and this necessity to mask his feelings only intensified them. He wondered what there could ever be again in life to match what he felt for Pamela Tudsbury. She wore Burne-Wilke’s large diamond on her finger, as she had once worn the smaller diamond of Ted Gallard. She had not married the aviator, and she had not yet married Burne-Wilke, four months after the wrenching farewell in Moscow. Was she still caught as he was? This love kept triumphing over time, over geography, over shattering deaths, over year-long separations. A random meeting on an ocean liner had led step by step to this unlikely meeting in Persia, to these profoundly stirring glances. Now what? Would this be the end?