War and Remembrance (80 page)

Some instinct made Byron tread cautiously. “Dr. Jastrow was living in Siena, retired from teaching history at Yale, writing his books. Natalie worked as his secretary. They were caught there when we got into the war. So—”

“Let me interrupt you right there, Lieutenant. All the Americans who were interned in Italy were exchanged in May.” Babbage was smiling and scrawling as he spoke, his left hand curled around the pen. “So they should be home by now, no problem.”

“Well, I was out in the Pacific then. I don’t know what happened, but they weren’t exchanged.”

“How odd.”

“And last anybody heard, they were going to try to get to France.”

“You mean illegally?”

“I really don’t know any more details.”

“What’s her uncle’s name again?”

“Jastrow.”

“Spell it, please.”

“J-A-S-T-R-O-W.”

“Well-known author?”

“The Book-of-the-Month Club took one of his books.”

“Good enough. Which book was that?”

“A
Jew’s Jesus.
”

This did bring a reaction from Babbage. His smile flared out, his eyebrows went up, and his eyes shone. “Oh? He’s a Jew?”

“Not a practicing one.”

“Few of them are, it’s a question of nationality, isn’t it?” Slight pause, and a happy grin. “Your wife is one, too?”

“Yes, she is.”

“You’re not, obviously.”

“No.”

The left hand scrawled and stopped. With a genial nod and a wink, Babbage got up and walked into the anteroom, saying, “Half a sec.” He was gone about five minutes, while Byron stared at George Washington, at Roosevelt, at Hull, and at the grimy rain-beaten buildings across the street. Babbage returned, sat behind his desk, and clasped his hands before him. “No, they’re not in Marseilles. And there’s no record of them anywhere in the unoccupied zone. Have you checked with the International Red Cross? What with their being Jewish, and the kind of books he writes, they may well have landed in an Italian concentration camp.”

“Suppose they’d made it to Toulon, or Algiers? Would you know?”

“If they’d reported in to American authorities, I’d know. The roster of all Americans in the area is my responsibility. Now, if they attempted an
illegal
transit of France — well, let’s just hope they didn’t, Lieutenant. The French police are getting damned tough with Jews on the run.” He cheerily smiled. “But I don’t know why they should have done such a silly thing, if their papers were in order. Right?”

“Right.” Byron abruptly stood up.

“Well, it’s an unusual case.” Babbage rubbed his jowl with the back of his hand. “You a submariner, your wife working for this relative Who writes these leftist books, and —”

“What? There’s nothing in the least leftist about
A Jew’s Jesus.”
Byron allowed hard annoyance into his voice. “It’s a historical work, and very brilliant.”

“Oh? Well, I’ll have to read it. I thought it might be one of those tripey things that make out Our Lord to be a revolutionary. That’s the old leftist line, isn’t it?”

“Much obliged.” Byron stalked out, galled by this frustrating finale to the long trek from Australia: a bureaucratic stone wall, mildewy with snide
anti-Semitism, in a Marseilles consulate. He had the addresses of a Quaker agency and a Jewish committee, and he decided to walk off his irritation, though it was still raining. He had last visited Marseilles in 1939, in his vagabonding after dropping out of graduate school in Florence, and he retained pleasant memories of the Canebière boulevard with its opulent window displays and seafood restaurants, and the noisy cheerful people, so unlike the glum French elsewhere. Rain or shine, Marseilles had been a delight.

It had much changed. The people appeared peaked, weary, and impoverished. The long, wide, quiet Canebière, all but empty of auto traffic, had a plague-stricken look. The rain-blurred shop windows offered scanty dusty things like badly made garments, cheap Vichy propaganda books, and cardboard luggage. The famous food markets were pitifully shrunken. The meat stalls that were not barred shut vended horrid scraps caked with black blood: tails, ears, guts, lungs. The few vegetables for sale were sparse, wilted, and wormy-looking. There was no fruit. Amazingly, there was no fish. All the famous stalls, which once had been piled with gleaming bright-eyed fish wet from the sea, and all manner of shellfish in beds of seaweed, were shuttered. The cancer of German conquest was visibly eating at Marseilles.

Outside the Quaker office Byron found a great jam of children on the streaming sidewalk, blocking the entrance; children by the dozens, from toddlers to adolescents, huddled under dripping umbrellas. Inside, typewriters were clattering amid much high-pitched French gabble. A fat American woman herding the children into a line said that she had no time for him; Congress had passed a special resolution, allowing five thousand Jewish children into the United States: no parents, only children, and the Quakers were rounding them up as fast as possible, before Vichy changed its mind about releasing them, or the Germans grabbed them to ship them east, or the State Department threw in a new monkey wrench. Byron despaired of accomplishing anything here, and he left.

The Jewish office, called the “Joint,” was in a different neighborhood. He had to ask directions. The first two Frenchmen he approached skulked off without a reply. He persisted, and found his way to the place. In so doing he walked right past the building where Rabinovitz had ensconced his wife and child; just one more wet gray four-story Marseilles apartment house in blocks and blocks of them. He strode by, hunched against the rain, in a close blind chance miss, as two submarines running silent can pass each other in the undersea dark by inches and not know it.

In the small crowded anteroom of the agency office, a hollow-eyed young woman at one desk frantically banged at a typewriter, but Byron could not approach her; a long line waited at the desk, coiling all around the room and snaking through people sitting in chairs or lounging on their feet, some
holding battered valises, all talking every known language (or so it seemed to Byron) but English. Sad fear pervaded this crowd, visible in faces and sounding in voices. Byron leaned against the wall, wondering how to proceed. A plump dark young man in a trench coat came out of a door behind the desk, looked busily about, and shouldered toward the street entrance. Passing Byron, he stopped and said, “Hi.”

The American monosyllable was clear as a bell. Byron replied, “Hi.”

“Got a problem?”

“Sort of.”

“I’m Joe Schwartz.”

“I’m Lieutenant Byron Henry.”

The man arched a heavy black brow. “Had lunch?”

“No.”

“Ever eat couscous?”

“No.”

“It’s pretty good, couscous.”

“Okay.”

Schwartz led him a block away to what looked like a tailor shop; at least there was a headless unclothed dummy in the narrow gloomy window, and a yawning cat. They passed through the shop to a back room where at small oilcloth-covered tables people were eating. The couscous, served by an unshaven man in a skullcap, was a sort of farina with vegetables and a hot spicy meat gravy. Acting again on instinct, Byron told this stranger his story, including everything he had withheld from the American consul. Schwartz kept nodding as he ate with appetite. “Leslie Slote. Bern. Thin blond fellow,” he said. “I know him. Very smart. Nervous type, very nervous, but he’s all right. That fellow Babbage is bad news. These fellows here in Marseilles vary. It’s an individual thing, some are fine guys, and the man you want to talk to here is Jim Gaither. If anybody knows anything about your wife, it’ll be Gaither.”

“Who’s Gaither?”

“The consul general. He’s not here now, though. He had to go to Vichy.”

“I must return to Gibraltar today.”

“Well, maybe you can phone or write to him.”

“What do you do?”

“Right now I’m organizing thirty typewriters. One thing the Germans have is typewriters, so they trade them with the French.”

“What do you need thirty typewriters for?”

“The Joint office in Lisbon. That’s where I work. The American consulate in Lisbon has a total of three typewriters. It’s unbelievable. So we’re going to have plenty of typewriters from now on, and volunteer typists to fill
out papers. Jews aren’t going to be stuck in Lisbon any more, when a ship becomes available, because of a lack of typewriters.”

“If my wife passed through Lisbon, would you know?”

“I’d know about her uncle.” Schwartz looked thoughtful.
“A Jew’s Jesus.
Who hasn’t read it? Now listen, Lieutenant. Some decent Italian or French people could well be hiding them. Be optimistic.”

“How bad is the situation?”

“You mean, of the Jews?”

“Yes.”

Joe Schwartz’s voice went deep, the face stony. “Very bad. In the east Jews are being murdered, no question about it, and the French are letting the Germans take them away. However” — he returned to his goodnatured manner, even smiling — “there are many decent Christians, willing to risk their lives to help. Things can be done. It’s a complicated picture, and we do what we can. Did you enjoy the couscous? How about some tea?”

“Sure. Thanks. The couscous was good.”

“What’s he like, Aaron Jastrow?”

Byron hesitated. “Very regular in work habits. Quite a scholar.”

“That shows in his work. Informative. But
A Jew’s Jesus
is a best-seller for Christians. You know? It’s bland. Vanilla-flavored. Nice. Christianity has been hard on the Jews. The Crusades, the Inquisition, and now this. The Germans are supposed to be Christians.”

“I’m a Christian. Or rather, I try to be,” Byron said.

“I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“You didn’t, but nothing Jesus taught leads to Hitler.”

“That’s very true, yet if Jesus hadn’t walked the earth, would such things have happened? Europe is a Christian continent, isn’t it? Well, what’s going on? Where’s the Pope? Mind you, there’s one Catholic priest right here in Marseilles who’s a saint, a one-man underground. I only hope the Gestapo doesn’t murder him.” Looking at his watch, Joe Schwartz shook his head. “How did we get into this? Yes, A
Jew’s Jesus.
Well, anyhow, it’s a good book. It brings Jesus down from the stained glass, the big famous paintings, the huge crosses, where’s he’s always dying or dead. It shows him walking around among Jews, a poor Talmud scholar, a boy prodigy, a real living Jew. That’s important. Maybe it’s enough. More tea?”

“I’ve got to get back to the consulate.”

The rain was blowing in slant sheets outside. They paused in the doorway to turn up their collars. Schwartz said, “I know where you can hire a cab.”

“I’ll walk. Thanks for lunch. Tell me something,” Byron said, looking hard at Schwartz. “What can somebody like me do?”

“You mean about us, about the Jews?”

“Yes.”

The heavy lines reappeared in Schwartz’s face. “Win the war.”

Byron held out his hand, and Joe Schwartz shook it. They went their separate ways in the rain.

Back in Gibraltar, Byron boarded the
Maidstone
dog-tired, after turning in his pouch at Allied headquarters. He meant to collapse on his bunk in his clothes, but a dispatch lying on his desk jolted him alert.

FROM: BUFERS

TO: CO HMS MAIDSTONE

VIA: COMLANT

LIEUTENANT (JG) BYRON (NONE) HENRY USN DETACHED TEMPORARY LIAISON

DUTY ROYAL NAVY X PROCEED SANFRAN REPORT CO USS MORAY PAREN SS
345

PAREN X CLASS TWO AIR PRIORITY AUTHORIZED

Aster!

In a recent U.S. Fleet letter, Byron had seen a roster of new-construction submarines and their skippers, including
USS MORAY (SS 345)
—
Carter W. Aster, Lt. Cdr. USN.
This was Aster’s style, to ask BuPers for officers he wanted, instead of taking what he got. Byron dropped on his bunk, not to sleep but to ponder. A gladsome, an electrifying prospect, suddenly; putting one of these new fleet subs in commission, to sail again with Lady Aster against the Japs!

He could leave the
Maidstone,
he knew, when he pleased. The tender captain had not requested the American technicians, didn’t really need them to maintain the S-boats, and faintly resented the whole arrangement. Had this dispatch come a few days earlier, Byron would have packed and left at sunrise. But another courier trip to Marseilles was scheduled, and he decided he would make that last trip, in the hopes of seeing Consul General Gaither. That fellow Joe Schwartz seemed to know what he was talking about.

A
MASTER
plumber named Itzhak Mendelson owned the flat and the building where Natalie was holed up with her baby and her uncle. A Polish Jew, Mendelson had come to Marseilles in the 1920s and had done very well. His firm serviced the municipal buildings; he spoke excellent French; he knew magistrates, police chiefs, bankers, and all the most important criminals. So Rabinovitz had told Natalie. Mendelson was no Resistance man, and the Jews who slept on his parlor furniture or randomly on the floor were not underground types wanted by the Gestapo or the French police. They were objects of compassion, innocuous drifters like Jastrow and Natalie, lacking the proper papers to reside in Marseilles or to get out of France legally.