War and Remembrance (103 page)

“Whatever you’ve heard of me,” the Assistant Secretary replied with a shade of weary tolerance, “I’m not given to wasting my time. Nor that of anyone who works with me. We’re all carrying too heavy a load.”

But the man might be brushing him off;
write me a memorandum
was a very old departmental dodge. “Sir, you know about the joint Allied statement on the Jews, I suppose?”

Long silently nodded.

“Do you believe — as I do — that it’s the plain truth? That the Germans are murdering millions of European Jews, and intend to murder them all?”

A smile came and went on the Assistant Secretary’s face; an empty smile, a mere agitation of the mouth muscles.

“I happen to know quite a bit about that statement. Anthony Eden drew it up under pressure, and it’s nothing but a sop to some prominent British citizens of that race. I think it will do more harm than good, just provoke the Nazis to harsher measures. But we can’t pass judgment on that unfortunate race, we must help them if we can, within the law, in their time of agony. That’s my whole policy, and that’s why I want a memo on that conference idea right away. It sounds practical and constructive.” Breckinridge Long stood up and held out his hand. “Now will you help me, Leslie? I need your help.”

Getting to his feet and accepting the handshake, Slote took the plunge. “I’ll try, Breck.”

The four-page letter that Slote wrote that night to William Tuttle ended this way:

So perhaps you were right, after all! It’s almost too good to be true, this possibility that I can have some influence on the situation, root out the worst
abuses, and enable thousands of innocent people to go on living, largely due to the accident that my father was Princeton ‘05, and Ivy Club. Sometimes things do work out that way in this Alice-in-Wonderland town. If I’m pitifully deceived, I’ll know soon enough. Meantime, Til give Breckinridge Long my full allegiance. Thanks for everything. I’ll keep you informed.

S
LOTE
and Foxy Davis were reviewing the early press clippings about the United Nations statement for a first report to the Secretary on the national reaction, when Slote remembered that he was dining at the Henry home. “I’ll take these with me,” he said, stuffing the batch into his portfolio, “and draft the thing tonight.”

“I don’t envy you,” said Foxy. “Bricks without straw.”

“Well, all the returns aren’t in.”

Walking to the corner to catch a cab, Slote noticed a stack of the new
Time
magazines, still tied with string, on the sidewalk by a newsstand. He and Foxy had been hungering for a look at it, since a
Time
reporter had interviewed Foxy on the telephone for almost an hour about the evidence for the massacre. He bought a copy, and in the light of a streetlamp, despite a drizzle that made the pages limp and sticky, he thumbed the issue eagerly. Nothing in the news section; nothing under features; front to back,
nothing.
How could that be? The
New York Times
had at least run it on the front page; a disappointing single-column story, overshadowed by a right-hand streamer on the flight of Rommel, and a two-column story about a cut in gas rationing. Most of the other big papers had dropped it inside, the
Washington Post
on page ten, but they had all done something with it. How could
Time
utterly ignore such an event? He paged through the copy again.

Not one word.

In the
People
section the picture of Pamela and her father that he had seen in the
Montreal Gazette
caught his eye.

Pamela Tudsbury, fiancee of Air Vice Marshal Lord Duncan Burne-Wilke
(Time,
Feb. 16), will leave London for Washington next month, to carry on the work of her late father as a correspondent for the
London Observer.
Until a land mine at El Alamein ended Alistair Tudsbury’s career
(Time,
Nov. 16), the future Lady Burne-Wilke, on leave from the WRAF corps, globetrotted with eloquent, corpulent Tudsbury, collaborated on many of his front-line dispatches, barely escaped Jap capture in Singapore and Java.

Well, he thought, this may just interest Captain Henry. The flicker of malice slightly assuaged his disappointment. Slote did not like Henry much. To him, military men by and large were grown-up boy scouts; hard-drinking time-servers at worst, efficient conformists at best, banal narrow-minded
conservatives to a man. Captain Henry bothered Slote because he did not quite fit the pigeonhole. He had too incisive and agile a mind. On that memorable night in the Kremlin, Henry had talked up to the awesome Stalin quite well, and he had pulled off a feat in getting to the front outside Moscow. But the man had no conversation, and anyway he reminded Slote of his galling defeats with Natalie and Pamela. Slote had accepted the dinner invitation only because in all conscience he thought he ought to tell Byron’s family what he knew.

Welcoming Slote at the door of the Foxhall Road house, Henry scarcely smiled. He looked much older and peculiarly diminished in a brown suit and red bow
tie.

“Seen this?” Slote pulled the magazine from his overcoat, open to the photograph.

Henry glanced at the page as Slote hung up his damp coat. “No. Too bad about old Talky, isn’t it? Come on in. I believe you know Rhoda, and this
is
our daughter, Madeline.”

The living room was astonishingly large. Altogether, this establishment looked beyond a naval officer’s means. The two women sat on a sofa near a trimmed Christmas tree, drinking cocktails. Captain Henry handed his wife the magazine. “You were wondering what Pamela would do next.”

“Bless me! Coming here! Engaged to Lord Burne-Wilke!” Mrs. Henry gave her husband a sidewise glance and passed the magazine to Madeline. “Well, she’s done all right for herself.”

“Christ, she looks so old, so tacky,” Madeline said. “I remember when I met her, she was wearing this mauve halter dress”— she waggled one little white hand at her own bosom —“all terribly terrific. Wasn’t Lord BurneWilke there, too? A blond dreamboat with a beautiful accent?”

“He was indeed,” said Rhoda. “It was my dinner party for the Bundles for Britain concert.”

“Burne-Wilke’s an outstanding man,” Pug said.

Slote could detect no trace of emotion in the words, yet he was sure that in Moscow Pamela Tudsbury and this upright gentleman had been having a hot little time of it. Indeed, it had been his pique at Henry’s success with Pamela that had impelled him to drop his professional caution, and slip the Minsk documents to a
New York Times
man, thus starting his slide to his present nadir. Pamela’s reaction in London to the news about Henry had indicated that the romance was far from dead. If Victor Henry did not have the soul of a wooden Indian, he was very good at simulating it.

“Oh, his lordship’s unforgettable,” exclaimed Madeline. “In RAF blue, all campaign stars and ribbons, and so slender and straight and blond! Sort of a stern Leslie Howard. But isn’t that a screwy match? He’s as old as you, Dad, at least. She’s about my age.”

“Oh, she’s older than that,” said Rhoda.

“I saw her in London, briefly,” Slote said. “She was rather broken up over her father.”

“What news of Natalie?” Pug asked Slote abruptly.

“They’re still in Lourdes, still safe. That’s the nub of it. But there’s a lot to tell.”

“Madeline, dear, let’s get the dinner on.” Rhoda rose, carrying her drink. “We’ll talk at the table.”

The candle-lit dining room had fine sea paintings on the walls and a log fire flaming in the fireplace. The mother and daughter served the dinner. The roast beef seemed a luxurious splurge of money and red points, and the plate and china were far more elegant than Slote had expected. While they ate, he narrated Natalie’s odyssey as he had gathered it from her early letters, some Swiss reports, the Zionist rumors in Geneva, and Byron’s story. It was a sketchy version patched together with a lot of guesswork. Slote knew nothing of Werner Beck’s pressure on Jastrow to broadcast. A German diplomat had befriended Natalie and her uncle, as he told it, and settled them safely in Siena. But they had illegally disappeared in July, escaping with some Zionist fugitives, and had popped up months later in Marseilles, where Byron had caught sight of them for a few hours. They had planned to join him in Lisbon, but the invasion of North Africa had brought the Germans into Marseilles and prevented their departure. Now they were in Lourdes with all the American diplomats and journalists caught in southern France. He passed over Natalie’s refusal to go with her husband; let Byron tell that to the family, Slote thought.

“Why Lourdes?” Captain Henry asked. “Why are they interned there?”

“I don’t really know. I’m sure Vichy put them exactly where the Germans wanted them.”

Madeline said, “Well, then, can’t the Germans take her from Lourdes whenever they feel like it, with her uncle and her baby, and ship them off to some camp? Maybe cook them into soap?”

“Madeline, for heaven’s
SAKE!”
exclaimed Rhoda.

“Mom, those are the gruesome stories going around. You’ve heard them, too.” Madeline turned on Slote. “Well, what about all that? My boss says it’s a lot of baloney, just stale British propaganda from the last war. I just don’t know what to believe. Does anybody?”

Slote contemplated with heavy eyes, across his half-eaten dinner and a centerpiece of scarlet poinsettias, this bright comely girl. For Madeline Henry, clearly, these were all happenings in the Land of Oz. “Does your boss read the
New York Times?
There was a front-page story about this day before yesterday. Eleven Allied governments have announced it as a fact that Germany is exterminating the Jews of Europe.”

“In the
Times?
You’re sure?” Madeline asked. “I always read it straight through. I saw no such story.”

“You overlooked it, then.”

“I didn’t notice that story, and I read the
Times,
too,” Victor Henry observed. “It wasn’t in the
Washington Post,
either.”

“It was in both papers.”

Even a man like Victor Henry, Slote thought in despair, had unconsciously blocked out the story, slid his eyes unseeing past the disagreeable headlines.

“Well, then they are in a pickle. From what you say, their papers are phony,” Madeline persisted. “Really, won’t the Germans get wise and haul them off?”

“They’re still in official French custody, Madeline, and their position’s not like that of other Jews. They’re interned, you see, not detained.”

“I can’t follow you,” Madeline said, wrinkling her pretty face.

“Neither can I,” said Rhoda.

“Sorry. In Bern the distinction became second nature to us. You’re
interned
,Mrs. Henry, when war catches you in an enemy country. You’ve done nothing wrong, you see. You’re just a victim of timing. Internees get traded off: newspapermen, Foreign Service officers, and the like. That’s what we expect to happen with our Americans in Lourdes. Natalie and her uncle, too. But if you’re
detained
when a war starts — that is, if you’re arrested — for anything from passing a red light to suspicion of being a spy, it’s just too bad. You have no rights. The Red Cross can’t help you. That’s the problem about the European Jews. The Red Cross can’t get to them because the Germans assert that the Jews are in protective custody.
Detained,
not
interned.
“

“Christ Almighty, people’s lives hanging on a couple of goddamned words!” Madeline expostulated. “How sickening!”

This one lethal technicality, Slote thought, had penetrated the girl’s hard shell. “Well, the words do mean something, but on the whole I agree with you.”

“When will she ever get home, then?” Rhoda asked plaintively.

“Hard to say. The negotiations for the exchange are well along, but —”

The doorbell rang. Madeline jumped up, giving Slote a charming smile. “This is all wildly interesting, but I’m going to the National Theatre, and my friend’s here. Please forgive me.”

“Of course.”

The outer door opened and closed, letting cold air swirl through the room. Rhoda began to clear away the dinner, and Pug took Slote to the library. They sat down with brandy in facing armchairs. “My daughter is a knucklehead,” Pug said.

“On the contrary,” Slote held up a protesting hand, “she’s very bright.
Don’t blame her for not being more upset about the Jews than the President is.”

Victor Henry frowned. “He’s upset.”

“Is he losing sleep nights?”

“He can’t afford to lose sleep.”

Slote ran a hand through his hair. “But the evidence the State Department has in hand is monstrous. What gets up to the President, of course, I don’t know, and I can’t find out. It’s like trying to catch a greased eel with oily hands in the dark.”

“I report back to the White House next week. Can I do anything about Natalie?”

Slote sat up. “You
do?
Do you still have your contact with Harry Hopkins?”

“Well, he still calls me Pug.”

“All right, then. There was no point in alarming you before.” Slote leaned forward, clutching the big brandy glass so hard in both hands that Pug thought he might smash it. “Captain Henry, they won’t remain in Lourdes.”