War and Remembrance Page 18

  He shouted in the tube, “Chief, right on the money! He’s there over the hill, hull down.” Happy laughter resounded from the control room. Aster turned to Byron, his face glowing. “Briny, let’s go to General Quarters.”

  At the alarm the usual racket ensued: loud scurrying and shouting, clanging of watertight doors, barked reports by telephone talkers. Turkell arrived and slung around his neck the Is-Was, a convoluted plastic instrument that gave bearings for a torpedo shot if the TDC failed. Byron nervously took his place at the computer. He had worked the black-faced instrument and its constantly turning dials in sub school and the simulator on shore, but had never before manned one at sea. The device put together the three moving elements of the attack problem — torpedo, submarine, victim — boiling down all the evolving data to one crucial number: the final bearing on which to launch the torpedo. The information coming in was of varying reliability. Course and speed of the Devilfish were precise; but the data on the target ship consisted of sonar readings and periscope glimpses, inexact and fleeting. The officer on the TDC had to guess which readings were fluky, which more or less accurate, in feeding new numbers into the machine. Wilson Turkell had rare insight for this. The responsibility weighed on Byron but excited him, too.

  On the plot and on the computer, submarine and target continued to draw together. Aster paced and smoked, waiting for the time of sunset to put up the periscope again. “I’m not scaring off our plump little friend up there,” he observed to Turkell. His usually pale face was bright pink, and his lithe nervous pacing and finger-snapping were working up tension in the attack party which Byron could see on the sailors’ faces.

  “All right,” Aster said at last, crouching at the periscope well, “up scope!” He caught the handles, and snapped them in place. Rising with the scope as stylishly as Hoban had done, he was looking through the eyepiece as it went up. “Range. Mark! Six thousand. Bearing. Mark! Two two four.” The periscope had scarcely stopped when he ordered it down again. “Okay. Angle on the bow, twenty port. It’s a medium-sized tanker, Foof. About five thousand tons.”

  “Jap silhouette?”

  “Hell, tanker silhouette! What other nationality is chugging around in the South China Sea?”

  “That’s what we don’t know, Lady,” said a melancholy voice.

  Like a ghost’s, the bristly face of Branch Hoban rose through the hatchway. He climbed into the conning tower, his eyes haunted and sickly bright, his head bloodily bandaged, his lean frame stooped in his old tiger-pattern bathrobe, which dragged on the deck. “Maybe some fool Dutchman hasn’t got the word. Maybe it’s one of our own ships out to rendezvous with a fleet unit. We just don’t know.”

  “Sir, it sure as hell doesn’t look American.”

  “Lady, we’ve got to know.”

  “Okay. Identification manual, Jap merchants, tankers,” Aster snapped at the quartermaster. Again he raised the periscope to call range, bearings, and angle on the bow. “Come on, come on, Baudin. Where’s the manual?”

  “Here, sir!” Hurriedly the sailor spread the open book on the navigator’s desk. “Tanker silhouettes.”

  “I see them.” Aster stared at the book, seized a red pencil, heavily ringed a silhouette, and showed it to Hoban. “That’s the type, forty-five hundred tons. You can’t mistake the broken line of that bridge house. It even looks like a goddamn pagoda. Take a look, sir. He’s like a cardboard cutout in the sunset.”

  “Up scope,” said Hoban. His movements were slow and slack. He called no data as he peered through the eyepiece. “All right, down scope…. Well, it’s a setup, Lady. My vision’s very fuzzy. You’ve identified him, so go ahead.”

  “Attack, Captain?”

  “Yes, if you want to, go ahead and shoot him.”

  “Byron! Normal approach course?”

  “Normal approach course one six zero, sir,” Byron rapped out.

  “Helmsman, come to one six zero.”

  “Coming to one six zero, sir!”

  “Make ten knots!”

  Aster took the loudspeaker microphone. “All hands. The Devilfish is commencing an attack on a tanker.”

  Hoban said rapidly and hoarsely, “One piece of advice. Those new magnetic exploders are lousy. I fought this fight in BuOrd years ago. I know. They cost me two hits yesterday. Set your torpedoes to strike the hull, otherwise you’ll miss the way I did.”

  “We have orders to shoot ten feet under the keel, sir.”

  “True, but I hear the Japs are building flat-bottom tankers, Lady.” Hoban winked. In his sad chalk-white face the effect was peculiarly clownish. “Don’t you know about that? Drafts of six inches and less.”

  With a keen glance at the captain, Lieutenant Aster ordered a shallow setting for the torpedoes.

  From the start, this second attack was so like the drills in the Cavité attack trainer that Byron’s sense of reality became numbed. Aster had conducted dozens of mock torpedo runs, with Turkell as kibitzer, and Byron on the computer. This situation seemed exactly like a school problem, complete with a rapid fire of reports, orders, questions, and course changes to keep the TDC officer frantically at work. The conning tower in the trainer on the beach had looked the same, even smelled the same — mainly of sailors’ sweating bodies, Aster’s cigar, and the acrid odor of the electric equipment. Byron became utterly absorbed. He wanted to do well at this game and to earn praise. He knew that they were underwater and that a real target ship was generating the data, but that was a foggy awareness compared to his sharp hot focus on the numbers, the trigonometry, the turning dials, and the oncoming moment for his solution — that all-important final bearing, which would fix the gyro angle of the torpedo.

  The whole thing seemed to racé. Aster approached even closer than he had in the school drills. The computer showed the target at nine hundred yards before he said in brisk tight tones, “Final bearing and shoot. Up scope. Mark! Bearing one nine eight. Down scope!”

  “Bearings on,” Byron called. “Gyro angle one seven port!”

  “Shoot!”

  “Fire one!” The torpedoman pressed the firing key. “Fire two!”

  The jolts of the launch shook Byron into realizing that two TNT-loaded weapons were now lancing through the water to destroy a ship and its unsuspecting crew, guided by his mathematics of death. The tanker had not once changed course or speed. This was unrestricted warfare, all right, he thought: a shotgun to the head of a pigeon. If only the torpedoes worked this time! The seconds ticked away —

  BRAMM!

  BRAMM!

  Another surprise! Exploding torpedoes at nine hundred yards knocked the Devilfish about almost like depth charges. The deck jerked, the hull rumbled, the attack party staggered. Yells echoed through the submarine, and Lady Aster shouted, “Oh, WOW! Oh Jesus! Oh my God, what a sight! Captain, Captain!”

  Hoban hurried to the periscope, his robe flapping around his bare shanks, and bent to the eyepiece. “Oh, beautiful! By Christ, Lady, it’s a successful patrol! This does it! It just takes one! Oh, that’s just beautiful! Magnificent!”

  Byron snatched the ship’s camera from a drawer, and as the captain stepped away, he fitted it to the eyepiece. Slapping his back, Aster chortled, “Goddamn, Briny, well done! Just get a couple of shots, then take a look, baby, take a look. He’ll burn for a good while. It’s the sight of a lifetime! Foof! You look next. Let everybody take a look. Everybody in the attack party!”

  As Byron stooped to the eyepiece, a spectacular night scene leaped into view, framed in the black circle of the scope. Against a starry sky a flame shaped like a candle flare hundreds of feet high was rising from a black tanker shape half-enveloped in a red ball of darker fire. Pouring from the top of the candle flame, billows of black smoke blotted out many stars. The sea was a bath of gold. Lady Aster slapped his bent back. “How about that? A perfect solution, you young sack rat. Perfect! Two out of two! Well done! Have you ever seen anything more beautiful in your life?”

  Byron was try
ing to grasp that all this was true, that this was a kill, that the depth charging was avenged, that Japs were dying horribly in that gorgeous holocaust, but a sense of reality still eluded him. His honest sensations were above all heart-pounding triumph at the good shot, admiration of the wild thrilling fire spectacle, and a trace of theatrical sadness, as at the end of a drama or a bullfight. He searched his spirit — all in these few seconds at the periscope — for compassion for the frying Japanese sailors, and could find none. They were abstractions, enemies, stepped-on ants.

  “I never have seen anything half as beautiful,” said Byron Henry, yielding the scope to Turkell. “I swear to God I never have, sir.”

  “You bet you haven’t!” Aster threw long arms around the ensign and squeezed him like a gorilla. “Merry Christmas! Now you’ve got a story to tell Natalie!”

  13

  IESLIE SLOTE tended to see Natalie Henry in any lithe tall girl with heavy dark hair pulled back in soft waves. When he spied one at an eggnog party in Bern, the usual slight shock ran along his nerves. False alarm, of course. Natalie was capable of showing up almost any place, but he knew where she was.

  This pseudo-Natalie was chatting with the host of the Christmas party, the British chargé d’affaires, under a bright painting of King George VI in a much-bemedalled uniform. Slote maneuvered in the noisy polyglot crowd for a better look at the oval face, the big slanted dark eyes set far apart, the high cheekbones with slight hollows underneath, even the too-orange lipstick — remarkable resemblance! She was certainly Jewish. Her figure was slighter and therefore more seductive than Natalie’s, which to Slote’s taste had always been a bit large-boned. He kept watching the girl as she moved through the smoky reception room. She began to return his glances. He followed her into a panelled library, where she halted, sipping a tall drink, by a globe on a bronze stand.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello.” The intense eyes turned up to him were clear and innocent, like the eyes of a clever teenager, though she looked to be in her twenties.

  “I’m Leslie Slote, first secretary at the American legation.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Oh, have we met?”

  “I asked someone about you, because you kept staring at me.” She spoke in a mild sweet voice with a British accent, faintly Germanic in intonation.

  “My apologies. You look amazingly like a girl I’m in love with. She’s happily married, so it’s rather idiotic of me, but anyway, that’s why I stared.”

  “Really? Now I already know too much about you, while you don’t even know my name. It’s Selma Ascher.” She held out a thin hand with a grip less firm, more girlish than Natalie’s. She wore no rings. “My friend said you were transferred from Moscow for being too partial toward Jews.”

  This irritated Slote. The story was all over Bern. Who in the legation was spreading it? “I wish I could claim such martyrdom. My transfer was routine. I’m glad to find myself where food is good, lights go on at night, and guns don’t go off.”

  She shook a schoolteacherish finger at him. “Don’t! Don’t be ashamed of it. Can’t you realize how that distinguishes you in your Foreign Service?” She turned the creaky globe with a pale hand. “A big world, isn’t it? And yet there is not one place left on it for Jews to go. Always before, down all the centuries, there’s been at least one open gate. Now all are barred.”

  Slote had not thought to run into such heavy weather. Could this girl, with her smartly tailored suit, her assured manner, her laughing demeanor with other men, be a refugee? He had long since become callous to the woes of the driven unfortunates who haunted the legation. There was no other way to keep one’s sanity.

  “Are you in difficulties?”

  “I myself? No. My family left Germany when I was a child. We’re Swiss citizens. People thought Hitler was a joke then, but Papa was not amused.” She tossed her head, and her tone changed. “Well! Tell me about the girl I resemble. But first, please, get me more soda water with lemon peel.”

  At the bar he paused to throw down a hooker of gin. When he returned, Selma Ascher stood at the globe, arms crossed, one hip and leg thrust to a side, outlining a delicious thigh under the slim blue skirt; an old Natalie pose. “Well, about this girl,” he said, “she’s the niece of Aaron Jastrow, the author — if that means anything to you.”

  “Oh? A Jew’s Jesus, and A Jew Named Paul? Of course. I didn’t much care for the books. They’re brightly written, but rather shallow and atheistical. So she’s Jewish! How did you meet, and where is she now?”

  She avidly took in his story about Natalie. Selma Ascher could focus her pellucid brown eyes like a light beam. Slote’s eyes kept going to the strong pulse beating in her white throat above a lacy blue blouse. High nervous energy here.

  “But what a strange business! Why didn’t she abandon this leech of an uncle, famous or not?”

  “She was gradually sucked in. When it was too late she frantically tried to get herself and the baby out. The Pearl Harbor attack trapped her.”

  “And where is this young Gentile naval officer now, the father of her baby?”

  “On a submarine in the Pacific.”

  “Most peculiar! I feel sorry for her, but her judgment must be very bad. How do you know she’s in Siena?”

  “I’m working on the exchange of interned nationals. That’s where Italy’s housing our journalists. She’s on the list with Dr. Jastrow.”

  “Does she know you’re trying to effect her release?”

  “I hope so. The Swiss legation in Rome transmits our messages, and I’ve written to her.”

  “Will you get her out?”

  “I don’t know why not. Her uncle’s published magazine articles, and she’s been his researcher. A lot of Italian journalists are caught in my country. It’ll take time, but there shouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  “Perfectly fascinating.” Selma Ascher offered her hand. “You must write her about the girl you met in Bern who resembled her.”

  “Let me take you home.”

  “I have my car, thank you.”

  “But I’d very much like to see you again.”

  “Oh, no, no.” Her eyes rounded in ironical amusement. “I’d only depress you, reminding you of your lost love.”

  With a swing of hips as pleasant as waltz music, she left the library.

  “Then you think the Soviet Union will hold out?” said Dr. Ascher, a plump man with heavy gray hair and a big hooked nose. He sat at the head of the table, his deathly tired face sagging on his chest.

  Slote was disconcerted by the bald question, much as he had been by the unlooked-for dinner bid, and by the wealth of the Ascher home. They were dining off heavy gold-trimmed china. On the panelled walls two Monets glowed in pencil-beams of light from ceiling apertures. Selma smiled across the table at Slote. “Papa, you’ll never get such a flat commitment from a diplomat.”

  She sat between a red-faced priest in clerical garb, who was eating and drinking with lusty appetite, and a tall stringy old Englishman with an ugly wart on his nose, who accepted only vegetables and left them almost untasted. There were ten at the table, all strangers to Slote but Selma. The father and Selma’s brother, a prematurely bald little man, wore black skullcaps. In all his travels, Leslie Slote had never before dined with Jews who wore caps at table.

  Selma’s mother touched Slote’s hand. On her slim fingers red and blue fire danced in two large diamonds. “But you’re fresh from Moscow. Do tell us your impressions.”

  “Well, things were at their worst when I left in November. They’ve somewhat improved since.”

  Slote slipped smoothly into his monologue on the winter counterattack: generals’ photographs in Pravda over victory headlines, sheepish officials streaming back to Moscow from Kuibyshev, improved food supply, fading air raids, columns of unshaven gaunt Germans marching down Gorki Boulevard in the snow under Red Army tommy guns, wiping snotty noses on their ragged sleeves. “ ‘Winter Fritz,’ the Russians
call these fellows,” Slote said, and his hearers laughed and looked happy. “But here it is mid-January. The Germans gave some ground, but Hitler still holds western Russia. The counterattack looks to be petering out. One can’t be too optimistic. Except that the Russian people do impress me with their stamina, patriotism, and sheer numbers.”

  Dr. Ascher wearily nodded. “Yes, yes. But without ninety percent of her heavy industry, how can the Soviet Union go on with the war?”

  “They moved factories behind the Urals all during their 1941 defeats. It was a superhuman job.”

  “Mr. Slote, Hitler’s factories didn’t have to be moved. They’re the best in the world, and they have steadily been grinding out mountains of arms. He’ll start a big new offensive as soon as the mud dries from the spring thaw. Can those transplanted factories give the Russians enough arms?”

  “They’re also getting Lend-Lease supplies.”

  “Not enough,” snapped the old Englishman. “Not for them, and not for Britain.”

  “What I fear,” said Ascher sadly, “is that if he takes the Caucasus in 1942, and Leningrad and Moscow are still cut off, one can’t exclude a separate peace.”

  “Precisely what Lenin did in 1917,” said the Englishman. “Communists will sell out their allies at the drop of a hat. They’re total realists.”

  Selma’s mother said, “That would be the end for the Russian Jews.”

  The priest, his small eyes darting at Slote, paused in his vigorous attack on half a duck. “What’s the condition of those Jews in Russia now?”

  “Behind the German lines? Probably fearful. Elsewhere, tolerable. The regime shunts them about like cattle, but that’s how Russia more or less handles everyone.”

  “Are the stories coming out of Russia and Poland true?” said Dr. Ascher. Slote did not answer. “I mean about the big massacres.”

  Hard stares at him, from all around the table.