Eagles at War (47 page)

She was touched as his face lit up with enthusiasm. He could handle challenges like this—the politics of business or of service life had always baffled him.

"When do you start?"

"I'm going to begin picking out the people right away—first-rate pilots and good mechanics. I've got to get some airplanes—Gooneybirds, mostly—and trucks, machine tools, it's like fitting out a safari. But it'll be fun. We'll get to fly the latest German stuff, especially the jets."

"Great. I bet they'll have them all lined up for you, washed and waxed. They'd never dream of booby-trapping them, would they?"

"Damn, that's why I like to talk to you. I'll have to line up some ordnance people, too. I would have thought of it sometime, but this really helps. You're a doll."

"Okay, how about a favor in return?"

"Sure. Name it."

"Don't sink with Caldwell's ship. You've got to protect yourself and your family." She paused. "You've got to protect me. The way Lee is, you could wind up taking the fall for the whole operation."

"Taking the fall"—her
Casablanca
argot. "Well, here's looking at you, kid. Don't worry about it, I won't. Anything else?"

Roget ran up the stairs with an enthusiasm that belied his years, arms encumbered with a tripod and rolled-up drawings. Patty had never grown used to seeing him with short hair, but noticed that, for the first time since Clarice died, his old familiar grin reached from ear to ear.

With a flourish, Hadley threw back the first page. Underneath was a pastoral drawing, lots of green fields, trees, a lake, and in fluffy, cloudlike print, the words roget acres.

The second page flew back, and there was a little house, square, flat-roofed, painted white with windows spaced equidistantly across its front, the door smack in the center.

"Patty, you know we never had much luck building airplanes—and after the war it's going to be very rough for a while. But what's the two things in shortest supply, that all the GIs will be hungry for?"

"Cars and houses?"

"Right. We don't have the money to build cars—but you're looking at a brand new concept—mass-produced housing. Bandy and I've been talking about it for a long time, and it's something we've got the factory and the work force to do. And the land, too!"

Bandfield broke in, excited. "We'll build these little jewels in sections in our factory at Downey, cart them out the door, and set them up on the perimeter of the airfield. 'Roget Acres' first, then the next one can be 'Bandfield Village.' And we can have Charlotte Street, and George Street ..."

"My God, you guys—"

"Don't say a word, yet. Look at this plat."

He pulled down the third drawing, and the little cube houses marched across the landscape straight as West Point cadets on parade, the parallel streets divided into block-long squares, row after row.

"And look, here's how we'll build them. The kitchen and the bath will be built back to back—simplifies the plumbing, build one unit and install it. All these will be three-bedroom houses, living room, tiny dining room, and kitchen. I figure we can build them for thirty-five hundred, and sell them for sixty-five hundred, lot and all. We already own all the land we'll need at the airfield and in Salinas. The factory's all paid for and we have a good work force. We'll make us a fortune!"

"Don't make the streets so square. Curve them around, break up the lines so that it doesn't look like a tent city or a military parade ground—the guys coming home will have had enough of that. And let's vary the houses a little bit—you know, flip the drawing so that you get a slightly different look. And you'll need some room for playgrounds and stuff—all these young newlyweds are going to start having families right away. Maybe every three blocks, leave one block as a park area? And—"

"Lemme show you something, Patty, it's a detail drawing of the kitchen."

Roget put up another drawing on the tripod. "Straight out of
Good Housekeeping."

"Straight out of the twenties! You guys should take a trip back East to see what Kelvinator and General Electric have on the drawing boards, and design the new stuff right in." This was it, she thought, a new career, something she could do without damaging the family.
"I
could do that. That could be part of my job, flying around the country, checking on the new appliances."

"Patty, I got to tell you—"

"Wait a minute. And the colors. You don't want them all white. It'll be no more expensive to have them half a dozen pastel colors—pinks, blues, light greens—and trees, you need to plant trees."

Bandy was beaming. "By God, Patty, I never thought you'd approve of this. I told Hadley you'd come down on us like a ton of bricks because we were getting out of our field."

"No, you guys can build anything, and houses made out of wood and stucco should be easy, because you won't need skilled labor to throw them up. I'm all for it." Am I! It'll be a new life.

Hadley was indignant. "We're not going to build them out of wood and stucco! That's the whole point. We're going to build them out of aluminum! We'll prefabricate the structural stuff, the beams and rafters, and rivet sheet aluminum on the outside. Low maintenance."

"Whoa, guys, listen to me! This is a million dollar idea, but it's a two-by-four and stucco idea. You start building them out of aluminum and you'll have all sorts of problems with building codes, unions, everything. If you want to build with aluminum, stick on some wheels and sell them for house trailers."

Hadley and Bandfield had been bit by unions in the past and grimaced at the thought.

Patty went on. "You guys are making the same mistake you made with airplanes—you're just fascinated with technology. It never occurs to you that simpler might be better."

"She's got a point, Hadley. Maybe we could make stick-built houses at first, and experiment with aluminum trailers. That could be your special sideline."

Disappointment etched the older man's face—he'd already envisioned a metallic countryside gleaming with Roget Aluminum Houses.

Patty saw it and prodded him. "Just think, Hadley, not 'Roget Acres' at first. Let's call it 'Clarice Acres.' She wouldn't care if the houses were conventional—she'd probably prefer it. You know she never really did like airplanes."

"'Clarice Acres.' You're right. She'd be so proud."

"Hadley, you old dear, she
is
proud. She's looking down right now, and she's pleased as she can be."

The two men bounded out of the room talking excitedly, and Patty lay back and switched on the radio, saying to herself, "Of course, if they send Bandy to Leavenworth, we might have to change our plans."

*

Berlin/February 23, 1945

February's nerve-bludgeoning cold went on forever, endless gray days filled with wet and chilling winds that made the suffering from malnutrition and thin clothes even worse. Lyra could not remember when she had last been warm or taken a bath. Walking was an agony; she blinked back her tears and bit her chapped lips in pain. Shivering, she glanced over the dirty snow that partly covered the ugly shambles of the Berlin Zoo. Miraculously, some animals still survived, calling piteously from their cages, the few remaining zookeepers moving around listlessly. The predators had been killed as a safety measure after a tiger had escaped. That would be ironic, she thought, to live through the bombing in Berlin and then be eaten by a wild animal!

The ragged group of her fellow prisoners looked like peasants in a Brueghel painting, their figures bent, arms thrust within the folds of their coats, feet stamping the ground for circulation. Few faces could be seen among the swathed heads, shielded in scarves or blankets. A few of them had been acquaintances in that far-off past when there was food and warmth and hope.

It was an unlikely crew of prisoners, even in the twelfth year of the Third Reich. Some were aristocratic members of the diplomatic service who had fallen out with the regime. Others were wives of eminent hostages or family members of the July 20th conspirators. There were even a few confused foreign dignitaries from the satellite countries now occupied by the Russians. Some had been riding trains for weeks, aimlessly going from one collection point to another. For some obscure reason they were considered by their captors to be too distinguished to be put in the usual cattle cars, but too dangerous or valuable to be set free. Others, the most frightened and subdued, were straight out of Gestapo interrogation centers. A few, obviously the most well cared for, had been held under arrest in relative comfort at various country homes around Berlin, as Lyra had been until her "escape."

They had all been brought under armed guard to the Tiergarten Tower, a monolithic concrete flak structure brooding over the bomb-blasted remnants of the Berlin Zoo. Thirty-seven meters high and seventy-one meters on the side, it was the apotheosis of Hitler's concrete architecture, a neo-Romanesque monstrosity. Its huge fortress windows were shuttered with steel, and within its clammy walls were combined barracks, bomb shelters, civil defense headquarters, and, in recent weeks, a hospital. On the roof, batteries of 12.8-cm flak guns were manned by sixteen-year-old boys. A near-twin building stood opposite for the radar fire-control systems.

Built early in the war, the towers had appeared to grow in size over the years as the historic buildings of Berlin were flattened around them by the Allied bombing.

The Tiergarten Tower was their collection point for the trip south to Dachau. Lyra was there by accident. After a long run of luck, she had been picked up on the streets of Berlin and forced to join the prisoners. It had begun weeks ago when Hafner had telephoned her at Harzewalde, saying that he was coming to get her. She had slipped away in one of the vans being used to remove Kersten's furniture and paintings. As difficult as transport was to obtain in Germany, six Opel Blitz army trucks had rolled up to the house, and a crew of foreign laborers systematically removed the most valuable pieces under the direction of an officious young SS noncommissioned officer. He told her that the entire lot was being sent to Kersten's home in Stockholm, adding proudly that the orders had come directly from Heinrich Himmler himself.

Hafner's guards had already fled, and when Lyra insisted on accompanying the household goods for "safekeeping," the SS man had reluctantly agreed. The shipment was supposed to go by truck to Neustrelitz, and then by rail to Stralsund on the Baltic. Her heart had leapt. With luck she hoped that she might be able to bluff her way to Stockholm—and Ulrich—with the furniture.

They had left well before dawn, the jolting truck convoy rarely exceeding twenty kilometers per hour, often stopped by the welter of refugee traffic fleeing the Russian advance. At first light a flight of Russian Sturmoviks fell on them, burning the trucks out in two passes before systematically strafing the columns of refugees. Bruised but not wounded, Lyra had joined the trudging refugees as they made their halting way toward Berlin, riding the last twenty kilometers in the back of an ox cart. She rode next to a sobbing grandmother and carried the baby boy whose mother had been killed. She was glad it was not Ulrich; she never wanted him to be exposed to the war or have to live with these bestial Germans. She'd grown to hate them as a people, not only the monsters at the top but the Helmuts who supported them, especially the supine masses who accepted their lot so stoically. Why didn't they rebel? There was a point where suffering should end, where enduring should cease and anger take over. Furious with all things German, she clutched the baby to her as they lay stuffed like rag dolls among the pathetic baskets of household goods.

In Berlin the baby's grandmother took him back, and Lyra began to wander vainly from one friend's bombed-out apartment to another. Her circle of friends and co-workers had simply vanished, dead or evacuated to the south. It was just as well—they would have been too frightened to shield her, and some might even have turned her in. Once she passed the ruins of Goebbels's apartment. The building was demolished, the entire block gone, submerged in the crumpled ocean of brick and mortar in which Germany swam.

After one RAF air raid she'd wandered the smoking, rubble-choked streets, a moistened scarf wrapped around her face. In an alley she had stumbled over the body of a young woman, holding a baby no older than her own, both dead no more than a few hours. Lyra said a silent prayer, then searched the woman's tattered purse. She removed a few marks, the identity papers, and the ration coupons. Ordinarily they might not have helped—you had to deal with a single store, and she would have been recognized as an imposter—but the bombing was so extensive now that ration coupons had become currency. The woman's picture didn't look like Lyra, but like the other bombed-out refugees, she'd become so bedraggled that the differences were obscured. She had been able to get past the checkpoints and the
Feldgendarmerie,
press gangs searching the streets for deserters. They were looking for men to man the shattered regiments on the crumbling Eastern front, but they abused their power freely, checking everyone's papers, including shawled old grandmothers and even obviously wounded veterans, their legs or arms gone, shattered victims hobbling along the shattered pavements.