The Hour of the Cat (9 page)

“The
Invincible
and
Inflexible
put an end to the Admiral's success,” the attaché said.

“Yes, but the
Dresden
got away.”

“Quite right. It was the
Glasgow
that finally caught up with you and sent the
Dresden
to the bottom, was it not?”

“We were hit by
Glasgow,
but we scuttled it ourselves and fled ashore. The crew was interned, but I was too young to waste away in such a place, with nothing more exciting to look forward to than a daily siesta. I escaped across the Andes, reached Buenos Aires, and sailed with a Chilean passport through Plymouth to Rotterdam.”

“The one that got away!”

“That time at least.”

They'd watched from a nearby hill as the
Dresden
reared up out of the water, heaved its stern in the air and keeled over to expose the gaping, smoking, fatal wound in its starboard side. The sturdy, reliable, hardworking
Dresden
slipped rapidly into the green sea. An oil slick spread over the surface of the water like a blood stain. It felt as though they witnessed the death of an old and trusted mate.

Three of the crew died from cholera while interned on the bleak island of Quiriquina. Another went mad. One slit his wrists. He was surrounded by death, certain it would come for him if he stayed, so he fled, across the Andes, death a pace or two behind. The commendation that accompanied his Iron Cross saluted his “heroic determination to rejoin the struggle for the Fatherland and fight unto the death.” But it was fear—the fear of death—that drove him to escape, not heroism.

 

 

Gresser served tea. The attaché spoke of his hope their countries wouldn't be adversaries again. He recognized Germany's claim on territorial adjustments to the Versailles Treaty. “But all this saber rattling is putting everyone on edge.”

“Wanton aggression must be strongly opposed,” Canaris said. “The security of Europe depends on it. Your government must face up to that.”

“Come, Admiral, I'd hardly call the Czechs ‘wanton aggressors. '”

“Neither would I.”

The attaché stared at the tea leaves in the bottom of his cup, as if the meaning of Canaris's implicit criticism of his own government might be found there. After an unnatural pause, he described a motor trip he'd taken on the new autobahn, the wonders of its broad lanes, no lights or crossways or local traffic. He had an Englishman's love of monologue as well as a talent for it. Canaris was delighted to be relieved of the burden of conversation. They parted with an amicable handshake.

Canaris finished up his work and prepared to leave. The nap hadn't done much to relieve his sluggishness, and the reminiscences of the
Dresden
, of what seemed a lost, irretrievable innocence, left him nostalgic. He'd served on the
Dresden
in a different time, a different world, when the sea and its endless horizons encouraged dreams and illusions that duty and the war obliterated.

He remembered one time in particular, during the last full summer of peace, in 1913.The
Dresden
had been temporarily relieved from South American patrol and sent on a goodwill call to the city of Baltimore, for the occasion of the American Independence Day. Passing up an invitation to visit Washington, D.C., Canaris and another officer took a train to New York on a three-day leave. After some stretches of open country, the rail corridor they rode through became thick with an impressive array of bustling warehouses and smoke-belching factories. They were quite prepared to dislike New York, a town of legendary political corruption, filled with lumpen Irish and the dregs of Naples and the Polish shtetls. But as the train sped across a great marsh, and the tops of the city's tallest buildings could be seen twinkling magically, like the evening star, in the purple gloaming, Canaris felt a sense of excited anticipation.

The train plunged into a tunnel and emerged a short while later in the great steel and glass-covered cavern of Pennsylvania Station. The German deputy vice-consul of New York was there to meet them. He led them to a broad traffic-choked avenue ablaze with electric lights and into a waiting automobile. After they checked into their hotel in an area every bit as bustling as that around the station, the deputy vice-consul escorted them to an outdoor Italian restaurant where a tan-skinned cantatrice sang about love and broken hearts. In the morning they visited the zoo in the Bronx, the thinly populated northern part of the city. Later, they toured the metropolitan art museum and went to the top of the newly opened Woolworth Building, traveling everywhere on the city's efficient train and tram system. The deputy vice-consul was a man in his mid-thirties, a florid and rotund Bavarian, who seemed as inured to New York as any native. That night, in the intermission of the play he took them to—a comedy they barely understood but that drew incessant laughter from the audience—he flirted with several women. He consorted with every cab driver and doorman as though they were mates of long acquaintance.

The manager of the hotel was waiting for them when they came back. He was the grandson of a Berlin composer, a Jew, and welcomed them warmly. He opened a bottle of fine Riesling, and when that was gone, brought out a bottle of American whiskey, which had a coarse, smoky taste. Canaris's companion excused himself, explaining that they had to catch a train early the next morning back to Baltimore. Canaris followed him out but didn't return to their room. He needed some fresh air. He rode the elevator to the hotel's roof garden, where he drank wine at the bar and stared at a lovely girl in a violet hat and dress who sat between her parents beneath a lattice entwined with paper flowers. The parents didn't seem to notice him, but the girl did. She smiled at him.

The warm night air and the flow of the wine fermented silly, evanescent thoughts. He would propose to the girl. Their wedding night would be in this very hotel, her in the bed in frilly white undergarments, waiting for him as he packed away his uniform in the bottom of their traveling trunk, where it wouldn't be discovered until decades later when a grandchild went rummaging about in the attic of their house. He would seek employment in the tumultuous commerce that drove the city, import-export perhaps, and assume the same style as the deputy vice-consul, the unguarded bonhomie. The girl and her parents left. She looked over her shoulder at him as she went out. A look of desire. In the distance, beyond the roof garden, the broad, well-lit, heavily trafficked avenues stretched north, toward the great open space of America.

He drank more wine. How easy this city had it. Berlin had been raised to greatness not by the River Spree or the luck of geography, but by struggle, battle, the concentrated willpower and firepower of a state with enemies on every side. New York was handed greatness, wide river, deep, capacious harbor, the ocean at its door. Soldiers were nowhere to be seen. There was no rival military power for a radius of three thousand miles. Even the police lacked any sense of military bearing—fat, slovenly Irish peasants who strutted about with the gait of a farmer taking a cow to market.

The sharp, unceasing pain in his head the next morning was made all the worse by the unrelenting cacophony of the New York streets. He couldn't remember the face of the girl at whom he had stared so intently. He boarded the train to Baltimore. The
Dresden
sailed that evening
.
When the war came, and she went to the bottom, he made his epic, dangerous journey back to the Fatherland, took the assignments that were given to him without protest or complaint, even desk work in Berlin, sitting bolt upright, mind harnessed to the iron coulter of military paperwork.

Occasionally, as he did now, he recalled his visit to New York. The roof garden. That girl. Her look. Violet. Memories that grew fainter. Besides, the city he visited had long since disappeared. Like the rest of America, New York had fallen on hard times. Unemployment rampant. The busy gaiety of the city gone. Streets overrun by competing mobs of gangsters who fought gun battles for control. The chaos that democracy inevitably brought. But there'd been a moment when it enticed him, possibilities never pursued that now seemed only wild fantasies.

The sustained buzz of the intercom drew Donovan's attention from the nagging pain behind his knee. His secretary had probably been pushing the button for some time. He put the switch in the “on” position and bent close. “Yes.”

“Colonel Donovan, sorry to interrupt, but I have John Foster Dulles's secretary on the line, and she wants to change your luncheon appointment from the River Club to the dining room at the law offices of Sullivan & Cromwell. Mr. Dulles's back is bothering him and he'd appreciate not having to travel uptown.”

“Fine.”

“And she wants to know if you mind that District Attorney Dewey will be joining you.”

The constriction behind his knee became almost unbearable. “Oh, Christ.”

“Does that mean you don't wish Mr. Dewey included?”

“No, no, I'm sorry, my leg is acting up, that's all. Include Mr. Dewey by all means.”

“Shall I bring you some aspirin?”

“That's not necessary. It'll pass. It always does.”

Then again, Donovan thought, aspirin might lessen the headache that sometimes followed John Foster Dulles's ponderous monologues. Dulles had brought Tom Dewey with him before, obviously convinced that the Racket Buster was his great white hope for putting a Republican in the White House and elevating himself to Secretary of State, a position held by his grandfather and uncle. Dewey and Dulles together would make for a grimly serious lunchtime. “On second thought,” he said, “yes, please bring the aspirin.”

The ache settled into a concentrated throb. Standing usually helped. This time it only made it worse. “A phantom pain,” the doctor said. “The bullet shattered all the nerves and blood vessels. You couldn't have any sensation there.”

Couldn't, but did.

Donovan sat down again and drove his knuckles into where the throbbing had intensified. Years ago, he'd rubbed a spot nearby and felt something sharp. It turned out to be a sliver of shrapnel that had worked its way to the surface a full decade after it had entered. The common phenomenon of wounds working beneath the skin, invisible, but still there, still capable of making their presence felt. He could never remember when exactly he'd been hit by shrapnel, but it had to have been soon after he crouched on the lip of the shallow trench the men had dug, stood, and blew his whistle.