No Dawn for Men (2 page)

The front rows of the jam-packed arena were filled with the
crème de la crème
of the Nazi Party and the German military. Start there and work your way back, his SIS contact had told him. So, throughout Hitler’s “we will take the Sudetenland if you don’t give it to us”
 
speech, the reporter snapped away with the tiny camera hidden in his opera glasses.
Great fun,
he thought, planning on what he might say if by some unlucky chance his camera, or its compact film canister, were discovered.
There are more Germanophiles in England than you realize, old chap.
Was Germanophile a word? No matter. He spoke better German than most Germans spoke English. The rough “low” Silesian dialect he affected in general conversation with Germans was something he had picked up during a two-week liaison with an arrogant but sexually inventive “reporter” for the Home Press Division of the Propaganda Ministry while they were both covering a Wagner festival in Leipzig in 1935. Adolph did not attend, but many of his high-level henchmen did, making for a huge harvest of pictures. The reporter, a top-and-bottom natural blond, said she was sleeping with Goebbels and needed a break from his neurotic fretting about his
untreue
to his wonderful Magda. “
Wondervoll Magda
my ass,” his friend had said. “She’s frigid and bony and he fucks her only out of guilt.” “I’m your man,” the reporter had said, the same twinkle flickering in his eye as when she smugly identified herself as a reporter. Korrespondent
my ass,
he had said to himself.
Try reporting something critical of Hitler, or the Nazi party.

“He doesn’t want any Czechs
at all
,” the American reporter sitting next to him said. “How fortunate for Mr. Benes.”

“Yes, I like the ‘
at all
’ bit,” the reporter replied. “I suppose Benes is listening, poor chap. The Czechs are always in the way.”

“And Chamberlain and Daladier,” the American said. “What will they do, do you think?” But the reporter was not listening.
Fuhrer, command and we will follow!
the crowd, on its feet en masse, was now chanting in one voice, fifteen thousand Germans baying in unison as their mad leader howled at the world. Panning the wildly cheering crowd, the reporter saw ecstasy on its collective face, its thousands of pairs of eyes on fire with lust.
Orgasms
, he thought,
they’re having orgasms. These huge Swastika banners, the little dog foaming at the mouth. It’s an orgy.

He stopped his panning abruptly to focus on a tall, handsome brunette in the tenth row center. She was not clapping, but simply standing still and clasping her hands in front of her. Was she grimacing? That would take courage. Had he seen her before? Yes he had. He never forgot a pretty face. She had been at the bar at the Adlon, his hotel, last night, having a drink with a rumpled but distinguished looking older man, Germany’s version of the Oxford don. Swiveling left and then right, the reporter snapped pictures of the handsome uber-Aryan men on either side of the brunette. Both were in SS gray, both square-jawed Nordic blonds, both clapping wildly.

“Fleming,” his colleague said. “Put those silly glasses down. What do you think Chamberlain will do? He’s
your
Prime Minister.”

“Are you a dog lover, Dowling?” the reporter replied.

“Excuse me?”

“I daresay most of you chaps are. Americans, I mean.”

 “Aren’t you Brits batty over your fucking hounds? The hunt and all that?”

The reporter smiled. He himself did not like dogs, had indeed avoided them at all costs for as far back as he could remember. “We had a great pack of them,” he said. “Have you seen what they do when they corner a fox or a stag?”

“We don’t get much of that in Chicago.”

“Does it matter what Chamberlain does?” the reporter said. He had, he knew, a reputation for flippancy in the international press corps, of which he was only sporadically a member. To them he was a dilettante, rich and pampered, a reputation he hoped was a result of hard work and not something he naturally exuded. “Look down there,” he continued, nodding first at the manic crowd below, and then at their bizarre, Chaplinesque leader, his right arm held high in the Nazi salute, the white-hot flame of the fanatic in his eyes. “In a few days, or a few months, the hordes of hell will be unleashed, no matter what decision Chamberlain takes.”

“Madmen and cowards,” the American said. “Europe’s specialties.”

Spot on,
the reporter thought, wincing inwardly, surprised, as usual, that his faux arrogance had once again been taken seriously.
Mustn’t lay it on too thick, old boy, you may need a friend one day, and who better than this burly Nebraskan with the blond forelock, the ham hands of a boxer, and, I must say, a keen insight into the continental soul?

2.

The Old Quad, Pembroke College, Oxford University

October 3, 1938, 6:00 p.m.

Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, John to his wife Edith, John Ronald to his friends, had just lectured on Beowulf, but his troubled mind had been on the handwritten manuscript on his desk on Northmoor Road the whole time. Torn between thinking about it and thinking about anything but it, he sat on a stone bench between two very old sycamore trees, a favorite spot of his. Buttoning his worn tweed jacket and wrapping his woolen scarf around his neck against the winter-tinged wind blowing across the quad’s expansive lawn, he sat under the red and yellow canopy formed by the autumn leaves overhead, trying to decide. Instinctively, he reached for his pipe and tobacco pouch and was about to set match to bowl when he noticed the newspaper weighted down by a rock at the far end of the bench. The wind was ruffling its pages. The rock did not conceal the headline:
IT IS PEACE IN OUR TIME
. He had heard the news of course, had read the
Times
’ front-page article on Saturday. This was the
Daily Mail
, a paper he rarely read. He picked up the rock, thinking to carry the paper home to read later, or, more likely, toss it into a dustbin along the way. Politics did not interest him, and war—another war—was something he could not bring himself to contemplate.

As he was setting the rock aside, he saw a small square of folded paper stuck to its flat underside. He pulled it off, unfolded it, and saw typed in the very center:

Þat kann ek it tolfta,

ef ek sé á tré uppi

váfa virgilná,:

svá ek ríst ok í rúnum fák,

at sá gengr gumi

ok mælir við mik.

The professor turned the paper over, where it was blank except for the residue of the glue that had been used to adhere it to the rock, then back again.

“Hávamál,” someone said.

“Yes, of course,” Tolkien answered, his voice a low murmur as he read again the Norse runes.

“And the translation?” the voice said.

“What?” the professor said, turning to his left and seeing a tall trench-coated man standing there in ominous silhouette, his back to the setting sun. “Pardon me?”

“Professor Tolkien. It’s me,” the man said, “Arlen Cavanaugh.”

“Arlie?” Tolkien replied. “Cavanaugh? What are you doing here?”

“I’ve come to ask a favor, sir. Can you translate that bit?”

“Of course I can.”

“Can I stand you a drink, sir?”

3.

Oxford

October 3, 1938, 6:15 p.m.

From his seat in the back of the Eagle and Child pub—or the Bird and Baby, as it was known around Oxford—Professor Tolkien watched as his old student, Arlen Cavanaugh, weaved his way, a Guinness stout aloft in each hand, to him. Tall and thin, his blond hair swept back to reveal twinkling blue eyes, pointy ears and a narrow face, his former student seemed to glide effortlessly around and through the knots of people standing, talking and drinking in the crowded pub. Did his feet touch the floor? The professor remembered that Arlie had been a great athlete, swift and graceful on the rugby field, where he seemed never to lose his balance, and the squash courts, where he bested all comers, smiling impishly and barely breaking a sweat the whole match. The word “elven” came to Professor Tolkien’s mind, which surprised him since he was used to thinking of elves as smallish creatures.

On the five-minute walk from Pembroke he had had a quick lesson in the improbable. Arlen, a poor student from a rich Midlands merchant family, had, after flunking out of Oxford, wangled an appointment to Sandhurst, where he lasted less than a month, and then managed somehow to land a job in Naval Intelligence, where he now worked directly under its director, a man named Hugh Sinclair, who Arlie referred to as Uncle Quex. SIS, MI-6.
Quite.

“Why the note under the rock?” the professor asked when Arlie was seated.

“I was just having fun. You know me.”

“That’s why you were sent down, Arlie.”

“No doubt, sir.”

“What’s your interest in Hávamál?” The professor had pulled the note out of his pocket and spread it on the scarred wooden table.

“We think Herr Hitler is interested in it as a code book.”

“That’s absurd,” John Ronald replied. “It would be easily deciphered.”

“Decoded, actually.”

The professor, now forty-six and with World War One between him and his youth, rarely recalled his undergraduate days with anything but pain. Two of his best friends lay buried in the Somme Valley. He smiled now though, thinking of the brashness of the TCBSers, as he and his small coterie of public school classmates called themselves, not unlike the brashness of Mr. Cavanaugh.

“So you’re lecturing me now,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to turn his smile into a frown of mild indignation.

“No, sir. Just correcting your usage. Codes are decoded, ciphers are deciphered.”

“Is this what you’re learning at Bletchley House?”

“Yes, sir. Among other things.”

“Excellent. Learning something.”

“We had the same thought,” Cavanaugh said, “about Hávamál. The Germans have Enigma machines. They are well beyond code books.”

“Should I still be worried about German aggression?”

“Professor . . . Are you serious?”

“I was rather hoping the headlines were accurate.”

“There’s no chance of that. Hitler’s a madman.”

“Are you sure?”

“‘
They have seen my strength for themselves, have watched me rise from the darkness of war, dripping with my enemies’ blood.’”

“My God, Arlie. You were listening.”

Silence, and a disarming, boyish smile from Arlie; then, the smile short-lived, the young man’s face suddenly deadly serious: “He’s killing Jews by the thousands. He’s arming himself to the teeth. Uncle Quex says he’ll invade Poland next year.”

“And what is it you need of me?” The quote from Beowulf had penetrated the professor’s defenses. He had learned about evil on the Somme and did not want to believe that its great dark shadow was again falling over the world. But of course it
was.
And here was a young man some might consider intellectually challenged to remind him, to jar him from his personal struggle with what was, after all, just a novel, a fiction, epic though he hoped it might be.

“Do you know a Professor Franz Shroeder?” Cavanaugh asked.

“Franz Shroeder? Yes. He taught one term at King Edward’s when I was there.”

“He’s a top man in his field.”

“Correct. Norse Mythology, of which Hávamál is a core text.”

“He’s retired, I believe.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“Or on a long sabbatical.”

“You can get to the point, Arlie. Indeed, having heard Grendel’s words fall from your lips, I am eager to know what it is.”

“You’re going to Berlin on Wednesday, to talk to a publisher, I believe. A German translation of
The Hobbit
.”

“You believe?”

“I know.”

“What else do you know?”

“You have a five-day visa.”

“Correct.”

“Shroeder is working on something on direct orders from Himmler. We’d like you to help us find out what it is.”

“Who is Himmler?”

“The head of the SS, Hitler’s political police. A nasty bunch. The Gestapo comes under his command. You’ve heard of them of course.”

“I have. Difficult to avoid hearing of them from time to time. How would I do this—discover what Shroeder is working on?”