Second Generation (32 page)

"How do you mean that?" Tom asked Whittier.

"The way I put it. What do you think of him. Do you like him?"

"No one likes Clancy. But he does know banking."

"A1 Sommers is going to retire in September. Clancy wants to be chairman of the board. That's been his dream all his life."

"What do you think?" Tom asked diplomatically.

"I think no. I don't like him. He started out as a little mick in the Tenderloin, and essentially this is what he remains. You will control the stock. I want you to assert yourself. Can you do it?"

"I think I can," Tom replied, pleased and not a little amazed at his own self-assurance. Whittier's frankness with him had helped build this assurance. He had never opened up quite in this manner before, never taken Tom so wholly into his confidence.

"I've been thinking about this consolidation for years," Whittier told him. "There's no doubt in my mind that once our interests are joined, we'll hold the balance of power on the Coast. From there on, we'll call the plays. I don't know yet exactly how we'll do it. That has to be worked out. But I want no slip-ups with Clancy. If he remains, it means only trouble. We want him out. Do you agree?"

"He's been with the bank forty years," Tom said slowly. "He's sixty-eight or sixty-nine. We could put through a sixty-five-year-old retirement rule, which would make it a little less personal. I think I could manage that."

"Only as chairman of the board. Do you think you can manage that?"

"If I have the votes, yes."

"So it's a question of Barbara. Between you, you'll have three hundred and eighty-two-thousand shares, seventy percent of the stock. What about Barbara?"

"I haven't seen her for years."

"Do you correspond?"

"Occasionally. She's supposed to return next week—at least that was her plan the last time I heard from her."

"I never asked about the split between you, never felt it was my affair. Truth is, I never quite got over that business of the strike. Was it over your father?"

"In part. Oh, we're not enemies. I can talk to Barbara. I can't think of any reason why she should stand in my way."

"You might plan to spend some time with her when she returns, win her confidence. It's important, Tom. I don't want to upset you, but Clancy and Sommers hold enough stock between them to tip the balance if we were to have Barbara turn against us."

"I don't think she would."

"On the other hand, your mother holds enough stock to tempt Barbara. She must not be tempted."

"I think you must let me handle it," Tom said.

"I have faith in your abilities," Whittier agreed.

The following day, as they stood at the gates to the White House, he spelled out that faith. "The trick, Thomas," he said, "for a man who intends to take up residence there someday, is to plan in advance. Not a month or a year in advance, but a lifetime. You have some of the qualifications, but it's a damn sight more than that. You have to establish a record. You have to calculate every move in your life, and one thing you damn well cannot afford is sentiment. Whether you're going to a toilet, a cathouse, or a dinner party on Nob Hill, you think of how it will look on the record. That benighted, crippled man in there will not live forever, and sooner or later our party will have its day. So take a good look at it."

"You're being very kind, John. But you're overrating me."

"I certainly am, Thomas," Whittier admitted. "At this moment, I don't think you have the qualifications for the state assembly, and that's pretty much the doghouse of it all. You've spent your twenty-seven years sitting back and waiting for the Seldon trust to fall into your lap. If you think you can do something else with the next twenty-seven, I'll back you to the hilt." He paused and faced Tom. "When we go in there and sit down with Harry Hopkins, it can begin an association that can change some history. Do you like the idea?"

"I do. Thank you, John," Tom said, not humbly, but as a confirmation between equals.

"Good. Now let's get to work."

The enormous, ornate, two-room suite in the Adlon dismayed Barbara. "I don't want this," she informed the manager flatly, staring at the baroque furniture, the thick gold and blue rug, the gilted drapes, the huge vase of fresh flowers. A black Mercedes limousine, waiting at the station for Harbin, had taken her there—Harbin still the proper, reserved, avuncular tour guide and protector— where Harbin had whispered a few words to the manager. Already Barbara was beginning to regret the fact that she had committed herself to Harbin's cloying courtesy. To be on her own, to do as she pleased and go where she pleased, had become second nature to her. She told herself that she was perhaps the most poorly equipped candidate in the world for the act of dissembling. This whole venture, she felt, was both romantic and stupid.

"I don't want this," she said, "and furthermore, I can't afford it."

The manager's English was not the best.
"Bitte, sprechen Sie langsamer.
Slow, yes? I understand, but slow."

"It is too expensive."

"So? No. I agree with ze baron, price is the same as Esplanade.
Bitte.
You are important guest."

Her luggage was in the room, and she was too tired to carry on the argument. The manager left, and Barbara kicked off her shoes and sprawled out on the vast bed. What on earth was she doing here in Nazi Germany, in Berlin? "If I had an ounce of intelligence," she told herself, "I'd be on the next train back to Paris and then to Cherbourg and home." Suddenly, she felt so wretched and lonely and aimless that she began to cry, and, still crying, she got up and walked to the huge mirror that took up most of one wall of the bedroom. Staring at the woeful, weeping face in the mirror, she burst into laughter, weeping and laughing at the same time. "Oh, I am a card," she told herself. "What a great undercover agent I have turned out to be!"

Enough of that, she decided. She stripped off her clothes and showered. It was still early, not yet midday. She dressed herself in a pleated plaid skirt, white blouse and light cardigan, and a good, solid pair of walking shoes; then she paced around her suite, studying it, and beginning, in her mind, the composition of her first "Letter from Berlin": "One discovers, immediately, a German gift for tastelessness. This is no inconsiderable talent. One would have to haunt the bazaars for weeks to discover a rug so garish and vulgar as that which covers the floor of my hotel living room."

She rejected it, annoyed with herself. She had hardly looked at the city, and she had no right to judge. She also realized that she would have to change the manner of her writing. There was something almost obscene about commenting on taste and manners and hotel furnishings in Berlin of 1939. "No preconceived notions," she said to herself, "not even in this cesspool. You go out and you see, and you make no judgments until the facts are presented before your own eyes."

It was just past noon when she came out on the street to a pleasant, sunny day, a cool breeze, and stretching before her, the magnificent reach of Unter den Linden. She knew from her guidebook that the university was on the same avenue, but she had carefully avoided mentioning it or asking about it. Now she decided to set out to find it on her own, after which she would find a restaurant and have some lunch. She strolled down Unter den Linden, studying the faces of the people who passed by. In all truth, she had to admit to herself that here on this lovely avenue there was no indication of what she had read about Germany. The people were well-dressed, cheerful, very ordinary human beings. Men looked at her, but then, she was sufficiently aware of her own face and figure to accept the fact that men looked at her, even though she herself could not accept a picture of herself as a beautiful woman. It was all so normal, so very matter-of-fact a picture of life in a busy, prosperous city, that she had to keep reminding herself where she was.

When she reached the university, opposite the Zeug-hauess Musum, she had the eerie feeling that the unseen eyes of the Gestapo were fixed upon her, and she made sure not to slow her pace or give the university buildings more than a passing glance, which she felt was all their unattractive architecture deserved. Certainly, her reaction was based on nothing more than her own excited imagination, yet for all that, she felt naked and alone. She would not go near the university on her first day in Berlin, nor on her second; she had to have, in her own mind, a valid excuse, some pages in her writing that would deal with higher education. She wandered along and found herself in Leip-zigerstrasse; she ate a sausage and drank a glass of dark beer at a food bar and then walked back to the Adlon. First things first. Bits and pieces of reading surfaced in her mind. If one went in for this sort of thing, one had to cover every movement. She picked up her copy of
Mein Kampf,
regarded it distastefully, and then began, to read, thumbing the pages, picking up passages here and there:

"All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word man—"

A knocking at her door gave her an excuse to throw the book from her in disgust. "Oh, no," she whispered. "There are people with a penchant for wandering in sewers. I am not one of them." Then she went to the door and opened it.

A tall, slender, thinly handsome woman stood there, black hair in a close bob, high-bridged nose, and cynical gray eyes. She wore a flowered dress of red silk with a fur piece thrown across her shoulders. "My dear," she said, without formalities, "you are beyond question the beautiful, enchanting Barbara Lavette. Dutzi is quite right. You, my dear, are a knockout. In your own way, mind you." The accent was British, the voice high-pitched, confident, and touched with arrogance.

"Who are you, if I may ask? And who on earth is Dutzi?"

"Ah, so much for the famous—or for the infamous, should I say? I am the notorious Pleasance Rittford. Does it shock you, my dear?"

"Should it?" Barbara wondered, trying desperately to place the name. Certainly she had heard it—something British upper class and reasonably scandalous.

"My dear child, must I stand in your doorway? Even if you bloody well don't approve of me, you can invite me in."

"Please come in," Barbara agreed. "How do you know I disapprove of you?"

"Plaid skirt, walking shoes, cardigan—all of it eminently sensible. Eminently sensible people do not approve of me. You see, I do not hate Nazis. I quite adore them, and I make no secret of it."

It fell into place, Lady Pleasance Rittford, wife of Lord Nigel Rittford, both of them eager and articulate supporters of Hitler's new order and very vocal propagandists against Britain taking up arms against Germany. Barbara's first inner reaction was cold shock, a kind of sick disgust and an impulse to burst out in a storm of righteous anger. This she controlled, even managing to maintain her expression of naive bewilderment. After all, she was not a tourist. She was a writer who had stupidly agreed to do a job for a cause she neither understood nor approved of; but she was also a writer whose editor would turn handsprings after reading the kind of story she could do on Lady Pleasance Rittford.

"I don't shock you?"

"Perhaps a bit," Barbara admitted, forcing a smile, studying Lady Pleasance carefully. "At least forty," Barbara said to herself, "neurotic, terribly thin, hardly a sex object, and absolutely obsessed," trying to remember what she had read of Freud on the subject of obsession and compulsion. How wasted her two years of college had been; but again, how is anyone at age eighteen to know what educational necessities will arise a decade later?

"Poor dear, to come blasting in on you like this." She pointed to the great mass of yellow roses on the coffee table. "Dutzi's trademark. He is quite taken with you. You must thank him profusely. He's very sensitive and sentimental under that fishface Prussian mask of his."

"Who is Dutzi?"

"The Baron—Harbin, your traveling companion. His close friends call him Dutzi." She wet her lips with her tongue and leaned back, assessing Barbara. "Not you. It wouldn't sound right from you at all. It's that English schoolgirl look that has his heart dancing. Keep it. It's worth its weight in gold—or in yellow roses."

"What on earth are you trying to tell me? I barely know this man."

"Oh, he's not in love with you, my dear, if that's what you're thinking. Men like Dutzi don't fall in love. But Dutzi has his Aryan image and ideal. He's quite nutty on the subject, and you fulfill it."

"Good heavens! Would you please tell him that I am a mongrel."

"That won't make a bit of difference. Aryan is as Aryan decides. They get rid of only the truly loathsome types. You wouldn't have a drink, would you, dear? I'm positively parched."

"I haven't had time. I only arrived this morning, and I've been wandering around Berlin. I'll have them send up something."

"I'll do it." She sighed. "Unless your German is good?"