Tycoon (16 page)

The Belgian officer pronounced them damned fools but made no further attempt to stop them.

Jack drove, going slowly, taking care not to appear to be in any purposeful hurry. It took half an hour to reach the village of Rochefort, which was nearly abandoned. A store had been looted, and some of its merchandise lay on the sidewalk. A café was open. Two men lay on the floor, passed-out drunk.
Three others remained erect only by clinging to the bar. A forlorn woman, apparently a prostitute, sat at a corner table, drinking wine as if it were the last she'd ever taste.

The proprietor stood behind the bar. He too was drunk. He reached to a shelf behind him and handed Jack and Curt two bottles of red wine. “It is free,” he said. “Today everything is free. Tomorrow I have no business.” He nodded toward the prostitute.
“She
will have business. Her mother did, the last time.”

They accepted the wine and put it in the car. There on the street before the café they heard for the first time the thunder of artillery.

At the edge of the village, Curt asked Jack to stop. “Let's talk about going back,” he said. “The Belgian officer may be right—I mean, that we're a pair of damned fools.”

“The Stuka flew right over us and paid no attention,” Jack pointed out.

“The next one might not.”

“Well, then, tell me something. If you were alone, if I weren't with you, would you go on or go back?”

“I'm a war correspondent,” said Curt. “It's my
business
to go on. It isn't yours.”

“In other words, I hire you, so I should send you out to face danger and go back myself,” Jack said as he shoved the Mercedes in gear and drove northeast on the road to Marche.

The main road from Bastogne to Namur passed through Marche, and it was on the outskirts of the town that they met the Germans.

Jack turned a corner, and there, sitting at one side of the street, apparently not wanting to block traffic, was a German tank. It was a Panzer IV, as they would learn. Two men in black uniforms, wearing garrison caps, with their shirtsleeves rolled up in the spring sunshine, stood on their tank and were talking to two infantrymen in field-gray uniforms and bucket helmets. A school-age boy in short pants stood a short distance away, staring curiously.

One of the black-uniformed men, the tank commander, turned and looked at the white Mercedes. His expression suggested that he had just wandered onto a circus lot and was confronting two clowns. With a firm, curt gesture, he ordered Jack to drive up to the tank.

He spoke to them in German. Jack understood enough to know that he was asking who they were.

“We are Americans,” Curt told him in English. “Neutrals.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We are journalists, foreign correspondents.”

The tank commander jumped down and walked to the car. “Your passports, please,” he said brusquely.

Curt handed him his passport. He examined it carefully, then asked for Jack's.

The tank commander was a muscular blond man of thirty years or so. He fixed a mildly contemptuous smile on the white Mercedes. “War correspondents,” he muttered as he handed back the passports. “Wait here.”

He returned to the tank and climbed up. A man inside handed him a radio microphone, and he communicated for a minute or so.

Jack and Curt waited. In ten minutes a car drove up, and an officer stepped out.

“I am Captain Hans Ritter,” he said. “
Abwehr
—German military intelligence. We know who you are, Mr. Lear, Mr. Frederick. You left Paris, where you stayed at the Royal Monceau, Mr. Lear, then traveled to Arras, to Dinant, and—”

“You know a great deal,” said Jack.

“We know something more, Mr. Lear. We know you are a Jew. And we are going to show you that we do not abuse Jews.”

J
ACK AND
C
URT DINED THAT EVENING IN
N
EUFCHÂTEAU ON
bread and soup from a field kitchen, supplemented by their two bottles of red wine. Captain Ritter and an
Abwehr
colonel named Cassell were with them.

The archetype of a German professional military officer, Cassell spoke almost no English. Jack spoke imperfect German
to him, explaining that his grandfather and grandmother had been German.

Through Ritter, Cassell told them, “You must forgive me, but I am very busy. I need hardly tell you what is about to happen. Within the next forty-eight hours this great war is won or lost. I assure you, gentlemen, it is won—by the German Reich.”

Jack did not mention the strafing of refugees. He had something else in mind and did not want the Germans to decide he was hostile. “We would like to be able to observe your attack on the Meuse and broadcast a live account to the United States.”

“You want to tell the story of this battle? I will arrange it.”

“One thing more, Colonel,” said Jack. “We left a French national and a Belgian national in Dinant. Employees of Lear Broadcasting. I would be most grateful if they could receive safe conduct from Dinant to wherever we may be.”

Captain Ritter grinned. “The Fleming who rented you the car is in our employ. Your redoubtable Monsieur Belleville is ignorant of that fact. Dinant is in our hands now. The men you speak of are in our custody. They will be released to you. No difficulty.”

A German lieutenant named Huntzinger drove the white Mercedes, which now flew German flags. A command car followed, carrying technicians and equipment. Their broadcast post was set up on a hill east of Sedan, from where they had a view of the river, the town, and the wooded hills behind the town where the French awaited the German assault.

The technicians arranged to transmit on an army frequency to a relay station in Bastogne, from which the signal was sent to Norddeutchsche Rundfunk in Hamburg, which transmitted to the same receiving station on Cape Cod that had received the interview with Hitler and his
Sportspalast
speech in 1938.

Lieutenant Huntzinger explained what they saw. The attack began with an hours-long artillery barrage, supplemented by incessant Stuka dive-bombing attacks on the French positions, particularly on the French artillery situated in the woods behind the town. By the time German infantry units began to cross the Meuse in large rubber boats, the smoke and dust from the explosions hung so heavy over the town and river that the
French could hardly see the boats and sank very few. German infantry stormed through Sedan and up to the heights behind, where they drove the gunners away from the artillery that could have saved the French. By the middle of the evening it was apparent that the German army was crossing the Meuse at Sedan all but unopposed.

Curt was on the air. For hours, listeners to the Lear stations heard the sounds of the battle and his voice telling Americans what was happening in France: “Here at Sedan on September 2, 1870, the French Emperor Napoleon III surrendered to the German army in one of the worst military disasters in the history of France. Tonight, May 13, 1940, it appears that the equal of that disaster may be developing.”

For the German army it was a military coup. For Lear Broadcasting it was a journalistic coup.

E
VEN AFTER
F
RANCE HAD FALLEN TO THE
G
ERMANS,
C
URT
Frederick could have stayed indefinitely in Paris. He and his network were regarded by the Germans as basically friendly. He had not been able to get Betsy out of town before the Germans arrived, but they were never in any danger. In fact, in many ways Paris was still Paris that summer of 1940, at least for the citizens of neutral nations. Still, any broadcasts from there would have been subject to strict censorship.

Jack ordered him to move his base of operations to London. Curt took Jean-Pierre Belleville and his wife with him, but anticipating a German attempt to invade the British Isles, he sent Betsy home. She was scheduled to cross the Atlantic on a Cunarder, but on its eastbound voyage it was sunk by torpedoes. She went instead on a modest American ship.

Back in the States, Jack spoke at three dozen dinners, describing what he had seen in Belgium in May.

“They cared nothing for the lives of those people. Children.
Pregnant women. Old people. To drive them onto roads where they would impede the flow of Allied troops and supplies to the front, they machine-gunned refugees without mercy. I saw them lying on the ground. I saw their blood. I saw their torn flesh. I heard their screams. And I saw or heard no sign of regret from the German officers who so kindly helped us to broadcast descriptions of their victory.”

America Firsters complained that Jack Lear was using his network to help Roosevelt drag the nation into war.

Time
used his portrait on a cover and published an extensive account of Jack Lear's adventures in Belgium in May of 1940.

Time
did not know and did not mention that he had invited Solomon Weisman to visit him and had joined B'nai B'rith.

1941

T
HE MAN
C
URTIS
F
REDERICK HAD BROUGHT TO
B
OSTON WAS
not really his brother. His name was Willard, but it was not Willard Frederick. What was more, he was not working on a biography of William Lloyd Garrison. He had wept when Curt married Betsy, and he'd wept again when Curt left for Europe and said he could not take him along. He endured life in Curt's Cambridge apartment until January of 1941 when Curt wired him from London that he should come over and share a London flat with him.

Having felt he could not bring Betsy to London and subject her to the hazards of the Blitz, Curt had decided Willard had a renewed place in his life.

In fact, the two men had never ceased to see each other. Curt's marriage had not terminated their relationship, as Curt had assured Willard it would not. They did not live together in Boston, but they shared a satisfying intimacy at least once a week.

Curt's flat in Kensington was smaller and shabbier than any quarters either man had ever before occupied, although it was regarded by Londoners as a fortunate residence in a fortunate neighborhood the Germans did not bother to bomb. A retired major general and his wife had lived in it until the general was
recalled to active service and sent his wife to Kent to live with her sister for the duration of the war. The flat consisted of one bedroom, a living room with dining alcove, a kitchen, and a bath. The upholstered chairs and couch featured antimacassars, and the windows were covered by yellowing lace curtains.

Willard, whose real name was Willard Lloyd, called his dominant partner Curt, which he pronounced “Coort.” Curt called him “Cocky.”

Cocky did not look like Curt's brother. He was a slight, spare man with only a little sandy hair remaining on his head. He painstakingly shaved off what little hair grew anywhere else on his body. Clothed he was nondescript, but when he pulled down his pants and shorts he released a memorable penis and happily displayed his sole distinction.

Cocky made it a point to be stark naked whenever Curt came home to the flat, except of course when cold weather made that impossible. When he was naked he displayed the penis that was the origin of the nickname Curt had given him. It was eight inches long and two-and-a-half inches thick. He loved to have Curt admire it and fondle it, and when the flat was too chilly for him to be naked, he pulled it from his pants and walked around with it hanging out.

Cocky would greet Curt with an account of what he had been able to buy that day for them to eat and drink. He spent all day, nearly every day, looking for whatever would relieve the spare, bland diet Londoners endured throughout the war. He found black marketeers and paid them exorbitant prices for meats and vegetables and spirits that almost no one else had.

Theirs was a domestic relationship: Curt earned their living; Cocky kept house.

Hot bathwater could hardly be had, but Cocky bathed Curt nearly every evening. He left water out in pans and a bucket all day, to become tepid. Then he warmed it more, using as much gas as he dared. He washed Curt lovingly, licking him too, especially behind the ears and between his toes, and, of course, in his crotch. Invariably he finished by sucking Curt's penis into his mouth and licking and nibbling until he induced a full orgasm. Some nights, when Curt was exhausted, Cocky worked on him as long as it took to coax a climax out of him. He didn't ask Curt to reciprocate, and Curt never did. The most
Curt ever did for him was to masturbate him. Cocky was grateful for that.

Cocky was a most unselfish man. All he asked for, really, was warm appreciation. All he wanted was to feel affection from his lover. He loved to sit on a couch beside Curt when Curt was reading or listening to the radio and to have Curt casually fondle his big penis.

He begged for assurance, repeatedly. “You don't play our games with other men, do you, Coort? Please promise me you don't.” On his knees and working Curt toward a fine orgasm, he pleaded breathlessly.