Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Of course,” Dobelmeir said flatly. “Of course.”

The atom, Garbrecht thought, with a slight touch of exhilaration, is a marvelous thing. It hands over everything like a magic charm. Mention the atom, and they will solemnly believe any bit of nonsense you feed them. Perhaps, he thought, grinning inwardly, I will become a specialist. Garbrecht, Atomic Secrets Limited. An easy, rich, overflowing, simple field.

Dobelmeir was industriously scratching down the doubtful history of Professor Kittlinger, Atomic Experimenter. For the first time since he had begun working for the Americans, Garbrecht realized that he was actually enjoying himself.

“You might be interested,” he said calmly, “in something I picked up last night.”

Dobelmeir looked up assiduously from his desk. “Of course,” he said gently.

“It probably doesn’t amount to anything, just drunken, irresponsible raving …”

“What is it?” Dobelmeir leaned forward keenly.

“Three days ago a General Bryansky, who is on the Russian General Staff …”

“I know, I know,” said Dobelmeir impatiently. “I know who he is. He’s been in Berlin for a week now.”

“Well,” said Garbrecht, deliberately playing with Dobelmeir’s impatience, “he made a speech before a small group of officers at the Officers’ Club, and later on he got quite drunk, and there are rumors about certain things that he said.… I really don’t know whether I ought to report anything as vague as this, as I said, just a rumor.…”

“Go ahead,” Dobelmeir said hungrily. “Let me hear it.”

“He is reported to have said that there will be war in sixty days. The atomic bomb is meaningless, he said. The Russian Army can march to the Channel from the Elbe in twenty-five days. Then let the Americans use the atomic bomb on them. They will be in Paris, in Brussels, in Amsterdam, and the Americans won’t dare touch them.… Of course, I cannot vouch for this, but …”

“Of course he said it,” Dobelmeir said. “Or if he didn’t, some other of those murderers did.” He leaned back wearily. “I’ll put it in the report. Maybe it’ll make somebody wake up in Washington. And don’t worry about reporting rumors. Very often there’s more to be learned from a rumor than from the most heavily documented evidence.”

“Yes, sir,” said Garbrecht.

“I don’t know,” said Dobelmeir, “whether you heard about the bombing in Stuttgart yesterday.”

“Yes, sir. I did.”

“I have my own theory about it. There are going to be more, too, take my word for it. I think if you got to the bottom of it, you’d find our friends, the Russians, there. I want you to work on that, see what you can pick up this week.…”

“Yes, sir,” Garbrecht said. What a wonderful man Seedorf is, Garbrecht thought. How astute, how correct in his intuition. How worthy of faith. He stood up. “Is that all, sir?”

“That’s all.” Dobelmeir handed him an envelope. “Here’s your money. You’ll find two weeks’ pay I held back in the beginning are added to this week’s money.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Garbrecht said.

“Don’t thank me,” said the Major. “You’ve earned it. See you next week.”

“Next week, sir.” Garbrecht saluted and went out.

There were two MP’s standing at the door, in the clear winter sunshine, their equipment glittering, their faces bored. Garbrecht smiled and nodded at them, amused now, long in advance, as he thought of himself scornfully carrying the delicate parts of the first bomb past them, right under their noses.

He walked briskly down the street, breathing deeply the invigorating air, patting the small bulge under his coat where the money lay. He could feel the numbness that had held him for so long deserting him, but it was not pain that was taking its place, not pain at all.

L ance Corporal Alfred Hawkins stood on the Haifa dock, his fingers wet on the long nightstick in his hands, the unaccustomed helmet heavy on his head, watching a naval launch slowly bring in the two-masted schooner Hope , its decks and tattered rigging swarming with people, who looked like clustered dark bees, so far away, and not like people at all. Please, Lord, Hawkins prayed to himself, standing at ease with his platoon, warm in the yellow Mediterranean sun, please, Lord, keep me from hitting any of them.

“Don’t take any nonsense from the buggers,” Lieutenant Madox said, standing in front of the platoon. “Whack ’em a couple of times and they’ll behave like bloody gentlemen.” He turned and peered at the shabby schooner slowly approaching the dock, and Hawkins was sure that the look on the Lieutenant’s thick red face was one of pleasurable anticipation. Hawkins looked at the other men of the platoon. Except for Hogan, you couldn’t tell anything from their faces. In London once, during the war, Hawkins had overheard an American Air Force major saying, “The British would watch Hitler hanging or their daughters marrying into the Royal Family or their own legs being chopped off at the knee and not change expression by one twitch of the eyebrow. You can’t beat an army like that.” The American had been drunk, of course, but, looking around him now, and remembering other times, too—like the day outside Caen and the day on the Rhine and the day his company went into the concentration camp at Belsen—Hawkins could understand what the American had been talking about. In ten or fifteen minutes, the men around him might be in the middle of a very mean fight on board the schooner, against clubs and knives, perhaps, and maybe even home-made bombs, and except for Hogan, again, all of them looked as though they were merely lined up for a routine roll call outside their barracks in the morning. And Hogan, of course, was an Irishman, and not the same thing at all. He was a small, thin boy, with a tough, broken-nosed, handsome face, and now he was fidgeting uneasily, his jaw rigid with excitement, pushing his helmet back and forth on his head, shifting his nightstick, breathing loudly enough to be heard over all the small noises of the harbor and the platoon around him.

They were singing now on the schooner. The rising and falling, chanting, foreign melody came thinly and defiantly across the oily green water. Hawkins could understand several words of Hebrew, but he could not make out what the song was about. It sounded wild and somehow menacing, as though it should not be sung in sunshine and in the morning or by women’s voices but late at night, in the desert, by lawless and desperate men. Esther had translated two or three Hebrew songs for Hawkins in the last few weeks, and he had noticed that the words “freedom” and “justice” figured in them prominently, but those words did not seem to fit with the flat, dangerous, hoarse music hammering across the harbor from the slowly moving old boat.

Hawkins wished they wouldn’t sing. It made it harder if they sang and you knew they were singing about freedom or justice. After all, they were singing to him, and to the other men around him, and what did they expect him to do?

Hawkins closed his eyes, as though by shutting out the sight of the dark-clustered boat inexorably being pushed to the dock, and the clubs, and the transport waiting to take them to the stockade on Cyprus, he could somehow also shut out the sound of the rough, challenging voices of the Jews.

He closed his eyes, his youthful, almost childish face, sweating under the hot helmet, painfully composed, painfully disclosing nothing to the Lieutenant or the men around him or to the eyes of the fugitives he was expected to punish. He closed his eyes. He was uncomfortable in his wool battle dress and the tight canvas belting, and was sorry he was in Palestine, sorry he was in the Army, sorry he was an Englishman, sorry he was alive. This was not what he had expected when he had reënlisted, six months after the war was over. He didn’t know exactly what he had expected. He had just known he did not want to live in Southampton, in the foggy weather, among the ruined docks and the torn buildings; in the same house with his father, who had had his arm torn off during a raid in 1941; in the same house with his sister, whose husband had been killed at Bari in 1943; in the same house in which he had lived for such a short while with Nancy, who had later divorced him and married an American sergeant in the port battalion—and that was a soft job for a soldier, wasn’t it, during a war. He had just known that after four years in the Army, ever since he was seventeen, he did not want to start looking for a job as a longshoreman on the wrecked wharves, he did not want to stand in a queue collecting the unemployment dole, he did not want the bitter weather of unheated winter England after glimpses of Africa and summer France. And the only thing he had known was soldiering. They had made it a little more attractive—they had raised the pay and promised many rather vague benefits—and, if the truth must be told, the only time anyone had ever really taken care of him was in the Army. It was certain no one was really going to take care of you as a civilian, Socialist government or no Socialist government. Though he had voted for them, of course. He had read all the pamphlets and he knew what he was doing, a common soldier in the Army of the King, the son of a workingman, the grandson of a workingman, the great-grandson of a working-man. That was another thing about the Army. It had given him the chance to read for the first time in his life. Especially the two periods he’d been in the hospital, first with the bullet in his hip and then with the piece of shrapnel he’d picked up twelve days before the end of the war. The hospital library had had a complete set of H. G. Wells, and he had slowly and studiously gone through it all, soberly agreeing with the energetic arguments of the old man. By the time he’d got out of the hospital, he had become a confirmed Socialist, believing that education could change the world, and that violence was a hangover from primitive times, and that year by year the human race was certain to improve. He opened his eyes for a moment and looked at the schooner. It was much closer now, and he could smell it, too. There were perhaps three hundred people jammed onto it, men and women, and they had obviously not had the most complete sanitation facilities. He wished H. G. Wells were on the dock in the uniform of an infantry lance corporal today; it would be interesting to see what he would do.