One Clear Call I Read online

  “My orders are to get to Rome at the earliest possible moment,” said the mysterious civilian. “They allowed me only three days to be briefed in Washington and New York. Couldn’t you put me aboard a sub by seaplane?”

  “The trouble is, the subs never radio their whereabouts except in an emergency. You understand, that would be too helpful to the enemy. I’ll have to consult my superiors and see what can be done for you.”

  V

  The officer drove his guest into the country and parked him in the shade of an acacia tree. He wouldn’t let him be seen in Intelligence headquarters, which were in a commandeered hotel in the city. “There are spies everywhere,” he said, and Lanny was duly grateful.

  This Lieutenant Ferguson was not a regular Navy man, he explained; the reason he knew so much about Italy was that he was a painter and had spent a couple of years in Rome and Florence. That had been up to the time of Mussolini’s declaration of war on America, and Ferguson had been interned with the newspapermen, first in the Regina Coeli prison—what a name for a hellhole, the Queen of Heaven!—and then in the ancient city of Siena. Apparently his father had been a man of means, for he had met many of the “right” people in Rome—“right” in the political as well as the social sense.

  Ferguson didn’t ask questions about whom Lanny knew, or how he expected to get by with both the Italian and the German authorities. He understood that this was somebody special, and he just told what he knew about conditions in a land unwillingly at war. He had heard the Germans speaking what they called Italian and could give an imitation of them, very comical—and there was no harm in laughing heartily under an acacia tree. The young officer had brought a basket of lunch and they made a day of it; Lanny asked questions and the other poured out answers. He liked the Italians but loathed the Germans, and the Italians shared both these attitudes. Lanny had heard the phrase “friendly enemies,” and now he learned a new phrase—“unfriendly allies.” Italy had been at war for three years and hadn’t been able to beat even the Greeks; the Italians were humiliated, hungry—and helpless.

  The Navy had a policy, derived from the State Department or from the Combined Allied General Staffs, Ferguson didn’t know which. We were not asking the Italian people to revolt, because we knew they couldn’t—the Fascists had all the weapons. We didn’t want to throw the country into tumult, for that would make it harder to manage and in the long run wouldn’t help anybody but the Bolsheviks. The program was to knock out the Mussolini gang and make a deal with the higher Army officers and the big business crowd, who would be ready to come over to our side as soon as we were ashore in force. That was the way to take advantage of the anti-German sentiment in Italy; the way to get the fleet and the air bases and save the lives of American soldiers.

  “In other words, just what we did in North Africa,” said the P.A., and the ex-painter said, “It worked there, and all the Italians know it, and the higher-ups aren’t thinking about anything except to be the lucky de Gaulle or Giraud.”

  “I notice you don’t say ‘the lucky Darlan,’” replied Lanny with a chuckle. He didn’t say how he had been worried by the prospect of having one of the worst of the Vichyites put in charge of the first of our military conquests, and how lucky we had been in having that incubus knocked off our necks by several bullets from an assassin’s pistol. Lanny wasn’t here to carry out his own policies; he was taking the orders of his Boss, and he tried not to worry because they were also the orders of Winston Churchill. During the three years in which Britain had been at war with Italy Lanny hadn’t failed to notice the Prime Minister’s persistent wooing of the Italian monarchy in his speeches; Winnie wanted to make the peninsula into a nice respectable bourgeois kingdom, as much like England as possible, and good for trade. Lanny kept before his mind the idea that the British people, with their common sense, would have something to say about that program after Mussolini and Hitler had been dumped into the ashcan.

  VI

  The P.A. was driven back to the city of Bizerte and left to find himself accommodations in one of the hotels which had not been taken over by the military. Lieutenant Ferguson gave him a pass which would serve if he were stopped by the Military Police. At nine next morning he was to walk past the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall of Bizerte, and Ferguson would be there if he had any news. If not, Lanny was to come again at noon and again at three. All that was an old story to a secret agent who had been posing as an art expert all over Europe for six years.

  He said, “I would like you to do me one favor. I have an old friend who is an officer in General Giraud’s army; his father is an extremely wealthy man, and they may know people in Italy who will be of use to me. Captain Denis de Bruyne is his name, and if he happens to be anywhere near by he will come to see me at once.”

  Lieutenant Ferguson said it should be possible to find him; it was arranged that after getting settled in a hotel Lanny would go outside and call Ferguson on the phone—not mentioning his own name, but merely the name of the hotel where he could be found. If Ferguson was able to find Captain de Bruyne, he would give the code message that “Annette” was in town and where she was staying. Annette was the name of Denis’s wife, and he and Lanny had used it as code in Algiers. There was, alas, no chance that the real Annette could be anywhere within reach, for she was in Seine-et-Oise, in the hands of the Germans, and Denis had not seen her since he had made his escape after being wounded in battle three years ago.

  Lanny found a room, not without some difficulty; then, after eating a rather skimpy dinner in a café, he went back to the room, took off his clothes—for it was not merely hot but muggy—and stretched out on the bed, not to sleep, but to recite to himself the lessons he had learned during the day. Not for anything would he have made notes of them; he must go over them and impress them upon his mind—names, places, dates, and the details which would have been gossip under other circumstances, but which in the near future might be the means of saving or losing his life. Dino Grandi had been popular with the Cliveden set when he had been ambassador in London; Federzoni, chairman of the Italian Academy, was rumored to be getting ready to desert II Duce’s sinking ship; the same for the Count of Turin, cousin to the King; Marshal Cavallero had been involved in a shipbuilding scandal during the war and had been ousted by Mussolini; ex-Premier Orlando—good God, they were even thinking of resurrecting that aged stout souvenir of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919! The grandson of Budd Gunmakers, as Lanny had been then, had met an American lady who had sat next to the then Premier of Italy at a dinner party, and had been struck dumb by his statement that his wife never got out of childbed without having become pregnant again. Now these hastily begotten sons were at an age to be knocked out of the skies by American airmen, or bombed in Taranto and Spezia because they did not dare to bring their ships out to sea. What a world!

  VII

  In the midst of this came a tap on the door and a voice telling Lanny there was a gentleman to see him. He replied that he would come, put on his clothes hurriedly, and went down into the lobby. There was Denis his face worn, and looking not too spruce in his uniform. They did not embrace as they would normally have done; Lanny made a motion with his finger, and they walked out and down the street together until they came to the park near the waterfront. There they found themselves a seat, and the light of a half moon made it possible for them to be sure that no spy was in reach of their low voices.

  Until recently the P.A. had been able to go into Vichy France and to meet Denis’s younger brother, Charlot, who was one of the hated pro-German crowd. But now those days were over, and Lanny had no news of the erring young officer. The Vichyites had set up a mock government somewhere near the German border; their Army men might now be on the Russian front, or they might have been sent into Sicily. Poor Denis was obsessed by the dreadful idea that he might meet his brother on the field of battle. Such things had happened in all civil wars, in France as in America, and the elder imagined himself turning a dead body over and s
eeing the face which had been dear to him from infancy up to the time of la patrie’s tragic collapse.

  Presently he said, “I heard that you were lost, Lanny. I was dreadfully upset.”

  “I was down in the desert,” the other explained; “but I got out all right. I had the fortune to meet a camel caravan.” He didn’t say that he had been brought into the German lines, or where he had been since parting from his friend. Instead he remarked casually, “I gather that we are going into Sicily.” This, of course, would be no secret to a French officer.

  “You should pay a visit to our troops, Lanny. You would be delighted by what you would see. The honor of France has been saved.”

  “You have seen real fighting, I learned from the radio.”

  “All the way from Kasserine to Cap Bon. We have stood up to the enemy, with weapons as good as his own, or better, and we have driven him back, foot by foot. We had to storm one hill after another, for a hundred miles—positions the enemy had been preparing for half a year.”

  Lanny encouraged his old friend to tell this story. For three years Denis had lived in humiliation, not merely because la patrie was under the conqueror’s jackboot, but because to a clear-sighted Frenchman it was apparent that his own bad judgment, and that of his family and his class, had been responsible for the debacle. But now Denis had helped to wipe out the stain, with his own blood and that of his men. He had got a bullet through the shoulder and had stayed in action for a whole day with merely two chunks of cotton poked into the wound at each opening. He looked like a much older man.

  “Tell me,” said the P.A. as casually as he could, “how do your men feel about the prospect of fighting their way through Italy.”

  “They are dancing with impatience, Lanny. They will consider that they are on their way home. Do you suppose there is any chance of our landing on the Riviera?”

  “Nobody tells me things like that, cher ami. But there seems a good chance of your marching to Rome this year. Do you know anybody there?”

  “I have a cousin in Rome, the Marchesa di Caporini. She visited Paris not long before the war.”

  “I heard your mother speak of her, but that was before the Marchesa’s marriage. What sort of person is she?”

  “A very elegant lady, but not very happy, I believe. The Roman aristocracy must be in a bad way by now; as you Americans say, they have got a bull by the tail.”

  “Your cousin’s family is committed to the regime?”

  “She was when we saw her. She did not make a success with us because she thought Italy ought to have Nice and Savoy. We couldn’t see that such an issue was worth fighting about, but we considered it decidedly bad taste. It is painful to realize what fools we were in those days, Lanny. We really believed the dictators were generous men, planning to bring in a new regime of order and prosperity.”

  Lanny replied, “You must keep that in mind when you think about Charlot. Both you and your father taught him to believe in the New Order, as you called it. You must not blame him if he cannot change his mind as fast as you.”

  “Believe me, Lanny, I think of that all the time. If only I could get hold of him, to reason with him, to make him see what satanic actions his Nazi friends have performed!”

  The other smiled. “I am afraid he would reply by citing the satanic actions of the Russians. He would not fail to add what the British Fleet did at Oran, or Mers-el-Kébir, as you call it. I do not know what he would cite against us Americans, because he was too polite to mention that subject to me. He would surely not be pleased by our invasion of the soil of Algiers, which is called a part of Metropolitan France and therefore is sacred.”

  VIII

  In the morning the P.A. strolled past the Hôtel de Ville at the hour specified, and then back again, but there was no sign of the Intelligence lieutenant. Lanny walked and inspected the great naval base of Bizerte, which was now British and American, and which would live in Army history because it rhymed with “dirty Gertie.” (It didn’t, but the GI’s weren’t going to bother their heads or tongues with the correct pronunciation of any foreign name.) These khaki-clad heroes were performing prodigies of labor, restoring docks and cranes, and at the same time unloading mountains of stuff from ships. Six times in the course of a morning stroll Lanny was stopped by MP’s and required to show his papers. These were in order, so he got a respectful “OK, sir.”

  The immense basin and its complexity of docks were full of craft of all sizes and shapes—a wonderful target for bombers, but not one showed up that morning. A new expedition was in preparation, and nobody here could have any doubt where it was going. He had seen a great flotilla arrive to take Algiers, and he knew what prolonged planning and preparation had been required. Now here was another “amphibious operation”—“Husky” it was called. This time the distance was short, one or two hundred miles across the strait to the large triangular island of Sicily. There would be enemy planes in the air, and enemy submarines in the water, and enemy guns large and small in the hills which covered the beaches. How many there would be and what forces to man them were perhaps known to those who planned the landing, but surely not to the plain “Joes” who were in near-by camps, resting before going on board the vessels.

  Only a year and a half had passed since the attack on Pearl Harbor had dragged America into this war. Miracles of production had brought an armada here, equipped with something like a quarter of a million different articles, from tiny ball bearings of the hardest steel, so small that the eye could hardly see them, to huge tanks, self-propelled tank-killing guns, and LST’s especially built to slide up on beaches and let down ramps on which the monsters could roll ashore. Most of the soldiers had but the vaguest idea of why they were in a war, but they had been told there was a job to do and they were doing it. They had seen pictures of a fellow with an ugly mug, standing on a balcony and throwing out his chest like a pouter pigeon. They called him “the Deuce,” and didn’t mean any pun, but thought that was the way his title was pronounced. A generation ago their fathers had come over and put the Kaiser “in the can”; and now there were two more, a Deuce and a Führer. A Seabee from Texas with whom Lanny got into conversation thought that the leader of the Germans was called Führer because he was in a fury all the time.

  At noon there was still no lieutenant, so Lanny got his onion soup and bread and fruit in an obscure French café, meantime studying diligently a small Italian dictionary he had picked up in a bookstore. This was a proper thing for either an American or a German to carry, and he would not merely refresh his memory on phrases he would need, but would practice saying them like a German. The land of Dante and Leonardo was swarming with Teutons both military and civilian, and no matter how much the Italians disliked them they took their money and let them alone—and that was all a secret agent needed.

  At three o’clock there was the lieutenant, saying, “The Navy reports that it would hardly be possible to set you down on the beach at Ostia. It is well fortified and patrolled. There are barbed wire, mines, searchlights, and no doubt radar; any craft approaching would pretty surely be detected and fired on. The nearest unguarded shore is more than ten miles to the south.”

  The P.A. replied, “OK, let them land me there, and I’ll find transportation.”

  Said the lieutenant, “Here is a map for you to study. You will be flown in a seaplane, and I will be in front of your hotel at twenty hundred.” Lanny replied, “I’ll be ready”; and that was all. He went back to his room and learned about the roads and villages south of Ostia, then strolled and looked at more of the spectacle of Operation Husky. He had supper in another café—never the same, lest anyone should get his features fixed in mind. He returned to his room and studied until five minutes before eight, or twenty hundred as the Armed Forces called it, when he took his bag and went down to the lobby of the hotel, paid his bill, and went for a stroll.

  It was just about dusk, and he didn’t have to return to the front of the hotel, because the officer in the jeep saw
him and swung round to the curb and took him in. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans had read mystery stories, spy stories, “thrillers” of one sort or another, and now they were getting a kick out of being called to enact in real life what they had read. There wasn’t any play-acting about it, because this polyglot port had been in the hands of the enemy only a few weeks ago, and any hotel waiter, cab driver, or Arab wrapped in a dirty white bedsheet might be a spy, reporting to a technician with a sending set hidden in a barn, or a fisherman’s hut, or even a load of garden truck being brought into town.

  IX

  It was all right to talk in a moving car, for no one could get near enough to hear above the sounds of the engine. Ferguson put into Lanny’s hands a large wad of Italian money which he had got in exchange for American money Lanny had entrusted to him. Then he remarked, “The Navy is paying you a compliment in lending you a seaplane.” Perhaps that was a hint from a young officer whose curiosity had got the better of his discretion. But Lanny did not take the bait; he said politely, “I appreciate the honor.” In order not to seem uncordial he added, “Someday when this is all over, fate may bring us together again, and then I’ll tell you a story that will interest you.”

  “I hope it may happen,” replied the younger man, who had been deeply impressed by his good-looking and friendly passenger.

  Against a badly wrecked concrete pier lay the small, fast seaplane. Lanny was introduced to the pilot, a lieutenant, and the co-pilot, an ensign. Each of these had a seat, and Lanny was invited to sit on an inverted bucket with a folded blanket on it to make it less hard. He shook hands with Ferguson and thanked him for his kindness. Two sailors pushed the plane away from the dock; its engines, already warmed up, were put into gear, and it glided out into the wide main basin of the harbor. Darkness enveloped the plane, but several small guide lights were turned on; the engines began to roar and the propellers to whirl, and the seaplane forced its way through the water. A ticklish moment, for you couldn’t see ahead, and what if some small boat, sneaking out without permission, happened to lie in the path?