World War 2 Thriller Collection: Winter, The Eagle Has Flown, South by Java Head

She smiled at his discomfort. It was not easy to disconcert him. ‘I have not had a terrible time, Harry. I’ve had a son.’

Winter glanced at the baby in the cot. ‘I wanted to be here sooner, but there was a complication at the bank this morning. The senior manager came to talk to me while I was shaving. At home, while I was shaving! One of our clients died…. It was suicide.’

‘Oh, how terrible, Harry. Is it someone I know?’

‘A Jew named Petzval. To tell you the truth, I think the fellow was up to no good. The secret police have been interested in him for some time. He might have been a member of one of these terrorist groups.’

‘How do you come to have dealings with such people, darling?’ She lolled her head back and was glazy-eyed. It was, of course, the after effects of the anaesthetic. The nurse had said she was still weak.

‘It was one of the junior managers who dealt with him. Some of them have no judgement at all.’

‘Suicide. Poor tormented soul,’ said Veronica.

Winter watched her cross herself and then glance at the carved crucifix above her bed. He hoped that she was not about to become a Roman Catholic or some sort of religious fanatic. Winter had quite enough to contend with already without a wife going to Mass at the crack of dawn each day. He dismissed the idea. Veronica was not the type; if Veronica became a convert, she was more likely to be a convert to Freud and his absurd psychology. She’d already been to some of Freud’s lectures and refused to laugh at Winter’s jokes about the man’s ideas. ‘It’s a good thing you’re not running the bank, my dearest Veronica. You’d be giving the cash away to any bare-arsed beggar who arrived with a hard-luck story.’ He moved a basket of flowers from a chair – the room was filled with flowers – and noticed from the card that the employees of the Berlin bank had sent them. He sat down.

‘I want to call him Paul,’ said his wife. ‘Do you hate the name Paul?’

‘No, it’s a fine name. But I thought you’d want to name him after your father.’

‘Peter and Paul, darling. Don’t you see how lovely it will be to have two sons named Peter and Paul?’

‘Have you been saving up this idea ever since our son Peter Harald was born, more than three years ago?’

She smiled and stretched her long legs down in the bedclothes. She’d chosen two names her American parents would find equally acceptable. She wondered if Harry realized that. He probably did; Harry Winter was very sharp when it came to people and their motives.

‘All that time?’ said Winter. He laughed. ‘What a mad Yankee wife I have.’

‘You are pleased, Harry? Say you’re pleased.’

‘Of course I am.’

‘Then go and look at him, Harry. Pick him up and bring him to me.’

Winter looked over his shoulder hoping that the nun would return, but there was no sign of her. She was obviously giving them a chance for privacy. Awkwardly he picked up his newly born son. ‘Hello, Paul,’ he said. ‘I have a present for you, child of the new century.’ He was a pudgy little fellow with a screwed-up face that seemed to scowl. But the baby’s eyes were Veronica’s: smoky-grey eyes that never did reveal her innermost thoughts. Winter put the baby back into the cot.

‘Do you really, Harry? How wonderful you are. What is it, darling? Let me see what it is.’

‘It’s a plot of land,’ said Winter. ‘A small piece of hillside on the Obersalzberg.’

‘A plot of land? Where’s Obersalzberg?’

‘Bavaria, Germany, the very south. It’s the sort of place where a man could build himself a comfortable shooting lodge. A place a man could go when he wants to get away from the world.’

‘A plot of land on the Obersalzberg. Harry! You still surprise me, after all this time we’ve been married.’ Through the haze of the ether that was still making her mind reel, she wondered if that represented some deep-felt desire of her husband. Did he yearn to go somewhere and get away from the world? He already had that beastly girl Martha to go to. What else did he want?

‘What’s wrong?’ said Winter.

‘Nothing, darling. But it’s a strange present to give a newborn baby, isn’t it?’

‘It’s good land: a fine place with a view of the mountains. A place for a man to think his own thoughts and be his own master.’ He looked at the baby. It was happier now and managed a smile.

1906

‘The sort of thing they’re told at school’

‘You have two delightful little boys, Veronica,’ said her father. He watched through the window of the morning room as the solemn ten-year-old Peter pushed his radiantly joyful little blond brother across the lawn on a toy horse. The children were in the private gardens of a big house in London’s Belgravia. It was a glorious summer’s day, and London was at its shining best. An old gardener scythed the bright-green grass to make scallop patterns across the lawn. The scent of newly cut grass hung heavily in the still air and made little Pauli’s eyes red and weepy. Cyrus sniffed contentedly. Their English friends urged them to come to London in ‘the season’, but the Rensselaers preferred to cross the Atlantic at this time of year, when the seas were calmer. ‘No matter what I’m inclined to say about that rascally husband of yours, at least he’s given you two fine boys.’

‘Now, now, Papa,’ said Veronica mildly, ‘let’s not go through all that again.’ She was wearing a long ‘tea gown’ of blue chiffon with net over darker-blue satin. Such afternoon gowns gave her a few hours’ escape from the tight corsets that fashion forced her into for most of the day. It was a lovely, loose, flouncy creation that made her feel young and beautiful and able even to take on her parents. She pulled the trailing hem of it close and admired it.

‘She’s given Harry two fine boys,’ Mrs Rensselaer scoffed. ‘Isn’t it just like a man to put it the wrong way around? Who endured that dreadful hospital in Vienna, when there was a bedroom and our own doctor waiting for her in New York City?’ They were getting at her again, but she was used to it by now. She noticed how much stronger her mother’s high-pitched Yankee twang sounded compared with her father’s softly accented low voice. She noticed all the accents much more now that her life was spent amongst Germans. She wondered if her spoken English had now acquired some sort of German edge to it. Her parents had never mentioned it, and she knew better than to ask them.

‘I couldn’t have come home to have the baby, Mother. You know I couldn’t.’ She suppressed a sigh. For six years they’d nursed this resentment, and still it persisted.

Her father watched the children cross the road hand in hand with their nanny and heard the front door as they came in time to have a wash before tea. He said, ‘I travel across the Atlantic regularly, Veronica, and your mother usually accompanies me. It’s ridiculous for you to go on pretending that you can’t come home for a visit when we come here to London every year without fail.’ He thrust his hands into his pockets. ‘By golly, when I first came to Europe, I sailed on a four-masted barque, now your mother and I sleep in state rooms with running water, and eat dinners that wouldn’t disgrace the Ritz.’

Cyrus G. Rensselaer was a distinguished-looking man in his mid-fifties. He had a shock of black hair combed straight back, pale-blue eyes, and a large moustache. He made no concessions to the warm weather: he wore a black barathea morning suit with a fancy brocaded waistcoat, and a loose tie with a silver pin through the knot. Yet there was a certain unconventional look to him – his hair was longer than was fashionable – so that sometimes, on the steamship coming over, fellow passengers thought he might be a famous musician or a successful painter. This always pleased Cyrus Rensselaer because he often said that he would have become a painter had his father not thrashed him every time he wanted to stop studying engineering.

‘I know, Father. You’ve told me all that in your letters. But Harry is a German; the boys are German. I think of Germany as my home now.’ The difficulty was that her parents spoke no foreign languages, and their one visit to Berlin for the wedding in 1892 seemed to have deterred both of them from ever going to the continent of Europe again.

‘You were able to go to Vienna and have the baby, darling,’ explained her mother. ‘Papa feels that coming back to New York wouldn’t have been all that much more of a strain.’

‘The baby was early, Mother. We were in Vienna and the doctor said I shouldn’t travel.’ She looked at her parents; they were unconvinced. ‘Harry was furious about it. He’d made all the arrangements in Berlin. Poor little Paul – Harry used to call him “the little Austrian dumpling” until I made him stop saying it.’

Her father pulled a gold hunter from his waistcoat pocket and looked at it. ‘Didn’t your Harry say he’d be back for tea?’

‘He’s lunching at the club.’

‘He likes clubs,’ said her father.

‘It’s some mining deal…’ explained Veronica. ‘Someone has discovered a cure for malaria. They think it’s something to do with mosquitoes. Harry says that if it works it will really open up the darkest part of Central Africa.’

‘It’s not a woman, is it?’ whispered her mother.

‘No, it’s not a woman, Mother.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ her mother asked.

‘I’m sure, Mother. Harry’s not so smart about women as he is about money.’

Mr Rensselaer did not like hearing Harald Winter praised, and he certainly didn’t like to hear him praised about his investing and banking skills, at which he considered himself pre-eminent. ‘I’m surprised your Harry isn’t investing in flying machines,’ he said sardonically.

Veronica looked up at him sharply. ‘You underestimate Harry, Papa. You think he’ll invest money into any crazy scheme put up to him. But Harry is clever with money; he would never put it into the hands of people like that.’

‘I’m darned if I ever know what to make of your Harry,’ said her father. ‘He spends money on such toys as this Daimler Mercedes and then takes you down to a cabin on the Obersalzberg and makes you manage with only a couple of local servants. I didn’t pay for your education so that you could wash dishes and sweep the house.’

‘It’s not a cabin, Papa, more like a hunting lodge. The land passed to Harry because of a bad debt. He gave it to Pauli as a christening present. Now he’s built the house there. I love going there. It’s the only time I have Harry all to myself. And we take two maids from the Berlin house, as well as the cook, Harry’s valet and the chauffeur.’

‘It sounds like a lot of work for you, darling,’ said her mother. ‘And walking for five miles! We could hardly believe it when we read your letter. We couldn’t picture you walking so far. Don’t you get lonely?’