Free War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk Page A

overcoat and corduroy cap, Dr. Werner Beck hopped out of the Mercedes, opened the front and back doors, and bowed and smiled. The scene was swimming around Natalie. Jastrow got in at the front door as Beck loaded the two suitcases in the trunk. Carefully, Avram Rabinovitz bestowed the basket in the back seat. “Well, good-bye, Dr. Jastrow,” he said. “Good-bye, Mrs. Henry.”
    Beck got into the driver’s seat.
    She choked to Rabinovitz, “Am I doing the right thing?”
    “It’s done.” He touched a rough hand to her cheek. “Next year in Jerusalem.”
    Tears sprang to her eyes. She kissed his bristly, greasy face, and stumbled into the car. He shut the door on her. “Let’s go!” he called in Italian at the crewmen. “Get the plank in!”
    The Mercedes drove down the wharf, with Jastrow and Beck blithely chatting. Natalie bent over the baby’s basket, dry suppressed sobs convulsing her throat. As the car headed north out of Naples on a deserted macadam highway, the sun rose in a white blaze. Its slanted afternoon rays were lighting the Via Veneto when Werner Beck halted his car at the American embassy, and helped Natalie alight. Louis had a high fever.
    The Red Cross was handling mail for the internees. Before Natalie left for Siena, she wrote Byron what had happened, summing it up so:

Now that I’m back in civilization — if you call Mussolini’s Italy that — I can see that I did the prudent thing. We’re safe and comfortable, an American doctor’s been treating Louis, and he’s on the mend. That boat was a horror. God knows what will become of those people. Still, I wish I didn’t feel so lousy about it. I’ll not rest easy until I learn what happened to the
Redeemer.

5

    E XCEPT for the haunting uncertainty about his wife and baby, Byron Henry was enjoying the new war with Japan. It had freed him for a while from the
Devilfish
and its exacting captain, for salvage duty in the ruins of the Cavité naval base. Under the bombed-out rubble and broken burned timbers lay great mounds of precious supplies in charred boxes or crates — electronic gear, clothing, food, machinery, mines, ammunition, the thousand things needed to keep a fleet going; above all, spare parts now desired above diamonds. With a sizable work gang, Byron was digging out the stuff day by day, and trucking it westward to Bataan.
    His feat of retrieving torpedoes under fire during the Cavité raid had brought him this assignment direct from Admiral Hart’s headquarters. He had
carte blanche
in the burned ruins, so long as he produced the goods at the peninsula enclosing the bay to the west, where American forces were digging into the mountains for a possible long siege. This freedom of action enchanted Byron. His contempt for paperwork and regulations, which had gotten him into such hot water aboard the
Devilfish,
was a prime scavenger virtue. To get things moving he signed any paper, told any lie. He commandeered idle men and vehicles as though he were the admiral himself. For overcoming resistance and settling arguments, he used fire-blackened cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes — which worked like gold coin — from a vast cache he had come upon in the ruins. His drivers and loaders got plenty of these, too, and he made sure they were well fed. If he had to, he brought them into officers’ messes, brassily pleading emergency.
    Once during an air raid he marched his seventeen men into the grill of the Manila Hotel. The dirty, sweaty crew ate a sumptuous lunch on white napery to string music, while on the waterfront bombs exploded. He paid the enormous check with a Navy voucher full of fine print, adding a five-dollar tip from his own pocket; and he walked out fast, leaving the head waiter staring dubiously at the flimsy blue paper. Thus Byron got his raggle-taggle pickup gang of sailors, longshoremen, marines, and truck drivers — Filipino, American, Chinese, he didn’t care — to drudge cheerily from dawn to nightfall.