Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

21.

Part IV: Nob Hill

April 1945

Tim read The San Francisco Chronicle every morning with his coffee and muffin in the hotel, and he kept up with the general drift of the vast and mysterious ocean of human events. At the same time he had to keep an eye on the chrome Art Deco clock on the cafeteria wall to avoid being late for work. Most importantly, the City of San Francisco was readying herself to become the scene of one of history’s turning points, a hinge of new hope, as representatives of at least 50 nations gathered for a two month conference that would result in the founding of the United Nations in June, 1945.

On April 12 came the shocking news of FDR’s death. The President of the United States had died during the night. San Francisco, the United States, it seemed the world carried about them a strange quiet, a pall of grief for days on end. Those of the right wing who had ceaselessly denounced FDR feeling he had done too much, as well as the extremists of the left who felt he had not done enough, for once remained largely silent, in a nation that was shedding tears today, a nation whose majority felt a genuine sense of loss. They felt they had been rescued from the dark, cold jaws of modern history’s worst financial ruination by this aristocratic, wheelchair-bound dandy who had told them “There is nothing to fear but fear itself,” at a time when a deep and unspeakable terror gripped those who had been out of work and hungry and unable to feed their families for so many years that it really seemed as if a Biblical end of time had arrived. Then, against the rabid screeching of the German tyrant, and the obscene posturing by Italy’s bully, and the cruel strutting of the Japanese throughout Asia, Roosevelt had presented an urbane, civilized, charming counterpoint. The news of FDR’s passing was in the air, a single voice, a single radio broadcast emanating everywhere from windows, doorways, in bus stations and train terminals, on the streets. Even the newsboy did not need to shout, but silently passed out papers and collected his pennies as fast as his grimy fingers could fly. The voice was everywhere: Arthur Godfrey, recounting the final bittersweet journey down those broad boulevards in the nation’s capital to the train station—not for burial in that great resting place in Robert E. Lee’s onetime backyard at Arlington, but to the President’s home town of Hyde Park, New York. With each tolling drumbeat, there was a sense that this young nation, which appeared to be weathering yet another crisis, was gathering about itself the heavy folds of history’s mantle. It was one of those moments when people felt in their marrow that some important turning point of history was at hand.

FDR, 63 and long ailing from the after-effects and side-effects of childhood polio, had died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in his favorite resort at Warm Spring, Georgia. The new President, Harry S. Truman of Missouri, was sworn in and waiting as the funeral train made its way to the nation’s capital. The train traveled slowly, always along tracks lined for miles and miles by tearful citizens, sometimes slowing almost to a stop as crowds overwhelmed the tracks to lay flowers or touch the passing car. No matter what the wealthy and conservative few said who hated him, and would perhaps hate him for many years, the people had given him enormous landslide victories in his unprecedented four terms. The common, everyday working people who now came to say their goodbyes, and nobody needed to restrain them or lay a hand on them in this great democracy.

Tim and his fellows at the office found it difficult to get much work done in this climate. The funeral train took FDR to Washington, where he lay in state, and then on to New York. Life got on under the administration of Harry S. Truman, the bespectacled and plain-spoken Missouri haberdasher who seemed like an odd choice to follow in FDR’s footsteps.

Ironically, a little over a week later, the fate of the world tilted again, for in a city square in Milan hung the mangled bodies of Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and their closest aides. They hung by their heels on slaughterhouse hooks. Her skirt was modestly tied around her bloodied legs. A rifle butt propped up Il Duce’s battered face for photographers’ flashing bulbs. At least four bodies hung upside down, with their arms stiffly spread in a final morbid embrace for millions they had led into war and disaster. Just as ironically, two days later, Hitler had shot himself in the mouth after giving his new bride Eva Brown poison. The rubble-choked, fetid, stinking bunker in the heart of Berlin was a ruin filled with the corpses of some of the Third Reich’s leaders and their children, and Cossacks swarmed through the city raping, burning, and looting—so much so that many Germans killed their families and then committed suicide. In the last frenzied days of the Reich, when its leaders were either committing suicide or looking for Americans to surrender to rather than be captured by the Soviets, Grossadmiral Doenitz took over the helm of the crippled state for less than three days, just long enough to surrender. During those chaotic days, a frantic barrage of orders crisscrossed in the dying machinery of Hitler’s military services, and all of it was too fast and too confused and often too secret for the news media to keep up with. Europe was enveloped in the greatest humanitarian crisis in history, the wandering of nearly thirty million displaced Germanic civilians—most from Slavic nations, many of them innocent children—through lands in which they were hated for what their countrymen had done, or for who they were, or both. In many cases, babies were simply taken from their mothers and thrown down wells or into latrines to drown. Starving people who could hardly walk anymore were bayoneted or stomped to death. Some were dragged from their death march on muddy and cold roads and forced to labor without sustenance until they dropped dead. Meanwhile, the Allies were opening up the hundreds of crusted-over sores of Hitler’s mass extermination program, and the photos and stories coming out of concentration camps were too ghastly for comprehension. Still, as always, the cold, cynical, calculating machinery of human events ground on. Where one suffered, the other rejoiced. Where one cried, the other laughed at his pain. Stalin could well do a little victory dance of his own, in the manner of the dead Adolf, at the thought of having wrested half of Europe into the Communist darkness. And so it went. Would the world be any different now that nationalist socialism had been exterminated? Would a world suffocated by international socialism be any kinder? These were the questions being asked by readers and editorialists in the newspapers, on radio, in movie newsreels.

In October 1944, FDR had met with Papa Joe, Churchill, and China’s Chiang Kai-Shek at the Georgetown residence of the heirs of a vast laxatives fortune, the Blisses, to hammer out a proposed world future. Hopefully, this would create a stable world order and a sound money and banking system within a framework of mutual security. The enterprise that sprang forth from this, as Tim read in his papers, was the United Nations. The hope was that the victors had learned from the mistakes of their predecessors in places like Vienna (1815) and Versailles (1919). The sundered enemy would not be humiliated and chained to devastating reparations, but fed, clothed, housed, governed, rehabilitated, and ultimately set loose as an ally rather than a liability. That was the hope. A few editorial writers had misgivings about the Marshal Stalin’s long history of deceit, violence, and treachery in the service of international Communism. They pointed to the genocide of Kulaks in the 1930s or the mass murder of the Polish officer corps at Katyn, but a pretense had to be made that one was dealing with civilized folk—how else to create a new world order?—and thus proceeded the partition of Europe, as did the daydream, as many called it, of a United Nations.

In February 1945, two months before his death, the ailing FDR had met with Stalin and Churchill at the Crimean resort of Yalta to lay out the groundwork for the world’s future alignments. Churchill and Stalin concentrated on the division of Europe, while FDR focused more on the still ongoing world war with Japan in the Pacific. There had been other meetings, but at Yalta Stalin brought with him concessions he’d wangled from Churchill—for example, the West would get Greece and Austria, while Stalin could take Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. Similar considerations would apply to Poland, to the Soviet-occupied eastern zone of Germany, and to other old Russian hegemonies. Marshal Tito, a Communist maverick, firmly controlled the hybrid nation of Yugoslavia. The losers of Yalta, who were sure to remain bitter for years to come, were men like DeGaulle and Chiang Kai Shek, who had been excluded while their national interests were being pawned like second-hand goods. All this was interesting but ultimately a dizzying array of inconceivable large-scale detail that Tim would not quite get his arms around.

Men like Tim were being shifted from the Atlantic front to the Pacific front as the endgame of the Asian war started to play itself out. Tokyo was being bombed night and day. The Japanese had lost most of their navy, their air power, their army. They yielded their entrenched positions in the Pacific, an island at a time, an atoll at a time, a ditch at a time, every inch exacting a bloody toll in lives. The Allies applied the lessons learned over Germany and brought the new technology of fire storming to the paper and wood cities of Japan. The very air over some cities caught fire and burned for hours in huge fireballs as incendiaries created cyclonic updrafts of superheated air which then allowed cool, oxygen-rich air to be sucked in underneath, continuing the plasma cycle. Humans were mummified alive in their underground shelters.

In all of it, Tim felt a vague uplifting sense of hope that the future would have to be brighter with the world war behind. A world at peace must perforce be a happier place than a world in which nearly a hundred million lives were shed in a grisly manner in five short years.

The City of San Francisco, in particular, took great pride in announcing to the world that it would be the mother, the founding womb, of an organization that would cause men to beat their swords into ploughshares: the United Nations.

This April 1945, the city cleaned and preened itself as it prepared to receive dignitaries from some 50 nations who would sign their names and commit their nations to a new way of running world affairs. Already, the city’s hotels were filling up with foreign dignitaries like arrays of exotic birds in their turbans, dashikis, tunics, uniforms, suits, and colorful wrappings. Flags snapped crisply as added poles were erected for them in the balmy spring breezes atop the city’s hills. It meant much tighter housing for a city swollen with troops and officers marshaling to finish the war against Japan; consequently, many a colonel or Navy captain found himself unceremoniously doubled up in on-post housing instead of sitting in the city’s best hotels. Tim thanked his lucky stars that the Hotel Auger was not on the primary requisition lists, and he kept his fingers crossed that nobody would remember him and evict him in favor of some beribboned South American colonel.

During this time, it happened that Tim came down for breakfast one morning and found a dark-haired young naval officer sitting at his customary single table near the window.

The Hotel Auger had certain rules. You brought down yesterday’s tray, if you had taken it with you, perhaps to eat in your room. You left the tray on a window counter at the kitchen. Then you picked up a clean, empty tray and went to another window where a pair of Mexican cooks filled your plate to order. Then you paid the person at the cash register, usually the old Chinese man or one of his family. Then you went to your seat—and people tended to always sit in the same seats day after day by some unspoken rule.

Tim just happened to bumble down glancing through the newspaper, so he was surprised when he lowered the paper to see a sullenly handsome, glinty-eyed man in black dress uniform half rise, extending a hand in apology. There was no apology in the eyes, but a kind of cold aura of calculation. Tim gathered he was shaking hands with a logistics officer. The man had a deep voice and strong beard shadow, and exuded an odd feeling as if he went about requisitioning bits of power here and there and yet seemed hungry for any kind of human contact. “Hello,” said the man, “I’m Dick Nixon. Did I take your place here?”

“No, no,” Tim said laughing as they shook hands. He felt the strength in the other’s grip, almost as if the man wanted to pull him down and make him sit with him. He pulled his hand back. “Excuse me.”

Nixon pointed to the chairs on either side of him. “Please, help yourself. Keep me company.”

Tim nodded. “Sure, thanks. I’ll get my food first.”

As Tim picked up a fresh tray, he heard a woman’s voice: “Looks like you lost your spot.” He turned and saw the blonde woman. He liked her. “Yes,” he said, wondering if the time were ripe to approach her. “Thank you.”

She pointed to the long empty table beside her. “Well, if you need a parking spot, you’re welcome to drive up here.”

“Thanks. That’s very kind of you. I’d like to.”

She seemed poised and sure of herself as she pointed brightly to the empty spot opposite her. He did not give Nixon another glance, and he never did see the officer again, but he resolved to remain grateful for the inadvertent introduction.

“How are you?” he asked as he unfolded his napkin on his lap.

She was buttering a scone and looked up with mischief in her eyes. “I’m not sure. You’re not going to scold me for throwing crumbs out my window, are you?” It was the silly kind of thing men and women said to one another in this situation.

He shrugged, knowing it didn’t matter what he said as long as he said it with the right combination of pleasantness and poise. “Were they contraband crumbs?”

“Are you a crumb cop?”

“Well, no, but I...” ...and so it went, back and forth, and quickly they were smiling, leaning toward each other, wrapped up in each other’s aura. She wore an odd uniform, kind of an Army officer’s khakis with pants. It was almost a jump suit of sorts, and she had flight wings on her lapels. She had a rakish little garrison cap tucked through her shoulder epaulet on one side. Her hands were big, but long and feminine. He was about to ask about her job when she held up both hands and looked startled.

“Oh wow,” she said as she glanced at her little wristwatch. “I’ve got to run, run, run! I had no idea I am so late!”

“Look what I made you do.”

“You bad man.” She rose and threw things on her tray. “Will you have breakfast with me again? This was fun.”

“Every day if you’d like.”

“Deal,” she breathed and was gone.

He caught a glimpse of her leaving: athletic, somewhat short, with short-cropped hair that was nevertheless thick. Her hair was blond underneath, and reddish-gold on top where it caught the sun by day. His last glimpse was of her narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered form walking gracefully and unaffectedly off. He went to work that day and did not realize—until he returned home alone to his empty room that evening—which he had totally, for the first time, forgotten to even glance at the newspaper all day. He'd forgotten to ask her name, so resolved to ask her next morning. It gave him something pleasant to look forward to as he fell asleep.