The Hour of the Cat by Peter Quinn Page A

to relieve his sluggishness, and the reminiscences of the Dresden , of what seemed a lost, irretrievable innocence, left him nostalgic. He’d served on the Dresden in a different time, a different world, when the sea and its endless horizons encouraged dreams and illusions that duty and the war obliterated.
    He remembered one time in particular, during the last full summer of peace, in 1913.The Dresden had been temporarily relieved from South American patrol and sent on a goodwill call to the city of Baltimore, for the occasion of the American Independence Day. Passing up an invitation to visit Washington, D.C., Canaris and another officer took a train to New York on a three-day leave. After some stretches of open country, the rail corridor they rode through became thick with an impressive array of bustling warehouses and smoke-belching factories. They were quite prepared to dislike New York, a town of legendary political corruption, filled with lumpen Irish and the dregs of Naples and the Polish shtetls. But as the train sped across a great marsh, and the tops of the city’s tallest buildings could be seen twinkling magically, like the evening star, in the purple gloaming, Canaris felt a sense of excited anticipation.
    The train plunged into a tunnel and emerged a short while later in the great steel and glass-covered cavern of Pennsylvania Station. The German deputy vice-consul of New York was there to meet them. He led them to a broad traffic-choked avenue ablaze with electric lights and into a waiting automobile. After they checked into their hotel in an area every bit as bustling as that around the station, the deputy vice-consul escorted them to an outdoor Italian restaurant where a tan-skinned cantatrice sang about love and broken hearts. In the morning they visited the zoo in the Bronx, the thinly populated northern part of the city. Later, they toured the metropolitan art museum and went to the top of the newly opened Woolworth Building, traveling everywhere on the city’s efficient train and tram system. The deputy vice-consul was a man in his mid-thirties, a florid and rotund Bavarian, who seemed as inured to New York as any native. That night, in the intermission of the play he took them to—a comedy they barely understood but that drew incessant laughter from the audience—he flirted with several women. He consorted with every cab driver and doorman as though they were mates of long acquaintance.
    The manager of the hotel was waiting for them when they came back. He was the grandson of a Berlin composer, a Jew, and welcomed them warmly. He opened a bottle of fine Riesling, and when that was gone, brought out a bottle of American whiskey, which had a coarse, smoky taste. Canaris’s companion excused himself, explaining that they had to catch a train early the next morning back to Baltimore. Canaris followed him out but didn’t return to their room. He needed some fresh air. He rode the elevator to the hotel’s roof garden, where he drank wine at the bar and stared at a lovely girl in a violet hat and dress who sat between her parents beneath a lattice entwined with paper flowers. The parents didn’t seem to notice him, but the girl did. She smiled at him.
    The warm night air and the flow of the wine fermented silly, evanescent thoughts. He would propose to the girl. Their wedding night would be in this very hotel, her in the bed in frilly white undergarments, waiting for him as he packed away his uniform in the bottom of their traveling trunk, where it wouldn’t be discovered until decades later when a grandchild went rummaging about in the attic of their house. He would seek employment in the tumultuous commerce that drove the city, import-export perhaps, and assume the same style as the deputy vice-consul, the unguarded bonhomie. The girl and her parents left. She looked over her shoulder at him as she went out. A look of desire. In the distance, beyond the roof garden, the