Books: Tides of War

A trio of strong thrillers

For a few heady peacetime years, the Normandie was the most magnificent ship afloat. The dining room, it was boasted, was longer and more lustrous than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. But when the French liner burned and capsized at its Manhattan dock in 1942, it was not so much its beauty that was mourned as the loss of one of the fastest passenger ships ever built, then being refitted as an Allied troop transport that could outrun any U-boat. In Normandie Triangle (Arbor House; 475 pages; $13.95), Novelist Justin Scott evokes the grace and power of the great ship even as he describes its destruction and welds an ambitious Nazi stratagem to the smoldering hulk.

The U.S. Navy insists that the Normandie’s sinking was accidental. Like many real-life experts, however, the novel’s hero, Steven Gates, a naval architect who was aboard the ship when it burned, is convinced that Nazi saboteurs were responsible. In hope of proving his theory, Gates quits his top-level designing job and joins a salvage crew on the ship.

On another side of the triangle is the man who engineered the liner’s demise, a Nazi spy posing as a Dutch salvage expert. Code-named the Otter, he is the illegitimate son of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, and thus has unlimited backing in a behind-the-lines war of disruption and sabotage aimed at closing the Port of New York.

The Triangle’s overt heroes belong to a tough little unit called Group M, which spearheaded British intelligence in New York. They are engaged in a desperate effort to pin down Otter and keep the Atlantic sea lanes open. As an ironic result of Gates’ own efforts to track down the master saboteur, the British group is convinced that he is the Otter. Gates meanwhile has found out that the German has smuggled over a minisub and plans to torpedo the Queen Mary with 15,000 troops aboard.

Justin Scott made his reputation in 1978 with The Shipkiller, a superbly written thriller that also had the sea and revenge as its themes. In Normandie, he is again a virtuoso of technical detail and characterization.

A compulsion of another sort drives Schism (Crown; 310 pages; $12.95), by Bill Granger. Father Leo Tunney, a Roman Catholic missionary and sometime CIA operative, totters back to civilization from the Cambodian jungle, where he has been missing for 20 years. Why? Before shipping him back to his order in Florida, the Company does its unsubtle best to pry the answer from the emaciated priest. Back home, Tunney attracts a lot of professional interest. There is a top KGB operative from Moscow, a sacerdotal snooper from the Vatican, a cold-blooded loner from a

Washington intelligence unit and enough assorted goons to fill a San Quentin production of A Chorus Line.

What they are all after is a journal in which the priest describes a Cambodia-based Soviet military project that could trigger World War III. The priest’s journal is finally retrieved by a comely, red-haired reporter, Rita Macklin, who, unlike most other fictional red-haired reporters, is both credible and vulnerable. Schism, like his first novel, November Man, shows Bill Granger to be deft at high-wire suspense. His prose has the gritty tone of a Le Carre and a special feeling for a burned-out case.

Also in the combat zone of the spirit is Stefan Kanfer’s Fear Itself (Putnam; 215 pages; $12.95). Set for the most part in Europe, New York and Washington, his novel is a deeply felt portrayal of Nazi savagery, the specific horror of the Holocaust, the courage of the few, and a slumbrous, insensitive America. It is largely the story of Niccolo Levi, a talented young Jewish actor who, by late 1943, has joined the underground in his native Italy because, as he says, “nobody promised anything except survival, which is what an Italian Jew did best.”

Levi’s extraordinary memory and a chameleonic talent for impersonation enable him to evade capture for a while. When the Germans do catch him, he is sent to the same Polish death camp where his child has been killed and his wife is dying. Her final moments permanently change Levi’s life: “He understood everything now. He looked past the chimneys at the dull sun. It was at its midway point. Noon. Poland’s winter. 1944. He was to remember it as his last sane moment.”

At the same time in Washington, F.D.R., weary and wasting, cannot understand why Jews are making such impassioned efforts to have him halt the Holocaust. “Always as if no one else were suffering,” sighs the President. “What about the French? What about the Chinese? What about our own boys at Anzio and Midway?”

Or New York, where American and German agents hunt and are hunted? Manhattan-based OSS Agent Carl Berlin picks up a trail that leads to something big. Berlin, a German-born Jew, learns that Levi has escaped the death camp and is already in the U.S. His purpose: to stamp the plight of the Jews on the world’s conscience by assassinating Roosevelt. This seems incredible: the Italian actor is in Hollywood beginning a movie career even though he can barely speak English. However, Levi’s disappearance from a film studio sets off a cross-country chase. With a sackful of disguises, Levi makes his way to Warm Springs, Ga., where F.D.R. is soaking his paralyzed legs. The showdown brings on Nazi agents and a three-way shootout, though that is not the way the story ends.

For all the blood between its pages, Fear Itself is a celebration of life. Kanfer, Books editor of TIME and author of The Eighth Sin, a 1978 novel about Nazi efforts to exterminate gypsies, writes with wit, subtlety and passion. Not all the ire is directed at the death-camp butchers. In passages as sardonic as any ever written about war-bloated Hollywood, Kanfer describes the unconcern of some successful American Jews for their doomed brethren in Europe. It is a part of the terrible secret that Fear Itself embodies in an exciting work of fiction.

—By Michael Demarest