He thinks about asking her, but he doesn’t want her around. Things are in a bad way between them, and he’s heard that she’s seeing someone else, some young army officer. He doesn’t really care. She is a burden, he thinks, let the handsome officer have her. What worries him is whether he is going to find a replacement, but for the meantime he is too interested in the news.

At the Press Club, the atmosphere is electric. There are journalists from nearly every country in Europe, except England of course. They know they should be at their bureaus, but they want to be together, sharing scraps, speculating. The air is thick with excited chatter and smoke, and he notices that a few are even drinking champagne.

He looks for a familiar face, and there are plenty, but the person he wants to find is William Joyce, his fellow collaborator and rival at the Reichsrundfunk. They call him “Lord Haw-Haw” at home, which he and Joyce find amusing, because Joyce’s voice is anything but lordly. The papers at home must be referring to Joyce’s predecessor, they think, Normal Baillie-Stewart, very much a “Haw-Haw,” a Sandhurst man through and through.

He finds Joyce, instantly recognizable with the huge scar on the right side of his face, running from his ear to his mouth. He is a short man, but powerful, with broad arms that he likes to keep folded. He is there with his wife, Margaret, who is pretty and has a good figure—apparently she was a dancer, even performing cabaret shows for the BUF in and around Lancashire. He’s always liked Mrs. Joyce—a blackshirt bride no less!

“Hello, Bill,” he says. “Hello, Margaret.”

They greet him, Mrs. Joyce very charming, Joyce very guarded, edgy as always.

“Isn’t this great news?” he asks.

“Great news indeed,” says Joyce. “I’m going to talk about it tonight.”

This is not what he wants to hear. He thinks that he should be the one addressing the British tonight, not Joyce. Why the hell have they picked him?

“What are you going to say?”

“I’m going to tell the British that now’s their chance,” Joyce says. “That it’s clear that Hitler’s doing the right thing, smashing the Commies once and for all. I’ll tell them that it’s time they came along and helped us to beat the real enemy.”

“Sounds good,” he says. “Have you already written it?”

“I’ll do so later, when there’s more news.”