Dear Udo:
I got your postcard. I hope swimming and Ingeborg are leaving you enough time to finish the article as planned. Yesterday we finished a round of Third Reich at Wolfgang’s house. Walter and Wolfgang (Axis) against Franz (Allies) and me (Russia). It was a three-way game, and the final result was: W & W, 4 Objective hexes; Franz, 18; me, 19, including Berlin and Stockholm (you can imagine the condition in which W & W left the Kriegsmarine!). Surprises in the diplomatic module: in autumn of ’41 Spain goes over to the Axis. Turkey wooed away from the Allies thanks to the DP that Franz and I spent prodigally. Alexandria and Suez, untouchable; Malta pounded but still standing. W & W did their best to test parts of your Mediterranean Strategy. And Rex Douglas’s Mediterranean Strategy. But it was too much for them. Down they went. David Hablanian’s Spanish Gambit might work one time out of twenty. Franz lost France in the summer of ’40 and weathered an invasion of England in spring ’41! Almost all of his army corps were in the Mediterranean and W & W couldn’t resist the temptation. We applied the Beyma variant. In ’41 I was saved by the snow and by W & W’s insistence on opening fronts, at a huge cost of BRP; they were always bankrupt by the last turn of the year. Regarding your strategy: Franz says it isn’t much different from Anchors’s. I told him that you were corresponding with Anchors and that his strategy had nothing to do with yours. W & W are ready to mount a giant TR as soon as you get back. First they suggested the GDW Europe series, but I convinced them otherwise. I doubt you’d want to play for more than a month straight. We’ve agreed that W & W and Franz and Otto Wolf will take the Allies and the Russians, respectively, and that you and I will take Germany, what do you say? We also talked about the Paris conference, December 23–28. It’s confirmed that Rex Douglas will be there in person. I know he’d like to meet you. A picture of you came out in Waterloo: it’s the one where you’re playing Randy Wilson, and there’s an article about our Stuttgart group. I got a letter from Mars, do you remember them? They want an article from you (there’ll be another by Mathias Müller, can you believe it?) for a special issue about players who specialize in WWII. Most of the participants are French and Swiss. And there’s more news, which I’d rather wait to give you when you get back from vacation. So what do you think the Objective hexes were that stymied W & W? Leipzig, Oslo, Genoa, and Milan. Franz wanted to hit me. In fact, he chased me around the table. We’ve set up a Case White. We’ll get started tomorrow night. The kids at Fire and Steel have discovered Boots & Saddles and Bundeswehr, from the Assault Series. Now they plan to sell their old Squad Leaders and they’re talking about putting out a fanzine and calling it Assault or Radioactive Combat or something like that. They make me laugh. Get lots of sun. Say hello to Ingeborg.
Fondly,
Conrad
After the rain, evening at the Del Mar is tinted a dark blue shot through with gold. For a long time all I do is sit in the restaurant watching people come back to the hotel looking tired and hungry. Frau Else is nowhere to be seen. I discover that I’m cold: I’m in shirtsleeves. Also, Conrad’s letter leaves me with a trace of sadness. Wolfgang is an idiot: I can picture his slowness, his hesitation at each move, his lack of imagination. If you can’t control Turkey with DP, invade it, you moron. Nicky Palmer has said so a thousand times. I’ve said so a thousand times. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I felt alone. Conrad and Rex Douglas (whom I know solely through letters) are my only friends. The rest is emptiness and darkness. Unanswered calls. Snubs. “Alone in a ravaged land,” I remembered. In an amnesiac Europe, with no sense of the epic or heroic. (It doesn’t surprise me that adolescents spend their time playing Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games.)
How did El Quemado buy his pedal boats? Yes, he told me how. With what he had saved from picking grapes. But how could he buy the whole lot, six or seven at once, with the money from just one harvest season? That was the down payment. The rest he paid little by little. The former owner was old and tired. It’s hard enough to make money in the summer, and if on top of that you have to pay an employee salary… so he decided to sell them and El Quemado bought them. Did he have any experience renting out pedal boats? No. It isn’t hard to learn, said the Lamb, mockingly. Could I do it? (Silly question.) Of course, said the Lamb and El Quemado in unison. Anyone could. Really, it was a job that required nothing but patience and a sharp eye for runaway pedal boats. You didn’t even have to know how to swim.
El Quemado came to the hotel. We went upstairs without being seen by anyone. I showed him the game. The questions he asked were intelligent. Suddenly the street filled with the noise of sirens. El Quemado went out on the balcony and said the accident was in the tourist district. How stupid to die on vacation, I remarked. El Quemado shrugged. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt. From where he stood he could keep an eye on the shapeless mass of his pedal boats. I came over and asked what he was looking at. The beach, he said. I think he’d be a quick study.
The hours go by and there’s no sign of Ingeborg. I waited until nine in the room, jotting down moves.
Dinner at the hotel restaurant: cream of asparagus soup, cannelloni, coffee, and ice cream. Lingering at the table after dinner, I once more failed to spot Frau Else. (She certainly is nowhere to be found today.) I shared the table with a Dutch couple in their fifties. The subject of conversation at my table and across the restaurant was the bad weather. The diners expressed a number of different views on the subject, which the waiters— invested with a presumed meteorological wisdom, and locals, after all—took it upon themselves to arbitrate. In the end the faction that forecast good weather for the following day won.
At eleven I took a stroll through the various rooms on the main floor. There was no sign of Frau Else and I headed on foot to the Andalusia Lodge. The Lamb wasn’t there but half an hour later he showed up. I asked him where the Wolf was. The Lamb hadn’t seen him all day.