The Tristan Betrayal

by Robert Ludlum

  Metcalfe entered the large main room, which was crowded with a motley assortment of people gathered before a roaring fire. Some of the faces he recognized quickly: the British ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps; the Greek ambassador, left-leaning yet shrewd; Count von der Schulenberg, a tall, gray-haired, distinguished-looking gentleman who was, by virtue of his long tenure here, the dean of the diplomatic community. There were others who looked familiar. He noticed Amos Hill-iard, who glanced at him, seeming to indicate recognition with a subtle widening of the eyes before turning away. “How High the Moon” was playing on a gramophone in the corner, an old windup Victrola with a large decorative horn.

  He introduced himself to a woman standing near the entrance—the American ambassador’s wife, it turned out.

  “Gate crasher?” she said. “You? Don’t be silly—you’re Charlie Metcalfe’s boy, aren’t you? You know, your father and I . . .” And the woman began prattling about some social dalliance at the Union League Club in New York decades ago. It often went this way when Metcalfe met old-line Social Register types. The Metcalfe name was not only well known, but it carried a certain cachet even among those with cachet, for Metcalfe’s father not only was wealthy but also had been a prominent figure on the social circuit, in a way that never interested his sons. Stephen had often reflected upon whether the vocation he had chosen—a spy for his country, requiring impersonation and acting and the assumption of a cover identity—had been his response to the falseness he’d perceived in his father’s social whirl.

  Now the Madame Ambassador, having removed his coat and glanced curiously at the torn lining—the result of the NKVD’s tossing of his hotel room—clutched both of his hands and began giving him the rundown on the party’s guests in a low, confiding burble. “That little man over there is the Italian ambassador, Augusto Rosso, with his American wife, Frances. We’re not supposed to like him but we do, we do, he’s really lots of fun, he’s always taking us around Moscow in his open-topped roadster, he loves to play poker all night, and he has the most lovely black spaniel, Pumpkin. Ah, and let’s see, over there, thick as thieves, are the ministers from Turkey, Greece, and Serbia; they’re always gathering for coffee each morning in Stafford Cripps’s sitting room; it’s a veritable kaffeeklatsch they’ve got going. That Romanian fellow over there, I shouldn’t tell you this, but he’s being treated for the clap, and let me tell you, Moscow is not the place for VD treatments; he has to fly out to Stockholm every other week. Well, Stephen, I hope you’re prepared to talk politics, that’s all they ever talk about here, it’s boring, I hope you can stand it—”

  Metcalfe accepted a drink—a genuine Scotch—from her and excused himself, telling her he couldn’t possibly take up any more of her time. The word of his arrival had spread quickly among the assembled. Even amid the important and celebrated here, Metcalfe was a celebrity, though of a minor stripe: he was at the least a curiosity, a visiting businessman here on some unstated family business, a presentable young single man from a prominent family. He was fresh blood, or perhaps fresh meat hurled into a cage of starving lions; everyone wanted to talk to him, to get the latest gossip from the States, to introduce him to their daughters or sisters.

  Alcohol flowed, and the food was abundant: caviar, black bread and butter, smoked sturgeon. The crowd pulsed with a kind of nervous splendor, a hollow luxury. Here, in the midst of Russia’s privation, the guests enjoyed the best of everything. Metcalfe was a stranger here, but he knew how to play the role. By the end of his adolescence he had been to enough shindigs that he was an expert at the witty repartee, the raised eyebrow, the indirect allusions to Groton and Exeter, Princeton and Yale, to parties in Grosse Pointe and Watch Hill and Bar Harbor.

  All around him, just as the ambassador’s wife had warned, was talk of politics. Everything concerned the war and whether the U.S. would enter it. Most of all the talk seemed to center on Germany. The tidbit that Ted Bishop had imparted earlier, about Russian Foreign Minister Molotov going to Berlin, was the hot gossip item of the party. What did it mean? the diplomats wondered. Was Russia about to join the war, with the Germans, against Britain? If so, that was a nightmare.

  Metcalfe overheard snatches of conversation.

  “But von Ribbentrop signed a ten-year nonaggression pact!” an American attaché was saying to a Brit.

  “You seriously think the Germans intend to keep it? Get serious.”

  “They have to keep it. The Germans can’t fight a war on two fronts!”

  “Any treaty Hitler signs is nothing more than a piece of paper, and never forget it. Plus, the man despises Communism!”

  “Hitler’s no idiot. He’ll never attack Russia. That would be insanity—it would be the end of him! His men have to know how strong Russia is, the Red Army—”

  “The Red Army? But that’s exactly the point! Stalin shot ninety percent of his top Red Army commanders in the last couple of years, and Hitler knows it!”

  Metcalfe chatted briefly with the American ambassador, who told an anecdote, obviously well honed from countless retellings, about how a toilet at his residence at Spaso House had gone on the fritz and they couldn’t get anyone to fix it, and so the ambassador had had his telephone operator call the Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Vyshinsky, to say that if the toilet wasn’t fixed within one hour, the ambassador was going over to the Commissariat to use Vyshinsky’s.

  The ambassador introduced Metcalfe to Amos Hilliard. “You should come over to the embassy for lunch sometime,” the ambassador said.

  “Yeah,” Hilliard muttered when the ambassador had moved on. “Canned tomato soup made with condensed milk, and canned pineapple for dessert. All the canned goods you can stand.” He lowered his voice. “Now, let me see, most of the German contingent is here. They don’t miss a party at the dacha. There’s General Köstring, their military attaché, and there’s Hans Heinrich Herwarth von Bittenfeld, whom everyone calls Johnny—a most useful source and no supporter of the Nazis, but that’s entre nous. And there’s . . .”

  But Metcalfe had ceased paying attention. There, across the room, her arm linked in that of a large, pudgy man with a double chin, was Lana.

  She was dressed in a gown of white and gold, and she looked a world apart from the ordinary Russian woman. She was smiling at something her lover was saying, but it seemed a sad, tentative smile. She held a champagne glass but did not seem to be drinking from it. Lana was surrounded by uniformed German officers as well as others, dressed in civilian clothes, who had a certain Germanic look about them—the rimless glasses, the Hitler mustaches, the beefy, well-fed arrogance. She was at the center of a knot of admirers, and she appeared to be bored to desperation.

  “. . . If you want to be that up-front about it,” Hilliard was saying. “There’s no reason why you two shouldn’t just meet—after all, you’re an American businessman, always looking to make a quick buck wherever you can; you don’t care who you make it off. All right?”

  “Excuse me,” Metcalfe said, drifting away toward her like a moth attracted by a bright light. As he maneuvered through the crowd, she turned abruptly and caught his eye. His breath caught. In her gaze he saw what seemed to be sparks, a smoldering fury, though from a certain angle it might have been mistaken for interest—passion, even, the sort of look she used to give him six years ago. But he knew better, whatever he wanted to imagine. She was furious at him, her fury unabated.

  As he worked his way through the crowd—how many damned cocktail parties must I suffer through? he asked himself—his mind ran though his store of ready-made quips. Would she think he was pursuing her? If so, there was nothing wrong with that, for women enjoyed being pursued. Yet she could not be sure; after all, this was just the sort of party at which someone like him would naturally be expected to appear. She would wonder whether this was purely a coincidence.

  “Stephen!” It was the ambassador’s wife again, intercepting him with a hand pressed flat against his chest. “I don’t see you talking t
o any of the available young women here, and I think that’s a frightful waste! They’re starved for male company, you know. You really ought to do your patriotic duty.”

  “I’ll give it the old college try,” Metcalfe replied. He continued edging toward Lana until he was just about at her side.

  “Oh, you needn’t go that far,” the ambassador’s wife giggled. “I know all about you at Yale, you know. I hear the most alarming stories about you.”

  “My conscience is clear,” Metcalfe said serenely. He was now so close to Lana he could smell her delicate perfume, feel the warmth radiating off her bare arms. His heart was beating so hard he wondered if it were audible.

  Abruptly Lana turned around and met his eyes. “A clear conscience,” she said levelly, “is usually a sign of a bad memory.”

  He grinned sheepishly and replied in Russian: “I take it you don’t have a performance tonight.”

  She looked at him and smiled right back. Only someone who knew her well would know the smile was not genuine. “They seem to get along fine without me.”

  “I rather doubt it. May I meet your . . . friend?” Metcalfe’s face was composed in an expression of innocence, but she knew better.

  A flash of annoyance flickered in her eyes, but she covered it with a polite dip of her head. “Of course. Rudi, I’d like you to meet an acquaintance of mine.”

  Rudolf von Schüssler regarded Metcalfe incuriously. He extended a damp, pudgy hand and shook limply. He was a tall, rotund man with beady, nervous eyes and a goatee that sat astride a double chin like an animal pelt.

  “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Metcalfe said in English. “I’m particularly honored to meet a man with such impeccable taste in women.”

  Svetlana blushed suddenly. Von Schüssler looked bewildered, as if unsure how to reply.

  “I’m told you’re a member of what’s known as the finest diplomatic mission in all of Moscow,” Metcalfe continued.

  “And you are here because . . . ?” von Schüssler inquired. His voice was high and soft, almost feminine.

  Did he mean in Moscow or at the party? Metcalfe decided he meant Moscow. “I travel a good deal for my work.” He turned slightly, forcing von Schüssler to do the same, which took him out of the circle of Germans with whom he had been conversing. The others resumed talking, enabling Metcalfe, Lana, and von Schüssler to speak privately.

  “Which is?”

  “My family’s firm is Metcalfe Industries. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”

  “I am not well versed in American corporations.”

  “Really? But surely you know that some of our greatest American corporations have helped build up your regime. Why, the Ford Motor Company built troop transport vehicles for the Wehrmacht, of course. The trucks that enabled your soldiers to roll through France and Poland were produced by General Motors—trucks that are the backbone of the German army transportation system.” He paused, watching the German’s expression closely. But von Schüssler only looked bored. “And of course your Führer gave Henry Ford the highest civilian honor awarded by the Nazis—the Grand Cross of the German Eagle—as you may remember.” He shrugged. “I’m told Hitler keeps a large portrait of Mr. Ford next to his desk.”

  “Well, I believe it was an American president who said, ‘The business of America is business,’ ja?” von Schüssler said, reaching for a sevruga-trimmed canapé. For an instant Metcalfe thought the German was winking at him, but then he realized it was merely a twitch.

  “Some of us in American business,” Metcalfe said carefully, “believe that international trade blazes the path for politics. It’s always nice when we can make money while helping to . . . strengthen those historical forces that we cannot openly support, if you understand me.”

  Metcalfe was dangling the bait, but would the German bite? Surely von Schüssler had to understand what Metcalfe was hinting at—that here was another American industrialist who secretly supported the Nazis. If he took the bait, von Schüssler would be revealing something of his own private inclination. But if he was a secret opponent of the Nazi regime, there would be subtle indications, signs in his manner, his expression, to which Metcalfe must remain alert.

  “I’m sure that money, like love, will always find a way,” von Schüssler said blandly.

  “Not all of my colleagues think as I do,” Metcalfe said carefully. “There are some businessmen who do not wish the Nazis well. They consider you barbarians.”

  Von Schüssler seemed to bristle. “You should tell your fellow industrialists that we are not the barbarians. The German people—the real German people—have always loved beauty and strength, both. We are interested only in restoring civilization and order. A Europe unified under the Führer will be a place of peace, law, and order. And order is good business, no?”

  Metcalfe scrutinized the man’s expression closely. Was there a flicker of skepticism, a moment of doubt, a hint of irony—of any distance between the words spoken and the man speaking them?

  There was not. Von Schüssler’s face was composed, impassive; the sentiments he expressed were, to him, nothing more than commonplaces. He might have been a schoolteacher explaining the difference between reptiles and mammals to a particularly slow student. A small man with mousy brown hair and thick-rimmed glasses pulled von Schüssler aside and began speaking to him in rapid-fire German.

  At last Metcalfe and Lana were alone, and finally she hissed at him, “Don’t you ever visit me at home again, do you hear me? Never!”

  “God, Lana, I’m sorry,” Metcalfe said, stricken. “I didn’t realize—”

  “No, you did not realize.” She seemed to relent a bit, her outburst subsiding. “There are a great many things you don’t realize.”

  “I’m beginning to see that.” Many things, he thought. For one, he hadn’t realized how much he still loved her. “We’ve got unfinished business, you and I.”

  “Business, yes,” she said with a sad shake of the head. “Everything to you is business. I hear the way you talk to Rudi, the deals you want to make with those people. Anything for the almighty dollar.”

  “Perhaps there are some things you don’t realize,” he countered softly.

  “You are a businessman. A man of business. You may try to rebel against what you have been given, what you have inherited, but it is no use. The stain is always with you.”

  “Stain?”

  “Of capitalism. Of making money from the blood of the workers.”

  “I see,” Metcalfe said. She did not sound like the carefree, apolitical Lana of old; she sounded now like some Komsomol instructor, as if she had somehow absorbed all the Communist Party propaganda that she used to mock. “If enterprise is a stain, then it’s a stain Russia has . . . purged . . . clean in recent years.”

  “It is as our great leader says,” she intoned solemnly. “You cannot make an omelet without burning down the chicken farm. As the slogan goes, Communism equals Soviet power plus electrocution of the whole country.”

  What was she trying to say? Was she deliberately misspeaking? There was not a trace of irony on her face.

  “I don’t think that’s quite how Stalin put it. I thought he defended his bloody purges by saying you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  She flushed. “Stalin knew long before the Russian people knew that there would always be enemies of what we are trying to create.”

  “Oh? And what are ‘you’ trying to create?”

  “We are building a new socialist state, Stephen. Everything will be collectivized. And not just collective farms. Everything. Factories are being collectivized. Families are being collectivized. Soon poetry will be collectivized, too! Can you imagine a society that has succeeded in doing that?”

  She was talking nonsense, parroting empty slogans. But it was too much, too ridiculous, as if she was almost mocking the propaganda that was all around. Was that possible? Yet if she was truly ridiculing the sinister language of Communist propaganda, she was do
ing it in such an understated way, with a wit so dry he barely recognized it—or her. What had happened to the sweet, simple Lana, the ballerina with nary a serious thought in her head?

  “Lana,” he said quietly, “we need to talk.”

  “We are talking now, Stiva.”

  “Alone.”

  She paused as if weighing something in her mind. “Have you ever seen the grounds here? The land is really quite lovely. Shall we go for a little stroll?” She suggested it in an offhand, playful way, but he knew what she was doing. She was, for the first time, acquiescing, agreeing to speak with him.

  “That would be nice,” he said.

  It was bitterly cold outside, hardly a night for taking a stroll around the rolling lawn behind the dacha. Lana wore a long fur coat that appeared to be mink, and a matching hat, an ensemble that was an extravagance all but unobtainable in Moscow these days, Metcalfe knew. He wondered whether it was a gift from her new German lover. “Those people,” she had disdainfully called the Nazis. What did that mean? Did she hate von Schüssler and what he stood for? If so, why was she with him? The Lana Metcalfe knew was no vapid materialist; she would never strike up an affair with a lover simply for the things he could buy her.