The American Ambassador

by Ward Just

  “So you still see her?”

  “Not often,” Kleust said.

  “I wish she’d lay off,” North said.

  “Your people have to learn,” Kleust said.

  North nodded, that was true enough. He said softly, “Can I see the file?”

  Kleust said, “I don’t have it. Duer has it.”

  “Will he let me see it?”

  “He hasn’t let me see it,” Kleust said. “They guard things closely, you know.”

  “Have you asked to see it?”

  Kleust said, “No.”

  “All right,” he said. “Tell me about Herr Duer.”

  “Trained with your people, and the British. He’s not a fool and so far as anyone knows he’s actually on our side.” Kleust smiled. There had been another spy scandal in the security services of the BRD. “And he’s too young to’ve been a Nazi, so he’s clean there, too.”

  “And he wants me to go to Hamburg.”

  “Perhaps the boy made an error. Uncharacteristic. He is a careful lad. The truth is”—Kleust joined North at the window—“Bill Jr. does have a connection with the three men who were there. They have had financial dealings, and it was not exactly a state secret that these three had attracted the attention of Duer’s people. It was very foolish for Bill Jr. to be at that particular café. Duer thinks perhaps it was significant.”

  “Significant,” North said. “Significant of what?”

  “Maybe he’s trying to send a signal. He’s clever enough to know that these three would be under surveillance, that there would be photographs.”

  “It’s a hell of a roundabout way of going about it.”

  “It’s the way they are.”

  “And who is the signal meant for?”

  “Maybe you,” Kleust said.

  “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s what Duer thinks. And this is Duer’s business.”

  “Duer-who-doesn’t-believe-in-coincidence.”

  “Yes.”

  “He wants me to go to Hamburg to finger my son.”

  “There’s something else,” Kleust said. “Duer has been picking up little bits and pieces of information. Sometimes I think”—he smiled and beat a little tattoo on the window glass, S.O.S.—“that they have the entire country wired for sound. But he has ‘indications’—and don’t ask him what they are, because he won’t tell you, or if he does tell you what he says won’t be the truth—that Bill Jr. and his gruppen have an operation going. We are certain that he and three others robbed a bank in Bremen, so they have funds. The operation is something serious. His word, not mine. Duer thinks they have. That they are planning an assassination, probably an American.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Duer’s serious. He didn’t fly six thousand miles for nothing.”

  “I still don’t believe it.”

  “Duer knows his business.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think that Duer knows his business, and that he is not a fool.”

  After a moment, North said, “You never knew him as a little kid.”

  “But I did, you know. Back in the early days, remember—” North nodded, they had a photograph of Kleust holding Bill Jr., age five, Victoria Falls in the background. “We do go back a long way, don’t we?” Slumped against the window, he looked out into the heat. In a country wired for sound, they had picked up the boy’s voice and deduced that he was preparing to kill someone, probably an American. He was studying his own reactions, and was not surprised to find himself neither astonished nor insulted. He had not ordered them out of his office, had not challenged Herr Duer to prove it.

  “Remember, the pictures, at night?”

  North shook his head. He didn’t remember.

  “He was very little, maybe four years old. And when you took him up to his bed at night, he’d refuse to go to sleep until one of the pictures on the wall was removed. It was a different picture each night. He’d select one that had to go, and you’d put it outside the door, and replace it the next morning. It was very funny. Very cute. He wanted a different—vista. Each night.”

  North smiled, remembering. Outside, Benson yawned, rising, pulling his chair farther into the shade.

  “Did you ever figure it out?”

  “No, never did. All kids have quirks. This was Bill Jr.’s.”

  “And it was harmless,” Kleust said. “But he was so insistent.”

  North looked at the German. “Did that reminiscence go into the file?”

  Kleust shrugged.

  “It must be quite a biography.”

  “He’s dangerous, Bill.”

  North looked at his watch, almost noon. He said, “I’ll have to talk to my people.” When Kleust said nothing, he inquired softly, “Have you talked to my people?”

  “No,” Kleust said. “I meant what I said. All this is off the record. We came here to get a positive identification. There was no need to clear that with your people.”

  “I wondered,” North said.

  “This is not an interrogation. We have no right to interrogate you. We came to you for help and you gave it. Isn’t that right?”

  “Right, Kurt.”

  “The other thing is, Bill. We don’t know exactly where the boy fits in. No doubt that he does fit in, but we don’t know whether he’s leader or follower or free lancer or what. We don’t know if he’s giving orders or taking them. He’s a puzzle, your boy. And from our bits and pieces we aren’t sure about his motives, either.”

  “What are you sure about, Kurt? Tell me one thing.”

  “He’s a dangerous boy.” Then, putting his hand hesitantly on North’s shoulder: “You have a right to be angry, Bill. Throw us out of here. Challenge Duer. Accuse me of disloyalty. I’m surprised that you’re not angry.”

  The ambassador continued staring out the window, a ghost of a smile on his face. There was a German word, Grübelei, meaning a grubbing among subtleties. It often resulted in Katergefühl, a state of self-reproachful irritation that cannot be rendered by any English word. It was no anger he felt, but fear. He was not angry at this any more than he would be angry at hearing a doctor’s diagnosis that he or Elinor was dying. In the circumstances, anger was cheap. He was not special, nor was Elinor, nor Bill Jr. except in their connection to one another; they were not special in the eyes of God. He had always thought the most fatuous three lines of modern poetry Dylan Thomas’s

  Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

  Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

  A Welshman’s autistic image of an old geezer—doing what? Cursing nurses, tearing out the IV, overturning the bedpan, sobbing, railing at God—for what? Dealing bad cards. Poor me, boo-hoo. He said, “Who should I be mad at, Kurt? The twentieth century? Columbia University? That they didn’t give him better instruction in the humanities? The American culture? Me? Elinor? This is a terrible sickness, and I don’t see what anger has to do with it. I’m scared to death.” He held out his hand for Kleust to inspect the tremor. “Look at that.” As he spoke he could feel his anger and indignation rising. He hated explaining himself, nor had he any taste for proposing rules of behavior. Every time he did he sounded like a relic of the nineteenth century, Grübelei among varieties of religious experience. Dour, discredited stoicism, without the pinprick of contemporary irony. A relic, a throwback, an antique; but without self-pity. He could claim that much for himself, and for Elinor. Enough of that. He said, “Is Duer wired?”

  Kleust smiled. “Duer is always wired.”

  “Have you ever worn a wire?”

  “No,” Kleust said.

  “Damnedest things, they work like a charm. No bigger than a wristwatch.”

  “Are you wired, Bill?”

  “No, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

  They were silent a moment. Then Kleust said in German, “I will tell you everything that we find out. Please tell Eli
nor that, for me.”

  “What about the file?”

  “I’ll see about the file.”

  “Duer can find a way to do it informally.”

  “Perhaps,” Kleust said.

  “He can do it orally, if he wants. Though I’d rather see it.”

  “I’ll talk to Duer.”

  North watched old Benson drag his chair into the deep shade. He said, “Remember the missionary, what was his name, Burkhalter?”

  Kleust smiled. “How could I forget?”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “He’s back in Germany. He’s a very old man.”

  “In Sylt, I suppose.”

  “No, he’s in the DDR. The East.”

  North considered that. Conceivably he wanted to be closer to Wittenberg, the soil of Martin Luther. He said, “I owe you one for that afternoon.”

  “No, you don’t.” He shook his head. “It was an escapade.”

  “We were a couple of Georgie Pattons, weren’t we? Elinor found another hunk of shrapnel the other day, size of a pinhead. Emerged south of my liver. A billet-doux, she called it. Souvenir of the early days.”

  “I’m sorry about all this, Bill.”

  “Remember what Burkhalter said, the quotation from Goethe? I didn’t catch it, and I had to ask you to translate. And you didn’t want to, but you did. ‘The Germans make everything difficult, both for themselves and for everyone else.’ ” North smiled, but Kleust did not. “As you say, Duer is a good man, the best you have. God damn him. I’ll talk to my people. I wish to Christ you’d stayed out of this, Kurt.”

  Kleust said in German, “It is important for us, Bill.”

  North was looking out the window again. He thought he would not invite Kleust to lunch. They could save the Riesling for another day. He noticed a commotion at the candy-striped barrier, Benson rising from his chair. One of the Marine guards stepped out from under the portico, then halted. The woman in the red bandanna was approaching, her arms in motion. He could hear nothing. The Marine took another step forward, then turned. Benson went to the barrier and stood there, talking with the woman. She moved from foot to foot, her gold bangle glittering in the sun. Benson took something out of his pocket and gave it to her and she bowed, stepping back. Benson waved his arms, and for a moment the ambassador thought he was rudely dismissing her; but he was only shooing away the flies. She moved off, looking slyly back at him. Her face was concealed by the bandanna. The Marine stood quietly, stunned. Benson watched her go, then shuffled back to his chair in the shade. North shook his head.

  Kleust was at the door. “Shall I call the others?”

  “Go ahead,” North said.

  “You’re a good man, Bill.”

  “I feel like the last Jew in Berlin,” North said.

  5

  MORE OR LESS, that was the story the ambassador told them the next morning. And in the sudden silence that followed—North uncomfortable, restless, truly exhausted though it was not yet noon—Carruthers clucked mournfully. “They really shouldn’t have spoken to you without speaking to us first, really they shouldn’t’ve. And you shouldn’t’ve gone, without clearance. You said you were going to clear it, but you didn’t.”

  Hartnett leaned forward, ever the professional, watching, worried but trying to remain nonchalant, the customary protocol of the healthy in the presence of the sick; an unbalanced transaction.

  “I considered it a private trip. Still do.”

  Carruthers shook his head. “Not good enough, Bill.”

  “But it’ll have to do, won’t it?” He said, “I went to Hamburg. We were let strictly alone, and in due course Bill Jr. made contact. The usual jargon. Very skillfully done and if Duer and his people were following us, we lost them. We had the visit with Bill Jr. that I described, and then we went back to Africa.”

  “Irregular,” Carruthers huffed.

  “Did you make any report to the Germans?” Hartnett asked.

  “No formal report,” North said. “But of course I talked to them. Why not? I told Kleust roughly what had happened. A couple of weeks later we went upcountry, Kleust and I. We went to hell and gone to shoot crocodiles. And I told him roughly what had happened.”

  “Endangered species, tut-tut,” Carruthers said with a small smile.

  North looked at him blankly. There were twelve thousand crocodiles on the lake upcountry. Crocodiles were common as flies.

  “They have all this, you know, the committee, Winston and Dunphy. The approach from the Germans, your trip to Hamburg, your meeting with your son.” Carruthers consulted one of the everpresent documents. “They call it a rendezvous.”

  North looked at his watch. “They can call it anything they like. Look, I’m tired. I’m due upstairs for tests. So if you don’t mind.”

  Carruthers cleared his throat, not neglecting to shoot an alarmed sidelong glance at Hartnett. North looked terrible, gray-faced and weary; he said he had slept poorly, insomnia. Well, it was an incredible story, Carruthers said, fascinating. But there were still one or two points that he wanted to clear up, one or two loose ends— Hartnett concentrated, listening. That was what he was supposed to be so good at, listening. Listening for the life behind the words, the unspoken thought, the undertow. In the lawyer’s world, as in the diplomat’s, context was everything. The atmosphere, the history, the stakes: the state of mind now, as a function of the state of mind then. And not only what you remembered, but what you knew. Really, it was the reordering of the past in order to secure the future. He would have to listen to each of North’s many voices, and they were not always easy to distinguish. Bill North was a subtle character. He was a government man trying to live in obedience to his good conscience, mindful of his oath of office, a worldly man, not easily surprised. A little bit of a cynic. Who wouldn’t be, given the circumstances, twenty-five years of work for the American government?

  And when did such a man surrender, throw up his hands and declare that the struggle was no longer worth waging? It would be when putting a good face on things no longer counted, had no purpose; when the weight of events was too great. A client would say, The hell with it, you work it out, do the best you can, but settle it quickly. Meaning: I am not innocent, and time is short. Listen carefully to those instructions, counselor, and decide at once not to put your client on the witness stand, or in the negotiating room, or anywhere near the enemy. The stakes were too high.

  Yet such a man would not want to turn his face to the wall, either, and if his life contained disloyalties, if there were the usual misunderstandings and contradictions, he would want to explain himself, not to justify or to atone—that was the trouble!—but simply to get the facts straight and in sequence, knowing that a life was not a narrative written by a single author but a miscellany. Such a man would think that at the end, all there was was memory and blind faith.

  Carruthers was still talking but North’s eyes were closed. Hartnett tapped him on the knee and he looked up, blinking. Then he closed his eyes again. Hartnett said, “Paul,” and they both stood. This session was at an end. Hartnett thought of the son, looking at the father. To Bill North, his son must seem an undiscovered part of himself, an unmapped, uncharted territory of his own continent. My God, he thought, something had gone terribly wrong. North was motionless, eyes closed, sitting in his chair, waiting for the doctor, waiting for them to leave. And waiting for his son, too; that was foregone. Such a man would abandon his fortified self, and move far afield. Such a man would make an excellent and large-minded amanuensis, but a terrible witness. He would not hesitate to testify against himself.

  “Look, Bill,” Carruthers said. “They have something else, something new. I don’t know where they got it, maybe from the West Germans. Maybe from your friend Kleust. Nobody’s heard anything about him for two years, but now they’re hearing things again, and they think he’s coming up from underground.”

  He heard the door close softly, and he opened his eyes. He was alone in the solarium, except
their words were in the atmosphere. The light hurt his eyes, so he closed them; it was less painful in the dark. But he could hear the humming of the fluorescence. What did parents say to children? I have eyes in the back of my head, and I can see you wherever you are, and know what you are doing. You did, too, as a young father; a particular noise or, more usually, a particular silence and you’d put down the paper and cock your head.

  Bill Jr., what are you doing?

  I’m not doing anything.

  Yes, you are.

  It was good enough propaganda while it lasted; not as durable as Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, but good for four or five years, a fragile cease-fire, administered by the eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head peace-keeping force.

  Yes, and you could shut your eyes but the humming of the electricity remained. The trouble was, he felt that he was the one who was being watched. Everyone had a hidden pair of eyes, as each word seemed to have a hidden meaning. He had spent too long listening to Hartnett and Carruthers, and himself, too. He was tired ot the sound of his own voice, blah blah blah. There was too much pressure behind his words, too much left unsaid, too much that couldn’t be said; and so much that wasn’t known. Too much of the past in the present. He wished Kleust were there, with his bred-in-the-bone naturalness. His fatalism and his fables, and his paradoxical faith in the future; no future could be worse than the past, probably. Kleust reminded him of the African continent in its variety and density, and endurance, and restraint.

  Africa had thickened them both. And coming so close to death there, at such a young age. For a time it gave them the feeling that they were invincible, capable of deeds beyond their wildest imaginings; the truth was, it made them romantic in their own eyes. They never spoke of it, for the truth was too ludicrous. Kleust no doubt saw himself as Lohengrin, the Knight of the Swan, Wagner’s Shane, who arrives out of the forest as if by magic. It was not a comparison to be pressed too far, but it was irresistible. North did see himself as a Western gunfighter, Bat Masterson cleaning up the town; a pacific man, no stranger to irony, but a good man with a gun and brave as an eagle. That Bill North, he’s quiet, but a hard man when aroused.