Blackford waited to be told what it was. Rufus did not divulge it.
He continued. “What we cannot know is exactly when or how the Soviets would move. We know what they are in a position to do on the ground. We’re fighting a war in Korea, where we’ve concentrated practically everything we have. We all but demobilized the army during the panic to get home after the war. We wrote a treaty that forbade West German participation in a joint military command. The French economy is on the floor, and the French military is completely absorbed all to hell and gone, off in Indochina. The British are exhausted, and engaged in full-time decolonization. We put up a good front about NATO, and Ike made some nice speeches over here, but here are the facts. The Russians have three million men on their western border, comprising one hundred and seventy-five divisions. Twenty-two of these divisions are in East Germany and are mostly motorized, backed by sixty divisions facing west; East Europe has sixty to seventy divisions under arms. We have ten divisions in West Germany—most of them under strength, backed by commitments for twenty divisions. The Russian presence in Korea is negligible. So they have available to fight in Europe the whole of their military machine. We figure they’d mass on the West German border, and twenty-four hours after they move, they’d reach the Rhine. Three days later, Paris. Either there would be no resistance at all—which is a strong possibility if NATO collapsed right away; or there’d be a fierce resistance of a partisan nature, and bloodletting on the scale of what went on in western Russia in the early days of the war. It is”—Rufus looked up at Blackford—“the worst potential situation I have seen since the Battle of Britain.”
“Hell, Rufus, what about our bomb?”
“There’s something we don’t know. We don’t know whether the President of the United States would order the use of atomic weapons to stop the Russians if they did move.”
“But you do know—I assume—what can be done to keep the Russians from moving?”
“I think so. But first, consider three alternative constructions.
“Alternative One: Stalin is anxious to strike, desires Wintergrin to win the election, challenge it, and so give him an excuse to go ahead and gobble up the rest of Europe.
“Alternative Two: The Soviet Union is not anxious to take on the West but is prepared to do it—if Wintergrin is elected and issues his ultimatum.
“Alternative Three: The Soviet Union isn’t anxious to take on the West and won’t take us on even if Wintergrin is elected and presents his ultimatum.”
“Surely the third alternative is too remote even to think about?” Blackford ventured. He had by now ten weeks’ intensive familiarity with the German press, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and his observations of the working of Stalin’s iron will were well integrated. Stalin yield to Wintergrin?
“I list it out of a sense of obligation to list all the alternatives. Now, as for Alternative One, which early on was popular at Defense, I was always skeptical. The weakness of NATO apart, the American atomic deterrent apart, to take on all of Europe is something very few military men would counsel Stalin to do at this moment. If he has to do it in order to keep East Germany, that’s one thing. Otherwise—later, maybe. It would mean occupying Italy, the parts of Austria they don’t already occupy, West Germany, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia; then war, along whatever ground rules, with England and the United States. No, they can’t be anxious for that.”
“So it comes down to Alternative Two?”
“In my opinion it comes down to Alternative Two.”
“What are they saying in Washington about the chance of Wintergrin’s winning?”
“We have been running polls every week. The week before Frankfurt, it was Wintergrin twenty per cent. The week after, it was Wintergrin twenty-eight per cent. A week ago he slipped—some of the criticism is beginning to tell—down to twenty-four per cent. But now listen to this: the poll four days ago, after his television press conference in Berlin, put him at thirty-four per cent—only four per cent behind Adenauer, and ten per cent ahead of Ollenhauer.
“There are three weeks before the election. Wintergrin’s tide is rising. We are directed to proceed on the assumption that he will be elected the next Chancellor of West Germany unless he sinks to below thirty per cent, or unless Adenauer’s lead should rise to eight points. As a result of this week’s upset, we are now polling continuously, making collations twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays. The election is on November fifteenth. If on November eleventh the polls still show him at thirty-plus and Adenauer less than thirty-eight, we must, to be safe, assume that he would be elected.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do about it? To be ‘safe.’”
“We’re supposed to do what we can to lower his standing in the polls.”
“That will be an interesting job. Shall we begin by coming up with documents showing that he was really working for the Nazis in Norway?”
“That possibility is being studied.”
“Shit,” Blackford said, and instantly regretted it. One didn’t say that kind of thing in Rufus’s presence. Not because Rufus was a prude. But because it was an affront to his professionalism. Rather like a doctor swearing at an inflamed appendix. Rufus, of course, overlooked it. He said only, “There are a good many other possibilities, of course.”
Blackford started to say, “All of them equally distasteful?” but checked himself. The questions being pondered by Rufus had nothing to do with good taste or bad, delicacy or indelicacy. He said instead: “I suppose we could fan the Wintergrin-will-lead-us-to-a-third-world-war movement.”
“There is always that.”
“Well, what happens if on the eleventh of November he’s still got more than thirty per cent of the vote?”
“He will have to be killed.”
Blackford stood up, his pale face suddenly burning, his lithe body stiff, tilting forward. He could only think to say softly, reproachfully, “Rufus!”
“Moreover, there is only one person who could do it, expeditiously, who could get inside security, arrange for it to happen without suspicion. Who is, in fact, inside.”
Blackford sat down. The pause was long. “Rufus. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. You couldn’t, if you knew him …”
Rufus snapped: “The matter does not hang on Wintergrin’s amiability.” And, in a different tone of voice: “Nobody can make you do it, Blackford. And it may not prove necessary to try. It is necessary to guard against the high possibility of a world war and the loss of Europe. We must get on with these preparations irrespective of whether we ever trip the wire. To do that we need at least your cooperation, deferring until another time the question whether you would … act as executioner. I must ask you to cooperate at this critical stage.” Rufus rose solemnly, and Blackford was reminded that he was facing the man Churchill had acknowledged as the single principal asset of the Allies during the Second World War.
Blackford didn’t have the stomach to discuss the matter at any greater length with Rufus. He needed someone human to argue with. “Let me talk with Singer, please.”
“Of course. Lunch is waiting for you in the dining room upstairs.”
He was there at exactly seven-thirty. Blackford, true to his training, pulled up across the street exactly on time, so that there was no moment during which Wintergrin was waiting for an automobile, or an automobile was waiting for Wintergrin. On reflection, Blackford thought as Wintergrin opened the door and moved in next to him, the clockwork rendezvous—assuming anyone observed it—looked more suspicious than if one party had had to wait a moment or two for the other. The fine synchronization made it look like a getaway car.
Blackford had had a stiff drink of scotch in his room at the inn, seeking to tranquilize the day’s events, and was struggling now to act natural. Wintergrin helped; he was in high spirits as they went down Goethestrasse, toward the highway west. Stopping at a light, Black looked across and noticed for the first time that in addition to the unaccustomed fedora, Count Wintergrin
had a mustache.
“Not bad. I wonder what Hitler did when he wanted to go out incognito? Wear a yarmulke? How long have you had that?”
“Since becoming a fixture on television. I have used it perhaps five times, and it is quite wonderful. I have never been recognized with it on. I wish I could fool Wolfgang with it—but I can’t; I have to get his permission to use it. The authenticity I owe to my sainted mother. When, after three months’ progressive disgust, I decided to shave off the mustache I grew at college, mother persuaded me to let her clip off the ends, which I now use. I am surprised dear mother does not ask me to save my fingernails. Sometimes, after hearing Roland Himmelfarb’s dire reports on our financial problems, I am tempted to auction off my fingernails. Do you suppose you could persuade your Marshall Plan people to buy some at a price consistent with German dignity and American resources?”
‘I’ll try … Axel”—that was the first time, and the scotch helped to make it possible; besides, Blackford thought wildly, what is the proper mode of address between executioner and executionee? He would have to research this. He could not think, offhand, of a course at Yale that covered the subject adequately, though no doubt Professor Lewis Curtis, professor among other things of European arcana, could at a moment’s prodding deliver a lecture on the subject. Surely, in a democratic age, matters had advanced from such stiffness as the axeman’s who asked Mary, Queen of Scots: “Your Majesty, would you bend your head down a little lower, please, ma’am?”
Blackford said: “Bonn has been pretty good about expenses. Needless to say, we’re over the budget—that’s always expected. But I’ll tell you what: If you would agree to get yourself martyred, I’m sure I could persuade Washington to requisition—that is the word, Axel: never just plain ‘acquire’—your fingernails as relics for the altar at St. Anselm’s.”
“Thank you, Blackford. I shall take up your proposal with my staff at our meeting at ten tomorrow. I am quite certain that Weil, my finance chairman, will give it every consideration.”
They reached the Gummersbacher Hof, and Blackford went in ahead and asked for Walter, informing him that Blackford’s guest was parking the car. Was everything in order?
Perfectly. They would have Chambre séparée 3, entirely private, and Walter’s first waiter, Karl, would take care of the dinner order, and there would be a bottle of champagne in gratitude to the Americans who were rebuilding the beautiful chapel of St. Anselm’s. Blackford, desiring leverage for his request for privacy, had let drop his mission in making the reservation. Walter led him through the dimly lit fin-de-siècle dining room, past crystal and candles and roast goose and crepes suzettes and animated Germans, a few with wives, others with women as conspicuously nubile as they were unattached; and finally to the little room sheltered, like one or two others, by a curtain. A single candle-flame held the darkness at bay. At the sides of the table were upholstered chairs. Walter showed Blackford where the bell button was located (on the wall, by the head of the table), and reiterated that Herr Oakes had only to mention Walter’s name to Karl and, without a moment’s hesitation, Walter would materialize. Blackford went out to the parking lot and brought in the Liberator, who slithered by the twenty couples without problem—twenty couples whose thought, in any event, was not, at that particular time and place, easily arrested by politics.
Wintergrin seated, the curtain drawn, was expansive. He drank quickly from the champagne at the table, in sharp contrast with his habit of ordering a single glass of white wine and leaving it virtually untouched. Blackford too drank copiously as they looked unhurriedly at the menu. Wintergrin’s paternalistic inclinations were not, however, adjourned, and Blackford was amused to hear his host say, as if in a soliloquy: “Let me see … they have fresh crayfish tonight. But also trout. I think we’ll have the crayfish. Yes, don’t you agree, Blackford?—without looking up, and without anticipating any verbal reaction. “To begin. Yes, to begin. If my mother didn’t always serve trout, I would order it here, since they are superbly done. But under the circumstances, we must have something else. Yes. Something else. Of course.” This time he did not bother even to say what his selection was. He pushed the button, and in seconds Karl arrived with his notepad.
“The wine list.” Karl had it in hand. Count Wintergrin drank infrequently, so his attention tended to focus on the familiar wines, and he picked out a Schorlemmer Mosel, then a Lafitte, and gave the order for the meal. Karl walked out. For the first time Wintergrin looked up.
“Will the United States work very hard against us?”
Blackford’s mind ran to the joke passed around at school about the Prussian disporting himself with the whore who, it transpired, was palpably enjoying herself, causing the Prussian to pause in mid-enterprise and say: “Now wait a minute, Frieda. Just who is fucking whom?” So now Blackford Oakes, a.k.a. Geoffrey Truax, was invited to inform Count Wintergrin of United States policy toward the reunification movement! Blackford was confident of his instincts about Wintergrin’s preternatural innocence respecting Oakes’s role at St. Anselm’s. What, then, was Wintergrin after, asking him such a question? Did he mean to probe Blackford’s knowledge of what U.S. officials were saying in Bonn, the principal Western listening post for American diplomacy? If that was Wintergrin’s intention, surely he’d have approached the question more obliquely? If the idea was to suborn Blackford’s good nature by teasing him into indiscretion, Wintergrin would surely have waited—a long evening lay ahead of them—until the wine had done its notoriously good work in softening preprandial resolution. No, Wintergrin was being characteristically frank, surely—ingenuous.
He took a long, slow drink of champagne. “Well, as you know, the Administration is backing Adenauer.”
“Of course I know. That much is obvious. They’ve backed him from the beginning. And I am not unsympathetic with their motives for doing so. They didn’t anticipate a reunification movement. Now they have one. The Soviet Press and the left press throughout Europe have responded to our challenge exactly as one might suppose they would. But is it inconceivable that the U.S. Government—are you aware, Blackford, that not one American official has interrogated me, however indirectly?—might change its mind? Or even that it would remain neutral? What puzzles me, now that there are only three weeks to go, is: What will they do to reinforce Adenauer’s position? And what will they do if they conclude that Adenauer is going to lose—that I am going to win? I’ll tell you something confidential.” He drank his champagne. Blackford followed suit. Wintergrin leaned toward him. “The Americans are conducting polls. You know, we are not yet officially permitted to do so. But even if Der Spiegel goes ahead, as it threatens to do, American polling techniques are far advanced, thanks to your Truman-Dewey experience. Now I happen to know—one of our people is, well, nicely situated in there—what the most recent poll says. Do you know?”
“No,” Blackford lied, tilting his glass to hide his face.
“I am at thirty-four per cent. Adenauer is only four points ahead of me. I began at twenty per cent. There have been ups and downs. But the upward graph is steady. And”—he drank slowly now from what was left in his glass, and looked directly at Blackford, his face calm, resolute, solemn, his eyes slightly raised as if the subject were, somehow, slightly indiscreet—“I am going to win. Assuming an exact three-way split, I would need only thirty-four per cent. But I am every day taking votes from Adenauer. And why not? Adenauer’s position is no longer interesting. It is the position of … an … inchoate reunifier. He is progressively seen as the impotent candidate. I make this prediction: When the votes are counted, Ollenhauer will be ahead of Adenauer. The publicity against me is—if only my enemies knew it”—he chuckled, a little nervously—“if only you people realized it—at the strategic expense of Adenauer. Everyone who is persuaded by what they say about me—that I’ll bring on a war—will be frightened into Ollenhauer’s camp, don’t you see? If they are scared to death of any confrontation with the Soviet Union, won’t they go, af
ter the battering they are taking, as far away from confrontation as possible? Ollenhauer is a good German, but his idea of reunification is something that will happen when Stalin’s grandson gives away East Germany as a wedding present to his German bride.”
Blackford tasted the first course before answering, waited for Karl to leave, and said, cautiously: “Well, I don’t know what they’re saying in Washington. But I can guess. They’re probably saying: What in the hell are we supposed to do if Wintergrin’s elected, gives Stalin his Frankfurt ultimatum, Stalin says screw you, and oils up his legions to overrun West Germany? Washington is not prepared for that, I’d guess. What could it do? NATO isn’t strong enough. The Bomb means a third world war, and that probably means the last war. I assume the Russians wouldn’t give you time to develop your own strength to resist the Russian Army …”
“The Russians”—Wintergrin edged his chair closer to the table, and gripped his glass of wine—“the Russians,” he said in a strident whisper, “are scared to death. Don’t ask me how I know. But I do. They are counting on threats and bluff to dispose of the Wintergrin problem.” He took from his pocket an envelope on which he had made notes. “This is very confidential. We have someone in Ulbricht’s entourage. He reports that Ulbricht sent on dutifully to Moscow an intelligence report taken by his own people predicting that any move by the Russian military across East Germany would mobilize the whole country in opposition, which would rip right across Eastern Europe, endangering the whole Soviet postwar position. I wonder if the CIA knows, or guesses, this? With these problems in the countries they presently occupy, can you imagine the Russian situation if they moved and tried to take over West Germany? Let alone our NATO neighbors?”
“Well, yes. I imagine that, among other things, previously ill-fed Russian military officials would be eating the crayfish here tonight.”
“Blackford, there is a limit even to what the Russians can ingest. The prime minister Count Witte warned Nicholas II on the eve of the First World War on that point, trying to dissuade him from declaring war against the Germans. Stalin is everything evil and avaricious you want to say about him. But he has practically never—in his career—shown a disregard for strategic prudence. His only lapse caused him to be taken by surprise by the Nazis. He very nearly lost Russia, never mind the world revolution. Do you want to know what I think would happen—what I think will happen? The Russians will reply to my ultimatum with a series of face-saving qualifications. I am telling you, swearing you to silence, that I will let them get away with it. I would even extend the deadline. I would sign a nonaggression treaty. I would go to Moscow. I would even push NATO out of Germany … But when the final moment comes, they will give us back Germany. I’m telling you, Blackford, they will give us back Germany without war. Of this I am confident. More confident than I am that the West—that you”—he looked up directly at Blackford, as though Axel were addressing the President of the United States—“will take the historical opportunity my movement presents you. The temptation to prudence is so great. And the means of effecting prudence can be ugly—I know; I was involved, once, in effecting prudence (we were right, in the circumstances) in Norway, in 1944: there was a dead Norwegian left over. He might—conceivably—have escaped us, with tighter security. I could never escape the West, if the fatal decision were made. I can only hope that the West will see: through my eyes if necessary; through their own eyes, if only they will widen them. Don’t you see, Blackford, I have got hold of the key to the eventual liberation of Eastern Europe?”
Stained Glass Page 10
