“I’m having dinner with her tonight. Would you like me to strap her into a polygraph, tell her it’s a new simultaneous-translation gadget?”
Rufus went on as if there had been no interruption. “There’s no way at the moment to establish who she’s working for except by the process of elimination. So remember the rule: assume the worst, until something, else is proved. We should get reports from the field later today or tomorrow.”
Singer Callaway interposed. “There is the direct approach, Rufus. Black could go to Wintergrin and tell him there’s a bug in his room, that it leads to Erika’s room, and what the hell’s going on? Wintergrin calls in Wagner and they either own up, pleading routine security precautions; or else they deny it convincingly, in which case we know Erika is a Soviet agent.”
Rufus looked at Singer, disappointment written on his face.
“The disadvantages would appear to me critical. One: What happens then? We are probably at this point better off with Erika Chadinoff in the picture than out. Two: What if Wintergrin’s security officer is lying—and he did install the bug? The very fact that you discovered a highly sophisticated bug would suggest to him that you have certain skills alien to those of a construction engineer. Resulting, three, in casting suspicion on you, which is the last thing we can stand.
“No,” he concluded, “that’s out.”
He paused. Oh, God, Blackford thought, we’re going into one of those trances. There was nothing to do but wait it out.
It didn’t last too long. “Do you remember the Teller-Freeze Bypass, Blackford?”
“Of course.”
“It worked in London. A suitable variant could be useful to us here. We need to discover—and we don’t have much time—how she is reporting back to her people. If we’re lucky enough to find her making contact with a known agent, then it doesn’t matter what she says. But if she is passing along information to someone unknown to us, her passing on a special piece of goofy information could help tip us off.”
“That’s not going to be easy, Chief. I’ve been using my bugged telephone only to call Colonel Morley. It wouldn’t be easy to be kittenish with him. And they must all know that Morley isn’t a plant. I doubt she’s even transcribing my calls to Morley and passing them on. No, whatever I shoot into the Soviet bloodstream won’t be through the bug, but in conversations with her. I’ll see if I can figure something out, but I don’t think this arrangement is a natural for that formula … Let me think about it.”
“Very well. But think about it fast. Meanwhile, whoever is going to undertake the—elimination, if it is to be undertaken”—Rufus was given to direct speech, but certain words he avoided like an undertaker—“plans for it have got to be formulated. We should come up with alternative arrangements. I don’t expect you, Blackford, to come up with the definitive plan—that’s for Spring and Pulling in consultation with us. But no effective plan can be conceived, let alone brought about, without you.”
A day earlier, Blackford would have made a mordant remark. No longer. After his long introspective evening he had come to the conclusion that whatever he elected to do or not do himself, he would refrain from emphasizing his moral superiority over his associates. Either Blackford Oakes would cooperate or Blackford Oakes would not cooperate. He had said yesterday, after the three awful hours with Singer, that he would reserve a final decision on whether he would be willing, as he now termed it, to “trip the wire.” He preferred the expression “push the button,” which phrase, however, he shrank from both as a cliché and as presumptuous: the buttons, after all, were being pushed in Washington. So, pursuant to his resolution, he spoke now only in professional terms.
“I was a little brusque with the … electricians last night. I’ve already apologized to them. I’ll give them the help they need. My principal function—I mean, depending on the final arrangement—has been discharged.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean I got them their passes, so they can go in and out of the courtyard. As chapel electricians they get to go anywhere they want. I doubt there’d be any problem if they said they wanted to go right in the castle to look at electrical connections, all that sort of thing. Mention work on St. Anselm’s chapel around there and you can do anything you want. So if the ‘creative’ work is going to be done by Spring and what’s his-name, they’ve got themselves a pretty free rein. I’m not sure anybody would ask questions if they started constructing an electric chair in Wintergrin’s study. What else am I supposed to do?”
Rufus said, “Answer any questions they have. And”—he got up from his chair—“put your own ingenuity at our disposal. You haven’t exactly performed as a creative artist.”
Blackford decided to say nothing.
He was back at St. Anselm’s at four, spent two hours at the chapel, returned to the inn, washed, and killed an hour reading the afternoon papers from Essen, Hamburg, and Munich. Singer had suggested he call at three minutes after eight, ahead of the dinner date, to a special pay phone number in the event there was information from the field.
There was. Erika Chadinoff, the Paris people reported, once had a torrid love affair with a young undercover Communist activist who had been murdered. The culprit was never caught. The deceased’s dossier had been carefully examined by M. Raymond de Guest, chief of the political section of the Paris police, who wrote at the time—1948—that in his opinion it was a political vendetta, possibly the work of anti-Communist resistance leaders. There had been four “executions” during that fall for which there was no apparent motive. Two of those killed had been members of the anti-Communist Croix de Feu. (One had been pushed off the first story of the Eiffel Tower at night by a man who thought himself unobserved, but the entire operation had been seen by an amorous young couple whose tender extrication from one another caused a delay in shouting alarm that made chase unfeasible. The other, an excellent swimmer, was mysteriously drowned off Nice. He was wearing contact lenses. But his friends reported that he invariably removed his lenses before going out to swim.) Rome reported that Erika had been briefly in the news in 1949. She was mistress to the fiery young Christian Democrat legislator who in the critical election of 1948 had proposed the illegalization of the Communist Party and very nearly carried the day. He was now in prison, convicted of demanding a kickback from the wages of a translator he had placed with the UN Secretariat. The chief witness, indeed the only witness against him, was the translator herself—Erika Chadinoff. The prosecution had presented checks, made out to Erika by her UN employers but deposited to the account of the defendant, Giovanni Buegos. He swore ignorance of the transactions. Asked how he could account for his swollen bank account, he had replied that eight hundred dollars over six months was not all that conspicuous, and he hadn’t even noticed it. Five to seven years. His political movement might as well have been convicted along with him.
“Sounds like what we’re looking for, don’t you think?”
“Yes. But her parents! Did you check out the story that her father suggested she apply for this job?”
“We got someone in to see the old boy—a ‘reporter’ from the Chicago Tribune. Chadinoff likes the Tribune, told the reporter he found Colonel McCormick’s recent charge that Rhodes scholars are picked with the subversive strategic purpose of effecting an amalgamation between Britain and the U.S. hilarious, but he believes this is a good age to cultivate mutual suspicion. The reporter represented himself as doing a piece on Wintergrin’s staff, and obviously his daughter Erika was the best-known member of the staff among the international set. He asked whether M. Chadinoff approved her working for Wintergrin. He said he certainly did approve. So much so that when she told her parents she was going to work for Wintergrin, if necessary as a volunteer, the old boy said if there was no money for her salary he would stake her.”
“Well, that probably does it. She lied to Wintergrin. She told him, and he told me, that the whole thing was her father’s idea. So what do we do?”
> “What do you do? I don’t know. I know what we do over here. We’re moving all this information to Washington right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Secretary decides to confront Gromyko with it today.”
“In that case she’s bound to find out pretty soon that I’ve blown her cover. Although”—he mused—“the Soviets are even more secretive than you people. Sorry—I mean us people. You didn’t tell me I was blown until I confronted you with the telephone bug. Maybe they won’t tell Erika we know about her. No way of saying. Still, I’d better act fast if there’s going to be any element of surprise. I’ll let you know how it goes. Same number tomorrow?”
“No.” There was a pause as Singer—Blackford could almost see him—turned the pages of his notebook. He read out the new telephone number. “One of us will be in. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. So long, Singer.” In a way he could not account for, Blackford felt better. Perhaps because at least over the next period he would be exerting himself to outwit a Soviet agent, leaving to one side, if only temporarily, the question of how to dispose of the Soviets’ most formidable enemy.
She was dressed in blue and wore gold on her ears and around her neck and wrists. There was a trace of red in her light-brown hair and, Blackford thought, a trace of pout in her lips he had not noticed before. Her eyes were a working blue, never still, and she smiled confidently as, putting down the newspaper, he rose, took her hand and affected something of a bow, and said,
“Not bad for a little Nansen girl.”
She smiled and they walked out together to Blackford’s car, parked across the street.
“Where are we going?”
“I ran into a nice place the other night at Gummersbach. Have you been there?”
“No.”
“I think you’ll enjoy it.”
Driving down the highway he said, “The speech at Bremen went well, I take it?”
“Very well. Did you see the papers?”
“All but the Polish papers. How did they take the declaration of war?”
She laughed. “They were very good sports.”
“It does rather give them … status, don’t you think? Has anyone ever declared war on you?”
“Nobody would dare. Nansen would send the marines and destroy them.”
“Nemo me impune lacessit. There, I bet I’ve said something you can’t translate.”
Again she laughed. “Silly goose, as they used to say in London. That is the motto of one of the Queen’s orders, I forget which. ‘No one crosses me with impunity.’ Nemo means no one, as in Captain Nemo.”
“Really, Erika, you are an awful exhibitionist. I should think it would be very difficult for anyone other than Einstein to be married to you. I suppose you know all about relativity?”
“I know everything I need to know about relativity.”
“Do you know what E=mc2 means?”
“Yes. Hiroshima.”
“What’s the difference between Hiroshima and Vorkuta?”
He felt her tighten, and he said to himself, Cut it out, Oakes. This isn’t your show. Somewhere about four thousand miles away the Secretary of State and the Soviet ambassador are deciding how to handle this one. Cool it. Bang her if you want to, but if you feel like talking politics with her, go take a cold shower.
So he talked about a problem that was vexing him in the chapel and managed to engage her in the problems they were facing in the reconstruction well through the first course of herring and sour cream which—it was late—she ate avidly, injecting enough bright commentary to suggest a genuine interest in the problems he faced. Two hours later they had spoken of her experiences growing up in London, of his brief experience as a schoolboy at Greyburn, of, the coincidence of his having been at the same school where Wintergrin spent so many years.
She interjected that she and her parents had been in London at the same time, leaving right after Pearl Harbor, and Blackford said that he also had left right after Pearl Harbor. When, exactly? And they gasped at the coincidence of their both having sailed aboard the S.S. Mount Vernon, and suddenly Blackford remembered the little girl. Could it have been she? Her eyes shone. Of course, the handsome American blond boy with the apple! Really, he hadn’t changed so much. It was only eleven years ago. Why had they not seen each other during the voyage? Ah, class distinctions. Erika’s face sobered for the moment. She and her parents had traveled in third class, Blackford in tourist class, as they then called the second class, and the barriers between the classes were resolute. So that tall man with the high eyebrows was Dimitri Chadinoff! Off to overpower Harvard University’s Russian Literature department! It was all intensely enjoyable, and soon became engrossing. She seemed as anxious as he to exercise her mind and her emotions removed from the epic dimensions of the drama in which she was directly involved. She asked him, when he ordered liqueurs, whether he felt lonely facing so many more months of work in so remote a part of Germany, and he said yes, he was very lonely, and was there anything she could do about it? She let her hand, underneath the table, rest on his knee, and he took it and told her she was very beautiful, and she replied that he was the most beautiful American she had ever seen, and he called for the bill, signaled for Walter and whispered to him and he brought, along with the bill, a bottle of iced champagne wrapped discreetly in a napkin. In the car they embraced, and he guided her hand to his excitement and she said in a whisper, “Quickly, let’s go to the inn.” He turned on the radio and, with some difficulty, drove the half hour while she, caressing him, said not a word. He told her to go to her room, he would follow. In ten minutes he was there with the champagne. She went to him gladly, ardently. The dim light came in from the bathroom, and they walked away from its beam to the bed, where she lay down turning her head away while he untethered himself and came down on her violently, while she looked him in the face, squeezing him past pain to pleasure. He breathed with difficulty and suddenly she was Florence Nightingale dressing his wounds, bringing him back to life from battle, triumphant in her powers, and now they were airborne, riding high over St. Anselm’s and the forests of Westphalia, higher, higher, so high they could see all of Germany and now Poland, England, Russia, and soon the Atlantic and the whole world, round and round they sped, the pleasure ship on the nonstop intergalactic flight until the moment came for the dive down to that little twinkling village by the sleepy old castle of St. Anselm’s, just making it in their spaceship, just in time to their bed, in a delirium of pleasure. Blackford was wet. Erika tickled him lazily. And said, hoarsely, that he wouldn’t be lonely any more. That, he said rising, deserves a drink. She watched him as he uncorked the bottle, the devilishly beautiful young man, and thought yearningly of Paul, who had been even more beautiful.
CHAPTER 14
“Bring him in,” he told his aide on the telephone.
The Secretary, a gentleman of tidy memory, calculated that this would he the eleventh meeting with the ambassador on the matter of Wintergrin. And for the first time he felt he could, if not with assurance at least with self-confidence, take the offensive. The door opened and an aide brought in the sourdough Russian who had never been seen to smile. It had been conjectured by a cosmopolitan British journalist—sentenced by his superiors, for gross misbehavior, to three years covering the United Nations, where the Soviet ambassador worked before being reassigned to afflict Washington—that someone had told him, when a young man, that Stalin disapproved of smiling as revisionist; and so the ambassador routinely added this to the other mandates from Stalin which he faithfully executed, like never telling the truth.
“Good morning, Mr. Ambassador.”
The Secretary rose gravely and, as always, walked over to the little sofa and sat down next to his guest, waving the translator in the direction of a chair in front of them. “Shall we get right to the point?”
Nothing was better calculated to put the ambassador at ease, inasmuch as his inventory of badinage was as painful for him to rehearse as for the liste
ner to hear, and in any case had been depleted after the second visit.
“Now, Mr. Ambassador, the position of your government right along, has been that merely because we had an agent in the Wintergrin entourage, we were presumptively responsible for the Wintergrin phenomenon.”
“That, Mr. Secretary, and the identity of interests of your government and Count Wintergrin.”
“Well, if you wish to charge my government with the heinous offense of desiring that one day the residents of East Germany should rule themselves, then we are guilty: as is the Human Rights Covenant of the United Nations, which when it came up before the Security Council, you did not veto. But let that pass. It comes now to our attention that you have an agent of your own in the Wintergrin entourage, and that that agent is at least as well placed as our own.”
The translator, who had been with the ambassador for six years now, sensed when he should slow down the rendering of a negotiator’s remark, or extend the number of words necessary to convey the message. It seemed a very long time before he put into Russian what the Secretary had just said, and of course the ambassador had that much more time to compose a reply.
“You refer, perhaps, to dissenters in the Wintergrin camp who are opposed to war and fascism?”
“Well, actually, no, I wasn’t referring to dissenters in the Wintergrin camp who are opposed to war and fascism. I was referring to Miss Erika Chadinoff.”
The ambassador elected not to quibble. He knew when to quibble—indeed, could do so for weeks and months on end. To do so now would suggest that his government was keeping him in the dark. In fact, it was—the ambassador had no idea how Stalin would finally respond to a Wintergrin ultimatum if ever it were issued. But on such a matter as the Chadinoff woman it would not do to deny her role. Clearly the CIA was on to her.
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