Stained Glass

by William F. Buckley

  “We need to protect our interests, Mr. Secretary.”

  “Precisely. Now, as to the plan. There is no longer any reason why it should not be executed by your agent rather than by ours.”

  “Your government bears primary responsibility for Count Wintergrin, and your government must, under the circumstances, take the responsibility of removing him.”

  The Secretary elected to be frosty, which he could do without strain.

  “I shall not spend more time telling you what I told you in our ten previous meetings on the subject, namely that Wintergrin was not our enterprise. I will not even go beyond making the obvious historical point that if there were no occupation of East Germany there would be no cause for Wintergrin to ignite. Because of your government’s threats we have had, most reluctantly, to acquiesce in a disgraceful enterprise. It clearly matters more to us than to you who should execute that plan. The reasons why it should be our responsibility rather than yours—because we had an agent in the field and you did not—now no longer apply and, accordingly, I invest you with the responsibility.”

  The ambassador had been in frequent communication with Stalin himself, through Ilyich of the KGB, and knew now how to cope with the hand grenade thrown to him. The directive had come from Stalin himself. He could imagine that Stalin thought it both ingenious and merry, in the sense that Stalin understood merriment.

  “I had of course previously relayed to our government the objections you have so persistently made on the point in question. In the light of the current development, I am authorized to suggest a compromise.”

  “A compromise? How does one compromise on this point?”

  “It is suggested that we settle the matter in a way sanctioned by both Russian and American tradition.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of playing cards, and laid them down on the coffee table in front of him. “The low man does the job.”

  The Secretary’s mustache writhed in indignation, contempt, mortification, and settled finally like a bull’s horns aimed at his tormentor.

  “Mr. Ambassador! Now I have seen everything!”

  He rose and paced to his desk, looking up as if pleading at the portrait of John Jay. He could think, at first, only of such a retort as might be appropriate in a western saloon. He closed his eyes as he spoke.

  “To begin with, I would need to send the cards to an X-ray technician to inspect.” He almost added, “And I would need to search your sleeves.” He looked at him out of the corner of his eye, to ascertain his reaction to the supreme diplomatic insult. The ambassador sat as if made of stone, which as a matter of fact, the Secretary thought, he was, really. He paused, wondering whether it would be possible to communicate to him the coarseness of the suggestion. He decided it would not. The diplomat in him took over and he wondered if he might succeed in pushing him further. He would try.

  “Mr. Ambassador, if your government is willing to draw cards on the question, then your government is confessing its willingness to do the deed. In that event, what reason is there for you not to do it? It serves your direct interests, not ours.”

  “Ah, then, you admit that Wintergrin’s enterprise serves your interests!”

  The Secretary groaned.

  “And besides, you agreed at our sixth session to execute the plan. There is no need, Mr. Secretary, to proceed as if we had not had our previous meetings.”

  “We agreed to the plan on the grounds that your threat, though unspecified, could mean another bloody war. But we have not yet agreed to have one of our agents carry out the plan.”

  “Do you wish me to return to my government and advise it that our plan—”

  “—your plan—”

  “—our plan is rescinded? I am prepared to do so.”

  The Secretary stopped, thought deeply, and returned to the sofa.

  “There isn’t much time, Mr. Ambassador. The eleventh of November is twelve days away. The efforts to bring Wintergrin down in the polls will begin, as planned, tomorrow. The arrangements for the twelfth, in the event the polls show Wintergrin’s probable success, must be laid carefully. There is no time for further bickering.”

  “Then draw a card, Mr. Secretary.”

  He’d have given the remaining years of his life to have there and then drawn the two of clubs. But he could not himself touch the cards. For reasons of … ethics? Pride? He could think of only a single retreat.

  “Very well. Let the agents in the field do the card-drawing.” There was a certain poetic consistency in this, he thought wearily. And added, “They will in any event need to be introduced to each other formally, since it is agreed that the details of the plan will be approved by your technicians and ours.”

  “I accept your modification,” the ambassador said, reaching down and pocketing the cards. “I shall leave it to you to suggest a meeting place. Of course, not Germany. I would suggest Switzerland. If you will be good enough to advise me the place and the time, we shall deliver Colonel Boris Bolgin, from our London embassy, and Miss Chadinoff. You will supply your agent in the field, and the relevant superior.”

  The Secretary pressed a buzzer. Instantly his aide appeared.

  “Kindly show the ambassador to his car.” He rose and shook hands, unsmiling. The translator in his double-breasted black suit waited indecisively. Some diplomats shake a translator’s hand always, some never, the Secretary sometimes. The Secretary extended his hand, the translator took it, and they went out.

  He went to the red telephone—to report, for perhaps the sixtieth time, the most recent development. The President would talk to no one else about the Wintergrin matter, and with the Secretary he would speak about little else.

  CHAPTER 15

  On Tuesday morning, November 2, Blackford advised Overstreet he would be going to Geneva for a few days on romantic leave, that his American girlfriend was there with her parents and that he had grievously neglected her.

  Where would he be staying in case anything came up?

  Blackford upbraided himself for failing to do his calisthenics as an agent, but he extemporized plausibly. He would he picking up a message at the Hotel Richemond, he said, advising him where the American party was quartered if the Richemond proved, for whatever reason, not to be to the liking of the crotchety father. In any event he couldn’t see that in the next two or three days he would be needed as the work—carpentry mostly, following designs already approved—would be routine. He would be back in plenty of time to submit to the count’s weekend inspection trip.

  Okay, said Overstreet, and at ten Blackford drove to the airport at Bonn and boarded a Lufthansa Convair to Geneva. From there he went by rail along the lake as far as Montreux, then switched to the MOB line, heading east up the mountainside into the Bernese Oberland. As the little train rose and the Alps descended on him, he found it irresponsible that his thoughts should turn to skiing, which he longed to attempt in the lofty Alps after several winters of rope tows in Vermont during hectic weekends away from Yale.

  At the railroad station in Montreux he picked up a hastily produced official tourist brochure describing, in an English obviously torn unwillingly from the German womb, the delights of Alpine life. The Bernese Oberland Tourist Bureau had evidently decided that the area and its inhabitants needed glamorization in order to increase the tourist trade. Accordingly, as the little train chugged up the foothills Blackford read that he would be “passing next by to the grand villa of Charlie Chaplin at Vevey, past the residence of Noel Coward at Les Avants, within sight of the orange-shuttered chalet of David Niven at Château d’Oex.” He ruminated that Charlie Chaplin was spending so much time these days avoiding taxation, he must perforce be neglecting the proletarian cause. After Rougemont, the brochure said, he would pass “outside of French-speaking Switzerland,” entering the Bernese Oberland at Saanen. “Go past Saanen to Gstaad,” Singer Callaway had told him, because though the Chalet Haltehüs is in Saanen town limits, it’s three kilometers up the road and there are no taxis until
you get to Gstaad.

  Beginning at Château d’Oex even the meadows facing south were covered with snow, and getting off at Gstaad Blackford was amused to see three horse-drawn sleighs available as taxis to passengers leaving the train. He had too far to go for one of these, he reasoned, and so hailed a taxi, a small diesel-Mercedes 180 and, on impulse, asked first to be taken to a skirental store. Two blocks from the station, down the single, bustling, Swiss-pretty main street, the car stopped opposite Hermenjat, where he bought corduroy pants and a light wind-breaker and rented ski boots, skis, and poles. A skiing map of the area in hand, he followed the route the driver took to Chalet Haltehüs, “on the Saanen road, near Schönreid,” Singer had said. Ten minutes later the driver pulled up to a chalet of moderately imposing size, the bottom story covered in off-white stucco, two outdoor wooden staircases leading in a squat V up to the second, clearly the principal story, encased in a cuckoo-clock wood which had probably weathered a hundred Swiss winters. He paid the driver, propped his skis against the stucco wall, walked with his suitcase up the stairs, rang the bell, and was greeted by Rufus.

  Blackford, at six foot one, had to duck to clear the door lintel and was surprised by the bright burnished-wood interior. Clearly a refurbished chalet, preserving the original wood panels and beams, but freshly and even luxuriously decorated for winter clients. Rufus took Blackford’s trench coat and told him the suite in the first story would be his, that the bedrooms upstairs would be taken by himself and Singer Callaway. “Singer won’t be in till later tonight. We agreed there would be only the four of us at the meeting, which”—Rufus looked at his watch—“is fifty-five minutes from now.”

  Blackford proposed he install himself, put on country clothes, and then rejoin Rufus, which he did five minutes later.

  They sat on sofas opposite the unlit fireplace.

  “We will get done as quickly as possible the business between yourself and Chadinoff. Then Bolgin and I will stay on and discuss arrangements. It would not be appropriate for you to be present at that discussion. I have a rented car in the garage if you should want to go into Gstaad.”

  “Rufus, what are the chances the blitz you people have programmed for the next few days will topple Wintergrin in the polls?”

  “Impossible to say. Blitz is the word for it. That’s what we, and … they … have prepared. The polls on Thursday put Wintergrin down a little at thirty per cent, Adenauer at thirty six per cent. If all goes well, the twelfth of November will pass by uneventfully.”

  Blackford decided to take advantage of the optimistic note to restréss a formal point.

  “You realize, Rufus, that I said I’d cooperate in the arrangements, but I have never said I’d do it … myself. I haven’t said that.”

  “I am aware of it.”

  “Suppose I lose the hangman’s draw. What assurance do you have I will live up to your bargain?”

  “I have no such assurance.”

  “Just so that’s clear.”

  “That discussion is for the evening of November eleventh if the decision then is to consummate the plan.”

  Blackford let it drop. He found it easier to discuss philosophical matters with Singer than with Rufus. Rufus, he knew from past experience, was given to profound thought. But what wrestling he did he did internally, Blackford supposed. For Rufus ethical dialogue, unless integral to an operation, was digression—worse, distraction. If Rufus were asked to do something he thought unconscionable, what would he do? Blackford wondered. He would probably decide what was unconscionable in the context of the strategic realities, Blackford imagined. But if they did not in his opinion justify the proposal, Rufus would quite simply refuse without giving, let alone elaborating, the reasons. It was not a part of his character to muck about publicly in ambiguities. If at some future Nuremberg Rufus were convicted, he would deserve to die.

  “What do we know about Bolgin?”

  “Boris Andreyvich Bolgin. Age, fifty-four. Ukrainian. Young career official in the OGPU, sent to Siberia for ten years during the 1933 purge trials, released after Hitler struck, wife and daughter left him, assigned to counterintelligence, fluent in German, at home with English. During the war he served on the eastern front, then intelligence work in Sweden. A friend—if that’s the word for it—of Ilyich, head of the KGB; they were classmates at the Academy in Kiev. He is—as you may have learned in London—ostensibly military attaché to the Soviet ambassador. In fact, he is chief KGB agent for western Europe.”

  “Have you ever met him?”

  “No.”

  “What does he look like?”

  Rufus opened his briefcase and pulled out a photograph.

  “Grim-looking bastard.”

  “An expert studying his face might guess he had spent time in Siberia, courting frostbite.”

  Blackford felt chastened. Rufus left to prepare tea, declining Blackford’s offer to help. Blackford looked out the frame window to the Gstaad Valley. The sky was blue in patches; the mountain profiles laced the scene behind Saanen traveling to the west of Gstaad, disappearing in the distance. And to the east was what seemed a different range coming in a few hundred yards in front of the chalet, proceeding north, again as far as the eye could see. Two cows, prodded by an old grizzled farmer with walking stick, came down the road. The bells on their collars sounded dully but distinctly, enticingly. The farmer smoked a pipe.

  At least he wasn’t dressed in Tyrolean garb, Blackford sighed, wondering how Switzerland managed to look so quintessentially Swiss. Maybe the farmer was the same man who wrote the brochure, moonlighting. Then he spotted the car. It was coming up the road, and had begun to slow down. He went quickly to the kitchen door.

  “They’re here.”

  Rufus walked out with teapot and four cups on a tray. He put it down on the dining table, recessed in a corner of the living room against two windows, and walked to the door, reaching it just as Bolgin and Erika Chadinoff did. He opened it.

  “My name is Rufus.”

  Bolgin walked ahead of Erika, took off his hat and gloves, and said, with a deep bow: “Ah, Rufus, at last. I am Boris Andreyvich Bolgin. And here is Fräulein Erika Chadinoff.”

  “And this is Mr. Blackford Oakes.”

  Bolgin unwound a long gray scarf while staring at Oakes, who, wordlessly, took Erika’s rough fur coat and Bolgin’s, and hung them both on the hooks at the side of the door.

  “Ah, Oakes!” Bolgin said, moving toward the dining-room bench toward which Rufus motioned him and rubbing his hands as if he had stepped in from a Siberian cold. “I have looked forward to meeting you. Yes, indeed, I have looked forward to meeting you.” Blackford waited tensely. Would Bolgin reveal knowledge of Blackford’s activities in London?

  No.

  “Yes, I have looked forward to meeting you. And, of course, you know Miss Chadinoff. You are,” he cackled, “colleagues!” Blackford looked Erika in the face for the first time. She showed no emotion. Why should she? She had known right along what his business at St. Anselm’s was. And now she knew he had known her true role at St. Anselm’s that night at Gummersbach. So? What did she have to be ashamed of? She hadn’t spent the evening artfully criticizing Karl Marx. She had added no private deception to the public—so to speak, the institutional—deception. Her biological attraction to him was unfeigned—indeed, she’d have had to feign the unnatural, otherwise. She had taken her private pleasure with him, during which she was acting other than as an extension of Soviet foreign policy. Bolgin had dispatched a technician to bug Blackford’s room, but, listening dutifully once a day to the slender accumulation of the voice-activated tape, she had learned nothing in any way embarrassing to him. She said without a trace of stiffness, “Yes. How are you, Blackford?”

  They sat and Rufus poured. Bolgin’s chatter was unceasing. Clearly he thought it appropriate to talk for a while about the common concern of the “peace-loving powers,” as he persisted in calling them, to avoid the horror of another war. And so he went on abou
t the awful, unconscionable gamble Count Wintergrin was taking with the fate of Europe, indeed—Bolgin was using his hands now—the fate “of all the civilized world.” Blackford was never more tempted: to dissect that analysis and spit out his contempt for it. But he had rehearsed in his mind how the meeting would probably go, and he could not say he was entirely surprised by Bolgin’s prolegomena. At least the CIA did not require Blackford to nod his head in agreement. Perhaps that would come later? In an age of accommodation? But relief came soon. Rufus was having none of it either. As a matter of fact, even Erika’s expression was blank as she sipped her tea and nibbled at a cracker and let Boris Andreyvich go on, and on. But when Bolgin began a story about Soviet heroism in aborting the fascist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, Rufus shot out:

  “Colonel Bolgin, we are here to murder a human being not history.”

  Bolgin reacted instantly to the snap of authority.

  “Of course of course of course, my dear Rufus. Of course of course, and you must be oh so tired. Erika and I are rested. We came last night. Indeed, Erika went skiing this afternoon.”

  Blackford looked up with interest, and allowed himself to say, “Where?”

  “On the Hornberg, up the road five kilometers.”

  “How was it?”

  “The snow is fresh. It was … fine.”

  Rufus got up, removed the tea tray, and went to his briefcase.

  “Let us be very formal about this, Colonel Bolgin. I purchased these cards in Geneva this morning and you will see that they are still sealed. It is, however, concededly within our resources, as within yours, to doctor a set of cards and make them appear to be new and unused. Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Well,” said Colonel Bolgin, “in truth I do—not that I mistrust you—on this occasion!” he cackled again. “But as you say, we must be stiff-upper-lip formal.” Blackford did not know exactly what kind of formality that was, but waited.

  Bolgin reached out and picked up one of the three decks, opened the seal, and spread the cards out on the table. Then he shuffled them. Blackford had seen a thorough shuffle or two in his time, but he had never seen anything quite to compare with this. It was mesmerizing. Colonel Bolgin shuffled the cards without comment for the better part of two minutes. Then he lifted the red-and-white checkered tablecloth and rolled it back halfway up the table.