“We nevertheless are convinced that he was engaged in the Vemork operation in which you were engaged.”
“That’s possible. There were two units of frogmen. Ours went in from the northeast lagoon, the other from the beach. Both groups planted explosives, and as far as our unit knew, both sets of explosives went off. The idea of the two units was of course to hit the ship in the event that one unit was discovered.”
Wagner continued. “We have not found him involved in any pro-Soviet political activity. We simply cannot discover at the moment any ideological ties to the Soviet Union.”
“Well, what do you propose to do about that … liar?” Wintergrin had never been heard to use profanity. “He stands up at a press conference and says he gave me information about the scheduled date of the Allied bombing of the freighter, that I gave that information to the Gestapo, thus permitting Nazi antiaircraft artillery to blast every one of the British bombers out of the air, and he produces a photostat, a forgery, of a Gestapo memorandum recording the details of the meeting with me.”
He paused. “If so much of the press hadn’t become an echo chamber for any anti-Wintergrin story, the Norway allegation wouldn’t have appeared except in the satellite publications, unless they had established the legitimacy of the Gestapo document.”
“I’m afraid it’s being taken quite seriously,” Himmelfarb said. “I have telegrams from a half dozen of our critical supporters telling us we’ve got to explode that charge.”
“What are you proposing, Jürgen?”
“A trip to Norway, Count Wintergrin, about which I’d rather not say anything more. And, sir, may I see you after the meeting is over?”
“Of course.”
He turned again to Grossmann. “I think, Kurt, that after the press meeting Tuesday at Bonn we would do well to organize a big rally, if there is time to do it. I would suggest Frankfurt, at the same Paulskirche. I would then attempt a speech that would reiterate my defenses. Above all, the voters must not now be distracted, demoralized …” He smiled. “Anybody got any good news?”
There was silence. Then Grossmann spoke. “Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune has endorsed you.”
“Well, just so long as Senator McCarthy doesn’t endorse me.”
“I think we have been able to abort that.”
“Anybody else?”
“The Ollenhauer camp is still reeling from the endorsement of you two days ago from Heinrich Regnery. The metalworkers’ support was personally courted by both Adenauer and Ollenhauer. Our getting it was a huge plus.”
“Well,” said Wintergrin, “I suppose it’s good to know the enemy probably doesn’t have a shot left to fire.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about, sir,” Wagner said.
Wintergrin rose, told his associates he would be working at his desk most of the evening and would be available to anyone who wanted him.
“Come into my study,” he said to Wagner.
They sat down and Axel took another glass of the mineral water, left there after his tray was removed.
“Count Wintergrin, I am moderately well satisfied with the security we have organized for you in your travels—moderately satisfied, not completely satisfied.” Wintergrin noticed that young Wagner, undeniably talented and thorough, had even so in the past few weeks contracted a severe case of creeping pomposity.
“The only alternative, Jürgen, would be to arrange to have me give my speeches from the inside of an armored tank.”
Wagner ignored the taunt. “I intend, during this last week, to insist on even greater precautions in the assembly halls, and even in the television studios. Do you know the President of the United States has thirty-two people protecting him at all times?”
“I am not as unpopular as the President of the United States”—Wintergrin smiled, having read about Truman’s latest Gallup poll.
“Please, sir, you must cooperate.”
“Very well. Make such arrangements as you deem necessary. But don’t put me behind plate glass when I speak. Is that all?”
“No, sir.”
Wintergrin looked hard at him. “Then what else?” “We must do something about internal security.”
“What do you mean?”
“There really hasn’t been a sufficient check on the people who have access to you. I asked the sentry the other day for a head count. An average of fifty-five people came in and out of the courtyard every day last week, even with our sentry system which denied passage to”—Wagner pulled out his neatly kept notebook—“one hundred and six people, including a delegation of ladies who called themselves ‘Daughters of the American Revolution.’ Apparently the American revolutionaries dress well, according to the sergeant. Who needs to come into the courtyard? Your family and aides, of course; suppliers for the merchants; the mailmen; messengers. Now, most of those in this category don’t enter the palace, but some do. And anyone posing plausibly as a supplier could situate himself so as to work mischief from someplace within the courtyard.”
“I don’t know that I even have the technical authority to close it off to suppliers. I forget, do I own the courtyard?”
“Legally you do. Legally you own the land on which the shops are situated. Two hundred years ago they were leased, on a yearly rental payment of one mark, which is regularly collected by the bursar, preserving your technical rights.”
“What do you propose I do? Drop the bread and cheese for the villagers from an airplane?”
“Sir, we must escort all merchants to where they are going, and back out. We have the manpower to do it with the help of the Freiwilligen. All packages and mail for the castle should be left with the sentry.”
“All right. But call a meeting of the courtyard—after all, there are only twenty—present the problem, and ask for their cooperation. I am hoping for one hundred per cent of the St. Anselm’s courtyard vote. Is that all?”
“No, sir. There is the reconstruction gang. This afternoon I counted eight people working in the chapel.”
“Good. I wish it were eighteen. Or eighty. Nothing must slow down the work on the chapel.… Don’t worry, Jürgen. I know Blackford Oakes well and I trust him.”
“Why should you?”
Axel said nothing for a moment. Jürgen resumed:
“He brings in Americans, Italians; this morning I signed a pass for a Portuguese—”
“Ah yes, the mosaicist. Oakes talked to me about him. Said to be better than anybody in Italy. Or, at least, anybody available.”
“But we don’t have proper security checks on them, any of them. We don’t even have a proper security check on Oakes.”
“What kind of check would you propose we do?”
“I do not propose a check. If Oakes were, say, a CIA agent, they would have arranged a pretty good cover for him, probably something we couldn’t penetrate. You should require that all work on the chapel be suspended until after the election.”
“Impossible. Out of the question.”
“One week? Why? The Americans aren’t going to be so angry they’d cancel the project.”
“Nothing is to interrupt the work on the chapel. Jürgen, I do not mean to be less than appreciative, but it is not unusual that, when charged with security, one becomes—overcautious. Let me leave it this way: I trust Oakes personally; besides which, and do not ask me to elaborate, I believe he is ideologically useful to me.”
“Sir, the two superpowers are determined to stop you. God knows they’ve made that plain in the last few days. Why shouldn’t they be willing to do so … right here?”
Wintergrin paused and leaned back in his chair. He looked suddenly older, judicious. He examined the hard young face of Jürgen Wagner, just young enough to have escaped service when the war broke out. And lucky enough to have had a French godmother across the Alsatian border who spirited him in to escape service in the war when, in 1943, he reached seventeen. He lived at the lonely farmhouse as her retarded son. It had been a long, long act, and Wintergrin wondere
d at the weight of such an imposture on someone of that age. During that period, passing month after month hiding from the Nazis and from the collaborators, Wagner had become nervously conscious of security, and intellectually interested in the subject. So that, on returning to Germany and showing no special aptitudes in academic work, he had gone to the police academy in Heidelberg, then quit to take on private assignments in security. He was plodding, literal, fearless, and exceedingly suspicious. Wintergrin felt it necessary not to discourage him, but now felt it necessary to curb him.
“Jürgen, what you say is not outside the range of possibility. But it is very unlikely, and I have no alternative than to assume that that which is grossly unlikely will not happen. Otherwise I would not dare have breakfast with my own mother. And anyway, the logic of your suspicion leads to the fatalistic conclusion that if they insist on my scalp, they’ll have it.”
“They wanted Hitler’s scalp, and they didn’t get it.”
“Hitler controlled Germany. I do not.” He rose.
Wagner said, “Do I have your permission, then, at least to tighten security in the chapel?”
“Yes. But don’t get under Oakes’s feet.”
Wagner nodded his head, and left, without saying goodnight.
He raged with resentment and frustration. He did not, to begin with, like Oakes, and he persuaded himself, over and over again, that there were no personal reasons for this dislike—though it was true he was put off by the young American’s savoir faire, his easygoing relationship with the count, whom he addressed as “Axel”! He resented Oakes’s obtrusive good looks, his fine physical build, his fluency in German, his manifest mastery of the work in the chapel. He thought it odd that someone of Oakes’s background and training would be devoting so much time to the rebuilding of a chapel which, however splendid, was a minor concern of a very busy world and, a fortiori, of a very gifted young engineer. But he forced himself to lay the matter of Oakes to one side. Right now he had mostly Norway on his mind. Later in the week he would make a close inspection of the chapel, after everyone had left for the day.
CHAPTER 17
Trygve Amundsen got off the commuter train and walked with his companion toward his little office on slightly seedy Klingenberg, where he struggled to make a living as an importer of foreign automobile parts. At the door his companion told him he would be by to pick him up and escort him home at exactly five. He would meanwhile be across the street, by the designated telephone, if his advice or his services were needed. Amundsen nodded, and reminded him pleasantly that he, Amundsen, had been decorated for bravery in the resistance and was not exactly defenseless. The office was locked, so he took out his key.
The door opened directly on the main business room with its long counter, the order forms and catalogues and bulletins from France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Sweden, strewn about. He was surprised that Ingemar was not there. It was nine-thirty, and his young assistant was to have begun the monthly inventory check at nine. He picked up the telephone from Ingemar’s empty desk on the far side of the counter and dialed his home number, intending to reproach him most directly—Ingemar had been married only a month ago and Amundsen was disposed to be indulgent; but the honeymoon was over. Ingemar’s wife answered. “I have been calling you at the office every few minutes, Mr. Amundsen. This morning at six, Ingemar’s mother’s doctor called from Beitstad. Ingemar’s mother took very ill last night. They fear it is a stroke, so Ingemar left on the nine o’clock plane for Trondheim. But he is booked to come back tonight if all is well with his mother. He asked me to apologize to you.”
“Well, hardly his fault,” Amundsen said, just the least bit reluctantly, hung up the telephone, and looked up into his own office door and into the barrel of a .44 automatic. At the same time, from behind, he felt steel on his neck and the man behind him said:
“Put your hands behind your back, Amundsen. And hear this: As far as I’m concerned, I’d rather kill you than get from you what we are here to get from you, so I beg you to give me the opportunity.”
Amundsen moved back his hands, which were then handcuffed with professional dispatch, and he was shoved into his own office, onto the couch where he would seat special buyers when they came to him.
The same man said: “You had two appointments this morning. Your assistant thoughtfully wrote down their telephone numbers. We telephoned to say you were called away for the day. In fact, your absence may prove to be permanent. Your buddy across the street doesn’t expect to see you till five. Ingemar is north on a wild-goose chase. A small sign outside the door says ‘Closed for the Day.’ We will not be interrupted.”
Amundsen said nothing. The two men had made no effort to disguise themselves. The one who was doing the talking he recognized without difficulty. Dana Neilson. He too had been in the resistance. On two occasions they had worked briefly together. Like Amundsen, he was about thirty years old. Unlike Amundsen, Neilson was still lean; he was strong-jawed, with a splotchy face that showed the ravages of frostbite, and dark-red curly hair. His companion was younger, intense; his pistol, to which he had now affixed a silencer, was aimed once again at Amundsen’s head, from which it never moved.
Neilson sat down at Amundsen’s desk and tilted back the chair, looking across the room at Amundsen, sitting on the couch, his arms behind him, his eyes on the floor, his once flat stomach paunching over his belt.
“There is no time, Amundsen, as you must realize. So where are we? Your business is very nearly bankrupt, your wife is tubercular, your son is with his grandparents. You badly needed money. You did not know Axel Wintergrin, so what you did to him you did impersonally. That makes it a little easier to swallow—I suppose. But I did know Axel Wintergrin. He saved my life at Vemork, and he very nearly gave his life on more than one occasion to help my country. Incidentally, your country too, Amundsen. But we are here now to extricate ourselves from this mess you got us into.” He got up and walked to the end of the room, leaning now against the door.
Amundsen did not move his head or his eyes to follow him.
“First let me tell you what we don’t require of you, and that is your exposure as a fraud-for-hire. That’s your problem, and if you live, you can live with it.
“The story will be as follows: An unidentified man telephoned you ten days ago and said that unless you cooperated with him he would kill either your wife or your son, and moreover would kill them sooner or later if you turned to the police for help.
“He told you the story you were instructed to carry to the press. And he sent you by mail the forged page from the Gestapo records, with the story that you had snatched it from Gestapo Headquarters when you participated in the assault on V-Day.
“Since then you have had a bad bout of conscience, and you asked a former friend in the resistance—that’s me—for help. I did some sleuthing in the ideological underground and got a lead on the man who phoned you—that’s Hans, sitting over there. I ‘almost nailed him,’ but he slipped through my fingers on a flight to Paris. I will have given a complete description of him to the police. I have that description here. It will coincide with the flight out of Oslo to Paris at two p.m. today, which Hans here plans to take. No ideological clues. It does not serve our interests to link this operation either to the CIA or to the Communists, or to Wintergrin’s political enemies in Germany.
“The money, however much it was, and wherever it is, you get to keep. I wouldn’t worry about your contact moving in on you. I intend to take you to the north country right now, and there you will hold a secluded press conference tomorrow before three invited and highly respected journalists so as to disguise your whereabouts until Hans here is ‘run down.’ Your wife and son will be under protective surveillance till November fifteenth. The German elections are a week from tomorrow, after which whatever the damage in Germany it will have been done, and you’ll be safe. You have my word that if you need protection in the future, I and my friends—and Wintergrin’s friends—will give it.”
Amundsen spoke for the first time.
“The man outside. You are aware he is from the police?”
“Of course. His name is Olaf Erlingssen, and he works out of the Bogstadveien Police Station.”
“Is he supposed to believe all this?”
“You know him better than we do. But we have plans for Hans to leave a meaty enough trail to make the police believe he is a central figure.”
“I suppose I should ask: the alternative?”
“We will kill you right here, at noon when those bells up there go off. And, this afternoon, four members of the resistance—including Dr. Rosenkrantz—will go as a delegation to the press and give our opinion that Wintergrin has been gravely libeled, that you were mixed up in an intricate international power play, and that maybe you got your just deserts.”
Amundsen’s jaw jutted out and he lowered his head. He thought about his wrecked life and wondered fleetingly whether he mightn’t just as well accept the bullet, which he had not an instant’s hesitation believing would enter his skull at the stroke of noon. But he thought then of the pale face of Margrit, who the day before had said to him with that sadness that always overpowered him: Would he truly wait for her, even if the cure required a whole year? And he had answered huskily that he would, that he would wait however long it took.
“Very well,” he said.
CHAPTER 18
Over the weekend tension heightened. The announcement on Saturday that Wintergrin would hold a full-scale press conference in Bonn on Tuesday at eleven created a rendezvous on the international calendar. All Monday the television crews were at work. Finally Kurt Grossmann announced that facilities would need to be pooled and a drawing was held to decide whose cameras would be permitted into the 150-seat chamber, admission to which had been solicited on behalf of three hundred reporters, cameramen, and photographers. That morning, Die Welt had said editorially that Count Wintergrin’s answers to the myriad questions, personal as well as political, would influence many voters still on the fence. “A people have the right to know their leaders. Some of the questions that will be put to Count Wintergrin are concededly extrapolitical, but the fate of Germany is a total concern. We need to know not only the policies of our leaders but something about their habits, their morals. The country is entitled to ask, and weigh the answers to, any question that might throw a light on the character of a man who seeks to guide that nation toward what some see as perdition, others as the first step toward a reunified republic.”
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