Stained Glass

by William F. Buckley

  There was a cacophony of sounds. Commotion, reporters struggling to get out, applause, here and there a whistle: the sounds of excitement. Wintergrin raised his hand deferentially, turned, and walked out of the room. The camera went back to the network host.

  In Washington the same two men sat wearily by the same kitchen table in the same empty house in Georgetown where, a month earlier, they had set into motion the plan to neutralize Count Wintergrin. It was six twenty-five in the morning.

  The Director rose and turned off the impressive shortwave speaker that had brought in the press conference, simultaneously translated exclusively for this audience of two men by an intercepting technician in an electronic warren a mile away.

  There was a long silence.

  “Pelzerhaken. So that’s where the warheads ended up,” the Director sighed. “Well, at least it’s no longer a mystery. And thank God the Soviets have never got on to it. Though, come to think of it, if we hadn’t already decided on the other … plan, it mightn’t have been a bad idea to let ’em know Wintergrin’s people had got hold of those bombs.”

  The reference was to the B-36 bomber which, with its four atom bombs, went down on maneuvers eighteen months earlier close by the East German border, near the mouth of the Lübeck estuary off Pelzerhaken in North Germany. CIA divers with the latest equipment had got there in three days. But when, on the tenth day, they came finally on the carcass of the plane, the bombs were gone. Not a word about the missing aircraft, let alone about the missing bombs, had leaked. It was the most heavily guarded secret of the season. It was assumed by the Pentagon and CIA that the Soviets had got there first with one of their omnipresent patrol boats out of nearby Rostock and spirited away the vicious, precious cargo; but the President decided against accosting them with it. And decided also against advising the NATO powers about the incident for fear of a sundering scandal. In Soviet hands the bombs were merely redundant. In the hands of Wintergrin they were something else.

  The Secretary spoke. “If Wintergrin goes, we’ve still got to get our hands on the bombs. We can assume from what he’s been saying that a scientist—maybe more than one—is in on the act, how you set off the goddamn things, that kind of business. Why not comb the list of his supporters among German scientists and see if any of them hangs around the Lübeck area?” It must have been local German divers-of-opportunity, probably sportsmen, who pulled them up. God knows how they got from Pelzerhaken to Wintergrin. Will it ever end?”

  The Director was silent.

  The Secretary’s voice brightened as he turned to another subject. Sarcasm was his crutch, his staff of life, his very best friend, come now, at twilight on execution eve, to his rescue; the first service, at 6:30 a.m., it would perform for its master in a long, long day of servitude. The Secretary rose and, walking to the stove for the coffeepot, said in his … public voice: “I say, Allen, that was a great performance your people managed in Norway.”

  “Yes,” the Director said. “I was sure that would impress you.”

  “Once a member of the resistance, always a member of the resistance. I rather wish that particular member of the resistance, your pal Amundsen, had been a casualty of the occupation.”

  “We didn’t have much time.”

  “Right, right. I suppose with more time, we might have contrived for Wintergrin to get seventy-five per cent of the vote.”

  “Assuming, he went on to the polls.”

  “I had not thought to make that macabre distinction. Of course, now that he has proved so successful, he will end up not receiving any votes, now that we have—I believe necessarily—succumbed to Soviet blackmail. But as a point of technical interest, have you looked into the question whether his name on the ballot can be struck on the grounds that he has … departed this vale of tears?”

  “Between November twelfth and November fifteenth? I haven’t, to tell you the truth. I see what you mean. Theoretically he could, so to speak, win posthumously.”

  “I suppose. But no, his vote will collapse, necessarily.… I must say, Allen, he is an impressive young man.”

  “Fatally impressive.”

  “No puns. Remember, we made that covenant at Potsdam.”

  “I wish that was the only covenant we had made at Potsdam.”

  “Yes, he really is something. Are you a betting man?”

  “Depends whether one of my agents can inform me what’s going to happen. Or make it happen. What do you have in mind?”

  “This is Tuesday the ninth. We’ll have the critical poll the day after tomorrow. I bet it will show Wintergrin even with Adenauer.”

  “I decline the bet.”

  “Have some more coffee, Allen.”

  “I don’t want any more coffee.” He rose and walked, pensive, to the door. As an afterthought he murmured, “Thanks anyway.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Jürgen Wagner said goodnight to Heinrich Stiller and Kurt Grossmann when, at about ten, they left their desks and, assuming he would decline—he always did—invited Wagner perfunctorily to join them for a nightcap. He would stay at his desk, he said with maybe a hint of self-righteousness, for another hour or two—he had a number of reports to read.

  He waited an hour until he was certain Stiller and Grossmann had left the courtyard. Sometimes they paused across the way at the Anselmsklaus for their beer or brandy, instead of going on to the bar at the inn. He opened his drawer, brought out his .32 automatic, snug in its holster, and buckled it on his belt. He fished out a large flashlight from the closet and his overcoat from the rack. Saying a curt goodnight to the palace sentry, he walked out into the courtyard and down toward the chapel. The Anselmsklaus closed nowadays at eleven, Wagner’s security arrangements having put a crimp on outside patronage. There were only the sleepy second-story lights from some of the living quarters of the residents of St. Anselm’s, at the southern end of the courtyard, to interrupt the darkness. The chapel on the east end was dark. He looked about cautiously. There was no one lingering outside, in that black and cold; only mounds of dimly perceived building materials. He went to the door, which was unlocked (how typical! Typical! To leave the chapel unlocked. Typically American, and quintessentially Oakes, with his easygoing approach to all things. And the bother he had gone to to secure a duplicate key to the chapel door!). He pushed it open. In the narthex he stumbled. He flashed his light down and saw a half-empty case of white Tafelwein. His breath, crossing the ray of light, produced billows of fog in the cold. Wagner did not really believe people should drink alcohol under any circumstances. To drink at work was unthinkable. But it did not surprise him that the “chapel crowd,” as he regularly referred to the workmen under the American Oakes, should take wine with their midday meal—and tipple at God knows what other hours! He stepped around the wine.

  Next he saw coils of heavy wire, over there a mound of bricks, everywhere sacks of mortar. Beginning his methodical clockwise tour, he walked past the first of the reconstructed columns up the northern aisle, past the heavy lathe that caused the whine heard halfway down the courtyard. He buttoned the throat button of his overcoat and set out to do what he had come to do: make a systematic inspection of the chapel.

  At the north end of the transept he came on Oakes’s little enclosed office. Wagner opened the unlocked door and shone his light about the desk, the filing cabinets, the long table with the stacks of blueprints, sketches, photographs. In the deep left-hand drawer of the desk, opposite the typewriter, there were papers and correspondence that betrayed personal—highly personal?—notations. These he began examining in laborious detail. Knowing no English, he copied meticulously into his notebook marginalia, presumably in Oakes’s hand, scratched out on letters, most of them from Bonn—perhaps they would provide a clue. He would confide in Erika tomorrow, and ask her to go over them.

  An hour later he had worked his way past the choir stalls, behind the altar, back to the south transept where the formidable chromoscope was rooted, and along the south aisle to within a
few yards of the narthex and the entrance door. He stepped into a cavity in which a recessed confessional had stood and, climbing out, grazed against yet another heavy tarpaulin. A little wearily he tucked up the apron to look at the contents. Instead of the habitual naked building materials, he saw a wooden box of sorts, half as tall as himself, equally wide and deep. He was surprised to find it padlocked, further surprised to note that the lock was substantial. His light traveled to the hinges, but these were buried inside the wood—there was nothing to unscrew. Moving the tarpaulin off the large box, he edged around to examine the possibilities of rear entry. But the wood was solid. He tapped his flashlight against it. It wasn’t as heavy in the rear as on the other three sides.

  He walked resolutely across to the tools he had passed, neatly laid out on improvised shelves. Running his light back and forth he selected a hand drill and a small saw. Fifteen minutes later, after drilling enough contiguous holes to allow the point of the saw to enter, he was neatly incising a square five inches by five inches, which he jimmied out, permitting him to train the light into the box.

  There were bundles of electrical wire, an assortment of what looked like converters, or adapters—several boxes of them—and, still visible before the surrounding materials choked off the light, an instrument that appeared to have an aerial appended to it. He inserted his arm through the little hole and drew the device gently out.

  He studied it. Some sort of radio, since it had an aerial and a speaker. Conceivably a listening station? For instructions?

  From whom?

  He gripped the radio and slowly, carefully, drew out the aerial. He propped the radio against the back of the box, and the steam from his breath hindered for a moment his inspection of the dials. One switch was clearly the on-off switch, so he turned it on, heard a click, and a gratifying hum. Then nothing. He would try turning up the volume. He put his finger on the knob and turned it gradually clockwise. Still no reception. He continued to turn, and at the end of the cycle there was a click, as if the knob had reached the end and would be locked there. But it bounced back. So he turned it again, and again, and again, causing a click-click-click.

  BUZZ. BUZZ-BUZZ-BUZZ. Blackford sprang from his bed and dove into his clothes closet, whence the unmistakable signal had unmistakably issued. He bent over his set and instinctively raised it to his lips so that he could reply to the signaler. But he paused. To what signaler? Only Hallam Spring and Bruce Pulling had access to the counterpart set in the chapel, reserved for extraordinary communications between them, and they had all said goodnight to one another at the bar a half hour earlier, all three heading for bed. The box. With the instruments. And the other things.… In less than three minutes, wearing a sweater and corduroy pants over his pajamas, he was in his car, his flashlight beside him. Approaching the courtyard he forced himself to be calm, and gestured nonchalantly at the night sentry who, recognizing him, waved him past. He doused the headlights and slid the car up under the old tree, thirty yards from the doorway to the chapel. Stepping out he realized how cold it had become. Now all the lights of the courtyard were out save a dim undifferentiated illumination that hung over the sentry boxes at the palace, and by the sentry he had just passed. He grabbed his light and walked slowly, noiselessly, to the door of the chapel. He stopped and listened. A faint noise within. He concentrated. What was it? The sound came in strokes of irregular interval, and the tones were not equally pitched. One stroke sounded squeaky; and then he knew that the man inside was sawing wood. The same man who had just now used the radio. Why, having apparently gained access to the box, was he now sawing wood?

  The sawing stopped. Oakes concentrated his thoughts furiously. In the box was all the equipment Spring and Pulling had brought to permit them to adapt to the requirements of any situation. Most of the material was consistent with the general inventory an electrician would need on rebuilding a chapel—wiring, voltmeters, generators, the radio—explosives? He thought quickly: What might be the excuse for a variety of explosives at St. Anselm’s chapel? He knew now that he was at the mercy of an intangible: the intelligence and the degree of suspicion of whoever was examining the box. He feared the worst. Routine inspection would not be conducted at this hour, or with such tenacity. His heart was pounding as he forced himself painfully to think through the alternatives. His mind closed on them. And all of them required that he open the door lest the man inside should leave the chapel and—become the proximate cause of a third world war, for God’s sake! Blackford flashed on the light, swung open the door, closed it shut behind him, and said in a loud tone aiming the light at the box, “Who’s there?”

  Wagner came out from behind the box, a bundle of dynamite sticks in his hands. Blinded by the shaft of light, he could not see Blackford, but recognized his voice. His own flashlight thrust forward, Wagner walked two steps toward Blackford, dropped the dynamite and, his free hand wrestling to unbutton his overcoat, let out a long fierce yell. HOOOOWWWWWAAAWWOOWWW! Wagner’s flashlight waved wildly as with his other hand he thrust for his pistol. In the darting shafts of light, Black saw the wine case, grabbed a bottle by the neck and with the massed strength of his whole body thrust it fiercely up at Wagner’s Adam’s apple, exactly as he had been trained to do at the gymnasium in Arlington. Wagner fell back, lifeless, dead. Blackford, sweating, through the cold, dragged the tarpaulin over him, pushing under it the hand with the pistol grip locked firmly in it. He grabbed the bottle of wine, smashed the cork end across a pile of bricks, shielded the ragged edge with his thumb and second finger providing a nipple and, struggling to imitate the ghoulish frightened scream he had just heard, repeated it again, HOOOOOO WWWWAAAWWWOOOWWWWW! He walked quickly to the north end to his study, turned on the light and shouted one more time. He was halfway through the shout when the door burst open and the two sentries, lights flashing, automatic weapons pointed, descended on him. Blackford looked at them and took a long swallow from the bottle of wine. Lowering his voice, he began again to wail.

  “I am so sad, my friends, I am so sad! Here”—he aimed the wine bottle drunkenly at the empty glass on his desk—“here, have some wine. I was in bed, my friends, right in bed, right … ready … when she—no explanation, mind you, not a word of explanation—what did I do to her, you may be thinking? I did nothing to her. Ooooh.”

  “Quiet! Herr Oakes! You will waken the castle itself.”

  “Nothing! I did nothing to her, and she ups and leaves me. I run after her—practically in my pajamas!—but she has disappeared, and I can think now only of my work to distract me, but I cannot disguise my grief!”

  “You had better go home and get some sleep, Herr Oakes,” said the older of the two men, offering to give him a hand. Blackford drained the wine bottle and agreed that perhaps this was advisable, slurring his words. And then he turned and said to the senior sentry:

  “Do you suppose she might have changed her mind? Come back to my room?”

  The young guard muttered to his companion in rapid, idiomatic German that if she did, she would not take much satisfaction from Herr Oakes in this condition.

  Blackford began slowly to walk out, clutching the bottle, though it was empty now, and chattering ceaselessly as he teetered past the door, grabbing it for balance.

  At the car to which the guards escorted him the senior guard said, “Do you want me to drive you to the inn, Herr Oakes?” Blackford took mock offense, stiffened as if he were a general conducting an inspection tour, stepped into the driver’s seat, stripped the gear, lurched the car in reverse, and then, after several forward spasms, the car began to move, and Blackford waved regally, driving off.

  He knocked softly on Hallam Spring’s door. In a minute it was open and Blackford, still breathing heavily, let himself in.

  “Get Pulling,” he whispered.

  Spring went to the adjacent room through the connecting door and in a moment came back with Bruce Pulling, looking apprehensive but, like Spring, wholly alert.

  Blackford sat on the
couch and made motions requesting a scratch pad. Spring snatched one from the desk, giving it to Oakes with a pencil.

  Blackford wrote, Is this room clean?

  Spring read the pad and broke silence. “Yes,” he said in a normal tone of voice. “We sweep it every couple of days. Go ahead, but keep your voice down anyway.”

  “I just came from the chapel. I killed Jürgen Wagner. He sawed his way into the provisions box. When I came in he had a bundle of dynamite in his hand. He had sawed open the back of the box and pulled out the walkie-talkie and, screwing around with it, buzzed my unit. I got the signal and tore over there. I got there, I figure, just after he finished sawing a big section out of the rear, so I went in. He let out a godawful scream, so I gave it to him in the throat with a wine bottle. Just in time. When he went down he had a pistol in his hand.”

  “How’d you get out?” Spring reverted to a whisper.

  “I yelled and screamed where Jürgen left off. Pretended I was drunk—no sweat with the sentries, who heard the yowling and ran in. Now: You two have got to get there in the morning ahead of Overstreet and the gang. They check in at eight. How long do you figure it would take you to put the body in the box or in a tarpaulin, clean up whatever is suspicious, and load it on the half-ton?”