Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  When he was weakened and in agony they frog-marched him down the stairs and out of the building. A blue Hudson stood at the curb with its engine running. They threw him onto the floor in the back. Two of them sat with their feet on him and the other got in the front and drove.

  He was in too much pain to think about where they were going. He assumed these men worked for Vyalov, but how had they found him? And what were they going to do with him? He tried not to give in to fear.

  After a few minutes the car stopped and he was hauled out. They were outside a warehouse. The street was deserted and dark. He could smell the lake, so he knew they were near the waterfront. It was a good place to murder someone, he thought with grim fatalism. There would be no witnesses, and the body could go into Lake Erie, tied inside a sack, with a few bricks to make sure it sank to the bottom.

  They dragged him into the building. He tried to pull himself together. This was the worst scrape he had ever been in. He was not sure he could talk his way out of it. Why do I do these things? he asked himself.

  The warehouse was full of new tires piled fifteen or twenty high. They took him through the stacks to the back and stopped outside a door that was guarded by yet another heavyset man who held up an arm to stop them.

  No words were spoken.

  After a minute, Lev said: “Seems we have a few minutes to wait. Anybody got a pack of cards?”

  No one even smiled.

  Eventually the door opened and Nick Forman came out. His upper lip was swollen and one eye was closed. When he saw Lev he said: “I had to do it. They would have killed me.”

  So, Lev thought, they found me through Nick.

  A thin man in spectacles came to the door of the office. Surely this could not be Vyalov, Lev thought; he was too weedy. “Bring him in, Theo,” he said.

  “Sure thing, Mr. Niall,” said the leader of the thugs.

  The office reminded Lev of the peasant hut in which he had been born. It was too warm and the air was full of smoke. In a corner was a little table with icons of saints.

  Behind a steel desk sat a middle-aged man with unusually broad shoulders. He wore an expensive-looking lounge suit with a collar and tie, and there were two rings on the hand that held his cigarette. He said: “What is that fucking smell?”

  “I’m sorry, Mister V, it’s puke,” said Theo. “He acted up, and we had to calm him down a little, then he lunged up his lunch.”

  “Let him go.”

  They released Lev’s arms, but stayed near.

  Mister V looked at him. “I got your message,” he said. “Telling me I should be more polite.”

  Lev summoned his courage. He was not going to die sniveling. He said: “Are you Josef Vyalov?”

  “By Christ, you’ve got some nerve,” the man said. “Asking me who I am.”

  “I been looking for you.”

  “You have been looking for me?”

  “The Vyalov family sold me a ticket from St. Petersburg to New York, then dumped me in Cardiff,” Lev said.

  “So?”

  “I want my money back.”

  Vyalov stared at him for a long moment, then he laughed. “I can’t help it,” he said. “I like you.”

  Lev held his breath. Did this mean Vyalov was not going to kill him?

  “Do you have a job?” Vyalov said.

  “I work for you.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Hotel St. Petersburg, in the stables.”

  Vyalov nodded. “I think we can offer you something better than that,” he said.

  { II }

  In June 1915 America came one step closer to war.

  Gus Dewar was appalled. He did not think the United States should join in the European war. The American people felt the same, and so did President Woodrow Wilson. But somehow the danger loomed closer.

  The crisis came about in May when a German submarine torpedoed the Lusitania, a British ship carrying 173 tons of rifles, ammunition, and shrapnel shells. It also carried two thousand passengers, including 128 U.S. citizens.

  Americans were as shocked as if there had been an assassination. The newspapers went into convulsions of indignation. “People are asking you to do the impossible!” Gus said indignantly to the president, standing in the Oval Office. “They want you to get tough with the Germans, but not to risk going to war.”

  Wilson nodded agreement. Looking up from his typewriter, he said: “There’s no rule that says public opinion has to be consistent.”

  Gus found his boss’s calm admirable, but a bit frustrating. “How the heck do you deal with that?”

  Wilson smiled, showing his bad teeth. “Gus, did someone tell you politics was easy?”

  In the end Wilson sent a stern note to the German government, demanding that they stop attacking shipping. He and his advisers, including Gus, hoped the Germans would agree to some compromise. But if they decided to be defiant, Gus did not see how Wilson could avoid escalation. It was a dangerous game to play, and Gus found he was not able to remain as coolly detached about the risk as Wilson appeared to be.

  While the diplomatic telegrams crossed the Atlantic, Wilson went to his summer place in New Hampshire and Gus went to Buffalo, where he stayed at his parents’ mansion on Delaware Avenue. His father had a house in Washington, but Gus lived in his own apartment there, and when he came home to Buffalo he relished the comforts of a house run by his mother: the silver bowl of cut roses on his nightstand; the hot rolls at breakfast; the crisp white linen tablecloth fresh at every meal; the way a suit would appear sponged and pressed in his wardrobe without his having noticed that it had been taken away.

  The house was furnished in a consciously plain manner, his mother’s reaction against the ornate fashions of her parents’ generation. Much of the furniture was Biedermeier, a utilitarian German style that was enjoying a revival. The dining room had one good painting on each of the four walls, and a single three-branched candlestick on the table. At lunch on the first day, his mother said: “I suppose you’re planning to go to the slums and watch prizefights?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with boxing,” Gus said. It was his great enthusiasm. He had even tried it himself, as a foolhardy eighteen-year-old: his long arms had given him a couple of victories, but he lacked the killer instinct.

  “So canaille,” she said disdainfully. This was a snobby expression she had picked up in Europe that meant low-class.

  “I’d like to take my mind off international politics, if I can.”

  “There’s a lecture on Titian, with magic-lantern slides, at the Albright this afternoon,” she said. The Albright Art Gallery, a white classical building set in Delaware Park, was one of Buffalo’s most important cultural institutions.

  Gus had grown up surrounded by Renaissance paintings, and he particularly liked Titian’s portraits, but he was not very interested in going to a lecture. However, it was just the kind of event to be patronized by the city’s wealthy young men and women, so there was a good chance he would be able to renew old friendships.

  The Albright was a short drive up Delaware Avenue. He entered the pillared atrium and took a seat. As he had expected, there were several people he knew in the audience. He found himself sitting next to a strikingly pretty girl who seemed familiar.

  He smiled vaguely at her, and she said brightly: “You’ve forgotten who I am, haven’t you, Mr. Dewar?”

  He felt foolish. “Ah . . . I’ve been out of town for a while.”

  “I’m Olga Vyalov.” She held out a white-gloved hand.

  “Of course,” he said. Her father was a Russian immigrant whose first job had been throwing drunks out of a bar on Canal Street. Now he owned Canal Street. He was a city councilor and a pillar of the Russian Orthodox Church. Gus had met Olga several times, though he did not remember her looking quite so enchanting: perhaps she had suddenly grown up, or something. She was about twenty, he guessed, with pale skin and blue eyes, and she wore a pink jacket with a turned-up collar and a cloche hat with p
ink silk flowers.

  “I hear you’re working for the president,” she said. “What do you think of Mr. Wilson?”

  “I admire him enormously,” Gus replied. “He’s a practical politician who hasn’t abandoned his ideals.”

  “How exciting to be at the center of power.”

  “It is exciting, but strangely enough it doesn’t feel like the center of power. In a democracy the president is subject to the voters.”

  “But surely he doesn’t just do what the public wants.”

  “Not exactly, no. President Wilson says a leader must treat public opinion the way a sailor deals with the wind, using it to blow the ship in one direction or another, but never trying to go directly against it.”

  She sighed. “I would have loved to study these things, but my father wouldn’t let me go to college.”

  Gus grinned. “I suppose he thinks you would learn to smoke cigarettes and drink gin.”

  “And worse, I’ve no doubt,” she said. It was a risqué remark for an unmarried woman, and the surprise must have shown on his face, for she said: “I’m sorry, I’ve shocked you.”

  “Not at all.” In fact he was feeling captivated. To keep her talking he said: “What would you study if you could go to college?”

  “History, I think.”

  “I love history. Any particular period?”

  “I’d like to understand my own past. Why did my father have to leave Russia? Why is America so much better? There must be reasons for these things.”

  “Exactly!” Gus was thrilled that such a pretty girl should also share his intellectual curiosity. He saw a sudden vision of them as a married couple, in her dressing room after a party, talking about world affairs while they got ready for bed, himself in pajamas, sitting and watching while she unhurriedly took off her jewelry and slipped out of her clothes . . . Then he caught her eye, and got the feeling that she had guessed what he was thinking, and he felt embarrassed. He searched for something to say, but found himself tongue-tied.

  Then the lecturer arrived, and the audience fell silent.

  He enjoyed the talk more than he had expected. The speaker had made Autochrome color transparencies of some of Titian’s canvases, and his magic lantern projected them onto a big white screen.

  When it was over he wanted to talk some more to Olga, but he was prevented. Chuck Dixon, a man he knew from school, came up to them. Chuck had an easy charm that Gus envied. They were the same age, twenty-five, but Chuck made Gus feel like an awkward schoolboy. “Olga, you have to meet my cousin,” he said jovially. “He’s been staring at you across the room.” He smiled amiably at Gus. “Sorry to deprive you of such bewitching company, Dewar, but you can’t have her all afternoon, you know.” He put a possessive arm around Olga’s waist and led her away.

  Gus felt bereft. He had been getting on so well with her, he felt. For him those first conversations with a girl were usually the hardest, but with Olga small talk had seemed easy. And now Chuck Dixon, who had always been bottom of the class at school, had just walked away with her as easily as he would have taken a drink from a waiter’s tray.

  While Gus was looking around for someone else he knew, he was approached by a girl with one eye.

  The first time he met Rosa Hellman—at a fund-raising dinner for the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra, in which her brother played—he thought she was winking at him. In fact one eye was permanently closed. Her face was otherwise pretty, which made her disfigurement more striking. Furthermore, she always dressed stylishly, as if in defiance. Today she wore a straw boater set at a jaunty angle, and managed to look cute.

  Last time he saw her she had been the editor of a small-circulation radical newspaper called the Buffalo Anarchist, and Gus said: “Are anarchists interested in art?”

  “I work for the Evening Advertiser now,” she said.

  Gus was surprised. “Does the editor know about your political views?”

  “My views aren’t quite as extreme as they used to be, but he knows my history.”

  “I guess he figured that if you can make a success of an anarchist newspaper, you must be good.”

  “He says he gave me the job because I have more balls than any two of his male reporters.”

  Gus knew she liked to shock, but even so his mouth dropped open.

  Rosa laughed. “But he still sends me to cover art exhibitions and fashion shows.” She changed the subject. “What’s it like working in the White House?”

  Gus was conscious that anything he said might appear in her paper. “Tremendously exciting,” he said. “I think Wilson is a great president, maybe the greatest ever.”

  “How can you say that? He’s dangerously close to getting us involved in a European war.”

  Rosa’s attitude was common among ethnic Germans, who naturally saw the German side of the story, and among left-wingers, who wanted to see the tsar defeated. However, plenty of people who were neither German nor left-wing took the same view. Gus replied carefully: “When German submarines are killing American citizens, the president can’t—” He was about to say turn a blind eye. He hesitated, flushed, and said: “Can’t ignore it.”

  She did not seem to notice his embarrassment. “But the British are blockading German ports—in violation of international law—and German women and children are starving as a result. Meanwhile, the war in France is at a stalemate: neither side has changed its position by more than a few yards for the last six months. The Germans have to sink British ships, otherwise they lose the war.”

  She had an impressive grasp of the complexities: that was why Gus always enjoyed talking to her. “I studied international law,” he said. “Strictly speaking, the British aren’t acting illegally. Naval blockades were banned by the Declaration of London of 1909, but that was never ratified.”

  She was not so easily sidetracked. “Never mind the legalities. The Germans warned Americans not to travel on British liners. They put an advertisement in the papers, for goodness’ sake! What else can they do? Imagine that we were at war with Mexico, and the Lusitania had been a Mexican ship carrying armaments intended to kill American soldiers. Would we have let it pass?”

  It was a good question, and Gus had no reasonable answer. He said: “Well, Secretary of State Bryan agreed with you.” William Jennings Bryan had resigned over Wilson’s note to the Germans. “He thought all we needed to do was warn Americans not to travel on the ships of combatant nations.”

  She was not willing to let him off the hook. “Bryan sees that Wilson has taken a grave risk,” she said. “If the Germans don’t back down now, we can hardly avoid war with them.”

  Gus was not going to admit to a journalist that he shared these misgivings. Wilson had demanded that the German government disavow the attacks on merchant shipping, make reparations, and prevent any recurrence—in other words, allow the British the freedom of the seas while accepting that Germany’s own ships were trapped in dock by the blockade. It was hard to see any government agreeing to such demands. “But public opinion approves what the president has done.”

  “Public opinion can be wrong.”

  “But the president can’t ignore it. Look, Wilson is walking a tightrope. He wants to keep us out of the war, but he doesn’t want America to appear weak in international diplomacy. I think he’s struck the right balance for the present.”

  “But in the future?”

  That was the worrying question. “No one can predict the future,” Gus said. “Not even Woodrow Wilson.”

  She laughed. “A politician’s answer. You’ll go far in Washington.” Someone spoke to her, and she turned away.

  Gus moved off, feeling a bit as if he had been in a boxing match that had ended in a draw.

  Some of the audience were invited to take tea with the lecturer. Gus was among the privileged because his mother was a patron of the museum. He left Rosa and headed for a private room. When he entered, he was delighted to see Olga there. No doubt her father also gave money.

  He
got a cup of tea and then approached her. “If you’re ever in Washington, I’d love to show you around the White House,” he said.

  “Oh! Could you introduce me to the president?”

  He wanted to say Yes, anything! But he hesitated to promise what he might not be able to deliver. “Probably,” he said. “It would depend on how busy he happened to be. When he gets behind that typewriter and starts to write speeches or press releases, no one is allowed to disturb him.”

  “I was so sad when his wife passed away,” Olga said. Ellen Wilson had died almost a year ago, shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe.

  Gus nodded. “He was devastated.”

  “But I hear he’s romancing a wealthy widow already.”

  Gus was discomfited. It was an open secret in Washington that Wilson had fallen passionately, boyishly in love, only eight months after the death of his wife, with the voluptuous Mrs. Edith Galt. The president was fifty-eight, his paramour forty-one. Right now they were together in New Hampshire. Gus was among a very small group who also knew that Wilson had proposed marriage a month ago, but Mrs. Galt had not yet given him an answer. He said to Olga: “Who told you that?”

  “Is it true?”

  He was desperate to impress her with his inside knowledge, but he managed to resist the temptation. “I can’t talk about that sort of thing,” he said reluctantly.

  “Oh, how disappointing. I was hoping you’d give me the inside gossip.”

  “I’m sorry to be such a letdown.”

  “Don’t be silly.” She touched his arm, giving him a thrill like an electric shock. “I’m having a tennis party tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “Do you play?”

  Gus had long arms and legs, and was a fairly good player. “I do,” he said. “I love the game.”

  “Will you come?”

  “I’d be delighted,” he said.

  { III }

  Lev learned to drive in a day. The other main skill of a chauffeur, changing punctured tires, took him a couple of hours to master. By the end of a week he could also fill the tank, change the oil, and adjust the brakes. If the car would not go he knew how to check for a flat battery or a blocked fuel line.