Overnight, China had the means to achieve nuclear equality and would no longer discuss future peace on America’s terms but only on its own terms. If anyone dared to risk war in those times, China was probably the best prepared to take that risk and knew it. In my opinion, if Soviet Russia had not made an alliance with your country, it is conceivable that we might this moment be living in a world full of rice paddies, so to speak. But today, with Soviet Russia on your side, the balance of power is once more aligned against China. Yet, perhaps the arrangement is tenuous and temporary. International tension remains. Is one man entirely responsible for this dangerous situation? I doubt it. But should one man bear the major portion of the responsibility? I believe so. Who, then, is this culprit? Simon Madlock? No. Emmett Earnshaw? Yes. It is you, Emmett, who must bear the responsibility before the bar of history, because you were inattentive and disinterested and derelict in your duty during a critical period of our epoch. This failure of yours I have witnessed firsthand. This I have written. This I shall publish.”
Puffing, Dr. Dietrich von Goerlitz leaned forward on his cane as if to rise, but seeing that Earnshaw had made no move to leave, Goerlitz restrained himself and waited.
Earnshaw had absorbed the original shock of learning fully of Simon Madlock’s independent activity. Even if the German industrialist had overdramatized it, the activity could not be denied. There was the sheaf of documentation lying on the coffee table. And what this represented was not an aide’s disloyalty but Earnshaw’s own bankruptcy as a leader.
What must come next would be difficult, but there was no other choice.
“Dietrich,” Earnshaw said quietly, “I came here to request that you drop that chapter about me from your book. In the light of—uh—of what you’ve said, perhaps I cannot ask that much. Instead, I shall make another request. In all fairness, I think you should modify some of your judgments. I cannot be convinced that what you have written will tell the public the whole truth. You and I know there is much more to it, much more to my Administration and—uh—leadership that you are omitting. You have said that Simon was a man of good intentions. Well, so was I. Yes, Dietrich, I was a man of peace and honor, and in my Administration I sought only peace on earth for all men and honor for my people’s cause. You know that is true, and I suggest that it deserves to be said.”
The wrinkled folds on Goerlitz’s face shook, but his agate eyes stayed hard. “Nothing deserves to be said except what is fact. Your regrets and good intentions and soft sentiments are not facts. They are apologies. They distort existing truth. The only facts are in those documents. Let the world see them and interpret them as it wishes. If you desire changes in my chapter, I will gladly make them. But the changes must be facts, nothing less. If you have other documents I have not seen, documents to contradict or modify these facts, I shall include them in my book. Do you have such papers?”
“You know I do not.”
“Verzeihung! But then you must be judged now, as I was judged in the recent past, solely by available evidence. You must be judged by me as I was judged by your International Military Tribunal in Germany. I was judged not on my word but on cold documents that involved me with Hitler, that indicated I had used 80,000 Nazi captives as slave laborers in my factories during the Second World War. The fact that I resisted using such workers, that they were forced upon me, was not a fact to your Tribunal, because I could not prove it. All that existed for them was the fact that those slave laborers worked in my plants. I appealed to those in authority, I appealed to you, to support my word, to modify the cold documents. I was ignored. So I paid for what had been written over my name. I paid, Emmett. And now you must pay, too.”
“But our cases differ,” Earnshaw protested. “I did not judge you. An international court judged you. But you, alone, are taking it in your hands to judge me.” He caught his breath, and then said quickly, “What I cannot understand is your motive, Dietrich. What have you to gain by unfairly crucifying me? If you had a political motive, I would understand. If you were anti-Chinese, and felt I had betrayed your cause by helping China, it would make sense. But you are not anti-Chinese. You trade with them every day. So why punish me?” He hesitated. “Unless—you have secret feelings?”
“I have no secret feelings,” said Goerlitz brusquely. “I am neutral. Business is neutral. I serve those who pay their bills. Today, I have no interest in causes.” He glared across the table. “My motive, you want to know? I am not interested in crucifying and punishing you, as you put it, as a personal matter. I am interested only in truth, because only truth will eliminate those who are not fit to survive, those whose weakness destroys not only themselves but even the strong around them. What did our philosopher say? ‘I teach you the superman. Man is something to be surpassed.’ But Man can be surpassed only if the weak are revealed and cast aside.”
Earnshaw had heard the words, but they were beyond his comprehension. He knew only that they sounded strangely sinister. “Dietrich—” he began, seeking to bring them both back to simplicity and understanding.
Goerlitz held up his hand. “Allow me to finish. I am trying to say—and now I will be more blunt—that you were not fit to be a leader. Vanity made you pretend to leadership, and your weakness enmeshed us all in potential catastrophe. Like my father, like his father before him, I have been taught to abhor and oppose weakness. Now, weakness has many disguises. One is indifference. Another is stupidity. Yet, another is cowardice. You have worn every face, even cowardice, as when I appealed to you to speak out on my behalf during my trial, and again when I petitioned you to have my sentence mitigated. Your weakness made you afraid. You put your own political safety before integrity and honesty. You allowed me to go to Spandau Prison, to remain entombed behind those thick walls and electric barbed wires. You permitted me, a Goerlitz, one you once called friend, to suffer confinement with lowly, disgusting Nazi war criminals, to live like an animal in a hole, shorn of dignity and freedom, feeding off scraps like a pig, with no human companionship except from that shrieking, howling, heiling madman, Rudolf Hess. Four years of that I suffered, when your strength instead of your cowardice might have influenced the Americans to save me from that hell. In the end, it was the Russians, their leader Talansky, who was strong enough to release me, because he needed my factories. But you—where were you, my good friend? You were occupied only with your comforts and your vanity, and just as you ignored me, you ignored your holy duties and abdicated policy-making to Madlock, and you were thus instrumental in allowing Varney to defect.”
In the silence that followed, Earnshaw stared back at the German. Voice trembling, Earnshaw finally spoke. “Now I know why you are doing this to me, Dietrich. It is not truth you are after. It is personal revenge.”
“No, you fool!” Goerlitz shouted. “I wouldn’t demean myself for personal revenge. Emmett, you are a simpleton. You cannot understand, not in your lifetime. But try, try. I read you a last time from my primer.” He spoke in measured sentences, enunciating clearly as if explaining to a child. “There are those of us who believe that the world must not be run by men who are smiling, charming, incompetent reflections of the nincompoop masses. There are those of us who believe that the affairs of the world can be conducted peacefully and efficiently only by authorities who are not experts alone but who are also men of decisiveness. We respect and support the Movers, the ones who Do, the ones who Act. There are many such men, in many nations, and among these are the leaders of China. They Do, they Act, and in so Doing and Acting, they deserve to survive, for they will make the world better for most of us by forcing the West to choose men who are their equals. I repeat, I have no politics. I have coal mines, I have blast furnaces, I have the goods of the world, and among those goods, weapons. I offer all I possess to each and every nation on earth, to use as it pleases, in the safe knowledge that the fittest will survive and bring peace.”
“You spoke of everything except human friendship,” said Earnshaw. “Doesn’t that count for so
mething?”
“That counts for much, if the friends are held together by strength. At one time, when you represented the American elite, I thought you were one of us. After you succumbed to the euphoria of popularity, I saw that I was mistaken. You chose to serve no one but yourself. You abandoned us, and now you must suffer the consequences.” Goerlitz’s agate eyes remained fixed on Earnshaw. “Do you understand me now?”
At last, Earnshaw felt that he understood. Inside himself there was an emotional comprehension that he found difficult to define intellectually. You abandoned us, Goerlitz had said, and the us was the same as the shadowy they that people used to indicate that super-club, super-cult, super-government that was not exactly a club or cult or government. It was—what? It was they—no roll call, no membership, but an elite that influenced and directed the affairs of the planet, an elite that observed no boundaries of nationality but ruled by an unspoken yet mutual understanding of the uses of power in every area. In short, they ran the world, and only they could save it. And according to Goerlitz, for a time Earnshaw had qualified to be one of them. But then, because he lacked the toughness required for leadership, he had failed to help a blood brother, he had committed the unpardonable crime. He had betrayed them. And now you must suffer the consequences, Goerlitz had concluded.
Earnshaw understood at last.
He had been sentenced. There could be no appeal.
Yet, one minor puzzle nagged him. “Dietrich,” he said, “I know my time is up. One final question. Why did you bother to see me today?”
“Because I promised I would, so I did.”
“Promised? Whom did you promise?”
“I—” Goerlitz stopped, considered his cane, and said, “I promised myself. I decided you deserved one hearing. If you had spoken to me clearly and directly of your failures, if you had recognized them and repented them, if you had shown some strength of character, I might have reconsidered publishing that chapter. But, Emmett, you have not changed, you have not changed at all.” Slowly, with effort, Goerlitz pushed himself to his feet. “I shall publish the book as it stands.”
Earnshaw had risen. “Do whatever you wish.”
Goerlitz hobbled to a cord beside the window. He tugged at it. “My butler will show you out.”
Earnshaw started for the hall. He heard Goerlitz call his name. He halted and turned.
“I see your face,” Goerlitz said. “I see you still do not understand… You have not read Nietzsche? You should. It is made clear in Nietzsche.” Then, in a croaking voice, he went on. “‘What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is bad? All that comes from weakness.’” He paused, and then he said, ” Thus spake Zarathustra.’”
Not until some minutes later, when he had emerged from the Hotel Ritz into the Place Vendôme, did the enormity of his defeat and loss completely engulf Earnshaw. His mind had teemed with a hundred hurts and angers. His mind had ranged from sadness over Madlock’s misdirected idealism to anger over Goerlitz’s fanatical cynicism. Now, in the fresh air, his mind was left with only himself and his baffling weakness of character.
The limousine door was opened, but Earnshaw was loath to enter it. The limousine resembled a hearse.
Standing there, he wished himself dead and did not care if the wish was blasphemous. But he knew that his wish would too soon be granted, and it was out of his hands anyway. Within twelve days, before the Summit’s end, a member of they, whom he had abandoned, would perform the brotherhood’s ritual of liquidating Emmett A. Earnshaw from the living. His disgrace would affect Carol, his card-playing cronies, his Presidential Library visitors, his political party’s faithful. His disgrace would obliterate poor Isabel and poor Simon, whose good names depended upon the survival of his own good name. His disgrace would blot his name from the earth’s honor roll for all eternity.
He would vanish, and all that would remain of him would be a gravestone bearing two chiseled words: RUE CATHAY.
THE LEFT BANK was as congested with traffic this late afternoon as the Right Bank had been early in the morning, and Matt Brennan wondered what he was doing here. Cringing as his insane taxi driver swerved in front of another car to gain the inside lane, Brennan sat up in time to watch his driver turn safely into the Rue de Seine.
Although he knew that it was a wild goose chase—one too ridiculous to mention even to Lisa—Brennan consoled himself with the virtuous feeling that came from doing at least Something.
Yet, perhaps, there was a small degree of sense in pursuing the lead. Jay Thomas Doyle had thought so, and Doyle, despite his aberration concerning the Kennedy assassination, was an otherwise sensible person.
Brennan had bumped into Doyle after the fiasco at the Maison Legrande. He had taken a long walk, ruminating over his situation, as he window-shopped, and it had been quite late in the afternoon when he returned to the Hotel California. He had entered the lobby at the very moment Jay Doyle was about to leave a manila envelope for him at the desk.
“Research for you,” Doyle had explained, handing him the envelope. “I promised I’d look up Rostov in the ANA files.
_.
Well, after I finished my work for Earnshaw, I poked through the morgue. Sure enough, there was a fresh folder on Rostov. Not much in it, really. A few pages dated a day or two back. Apparently, the staff has been getting up background data on every delegate. I’d guess Hazel Smith supplied what little there is of this. Russia’s her backyard. Anyway, Matt, there’s mostly statistical and biographical information on Rostov. And a paragraph on his avocations. Maybe you’ll see something there. I admit, I don’t.”
They had strolled across the lobby while Brennan opened the envelope, took out Doyle’s notes, and hastily scanned them.
Doyle, looking over Brennan’s shoulder, had pointed to the last paragraph. “There’s the best stuff. Rostov when he relaxes. He likes Hungarian food. Okay, there are several good Hungarian restaurants in Paris. You might run into him in one of them. Then there are his favorite recreations. Horses and chess. Maybe that means he might take an hour off to watch the races at Longchamp or Neuilly, or look in on a chess club—there are almost a dozen in Paris, like the Caisse Brasserie des Templiers—though he probably wouldn’t have time for that. And his hobby is collecting rare books and manuscripts. Well, if he’s a serious collector, he won’t be able to resist the shops on the Left Bank. They’re great.” Doyle had been apologetic. “That’s all, Matt. Sorry. Guess it’s too general to be useful. But I thought you should see it.”
A dead memory had been sparked alive in Brennan’s mind. “You were right to show it to me,” he had said. “I’m grateful, Jay. There just might be something here.”
“No kidding? I can’t imagine what.”
“I’ll have to give it some thought. See what I can remember. When Rostov and I were in Zurich, we got along famously because we had several common interests. One was that we were mutually fascinated by certain historical figures. I’m a reader. I liked to read about those personages. Rostov is—well, was—a collector, and he liked to collect first editions and autographed letters by and about them. Actually, he was a serious collector, and you’re right, he might find the Paris antiquarian bookshops irresistible. The trouble is—it’s like hunting for a needle in a haystack, to coin an expression. If he browsed at all, where would he browse? And when? And—well, hell, none of this is your concern. I’ll have to sort it out.”
“I think it’s worth a try,” Doyle had said.
“Jay, in my present state, anything’s worth a try. I’m genuinely grateful to you.”
After Doyle had left, Brennan had gone into the dim California bar and settled at a table. Drinking his Scotch-and-water, nibbling his popcorn, he had reread the last paragraph of the research material.
The Plot Page 49
