A profitable relationship for both parties, and moreover a relationship almost three years old. But then last week Spender had reported that a particular taxi had been reserved to pick up Lt. Colonel August Hester at 11:30 at the Schwanenhof at Pankow, a watering place for highly placed East German gentry, which before the war had also acted as a discreet brothel, and was now showing signs of recidivism. The Bruderschaft had been looking for an opportunity to settle scores with Colonel Hester, who presided over what was generally referred to, in plain talk, as the Torture Wing of the Pechnow Prison, and had, in early April, himself presided over the torturing to death of a twenty-two-year-old member of the Bruderschaft whose older brother, aged twenty-four, now claimed the privilege of arranging to arrive at the Schwanenhof at the same time as the taxi carrying Colonel Hester. He did; and when, ready to do his duty, the avenging brother turned away from the newsstand at the corner at the same moment the colonel walked out of the noisy bar, the older brother was mowed down by two sharpshooters who had clearly been waiting for him. Aristophe had been paid twice that day, and the idea was that, tonight, he would be paid one final time.
The price on the head of Henri Tod was distractingly high, and accordingly he consented to Sophie’s rather elaborate, but unmistakably effective, ministrations. His fine straight brown hair was soon gray and curly. His almond-shaped eyes had now just that little lift that gave them a squatness faintly oriental. A shadow under his left nostril suggested a scab not entirely gone. And the tip of his right front tooth was now gold. He appeared a slender man, in his mid-fifties, something of a roughneck. He was appropriately dressed, and his documents revealed that he was a butcher, employed in West Berlin at a large concern that provided fresh meat for the American garrison. Stefan Schweig was an assistant who, dressed in a sport coat and open shirt, looked slightly raffish, and could have been one of the hundred thousand young Germans who prowled the streets on Saturday looking for entertainment. Stefan carried a .38 and a powerful tear gas canister in his jacket pocket. Tod had a hunting knife, and the Hi-Standard .22 revolver he handled as adeptly as a barber a straight razor. It was a convention at Number 12 that when a meeting was over at which Henri Tod was present, Sophie would require that with a single shot he extinguish the candle at the far end of the room, in the center of the padded section that guarded the main safe, using the silencer. One time he had missed the target, the refractory candle continuing to give out light after the bullet had plugged the mattress behind. Sophie and company were amused at this unusual sign of Tod’s fallibility. But Tod was desolate, and that weekend he devoted to recapturing his skill, and finished by putting out ten candlelights in a row.
It was still easy, on the S-Bahn, to cross over. Less so if one were carrying packages; so these Henri and Stefan did without, burying themselves, standing, in the smoker, and handing out their identity cards at Friedrichstrasse to the Vopos without bothering to raise their heads from the newspapers they were both reading. In the event either of them was searched, they had contingency plans, centering around Klaus, over in the corner in the oversized raincoat who, if needed, would materialize and identify himself as a Vopo inspector general, taking charge.
It was just after nine, and the killers ambled first to the Löwen-Eck where they sat, ordered beer, and began a game of skat, Stefan removing the playing cards from his pocket. After a half hour Tod asked the waiter whether Herr Spender was expected, as Tod had a message for him. The waiter shrugged his shoulders. “It’s Saturday. Probably he’ll work late at Helsingforser Platz. If you want, you can tell me, and if he comes in late, I’ll tell him.”
“Yes,” Tod said, bundling up the cards, and to Stefan, “—it’s getting late, old boy, let’s roam about a bit. Yes, if you see Spender, tell him a friend of Colonel Hester wanted to express his gratitude. That’s all,” and he put a 50-pfennig piece in the waiter’s hand.
They spotted him at Helsingforser Platz. Normally he sat inside the glassed cabin, his knees under the long linoleum table at one end of which was the active radio dispatcher. Tonight he was standing in the cabin for a moment to check with the assistant dispatcher, then outside to resume what was apparently a heated conversation with an elderly, stoop-shouldered man wearing a driver’s cap, presumably gone off duty and arguing with the boss. Henri walked past the cabin to the street corner, without looking left toward the dispatcher’s box in the large parking lot. Now in the shadows, Henri stopped to light a cigarette and whispered, “Go over there, northeast corner. See the wind current over the chestnut stand? It’s moving toward the taxi area. Lob the gas into the area of the back taxis when you see me, in the lead taxi, begin to drive out toward the dispatcher. There’ll be a lot of confusion. I’ll nail him as my taxi goes by. All right?”
“And then?”
“And then you go back to the bar, get the waiter, and tell him never mind about Spender. Colonel Hester delivered the message himself. Then get the hell back home.”
“And you?”
Henri Tod looked at his young confederate, and for a moment said nothing. “My job, Stefan, is to see to it that our people don’t worry about me. Only the Communists. I will see you on Monday.”
They separated. Henri ambled toward the lead taxi and told the driver he wished to be taken to Oberbaumstrasse. The driver nodded, and then whispered, “Can you pay me in West German marks?”
“I’ll split the difference,” Henri replied. The East German mark was selling on the open market for one quarter the West German mark, and in any event was not being accepted, by many West German commercial enterprises, as tender. Henri’s reply had been conventional: He would agree to pay in West German marks, but he would pay half the taxi bill.
“All right.” The driver started the motor.
At that moment a few yards behind him there was a small explosion. It was followed by what seemed like a gusher of smoke, instantly felt by those downwind of it as tear gas, and now drivers, passengers, and pedestrians were yelling, coughing, beginning to run. Meanwhile Henri had rolled down the taxi window as the driver quickly engaged the gear and started out, well ahead of the airflow of gas. He followed the custom of pausing at the dispatcher’s gate, where he yelled out his destination: “Oberbaumstrasse.” As he did so, Henri, his face largely concealed from the open window, fired a bullet into the brain of Aristophe Spender.
Henri had not counted on what then happened in quick succession. The assistant dispatcher dove under the table and evidently hit an alarm button. Simultaneously a siren began to scream—and a crossarm gate fell suddenly across the entrance to the parking lot, blocking entrance, or exit. Henri’s driver had gradually assimilated the events, and now slammed his foot on the brake just in time to miss crashing into the gate. He looked back, into the muzzle of Henri Tod’s pistol. Tod looked quickly behind and saw that there were people on the run headed toward him, fleeing the tear gas, but perhaps also determined to overtake the car from which the bullet had done its conspicuous work under the neon light of the dispatcher’s office. Tod opened the door, slipped the pistol into his pocket, and began a lope, not wanting to attract attention. When he saw that three of the pursuing throng deflected in order to follow him, and that two of these were armed Vopos, he broke into a full run. He followed the Warschauer Strasse, the least lit of the two streets he had the choice of running down. But before he had gone a half block, one Vopo had begun to fire, and he felt the bullet pierce his back under the shoulder. The tumult behind him increased, and Henri looked desperately for an alley to run down, found one, and was gratified that the lights were less frequent. But the pursuit was hot and, hardly able to see, there being no lighting left, he ran into a concrete blockhouse. He fingered his way desperately around its grainy surface. The throbbing pain in his shoulder suddenly became acute. The wall led him to a door he did not need to open, because it was already open. He dove through the black space, breathing hard, and his eyes, now slightly adjusted to the dark, seemed to discern huge rectangular bulk
s. He rushed toward one, and saw that it was an empty train car. He ran toward the far end of the station and, turning a corner, ran fifty yards and then stopped, breathless. Now he heard noise and saw, reflected on the high, vaulted ceiling of the huge station, the rays from the searchlights with which the Vopos were armed. He heard the shout, “He’s in here somewhere! Cover all the entrances! Fritz, follow me!”
Henri leaned against the coach stairs, panting. He thought to throw himself under the car, hoping that his flattened shape would escape detection; but he knew this unlikely, and considered for a moment a firefight, probably suicidal, though he could take five men with his five remaining rounds of ammunition. But the roar that increased in volume suggested that the Vopos had congregated in force. It was then that he heard, from behind, a soft male voice. “Quiet. Step up. Two steps. But quiet.”
Henri Tod, pistol in hand, struggled up the stairs of the coach car. He could not see his host.
“Just a formality, but do you mind giving me your pistol?”
Reluctantly, Tod handed it over.
“Now, follow me.”
The door to the outside was first quietly locked. Then the door to the carriage was turned, and locked from the inside.
“Follow me.”
Henri’s host held a tiny flashlight and walked down the railroad car’s corridor. After a few steps, Tod found himself in the most luxurious sitting room he had ever seen inside a railway car—stretching fifteen meters. It was lit by small candles, but he could discern the velvet, and the bronze, and the rosewood, and the couches. And the girl, sitting in one of them, the soft light from a sconce shining on her, a glass of wine in her hand.
“Ah, Claudia,” his host said, “we have a guest I know that this violates our rules. But it just happened that he and I arrived at our Berchtesgaden at exactly the same moment. He was being pursued by people who sounded most awfully disagreeable, so I presumed that you would agree to extend our hospitality, just this one time?”
Caspar did not wait for her answer, turning to Tod.
“The lights you see here are absolutely undetectable from the outside. Not so any considerable noise, though this railway car is better soundproofed than the average. Still, hold down your voice, if you have any inclination to start singing, or whatever. We will, I suppose, in due course hear our friends attempt to enter the car. They will discover that it is locked. This will not make them suspicious, because the other 248 cars in this part of the station are also locked, and it is altogether unlikely that they will rouse the Chief of the Railway Division at this hour to ask for 248 keys on the assumption that you were carrying one in your pocket. They will look for you under the cars, and on top of the cars. They will then post a guard, and look again tomorrow when it is light. They will abandon the search for you sometime tomorrow night, Sunday, which will facilitate our dispersal the following day. Claudia and I are working people. And what, sir, do you do, when you are not avoiding Vopos?”
Henri Tod managed a smile. But he needed support, and so reached out his hand and leaned against the wall before falling on the floor in a dead faint.
13
On the airplane, right after takeoff and the meeting with Macmillan, the President was given his news roundup. Normally he went through this eagerly, circling condensed items he wished to see in their entirety—a column, say, by James Reston, who had a way of making him feel philosophically serene, though that was a hell of a question Reston had asked the day of Inauguration. “Mr. President, just what do you expect to do with the presidency?” What would have been an appropriate answer? “I dunno, Scotty. Something Periclean, I think.” He’d read it later, he gestured, easing back the chair behind the desk of the private compartment of Air Force One. He had got it a little bit out of his system, talking with Macmillan. And on the flight from Vienna, Tommy Thompson and Chip Bohlen—God, they ought to know the Russians if anybody does, time they’ve spent there, poor buggers—they said to me: Don’t be upset. That’s just the way “they” are. I said, You don’t mean “they” are all like that crazy man Khrushchev, do you? Well, not quite. Khrushchev is sort of unique, they felt, but I might as well, they said, have been talking to anyone else who was head of the Soviet state. That’s the way “they” talk? Well by God, that’s not the way they’re going to talk to me. Fuck summit conferences. No, that’s the wrong word. Don’t want to say anything unfriendly about fucking. To hell with summit conferences. I mean, God knows I tried. He comes rolling in over his empire. A train, all the way from Moscow, stopping here and there like the czars, to receive flowers from little girls in countries he owns like I own Boston, and before the first afternoon is over he is sitting there, looking me straight in the face—there he is, with Gromyko, Menshikov, and Dobrynin. The three Russians who probably know the most about America. And there I am, with Thompson, Bohlen, and Kohler, the three Americans who probably know as much about Russia as anybody. And Rusk. And Khrushchev tells me that all the so-called satellite countries are absolutely free, and in fact, he doesn’t even remember the names of their leaders! I mean, if he had said he couldn’t remember the names of all the leaders he’s had replaced, or executed, I might have believed him. Oh yes. Later on, maybe that was the next morning—doesn’t matter—he looks me in the face again and says that Poland is more democratic than the United States! I mean. He was sore—and all I had said was that we all believe in political independence, but that some countries are located so close to our own that we have to look out after our vital interests, and how would he like it if we said there had to be free elections in Poland? You’d have thought I had propositioned Mrs. Khrushchev. No. Nobody would ever think I had propositioned Mrs. Khrushchev. But he really laid it on. Now what is a President of the United States supposed to say, when the leader of the Soviet Union carries on about Polish independence and Polish democracy? I was very polite—everybody told me I was polite. Everybody told me I had held my ground well. They probably told Neville Chamberlain the same thing. Hell, I know I didn’t hold my ground well. What would Ike have done? What would Churchill have done? I must find out about that. Was I supposed to say: Are you going to tell me that the Russian troops that imposed order on Hungary in 1956 were Moscow U. graduate students doing lab work on democracy? How in the hell would Dean Acheson have replied to Khrushchev? I must get the answer to that … You can’t talk to him. I say, Look, we don’t want war “because of a miscalculation.” Now, was that so offensive a thing to say? You’d have thought I had questioned Lenin’s sincerity. (Was Lenin sincere? I forget.) MISCALCULATION! he said. Could I have heard you use that word? Are you suggesting that when the people respond, as they inevitably will, to the social forces of history, that that is a miscalculation? And is it a miscalculation that the United States, which pretends to be anti-colonialist, supports the most repressive, reactionary countries everywhere it can? Is that a miscalculation? And so on and so on and so on and so on … In the afternoon, before leaving, we walked together and I thought maybe now he’d ease up. Not at all. Did I want war? he said. He didn’t want war, of course not. No Communists want war. Ask Lenin. Ask Marx. He knew that the Pentagon wanted war, he knew that the Nazi generals in Germany—who are really running NATO—he knew that they wanted war. Well if we wanted war—he didn’t want war—that would be that: We want war? We get war.… God knows I tried, on the Berlin thing. Interesting point he made about Japan, the bastard. Interesting to a sophomore debate team. A junior debate team would laugh the position out of court. He says: You people didn’t hesitate to make a peace treaty with Japan without consulting us, right? Well, why should we hesitate to make a peace treaty with East Germany without consulting you? How do you handle something like that? The Russians got into the Japanese war—what was it, two days after Hiroshima? Two weeks? All we did is fight Japan from Pearl Harbor all the way to Hiroshima, and we need to consult Moscow before making a peace treaty with Japan? But now we’re talking about Germany. Berlin. Berlin would be the capital of Russia if
it hadn’t been for us imperialist warmongers. We kept Russia alive. Sure they lost ten million men. Ten million men less for Stalin to kill for other reasons, big deal. Sure they fought heroically, fought desperately. So did the Nazis, for that matter. So he compares our making a treaty with Japan with his making a treaty with East Germany. Neat. And he says: Look, it’s sixteen years since the war was over, this is ridiculous. You people said at Yalta you’d be out of Berlin within two years. I hadn’t been briefed on that, and no one remembered it when I met with my troops that night. But the hell with it, he knows occupation arrangements under treaty can only be rearranged by collective action of the four occupying parties, and he is the only party that’s wanting to change it … Oh yes. Forgot. I made that point maybe five times. Five times? Was it fifty times? That he was the one who was wanting to change things, that we weren’t pressing for any changes, that therefore he was responsible for others’ reactions to changes he was responsible for making. And what did he say? I guess I could have guessed. All life is change, yeah yeah, was that Heraclitus? Or Plato? Or Jack Benny? One more time I tried reason. Look, Mr. Chairman, if we let you unilaterally abrogate our rights in Berlin, then every treaty we’ve got will just be considered by our allies as nothing more than a piece of paper. So he says, what do your allies want? Why do they want Berlin? Would they feel happier if they had Moscow? And he looks over at Gromyko, as though it was a serious point he was making. I mean, serious that what we really want is Moscow. And Gromyko nods his head. Reflectively. Khrushchev got a great kick at dinner at the palace, telling me Jackie said she thought Gromyko had a pleasant smile. Had fun with Jackie about that later on, asked her if she thought Boris Karloff had a pleasant smile. Then Khrushchev said a lot of people think Gromyko looks like Nixon. I was a good boy, I didn’t say a lot of people think he acts like Nixon.… God, what a relief to be with Macmillan. For one thing, we can talk about what the exact nature of the problem is. Dean Acheson’s got a memo—he thought it would be useful before I prepared my television address—that’ll be some address. I must remember to ask Arthur what a historical euphemism for fuck-up is. Acheson, as usual, has a point, and I got a chance to mention it to Macmillan. I didn’t start off by saying Dean thinks we might actually end up having a nuclear war over this one, which is what he thinks. What caught my eye was this. Acheson said: Look, suppose Khrushchev goes ahead with his treaty, suppose that the government of East Germany now becomes the government that we need to check our passports with, etc. etc. etc., when we send our military convoys over East German territory on the autobahn to Berlin. Suppose that the guards that check the papers at the airports are East German, not Russian … well? Granted that is a violation of treaty arrangements. God knows we know all that. But suppose that is all that changes? Go to nuclear war over that? No. Acheson suggests we take two divisions over the autobahn, headed for Berlin. See what happens. Prepare for any contingency. But make one thing absolutely plain to Khrushchev, namely that if anybody attempts to keep us from getting to Berlin, we’re going to fight. The scale of that fighting is to some extent his doing. And what did he tell me, last words in Vienna: If you interfere with the rights of the sovereign Democratic Republic of Germany after we have concluded the peace treaty, either their land rights or their air rights, we will meet that challenge with force. But Acheson has an interesting point, I thought, and Macmillan likes the idea of pretending nothing really happened, though I have the feeling that was about all he liked about Acheson’s memo. Still, it’s a breakthrough of some sort—i.e., we’re just plain not going to go to war over a change of uniform.
The Story of Henri Tod Page 10
