The Story of Henri Tod

by William F. Buckley

  But Blackford had things to do, and as they pulled out of Nuremberg—with two additional passengers in his compartment, a middle-aged couple, the mother (grandmother?) carrying a baby, asleep—he took a writing pad from his briefcase. He reflected that it had been over ten weeks since he had seen Sally. During that period there had been, at first, the ache so to speak ad personam. It was she he had missed, so sorely. But, gradually, Sally Partridge was missed not only particularly, but generically. How on earth did monks manage, he wondered. He began to write.

  “Dear Miss (Mrs.?) Lewis:

  You ask, and understandably so, Who am I? You instruct me to tell you more about myself.

  Very well, but on the understanding that you keep the information to yourself.

  I am the love child of the Prince of Wales and Tallulah Bankhead. I was born in 1925, and was kept hidden away on an Aegean island. There I learned to spear wild hogs, fight bulls, track snow leopards, and walk over burning coals. During the summers, my father sent the faculty of Eton to teach me Latin and Greek and history and science. During the winters, my father sent the faculty of Sandhurst to teach me the art of war. During the springs, my mother sent me hetaerae to teach me the arts of love. In the autumns, grandfather sent me to the Tower of London to study my ancestry. When I was twenty-one I was banished, provided with a little competence, and invited to make my own way. I have done moderately well, having acquired General Motors in the States, Aramco in Saudi Arabia, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I am bidding on the Bank of England, but will not have news until we arrive in Vienna whether I have got hold of it.

  But if you will not dine with me tonight, I shall renounce everything and enter a monastery. Or, if you prefer, I could throw myself across the tracks, and those strollers who pass by before the great train shatters my flesh and bones will hear from my lips only the words, ‘Linda willed it so.’”

  Blackford put the paper in an envelope, on which he wrote out his car, compartment, and seat number. He walked to car 326 and gave the message to the attendant to deliver.

  He heard back in a half hour or so. “Dear Mr. Jerome:

  I cannot tell you much about my parents, as I was a foundling. I was born with three arms and three legs, but the doctors did their work competently, and it is only when I am viewed from a certain angle that anyone can see that something is wrong. That angle is not at one hundred and eighty degrees, so at dinner tonight, sitting opposite me, you should not be distracted.

  Yours. L.L.”

  He spent the afternoon reading, and, at Munich, reflecting on Hitler’s putsch, two years before Blackford was born. In nine months, some people produce babies. In nine months, Hitler produced Mein Kampf. He wondered whether Henri Tod had anybody keeping an eye on the beer halls in Munich these days.

  By the time he had got to the death of Julius Caesar they were at the border, showing passports to the Austrian authorities. When the train pulled out, the late eaters would be summoned for the second seating. The attendant with the bell walked through moments after the train began to pull out. Blackford put the book on his seat and went forward to the dining car, giving the yellow voucher to the captain, who seated him. He asked for the wine list, ordered a bottle of Austrian white, and was sipping it when she came.

  It went wonderfully well. She was calling him Bucky even before they had done with the salmon. She worked for the United States Information Agency as a librarian. She was a Virginian, divorced—childless—from a husband “who was very sweet, but, really, he likes to drink more, actually, than he likes to do anything else.”

  “You mean literally anything else?”

  She smiled. “I mean literally anything else.”

  “Is that why you didn’t have children?”

  Linda looked up at Blackford, and for a moment it appeared as though she might resume calling him Buck. She took the bull by the horns. “That really is none of your business, is it?”

  “Well, you see, it is actually. I’m completing a doctoral thesis on the relationship between alcoholism and the birth rate. Did you know that in the Soviet Union the birth rate is actually declining? Is your husband—I mean, was your husband—a Russian?”

  She laughed. The crisis was over. What did Buck Jerome do with himself? she asked as she sliced at her lamb chops.

  Blackford was better schooled at answering that question than any other. Depending on who asked it, he accented, or did not bother to do so, the plausibility of his answer. When on business, he might give an answer so plausible that it had the effect of causing him to disappear into the furniture of the room. If the encounter was utterly transient, it did not much matter what he answered. On such occasions he was, safely, a lawyer, or an engineer. He preferred the latter to the former, if there was the risk that the questioner would spend more than a conversational moment or two with him and began to talk Blackstone. Blackford could handle engineering, in as much as he was an engineer. What he could not so easily handle were questions about what he was working on at the moment, where he was working—that sort of thing.

  Linda was halfway between these extremes. It had to sound plausible, but need not be profoundly so. “I’m doing a study for the Relm Foundation on economic recovery and Marshall Plan Aid. I’ve got a couple of appointments in Vienna tomorrow morning, and am due back in London tomorrow night.” She was only politely interested, which helped.

  Both Blackford and Linda were in need of company, and they stayed in the dining car until it closed, and went then to the bar car, where they had coffee and an Irish whiskey. They had passed Linz and reached the outskirts of Vienna. Linda was candidly attracted to the informal American with the arresting face, expressive, relaxed, with the intelligent eyes, and the features so strikingly handsome in arrangement. Blackford enjoyed her greatly, and reminded himself how much more satisfying was the company of women than of men, particularly after prolonged celibacy.

  Would she permit him to drop her off at home? Yes. Where was he staying? At the Regina Hotel.

  Would he rather share her apartment?

  That, he responded with a smile, was the most munificent offer since the Marshall Plan. He was positively joyful as he leaped up to assemble his bag and briefcase, saying he would meet her back in her car and help her with her bag.

  In the taxi they chatted cheerful nonsense on the ten-minute trip to the Boltzmann Gasse, and she was laughing when the cab stopped and she fumbled for her keys. Blackford was at this point carrying three bags, she only Blackford’s briefcase. Then suddenly she said to be quiet, she did not wish to wake any of the neighbors. So they rode whispering up to the sixth floor, and she opened the apartment on the right, flicked on a standing lamp in the living room, and disappeared from view. She returned in a dressing gown, with a tray and a bottle of wine. But the talk, suddenly, petered out. They drank from their glasses and looked at each other in the dim light. Blackford pointed, wordlessly, at one of the two doors that could be seen from the sofa. She smiled and shook her head, pointing her finger at the other door. He rose and entered a bedroom, lavender in sight and smell, into which the light from the living room only faintly penetrated. In a moment she heard him speak, asking her please to join him. They discovered a great, even urgent need for each other, and she was no less pressing than he as they met, tasted, devoured, and had each other, so to speak, by acclamation. Soon, he kissed her, and said that now he would bring the wine. She watched his body as he moved into the living room where the tray lay on the coffee table, and wondered whether, if he actually had been raised in the Aegean, this Bucky might not have rekindled jealousy in Olympus. They drank in the semidarkness, and soon reexperienced each other, with mounting excitement, with a passion unbridled, but never raucous.

  He knew to make love without chatter, and also as they lay happily together later, without talking about future contacts; and she knew as much, so that neither his failure to initiate talk of a more enduring relationship nor her failure to inquire why he did not marred the seren
ity they now found. Somehow she knew he needed to leave the next day, and somehow he knew she knew it. So that there was no explaining done. And when in the morning she awoke, Buck Jerome had showered and dressed and made the coffee, and was looking about for something edible. She had intended, she said, to stop at an all-night delicatessen and buy fresh bread, but now all she could offer him was crackers and butter and honey, which was all, he said, he wanted, that and the peach he saw in the refrigerator which, having probed it, he pronounced saignant.

  They walked down together. “Your hotel is directly in line with the embassy, so I’ll drop you,” she said. Once again they were silent, though one or the other would answer the questions of the talkative cab driver, or acknowledge, as required, his commentary. Blackford discovered only then that she understood German and could get by in it. When they pulled in under the portico of the hotel, Blackford passed his briefcase out to the porter, who had taken the handbag from the cab driver. He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “You are a wonderful woman,” he said, and she knew that he meant it, and so she went contentedly, if a little sadly, off to work. There would be one whole week’s magazines to sort out in the library and the new books. She had slipped Time into his briefcase.

  Blackford checked in at the desk, extending his passport. “Ah, Mr. Jerome, we expected you last night.”

  “The train was late,” Blackford said, filling out the registration card. “Very nice train, though,” he mumbled, and the clerk spoke about the weather.

  20

  At two in the afternoon on Thursday July 27, the sun shone over Vienna with only occasional interference from lazily scudding clouds that skipped about the Stadtpark as playfully as the children who frolicked with their toys, shouting out their pleasures and pains. The chestnut and oak trees of modest girth—fifteen years ago the young trees had been planted, replacing trees chopped down for firewood during the war—cast only the slightest vertical shadows, the sun being close, at this hour, to its meridian. Blackford Oakes, seated at one end of a park bench centrally located, was dressed in khaki trousers, a cotton sport shirt, and light navy blue sweater tied loosely about his waist. He wore dark glasses and was reading Linda’s Time when he heard the man say, in German:

  “I am Frank, Mr. Oakes.”

  Blackford looked up, but did not rise. “Ah yes, Mr. Frank. Well, we have both come a long way, so you may as well sit down.”

  Dmitri Gouzenko did so. He had on a light gray suit and a fedora, and he carried a briefcase. He was clean-shaven. About forty years old, Blackford guessed, of stocky build, but manifestly agile. His expression appeared well controlled, though his eyes were intense. A man of purpose.

  “Shall we open the conversation by your giving me the money, which I shall put into this briefcase, handed to me a few days ago by your courier?” His German was fluent.

  “I have the money here.” Blackford pointed nonchalantly at the little duffel bag on the grass beside him. “I’ll give it to you. But only after you tell me about Clementa Tod.”

  Dmitri paused for a moment. He deliberated whether to make a scene on the purely technical point, namely the promise that the money would be instantly forthcoming if he agreed to go to Vienna. It wasn’t worth it.

  “How did you come to know her, how did you learn her name, where is she, and how do you propose getting her to West Berlin?”

  “Those are extensive questions, Mr. Oakes.”

  “I figure they could be answered in maybe five minutes. That comes to ten thousand marks per minute. Not bad pay for a Communist. By the way, your German is very good. Where did you learn it?”

  “Mr. Oakes, I am not here to answer questions about myself.”

  “Your concern for your privacy certainly exceeds your concern for mine. Do you always put people’s toothbrushes in your letters? Is that your signature?”

  “Mr. Oakes, I am a soldier of fortune. Under the circumstances, I find out what I can. I do not doubt that you will endeavor to find out everything about me you can. I am, however, under no compulsion to cooperate in this enterprise.”

  “Fair enough, Frank. Fair enough. Okay, so I don’t know anything about you, but we can go on and talk about Clementa. How long have you known her?”

  “Mr. Oakes, my obligation is to satisfy you that I can deliver her. The question of how long I have known her is not to the point. However, I don’t want to be unnecessarily fussy, so … I have known her for over two years.”

  “Circumstances, please.”

  “I committed an, ah, irregularity. Of a commercial nature. In Kiev, where I was then living. I was sentenced to five years in a camp at Vorkuta. During the last two years, I was assigned to the guards’ section because of my knowledge of German. There I was used as a translator interrogating German prisoners coming into the camp, and for miscellaneous other duties, mostly clerical. It was then that I met Clementa Tod.”

  “What was she doing there?”

  “You should ask, ‘What is she doing there?’”

  “Clementa Tod is still at Vorkuta?”

  “That is correct.”

  “All right. What is she doing there?”

  “She is acting as an assistant to the superintendent. She is the bridge between him and the personnel who look after the guards. I expect you know that she was at Auschwitz? Evidently it was not known to her family—to her brother—that the Russians liberated the camp before her scheduled execution. She was sent to Vorkuta in April of 1945, and has been there ever since.”

  “What is her sentence?”

  “Originally, she was simply booked as an ‘alien vagrant.’ It was obvious that she had not been in collusion with the Nazis, so that when I became interested in her and got permission to see her records, I discovered that she had never in fact been sentenced to any particular term at Vorkuta.”

  “Why, then, is she still there?”

  “Clementa Tod, I came to discover after a number of conversations, went into deep psychological shock on the day of her capture. The Nazis openly executed the couple that had been protecting her. Her brother was away in England. Her parents had been eliminated two years earlier. She was loaded onto a train the same day she was picked up. Yet she spoke very detachedly about her past. In any event, you are evidently not aware that prisoners are not released, under the Soviet system, unless they have someplace to go. Lacking any family or any home or any reserves, Clementa has no place to go.”

  “And how would you remedy that?”

  “I would marry her. Then bring her to East Berlin. Then to you.”

  “What are you doing in Berlin?”

  “I am not in East Berlin. I am in Potsdam. After I got out of the camp, I got my old job back. I translate and do odd jobs for the Amtorg Corporation, including purchases.”

  “Does that take you to West Berlin?”

  Dmitri smiled. I can see where your mind is traveling, Mr. Oakes. “No, I stay in the Eastern sector.”

  “Except when you run out of toothbrushes, which is when you go to West Berlin?”

  Dmitri smiled. “I am a man of business. I need occasionally to move about. But mostly I stay in the Eastern sector.”

  “Let me see your work permit for Potsdam.”

  “Ah, Mr. Oakes, to see my papers would require that you also see my name. And I see no reason to communicate that to you.”

  “What does Clementa know of her brother’s current activities?”

  “She was called in a few months ago when Henri Tod was becoming increasingly notorious and she was questioned. She has not exchanged any communication whatever with her brother since she last saw him in 1943. She has no address for him. She has no cousins, uncles, or aunts.”

  “How do I know she would come to Tod?”

  “Henri Tod is the only thing she has in her whole life. They were exceptionally devoted as children. I mentioned to her the possibility of rejoining him, and she was ecstatic.”

  Blackford took the duffel bag and place
d it on the bench between him and Dmitri. “Okay. We’ll take a chance. You may as well take the bag, too. Transferring twenty-five thousand marks in cash in the park at midday might be spotted and thought to be aberrant behavior.”

  “I did not know we would be meeting in a park until I talked with the concierge. My own briefcase is not entirely empty, by the way.”

  He leaned over and opened it. He took out another picture of Clementa, with another note to her brother scratched out on its back. “This is for Henri Tod.”

  “How long will this operation take?”

  “Not too long, I should think. I can be in Kiev by Saturday. The paperwork at Vorkuta is minimal. I would hope to be back in Berlin within a week. I need to have a fresh address for you. The White House forwarding system is notoriously slow.”

  Blackford grinned, and wrote out a telephone number, tore the page from his notebook, and handed it to him. “I check this number a couple of times every day. I receive brief messages.”

  “Mine will be brief. It will suggest to which of the passage points I will bring Clementa, and when. Will you be carrying a duffel bag, or a briefcase?”

  “You’ll get your money, Frank.”

  “Well, in that case I can think of no other matter that requires discussion. Can you?”

  “No. Only this. If, after you marry Clementa, you fool with her, Henri Tod will cut your balls off.”

  Gouzenko smiled. “Henri Tod cannot expect his sister, after what she has been through, to return to him a virgin. But my own interest in her is exclusively commercial.”

  Blackford got up. “Be seeing you, Frank. Both of you.”