The Story of Henri Tod

by William F. Buckley

  By the end of the first week, he had come to trust Caspar, as also Claudia, wholly, subject to his adult lifetime’s presumption against imparting to anyone information it was not necessary to divulge. Their loyalty and courage was one thing. But there was in Caspar a quality, probably ineradicable, of devil-may-care, which was attractive, even endearing—but which could conceivably bring down the entire operation. “Caspar,” he had said from the sofa, after coming upon the section in the July 28 minutes in which Caspar had interposed the suggestion that perhaps one means of demoralizing the commuters would be to have one commuter per day disappear inside a trapdoor at each passage point, “Caspar, you mustn’t do this kind of thing. You must strive to be absolutely sober, and indispensable to your uncle. If he ever gets impatient with you, remember, he can still appease your mother by giving you a soft job in the bureau of taxi licenses. It doesn’t have to be a job in his own office. Please don’t take such chances.”

  “Okay,” Caspar grinned, his feet stretched out on Hitler’s best coffee table. “On the other hand, it wouldn’t do, would it, Henri, for me to change too suddenly? Might make him suspicious?”

  “You uncle is suspicious as a matter of principle. Don’t worry about that. Worry about provoking him.”

  Claudia returned with the news of her meeting with Bruni, warned that she had got just the morning off, pleading that she had to accompany her mother to her dying aunt in the hospital at Gross-Ziethen. She pulled out the little hypodermic needle and rubber tubing, and with some trepidation—this was more difficult than injecting penicillin into muscle tissue, she proclaimed, never before that morning having taken blood—went through the motions Bruni had taught her. “I’ll take this right away to my friend,” she intoned as, slowly, she drew back the plunger, pulling Henri’s blood into the little glass cylinder. “And tomorrow—that’s when I’m supposed to be picking up my mother at Gross-Ziethen—I’ll bring back word from your friend Bruni.”

  Tod was satisfied. He yearned, above all else, to see the minutes, a report, of the meeting at which Khrushchev’s response to Ulbricht was rendered. And, alone now in the coach, beginning his tenth day in Berchtesgaden, he reflected on the arrangements that would need to be made in order to get, every day, Caspar’s information while protecting the most valuable pipeline anyone, surely, had ever had in the history of intelligence to the enemy’s deliberations. “Worry only in part about the enemy’s capabilities. Worry about the enemy’s intentions.” Who first said that? Was it Julius Caesar? Cato? Alexander? It could have been Abel, who knew the power of Cain, but did not know his intentions, and then suddenly it was too late.

  24

  Bruni had carefully studied the results of his remote-control medical diagnosis. He satisfied himself that Henri was healing and did not need dramatic medical care. That finding released Blackford from any obligation to plead with Rufus and the U.S. military for heroic clandestine intervention. On the other hand, Bruni did not judge Henri ready to proceed instantly to make his own way back to West Berlin, involving, as such a journey would, makeup, tension, oblique routing, and the possibility of en route harassment. He conveyed to Claudia his most urgent recommendation that Henri remain where he was for three or four more days. Henri reluctantly agreed to do so, but was cheered on learning from Caspar that Khrushchev had summoned, most secretly, the leaders and the first secretaries of the Warsaw Pact to Moscow and that they would be departing that very day.

  Just before leaving, Caspar told Henri, his Uncle Walter had come up with a fresh idea for complicating border arrangements. Polio! “Where was polio when I needed it most!” Caspar imitated the accents of his uncle, who cared about the devastations of polio only if he, or Stalin, contracted it. Ulbricht, in consultation with his kitchen cabinet, had decided that an “epidemic” of polio in the GDR justified extravagant care to prevent its infection of the Federal Republic. “If Uncle Walter really thought those cars and trucks were carrying polio germs into West Germany, he’d be giving them a police escort.” And then a West German paper, with a name the pronunciation of which Caspar pleasured himself in repeating in heavily accented British, imitating the BBC announcer who had quoted from it, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, had predicted that the closing of the sector boundary in Berlin was imminent. Inasmuch as, in his celebrated press conference of June 15, Ulbricht had in as many syllables told the questioning reporter that no such thing as a dividing wall was in prospect, the East German press derided the prediction.

  Nevertheless, there was reaction from the Allies. Whether in specific response to the prediction of a partition in Berlin, or simply to give the appearance of coordinated activity, Washington issued an order. And the U.S. Army Commander for Europe ordered all U.S. military not on leave to return to military quarters by midnight. Six nights per week. On Sunday, they could stay out until 1 A.M. Henri Tod told Caspar of the bitter comment after Hitler’s march on Poland, which followed his march on the Sudetenland, which followed his march on Austria, that whereas Chamberlain took his weekends in the country, Hitler took his countries on the weekend.

  On the third day, having got word from Claudia of Henri’s growing strength, Bruni authorized Henri Tod to leave his quarters and come home, taking, of course, due precautions. Tod planned to leave on the S-Bahn at 10:15 P.M., which was the hour when the substantial post-theater traffic returned home from the East to West Berlin after the show, stretching to 11:15 for those who wished to dally. The trains at that hour were shortened, and patronage dense, so that there was little risk of being conspicuous. As ever, a member of the Bruderschaft would stand by, in the event that anyone approaching their leader behaved menacingly.

  It was, Henri reflected as Claudia struggled to put on makeup that made him appear a man of sixty-five, as sad a night as he remembered since that awful evening after which, he knew, he would be separated from his beloved Clementa. It was almost inconceivable to him that in twelve days he’d have forged ties so strong as those he felt now toward this slim, competent, pretty, quiet girl who had risked her life to help what was then a stranger. And, looking back from the improvised makeup room by Claudia’s galley to the imperial sofa on which, as not unusually, Caspar stretched out, Henri reflected that the Prussian knout had not driven away from Germany whatever it was that was responsible for creating the elfin charm of Till Eulenspiegel. Caspar was there, playing with the shortwave radio, but he was not really concentrating on it, because he too felt the keenness of an impending separation that would almost surely be permanent, unless he and Claudia decided at some point themselves to leave, in which case, of course, he would begin his new life by signing on as a member of the Bruderschaft. In Henri he had found a somewhat older man who had given him the only complete human satisfaction that Caspar had ever had from another man. When in the late afternoons Caspar hurried over toward Berchtesgaden, taking the usual devious routings, to tell Henri what had happened that day, he felt a sense of accomplishment, of usefulness, he had never felt before; that and the pleasuring of Henri Tod were a perfect combination. In the days that lay ahead, the procedures had been specified by which Caspar would continue to relay his intelligence. But it would never be the same as it had been these past days, with Claudia listening, dressed in her apron and cooking in the galley, and darting out to hear Tod’s incisive comments.

  Henri would be lying on the couch, his arm in the sling, facing Caspar, who alternately sat and darted about to help Claudia, but always reacting in some way to what Henri was saying. Henri would discuss with Caspar the political implications of this or that projected move by his Uncle Walter, or whatever.

  Then there were the discussions at dinner, everything from the fate of Germany to the experience of this or that friend, something heard that very day by Claudia at work, or by Caspar; and Henri would reach back and tell them tales of this person or that, known to him. He knew name, rank, and serial number of everyone in the huge East German bureaucracy. He knew relationships—who was sheltered by whom;
who was secure, who less so, in Ulbricht’s esteem. He spoke as if he were the official, inside historian of the German Democratic Republic.

  And all of this in the sealed-off, profanely comfortable, regally appointed railway car within which the great malefactor whose only competitor in Europe had been Josef Stalin had ridden up and down Germany for four years, giving orders by telephone and teletype in the instrument room aft to bomb more civilians, kill more Jews, draft more young Germans, scorch more Russian earth. From this car, during substantial intervals, Hitler had run one side of an entire world war.

  And lately from this car, Caspar suddenly permitted himself to believe, a tiny little counterrevolution against tyranny had been commanded by the leader of a band of young Germans who would not accept things as they were.

  The thought of Henri leaving—Henri, the center of that movement; and a human being whose personal qualities had overwhelmed, equally, him and Claudia—made him inconsolably sad; almost irresponsibly sad, he thought as he struggled to control his emotions, drinking yet another glass of the Ukrainian champagne he had spent his week’s savings to buy for tonight.

  The time came. Caspar would lead him to the S-Bahn. Claudia would stay behind. During the preceding three days Henri had performed exercises rigorously, so that when for the first time he stepped down from the platform, he felt physically competent. Less so emotionally. He had embraced Claudia, but had spoken not a word. He thought briefly of his leave-taking from Clementa. He embraced her again, and this time said that they would see each other again, very, very soon; though not again, he supposed, at Berchtesgaden.

  Tod’s return was not uneventful. The car which, by prearrangement, he entered was, as projected, crowded. But as it approached the border a burly Vopo got in and began asking for papers. These were produced sullenly, and the Vopo sergeant became progressively gruff in manner. He came to Tod and stuck out his hand. With one hand on the railing to keep his balance, Tod produced his identity card with the other. The sergeant stared at it. Behind him, in a disguised treble, a passenger let go an obscenity about Ulbricht and his whores. The Vopo wheeled about but could not identify the taunter. In retaliation he turned back to Tod and shouted, “You. You will get off at the next stop with me, and answer some questions.” The next stop being the final stop in East Berlin before the crossing, the moment was tense.

  “What’s going on here?” A large gray-haired man emerged from the crowded corner of the car. “Sergeant”—the stranger flashed his credentials before him—“I am Colonel Himmelfarb, Volkspolizei. What exactly is going on here? Who was the man who insulted Chairman Ulbricht?” Colonel Himmelfarb had managed to place his large frame between Henri Tod and the sergeant, and now there was considerable bellowing, and the colonel asked that the passengers behind where the sergeant had been standing identify the mischief-maker. During the hubbub, Tod slid slowly away, and when the train stopped at Friedrichstrasse he stepped out on the platform as though it were his destination. The tumult in the car meanwhile subsided after the colonel had given the passengers a lecture on civic responsibility. Tod caught the next train into the Western sector. A small convoy of waiting, nervous friends discreetly led Tod as close to his personal quarters as he permitted. Only Bruni knew that he lived at 28 Kurfürstenstrasse, to which he accompanied him. Henri was tired now, suddenly, after his first protracted exertion, so he asked Bruni if he might postpone until tomorrow an account of everything that had happened during the fortnight, and why he felt it so important that he return quickly. Bruni readily assented, but said that before leaving he would insist on taking Henri’s temperature and pulse, and putting him through a mild neurological examination. Henri sighed and said very well, and together they climbed to the attic of the little house on Kurfürstenstrasse, the first two floors of which had never been rebuilt since the day when the SS had stormed in to search it, after arresting its owner at his office. Colonel von Stauffenberg had been taken away to be tortured and executed for the crime of attempting to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20. Intending to burn down the entire house, they had left flaming torches, but a kindly and officious neighbor had got there in plenty of time to restrict the damage to the first two floors, which were gutted. But the scaffolding was solid, and the third floor was entirely habitable, and that was where Henri lived, proud in the knowledge of who last had lived where he now lived alone, monastically, in three rooms, the walls of two given over to volumes of philosophy, the other to research materials that gave to the leader of the Bruderschaft most of anything he needed to know about the geography of Berlin, or the background of the tyrants who governed it.

  He submitted acquiescently to the quick examination. Bruni pronounced himself pleased by heartbeat, temperature, and pulse. They shook hands warmly, and Henri turned on the radio before sleeping, and heard that Mayor Willy Brandt had conferred with the three Western commandants about countermeasures against East German harassments of the workers who came to West Berlin to work, and that the three Western commandants had sent off a note to the Soviet commandant in East Berlin protesting the interference in intercity travel. Whatever was coming, Henri thought as his fatigue began to overcome him, was coming now fast, very fast. Eyes closed, he reached for the electric cord, fingered his way to the switch, doused the light, and slept, his first night in almost a fortnight asleep on a bed that had not been Adolf Hitler’s.

  25

  Tod slept soundly and awoke refreshed, though for a fleeting moment he found the absence of Claudia and Caspar almost intolerable. He boiled water while washing and dressing, took tea and a dry cracker, and, after the routine exploration out the window, walked down the circular iron staircase that permitted passage through the two gutted stories, and walked out the door, headed, as by arrangement, for Number 12. There Bruni was waiting, and three other young men, the high command of the Bruderschaft.

  Tod had carefully thought out the means by which he would get communications from Caspar. The use of the telephone was excluded: Ulbricht had cut off municipal intercommunication, so that a West Berliner could not now telephone across the street to an East Berliner to whom from his balcony he could wave, save by telephoning Copenhagen and putting through an international call.

  It would need to be done by foot, and at the current political tempo it would need to be done once or even twice per day. Caspar had undertaken to do a paraphrase of the information he gleaned, unless there was detailed information that needed to be got through. Tod’s decision was to send a courier from West Berlin into East Berlin, rather than ask Claudia to come west. Under no circumstances, he instructed him, was Caspar to risk passage into the West, particularly if he had on him any information that might prove troublesome. Ulbricht, without apology or explanation, was now ordering a thorough body search of up to ten percent of westbound Germans. But the Berlin Ostbahnhof, where their Berchtesgaden lay, was situated directly opposite a passage point. The courier would need only to go to Oberbaumstrasse, cross the street, enter the station through its main entrance, at the opposite end of the deserted sidings with the abandoned old coach cars, including 10206. Just to the left, after passing through the principal entrance to the station, was a row of locked compartments where travelers could leave, overnight or for a full day, a small suitcase. It was agreed that after Caspar’s return from his uncle’s office he would type the précis of the minutes at home, on his father’s typewriter. He would then meet Claudia, who would put the message in an envelope and deposit it in one of the lockers. Provided the locker was every day fed two 10-pfennig pieces, it would not attract the attention of the inspector, as the timing mechanism would not indicate that its lease was overdue. But in the event something should go wrong with that mechanism, causing the inspector with his passkey to open the locker, he would find in it a brown paper bag, two cans of biscuits, and a half pint of schnapps. Such a parcel as might routinely be left by any East German traveler. He would not be tempted to explore in the further recesses of the locker, where an envelope wo
uld repose, in which plans for the future of Berlin were to be found.

  Before leaving the station, Tod had rehearsed his hosts in the details of the operation, and Claudia had without difficulty got a locksmith to duplicate the key to the locker they would use. They then were left with one key, while Tod took the second. His courier—he would alternate Georgi and Roland—would inspect the locker during the rush hour between seven and eight in the morning, and again during the rush hour between five and six in the afternoon.

  At first Tod had thought not to tell anyone the identity of his informant. But by the time he arrived at Number 12 he had decided that Bruni must know, in the event that Tod met with an accident. So when he briefed his companions on the new informant, whom he designated as “Wotan,” he shielded—and of course they understood—Wotan’s identity. He would tell Bruni later in the day who Wotan was.

  And so he told his companions, during the briefing, that he had reason to believe that as they spoke, Ulbricht was in Moscow, conferring with Khrushchev and leaders of the Warsaw Pact. Moreover, the purpose of that meeting was to come to a resolution involving Berlin. He also believed that Ulbricht intended to plead one more time for Russian approval of Ulbricht’s plan actually to partition the city, denying to any East German access to West Berlin, and vice versa. He would, he said, expect a report on that meeting very soon, and that would be the moment when the Bruderschaft met their ultimate test.