Although this was at the far south end of the city, the commotion had reached the bridge. There was heavy activity with construction workers bent on planting the barbed wire and the concrete blocks. But virtually all the administrative concentration was on westbound traffic. The Vopos had been cautioned not to interfere with east-bound Americans, and accordingly, when Blackford and Tod showed U.S. passports, the guard nodded them on.
“But you will not be permitted to take your automobile,” he said. “Those are orders.”
Blackford tried arguing with him, but it didn’t work. He turned to Mateus, told him to wait for them back at the apartment, nonchalantly reached for the laundry bag and, conversing uninterruptedly with his fellow American, walked across into East Berlin carrying a bag with two false passports, two pistols, binoculars, one smoke grenade, and one tear gas grenade. Two blocks into the city, they looked for a taxi. But on August 13, 1961, there were no taxis. Blackford hailed a passing vehicle. “Sir, my sister is very ill, and I need to go to her. Please”—he passed the driver a hundred-mark bill—“drive us to the corner of Frankfurter Allee and Proskauer Strasse.” The driver obliged.
At the corner, Blackford and Henri entered the café they knew to be there, two blocks from Clementa’s apartment house. They sat down and ordered coffee and beer. Several dozen men and a few women were silently staring at the television set on top of a battered old phonograph.
And now Henri Tod took over. “You agreed, Blackford, that the operation will be under my command. You have most thoughtfully made it easier than it might have been. I will repeat now our understanding.”
He looked at his watch. It was 10:12. “At 10:25 we will leave the café. We will arrive outside 117 Frankfurter Allee at 10:33. We will enter the apartment house together, and walk up the staircase. At the third floor, you will stop. I will climb to the fourth floor, and will ring apartment 4B. When the door opens, I will simply demand my sister at gunpoint, and if I find there only the Gouzenko man, I’ll drop this sandwich pail with the money in it. In fact, I shall permit him to open and examine it.
“If there are KGB there, I expect to catch them off balance. But in any event I will give the signal for you to come up and give me cover. Are we understood?”
“Those are the arrangements,” Blackford said. “And you know what, Henri, we may as well enjoy our beer and coffee. Our schedule permits us thirteen whole minutes to do so! Oh goodness, how leisure time can spoil a man!” He lifted his glass to Henri; and, for the first time since leaving the armory that morning, Henri Tod smiled.
Dmitri Gouzenko, for the obvious reasons, did not have his radio turned on that morning. He had a gramophone, and Clementa and he were listening to the music of Richard Strauss soon after they had breakfast, as she washed the dishes. Every half hour or so Dmitri would leave his apartment and cross the corridor, as he had been doing now for over a week, ever since they got there, explaining to Clementa that across the way was the office to which he reported and from which he received instructions, but that it was otherwise uninteresting, not worth her visiting; besides which, it was for men only. Clementa was entirely unconcerned, attending to her sewing—she had embarked on an ambitious petit point for Nina’s birthday, and was intermittently reading a Dostoyevski novel. Dostoyevski was all she ever read, and she did the cycle in eighteen months, beginning it all over again. She never tired of it, besides which, she said, she had always forgotten the plots by the time she turned back to them.
Across the hall, where Glazonouw and Shelepin were on duty, the radio was very much on. They listened to RIAS, though they would check every hour or two on the East Berlin station. And when the bulletin had come in an hour before, that Henri Tod had been arrested, Glazonouw had taken the unusual liberty of knocking on the door of Gouzenko, who instantly came out, and the three of them huddled together.
Clearly the ambush was no longer relevant. Henri Tod had been told that he and only he could entice Clementa to follow him to West Germany. Now not only was there a physical obstacle to any such journey, but Henri Tod was in jail. Operation Tod was—defunct. To be sure, this would need to be certified by headquarters, and headquarters, on this day, Gouzenko guessed, was not to be easily distracted from its principal concern, which was with the hectic activity of the Wall. “The thing to do is just to sit, and relax. Figure it will be another twenty-four hours, maybe a little more, before we are officially relieved of duty,” Gouzenko said.
Quite right, except that in the commotion they had not reckoned on Helmut Bollinger, and Bollinger, sitting alone, twelve hours every day, until relieved, ten days in a row, in the little room on the sixth floor directly across the street, had no radio. His relief corporal, Sebastian, had taken it out to be fixed three days before, but it was not yet returned. So that he had nothing to do, hour after hour, except his duty; and that was to peer out the window, binoculars in hand, in the event that any unusual or suspicious person or persons approached 117 Frankfurter Allee, which was exactly how Bollinger would describe these two men, one dressed in fatigues, the other in slacks, neither of them familiar, who now approached and, obviously unfamiliar with the apartment house, closely scrutinized the directory in the hall.
Bollinger was glad to have a reason to relieve the tedium. He took the telephone, dialed the number of his confederates across the street, and said, “Two men. Strangers. Careful.” Instantly Glazonouw and Shelepin were back at their battle stations.
The two men walked wordlessly up the dingy stairs to the third landing. There Henri Tod nodded at Blackford, who stopped and bent down as if to tie his shoelace, while Henri proceeded up another flight.
He turned left, facing the door to apartment 4B. With his left elbow he depressed the buzzer. In his left hand he carried the lunch pail with the money. In his right hand, the pistol. He heard a voice.
“Who is it?”
“I have come to see Madame Gouzenko.”
Those words, the last Henri Tod ever spoke, were answered by a rain of bullets. Blackford leaped up the stairs in time to see the door opening. He fired six times, bringing down the two killers. Instinctively he sensed the nature of the deception. He bent down quickly, grabbed Henri’s unfired pistol, and with all his strength aimed his foot at the door to 4A. The door, splattered by the same bullets that had penetrated Henri’s body, flung open. Pistol in hand, he found the weapon aimed straight at and six inches away from the body of the man of Vienna, Mr. Frank. Blackford’s blood was boiling, and he knew that life would not again give him such satisfaction as now he would get from pressing the trigger at the man who had managed the ambush of Henri Tod. It was then that he spotted her, sitting on the couch.
She could only have been the sister of Henri Tod. She looked up at him, her face oval, eyes dark, her hair framing the face and features of a madonna. She said nothing, continuing to sew, while Gouzenko slowly backed toward her, his hands held high.
Blackford thought breathlessly. He needed to move quickly, but he needed above all to establish one thing. He said, simply, “Clementa?”
“Yes,” she replied, “and who are you, and why is there so much shooting again?”
He said, purposefully, “Is this man, Gouzenko, your friend?”
She replied, “He is not my friend. He is my husband. He is the father of our little girl. Please, sir, do not harm him.”
Blackford was breathing hard. He took a full minute to compose his thoughts.
“Gouzenko,” he said, “I am leaving here with—the body. I propose to take it back to where he was born, to get him the kind of burial he’d have wanted. I expect you to do nothing for one full hour, allowing us to get across. Is that … an understanding?”
“That is an understanding, Oakes.”
Later, Blackford would have difficulty in reconstructing what he then did, but at the time his motions came as reflexes. He walked to the middle of the road and stopped the first car that approached, an old Opel four-door sedan driven by a large middle-aged ma
n wearing a black derby. He approached the driver.
“I am sorry, sir, this is a military emergency.” He pulled out his pistol, directed the driver to the hallway of the apartment house, and instructed him to take the corpse by the legs. Together, they lifted Henri Tod onto the back seat.
“You will find your car on applying to the Volkspolizei late this afternoon,” he said, driving off.
He headed right for the Brandenburg Gate, never mind the lesser passage points. When he was within a hundred yards of the barricade he was overwhelmed by the spectacle—the platoons of construction workers, the armored cars, the sirens. Across the burgeoning partition was what looked like the whole population of West Berlin, crowds which now included, front and center, the hastily assembled military band playing patriotic anthems. He forced his car right to the passage point, which had had virtually no traffic until now. He leaned out of the window, stuck out his American passport, and said to the captain (normally, it would have been a corporal), motioning behind him with his other hand, that he had a dead man in the back seat. His tone was straightforward, impatient, businesslike, imperious.
“Corpses traveling between sectors must be moved by certified morticians, pursuant to regulations.”
“Fuck regulations, captain.” It was hard to make himself heard because the band was now playing “Deutschland Über Alles,” and the amplified sound made conversation difficult. “This man”—he shoved Henri’s West German passport in the captain’s face—“was married to my sister. You take the stiff if you want. What a goddam mess. Do you also want the widow’s telephone number? This is the last domestic scene I’m getting into. Goddam it, will you raise that bloody gate?”
The captain peered at Blackford, hesitated a moment, then looked to the right at the construction workers with their ear-shattering acetylene torches, to the left at the armored cars moving about, raising and lowering their cannon, and across the way at one hundred thousand West Germans and the military band. “You may not take the vehicle through. That is strictly forbidden,” he growled.
Blackford looked up at the captain with impatience. Wordlessly, he opened the door at his side and got out. Then he opened the back door, reached in, and dragged the corpse out onto the pavement. Bending his knees, he now grabbed one arm of Henri Tod and hoisted the corpse over his shoulder. He began walking toward the barrier. “Tell those bastards to let me go by,” he muttered to the captain, who nodded to the intervening guards, who moved the wire, to permit the final passage home of Henri Tod.
37
It had been set up as a buffet. There were, after all, twenty people invited. An unexpected guest had been the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who briefed the President on events that day in Berlin, bringing him up to date on what the President had got at noon, over the telephone, from the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Adviser. Mostly his guests were social friends, but because one of his advisers was vacationing at nearby Wellfleet, he had asked him to come, and his wife. And, from down the street, they had invited Judy Garland and her husband, on the strict understanding that they would not fight with each other even if the party lasted until ten o’clock.
The children had been the center of attention—not only the infants, but the boys and girls, most of them nephews and nieces ranging in age from eight to sixteen, who had been racing during the day in the regatta. The shrieks and yells of the returning sailors, the boisterous swimming and the tennis playing—it had been a fine, full day. And now the children were packed off, the scene was stilled, and the senior party had their drinks, and chatted. It was 8:30 before the food was brought out and they filled their plates and sat randomly.
Around one card table, the President sat with the Director, the President’s assistant from Wellfleet, and Judy Garland. The President was distracted, and although he responded to all remarks addressed to him, those who knew him well knew that he was not really engaged in the conversation.
It was dark by the time the coffee was served, and the chatter was everywhere, like the sound of crickets. Suddenly the President lifted the glass of white wine that sat in front of him, which he had not touched during the meal. He caught the eye of the Director and said, in a voice so quiet as to stress the privacy of the communication:
“Let’s drink to Rheingold.”
The Director raised his glass in acknowledgment.
“Too bad,” the President added, putting down his glass.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the studies of several authors and historians whose books helped me greatly with the factual material. They include The Ides of August, by Curtis Cate; Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis, by Honoré M. Catudal; The Wall: A Tragedy in Three Acts, by Eleanor Dulles; A Thousand Days, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and Khrushchev Remembers, by Nikita Khrushchev or whoever else wrote the book, a controversy I wish to be left out of. Some liberties have been taken with the chronology, but not many. I must mention the joy of word-processing on my Kaypro II.
I gave the manuscript to my family, friends, and colleagues. To my wife Patricia, son Christopher, sister Priscilla, and brother Reid. To Charles Wallen, Jr., Thomas Wendel, Sophie Wilkins, Marvin Liebman, and my agent, Lois Wallace. To my colleagues Frances Bronson, Dorothy McCartney, and Susan Stark. To Chaucy Bennetts my thanks for her splendid work, as also to Joseph Isola, as ever. Dorothy McCartney, my researcher, relied heavily on the generosity of Ingeborg Godenschweger of the German Information Center, who knows so much about Berlin she might have founded it.
To them all, for advice, correction, encouragement, research, proofreading, and typing, I am profoundly grateful. I must especially acknowledge the work of my old friend Sam Vaughan, and my new friend Kate Medina. Their editorial suggestions were superb, their patience and good cheer exemplary.
And finally, in connection with my stay in Berlin, I owe thanks to Nona Oeynhausen, to Dr. Otto and Mari Ann von Simson, to Mr. Ernest Nagy of the American Embassy in West Berlin, and to Ambassador Rozanne L. Ridgeway in East Berlin and her colleague Günther Rosinus, the press and cultural attaché. Fine counselors, friends, and cicerones.
Stamford, Connecticut
July 1983 W.F.B.
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Copyright © 1983, 1984 by William F. Buckley, Jr.
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Cover illustration by Karl Kotas
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1853-1
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