“Yes,” Elam said, not looking at him. Elam had his hands in his pockets; he had brought no overcoat for the visit to New York and had borrowed a shearling jacket that was too big for him. He was younger than Misha; Shiloah had sent a child, except this one had the metallic gaze of a salamander.
Misha cleared his throat. “He’s expecting us?”
“He had a phone call from Jerusalem to get him thinking.”
Misha watched the arm rise past fifteen; he could feel his pulse in his hands.
Elam looked over at him, measuring him from head to foot. “Wipe your lip. You’re sweating. Don’t worry, it won’t take ten minutes.” And then he fell silent as the floors clicked by.
At twenty-nine, the doors opened and a snappily dressed young man said “Good evening,” didn’t wait for a reply, then turned on his heel and led them to a pair of oak double doors. He opened the doors and remained outside. Misha wouldn’t soon forget the expensive snick as the doors shut behind them.
Elam didn’t pause. He kept moving down the short corridor, past the oil paintings and the bronze Degas figurine in its bell jar. Misha followed, his shoes settling gently into the perfect carpet at each step. Ahead of them, a wall of dark drapes covered what must have been the most expensive view in all Manhattan. Still moving, Elam snapped a finger then pointed to the door on the left. There he stopped and rapped four times, quite slowly.
It seemed absurdly easy: Elam knocked and the door opened. Misha recognized the face instantly from the photographs.
“Hello, fellas, come on in,” Nelson Rockefeller said easily, his eyes cool. Craggily handsome, a large forehead and swept-back hair, hunched slightly at the shoulders, Rockefeller wore a wintry smile that vanished when Elam only nodded and kept moving to an armchair near the desk. Misha took the second chair, the dossier on his knee. It’s a momentum game, Shiloah had told them.
“Welcome, gentlemen,” Rockefeller said. “Can I offer you a drink?”
“We don’t drink,” Elam said. Then, after a pause: “Thank you. You have some idea what this is about?”
Rockefeller, who was in his shirtsleeves, frowned slightly. “No. I had a call, but it didn’t make any sense to me. Something about some papers.”
“Yes, that’s why we contacted your lawyer, Mr. Dulles. He’s aware of the urgency of the matter,” Elam said. God, he’s calm, Misha thought. I’m fighting to keep the jitters out of my legs and it’s like he’s ordering coffee.
That made Rockefeller pause. “Yeah, well, he wasn’t available.” He shifted slightly, waiting, his hospitality cooling.
Elam held out his hand for the dossier and Misha passed it over.
“This is the dossier Jerusalem told you about,” Elam explained. “We’ve selected what amounts to the tip of the iceberg. It’s interesting reading.”
He passed the folder over and then surprised Misha by standing up and walking to the big window beside Rockefeller’s desk. He stopped and stared out over the skyline through the venetian blinds.
The effect on Rockefeller was palpable: his eyes went from the dossier to Elam and then to Misha, who consciously slowed his heart rate to something that didn’t register on his temple with each pulse.
Rockefeller’s eyes hit the first page, the current account records from 1943. He turned slightly, involuntarily, toward Elam, his eyes moving as he read.
Elam chose that moment to move slowly from the window to the drinks tray. There, cool, contained, he poured a large Scotch for Rockefeller, then put the glass down on the opened file folder, right beside the contents of the banking file. “Turn the page,” Elam said.
Incredibly, Rockefeller did so. Next was the share structure of a very well-known Swiss bank, courtesy of files no one next to God in Switzerland had ever seen, except a sweet young thing at the Zürich public registry office who happened to know Israel Kipfermann’s son. “The next page is very informative. I think even a journalist might follow its implications,” Elam said.
Rockefeller’s hairline was suddenly shiny, rivets of perspiration gathering there. He turned the page and moved his glasses back with a finger: page three was the record of a 1944 share transfer, a transfer tantamount to treason in any U.S. jurisdiction, complete with U.S. Treasury Department letterhead.
Rockefeller studied that one for a very long time.
He looked up, ignoring the Scotch. “What’s Ben-Gurion want?”
Elam was already reaching for the files. “Votes,” he said simply. “Latin America votes for partition. We need all fifteen. You get us our votes, you say goodbye to this embarrassment, you can put the dossier right in your safe.”
Rockefeller said nothing, turning page after page, some faster, some slower, the U.S. government documents giving him most pause. At the last page he closed the file, ran a finger along his hairline. Misha expected a rant or a confession, but there was only silence and the dim sounds of the city beyond the plate glass.
There was no trace of stress in the man now. He raised his hand and, when he spoke, his voice was flat and slow, almost a recitation, not a reaction.
“Think you can walk in here and waltz off with the whole damn store?” Rockefeller rolled the dossier into a cylinder. Fixing Elam, he began tapping the desktop with it. “Condition one: what I’ve read never sees the light of day. Clear?”
“That’s understood—”
“You got that right,” Rockefeller said. “If a word of this leaks out, you can tell Ben-Gurion he’ll be drilling for oil in his own backyard, because I’ll personally guarantee that’s the only place on the planet he’ll find it. Understand that.
“Condition two. You want your country? You get your country. But only if you give up your pound of flesh at Nuremberg. Not a single German banker goes on trial. Not one.” Rockefeller stopped tapping the cylinder he’d made from the file and pointed it at Elam. “But you don’t get both. Vengeance or a homeland. That’s the deal.”
“I’ll have to consult Jerusalem about that,” Elam said, his voice flat.
“Consult all you like: Ben-Gurion has one card,” Rockefeller said easily, “and you’ve just played it. Condition three. The Nazis we used as intelligence assets? They stay secret too. Total immunity. You don’t touch them. You don’t leak a word to the press. They’ve vanished, lock, stock, and barrel. Clear?”
Now all Elam could do was nod. The room had gone silent except for the ticking of the clock on the big oak sideboard.
“You seem a sensible sort of fellow. Good. Condition four. You’ll have your votes, but not a single American businessman or banker gets tarred with this. Not me, not anyone. We didn’t win the goddamn war to put half of Wall Street on trial.” Rockefeller raised the Scotch glass to his two guests. “Thanks for coming.”
“I need to make a call,” Elam said. He’d gone gray. For his part, Misha would have given Rockefeller a nudge out the window at that point. He jammed his fingernails deep into his palms to contain his anger.
“I thought you might,” Rockefeller replied, taking a sip of Scotch.
They waited two hours for Jerusalem to call back.
It seemed like two days. They sat in a side office about to be painted, its furniture covered in white drop cloths, a reminder of how short their stay was to be in Rockefeller’s world. They sat in silence, reckoning the room was bugged. When the call came, Elam and Jerusalem agreed the line had to be tapped, so they chose Hungarian, Elam’s second language, and kept it short, knowing full well if the line was monitored they’d buy a few hours at most. Elam was inconsolable: no one at Shiloah’s send-off had expected the counterpunch.
“Did we choose the wrong man?” Elam asked wearily.
“Start at the top, work your way down, that’s the way,” Misha said. “Piece of work, isn’t he?”
But Elam was lost in his own thoughts. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Don’t give him the satisfaction.”
Elam nodded. “We’ll get the votes. That’s something.” He
had his head in his hands and Misha could see the ring of sweat at his collar. “You know,” he said slowly, “I’m beginning to think God—”
Elam picked up the ringing telephone and listened briefly. He put the receiver down, biting his lip for a moment, and exhaled. He still gripped the phone as if it might float away, looked up with eyes devoid of hope, and said, “It’s yes,” in a whisper. “They said yes.”
They went back into Rockefeller’s office and in three minutes—Misha checked his watch for history’s sake—they were out, the deal confirmed.
The young man in the natty suit reappeared as if out of a hat and summoned the elevator, a pitiless glint in his eye as he waited with them in silence. What was there to say?
In the elevator down, Elam passed his hand through his hair. “If we don’t get the votes,” he said quietly, slipping his hands back in his pockets, “I’ll climb every stair in the place to get to that creep, then I’ll break his neck. And the other guy too, Mr. Suit. Him first.”
Misha believed him.
LVII
NOVEMBER 29, 1947
Foster moved through the crush slowly, parting the throng with his hands, like a bear through bramble. The Lake Success UN hallway ebbed and flowed with diplomats, as if someone had opened a can of envoys and poured them down the main corridor. Ambassadors and chargés d’affaires stood nose to nose, a muddle of entreaties, refusals, and deal making, with a sprinkling of the exotic, the Ethiopians and freshly admitted Yemenis resplendent in their tribal finery. A pair of New York clerics deputed from the cardinal archbishop’s office, nearly identical ruddy-faced Irish prelates in their official blacks—Foster recognized Father Thomas Mulgrew from a Sullivan and Cromwell conference—slipped in and out of the scrum, buttonholing their targets with clear-eyed appeals to listen to the Holy See’s reason. “Why not a third way, a third power, neither Arab nor Jew,” Father Mulgrew murmured to an Ecuadoran diplomat, “say Spain or America, to preserve the peace and access to the Jerusalem holy places?”
“Evening, Father Tommy,” Foster said, leaning down, “talking to one of my votes, are you?” The high-cheeked Ecuadoran watched, bemused, a man at a tennis match.
“I am, you must understand, a man with two ears,” the Ecuadoran interposed.
“Never hurts to keep the good word alive,” the cardinal archbishop’s man observed. “Persistence is a virtue, Mr. Dulles, I do believe.”
Foster held his silence, winked at the Ecuadoran, and moved off. Foster, himself a delegate Harry Truman had appointed to bring the Palestine partition deal home, set himself to guard the entrance to the delegates’ cloakroom, now wall to wall with assembly members. There, he towered over the slender, dark Cubans who’d gathered to parley. He hadn’t seen anything like this chaos since a tour of the Chicago Mercantile’s commodity pits.
The Argentines had attracted both barrels: the Brits and the Americans had swarmed them at the last General Assembly recess five minutes ago, the Brits cajoling for an abstention, the Americans for a yes. The Soviets had taken a new tack, rising above the fray with a distinctly Russian hauteur. The apparatchiks plied their trade with the melancholy but resolved Arabs, Persians, and Turks, keeping Stalin’s delphic options open.
The Yugoslavs, wild cards and no proxies of the Soviets, had their backs to the wall, facing all four deal makers at once: Zionists, Arabs, Brits, and Americans. Jessops, one of the U.S. aides running between the rival factions, rushed up to Foster, his forehead trickling sweat, and mumbled in his ear: “Straw vote has it 29–27 against, if everybody votes. Which they won’t,” Jessops warned, thrusting a scribbled vote count into Foster’s hand. “Damned if I can get a straight answer about which of the abstainers will stay out. And the new Vatican announcement has the Latin Americans holding strong. If it goes to the floor as it stands, we’re cooked.”
Foster nodded and reached into the circle of Cubans and found Alejandro Sebastiano’s shoulder with his big flat hand; he pulled the smoothly turned-out Cuban bodily from the knot of arguing diplomats.
Sebastiano turned like a Marseille toe dancer on shoes polished bright as crude oil. “Ah, my friend Foster, this crazy, no?”
“There’s a quiet spot I know, Alejandro. This way.” He angled the Cuban toward the cloakroom and then pressed him into the tiny ladies’ washroom. “It’s snug, but it’ll do,” he said, snapping the lock shut as he closed the door tight. “All right, Alejandro, our families have done business for over half a century. The railroads, the cane mill deals, United Fruit. It’s all on the line today. What do you want for a yes vote?”
“We are good sons of the Church, Foster. We will vote as the Holy Father has instructed. We want nothing.”
“Nothing? I’ve got the authority to swing you whatever you want: financing for your father’s unfinished rail line to Cienfuegos, underwrite the telephone system you and your brother own—what? What do you need?”
Sebastiano was smiling, the smile of a man who knew perfectly well where the end of the game lay. “It’s all true,” he observed.
“Of course it is. Firm offers. Write yourself in on the deal of a lifetime, Alejandro.” Foster hesitated, eyeballing the smaller man hard. “What’s true? What are you getting at?”
“The Zionists. They have you by the cojones. His Excellency the Brazilian ambassador tells me the fix is in.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You talk like a salesman, promising and promising.” Sebastiano lit a cigarette, a lace of blue threading over his perfect hair.
“I keep my word, Alejandro. Your father knew that. Who’s done more for you than I have? The tobacco franchises, the rail and telephone bond issues—you know that.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. That the rumors are all true.”
“What isn’t a rumor around here, Alejandro? It’s a marketplace out there.”
“No rumor, then: fact after fact,” the Cuban declared. “The preliminary vote says the Zionists will lose, no? By six, seven votes. No hope. The Arabs win, yes? Ah, but no, señor, no, the vote is postponed. And suddenly all the Latin countries in the Vatican’s back pocket? They swoon, all of them, Santa Teresa! Again they think, and think again their vote. Porqué? After his visit, the telephone call from your friend and client Mr. Rockefeller, of course. Convent girls falling, those men—they faint to his touch, no? Costa Rica, Venezuela, Honduras.” Sebastiano laughed, like a busy signal, staccato and harsh; he waved a tanned hand meaningly. “Mr. Rockefeller is a Svengali when he comes to call. He knows all, sees all—he knows where the bank president from Tegucigalpa has his millions and his mistresses, where the general from Buenos Aires receives la heroína, how the electricity came to Bolivia with the silent Germans who hide in the mountains—a very big mystery to the people. Mr. Rockefeller knows where the skeletons are. It is no matter to him to twist the knife for a vote to abstain: what are we to him?”
“You know things, Alejandro.”
“I pity the Arabs,” Sebastiano reflected, ignoring Foster. “I never thought I would, but I do: their terrible leaders, corruption even worse than in my Cuba … and, my God, their high priests or whatever they’re called, vengeance is all they offer, no hope. The Jews will drive them out like rabbits … and there will be war after war. Those unhappy, unlucky people.” He shook his head then gazed at Foster steadily, preparing to deliver a Cuban nugget of philosophy. “My father has been dead for twenty years, but he and my mother, God rest her, they gave me two good eyes. Mr. Rockefeller has nothing in his hand to harm me or my family.” Alejandro Sebastiano took a long, last drag from his cigarette and gave a most eloquent Cuban shrug. “Ah, but who knows what this terrible scandal is?”
Foster raised his hands as if to make a point, but words failed him a moment too long.
“We will vote as the Holy See asks. Who needs another war over Jerusalem? It’s madness.” Sebastiano flicked his expensive cigarette into the basin. “And remember, we took Jews when you and your heroic pre
sident refused them. You can keep your abstention, my friend, and all that comes with it.” He stepped past. “Buenos días, Foster.”
“Alejandro …”
He stopped in the open door. “You know, Foster, I thank you for all you did for my father and my family. But you know what they say about you here, the Spanish-speaking countries? They say you see a brown face and your mind goes blind. You cannot see us. I tell you something: someday you will see us and all the brown people. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must use the men’s room.”
Outside, an aide knocked. “Mr. Dulles? You in there? Mr. Dulles?”
The vote was an hour away.
LVII
There was not a seat to be had on the UN assembly floor. Half the State Department had wanted to be there for the vote; Eleanor was one of the lucky few who got in, thanks to Foster. She sat at the very back of the press gallery, where one of the Washington wire reporters recognized her and gave up one of the few chairs in the press box. He dragged it in front of a pillar; Eleanor stood on the chair in her sensible shoes, her boxy purse clutched in front of her. Around her, the men from the press stood so close together few could find the elbow room to take notes; one or two wags propped their notepad on the back of the man in front of them.
There was a steady buzz of talk, sparked by the tension and the din from the marchers and demonstrators outside, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, singing the Hatikvah and chanting. The delegations below were packed together like spectators at a bullfight; a thin veil of cigarette smoke hung overhead in what had once been a Flushing Meadows skating rink and, before that, one of the 1939 World’s Fair sports halls. By an accident of the American calendar, Thanksgiving had bought the Zionist cause two days’ grace.
The arithmetic was blunt; every newspaper in New York explained it on page one. Abstentions were crucial too, as each abstention lowered the votes needed for a majority.
The Witness Tree Page 43
