The Story of Henri Tod (13 page)

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 bulks. 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.