The Story of Henri Tod (3 page)

“We got big assets in Berlin these days? Haven't been there for a while.”

“The biggest asset we have in Berlin at this moment is Henri Tod and his Bruderschaft. We have our own contacts too, but Tod's people are something. And that is the principal mine right now. Your first stop. You will need an extensive briefing on Tod. A very unusual young man. There is a great deal to do.”

“Do we have anybody—over there?”

“You mean in the Kremlin?”

“Well, come to think of it, yes, in the Kremlin.”

“If I answered that question, Blackford, you should turn me in to the Director, who would—quite properly—fire me.”

“Rufus, old shoe, if ever they fire you, I'll defect and we can start our own country. Meanwhile we might use our sources to lay on an atom bomb or two, so that we can be impregnable.”

Rufus permitted himself to smile.

3

The bell on his desk rang timidly, almost hesitantly. As if especially trained to be obsequious. Walter Ulbricht, Chairman of the Council of State of the German Democratic Republic, and First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, responded. Responses were available in any of a number of combinations. If his secretary saw a single green light, that meant that she had permission to relay her message into the little loudspeaker on Chairman Ulbricht's desk. If she saw a red light, that meant that she must abandon, until exactly thirty minutes later, any attempt to communicate with Chairman Ulbricht. Thirty minutes later the executive secretary had instructions to begin again, from scratch. If, in response to the little buzzer, two green lights were flashed, that meant that if the visitor Chairman Ulbricht was expecting had arrived, he should without further ado be admitted, always assuming that the secretary had established that the visitor outside his door was, undeniably, the person expected. If a green and a red signal were shown, this meant that the visitor, or the message, was to be passed along in exactly five minutes—i.e., that the Chairman could not, for whatever reason, be interrupted
at this particular moment
. If
both
red lights were shown, that meant that the Chairman had changed his mind about seeing the visitor to whom an audience had been granted, and his secretary was to tell the visitor to seek another appointment at another time. On the other hand, if the initial ring had been other than for the purpose of announcing a visitor, then the secretary, upon seeing the green and the red lights, was to re-signal the Chairman, by ringing again the anemic bell. “Why don't you get those little machines that make the lights blink on and off, Uncle Walter?” Ulbricht's personal aide-de-camp, Caspar Allman, had asked him a few days before. “That way you could double the number of messages you could give Hilda.”

“I have thought about that,” Ulbricht replied, not looking up from his desk, and wondering for the one thousandth time why he had agreed to take on his widowed sister Ilse's impossible son. Walter Ulbricht was certainly making up for executing the boy's father, he thought, though Caspar's extraordinary fluency in five languages protected the Chairman from charges of nepotism. As if Old Pointy Beard, as the Berliners referred to him (not in his presence—the Chairman would have tattooed his nose, if Lenin had), needed to protect himself from anybody this side of the Kremlin. “And I shall think about it some more if I incline to think about it more. Does that answer your question?”

“Yes, Uncle Walter,” the young man said, leaning back on his chair by the mini-desk at the corner of the office, and swatting at a fly that had got on his beardless face, but missing it.

Today being Monday, Chairman Ulbricht looked with particular resignation at his watch. The time was exactly eight o'clock. This meant that he would now be briefed by his chief of staff. He depressed both green buttons, and Herr Erik von Hausen opened the door and came in.

Von Hausen was a small man, fastidiously dressed, in somber blue. He wore pince-nez which, every few minutes, drawing his handkerchief from his side pocket, he would wipe, carefully refolding the handkerchief and replacing it in his pocket.

Ulbricht motioned him to the usual chair, a gesture von Hausen acknowledged with a “Good morning, Mr. Chairman.” And, to one side, “Good morning, Caspar.”

“Good morning, sir,” Caspar replied.

The Chairman said nothing. He leaned back slightly in his straight chair, the signal that von Hausen was to begin, which he did.

It was the day for the weekly report the Chairman dreaded most hearing. An account of how many East Berliners, and East Germans, had emigrated to West Berlin. The figure for the third week in April, 1961, was an astonishing five thousand and fifteen. Of these, 42 percent, von Hausen went on, had resided in East Berlin. The balance had come into East Berlin from outside the city to one of the eighty-eight transit points, whence they were taken by the West German police to the great processing center at Marienfelde, where they registered their desire either to stay in West Berlin or to fly west, to West Germany.

“What is the current count on the number of East Berliners who work in the Western sector?” Ulbricht asked, tapping his finger on his desk.

“The figures are not exact, Mr. Chairman. Between 53,000 and 53,075.”

“Can't you get more exact figures than that?” Ulbricht needed to express his exasperation in some way.

“Those figures strike
me
as pretty exact,” Caspar Allman volunteered.

The Chairman turned his head slowly in the direction of his nephew. “Your views on the matter are neither solicited, nor interesting, nor welcome.” Caspar shrugged his shoulders, reached over to pick up the copy of the
Neues Deutschland
, and said nothing.

“I tell you, von Hausen,” the Chairman declaimed, “pending a final solution to this problem, we have got to increase the difficulties of these cowardly traitors when they set out to desert their fatherland.”

“Do you have any suggestions, sir?”

“Run over for me what we are currently doing to discourage the traffic.”

Von Hausen leafed through a black notebook, adjusted his glasses, and began to read: “Respecting the flow of citizens from outside Berlin, we have sharply limited the schedule of buses and trains entering the city. The service is erratic, punctuality is discouraged. It is no longer possible in East Germany to count on making any connections if the objective of the voyage is to travel to Berlin.”

“Good.”

Von Hausen went on: “When passengers board trains or buses, their traveling papers are inspected. Any irregularity is instantly taken as disqualifying, and the passenger is let off at the next station.”

Caspar turned down the paper he was reading. “Why not stop the train and make them get off wherever they are? That would make things much more inconvenient for them, wouldn't it?”

Ulbricht's instinct was once again to rebuke his nephew. But before doing so he gave thought to his proposal. “Not a bad idea, von Hausen. Not a bad idea. They might find themselves, with their baggage—which I assume is extensive—fifteen or twenty miles from the nearest telephone. Yes, yes. Good idea, Caspar. What about the day workers coming over to this side?”

“Well, sir, as you know, we have done the following. We do not, effective last week, permit them to buy anything at any East Berlin store unless they pay in East Berlin marks for it, and of course East Berlin marks are trading on the black market at six to one. So if they want to buy something here, they need to pay six times as much for it. What would you think, sir, of adding an additional requirement, that they produce working papers to show that they have earned their marks in the Eastern sector, and also show an exchange slip certifying that any Western marks were exchanged at the official one-to-one rate?”

“That is a capital idea, von Hausen,” the Chairman said.

“Why not tattoo all workers who cross the border into West Berlin?”—once more, Caspar Allman turned down his newspaper.

The Chairman stared at his nephew. It occurred to him that the suggestion was ironic. But then it occurred to him that perhaps it was not. From time to time during the months his nephew had been taken on as personal aide, he had shown a rather ingenious turn of mind. The Chairman decided to be patient.

“That would not be feasible, Caspar. In the first place, the exercise is elaborate. In the second place, it would attract entirely too much attention. It isn't as though it could be done to all fifty-three thousand East Berliners in one evening. There is the further problem that tattoos are not easily erased, making it difficult for the traitors to become integrated after their rehabilitation.”

“Just trying to be useful,” said Caspar, going back to his newspaper and resuming the crossword puzzle.

“We need”—the Chairman began to stride along the length of the room, his head bowed in concentration—“more public … emphasis on the nature of the treasonable activities of the Germans who go over to the capitalist-imperialist side of town. I have studied the breakdown you gave me last week. The number of doctors. Of engineers. Of technicians. We are a society of only seventeen million people. Who, at the rate at which this lesion is proceeding, will build our bridges tomorrow, cure our ills, repair our telephones?”

“Could we perhaps hire them to work here?” Caspar volunteered.

“You
idiot!
Hire
our own workers
to come back to
their
native country, and to do there their
own work!”

He reached his desk chair and sat down, in silence. “The problem,” he said, his voice steady, “is the problem of Comrade Khrushchev. He must be made to recognize this. Meanwhile we must do what we can do, pending a final solution.… Von Hausen, assemble your staff and come up with supplementary discouragements we might use. Either at the border-crossing points or this side of them. I want that emigration figure halved during the month of May. Halved. We will discuss other matters at our afternoon meeting.”

“Yes, Mr. Chairman.” Von Hausen bowed his head slightly, and left the room.

The Chairman turned to his nephew. “Ah, Caspar. The problems of governing are sometimes of very near superhuman difficulty. What we must do, of course, is close the Berlin border. Permanently.”

“I thought that was illegal under the postwar arrangement?”

“What is illegal and what isn't illegal is a matter of definition. We have excellent legal interpreters here and in the Soviet Union.”

“What if the legal interpreters in the United States and Great Britain and France decide that their understanding of freedom of movement throughout Berlin is the correct understanding?”

“We would need to disabuse them, Caspar. We would need to disabuse them.” Walter Ulbricht looked out his window in the direction of the border. “I see there,” he said, “a great wall.”

“Oh Uncle, walls don't work anymore. Walls were for Chinese, way back when.”

The Chairman paused, considering whether to expand on his thoughts in the matter. He decided against doing so, and instead called the meeting to a close. “Tell your mother I am expecting her tonight at the reception at the House of Ministries for the winners of the bicycle tournament. She is to present the main cup. She should be here”—the Chairman looked down at the time schedule on his desk—“not later than 5:45. I am lunching with the Polish Ambassador, and we are conferring during the afternoon. I won't be back here until tomorrow. Get done whatever work you have pending, and take the afternoon off.”

“Thank you, Uncle Walter.”

“Is that you, Caspar?”

“Yes, Mother. He let me go early today.”

“Well, sit down and read. Lunch will be ready in a half hour or so. No, don't sit down and read. Fix the light in the radio. I've asked you to fix it ten times. It's an awful bother at night to tune it.”

“I don't have the right bulb for it.”

“Did it ever occur to you to go
get
the right bulb for it?”

“Yes, Mother. It has
occurred
to me, but it has not occurred to the German Democratic Republic to requisition any bulbs of that kind. I would need to go to the other side.”

“Well”—Mrs. Allman materialized in the doorway of the kitchen, wearing an apron. Her hair had been blond. She was stoutly built, like her brother; and, like her brother, was of imperious turn of mind. But in her face there was a softness that showed through the lines. She looked at her son while slowly, almost absentmindedly, rubbing the frying pan with a little ball of steel wool.

“Darling Caspar, a week ago I said I wouldn't bring it up again, but how are you going to accomplish
anything
in your life with your present attitude? The only thing you know is language. If it is necessary to go to the other side—to West Berlin—to get a light bulb for the radio, why do you not
go
to the other side? The radio the other day said that there are an average of 250,000 crossings every day. Why cannot there be 250,001? I talked with Walter about you just yesterday, and he tells me that you loaf your way right through the day in the office. You are clearly not aware of the advantages you have as a young man working for your uncle, right in his private office. He has always been very indulgent toward me, and he tells me that he likes you personally. But you cannot expect him to tolerate you forever unless you are actively helpful to him. You do understand, don't you, Caspar? You are almost twenty-one years old, and except for your languages, you failed your work in the university. Your father—” but instantly Ilse Allman sought to make her way back: Caspar's father's name was not mentioned in the household. Someday, perhaps, she would talk to her son about his father. Perhaps. For now, she would depersonalize her reference to his dead father. “—Your father's people, you know, were all very industrious. Four brothers, one doctor, one architect, one engineer, one academician. It isn't as though you had been genetically deprived.”