Too Bad to Die (22 page)

Carefully, he set down his cup. His mind was racing. “Does Michael know I'm here?”

“I didn't tell him. I haven't told anybody. You said secrecy was vital.”

“I did.” He leaned toward her impulsively and kissed her cheek. “Nothing so precious as a discreet woman, Grace. Keep mum. I'll talk to Hudson myself. Tell him to find me here as soon as possible, will you?”

H
e had hoped to present the Sword in the middle of the afternoon, so that the gift would not dominate the dinner hour at the Russian Embassy, but poor Pamela's illness had made a general muck of things and the schedule was unavoidably delayed. The lunch meeting among the three principals had been moved back, so that they gathered at three o'clock to take up the issue of Overlord.

The discussions had not gone well, in Churchill's opinion. Stalin was adamant that the Allied invasion of Western Europe must take place by May, and must be launched from England across the Channel into France. He had no notion how difficult such a seaborne invasion would be—or how brutally the Channel had devoured any army that attempted to cross her. Churchill had argued for the Mediterranean as the point of attack, with a land assault north through the Balkans. But Roosevelt seemed to be leaning toward Stalin's point of view. Roosevelt controlled the main part of the Allied invasion force. And that meant, to Churchill's dismay, the American preference would probably prevail. His personal ability to use England's influence to England's long-term good was failing. He felt outnumbered. Uneasy. Irrelevant.

Roosevelt had drawn him aside at one point that afternoon and whispered to him bluntly: “I'm going to try to get on Uncle Joe's good side, Winston. I know you won't mind if I pretend to be a little hard on you, now and then. It doesn't mean a thing.”

Idiotic words, in the midst of a tense and delicate negotiation about the future of a global war. They should have decided beforehand what their joint position would be. But Roosevelt had resisted his attempts to plan. Churchill understood, with desolation in his gut, that Roosevelt had no need to stand with him anymore. Franklin had learned from the past few years—from Churchill's wisdom and long experience. He was ready to cast aside his mentor now, and act alone.

The afternoon talks ended without a decision. Overlord would be raised again tomorrow, and the day after that. But Churchill suspected the decision was already privately made. They would not be attacking through the Balkans.

It was six o'clock, therefore, before the three delegations could be mustered in force, in the Russian Embassy's large conference room—a beautiful elongated oval, rather like a race course, lofty and lined in cypress paneling—for the Sword of Stalingrad.

Honor guards of British and Soviet troops were ranked down both long sides of the room, and a hush prevailed, rather sacred, as though a Holy Relic were about to be unveiled. Stalin stood on a dais with his generals beside him. Lavrentiy Beria, short and solid and grimly bespectacled, hovered behind the Marshal's back. His son, Sergo, was nowhere to be seen.

Churchill was still nursing his voice. He cleared his throat noisily as he waited outside the conference room, and took a nip of whiskey from the flask he carried. He was wearing a dark blue Royal Air Force commodore's uniform. This was a conscious sartorial choice. At the moment he glorified Stalingrad, he intended everyone in the room to remember the RAF boys who had died over the English Channel, vanquishing Hitler's Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

There was a Soviet military band set up somewhere and it had launched into “God Save the King.” He lifted his chin and marched ceremoniously into the long room, a lieutenant following him with the Sword. “God Save the King” segued into “The Internationale.” Churchill halted before Marshal Stalin, bowed, and took the scabbard from the lieutenant.

“I am commanded to present this Sword of honor as a token of homage of the British people,” he said. Homage. Good lord. What a choice of words. As though this man were God. The Press will have a field day.

He placed the Sword firmly in Stalin's outstretched hands.

The Russian pirate let his eyes run the length of the scabbard. Then, to Churchill's surprise, he kissed it and said something in Russian.

“You have the thanks of the Russian people,” said his translator, Valentin Berezhkov.

Churchill felt his eyes grow moist. He had been afraid, these last few days, that the entire effort would be for naught—that Stalin would place no value on the gift or the emotion behind it—but he could see, now, that ritual was important everywhere, among Communists and aristocrats alike. How else to elevate the loss and pain of war, if not with the trappings of
glory
? He had always known how to strike the right chord—in speech or gesture—that could render the commonplace historic. It was one of his gifts. In the Marlborough blood. A relic, like the Sword, of a vanished power.

Stalin offered the Sword to Roosevelt, who was seated—as he was throughout the public events of this conference—in a straight-backed chair. A bit of theater that preserved the illusion the President could come and go at will. The wheelchair appeared only in the private corridors of the embassy. Stalin was keeping his allies' secrets.

Roosevelt unsheathed the Sword in a debonair fashion, and examined the writing engraved on the blade. “Truly,” he said, “they had hearts of steel.”

The translator translated. Stalin threw back his head and laughed. Inappropriate, perhaps—but
Stalin
in his native tongue meant
Man of Steel
.
Perhaps he thought Roosevelt was making a pun. Never mind. Roosevelt sheathed the blade and returned it to Stalin.

Which was when it happened. In front of the entire assembly—the gathered members of three delegations, several hundred strong—Stalin turned and casually handed the Sword of Stalingrad to his old friend, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who was standing on the dais near him. Voroshilov clutched at the unexpected burden and grasped it upside down. The Sword clattered out of the scabbard and struck his foot, bouncing off the dais to the parquet floor.

There was a gasp—from whom?

A titter, quickly converted to a cough, from the far right of the room.

Churchill flushed to the roots of his hair, glanced at Stalin—who was smiling strangely—and then bent to pick up the trophy. Voroshilov was ahead of him, however, spluttering in his guttural way. He dove for the Sword and the scabbard, clapped them together with unseemly haste, and scurried back to his place on the dais.

And that was that.

Someone in the delegations began to applaud. The band played a Russian folk tune—sad and plaintive. Churchill bowed again, feeling overblown and idiotic. He hoisted himself up onto the dais and bent over Roosevelt's chair.

“That fellow,” he said, with a nod toward Voroshilov, “was never trained for cavalry.”

“But he's damned good at a stab in the back,” Roosevelt murmured.

So he saw Stalin's smile, too, Churchill thought. And flushed, if anything, more deeply.

—

“S
HE HAS RETURNED
, that English woman, like a fool in love,” Siranoush announced, as she handed Ian a bowl of stew.

He was sitting at Zadiq's conference table, poring over a map. He was famished, but the scent drifting up from the bowl was dispiriting. “Lamb, again.”

“With eggplant,” she said encouragingly. “It is called
khoresht bademjan,
Arev says, and he gets it from a woman who cooks in the bazaar. You should eat it. I do not know when last you ate.”

“But my friend.” He set the lamb stew aside and rose. “I must go speak to her.”

“If she is a proper woman she will know how to wait.” Siranoush sat down with her back to the fire. It turned her tumbled hair to shot silk. “She is an operational risk, Bond. Wandering the bazaar twice today with her nose in a perfume bottle. In her ugly English uniform. There are German agents everywhere in Tehran, and they will see your fool. She draws attention.”

“She doesn't realize. Not all of us grew up in the bosom of the NKVD,” he said lightly.

To his surprise, Siranoush turned her head as though he had struck her.

“Some of us had no choice,” she said.

—

G
RACE WAS
looking for him this time, if only out of the corner of her eye. To Ian's practiced gaze she looked self-conscious, too aware of her movements among the perfume bottles, as though she were running through a rehearsal. He glanced around for Hudders in a neighboring aisle, but there was no lanky American in civilian clothes examining spices or walking sticks. He approached her in a leisurely fashion and waited until she had seen him. She smiled perfunctorily.

“How odd that we should meet like this, Commander Bond, twice in one day!” she exclaimed. “Among the perfume sellers, too!”

Siranoush was wrong. Grace had never been a fool. Not even in love.

“Was the attar of roses disappointing?”

“It's lovely, of course,” she said, “but I think I shall make a gift of it. I want something fresher for myself—perhaps orange water. I believe it's one of the specialties here.”

“Where's Hudson?” he murmured, as he watched her swoop and flutter among the bottles.

“Couldn't come. The PM presented the Sword and the known world was packed like sardines in the neighbor's best room.”

“Of course. I'd forgotten about the ceremony.” Ian shoved his hands in his pockets with forced ease. “What now?”

“There's a dinner, but Hudson mayn't be going. I'll try to send him here later, but I can't promise. I'm supposed to be on Signals duty. For your Professor. He won't talk to a regular embassy staffer.”

“If Hudders can't get away tonight, tell him to try in the morning,” Ian said. “In the meantime, tell him to watch Harriman like a hawk.”

She stared, a bottle of perfume suspended in midair.

“It can't be too difficult. They're both Americans.”

“Harriman?” she repeated. “Because he sleeps with Pam Churchill? By that logic, you could suspect half the men in England.”

“Cat,” he said.

—

T
HE DINNER
went from bad to worse.

Only Stalin and his interpreter, Berezhkov, were there to represent the Soviets; Molotov was indisposed. Churchill wondered briefly if he'd eaten the same stuff that had made Roosevelt sick the night before. His bronchitis was so bad he could taste very little and had almost no appetite. He made a show of pushing his food around on his plate and concentrated on the wine, of which there was far too much. They were all half drunk. That would serve Stalin's purposes very well, Churchill thought acidly. Whether he felt outnumbered by his allies or strangely resentful of the ceremony that had just been enacted, the glorious Sword put into his hands, Stalin was vicious this evening. He offered up barbed comments through his interpreter that only the enforced goodwill of his guests prevented from being received as insults. He was particularly cruel to Churchill—almost as though by offering the Sword of Stalingrad, the PM had deliberately embarrassed his host, who had nothing to offer England in return.

I am a duke's grandson, Churchill thought, showing up a barbarian warlord from Georgia. I should have known how he would take it.

But he hadn't, and in retaliation Stalin threw his vile pronouncements in Churchill's face.
Just because Russians are simple people,
his interpreter said blandly,
does not mean that we are blind and stupid as well. We can see what is before our faces.
How to respond? Should he utter a hearty “Of course! Naturally! No one would suggest . . .”

And what on earth was he expected to reply to this?
You nurse a secret affection for Germany. You wish to see a soft peace. A negotiated surrender. You wish your friends to survive with their dignity intact. As for me—I believe that fifty to a hundred thousand German officers of the Commanding Staff must be liquidated . . .

Liquidated! It was outrageous. Perhaps this was why Molotov was absent; no Foreign Minister worthy of his portfolio could sit by while such despicable jokes were uttered.

Franklin's son Elliott was at dinner this evening—a strange concession, to admit family when military chiefs were absent. He had downed at least four glasses of red wine and his face was beet red. A weak and anxious smile was fixed on his face. “Kill 'em all,” he agreed. “The Nazi swine.”

Churchill's frown deepened and he reached for his wine, feeling the edge of a black depression knife across his brain. There was no basis for trust in the room. No possibility of
working
with such a man.

Roosevelt was grinning determinedly, as though the conversation were all in jolly good fun. Churchill darted a glance at his old friend over the rim of his wineglass and detected a look he had last seen on the playing fields at Harrow, the sort of expression two bullies share when they're enjoying a joke at a third boy's expense. I'm Third Boy, he thought morosely, and so is England now we've exhausted ourselves in this war. These two will carve up the globe between them and ask us to thank them for it.

“Now, now, Marshal Stalin,” Roosevelt cried in the gayest of voices, “surely we can agree to shoot just forty-nine thousand. It looks better if the number's odd.”

Stalin made a show of laughing. As though so many more corpses in the tally of carnage was a better tribute than a trumpery sword.

Churchill's rage reached its tipping point.

“Criminals must pay for their crimes,” he said furiously, “and so must individuals who commit barbarous acts. But the cold-blooded murder of soldiers who fought courageously for their country will never be tolerated. In accordance with the Moscow document,
which I myself wrote
and both your countries signed, the guilty must stand trial at the place where their crimes were committed. But wholesale slaughter in the name of political expediency? Never!”

He threw down his napkin, pushed back his chair from the table, and stalked from the dining room. Had they forgotten the Moscow Declaration so soon? It had been ratified only a month ago. It outlined a reasoned approach to justice and retribution in the postwar world. Trials, not firing squads. A United Nations, not a witch hunt.