Fail Safe (11 page)

Betty's comments had just about done it for the party. Everyone drank and chatted politely for a few minutes. Then there was the Intricate ballet of social disengagement. Black knew that their host would not forget his heretical position. The Senator was a methodical man.

In the taxicab back to their apartment neither Black nor Betty had spoken. She had fallen asleep on his shoulder; her teeth grinding.

General Black snapped back to the present as the Cessna 810 approached Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington. Looking down on the water-veined flats of the Chesapeake Bay area, he regretted that the air approach to Andrews didn't take him over Washington proper. He never ceased to be stirred by the splendor of the Washington Monument's slim white spire, the awesome majesty of the Lincoln Monument The Pentagon, though, that was something else again. Its low, squat improbable shape was not designed to capture an airman's fancy. It was more like a great, bureaucratic land battleship pulled up alongside the Potomac. That's about what it was, mused Black, laying siege to the helpless flotilla of weaker bureaucratic ships across the Potomac.

Back to work, Blackie, boy-general, he said to himself. Life is earnest, life is reaL

He brought the plane in for a skilled and effortless landing. Ten minutes later he was in a staff car and on his way to the Pentagon.

The President looked across the desk at Buck. Buck knew that the President did not see him. His eyes were slightly squinting. Buck twisted in his chair. The motion caught the President's eye. His face suddenly hardened and he seemed to come back into the room.

"What do you think of that list, Buck?" he asked, pointing at the card that Buck still held. Buck hesitated, lifted the card as if it were very delicate, glanced again at the names. He felt like licking his lips, but resisted. His mind reached for an answer, something that would make sense. It was impossible.

"I only know them as names," he said quietly. "A few'I have never even heard of."

He saw approval in the President's face. Then the President was not seeing him any more, but was abstracted.

"Relax, Buck," the President said. "We're in an emergency, but we've got time, a little anyway. Time and a decision. That's what an emergency is. Now the decision is what those people on the list have to help us with. The time we can't control. It just passes."

It sounded silly, but Buck knew that the President was not thinking what he was saying. His voice and his mind 'were operating on different levels. Then they came together and the President was seeing Buck again.

"Buck, that group sees one another all the time, day after day," the President said. "They've probably talked over things so much that they've got a nice committee solution for everything. Right?"

"Yes, I imagine they have," Buck said.

"The only problem is that this is something they have no solution for," the President said. "Bogan told me that in Omaha they had no standard operating procedure for this kind of thing. So we've got a novel situation, something completely new."

The President swung in his chair and looked at his secretary. Quite automatically her pencil lifted, moved toward the notebook.

"Blackie's in the Pentagon group, isn't he?" the President asked.

Buck's eyes ran down the list

"There is a General Black, Mr. President," he said. His throat felt dry.

"That's Blackie," the President said. "We went to college together." He paused. "Blackie's a bright boy, got guts and I'd trust him with almost anything. He can think on his feet, deal with a novel situation. Trouble is that either they'll 'make a committee solution or they'll all listen to someone like Blackie. He doesn't talk much, except when he believes in something. . . ." His voice dropped and he stared at the wall, not seeing it. Then be swung back to them, entirely in focus, speaking briskly. "Next we need someone who's not a Pentagon person, but who knows his way around. Whom do you suggest?"

He asked the question of both Buck and Mrs. Johnson. Buck stiffened. His mind went flat, incapable of memory. He could, quite literally, not recall the name of a single person. His mother? Gypsy Rose Lee? Old Mr. Carmichael in the apartment below? He must be losing his mind.

'Mrs. Johnson looked at the President, then flicked over a few pages in her notebook. "They've got that Professor Groteschele out there for the 'briefing," she said. "He's not one of them. I mean he doesn't work at the Pentagon."

The President rocked in his chair.

"lie doesn't work for the Pentagon. That's right," he said slowly. "But that book of his almost made him one of them." He paused. "O.K., Johnnie, he'll add something to a bunch of people that have been seeing one another too often. Tell the Pentagon to include Groteschele in the advisory group. Tell Swenson that Groteschele is personally cleared by me and that he can say anything he wants on any subject."

"As long as it's relevant," Mrs. Johnson said and smiled tightly.

The President grinned. "Swenson has a pretty well-developed sense of the relevant," he said.

"I know that, Mr. President," Mrs. Johnson said.

"I know that you know that, Mrs. Johnson," the President said and made a mock bow.

She smiled, turned, and left the room.

Buck sat silently with the President of the United States. He knew they were waiting but he did not know what for.

Walter Groteschele awoke at precisely 5:80 A.M. He did not awake at the sound of an alarm dock and, indeed, he did not even wear a wrist watch. Despite this he was certain of the time. He was awake fully. As he swung out of bed his mind began to block out the day. It was a quick, neat process, something that occupied him only from his bed to the bathroom. By 6:10 he would be showered, shaved, dressed, nourished by one cup of instant coffee, and waiting for the train at Scarsdale. An hour to La Guardia-8:30. An hour to Washington (and his second cup of coffee, at 10,000 feet)- 9:30. At the Pentagon by ten minutes to ten.

The check list was complete. The day was under control.

Groteschele stepped on the bathroom scales-i 85. He had weighed 165 when he was twenty-one. He knew some men who refused to weigh themselves, were afraid to get the bad news. Groteschele weighed himself every day of his life. As he stepped off the scales he even forced himself to think what the additional fat meant. Face reality, he told himself with a quiet pride. Facing reality was what had gotten him where he was.

As he showered, rubbing his body with a rough natural sponge, he ran over the physical differences between

twenty-one and forty-eight Then he had been lean and muscular. Now there was an overlay of fat about the torso. Not gross, but noticeable in a suit. Softer. Around the waist the flesh was a bulge. Where it showed most was in his neck and face. His collars were usually tight and bit into the flesh, making his face slightly pink. As he shaved he calculated whether or not it would be possible to exercise the fat off. The calculation did not take long.

He did not have time for exercise.

Only once during his five-stage (car, train, taxi, plane, taxi) trip from Scarsdale to Washington did Groteschele's mind relax and think of anything except the briefing he would present It was in the taxicab from Grand Central to La Guardia. There was something about the luxuryof a taxicab, to ride alone while others rode in buses, that made Groteschele think of his youth. Briefly he permitted himself the luxury of letting his mind, wander.

Groteschele's father was a tough, brilliant, and hardworking physician, a highly skilled surgeon. He was also a Jew, unfortunately in Germany. Early in the 1930s he had seen what was coming. He had argued withother Jews in his native Hamburg that there were only two alternatives: arm and fight, or leave Germany. The great majority of his friends and relatives, anchored by their possessions and inured to the prospect of suffering, stayed in Germany. Many of them died in gas ovens.

Walter Groteschele was fifteen when his father abandoned his medical practice and moved from Hamburg, via London and New York, to Cincinnati. Before his father could practice medicine in America it was required that he take two years of residency and pass a series of examinations. He was never able to get enough money ahead to do the two years' residency. Emil Groteschele worked first as a ditchdigger for a utilities company. He could not, however, stand the calluses and the coarsening of his surgeon's hands. Eventually he wound up as a butcher in a kosher butcher shop. This was an irony, for Emil GroteSchele was a Reform Jew and anything but devout. But the work did allow him to use his hands in somewhat the fashion for which they had been exquisitely trained.

Emil Groteschele was not an embittered man. He had understood clearly what his prospects were when he left Berlin. He was saving his life and the lives of his family. Nothing more. One of the few times that his son had seen him angry was when the subject of the Diary of Anne Frank came up. Emil Groteschele had offended the Jews of Cincinnati by arguing that Anne Frank and her family had acted like imbeciles. Rather than hiding in an attic and clutching their Jewishness to them they should have made plans to escape. Failing that, they should have been prepared to fight the Nazis when the final day came. "The steps leading up to that miserable attic should have been red with Nazi blood-and that of the Frank family," Dr. Groteschele argued bitterly.

"If each Jew in Germany had been prepared to take one SS trooper with him before he was sent to the camps and the gas ovens, precious few Jews would have been arrested," Emil Groteschele argued. "At some point Hitler and the SS would have stopped. Face it. If every Jew who was arrested had walked to the door with a pistol in his hand and started shooting at the local heroes, how long would the Nazis have kept it up? At around a few hundred they would have started to think twice. At a few thousand they would have started to shake a bit. If it got to twenty thousand, they

would have called it off. But the first Jews who shuffled quietly off to death camps or hid like mice in attics were instruments of destruction of the rest."

Groteschele knew that his father considered all of life a battle. He was a complete Darwinian; so much so that he never expressed self-pity for his fall from master surgeon to journeyman butcher.

"It's a new environment. I'm not as efficient as the Americans," the muscular determined man said in a pitiless voice, as if he were talking of someone else. "The American was bred for this environment; the weak ones disappeared long ago. I was bred for a softer environment: Jewish ladies with too much fat, rabbis with ulcers, people who ate too much sour cream, lox, matzoth balls." He stared at his son. "Every group protects itself, just as the individual does. Don't waste time whining. Be good enough to get into the group you Want."

His son had taken the advice seriously. He attacked knowledge as if it were an enemy. By the time he was a senior he had won every academic honor in the Cincinnati public schools.

When Groteschele went off to a small Ohio college he had three separate scholarships and not the slightest notion of what he wanted to study. His first year he took liberal-arts courses and studied his classmates. It was reassuring. They were uncertainly motivated, pleasant, anxions about dates, inattentive to lectures, obsessed with material objects-cashmere sweaters, convertibles, record players, stolen college banners. They were the new Jews, Groteschele thought, binding themselves with the invisible links of possessions, but they lacked the drive and ability to absorb punishment that the real Jew had.

Grbteschele majored in mathematics. He went about

making the choice systematkally. He learned nothing from talking to his classmates. Instead he. sought out the brightest professors on the campus and questioned them. He pushed them on what American industry would be like in five years. Their advice was unanimous. The nation would be at war or finishing a war and science would be going through a new surge of progress. It would be sparked by mathematics. He was a Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and summa cum laude at graduation; and did not, literally, know the names of more than a dozen of his classmates.

Before Groteschele could find a job, waves of Japanese planesawept over Pearl Harbor and changed all of our lives. By now Groteschele had developed a prescience, a hard intuition, about what would happen in the future. He did it by the elimination of hopes and the substitution of the calculation of realities. He applied his father's Darwinism in a methodical and tough manner. He was no Cassandra but he tended always to look carefully and cautiously at where he would be in five years and to move with what was inevitable. His calculation led him to volunteer at once for military duty.

He was selected for OCS and when he finished he was assigned to a group of officers who interviewed German prisoners as part of their processing before being sent to POW camps throughout the country.

At first the job had a delicious undertone of vengeance to it and Groteschele did not deny this to himself. Day after day the men who had bullied Jews in the comfortable little towns of Germany, had swaggered in their party uniforms, had roared and lusted for war, now paraded in front of him. They were bitter-eyed, frightened, uncertain, homesick. Groteschele

found them a disappointment and he was surprised at his own reaction.

After a few weeks the interviewing became dull. It was impossible to stay angry at lines of potato-fat men with vacuous eyes who were slack and weary from the Atlantic crossing, who always whined their ignorance of concentration camps. "Konzentration camps, ach nein, Herr Leutnant," eyes bulging with fake surprise. "Impossible. I never heard of it." And then the inevItable statement about being a little man, a man in the ranks, a man who carried out orders, a man who did his duty, a man who was secretly anti-Nazi.

After a few months Groteschele, -because of his skill In German, was able to get himself transferred to the section which interviewed SS troopers. These interviews were longer, more concentrated, more meaningful. The interviewing officer could, in fact, question an SS man as long as he wished. Groteschele always guided the conversation to the Jewish question. The SS men stared back at him, unafraid and their faces expressionless, and said, "Rabbits. The Jews are like rabbits, but without the speed of a rabbit." Always it was a rabbit or an undernourished rat or a mouse to which they compared the Jews.