Searching for Wallenberg (6 page)

And for some reason the music led him to another forgotten Wallenberg memory, a television movie from the 1980s starring Richard Chamberlain as the Swedish hero. Very long, and filled with the usual TV emphasis on the obvious melodramatics, Manny recalled, but played credibly by the actor. The show had prodded Manny to wonder about the case at the time. Thus, another subtle marker had been planted quietly in his brain …

“That was good! Really expressive!” approved his teacher, gleaming. “Only in those middle notes I think you could go a bit more slowly, for emphasis, okay?” Josh nodded. “And I definitely think you can use that for one of your audition pieces, yes?”

At this the boy’s broad little face beamed. She asked him to go over a few of the scales before finishing up, and he restarted …

Later, in the rambling country house, Gellerman, after dropping the boy off with his mother in town, made a scotch and water, glanced through the mail, took some cheese and sat in the book-filled living room, putting on the radio. He loved radios almost as much as books, and kept a radio in every room. He was especially fond of an old KLH and a Grundig. (He still preferred those to iPods and earbuds.) The late afternoon filled with the darkening sky, hanging low over the meadow and the forest. The house needed decluttering, for sure— as his ex-wife always complained—but so what? The mounds of books were piled everywhere, but he knew where to find any book, and the wild ménage seemed finer to his eye than the clarity of orderliness. Sitting in his Swedish leather chair, he looked through the new books he had borrowed from the library on Raoul, and drank the scotch. Quietly, he read. After two hours he was stirred, and, acting on an urge, walked to his far corner study to give his new project a little twilight surge. He took out a notebook and scribbled a few notes to add to his gathered pages. Vermont Public Radio 89.5 delivered classical music through his old Emerson radio.

From his old knowledge of the case and the new studies, he saw that the obvious problems with the case remained. Had Raoul been killed by the Russians in 1947? (Originally they said they knew nothing; years later, they claimed heart failure; and in the 1980s, they said he had been shot, but that no records existed—no interrogation or criminal case file, no documentation of the killing or a death certificate.) Had he lived on somewhere in the Gulag? More significantly, why hadn’t he been traded out, or exchanged, by the Swedish government, during those two years in Soviet imprisonment? Or purchased into freedom by the very wealthy and prominent Wallenberg family in Stockholm? Wouldn’t the Rockefellers, for example, have rescued one of their own, by hook or by crook (money, threats, influence)? Manny read a few dozen of the letters between Raoul and his paternal grandfather who had replaced, with affection, the naval father who had died when Raoul was less than a year old. He had tutored the young man well, sending him all over, from Haifa to Capetown, including three years at Ann Arbor for his architecture education. The grandfather’s letters hardly ever mentioned the rich cousins, let alone suggested that Raoul join up with them. In other words, the grandfather and Raoul were on the same page, the same axis of feelings and values regarding money and power.

Gradually Manny began to get a clearer sense of things, a sharper angle: Raoul was the outsider within the conservative and iron-fisted Wallenberg family and its vast banking and business empire. But an outsider with what qualities? Manny wondered and jotted. Was he a threat? If so, what sort?

He took a hike through the long rambling house—a kind of three-part Lego creation of an old house, a barn, a 1930s wing, put together in different decades—arriving in the kitchen and cutting a few slices of cheese and apple, and setting them on a plate with stoned wheat crackers. In the large living room he searched through a few piles of books and found several old black and white postcards from Budapest, of the charming Lancid and Elisabeth Bridges, and of the tree-lined Andrássy Street boulevard. Manny recalled his days there, a few years back, as a visiting professor at the Eötvös Loránd University; his friends Lazslo, Tibor, Loke, Julia, Andras; and the bronze statue of RW near his apartment in the second district of Buda. The bronze Raoul had seemed to eye him daily as he had walked up the Szilágyi Erzsébet Fasor to shop at Budagyöngye. (He learned that his Salgo Professorship was named after the same man, Nicolas Salgo, who had commissioned the sculpture.)

Revved up, Gellerman opened his laptop and began writing a scene:

At the grand mansion of Marcus Wallenberg in Stockholm, in the salon with family portraits in gilded frames on the walls, a red-jacketed servant appeared with drinks on a silver tray.

“I don’t really see how we should arrange anything, Marcus, without putting ourselves and our firm at some risk,” said Jacob.

Marcus nodded. “Maybe great risk, I concur.”

“Also,” Jacob went on, “it’s not like he’s one of us really. His father was part of our inner circle, to be sure, but when Raoul Oscar died, the connection grew much thinner. His mother—well, she didn’t count. As for that disagreeable grandfather …”

“Yes, I understand, and quite agree.” Marcus drank his aquavit.

“And Raoul’s personality … arrogant, skeptical, not a family player. I never trusted him, or even liked him. Far too independent. And stubbornly so. Even when we gave him those few handout jobs to perform, he had to go around poking his nose everywhere.”

“And not really interested in Enskilda or any of our business ventures, no matter—”

“Or very interested in females, from what we have observed. Just the one so-called girlfriend and ten-minute ‘engagement’ perhaps, but that ended quickly enough. Who knew if that was even
real
? Or a clever camouflage, like all of them? And since then? Never a steady woman, definitely strange. And we will not permit
queers
in our family.”

Marcus nodded. “Too much risk all around. Practically speaking, he knows a little too much about our business. Our dealings with the Germans. And remember, he looks at matters from a very different angle. I cautioned you a long time ago”—he accepted a new round of drinks—“we never should have let him get so near to our private arrangements and our international dealings.”

“He cannot
prove
anything, of course.”

“True enough. Still, when I go off to the states to clean up things and try to get us off that nuisance FBI Blacklist, it would be most unfortunate if there were any ‘entanglements’ dangling whatsoever. And Raoul, let us face it, could create a few if he wished to.”

“I don’t think—”

“He is a purist ethically, isn’t he? The naïve fool!”

They sipped their aquavits, in their monogrammed glasses.

“Then we will do nothing on the Lybianka matter, agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“And if the shrewd PM or the king should ask our advice, our counsel?”

“Sympathy from a distance, neutrality from up close. Whatever the government wishes to do, we will respect that wish, but not push them in any way, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Will it look … odd? Or cold-blooded?”

“Oh, I think it will look
patriotic
, first and foremost. Our family and Enskilda Bank have always sought to look like, and act like, true Swedish patriots.”

A pause, while the grandfather clock ticked loudly.

“Poor fellow, though—Soviet prisons are not exactly a tea party.”

“He brought it all on himself. The kind of headstrong and stubborn fellow he was, and remained. Helping Jews! Imagine! Why? What business was it of his anyway?”

“Well,” Marcus considered, “his side of the family did have some Jewish blood, ages ago, before the conversion. And his aim may have been … idealistic.”

“In our day and age,” Jacob declared, “there is only room for aims that are realistic, determinedly realistic.”

“Come, let us take our drinks in to dinner, and not let the ladies complain of our usual lateness.”

The two gentlemen stood up.

Gellerman stopped, leaned back, read his pages. Too exaggerated? A
convenient
scene? Was there enough evidence to support this psychological picture, this 1945–46 “situation” of these tough Wallenbergs scheming for their self-protection and abandoning Raoul? Well, yes, there was, and if some of it was only circumstantial as yet, it was strongly circumstantial. Verify, only verify, Moritz Schlick had said, in Manny’s college reading. He recalled the aphoristic wisdom of the Austrian philosopher. Not an easy task, he told himself. Would he need Stockholm, Budapest, Moscow, to fill in the gaps, test his ideas? Or would Google do the job—well, fill in parts at least? … His imagination would do the rest.

He looked out at the Japanese crabapple tree, whose pink May blossoms made the month burst with delicate beauty.

Why was he getting involved this way, drawn in to Raoul’s ordeal and mysteries? The thesis may have sharpened Manny’s probe, and the surprising hidden memories unfolded to enhance the interest, true enough; and yet, was there more? Something deeper, which he didn’t know of? Was there something about Raoul and his situation(s), his outsider status, his sense of family exile, his apparent aloneness, that appealed especially to Manny? Well, he’d have to wait and see it through, work it through, and then understand, judge. Wallenberg was a personal conundrum wrapped in a mystery of history, which in itself drew in Manny the historian.

“Wallenberg and Gellerman,” he murmured to himself. “What a strange pairing.”

The next day Manny played tennis at the indoor courts with his regular partner, Peter Harrison of the English department. They were a good match: roughly the same age of mid- sixties, the same sturdy five-foot-eight build, and had the same hearty stamina and competitive desire. Peter was a steady player, a crafty southpaw, and the two battled to a close match for an hour. Manny loved the sport, which he’d learned relatively late in life at age twenty-nine, and continued to absorb new aspects of strategy. Against this player, for example, he had to cope with high lobs from his backhand side, to his own backhand, and he had two choices: either to hit the ball with his weak backhand or to run around it and smash it with his stronger forehand, either cross-court, or down the line. Today the tendonitis in his forearm felt well enough to hit through, so Manny ran around the lob for his firm forehand hits and did well. They played a 6–6 set, and then ran to 8–6 in the tiebreaker, with Manny losing. They shook hands, chatted, arranged another match, and showered. Afterward, Peter asked what he was working on, and Manny found himself answering, “Oh, I think I’m onto a new project, something over in East Europe, but it’s a little too early to talk about it just yet.”

In a few minutes he was driving over to the college, body relaxed, spirit lifted—as from yoga—and he grew conscious of the taken-for-granted pleasures of this little town, the ease of daily acts, the rounds of sporting pleasures. Something like what Raoul had said about his life in Ann Arbor, in letters to his grandfather, including tennis. Immediately Manny’s sunny feeling diminished as he thought of that faraway young man wasting away in the Soviet prison, his harrowing two years there, and uncertain ending … Gripped by a darker feeling, Manny felt that faraway hand for the next few hours, before he came up again.

He sat in his office and read through the thesis draft once more, for Angela was coming to see him later. There was not much new in this reading, as he had expected. Raoul was still a great savior of Jews, etc., except for the brief few pages on that fanciful Budapest lady and her mad fantasy; and something else, buried in a long footnote: the sightings by those other prisoners. These were cited in a Swedish-Russian Working Group paper. Well, he’d have to check into that—maybe have Angela “research” it on Google, where “research” of fifteen minutes equalled fifteen hours of the old ways of pursuing a subject—and probably missed crucial tucked-away items. Also mentioned was an unpublished manuscript suggesting again that RW may have been that double spy working for the Germans and Americans, this one written by a Soviet émigré living in New York. He recalled that the
U.S. News
article was cowritten by a Hungarian émigré, and realized that conspiracy theory was an East European specialty, like one of their rich strudels or thick custards. Manny jotted down the information, and would check up on that as well.