Stained Glass (3 page)

The disciplined left, and of course the papers in East Germany, had the ready answer. Wintergrin was this season's Hitler!

In late December of 1949
Neues Deutschland
ran a large feature section triumphantly announcing that a search in Sweden revealed that there was no record that Axel Wintergrin had been detained in a Swedish concentration camp. The article suggested he had feigned opposition to Hitler for the sole purpose of sparing himself the rigors of military life and the dangers of service on the eastern front, and had spent the war years in Swedish dissipation. The story, given wide circulation everywhere in Europe, and intensively circulated within West Germany, brought a tide of curiosity and evolved quickly into dismay in his camp. Wintergrin's failure during that heavy week to answer questions about the sensational charges caused apprehension among even his closest followers, though those who knew him did their best to reassure everyone that he would be vindicated, as they firmly believed, somehow, he would be.

Finally he scheduled a press conference—and limited attendance to six journalists. What he had to say—he gave out in a general release—was not easily said in the hectic circumstances of a general press conference. (“Shee-yit!” the dumbstruck, excluded New York
Times
correspondent in Bonn reacted, on receiving the notice. “Who does this young kraut think he is? Immanuel Kant calling a press conference to explain his
Critique of Pure Reason?
”) But clearly there had been no political favoritism in making out the list—one was the correspondent of
Der Spiegel
, a journal whose hostility to Wintergrin was rancorous and sustained.

The meeting took place in a private dining room in the Rheinhotel Dreesen at Godesberg, where ten years earlier Hitler had talked Chamberlain out of hunks of Czechoslovakia. The reporters arrived on time, and there were a score of others outside the room, patiently but firmly denied entrance by Wintergrin's friend Roland Himmelfarb. One reporter-photographer from
L'Humanité
pressed for admittance, and three burly figures, manifestly at his service, added their pressure to the reporter's attempt at a forced entry. Surrounding photographers snapped pictures of the contest. Himmelfarb, holding the door, called out for the help of hotel personnel. Axel Wintergrin, disembarked from the small Mercedes driven by a student volunteer, entered the hotel lobby at the height of the commotion. An aide, rushing to relieve Himmelfarb, paused to brief Wintergrin in telegraphic bursts. “Communist bastard …
L'Humanité
… here with thugs …” Wintergrin reached out, collared the French reporter, and lifted him whole up on his toes, his nose within a few inches of Wintergrin's, holding him there silently until the noise abated. “Go back to your commissar in Paris. Or, better still, head that way”—Wintergrin pointed his nose to the east “to the Soviet Union, and tell them that force in Germany will be used only
against
tyranny, not to promote it.” He dropped the paunchy reporter, whose swagger had diminished as, one by one, his companions had been subdued by Wintergrin's partisans, and he fell almost to the floor before salvaging what he could of his aplomb and, muttering something about how Nazis will always be Nazis, scurried out of the lobby, the most photographed photographer of the season. Wintergrin walked into the room and apologized to the press for detaining them.

Wordlessly he distributed a copy of the citation he had received from the King of Norway. He gave the names of three Norwegians with whom he had associated in the resistance. He would prefer, he said, to answer questions after the press had satisfied itself of the validity of his representation. The first questioner asked why had he not revealed his actual story, instead of saying that he had been detained in Sweden.

It was precisely because he had in fact been active in the anti-Nazi resistance, he said.

“What was there to hide then?”

“The German people know now that it was wrong to support Hitler. I did not want, in 1945, to lecture my countrymen, most of whom, after all, were Germans fighting under Nazism, not Nazis fighting under Hitler. Their punishment was heavy enough without adding to it the reproaches of a twenty-five-year old.”

“Are you then saying that Germany now, the Germany of 1949, is different from the Germany of 1945?”

“Even in 1945 the support for Hitler was largely inertial. If the war had ended, and Hitler had faced a free election, he would have lost. There is no significant nostalgia for Hitler today. Those unhappy Germans in the East who continue to live under tyranny do so because they have not—yet—been given another choice.”

The meeting ended. In a matter of hours, Norwegian reporters tracked down the former resistance fighters. Olin Justsen was now a naval architect, living in Kristiansand, and he said to the reporter, Yes, he had known “Alec”—he knew him by no other name, but recognized him on seeing his photograph in the paper—and had participated with him in two missions.

“What were they?”

“Well,” said Justsen, puffing on his pipe, his eyes glazed, his hand trembling slightly, “one of them required attaching an explosive to the hull of a freighter sent over by the Germans to take a load of heavy water to Germany. That mission was accomplished.”

“What was the other?”

“The other,” Justsen said, in measured accents—he had consulted his own conscience rigorously on this, anticipating the question—“involved the elimination of an individual.”

“Who?” the reporter asked.

“We do not give out his name.”

“What had he done?”

“We do not describe his crimes.”

“Was he a German?”

“We do not give out his nationality.”

Neither of the other two Norwegians questioned knew about the assassination. They had served with Wintergrin on other missions. Pooling their information, reporters counted two parachute jumps into German bases in Norway, three demolition jobs, two intelligence sorties into Nazi installations, plus the mysterious assassination. Rhino Heitger, the grand old man of the resistance, would not talk except to say that from the time Wintergrin presented himself in 1939, occupying a desk in routine intelligence work, through the occupation, until liberation, he had refused no assignment except one that might take him to his native country, betraying his identity, and imperiling his mother.

The information, consolidated in the major newsrooms of Europe, was sulkily reported by the hostile press and, dispiritedly, the newsmen gave up that line of attack on Axel Wintergrin, which would have taken care of so many problems, if only
Neues Deutschland
had been right. When next Wintergrin spoke, on Wenceslaus Day in Frankfurt, he was given a standing ovation before he uttered a word. He received this by fastening the two bottom buttons on his coat, and smiling his half-distracted smile. His speech was on the usual themes, and later, at the press conference, he spoke the words, in answer to a question, that caused the phone to ring at the home of Pyotr Ivanovich Ilyich in Moscow, even though it was almost midnight there; and, in the United States, where it was late afternoon, caused an aide to walk right into the office of Allen Dulles. What, the reporter at Frankfurt had asked, were Count Wintergrin's plans? Why, he said, his plans were to organize his movement into a political party to compete in the elections in November, which elections he was certain of winning.

Having won them, he would proceed to liberate East Germany.

CHAPTER 3

After Blackford Oakes's mission in England was completed—his maiden mission, he mused—it was thought wise by his superior to immerse him in his trade in order to fortify his cover. “You've been posing as an engineer, Black. Maybe it's time to remind yourself that that's actually what you got your degree in at Yale.” Black was listening at a safe house in London to his experienced, relaxed superior, Singer Callaway, the only American in England who knew that Blackford Oakes was a deep-cover agent of the CIA. “Figure out a convincing way to terminate your project here in the next couple of weeks—you can say the sponsoring foundation has run out of funds; or maybe that they're satisfied with what you've already submitted—figure out exactly what to tell your mother and your friends. Go back to Washington. Tell your mother you have to report to New York on the work you did: hell, Black, you attend to the details, then let me know what the story is and I'll get it coordinated with New York.”

Blackford did so, and it did not prove difficult. No one knew enough about his arcane work, researching historic projects, to question him.

His mother gave a little farewell dinner for him at her house on Portland Place, and his sartorially overstuffed stepfather, dressed in velvet smoking jacket and gold-braided evening slippers, delivered an affectionate and prolonged toast. Black loved the unabashed orotundity of it. A couple of glasses of port, and Sir Alec Sharkey sounded like Mr. Micawber. While managing to look exaggeratedly, impossibly British, he nevertheless looked proudly in the direction of his stepson, as though they were of one flesh and blood. Blackford, at twenty-six, six months a resident of London, was by then experienced in the celebrated amenities of upper-class British life. He rose to his feet, said soothing things about British engineering technology, and—as was always expected of him—made genial references to British ways and institutions. Ah, dear old England, Blackford thought, while his lips were going through the motions: But what can the rest of the world reasonably expect of you, after all you have been through? At least you have yourself a first rate queen, who cares …” And so, on my leave-taking, I wish to thank Sir Alec for all his patience and goodness during the past months, and to thank all his friends—and my friends—who have been so kind to me. And of course, to toast, with suppressed emotions on the subject of her expatriation from our native land, my beloved mother, Lady Sharkey.” His mother rose with tears in her eyes, and Blackford took his seat, the object of universal admiration: the ladies loved his stunning good looks, his fair hair and inquisitive blue eyes, and easy manner; the men were taken by his slouchy informality, which managed just the necessary ration of deference owed by the young to their elders, without any suggestion of sycophancy, or any presumptive commitment to the bizarre notion that because he was young, he was any less competent, in his own disciplines, than they in theirs. Blackford had the American republican's innate aversion to servility. Even as a schoolboy at Greyburn he would say “sir” once, to confirm his understanding of an axiomatic hierarchy. But he would never repeat the word in the same conversation. At age sixteen he got into serious trouble for a libertine application of his code. At twenty-six his amiable self-assurance set him slightly apart: the young man, bright, inquisitive, courteous … to whom, however, condescension would have been inconceivable.

Sir Alec had a friend, Lord Brougham, who was beloved by all until the third drink of the evening, at which point His Lordship would begin to talk about his most recent pheasant shoot—usually that morning—as if all the world hungered to hear the details and savor every step of the chronology. (
The Day Lord Brougham Shot the Pheasant
, by Jim Bishop, one survivor of an evening had suggested as an appropriate title and author for a book.) Mostly his friends coped with him by the simple expedient of avoiding his company after 7 p.m. or the second drink, whichever came first. On the occasions when they found themselves trapped in his company at a dinner party, they would sweatily engage other members of the party—
any
other member of the party—in concentrated, often nonsensical, discussions, for so long as they hovered as possible targets of Lord Brougham's narrative compulsion. It happened to Blackford early on during his stay in London, and he was unprepared as Lord Brougham, scotch and soda in hand, began to tell Blackford what had been the situation in the field that morning at nine-fifteen. When, fifteen minutes later, Lord Brougham was describing the situation in the field that morning at nine-thirty, Blackford summoned his training as a scientist to project that at such a rate Lord Brougham, having spent all day hunting, would be done with the account of his hunt at approximately 2 a.m. He thought fleetingly of interrupting His Lordship to tell him about the review of
Parsifal
, which his father delivered on the lone occasion when he had been dragged by Blackford's mother to the Metropolitan, so far from his chosen world of airplane work, airplane talk, airplane testing, airplane jokes. “
Parsifal
is the opera that begins at five-thirty and when you look at your watch three hours later, it is only five forty-five.” But Oakes's sense of occasion stopped him. Instead, he put his arm firmly on Brougham's shoulder and, winning the admiration of all experienced martyrs in the room, said to him in mock earnestness: “Lord Brougham, I'm too young to stand the suspense. Unless you shoot that bird in the next”—Blackford looked at his wristwatch—“sixty seconds, I'm going to have to ask the butler for some saltpeter.” This was said with such high good humor that Lord Brougham, who didn't really understand exactly what it was Blacky said, actually stopped talking and laughed—which sound, Blacky later told his mother, would certainly have scared away the birds.

On the plane home he opened the letter from Sally, scooped up in the valedictory probe of his mailbox on his way out to the taxi, lugging bags and briefcases. He had waited deliberately until he was in the Constellation before opening it.

“Dear Blacky:

“Has it ever occurred to you that I am a
professional
student of English and that I ought to be
paid
for writing you letters, which take me away from the pleasures of pursuing my inquiry into Geof. Chaucer? It isn't as though my letters were responses to your own, since I have written you six times since the first of January. That was the day you made The Resolution. I'll quote it to you. I am in the mood to quote Blackford Oakes, my darling, to Blackford Oakes, that crud. ‘Dearest Sally: It is New Year's Day, and though distracted in London (I am going to Buckingham Palace to a party for Margaret Truman), you are as always first in my thoughts, on the first of January. I am a very methodical feller, Sally, as you probably never realized, since you concern yourself with odes to Westminster Bridge, while I concern myself with building Westminster Bridge. Anyway, my vow tonight, for my darling, is to write you twice a week, come rain or come shine, even if at Buckingham Palace I find myself having to say to the Chief American-Watcher: “Where is the nearest desk?” ‘I've really got to go.' Very funny, Oakes. That was twelve weeks and three letters ago. I'm glad people don't have to drive their cars over bridges built on your promises.