The Story of Henri Tod (17 page)

“It's nice to know,” Tod said, sipping on his cup of tea, “that public resentment means anything.”

Claudia spoke. “You should see the reports my boss is getting about the train service. Yesterday one traveler, seventy years old, started to beat the conductor with his umbrella after the train had stopped for over an hour. The heat is awful right now. All the trains coming in are being instructed to be irregular.” She got up with the panful of sliced potatoes and disappeared for a moment in the galley. “Next thing you know, they'll be giving out medals for Most Unpunctual Conductor of the Month.”

“There's no talk, then, of a D-Day?” Henri asked.

“No,” Caspar answered, opening a bottle of wine and pouring two glasses. “And I don't think he has a D-Day in mind, or he wouldn't talk about being flexible about the enforcement of the permits for foreign work.”

“Speaking of trains, I'll tell you something odd; listen to this,” Claudia said. “A report comes in from the division chief in Leipzig, and there's a covering letter on it to the boss. I know they're friends, because they've corresponded, and sometimes I put in a telephone call to the Leipzig man—his name is Stunning. Well, this report was on secret preparations being made at the Karl-Marx-Stadt Locomotive Works. They're making armored cars suitable for transporting prisoners.”

Tod and Caspar fixed their eyes on Claudia. The report riveted their attention.

“The inventory is, as of this moment”—Claudia tilted her head back, and her light brown hair fell over part of her animated face—“thirty-eight cars, I think that's the exact number.” She fished out a piece of paper from her purse. “Here, I copied it down: ‘Cars suitable for transporting prisoners. Defined as cars that can be locked, that have minimal extra-utilitarian accommodations, and whose windows are barred.' Question: Who's going in those cars, where are they going, and when?”

Tod looked up. “That's important news. Either they're going to transport prisoners in large numbers to different camps—or they plan to have more prisoners. The type of German who lives in the East and desires to move to the West. Will you be seeing the follow-up correspondence on that?”

“I expect so. I open Herr Kohl's mail routinely, except letters marked personal from personal friends. There aren't many of those, and this report wasn't marked confidential.”

Tod turned to Caspar. “How are they doing on … me?”

“There's a rumor out that your own people have been looking for you for several days. Uncle Walter and General Schlepper were discussing that this morning. Schlepper thinks you're not in East Berlin, and not dead. He thinks you may be out of the country for some reason or other, and there are strong rumors that you are in Paris to pick crumbs from the table of Kennedy-De Gaulle. Uncle Walter thinks you may have gone to Bonn to conspire with Adenauer about what he should say when he comes to Berlin—Uncle Walter never forgets the West German election is only two months off, and he likes to talk as if you and Herr Adenauer were political partners.”

“I've never even met the Old Man,” Henri said.

“They hope that they can pressure Willy Brandt to step up his criticisms of Adenauer. But they don't
know
where you are, and they're dying of frustration. Oh, I forgot!” Caspar walked over to his briefcase. “You'll like this, Henri. An artist's rendition of what they think you look like.”

Henri Tod, Claudia looking over his shoulder, mused over a drawing of a dark-complexioned man in his thirties, with slender features, straight hair, fine nose, high cheekbones, and a trace of a cleft in his chin.

“Now, that is interesting,” Henri said. “Someone has reported on my chin! Well, I've been seen by enough people. I'd say the picture was useful only in general circumstances. Not much use for specific identification. What kind of circulation are they giving it?”

“All the sector passage policemen have got one, and the railroad and airport people. They're also passing out the rumor that anyone who brings you in will receive a state bounty of 250,000 marks. They're not going public with that. I suggested it, but Uncle Walter said it sounded too bourgeois, the stress on the bounty. They're really hot for you, Henri. Wish Claudi were as hot for me.”

She pulled Caspar's head back by the hair, and laughed. “Now get over to the table, and I'll serve. I have something nice tonight.”

Henri said, “You have something nice every night. That's why I had a little fever for so long. My constitution doesn't want me to go home and miss your meals! How do you manage? Do you suppose the Führer ate like this?”

“Of course not,” Caspar said. “He was primarily a vegetarian, remember. I suppose he could have been induced to eat meat if he had been told it was human.”

“I wonder where exactly he sat,” Claudia said, looking about the dining salon.

“I know that,” Caspar said. “It's in Father's notes. He sat in the corner there when the shades were up during the day. That was so nobody from the outside could see him. And when he had a staff meeting, or a number of guests at lunch or dinner, he sat exactly where you are sitting, Henri. Behind the closet, leaning up on the forward bulkhead, is a wooden section that attaches to this, making room for eight diners. Others invited to dine in The Presence clustered about those round table-desks over there”—he pointed to the far end of the drawing room, which dissolved into the green felt lounge-study. Claudia served the venison, salad, fried potatoes, pumpernickel bread, butter, and cheese, and set out a bottle of red wine.

Henri suddenly emptied his teacup, and poured into it a few drops of red wine.

“I want to make a toast. To the best foster parents I have had since I was a boy. May the God of Abraham bless you both, and may your countrymen someday know what you have done for me, and for them.”

Claudia and Caspar sat, their heads slightly bowed. They didn't know whether it was right to take part in a toast when they were being toasted, this never before having happened to either of them. Claudia broke off the moment of embarrassment by lifting her own glass and saying, “And I want to return the toast. You have given Caspar and me more hope, and more brightness, in ten days than we found in many dreary years before we knew you.”

Caspar raised his glass. But then, gently, he corrected her.

“More brightness, Claudi means, than at any time until she and I met.” His eyes moistened as he looked at her.

“That was what I meant,” Claudia said, shyly.

Caspar turned now to Henri Tod. Caspar didn't often use the idiom of candid idealism. But he found himself, almost instinctively, bowing to Henri Tod as if to a natural leader, a man of station; Caspar's superior.

In bed, the night before, Claudia had said to Caspar, “I would follow him anywhere.”

Caspar sought to break the tone. “Not to bed, you wouldn't.”

She smiled at Caspar and put her arms around him, holding him tight to her. “No, because it would be like sleeping with a saint, and you have hardly prepared me for that.” Caspar slid his head under the covers. Claudia gave out a little playful shout. “Caspar!”

“Well, you said I wasn't a saint, so take that.” She laughed again. “And that!” Soon she was no longer laughing but quietly moaning. “And that and that and that and that and that,” he said softly, his exclamations now slow, rhythmic, as the sheets slid down from the bed, the bodies illuminated only in the light of the single candle by the bedside.

Moments later his head was beside hers again, and they nestled together, happier than they had ever thought possible.

18

“Is this the concierge? You have a message for Mr. Jerome?”

“How do you spell your name?”

“Jakob-Eda-Rosa-Otto-Marie-Eda.”

“Just a moment. Yes. A Mr. Frank left the message that he will keep his appointment.”

“Thank you.”

“Bitte.”

Blackford thought it best not to travel directly to Vienna conspicuously, which he would be doing if he took the next flight out. He was booked the following day on the 9:30 flight to Frankfurt, where he would board the train. Meanwhile he needed to make a routine check with two informants, whom he saw respectively at five and seven. At 8:30 he had an engagement with Bruni. Bruni had left word that morning that he needed to meet with Blackford, suggesting a little coffeehouse conveniently located by the subway, near the Tiergarten. He was there when Blackford arrived, and he was munching on a cheese roll, a stein of beer handy.

Bruni, with his rimless glasses, heavy suit, and young yet jowly face, seemed ill cast as principal aide to the dashing head of the Bruderschaft. He had graduated as a doctor of medicine from Humboldt University in East Berlin. He was thereupon conscripted and sent as a lieutenant in the GDR army medical corps to an infirmary in Dresden. Here he had interned for a year under a quiet, elderly doctor whose hands, at the operating table, grew progressively unstable as he gave way to alcohol. As his only surgical assistant, Bruni had twice now noticed obvious misjudgments, the second of which nearly proved fatal to the patient, and decided that his duty was to report the problem to the adjutant at headquarters. The next day, orders were written detaching Lieutenant Bruni Lestig to duty at Bautzen, a prison for political prisoners. There Bruni found that his time was mostly devoted to attempting to repair the broken bodies of those prisoners, bodies that frequently were beyond repair. As a clinician, he recognized that he was logging valuable experience. As a moralist, he found it was no longer possible simply to overlook the nature of what he was engaged in.

He had, by considerable effort during the years of college and medical school, forced himself to put politics in the deep freeze of his mind. He did not remember when exactly he made the decision to go over to the West. But perhaps, he had told Blackford at an earlier meeting, it was when they brought in the elderly woman. He declined to describe her condition, but confessed that far from undertaking to keep her technically alive, he had, after examining her, given her a lethal dose of morphine. “I think it was about a month after that that I sneaked into East Berlin while on my vacation at Neuruppin.”

When he reached West Berlin, Bruni could not turn again to medicine. He found that any attention paid to the anatomy recalled the grisly role he had played while practicing a profession he had sacrificed much to master. Among the things he had sacrificed was attention to other than biological kinds of health. Now his indifference to the one kind of health heightened his interest in the other. It was as his curiosity and concern for social health matured that he encountered Henri Tod. A year later, Bruni left his job as a junior manager at the Daimler sales office to spend the whole of his time with Tod, to whom he gave himself completely and who, above all other men in the society, Tod trusted.

Bruni motioned to the waiter; then, to Blackford, “You will join me?”

Blackford nodded. “I'll have the same. Do you have any news?”

Bruni's mouth was full. But he managed a “Yes,” and Blackford waited until Bruni had washed his food down with a long, deep drink of beer. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Have a look.”

Blackford read the note. It was handwritten, and signed, “T.”

“Is this Henri's handwriting? I'm not familiar with it.”

“Yes. It is his. I know it as well as my own.”

The note said: “Bruni—I am all right. But it will be four or five days or maybe a little more before I can return. Meanwhile our friends must not have the impression I am out of action. Involve ‘me' in something. I leave the details to you. Always, T.”

“Have you figured it out?” Blackford asked, beginning on his own cheese roll.

“He is obviously in East Berlin, and almost certainly he has been wounded. There was a chase after the execution, we have verified. But he is apparently in friendly hands. He reasons that any suspicion that he is still over there will cause the kind of alert he doesn't want and maybe his friends, whoever they are, can't afford.”

“Have you decided what to do?”

“Yes. I told Stefan Schweig this afternoon that I had a telephone call from Henri, that he was in Paris. That he had gone there to make financial arrangements and to get something on the Kennedy-De Gaulle meeting, which he would be bringing back with him.”

“How's this news going to get back to East Berlin?”

“My dear Blackford,” Bruni said, mouth full again, “surely you must know that that is no problem at all? Not all our friends in East Berlin are double agents. Stefan has been instructed to pass the word along to our contacts.” Bruni took another swallow of beer, and then said, wiping his mouth with his napkin, “Now you must wonder why I have revealed these details to you?”

Blackford smiled. “Actually, Bruni, I hadn't really had time. But I suppose I would have wondered later on tonight. Go ahead, I'm listening.”

“The first reason is that I trust you. But I don't give away state secrets—and my suspicion that Tod is probably crippled in East Berlin is as close to a state secret as I have ever known. I don't give away state secrets to people just because I trust them. I am trying to think ahead. I expect I shall hear from Tod again, and probably soon. He may want to come back even if he is less than completely well. I want you to make contingent arrangements if they should prove necessary.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“An American officer. Say a lieutenant colonel. Someone in his forties. He's visiting in East Berlin. Say the Pergamum Museum, with another officer, call him the major. The major calls headquarters and reports he fears the colonel has had a heart attack, and they should send a military ambulance instantly. Ambulance arrives and takes uniformed colonel back into West Berlin. Only—of course—it's Henri. The real colonel, now in civvies, makes his way back routinely. Such an operation would take a little time to organize. It may be needed. We don't know how sick Tod is.”