The Story of Henri Tod (21 page)

23

Blackford had been gone a mere forty-eight hours, but right away he noticed that the strain in Berlin had mounted. Ulbricht had ordered the number of Vopos regulating the transfer points to be increased by a factor of six. The commuters were beginning to feel seriously threatened when they went out in the morning to work. And those who set out accompanied by their baggage and obviously intending to stay in West Berlin were being harassed almost to the point of physical detention.

And Bruni had been right. The day after Blackford left he had heard again from Tod, and this morning yet another communication, this one advising Bruni, using the code only the two of them knew, that he was to meet an emissary at Residence Four at ten o'clock, and that she was absolutely to be trusted. Tod's handwriting, well known to Bruni, appeared on the back of a picture postcard of a slight, pretty girl, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, dressed in a bathing suit and laughing as she stood on the beach of what appeared to be a lake, laughing at something someone was doing, or not doing.

“She came promptly at 10:05. I got right to the point and asked where Henri was. She replied by asking me for some kind of proof that I was Bruni. That stumped me. I don't tattoo my name on my chest. Then she made it easier for me. ‘What did Henri tell you once about your name?' I remembered,” he laughed. “‘He told me he thought Bruni was a nickname for Brunnhilde.'

“So she relaxed right away. She told me that Henri had indeed been shot that Saturday, but that he had got away, and she and her ‘companion' were looking after Henri; that at first he had had a considerable fever, but they had got some penicillin, and his strength has been going up and his fever down. It was thirty-eight degrees this morning—”

“How much is that in real money?” Blackford interrupted.

“That,” Bruni reflected, “is about one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Then she said he was busting to get back here, but also, the girl said, mostly because he was getting very useful information which he wanted to get to us right away, but didn't want to convey it through a third party, even through the girl herself.”

“Does he want us to go in and get him?”

“I told her we had contingency plans for getting him out. But then what I did was write down a medical questionnaire on the basis of which I can do a better job of diagnosis. I told her we ought to get a blood sample. I gave her a twenty-minute lesson on how to do it, and had her experiment on me. She says she has a friend, a nurse, former roommate, and she's quite sure she can get Henri's blood over to her and have it examined for infection. She's coming back over here tomorrow morning, and on the basis of the information she brings I can make a pretty good judgment as to whether we're better off letting him sit it out there for a few more days, or whether we ought to take the risk of bringing him in and giving him treatment here.

“Meanwhile,” Bruni picked up a clipping, and handed it to Blackford, with a bow of the kind one makes when one expects one's achievement to be applauded, “here's an account by Spartacus.” “Spartacus” was the principal hatchet man-toady-gossip columnist in the East Berlin
Neues Deutschland
. In today's column his readers were informed that Henri Tod had run off to Bonn to conspire with the government's “Nazi generals.”

“Nice going.”

“I don't suppose I should ask
you
what you have been up to?”

“That's right,” Blackford said. “You shouldn't.” He smiled. You will know, pretty soon now. Unless, Blackford thought, Mr. Frank turns out to be nothing but a con man. A con man twenty-five thousand marks richer than he was yesterday morning.

Henri Tod was at once restless and elated. Saturday night he had very nearly been apprehended and very nearly been killed. He was saved—by a young confidant of Walter Ulbricht who proceeded during Henri's convalescence to bring him not only medicine for his wounds, but news of that very morning's most intimate meetings between Ulbricht and his confederates. When he first saw the minutes of Friday morning's meeting, Tod was breathless with excitement. In Caspar Allman he had a direct link with the inner mind of the enemy. Could the whole business be a flamboyant, spectacular charade? Only if he, Henri Tod, had plotted, last Saturday night, to grope his way, in the dark, to come to rest at a remote siding of the Berlin Ostbahnhof, at this particular car, at this particular moment.

By the end of the first week, he had come to trust Caspar, as also Claudia, wholly, subject to his adult lifetime's presumption against imparting to anyone information it was not necessary to divulge. Their loyalty and courage was one thing. But there was in Caspar a quality, probably ineradicable, of devil-may-care, which was attractive, even endearing—but which could conceivably bring down the entire operation. “Caspar,” he had said from the sofa, after coming upon the section in the July 28 minutes in which Caspar had interposed the suggestion that perhaps one means of demoralizing the commuters would be to have one commuter per day disappear inside a trapdoor at each passage point, “Caspar, you
mustn't do
this kind of thing. You must strive to be absolutely sober, and indispensable to your uncle. If he ever gets impatient with you, remember, he can still appease your mother by giving you a soft job in the bureau of taxi licenses. It doesn't have to be a job in his own office.
Please
don't take such chances.”

“Okay,” Caspar grinned, his feet stretched out on Hitler's best coffee table. “On the other hand, it wouldn't do, would it, Henri, for me to change too suddenly? Might make him suspicious?”

“You uncle is suspicious as a matter of principle. Don't worry about that. Worry about provoking him.”

Claudia returned with the news of her meeting with Bruni, warned that she had got just the morning off, pleading that she had to accompany her mother to her dying aunt in the hospital at Gross-Ziethen. She pulled out the little hypodermic needle and rubber tubing, and with some trepidation—this was more difficult than injecting penicillin into muscle tissue, she proclaimed, never before that morning having taken blood—went through the motions Bruni had taught her. “I'll take this right away to my friend,” she intoned as, slowly, she drew back the plunger, pulling Henri's blood into the little glass cylinder. “And tomorrow—that's when I'm supposed to be picking up my mother at Gross-Ziethen—I'll bring back word from your friend Bruni.”

Tod was satisfied. He yearned, above all else, to see the minutes, a report, of the meeting at which Khrushchev's response to Ulbricht was rendered. And, alone now in the coach, beginning his tenth day in Berchtesgaden, he reflected on the arrangements that would need to be made in order to get, every day, Caspar's information while protecting the most valuable pipeline anyone, surely, had ever had in the history of intelligence to the enemy's deliberations.
“Worry only in part about the enemy's capabilities. Worry about the enemy's intentions.”
Who first said that? Was it Julius Caesar? Cato? Alexander? It could have been Abel, who knew the power of Cain, but did not know his intentions, and then suddenly it was too late.

24

Bruni had carefully studied the results of his remote-control medical diagnosis. He satisfied himself that Henri was healing and did not need dramatic medical care. That finding released Blackford from any obligation to plead with Rufus and the U.S. military for heroic clandestine intervention. On the other hand, Bruni did not judge Henri ready to proceed instantly to make his own way back to West Berlin, involving, as such a journey would, makeup, tension, oblique routing, and the possibility of en route harassment. He conveyed to Claudia his most urgent recommendation that Henri remain where he was for three or four more days. Henri reluctantly agreed to do so, but was cheered on learning from Caspar that Khrushchev had summoned, most secretly, the leaders and the first secretaries of the Warsaw Pact to Moscow and that they would be departing that very day.

Just before leaving, Caspar told Henri, his Uncle Walter had come up with a fresh idea for complicating border arrangements. Polio! “Where was polio when I needed it most!” Caspar imitated the accents of his uncle, who cared about the devastations of polio only if he, or Stalin, contracted it. Ulbricht, in consultation with his kitchen cabinet, had decided that an “epidemic” of polio in the GDR justified extravagant care to prevent its infection of the Federal Republic. “If Uncle Walter really thought those cars and trucks were carrying polio germs into West Germany, he'd be giving them a police escort.” And then a West German paper, with a name the pronunciation of which Caspar pleasured himself in repeating in heavily accented British, imitating the BBC announcer who had quoted from it, the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
, had predicted that the closing of the sector boundary in Berlin was imminent. Inasmuch as, in his celebrated press conference of June 15, Ulbricht had in as many syllables told the questioning reporter that no such thing as a dividing wall was in prospect, the East German press derided the prediction.

Nevertheless, there was reaction from the Allies. Whether in specific response to the prediction of a partition in Berlin, or simply to give the appearance of coordinated activity, Washington issued an order. And the U.S. Army Commander for Europe ordered all U.S. military not on leave to return to military quarters by midnight. Six nights per week. On Sunday, they could stay out until 1
A.M
. Henri Tod told Caspar of the bitter comment after Hitler's march on Poland, which followed his march on the Sudetenland, which followed his march on Austria, that whereas Chamberlain took his weekends in the country, Hitler took his countries on the weekend.

On the third day, having got word from Claudia of Henri's growing strength, Bruni authorized Henri Tod to leave his quarters and come home, taking, of course, due precautions. Tod planned to leave on the S-Bahn at 10:15
P.M
., which was the hour when the substantial post-theater traffic returned home from the East to West Berlin after the show, stretching to 11:15 for those who wished to dally. The trains at that hour were shortened, and patronage dense, so that there was little risk of being conspicuous. As ever, a member of the Bruderschaft would stand by, in the event that anyone approaching their leader behaved menacingly.

It was, Henri reflected as Claudia struggled to put on makeup that made him appear a man of sixty-five, as sad a night as he remembered since that awful evening after which, he knew, he would be separated from his beloved Clementa. It was almost inconceivable to him that in twelve days he'd have forged ties so strong as those he felt now toward this slim, competent, pretty, quiet girl who had risked her life to help what was then a stranger. And, looking back from the improvised makeup room by Claudia's galley to the imperial sofa on which, as not unusually, Caspar stretched out, Henri reflected that the Prussian knout had not driven away from Germany whatever it was that was responsible for creating the elfin charm of Till Eulenspiegel. Caspar was there, playing with the shortwave radio, but he was not really concentrating on it, because he too felt the keenness of an impending separation that would almost surely be permanent, unless he and Claudia decided at some point themselves to leave, in which case, of course, he would begin his new life by signing on as a member of the Bruderschaft. In Henri he had found a somewhat older man who had given him the only complete human satisfaction that Caspar had ever had from another man. When in the late afternoons Caspar hurried over toward Berchtesgaden, taking the usual devious routings, to tell Henri what had happened that day, he felt a sense of accomplishment, of usefulness, he had never felt before; that and the pleasuring of Henri Tod were a perfect combination. In the days that lay ahead, the procedures had been specified by which Caspar would continue to relay his intelligence. But it would never be the same as it had been these past days, with Claudia listening, dressed in her apron and cooking in the galley, and darting out to hear Tod's incisive comments.

Henri would be lying on the couch, his arm in the sling, facing Caspar, who alternately sat and darted about to help Claudia, but always reacting in some way to what Henri was saying. Henri would discuss with Caspar the political implications of this or that projected move by his Uncle Walter, or whatever.

Then there were the discussions at dinner, everything from the fate of Germany to the experience of this or that friend, something heard that very day by Claudia at work, or by Caspar; and Henri would reach back and tell them tales of this person or that, known to him. He knew name, rank, and serial number of everyone in the huge East German bureaucracy. He knew relationships—who was sheltered by whom; who was secure, who less so, in Ulbricht's esteem. He spoke as if he were the official, inside historian of the German Democratic Republic.

And all of this in the sealed-off, profanely comfortable, regally appointed railway car within which the great malefactor whose only competitor in Europe had been Josef Stalin had ridden up and down Germany for four years, giving orders by telephone and teletype in the instrument room aft to bomb more civilians, kill more Jews, draft more young Germans, scorch more Russian earth. From this car, during substantial intervals, Hitler had run one side of an entire world war.

And lately from this car, Caspar suddenly permitted himself to believe, a tiny little counterrevolution against tyranny had been commanded by the leader of a band of young Germans who would not accept things as they were.

The thought of Henri leaving—Henri, the center of that movement; and a human being whose personal qualities had overwhelmed, equally, him and Claudia—made him inconsolably sad; almost irresponsibly sad, he thought as he struggled to control his emotions, drinking yet another glass of the Ukrainian champagne he had spent his week's savings to buy for tonight.