Stained Glass

Stained Glass

A Blackford Oakes Mystery

William F. Buckley, Jr.

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

F
OR
G
ERHART
N
IEMEYER

Prologue

Although a mere deputy, Colonel Dmitri looked up from his high-backed chair and whispered to his superior, “Sir, should I perhaps open the window?”

General Wassily Lestovich Mishkin, Hero of the Soviet Union, twice decorated with the Order of Lenin, chief of staff of the armed services of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, gazed at him wordlessly, his eyebrows contracting, the compressed sweat catching the light of the huge log fire obstinately, copiously fed by an orderly, maintaining a temperature in the smoky, airless, fur-covered anteroom of—Dmitri estimated—90 degrees. Mishkin returned to staring at the fire, and Dmitri returned to his stiff uprightness, looking across at the two other deputies, and, seated on the little sofa opposite the general, Admiral Nicolai Stepovich Fechitov, chief of Soviet naval intelligence, the sweat staining the armholes of his crisp light-blue jacket; and so they waited for the reappearance of the man who, invoking the august name just after eleven in the evening—three agonizing hours ago—had summoned them from their apartments to drive with him to Trionoshka, the dacha that sheltered the omnipotent, omniscient, omnicompetent leader and patron of them all.

Reaching it, they were escorted by Captain Gektor Glazunov, personal aide to the Marshal, into this anteroom, lit by a small lamp at one corner, and by the firelight. They were stunned by the heat, a wrenching contrast to the creaky-snow-cold they experienced during the short silent walk from their limousines into the dacha. General Mishkin looked over to Ilyich, who had brought them here, chief of the KGB, responsible for the internal security of the Soviet Union and for intelligence operations world-wide, and whispered,

“The heat?”

General Mishkin had never before been summoned to Trionoshka, where, in progressive isolation, the Marshal was now spending practically all his time.

“He does that.” Pyotr Ivanovich Ilyich had paid a dozen visits to Trionoshka since the days when it was gradually transformed from an occasional country lodging into a semipermanent residence. He had often been summoned at midnight, been kept waiting in this room an hour, even two, before being called by Glazunov into the windowless bedroom-study. When the anteroom was hot, it always followed that so was the temper of the overseer of Trionoshka, and of the Soviet empire. Moreover, the little lamp gave off insufficient light to read by, so there was no means of distracting oneself, even if it were possible to focus on other matters than what to be prepared to say in reply to whatever it was that the leader would ask about, hint at, or command.

But moments after the general, the admiral, the KGB chief and their deputies sat down, occupying six of the eight seats in the room—two sofas and four heavy wooden chairs—the shaded door at the other end opened, and Glazunov came back into the room. A youngish man with thinning blond hair and spectacles, his cheeks, normally a steady pale, were flushed. He went directly to Ilyich.

“The Marshal will see you.”

Ilyich stood, cleared his throat, and followed Glazunov, who closed the door quietly behind them.

Instinctively Admiral Fechitov looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes past two.

He stole a look at it when Ilyich reappeared fifty-five minutes later.

Ilyich took the unoccupied stiff-backed chair and drew it up to the perimeter of the semicircle around which the men were seated.

“The Marshal”—he cleared his throat, and by great force succeeded in controlling it—“the Marshal is very …
upset …
over the development in Germany. He finds it …
inconceivable
… that that …
young fascist
… should be …
countenanced
. He wishes to know why the …
friends of democracy
… in the area have not asserted themselves and silenced him. He is …
impatient …
with the suggestion that this person is only a flash-in-the-pan. He does not wish to listen to such …
subversive gibberish
. He does not want to listen to it from me …
a notorious bungler
. He does not want to listen to it from …
stupid
… chiefs of staff. He does not want to hear it from …
lazy and ineffectual
… admirals who are …
allegedly …
exercising their responsibilities. He directs me to arrange for the immediate trial for treason of the editor of
Pravda
, who wrote the article saying that the count is merely a ‘hot-headed college debater.' He is a college debater in the same way that Hitler was a …
paperhanger
. He wishes to know why Americans have succeeded in maneuvering the agent Oakes into the picture while we …
dolts, buffoons, incompetents
… have yet to move …”

There was silence. Finally General Mishkin spoke. “What concretely does he desire us to do, Pyotr Ivanovich?”

“He declines to say.”

Admiral Fechitov said in a hoarse whisper, “Does he intend to speak to us directly?”

“I don't know,” said Ilyich.

“I don't know,” said Ilyich.

“Is he through with
you?
”

“I don't know that either.”

“Does he”—Mishkin asked—“habitually fail to advise you when he is through with you?”

“He does not say. Glazunov tells you.”

“What do we do now?”

“We sit here, until we are summoned, or until we are dismissed.”

CHAPTER 1

At first, they were saying about him, Oh my God, it's Hitler all over again! That was back in the days of the Berlin blockade, when this dismayingly young man gave the speech at Heidelberg declaring that it was the German people who must open the roadway to Berlin blocked by the Russians. A middle-aged veteran in the audience got up and, achieving the speaker's attention, delivered the Nazi salute. There was pandemonium, and the heckler was finally dragged out by two campus police, after they were roused from their game of chess at the gatehouse and went at a run to the student union building. But that disturbance wasn't the sensation of the evening.

It was the speaker. This was not the bluster of one of those sulky veterans boozed up on nationalism. Axel Wintergrin spoke with a moderation quite un-Prussian. It made the experience of him all the more vivid. The crowds—there were crowds now, everywhere—would listen, and
cheer
. And the cheers had in their full-throatedness that resonance that is missing from responses to spellbinding oratory when, in the back of the crowd's mind, the speech is seen as resting, finally, on rhetorical orchestration, vocal fury, bombast. “It's the kind of satisfaction,” Blackford Oakes wrote to his superior in the first dispatch, “that Socrates must have given his students after completing one of his syllogisms.” The distinctive enthusiasm aroused by a mobilizing analytical demonstration, rather than by a mere call to action to appease tonight's restless glands—his was a call to a fundamental reorientation.

Axel Wintergrin managed this by any number of elaborations on two central themes. The first was that life under the Soviet domination was intolerable. “That isn't the correct word for it,” he said on one occasion, pausing to make one of those mid-speech distinctions which no professor of rhetoric would have thought, well, tolerable, in a declamatory situation “—no, if it were
intolerable
, then people would not tolerate it. But people
do
tolerate it. Just as”—and here was the kind of thing his critics, more properly his enemies, could not forgive him for—“just as the German people
tolerated
Adolf Hitler. It is
insufferable
,” he went on, “that a people presumed to have been liberated in 1945 should have been instantly enslaved in 1945. It is worse than insufferable that the brothers of those enslaved people—you, my friends, I, all of us in what they call ‘West' Germany—should apparently acquiesce in their enslavement.” He had called for a German militia “to enforce the terms of an agreement that has clearly been violated,” and everywhere units of young and middle-aged Germans were spontaneously forming when, suddenly, the Russians relented, ending the blockade.

His second theme, as he developed it later, touched America. (He had a way of simply ignoring the other NATO powers, as if they were vermiform appendages. This greatly irritated western European leaders, to say nothing of his second cousin, Queen Caroline of England.) America, he would explain, was a country of decent people who insisted resolutely on their own freedom and had made great exertions to bring freedom to others, and to liberate Germany and East Europe from tyranny. But before their effort was consummated, the will failed; and the result was not only the satellite empire of the Soviet Union but a divided Germany. The thing about America, he said, is that it is engrossed in its own pursuits. Its NATO enterprise is purely defensive. This was the line he was now taking, in 1952, four years after the Berlin blockade. When John Foster Dulles, during the presidential primary campaign that spring, had made the wispiest noises about the liberation of East Europe, he had been roundly denounced as a warmonger, said Wintergrin, and it was plain to see from the hasty retreat of candidate Eisenhower that the good and kindly general believed his Crusade for Europe was ended. It was also quite clear that General Eisenhower had no appetite for reopening that which, however “infelicitously” (the young count's sarcasm was strangely unabrasive), had been settled at the diplomatic conferences of 1945. Under the circumstances, America was of very little tactical use to freedom-seeking Germans. But Germans could find comfort in this. Wintergrin would tell his audiences: Just as American troops in Europe were less than anxious to take on the Russians, neither were they anxious to take on Germans determined to effect their own liberation. And he, Axel Wintergrin, had a plan, which in due course he would divulge.

Whereupon Stalin, who in the early days had himself made something of a joke of Wintergrin—oh yes, they tell jokes in the Kremlin!—became obsessed by the young phenomenon. Orders went out to do something about him.

This, Blackford wrote in a long dispatch one week after arriving in Germany in September, when he became an extension, however attenuated, of Stalin's will, was not going to be easy to do; indeed, all the routine things to control or moderate Wintergrin had been tried now for four years—ever since Heidelberg—and simply hadn't worked. There was the initial setback in 1949.

CHAPTER 2

Wintergrin was twenty years old when Hitler marched into Poland. A first lieutenant in the lead reconnaissance battalion, he reached Warsaw ahead of the shock troops that would crush the city. Twenty-four hours after he was in Warsaw, Lieutenant Axel von Euchen Wintergrin disappeared.

For a few months the relevant people tried to find out what had happened to him, but notwithstanding the diligence of German record-keepers, interest waned, and it was supposed that Axel Wintergrin, the gifted young Count of St. Anselm, was the casualty of a Polish sniper, or that he had been kidnaped and killed. After six months, during which the German prisoners held by the Poles were liberated or killed as the resistance movement was smashed, Wintergrin was officially reported Missing in Action and Presumed Dead, and his widowed mother was sent a decoration of sorts which she hung around the photograph of her son but only after prying from the medal the disfiguring swastika. The absence of it was noticed by the mayor of St. Anselm's on the feast day of St. Anselm, when the countess, observing tradition, entertained local officials at the castle; and the countess, her graying hair in perfect trim, her leathery face handsome and resourceful, sipped her tea, then said Yes, decorative swastikas are not safe these days when the patriotic fever causes them to be so greatly coveted. She would not be surprised to see it materialize on the charm bracelet of her silly little maid, Nona.