Stained Glass (8 page)

The Director spread the papers on his desk, and as he went over them one by one he handed them wordlessly to his deputy, Jim Sanderson. Then he said, “I remember this one, Jim. He cracked the big one in London last January. Came close to going down along with the Brit. Rufus's preference is always for not taking any chances. I personally authorized him to extricate Oakes. Here we are again, I guess you could say, up against the consequences of Western sentimentality. How the hell do you suppose they found out about him? None of the Brits have any idea he was our man. I know we aren't supposed to think the Commies are superhuman, but it beats me how they find out about some of these things. Now, Joseph Stalin, Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, having discovered that one young Yalie, Oakes, CIA, is working at St. Anselm's rebuilding Wintergrin's church, has it all figured out: “
We're
behind Wintergrin! Never mind that we've been investing in Adenauer for seven years. So the Soviet ambassador calls on the Secretary of State and chews and chews and chews his ass—sometimes I envy the ambassador, Jim—and says unless we ‘take care of the situation,' Stalin will take care of the situation in his own way. Of course, he doesn't tell us what Stalin would do, and he doesn't tell us what
we're
supposed to do. It isn't as easy as recalling Oakes—the Secretary suggested that. No, sir, he wants much more. But he isn't willing to say what.”

Knowing his boss, Jim Sanderson knew he was expected to give concentrated thought to what was being said; knew he wasn't supposed to comment until the Director's ruminative questions stopped being rhetorical. He did most of his thinking by soliloquy, preferably in the presence of one other person. Toward the end of his introverted trance, he would actually consult.

The Director leaned back and puffed on his pipe, which had lain unused on his table for ten minutes, suggesting the gravity of the emergency.

“I tell you what let's do, Jim. Let's drive out and see Rufus. He's the best; and he has the advantage of knowing this Oakes, in case the recommendation we come up with requires some action at his end.”

Rufus, yielding to the entreaties of his wife, had finally agreed, after thirteen years abroad, to repatriation. The war years had been spent in England, the postwar years in France. Not given to expressing his feelings, he hadn't told his wife—hadn't succeeded, really, in informing himself just why he was averse to returning to America, even for a visit. After the Oakes crisis in London early in the year, he was ready to move back to their cottage in the French countryside and resume the tending of his beloved roses. The night after Viscount Kirk was killed, he took Muriel to the theater, and on to dinner at the Connaught. He ordered a whiskey—his first drink since taking on the case—and she drew courage to ask, Wouldn't he now, nearing sixty, take her back to America? They were childless, but her sister lived in Baltimore, and Rufus had two very old friends in Washington who always visited him when they traveled in England and France, giving him much pleasure. She asked why he resisted returning, and he forced himself to think the question through. He was silent—Muriel was no longer exasperated by this tic of her husband's, rooted in him, against which no force of man or nature was effective: when Rufus was thinking, generals, prime ministers and wives simply sat there and waited. “I could have read through the novels of Jane Austen during Rufus's pauses between 1941 and 1945,” the director of MI-5 complained to Churchill after the war. “If it hadn't been for Rufus,” Churchill snapped back, “you would be reading Jane Austen in German.”

An exaggeration, of course. Everything Churchill said was an exaggeration. But this one was as close to the simple truth as Churchill ever came. Eisenhower explained Rufus to a skeptic: “Look at it this way: He was the man who kept the atom bomb from Hitler. And the guy who told me it was safe to move into Normandy.”

Eventually Rufus came out of it. He told Muriel, taking her hand under the table and pressing it, that during the war he had been responsible for saving a great many American lives.

“I know that, darling, I know that.”

“But I was also responsible,” he blurted out, “for killing Americans.”

Muriel did not react, though her hand turned lifeless now.

“I am talking about
innocent
Americans, Muriel.”

She knew that her role now was to supply the soothing background noises. Any attempt at moral analysis was not likely to advance what her husband had obviously already attempted; indeed, it would perhaps set him back to hear points he had already traversed analytical ages earlier. It was sufficient that he spoke now less emphatically than before about
not
returning. So all she said was what she felt she could safely say. “You tried to do not necessarily the right thing, but the better thing.” He looked at her, his eyes widening. The formulation, though only a variant of the cliché about choosing the lesser of two evils, struck him as fresh and liberating in this conjugation of it. That evening Muriel wrote to her sister to say that, although the decision had not finally been made, she thought it safe to predict that they were at last coming home.

It was an hour and a half's drive to Westminster. Rufus had said over the telephone that he would have a light dinner waiting for them, after which they could go to his study while Muriel did the evening work at the nursery. On that understanding, Muriel went to the greenhouse, and Rufus washed the dishes, while Dulles and Sanderson dried.

“What do we know”—Rufus handed Dulles a wet saucer—“about the prospects for Wintergrin in November?”

“You ask the critical question, Rufus—as usual. We don't
know
. This is September, and anything can happen. His movement might collapse tomorrow. He hasn't been around long enough to be an ‘established' national leader. There's so
much
that works against him. He is
thirty-one
years old. He has never run for elective office. There must be a lot of Germans who resent his having fought against Germany, never mind Hitler. He has given out no elaborated plan of what he will do if he achieves office. He's got people running for legislative office in every district. How many of
them
are going to risk associating themselves with the Reunification ticket?”

“That's one side of the picture,” said Dulles. “Now—here Jim, your turn”—Dulles handed his deputy the wet coffee cup to dry. “The other is that he is becoming—has become—a national hero, and don't underestimate that. He apparently speaks with a quiet eloquence that leaves people … consecrated. Leaves them hungry for sacrifice, for a national effort—to free East Germany and unite the German people. He tells them only an act of
will
can bring this about. That history and ‘right thinking'—I asked Father Avery what that meant, and he said it comes from
‘recta ratio,'
medieval Catholic abracadabra for the basis for doing the right thing—”

“Is he a Catholic?” Rufus interrupted.

“Yes. And excepting the political left, and the people who believe that good old Adenauer ought to be rewarded by being the first elected chancellor, he doesn't
really
have any hard enemies. The free labor union people are suspicious, but not hostile. The students are fascinated by him—he's given them the first taste of idealism they've ever had. Remember that. All the Germans have had to engage them during the last seven years is the rebuilding of their country—that's kept their muscles busy. But aside from contrition over Hitler, there hasn't been anybody around who's asked them to make a national sacrifice. And what a cause! To liberate their fellow Germans!”

“Have there been polls?”

“Until the treaty goes into effect next March, political polls are technically forbidden. That was one of McCloy's obscure precautions back in 1945. He didn't want any radical movement ignited by poll fever. We know some of the big publishers are going to defy this and take some polls, and it isn't clear whether the occupation authorities will go to court and try to get an injunction against them. Meanwhile we've taken our own poll, ostensibly a commercial poll testing German attitudes toward a number of economic products.”

“How does he come out?”

“Twenty-one per cent. And that was three days ago, Labor Day.”

“How are the other two parties doing?”

“Neck and neck. Ollenhauer's SPD is logging thirty-three per cent, Adenauer thirty-six per cent.”

They were seated now and Rufus continued his interrogation.

“Gromyko said we have to come up with something, but wouldn't say what?”

“That's right. And he wouldn't tell Acheson what Stalin would do if we didn't do whatever we're supposed to do, but he made it sound like the end of the world.”

Rufus rocked slowly in his chair, and thought. Dulles and Sanderson were silent.

“It seems to me Gromyko isn't being all that difficult to understand.”

“About what he wants us to do?”

“About what he wants us to do. He wants us to kill Axel Wintergrin.”

CHAPTER 7

Blackford was told the political stratagem early in September, and instructed to try to get an idea what Wintergrin's countertactic might be. Under no circumstances was he to bring up the matter until it was public knowledge. After that, he should evaluate Wintergrin's reaction, and advise his contact in Bonn. Whether he would be able to get any reaction at all depended on the evolution of his relations with Wintergrin. Would their talk be confined to the church? Or would Wintergrin, committed to spending several hours per week with Oakes, digress to talk about other matters as well? If there were ways to do it, the CIA would have programmed Instant Friendship between Geoffrey Truax, a.k.a. Blackford Oakes, and Axel Wintergrin.

In fact it worked out. Although the day after they first met Wintergrin was formal at the rendezvous in his father's library, by the end of the three-hour session he was clearly relaxed with Blackford. In the chapel, seated in Blackford's makeshift little office, or in his father's office surrounded by drawings and photographs, or back in the chapel talking with the carpenters or masons, or seated at the chromoscope, Wintergrin was clearly taking his relaxation from the exigencies of a week planned from breakfast to midnight with speeches, meetings, interviews, broadcasts, always in the company of his staff, a week harnessed to the single objective of taking political power. Once a week he would meet with two men whose identity was not known to any member of the staff save Himmelfarb, who would set up the appointments at times and in places where the three men could meet unnoticed. The first, known to the staff only as “Herr Mahler,” was a repatriated Jewish physicist at the University of Heidelberg whom Wintergrin had come to know during his college days, the second (“Herr Gottstein”) a businessman in West Berlin. Apart from these very private meetings, Wintergrin was away from his staff only when with his mother in the castle—and with Blackford Oakes in the chapel.

By the following weekend, Wintergrin felt at ease with Blackford, to whom he would recount, when the mind wandered from the business of the chapel, something of the week's experiences. At first he judged Oakes to be the unique combination: someone entirely apolitical who was however interested enough in the drama of which Wintergrin was the protagonist to be engrossed in the narrative. Later he discovered that Oakes, too, was highly engaged in the Cold War, though this did not distract him from his work in the chapel. Wintergrin liked, too, the extraordinary self-confidence of Oakes, whose easygoing competence had instantly disposed of any problems with his staff arising out of his relative youth and inexperience. And, besides, Wintergrin had not really known any Americans, though he had read American journals and American authors, and seen the usual movies. At Greyburn there were no Americans when he was there. A planned visit to America in the summer of 1939 was put off for the obvious reasons. In Norway there were no Americans, save the occasional few who came down in the dead of night in parachutes. The handful of Americans who worked at the University of Heidelberg were not typical of the breed. He saw in Oakes the self-confidence America fleetingly exhibited in the postwar years, a brightness of spirit, an appealing social audacity and wit, unmannered, uncultivated—that and a seriousness of purpose. In two weeks, after five meetings, they were, in fact, friends.

The CIA plan was to amend the Constitution of the Federal Republic so as to make it unconstitutional for anyone to serve as chancellor before he was thirty-five.

The plan had the drawback of being a bill of attainder not very different from a proposed constitutional amendment barring any chancellor with the initials A.W. As it stood, it had the virtue of simplicity, and a certain generic plausibility. What was so unreasonable about requiring that the principal executive officer of West Germany should be at least thirty-five? Wasn't there a provision in the United States Constitution—paradigm for the world!—that demanded exactly the same thing?

None of the abstract arguments was in the least objectionable. There was only one trouble with the idea: Nobody had thought of it before. Nobody even brought it up during the two laborious years dedicated to constructing a new constitution, which had been duly approved by the occupying powers and had gone out to the people, who in turn overwhelmingly approved it. Now an addition to that constitution was being proposed, the purpose of which was the disqualification of Axel Wintergrin. That criticism Washington had of course anticipated. “What they
don't
know,” the Director said to the Secretary, “is that a bill of attainder against Count Wintergrin is a hell of a lot less personal than bumping Count Wintergrin off.” (The Secretary had winced at the levity.) Following a protracted and argumentative ritual between the Secretary and the Soviet ambassador, in three acts over six days, in which the dialectic sometimes became so oblique that the Secretary at one point wondered what he had
himself
meant to imply by his last statement, it was agreed that an effort to abort the reunification movement via a constitutional amendment would be made, and that the resources of both powers would be mobilized to make the move succeed.