The Story of Henri Tod (15 page)

“Then why was he shot?”

Caspar looked at her, and paused. She had moved along the settee, pushing away the coffee table with her foot, and was caressing him behind the ears.

“I know why my mother
thinks
he was shot,” Caspar said, his voice husky.

“Why?”

“Because the Soviet military tribunal declared him a war criminal on the grounds that he had designed trains that transported victims to the camps.”

“Did he?”

“I should certainly think so, Claudia. He didn't spend fifteen years designing custom cars so that he could design this one car for Adolf Hitler. And after he designed train cars, I don't think he put up brass plates: ‘
NOT TO BE USED TO PROVIDE TRANSPORTATION TO EXTERMINATION CAMPS
.' Of
course
he designed trains that were used for that, but he didn't design cars
expressly
for that. As far as I know, they used mostly cattle cars.”

“Then why did they shoot him?”

Caspar got up. He looked very young in the dim light, but the customary raillery was gone now. He looked to one side and spoke in a monotone.

“He was shot on orders from my Uncle Walter, because Uncle Walter discovered that my father had sent railroad coding information to the Americans with a message indicating how the Americans might, by trying to take over three or four critical control centers, regulate the flow of traffic. That was when the Russian and East European refugees were beginning to be shipped back to Russia to be killed. What Father apparently didn't know was that the whole operation had an American stamp of approval.”

“How do you know this?”

“That's easy. Because my father wrote it.”

“To whom?”

“To me. The night before he was shot. A sealed letter, kept in the envelope with my birth certificate and baptismal papers, with a note to Mother that she was to hand me the letter, unopened, on my twenty-first birthday. I saw the letter last September. The day before I asked you about this car.” Caspar was back on the sofa, his head on Claudia's lap. His voice was at once childlike and august. “What happened was that I sniffed out the key to the locker one day when Mother was out. So, of course, I looked inside, and found all that stuff, including the master keys to this car. Then I saw the letter. And, of course, I opened it. Mother was away for a week, with Uncle Walter, at some state function. The last line of my father's letter said he wanted me to know the truth, but that if at the time I read the letter my Uncle Walter was still alive, and if my mother was still alive, I was not under any circumstances to divulge its contents to my mother, as it would only make personal and political problems for her.

“My problem then was to come up with a dummy letter, because often Mother had said to me that when I was twenty-one I would see a letter from my father. Her curiosity about it was terrific. So, using Father's typewriter, I faked a letter. I began by saying that he would pretend to have handwritten a letter from the prison, but in fact he was writing it at home but before going to trial, in case he did not have an opportunity later on. Then I just copied everything in his letter, the kind of thing you would expect a father, the day before his death, to write to a five-year-old son. And, of course, left out the important parts.”

“Did it work?”

“No problem at all. On my birthday in May, Mother just cried, and said how beautiful the letter was, and how Father had really been an innocent victim, but that in that postwar atmosphere it hadn't been possible to distinguish the true Nazis from the mere professionals, and so on. I didn't tell her what I thought, which is that the leading Nazi survivor is her brother, my Uncle Walter.”

Claudia said nothing. But she began to cry. Caspar, alarmed, took her into his arms. “Claudia, Claudia, why? What?”

“They did it to my oldest brother too, and what I told you about my father being killed in the war isn't true. He was taken on—one of your father's railroad cars—to the camps. My father's crime was that at the town meeting at Leipzig he gave a speech against the practices of the occupying Soviet troops. He was gone the next morning. We never heard from him again, or about him.”

Caspar sat up, but without releasing her hand. He pressed it. “Do you know, Claudia,” he smiled, “I do believe that you and I are security risks! When I become prime minister, you will be my commissar, in charge of the Railway Division of the German Democratic Republic.”

They heard a moan from the bedroom. Claudia went quickly. Henri's face looked flushed. She turned to Caspar.

“I'm going for a thermometer and some medicine.”

“No. I'll go.”

“Caspar, quiet. In the first place, I work in the railway headquarters. In the second place, I would not fit any description of the man they are looking for. In the third place, if they do find me, I know what to say and how to say it, about what I've been up to.”

Caspar smiled, and let his hands down from her arms. “Which, right after you get back, will prove to be correct.”

They took the routine precautions as she walked down the steps of Berchtesgaden and, knowing where and when to turn, was soon in the alleyway of the office building. There were more guards than usual. She showed her pass. “I need to get some papers from my office,” she said simply to the sergeant who looked at her card, and she walked into the building, and out the rear door. Not to the all-night pharmacy, where an order for antibiotics at that hour might raise suspicion, particularly when she had no doctor's prescription, but to the apartment of her former roommate, Margret Nilsson, who worked in the hospital as a nurse and kept in her house a little of everything. And a lot of what Claudia had needed almost daily since coming to know Caspar during that placid week in that sylvan setting, so far from the impacted grisliness of the offices in which they spent their working lives.

To Margret, Claudia confided that she needed a little help “for this reason or that.” Margret, while not probing the confidences of her friend, was as ever loquacious about her own concerns. She readily consented to get the prescription and have the blood analyzed. “Oh Claudia, I am so very much in love. Yes, a doctor. Unfortunately, he is married. I don't know what I will do if we can't live together, forever.”

Margret's leisurely rhythm as she described her passion did not synchronize with Claudia's pressing need. But after an hour she had the prescription, her ex-roommate's doctor-lover's signature nonchalantly forged on a prescription blank from a pad Margret kept at home. Claudia did not wish to appear indifferent to Margret's passion, but she managed, soon, to kiss her good night and get on with her desperate business.

16

At exactly five minutes after four in the afternoon a tall man wearing a fedora and a brown suit stepped out at Arnswalder Platz, carrying a briefcase. He turned west purposefully and began a measured stride, looking neither right nor left. He had walked one block when a 1958 Trabant pulled up alongside him. A man seated in the back seat opened the car window and said, “Mr. Jerome?” The man carrying the briefcase stopped and said, “I am a porter from the Hotel am Zoo. I was instructed by a Mr. Jerome to give you this briefcase. He regrets he could not deliver it himself.” The porter handed over the briefcase and walked away.

Captain Gouzenko clenched his teeth, and to the driver said, “Go up Pasteurstrasse for one block. Turn right on Greifswalder. Keep the radio on alert. If we are being followed, we will be notified by the time we reach Bernhard-Lichtenberg. If we are not being followed, then go back to Hildestrasse.”

Dmitri Gouzenko opened the briefcase. It was empty, except for a single envelope through which a yellow toothbrush protruded at either end. Gouzenko deliberated for a moment whether to open the missive himself or wait and let Colonel Ustinov open it, but decided to go ahead. He took a penknife from his pocket, slit the envelope open along the narrow side, and pulled out a letter.

“My dear F:

“The suggested rendezvous is unsatisfactory, for reasons I leave to you to imagine. The next time I visit in East Germany it will not be at the invitation of a stranger.

“I am, as you may or may not believe, not a floating exchequer for Mr. Henri Tod. I certainly hope that his sister will be freed, and unofficially I have agreed to accept Mr. Tod's commission to act as his intermediary in effecting his sister's repatriation. (Mr. Tod does not question the authenticity of the photograph.) But of course the details will need to be worked out, and we shall have to know that your plans are feasible.

“Inasmuch as I do not plan to visit East Berlin, and you evidently do not desire to visit West Berlin, I agree to meet you in Vienna. If you desire such a meeting, telephone the concierge at the Hotel am Zoo and tell him you wish the concierge to advise Mr. Jerome, when he calls in, that Mr. Frank (I am contributing four more letters to your name) will meet Mr. Jerome as planned. I have checked the schedules, and there should be no difficulty in arriving in Vienna by Thursday late afternoon. You may proceed by plane or by train, as may I. When you reach Vienna, call the concierge at the Hotel Regina and ask if Mr. Jerome left an envelope for Mr. Frank. Mr. Jerome will have done so. The envelope will indicate where I will meet you, and at what time. I shall not have a colleague along, and you are not to have one along either. I will have with me a briefcase, but this one will have 25,000 marks as a gift from the International Association to Benefit Refugees from Nazism Imprisoned by the Soviet Union. Another 25,000 will be yours when Miss Tod reaches West Berlin.

“Oh yes. Spectrographic analysis reveals that the toothbrush is now contaminated, and so I return it. If you decide not to go to Vienna and wish to communicate further with me, write in care of the White House. They always know where to reach me.

“Yours truly,

“O.”

Ustinov, in his clandestine office at Blockhouse H, on reading the document confessed his surprise to Dmitri Gouzenko and rang for Felix Zimmerman, who appeared twenty minutes later looking suave and suspicious. Ustinov leaned back in his chair. “I just don't understand it. The reconstruction we made, confirmed by your wife Clementa, about Tod's relationship with her simply does not explain Tod's indecisiveness. He seems almost blasé about her turning up alive. I'd have expected almost immediate action.”

“Do we know that Tod has seen my letter?” Gouzenko asked.

“It would seem to me inconceivable that such a discovery would be kept from Tod by his American friends. And Tod is reported here as having verified that the picture is that of your wife. Of course, she
has
changed; perhaps Tod has changed. But I would be surprised. The question now, of course, is do
we
go along?”

“Sir, if I may say something here,” Gouzenko spoke. “They don't know for certain whether Mr. ‘F' is KGB or a mercenary. Our response at this point is surely going to incline them in one or the other direction. If we
don't
go to Vienna, they'll—”

“Of course we will go to Vienna,” Ustinov interrupted.

“I was going to say, Colonel, that the only reason not to go to Vienna is if we conclude that they are not interested in Clementa, and that is inconceivable. And if we don't go, they'll conclude it was definitely a KGB operation, that Clementa is safely in Soviet hands and we're simply using her as bait for Tod. In that case, unless Tod is willing to exchange his own freedom for Clementa's, which isn't likely—he presumably wants to enjoy her company—the whole operation will stall. Among other things, Tod would first need to convince himself about Clementa's condition, and on that point we couldn't be very reassuring.”

“You are saying if we don't go, they'll conclude they haven't been dealing with an independent operator. I agree. But what do we think we can get out of the Vienna rendezvous? Other than the money?”

“Well, Colonel, I could maybe stand a chance of stringing him along. I could go and tell him that I worked at the Vorkuta labor camp, that I got to know his sister, who has been in that camp for fifteen years but is not under sentence at this point. I could say that she is a little amnesiac but otherwise quite normal. And that it would be possible for me to return to Vorkuta, and plot with her to effect her release by marrying her. He may even know about Article 118.”

“Article 118 does what? Remind me.”

“It permits ‘rehabilitated prisoners' to leave a camp provided a) they have a family to return to, or b) a job that also provides living facilities. My line—and I think he would swallow this—is that I am willing, for fifty thousand marks, to go back to Vorkuta, take out wedding papers, and bring his sister to East Germany. From there, as we all unfortunately know, it is easy enough to get her into West Berlin.”

“On what pretense would you tell him you could get her into East Germany from Russia?”

“Colonel Ustinov! You forget that I
live
, and am employed, in East Germany. Ever since leaving the camp, I have worked for the Amtorg Trading Corporation in Potsdam. Remember?”

“Yes, yes. I remember your cover story. So then?”

“So then my wife brings in Henri Tod.”

“Where? How?”

“There are a variety of ways, sir. One of them that appeals to me I would need to discuss with my wife before elaborating. But you must agree we have lost nothing. I go to Vienna for two days. I return with 25,000 marks. In a week or so we arrange to fly my wife in from Moscow. We proceed from there.”

“You are quite certain your wife will cooperate, Gouzenko?” Zimmerman broke in.

“I am quite sure my wife will cooperate, Herr Zimmerman.”

“Very well.” Ustinov put his initials on a form on his desk. “Fill it out yourself, and get to Vienna. If you bring back Blackford Oakes's head, I will put you in for a promotion. Bring the money to me.”