The trade, p.34
The Trade, page 34
He could just wiggle forward, pushing with his heels and his palms. He wanted, more than anything in the world, to crawl out of that bitterly cold dark pipe. He crawled on. A heavy noise sounded, followed by a clank, and it took him a moment to identify it. Brewer had put the cover in place. Thomas was entombed three feet under the earth and alone.
Now all he had for company was the sound of his panting. He told himself he was mad and tried to recall the mental exercises he had been taught to cope with his fear. He began with the multiplication table. At two times thirteen he couldn’t go on. The fears were swarming. The sound of mortars filled the air. And the mad faces began to cluster around his head, screaming.
There was no turning around now. He had to go forward. He had no idea how much progress he was making, how far he had to go. He tried to recite the names of the fifty states, starting with Alabama. He couldn’t get past Alaska. He tried to remember happy days as a child with his sister and brother. But he couldn’t even remember their faces. He couldn’t remember his mother’s face or his father’s.
“Two times thirteen is twenty-six,” he said aloud. “Now two times what?”
But it was no good. Panic was seizing him again. The mortars would have their way. They went off, the faces drew closer, the blood ran, the flames exploded and that gaping grave in the embankment waited to receive him again. He shouted in terror.
To escape his panic he commenced a hysterical squirming inside the pipe and rammed his head repeatedly against the pipe. He began to tear the flesh on his back. His knees were cut and bleeding. His hands began to grow sore. In the flooding sweat that streamed through his hair, he felt blood flowing. There were giant rats ahead of him with burning red eyes and flashing teeth, he imagined.
“Alabama,” he cried through clenched teeth. “Two times what? Two times what?” His head rammed against an obstacle.
He was looking up through a grating at the outline of the limousine bumper. It had grown lighter. And just beyond it, he could see the Snooper.
He lay spent and panting, looking through the grate feeling like a man in his coffin. And now, inexplicably the panic was worse than ever. He wanted to get out, to wake the house and surrender—anything to get out. But he was afraid to reach up and push against the grate. Maybe it was screwed down. Maybe it was too small.
“Two times Alabama.”
He reached up with his left hand and pushed. The grate resisted him. He pushed again. It still didn’t move. Absolute fright gave him superhuman strength and he pushed a third time. It lifted straight up. That’s when the light went on. Up above him in the drive, an electric light flooded the area. Thomas let the sewer cover settle back into position. But it settled on an angle. It was lapped over the rim. He heard a footstep. A man was standing beside the car. He could see a pajama leg and a slipper tip.
Thomas’s panting seemed loud enough to be heard a block away. He tried to silence it, taking longer, quieter breaths. The sweat was freezing cold on his body and the draft was drying it. His teeth were chattering. Surely the idiot standing there could hear him.
He suppressed a cry for help. It was as though someone else were in charge of his voice, someone with a demoniacal will to make him shout out the word “Help!” He shut his lips and clenched his jaw. The slipper moved. The man walked toward the twin gates. He must have been scanning the street, looking and listening.
The slippers walked back and stood again by the car. He must have been staring at the cockeyed sewer cover. He must see it. A slipper reached out and pressed against the side of the cover. It pushed and the cover clanked into place. Thomas nearly shouted. Abruptly the light went out and a door shut firmly.
Thomas pushed the sewer cover aside and reached up for the Snooper. He got it, and pushed it down into his pants on the lower part of his belly. He sat up and thrust his head out of the sewer line. It was getting lighter by the minute. He would have to hurry.
But he couldn’t face it again, that long cold frightening sewer pipe. He crawled out and lay under the automobile, shivering and ready to surrender. He could simply stand up and knock on the door. And that would relieve him of responsibility. He would never have to enter a sewer pipe again. He took a deep breath, turned, rolled and put his head back into the sewer line.
“Two times two,” he told himself. The capitals of the states would be next. But the only capital he could think of was Boston. Arizona came after Alabama.
He couldn’t get the sewer cover back in place with his feet and decided to leave it. Now, fatigue added to his other problems. Each time he crawled too vigorously, his bleeding knees complained. His palms shot pain up his arms every time he pressed on them. He had a thumping headache and now his muscles were too tired to push effectively. A fluttering of the muscles of his back warned him. The cold and the fatigue were getting to them and they were on the verge of cramping. He would never be able to sit up and stretch and work them out if that happened. His back could be thrown out. They could paralyze him in the pipe.
The mortars exploded in his head. The screaming faces returned. Sirens sounded. It was so bitterly cold. His teeth chattered uncontrollably. He was in a race now with his incipient back cramps. It seemed twice as long. There was no end. Each thrust should have brought him to the end. But all it brought was more disappointment. He shouted in terror again.
Now it was too late: his back muscles seized. “Oh my God,” he sighed. He had to sit up. He tried to bend his head upward and found it had more play. He thrust higher. He was free. A moment later the sewer cover slid aside, and he was looking up at the concerned face of Charlie Brewer. In the dawn light, he noted irrelevantly that Brewer needed a shave. And he realized that his phobia was gone.
Brewer reached down and helped pull him out of the pipe. A moment later, with the cover in place, they were stumbling and jogging toward the car while Thomas struggled into his overcoat. All he could think of was turning on the heater in the car.
He’d almost forgotten about the Snooper.
Brewer got the car started, and they drove through the morning streets of Basel while Thomas worked the controls on the Snooper. His bleeding palms were caked with cracked scabs.
He pushed the play button.
“Nothing?” asked Brewer. “Hot damn.” It hadn’t recorded anything.
“Good evening, Mr. Fox,” Manfred Fritzsche’s voice said abruptly.
Mr. Fox replied in an unmistakable Chinese accent.
“Chinese,” Thomas observed. “Why Chinese?”
Mr. Fox served a cup of tea, then immediately addressed himself to the business at hand.
“Mr. Fritzsche, my government has had a very difficult time with your proposal and I’m afraid I bear unhappy news for you. We reviewed all the terms of your offer which include….” Mr. Fox then recited, very knowledgeably the major features of the German proposal, twenty-six in all.
“It took us much longer than I expected,” Mr. Fox said, “to reach a decision and I must tell you now that we can accept it only if you accelerate your timetable. Your proposal takes too long.”
There was a long sigh, obviously Fritzsche’s. His voice asked uncertainly, “You mean you accept if we increase the timetable? Is that what you are saying?”
“Precisely.”
“You accept? Those are the two most fateful words of the twentieth century, Mr. Fox.”
“I think so too, Mr. Fritzsche,” Mr. Fox replied.
Thomas looked with wonder at Brewer. “Great God on the Mountain. Germany and China against Russia with a subversive army already inside and in place. Round three.”
They took turns napping and driving. By nine o’clock in the morning they were in a steady downpour again.
“In Germany in the winter all it does is rain,” Brewer said.
“Except when it’s snowing.”
They covered the miles with a weary determination, heading for the one telephone that could handle the Snooper tape.
Sheets of driving rain were falling when they reached Bernie Parker’s office. It was just as they’d left it days before, still ankledeep in confetti. It looked all the more dismal in the gray light and falling rain.
Thomas struggled through the confetti to Bernie’s office and opened the desk drawer. There was a telephone unit with a separate tape deck. And there he stopped. And considered.
The moment Wynet got the tape transcript, he’d work it up through channels to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thomas could picture them all sitting around one of those gargantuan conference tables they were so partial to, all of them awed, listening to the voice of “Mr. Fox” and Manfred Fritzsche. The JCS would then slump back in their chairs and solemnly agree that the President must hear the tape.
And then the voice traffic between Washington and Bonn would reach a din. And no doubt the timid souls on both sides would overrule and Russia would be saved. But if he withheld the tape, a terrible war might break out. Thomas sat down and looked at the sea of confetti. Brewer stood in the doorway waiting.
“What are you going to do?” Brewer asked.
14
There was a festive air in the barroom of the Bismarck Club.
The few, the very few, who knew about the Doomsday Book and about the Chinese response, stood with Fritzsche at the bar, periodically chuckling over silly jokes and patting each other on the shoulders.
“A great day for Germany, Manfred,” Dr. Hesse said.
“Too bad Otto isn’t here,” Fritzsche replied. He glanced over at Gustav Behring, unconscious at a table, his head on his arms. The three of them had done it.
Fritzsche stared into the clubroom at the jagged line over the fireplace. The Borderline. Soon it would be just a bad memory. Something avenged.
Now—right now in Russia—he knew, they were digging up the printing presses and laboriously, a piece at a time, assembling them. Soon clandestine broadsides in several dozen tongues would be exhorting ethnic groups to dream of freedom and self-destiny, incendiary words, read aloud to men assembling rifles and other weapons by candlelight. The fuse had been lit and the Russian bully would at last be getting his.
The doors would truly blow off the Kremlin.
No one wanted to leave. They stayed in the small knot all afternoon, joking, laughing and periodically whispering solemn words to each other.
At five that afternoon, in the still heavy rain, a special messenger in peaked cap and glistening raincoat drove up to the entrance of the Bismarck Club in a van and stood dripping on the black-and-white chessboard tiles of the lobby. He refused to deliver his package to anyone but Fritzsche himself.
“Top secret,” he kept saying. “For Mr. Manfred Fritzsche only. No one else.”
Eventually persistence won. He was led to the bar where Fritzsche stood.
“Well,” Fritzsche said, holding out his hand. The others, in silence, watched the messenger.
The messenger glanced at them and waited.
“We are all friends here,” Fritzsche said. Someone chuckled. Fritzsche held out his hand again.
The messenger still held back.
Fritzsche frowned thoughtfully and stood up. “Very well. Follow me.” He led the messenger to a small meeting room and sat behind a desk. “Now,” he said. He gave the messenger a tolerant avuncular smile as a fresh salvo of laughter carried from the bar.
The messenger put a small box on the desk as though it were a gift of inestimable value. It was wrapped in ordinary brown paper and tied with office string. Fritzsche, wondering if it was from Otto Dorten, pulled the string away, opened the wrapping and found a small box inside. He lifted the cover.
Something was wrapped in white tissue paper inside. He opened it. A button-sized microphone tumbled out and rolled on the desk—a wall tap. He frowned at the messenger.
In a second piece of tissue lay a rosette identical to the one on his lapel. The pin was loose and when he examined it he saw it was a miniature microphone. Fritzsche removed the rosette from his lapel and pulled out the pin. It too was a miniature microphone. Everywhere he went, every word he uttered, was broadcast to secret listeners. And in bed he babbled his love into a wall tap.
There was still another small package in the box. He opened the white tissue paper and into his hand fell a small ruby ring. He gasped. It was the ring Tatzie was wearing the night he buried her.
From the bottom of the shallow box, three words in black ink stared up at him. “She was innocent.”
Fritzsche was too shocked to move. The tiny ring lay in his palm, reminding him how small her hand had been—that lovely hand that had so often held his. The ring stone winked in the light like a smirking coconspirator: you and me.
Innocent: a permanent torture chamber made up of eight letters. He stood up. He had to be alone. “Innocent,” he murmured as he fled down the hall, past the laughter in the barroom, away from his great victory, pursued into the rain by the word. Innocent.
Kaethe Dorten had left the club before Fritzsche.
She probably should have gone to her parents’ home to be with her father. After all, it was the greatest day of his life. But he had become so excited when he heard the news of the Chinese decision that he had to be heavily sedated and put to bed.
She could have stayed at the club and represented her father at the festivities. Gustav Behring had made quite a fuss over her. But he’d seemed unaccountably sad and drank too much, then had passed out with his head on his arms. He would have to be sobered up by club personnel so that he could meet his wife’s flight from Italy in the evening.
And she found Manfred Fritzsche’s crowing all over the bar too much to bear. He didn’t deserve the accolades he was receiving.
At dusk, in the rain she emerged from the Bismarck Club and paused by the entrance, arrested by the sound of the muffled laughter inside. It was different from the usual, civilized chortle. This laughter had something angry in it, the guttural back-of-the-throat laugh one heard at boxing matches and bullfights. It was a tribal, bloodstained laugh of triumph.
She wanted to get away from it yet she wondered what to do with herself. She couldn’t simply go home and go to bed. And in the morning she couldn’t go back to the publicity business and worry about a campaign to sell a new soup cracker while an awesome future was unfolding in Russian cellars.
Had she really held Colin Thomas in her arms? Had she really felt the walls of her heart ready to burst with the flood of love for him? She wanted to negotiate with someone in charge of the universe—strike a bargain—to get Colin back if for only a week or even one night.
Good dutiful Kaethe, she called herself. For the sake of a mad plot, she had turned away the man she’d been seeking all her life, in every near-crash of her plane, every hairpin turn of her car. She would never meet his like again. Life had sent him to her and she had sent him away. Life never gave second chances.
Ever after Colin’s memory would call to her like a sea bird’s cry at dawn that woke one with an ache of regret: and the mind would be tossed up on the shores of consciousness for another solitary day. Would she feel a catch in her throat now every time she saw someone who reminded her of him—by the tilt of his head, the set of his shoulders, the mirth in his eye? And what would happen if ever she should see Colin himself—at an unexpected turning of a stair, in an airport or in a dark empty parking lot?
A club member got out of his car, pulled up the collar of his raincoat and strode toward the entrance door beside her. And for a fleeting instant, in shadow, Colin was before her. Hope rose. But the trick always failed in the end and the man was not Colin.
She felt mocked by the terrible laughter behind her as she watched the man step quickly through the rain.
“Colin?”
The man stepped closer.
“Colin, is that you?”
Then he put his arms around her and when she hugged him, she felt the scar on his back through his wet coat.
She didn’t want to reason anymore. She’d gotten him back and she was content to stand and hold him and hear her heart pounding in her ears. No other emotion could equal her love.
He took her face in his hands and he kissed her. “Oh, Colin. How fortunate I am.” Then slowly, she knew. She drew her head back.
“You found him?”
He nodded.
“I mean Fox,” she said.
He nodded again. “Fox. In Basel.”
She glanced anxiously back toward the noise in the bar. “What did you do? Colin, tell me.”
He took the reel from his pocket and put it in her hand. She stared at it.
“I transmitted it by phone to Wynet in Washington,” said Thomas. “The whole thing.”
“Oh. What have you done?”
“I don’t know. I truly don’t. I just felt that the rest of the world had to be told.”
She didn’t know if she was going to weep or clap her hands for the joy of love. “I don’t know either, Colin. I only know that we love each other and that’s the most important thing in the world.”
And then he said it. “I love you, Kaethe.”
General Claude Wynet was struggling through the most difficult hours of his life.
He played the tape of the Fox meeting over and over. He walked around his office, stared for long minutes at the large map of the world on his wall, in particular at the Sino-Russian border and at Germany. It was an awesome idea. If the German plan got rolling, no one on God’s earth was going to be able to control it. No one could tell how it would turn out.
But it also presented an unparalleled opportunity. Russian nuclear capability could be destroyed, Russian war plans aborted.
General Wynet poured himself a double scotch, neat, and sat down at his desk. He swallowed a mouthful, then slowly, deliberately, his right index finger reached out and pressed the erase button. In seconds the tape was a blank.
EPILOGUE
Winter was on its way to Central Russia. Already they’d had their first sharp frost and the earth was becoming hard. There was the smell of snow in the night air.
