Carlson was mildly amused. Or perhaps he needed another of his detours. “And didn’t you finish college?”
“Eventually. On the GI Bill. But first, my weakness for French landed me in North Africa as an interpreter, and got me promoted to Paris before the Germans pulled out. Someday, you must let me show you my bullet hole. Oh, it’s not in me. It looks much better decorating a corner building on the Place Saint-Michel.”
Carlson had a new look of interest in his eyes. “What were you, in that war? OSS?”
“You might call me an expendable contact man. Strictly minor jobs, but seldom a dull minute.”
Carlson showed some quiet astonishment. He seemed relieved, too, and thoughtful. “You didn’t tell Vaugiroud you had been working with the French Resistance.”
“With his record? My few days in Paris, even with a bullet hole—” Fenner shook his head. “That proves two more things about me: I know when to fall flat on my face; and I can keep my trap shut.”
There was a deliberate pause. Then Carlson said slowly, “I’ll tell you about Kalganov. After that, I don’t think you’ll argue about staying here for a couple of days—until he and his contacts are safely locked up. Here is what we know about that name. He has used many others at various times, but this is the real one.” And Carlson’s unemotional voice began pulling the facts out of a well-remembered file.
Alexei Vassilievitch Kalganov, born in Kiev, 1917; taken to Belgrade in 1919 by émigré parents; his father an ex-general turned taxi driver. Early years unrecorded. By seventeen, he was taking part in Balkan politics—blowing up bridges, derailing trains, shooting at cabinet ministers. Two years later, he added some ideology to his anarchism and went to Moscow. He had specialised training there, and was sent to Spain—not to fight, but to liquidate. From there, he went to Marseilles and learned how to organise. He went back to Moscow in 1944, travelling through Paris, with a Resistance group (subsequently eliminated) helping his escape. He worked with Beria for a couple of years, in the Ukraine, in eastern Poland. And then he became untraceable.
It was thought he had been liquidated with Beria. Except, in recent years, there were hints of the name Kalganov—from a couple of defectors who had been trained in assassination, from a few of the terrorists who were arrested in some of the disturbances he had possibly organised. Kalganov was, perhaps, dead. Yet the name persisted. Since 1946, it had become a rumour, a myth, a threat, a hidden menace.
Carlson ended. And frowned. “In 1946, just before he disappeared, he stated that he had killed over two thousand people. Two thousand, and twenty-nine, to be exact. And don’t think he was boasting. Those were the days of the grand massacres. I guess the anarchists and socialists he liquidated in Catalonia, at the end of the civil war, accounted for half of them. And the Free French he finished off, when he was trusted by the maquis, added some more. And the Ukrainians, and Poles—” Carlson’s frown deepened. “Let’s have another drink,” he said.
As it was poured, he went on, “Today I learned two interesting facts from Vaugiroud: he identified Wahl as a terrorist who was secretly passed through Paris in 1944, en route to Moscow; he recognised the man watching his house as Robert Wahl’s chauffeur. So after I left Vaugiroud, I paid a visit to my friend Bernard, over at the Sûreté. He had been interested in Kalganov ever since those murders in the maquis. He has collected a file of photographs—men who have been known to work with Kalganov.”
“And none of Kalganov himself?”
“What do you want to do—make our job easy?” But Carlson had made some discovery from the Sûreté files. There was excitement in his eyes, in his voice. “The man who watched Vaugiroud’s house is one of Kalganov’s men, all right. His name is Jan Aarvan. And that’s the boy I want you to avoid, Bill. So you’ll stay here. Right?”
Fenner nodded. A bargain was a bargain. Carlson had answered his question. But he still had others to ask. “So Robert Wahl is Kalganov?” And I wasn’t so far wrong, he thought.
“Possibly.”
“Only possibly?”
“Deductions and coincidences don’t make a case. But—” Carlson smiled—“this is the first opening in that blank wall. Thanks to Vaugiroud.”
“And to calculated risks.”
Carlson turned aside the compliment by saying briskly, “We’ll have to concentrate on Robert Wahl. When we catch Kalganov, it will be for a crime that Robert Wahl has committed. So far, Wahl hasn’t made any mistakes.” Carlson thought over that. “So far,” he repeated, more optimistically.
“Have you any idea what he is planning now?”
Carlson only looked as ignorant as possible. The briefing session was over. “It certainly isn’t just handing out leaflets, organising pickets.” He glanced at his watch and rose. “I’ll push off. I probably won’t see you again, so—”
“Where shall I leave the apartment key?”
Carlson looked at him sharply.
“I’ll stay here for a couple of days—no good adding to your ulcers—but I’m pushing off, too.”
“Where?”
“I’ll be wandering around the provinces for the next two weeks. I’m doing a couple of articles on the French national theatre. I won’t be back in Paris until mid-September. Does that make you feel better?”
“No.”
Fenner said in amusement, “Hey! Let’s keep things in proportion, Neill. Kalganov hasn’t taken over France.”
“You’d be surprised how much backing he can command from ordinary party members, who won’t know what they are doing, or why they are doing it, but who’ll obey. Without one question. They’re fighting a war—”
“Look, you don’t have to exaggerate to make me realise they’re a well-organised bunch—”
“Exaggerate? That would be impossible with men like Kalganov. They are hard realists, in the same sense as the top Nazis were realists. Their aim is total victory. And if they speak of total victory, they are at war. Or aren’t they?”
“I’m not arguing with you on that. But, at present, they are—well, partly leashed.”
“Are they?”
“Or at least marking time.”
“And they’ll halt smartly—on whose command?”
“They do take orders. That’s what you said yourself, wasn’t it?”
“Sure,” Carlson said wearily, “they all take orders. All the way from soft-sell, sweet-talk boys who bloom in the open right down to the hidden things in the undergrowth like Kalganov, they all take orders. That, Bill, is what depresses me.”
He worries too much, Fenner thought. He’s losing his sense of balance. He will end up not even seeing real peace when it’s offered to us. “Relax, Neill, relax. After all, the masters have been talking peace. At Geneva, for three years. They’ve been getting nowhere fast, I admit, but the thing to remember is that they haven’t walked out of the conference room. They are still talking. No bombs exploded for three years. That’s my point. There’s always some hope while there’s talk.”
“Only if the two people talking mean the same thing in the words they use. Peace, for instance. There’s peace in Hungary, according to the Communists. But who wants that kind of peace? Bill, when both sides have agreed on an exact meaning of an all-important word, such as peace, and start talking from there—I’ll not only relax, I’ll be able to resign and go back to Iowa, where there’s a small-town newspaper I once edited. And on Sundays I could stretch out in my favourite spot under an apple tree I used to know, and I could look up at the sky and say, ‘Peace, you’re wonderful!’” Carlson’s voice had lost its edge. He laughed at himself, at Bill Fenner. “You civilians! You hear an army man worrying aloud about the Russians, and you immediately think he is some jaundiced militant, trigger happy. He is just as much a civilian as you are, only he has probably been reading the documents that don’t get published.”
There was a slight inclination of Fenner’s head. “Okay, okay,” he said soothingly.
“Here’s one little item that wil
l be published, however. Tomorrow. In headlines right across the front page. The Russians, while still talking at Geneva, have exploded a bomb.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“They’ve broken the moratorium?”
“Smashed it. This bomb is only the first of a planned series. There’s another being popped right this minute. It takes several months to prepare a series like that. What price talk?”
“My God—” Fenner’s anger was rising.
“Exactly how I felt,” Carlson told him. “Remember that piece of fakery, will you, when you are dealing with the Kalganovs in this world?”
“I’ve had some experience with them,” Fenner reminded him sharply. Perhaps that had been his whole opposition to Carlson in the last half-hour: the feeling that Carlson might have studied Communist techniques, but he himself had experienced some of them, first hand, and nothing made up for all the bitterness and anguish of a personal betrayal.
“You haven’t. Kalganov is a different type from your ex- wife’s friend in New York. He isn’t George Williston, alias Geoffrey Willis, alias Bruno.”
Fenner could only stare blankly.
“In New York, your wife had two other names, also. Didn’t you know?”
Fenner rose. He shook his head. He walked over to the desk, then to a bookshelf, then to a picture.
Carlson’s quiet voice, flat and unemotional, followed him. “Kalganov makes George Williston look like a toy balloon you can buy at the Central Park Zoo.”
Fenner said slowly, under control again. “What about Fernand Lenoir? Is he another Williston, or is he in Kalganov’s league?”
“Kalganov wouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone like Williston. So, judging from today’s interest in Vaugiroud, Lenoir is Kalganov’s man. Kalganov protects his own to protect himself.”
Fenner came back to the group of armchairs. “Sandra has really moved up,” he said bitterly. “Or gone far down.”
For a moment, Carlson hesitated. “You did divorce her?” he asked.
“She divorced me.” A small smile played around Fenner’s lips. “For desertion. In Mexico.”
“You went down there, I hope?” Carlson asked in alarm.
“I sent a lawyer to represent me.”
Carlson relaxed. “Then it is legal.”
“Quite final.” Fenner’s voice was final, too.
“I’m glad of that. Especially now.” He added, as if his words had sounded too ominous, “Desertion? Of all the damned impudence!”
“I did walk out.”
“Into a hospital.”
“You pick up a lot of information, don’t you?”
“Just an old newspaperman, like yourself.” Carlson remembered something. He sat down again. “I’ll just have a last cigarette. Sit down. Relax, Bill.”
What’s next? Fenner wondered. He sat down and lit a cigarette, too.
“Mike Ballard met you at the airport. How well do you know him?”
“Just off and on. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing as yet.”
“You mean he’s enjoying Sandra’s parties too much?”
“He is clean politically. Honest enough, that way.”
“Then what?”
“Well—he is laying himself wide open for blackmail.”
“How?”
“He has a family which he seems to love. He has a career that he likes. Yet the idiot has set up a mistress in an apartment in Paris, with the money that he has made on the stock market by following Lenoir’s friendly tips. Could you warn him—tactfully?”
“Me?” Fenner had to laugh. “He thinks I am here to take over his job.” And no wonder Walt Penneyman has been worrying about the Paris office. “Good God—Ballard isn’t even in town this week-end. He didn’t expect any news to break. Left everything in charge of André Spitzer. Let’s hope Spitzer can handle it—or else Walt Penneyman will really start his own bomb explosions.”
“Spitzer will handle his report on the French reaction to the breaking of the moratorium exactly as Lenoir would like him to. Play it down, muted key. Show no alarm, suggest understanding for Russia’s mistrust which makes her sometimes so ‘difficult,’ drop a reminder of Hiroshima, pull out every psychological stop in the organ accompaniment to the neutralists’ hymn.”
“Does he think Walt Penneyman is a fool?”
“No. He knows that Penneyman, like the rest of us, will be shocked and bewildered. And angry. Angry, too, with the French, who—from Spitzer’s report—seem to equate Soviet Russia and the United States as two similar nuisances. By the time your New York office gets in other reports from Europe, and starts evaluating the news properly, Spitzer’s suggestions will have entered into a lot of subconscious minds. Second reports from France, however corrective, won’t entirely blot first impressions out of some minds. And in Spitzer’s creed, every little helps.”
Fenner nodded. He had seen that happen before. It was one of the nightmares of newspapermen: the dishonest source, the unsuspected twist. The Nazis had been expert at that. There was one major news source in Europe that had scarcely recovered yet from that duplicity. “How the hell did Spitzer ever edge his way into the Chronicle?”
“Ballard needed extra help, and Lenoir recommended Spitzer. He has an enormous capacity for work. Most obliging, and no complaints. So promotion came. He is now second to Ballard. He also introduced Ballard to his mistress. What you might call the generally useful type.”
“He will be out on his ear after his handling of today’s news.”
“Will he send it under his own name?” Carlson asked with a most disarming smile.
Of course he wouldn’t. He would send it under Ballard’s name, with the friendly pretence of covering up his boss’s absence. And Ballard would either have to stand by the report or give himself away.
“Where is he this week-end? Could you reach him?”
“I’d have to ask Spitzer for his address,” Fenner said. He swore under his breath. “Damned if I don’t spike Comrade Spitzer’s little gun.”
“How?” Carlson was suddenly and most cheerfully interested.
“I’ll cable a report to Penneyman myself, say Ballard’s in bed with grippe—”
“Sweet Mademoiselle Grippe,” Carlson said reflectively.
“You’re recovering fast.” And Carlson did look more like the Carlson of that morning.
He said, “It’s pleasant to spike a gun now and then. Perhaps that’s all we can do: keep spiking, until they get good and tired of loading.” Carlson thought over that. “Yes, when our policy is to prove that defence is superior to attack—a most original policy, which would certainly have lost us the American Revolution—the only thing we can do is to keep spiking, call their bluff from the big to the small, let them get away with nothing, wear the bastards down. Bill—thank you! You’ve put life in these old bones. You’ve inspired Carlson’s Doctrine of Peaceful Persuasion, or Co-existence without Burial.” He watched Fenner searching for some writing paper in the desk drawer. “You really are going to cable Penneyman?” he asked delightedly. “What authorities have you interviewed, Mr. Fenner?”
“What authorities has Spitzer interviewed?”
Carlson’s old grin was back in place. “Well, you could guess the official French reaction easily enough: De Gaulle vindicated in refusal to hold conferences with Russians. As the old Cross of Lorraine proverb runs, ‘He who sits in a bed of poison ivy will sleep facing down for a month.’ Vive la France! Et les pommes de terre frites!”
“You just go home to bed and leave me to work out a short cable to Penneyman.”
“And how are you going to send it? The transatlantic wires will be crowded out.”
“All right; stay. And take the cable with you. You have ways and means.”
“It seems to me I’ve been doing a lot of work today for Walt Penneyman and his New York Chronicle. What would a Congressional committee say?”
“It could be that a Congressiona
l committee may owe him a vote of thanks.”
“He certainly started something when he asked Vaugiroud to analyse a planted lie,” Carlson conceded, and wandered off in the direction of the bathroom as Fenner sat down at the desk. By the time he came back, Fenner had finished wording the cable. It was brief: Ballard was ill and could not make a full report until Monday; Penneyman was to disregard any substitute report meanwhile which did not emphasise official French justification of De Gaulle’s policies or did not credit the French people with the same shock and outraged concern that all free men must feel everywhere.
“Discreet,” was Carlson’s comment as he pocketed the message. “Can’t do anyone any harm except Spitzer.” He started on his way to the door. Casually, he looked at Fenner; most casually, he said, “Talking of discretion—does this project of yours on the national theatre have to deal solely with France? There are other national theatres in Europe, you know.”
“That’s for next year, and the year after that. I’m an optimist, it seems. Even in spite of tonight’s news—” Fenner shrugged.
“I’m with you there. Keep on planning: it’s one form of survival. Provided we keep on spiking those guns, too. But frankly, do you have to stick closely to your plans? Why not switch to England this year? Or Greece? September’s a good month there. Sea is fairly flat; sky is cooling off. Or what about Sweden? Have you seen the girls in Stockholm?”
“You sound like a travel folder.”
“I can’t be a very good one. No interest, Bill?”
Fenner thought of a slender girl with fair hair that fell softly over her brow at the brush of a breeze. Would she wear a little black dress and short white gloves when she sat in the Piazza di San Marco? Whatever she wore, he’d know her. He said, “I wouldn’t mind a trip to Venice.”
Carlson’s slow walk halted. He stood very still. “Venice. Why Venice?” His voice was guarded.
“I like it. September’s a good month there, too. The tourist invasion is just about over; the Fenice opens up.” He was almost talking himself into a visit to one of his favourite places. He grinned, and clamped down on the idea. “Next year, with luck,” Fenner said. “I’ve planned out this September too well to change now.”
The Venetian Affair Page 13