Stained Glass

by William F. Buckley

  He stared briefly at the hot rolls and butter, drank a half cup of black coffee, and walked across the street to the pay telephone.

  There was no need, really, to call Singer. The rules of the agency were: Communicate upstairs as infrequently as is efficient. The rule of thumb is to communicate disturbing news, not reassuring news. He had only reassuring news. Wagner’s diary did indeed make mention of the chapel, under a heading of “Areas and Persons to Be Investigated.” Wagner had drawn lines down the column up to the chapel, suggesting that investigations had been completed to that point but not including it.

  But now Wagner’s diary no longer existed. It had been cremated in the little fireplace in Blackford’s room, and no copy could reasonably be assumed to survive it.

  All this he told Singer Callaway, using the code, but really why he called—he knew, and Singer knew—was on the miraculous chance that Washington had suddenly thought better of the plan, granting a reprieve.

  He didn’t put the question directly, but he did ask whether he shouldn’t telephone Singer later in the day—he was pleading, actually, for an, opportunity to make yet another appeal—“in the event you had anything to report.” Singer replied slowly, and a little sternly, that no change in plans was conceivable at this late moment, that in the incredible event that such a change should be ordered, he, Blackford, could count on his old friend, Singer, to communicate to him, in time, an interdictory message. So Blackford rehitched himself to the work wheel.

  He spent the first half hour with Overstreet, who pronounced the restructuring of the chapel’s trussed roof complete, the timbers and crossmembers sound and stalwart. The carpenters were busy now on the choir stalls, the lathe whining away at the kiln-dried wood under the watchful eye of Conditti, transmuting it into the subtle arabesques of an unknown master.

  “You know the count’s coming in this afternoon to check the glass?”

  “That’s Conditti’s department.”

  “Yeah, I know. But after he’s through looking at the glass, why don’t we show him the first meter or so of the choir stall, to see what he thinks of it?”

  “Why not? He’d better think well of it. We’ve only got one of the best woodworkers in Europe doing it.”

  “What did you say?”

  Overstreet raised his voice to be heard over the lathe, and repeated himself. Blackford nodded, and walked over to the chromoscope, beckoning Conditti to join him.

  “Wintergrin’s coming in to check the blue this afternoon. Let me have a look at it.”

  Conditti laid out the sample crystals in the frame, tightened it, and inserted it in the chamber at knee level. Blackford leaned over, looked into the viewing port, and put his hands on the control levers.

  “Okay. Light her up.”

  Conditti pulled the switch and Blackford found himself looking into a deep blue, rich, dark, but translucent. With his right hand he slowly decreased the intensity of the beam. The blue got darker, and, finally, opaque. Under the frame was the lettering 1-B-5.

  “Next,” Blackford said and Conditti clicked the second frame into position. This blue, 2-B-6, was noticeably lighter.

  “I’ll try ’em side by side.”

  Blackford turned the zoom control permitting all six blues, substantially reduced in size, to be seen at once. He fiddled with the light intensifier and let his eyes travel back and forth from the lightest blue to the darkest, straining to evaluate not only translucence but richness. Viollet-le-Duc, in the Dictionary of French Architecture, holds that “the first condition for an artist in glass is to know how to manage blue. The blue is the light in windows, and light has value only by opposition.” So Blackford instructed Conditti to arrange on the tray a border of yellows, purples, greens, in identical sequence, to surround each blue, so that the eye could judge the composition. Conditti went to work and Blackford went to his office.

  Outside there was hubbub as the campaign caravan returned after the evening at Hamburg. There was no window in Blackford’s office, the makeshift ceiling of which began under the north rose, so he could only imagine the scene he had seen so often—Wintergrin jumping out of the car, a weary but exhilarated staff filing out with papers, briefcases, overnight bags. Only four more days … What must it be like at the campaign headquarters of Adenauer and Ollenhauer? he wondered.

  He felt hungry and asked Overstreet and Conditti if they would join him for soup at the Anselmsklaus. They agreed, and Conditti pulled a bottle of the Tafelwein from the case by the door. He usually brought his own wine and sandwich, ordering soup and coffee from the restaurant. Spring and Pulling, sitting on workbenches, were already eating their box lunches and sipping Coca-Colas. They acknowledged Blackford’s perfunctory greeting and went back to their sandwiches, accompanied by the tap of American jazz coming in over their portable radio from the U.S. Armed Forces radio station in Frankfurt.

  At the table Blackford asked, “If the count wants a target date, is it too early to give it to him?”

  His mouth full, Overstreet nevertheless managed to say, “Figure late summer, early fall”—he swallowed and took a glass of wine—“if we can get enough people on the glass. But with the scope, we can code the colors once and for all, and won’t have to bring ’em in one by one to test. The lancet windows won’t be any trouble, we’ll have that glass in a month. It’s going better than I expected.”

  Blackford nodded.

  Conditti asked, “If the old boy becomes chancellor, I understand we might just have to suspend this here project, won’t we?”

  “Who told you that?” Blackford spoke sharply.

  “Well, everybody talks about mobilization and war, that sort of thing. I assume if this place is going to become a battlefield, they aren’t going to want American workers underfoot. At least not this American worker. I was too young for the last war, and I plan to be too old for the next one.”

  “Don’t you understand,” Blackford heard himself almost shouting, “the Russians are bluffing. They’ve got no intention of overrunning Germany. It would be suicidal in the long run, and maybe even in the short run.” Conditti and Overstreet were startled by Blackford’s vehemence. They had thought him unconcerned with such matters. His next words were reassuring to their image of him.

  “At least I don’t think they would”—his voice trailed off, as if he had lost interest in the subject.

  At three-thirty, a secretary from Count Wintergrin’s office came to the chapel to confirm that he would be ready for his appointment at four o’clock promptly.

  “I’ll come by and pick him up,” Blackford said.

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “I have to leave something with Miss Chadinoff,” Blackford said, pointing vaguely to a flowerpot at the corner of his desk.

  “Very well,” she said smiling. “We’ll see you later. Do you think the count can finish his inspection within an hour? He has other appointments.”

  “I think we can be finished by then,” Blackford said.

  At three forty-five he walked out of his office and approached Conditti, who was working on the mosaic Tree of Jesse. “When the count comes in, Arturo, no need to stop your own work. I can handle the crystals.”

  Putting on his windbreaker he stepped outside and headed up the courtyard, the little flowerpot in hand. The sentry admitted him and he walked sure-footedly into the dining area to Erika’s desk. Her Polish assistant was seated at the next desk down, earplugs on, typing out a translation. He pulled up a chair next to her and set down the flowerpot on her desk.

  “Erika,” Blackford said in a whisper. “Listen to me carefully.” His outward expression, as he slouched in the chair, was relaxed—he had a minute before going in to fetch the count.

  “Yes,” she said, the smile suddenly gone.

  “I’m not going to do it.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not going to do it!”

  “Quiet!” he whispered. Then, “Look, we don’t have time, so just listen, don’t
argue. I am not going to fire that transmitter. Nothing you or anybody else can do is going to make me. You’ve joined Axel on his chapel visits from time to time. Well, join him on this one. And then you do it if you want to.” He pulled the little metal case out of his pocket. “There are two switches.” He clicked one. “There, the battery’s on. The second switch is that one, recessed to prevent its going off accidentally.” Erika stared at the case which Blackford held below the surface of the desk. “The plan is to depress that button about five seconds after the chromoscope is turned on. Then dispose of the damned thing first chance you get. Here’s your chance to strike a blow for organizational discipline,” said Blackford, dropping the transmitter case discreetly into Erika’s open purse. “I’ll be a good assistant. I’ll put him through his paces. But if the plan goes forward, it’ll be because you depressed the switch.”

  She turned to him, unbelieving, trembling, scared, speechless.

  Blackford got up. “The show is in your hands. If you don’t fire the thing, nobody does, and the plan will abort. Fire it, and maybe you’ll be secretly decorated by Stalin. Maybe by my government. Who knows? They could be working up a joint award.”

  She got up and with her lips made a spitting sound, grabbed her coat with trembling hand, and went out into the corridor. Blackford knocked at the door of Wintergrin’s study and Axel opened it himself, the eager light in his eye he inevitably brought to business in the chapel and, in the past few weeks, to visits with Blackford.

  “All ready, Blackford. All ready.” He pulled a raincoat off a hook and strode out, an arm around Blackford’s shoulder, followed by the leech-like Wolfgang. At the vestibule were Erika and Roland. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s all go and see the progress.”

  They set out across the courtyard. Axel engaged Blackford in rapid conversation. “The crowds last night! There was no mistaking their purpose. No mistaking it. Their mind has been made up. A few months ago they were excited. Today they are determined. It will come to pass, Blackford, you wait and see.”

  Blackford had to look away. He could not have spoken at that moment.

  He did not have to, because Axel went on. “There was a woman there who stopped me on the way out. She has a mother and two brothers in Leipzig. One of the brothers has been sent to an eastern camp. The mother is in prison for delivering a letter to a friend, a letter from a prisoner to his mother. The woman said she and her family have been praying for me every day since the Frankfurt Convention. And let me make a prediction. On November sixteenth, an intermediary will call on me with the intelligence that the Ulbricht government wishes to negotiate. That’s more, Blackford, than a mere hunch. But let’s talk about the chapel. About the enduring things.”

  They reached the door and entered the chapel. The workmen paid no attention to their august but familiar visitor. The visitors walked up the aisle and turned right at the transept. Wintergrin glanced at the chromoscope. “Ah yes, our friend here is proving useful, isn’t it? What Meister Gerard could have done with one of these!”

  “Yes”—Blackford forced himself to say something—“the flexibility is certainly there.”

  Wintergrin went rapidly to the operator’s position, sitting at the stool, bending over, and reaching for the controls. Roland Himmelfarb was looking casually about the chapel to gauge the progress in a more general way. Blackford looked up at Erika. She was ten yards removed from the switch box, staring resolutely at Oakes. He followed her eyes to the switch box. On an adjacent hook she had hung—her handbag. Her eyes pierced his. Erika Chadinoff was not going to do it. The voice of Count Wintergrin, a little impatient, sang out. “I say, I’m ready, Oakes.” Blackford walked to the switch box. Wintergrin, head bent down, hands on the dull-gray levers, went on.

  “Maybe this time we’ll get it, eh Blackford? The original St. Anselm’s blue. Sometimes even at midday I close my eyes and see those blues, the north rose. Everything is more authentic in the mind’s eye.”

  “All ready, Axel,” Blackford said huskily and, staring at the hanging handbag, the clasp open, he pulled down the switch, closing his eyes. He counted to himself—one—two—could Erika have left the handbag but kept the transmitter?—three—four—he opened his eyes and stared into the half-open bag, and spotted the dull-steel corner of the transmitter. Axel was saved! But he continued as if by inertia counting—five—six—seven—his heart pounded under the pressure of conflicting emotions—eight—nine—ten—a blast shook the heavy machine, followed by firecracker-style explosions within it, and a searing human moan. Rufus had made contingency arrangements, Blackford knew instantly.

  He yelled and yanked off the main switch. Himmelfarb shouted and ran over to Axel, seizing him by the shoulders. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” Wolfgang hurled himself at the machine and pounded his fists on it. Workmen from all sides rushed to help. They stretched out Axel Wintergrin gently on the ground. Himmelfarb yelled at Erika, “Get a doctor! Get a doctor!” She ran out, pausing only to snatch her purse. Roland leaned his ear against Wintergrin’s heart.

  “There’s no sound there,” he said; “no sound,” he said again, sobbing convulsively until the doctors came, and the ambulance and the guards, taking them both away.

  CHAPTER 23

  Blackford spent the next chaotic hours in the chapel, mostly with Overstreet and Conditti, trying to answer questions for which they had no answers. Conditti was heard to say over and over again that his father’s chromoscope had never before caused injury, let alone death. He had instantly attacked the charred hulk with screwdrivers and wrenches to examine the blackened interior, but despaired finally to reconstruct the cause of the accident. The electrician at St. Anselm’s, conscripted to duty by the magistrate, stared at the remains and professed his inability to explain what had gone wrong, mumbling that it should be shipped to the laboratory at Düsseldorf. “It’s like the wreckage of an airplane,” he kept repeating to everyone who approached him. Conditti asked Hallam Spring if he could help with the analysis, and Spring traced the electrical cables from the chromoscope to the fuse box behind it, and from there back to the central power source. The wires had standard insulation. Clearly, he surmised, defective insulation inside the box contrived to electrocute Wintergrin, and the short circuit had then caused a fire in the box.

  All these deductions were arrived at within the hour, but for three hours more they repeated it, to themselves, to each other, to relays of representatives of Count Wintergrin’s staff, to reporters crowded outside (the magistrate forbade them entry into the chapel, posting two guards). There was a press conference of sorts, held at the porch of the chapel, with Overstreet and Conditti answering questions, then the electrician from St. Anselm’s, then the magistrate. In the turmoil there was a sudden silence when Countess Wintergrin, dressed in black, a Bible in hand, walked slowly, unaccompanied, up the steps to the porch. The crowd made silent way for her, resuming their dogged interrogatories only after she had disappeared into the narthex.

  She walked slowly but without hesitation up the aisle, observed only by the Portuguese mosaicist, who sat upright on a chair beside his mounds of colored chips, saying a rosary. The countess turned toward the chromoscope but said nothing to Overstreet or Conditti, standing by it, or to the local electrician, on his back wrestling with the wires extruded like spaghetti from the bottom of the machine. She turned to the north side and walked to the open office of Blackford Oakes. He was there sitting at his desk, grime and sweat on his face, talking in a rapid and suddenly dislocated German over the telephone to a reporter who had had the ingenuity to come up with the number.

  On seeing her he rose and, without comment, hung the receiver on the hook.

  The countess, a tight smile on her lips, addressed him.

  “Are you satisfied, Mr. Oakes?”

  Her atrophied smile was not without a strange understanding. Without giving Blackford time to reply, she turned and walked in measured gait to the half-constructed altar, before which she kne
lt, bowing her head, her lips moving for a few abject seconds. She rose then, retraced her steps, head slightly bowed. Once again the crowd fell silent as she moved through it and began her way up the cobblestone courtyard one hundred meters to her castle.

  Blackford reached his bedroom at ten. All the world, or so it seemed, was at the inn. A half-dozen reporters attempted to reach him, and now he was neither answering the phone nor acknowledging knocks on the door. “I should have insisted on counting your balls. Thank God Rufus saw through you—Spring.” Blackford stared at the note, and tossed it finally into the toilet. He tried lying down on his bed, but he could not un-cock any muscle in his mind or body. At eleven he got up and knelt to pick up a sheet of paper slipped under the door, only after concluding that otherwise the man pounding on the door would knock it down. The note read: “It is Wolfgang here, to give you protection.” He opened the door to the huge frame of Axel Wintergrin’s personal bodyguard.

  Wordlessly, Wolfgang reached into his back pocket and brought out a weathered black wallet. From it with fumbling fingers Wolfgang took out a piece of blue writing paper, folded. He handed it to Blackford, who opened and read it. Blackford turned white and felt his knees weaken. He murmured to Wolfgang to sit down and went to the bathroom, locking the door. There he was ill. He ran the water to dull the sound of his heaving. After a while gasping for breath, he sat on the toilet seat and stared again at the note. Could he, oh God, be misunderstanding it? He whispered the German words slowly, as if teaching them to a class: “Wolfgang: Falls mir irgend etwas zustösst (If anything happens to me), sofort Herrn Oakes benachrichtigen (please report to Herr Oakes). Er könnte Hilfe benötigen (He may need help). Gib ihm diesen Zettel (Give him this note). Das genügt (He will understand).” It was signed, “AW.”