He put down the telephone. “It was risky. But worth it. If Reynard’s clients had been the KGB, they’d have picked up the bodies. It looks to me as though Reynard had a partner, planned to pick you both up, and maybe negotiate with the KGB—or with us—an agreeable ransom. So partner shows up, looks at the scene, and decides he’ll sit this one out. Which means it’s reasonable to suppose the mole in Washington or wherever will continue to send the stuff to Mittelstrasse.”
CHAPTER 13
Already, Rufus had given instructions to the FBI. He was to be called the next time any post office handled a letter addressed to Frau Ilse Müller, No. 48 Mittelstrasse, East Berlin. In two hours he had a call from New York. He gave instructions, and then called J. Edgar Hoover.
At 6 P.M. Hoover, Rufus, and three technicians were at the principal laboratory of the FBI, in the cellar of the vast building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
They stood, staring down at an envelope, steamed open, and its one-page enclosure—a newspaper clipping, at the top of which had been typed in German, “Use. Thought this would interest you.” It was a report from the Herald Tribune by Red Smith on the Czech—U.S. hockey game.
Rufus said, “My guess is, with what we’ve been giving them, you’re not going to find any cryptographic paraphrases. The KGB will want the whole thing. It’s got to be there. Microphotography. Can’t be anything else.”
“Unless we’re on the wrong trail,” suggested the Director of the FBI, never entirely reconciled to his subordinate position in Operation Tango.
“That’s correct. We could be wrong. But we have gone to a great deal of trouble, and we have lost an agent, to identify this woman. The photographs”—he pointed to the dossier that included copies of past correspondence, almost always clippings, directed to Ilse Müller—“wouldn’t show up microphotography. But now we have the envelope and the original enclosure. We must proceed with total caution.” He looked at the principal laboratory specialist. “Everything we have planned depends on this letter’s being delivered to the address with minimum delay. But we must know”—he pointed to the letter—“if that little piece of airmail has in it five pages of minutes of the National Security Council.”
The technicians went to work. Hoover invited Rufus to his august office. In order to reach the Director’s desk it was necessary to walk through the huge room, its walls sagging with pictures, testimonials, newspaper headlines, plaques acquired by the Director during the preceding thirty-five years. He walked slowly, in the event Rufus wished to linger over the collection. Rufus, entirely without mannerism save for the distressing habit of relapsing occasionally into a totally impenetrable silence, knew less by intuition than by craft the endocrinological requirements of certain types of human nature; so that he said, his eyes skimming the walls, “What a very impressive office, Mr. Hoover. Abundant evidence of how greatly you have contributed to the national security.”
“Well,” said Hoover, his facial muscles now relaxed, “we all have a job to do.”
He sat at his desk, pushed a button, and a secretary materialized as quickly as if she had been hiding behind the curtain. “I’ll take coffee. You, Rufus?… One coffee, one tea, and I don’t need to tell you to be quick about it.”
They talked, but with increasing tension. Rufus had learned early to steel himself against disappointment, and on one occasion several years back had made a fairly respectable calculation that in his own experience he had been disappointed about ninety percent of the time. But he would not apply that ratio to this operation, not after what he had learned from Trust. The groundwork had been very thorough. After a while there was simply no way of continuing a general conversation without making specific mention of what both men ached to learn. Hoover spoke first.
“The Russians. Do they have cameras as refined as ours for this kind of thing?”
“No. But the East Germans do. The Zeiss plant in Jena went to them. There’s one instrument they’ve developed which can put an eight-by-ten negative in the diameter of a typewriter dot. The technique for implanting that negative on a piece of ordinary typing paper isn’t easy. You need to increase the pressure on the typewriter key enough to penetrate the paper, leaving a tiny hole. On a manual machine, not so hard, you just pound. Harder on an electric machine, though not impossible, because you can turn on the index pressure for maximum carbon copies, make your dots, then reduce the pressure to normal. With tweezers, you insert the negative in the dot after coating the back side with an invisible colorless adhesive, to keep the negative from falling right through. Then you go back—the trickiest part—and type lightly over the hole. But there is a slight residual protuberance. Sometimes you can feel it with your finger. Other times you have to slide the paper through a nivellator, calibrated to measure differences in thickness up to one one thousandth of a millimeter.”
“Yeah, I know all that,” said the Director, who as a matter of fact didn’t. It was then that his phone rang. He grabbed for it.
“Director, here.”
He listened for a moment, then put down the telephone without comment.
He smiled at Rufus. “The FBI always gets its man.”
It was with visible excitement that even these professionals presented for inspection to the Director and Rufus the repristinated letter. By courier it would return to the post office on the upper east side, and the next morning wing its way to Berlin. Rufus had requested that only a single copy of the unearthed documents be printed. The Director was manifestly irritated by this (he liked to keep copies of everything), but Rufus’s authority had by now been so markedly reinforced by the President that Hoover did not voice his resentment, instead authorizing by a nod of his head to his technicians Rufus’s request. In a half hour, carrying his locked briefcase, Rufus bade the Director good night, thanked and congratulated him, and said he would be in touch presently. He went to the nearest pay telephone and rang the emergency number. In a few seconds he was talking to the Director of Central Intelligence. “Important. Can you meet me at The Quarters right away?” “The Quarters” was the designated term for the offices from which Rufus was running Operation Tango.
It was just after nine. Rufus kept some fruit in the corner of the room and when the Director was shown in, he found Rufus sitting in a chair staring at a piece of paper under a bright light while munching on an apple.
“Did I interrupt your dinner?” the Director asked.
“Yes.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re going to tell me, I hope, that the envelope yielded the material?”
“I’m going to tell you more than that.” The Director had pulled out his pipe and drawn up a chair opposite the little coffee table in front of Rufus.
Wordlessly, Rufus handed him the three sheets of paper.
The Director looked at them, and shot to his feet.
“Great God almighty!” There was a silence. “So help me, Rufus, sometimes I feel like giving up.”
“I’ll never remind you that you said that, Allen.”
“But this means they’re all over the place.”
“Not necessarily. Might very well be the same one.”
“You mean, the minutes of the NSC, all this time, have been leaking out of my office?”
“It would appear so. But you know better than I what distribution is given to these minutes in your office.”
“The distribution is: one copy to me, one copy in the maximum security safe in my own office.”
“What do you do with your copy after you have read it?”
“I personally insert it into the shredder behind my desk.”
“Who brings you the copy?”
“It depends. In this case, the head of Canadian Operations. He’d bring in a single copy.”
“How then would you make a copy for the file?”
“Through my own Xerox machine.”
“Who operates that?”
“My Deputy’s secretary.”
“Isn’t th
at, then, the likely place to look?”
CHAPTER 14
It was agreed that the news of Michael would not be given to his parents until Blackford himself could do so, and throughout the first hours of the endless flight to Washington (though thank God for jet travel!) Blackford struggled with the formulation of an appropriate—or the least inappropriate—way to proceed. It was quite simply the case that Michael had given his life for Blackford. He had done this instinctively: Reynard had hardly given them time for deliberation. It was spastic heroism, uncogitated love. Blackford’s eyes went moist whenever he turned his mind to the episode, which he had difficulty keeping out of mind. Halfway across the ocean and well into a second bottle of wine, he suddenly perceived why his mind turned so constantly to those few seconds in a spirit not only of gratitude and love—but also of injury. It was that burr in the memory which at first he had passed over in consideration of the overarching drama. But it stuck there, tenacious. It was, of course, Michael’s strange behavior during …
Blackford took a notebook from his pocket, and a ball-point pen, and began to write:
8:00 Alarm rings.
8:10 Boil water.
… and so on. He characterized Michael’s mood from the moment he brought him coffee through the next half hour, during breakfast, when he visibly recovered from his slight hangover. Then Blackford had gone for the mail—
Instantly he knew.
Only the congestion of events, he consoled himself, could so have distracted him as for him not to have realized earlier that Michael had received a letter, and that that letter—nothing else—must have brought on the torment that showed on his face the moment that Michael rushed into Reynard’s discharging pistol.
He had slipped Michael’s letters into a manila envelope, sealed it, and placed it in his own briefcase. The family pictures he had packed in his suitcase, checking it on the Frankfurt–Washington Pan Am flight.
He reached into his case, drew out the envelope, and sliced it open. The letters were as he had scooped them up: a collection of several months in one neat packet, and a single letter, crushed, clearly, within the palm of one hand. It was three pages, handwritten on both sides in a tight hand. It was in Italian. “Caro Michelino” it began, ending “Col cuore affranto [with broken heart], Mama.”
Relying on schoolboy Latin, some French, a smattering of Spanish, he attempted to decipher it—but gave up after the second sentence. But he was too agitated to think about anything else. And so he set out to duplicate the letter (the words were entirely legible) in block letters on a legal pad of yellow paper.
He wrote one entire sentence in block script on his pad. Then he would drop four blank lines, and write out the second sentence.
By the time he was through, he had used up eight pages. He left out all proper names, coding them.
He then called the stewardess.
Most stewardesses were extra-attentive when Blackford Oakes rang the call button. They would often attempt conversation, but this one—plump, vivacious, efficient—could see that the handsome young American was preoccupied.
“Can I help you?” she asked, turning off his call button.
“I have an unusual request. I’m really sorry to bother you with it. But I would be ever so grateful if you would ask on the public address system if anyone on board is carrying an Italian dictionary.”
She laughed. “Of course I wouldn’t mind. Is it a particular word? I speak Italian. My mother was Italian.”
Blackford looked up at her. His impulse was to turn over the note pad—but of course he must not.
“Well thanks, and maybe if I get stuck with a particular word I’ll call on you, but if there’s a dictionary around, that would really help.”
“Attention, ladies and gentlemen, this is your stewardess, Corina. There is a gentleman in distress on our flight. He needs to borrow an Italian–English dictionary. If anyone has one and would be willing to part with it for a few minutes, Pan American would be very grateful.”
To her astonishment, no fewer than four signal lights flashed on. Corina went the rounds, making little notes of which dictionary corresponded with which passenger. Three were useless—assorted word guides fashioned for tourists, one of them giving perhaps five hundred words, the largest of them twice as many.
But the fourth, apparently belonging to a man whose name and address were written on the flyleaf: John T. Bergin, 1908 Hall of Graduate Studies, Yale University, was a well-thumbed onionskin Cassell’s Dictionary designed to handle everything short of the comprehensive dictionaries. Blackford returned the three to Corina, keeping the Cassell’s.
Knowing nothing about Italian declension or conjugation, Blackford—as obsessed now with the assignment as if the safety of the flight depended on it—began by writing above the Italian word the English equivalent, when this was unambiguous. After a few sentences, he found this method tedious. He decided instead to alphabetize all the Italian words. So he grouped the A’s, then the B’s, on down the alphabet. Then he sub-alphabetized each to the second letter. Now he copied them out on yet other yellow sheets so that, turning now to the dictionary, he could do so in an orderly way, hunting down the English equivalent. For several words, no English was given. (Either the words were extremely uncommon, or else they were slang, or else a part of a private vocabulary.) After wrestling with a few verbs, he began to feel an instinct for the tense. In just under an hour, he had an English word for almost all the Italian words.
Now, using his guide, he went back to his original pages and reproduced the letter. It was over 1,500 words long.
Again he rang for Corina.
“What does the word squaciata mean?”
“Can you show me the context?”
Somewhat guardedly, Blackford showed her a line on his yellow pad, making it difficult for her eyes to rove above or below that line.
“That,” said Corina, “means ‘torn apart.’”
“Thanks. And here’s the dictionary for Mr. Bergin. I wrote a note in it. Could I have some more white wine?” Corina smiled and went off.
Blackford carefully folded the original letter, within the folds of his numerous yellow pages, closed his eyes, tilted back his chair, and imagined what Michael must have experienced yesterday morning at breakfast.
The letter had spoken of his mother’s suspicions that her Benni had taken a mistress in New York. Ostensibly his trips were to visit the widow of Salvatore and old friends from the concentration camp. But the trips had now become weekly. She tracked down the telephone number of Mrs. Salvatore Gigli, and by deft questioning established that Benni had seen her only once in the past four months.
So: Maria had undertaken to discover what was taking Benni to New York with such frequency.
In the past few months he had also taken to staying late in the office on Fridays, almost without exception, and she resolved to begin her investigation by inquiring into the reason for this.
No one knew the offices of Ambrose & Gaither better than Maria. Accordingly she dropped by one Friday afternoon, as occasionally she did on weekdays while passing the building, to greet her old friends. But instead of leaving through the front door, she let it slam and slipped into an adjacent stationery closet, behind whose shelves were old files never consulted. By these files, she waited. When the last person but Benni had left the office (she had left the closet door slightly ajar), she saw Benni bolting the door. Then heard his footsteps. He stopped at his cubicle, then walked away, toward the blueprint room.
She followed him and, opening the door slightly, saw that he was diligently using the blueprinting machinery. She could think of no reason for him to do this. Moreover, he withdrew from the machine not the characteristically large stretches of blueprint paper, but letter-sized pieces. She ducked back to her hiding place.
That night, after he had gone to sleep, she went downstairs and looked through his briefcase. The texture of a half-dozen pieces of paper was different from the others. She knew t
hose to be blueprint paper. The next morning she left a note for him on his breakfast tray: she had risen early to go to a baptism, and would see him on his return from New York. She was, in fact, on his train (“I disguised my face,” she had written). She followed him to a park in Brooklyn where he left a newspaper on a bench which a stranger picked up. That night she searched his briefcase again. The blueprint papers were missing. The following Saturday she repeated the procedure and—though this time the reunion was at a museum—again, he had trafficked with the same man. This time she followed the stranger, who returned in due course, by subway mostly, to a commercial photographic studio in Brooklyn.
Her last words were: “My darling son, I am seized with terrible suspicions. Your father always thought the Communist Party was the savior of all of us, and although he said he left the Party when he came to America—now I am not too sure.” There followed the phrase, “I am torn apart.”
Michael, Blackford assumed, would have guessed that the woman they were setting out to finger at No. 48 Mittelstrasse was the recipient of the favors of no less than Michael’s father.
CHAPTER 15
During the world war, while the wholehearted, hyperkinetic Amanda Gaither was at boarding school at Ethel Walker’s in Simsbury, Connecticut, she felt out of things. Her roommate Jane had two brothers in the army; Jane’s younger sister Trish would lose, that summer, not only the brother who had been her constant companion from childhood, but also her young friend in South Carolina, who was going off to Annapolis. Amanda had no brothers in the service, and her father was too old to serve (he had been decorated in the first war). During a school debate in 1943 on the question “Resolved: This house believes the Allies should launch a second front in Europe now,” Amanda spoke emotionally in the affirmative, and during the rebuttal one of the girls, defending the negative, made a devastating reference to the understandable bellicosity of those who had very little of a personal kind to lose from premature military operations.
Marco Polo, If You Can Page 13