A waiter took their order and hurriedly left them.
“Well, Matt, old man, I’ve got it,” Neely announced at once. “Voilà!” He extracted a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and handed it to Brennan. “Hotel Palais d’Orsay. There’s the address, 9 Quai Anatole-France. That’s just across the river from the Tuileries. You go over the bridge, the Pont Royal, and turn right to where the Gare d’Orsay used to be.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“The Russians keep most of their overflow in that hotel. They always did and they still do.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“I have, several times,” said Neely. “It’s a surprisingly drab hotel for them to patronize. Shabby yellow walls in the lobby, uncleaned columns, a faded Oriental rug. But maybe not so surprising, since our Russian friends, despite their drift toward a capitalist economy, like to cling to the myth of pure Marxist proletarianism. Anyway, Nikolai Rostov, Assistant Minister for Far Eastern Affairs, sleeps there.”
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am, Herb.”
“Nonsense. My part was routine,” said Neely. “You’re the one with the big job, Matt. What do you intend to do?”
“See him,” said Brennan wryly. “Just go there and ask for him, or camp in the lobby until he passes through. The minute we’ve finished here, I’ll go straight to the Hotel Palais d’Orsay.”
Neely was shaking his head. “No, not today. Forget it.
Rostov went right on from the airport to the five-power Ministers’ confab in the Quai d’Orsay, where they’re laying out the agenda for the plenary sessions, and determining the protocol and rules—you know, chairmanship, the order in which to give the floor to each delegation and its proposals—all touchy and complicated, with Red China here. I’m afraid Rostov’ll be burning oil until midnight. You could leave a message at his hotel.”
“Maybe. I think I’d prefer to make it person to person. I read somewhere that tomorrow morning’s opening session begins at ten. I’ll be in his hotel by seven or seven-thirty.”
Neely began to eat the omelet the waiter had placed in front of him. “Think you’ll have any trouble seeing him?”
“Could be. What I’m up against is the fact that Rostov made a promise to me four years ago, and walked out on it, or maybe was blocked from seeing me or anyone else. Against me, also, is the fact that Rostov could not or would not respond to any appeals from me directly or through my intermediaries. Against me is the other obvious fact that he was in trouble as a result of Zurich, was persona non grata, and now that he’s been restored to government, he may want no part of me or of anyone connected with a damaging episode in his past.” Carefully Brennan applied more mustard to his ham sandwich, then looked up. “What I have going for me is the fact that Rostov really appeared to like me personally, to enjoy our friendship, short though it was, and he may have wanted to help me and been prevented from doing so. Also going for me—well, now that he’s active again, important again, Rostov may feel secure and powerful enough to give me a hand, may even want to, and, as I recall, he was a gutsy person, though, independent—”
“Yes, I remember.”
“—and he may still be like that, and not let anyone prevent him from doing what, in good conscience, he feels obligated to do. I don’t know, Herb, except it’ll be so very little I’m asking of him, a copy of the old Varney letter, or an affidavit swearing that I tried to restrain Varney and that I was innocent of complicity in his defection or of any security lapse. It’s such a small thing for him to do, but it’s a big thing to me. It can change my whole life.”
“Yes,” said Neely. He looked at his omelet. “I reckon you’ve got a good chance,” he added, but his voice was uncertain.
Brennan put down his sandwich. “What really puzzles me, Herb, is where Rostov disappeared to these last four years, and what happened that made Premier Talansky restore him to favor. I wish I knew. It might help.”
“No one knows for sure,” said Neely. “Ever since our alliance with the Soviets, many of us have hoped that they would open their books, so to speak. But I guess it’s hard to learn to trust when you’ve distrusted for so long, and it’s equally hard to shake off the old habits of secrecy.” He was thoughtful, and then he went on. “As I told you on the phone, the minute I learned that Rostov was back on the Soviet team and coming here, my mind went to you. I began to make casual inquiries, from the Ambassador on down, including a few friends from the President’s staff, from State, from the CIA.” He looked up. “It’s not much, with so much data missing, but conjecturing what the blanks might represent, I can still try to add it up.”
“Better than nothing,” said Brennan. “What’s your sum total?”
“Well, before Zurich, at Zurich, and unswervingly ever since, Soviet Russia has cast its lot with the United States and the Western democracies. Premier Talansky—and I believe this—is not interested in a Leninist-Marxist world revolution if the cost is nuclear obliteration. I reckon that he believes he’ll have it, the class revolution, anyway, if the world can survive. His one fear, like ours, is Red China. They’ve got a nuclear arsenal the match of our own, if not in quantity then in quality, and that’s quite enough to plumb blow up the old planet. But China, the new China since Mao has been put away in his mausoleum, is no longer the paranoidal belligerent we knew when we were youngsters. Remember those days, Matt? Remember back when Mao was saying, ‘East Wind prevails over West Wind’? Of course, that’s when they were still smarting from a century and a half of invasion and oppression by foreigners. I remember Toynbee reminding us, ‘In the years between 1840 and 1945 one country or another has taken bites out of China.’ Well, once Mao had the Lop Nor explosion under his belt, he was ready to bite back, and in China they dreamed of restoring their country as Chung-kuo, the Middle Kingdom, center of the universe. Adolescent dreams of glory. Because as you know, after Mao, his successors, particularly Chairman Kuo Shu-tung, a rightist, a pragmatist, have considered the realities of the world outside. I think you’ll agree he modified the Marxist-Maoist line considerably.”
“Perhaps,” said Brennan without conviction. “China has hardly been pacifist these last years.”
“Of course not, Matt. But somehow, it’s been different. Consider what’s happened. Taiwan was neutralized. The United Nations admitted Red China. After that, China won back a good deal of the traditionally Chinese territory it had lost in the past—parts of Outer Mongolia, portions of Siberia—and it gained political control of Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Korea—and it did so without igniting a major war, with hardly any need to draw upon the three million men in its People’s Liberation Army or the ten million in its militia. All this accomplished with little shooting and nary a nuclear weapon dropped. How? Well, you know how, Matt.”
Brennan smiled. “As Confucious never say, ‘i i chi i’—‘use barbarians to control barbarians.’”
“Exactly. Red China, after organizing and activating its own Cominform, encouraged or provoked, and supported or supplied, all those People’s Wars, wars of national liberation, revolutions, fought by Communist parties in every Asian country. And it worked, and they got away with it, because they were doing it in their own backyard. The minute that they began tampering with Japan—well, we intervened fast, and Russia intervened, because we couldn’t let Red China take over a tremendously industrialized nation. That would be big-time, big-power stuff, endangering world peace. So, after all these recent nervous months, Red China has let up on Japan and agreed to come and sit with us at a Summit and thrash things out. But I think that’s what they wanted in the first place when they started the Japanese adventure.”
“You really think so, Herb?”
“I’m sure of it, and so are the boys in the State Department. And this is the point I’ve been trying to make. The new Chinese leadership, now that it has established its own sphere of influence and control, now that it has achieved equality with its enemies, is realistica
lly aware that it can’t go for world-power status alone. No nation can go for the jackpot, today, alone. With Russia on its side as an ally, as Russia was until 1960, Red China was set up to dominate the entire world. But, with Russia on our side, as she is today, China knows it cannot dominate a damn thing more, cannot impose Communism, through aggression, on the world because too many mighty powers are aligned against her. Alone, the most China can do is to do what she has been doing, hold sovereignty over the area around her frontiers, occasionally win back some old real estate, continue to sweat at ending feudalism and improving industrialization at home. The comrades in Peking know that any effort to annihilate others means certain annihilation of themselves. So, at last, China’s Chairman and Premier, relative conservatives, I’d say, have fully turned their backs on the Marxist-Maoist expansionist policy, and have decided that survival as an equal power is better, more sensible, than no China at all, no planet at all. Believe me, Matt, China provoked the Japanese unrest and attempted coup as a face-saving device to tell us that she was ready to talk coexistence, rather than to dare coextinction. We understood, and we invited China to come here to Paris and join us in developing, once and forever, a real and workable foolproof system for arms control, disarmament, peace. Now, the Peking contingent is still talking tough, acting tough, and, indeed, they are tough, but most of us suspect that that’s a bargaining posture. In the end, I reckon they know, as we know, that the name of the game is hang-together-or-hang-separately. So hail, the gang’s all here for the Summit. And eighteen other smaller nations, with nuclear hardware or nuclear capability, are pledged to obey the treaty hammered out by their bigger siblings. Excuse the background briefing, Matt, but I do it so much with the press that it’s become a habit. Now then, Nikolai Rostov. Where does he fit into this?”
“Yes,” said Brennan, finishing the last of his wine. “Rostov. At the Zurich Parley he and his Russian comrades worked side by side with me and our crowd to bring Red China to its senses—that was four years ago—and make them see they had to be a party to any future disarmament agreement. At that time it seemed we’d have no trouble with them. Their nuclear stockpile wasn’t as advanced as our own, and their delivery was inadequate. Then it all went poof. They got Professor Varney and, in effect, complete equality with the top nuclear powers. Varney gave them the neutron bomb, as well as secret data on the anti-missile missiles that can carry the N-bomb. And as a result—”
“You and Rostov were blamed,” said Neely, shaking his head. “I reckon I’ll never forget it. You both wound up with the Black Spot. Okay. We know what happened to you. But what you want to know is exactly what happened to Rostov. Not easy. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, Matt, your friend Rostov was snatched out of Zurich by the Soviet secret police, dropped back in Moscow, kept incommunicado at the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinski Square, questioned by Chekist officers there, then probably tried for treason before a secret tribunal. Our experts thought that he had been found guilty of conspiracy for giving military secrets to China, and that he’d been shot. But since he’s surfaced very much alive, the general feeling currently is that he was acquitted of treason, maybe with the help of Varney’s letter, but was found to have been soft on China, and a questionable risk, and therefore he was unofficially punished by being removed from the center of government. There have been a couple of educated guesses on where Rostov has been the last four years. Someone thought he’d been given a minor diplomatic post out in Sverdlovsk, in the Urals. Someone else heard Rostov had been one of the administrators of Vorkuta, a Soviet labor camp in the Arctic. No matter. Here he is.”
“But why was he forgiven?” Brennan wondered.
“No one really knows, except that he had always been a Talansky man. He was probably on good behavior these last years. Above all, ever since Russia broke off with China, the Soviets have been deprived of real knowledge about China and I suppose they hated to go into this big meeting with the Chinese lacking sufficient trained, expert advisers. Rostov was an expert, as you know only too well, so presto, they forgave, they forgot, they brought him back.”
“It sounds too simple,” said Brennan.
Neely laughed, removed his spectacles and began to polish them. “Probably is. But that’s the best we can conjure up. It’s a pity our Government doesn’t forgive and forget in the same way. We sure could use you in this Summit hassle, Matt.”
“Thanks, but I’d be useless now. I’ve stagnated too long, been out of touch. I’d be as helpless as Metternich discussing nuclear disarmament. There have been too many new proposals since I was active.”
Neely slipped on his rimless spectacles and pushed them high on the bridge of his nose. “Not really. There are only so many ideas you can have about deterring nuclear suicide. What’s changed is not the means of containing the weapons, but the realignment and new ideas of the potential combatants. You remember the old setup? The United States had one set of proposals for disarmament, the Soviet Union had another, the United Nations had a third, and the People’s Republic of China had none. Well, tomorrow, when the five countries sit down at the table, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain have agreed on a single plan for arms control, Red China has an opposing one, the United Nations stands as an observer, and France has decided to play host and side with the majority vote of her guests. But basically, nothing has changed, Matt. The obstacles remain economic, political, military—and China has added two unique obstacles peculiarly its own: the matter of face and the matter of Oriental fatalism. The Chinese have to leave the Summit with a ban treaty that will keep their pride intact. If this is impossible to achieve, they will leave here alone, without signing a disarmament treaty, and to beef up their strength they’ve threatened to give nuclear bombs to ten other Communist countries under their influence in Asia and Africa. If pushed too hard, they just might walk out, and one day another Government there might set into motion the first strike, even if it cost them several hundred million lives, because they’re inured to national disasters and calamities like plagues and floods and famine, and they’re used to death on a mammoth scale. We are not. However, that’s another problem. But the Western proposals, from what I hear, should be acceptable enough. What’s shaping up would be gradual armed forces reduction; gradual destruction of nuclear stockpiles and of conventional, bacteriological and chemical weapons; abolishment of missiles and delivery systems; and cessation of nuclear weapon production; all of this to be accomplished in three stages over a six-year period. Also, there would be strict limitations on the types of vehicles used in outer space, an international control organization under the United Nations that would employ inspection teams and aerial observers, and above all, a peace policing force, conventionally armed, highly paid, composed of soldiers from thirty of the smaller nations. And as a sop to the Chinese economy, there would be a provision whereby every country could maintain nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes, each of these to be under strict international supervision. There will also be proposed, finally, a foolproof means of overcoming the worst obstacle of all.”
“The worst obstacle of all? You mean fear of concealment?”
“Exactly,” said Neely. “The major defense against fear will be a two-billion-dollar worldwide network of listening posts equipped with the latest Swedish seismographs that register the pounding of the surf a thousand miles away, and that can distinguish between earthquakes and underground nuclear explosions. There will be on-site arms-control inspection teams, and their inspectors themselves will be regularly screened as to their reliability through he-detector tests and injections of truth serum. There will be orbiting satellites sent aloft by the international control organization, these satellites varying their orbits constantly so that nothing can be hidden from their cosmic eyes. Daily, hourly, inspection reports from all sources will be funneled into an evaluation center, and processed by computers, and if any report is suspect, the peace policing force will fix to move in swiftly. Well, that’s basically t
he plan we hope and expect the Chinese will accept in the next days. Sounds familiar enough, doesn’t it, Matt?”
Listening intently, Brennan, for the first time in months, felt a longing for his old career, his old idealism, his old commitment to striving for a practical peace. It was strange to be aware, again, of emotions that had atrophied, emotions like curiosity and optimism and, somehow, faith. He nodded to his friend. “Yes, it sounds familiar, and it sounds good.”
Suddenly, Neely sat up. “My God, there’s the car coming. That means I’ve got to run to the press briefing at the Palais Rose.” He grabbed the check before Brennan could reach for it, and began to peel off bills. “I’m ashamed,” Neely said. “Our first time together in half a year, and I didn’t let you open your mouth… Matt, what are you doing right now?”
“Right now?”
“I mean after I leave here. You can’t see Rostov yet. You’ve seen the sights. Why don’t we stick together? Come along with me to the Palais Rose.”
“I—I’m not sure about that, Herb.”
“Why not? Come on. None of the reporters there will even recognize you. They’ll think you’re someone from the Embassy, and besides, there’ll be such a mob, all of them busy making notes, that you’ll be ignored. You might enjoy a preview peek of the Summit arena. The Palais Rose is an absolutely fascinating pile of pink marble. Built back around 1905, a duplicate of Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon out in Versailles. It’s on the Avenue Foch. Takes up about two-thirds of a block—7,500 square yards, to give you an idea—and I’m fixing to show the press mainly the grand salon, where the Big Five start meeting tomorrow morning. After today, the grand salon will be out of bounds to everyone but the delegates. Then—well—there’s a practical reason you should see the inside. For the next ten days, your friend, Rostov, will probably be there daily, sometimes at Premier Talansky’s elbow. If you run into any snags trying to catch up with Rostov, you might buttonhole him at the Palais. And you should know your way around there, if I ever have to slip you in. It may be useful, Matt, it should be painless, and I guarantee it’ll be over within an hour.”
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