The Story of Henri Tod

by William F. Buckley

  The President rang for his news summary, and said he wanted a Coca-Cola, and get Bobby on the line. Tell him it’s a collect call. He’ll like that.

  14

  Rufus didn’t question Blackford when, over the telephone, using their code, Blackford told him that it was necessary to consult with him in Berlin. “If you will call Sergeant McCall,” Blackford had added carefully, “she can catch you up.” Rufus understood from this that on arriving in Berlin he was not to proceed to Blackford’s apartment, no longer a “safe house,” in the terminology of the trade. “Sergeant McCall” was a number in the regular intelligence office with which Blackford maintained only such liaison as was necessary. The point was to meet under circumstances as nearly as possible secure. Blackford was given by “Sergeant McCall” a new address, at 64 Nollendorfstrasse, and a password. Subsequently he gave the same information to Rufus. Blackford was there a half hour before Rufus arrived, admitted into the apartment by the same elderly German woman who had already admitted Blackford. Rufus had lost weight, and showed signs of a fatigue Blackford had never before associated with him.

  “You look tired, Rufus,” Blackford said, taking the older man’s raincoat and hanging it in the closet. “Martha here has said she could fetch us up anything light. We have”—Blackford now imitated the booming, syllable-by-syllable accents of the vendors that cruised American trains—“choc-o-lates, can-dy-coat-ed ch-ew-ing gum, orange-ade, fresh cof-fee, cash-ew nuts. What will it be, ma’am, sir?”

  Rufus smiled and sat down. “Coffee would be fine. I ate on the plane.” In German, Blackford asked for two coffees.

  Rufus still liked to get to the point. Though in the last few years he had, Blackford noticed, developed a faculty for light philosophical badinage, in interesting contrast with his traditional reluctance to utter one extra-utilitarian syllable. Always Rufus was the professional, but now he would go to the point of permitting himself to display an affection for Blackford, perhaps because Rufus’s wife had so very much liked, and enjoyed, the young protégé of her husband. Blackford unabashedly admired Rufus, but never praised him except to Rufus’s wife, because to have praised Rufus to his face would have brought on mortal embarrassment. So, sitting down opposite Rufus, the coffee table between them, Blackford began. He told, in chronological detail, the events of the day before.

  “I wanted to consult with you before telling Tod about the letter. But I also made inquiries so that we could get hold of Tod later today if you thought we should consult him. And there’s been a hitch. Tod is missing.”

  Rufus looked up. “Missing since when?”

  “Missing since night before last, Saturday. Nobody knows where Tod lives. But there has never been a time when, by contacting the ‘office,’ you fail to establish contact. He simply calls you up, from wherever.”

  “Has the Bruderschaft grown since we last talked?”

  “It has. And is really catching the popular imagination. People don’t know what Tod looks like, but they quote him. He is becoming something of a folk hero. The Commies go crazy at the mention of his name, and if one East Berliner gets the clap, they blame it on Tod.”

  Rufus winced, and Blackford contritely reminded himself that raffish language visibly distressed Rufus. Even General Eisenhower, legend had it, would not permit swearing in the presence of his most valued intelligence officer. One time when General Patton was reporting on developments in Africa, he had, after the report was completed, taken off on a salty digression. In due course General Eisenhower turned to address a reference to Rufus, one of the dozen members of the staff present at the meeting; but Rufus had quietly left the room. “Wonder what Rufus would do,” Ike had at a moment of exasperation said, “if he had to decode an intercept from Hitler to one of his generals that said, ‘Fuck the 8th Army at 0500 June 8th.’” Beetle Smith had volunteered that Rufus would probably transcribe the intercept as, “The Nazis are planning to penetrate the 8th Army at 0500 June 8th.” Ike liked that and told it to Mamie, but then thought to remark at a meeting of his personal staff that no one was to make slighting remarks about Rufus or to Rufus. Of all of this, Blackford surmised, the wisest intelligence officer in America was undoubtedly aware. Sometimes, Blackford suspected, he snatched a little discreet amusement from it.

  “No doubt about it,” Blackford continued. “The GDR folks want Tod as much as any man alive. And let’s face it, they probably wouldn’t have much of a problem trying and executing him. Tod is not at all discreet about certain of his activities. He leaves fingerprints. Intentionally.”

  “Was he up to anything—unusual—that you know of on Saturday?”

  “I’m pretty close to Bruni, Tod’s principal aide. And when he told me this morning that Tod was ‘missing’ I told him that I might have news later on in the day I’d want to communicate to him, and what was the likelihood that his disappearance was sort of routine? Bruni got pretty hot under the collar and said that Henri Tod didn’t go in for ‘routine’ disappearances. He then sat down and said there was no reason for him, Bruni, to have less confidence in me than Tod has shown me during the past couple of months. So he told me that on Saturday Tod had gone over to the Eastern sector with Stefan Schweig on an assassination venture. The Bruderschaft do that kind of thing, you know.”

  “Of course I know. And I assume you’ve known that that’s one of the reasons we have dealt so circumspectly with the Bruderschaft.”

  Blackford stretched out his legs, accepted the coffee from Martha, and leaned his head back.

  “Rufus, we’ve got the beginning of a big problem here. I’ve been here now—what, over seven weeks? I’ve seen a lot of Tod, and no question about it: his intelligence apparatus is the best in town. Knows twice what we know, and he’s bankrolled. And unless you’re now going to confide in me that you know where he’s getting the scratch, let me help by telling you I don’t know. But I do know that routinely he pays off informers, and I don’t know what he’s paying them off with unless he’s robbing banks on the side.”

  “I would be surprised if he went in for that kind of thing.”

  “I would too. On the other hand, if he’s gotten into kidnapping, my guess is we’d have heard about it from the friends of the victims, and the only thing the Neues Deutschland hasn’t charged Tod with is kidnapping. But let’s hold that, and focus on other things. Now last Saturday, Bruni told me, Henri and Schweig, who is a youngster—”

  “How old is Schweig?”

  “Oh, maybe twenty-five.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Me? I’m thirty-five.”

  “Go on, grandfather.” Rufus permitted himself a half smile.

  “Rufus, you astonish me sometimes. I mean, you always astonish me. Anyway, he went out with middle-aged Schweig to do in a double agent.”

  “You do mean, to kill him?”

  Rufus’s penchant for precise language got in the way of idiomatic extemporaneity. “Yes, Rufus. The target was a double who got one of Henri’s boys mowed down by giving out information used by the Vopos.”

  “What happened? Is Schweig back?”

  “Yes, he got back late Saturday, after leaving the Bruderschaft’s calling card with a friend of the victim so that all of Berlin would know he hadn’t died accidentally, and Schweig simply assumed Henri was okay. He reported to Bruni that Tod had made the hit from a taxi, but that after that, Schweig ran off and didn’t see anything more. For one thing there was tear gas between him and the operation. For another, Henri had told him to get going after he let the tear gas go.”

  Rufus lowered his eyes and entered into one of his mini-trances, for the duration of which there was no point in talking to him, so Blackford sipped on his coffee. And in due course resumed …

  “Now here is something, Rufus, that maybe even you don’t know. I know you know Tod’s general background: rich Jewish boy and sister, parents to Belsen, taken to foster parents upcountry, the Nazis get on to them, execute the foster parents and send the sister a
way to a death camp. What you don’t know is that Henri Tod’s memory of his sister is something on the order of an obsession. He mentioned her to me only once, in that conversation we had a couple of weeks ago, when he let it all pretty well hang out. Anyway, he is convinced that she was the most wonderful creature God ever created, and you told me you found out he’s convinced that indirectly he killed her.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now”—Blackford held out the photograph—“we discover that Clementa Tod is alive. The impact of that on Tod isn’t easy to predict.”

  “Do we know it’s she?” Rufus said, looking at the photograph.

  “No, we don’t know it. But wouldn’t you say the guy who wrote that letter”—Blackford handed Rufus the document—“doesn’t expect Henri is going to doubt that that girl is his sister? I also assume that the mumbo jumbo on the back of the picture is some childhood code word. I think we ought to go on the assumption that the girl is alive.”

  “And of course,” Rufus said, putting down the letter, “the writer of this note desires us to believe that he is a double agent, or even merely a mercenary. And he could be just that. Fifty thousand marks is moderately serious money. More likely, though, I’d guess this was a Ustinov operation. Seems to me that what he cares about is Tod, pure and simple, not Tod and fifty thousand marks. The problem we have is to handle this whole business with some reference to Tod’s apparently unmanageable affection for his sister—what’s her name?”

  “Clementa.”

  “Clementa. We have got to learn more before we bring Tod in, because he may make hasty decisions, under the circumstances.”

  “Right. And that, Rufus, is why I brought you all the way from London.”

  Rufus smiled. “Let’s think now about it.” And they did, for three hours.

  15

  Claudia and Caspar stayed up with their patient. They had stocked, at their Berchtesgaden, only routine medications—aspirin, a cough syrup, Mercurochrome, bandages. Claudia stripped the young man, and instantly detected his facial disguise. She located the wound on the back of his shoulder and the corresponding wound above his chest. She whispered to Caspar that the evidence was pretty clear that a bullet had passed through their ward, who was now moaning quietly, slipping in and out of consciousness. Claudia boiled hot water, nursed the wound, cleaned and dressed it, wiped the makeup from his face, removing the gray wig, and then made a little puree of aspirin, which she attempted to get him to drink. He managed to get most of it down and was soon sleeping regularly, though in his sleep he spoke in convulsive jerks, unintelligibly. Claudia left the door of the master bedroom slightly ajar and motioned to Caspar that he should follow her into the adjacent salon.

  She busied herself unpacking, on the desk top, sausage, bread, honey, and cheese, while Caspar opened a bottle of wine.

  “Well now, Caspar, you have got us into a pretty pickle.”

  Caspar was visibly excited. “I don’t dare go out. I don’t know—maybe I could risk it, what do you think?”

  “Are you crazy? They’ve probably got searchlights out there. I hope they don’t have dogs. But he didn’t trail any blood.” She paused. “I suppose they are pretty sure by now that he got away through the open—south—side. That’s where he’d have headed if he had been able to see, and he could have run down those tracks pretty fast. Still, I don’t think you should go out.”

  “If I did, I could find out pretty quickly what they want him for. And I think that’s probably something we ought to know, don’t you?”

  Claudia was distracted. “He looked so tired, a little desperate. What a striking face, Caspar. I doubt he is a common criminal.”

  “He’s a common criminal unless he kisses my uncle’s ass first thing in the morning when he gets up, and last thing at night before he goes to bed.”

  Claudia munched on her cheese sandwich and smiled. “You know what my boss said in a letter to your uncle yesterday? He said, ‘Sir, the entire railway system is benefiting from your inspired guidance and attention to its problems.’”

  “My uncle doesn’t know one end of a railroad car from another. Marx forgot to tell him. Well, your boss is no different from everyone else’s boss. Uncle Walter believes that all of Germany is in his hands and that the only thing needed to cure everything is to stop the refugees. That and, maybe, the resurrection of Stalin.”

  “Caspar,” Claudia’s voice was soft, feminine, and now there was anxiety in it, “did your father actually … know Hitler?”

  “Yes, I gather he did. In that bundle of stuff in the locker I told you about there’s a letter to my father from Asshole Adolf (Heil, Asshole!).” Caspar did the Nazi salute. “Hitler was telling him stuff he wanted in this car. There were some sketches there. Pretty professional. See that”—Caspar pointed to the highly polished wooden slab, waist high, usable as a desk or a little dinette, that stretched out across one half the width of the car, but which could hinge down and over, disappearing against the wall—“Hitler designed that. It is exactly as he specified in his letter to my father.”

  “But how do you know that your father actually had personal contact with Hitler?”

  “Because in one letter my father referred to their ‘conference’ the day before about the car, and the notes he had taken.”

  “Was there anything—you know—well, anything—sort of … idolatrous in the letter? I mean, did your father go on and on the way the GDR people here do?”

  “Actually, he didn’t. My mother doesn’t like to talk about it, obviously. But once I asked her, just like that, ‘Mother, was Father a Nazi?’ And she said what I guess everybody says, ‘Caspar, your father was a railroad engineer, drafted into the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He did what he was ordered to do.’”

  “Then why was he shot?”

  Caspar looked at her, and paused. She had moved along the settee, pushing away the coffee table with her foot, and was caressing him behind the ears.

  “I know why my mother thinks he was shot,” Caspar said, his voice husky.

  “Why?”

  “Because the Soviet military tribunal declared him a war criminal on the grounds that he had designed trains that transported victims to the camps.”

  “Did he?”

  “I should certainly think so, Claudia. He didn’t spend fifteen years designing custom cars so that he could design this one car for Adolf Hitler. And after he designed train cars, I don’t think he put up brass plates: ‘NOT TO BE USED TO PROVIDE TRANSPORTATION TO EXTERMINATION CAMPS.’ Of course he designed trains that were used for that, but he didn’t design cars expressly for that. As far as I know, they used mostly cattle cars.”

  “Then why did they shoot him?”

  Caspar got up. He looked very young in the dim light, but the customary raillery was gone now. He looked to one side and spoke in a monotone.

  “He was shot on orders from my Uncle Walter, because Uncle Walter discovered that my father had sent railroad coding information to the Americans with a message indicating how the Americans might, by trying to take over three or four critical control centers, regulate the flow of traffic. That was when the Russian and East European refugees were beginning to be shipped back to Russia to be killed. What Father apparently didn’t know was that the whole operation had an American stamp of approval.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “That’s easy. Because my father wrote it.”