by John Lawton
“And why’s that?”
“He’s a chancer.”
“And how many times do think I’ve heard the same word used to describe you?”
§61
Vienna: June 3
On the Saturday of the summit, Wilderness stood with the US Secret Service, the CIA, and half a dozen blokes in uniform and medals he hadn’t been introduced to and about whom he had no curiosity.
The Ks had arrived by very differing means of their own choosing. Kennedy had flown in from Paris after a meeting with de Gaulle and was accompanied by his wife and mother. Jackie Kennedy had wowed Paris. Khrushchev had taken the slow train from Moscow via his satellite capitals, accompanied by his wife, Nina, and by Minister for Foreign Affairs Gromyko. Nina Khrushchev had wowed nowhere and no one.
As they waited, only feet from the red carpet that had been rolled out down the steps of the US ambassador’s residence, Dashoffy tapped him on the shoulder and pointed up at the sky.
Soviet MiGs and helicopters were orbiting Vienna. A sky-high riposte to the overblown motorcade that had been Kennedy’s journey from the airport. More stars and more stripes than anyone could ever be bothered to count.
“Lest there be any doubt,” Jack said softly.
Before Wilderness could say anything the Russian limousines swung into the drive, and the Secret Service parted like waves to let John Fitzgerald Kennedy trip lightly down the steps to greet Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, who was far from lightly swinging fat little legs from the car. Fred Astaire meets Oliver Hardy.
“The drugs must be working today,” Wilderness heard Dashoffy whisper.
Khrushchev seemed to Wilderness to take in everything in a slow, sweeping turn of his very round, very bald head. For a moment he could even kid himself that their eyes had met, but then the Russian leader was glad-handed by the president of the USA with a hearty “How are you?”—a phrase that needed no translation, but got one anyway, and no answer.
They posed for the press. For some reason Khrushchev had chosen to wear his wartime medals on his civilian suit. Wilderness did not doubt that Kennedy had won some medal or other in the same war—he had vague recollection of something about rescuing his crew after the sinking of a boat he had commanded in the Pacific—and he doubted it had occurred to JFK to wear it. It was move two in gamesmanship . . . first the MiGs, now the medals. First the might and the metal; now the superiority of age over youth, of suffering over privilege.
If Khrushchev had taken them all in with a curiosity amounting to suspicion, JFK only had eyes for Khrushchev and regarded him with an intense gaze amounting to scrutiny. Wilderness wondered about the lives they had led. Had Kennedy ever met a man like Khrushchev before? A Ukrainian peasant, illiterate until well into his twenties, who had survived in a political pit that had seen many of his contemporaries eaten by the bear. He was certain Khrushchev had met rich aristocrats before—but only to shoot them.
And they were both of them bound by good manners, smiling for the cameras, smiling for the watching world. It meant nothing and would count for nothing.
§62
They agreed to meet after the “show,” in the bar of the Hotel Sacher on Philharmonikerstraße. The British hotel . . . British in that they had billeted themselves there for ten years after the war and only left in 1955.
Dashoffy was late, and the bar at the Sacher was clearly not the only one he had visited en route. Wilderness had nursed one glass of claret for over an hour waiting for him. Jack ordered double scotches for both of them, downed his in a single gulp and eyed Wilderness’s so covetously that Wilderness pushed it across the table to him and watched it vanish in an instant. Jack’s hand went up to summon refills. Wilderness smiled at the waiter trying to convey silently that his friend would not be a problem and waited until they were alone. Jack had always liked a drink. Wilderness had never thought of him as having a problem with drink. The problem lay elsewhere.
“What’s the problem? I’ll tell you what’s the problem. You remember the old Charles Atlas ad from the magazines a few years back. Some scrawny kid gets sand kicked in his face by the beach bully? That’s what’s happening. Our scrawny kid is getting sand kicked in his face by their five-foot lard butt of a beach bully. And you know what? It’s humiliating. It is so fucking humiliating. We have a Khrushchev-monitoring team back in Langley. Physicians, psychiatrists, you name it. We know his hat size, his favourite food, his favourite colour. Whether he’s manic-depressive or depressive-manic or just plain nuts. Hell, we even have the results of his blood-pressure tests. We’ve seen the inside of the man’s arteries. We know what Khrushchev is like, what he’s capable of. And if we know, the president knows . . . so why in God’s name is he underestimating the little guy at every turn?”
“Well, he’s never met him before.”
“You’re forgetting the comrade’s US tour. Y’know. Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Can-Can? They met then.”
“OK. Then it’s his first summit.”
Wilderness felt odd. It was odd, to be justifying an American president to an American. To be showing sympathy where the man had none.
“Then I hope to God it’s his last. Joe, he knows nothing. Choate, Harvard . . . Congress . . . the Senate . . . but he knows nothing. He mangles ideas the way he mangles foreign languages. He hasn’t an original thought in his head. Khrushchev tackles him on Marxism and history . . . the inevitability of this and the inevitability of that. Kennedy looks at him as though this is the first fuckin’ time he’s heard any of it. And instead of waving it aside and saying ‘Let’s talk peace, let’s talk nukes or let’s talk war,’ he lets Khrushchev bang on, lets him set the agenda. And you know what? It’s as plain as the nose on your face that Kennedy has never heard all this crap before, that he’s never read a word of Marx and thinks a dialectic is the funny accent a guy from Arkansas has. That fuckin’ Russian peasant in there is wiping the floor with him like he was Rocky Marciano and Popeye rolled into one and the president, my fuckin’ president, is . . . is . . . Huntz fuckin’ Hall . . . the dopey one from the Bowery Boys, the one with his brains in his fuckin’ shoes.”
“Keep your voice down, Jack.”
Dashoffy looked around, satisfied himself that he hadn’t turned any heads with his outburst.
“Yeah. Right. I shouldn’t be another diplomatic incident. I don’t think the fans in this city could handle that much shit right now.”
“I read his book, you know.”
“What?”
“Why England Slept. It was in what passed for a library while I was attempting basic training just after the war. It’s more than generous to us. Took some brains to write that.”
“Yeah, well . . . maybe, just maybe I’ll make it my life’s work to find out who wrote it for him, because he sure as fuck didn’t. One of Joe Kennedy’s tame eggheads probably did. Because I tell you now . . . I was at Harvard the year behind Jack Kennedy and all he did was chase tail.”
“Jack, you sound sorry you voted for him.”
“Hell, kid. I voted for Nixon. I had my doubts at the time, the man can be a prize prick when he chooses, but right now I have no regrets. None at all, and if he runs again in ’64 I’ll vote for him again. I’ll even buy that used car he has for sale.”
Now Wilderness looked around. Every other person in this bar had to be attached to one foreign delegation or another. They still weren’t turning heads, but if he didn’t get Jack into the street and into the noise of traffic they soon would. If he didn’t get Jack away from the scotch bottle they most certainly would.
He steered him out of the hotel and down Kärntner Straße towards the Ring. A warm, midsummer night, full streets, a city buzzing with activity—enough to drown out Jack, but Jack seemed to have shot his bolt.
He looked across the Ring towards the Naschmarkt and the golden oddity that was the Secession Building. He seemed
to be breathing in petrol fumes like they were fresh air. Then he leaned against one of the iron columns that carried the tram wires, stretched out his neck and for a moment Wilderness thought he was going to puke, but he drew back, wiped a strand of phlegm from his lips.
“Hell, kid. You remember the first time we ever saw this place?”
It had been 1951. The three of them together. Jack, Wilderness, and Frank Spoleto. A city of shadows. Spook paradise.
“A mess of a city. A train wreck of a city. But it was fun, right? Tell me it was fun?”
Some of it had been. There was no lie in agreeing to that.
“Where’s this heading, Jack?”
“I dunno where it is heading, but I’m heading home.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be out at Schönbrunn in your tuxedo?”
“Fuck the tux. Kid, just flag me a cab, stick me in it, and tell me to keep my big mouth shut. I have drowned my sorrows and needs must I am sober in the morning. And thanks. I really didn’t mean to bend your ear quite so damn much.”
“That’s OK, Jack. My ear came to be bent.”
Dashoffy was still laughing at that as Wilderness closed the cab door on him.
He rolled down the window for one last word.
“Tomorrow it’s at their place. Can’t get you past the door, but it’ll be all over by lunchtime. Let’s meet for lunch. Not the hotel. Somewhere where I don’t feel I’m looking over my shoulder the whole time. You pick.”
“Frauenhuber in Himmelpfortgasse.”
“OK. I know where you mean. Passed it. Never been in. At one. OK?”
“OK.”
§63
Jack turned up sober, if grim.
Looked around.
“Kinda corny.”
Looked at the menu.
“Kinda limited.”
“Possibly, but in both cases very Viennese.”
“Hmm. Why d’you pick this place?”
“The romantic in me. Mozart played here. So did Beethoven. In fact for a while he was the resident pianist. Sat over there and improvised.”
“What? Like in a New York jazz club? Like he was Monk or Mingus?”
“Pretty much. I’d even be prepared to argue the case for Schubert being the first jazz musician. You look at his life it wasn’t a lot different from the one Charlie Parker led.”
“Booze, drugs, and dames, eh?”
“And not necessarily in that order.”
“Well . . . other guys used to put Beethoven on the turntable when I was in college. In one ear and out the other. Did he write a fifth something or other?”
“Everybody wrote a fifth something or other.”
“Whatever.”
Jack pointed to the menu. Subject abruptly changed.
“Boiled beef and carrots? Did Vienna learn to cook in an English NAAFI?”
He ordered it just the same, ate it just the same, and only over coffee—coffee and two large brandies—did he unwind enough to want to talk shop.
“I may be around a little longer. There was no scheduled afternoon session, but JFK has asked to see Khrushchev alone.”
He glanced at his watch, a dual-face giving the Continental and US Eastern time.
“They’re probably closeted together right now. Jaw jaw, war war.”
“On what topic, I wonder?”
Jack looked around, much as he had done at the Sacher, sighed, shrugged, and muttered, “What the heck.”
“You’re rushing back to London, right, kid?”
“Of course.”
“OK, when this farcical parade is over, when Macmillan is wondering ‘What the fuck was that about?’ and when Burne-Jones finally asks what difference any of this has made . . . you have one thing to tell him. There is only one topic . . . Berlin. And if being a desk jockey doesn’t suit you, Joe—and I figure it sticks in your craw like fishbone—tell old Alec you want to go back to Berlin. Because right now, and maybe till the end of fuckin’ time, Berlin is it. The bellybutton of the world—l’ombelico del mondo. You want to be where the action is you go to Berlin; you want to be there when the world ends you get to Berlin. Forget postings to Paris or Beirut . . . Berlin.”
“You think they’ll really go to war over Berlin?”
“I cannot speak for the Commie lard-ass, I will speak only for the ignorant streak of piss that is my elected president. No, we will never start a war over Berlin. Khrushchev can roll his tanks all over West Berlin, he can surround it with a solid ring of ICBMs . . . there is no way the US of A is going to start a thermonuclear war over Berlin. There is no way the US of A is going to start even an old-fashioned boots ’n’ bayonets war over Berlin. We’d need half a million troops to hold Berlin. We couldn’t supply them, feed them, or even billet them.”
The prospect was interesting. Did Wilderness want to go back to Berlin? He had been in and out many times since he left there in 1948.
“Did we go to war for Berlin in ’48? Did we go to war for Berlin in ’53?”
He’d been in and out many times—with eyes closed and his head down. He’d avoided almost anything that reminded him of his years there after the war, but, of course, everything did. Every time, he would call Erno Schreiber, and Erno would say, “I’m always home,” and every time Wilderness would talk him into meeting in a restaurant rather than climb the staircase at Grünetümmlerstraße, and watch the old man torn between pleasures of a menu and the taboo he would not break. He wouldn’t mention Nell Burkhardt and Wilderness wouldn’t ask.
“Of course we fuckin’ didn’t. And we’re not going to do it now. Khrushchev has Berlin by the pips. All the bastard has to do is squeeze.”
Berlin had its “man”—Tom Radley still ran the Berlin station. Had done for four years now. Perhaps Tom would like to move on? Perhaps Burne-Jones would move him on. He was hardly the brightest bear in the woods and certainly not the man to have in charge if all Jack’s gloomy predictions came true. Wilderness’s last meeting with Radley had left him thinking the man was a fool. Pleasant enough, a man you might enjoy propping up a bar with . . . but running a station a hundred and fifty miles behind the Iron Curtain was a different matter.
“Are you sober enough to talk sense?”
“I thought I was talking sense.”
“Tell me what you think Khrushchev will do, and try to avoid the genital metaphors.”
“It’s not a whit different from that tirade of his at the UN a while back. Was it last year or the year before? And that was not a whit different from the ultimatum he handed out in ’58. He seems to sound off all the goddamn time. Anyone can get frustrated. Some guys beat their wives, some guys get shit-faced, Khrushchev delivers ultimatums on Berlin. Basically it’s this . . . he fears a united Germany that might be just a tool of the West and on a lesser level he fears a Germany that will do what Germany did best all over again. On that score, you can hardly blame him. So . . . he wants a Germany free of the guys who won the war; he wants us all to withdraw. If we don’t . . . he’s threatening a separate peace treaty with the DDR . . . effectively ending the Second World War and Allied Occupation, and to turn Berlin over to them. Basically he’d nullify all the claptrap that came out of Yalta and Potsdam by pushing it all to the next stage. It has its logic. What I think it conceals is an intention to set the tanks rolling for the Rhine.”
“You know how many men the USSR demobilised after the war?”
“No, do you?”
“More or less.”
“Well, I don’t buy it. So they got rid of a few thousand guys fifteen years ago? They still have the draft and there’s no shortage of comrades in uniform.”
“Actually Jack, it was eight million. And another three and a half million in the last five years.”
“Sheeeit!”
“Quite,” said Wilderness, much as Burne-Jones
might have done.
“But . . . it makes no never mind. You know what I think? I think he’ll give us 1948 all over again.”
“Jack, that’s not possible. That stunt could not be repeated. The world has moved on since then. We’re not about barbed wire and armoured cars any more . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . I know rockets, sputniks, and dogs in space. I heard it all.”
“Besides. It didn’t work the first time. Why would blockading Berlin work a second?”
“Did I use the word ‘blockade’? Did I? I’m not saying blockade . . . but . . . but . . . Khrushchev will cut us off somehow.”
“Somehow? What assurances has Kennedy given to Brandt?”
“Nothing that could possibly mean anything. He may swear with his hand on his heart that we will stand by Berlin. But we won’t, we can’t. If Berlin comes up in the next few weeks you’re just going to hear sabres rattled . . . that’s all it will amount to.”
“Depressing. You ask me if Vienna was fun. Of course it was. But nowhere near as much fun as Berlin.”
“Even though you got busted and ended up with a Russian bullet in your gut.”
“I was young enough to ride out all that and more. Berlin was fun. Berlin might just have been the time of my life.”
“How old were you when we met in Berlin, kid?”
The ‘kid’ all but begged the answer.
“I was nineteen.”
“I was twenty-nine. I’d been in the army since 1942. I’d seen Europe all the way from Omaha Beach to Berlin. I felt old then. I’m forty-three now. I feel even older. Young enough for some grey-beard of a guy to tell me I have my whole life ahead of me, old enough to tell him to go fuck himself. Joe, I am tired. I’ve had this way of life up to here. After London I’m going to quit. My old man is nearly eighty. He can’t run the farm on his own any more. I had two brothers. Rick died in the Battle of the Bulge. Tony is some hotshot lawyer in LA. I’m all he has. I’m going to go home and run a farm. To hell with the spying game. To hell with the Cold War. It stinks. I’ll be happier with the smell of new-mown grass and fresh horseshit.”