“We propose to turn Safehaven inside out,” Lifton said quietly. “Let’s begin with page one, paragraph two, the line about the scope of the project when it began in the summer of 1944, in particular the late American president’s wishes that certain leading commercial personalities”—a phrase Shiloah would never forget—“pass under the knife.
“When wars come,” Lifton offered, “honorable men choose country over business. Or you can rationalize and trade with the enemy, the American phrase for such things. Some did. There are,” he said, turning the page—they all followed his lead—“several personalities who might persuade the balance of votes to come to us, through their business connections. We have a short list of those with sensitive connections to the Germans. But we are—”
Ben-Gurion finished the sentence for Lifton: “We are short of materials to threaten these people. Reuven, am I right?”
Shiloah nodded. “If we are to pry apart the bloc of votes the British have assembled against us, we need a lever.” His words hung there. “We need a little more information to choose a victim. Then,” Shiloah said, his lips set in a thin straight line, his gaze taking in young Elam first, “we will apply the lever.”
L
EASTERN AUSTRIA
DECEMBER 1946
Eleanor was now the State Department’s POLAD, political adviser to the military government in the American zone, an encyclopedia of a job that had her feeding horses one minute and marveling at the artfulness of Austrian counterfeiters the next. From sugar to wood screws, she bartered stuff “like it was Reverend Dulles’s jumble sale,” she wrote Foster: anything to keep the Austrian economy inching ahead. In reply to her plea for someone to help, State had dispatched its favorite emissary to Vienna, an odd little mustachioed Italian, cheerfully fey—his own phrase; even odder, a queer who didn’t care who knew. His legs were too long, his arms too short, his lips over-thick, and his eyes protuberant, nestled on either side of a weather vane of a nose. But Carmel Offie, whose reputation as the man-to-see had preceded him to Vienna, had no side, Eleanor noticed. Offie seemed just as happy with her today, on the creaking bench seat of the Studebaker truck hauling Sophie and Eleanor through the mountain roads east of the capital, as in the back of a limousine. He’d finessed a box of Schrafft’s chocolates at the Vienna PX for Sophie; Offie had press-ganged Janusz, their Free Polish driver, for the snowy voyage southeast, to truck in supplies for a new State outpost on the road to Bratislava. Sophie sat contentedly on the jump seat as the truck droned eastbound through the gusts of snow down the deserted Austrian two-lane.
“Why here?” Offie asked in his ferrety voice. “That’s easy. It’s a way station on our little reclamation project. Say our Franz is crossing the line. We can scoop him right off, safe and sound. And now we’ll have a safe house well inside our zone, far from prying eyes in Vienna.”
“Whose idea was it?” asked Eleanor.
“Mine,” Offie said, his cracked smile taking up half his face. “I set them up all along the zone line in Germany. This one has a soft center, Sophie, orangey. Want to try?”
Sophie took the chocolate. Outside, the snow began to metamorphose into a drifting fog creeping off the unworked fields.
“You shut your ears, Janusz,” Offie ordered, “or I will personally see you never make another pfennig out of the U.S. government again.”
“Nothing I’m hearing. Completely,” said Janusz. “Blind completely. Also.”
“Keep it that way,” Offie said, squeezing out a laugh. “Tomorrow we’re bringing over a scientist. I collect them, you see. Some people collect coins or stamps or scrimshaw. I collect scientists, German ones. They love me at the air force. Love me.”
“Carmel,” Eleanor said, “you are the least discreet person I have ever met.”
“Oh, you couldn’t be more wrong,” he wheezed. “Here’s the paradox: the more you tell secrets, the easier it is to keep them. I call it Offie’s Law.”
Sophie held a chocolate up to the dim light in the truck’s cabin. “I think the black stuff’s fudge, Mr. Offie.”
“It is. Want to try it?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you, Mr. Offie,” Eleanor corrected.
Sophie sighed, very much twelve. “Thank you, Mr. Offie.”
“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Your mother’s right: people notice manners. That green is a special kind of mint. I love the mint. Offie’s Law says that if you tell enough secrets, people stop listening. After a while you can say things like Mrs. Truman’s chauffeur wears high heels or Eisenhower’s girlfriend eats crackers in bed and no one cares. Human nature, I guess.”
They crossed a rough wooden bridge, which clattered like thunder under the big American tires.
“Who else is coming down this road, Carmel?” Eleanor asked.
“On Tuesday, the chief Gestapo officer in Belgrade. He’s an anti-Communist specialist. Terrific catch.” Offie had all the mannerisms of a headwaiter, pleased the chef was up to snuff that day. “And on Friday, two brothers, the Ludwigs, a couple of Austrian SS men who I understand did some terrible things in White Russia, but they’re really irreplaceable: they know more about the Communists in Prague than anyone. They’re actually quite amusing. Frank met them once, in Bucharest. Great storytellers.”
“Amusing? These are war criminals.”
“That’s why the State Department trusts me and my discretion. Why are we slowing down, Janusz?”
Janusz leant hard toward the windscreen. “This bridge. It should not be here. We should be at Sankt Margarethe. We have—”
He shut up as three Red Army soldiers materialized from the fog, their machine pistols dropping from their shoulders as one. At the end of the bridge, a T-intersection swirled with mist. One of the soldiers waved the truck over; behind them, a striped barrier pole blocked the road. The signs were in Cyrillic—all of them.
“Shhh, Sophie,” Eleanor said. “Sit close to me.”
“Well, I hope your Russian’s ready to go,” Offie said to Janusz. “Kill the engine. Now.”
“My God,” Janusz whispered, his voice scarred with fear. “My God. My papers. I am born in Russia.”
“Eleanor, you stay with Sophie. I’ll look after Janusz,” Offie said, his own smile at a hundred watts. “Stay in the truck. Don’t open the door. Don’t give them a reason.”
They were red-tabbed border security troops, imperturbable Siberian Mongols, the NKVD’s frontline soldiers. Two split, standing on either side of the Studebaker, their weapons leveled; the third, the NCO, walked over slowly, eyes fixed on the U.S. Army stenciling on the truck’s hood. Somewhere a telephone rang. He tapped on Janusz’s door with the barrel of his machine pistol. Janusz offered his papers, but the NCO kept tapping, then slapped a gloved hand on the windshield.
“Okay, folks. He wants us out. Slowly,” Offie cautioned. “Ellie, keep close to Sophie. Don’t get separated. Bring the chocolates.”
They walked in silence through the muddy snow to the guard hut, a two-roomed affair, stiflingly hot, a wood fire heating a samovar. On a beautiful oak desk stood a trio of telephones, one ringing. The NCO answered as the other two guards slammed the door.
Holding the phone at full tether, the NCO pointed Eleanor and Sophie to two chairs near the desk, then opened the door to his left and gestured Offie and Janusz through, accompanied by one of the Siberians. Eleanor heard the NCO sound out their names on the phone, repeating hers over and over.
Thereafter everyone sat, in a very theatrical silence, for a good ten minutes.
Two captured German staff cars lurched out of the fog, one an open Kübelwagen, the German jeep, the other a beautifully kept Mercedes sedan, its black humpbacked bodywork glowing with moisture. The rusty Kübelwagen, driven by an enormous Mongolian, backfired to a halt. A perilously young NKVD officer, needle-thin, pried himself out of the Kübelwagen, a valise under his arm, fitting his dress hat to his aquiline head. He entered and motioned Eleanor and Sophie to remain seated,
glancing through the open doorway at the other two.
“Papers,” he said, lowering himself onto the hard chair at the desk and his big flat hat into his in-tray. He studied Eleanor’s papers, then unlocked a filing cabinet, taking from it a document lockbox. This he opened, retrieving what appeared to be a logbook, page after page of handwritten entries. After another interminable wait—Eleanor could feel runnels of sweat coursing down her back—the NKVD officer looked up and his nose twitched, like a beagle’s.
“You are Colonel Dulles, intelligence adviser to the State Department in Wien.” His English was smooth, almost musical, his voice low and thoughtful: it occurred to Eleanor this episode might be far more trouble than Offie had anticipated.
“We haven’t been introduced. I am indeed Eleanor Dulles, colonel, the political adviser to the U.S. military government in the U.S. zone of Occupied Austria. This is my daughter, Sophie. You are?”
“Captain Ilya Ilyitch Yesnaev, NKVD. The child here is very dangerous. There are kidnappings here. Bandits want American children, for ransom.”
“Sophie, where are our manners? Would you offer Captain Yesnaev and his men some chocolates, please?”
“The orange ones are very good,” Sophie suggested. “I like them.”
Yesnaev hesitated, staring at the open box with its gilt paper and rows of plump chocolate buttons. “You first. This one,” Yesnaev ordered. After Sophie and Eleanor each had a chocolate, a satisfied Yesnaev waved the guards over and they gingerly took a chocolate each, murmuring and nodding.
“Then I will have this one. Thank you. You should have your favorites. My men do not speak English. They are saying thank you.” He watched as Sophie wandered into the other room and shared her chocolates there too. Carmel’s a genius, Eleanor thought.
“Our papers are in order, I believe,” she said.
“You have no visa, no transit paper.” The Russian was eerily calm.
“I think,” Eleanor said easily, “you’ll find when you ask our colleague in the other room that we were lost in the fog. We have a manifest for all the items in the truck.”
Outside, through a windowpane dribbling condensation, Eleanor could make out four NKVD troops searching the truck. They had already stacked the bedsteads and crates of telephones and office chairs and a fat couch, complete with floral upholstery, trophy from some Nazi villa, its hemlines disappearing into the snow. Behind the truck the Mongolian driver dozed in the Kübelwagen, wrapped in a Red Cross blanket; the glossy Mercedes still idled, a thin trail of exhaust smoke blending into the fog. Eleanor fixed the young NKVD officer with her flintiest gaze.
“You are in the Soviet zone. You must have transit papers.”
“We didn’t think we were. We thought we were in the American zone still. It’s a mistake. We’re delivering furniture. A Sunday outing.”
“You are a political intelligence officer. Why do you travel without papers?”
“We weren’t traveling,” Eleanor countered. “We were helping make a delivery. My daughter and I wanted to go for a drive, to get out of Vienna. This delivery truck was our first chance.”
“Even in snow. You travel even in snow. An important mission.”
“I don’t think a furniture delivery is an important mission. And telephones. We have telephones.”
Yesnaev sighed and waggled a thin index finger at Eleanor. He locked away all the papers and strolled in his comically big dress boots to the side room, not emerging for twenty minutes. Then he put on his coat and carefully fitted his uniform hat and left the checkpoint command post without a word. Enter the villain, Eleanor calculated, staring at the Mercedes. Sophie sat very close, holding her mother’s hand.
Yesnaev trudged through the snow to the Mercedes, lurching a little in his tall boots. The passenger window rolled down and a desultory conversation followed, with much shrugging from Yesnaev. Yesnaev walked away and climbed into the Kübelwagen, then slapped the Mongolian on the arm. The rusty little four-wheel-drive car whined up the hill in a spray of snow, vanishing into the fog.
Yesnaev’s colleague was much older, haunted, a once-heavyset man worn thin, a single thick black eyebrow the only clue he’d ever been young. Eleanor put him down as a Georgian—not Russian, at any rate. His greatcoat was clean but worn; a cloud of fatigue followed him, his eyes watchful but dull behind round-lensed steel spectacles. A man who’d seen too much, Eleanor decided, watching him settle himself into his chair, unlock the document box, and begin to read the material Yesnaev had prepared. Sophie had decided the proceedings were nothing to worry about; she’d fallen quietly asleep on Eleanor’s shoulder.
For several minutes the only sound in the hut was the dry turning of paper. When he finished, he looked at Eleanor over the top of his spectacles. Then, with a surprisingly light voice in barely accented English, he began: “This is a happy morning for me, colonel, after so many years. So many years.” He seemed almost affectionate. “We have a friend in common.”
Eleanor had never encountered a less happy human being. “We do?”
“I have not seen him … since before the war. A long time ago. Perhaps you have. Or he may be dead. I often wonder what happened to him.”
“What is your name? Perhaps that would help.”
“Oh, my name is not so important, Miss Dulles.”
The senior NKVD officer opened his thick satchel and removed a small metal box. He unlocked it and flipped through a series of card files, finding one. He carefully pulled a passport-sized photograph from one card and held it out for Eleanor to take. “I met him in Stockholm, many years ago,” the NKVD man said.
“I don’t recall him.”
“You don’t recall him? You’ve seen him before, you think?”
“I don’t recall.”
The NKVD officer stripped off a small envelope adhered to the file card’s reverse. He opened the envelope and produced another image, a portrait of a group of young men, clearly English, taken in front of their college.
“The year is 1933. Cambridge. Perhaps you knew him when he was younger.”
Eleanor said nothing.
“No? How unfortunate. I have often wondered what became of my old friend. He simply vanished, you see, causing his friends much worry. Most unlike him, really. Then he went to New York. He worked for your brother there, and then … something happened. You might have met him in New York, you see. That is the theory of mine. I have given this much thought over the years, such was my distress, all those years ago, when my friend disappeared. I do worry about him still, you see.”
The colonel tapped the envelope again. A blurry, smudged image fell out. At first Eleanor thought it might be a negative: four people on a street in New York, glowing oddly in the photograph’s emulsion.
“I believe the woman on the right is you, colonel. The man to your right is Misha Resnikoff.”
A chill shot through Eleanor. She raised her eyes and steadied her voice. “I don’t understand. Where did this photograph come from?”
“New York City, August 1938, in the Greenwich Village. It was night, you see: it’s a photograph taken with infrared film. That is you, is it not?”
“These things can be forged. Who is to say this isn’t?”
“It isn’t forged. I took it myself. Just before my friend disappeared. That is you, is it not?”
“I can’t tell.”
They stared at one another for a good long time. Then, sadly and with infinite patience, the NKVD officer gathered his photographs and replaced them. That accomplished, he shook Eleanor’s hand.
“You’re free to go, all of you, including Mr. Carmel Offie, the distinguished State Department spy. My greetings to your brother, the other Colonel Dulles, at Wiesbaden. And your other brother, Foster, the famous anti-Bolshevik. He was, I believe, one of us in the Tsar’s war.”
“One of us?”
“You are much too modest, colonel.” He paused, considering her as a surgeon might assess his next appendectomy. “It’s a smal
l world, our profession. Your family profession.” The NKVD officer drew his greatcoat closer and for a moment Eleanor caught a glimpse of his badge of rank: colonel-general.
“Diplomacy?”
“I am an admirer of theater, colonel—you might have missed a career as an actress. Not diplomacy. In Russian we have a more accurate word, a better word, colonel, I think, for our work: konspiratsiya.” He offered her a mocking salute. “Tell your driver he is a lucky man. We shot one of his kind the other day.”
“Wait till I tell Wisner,” Carmel Offie enthused. “He’s going to be green. Wasn’t that something?” They had reached the suburbs of Vienna; the fog had fissured, breaking up as the noon sun licked at its frayed edges. “What was the second guy like, Ellie, the one who didn’t question me, what’d he want?”
“He said he knew my brother Allen had been in Bern during the war. Fishing around.”
“Pity I didn’t meet him. What’d you say? A colonel-general?”
“I think I was just a curiosity. Even NKVD colonel-generals like to brag, I’d think.”
“Janusz here, he was sweating buckets, weren’t you, Janusz?” Offie kidded.
“They take people like me,” Janusz said flatly, “put them on train, send them east.”
“Or shoot them out of hand,” Eleanor said.
“Yes,” Janusz said, wiping his dry lips with the back of his hand.
“I gave away all the chocolates,” Sophie said. “Do you think you can get more, Mr. Offie?”
The Witness Tree Page 39