Echo House

by Ward Just

  "Various Longfellows."

  "And you think they'd sell?"

  "If the price was right," Axel said. "If we promised to keep the name."

  Ed smiled. "Do we promise to keep the in-laws and the cousins and the nephews and the godsons also?"

  "There are one or two that we would want to keep."

  "The smart ones," Ed said.

  "Not necessarily," Axel replied. "Do you want me to look into it?"

  "Do," Ed said after a moment. "Of course—you'd want to keep your stake."

  "Of course," Axel said.

  "And there's no conflict there," Ed said.

  "Why would there be a conflict? Where do my interests conflict with the government's interests? If I can be helpful to my government's intelligence service, why shouldn't I be helpful? It's symmetrical, Ed. There's no conflict."

  "I imagine you have a man at Longfellow's. Someone who looks after your interest."

  Axel said, "You know him. He worked for us in the old days. Carl Buzet."

  "Carl Buzet," Ed said. "I know the name but I can't place it."

  "He worked for Harold Grendall," Axel said. "He was Harold's paymaster. Carl Buzet managed the accounts and managed them well. They were difficult accounts. He's thorough and has a head for figures. Not for much else."

  Ed Peralta was staring into the middle distance, his eyes half-closed. "Wasn't Carl Buzet in some trouble?"

  "Nothing serious," Axel said.

  "No, I remember distinctly. There was some trouble."

  "He had a divorce," Axel said.

  "An ugly one," Ed said. "His wife was unpleasant."

  "She was Czech."

  "She hated Carl because he was a Jew."

  "Carl loved her," Axel said. "God knows why."

  "She went with other men."

  "That's right, Ed."

  "I remember it now. He shot one of them."

  "It was an accident,' Axel said.

  "He shot him in the face," Ed said.

  "Drop it, Ed."

  "And you're satisfied with Carl?"

  "Very," Axel said.

  "All right," Ed said. "He's your headache."

  "That's correct," Axel said.

  On the floor, the president pro tem banged his gavel. Ed said, "I've got to be getting back."

  "I'll make the necessary inquiries into Longfellow's."

  "Can we discuss it at lunch on Wednesday? I want Harold and Lloyd on board."

  "Of course," Axel said. Then he put his hand on Ed's arm. "I think they're about to vote on Jimmy's nomination."

  "Without a debate?"

  "Looks like it," Axel said.

  "Where's your man? I don't see him."

  "Alfalfa Bob left the chamber a moment ago," Axel said. "He yielded back the balance of his time."

  A moment later James T.C. Longfellow became ambassador to the Republic of Portugal, by a voice vote.

  They were friends from OSS days, now back in government and happy to assemble once a week at Echo House to discuss the situation in their beloved Europe, miserable and worsening. They gathered in the dining room below the forbidding portraits of Adolph Behl and his whiskered father, and Constance in an unlikely blue gown, a brooch at her throat, diamonds circling her wrists, an ardent smile on her powdered face. She could be said to preside at these weekly luncheons, peering severely over Axel's right shoulder; and "meeting" would be a more accurate word, since the food was indifferent and merely an accessory to the conversation. Carafes of wine rested here and there on the wide table. Axel used his best crystal and china and saw to it that each man had an ashtray and a silver cup of cigarettes. Various Cognacs and eaux de vie waited on a side table. If the day was warm, the windows were thrown open to the weather, bright belts of yellow sunlight lashing the table, the room redolent of Behlbaver roses and freshly mown grass. These arrangements never varied, except if the weather was foul, when the windows were closed and the sconces lit, making the room as faded and cheerless as a barracks.

  Mrs. Johnson retreated as soon as lunch was served. Axel sat at the head of the wide table, flanked left and right by Ed Peralta and Harold Grendall. Lloyd Fisher was next to Harold and André Przyborski was next to Ed. André was one of the many Polish patriots who had emigrated to America rather than remain in London or return to the tortured continent, overrun with Reds and their surrogates. André received his paycheck from a Chicago congressman, on whose staff he was listed as legislative liaison.

  The first part of the lunch was always concerned with personalities, the latest rumors about the evenings of poker and bourbon at the White House and who was up and who was down at the State Department and the various military services, and the implications for the budget. The weather was fine this noontime and the talk relaxed—until Axel made a remark about the Iliad, his current bedtime reading, war as a contagion, war begetting war, war so total and pervasive and strenuous and intoxicating that no combatant could remember how or why it began and could foresee no end. War was life's constant, as reliable as the tide tables. Peace was out of the question, not on the table, given the determination of the Adversary and the incomplete memories of everyone else.

  The men nodded grimly and agreed that the West was in for a long winter, one that would last for decades, a modern ice age. The trolls were gathering under the bridges of Europe, Ed Peralta said, remembering the story he had read to his six-year-old the previous evening. The old windbag Bernard Baruch had coined a useful term only the other day: Cold War. Cold War benefited the Reds because Cold War was war in the shadows, war under the skin, a war for souls, a war of feint and duplicity that suited a dictatorship, where there were no legislatures or courts of law, no free press, and if you spoke your mind they sent you to Siberia.

  No public opinion, Harold Grendall said.

  Plenty of public opinion, Ed Peralta corrected. You just can't say it out loud.

  They want democracy, Harold said.

  They like democracy, all right, Ed said. They're not opposed to it. They want the right to vote and the rule of law and the right to travel and speak up and read the books that interest them. They'd like a chicken in every pot. They'd like to own a car and watch a soccer match on Sundays and enjoy some vodka with their meals. They just don't like capitalism.

  Ed Peralta observed that he had not read the Iliad since college and now he had no time to read anything at all, except reports from his men in the field. The reports made your hair stand on end, the organizational skills of the Kremlin were formidable, and terror had as much to do with it as money. They're disciplined people and they know what they want. There were Red cells in every government in Western Europe, with new ones added every day, led by some of the best educated men on that side of the ocean, men who believed. Some of them were like the early Christian mystics talking about the divinity of Christ and the Virgin and the pervasiveness of the spirit of God, an inescapable spirit that one day would transform the world. They've seen the socialist system, they know what it does, and still they believe.

  Lloyd said, "Not entirely. They don't believe in that so much as they've lost faith in the other."

  "Still," Ed said. "Some of these names—"

  "Give us one of the names," Lloyd said.

  Ed named a mutual acquaintance, a senior figure in the British defense ministry, a peer of the realm. "You remember him," Ed said. "Wore a dinky little toupee. Lived somewhere in Regent's Park. Had a good war. Great backgammon player, screwed everything in sight."

  "I don't believe it," Harold Grendall said. "I knew him well. We used to go to the races together."

  "Believe it," Ed said.

  "You're watching him?"

  "We are. Have done for some time."

  Lloyd said, "The mother country thinks it's entitled to something, having stood alone for so long. They think they're entitled to the chicken in the pot and the car and so forth and so on and don't realize they're broke. Their banks don't have any money because all the money's over her
e. They think they're entitled to a reward and instead what they're getting is power shortages, strikes, unemployment, and condescension."

  "He always won," Harold said.

  "I never met him," Axel said.

  "He lived somewhere near you," Ed said.

  "Sylvia knew him," Axel said. "And his mistress."

  "We don't know who to trust," Harold said.

  "We'd better find out," Lloyd said.

  "We don't know how to fight this kind of war," Harold went on. "They work in darkness and we work in daylight. We're learning, but it's slow work, and discouraging. We have to find our own shadows, to make our system work for us instead of against us. We only need a sliver of shadow here and there. The way it is now, all our trumps are face up and Ivan's aren't."

  "Not all of them," Eld said.

  "Most," Harold insisted. "And too many kibbitzers."

  "I agree with that," Ed said.

  "And the money," Harold said.

  "We'll get to that later," Ed said.

  André Przyborski was listening to them with growing alarm. He hated it when they began to doubt themselves. Doubt led to confusion and confusion led to a loss of purpose and resolve. The Red Army was formidable but not so formidable that it could not be undermined, given enough time, money, men, and resolve. The future of Poland depended on these men and others like them. André said, "My people know how to fight them."

  "No one knows anything about Homer," Axel persisted. "You can't find him in the Iliad. He's the author of it but he's not present in it. You can't hear his voice as you can hear Tolstoy's or Carlyle's. Homer doesn't seem to be guiding the story. He's only the amanuensis, and war itself is telling the tale. Every war has its own personality, and our Cold War is a tyrant. Cold War is the novelist. We're only characters in the novel."

  Ed shook his head. 'Joe Stalin's the author of this one. He's the one who wants it and so far he's in charge of it."

  "Then we'll lose," Axel said.

  "And deserve to lose," Harold said.

  "But what if I'm right?" Axel said.

  André Przyborski moved uncomfortably in his chair, looking at the worried faces around the table. What was wrong with them? Djugashvili was just another ignorant peasant from Georgia, crueler than most, dumber than most, maintained by a system with so many inner contradictions that it was only a matter of time before it fell of its own weight. A system could bear the weight of only so many corpses before it became contaminated. Of course you could help things along, worry them from time to time. You could never allow them an inch of room or an hour of peace. Poland would eat at Djugashvili's heart like a cancer. He would know no rest.

  "We will not lose," André said.

  "You have no idea of the people who are involved," Ed continued. "People who ought to know better, people who saw the last war at first hand. Educated people, serious people like us—"

  "We got a report the other day," Harold said. "We think as many as five million people died in Siberia before the war. Five million Soviet citizens arrested on suspicion and sent to the labor camps in the East. Suspected of plots, everything from sabotage to cracking a bad joke. High treason. Poets, farmers, policemen, apparatchiks, soldiers, peasants, all dead. Stalin's whim."

  Lloyd said, "It's not five million, Harold. It can't be. Five million's too high. Think about it a minute. They didn't have transport for five million souls from the cities to Siberia—"

  "It was more than twenty million," André said softly.

  The others were silent. Ed sighed and lit his cigarette, raising his eyebrows fractionally. André had an emotional Polish temperament and let his politics run away with him. His politics interfered with his judgment and damaged his own cause. He was irrational. His hatred of the Russians was such that he believed every atrocity, no matter how far-fetched. He saw unlucky Poland pressed between the fists of the Hun and the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks worse by far; his exaggerations served only to discourage the very intellectuals whose support was so essential to the struggle. André's twenty million was a fine round number to use in the newsletters and the congressman's speeches and in the private briefings he gave members of the Appropriations Committee when it was considering the supplemental. His general pessimism and bleak assessment of the Russian character, fortified as it was by his many grisly anecdotes, was much in favor on the Hill.

  "Many, many more than twenty million," André said, glaring at them. "Maybe as many as thirty million, if you go back to the purges of the early 'thirties. And the Russian pigs didn't need trains or trucks. They marched them, west to east. They marched them across the time zones on foot." André leaned forward, angry, the veins in his neck bulging like ropes. Everyone said he had the face of a saint, perhaps El Greco's Jerome, long, thin, and tormented. Women found him especially attractive.

  "At any event," Ed said after a pause, "Ivan's throwing money around, Swiss francs, escudos, dollars, you name it. They have as much money as they need because they have the keys to the treasury, thanks to Stalin. As Harold said, we need a sliver of shadow here and there. We need our own shadows to put our money in."

  Harold Grendall cleared his throat. "Ed said he described the problem to you, Axel, and you had an idea."

  "Axel thinks we should buy our own bank," Ed said.

  Lloyd Fisher laughed. "What? Buy the Chemical Corn?"

  "Jimmy Longfellow's bank," Ed said.

  "Isn't he the one who married the Fifty-second Street quiff?"

  "Lloyd," Axel said. "You're on thin ice."

  "Let Axel explain it," Ed said.

  Axel took them over the ground he had covered with Ed Peralta, adding a nuance here and a fresh detail there. He spoke for five minutes and when he stopped, the company was silent, each man assessing for himself the dangers and opportunities.

  "Will they sell?" Lloyd asked.

  "Yes," Axel said.

  "We've never owned a bank before," Lloyd said.

  Harold looked across the table at Ed, who was sitting back in his chair, imperturbable as Buddha. "Have you walked this up the line, Ed? Discussed it with the fellow in the corner office? Shown him the roots and the branches? Put him in the picture?"

  "It's cleared," Ed said.

  "He has no difficulties with it?"

  "None he expressed to me."

  "Hard to believe," Harold said.

  "He was satisfied that Axel was involved. He wanted to talk to Axel."

  "And has he?"

  "Yes," Axel said.

  "You explained everything to him?" Harold asked.

  "I answered his every question," Axel said.

  "I'm worried about the security of it," Harold said.

  "So was he," Axel replied. "But I've reassured him."

  "And the nature of your reassurance?"

  "That's my end," Axel said. "Don't worry about that part."

  "I don't know," Harold said doubtfully.

  "I'm in," Lloyd said. "How soon can you do it?"

  "I've done it," Axel said.

  "Whoa," Harold said.

  "I own Longfellow's, as of Monday. Amazing how eager the cousins and the in-laws were to sell. And after we signed paper, they told me I'd taken a risk because of the certainty of a worldwide depression, now that the war was over. The banks would be the first to fall." Axel lifted his eyebrows. "If you want a piece of this bank, I'm inviting you in. If you don't want a piece, that's fine, too. It's a superb investment for me."

  Ed said, "They're idiots."

  "What's our next step, then?" Harold asked.

  "You and Ed meet with Carl Buzet. Lloyd, too. Lloyd can handle the paper. We'll need papers of incorporation and so forth and so on. We'll need to allocate the stock, set up a board of directors. Carl handles my interest, so you'll be dealing with him."

  "I never trusted Carl Buzet," Harold said.

  "He doesn't trust you, either."

  "I like Carl," Ed said. "I'll handle Carl."

  "No one 'handles' Carl," Axel said.
"You talk to Carl as you'd talk to me."

  "What's our stake?" Ed asked.

  "Forty percent," Axel said. "I keep sixty."

  Now Lloyd Fisher cleared his throat and the others turned toward him. His pale face twitched. He said nothing for a moment, then announced he had bad news. Next Wednesday would be his farewell lunch at Echo House, because he was resigning from the government. He was leaving to return to Chicago to take over the family firm, almost bankrupt. Fisher, Gwilt had been very, very good to kin for generations, since before the turn of the century. They, too, had been inattentive, but when you're inattentive in court, you lose the case, and then you lose the client. The firm's affairs were a mess and someone had to take charge.

  "My father begged me, and I couldn't refuse him. I wanted you fellows to know first. Christ, I hate it. I don't want to leave Washington but I've got no choice. My grandfather founded the firm, you see."

  There were expressions of sympathy all around and then Ed Peralta asked how long it was since Lloyd had opened a law book.

  "Since 'thirty-nine," Lloyd said. "But there's more than one way to practice law. Some of the ways don't require a law library. You have to call yourself something, so you call yourself a lawyer." He went on to explain the life he imagined for himself in Chicago, the city that crackled with the sound of banknotes; and the banknotes could buy you anything you wanted, except a life inside the federal government working with your closest friends. Golf on the weekends, same foursome every weekend, and dinner every Saturday night at the Club with Republican Dummköp-fen complaining about Truman and the Jews and the socialists in the government and high taxes and labor unions and the rest. "Be sure to let me know how the Cold War turns out, and if the Jews win it."

  Ed said, "Get the firm on its feet and come back. There's always a place for you here, Lloyd."

  "It'll take years," Lloyd said.

  "So will the Cold War," Ed said.

  "Maybe we'll need some help in Chicago," Harold said.

  "I can get you Republicans and mobsters, nothing in between."

  "I have friends in Chicago," André said.

  "Sorry, old boy," Lloyd said. "They wouldn't be admitted into the Club. They'd be turned away, Polish riffraff."