52
THE knot of Leslie Slote’s tie came lopsided twice in his shaky hurrying hands. He flung the tie in a corner, pulled another from his dresser, and managed a passable knot. He put on his jacket and sat in a heavy brown leather armchair to calm himself with a cigarette, flinging long legs on the ottoman. A German correspondent had abandoned this apartment on June 15, making a hasty deal with him. For Moscow, these were splendid digs: three rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, solid German furniture. Pamela Tudsbury liked the place and had cooked many a dinner here for Slote and some of their friends.
The English-speaking embassy people and correspondents—an isolated, gossipy little band—assumed that the British girl and the American Foreign Service officer were having an affair. So did Slote’s thickset Russian maid, Valya, who beamed on them and tiptoed about when Pamela was visiting. Slote yearned for such an affair. He had not gotten over the marriage of Natalie Jastrow, and nothing closed such an ego wound like a new romance. But Pam Tudsbury, whom he remembered from Paris as the warm-blooded girlfriend of Philip Rule—wild in her ways, candidly sensual, freshest and gayest when the dawn came up—brushed off his passes. She was in a gloomy state; she was being true, she said, to her fiancé, a missing RAF pilot. Pam’s skin was fair as in the Paris days, her heart-shaped face with its thin bow of a mouth still a flower of English prettiness. She wore tailored wool suits, flat shoes, and glasses; but inside that secretarial uniform glowed the girl who had whipped off her stockings and splashed barefoot in the fountain on a midsummer night with Phil Rule, holding her red silk dress at mid-thigh. She still owned that dress, and sometimes wore it.
Slote had patiently been taking Pamela’s company on her terms, biding his chances to improve them. But the arrival of Captain Victor Henry deprived him of Pamela on any terms. When he glimpsed Pam with Henry, Slote knew at once he was looking at a woman in love. So much for fidelity to the missing airman! As for Captain Henry, this stumpy, sallow, tired-looking fellow of fifty or so seemed to the Foreign Service officer almost a caricature of the anonymous military man: short on small talk, quick on professional matters, poker-faced, firm, and colorless. One couldn’t even tell whether Henry liked Pamela Tudsbury. He made no visible return of her unguarded deep glances. Slote failed to fathom the attraction this middle-aged dullard held for the young Englishwoman, and he had never understood Natalie Jastrow’s infatuation with the man’s son, either.
Fate had served him a strange, indigestible dish, Leslie Slote thought—to be beaten out first by the son and then by the father; neither of them, in his own judgment, a worthy rival. Byron Henry at least was a handsome young devil, and had much changed Slote’s ideas of the susceptibility of clever women to surface charms. But there was nothing charming on the surface of Byron’s father. The best one could say for the man was that he still had his hair, thick and dark, and that his waist showed an effort to stay trim. But his age was evident in the weary wrinkled eyes, the gnarled hands, the seamed mouth, the deliberate movements.
Slote was about to meet Admiral Standley and Captain Henry at the Hotel National; he was going to interpret for them at the Kremlin banquet. This privilege did not, in prospect, make him happy. He was in a state of panicky foreboding.
During the first weeks of the invasion, Slote’s physical cowardice, which he lived with as other people live with hay fever or high blood pressure, had not acted up. Slote was an admirer of Soviet Russia. He believed the news on the loudspeakers and argued that the German victory claims were propaganda. Six hundred miles, more than a hundred million Russians, and above all the great Red Army lay between him and the Germans. It was too far even for the Luftwaffe to fly. The barometer of his timidity read the Moscow climate as sunny and fair. The Muscovites—a peaceable, good-natured, rather shabby swarm of workingmen in caps, workingwomen in shawls, boys and girls in scarlet Young Communist neckerchiefs, all with flat calm Russian faces so much alike that they appeared to be one family of several million first cousins—placidly piled sandbags, taped windows, held anti-incendiary drills for air raids that didn’t come, and otherwise went about their business as before under blue skies, in warm sparkling weather. Silver barrage balloons bobbed at their winches in open squares. Snouts of anti-aircraft guns appeared on the roofs of hotels and museums. Strapping red-cheeked young men wearing new uniforms and fine leather boots streamed to the railroad stations. Tanks, multi-wheeled trucks, and motor-driven big guns thumped and clanked along the boulevards day and night, all heading west. The theatres and cinemas stayed open. The ice cream of the street vendors was as rich as ever. The summer circus was playing to great crowds, for this year there was a dancing elephant as well as the bears. If one could trust one’s eyes and ears in Moscow, the Soviet Union had met the onslaught at its distant borders and dealt the Nazis their first big defeat, exactly as Radio Moscow claimed.
Then Minsk fell, then Smolensk, then Kiev—each Russian acknowledgment lagging a week or more behind the German crows of victory. Air raids started; the Luftwaffe had come into range. Nobody else in the embassy became as alarmed as Slote, because nobody else had counted much on the Russians. Moreover, nobody else had undergone the ordeal of Warsaw. Since May, the ambassador had been storing food, fuel, and supplies in a large house thirty miles from the city, to sit out the coming siege. A few of the Americans, rubbed raw by the Russians’ difficult ways, even looked forward to seeing the Wehrmacht march into Red Square. At least, after a few drinks, they said so.
Slote had stopped arguing, having been proved so wrong about the Red Army. But he thought the complacency and indifference of the other Americans was almost insane. The air raids were getting worse as the Germans drew nearer. Moscow’s amazingly thick anti-aircraft barrage provided a comforting canopy of green, red, and yellow fireworks, mounting past searchlight beams in the black night. Yet bombs did fall. The terror of the siege guns was still to come. Even if he survived the siege, thought Slote, how safe would he be? By then Roosevelt’s blatant help to Nazism’s enemies might have provoked a triumphant Hitler to declare war. If Moscow fell, the Americans might all be taken to a ravine and shot like the Jews in Minsk. Then Adolf Hitler could apologize for the mistake, or deny that it had happened, or say the Russians had done it.
Berel Jastrow’s story filled Slote with horror. He had read the books about Germany on the list he had given Byron Henry, and many more. The Germans, in their naïve passion for obedience, their streaks of coarseness and brutality, their energy, their intelligence, their obsessive self-centeredness, their eternal grievance that the world was against them and doing them injustice, their romantic yearnings for new extremes of experience—this last trait bubbling up ad nauseam in the romantic philosophers, and nailed down by Goethe once and for all in the Faust image—these eighty million strangers in Europe seemed to Leslie Slote capable, once they abandoned their strict and docile conventions, of slaughtering any number of innocent people upon orders, cheerfully and with no sense of guilt, not in the least aware that they were “committing atrocities.” There was no striking bottom in the German spirit. That was the strange and fearful thing about them. They were like remote cold children, as docile and as cruel. Hitler’s dread secret was that he understood them. Other nations at war could be counted on to observe such rules as exchanging besieged or captured diplomats. In Slote’s frightened view, such diplomats could perhaps count on Hitler’s Germans not to eat them—little more.
The red light of the setting sun was fading outside his window. It was time to go and accompany Victor Henry to a night of sitting in the bull’s eye of the Moscow air target.
Not surprisingly, he found Captain Henry in Tudsbury’s suite. Despite the chill in the room, the naval officer lolled on a couch in his shirtsleeves, smoking a cigar. Pamela was sewing at a crumpled blue coat with gold stripes, in the light of a red-shaded lamp atop an alabaster Venus.
“Hi there,” Henry said.
Pamela said, “Loose brass buttons. We don’t want them bounci
ng all over the Kremlin parquet floor. Have some Scotch and tap water, Leslie. Beaverbrook gave the governor a bottle.”
Glancing at his wristwatch, Slote sat himself on the edge of a chair. “No thanks. I hope you haven’t had much, Captain. When you start on a Russian dinner, the last thing you want in your system is alcohol.”
Henry grunted. “You’re telling me! I haven’t touched it.”
Pamela sewed, Victor Henry smoked, and the Foreign Service man felt he was very superfluous in the room. He looked at his watch once, twice, and coughed. “I said I’d meet the admiral in the lobby at six. It’s ten of. Suppose I look for him now. You’ll join us, Captain?”
“Sure,” Henry said.
“You seem so calm, Leslie,” Pam said. “If I were actually going into the Kremlin, I’d be vibrating.”
“Captain Henry seems pretty calm,” Slote said.
“Oh, him,” Pamela said. “He’s a robot. A mechanical man. Chug-chug! Choomp-choomp! Clank!”
“I need new batteries,” Henry said. “And possibly a valve job.”
The intimate teasing made Slote feel even more superfluous. “Well, in ten minutes then,” he said.
Pamela said, “Just two more buttons. Damn! That’s twice I’ve pricked my finger. I never could sew.”
Clumsy black limousines clustered before the hotel, a rare sight. Since the start of the war, the sparse auto traffic on Moscow’s wide boulevards and squares had been dwindling to nothing. Muscovites, taking evening strolls in their usual large numbers, glanced inquisitively at the machines, but did not stop to gawk. Chauffeurs and escorts in black caps and black leather jackets stood by the cars. The Americans called them “the YMCA boys”; they were secret police, and the people seemed loath to linger near them. But as the cars began to fill with well-dressed foreigners thronging out of the National’s narrow entrance, the pedestrians did form lines of quiet onlookers, peering with round friendly eyes at the clothes, faces, and shoes.
“How did you make out on those harbor charts?” said Admiral Standley to Henry, settling into the back seat and adjusting his hearing aid. He had once been Chief of Naval Operations, and the President had called him out of retirement for this mission. Slote could never make this shrivelled, leathery, bespectacled man, whose uniform displayed four rows of campaign ribbons, stop talking near NKVD agents, who undoubtedly knew English, though they never spoke it.
“I got nowhere,” Henry said. “As for operating codes and signals, forget it. Their fellow told me with a straight face that they had no such things, that they just communicated by Morse or flashing light, in plain language.”
“What tripe! Did you give them our stuff?”
“Well, I showed them our General Signal Book, and a few strip ciphers. I almost got into a wrestling match with this rear admiral, the small fat one. He started to put them away in his briefcase, but I retrieved them. I said no tickee no shirtee.”
“No! Did you really?” said the admiral. “Why, you may hang for that, Pug. We’re supposed to give, give, give, here. Why, you should just have handed over all our Navy’s code channels, and shaken hands, and toasted eternal brotherhood in vodka. I’m ashamed of you, Captain Henry, and goddamn glad you’re along.”
“We’re getting a quid pro quo for all we’re giving the Soviets,” Slote said. “They’re killing Germans for us.”
“They’re killing Germans so as not to get killed by Germans,” said the admiral. “They’re not doing it for us.”
Pug said to Slote, “Look here, Leslie, if we’re going to plan for convoys to Murmansk and Archangel, and for possible joint operations, we’ve got to swap hydrographic dope and operational codes. Hell, we’re not asking for secret combat channels. This is the stuff we need for seamanship and piloting.”
“Russians are obsessed with secrecy,” Slote said. “Be persistent and patient.”
The cars, having made a wide circuit of streets around the Kremlin, were stopping at a tall gateway under a red stone tower topped by a star.
“That won’t help,” said the admiral. “I think these birds just haven’t gotten the green light from Mr. Big, and until they do, no dice.”
At this stream of slang, the NKVD escort turned and squinted narrow Tartar eyes at the admiral, before saying to Slote in Russian, with a polite smile, that they would stay in the car on passing through the gate. The limousines, checked one at a time by big, fierce-looking, gun-bearing sentries in faultless uniform, drove into the citadel, stopped at an inner gate for another check, then passed among bizarre old churches to a long building with a majestic stone façade.
The visitors, with Russian officers mingling among them, left the cars, mounted the steps, and stood talking outside the great closed doors, their breaths smoking in the chilly air. A light blue sky, puffy with pink sunset clouds, arched from wall to wall of the fortress. Suddenly the palace doors opened, and the foreigners were blinking at dazzling light from globed chandeliers in a very long high-ceilinged hall, ending in a cascade of vermilion carpet on a far-off white marble staircase. As they walked in, warm air enveloped them, a novelty in Moscow, where all building heat had been forbidden until mid-October. Inside, a musty smell of old stone walls and old furnishings was mixed with an almost flowery odor. White-gloved attendants in military livery helped the visitors off with their coats and hats. Along the mirrored walls, on dark tables, dozens of combs and brushes were neatly laid out.
“Thoughtful touch, this,” Victor Henry said to Slote, as they stood side by side, brushing their hair. “Say, what did the ambassador think of that stuff from Minsk? Did you get it to him?”
Slote nodded at Pug’s mirror image. “I wanted it to go to Secretary Hull, high priority. The ambassador quashed that. The stuffs to be forwarded through channels to our east European desk.”
Pug wrinkled his nose. “That’ll be the end of it. Your department always drags its feet on the Jews. Better show the papers to some American newspaperman here.”
“The boss directly ordered me not to, in case it’s evaluated as fake atrocity propaganda.”
Young army officers, handsome clear-eyed giants in brown uniforms with scarlet collar tabs, appeared through side doors, and began shepherding the visitors toward the staircase. Walking beside Slote, Pug said, “Suppose you have Fred Fearing up for a drink, and he accidentally on purpose reads the material? A reporter will steal a scoop from his old blind grandmother, you know.”
“Are you suggesting that I disobey orders?”
“I don’t think that story should get buried.”
The admiral came and hooked elbows with them on the staircase, cackling, “Say, how’s this for socialist austerity? Can’t you just see ghosts of Czarist nobles and their beautiful ladies on this red carpet? This is right out of the movies.”
The company passed through a bleak modernist room full of desks with microphones, and the army officers explained that here the Supreme Soviet met. They straggled through one vast room after another, apparently unaltered since Czarist days, richly furnished in French or Italian or English styles, crammed with paintings and statuary, with no visible purpose except to overawe. The effect mounted of wasteful magnificence displayed helter-skelter with a heavy hand. In one room grander and richer than the rest, pillared in marble, with a vaulted gilt ceiling and red damask-covered walls, the company of about eighty men halted. The chamber seemed not at all crowded by them.
Mirrored doors opened and a party of Russian civilians came in, wearing unpressed flopping trousers and ill-fitting double-breasted jackets. Slote at once recognized several faces that lined Lenin’s tomb at the May Day parades: Molotov, Kaganovitch, Suslov, Mikoyan.
“Look at those guys come on, will you?” Victor Henry said. “They make you feel like the revolution happened last week.”
Slote gave him a quick glance. The apparition of these inelegant Communist bosses in the gorgeous Grand Palace had jarred him too, and the Navy man had crystallized this feeling in one sentence. Henry
was sizing up the approaching Communists through half-closed eyes, as though he were peering at a horizon.
“That’s the Politburo, Captain,” Slote said. “Very big cheeses.”
Henry nodded. “They don’t look like big cheeses, do they?”
“Well, it’s those terrible clothes,” Slote said.
Introductions began. Liveried waiters passed with trays of vodka in little tulip-shaped glasses and plates of pastry sticks. Slote ate a stick, for research purposes; it was far too sugary. A little man walked alone into the room, smoking a cigarette. No ceremony was made of it, nobody stopped conversing, but the grand state chamber and all the people in it polarized toward this man, for he was Stalin. It was a matter of side-glances, of shoulders and faces turned, of small moves in the crowd, of a rounding of eyes. So Leslie Slote saw for the first time in the flesh the man whose busts, photographs, statues, and paintings filled the Soviet Union like images of Christ in a Catholic land.
The Communist dictator, a surprisingly short man with a small paunch, moved through the room shaking hands and chatting. The subtle focus travelled with him like a spotlight. He came to the two American naval officers, put out his hand to the admiral, and said, “Stalyin.” He looked like his pictures, except that his pallid skin was very coarse and pitted, as though he had once had bad acne. His slanted eyes, thick back-swept grizzled hair, and arching moustache and eyebrows, gave him a genial leonine look. Unlike the other Communists, he wore a uniform of simple beige cloth superbly tailored, with sharply creased trousers tucked into soft gleaming brown boots.
Leslie Slote made introductions. Captain Henry said in slow Russian, with a bad American accent, “Sir, I will tell this story to my grandchildren.”
Raising a thick eyebrow, Stalin said in a low pleasant voice, “Yes? Do you have any?”