Stained Glass (28 page)

“I'm sorry about Wagner. Tell us about it.”

Blackford recounted the story.

Rufus was pensive. One of his silences ensued. And, finally:

“Was Wagner close to anybody? Is there anybody with whom he might have shared whatever suspicions took him to the chapel in the first place?”

“He wasn't close to anyone I know of. But he was devoted to his job, terribly thorough. More thorough than the poor bastard Wintergrin could really stand. I don't know if he ever confided any suspicions to Wintergrin.”

“Might he have kept a log, or notebook, in which he wrote that he intended to inspect the chapel?”

“I don't know,” Blackford said, reproaching himself for not having wondered about that possibility.

“If he did, and if the last entry in it says he's going off to check the chapel, we could be in trouble when the sentries are quizzed about your late appearance there.”

Rufus went on: “Did Spring or Pulling find a notebook on him?”

“I don't know,” Blackford said, feeling like a schoolboy.

Rufus looked at Singer, who without further ado picked up the telephone and dialed a number.

“Sergeant Gold, Singer here. Do you have the personal belongings of Corporal Selznick?”

“I have them in the safe.”

“Did you examine them?”

“Yes.”

“Was there a notebook?”

“Not exactly. A scratch pad. And the notes on it were all in English. Besides that, there was just his wallet, identification, a little money.”

“No address book, or notebook other than the scratch pad?… Right … Right. I tell you what. Get that stuff out of the safe and bring it around in a sealed envelope. Leave it with Frau Augstein. Thanks.”

Black reported his conversation with Kurt Grossmann, which suggested that, at least as of eight that morning, they hadn't got around to looking about suspiciously for clues on his desk. Then he said—

“I tell you what we
could
do. We could ask Erika to look on Wagner's desk. Her desk is about ten feet away, and she's not going to Hamburg, because Axel's giving the same talk there he gave at Stuttgart.”

He and Singer looked at Rufus. Rufus was thinking again.

Finally he looked at his watch. It was nearing six. “No, we won't call her now. If they decided to examine the desk, they will already have reviewed its contents. If they have not reached that point of apprehension or suspicion, they probably won't until tomorrow, or—who knows?—even the day after tomorrow. To call Erika without having arranged a code is dangerous. Look her up tonight, Black, and get her to go to work early and look then in Wagner's desk. If there is anything there that suggests the chapel was his destination last night, get it from her and destroy it, and tell her to leave everything else intact. Sooner or later they will get around to it. It is fortunate that the missing man happens to be the man who would be directing the investigation if he were around. We have to assume that the trail will not lead to you, Black, or that if it does, there will be nothing like enough evidence to indict you. Your behavior in the chapel was concededly bizarre, but to prove on the basis of it that you killed Wagner is more than anybody could handle. People don't move with great speed in these matters. And from tomorrow at about four the concerns of the Wintergrin people will be over other matters. But now of course is the time to plan for all contingencies. If Erika informs you tomorrow morning that the desk
has
been searched, I would
still
think it safe to assume you would not be questioned during the day—certainly nothing resembling formal action would be initiated. But if tomorrow you should be approached, then after the elimination”—he says it now without pausing, Blackford noticed—“you will need to be careful. It might prove necessary to go home, but only if the police start showing an interest in you. Otherwise you are to stay in St. Anselm's until the spring at least.”

Rufus turned suddenly to Singer.

“Shall we have a glass of sherry?”

He hadn't said anything so libertine even on the critical evening in London, Blackford thought. Blackford had regained his color, but his eyes were darker, furtive, and Rufus could not descry their meaning. Singer poured, and Rufus then said it, using exactly the words Blackford
knew
he would use. Blackford knew that, if only to make it hard for himself, Rufus would use the most provocative formulation, tushery and all:

“Are you prepared to do your duty, Blackford?”

Blackford put down his glass.

“Rufus, I don't want to be argumentative. But are you aware that I was never told on joining this outfit that I would be expected to kill people in cold blood? Let alone the leading anti-Communist in Europe?”

“This organization is structured to deal with contingencies. Are you saying we should have—could have—recruited people disposed to deal with
this
contingency, and trained them to do so? Where would we find them? Just what would we tell them? How would we train them? You aren't
required
to do it even now. But I
am
required to lay it on the line. The fact is the commander-in-chief of your government, his principal foreign affairs adviser, and the director of the intelligence agency devoted to protecting American interests—our sovereignty, our freedom—by nonmilitary means; these men, drawing on all their resources—yes, moral resources included—
feel that the situation is critical:
that this single man's activities are about to put the lives and liberties of whole peoples on the line. They despise, as I do, the government that has given us this ultimatum. They cannot even know, for certain, whether that threat is bluff. But they agreed, finally, that responsible statesmanship forbade taking so awful a risk—consider it”—Rufus managed to say it so that it sounded fresh, and awful—“
conceivably, the risk of millions of people dead
. They negotiated as hard as I have ever known our people to negotiate.”

“Harder than at Yalta and Potsdam?” Black interrupted.

Rufus let it pass. “Yes, harder than at Yalta and Potsdam. At every level. And finally, even on a little point, a point that was trivial to Stalin, but important to us: the matter of who should pull the lever. Here was the high point of Stalin's sadism, and the low point in our humiliation.
It doesn't matter to him. It does matter to us
. The best we got was the concession we played out in Switzerland; and you, and the United States, lost.

“So I put it this way, Blackford. You are the front-line agent of the commander-in-chief. You have been involved in the evolution of the plan. And it was you who drew the card. In doing so—never mind your reservations, which I admit you registered—you made, your protestations notwithstanding, a contract. If you decide now to refuse, we will have to try to maneuver without you. But if we should fail, you may be directly responsible for suffering on a terrible scale. Certainly you will be responsible—I speak now of what
has
happened, not of what will, or might, happen—for murder. For the murder of Jürgen Wagner. Because if the plan for tomorrow does not go forward, then what you did to Wagner was impermissible. If you follow through tomorrow, then last night you acted as a soldier. If tomorrow you refuse to consummate the plan, then last night you murdered.”

Blackford recoiled at the word. He paused a long time, and refilled his sherry glass. The room was silent. Then he said,

“Let's get on with the details.”

CHAPTER 21

He called Erika from Bonn and asked if she would have a late drink with him. Yes, she said, but she too would be working late. It occurred to Blackford that that was fine. “I've got to go to the chapel for a minute, so I'll pick you up at your office. How's that? About ten?”

As he drove he forced away the main theme, concentrating on the notation.
He would much prefer going over Wagner's desk himself
, without asking Erika to do so and giving her, unnecessarily, the story on Wagner. (Why should she—they—have and enjoy that extra mug shot of criminal America?) He pondered how he might physically manage it, and turned on the radio. The lead bulletin was of a joint declaration between the lame-duck President of the United States and his successor, declaring that any military aggression by the Soviet Union against West Germany would be met with the full force of NATO's troops. “Neither the President nor the President-elect mentioned any possible use of atomic defenses,” the commentator said, “and there was no immediate reaction in Moscow, where a general mobilization was ordered a week ago.” The commentator went on to review the day's profuse endorsements by labor union leaders and newspapers of the candidacy of Axel Wintergrin. Blackford snapped off the radio.

At dinner with Singer Callaway in Rufus's apartment he had thought back on their dinner together the preceding January, when neither spoke of the next day's enterprise. Tonight they did. Resisting moral speculation, they talked only about the plan, so thoroughly rehearsed now since the idea of how to kill Axel Wintergrin came to Hallam Spring. At a long meeting with Rufus, Callaway, and Blackford in Bonn, ten days earlier, Spring and Pulling had read from their portfolio of choices.

Spring provided the narrative, Pulling, the technical interpolations, leafing through his copious notebooks for details. The requirement—that it should be accepted as an accidental death—clearly contracted the possibilities, and palpably depressed Bruce Pulling with his affinity for explosives, which are uneasily assigned to detonate accidentally. Pulling argued the plausibility of an avalanche destroying Wintergrin's caravan descending from the courtyard, and he was industrious enough to document a natural phenomenon of similar nature in 1755—“perhaps related to the earthquake in Lisbon,” he suggested, hopefully. Blackford asked whether it was a concomitant part of the plan that a diversionary earthquake in Lisbon should be engineered on November 12, and Pulling, returning to the notes, said, No, he didn't think that necessary. There was a Poison Plan (mother's mushrooms), a Carbon Monoxide Plan (old exhaust pipes in the hermetically enclosed Daimler), an Incendiary Plan (he would perish in his bedroom from the smoke before the flames consumed the castle). The mode decided on, and checked out as agreed with Bolgin in Switzerland, was what they came to call the Scope Plan.

The division of responsibility was straightforward. Blackford must contrive to deliver Axel Wintergrin to the chromoscope. As always, Wintergrin would sit down, bend over until his forehead touched the face plate, and stand by to adjust the waist-level levers rooted on opposite sides of the chromoscope. Blackford would then turn on the current at the switchboard. A few seconds would go by while the count fiddled with the adjustments. “Then you gotta do
your
part,” Spring said to Blackford.

Blackford's “part” would sit in the pocket of his jacket. A cigarette-package-sized transmitter. On depressing the switch a module tucked into the chromoscope would be activated.

“The way I worked it out,” Hallam Spring had explained at the midnight session to Rufus, Singer Callaway, and Blackford, Pulling at his side doodling on a notepad, “is this. We're better off electrocuting the subject sometime after the power is turned on. Otherwise it has the feeling of an … execution. I could fix up the module with a computer circuit to go off when the subject moves the light lever on the right of the box the nth time, say the fifth—or the fiftieth, for that matter. But that would require monitoring the use of the chromoscope before the subject used it and counting exactly how many times it's used before the subject comes in, and I figure
that's
no good. The alternative is to detonate by a portable transmitter. It's a solid-state-receiver module, works like one of those garage-door deals, door goes up when you push the little transmitter button in your car.

“The chromoscope is wooden, so it's easy to insulate. I'll substitute a plastic linkage for the light lever, instead of the metal linkage inside the casing now, and lead a wire right to the metal handle. Another wire will lead up to the metal face port. I'd suggest Blackford wait maybe five, six seconds, to augment the impression that something went screwy inside the box, rather than have the one-to-one electrical effect of a guy turning a switch, then POW!

“Now when the house current, two hundred and twenty volts, is released, the subject's right hand will clamp onto the lever with the grip of a pit bull (reflex action), and contortion will force the head harder onto the face plate as the two hundred and twenty volts flow from the hand up the arm through the heart into the head and face. This will stop the heart. No ands, ifs or buts.

“The second function of the internal module is the incendiary one. It will go off at the same moment the electricity is sent to the right-hand lever and the face plate. The same current source will go into an igniter core, a block of magnesium (or chemical mixture—I'll decide between the two), either one capable of intense heat for enough time so that the fire will spread through the box and destroy the module and the insides of the machine. I can even rig it so the heat/fire source could spatter pieces around to accelerate the fire within the box.

“Here's something else I'll do. Wrap with rubber tape the heat/fire source, and that will produce plenty of ‘burning wire' smell. Nothing to it. Window dressing. But people expect electrical fires to smell like something burning.”

And he finished with easygoing pride. “You like?”

Blackford asked Singer Callaway how Spring and Pulling would stand up under questioning.

“They're trained agents. They won't budge. As for the plan, we ran it through the lab in Maryland. It checks out. There shouldn't be any problem. They can peer into the bowels of the scope all they want to. They won't find anything. A crazy accident.”