Stained Glass (31 page)

He looked up at the date. October 16. He pulled the engagement book out of his pocket. On October 15 they had dinner at Gummersbach. He struggled to recall exactly the words Axel had used. “
I could never escape the West, if the decision were made.
” He had been right. He could never escape the West, let alone the West combined with the East. All he could do was hope that, through Blackford, his urgent and hopeful analysis would be relayed to Washington, and his life, and mission, spared. Blackford felt he must weep. But there was pounding on the door.

“Are you all right, Herr Oakes?” Blackford dried his eyes, washed his face, and opened the door.

“You are very white, Herr Oakes. Shall I bring you medicine?”

“No, Wolfgang. I wish to go back to the chapel. Kindly escort me there without my being seen by the press.”

“Wait here, Herr Oakes. I will return with a plan.”

Blackford winced at the word.

“I'll wait. Knock softly four times.”

In fifteen minutes he heard the knock, opened the door, and was handed a hat and, with a certain diffidence, a mustache.

“It was Count Wintergrin's. He used it when he wished to travel incognito. It was in my safekeeping. I am sure he would want you to have it.”

Wordlessly Blackford brought it to his upper lip. He put on the hat and, head tilted slightly down, followed Wolfgang out, away from the lobby teeming with the jabbering reporters and the blaring television, through the kitchen into the cold air of Westphalia. He signaled to Wolfgang to follow him. On reaching his car, he motioned Wolfgang to the driver's seat. “Less chance of detection that way.”

Wolfgang drove skillfully to the fork and up the mountain road. He stopped automatically at the sentry gate and with his headlights illuminated the home-painted sign: ABSOLUTELY NO VISITORS. The sentry flashed a light on his face and paid no attention to the mustachioed stranger sitting by him. “Ah, Wolfgang, Is there any news? Do they know the cause of the accident?”

“They do not know the cause of the accident, Werner, and maybe they will never know.”

“A terrible day for St. Anselm's, Wolfgang.”

“A terrible day for Germany, Werner.”

The car slid forward. “Where do you wish me to stop, Herr Oakes?”

“It doesn't matter. I shall be going to the chapel for a few minutes. Please wait for me.” Blackford sensed that Wolfgang would take satisfaction from being given orders, all the better if they entailed physical discomfort which, in Wolfgang's mind, would be a measure of expiation for his failure to keep Count Wintergrin alive. “Of course, Herr Oakes, but first I shall see that you enter the chapel.”

This required safe passage past two sentries posted outside with strict instructions to prevent noncourtyard-folk—Schlosshofleute—from access to the chapel.

Blackford had removed his mustache and Wolfgang nodded authoritatively to the sentries.

“Anybody in there?” he asked.

“Only the lady translator,” one guard replied, motioning Oakes in.

Blackford stopped. He thought of retreating. But what, after all, was he pursuing on this morbid mission, if not a kind of full exposure? He'd have all the more willingly entered the chapel if warned it was tenanted by the whole detachment of Wintergrin's Freiwillige Schutzwehr, thirsting for victims and vengeance.

He took, without explanation, Wolfgang's flashlight and walked in.

There was no light, not even from a flashlight. Only the cigarette ember from the aisle, where the box had stood that carried out the body of Jürgen Wagner.

Blackford stopped.

He stood by her, leaning, against a column.

She said, “Why did you do that?”

“Because, after a lot of thought, a distinction crystallized in my mind.”

“A distinction between a contract entered into with capitalists and with Communists?”

“I wouldn't put it that way, but you can. A contract to do the wrong thing.”

“But then, after all, you did it.” In the dark Erika could not see the astonishment on his face. Instantly he understood. She thought he had, finally, reached his hand into the purse and touched off the electrocution. He would let her think it, he decided quickly.

“I suppose you think you would have been less guilty because you didn't push the button.”

“I wouldn't have been less guilty under the law. But I needed to assert my will. We are all—increasingly—automatons, Erika, and you are one willingly because it is a part of your creed. But even you broke. Even you.” And, he thought to himself, we have the all-seeing, all-knowing Rufus to thank for—his death and—the survival of European freedom?

“I don't know what they will do to me if you tell them what happened. They”—he moved his flashlight vaguely east, toward Moscow—“will never know that you were prepared to let the mission fail. I understood the necessity of what happened today, and even the necessity of my cooperation. But I needed to cut out for myself a tiny little area in which I was free to move. The freedom of a prisoner, in a cell six feet by six feet, to move to one or another corner of the room. The gesture was important for me, and all the more so now, knowing that it was important to you.

“But I have something else to tell you, Erika.”

“There's nothing more to say.”

“Yes there is.”

“
He
knew.
He
guessed I was an agent. He guessed what might be my mission. And he arranged that I should know this—through Wolfgang.” He passed over the letter, and shone the light beam down on it. And, then, away from Erika's eyes, because he sensed, by her silence, her emotions.

“He was a good man,” she said with strain.

“He was the finest man I ever knew,” Blackford said. And then, hoarsely, “If there's anybody left like him, we must meet again to … eliminate him.”

They moved toward the door and Blackford stumbled. The beam of the flashlight pointed to the case of Conditti's wine, reduced to two bottles. He leaned down, thinking to pull one out and suggest one for the road, but decided against it.

Epilogue

“Every year”—Roland Himmelfarb complained to his young companion who, though only sixteen, insisted that this time he would participate in the arrangements—“it becomes harder and harder to make out the list. Tomorrow will be
chaotic
. Quite
chaotic!
By placing chairs behind the altar we have made room for exactly twenty-two more people. Twenty-two! My own wife Heidi is seated in one of the confessionals!” Himmelfarb relaxed for a moment, and grinned at his long-legged, slim-faced, lightly freckled assistant. “If you have any sins on your conscience, Rudi,
that
will be the time to recite them: Heidi is very forgiving, as long as it's not me.”

The lanky boy, absorbed in grouping the three-by-five cards on the large table in front of him, did not turn his face. His chin was as yet without trace of a beard, his flaxen hair, a fading, blond, touching lightly on his beige sweater, his features tilted toward his work, on which he concentrated. Without lifting his head he smiled and replied, with a trace of an English accent, “Herr Himmelfarb has always been very kind to take all this trouble and responsibility.”

Roland Himmelfarb, owner-manager of St. Anselm's cement factory, only eight years old but already the largest in Westphalia, made no acknowledgment.

“My, how they agitate for an invitation. The chancellor's office has made six separate requests. I felt like saying: ‘The only seat left in the chapel is for the chancellor himself.' But
he
wouldn't come—no. Not even the Berlin Wall will bring him. Not even on the tenth anniversary. Maybe it's
because
of the Berlin Wall!” Himmelfarb's voice trailed off. Now he was talking to himself. He wondered what Axel would have done about the Berlin Wall. But then there would have been no Berlin Wall. He turned again to Rudi.

“But the party leaders, oh
they
are all coming. Afraid not to. Haven't missed a year. It's the foreign diplomats who—mostly—do not dare. A few do. Always the Spanish ambassador. And”—he chuckled—“in 1956 the Hungarian ambassador—what timing!—entered St. Anselm's as an accredited ambassador, and left St. Anselm's forty-five minutes later as an ex-ambassador! Axel—your, father—would have been amused. Look at those letters”—he pointed to the table in the old refectory. “Over ten thousand this year. Had to make a public announcement—in September, while you were at Greyburn—telling all applicants to go to their own churches at four p.m. on November twelfth, or listen on radio to our services. What they all keep asking for is television, but your father would
never
have permitted television in the chapel. Imagine what the television lights would do to the stained glass! After all that trouble in reproducing the glass. After that”—his voice faltered—“that—machine, for duplicating the glass. Well, the machine did its work. It killed your father. But … it took your father's blood, his light, his spirit, and put them in that glass. It restored St. Anselm's. No question about that. Some say”—he whispered now—“some old-timers say the reconstituted chapel is more beautiful even than it was before!” For the first time Rudi had turned from the cards and, eyes wide open, was looking up into Roland Himmelfarb's face, the boy's father's intelligence lighting the eyes, and setting the lips. Himmelfarb went on.

“I never saw it before the war, Rudi, but I agree. Because nothing is more beautiful than St. Anselm's. The Americans spared no expense, Rudi. They were here eighteen months after the accident, and at the opening in 1954 the critics—as they say in your Latin service,
una voce dicentes
—with one voice, Rudi, they acclaim it. You are—technically—the sole owner of one of the most perfect, most beautiful twelfth-century chapels in Europe.”

Rudi, who was arranging cards by code as Himmelfarb spoke, said: “Is Schwarzei-Mein an ambassador?” Roland took the card from the boy's hand and, wheeling left on his revolving desk chair, reached for a directory on his reference shelf.

“Schwarzei-Mein … Dieter … Yes. Ambassador-designate to Italy. He'll have to be seated in the Red Section. Any room left?”—he returned the card to Rudi.

“Yes. You forget, Herr Himmelfarb, that Prince Richard broke his leg skiing yesterday. That opened up a seat.” Rudi handed him another card. Himmelfarb looked at it.

“Yes. I don't know this gentleman. Except that he is an American. The request that we admit him came from—the chancellor's chief of staff. A direct call to me. He has only called me twice in all these years. Once to request, bashfully, a ticket for his daughter, who had a picture of your father hung over her bed at school and announced she would run away unless she could attend our Te Deum in 1956, I think it was—much to her father's vexation. And this time he told me he could not give me the name of the gentleman, who must be anonymous. But I accepted—in good faith (Herr Wittfogel is our friend)—his request. This is the card. ‘Herr Mayer.' Could be anybody; any nationality. He is
not
to be seated in the Red Section with the diplomats. And of course not with family and friends in the Blue, or old comrades in Yellow, or press in Green. Put him in White—‘Other Categories.' Ten years ago, Rudi, I'd have thirsted to know exactly who he is. Now I care only if he is in the market for cement. All there was before was spilled on November 12, 1952. But maybe all my energy, all Germany's energy, is stored somewhere, perpetually, like the energy in that stained glass. Maybe it will flow out of there one day. But if it does I hope it will be on a Tuesday or Thursday, because on the other days I am traveling with my concrete salesmen.

At exactly four the next afternoon the bells of St. Anselm's church began ringing, and in the courtyard the procession formed. It was led by the Archbishop of Paderborn, who was preceded by six altar boys in white surplices and red cassocks and followed by six priests. They began their stately way up the porch, into the narthex up the nave to the altar. The day bright, the air crisp, and the courtyard teeming with several thousand people who, from loudspeakers hoisted at a half-dozen locations on the castle and on the storefronts opposite, heard the bells melt into the organ tones that silenced the crowd, transfixing it in the sorrow tones of Bach's
Kom süsser Tod
. They could hear, the chorale ended, the choir, the voices of men, women and boys singing choruses written over two hundred years earlier at Leipzig, as by a composer who knew not only the organic sorrows of the human condition but presaged those of his own parish in East Germany destined to live under protracted human tyranny. Inside, just north of the last pillar before the transept, Blackford Oakes was seated. He listened to the choir and the organ, and closed his eyes. It was, in his memory, ten years ago. To the left, diagonally across the transept filled now by celebrities, some seated with heads slightly bowed, some kneeling, he saw his office door wide open. Through it he saw the papers, the files, the apparent chaos—though, in fact, everything had been in its place—because from that clerical and architectural pandemonium the chapel had been reborn, in beauty and rectitude. Just ahead of him on the right the chromoscope had squatted. The chromoscope. Blackford shut his eyes tighter, as he had done at all the other anniversary masses—this was the fourth, out of ten, he had been able to attend. But the tighter he shut them the more livid the stigmata of death. The knife-switch to the right under the explosive colors of the south rose. Blackford, his eyes still shut, allowed the vision to track back down to the narthex, past the grubby aisle where the big box covered by tarpaulin had lain, to the corner where Conditti kept his case of lethal wine bottles.

The chorale ended, the voices stopping in perfect, blissful unison. And Blackford opened his eyes on the dazzling perfection of the colored glass that showered its chromatic unity on him, a shaft of color from behind, and in front of him the even light, resplendent beyond the October deadline Meister Gerard had warned of, the entire nave and altar sections frozen in stained-glass beauty as the brilliant silence struck and the bishop, swinging the censer, roused the choir yet again, and, the Dies Irae begun, the monks, seated in the choir stalls beyond the rood screen, so finely chiseled and varnished, responded in the Gregorian mode. The tradition was observed that there would be brief readings from Scripture, but no homily. The old priest who had been ordained in that chapel before Hitler came to power read of the eternal wells of grace for the good of the meek of heart, and all the chapel resonated, an echo chamber for the words of beauty and hope. Blackford wondered, as he had wondered before, how he could last through the ceremony; but, as before, he looked about him with awe, knowing he would never again accomplish anything to match the re-creation, at age twenty-six, of this mausoleum of hope.