Winds of War (122 page)

Outside the Grand Palace the night was black, without stars, and the wind was cold and biting. The NKVD agents, leather collars turned up to their ears, blue flashlights in hand, looked sleepy, chilled, and bored, sorting the guests into their limousines.

“Say, how the devil can he drive so fast in this black out?” the admiral protested, as their car passed through the outer gate and speeded into an inky void. “Can Russians see like cats?” The car stopped in blackness, the escort guided the three Americans to a doorway, they passed inside, and found themselves in the small cold foyer of the Hotel National, where one dim lamp burned at the reception desk. The porter who had opened the door was muffled in a fur coat. The elevator stood open, dark, and abandoned. The admiral bade them good-night and plodded to the staircase.

“Come up for a minute,” Henry said to Leslie Slote.

“No thanks. I’ll grope my way to my apartment. It’s not far.”

Pug insisted, and Slote followed Henry up the gloomy staircase to his squalid little room on an areaway. “I don’t rate like Tudsbury,” he said.

“Tudsbury’s about the best propagandist the Soviet Union’s got,” Slote said, “and I guess they know it.”

Pug unlocked a suitcase, took a narrow dispatch case out, unlocked that, and glanced through papers.

“I hope you understand,” Slote said, “that those locks are meaningless. All the contents of that case have been photographed.”

“Yes,” Victor Henry said absently. He slipped a letter into his pocket. “Would you like a snooze? Please stick around for a while. Something may be doing.”

“Oh?” Out of his new and growing respect for Henry, Slote asked no questions, but stretched out on the hard narrow bed to a twang and squeak of springs. His head still reeled from the champagne that shadowy attendants had kept pouring at the movie. Next thing he knew, knocking woke him. Victor Henry was talking at the door to a man in a black leather coat. “
Horosho, my gotovy
,” he said in his atrocious accent. “
Odnu minutu
.” He closed the door. “Want to wash up or anything, Leslie? I’d like you to come with me.”

“Where to?”

“Back to the Kremlin. I have a letter from Harry Hopkins for the big cheese. I didn’t think I was going to get to hand it over in person, but maybe I am.”

“Good lord, does the ambassador know about this?”

“Yes. Admiral Standley brought him a note about it from the President. I gather he was annoyed, but he knows.”

Slote sat up. “Annoyed! I should think so. Mr. Hopkins has a way of doing these things. This is very outlandish, Captain Henry. Nobody should ever, ever see a head of state without going directly through the ambassador. How have you arranged this?”

“Me? I had nothing to do with it. I’m an errand boy. Hopkins wanted this letter to go to Stalin informally and privately or not at all. In my place you don’t argue with Harry Hopkins. I understand he talked to Oumansky. If it puts you in a false position, I guess I’ll go alone. There’ll be an interpreter.”

Calculating the angles in this astonishing business - mainly the angle of his own professional self-preservation - Slote began combing his hair at a yellowed wall mirror. “I’ll have to file a written report with the ambassador.”

“Sure.”

* * *

In a long, high-ceilinged, bleakly lit room lined with wall maps, Stalin sat at one end of a polished conference table, with many papers piled on a strip of green cloth before him. A stone ashtray at the dictator’s elbow brimmed with cigarette butts, suggesting that he had been steadily at work since the departure of the banquet guests. He now wore a rough khaki uniform which sagged and bulged, and he looked very weary. Pavlov, his usual English interpreter, sat beside him, a thin, pale, dark-haired young man with a clever, anxiously servile expression. There was nobody else in the big room. As the uniformed protocol officer ushered in the two Americans, Stalin rose, shook hands, with a silent gracious gesture waved them to chairs, and then sat down with an inquiring look at Captain Henry.

Henry handed him the letter and a round box wrapped in shiny blue paper. “Mr. Chairman, I’d better not inflict my bad Russian on you any longer,” he said in English, and Stalin carefully opened the White House envelope with a paper knife. Slote translated and Stalin replied in Russian, slightly inclining his head, “As you wish.” He passed to Pavlov the single handwritten pale green sheet, on which THE WHITE HOUSE was printed in an upper corner.

Pug said, as Stalin unwrapped the box, “And that is the special Virginia pipe tobacco Mr. Hopkins told you about that his son likes so much.” Pavlov translated this, and everything the American captain said thereafter, sometimes conveying Henry’s tone as well as a quick exact version of his words. Slote sat silent, nodding from time to time.

Stalin turned the round blue tin in his hands. “Mr. Hopkins is very thoughtful to remember our casual chat about pipe tobacco. Of course, we have plenty of good pipe tobacco in the Soviet Union.” He twisted open the tin with a quick wrench of strong hands and curiously inspected the heavy lead foil seal, before slashing it with a polished thumbnail and pulling a pipe from his pocket. “Now you can tell Mr. Hopkins that I tried his son’s tobacco.” Pug understood Stalin’s Russian in this small talk, but could not follow him after that.

Stalin stuffed the pipe, put a thick wooden match to it, and puffed fragrant blue smoke while Pavlov translated Hopkins’s letter aloud. After a meditative silence, the dictator turned veiled cold eyes on Victor Henry and proceeded to speak, pausing to let Pavlov catch up in English after three or four sentences. “That is a strange letter from Mr. Hopkins. We all know the United States manufactures millions of automobiles per year of many different models and types, including big luxurious, complicated machines such as Cadillacs and so forth. What is the problem with landing craft, then? Landing craft are armored lighters with small simple engines. Surely you can produce as many as you want to. Surely the British have plenty already. I cannot see this as a real obstacle to a second front in Europe now, as Mr. Hopkins states.”

Pug Henry pulled from his dispatch case sketches and production tables of landing craft. “Different types must be designed from scratch and manufactured, Mr. Chairman, to land against a solidly fortified coast. We expect mass production in mid-1942, at the latest. These papers may be of interest.”

Unexpectedly, in mid-translation, Stalin uttered a short harsh laugh and began to talk fast in Russian, straight at Victor Henry. Slote and Pavlov made quick notes, and when the dictator paused, Pavlov took over and spoke with much of Stalin’s hard sarcastic tone. “That is very fine! Mid-1942. Unfortunately, this is October 1941. If Mr. Hitler would only halt operations until mid-1942! But perhaps we cannot count on that. And what will happen meantime? I regard Mr. Harry Hopkins” – Stalin said
Gospodin Garry Gopkins
– “as a friend and a clever man. Doesn’t he know that any operation that the British can mount now - just a reconnaissance in force of a few divisions, if they can do no better - might decide the course of this war? The Germans have only very weak reserves, mere token forces, on the French coast. They are throwing everything into the battle on our front. Any action in the west might make them pause, and draw off just the decisive margin of strength here.”

Stalin doodled in red ink on a gray unlined pad during the interpretation, drawing a wolf.

Victor Henry said, “Mr. Chairman, I am instructed to answer any questions about the landing craft problem.”

Stalin used the back of his hand to shove aside the papers Pug Henry had laid before him. “Landing craft? But it is a question of will, not of landing craft. However, we will study the matter of landing craft. Of course, we have such machines too, for landing on defended coasts. Perhaps we can lend-lease some to the British. In 1915, when war equipment was more primitive than today, Mr. Churchill managed to put a big force ashore in Gallipoli, thousands of miles from England. Possibly he found the experience discouraging. But the Japanese have in recent years put ashore more than a million soldiers in China. Those men surely did not swim across, in such cold waters. So it is obviously a question of will, not of landing craft. I hope Mr. Hopkins will use his great influence to establish a second front now in Europe, because the outcome of the war against the Hitlerites may turn on that. I can say no more.”

The dictator finished the wolf in rapid strokes during the translation, and started another with bared fangs and a hanging tongue. He looked up at Henry with the oddly genial expression common in his photographs, and changed his tone. “Have you enjoyed your stay? Is there anything we can do for you?”

Victor Henry said, “Mr. Chairman, I have been a wartime military observer in Germany and in England. Mr. Hopkins asked me to go to the front here, if an opportunity arose, so as to bring him an eyewitness report.”

At the word “front,” Stalin shook his head. “No, no. We are obliged to guarantee the safety of our guests. That we cannot do, in the present stage of fighting. Mr. Hopkins would not forgive us if some misfortune befell you.”

“Mr. Hopkins has been unsparing of his own health, sir. It is wartime.”

An opaque wild look, almost the look in a gorilla’s eyes, came into Stalin’s gaze. “Well, you should understand that things are bad at the front. The Germans are breaking through again in force. We may soon see the worst hours for Russia since 1812. You will hear all the news tomorrow. That is why a second front now would earn for England the friendship of my people until the end of time.” He went back to work on the wolf.

Pug said soberly, “In view of this news, Mr. Chairman, I admire your cheerfulness of spirit at the banquet tonight.”

Stalin shrugged his broad sagging shoulders. “Wars are not won by gloom, nor by bad hospitality. Well if Mr. Hopkins wants you at the front, he must have good reasons. We will see what we can do. Give him my thanks for the letter and the tobacco. It is not bad tobacco, though I am used to my Russian tobacco. Please tell him my feelings about the second front. Perhaps your trip to our front could bring home the urgency. Mr. Hopkins is a good adviser to your great President, and as you are an emissary from him, I wish you well.”

Leaving the Kremlin and driving through the blackout, the two Americans said not a word. When the car stopped, Pug Henry spoke: “Well, I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I guess these fellows will take you home.”

“No, I’ll get out.” On the sidewalk, Slote touched Pug’s arm as the limousine drove off. “Let’s talk here. I was utterly shocked by this business of going to the front. If Mr. Hopkins knew of the catastrophic situation Stalin just admitted to” - the diplomat’s voice wavered and he cleared his throat - “he would surely withdraw those instructions.”

The night was ending, and though the icy street was still black, Pug could just see Slote’s pale face under his fur hat.

“I don’t agree with you on that. He’s a pretty tough customer, Hopkins.”

Slote persisted, “You won’t really get to the front, you know. They’ve just given some correspondents a tour. They kept them far behind the lines, feeding them caviar, quails, and champagne. Still, the Luftwaffe pulled an air raid on a village and almost nailed them.”

“Right, but that could happen to us here in Moscow, too.”

“But why go, for God’s sake?” Slote broke out in a ragged shrill tone. He lowered his voice. “At best you’ll see one tiny sector for a few hours. It’s foolhardy sightseeing. It’ll create endless trouble at the embassy, as well as for the Russians.”

Victor Henry chain-lit a cigarette. “Listen, if you can watch ten men under fire, you’ll learn a lot about an army’s morale in a few hours. Mr. Hopkins likes to call himself a glorified messenger boy. That’s an exaggeration, but I’m an unglorified one. Doing this job might give me the illusion that I’m earning my salary. Come upstairs for a nightcap. I have some good Scotch.”

“No, thank you. I’m going to write my report, and then try to get an hour’s sleep.”

“Well, cheer up. My own impression was that the big cheese was being affable, but that I won’t get to go.”

“That’s what I hope. No foreign military attaché has yet gone to the front, or near it. Good morning.”

During the talk the sky had turned violet, and Slote could see his way on the dead quiet streets. This was a relief, for he had more than once banged into lamp posts and fallen off curbs in the Moscow blackout. He had also been challenged at pistol-point by patrolmen. One walked toward him now in the gray dawn and gave him a suspicious squint, then passed on without a word.

In his flat Slote brewed coffee on the gas ring, and rapidly typed a long account of the banquet and the meeting with Stalin. When he had finished, he threw back the blackout curtains. The sun was shining. Staggering, bleary, he took a loose-leaf diary from a drawer and wrote briefly in it, ending with these words:

But the official report which I’ve just rattled off describes the meeting with Stalin in sufficient detail; and I’ll keep a copy in my files.

As for the Henrys, father and son, the puzzle is simply enough resolved after all. I saw the answer in the past few hours. They both have an instinct for action, and the presence of mind that goes with it. Byron displayed these traits in moments of physical danger. His father probably would too. But I’ve just seen him act in more sophisticated and subtle situations, requiring quick thinking, hardihood, and tact. It is not easy to keep one’s head in confronting a personage like Stalin, who has an aura like a large lump of radium, powerful, invisible, and poisonous. Victor Henry managed.

On reflection, I can understand why the ladies like such men. The man of action protects, feeds - and presumably fecundates, QED - more vigorously and reliably than the man of thought.

Possibly one can’t change one’s nature. Still one can perhaps learn and grow. Captain Henry suggested that I disregard orders and expose the Minsk documents to Fred Fearing or some newspaperman. Such an act goes entirely against my grain; and entirely for that reason, I intend to do it.