For all at No. 76—Emilia, Nikolai and Clare—Maureen most of all

To my late father, James Loftus

The following text is a facsimile of a decrypted “most secret” Nazi Party cable, dated October 2, 1944, and captured a week later by an Allied special unit at Gestapo headquarters, Strasbourg.

The original teleprinter decrypt exists and is held in the massive vaults of the National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland, U.S.A.

A16/937850302/006.4/02/10/1944

Streng Geheime Reichssache!

to be routed through Reichsmarschall Goering’s liaison to Party Leader Bormann for permission to onsend to Sicherheitsdienst/OKW/appropriate Luftforschungsamt field units

Memo unter vier Augen! (our four eyes only!—translator)

Mein Liebe geheerte Herr Reichsleiter Bormann

Luftforschungsamt has decrypted a series of 142 cables from various Swiss banks to correspondent banks throughout the Reich on behalf of a Colonel Dulles, American intelligence operative in Switzerland.

Dates of cables December 1942 until present. Last cable September 18 1944. LFA analysts believe this Dulles is organizing a banking network for German flight capital overseas in anticipation of the defeat of the Reich.

This criminal defeatism is claimed by Dulles to have the sponsorship of the highest officials of the Reich.

Please advise.

Goering

Reichsmarschall

Reply:

Matter already known this HQ. Appropriate measures taken. Bormann

ACT ONE

With a woman, always make good use of a secret

HONORE DE BALZAC

I

HENDERSON HARBOR, UPSTATE NEW YORK
NOVEMBER 1911

Night and the lake and a distant blurred cry in the silence: John Foster Dulles opened the big cottage front door and caught himself in the simple hall mirror for a moment. He listened, stock-still. There was only quiet from above, from the bedrooms under the long eaves, the quiet of a sleeping house.

Outside, the trees stood guard, the last of their foliage filigreed by moonlight. His shoes scraped on the polished floorboards. At twenty-four, he was practiced at late night entries; he and his brother Allen had often snuck back into the house after a stolen dip in the lake, bollock-naked, dripping and smirking, creeping up the staircase, thieves in the dark, their shoes in their fingers.

Foster listened again, willing a clue from the stillness.

This fall of 1911, Foster’s last year of law school, had been altogether a troubled season, with low leaden clouds and the strong Lake Ontario waves full of storm wind crossing from the Canadian steppe, reaching over the dock’s smooth woodwork for the rough creek-stone stairs above: there was something occult in this November’s unseasonable weather. The rain was relentless and the nights were restless and tropical and close, more June than Thanksgiving eve. Nature seemed out of kilter—even the horses in the Reaveys’ stable up Old Lake Road slept poorly, pawing and kicking at their stalls.

The neighboring farmers reckoned something foul was afoot tonight. So said Sully, the chain-smoking fisherman who rowed John Foster from Duck Island, where he’d spent the day cramming for the fall exams then fishing by dark, toward the Dulleses’ lantern-lit pier, Sully’s cigarette glowing orange as he breathed. The farmers had killed a pair of deformed calves born that night, Sully reported. They’d burnt the remains, in silence, leaning on their pitchforks, thoughtful, the greasy smoke a veil over the moon as Sully and Foster had rowed past the pyre.

There it was again.

At first Foster thought he’d heard the cry of a lynx or one of the nameless wild cats that roamed in packs in the dunes, living off the gulls, but this was different, and keener, closer to home.

Foster slipped back outside and listened to the hush of the shore breeze in the pines. Then came the crackle of breaking brush, the snap of scrub beneath boots moving fast. There were two paths to the open green behind the cottage where they’d played croquet and the women took tea during the long summer afternoons—but only one led from the Old Lake Road. That path produced a flailing figure sprinting down its narrow dirt length, up from the thornbush hollow, as if pursued by the hounds of hell.

Allen clutched his plaid shirt in his hand, his chores shirt, flying like a flag as he ran, bare-chested, his legs pumping as fast as they could, gasps of terror thudding out of him with each breath.

From behind him came a wailing. For a moment Foster thought Allen had been set after by a bear, but the crash of big boots behind Allen belonged not to a bear but to big Mack Reavey, damn near as big as a bear, yelling curses.

Allen broke into the open, sparing a glance backwards only when he reached the relative safety of Foster, a roadblock in the middle of the sloping lawn. “Oh, hell, Foster,” Allen wheezed, his chest moving like a bellows, “I’m done for!” Allen stared at the hulking shape of a very angry Mack, who, secure in his moral and physical superiority to his quarry, slowed to a rolling walk. Behind Mack, a slim white shape floated in the brush, the source, Foster knew with sudden certainty, of the feline cries. He instinctively placed himself between Allen and Mack Reavey, the town’s cooper, who had arms big as Allen’s legs and a fierce grin on him as he came into the moonlight, a grin that looked a lot like murder.

Eleanor had awoken at the first of the cries, blinking herself awake in the attic bedroom beneath the bare rafters. She’d pressed the lenses of her deep spectacles against the windowpane above her headboard, searching the night shapes.

She slipped out from under her comforter and wrapped herself in the gray cardigan stowed at the foot of her bed. She fitted her moccasins, then stepped lightly to the head of the stairs, past her parents’ closed bedroom door, straining to hear more.

She peered out the landing window, through a tendril of fog snaking through the treetops below: she could hear Foster’s dour tenor and the rough, low monosyllables of a voice that sounded like Mack Reavey’s. Caught in a fan of moonlight where the lawn met the pine forest darted a smear of red, white, and blue. Eleanor blinked. Mo Reavey in the woods at midnight? She remembered Mo and the two other girls at the general store that afternoon, their laughing faces crisp as a photograph, a conspiracy of giggles on the front porch, and Mo’s friend Carmel Kelly locking a mocking eye with Eleanor’s own mystified gaze. Eleanor, no slouch at the cruel emotional arithmetic of those girls, smelt scandal.

The three fifteen-year-old girls walked off, still giggling, knowing something Eleanor had no ken of, something powerful and exclusive. Then the girls were gone, heading for Mack’s big whitewashed cooperage, a converted barn where Carmel and the Reavey girls were known to hide in the dusty old loft, wantons reading penny dreadfuls in whispers. Rumor at school had it that you could get a homemade cigarette from Carmel Kelly, fresh from her father’s rolling machine, for a tariff so secret you had to negotiate with Carmel at the fence behind the fish company shed.

They’re Catholics, Eleanor reminded herself, they’re different. She moved down the stairs, the planking squeaking under her weight. The front door opened quietly and she stepped along the flower bed smelling of rain and mulch, toward the row of poplars Grandpa Foster had had planted on the windward side of the cottage. Her moccasins left silvery wet footprints in the grass. Ahead of her, moving downhill, toward the lakeshore, Foster and Mack walked together, their voices low against the shore breeze.

She saw no one else until a branch in the bramble angled down and the smudge of blue and white became Mo Reavey’s peaches-and-cream face, a blue ribbon falling from the tangle of her hair.

She had a snub nose and quick eyes and the terrified look of a daughter with an irate ox for a father and nowhere left to run. She wiped her nose with a flick of her wrist and sniffled, watching the two men in the distance.

“Are you all right?” Eleanor inquired.

Mo Reavey sniffed again. “I’m fine. For now. Gonna get a whupping from my pa.” A curious gloss came into her eyes, triumph registering there. “You’re his sister, ain’tcha?”

“Foster’s my brother, yes,” Eleanor acknowledged. “Here, take my handkerchief.”

Mo gave her nose a poke, once in each nostril, and stared at Eleanor over her fist. “Nah. Not that one, the other one.” She had a catlike smile now and Eleanor realized why Foster was gesturing and talking so carefully to Mack Reavey down by the lakeshore. She turned and saw Allen on the back steps of the cottage, his lank legs splayed open, a geometry of defeat.

“Yes,” was all Eleanor replied. “You have a sweater, Maureen?”

Mo Reavey was rubbing her knee. “Skint it,” she said.

“Take mine,” Eleanor said, and wrapped her cardigan over Mo’s shoulders, thinking, then searching the windows of the cottage for any sign of wakefulness from the others. Only stillness.

Mo Reavey held up three cigarettes. “That’s what I got,” she said.

“You had a bet with Carmel.”

“She said that brother of yours wouldna come see me ifna I asked.”

“Generally depends on what you ask a person,” Eleanor said, still careful, treating Mo Reavey like the skittish cat she so resembled, waiting for her to steady.

“Smarter’n yah brother,” Mo Reavey said. “He’s a fish.” She tugged the sweater tighter around her. “Said I’d show him something he ain’t never seen before and his eyes lit up like the Fourth ’a July. I knew right then Carmel owed me.” She smiled her cunning smile and Eleanor could make out Foster saying “understanding” and Mack backing off, the two of them calmer now, their hands at their sides.

Eleanor examined Mo’s face for some sign the girl could be trusted. “You like smokes?”

“Makes me feel like the Queen ’a England. Rich, like.”

Eleanor motioned Mo closer. “You can have all you want, right off Mr. Moxley’s shelf,” Eleanor whispered. “But you can’t tell your father. He wouldn’t approve of a girl smoking, now, would he?”

Mo flinched at the thought of it.

“He shouldn’t hit you, Mo,” Eleanor stated, nodding in Mack’s direction. “It’s not right.”

The girl shook her head. “No,” she muttered. “No.”

Eleanor had a sudden vision of this girl-child trapped in a life she, Eleanor, could only watch helplessly. “Next time,” Eleanor said, her hand falling gently on Mo’s thin shoulder, “next time you remind him his missus would never let him raise a hand to his children. You remind him of that. Your mother, God rest her, she’d never have let him do that to you.”

Mo nodded, mute.

“Then we understand each other,” Eleanor said. “You keep quiet and there’ll be a box of Camels in the tree behind Sully’s fish packing shed the day after Thanksgiving. And a week from now and the week after that.” Eleanor bent over and looked hard into Mo Reavey’s eyes. “You understand?”

“Yeah.” Next thing, Mo Reavey was walking up the dirt path, her haunches swaying beneath the cheap fabric of her one good dress, the dress she wore for Eleanor’s brother, Eleanor’s cardigan tossed carelessly over her shoulders.

Eleanor turned to find Foster and Allen alone on the back steps. They hadn’t seen her. She carefully circled beyond the reach of the moonlight between the trees, keeping well away from the cottage until she reached the cover of the poplars. Inside, each step up the stairs was a stopped heartbeat, until she reached her cold bed and stared at the roof beams. She didn’t sleep for a good long while. Foster, she was certain, was still having his say and Allen his silences, their voices low beneath the crash of the waves, deal-making.

II

Family legend held that the fine little Dulles sailboat could navigate the fifteen-minute passage to slender Duck Island solo, so many times had Foster and his brother and sister crossed the mile of channel. Foster had done it blindfolded once. On Allen’s dare, he’d landed the sailboat, furled the sail, then tied her down, all with Eleanor’s red bandanna kerchief over his eyes.

Today, Eleanor had taken the windward post, Allen the lee, and Foster the helm. Their maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster, once President Benjamin Harrison’s envoy to the whole world, sat on the bench seat to Foster’s left. A red and black blanket lay across the old man’s knees, its edges curling in the rising evening breeze. This was Thanksgiving with the Dulleses, as ever it was.

“The sun’s racing us,” the old man said. “There’ll be a long tack home, Foster.”

The sun winked behind the clouds as the trees of Duck Island appeared dead ahead, skeletal fingers above the shifting gray water. The slap of the water against the wooden hull increased in tempo as the sailboat reached new air midway. Eleanor looked back at Foster, who stood stone-faced, exchanging nautical small talk with his grandfather, the crosswind carrying their voices away from her. Allen sat like a Buddha in the shadow of the sail, out of earshot, staring into the horizon, lolling with the motion of the boat. Eleanor nipped back, along the gunwale, a nearsighted gamine, a foreshortened double of brother Foster, with masculine hands and spectacle lenses so thick they could pass for quartz.

She crept into the cockpit and Grandpa looked up at her with his slow eyes. “You’re quicksilver, Ellie, part of the boat, you are.”

Eleanor smiled back. “Love it, Grandpa, in my blood. Foster, I need to talk to you.”

Foster turned the tiller over to Grandpa and motioned Ellie into the claustrophobic cabin.

Eleanor hesitated. “This is harder than I thought.” She swallowed. “I saw the girl. Last night. I talked with her.”

Foster’s face clouded. “Yes,” he said. He looked at her carefully, his face unreadable. His was the kind of face older men find reassuring across a boardroom table, one poised with a well-turned answer—and an appreciation of the timing required of a young man bent on bigger things. He turned and looked out the hatchway, back at the mainland, at the cottage and the trees behind. “What did she want?”

“What did her father want?”

Foster’s eyes widened fractionally. “Entering rather into the spirit of things, aren’t you, Ellie?”

Her face didn’t change. “Cigarettes.”

Foster blinked, once. “And who’s paying her off in cigarettes?”

“Allie is. He’s going to find that out in about ten minutes.”

Foster’s lower lip tucked up under his front teeth, something he did only when he’d won a close poker hand and he sensed another good fall of the cards. He looked at her, a hint of admiration in his eyes. “Evidently,” was all he said, and stepped back up onto the deck.

Eleanor crept back along the rail to her post. She checked the tension of the line against the flat of her hand and eyed the swell of the sail, and waited for landfall. Ahead, a single birch beckoned.

Eleanor and Allen didn’t speak as they tied down the boat. Foster and their grandfather were already in the dunes, heading for their usual spot on the far beach, the old man with an arm around his grandson’s solid shoulder for balance. Eleanor looked at Allen out of the corner of her eye: he had his soft, meaningless smile in place, the blank charm that was second nature to him. She waited until Foster and Grandpa were well gone, pushed her glasses up her nose, and took Allen’s measure.

At nineteen, five years Foster’s junior and two Eleanor’s senior, Allen was experimenting with a mustache. This Eleanor found amusing, the way he nibbled at it and flexed his lip, wetting the hairs with his tongue like a cat; she wondered if Mo Reavey found the bristly moistness appealing. Allen tied off the sailboat and slapped the beach sand from his hands.

“Want to see if the old lighthouse is still standing?”

“Sure, I guess,” Allen said, and began to walk ahead of her.

“You seem tired,” Eleanor offered.

Allen said nothing, his boots scratching over the rocks as they walked along the low outcrop of shale set among the dunes.

“Maybe those Canada geese’ll be there, for a visit. The couple, the two we used to call Saul and David.”

“The disciples,” Allen said, not looking back.

They walked around the point. There, a derelict lighthouse, its aged glasswork cracked, kept guard over a flat strip of marl beach, littered with stones, glowing in the feeble sun.

“Why d’you think Grandpa never talks to us out here?” Allen asked. “I mean, we fish together, but it’s like we don’t exist when Foster’s around.”

They had run out of island; there was nothing ahead of them now but the lake. The entire horizon was water, a seam of blue-black where it met the sky. Eleanor smoothed her skirt, then tucked her crinkly hair behind her ear and sat down against a flat-faced boulder.

“It’s simple,” Allen said, answering his own question as he joined her. “Grandpa talks secrets only to Foster.”

Eleanor examined Allen’s face for some clue to the emotions she sensed within him. At times like this she reckoned he had no edges; he was a kind of mirage, with his old man’s hollow laugh and mocking eyes.

“You have your secrets, Allen,” she said.

He sat very still.

“Allen, I saw last night.” She said it quietly. “I saw Mack and Mo Reavey come and go and I saw Foster talk to Mack. I saw it all.”

Allen mightn’t have heard.

“We’re on the island,” she said. “I have to tell you everything, that’s the rule.”

The island was haven to a pair of deer and a clutch of hardy mallards. No one knew how the deer had managed to swim the mile-wide channel from shore, so by default the island was named for the ducks.

It was also home to a particular tree, the only birch in the island’s stand of jack pine, the source of a secret sibling compact. A decade ago this weekend, Foster, barely fourteen, had held an oath swearing beneath the birch. He had extracted a dire covenant from his two closest siblings, Allen, a wide-eyed nine, and Eleanor, half blind in those days before her spectacles, tomboy-bony and fast, all of seven.

“This is our witness tree,” Foster had said in his mock parson’s voice—neither of his listeners dared giggle—“and anyone who stands beneath its leaves has to tell the truth to any question. So help me God.” They had then pricked a spot of blood from one another’s forefingers with the sewing needle Eleanor had stolen from their nanny’s dresser drawer, and mingled the drops. “So help me God,” Eleanor had said, picturing the Higher Power as another Mr. Moxley, the taciturn, bearded counterman at the general store, and secretly rather thrilled at the daring idea of irritating him. Allen had blinked twice, swallowed, then muttered his assent in his trebly voice. “I can’t hear you,” Foster had announced grandly, and Allen had to repeat his oath while Eleanor sucked her trickling fingertip.

Allen turned toward her and opened his mouth, but no sound came, only a sigh. He wouldn’t move, she knew that. He’d sit there, silent as fungus, his head cocked toward the sound of the waves.

“She told me she did it for three cigarettes, on a dare, sounds like to me,” Eleanor said. “I think her father caught you at whatever you were doing and Foster saved your bacon.”

Allen seemed to shrink into himself.

“It was a schoolgirl bet, that’s all, to see if you’d take the bait, Allen. You made a fool of yourself for three cigarettes.”

“Are you going to tell Father?” he said, still feigning interest in the gentle waves slapping against the shore.

“I haven’t told anyone,” she said, sharper now. “I don’t want Foster’s good name tarred with the brush that’s tarred you.”

“Decent of you.”

“I happen to think the family name is worth something,” Eleanor said. “You might think about that too, next time.”

“What next time?” He rolled his eyes, then shifted his gaze to the low, dark clouds on the horizon.

Eleanor blinked behind her glasses. A stray strand of wiry hair, prized loose by the breeze, fell across her face. “Oh, Allen, surely you know yourself better than that. You and I both know there’ll be a next time.”

Allen abruptly stood up and walked down to the water’s edge. He picked up a stone and skipped it off the wave tops.

“I didn’t want to know any of this,” Eleanor continued. “If there’d been no Mo Reavey, maybe right now you’d be sitting over there with Foster and Grandpa, talking perch and politics.” Allen winnowed a handful of stones, chose one, sent it flying. “I know what you want more than anything.”

That caught him. He turned. “What’s that?”

But she was on the move, already making for the trees, her back to the beach and the plinking rocks, wet in his hand. “To be taken seriously,” she called over her shoulder.

“And I know what you want,” Allen said. A wet stone lolled in his palm.

She continued toward the lone birch.

His voice reached her, hoarse and loud. “You want to be pretty. You want boys to look at you the way they look at Mo. You want to have a boy sneak you into the woods and rustle your skirts.” He spun a darting skimmer twenty yards along the wave tops, admiring the result for a lingering moment. Then he came toward her, the soft smile long gone. “You hear me?”

Eleanor held one hand to her chest, a reflex; she found herself clenching her dress tightly in her fist. The first tear trickled free and pooled where her spectacles rested on her cheek.

“You aren’t pretty,” he said very clearly, so she wouldn’t miss a syllable. “And the boys would sooner watch paint dry as look at you. And that will never change.”

She made herself take a step, then another. Move. She left him there. The island melted in her welling eyes, salt on the tip of her tongue, while her brother skipped stones, calm again, beyond penance.

Allen mustn’t see her cry. That was perdition.

Eleanor sleepwalked along the spine of the short ridge, then down into the dunes that faced Canada, the sand leaking into her shoes, her skirts flying up to her waist in the wind. She didn’t care. For some minutes she made herself observe the passing weather, looking for a rhythm to distract herself. Do mothers feel this way about their wayward children? she wondered. She tried counting waves, like sheep; it didn’t work. The dune grass scratched the backs of her calves, like uncut fingernails. She couldn’t help herself: she felt perversely protective of Allen, as if, madly enough, he were incapable of protecting himself. This admission only made her angrier. Allen had little chance of escape—he was trapped in Foster’s wake, a dinghy behind a schooner. So what? she chided herself. His fate, not hers.

She faced no such dilemma, precisely because the world had little to offer her. Elder sister Margaret was the soft, companionable satellite of her mother; younger sister Nataline a spark plug and her father’s favorite, but so far in age from Eleanor they led separate lives. No: to Foster and Allen, the ones who counted, Eleanor was the Little Sister, struck from the family equation when the political futures were assayed. Already her family didn’t give her fair weight. That realization was part of her fiber—Allen’s insults only spurred her on.

She threw her shoulders back, adjusted her spectacles, and set off back over the sands.

She found Allen perched against his favorite boulder. She stood over him, her shadow falling across him, a cape of charcoal gray, though he gave no notice. Eleanor had her hands locked behind her back, her battle posture. Her eyes were dry as stones. Pity I have no mirror to see myself now.

“I have something to say,” she announced—their code phrase before testifying beneath the witnessing birch limbs.

“You don’t know everything,” Eleanor began. They faced each other, each standing within the radius of the birch tree, Eleanor deadpan and defiant, Allen shrugging his shoulders, a young man awkward, not at home in his body.

“The fact is,” Eleanor went on, her voice low and slow, “I saw much more than Foster did. I talked to Mo Reavey last night.”

She let that one sink in. Allen’s eyes flickered for a delicious moment and she knew she had him now.

“That’s right,” Eleanor said. “While Foster was stopping Mack from tearing you limb from limb, I was having a chat with Mo in the bushes. I guess,” she said, ever more slowly, “you’d like to know what we said?”

Allen grunted. He shifted from foot to foot, a man with tight shoes.

“Allen, don’t you ever insult me like you just did,” Eleanor said. “One word, just one, and Father knows everything. I don’t care if Foster gave Mack Reavey a thousand dollars to shut him—”

“Ten dollars,” Allen interrupted, but Eleanor wasn’t to be headed.

“—to shut him up, Father will know exactly what you’ve done on your Thanksgiving break, Mr. Man-about-Princeton. She’s only fifteen.” Eleanor paused before adding quietly, “And her father beats her.”

Allen looked at his sister blankly.

“So do you know what I did, Allen? I made sure Mo Reavey doesn’t go behind her father’s back and ruin us all to spite you. You’re going to have to buy Mo Reavey a box of cigarettes every week to keep her quiet. I’m to deliver them. You owe me a quarter already.” She waited for his reaction, then stuck her hand out for the quarter. There was none. “Any possibility of a child?”

Allen stood there, a steer awaiting the hammer blow between the eyes. He shook his head.

The two of them sat knee to knee on adjoining rocks, Foster and his grandfather-mentor, the low sun in their eyes as they spoke, Foster questioning, Grandpa Foster replying in his cracked Indiana drawl.

“Tough lesson to learn, but in that world, bloodlines, Foster, that’s the ticket.” The old man had a forbidden cigar going, and he squinted down its length through the smoke, pulling at his ancient muttonchops. “Fact is, Foster, you’re a scholarship boy from Watertown, New York.” He drew the blanket round his bony legs. “There’s Harvard and Yale boys’d buy and sell you before breakfast on their daddy’s walking-around money. No, Princeton’s bit of paper and your George Washington law degree mean damn in their eyes. Saw it myself. Without a Harvard law degree, without being shot at pretty good by Johnny Reb, and without a few good friends in town, I’d still be conveying farm mortgages in Indianapolis, Foster. You need all three and you got a hand full of deuces when the social bets are down.” He blew out a satisfying stream of smoke. “The State Department’s full of drones in smart suits, all running after the one or two men who really know which way is up. You want to be the one smart lawyer in a room full of diplomats. You want all the heads around the table looking to you for legal advice. Point?”

Foster nodded. “Point, Grandpa.”

“So you’ll have to crack Wall Street from the inside,” the crafty old patriarch said, lifting his lined face toward the lake breeze. “I can ask around, see who’ll take you on, see what you’re made of. You’ll start at the bottom, but after a few deals and a lot of midnight oil you’ll run rings around the pretty faces at State, Harvard law degree or not. The heart of the matter is business, Foster. Never forget that. Diplomacy is just the way in. But it’s what comes after the diplomats are done that matters: the deal. Putting people in a small goddamn room—excuse my French—get ’em talking, keep ’em talking. Knocking heads, if you have to. Make the deal stick and you’ll never have to litigate. How I made my fortune.”

The old man examined the smoke as it drifted away. “Here’s a prophecy: in ten years Wall Street ought to own Europe the way she owns America now. That means policy, finance, diplomacy, the whole shebang. And the rest of the world won’t be far behind. How old are you, Foster?”

“Twenty-five next February.” At twenty-four, his hair was already starting to thin, Foster reminded himself.

The old man nodded. “On February twenty-fifth, am I right?”

“Good memory, Grandpa.”

“Can’t forget my namesake’s birthday, now, can I?” He licked his lips, dry from the smoke. “Twenty-four? My word, last time I looked up, you were barely in long pants. You know, when I was about your age, Lincoln wasn’t even president. Saw him a couple of times, once in the hottest courtroom I’ve ever been in.” He blinked at the memory. “Summer sittings, up in Danville, just across the Illinois state line. That was a big thing, just to ride the train there in those days. And hot? Hot as Hades. Judge gave Lincoln permission to make his submissions in his shirt sleeves. He won, too. Good lawyer. Good voice—important, that.”

“You’ve been keeping a good Mr. Lincoln story under your hat, Grandpa.”

“Have I? Sorry, Foster. Forget who I’ve told what. Comes of too long in harness, I expect. Lincoln. Raised some money for his Senate run once, from a mill owner up Lafayette way. Twenty bucks, a lot of money in those days. Eighteen fifty-eight. My.” He had a pull from his bourbon flask and offered Foster one too. “Been thinking a lot about your future, Foster, up there in my writing room at the house. Written all the books on diplomacy this world needs. Now I conspire. All by myself.” Foster laughed and his grandfather waited him out. “Well, I’ve been thinking about those railroads.”

“Railroads?” Foster asked.

“Before the railroads there was precious little you’d recognize as business. Banks were small, not the huge affairs of today—the banks came and went like snow some years. Contract and criminal law was about it for lawyers—none of this corporate or international practice like now. No railways, no big banks, no steel. And these immense companies, U.S. Steel, Morgan’s banks, they’re not going to stop just because Teddy Roosevelt decided to kick ’em around with the Sherman Act.”

“Supreme Court’s just busted up Standard Oil,” Foster replied. “Word is American Tobacco’ll be next. I’d say the president’s got the whip hand.”

“That what folks are saying down there on Wall Street? Not on your life. Foster, what’s a man do when he can’t make a go of it in his own backyard?”

“He moves on,” Foster replied.

The waves were crashing louder now, as the afternoon breezes freshened even more.

Grandpa eyed the shoreline, nodding. “That’s right. You watch what these trusts do now.” He licked his dry old lips and stopped to think. “Rockefeller, Carnegie, Du Pont, the meatpackers, the coal and electric men, the oilmen Texas way: those boys didn’t get where they are sitting on their hands. They can taste the money just waiting overseas. Russia. Germany. Everywhere the British aren’t, and a few places they are. You watch where the smart money goes. Germany, Foster, Germany. Steel and coal and the Ruhr. Chemicals—which means they’ll need oil, and oil we’ve got. There’s your future.”

“You’ve rarely steered me wrong, Grandpa.”

“I did have something of a career once, you know, Foster, traveled the world for this country.”

Foster laughed again and his grandfather smiled. They were closer than father and son, the two of them, with a shorthand between them fast as a telegraph.

“Think like a lawyer first but like a businessman second. And keep your eye on the world, not just the next deal down the street. That’s the future, Foster. The future.” He nodded to himself again, suddenly spent.

His grandson took quick measure of the old man, his eyelids shut, pouched, and almost transparent with age. Foster reckoned Grandpa hadn’t much longer. Be some funeral, too: between his law practice and his decades as an ambassador here, there, and everywhere, Grandpa Foster knew most of the influential men on the planet. Foster tugged the blanket around the old man’s knees; he stirred himself with a fragile smile. “Thank you, Foster. They tell me you were dancing with young Helen Taft at the Russian ambassador’s ball last month. Cut quite a figure, the two of you, I heard tell.”

“A lovely young woman, Grandpa. But not for me.”

Grandpa Foster laughed and shook his head. “You’re a brave man. Not every young lawyer would walk away from the daughter of a future chief justice of the Supreme Court, my boy.”

“Thought of that too, Grandpa. Got plans of my own.”

The old man shivered despite the blanket. It was time to go. “I know you do, Foster, I know you do. You need me, just ask. I’ll get something off to Bill Cromwell, fix things up, keep my conspiracy on the boil. Hello, there’s my granddaughter. Ellie!” He waved at Eleanor, his rheumy eyes squinting to hold her in focus. “The old lighthouse still standing?”

“Sure is, Grandpa,” Eleanor replied. “A little more glass gone, but otherwise none the worse for wear.”

“Well, don’t you stand tall, Ellie,” her grandfather observed. “You look like the cat who ate the canary.”

Eleanor smiled at Foster over the top of her grandfather’s head and winked. “Feathers and all, Grandpa,” she said lightly. “Feathers and all. Allie’s just coming, Foster. He said he had some thinking to do.”

A Lake Ontario November dusk, a rustle of bats zigzagging across a streak of turquoise sunset, and the silence of Chekhov’s minute. Twenty minutes past seven and the dull silence of a family replete with holiday fare, struck dumb while the maid cleared under Mrs. Dulles’s not so indulgent gaze; she had a diplomat’s daughter’s sense of protocol.

When they were younger, Eleanor remembered, these moments in her best blouse seemed endless, glacial, but she learnt early on not to fidget. This discipline she now took for granted, like memorizing Scripture and singing in her toneless voice the hymns her father instilled in his children, necessary as air, even in the elastic Dulles version of Presbyterianism. Eleanor had witnessed the occasional battles that took place in her father’s work: a minor virtuoso of the just divorce and the intricacies of Presbyterian politicking, Reverend Dulles preferred the manse library and the kirk session’s back rooms to the diplomatic compromises and passing allegiances that so enthralled his gifted elder son and his distinguished father-in-law.

Foster, then a first-year law student, had accompanied Reverend Dulles, of counsel in the matter of Morrison versus Morrison. Eleanor, freshly sighted with her new spectacles, had watched through the session hall’s wrought iron keyhole. Grown men glowered at one another over the fate of Bessie Morrison, mother of two, indigent, and seeking to rid herself of a miserable marriage to the town drunk. Reverend Dulles had won her case for Bessie, against odds, through the sheer spirit of his arguments, as best twelve-year-old Eleanor could glean.

She was not a spiritual girl. She adored her mother with a passion that her father’s distant perfection never roused in her. They all did; she was a puckish woman with her father’s flair, a far cry from the orthodox cleric’s retiring spouse. The Reverend was more kindly uncle than father, welcoming when he remembered to be available, but all too often in Albany or New York on church business or putting out some theological fire at the seminary. He’d never mastered intimacy. There had been arguments, of course, but Eleanor supposed her father’s passions must have matched his love for his wife—there were five children, after all.

Nonetheless, in the backdraft of his wife’s speed and worldly charm, the Reverend seemed always a step behind, a man with dust on his shoulders, not a failure but not quite a success, even in his own eyes. Eleanor was alone in this appraisal: her two sisters, content with their lot, never much entered into discussions that strayed beyond the bounds of family.

The Reverend’s destiny in this company, he and his middle daughter well knew, was a seat below the salt.

Eleanor watched her father now, peering benignly over his glasses at Foster and Grandpa, all of them waiting for the plates to depart before they renewed their debate over that Princetonian hero of the Democratic Party, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, ex-president of Foster and Allen’s college and now governor of New Jersey, was sharing his own Thanksgiving table in Washington with Eleanor’s maternal uncle, the smooth and mobile Bertie Lansing.

“Uncle Bertie is likely to be Governor Wilson’s secretary of state,” Foster said with his usual dry certainty, seasoning his words in silence before he spoke.

His mother smiled evenly at her elder son’s aplomb. “Foster, you’d think you had your finger on Washington’s erratic pulse,” she said affectionately. Grandma Foster, a fox-faced, peppery woman in a fine blue dress, glowed at her daughter.

“It’s all over campus,” Allen offered, then laughed his hollow laugh. “The boys all think Uncle Bertie’s a shoo-in, except Frenchy Kellogg, and he’s never right about anything except slow horses and fast women. Or so they say.” He laughed again. No one joined him.

Grandpa shrugged, the black shoulders of his dinner jacket rising. “These things are balancing acts, Foster, careful balancing acts,” he said, gently ignoring Allen’s intelligence. “Your Uncle Bertie has solid connections, but what’s really important is that the president has complete faith in his instincts. Bertie’d be the first to admit he and Wilson don’t agree on everything—the Balkan mess for starters.”

Allen couldn’t keep still, Eleanor saw. He had the jitters as he listened, looking for his opening. Foster, as usual, beat him to the draw.

“Grandpa, to my mind Wilson’s right. How do you stop a three-way war? Post your own men in a crossfire? The Hapsburg curse, the Balkans. Then there’s oil.”

Grandpa proffered a diplomat’s well-gauged nod. “Then there’s oil,” he repeated, ruminating on the afternoon’s theme. “The Ottomans are sleeping on their oil and the lumbering Russians drowning in theirs. An interesting situation.” He coughed, and Eleanor knew his habits well enough to know old John Watson Foster had tired, his belly full of Kraków ham and the good local potatoes. “Allen, my boy,” he lobbed across the table, “what’s to be had at Princeton these days for a young divinity student in the making?”

Allen was surprised to be addressed, and Allen surprised was a moving target. “I’ve been talking to some of the fellows,” he said, “whose fathers did missionary work, and I, ah, think that I’d like to see something of the world.”

That you haven’t already seen in the smokers you’ve been to in Greenwich Village, Eleanor thought.

“Planning a broadening voyage, then, before divinity school?” Allen’s father said, the first time he’d raised his voice since the plates had been taken away. The Reverend had spies at Princeton, and the reports on Allen hardly inspired confidence. Eleanor had seen a letter from one of the spies on her father’s desk. The exposed top page featured the first of a half dozen potted biographies of Allen’s companions, beginning with Francis “Frenchy” Kellogg, of the New Orleans Kelloggs, cardsharp, imbiber of strong drink, and a profligate young man given, so the author noted, to “challenging young Mr. Dulles, a scholarship man, to contests involving cigarettes and foreign liquors and oversleeping lectures.” Mr. Kellogg was independently wealthy and Mr. Dulles appeared to be cultivating him for all the wrong reasons. “Allen does fancy a millionaire’s company,” the report concluded.

“I thought China,” Allen was saying. “They know us there.”

“What they know is your grandfather,” the Reverend replied crisply. “What they will come to know is you, Allen.”

“I mean to have a look on my own terms,” Allen muttered, eyes down.

Grandpa Foster and his bullish namesake had fallen silent.

“And then?”

“And then I shall see,” Allen replied stubbornly. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“You haven’t decided for divinity, dear?” his mother asked. If her question was an attempt to defuse things, it failed miserably.

“I haven’t decided for anything,” Allen said, affecting his most disarming smile, the one that reminded Eleanor of a department store floorwalker she’d seen in Rochester once. He’d tried to edge her toward the change rooms; she’d fled. He never stopped smiling the whole time.

“When do you plan to decide?” the Reverend pressed on.

“When I’m ready, Father,” Allen said, his voice a tone lower.

His father brought his hands together on the waxed tabletop, the gesture of a man used to speaking from behind a pulpit. “You have, I believe, given your word you would pursue the life of the cloth,” the Reverend said carefully.

Father doesn’t know the answer, Eleanor thought. That’s why he’s being so polite. Or he does. She spared a glance for her grandfather, but he was miles away, his gaze set on the crackling fire.

Allen didn’t answer for a long moment. “I have decided against that,” he said, brightening, as if he’d never had the idea in the first place. “I’m examining my options.”

The Reverend blinked once, then again, what passed for pique in the man. “You gave your word, Allen. You declared for divinity school and—”

“Father, let him finish,” Mrs. Dulles intervened.

“He already has, I think, Mother,” Foster said.

“Yes,” Allen said, “I have. Excuse me.” He stood, leaving the dining room in an awkward silence. The screen door slammed and Allen’s footfalls slammed over the porch floorboards.

“What good’s his word?” the Reverend asked dejectedly. “He has never learnt duty.”

“Let him be,” consoled Grandpa. “He’s only a freshman yet, and duty can be a damned empty thing, you know.”

They reflected on this while dessert arrived, Grandma Foster’s trademark pumpkin pie. But the white anger on the Reverend’s cheeks did not fade until well after dinner, when the traditional Thanksgiving fireworks Foster always set off filled the night sky with sizzling arcs and blossoms of hot light. Allen made a point of staying near Grandpa.

While the rockets exploded overhead, Eleanor slipped away to the small yard behind Sully’s shack of a house, to the tree that shaded his fish packing shed. She shinnied up, a packet of five cigarettes in her teeth, ready to be stuck in the elm’s cleft. There, to her astonishment, she found her cardigan, neatly folded. In the cardigan pocket there was a handwritten note in Mo Reavey’s copybook letters.

Dear Miss Dulls

I didden want to cause troubl for yr brother but hes a right fish. Here is yr sweter. Thanks. I talkt to my pa and things are better now.

Maureen Frances Reavey

At breakfast next morning, Allen was nowhere to be seen. Foster, rowing out with his law books for a last day’s cramming on Duck Island, finally spotted him on the mainland, walking the pitched dunes to the east of the harbor, head down, a prodigal alone with his secrets, his a slow progress in the sand.

III

BRYN MAWR, PENNSYLVANIA
OCTOBER 1914

The rain pecked at the window overlooking the perfectly clipped lawn, a misty rain that made Eleanor daydream the France of her childhood visits: fertile, lush hills, a yeasty medieval tang about the courtyard from freshly tilled monastery fields. She pictured a knot garden with stone benches that made one want poetry read aloud by a curly-haired, black-eyed troubadour named Jacques or Jean-Michel.

The crisp Professor Crandall, known—not within earshot—as the Tsarina, was reciting Shakespeare, an improving feature of her lectures, saved for Fridays. Eleanor had been at Bryn Mawr but six weeks of her first fall term and her head was spinning. Little of Watertown had prepared her for the sheer headlong flight into new books, new voices, new lives to watch and be part of, new intelligence from womanhood all over America.

Eleanor felt a nudge from her left. She glanced sidelong, to be greeted by the wide debutante grin of Thelma Keating, a product of careful Main Line breeding and unfailingly confident. Thelma rolled her eyes and mouthed Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou? just as the division bell rang three-twenty, marking the end of English 101A for that Friday. The professor scowled fiercely over her pince-nez as the brave ones shut books and notebooks in the middle of her speech. Eleanor kept hers open: she was in the front row.

“Ladies, Monday, Act Four!” Professor Crandall announced. A sudden silence descended as the intimidating Tsarina shut her own text and took in her charges with a beady eye. “And the essay on courtly love is due Wednesday. No excuses!” Crandall’s voice disappeared into the unstoppable hubbub of twenty spirited young women headed for the door, for the weekend’s prospects—not least misleading the local boys or an illicit cigarette or draft of wine in a tin cup by candlelight after the closely chaperoned Haverford freshmen departed.

That October, America watched, simultaneously horrified and smug, as Europe fought a pitched war from Belgium to Switzerland to the immense reaches of White Russia, doomed to deadlock in the mud. Even quiet days among the Gothic cloisters and shadowed archways of Bryn Mawr felt the knife’s edge of life and death half a world away. One of the German girls had gone home and three of the French, including Yvette Herriot-Duclos, a sweet girl whom everyone liked, from Eleanor’s own hall in the Rockefeller dorm. The sole Russian on campus, a sugar tycoon’s dazzling ice-blonde daughter, had lost her only brother somewhere near a killing ground called Tannenberg, where entire divisions of the Tsar’s vast imperial army had disappeared in an afternoon. She vanished herself, the same day the indecipherable telegram arrived, when a somber mustachioed chauffeur came for her and her many trunks. The dean was annoyed, the rumor went, because the Siberian had taken a crate full of library books with her. Eleanor didn’t believe it: the Russian girl was notorious for never doing a lick of serious work. Perhaps, knowing voices said, she’d simply taken up with that lover of hers in New York, the famous actor—there were less sane reactions to the war.

On the other hand, Eleanor did believe one of the seniors, a forthright Southern belle whose father was thought to have made his fortune financing dark business deals involving battleships and shells and Mexican banks. This war wasn’t the two-week cakewalk the smart-aleck newspaper columnists were fighting. No, she said firmly, if someone was making money, this was going to be one long-drawn-out war. And thank God we live in America, she’d drawled in the college coffee shop over “muddle,” the home-brewed treacly-sweet cocoa everyone drank by the gallon. Foster had agreed when Eleanor shared this assessment in her weekly letter—and Foster’s opinion was Eleanor’s gospel.

Eleanor cursed her family’s upstate New York frugality as she buttoned her coat. She had neither pocket money for the vaudeville house nor train fare home for the weekend. She would work. Already the cabs were queuing for the rich ones to catch the afternoon train to Penn Station, where they would be met by impossibly interesting people, Eleanor was sure. Surrounded by ebullient young women of all stripes, she lived her days frozen in a penumbra of reserve. Some nights, almost paralyzed with self-consciousness, she slept on the floor of her quadruple freshman room, wrapped in her mother’s steamer rug, the only way she could find sleep. In the end, the dam was finally breached by a small piece of paper.

The stone stairwells rang with voices as she followed the tide of undergraduates out into the gusting rain; it was falling faster now, turning the gray stonework black. As they left the building, Thelma trotted behind her, her piping voice high and clear. “The thing, Ellie, about the Slug”—Thelma’s pejorative for her unfortunate roommate—“is that she doesn’t bathe. She smells. I can’t abide it. But the Raven”—the incorruptible director of room assignments—“can’t abide me. It’s a standoff. You’re the best listener in the whole dorm, Ellie. Whatever shall I do?”

As they walked at a good clip across the quadrangle in the slanting rain, Thelma, whose father owned a power company, warmed to her next theme—Eleanor’s devotion to her studies, a failing, Thelma felt certain, she herself could remedy if only Eleanor would visit the Keatings some weekend. “You’ve got to get out of that library basement, Ellie, you’re going to turn into a troll,” and so on until they reached the dorm entrance, where, in Eleanor’s usually vacant mail cubbyhole, stood a green paper, square, folded in half. The bored hall clerk handed it over, returning to her crossword.

Grace Dunlop, beauty, redhead, and heretic, was demanding a rendezvous in that same library basement this evening. “Dear El,” the note read in purple ink, “meet me near the poetry stacks, close to seven. V important. Swimming (penance). GD.” Grace had underlined “important” several times. This was puzzling. They had shared a couple of awkward walks after psychology class and Eleanor had helped Grace with a paper on Chaucer, but, aside from a high tea interrupted when Grace was called away on family business the week before, their contacts had been entirely in Grace’s hands. Eleanor was at once her social and intellectual inferior, and not even in the same firmament as the beautiful Grace in the way of popularity. Not since Eleanor at age ten had declaimed to a bemused constellation of diplomatic worthies that “Theodore Roosevelt has very big teeth”—an offense for which Grandma Foster barely forgave her, even after Eleanor’s summary banishment without dessert—had she said or done anything remotely scandalous. But Grace Dunlop? She radiated scandal from every hair of her impossibly auburn head.

At dinner Eleanor struggled not to think of Grace’s enviable shape in the swimming pool, until Thelma’s incessant chatter demolished that vision. Eleanor battled her way dutifully through the sharp rain to the grand main library, which glowed magically from within, rectangles of yellow light in the pitch dark.

She settled among the basement poetry stacks at six-fifteen and set herself five hundred words on Héloïse and Abelard. But the clock and her nerves occupied her more than poetry, and her handwriting, never good, scrabbled all over the page. Grace will never come, she thought. Grace will never come.

Sitting alone, she had no idea what was expected of her. In the distance came the clip of leather on stone, fast, firm. Eleanor rose and walked to the basement window at the end of the aisle and laid her hand against the cool glass; it left a nimbus of mist. Heat. She shuddered.

“Ma poupée,” Grace announced. “You’re here!”

Eleanor turned to find Grace was smiling, fine teeth showing, pale green eyes set on her, appraising. She dropped a maroon carpetbag at her feet, clothes spilling out, a tennis racquet clattering onto the floor. Her wet coppery hair gleamed brown-black, its waves curled like seaweed against her forehead and neck. Grace managed at once chaos and stillness; the clash of momentum and languidness that left Eleanor feeling well less than average.

“I had a swim to sober up,” Grace said matter-of-factly. “Been drinking all day. I’ve the breath of a boulevardier, darling.” She bent close to Eleanor. “Here, see.” The sharp smell of chlorine mixed with the aroma of gin. Grace beamed at her. “Thanks for being here, darling. Only one I can trust.” She launched her body into a wooden chair in the corridor between the stacks. “You scholarship girls—shining example to us all.” She shook her hair out and a flick of water reached Eleanor’s cheek. “Or should I say, can you talk? You look silent and pained, Ellie.”

“My essay’s not starting well.” Her voice sounded so feeble.

“What’s it about?”

Eleanor cleared her throat. “Héloïse and Abelard.”

“Unhappy, unhappier, unhappiest. There’s a nice short essay. Beginning, middle, end, just like Crandall likes.” She smiled again. “Sorry, that’s not helping. I’ve been away. Our last visit was interrupted, you’ll remember, darling.”

Eleanor nodded.

“My uncle died,” Grace said evenly. “Something in his brain. It was very sudden. I got there before he died. The funeral was this morning.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Grace’s eyes were lit up, feline. “And the walls came tumbling down, darling.” She smiled her brilliant smile again. “He took all afternoon to die, you know. Struggled. Not pleasant.”

Eleanor flinched. “Grace! Why are you telling me this?”

Grace threw her head back and laughed. “Because you’re you, Ellie. Because you watch and you think and because you’ll tell me what you think. Because you’re brave.” She let her laughter die. “People think I’m a joke. No, don’t argue, darling, I’ll think less of you. People think I’m a joke, the mad Washington redhead. I’ll show you how mad I am. D’you know what’s more terrible than hate?”

Eleanor was mystified. “No.”

“It’s the moment you realize not everyone is nice. It’s a dreadfully frightening moment. I was thirteen. Six years ago—when I watched my uncle in his courtroom in New York. I went because I was sent by my aunt—to see my uncle battle these immigrant shirt-factory women. To make an impression, Ellie. I never would have gone on my own. That’s the paradox.”

They sat at an acute angle, in an alcove smelling of must, most of Germany’s poetry since the Middle Ages behind them in rows on the wrought iron shelves, while Grace Dunlop opened her Pandora’s box. She recounted her uncle’s story dispassionately, a stream of reportage made all the more scathing by her cold distance.

“Those women. Yes. There were nearly five hundred of them,” Grace began, “Russian and Polish Jews and Sicilians mostly, women and girls, crowded together on workbenches behind locked doors—the supervisors feared the girls would take breaks or steal materials if they weren’t locked in. It was, in a word, a filthy, badly heated, and almost unventilated sweatshop, darling—lung diseases ten-a-penny. One exit when the doors were locked, a steel ladder to the roof. Picture that if you can, darling. I can’t,” she said simply. “There are abattoirs more humane.”

One of the librarians passed, shushing Grace, who paid no mind. “The women eventually struck the place,” she continued, “in the winter of 1910. The police beat them, right in the street, in full view of the reporters and passersby. In the end,” Grace judged, “it meant nothing.”

Grace rummaged in her carpetbag and pulled out a silver flask. She took a deep pull at the liquor; Eleanor could smell the juniper vapor of gin.

“And changed nothing, nothing at all,” Grace declared. “Because, when the fire started one day six months later, the doors were still locked and the flames tore through the remnants and the clippings. A crematorium.” She halted, weighted by something so great Eleanor thought it might break her. “One hundred and forty-six women died. Most of them couldn’t speak English, so they died crying out in Polish and Yiddish and Italian for a God who would never help them fly when they threw themselves out the windows.”

Eleanor could only whisper the name of the factory. Grace stared at her for a long moment, then blinked once. “Yes, that’s it. So. Time never stands still, does it? The next day, all New York City turns out. Ellie, it was a parade for those women so huge, it took almost four hours for everyone to pass beneath Washington Square Arch. I know,” Grace recalled quietly. “I was there. I was there because my uncle presided at the arraignment of the women strikers the first time. ‘You are striking against God and Nature,’ he’d told them, ‘whose prime law is that man shall earn his bread with the sweat of his brow.’ My uncle was a thoroughgoing bible-thumping bastard. He thought no more of those women than draft animals, harnessed to their benches. I’m ashamed to be his niece, Ellie, judge and all, six feet under. There,” she said, “that’s my story.” She offered Eleanor the flask, and this time Eleanor drank.

“What are you going to do?” Eleanor asked, passing back the flask.

“I’m going to become a socialist, Ellie, of course. I’m going to be a complete traitor to my class, just to haunt the old bastard beyond the grave. My one consolation is that he’s frying quietly in hell.”

“Grace, you oughtn’t to say that.”

Grace lobbed the flask into the open jaws of her carpetbag. “Ellie, the whole reason I’m even in this damn library is to hear you talk sense. You’ve not a trace of side, Ellie. Don’t disappoint me now.”

Eleanor straightened in her hard chair; her fear of disappointing Grace drew her to her full height. “Your uncle was doing his best by the law, Grace. That was his job.”

“There you’re wrong,” Grace snapped, eyes blazing. “Being clever with the law doesn’t mean you can’t be a human being!” She stood as a hissed shhhh came down the aisle. “Oh, dry up!” Grace shouted back. “Come, let’s get out of here.” With a turn of her head she picked up her luggage and set off.

Her essay unfinished, Eleanor followed.

“Finland, Ellie, Finland,” Grace was saying as they crossed the great green expanse behind the Thomas Library, only crickets for company in the dark. “I want to go somewhere cool and white and pure and get this awfulness off my soul.” She was past drunk now, her eyes slow-moving and big. Eleanor carried her carpetbag. Grace sang a line from a parlor song, over and over, a snippet about the clouds coming and the rain.

“Finland’s certainly cool,” was all Eleanor could think to say.

They came to a path that wandered to the trees and there Grace stopped. She waved her flask in front of Eleanor; a last dram of gin sloshed inside. She turned to the lights across the campus fields. “There it is, darling, Avalon, the dreaming spires! All for the daughters of bankers and lawyers, more’s the pity!” She reared back and threw the flask as hard as she could into the darkest of the shadows. She offered her hand. Eleanor took it, a warm, vibrating thing, utterly alive. Grace led her once again, this time to her dormitory, the select Pembroke West, home to the “big beautifuls,” the college royalty, in silence.

Her single room, a coup for a freshman, was a doss-house. There were clothes piled everywhere, books in heaps, luggage thrown open and pillaged for whatever it was Grace needed that moment, then abandoned. An untidy stack of newspapers meant a dogleg past the bed.

Grace barreled through, pausing only to fetch her fur coat off a chair back. Throwing open the window to the autumn night, she scrambled onto the sill and out, expertly collapsing her skirts, a parasol of linen and lace. “Come on, Ellie! There’s a balcony—kick off those nun shoes and get out here!”

A dozen scrawled notes were jammed into the frame of her dressing mirror, reminders of Grace’s windmilling obligations—Anarchists Tues seven or Garment workers Valleyfield 9 23 ask for Sarah and more Eleanor might have read had not Grace called out again.

Eleanor crawled through the window and settled on the stonework next to Grace, a Shiva in mink. A flash briefly lit Grace’s face yellow-white and then the tobacco smoke curled away.

“There you go,” Grace said, offering her hand. “Wrap yourself,” she ordered, extending her coat over Eleanor’s shoulders. Eleanor could feel the warmth of Grace’s hip against hers. “Welcome to Gracie’s roost. A girl can smoke up here without setting the sheets on fire. Here, this one’s Turkish.”

“My God, Grace! How can you—” Eleanor coughed at the harsh smoke.

“Shhh. Can you hear that, darling? The wind? It’s like a last breath.” Grace shivered; Eleanor felt that too. “A thousand people at my uncle’s funeral. No one of them spoke the truth. It was all I could do not to shout ‘bastard’ during the damn elegies.”

Eleanor watched Grace for a long moment, a suspicion forming. “Grace, what is it?”

“What’s what?”

Without thinking, Eleanor took her friend’s hand and pressed it to her own chest. “What you came to the library to tell me.”

Grace left her hand in Eleanor’s grasp but finished her cigarette before answering. She dropped the stub into a cleft in the stonework, then lit another. “Very unladylike. My mother would kill me. You know, Ellie”—her voice changed, soft now and low—“you’re a witch. No one else figured it out.”

Eleanor was thinking of Mo Reavey and the dark house behind the cooperage. “We can just sit here if you like. We don’t have to say anything.”

“I tried to tell my mother once. At our summer place, up near Albany. I wrestled with it all the way there in the back of the car,” she said, staring into the night. “Oh, it was Tiffany’s, that flask. What the hell.”

Eleanor let her pick up the thread in her own good time, thinking, as she waited, of Foster fishing, his patience while the line lay still.

“I couldn’t. You know, I think back on it now and I realize I couldn’t tell because I had no idea what demons I’d let out if I told her. That was cowardly, I think.”

Eleanor let her sit with it.

“What the hell,” Grace said. “What the hell.” She sniffled again and this time she didn’t stop. “He used to take me away at parties, to his library. Close the door and lock it, as if he hadn’t. It was always the same, that locking—behind his back. Then the desk. That desk …” Grace barely moved, her head down. “I didn’t understand, you see, Ellie. I—I didn’t understand at first what was happening.”

Eleanor held her, listening to the broken memories, until nearly two, when Grace, finally exhausted, consented to bed. “Don’t go, darling,” Grace ordered sleepily, once under the coverlet. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Eleanor switched off the electric light and readied herself to sleep on the floor, under Grace’s fur coat, folded her own sensible mackintosh square for a pillow. She lay flat on her back for some minutes, then she saw a white shape over her head, moving slowly, like seaweed. She reached for her glasses and fitted them.

“It’s all right, darling,” Grace said, reaching for Eleanor. “You’ll be more comfortable here. Really you will.”

There came a knock at the door at nine. Eleanor woke first, but Grace knew who it was. “Annamaria!” she called, rolling her eyes. “Come back in an hour, damn it, I’m exhausted!” My maid, she stage-whispered.

“Yes, miss,” said the maid called Annamaria. Her heels clicked down the hallway and were gone.

Only then did Grace allow herself a hoot of laughter. “Well, we’ll be the talk of the campus, won’t we?” she said, gasping for breath. She looked at Eleanor and stopped. Eleanor lay next to her, her eyes shining. “Oh, God, Ellie, what’s wrong?”

“You’re so brave, Grace,” Eleanor said quietly.

Grace gently stroked Eleanor’s hair. “It’s easy to be brave with you, Ellie, really. You listen, darling. You care.”

“What you told me … it’s our secret, Grace. To the grave.”

“To the grave, Ellie.” Grace nodded, curling a length of Eleanor’s brittle hair around her fingertip. “And what’s your secret, Miss Dulles of Watertown?”

Eleanor sat up. “You know, all I do is work. I don’t know how to chase boys or play bridge or even ride a horse, all the things the ‘beautifuls’ do in their sleep.”

“And I’m one of them? One of the ‘beautifuls’?” Grace smiled. “Don’t be fooled. I’m no popularity princess. Here …” Grace leant toward Eleanor and cupped her chin in her hands. Grace’s lips were cool and full and gentle, and the kiss delighted Eleanor. “There,” Grace said, leaning back. “That seals it. We’re best friends. We’ll look after one another, come what may?”

“Yes,” Eleanor replied, her heart pounding. “Can I show you something?” she asked, her shyness returning in a flood.

“Ellie, don’t ask. Act. That’s the best way.”

“I’m so nervous,” she said, staring hard into Grace’s unmoving green eyes. “I just want you to know …” She slipped closer to Grace, remembering the ice-white fingers waving, seaweed in the still dark above her, and then gave herself over.

IV

SWITZERLAND
SEPTEMBER 1917

At this altitude, Eleanor could see her breath as it mingled with her brother Allen’s tobacco smoke in the bright autumn air. She swayed a little in her sensible side-laced boots as the Schilthorn cable car thumped over its iron guide wheels, floating weightlessly up the Swiss mountainside. A fortnight ago she’d left New York, aboard the SS Espagne, bound for Le Havre and the grim adventures awaiting a callow aid worker on the Western Front, impelled not a little by Grace’s groundbreaking solo trip ahead of her.

She’d had a brief walkabout of Paris three days ago. The city’s romantic spark barely flickered, the passersby on the quaysides walked glassy-eyed, distracted, trapped; it was hardly the entrancing gaslit belle époque Paris of her schoolgirl visit of 1909. The Germans were barely an hour away. She’d taken the Paris-Bern wagons-lits express here, a family mission of her own in mind before heading for the end of the world—Verdun. Eleanor sniffled as the cable car pitched in the crosswind.

The seven Bryn Mawr girls she’d traveled with on the Espagne had devised a smart uniform for France: a big flat-brimmed black hat, a white linen shirt under a heavy tweed jacket, a matching tweed skirt, all gathered by a broad Sam Browne belt, and a vast wool scarf, the ends tucked smartly into the Sam Browne. The girls had gathered for a photo in Paris, taken in the forecourt of a fine apartment building, the curtain lace prim in the windows. The group stood, hatted, gloved, and booted, on the pavé, before donated trucks, clearly sobered by the prospect of war up close but, in their smiles, secretly thrilled to be there and alive and doing something. Eleanor had beamed into the lens, her teeth and spectacles glowing in the magnesium photoflash. Then nothing: the whole project hung fire for two weeks, strangled by red tape. Eleanor, restless, caught the overnight train to Bern to haunt Allen.

Allen was smoking the pipe he’d come to affect; he’d contracted gout and for relief he’d propped his foot across the aisle. He’s become an old fogy without even trying, Eleanor observed. They were the cable car’s only passengers, the last ride up of the day. “Wonderful for sunsets, isn’t it,” Allen said. “Mother’d love it. Father’d want to know what it cost Grandpa Foster. And Foster would sue the sun, just to keep the shareholders in line.” His booming laughter rattled the cable car’s sheet metal.

“Aren’t you witty all of a sudden, Allen Dulles?” Eleanor replied. She didn’t laugh, but then Allen rarely amused her. In her purse she carried a letter from Major Foster, intelligence officer, to Allen, on U.S. Army letterhead. “Look Allie over but good, see what’s making him tick, get word back,” he’d said in the telegram from Washington. Foster, unfit for combat because of his vision and fighting a paper war as military intelligence liaison to the Alien Property Custodian’s outfit at Treasury, had his gimlet eye, as ever, set on Allen.

She stood at the prow of the cable car, wrapped in her new woolen coat. “Feels like a ship up here. Or a Zeppelin.” Ahead, on the great peak’s vast windswept belly, stood stretches of stripped pine. Eleanor cricked her neck to peer up at the looming skyline: there were no trees at all, only a frozen granite wave, then ice, then sky.

“An Englishman on the Espagne told us a story,” Eleanor said. “The Zeppelins came over London one night. A splinter bomb blew his windows out. ‘Cracked the Regency oak desk open like an eggshell,’ he told us, ‘but didn’t budge the sherry decanter.’ What’s that, down there, with the metal roof?” Far below, the mountain road was thin as wire; above, the deep whine of the great pulleys thrummed.

“Stechelberg weather post. They measure the snow, and the winds, I think, for avalanches,” Allen replied. “Hateful thing, bombing civilians. The Germans should hang for that.”

“You haven’t said a word about your war work.”

Allen fashioned one of his benign smiles. “Not supposed to.”

“Suddenly a sphinx about politics? That’s a change. Well, then, are you a success yet, Allie? Has Switzerland been good? Got the Kaiser on the run?”

He shrugged. “I’ve made a name for myself, of sorts. At least I’m no longer just Bertie Lansing’s nephew.” He tapped his pipe out and let the dry black shards fall to the metal floor. “Your letter said the aid people gave you a job.”

“I’ve been assigned to the Marne, up near the Belgian frontier. It’s a disaster area. I’m joining my friend Grace from college there.”

“Well, that’s something,” Allen said absently. He was preoccupied, packing his pipe.

Eleanor counted to five: Allen’s pipe smoking struck her as pretentious. “There’s no clean water, Allie, no shovels, no blankets. People are living in tents or barns, in the open. They’re the lucky ones. Disease is a nightmare.”

Allen nodded. “I’m sure you’ll do well, Ellie.” He sighed; he found evangelism tiresome. He wondered what Hannigan was up to for dinner. He felt the need to talk shop with someone who knew what the hell was going on, not his mannish sister, with her flat stares and flatter questions.

“I will,” she said simply. “It’ll be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I’ll do my best.”

Allen looked at her speculatively through the pipe smoke. “There’s this rumor at State. Uncle Bertie’s seen the paperwork. The President’s interested.”

“What rumor? Interested in what?”

“That we’re going to build the best spy network in Europe, from Paris to Petrograd and all points in between.”

“Allie,” Eleanor demanded, “what in God’s name has spying got to do with refugee work?”

Allen dropped his foot carefully to the floor, then walked up to the front of the car and sat against the rail next to her. They could see the cable car’s mountaintop terminus just ahead. “The Russian refugee work is the spy network,” he said quietly. “Informants, agents, in every corner of the continent, right under the noses of the police. Follow the grain sacks and the bandages, that’s what.” Allen drew hard on his pipe. “It’s in the works. I wish I’d thought of it. That kind of thinking makes a man’s career.”

Eleanor took a seat beside her brother. “Foster said you’d find your feet here. He was right. You’ve found a new religion too.” She put her hand on his sleeve. “Allen, are you asking me to work for the State Department?”

Allen stared at her for a moment, then let go a shout of laughter.

“Well, I don’t know how these things are done,” she said plaintively. “Why are you laughing?”

But Allen only laughed harder. She could feel the warm gusts of tobacco smoke on his breath. Eleanor blushed furiously. There were times she hated him. This was one.

It was a small family-run place, Italian, candles in Chianti bottles, checked tablecloths, all they could afford on the money Foster had sent with Eleanor less her train fares. They were alone except for a pair of morose Germans eating silently together. Allen had a second grappa and Eleanor anisette after the marinara. Their waiter was the chef’s kid, a poker-faced fifteen-year-old with a wispy unshaven mustache.

“The Germans in Bern come here as well?” Eleanor asked. This struck her as curious.

“All the time,” Allen replied. He was quite subdued. Perhaps it was the wine: he’d drunk most of the merlot himself. “There’s never any trouble. This place is no-man’s-land. We all need a spot that’s offlimits. Everyone’s very correct, very polite. In a way, we’re all in the same business.” He shrugged.

“And what happens when there is trouble?”

“The Swiss get damn angry. It’s their country. Their police get lots of practice watching everyone else spy on one another.”

Eleanor shook her head no as the boy walked past with a steaming kettle for tea.

“It’s good, living by one’s wits,” Allen went on. “But sooner or later you get fooled. It’s only ever a matter of time.” He sat in silence for a long moment.

“Have you made a mess of things yet?” Eleanor asked, smiling. It occurred to her that Allen didn’t want her asking questions—all the more reason to press on.

Allen nodded. “I told Foster about it. Or rather, he wrote to ask, because …” His voice trailed off. “Look, it worked like this, since you must know. I had a pacifist Austrian and a German with connections. If they talk to us, on the quiet, maybe we can engineer a separate peace. That was the idea. Problem was, everybody who shouldn’t have known knew. The day before. The whole thing made a complete fool of my Austrian, got my friendly German nearly hauled up on treason charges—the Germans guillotine for that—and everyone in town laughed at the big dumb American. It was,” he recalled glumly, “most embarrassing. But that’s small potatoes compared to Lenin.”

“Lenin? The Russian?”

“A minor legend now,” Allen admitted. “I didn’t answer the phone when he called, just before he boarded the train for Petrograd. He wanted a deal, I guess. Fortunately, no one else answered the phone either, not the French, not the British.” He was looking at the tablecloth, not moving, the darkness he’d always hid edging over him. But then he looked up, and smiled that loose smile again. “We should get our bill. The cabs dry up in Bern after ten.”

The proprietor waved them goodbye from his tiny portico in the September drizzle. There were no cabs, so they walked under Allen’s umbrella. They walked for a very long time without saying anything; Eleanor figured Allen was more drunk than he appeared. By the time they reached her tiny one-star ladies’ hotel, Eleanor’s shoulders were soaked and her feet squishing in her sodden shoes.

“Foster thinks you should come and work with him at Sullivan once the war’s over,” she said, looking up at him under the umbrella. He was indeed aging, thickening everywhere. He could pass for Foster’s age already. “He says there’s real money to be made, especially if you know the ropes at the State Department. More fitting for a Dulles of your wants and needs, he says.”

“Does he? He’s already asked,” Allen said. “I turned him down, Ellie. Just not done, a career State person carrying Sullivan’s water. Not even for Foster.”

“He said you’d say that.” She looked at Allen, who looked back at her, expressionless. He seemed slumped, diminished. She reached into her purse. “He gave me this to give you. I’m on the five o’clock Paris train tomorrow morning. Take care. And stick to Scotch, big brother. Wine makes you blue.” Allen’s gaze rose to meet hers. “I’ll write, Allie,” Eleanor promised. “But God knows how long a letter will take to reach you.” She handed him Foster’s letter; she could feel the dollar bills slithering inside. She offered Allen her cheek.

Allen took the envelope and bent to kiss his sister: theater, as much as anything else he’d done that day.

V

FRANCE
OCTOBER 1917

The newspapers on the train spoke of two things. The first was Russia: with the collapse of the Imperial Army, the Germans were shipping divisions west as fast as the trains could carry them. Even on her layover in Paris, Eleanor registered that many in the cafés and along the avenues thought this might mean the end of the war, the end of France. The second topic was far more immediate: the enormous German railway guns, which could reach central Paris easily. The shells roared over, regular as buses, one an hour, great things the size of an icebox.

She felt a tap on her shoulder. “Mademoiselle,” the Indochinese porter said in his bitten-off French, “we are here.” He was five feet tall, his oversize beret barely reaching Eleanor’s bosom. Two days after saying goodbye to Allen in Bern, she sat staring out the filthy window of the French army carriage through a wall of mist and steam-engine smoke. Welcome to Épernay, west of Verdun, focus of the German effort that autumn and the most relentless meat grinder of the war.

Eleanor was the only civilian aboard to come this far; her sole traveling companions were a battalion of freshly imported Algerians in their Zouave uniforms, baggy blue pants and red fezzes. They ignored her, preferring to sleep huddled together, or sipping their mint tea and pointing in awe at the white man’s strange buildings along the tracks.

The train’s destination was a tiny place with a grand name: Ste-Thérèse-de-Montluc-Valois. It was only a temporary rail station, little more than a shell of a platform and a copse of army tents, black with rain.

All around, the landscape was gray, flat, studded with trees burnt or halved by shell fire, milk-white with fog. The army train screeched to a stop; the Algerians stood aside to let Eleanor pass. As she stepped down, an iron-wheeled lorry scrambled over the rough ground near the shattered platform and backed up to the train. The Algerians began lobbing their bags out the windows of the carriage onto the lorry’s flat bed as Eleanor stood uncertainly, searching the shapes in the mist. A few yards ahead the line ended abruptly in a shell hole that would easily have swallowed a locomotive. At its edge, a team of haggard French engineers were building a wye spur line, to reverse the trains, a hive of industry in an otherwise lifeless place.

Somewhere a man’s broken voice cried “Jeanne-Marie,” over and over again, in anguish. Eleanor saw Grace before Grace saw her. There were two men waiting with her, one slim with an eye patch, the other bent-backed and shuffling, the three of them waiting beneath the shelled depot’s portico. Eleanor tried to focus. The short fellow had one shoulder higher than the other; the lame were suddenly valuable with so few young men left. Then Grace was waving. Another truck hove through the mist, another Indochinese driving, his head barely above the arc of the wheel, his glasses shining behind the windshield. He slewed to a stop just in time, scant feet from the train, and Eleanor saw the big red cross. There were more shouts and then she was in Grace’s soft embrace.

“The Red Cross’s made a mess of things, Ellie,” Grace bawled over the din of the bouncing truck. “Our little Bryn Mawr committee’s to be shut down. There’s no money coming in or going out.” The lorry jostled them together amid the crates and sacks of flour and rice for the Indochinese. “It’s awful for the families we’re trying to help.”

“So what’s to become of us?” Eleanor shouted back.

“The Quakers will take us on.” Grace seemed pleased. “We eat little, sleep less, work outrageous hours, get to Paris once a month for a good cry. It’s hell on the bad days, wonderful when we actually accomplish something.” She was trying to light a Gitane. Her friend with the eye patch, a French doctor it turned out, had only one arm, but he deftly struck a match one-handed to light her cigarette.

Eleanor looked around at her fellow passengers. The hunchback had immediately slumped down and gone to sleep, exhausted, his small hands upturned like teacups on his thighs. Except for the Algerians, the men around her were a catalog of missing limbs and eyes, of handicaps large and small, human debris, fragments of living people. She’d heard of a hospital in Paris full of men with no faces.

Through a tear in the lorry’s canvas side, Eleanor saw they were passing through an abandoned village, cratered by shell fire, the houses smoke-stained rubble. Of the church, only the altar remained, a bright white marble tooth in the gray. In the church’s side yard, a peasant attacked the church’s big front door with an ax, after an evening’s firewood. A child watched him, wrapped in a blanket, from beneath the eaves of the priest’s house. A sign above the door read Ste-Thérèse d, but the rest had been shot away. The lorry driver honked his horn. The child didn’t wave.

On the horizon a biplane appeared, flying perilously low, then disappeared into the mist. Ahead of Eleanor’s truck, a column of ambulances picked its way through the potholes, carefully, almost tenderly. Eleanor caught a glimpse of the cots fitted to racks inside the last ambulance as it passed, awaiting cargo. At twenty-four cots to the lorry, fifteen lorries—and she knew the drivers did six, sometimes eight trips to Paris a day, round the clock. That was over two thousand wounded a day. This was but one sector of a thousand-mile front. She shivered at the arithmetic.

There was a squeal of metal brakes and Eleanor tumbled against a crate of tinned meat.

“Minefield,” Grace called, offering Eleanor a drink from another of her silver flasks. “Santé, Ellie.”

“If you please, the drivers do this every day, mademoiselles,” the doctor next to Grace said in perfect English, doffing his kepi. “It’s not so dramatic.” He smiled thinly. “For them.”

“Your English is very good,” Eleanor said politely.

“I studied for a year in Cincinnati. I am a surgeon. I was a surgeon.” He tapped his shoulder with a fingertip. “Now I perform triage for the surgeons at the field hospital here.” He turned his cap in his hand. “I am not one for declarations, mademoiselle, but I tell you, France is grateful your country stands with us. We have lost a generation. We need the energy of the New World to put an end to this.” His eyes glistened as he replaced his cap.

Eleanor simply nodded. In Paris she’d heard such sentiments at every bus stop.

In ten more minutes the lorry and its bouncing passengers were within sight of the last line of supply trenches between the Germans and Paris; two more lines of trenches doglegged to the horizon, and beyond them lay real estate so scarred and trackless only the bullets’ whine told you which way you faced. Grace and the doctor alighted first. Eleanor hopped down into the muck behind them. Grace’s hunchback guide was still sleeping as the lorry trundled off, wanted elsewhere. A nervous quiet settled, a held breath. They walked the short distance to a shattered farm ringed by abandoned artillery emplacements.

“There was a terrific battle here last month,” the doctor said. “Les boches almost broke through. A barrage of mortar shells landed just as a German regiment attacked across this field. The bodies, mon Dieu. You could walk from here to there”—he pointed to the one farmhouse still standing—“without touching the ground. A boulevard of the dead.”

A signalers team laid telephone cable in the pools between the dugouts; far in the distance, a courier’s motorcycle threw up a fan of mud as it bucked and yawed toward its destination. There were no birds, not a sound beyond the whistling of the incoming shells. Eleanor, seeking a Jerusalem for her own small crusade, had found a country on the moon.

She slept that night in a drafty hayloft, wrapped in two green woolen hospital blankets from Canada. It was the only shelter for miles around. When she walked to the farmyard for breakfast, she found almost a hundred men had gathered to be fed bread and lentils and coffee and a tot of army-issue brandy. They were all peasants, young boys and elderly farmhands, paid in food. A lorry arrived and caused a sensation: for the first time in weeks there were shovels and buckets, even three pickaxes. For days now, a toothless farmer told Eleanor, offering his lacerated palms, they had been working with their bare hands and whatever tools they could salvage from the wreckage of their farms. He had learnt his bizarre English from British army programs on the only radio in the village, he said, and had absorbed the slow diction of the newsreader. “The sun is discriminating and sharp this morning, is it not, madame?”

The coffee was superb, the lentils a green slurry, and the bread stale, but a thoroughly chilled Eleanor was grateful for the way the brandy burnt in her belly. A semicircle of tents stood under a single arthritic tree at the end of a plank walkway. Several men, stripped to the waist, shaved at a trestle table. Eleanor’s feeble eyes caught a flash of red hair among them.

She asked the toothless farmer in her halting French who the men were. He was lifting a forty-kilo crate of precious olive oil tins onto a wheelbarrow. He must have been seventy; the muscles on his smooth, hairless forearms stood out like ropes, leathery and networked with blue veins. “Objecteurs de conscience,” he replied with a Gallic shrug. She could see now that Grace was serving the men coffee in an improbable outfit of debutante’s overcoat and white cotton nurse’s wrap. Eleanor shivered and sipped the last of her brandy. There was a terrible smell, a mingled stench of open sewers and something darker, and she realized it was the sharp rankness of death. We’re that close, she realized.

The men Grace served were gathering at one end of the trestle table, their heads bowed. “They are religious?” Eleanor asked the old farmer.

He searched his inadequate vocabulary. “Les Huguenots américains,” he replied, then wandered off with his wheelbarrow, the Marne mud sucking at his big pine clogs.

There was no sun. Without shadow, walking among the shell holes demanded sharper eyes than Eleanor’s. The doctor had warned them the night before: as many wounded drowned in the deep shell holes as died of their injuries. Sometimes the shells exploded so deep that small caves lurked beneath the wounded earth. Biblical, the doctor explained: the earth simply swallowed its victims whole. Everyone leaving the duckboard walkways went in pairs, armed with walking sticks. Skull-and-crossbones paper pennants marked the minefields. As if, Eleanor thought, anywhere’s safe.

Eleanor crossed the planking to Grace’s post, carrying a pot of fresh coffee and a round loaf of bread. All except one of the Quakers’ charges gathered around for breakfast. He stood, the biggest of them by a head, half shaven, his razor in midair, across the table from Grace in conversation. Eleanor put the coffee down and began to break the bread, listening. He spoke earnestly of the army; he wasn’t impressed with the Christian possibilities, he was saying. Grace had never had a spare minute for Christianity. She was smoking, a kerchief in her hair; the pockets of her white orderly’s cotton coat were jammed with papers, her body curved, in Eleanor’s estimation, rather close to the man across the trestle table.

“Grace, there’s a note for you from the schoolteacher. He needs money for firewood.”

“Eleanor, meet Jacob,” Grace said, waving Eleanor closer. “He’s helping build the schoolroom.”

The man lowered his razor into a tin dish frothy with soap. “Jacob Roth,” he said, stepping close and offering his hand. “Lancaster, Pennsylvania.” He had mahogany-colored hair with a spring in it; he hardly needed to shave, so slight was his stubble.

“I’ve been telling him about Bryn Mawr,” Grace said.

“Where the rich girls go,” Jacob said quietly, engulfing Eleanor’s hand in his.

“And some poor ones,” Eleanor replied, coloring. She was suddenly very conscious of her unkempt fingernails and the difference in their heights. Jacob was far bigger even than Foster; his baritone seemed to go right through her.

“You may let go of his hand, Ellie,” Grace said, laughing. “He can stand by himself.”

“Ja, I can,” he said, laughing too.

Eleanor was thoroughly mortified. Behind her, the Quakers’ Mennonite crewmen began praying in what sounded like Dutch. Jacob put a finger to his lips and lowered his head until they were finished. Eleanor watched him, fascinated.

“The schoolmaster’s an old woman, Ellie,” Grace said. “If I can pry a laugh from him, he’ll get his schoolroom. If not, he can wait another week! Terrible, aren’t I, Jacob?” She laughed again. “Plus, he has halitosis! Tell her, Jacob.”

Jacob shook his head somberly. “The teacher is a good man, Miss Dulles.”

Grace made a face. “Jacob here was the first farm boy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to volunteer for the army, except he volunteered as a conscientious objector. That’s how the Quakers found him—he’s Amish and they don’t fight, over anything, apparently. The army gave him a week in the stockade until some senator got him out. Jacob and his father built something or other for the senator, I guess. He’s quite a carpenter. The others are Mennonites from the Ohio valley. They don’t even speak English. They work like mules and never complain. I’ve taken a shine to Jacob here.” She showed her teeth sardonically; Eleanor felt a spike of jealousy. “He says he can build us a schoolhouse with his Mennonites in no time if we get ’em the tools and the timber.”

Jacob nodded slowly. He did everything slowly, his hands moving in careful arcs. “There are no trees. If there are trees, we mill our own timber. My father and I are known for this in our county. Good post-and-beam, good wood, a good schoolhouse.”

“Let’s round up that truck and find them a stand of timber, then,” Eleanor said. “What about nails?”

“They don’t need nails, Ellie,” Grace was saying as she watched the big carpenter finish shaving. “That’s the thing. Post-and-beam.” She glanced at Eleanor. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

Routine followed, days of delivering the work crews the coffee and dried milk and tinned meat, and the ashy gray bread the aid kitchens produced. In Eleanor’s neighborhood, the Germans, preoccupied with the British to the south, contented themselves with the occasional halfhearted shelling. Eleanor watched one shelling, under a blood-red harvest moon. The explosions, columns of light and dark, preceded terrifying thuds that burnt the ears. Debris floated in midair, bubbles in water.

The nights were otherwise quiet; exhaustion saw to that. Jacob and his Mennonites departed suddenly one October morning to build a bridge with the French sappers, miles away. Grace consoled herself with overwork. She and Eleanor trucked to the nearby depot at Ste-Gabrielle, to sort the clothes trained in from the city, carloads of them, working well past dusk by the light of two pressure lanterns in the yard. There were more coats than Eleanor had ever seen in one place at one time; her job was to assign the American sizes French equivalents. They had to work fast: the shipment, raised in Philadelphia in a matter of days, was slated for Belgium and had to be in Brussels yesterday, because an orphanage or hospital—no one was sure which—had burnt down. Hundreds of children with no family had lost everything, and were now lacking the prospect even of a decent winter coat.

Kleinmann’s, Carver and Sons, Barnes—all Philadelphia tailors; she thought of the names of the station stops along the Main Line. Devon Stratford Wayne St. Davids Radnor Villanova Rosemont Bryn. The woolly musk of the coats made her recall the cedary closets of her parents’ house. For a moment she might have been in one of the backyard trees, watching the stars, cold in the blue-black heaven, the treetops iced with moonlight.

“Penny for your thoughts, Ellie,” Grace offered, across from Eleanor at the sorting table.

“I was thinking about my parents’ house, about how they fed and clothed us all. Grace, I think I want to have children.”

Grace laughed her big laugh. “Ellie, darling, you haven’t a maternal bone in your body! I can’t picture you with a brat in your arms any more than me. Come on!” Grace hauled another bale onto the trestle table and used a rusty bayonet to cut the twine. “I need a smoke, Ellie, keep my eyes open.”

Eleanor gave Grace her Gitanes. “You owe me four.”

“That advice was worth four of these gaspers.” She looked into the darkness. “Another six bales, then we’ve done it.” In the glow of the gas lamp Eleanor saw how tired Grace was; her fair skin bruised beneath her eyes. She’d lost at least fifteen pounds, her hands had grown almost transparent—France and the war conspiring to wear her away. “We had too much money, too much history,” Grace said. “I had too many beaux, too much in my head for a girl from a tidewater Virginia town outside D.C. No, ma’am, I’ll leave my mothering to the next life. Want some brandy?”

A flare blazed silently over no-man’s-land, magnesium blue, a fizzing vertical scar in the murk. “Look at that, Grace. It’s beautiful, in an awful kind of way.”

“When my daddy was drinking and wanted to hunt something at night for the hell of it, he’d set a torch in the fork of a tree and shoot the deer when they came to see the light. Same thinking, darling,” Grace said quietly.

A truck banged out of the darkness. Grace saw him first, hanging off the passenger running board, a silly grin on his face. “I declare, Ellie, a ship in the night,” Grace said, drawing on the Gitane. She gave Eleanor a wink that cut through her heart. Eleanor took an extra pull at the brandy as Jacob Roth strode into the pool of light.

“Good evening, ladies,” he announced. “We have finished our bridge. Tomorrow we start the schoolhouse. We brought a kettle of potato soup from the sappers as a reward. I invite you to dinner.” He pulled a bundle of newspapers from inside his oilskin jacket. “I have the newspapers, yesterday’s, straight from Paris. Here, you may read.”

“Now there’s a real Pennsylvania gentleman, Ellie,” Grace said. She linked her arm in the big carpenter’s. “We have a few more bales, Jacob. Why don’t you and those Mennonites boys get that kettle on the woodstove. We’ll be over presently.” Grace gave him a light peck on the cheek, and even in the gaslight Eleanor could see the big Amish fellow blush.

The night sky suddenly glowed bright as day. The duty officer from the medical corps down the road was shouting at them to douse the truck’s gaslights. Somewhere above, a German aircraft circled; the French searchlights and anti-aircraft fire meant a blackout.

They ate the rich potato soup around the stove in the dark while the guns pounded away in the next field. When the soup kettle was empty, the Mennonites began to sing in old Dutch, a slow song of thanksgiving into the Marne night.

Cannon fire woke Eleanor from a sleep so deep that for one long moment she forgot where she was. Onethousandoneonethousandtwo: she listened as a family of mice scrabbled over the tin roof. Someone had told her how to count off the seconds to tell where the shells would fall—somewhere well to the south. She fitted her spectacles and peered between the barn boards: the explosions lit the clouds like sky-lightning. Eleanor held her wristwatch up. The flash of the explosions illuminated her watch face: 4.15 a.m. The shells awoke the big ravens in their lair beneath the metal roof of the toolshed next to the barn, their fluttering wings battered the tin roof.

She had read one of Jacob’s American newspapers in her cot the night before, by the light of a margarine candle. The headlines spoke of Russia’s drift into anarchy and a separate peace with Germany. Eleanor thought of Allen and his machinations. Whose was the important war? Foster’s, closeted in a military intelligence office in Washington with his legal papers and telegrams, or Allen’s, running like a foxhound among his spies, or hers, in the stench of it, within range of the guns?

Grace’s hammock, tied between the big loft beams, curled empty, her blankets gone. Eleanor pulled on her socks and boots and climbed down the loft ladder. Below, the rows of cots were empty for once. The French medical corpsmen had been reassigned. They left so little behind, she marveled, the scrupulous way of men under discipline.

The barn door hung open.

The shelling stopped; nothing broke the silence of the yard. A lantern glowed in the kitchen of the battered farmhouse, but that always burnt overnight, for the medical quartermaster’s work was never done. A hatless uniformed man, he remained bent over his papers, toiling amidst a faint scent of burnt coffee.

A flare from the German artillery spotters lit the barnyard for a long moment and Eleanor recognized Grace’s silhouette. Jacob towered over her, his head bent over hers. Grace leant on Jacob, blankets wrapped around them both. They danced, so slowly Eleanor at first thought they’d frozen on the spot. Grace hummed that same parlor song they’d once sung together at Bryn Mawr.

Eleanor watched. Crosscurrents of shame and jealousy and betrayal ebbed through her. Another shell flash lit the yard; she could feel the artillery’s distant impact through the soles of her feet. In the dying light her eyes locked with Grace’s. Grace gently shook her head and let Jacob lead her toward the shadows, her eyes closing.

Eleanor reached for the barn door to steady herself. Then her eyes blurred and a trickle of salt crept into the corner of her lips, stinging. I must move. Eleanor turned back into the barn; she didn’t draw a deep breath until she found her cot and stumbled under the cold blankets. She drew herself tight as she could, knees to her chest, willing herself to breathe, to be warm, safe. Her pillow crackled, the broken feathers rustling as she pressed her head deep into their warmth.

The departing truck woke her. The Mennonites sang a plainchant hymn as they rode the clattering Renault out of the yard. Eleanor opened her eyes and then the memory of Grace and her carpenter struck home. I’m not getting up. She would feign sickness. I refuse to get up. She found her spectacles, looked at her watch: it was past eight. A patter of morning rain had replaced the overnight stillness and the fog had returned, smelling oddly like damp laundry. Grace’s circular mirror was on the loft floorboards, within reach.

Eleanor picked it up and examined herself. Her face was a puzzle to her. It seemed to rearrange itself at will, from the unattractive to the radiant. Over homework one evening Allen had told her once she’d a face like a pachyderm’s behind and she’d hit him with the book she’d been reading—Kipling, she remembered, probably what gave Allen the idea. Her wiry hair was a lifelong embarrassment, her eyes dim and too small behind the thick spectacles, her lips thin and unsensual. What in high heaven had Grace ever seen in her? She swept her hair back. Only her smooth forehead and the set of her nose, she thought, had any breeding and saved her from a supremely forgettable face. It’s hopeless, she thought, I’m hopeless.

“Well, lazybones,” Grace called up from below. “You planning to sleep through the rest of the war?”

Eleanor snuggled into the warmth. “It’s raining. I’m sick.”

“Which is it?” Grace climbed the ladder, humming. “If you’re sick, Ellie, get to the infirmary,” Grace said as she gained the loft. “It could be that influenza.”

She coiled herself next to Eleanor’s cot and even in the thin light Eleanor could see she was aglow beneath the halo of red hair.

“We need a cat about the place,” Grace observed. “There’s a nest of mice in the roof. Listen.” A scrabble of clawed feet headed for the far end of the loft. “A big black and white tom. That’s what we need. It’s clearing toward the west, but there’s heavy fog just now. Darling, you look all in, now that I get a good look at you.”

Eleanor wrapped the hospital blankets around herself and sat up. “I saw you two last night.”

Grace scraped a match and lit a pair of Gitanes, passed one to Eleanor. “We’ve grown up since freshman year, Ellie. I want a man around, darling. No offense.” She bent over and kissed Eleanor softly on the forehead.

Eleanor looked away, then back at Grace.

“I’ve never lived life by halves,” Grace said. “Neither should you.” She blew a column of blue smoke among the roof beams. “I’m sorry you’re hurt, honey.” She plucked a shred of tobacco from her lip. “I’ve never done a thing I haven’t wanted to, Ellie.” Grace inhaled again, then carefully butted her half-finished cigarette. “Save yours, there’s no more until Friday.” She stood, staring down at Eleanor, then extracted the mirror from among the covers. “Eleanor, a word of advice: when the day starts badly, don’t go anywhere near a mirror. Bad for the soul. Come, darling, let’s see about that cat.”

Grace led her by the hand across the barnyard, looking for the quartermaster. “The French will have a rational way of obtaining a cat in a military zone,” Grace said over her shoulder, just as the thunder rolled out of the fog. A smear of orange Eleanor would never forget, like those flecks of sunlight in that Frenchman’s paintings of the Rouen cathedral. Then nothing, only mist, a damp itch like a spiderweb on her face as the orange disappeared into the white wool of the fog. Then the shouting started, mingled with the sound of boots sprinting through the mud. From not far off, toward the minefield boundary, Eleanor heard a terrible keening cry, and that must have been Grace disappearing at a run into the gray.

Outside it was raining again.

“They departed the road in the fog,” the one-armed doctor was saying, looking up from the forms accounting for the lost truck. “The brakes were locked, but they couldn’t stop with the weight of the wood. And now …” He passed his hand over the papers. “A quick death. One can find comfort in that. They were good men, men of conscience.” He shook his head. After three years of war the doctor had little sympathy left in him, but he spared what he could for the strangers who had come from half a world away to die trying to build this village a schoolhouse. He began to write again, backhanded, Eleanor could see.

“Perhaps if you dictate to me,” she offered.

“No, it is my duty. I will write it myself. You should really see to your friend.” He nodded and bent to his paperwork again.

Eleanor left the tiny office and walked across the barnyard to the tables where the graves registration men had already gathered silently, white cotton masks around their necks, shovels ready. The toothless old farmer noticed her as she passed the well, a new steel bucket in his hands. He nodded toward the barn. Eleanor sloshed her way through the maze of puddles to the place where her friend mourned.

VI

VENEZUELA
MAY 1924

Lake Maracaibo sits like a keyhole on the Venezuelan coastline. That year, the first of an army of mechanical men stood guard on its eastern brim, the waterborne oil derricks of the East Bolívar coastal field, their drill motors muttering in the distance, sinking new wells deep under the shimmering lake’s surface.

Standard Oil’s VIP protocol barge lolled at the company’s mooring, the oilmen gathered there beneath a big rectangular tent of mosquito netting dead amidships, the sighing canvas sunshade fluttering languidly.

As the oil minister, Marichal y Falcón, had written Foster, the lake had prospects, “a modern and profitable refinery in keeping with your client’s prestige and dedication to Venezuelan production.” Despite two years’ prospecting and drilling, Standard, the Rockefeller oil giant, had barely a toehold on the huge lake’s submerged oil pools.

Foster had demanded a round table for the breakfast meeting; he and Marichal y Falcón sat across from each other in the soft shade. Marichal was a collection of circles, from his face to his belly, a swarthy lipless specimen, barely five foot six, much given to rapid-fire blinkings, like semaphore, while he listened. John D. Rockefeller Jr. himself and his son, Nelson, cutting his milk teeth on this transaction, both immaculate in their best linen whites, sat to Foster’s right, with Señor Julio Cardozo, Foster’s almost boneless translator, to his left. Next, the narrow-eyed Señor Carlos Ruíz-Bacart, the oil ministry’s reptilian lawyer, completed the table.

The senior Rockefeller cleared his throat. “Look, we don’t want to hear about problems at the registry office, Señor Minister. We came here expecting to perfect title on that parcel so we can get this operation producing. We don’t like delays. We like the sound of drilling.”

Foster gathered from Marichal’s blinkings that he understood far more English than he allowed, even as the minister waited for Cardozo to finish translating. Marichal kept his hands over the crest of his belly as he spoke, his gaze fixed slightly over Foster’s head. “Here we have many ‘coyotes,’ unfortunately,” Cardozo translated, “unscrupulous men who prefer to prospect at the registry office rather than for oil. There remains the problem with a missing heir on the Espinosa tract. These people are migrant fishermen—they are very difficult to find. I beg you to understand this.” Marichal nodded while Cardozo spoke.

Catching Rockefeller’s eye, Foster thanked Marichal, then upped the ante. “Señor Marichal, surely you’re aware of your reputation in the United States?”

Marichal froze the half smile he wore, wary.

“Then I shall tell you, señor,” Foster went on. “You are an engine of high speed and power housed in a small body. This is your reputation. Yes, delays are against your industrious nature. I understand this, my client understands this. We expect good news. Soon.”

Marichal looked pained, but his hands never moved, only his eyes, marking the silent Nelson waiting in the wings. He replied directly to Rockefeller himself. “I understand this … problem, Señor Rockefeller,” he said meaningfully, in sound English. “I shall resolve the situation. Positively. I will need a few more weeks.”

The senior Rockefeller, apparently mollified for the moment, raised his palms in agreement. But his son’s cool stare, Foster noticed, never left the minister’s. Nelson glanced at Foster and gave a short sharp nod.

“Shall we move on to the pending legislation regarding shipping rates?” Foster asked. “And perhaps more coffee?”

The negotiations would proceed like this for another hour, he calculated, until they reached the nub of things. Foster sipped at the fierce coffee and scrawled a question mark next to Espinosa tract.

As the clock unwound, agreements followed: road access, railhead concession, a water purification plant upriver for the workers and their families, the usual sidebars to the main event. At quarter past nine, as the sun began its work, the six men took a break, distributing themselves along the barge’s polished rail in telling arrangement. Foster towered over the supple Ruíz-Bacart, set on examining the shoreline where the derricks thrummed. A dozen feet down the rail, Rockefeller and his son had cornered Marichal next to the cabin door.

“The legislature wants a 110 percent royalty rate,” Ruíz-Bacart was saying. “I wish I had better news.”

“We’ll whittle that down,” Foster replied confidently. “Or your senate can say adios to reinvestment.”

“As you know, Señor Dulles, oil in Venezuela flows up, not down,” Ruíz-Bacart replied quietly. “A question?”

Foster nodded and waited, watching Standard’s Fairey floatplane readying for takeoff down the shoreline, a pair of geologists hoisting their kit bags into the big red-on-white biplane. This should be Allen’s work, he decided, this fencing around with ministers and their flunkies.

Ruíz-Bacart leant closer, fitting a cigarette into his pearl holder. “The refinery. What do your clients want?”

“What do you want?” Foster replied. “One way or another, Mr. Rockefeller will get his refinery, here or Aruba. It’s up to Francisco and the boys at the ministry.”

“Aruba, it’s a problem, you know,” Ruíz-Bacart suggested delicately. “More excise, more taxes, more delay.”

Foster waited, a hand shading his eyes, looking at the floatplane in the glare. “Where are they surveying now?”

“The number six field,” Ruíz-Bacart replied. “The surveying is almost over. Core sampling now.” The Venezuelan lawyer sounded wistful, as if recalling a disappointing love affair.

Foster could hear Nelson’s voice, cracking with enthusiasm, as he chided Marichal about the royalty rate. Marichal wasn’t laughing quite so freely now.

“These things require a certain finesse,” Foster observed, looking down at Ruíz-Bacart, captured completely now within his own big square shadow. Foster let his words hang for a moment, then nodded, no more than a tip of the forehead, at the two Rockefellers. “If they go,” Foster warned, “they won’t come back. Marichal understands that?”

Ruíz-Bacart wrinkled his nose. “It’s oil,” Ruíz-Bacart observed. “He understands.”

Foster waited again. “I’m not so sure. Marichal’s in-laws still own the Serrano Bank?”

Ruíz-Bacart scratched his earlobe with a fingertip, then drew deeply on his cigarette. “Yes,” he said, puzzled. “Why?”

In the distance the big biplane revved up and began taxiing along the smooth water, turning head-on into the slight west wind.

“Because if Marichal doesn’t close this East Bolivar deal by Friday at the end of business,” Foster reported calmly, “they’re going to buy the bank and fire every last Serrano director. Today’s Tuesday and Marichal’s new at this, so we’re giving him four days. If Marichal doesn’t sign the Espinosas, that means Marichal’s got one unhappy wife come Monday. And if that doesn’t get your minister off his duff—”

“Duff? What is duff?” Ruíz-Bacart inquired, miserable, his narrow eyes as wide as they could go.

“His rear end,” Foster replied. “If that doesn’t get Francisco moving, I can tell you Marichal’s going to get a telephone call at that swank office of his from the financial ministry that’ll make him wish he never heard of Manuel Espinosa and parcel twenty-eight. Because,” Foster said, raising his voice as the approaching seaplane’s engine grew louder, “all the Espinosas in Caracas won’t be able to buy up the Venezuelan treasury bonds my clients are going to dump by noon Monday. Get the picture? First the bank, then the bonds.” Foster placed a paternal hand on Ruíz-Bacart’s thin shoulder. “We clear?”

The Venezuelan lawyer hadn’t moved. He licked his lips and, very carefully, pinched the burning end off his cigarette then tapped the stub from his holder and into the water, his face drawn. “What is the desired result?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“Two million barrels a day and Royal Dutch Shell out the door, Carlos,” Foster said. “That’s the desired result.”

Ruíz-Bacart’s lips were moving, but he might have been mute for all it mattered. Foster heard only the floatplane’s rising scream as it thundered across the barge’s bows, its wings trembling with the effort, dispensing parabolas of spray and a cheery wave from the goggled geologists, Standard’s gallant flying prospectors, secure in their success on the lake that gurgled oil.

from the archives of the Swiss federal police declassified 1999

Office of the Chief
Communications Bureau “T”
Federal Office for Police
Central Telegraph Office
Bundesrain 20
3003 Bern
RE 40 40
RE 39 39

December 4 1925

a memorandum regarding the diplomatic telegrams of the Vatican

As instructed, in order to continue our work on the new Bolshevik ciphers, we recently exchanged certain decoded Vatican files on the confidential negotiations with the Polish authorities regarding the <excised> until the end of the month. That telegraph circuit, as well as the Madrid-Milan circuit, remains tapped, as instructed. Submitted with respect.

This office continues to monitor the diplomatic telegraphic traffic of the Italian, Spanish, and Vatican representatives in Bern. The telegraphic correspondence is often cited in open letters to the cardinal secretary of state [see RK/98.156, attached] which were obtained Nov. 24. It is an elementary matter to compare the uncoded references to the encoded citations in the secret telegrams and to begin to decode the telegrams.

The Vatican diplomats continue to use local telegraph offices for their communications, which are routinely copied and sent to this office for analysis.

[signature]
Captain L.K. Deichmann
o/c Cryptanalysis section

VII

PARIS
DECEMBER 1926

A canopy of clear mid-morning sky shot with the irreproducible light of France: Eleanor was Paris-bound again. After stints at the London School of Economics and Radcliffe, she was now an economist, with a Harvard MA after her name, and a writer under contract, her Paris now an expatriate’s Paris, a hive of absinthe mirages and postwar poverty, its cafés full of foreign poseurs and idlers salted with the rare stray genius. “You might as well cross the Atlantic in a rowboat,” was Foster’s sour remark on hearing that Eleanor sought to research the French franc. But Harvard had paid her a stipend, then strong-armed a New York publisher into the promise of a microscopic print run of her analysis of the French currency, a first, actually—no one had ever thought to study a modern currency on the hoof before. Armed with a tight budget, Eleanor settled in.

For six months, long hours at the money ministries absorbed her days. She took a cheap if drafty room on rue Meuron, buttressed with her trove of finance files and papers, beneath the cobwebbed gables high above an art studio. She’d had barely a spare sou that first fall, before her parents cabled her a magnificent five hundred dollars and she could afford to thaw the space out with a coal egg in the grate first thing every morning. Before that windfall she’d lived on coffee and bread and Algerian oranges and prix fixe meals taken among the Sorbonne students. Rickety French governments came and went, interchangeable names in the big front-page stories; the franc went into free fall, as did the capital’s temperature. A bitter autumn only turned colder, then was blessed with a long week of timid sun before December creaked in, lacing the puddles with fine ice.

As winter gathered and the franc fell further against Eleanor’s hoard of dollars, her frugal meals at La Rotonde, a haven with its splendid square tables—ideal for a good spread of her work—left her with enough spare to take a real meal on occasion. On those rare evenings, a leavened Eleanor went dancing with one of a quartet of young expatriate Americans studying at the Cité Universitaire. But even fueled by the champagne and midnight dessert in the glossy restaurants of the rich sixteenth arrondissement, Eleanor always returned to her tiny hutch above the art studio alone.

Then, a fortnight before Christmas, her world shifted.

The door, caught for a moment by a ridge of slush, kicked, then slammed shut with a cascading of bells. The bookshop’s owner, a defrocked Jesuit, bone-thin and dusted with dandruff, dwelt in a silent cloud of cheroot smoke, and looked up from behind his big slab-sided rolltop desk, home to a hibernating cat. The proprietor was slowly, reluctantly liquidating his father’s library, reputed to be one of the best collections of political writings in Paris. Each sale cost him; he winced when paid. Knapp by name, his dour Teutonic presence irritated the neighbors. They didn’t take to Germans, of the French variety or not.

Eleanor had found the shop one day when she’d lost her way near St-Sulpice. Americans, Eleanor discovered, aroused a singular affection in the shopowner. In the last days of the war, an obscure American regiment had returned his hometown to la République. Knapp, if approached on a good day, would loan out a text for her research without charge. And Knapp liked his shop warm, no mean thing that winter. Eleanor worked there all she could.

As the door bells faded, Eleanor, in the wicker chair, kept her eyes on the Finance Ministry monographs Knapp had ordered for her, biting her lip in concentration, and didn’t look up. Bent on organizing the material from the clerks at the Paris stock exchange and her hours of interviewing at the ministry, she had spread her work out on the deep shelf in the front window alcove. A gust of cold wind curled around her shins and lifted her notes. She slapped them down, concentrating.

It was not every day that Knapp acknowledged the arrival of a customer, indisposed as he was to moving his inventory. He glanced at the man in greatcoat and homburg with his sack of books slung over his shoulder and shifted a pile of papers to make room for the spoils. The two exchanged a curt nod; Knapp licked a thumb and turned the page of Le Monde. The new arrival, short and squarish, with an intellectual’s soft clean-shaven face and unlined brow, wearing a collar and tie each a decade out of date, then disappeared into the literature stacks, his hands clasped behind him, a man strolling known ground.

Eleanor saw none of this. Over the past week she had begun to tease the threads of her theory into shape, that underpinning the dry numbers were living people, aspirations, fears, an emotional logic to the franc’s ebbs and flows, a reason to the tides of its value. Her pen began to dab the columns of numbers, arrows linking dates; she pillaged a nest of news clippings, paper-clipping them to her timeline. Her sense grew: she’d found what she’d come to Paris for. She tightened her sweater across her chest and glanced at Knapp’s old clock: she’d been working without a break for almost two hours. She capped her pen and rubbed the ink on her fingertip. The radio played Ravel, a piano piece, cresting, celebratory, pleasing even Knapp, to judge from his humming. It was time for a meal, a good one, to celebrate. She gathered her papers, stacking them. A half smile came as she filled her dowager’s handbag. It was worth it, every day of it, her Atlantic crossing in her rowboat. Foster be damned.

Knapp raised a pale hand as she left. The bookshop door slammed, the ecclesiastical bells tinkling behind her. The December fog gathered around her. She did not see the other customer’s face in the plate glass of Knapp’s establishment, framed by a circle of mist, his hand rubbing the windowpane, staring.

A coal cart, drawn by a steaming Percheron, its hooves flicking up sparks on the cobbles, pulled even with her, its driver staring down at her from above. She beamed at him; he doffed his beret and disappeared into the December mist. The gaslights glowed blue-green in the milkiness. Eleanor rejoiced in the Parisian murk: she’d done a fine morning’s work and had just decided on a lunch of bouillabaisse at the Norman restaurant off the square, the place the Sorbonne students went to celebrate or mourn an examination.

A voice from the mist: “Madame! Madame!”

Eleanor peered into the gray, waiting. A heavy figure emerged, his trousers snapping around his thick legs as he ran, his greatcoat open.

“Yes? Over here.”

Man, middle-aged, balding, a hat in his hand, pince-nez on Roman nose, a gentle face, Eleanor registered. He was smiling, embarrassed at his awkwardness. He had the paradoxical effect of growing shorter as he approached; perhaps it was the stoutness of his legs.

“Ah, you speak English. I should have known.” He was breathing hard. “You left your file at the bookshop. Knapp noticed.”

“Very kind of you, running like that for me in the fog. Thank you. Eleanor Dulles,” she said, offering her hand. “Watertown, New York, by way of Boston.”

“Aaron David Barenberg. I go by David. Baltimore born and bred. A pleasure, madame.” Barenberg placed his homburg on his head and began to button his greatcoat. “May I walk with you?”

“Certainly.” She looked at him as they walked, weighing him. “Baltimore. I know the harbor a little.”

“Madame is of the nautical métier?”

Eleanor nodded, giving nothing away. They had reached an intersection, but in the fog she couldn’t make out which. “Drat it, I’m lost. Where are we?”

“Just off the square. The métro is around the corner.”

Eleanor caught sight of the newsstand where she’d bought the International Herald Tribune when her neighborhood kiosk was sold out. “I recognize that tabac.” She turned to Barenberg. “Look, I’ve got something to celebrate, in my work.”

He raised his hat in salute. “Always a cause for celebration, an academic advance. I know how hard they are to come by.”

“Thank you. A stepping-stone, really. But I’d really rather celebrate with someone. Not to mention the fact I haven’t spoken English in days.”

Eleanor’s new acquaintance laughed. “Pity you don’t speak medieval French—then I could come. I never get a chance to speak medieval French.”

“No, no, no. I’m serious,” Eleanor said, an uncertainty rising in her: why doesn’t he just say yes? She straightened, her eyes level with his. “Care for lunch? Dutch treat at that seafood place on rue St-André-des-Arts? Maybe they have Baltimore crab cakes.”

Barenberg bowed from the waist, offering Eleanor the halo of hair atop his balding head. “I was taught never to refuse a lady—even without the crab cakes.”

Eleanor was charmed: no one had ever done that before. She shrugged her bag of books and papers onto her shoulder. “It’s an offer with a deadline. I have to be back to work at two.”

In the distance, an autobus Klaxon sounded.

“Then we have a civilized hour,” he said, a maître d’hôtel with the whole city in his charge. “I believe we might head back to the boulevard.”

“I don’t think so. If the tabac is down to my left—”

“I do believe we ought to try up, that way, toward the boulevard.”

“You’re sure?”

Barenberg nodded. “A gentleman never contradicts a lady—”

“But this time you’ll make an exception.” Eleanor waited.

He clasped his hands behind his back, stiffening. “Indeed.”

She took him in. “My brother and I, when we disagree, we often take up a wager.”

“A gentlemen’s wager?”

“Double or nothing for dinner, Mr. Barenberg.”

Her new friend blinked once, then again. “Yes, yes, of course.”

She turned on her heel. Men and directions: they never know anything.

They began to walk in silence toward the boulevard, Eleanor staring dead ahead into the fog and silence. Thirty or so paces up the narrow street and David looked back over his shoulder. Eleanor saw this but kept walking. Barenberg looked back again, hesitating.

“I think—”

Eleanor stopped. “Know what I think? I think you just bought bouillabaisse for two.”

Au Petit Trésor was a basement place, crowded with rough benches and scarred tables, owned by Madame Fortin, a fierce bretonne who stood immobile next to the till. Customers paid when they turned in their bowl, spoon, and napkin. Eleanor and David sat to one side of the stone fireplace, on a bench table of their own. Undergraduates crowded shoulder to shoulder on the other benches, arguing, liter mugs of beer clanking on the pine.

“So Knapp actually speaks with you? I’m impressed.” Eleanor dipped a chunk of Madame Fortin’s bread into the bouillabaisse and laughed.

“No. He endures me,” David admitted, “because I trade. I’m above cash, he thinks, like he is. That appeals to his vanity.”

“Knapp waves at me. Looks up once in a while, when he lights his cigar. He lets me work, though. That’s a blessing on a cold morning—a good chair and a good fire. And I like Polyphemus.”

“Oh, you read Greek?”

Eleanor stared at him for a moment. “No,” she said carefully. “Polyphemus is the cat.”

A strangled shout: at the next table a bearded young man stood, declaiming Nietzsche at the top of his voice and pulling at his sweater cuffs, possessed by either inspiration or the wine or both. Two girls pulled him down, one bored, the other laughing, very pretty and very drunk.

David winced as he spooned his soup, forcing a thin smile. “I take it you’re a mathematician.”

“Close. Economist.”

“The dismal—”

“I don’t find it so at all,” Eleanor shot back. “Sorry, that was a bit strong. I love it, it’s a constant puzzle, a human puzzle. And it’s not mathematical at all. Yet.”

He raised a finger hopefully. “Yet? It will be soon?”

“No, it won’t, not soon. I’m a realist. I have a lot more work to do. And what do you do to put bread on the table?”

“Three guesses.” He seemed bemused, likable now.

“You were in a bookshop. Something to do with words. But you’re an American.” She put her spoon down and leveled her gaze at him. “Oh, my. You’re not one of the lost sheep you see at the back tables at Le Dôme, are you? The talkers who haven’t written a word but they’re the next Flaubert?”

“That’s two down. Try again.” He smiled again. “Believe me, I don’t live on Daddy’s money.”

“I believe you, I saw the leather on your shoes. Let me think. You’re a French expert. I don’t speak well, myself. Enough to get by.”

“Oh, it’s worse than just French. Much worse. I look for the roots of obscure languages. Detective work. Rather like yours, I’d think.”

“That’s interesting. Which obscure languages?”

The next table was on to free love now, solemnly declaring itself in favor of promiscuity.

“I’m trying to work out the Jewish roots of the romance languages.”

“Ah. Maybe then I should be paying for dinner.” They laughed together.

“The Johns Hopkins French department,” he said, “hasn’t entirely lost its sense of humor. I have a stipend.”

“Harvard has a sense of humor too. I’m writing a book about the franc.”

It was Barenberg’s turn to think. “Do people write books about the franc?”

“I do.”

His gaze lingered on something. In the doorway, a couple were kissing while they waited for a table. Eleanor didn’t want to take Barenberg’s gaze personally. But she did. She held him to his bet and let him pay, and forty minutes later, just past two, she was feeding a coal egg into her grate, trying to think about exchange rates but remembering him.

A pneu arrived after lunch the next day, brought to her door by the apologetic young postman with the walleye. Eleanor opened it while standing in the open door, and read that David Barenberg would be waiting for her in a taxicab at the entrance to the Pigalle métro at four-fifteen sharp. Would she care to join him?

She arrived ten minutes early. It was too early for the poules in their heels and worn furs; they were still upstairs, readying themselves for their night’s work. She kept shrugging her big handbag back up onto her shoulder, her tic when waiting. A street photographer walked past, bowed under the weight of his big camera and tripod. There was no one else on the street but a sleeping clochard, snoring on the church steps behind her.

She’d been to Montmartre before, once before, for a dinner in an attic restaurant with one of Foster’s friends and his wife, a charity meal when she’d first arrived in Paris, up several flights of corkscrew staircase.

That memory was the closest she would come to a restaurant that night.

“Why did I invite you? You’re lovely when you argue,” David dead-panned as the big hired maroon Renault 40 clattered down the side street behind the Opéra, operated by a silent gentleman with a handlebar mustache who oddly struck Eleanor as a White Russian general on his uppers.

Barenberg had brought blankets, a down duvet, and a picnic dinner, including a small bottle of champagne, to accompany their private circumnavigation of Paris in winter. He had waxed expansive as they crawled past the Panthéon; sparred with the Emperor Napoleon’s shade as they orbited the glowing dome of Les Invalides; and tracked the evening’s passage over the city as the commissionaires closed the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens. Eleanor shifted in her seat, uneasy, swimming upstream in Barenberg’s torrent of opinion. She was tucked under the duvet, a plate on her lap on which skated a confit of duck sandwich. This automotive dinner was his party piece—just for her?

“And this,” he continued, pointing a gloved hand out the brass-trimmed window, “is the entrance Napoleon III used to hide one mistress from the other. That one there.”

He had been a talking Paris guidebook for almost twenty minutes straight, a nice safe topic. Eleanor took a deep breath. “Have you actually been inside the opera house, for an opera, I mean?” she asked.

“Of course. I do like opera.” The personal question had stopped him, just as she thought it would. “Yourself?”

“Never. I do work rather a lot, I think.”

He seemed shocked. “And in London? Have you been to the theater?”

She shook her head. “I mostly went on long walks round Regent’s Park. I couldn’t afford much more on my LSE scholarship.”

His eyes shone, he leant forward. “Perhaps we could go to the opera together, then.”

She said she’d think about it, weighing something else altogether. “May I be very direct?”

“That would seem to be your way, Miss Dulles.”

“Thank you. You’re a man of a certain age, a certain outlook. Have you ever been married?”

He slid back onto his seat. “Divorced. I’m divorced.”

“I didn’t know Jews believed in divorce.”

He smiled, a thinner smile yet. “Depends on the Jew. My, we’re certainly moving along, aren’t we?”

“I like moving along. Paris is all very interesting, especially with a fine dinner too, thank you, but I like knowing who I’m with.”

“I’m a Jew,” he said, his voice flat. He was staring at her now. “That is a problem for you?”

She blinked at him. “I ask what I need to know—I didn’t know what the Jewish belief about divorce was. That’s all.”

“I was beginning to worry there for a minute.” He laughed too, relieved, then rapped on the glass partition behind the driver, ordering him to pull over. “Let’s toast to that.” He filled their glasses, then raised his.

“I’m not quite sure what I’m toasting,” Eleanor said, sensing the wetness before she realized what had happened. “Oh, I’ve spilled. I’m so clumsy.”

He reached over, a napkin in his hand, and wiped the driblets of champagne off her sleeve. Then Eleanor found herself being kissed.

She felt she’d plummeted two floors in the elevator at Macy’s. She raised a hand to his cheek, not liking at all the way her head was tilting back. It was too much like a visit to the dentist’s, no matter how hard she blushed. He continued to kiss her. She opened her hand …

The glass flute broke with a quiet clink on the cab’s floor.

He knelt, picking up the fragments of glass. “I’m so sorry. Will you forgive me?”

Eleanor didn’t know what to do with her hands; she pressed them down into the duvet, all her secrets suddenly just under her skin. I can’t let him know this is my first kiss with a man. I can’t. “I think you …” she said as slowly as she could. “I think … I think I’d like it very much, if you don’t mind, if you would see me home.”

She didn’t let him come to the door.

Her concierge, Madame Perrault, unlocked the thick door to the art studio and admitted her as the limousine pulled away. A farm woman from the Armagnac country as clever as she was short, she took in the departing car, big enough for a state funeral. “Oh, madame is not well? The car, peut-être …” she inquired, too shrewd to ask a direct question, her small bird’s eyes scanning Eleanor for clues.

“I want a coffee, Madame Perrault. Have you made any?”

“Oh, of course, madame,” the concierge replied in her throaty English, following her up the stairs, solicitous enough to encourage a nugget for the neighborhood’s morning round of gossip. “Of course.” She was no stranger to her lady guests’ ups and downs.

“I don’t know what to do,” Eleanor said, her hand on her door. “He’s just awful, awful, clumsy. And a terrible kisser. That must count for something, no?”

Madame Perrault wore many faces for her varied tasks as concierge. At this she softened, thinking of a moment like this in her own life, long ago. Then she raised her eyebrows slightly, lowering her voice. “Madame Dulles, I like you. I like you very much.”

“I can’t see him anymore. Look at me. I’m in pieces.”

The concierge plucked at her apron pocket. “Madame, take this. It belonged to Monsieur Perrault. Voilà.”

The concierge’s handkerchief was linen and very fine; she dabbed it at Eleanor’s cheeks. “Thank you. Merci.”

Madame Perrault put her hands on Eleanor’s shoulders. “I have seen this before, madame, in my ladies. You have le choc. “

“The shock? I don’t understand,” Eleanor said through her tears.

The concierge cocked her head to one side, puzzled. “Surely madame understands. Le choc. This is the électrique. Le choc électrique. Madame,” Madame Perrault announced, “you are in love.”

VIII

DECEMBER 1926/JANUARY 1927

The neighbors believed Madame Perrault had fiery Gascon blood in her. That accounted for Madame’s tight way with a franc, her stubborn silences and milkmaid’s fist and pistol-shot knock. The bathroom door jumped when her knuckles struck.

Eleanor had dozed off in the bath, her tropical refuge. She had her cigarettes, her tea; she’d been catching up on the weekend’s newspapers, and noticed a mention of Foster’s law firm in a story about the renaissance of the great German steelworks. She tore it out and left it on the windowsill and, reading on, calculated the worth of her own nest egg, the portfolio she’d nursed along since graduation, entirely on her own. It was up, gratifyingly, on the strength of her latest Wall Street picks; she would have some small capital at her back when she returned home. That made her proud.

Economics had its rewards, she thought, considering Madame Perrault’s vast communal tub, with its ball feet and brass fittings and gas-fired water heater, an ominous-looking contraption, all hisses and tinks. Perhaps she would make a mark with her book after all.

She lit another cigarette; the strong blue smoke mingled with the scent of lavender water. Madame Perrault’s geyser thumped and Eleanor let loose another liter of scalding water. The hot mingled with the tepid, warming her; she could feel her pulse in her belly. Perhaps she should have her hair straightened. Her gravity-defying frizz, uncooperative to the last strand, clung, damp and dumpy, to her temples. It made her crazy in those moments; she wanted to maul her head with a stiff brush. She sighed and drew on her cigarette. At least I’m not fat. Who could get fat on strong coffee and long afternoons with numbers?

She stared at the dribbles edging down the pebbled glass in pearls. Why do men always act like mules in a stall? Why have they no sense of timing, of something like grace? She rehearsed what she’d say to him if they met in a café or on the boulevard. She would be firm but fair; he was a gentleman, clearly, and he knew better. He knew better. She felt a pang: perhaps it was her fault, perhaps she’d led him on, given an air of experience in these matters she did not possess. The point was, she knew better too. She could have kissed him back, had she had any sense that was what was required.

“What was required.” Blast the Dulles sense of propriety, she thought; it’s like we learnt love backwards. My body a foreign country, my own body. She looked down at her breasts and the small, low swell of her belly. Who would want this? She thought of him, all that rambling on about Paris, and decided he must have been nervous too. Who wouldn’t be? Grace never had these problems; she simply cut her man out of the herd and that was that. She thought of his fine white hands, an intellectual’s hands, hopeless for real work. Would she let him touch her with those hands, if there was a next time? His hands. God help David on board a boat.

She dismissed the thought of him wrestling with rope with those pianist’s fingers, trying to balance himself; that awkward vision disappeared like an old penny into the racket of the knocking Madame Perrault.

“Monsieur has flowers! Madame Dul-lez! Monsieur is here!”

“I’m in the bath,” Eleanor said. “And I’m not coming out.”

She heard the rattle of the hall window as Madame Perrault hauled it up. Unbelievable, this man’s timing.

“I’m not coming out, Madame!” Eleanor shouted against the closed door. “I’m not available. Pas disponible!” There are few things more annoying than having a man call for you when you’re content in the bath. Or having to talk to the man at all.

Then Madame Perrault’s voice barked out the window and into the street: “Monsieur! Madame Dullez est ici, dans le bain!”

Eleanor stood and reached for her towel. “The whole street doesn’t have to know,” she muttered. She dried herself, hard and fast, then pulled her wet hair back. The final humiliation was that all she had to wear in the bathroom was her cotton housecoat and Aunt Eleanor’s overcoat. She stepped, humiliated, into the cold hall, her bare feet leaving damp prints as she stalked, fire in her eye, to the window where Madame Perrault patrolled, her eyes gleaming triumphantly. Eleanor looked down.

David was right below, his hat in his hand, bald pate exposed. He looked up, smiled, and tucked his spray of tulips behind his back. “Did I get you out of the bath?” he asked, his eyes shining. From up here, she thought, he looks like an American Toulouse-Lautrec.

“As you see, Mr. Barenberg.” That was a little sharp, but she hadn’t anything else to say. Let him work for it.

“I’m so sorry. Shall I come back later?”

“I won’t be here later, Mr. Barenberg. I have a meeting at the ministry at four.”

A second-story window opened with a bang across the street. Wonderful, Eleanor thought: enter Madame Desrosiers, the butcher’s wife, a rail of a woman with steel gray hair and a matching mustache. Madame Desrosiers watched, impassive, with the mordant face of the onlooker who’s seen everything. She crossed her arms across her flat chest and gazed at David and his tulips.

David cleared his throat, hesitant. “I understand. Shall I leave the flowers with your concierge?”

“Madame must have the flowers,” Madame Perrault hissed.

“Madame isn’t going downstairs,” Eleanor hissed back, which inspired a string of resigned French mutterings from Madame Perrault.

Another window opened across rue de la Grande Chaumière, the kitchen window of Monsieur Petrocelli, the quartier’s inebriate mutilé, a one-armed Corsican legionnaire. Another character has joined the peanut gallery, Eleanor registered, complete with Dutch clay pipe and mid-afternoon finger of fine.

Madame Desrosiers unfolded her arms and pointed a long finger downwards. “Un duo d’injures, Madame Perrault? Ou l’échapper belle?”

Petrocelli, taken with the romance unfolding below him, was moved to bawl a slurred rendition of the only song he ever favored the street with: “Auprès du ma blonde, qu’il fait bon …”

Madame Perrault jabbed Eleanor with a sharp finger of her own. “Je tends la perche à madame l’Américaine.”

Eleanor could only grasp the tone of the shouted French conversation about the dilemma of the flowers, but that was enough. “Oh, for God’s sake, Madame Perrault, get the darn things, will you? Half the neighborhood is watching.” Then, as an afterthought, because Madame Perrault ran her life: “S’il vous plaît.” Eleanor felt rather than saw David’s open-eyed gaze and regretted her tone the moment their eyes met. “Wait, David,” she called, “Madame Perrault will come down.”

For some occult reason, hearing English delighted Monsieur Petrocelli, who wobbled to his feet, hauling his shapeless cap off his head. “Bonjour, Madame l’Américaine! Vos fleurs sont trop belles!”

Eleanor crimsoned. “Bonjour, monsieur le légionnaire.”

“I see,” Barenberg observed from the pavé, “that I have interrupted your bath. You look very clean. Beautiful, I would say. Beautiful, indeed.”

Eleanor felt herself relenting. “Not a bad bath for two francs.”

“Two? Well, that is a bargain. Madame Michaud charges me three francs, every other night only. It’s hard to indulge my American obsession with hygiene on the rue du Bac, I’m afraid.”

Madame Perrault emerged on the street below, striding right behind David, eyeing his bouquet. She spread her arms wide. “Beautiful, madame! See, please! Beautiful!”

David offered them up. “I do hope you like them. Came all the way from Rotterdam, I think.”

Eleanor felt herself quite surrounded. “Thank you, David,” she surrendered, her voice steadier than she felt.

Only too happy to make this match with an audience in attendance, Madame Perrault scuttled backwards, gesturing with imploring hands at David, glancing upwards at Eleanor, shepherding David toward the studio door. Monsieur Petrocelli stopped his bawling to applaud, as did the stone-faced Madame Desrosiers. The gendarme on the corner was watching now too; Eleanor could see him, his hands on his hips, smirking.

“Oh, do come in, then,” she said at last, so many eyes on her.

Madame Perrault clucked and fussed over the coffee, and stacked an ancient silver tray with petits fours. Where she kept those, Eleanor had no idea, for neither was there sign of a kitchen nor did Madame Perrault hold that anything but a good leg of pork was best for entertaining the hungry art studio models who came and went at all hours while not otherwise occupied downstairs. She had Eleanor and David knee to knee in her dark front room, more a parlor jumble sale than sitting room, with its Japanese scrolls and prints and brass jugs from India, all mysteriously unconnected to Madame Perrault. A matched pair of cats slept on a neatly folded Red Cross blanket in front of a stack of heavily worked canvases, their scent mingling with the tang of linseed oil and pigment. It suddenly occurred to Eleanor that Madame Perrault might well be a miser of some means. The flowers stood in a slim vase, yellow tulips; Eleanor reckoned David had spent a week’s spare cash to buy them.

The concierge and David were talking a mile a minute about Madame’s collection of books on art, one of which David had propped on his lap. Eleanor stirred her coffee, wondering whether or not she should have accepted the flowers. This occupied her for some minutes while the conversation ebbed and flowed around her. Then Madame was gone, vanished somewhere behind a heavy hanging carpet, and David was looking at her.

He shifted. “I must apologize for my advances the other night. That was utterly rude.”

Eleanor put down her coffee. “Yes. Yes it was.”

“I’ve considered my behavior and I want to assure you it will never happen again. You have my word, Miss Dulles.”

Eleanor thought for a moment. “Is this your usual way with women? Car rides around the city, flowers, a lunge? Is that your style, Mr. Barenberg?”

David looked horrified. “No. Certainly not, not at all. I assure you.”

Eleanor raised a finger. “I am not without feelings for you.”

“I am very pleased to hear that, Miss Dulles.”

“Well, don’t be, because those feelings right now are mainly annoyance and irritation.”

“I apologize,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”

“I accept your apology. Here’s the thing: I can take a walking tour of the city anytime I like. You, on the other hand, David Barenberg, you need to speak for yourself. If you please. And remember, you’re on probation.” She allowed herself a smile. “You are, you know, not without charm.”

He was beaming now. “Where shall I start?”

“Think of yourself as an interesting building you want me to get to know. Start there.”

He laughed. They had water in common, he began shrewdly, because he was from Baltimore. His grandfather was a stevedore who, like many Jews fresh off the boat, simply walked the hundred yards up from the pier to South Hanover Street and looked for work.

Yes, he was a Jew. That had its consolations and its sorrows; his family was more or less assimilated, respectable but barely making ends meet. He was a Johns Hopkins scholarship boy from a south Baltimore row house. Obsessed with words, he collected dictionaries and etymologies the way other, less driven boys collected tadpoles or baseball cards. He had been married once, a mistake for all sorts of reasons. There was a child, now in Palestine, and a complete ostracism by his ex-wife’s family, who were Orthodox and unforgiving of the divorce. “They hate me,” he said. He missed his child terribly. The ostracism was almost as painful: he felt he’d betrayed something bigger than even family—his heritage.

His own family were more understanding. He was closest to his sister; they met as often as they could, for long, probing dinners, sorting through their lives. Eleanor, he suggested, reminded him of his sister: her intellect, her way with an argument, her open-mindedness. The two had a tradition of a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner, all the trimmings, every year, especially since his divorce.

And France? It was a place to escape to at first, a new universe to be decoded, like the numbers in economics, but he loved it on a deeper level, he said. He loved France because it was somewhere he could begin again.

Eleanor took in the man behind the words, listening, conscious only of thinking that this was, for all his faults, the first man she was interested in meeting again and talking with again. He described many more things: his time at Johns Hopkins, the men and women he’d met, how much he loved Paris. Noticing the time, concerned for her meeting at the ministry, he excused himself and left, utterly correctly. Eleanor went back upstairs, light-headed.

Almost an hour after Barenberg left, Eleanor, an empty coffee cup in her fingers, stood and went to the shuttered window overlooking the street, her addled mind a blank. She swung the shutters open; the wintry gray light leaked in, too feeble to cast shadows. Outside, the taxidermist’s fat widow, a woman who’d never stopped wearing her black mourning veil since her husband was killed in action at Beauséjour in 1915, had begun her daily ritual washing of her storefront window. That meant it was a little after three in the afternoon on rue Meuron. Eleanor placed her hand carefully on the flaking sill, looked down the street toward the rumble of traffic on the boulevard Montparnasse. The shutter swung out in the winter breeze; she caught it and held it by the lock hasp. She felt her cheek and her chin with her fingertips, absently tracing her jawline. She was dreaming—about David’s voice and the animation of his face, the soap-and-tweed smell of him, the way his words flowed like springwater, enthusiasm and brains all at once.

David was learning: a month later he asked her to fly with him to Calais, for a day on the beach. There was a friend, he’d said, Auguste Dinant of the Académie Française, who had a nephew who flew for the government mail service, not the poste but the official government mail. He would smuggle them aboard; they could ride with the mail and paperwork and files. “Dinant and I, we trade old dictionaries,” David had said, as if that explained everything. Then he grinned. “Come on, Eleanor, you’ve flown before, haven’t you?”

He hadn’t, it turned out—she had. She’d flown from London-Croydon to Brussels in a converted Great War bomber. She’d had a grand time watching the waves below when they flew out over the vast mudflats of The Wash. Her ears rang for two days afterwards, but it beat the ferry by a full day. Flying travel was, as Foster would say, the future.

Auguste Dinant’s nephew landed them right on the beach; it was about the most romantic thing Eleanor could think of.

So here she was, on the beach at Calais, thinking of Mary Queen of Scots, listening to the Angelus bell from the convent, its gray Gothic hulk perched on its island hog’s back, high and dry in a sea of sand with the tide out. Down the beach, a brood of nurses pushed war amputees in wheelchairs on the rough wooden boardwalk that wandered the beach below the rubble breakwater. The sea crashed and boiled, rank after rank of heaving whitecaps thrown up by the crosswinds. David had started a small bonfire, feeding it with driftwood. They’d had a rough lunch and he’d given her an exquisite miniature copy of Shelley’s complete poems.

“I found it at Knapp’s,” he said. “I hope you like it, Eleanor. Look, the endpapers …”

She opened the small book; it was beautifully bound. She looked over at David and gave him a gentle kiss on the cheek.

“Would it be all right if I kissed you back?”

She slipped the book into her pocket. “I would like that,” she said.

He stepped close, his eyes closed. Eleanor blinked behind her thick spectacles to keep him in focus, closing her eyes only at the last moment.

They walked, arm in arm, watched by a regiment of high-stepping gulls milling at their feet, digesting a beached fish. “Sometime, maybe this spring, when the weather’s broken, I know a place,” he was saying. “It’s a cathedral town, very beautiful. We might go there.”

Eleanor let the offer settle for a few steps. “Which cathedral?”

“The cathedral of St-Étienne, at Auxerre.”

It meant nothing to her. “Why does a Jewish man with his nose buried in French dictionaries want to see an old cathedral?”

“It’s not just any old cathedral, Ellie. It was started the year of the Magna Carta. And not an hour away is another beauty, the cathedral at Vézelay. And any man with an eye in his head knows beauty when he sees it, no matter what inspired the beauty.”

“You’re flirting again.”

“As a matter of fact, I am.” He kissed her briefly. “It’s something beautiful I want you to see.” “With you.”

“Yes. With me.”

“All the way to Nivernois. That’s where Auxerre is, am I right?” They walked in silence. “I’m no expert on the French rail system, but that’s a good eighty kilometers.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“And Vézelay is beyond Auxerre, if I remember my map of France correctly.”

“Also true.”

She stopped. “Mr. Barenberg, are you asking me to spend the night with you in Auxerre?”

His face shone with anxiety. “Yes, as a matter of fact I am.”

She let go his arm. “Well, Mr. Barenberg, I suggest you go for a walk while I think this over,” she said in what Allen once called her schoolmarm voice.

“Ah,” he said, retreating a little. “I’ll perhaps take a look at those dunes.”

“You do that.”

Eleanor watched David circle behind the dunes. She turned and eyed the gulls, racing inland as the seas rose, replete with hake. She brushed the crinkly hair from her eyes and, to her shock, found herself remembering Foster and his friends at the cottage, naked, splashing in the lake beneath the light of a July half-moon, their appendages—Aunt Eleanor’s word—comically adrift between their thighs as they ran in the thigh-deep waves.

The memory drifted, merging with crabbed, forbidden thoughts of David’s pale, round body, thickset and broad-backed, to a whitewashed room, a closed door, a duvet, closeness. Eleanor let herself smile: the tension was to her liking, a knot gathering itself below her belly, tightening all the way to her heart.

She heard a shout, blurred by the wind. David stood atop the biggest dune near the path off the beach, waving both hands, the threads of his thinning hair trailing away in the breeze. He was calling something. She turned to listen.

“I love you,” he was shouting into the wind.

She waved back and cleared her throat.

“Yes!”

He stopped waving, puzzled.

She cupped her hands to her lips and shouted back: “I’ll go with you to Auxerre!”

He threw his hat in the air. The homburg spun away, rising in the stiff wind, a punctuation mark against the white sky.

IX

HENDERSON HARBOR
MIDSUMMER 1928

The sun over Henderson Harbor quarreled with a massive cumulus cloud, casting a massive shadow, paving a blue-black road from the horizon to the sunlit shore. Eleanor stood at the helm of her new boat, waiting for the wind to gather itself, planning her tack home. She pulled her hair from her eyes and waved to the shore. Several figures on the cottage balcony, smudges in the sun, waved back at her. David, in shirtsleeves and linen pants, trailed a hand over the side, a book face down in his lap.

“You and your family have a special love of the water, don’t you?”

Eleanor laughed. “I’m a water rat from way back.”

David caught her amusement and smiled. “You’re different out here, more relaxed. Pétillante, the French would say.”

“What’s that?”

“Sparkling, bubbly. Like champagne.”

“Well, isn’t that the sweetest thing to say to a woman at the helm.”

David turned his book over and fished out a slip of paper from between the pages. “There’s a letter stuck in chapter three of your Gatsby.”

“Oh, that. I’d forgotten. Is it from Grace?”

David folded the letter without reading it. “It is indeed. You tell me she writes a passionate, amusing letter. I didn’t know she drew.”

“Crow quill. She’s getting better, isn’t she? See the one of the Medici fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens?”

“Very fine, indeed. Still close, you two?”

“By letter, we are. She’s a rare bird, Grace. Had a hard time during the war. She lost someone very close.”

“Of course, of course. I’d forgotten you were in France together. We should look her up next time we’re in New York. See if she’s still a live wire. We could all use a good time.”

Eleanor glanced at the sky, scrutinizing the distant clouds. “Are you having a good time, David?”

“Your brothers—I make them nervous. Allen’s curious and distant, like a good diplomat should be. But Foster’s not even curious. He hasn’t said a word beyond ‘good morning.’ And that’s like pulling teeth.”

“Foster’s not one for small talk. He’s not built that way.” She was perspiring, her spectacles sliding down her nose. She pushed them back up with her forefinger. “Why? What are you getting at?”

“Eleanor.” He was staring at her now through the sunglasses he’d borrowed from Allen.

“What?” She paused, irritated. “What? No. You can’t mean—”

He closed the novel. “Eleanor. It’s obvious. I make Foster uncomfortable. If I were rich and blond and gentile and had a boat, well, I think he’d stop hanging on to his drink like it was going to jump out of his hand when I talk to him.”

“Foster’s a very reserved man. I tell him regularly what a stuffed shirt he is.”

An osprey dove, skimming the wave tops, came right at the boat, only feet away, then screamed off to stern.

He shook his head again. “Has Foster ever actually spoken to a poor person?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

David allowed himself a small smile. “You’ve just answered it yourself, dear. As I thought.”

“Just because Foster works on Wall Street, that doesn’t make him uncaring.”

David stood and shuffled to the bench near the helm. “You know how hard life is for the factory workers, the hours, the sheer toil,” he said, sitting. “I know. I didn’t get to Johns Hopkins on my father’s name.”

“What on earth does this have to do with Foster?”

“Surely you know the game. You want to be a policeman or a politician, join the Masons. You want to be a Wall Street lawyer, go to an Ivy League law school. You want to be secretary of state, it helps if you have one or two in the family. If you’re a Jew? You know about the quotas as well as I do.”

“You’re jealous, David, that it? Or just being competitive? Or is it just the heat?”

He’d leant forward, hands clasped between his knees. “America’s supposed to be far less class-bound than England or even France. But it’s not.”

“Hang on, I’m coming about. The wind’s up. It’s shifting. Watch your head when the boom swings.”

“Foster is in harness to the most powerful families in America, but he’s no aristocrat, any more than I am. You see, I’ve been thinking for the week we’ve been here, dear.”

“Evidently.”

“But he can’t see what we have in common,” David said, his voice tightening. “He’s an utter pragmatist. What’s the value of my work in his world? Less than nothing. He’s got his sights set somewhere over my head. That’s the simple truth, Eleanor: he can’t see me.”

“For goodness’ sake, David. Foster sees the world for what it is.” Eleanor let the boat run now, full in the gathering afternoon wind. “Surely you see Foster’s an intellectual too.”

David laughed, just hard enough to be heard over the clap of the waves against the hull and the throbbing sails. “Eleanor, there isn’t a salon in Paris or a club in London or New York that’d call Foster Dulles an intellectual. Look, he’s a lawyer who does business deals. Deals that lead to other deals, bigger all the time. That takes great cunning, great thoroughness. Not intellect. There’s a difference.”

Eleanor snapped him a harsh look. “That’s unfair, and you must take it back.”

“Dear, it’s true and I mean it as a compliment. He’s a trust lawyer, Ellie—maybe the best in the country. He helps the rich get richer, the big cartels get bigger. I read the newspapers. They say he’s the man who’s going to save Germany with Wall Street money. He’s already moved tens of millions of dollars into Germany, and from what I hear there’ll be many millions more.”

“Foster is going to be secretary of state someday.”

He rose and kissed her on the cheek. “And that ambition’s never, ever crossed your mind?”

“Oh, David, get your head out of the clouds. And don’t do that,” Eleanor snapped, shrugging him off. “I’m trying to talk to you and sail at the same time.”

David moved back to the bench, leaning his back against the gunwale, relaxed, bemused. He beamed at her. “You hate being told what to do, dear. There’s a world of difference.”

She shook her head. “Last time we talked, you said we’re at our best together, being different.”

“Which is another way of saying you like to win arguments, Ellie.”

“I think I just did.”

They both smiled. Eleanor stepped away from the tiller and kissed him. “Do you ever think about Auxerre?”

“Of course. It was wonderful, unforgettable. The way the radiator clanged and thumped, like a living thing. And that coffee.”

Eleanor gave a wry nod. “Then we broke up two weeks later.”

“And made up the week after that. It’s our pattern, dear.”

Eleanor laughed. “It is. I love you, David.”

“I love you, too, darling.”

They kissed again, then sat quietly together. For a few minutes there was nothing but the hum of the wind in the sails and the lapping of the waves between them. Ahead, the shore slid sideways, pendulum-like, as Eleanor tacked inland.

“Do you often think of him?” she asked. She turned into him; his arm came around her waist, close.

He gazed away now, his face set. “Hardly a day goes by.” He was clearly thinking about it, his forehead taut. “A very clever boy, a good boy, they tell me.”

They were close to half a mile offshore now; the breeze died. She fixed him with a quiet stare. “I want a child, David.”

“Darling, I want to have a child with you, more than anything. But you know I couldn’t support us. I have a hundred and twelve dollars in this world, dear. I can’t afford to do many things, not least visit Palestine and see my child. That keeps me awake nights.”

“I know it does, David. But think of this: I have a conservative portfolio, blue-chip stocks and bonds. I can put enough aside just from the dividends to cover our expenses, even if you don’t make a penny more than you are now.”

“It’s no way for a child to grow up, Eleanor, seeing his father can’t provide. I’ve done that once. Never again.”

She touched his face, looking at him. “‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.’ Have faith, David.”

“Nobly put, except for one thing, Eleanor: that’s the New Testament. I don’t ride that trolley, dear, remember?”

She sighed. “You know, it’s one thing to say you love me. That’s easy. It’s another to like me, to want to be with me. I’m not sure sometimes you understand the difference.”

“Of course I do.”

Her face lit up. And for a moment so did David’s; he thought he’d found Eleanor, all of her, at last, said the right words, done the right thing.

“Look,” she called, waving over his shoulder. “There’s Uncle Bertie! Hello! Wave, David! They’re waving to us!”

David waved, as ordered, but slowly, his fingers slightly flexed, as if massaging the heavy air. With the low late afternoon sun full in their eyes, at that distance no one ashore could gauge the emptiness of his face.

X

NOVEMBER 1930

“He’s awake,” the night nurse whispered. She adjusted the louvers with a practiced gentleness; a fretwork of light appeared on the quilt at the foot of the iron bed. Dr. Eberhardt stirred in his chair, his great body slimmed by the dawn murk. He blinked and whistled softly through his teeth and opened his eyes. Through the blinds the windows were treacly with rain. Hail, sleet, snow, and rain had cycled through the night; the downspouts trembled with the flow. Reverend Dulles, his hands at the edge of the counterpane, had little breath left in him. His skin was transparent, the flesh of his cheeks sinking into a death’s mask.

“He needs oxygen. Light another paper,” Dr. Eberhardt ordered the nurses, fitting the stethoscope into his ears. The ozone paper fizzed and flashed blue; a white trail uncoiled toward the parlor ceiling.

Dr. Eberhardt leant over his old friend and neighbor. He pressed his stethoscope to the Reverend’s chest for a long moment and listened, then nodded, somber, at the nurse. She opened the door to the hallway, where Foster and Eleanor kept vigil, seated on a pair of hard oak chairs from the manse dining room. Eleanor had talked her exhausted mother into bed an hour ago, then stayed with Foster at his post in the hall. They entered the parlor, silent, Foster first. Dr. Eberhardt muttered a quick “Good morning,” his chubby fingers tapping at the Reverend’s chest. He looked up, the truth clear in his red-rimmed eyes. “It’s pneumonia, Foster. He won’t last much longer. You should gather everyone.”

“Yes, you should,” said the Reverend in a cracked voice, surprising them all. “I have a few thoughts.”

A few thoughts: that was his phrase at family conclaves, his preface to the summing-up. He tried to cough but couldn’t. The nurse raised him onto the banked pillows.

“Oil of menthol, Miss Christopher,” the doctor said, slinging his stethoscope around his ample neck. “Open the passages, give him some relief.” The sheets atop Reverend Dulles’s chest rose and fell.

Foster inclined his head toward his sister. Eleanor left the parlor, her head pounding from the fatigue, and headed for the bedrooms upstairs to rouse her mother. She glanced out the window on the landing: the leaden dawn clouds crowded each other west before the nor’easter. She passed the room Allen often used during his visits home, empty, the sheets taut and undisturbed, the daguerreotype of Grandpa Watson astride a ceremonial horse in Peking hanging over the head of the bed. She didn’t allow herself to react to the empty room; that would come later. Through the hallway floor grate Eleanor could hear the peal of the kettle, smell the aroma of fresh rolls from below. The servants were already making breakfast: Irish tea, coffee from Kenya, hard-boiled brown farm eggs, Watertown’s own butter in disks in the cut glass cruets, the stem ginger marmalade Father adored.

Those breakfasts were over, Eleanor realized, forever. Not until her mother’s stricken face came to her bedroom door did Eleanor realize she herself was weeping. She took her mother’s hand. “It’s time, Mother,” Eleanor had rehearsed, “let’s be strong.”

But it was her mother, serene now, who carried her. “He has such faith, Ellie,” Mrs. Dulles said. “I wish I had his faith.”

The servants had been dismissed; already in mourning, they departed to console themselves over tea in the back kitchen. The sun had broken through the clouds by the time the Reverend spoke briefly of minor financial matters, but there was little left to address; Foster had long ago seen to that. Earthly matters concluded, Reverend Dulles gazed around the parlor. The immediate household had circled the bed, the day nurse near the door, Dr. Eberhardt at his old friend’s side, fists clasped behind his broad back; Mrs. Dulles and Eleanor on either side of the bed, each stroking one of the Reverend’s chalk white hands, Nataline and Margaret and Janet, Foster’s wife, in a semicircle at the foot of the bed. Foster placed himself beside Janet, stone-faced. Outside the parlor window, the manse’s great blue spruce undulated before the November wind; the dying man’s breathing mingled with the pattering against the window. He drew himself up on the pillows, a soft cough easing from him. Eleanor’s eye fell on the Presbyterian church calendar on her father’s big rolltop desk. Soon there will be icicles. Then a spark of annoyance brought her back. I must remember everything. There will be children someday to speak to of this.

“The strength of our family has been vital to me all these years,” he whispered. “I want to know, in these last hours, that you will all continue to look to the family first. I want you all to know that I expect …” Here he stopped, his shallow breath whistling. “… that I expect you all to treat Foster as the head of the family now. I should … I should like you to swear, as your last promise to me, that you will all abide by Foster’s counsel.”

An awkward silence followed this. No one, least of all Foster, had anticipated this last spark of drama in the old man. Mrs. Dulles stroked her husband’s cheek, her eyes never leaving his face. “I will, darling,” she said, her voice clear. Eleanor wept quietly as Margaret and Nataline and the others made their farewells and offered their oaths. Foster’s silent gaze never left his father’s face. As the grandchildren were led off by Miss Christopher, Eleanor looked at Foster: he seemed weighted already, a man stepping into a new life even as his father left this one.

Eleanor’s tears had stolen her voice. Missing David desperately, she could only nod when her turn came, and hold her father’s hand as if to hold him on this planet.

The undertakers moved like shadows in the stairwell, handing their long coats to the maid. Dr. Eberhardt must have called them, Eleanor thought. He was at the Reverend’s desk, filling in the death certificate in his old friend’s massive leather-backed chair. He had given Mrs. Dulles a sedative and was thoughtfully dipping his pen in her father’s favorite blue-black ink, the one he used for all his letters to Eleanor. She watched for a moment. Foster stepped beside her and closed the parlor door. He lit a cigar, the match flame trembling slightly as he held it to the leaves.

“So. No Allen,” Eleanor said.

“You can’t be surprised.” Foster patted his hair down, his habit when pushed to speak about the emotions of their family. It is all he can do to think of such things, Eleanor thought. “He knew Father, Ellie. He knew what it meant.”

“I don’t understand. Knew what? Death?”

“No, no. Knew he’d have to face Papa and choose whether or not to obey. That’s why he isn’t here. He’s worked for me for four years now—he didn’t have to ask for the time off from Sullivan. He knew all right.”

Eleanor had never heard Foster talk in such terms. It’s the Scots in us, Eleanor thought. We can’t give words to what’s inside. She could see he was fighting something within.

He drew on his cigar, expressionless. “Made him what he is, that,” Foster said, choosing each word as if it were in a foreign language. “Makes him soft and sharp, all at once, never really choosing. Talks pretty. People like listening to him. All the time he’s charming the daylights out of ’em, listening to them one better. Father ever tell you his theory?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“His idea was that Allen is none too fond of being in his own skin, so his charm’s a kind of a fog, keeps him protected from his real self. And that’s a dangerous vapor, Papa used to say, to store too close to raw ambition. Mighty combustible together.” Foster thought about that for a long minute before continuing. “No, Allen didn’t show up because it’s easier for him to keep skimming ’cross life. Choices are hard. He doesn’t much like hard.”

Eleanor twisted the skin on her knuckle. “It would’ve humiliated him, that oath.”

“Worse than that,” Foster said. He hadn’t shaved and that annoyed him further. “Would have made him choose. This way, he’s still in and out at the same time.” He made a tipping motion, back and forth, with the flat of his hand, like a man not quite sold by the deal on the table. “Open doors—that’s what Allen likes best. But that’s not where you make a man of yourself, Ellie, standing listening in the doorway. Not by a long chalk.”

“Did Papa mind?”

Foster glared through his spectacles with a cracker-barrel Yankee fierceness that alarmed Eleanor. “Of course he minded. No less than Mother does, no less than you do. And what’s most important, I minded. I know what his schedule is like at the firm, Ellie. I know when he can get away and when he can’t.” He turned away, his jaw set, the muscles in his cheeks taut. “Now let’s drop it. We owe it to Mother at least to keep the peace.”

Eleanor nodded, then offered Foster both her hands, outstretched. He didn’t move, so she stepped toward him, awkward and slow, and pressed her arms through and past his, lowering her face to his solid chest. She could hear his heartbeat in the silence of the parlor hallway; his suit smelt of tobacco but also of somewhere safe, the memory of her father’s Sunday blacks.

They stood there for a brief time, until Foster stepped backwards, stiff with embarrassment. “You’d better cable David, hadn’t you?” he asked. Foster fitted his glasses to his face then turned, already a man about his business.

Eleanor watched him disappear upstairs, leaving only a thinning strand of smoke. The smoke made her think of David, a cigarette in his hand, reading late at night, his soft eyes moving over the pages of French, the gaze of a lover upon his beloved.

ACT TWO

Three may keep a secret if two are dead.

Poor Richard’s Almanac, July 1736

XI

BERLIN
SEPTEMBER 1932

She saw him first: there might be nothing to tell otherwise. He was already at the lake’s edge, stowing his rucksack aboard his bright red kayak, alone in the gray-blue light of dawn, moving methodically, young, perhaps no more than eighteen, but much older in his carriage. He had an athlete’s body, disciplined, sure, unhurried. Eleanor wondered if he had paddled all night, for something—the way he double-checked his watch, perhaps, then scoured the north shore carefully—gave her to believe he had a timetable, that his was not a leisure tour in the picturesque half-light and early morning mist.

He straightened, then opened a map, the same chart of the rivers and lakes she had herself. For a paperweight he used a thick red book, and Eleanor had seen that before too, in the hands of her colleagues in London a decade ago. That’s Marx, she thought, and the thought gave her a strange thrill. Red boat, red book, red baron.

She had been awake in her tent for some minutes, listening to the birds gathering in the trees across the Krumme Lanke and the lap of the water. Last night, by the light of her primus, after setting aside her work on Basel’s freshly hatched Bank for International Settlements, she’d read a handful of election pamphlets that extolled this fellow Hitler. She was intrigued enough to write Foster a letter musing about the Austrian Great War corporal’s political rise. It’s a kind of awful hero worship, which leaves me cold, she wrote, but I do think there’s some merit in his economic thinking. I think, she repeated, cautiously, for she’d heard the stories of the “political murders,” the bodies found floating off the shores of lakes like this one.

The familiar scrape of the canvas faltboot on the coarse beach had stirred her. Still in her sleeping bag, Eleanor had found her thick spectacles and opened her tent, not ten yards away from the source of the sound. No one had stolen so much as a pfennig from her in hundreds of miles of kayaking that summer, but who could be sure? Her tent was pitched on a deserted stretch of the Grunewald lakeshore of southwest Berlin. Her native caution kept her inside her tent for a moment, despite the easy comradeship of the German waters.

Faltbooting was all the rage that autumn of 1932. Germany’s rivers were dotted with the collapsible canvas-skinned boats, and Eleanor, ever the water enthusiast, was literally the first American woman to join the craze. The country’s riverside hotels and pensions were crowded with faltbooters, as were the intercity trains, their baggage cars ferrying the neatly folded craft southward. Then the September rains came. She had been alone on the river for two full days’ solitary paddling, shrouded in oilskins, her glasses blebbed with rain. Heaven.

She looked at the newcomer again. Perhaps, she thought, the rains had made him late, but he did not look like a man late for anything. Then he did a most remarkable thing. He reached into the skirt of his kayak and produced a silver shape, winking in the morning light. She couldn’t quite make out what it was until he began to play, at first a fast scale of eighth notes, ascending, then a sharp jazzy trill off the top and the first slow notes of something she recognized, a song she’d danced to, that famous song about memory and love’s refrain. She listened, still as stone, as the ballad sighed out over the water, invisible smoke.

He stopped and lowered the silver cornet and stared across the lake. His gaze disappeared into the mist, his shoulders hunched, as he listened for something she could not hear. She threw aside her sleeping bag and drew on her rolled-up dungarees, her feet bare. She ran her fingers through her wiry hair. She could feel her pulse in the palms of her hands and looked down at them for a moment.

Eleanor needed a prop. She pulled her facecloth from her rucksack and her soap in its Bakelite clamshell. She strode across the gritty sand, feeling each grain. He was squatting at the water’s edge, the way children do at the beach, bare-legged now in his shorts, and bare-chested, his shirt and wool sweater tossed aside, the cornet on top of the heap.

He turned. “Morgen,” he said, his eyes scanning her. They were large and brown, set under dark eyebrows; his forelock fell over his forehead, dangling in midair. He had been rinsing his neck and face, which ran with water.

“Morgen,” she replied in her schoolgirl German. She had no idea what to say next.

He had paused, thinking very fast, she thought. He struck a needle of water off his chin and wiped his hand in the sand, rubbing it dry. He shook the grains from his palm and then stood, barely a yard from her, his hand out, the gesture of a fellow sportsman.

She reached for his hand and he grasped her forearm, startling her. “Misha Resnikoff, at your service,” he said in an English precise but tinged with Slavic rolling r’s.

She had not expected English. “How did you—”

He was kissing her hand now and caught her again in his glance. “I know a few accents. I speak German, Russian, English, French, naturally.” As if everyone does, Eleanor thought, trying to ignore the electricity traveling up her arm. We tongue-tied Americans. “A little Polish, less Italian, a few words of Armenian, my grandfather’s language. But I confess,” he said, straightening and releasing her arm, “it was your spectacles. They are most American.”

“Well, a very good guess indeed,” she said. “Eleanor Dulles.” She opened her mouth but nothing more came: her mind had gone blank. She looked behind him, beyond, for something to say.

“You bought your boat where? I see it’s a new model,” he said, filling the moment gallantly.

She had jammed her hands behind her, clutching towel and soap; she could not seem to find a comfortable way to stand. “Bad Tölz, actually. I see yours is a two-seater,” she observed, but she found herself again taking in his face. For an instant—only an instant—she thought of her David, stolid, obsessed, distant, reliable, waving her goodbye at the Hamburg America Line pier in New York. They’d worked out another truce, this time to cover her departure. Marriage? She’d sworn to herself she’d keep that topic out of mind.

As if he’d sensed this, something in his eyes shifted then. “Yes,” he said coolly, “I sometimes carry much luggage for the long trips and I find I need the space.” Then nothing, considering her. He had a heavy beard, a fact that seemed terribly important. She looked down instinctively at his hands, tanned and dark, the palms pale and ridged with a paddler’s calluses.

“Ah,” was all she could find to say. Then, trying to redeem herself: “It’s a beautiful morning. I was listening to the birds at dawn. Then you began to play.”

“Yes, I do play a little. Perhaps you are a poet?” he offered, tugging his shirt on, the muscles between ribs and shorts moving like fish beneath his skin.

She laughed, delighted. “No, no, no,” she said, recovering. “An economist.”

“I am going to Cambridge this term,” he said matter-of-factly. “My family business is banking. That is,” he said firmly, “not my life. No. This month I am reading Marx. Das Kapital. So my life is travel and an education in the world, jazz more than anything.” He seemed uncannily self-aware for one so young, she thought.

“What will you study?”

“Mathematics,” he said, and showed all his teeth in a self-mocking smile. “I believe it is my calling. But now, Miss Eleanor Dulles,” he said, freezing off the smile, “I must go. I have an appointment. My apologies—it would have been most pleasant to speak about economics here in this beautiful place with you. Unfortunately not.”

“Unfortunately not,” she repeated.

He extended his hand again and repeated the faltbooter’s gesture. Again her spine turned to light.

Then he was in his faltboot, an old one, she noticed, its sides patched, a small ensign on the kayak’s red prow lifting as the breeze gathered. She plucked at her hair, thinking. “Where are you from, may I ask?”

He looked at the ensign then back at her, settling into the kayak’s aft seat. “Latvia. Riga.” Then he stopped himself and grinned again. “Be well, Eleanor Dulles. Auf Wiedersehen.”

“Yes. Auf Wiedersehen.”

He worked his double-ended paddle methodically, the stroke of one used to the economy required of great distances. She admired his style as the kayak edged into the mist; he amused her with a pair of hard splashes, a kayaker’s salute. Then he was gone. She peered into the drifting mist and for a moment, as the mist fissured like cheddar, she could see the tiny bridge she had used for a landfall the night before, spanning the lake at its narrowest. There, on the bridge, in the shadow of a taller figure, stock-still, stood a child in profile, a knapsack on his back, a bulky fellow in a Greek fisherman’s cap holding his hand.

The mists crept back, filaments of fog knitting above the smooth water.

XII

NEW YORK
DECEMBER 1932

Friday night, a quarter past eight: one by one, the shining dark limousines drew up to the front door of 48 Wall Street, their headlamps throwing jaundiced cones through the veil of snow. A dozen beggars worked both sides of the street, guessing this would be the richest pickings north of the Bowery. But the partygoers moved straight from their cars to the open doorway of Sullivan and Cromwell, where a doorman in full livery moved the vagrants on. He wasn’t inhuman about it: management had provided him with a small float to pay the bums off and prevent them distressing the entering partners and their families.

A modest green Ford pulled up to the curb, property of the archdiocese of New York. A monsignor stepped out, in his all-black formal habit and the simple peaked black skullcap of his rank. He was deep in thought and, a casual glance might tell, not much pleased with his thoughts. His narrow face was pinched with irritation at the snow that melted on his thick round spectacles.

The doorman, who noticed such things as a matter of course, took in two things about the monsignor: first, he smoked a dark cigarette in the backhanded European fashion; second, he carried the same style of square black leather briefcase the Sullivan and Cromwell men carried their paperwork in. He batted away the snowflakes like flies, a particular sort of foreigner’s gesture, ignoring the doorman completely. A German for sure, the doorman thought, that exasperation is pure Kraut, as he closed the impressive door behind the cleric.

“Takes all kinds,” he muttered as the next car pulled up.

On the fifth floor, where Negro maids in starched caps glided with silver trays full of cut crystal tumblers of Prohibition eggnog through the softly lit boardrooms, the monsignor, Franz-Josef Sommer, late of Vienna and Salzburg and the Quirinal, made straight for the office at the end of the hall. He bypassed the crowd of partners smoking cigars and making grave small talk in the uncomfortable way businessmen do; this was Protestant turf, the terrain of the shrewdest trust lawyers in the United States in service to the most powerful men in the land. The monsignor had an after-hours appointment and he was early, as was his custom. He took a seat and waited in the oak chair at the end of the hall, his briefcase across his knees, a society dowager’s lapdog.

He lit another dark oval cigarette and reproved himself silently for not bringing a newspaper. He had so little time to himself on these trips, it would have been good to have something to read now. He sighed and drew on his cigarette as the door opened. A young woman with a fashionably curly permanent wave and a well-turned leg slipped out, her corkscrew hair slightly askew. She did not see the monsignor and stepped away from the open hallway, to an alcove to his left. There, she gathered herself in the shadows. The monsignor averted his eyes and wished again for his newspaper. The young woman walked past him, carrying a stack of gramophone records. She headed purposefully down the side hall, but the hawkeyed monsignor wasn’t fooled for an instant.

“Ah, Monsignor Sommer,” a hearty voice beckoned when the office door opened again a moment later. “Foster’s tied up with another matter for a few minutes, but do come on in.” Allen Dulles raised a hand in benediction. “And Merry Christmas, too. Can I get you a drink?”

“A little wine, red, if you please,” Monsignor Sommer replied as he lowered himself into one of Foster’s grand leather chairs; it gave a faint hiss as he settled. Allen pressed a button on the intercom and ordered a decanter of red from the firm’s private store.

“Glad you could make the party,” Allen said, taking Foster’s high-backed chair as if it were his own. “How was the trip over?”

“I had not traveled on a zeppelin before, Mr. Dulles—”

The monsignor’s lawyer raised a diffident hand. “Please, Monsignor. Allen.”

“I found it very pleasant, with typical German service. The sea,” he said, extracting another dark cigarette from his case—at which Allen pressed a big brass gas lighter into service—“the sea unfortunately does not agree with me.” He paused and exhaled. “Very kind of your firm to make the arrangements.”

“The least we could do,” Allen said cheerfully. What was a few hundred dollars when the monsignor held the purse strings to one of the biggest investment portfolios in the world? A slim waitress floated in and floated out again and Allen watched her go with a vertical flickering of his gaze. “Ah, here’s the wine. We’ve a connection or two to a rather nice vineyard, and I’m delighted to note you’re our very first guest to try a taste.” Allen poured a glass and waited for the verdict.

“Quite nice. Thank you,” the monsignor said. He glanced around the office, grand as anything in any bishop’s palace he knew. “I am a little pressed for time, so let us dispense with formalities. The Holy Father takes a great interest in these matters.”

“Where to begin, monsignor?” Allen replied, making a dismissive gesture with his cigarette.

“Mr. Dulles, our investment reports are quite negative—so much so, we are actively reconsidering all our German positions. In contrast, the Sullivan and Cromwell assessments of the German economy are uniformly optimistic, to a rather excessive degree, Mr. Dulles. This,” the monsignor summed up, “puts the Holy See in a delicate situation. A tiff in the corridors among God’s bankers, as the quaint phrase goes. The Holy Father is not amused.”

Allen nodded and began to pack his pipe. “You can’t be too careful with any investment, monsignor,” he said, working a burning match over the tobacco. “And Germany, at first glance, seems to be a country on the verge of real change. But I think—and it’s my firm’s position too—that Germany has the most potential of any European economy.”

And at that point Foster entered, his finger stirring his tumbler of liquor, his high Victorian collar tight about his neck. “Monsignor, welcome, welcome,” he said as his brother vacated his seat.

“Ah, the elder Mr. Dulles,” the monsignor replied as they shook hands. “We took the liberty of beginning in your absence. I was explaining there are one or two concerns in Rome about the state of our insurance investments in Germany.”

“Why?” Foster kept stirring his drink absently, staring at the Vatican’s emissary. “You losing money? Are they, Allen?”

“No, they’re not,” Allen replied. “There’s been an interruption or two in repayments, but these days that’s par for the course.” Allen smiled. “Besides, your own nuncio is happy. I had a letter from him last week. Very pleased.”

“Except the nuncio does not work with us. I have a responsibility to the investment and to His Holiness which is mine alone. Now, I would like to interview the people who made the reports your firm forwarded to us. I have questions,” Sommer said. He twitched his shoulders, as would a man whose shirt irritates him.

Foster stopped his stirring and exhaled noisily. “You’re looking at him, monsignor.”

“Looking at whom, Mr. Dulles?”

“You’re looking at the man who wrote the legal work for the German elements of your portfolios. You’re at arm’s length, monsignor—your only exposure in Germany is the Italian collateral. Which is why the buck, as we say in America, stops here. Those reinsurance deals we showed you are ironclad, monsignor. You’re covered six ways from Sunday, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

The monsignor looked uncomfortable. He hesitated. “My question, then: what is your prediction for the yield on the German municipal bond market over the next year?”

“Well over the European average.” Foster paused and looked at Allen for a second. “This is the best-performing bond market in Europe, monsignor. That’s a depression out there, and you’re nervous because a handful of water utilities have your insurance portfolio on hold, I got that right?”

The monsignor colored at this bluntness. “It’s more than a few water utilities, Mr. Dulles. We prefer the Italian insurance companies, if you must know. The Holy Father … well, imagine our nerves, with the Communists knocking on the Reichstag doors. It’s a very political situation, beyond the financial considerations. The German banks and insurance companies are, to be blunt, in bed with the Nazis: both want to cut Weimar’s throat. That is our concern. Expropriation, nationalization. We have a portfolio of Tsarist rail bonds, dead as doornails. You see, the Holy See knows its history—we have seen this sort of thing before. And the Reichsbank’s Herr Schacht is as good a dancing master as he is a banker—I very much doubt he will make good on the bond portfolios you have so assiduously helped market to your clients here and in Europe. No, it’s more than a few water utilities, Mr. Dulles. We smell revolution.”

Allen moved in to smooth the fractured silence. “No one’s disagreeing with you—”

“I am,” Foster interrupted. “If anything, the Nazis are a vent for a helluva big German frustration with the botch we made of Versailles. Unpayable reparations! We must have been mad. Let the Nazis have their day. The German banking system is in far better shape than it was even three years ago, their patent royalty arrangements second to none, a vibrant technology market. Hell, in chemicals alone they’re years ahead of us. I know, monsignor. I last visited Germany in the fall—Hamburg and Berlin, knocked on more than a few doors. I know the place, I know the players. Next question,” Foster demanded.

The room cooled a degree or two. “I will require a written assessment from you of the reinsurance arrangements you have structured for us, account by account, please,” the monsignor announced.

Allen was about to speak when Foster cut him off with a glance. “You’ll have that report by the end of business tomorrow. Will that be satisfactory?”

“Yes, it will.”

“Monsignor, you’re a client we don’t want in any way displeased with our work,” Foster said slowly, pitching his voice a shade lower. “But you surely acknowledge that, diplomatically, for Rome, it’s a nightmare to undercut what Herr Hitler is trying to do against the Communists.” He coughed and cleared his throat, running his hand over his hair. “The man has his faults, but damned if I see anyone else in Germany with a sound mind who wants the job. Hitler’s clear: he wants new roads, new hydroelectric facilities in the Ruhr, the remaking of the guts of German industry. Somebody’s going to have to get him the money, right?”

Sommer spread his hands. “Yes,” he murmured. “I take your point.”

“These are uncertain times, monsignor,” Foster agreed. “You hold tight, see what the new year brings. You’ll have your report tomorrow, and I’ll personally sign off on it. Allen, see we get our best men on this. Get ’em out of the party and in the number two boardroom, pulling files. Let’s go,” Foster ordered. “We can’t keep the Pope waiting.” He cracked his knuckles. “No more, I’m afraid, monsignor,” he said, rising and moving for the door, wearing the closest thing to a smile he ever chose to wear on his parson’s face, “than I can keep Mr. Cromwell waiting.” Foster offered Sommer a cool, dry hand and left.

The wives had congregated in the candlelit sitting room across the hall to escape the cigar smoke and compare notes on servants and schools. Time had reduced old Cromwell, the firm’s founding partner, to a patriarch trotted out only for state occasions. One of the junior partners was squiring the frail old man past the wives and into the holy of holies for his traditional male-only speech in a few minutes, but Allen had other things on his mind before he let Sommer depart.

“Franz-Josef, a moment,” he said, ushering the monsignor into his own office. “There’s an issue we didn’t discuss with Foster.”

“And that is?”

“Come in, sit down for a moment.” Allen closed the door and held the monsignor’s chair while he sat. “Monsignor,” he said, sitting on the edge of a desk more modest by half than his brother’s, “there are maybe three hundred businessmen in all of Germany who really count. Most of these men are our clients—not personally, of course, but their firms are. There’s a web of bankers and bank directors who run Germany. Often, as you know, they have more power than the corporate people themselves. Those bankers,” Allen said, tapping the palm of his hand with his forefinger, “are right here. We help underwrite them, establish their joint ventures, consult on the directorships they need to fill. Barely a phone call takes place among those men we don’t hear about, and damn soon. All in, this law firm has intelligence connections as good as the State Department, and probably the Vatican itself.”

The monsignor observed Allen’s performance blandly. This was, the monsignor gathered, an off-the-peg speech his lawyer took out of the closet when required.

“Things aren’t perfect in Germany,” the younger Dulles was saying, “and I’m far cooler to this Hitler fellow than Foster is. Rearmament means just that in my view, but we shall see. The bottom line is this: Germany needs capital. And, whatever my reservations about Germany sidestepping Versailles, if she needs capital, she needs capitalists. That’s something the bankers of Germany understand to a man.”

“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Dulles. I’m not a child,” Sommer warned. “God gave me two good eyes to see with and they tell me Germany will bite the hand that feeds it, mark my words, sooner rather than later.” The monsignor reached for his black leather briefcase and offered Dulles a quick handshake. “For the record,” the banker-priest observed, fitting his cap on, “I know these times are a wolves’ paradise—and every wolf for himself. This wolf is leaving your den now, Mr. Dulles. Thank you for the wine. Kindly see that the report is at the chancery office by dinnertime tomorrow evening. Good night.”

On his way out, Sommer passed the secretary with the curly hair he had seen in the hallway while waiting outside Foster’s office. Her cheeks were high in color and her eyes sharp, a woman rather more focused than a Christmas party required. He turned and watched her slip through the door into Allen’s office so quietly the door might never have been opened.

An hour later, after old Mr. Cromwell had wheezed his piece and the more sober senior men had begun to head home, Foster and Allen were smoking in Foster’s office. Behind Foster, his window framed a perfect New York snowfall. He rolled up a Sullivan and Cromwell memo and tapped it on the glass surface of his desk.

“We’ve broken the bank this time around, Allie,” he said bluntly. “These are the partnership payouts for 1932, plus or minus a few administrative items. You’re in for $160,000. What were you making at State when you left?”

“One one-hundredth of that.”

Foster shrugged. “The senior partners are slated for upwards of three hundred. If this keeps up, we’ll own Wall Street, what’s left of the old girl. What do you think, Allen? In for a penny, right? We go after Hitler’s business and really clean up?”

Allen was at the sideboard now, pouring Scotch. “I think anyone who wants to rearm Germany better be watched damn carefully. And Hitler has Hindenburg in his pocket, from what I hear.”

“What do you hear?” Foster demanded, swirling his Scotch and loosening his tie.

“That’s what the handicappers in Berlin are saying as of yesterday.”

Foster grunted. “Doesn’t matter. Somebody’s got to pony up the capital to keep the Germans afloat. Everybody’s in too far to give up the game now.”

Allen laughed softly. “That’s what Sommer said, before he lectured me about the advice the firm has given him.”

“Hell, he’s got half the Curia thrilled to be throwing Mussolini’s Lateran payoff around and he’s worried about the reinsurance on a few dud bond issues. He’s got thirty-eight million dollars to play with and he’s worried about his reinsurance. Man alive. Well, a rising tide floats all boats—I figure Hitler will have the German economy in high gear inside three years. Make geniuses of us all, you watch.”

“And they’re going to do it by ignoring every provision in the Versailles Treaty, and then some,” Allen warned. “Hindenburg is the army. If he lets Hitler in, the army’s going to either go Nazi outright or get into the sack with them. Then where the hell will we be?”

“Damnation, Allen, you and half my partners are going to bankrupt this firm through sheer perversity,” Foster said, his voice rising. “These deals are our bread and butter. You suggesting we walk away from the money tree? Because if we do, you can bet half the law firms on this street will be at each other’s throats to write the deals we walked away from to bankroll the German economy.” Foster coughed and cleared his throat. “Wonder how the wives are. Where’s Clover? She enjoying the food? Looks thin, eats like a sparrow. You should take her out, Allen, get her a square meal at Delmonico’s, look after her a little.”

Allen shrugged and sipped his Scotch.

Foster looked at him for a moment, then began to retie his tie. “Promised my loving wife I’d speak with one of the juniors’ wives about some damn scholarship. Must be getting old, I can’t remember the kid’s name. You coming along?”

Down the hall, seven or eight of the juniors were officially dry despite the open taps in the big boardroom. The cigar smoke of their elders and betters drifted down the hall as the mules of Sullivan and Cromwell strained at their traces, assembling the brief for the Holy See that Foster would sign tomorrow, not a drink in sight, nor hope of one.

XIII

MAY 1933

Back from a hand-holding client lunch with the widow Montague, Allen opened his window wide; his law office had broiled in the midday spring sun. He looked down at the boycott parade, a river of hats and signs from this height, a phalanx of Jewish war veterans, Pershing’s boys, many of them in their old uniform and puttees, slow-marching downtown, packing Wall Street from curb to curb. Allen loosened his tie and watched the tough old soldiers for a good while, pensive, reading the set faces more than the signs, a thinking man with a good deal to think about, not least his coming appointment with Foster.

The hallway clock pealed half past two. As he came around his desk, Allen found Leo Miller, Sullivan’s lanky young office factotum, in his doorway, his file cart jammed high with bundles of mail, one hand steadying the shifting paper pyramid. “Hey, hi, Mr. Dulles,” Leo called out cheerfully. “That tall German waiting downstairs, dressed like our other Mr. Dulles, high collar and all—that’s Klinsmann? The auto parts guy?”

Allen joined Leo in the hallway. “The one and only. This Law Digest spoken for?”

“Take it, sir, on the house. Klinsmann, huh? Gee, my first live Nazi in the flesh.” Leo tapped a file box knowingly. “We going to do business with Klinsmann?”

Allen glanced at Leo as they walked, but the beanpole clerk stared straight ahead as he pushed. “He and his partner seem efficient-enough businesspeople, Leo.”

Leo nodded. “What’s all this about using ‘Heil Hitler’ on the correspondence to Berlin, sir? Half our typists are Jews, Mr. Dulles—three of them have husbands marching today.”

Allen patted Leo on the shoulder, his football coach gesture. “Don’t like it any more than you do, Leo. It’s the cost of doing business. And that Klinsmann fellow’s going to boost our year-end.”

“I could use the Christmas bonus this year, Mr. Dulles,” Leo said feelingly. “My brother’s been outta work two years now. Two kids and a sick wife. This depression’s gotta turn someday, huh?”

“I certainly hope so, Leo. Well, here I am. You keep up the good work.”

“I will, Mr. Dulles. Thanks a heap,” Leo said without stopping. There was no stopping Leo: he was a go-getter.

Foster had his office window open, his cold cigar cocked in midair, a length of ticker tape between his hands like knitting as the machine chattered out the quotes. “You’re two minutes late. Get in here,” Foster growled, nodding hard at the sounds of marching floating up from Wall Street. “This blasted thing’s bigger than Lindbergh’s hoopla. Look at ’em, the great unwashed.” He scanned the tape, then threw it out the window. “They’ve closed the bridges and the Holland Tunnel.”

Allen hadn’t seen him this flammable in months. “And?” was all he could offer.

“Over eighty thousand, maybe a hundred. Goes on for blocks, from Central Park to the Bowery. The train home will be wall to wall—I’ll never get home for supper. Where’d you lunch?” Foster plowed straight on before Allen could reply. “They picketing the Stock Exchange?”

“No,” Allen replied. “It’s technically a parade, the mayor’s office says. I called Gladding at the Chase exchange desk. Not a lot of hecklers, Dave says. Want to go downstairs and take a look? Not every day of the week you get a chance to look a million-man boycott in the eye.”

Foster shook his head no, staring down at the sea of people jammed into the narrow street below.

Allen raised a smile, a trial balloon. “Well, at least they won’t interrupt trading like the damn anarchists, eh? Blew that corner right off the Morgan Bank. Remember that?”

Foster nodded, still thinking.

“They’re picketing all the German-owned stores,” Allen continued. “I heard that from one of the cops downstairs. Kresge’s, Ehmer’s, drugstores with Bayer in the window, camera shops … the docks as well. Hamburg America Line.”

“The German banks?”

“Them too. Ted Townes called, said there’s hundreds of people on the steps of the Deutsche Bank offices, that many, maybe more, in front of the German consulate over on Twelfth. A Jewish boycott of the Nazis as far as the eye can see.”

Foster chewed on the Cuban cigar, the big muscles in his neck working. “I suppose after they bring Hitler down they’ll want a slice of Palestine. A country.” He reached for the stuttering ticker tape, reading. “Well, well, well, the German stocks have taken a hit, pretty near all of them. Has anyone thought this through? Bosch, the chemicals … who do we talk to?”

Allen was lost. He shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“Use your God-given brain, will you? What’s State think?”

“I doubt they’re thinking anything yet,” Allen said, wary, feeling his way. “Roosevelt’s enthusiasms haven’t reached the striped pants crowd yet.”

“Well, Roosevelt’s going to have a field day with this. Jews against big business—right up his alley, never mind his fruitcake wife. What I want to know is, who’s putting up the money?”

“I don’t think it’s any one outfit,” Allen suggested. “There’s union money, the socialists. Look at the signs—secular Jewish groups, the Great War veterans, the Joint Distribution Committee, Jewish Agency.”

Foster shook his head. “Bolsheviks?”

“They’ve been very careful to steer clear of the Soviets. Rabbi Wise is a good politician. Besides, the Soviets are—”

“A big market for the Germans. This all of them? The whole parade? I heard Boston and San Francisco too.”

“Supposedly. London’s turn tomorrow. We had a cable warning about hard currency transfer problems—”

“I saw it. I just got off the phone with Schacht in Berlin. You think I’m hot? He’s apoplectic, I tell you.” Foster slammed the window shut. “He’s got hard currency reserves for two months, less if they have to start buying dollars to shore things up. The Reichsbank is damn near broke, never mind skipping bond payments.” He lowered himself into his chair.

“You think it could bring Hitler down?” Allen stood, keeping his distance; Foster radiated a tamped-down fury.

“A dollar is a dollar,” the elder Dulles replied. “Put enough of ’em in a row and, yes, a solid push could bring Hitler down. You’re the one who’s been to Berlin lately, you tell me.”

“Hitler’s hanging on by his fingernails. One good push …” Allen shrugged.

“Wonderful. More chaos. How does anybody expect to do business?” Foster idly flipped through the papers on his desk, patting the top of his head, one of his tics when stressed. “Well, I’ll tell you, they keep this up, never mind Palestine, the Zionists’ll have a Red Berlin on their hands. Interesting times, isn’t that the Chinese curse?” He looked at a wire photograph from the morning papers. “Look at that sign. ‘No more business as usual.’ They’re only hurting themselves.”

Having weathered the worst of the storm, Allen readied a strategic retreat. “The Jews have a point. They have to live somewhere.”

“Appears they’re living right here.” Foster gave a sardonic smile and raised page one of the Wall Street Journal. “More good news. Klinsmann gave an interview this morning, right off the boat. He’s having a child, by the sound of things.”

“I’ll bet he’s fit to be tied,” Allen agreed.

Foster lit his cigar and began to straighten his papers. “We’ll find out soon enough,” he said with a grim smile. “He was stuck in the traffic. Speaking of looking a boycott right in the eye.”

Allen took another step backwards, checking his watch. “I’ve got Peters from Standard Oil at two forty-five. What’s Klinsmann want?”

Foster had his cigar going again. “What everybody else wants in Germany these days, something for nothing.” He waved a letter at Allen, holding it up like a bad fish. “Look at this letter from the German bondholders’ association.”

Allen looked the letter over, then waited a long moment before replying. “I see. Not exactly a surprise, is it?”

Foster’s thin lips puckered, knitted with bile. “You know, for once in your life I wish you’d just come out and say what the devil you mean. ‘Not exactly a surprise.’ Jumping Jehoshaphat. Talking to you is like pinning a squid to the wall.”

“I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, so what the hell,” Allen replied, his voice veneered with an imposed calm. “What’s the maturity date for that last batch, the Dillon, Read paper for the Hamburg electric company?”

“Ninety eighty-eight.” Foster was fighting off a lopsided grin: Allen could tell he had him now.

“Pity the bondholders. Hitler’s never going to pay, Fos. Not in a month of Sundays. What’s that line Keynes had? ‘In the long run we are all dead.’ He’s right. Beats an interest payment every time, death.”

Foster did one of his U-turns, standing again, the cigar smoking, raising a thin trail of blue-white behind his back. “We’ve got more immediate problems. Roosevelt’s bright boys are just dying to shut Wall Street as we know it down for good. You watch. The man’s a traitor to the property-owning class. Hyde Park aristocrat my eye, he’s a parlor socialist.” That irritation expended, Foster rapped on the glass, pointing. “Look at this knucklehead and his sign. ‘Don’t trade with Nazis.’ How can we control them if we don’t trade with them? You’d think every German’s a National Socialist.”

Clearing his throat, Allen shook his head. “Hitler thinks so. The Jews aside, of course.”

Foster was still tapping at the window glass; from the sound of it he hadn’t cut his fingernails recently. “Hitler’s a historical necessity. He’s about the only politician who can keep the factories running and the Reds out. You’ve said so yourself. You’ve read Eleanor’s last note, she says much the same thing.”

“That’s not my sense of her letters. I think the Brownshirts scare the hell out of her.”

“Come off it. Ellie can read a balance sheet as well as any man. She knows who’s buttering the German rye.” Foster stalked back to his chair and lowered his big body, the upholstery hissing as he settled.

There was someone in the hall, walking slowly past. When battling Foster, Allen couldn’t abide eavesdroppers. “I don’t see how you think we can continue to do business there, you know,” he said quietly. “Have you read Slater’s article in the Journal about the German law courts?”

“Now we’re getting to the nub, aren’t we?” Foster asked with some satisfaction, rocking back in his chair. “You do take a while, Allen, but eventually the veil drops. Yes, I read it. And I say Hitler’ll learn he needs the law to survive, just like every other politician.” Foster picked up a typescript. “Here’s my reply to Slater, for the next Foreign Affairs. ‘I believe Hitlerite Germany, the new Germany, is undergoing a rebalancing, in the wake of the old regimes, the old imperial powers. Hitler’s is a more vigorous national response to history. That the Germans have an import surplus should commit us more deeply to raising more capital to help redress it.’”

“You’ve used ‘more’ twice in one sentence.” Foster was staring at him. Allen felt the flush rise up his neck to his face. “You asked for straight talk?” Allen replied, his voice low. “What if Hitler nationalizes everything, the Ruhr, the mines, the auto parts plants, the chemical works? What the hell do we tell our clients then? ‘Sorry about that’? Those bond commissions made us rich. We better start cutting our clients a way out of this German business or we’ll end up practicing traffic law in Poughkeepsie.”

Foster, still rocking in his chair, considered his brother, minuscule squeaks punctuating the din from below. “Well, there’s a deep vein of philosophy.”

Allen gestured toward the door. “I’ve got a mountain of files to sort out for Peters, for the Standard Oil deal. Rockefeller’s man has got details on the brain.”

Foster stroked the lint on his jacket thoughtfully, still staring at Allen. He found a fragment of crisp burnt tobacco on his shirtfront and made a show of flicking it off before speaking again. “When you’re finished your little rebellion,” he said, stroking a leaky eye behind his glasses while fixing Allen with the other, “you might do well to remind Peters I reviewed the last two trust agreements for Standard Oil myself. For the details.”

Allen lowered his voice again, a slight smile masking the fresh flush of anger on his cheeks. “I will. I will at that.”

As Allen’s footfalls died away, Foster contented himself with the quiet of his spacious office, the sounds of the protesting crowds far away. He stared at his closed door and shook his head. Will wonders never cease? Allen had never, ever been so contrary before. Not once: never in all his years as Sullivan’s lead trustee to socialite biddies and scapegrace second wives. And now taking Peters on—that was a real change from the estate hackwork Foster could trust him to rough out with a dull pencil before Foster himself weighed in with the scalpel. Well, Allie’s found his balls—and for once they’re not in his own hand.

Foster adjusted his glasses, straightened his legal pad before him, and began to draft one or two wrinkles that might keep Herr Doktor Ludwig Klinsmann, the king of German automotive bearings, on the side of the angels.

XIV

NOVEMBER 1933

Even the schoolchildren were surprised—all this whiteness and not even December.

They strode down new white pavement, chins buried in their scarves, leaving traceries of black in the untouched snowfall, their bookbags and hats and hair webbed with the fresh fall. Gusts of the clotted November snow tumbled across Sheridan Square, past the silent drinking men at the oil drum full of burning tree limbs, the pure white blanching its column of black wood smoke. “Another million unemployed by Christmas!” the Herald Tribune’s newsboy shouted against the wind on the corner. Eleanor’s footfalls filled in almost as fast as she walked, making for the gypsy tearoom around the corner from Grace Dunlop’s house.

Épernay was sixteen years ago. Eleanor’s old friend had run off to somewhere in the Deep South with a handsome heir to an Oklahoma oilfield named Peter whom nobody in their circle knew, moved to Argentina with him, and then came back ten years later, a child named India in tow. Grace had been widowed to a riding fall, she’d told her old classmates, sharing a suitcase full of photographs of life on the pampas to make up for the years incommunicado.

She hadn’t settled down since, the gossip ran; no one would ever tame Grace again, her friends all said. Never.

That marriage—on the train and off to the next experience—was pure Grace. She is, in short, everything I am not, Eleanor thought affectionately. The snow misted her spectacles as she opened the tearoom’s door.

There were two shivering men at the entrance, stamping their shoes in the snow, selling sunflower seeds and apples. “Nickel for a bag and a good Spy apple, ma’am,” the one with the thin brown scarf offered. Both men had been soaked through across the shoulders by the wet snow.

“I believe I will,” Eleanor replied, feeling for the coin in her purse.

“Thanks, ma’am. ‘A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind,’” said the second, tipping his cap.

“Shakespeare,” Eleanor observed. “And well chosen.”

“You’re a connoisseur, ma’am,” he said, replacing his cap and holding the door open, a silver bell tinkling. A rush of muggy air held all three of them for a moment.

“You’re actors, then, down on your luck?” Eleanor asked.

“Yes, ma’am. He’s legit and I’m in vaudeville,” the apple-and-seed man replied. “We’re looking for a break. Tough, though.”

“Good luck to you,” she replied politely.

In the corner, her elbows set firmly on the table, prop for her remarkable face, sat Grace Dunlop, missing friend, once and perhaps future confidante, and, for several hot autumn weeks twenty years ago, the most adventurous thing Eleanor had done in her life, until she’d met David, the cuckoo in the Dulles family nest.

“Tell me about him, Ellie,” Grace ordered, after they had embraced in a flurry of familiarity that set Eleanor’s heart pounding. “What’s he like, this lover of yours? Come, come, out with it!”

Eleanor stirred her tea and tried to bear herself with something like nonchalance; the ladies at the next table were eavesdropping and she could feel her cheeks burning, lover not being a term in her vocabulary, public or private.

“Don’t you play coy with me, Miss Eleanor Dulles,” Grace commanded. “I can see right through your crusty Presbyterian soul. You’re in love, and no shame in that.”

“No,” Eleanor agreed, coloring. “Indeed not. Where to begin, then?”

“You could always start at the beginning, couldn’t you? Or is that too logical for your lovestruck head?” Grace suggested.

“Well, it’s old news, Grace. It’s been seven years since we met in Paris—”

“Paris!” Grace hooted, delighted. “Well, something drew you back, Ellie dear, to the city of lights. But I’ll shush,” she whispered dramatically, reaching across the table and holding on to Eleanor’s hands for a long moment. “Do go on.”

Eleanor retold her love story, pell-mell, for a good five minutes, the enthusiasm pouring out of her. “He was so open about his life,” she was saying, “even painfully so. Divorced, terrified he’d harmed his child, and guilty about the divorce as a Jew. But open, in a way American men so rarely are. That’s what I found so attractive about him: we could be friends. He was the first man I’ve met who is a good listener, I suppose that’s what it is.” Eleanor took a sip of her cool tea and found herself staring down at the tabletop, tight with embarrassment, awaiting the first blow from the worldly Grace.

“Well,” Grace said at last, “that’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make, and that’s a fact.” She considered Eleanor thoughtfully, measuring her next words. “And just how romantic a romance is this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Eleanor, do you love the man or do you just like talking about him?”

Eleanor looked up at the big mirror on the far wall and let her eyes roam over the faces at the tea shop’s tables for a moment. “It’s—well, it’s a big thing for me to say, Grace,” she replied, lapsing into the formal, as she did when big things were to hand, “but, yes, I believe I love him. Truly.”

“Well, it’s the only game in town, you take it from me,” Grace said fervently. “I’ve made my own quest for the grail too, darling. I still believe in it, and then some. You remember when I decided to marry Peter and trundle off to that Argentine cattle ranch of his? Never regretted a minute of it, Ellie, down to the moment I held him in my arms as he died. You find true love in your life, darling, and you hang on to it like it had teeth to bite you back, ’cause that old demon may never come your way again. And that’s my advice to you.”

“Well, the arithmetic was starting to weigh me down, Grace,” Eleanor said. “I was beginning to think there was nothing in the stars for me—past thirty, no children, trying to make my way in a man’s profession … Oh, my word, Grace, I haven’t asked after your child! How is India?”

“Very bonny, thank you. She’s thriving, going to a lovely little school uptown, costs me a fortune, but she loves it. She has Peter’s eyes and my hair and is quite the cleverboots. Leads me a merry chase. And go on, Ellie, you can ask,” Grace said with a laugh. “I am not without admirers, you know.”

Eleanor smiled. “Well, I’m glad. Anything serious?”

“Well, yes, actually, there’s a very special someone, someone quite unexpected,” Grace said, a musing half smile softening her. “I met Bert at the kind of political meeting you wouldn’t be seen dead at, Ellie. Communists, every man jack of ’em.”

“Well, this conversation is taking an exciting turn, isn’t it?” Eleanor observed. “Are you a Communist now?” she asked, on the verge of a laugh. “Forgive me, that was crass.”

“As a matter of fact, I am,” Grace replied easily, “and the work is exciting, as exciting for me as I’m sure the war work in France was for us both, except it’s here, right in this neighborhood, in the streets of New York, for the political survival of the least of the least. Gave away my money—your shiny bright investment advice made me eight thousand dollars in five years, Ellie, and every penny of it I gave away—that’s what I’m doing. What Bert and I are doing,” she said, correcting herself. “You’d be excited too, if you knew Bert. I think you’d see why I’m so in love.”

“What does he do, Grace?”

“Bert Crawford, aged thirty-one, born Boston, Mass., occupation schoolteacher and member of the Communist Party of the U.S.A.,” replied Grace, now sitting quite still, like a schoolgirl reciting Latin conjugations, “is a she, Ellie. Roberta Louise found me and I found her and we’re utterly in love,” Grace said quietly. Then she waited, her eyes steady on her old friend.

Eleanor was struck dumb. The first thing that surfaced in her was the moment Grace had told her at Bryn Mawr that they were over, in that way—not the word she’d used, but Eleanor, heartbroken, had blocked all sound as Grace spoke. In a gentle way, of course, but that gentleness only lit up all the more the scalded nerves of her heart.

“I’m so happy for you, dear,” Eleanor said, letting a brave smile rise. “After so much pain and sorrow.”

“I’m still so bourgeois about it all, Ellie, still afraid my friends will cut me dead. My family has, without a penny. I’ve just Grandpa’s trust fund left—thank God the Dutch know how to build a tropical railroad, darling.” Her hands came up from her lap and she took hold of Eleanor’s again, something desperate in her grasp. “I never thought I could love another human being again after Peter died, Ellie dear,” she confessed, her eyes full. “But I can. I do.”

Grace attracts damage, Eleanor decided, in the most beautiful way possible. She left the sweltering tearoom as soon as she decently could, one of Grace’s perfect kisses singeing her cheek all the way to Penn Station.

XV

JANUARY 1934

Three floors to go and no breath at all to climb, Eleanor thought, her legs oddly light and weak. Outside David’s brownstone, the cold deepened as the city night closed in. Breathless, she’d stopped in the overheated stairwell to rest against the third-floor railing. Eleanor folded herself heavily into a chair nestled next to a much-dripped-upon scaffolding. Musser, the building supervisor, a pudgy, florid man in painters’ coveralls and a porkpie hat, stepped out from his shadowed doorway. “Hello there, Miss Dulles,” he growled. “You okay?”

“Just a little short of breath, Mr. Musser,” Eleanor replied. “This heat, I think.”

The super pointed skyward. “Professor’s out. You want some ice water?”

Eleanor slipped off her gloves and dropped them in her purse. She felt feverish. “No, thanks. I’ll just let myself in and have a lie-down.”

“Want a hand up those stairs?”

Eleanor rose, shaking her head no. “How’s Mrs. Musser and that great plum cake?”

“Me, can’t live without it. The missus, though, she was laid up there for a while, but she’s over in Jersey, at her cousin’s. Still thinks the world of you for that national pension you wrote about in the paper, Miss Dulles. I’m hoping that’ll do some good there, down in Washington.”

“I’m teaching at Bryn Mawr, but I’ll fight for a pension for old people, you can count on that. Give her my best, Mr. Musser,” Eleanor offered as she climbed the rest of the way to the sixth floor. After a slow ascent she used her own key and fought off a wave of nausea as she shut the front door behind her. In minutes she was asleep atop David’s sagging bed, too tired to do more than draw the blinds and let her shoes drop to the floor.

She woke to a kettle whistling in the kitchen. David’s clock ticked on the window ledge. Replacing her spectacles, she let her stockinged feet dangle over the bedside rug. An oblong of light from the hall fell across the desk—there was David’s hat. Eleanor lifted the hat, thinking to hang it on the coatrack behind the bedroom door.

Beneath the hat lay a thin stack of postal receipt flimsies, perhaps ten in all, neatly pinned together with a seamstress’s straight pin. She wouldn’t have thought twice, save a single receipt had tumbled free when she’d lifted the hat. That receipt and the one atop the stack were identical—but dated precisely one month apart. Curious, she riffled through them.

They were all the same—to Paris and sent the third day of every month, going back to the fall of 1932. To 128 rue Dufau, in the fourth, the Marais, the Jewish quarter of Paris. She knew where that was—around the corner from the mairie, on place Baudoyer.

He’s having an affair, Eleanor thought, suddenly very much awake. Mechanically, she dropped the hat to its spot on David’s desktop then stepped back, away from the light. She lowered herself to the creaking bed, her heart a separate living thing, flying away. Footsteps. She lay down facing the wall and shut her eyes. The hall light clicked off and the door edged open again.

“Darling? Darling, it’s me. I’m making iced tea.”

Eleanor barely breathed as the door drifted open. David came closer and she heard him at the desk, things moving in the darkness. Then the door closed and, after a moment, the radio in the kitchen began to play, a voice, far off, then music, something mournful, with horns and violins, diminuendo.

She opened her eyes. I must clear my head. She turned over and searched the dim outlines of the room around her, the city lights leaking through the cheap blind.

The hat was gone, the receipts on David’s blotter too.

I have to see him, look into his eyes. She slipped into her shoes and opened the door, silently rehearsing her first question.

And then something swirled up from her belly, a bubble of a new kind of seasickness, and in that moment she knew a kind of solitary knowing that swept everything else away.

Sprouting torn-paper bookmarks, David’s big medieval French tome lay open on the dining table, next to the teapot and a torn loaf of Viennese bread and the near-empty paper packet of Pocatelli’s best ham and the half wheel of cheese, gored by Eleanor’s knifework. There were fine olives and a sprig of scallions and she devoured those too, emptying the icebox in a trice. “Good thing I stopped at the deli on the way home,” David observed. “You might’ve eaten the furniture.”

“I’ve never been so hungry. I want the dime breakfast at Carl’s tomorrow.”

David gave a low whistle. “So when did you know?”

“I literally had my hand on the bedroom door to come out and see you.” Eleanor shook her head and smiled.

“Well, I’ve never seen you cry like that. Buckets. Oceans.” David gathered her close, kissing her gently. When she opened her eyes, he was studying her from behind a big grin. “Of course, I’ve never seen you eat like this either.”

“We won’t know for sure until I see Dr. Matlin,” Eleanor warned, her mind going like a locomotive. “We’re going to have to get married, David.”

He beamed at her. “That goes without saying. Have you a date in mind?”

“This is serious. How are we going to do this, David?”

“Do what?”

“Live with me at Bryn Mawr and you shuttling between Columbia and Johns Hopkins and have a baby?”

David hesitated. “I could ask Hopkins for a research fellowship here at Columbia. That would help.”

“That’ll last a year, David, never mind diapers, a crib, bottles, a nanny so I can work. After a year, then what? A baby means a different life.”

His face froze. “I realize that, darling. I do have a child of my own.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Don’t be so … oh, let’s not bicker. Not now, David.”

“But the fellowship is how I can help.”

“All right, apply, see what the department says, but I think we should use my savings to live on. We know that’s a sure thing.”

David reached over the table and closed the tome of medieval French poetry.

Eleanor put her hand on his. “You know that I know how important your work is, David. But we’re having a baby and things are what they are. When the pensions job in Washington starts, then we can be together there. Does that make sense?”

He worked his fingers through his beard, then nodded.

“But for now, darling, let’s be gentle and cautious, for the baby’s sake.” She could see the clouds in his eyes. “Columbia and Hopkins together wouldn’t pay you enough that I could give up Bryn Mawr. What would the fellowship pay? Barely enough to cover the rail tickets back and forth. I think we have to go where the money is, hard as that is. Honestly, I don’t have a better solution.”

David took a deep breath. “If that’s the best thing, that’s what we’ll do.”

Eleanor hesitated, then she nodded, keeping her silence. She felt a terrible need to brighten him. “It’s the best thing, David. Easy or not, it’s for the best.” She kissed him, wanting to gather him close, but there was, she knew wordlessly, in her bones, a part of him she could never hold.

Carbon copy of original from Misha Resnikoff’s papers

February 6 1934
Stockholm

Dear Reuven

Motta Gurevitch arrived at stepfather’s cottage.

I gave Motta the valise from the safety deposit drop at the bank in Charlottenburg with the Berlin stock certificates—that should keep you afloat for a few months, judging from the contents.

Cambridge is an exotic place, especially for a Balt like myself—the old paneled halls, the libraries, the perfect English river and the stone buildings and the sheer greenness. My maths tutor is a fellow called Turing, a genius typical of the place. I couldn’t imagine him anywhere else.

I’ve met several Party people, upper-class socialists gone hardline, a mix of naïveté and passion. In my first year the “comrades” included Kim Philby, head of the university socialist group, who shares an economics tutor with me, Professor Carlyle. We met weekly almost from the start of last year’s first term, at Carlyle’s rooms, known far and wide as “the red house.” The people are quite appealing and many of them destined for the highest reaches of the civil service.

Philby’s a smooth one, a stutterer with real ambition to escape his Arabist father’s shadow. We debate endlessly British control of Palestine and who really makes British policy in Arabia—Philby stoutly maintains it’s the oil companies.

There are others more or less Communist in persuasion if not in fact. I’m not certain how deep the allegiance to Moscow runs in many of these people—it’s more the ideals of the Communist International. I am the sole Jew except for James Klugman, about whom more later.

Through Philby and a voice on the telephone I never identified, I met a photographer and teacher, Edith Tudor-Hart.

She was born a Suchitzsky in Vienna and has come to England to escape the Nazis. Her photographs of the children orphaned during the Vienna crackdown last year I saw in the basement of the local church. Most moving, I must say; so too her photograph of the Welsh miners come to Oxford—a huge column of them, all the way to the horizon. Very much a true believer, she is. I’m meeting her again in a fortnight.

You should know that Adela and I aren’t seeing each other, for which I blame you utterly.

All best
Misha

PS At the Cambridge-Oxford boat race last spring, I met an American Jew Adela knew from Germany, James Kronthal. Kronthal’s a rower too, a Yale man who’s worked in various German “privatbanks,” including his family’s own. Suggest you have a go at him.

NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT

February 21 1934

statement of PO Terry ADAMS [4309] / see attached statements of Dr BRIERLY, PO MCKIERNAN 5666

Acting on information received from Mr James MUSSER, building supervisor of 116 W 126th St, at 1238 pm I entered apartment 6B, sixth floor back in the company of PO MCKIERNAN [5666]. MUSSER reported a smell of gas when he was about to change a light-bulb on the landing near 6B at approx 1145 am. He checked with the two other occupants in their apartments at that hour, Mrs Sally MILLS in 6A and Mr Julio MARTINEZ in 6D. Neither had noticed the smell of gas until MUSSER called it to their atention [sic].

MUSSER and MARTINEZ tried 6B at approx 1150 am but got no response. Both MUSSER and MARTINEZ indicate there was a strong odor of gas from 6B. MUSSER did not have a master key to 6B with him, so he returned to his office to retirve [sic] it.

MUSSER and MARTINEZ entered 6B at approx noon. MUSSER entered the kitchen and found the deceased AARON DAVID BARENBERG lying face down in the oven, a number of wet bath towels around him. BARENBERG had made a tent from the towels, MUSSER reports.

MARTINEZ immediately pulled BARENBERG from the oven. MUSSER turned off the gas and opened the kitchen window.

BARENBERG was blue, MARTINEZ reports, and his eyes were open. MUSSER attempted to revive BARENBERG by dragging him to fresh air. MARTINEZ reports shouting and slapping BARENBERG but received no response.

BARENBERG appeared to be dead to both MUSSER and MARTINEZ at approx 1202 pm at which time MUSSER and MARTINEZ went to the MARTINEZ apartment and called NYPD.

I found BARENBERG lying on his back near the window. His eyes were open. He was not breathing. BARENBERG wore a red dressing gown and undershirt and underpants. His spectacles were on the kitchen table. PO ADAMS found a note in the right dressing gown pocket. The note was in the French language. PO MCKIERNAN called ambulance at 1246. Dr Malcolm BRIERLY attended and pronounced BARENBERG dead at the scene at 0102 pm. Probable cause of death: self-asphyxiation.

[signed]

badge 4309

XVI

MARCH 1934

Eleanor woke, hollow with growling hunger, to a streaky pink sunrise outside her hospital window and the distant sounds of newborns wailing in the nursery. She had completely lost her sense of time; her world was an enameled bed and a steel table and a body that barely felt like her own. The baby’s last feeding had been at four a.m.; now the obstetrics ward bustled with breakfast carts and determined nurses on squeaking rubber soles. Since four, frigid showers had come; sharp icy drops tinked against the windowpane. She stared at the melting world outside, listening for her daughter’s cry. One of the night nurses entered, on the last of her rounds before signing off.

“What time is it, Katharine?” Eleanor asked, her throat parched. She coughed and put on her spectacles.

“Suck on the ice, dear. It’ll help.” Katharine was tall and thin and dryly focused, with slightly protuberant eyes and a wise smile. “Just past six. She’s sleeping better now. Feeding in fifteen minutes. Your brother is here.”

Eleanor felt as if she’d been riding a horse for a week. She rolled over and a fist of pain shot right through her. She stifled a groan. “Which one?”

“The older one. Mr. Foster Dulles.”

“See him in, Katharine. Thank you. I forgot where I put the telegrams.” Eleanor reached for her side table and this time the groan wasn’t so quiet.

“The stitches. I wouldn’t do that again for a few days, dear,” warned Katharine. “But don’t you worry. Get your rest, that’s the only thing you’ve got to worry about.”

“Of course. Thank you.” Eleanor closed her eyes, drifting, still drugged from the anesthesia, muddled and lost. She awoke as Foster came in, homburg in hand, in full suit and sprucely shaven and to all appearances a man who’d been up for hours.

“Congratulations, mother. How’s the wee bairn?” He bent to kiss her.

Eleanor felt rather than knew the baby was next to her, and that discovery gave her a quiet, wondering thrill. She looked over at the pink shape, minuscule and finely black-haired. “She’s sleeping. A hard night. Such a beautiful child, isn’t she?”

Foster craned over the tiny shape, staring. “Ah, yes. The Dulles forehead, I see.”

“You’re up early.”

“So are you. Get any sleep?”

“A little. It’s such a miracle, isn’t it? I mean, new life. There. Right next to me.”

Foster nodded. “I’m on my way to the office, but I wanted to see you two quickly before the whole clan descends this afternoon. A quick visit, in, out, you know.”

“Foster Dulles,” Eleanor said reprovingly, “I do believe you’re nervous. It’s only a baby, a little girl. Your godchild, you should know.”

“Well, that’s just wonderful. Thank you. I’ll do my best. Does our latest Dulles have a name yet?”

“I’d thought of all sorts. My word, I can barely hear her breathing,” she said, listening close. “I’m very partial to Sophie, after Great-aunt Sophia. There was a Sophie in David’s family too, somewhere.” She shook her head. “Oh, Foster, it comes in … in waves of it. I miss him so much, and I’m all over the place.” She blinked back the tears, uselessly, the sorrow breaking out of her.

Foster stepped back and gently closed the door with a click. “I’m sure it does, Ellie.”

“I feel so awful, even thinking of being happy,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Mother. Widow. I don’t know what the words mean, I don’t know where I am. I wish Mother were here. I miss her almost as much as I need David.”

Foster bent and embraced her clumsily, then extricated himself. “God sends us what’s to improve us.”

“Well, He never went through labor, Foster, I can tell you that,” she said, blowing her nose. “Look. She’s stirring.”

Foster didn’t smile. “No, I don’t suppose He did.”

Eleanor exhaled, the first deep breath she’d ventured since the operating room. “Forgive me. I’m so tired I say the first thing that comes into my head. Everything now seems so unimportant except the baby. Nothing else matters.”

“You may feel that now, but—”

“—you know, Foster, you do mean well, but I don’t want to think about how I feel for a while. I’ve never been this tired in my life. Talking exhausts me.” She offered Foster the stack of telegrams. “Aunt Eleanor’s is lovely.”

“Nice to hear from cousin Meredith, all the way from China,” Foster said, riffling through the slips. “Have you given any thought to a last name?”

“I’m already Mrs. Barenberg. Why?”

Foster looked up from the telegrams. “I thought you might want to think of returning to Dulles,” he said slowly.

“You’re ever so terribly obvious, Foster,” Eleanor replied. “That’s why you’re here at the crack of dawn, in your best suit, isn’t it?”

He was stone-faced. “Well, have you?”

“My daughter isn’t Dulles property, Foster, proud as I am of our name, my name. She’ll be her own woman, you have my word on that.”

“Then why not give her the best start she can have? Your name.”

Eleanor suddenly felt sick. “What’s wrong with David’s name?”

“Let’s be practical, Ellie. Right or wrong, a Jewish name is hardly an asset in most circles.”

“And Dulles is going to help, you think?”

“Hasn’t hurt so far, has it?”

Little Sophie stirred in her bassinet. “She’s going to need feeding in a few minutes.” Eleanor hauled herself upright, grimacing, and began to brush her hopeless hair. “I’m afraid to look in a mirror. Foster, you forget one thing: Sophie’s going to face far more difficulties because she’s a female than if she’s taken for a Jew.” “Mistaken for a Jew.”

“Mistaken for a Jew?

What are you getting at?”

“Exactly my point,” Foster replied.

“My God, you are serious about this, aren’t you?”

Foster moved his hat in his fingers for a moment. “I wanted to get here before they had you sign the birth certificate forms. These legal things can take some unraveling, you see. Her eyes are open.”

Eleanor lifted her daughter to her. “Here, darling, here …” She began breast-feeding Sophie. “We’re getting good at this, aren’t we? There, there …”

Foster looked away. “I thought the latest was to bottle-feed. Baby formula, they call it. We have clients who make—”

“I get one chance at this,” Eleanor interrupted, her voice flat. “I’m thirty-nine. I’ll see to my daughter how I want. Would you call the nurse with that bell push, please?”

“These things are not easily undone,” Foster replied. He cleared his throat. “It’s not a—”

“Foster, I’m nursing my baby,” she said frostily.

The door clicked open and Katharine appeared behind Foster.

“Should I lift her like this?” Eleanor asked.

“You’re doing fine. She’s just sleepy. She’s fine.”

The nurse left, leaving the door open.

“Why?” he asked. “Why did you change your mind at the last minute?”

“At the wedding?”

“Your name. Yes.”

“She’s gone to sleep. I’ll just hold her. Pull that pillow over, will you? Thanks. Do you have time for this?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Foster said, lowering himself into the hard wooden hospital chair.

“I’ll tell you a story, then. The night before the wedding, I had no problem getting to sleep,” Eleanor began. “But two-thirty came—I noticed the clock—and I woke up completely. My mind was so clear, as if I’d slept half the day away. I went out on the balcony and looked out at the Potomac. David was at his sister’s place in Baltimore, so I searched the horizon, imagining where he was, where he was sleeping, what he was dreaming, what our life would be like together.” She stared absently out the window now. “I had no premonitions, even with all the problems we’d had. I’d made up my mind that he was the man for me for the rest of my days, that we were what we were, that we’d grow together, be together, have children together. I wasn’t distracted, wasn’t worried. I knew David had great pain. I couldn’t have not known. I suppose the psychiatrists would know what went wrong, but I—no, wrong is the wrong word. He was a dark soul. There were parts of him that were unreachable—even, I think, for him.” She turned back to Foster. “Can you imagine such a thing? You know, when we went to France together, that first time, he was so transformed. Happy, down to his shoes. I think he’d finally managed to escape all the guilt about his divorce and not seeing his son. That was … soul-destroying. That was the phrase he used, and it must have been. For him.”

“You haven’t told me why you chose the name.”

“Oh, Foster, you’re hopeless. This isn’t about the name. It’s not nearly as important as you make it, not nearly as important as how much I loved him. Still do: that’s the point. When I came out of the anesthesia yesterday morning, I was pretty wobbly. When I finally got my glasses on and I could see Sophie, I heard David’s voice. Not in my imagination, but right here. He was right here, in this room. He wasn’t a shadow, but a feeling at the back of my neck that another person was in the room, with us. Do you believe me, Foster?”

He raised both hands, leaving the homburg nestled in his lap. “I’ve never known you to lie about anything, Ellie. If you say it’s so, it’s so.”

“We’re no good at this talking about ourselves, Foster,” Eleanor muttered, “not in this family. We’re just something awful at it.” Her eyes filled again, swimming behind her spectacles. “The worst thing, the very worst thing, is that everyone talks about David as though he’s gone. It’s awful. I need to talk about him, to say his name, remember his smell, the way he held a book, the softness of his eyes, the boy inside all that formality.” She searched her brother’s face. “You have to be patient with me, Foster. You mustn’t judge. I need you to talk about David, just so I can hear his name. And don’t leave the room, don’t abandon me. I know how hard it is to see me … like this. But please stay. The biggest terror is that I’ll let all the grief out, all at once, when I’m alone … then I’ll disappear. I’ll just disappear.”

Foster took his spectacles off and rubbed his eyes, looking suddenly old. He fitted his glasses back on and said, “Is there anything I can do, of a practical nature?”

Eleanor surprised even herself—she laughed. “You know how you can help most—oh dear, that’s all wrong, you’ve been a tower since David died—but just one small thing, that you’ll be so good at. Will you?”

“Of course.”

“Let the others know. About talking about David. I can’t tell them all, one by one.”

“All right.”

“Starting with Allen.”

“Starting with Allen?”

“Whenever we meet, as soon as he can, he leaves the room, his face even glummer than mine. It’s infuriating. Like he’s the one in mourning.”

Foster leant forward in the old chair. “I will. I’ll do it. Now about baby’s name, Ellie. You were saying.”

“I forget … I’m sorry.”

“David’s voice,” Foster reminded her. “You were remembering David’s voice.”

“Oh, God, Foster, I’m forgetting everything.” She blinked, running her fingers through her hair. The morning sun cut sharp squares of light on the white ward room wall. “That afternoon, before the wedding—we had no money, you see, I wanted to give him something special. I’d told him I was going to keep Dulles, but I chose his name then and there. As a gift. That’s all. A gift.” Her gaze locked on the newborn, sleeping in her arms.

Foster watched her, waiting.

“Do you think he’d mind?” she said at last. “David did love me so.”

From the personal archive of Misha Resnikoff

Discovered in file labeled only as “May 1936” / translated from French by MR

Prof Dr Guillaume Charteris-Reynaud [personal file: 498/23R] of the Sorbonne was visiting Prof Dr Barenberg [personal file: 124/61E] in New York in February 1934, approximately two weeks before the suicide. 23R was not interviewed by the New York police in connection with the suicide of 61E, as he had returned to Paris before the time of his colleague’s death. This was his first statement about the matter. Operative T—, a stringer for the Jewish Telegraph Agency, interviewed 23R at his residence 63–65 rue du Bac, VII, May 16 1934.

Operative T- located 23R by looking for past coauthors of 61E. Her shorthand notes follow; acting on instructions from headquarters, Operative T- did not publish her findings.

May 16 1934

Prof Dr Charteris-Reynaud is a widower, aged 52, severely wounded in action at Bois des Caures, near Verdun, losing most of his lower right leg. He was invalided out of the armed forces in March 1917 and walks with a profound limp. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for heroism in the Bois de [illegible] action. He knew Prof Dr Barenberg well; the two were fellow specialists in romantic medieval poetry of the XIIIth and XIVth centuries.

Charteris-Reynaud was on a New York subway car on February 4 1934, a Sunday, en route to a scheduled meeting with Barenberg at the Grand Central Station, at 2pm. Charteris-Reynaud had asked to see a painting exhibition at a gallery on 42nd Street run by his cousin [illegible].

As Charteris-Reynaud left the car, he saw Barenberg and a much larger man, well dressed, big square body, in rimless glasses, homburg hat. “He looked German, especially as he wore acetate collars, very dated. We haven’t seen those in Paris since before the war,” was Charteris-Reynaud’s reaction. “Barenberg had confronted the other man. That was clear. They were having a terrific argument at the far end of the platform, past the stairs up, away from the others there. I didn’t know how to approach them and my English is not very good, but I could see the bigger man was irate [illegible].

“‘I have Jewish clients all over Germany,’ he kept shouting. Barenberg appeared terrified, that was my first impression. The bigger man was quite close to him. I thought he might hit Barenberg with his fist or his umbrella.

“I waited near the stairs. There was a small crowd there, from the earlier train, watching. Barenberg didn’t move. He stood there and took it, a real tongue-lashing.

“Nobody moved until the conductor blew his whistle and then the man shouting at Barenberg left the platform. Barenberg was quite shaken. I asked who the man was and he said ‘my brother-in-law.’ He wouldn’t say what the argument was about, but he did admit ‘it is a family matter.’

“I have known Barenberg for over twenty years: I have never seen him in such a state. I had misread his posture. He was pale and sweating, but he wasn’t afraid: he was furious.

“It is my opinion that Barenberg’s brother-in-law had been very insulted by something Barenberg had said, something about the Jews in Germany. I have never seen him so profoundly disturbed.”

XVII

NEAR DOVER PLAINS NY
AUGUST 1935

The shaded forest track was relief indeed from the heat wave they’d driven through on the new state parkway up from Salt Point. The unpaved wooded road wound along the hillslope some thirty feet above the creek bed, falling away almost vertically to their left, a palisade of hardy balsam and crisscrossing vines overhanging the rushing white water below.

Grace slowly edged her mother’s pretentious big black car—a peace offering in the ongoing Dunlop wars—over the old wooden bridge and into a small spur of earthen roadway nestled beneath the canopy of hillside trees. She switched off the ignition. For a long second all anyone could hear was the hissing roar of the creek slashing its way over the rocks and the tinkling of the engine as it cooled.

Clover Dulles opened her door gently. “So quiet,” she said. “Allen would love it here.”

Eleanor had the sleeping Sophie at her feet. With a practiced lift, she gently raised the toddler up and deposited her across her shoulder without waking her. “It’s perfect,” Eleanor agreed. “I found this place when I first walked the trail, Clo. One of the farmers told me about the old limekilns across the bridge. They’re pre-Revolutionary.”

Grace had her hands on her hips, shaking her head at the wall of water crashing down the belly of the gorge. “Well, my dear, you’ve found us a spot and a half here. I should have brought India. She’s mad for water—look at it, delicious!”

“I haven’t brought my bathing suit,” Clover observed.

“That makes two of us!” Grace replied, laughing slyly.

Eleanor shrugged at Clover as her sister-in-law shared with Grace the weight of Aunt Eleanor’s massive wicker picnic basket.

“What the devil’s in here, Ellie, a body?” Grace demanded.

“Not too fast,” Clover warned. “I haven’t your strength, Grace.”

“Been in the family forever,” Eleanor replied. “When we were children, Allen called it ‘the coffin’—Father always made him carry it.”

They picnicked on an enormous sun-warmed boulder just above the flying water, three pale fish on a rock, full in the mid-afternoon glare. Afterwards, Grace and Eleanor lolled naked in the rapids, Clover read the Sunday paper, and Sophie slept in the pine crèche Eleanor had stowed in the limousine’s trunk, in the shade of a towering Austrian pine.

“Warmest I’ve ever felt this,” Eleanor judged, rising and falling with the pulse of the creek water. “Usually it’s like ice, coming right out of the Berkshires. I haven’t been here since … years. I remember the first time I came here, just before I went up to Bryn Mawr. I camped up on the hill, cooked in the rain, and loved every minute of it.”

“One woman against nature,” Grace offered. “That’s you.” She considered Eleanor, the creek water sluicing over her freckled shoulders. They had settled just downstream of the bridge, its silhouette cutting the afternoon sun in half. “Our husbands do have this habit of shuffling off, don’t they?”

“I can’t be flippant about it yet. There are times I look at Sophie and …” Eleanor’s voice fell to nothing.

Grace stroked her friend’s cheek and the line of her jaw with a finger slick with water. “I know, darling, I know. I sometimes catch Peter’s grin when India’s prattling on about something else entirely. Oh, dear God, who’d have thought we’d both end up widows?”

“Do you ever think you might have saved Peter—”

Grace hooted, harsh in that place, and splashed at Eleanor. “That way madness lies, darling. We’re each of us born alone and we die alone—I’ve no illusions on that score. Peter died because he looked the wrong way on a bad horse. It threw him. And the fall killed him, as night follows day. Not a thing I could have done about it, even ten feet away.”

Grace said nothing more as they watched a blue heron trout-spotting not twenty yards upstream of them.

“No one’s suggesting you forget for a moment, darling, not a single moment. My granny Trinette Agnes, a real dame, had a saying she saved for funerals—and Granny Tee went to plenty of those. ‘You can forgive them for dying—that’s easy enough, in due time. But then you have to forgive yourself your own regrets—and that’s like pulling teeth.’”

Grace let herself float past Eleanor, down the staircase of falling water, her feet bobbing out of the bubbling turbulence. She reversed, nestling against a big trapezoid of granite, and took Eleanor in. They had eddied out of the shadow of the wooden plank bridge, much closer to Clover and Sophie, who slept on, a smudge of pink and white against the great black rock.

“Haven’t lost that Presbyterian faith, have you, darling?” Grace asked Eleanor. “Going pagan like your sister-in-spirit?”

“I gave real thought to converting, you know,” Eleanor admitted.

“Oh, that’s priceless, that is,” Grace disparaged. “D’you know, they shave their heads and wear wigs, Jewish women? Did you really think to convert, darling? Or was it a spot of lovesickness?”

“That,” Clover observed mildly over the top of her newspaper, “would’ve set the cat amongst the pigeons in the Dulles clan, wouldn’t it?”

“That’d appeal to you, Clover Dulles,” Grace said between laughs. “You and your reputation for mischief.”

“I’d have had his faith, at least,” Eleanor replied from the creek below. “There’s that.”

“Easy for me to say, Eleanor, but you’re not alone in this world,” Clover gently chided. “You do have your child. I know, if I ever lost Allen, I’d find comfort in our children. I think being alone would be just an awful thing after a loss like that. But those Dulles boys would fare just fine.” She paused and turned a page. “You know, I do believe they’re a pair of sharks, those brothers of yours.”

The others stared at the slim figure behind the newspaper for a long moment.

“Well, I’ll be … out of the mouths of babes,” Grace said, standing up, hands on hips. She drove a glassy crest of creek water at Eleanor with both palms. “Enough doom and gloom!” she bellowed. “You brought us here—enjoy it, Miss Muddlehead! Race you to that rock!” Grace arced her lithe body out of the water for an instant, diving into the swirling pool downstream. Eleanor gave chase, her laughter echoing into the trees, healed, for the span of that sweltering afternoon, by Grace’s sheer waterborne momentum.

XVIII

WASHINGTON, D.C.
APRIL 1936

The spring rains in Washington that year were warm and relentless, a perpetual drizzle knocking loose the fragile new magnolia and cherry blossoms, sending them spinning down the gutters, lost ships. By mid-month, as the taxman beckoned, Washington had assumed the half-drowned air of a tropical outpost. In the teeming lobby of the byzantine Senate Office Building, a morning full of numbers in her head, the newest hire of the burgeoning Social Security Board’s pensions office unfurled her umbrella. Eleanor had spent the past two hours on the politicians’ turf and she’d escaped with her skin intact, no mean accomplishment for a rookie.

A familiar voice: five yards from her, his raincoat blotched with rain, Foster had entered the lobby, close in conversation with a colleague, both forceful, big men. Foster’s interlocutor stood half a foot taller, square-jawed and crew-cut, a dime-sized swastika button in his lapel.

Spotting his sister, Foster called: “Ellie, hello! I left you a message this morning. You get it?”

“No, Foster. I’ve been in Social Security meetings all morning.”

“Eleanor, this is Bar—” A sheaf of papers slipped from Foster’s grasp, spinning down. “Pardon me …”

The German stepped into the breach, taking her hand, kissing it, and clicking his heels. “Baron Kurt von Schröder. Enchanté. I have read your book on the Bank for International Settlements, madame. Most informative.”

“Good of you to say so, Baron,” Eleanor replied. “I went to Germany to write it, actually. And, what with Sullivan and Cromwell’s interest in the bank, I did have my brothers to interview first, you see.”

Foster had recovered his papers. “The Baron is on the BIS board, Eleanor. He holds the German seat. His family owns the Stein Bank of Köln.”

They chatted. None of them saw the older couple at first. They advanced arm in arm, put-upon and not a little lost in the jumble of the buzzing mid-morning crowd beneath the rotunda, in their sixties, fading, the two of them, him with a salt-and-pepper beard, her in a worn persian lamb jacket and veiled hat.

Eleanor, glancing at them over Foster’s shoulder, saw the woman just as she seemed to recognize Schröder. Her heels clattering, her face anguished, she shrieked: “Dieb! Nazi! Verbrecher!” and flew past Eleanor with surprising speed, striking Schröder on the ear with her clutch purse, blindsiding him, knocking his hat off. The Baron parried the next blow with his briefcase as onlookers stared.

The older man with her caught Schröder’s attacker in mid-stride, shouting, “Herauf, bitte, Beate! Herauf! Bitte!”

The woman, sobbing with rage, hauled back her veil and spat at Schröder, barely missing. A red-faced Capitol policeman, his belly jouncing as he ran, stepped into the circle around Schröder. “Hey, break it up, break it up! This is the Senate of the United States, lady.”

His voice shaking, the bearded man this time held his wife back. “My wife is … upset. Beate, bitte, Ruhe!”

“That doesn’t mean she can hit people,” the policeman warned. “Now you two stand over there. Move it.” The couple stepped aside. He took in Schröder. “You all right, sir?”

The Baron’s voice was low and hard. “Fine, thank you. Tell me, officer, do you allow madwomen in your government buildings as a matter of course?”

“She just came up and started swinging, officer,” Foster said.

“Nobody hurt?” the policeman demanded.

“No,” Foster stated. “I’m an attorney, officer. I think my client would prefer to let this slide. He’s a visiting dignitary.”

Looking the couple over—the old gent was dabbing his wife’s eyes with a handkerchief—the policeman jerked a thick thumb at them. “They leave. Now. No charges. Okay?”

“Thank you, officer,” Foster said. The policeman approached the older couple and escorted them out the grand front doors.

Eleanor had picked up Schröder’s black hat and handed it to him. “I can assure you, Baron, Washington isn’t usually this exciting.”

Guffawing, Foster agreed. “They save the real fights for the Caucus Room, just behind you, Kurt.”

Looking relieved, Schröder nodded. “Indeed? Perhaps we should return for the afternoon bout, Herr Dulles?”

“I’m sure that can be arranged, Baron,” Foster said, brandishing a fist. “Blood all over the walls.”

Eleanor offered her gloved hand to Schröder. “I’m so sorry, Baron, but I must go. Do excuse me.”

The banker bowed again. “By all means, madame. A pleasure to meet you. It’s been most … what? Memorable?” He kissed her gloved hand. “Auf Wiedersehen.”

As she turned to leave, Eleanor asked Foster, “Are you at the Hay-Adams?”

“Yes. Drinks at five-thirty?”

“See you then. Goodbye, Baron.” Schröder inclined his head and replaced his hat; Eleanor noticed his perfectly manicured fingernails.

She made her way through the crowd to the street exit, where she met the Capitol policeman. He made a thoughtful face and tucked his thumbs into his Sam Browne. “I hear a lotta hard-luck stories in my job,” he said quietly, glancing at the German couple. “That’s gotta be one of the worst, ma’am, that one.” He nodded and returned to his beat.

At the top of the broad granite Constitution Avenue stairs, the old couple huddled beneath a single tired umbrella. “I couldn’t help myself,” the woman was saying in refined German.

“Excuse me,” Eleanor said, her umbrella touching theirs. “Are you all right?”

The older man smiled an ironic smile, his brown eyes calm and inquiring; they reminded her of David’s. “I am a doctor, madame. Dr. Solomon Neimann. Beate, my wife.” Mrs. Neimann gave a short nod, recovering a little.

“Do you know who that man is?” Eleanor asked.

“Forgive my wife,” Dr. Neimann said. “Here, here in your capital—the shock, it was too much.”

“I hope,” Eleanor said in her schoolgirl German, “that you will soon feel better, Mrs. Neimann.”

Mrs. Neimann brightened. “Oh, you speak German. He is a friend of yours, Schröder?”

“No, I’d just met him. My brother is a lawyer. The Baron is one of my brother’s clients.”

“Mein Gott! He is the SS man, do you know this?” Dr. Neimann declared. “Do you know what this means? Schröder, one of the inner circle, gives the SS the factories the Nazis have stolen—from us, from my wife’s family.”

Mrs. Neimann had calmed herself. “We paid bribes,” she said patiently. “We obeyed laws. And still they took everything from us. Our factory in Köln, the Nazis threw my uncle, my father, in the street. Schröder and his bank bought the factory for nothing. He is criminal. They are all criminal. The senator, he can do nothing. Nothing.” She began to weep again, disconsolate.

Eleanor gave Mrs. Neimann her handkerchief.

“Danke schön,” she said, then switched to her stumbling English. “Today our workers make … SS hats. Understand? For the SS. My family factory. That animal, his hat … can you imagine this?”

“I have heard a little of such things,” Eleanor admitted.

“Then you know. Then inform your brother, please,” Dr. Neimann said. “America, so naive.”

“I’m so sorry, I’m in a hurry, but before I go—one question. Are you related to the economist Gunter Neimann?”

“But of course,” Dr. Neimann replied. “He is my nephew.”

“The same Gunter Neimann who married Marta Bravo de Urquía?”

“Yes, yes, this is the same. They are trying to get out, but it is not so easy, you must understand.”

“I went to school with Marta. Here,” Eleanor said, “take my card. If you need anything, call. Please call—I want to help Marta and Gunter. I must go. I’m late.”

“Thank you,” Dr. Neimann said.

“So much,” his wife added, trying bravely to smile.

Eleanor left them there, comforting one another in the rain. She felt a needle of loneliness, but also something new: a dim sense of new purpose in the harsh shadow of sorrow since David’s death.

“Of course he’s a client,” Foster said irritably. “So’s his bank. The sugar,” he ordered, “please. This old-fashioned’s got too much damn bitters in it. Schröder’s been a client since the war, run banks in England and here as well. Good solid banks. We’d be fools not to have them as clients. Why?” Foster brooked nothing but the best when he dined, and the Lafayette restaurant at the Hay-Adams was the best, a hushed place, the dull Washington evening full in the room’s perfect windows.

“The woman said he was in the SS, Foster,” Eleanor said, holding her ground. “That he’d stolen their family factory in Köln.”

“Let’s make a few things clear, shall we?” Foster said, chewing thoughtfully on a bread stick. “First, I’ve had—what?—a dozen Jewish clients in Germany since Hitler came to power. Eight of them, I got almost all their assets out. Want the names? Happy to give ’em to you.”

“These people are called Neimann.”

He shook his head. “I don’t have a client by that name. No,” he said, his habitual finger in his old-fashioned, stirring. “It’s a revolution, Eleanor. You know—you’ve been to Germany. Revolutions aren’t clean. It’s not so easy to see things in black and white. They walk through the door. I help them. That’s what I do. I get them the best deal I can, if they’re in a situation like the Neidermanns.”

“Neimann. Their name is Neimann. They’re the aunt and uncle of an old classmate of mine.” She waited, her Riesling warming in her hand, but Foster said nothing. “They’ve lost everything. They were talking to Senator Dunaway, on the Finance Committee, to see if there was something he could do.”

“Look, Eleanor, you’ve been around the block,” Foster said, chewing a stray pebble of ice. “Find yourself on the wrong side of history and it runs right over you. We can’t save the world, Ellie. That’s not our brief.”

Eleanor winced and put her glass aside. “I’ll be frank. I was surprised your client was in the SS.”

“Well, don’t be. The SS is an important factor in German business these days. It’s mainly lawyers and aristocrats trying to be good Nazis without mixing with the revolutionaries and bullyboys in the Brownshirts.”

“Not much left of the Brownshirts,” Eleanor observed.

“All the more reason to do business with a man like Baron von Schröder. Better class of people,” Foster replied. A waiter passed and nodded at Foster’s drink: they knew him here. “No, take it, I’m finished with it. And bring me the oldest bourbon you’ve got. Where was I? Revolutions. I’m thinking of giving a speech. Revolutions and Self-Improvement.” He reached for a note in his pocket. “Something like this: ‘Communism and Fascism have changed—almost overnight—the characteristics of entire peoples. Millions of individuals have been made into different and, on the whole, finer people; personal pride replaced by self-sacrifice and discipline. There is a conscious subordination of self to the end that some great objective may be furthered.’” Foster folded his notes and returned them thoughtfully to his pocket. “What do you think?”

“The Neimanns would beg to differ, I’m sure. You can’t just ignore the victims.” Something always held her back when debating Foster. Eleanor shifted her cutlery about on the crisp white tablecloth, thinking. “I know you think I’m a socialist—”

“You are. Too much theoretical flimflammery pounded into you at Bryn Mawr.”

Eleanor frowned and leant over her drink. “Don’t be such a stuffed shirt, Foster. You know these economies are in dire, dire shape. Keynes is right: there’s nowhere else to turn but the government’s ability to borrow. We need pensions, guaranteed pensions. Not just military pensions. It shouldn’t take three depressions to teach us that. Half our old people are penniless, through no fault of their own. That’s a travesty. The Germans knew that fifty years ago. So do the French, the British.”

The waiter brought a double bourbon and departed. Foster sniffed it approvingly and took a long sip. “What properly is my role, Eleanor?”

“You tell me. What have the Neimanns or their children done wrong? What did they do to deserve losing everything? No more than these unfortunate people without pensions or a doctor in Texas or West Virginia or Oklahoma.”

“I’d represent the Neimanns if they came to me. That’s what a good lawyer does.”

“Foster.” She paused and took a breath. “They called me at the office two hours ago, asking if Social Security could help them. They can’t afford a lawyer like you. They’ve lost everything.”

Foster rolled his eyes. “You’re starting to sound like La Grande Bouche.”

“Pardon?”

Foster stared at her. “I thought you’d know that one. Eleanor Roosevelt.”

“That’s not the point and you know it, Foster. Talk to Schröder. Ask him why his bank bought their hat factory for eighteen percent of its real value.”

“Weren’t they compensated? Didn’t they agree? They’re here, aren’t they? Steamship tickets don’t grow on trees.”

“They had a gun to their head, Foster. Herr Neimann was worth more than all your partners put together.”

“I represent my clients, not the whole suffering world. That’s why we have religion, I thought. To keep suffering in perspective.” He ran his fingernails up and down the cut glass grooves of his tumbler.

“Religion won’t pay an old widow’s bills,” Eleanor replied. “Try telling that to the mortgage manager down at the savings and loan sometime.”

“And just what are you doing to help, madame?”

Eleanor took another deep breath. “I’m doing my damnedest to make sure we don’t have a revolution of the unemployed here. Social Security means dignity and peace of mind for people who have worked all their lives and have nothing.”

Foster recoiled. “How can you work all your life and have nothing? That makes no sense.”

“It makes no sense to you, Foster. You haven’t known a day’s want in your life. Give me twenty dollars. Right now.”

“Is this a holdup?” Foster looked bemused.

“Angry widows are on the march, Foster, right here in the Lafayette Room of the Hay-Adams Hotel. You give me the twenty dollars. You’re giving the Neimanns a down payment towards their fare to Palestine. That’s where they want to go, and I mean to see they get there. I’m passing the hat at the office.”

“Our conversation today is all about hats.” He opened his wallet, bemused, and offered her a crisp bill. “Here. That was a joke, Eleanor. A joke. I haven’t totally lost my sense of humor.”

“Give me another twenty dollars.”

“What’s this twenty for?”

“Baron von Schröder’s contribution. You can collect it from his next billing statement. ‘For services rendered.’”

Foster laughed to himself, prizing open his wallet again. “You’re a treat, Eleanor. A real treat. Here.”

“That was a joke, Foster, a joke.”

“No, it wasn’t. You just took forty dollars off me.”

Eleanor cracked a grin. “You’re right, it wasn’t. Neither was losing their factory to the Neimanns. Now, what’s Schröder doing at the BIS?”

Foster swirled the ice around his bourbon, weighing whether or not to order another. “Seeing that Hitler and Schacht make as few debt payments as possible on the Young Plan, is my guess. There’s going to be a lot of German bonds papering walls, I’m guessing.”

“Seriously.”

“Well, I’d better answer seriously, hadn’t I? The Schröder branches here and in England help underwrite some pretty big deals. I want Allen on the board of the New York branch. Keep an eye on the London financing deals that way. You know as well as I do, Ellie, Germany’s got the most vertically integrated economy in Europe right now, and it’s roaring along. Hitler seems to have found the key to getting unemployment down and factories humming in a hurry. I have a lot of American banking clients looking for a juicy German deal to back. We’re dying here in comparison.”

“Come on. You can’t get your money out, can you, Foster?”

“Oh, there’s ways and there’s ways. The classic neutral banking countries—Switzerland, Sweden—they have their uses, especially for the German branch plants. We look after our clients. They come back for more, believe you me.”

“Hitler likes this?”

“That’s why I have my friend the Baron. Baron von Schröder knows which way is up in the inner sanctum. He’s on the board of ITT, close to Heinrich Himmler—”

“Himmler? I’ve never heard of him.”

“Nobody has,” Foster said, raising his glass in mock salute. “He’s their J. Edgar Hoover. Runs Hitler’s personal bodyguard. Good name to know. Point is, Schröder tells me he and his bank board members keep Himmler in clover—a million marks at a time.”

“It’s a good business, being Himmler.”

Foster laughed again, hard. “I like you much better when you make me laugh.”

“And I like you much better when I have your forty dollars. I must be going. I don’t want to miss Sophie’s bedtime.”

“Can I borrow twenty dollars?” Foster asked. “I’m a little shy of the bill.”

Eleanor stood and kissed him, briefly. “No. And you were never shy. Goodbye, Foster. Love to Janet. Thanks for the drink.” “And love to little Sophie. One last thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Make sure your friends the Neimanns get wherever they’re going. They’re short, you let me know.”

At the cloakroom counter, Eleanor waited for a moment while the girl retrieved her coat. She looked back: Foster, buried in his newspaper, was scribbling on his yellow legal pad, his broad back to her, working, ever the mule.

Outside, the sun was down, the April evening cooling, life opening up on the quiet Washington streets. I’d like to be utterly lazy just for once, Eleanor thought. Sail to Nova Scotia, anchor the boat in a quiet cove, tuck Sophie in for a nap, sit there in the cockpit, read, forget the world … Perhaps in another life. At home, the door would open and there would be Sophie: her life. On the bus to F Street, in her customary seat up top, at the head of the double-decker’s stairs, she tried to imagine where Gunter and Marta Neimann were, and how a hat factory came to break hearts.

XIX

NEW YORK
MAY 1936

The topic was Germany; the entire board showed up. Allen, yet to appear, had called the meeting on barely a day’s notice, but there they were, all the Sullivan and Cromwell kingpins, ringing the boardroom table over breakfast: managing partner Foster, Joe Seligman, Arthur Dean, the Seabrooks—father and son—and Norrell Dunfield from the Berlin office. The coffee cart had just departed when Seabrook senior put down his newspaper and scanned the faces around the table.

“Gentlemen,” he intoned, “court and the markets open in an hour, so we’ll cut it off at quarter to. Foster, as we agreed, I’ll steer this. We all know why we’re here.”

“Agreed, Phil,” Foster said, twitching. Seabrook caught Foster fussing with his thin hair.

Seabrook made a face. “I take it we’ve all read this morning’s Journal editorial, have we?” He took in the others over his spectacles. “No? Then I’ll parse for you illiterates. After a few pointed questions about brother Allen’s Friday evening lecture at Town Hall about our German bond difficulties, there follows a few choice words about whether or not Sullivan and Cromwell has gone and shot ourselves in the foot—both feet—for all the world to see. Here’s a choice quote: ‘The emphasis, it would appear, in the legal work done promoting the German bond issues was hardly the well-being of the bondholders. No: the deals were designed to spring the richest fees and commissions for the lawyers who promoted the deals for the banks and the bond houses. They sowed the wind—they reap the whirlwind.’ In short, we got rich and our clients are going to take a very cold German bath.” Seabrook slapped the paper shut. “We’re all in favor of free speech around here, and gentlemen all … but Gabriel and all the angels, seems Allen’s invited our friends at the Securities and Exchange Commission to come after us full tilt. And that’s not the half of it. Dunfield?”

A thin, tense Dunfield scanned the faces around the table. He seemed hunted, smaller, diminished, since the last time he’d visited head office, his fingers limned with nicotine stains. “Gentlemen, the firm sent me to Berlin four years ago now. It’s good to be home, I tell you. I’ve taken more than a few lumps, trying to make the office pay its way. Twice I’ve been caught in street fights or Nazi rallies that got out of control.” No one said a word. “Got the stitches to prove it. Here’s what’s going on now, right up front. One: The law courts are completely in the hands of the Nazi party, which gets its way by decree if not by judgment. Two: Property issues, especially Aryanization of Jewish property after the Nuremberg laws, now hinge entirely on political connections. If you’re Jewish, you’re a nonperson, at the mercy of a government that at best wants you out of the country, at worst dead, and your property confiscated in any case. Three: Torts? Meaningless. It’s a police state—there are no remedies for the enemies of the state. Four: Any dissent is crushed by arrest and transport to one of those new political prison camps. People disappear or are murdered on the slightest pretext, so the professions have been gutted. Five: The economy is driven by the military’s needs. Nothing else matters. It’s almost impossible to do legitimate business in Berlin. That’s the long and short of it.”

Seabrook junior, barely five years out of law school and there as an observer, slowly turned his coffee cup between his fingertips. “We making money in Berlin?”

A moment’s silence followed, broken by Seligman. “We haven’t done an important deal in Berlin in almost a year. Most of our billings for ’36 are fees for cloaking German offshore holdings, Sweden and Switzerland mostly, but we’ve got a couple of Standard Oil contracts to work out that have German implications.”

“Right. You figure it’s worth the candle, Dunfield, keeping the Berlin shop open?” inquired Seabrook senior, his spectacles now perched atop his head.

“Honest answer?” Dunfield replied. “I wouldn’t want my family in Berlin. You have to understand: everything—and I mean everything—you do in Hitler’s Germany is political. Everything. I had six good Jewish employees: they’re all gone. And that’s just for openers. The taxes are iniquitous.”

“Duly noted,” Seabrook observed. “See any big deals down the road?

“A deal’s always possible, in theory. Question is—”

“—how do we get our clients’ money out?” Seligman mused.

Dunfield looked around the table for support. There was none. They were all biding their time, waiting to see Allen’s cards.

“Exactly,” Dunfield continued. “The currency restrictions are enough to kill any deal, and that’s the way Hitler wants it: the foreign exchange stays at home, so they export like crazy. Fact is, unless you’re selling ’em munitions or raw materials for the military, you’re the last one in.”

Foster was staring hard at his blank legal pad, occasionally tapping the lined yellow paper with his pen tip, but writing nothing.

Seabrook lit a new cigar: he was not a nostalgic man. “Joe?” he asked.

Dropping a file folder three inches thick to the tabletop with a satisfying thud, Seligman said smoothly, “Billing statements for the last year.” He then pulled a thick red file from the annual record. “These are the billing statements for our Jewish clients. They’re wondering what the hell we’re doing in Germany—even if they’re making money in Herr Hitler’s playground. They want to know why we still have a Berlin office. They want to know why we still have clients like Hamburg America, IG Farben, Bosch—the list goes on. We have a choice to make, gentlemen, and we’d better make it soon, or our Jewish clients and their friends are going to make it for us.” He placed his hand on the big billings file. “This isn’t small beer.” He took Foster in with a long glance. “There are real consequences to keeping Berlin open, Fos. Hitler—at least in the opinion of a goodly number of our clients, and the press to boot—is a scourge on the planet. We make a clean break from Hitler, gentlemen, or we lose not only anti-Nazi clients here, but our reputation as well. And that’s going to be far harder to recover than a few hundred thousand bucks”—Allen strolled in—“in billings.”

“Must be talking about my billings,” Allen said, grinning. “Sorry I’m late. The breakfasts at the House of Morgan do go on.”

“You haven’t missed the fireworks,” Seabrook senior offered. “You’re up next. We’re getting the gospel according to Joe. Dunfield’s already had his say.”

“It’s going to hell in a handbasket as a place to do real business, is what I said,” Dunfield repeated, noting Allen’s late entrance with a flinty eye.

“Thanks. Sorry, Joe. Norrell, welcome back from Berlin, sorry.” Allen took his seat.

“We haven’t any choice,” Seligman said, his voice flat. “Even our own people are angry. There’s at least four of the most promising associates threatening to leave. The next generation of our office, out the door.”

“I have letters from Parsons, Young, Wallace, and Stark,” reported Seabrook senior. “There’s not a hothead in the bunch. Stark and Parsons brought us the big Americo Pipe deal.”

“And there’s me,” said his son, examining a point in space over Foster’s head. “I haven’t written my letter yet.”

That cooled talk for a long moment.

“I don’t see a compromise,” said Arthur Dean, speaking for the first time. Dean was the heavyweight, the silent one, the only lawyer Foster deferred to. Dean had both fists pressed down on his green baize blotter, hard. “I say we shut Berlin down, cut our losses, rebuild here. Boom. Like that. Allen, you opened this can of worms up at Town Hall—say your piece. Last word to Fos.”

“It’s not only the four who’ve written letters, and young Seabrook,” Allen opened, pitching his voice softly, so the others at the far end of the table had to crane in to hear him. “We’re going to have a palace revolution right here at head office. Look at the papers: every day there’s a steady drumbeat of reasons to get out of Germany. First off, as Norrell knows, you can’t be a lawyer in Berlin. You just can’t. How can you practice law in a place where the courts are controlled lock, stock, and barrel by the state? I can’t. We can’t represent our clients properly. I vote we shut it down.”

Dean broke the cavernous silence after that broadside. “I think it’s time we heard from Foster.”

Foster took off his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “We have to keep a sense of proportion,” he said, almost to himself. He put his glasses back on. “Damn it, the place is open for business. You all know what’s going to happen if we close down Berlin. Half of Wall Street’ll be on the next boat to Bremerhaven, waving contracts.”

“I take it that’s a no,” Dean summed up.

“You’re damn right it’s a no, Arthur,” Foster snarled, flaring. “If Hitler falls, that country’s going to be red as Mrs. McGillicuddy’s drawers inside six months. Then we’ll see how our French clients like staring across the Rhine at a Communist Germany. Anybody thought about that one?”

Seabrook junior rose to his feet and rested his hands on his chair back. “I’m speaking only for myself, no one else.”

“The other associates,” Dean acknowledged, “will have the floor when it’s their moment.”

“I’m not staying at this firm if we continue to have law offices in Germany,” Seabrook junior declared. “We don’t have to do business with these people. It’s as simple as that. There’s been a Seabrook at Sullivan and Cromwell since 1890. If we decide to keep that office open, I’m giving my notice, effective immediately. Thank you.” He smoothed back his hair.

Foster sat, stone silent, his big hands opened flat, covering his legal pad as if it might fly away.

“That seems pretty clear,” Dean said. “Allen?”

“When I gave that speech at Town Hall, I was the first to take our business outside these four walls, first to speak about what’s happened to this firm, about our business in Germany. Things have gotten pretty lively since.”

“Lively? The house is on fire,” Dean noted.

This raised a brief gust of laughter from all except Foster. Allen registered that abstention out of the corner of his eye.

“Well, I guess”—he hesitated, gathering himself for the collision—“we’re on very thin ice. I simply don’t see how we can in fact—”

“In Shakespeare, Allen,” Foster cut in, “this is where they send in the assassins. The only fact in politics is power. And Hitler has it. What do you propose we do, young Seabrook, take it away from him by walking out in a fit of legal pique?” He stared at each of them in turn; only Dean and Seligman met his gaze. “Well, it won’t work. I made the German account in this law firm, and by God I’ll unmake it. This is exactly what the competition wants, you know: they want us to go picnicking on one another here at this law firm.” Someone down the table cleared his throat nervously. Foster took off his glasses and folded them, turning them in his hands. “We don’t do this. We won’t. It’s worse than wrong: it’s careless.”

“Foster, no one is trying to take the account away from you,” Seligman said consolingly, “or deny your role in making us all rich men.”

“Then why in God’s good name are we sitting here now?”

“Because we took the money, Foster,” Seligman replied, unflinching. “We took the money.”

Foster snapped his glasses back on. “You won’t get around me with a moral lecture, Joe. Least of all you.”

“I don’t want to do this, Foster.”

“Then don’t. Sit down, Phil junior, you look out of sorts standing there. All right, Joe, level with me—what do you want?”

“Hitler’s been in power over three years, Foster. Whatever the future is for that horrid little man—and I personally hope it’s mercifully brief—people will say we didn’t cut him loose when we first saw him for what he was. They’ll say we kept doing the deals.”

“Allen. You. What do you want?”

“To stop arguing, Foster,” Allen replied softly. “To finish it.”

“I like a good argument, personally,” Foster shot back. “Good for the circulation. Tell me, now that you’ve fitted me up for the box, why not hit the godforsaken nail?”

Allen colored. “The young lawyers came to me—”

“—for a quiet confidence or two. Your Dutch uncle routine. Allen, you want Berlin shut because it’ll make your life easier when you represent us at that merry-go-round they call the State Department. Well, I like kicking the State Department in the teeth at least once a year, just to see my tax dollars at work.”

“That’s harsh,” Allen replied, his voice set low. “I did the right thing. For all of us.”

Seabrook noticed a vein on Foster’s temple throbbing. “And pigs will fly,” Foster muttered.

“In which case,” Arthur Dean said to no one in particular, “there’s going to be pork all over the boardroom ceiling in short order.”

No one had the spine to laugh just then, though Dean dined out on his bon mot for years afterwards.

“I have a stock swap closing in fourteen minutes,” Dean said gently, pitching his words gingerly, like eggs, “thirteen if you count the walk to my office. Foster, you’ve had your say.”

Seligman, who had a theatrical instinct or two, slid an envelope out from under his blotter. “It’s over, Foster. If you want a full vote of the board, if you want to take this right to the wall, here are the votes.” Joe opened the envelope and pushed a single page of typescript over to Foster. “I polled all the partners and all the associates too. It’s overwhelming.”

Foster read the results in the dead silence. He took off his glasses again. He rose and went to the boardroom window, the full span of the room away from Allen. Finally, he coughed once or twice, then chewed his thin lips. “I see.” He turned to face them. “I can’t agree, but I must consent. It’s the will of the board. We close the Berlin office forthwith. Minutes to me first thing tomorrow … No. No minutes.”

“We weren’t taking notes, Foster,” Joe Seligman assured him. “There won’t be any minutes. Phil and Arthur thought that might be—”

“—advisable,” Seabrook senior finished.

“I understand,” was all Foster said, his eyes fixed somewhere far away.

Dean watched him for a moment, then broke up the meeting. “Good. I’m off. My deal has to be at the registrar’s by noon. Those typists have sixteen copies to crank out.”

The others followed wordlessly. Seligman, the last, hesitated for a moment but saw that Allen hadn’t moved. Joe closed the door, and the click hung between the brothers until Allen stood and walked the length of the boardroom table.

“Don’t. Don’t say a word,” Foster warned, his face flushed. He gestured past Allen to the closed boardroom door. “You’re quite the diplomat, Allen. All that with a few meetings and a single piece of paper.” Foster extended his hand. Allen hesitated, then took it. Foster squeezed and drew his brother closer. “Last time, you understand?” he said, hoarse. “I brought you here, I made you, handed you off to clients like Rockefeller and Rollie Harriman, got you out of one big hole.” He bent close to Allen, his grip tightening. “Never end-run me again, hear? This is where you say yes. “

“Yes,” was all Allen said.

“Good morning.” Foster turned his back and went to the window, looking down the facades of Wall Street.

Allen left Foster, the pallid winter light on him, his suit bunched high over his big shoulders. None of the fight had gone out of Foster, a bull cornered but untouched.

correspondence file: Eleanor Dulles to Grace Dunlop

Bryn Mawr

May 17 1936

Grace

It’s a very quiet Sunday morning here; there’s that late-in-the-semester feeling of new summer and a new life in the quads. I’m at Professor Kiley’s house. I wrote her, telling her I needed a break, and her daughter—who’s now sixteen and a lovely girl—has taken Sophie to Philadelphia for the day. I’m in Prof. K’s workroom, watching one of the students reading, her back to the old tree near the path to Wyndham, and wondering, “Was I like that, was that me, ages ago?”

The work for SSA is really rolling now. We’re overworked on all fronts—policy, legislation, administration—but it’s coming together. It’s quite a thing, to consider that I’m the research leader for the whole Social Security program, with all those lives to think of. We make jokes about it some days, when the work gets to be too much, about taking away Mrs. Miller’s pin money in Sheboygan and having the whole thing fall down. But on the whole, it will work and it will make a difference.

I’m also pushing for a historian to keep track of our progress. I’ve had quite a fight here and on the Hill getting the money set aside to keep a record of what’s gone on. These are big, sometimes overwhelming, policy decisions the government is making, and they rely on us to get it right for them. Might as well have history see what we did, for better or for worse.

Sophie’s fine, she’s reading all the time now and a happy child. Her latest success is demanding I help her bake her “mixtures,” inventions of her own in the kitchen. We don’t eat them, of course. One or two of them might be bulletproof. I think about Sophie a lot in my work, about her retirement, what she’ll have to look forward to, what we’re doing for the ones after us. I remember what Professor Teasdale used to say about public service, that we are what we do. It’s good work. It’s made me a better person.

Foster calls me “Red Eleanor” when I get too loud over dinner. I don’t care, neither he nor Allen has much sense what it’s like to be poor in this country. When you’re back, tell me all about Siam. I want to hear about Bert and her family. That ambassador’s story, the one about the ship to Ceylon? Is it true? Tell all, Gracie, you always do.

Give India a hug from Aunt Eleanor.

Love
Ellie

XX

JUNE 1936

The sybaritic Allen savored his visits to 26 Broadway, the oil capital of the world. The penthouse office was a prince’s lair. Nelson Rockefeller’s private dining room at his family’s head offices was gently lit with elegant tapers and a minimum of electric light; a butler came and went silently on crepe soles, bearing silver trays, while Allen and his client talked, referring to a file Rockefeller had open to his right. They had reached dessert: Kona–Blue Mountain coffee, a perfect flaky galette, and anisette.

“I’m of the opinion that sooner or later there’s going to be war, Nelson,” Allen said, choosing his subdued tone, the one he used for the heavyweight client closings. “Could be five years or ten years from now. But everything I see says war with Germany. I was there a month ago for a disarmament conference. The Rhineland is just the start for Hitler.” Rockefeller said nothing, listening, a thumb across his lips sealing in his thoughts.

Rockefeller turned a page. “Okay. There’s a war. What if we do want to move money around that’s parked in Switzerland? Says here you’re recommending the Bank for International Settlements?”

“We are,” Allen agreed. “We’ve worked out a few wrinkles there, too. The idea’s really implicit in the Standard–Farben share swap. There’s no reason why your Standard–Farben royalty flows shouldn’t go through Switzerland to the BIS and on to New York. And vice versa for the Standard outflows from Germany.”

“We’ve got almost forty percent ownership of the Thyssen bank shares via Chase?” Rockefeller was saying.

“That’s correct. Chase New York holds thirty-eight percent of Thyssen’s cross-holdings in Farben.” Allen took a sip of his anisette, letting it linger.

“So you and Fos are proposing to cloak Standard’s German holdings with a Swiss holding company, here in the U.S., to protect the thirty-eight?” Rockefeller slapped a hand down on the file. “I like it. I don’t like Sweden, and Portugal’s too close to Spain. I see those Spanish Reds just shipped their entire gold reserve to Moscow. Jesus.”

“They’ll never see that again, you ask me,” Allen replied feelingly. “Stalin got his start robbing banks, didn’t he?”

Rockefeller leant back in his chair. “Bank secrecy makes all kinds of sense, but how does the Swiss end work? Moving money around, I mean? How do I know my business is secure while there’s a war on?”

“The Swiss banks use the latest coding communications, the best around. Nelson, we use the same machines ourselves at Sullivan.”

Rockefeller tapped the table with a fingertip. “So, you’re convinced there’s going to be a war. You’ll be cloaking all kinds of corporate trade, won’t you? Good for business, right?”

“Actually,” Allen said quietly, “most of Wall Street have enough on their plates just keeping their heads above water. And the State Department? They’re all ostriches. Nobody wants to know. You’d be ahead of the game.”

“I see your old friend Norman Davis is running the Council on Foreign Relations. He figures Hitler’s not going to stop until he’s got Austria and maybe even Czechoslovakia too.”

Allen, polishing off his galette, nodded. “Who can afford a war in Europe these days, except Hitler—”

“We have a real client in that German air force,” Rockefeller mused. “They need leaded aviation fuel, and lots of it—and that’s our patent.”

Allen could see Nelson’s gears going. “All the more reason to cloak like this,” he observed. “A really fine dessert. And superb venison, Nelson.”

“We fly ’em in live from upstate, nothing but fresh-killed at this table, I can tell you that.” Nelson closed the cloaking file and pondered its cover for a moment. “Right. Let’s keep on with this cloaking neutrality idea some more. Here’s what I hear on the Standard grapevine: Caracas, Bogotá, Mexico City—the South American countries are going to follow the Vatican’s lead and stay out of it if Europe goes up, aren’t they?”

“The State men tell me yes, yes, they will. The Pope’s made it quite clear the real enemy is the Bolsheviks. My best information says they’ll stay neutral. But that’s only part of the story,” Allen continued. “No point in pumping oil you can’t sell because your tankers are on the alien property custodian’s list. Everything’s got to be able to move with a war on. Otherwise you’re hamstrung by currency restrictions or even flat-out confiscation.”

Rockefeller nodded, poker-faced, waiting while the servant cleared. “Tell me, what’s Schröder doing? Prescott Bush over at Brown Brothers is jumping up and down, telling me we should be looking for a bank that’ll go both ways.”

“Well, sure,” Allen agreed, warming to his theme. “Nothing new. The big German industrialists started doing it in 1917, the smart ones, August Thyssen among ’em, getting the ownership paperwork into neutral cloaks to beat the Armistice reparations claims. His son Fritz has made an art of it, used the money to put Hitler in power, bought and paid for—thinks he’s entitled to a break on the Nazi tax rates. I hear Fritz got his real profits stashed offshore, well away from the Nazi tax auditors. Someplace convenient, I hear, like Brussels or Amsterdam.”

Rockefeller thumbed through the file again, thinking. “And after a war?”

“The neutral paperwork is your safety valve. When you’re ready, you lift the cloaks and there are the profits, safe and sound, ready to repatriate. And it means you can move oil profits around easily too, from neutral to neutral. Handy if you’ve got patent or dividend outflows in harm’s way.”

Rockefeller held Allen with a steady gaze. “What’s the risk?”

“Waiting. We know a little from the inside about how alien property issues play out, you see. Foster helped run the Alien Property Commissioner’s office in 1917.” Allen shook his head slowly, feeling his belly pressing against his waistband. “And we have Washington wired on cloaking matters, right down to the committee tablings—that’s our bread and butter down there. The existing language is appendix three. If you want a second opinion about the details of moving profits offshore, there’s Fletcher at Polk, Davis.”

“Something this big, count on it. Who else you doing this for?”

“That’s privileged,” Allen murmured, “but run a few big Fortune 100 names past me.”

Rockefeller listed a half dozen household names of American industry and finance. Allen merely smiled.

Then, abruptly, the evening was over. Rockefeller stood, flicking his napkin aside. “Fine. Draw up the papers,” he ordered, “then you walk me through them. You must excuse me, Allen. I’ve got another appointment.” He gestured Allen to the richly polished doors. “Now, why don’t you and the boys move Sullivan and Cromwell uptown to our new center? Give you a hell of a deal on the rent. And your staff’ll love the offices. I helped design ’em myself. Lots of light, lots of space, air conditioning, fast elevators. Won’t find a better office in the city … or the world, for that matter.”

Allen chuckled ruefully. “I’d move in a flash, you know me.”

Nelson laughed and nodded as he walked Allen out. “Well, if you fellows change your mind, you know where to call.” He stopped and patted Allen on the shoulder. “Best to Foster and your wife. See you at the yacht club this weekend?”

“Should do,” Allen said, allowing the butler to help him into his overcoat. “We’re racing, give old Smithson a run for his money if we get the right wind. Remember me to Mary.”

Nelson closed the door as Allen left, turned and opened a side door to a small sitting room with a view of Broadway, bright with lights. There, jammed lankily into an exquisite Hepplewhite chair, Prescott Bush grinned; to his left, bent over the backgammon board, considering his next move, sat the poker-faced Dutch banker Renni Schippers—two moneymen in the anteroom of a prince.

“Whose wife is he after now?” Bush asked, not looking up, a cigarette in his mouth.

“Now, now,” Nelson said, “let’s not give Allen a bad reputation in front of our Dutch guest.”

“I know all about Mr. Dulles, thank you,” Schippers replied.

“That’s good,” said Bush, appraising his position on the board. Schippers rolled poorly yet again. “That’s even better,” Bush said, pleased. “I’m up two-eighty for the night, Nel.”

“For now. I’d watch him, Pres. These Dutchmen are all short arms and deep pockets. Bet you didn’t know our friend here is Fritz Thyssen’s man in Rotterdam.”

“Did so,” Bush countered. “Who else you making money for, Renni?”

Rockefeller settled himself on the chaise longue. “I would’ve thought you’d’ve figured that one out, Pres: me. Let’s hear the latest from Berlin, Renni.”

“It’s about you, Mr. Rockefeller,” Schippers replied, not looking up from the game board.

“Well,” Nelson said, lighting a cigarette, “I guess I better have another drink in me before I hear the news.”

“The rumor is,” Schippers began, “that you and IG Farben are swapping stock, Mr. Rockefeller. To cover the handover of patents and royalties for synthetic oil. Standard and Farben, the two biggest chemical concerns on the globe, married at last.”

“It’s a big big deal,” Bush said, “one for the history books. I could use a piece of it, Nelson.”

Rockefeller ignored Bush, sliding the cigarette lighter over to Schippers, who lit a rough-looking Brazilian cigarillo. “Now the banker’s question,” said Schippers. “We’re speaking about Standard’s oil revenues and royalties. How do you get that kind of money out of Hitler’s Germany, Mr. Rockefeller?”

“Roosevelt’s got all kinds of smart young lawyers,” Rockefeller began, unhurried now, “with nothing better to do than sniff out exactly that, especially if there’s a war on. So that’s where my dinner companion comes in. We’ll get our money out, I guarantee you that.”

“Sure,” said Bush, who, on the wagon or not, looked rather the worse for wear, now Nelson had a good look at him. “That’s what you say today. But what if Hitler doesn’t play ball?”

Rockefeller glanced, very quickly, at both men—he’d heard enough. “Let’s get my table at La Martinique, say hi to the girls, have a few laughs. We’ve been working too damn hard. Hell, it’s almost ten on a Friday night, no wives: what say?”

“There, Mr. Bush,” Schippers said, finishing off the genial Prescott with a great last run. “I do believe you owe me four.”

“Hell’s bells,” Bush said. “I didn’t see that one coming.”

“Told you, Pres, he’s ruthless,” Rockefeller said. “Or there’s Bob Hope at the Vogue. Or that Jewish kid, Danny Something-or-other. He does this thing with Russian names I hear’s a panic.”

Bush straightened. “Not me, Nelson. I’m tapped out, headache, the works. Good night, Nelson. Renni.”

Schippers said nothing. Bush kept rolling right to the door, with a practiced drinker’s calculated stride. Rockefeller let the door’s closing cue his first question.

“He’s sober these days like I’m Kaiser Bill. First off, Renni, who told you about the stock swap? That’s a family recipe.”

Schippers felt a shard of ice in his rib cage. “You hear things in my line of work, Mr. Rockefeller. Rumors.”

“You’re nursing Thyssen’s bank deal in Holland, right?”

“How? Yes. Yes I am.”

“For Fritz Thyssen.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“Prescott got a piece of that?”

Schippers shrugged. “Not a big piece, Mr. Rockefeller. After, it’s Prescott—Brown Brothers Harriman are the main money. But yes, Prescott’s got a piece of Thyssen’s bank here, Union. Thyssen’s got himself a bank with two front doors—one here, one in Amsterdam.” He shrugged again, wary. “Just in case.”

Rockefeller leant over the table, serious as sin, his face pressed close now to Schippers’s. “You know I don’t want to drag this out of you, Renni—you know I’m an oilman, I like predictability,” he said in a tone that allowed no contradiction. Schippers didn’t utter a syllable. “I don’t want my Standard stock price yanked up and down when there’s a lot going on,” Rockefeller said, his eyes fixed and very very cool. “And there’s always a lot going on, Renni, isn’t there?”

This June 1936 file emerged from the KGB liaison files housed in the East Berlin headquarters of the Stasi. When the East German secret police archives were looted in November 1989, after the Wall fell, Misha Resnikoff bought it, amongst other classified agent/source files from one of the more entrepreneurial looters: this individual had simply looked Misha up in the phone directory. (Note: SÖHNCHEN was Moscow Center’s cover name for Kim Philby.)

OTTO to file re RUDERER [“the rower”] / RUDI

RUDI is the adopted stepson of a former Nobel Oil agent, a senior manager, Samuel RESNIKOFF, a former Russian citizen, now a Swedish citizen resident in England. RESNIKOFF senior—hereafter KONTO. KONTO is at present director general of the Enskilda Bank in London. KONTO worked in the former Tsarist territories of Abkhazia and Baku as a Nobel oil field manager until the Revolution. KONTO’s Russian connections were extensive, including Grand Duke Michael, brother to the Tsar. KONTO’s family is Armenian on both the maternal and paternal sides; KONTO is talkative, persuasive, even-tempered, and an objective capitalist of the most confident kind. KONTO and RUDI are polite but distant.

RUDI is a rower who has had some success at Cambridge as both a mathematician and an athlete. RUDI is also an amateur musician. He appears to be an overachiever of sorts, denied the kind of paternal praise he seems to need by the premature death of his father and his stepfather’s relationship with RUDI’s natural mother. RUDI is amorous but not overly promiscuous. RUDI has a lover in Stockholm, a Swedish-Polish Jewess named Adela BRAUDEL—hereafter FREUNDIN—who is a Zionist activist. RUDI’s relationship with FREUNDIN is marked by great passion and great ambivalence; RUDI obsesses about his sexual performance, even though of the two he is the more experienced. Again, this would seem to point to a deficiency in praise.

RUDI is an exceptional talent intellectually. Inquiries elsewhere indicate RUDI is one of the few natural mathematicians at Cambridge with languages: he speaks English, Latvian, Polish, German, and some Russian, also Yiddish and Swedish to a degree. His mathematical talents express themselves also musically; RUDI is an amateur cornet player and is fascinated with “the problems,” he says, “of jazz harmony.” The instrument does not really fulfill him, as he has not mastered it.

He is eccentric and does not keep regular hours and has little comprehension of personal budget or the value of money. Despite this, RUDI refuses all offers of money. He came to us via SÖHNCHEN.

RUDI has no known connections to the Zionist underground: he appears to be apolitical as far as a Jewish Palestine is concerned, likely as a means of rebelling against KONTO.

Since the spring of 1934, RUDI has been employed as a foreign exchange clerk at the Enskilda Bank branch in Stockhom [sic]. When approached to pass counterfeit U.S. dollar bills, he refused, because, quite logically, he felt the risk not worth the effort. We did not press the matter: RUDI is too promising a source to imperil his talents on a counterfeiting operation.

This summer, KONTO has obtained a position for RUDI with the Stockholm company and former Nobel Oil subsidiary Beurling-Kryptor, a cipher machine company with clients throughout Europe. As the Beurling machines are vital cryptographic instruments in the capitalist countries, this is a vital connection. For RUDI’s personal history with source SÖHNCHEN, see [REDACTED]. RUDI is competing in the Berlin Olympic Games as a rower. No repeat no contact with RUDI in Berlin is advised.

From Misha Resnikoff’s microfilm archive; translated from the Hebrew by MR

Shiloah to Ben-Gurion by hand

No. 322

July 22 1936

David

Further to your query of the 18th.

Met with young R. at our house in the Galilee. You’ll recall he was active for us at Cambridge and in Germany, as part of David Kauffmann’s TRANSPORT group, moving financial documents and gifted orphans.

R. had just returned from Berlin, where he injured his wrist in a qualifying race at the Olympics. You might have your office send a card.

We spoke over several days. Discussion revealed R. as the ideal candidate, as Kauffmann suggested.

R. has agreed to our project and will proceed via Stockholm to New York.

Shiloah

XXI

EN ROUTE TO CHICAGO
SEPTEMBER 1936

The Twentieth Century Limited thundered along the bank of the Mohawk River west of Albany, a silvered caterpillar leaving a spoor of steam and soot on its way west. Eleanor entered the dining car with her reservation card and came face to face with Allen, at a table for two, a bottle of wine and a newspaper before him. The train barreled straight for the sunset streaking the rough hills on either side of the river valley, framing Allen in a square of rich light.

“Eleanor, small world,” her brother chuckled, folding back his newspaper to make room. “Have a seat. What a surprise. Heading for the Windy City?”

“I’m giving a lecture to the economists at the university, pension planning and investment. You, Allen? You haven’t darkened Chicago’s door … since when?”

“Well, I’m traveling with a client from Rome, Monsignor Sommer, Austrian merchant banker now doing the Pope’s books.” Allen offered her his best smile, easing into his role as host; he might have owned the dining car. “He’s two cars back, reading the fine print on a balance sheet. The Vatican likes its money nice and safe at night. Here, let me get the chair. How’s the lovely Sophie?”

“She’s with her nanny, Charlene. How are Clover and the children?” Eleanor asked, settling herself.

“Fine, fine,” Allen said, waving his hand vaguely. “Waiter, may we have another glass, please?”

“What’s wrong? Now I look at you, you look red in the face.”

“I am red in the face. Letters section. There. Second column.”

Eleanor nodded in agreement. “I saw it too. That’s what he believes, Allen, you know that.”

“Some hashed-up mysticism. That’s all I can get out of him,” Allen said, chewing at his consonants. Allen slapped the newspaper with the flat of his hand. “What’s with our dear brother? Even the housekeeper at the Berlin embassy can see what Foster can’t—Hitler won’t stop. Foster’s gone too far this time.” He flicked the edge of the newspaper page in annoyance. “I’m going to write the Times myself.”

“It can’t be good for your law practice, to see you two going at each other in public, hammer and tongs.”

Allen had gone deaf. He stared out the window at the evergreen gloom of the Finger Lakes hills at sundown. “Worst is, Foster’s driving the other partners to distraction every time he writes the Times. Then I get it. They twist my arm. Seligman, Seabrook—Dean’s ready to throw him out the window.” Allen stopped and rubbed his eyes. “‘Can’t you talk to him?’ they say. ‘Can’t you get him to tone it down a bit?’”

“You’re brothers,” Eleanor reminded him. “You’d both better think about all the Thanksgivings, all the family Christmases, the baptisms and the weddings and the funerals that lie ahead. For all of us. What would Mother say? So public, Allen.”

“I won’t be pushed around like some office boy.” He looked straight at Eleanor for the first time. “How are you, sis? Have the Reds at Social Security made a convert of you yet? Ready for Moscow, commissariat of pensions?”

Eleanor marked Allen’s abrupt changes: they meant fresh weather and stiff crosswinds. “Fine, thanks. It’s mostly econometrics, but I’ve always liked numbers, making sense of them. And I’m doing some good. All in all, a good thing.”

“You like the people?” Allen asked abstractly. “At State, I liked the people. Best thing about the place, really.”

“I do. Yes. All different kinds. We’re a good mix. I’m happy.”

Allen was staring over her shoulder. A woman, Eleanor guessed. She glanced back quickly and saw a sleek, dark-haired woman in a mesh hat and gloves, dining alone.

Eleanor tried a different tack. “I crossed paths with your client the Baron, Kurt von Schröder.”

“Yes,” Allen replied, still staring. “I’m on a board with him and Prescott Bush. A bank. Schröder’s one hard man. Don’t let that title of his fool you.” Eleanor waited him out; he drew himself back to her. “I was in Rome last month.”

“I see.”

“Yes, meeting with Monsignor Sommer. He’s number three in the Vatican financial operation—he’s good, knows the angles, knows the politics. Outdoorsy kind of fellow, hiker, skier. I like him. Solid businessman.”

Eleanor clinked her glass against his. “Maybe I should ask this monsignor to pray for you and Foster.”

He was staring again. “Pardon? What did you say?”

“Maybe I should ask him to pray for you two. For peace at Sullivan and Cromwell.”

“Save that for Foster,” Allen said, his voice flat. “He’s the one who needs to talk to God.”

“And you a parson’s son. My, my. Times have changed.” He wasn’t there anymore. How quickly he turns it all in, Eleanor marveled. “Allen. It’s me,” she reminded him.

His voice was far away. “You know, I’m supposed to be successful, aren’t I? But whichever way I turn, I’m still eating Foster’s dust. It’s why I travel so much. Gets me away.”

“Allen, you’re doing fine. Foster had a ten-year head start—you went from a diplomat’s desk to Wall Street out of night school law. That’s saying something.”

“The only thing I’ve ever really loved was skulking around Bern. Those two years I really did something useful. Wall Street lawyering isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

“We all wanted to be secretary of state, Allie. Not just you.”

“You want a brandy? I could murder a brandy.”

“Lovely. Thanks. Maybe if you took the family to Cuba or Mexico, got some sun together, that’d help. That way you mightn’t need the monsignor’s prayers to keep you on the straight and narrow.”

They sat in silence as the train thundered on, westward toward Buffalo and the run-up to the Great Lakes and the Midwest’s wide-open spaces.

“Here’s the guts of it, Ellie,” Allen said finally. “The intelligence game gets in your blood. You live in a different way, underneath the skin of everyday life, where the secrets are.”

“You know Washington …” Eleanor left the rest unsaid.

“Forget it. The State Department hasn’t got a plugged nickel for political intelligence, here or overseas. The readers of the Ladies’ Home Journal know more about what’s going on in Germany or Soviet Russia than State. You’d be amazed. And don’t even talk to me about the military.”

The snifters arrived. “A toast, then. To spies everywhere, my brother included.”

“To spies everywhere. And ex-spies. Me included.”

But Allen was looking over her shoulder again: enter Monsignor Sommer. Above his dog collar his face wore a hiker’s tan, shiny and brown as a fresh-minted penny. He held a hefty stack of documents. A working dinner with the padre-banker, Eleanor thought as she caught the name on the file tab in Sommer’s fine cursive.

Cloaking, she glimpsed as Sommer took her hand, client memorandum / John Foster Dulles. A good thick file, Eleanor noted, and sown from top to bottom with the strips of yellow paper the cleric-banker used for bookmarks. A good thick file.

Misha Resnikoff’s personal archive

From the desk of James Kronthal

SS Kungsholm

April 16 1937

Dear Misha

Good to hear from you. I’m still rowing—you? Your letter reached me in Stockholm—talk about ships in the night! Am just returning to New York myself. As a matter of fact I do know Foster Dulles from my family’s business in Germany and in any case Eleanor went to Bryn Mawr—and I know plenty of that crowd. I’ll do what I can to set something up for you. And I could intro you to Garbo—she’s two decks up, with the VIPs …

Jim

ACT THREE

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

CHARLES LAMB

XXII

NEW YORK
AUGUST 1938

The auction house sweltered in the shimmering heat trickling in from Fifty-seventh Street through the open transoms of Lorber and Sons. Beneath a high tin ceiling, a crowd of art lovers pressed close to the austere rows of Old Dutch Masters paintings and drawings. Eleanor dabbed the back of her neck with her handkerchief and nudged her glasses back into place on her slippery nose. The drawings were behind glass, cool in repose beneath the gleaming smoothness. One particular piece held her, a graceful line drawing, white pastel pencil on red chalk, beautifully done, opal and dark and rich red.

Eleanor, Sophie, and Grace escorted Grace’s formidable mother, who also considered the drawing at length, Lorber catalog in hand. Mrs. Whyte, a great wintry beauty in her day, resembled the doomed Russian empress Alexandra. Barely five feet tall, her slim swimmer’s body now bent with age, she suffered no fools, and bore a flinty view of males in general, having been spectacularly deceived by several, notably the errant ex-husband who “helped give the world Grace.”

“Why, I do like that one, Grace,” Mrs. Whyte said in her precise Philadelphia accent. “That background—I cannot divine it.”

“The catalog says it’s Christ and Mary Magdalene,” Grace said.

Eleanor, who was closest, read the tiny note pinned to the wall below the drawing. “It’s chalk and pastel, Mrs. Whyte. Red chalk on dark blue rag paper, says here.”

“It’s a treat, isn’t it, this? Lovely light, very fast work. Yes, indeed,” she observed, leaning in closer, her hawklike reflection filling the glass.

A tall, crisp gentleman in white shirt and suspenders approached, his linen trousers rustling in the heat. “May I be of assistance, ma’am? I can see you’re a fellow enthusiast.”

Mrs. Whyte gave him a once-over, replying after a frosty pause: “And you are?”

“James Kronthal. I’m a graduate student at Yale in art history—I’m in no way connected with the auction or these drawings, ma’am. However, I do know a little about Rembrandt drawings, if I may.”

Mrs. Whyte didn’t offer her hand. Eleanor gathered she knew a tout when she’d spotted one. “Own any of these, do you?”

“As a matter of fact, I do have a small chalk drawing,” Kronthal replied politely. “I love the light. Like this one.”

“What did you pay for it?”

Grace slipped between them. “Forgive my mother, Mr. Kronthal. She’s an enthusiastic shopper, as art lovers go. Grace Dunlop, how do you do? This is my friend Eleanor Dulles, of the Watertown Dulleses, and her daughter, Sophie Charlotte. And my mother, Sarah Louise Whyte, of the Boston Whytes, lately of Philadelphia.”

“James Kronthal, Philadelphia, late of Frankfurt, Germany, where I help run the family bank.”

“A pleasure, I’m sure, Mr. Kronthal,” Grace replied, laughing, “to know someone intimately acquainted with a bank.”

“Never you mind, Grace.” Mrs. Whyte continued where she’d left off: “What did you pay, Mr. Kronthal?” She paused. “That a German name?”

“It is, ma’am, but we’re a Philadelphia family now. I paid six hundred marks, at an auction in Germany some time ago.”

“What’s that in dollars?” Mrs. Whyte demanded, staring up at the much-taller Kronthal.

“These days, about one hundred and seventy-five dollars. More or less. A fair price, but not a bargain. There are quite a few Rembrandt copies around, you see. You have to be careful. In my spare time I’ve bought and sold a few, as favors to friends and relations.”

Something about this satisfied Mrs. Whyte. “What do you make of this one? I rather like it.”

“It’s a very pretty little picture indeed, Mrs. Whyte.” Kronthal moved closer to the drawing as he spoke, paying his respects before consulting its description. “The catalogue raisonné refers to the last two owners. To my mind they are both reputable collectors. But it is for sale.”

“Perhaps they need the cash,” Mrs. Whyte said, looking very hard at the drawing.

“That’s entirely possible, Mrs. Whyte,” Kronthal replied. “May I make a suggestion?”

Little Sophie tugged at Eleanor’s sleeve. “Mommy, Mommy … skater, there!”

“Yes, dear. Certainly. Excuse us,” Eleanor said, leading Sophie through the throng of art lovers to a row of cool white statues standing against the far wall.

“You may make your suggestion, Mr. Kronthal. No guarantee I’ll follow your advice. I’ve some horse sense and we’ve just met.”

“Mother,” Grace suggested, “he’s only trying to help.”

Mrs. Whyte gave her daughter the benefit of a dazzlingly insincere smile. “Grace, dear, help Eleanor show Sophie the statues, would you? I’m trying to buy a picture here.”

Eleanor’s Washington confrontation with the unfortunate Neimanns had a silver lining—the revival of her Bryn Mawr friendship with Marta Bravo de Urquía. Marta, Bryn Mawr ’17, a sculpted Argentine brunette and heiress to a now-shattered Buenos Aires meatpacking fortune, had managed to string a series of visas together, reaching the oasis of New York with her husband, Gunter, a slim fellow with a fine profile and goatee.

Gunter studied the other café goers in the tiny Lorber bar with a dispassionate boulevardier’s eye. The Neimanns were Eleanor’s guests at the auction, their first breath of New York culture after she’d arranged their hotel. In his heyday, Gunter, nephew of Solomon and Beate, was one of the most respected economists in Central Europe. In the Germany he’d just fled via Argentina, as both a Jew and an eminent socialist, Neimann was a marked man twice over. Marta had already moved into the auction goers, a remarkable beauty even amongst the Manhattan elite.

“Marta is keen to buy something,” Gunter was saying, “but there are adjustments, you know? So different, America. A madhouse of new things—perhaps I am too old for your country. I look forward to Switzerland, once our visas are in order. So again, I say thank you, darling Eleanor.” Neimann embraced her, his cheek scented with bay rum. Behind his spectacles the eyes were mocking, melancholy. “Perhaps we shall see Allen here?”

“No, he’s stuck in an arms conference in Washington, Gunter.”

Somewhere near, a waiter dropped a glass. Neimann flinched, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand. “Perhaps better to learn elsewhere about this manhattan cocktail, I think.”

“It’s only the bar of an auction house, Gunter,” Eleanor warned. “We’ll see about an American beer, all right?”

“Coffee, I think. About this American beer I know,” Neimann said, making a philosophical tipping motion with his open palm. “Moment. I must see for Marta.” He worked his formal way through the auction goers, New Yorkers and out-of-towners milling about most un-Teutonically, Gunter’s first taste of American casualness.

Eleanor and the Neimanns had wandered the Rembrandt oils with Sophie in tow while Mrs. Whyte towed Kronthal around the Dutchman’s sketchworks. The Neimanns had now resigned themselves to paper cups full of Nescafé at a small table near the bar. Eleanor joined them, Sophie on her lap.

“Not coffee as we know it,” Gunter observed, “eh, liebchen?”

Marta delicately moved a wooden stick in her cup. “I’ve had worse, dear. Strong coffee you get from the Italians here. The rest of America, they drink this watery stuff.”

“You were saying about the four-year plan?” Eleanor prompted.

“Madness!” Gunter barked, blinking behind his spectacles. “The army cannot spend all the money! Autobahn here, autobahn there—it is no economy, not real products for real prices. And soon the inflation! But Herr und Frau Schmidt cannot see this.”

Eleanor nodded her agreement.

“The regulations! Incredible. The Nazis send auditors to a Fabrik. If they find one error, one small error in the accounts: one million marks. This is the fine. No one complains. All are sick with the terror or blind or Nazi themselves, Agenten.”

Marta put her hand over her husband’s. “You know from Aunt Beate and Uncle Solomon—there’s almost nothing left of public life for us Jews, Ellie. The shops, the universities, the courts, the hospitals, all banned. Even the garment business, Judenrein. You can’t buy a decent dress unless you have your own privat Jude, a Jewish designer the Party women use. It’s crazy. Want an apartment? Denounce a Jew. Or blackmail him. Or have him beaten. Completely, completely criminal.”

“I can’t believe it’s become so awful so fast,” Eleanor said.

Gunter snatched a handful of air and closed his fist around it. “Terror, my dear Eleanor, requires a certain tempo. Everything must be done quickly, with violence, before people can think.” He banged the table. “And the radio, on always. Always the radio. You know what the German businessmen call themselves now?” Neimann demanded, his voice peaking. “Weisse-Juden: the white Jews. They know they are next.” He stared at Eleanor, his spoon sinking into his cold coffee. “That, I tell you as an economist, is the state of affairs in the Third Reich.”

Gunter did not speak again for the balance of the auction, a once-made man calculating how much he’d lost, wrapped in an exile’s silence.

The Lorber auctioneer drew breath for the finale, his face glistening in the heat. “Further bids to $920? Going twice! Sold! Lot 441, ‘Haarlem field from the south,’ a sketch in oils, sold to number 236, the lady in the fourth row, for $915. That is the last of the Rembrandt oil sketches, ladies and gentlemen, and a good time to take a short break. Coffee and canapés in the south gallery hallway. Three-fifteen sharp for the oils.”

“Well done, Mrs. Whyte,” Kronthal enthused over the buzz of conversation. “At a very good price, too.”

“Lovely lines, I must say,” Marta added. “It’s most attractive.”

“I’m much obliged for your assistance, Mr. Kronthal,” Mrs. Whyte said. “Come, let’s take a close look.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kronthal,” Grace interposed. “You’re very kind.”

Kronthal gave Grace a wink over Mrs. Whyte’s head. “Always a pleasure to see a fine lady happy, Miss Dunlop.” And he led a very pleased Mrs. Whyte away to the frames expert, a round little man in a toupee holding court for a platoon of lady art enthusiasts near the gallery doorway.

“Well, that was easy,” Grace said to Eleanor. “Thank God for our new friend. Last art auction Mother went to, she brought the house down when she didn’t care for the manners of one of her competitors for a rather good Louis Quinze chair.”

“Your mother is utterly charming, Grace,” Marta said. “I think she’s wonderful. Ellie, we must go. Gunter has to appear at the Swiss consulate this afternoon for our visas.”

Eleanor replied with a goodbye kiss. “Auf Wiedersehen, dear Neimanns,” chimed Grace as Marta led the silent Gunter away, Frau Neimann’s sinuous departure causing more than a few husbands to gaze wistfully.

“Did you enjoy yourself, Sophie, darling?” Eleanor asked.

“Yes,” Sophie replied, “the bang with the hammer, Mommy.”

“Grace! Come!” Mrs. Whyte hove at them from across the auction floor, waggling her striped parasol aloft.

“Just a moment, Ellie,” Grace stage-whispered. “I’ve an idea: we can walk to the Russian Tea Room, recover from all the excitement. I need some fresh air.”

“Grace! Come!” Mrs. Whyte repeated. Grace went. Eleanor and Sophie bought five ices from the buffet while Grace fenced with the redoubtable Mrs. Whyte in the cloakroom.

A truce ensued and Grace returned, much amused. “Well, will wonders ever cease, Eleanor Dulles. Mother and Mr. Kronthal think we should go to a nightclub down in Greenwich Village. A friend of Mr. Kronthal’s runs the place and it’s apparently quite an adventure. Look, Bert’s at a rally tonight across the river and Mother’s never been to such a place. Let’s all go.”

“That sounds like a hoot. Why not? Sophie, do you still want to have a visit with Ruthie Shipley?”

Sophie skipped and shouted: “Oh, yes, tree house at Ruthie’s house!”

A wave of overheated auction goers pressed toward the street door.

“Our new friend can’t remember the name of the place, but tell the cabbie Seventh Avenue South,” Grace said, “off Waverly Place. Used to be a speakeasy called the Golden Triangle—jazz, alcohol, and perdition, Ellie! Quarter to eight, darling!”

Just before eight, Eleanor arrived at the nondescript wooden doorway of a Greenwich Village basement joint, eyeing the pitched wooden stairs down to the cellar. Hazarding those, she entered bedlam—what the Parisians call a boîte, she thought to herself. She took in the dimly lit claustrophobic room, all fire-engine red: red carpet, red walls, rickety third-hand wooden chairs, and a string of odd paintings that jarred the eye. A man in a bad suit and an open-necked shirt leapt to his feet and began shouting, inspiring a fractured argument with a clearly inebriated woman about the future of the female working class.

Beyond this slanging match, Eleanor spotted Mrs. Whyte, Kronthal, and Grace seated on a tired banquette facing one side of the stage, grinning at the proceedings. Onstage, a black pianist and a young white cornet player readied themselves to play, ignoring the catcalls and the shouted poetry.

The pianist produced a fragment of a melody, then stopped working the upright’s battered keys, waiting for the horn player to stop pacing the tiny stage. With a shake of his head the piano player laid down a thumping stride line which seated the bar stool poet. The horn player joined in, barely audible over the howls of mock applause for the abashed poet.

Eleanor, grinning now herself, took a seat next to Kronthal. “Glad you found the place,” he called as she bent close to hear.

“What is it I’ve found, actually?”

“It’s the Village’s hot spot these days. Called the Vanguard,” Kronthal said, beaming at the chaos of the place: several men were arguing loudly at the bar about Henry Ford, and a pair of large women in high heels had paired off at the far end of the room, teaching one another, improbably, how to belly dance to the jazz.

“They do this every night?” Eleanor asked.

“Sometimes there’s cabaret.”

“As if this weren’t,” Eleanor called out.

Kronthal laughed. “I’ve ordered us a round of manhattans.” A short man in a gray suit had a box of liquor beneath his table and a cocktail mix kit in the open suitcase on the chair next to him. He waited with the patience of a shoeshine man, smoking as he watched the musicians. “That’s about all that guy over there makes. They don’t have a liquor license,” Kronthal observed, “so we improvise.”

“That’s fine. Whatever you’re having.” Eleanor was thrilled with the place; she was fascinated by the curly-haired young horn player working his way through the chorus of Gershwin’s “Love Walked In,” breaking out of the melody and improvising, stumbling with an idea right at the end of his solo but winning a good round of applause.

The young pianist then cut his colleague dead, working up two beautiful choruses, fresh and full, like nothing Eleanor had ever heard before, and brought the ballad home with an innocent flourish. The horn player leant shyly over the tiny microphone and offered their thanks before he stepped down and passed Eleanor’s table on his way to the door.

“Say, I know that fellow. Just a second.” Kronthal jumped up and followed him. The pianist stayed onstage, playing a fast tune Eleanor hadn’t heard, a jarring, powerful blues that quieted the place entirely.

“That’s wonderful piano playing that colored boy’s doing,” Mrs. Whyte said. She hummed along, captivated. “That’s Artie Shaw. Beautiful.”

“Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks, Ellie. Grand, isn’t it?” Grace said, swirling her manhattan with a pearl hat pin.

“Never seen anything like it.”

The pianist let his melody drift into the tiny club, into a mesmerized silence. Grace nudged Eleanor. “Who’s Jim’s new friend?” Eleanor could barely make out the horn player sitting with Jim in the dark and the smoke and the red light.

The pianist finished. There was an audible sigh from his listeners, and as he left the stage the harsh overhead lights faded to black, and applause and a shower of coins rained down on the empty stage.

Eleanor caught the waiter’s eye. “What’s that colored piano player’s name?”

“Elmo Hope. From right here in New York.”

“He plays like an angel,” Mrs. Whyte said.

“Until nine o’clock,” the waiter said, laughing. “Then his momma comes to take him home.”

“Young man, would you give Mr. Hope this?” Mrs. Whyte offered a five-dollar bill. The waiter took it to the young pianist, now smoking in the corner. He accepted it wordlessly, in another world.

Kronthal came over to Eleanor and her friends, followed by the cornet player. “Ladies,” Kronthal announced, “I’d like you to meet an acquaintance of mine from Germany. He’s a rower too. Misha Resnikoff, lately of Stockholm, Sweden, and London, England.”

“A pleasure to meet you all,” Misha said. “I hope my playing wasn’t too hard on your ears.”

“You were great,” Kronthal enthused.

Misha smiled. “No, the pianist is great. I’m just shoving the notes along.”

“Forgive me, but haven’t we met before?” Eleanor asked.

Misha studied her face for a moment in the dim light. “You know, we have met, in Berlin, on that lake near the Wannsee, I forget the name. You were camping. Early one morning. The fall of 1932.”

“You two met kayaking?” Kronthal was laughing and waving for another round from the gray-suited gypsy bartender.

“What on earth are you doing in New York? Are you a professional musician?” Eleanor asked, delighted.

“No, that decidedly I am not. I work for National Cash Register … uptown, I think is the word.”

“Seems we meet rowing—at the Oxford–Cambridge boat race, then at the Olympics,” Kronthal offered. “In Berlin. He rowed for Latvia.”

Grace raked Misha with a practiced glance, then looked at Eleanor, sizing this up. “Well, aren’t you a man of many talents?”

“Very kind of you, but no, I’m just a foreign mathematician getting out of his very small apartment for the evening.”

“You play well,” Eleanor said loyally. “I remember now.”

“No, no. You wait until later, when the real jazzmen play.”

Misha sat down next to Eleanor and placed his horn on the battered tabletop. She accepted a cigarette from Kronthal. “Tell me, what were you doing on that lake that morning?”

“Nothing special. I kayaked all over Europe in those days.”

“Oh, don’t get Ellie started about boats,” Grace warned. “She’ll never shut up.”

“Mr. Kronthal,” Mrs. Whyte demanded, emboldened by her second manhattan, “that man is going to put a gramophone record on. Would you care to dance?”

Kronthal offered his hand. “Indeed I would.”

They danced to “Heart and Soul,” and several other couples joined them, even as the bar stool poet staggered backwards past them, muttering: “It’s true because it’s political. Liquid infinity, Dave, that’s the ticket …” The sweating waiter steered the weaving poet up the stairs and out into the still August night.

Grace, far quicker than Eleanor, asked Misha, “Why don’t you two dance and talk at the same time?”

“Forgive my manners,” Misha said. “Would you care to dance?”

Eleanor grinned shyly. “It’s been a while, I can assure you.”

“I’m sure we’ll manage.” They did, moving together comfortably, apart from the others, to one side of the stage. The pianist shot Misha a smile that read Who’s the old broad you got there?

Eleanor was too happy to care, in this cracker box of a club full of smoke and music and crazy politics. This is about as far from Watertown as I could get on a weeknight, she reflected. She liked Misha’s touch and his back, well sprung with muscle. “You seem distracted,” she offered.

“I’m sorry, I’m listening a lot and dancing a little,” he apologized.

The recording ended. Somewhere at the other end of the room a radio crackled to life: more music, a swing band from the Empire State Building. Misha held Eleanor’s hand and pulled her closer. “I owe you a good dance, not a lecture on my feeble jazz career.” They danced to the pianist’s slow ballad, Misha leading gently.

“You don’t seem very political,” Eleanor observed. “Not compared to some of the characters here.”

He laughed, his smile bright in the dark. “I am,” he promised, “the most political mathematician you ever met.”

The ladies’ room ten minutes later: Grace and Eleanor were at the sink mirror, laughing. “Well, Mother certainly is having a whale of a time, isn’t she? That James is charming the daylights out of her. Not exactly a wallflower yourself, are you, Ellie?”

“I’m a little short of breath. It’s hot out there.”

“Yes, you’re a little flushed, darling, now I take a look at you.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve been on a dance floor,” Eleanor replied.

Grace stepped back and stared at her friend in the scarred mirror. “Well, Gabriel and all the angels, Eleanor Dulles, you’re smitten.”

“You’re being dramatic, Grace.”

She clasped Eleanor’s wrist. “Honey, look, your hands are trembling.”

“Oh, Grace, he’s ten years younger than me.”

“I tell you one thing and that’s for sure, Miss Dulles, that young man is no boy. You can feel it coming off him. And don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“You talk such trash, Grace. Really.”

“I do not. Have you even been close to a man since David died?”

“No.”

“Comb, please. A word of advice for you: you want to see a little more of the world than those pointy-headed folk up at the Social Security tabulating office. Life’s just going to pass you by.”

“I’d make a perfect fool of myself.”

“Take him canoeing or whatever you call it, get out on the water, get some sunshine. I’ll look after Sophie.”

“I haven’t been faltbooting in ages.”

“Time to go, honey. These things are never chance.”

There came a rapping on the door, exasperated. “Come on out, you two,” Mrs. Whyte ordered, her voice muffled by the thin door. “I’m not a camel.”

XXIII

SULLIVAN COUNTY, NEW YORK STATE
SEPTEMBER 1938

They’d borrowed Mrs. Whyte’s roadster, a blue-black cloth top Hispano-Suiza convertible Eleanor secretly coveted for its muscular ways. Last of my fantasies, she thought as she drove west along a winding stretch of dusty road cut through mute evergreen forest. She’d borrowed Grace’s sunglasses as well, but even so, the midday sun gave her a headache that didn’t fade until they crossed the Hudson into the wilds of Sullivan County. They’d stowed their boats in the convertible’s trunk; a picnic hamper lay between them, draped with the morning newspapers, Misha having read the headlines to Eleanor as they left New York behind.

“Hang on, we have to turn here,” Misha warned over the clatter of revving engine and sprayed gravel. “This is it—Beech Mountain Road. Well done.”

“Don’t thank me,” Eleanor replied, gearing down to make the turn. “Thank Grace—she’s very keen on point-to-point rallies.”

“Ah,” Misha said. A roadside sign, holed by pellet guns, caught his attention. “Mongaup. What is that?”

“Indian name. The Lenni-Lenape tribe. They were forced all the way to Oklahoma.”

“All very mysterious, America.”

This time Eleanor didn’t laugh. “You’re pretty mysterious yourself, Herr Krumme-Lanke-at-dawn.”

“At Cambridge they called me ‘The Eskimo.’ Because of the kayak.” He looked down at Grace’s map and found the crescent of blue ink marking Mongaup Pond. “How do you know Jim Kronthal?”

“I only met him that day. The art auction Grace’s mother had taken us to. He came over and started to talk about Rembrandt. You?”

“It’s a small world, Jews who row,” Misha said, laughing.

“So meeting at the Vanguard wasn’t entirely coincidence?”

Misha shook his head. “He’d been promising me an audience for weeks. Usually it’s me, Elmo, and the bar stool philosophers.”

The forest suddenly opened into an expanse of meadow, high thin grass cleaved by a derelict split rail fence and dotted with clots of blackberry and hawthorn. A great gray house, gabled and eaved in peeling gingerbread, sailed a sea of uncut rye, barely moving in the heat; in each window, a white face and side curls and a black hat and passive eyes, watching.

“Those are Orthodox Jews, Hasids.” Misha paused, staring. “In the middle of nowhere.”

Eleanor nodded. “They’re probably up from Brooklyn.”

Misha was transfixed. “I—you don’t think of this in America. Reminds me of Vilna. It’s like they’ve never seen a car before.”

“Vilna?”

“In Poland. The ‘Jerusalem of the East.’ I have an uncle there, in the timber trade. We’re mostly Latvian. I come from a long line of Riga timber merchants. On my father’s side.”

“What does your father do?”

Misha smiled at her. “He’s still in Riga. He’s buried there. Real brains, too, long line of Yiddish scholars. He loved words, he loved to sing.”

“You had your instrument with you in Berlin. I remember that.”

“Those days, always.”

“A cornet-playing navigator.”

“Navigating by the stars,” Misha agreed. “Here’s a navigator’s story for you: One of the profs at Cambridge had worked out that in 7 BC, three of the closest planets aligned and overlapped. Over Palestine, they would have looked like a star, for months on end.” He laughed, a big full laugh that Eleanor felt go right through her.

“Have you been to Palestine?”

“Once. I worked in a bank, in Haifa, after my Olympic fiasco. My stepfather arranged it.” They were coming to a fork in the road. Misha ran his finger along the blue line of secondary road. “It’s left here. We’re almost there. Kronthal tells me your brothers are bankers’ lawyers.”

They’d hit a patch of gravel left by the winter plows, and the stony roar against the Hispano-Suiza’s curved fenders filled the car. “They’re what?”

“Lawyers. For bankers.”

Eleanor made a face, curious. “How on earth did he know that?”

He’d let that part drop carelessly. “His family in Germany, they’re bankers too. We stick together, we bankers’ brats. They knew about your brother Foster, he said. Bond deals or something.” Grace had lent them a guidebook too; Misha scanned the page as they closed on the lakefront road. “Says here this watershed runs all the way to Delaware and the Chesapeake Bay. I’ve heard of the Chesapeake. That’s where the fishermen speak like Shakespeare.”

Eleanor chuckled, slowing as they moved deeper into the evergreen forest. “You’re so serious. Resnikoff, there’s a name. Does anyone ever call you Romanoff?”

He shook his head, reading. “My stepfather’s family were originally Resniks: butchers, ritual slaughterers. The ‘off’ came when they began handling the Tsar’s oil business. Look, you can see the lake, through the break in the trees.”

They paddled the length of the lake. The calm of the place hung heavy in the afternoon sun, the click of lake water against the taut canvas hulls counterpoint to the sluicing snick-drip of the paddle blades through the water. They shared the quiet concentration of water folk, making dead true for the farthest reach of the lake, their wakes parallel. Eleanor had five beats to his four, but there was little else to choose between their styles: upright, balanced, economical. They’d covered the three miles of open water at an easy pace, only the cawing of a mallard furious at the interlopers for accompaniment. On the lee shore of a small bay they pulled in, quietly assembling a deadwood fire for shore lunch, and spreading Eleanor’s old plaid blanket over the harsh hot sand. This was September masquerading as July, down to the pure white sun overhead.

“Why always a two-seater?” Eleanor asked while a half chicken crisped in the fry pan. She’d been thinking back to the other lake, six years ago, the threads of fog and the bridge and the stony beach sand under her sleeping bag.

Misha shrugged, opening their bottle of Riesling with one swift pull. “You never know when you’ll have a passenger,” he said, running a thumbnail across the wet end of the cork. Eleanor stared at him, prodding the chicken about in the bubbling fat, but he never broke a smile. “Besides, I can always pack the extra space for overnights. You should turn that—wings don’t take very long.” Then he smiled. She marked that smile, the distance of it, of him.

“It’s good, you know,” he said, looking west across the lake. “The water. Being out here. It makes me feel like I’m living for something. Maybe a little closer to God.”

She nodded. “I know. A little closer to God.” The chicken had browned nicely before she spoke next. “The first time I met you, I thought: he’s doing something dangerous, that one.”

“Eleanor. I work in an office. The most dangerous thing there is the elevator.”

“What’s your boss at NCR like? Let’s gossip,” she ordered.

“Fascinating creature. Tall party, low paunch, no visible hair. No visible sense of humor. Knuckle cracker. Very bad suits, but that’s the national costume here in America, apparently. Wife, Alice. Or Anne. Something with an A. Photo near the phone, two fat kids, names unknown, not in the least attractive. I know my job. He leaves me to it.”

“Which is?”

“I work with the mathematics of ciphers. An odd trade, but an old one, goes back to the Chinese. Honorable, international, a little travel. People will pay good money so that other people can’t read their business. Good colleagues. We’re all badly paid enough to be interesting. Usually.”

She flipped the chicken and stood, scrubbing the sand from her knees. “I’ll tell you something: you’re something of a cipher yourself, Herr Resnikoff.” Eleanor crossed her arms over her chest before she asked: “Is there someone?”

“A woman, you mean? No. I wanted a new life here in the New World. There was once, but sentimental I’m not. You?”

“Between job and Sophie, I’ve a full life. Besides, I’m the cautious type. Too timid. Are you ever going to pour that wine?”

“You know, my favorite thing about kayaking is sleeping in warm sand. Feeling my spine settle.” He poured the wine into Mrs. Whyte’s finest. “Is this the part where you try to figure out if I’m a right bastard or not? What ruined women I’ve left in my wake?”

Eleanor was bent over the fry pan, testing the chicken, not looking at him. “Oh, I’ve a pretty good idea, thanks, just watching you operate.” She waved her tongs at him. “Lunch, Herr Resnikoff, is served.”

They lounged on the blanket, both hungry from the trip across the lake. “Grand. That’s a good salad you’ve made there. I didn’t think Americans knew what endive was.” Misha tore the bread to pieces while Eleanor slid the crisp chicken onto Grace’s good bone china plates.

She offered Misha a glass; they toasted one another. “Endive? I lived in Paris once, after the war.” She took a sip of the light, cold wine. “Oh, I’m an education. You wait.”

In the distance, birds cried at a fixed pitch, a repeated note on a piano. They had napped, not touching, until the birds woke Eleanor, her clothes clinging to her from perspiration. She found him gone, the heat-shimmered beach too coarse for a trail of footprints, his kayak unmoved. She searched the length of the water for him, thinking he’d gone swimming, but the surface was utterly still.

She made for the woods, her damp hair suddenly cooling the nape of her neck. She found a place to sit in the shade between the firs and looked back across the lake, her hands primly in her lap, waiting, quite happily, she decided, just to see his face again. “Well, Eleanor, old girl,” she muttered, “you’ve done it this time. Here you are, miles from civilization, wandering the forest primeval with a man you met in a madhouse. You’re going to hell in a handbasket.” She laughed, wondering if it was true you really got what you deserved in this life. Did all the heartache since David’s death amount to a chance—only a chance—of something like real happiness? Or did no one or nothing care?

She looked straight up, through the cross-hatching of pine boughs, at the silver-blue sky. The trees paused motionless in the heat; even the insects were too drowsy to fly. She leant back against a long-dead maple and peered into the green gloom. She should have done this long ago, returned to the water and the trees and the sky and let her soul settle somewhere new. A memory of Sophie crossed her mind: a child running across a farmyard, chasing a calf, laughing as the fleet little animal stutter-stepped away. Whose farm was that? she thought. The Butalas’? No, that wasn’t right. She smiled and shook her head. She had forgotten so much in the intensity of mothering.

Eleanor looked down at her hands, her palms worn red from the friction of the paddle. They had become the soft, citified hands of a bureaucrat. I’ve lost my calluses. I’m just a weekend waterman now. She could remember them in Germany, the last time, the book on the Bank for International Settlements growing in her mind, ridges of callus across her palms and where her fingers gripped the double scull, hard and leathered.

He’s not even thirty and I’ll never see forty again. A shiver went through her and she realized, for the first time in ages, that she had never taken off her wedding ring. Eleanor gently turned the ring, watching the light in the triplex of diamonds where the crystals caught a fine needle of sunlight. “Well, David,” she began, a spike of embarrassment darting up her spine. She cleared her throat and thought some more. “David. David, it’s me,” she said very quietly. “I’m still alone. Or maybe not. Are you? Are you alone, where you are?”

A heaviness crumbled inside her, a breaking sigh that came trembling out of her as the tears fell. She sniffed and laughed a little, everything suddenly absurd, this idea of talking to David especially. “I suppose not. You can’t be alone, if … if there’s a heaven, can you? No. No, you can’t.”

Down the beach, a slim figure walked toward her. The heat from the sand made a mirage of him. She heard him whistling but couldn’t make out the tune; perhaps there wasn’t one, but the sound was cheering and clear, a folk song, perhaps, from far away.

He was closer now, probably wondering where she had gone. She looked up at the sun: must be nearly three—time to think about heading back to Grace’s car and the train ride back to Washington, to the world of echoing corridors and ringing telephones and closing doors. He halted on the far side of the small bay, looking back toward the ridge that represented the high-water mark of the lake eons ago.

Then, to Eleanor’s surprise, he tossed off his shirt and trousers and everything else, his boots flung away underhand, and cut a splashing path into the glassy lake. She didn’t dare move as he knifed straight at the far shore, a perfect rolling crawl, a white arrowhead in the gray-green water.

Just as suddenly, he reversed and emerged, and walked back to his clothes, drawing his trousers on, his shirt thrown over his back, his boots in his hands. He came around the long arc of the small bay, whistling again, that strange rising tune, definitely something she’d never heard before, his face coming into focus, varnished with lake water, happy, she realized, just to see her. She stepped from the trees and onto the beach.

He waved. “There you are! There’s a fire tower up on that ridge. See for miles. Really quite wonderful, see almost to the Hudson, I think. That’s where the trees end. Great walk. You too?”

She felt a thrill of closeness and smiled at him. “I wandered off into the woods after I woke up. I love the quiet, with the water out there,” she said, scrambling down the small bluff to the gritty beach. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I have to go back to Washington tomorrow, pack tonight, that sort of thing. Do you mind if we head slowly back? Comes with being a working mother, you see.”

“Of course, of course,” he said, visibly pleased at his conquest of the fire tower, and began to right the boats.

“No, not simply wrong, it’s criminal,” Misha disagreed. “No one will stand with the Czechs.” He drove; they bantered, good-naturedly at first as the sun set behind them, then more sharply as they approached Manhattan. “Mussolini as mediator?” he went on. “That’s a joke. You Americans don’t understand: Hitler’s a cannibal.”

Eleanor had bent herself against a folded blanket, a rough pillow jammed between the car seat and the door, her arm flung out. “So I take it you don’t see the Sudeten crisis as any kind of resolution?”

“Oh, come on. Why the hell should Hitler stop? The English don’t care, the French are terrified. Goering’s already told one of your diplomats your country will become the most anti-Semitic country in the world within a decade, once Roosevelt is through with America. The Nazis think you’re finished: Roosevelt is a Jew—”

“If you’d let me speak, please.” Eleanor waited. “Roosevelt’s no more a Jew than I am.”

“Of course not. You know that and I know that, but the Nazis believe their own propaganda. It’s easier for them: thinking can take you places you don’t want to go in Nazi Germany, believe me. Where was I?”

“We’re finished,” Eleanor replied, thoroughly enjoying herself.

“We are?” He shot her a look, but she was gazing out the window at the meadowlands, soft hills green as lime skin in the lengthening shadows.

“You were speaking of the end of America.”

“Ah.” He looked over at her carefully. “You believed in Hitler once, didn’t you?”

“Once,” Eleanor admitted. “Very early on. I thought socialism was the answer for Weimar. Still do. What can I say? I’m a socialist: I worry about the children and the elderly and their pensions and the unions.” She opened her purse and dug out a very crumpled pack of very old Pall Malls. “I thought Hitler’s ideas might work.”

“That’s why you were in Berlin, at Krumme Lanke?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s why I was there. I was there to research my book on the Bank for International Settlements, but more, really, to see for myself. All it took was one ride on a tramcar to see everything: the coarse faces, the fear, the worry. And my friends there, my socialist friends, they were the first to fall into the Gestapo’s hands when Hitler became chancellor, the first ones into the Black Marias.”

“Well, at least you’re honest about it. Half the people I talk to who were once for Hitler don’t own up. What, the unemployment—that what sold you?”

“I thought there would be a genuine socialist revolution, like in Austria.” She lit a cigarette and offered it to him; he declined. “I was wrong. Hitler’s no socialist. That’s a lie. And what do you believe?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the only economy that works these days is a military one. That hardly bodes well for the women and children, does it?”

“You sound like my brother Allen. He’s certain there’ll be another European war. Same reasons, different reasoning.”

“Clearly a man of fine and subtle mind.”

Eleanor snorted. “The family believes the brains all went the other way, Herr Resnikoff.”

Misha thought for a moment. “Families almost invariably back the wrong horse. Shakespeare’s full of such lessons. Your other brother seems to be a horse’s arse when it comes to understanding Germany, from what little I’ve read.”

“Foster is a first-class attorney,” Eleanor shot back, upright on the bench seat, eyes flashing. “You won’t find a better lawyer, anywhere. He runs Sullivan and Cromwell, managing partner, has for years.”

“Doesn’t make him a statesman—makes him a great lawyer. In any case, I want to see what might be saved here. It’s a huge country, America, a young country. The workers here have real spirit. Look at New York, the life here, the drive of the working people.”

“I thought you were a banker. You sound more like a Marxist.” They were on the highway now, in open country, the landscape flat as polder, the serrated edge of the New York skyline just ahead. “I’ve known a few front-porch Marxists in my day, I can tell you that,” Eleanor said. “Grace for one.”

They’d reached the four-lane highway, a stub of new expressway just before the tunnel across to Manhattan.

“Your friend Grace? She’s no Marxist—she’s an anarchist, and a rich one! A dangerous woman!” He laughed.

Eleanor made no reply. She smoked for a long minute, watching the suburban houses slip past. “Will Stalin oppose Hitler?”

Misha slapped the steering wheel in annoyance. “You’re the economist, you tell me. Why should he? Stalin feeds the bastard, sells him oil, wheat, rice, iron, minerals, natural gas.”

Eleanor cast a shrewd eye at him. “Cash registers and cipher machines don’t seem very exciting for a man of your talents. You like politics, do you? My brother Allen is going to run for Congress. I can introduce you. He’d like you, I know. He’s a wanderer too.”

They had reached the end of the highway; a fleet of cars and trucks were funneling themselves toward the tunnel mouth to New York.

“Why not?” he said. “Might be amusing. This is America. Who cares about my émigré politics?”

“Might be more than amusing, at that. Allen could win,” Eleanor observed. “Real connections in Washington might do you a world of good.”

Misha thought for a moment, assessing the congealed traffic, then switched on the convertible’s bug-eyed front lights for the run through the tunnel. “Tell me about your brother. Your brothers. Tell me,” he said, not looking at her, eyes set on the twin line of vehicles ahead in the gloom, “about Sullivan and Cromwell.”

XXIV

NEW YORK
SEPTEMBER 1938

Misha could hear the rustling of appointment book pages as the Sullivan and Cromwell secretary searched. “Seventh floor, ask for Dr. Spielberger’s office. He’ll be in the waiting room”—then a metallic click as she rang off. How was the woman so sure he’d be in the waiting room, Misha wondered as he rode the throbbing elevator of One Park Avenue upwards. The elevator operator, a forward fellow of uncertain age, had a bright, closely shaven face.

“First time in New York, mister?” He chewed his gum as if it might escape.

Misha nodded politely.

“Waddya think so far?” the operator pressed on.

“Impressive, I must say. How’d you guess?”

“No guess. The shoes. You get to know. You’re English?”

“No. Latvian. From Latvia,” Misha replied, just to cross him.

“Oh.” He seemed disappointed. Misha guessed he was either early forties or a serious drinker in his late twenties biding his time until the first sip of the afternoon. “That’s somewhere’s near … I dunno,” the operator surrendered.

“On the Baltic. Between Germany and Russia.”

The operator shook his head. “Jeez. Who’d wanna live there? Your floor, mister.”

Dr. Spielberger’s office boasted a pair of lions guarding faux Greek columns on either side of the big buffed oak door, which Misha opened, revealing Allen Dulles reading Investors Daily, his foot raised on a stool, alone in a waiting room big enough for six dentists.

“Ah, you must be Misha, the fellow Eleanor mentioned. Find your way here all right?”

“You have a very able secretary, Mr. Dulles.”

“Allen, call me Allen. Sorry we have to meet like this, but I’m short of time, getting the campaign off the ground. Eats my days whole.”

“You’ll be next?”

Allen looked puzzled. “I’ll what?”

“The dentist,” Misha said.

Allen chuckled, the laugh of a deferential man accustomed to calibrating his degree of amusement precisely to the company he kept. “Oh, no, my teeth are fine. It’s my gout’s acting up. I have a client who asked me to make sure she got home all right.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

Allen wasn’t quite sure his new acquaintance was entirely sincere. “Well, you do anything for a client like Mrs. Osgood Boone. She’s our fourth-wealthiest client, and the firm sees to it she stays that way.”

Allen looked down at his magazine at a photograph of Alice Faye. Misha marveled at the short attention spans of the Americans he’d met so far; they seemed incapable of sustained thought.

“Ah. You administer her trust.”

Allen raised his head, adagio, the movement of a big animal. “Not as slow as you look, are you?”

“There’s some advantage in being perennially underestimated.”

“I see. The underspin game. We’ll see about that. Eleanor has this idea you’d be useful around the campaign office. We’re always looking for a good banking man. Late start, I’m afraid. We’re playing catch-up.”

“With Mrs. Boone?”

“Oh, her vote’s in the bag, I’d say,” Allen answered. “Eleanor tells me you worked for the Enskilda Bank in London and Stockholm.”

“As glorified foreign exchange accounts manager on the bond desk.”

Allen frowned, weighing this. “Well, that’s what we need, an accounts manager. My first choice, a fine fellow, has decided his new wife is more important than my electoral success. Can’t say I blame him—she’s a pistol. What about you?”

“I don’t have a wife.”

The lawyer let go a real laugh this time. “You’ve got references?”

“Sheaves,” Misha replied, sliding the envelope across.

Allen arched his eyebrows. “Let’s have a look. Can’t have you wandering off with the silver, can we?” He shuffled the pages, reading. “I know Gleisner in London. Good man. Met him in Berlin, actually, end of ’33. What’s he now?”

“He runs the Enskilda head office in the City.”

Allen folded up the letters and handed them back. “If Gleisner says you’re okay, you’re okay with me. When can you start?”

“After work tomorrow.”

“Which is?”

“National Cash Register. I’m in research.”

“You know what they say? It pays to stand next to the cash register.” Misha laughed dutifully as a perfectly turned-out nurse appeared.

“Mr. Dulles? Dr. Spielberger is bringing Mrs. Boone out now.”

“You go to the Belmont Hotel tomorrow,” Allen said to Misha, lowering his gouty foot to the floor gently, “and ask for Don. He’ll show you the ropes.”

Dr. Spielberger, a smooth, tanned gentleman in his late fifties, entered with a small, birdlike woman on his arm. Eighty if she’s a day, Misha guessed, and dressed like a schoolgirl, in black twinset and white Peter Pan collar, except for the string of exquisite pearls at her neck and a regally proportioned wedding ring.

“I feel so much better, Allen,” Mrs. Boone announced in an actress’s throaty voice. “Doctor, I can’t thank you enough. You are a wonder.”

“Lovely to see you again, Mrs. Boone,” the dentist replied. “And Mr. Dulles, those oil stocks you recommended are just purring along.”

Allen laughed graciously while Mrs. Boone gave the dentist a peck, then pirouetted on tiny feet to confront her escort. “I want flowers to celebrate, Allen. I want the foyer lush with them. Take me to the florists on West Eighty-seventh. Come. Time’s wasting.”

It’s straight out of Molière, Misha thought: the crone, the doctor, the crafty consort, and the ingenue.

Allen glanced at his watch as the dentist and his starlet nurse withdrew behind the marbleized door. “Unfortunately, I have to get back to the office, Mrs. Boone. But my associate here will take you—”

Mrs. Boone’s dried lips formed a perfect moue. “You promised, Allen.”

“Now, now, Mrs. Boone. I have to see to business this afternoon, your trust included. Tiresome, but true. Look here, this fellow is Russian aristocracy”—he winked at Misha, leading his desiccated charge to the entranceway—“a real live relative of the Romanoffs.”

Misha rose to the occasion. “Distantly, actually, ma’am. We were in service.”

“Oh. Oh, indeed?” the dowager twittered, examining Misha, drawing her pearls through her fingers like a rosary. “In service to the Romanoffs? How extraordinary. Where, at the Winter Palace?”

“No, ma’am. The summer palace, at the Peterhof,” Misha invented.

“Summer? That’s it, that’s the idea! I want orange. I must have orange.”

“Pardon, ma’am?”

“You’ve inspired me, young man. I want orange flowers for my foyer. To celebrate.”

Misha said the first thing that came into his head: “Tiger lilies, ma’am.”

“Oh, that’s a capital idea. Fiery and orange against the gray marble. Wonderful. And you can just tell me all about that mad monk. Hold nothing back: was he really a constant visitor to the empress’s bedchamber?”

Allen loitered at the coats, bending close to Misha. “She’s half my bonus, get me?”

“My uncle Vladimir,” Misha improvised, “one of the imperial chamberlains, would become particularly angry when I’d inquire about the domestic situation, ma’am.”

Mrs. Boone paled at this revelation. “Quel scandale. And the little boy in his care. Quel scandale … tell me more.” She pressed close to Misha as they left, past the dentist’s absurd brass lions curled on their plinths, awaiting with sightless eyes their next prey.

XXV

Three days later. The old politicos and Misha worked through the supper hour at Dulles campaign headquarters: the Belmont Hotel’s side ballroom was the staff’s bull pen, its floor space webbed over with a tangle of telephone cabling. Heaped brochures and stacks of handbills flanked garbage pails overflowing with trash from the boxed lunches sent in. Allen’s wide, impassive face stared down from every wall, overserious and looking rather as if he’d sat in something unpleasant as the photoflash went off, Misha thought.

Misha deviled away at the campaign ledgers on an adding machine whose keys stuck. Don Hollander appeared, a thin, tough, distracted political hack with a hound dog face and tie askew. Hollander smoked constantly, his concave chest fighting for breath beneath a graying rayon shirt. He spoke between coughs, a shoebox full of receipts at his side. “Hey, you done?”

“We balance. This week, anyway,” Misha said.

“Sure, great. Get onto that night manager, sort out these meal receipts. Tell ’em we’re just renting—we don’t want to own the damn place.” He dropped the box on Misha’s desk.

“Right,” Misha muttered. “We don’t want to own the place.”

Twenty minutes later, that brush fire extinguished, Misha returned to Hollander’s office, knocked, heard Hollander’s rasped laugh and something unintelligible through the door.

“Oh yeah, he’s a real Svengali with the broads, he is—Hey, shut the goddamn door,” Hollander ordered. “And next time wait till I answer. Jesus.”

Misha had walked straight into the stares of Hollander and two box-headed lugs in suits sitting quite close to two briefcases atop Hollander’s desk. The briefcases immediately caught Misha’s eye. One of the matching lugs tried to shut them fast, but he glimpsed the stacked greenbacks in neat rows nonetheless.

Misha put the meal expense account file on Hollander’s desk, not too close, he thought, to the briefcases. “The night manager says we can meet with him at nine tonight in the coffee shop.”

Hollander swung his worn shoes onto his desk and lit another cigarette. “Where you from? Originally?”

“Latvia. But I—”

“Shut up,” Hollander said easily, the way most people say good afternoon. “Here we do things different, different from wherever the hell it is you’re from.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Misha offered.

“What money?” Hollander asked, squinting through the cigarette smoke. The lugs stared back too, waiting to be fed or watered, Misha thought. “Allen wants to see you at seven.”

“Where?” Misha asked. The two lugs hadn’t stopped staring at him: apparently a Latvian Jew was a novelty.

“I forget—you’re new. Every night at seven he takes a steam bath downstairs, talk strategy, crap like that. His campaign’s in the toilet, he never misses a steamer.” Hollander sighed and flicked away the cigarette ash. “I should be more positive. He’s got a radio speech tomorrow at nine a.m., so that’s what’s on deck.”

“On deck?”

“Skip it. There something else? Or you planning to move in?”

“Will he have questions about the ledger accounts?”

“I doubt it. I most sincerely doubt it. Now, if you’ll excuse us …”

Misha left for his post in the bull pen. A telephone rang on the desk of a beehived brunette. “Vote Dulles in the sixteenth district,” she said mechanically. “Hello?”

As Misha passed, the brunette tapped a pencil on her cheek, eyeballing him from head to toe, as if he were beef on the hoof. Politics, he decided, is a different country altogether.

Misha presented himself at the hotel steam baths promptly at seven. The first to arrive, he sat and mulled over the briefcases and the cash, thinking of Cambridge and his history course on the glory days of gerrymandered England. The baths door opened with a cooling gust and an avuncular Allen, his laugh preceding him, led in the two lugs from Hollander’s office, wrapped in towels. Misha was naked, feeling very circumcised to boot, and wondering if he’d breached another mysterious facet of American etiquette, but Allen could have cared less.

“Hello, there,” he said, waving affably through the mist, “this is Dave and that’s Walter. They’re from head office.”

“We met,” said Dave, but Walter kept his peace. Allen sat next to Misha on the tiled bench across from the heavies, whose dull eyes never left Misha.

“So, did Don tell you about the other part of the job?” Allen inquired.

“No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

“There are certain fund-raising activities we all have to do around here, all right?”

“What’s it involve?”

“Picking up contributions and bringing them to headquarters.” Allen suddenly seemed to find the backs of his hands highly interesting.

“It’s easy,” Walter piped up encouragingly. “You won’t feel a thing. Tomorrow night. The guy’ll be waiting for you.” He showed his teeth, a bagman’s smile. Dave passed Misha a business card, then nodded toward the door; Misha took the hint. Walter and Dave stared at him as he passed, owls in the mist.

“A good man, bring him to the radio speech for luck,” he heard Allen say as the steam bath door slid shut.

The campaign team crowded in behind the big control board in the engineer’s booth at the Metro News studio for Allen’s radio speech: Misha, Hollander, a nervous speechwriter named Hewitt, and the coffee girl, fussing with a plate of untouched doughnuts. Hollander’s heavies minded the door. Clover Dulles was campaigning uptown with Eleanor in tow, giving a speech on Allen’s behalf at a ladies’ club, which Allen cheerfully referred to as “the hen party.”

On the occasions they actually crossed paths, Misha noticed little chemistry between husband and wife, despite Clover’s best efforts to corral votes for Allen. Misha rather admired her for her quiet loyalty. Moreover, Misha already gleaned that it was a wise man who didn’t leave his wife alone at the country club with Mr. Dulles. “He’s a real Svengali,” Hollander had said. Now Misha knew what the old hack meant.

Allen’s persuasive gifts worked best one-on-one and didn’t encompass speaking to the masses. He’d tried his speech out on Hollander before the On Air light went on; the politico immediately stripped out all the adverbs and urged passion. It made little difference to Allen’s delivery: he spoke like a sleepwalker on-air, but came alive in the booth afterwards.

“Hate it, actually, talking into a microphone all on my lonesome,” he admitted, for a moment bashful and open and quite appealing, Misha thought.

“Never mind,” Hollander replied, scanning his clipboard. “We’ll wow ’em tonight at the chicken dinner. Okay, everybody, car’s waiting.” Then, to Allen: “You have an hour.”

In the hallway outside, Allen was in no hurry to join his handlers at the bank of elevators en route to the next campaign stop. Curious, Misha waved the others on, pointing meaningfully to the men’s washroom next to the studio. He then watched as the car went up, not down. Metro’s coffee girl was leaving the studio with her tray. Misha called to her, “Miss, what’s on the thirtieth floor?”

“Oh, that’s the top brass. Their suites and all. Can’t get there unless you’re in the book.”

Misha thanked her and blandly rode the next car to the thirtieth, arriving in a hushed hallway dominated by a mirror wall across from the elevator doors. A plaque stood on a wooden stand: No public access—Metro security. He stepped out, his campaign pass in his hand, ready to play dumb, just as the elevator bell rang again. This is like Charing Cross on a Friday afternoon, he thought, slipping around the corner to see who arrived next.

A woman left the elevator, dressed to the nines, veiled and gloved and looking as if she’d just left the beautician’s. She moved to the strip of mirrors and raised her veil, examining her lips and flicking back a strand of red hair.

Eleanor’s college friend. Misha had gathered she was all the other way, as a remarkable number of bohemian women in Greenwich Village were. But no: Misha did the arithmetic—wife uptown for ladies’ lunch, campaign team occupied preparing for this evening’s rubber chicken … and the candidate at liberty for an hour.

As if on cue, Allen came round the corner. Misha caught them the moment their eyes locked. He couldn’t make out the murmured greetings, but watched as Allen kissed Grace’s gloved hand with a lothario’s practiced ease, watched Grace depart on Allen’s arm.

The address was 50 Rockefeller Center, the Associated Press Building, twenty-eighth floor—the highest, Misha reflected, he’d ever been without wings. At the end of a cavernous polished hallway he stopped and read the reverse of Dave’s business card. The hallway lay in lunar shadow, but a cop read by the light of a bare bulb where the hallway split in two. “Where’s room 2806?” Misha asked.

The cop looked up from his newspaper. “Down and to your left. Watch out for the scaffolding—they’re still wiring the twenty-ninth.”

The cop shook his newspaper out: AGREEMENT IN MUNICH? the headline read. A photo spread showed the marching soldiers parading before a general and a cardinal, high above on a formal balcony.

“What’s the latest?” Misha asked.

“Looks like those crooks made a deal to cut up Czechoslovakia. Only nobody asked the Czechs.”

“You’re one of few who care, officer.”

The cop flicked the paper down and eyed Misha. “Hey, my mom’s from Prague. Believe me, mister, it’s all I ever hear about.” He inclined his head toward the light glowing softly through the transom glass at 2806. “Knock hard, pal. He’s a real prep school prick.”

Misha winked as he knocked at 2806. “It’s open,” called a bored voice.

Inside, a single gray metal desk occupied one corner of the office, the desk lamp the only light. A radio played on the desk, where an epicene young man studied a thick book entitled Corporate Law. “You the magic Latvian? I heard about you,” the fellow said, unimpressed.

He wore a school tie, Misha noted, and had the look of the tennis club about him: the kind of uncomplicated personality who never quite leaves his school days behind.

“It’s a whole city, this place.”

The aide said nothing, smoking.

“This your office?”

“Fat chance. I’m where they keep the help, two floors down.” He worked the safe’s dial.

“I see. Night school law?” Misha scanned the desk, seeing a letter addressed to Nelson Rockefeller. He gently slid the top letter aside with a fingertip: more letters for Rockefeller.

“I flunked out once, but my dad got me back in. I’d rather be bumming around Mexico. Those Mexican girls, I tell you.” He swung the safe open and produced a thick envelope out of the shadows.

Misha took it. “That’s it?”

The phone rang. “What? You were expecting the Rockettes—no, sorry, not you, sir,” he said into the handset. “Yes, it’s Callaghan here, sir. Gillette’s at the front door.” He rolled his eyes. “Yes. Yes. Will do. Good night, sir.” He put down the phone carefully, as if it might bite, then flicked a switch set in the desktop. “Yessirnosirthreebagsfullsir. Christ.”

A squawk box came to life somewhere and a scratchy voice grumbled, “Gillette here. What’s up?”

“Hey, Eddie, yeah, look, I’m starving up here. Go across the street and get me one of Monnie’s hot beef sandwiches and a Coke, will you? Oh, yeah, and a side of her peach pie. I got coffee here.” He flicked the switch back and stared at Misha, spoilt boy all over him. “Your guy going to win?”

“My guy?”

“Dulles. The boss’s lawyer. Your guy.”

Misha composed what he hoped was a very American reply. “Sure. No problem.”

“Don’t want to be throwing good money after bad, do we?”

“No. We sure don’t,” Misha agreed, sharing a cynical grin, then left.

In the elevator, he calculated from the weight and thickness of the envelope that he was carrying serious money: a good inch and a half of bills. He had his passport and more cash than he’d ever seen outside a bank. He toyed with the idea of a quick flit to Palestine, cashing in. Or the Far East: vanish there for decades, up in Burma. When he stepped out of the elevator, the ground floor was eerily lit and silent.

Never mind Rockefeller’s cash. What we want, Misha decided as his obviously English shoes led him across the brand new floors of Rockefeller Center to the street doors, is a good look at Mr. Dulles’s mail.

The afternoon after election day, Misha left his office early to pack up his things at the Belmont; everything fit into two boxes. He was about to move the boxes out to the taxi stand when he saw Allen crossing the empty campaign bull pen, alone, subdued. A phone rang on one of the desks and Allen walked right past it, catching sight of Misha. “Coffee’s on,” Misha said. “Might cheer you up.”

“Uh, hello, Resnikoff. No, thanks,” Allen said. He looked flat, the fluent charm gone out of him.

“Hard luck last night, Allen. We gave them a race, though. Everyone really pitched in.”

“Yes, they did. That they did.” He dragged a spare chair next to Misha’s stripped desk. In the distance, the phone rang on. “Who can that be?” Allen wondered, but made no move to answer it. “You know, we haven’t spent ten minutes together, young man. Oh, I forgot to tell you, Eleanor called this morning, said to say hello. Are you close, you and my sister?”

Misha lowered the last of his notebooks and papers into a box. “We met in Berlin and we keep bumping into one another near water.”

Allen yawned. “Her and the water. It used to be trees.” He shook his head slowly. “Climbed trees quick as a squirrel. A tomboy. She’d like to be secretary of state. So would I. So would Foster. Things can get a little crowded.” He laughed softly and packed his pipe before he went on: “Still, good of her to mention you. You’ve done well, Hollander says. A nut cutter, Donnie—right out of the Standard Oil stable, one of the great political operatives, I always said. He’ll have that Nelson governor of New York one day. If Donnie likes you, you must be one too. Are you a nut cutter, Misha?”

It occurred to Misha that Allen might have stopped at the hotel bar to fortify himself before cleaning out his desk. “I suppose if it’s a ‘him or me’ situation, then yes, I am.”

“Thought as much. It’s in your eyes. I spent a lot of time sizing people up, when I was in Austria and Switzerland during the last war. I had a feeling about you. Eleanor said you’d be good. I can see why. What’s next for Misha Resnikoff?”

“Back to research for National Cash Register.”

The phone finally stopped ringing. Allen considered the smoke he was creating before he spoke again. “So you said. Business machines. Up-and-coming thing, I hear.” He glanced away; Misha followed his gaze to the office clock. “Automate everything. It’s the way of the world. Won’t need lawyers next.”

“I saw your letter in the Times this morning on Hitler’s rearmament. You’re right: the clock’s ticking.”

“Didn’t help my campaign much. Never mind.” Allen closed his eyes and rubbed them. “Sorry. I’m tired. It takes a lot out of you, politicking.”

A whistle: a courier stood in his khaki jumpsuit, clipboard in hand. “You Mr. Resnikoff? Sign here.”

Misha looked the package over: no return address, no postmark.

“One of your girlfriends sending her regards?” Allen chuckled.

“Spasiba, goszpada Boonaya,” Misha said.

“Pardon?”

“Russian for ‘thank you.’ My first American girlfriend, Mrs. Boone is. She loves it when I speak a little Russian.” Misha’s phone rang. “That’s her now.”

Allen puffed away contentedly. “Maybe she’s written you into the will.”

“You’d know, wouldn’t you?” Misha replied, then picked up the phone. “Sorry? No, it’s Resnikoff. Yes, he’s right here. Put her through.”

He handed Allen the phone. Dulles cupped a wary hand over the receiver. “Not a reporter, is it?”

Misha shook his head no.

Allen listened, intent for a moment, eyes moving. “Five minutes,” was all he said, and hung up, brightened considerably.

“Good news, I take it,” Misha said.

“Best kind. Look, would you mind locking up? Don and the boys will close things up first thing tomorrow, get the rented furniture back. I should get home. Nice talking to you.”

But we hardly did, Misha thought.

“Thanks for your help. If you need me, just call.” Allen placed his card on Misha’s box and they shook hands. “Goodbye, Resnikoff.”

Misha thought about the voice on the telephone for a moment as he watched Allen walk down Lexington through the Belmont’s big glass window. Something about Allen’s posture tipped him. Misha grabbed his coat. By the time he’d left the Belmont, he was half a block behind Allen and closing fast. At Fifty-first Street, Misha realized Allen wasn’t heading home at all; he was greeted at the cab stand by Grace Dunlop, who affectionately took his arm.

Misha stepped back gently into a knot of pedestrians, watching as the couple boarded a taxi, heading downtown, not uptown, toward Allen’s townhouse on Fifth. The cab pulled away and Misha saw the passengers’ heads incline toward one another.

Misha spun on his heel, went straight back to the Belmont bull pen, switched off all the lights, and then took the key to Allen’s hall office from Hollander’s key tree.

He methodically searched Allen’s desk drawers, finding nothing much at first, but inside a folder marked Fundraising and Confidential he found a two-page client list on Sullivan and Cromwell letterhead. Even more interesting was the series of pink appointment carbons on Allen’s spike. One, a week old, read Standard Oil / Rockefeller / cloaking / BrownBrosHarriman.

Misha took them all. Locked inside his own office, he opened the courier packet. There was an unsigned file card in crabbed English handwriting, with a safety deposit box key adhesive-taped to it. Decoded from its cover of an order for office equipment parts, the note read:

Moscow Center situation fragile.

Advised Resnikoff, Misha workname RUDI

on a short list of suspect agents.

Misha burnt the file card in his ashtray. The message fizzled with an aquamarine flame, leaving the antiseptic odor of a doctor’s office. Prepared paper, he knew, crumbling the warm ashes just to be sure.

The teller left Misha alone in the familiar quiet of the Old Nassau Trust Company’s safety deposit examining room. The double-key box was ancient, its lid bent from decades of use, the black enamel cracked. He opened the dun envelope inside, fanning out a detailed escape itinerary, three hundred in dollars in cash, and a Swiss passport in the name of Resnikoff, expiration date January 24, 1939: four months to run. In a felt bag he found a nine-millimeter Beretta and two full clips.

All signs, he thought to himself, point to an interesting autumn.

XXVI

MID-OCTOBER 1938

They were hammering somewhere deep inside the blackened ruin. Eleanor could hear the demolition men at work the moment she left the cab and began her trek across the forecourt, littered with half-burnt beams and fragments of roof, the acrid reek of smoke hanging in the fine morning air. An entire window frame lay near the front door and she guessed it might have been blown out—Eleanor left that thought alone, not wanting to contemplate its meaning.

Across the street, the patrons of the Irish bar had their faces to the glass, watching. The man holding the folder marked Fidelity Mutual huddled with the fire marshal as the policeman led Eleanor past the yellow wooden sawhorse with NYFD stenciled on its sides. “He’s got no curve and they shellacked him the last time he tried that piecea shit changeup,” the insurance man argued. “Two on, two out. Jee—zus. Pull the guy, get him the hell outta there.” The fire marshal whispered something and the insurance man dropped the subject, throwing Eleanor a sympathetic glance.

“Miss Dulles?” he called. “This way, ma’am. Walk right where I walk. Don’t wander. The floors aren’t safe.” The hammering continued, props holding charcoaled beams off the mosaic-tiled stairwell.

“What happened?” Eleanor asked as she ducked under a beam holding the walls in place.

“Watch your head, ma’am. The fire started next door. Paper warehouse, big rolls of paper. They didn’t burn, but they soaked up the water from the hoses working on the roof fire. Those big rolls expanded, pushed outwards, and collapsed the old brick wall like it was nothing—and that broke open the gas. This is it, right over here. Number four. One of the boys found the door in the middle of the street.”

They were standing where the stairs ended, a three-story drop to the massive heap of timber and stone that had once been the first floor. “It would have been quick,” the insurance man was saying. “I’ve seen a lot of these. They wouldn’t have known a thing. The smoke comes first, you see. Most people never wake up.”

Eleanor said nothing. The collapsed brickwork had fallen right through Grace and India’s flat—Bert’s too, come to think of it, she remembered with a twinge—half a warehouse wall, taking down that entire corner of the walkup in a matter of seconds.

“It put most of the fire out, actually,” the insurance man was saying. “There wasn’t much left to burn.” He hesitated, appraising her. “If you take my point, ma’am.” He cleared his throat. “Knew the family, did you?” He had a handkerchief ready: he always did.

“She was family,” Eleanor said simply, dabbing her streaming eyes. “How did it start?”

“Electrical, is my opinion,” the adjuster said. He was a quiet, chubby little man with the blank adolescent face of the perpetually unworried; he’d done work for Foster on an arson settlement, ages ago. Where does Foster keep them? Eleanor wondered. “A fault in the wiring in the wall. The warehouse went up, the wall fell, then the gas lines cracked open here.”

She looked at him, his hands defensively in his pockets, a man from an office fretting she’d weep again. “Have they found the bodies?”

He cleared his throat again and hesitated. “That’ll take some time.”

Eleanor suddenly realized they might be standing atop the bodies. She shifted her feet, heartsick, her mind suddenly clear as ice. He dyes his hair, Eleanor realized, and then she didn’t want to see any more. Her eyes were sore, as if she’d survived the roiling smoke herself. It was only then she heard the familiar voice, chatting with one of the arson inspectors.

As in most Irish public houses, the bar had the flavor of the high altar. Eleanor and Misha sat well away from the oak monstrosity where the regulars smoked and stared, and far from the window, which gave out onto the street, still crisscrossed with the snaking canvas fire hoses. They were at a side table beneath a worn photograph of a minor ward heeler—complete with imposed smile and snug suit—from the days when the accents of County Clare or County Cork in the neighborhood hadn’t yet been supplanted by those of Misha’s forebears.

“I don’t know if she’ll survive the shock of it,” Eleanor was saying. “I’ll have to tell her. I don’t want the police going to her door. She’s seventy-nine.”

“Mrs. Whyte will survive, don’t you worry,” Misha said. “She’s immortal.”

They sat together in silence, Misha having seated Eleanor with her back to the window. The sound of a jackhammer thrummed through the bar’s window glass, a sound like falling plates. Misha guessed they were breaking up the sections of collapsed wall to get at the bodies.

At the back table, an unwashed fellow dozing on his folded arms revolved his head and considered Misha sideways, smiling blissfully, then faded back into his own embrace. Misha waited as Eleanor took her glasses off and wiped her eyes, timing it, not knowing quite where it would lead.

“I’m not sure how to say this, but your brother—”

“I knew. Yes.”

“I saw the two of them together, the day after the election. Surprised the hell out of me. They seemed a couple.” Her face a mask, Eleanor said nothing.

“Sorry. I’m talking nonsense,” Misha said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“No, no, you’re not,” Eleanor retorted, a sliver of anger goading her. “Forgive me. That was harsh. You’re trying to be gentle, I know.” She glanced at the clock over the bar. “It’s quarter to two. You have to get back to work.”

“Are you all right alone?”

“I’ll be fine. Foster’s going to meet me at Grand Central—he’s coming with me to tell Mrs. Whyte. There’s … the lawyering things that need to be done.” She looked at Misha with eyes empty of hope. “I don’t know if I can face the funeral. I loved her. I loved her so.”

“I can stay. I’ll call. My boss will understand. You were saying.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” The door opened; two reporters scanned the bar and spotted them. “Keep them away, will you?”

Misha stood and warned the pair off in short order. They headed across the street and contented themselves with morning-after photos of the shell.

Taking a deep breath, Eleanor stared at her beer. “It’s gone flat.”

“And warm. Want a fresh one?”

She shook her head no. “I’ve always wanted to go to Ireland. We’re Scots-Irish. I’ve always wanted to go,” she repeated, far away. “Grace and I swore we’d go together, once the Armistice was declared, spend a month on bicycles in Ireland, away from all that death in France.”

Misha studied her, letting her run on.

“It seemed like such a good thing to do,” Eleanor was saying. “With her, I mean. I wish we’d done it.” Her eyes were filling; that seemed to annoy her. “I should be brave. Braver. But then there’s the child, and I think of Sophie.” She let out another big breath and straightened her shoulders.

“Jews bury quickly: it’s in our law. Good thing, I think. Get on with the mourning, with living life. I’ll come with you to the funeral, if you like.”

“Oh, I doubt there’ll be one,” Eleanor countered, shaking her head again. “Not with Bert’s family. Too complicated, I think. No—a private memorial service. Otherwise,” she went on, working up a wry half smile, “there might be a scene. Those Dunlops don’t know when to quit, I hear. Even at a wake.”

The barman, solicitous, caught Misha’s eye, but he declined with a raised hand. “Where are you tonight?” he asked gently.

“Back to Washington. Back on the train. My second home. I’m teaching one day a week at Bryn Mawr. Day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll see you off, if you like.”

She smiled, bravely. “Grace would laugh. The least sentimental woman I’ve ever met.” She touched a handkerchief to her eyelids. “You’re very kind, but I’m not fit company. I should go.”

He stood and helped her on with her coat. Eleanor brushed his cheek with a kiss. “Good of you,” she said simply. She searched his eyes for a moment, looking for God knew what, then she left, her gaze straight ahead, never looking once at the sodden heap of smoking stone and coal-black beams.

She was, Misha decided as he paid the bar tab, a superior sort of person, this Dulles woman, with her plain talk and her common sense and her love of the underdog. He opened his satchel and took out a public library book: Brittan’s War Poetry. In pencil, some pages in, was a New York telephone number: Wintergreen-6 3022. He dropped his nickel into the wall pay phone and dialed. Once connected, he let the bell ring three times and hung up. Then he waited, working his way through a half-completed crossword at the bar.

Precisely at 3:10, a small dark man with the cropped hair of a factory worker and the knowing slow eyes of a country cleric came to the door. “You will meet Alex at seven past seven this evening,” he said, indicating a well-known address on a square card. “You understand?”

Misha said he did. The messenger’s dispassion chilled him. “There’s something wrong?” Misha asked.

“Deviation is everywhere,” the messenger replied. “We must root it out wherever we find it. That is our cause.” He examined Misha, his gaze devoid of any clue. “The dedicated have no concern. Only the deviationists.” He nodded, almost to himself. Then, self-contained, watchful, he departed as quietly and deliberately as he’d come, a breath of ice.

Moscow will come soon. A real hood, too, this time, Misha decided. With Center in an uproar, they’ll give me both barrels.

At the fire site, two men with a tape measure marked off the sidewalk with chalk, consulting a sheaf of architectural drawings. The fellow with the jackhammer was on his break, black rings of sweat darkening his shirt, a man happy to be thinking he was almost done another day’s work, a Thermos cup in hand, his back against what was left of the front wall, blithe caretaker of someone else’s tragedy.

The evening cold chased the sunlight from the Radio City concrete. Misha stood stock-still in the chilly shadows at the West Fiftieth Street curb, at the open mouth of the truck ramp that burrowed deep beneath the tower behind. And sometimes you wait and you wait some more. You have to wait like—Shiloah had told Misha this once, long ago in a Baghdad restaurant, after one of Misha’s first kayak trips through Germany—you have the patience of God Almighty.

A tired Ford coupe rolled up to the curb: he was face-to-face with Moscow’s latest missionary, who announced himself as “Alex from Philadelphia.”

Misha was Carl from Baltimore; he handed over the book of poetry, which the Russian slipped into his valise. “Get in, we’re late,” the man called Alex ordered. “You have the documents?”

He was furious, coiled with tension, snapping his fingers at Misha. His clothes were good, American in cut and fit, and he had a dime-sized mole on his cheek and slight cast in his right eye, a kind of floating cloud over the iris. He looks like George Raft, Misha thought.

“You’re late, Alex, it’s seven-twelve,” Misha declared, locking eyes with him. “Here, it’s all in here. The documents.”

Alex’s driver was a wide-necked Italian with narrow eyes; he smelt of pomade and garlic; his neck was so thick he could barely turn his head to see Misha get in.

Alex said nothing, avoiding Misha’s eye. He rapped on his window with a bare knuckle and they were off, just as Misha expected, doubling back and heading for the waterfront, rolling through Times Square, the storefronts and billboards dropping into the straight-ruled shadows as the half sun settled into the Hudson.

“The Amtorg dock?” the driver asked.

Alex nodded yes and glanced over the National Cash Register documents. “What does the mechanism here do?”

“Sets the number of variables. Say you wanted an artillery calculation performed, follow? You’d have to recalibrate it—”

This was beyond Alex. He said something short and hard in Italian to the driver. “You have been most undisciplined,” Alex complained. “Most undisciplined. Concrete thinking is in order.” He jammed the papers back into the briefcase then reached into his pocket, producing a handgun, which he jabbed into Misha’s side. “You are a Fascist spy, contact of the known German operative Kronthal.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Misha replied, but Alex only nudged the gun into his ribs harder.

“You will shut up,” he growled, and Misha gathered Alex was very angry indeed. “I will speak. You will listen.” He said nothing more as the Ford turned west onto West Twenty-ninth, at the foot of Pier 68. The pier head was a fire inspector’s nightmare—heaps of smashed crates, empty oil drums, a coil of ancient hawser, the pier itself reeking of creosote, its boards crumbling. A twin-smokestack freighter, a big one, lay tied up at the end of the dock; a wire mesh gate opened onto the dock. The Italian turned off the ignition. Not a sound, not a soul moved aboard the ship.

“You don’t understand what I’m giving you—”

Alex ignored him, searching the night.

A faint light flicked on and off from the bridge of the ship. Alex peered out the window, then tapped the Italian driver on the shoulder.

The engine started and Alex relaxed fractionally, looking down to check on the pistol.

Misha braced himself against the door, his shoes flat against the doorjamb, coiled, and then launched himself, headfirst, at Alex’s lowered face. For a split second he thought he’d missed completely, but then the top of his skull crushed Alex’s nose, driving a groan and a considerable splash of fresh blood from the Russian. Misha felt the nose cartilage break and caught a whiff of gasped beer and sausage from Alex’s shocked innards. Misha leant back and saw Alex slumped, unconscious, against the driver’s-side rear window, his neck cricked at an odd angle, blood trickling from his displaced nose, not a breath in him.

The pistol had fallen to the floor. Misha swept the warm metal up and brought the gun butt down with everything he had into the driver’s temple, accelerating right through him, just as Shiloah had taught him, sending the Italian’s squat head bouncing off the side window. The glass starred; the Italian’s eyes pinwheeled. Slithering downwards, he became intimately acquainted with the steering wheel.

Misha’s breaths came in deep gasps. Worse than piano moving, he thought absurdly, and then he realized the Ford was creeping ahead in neutral now that the Italian no longer kept the brake on.

He could barely see and felt something wet on his forehead; he must have sliced his own scalp with the impact against the Russian’s face. He wiped his eyes and tore the briefcase open, fumbling past the photostats of Metropolitan Gas’s latest meter design on NCR letterhead, his fingernails breaking as he ripped at the tongue of stiff leather at the very base of the briefcase.

The leather gave way and he pulled out Shiloah’s Beretta, two spare clips taped to the grip. He jumped from the car, leaving the door open, then threw the Russian’s pistol far into the Hudson, glimpsing a nick of silver against the river’s dark where the gun sank.

His briefcase in one hand and the Beretta in the other, he heaved his shoulder with all his might at the Ford’s door pillar. The car picked up speed along the dock’s gentle downslope. The front wheels went over cleanly, then the chassis dropped with a terrible clunking sound, and from somewhere underneath petrol coursed; the rear fender levered up, almost as high as Misha’s head, and it was a matter of a short sharp push with his shoulder against the Ford’s belly pan. The car went over, settling with a great sucking splash on its roof, the river water greedily filling its interior.

The last Misha saw of Alex’s second-hand Ford was the glinting chrome of the rear fender sliding into the swirling current and the spreading crescents of bright water.

He heard voices. Of course: the watchers. A car started, close, then headlights came on, revealing the empty space where Alex’s Ford had been. That’s done it, he thought, starting to run. Misha reached the wire mesh gate and threw that shut, snapping the lock on the chain through the uprights: his pursuers were locked in. The second car leapt straight at the gates, screaming at him in low gear, then squealed to a halt on the oiled decking. The engine dropped to idle and there was a slamming of doors and running feet, the footfalls echoing off the dock’s planks.

He heard a shot, cringed, waiting for the impact. I need a hat, he thought. I’ve cut my head and I need a hat. He ran his fingers through his hair and they came away slick, not with blood, but with sweat. He slowed to a jog, breathing hard, crossing a wide street, he had no idea which, right into the path of an oncoming cab.

“Hey, Mac, you late for a train or what?” shouted the driver.

Misha stopped and turned, gasping. “Where’s the nearest rail station?”

“You gotta be kidding. Penn Station’s right behind you. Where you going?”

Misha had a dim memory of crossing the Hudson with Eleanor. He made himself remember the name. “Across the river.”

“Where?”

“Lexington Manor. D’you know where it is?”

“Livingston Manor. I know where that is—you’re talking to a charter member of the Sullivan County Rod and Game Club, bub.”

“How far is it?”

“Ten bucks. That’s how far it is.”

Misha climbed in and showed him two fives. The cabbie swung the car around savagely, U-turning in the middle of the broad avenue. “Tell me,” Misha asked, “does Sullivan County have anything to do with Sullivan and Cromwell?”

“Sullivan and what?”

“Cromwell. The law firm.”

“Oh, those guys. They own halfa Wall Street. But so far they don’t have their mitts on my fishing hole.” The cabbie slapped the meter off and settled in for the duration.

XXVII

Misha paid the cabbie and followed a path to the front door through the hip-high grass. The mansion was teetering and massive, the size of a fair-sized European villa, shuttered, gray clapboard, a huge porch, half hidden in the trees and long grass. “Gawd help ya, Mac,” the cabbie shouted before wheeling his car back to town. A light switched on on the second floor and a face appeared; even in the darkness Misha could see the beard and the curls and the white shirt. The window opened and a thin young man leant out.

“Shabbat shalom,” he said. “Welcome to Ezrath Israel. You came all the way from New York by cab?”

“Shalom shabbat,” Misha replied, shifting the briefcase with the Beretta from one hand to the other. “Yes. Yes. That’s me.”

“You must own the cab company, mister.” He was smiling.

The caretaker’s name was Aharon. He was bearded and lantern-jawed and, despite his friendliness, quiet to the point of disappearing. He gave Misha an austere high-ceilinged room on the second floor, very clean, good bed, a side table, a window that opened on the forest. The place smelt of disinfectant and the cedar coat hangers in the closet, which clacked together when Misha opened the door. No books, no bible, no ashtray, nothing. Every drawer was empty, spotlessly clean; the mirror shone, the waxed floorboards glowed in the light from a single overhead bulb, which Misha turned off immediately.

He asked Aharon to bring him candles and matches and some writing things. After Aharon left, Misha stowed the Beretta and the spare clips behind the water closet tanks. Memorizing the penciled telephone number in the passport Shiloah had left him in the bank box—Grover-1 1522—he sealed the Swiss passport and almost all the cash in an envelope. The envelope he thumbtacked onto the back of a dresser drawer, an old trick from his days in Germany. The briefcase he gave to Aharon, for luck; the caretaker, who had his own angular sense of humor, accepted the gift with mute amusement.

The crickets began. Misha went to the window and let his eyes grow used to the night, until he could make out the individual branches on the pines. A breeze came up; he could smell the resin and the faintly mossy smell of the lake in the distance, and he remembered climbing the fire tower and the two kayaks and the sun on the water.

Moscow had gone off the deep end.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, then, his eyes brimming with exhaustion, blew out Aharon’s kosher candles and slept for thirteen hours.

The morning of the second day, after Aharon brought him tea and bread, Misha had a long bath, thinking, working the angles, neck-deep in the mammoth tub. He went downstairs to the kitchen; there, amid slicing and mixing machines mothballed for the winter, he found the resort’s ancient telephone.

His first call was to the penciled telephone number from the passport, somewhere in New York City, at the appointed hour for emergency calls. Misha guessed a pay phone: he could hear traffic. No response, just breathing and scratching of pen while Misha dictated his new address and phone number in his clumsy Hebrew. Shiloah’s terror of wiretaps, he remembered. He’s got wiretaps on the brain. The second call, to Eleanor in Washington, yielded no answer.

Leaving Aharon to his midday prayers, Misha went for a walk, following the curving dirt road away from Ezrath Israel, toward the break in the trees where the lake was.

The lake was Indian-summer warm. He swam, then found a large flat boulder. He stretched out there and managed to sleep.

He dreamt of wheeling birds and a great white building honeycombed with closed offices and long hallways and men in uniforms. A car drove down a massive corridor, big as Versailles. A wall of Pacific-blue water followed the car, cresting, thundering at him. The man from Amtorg floated past … Misha snapped his eyes open, heart pounding, shaken, sure he’d awake in the stone bowels of a Moscow prison.

He reached Eleanor’s house that night on the cranky old telephone, after ten, while the peripatetic Aharon buffed the lobby floor, great dragonfly wings thrumming down the hall. She wasn’t home, said a woman’s voice, a Southern accent, bemused. “She’s leaving for New York tomorrow early,” the voice said before ringing off. In the background, he could hear the radio playing Benny Goodman.

On the morning of the fifth day, the lowering sky was streaked with clouds threatening rain. A rattletrap truck arrived, barely painted, its engine running on and shaking the vehicle even while the driver got out and went to its back gate. Someone had roughly painted over Diamanti Brothers Lumber on the driver’s door, but Misha, wrapped in a blanket in the front porch hammock, could still make out the phone number: EG578, somewhere in a place called Atlantic City, wherever that was. He sat up and gazed at the driver, now lowering a shapeless kit bag, then two more and the faltboot in its cylindrical canvas sheath. Misha recognized a familiar Greek fisherman’s cap and the thick spectacles: brawny David Kauffmann, Reuven Shiloah’s slope-shouldered go-between. Kauffmann had been Misha’s contact with Jerusalem during the early years at Cambridge and in Germany, supervising Misha’s kayak “bus service” in and out of the new Reich.

Kauffmann carried the four bags to Misha’s doorstep, and he wasn’t moving them an inch farther than the dust at his feet.

“What is this place?” Kauffmann muttered.

“A resort,” Misha replied, hands thrust in his pockets. “A resort for the Orthodox Jews from the city.”

Kauffmann looked at the overgrown grass. “Cleared out your place, your office, everything. You’re so hot, you’re glowing.” Misha said nothing as Aharon brought Kauffmann a tall glass of water. “I got everything I could carry out of your apartment: your typewriter, books, anything I could move fast.”

“My horn?”

“If it’s there, it’s there. You should be asking a different question.” Kauffmann took off his leather cap and ran his hand over his pate. “‘Am I worth it?’ We’ve—Reuven has—we’ve stuck our necks out for you. Half of New York is after you. Here.” Kauffmann took a pair of books from the kit bag and handed them over. “From Reuven. Where’s the dog? I heard there’s supposed to be a dog, a big one.”

“I’ve never seen a dog.”

Kauffmann shrugged, boarded the rattletrap truck, and left. Misha looked at the books in his hand: La Ciudad de la Habana. Beneath that was a Spanish-English dictionary. There was no inscription.

The first of the autumn rains came; sheets of water rent the fading leaves off the big maple in the side yard. Aharon’s silent diligence with a steady parade of pots and buckets in the attic kept the lower floors dry. The old house had grown on Misha; he liked the clapboard monster’s odd mix of heavy-curtained Old Kraków and cheerfully empty-headed Americana, the kitsch photographs of Al Jolson and Ethel Merman next to photographs of the Holy Land and Franklin Roosevelt and the yellowing wallpaper with cowboys and Red Indians and the plastic deer grazing on the kitchen window ledge.

Kauffmann had indeed brought the cornet. Misha walked his horn into the barn and climbed into the hayrick. He had a small folio of sheet music, old big band tunes, but nothing he wanted to try cold. He ran a few scales, spitting and wincing. The first few notes scraped out, hanging painfully, but within a minute he found his lips weren’t totally lost. He tried “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” which worked out rather well, attracting a dog of no known provenance, possibly the one whose absence had perplexed Kauffmann. Misha let rip. The dog watched, wide-eyed, then scurried off, leaving Misha to play until his lungs burnt.

The rain began again, a steady tapping on the barn’s tin roof. Afterwards, he squatted in the empty hayrick, sore-lipped and pensive, occasionally clicking the valves of the horn, knowing he’d slid far down the steep mountain of jazz. The sound of a horse’s hooves grew, moving on up the rough road.

XXVIII

Astalemate while they took one another in, almost five years’ silence between them. “I should start calling you Farmer Misha,” Adela Braudel declared, not moving. “The beard, the clothes, all a bit rustic, especially the smell.”

He fingered the valves on his horn. “I was in the barn. Playing.” In the laneway, the cart horses clipped away into the distance.

“You’ve been playing, all right. Idiot: those two are all over the papers. The Soviet embassy has lodged a formal complaint against the American police, the mayor … they’re turning New York upside down looking for the killers. What were you thinking? Reuven is ready to write you off, you know that? And after all he’s done for you. You know what he once said to me? ‘Della, he’s worth it. If we had twenty Mishas, we’d have a country.’ Some hero you turned out to be. You know where I’ve been the past two weeks?”

“I have no idea,” Misha allowed.

“In and out of the Rothschild Palais in Vienna. Trying to ransom Jews out of there. From the Gestapo. All very correct, all very sickening. You should see their eyes.”

“You’ve changed.”

“Unfortunately, you haven’t. I need to move—I’ve been sitting for hours. Make some tea, please, will you?” And she strode away, her blunt black hair thrown back by the wind, her umbrella dead vertical. Misha watched her from the kitchen while he waited for the kettle on the gas ring, floating through the deep sea of dying grass, very beautiful, smoking and examining the forest trees in the rain.

He emerged from the kitchen with the tea, but she’d already returned, her hand on the rail at the foot of the main stairs, no woman of his. “Where are you going?”

“Kauffmann tells me the room at the back of the third floor has a big canopy. I’m going to have a long nap.”

“How’d he know that? He never went upstairs.” Adela ignored this. “You want me to wake you?”

“No.”

He reached for her bag, but she was there first.

She climbed the stairs, the hem of her skirt swinging in reproof as she strode away from him. He listened to her footfalls move across the bowed floorboards. Misha stood motionless. Whatever calculations enter into all this, he thought, this moment had better be reckoned among the debits. Then the pipes sang and Adela’s bathtub thundered with the good Sullivan County water.

Aharon laid them a fire and then vanished tactfully somewhere upstairs. Misha pictured him praying under the eaves, as close to heaven as he could get. An awkward silence followed while Misha poured fresh tea, broken only by the crack and pop of the firewood.

“What are you thinking?” he asked after a careful glance at her.

Adela stared straight into the fire, strain in her eyes, cracks all over her. “What we choose now, that’s what our children will come to think of us. Me and you. It’s not politics, not café debates, or point making. It’s something that … that’s the end of our families, our Europe, scattered all over the world. It’s the end of our time. That’s what I see.”

He sipped his tea, letting her come to him.

“We’re three in a boat: you and me and Reuven,” Adela continued. “The Comintern, this paramour of yours, it’s blinded you in one eye. Don’t close the other. Walk away from us now, you’re lost. And that will break my heart.”

“I wish I had your trust in the ways of the world,” Misha said.

“What if you were told you’d die tomorrow morning? What then? How would you square the circle?”

“I’d say I played well and rowed straight and I loved as best I could.”

She shrugged, cupping her tea mug close in both hands. “Two years ago you’d have said it differently.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, yes. You’d have said, ‘I’m a Jew before anything else,’ then taken anyone who disagreed with you outside. You’ve changed.” She pulled back her hair and fixed him with a sharp glance. “I’m going for a walk. Want to come?”

They followed a path through the high grass, down to the fence at the edge of the estate where the forest began again, then to the east, toward the road from town, not talking, Misha a contrite distance behind her, watched by a bevy of motionless dark birds on the telephone wire.

The creek ran high with the autumn rains. In the evening shade the air was sweet but uncomfortably cool, Adela’s pace economical and fast. La femme est la campagne de l’homme, he’d read once. He hadn’t understood the aperçu then, but he grasped it now with a vengeance.

They’d always walked well together, driven as she was; they were well matched that way, he thought morosely. He’d just about worked up the nerve to speak when Adela reached back and clutched his arm. “My God, look!” She spotted the antlers first as a magnificent stag broke cover from a head-high hedge of scrub and leapt straight up, its legs and neck at full extension, a beautifully muscled milk chocolate arc hanging in midair then breaking downstream, sure-footed even among the wet creek bed rocks, a tremendous clattering rush of power away from them. With a final defiant toss of its antlers, the stag disappeared into the brush.

“Have you ever seen anything like that? My God!” She laughed, all nerves, still holding his sleeve, listening as the stag’s hooves thrashed through the forest and into silence. “I need a smoke,” she announced. “Let’s sit down.”

He’d spread his leather jacket over a massive pine stump and offered her a seat. She lit a cigarette: that was when Misha noticed the ring, crowned with an exquisite honey brown jewel he couldn’t name. “I love Canadian cigarettes,” she said, holding the match until it was cool. “Much stronger than those hopeless American things.”

“I haven’t asked: where have you come from?”

Adela waved her cigarette package. “Montreal, raising money.”

“And?”

“They have me buying Jews from the SS, Vienna, Berlin, Munich. An awful, awful business, ransoming people. The SS steal the biggest Jewish property they can lay their paws on and set up shop. In Vienna, it’s the Rothschild Palace and an SS lieutenant, obersturmführer—or unter?—I can’t remember, barricaded behind a desk, huge thing, fit for a king. I go in with a lawyer from the Joint, an Austrian, not a Jew, a brave fellow. Secretaries and underlings come and go with files and more files and coffee and cake, finest china and silverware, all looted, I’m certain. There’s thirty staff—people coming and going all the time, moving paper, totally inhuman. And all very correct, thugs pretending manners. And the process? It’s sickening. The SS have records of bank accounts, auction sales, confiscations: the German mania for records. So you can’t lie to them—the game is to flatter and tease and edge them sideways. Complete hell. God, let’s talk about something else.”

Adela gave nothing else away, leading them back along the town road, silent. A mail truck passed them, so Misha checked the mailbox while Adela walked on ahead, exploring the copse of fir behind the barn. There were a half dozen envelopes, bills and circulars and two small packages from a religious bookstore in Brooklyn.

Walking back from the mailbox, Misha heard barking and laughter. Adela was playing with the big dog. Misha went inside and tossed the mail on Aharon’s spotless desk, thinking to make more tea. The old phone began to ring as Adela came into the kitchen, passing close to him, still wearing her German hiking boots and smelling faintly of lavender, pink from the heat of the walk, her hair damp from the exertion and clinging to her temples in ringlets. She picked up the handset: “Louis, hello …” Her voice trailed off ominously. Misha caught her expression: Someone’s dead, he guessed.

“Burned them all?” Adela was saying, her voice taut. “My God. My God. What about Essen? Did Dr. Vogelstein get his visa? Did he get the family out? My God. How many? It’s the end, Louis. It’s the end. Any word from Munich? To where? Dachau? All four brothers? I thought Markus was in Argentina. What does the radio say?” She waved at Misha. “Is there a radio here? Shortwave?”

A persistent autumn rain pecked at the glass in Mr. Sherman’s front door. They huddled around the general store’s blackened oil stove for warmth, the shortwave radio on the counter. They listened, the two of them and Aharon and Mr. Sherman. “… in a statement to the foreign press corps in Berlin, a propaganda ministry spokesman said that the Nazi leadership had no hand in the quote spontaneous end quote attacks. Meanwhile, all over the Third Reich, the synagogues burn. This is Frank Gibbons in Berlin for American Mutual Radio.”

“Can it get international shortwave?” asked Adela, her face set.

“Not so much up here in the hills, miss,” Mr. Sherman said kindly. “You got family there, miss? It don’t look too good.”

“No. No family. We both worked there. We have many friends and colleagues.”

Aharon spoke, very softly. “I have a friend in Colmar—Benjamin. We were at camp together, just down the road, the same bunkhouse. The letters from him stopped last fall.” He turned his glass in his hand. “I think about him all the time.”

Mr. Sherman, a gentle, potbellied fellow in a woolen shirt and spectacles, asked: “You want to take the radio, miss? I can live without it for a coupla days. G’wan. Take it.”

After dinner that night, as Adela read in her room two floors up, Misha and Aharon did the washing-up by kerosene lamp. In the night clouds, geese were flying, great chevrons of them, southbound for Mexico.

“They sleep at the lake,” Aharon said, listening to the cries.

“Maybe I will too,” Misha replied.

Misha and Adela patrolled the front porch in silence, watching the stars. A nearly full moon enameled everything an icy blue-white. A cold breeze grew and a handful of leaves fluttered down onto the porch planking. “Reuven’s found you a job with the Joint in Havana,” she said at last. “You’ve a new life. You’re Karl Halvorsen. You can start all over again.”

“So: I grow a mustache, get a tan, meet a few Spanish girls, that the plan?”

She wound up for a crisp backhander, but this time he caught her.

“Let go of me.”

“Look, the ash—” He flicked the burning cigarette ash off her chest, catching the weightless shape of her breast. They stared at one another for a good long moment. He broke the stare by taking the pack of cigarettes from her hand, tapping one out. “What’s the story with your ring?”

“None of your business.” She turned her back to him, the smoke rising over her shoulder. “You’re making a mess of your life. Samuel and your mother—such heartache you’ve caused,” Adela said quietly, “you don’t know.”

He could see his breath, proof he was here and alive, against the cold softness of the coming winter. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Grow up. At least I’ll have what I know I want: I want a homeland for my children.”

That stopped him. “Your children?”

“Yes. For my children. An Israel. In my lifetime—this year in Jerusalem.”

“Della. Sit down. Let’s talk.”

“Don’t try your sad choirboy face on me. I know you,” she warned, pulling hard on the cigarette. “I was in Paris last month, I went to the cafeteria at the Russian Conservatory by myself. Ate pelmeni, drank two vodkas, the waiter hovering, worrying I wasn’t going to pay because I’d had my best coat stolen and I must’ve looked like a Russian down on her luck. I didn’t care: I ate the pelmeni and drank the vodkas and I missed you.”

Misha moved closer to her, but she stepped back. “Don’t you dare. I would have done anything for you, you know that, moved in with you, done the laundry, cheered you at the boat races. I was yours. Do you know how lucky you were? You had me. Now you don’t have me. You don’t.” She was white-faced with fury, her arms tighter yet across her chest. “Look at you. Your Moscow friends have turned on you, you fool—now there’s only us. A fine experiment.” She waved him off, dismissing him. “I have to go—there’s a car coming for me.” From somewhere she produced an envelope. “Your ticket. Welcome to nowhere. I hope you like it.” She turned to go, then turned back. “You know, it’s better you have her.”

“Who?”

“Don’t ‘who’ me. The American. The economist.”

“You’re well informed, aren’t you?”

“Here’s a prophecy: you’ll have her for a short time … and me, your whole life. The angels are watching, Misha. Both of us. You’ll see.” She let that hang, then flung her ring hand at him. “And this? I found it. Between the cushions of a seat on a train. Near Kraków. It’s amber. Russian amber. Goodbye. No, don’t say anything.”

She walked up the path alone, suddenly another woman entirely; her dark pullover melted into the gloom of the moonlit trees. Misha couldn’t bear the thought of watching her leave. He stayed there until he heard the sound of Kauffmann’s truck, and even then he didn’t move until he’d smoked a second then a third cigarette. He wondered if Reuven had sent Adela out of sheer perversity, but even as he thought it he discarded the notion. There weren’t enough agents in Europe, never mind America. Adela was closest and the job had fallen to her.

In the span of a week, he’d become a man on ice.

XXIX

LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK
DECEMBER 31, 1938

Fresh snow glazed the narrow road, confetti swirling across the winding black asphalt in the crosswind. The cabbie had the taxi’s feeble heater on full blast, but Grace’s old fur, thrown across Eleanor’s knees, stoutly kept out the draft. The cab windows were completely frosted over. Eleanor could feel the wind roaring right off the Sound, lifting the car with each gust.

“We’ll make ’er there, ma’am. Don’t you worry,” the driver said. “The little girl okay?”

Sophie was asleep under the fur, only her eyes, forehead, and dark hair showing above the hem. Eleanor pulled Sophie’s hat down even farther over her ears. “She’s fine, still sleeping. It’s the fourth laneway on the left, just past a stand of poplars. Another two miles or so.”

The cab swung crazily for an instant over a lick of black ice, but the driver caught it smartly and then they were rumbling axle-deep through the drifts filling in the sea road everywhere the wind ran free.

The lights of Foster’s house barely reached through the fine snow, pinpoints of thin yellow warm against the gathered white. A spiral of snow blew sideways off the roof. The cabbie left the engine running as he opened the taxi door: Eleanor could hear the naked beech and oak clack and clatter as she wrapped Sophie tighter.

Millie and young Iris, Foster’s housemaids, were in the open doorway, wrapped in their best coats, their coat hems and their black service skirts blown sideways in the fierce wind. “That beautiful child—she sleep the whole way, Miss Dulles?” Millie asked.

“The train was an hour late to begin with, Millie. Any word from Mrs. Dulles?”

“Mrs. Foster, you mean? She’s stuck in New York, ma’am. They’re not even going to try until things calm down tomorrow.”

“Mommy, where are we?” Sophie whispered.

“We’re at Uncle Foster’s, darling, safe and sound. I’m going to put you to bed. Millie, if Janet calls, let her know we’re fine and I’ll call her first thing. Is Foster in a meeting?”

Iris took the luggage. “He and Mr. Allen are having dinner with the Baron, ma’am.”

Eleanor plucked the visiting card from the silver tray. “Well, I never …”

“Something wrong, Miss Eleanor?” Millie asked, as Iris wedged the luggage onto the dumbwaiter.

“I’ll put Sophie to bed. Come, darling,” Eleanor said. Her cheeks had gone white. “Millie, I’ll have a whiskey when you’ve a moment.”

Eleanor crossed the big second-floor landing to the bedroom wing, with Sophie safely asleep. At the foot of the stairs the dining room doors swung open, revealing Allen, a drink in one hand and a note in the other, his face glowing from the alcohol and the rich food. He saw her and gave a slow wave. “Why, hello, Ellie, Happy New Year.”

“—the BIS board isn’t a problem,” a German voice observed from within the dining room. “The Swiss know where their next franc is coming from—we’ve got them by the short hairs.”

Allen closed the doors behind him, all innocence.

“And you, Allen.” Eleanor grabbed her brother by the elbow and tugged him toward the library. “That’s Baron Schröder. You could have invited me, you two. You know I wrote the book on the bank. Why didn’t Foster invite me?”

“I thought you were here to visit with Janet. That’s what Foster told me.”

“You’re really a peach, you know that? What’s he now, a general in the SS?”

“He’s got a chestful of medals staring at me across the table. That’s all I know.”

“Am I just the kid sister forever?”

“Wasn’t my idea, the dining arrangements. Foster decided we’d have a long leisurely dinner while you ladies occupied yourselves. Where’s Janet?”

“Millie says she’s stuck in Manhattan for the night.” She pulled at his dinner jacket sleeve again. “Get back in here, I’m not through with you.”

“Eleanor, I have to get—”

Eleanor closed the library door. “Allen Welsh Dulles, don’t you move until I’m through with you.” But just as she began to speak, Millie opened the thick library door, bearing drinks.

“Excuse me, ma’am, I’m sure,” Millie said, slipping away backwards with her tray, drawing the door shut behind.

“Two words. Grace Dunlop.” Eleanor stood between Allen and the door, jaw high, hands in midair, awkward in her fury. “You …” she hissed. “I was at school with Grace Dunlop. She must have told you that. It wasn’t enough that you cheat on your wonderful wife, you had to throw yourself at my best friend and then …”

Allen swirled his drink in its tumbler, not moving.

“You are a complete and utter bastard,” she said, her voice low and cutting. “Do you know how you break your wife’s heart? Clover knows, every step of the way, she knows. How can she not? You choose her friends and wives of her friends. You don’t give a damn. You don’t give a damn. You’re unspeakable.”

Allen lowered his voice, choosing a plausible tone. “Terrible thing, her death. Terrible.”

“You spoke with her—you broke off an affair with her, didn’t you?”

“I have to get back to Schröder.”

“Leave him to Foster. Face it, it’s Foster’s ear he wants anyway.” She put her back to the door. “I’ve known Grace for twenty-five years. I never confronted her. I should have, but I didn’t. Do you know how hard that was?” She looked at the note in his hand.

Allen’s face had gone blank, carnivorous. “We all have our little secrets, don’t we? Let him—let her—who is without sin cast the first stone. Isn’t that what Father would have said?”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Grace told me. About you. She wasn’t very discreet with her pillow talk.” He stepped past her, opening the thick door. “But then, I expect you know all about that. Excuse me. See you at breakfast.”

Eleanor stood in the library, utterly alone. She looked down at her hands: they trembled, ready to fly away. She found herself staring into one of Janet’s beautiful antique mirrors, vestige of a shopping trip to Paris they’d shared, in more peaceable days.

XXX

HAVANA
NOVEMBER 1939

The only thing moving more slowly than the ceiling fan carving a wobbly whoop-whoop through the still heat was Misha’s conversation with Leonel Santos. Santos, a fine-boned Spanish Cuban, pale and languorous, played the role of a deputy minister much given to fussing with the papers on his desk while he shrugged within his white linen and feinted around Misha’s questions.

The Hamburg America ship had been in quarantine in Havana harbor for two full days in the broiling sun; already several Jews had tried to swim to shore after a perilous leap from the deck to the filthy waters below. After returning the fugitives to the ship, the Cubans had sealed the vessel off, already having declared the tourist visas invalid without landing documents. Misha hadn’t a hope in hell of getting aboard. He had in his lap a short list of three dozen passengers who had valid American entry visas from the Stuttgart consulate; for them, he thought he had a slim chance. They were men under forty, well educated, single. If he could get them past the Cubans, he thought he could get them into America. That, at any rate, was the plan.

“Let’s cut to the bone, all right, Leonel? Who will decide if the visas are valid?”

“The minister, of course,” Santos replied. “He has the final say in these matters. Unless the president decides in lieu. Then that is final too.”

“Then why is your senate immigration committee up in arms? I saw Senator Delgado this morning—”

“A good man, an honest politician,” Santos added, admiring his manicured fingernails.

“I’m sure,” Misha agreed, inching the conversation along. “That’s why I went to see him, Leonel. I wanted a straight answer. He sent me back to you.”

“Information is difficult for me. The people who know, know who I am.” Santos had an actor’s way with the inflections of a frown; this one was pitched somewhere between regret and resignation.

“Leonel, a thousand of my brethren are on that ship, and I’m not going to give up until I get the minister’s version of events.”

The phone rang, a twittery pealing ring. Santos picked up the receiver with an immaculately kept hand. He spoke the impenetrable “mashed potatoes” Cuban Spanish, very fast, larded with slang. Misha caught “tomorrow” and “difficult to say” and “he’s with the president now” and not much else in a conversation that lasted over five minutes. Santos kept his end up, muttering consoling sounds into the handpiece as he swayed his thin body from side to side. He looks like a kid in a man’s suit, Misha reckoned. Santos was in fact reliable, one of the few Cubans Misha’d come to trust in his year as the Joint Distribution Committee’s Havana representative without portfolio. Shiloah’s stipend meant Misha’s days were spent trailing from one visa section to the next of every embassy that might entertain an exiled Jewish family’s application.

On the side, Misha, known in Havana as Señor Karl Halvorsen, commercial traveler from Göteborg, ran a useful string of informants on the Havana waterfront and in two or three of the lesser ministries. Problem was, in the vortex of corruption that was the capital’s bureaucracy, the Joint didn’t have the cash to pay off the big boys in the police and the military. Misha had learnt the game: show up early, listen a very long time, and then be prepared to wait, really wait—days sometimes for the simple things, weeks for paperwork, often months—unless the right palm was greased. The graft became as formalized as Versailles etiquette, theater with money, observing the expected dead politeness, with only an ashy taste of moral defeat in the hallway afterwards. Cuba ran on its own byzantine commerce—the devil take the creature foolish enough to curry hope.

Santos had drifted off into a cloud of affirmatives, his eyes glazing over with the effort. “Fine, yes, I’ll tell him. Oh, yes, yes. Absolutely. Yes. Good.”

And then, spent, Santos hung up. Misha tried the tack he saved for last: “You have a thankless job, Leonel.”

Santos shrugged from the depths of his suit. “There is something I must tell you. In confidence. As one gentleman to another, dear Karl.”

“All right,” Misha said, readying his papers to leave and knowing full well the real deal making had just begun.

“I have made an important discovery.” Santos wore the poker face of a man who’d seen a run of cards take a sudden turn for the better but then thought better of revealing his luck.

Misha grunted. “All right. Who?”

The Cuban lowered his hands, palms down. “Slowly, slowly. My friend works in the president’s office. He will get you in.”

“Perez-Crespo?”

Santos nodded and waited a moment before speaking, weighing Misha’s response. “There is a precondition. Perez-Crespo is a good man. He married a Jew from Argentina. He has to protect himself.”

“Yes?”

“He cannot get you on the San Luis. No one I know can. He can get you into the president’s house on Saturday—”

“That’s four days from now. Come on, Leonel, the ship might sail any minute.”

“I am so sorry. It’s the very best I can do.” Santos ran his tapering fingers once over his brilliantined hair. “I tell you this as a friend: the rumors about the bribes to land your clients are true. The immigration director did not share the bribes out. He withheld, played favorites. Important senators were cut out, only two of the big generals were paid. That’s the truth. Nothing will happen, my friend, unless you can persuade the president to intervene.”

“Was he in on the payoffs?”

Who can say? said the eloquent expression on Santos’s face. “This I do not know. In truth. Perez-Crespo was offered no money.”

“How do you know?”

The question amused Santos. “Because he’s my wife’s cousin, dear Karl, come on. He would never lie to me. Never.”

“Then I’ll just have to believe him, won’t I?”

Santos thought for a moment, readying his last card. “Perez-Crespo says the other ministers have threatened the president already, to ensure their cut. That is the news as of an hour ago.”

“What’s the immigration minister doing right now?”

“Right now? He’s in Miami for the weekend. Probably in his father-in-law’s VIP box at Hialeah, getting ready for the big race.”

“The big race?”

“The minister is at Hialeah, watching the horses run. He likes the horses.” Santos nodded to emphasize this important fact.

“Cuba,” was all Misha could think to say. A thousand doomed Jews in Havana harbor and the one man who can save them? He’s at the track in Florida.

“Cuba, sí,” Santos agreed.

For a time only the fan blades spoke. Finally, Misha cleared his throat. “Then there’s our other business, Leonel. How’s your cousin Alfonso?”

Santos creased his perfect skin with an ambiguous smile. “He checked his bank account yesterday.”

“Everything satisfactory, I take it?”

“Eminently,” Santos agreed. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a slim manila envelope. “As usual?”

Misha nodded. It was a precaution they observed carefully: Misha never took anything from Santos’s office.

“It is wise,” Santos replied. “I will begin.” He opened the envelope and slipped out a page of typescript, reading in slow schoolboy English, clipping the short vowels as he worked his way through the letter, translating as he went.

“Cousin Alfonso wishes you and your family well. Concerning the matter of the refinery at Regla and the visit of Señor Nelson Rockefeller of the Standard Oil Company—Alfonso, as the number four man at the refinery, was responsible for taking Señor Rockefeller on a tour of the plant and sharing with him a working lunch with Señors Ramos and Cruz-Castillo, the refinery’s managers. Alfonso is of course a trained accountant.”

“Of course,” Misha said, for Alfonso’s accreditation had been a factor in negotiating the amount of the bribe.

“We come to it now,” Santos reported. “This is verbatim: ‘Rockefeller tells Alfonso at the lunch he will be made a big new job in the State Department of America, commanding all secret political and diplomatic operations from Mexico south, including all the Caribbean.’ There’s more here about the English blockade and the German U-boats refueling offshore with Standard’s diesel fuel, but you—”

“—have already paid for that, thank you,” Misha said, smiling. “Go on.”

“This is interesting, though,” Santos went on. “‘The refinery at Regla, the Betol facility, is majority owned by Standard. Señor Rockefeller has ordered an immediate expansion of refinery renovations, to accommodate yet more oil from Standard’s South American drill fields.’”

“Why, if there’s a British blockade, does Rockefeller want to increase production? Where’s Standard going to sell the oil?”

“You see things immediately,” Santos noted cheerfully. “Sí. Well, my friend, he’s going to sell it to the Germans. Any fool can see that.”

“This fool wants to see proof.”

Santos detached a yellow carbon copy from the letter and showed it to Misha, indicating the customs and excise rubber stamps in sticky maroon ink. “It’s a Betol waybill from last week. You see the amount? Eighty-six hundred kilos of maritime diesel. That shipment of oil was sold in international waters the next day to the waiting U-boats, very thirsty U-boats. It’s really quite simple—Alfonso himself made the deposit in Swiss francs on Friday. And make no mistake, my friend, the U-boats never sink a Standard Oil tanker. Oh, no. I would say,” Santos concluded, “that if Señor Rockefeller gets his new job, there will be many happy German faces and many sad English faces. I finish now. ‘The increased capacity of the refinery is directed almost entirely towards marine diesel suitable for U-boat use. Also custom refining runs would then be possible, processing overages from the Standard refineries at Maracaibo.’”

“All for the U-boats?”

“That’s what Alfonso says … and he does the books.”

“And if the war comes to Cuba? What then?”

Santos shrugged. “It’s Rockefeller’s oil. He can do with it what he wants.”

“Evidently. It’s a good business, selling to both sides.”

“The best,” Santos agreed. He paused. “One can only admire such a business.” He folded the paper from Alfonso and dropped it in his ashtray. They both watched it burn for a long moment.

“You want some coffee?” Santos asked. “I need a coffee.” He pressed the buzzer underneath his desk and a feminine voice called out “Momentito” from down the hall.

“I should go, thanks,” Misha answered. “Tell Perez-Crespo I’ll be there on Saturday. Noon?”

Santos shook his head at this. “No. After lunch. I’ll get you in. You should stay. You should see Zeida. She’s new.” He beamed. “She brings the coffee.”

“Some other time, Leonel. Buen.’”

In the hallway, Zeida and her coffee cart passed. Misha turned to watch Zeida and her freewheeling hips sweep into Santos’s office, her heels squeaking on the parquet floor. It’s good to be deputy minister, Misha thought, wondering just how much the Joint would have to pay next time.

Misha barely slept that night, rising at three to make tea and lemon on the single gas ring in the yellow-tiled kitchen, watching the clouds dodge the chrome white moon over Havana’s Vedado. He heard the car coming from a long way off, a big American sedan, the thrum of its overpowered engine echoing off the multicolored stucco of Misha’s apartment block. When the big white Chevrolet stopped in the street below, a familiar figure emerged, identifiable by both thickset body and leather cap. He glanced up, then strode straight at the doorway below.

“You get around, don’t you?” Misha asked in his rough Hebrew as he let Kauffmann in.

“My job is to get around, sonny. I could use a rum.”

They stood at the window of Misha’s big bare central room while Misha poured Kauffmann a treble, backlit by the glow of a kerosene lamp, the night sounds filtering in.

“What brings you here? Shiloah on the warpath?”

“Ask him yourself. I’m just the messenger.”

“So what’s the message?”

Kauffmann tipped his fisherman’s cap back on his head then spread his feet, bracing himself. “Your mother never got out of Warsaw, Misha. She’s all right, living in a safe house in the suburbs with a Swedish family. Your stepfather is sending money, but it’s not possible to move her. She lost her papers in the air raids when the war started.”

“What the hell was she doing anywhere near Warsaw with bombs about to fall?”

“Your grandmother wanted to die in Warsaw. Your mother tried to persuade her, but the old woman had her wish. That’s all I was told. I’m sorry.” A condolence from Kauffmann was something rare: it gave Misha pause.

“What the bloody hell was Samuel thinking, letting her stay?”

“Don’t know,” Kauffmann said, stone-faced, sliding a thick envelope across the table. He rose to go. “Mind your back, sonny. We’re not exactly the flavor of the month right now.”

Misha opened the envelope and found a worn but well-maintained Smith & Wesson .38 revolver and a box of cartridges. “Good of Shiloah. To help like this.”

“Did he hell,” Kauffmann snorted. “It’s my spare kit. As far as Shiloah’s concerned, you’re still wandering the desert.” He flipped an envelope underhanded at Misha’s chest. “There’s some Swiss francs. On my tab.”

“Decent of you.”

“I see your reports,” Kauffmann observed. “You’re getting there. And who doesn’t deserve a second chance in this racket?” At the door he said, “Tell me—the girls here as good as they say?”

“One or two of them. Keeping a low profile myself.”

Kauffmann nodded. “There’s Germans about, heard ’em at the bar. They own half the Cuban police, I hear.”

“The Germans have the run of the docks—they make sure their oil moves first.” Misha then asked, “What’s next?”

“Mexico, see if I can buy some visas for that lot in the harbor.” Kauffmann exhaled hard. “There’s already enough Jews to open a delicatessen on every street corner in Mexico City. Most depressing thing I’ve ever done, this job, know what I mean?”

Misha said he did and watched Kauffmann descend the stairs, something simian about the way he moved. The Chevrolet roared off; in the distance, a ship’s horn mourned. Misha looked out over the rooftops at the Malecón below. The tide was in: the Caribbean battered the old Spanish seawall mercilessly, tossing the walkway manhole covers up like poker chips.

At least, he thought, Mother’s safe where she is—God alone knows what lies in store for the thousand out there in the harbor. The portholes of the German ship glowed in the dark and cast a necklace of light about the ship, reflected on the low, smooth waves. Misha took a deep breath. He tried to picture a good outcome—perhaps a presidential order to accept the refugees at his audience on Saturday? Perhaps.

But all Misha could picture was an empty jetty and the trail of an ocean liner’s wake, headed east.

ROYAL NAVY: MOST SECRET

DOWNGRADED TO UNCLASSIFIED by auth. [signature] 2/xi/1996

not for public release until 2004

Typescript of telephone call #48
10:12 am
October 12 1941

Auditor: W/O R.J.H. Parker-Rees, RN
Transcribed by Lt. L.J. Kelly

UNKNOWN OPERATOR/WASHINGTON
its an open line sir youll have to scramble

Q/112

right tell his operator to scramble

UNKNOWN OPERATOR/WASHINGTON

its going through theres the line noise itll cut out once your caller starts his

Q/112

terrible [two seconds line noise] get used to it

UNKNOWN OPERATOR/WASHINGTON

go ahead sir youre scrambled now

Q/112

good morning allen bill donovan here calling from

washington how are you this morning

W/056

fine thanks bill nice to see you at the club the other night thought old ralph macatee was in great voice didnt you

Q/112

the mans missed his calling couldve been one of the great irish tenors except hes a new yorker cant have that where i hail from mans got to be dublinborn sing like that reason im calling allen is that somethings come up

W/056

oh somethings come up

Q/112

along the lines we talked about at the club the idea you had

W/056

i see im all ears bill you know me chance to do something instead of driving this law desk of mine all over town

Q/112

youd be doing something all right allen whats going on is a new push a real effort to start up an intelligence service here i want you to be a part of it right here on the ground floor starting in the spring when i have a budget some hawkeye at state wont confiscate at the drop of a hat

W/056

ha ha ha ha ha

Q/112

early days yet allen ive got arthur goldberg the labor lawyer from chicago good man lining up things for you contacts a real good start on oh half a dozen networks from here right through to the far east good challenge right up your alley we think theres real action here allen and itd get you in on the start of things

W/056

ok tell me more about whats going in dee cee why spring why not now

Q/112

may take even longer uphill fight for every nickel I can shake out of a budget anybodys budget ive got the world mad at me here state war treasury all wanting to shut me down cut the purse string im a one-man band these days talking it up all over hells half acre trying to find people wholl buy the idea we need an overseas eyes and ears what we need you for is what you do best: run agents we need you allen we need your old magic with field agents run the maritime unions for us out of new york

W/056

pays great too ill bet

Q/112

dollar a year for starters probably less once you really have to work at it

W/056

i run my own shop my way

Q/112

i havent got the manpower to do anything but run stringers allen never mind the money sure youre your own man promise you that

W/056

all right heres my counteroffer ill take it but if theres a war and were in it I want bern I dont want london or anywhere else bern I know like the back of my hand I can do something there without the generals shining a flashlight up my backside every five minutes and counting the paper clips I used last week

Q/112

you got a deal can you get out of sullivan in a couple of months

W/056

ill work something out

Q/112

shake things out with goldberg idea is an office for you rockefeller center have to buy off the existing tenants

W/056

youve got a bank somewhere

Q/112

ill courier you the money fifty to start run your own books watch every penny

W/056

nobody launders money like a wall street lawyer bill you know that

Q/112

ha ha ha once youre in say march or so you get three staff you better have a demon secretary because the filing goes through the roof art goldbergs down in the bowels of the war department I think he was last seen in the room next to the furnace so let it ring a few times before you give up he might not hear you if the heats on so long

W/056

bye bill

TRANSCRIPT ENDS

CENTRAL REGISTRY addendum

- The attached original document is PF File No. v45/946/1941, with two annexes, to be filed under personal files of Dulles Allen Welsh and Donovan William Francis.

- This document is graded ORANGE. DO NOT DETACH / COPY/ DESTROY

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XXXI

WASHINGTON, D.C./CONNECTICUT
NOVEMBER 1941

The Cuban stamp she noticed immediately, but the image on the front of the homemade black-and-white postcard caught her between the eyes: staring into the sun, knee-deep in the Havana harbor, his kayak tethered behind him, stood an unshaven, darkly tanned Misha Resnikoff, his hair tucked back under a bandanna, a Cuban shirt, the sleeves rolled up, fluttering around him in the sea breeze off the Caribbean.

Hello from Havana, where the photographers have these big Victorian box cameras—they’ll make a postcard for you, right on the beach. I’m working here, various things—it’s cheap and not at all like NYC.

I’ll call you as soon as I reach Miami.
Sorry about the short notice.

Hope we might connect
All affection, M.

The moment she heard Misha’s voice all the way from Florida, Eleanor called Clover to look after Sophie. She knew she had just the place: a state park, in the Connecticut hill country near Danbury, where the boating was fine and the shores dotted with clapboard cottages, owned mostly by city people come for the fishing. She put the postcard in her purse. From time to time, fascinated by it, she’d take it out and peer at the face beneath the emulsion, trying to read his expression.

Who knows if I’ll ever feel like this again—who knows? she asked herself in the village when she rented a cottage from a pharmacist she knew, a tired widower with three straitlaced daughters, all of whom had taken sailing lessons up near Henderson Harbor. The cottage boasted a dock and a boat, and a broken path between the trees. She threw all the windows open, then set about cleaning the kitchen to her own fierce standards, relishing having to carry the bucket from the pump outside for some puritanical reason that amused only her. She made the bed last, with no expectations, only anticipation. It was quite unlike anything she had ever done; she even placed a quartet of her favorite photographs on the side table, to place herself in time: Henderson Harbor, Bryn Mawr with Grace and Marta, the courtyard in Paris with the aid workers, Sophie in her crib at F Street. As she sliced the cheese for a salad plate, she noticed that a shiny steel rectangle the size of her palm dangled from a shower curtain hook over the kitchen sink—a fisherman’s shaving mirror. She looked at herself and smiled, allowing herself, for a moment, the thrill of feeling desired again.

He arrived that night, his flashlight bobbing down the trail from the dirt road to the village where the fisherfolk hauled their boats out, the crunch of his boot leather on gravel preceding. The trees along the roadside gave way to a view of a silvered lake cupped among the Berkshire Hills, mercury in a black lacquer bowl; it seemed to him as if the Masurian Lakes had been transplanted to America, pines and Polish birch and all.

As he walked through the village, following Eleanor’s directions, he wondered if he’d ever really believed outside the moment. She accepted him; she was uncomplicated and listened. Acceptance: perhaps that was the why between the lines of what held them in one another’s lives.

They slept together that night after a meal by camp lantern and a walk down to the dock to pick out the stars in the cold November sky. She made him laugh with her memory of his cornet on the Krumme Lanke and sobered him with talk of her daughter, that being a world beyond him, a different planet, having another in one’s care utterly. He offered small thoughts, recognizing her nerves; she smiled back, anticipating the night, as they made their way between the trees back to the cottage, its kitchen window providing the only light on the path ahead of them.

The bed was small and creaked. She was afraid, timid, and surprisingly unschooled in her own body. After, when they lay together in the dark, the pines scratching at the shingles overhead, she apologized for her awkwardness, quietly ashamed she had disappointed him. He listened and entwined himself in her, seeing the loss in her. “Think of us swimming together,” he whispered. She threw caution to the winds and astonished him. Afterwards, he curled together with her, spoons in a drawer.

Finally, at sunrise, snug in sweaters and flannel shirts, in the boat she skippered to their breakfast spot, Eleanor disclosed, with eyes shining, that she’d never felt that before, and laughed, unfettered and hugely pleased, her eyes on him. They stayed on the island until well into the afternoon, tending a warming fire, sharing a down comforter she’d brought, talking about everything and nothing.

Aside from the shivery secret experiments with Grace at school all those years ago, Eleanor had never completely entrusted her body to another person, not even David. The affair thrilled Misha too, seeing the new power in her. They made love in their beach clothes for warmth and slept and made love again, refusing to scramble into the cover of the trees once when a biplane droned overhead. “The mail plane to Boston,” she explained, shirt wide open, beaming, as they huddled on the verge below the willows. Then she reprised her new ferocity.

“Just who are you, really?” Eleanor asked softly. The power had gone off just after ten that night and they went to bed with candle stubs in jam jars on their bed tables. They had made love and he was wide awake, reading one of the pharmacist’s cowboy pulps.

He laughed and rolled onto his back. “I’m the adopted son of a secular Latvian Jew named Resnikoff, who used to work for Nobel Oil in Russia and now runs the London branch of a Swedish bank. My real name is Misha Alboim and I’m really seven feet tall.”

“Enskilda Bank?” she asked, impressed, once she’d stopped laughing.

“One and the same,” he agreed. “My stepdad married my mother after my father died. He’s civilized, quiet, respectful of my mother, everything my father wasn’t.” Misha tucked the book jacket into the western to keep his place. “He was really an unhappy man, I suppose,” he continued, “but I miss him still.”

“My late husband … I feel the same way about him,” Eleanor said softly. “A quiet man who loved French the way you love your music. He was one of those people who aren’t quite capable of managing the real world. I’m afraid I didn’t help him much.”

Misha rolled over on his side and examined the stand of photographs Eleanor had posed on the bed table. “Who’s the beauty chorus?”

Eleanor reached across him and he kissed her. “That’s Bryn Mawr, my dormitory. A long time ago. The redhead is Grace, the dark one Marta Neimann. Marta and her husband are in Switzerland.”

“Are they all so beautiful at Bryn Mawr?” he said, holding the photograph up in the half-light.

“Grace … she’s too hard to speak of, even now. Marta was voted the most likely to marry a millionaire. She married an economist instead.”

He reached for her face. Eleanor had put her glasses on to see him and he moved too close; she couldn’t make him out for a moment.

“David worried terribly about money. He had a few dollars from translations and literary analysis work, but he couldn’t survive on that. And wouldn’t take money from me. He had a child from his first marriage. That ended in divorce. I don’t think he could cope with that either. And, as you can plainly see, we weren’t the world’s most experienced lovers, either,” she said, smiling a little now.

“How strange, given your family, that you’d choose him.”

She nodded. “My family is as upstate New York Scots-Irish as it’s possible to be. It’s true.”

A fractured silence followed: Misha realized she was utterly open to him, not just her body but her life was there in her eyes, all of it.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

She was staring at the reflection of one of the jam jar candles in the window. Through the trees, the moon lit the lake, flat yellow light, smooth as ceramic. “Princeton, they both went to Princeton, my brothers. Foster was the class of ’07 and Allie class of 1912,” she began. “Foster will be secretary of state someday. He is brilliant, rich, well connected, and knows how power works. I love him as much as I respect him, and that’s saying something both ways.” Eleanor stopped and Misha gathered that was her way: she could only unfold her thoughts so far before she felt the strain and had to regroup.

“Allen? You know him a little now from the campaign. Here’s a story: I have a younger sister you’ve never met, Nataline. One day Allen and Nataline were alone on the family raft at Henderson Harbor and my three-year-old sister slipped into the water, right at Allie’s feet. He just watched her, floating there in her summer frock. Didn’t raise a finger to save Nattie. My mother had to swim out to rescue her.” Eleanor blinked behind her glasses at the memory. “He said he didn’t know she was drowning. That was his excuse.

“Well, neither Foster nor I quite trust him. Allie’s a walking shortcut. He’s forever trying to get out of Foster’s shadow without doing the work Foster did to get where he is. Foster is an old-fashioned saltwater Yankee, more Victorian than anything else. There’s no comparison—and I love them both,” Eleanor went on. “And I hate him too. He and Grace … that was terrible. I’m convinced he jilted her. She was far less strong than people think.”

Misha listened, saying nothing.

“I’m bitter, still. I don’t know if I can forgive him for hurting her. There,” she said, forcing a smile, “that’s my tale of love and family. Mixed record, I’d say.”

He absorbed this, marking the glow of her. “A black sheep, I am—and I’m the only sheep. My father died when I was just a boy. By the time my father was my age, he’d published two books and was lecturing all over Germany and Poland and Russia. At nineteen I had no ideas beyond playing horn and kayaking. My stepfather found me a plum job at the Enskilda Bank and pulled strings to get me a place at Cambridge. But I hated working at the bank and didn’t much like Cambridge. I did a mediocre degree despite having a genius named Turing for a tutor. I couldn’t make the U.K. Olympic eight, so I went to the Berlin Olympics for Latvia and broke my wrist in my very first heat. Samuel found me another plum job with Beurling and that brought me to New York, where I hung around the NCR offices and helped your brother lose. My response? Take a duck dive in Havana and then darken your doorstep. I’ve got to get serious.”

“I know Allen thought well of you, NCR did too, and you could get a job with any investment bank with your CV. Where’s the failure in that?”

Misha made a sour face and shook his head. He sat up and set his pillow at his back. “I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like had my father lived and if I’d had a brother or sister.”

Eleanor reached for her sweater and pulled it on, shrugging her head through the neck hole. “I’ll tell you a story about my brothers I’ve never told anyone.” She stopped again, recalling. “My father was dying. It was the fall of 1930. God, is it eleven years ago? It must be. My father had gathered all of us around him in his room. He made us all promise, with him lying there on his deathbed, that we’d all treat Foster as the head of the family when he was gone. And we all promised. Funny thing is,” Eleanor said softly, “Allie never showed—can you imagine? He was in Europe, Bern, I think. He never even came to the funeral, to his own father’s funeral. Still makes me so angry I can hardly speak. So I love him—at his best, there’s lots to love. But not without remembering the broken promises.”

In the silence, as the candles flickered, Misha comprehended there were deep waters in Eleanor’s world, pressures and crosscurrents he’d seen among his politically connected friends at Cambridge. It’s what came, his stepfather had once memorably said of his own world, of vaults and boardrooms and toying with tigers.

At half past two he sat upright and felt her move close.

“What is it?” she asked from the darkness.

“Does the U.S. still have an embassy in Warsaw?”

“The ambassador’s in London, with the government-in-exile. There’d be someone on duty, a consul at least. Technically, the U.S. is still neutral, yes. Why? What’s wrong?”

“This is an imposition. I need … could you help me with papers? Your contacts at State?”

“Of course. I mean, I’ll try. There are procedures, rules, you know. I don’t run the place, I mean not yet,” she said, smiling up at him. Then she read his face: “Misha, what is it? You look awful.”

“My mother has been stranded in Warsaw since the Poles surrendered. She had papers, good ones, and she was safe until three weeks ago. The Gestapo sent her to the ghetto,” Misha said, his voice flat. “I have to get her out. I need visas, passports, everything. I can pay.”

“Dear God, your mother. Why haven’t you said something before?”

“I didn’t want you to think that’s why I was here. That that’s why—”

“Don’t be stupid,” Eleanor replied, reaching for her glasses. “We’re well past that. I know you more than a little—and you’re in my bed because I want you here. Now, you’re going yourself, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I have to try, it’s hell on earth there. She’s dead if I don’t move fast.”

Eleanor pulled the counterpane around her and made for the ancient wall box telephone in the hallway. “I have an old family friend at the State Department, Max Puddicombe,” she said, spinning the bell crank. “Max knows the dragon lady who runs the visa section. Get a pen, write down the dates and places and times, and we’ll try Max.”

“It’s a little early.”

“The State Department never sleeps. He’ll answer.” She snapped a glance over at Misha. “What are you waiting for? There’s a pen and paper on the kitchen table. And make some coffee. We’re going to be up for a while.”

XXXII

EUROPE
NOVEMBER 1941

The Clipper flight to Lisbon was full: several film stars, a bevy of slick Spanish businessmen and their mistresses, not to mention at least one internationally notorious Vichy French collaborator, an Egyptian sheikh who smoked a hubble-bubble relentlessly, three Chinese women in superb silks, all three of great age and greater wealth … and not a single Jew Misha could spot.

Misha never left his tiny stateroom, preferring to coil himself up, between steep bouts of sleep and hours whiled away at the stack of novels he’d bought at the Foynes bookshop on the Shannon layover. After Lisbon lay the train from Berlin east to Warsaw. He was going, quite deliberately, with malice aforethought, into the belly of the beast.

And, six days and £2,200 of Samuel’s cabled money later, here Misha was, seated between two Polish smugglers en route to the gate to the ghetto. Sentries patrolled a rough wooden scaffold, a massive stile over the crude brick wall, checking papers and searching everyone coming or going. Even from the foot of the scaffold one could smell the pestilence beyond, the reek of far too many human beings in far too small an enclosure, the calculus of slow death, in century-old tenements already desperate before the Germans came.

“We will cross here,” Janek the driver announced as the lorry ground slowly up to the gate at Nalewki and Nowolipkie Streets. A medieval street scene of carts, soldiers, and dozens of people in all manner of clothing milled around a figure flailing on the cobbles. “Oh, whore’s breath,” Janek’s partner Karol muttered as he opened the lorry door, “an epilep. Gives me the creeps, when they go crazy. Hey, Markus!” he shouted, and a tall Wehrmacht soldier, a corporal, ambled over to the truck, his rifle slung over his shoulder, his face a stony study in uncaring; he must have been forty. Misha noticed he was missing half his right hand; he took Markus for a policeman done up as a soldier, and an old one at that.

“Hey yourself,” the guard replied. “What have we here?”

“An expensive package. Show him your papers, please.”

The corporal scanned the Swedish documents and then fingered the four 500-zloty notes; they vanished. “Have them out in an hour, Karol, there’s going to be a roundup at four. Yid hit one of my guys with a brick on Muranowska last night, gave him a new place to part his hair. Go on, an hour,” he repeated, waving at the guard at the gate ahead with an indolent hand.

They rolled through without a hitch, and Janek the driver aimed the truck right, to the east, easing through the throng. The ghetto streets were unbelievably crowded, Jews of every walk of life thrust together, shoulder to shoulder, six, even eight across on the sidewalk.

“I have made all the arrangements,” Karol said, smoking, thinking. “Mild, aren’t they, these, Janek?” But Janek was trying to get the truck across Franciszkanska street without running over the kids who were screaming at him to stop.

“What’s in the back?” Misha asked.

“Cooking oil, potatoes, ass wipe for the hospital. Even some rice, because we’re good at what we do, aren’t we, Janek? You bet we are,” and he flashed his bridgework again.

The truck stopped abruptly at number thirty-two, down the street from the Jewish hospital. “You have forty-five minutes,” Karol said, throwing open the door. “Be on the street, ready to go, or Janek will leave you here. When Markus at the gate says an hour, he means an hour.”

Miriam nearly fainted when she saw her son; she took almost ten minutes to pack while he watched and agonized at the junk she was bringing as well as the treasures, the last four family photographs of his birth-father’s parents in Riga, and a single silver-framed portrait of her mother, taken in a Paris restaurant in 1912.

Halfway down the stairs, a lad with no shoes and a girl of perhaps ten with perfect limpid eyes, sister and brother, begged Misha to take them too. The boy had to be taken away, screaming; the sister stood mute, with such a look of pain in her eyes that Misha knew her face would haunt him till he stopped drawing breath. Miriam gave the girl a few greasy zlotys from her stocking, the last of her money, kissed her on the cheek, and then tore herself away from the staring child.

An old woman reached out from a crowd of people standing watching on the pavement. “Go! And God go with you! But do not forget us!” she called out.

Karol was two minutes early. At the ghetto gate he had to bribe a Jewish “blue policeman” not to steal Miriam’s few photographs for the salvage value of their silver frames. Here they eat their own too, Misha thought as the truck ground through the checkpoint.

It passed like a dream. Five minutes later they were on the Aryan side, the big truck empty except for Miriam’s meager belongings, rolling down the spacious Kraków Boulevard as if no one had a care in the world, Miriam on Misha’s lap, her disbelieving face tracked with tears. Even garrulous Karol shut up in the face of her sorrow.

“They’re all finished,” she said, over and over, “all finished.”

The Austrian had refused the more battered American bills. He examined the clean notes only—there were counterfeits about. He slipped the packet of clean twenty-dollar bills into his boot; the rest went into a dun envelope marked, for some occult reason, Futur in block Gothic type, then he walked back to his pine hut and its smoking tin chimney, his ersatz coffee and real schnapps. With two full jerricans in the trunk, they had enough diesel for nearly a thousand kilometers; Misha had done the math on the back of an envelope.

They drove west, fast, fast as the Daimler’s gasping engine would go—the wall-eyed mechanic had told Misha the car had once belonged to the mayor of Warsaw—straight down the center line of the two-lane Polish highway. They halted only for the floodlit checkpoints manned by bored middle-aged men in field gray, barbers and cobblers and cooks and typists too old to fight the Russians. At Poznan, Misha sidestepped trouble by handing over his last package of Camels, a twenty-dollar bill tucked among the cigarettes.

The Polish-German frontier detained them an hour, while phone calls went back and forth and rain drizzled down on a no-man’s-land lit by arc lights that gleamed on the Daimler’s slick hood. Miriam slept, waking only for more soup from a steel canister. They headed south-southwest, down the curving sweep of the autobahn just inside the Austrian border, into the foothills. They were both wrapped in blankets, the diesel roaring flat out as the autobahn gave way to the mountain roads switchbacking toward the border, now fourteen hours on the road.

Miriam woke at dawn on the second day. They stopped at a churchyard, somewhere near Rottweil, the map said. Misha, scrupulous about such things, shaved in the car mirror, while Miriam wandered off, nearly getting lost in the thick Alpine mist. They shared the last of the coffee and departed. The sugar and the caffeine kept Misha driving at a steady 110 kilometers an hour onto the Schaffhausen plain.

They’d reached the last German village before the Swiss border, a depressing place full of filthy trucks and great herds of sheep led by dogs, and tired, unsmiling men in oilcloth coats, old men, hawk-faced veterans of the first war who stared at the two Jews in a rich man’s car, their eyes rimed with suspicion. “Your father,” Miriam began as the Daimler idled at the border crossing, “was not the kind of man to say he loved you. But he loved you very much. He was proud of you.”

Her rings, the diamonds and emeralds and earrings and all her jewelry were long gone. He’d never seen her before without her precious things; here she was, pale and tired, but her dignity intact. “He told me,” Miriam continued, her hands wrapped around the metal mug of the last of the soup, “just before he died, that he wanted you to be the rabbi he hadn’t been.”

A bead of sweat crept down Misha’s spine. “What would he think of me now?” he wondered aloud, leaning on the steering wheel as they waited in a long queue of vehicles, the Daimler’s windows fogging over. He had the passports and visas and letters of transit ready, piled neatly on the metal dashboard; he’d picked them up once or twice, the nerves getting to him, until Miriam, full of a fatalist’s calm, wisely put the papers in her lap.

Misha stared straight ahead. “He wouldn’t have left. He loved Riga. He’d’ve hated that I left. That you left. And I’m no rabbi, any more than he was a plumber.”

“The dogs … look.” The Dobermans leapt, snarling, at the full length of their leashes, pointing. A lorry driver was now spread-eagled against his cab while the dogs roared at him. Misha watched as the small drama played itself out on the floodlit borderline, two men in coveralls clawing off the ribs of the crate planking with well-used hammers.

“He’s had his chips, that one,” Misha announced, dropping the Daimler into gear. Ahead, another lorry’s engine turned over; the queue inched forward, tendrils of exhaust trailing up as the clutches caught. He made a mental note to cable Eleanor from Schaffhausen—two words, she’d asked of him: Krumme Lanke.

His mother touched his arm. “It will end, one day, this,” Miriam said flatly. “And we’ll breathe again.” She looked at her son. The guards were dragging the lorry driver away, the toes of his worn boots bouncing off the rough gravel.

Misha looked neither right nor left as the Daimler’s unprotesting tires pulled them forward, toward the clean clean air of Switzerland.

XXXIII

WASHINGTON
DECEMBER 7, 1941

Mrs. Whyte’s elderly cook was sobbing: Eleanor could hear her through the thick oak swing door to the kitchen. Outside on K Street, nothing moved. Churchgoers had returned home to the news, bits and pieces from Hawaii and Washington, reports fractured and molten. The radio, a big square Goodyear Mrs. Whyte favored for her Metropolitan opera broadcasts, glowed dully in the mid-afternoon December gloom, a spray of jonquils atop its polished cabinet.

Eleanor had been strolling, oblivious, on K Street just before noon, bringing Sophie back from a long walk in the park, their bag of bread crumbs for the milling pigeons empty. A gangly newsboy in black high-top sneakers ran past them, an armload of copies of the Post’s flash edition against his chest, shouting “Japs bomb Pearl!” in a piping voice at the stunned passersby. Mrs. Whyte’s house was only half a block away; Eleanor headed there as the first air-raid sirens began to sound in the distance, murmuring a word of thanks that Misha and his mother had reached Switzerland and safety two days before.

“Mommy, what’s happening?” Sophie asked as they climbed the big stone steps of Grace Dunlop’s girlhood house.

“I’m not sure yet, dear,” Eleanor said carefully. “Let’s find out at Mrs. Whyte’s, shall we? Perhaps she’ll have a cherry ice, like last time.”

Sophie, too shrewd for this misdirection, didn’t answer. They knocked and heard Mrs. Whyte’s bawled “Come!” from deep within. The ancient staff were fewer and the vast blood-red Iranian carpets still dusty and the thick yeasty smell of dog still hung everywhere in the hothouse air. Mrs. Whyte still padded about in a strange mix of nightclothes and formal wear, her pearls at her neck, a Spode teacup leaking crème de menthe as she came to greet them. “They’ve bombed us! Those awful Japs,” she railed, passing the side parlor’s gallery—“the museum,” Grace had called it, chock-full of Old Masters—without so much as a glance at Eleanor and Sophie. A tall gentleman in a sharp gray suit was paying very close attention to one of the pictures. He moved on, taking down the next work and examining its back before returning it to the wall and moving into the high-ceilinged main room to join them.

“Ellie,” she said, exhaling peppermint, “you remember Jimmy Kronthal, of the Philadelphia Kronthals? Come here, near to the radio, Jimmy. Glenda, bring us all tea, the Lapsang, if you please.” Mrs. Whyte was in her element, crisis being the family birthright. The elderly maid, her eyes red-rimmed, shuffled off to the kitchen in silence, weighed down by her empty tray.

“The Yale man and art expert. Nice to see you again, Mr. Kronthal.”

“Especially so, given the dire circumstances, Miss Dulles.”

“I expect you’ll be leaving the art business for the duration, Mr. Kronthal,” Eleanor said.

“I already have. I’ve volunteered to work at your brother Allen’s shop, at the Coordinator of Information’s office. Started in October.”

“Oh, that. That’s hush-hush, isn’t it?” Mrs. Whyte inquired, her eyes gleaming.

“It is at that,” Kronthal replied. “Mrs. Whyte, may I have a word with you in private, please?”

“Certainly, my dear,” Mrs. Whyte said, sashaying to the big French double doors to the picture gallery, Kronthal in tow. The beautiful doors snicked shut. Clearly Kronthal was Mrs. Whyte’s painting knacker: Eleanor and Sophie and Pearl Harbor had wandered into that Sunday’s transaction. Across the room the radio crackled on; a reporter in Seattle was reading the wire copy from Honolulu in monotone. The phones were down, he said, and the only news getting out of Hawaii arrived via clattering undersea telex.

“Sophie,” Eleanor asked as she watched Mrs. Whyte stalk the carpet between the side parlor’s two grand windows, weighing Kronthal’s estimates, “do you want to play with the dolls upstairs?”

Sophie, wide-eyed, shook her head no, all thoughts of cherry ices long gone. Eleanor pulled her close and sat next to her on the sofa, an evil-smelling maroon thing big as a barge, which groaned like a cheap coffin whenever Eleanor shifted. Mr. Whyte had been in railroads, Eleanor recalled, an endeavor that led to great booms—her railway bonds bought Grace all manner of freedom—and equally dire busts. The Depression had not been good to Mr. Whyte, his rail lines spinning off red ink; then, two years ago, a massive refinancing in the offing, he chose a fine moment to die, triggering a bankruptcy and leaving Mrs. Whyte an astonishing art collection and equally astonishing debts. One by one, the widow Whyte was selling off the Degas sketches and the Matisses to fend off her late husband’s creditors.

Eleanor stole a glance as Kronthal was dismissed, and he left with the briefest of goodbyes—la Whyte took no prisoners, even in her straitened circumstances. Mrs. Whyte ordered lunch, calling to the maid to turn up the radio. “Glenda’s grandson is out there,” Mrs. Whyte proclaimed. “Terrible, terrible.”

The radio reporters tried to keep a running tally of the early casualties, vague, no real numbers; Eleanor reckoned the censors were already at work. She and Mrs. Whyte took cup after cup of tea in silence as the awful news rolled over them.

Mrs. Whyte reached a senator of her acquaintance to demand news on Glenda’s behalf. A hand over the mouthpiece, she repeated for Eleanor’s benefit his report, delivered from the State Department ticker tape room. No one knew anything; the President and the cabinet were meeting; sirens wailed and armed troops were on the move in the empty city, sporting the anachronistic puttees and flat tin helmets of 1918 vintage.

Meantime, Mr. and Mrs. Pattison, from the Pattison mansion next door, came over with a sleeping draft for Mrs. Whyte’s high-strung dogs and conveyed breathlessly that sandbags were appearing like mushrooms at the big intersections, their eyes shining with the thrill of it. Sophie had drifted off in Eleanor’s lap, her face pink with sleep. The cook prepared a curried stew stiff with beef and sweet potato and they all ate, listening to rumors of mounting casualties and the first horrified reports of the destruction wrought by the Japanese aircraft.

There are young Americans dying right now, Eleanor thought, sipping the pale red wine Mrs. Whyte hoarded in her cellar. Soon it will be that way everywhere. Her mind drifted to a memory of the Armistice celebrations in Paris, as President Wilson was feted. We’ll learn peace is such a fragile thing … all over again. The phone was ringing; the maid appeared, her pinched face overwhelmed by awkwardly penciled eyebrows, and announced: “Miss Dulles, your brother, ma’am.”

Mrs. Whyte had fallen into a deep moody silence and said nothing as Eleanor left for the great hall. The telephone hung in an alcove surmounted with an elk head. She had the strange sense the beast listened while she spoke to Allen, his voice thick with worry. He had, he said, tracked her down via Kronthal, footwork so fast that Eleanor reckoned Allen was very bothered indeed. They traded stories about the attack, then Allen asked, out of the blue: “That old address book of yours, the green leather one. I need a phone number in Berlin. Can I meet you at your place? Tonight, after seven?”

Eleanor could tell it was a government car: a black everyman’s Ford sedan and D.C. license plates. The driver was uniformed military and never moved as Allen left the car. Allen came to the door, hat in hand, and, unprecedentedly for him, refused a drink. Eleanor read a series of Berlin telephone numbers to him from her old green leather-bound address book and then followed him back to the black Ford. There in the back seat was James Kronthal.

“So you two work together?” Eleanor asked as Allen gave her a perfunctory kiss.

“Yes, in a manner of speaking,” Allen replied. Kronthal merely flashed one of his nervous smiles. All boys together, playing spy, Eleanor thought.

“What do you want the numbers for? Nothing dangerous, is it?”

“Research. On the German opposition to Hitler,” Allen said.

“Allen, these people trust me,” Eleanor warned. “Don’t—”

“I know, they’re socialists, lefties, enemies of the state,” Allen interrupted. “That’s why we need them.”

Allen rapped his goodbye on the Ford’s back window. “And who is ‘we,’ Allen?” Eleanor called out, but the Ford slid away, its tail-lights drifting into the first blackout of America’s new war. Eleanor held her arms close, thinking of the faces of the people she’d met in Germany, Austria, Prague: the Boltzmanns, the Kirsches, the kindly professor in Köln who lent her his typewriter to write her BIS book. Overhead in the darkness, fighter aircraft crisscrossed the capital, the drone of their engines like monks chanting. Sophie stared out of Eleanor’s front window; she waved, a sliver of sanity in a world turned upside down.

XXXIV

NEW YORK
DECEMBER 13, 1941

Foster didn’t smile: he knew his client and had a good read on all three hundred pounds of Hector Greer before the man dropped himself heavily into Foster’s best office chair. “Sit down, sit down, Hector. How are you?” he inquired, knowing the answer full well.

“Thanks for seeing me on a Saturday, Foster.”

“The least I can do for one of my oldest clients. What’s it been, eighteen years?”

Hector Greer nodded halfheartedly, his chubby baby face sagging, weighted down with defeat, his forehead sown with blebs of sweat.

“So. What’s all this about? You told me it was an emergency.”

“My plant. In Germany. My methanol plant in Erfurt, Foster. It’s gone.”

“War’s a terrible thing. A lot of people are going to die because of this war. I tried to keep us out. You know that. I tried.”

“I’m a chemist,” Greer began, his empty hands massaging the air. “I put every last ounce of engineering I know into that plant. My copper halide conversion unit made Erfurt, oh, yes, it did. It’s years ahead of anything here. There’s no better methanol plant around.”

“Hector,” Foster warned, offering a subarctic smile. “Look who you’re talking to: I helped you raise the money, the firm filed the patents for you. Look, I’ve lost dozens of clients on the other side this week, some of them friends I’ve known for twenty years. But war eats everything. Even methanol plants.”

“I’m in trouble, Foster.” Greer clutched his hands together as if he were afraid of losing his fingers too. A haze of gin wafted from the big man.

“You’re hardly on your uppers, Hec. Last annual report I read said you own everything in Cleveland that isn’t steel.”

“Foster, you don’t—look, this isn’t some kind of nostalgia. It’s war. And now I’m some kind of a Nazi-lover. I’ve been in the news lately … because of the plant. I’ve had phone calls.”

“Call the police, Hector. Threats are crimes.”

“The police … I never wanted to get mixed up in politics.” Greer’s hand had moved to his midsection, holding the great hemisphere of his belly in place.

“Here, hair of the dog,” said Foster, offering a double shot of his best sour mash. “Why don’t you go on up to that place of yours in Maine? That’s what I do: head up to duck country—get away for a while. Make more sense than half of Wall Street, your average mallard.”

Hector Greer missed this advice, the glass dead in his hand. “I don’t want to even pick up the phone,” he mourned, a slow amphibian’s blink crossing his features. “You must remember Cal Jorgensen, the guy with the oil contracts out of Spain? He was in and out of Berlin all the time. The Boston cops found him last week, in a car at the bottom of the Charles River.”

“I saw that. Drove right off the bridge.”

“Only he had a bullet in his head first,” Hector said, nodding, examining the carpet with great care. “That part didn’t make the papers. I know. I went to the funeral home, I saw what they had to do to Cal to clean him up. That was the end of November. Then there was that guy, I forget his name, always trying to corner the market in electrical parts? He was at your Christmas party last year, thin guy, liked the sauce.”

“Harvey Pendleton, electrical wholesaling business, up and down the east coast. Furlong and Haas, his father-in-law’s business, he made it big. German parts, mostly, right? Where’s he based again? New Jersey?”

“Baltimore. Got an office here, though, over on Thirty-ninth, big spread. He was going to marry a German, he said, set himself up in Germany, only place to do business, he said.”

“That’s going to be an interesting marriage these days.”

Greer closed his eyes then opened them; the worry had driven all color from his patchily shaved face. “Yeah. Well, he’s dead too.”

“He’s what?”

“Walked right out his office window first thing one morning. Two weeks ago. Another one that didn’t make the papers. Six floors down. They had to hose old Harvey off the sidewalk.”

Foster hadn’t touched his own drink. “Don’t be neurotic, Hec. Nobody’s after you. You don’t even have a plant in Germany anymore.”

Greer had his hand over his face, sighing. “Things happen in threes, you know. You should hear the phone calls. There’s people who want to kill me. They know I had Baron von Schröder on my board, and he’s in that SS. What kind of advice was—”

“Now, Hec, you get a hold of yourself.”

Greer shook his head then loosened his tie, his fingers working his collar open. “You know I swore off, but I couldn’t help myself—I went to the spiritualist. I reached my mother. We spoke, first time in months. My mother, she sees nothing but night ahead for me … and my cards are just awful.”

“Come off it. You’re a rational man, Hector.”

“I believed you. You told me there’d be no war with Germany. You said you had contacts, second to none, all over Berlin, you said, bankers and the top brass, you knew them. All the big men, you said. Now look what’s happened. That plant—I put my heart and soul into that plant. It’s not just a building to me, Foster. I have no children, no wife, no family. It’s my life, building something from nothing.”

“What exactly do you want me to do?”

“I want you—I want you to do what’s right,” Greer said.

“Hector, Hector. What’s that mean?”

“I believed you when you told me I could invest just like your other clients, you told me their names, Rockefeller and Harriman and Bert Walker’s son-in-law, Bush.”

“You made a lot of money off that plant, Hector. A lot of money.”

“And it’s gone, Foster. Now you have to make it right. You have to get me my plant back.”

Greer wept now, big slow tears on his fat cheeks. Foster watched for a few moments, then reached for the intercom. “Miss Hayes. Get Allen. Get him in here. Now.”

“I’m an engineer. I build things.” He reached into his pocket. “You have to make this right.”

“You’re not in a fit state to instruct counsel, Hector. Now put whatever’s there back in your pocket. Enough’s enough.”

Allen breezed in wearing a forced smile, glancing at his brother for a cue. “Oh, hello, Hector—”

“Hector here isn’t on his game today, Allen. He needs a word with you.”

“What seems to be the trouble, Hector?” Allen was between them now, following Foster’s eyes to the hand in Greer’s pocket.

“I’ve lost Erfurt. The war. It’s gone. Foster said there’d never be a war, that I couldn’t lose with the Erfurt deal. That plant made me. It made me.”

Allen eased Greer up off Foster’s chair. “Well, Hector, why don’t you come down the hall and we’ll see what we can do. You’re a resourceful man, always have been. Smartest chemicals man in Cleveland, Ohio, that’s Hector Greer. A little judicious thinking in the cool of the afternoon, that ought to sort it out, right, Foster?”

“Nothing that can’t be solved with a little clear thinking, I always say.”

“Another year, one more year,” Greer mumbled through his tears, “that’s all, and I would have been out. It’s too soon. You’ve got to make it right.”

Foster stood at the door now, bending close as Allen guided Hector Greer’s shambling bulk out of the office. “Get him the hell out of here,” Foster hissed. “This is a place of business, not an asylum.”

“You come with me, Hector. Let’s talk,” Allen said cheerfully. As they moved into the hall, Allen reached into Hector’s pocket and retrieved a penknife, tiny and bright against Greer’s huge body.

“Yes. A talk. Down the hall. The German thing has us all spinning our wheels, Hector,” Foster said from the doorway.

“My mother sees nothing but night, Allen,” Greer said.

“Well, you know what they say, Hector,” Allen said, winking at Sullivan and Cromwell’s heaviest client, “it’s always darkest just before the dawn.”

ACT FOUR

Si vous voyez un banquier suisse sauter d’une fenêtre, sautez après lui.
Il y a sûrement de l’argent.

If you see a Swiss banker jump out of a window, jump after him.
There’s bound to be money in it.

VOLTAIRE

XXXV

BERN, SWITZERLAND
JANUARY 1942

The door on the third-floor landing was enameled black, fresh paint; a single brass thumbtack held a card lettered Herr Professor Dr. S.R. Schorr, Commercial and Legal English Translations, home to Misha’s old don from his middling college at Cambridge, the sharpest economist around the place. Misha knocked. When the door opened, he didn’t recognize Schorr at first, a boy’s face given over to gravity, a wide mouth with too many teeth. That changed when Dr. Schorr spoke, kind, quick, appraising eyes behind the tortoiseshell ha’penny spectacles. “Come in, come in, you’re early, aren’t you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

Misha made a fast inventory of the place: sloped ceiling above a wall full of wooden card files, like a public library’s; a low bookshelf full of bankers’ folios, the kind auditors lug around the City—and then he knew what London wanted him for. The papers on Professor Schorr’s desk were like architect’s drawings, with a clear template for the shapes linked by dotted lines and lettered in colored inks.

“Tea.” That wasn’t a question either. “You roomed next to Gunnison at Cambridge, Charlie Gunnison, the astronomer, didn’t you? I tutored his brother last term before the war.”

“I suppose I did,” Misha replied, trying to recall what had happened to Charlie.

“He’s up in Wales, hunkered down with the latest radar antennas,” said Schorr, fiddling with the very precise Swiss gas ring. “Mind Beryl, would you? She’s a bit fragile now the weather’s changed.”

Beryl was Schorr’s aspidistra: Misha added Beryl to Schorr’s boiled tweed suit and the dull beige lace curtains and the green metal desk and the deflated rose-and-trellis tea cosy next to the red telephone to the growing list of Ministry of Works–issue furnishings, all clues to Schorr’s real job—and it wasn’t translations.

“Been here long?” Misha asked politely, thinking I’ll die up here come summer.

“Since August. Lovely breeze off the river,” Schorr said. He must be psychic, Misha thought.

“Navy got you? Spying for the nautics?” Misha gratefully accepted a steaming mug of tea. Bern was penetratingly cold and that was a very dead coal fireplace on the far wall.

Schorr seemed impervious to the frigid state of his den; he loosened his woven wool tie thoughtfully. “Oh, God, no, never the nautics, dear boy. Ministry of Economic Warfare. We’re the bank detectives, like W.C. Fields—no transaction too big or too small, that’s our motto—bonds, gilts, reinsurance shenanigans our specialty. And we do like oil. Lots of trade there—oil’s always dirty.” Schorr grinned his terrible teeth and Misha remembered that Schorr for some unaccountable reason was a terror with women. “Yours truly’s the entire Swiss research bureau. Or rather, we are. London was rather afraid you’d leg it to Lisbon, you know. Shouldn’t want the whole war to myself up here, frankly. Plenty of muck to shift for two, honestly.”

“Fine. Wonderful. Robbing Swiss banks for His Majesty, are we?”

“We don’t rob them, dear boy. We leave that to MI6. Our boys wire the accounts and then you and I, we do our sums, figure out which comings and goings are smelly. And then there’s the poor bloody commercial travelers. I spend a lot of time listening in hotel cafés to the raincoat brigade. I’m first on their list, friends from my uncle Rex’s days in the motor trade on the Continent, you know, keep the pot boiling. How’s your dad these days?”

“My stepfather, you mean. He’s well. Still running—”

“Enskilda, I remember Sam. Have a look at this file, if you wouldn’t mind. He and I were the only two Jews at a conference in Egypt once. Good man to know in Cairo, is Sam. And knows his way around a vodka bottle. Next page, the blue personal file: recognize this bird?” Schorr had his back to Misha, staring out the window over the rooftops of Bern to the winter mountains and France beyond.

“Dittersdorf? Germans aren’t my patch,” Misha observed, scanning the typescript.

“No. Next one, the Dutchman. Thyssen’s legman.”

“Schippers. Ah. Yes. Him I know. Friend of my stepfather’s—ran the Haifa branch of the Union. I did a summer placement there, God, in ’36. What’s Renni’s crime? Nicked the silver service?”

“Dunno. We’re doing a trace on the naughty Dutch banks these days. Which would be just about all of them. Meinheer Schippers is running a very suspect bank, looks like to me, a real witches’ brew—Thyssen and oil and Rockefellers.” He drew back his cuff and peered down at his watch. “Oil again. Dead boring, really. Look, take your coat off. Have a go at Schippers, there’s the lad. And have a care for Beryl, would you? I wouldn’t stand so close. She’s a bit neurotic.”

XXXVI

NOVEMBER 1942

The borders were sealed, spoke the wireless; Misha listened for a minute more, then, with a single pithy expletive, switched the radio off. He was well in harness now, stowed daily at Schorr’s back desk. There he deviled away at the reports Schorr fed every evening into the cracked leather pouch for the long flight to Lisbon.

Misha’s trajectory had placed him precisely where Shiloah wanted him: at the crossroads of secret finance, at the height of the war, at the side of one of the cleverest investigators London had. Everything London knew about gold or dollars moving to Spain, Shiloah knew within the week, with Kauffmann and his kin working the courier routes south. Misha, hundreds of miles from Stockholm and a lifetime from the Cambridge backs.

He threw his morning paper away, the pages spiraling down from the tiny kitchen table, a wire photo of the Germans marching through Marseille blurring as the broadsheets fell. Misha had a shopping list of bits and pieces, housekeeping research, to keep the chatter with the Americans going; he’d have a visit at the American legation, cool off, gossip with Kronthal, take back the banking files he’d borrowed over the weekend. If he timed things right he’d be there just in time for one of the pastry trays Ambassador Harrison sent round on busy mornings for the plebs.

The American legation was jumping. At the door the unarmed Swiss policeman who usually read the paper seated on his bentwood chair now stood at a jerry-rigged wicket, a fresh rubber stamp out, issuing passes; the imprest squeaked as he stamped Misha’s yellow entrance card. The place smelt as it always had, of beeswax in the corridors, the closets musty with old rumors, the aroma of an old woman’s purse. He jogged up the stairs past the bust of General Grant some daft Swiss politician had donated, God alone knew why. At the landing, Misha took the short corridor left and heard Kronthal well before he saw him, a hissed order, almost impossible to understand, except it was repeated, very fast, then the phone slammed down with a report like a small-arms shot. A harsh “Never call me here” was all Misha heard, in a German tight with stress.

He hesitated, heard dialing, then Kronthal’s voice, supplicant: “I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. I said I’m sorry. Six-fifteen.” Then the phone was replaced, civilly this time. Misha crept backwards and then overweighted his footsteps, reapproaching Kronthal’s open door.

“Up early, aren’t you, James?” he asked, sailing in fast. Kronthal had an armful of cables, a month’s worth, Misha calculated.

“Stay there,” Kronthal ordered as he enclosed the loose coded dispatches in the clothbound binder Misha knew went straight into the big vault in the room next door, a coding officer’s housekeeping. He snapped the binder rings shut. “Heard the latest?” Kronthal lit his cigarette with a worn gold Ronson, squinting at Misha through the smoke.

“France? Felt it coming for days. I could strangle the nearest German.”

Kronthal frowned. “The Swiss don’t care for that kind of talk. Their kissing cousins, the Germans.” He exhaled, calmer. “Actually, I meant the other news. He’s done it again, our friend Eleanor’s brother. Just had a telegram from the border post at Annemasse. Some gendarme let him through.”

“He’s heading here?” Misha asked.

Kronthal shrugged: he had, the gesture said, not given it much thought.

“The ambassador’s going to blow a blood vessel,” Misha said. “There’s history there. Dulles and Harrison go back.”

“Harrison hates Foster Dulles’s guts. And that’s not the half of it: Allen’s got a million-dollar bank draft in his back pocket. Harrison wouldn’t even touch the paper—he stared at Allen’s voucher like something’d just died on his blotter.”

Misha had an arm draped over his chair back, thoughtful, listening. “Not much cover in that, is there?”

“It’s the all-American way—says we’re open,” said Kronthal, chewing his thumb thoughtfully, “open for business.”

“Speaking of which,” Misha said, keeping things moving, “I’ve got those accounts files Dalton wants back. He in yet?”

“Of course. Before sunup,” Kronthal replied. Treasury’s liaison to the Bern legation, Dalton was a little too damn quiet for an American, Misha had decided, a shrewd stringbean who produced flawless briefs on Swiss bank arcana.

Schorr loved Dalton’s reports. He’d dedicate an entire teapot’s worth of reflection to them, drawing Misha in for the finer points. Not only did Dalton not say much, but he disappeared for days at a time, God alone knew where. Spain, the trainspotters said, the long way round, via Lisbon, nosing around the Madrid banks and the ticker tapes at the bolsa and the hallways of the law courts. He had a wife and kid at home in Toledo, Ohio, Misha knew; Dalton had left for Switzerland a month after his wedding. He was the kind who went the extra mile, utterly reliable, and he didn’t mind helping Misha, who’d share his own gleanings in return.

Kronthal’s extension rang. Misha guessed there might be something to that call too, from the speculative look Kronthal gave the telephone before picking it up. Misha threw Kronthal a backwards wave and saw himself out.

Dalton’s office was across the hall, a long zigzag of a room, lit for some long-forgotten reason by a spectacular brass chandelier, its walls held up, the joke went, by Dalton’s files. The Treasury man had his feet on his desk, reading an old copy of the American Mercury.

“Oh, heya, Resnikoff. Says here that there’s termite mounds in Africa forty feet high. Can you beat that?”

“What’s to beat?”

“No, seriously, takes ’em years. Sorta like a cathedral, y’know? Whatever termite starts it never lives to see the mound finished. Great place, Africa. I’m going back.”

“You are?” Nothing about Dalton surprised Misha anymore.

“Sure. Once the war’s over, I’m taking the family. See it before it all changes. What you got there? Treats?”

Treats was Dalton’s code for more files. “Traders,” Misha said, putting them down on a spare chair.

“Sure, traders,” Dalton said, pointing with his free hand to a thick typescript on his desk. “Take it—yours truly on the Davos beehive. All about crooked lawyers and their SS playmates. Right up your alley.”

“I never get to read them,” Misha said, taking the paper. “Schorr reads the good bits aloud to me and then files them somewhere ultrasecret. He’s quite mad.”

“He’s sane as you and me and a really fine investigator, that guy Schorr,” Dalton said, still reading. “And you better behave or old Schorr’ll send you back to London, where there’s real bombs falling.” Dalton’s big soft melancholic eyes blinked slowly, like a seal’s. “Me, I’d keep my head down and my shoes shined.”

Misha shook his head. He took Dalton’s paper and walked out, pausing only for a moment at the big window overlooking the top of the stairwell to watch Allen Dulles leaving the black Bern taxi downstairs, wearing the same shapeless hat Misha had last seen him wearing in New York, a size too small for his head. Allen headed straight for the stone steps fronting the building, a thin attaché case his only luggage, purposeful as a door-to-door salesman, Misha surmised—and as sure of his lines.

It was nearly five-thirty and the party should have wound down, but everyone was staying to see how the ambassador would play the Dulles arrival. “I don’t think he’s going to show,” Dalton, who didn’t drink, muttered to Misha. They were at the edge of the crowd ranged around Dulles in the reception room, where the Swiss bartender built whiskey sours and manhattans two at a time to keep up with the demand. Ambassador Harrison, a stickler for protocol—Dalton did an acid imitation of Harrison ordering his breakfast in excruciating detail, a turn that went on for nearly a full minute—had not made his appearance. Dulles’s impromptu reception was edging toward college smoker, everyone talking and no one really listening. Americans, Misha decided, weren’t much for a quiet drink. He wondered what he’d say to Dulles. Or, more to the point, what Dulles would say to him.

The legation’s big translator, Dan Cossey, a thickset Brooklynite who spoke equally flawless German and French, winked at Misha and inclined his head toward the door: the ambassador had finally arrived, a tanned man, more English than the English in the manner of the American upper class, sporting flicked-up hair over his ears and collar and a horseman’s languid posture. Looking through the crowd, Harrison tugged for a moment at his shirt cuff and then allowed rank to open his path to the bar, a route, Misha noted, that took His Excellency well away from the scrum around Dulles, through the secretaries and the abashed Swiss cleaning staff close to the wall, stoically holding their orange juices—no spirits for the proles.

Leland Harrison’s finger of single malt awaited him on the bar on a silver salver. He turned, cleared his throat, and the room fell silent. Harrison, wearing a half smile, gave Allen a tart welcome, using the word cooperation four times.

The entire greeting absorbed less than a minute. Dulles wasn’t allowed the benefit of more than a brief toast in return before Harrison dispatched himself to the peace and quiet of his pasha’s lounge, his drink vanishing in a single impatient swallow.

After he left, Allen Dulles led the party up another notch, telling an uproarious story about a Bern adventure of his a quarter-century before, rounding it off with the worn joke everybody already knew about the statue in front of the parliament across town. They all laughed anyway, but none more than Allen, that booming hollow laugh Misha remembered from the election conspiracies at the Belmont Hotel. From the corner, Kronthal edged through the crowd to the bar and deposited his empty glass.

Misha was on the move first, outside and posted in the soft evening shadows, pausing silently for a long breath, well ahead of Kronthal as he pattered down the legation steps, his hands deep in his pockets, and walked quickly past, the wrong way for his habitual journey home. Misha gave him another fifteen yards and then slipped behind the American, keeping to Kronthal’s blind spot as the thin gray Bernese dusk, full of leaf smoke and coming rain, closed in on them.

They were down by the river now, on the periphery of an old cemetery set on terraces below the sheltering firs, the tang of wet earth rising into Misha’s bones. He shivered, watching from the side of a tree bent starboard by centuries of Alpine wind as Kronthal picked his way down the flagstones along the path, merging with the shadows. Fog, shapeless and slow, crept through the trees ahead of Misha, accompanied by the slow drip of the afternoon’s rain down through the layered leaves and pine needles and, quite close, the dull, breathy flow of the Aare. A pumping station thrummed in the distance, a Victorian sound of steam and turbine and spillway, its clerestories bleeding light through the mist.

Misha could hear Kronthal’s footsteps in front of him and then the snap of a fallen tree branch. Then a susurration of voices, muffled by the dripping rain and the river, not German but fluid French.

Kronthal was speaking, his hands moving: Misha could see nothing beyond him. And then he glimpsed a second shape, close to Kronthal in the evening gloom, a hand extended, perhaps two. Misha moved very slowly, to the bend in the path, minding his steps, the low pine boughs scraping his back as he peered downhill.

He circled, checking his own back, making sure. Should be wearing a hat, he thought absurdly, lose all that body heat otherwise. A gaggle of ravens settled into the trees, their cries sharp and insistent.

Misha was now just close enough to see: a slender shape in a greatcoat, moving to embrace Kronthal then leaning back, clearly another male, his dark hair slicked straight back, an epicene face, quite young, almost certainly Chinese. Kronthal was very close to him now, Misha could see, and then he turned away, just as the slender man’s coat fell away, tumbling backwards, thrown clear by Kronthal’s long reach.

Misha stared, wide-eyed, horrified at Kronthal’s recklessness. Now Kronthal had the Chinese youth’s white shirt wide open, his head bent down to the younger man’s chest. He held Kronthal’s head in his hands, murmuring.

Misha had seen enough. He stalked back up the trail, thinking furiously, overheated by the connections and consequences of Kronthal’s folly. He slowed his walk deliberately. And therefore … and therefore Allen Dulles, freshly imported hero and temporary millionaire, has a very large problem: his cipher man James Kronthal, a sitting duck for blackmail, sees every coded cable, incoming or outgoing. His mind went suddenly icy calm, clear as glass. The vision of Kronthal and his catamite was, Misha thought, the kind of connection one banked for a rainy day—an insurance policy against the vagaries of what looked to be a very long war in Switzerland. He climbed the wooden steps at the head of the path and took his first steps along the pebbled main walkway to the park gates.

Five minutes from his flat stood a photography store. It was well after hours, but the owner had just come out of his darkroom and Misha tapped on the glass, pointing at a used German camera, small enough to fit in his pocket, on sale with a pair of decent detachable lenses.

XXXVII

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND
FEBRUARY 1943

The officer in the hallway pointed at the open doorway and nodded. And good luck, his frown said.

“Hello, Diesing.”

The obese fellow who seemed part of his enormous desk didn’t look up—not the kind of man who took kindly to interruptions. “The hell d’you want?” he growled, his frugally short pencil gliding across the accounts page.

“It’s me, actually, Diesing, young Resnikoff, Samuel’s Misha, just in town.”

Still without looking up, Martin Diesing extended a paw. “You’ve closed the door before you shook hands, Resnikoff: you want something. I know you aristocrats, always on the prowl, propping up the family balance sheet. How’s my old friend?”

“My stepfather’s doing very nicely, thank you, I should think. He’s got a new investment strategy.”

“Let me guess. Something to do with oil.”

Misha settled into Diesing’s stiff wooden chair with a dry laugh. Diesing finally looked up from his grand paper-strewn desk dominated by a great red and green accounts ledger.

“Diamond drill bits. The world needs diamond drill bits, and the cheapest way to get ’em is artificial diamonds. There,” Misha said, “you’re a millionaire.”

Diesing, so overweight and slow-moving his colleagues called him “the ox,” had almost no need for sleep—he could work for days on end, and did.

He was the chief auditor for the Swiss bankers’ association. His soft pink eyes had seen more bank paperwork than anyone in Switzerland, so the story went. He should have had an office in Bern or Zürich, but he was from Davos and refused to move or commute, so they moved the office in around him.

“A millionaire?” Diesing said. “I know enough about money to know I’ll never have any. I’m still saving up for a car, but since I want a Mercedes, I think I shall have to wait until the present disagreement ends. Spare parts from Germany are an adventure these days.” He squared off a stack of financial statements and filed them, covering the closed file with the palm of his plump hand, as if the contents might fly away and escape his sharp eye, an eye he fixed on Misha.

“You have a shopping list or just one item? I haven’t got all day. Unlike you, I work policeman’s hours.” He smiled, undercutting his irritability with what might be affection. Samuel had done Diesing an obscure favor once; Diesing never forgot anything.

Misha set his elbows on the inside of his thighs and leant forward, his voice low. “If one wanted to move large assets—not cash—in and out of Switzerland these days, what’s the safest way?”

“‘One’? Does that mean you, young Resnikoff? Taking up a life of crime, are we?” Diesing coughed and took a pastille from a drawer without offering Misha one. “Your stepfather warned me about you, you know. Said you were a buccaneer. I can have a round-the-clock watch on you in an hour, my friend, if you’re having an adventure, you and your pal Schorr.”

Misha shook his head. “A research question, I assure you.”

Diesing looked at Misha. “Best leave research to the researchers, no?” But then he cracked a small smile. “Fine. I’ve warned you. I can always tell your stepfather that much when you land behind bars. A courier,” the big Swiss continued. “That is, if you can find a trustworthy one these days. Last I heard, the starting bid for a peek at the contents of a courier’s locked satchel was five hundred gold francs. The courier who told me … well, I rather think his employers have given him a raise, at those rates.” Diesing put down his pencil stub. “Personally, I wouldn’t send a pfennig by wire. Or telephone transfer. Unless you’ve got a solid ciphering machine, half Europe could know your business by sundown. That’s what I tell my people. But do they listen?”

Diesing examined his paperwork with silent care. “You know all that part, don’t you? Don’t need my humble opinion.” He turned his hand over and rubbed at a stubborn ink stain on his finger. “In any case, didn’t you spend a couple of years fiddling with such things? Haegelin, was it?”

“Beurling, actually. But I take your point.”

“See that you do.” Diesing moved the pastille from one round cheek to the other, his gaze steady on Misha. “No, couriers are the way to go. What are you planning to move, the Bank of England?”

But Misha was thinking; he unbuttoned his greatcoat as he spoke. “There’s a German commercial legation in Davos, isn’t there?”

Diesing pulled a face and for a moment Misha thought he’d be out on his ear. “Yes, you are a buccaneer. It’s in your eyes. How did you know about the legation?”

“Public library. I looked at all the phone books until I found the Germans had a commercial office in Davos.”

“It’s quite a place, you know. They have a dozen people working there, a coding office, and a trio of lawyers next door they keep very, very busy. Half of them are SS, the other half civilian or military, the Abwehr. Hate each other like tomcats.”

“Who has the best couriers? The most trustworthy. In your opinion.”

Diesing made a windy noise as he exhaled. “The Soviets. Screw Moscow and you get a bullet in the back of the neck, no questions asked—Schorr will tell you the same. They’re not often here, mostly Bern or Zürich. Very good, professional, almost inhuman, I’d say. Everyone else is more or less corruptible. Except, one hopes, the black army from Rome. The Pope’s men all have diplomatic immunity. Which is a nice touch. We’ve never even asked one of the Vatican bank couriers for so much as the time of day. No point. The nuncio’d be all over us. Very bad scene.”

“They’re in town frequently?”

“Planning to take one to lunch? You might ask me along. For professional reasons. I’ve never broken bread with one of God’s bankers. Be a first.”

“Seriously, Diesing. Are they out and about?”

“Yes. Generally at the Red Cross’s bank, Crédit Suisse-Romande.”

“And you never bother them, because of the immunity?”

“Uh-uh.” Diesing poked a finger toward the door. “Goodbye, my young friend. That’s your one answer and you don’t want to ask more, believe me. I don’t want to answer to your stepfather if I pull you out of the Aare some fine morning, understand?” He tapped his smooth forehead. “Don’t forget to sign out or they’ll drag you back. My best to your stepfather, hear?”

“Thanks. Hope I didn’t overstay my welcome.”

Diesing had already returned to his files, but he looked up one last time. “You did, but here’s a question you didn’t ask,” Diesing said softly. “Which banks are never audited by outside scrutineers? Don’t answer.”

Misha nodded his thanks.

“One final note,” Diesing said. “Your new friend Dulles meets with the German consul, Willi Gehrig, every fifth Friday in Zürich. Gehrig is hard to miss—he’s a giant, over two meters tall. He’s a lawyer. Dulles loves him. Loves him. Gehrig helped found the Gestapo, then saw what that meant and sold out his Gestapo pals to the military intelligence people. Now he’s one of them. I’ve met him once or twice. Plausible, fluent, very anti-Hitler. Like talking to a very intelligent giraffe. Which is what we call him around here—die Giraffe. Arrogant bastard, though—pushy. Then there’s an émigré German couple here in Davos. Every other Tuesday, on the stroke of three, they have a coffee with Dulles. They’re Jews, socialists apparently, with connections in Germany worth probing, I’d say, if Dulles is courting them. Might be amusing to watch Dulles chat them up. Everyone else does.”

Misha walked for some considerable distance along the river, quite fast, sensing his fragment of a theory becoming an obsession. And Diesing never wasted a hint: he wasn’t the kind.

Whatever the Germans were doing at their Davos offices, they were doing it flat out. The coding room, Misha calculated, would be at the back, no open window for the likes of him to stare through while the clerks ran the numbers through the ciphering machine.

Misha took a table at the café next door. For the next two hours he made notes on a paper place mat and kept them as a bookmark. He saw from the lunch shift change there were at least eight employees, perhaps more, with a steady stream of visitors, several in German military uniform, one massive secretary sporting a Rhinemaiden hairdo. The most interesting were the two SS officers who came and went inseparably as Siamese twins.

They entered the café and took a table next to the bar. Misha went to the WC, walking right past their table. One of them wore a dirty shirt and smelt faintly of garlic. The other’s eyes were bloodshot, those of a burnt-out man.

Three years ago Germany stood on the throat of Europe. Now, what with Stalingrad in the history books, the tide was running the other way.

The Nazis have more money than time.

Diesing’s estimation of events had been dead right, down to the ringing of the three o’clock bell in the town hall tower to mark the occasion.

The black van bore Bern plates: the first clue. The quartet of Swiss policemen in their flat gendarmes’ kepis left the van without a care in the world, as relaxed as the SS staffers from the legation were fatigued; behind the van, a slim blue Citroën glided to a stop. Its driver was an entirely different piece of work, goateed, tall, muscular, a hunter, the intensity coming off him apparent even to Misha, thirty yards away.

At the other end of the street, Allen and the couple with him walked eastbound, the late afternoon sunlight at their backs, three figures in a row in perfect silhouette, targets in a funfair shooting gallery; Allen’s crushed hat marked him as the man on the left, minding the curb.

Misha glanced at the gendarmes and suddenly grasped what might happen, today of all days, from the simple inclination of the head from the goateed officer now instructing the gendarmes from the Citroën’s open window. He’s cutting the bloodhounds loose, Misha determined. Sure enough, the four constables fanned out in pairs, a pair to each curb, waiting, their winter coats skimming the snow piles as they closed off the street, penning the walkers in.

Misha focused down the street, hard, into the sunlight. Two of them. He had to look twice: Allen had vanished in an eye blink, the couple continuing on toward the first pair of gendarmes, oblivious.

The two SS fellows hadn’t moved; the confrontation happening right before them, the café’s big front window a proscenium for the unfolding collision—they were oblivious, one reading a newspaper, the other smoking and rubbing his eye.

Misha saw no more than a flicker of movement in the tiny café across the street, a shadow moving amid the white disks of the marble tabletops behind the plate glass, dim in the shadows cast by the roofs opposite.

Allen had taken a table to take in the proceedings.

A minute passed as the couple ambled down the street, stopping to window-shop here and there, their destination evidently the train station.

The woman was exceptionally beautiful. Misha would have recognized her anywhere: the dark-haired American beauty whose photograph he’d seen at the cottage, Eleanor’s friend, the economist’s wife … Marta Neimann.

The gendarmes closed in: Gunter saw them and read them, but his wife did not.

It made no difference.

The police van was discreet, under way moments after the four gendarmes confined the Neimanns in the lockup at the back, even with Marta nearly fainting. Above, in the windows of the second-floor apartments, several lace curtains snapped shut, the neighbors satisfied at the neat work of their efficient constabulary. A minute later the street was clear, the evening sunlight collapsing on itself, and nothing might have happened: one never would have known the Swiss had arrested two Germans on the run.

Misha looked for Allen in the café on the corner, but the table near the door stood empty except for the wineglass and the newspaper, curling up and down in the wintry breeze.

God and all his angels alone knew for certain, but Allen was hardly in the habit of having his constitutionals interrupted by Swiss policemen, especially those duty bound to feed two émigré Jews into the Gestapo’s bottomless maw. Was this a quid pro quo, a debt being called in? Had Allen squired Eleanor’s friends right onto the abattoir ramp? Or was this just dedicated Swiss police work, arresting two German nationals with expired visas?

Who knew? Misha could barely think: powerless to intervene—it was against every rule Shiloah had taught him—he was on fire inside. And all he knew for certain in that bleak slice of time was that, had there been a bus nearby, he would happily have pushed Allen under it. The only good Misha could see in this episode was that now he had a match, a small one but useful nonetheless, with which to burn Allen.

Next on Misha’s shopping list for Shiloah was a detective-inspector of the Swiss police service, the inimitable Hans-Peter Russi, lead choreographer of the spies’ minuet that year in Switzerland—a dance Allen Dulles evidently knew well. As Misha left, the SS men were debating Swiss chocolate, killing time. They hadn’t noticed a thing.

XXXVIII

A WEEK LATER

If Diesing was a rotund Mutt, Hans-Peter Russi of Bern was an ascetic Jeff, a short, cautious man, even for a Swiss bank policeman, which was saying something. He was dark and droll, of Bavarian descent, which marked his eyebrows, and also of French descent, which marked his palate. He was thin, rarely ate, and only then with the careful strategy of the practiced gourmand, hampered by the trigger finger he’d lost in a hunting accident. Heavy-bearded and slow to gesture, Russi was a bachelor with no known liaisons, famous in Switzerland for his uncanny ability to play his informants.

His children’s choir, he called them, and he kept them in tune partly by force of his pragmatic wit and partly by regularly spending a goodly portion of his departmental budget on them. He was also that rarest of witnesses, completely unbiased. Having been lied to by so many for so long, Russi took the rather humane decision that life was essentially a comedy, with an intriguing cast, many of whom were motivated to sin by the forbidden holdings of Swiss banks.

Russi put down his coffee and looked at Misha. “Who’s paying for this?” he asked genially.

“I am,” Misha replied. In the background, a string quartet was working its way through a Haydn piece. Misha had been half listening, half watching Russi efficiently demolish the most expensive dinner in Bern.

“You mistake my meaning,” Russi said. “Who’s paying you to talk to me? You might as well tell me the truth: I’ll find out anyway. I read enough wiretaps over breakfast to know what half of Bern is having for dinner, my friend. Besides,” he said, winking, “the truth is a very refreshing thing in our business.”

“The U.S. Treasury Department,” Misha replied. “I’m working for Enskilda Bank by day and nosing around for the Americans by night.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” Russi shot back, making a sour face. “You’re working for Schorr, for the British.”

“Oh, really? Am I?”

Russi had lost his sense of humor. “Here are your marching orders, my young comedian. You just keep nosing around Bern, where I can keep my beady little eyes on you,” Russi said, already, to judge from the gleam in his eye, thinking of the next course. Then came Russi’s bombshell: “How’s Mother Russia these days?”

Misha felt as if he’d slid into a mountain stream. “Fine,” he said.

“Oh, come, come, my friend, do you think I live in restaurants? I’m quite happy to listen to your side of the New York incident.” Russi allowed himself a satisfied smile. “All this and you’re paying for the dinner. It’s a good night’s work.” Russi arranged his cutlery perfectly, the etiquette of a man much used to doting service. “Care for an opinion?”

“As if I have a choice.”

“Not if you’re paying,” Russi reminded him. “The Soviets are a far more dedicated lot than the Germans who hang about cafés, where the likes of you can watch them for hours on end, like goldfish. No, I would be minding my back rather carefully if I had the Soviets interested in my whereabouts.”

“Your fantasy life’s getting the better of you, Hans. You’re seeing things.”

“And, quite out of character, you’re not saying anything,” Russi said. “That in itself is interesting.”

“Tell me about Dulles.”

Russi gave an unpleasant laugh. His laugh, like his body, was all acute angles and sharp edges. “There? Good for you! See what I mean?”

“About what?”

“About how refreshing the truth is? Tell me, my young friend, don’t you feel better, now that we have the truth on the table between us?”

“Bugger this for a lark, Hans. You’ve eaten like a king. Let’s do business.”

“Fine,” Russi said equably, and waved the waiter over for another bottle of crackling iced Sancerre.

“Dulles has been meeting with various German anti-Hitler people for months,” Russi was saying. “Stalingrad brought them out of the woodwork. Princes, Catholic aristocrats, Abwehr people, and even the occasional SS man, who, despite their preference for the café life, are realists. They’ve been lining up to talk to Dulles, rather like I imagine his clients at his posh law office in New York did, everyone with a problem and story to tell. Do your people read his cables?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Russi tutted. “Now, now. I get very put out when foreigners cross my wires. My government here likes my reports nice and orderly—just like our neutrality. That’s what I give them. Look, I like you, Misha.”

“Well, that makes all the difference.”

“Right, have it your way,” Russi said, bruised. “Everyone here is watching Allen Dulles. It’s the fashionable Bern pastime. After coffee and a good read of the newspaper, have a listen to what Allen’s telling Washington. It’s no secret, really. Half the time he just talks on the telephone. I’ve played the acetates for several of my Abwehr colleagues and they’re not terribly impressed at the quality of Dulles’s work here. And I gather Washington isn’t either. But that’s not the point, is it, from your point of view?”

“You believe in capital punishment, don’t you, Hans?”

Russi looked horrified. “No! Why do you ask?”

Misha poured himself half a glass of Sancerre and topped up Russi’s glass. “Because you’re boring me to death. I know all this. Anyone in Bern or Davos for a couple of hours knows all this. What I want to know is, why, if Dulles is such a befuddled operator, are they queuing up for days on end to pay their respects?”

“You work for the Ministry of Economic Warfare, Misha. You know the Americans have enough money to buy whatever they want to hear. That’s why you and I are here, isn’t it?”

“But what do you hear, Hans? What’s crossing your desk as you eat your breakfast brioche?”

Russi suddenly ran out of charm. “It’s damn hard, balancing things the way I do. I have all kinds of competing interests to weigh. Who do I tell? What do I bury? Those German Jews I arrested and deported, the Neimanns? They’re somebody’s son, somebody’s sister, but they have to go. So they go. That’s the game. Nobody wins, nobody really loses, but we get to spend lots of money demonstrating how suspicious we can be. Dulles? The English counterintelligence people are wiretapping him, we’re wiretapping him. I’d bet next bottle the Germans, to make it unanimous, are wiretapping him too. Or, if they’re ambitious, they’re trying to buy our intercepts. And the band plays on, isn’t that the English expression?”

“Anyone made you an offer, Hans? Just between us, Hans, as friends?”

Russi’s face darkened—he missed the joke completely. He fussed with the creases in his napkin for a moment. “If that’s what the word is about me, you’ve heard wrong. I find too much pleasure in my restaurant vice to take a bribe. Besides, who would I spend it on? No, it’s much more interesting being the cat and watching the mice run the alleys than actually getting down on all fours in the muck. Personally, I’d ask the Luftwaffe ciphers lads about Dulles: they have a branch here, you know. Three tired men in spectacles and terrible body odor above that fur shop just down the street from the phone exchange. Three little men who listen like ferrets all day to the main telephone line into France, the Bern–Strasbourg–Paris trunk line, the only route for all the international calls and telexes north. We’re thinking of burning one of them: he likes it when the girls tie him up, and Swiss maidenhood can only be perverted so far. We call him Anton the airman. He’s really quite something when the girls—”

“You know what I think?” Misha interrupted. “I think Dulles is here looking after his old prewar German clients, and quite likely his American clients too, just to round off a day’s work. Is he playing games with the banks?”

Russi raised his hands. “Off-limits. What I tell you I have to tell my Abwehr colleagues—more or less, you understand—and I’m not about to tell them. Understand?”

“That’s fine. Couriers or telexes?”

“Yes. Well,” Russi said, curt and moody again, “the bank transfers, they’re all done on Beurling machines, my friend. You probably helped design half the machines in Switzerland.”

“I’m overrated as a mathematician, Hans, trust me,” Misha said, favoring the little Swiss with a glowing smile. “Now if you want a good cornetist, then we can talk.”

They nattered about jazz for a few minutes while the waiters cleared. Misha waited for Russi to open up again; he didn’t dare lose the Swiss at the last hurdle.

“Dulles isn’t an anti-Semite, you know,” Russi said at last, examining the backs of his hands in great detail. He raised his eyes and stared at Misha. “He’s just a little busy.”

Misha made a skeptical face. “What brought that on?”

“I told you. We read his reports. Do you know how many people have told him what’s happening to the Jews in eastern Europe? Do you know what an open secret the massacres are? Half the commercial travelers who come through here have heard bloody good rumors of atrocities from their contacts in Germany and farther east. Dulles is sitting on those rumors. Which begs the question why.”

“So we’ve heard. Good money says he’s talking to the wrong kind of German to hear those rumors, agreed?”

“Why would I agree with you, Misha? For one thing, which ‘we’ are you this time? You really are a changeling, my friend—a dangerous thing to be in this town.” Russi was looking at Misha for the first time with something like genuine frankness. “If you’re playing a double game to get at Dulles, don’t count on me to watch your back.” He sucked his teeth, weighing what he would say next. “I don’t see all the surveillance reports, you know. But I do know one German industrialist who’s through Bern several times a year who’s an eyewitness to senior SS people bragging about the killings. They’re quite open about it among their business associates. The numbers are staggering, from what he’s told one or two banking friends who talk to me. And do you know something? He talked to Dulles within a day or two of coming here.”

“And Dulles hasn’t forwarded the reports to Washington.”

Russi gave his Cheshire cat smile again. “You’re a bright fellow. You can draw your own conclusions about which Germans Dulles is doing business with.” He drained his glass at a single gulp, something Misha had never seen him do before. “But you ask me, it’s a penny to a pound your average Dulles lawyer colleague in the SS, he has no trouble getting his reports to Washington if it suits Mr. Dulles. These old banking comrades, they stick together.” Russi scratched a nostril irritably, then sniffled. “Likewise every passenger off the train from Berlin whose fictions Dulles cables weekly to Washington. Them too.” Russi sneezed and blew his nose into his fine white handkerchief. “No dessert fondue for me,” he announced. “I am allergic to chocolate. It’s a very great pity.”

Russi twisted his pinkie ring around and around, morose. “It’s soul-destroying, our business. But I do like you. You have entertainment value. Talk to this fellow.” He wrote a Zürich phone number on one of his business cards. “He’s met the German industrialist, the one who knows about what’s at the end of all those trains that go east and never come back. Plus he knows Dulles. And he’s one of your countrymen.” Then Russi fell silent, his coquetry spent.

“He’s Latvian? You’re joking,” Misha said, stunned. “I—”

“No, your other nationality, the older one,” Russi replied. “Israel Kipfermann is the senior Jewish banker in Switzerland. Be nice to him, we’re friends. He’s an honest man.” Russi appeared to appreciate the quality.

Not until he was out in the street did Misha realize that the weight bumping against his hip was a Walther PPK pistol in his coat pocket. Had Russi slipped the gun there during dinner? Misha pressed the lapels of his greatcoat, searching. In the inside breast pocket were two spare clips of nine-millimeter ammunition.

He made a mental note to mention this gift to his stepfather someday. And to send Russi flowers. He’d like flowers.

XXXIX

MARCH 1943

Adela arrived by train, in a Swiss Red Cross hospital car; something had gone wrong. She should have arrived at eight in the evening, but he heard nothing until the hospital called him just after seven, the first hour of a gray morning. The corridor was wide and well lit and smelt of carbolic. A very Swiss notice—All visitors will observe silence of the sick—was pinned to the wall next to her room. This wing was terribly quiet and Misha gathered they had put her here so as not to disturb the others down the hall. “She has dreams,” the attending nurse had said confidingly as she led him down the hall. “Very harsh dreams, I would say. Do you know her well?”

There had been a miscue at the reception desk because his name was on the wrong list; the apologetic intern showed him the paperwork and to his surprise Misha saw one of Kauffmann’s work names, Julius Kahan, second from the bottom. After several minutes of failed negotiations Misha finally demanded a telephone and, after a short farrago in Yiddish with a deep voice with a Spanish accent, had the Jewish Agency call down its approval from Geneva.

This is where they bring the dying, said a voice in his head; he obsessed about that, that and the slip of blue telegraph paper he had in his hand. The single cryptic line at the end of the Agency’s message from Budapest, stripped of the extraneous coding, could not even in a few blunt syllables mask Shiloah’s voice: permission disclose granted.

“She won’t recognize you,” the nurse warned, stopping him at the doorway. “The doctor ordered me to tell you that she refuses to eat more than what she knows they are eating in Kraków. You understand: refuses to eat. We cannot force her. So,” she said, irritated with her own impotence.

They had closed the blinds, but the mountain sun eddied around the closed slats, falling in fingers of light on the blue-striped blanket. Her head lay deep on the pillow and there was a crucifix over her bed, an oversight Misha thought better of correcting. She wore a white cotton cap. She looks like a baker, he thought, ready to joke with her, until the state of her face registered in the cool, dim light.

Adela couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds: her cheeks had collapsed into hollows and her closed eyes seemed bulbous, large as hen’s eggs beneath almost-translucent eyelids. Her skin was the color of window putty; the only clue she was still alive was the steady blue pulse at her temple, a thready vein trembling there.

“I know it is a shock, mein Herr,” the attending nurse murmured. “Please remember it is a five-minute visit.”

He said nothing that first day and only sat there, feeling the bones sigh as he held her hand, tears pouring down his cheeks, humming a Yiddish song he used to sing to himself when he ferried the orphans out of the Reich. She gave no sign she heard.

He was back at eight sharp the next morning; this time Adela was awake, an untouched breakfast on her side table. Her eyes were fever bright and at first she did not recognize him, but when he spoke her name she shook her head in disbelief and the ghost of a long-past enthusiasm came over her.

“Oh my God, Misha, it’s you! I’m hallucinating, tell me I’m not hallucinating!” Adela muttered, too weak to cry but trying to sit up. The effort only knocked her cap off and then he saw she had lost most of her hair—the nurses had cropped what was left. Great patches of pale skin and a thin scar above her forehead. He touched the scar instinctively and she raised a hand to cover his fingers, holding them there for a moment.

“Look at me, Reuven’s ace agent, one foot in Palestine already, eh?” The false heartiness exhausted her; she shifted and frowned, settling back on the pillows. “I was in Kraków. The Gestapo beat me,” she said, hoarse, “when I tried to help an old Jewish woman up.”

“What the hell were you doing in Kraków?”

“For the Agency … on Enskilda papers … researching rolling stock and rail equipment … finance the deals with the Reichsbahn.” She had settled back now, her face half hidden in the pillow; there was a patina of sweat on her forehead simply from talking to him.

“And what were you really doing?”

“Talking to Polish railway workers … the transports to the east,” she replied. “Transports to the east … round the clock—”

He put a finger to her dry lips and stopped her. “Gently, dear, gently. Did you tell someone?”

“I told Kipfermann. The things I’ve seen, Mish …” The blanket moved with her as she cried, her eyes closed, breathing shallow.

Misha waited for a long minute until she lay calm again. Then, for the first time in a very long time, he went with his heart. “Adela,” he called, too harshly. “You must listen. I have to tell you something. Something about England.”

She nodded. “I’m not dead yet, Mish. I can hear you.” Then she winked and that just about broke his heart. “Your mad affair with Stalin … those awful commissars of his?”

“It was a job, for Reuven. Go underground, see what Moscow would make of me.”

“Did you change your mind, then?” she asked, ever so gently.

He looked down at her: the irises of her eyes had gone almost black. “No, Della, no. It was an acting job, to get inside what the Russians were doing, the Comintern, at the university, get myself recruited.”

“I—I don’t understand.”

“It was Reuven’s operation, his idea, to learn what the Russians had in mind for us.”

He had her hand, cool and thin and damp, in his own palm, a dying fish trembling there in his grasp. The sounds of another ordinary day within the hospital’s shining white walls leaked into Adela’s tiny room, another planet.

“What?” she asked, the lines around her eyes tightening. “So worried. Don’t.”

From somewhere down the hall there came a great deal of bad language, squelched by a rising buzz and a door slam in the distance.

“The nutters,” Adela observed drily. “I’m off to England next. That should be a relief to you, darling. Get me out of your hair.”

Misha look amazed for a moment, then made a special effort to compose himself, stop the emotions chasing themselves across his face.

“You want to come to England too?” Adela asked, fading even as he watched. “I’d thought your work here …” She didn’t finish and he thought she’d passed out, but she opened her eyes again. “I always thought you’d be a civil servant, you see. Edging ever upwards in your clever way …”

She levered herself up on her elbow, her sleeve falling down, revealing a forearm no greater in diameter than a child’s. “How very brave of you, working alone for Reuven that way … even putting up with my tantrums … I didn’t know, you see.”

“You couldn’t know. Wouldn’t have been safe for you.”

“But I can look after myself. I always have. Reuven knows that. You know that. Why didn’t you tell me the truth, Misha?” Then she repeated herself, this time quite loudly, and a nurse appeared protectively in the doorway.

Then the fever of discovery or simply the fever within her, whatever it was, broke loose and Adela slipped back into the cratered pillow; the energy her outburst cost her horrified him.

Misha held her until the day nurse, face frosty with annoyance, abruptly ordered him away. Adela called for him as he was led off, then again, and he knew he’d broken her heart twice over.

That night, for the first time in years, at the hotel bar he got himself deliberately and very thoroughly drunk. Just past three in the morning, he was sick. He showered, tore off the sweat-soaked sheets, and demanded housekeeping bring him a fresh set.

A very severe Swiss woman did so, leaving wordlessly and pocketing the two-franc tip. He was asleep, purged, within minutes. He had no dreams, but woke again in the darkness, still hearing Adela’s cry.

He wasn’t sure she’d understood.

The next day was Friday, and at half past ten, after cabling Miriam in London about Adela’s state, he brought soup in a jar. He’d made the stock himself on a hot plate in the hallway, a clear broth from boiled vegetables he strained with a sieve cadged from one of the waiters in the restaurant downstairs. The doctor, a needle-thin and very correct Schweizerdeutsch, made him divulge all the ingredients and forbade her salt. Misha stood the metal container out of her line of sight while he took off his coat. “She’s taken a little millet with yogurt,” he said. His expression was not hopeful. “I believe your visits are helping. Please,” he said, opening the door and ushering Misha in.

She was sleeping on her back, one hand cast over the blanket, palm up, a discarded toy. She seemed utterly helpless. He waited for her to wake, but she didn’t. He left the soup. When he got back to his hotel, he called the number Russi had given him.

Israel Kipfermann himself answered. Yes, he said, he would come.

Misha said nothing about Russi. Not, he thought to himself as he hung up, on an open telephone line.

Kipfermann was there the next day, in an impeccable suit, a carnation in his lapel and his shoes gleaming. He caught Misha looking at the shine and gave an eloquent shrug: Kipfermann was that rarest of bankers, one who didn’t take himself seriously. He had brought a spray of yellow jonquils, which stood like frozen fire in Adela’s dim room. “My wife said the scents from the flowers wouldn’t make her sick,” he announced solemnly. They watched her sleep and Misha noticed his soup container was empty, standing on the side table on a napkin.

“Did she drink the soup?” he whispered, but Kipfermann only inclined his head to the door and led him out.

Kipfermann sat on a sighing chesterfield, its fabric alive with green vines. “I’ve cabled Reuven. She is dying,” he said simply. “She was probably beyond help when I met her at the train station in Zürich. She was badly beaten up in Kraków, but somehow the Swedes ransomed her out—I don’t know that we could have raised the money in time. She’s been talking to the Polish rail people, did she tell you? She’s actually had human ashes in her hair, blown there by the wind, the day she drove from Kraków west to the biggest camp, right on the main rail line from Munich to the Russian frontier. It’s an industry, Mr. Resnikoff. The Nazis have made destroying us an industry. They all know, you know—the Americans, the British. They’ve known for months. They do precisely nothing.”

Little of this registered: Misha was trying to grasp the fact that Adela was really dying. “But didn’t she drink my soup?”

“My dear man, she eats nothing, drinks a little water. She’s killing herself—don’t you understand?” Kipfermann exhaled smoke from his nostrils and rubbed a spot on his shoe. “Her thinking is that she ought not to eat more than the people she saw on the street in Kraków, in the old quarter. Have you been to Kraków, Mr. Resnikoff?”

Misha nodded.

“They’ve paved walkways with broken headstones from the Jewish cemetery. No end of inventiveness, the Germans.” He seemed quite calm, but Misha could see the pale blotches on his face where the anger collected. “The project is proceeding in an orderly fashion, undisturbed by the rest of the world, Mr. Resnikoff.”

That night, fueled by a little broth and Mrs. Kipfermann’s herbal tea, Adela gave a statement, with Misha and Kipfermann and a dour Swiss judge listening, his skeptical face melting as the evening wore on into a mask of stunned disbelief. The young stenographer had been irritated at having to work that night, but at the end of Adela’s statement she was so shaken the judge had to escort her to the ladies’ room. They could hear the girl being sick from behind closed doors.

delivered March 28 1943 in presence of Herr Dr Israel KIPFERMANN, banker, canton of Zürich, and Herr Dr Marcus STARCK, judge-advocate, at the Klinik Feuermann, Bern. Oath administered by Herr Dr STARCK.

Affidavit made by Adela Mira BRAUDEL, underwriter with the Enskilda Bank, Stockholm, age 31, unmarried, of Jewish descent.

transcript prepared by Charlotte HARTKOPF, city of Bern stenographer witness: Misha RESNIKOFF, commercial traveler, Swedish national

AFFIDAVIT

My name is Adela Braudel. I give this sworn statement of my own free will. I am of sound mind. I am a naturalized citizen of Sweden, born January 21 1912, in Warsaw, then a possession of Imperial Russia. I have been a Swedish citizen since November 26 1934. I am here at the clinic because of complications from an assault in Kraków by a German officer March 12.

I am an employee of the Enskilda Bank, Stockholm, in the merchant banking section. My superior is Dr Bjorn SVENSSON. I began my employment in September 1933. I visited both Germany and Poland on bank business on many occasions from 1934 to the present time. I inspect both oil and metal refineries underwritten by the bank. My father was an engineer. I worked and traveled with him after my studies in economics at Warsaw University concluded in 1931.

I did not travel to Poland from August 1939 until the fall of 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, because commercial travel was unsafe. My first trip took me from Stockholm to the coal and steel regions of Poland, Silesia, and the Katowice region, but I saw nothing which confirmed rumors surfacing in Stockholm about mass German atrocities against the Jews of Poland.

In the fall of 1942, with assistance from various Swedish Jewish groups, my employers arranged a major inspection tour of the Katowice and Lublin regions, the latter to view a possible oil pipeline route from the Romanian oil fields through the Carpathians. While this German-Romanian deal never materialized, the research the bank needed to have in place enabled me to travel in the Lublin region in the fall of 1942.

I speak both Polish and German fluently. I do not look Jewish. I understand the German psychology and had a Swedish diplomatic passport as well. I departed Stockholm on November 29 1942 and arrived in occupied Copenhagen December 1, onbound for Berlin.

In Berlin, I had several meetings with the various ministries involved in structuring the pipeline deal, including several principals of Hermann Goering’s Kontinental Öl concern, which sought Swedish drilling technology and replacement parts for the project. I did not meet Goering personally but he stood to make millions of Reichsmarks if the deal went through.

I traveled to Lublin via Warsaw, which I saw only briefly from my Reichsbahn Pullman carriage. I was not allowed to leave the train in Warsaw. This caused me great anguish, as my parents were trapped in Warsaw when the Germans invaded. I have not heard from either of my parents since a letter from my mother in May 1940.

My three-day inspection trip to Katowice and its steel and coal facilities was uneventful, as I was escorted at all times by a Konti representative, MEYERSOHN, who was careful to monitor my movements.

On December 6, at about 10 am, I arrived at Lublin station. The station’s marshaling yard had some sixty wooden-sided freight cars with barbed wire over the windows. When I tried to get a closer look at these carriages, the German conductor closed the sleeping berth blind. When my train reached the station, I managed to get a second look while my luggage was taken off and I realized these carriages were used for transporting human beings. I asked a Polish baggage handler quietly what the carriages were for and he said nothing but drew his finger across his throat and walked away.

The next day, two Konti representatives met with me at the Hotel Francuski. I asked for a car to inspect the region and was told certain areas were off-limits for military reasons. I said I understood this and then I reconfirmed the route I had permission to take. I was treated very correctly and no threatening action was even hinted. It was clear the Germans wanted this deal under way as soon as possible.

I was given a car and a driver. The driver was a German Pole named PEKARSKI who drove German civilian VIPs for the hotel. I bribed him with SF100, enough for him and his family to live on for six months in occupied Poland. We immediately set out for the southern part of Lublin, where I had heard there was a large camp called Majdanek, right on the edge of the city.

This was so. The rectangular camp complex, which is easily visible from the suburbs of Lublin, has about fifty barrack buildings and is completely surrounded by barbed wire. It is a major operation. There has long been rumored a killing facility within the complex and PEKARSKI told me that “thousands” of Jews have entered the camp via a rail spur line in the boxcars. They are never seen again. The smell of the camp was awful. PEKARSKI confirmed this was rumored to be a crematorium “for the dead Jews.”

I interviewed PEKARSKI’s cousin, one PAWLUK, who expected a bribe himself. We met in PEKARSKI’s car in an orchard some kilometers from Lublin. I gave him SF30 and he told me that the camp had “done away with” tens of thousands of Jews and Red Army prisoners by shooting and in “the ovens,” small furnaces where people are gassed to death. PAWLUK has not seen the ovens himself, but confirms dozens of people die each day in the forced-labor groups breaking the rocks he trucks away. He confirms there is a crematorium facility. He says all the Poles in Lublin “know what is happening to the Jews at Majdanek.”

PAWLUK says the camp near Wlodawa is “completely for killing” and has only a small prisoner population, “all Jews.” There is considerable black market commerce between the nearby Polish townsfolk and the camp guards at the Wlodawa camp, and it is clear from personal items bought and sold that wholesale killing is going on at this camp, “entire families, as soon as they arrive.” Dozens of trains a month enter the camp but no one ever leaves. PAWLUK has never been near the Wlodawa camp, but he said “it would be worth my life getting caught there with no reason.”

On my last day in Lublin, I spoke to a German Catholic priest at the hotel, there to visit a sick brother in the army who had suffered a heart attack. He recognized immediately what I was doing after my first serious questions. He became very nervous and would not give his name, for fear of reprisals against his brother’s family, but he did agree to meet me outside the hotel. We met several hours before my train was to leave, in a park near the Old Town, pretending to encounter one another by accident.

The priest told me that “there is a ghetto in Lublin itself, not five hundred meters from where we sit. It is something from Gustave Doré,” he said, “hell on earth.” He had not seen the ghetto but had spoken with two Wehrmacht soldiers from his brother’s unit who had been inside the ghetto two days before and were shocked by what they had seen. They described the treatment of the Polish Jews, including the very old and children, as “beneath the dignity of the German people.” When I asked to speak to the Wehrmacht soldiers if possible, the minister refused. “I cannot risk the lives of innocent men, even to help you,” he said. When I asked him about the innocent people being killed in the ghetto, he said, “I know what is going on there. But I cannot risk another life to stop it, do you see? Not even yours.”

On the train back to Berlin, I spoke with a fellow passenger in the dining car. This was Rigoberto RODRIGUEZ, a Spanish wine agent who had business in Romania. I asked him if he had seen anything unusual from the train. We spoke in our common language, French. RODRIGUEZ said that when his train to Kraków passed a certain area to the west of Kraków, not far from Katowice, the entire train had its blinds pulled down. The conductors would only say the area was “a military secret,” but RODRIGUEZ said he’d been on that route before and had heard German tourists joking in whispers about what “was happening to the Jews there.”

As my health is failing, I want my recollections recorded. Should my parents survive me, I have asked that this statement be shown to them. I want them to know I tried to do something to stop the sufferings of my people.

I swear this statement is truthful in all material respects and given to the best of my ability.

[signed]

Adela Mira Braudel

on this 28 March 1943

witnesses

[signed] Misha RESNIKOFF

[signed] Israel KIPFERMANN

He came back Saturday for an hour while she slept. Sunday they wouldn’t let him in. “She is too weak,” the intern said.

Monday morning Misha couldn’t sleep, so in the predawn murk he walked the two and a half miles to the sanatorium. He knocked at the shuttered front door and this time they let him in, hurrying him to the third floor.

Adela Braudel died ten minutes after they let him into her room. She simply stopped breathing. Misha sat with her, alone, until the sun came up and the doctor came back to ask him to sign a form. They gave him a sedative and let him sleep in the room next to the conservatory. He slept until noon, and when he walked back to her room, heart pounding, hoping against hope he’d dreamt the whole thing, the bed was stripped and the blinds wide open.

Light streamed into the room; in the distance, the sunlight lit up the perfect Swiss mountain snowfields as if by electric current, a terrible, clear, beautiful morning.

They buried her in the tiny Jewish cemetery in Zürich; the plain pine coffin had no nails, in the Orthodox tradition, and Misha paid for the simple headstone. The rabbi seemed younger even than Adela and sang Kaddish in an eerily high register that echoed around the hillsides. When Adela was interred, her coffin felt nearly weightless. We are, Misha thought as he held the rope, burying but the breath of her.

XL

MAY 1943

“Bring the papers,” the handwritten note from Kronthal demanded, asking Misha to meet him at the bus stop in front of a florist’s shop, steps away from the walled entrance to Bern’s Jewish cemetery. The first of the May rains left puddles shining like new florins where he walked, mulling why Kronthal hadn’t asked him over to the legation offices. But it was a Sunday, and Bernese Sundays were designed, Misha had long ago decided, for as little in the way of event as the Swiss could possibly engineer. Misha took the precaution of visiting his lockbox and retrieving the buff envelope of four-by-five photographs from its resting place.

Kronthal’s note asked for a ten o’clock rendezvous, which meant most of the Konditorei and cafés along Misha’s route were shuttered. The occasional cab trawled by—which might have been the Swiss police putting in a little overtime—but only the churchgoers showed any sign of life. Prim and staid and properly Calvinist, the Bernese went about their Sunday morning, it seemed to Misha, with a calculated eye on eternity. Kronthal arrived in a taxi, which stopped in the small square well inside the cemetery gate. There, a gaggle of pigeons foraged the cobbles, so tame the passing cab didn’t fluster them. The leavings were sparse: this was Bern, spotless to a fault.

Kronthal had a seed packet with him.

“Not burying someone, are we?” Misha asked as they watched the pigeons at work.

“I sure as hell hope not. You brought the papers?”

Misha nodded and followed Kronthal the forty-odd paces to the cemetery gates. “A moment,” Kronthal said, fighting the key over the tumblers, producing a small screech, fingernails on slate.

Once in, the American glanced quickly up the hill, scanning the trees. “It’s too quiet,” he muttered, but didn’t slow his pace. “Far too quiet.” They headed along the top of the low ridge, between the old black headstones, cracked teeth set in the fuzz of the new spring grass.

He led Misha toward a squat black and white granite mausoleum set inside a low cast-iron railing, ornate with grape leaves and relief heads of lions, rams, antelopes. The lettering on the black marble read WEISZ; a strip of stained glass ran all the way around the mausoleum’s circumference, just below the roofline; a Torah scroll unwound on either side of the family name.

Kronthal slowed, checking his watch, then hopped the cast-iron railing. At the entrance to the mausoleum, he disappeared inside and returned very quickly, his face a mask of worry. “Matthias!” he called once, then again. “They’ve gone,” he said to Misha. “They can’t have.”

But they had. Misha entered the cool darkness of the Weisz memorial. A jumble of Red Cross blankets, boxes of canned food, a Primus stove, and a pyramid of methylated spirits tins lay on the floor, with a bucket and a heap of Swiss newspapers.

“They’ve been here for nearly two months,” Kronthal said.

A clanking sound drifted from the stand of spruce behind them, and an ancient bicycle worked its way toward them, piloted by a disheveled fellow in a cap, smoking as he pedaled.

“Let’s see if Matthias is sober this morning,” Kronthal remarked.

Matthias hove the bicycle to, dragging a boot to brake. He was sober—barely—grizzled with a thin beard, his bulging eyes the worse for wear. Misha saw Kronthal hand the groundskeeper a five-franc note.

“They’ve gone, haven’t they?” Kronthal asked in his slow German, his voice hard. The groundskeeper didn’t meet the American’s eye. “What? Where? Spain? Say something, Matthias.”

The old groundskeeper fingered the banknote. “No. France. They were arrested last night.”

“Arrested? Who told the police?”

“Our council. The Jewish council. They told the police, told them the brother and sister were here.”

“Dear God. Why?” Kronthal demanded.

“They weren’t registered. The council voted to tell the police, so they wouldn’t … so it wouldn’t look bad on the Jews of Bern.”

“The council told the police,” Kronthal said, his voice low, amazed.

“Yes. They thought it was better that way.”

Misha joined them, standing a little apart. “Did you see the arrest?”

“No. No. The cemetery was closed,” said the groundskeeper, looking out over the rows of headstones. “I saw the place”—he waved a hand at the mausoleum—“was empty this morning, when I brought them the water for the washing.”

“They were gone,” Misha said.

“Gone. Yes. Gone.” The groundskeeper tapped a drumroll on the bicycle handlebars with his gnarled fingers. “To France,” he repeated.

“What will happen to them in France?” Kronthal asked, far too gently for Misha’s taste.

“A transport. To the east. Somewhere there.” The groundskeeper pointed first, then drew the same bent finger across his lips, as if the incident were still a secret to be kept. He shook his head, blinking. “They were children. What kind of threat were they to anybody?”

A pall of shame covered all three of them. No one looked at anyone else, until finally Misha eyed Kronthal—the OSS man was staring at his shoes, his hands thrust past his splayed-back coat into his trouser pockets. Kronthal cleared his throat, eyes welling, but no words came.

Matthias the groundskeeper mounted his bicycle, clanking away down the hard-packed path between the headstones. Two crows settled into the open door of the Weisz mausoleum, but Kronthal never saw them. He walked into the tiny copse of pine just down the path and stood there, alone, for a long minute.

“You knew them, then?” Misha asked. They sat, facing one another, on the knee-high ornamental wall bordering the flagstones to the mausoleum entrance.

“Nicknamed them, even. Adam and Eve. Sweet, sweet kids, brother and sister. Belgian Jews.” Kronthal thought for a moment, looked away, looked back. “I’ve been a fool.”

“Never underestimate the power of fear. You did okay. You did what you could.”

“I wanted you to get them to Palestine. You know people. I know you do.”

Misha nodded. He wondered how far Kronthal’s knowledge went.

He made a pained face. “I waited a day too long. I thought they’d be safe on the Sabbath.” He had his hands open in his lap; he waggled his fingers, then made a pair of fists. “God. They’re halfway to Paris now. Or worse.”

“I’ve a name for you,” Misha said as he reached over and prized the flask gently from Kronthal’s pocket. “Nothing to do with this.”

Kronthal made no reply.

“Renni Schippers. Union Bank. Amsterdam. Branch in Haifa. Has his finger in Rockefeller oil money when he’s not fronting Thyssen’s millions offshore.”

Kronthal sat motionless, his eyes glazed with smashed hope. He focused on Misha. “How are you going to use Schippers?” Kronthal asked. Not, Misha noted, How would I know about Schippers? but Schippers as a given. “Look, Misha. I trust you, but there’s plenty of people who’d use what I know against … you know the drill. To compromise.”

Misha said he understood, then waited.

“The legation, well, it’s split right down the middle,” Kronthal continued. “There’s Dulles on the one side, ready to do anything, use anybody. And then there’s Harrison, who can smell a diplomatic incident a mile off. It’s a blood feud most days.”

What followed wasn’t strictly true, but Misha knew the power of a well-timed leap into the dark. “I want the connection between Thyssen’s Dutch bank and Schippers’s bank in Amsterdam and New York. The Dulleses are up to their necks in the legal work. It’s a swamp, Jim. There are interlocking boards of directors and share swaps left, right, and center, with Standard Oil and IG Farben popping up every time you look under a rock. It’s a pipeline for oil deals, cash, shares, and God knows what else. And word is you know all about it.” He offered Kronthal the envelope from his chest pocket.

Kronthal stared for a long moment at the first image. “You have the negatives?” he asked quietly, handing the envelope back.

Misha nodded. Kronthal raised his hand in dismissal, then took off his hat. He turned the hat in his fingers, buying time. “Where,” he asked, his face slumped, “do you want me to begin?”

Misha could feel how fragile this was, so delicate it could all shatter. He waited.

“Thyssen is everything,” Kronthal opened, his voice suddenly determined. “Thyssen made Hitler. People think Schacht or Schröder did. No: it was Thyssen. He made the devil’s compact with Hitler.” He shrugged, drifting away again. “My family in Philadelphia … we don’t get along. They sent me to Frankfurt, to the Sperrlerbank, to get me to go to law school. Sperrlerbank is run by my German cousins, the Aryan side. It’s a small bank, but it has some very influential clients: the Hallstadts, the Langemanns, the Ehrlenmayers.”

“Had, you mean: those are all Jews.”

“Yes, yes, that’s true,” Kronthal said, still looking away.

Misha let the American come back, let him turn his face into the warm sun, gave him air. Finally their eyes met. “Perhaps,” Misha suggested, as if offering a slice of cake, “you were at one time privy to the legal work regarding the Sperrlerbank’s corresponding banks outside the Reich.”

Kronthal’s eyes never left Misha’s. At last he said: “You don’t pussyfoot around, do you, Resnikoff?”

“Why should I? I’m feeling a little nauseous about all these funny banks with Foster Dulles’s handwriting on their charters and his placemen on their boards.” Misha examined Kronthal’s smooth features for a sign the American had seen some way out of the bear trap.

There was none—nothing at all.

“I figure you and I”—here Misha gestured complicitly back and forth between the two of them—“have our very small fingers in a very big dike: if it breaks, it’s going to rain runaway Reichsmarks and oil money and gold from Bern to Lisbon to God knows where else. Is it going to rain, Jim?”

Kronthal seemed ready for something. Then, abruptly, he stood and pulled his coat together, clasping his hands behind his back.

“This is the pointless, pointless world we’ve made,” Kronthal said finally. “Children are deported because they offend the Swiss sense of order? Jews offering up their own? God. And look at us. Look at us.”

“It’s loot, Jim,” Misha pressed on, “what’s behind that dike: you saw that yourself at the Sperrler in ’36. Those first dribs and drabs you saw were just the skimmings, for sure—and it’s an ocean now. I don’t want you, or your family, pilloried. I can find the rest, the corporate paper, the really awful personal stuff the big boys have done, but only if I can see into the banks. Starting with Foster Dulles’s legal work.”

Kronthal shook his head no. “I can’t, Misha. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I care about Foster Dulles. Him I don’t care about. But there are people I do care about who’ll be torn to pieces if this gets out.”

“Allen, then. You know what he’s really doing here, what all those meetings with his old clients are about. I know you know. Those banks are moving his clients’ flight capital, have been since Stalingrad fell. It’s blood money, Jim. And you know that for sure.”

“I can’t. Not because of them, either of them. You’ve seen them up close. They’re … the technicians, no holds barred, come at you any way they can with those battalions of lawyers. At least Foster is. Allen’s the hand-holder …” Kronthal was drifting: Misha could sense him slipping away, the chance lost. Kronthal shook his head, then shared a feeble smile with Misha. “God, they do love power, don’t they? But I can’t talk. I can’t.”

“How far does it go, Jim? Point me there and the negatives are yours, like nothing ever happened. I promise you.”

Kronthal kept his silence. He turned and walked down the brick-dust path, through the grave markers broken by age and frost, breaking himself—but not giving way. Misha put his back to the family Weisz’s fine smooth marble, letting the mid-morning sun warm his face, as Kronthal headed for the cemetery gate.

Misha pictured a railcar heading into the marshaling yards of Paris, two terrified children, utterly alone. Somewhere, Misha wanted to believe, poor Adela watched over Kronthal’s wards, a nameless brother and sister, keeping them close, with arms of loving grace.

From Misha Resnikoff’s microfilm archive: diary 1942–44

July 26, 1943

re: Kronthal

Yet more liaison intrigue with the Americans; Schorr has winkled out of Dalton that the OSS section at the Bern embassy is backtracking through its own cables, an investigation in the form of repeated queries to the Office of Censorship. The OOC vets all transatlantic cables, I’m told: they are the repository of all suspect cable files.

Question is: why? Schorr thinks there’s dirty work at the crossroads—why else would anyone go to the trouble, except to cover one’s traces? Did this mean the OSS Bern is being wiretapped by their own people? If so, why?

XLI

WASHINGTON, D.C.
JULY 1943

There were no fireworks that year on the Potomac: the Eastern Seaboard’s strict blackout meant a daylight Independence Day. By the time Eleanor and Clover arrived, concertgoers had already crowded the Watergate hillside, picnickers, servicemen, schoolkids, and bureaucrats alike. No matter: playing hooky from their own children for the afternoon, the sisters-in-law had rented the rowboat now floating upstream of the symphony’s barge stage. A swell of applause carried out over the water; the four Red Army singers at the microphone had finished their number.

“What’s a bandura?” Clover asked as she clapped. “Does it say in the program?”

“It’s like a balalaika, only Ukrainian,” Eleanor replied, glancing at her watch. “They better sing the next one fast—the boat’s due back.”

The Red Army men began “It’s a Long Long Way to Tipperary,” belting out the tune Eleanor remembered from the doughboys on spree in Paris in a different war. The hillside listeners sang along, the mood along the water suddenly wistful.

“I know another version, from France,” she confessed as the four Russians thundered on over the loudspeakers.

“Oh, sing, Ellie, let’s hear it,” Clover egged her on.

“That’s the wrong way to tickle Marie,
That’s the wrong way to kiss!
Don’t you know that over here, lad,
They like it best like this!
Hooray pour le Français!
Farewell, Angleterre!
We didn’t know the way to tickle Marie,
But we learnt how, over there!”

Eleanor sang along all the way to the finale; several fellow rowboaters applauded her rendition specially. “I’ll bet that’s the one Allen knows too,” Clover said as they each took an oar and made for the boat rental stand.

“What’s the latest from Bern?”

“Oh, he never actually says anything in those letters of his except how hard he’s working, but he’s moving from blossom to blossom, I’m sure. He thinks I don’t see through him. Wait’ll he gets the bill from the jewelers.”

“Clo, dear, you’re fearless.”

“No, Ellie, if I were fearless I’d’ve stood toe to toe with Allen like you do. I let him know I know by buying a new bracelet or two on the Tiffany account. Easier that way. Oh, Lord love us, look who’s at the dock,” she whispered to Eleanor. “It’s that Prescott Bush, looking overly refreshed.”

“And one of Foster’s clients, I do believe,” Eleanor noted.

“Men, Ellie, men. Lately they bring it out in me,” Clover averred. “Oh, here’s a scene.”

The rowboat bumped against the dock. The boat rentals man, a feisty Italian, stood well shorter than the distinguished fellow with the hangdog face waving a five-dollar bill.

“I can’t rent you a boat, sir,” the rentals man interrupted. “Company policy.”

“Here, take the money … that’s what you want, a tip? Make it all right?”

“You’re pretty loaded, sir. That’s why I can’t rent you a boat. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have these ladies to attend to. Leggo my arm, sir.” The rentals man tied off the rowboat and helped Eleanor out first.

“Clo, here’s a hand up,” Eleanor ordered, stepping between her and the two men.

“I’m going to make my escape, darling,” Clover whispered. “I can’t stand a man when he’s pie-eyed.”

“Bye, dear, and love to the children,” Eleanor replied, kissing Clover goodbye.

“Don’t you know who I am?” Bush breathed, quite close to Eleanor. He’d followed the rentals man to the edge of the dock, leading with the greenback in his hand.

“Hello, Pres,” Eleanor said, beaming at Bush. “It’s Eleanor, Eleanor Dulles.”

“Oh, hullo, Eleanor. Can I have your boat? Fella here seems to think not.”

“Your money’s no good here,” Eleanor said, hooking her arm into Bush’s, steering him inland, while the rentals man shook his head and busied himself with the next incoming rowboat. “And you know, Pres, the concert’s over. What say we go for a walk, catch up? How’s Dorothy?”

“Uh, okay. I just wanted to go for a row. Been a helluva day.” Bush towered over Eleanor, dark charm oozing from him. “I’ve had a few,” he admitted, unprompted.

“Well, there’s a war on, can’t blame a man for seeking a little solace on his day off.” Eleanor guided Bush toward the footpath. “Where are you staying, Pres?”

“Century Club … wanna come for a drink?”

“That’s kind of you but no, thanks. Say, you know, Foster hasn’t seen much of you lately.”

“I’ve been lying low. The papers. The damn papers. They just gutted me. I was only a cog. I’m not a Nazi banker.”

“Not so loud, Pres, let’s get you into a cab, shall we?”

“Those goddamn reporters. The Union Bank—the Nazi bank, the newspapers call it? I have one share, for shit’s sake. Harriman and Schippers—don’t see them all over the front page …”

“Never mind that old thing, Pres. What’s fun these days?” Eleanor asked, jollying him along. They picked their way through the crowd climbing away from the river.

“I’ll tell you what’s fun,” he growled, all charm dissipated. “Have some of this.” Bush shoved a fifth bottle into Eleanor’s free hand.

“I’ll join you, then, if that’s fun,” Eleanor announced sunnily. She feigned a great pull at the bottle, then drained it upside down as they walked.

“You’re a real broad,” Bush mumbled. “Sorry, shouldna said broad. Lady, is what I meant.”

“I’m touched, Pres, I really am.”

“I know a secret, just between us pals,” he whispered. “Because you’re a lady. Say, didja finish it?”

Eleanor showed him the empty bottle and his eyes bulged. “If that doesn’t beat … y’know, you are a broad, Eleanor. I could never figure out what you saw in him.”

“Who?”

Bush licked his lips, thoughtful, a sheen of perspiration on his face. “David. Your husband. What you saw in him.”

Eleanor smothered her surprise, glancing at Bush sidelong. Hailing a taxi, Eleanor waited him out.

“Did Fos ever … did Foster ever tell you, about the newspapers?” Bush blinked hard, trying to hold his eyes still. “Those damn … newspapers. Had to get the ambassador outta bed, the Paris one … the Paris office … they called Fos …”

“What Paris office?”

A cab rolled up and Eleanor eased Bush in. He still had the moist five-dollar bill in his big hand; she passed it to the cabbie. “This gentleman needs to go to the Century Club, please. Keep the change.”

Bush was glassy-eyed now, fading toward sleep. “Jewish newspaper, in Paris … they called … got the ambassador outta bed … woke ol’ Jess Strauss up … after David, y’know, did what he did. The Jewish newspapers in Paris … knew about David … how could they know that?”

And that was all. The cab tore off as if gasoline had never been rationed.

Half an hour later, Eleanor was searching her attic with a will, moving boxes away from the big steamer trunk where she’d stored all her David things from France: the letters, the books, the old maps of Paris, the contents of his desk, which the movers had carefully boxed and tied up with string.

… the Paris office … they called Fos … newspaper. Prescott’s words muttered to her again as she cut the string. She’d never opened the box, nor the trunk itself, except to retrieve a few photographs for Sophie’s bedroom wall. She’d never wanted to sort through these things, until now.

Eleanor sat on the dusty beams, the big Coleman pressure lantern puffing away as she searched, the harsh green-blue light etching everything in sharp relief. She held his diplomas, the folio of monographs, still unpublished. How little we actually leave of us, she let herself think, a few pounds, give or take.

She cut the string with the maid’s fruit knife and spread the box’s contents out on the attic floorboard. She opened all the envelopes and slid the pages into the light. The green U.S. Postal Service flimsies were all there, nine years later, held together with a straight pin. She separated them, cool and ferociously curious all at once.

She left the trunk open, went downstairs with the receipts, and called the State Department’s night operator. Waiting for the return call took her a long look out the kitchen window. The night operator worked in a hive of thrumming telexes and ringing telephones; she had a prairie-flat Midwest accent and the small-town habit of making of every statement a mild question.

Eleanor could hear the big pages of the directory fluttering as the operator worked. “Just checking the gazetteer for you, ma’am. Again, that’s 128 rue Dufau, in Paris?” She made it sound like pears.

Eleanor said yes it was.

“You want the number?”

“No, no, thank you. Just what it—just who the number belongs to.”

“Well, in 1939, the last record we have, 128 rue Dufau was the office of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. That’s a news service or a newspaper. That help you out?”

Eleanor thanked and rang off. She cleared her throat and decided on a pot of tea, the ritual of it, to amplify the not giving in.

But not yet. On her way to the kitchen she went to her bedroom, in shock, the side-stand light glowing, her books and things welcoming but feeling right now like another woman’s. She sat at the foot of her neatly made narrow bed. She sat there, very still, for quite some time, only the muted F Street sounds for company. Her mind threw off shards of memory, lantern slides of her time with David, fracturing as they tumbled past.

She stood and stripped back comforter and sheets. Very carefully she remade her bed, tightly, smoothing the edges with the flat of her hand the way shopgirls sharpen the wrapping paper seam of a Christmas present. She switched out the light, went to the kitchen, and set about making tea.

From Misha Resnikoff’s microfilm archive: diary 1942–44

Typed file card: Kronthal, James

Schorr’s files on Kronthal make for interesting reading. The son of a wealthy Jewish Philadelphia family, Kronthal and his father never got on. Kronthal’s love of art and the art world didn’t meet his father’s expectations: that his son would help seal the relationship between the Sperrlerbank, the Privatbank run by their German relations, the Sperrlers, and the American Kronthals.

Kronthal, as I reported, did auction looted Jewish art for the Sperrlerbank: I confirmed this with a Zürich art dealer who was involved in the 1941 auctions here, which Goebbels himself sponsored. Kronthal supplied artworks to the very cream of Nazi society.

Even more interesting are Kronthal’s connections to Allen Dulles’s brother, Foster. Foster’s German municipal and power/water bond placements went through the Sperrlerbank. The Sperrlerbank manages the private accounts of several leading Nazi personalities, including Kammerer, the plenipotentiary for industrial development, whom Foster knows personally. What’s not known is whether these people were Foster/Allen’s clients before the war.

I suspect some of them were. Schorr certainly does. Schorr’s convinced the client connections explain Allen’s enthusiasm for German commercial travelers here in Bern. It can’t be their politics, because the Nazis don’t allow suspect politicals to travel. Anyone who travels to Davos or transacts business at a Swiss bank is certainly a Party member; the really sensitive transactions appear to be handled by SS lawyers.

From Misha Resnikoff’s microfilm archive: diary 1942–44

August 19 1943

New face around the premises. Dulles has a fixer, Hungarian-American named von Gaevernitz. They’re inseparable. Von G does the running while Dulles does the string pulling. Von G worth watching: Schorr’s opened a file on him. Close to Hungarian bankers keen to move capital out as Soviets move west.

Schorr has had me write a memorandum regarding the sudden spike in transmissions from the American legation. His theory is that Dulles has a very good German source, but Schorr cannot convince any of the MI6 people of this, so much do they distrust Dulles’s judgment. Nonetheless, the radiotelephone traffic to Washington has nearly trebled in the past few weeks.

The British dismiss it all—whenever asked—as “provocation.” Schorr thinks Dulles is running a double agent, likely diplomatic, but no one believes him. MI6 underestimate Dulles, Schorr thinks.

I do too.

ACT FIVE

Espionage is not a game for bishops.

ALLEN DULLES

XLII

WASHINGTON, D.C.
MARCH 1944

There are meetings from which there is no escape: Eleanor had a grim feeling from the agenda alone. That and the way Max Puddicombe’s long thin mandarin’s fingers stroked the papers he moved from blotter to folder to tabletop and back. Eleanor had known a fellow at Social Security who made pipe cleaner animals; to enliven a really dry meeting, he’d raise a pipe cleaner hind leg.

“Moving along to the next item,” Max prompted, “top of page three, banking practices in Lisbon with respect to rubber production. Arnie, you have the floor.”

Puddicombe was a State Department fixture, a towering gentleman with a basset hound’s face, a veiny nose, and strangler’s hands, twice passed over for an ambassadorship, with moods to match. He was waiting to hear the results of his third go-round: rumor had it Lisbon was to be his in the new year. And bon voyage, Eleanor prayed: she was State’s foreign exchange specialist in a room full of policy sharks. Anything, some days, for peace. Puddicombe rode shotgun on the Friday sessions. It was a small room, Eleanor reflected, but felt like a phone booth whenever Treasury and State convened.

To her right was Joe Dufour, a pliable Treasury man obsessed with oil; the high-strung Arnie Schulman, Dufour’s partner, ate, smoked, and drank rubber production. Arnie Schulman was a pit bull: if there was rubber moving around the globe illegally or to enemy benefit, Arnie was there, figures spilling out of him. Opposite Eleanor was the darkly groomed “Baking Bob” Baker, the FBI’s eye on this economic warfare sweatshop.

Eleanor’s specialty was, she preferred to think, a little less pedestrian: she wanted to rule the postwar German economy, the very heart of the rebuilding. After a late lunch she’d fought off the torpor that only State Department wartime “mystery meat” could induce, and culinary metaphors were much on her mind. That’s the hors d’oeuvres, she reckoned, having seen a few of the wars between Puddicombe and Schulman, here comes the meat and potatoes. Schulman wound up his pitch for an interdiction order to halt a rubber shipment out of Lisbon with commendable dispatch and handed off the baton to Dufour.

“Thanks,” Dufour said, head bobbing as he made sure everyone was ready. “In the red-tagged file marked ‘petroleum surveillance slash Caribbean,’ this month’s, you’ll see things are moving along much faster communications-wise. Maxwell, thanks for the lead there. Now, the oil situation is, as always, delicate.”

Max snorted. “Are we to fight this blasted battle all over again, Joe? I mean, really, every other week? We haven’t the resources to search and track and surveil and seize.”

“Side issue, Max, side issue. We can get the money if you people at State go to bat for it. You’re the arch deal makers,” Dufour said, pouring it on. “You’re the professionals. We need you to lead for us.”

Dufour was digging in for a long siege, Eleanor could tell. She nudged the slick Baker, but he only winked back: he reserved his brand of emollient for later. Meantime, Puddicombe was immobile. His Mount Rushmore look, Eleanor thought, the blocked statesman rising in him. She waded in herself.

“Point of order on the intelligence side, please,” Eleanor said. “We’re concerned about the postwar implications of outright seizures too, Maxwell, but the fact is that Treasury has been turning up excellent intelligence from the Brits. We’re asking for additional Coast Guard cutters and B-24 surveillance of the Lisbon–Azores–Caracas oil route.”

“We go further, Max,” Dufour added, wading knee-deep in Eleanor’s slipstream. “We want inspectors on the Standard Oil tankers on that route. We know from naval intelligence there are German oil brokers on those tankers, right now, in port, in Caracas and the Azores, never mind dockside in Lisbon.”

“We’ve been over this and over this,” Max rejoined. “Why badger me? Go straight to Hoover and have his piranhas take a bite out of these Nazi operatives. You tell Hoover that, Mr. Baker: let him earn his keep. You know I can’t play both sides of the fence and still keep my people on the ground—”

“And not on their feet,” Schulman threw in sotto voce.

“Lisbon’s damn sensitive right now,” Puddicombe thundered.

Schulman plunged on. “Let’s make a direct representation to the Portuguese government that we know they’re transiting oil on Standard tankers under false flag. Those tankers are effectively under German control from the moment they reach harbor. It’s a mockery of neutrality. Standard knows it, the Portuguese know it, and the Germans know we know it.”

Eleanor bought Max a moment to recoup: “What do the lawyers say, Joe?”

“The lawyers say we can take them off at the knees,” promised Dufour in his compressed Boston accent. “You know the lay of the land in Lisbon, Max. What’s possible?”

If Puddicombe was basking in the glow of Dufour’s warm words, he gave nothing away. “I will undertake to approach the secretary tomorrow afternoon. No promises. I can’t”—he paused here, a moment of delicacy for the coming verb—“anticipate things. But I will make the pitch. Motion to approve?”

“So moved,” said Eleanor.

“Second?” Puddicombe asked.

“I second,” Joe Dufour said, looking around to see if anyone was as surprised as he was at this outburst of consensus. Baker just stared at Max, marveling.

“It’s unanimous, then,” Puddicombe said, joyless as ever. “Coffee and a break for fifteen?” Puddicombe hauled his huge frame out of the chairman’s seat and lumbered out of the room.

Eleanor caught Dufour’s eye and winked. “That was easy,” she stage-whispered.

“Better this week than two weeks from now,” Dufour observed.

“Yeah,” Baker added from the sidelines, grinning, his hat already on. “Once the posting comes through, he’ll be insufferable. Till next time, all.”

“Better than that: he’ll be in Lisbon,” Schulman rejoiced. They all smiled and gathered their papers before the security people swept the room.

In the stairwell, with Schulman and Dufour occupied with an agitated naval officer and Baker departed for the FBI, Puddicombe lurked. He’d bought a cheap cigar from the blind tobacconist down the hall, was lingering for a moment with the second edition of the Post, his oversize body bent over the broadsheet. He caught Eleanor’s eye, snapping the paper shut, and nodded toward a nearby bench. He sat first, heavily, splaying his knees wide the way old men do and clearing his throat with a tremendous grinding exhalation.

“These cheroots, be the death of me,” Puddicombe observed.

“Nonsense, Max, everyone knows you’re immortal. You’ve got Lisbon, and likely Paris up your sleeve next.”

“What about you, my dear? What’s up your sleeve for the balance of this war?”

“Give me the financial side. It’s where my heart is.”

“You sell yourself short,” Puddicombe growled. “When this war wraps up, we’ll face a Sovietized Europe, squatting there on the eastern horizon. Your brothers have been saying as much for years. Keep it in the family, Eleanor: State’s going to need people of your caliber. They all think I’m going to Lisbon. Not in the cards.”

“Why are you telling me this here? Walls have ears.”

“Not in the least. I’m asking you to come and work with me. Austria. And likely Hungary, if that survives the Red horde. There’s a job going, political adviser on the military side. It’s a State Department posting but you’d be a colonel in the army, with all that entails. You’d report to me. Interest you?”

“I’m flattered, but why me? Why now? The world thinks you’re bound for Portugal—I don’t understand.”

“Let’s not mince words, Eleanor. Austria is on Stalin’s butcher’s block. D’you want to be where the action is—or forever in meetings like this?”

“How did my name come up?”

“I made it come up. You’re head and shoulders ahead of your colleagues, Eleanor. You’ve got a fine diplomatic pedigree and you know the Austrians’ little ways.”

“I know Germany better.”

“Ah, there’s a thought, there’s a thought. Better you confine your thinking to Austria, you follow? History on the boil, I call it. Engineer a new status quo in Europe, starting with Vienna.” Puddicombe chuckled. “I know, I know, I’m not the friendliest bull in the pen, Eleanor, but I know a good mind when I see one, and you have a good mind.”

“I’m an economics expert, not a military liaison, Max. What are you really offering me?”

Puddicombe was writing on the back of his business card. “A very good job. You can run your own shop, a whole country—”

“What’s the catch?”

“Seat-of-the-pants economics. Get the deals done, keep the Russkies well out of the cookie jar, all’s fair in love and war, and this’ll be war, chance to do some real good. One last thing?”

“What’s that?”

“Anybody asks, it’s Lisbon for old Max, hear?” He unfolded himself from the bench, an awe-inspiring piece of pneumatics. “I hope there’s cake with the coffee. Probably too much to expect something chocolate, though, eh?” He peered down at her for a long moment, examining her with his fell eyes. “Get back to me, end of the week.”

With that, he hauled off, leaving Eleanor to digest the old boy’s mastery of the State Department’s trapdoors and secret passages. Even before he reached the door at the foot of the stairs, Eleanor knew she’d say yes.

XLIII

BERN
MAY 1944

The Swiss girl was lithe and coolly blonde, with small breasts like apples; she smoked incessantly while Misha dressed, blowing streams of smoke out the open window as she watched. “You are English, no? The English are gentlemen. Not like the French, who are lazy in bed and not very clean, or the Germans, who are mechanical. The English gentleman,” the girl observed in her staccato Swiss-German, “can however be extremely perverted.” She showed her teeth decoratively and inhaled again, arms crossed over her bare chest.

“I wouldn’t know,” Misha said drily. “I’ve never slept with an Englishman.”

The Swiss girl hooted a laugh as efficient and straightforward as her performance—at ten gold francs plus forty-pfennig gratuity—had been. “That’s very funny. You can’t be English. They never laugh about love. It’s something they take very seriously. What are you, Polish or something? You look like a Pole, a Polish lancer,” she added, giggling. “Lancer,” she said again, and blew smoke out her nostrils.

“Thank you, fräulein,” Misha said. She blew him a professional kiss; he left an extra franc on the dresser.

In the hallway, a willowy North African girl studied him silently as she padded down the carpet in her kimono. In the wake of her frank glance, it occurred to Misha that half the men who traveled through Bern on diplomatic transit visas patronized the place, which meant Swiss counterintelligence had some—if not all—of Madame Verbier’s rooms bugged, just for the gossip, if nothing else. In the vestibule, the hennaed madame briskly inquired about his degree of satisfaction and offered him coffee and Portuguese brandy.

Eyeing himself in the baroque mirror over the tiny zinc bar, he suddenly recalled something old Dr. van Tassel, his boss at Beurling, had told him over coffee and brandy ages ago: The best telex wires have money in them.

That’s why the banks have the best ciphers, Misha thought as he boarded the elevator to the discreet circular foyer just inside the brothel’s massive black front doors, their wires are hot and cold running money.

As the lift descended, he could see the bouncer straighten his tuxedoed shoulders; he’d been reading and was smartening up to make a show of subservience for Misha’s exit.

Or so Misha thought. Immediately behind the bouncer, at the farthest reach from the entrance, hidden behind a copse of tall palms, stood what appeared to be a service door, visible only to the hawkeyed in the lift from above. Even Misha, who’d acquired the habit of inventorying exits and entrances, had missed this one as he’d entered the brothel. Curved to match the foyer’s rounded wall, the service access opened inward, like a prop door in a French farce.

An intercom buzzed once, then again.

A tall fellow, immaculately dressed and film star handsome, exited through the stand of palms, heading for the brothel’s street door. The service door began to close with a hydraulic hiss.

The bouncer in the tuxedo eased out of Misha’s line of sight to answer the intercom, and for an instant, as the lift settled onto its rests, Misha saw through the service door down a hallway—not the line of brothel cribs he expected, but a dingy institutional green hallway lit by a series of bare lightbulbs cradled in wire baskets. Over the hall’s green paint ran hundreds of conduits and cables. The passage clearly led next door, to the aboveground section of Bern’s telephone and telegraphy system.

The door clicked shut.

It was a long walk and a cool night and the fog curled among the trees as Misha tracked his quarry, unhurriedly moving past the park lined with a wrought iron fence, its great green oaks half-lit with the bluish light of the street lamps. At the next intersection his target turned left, and there the lamplight ended, at the street called Herrengasse.

Misha stepped into a darkened doorway and watched his quarry head for number twenty-three. From twenty yards away, it was child’s play. He watched the big gray-haired man in a suit coat come to the door. For an instant the streetlights glinted off his spectacles; through the lace curtains a fire burned in the drawing room grate, a beacon of civility in the night.

“Hello, Gero, come in, come in, how did it go?” a familiar warm voice asked.

The door closed and the curtains jumped together, closed by unseen hands.

May I present to you, Mr. Dulles, Misha joked with himself, Herr Gero von Gaevernitz, Bern’s favorite Hungarian-American fixer and front man.

The line to Stockholm echoed and crackled and the rotors never stopped ticking over. Like speaking into an old sewing machine, Misha thought. He’d called Beurling’s Stockholm office from the Bern central post office, eventually reaching Dr. Van Tassel at his lake house.

“It’s your summer student, the dark Latvian one, from several years back,” Misha said, speaking in machinelike syllables over the noise. “Remember me?”

A pause while the index in the old man’s head worked. Van Tassel switched to Latvian, just in case, but didn’t use Misha’s name. “Of course I do. You found me on my vacation, so your skills are still good. How may we help?”

The plural was a Van Tassel tic: he was the furthest thing from grand, with a countryman’s habit of including everyone.

“I am in Bern,” Misha said. “Do we have anyone here in the trade?”

“Moment,” Van Tassel said, and sneezed, very loudly, into the phone. “Terribly sorry, what did you say? Bern?”

“Yes. Bern. Do we have anyone here?”

“Oh, yes, indeed we do,” Van Tassel enthused, “a very good person indeed.” He switched to Russian to read the numbers, very quickly, and Misha scribbled them down. “I’ll contact first, shall I?” Van Tassel offered. “Our friend is quite shy.”

“Very kind. The family is well?”

“Oh, yes, the family is very well, rather like a Balkan circus,” Van Tassel acknowledged. “Let me know how your project turns out, will you, please? You know I like to stay in touch with my students. And how—”

The line went dead. The Swiss post office clerk’s eyebrows arched when he saw the toll charges.

The address was above a toy shop, across the street from the university bookstore. The sign said simply BORG, in blue ink on the card jammed cockeyed in the brass mail slot. Misha buzzed and the electric dead bolt snapped open. The stairs were eerily clean. A huge freight door, complete with counterweights and a medieval padlock, blocked further passage; the landing smelt faintly of acetone.

The same card, with the same blue ink reading BORG, was pinned to the wall next to the door; a pair of galoshes stood on a small yellow rug, the galoshes stuffed with newspaper to wick them dry. He’s finicky, Misha thought to himself as he knocked, old and finicky.

He was utterly wrong. Borg answered the door in his stockinged feet. He looked barely twenty, a slim Swiss cursed with a spray of reedy blond hair and thin pantograph arms and bulbous fish eyes behind rimless glasses. His place was a cheerful maze of old radios and telephones and microphones on metal shelves, half spools of wires of assorted gauges, and the scent of soldering rosin thick in the air. “It was once a shoe fabrik,” he said in a singsong farmer’s Swiss-German, “but nobody wanted a place this size but me.” He waved a bony hand at the art nouveau iron arches far overhead. “So I live here,” he said, leading Misha to a scarred old gray table and a couple of chairs. Against the wall, a small woodstove began to clink and pop.

“So? You are a friend of the professor’s, from Sweden?” Borg’s voice naturally fell to questions, and he kept moving his lank hair from his eyes as he spoke.

“Yes, Professor van Tassel was my boss at Beurling. He thought you might be able to help, as a colleague.”

Borg looked a little shocked. “But of course! He spoke very highly of you.”

Misha took a sheet of paper from one of the many heaps on the large gray table and began to draw. “I have a theory, about banks, Swiss banks,” he began as Borg moved around the table to watch. “It’s not all the way there yet, but let’s try this.”

And so Misha began to engineer a window in the wall around the back pocket dealings of Mr. Allen Dulles and his colleague with the penchant for phone exchanges, Gaevernitz.

“Sure, sure,” Borg said. “So? That’s the phone line to Berlin? How very interesting.” Misha glanced at his new acquaintance, but Borg was staring down hard. “How can I help?”

Half an hour later, they had had tea and covered six pages in notes, Borg pacing back and forth in his socks while Misha lobbed questions at him from the unhappy gray table, its surface pitted by hot solder and God only knew what else.

“He told you I do some work for the police?” Borg asked. “I ask because I have certain, you know …” He left that part open.

Misha nodded. Van Tassel hadn’t said a word, but Borg was rolling and the last thing Misha wanted to do was derail him.

“There is a section of the criminal police that handles the banking cases,” Borg said, “only three guys, Russi and his two investigators. They’re good, but they’re only part-time. They have full criminal duties too—anyway, they’d need thirty to do the job properly. That’s how much information the surveillance on the Berlin accounts turns up, even without the wiretaps. Now, about the codes?”

“That’s the easy part. They’re pretty well all prewar Beurlings. They’d probably customize them, right?”

“It’s so,” Borg said, “I’ve done some work for several of the banks. Not here, in Zürich.”

“How many phone lines are there between Switzerland and Germany?”

“Thirteen direct, but there are dozens of circuits possible. Davos for instance goes through Bern, but two of the Zürich banks use a single circuit, a dedicated telex line, right to Berlin. They share the line.” Borg smiled his strange smile.

“And?”

“No one’s broken the ciphers. Not here, anyway. I know they’re trying, but they need someone like me. Or you.” “But it is technically possible?”

“To tap the banks’ telex circuits? Sure, sure. The Zürich phone exchange’s a piece of cake. I’m in and out two, three times a month, keeping the government lines clean.”

“So there’re lines somebody guarantees are untapped?”

“Certainly, of course. Can’t have some minister chatting up his mistress on a tapped line, now, can we?”

Misha was gathering the notes he’d made and folding them neatly in half. He slid a buff envelope onto Borg’s desk then walked over to the wood-burning stove and dropped the folded papers in, slamming the cast-iron door shut with the tip of his shoe. When he turned, the envelope was gone.

“We’re in business, then?” Misha asked.

“Sure, sure. When?”

“Tonight, as a matter of fact. One more question. There’s a posh whorehouse on Knopfmanngasse, you know the one? Madame Verbier’s place?”

“Of course. It’s right next to the—”

“That’s right. The municipal phone exchange. There’s a common wall. Even a common service door, if you know where to look. I thought so,” Misha said, registering Borg’s nod with satisfaction. “If you wanted to beat a wiretap, you’d go right to the exchange, wouldn’t you?”

Borg stared at him. “You could do, yes,” he said slowly. “No one can wiretap an entire exchange. You could guarantee a clean line there, though. It is possible.”

Misha winked at his young Swiss friend. “We’re going to find out if you’re right.”

Borg smiled. “Sure, sure.”

Six hours later, Borg waved him into the telex cubicle. Misha checked the hallway for the night operator but heard only silence. “Don’t worry, he’s got a girlfriend he meets out back for a smoke and a smooch. He’ll be gone for fifteen minutes, no problem,” Borg said. “He’s got better things to worry about, trust me.”

They both wore blue Post Office work suits. Borg opened a cigar box on his workbench. “He’s lazy, but he’s fast, that’s the thing,” said Borg, holding up the night shift keys. “And his girlfriend’s pretty fast too,” he added, grinning. “She’s going to get him fired one of these days.”

“If we don’t do it for him first,” Misha said, lowering himself into the steel stenographer’s chair. The console was just like the test machines Beurling used, and after a few trial keystrokes he felt at home. “Can you switch to a government circuit safely before I start to transmit?”

Borg stepped behind the telex machine and guffawed; the laugh echoed in the concrete room and unnerved Misha. “You haven’t done this in a while, have you? Hell, this machine has burst capability. You key your transmission in, and then I’ll show you how to send the message in two seconds flat. Go on, start typing.”

Borg fiddled with a series of plugs at the back of the machine then leant over the top of the console. “Type fast, friend, you’ve ten minutes.” He winked at Misha, then slipped out to stand watch; Misha could hear the squeak of his crepe soles on the linoleum all the way down the service corridor.

Misha read off the code groups that made up his message and typed them in slowly and methodically, all three hundred–odd of them. It took a good five minutes.

“I can’t get the tape to spool,” Misha hissed out the doorway.

Moments later, Borg was back. “Watch,” he said, aligning the paper tape with an expert jab through the sprockets. The paper tape shot snick-snick-snick through the gearing, snapping and looping like a caterpillar, and the silent machine stuttered to life. There was a rapid-fire clicking for far less time than Misha expected, a blur of metal and ribbon and yellow paper as the burst transmission went down the line, all the way to Tel Aviv.

The automatic typing stopped; Misha tore off the yellow sheet. There, in all its spare beauty, lay revealed a terse message to Shiloah, telling him how Switzerland’s banks had a very private line all the way to Berlin and how he had stumbled on the mother lode: the Americans’ head spy hereabouts, for whom dollars were no object, had bought himself a slice of the Swiss government’s private telex line to Berlin.

XLIV

JULY 21, 1944

Misha’s debriefing with Allen was originally slated for Saturday noon, but Allen—unprecedentedly: they loathed one another—had called Schorr directly at the tiny MEW office, asking to meet a day early, at three. “Don’t be late,” Schorr ordered, straight-faced, as he replaced the telephone, raising a reproving finger at Misha. “Word is Dulles is waving a fresh batch of twenty-dollar notes around—you’ll want to be at the head of the queue.”

The café facing the Klein Schanze gardens was nearly empty in the wake of a busy Friday lunch. Misha waved the waiter over for the bill as he worked his way through the café’s inventory of foreign newspapers—reported bomb attempt on Hitler’s life apparently true; the Allies were still bottled up in Normandy; would the Germans torch Paris?—finishing with a three-day-old account of the latest battle in the hallways of the Swedish legation in Budapest. ANOTHER 630 VISAS ISSUED TO RESCUE JEWS, read the headline. He sighed and snapped the paper shut as the waiter laid his bill on the table.

Misha must have muttered something to himself, because a well-dressed Frenchwoman smoking at the next table—a diplomat’s wife, perhaps: she had the bearing for it—caught his fretful gaze as he fished for change in his jacket lining pocket. “The Germans have sent an envoy to ask for trucks, to ransom the Jews they haven’t already deported,” the woman said, quite angry, her pale eyes searching his face. “It was on the BBC last night. The British have refused the ransom. I offer my sympathies and my regrets Hitler wasn’t incinerated. It is a very shameful time,” she said softly.

Misha nodded, then laid a string of coins in the waiter’s wooden tray. “Why God doesn’t simply shut the whole thing down escapes me,” he replied, “but I expect He’s just biding His time.” The woman inclined her head; it was all very correctly done, another of the civilized moments Bern in wartime offered, oasis in a charnel house.

Misha was in the right neighborhood: Kauffmann might be in, he guessed. By the time he’d knocked at the nondescript alleyway back door, he could hear a string of baritone notes. Kauffmann met him clad in green rubber gloves and a white butcher’s apron. For a moment Misha thought: He’s cracked—he’s dismembering somebody. “Fancy meeting you here,” Kauffmann said, locking the wobbly sheet metal door as it rumbled shut, a kettledrum on hinges.

“Auditioning for the symphony, are we?” Misha asked as Kauffmann led him down the gloomy hallway and through a wooden doorway.

“Opera, sonny,” Kauffmann said, not looking back. “My uncle Herschel was a cantor back in Odessa. Close the door behind you—there’s a draft. Hear some genius almost blew Hitler up yesterday? That bastard’s got nine lives.”

“Ten to my one,” Misha agreed as they followed a stunted stone tunnel, peeling whitewash hanging off the ceiling like flayed skin. The hall to Kauffmann’s tiny darkroom smelt of drains and the vinegary chemicals in his big steel developing tank.

“God will get our beloved Führer yet,” Kauffmann said acidly, working through the darkroom ritual, finally switching on the red light and fishing around in the tank for the canisters of film, his broad back crimson in the dim glow.

“You’ve been busy,” Misha said by way of an opener. “I don’t usually think of Switzerland having a steady supply of break-and-enter experts.”

“Stick around, you might learn something,” Kauffmann muttered, bent over the sink. They’d been speaking Hebrew, Misha’s rusty but serviceable; Kauffmann had a habit of dropping American slang into his replies. “So how was Lisbon?”

Misha stroked his jaw, reflecting. “Crawling with German flight capital. I spent four days getting very inky fingers in the national registry office.”

“With Dalton?” He didn’t wait for Misha to reply. “Step back, there’s a good lad, it’s the enlarger I’ll be needing next.” Kauffmann had a palette of nuanced grunts: one erupted that Misha knew to represent thoughtfulness. “My break-and-enter guys, one of them’s a policeman, the other’s … something else. Look at these.” They pored over the photographs: a cable log, incoming and outgoing, the entries in flowing Italian copperplate. “The handwriting. It’s beautiful. Priests, their school days, I guess.”

“That’s a lot of money. For priests.” Misha was reading the line entries in another photograph; Kauffmann’s specialists had done the ledgers and bank statements too, even the courier expense files.

“How much is a lot?” Kauffmann murmured philosophically; he often asked questions without raising his voice at the end. He laid a shining fresh image on the table next to the enlarger. They were both reading now, the ticked-off list of financial documents readied for the Vatican’s diplomatic pouch, there in gleaming black-and-white.

“Will you look at this?” Misha said, eyeing the paperwork. “We could ransom a thousand Jews on what they move in a day.”

Kauffmann peeled off his rubber gloves and rubbed his chin. “Reuven doesn’t pay me to think,” he observed as he sprayed down the metal developing trough, watching the fresh water sizzle on the stainless steel.

Misha read the cable logs, looking for patterns. “What’s this word?”

“Italian for debenture,” Kauffmann said. “I looked it up at the library.”

Misha turned the page, running his finger slowly down the column of entries. “Any lawyer’s letters? Legal correspondence? Letters of instruction?”

Kauffmann cleaned up carefully, a veteran bachelor’s primness. “I wouldn’t know. I just get the film and send it off. But I have an idea.”

Misha waited, leaning against the sink.

“That librarian sent me to the federal registry,” Kauffmann continued, “the place on the Postgasse, near the Belle Époque. This fellow Hödel helped me, loves his files and ledgers and whatnot.”

“The corporations office?”

Kauffmann nodded.

“Who’s the head boy at the Vatican consulate here, on the financial side, the traveling bank officer? Ever see him?” Misha asked.

“A monsignor, an Austrian,” Kauffmann replied, offering Misha a cigarette now his chemicals were all stoppered and the sink hosed down. “I read up on this monsignor’s bank, you know, down at the registry office.” He was rinsing out his work cloth and laying it out to dry, square and flat on the steel sink top. “Here’s a good one: any idea when the Vatican bank was incorporated?”

“Dunno. The Crusades, round then?”

“Not even close.”

“After the Renaissance, then. The Medicis. Venice? All those Lombard bankers?”

Kauffmann pulled hard on his cigarette. “Nineteen forty-two.” He clipped the rubber gloves to the wall. “Let’s go for a walk. You need to know some things.”

“Odessa had a bank. The Tsar came to visit—it was his bank. He wanted to see his money, he liked seeing his money,” Kauffmann said as they walked along the stone bridge over the river, both of them needing air. “He forgot a glove at the bank. By chance, my uncle Herschel found it. He brought the glove home—Aunt Nina was ready to kill him. She was terrified it would bring the police, a pogrom, worse, maybe. Uncle Herschel, he passed the glove around—everyone examined it, admired it. We were poor Jews and this, this was the Tsar’s glove, after all. I myself held the glove, tried it on. I can still feel it, perfect lambskin, white as snow. Never seen anything so beautifully made.”

Misha waited for Kauffmann to continue as the two of them reached the middle of the bridge. “Rebbe Gershon decided better we destroy the glove than return it. Why draw attention to ourselves? We had enough problems. So that was the end of the Tsar’s glove.” Kauffmann set himself against the bridge railing; a fine spray of river water rose, misting them.

“Mostly I don’t care about them, the ones I watch,” he went on. “This one, him I like.” His elbows propped on the railing, Kauffmann made a pyramid of his fingers under his chin, tapping them together before he began. “Franz-Josef Sommer,” he recited, his eyes blank as he recalled, “monsignor, fortyish, looks younger. Austrian birth; carries both Vatican and Austrian passports. Runs the foreign exchange desk at the Vatican bank—he sees all the comings and goings. I got his business card off the table in his entranceway.” Kauffmann reached into his pocket and pulled out a fine engraved card:

MSGR FRANZ-JOSEF SOMMER
ISTITUTO PER LE OPERE DI RELIGIONE
LA CITTA DEL VATICANO

Kauffmann turned the card over. He scratched his nose and tipped his leather cap back on his big round head: the gears were working. “It’s a very long game Reuven’s playing, Resnikoff.”

“I know,” Misha replied. “We all are. Someday, after this war is over, there’ll be a reckoning about a few things. I’ll see to that. For Adela’s sake. Palestine for one. You can count on it.”

Kauffmann gave Misha a rare admiring glance and nodded.

“You hear of any legal work done in New York?” Misha let that drift off over the waters of the Aare.

Turning, Kauffmann put his back to the railing, shaking his head. “I don’t see it, New York. What’s it mean?”

“Stick around,” Misha said. “You might learn something.” He looked at his watch, then tapped Kauffmann on his forearm. “What it means is that the Tsar left his glove.” Misha stepped away, gave Kauffmann an outsized bow, and began to walk across the bridge, heading for Thun.

“Hey, where you going?”

“To see a rabbi,” Misha replied, not looking back.

Nearby, the St. Vincent’s cathedral bell clanged three as Misha climbed the steps to the address Allen had given Schorr. The meeting was at a mechanics’ institute, a lending library and night school on the Ensingerstrasse, just off the Thunplatz, a big high five-floored place two doors down from the Ecuadoran embassy, dedicated to furthering the lot of technically minded young men. “My brother Foster sends them money,” Allen had told Schorr. Misha thought that just might be true: the place was austere and clean as only the Swiss can clean, with a heavy whiff of the evangelical in the portraits in the main hall.

The silky Gero von Gaevernitz met Misha at the door, key in hand; they were, Gero said in his patrician voice, the only ones in the building, an exclusivity that evidently appealed to the Hungarian. At the foot of the stairs they came to a double set of windowed doors opening on a room cool and dark. The cellar library was divided by ranks of bookshelves lined with boxed books, donations, Misha gathered, of an improving nature. Allen had laid a welcoming tray of bottles and delicatessen on a grand desk, dusty from disuse; an ancient brown telephone, the chrome of its bell chipped and worn, stood guard next to the mineral water. A weak light trickled in through the street-level pebbled glass windows.

“Misha Resnikoff—haven’t seen your smiling face in far too long. Come in, come in. How long’s it been?”

Misha shook Allen’s fleshy hand and found himself suddenly irritated at the sight of Allen’s bland, avuncular face. “Not since the Christmas party you threw for us research plebs slaving away in the financial trenches. What’s the latest about Hitler?”

Allen settled himself on his elbows, his thinking man’s posture. “Hitler will have his revenge—the Gestapo’s already making arrests by the truckload. Prelude to a bloodbath, I should think. Goebbels has broadcast as much,” he added, subdued. “I expect very few of the resistance people will survive. I am acquainted with many of them. A bloodbath.”

“I know what it’s like to lose someone to the Nazis.” Misha waited thoughtfully. “You know so much so soon. Your sources are quite remarkable. Which makes me wonder.”

“Wonder about what?”

“About why I didn’t see any reports from you about the Hungarian deportations.” Misha took a wooden chair and settled in for the festivities, resisting the temptation to put his feet on the desk between him and Allen. “Everybody else had them. Hundreds of thousands of people, dozens of trains, running for weeks, and not a peep from you. Surely you know a Hungarian or two who might explain the mystery of half the Jews of Hungary vanishing into thin air.”

Gaevernitz kept slicing the rye bread, not missing a beat. Allen considered Misha, unblinking behind his spectacles. “Maybe that’s a good reason to report on something else,” he replied evenly. “Because everyone else is charging off in the opposite direction. Keep an efficient distance.”

“There’s efficiency and there’s efficiency,” Misha said. “All those German businessmen, on all those trains … and not one of them’s said a word to you—but never mind the Jews. A detail. Let’s trade some trucks for them. Heard anything about that from those SS types who keep washing up on your door?”

“Bit aggressive, isn’t he, Gero?” Allen remarked, his gaze set on Misha as Gaevernitz portioned out the food. “Let’s have the wine.”

“He’s just hungry,” Gaevernitz offered, passing Misha a plateful. Misha waited for Gero to sit down; he didn’t care for someone behind him he couldn’t see.

“So you and Dalton had a field trip to Lisbon?” Allen asked gently.

Misha didn’t stint himself and built a solid sandwich while he weighed the question. “We met for a meal and crossed paths once or twice, but we were on separate assignments.”

Allen wasn’t eating. “I hear otherwise. I hear you two were digging away in the Lisbon registry office like a couple of kids in a sandbox.”

“I’m sure,” Misha said, “it’s all in Dalton’s report. He writes a very good report. Schorr frames them and puts them up on the wall, to keep me motivated.”

Gaevernitz cracked a smile, but Allen didn’t. “Yes, he does,” Gaevernitz said. “But you see, we’ve not seen yours.”

“Ask Schorr,” Misha replied, chewing. “It’s his report to circulate.” He noticed Allen had touched neither wine nor food.

“Come, now, you know as well as I do your boss, Schorr, is none too fond of me, my industrious friend. You and I, on the other hand, we go way back. Gero, did I ever tell you how Misha here helped me out on my election campaign?”

“The soul of discretion,” Gaevernitz offered from the one comfortable chair in the whole basement, “you’ve said so many times.”

“And now as then,” Allen went on, finally unwrapping an easy grin, “Mr. Resnikoff can be counted on. Even Jim Kronthal says so. ‘Resnikoff? Best banking intelligence man I know. Knows where the skeletons are.’ That’s what Jim says.”

Misha took a sip of the thin Swiss wine, raising his glass to Allen in mock salute.

Allen’s grin cooled. “I can’t read Dalton’s report, you see. It doesn’t exist.”

“Your staffing worries are no business of mine.”

Dulles glanced over at Gaevernitz. “They are, actually,” the Hungarian said.

Allen took off his glasses and began to polish them with a serviette, considering Misha with his naked moist eyes. “Yes, they are,” he agreed. “Dalton was hit by a truck three hours ago, on his way to my flat.” Misha flinched. “He’s got three crushed ribs and a broken jaw and his knees won’t see another tennis court,” Allen went on. “And the brain swelling … it’s a coma, Misha.” He made a face. “He won’t be talking for quite some time.”

“And whoever hit him took the trouble to relieve him of his valise,” Gaevernitz added. “So you see, Mr. Resnikoff, we’re not the only ones with an interest in Dalton’s report.”

“We’ve a little time, a small head start,” Allen offered. “And rest assured, we’ll protect you. We just need to know what’s in Dalton’s report.”

There was a very long silence indeed. “It’s a shock,” Misha said finally.

“It’s a shock for all of us,” Gaevernitz agreed.

Misha shook his head slowly. “No, it’s not.”

“It’s not? Whatever do you mean?” Allen asked.

“I speak only for myself. What’s a shock,” Misha said, “is your impatience, Allen. You may be many things, Allen, but I’ve never known you to be impatient.”

“Your colleague was all but killed this afternoon,” Allen replied. “Why aren’t you impatient yourself?” Allen was packing his pipe now, weighing his next words. “If I were in your shoes, I’d be a worried man.”

Misha didn’t move. Gaevernitz had risen somewhere behind him, stacking plates.

Dulles lit his pipe, working the match over the bowl. “Russi reckons it was Communists, Misha. His people identified the truck, even if the driver’s long gone, on his way to Spain. But you’re not worried. That’s clear. And that means one of two things, logically. And I know you for a logical man, Misha. You could be working for the Russians, which might explain why you’re not upset by Dalton’s situation. Or you’re not working for the Russians. Which is really more interesting. Because that means you have somebody very trustworthy watching your back … and I doubt it’s Schorr. He’s a deskman, the least bloodthirsty man in Bern. So, Misha. Who’s watching your back?”

The sharp scrape of Misha’s chair echoed as he stood. “Thank you. It’s been most enlightening, Mr. Dulles. You too, Herr von Gaevernitz. For the record, Dalton’s report would have said all those joint venture companies incorporated in Bern and popping up in the Lisbon registry filings, the ones with head offices in Buenos Aires and São Paulo and Lima, they’re a daisy chain of interlocking joint ventures from here to South America. That’s what he found. I wonder who did the legal work. Those SS lawyers in Davos? Or maybe the answer’s far closer to home. I don’t know—I’m not there yet.” Misha reached inside his coat and tossed an envelope on the desktop. “Have a present. Dalton’s Lisbon filing requests, for all the documents he ordered. I took the precaution of liberating the carbon copies off the registrar’s spike. So the Russians wouldn’t get them. Or the Germans. Or you, maybe, Allen. You tell me.”

Misha leant over the table, his hands on the oak. “It was all very cleverly done, you see. I think Dalton was on a wild goose chase, looking everywhere—gold, shipping companies, wolfram, diamonds, even insurance—everywhere but where you”—he turned and took in Gaevernitz—“and you, Allen, didn’t want him looking. You sent him to Lisbon, didn’t you, gave him his marching orders? Because he was getting warm, wasn’t he?” Misha didn’t pause for a reply. “There’s a saying about travel, you know.”

Allen puffed away, his face inscrutable through the coils of smoke. “And what saying is that, young Resnikoff?”

“All roads lead to Rome, Mr. Dulles. Good afternoon.”

I hope Reuven forgives me that last one, Misha thought as he climbed the stairs, but then Reuven hadn’t caught that final brief tremor of surprise on Allen Dulles’s face. Misha opened the door and took in the sweet midsummer mountain air. It felt clean and fresh after the claustrophobic cellar library and Dulles’s sudden anxieties about poor Dalton and his obsessions.

Gold, shipping companies, wolfram, diamonds, even insurance— that left oil.

Listening to Misha’s footfalls fade away, neither Gero nor Allen spoke. When the building was silent again, Allen tapped out his pipe on the tabletop and reached for the telephone. “He’s a temperamental sort, isn’t he?” he said as he cranked the old phone’s handle. He asked the operator for the Café Wettlaufers. “Hello, yes, it’s your regular from table six, recognize the voice?” Allen asked. “Yes? Good. What do you hear about die Giraffe?”

Gero found a pulp novel in one of the boxes and examined its cover. “Is there really a place called the Everglades, full of alligators?” he asked, thumbing the pages. “How primitive. Fascinating place, your Florida.”

Not moving, Allen listened to the telephone, then rang off. “That was Gossman at Wettlaufers. His daughter’s on the German consulate’s night switchboard. They’re on double shift—it’s raining cables, the phone never stops, Gossman says. And when the bomb at Hitler’s headquarters went off, Willi Gehrig was in Berlin, right in the Bendlerblock, the Wehrmacht headquarters. The Gestapo and the SS arrested everyone in sight and shot the ringleaders in the headlights of the staff cars.”

“So. We wait,” Gaevernitz said.

Allen thought of Gehrig and Eleanor and her old green leather address book. Those names, many of them, her friends’ names, were on the Gestapo’s list of the doomed now—of that Allen was sure. “We wait,” he agreed. They’d be at the coding machine well into the night, reading the entrails of the failed coup, piecing together the names of the dead and the disappeared.

XLV

AUBERJONOIS, FRANCE
LATE SEPTEMBER 1944

Auberjonois was no more than a dozen stone houses and a tired church dedicated to Saint Hippolyte, a freshly liberated tricolor hanging wetly at the good saint’s ankles. Allen waited for Donovan’s convoy at the Auberjonois crossroads, his brand new OSS-issue jeep parked in a mud lake, the canvas roof thrumming in the pelting rain. He was a man with much to digest about his future. He’d driven himself here; he didn’t want anyone with him when he turned over the microfilms of his Bern files. This was his moment, alone. He might be out of this job in a week’s time, if the military people who loathed him had their way. Bern, his cocoon for nearly two years, was any man’s town now. The era of the lone wolf was over.

When the Swiss-French border had opened two days earlier and Patton’s tank troops met the Free French columns driving northward from Marseille, Allen had suffered a curious letdown. He lost his usual deft wit with his OSS subordinates, sulking in his office, staring at the maps on the wall for long stretches, his pipe gone cold. His appetite for his customary long, observant walks through Bern faded; for the first time in his life he didn’t care when the telephone rang. But it wasn’t only that Bern had lost its luster; the Safehaven investigators, Treasury Department second-guessers, were nosing around the Swiss banks and trading houses, looking for the bones of German flight capital. What do they know about espionage? He felt as if a contingent of out-of-town Rotarians had shanghaied the neighboring table at the Waldorf and spoilt his party. He had, he reminded himself, been the man who first reported the conspiracy to kill Hitler that summer; even if no one in Washington cared, he’d processed microfilms of a thousand German Foreign Office files, work of Wood, the best agent anyone in Bern ever ran, a Foreign Office documents man the Brits themselves had turned away.

So what next?

He smoked his pipe and waited. Never again stuck in a lawyer’s office, he swore, not among the papers and the corporate seals and the casebooks. No, he’d made a useful life for himself, a spy’s life. He’d caught the scent of a new kind of power, but the most pressing matter just now was the questionable survival of Donovan’s fragile OSS—and there Allen had an Italian gambit in mind.

As for Allen’s reunion with Donovan, Kronthal had found a stone-and-terra-cotta farmhouse just outside Auberjonois with a magnifying glass on a Swiss army ordnance map. The parish priest, who kept an eye on the old house for the absent Monsieur Decarie, otherwise occupied scavenging parts from damaged German tanks in a forced labor factory outside Munich, had given Allen the key to the big front door’s rusted-out lock; the tumblers screamed when he turned the key. Allen now waited at the end of the farm laneway; he drew on his pipe, the smoke creeping out into the rain as he weighed how he’d pitch Donovan, whom he hadn’t seen for two long years.

A convoy of Studebaker trucks soon broke Allen’s reverie, their wipers fighting a slashing rain that cut quick-running rills in the red earth of the village of Auberjonois. The trucks, curiously empty of troops, settled into the ooze as the engines switched off. The OSS general leapt out of the door of the first truck and shouted backwards at Allen, over his shoulder, into the rain. “Got a present for you, Colonel Dulles.” Donovan stepped to one side, hands on his hips beneath his rain poncho, legs akimbo like a circus master, a big Irish grin cracking his face.

The last thing Allen expected to see was the enormously tall figure wearing round-lensed spectacles unfolding himself from the back of the lead Studebaker, dwarfing the pair of ponchoed MPs at his side. “We are in the mountains, my friend, so have a Bavarian hello—Tschüss, Herr Dulles,” called Willi Gehrig in English. Die Giraffe—anti-Hitler conspirator and walking dead man. The Bavarian slang was a leaden joke: no rustic with straw in his hair, the art collector from Hamburg had been Allen’s best source in the Abwehr—and a very cool customer indeed.

They sat at the Decaries’ grand old table, worn by decades of hardworking trenchermen at their meals, the quiet of the place seeping out of the stone walls. Gehrig dominated the head of the table, a Brobdingnag in a banker’s tweeds, chain-smoking and demolishing a rhombus of farmer’s cheese, scraped onto torn crescents of baguette with a GI mess kit knife.

“The CIC guys found him in the forest with a compass in his hand, looking for due north like an overgrown Boy Scout,” a beaming Donovan told Allen. “Told everybody to get him to Dulles. Nobody but Dulles. Show him the damn Gestapo identity disk.”

Gehrig spread out the forged passport papers and the secret policeman’s steel identity disk that enabled him to walk out of the Reich. “Here I have my SD Kennkarte and Durchlaßschein too,” Gehrig said in his bass voice, his diplomat’s English clipped with a distinct north German accent. “Cost me every pfennig you sent, Allen, but it worked. I wasn’t strung up on a meat hook like the others.” He glanced at Allen as he dusted the baguette crumbs from his fingertips. “Now. About Italy. I can tell you”—Gehrig moved the papers to one side and drew a rough map of northwestern Italy on the back of one of Allen’s file sleeves with a pencil stub—“from the Swiss frontier south to Genoa, every building, every bridge of value, they will all be mined. Here is Torino, here Milano. I myself reviewed the sabotage plan, from the factories to the viaducts. The plan is well advanced. Although the Italian collaborators are hardly first quality, the munitions depots are well stocked. The Wehrmacht and Waffen SS engineering battalions will obey—what do they have to lose? They hate the Italians, no question.

“There are hundreds of millions of marks in play in the region’s industrial facilities, bridges, rail links. Moreover, the Vatican, the chief negotiating intermediary, has sizable investments here. The partisans control the mountains, the Wehrmacht and the SS the valleys and rail lines.” He pulled a big manila envelope from his jacket pocket, opened it, and offered Allen a typescript nearly half an inch thick. “A memorandum, most useful. The Reich Foreign Office estimates, in the absence of an Italian government, that the Holy See is terrified of two outcomes: either the Nazis destroy the industrial heartland of Italy and ruin the economy for a decade—an open door for the Reds—or the Communists themselves will seize it for themselves. The Swiss are equally terrified: they lose their route to the sea if northern Italy is reduced to ruins.”

Donovan gestured at Allen to proceed, but Gehrig wouldn’t be headed so easily. “This is how they will come at you, Allen,” die Giraffe predicted. “The SS is breaking up. Last month, one faction—the realists, more or less—allowed the Party to convene conferences all over the Reich, to discuss flight capital and restoring the Party after the war. The other faction is delusional,” Gehrig observed drily. He turned over his envelope and examined his notes. “They believe a peace with the West against the Russians is possible. They may be fantasists, but they are rational enough to want to preserve the Reich’s wealth from Moscow. They have Himmler’s ear; they can travel and, within limits, speak for themselves. They will knock on your door first. You don’t want them—they are cutthroats, political policemen.

“You want to wait for Schellenberg’s men, the economic types, looking to trade anything they can.” He ran a massive hand over his chin, pondering. “They have the run of the SS banking system, especially in the neutral countries. In Switzerland the Privatbanks are their banks of choice—all the Swiss shells and cloaks set up by the Reich’s commercial office in Davos. Schellenberg’s people are Amt VI, the foreign counterintelligence section. They know how to bargain, and they are going to make you offers you won’t believe—shares in banks and factories, patent agreements, insurance, gold and silver, art by the boxcar-load. They’ll offer it all, believe me. At the same time, they will be knocking on the Vatican’s door, promising to preserve the factories of the north from the demolition teams. They want the Vatican and the Swiss to broker an Italian peace with you … and save their necks into the bargain.”

“Is Bormann backing this? How can Himmler and the SS move Party assets around without Bormann’s knowledge?” Donovan interposed.

“That’s true,” Gehrig admitted. “Take one case: Thyssen, the steel tycoon. Thyssen and Bormann have been working together on a plan to move their holdings out. Since Stalingrad. I have a cold,” he said. Gehrig cleared his throat, a growl muted by an enormous fist at his lips. “For years Thyssen was under house arrest. He’d refused to support the attack on Russia—I know for a fact Bormann visited him.” The German had a child’s tiny hardback notebook in his hand, no bigger than a deck of cards. He looked down and shuffled a few pages; Allen could see the minuscule handwriting, dabbed with a fine-pointed pen. “The eighth of November, 1943. I made a note. You see, in even meeting Bormann, Thyssen was playing a very dangerous game. Thyssen had fooled the Reich’s tax collectors for years with all his shell companies and overseas cloaked companies—New York, Amsterdam, Zürich.” He was sketching a columned building with the side of his pencil lead, curls of smoke from chimneys, clouds above, looking down as he spoke. A bank, Allen thought. “This was dangerous also for your intelligence colleague Mr. Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller’s own bank owns tens of thousands of Thyssen shares, safe in Thyssen’s vault in Berlin. Bormann could have had Thyssen strung up as an American spy for that alone. But if you’re Martin Bormann and you want to hide a fortune, gentlemen, you don’t get rid of the man who knows how.”

Gehrig continued at full throttle for nearly twenty minutes, while Allen and Donovan listened to the German empty himself after three months on the run from the hangman—Thyssen’s offshore banking schemes in the Netherlands and on Wall Street; how Goering’s oil monopoly made him millions reselling American oil; how the Spanish and Portuguese banks had taken the overflow Nazi loot from the Swiss for resale—the whole sordid endgame of the Nazis’ decade-long orgy of looting and money laundering and corporate perfidy.

“You cannot,” Gehrig mused, his pencil held high for emphasis, “simply cannot conceive of how much money is at stake, in gold alone. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Even now, the SS are organizing to hide it all. That is the price of an early peace, you see: the seed capital of a Reich after Hitler. That’s what the SS wants. They’ll give up everything to keep that capital intact, in their hands. So when the Italian industrialists and the bankers and the quiet men from the Vatican come to you and ask for the keys to the factories of Milano and Torino—know what the price of surrender really is. Bormann loves that money more than his children. And I hear he’s very fond of his children.”

With that, yawning an elephantine yawn, his eyes red-rimmed, Gehrig fell silent, his finale as abrupt as his beginning. “There. Now you can hang Bormann and Thyssen for all I care. I would like to go to sleep,” he announced.

Donovan called the MPs, who locked the giant Abwehr man in the Decaries’ big low-ceilinged upstairs bedroom, a bright, white place under the roof beams. “He don’t fit, general,” one MP, a taciturn Oklahoman, reported to Donovan, “so we set him down across’t two beds. Some jeezly tall, ain’t he?”

By four that afternoon, Gehrig’s intelligence digested and two strong Alsatian beers later, Allen and Donovan got to their OSS business. “What’s wanted,” Allen began, after cleaning up a roughed-together traveler’s meal of ham and cabbage and lentils and more of the local baguette, “is the means of keeping our work alive in peacetime.” He stacked the absent farmer’s thick crockery plates. “It’s going to take money, and that’s highly thought of over there in Washington.”

“It’s highly thought of over there in Bern, judging from what the Treasury bean counters say the Nazis shipped out of Europe, just like Gehrig says,” Donovan replied quietly. “Go on.”

Allen gave that sally a clean pass. “OSS has to produce political results or we’re dead as a post after the war,” he went on. It was past five now; the brim of the autumn sun edged below the mountain peaks. The MPs stood watch on the stone patio out back. Allen had a fire going, warming the place.

The two old spies contemplated the flames for a moment, lulled by the peasant food and the stolen calm: the front lines lay only twenty miles to the east.

“How’s this Italian idea of yours help our work?” Donovan demanded, his blue eyes sharp, and rose from his chair. He had bathed and shaved; he wore an old ski sweater over his uniform shirt. Allen had borrowed Monsieur Decarie’s coveralls and thick wool field jacket.

“I want to do two things in Italy before the end of the war changes everything,” Allen said slowly. “First, I want a free hand to negotiate a secret surrender. Gehrig’s right: already the phone’s ringing off the hook from my anti-Nazi contacts who want to put a German surrender in play right now.”

“Whoa, whoa. You can’t go freelancing a separate peace, much as I’d like to see the shooting war end. Stalin will scream blue bloody murder.”

“Bill, I know these people,” Allen countered. “I go back a long way with these Germans—the last of the old socialists. They’re all over the Foreign Ministry and the Abwehr.”

Donovan barked a sour laugh. “Allen, Gehrig’s just told us Hitler had those people strung up by the dozens this summer.” Donovan had propped himself against the mantelpiece, a hand dangling free, forming a fist he unconsciously opened and closed as he spoke. “No. The answer’s no. And don’t fight me on this, Allen,” he ordered. “You’ll cook your own goose and mine as well.” Donovan watched the fire for a moment. “You should see the cables I get from Treasury about you. They’re saying your German contacts are your old law clients, that you’re Berlin’s back door for flight capital. And the press is sniffing around—be damn careful. Wall Street was never one of the President’s dearest loves. You’d have no one covering your back.”

Allen gave nothing away. “Careful about what, precisely?”

“Those trucks outside?” Donovan inclined his head toward the thick glass window. “They’re loaded with records from our Safehaven teams in Lisbon and Madrid, heading for Bern. I’m delivering ’em.” He watched the fire, the muscles in his cheeks working. “One misstep and you’ll be page one, believe me. The Democrats would love to see your head on a platter. And mine: we’re Republican Wall Street lawyers, Allen. And if that wasn’t enough, I handed you and your brother most of my own German clients in ’35—anybody with an index to the New York Times knows that, never mind those Bolsheviks at Treasury these days.”

Allen started to argue, but Donovan waved him off. “No. And I mean it—there’s no political cover at all. First off, I don’t see Dewey winning come November. I see four more years of Roosevelt, no matter what your brother writes in those disjointed letters to the Times.” He nudged a log with his boot tip; a shower of sparks danced up the chimney. “I’ve made myself clear?”

“You have.”

“Let me ask this delicately, because I don’t want you flying off the handle when you get back to Bern. A lot of those SS people Gehrig’s warned us about are already on the war crimes lists. Double-cross the SS, Allen, and you have my blessing. Hell, shoot ’em in cold blood, with my compliments. But don’t double-cross me. We need every last one of those sons of bitches as bargaining chips when the war crimes trials start, to show what the OSS did to bring the bastards to justice. That’s the way it’s going to play—clear?”

Allen said it was.

The fire ebbed low; Donovan added another log and watched the flames lick at the dry bark for a moment. “Have you or any of your staff used the public telex landlines from Switzerland?”

“Of course,” Allen replied. “We know what we’re doing.”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘of course’? Last count I saw, there were more wiretappers in Bern than holes in the goddamn cheese.”

“We’re secure.”

“Nobody is, Allen. Who’s your coding officer? Still Jim Kronthal?”

“Yes. Jim’s my right hand.”

“Then just you remind him that the landlines are tapped six ways from Sunday. We’re changing all the Bern codes in the next forty-eight hours.”

“Is Safehaven wiretapping, that you know of?”

“Does a frog have a waterproof asshole?” Donovan fixed Allen with a flat stare. Allen waited while Donovan cooled his Irish a little. “It’s nearly seven. Get your coat, Colonel Dulles,” Donovan ordered, whistling to rouse the MPs outside. “Time to sing for your supper. If we’re going to build the OSS into whatever we’re going to call this beast after the war, we’ll need you onside. Come on. The MPs will ride shotgun on Herr Gehrig. You and me, we’ve got a drive ahead of us, to the airfield at Entzheim. If we’re lucky we’ll get a B-25 with real seats. If not, we’re riding the mailbags all the way to London.”

Five hours later they were in Knightsbridge, in a drafty granite den of improvised offices not far from Harrods, where Allen found himself, rather to his surprise, feted as a hero by the civilian intelligence types. Not so the military intelligence brass, who that evening kept a discreet distance.

The next morning, a flying bomb’s throaty drone interrupted Allen’s first London breakfast, at the Savoy; the sirens wailed in the distance after the blast set the hotel’s cutlery tinkling. “South of the river,” someone said professionally. The waitresses, imperturbable, gave no notice, but in the streets it was different. A million people had already left the city; entire neighborhoods were deserted.

Despite the good news from France, the faces of the London passersby were drawn from exhaustion after a hundred days of attacks out of that summer’s eerily overcast skies. The war was far from over; talk over the dour Savoy oatmeal and side of watery canned peaches looked past its end to a New Europe, rebuilding with American capital and American know-how. Allen, knowing his moment was now or never, turned the conversation to the war’s denouement and, implicitly, a job for himself. An indulgent Donovan and two curious men from the State Department stirred their tea and listened.

Italy, Allen averred, was where the war in southern Europe would resolve. He cited chapter and verse from Roman clerics of his acquaintance, diffident, well-traveled Jesuits of a cosmopolitan persuasion, broadening his theme, rolling now. There were SS people, Allen made clear, who would play ball, stout fellows in the coming struggle against the dark hordes of Communists boiling across the eastern approaches.

And they’d come to him, Allen went on, ignoring Donovan’s darkening gaze, these docile men from Berlin, hat in hand, to broker the silence of the guns south of the Brenner Pass, yes, it was true, even to his safe house at a certain hotel in the hills outside Bern. A long, thoughtful silence ensued, which Donovan, irritated, a hard eye flickering over the two pensive diplomats, made no attempt to breach. Finally, one of the State Department men, a quiet sort not much given to harsh judgment, put Allen right off his fruit cup: “And to whose SS do these guys belong? Yours, Colonel Dulles? Or Himmler’s?”

Donovan had the grace to laugh, if only to ease the moment. Allen didn’t. Nor did he much care that he had no green light: aiming for far bigger postwar game than a simple peace in Italy, he had turned his sights squarely on Moscow—even if, inspired by Robespierre’s quaint phrase, it meant breaking a few eggs.

XLVI

BERN
OCTOBER 1944

The card was still pinned to the wall next to Borg’s door, with his name in the blue ink; the same pair of galoshes stood on the small yellow rug, stuffed with newspaper to dry them out. But this time the door swung open slowly when Misha knocked.

Oh boyoboy, he thought to himself.

It had been done very professionally. Most of Borg lay under a heavy Arab carpet, which his assailants must have used to muffle the noise while they did what they did to him. There were several lamp fixtures nearby, all broken up, their extension cords severed. Misha let his eyes follow the cords to the junction box on Borg’s worktable.

The big loft room smelt faintly of the roasting pan, sweetish and almost appetizing except that the live electric cords had left arcing burns on his arms and neck which meant the sizzle was Borg. Misha stared down at him. His eyes … Misha drew out his very illegal Walther and was just about to kneel down to lift the carpet off Borg when he noticed the slim, dapper figure next to the window.

“Herr Resnikoff, wherever did you get that gun?” Hans-Peter Russi himself asked, a wolfish smile on his face. “It’s a very nice gun.” He stepped closer, moving around a heap of electrical junk Borg must have toppled over as he tried to escape.

“That,” Russi said, looking down, “is not very nice.” He blew his nose in his fine handkerchief. “I came to arrest Herr Borg for fiddling with government phone lines,” he added, watching Misha for his reaction. Misha could see Russi’s search warrant peeking out from his pocket. “He knew which lines were untappable. That’s a valuable thing to know, wouldn’t you say?”

“What I think is that Borg tried to sell that phone line tidbit to the wrong people.”

“I should say so,” agreed Russi quietly. “Two men from the Soviet embassy left this address in a car not twenty minutes ago. We had the building under surveillance and I imagine we have a nice film of the looks on their faces as they run to their car. It wasn’t the Russians who killed Borg, that’s for sure. I think our friend here really crossed the line with the Germans. Look, put that rug down, will you?”

Misha did and slid the Walther’s safety catch back on. He hoped to God Borg hadn’t named him or he’d be having a conversation with the wrong end of a wire himself.

“I think Borg stumbled on Himmler’s money line between Switzerland and Berlin,” Misha said. “He died because he found out what no one was ever supposed to know: those accounts you and I are both interested in—don’t give me that all-innocent look, Herr Russi, you know which ones I mean—we’ve discovered the Nazi washing machine has an American hose. Borg found the back door that makes it possible, free of wiretaps. Money comes in dirty there”—he pointed east to Zürich—“and comes out clean there”—and he pointed west. “That about right?”

Russi looked irritable, cheated of one of his long Socratic inquiries. “An American hose, that’s rather good,” he said ruminatively. “I wonder if the phones still work here. On second thought,” he said, looking pointedly at Misha, “I think I’ll use the phone in the shop downstairs. I’m a gentleman: you have five minutes.” He turned and started for the door, then stopped. “In case they wanted you, Misha, we’re watching you. Don’t be difficult, will you? My people are expensive, which costs me, and the tax they pay on the overtime makes them damn touchy. Five minutes, understand? And don’t mention me in your report.”

The desk held nothing. Whoever killed Borg had taken all his paperwork and notebooks; a single pencil stub rolled around in the top desk drawer. No work orders, no carbons, no accounts ledgers. Nothing. His books had all been turned out into a heap on the floor near the kitchenette. Misha checked the toilet tank and all the contents of the refrigerator, then, slowly and painstakingly, all Borg’s jackets, inside and out, then his hats, then his shoes.

Think. Borg’s door is broken down. He’s home. He knows why the intruders have come. He knows what they’re after. A photo or a document: some proof of how the money is moved so elegantly. He’s got to move very fast to protect what he’s got … Misha pictured the break-in, the few frantic seconds Borg would have had, before they were on him, to safeguard what he had.

Then Misha saw the laundry bag. It was half hidden beneath tossed bedclothes, almost too casually left alone, as if whoever had searched the room had grown progressively angrier and angrier.

Pays to stay calm, Misha thought as he reached in and found the second pair of PTT overalls. In the front right pocket he felt something: a box of matches. He opened the box and was rewarded with a scrap of paper, folded many times.

Even with the paper only half unfolded, Misha knew he’d found the PTT repairman’s reference for all the telephone exchanges in Bern. One by one, ruled out carefully in red ink, were some two dozen phone exchanges’ names. Borg had tried them all, working out which voice line was safe for Dulles.

Müller Platz 5.

Misha ran his finger along all the MP exchanges and had a sudden inspiration. He reached in his pocket and opened his wallet. Russi’s card had Israel Kipfermann’s Zürich number on it in Russi’s clear, blocky policeman’s handwriting.

Russi’s phone number was Müller Platz 5 131.

The safe telex line between Berlin and Bern is the same exchange on which Swiss counterintelligence has its own office lines: this is the Swiss hotline to Himmler.

Dulles had hit on the perfect means of staying in touch with his contacts in Berlin: he had the Swiss counterintelligence longdistance trunk line, clean as a whistle, whenever he wanted it, simply by sending a cutout—Good evening, Mr. von Gaevernitz—down to the phone exchange.

He left, careful not to look at the broken shape beneath the carpet near the workbench. When Misha passed the front window of the shop below Borg’s flat, Russi was still on the telephone, his back to the plate glass, his small hand rising and falling for emphasis.

XLVII

WIESBADEN, NEAR FRANKFURT
SEPTEMBER 1945

A beautiful late summer day: drinks on the terrace, the arbor vines gleaming in the sunlight. War might never have happened, Eleanor daydreamed. They were waiting, she and Max Puddicombe, filling in the time until Allen and his new Wiesbaden sidekick, Frank Wisner, showed. At least that Gaevernitz is elsewhere, she thought. He gave her the creeps.

“The monsignor and his train are late. Have some more cake. It’s wonderful, mocha cream and hazelnut paste.”

“Franz-Josef’ll be beside himself,” Eleanor warned. “From what I’ve read, he and his brother are very close.”

“And damn lucky,” Puddicombe observed tartly. “Brother Klaus is this week’s Lazarus, believe you me.”

“It’s all so strange. Down the hall a man sleeps in a fresh bed who this morning was in a cage with a thousand other men on their way to Siberia. Or worse.”

“Or worse indeed.” Puddicombe threw up an elongated, aristocratic hand in appreciation of the villa’s prospect. “A Jewish art dealer’s summer place. Handled only the most choice stuff. Hitler cleaned out the paintings personally.”

“There are two children’s rooms upstairs. I saw the furniture. What happened to the family?”

“The family? What else? They got a one-way ticket east, all of ’em.” Puddicombe seemed eerily unmoved. “Name of Echkenazi. It’s on the nameplate out back, on the garage wall, underneath the ivy. One of the army drivers spotted it.”

“The neighbors might know. Seems like an awful thing, just to forget the people who lived here once. Like they never existed.”

“The neighbors,” Puddicombe replied, “won’t know a thing: three monkeys sitting on a tree, this whole country.” He filled their glasses again. Eleanor idly wondered what sort of person Puddicombe went to bed with—if at all, she thought. Who would go to bed with Max? “We’ll be gone soon too. Our circus here is getting too big for its britches. And when we go, who’ll care about the Echkenazis in this neighborhood? No one. House’ll be sold and that’ll be that.”

“Imagine this happening at home.”

“You can’t, can you?” Puddicombe was shaking his head, relaxing into the champagne. “But we’ve had our moments.”

In the distance someone accomplished practiced the flute; the music wound its way onto the terrace, the notes burnished, precise. Puddicombe helped himself to another piece of cake.

“So what did he do?” asked Eleanor.

Puddicombe did some brute work on the pastry before replying. “Let’s just say incinerating a Russian village was a slow day for these fellows.”

“Klaus was one of ‘these fellows’? Why did the Soviets let him go?”

“We told them he was someone else,” Puddicombe said evenly, “and had the papers to prove it. A little white lie.”

“Who did we say he is?” she pressed.

“A colonel in the Luftwaffe, ran an antiaircraft battery. Has a cousin in Chicago, a heavyweight congressman. Family reunification,” Puddicombe said with an ambiguous smile. “The smart boys in Berlin ran the papers off Thursday, I sold my soul to His Excellency Ambassador Akimov on Monday, we called in a few favors here and there, and that’s that. Now it’s Wednesday and I say good riddance.”

“Wait a minute. Franz-Josef is here to vouch for a wanted man?”

“I was told to cut a deal, I cut a deal. You don’t want to nose around too much, Eleanor. Get your nose burnt.” Puddicombe settled his glass on the exquisite side table. “What a view. Look at those clouds, headed here. Pity. You can just smell the rain.”

Inside, somewhere near the kitchen, a door slammed and Allen’s baritone droned above the not-quite-dissolved Mississippi accent of his new best friend, Frank Wisner.

Eleanor could see Allen’s square, well-tweeded bulk through the kitchen lace curtains eddying in the breeze. “Ah, the girl’s left us a lunch. Why shouldn’t we bring State into the picture?” he was saying.

“No,” Wisner replied. “We don’t even ask. We just do it, Allen. We ask questions, everybody asks questions. And that’ll be the death of it. She’s good, Hannaluise. Look at this spread.”

“Safety in numbers. We’ve bought ourselves one big operation. We better make sure we’ve got our big ol’ ass covered.”

“Why do you think we’ve got Jim Angleton in Rome? To cover our asses. We can lay the whole thing off on the men in black. Hey, that’s real creamery butter—where does Hannaluise find this stuff?”

Allen chuckled. “I’ll bet she knows the black market like the back of her hand. Not too hard on the eyes, either.”

“Now, Allen, you leave the help alone,” Eleanor called out. “Bring out that lunch before it’s all gone.”

Allen, moving fast by his standards, stepped onto the terrace with the enormous silver tray, weighted with a spectacular lunch. Wisner trailed him, a conventionally handsome man, blondish, muscular, radiating a passionate, almost distracted, energy.

“Nice to see you, Ellie,” Allen said. “You too, Max. Sorry we’re a little late.”

She gave his cheek a cool peck. “Hello, Allen.”

“Ellie, you remember Frank Wisner from Foster’s Christmas parties? Frank was with Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, just down the street from our shop. Frank’s fresh from OSS Bucharest, eyeball to eyeball with the Russians.”

“Bad as it sounds?” Eleanor asked, noting Puddicombe’s deliberate silence.

“Worse,” Wisner declared. “And we just walked away. Sickening what we’ve let the Russians do to the Romanians. The elections next year? A big goddamn joke. They’re the next enemy, the Russkies, I can promise you that.”

“Hell, Frank, you put me right off my lunch,” Allen muttered.

“When did you leave, Frank?” Eleanor asked.

“Six days ago. Let’s get right at it: who’s handling the Q and A on our guy here?”

“Lieutenant Benjamin Vanbrocklin of the 430th Counterintelligence Corps,” Puddicombe recited. “He’s probably just leaving the train station. The 10:33 is late.”

Wisner balked. “The 430th? Not one of ours. I thought—”

“Better this way,” Allen covered. “He’ll be twice as white, once Vanbrocklin is through with him.”

A guard, a big silent fellow with slow eyes the color of molasses, appeared in the doorway, unsmiling. “He’s having some kind of nightmare, colonel. Should I wake him?”

“Let him sleep, corporal. Where’s Franz-Josef, Ellie?”

“He’s got himself a horse, apparently, to get here from the chancery office. Their car broke down.” This last over an insistent rapping at the front door. “I’ll get it. It might be him.”

In the doorway stood a thin, clumsy, bespectacled stringbean in an ill-fitting uniform, slow-speaking. “Good morning, ma’am. Lieutenant Vanbrocklin here to interview the prisoner.” He blushed right to the roots of the razor burn on his neck, a farmer’s awkward son.

“I’m Eleanor Dulles, lieutenant. Do come in. We’re having a light lunch while we wait.”

“I do apologize, ma’am. They told me a Colonel Dulles would be here.”

“There are two Colonel Dulleses here, lieutenant: I’m one and my brother’s the other. Come, have lunch. We’re waiting for our guest’s reference to arrive.”

“That’s good. This case has me a little confused, ma’am. Perhaps you could tell me what, or why—”

“I think the other Colonel Dulles had better do that, lieutenant. May I take your coat?” Then the doorbell rang again. “Busy here today. Excuse me, lieutenant. You just head on out through the kitchen to the balcony patio and introduce yourself.”

Eleanor opened the door and Franz-Josef Sommer, monsignor and banker, stood there, barely changed from the hale outdoorsman financier who’d once shared a dining-car table with her.

Klaus Sommer slept curled up like a cat, his back to the wall, the posture of a man used to protecting himself even in sleep. He was six inches taller than his brother; his impossibly thin wrists hung from the shirt someone had lent him. The skin of his scalp was barely less gray than the cropped hair left him by the camp razor. He snored. His brother reached over and stroked the tall man’s bony shoulder, but Klaus didn’t stir.

“Where was he?” Eleanor whispered.

“Sachsenhausen,” the monsignor replied.

“I thought—”

“It was. The Gestapo camp. The NKVD runs it now. For their politicals. Same prisoners, different guards.”

“My heavens, what a world,” Eleanor sighed. “How did they find him?”

As they left the bedroom, Vanbrocklin entered behind them, his thin satchel in hand. The big guard closed the door and locked the lieutenant and his slumbering quarry in.

“One of your brother’s agents with the Red Cross got word out. The brains of the family, Klaus is,” Franz-Josef promised. “Languages, everything. You’re getting gold, I’m telling you.”

“Saint Michael and all the angels,” the monsignor called out. “Is that real champagne? I haven’t seen real champagne in years. Colonel, let’s have a glass, for old times.”

They did. Eleanor wondered exactly which old times she was having a glass for.

An hour later, a steady autumn downpour dripped off the perfect blue firs of Herr Echkenazi’s fine garden. They’d moved into the villa’s dining room and turned the lights on. It was a splendid room, high-ceilinged, with putti flying nowhere in the corners and a flickering chandelier big as a jeep. Eleanor thought of the children’s rooms upstairs—the beds were still there, still made. She hadn’t the nerve to look in the children’s dresser drawers. Lieutenant Vanbrocklin packed up his thin satchel, a philosophical look on his narrow face.

“He knows far too much to be a simple flak officer, sir. My guess? He’s Abwehr. It’s all over him. What I don’t get is why the Russians let him go. Really unusual. You’ve been slipped one under the door, sir. A real present. There’s NKVD guys in Berlin who’d love to take him apart.”

“You sound convinced, lieutenant,” Allen offered, along with his wash-and-wear smile.

“You don’t seem worried, sir. I’d be, for sure. You vouch for this guy, you’re bucking for egg all over your face.”

“You’ve seen a few Abwehr cases from the eastern front, then, I take it?” asked Puddicombe, who was frowning, a tad heavily, Eleanor reckoned.

“One or two or six or so,” Vanbrocklin said.

“What other cases are you working, lieutenant?” Allen asked, all charm.

“Here’s one from my collection,” Vanbrocklin said. “Bussinger, Alois, DOB 26 March 1909, Austrian citizen, long line of military officers, colonel, Abwehr liaison section to Wehrmacht high command. Six-one, one-ninety, looks like Tyrone Power—must be heck on the ladies. One fine intelligence officer, brain like a Swiss watch. Only he scouted Jews for the Wehrmacht list makers all over central White Russia. Made up the death lists, village by village. He also handled the commissars, the captured ones, the ones Hitler personally wanted shot. Signed off on hundreds of ’em. Oh yeah, I talked to him all right. DP camp at Bolzano. Funny thing. He was pretty calm about telling me all that. That puzzled me, why he was so cool about it all. That was about three weeks ago. He was all ready for the rope, you ask me, open and shut: top one hundred war crime suspects in American custody. The Russians would’ve hanged him faster than shit runs out of a goose, you’ll pardon my French, sir. Then the Brits asked for him, waving a warrant for war crimes on the eastern front.”

There was a very long pause there, Eleanor noted, with neither Puddicombe nor Allen nor Wisner meeting one another’s eye.

“Why stop there?” Puddicombe demanded.

“I’m thinking,” Vanbrocklin said.

He’s going to take them all on, Eleanor thought.

“What’s there to think about?” shot Wisner, electric with impatience. “You’re a professional, an army counterintelligence man: you know what you’re after. Where’s Bussinger?”

“The Brits lost him, sir.” Vanbrocklin was putting his notebook away.

“They lost him,” Frank marveled.

“Lost him, that was careless,” Allen observed. His eyes had never left Vanbrocklin.

“Doubt that, colonel,” Vanbrocklin replied, looking straight at Allen. “I reckon it was a done deal. There’s a pattern. To my way of thinking, that is, sir.”

“You’re saying our allies are deliberately losing …” Puddicombe couldn’t finish.

“That would be careless, Max,” Allen eased in. “You know, lieutenant, you ever want a job, you ask for Colonel Allen Dulles at OSS Wiesbaden. You’re just what we’re looking for. You can spot a black-eyed pea in a bushel of beans blindfolded, I can tell.”

“No thanks, sir.”

“I wouldn’t be so quick, lieutenant,” Allen purred. “You know how many CIC men would jump at the chance? You’re looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

“Could be, sir, could be. But back home in Wisconsin, we got this other expression about horses: if your horse’s bolted, no sense slamming the barn door. I’ll be going now. But one more thing. Colonel Dulles, you know what I think, sir?”

Allen favored the CIC man with a cold smile. “Always happy to hear from a fellow officer, lieutenant.”

“Sir, you want to keep Monsignor Sommer’s brother right where you can see him? Hire Brink’s. One of those big gray armored trucks. These Abwehr birds have a funny way of flying west for the winter, sir.”

A thin laugh edged from Allen, but his eyes were all business. “I’ll bear that in mind, lieutenant.”

“I’ll see you out,” Eleanor offered.

“Kind of you, ma’am.”

In the entranceway, Eleanor touched Vanbrocklin’s sleeve. “That coat’s not CIC issue, lieutenant. Those tabs are quartermaster corps. There a story here?”

“It’s quartermaster corps all right, colonel,” the CIC man replied. “It’s my uncle Mort’s, ma’am. He was killed during the Arnhem mess, setting up a field hospital. Sniper got him. Some of the guys in his unit tracked me down. Uncle Mort talked about me all the time, they said, about me going to the University of Chicago. They figured he’d want me to have the coat. Keeps me honest.”

“So it’s more than just a coat.”

“Never told a lie, ma’am. Never saw anybody wrong. That was Uncle Mort. Good day, ma’am. Thanks for the tea.”

Men’s laughter carried from the dining room; Allen had made a joke about Brink’s. And then the pop of a champagne cork and more laughter when the cork hit the chandelier. Eleanor climbed the stairs slowly as the big guard stared straight ahead, pointedly ignoring her. At the landing, Eleanor ran her hands over a tiny pit in the plaster: a painting had hung there once. The nursery was the next door on the left.

Standing frozen in the doorway, Eleanor tried to imagine the children who’d lived there, their sounds, their footfalls, their tiffs, their faces in sleep. She made herself move to the chest of drawers between the two children’s beds. Thinking of Sophie, Eleanor opened the top drawer, hoping to find some last remnant of the long-vanished Echkenazi children, something to keep their memory alive.

Atop the neatly folded shirts and underwear lay a Hitler Youth uniform.

An hour later: Allen and Puddicombe were locked in the main floor office down the hall, in conclave; Eleanor and the monsignor remained in the parlor, drinking Puddicombe’s best Bushmills from Herr Echkenazi’s fine crystal. Wisner and Klaus Sommer had left by truck, three in a row on the front bench seat of the Studebaker truck with the stone-faced guard, bound for God knew where.

“Play the padre some music, don’t answer the door,” Allen had ordered curtly, locking. “The phone too.” So Eleanor sat like a wallflower with a very thoughtful Monsignor Sommer, the gramophone on, playing a Beethoven sonata, number fourteen it was, C-sharp minor, Gieseking’s note-perfect recording, as she waited in the parlor.

Not since Grace’s funeral did she remember so wanting a cigarette.

“This Gieseking is sublime, in my opinion,” offered Sommer.

Eleanor kept her silence, smoking. The young CIC man had set her thinking.

“The elegance of his phrasing. Listen.”

“You’re here because you’re in it up to your ears.”

“In what?” Sommer asked, startled.

“What are you, monsignor, the money? Is that it?” She paused, but Sommer made no reply. “This house used to belong to a family called Echkenazi,” Eleanor went on. “They had two children. Those children are never coming back from wherever they were sent, them and a couple of dozen of my old German socialist friends who’re no longer this side of heaven. I don’t know what’s going on here, but you’re in it. You and Allen and his enthusiastic friend Wisner. You know what Max Puddicombe told me was going to happen today?”

Sommer would never reply. Puddicombe appeared in the doorway, putting on his hat, nodding to Sommer as he passed. They left together, brusquely, the big thick oak front door settling quietly into its jamb behind them. Allen and Eleanor were left alone.

“You’ll want a ride to the hotel.” It wasn’t a question.

“Allen, what are you thinking?”

“Don’t start. You don’t know what you’re talking about, believe me.”

“You’re dead right. I thought I was here to keep Monsignor Sommer cheerful for some sensitive operation you and Max had cooked up. So I did. And what happens?”

“I said, you want a ride to the hotel?”

“I don’t know what you’re running, but I want no part of it. And no, thanks, I’ll walk. I need the air.”

She left without looking back. Allen stayed at the window, half in darkness, half draped in the Echkenazis’ beautiful white lace curtains, half ghost, half shadow, watching her walk away, a doughty shape in her best wool coat, brimful of ire.

XLVIII

BERLIN
A WEEK LATER

A crowded street market in the dust, in a city shorn of cartography, acres wiped clean, ash-white from the incendiaries, revenge for Guernica, Rotterdam, and Coventry. Nothing in Berlin worked: not the sewers, bleeding a high reeking stench; not the streetlights, empty eye sockets; not the burnt-out tram beached at the corner, roofless, a rib cage on wheels. Misha registered the haunted milling amongst the market stalls, drawn, hungry, their faces marking the end of the nightmare.

“We miss each other everywhere else, but we keep meeting in Berlin,” the smiling woman in the thick glasses said to Misha, who’d just finished haggling over a dozen bottles of Bordeaux with a tiny, fierce Berlin Frau. “Like the car?”

“Eleanor!” Misha beamed, and gave her a hug, looking over her shoulder at a huge black Mercedes-Benz limousine, a six-wheeler … and then it dawned on him. “Is that …?”

“It is indeed,” Eleanor said proudly. “Hitler’s own. I was assigned to deliver it here, with State Department plates, all the way from Salzburg. And it’s Colonel Dulles, if you please, State Department political adviser, Occupied Austria.” She was laughing and holding both his hands.

A crowd of Berliners gathered, gawking at the infamous big car, nodding and pointing and then moving on. A solitary woman spat. The two of them stood in the rubble-filled courtyard of the only government building still standing on that stretch of the Potsdamer Platz: since VE day, the building, an annex of the old Foreign Ministry complex, had become English-speaking Berlin’s nerve center, its untouched forecourt littered with messages for lost kin and handwritten advertisements for everything from refrigerators to spare tires. All Berlin was for sale, including its women, several of whom, quite beautiful, lingered nearby in the privacy of a deep archway, smoking the Camels their bodies had bought.

Misha pointed at a crate at his feet. “And a good thing, too. I’ve some rather good wine here. Care for an early lunch, a picnic?”

Behind them, a young woman in American sunglasses detached herself from her station on the streetwalkers’ row. Another day Misha might have spotted her, a pretty young thing wearing a yellow floral dress and the expression of someone who’d just made an important discovery.

“Surprise me,” Eleanor ordered, and held his arm tighter.

His eye fixed on the U.S. Army corporal sitting in the limousine, Misha reached into his wine crate and pulled an armful of bottles free of the wooden slats and packing shavings. “Let’s see how free enterprise works in free Berlin,” he said, grinning.

“His name’s Dave,” Eleanor said.

They left for a picnic in Hitler’s limousine, zigzagging through the maze of rubble and ruined streets, making for Grunau and the old Olympic rowing grounds to the southeast, deep in the Soviet zone. With Colonel Dulles’s POLAD papers from the U.S. State Department and the big Benz as their vehicle, Eleanor and Misha watched straight-faced as the awed Russian sentries waved them straight through the checkpoint. Twenty minutes spent on clean gravel road—the Russians were too poor for asphalt—and they were on familiar ground.

“Hey, Mac,” the corporal named Dave asked, pointing at the barbed wire and empty guard towers of an abandoned prison camp on the banks of the Spree, “that can’t be the place, huh?”

“Keep going,” Misha ordered, drinking the French red from a mess-tin cup, “we’re almost there.”

“I’m lost,” Eleanor said.

“No, you’re not. You’ll recognize this. It’s the Langer See. Schönefeld airport’s over there.”

“What’s left of it, Mac,” Dave said laconically. “That place is deefunct. Won’t be flying in and out of there for a while.”

“There!” Misha pointed. “Left down this road, towards the river.”

The limousine swayed over two small bomb craters, its suspension groaning as Dave ground slowly down the tree-shaded lane in first gear.

“My God,” Misha said. “Look at that.”

A line of craters walked toward the shattered building—they could see how the bombs had fallen in a pin-straight line, ending with the low white building at the water’s edge, its roof completely gone and the south end gutted and blackened by flames.

“It’s—” Misha corrected himself. “That was the Olympic boathouse. Hell. What a pity. It was beautiful.”

“You want me to take you back?” Dave asked.

“No,” Eleanor declared, fixed on something Misha didn’t catch. “We came for a picnic and a picnic we shall have. Let’s try down by the river.”

They found a spot a half mile from the boathouse and gave Dave three hours to return, in exchange for a brace of Bordeaux bottles. The riverside was eerily quiet, no boats, no birds, nothing. It was as if the ruined city had been frozen in the May sun, with only the river itself in movement.

They had found a table and a pair of chairs in the rubble and had a civilized meal in the shade of a copse of lindens half stripped by the blasts that had leveled the boathouse.

Misha chewed on a heel of hard Emmenthal. “I’m still working the German banks for a part of the War Office that still cares—they folded the MEW so fast it was almost indecent.”

“Count on it, it was indecent. Sleeping dogs, I suspect.”

Misha made a face. “That’s exactly the problem—millions are missing but very few leads. I’ve been interrogating the senior Reichsbank officials. A depressing lot.” He lay on the grass, staring out over the water, thinking. Eleanor let him. “I tore my wrist up just over there, past those birch. I was leading. The Olympic quarterfinals. A long time ago.”

“A long time ago,” Eleanor agreed.

Misha rolled over onto his belly. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Remember your beautiful friend from Bryn Mawr, who married the German economist—what was her name?”

“Neimann, Marta Neimann. Why?”

“The Neimanns. That’s right. Ever hear what happened to them?”

“No, no, I didn’t. I’ve filed a request with the Red Cross, but nothing yet.”

He looked at her for a moment. “I saw them arrested,” he said slowly. “In Davos, no farther away than from here to that tree. Now here’s the coincidence: they were walking with Allen just moments before their arrest.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Misha shrugged and frowned. “I’m not sure what I mean myself. All I know is the Neimanns walked right into the arms of the Swiss police. Eleanor, the Swiss deported German Jews all the time. I wouldn’t be too hopeful they’re alive.”

Eleanor thought before replying. “You don’t think Allen betrayed them, do you?”

It was Misha’s turn to pause. “I don’t have a scintilla of proof. But Allen’s a veteran agent runner. He wouldn’t just walk into a police trap.”

“But he didn’t,” Eleanor replied. “You just said he walked away.”

“Let me put it this way: I’d feel a whole lot better about it if he’d been there when they were arrested, d’you see?”

Eleanor sighed. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I do see. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“It does, actually,” Misha interposed. “Perhaps they are alive,” he added, without much conviction.

“I’ve got friends at the Red Cross from ages ago. I’ll give them a push.”

Misha nodded, content to leave the topic alone. “Back in ’36 there was a Weinstube somewhere near here, I had drinks there. You ordered with this pneumatic system, a vacuum took your order away. All very German.” He blinked, thinking, examining the low line of trees across the Spree. “I think I’ve made up my mind I’m going to live here.”

“But it’s a ghost town for Jews, Berlin! Why?”

He stared out over the water then took another sip of the rich Médoc. “So I don’t ever forget. So they never forget. Besides, I’m not the Mediterranean type. The sun makes my eyes hurt.”

Eleanor weighed this, then the look on his face. “I think we need to go for a walk. We’re thinking too much.”

She took him by the arm and led him along the path beside the embankment, away from the sight of the prison camp on the far shore, away from the shell of the boathouse, into the hillside woods, dark and cool and green despite the sun.

“Do you know people, people on the inside, at the Jewish Agency?” Eleanor asked as they walked.

“Here and there, yes. Why?”

“I’ve never told anyone this before, you understand, not even Foster. Especially not Foster. You’re the only one I’d trust. Okay?”

Misha nodded.

“My husband, I believe, was sending reports to the Jewish Agency in Paris before he died.”

Looking at her sidelong, Misha declared: “What on earth makes you think that?”

Eleanor told him about David’s postal receipts and the Paris telegraph agency’s address. They’d stopped at the crest of a hill crowded with birch, survivors of the fires nearby.

Misha put his back to one and crossed his arms on his chest. “You have German? Then you’ll get Yiddish. Lakhn mit yashtsherkes— get it?”

Eleanor worked it out slowly. “‘Laughing with lizards …’ That’s my answer?”

“You Americans, always too literal. Rough translation? ‘To laugh so bitterly you don’t cry.’ There’s your answer.”

“Not much of an answer, is it?”

“If he was, he was. If he wasn’t, he wasn’t.” Misha kissed her very gently, then leant back. “Let it go, all right? You won’t bring him back, knowing or not.”

She fixed him, then decided. “So, Mr. Lizard, now that you’re all soft with wine, another question?” Eleanor stopped, gathered herself, then said quietly: “You’ve lost someone close, haven’t you?”

Misha stared at her then nodded, blindsided for once. “How did you know?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“Your eyes, Misha. There. Your shoulders sometimes too—like a child who’s been bullied. Poor you.”

“Poor Neimanns, poor you, poor everybody,” Misha replied.

Eleanor cupped his face in her hands and gently, with far more tenderness than even she thought she had in her, kissed him.

Misha woke first. Eleanor slept on, tucked beneath their coats. Her carnality had quite bowled him over. He’d had an inspiration in return, the moment his eyes opened.

Far from certain what he’d find, Misha dressed quickly and set off down the half-mile-long riverside pathway through the linden and birch to the boathouse. The river was to his left, the sun filtering down through the overhanging branches, islets of white on the dark-shadowed pathway. He heard laughter and the familiar squeak-groan of dry oarlocks; he looked upriver. A couple, Russian by the sound of them, rowed across. The woman was taking a photograph of the man as he rowed. The man shipped his oars and gestured for the camera. Laughing, the woman flirted with the lens as they drifted downstream. Misha, curious, watched them as he walked, then glanced at the Red Army jeep parked amongst the trees on the far side.

He reached the end of the path and the boathouse itself. It was a miracle the structure still stood. He shouldered the clapboard wall: it creaked and gave slightly at his touch. He could just wriggle in, chest to the wall. He arched his back to spring wreckage away, edging his way crabwise between the wall and the heaped pile of splintered wood that remained of the roof and its beams.

A few yards along and he was face to face with it, the beautiful cameo frame of ivory. Pristine save for a hairline crack in the plate glass over the photograph was the image of the rowers at the Krumme Lanke pergola, hoop skirts and all.

The screws defeated him until he remembered the change in his pocket. An English ha’penny coin helped him prize loose his treasure; he placed it lovingly in his jacket. He wormed his way onto the skeleton of the indoor dock, out of breath, covered in dust, and streaked with sweat. Here he could stand and inspect the old racecourse; he looked upstream and saw the rowboat near the riverbank, bobbing empty on its line. He worked his way back onto dry land and headed back toward Eleanor.

Far enough from the boathouse to feel utterly exposed, Misha felt rather than heard the footfalls behind him, just for a heartbeat, the sound of boot on soft earth, then nothing. He held his breath and listened again, every mutter of the shadowy woods in his ears. The Russian woman stepped out from behind a tree squarely into the middle of the path, not five yards from him, and raised a Tokarev semiautomatic pistol in a smoothly practiced arc.

A thump of adrenaline dropped him instantly into a crouch and Misha felt the sizzle of the first round as it screamed through the airspace his face had occupied a moment before.

Then he heard the crack of the handgun, and the pathway through the trees and the wooded rise behind it became a kind of sticky haze of light and dark. Moving too slow, too slow, he dived into the bramble, uphill, driving off his stronger foot, landing facedown in the soft, dry soil.

Of course: two of them … and then something whined past his shoulder and a cascade of branch and leaf fragments rained over him. The bang-crack of the rifle never registered: Misha was on his belly, wriggling into a quintet of birch saplings in the hillside swale above the river path. A low run of evergreens, head-high, stretched ahead of him in the gloom, and he moved very slowly toward them. Once there, he took stock for a few quick breaths.

Shiloah had taught him about being the hunted: circle, buy time, stay low, and never stop moving. They would try to drive him uphill, where the cover broke, to silhouette him against the light at the top of the ridge.

Misha decided. He left the cover of the evergreens, cutting uphill, following the shade lines, as hard and as fast as he could, then dived across a small clearing, colliding in the forest gloom with a slender tree, ricocheting off that and running again, broken-field, like a rugger player, uphill in a semicircle, jinking and stutter-stepping, anything to prevent a clear shot.

Then he turned, diving, rolling, somersaulting back downhill, not caring how much noise he made, tearing down through a gap in the underbrush. He hit the flat ground where the forest met the path, sprang to his feet, and began to run, keeping to the shadows, not fearing the woman now, only the rifleman, whose weapon could find his back at a distance.

Then he heard, very clearly, off the water, a voice, Russian, hoarse, a man’s voice. Forget the river, he calculated, and glanced around.

A great linden, one of a row that guarded the waterfront, loomed on the uphill side of the path. He tore off his shoes and socks, tied the laces with fumbling fingers, and tossed them around his neck. Half shinnying, half clawing, he began to climb, climbing for his life, straddling the massive tree trunk, muscles shaking and trembling and gasping as he hauled himself into the heart of the canopy.

He clung to the linden fifteen yards above the forest floor, completely hidden now, his body closer to that tree than any woman had ever held him, his breath roaring out of him in rib-bending gouts of air. The sweat poured off him, down his face, onto his eyelids and lips, and down the wet hair on the back of his neck, like a racehorse in full lather.

He willed his heart to slow. His breathing followed. He listened, wedging himself deep into the cleft of the linden, his back curved concave, his shoes in his lap. He could feel the bark shards burning in the soles of his feet.

Through the leaves, he glimpsed the two Russians in their rowboat. The man rowed quickly, either furious or fearful, Misha couldn’t tell; the woman held the gunwales rigidly, as if she might fly away.

He leant back into the cover of the leaves and settled in to wait for whatever might happen next.

A dog’s barking echoed through the forest, waking Misha. He sat up, too fast, and cracked his head against the trunk. Shifting, he felt something slip and looked down: his shoes hit the forest floor with a thud. The barking moved closer and he heard shouting, dulled by the leaves, indistinct.

Then the dog was below, circling his shoes, raising a terrible racket.

A skinny MP stepped forward and looked skyward, his M1 carbine angled at Misha’s chest. “Hey, Jake,” he yelled. “I got him. Hände hoch, buddy.”

“I’m with the War Office,” Misha protested.

“I know. You gonna come down, Mr. Resnikoff? You got a lotta people worried about you.”

Back in the American zone, Misha spent the rest of the afternoon in a military-police station. He repeated, “Gunshots? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” some twenty times before the MPs released him with a stern lecture. He walked back to his office at the edge of the British zone, the top floor of what had been a brewery. This was home these days, desk, chair, Sixth Army cot and filing cabinet and telephone. He lifted the phone: dead again.

He’d missed a meeting that afternoon with the French about currency policy; Schorr had left him a querulous note. At least his pay was waiting for him. A courier arrived with a package from Eleanor’s State Department office across town, with his papers and a brief note from her, wondering where he was and telling him she’d been called away on urgent business. She gave a military-exchange telephone number and an address and that was all. He was seeing ghosts in the hallway by then, so he locked himself in the washroom, washed and shaved, gently pried several splinters from his feet, and then put the second of his two shirts on.

He picked most of the dust and debris off his jacket and headed out, armed with a bundle of Reichsmarks and five fresh five-pound notes; in today’s Berlin that much might buy him a new suit on the street. An obliging Canadian NCO driving a Bren carrier took him to the Burgerbraukeller, but there were no burghers left in this cellar, only Allied officers and German touts, with a sprinkling of working girls.

Halfway through his chicken stew, Misha heard a familiar voice. Standing at the foot of the cellar stairs was Kronthal, with a short fellow with a massive nose and a fleshy mouth surmounted by a thick mustache—Italian at some point, but a fellow American to judge from his hat and coat. They argued with the maître d’, a lost cause: there were no tables. Misha paid and made his way up the crowded stairs, spotting Kronthal and his short companion heading down the street toward the remains of a big department store whose basement, Misha heard tell, held several “clubs.” Little more than gimcrack tables and a piano and watered-down drinks, the clubs were a vital part of Berlin commerce, crossroads for every trader and pimp in town.

He followed them, not knowing quite what to expect but gauging that tailing Kronthal might yield something. The department store sign read ÖTCHNER, the initial H long gone. Kronthal and his companion continued past the main entrance into an alley marked off with red warning ribbon, which the gas men strung around town like Christmas garland. Misha counted to ten, then followed.

The Italian fellow led Kronthal to a boarded-over storefront and then stopped, bending to knock on an iron service door set in the pavement—three hard double raps. The door opened and Kronthal and his friend descended. A Berliner, an old man pushing a wheelbarrow full of women’s shoes, walked past and caught Misha staring at the closed door.

“It’s for the pansies,” the old man said, shrugging. “Transvestite club.”

Remembering a story Shiloah told him about a stakeout of his own, Misha waited for a few minutes for a kid of perhaps twelve or thirteen, carrying a sack of kindling, to cross the street. Misha hailed him, offered him five marks, and sent him into the club. He then waited in the shadows of a bombed-out butcher shop, its tile floor covered in fine dust an inch thick, its ceiling a jumble of broken wood and hanging cable. Somewhere water dripped.

The iron door slammed open and eight or nine men hurriedly followed the boy out of the club, including Kronthal and his companion. “Funny, that,” Misha said to himself. “Just announce ‘military police’ in a crowded club and up they come.” The kid accepted tips from the fleeing men as they fanned out.

Misha followed Kronthal and his companion for another ten minutes, until they entered an office building, just off one of the canals, from which an American flag hung limply in the spring air. He hired a car and paid the driver five marks to wait while he watched the building entrance. Another car pulled up, a big official American Dodge, quite new, and a familiar figure emerged and walked up the stairs.

It was Renni Schippers, looking spruce in a new suit, every inch the successful banker Misha remembered from his Haifa days. And, sure as night follows day, some minutes later down the stairs came Schippers, with Kronthal and his odd colleague, ready for an evening out.

So, Misha calculated, we have an OSS spy, an American fixer, and a suspect Dutch banker out for a companionable evening in Berlin. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and gestured after the departing Dodge.

By eight-thirty that night he’d followed the three to the best rooftop restaurant in Berlin. Misha waited below, chewing on a hard roll and a length of real Italian salami he’d bought at the all-night bakery on the corner. At half past ten, well after curfew, the three emerged and boarded the big Dodge. Misha dropped a postcard in a postbox, addressed to Schorr at the office, explaining tersely what he’d found.

After dropping off Kronthal and his odd friend at their hotel, Schippers went straight to the rail station and bought a first-class ticket for Amsterdam.

Every nerve told Misha to follow.

Armed with his War Office pass and military passport, Misha bought a second-class sleeping-car berth, to keep his distance. That night, just past four and just before the Berlin–Amsterdam express reached the Dutch frontier, Misha used the passport and another five-pound note to bribe the sleeping-car conductor for his passkey.

After five minutes with a penlight and the sleeping Schippers’s papers, Misha knew enough: there was a New York end to Schippers’s banking work for Thyssen in Berlin—and Schippers himself was the courier.

A carefully worded postcard to Shiloah’s mail drop in Marseille did the rest.

ACT SIX

Cunning men’s cloaks sometimes fall
Sicilian proverb

XLIX

TEL AVIV
JUNE 1946

Reuven Shiloah and Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion sat in the wily old leader’s garden, in a shell of intimacy in the darkest shade, on identical simple wooden chairs. The sun shone paper white in the sky, coming up on noon. As he spoke, Shiloah’s gap-toothed smile appeared in his round, flat, almost Asiatic face as often as his harsh frown. The pair of them watched a field mouse pick its way along the line of feed Ben-Gurion had spread on a sunburnt path between the trees.

“Yes, there is now a United Nations. And yes, the British mandate in Palestine will die on paper there. No matter. We will still have to fight. And always we must act as if we have no friends,” Reuven warned. “Because we don’t.”

Ben-Gurion glanced at the mouse nipping at the seeds he’d cast. He listened, rare for him, his street fighter’s face turned to Shiloah. His friend Reuven, his sense of anticipation as feline as his watchful eyes, was a legend for the way he could almost touch the future with his hooded thinking. That ability, above all others, was why Ben-Gurion admired the keeper of Zionism’s secrets. “You are suggesting, then …” Ben-Gurion offered.

“I am suggesting nothing. Yet.”

Ben-Gurion said nothing in reply.

Shiloah examined the old stone wall surrounding the garden, seeing something only he could see. “I propose that we exploit a paradox: that America is so very puritanical because it is so very corrupt.” He laid his hands flat on the table. “That is our weapon when the time comes for the vote at the United Nations. And all the more powerful a weapon because no one expects such a thing from us.”

“And just how expensive is our weapon?” Ben-Gurion asked.

That was a yes; Shiloah knew. “We have people who know quite a lot about the connections we need to exploit the swing votes for partition. Make no mistake, David, we are talking out-and-out blackmail here: one chance. We need to have our facts straight and we need to time this very carefully. I need,” he said, finally taking on Ben-Gurion’s blunt question, “time for some experts to examine the problem, Sol Lifton for one.”

Ben-Gurion nodded.

“Money is secondary for now,” Shiloah said. “I need to take one or two banking people off our operations in Europe … after that, not much, some travel. Not much.”

Ben-Gurion stood and stretched his tree-trunk legs: he and Shiloah had been sitting for almost half an hour. “What are our chances at the UN, Reuven?”

“If we hold the right feet in that fire, we may get the votes for partition. It’s a very short list of feet,” he said, allowing himself a smile. “But that is good—”

“Because we have no time.”

“Very, very little time,” Shiloah corrected. “We can work something. Have Kollek and Shertok at the meeting, if you can. And young Elam, our specialist at such things.”

“Kollek, yes, Shertok, no: he’s in London next week to meet with Weizmann. And of course Elam.” Ben-Gurion thrust his hands in his pockets. “You have a week to produce. Make the most of it. We live in a diminishing present.”

Shiloah stood.

“One last thing, Reuven,” Ben Gurion warned. “You cannot have a single American Jew caught committing espionage for us. Not one. Not ever. That will be the end of us: we will never raise another dollar in America if such a thing were to happen.”

Shiloah nodded and excused himself. As he left, Ben-Gurion sat in the shade, a blunt block of a man in a white shirt, his hands on his knees, the posture of a tough old farmer, alone with his thoughts.

A day later, five sat around a small table: Shiloah, Teddy Kollek, Lifton—the thin, taciturn fellow from the Institute’s banking section—and his assistant, a sharp-faced woman in khaki battle dress named Suri Handtmann. The fifth, Ben-Gurion, held a typed list Shiloah had passed him while they shared tea before the others arrived. He slid the list into the middle of the tabletop and looked at the faces around him. His glance was brutally frank. He spun the paper with his thick thumb, his forefinger the axis.

“We haven’t enough,” he said. “According to Reuven’s best estimate we’re at least fifteen yes votes short.”

“Delay until spring,” the easy, handsome Kollek offered. “Keep the partition vote off the order paper. Delay, delay, delay. The closer the vote to the day the British leave, the better for us. We’ll be that much better prepared to fight.”

No one said anything. “Sol Lifton here,” Shiloah said into the silence, “is our banking expert with the Institute in London. He has identified one or two openings we might explore. Sol?”

Lifton endured his high, thin voice and lank, dusty hair equably; he seemed all dry bone held together by nut-brown skin. He licked his lips and began to speak as if it pained him to form the words.

In August, Lifton and Handtmann had had a long meeting in London with a Jewish U.S. Army investigator attached to an Anglo-American anti-money-laundering team. Little did the investigator know that an occasional there as an observer, to whom he had taken a shine, happened to be a Miss Polner, one of Lifton’s contract players, a sweet thing with curly hair and big eyes, occupation Palestinian university student at the Imperial College.

“This American was not particularly handsome, even for a financial investigator,” Lifton continued, “about whose physical beauty I am myself no advertisement.” They all laughed, needing the relief. “I suggested she take her glasses off, for operational reasons.” No one expected that maneuver from the shy Lifton. “She knows men,” he continued, “an asset in this case. Human nature took its course. I don’t believe Miss Polner ever put her glasses back on until the American was on the plane back to Switzerland. I have,” he added, “a rather lengthy report from her about his activities for the American Treasury Department’s investigation called Safehaven.” He passed out copies of a seven-page typescript as Elam arrived, a slim, hard-eyed young man.

“We propose to turn Safehaven inside out,” Lifton said quietly. “Let’s begin with page one, paragraph two, the line about the scope of the project when it began in the summer of 1944, in particular the late American president’s wishes that certain leading commercial personalities”—a phrase Shiloah would never forget—“pass under the knife.

“When wars come,” Lifton offered, “honorable men choose country over business. Or you can rationalize and trade with the enemy, the American phrase for such things. Some did. There are,” he said, turning the page—they all followed his lead—“several personalities who might persuade the balance of votes to come to us, through their business connections. We have a short list of those with sensitive connections to the Germans. But we are—”

Ben-Gurion finished the sentence for Lifton: “We are short of materials to threaten these people. Reuven, am I right?”

Shiloah nodded. “If we are to pry apart the bloc of votes the British have assembled against us, we need a lever.” His words hung there. “We need a little more information to choose a victim. Then,” Shiloah said, his lips set in a thin straight line, his gaze taking in young Elam first, “we will apply the lever.”

L

EASTERN AUSTRIA
DECEMBER 1946

Eleanor was now the State Department’s POLAD, political adviser to the military government in the American zone, an encyclopedia of a job that had her feeding horses one minute and marveling at the artfulness of Austrian counterfeiters the next. From sugar to wood screws, she bartered stuff “like it was Reverend Dulles’s jumble sale,” she wrote Foster: anything to keep the Austrian economy inching ahead. In reply to her plea for someone to help, State had dispatched its favorite emissary to Vienna, an odd little mustachioed Italian, cheerfully fey—his own phrase; even odder, a queer who didn’t care who knew. His legs were too long, his arms too short, his lips over-thick, and his eyes protuberant, nestled on either side of a weather vane of a nose. But Carmel Offie, whose reputation as the man-to-see had preceded him to Vienna, had no side, Eleanor noticed. Offie seemed just as happy with her today, on the creaking bench seat of the Studebaker truck hauling Sophie and Eleanor through the mountain roads east of the capital, as in the back of a limousine. He’d finessed a box of Schrafft’s chocolates at the Vienna PX for Sophie; Offie had press-ganged Janusz, their Free Polish driver, for the snowy voyage southeast, to truck in supplies for a new State outpost on the road to Bratislava. Sophie sat contentedly on the jump seat as the truck droned eastbound through the gusts of snow down the deserted Austrian two-lane.

“Why here?” Offie asked in his ferrety voice. “That’s easy. It’s a way station on our little reclamation project. Say our Franz is crossing the line. We can scoop him right off, safe and sound. And now we’ll have a safe house well inside our zone, far from prying eyes in Vienna.”

“Whose idea was it?” asked Eleanor.

“Mine,” Offie said, his cracked smile taking up half his face. “I set them up all along the zone line in Germany. This one has a soft center, Sophie, orangey. Want to try?”

Sophie took the chocolate. Outside, the snow began to metamorphose into a drifting fog creeping off the unworked fields.

“You shut your ears, Janusz,” Offie ordered, “or I will personally see you never make another pfennig out of the U.S. government again.”

“Nothing I’m hearing. Completely,” said Janusz. “Blind completely. Also.”

“Keep it that way,” Offie said, squeezing out a laugh. “Tomorrow we’re bringing over a scientist. I collect them, you see. Some people collect coins or stamps or scrimshaw. I collect scientists, German ones. They love me at the air force. Love me.”

“Carmel,” Eleanor said, “you are the least discreet person I have ever met.”

“Oh, you couldn’t be more wrong,” he wheezed. “Here’s the paradox: the more you tell secrets, the easier it is to keep them. I call it Offie’s Law.”

Sophie held a chocolate up to the dim light in the truck’s cabin. “I think the black stuff’s fudge, Mr. Offie.”

“It is. Want to try it?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you, Mr. Offie,” Eleanor corrected.

Sophie sighed, very much twelve. “Thank you, Mr. Offie.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Your mother’s right: people notice manners. That green is a special kind of mint. I love the mint. Offie’s Law says that if you tell enough secrets, people stop listening. After a while you can say things like Mrs. Truman’s chauffeur wears high heels or Eisenhower’s girlfriend eats crackers in bed and no one cares. Human nature, I guess.”

They crossed a rough wooden bridge, which clattered like thunder under the big American tires.

“Who else is coming down this road, Carmel?” Eleanor asked.

“On Tuesday, the chief Gestapo officer in Belgrade. He’s an anti-Communist specialist. Terrific catch.” Offie had all the mannerisms of a headwaiter, pleased the chef was up to snuff that day. “And on Friday, two brothers, the Ludwigs, a couple of Austrian SS men who I understand did some terrible things in White Russia, but they’re really irreplaceable: they know more about the Communists in Prague than anyone. They’re actually quite amusing. Frank met them once, in Bucharest. Great storytellers.”

“Amusing? These are war criminals.”

“That’s why the State Department trusts me and my discretion. Why are we slowing down, Janusz?”

Janusz leant hard toward the windscreen. “This bridge. It should not be here. We should be at Sankt Margarethe. We have—”

He shut up as three Red Army soldiers materialized from the fog, their machine pistols dropping from their shoulders as one. At the end of the bridge, a T-intersection swirled with mist. One of the soldiers waved the truck over; behind them, a striped barrier pole blocked the road. The signs were in Cyrillic—all of them.

“Shhh, Sophie,” Eleanor said. “Sit close to me.”

“Well, I hope your Russian’s ready to go,” Offie said to Janusz. “Kill the engine. Now.”

“My God,” Janusz whispered, his voice scarred with fear. “My God. My papers. I am born in Russia.”

“Eleanor, you stay with Sophie. I’ll look after Janusz,” Offie said, his own smile at a hundred watts. “Stay in the truck. Don’t open the door. Don’t give them a reason.”

They were red-tabbed border security troops, imperturbable Siberian Mongols, the NKVD’s frontline soldiers. Two split, standing on either side of the Studebaker, their weapons leveled; the third, the NCO, walked over slowly, eyes fixed on the U.S. Army stenciling on the truck’s hood. Somewhere a telephone rang. He tapped on Janusz’s door with the barrel of his machine pistol. Janusz offered his papers, but the NCO kept tapping, then slapped a gloved hand on the windshield.

“Okay, folks. He wants us out. Slowly,” Offie cautioned. “Ellie, keep close to Sophie. Don’t get separated. Bring the chocolates.”

They walked in silence through the muddy snow to the guard hut, a two-roomed affair, stiflingly hot, a wood fire heating a samovar. On a beautiful oak desk stood a trio of telephones, one ringing. The NCO answered as the other two guards slammed the door.

Holding the phone at full tether, the NCO pointed Eleanor and Sophie to two chairs near the desk, then opened the door to his left and gestured Offie and Janusz through, accompanied by one of the Siberians. Eleanor heard the NCO sound out their names on the phone, repeating hers over and over.

Thereafter everyone sat, in a very theatrical silence, for a good ten minutes.

Two captured German staff cars lurched out of the fog, one an open Kübelwagen, the German jeep, the other a beautifully kept Mercedes sedan, its black humpbacked bodywork glowing with moisture. The rusty Kübelwagen, driven by an enormous Mongolian, backfired to a halt. A perilously young NKVD officer, needle-thin, pried himself out of the Kübelwagen, a valise under his arm, fitting his dress hat to his aquiline head. He entered and motioned Eleanor and Sophie to remain seated, glancing through the open doorway at the other two.

“Papers,” he said, lowering himself onto the hard chair at the desk and his big flat hat into his in-tray. He studied Eleanor’s papers, then unlocked a filing cabinet, taking from it a document lockbox. This he opened, retrieving what appeared to be a logbook, page after page of handwritten entries. After another interminable wait—Eleanor could feel runnels of sweat coursing down her back—the NKVD officer looked up and his nose twitched, like a beagle’s.

“You are Colonel Dulles, intelligence adviser to the State Department in Wien.” His English was smooth, almost musical, his voice low and thoughtful: it occurred to Eleanor this episode might be far more trouble than Offie had anticipated.

“We haven’t been introduced. I am indeed Eleanor Dulles, colonel, the political adviser to the U.S. military government in the U.S. zone of Occupied Austria. This is my daughter, Sophie. You are?”

“Captain Ilya Ilyitch Yesnaev, NKVD. The child here is very dangerous. There are kidnappings here. Bandits want American children, for ransom.”

“Sophie, where are our manners? Would you offer Captain Yesnaev and his men some chocolates, please?”

“The orange ones are very good,” Sophie suggested. “I like them.”

Yesnaev hesitated, staring at the open box with its gilt paper and rows of plump chocolate buttons. “You first. This one,” Yesnaev ordered. After Sophie and Eleanor each had a chocolate, a satisfied Yesnaev waved the guards over and they gingerly took a chocolate each, murmuring and nodding.

“Then I will have this one. Thank you. You should have your favorites. My men do not speak English. They are saying thank you.” He watched as Sophie wandered into the other room and shared her chocolates there too. Carmel’s a genius, Eleanor thought.

“Our papers are in order, I believe,” she said.

“You have no visa, no transit paper.” The Russian was eerily calm.

“I think,” Eleanor said easily, “you’ll find when you ask our colleague in the other room that we were lost in the fog. We have a manifest for all the items in the truck.”

Outside, through a windowpane dribbling condensation, Eleanor could make out four NKVD troops searching the truck. They had already stacked the bedsteads and crates of telephones and office chairs and a fat couch, complete with floral upholstery, trophy from some Nazi villa, its hemlines disappearing into the snow. Behind the truck the Mongolian driver dozed in the Kübelwagen, wrapped in a Red Cross blanket; the glossy Mercedes still idled, a thin trail of exhaust smoke blending into the fog. Eleanor fixed the young NKVD officer with her flintiest gaze.

“You are in the Soviet zone. You must have transit papers.”

“We didn’t think we were. We thought we were in the American zone still. It’s a mistake. We’re delivering furniture. A Sunday outing.”

“You are a political intelligence officer. Why do you travel without papers?”

“We weren’t traveling,” Eleanor countered. “We were helping make a delivery. My daughter and I wanted to go for a drive, to get out of Vienna. This delivery truck was our first chance.”

“Even in snow. You travel even in snow. An important mission.”

“I don’t think a furniture delivery is an important mission. And telephones. We have telephones.”

Yesnaev sighed and waggled a thin index finger at Eleanor. He locked away all the papers and strolled in his comically big dress boots to the side room, not emerging for twenty minutes. Then he put on his coat and carefully fitted his uniform hat and left the checkpoint command post without a word. Enter the villain, Eleanor calculated, staring at the Mercedes. Sophie sat very close, holding her mother’s hand.

Yesnaev trudged through the snow to the Mercedes, lurching a little in his tall boots. The passenger window rolled down and a desultory conversation followed, with much shrugging from Yesnaev. Yesnaev walked away and climbed into the Kübelwagen, then slapped the Mongolian on the arm. The rusty little four-wheel-drive car whined up the hill in a spray of snow, vanishing into the fog.

Yesnaev’s colleague was much older, haunted, a once-heavyset man worn thin, a single thick black eyebrow the only clue he’d ever been young. Eleanor put him down as a Georgian—not Russian, at any rate. His greatcoat was clean but worn; a cloud of fatigue followed him, his eyes watchful but dull behind round-lensed steel spectacles. A man who’d seen too much, Eleanor decided, watching him settle himself into his chair, unlock the document box, and begin to read the material Yesnaev had prepared. Sophie had decided the proceedings were nothing to worry about; she’d fallen quietly asleep on Eleanor’s shoulder.

For several minutes the only sound in the hut was the dry turning of paper. When he finished, he looked at Eleanor over the top of his spectacles. Then, with a surprisingly light voice in barely accented English, he began: “This is a happy morning for me, colonel, after so many years. So many years.” He seemed almost affectionate. “We have a friend in common.”

Eleanor had never encountered a less happy human being. “We do?”

“I have not seen him … since before the war. A long time ago. Perhaps you have. Or he may be dead. I often wonder what happened to him.”

“What is your name? Perhaps that would help.”

“Oh, my name is not so important, Miss Dulles.”

The senior NKVD officer opened his thick satchel and removed a small metal box. He unlocked it and flipped through a series of card files, finding one. He carefully pulled a passport-sized photograph from one card and held it out for Eleanor to take. “I met him in Stockholm, many years ago,” the NKVD man said.

“I don’t recall him.”

“You don’t recall him? You’ve seen him before, you think?”

“I don’t recall.”

The NKVD officer stripped off a small envelope adhered to the file card’s reverse. He opened the envelope and produced another image, a portrait of a group of young men, clearly English, taken in front of their college.

“The year is 1933. Cambridge. Perhaps you knew him when he was younger.”

Eleanor said nothing.

“No? How unfortunate. I have often wondered what became of my old friend. He simply vanished, you see, causing his friends much worry. Most unlike him, really. Then he went to New York. He worked for your brother there, and then … something happened. You might have met him in New York, you see. That is the theory of mine. I have given this much thought over the years, such was my distress, all those years ago, when my friend disappeared. I do worry about him still, you see.”

The colonel tapped the envelope again. A blurry, smudged image fell out. At first Eleanor thought it might be a negative: four people on a street in New York, glowing oddly in the photograph’s emulsion.

“I believe the woman on the right is you, colonel. The man to your right is Misha Resnikoff.”

A chill shot through Eleanor. She raised her eyes and steadied her voice. “I don’t understand. Where did this photograph come from?”

“New York City, August 1938, in the Greenwich Village. It was night, you see: it’s a photograph taken with infrared film. That is you, is it not?”

“These things can be forged. Who is to say this isn’t?”

“It isn’t forged. I took it myself. Just before my friend disappeared. That is you, is it not?”

“I can’t tell.”

They stared at one another for a good long time. Then, sadly and with infinite patience, the NKVD officer gathered his photographs and replaced them. That accomplished, he shook Eleanor’s hand.

“You’re free to go, all of you, including Mr. Carmel Offie, the distinguished State Department spy. My greetings to your brother, the other Colonel Dulles, at Wiesbaden. And your other brother, Foster, the famous anti-Bolshevik. He was, I believe, one of us in the Tsar’s war.”

“One of us?”

“You are much too modest, colonel.” He paused, considering her as a surgeon might assess his next appendectomy. “It’s a small world, our profession. Your family profession.” The NKVD officer drew his greatcoat closer and for a moment Eleanor caught a glimpse of his badge of rank: colonel-general.

“Diplomacy?”

“I am an admirer of theater, colonel—you might have missed a career as an actress. Not diplomacy. In Russian we have a more accurate word, a better word, colonel, I think, for our work: konspiratsiya.” He offered her a mocking salute. “Tell your driver he is a lucky man. We shot one of his kind the other day.”

“Wait till I tell Wisner,” Carmel Offie enthused. “He’s going to be green. Wasn’t that something?” They had reached the suburbs of Vienna; the fog had fissured, breaking up as the noon sun licked at its frayed edges. “What was the second guy like, Ellie, the one who didn’t question me, what’d he want?”

“He said he knew my brother Allen had been in Bern during the war. Fishing around.”

“Pity I didn’t meet him. What’d you say? A colonel-general?”

“I think I was just a curiosity. Even NKVD colonel-generals like to brag, I’d think.”

“Janusz here, he was sweating buckets, weren’t you, Janusz?” Offie kidded.

“They take people like me,” Janusz said flatly, “put them on train, send them east.”

“Or shoot them out of hand,” Eleanor said.

“Yes,” Janusz said, wiping his dry lips with the back of his hand.

“I gave away all the chocolates,” Sophie said. “Do you think you can get more, Mr. Offie?”

“Sure, Sophie, sure,” Offie said, examining the map. “Goddamn army. Look at the copyright date. This is prewar. No wonder we got lost. Good thing we got stopped where we did, my friend, or we’d be in Hungary by now.”

“Puddicombe’s going to hit the roof,” Eleanor said thoughtfully.

“I don’t think so. You’re with me. Safe and sound.”

That was too much for Eleanor. “You think this is some kind of lark, don’t you?”

“What? You’ve just had an adventure, Eleanor, something you can tell your grandchildren about—”

“Janusz could be dead by now. They might have shot him, right there in the snow.”

They hit a pothole and a spray of slush washed over the windscreen. Janusz set the wipers going. They slowed as the big truck climbed a rise.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m here,” Offie said.

“He told me, that Russian, the second one, he told me they’d shot someone like Janusz just last week.”

Janusz looked over at Offie and for a moment Eleanor thought he might hit the smaller man. “I feel this. Yes.”

“They have their orders,” Offie sulked. “Don’t be naive. This is war and we’re right on the front line.”

Eleanor faced Offie. “Naive I’m not.”

Offie formed his most winning smile. “Think of it as housekeeping. We have our uses for old Nazis, and the Russians have theirs.”

“What are you doing with them,” Eleanor demanded, “these horrors, these killers?”

Offie sat up, drawing himself to his full height. “You want me to draw you a picture? We haven’t got a single source worth the name in Albania, Poland, Hungary, Romania. We need what these people give us. Upset? Go talk to your brother. See how hard he laughs.”

“Allen? What are you saying?”

“Sure,” Offie said, far too smugly for Eleanor’s taste. “Him and Wisner and Puddicombe. Your brother Allen is kingpin of the whole shooting match. We’re moving his favorite tame Gestapo and SS men, the guys he cultivated in Italy, his Vatican links, anybody with a pretense to intelligence value, sheep-dipping ’em right, left, and center. It’s damn near a whole anti-Soviet army right now, parked all over Rome, right on Church property.”

“I can’t believe—”

“Do you think Puddicombe gave you Austria because he likes you? Allen told him to hire you, ‘to keep it in the family,’ he said to me. He wanted someone he could trust not to muck up the money side east of the Brenner Pass.”

“What … what is it I’m helping?”

“A ratline, an escape route—it runs through Rome, ends up God knows where. I can tell you we’re safe-housing half the Gestapo most wanted in Frankfurt, you know, never mind Rome.” Offie slapped the dashboard for emphasis; Janusz flinched. “See that place on the hill over there? That’s a story. Knock on the monastery door sometime, see who answers.”

Carmel Offie pulled his hat down over his eyes. Sophie looked at Eleanor, who pulled her close. Janusz kept driving, the big Studebaker pile-driving west through the snow.

A week later, after another snowfall.

The army driver dropped Eleanor off at the big wrought iron gate called Himmelpforten—“Gates of Heaven.” Eleanor had her clumsy American galoshes on, the smallest size she could find at the base PX. They squished along in the melting snow as she worked her way up the winding stone stairs to the entrance of St. Leopold’s. On the adjoining hillock, a stone barn echoed with cluckings of chickens herded by an ancient monk, his cowl up against the rising wind. The chapel bell rang and rang, but no one responded. Eleanor examined the charterhouse facade: several of the windows were cracked or blown out, and then she saw the pitted black stitch work where the cannon shells or machine-gun bullets, whatever they were, had struck the house of God. “Hell of a fight up there,” the staff sergeant had told Eleanor. He’d given her a letter of introduction from the local brigadier-general. “Five monks bought it, ma’am. Big tank battle, last day of the war. What the hell’s the point of that?”

Eleanor reached the front steps. Down the hill she could see the village, a perfect Austrian vista, church spire, a lick of gray wood smoke hanging above terra-cotta roofs, clean white stucco buildings, a column of schoolchildren singing as they crossed the cobblestone square, shiny black with snowmelt in the morning sun. She turned the corner, where the chassis of a farm tractor stood, its engine draped with an army-issue tarpaulin, a range of greasy wrenches and screwdrivers lined up there, toy soldiers on a board. A smoke-streaked Tiger tank sat beyond, its turret knocked half off.

Evidently the tractor had given up the ghost struggling with the mess in the cobbled sideyard. The yard was neatly piled with the remnants of the monastery’s west wall, whatever hadn’t been blown to pieces by the 88-millimeter cannon of the massive German tank. The rising wind blew back a laundry line of tarpaulins flapping in the damp breeze, revealing the monastery’s first-floor hallway and what remained of a library, the beautiful wooden shelves disconsolately bare. The scaffolding’s lower beams covered a shell hole blown so deep in the cobblestones you could have parked a car in it. On the third floor, a young monk—Is that what you call them? Eleanor wondered—seated high in the scaffolding swinging his sandaled feet, his shins clad in farmer’s leather leggings, watched the approach of the American lady in her colonel’s uniform.

“May I help you, madame?” He was a German, not an Austrian, a Berliner perhaps from his accent.

“I’m looking for the abbot.”

“No abbot here, madame, we’re Franciscans. That’s for Benedictines.”

“I’m sorry. Father Matthias Obermayer, then.”

“A moment.”

The novice slipped away silently, reappearing a minute later in the ground floor library and gesturing Eleanor in.

The dark central hallway was frigid. There was no electric light; the hall sconces held half-gutted candles. Somewhere above, the plumbing clanked and gurgled. The novice swung the great black refectory door open and a row of cropped heads looked up. Eleanor stopped. A reassuring fug wafted past her, a warm breath of fresh rye bread and wood fire and vegetable stew. A tall, red-faced man rose from his bench halfway down the table and motioned the novice back to his work. Father Matthias had a quick pace and a quicker temper, Eleanor gathered, taking in his headlong walk and sharp black eyes.

“Madame colonel, I received the message. I apologize, we had our tractor expire this morning, as you see.” He raised his grease-stained hands. “Do come to my office. There is a fire there, rather more comfortable than the library.”

“Where are your books?” Eleanor asked politely.

“When the fighting came close, we moved most of them into the basement of the hospital in Reinecke-Grossdorf, the nearest town. We have some irreplaceable texts—a 1494 Gutenberg, some Celtic manuscripts … and many other documents.” He wiped his hands on a petrol-soaked rag. “Oh yes, a map of your own continent, from 1512. Remarkable, that. Moving it all took us a week. They are still there, safe. The hospital basement was a bomb shelter too—I should think the doctors and nurses had something to read when they needed it most, no?”

They entered a low-ceilinged room, its joists big as railroad ties, with a fire roaring in the grate and a desk the size of an altar, topped with green glass and piled with texts and papers, behind which the restless Father Matthias stopped for a moment.

“Wood we have. Unfortunately, our furnace runs on coal. I have a monastery full of very cold monks. Worse than nuns, you know. I compare notes with the mother superior at Sankt Ursula’s. They have no furnace either, but they don’t complain. But I’m being uncharitable. We are all tested, each in his own way. Tea? It’s very good. We have a brother house in Ceylon: they sent us a good supply once the mails worked again. You had something for me, you said, a document perhaps?”

He seems to like paper, Eleanor reflected as she offered the letter.

He read in silence. “The archbishop has consented?”

“Yes.”

A reluctant silence followed while Father Matthias reread the letter. Judging from every wrinkle in his ruddy face, he was looking for a way out.

“Why?” he said, putting the letter down.

“Because I want to see for myself, Father. It’s personal.”

His eyes flashed a warning. “It’s not, for me. I would take anyone here. Anyone. That is clear?”

“Very clear,” Eleanor agreed.

“They may not speak to you,” he warned. “They never speak to us, except for the essentials. It’s not much of a life … although I have some hope one or two of them might find God here.” He gave a thin smile. “But then I’m an incurable optimist. Brother Anton will take you. I have another commitment, at the infirmary. A brother is dying—my turn at the vigil.”

“Thank you.”

Father Matthias held the door for Eleanor. “Colonel Dulles, a last question. Do you pray?”

“Yes, Father, I do.”

“Then pray for me, will you?”

The novice reappeared and led Eleanor down the hall. He unlocked a door, revealing a narrow set of stone stairs. He climbed, one flight then a second, stone steps worn by centuries of sandals. Another door opened on a short hall lined with ceramic brick, perhaps once a steam bath or sauna; at the end of the hall he knocked, three fast, one slow, and unlocked the heavy iron door.

The attic was large, but its ceiling sloped sharply. A row of canvas partitions reminded Eleanor of the field hospitals she’d seen in France in the last war. These divided the space off a central corridor into a half dozen cubicles. There was dead silence except for the crackling of a small woodstove, tinking away under the eaves.

“It’s Brother Anton,” the novice announced. A man, clearly an officer, emerged from the canvas cubicle closest to the door. He stood well over six feet, with intelligent, unworried eyes. “There’s an American colonel here to see you. The bishop sent her. It’s all right.”

Two more men appeared, one bearded and thickset, the other taller. They stared at her, then the taller one turned on his heel and returned to his room; a cot squeaked. The officer type stepped forward, clicked his heels, and bowed, very correctly. Neither was over thirty: the very picture of SS men. All wore nondescript civilian clothes, woodsmen’s clothes; a row of hobnailed boots stood in precise order near the door, well dubbined and cared for. The room smelt of disinfectant and cedar, like the upstairs closets of the lakeside Dulles house at Henderson Harbor.

“We are not prepared to entertain, colonel,” the first officer said. His soft, low voice reminded her of Allen’s, burnished with a chill charm. “My apologies.”

“You must be Major Metz.”

“Obersturmbannführer, strictly speaking. I am SS. As you see.”

Metz’s name was on want lists all over southern Europe, accused of terrible things in the anti-partisan campaign in Slovenia—a barn full of villagers set aflame, summary shootings, children taken away; Eleanor had stopped reading the circular after that. The other two were on Soviet want lists, for God alone knew what horrors there. Yet here they were, plain as day, eating monastery food and working in the grounds—well rested, in the pink, untroubled.

“Do you want me to stay with you, colonel?” Brother Anton asked.

“No. No, that’s quite all right. I’m—I’m ready to go. Thank you, Major Metz. Good day.”

Metz said nothing, but clicked his heels again and gave another curt bow. He’d never moved, never conceded an inch.

Outside, in the cold hall, at the dumbwaiter door, the novice looked at her curiously. “I serve them every day, you know, madame. They’ve been here for almost a year, waiting to go to Italy. Many people come to visit them, you’d be surprised.”

“That’s what everyone tells me.”

“Sorry, madame?”

“That I’d be surprised.”

LI

LONDON
SPRING 1947

They sat, backs to the wall, in the company of demobilized men quenching their thirst after a day’s legging it around the city looking for work, a press of young men full of ideas and impatience, trying to catch up with the lost years of their lives, arguing football and film stars and money. Misha and Shiloah met at a Hammersmith pub just up from the river. After the preliminaries, Shiloah raised a finger for a second round and began to outline Sol Lifton’s clever course through the paper sea of Safehaven. By the time Shiloah had finished, the pub was full. “If these people really knew what the game was, they’d be in the streets,” Misha said.

“Well, my young friend, be kind,” Shiloah warned. “They believed they were fighting for the very best human beings aspire to.”

“Be kind? I take it there’s a job in this for me, Reuven. Is kindness involved?”

“Of a sort, of a sort. We need certain papers.”

“It’s shaky stuff, turning a man for your own ends,” Misha reflected. “If it backfires … God help you.”

Shiloah looked at Misha, measuring him. “I sincerely hope He will. Because unless I’m completely off the mark, Misha, there will be a war in Palestine. Agreed?” Misha nodded and Shiloah continued: “If we have the United Nations at our back, then we’ve a cause the world recognizes. Lose the vote and we fight absolutely alone. The world will show us no more pity than during the Shoah.”

Some of the men in the pub stood in a circle singing a rower’s song Misha dimly remembered from his Cambridge days. “Where are these papers you want?” he asked over the din.

“We need the index for Safehaven, Misha.”

“We know this exists?” The singing was louder now; Misha could barely hear Shiloah’s answer, delivered into his ear with force.

“Every archive has an index, Misha, a road map. No index, no eyes, only useless files gathering dust in the government’s belly. Blind, you see?”

Misha watched the pub singers, arms around one another’s shoulders, glasses high. He turned to face Shiloah.

“Eleanor,” Misha said, but Shiloah did not make out the word. He bent closer, so close Misha could make out the individual hairs on his temple.

“Eleanor,” Misha said again.

This time Shiloah understood him.

NSA copy: National Security Agency / Document Declassification 16.722 [rubber stamp] [initials]

Treasury Department

G6/8875

SAFEHAVEN [stamp]

do not index

do not cross-reference [stamp]

eyes only

distribution list: [BLACKED OUT]

released for destruction [stamp]

shredding release: RHK [stamp] [signature]

February 15 1962

typescript of conversation recorded between AR/617 and GL26/279

transcribed by EMcK from acetate disks 456/457

date recorded: 24 April 1947 from 1869 local time device installed: 22 April 1947 by [illegible] [initials]

Old State Department Building

room 354

-begins-

617 filthy weather/i couldnt find a cab for blocks /six seconds silence/

279 your soaked my dear/look at you/how wonderful to see you again mish

617 you too eleanor/your looking well

279 [BLACKED OUT] told me youd crossed paths in bern

617 yes i saw him once or twice/usually near the river on walks

/22 seconds noise/poss vacuum cleaner in hallway

279 your lucky i was still here [inaudible]

617 working late

279 trying not to work late [laughter]/you havent changed a bit

617 im still paddling whenever i can/my last trip was across the chesapeake two days ago/two duck hunters nearly did me in

279 i can send down for coffee

617 im fine thanks/hows sophie

279 well/schools fine/shes a bit talkative/must be the dulles in her

617 what fresh crisis are you managing tonight

279 trieste again/its a dangerous situation all told/im going back this fall/im hoping the open city plan [inaudible] because tito has [inaudible]

617 [BLACKED OUT]

279 [BLACKED OUT] services/but i dont know/theres all kinds of sensitive cross-border things were trying/the liaison [BLACKED OUT] 617 i was at school with [BLACKED OUT]

279 [inaudible] the entire building at this hour

617 cant be too careful

279 you look worried

617 i have a contract with an old treasury friend to sort out some old files

279 we have no secrets mish/i trust you like family

617 thats it actually/theres family implications eleanor/your aware treasury began searching for nazi offshore assets in 1943/you were state liaison to one of the investigative committees/i think

279 german and austrian central banking/yes/i signed on shortly after [BLACKED OUT] left for bern/you were still here/you hadnt gone to bern right

617 thats right/i still had that tiny place near the cathedral

279 [laughter][inaudible] when it rains

617 except for the eggs/i dont think i ever ate eggs again [laughter]

279 so

617 well/i have some news

279 yes

617 its not good /four seconds silence/

279 your frightening me/what is it

617 it appears that [BLACKED OUT] did client work in bern

279 what kind of client work 617 the kind i was sent to find for m.e.w./constructively what weve discovered is treason/representing his client interests with the nazis 279 whats he done

617 it looks like/and im not saying this would be my testimony in court

279 go on

617 [BLACKED OUT] files are in the basement here/all of them/thats where [BLACKED OUT] are filed/the [BLACKED OUT] originals /12 seconds silence/

279 youve seen them

617 yes/but safehaven was shut down and now state has everything/that’s true /seven seconds silence/

617 i need the index/the index downstairs /seven seconds silence/

279 can you protect [BLACKED OUT] if you have it

617 hes a small fish/theres far bigger /eight seconds silence/

279 i dont know where your going with this

617 [inaudible] the index itself

279 yes/but can you protect [BLACKED OUT] going to run for the senate in [BLACKED OUT] is still his law partner at [BLACKED OUT] cromwell/itd be a disaster for [BLACKED OUT]/never mind break [BLACKED OUT] heart

617 i know how safehaven worked/but without the index i cant protect him/the state files alone run into the hundreds/i ran the hollerith cards through for the post files/and you realize theres all kinds of collateral filings at s.s.u. [FOOTNOTE] too/the military side as well /six seconds silence/

279 how bad is it

617 i think the political implications are pretty awful/its enough to end his career/whatever it does to [BLACKED OUT]/the state files ive seen are pretty clear/he was trying to free up swiss ig farben securities for pennies/for himself and his clients/using his connections in bern with the/ENDS

[DISK CHANGE/456/457]

279 [inaudible] to the end/hes my [BLACKED OUT] /12 seconds silence/

279 without the index/you cant find a thing/its just paperwork on shelves

617 thats what im thinking

279 where

617 the safehaven state liaison files/the central index to states holdings

279 how many other indexes are there

617 safehaven packed up so fast ours here appears to be the only one left/only one i know of /10 seconds silence/telephone ring

279 hello/oh hello norton/no the yugoslav consular officer is a croat named pejakovic/hes reliable/certainly/no id ask [BLACKED OUT]/hes seen that material/fine/goodbye /three seconds silence/

279 where was i/you said there were bigger fish

617 [BLACKED OUT] for sure/and [BLACKED OUT]/ive seen the banking files/they came across my desk more than once/so you see its very big/bigger than [BLACKED OUT]

279 the democrats would have something like this page one from coast to coast mish

617 yes/hang on/dont say anything/ill write it down /six seconds silence/

617 nod if you agree /nine seconds silence/

279 my god/thats bold

617 what do you think /nine seconds silence/

279 cant you just lose the evidence

617 its all we have

279 I need to think /knock on door/

279 one moment [inaudible] /22 seconds inaudible conversation/

279 i feel sick mish/i feel physically sick/i feel heartsick/this is my [BLACKED OUT] were talking about

617 i couldnt believe it either

279 i need to talk to [BLACKED OUT]

617 fine but i have to move fast/you understand/theres almost no time /scrape of furniture/

/13 seconds inaudible conversation/

ENDS

LII

SAG HARBOR, NEW YORK
APRIL 1947

It was an hour before sunset, with the party at its height, the porch deck full of chairs and tables, the tablecloths fluttering in the shore breeze, the lanterns awaiting the dusk. Eleanor and Foster left the party separately, making their way to the dock where the thirty-footer lay moored. A cloud of fireflies curled close to shore and their dancing light reflected off the waxed hull. Aboard, they had no need to speak; they each went about their separate duties in silence. Six years it had been, the summer of 1941, since their last sail together, the last summer of America’s peace, on the Chesapeake, on a beautifully rigged boat someone had lent Foster for the weekend.

She brought up a pair of Scotches from the galley and sat herself on the bench seat to her brother’s left, at the tiller. They clinked glasses and she broke the silence between them.

“Treasury has had a project called Safehaven up and going since the fall of 1944. It’s a vacuum cleaner of a thing, taking in all kinds of evidence, good, bad, and indifferent, about German financial connections. It’s Morgenthau’s brainchild.”

“Heard so,” Foster replied. “You know, Ellie, if Truman’s boys spent half as much time trying to figure out how to get Germany back on her feet as they do looking for Nazi loot, we’d all be further ahead.”

This was old territory; Eleanor chose not to argue with him. “The thing of it is, Foster, Safehaven had a large team in Bern during the war.”

Foster looked down at her over the top of his spectacles and raised his eyebrows. “Heard that. There’s a shop in London too.”

Ellie nodded. They were half a mile from shore already and it was a startlingly beautiful sunset on Lake Ontario. The lake’s wave tops were paved with egg-yolk yellow light. The clouds huddled around the crest of the setting sun, and the bobbing of the boat was all she’d ever needed to calm herself.

“They wanted to send Allen home, you know,” she said. “I saw the file at State, from the Bern post files. Safehaven’s after him.”

Foster was immobile. He had that set to his jaw, though, that meant he hadn’t liked what he’d heard. If Foster hated anything, it was hearing something he hadn’t known about beforehand. “Sent home for what? What’ve you seen?”

“The Treasury people don’t like me and I don’t like them, Foster,” Eleanor began by way of preamble.

“Doesn’t matter a damn who’s behind it,” her brother replied. “What matters is what they’ve got to show the President. That’s the name of the game.” Foster steered the boat to the northwest with a practiced swing of the tiller. “What’ve you seen, Ellie? What have they got?”

“They had enough to send him home. Looks to me like they caught Allen red-handed, with his hand in the cookie jar.”

“Specifically? What exactly?”

“I think Allen was cutting a deal with IG Farben while the war was still on. Him and that smoothie Hungarian sidekick of his, Gero whatever.”

Foster said nothing, the thoughts working their way across his impassive face. “Did you see any reference in what you read to evidence describing who the vendors actually were?”

“No. The Safehaven people seem to have figured out he wanted to piece off the Farben Swiss subsidiaries. He knew the right banks to ask, I’m told.”

Foster nodded. “Well, that’s something. At least he wasn’t paying the SS cash on the barrelhead,” Foster said, grim-faced. Then he caught the look of horror on her face and broke out a rare laugh.

Eleanor flushed and straightened. “Foster, you may not want to take this seriously, but I could lose my good name, maybe my career at State, if this gets out. I’ve worked too damn hard for too damn long to be brought down by that man.” She sat there, her jaw out, Foster’s feminine double, and he looked down at her and saw his own reflection in her anger. “You’re not a woman stuck in a man’s world, Foster, with just about everyone around you waiting to see you fail. I don’t need to give them a reason, Foster, believe me.”

“I understand,” Foster said, his voice too hoarse to be heard over the flapping of the sails as he began to tack into the dying evening breeze. “Believe me, I do. I’ve decided to run for the Senate, Ellie. Not to mention I’m on the delegation at the UN on the Palestine file.”

“Palestine. There’s another kettle of fish.”

“We’re near the sandbar. Let’s haul up for a bit, Ellie, shall we?” Foster asked. They reefed in the sails, dropped anchor, and let the sailboat yaw in the waves of Long Island Sound.

“Foster, if this gets out,” Eleanor announced, “Allen’s going to bring us all down, along with everything we’ve ever worked for, gone.”

Foster propped his moccasins up on the taffrail. “Truman’s going to die a quiet death in the next election. And we should be at the head of the line when President Dewey hands out the spoils. Question is, how can what Treasury have on Allen upset the applecart? First, what have they got? Second, where have they got it? Third,” Foster asked, counting his points off on his fingertips, “who the hell is looking after it? Always best if your opponent’s bullets are in your hand and he’s pointing an empty gun at you.”

On the shore, the first lights were coming on, barely visible in the full light of the sunset, and the trees of the lakeshore forests had merged to a single rough hedge against the sky.

Eleanor listened, but she wasn’t there. A kernel of resolution about Misha’s overture had taken root in her. With all her might she stared at the last of the sun, remembering Clover’s long-ago remark, the one about sharks.

LIII

WASHINGTON, D.C.
MAY 1947

A week later. She’d paced her office, distracted and jumpy, from half past eight onwards, working up her nerve. How do criminals do it? she wondered, staring out her window. No wonder they look so hunted. She’d worn her gray twinset this morning, wanting to blend into the woodwork, seeking camouflage.

After waiting for the mail clerk to clear the floor’s morning post and send the elevator back up, Eleanor took the elevator to the basement, thankfully alone, her big book bag in front of her like armor.

“Mornin,’ Miz Dulles,” the guard at the archive door drawled, unlocking the electric gate with a practiced fingertip on the Open button. “Nice to see y’all. Havin’ a wander, are you?”

“You can open that gate sight unseen, Mr. Carlson,” Eleanor said, and showed him the authorization she had typed herself, to view the southwestern Europe post files.

“Oh, you know me, Miz Dulles,” Carlson replied vaguely, then signed off on the clearance panel, handed her an orange chit, and filed Eleanor’s dummy authorization in his routing tray. “Don’t need to tell you where the department’s Austria files are, now, do I, Miz Dulles?”

“I’m sure you don’t, Mr. Carlson,” Eleanor replied brightly. She shifted her book bag against her side and felt the big binder nudge against her ribs. She nearly gave up, then and there. Her heart was pounding; a caterpillar of sweat zigzagged down her back.

“Good luck, ma’am. Looks like you got a pile to do.” He was practically doffing his cap, Eleanor noted with satisfaction. “Can I carry that big green feller for you, ma’am?”

“Oh, no, thanks, there’s life in the old gal yet.” He favored her with a Southerner’s chuckle as she hoisted her knit book bag over her shoulder and turned toward the archives room. “Never ends, does it, Mr. Carlson?” she asked over her shoulder, and he laughed again.

Instead of turning right, for Austria, Eleanor strode across the main aisle then took a sharp left, where an old black-on-green metal sign read Treasury Liaison.

The State Department’s basement archive was nicknamed “the vault” but was in fact a single vast room, perhaps a hundred feet long and half as broad, filled with a maze of filing cabinets jammed together in quadrangles to form the walls of small rooms of cabinets and even smaller alcoves; some of the alcoves had a massive head-high safe forming one wall. It was rather like being in a medieval labyrinth except the hedge was green metal, not leaf and limb. Eleanor double-checked the serial number for boxes upon boxes of State’s Safehaven accession, moved here to the department’s basement trove when OSS vanished into thin air a year ago. “No one will want to read these files but you, trust me,” Misha had told her. “No one will be the wiser. The trick will be …”

Eleanor knew what the trick would be: she found the right alcove and double-checked the citation on her paper slip.

The filing cabinets stood shoulder-high to her; amongst them waited a simple desk and chair. She laid the big olive binder down, then scanned the cards indicating the holdings of the filing cabinets around her. She started on her left, determined to move clockwise until she found the index. She opened the first filing cabinet.

As the drawer rumbled to its full extension, Eleanor’s mind spun furiously. She glanced away, taking a deep breath. Indeed what she’d planned on was impossible: the Safehaven index was on punch cards, thousands of them, hanging from Hollerith racks. The cards swung slowly back and forth, mocking her. She put her hand on them to stop the swinging.

It had never occurred to her, because she’d seen all kinds of indices before in State’s neat binders containing neat columns of cross-references and file locators, that Safehaven was an octopus, sucking in tens of thousands of leads for thousands of potential investigations around the globe. She should have guessed that the scope of the filings meant a huge index, with thousands of cross-filings.

She reached for the worn wooden chair, steadying herself with a hand on the chair back.

Eleanor forced a deep breath into the deepest part of her lungs, the way she did when white water lay ahead and she had to work her faltboot through the treacherous currents around the rocks. I must think.

She discarded several options and then realized that sitting there was a dead giveaway. She was at work, this was a place she knew, where she was respected, where she had made herself useful. She had damn well better look the part.

She pulled a fresh legal pad in front of her and opened her fountain pen. You have to dig a hole, start somewhere.

From the third drawer—until the day she died she would never be able to explain why she picked the third drawer—she pulled at random some three dozen cards and fanned them out on the tabletop.

TEHRAN/CONFERENCE/PROCEEDINGS
TELEGRAPH/DECRYPTS
TELEPHONE/WIRETAPS/SOURCE
TELEXES/OTHER
TRANSCRIPTS/WIRETAPS
TRANSFERS/CABLE/DECRYPTS

She stopped.

They tapped Allen’s phone in Bern.

She reached for the Hollerith needle in the tray atop the cabinet, standing on tiptoe to get it, her back cracking as she stretched. Replacing the cards at the head of the queue of hundreds in the third drawer, she opened the first drawer and looked for the D section.

There it was, a sub-archive card that read: DECRYPTS/SOURCE/ REPORTS/BERN and LONDON and a dozen other cities, including New York and Rome and Lisbon. Safehaven had been tapping the bank transfers.

Certain she had found the shorthand “handwriting” of the financial investigators, Eleanor lifted the card and looked at its back.

Blank.

She bit her lip.

Think: Safehaven needed evidence.

If you knew the accounts, you knew the principals involved … and that’s the way indictments are built, name by name, date by date.

She carefully inserted the pin through the punch card hole for Accounts and was rewarded with a rich trove of decrypt filings. They were all in a single box: 287–0003/D098.1.

She looked at her watch. Ten-twelve. It was, Eleanor knew, Carlson’s habit to ask her if she wanted coffee from the canteen, something they shared at his counter for a few minutes, catching up on the department gossip. She had six or seven minutes. A scrape of ladder on linoleum and a flicker of light: several aisles over, the janitor plied his trade, changing the fluorescent tubes.

Eleanor pried her shoes off, leaving them neatly paired beneath the worktable. She checked her note against the alcove’s holdings and felt her heart quicken: the decrypts were in the next alcove.

Some filing clerk had grown bored or lazy or both—her target lay there on the floor, propping up a carton of General Electric government-issue fluorescent tubes. She lifted the lid off the box and took out the first file folder. It was the subindex for all the liaison decrypt files, from stations all over the world, destined for the Safehaven team from non-Treasury sources.

And it was at least two inches thick, hundreds of pages.

Eleanor returned to her press binder in the first alcove and removed the binder’s five hundred blank pages, her hands shaking. She squared off the subindex and slid the block of paper into her binder.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

The decrypt subindex was far, far too thick.

She stared at the ceiling. Long tracks of fluorescent lights flickered and hummed overhead.

Eleanor needed a pretext, in case the janitor grew suspicious, so she drew several files at random from the cabinet next to the worktable and made the notes of a madwoman, scrawling names and dates in such a hodgepodge no one could ever decipher her handwriting.

She took up her fountain pen and pad and returned to the second alcove.

It couldn’t be.

In the box that held the old, discarded fluorescent tubes upright, in splendid chaos, lay a half dozen steel tins, each numbered by hand on strips of masking tape, the lighting tubes jammed amongst them, throwaways.

Eleanor did not dare move. She made herself take a silent deep breath and then carefully moved the glass tubes apart and, one by one, lifted the tins out and pressed them between her notepad and her bosom.

After sliding the tins into her book bag, she checked her watch.

Ten-nineteen: coffee time.

In a fever of triumph, Eleanor put her shoes back on, jammed her pen behind her ear, and took a pair of coins from her change purse, marching to Carlson’s station. “My turn for coffee today, Mr. Carlson,” she declared, passing him at full tilt. “To repay a gentleman’s kindness.”

“Why, thank you, Miz Dulles. Right kind of you.”

Double cream, no sugar. She had tea. The round-trip took twelve minutes.

She refused Carlson’s nickel for the coffee and returned to the first alcove. In the distance she could hear the rubbery squealings of a pushcart: the lighting repairman, back at it.

Even better, she thought; she was getting a taste for the game.

She stepped out of the decrypts alcove, just in Carlson’s sight line, and where her own doings would stay out of the repairman’s view. “Excuse me,” she called out as he came down the aisle. “There’s a bulb or whatever you call it out here, sir. The buzzing’s making me crazy.”

He was dark and sullen and not pleased to have a short woman in glasses order him around. “Yes, ma’am,” he muttered, then something else Eleanor couldn’t make out.

A minute later she struggled down the aisle to Carlson’s post, her cardigan, Waterman pen, and legal pad under one arm, the binder balanced awkwardly atop the rest.

“Oh, Miz Dulles, please,” he called out, and strode around his counter to help her. “Let me take that for you, Miz Dulles. Half as big as you are, begging your pardon, ma’am.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Carlson, I’m sure,” she said primly, adjusting her teetering hat with a hand freed by the guard’s kindness. “It’s accounting. Very hard on the eyes, but I see your colleague is replacing the bulb over there.”

Mr. Carlson made a disapproving face. “’Bout time and all, Miz Dulles. Which floor, please?”

“Mine, Mr. Carlson.”

“Moving up in the world, Miz Dulles, getting a floor all to your lonesome.”

Eleanor kept the chat going back and forth with the talkative commissionaire until the elevator arrived. Carlson would have given her flowers if he’d had them, she thought to herself as the elevator door closed. She quickly punched the button for the ground floor and stepped into a Chinese delegation bound for a meeting upstairs.

She walked carefully out the front doors, willing herself to disappear into the mid-morning strollers on the sidewalk. Across the street she could see a face in a cab window. The book bag chafed at her shoulder; Eleanor shrugged it back to a more comfortable spot.

Her spectacles were slipping down her nose and she realized to her embarrassment that her forehead was tracked with perspiration. As she waved to Misha in the cab, one of the pilfered microfilm tins slipped down, threatening to fall out from under her hat. For one long, delicious moment she felt like a woman who’d had one champagne too many.

LIV

TEL AVIV
SEPTEMBER 1947

They met away from downtown, in a boarded-up plumbing supply store donated by a wealthy benefactor, the dusty metal shelving still there for cover; telephone technicians were inspecting Ben-Gurion’s house for microphones and wiretaps. Shiloah and Lifton smoked as they read through the neatly stacked piles of smudgy microfilm images, blown up on glossy paper, all of which Lifton’s people had sorted into orange crates. Amongst themselves they called the cache of Safehaven documents “the fruit market.”

Working around the clock, they’d sorted the documents into subfiles that they’d delivered to the abandoned shop through the busy kitchen of the restaurant next door, wrapped in painter’s drop cloths. “We had to send to Athens for more photographic paper,” Sol Lifton said, grizzled with fatigue and nicotine. “That took two days. We didn’t have enough in the whole city to print all this.”

He and two Agency colleagues had segregated the files into a dozen stacks. Lifton had pinned a long sheet of blank newsprint on the wall, filling that in short order with notes: their road map through the maze of paper. “What we have here is an archive of financial intelligence reports from all over the U.S. government,” he said as he lettered his chart, “at home and abroad. Quite a proposition. I must say, Reuven, this was a masterstroke, to ‘organize’ the entire investigation index.”

Ben-Gurion entered without knocking and took in the secret sweatshop. “It’s a bargain at that, Reuven,” he said. “The Cabinet has agreed to proceed.” Ben-Gurion read at random a foreign exchange document from a Dutch bank. “Very imaginative, but such a scheme requires many banks, many intermediaries. How did the Nazis think they could keep these transactions secret?”

Lifton was a cautious man but sure of his ground, another one Shiloah had unearthed on his travels, in the days when Lifton was working nights auditing hotels for an English accountancy firm. “The secret’s held because so many people are implicated,” he began. “Look at the names of the businesses involved, the banks, the law firms—one falls, they all fall,” he said, interlacing his fingertips. “Sure, it’s an open secret that the war meant nothing for some big businesses, but try to assemble a criminal prosecution against such men. No. These are the fingerprints of American business all over the Nazi finance system.”

Ben-Gurion sat down at the table near the balcony double doors. He put down the sheaf of photographic paper and lowered his head into his hands, scratching at his mane of white hair. “What we could do is raise evidence to demand a bankers’ trial on the American side. It’d be true, but would the reaction in America influence the vote?” He rubbed his eyes, tired. “I’m running out of ideas.”

“Our enemies will say we are in league with the Ruhr capitalists and anti-Soviet, David,” Shiloah countered, “because we’re shifting the blame that’s rightfully on German shoulders. And our friends will say we let the Nazis off lightly because we’re criticizing the Americans. No, we must be very, very careful. We make this move, we never get it back.”

“Could sell the whole thing to the Russians and retire,” Lifton joked, straight-faced. “That’d put paid to the Nuremberg trials, bang, like that.”

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Ben-Gurion replied. “Or we could eliminate the middleman and bribe the English authorities here direct,” he muttered. “Look, what about carefully tipping the American Congress? We have friends there who know there’s more to the story than what’s in the newspapers.”

“Take forever,” Shiloah said. “No, I think we burn someone who can help us now.” He held up a photostat of a Swiss lawyer’s letters of instruction from a New York law firm. “Our goal is to win this vote, no? Then we do what we have to, David. One of Sol’s assistants found this.”

Holding the photostat up to the light, Ben-Gurion considered the lawyer’s letter, following the formal business German with the back of his fingertip. “I think I follow. This letter instructs certain account transfers, am I right?”

“Correct, chief. The beauty of the letter,” Lifton said, “is that it tells us which amounts, from which bank to which bank. We can track a secret transaction, clear as day, from New York to the Nazi accounts in Zürich.”

“And how the hell did the Americans get this?” Ben-Gurion was fascinated. “This is good, very good. Tell me it’s not a forgery.”

Lifton shook his head no. “Don’t worry, chief. My boys found a dozen or so other letters like it, and half of them are identical instructions, for identical accounts.” He reached for a carbon copy Shiloah was holding. “Here’s a wiretap of a conversation between Zürich and one of the corresponding banks. The middlemen lost some business, they got annoyed. That’s what we think, from other correspondence. Straight-out jealousy, a leak to the competition’s enemy.”

Ben-Gurion nodded. “Not a tactic strange to us, my friends,” he muttered. “Then why haven’t the Americans prosecuted their own people for this kind of thing?” he wondered. “Surely that’s enough to send a man to prison.”

“Send you and me to prison, David, if we were caught, but not those people. That’s the point.”

Ben-Gurion grunted assent. He was reading Lifton’s abstract again, his glasses halfway down the bridge of his nose. “Why did you mention the Russians a moment ago, Sol?”

“We could use the votes they might swing our way, but they’re too few.”

“Careful, David: once Stalin is in, it’s hell to get him out again,” Shiloah reasoned. “He’s not voting for us because he loves us: he wants to send in the Red Army if Palestine becomes a war zone. That’s his play.”

Ben-Gurion put down Lifton’s abstract and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. “We should blackmail the Pope,” he said slowly, “if what this file on the Vatican investments says is true.”

They all thought about that for a moment, and then Lifton broke the silence with an uncharacteristically loud laugh and then they all laughed. “It’s true, all right, chief,” Sol agreed, “but we can’t take on the Vatican. Behind the Pope are forty million American Catholics. The Pope already stands against a Jewish Jerusalem.”

Shiloah eyed Lifton’s list. “What’s the biggest swing bloc of votes, gentlemen? It’s right there on Sol’s list—the Catholic countries of Europe and South America.” He tapped the wall chart with his index finger. “If we break the Vatican’s hold on that bloc, we’re up a dozen, maybe even fifteen votes.” He turned to face Ben-Gurion across the table where the abstracts lay amid the ashtrays and teacups. “Fifteen votes. That’s enough for a win.”

The other two looked at him. “And how are we going to do that?” Lifton demanded, his voice half an octave higher in disbelief. “You can’t be serious, Reuven. Blackmailing a Pope?”

“Not the Pope in Rome, Sol. Another pope, an American one. There,” he said, pointing at the corporate officers on another piece of letterhead. He held the shiny photo of the document high, flexing it slightly, sarcastically. “Let’s start at the top, shall we? We’re going to build a case around that letter of instruction. We’ll need a file that’ll give the pope of Wall Street a heart attack when he opens the first page.”

LV

WASHINGTON, D.C.
OCTOBER 1947

To use Donovan’s phrase, they were building the beast, now dubbed the Central Intelligence Agency. The workmen and floor polishers were knocking the newly acquired offices into shape; the phones had arrived that afternoon, a crate of them spilling straw in the corner of Allen’s office. Wisner had torn them open, impatient to test the lines. He and Allen had been talking for a good hour, canteen coffee cups on the desk and a fifth of Scotch alongside Allen’s pipe accoutrements. A girl in a cloth coat and hat, ready for home, had brought them a tray of cold cuts and departed. A wanderer looked in, dark-faced and quick, asking for someone who knew “Ed at the FBI,” shrugged at Allen’s apology, and left.

“Who’s that?” Wisner asked around a mouthful of pumpernickel and salami.

“One of Carmel’s finds. Personally knows half of Bulgaria, apparently.”

“Oh. So the report’s coming along?”

“I’m hiding the meaning rather well. When you’re writing for Congress,” Allen advised, “it’s the art of it, actually.”

Allen looked over, awaiting Frank’s reply, but Wisner was busy staring, his face a study in irritation, at the gray cadaver of Jim Angleton, who’d appeared silently. “I wish he wouldn’t do that,” Wisner complained to Allen. “Makes me jumpy.”

“Jim never knocks, do you, Jim?” Allen asked. “So what’s the latest from Gallup?”

“Dewey’s ahead by eight percent and climbing. Could be a landslide, my man says.”

“I’d like to think we had a future either way,” Wisner fretted.

“Give it a rest, Frank, we’re home and dry. I’ve just finished cheering Jim Kronthal up, don’t you start.”

“About the polygraphs, Allen,” Angleton breathed. “We need to resolve this before we go much further. I want to polygraph the entire intake, all two hundred of us.”

Allen stopped reboring his pipe. “No,” he ordered. “Flat-out no. We’re having an immaculate conception here, and I don’t want Hoover or the military people involved. No.”

“Everyone gets a free pass?” Angleton asked, eyes huge behind his thick lenses. “Even the ones with suspect contacts, ones might be a risk?”

“Everyone. You can’t flutter nine out of ten, Jim, and alienate them in favor of the one you don’t. No: everyone’s in or everyone’s out. And they’re in. End of argument.”

“First off, there’s no reason to believe—” Wisner interposed.

Angleton cut across him: “There’s every reason to believe the Soviets would plant somebody in the first intake. Every reason. I’ll want a memo to cover that, Allen.”

“Jim, you worry too much, really you do,” Allen chuckled. “You’d think it was the end of the world, counterintelligence-wise.”

Angleton’s sepulchral face remained inscrutable. “It’s a mistake, Allen. I promise you.”

“Jim, the day we both make a mistake about the same thing is the day I’ll hang up my deerstalker, all right? Let’s move on. We’re talking about moving money for the Ukrainians, any ideas?”

“I’ll get back to you, yes,” Angleton replied, and faded out again, silently as he’d come.

“Let’s have a lunch tomorrow, sort things out,” Allen called after him. “He’ll call. He always does,” he said to Wisner, who’d been watching.

“He gives me the willies, sliding in and out of here,” Wisner observed, “the ghost of Ichabod Crane.”

“An operatic personality,” Allen offered. “Cut him some slack: he’s the best counterintelligence mind we’ve got.”

Wisner rolled his eyes. “Jim was born five hundred years too late: he should’ve run the Spanish Inquisition. Hell, if we don’t trust these guys, our very own, the guys we start with, who can we trust?”

“Don’t give him ideas,” Allen said, chuckling again, as Carmel Offie’s laughter wheezed down the hall.

“That’s it, won’t get a lick of work done now,” Wisner said, rolling his eyes again. A fresh gale of laughter, deeper. Kronthal, Allen recognized, he and Offie back from a liquid lunch somewhere divey—Offie loved slumming.

A desultory three-way gossip session followed. Wisner, who found Offie a little too queer for his taste, struck up a long phone conversation as the others traded scuttlebutt about the European stations. So it was that Frank Wisner saw her first: the other three parleyed near Allen’s window, but Frank was on the phone, closest to the door. He looked up, snapping his fingers to silence the others.

“Hello, Eleanor,” Allen said quietly. “How long have you been here?”

“Long enough. Hello, Carmel. James.” Eleanor entered and nodded at Wisner, who’d pointedly put his hand over the phone then retracted it, speaking into the handpiece quite fast: “I can hear you, yes. One moment, I’ll call back. Yes. Not now.”

“Long enough?” Allen asked.

“Long enough. Can we speak?” Eleanor inclined her head down the hall.

“Yes. Let’s go,” said Allen, his face dark. “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

“Nice to see you all,” Eleanor offered as she stepped out ahead of Allen.

Offie’s instinct was, as ever, to smooth: “You too, Eleanor. The tiles are done in the washroom, Allen. The boardroom’s got no carpets yet. To your left.”

As Allen muttered, “I know where it is,” Eleanor glanced back. It’s true, she thought—they’re all in awe of him.

Allen stared straight ahead, simmering. “How the devil did you get in?”

“I told them who I was—no false name, no code words.” Eleanor poked him with an elbow, but Allen gave no notice. “Besides, I’m a colonel and a State Department political adviser—never mind my woman’s wiles. These things still count for something, even with your gatekeepers.”

“Soon fix that. Why have you come?” His fingers dived into his pockets; change tinkled.

They’d reached the boardroom, slick with fresh paint and new furniture mottled with packing dust. Neither took a chair. “My, Allen, questions, questions,” Eleanor chided. “Not: How are you, Ellie? How is Sophie? What news from Vienna? No: why have I come? You look harried.”

“It’s a busy time around here.”

“Then perhaps you should take a break,” Eleanor suggested coolly. “Take the family somewhere. Look at you, pale as a pigeon. You haven’t seen sunlight in weeks.”

“What’s brought you here, Eleanor? Out with it.” Allen pulled at his ear, wary.

“You’re the man with your finger on the secret pulse. Don’t tell me I know something you don’t? That’d be something to tell the boys back at the office.” Eleanor considered him: Whatever I had of him, I’ve lost him, I’ve lost him.

“What’s the point here, Ellie?”

“You stay. You get to stay.”

“Stay? What on earth do you mean?”

“That’s the first part.”

“First part of what?” Allen stared: she had his attention now.

“Listen. You’ll learn something.”

“I’m listening.”

The anger shimmered off him and for a moment Eleanor thought she’d lose her nerve. She bit the inside of her cheek and took a breath. “The second part is that the UN will vote to partition Palestine.”

Allen laughed in disbelief. “Hate to burst your balloon, Madame Secretary of State, but word is the Zionists stand a dozen votes short.”

“I’m sure they do. But I’m right.”

“You’re off your socialist rocker. Wisner just got off the phone with Foster. Foster says it’s touch and go. The Zionists lost the straw vote yesterday by twelve votes.”

“You get to stay. And the vote passes. I’m going now.”

He was more puzzled than angry now, the control back, the smoother, malleable Allen working up his charm. “Wait, you can’t leave it at that. What are you telling me?”

“I’m keeping it in the family, Allen.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Gunter Neimann.”

“I still don’t understand,” Allen repeated. “Who’s he?” He’d sprung his hands against his hips, echo of the boy’s pose before a tantrum.

“I guess you can’t remember everyone in your line of work, can you?” Eleanor murmured. For a moment she pitied him. “It’s a secret. You love secrets? Well, I love you. I love you, Allen. I don’t like you much, but I do love you.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“I say I love you, you say what’s wrong. Why can’t anyone in this family speak their heart?”

Eleanor left him there. She took the back stairs down, her big handbag jostling against her side, shield against whatever fresh vitriol Allen and his sergeants brewed amongst themselves in their new rooms. A thought came to Eleanor as she caught her breath, felt her throat relax: The opposite of love isn’t hate—it’s power. She had seen that equation just then, there in the sharpness in Allen’s eyes as he calculated all he might lose.

LVI

NEW YORK
NOVEMBER 22, 1947

Along, silent elevator ride up to the boardroom. Neither said a word as the car clanked past the lower floors. This is how a hanging feels, Misha thought. And I volunteered for this. The dossier under his arm seemed to weigh many pounds; it might fall through the floor and burn into the bowels of Rockefeller Center if he loosened his grip.

“Done this before?” Misha said at last, as they watched the elevator’s indicator arm sweep upwards.

“Yes,” Elam said, not looking at him. Elam had his hands in his pockets; he had brought no overcoat for the visit to New York and had borrowed a shearling jacket that was too big for him. He was younger than Misha; Shiloah had sent a child, except this one had the metallic gaze of a salamander.

Misha cleared his throat. “He’s expecting us?”

“He had a phone call from Jerusalem to get him thinking.”

Misha watched the arm rise past fifteen; he could feel his pulse in his hands.

Elam looked over at him, measuring him from head to foot. “Wipe your lip. You’re sweating. Don’t worry, it won’t take ten minutes.” And then he fell silent as the floors clicked by.

At twenty-nine, the doors opened and a snappily dressed young man said “Good evening,” didn’t wait for a reply, then turned on his heel and led them to a pair of oak double doors. He opened the doors and remained outside. Misha wouldn’t soon forget the expensive snick as the doors shut behind them.

Elam didn’t pause. He kept moving down the short corridor, past the oil paintings and the bronze Degas figurine in its bell jar. Misha followed, his shoes settling gently into the perfect carpet at each step. Ahead of them, a wall of dark drapes covered what must have been the most expensive view in all Manhattan. Still moving, Elam snapped a finger then pointed to the door on the left. There he stopped and rapped four times, quite slowly.

It seemed absurdly easy: Elam knocked and the door opened. Misha recognized the face instantly from the photographs.

“Hello, fellas, come on in,” Nelson Rockefeller said easily, his eyes cool. Craggily handsome, a large forehead and swept-back hair, hunched slightly at the shoulders, Rockefeller wore a wintry smile that vanished when Elam only nodded and kept moving to an armchair near the desk. Misha took the second chair, the dossier on his knee. It’s a momentum game, Shiloah had told them.

“Welcome, gentlemen,” Rockefeller said. “Can I offer you a drink?”

“We don’t drink,” Elam said. Then, after a pause: “Thank you. You have some idea what this is about?”

Rockefeller, who was in his shirtsleeves, frowned slightly. “No. I had a call, but it didn’t make any sense to me. Something about some papers.”

“Yes, that’s why we contacted your lawyer, Mr. Dulles. He’s aware of the urgency of the matter,” Elam said. God, he’s calm, Misha thought. I’m fighting to keep the jitters out of my legs and it’s like he’s ordering coffee.

That made Rockefeller pause. “Yeah, well, he wasn’t available.” He shifted slightly, waiting, his hospitality cooling.

Elam held out his hand for the dossier and Misha passed it over.

“This is the dossier Jerusalem told you about,” Elam explained. “We’ve selected what amounts to the tip of the iceberg. It’s interesting reading.”

He passed the folder over and then surprised Misha by standing up and walking to the big window beside Rockefeller’s desk. He stopped and stared out over the skyline through the venetian blinds.

The effect on Rockefeller was palpable: his eyes went from the dossier to Elam and then to Misha, who consciously slowed his heart rate to something that didn’t register on his temple with each pulse.

Rockefeller’s eyes hit the first page, the current account records from 1943. He turned slightly, involuntarily, toward Elam, his eyes moving as he read.

Elam chose that moment to move slowly from the window to the drinks tray. There, cool, contained, he poured a large Scotch for Rockefeller, then put the glass down on the opened file folder, right beside the contents of the banking file. “Turn the page,” Elam said.

Incredibly, Rockefeller did so. Next was the share structure of a very well-known Swiss bank, courtesy of files no one next to God in Switzerland had ever seen, except a sweet young thing at the Zürich public registry office who happened to know Israel Kipfermann’s son. “The next page is very informative. I think even a journalist might follow its implications,” Elam said.

Rockefeller’s hairline was suddenly shiny, rivets of perspiration gathering there. He turned the page and moved his glasses back with a finger: page three was the record of a 1944 share transfer, a transfer tantamount to treason in any U.S. jurisdiction, complete with U.S. Treasury Department letterhead.

Rockefeller studied that one for a very long time.

He looked up, ignoring the Scotch. “What’s Ben-Gurion want?”

Elam was already reaching for the files. “Votes,” he said simply. “Latin America votes for partition. We need all fifteen. You get us our votes, you say goodbye to this embarrassment, you can put the dossier right in your safe.”

Rockefeller said nothing, turning page after page, some faster, some slower, the U.S. government documents giving him most pause. At the last page he closed the file, ran a finger along his hairline. Misha expected a rant or a confession, but there was only silence and the dim sounds of the city beyond the plate glass.

There was no trace of stress in the man now. He raised his hand and, when he spoke, his voice was flat and slow, almost a recitation, not a reaction.

“Think you can walk in here and waltz off with the whole damn store?” Rockefeller rolled the dossier into a cylinder. Fixing Elam, he began tapping the desktop with it. “Condition one: what I’ve read never sees the light of day. Clear?”

“That’s understood—”

“You got that right,” Rockefeller said. “If a word of this leaks out, you can tell Ben-Gurion he’ll be drilling for oil in his own backyard, because I’ll personally guarantee that’s the only place on the planet he’ll find it. Understand that.

“Condition two. You want your country? You get your country. But only if you give up your pound of flesh at Nuremberg. Not a single German banker goes on trial. Not one.” Rockefeller stopped tapping the cylinder he’d made from the file and pointed it at Elam. “But you don’t get both. Vengeance or a homeland. That’s the deal.”

“I’ll have to consult Jerusalem about that,” Elam said, his voice flat.

“Consult all you like: Ben-Gurion has one card,” Rockefeller said easily, “and you’ve just played it. Condition three. The Nazis we used as intelligence assets? They stay secret too. Total immunity. You don’t touch them. You don’t leak a word to the press. They’ve vanished, lock, stock, and barrel. Clear?”

Now all Elam could do was nod. The room had gone silent except for the ticking of the clock on the big oak sideboard.

“You seem a sensible sort of fellow. Good. Condition four. You’ll have your votes, but not a single American businessman or banker gets tarred with this. Not me, not anyone. We didn’t win the goddamn war to put half of Wall Street on trial.” Rockefeller raised the Scotch glass to his two guests. “Thanks for coming.”

“I need to make a call,” Elam said. He’d gone gray. For his part, Misha would have given Rockefeller a nudge out the window at that point. He jammed his fingernails deep into his palms to contain his anger.

“I thought you might,” Rockefeller replied, taking a sip of Scotch.

They waited two hours for Jerusalem to call back.

It seemed like two days. They sat in a side office about to be painted, its furniture covered in white drop cloths, a reminder of how short their stay was to be in Rockefeller’s world. They sat in silence, reckoning the room was bugged. When the call came, Elam and Jerusalem agreed the line had to be tapped, so they chose Hungarian, Elam’s second language, and kept it short, knowing full well if the line was monitored they’d buy a few hours at most. Elam was inconsolable: no one at Shiloah’s send-off had expected the counterpunch.

“Did we choose the wrong man?” Elam asked wearily.

“Start at the top, work your way down, that’s the way,” Misha said. “Piece of work, isn’t he?”

But Elam was lost in his own thoughts. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

Elam nodded. “We’ll get the votes. That’s something.” He had his head in his hands and Misha could see the ring of sweat at his collar. “You know,” he said slowly, “I’m beginning to think God—”

Elam picked up the ringing telephone and listened briefly. He put the receiver down, biting his lip for a moment, and exhaled. He still gripped the phone as if it might float away, looked up with eyes devoid of hope, and said, “It’s yes,” in a whisper. “They said yes.”

They went back into Rockefeller’s office and in three minutes—Misha checked his watch for history’s sake—they were out, the deal confirmed.

The young man in the natty suit reappeared as if out of a hat and summoned the elevator, a pitiless glint in his eye as he waited with them in silence. What was there to say?

In the elevator down, Elam passed his hand through his hair. “If we don’t get the votes,” he said quietly, slipping his hands back in his pockets, “I’ll climb every stair in the place to get to that creep, then I’ll break his neck. And the other guy too, Mr. Suit. Him first.”

Misha believed him.

LVII

NOVEMBER 29, 1947

Foster moved through the crush slowly, parting the throng with his hands, like a bear through bramble. The Lake Success UN hallway ebbed and flowed with diplomats, as if someone had opened a can of envoys and poured them down the main corridor. Ambassadors and chargés d’affaires stood nose to nose, a muddle of entreaties, refusals, and deal making, with a sprinkling of the exotic, the Ethiopians and freshly admitted Yemenis resplendent in their tribal finery. A pair of New York clerics deputed from the cardinal archbishop’s office, nearly identical ruddy-faced Irish prelates in their official blacks—Foster recognized Father Thomas Mulgrew from a Sullivan and Cromwell conference—slipped in and out of the scrum, buttonholing their targets with clear-eyed appeals to listen to the Holy See’s reason. “Why not a third way, a third power, neither Arab nor Jew,” Father Mulgrew murmured to an Ecuadoran diplomat, “say Spain or America, to preserve the peace and access to the Jerusalem holy places?”

“Evening, Father Tommy,” Foster said, leaning down, “talking to one of my votes, are you?” The high-cheeked Ecuadoran watched, bemused, a man at a tennis match.

“I am, you must understand, a man with two ears,” the Ecuadoran interposed.

“Never hurts to keep the good word alive,” the cardinal archbishop’s man observed. “Persistence is a virtue, Mr. Dulles, I do believe.”

Foster held his silence, winked at the Ecuadoran, and moved off. Foster, himself a delegate Harry Truman had appointed to bring the Palestine partition deal home, set himself to guard the entrance to the delegates’ cloakroom, now wall to wall with assembly members. There, he towered over the slender, dark Cubans who’d gathered to parley. He hadn’t seen anything like this chaos since a tour of the Chicago Mercantile’s commodity pits.

The Argentines had attracted both barrels: the Brits and the Americans had swarmed them at the last General Assembly recess five minutes ago, the Brits cajoling for an abstention, the Americans for a yes. The Soviets had taken a new tack, rising above the fray with a distinctly Russian hauteur. The apparatchiks plied their trade with the melancholy but resolved Arabs, Persians, and Turks, keeping Stalin’s delphic options open.

The Yugoslavs, wild cards and no proxies of the Soviets, had their backs to the wall, facing all four deal makers at once: Zionists, Arabs, Brits, and Americans. Jessops, one of the U.S. aides running between the rival factions, rushed up to Foster, his forehead trickling sweat, and mumbled in his ear: “Straw vote has it 29–27 against, if everybody votes. Which they won’t,” Jessops warned, thrusting a scribbled vote count into Foster’s hand. “Damned if I can get a straight answer about which of the abstainers will stay out. And the new Vatican announcement has the Latin Americans holding strong. If it goes to the floor as it stands, we’re cooked.”

Foster nodded and reached into the circle of Cubans and found Alejandro Sebastiano’s shoulder with his big flat hand; he pulled the smoothly turned-out Cuban bodily from the knot of arguing diplomats.

Sebastiano turned like a Marseille toe dancer on shoes polished bright as crude oil. “Ah, my friend Foster, this crazy, no?”

“There’s a quiet spot I know, Alejandro. This way.” He angled the Cuban toward the cloakroom and then pressed him into the tiny ladies’ washroom. “It’s snug, but it’ll do,” he said, snapping the lock shut as he closed the door tight. “All right, Alejandro, our families have done business for over half a century. The railroads, the cane mill deals, United Fruit. It’s all on the line today. What do you want for a yes vote?”

“We are good sons of the Church, Foster. We will vote as the Holy Father has instructed. We want nothing.”

“Nothing? I’ve got the authority to swing you whatever you want: financing for your father’s unfinished rail line to Cienfuegos, underwrite the telephone system you and your brother own—what? What do you need?”

Sebastiano was smiling, the smile of a man who knew perfectly well where the end of the game lay. “It’s all true,” he observed.

“Of course it is. Firm offers. Write yourself in on the deal of a lifetime, Alejandro.” Foster hesitated, eyeballing the smaller man hard. “What’s true? What are you getting at?”

“The Zionists. They have you by the cojones. His Excellency the Brazilian ambassador tells me the fix is in.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You talk like a salesman, promising and promising.” Sebastiano lit a cigarette, a lace of blue threading over his perfect hair.

“I keep my word, Alejandro. Your father knew that. Who’s done more for you than I have? The tobacco franchises, the rail and telephone bond issues—you know that.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. That the rumors are all true.”

“What isn’t a rumor around here, Alejandro? It’s a marketplace out there.”

“No rumor, then: fact after fact,” the Cuban declared. “The preliminary vote says the Zionists will lose, no? By six, seven votes. No hope. The Arabs win, yes? Ah, but no, señor, no, the vote is postponed. And suddenly all the Latin countries in the Vatican’s back pocket? They swoon, all of them, Santa Teresa! Again they think, and think again their vote. Porqué? After his visit, the telephone call from your friend and client Mr. Rockefeller, of course. Convent girls falling, those men—they faint to his touch, no? Costa Rica, Venezuela, Honduras.” Sebastiano laughed, like a busy signal, staccato and harsh; he waved a tanned hand meaningly. “Mr. Rockefeller is a Svengali when he comes to call. He knows all, sees all—he knows where the bank president from Tegucigalpa has his millions and his mistresses, where the general from Buenos Aires receives la heroína, how the electricity came to Bolivia with the silent Germans who hide in the mountains—a very big mystery to the people. Mr. Rockefeller knows where the skeletons are. It is no matter to him to twist the knife for a vote to abstain: what are we to him?”

“You know things, Alejandro.”

“I pity the Arabs,” Sebastiano reflected, ignoring Foster. “I never thought I would, but I do: their terrible leaders, corruption even worse than in my Cuba … and, my God, their high priests or whatever they’re called, vengeance is all they offer, no hope. The Jews will drive them out like rabbits … and there will be war after war. Those unhappy, unlucky people.” He shook his head then gazed at Foster steadily, preparing to deliver a Cuban nugget of philosophy. “My father has been dead for twenty years, but he and my mother, God rest her, they gave me two good eyes. Mr. Rockefeller has nothing in his hand to harm me or my family.” Alejandro Sebastiano took a long, last drag from his cigarette and gave a most eloquent Cuban shrug. “Ah, but who knows what this terrible scandal is?”

Foster raised his hands as if to make a point, but words failed him a moment too long.

“We will vote as the Holy See asks. Who needs another war over Jerusalem? It’s madness.” Sebastiano flicked his expensive cigarette into the basin. “And remember, we took Jews when you and your heroic president refused them. You can keep your abstention, my friend, and all that comes with it.” He stepped past. “Buenos días, Foster.”

“Alejandro …”

He stopped in the open door. “You know, Foster, I thank you for all you did for my father and my family. But you know what they say about you here, the Spanish-speaking countries? They say you see a brown face and your mind goes blind. You cannot see us. I tell you something: someday you will see us and all the brown people. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must use the men’s room.”

Outside, an aide knocked. “Mr. Dulles? You in there? Mr. Dulles?”

The vote was an hour away.

LVII

There was not a seat to be had on the UN assembly floor. Half the State Department had wanted to be there for the vote; Eleanor was one of the lucky few who got in, thanks to Foster. She sat at the very back of the press gallery, where one of the Washington wire reporters recognized her and gave up one of the few chairs in the press box. He dragged it in front of a pillar; Eleanor stood on the chair in her sensible shoes, her boxy purse clutched in front of her. Around her, the men from the press stood so close together few could find the elbow room to take notes; one or two wags propped their notepad on the back of the man in front of them.

There was a steady buzz of talk, sparked by the tension and the din from the marchers and demonstrators outside, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, singing the Hatikvah and chanting. The delegations below were packed together like spectators at a bullfight; a thin veil of cigarette smoke hung overhead in what had once been a Flushing Meadows skating rink and, before that, one of the 1939 World’s Fair sports halls. By an accident of the American calendar, Thanksgiving had bought the Zionist cause two days’ grace.

The arithmetic was blunt; every newspaper in New York explained it on page one. Abstentions were crucial too, as each abstention lowered the votes needed for a majority.

“Where’s Dr. Weizmann?” Eleanor asked the reporter next to her. The aristocratic old scientist who had led the Zionists for three decades was nowhere to be seen.

“Back at the hotel, that’s what they said. I heard it was too much for the old guy.”

“Too much for me,” Eleanor said, her lips dry. She could feel her heart pounding the way it did the moment her kayak hit white water. There was a lull in the din from below while an impassive Arab delegation in their fluttering traditional robes moved down the aisle in full sail. It was just before five p.m. and the last of the preliminary speakers had just sat down. Below her, Foster sat with the American delegation. He had nodded at her, and his face, as usual, was inscrutable. She raised her arms questioningly and he shrugged back.

If Foster doesn’t know …

Perhaps the newspapers were right, all the pressure on the swing countries had come up short. Below, the assembly president was gaveling the partition vote to order. The coughs and mutterings began to die away as the president motioned to an aide to bring a simple wicker basket to him. It contained each of fifty-six nations’ names on small slips of paper. He straightened and peered out into the great hall, at the murmuring sea of faces before him.

“Guatemala,” he said firmly, put the slip aside, then waited.

It was as if a great electric current surged through the assembly, shocking it instantly into an uncanny silence. The world is here, Eleanor thought, and it’s holding its breath.

The chief Guatemalan delegate rose to cast his vote.

Behind Eleanor, from near the back wall of the spectators’ gallery, a single strained voice called out, harsh but clear: “Ana ad Hoshiya!” There was an uproar, which the president gaveled down.

The newsmen were going mad, desperate to decode the shout. “It means ‘Lord, save us,’” a voice spoke up clearly, a voice with an eastern European accent by way of England. “It’s Hebrew.”

She turned to see where he was, but the pillar stood in her way. She braced herself against the chair back and leant far to her right, but she couldn’t see if it was really him.

“Pro, señor,” the Guatemalan delegate announced.

Another sea of murmurs rose, washed over the hall, and subsided. Eleanor penciled a rough grid on the back of an envelope and entered a slash under yes.

The next slip appeared in the president’s hand: “France.”

The French had abstained on Wednesday. Several dozen heads on the floor swiveled to see what the French would do when the vote counted.

“Pour, monsieur le président,” intoned the French delegate. The hall gasped as one. The president, this time with his gavel ready, thumped the vote to order with several sharp blows.

The next votes were evenly and predictably split: the USSR for, Cuba against, Mexico abstaining.

The following vote was a sensation: the Haitian delegate, opposed on Wednesday, stood and voted for.

Then, one after another, the Latin American countries either abstained or voted for; Cuba aside, there was not a single “against” vote in the entire Western hemisphere. Even the hardened reporters were struck dumb, their pens in midair, as they watched the Bolivian delegate sit down, another completely unexpected reversed vote, the third of three in from Catholic Latin America. Several votes later, Eleanor looked around the pillar again as Nicaragua also reversed its vote, moving the pro vote ever closer to partition.

Misha was huddled with two other men near the door. He didn’t look up. She could not reach him: the press box was shoulder to shoulder.

Eleanor looked down at her own scribbled record of the vote. Norway led a run of five fors in a row. Brazil, Byelorussia, Denmark: for. India: against. Then another three in a row for: Ukraine, the Dominican Republic, and, dramatically, New Zealand a change from Wednesday’s abstention. The newsmen realized almost as one that they had a hell of a story on their hands, even as the Venezuelan delegate voted for. China abstained. Poland: for.

“What you got, Lou?” a reporter in a porkpie hat demanded.

“Twenty-six for, eight abstentions, eight against, with fourteen to go,” Lou, standing at Eleanor’s feet, replied in a Brooklyn accent.

“Jeez, they’re swimming in abstentions,” the first said. “They might win the damn thing. That’d be something.”

Chile abstained. Now you could hear a pin drop as the president pulled the remaining Middle Eastern nations from the hat.

“There goes my five bucks,” the other reporter joked as Saudi Arabia voted against.

Then it was down to the final dozen votes.

Eleanor checked her tally.

The United Kingdom’s Sir Alexander Cadogan announced His Majesty’s government would abstain from voting.

Two against: Turkey and Pakistan.

Then South Africa: for.

Yugoslavia abstained.

When it came time for the Dutch delegate to rise, the entire hall knew the magic number.

The Dutchman voted for.

The assembly hall went stone quiet as the president drew Iceland’s slip.

Iceland voted for.

Inside the hall there was a kind of awed silence for a moment. Then, even as the radio broadcast told the crowd outside that history had been made, a dull roar penetrated the hall.

The Jews, for the first time since the Romans destroyed the temple of Solomon, had a homeland of their own.

The stream of people carried Eleanor along to the front doors of the skating rink, where photographers had gathered and where a copse of microphones stood, awaiting the reactions of the diplomats still eddying from the exits.

She saw no one she knew, least of all Misha, until the flow of people swept her outside, onto the forecourt, where a madly happy throng ignored the gloomy dusk tinged with rain. “We have a country!” one woman called out of the crowd, which wasn’t quite true. What the Jews had now was a place to fight for, and that, as Eleanor well knew, was a very different thing.

She tried to work her way to the row of cars and limousines in the driveway, but she could not; the silent, proud Arabs, their pure white robes shimmering, were leaving, they too thinking of the fight ahead. The crush was impossible.

Then, against all odds, she turned and saw three or four men moving toward the rank of cars. A cry went up from the crowd as they recognized the leaders of the Jewish Agency and called their names: Shertok, Shiloah, and the others, each of them wreathed in smiles. And, to one side, a younger one, curly-haired, smiling for all he was worth too, his profile unmistakable. Eleanor called out.

Misha turned to the waiting cars and saw her then. He cut through the crowd toward her, and by the time he reached her Eleanor found she could no longer see for the tears.

He kissed her, hard, holding her fiercely, and she could feel his tears on her cheek. “You haven’t shaved,” she whispered.

“I’ve been a little busy,” he said as the crowd began to sing the Hatikvah as one. “I’ve a memento for you.”

She took the simply wrapped package and felt its heft, then smiled. She kissed him, deep into the bristles on his cheek. “Grunau,” was all she said.

“That’s right, from the boathouse. I found it.” He pressed it into her hand.

The crowd surged around them, a sea of singing people, faces wreathed in pure joy. Misha looked around him for a moment and Eleanor caught his uncertain expression. “Where are you going now?” she asked as the crowd pressed them together; she could see the hauntedness in the depths of his eyes.

He turned to look at her, his face set, driving his hands deep into his coat pockets. “I told you once before: Berlin.”

“Berlin? You’re joking. Truly?”

Misha nodded. “Berlin can always use a few Jews like me.”

“It seems a little perverse, Mish. I mean, what’s there for you?”

“I’m a European Jew, Ellie. I can’t live in Palestine, not me.

I’m a different breed.”

“What will you do?”

“I’m thinking a lot of nothing for a while. Play my horn, mostly, maybe open a jazz club. I have a little money.”

“In a Swiss bank?”

“Very funny,” Misha replied, and smiled gently. “Well, this is it. I’m on a boat tonight.”

“Boats again,” she said, trying to be brave.

“Boats again,” he agreed, meaning it, and bent close to her, kissing her gently, this time full and sweet.

“Congratulations, Mish,” was all Eleanor could say, nodding, a blessing and farewell all at once, as she touched his cheek again. “You should go. They’re holding the car for you.”

He kissed her once more and turned back into the crowd, cutting his way through the chanting, singing mass. Then he stopped and shouted something.

Eleanor held her hand to her ear, puzzled.

“I mean ‘Thank you’!” Misha shouted again. “Shalom!” Then he was gone, a face in a car, a smudge of white, a hand waving, gone.

LIX

A cool rain edged off the Long Island Sound, melting the last of the wild day into night, streaking the sidewalks with ripples of light. There were, for once, more cabs than fares, the world’s diplomats generously offering one another the next car, their correctness unruffled by the history they had wrought. The wind gusted and the rain fell harder, blackening the naked limbs of the Flushing Meadows trees. The police kept the two Palestinian contingents, Arab and Jew, well apart, and their shouts and counter-shouts blended into a crude human roar, but on the fringes of both sides the thoughtful weighed what had just happened inside the old rink, and were struck silent.

A figure edged through the throng on the curb, a package jammed against her side, carefully taped and labeled. Its corner caught the Italian ambassador’s sleeve and there was a gentle moment as he recognized the smallish woman wearing the thick spectacles and the broken smile. The two exchanged apologies in Italian; the crowd closed in and the moment was gone in the cool breath of a fresh downpour. There are some victories best tasted alone.

Eleanor Dulles walked into the angling showers, her umbrella bobbing in the crosswind, her shadow an awkward shape against the flat gray buildings, the heels of her sensible shoes leaving ringlets of light in the pools of rainwater. She turned a corner and the mob’s shoutings faded into the hiss of the falling rain.

She stopped and peeled back the stiff brown paper and looked down at the oval cameo, the faces of the crowd at the long-ago regatta, serene, the rowers with their oars held vertically, Masai with their assegais, she thought, the women in their hoop skirts and cinched waists and full hats, so beautiful. One of the rowers standing caught her eye, a darkish fellow, muscular, his shoulders round with bunched strength, his crossed arms smooth and perfect. He had his back to one of the columns of the Krumme Lanke pergola. How young he seemed.

Eleanor walked on, still light-headed. Perhaps it was Goethe, she thought to herself, muddled and sharply rational all at once, the feelings tumbling through her like clouds—or was it Schiller? She couldn’t recall anything save the words themselves: So empty is the space / where once my heart did beat / as in love, so in treachery—was that right? or was it “conspiracy”?—it is given to us to live / such things to the full / but once.

Eleanor turned west and considered the street ahead of her. Manhattan was a smear on the horizon, a child’s watercolor of a city awaiting winter. She wandered to the river’s edge, a small middle-aged woman thickening at the waist, her wool skirt shivering in the November wind, a stray strand of her gray hair trapped beneath the bridge of her spectacles. She came to the railing and pulled her hair back, straightening her glasses to see the far shore. As she did so, the last of the sun breached the clouds and a pillar of light carved a bright disk on the dark surface of the river.

A small sailboat edged along the water, a twenty-four-footer, she reckoned, its sail full in the early evening light, its wake a perfect chevron, wrinkles of evening sun on the wave tops. She watched until the boat came close enough for her to make out the lines of rigging and the trimwork on the cabin, strips of varnished red-brown against the white. She wished she were aboard, wanting that feeling of flying on the water she’d known since childhood.

She stood quite still, her body upright, a hand on the rail. There would be a new country in the oldest quarter of man’s time on this planet, a place of safety for a shattered people. It was, she decided, worth the sorrows, worth having lived for, fair recompense for all her brother had done: the one right thing.

Eleanor raised her gaze across the river; the shadows of the great city skyline cut like templates. She faced north, upriver, to the source, where rivers are born. And her own source: she needed to see the lake again, the purity of it, its still smoothness, the tang of the pines at nightfall, the fine coolness of the mornings stealing south from Canada, her lake, Eleanor’s lake—that was what she would do. A fresh gust spun the last leaves around her. She began to walk. A crescent of leaves followed her, guardians.

POSTSCRIPT

This is a novel, but much of what you have read is based on known fact—although the most intriguing elements are still classified. Some isn’t. There were no Neimanns, for instance, but Baron von Schröder knew Foster Dulles well; the Sullivan and Cromwell record of involvement in “cloaking” Nazi assets is clear; Reuven Shiloah did in fact mastermind the Mossad from the networks we recount. Eleanor did work with the Quakers in France in 1917 and had a peculiar habit of turning up in Allen’s life at critical points, just as we suggest, not least in Trieste in 1946 … but that’s for another book. So is the interrogation Foster endured about his cloaking practices at the hands of some highly motivated Treasury lawyers in 1942; thanks to our colleague Professor Cees Wiebes for drawing this to Brendan’s attention.

Allen, from 1953 to 1962 the head of the CIA, produced wartime intelligence of often highly dubious quality, a fact noted by Nuremberg trial judge Michael Musmanno. In a memorandum long classified, Judge Musmanno excoriated Allen for obtaining immunity from war crimes prosecution for his SS contacts, including many of his Bern SS interlocutors, in exchange for a separate Italian surrender. And the Vatican did work hand in glove with the murky proponents of the Ratlines: the saga of the Balkans war crimes suspects and the Vatican ratline alone—John and Brendan met while Brendan was researching a CBC TV investigative documentary on Canada’s role in the affair—is stomach-turning.

Equally disturbingly, the Vatican did own a series of interlocking joint ventures stretching from Italy and Switzerland to Lisbon and to South America, never mind interests large and small in banks and insurance companies in Mussolini’s Italy, Vichy France, Fascist Spain and Fascist Portugal. Brendan’s recent research on behalf of American investigative reporter Gerald Posner suggests the insurance companies of Italy bear serious examination regarding Nazi capital flight; when God closes a window, He opens a door, as the saying goes.

Many of those closest to Allen, despite liking him, acknowledge he was corrupt; his postwar Berlin Station colleagues essentially admitted to longtime CIA reporter Joe Trento acting as Allen’s procurer; Trento’s interview with Jim Angleton on the old counterspy’s deathbed is one of the most important assessments of Allen’s time at the CIA. Several of Allen’s non-CIA colleagues were far less kind. One, who’d briefed Allen with accurate estimates of Soviet economic data—all were ignored—termed him “a whore and a liar.”

Allen was the last person to see Jim Kronthal alive. Kronthal died, allegedly by his own hand, after a final meal alone with Allen in 1953. He is to this day the prime suspect for the CIA’S most senior Soviet mole; he was almost certainly the subject of the sexual blackmail we recount, perhaps as early as 1935, by the Gestapo.

John personally interviewed the Haganah agent who had first-hand knowledge of the blackmail of Nelson Rockefeller. Prescott Bush was indeed up to his eyeballs in the Union Bank affair, and some believe—John does, Brendan is not so sure—that the Bush family fortune stemmed from his single Union share. Certainly the Bern–Berlin wiretapping story is true; John has seen the Luftforschungsamt intercept that opens the novel—in a slightly different form—at Fort Meade, the National Security Agency’s massive archive, when his NATO-level security clearances allowed him to roam the vaults at will.

Eleanor Lansing Dulles died at the age of 101 in 1996; her death marked the end of an unequaled dynasty of 130 years of Dulles family involvement in the U.S. diplomatic service. Long identified with West Berlin affairs, Eleanor lived to see a minor genius bicycle along the parapet of the suddenly meaningless Berlin Wall on CNN. Hers was a remarkable run. Her work for children during her retirement says much about her priorities. Her friend Grace Dunlop is a composite of real, known friends mentioned in Eleanor’s autobiography.

And Misha? Misha is a composite of several underground Haganah operatives, now all long dead … and Eleanor’s wartime lover, whom she details in her autobiography in ruminative and discreet terms. Eleanor did help mastermind the rescue and escape of her paramour’s mother from Warsaw, whom she never named and whose identity is still deep in classified FBI and State Department files. In 1999, whilst researching a different book, in a Berlin still not yet again the German capital, Brendan did hear rumours of an elderly jazzman well-known to the waiters of a certain café not far from Berlin’s Great Synagogue. Ask the right waiter … you might find there’s a book in it.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
96/11/04 Statement: Death of Eleanor Lansing Dulles
Office of the Spokesman

Press Statement by Nicholas Burns/Spokesman
November 4, 1996

DEATH OF ELEANOR LANSING DULLES

Eleanor Lansing Dulles served with distinction in the Department of State for two decades. She helped establish the basis for modern U.S.-German relations, earning a reputation as an expert on German affairs. During World War II she made an important contribution to the planning for postwar Germany. In the immediate postwar years, she served in the Office of the U.S. Political Adviser in Austria during the difficult years in the postwar reconstruction of that divided country.

During the 1950s, she served in the State Department’s Office of German Affairs where her most important accomplishment was the organization of the “Berlin Desk” at a time when the foundations were being established for the new Federal Republic of Germany and a revived West Berlin surrounded by Soviet occupied East Germany.

In honor of her contributions to the re-establishment of a democratic Germany, Eleanor Dulles received many awards, including the award of the German-American Federation in 1985 and the Benjamin Franklin Award of the Free University of Berlin this year, which, regrettably, illness prevented her from receiving personally.

Prior to her Department of State experience, Eleanor Dulles, who had been an assistant professor for a time at Bryn Mawr, served with the Social Securities Board where she was part of the team that organized President Roosevelt’s new Social Security System.

Eleanor Dulles was the sister of John Foster and Allen Dulles, but her accomplishments in the Department of State and elsewhere were the result of her own outstanding abilities and effort. Like other women in government service in mid-century, she had to confront persistent sex discrimination, prejudice against the hiring and advancement of women, and obstacles to obtaining important assignments. Eleanor Dulles overcame the limitations of her times and achieved a lifetime career of distinguished public service.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

This novel would not have been possible without reference to the following books:

Brendan consulted over four hundred books for this novel and countless websites and postings by intelligence historians. Key references include Eleanor Dulles’s own autobiography, Chances of a Lifetime; Leonard Mosley’s Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network; Townsend Hoopes’s The Devil and John Foster Dulles, and Gentleman Spy by Peter Grose, who unearthed the delicious “sharks” quote by Clover Dulles. Joe Trento’s Widows and The Secret History of the CIA were vital. John and Mark Aarons’s two provocative collaborations, Unholy Trinity and The Secret War Against the Jews aside, Burton Hersh’s The Old Boys is the one book Brendan kept returning to. Likewise John F. Pollard’s essential history of Vatican finances, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, and Haggi Eshed’s Reuven Shiloah: the Man behind the Mossad. Lipsius and Lisagor’s shrewd A Law Unto Itself, the story of Sullivan and Cromwell, is a rich source, superbly researched. Brendan’s thanks to Marion Welch, law librarian at the University of Western Ontario, and Jerry Mulcahy, the business school librarian at UWO, for their unstinting help.

SPECIAL THANKS

How the hell do two people co-write a novel? John and Brendan aren’t Nordhoff and Hall, who wrote the Bounty novels; while Brendan dramatized a story that John pitched him off the top of his head, without John’s inspired notion of directing Brendan right at Eleanor, this book would never exist. Nor without John’s remarkable voyage around the National Archives and the National Security Agency’s vaults would there be a novel about the Dulleses.

This book required a research path of some depth and breadth, simply to understand, albeit without benefit of interviews with the long dead, the complexities of the financial crimes and misdemeanors of World War II. In that respect, two colleagues led a most distinguished pack: Marc Masurovsky—friend, tireless researcher, mentor and dry Gallic wit, for whom no praise is enough. Marc, as anyone who has attempted to sift, clear-eyed, through this aspect of World War II history knows, has an eerie gift for sorting the wheat from the chaff, all the while applying a relentless intellectual rigor.

As for Burton Hersh—Brendan’s friend and patient adviser when all threatened to overwhelm him in researching and then dramatizing the story John proposed—in Burton there is a toughness about these matters which stemmed from his own soundings. Without Marc and Burton, both most gifted investigators and ruthlessly honest historians, Brendan would never have found his feet: John’s tale was too rich.

We made so many good friends in this quest for the Dulles saga, dauntless bloodhounds, all: Douglas Vaughan Jr. and Georg Hodel, whose own work in this area we trust will see the light of day soon; the inimitable James McCargar, grand old State Department intelligence hand and bon vivant; Joe Trento, whose generosity and enthusiasm runs as deep as his pedigree as heir to Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson; Professor Cees Wiebes, who helped with certain delicate inquiries about Switzerland, Sweden and the Bank for International Settlements; Prof. Michael Salter, whose delvings into Operation Sunrise and the legal issues of immunity for intelligence sources is well worth weighing; our gifted Canadian intelligence history colleague, Victor Madeira, who has a book or two in him himself, who always addressed even Brendan’s most opaque inquiries.

Also part and parcel of the nine-year grind to bring this book home: Brendan’s former producer at CBC TV’s the fifth estate, a paragon of integrity and a great friend, David Kaufman, whom we tried (and failed) to libel to the hilt in our Kauffmann; our agents, Pamela Paul and Reid Boates, who helped more than they’ll ever know; Brendan’s co-writer in his attempts at comedy, Sheila McCarthy, who unfailingly kept him positive and laughing; intelligence scholar David Alvarez, whose insights into Vatican diplomatic ciphers was a catalyst for far more; legendary Jerusalem correspondent Jay Bushinsky, a true gentleman and a delightful conversationalist, drew our attention to certain intriguing pre-war leads; the late novelist and journalist Mordecai Richler, whose brief correspondence with Brendan suggests he was Canada’s most underrated investigative reporter: the man knew stuff about the Mossad.

Anne Collins is an editorial goddess, as anyone with an eye in his head comprehends. Anne fought off the bean counters while Brendan struggled; we’d walk through walls for her. Editor Craig Pyette, our collaborator and guide in reducing a gargantuan first draft to this span, wielded a deft editorial blade. One’s eyes fail: neither Liba Berry nor John Sweet missed a trick in copy editing and proofing, respectively, for which careful scrutiny many many thanks. Special thanks to Terri Nimmo, whose cover artwork so perfectly captures what we have tried to evoke.

And last but definitely not least, thanks to the legendary John E. Taylor of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. John was at the old Archives building the day the first OSS materials arrived in 1948. An imp of a man, with a child’s love of opening the next box of declassified documents, John is literally the Rosetta stone for anyone serious about understanding the secret history of World War II. He’s immortal.

Likewise (Brendan writes) my love for my wife, Maureen Argon, and my three children, Emilia, Nikolai and Clare, who endured an absentminded dad for far too long. The next one will be short and sweet, guys: I promise.

A final note: the documentary trail of World War II, like so much of the public record since 9/11, is being eroded even as you read this. The clawback of documents once public is a national scandal. If this book moves you as reader to do anything, send the Federation of American Scientists a donation: the FAS is the bulwark against an insidious destruction of the public record, of history itself.

Brendan Howley and John Loftus

in continuing memory of

RACHEL DAVIS
1980–2004
peacekeeper

JERRY JOHNSON
1949–2005
lover of life

and

“the old spies”
especially
DAN AND ANN BENJAMIN
an American and a Brit
husband and wife
best of friends
and
the best of spies
who died too soon

BRENDAN HOWLEY is a novelist, an investigative reporter and screenwriter. He lives in Stratford, Ontario. The Witness Tree is his third novel.

JOHN LOFTUS is a former US Justice Department Nazi war crimes investigator, a whistleblowers’ attorney, an expert in intelligence matters, and author of the bestselling books The Secret War Against the Jews and Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican’s Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets. He lives in Tampa, Florida.

VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2008

Copyright © 2007 Twinfish Productions and John Loftus

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2008. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2007. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

www.randomhouse.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Howley, Brendan
The witness tree : a novel / Brendan Howley & John Loftus.

eISBN: 978-0-307-36960-4

I. Loftus, John, 1950– II. Title.
PS8565.O95W58 2008      C813’.54      C2008-900448-5

All of the documents included in the text of The Witness Tree are entirely the creations of the authors and the publisher.

v3.0

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Act One

Chapter I: Henderson Harbor, Upstate New York November 1911

Chapter II

Chapter III: Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania October 1914

Chapter IV: Switzerland September 1917

Chapter V: France October 1917

Chapter VI: Venezuela May 1924

Chapter VII: Paris December 1926

Chapter VIII: December 1926/January 1927

Chapter IX: Henderson Harbor Midsummer 1928

Chapter X: November 1930

Act Two

Chapter XI: Berlin September 1932

Chapter XII: New York December 1932

Chapter XIII: May 1933

Chapter XIV: November 1933

Chapter XV: January 1934

Chapter XVI: March 1934

Chapter XVII: Near Dover Plains NY August 1935

Chapter XVIII: Washington, D.C. April 1936

Chapter XIX: New York May 1936

Chapter XX: June 1936

Chapter XXI: En Route to Chicago September 1936

Act Three

Chapter XXII: New York August 1938

Chapter XXIII: Sullivan County, New York State September 1938

Chapter XXIV: New York September 1938

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI: Mid-October 1938

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX: Long Island, New York December 31, 1938

Chapter XXX: Havana November 1939

Chapter XXXI: Washington, D.C./Connecticut November 1941

Chapter XXXII: Europe November 1941

Chapter XXXIII: Washington December 7, 1941

Chapter XXXIV: New York December 13, 1941

Act Four

Chapter XXXV: Bern, Switzerland January 1942

Chapter XXXVI: November 1942

Chapter XXXVII: Davos, Switzerland February 1943

Chapter XXXVIII: A Week Later

Chapter XXXIX: March 1943

Chapter XL: May 1943

Chapter XLI: Washington, D.C. July 1943

Act Five

Chapter XLII: Washington, D.C. March 1944

Chapter XLIII: Bern May 1944

Chapter XLIV: July 21, 1944

Chapter XLV: Auberjonois, France Late September 1944

Chapter XLVI: Bern October 1944

Chapter XLVII: Wiesbaden, Near Frankfurt September 1945

Chapter XLVIII: Berlin a Week Later

Act Six

Chapter XLIX: Tel Aviv June 1946

Chapter L: Eastern Austria December 1946

Chapter LI: London Spring 1947

Chapter LII: Sag Harbor, New York April 1947

Chapter LIII: Washington, D.C. May 1947

Chapter LIV: Tel Aviv September 1947

Chapter LV: Washington, D.C. October 1947

Chapter LVI: New York November 22, 1947

Chapter LVII: November 29, 1947

Chapter LVII

Chapter LIX

Postscript

A Note on Sources

About the Authors

Copyright