“No,” said the Secretary. “If he asks for a Southern or Central European job I think he should get it. That’s where he belongs.”
So that settled it.
As he rose from the table the Secretary said, as if it were an afterthought and of little consequence, “Mr. Matson, would you mind sending me the cables on the Bulgarian fishing boats?”
CHAPTER THREE
1
FOR THE NEXT six weeks Jeff Baker became a blue peg that was moved across a board called “Orientation” in Mr. Dannenberg’s office. He absorbed lectures on Atomic Energy and International Security, the Crisis in Britain, India at the Crossroads, The Petropolis Conference, Greece at the Crossroads, Political Problems in Southeast Asia, The Crisis in Germany, France at the Crossroads, The Arab Crisis, Italy at the Crossroads, Why The Straits Are Vital, The Austrian Crisis.
It was also a period of filling out papers and forms. One of these asked where he wanted to go—his “preference sheet.” He was allowed four choices, and assured that only very bad luck could keep him from one of the four. He recalled that long ago his father had mentioned that the Department never, never, under any circumstances sent a man to the post of his first choice, probably under the assumption that he had a girl there. He doubted whether this custom had changed.
Originally he had wanted Rome, or Milan, or Trieste, for he knew the terrain of Italy better than he knew any state in his own country, and for the Italian people he felt warm sympathy and big-brotherly tolerance. He put down Shanghai, Trieste, Rome, and Budapest. He hoped it would be Budapest. This would interest and please Susan Pickett, but why it was important to please or interest Susan Pickett he didn’t precisely know. He’d called her twice. The first time she’d been busy, and the second time she’d said, “Jeff, I’m thinking. You undertand, don’t you?” He’d said sure, he understood, but he didn’t understand at all.
Jeff’s blue peg moved from the board called “Orientation” to the one called “Processing.” He was briefed by the Department’s travel experts, chivvied about his insurance and his will, given shots for typhoid, typhus, yellow fever, tetanus, and plague, and exposed to stern and somewhat melodramatic talks on personal security.
When he had been pumped so full of lectures and vaccines that it seemed both his brain and his body must burst, Dannenberg told him he had been assigned to Budapest, and would finish his training on the Balkans desk. “You’ll get the big picture of what’s going on in your area,” he explained. “You’ll report to Mr. Matson in Temporary Building P. You probably won’t do much except read the dispatches, but that’ll keep you busy.”
“I want to thank you,” Jeff said, “for all your help. That day I took the oral, I thought I’d never make it.”
“Quite truthfully, I didn’t either, for a while,” said Dannenberg. “You know, Baker, sometimes agreeable silence is the best diplomacy. We all learn that. Some of us learn it too late.”
“I see,” Jeff said.
“I’d stick pretty close to Matson, if I were you. I’d try to understand his viewpoint. Since he’ll be your Division Chief while you’re at your first post, he’ll have a good deal to do with the advancement of your career. He won’t be so important as your Chief of Mission, and your senior colleagues, naturally, but it doesn’t hurt to have friends in the Department.”
“What’s Matson’s viewpoint?”
“Well, just between us, Matson is a war now man. I think he was a bit alarmed by what you said about war, and you’d do well to make your peace with him.”
2
The next day Matson found a desk for Jeff in the Balkans Division. Over this desk began to pass carbons of the incoming file of cables. An American lieutenant had been beaten by the Jugoslavs; three conservative leaders in Rumania had disappeared and were presumed dead; the Cominform in Belgrade was sending propagandists into the Caribbean countries; a Viennese doctor, escaped from a Russian bacteriological warfare laboratory, reported the Russians had been extremely successful in their experiments with anthrax and bubonic plague. Prague was excited about the stepped-up production of the uranium mines in Bohemia, and was wondering what had become of some of our agents in the area. Four Soviet tank divisions were maneuvering in Lower Austria. Budapest said a Swiss traveler had talked to a German scientist who had helped perfect an atomic bomb, in one of the factories beyond the Urals, which would fit into a suitcase. A hand grenade had been thrown at the Legation in Tirana. The Consul in Salonika was sending his wife home.
The monotonous tidings of conflict, terror, and violence sucked at the reservoir of his hope. When he looked out on Constitution Avenue, clean and white in the late summer sun, on the cars shining like bright beetles, on the incessant antlike movement of people, grouping in little patterns, on the girls with hands linked to the arms of their men, it seemed unreal as musical comedy in technicolor. In this building was the real world. One day one of these cables would clatter out of the code machines, just like the others. Only this one would clothe half those puppets in uniform, send that man to Iraq, that woman to Alaska, bury the corner policeman in the rubble of his own home, or wipe them all out, entirely, as a bad production which had remained on stage beyond its time.
3
On the day that the Bulgarian Communists tried and executed Kenov for no greater reason than that he led the opposition, Matson called Jeff into his office. “Well, Baker,” he asked, “what do you think of things? Still anxious for the Balkans?”
“Yes, I still want to go,” Jeff said.
“You saw the dispatch about Kenov?”
“Yes, I saw it.”
“He was a friend of mine,” Matson said. “A good friend. Just as good a friend as any friend I have here in Washington. And he was a gentleman. He’s been in my home a dozen times. Furthermore, he was a good public servant. He devoted his life to raising his people out of ignorance and poverty. He opposed the Nazi tyranny, and he opposed the Red tyranny, and now those damn beasts have killed him.”
“They’re bastards, all right. But do you think all of them are bastards?”
“Enough of them are bastards so sometimes I agree with those who say we can’t be far wrong in wiping out the whole bunch, while there’s time.”
“You can’t kill two hundred million people.”
“Wouldn’t have to. Just kill thirty or forty million, and hang the New York radicals from every lamppost on Fifth Avenue. That’s what people are saying and perhaps that’s the only answer.”
“Isn’t that genocide?” Jeff said. He knew he should be quiet. “Isn’t that advocating the same thing for which we condemned the Nazis? Incidentally, for which we condemned some of them to death?”
Matson seemed whiter than ever, as if all the blood had fled from his face and hands to feed the hot ball of anger inside him. “I’ll take my chances on being condemned,” he said. “We are engaged in a struggle for survival—our world against theirs. You have been picked as one of the men to go out in the front line. You should have no doubts.”
Jeff had to say it. “But I do have doubts. I’m confused. I feel like I’m wallowing around in a swamp and can’t find my way out. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong any more. Poor Winant must have felt like this, only worse, because he knew so much more than I know and I find that the more I know the more I’m confused.”
He knew he had mentioned Winant because Dannenberg had said he looked something like Winant, and his subconscious had been considering Winant—and Winant’s suicide—ever since. He knew now how dismayed he had been when Winant killed himself, and then Jan Masaryk killed himself. Their deaths had made him feel exactly as if he had lost an older friend out of his platoon. He knew neither of them, yet their deaths were personal.
Matson had been doodling a set of round noseless faces across his blotter. He punctuated them with grim little mouths before he spoke. “What you’ve just said proves I was right. I don’t mind telling you that you’re in my Division in spite of my prot
ests. In times like these men of your temperament should be sent to Madagascar or New Zealand, whatever their experience. The Secretary insisted you go to Europe, and Dannenberg gave you to me.”
“I didn’t know that,” Jeff said.
“I’m glad to have you, so long as you behave. You’ve been picked for Budapest, and you’ll go to Budapest next week, and by God you’ll go as a soldier. You’ll take orders and carry them out.”
“Yes, sir,” Jeff said, because there wasn’t anything else to say.
“I mean that literally,” said Matson. “The Legation in Budapest is on a quasi-military footing. We now consider the Embassy in Moscow as nothing more than a garrison under siege, from which there can be few sorties for intelligence and information. But Budapest is a listening post and observation post deep inside the enemy lines. Exactly what you’ll do there is up to Admiral Blankenhorn, as Chief of Mission. Maybe he’ll let you work under Keller. Maybe he’ll make you stable boy. I don’t know.”
Jeff knew from the cables that Fred Keller had arrived in Budapest a month before, and that his title was Special Assistant to the Minister. No reference to his work ever appeared in the cables. Matson guessed at Jeff’s curiosity. “This is extremely confidential,” he said. “It is probably the most confidential work going on in my area. You will have to know about it sometime, so I might as well tell you now. Mr. Keller is forming resistance groups inside Hungary. If it works out there we’ll try it in other countries. We call this experiment the Atlantis Project. You know—Atlantis, the bridge between the continents. When war comes, we’ll have an organization in Europe.”
“When war comes?” Jeff said.
“Yes. War must come. I know it’s not diplomatic to say it, but I’m a realist.” He spoke with the finality of one who has stated the world is round. Jeff knew there was no use arguing, then or ever. Not with Matson.
4
Gerald Matson anticipated war with Russia with the mingled confidence and impatience of one waiting for the last act of a play in which it is certain the villain will get his just deserts, the hero will get the girl, and everyone will live happily ever after.
While others in the Department had blinded themselves to the Soviet menace, it had always been plain to him, and he had never dodged speaking his mind on it. Sometimes this had not made him popular in the Department. In the first two Roosevelt administrations, when the Reds and their allies—the C.I.O., the New Dealers, the radicals and social planners—had been running the country, he’d been buried in the Visa Division. He’d been able to perform useful services there however. He’d guarded the dam of immigration quotas, restrictions, and regulations against the stream of refugees from Germany. It wasn’t that he had anything against the Jews, although of course he was glad too many didn’t get into the Department. It was simply that the National Socialists regarded Communists as their first enemy, and therefore it could be assumed that most of the people getting out of Germany were Communists.
He was in the Mediterranean area when the Spanish war flared, and he was able to use his influence to keep a steady stream of supplies going to Franco, and to discourage American enlistments and other help for the Reds.
When the Russians attacked Finland, and Molotov signed the pact with Hitler, he was rescued from the blind alley of the Visa Division, and once again sent abroad as a Minister.
His star dipped again when we entered the war, but once the war was over, and the intentions of the Soviet Union began to unfold, he became an important man in the Department who never failed to remind his colleagues that he had recommended the extinction of Bolshevism as far back as 1920, when we still had troops in Siberia.
He himself did not know at what precise point in his life he became aware of the Red menace. It may have started as far away as the dinner table in his boyhood, although it was not called a Red menace at the time, and indeed had no name. His father had his money in street railways in Pennsylvania, and was harassed by agitators, radicals, strikers, the damned Socialists who were advocating public ownership, and the damned laborers who didn’t know what was good for them.
While he was at Harvard he became alarmed at the radical talk among some of the undergraduates and wrote a letter to the Transcript. The letter was printed, and there was a good deal of comment. His father commended him, praised his literary style, and said the family at last had produced a statesman.
In his second year in the Department he wrote an evaluation of the Lenin-Trotsky dogma of world revolution which was good enough to be used as source material for future studies.
In 1925, while he was in Bucharest, he met and married the lovely, sad-eyed Countess Anya Lewenska. This was before the Department tightened its regulations concerning marriage to foreigners. She was Russian, and the Bolsheviks had murdered her father and mother and confiscated their estates. He was never able to forget this, for in the years that followed their home became a port of call, refueling station, and sometimes a permanent harbor, for her brothers, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, and cousins twice removed.
Gerald Matson’s brothers, who now ran the family utilities holdings, kept him informed of the close connections between the Reds in Russia and the Pennsylvania Reds whose unions each year became more powerful and demanding. All his life a Red conspiracy had been closing in around him, and he knew the only solution was war against Russia. As he constantly warned his colleagues, the United States was engaged in a battle for survival.
5
It was eight that night when Gerald Matson drove to his Alexandria home. For two weeks he had been working late in the Department, for Count Igor Lewenski, his wife’s younger brother, was their house guest. The Count’s dress shop had failed, and his perfume establishment had failed, and Matson knew he would be wanting capital to start another business. Matson was fending off the inevitable moment when money would be discussed. Whenever they discussed money, it ended with his having less, and the Count more, or at least some.
After coffee Matson remarked that it had been a long time since they had been to a movie, and Bob Hope was playing in Alexandria. He was aware that the Count professed to scorn American comedy, on the grounds that it was not understandable.
The Count, who had his sister’s sad eyes, and who for twenty years had defended himself against the ways of this strange land by an air of bewilderment and surprise, as if he had just passed Ellis Island, saw his opportunity. “I hear there is much money in Hollywood—much.”
“When did you learn that?” Matson said.
“I hear it. It is said that there is more money in Hollywood than there is in New York. I was told that if I had opened my salon in Hollywood I would have been a huge success. In Hollywood they have respect for blood and ancestry.”
Matson made a rude noise with his thin lips.
“Gerald!” his wife said. “Let Iggy say what he has to say! I think he has a very good idea.”
“Yes,” the Count said. “It came to me last night when I heard the government has ordered there should be anti-Bolshevik pictures.”
“The government didn’t do any such thing,” said Matson. “Some Congressman merely suggested it. The government can’t order movies made.”
The Count shrugged. “When anti-Bolshevist pictures are made they will need technical advice. I will be there. It will be a great chance to make money and inform everyone about the Bolsheviks too.”
“Meanwhile,” said the Countess, “Iggy can open a dress shop. He will no doubt meet influential people. When they need technical advice he will be available. I think it’s a remarkable idea.”
“Yes,” said the Count, “it will be a double opportunity.”
“Iggy doesn’t want another loan,” said the Countess. “He just wants you to make an investment.”
Matson knew he was trapped, yet he continued to struggle. “We’ll discuss it tomorrow. I’m tired. They keep unloading pacifists on me. It’s disheartening.” He could always distract his wife with Department shop talk.<
br />
“Pacifists!” she exclaimed.
“Yes, pacifists.” He told them about Jeff Baker, and how he had tried, unsuccessfully, to keep this dreamer out of the Department, and then out of Europe, and finally out of his own Division.
“Sometimes,” said the Count, “it is apparent this government is crazy—insane. How this country ever became the leader among the nations is to me utterly incredible.”
“And if he goes to Budapest he will work on the Atlantis Project?” said Anya.
“He might.” Anya was still beautiful, and an imaginative and popular hostess, and she had been a great help to him in his career, but sometimes he wished she would not speak so carelessly of secret matters.
“What is this Atlantis Project?” asked Iggy.
“I don’t think it should be discussed here, Anya,” Matson said.
“Now, Gerald, don’t be ridiculous. Iggy is one of the family, and anyway he’d be the last person in the world to mention it. I think it would be much safer to tell Iggy than have men like this Baker know about it, and perhaps even get into it.”
“I don’t want it discussed!” Matson said. He decanted a thimbleful of brandy into one of his King Alexander glasses.
“Don’t you trust me?” the Count asked. “Me, your own brother-in-law—me, a man who is a victim of the Bolsheviks?”
“Gerald, you’re so silly,” Anya said. She talked on, and before Matson could stop her she had said, “I think it’s the most wonderful idea, to build another underground.”
“Shut up!” Matson yelled.
“Come, come,” said the Count. “No quarreling. I don’t wish to Know your secrets, Gerald, if you do not trust me.” He poured brandy to the rim of his glass. “I drink to the downfall of the Bolsheviks!”