“To their end,” Matson said mechanically, and raised his own glass. It had to come sooner or later, and it was his judgment that the sooner it came the better. It should come before the Reds had atom bombs. To the war! The war would end this constant rasping of his nerves, his worry over money and his future in the Department. The war would eliminate the radicals and emasculate the unions and placate his brothers. The war would give jobs to his in-laws, and eventually send them back to their estates in Russia. For Matson, the war would mean peace.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
THE DAY BEFORE Jeff Baker was to leave for Budapest Matson summoned him to his office and said, “I had a call for you from Horace Locke. He wants to see you before you leave. Friend of yours?”
“Horace Locke? No, but I’ve heard my father speak of him. I haven’t heard his name in years. I thought he was retired, or dead, or something.”
“He isn’t, but he should be.”
“Yes?”
“He isn’t very well liked in the Department. He’s outlived his time, and should be out on pension. I wouldn’t take anything he says too seriously. That’s just a friendly hint.”
“Thanks,” Jeff said. He had tried to follow Dannenberg’s advice, and understand Matson’s viewpoint. He had been attentive, respectful, and had muffled his own opinions as much as he could. He tried to agree, at least outwardly, with whatever Matson had to say, as he did now.
“You’re not to talk about anything that goes on in this Division.”
“I won’t, sir.” He could not bring himself to like Matson. When he talked to Matson he felt that his distaste, no matter how carefully he censored it from his voice and masked it from his face, must somehow show, for he knew Matson could feel it. It was as if, like a dog, he exuded a hostile odor, for he could feel Matson bristle.
“If Locke has anything to say about this Division I want a complete report on it. He sometimes tries to start trouble.”
“Yes, sir.”
2
Jeff found Horace Locke on the second floor of Old State, across the street from the White House. The Department, in return for New War, had ceded Old State to the Presidential special agencies, so Horace Locke’s office was like a forgotten island around which eddied and bubbled the activity of a foreign sea. On the office door hung a sign—“Adviser to the Diplomatic Monuments and Memorials Commission.”
There was no anteroom, no secretary, no typists or messengers. There was only a thin, wispy, white-haired man, dressed in tweeds that were soft and silky with years, small in his loneliness. On his desk was the minimum issue, for one of Career Minister rank, of double pen set, water flask and glasses, metal calendar, two telephones, and in and out files, empty.
Jeff had expected he would be infirm, or dull-witted or cantankerous with age, but actually he didn’t appear so old. He certainly wasn’t any older than the Secretary of State, and he didn’t seem much older than Dannenberg or Matson. His manner was composed and yet alert, his handshake quick and steady. “You’re Baker, eh? Your father was Nicholas Baker, isn’t that right?” he began.
“That’s right, sir,” Jeff said.
“I thought so. Didn’t think there would be two Jefferson Wilson Bakers. Can you pull up one of those leather chairs? Don’t know whether they’re comfortable or not. Nobody ever sits in them.” He waited until Jeff moved the chair, and then he said, “How proud your father would have been—how very proud! Guess I’ll have to be proud for him. We were good friends, you know.”
“I’ve heard him speak of you quite often.”
“It was only luck that I knew you’d made the Foreign Service. Saw your name this morning in the Department bulletin. That’s all that ever crosses my desk, now, the daily bulletin.”
Jeff knew he should say something, but he was afraid that whatever he said would be wrong. Horace Locke was obviously in an uncomfortable position, and perhaps it would embarrass him to refer to it.
For a moment Horace Locke remained silent, too, although his clear gray eyes were inspecting Jeff, drinking in detail, analyzing, judging. “If I had known sooner,” he said, “there are some things I could have—.” He shook his head. “No, I couldn’t have been of any help to you. Sometimes I forget I’m no longer a Division Chief. Anyway, you did all right for yourself. You’re an FSO, Class V, and you’re going to Budapest. That’s good. What’s your job going to be?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I’ll be one of the Third Secretaries.”
They talked of Jeff’s father. The way Horace Locke talked, Nicholas Baker had been much more influential, in the Department, than Jeff had ever guessed. Jeff remarked about this, and Locke said:
“Don’t underestimate your own importance. Foreign policy is not made by speeches, or treaties, or directives, or proclamations. It is made by men, and what they do. That’s why I stay in the Department. I’ve got too big a stake in the Twentieth Century to pick up my chips and get out. Some day I might be able to do something again.”
Jeff said, “I did something once.”
“What’s that you said?”
“Oh, nothing,” Jeff said.
3
He said, “Oh, nothing,” but he knew now that it was something. It was something he couldn’t speak of. He hadn’t learned until much later what it meant. He hadn’t known a military axiom—that the action of a junior officer can sometimes influence a skirmish, an engagement, a battle, a campaign, a war. History.
Nobody in the General’s War Room back in Florence—a War Room in a tent, but commodious and comfortable nevertheless—selected Jeff Baker to be the spearhead, the point, of the offensive against the Gothic Line in September of 1944. The General himself was not responsible for the offensive. It was ordered by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, who were worried. The Germans were planning to pull four divisions out of Italy and send them to the Western Front. If this happened the offensive in the West, already gasping for supplies, would certainly bog down. And if the logistics disease became worse, and the Germans counterattacked in the winter, those four extra divisions would become enormously important. So the General in Florence received a directive to attack the Apennines frontally from the south. If he pushed through to the plains of the Po beyond, that would be wonderful but most unlikely. In all history no army had ever successfully shoved upward through the shark jaws of the Apennines. That’s exactly the way it was—like pushing one’s naked hand through a shark’s clenched jaws. If the four German divisions could not leave Italy—if they could be contained—that would be enough.
Back in Florence the General selected the 91st Division to assault Futa Pass and fight its way up Route 65, the only hard-surfaced, all-weather road across the mountains. But before Futa Pass could be stormed and held, it was necessary to capture the high ground which commanded the pass. For this task the General selected the 85th Division, which was fresh and rested.
The general commanding the 85th looked over his maps, and saw that there were two mountains—Altuzzo and Traponi—that he must take. Between them rose a hill, unnamed and with its exact height not given, which could be useful if captured. He assigned the 339th Infantry Regiment to Altuzzo, the taller of the two peaks.
The colonel commanding the 339th, a West Pointer immensely proud of his regiment, planned to assault Altuzzo with one battalion during the night, and send in another battalion at daybreak, and keep his third in reserve. From his command post in an abandoned villa in Scarperia, curtained from German observation and fire only by a row of willows, the colonel looked up at Altuzzo and knew he would need all three.
It happened that Jeff’s battalion was picked for the night attack, and his company was picked by the battalion commander as the spearhead, and his Old Man chose Baker’s platoon as the point. So it was just accident that Jeff Baker led the attack on the Gothic Line.
It turned out that Jeff Baker’s platoon did better than expected, and Futa Pass was stormed and held. They named a mountain after him. They call
ed it Baker’s Peak. People said we might never have got Futa Pass except for Baker’s Peak. The four German divisions were contained according to plan, and final victory came in the spring.
Jeff never spoke of it, and indeed wished he could banish it entirely from his mind, for he felt more guilt than pride in his part in it. He had survived, but the crucible of fire had been too hot. It had altered the tensile strength of his inner metal.
4
Jeff said, “Mr. Locke, I’m sure with all your experience you’ll be called on eventually. But why can’t you do anything now?”
Horace Locke didn’t seem to hear. He leaned back in his chair and half turned, so that he looked out over the White House, and The Hill beyond. “We were so proud of the Twentieth Century,” he said softly. “Why, we even named a train after it.”
“What happened to you? Why aren’t you a Chief of Division any more?” Jeff hazarded.
“I’m going to answer you,” Locke said, his voice still low. “Because I have dangerous and unfashionable thoughts. Because I won’t go along with the ‘you’re another’ school of diplomacy. Because I believe we can have another war, or we can have civilization. We cannot have them both.”
Jeff said, “Maybe I’ve got dangerous and unfashionable thoughts too.”
“Knowing your father, I thought you would have. But we are not alone. We are only two in a great majority. True, it is a majority inarticulate, confused, and almost ashamed of displaying its consuming will for peace. We turned over our leadership to those who have a vested interest in war, and we have had trouble getting it back. My judgment tells me that we will never get it back, that the odds are for another war, and the dissolving of all our rights and freedoms. We will believe that thus we can beat the Russians, and survive. But if we survive it will be only as blind ants underground, fearfully guarding their eggs and breeding more soldier ants so they can continue to exist, always blind and underground.”
“That’s a pretty black picture.”
“I know it. We have the choice of believing Patton, who said, ‘Man is war,’ or of believing Sherman. I’m afraid we’ll believe Patton.”
Jeff thought of the Nebelwürfe coming in on the slopes of Mt. Altuzzo, and the terrible winter of ’44, when it was always cold and always wet on Route 65, which the homesick doughs called Easy Street. “When it comes,” he laughed, “I want to be the guy who hands out the doughnuts on the dock at Hoboken.”
Horace Locke smiled, as though he had followed Jeff’s chain of thought perfectly. “I don’t think that would help you much. There was ‘Remember the Maine,’ and then there was ‘Remember Pearl Harbor,’ and the next one will be ‘Remember New York.’”
He paused, and the smile disappeared. “In every country are men who want war for one reason or another. The military we can understand. They have been trained and educated for one purpose, and when they pursue their raison d’être it is understandable. But there are many others who want war, and their motives are not always so clear as, say, the greed of our local Krupps, and the fear and suspicion of the men in the Kremlin. All of them have some personal reason—and to them a good reason—for bringing down the house of man in atomic shambles.”
“So what can we do?” said Jeff.
“We do what we can. It won’t be much, but more than most. Most people cannot make themselves heard above the din for war. In the Foreign Service you can observe, you can report, you can even act.”
“I hope so. But I’m not sure how.”
“I can’t tell you. You’ll know when the time comes.”
“A Third Secretary can’t do much.”
“You’d be surprised what Third Secretaries have done. Of course they can bottle you up. They can stop all your reports. But there’s even a way to get around that. It’s been used many times.”
“Yes?”
“When you have something to say, and you cannot say it officially, put it in a letter to some friend in the Department. A man you trust.”
“Isn’t there a regulation about that?”
“There is, but it’s pretty elastic.”
“I don’t have any friends in the Department,” Jeff said.
“You can have me.”
Jeff wondered whether he was engaging in a conspiracy. He didn’t feel as if it were a conspiracy. It seemed perfectly natural and normal. “I’ll remember that,” he said.
“I don’t know whether I’ll be able to do anything with what you write me, if you do write,” Horace Locke said, “but I’ll try.” He put his hands on the arms of his chair, and Jeff knew their talk was over. “I have to keep trying,” Locke said as he rose, “until they finally kick me out of here. But I’m afraid it is hopeless. If there is to be peace, it must be dictated from up there.” He pointed his hand towards the old-fashioned, soaring ceiling, not self-consciously, but matter-of-fact as if of a certainty there were something up there.
Jeff could not help but look, and there was nothing up there except an embossed Great Seal, dirty and yellowing, and Jeff realized this once had been part of the suite of the Secretary of State.
CHAPTER FIVE
1
JEFF BAKER SPENT the rest of that day completing the list of purchases recommended by the travel experts in the processing section. He had been told that you could not be certain of buying anything in Budapest—a city where once you could buy everything—that the Mission maintained no commissary, and there was no PX closer than Vienna.
He bought vitamin pills, lighter flints, chocolate, sulfadiazine, a hundred razor blades and spare razor, a portable radio adjustable for all current frequencies, two dozen cakes of soap, and six tooth brushes.
2
He went back to the apartment and began to pack. As a Third Secretary and Vice-Consul he was entitled to a number of privileges, among them a five-gun salute when boarding a man-of-war, and an extra eighty-pound weight allowance on trans-ocean planes. So that gave him a hundred and thirty-five pounds in all. He found he could get almost everything he possessed, except his books, into the four-suiter, the two-suiter, and the pullman bag, all new and unscarred by travel.
He was even able to pack his maps. He collected maps as some men collect old theater stubs and programs, or first editions, or circus posters. He could look at a map with the rhapsody of a botanist examining a prize orchid. He knew maps. He loved maps. Everything on earth seemed to change except its contour, the depth of its oceans, the heights of its mountains. Maps were solid things. You could depend on a map.
He didn’t pack the written and photographic memories of his father. He would ask Stud to put them in a safe deposit vault. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to keep them, but he did want to keep them. He felt he could depend on them, too. Wasn’t that a silly feeling?
He had also bought a diplomatic dispatch case, of handsome pigskin, tooled in London. It had cost him forty-five dollars, and this seemed a lot of money, especially when he had nothing to put in it except a handful of personal papers, and the parchment commission, carefully enclosed in cellophane, in which the President of the United States said he reposed “special trust and confidence in your Integrity, Prudence, and Fidelity.” He was enamored of the dispatch case as a woman with her first mink wrap. It was the patent of his office, the insignia of his rank. Anthony Eden could possess no better. He was admiring its austere beauty, standing on the table with his black homburg beside it, when Susan Pickett called.
She said she’d just heard from a girl in Balkans that he was leaving soon, and she hoped he’d drop in and see her before he left.
“I’m flying at seven in the morning,” he said.
“Oh! I didn’t know it was that soon.” She sounded upset. “I suppose you’re awfully busy, packing and saying goodbye. I guess you won’t have time.”
“I’m all packed,” Jeff said. “I’ve said all the goodbyes I have to say.”
“Except me.”
“Except you.” He discovered that when he visualized her at the other
end of the phone it stimulated and exhilarated him almost as if he could touch her. It was a phenomenon at once pleasant and improbable of fulfillment, like a schoolboy’s desire for the prettiest girl in the senior class.
“Well?” she challenged.
“Can I see you?” Immediately her reply became important. If she already had a date, or she was tired, or busy, or he could come over but only for a few minutes, then it was going to mean much more to him than a barren final night in Washington. If she said no, he was going to be miserable for a long time. He had committed himself.
“I wish you would come over.”
“I’ll be over right away.”
“Not too quickly. Give me an hour. I just got home.”
“Okay. An hour.”
He didn’t need a shave, but he shaved anyway. He spent an unnecessary length of time changing his shirt, and he had trouble knotting his tie. He found he didn’t have proper control over his fingers. They insisted on shaking. Maybe I’m in love with her, he told himself. Maybe this is the way love is, exicting and adventurous the way it was when I was sixteen. More of an adventure than flying to Europe in the morning. Much more.
He told himself he couldn’t possibly be in love with Susan Pickett. He’d only been out with her once. Besides, he had always believed that when he fell in love with a girl he would think of marriage, and he wasn’t thinking of marriage at all. He was just wondering what she’d do, if anything, this night. His mind was racing from one imaginary scene to another, savoring the possibilities. In a vague way he felt this was somewhat sinful, if he really was in love with her, and wondered whether the thoughts of other men were as gross as his own. He couldn’t imagine his father ever thinking as he thought now. Others of his own generation, yes. His generation had attained a certain sophistication about sex. His generation had broken the puritan chains. His generation had traveled. His generation had been around.