The hour became late and they drifted away, two by two.
Only Sean and Miss Rasmussen were left as the fire dimmed to its coals. Igor saw that Miss Rasmussen was looking at Sean with loving eyes and that his farewell should be made.
“I must go back to Copenhagen but first you must tell me what happened to Captain Orlov?”
“One of the boys in the Marine detachment has Russian-born parents. They spoke it at his home all the time. We got him a chauffeur’s uniform, borrowed a car from the embassy motor pool, and stuck a pair of Red flags on the fenders. Captain Orlov was driven to Elsinore to see the Soviet ambassador.”
“But ... but ... the ambassador was at the Wivex tonight.”
“You don’t say.”
“But ... but ...”
“He was driven to Hamlet’s castle and told to knock on the gate. The car drove off. Well, Orlov speaks only Russian and we figured he’d have a hell of a time finding a Russian-speaking Dane. He should get back to Copenhagen tomorrow sometime ... if he’s lucky.”
Igor Karlovy laughed until his stomach ached and tears rolled down his cheeks. “That stupid bastard!” Orlov was probably making out a report on him. Now, he could never turn it in because he would have to admit being tricked by the Americans. When he gained control of himself he thought the time for a farewell had come.
“It was a nice journey, Major O’Sullivan.”
“See you around, Colonel.”
Sean thundered out of a deep sleep, fished around for the night-stand lamp, and switched it on.
Igor Karlovy hovered over him, roaring drunk. Miss Rasmussen screamed and threw the blankets over her head.
“You son of a bitch! It’s four o’clock in the morning!”
“I intend to go,” Igor said, “but first I demand to know why you want to destroy us!”
“Because, you simple bastard, we crave the latest Moscow fashions!”
Chapter Eighteen
THE AMERICAN ARMY BAND marched beneath the reviewing stand striking up “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The honor guard, a crack drill team of Negroes, followed the band in double cadence, executing an intricate close-order drill.
Marshal Alexei Popov waved his hand in appreciation. The Russian was in a jovial mood. Great medals adorned his tunic from armpit to armpit, chest to navel. Elements of the mighty Second American Armored Divisions followed with their tank treads setting up a rumbling din.
Standing next to Popov was Lieutenant General Andrew Jackson Hansen, First Deputy Military Governor. Hansen remembered a year back. The President was in Berlin for the Potsdam Conference and drove between two solid lines of tanks of an entire division. American might was then on display. Soon parts of the division would be pulling out of Berlin, once again reducing the garrison.
A year ago, at the end of the war, there were three million American troops in Europe; now less than a third of the number and shrinking fast. The stampede was on to bring the boys home and to hell with European involvements. Hansen had pleaded in council after council that twenty divisions had to be left in Europe. The Congress led the parade of deaf ears.
That was why Marshal Popov was in a genial mood. All along, Soviet experts had predicted the American withdrawal. Soon the Americans would be too weak to withstand concerted pressure.
The parade honoring the first anniversary of the occupation of Berlin made a public show of unity. In the beginning the Berliners looked upon the Americans as liberators and were shocked. During the first year in the Berlin Kommandatura and the Supreme German Council the Americans seemed to be doing everything possible to please the Russians.
Colonel Neal Hazzard stood in the row behind Hansen, beside his adversary, Brigadier Trepovitch. The latest tirade from the Russians was over the American formation of a sports program for German children with GI’s acting as instructors and coaches.
Trepovitch harangued that it was an attempt to encourage the rebirth of German militarism. When the Russian saw how the children flocked to the American soldiers, he attempted to institute a duplicate program in the Russian Sector.
Neal Hazzard said he knew why the Russians used the knight as their favorite chess piece. “It’s like a Russian. It can move in eight different ways ... all of them crooked.”
As Scotch pipers of a tradition-rich regiment set up a wail in the streets, Neal Hazzard wondered how far the Russians were going to push before we began to push back.
“Neal,” General Hansen said, “we are pleased with the way free elections have gone in Hesse, Bavaria, and Württemberg-Baden. I’d like to press for them in Berlin.”
“There’s a difference, sir. We don’t have Russians to contend with in the zone.”
“The Constitution is ready to be handed down. Take a crack at it in the Kommandatura.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hazzard brought the matter up, expecting a stalling act from Trepovitch.
The Russian returned at the next meeting with instructions, and, to everyone’s surprise, suggested elections at an early date in October.
Neal Hazzard was baffled. He went to O’Sullivan for advice.
“Sure the Russians want elections,” Sean said. “We both do for different reasons. We want them to dispose of our responsibility. They want them to entrench themselves.”
“How do they figure they can win?”
“They’re dealing to us with a stacked deck.”
“They can’t win after what they’ve done to this city,” Hazzard insisted.
“They’ve made a calculation, Colonel, that we won’t lift a finger to help the free parties. They’ll have them demoralized to a pulp.”
Sean’s estimation was based on the way the Communists had squeezed the life out of the political opposition in the Russian Zone of Germany. In city after city the Democratic Party leadership along with the other free parties were coerced into the anti-Fascist front. The pattern was the same. For window dressing a Democrat or member of the Christian Party sometimes held the post of mayor. But always he was flanked with deputies like Heinz Eck and the police, education, propaganda, and food control was in Communist hands.
After smarting from Ulrich Falkenstein’s rebellion, the Communists went to work on the Democrats in the Russian Sector of Berlin where the West could not operate. Systematic terror lopped off Democratic and Christian leadership.
Despite Falkenstein’s earlier pleas, his party was being splintered away.
Feeling no Western opposition, Trepovitch then presented the petition to license the anti-Fascist front as an operating group in Berlin “because it was in existence in the Soviet Zone.”
In England, the Labor Party, first cousins of the German Democrats, brought pressure on their occupation officials to stiffen British opposition. It was Colonel T. E. Blatty who answered in the negative to the anti-Fascist front.
Then a strong French stand by Jacques Belfort said that France would recognize the anti-Fascist front, but only as a continuation of the Communist Party. This was the first feeble beginning of resistance.
At American Headquarters individual officers such as Sean O’Sullivan acted on their own initiative to help the free parties in dozens of “unofficial” ways.
For the most part, the West remained ineffective as Rudi Wöhlman and Heinrich Hirsch engineered an election campaign to put the most uncouth ward heeler to shame, by comparison.
Russia, controlling Berlin’s only radio, refused to give the free parties a single minute of air time.
Mitte Borough, the center of the city, began to look like Moscow on May Day. Banners in defiant red and white hung from nearly every wall.
THE SOVIET UNION IS THE FRIEND OF THE GERMAN WORKING PEOPLE!
FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY THROUGH THE PEOPLE’S PROLETARIAT PARTY!
TURN BACK THE WARMONGERS!