near the dais and clinked glasses amid smiles and hand-clapping, “I thank you for that fine toast, and in response, you can keep California.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Pug said and they both drank. “That’s a good start, and can you do anything else for us?”
“Certainly. Fast action,” said Stalin, linking his arm in Pug’s. They were so close that Pug caught an odor of fish on Stalin’s breath. “American style. We Russians can sometimes do it too.” He walked toward the two admirals, and the old red-faced Russian stumbled to his feet and stood very erect. Stalin spoke to him in low rapid sentences. Slote, behind Victor Henry, caught only a few words, but the pop-eyed look of the admiral and Stalin’s tones were self-translating. The dictator turned to Victor Henry, beaming again. “Well, it is arranged about the weather codes and so forth. Tell your chief that we Russians do not intentionally embarrass our guests. Tell him I feel the American Navy will do historic things in this struggle, and will rule the ocean when peace comes.”
As Slote quickly translated, Admiral Standley stood, his thin withered lips quivering, and grasped the dictator’s hand. Stalin went back to the head table. The incident seemed to stay in his mind, because when he rose to make the last toast of the evening, to President Roosevelt, he returned to the theme. The interpreter was Oumansky, the ambassador to the United States, whose well-cut blue suit marked him off from the other Russians. His English was extremely smooth. “Comrade Stalin says President Roosevelt has the very difficult task of leading a country which is nonbelligerent, yet wants to do all it can to help the two great democracies of Europe in their fight against Fascism. Comrade Stalin says” — Oumansky paused and looked all around the wide room, in a silence no longer marred by gunfire — “
This religious phrase brought a surprised stillness, then a surge of all the banqueters, glasses in hand, to their feet cheering, drinking, and applauding. Harriman heartily shook Stalin’s hand; the plethoric little Russian admiral grasped the hands of Slote, Henry, and Standley; and all over the room the banquet dissolved in great handshaking, backslapping, and embracing.
But the evening was not over. The Russians marched their guests through more empty splendid rooms to a movie theatre with about fifty soft low armchairs, each with a small table where attendants served cakes, fruits, sweets, and champagne. Here they showed a war movie and then a long musical, and Slote did something he would never have believed possible: in the heart of the Kremlin, he fell asleep. A swelling of finale music woke him seconds before the lights came on. He saw others starting awake in the glare, furtively rubbing their eyes. Stalin walked out springily with Beaverbrook and Harriman, both of whom had red eyes and suffering expressions. In a grand hall, under a vast painting of a battle in snow, he shook hands with all the guests, one by one.
Outside the Grand Palace the night was black, without stars, and the wind was cold and biting. The NKVD agents, leather collars turned up to their ears, blue flashlights in hand, looked sleepy, chilled, and bored, sorting the guests into their limousines.
“Say, how the devil can he drive so fast in this black out?” the admiral protested, as their car passed through the outer gate and speeded into an inky void. “Can Russians see like cats?” The car stopped in blackness, the escort guided the three Americans to a doorway, they passed inside, and found themselves in the small cold foyer of the Hotel National, where one dim lamp burned at the reception desk. The porter who had opened the door was muffled in a fur coat. The elevator stood open, dark, and abandoned. The admiral bade them good-night and plodded to the staircase.
“Come up for a minute,” Henry said to Leslie Slote.
“No thanks. I’ll grope my way to my apartment. It’s not far.”
Pug insisted, and Slote followed Henry up the gloomy staircase to his squalid little room on an areaway. “I don’t rate like Tudsbury,” he said.
“Tudsbury’s about the best propagandist the Soviet Union’s got,” Slote said, “and I guess they know it.”
Pug unlocked a suitcase, took a narrow dispatch case out, unlocked that, and glanced through papers.
“I hope you understand,” Slote said, “that those locks are meaningless. All the contents of that case have been photographed.”
“Yes,” Victor Henry said absently. He slipped a letter into his pocket. “Would you like a snooze? Please stick around for a while. Something may be doing.”
“Oh?” Out of his new and growing respect for Henry, Slote asked no questions, but stretched out on the hard narrow bed to a twang and squeak of springs. His head still reeled from the champagne that shadowy attendants had kept pouring at the movie. Next thing he knew, knocking woke him. Victor Henry was talking at the door to a man in a black leather coat. “
“Where to?”
“Back to the Kremlin. I have a letter from Harry Hopkins for the big cheese. I didn’t think I was going to get to hand it over in person, but maybe I am.”
“Good lord, does the ambassador know about this?”
“Yes. Admiral Standley brought him a note about it from the President. I gather he was annoyed, but he knows.”
Slote sat up. “Annoyed! I should think so. Mr. Hopkins has a way of doing these things. This is very outlandish, Captain Henry. Nobody should ever, ever see a head of state without going directly through the ambassador. How have you arranged this?”
“Me? I had nothing to do with it. I’m an errand boy. Hopkins wanted this letter to go to Stalin informally and privately or not at all. In my place you don’t argue with Harry Hopkins. I understand he talked to Oumansky. If it puts you in a false position, I guess I’ll go alone. There’ll be an interpreter.”
Calculating the angles in this astonishing business — mainly the angle of his own professional self- preservation — Slote began combing his hair at a yellowed wall mirror. “I’ll have to file a written report with the ambassador.”
“Sure.”
In a long, high-ceilinged, bleakly lit room lined with wall maps, Stalin sat at one end of a polished conference table, with many papers piled on a strip of green cloth before him. A stone ashtray at the dictator’s elbow brimmed with cigarette butts, suggesting that he had been steadily at work since the departure of the banquet guests. He now wore a rough khaki uniform which sagged and bulged, and he looked very weary. Pavlov, his usual English interpreter, sat beside him, a thin, pale, dark-haired young man with a clever, anxiously servile expression. There was nobody else in the big room. As the uniformed protocol officer ushered in the two Americans, Stalin rose, shook hands, with a silent gracious gesture waved them to chairs, and then sat down with an inquiring look at Captain Henry.
Henry handed him the letter and a round box wrapped in shiny blue paper. “Mr. Chairman, I’d better not inflict my bad Russian on you any longer,” he said in English, and Stalin carefully opened the White House envelope with a paper knife. Slote translated and Stalin replied in Russian, slightly inclining his head, “As you wish.” He passed to Pavlov the single handwritten pale green sheet, on which THE WHITE HOUSE was printed in an upper corner.
Pug said, as Stalin unwrapped the box, “And that is the special Virginia pipe tobacco Mr. Hopkins told you about that his son likes so much.” Pavlov translated this, and everything the American captain said thereafter, sometimes conveying Henry’s tone as well as a quick exact version of his words. Slote sat silent, nodding from time to time.
Stalin turned the round blue tin in his hands. “Mr. Hopkins is very thoughtful to remember our casual chat about pipe tobacco. Of course, we have plenty of good pipe tobacco in the Soviet Union.” He twisted open the tin with a quick wrench of strong hands and curiously inspected the heavy lead foil seal, before slashing it with a polished thumbnail and pulling a pipe from his pocket. “Now you can tell Mr. Hopkins that I tried his son’s tobacco.” Pug understood Stalin’s Russian in this small talk, but could not follow him after that.
Stalin stuffed the pipe, put a thick wooden match to it, and puffed fragrant blue smoke while Pavlov translated Hopkins’s letter aloud. After a meditative silence, the dictator turned veiled cold eyes on Victor Henry and proceeded to speak, pausing to let Pavlov catch up in English after three or four sentences. “That is a strange letter from Mr. Hopkins. We all know the United States manufactures millions of automobiles per year of many different models and types, including big luxurious, complicated machines such as Cadillacs and so forth. What is the problem
