The Story of Henri Tod Read Online Free

people are something. And that is the principal mine right now. Your first stop. You will need an extensive briefing on Tod. A very unusual young man. There is a great deal to do.”
    â€œDo we have anybody—over there?”
    â€œYou mean in the Kremlin?”
    â€œWell, come to think of it, yes, in the Kremlin.”
    â€œIf I answered that question, Blackford, you should turn me in to the Director, who would—quite properly—fire me.”
    â€œRufus, old shoe, if ever they fire you, I’ll defect and we can start our own country. Meanwhile we might use our sources to lay on an atom bomb or two, so that we can be impregnable.”
    Rufus permitted himself to smile.

3
    The bell on his desk rang timidly, almost hesitantly. As if especially trained to be obsequious. Walter Ulbricht, Chairman of the Council of State of the German Democratic Republic, and First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, responded. Responses were available in any of a number of combinations. If his secretary saw a single green light, that meant that she had permission to relay her message into the little loudspeaker on Chairman Ulbricht’s desk. If she saw a red light, that meant that she must abandon, until exactly thirty minutes later, any attempt to communicate with Chairman Ulbricht. Thirty minutes later the executive secretary had instructions to begin again, from scratch. If, in response to the little buzzer, two green lights were flashed, that meant that if the visitor Chairman Ulbricht was expecting had arrived, he should without further ado be admitted, always assuming that the secretary had established that the visitor outside his door was, undeniably, the person expected. If a green and a red signal were shown, this meant that the visitor, or the message, was to be passed along in exactly five minutes—i.e., that the Chairman could not, for whatever reason, be interrupted at this particular moment . If both red lights were shown, that meant that the Chairman had changed his mind about seeing the visitor to whom an audience had been granted, and his secretary was to tell the visitor to seek another appointment at another time. On the other hand, if the initial ring had been other than for the purpose of announcing a visitor, then the secretary, upon seeing the green and the red lights, was to re-signal the Chairman, by ringing again the anemic bell. “Why don’t you get those little machines that make the lights blink on and off, Uncle Walter?” Ulbricht’s personal aide-de-camp, Caspar Allman, had asked him a few days before. “That way you could double the number of messages you could give Hilda.”
    â€œI have thought about that,” Ulbricht replied, not looking up from his desk, and wondering for the one thousandth time why he had agreed to take on his widowed sister Ilse’s impossible son. Walter Ulbricht was certainly making up for executing the boy’s father, he thought, though Caspar’s extraordinary fluency in five languages protected the Chairman from charges of nepotism. As if Old Pointy Beard, as the Berliners referred to him (not in his presence—the Chairman would have tattooed his nose, if Lenin had), needed to protect himself from anybody this side of the Kremlin. “And I shall think about it some more if I incline to think about it more. Does that answer your question?”
    â€œYes, Uncle Walter,” the young man said, leaning back on his chair by the mini-desk at the corner of the office, and swatting at a fly that had got on his beardless face, but missing it.
    Today being Monday, Chairman Ulbricht looked with particular resignation at his watch. The time was exactly eight o’clock. This meant that he would now be briefed by his chief of staff. He depressed both green buttons, and Herr Erik von Hausen opened the door and came in.
    Von Hausen was a small man, fastidiously dressed, in somber blue. He wore pince-nez which, every