Irving Wallace - The Man

For a moment Dilman’s mind went to the five days of arguments, concessions, bartering in the drafty Grand Château at Chantilly. Although the Soviet Premier had been generally reasonable, his occasional flare-ups of temper had been irritating, as in the instance of his demands for freedom for native Communists in Baraza and other AUP countries. Too, his sporadic sarcasm had been annoying, as when he had chided Dilman and Eaton for finding a Communist bogeyman under every American bed. “You outlaw the Turnerites on the pretext they are using our good Moscow gold to overthrow you,” he had said. “Do you think we are crazy to waste money on your oppressed minorities, to incite them, when they have more anger against their capitalist overlords than we ever had or will have? Bah. When you are in trouble, you try to wriggle out and divert your masses from your own shortcomings by making them see Red, at home or in Africa.” Yet the gibes, the tantrums, had been fewer than Dilman had expected, and after Kasatkin had spoken his pieces for his Presidium and Pravda back home, he had always proved ready to trade. He was not a fanatical crusader, Dilman had guessed early. He was a pragmatist. When he spoke as Communism’s voice, with Lenin’s intelligence, he was perverse. When he spoke for himself, with his own intelligence, he was reasonable.

Now the Russian had extended a friendly and spontaneous invitation to Dilman, and Dilman found the other’s brusque, forthright, roughneck warmth difficult to resist or offend. Yet Dilman was tired. “Well,” Dilman said hesitantly, “I had promised Mr. Illingsworth and Secretary Eaton we’d try to get back at-”

“You promise nothing to the ones who work for you, you owe them nothing,” Kasatkin said with mock severity. “You owe only your proletariat, the working people, your allegiance and health to do good.”

Dilman cast a sickly smile at the Russian leader. “I’m less certain than you that my proletariat-or yours, for that matter-are all so unanimous in worrying about our good health.”

“You speak for yours, I shall speak for mine,” said Premier Kasatkin cheerfully. “Come now, Mr. President, some air, the two of us together, no advisers, no specialists, no petty bureaucrats. Five days we have been surrounded. One night, the last, let us be alone together, a social promenade to cement our continuing good relations. What are thirty minutes in a lifetime, after all? And who knows?” He winked broadly. “Our thirty minutes may mean more to the world than our other accomplishments of a lifetime.”

The Russian seemed so determined to end their meeting on a friendly note that Dilman could deny him no further. “Very well,” he said. “A short walk, then, in the gardens.”

Arthur Eaton had come upon them during the last exchange, and he appeared pained, trying to indicate that he disapproved, but Dilman avoided his eye. Dilman had permitted the Russian to take him by the arm, when Eaton finally protested. “Mr. President, we’re expected to depart-”

Premier Kasatkin brushed his hand toward Eaton as he might brush off a bothersome fly. “You go have some champagne with the other courtiers, Eaton. You keep busy with my pretty secretary with the yellow hair over there-Natasha. She admires you. Give your President and me, two simple men of the streets with bad table manners, a chance to discuss earthier matters alone-like our children, and our hernias. A half hour, Mr. Secretary.”

And now Dilman and Kasatkin were crossing the ancient cobblestone courtyard of the seventeenth-century Palace past the saluting Garde Républicaine, marching through the gate of the iron grillwork fence, preceded and followed at short distances by United States Secret Service men and Soviet KGB agents.

As the two leaders entered the 250-acre gardens, Dilman could see that the autumn season had already stripped the ancient trees of their green foliage. Yet the night was mild, refreshing, and the varicolored gush and spray of the spotlighted fountains lent their walk a festive air.

Dilman indicated a path that led in the direction of the Trianons, and the Russian Premier nodded and turned off with him, while the bodyguards ahead scampered back into line. Out of the corner of his eye Dilman glanced once again, as he had so many times in the past five days, at his Soviet counterpart and marveled at the familiarity of his face. What there was about Kasatkin, he had realized from the moment of their first handshake in the Grand Château at Chantilly, what there was that had partially disarmed and captivated Dilman, was the Russian leader’s uncanny resemblance to old Grandpa Schneider.

In the pantheon of Dilman’s memory, the brightest eternal flame honored Grandpa Schneider. When Dilman was seven and eight and maybe nine years old, surrounded by squalor, poverty, anger, deprived of all love except that which his mother could find strength and time to spare, the only male affection and guidance that Dilman had known had come from Grandpa Schneider. The old man-although lately Dilman had realized the old man could not have been that old then-had not been a grandpa and his name had not been Schneider. He had been an immigrant Jewish bachelor and a tailor (which, in Yiddish, was schneider ), and because, when he was not hunched over the sewing machine or over the steam presser, he sat in a rocker, wearing a shawl and spectacles low on the bridge of his nose as he stitched, he had become Grandpa Schneider to the colored neighborhood and had been as pleased as if he had been crowned.

For Dilman, as a child, that rickety hot tailorshop had been the manor hall of a bountiful prince. Sitting cross-legged at Grandpa Schneider’s feet, while the old man repaired his shirts or patched his knickers or black stockings for free, Dilman would listen big-eyed to anecdotes of a faraway duchy named Bialystok in a kingdom named Poland. From Grandpa Schneider he would receive at no cost, and in equal quantities, Jewish aphorisms, licorice sticks, revised stories from Sholem Aleichem and Tolstoi, cinnamon rolls, and capsule biographies of such intellectuals as Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, Elbert Hubbard, and Arthur Brisbane.

Long years later Dilman had often thought that more than the material deprivation of his youth, the oppression of his race, the goading of his mother, it was the magical goodness and encouragement of that kindly, improbable old tailor that had sent him to books, to schools, to law, to whatever he had become in life. During the hard years much had gone out of Dilman’s memory, or faded into the hinterland of memory, but not Grandpa Schneider. Dilman’s love for the old man was ever there, burning bright.

And that was why, although he had come to the Chantilly Conference tense, prepared to be aggressive, he had been immediately softened by Nikolai Kasatkin, despite the latter’s subsequent bombast. For the faces of the Soviet Premier and the immigrant tailor of cherished memory were almost the same face. Thereafter, Dilman had been unable to be anything but friendly, amiable, and receptive toward Kasatkin, who, himself disarmed, most often responded in kind. If the Chantilly Conference between two of the mammoth powers on earth were a success, and its success one day recorded by learned professors in weighty historical tomes, would there be any mention in any index of “Schneider, Grandpa”? Well, so much for definitive histories, Dilman had thought.

Tonight, observing Premier Kasatkin strutting beside him along the Versailles garden path, Dilman still saw the old tailor’s knobby peasant profile matching the Russian leader’s profile, but he observed more. For all his sixty years, Kasatkin was taller, heavier, more muscular than the one residing in Dilman’s memory. Too, Kasatkin’s silver hair was fuller, his nose more pugged, his bridgework (startling, when he laughed) made of stainless steel and not gold.