Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

‘Big Loaf calling,’ said the radio, ‘Blanchot stuck in a bunch, it’s getting difficult, he’s with the French Ambassador and an American journalist.’

It was at that moment that the cat was set among the pigeons. When it was announced that the suspect had left with the French Ambassador at Berne.

Walker blanched. Radio again:

‘The French Ambassador has driven off with our client in a DS.’

It was de Vèze who suggested it. He was with Lilstein, Max and the correspondent of the Washington News, Linus Mosberger. Mosberger is a top-notch interviewer, he tries to get de Vèze to talk, departure of de Gaulle, Pompidou’s speech in Rome, before the referendum, saying he was ready to undertake great tasks if the opportunity presented itself, that is if de Gaulle lost the elections. Getting an old Gaullist to talk, persuading him to say what he thinks of Pompidou, checking what he says, Pompidou has betrayed his own side, he is assumed to have betrayed his own side because his wife had been insulted.

‘Is there any truth in what they say, Ambassador? that Pompidou dropped the Gaullists because certain Gaullists had slandered his wife?’

De Vèze reckons the American is very direct.

‘I’m sure, Monsieur Mosberger, that certain services of the American government could tell you far more about it than I can.’

And suddenly de Vèze:

‘Goffard, I’ll give you a lift.’

Mosberger and Lilstein took their leave.

It was Max who got into the DS with de Vèze.

The CIA man, Walker, asked wasn’t there anything they could do while they were on the road? He had a quiet voice:

‘We could blow a tyre with a rifle with telescopic sights, I’ll take the shot myself if you don’t want to, or we could stage an accident along their route, they stop, get out, take a look, and we can hold Goffard as a witness.’

Everyone started coming out with theories better suited to the pages of crime thrillers, Walker is now in charge of operations, an incident on the road taken by the French Ambassador, he’s returning to Berne, the best spot would be around Winzig, an hour’s drive away, that would allow enough time to set it all up, they’ve decided to go for it, mad rush to get away before de Vèze, maybe ten vehicles, Walker in one of them, Winzig here we come!

The Ambassador’s DS drove out of Grindisheim and two kilometres further on dropped de Vèze and Max at a small flying club on the banks of the Rhine, setting them down by a twin-engined aircraft, high wings, metallic grey with a red stripe along the fuselage.

‘Max, if you promise not to go round telling everybody I use an air taxi instead of tooling around in a DS, I’ll take you to Basle.’

De Vèze stroked the nose of the plane.

‘Same model as Eisenhower had, an Aerocommander, the 680, no, I’m not in that much of a hurry, actually it’s so I can fly a plane. An Ambassador isn’t allowed to pilot his own plane, so I hire a taxiplane, always the same one, an Aerocommander, high wing, gives you the best view of the landscape. And now and then the pilot lets me have the double controls. But that stays between the two of us! Climb aboard, we can talk, Grindisheim — Basle, we fly over the Rhine, beauty, legends.’

In the plane, de Vèze has given Max a big surprise.

Max assumes that de Vèze would start where they’d left off in a conversation they’d both had four years earlier when, a month after that evening in Singapore, he’d visited de Vèze in the Embassy in Rangoon. They’d sat in de Vèze’s office, Max had looked upon the Ambassador with an affection he couldn’t explain and had started telling him about a trip through Haute-Savoie, it happened a long time ago.

A trip taken in 1929, Max on Alpine roads in the company of a lady, a very great lady, a journey that took them from Waltenberg to the French Alps, a road rimmed by precipices but negotiated without mishap, Max had come to see de Vèze’s parents with this lady.

‘She’d agreed to come with me, as friends, we set out from Waltenberg, I’d told her everything, she knew how your mother was. When we got to Araches she sang for your mother, a capella , in German and in French, your mother cried and held Lena close in her arms, you were five, Ambassador, Lena had brought you a present, a big wooden roundabout, fully working, we’d bought it from Weber’s in Zurich, the Blue Dwarf there, you loved it. A two-tier Limonaire, wooden horses. In those days you had an Irish setter who was jealous of your merry-go-round and wanted to play with you, I had long talks with your father and Lena sang for your mother, later your father wrote to me saying that for years afterwards your mother went on singing what Lena had sung to her.’

De Vèze could have talked about all that with Max as a preliminary to more important business, and then tell him how sad he’d been for never having seen Lena again and for not being there when she was buried, he could also have talked about Hans, the way he’d finally met up with him in Geneva, they’d had dinner together, on a boat which sailed round the lake, de Vèze never mentioned a word of all that, in the cabin of the plane he had given Max a big surprise, came straight out with it:

‘How was Arlington?’

‘Terrifying, Ambassador.’

That’s what Lena’s funeral at Arlington was, terrifying, respond at once with something forceful, don’t behave like someone who’s caught off balance and hides behind anodyne comments, move smartly to a point beyond where de Vèze expects Max to be.

‘Terrifying, I wept, in the middle of a military cemetery, I didn’t last out, they folded the flag and they gave it to me, to me, Goffard, a foreigner. And Leone Trice sang “Voi che sapete”, terrifying, much more terrifying than today’s proceedings, Arlington, Americans in full dress uniform, three salvos and bagpipes, military funeral though she hadn’t asked for anything.

‘Two or three top officials had pulled every string in the CIA, the Pentagon, the White House, can you imagine who was there? Music lovers, spooks, generals, aesthetes, patricians, liberals, singers and blackmailers, all clustered round the coffin of Lena Hellström, star-spangled banner, it was mainly the CIA who organised the show, important for them to show that she was one of theirs, that they don’t only work with schmucks and finks, everybody there was wondering how long it was since the CIA recruited her.

‘No one can possibly say they’d never recruited her, she was grandmother to the lot of them, she’d watched them cut their teeth, and before the CIA she’d been in at the birth of the outfit that came before it, the OSS, she’d started before all that, she sang, she had lots of useful contacts among the Germans, the English, they loved her in Berlin, eternal youth, Belle Époque, the great eagle above a frozen lake, she started with the war, in ’14, pre-dated even the OSS, as it happened, she was living in Switzerland with Hans, he left her to go off and play heroes, or rather she walked out on him when she realised he was going to leave her, that he wouldn’t desert just to please her, she felt it was like being at the opera, she left him without saying where she was going, or rather they left each other, Hans always said “over a stupid thing”.

‘She wasn’t all that anxious to see him again but on the off-chance she decided to go to Berlin and take a few singing lessons before returning to the United States, to improve her command of music, the world goes up in flames and she decides to improve her singing.’

Max had gradually pieced together Lena’s story, he felt he could tell it to de Vèze but he didn’t tell all of it, he was afraid to say too much that was definitive, to be too careful about choosing a particular way of putting the events together, the sequences, afraid of suddenly finding he’d gone out on a limb because he’d said too much, he relived Lena’s story as he had relived it in his seat, in the front row at Arlington, in flashes, with clear moments, brief scenes, snatches of dialogue.