Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [174]
In the center of the street arose a column, and on it a pair of vikings blowing long trumpets. The Danes joked that the trumpets would sound when a virgin passed.
Raadhus Plaza stretched below. Copenhagen was starting a new day with wonderful briskness. Tens of thousands of Danes pedaled their bicycles, weaving around automobiles, and the square was alive with the sounds of cooing pigeons, sharp heels on stone, voices of the rapid, indistinguishable language.
How different from the movement of the troubled grim masses in Moscow, Igor thought.
Colonel Igor Karlovy was a man deeply disturbed. The five-week inspection tour of the Western Zones and the conference in Copenhagen were drawing to a close. He had felt uneasy about the safety of Lotte Böhm. No communication between them had been possible. The separation had made him realize that he loved her ... and he had committed a cardinal sin in losing his hatred for Americans.... Questions gnawed at him. They could never be asked.
One could watch Copenhageners for hours, Igor thought. The Soviet delegation was housed in a wing of the Palace Hotel in the heart of the city. The Americans were a mile and a half away at the D’Angleterre. Between them ran Frederiksborg Way, a narrow street lined with exclusive shops and department stores.
The Russians always tried to hold meetings and luncheons at the American hotel so they could walk Frederiksborg Way. The shops were filled with goods they had never seen ... watches, silver, porcelain, furs. The people were handsome, they smiled, and they were well dressed; and all this was in an austere period at the end of a war. Was this capitalistic decadence?
If Major O’Sullivan and the other Americans and British he had dealt intimately with were proof of Western imperialism, then the proof was wrong. Most of them came from humble backgrounds with at least one parent from another land. They were hard-working, intelligent, and friendly.
Why did Azov send me on this mission?
Igor remembered his complaint to a British major about the fact that the coal miners in the Ruhr were striking and holding up Russian reparations shipments.
“But these chaps have every right to strike, you know,” the Englishman answered.
They have no rights. They are Germans and you are an occupying power,” Igor had insisted.
“Poor devils have been fainting from hunger. A miner can’t do a decent day’s work on two thousand calories. Damned healthy sign when they got enough dander up and had the cheek to strike.”
In the Saar, German students were protesting French occupation regulations. A French captain shrugged. “Students always demonstrate. It is a student’s prerogative to demonstrate. Works off energy.”
Damned if students demonstrated in Moscow! How could it be a healthy sign to disobey authority! In all his life Igor had accepted orders without question.
How could the Americans, British, and French permit freedoms to the Germans which he, as a Russian, did not have?
The Americans and British were at ease. They were so sure of themselves. Perhaps they were so sure of their way of life! Or perhaps the Russians were unsure of theirs. Was that it? The Russians feared themselves, feared each other?
Igor hungered to know truth and he walked on dangerous ground. Major O’Sullivan had become his friend. If there was only a way to speak to him....
That evening Captain Ivan Orlov, NKVD, sat at his desk at the Palace Hotel finishing a report to his superiors giving his findings on those members of the Soviet delegation he was assigned to watch.
Colonel Karlovy would come in for bad days, at last. All through the end of the war, Karlovy had belittled him, ignored him; till now there was nothing to accuse him of.
Now there were solid suspicions that Colonel Karlovy was getting a soft attitude toward the West and had even engaged in a friendship with Major O’Sullivan, an American spy!
Ivan Orlov was fulfilled! After all, one is assigned to watch someone and there can be no accomplishment unless