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Lloyd was electrified. "Substantial additional help" was what Bevin had asked for.
"The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future," Marshall said. "The United States should do whatever it is able to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world."
"He's done it!" Lloyd said triumphantly to his uncomprehending baby daughter. "He's told America they have to give us aid! But how much? And how, and when?"
The voice changed, and the reporter said: "The secretary of state did not outline a detailed plan for aid to Europe, but said it was up to the Europeans to draft the program."
"Does that mean we have carte blanche?" Lloyd eagerly asked Evie.
Marshall's voice returned to say: "The initiative, I think, must come from Europe."
The report ended, and the phone rang again. "Did you hear that?" said Bevin.
"What does it mean?"
"Don't ask!" said Bevin. "If you ask questions, you'll get answers you don't want."
"All right," Lloyd said, baffled.
"Never mind what he meant. The question is what we do. The initiative must come from Europe, he said. That means me and you."
"What can I do?"
"Pack a bag," said Bevin. "We're going to Paris."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
1948
Volodya was in Prague as part of a Red Army delegation holding talks with the Czech military. They were staying in art deco splendor at the Imperial Hotel.
It was snowing.
He missed Zoya and little Kotya. His son was two years old and learning new words at bewildering speed. The child was changing so fast that he seemed different every day. And Zoya was pregnant again. Volodya resented having to spend two weeks apart from his family. Most of the men in the group saw the trip as a chance to get away from their wives, drink too much vodka, and maybe fool around with loose women. Volodya just wanted to go home.
The military talks were genuine, but Volodya's part in them was a cover for his real assignment, which was to report on the activities in Prague of the ham-fisted Soviet secret police, perennial rivals of Red Army Intelligence.
Volodya had little enthusiasm for his work nowadays. Everything he had once believed in had been undermined. He no longer had faith in Stalin, Communism, or the essential goodness of the Russian people. Even his father was not his father. He would have defected to the West if he could have found a way of getting Zoya and Kotya out with him.
However, he did have his heart in his mission here in Prague. It was a rare chance to do something he believed in.
Two weeks before, the Czech Communist Party had taken full control of the government, ousting their coalition partners. Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, a war hero and democratic anti-Communist, had become a prisoner on the top floor of his official residence, the Czernin Palace. The Soviet secret police had undoubtedly been behind the coup. In fact Volodya's brother-in-law, Colonel Ilya Dvorkin, was also in Prague, staying at the same hotel, and had almost certainly been involved.
Volodya's boss, General Lemitov, saw the coup as a public relations catastrophe for the USSR. Masaryk had constituted proof, to the world, that east European countries could be free and independent in the shadow of the USSR. He had enabled Czechoslovakia to have a Communist government friendly to the Soviet Union and at the same time wear the costume of bourgeois democracy. This had been the perfect arrangement, for it gave the USSR everything it wanted while reassuring the Americans. But that equilibrium had been upset.
However, Ilya was crowing. "The bourgeois parties have been smashed!" he said to Volodya in the hotel bar one night.
"Did you see what happened in the American Senate?" Volodya said mildly. "Vandenberg, the old isolationist, made an eighty-minute speech in favor of the Marshall Plan, and he was cheered to the rafters."
George Marshall's vague ideas had become a plan. This was mainly thanks to the ratlike cunning of British foreign secretary Ernie Bevin. In Volodya's opinion, Bevin was the most dangerous kind of anti-Communist: a working-class Social Democrat. Despite his bulk he moved fast. With lightning speed he had organized a conference in Paris that had given a resounding collective European welcome to George Marshall's Harvard speech.
Volodya knew, from spies in the British Foreign Office, that Bevin was determined to bring Germany into the Marshall Plan and keep the USSR out. And Stalin had fallen straight into Bevin's trap, by commanding the east European countries to repudiate Marshall Aid.
Now the Soviet secret police seemed to be doing all they could to assist the passage of the bill through Congress. "The Senate was all set to reject Marshall," Volodya said to Ilya. "American taxpayers don't want to foot the bill. But the coup here in Prague has persuaded them that they have to, because European capitalism is in danger of collapse."
Ilya said indignantly: "The bourgeois Czech parties wanted to take the American bribe."
"We should have let them," said Volodya. "It might have been the quickest way to sabotage the whole scheme. Congress would then have rejected the Marshall Plan--they don't want to give money to Communists."
