Upsetting the Balance

The interpreter leaned forward in his seat as the carriage began rolling. He looked petulant. Molotov understood that: if the interpreter was not useful, he would soon be performing a function where he was, most likely a function that involved carrying a rifle, living on whatever he could scrounge, and trying to survive against superior Lizard firepower.

“You are going to the Subtreasury Building, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the driver said. “Our first president, George Washington, took his oath of office in front of the old city hall that used to stand there. Inside, in a glass case, is the very stone he stood on.”

“How interesting,” Molotov lied.

“Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the interpreter said hoarsely, pointing to a sign on a corner, “we are traveling down Wall Street at this very moment.” He looked around in alarm, as if he expected an assault from a regiment of swag-bellied plutocrats in toppers, cutaways, and spats, each one sporting a diamond ring bigger than the last and puffing a fat cigar.

Molotov looked around, too. Some of the people on the fabled street did wear business suits, but more were in workmen’s clothes or uniforms. They didn’t look quite so shabby as men on the street in war-ravaged Moscow, but they didn’t seem wildly wealthy, or even prosperous, either.

In a helpful tone of voice, the driver said, “The Subtreasury Building is right across the street from the New York Stock Exchange.” Had Molotov’s interpreter had an apotropaic amulet, he would have taken it out and brandished it at the mention of that tool of the Soviets’ ideological devil.

The Subtreasury Building was a dignified structure in the Greek Revival style of the previous century. To Molotov, for whom socialist realism was as much an article of faith as the doctrine of the Incarnation was to Pope Pius XII, having a building pretend to be something it wasn’t summed up the dishonesty of the capitalist system. That the skyscrapers along Wall Street dwarfed the Subtreasury Building told him everything he needed to know about where economic power in the United States really lay.

A bronze statue of a man in outmoded clothing stood on the steps. As Molotov went past it, his interpreter said, “There is George Washington, the first president of the United States.”

Molotov dismissed the first president in half a dozen words: “He is dressed like an aristocrat.” The offhand condemnation made the man who had driven him to the Subtreasury Building mutter something under his breath. Behind the impassive mask Molotov always wore, he chuckled to himself.

Inside, a smiling flunky led him and the interpreter to a large, airy, well-lit chamber. The men waiting behind the tables there rose politely as he came in. “Good morning, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Cordell Hull said. “Excellent to see you again.”

“I am pleased to have this opportunity to consult with my allies in the joint struggle against the imperialist aggressors from the stars,” Molotov answered, keeping any dealing on a personal level to a minimum. “It is also good to have representatives of Great Britain here, after the heroic resistance her people have shown against the aliens’ invading forces.”

“Do you know Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Halifax?” the American Secretary of State asked.

“I had the honor of meeting Lord Beaverbrook in Moscow two years ago, when he headed the Anglo-American mission on sending aid to the Soviet Union after the unprovoked and perfidious fascist attack,” Molotov said, nodding to the present British Minister of Supply.

“Good to see you again, Molotov,” Lord Beaverbrook said, sticking out his hand. He was a tall, ruddy, balding man in his mid-sixties, with a shrewd, blunt-featured face and an air of energy that would have done credit to someone half his age.

“You will introduce me to Lord Halifax?” Molotov said. “We have never met in the flesh.”

What he did know about Halifax, he did not fancy. The British ambassador to the United States had been Foreign Secretary under Neville Chamberlain before war broke out and during most of its first year, till the Chamberlain government fell in the aftermath of disasters in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France. All through his time in office, he’d advocated appeasing the Hitlerite beast by tossing one country after another into its ravening maw.

Now, though, he nodded civilly to Molotov and extended his right hand. The left sleeve of his coat hung limp; his left arm had been withered from birth, and lacked a hand. “A pleasure to meet you at last,” he murmured.

“Indeed,” Molotov said, looking up at him. He was taller and balder than Beaverbrook-he had to be within a few centimeters of two meters tall. Most men, though, were taller than Molotov; he refused to let that, or anything else, intimidate him. “Now that we have dealt with the formalities, shall we move on to the business at hand?”