Last Call for Blackford Oakes (2 page)

“I don't know how it's all going to end up with Gorbachev. You saw what he said on the seventieth anniversary of their revolution?” Reagan reached into his desk for the clipping. “What he said was”—Reagan's voice was detached now, at public-speaking level—“that—I'm quoting him—‘In October 1917, we parted the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, the world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.' Maybe he needs a little prodding.”

“Well, sir, we've got a defense budget of nearly three hundred billion. That's prodding, right?”

“Yes. That's one way to make our point about road signs. Cap Weinberger would like to hear it put that way. Well, he's secretary of defense, and secretaries of defense have a right to think that hundreds of billions on defense are a means of prodding people to do the right thing.” He got up from his chair. “If you need to see me again”—he extended his hand—“call Kathy.”

Blackford walked to the side door. “Oh, Mr. President, I forgot. Good luck on the Nicaraguan business.”

“Black, you want to handle
that
for me while you're at it?”

Blackford opened the door and left the office.

The meeting he then scheduled with the director had a delicate edge. William Webster, the wise and polished director of the CIA, had never been told about the critical intervention of October 1986. It would have been impossible for Oakes to brief him now in detail on his forthcoming trip without giving him the background on the previous mission. So Blackford, on meeting with Director Webster, said only that he would be away on a confidential mission for the president. He spent an hour with Webster devoted to examining the general political situation in Moscow and Eastern Europe.

“You got any other presidential commissions you're undertaking?” Unlike some of his predecessors, Webster was not looking for ways to reassure himself of his authority as head of the CIA. He quickly accepted that this new mission was somehow linked to an earlier mission. He raised no questions about Blackford's going, though he was ill at ease with the hastiness of the cover arrangements the agency would need to undertake.

On the October mission, Blackford had taken with him a young CIA colleague, a Ukrainian-born Iowan called Gus Windels. They had traveled as father and son, “Harry Singleton” and his son, “Jerry,” ostensibly engaged on an innocent mission, tracking down Jerry's long-lost aunt. It hadn't been difficult for twenty-eight-year-old Gus to pose as the son of the man he was accompanying. Blackford, at six feet two, was a shade taller than Gus. His hair still showed some of its original dark blond, though it was now mostly gray. Blackford was no longer eye-catchingly handsome, but he was ruggedly attractive, with blue eyes and an inquisitive chin that reinforced the words he spoke, and sometimes energized thoughts that ran through his agile mind. Blackford was spare in frame and moved with habitual ease, though he was not the limber youth he had been, so memorably, for so long. He was plausibly the father of the blond young American at his side on the Pan Am flight to Zurich.

Now, Windels was stationed in Moscow, working under his own name at the United States Embassy. It was he who had alerted Oakes to the suspicion of a fresh plot. He could speak with Blackford in a private shorthand. They had developed a special relationship during the dangerous October days of the exploitation of the covert defector, the preparations to betray the young Russians, and the consummation of a presidential directive. This time, Gus put it all in a discreet few words cabled to Blackford's private number. What he said was: “It's come up again, possible threat to #1. No way to upload this through official channels. You must come.”

Blackford trusted Gus Windels's judgment, trusted it enough to take the case to the president.

CHAPTER 2

Ursina Chadinov was six years old before it occurred to her to wonder about the rule of the house.

The house in question comprised one and a half rooms in the crowded Gostiny Dvor district of Leningrad. During the great siege, just over ten years earlier, the apartment had belonged to a Jewish violinist. He performed with the symphony, until such concerts were simply excluded by the fighting and the starvation. Even after the long postwar years that had gone into the reconstruction of the lustrous city founded by Peter the Great at the turn of the eighteenth century, Gostiny Dvor, like many other living areas, had to put up with inconsistent supplies of water and electricity.

Still, it was home, and welcome to the Chadinovs. The rule of the house, which Ursina now questioned, was that only the English language would be spoken at mealtimes. What had brought her question to the table was the dispensation of the rule the day Josef Stalin died. Dmitri Chadinov thought that some gesture was appropriate, on the death of the general secretary. Chadinov had spent many hours, over two decades, defending Stalin at postings abroad, in England, in Turkey, and in France. He had harnessed his skills as a diplomat to celebrate the accomplishments of the Soviet leader. He was not himself persuaded that the death of Stalin was a terrible event for the Soviet Union, but such thoughts were never shared, not with his wife, Simona, and certainly not with Ursina, his precocious daughter.

“The reason we speak in English during meals is to teach you the language, Ursina. The English language—after Russian—will be the most important language in the world, and not only in diplomacy, but as—” He turned to his wife. “Simona, how do you translate lingua franca?”

The fifty-year-old Lithuanian ran a big spoon around the pot of simmering potato soup and furrowed her wide brow. “You treat me like a Latin–Russian dictionary. It is more than thirty years since I studied at the nunnery. You would translate that, roughly, as ‘universal language.'”

“If it is universal, why don't my friends also speak English when they eat?”

“Because,” Dmitri Chadinov answered, “you're more special than other little girls.”

“If I'm so special, why do you take me to dancing classes only one day every week? Tamara goes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”

“Because,” Simona interrupted, “Tamara's mother is with the Maly Opera and has special privileges.”

“Our teacher, Comrade Uziev, says nobody has special privileges in a classless society. How do you say that in Latin, Mama?”

Dmitri laughed. “Even in a classless society everyone has a responsibility to develop what skills they can. Like mine. I can speak English, you know that, and I can also speak Turkish and Norwegian and French. And your mother can—”

“Teach religion.” Simona served up the potato soup. She smiled at her husband, but it was a tired smile, after three decades of renouncing the religious faith in which she had been trained, but which she could no longer practice. The revolution had ended all that. All that bourgeois superstition.

“Anyway, tomorrow we will resume our rule,” Dmitri concluded the discussion. “Only English at mealtimes.”

Ursina cocked her head and brushed the light blond bangs to one side. “I don't think I will speak English with you tomorrow.”

The senior Chadinovs stared at her, speechless.

“Well,” said Dmitri, “maybe tomorrow you won't be eating anything.”

“I don't care.”

“Leave her alone,” Simona addressed her husband in French. “She'll have forgotten the whole thing by tomorrow.”

“D'accord,” Dmitri said. And to Ursina, in Russian, “Tomorrow we will attend the memorial ceremony for Comrade Stalin in Palace Square.”

“All right,” Ursina said. “Do you think they will ask me to dance at the celebration?”

Dmitri smiled. “It isn't a ‘celebration,' Ursina. It's a—” he motioned to Simona for help.

“A requiem.”

“No, no, Simona. That is a
religious
term. It is a … meeting to register our … grief … at the loss of our leader. Do you understand, Ursina?”

“All right. I'll recite the poem, ‘Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; / All the king's horses / And all the king's men—'”

“Ursina!” Simona looked at her daughter and thought: What will she be when she's sixteen, not six? Whatever else, Simona thought, Ursina would be very beautiful, and her inquisitive eyes would shine very bright.

CHAPTER 3

Ursina was twelve when her father gave himself the lethal dose. She was disconsolate, but also curious as to why he would do such a thing, and she managed, one day when her mother was out shopping, to unearth the folder containing the medical records. She learned that her father had been diagnosed with syphilis.

Simona was surprised and cross on being told by her daughter that she had learned the reason for her father's suicide.

“I'm going to read up about syphilis,” Ursina said. “I know a library that has
all kinds
of medical books. How did Papa get syphilis?”

Her mother said that it was a disease her father had contracted while in diplomatic service in Turkey.

“Is Turkey very full of syphilis, Mama?”

Simona knew by now that evasions didn't work with Ursina. She replied simply, “Yes. It is a deadly and very painful disease. Winston Churchill's father died from it.”

“Was he in Turkey?”

“Yes,” Simona said.
Why not just “yes”?
She succeeded. Ursina didn't come back for more, didn't ask when the elder Churchill had visited Turkey.

At school, Ursina focused her enormous energies on science, and one day she announced to her mother that she would become a doctor. But she didn't spend all her afternoons in libraries and laboratories. She was intensely curious about the splendid city she lived in, and bicycled studiously about the city and its outskirts with Tamara, her schoolmate, who had qualified for special training in ballet.

“I must be very careful when bicycling not to do any damage to my legs,” Tamara said.

Ursina teased her. “If you do, I will operate on them.”

Tamara laughed, half-heartedly. The very idea of turning over the care of her legs, destined to be seen in the Kirov Ballet, to Ursina! But after feigning concern, she bicycled along vigorously with her friend on this bright afternoon in early October. It took them nearly an hour to reach the deserted palace at Tsarskoe Selo.

Tamara was reluctant to walk through the tall grass surrounded with
NO TRESPASSING
signs, toward the old palace, but Ursina persisted.

“This”—Ursina, standing by a tree halfway to the building, looked excitedly about her—“was where the czar and czarina and their four daughters and the little czarevich strolled.” She closed her eyes, conjuring the scene forty-five years ago. Motioning to Tamara to follow her, she walked resolutely toward the deserted mansion.

There was a guard sitting, legs outstretched, in a guardhouse outside. He hailed them to stop. But after a brief conversation with Ursina, he motioned the girls to go ahead and explore, but told them to be back in twenty minutes. “Or I will apprehend you and have you flogged!” Ursina laughed, and the guard laughed with her, wondering if he had ever seen a more beautiful fifteen-year-old than this one, with the oval face, large brown eyes, and mischievous mouth.

The ghostly palace had been mostly living quarters, Ursina remarked as they walked about the ground floor. “But there were public rooms—this was obviously one of those, look how long it is—for the ministers who waited on the imperial presence. They were made ministers because the czar tolerated a lot of parliamentary agencies around him.”

“What did they do?” Tamara asked.

“Not much.” Ursina showed off the knowledge she had picked up from the library book on Leningrad's palaces. “Remember, the czar was crowned as
Autocrat of All the Russias
. He did what he wanted—until our people came to the rescue.”

They looked about and then, on the way back across the park to their bicycles, stopped again at the guardhouse, where Ursina gave the old guard a piece of the rock candy she carried. “That was very interesting. Thank you, comrade.” He smiled and took the candy.

Ursina didn't linger over imperial history and didn't pause, after her early bicycle tours, to study palaces. Year by year she immersed herself more deeply in her study of science. She took to spending her free hours, after school, at army hospitals, the closest being the hospital at Moskovsky Avenue 1072. It was one of six charged with tending to the broken bodies of four thousand survivors of the long and bloody war with the Nazis, a war that ended the year before Ursina was born. She contrived to look older than seventeen by pulling back her hair, wearing a babushka, and applying a thin layer of lipstick.

She paid special attention to Ward 14. That ward was maintained as a hospice. Its patients were all dying, some more quickly than others. Ursina lingered regularly with Lutz, nearly every part of whom—excepting only his smile, which Ursina thought indestructible—had been shattered by a land mine. He managed to smile even when being fed potions that made other patients gag.

But Lutz was not a smiling scarecrow. He spoke with great absorption of his own story, and his expression was sometimes overtly melancholy.

“You know, Miss Ursina, I stepped on that mine eighteen years and four months ago and have been in hospitals all that time. Yes, I remember the day and the hour and the minute, January 11, 1945, at 1406. But you know what, Miss Ursina, what I remember most was the pain of the weeks
before
we set out on that road.”

“From another wound?”

“No,” Lutz smiled. “Unless you call hunger a wound. We were eating bark from trees. One day, Miss Ursina, you will permit me to make you a birch stew.… Don't stick out your tongue on your pretty face! Birch stew can be delicious, if you're hungry enough, and if you are allowed to sleep after eating it. Sleep was difficult for the Fifth Motorized Rifle Division because the artillery batteries were only a few kilometers behind us.”