Who's on First (3 page)

“Funny.”

“Look, Sally.” His hand played with her light brown hair, and she moved her head to acknowledge the caress. “You're not supposed to know how to build a bridge, like us engineers; but us engineers
are
supposed to have some idea when Jane Austen died, so cut the crap, okay? When
did
she die?”

“1817. What's the point?”

Blackford resumed his inspection of the bookshelves. He delayed in answering.

“Oh, I forgot,” he said, slumping down again on the couch and extending his hand to receive the proffered drink. “I guess I was going to say that because you now have yourself a Ph.D. based on your knowledge of the Life and Times of J. Austen, this shouldn't suggest to you that you're omniscient on the matter of the life and times of Joseph Stalin—(when did Stalin die, darling?)—or his choirboys who moved into Budapest. What was
I
doing? Sally, you've known now for five years the business I'm in, and for five years you've known I can't tell you what I do, so why ask?”

She moved beside him and sat on the arm of the couch, and whispered. “Blacky darling, you're the loveliest man I ever met, and it isn't like you to be irritable. That's happening to you because of your involvement in … in this
sordid mess
.” He thought: if only she knew how sordid it was. And then, impetuously, though he had solemnly resolved he wouldn't do so, he told her—about Theo.

He could scarcely get through it, and in the end he was hoarse, and there were tears.

“You see, his last thought—hell,
one
of his last thoughts, God knows how many one can have in the three minutes—one hundred and eighty seconds—it takes to strangle—one of his last thoughts must have been that
I
was one of
them
. How else would the KGB have got hold of the address of the Safe House? I've thought about it. I've built calculuses of probability. Cathedrals of logic. I've catalogued every explanation I could think of. Theo concluded either that I was a traitor; or if not, that I was a sympathizer who confessed, or was tortured into giving up my secrets; or that I was careless, and let the information get out. They drove right to his fucking house
as if they'd come to escort him to his wedding!
”

Sally asked softly, “How
did
they know?”

“I damn near blew the place apart trying to find out. You know something? The arrangements at that boardinghouse were made
by me
personally. The cash payments were made every two months by a Hungarian contact who lived in the suburbs, a guy we had worked with for years. I got out there, two days later—had to show my phony papers at two checkpoints—ready to kill the son of a bitch. I knocked on the door and demanded to see him. His wife doesn't speak German, English, or French, but she caught on. She put on a heavy shawl and beckoned me to follow her. She grabbed her daughter from the study, a girl about ten or twelve. Then she led me wordlessly—I just followed her—six blocks away, to a cemetery, and then to two fresh graves. He had died—three weeks before the Russians came—of a heart attack, the daughter explained to me in schoolgirl English. The other grave was the girl's brother's. He was killed by the Russians during the Resistance, a day before Theo. I didn't ask her anything else, I just left her, kneeling by the graves, with her little girl, reciting a rosary.”

The silence was long.

“Who did it?”

Blackford shrugged his shoulders. “In this business, you never know. Maybe the landlady got suspicious. Who knows?”

“Blacky, you've got to get out.”

“I'm not going to get out.”

“In that case—I'm not going to marry you.”

He looked at her, without resentment. Why should she understand? The U.S. Government understood, in a geopolitical sort of way. In the same sense that one can understand that what's good for General Motors is good for America: What's good for humanity in East Europe is good for America. But only a few really understood. And many of them were immobilized by a paralyzing fatalism, like decent southerners, who lived without protest, generations after witnessing a lynching. Blackford Oakes felt only this, that there wasn't any alternative for those few who
did
understand, or thought they did. They
had
, living in the same world, to do
something
. He wanted very much to marry this intriguing, learned, beautiful woman—who went frequently to meetings of the Sane Nuclear Policy Committee, who talked fervently of disarmament, and the lessening of international tensions, and of the great thaw that had resulted from the death of the abnormal Stalin, and of how the U.N. was our last, best hope. There were two kinds of coexistence, he saw. One with
them,
two-scorpions-in-a-bottle sort of thing. And coexistence with people like Sally, who wouldn't step on a scorpion, for fear of causing pain. His impulse,
at this very moment,
was to march with her to the altar and to swear before God that he would live with her as one person, and love and protect her, in sickness and in health, till death did them part. Why not? Budapest was
four thousand miles
away. This business of being involved in mankind was just too goddam much. If he could keep his distance from Tobacco Road, couldn't he leave
Budapest
be, let alone
Moscow?
He took her hand and leaned up, to kiss her gently, above the eye. Suddenly his mood changed, and he felt a general elation as the parts came together; the concept of integrated coexistence. He brought her close to him and said: “Whenever you say, I'll wait for you always. But I can't disengage now on the other things. Do you understand?” “I do,” she said, stroking his hair. They sat there silently for a long period. The late afternoon became early evening. The apartment became dark.

Suddenly he looked up, his boyish face bright with the ingenuity of it all: “Ah,” he said, “let's move into the bedroom! Better light.…”

She turned her head to one side, and he thought he had never seen such lovely hair.

“No, Blacky,” she said softly, “I won't need much light … to read to you from Jane Austen.”

4

The director and his aide Jerry Adams got out of the car and buried their faces in woolen scarves as they walked the thirty yards up from the driveway to the ski lodge. They might have done so in any weather but, under the frigid circumstances, if anybody was observing them such a decision would have appeared logical, in the bitter cold of Stowe, Vermont, against an easterly that howled down the mountainside on which the comfortable lodge abutted, a single light in the kitchen holding out against the blackness. Moreover, if somebody had been lying in wait in a parked car, he in turn would probably have been spotted by the two occupants of another car that, passing the driveway, at nonchalant speed, continued down the road—so lonely, after dark, all the skiers having long since retreated to their caravansaries dotted about the mountain and village.

The second car drove the half mile to the chair lift and anyone observing it would assume it was bound on a maintenance or logistical mission. The headlights appeared to verify that the scene was abandoned, and so they paused at the lift, got out of the car, entered the building through the skiers' passageway, disappeared from sight for a few moments as if attending to some commission or other, reentered the car two minutes later, turned it around, and drove back, stopping at the garage at the south wing of the lodge which, after Jerry unlocked the door from inside, they entered and parked. Silently one of them walked back to the Director's Chevrolet, turned the key that had been left in the ignition, and moved the car over alongside their own. Now they locked the garage doors from inside and walked into the kitchen. The Director and his aide had hung their coats and entered the lively, paneled living room, past the dining room with the counter separating it from the kitchen, and stood by the fireplace, out of sight of the kitchen and beyond the range of anyone's hearing. Jerry said, taking a heavy log from the Director, “Let me do that.” He piled it on the kindling and newspaper, looked about for a match, and settled for the Director's pipe-lighter. The response was immediate and gratifying, and they both stood close-by as the flames swept up, illuminating in dancing shadows the large comfortable room to which a wealthy sportsman brought his grandchildren to ski four or five times a year, but never on those Mondays and Tuesdays marked on his calendar with an “X,” after a telephone call from his old friend and classmate, the Director.

Jerry sighed. “I must say, sir, the upper class really knows how to live.”

The Director's reply was oblique. “You ski?”

“Yes, sir. As a matter of fact, I used to come to Stowe every now and then from Dartmouth. I was on the ski team. We lost seven consecutive meets.”

The Director was clearly not shaken by this piece of intelligence, but years in diplomacy had trained him intuitively to keep a conversation alive rather than appear abrupt or indifferent. “Bad luck, eh?”

“No sir, bad team. But we had a lot of fun. Dartmouth isn't opposed to fun. Some people there even encourage it.”

“You sound nostalgic. Are you implying your present employers don't encourage it?”

“That's a pretty fair way of putting it, sir.” Jerry was on his knees, taming a promiscuous log. His red hair and freckles and powerful hands were highlighted by the fire as he gripped the iron. The Director smiled. Jerry Adams had been with him five years, and knew every one of the Director's crotchets, including that appetite of his for petty complaints against Life in the CIA. Such complaints stroked the general sense of stoicism the Director thought appropriate to the profession.

“So you find yourself burdened, do you?”

“Yes, sir. Any chance of hiring more lady spies?”

“The Supreme Court hasn't got around to telling us we have to have a quota.”

“How about some preemptive action?”

“Sow wild oats on your own time,” said the Director, looking at his watch. “In four minutes exactly, open the door for Serge. Rufus will arrive five minutes later. They'll be cold. They've parked their cars at the inn, and they don't know each other.”

Ten minutes later the three men sat about the fire while Jerry mixed drinks in the kitchen, chatting to the security men, one of whom, wearing an apron, was starting the oven, while the other decanted two bottles of wine.

“It is very good to see you, Rufus,” the Director said, nodding to the portly man opposite, who had got a little balder, a little older, but whose eyes and demeanor were unchanged.

“It's fine to see you, Allen. Though you do make it difficult to stay retired.”

“At sixty-two you're too young to retire. I suppose one of these days somebody will discover you. Write a book about you. After that I promise I won't call you. After that I can't even promise to
recognize
you!” (Had he overdone it? He looked out of the side of his eye. Rufus's smile was formal, but clearly he was unconcerned.)

He turned to the third man, sitting opposite the fire. He wore boots, heavy woolen trousers, and a crew-neck sweater; but even so he rubbed his hands together, as though they would never grow warm. His hair was white, his skin jaundiced, his build stocky, tough.

“You will always be cold, eh Serge?”

The reply was in a heavily accented English. “I will always be cold.”

“Rufus, I am aware that you and Serge haven't met. Haven't even heard about each other, as far as I know. On what we are calling Plan 717—July 1, 1957 is the beginning of the International Geophysical Year—you will, I hope, agree to work together.”

Jerry brought in the drinks, and then went back to the kitchen.

The Director addressed the Russian. “This is Rufus. All I need to tell you about him is: He's the best we have.”

Then he turned to Rufus. “Three years ago, Serge defected. Two of our top people—you know them both—spent the better part of a year with him. He has given us invaluable stuff. We're still living off a lot of it. At our end we promised him security—and to leave him alone. He owes us nothing. But we've gone over and over the 717 project, and I concluded”—now he turned again to Serge—“that you are the key to its success.
If
it will work, it will be because of you.”

Neither man commented. Rufus held his drink in his hand without even pretending to sip it. Serge attacked his in half-glass bouts and in the ensuing hour the Director twice refilled the glass.

Now the Director assumed his professional stance, standing, leaning against the stone of the chimney, puffing on his pipe.

“The Communists”—he was careful, in Serge's presence, not to say “the Russians”—“are feverishly at work on a satellite. First, they
want
a rocket and experience in atmospheric flight. Accurate intercontinental missiles is the payload of the whole enterprise. Second, the Hungary business hurt them. They're pretty stoical about psychological setbacks, in the noble tradition of the Stalin-Hitler Pact; but they don't
enjoy
it.”

It occurred to Rufus that when engaged in exposition the Director treated anyone present like a beginning student. Rufus had been present on the occasion when the Director, addressing Eisenhower's general staff the day before D-Day, actually instructed them on the size of a German division. He was now lecturing a Russian on Communist psychology.

“Their organs and the satellite press have been grinding away about the great achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Khrushchev's Twentieth Congress speech—a copy of which we got hold of and turned loose, but which was so easy to do it's obvious they didn't care—is encouraging the myth that the death of Stalin means the death of Soviet despotism. Viewed by Stalin's standards it's true that the internal situation is less capriciously totalitarian. But it's untrue that the state is any less totalist in its repression, or ravenous in its ambitions.”