Saving the Queen Read online

  “Come in, Oakes,” he said, rather more genially than was the custom in Washington. Blackford walked in and sat down in the living room immediately to the right of the entrance.

  Callaway poured coffee.

  “It’s hard to know where to begin. By the way, in England, anyone wearing the kind of costume you have on is very conspicuous. A blazer and gray trousers won’t do. They wear suits here, on all occasions. Anyhow, I’m an assistant cultural affairs officer at the embassy, two and a half blocks from here. The cultural affairs officer and the ambassador know what my job is, no one else. I spend about four hours a day on cultural affairs of one kind or another, and no one knows when I’m away from the embassy what I’m off doing—presumably listening to poets or watching ballet groups that want to visit America. I have a superior in England from whom I am currently detached, reporting instead to a single man with a single mission whose presence, indeed whose existence, is not known to anyone else in London.”

  Callaway’s voice was midwestern, though not twangy like Senator Taft’s. He spoke with energy, contained only by a seeming fear of running away with himself: Every few minutes Blackford had the sense that Callaway was reaching up and putting on the metronome to rein his speed. He spoke with spontaneity, but in large figured patterns, like a skier slaloming carelessly down a mountain, tracing loosely perfect curves.

  “The heat is on. Stalin knows we’re developing the hydrogen bomb, and that he can’t speak back to us persuasively unless he’s got one too. The Brits have had teams of people going over, and over, and over again, everything Klaus Fuchs probably took with him. They don’t know what he was doing during the long hours he spent in the library and away from the office. Alan Nunn May has been in prison six years, and I’ve waged a campaign to get him sprang.”

  Black raised his eyebrows.

  “He’s not doing anything in prison except serving time. Outside, he might resume his activity, and we can keep an eye on him. The restrictions voted by Congress are useful. It gives us the handle for asking questions relating to security, and we have already established the practice of asking to see the personnel records of anyone involved in nuclear stuff. That situation has improved a lot in the past few months. Two foreign service officers have been missing for six months, and we haven’t yet given out a general alarm, but we’ve got to think they’re in Russia—or dead. But if they’re dead, it’s not our doing. They weren’t working for us, and we have now dug into their college records: one Commie, one fag, Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean; Burgess was in Washington for a while with the British Embassy and did a lot of contact work with our people. Oh my God, is there no end to it?”

  “End to what?” Blackford asked.

  “End to not knowing whom you can trust and whom you can’t trust.”

  “I would suppose not,” said Blackford, “since there will be defections in both directions always.”

  “A lot of the guys we’ve come across, and are looking for, became Communists before the war, for reasons you are familiar with—social idealism, and, now and then, political exigency. Some of them, but not many, came in through the study of Marx. The war fused a lot of disparate impulses together. There was only the one cause—beating Hitler—and the consensus was entirely negative. After the war came the great diaspora, but many of our people clung to the Soviet star. I can’t help but think they will diminish in number. There is too much information flowing out of the Iron Curtain that can’t be assimilated by British stomachs, which tend to be healthy—the Communist party has about thirty thousand members. Stalin has right now maybe ten million people in concentration camps. That has got to affect, sooner or later, the success of Soviet recruiting in England—and in America. They don’t have a Joe McCarthy here, but it’s getting pretty unpopular to be a Communist or an apologist. They didn’t used to care; now they do: so that social pressures within the universities, and in the professions, are blowing away a lot of the loose-hanging supporters the Commies used to have. The other day, Professor Meachey signed a protest agamst the Czechoslovakian purge, which is the first Communist purge in history Professor Meachey has reacted against. Of course, he’s only seventy.”

  Blackford knew all about Meachey. He had led the Oxford Committee to protest the imputation of guilt to Stalin during the show trials in the late thirties. He had defended the Stalin-Hitler Pact with fiery eloquence, and he had warned as recently as four months ago against the “McCarthyization of Great Britain.” Would the Red Dean of Canterbury be next? Blackford wondered.

  They drove out in Callaway’s car, west, toward Windsor, and lunched at Maidenhead. Callaway spoke steadily. Attlee, he said, was going to Washington, among other things to persuade Harry Truman on no account to use the atom bomb in Korea. The British election was coming soon, and the chances were very good that Churchill would come to office again. The peace party in England, demonstrating against the atomic arsenals maintained by NATO, was dominated by the Communists and financed by them. The British labor unions were pretty solid and were turning against Horner of the coal workers, who had said two years ago that his union would strike and refuse to supply coal for any war against the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan was working well and, in West Germany, accomplishing some kind of a goddamned miracle.

  Blackford enjoyed the quaintness of the five-hundred-year-old inn, and the trim garden where they sat, to celebrate the sun, eating dried-out fish and cold potatoes.

  It was then that Callaway said, “You’re going to have to step out into London society. That takes money, a lot more money than we are paying you. I’ve gone over it in some detail with the boss. We figure you will have to spend four or five hundred pounds per month to live the kind of life we want you to live. That means you get a large apartment, in a right part of London, maybe somewhere near Mayfair, and you start mixing with the social set—you know who they are.

  “Now, there are two cover problems. The English present no problem; they’re used to rich Americans, and one more won’t surprise them. The problems are your parents; and your friends from Yale, and so on, coming over and visiting with you.

  “As far as your parents are concerned, I think you can bring it off by saying that your flat belongs to the foundation. It is part of your job to entertain British engineers and scientists, to persuade them to co-operate with you on your project. Will that satisfy your mother and stepfather?”

  Blackford thought.

  “Mother wouldn’t give it a moment’s notice,” he said. “But my stepfather is capable of wondering about the extravagance even of American foundations. On the other hand … he wonders about the extravagance of everything American. So unless you’re going to have me buying race horses, I think I can persuade him that everything I do is accounted for by the foundation using blocked and otherwise illiquid assets in England. He’d understand—even sympathize with that.”

  “What about your friends, coming in and visiting?”

  “That’s tougher. On the other hand, they can be led to believe it’s my stepfather. They know he’s well off, but not how well off, and know he had difficulty getting money to me in New Haven. But he wouldn’t have that problem here.… I suppose it would help not to have my stepfather and my friends at the same party.”

  “I shouldn’t think that would be too tough.”

  “No,” Blackford agreed, smiling at the thought of presenting his stepfather, who dressed like Jeeves, to some of his friends.

  Callaway thought—they were back at Park Street now—and said, “Okay … the money itself will come in from the foundation. At the end of every month, write out a very general voucher, and bulk the expenses under the heading: ‘Entertainment in re Project.’

  “Now,” Callaway said, “I’m going to leave you alone for three months.”

  “Three months!”

  “Three months. You can get in touch with me anytime you want. But we know that organic relations are best developed by an agent operating naturally. Get your own apartment�
�”

  “Flat.”

  “Yeah, flat. Get it furnished, drift around as you find yourself drifting naturally. All you need to do is remember the objective: We want you, a wealthy young American engineer, a former air ace, handsome and intelligent, popular, a uniform success, except for an ugly and ambiguous episode at Greyburn College years ago”—Blackford flushed, but did not interrupt—“inside the English social set, maybe even a guest on some occasion or other at one of the affairs the royals attend, an extra man at one of those parties. Something of a social fixture. If you can’t manage that, we have alternatives. We can try, using our own resources, to get you into the milieu we want; we can assign you to another covert operation; we can pull you out of deep cover and give you a desk job in Washington; or we can fire you.”

  “There’s one more. But I’m glad you didn’t add: ‘Or dispose of you,’” Blackford said, rising.

  Callaway smiled, with great warmth. And Blackford experienced the current of faith that lit up that smile. Now Blackford knew Singer had that faith in him—knew it with a scientist’s detachment. It was well founded. Blackford was not in the least dismayed by the assignment. He had the wherewithal, the background, the manner, the looks, his father’s gypsy glamour and audacity, his mother’s quiet and gentle tenacity; and now he had money to buy the paraphernalia without which you do not, in London as a foreigner, get very far past the doorman. Why should he not end up among the dozens of young men who make it to the best parties? Of course, it would help if the CIA had made him a young duke, but failing that, better an untitled American than an untitled Englishman: They can’t hold these misfortunes against an American. He dreaded only the prospect of running into the Old Boy network of Greyburn College, the thought that tongues would wag. He wondered how his experience had survived in Greyburn mythology.… Anthony Trust could not tell him; after settling for the security and certainty of Greyburn, he had been ordered to America by his mother twenty-four hours after Blackford left, minutes after Pearl Harbor. The chances were overwhelming that he would meet one of his former classmates, and that The Story would circulate. Nothing to be done about it. Beyond a little embarrassment, there was nothing in prospect that would impair his mission, whatever the mission proved to be.

  “I take it you’re not ready to tell me what it is I’m supposed to look for once I’m a social lion? Just a routine check under the potted plants?”

  Callaway stood up. “All in good time.”

  He opened a drawer and pulled out an envelope with a thousand pounds in it. “Sign here,” he said, giving Blackford a foundation report form, “and send it in yourself to your contact at the foundation. Don’t let me hear from you unless you really need me. Good-by.” He had led Blackford to the door. “And good luck.”

  Eight

  Queen Caroline was awake, but did not ring for her tea, toast, marmalade, and one sausage. (“I said one sausage, Emily, one-one-one-one sausage,” she had exploded almost two years ago. “Do I have to pass a royal decree to make that clear? I know my larder is full enough to provide me with six sausages, and I know I am a constitutional monarch with very limited powers, but I should have enough authority—or maybe I should consult the Prime Minister on the question?—to get one sausage when one sausage is all the sausage I want!” “Yes, ma’am,” Emily had said, and rushed down to the chamberlain to ask him please personally to instruct the kitchen.)

  She was not exactly tired, but she was a little bored and saw no point in unnecessarily accelerating her schedule and thereby increasing the length of her day. Being Queen was a marvelous job, really, with no end of compensations, but she had to admit that whereas she was awfully skeptical when her cousin, during her brief reign, complained on one occasion at Sandringham about the burdens of office, she knew now that her predecessor had been entirely correct. Not that she had given it much thought. No doubt if she had had to submit to one of those tests they give to common criminals (“You say you were at Brighton when Nellie was murdered?”), in the course of which she was asked: “Did you ever dream about being Queen?” she would have to confess that yes, she did, but it was psychically meaningless—after all, Emily and every other serving woman probably dreamed from time to time about being Queen. Caroline’s dreams had been purely in the nature of fantasy. That an exquisitely tended airplane would crash, killing a pregnant Queen and her younger and only sister, was statistically outrageous. The House of Commons had since passed a law forbidding the sovereign, and the next in line for the throne, from traveling together in the same plane. She mused, all the time that debate was going on, on the inexplicit premise of the bill, namely that nature should not be permitted to strike again in such a way as to saddle the kingdom with another Queen Caroline. But that was perhaps too personal a way of looking at it, really. The protest was more in the nature of a routine precaution against multiple tragedy than a bill of attainder animadverting on the performance of the incumbent monarch.

  As a matter of fact, it had turned out quite the contrary—Caroline took fugitive satisfaction out of it. Her manifest concern for every English problem struck neither her ministers as officious nor her public as imperious or even unfeminine. She was on the one hand unequivocally pro-British—the least penitent monarch who ever lived, by no means given to ostentation for its own sake, but utterly prepared to use the huge resources of the crown for public effect. So that when she was putting on a state dinner she was a great theatrical success. But she was a great success also when she visited bits of her kingdom laid waste by tragedy—fires, pestilence, storms, whatever. She would talk quite freely within the range of the microphones and television cameras to the victims, make practical suggestions, show a familiarity with the mechanical availability of state services. And—altogether unusual—she would sometimes express a pulverizing royal impatience over the failures of the state bureaucracy. She was in that sense an ombudsperson: always on the side of her subjects, opposed—theoretically—to herself, the embodiment of the state. But she would be seen, sometimes in these extraordinarily frank glimpses of her on television, thinking out loud; inquisitive about things; naturally curious. Her reactions were never packaged, and not entirely predictable, except for that predilection to side with the victim and against the man who specialized in rushing forward with forms to fill. In a year, she had become an omnipresence—eccentric, autocratic, desirable, feared, and quite frankly beloved.

  To be sure, thought Caroline, reaching down with her toes to touch the gilt footboard, which she liked to do to remind herself how very tall she was, in contrast to her predecessor—she was by no means a perfect Queen. For one thing, she was perfectly capable of making it perfectly clear that she was bored to death. She did not shirk those duties she had to perform in virtue of her office; but she did not see it anywhere specified that she should pretend to enjoy them. Some she enjoyed hugely: receiving the weekly report from the Prime Minister in particular. She was deeply and meticulously informed about politics, in which she had been interested even as a girl, her father’s favorite, with whom he would discuss political matters as animatedly as if he were talking to a party leader. The Prime Minister, accustomed to thirty-minute ritual sessions with her predecessor, found himself, before the flowers had bloomed on her predecessor’s grave, required to allocate as much as two hours to answering Queen Caroline’s searching questions.

  She had begun by meticulously observing the rule that she was merely an auditor. But, really, that was unrealistic, she soon discovered. If she were entirely passive in receiving the news of her first minister, why could he not send his reports over on magnetic tape—or rather, Caroline smiled, on Royal Magnetic Tape? Excuse me, ma’am, the Lord Chamberlain is here with the Royal Tape from the Prime Minister.” The Lord Chamberlain, in his silk knickers, advanced reverentially toward her, his hands extended under a velvet cushion on top of which was one sixty-minute tape.

  She was smart enough to advance herself slowly, and before long the Prime Minister really had
no alternative than to talk to her as he might talk to the Home Secretary. He had explicit authority over the Home Secretary, and she had explicit authority over the Prime Minister—she could discharge him if she wanted to. But that would result, as she learned from her tutor twenty years ago when as a precocious child of eleven she had asked about it, in a “constitutional crisis.”

  “What is a constitutional crisis?” she asked.

  “That”—her father, sitting nearby smoking his pipe and reading the afternoon paper, interposed—“is, for instance, when the King fires his Prime Minister, the Parliament calls a general election, the same party is returned to power, and elects the same man as Prime Minister. The monarch would have to resign.”

  “Why?” Caroline had asked.

  “Why? Because, dear, Parliament is really sovereign.”

  “Then why do they call the King the sovereign?”

  “It is a protracted metaphor,” her father had said; and she did not quite know what that meant, not for a few years. The phrase had stuck in her memory, and she had decided, on finding herself suddenly the sovereign of Great Britain and its diminishing empire, that if other people were going to play along with the metaphor, she might as well see what was in it for her. The Prime Minister, who had inexplicit authority over the Queen, could not really exercise it without weakening, perhaps even destroying, the metaphor. And this no Prime Minister was likely to want to do. Under the circumstances, she began to exercise not her theoretical powers to command compliance, but her indisputable powers to command attention—anywhere; for just about as long as she chose. Moreover, she insisted on talking about the things that interested her. At the third session with the Prime Minister, who had been rattling on for at least ten minutes about what the Houses of Parliament were intending to appropriate to preserve the parks’ deteriorating rose gardens, she interrupted him:

  “How many atom bombs do we have?”