Saving the Queen Read online

  They walked out, an elderly guide leading the way.

  “What time is it, or does it matter?” Black asked, looking at his watch, which, he thought, said only 7 P.M.

  “L’heure bleu, they call it in Paris. And, in Paris, no hour is inappropriate for, as you say, engineering studies. Mine is Michelle. She has the most splendid front and the most splendid rear I have ever seen.”

  “Don’t talk to me about Michelle, talk to me about Doucette.”

  “Blackford my boy, haven’t I always looked after you? Doucette is preferable even over Michelle. I elected Michelle only because when I popped in and took a look, Michelle was so obviously, so irresistibly attracted to me—there, on the spot—I could not bear to tell her she would be spending the golden hours of the afternoon other than in the arms of the best America has to offer, certified by the Marshall Plan.”

  “Shit.”

  “Please elevate your vocabulary, Blackford. We are going into a very respectable establishment, where the girls are easily shocked. To say nothing of Mme. Pensaud.”

  Anthony parked, and began walking, past any number of vacant parking sites, what would turn out to be three full blocks.

  “By the way, the charge is F.12,500, about twenty-five bucks. Slip it in her purse. Or maybe your … nurse … already taught you the right way to do these things? And listen, we’ll have to sit downstairs in the lounge with the two girls and madame and order more champagne, which will cost us another F.8,000 apiece, but that’s expected—that’s where Mme. Pensaud makes out.”

  Anthony rang the button. An old, squat woman wearing a spotless uniform opened the door.

  “Nous avons un rendez-vous avec Mme. Pensaud,” Anthony said, and they were thereupon led into a lounge, with three sofas of heavy red velvet, walls of heavy yellow damask wallpaper, and heavy red curtains, drawn. On every wall was a huge color lithograph of a member of the British royal family, and, over the desk, a group photo, published by Paris-Match, suitable for framing, and, here at Mme. Pensaud’s, suitably framed. The coffee table had only that afternoon’s France-Soir on it. Before they had sat down, Mme. Pensaud came in, lorgnette hanging over her bosom, dressed in black lace with pearl necklace and earrings, and a large diamond ring on her fourth finger. Her hair was elaborately coiffed, lifting up above her head, with ringlets down front, reaching ambitiously over her parched forehead. She wore light lipstick and was dabbed—impregnated?—with an aroma that excited Blackford, who made a note to try to remember to ask what it was exactly, if things went in that direction, so that he could buy some for his mother. Mme. Pensaud shook hands jovially with Anthony and greeted Blackford.

  “Oo-la-la, you haarr beeyutifool!” she exclaimed, raising her hand slightly more formally, only to recall, and deftly divert her motion, that American men are not trained to kiss the hands of married women. She sat down and talked in halting English, until Anthony suggested that they might speak in a French, however clumsy, with her guests—vos invités. Blackford thought that most diplomatic.

  “Yass, that ees bettehr,” Mme. Pensaud said, switching now into French, “because anyway, Doucette and Michelle don’t speak much English.”

  She began then to talk again and at length. Clearly, she loved the sound of words, especially her own. Anthony interrupted only to suggest they have a little champagne together, upon which Mme. Pensaud registered surprise and pleasure and rang the bell at her side, producing the maid and the champagne within a matter of seconds. She spoke of French politics, the dreadful mess into which the Fourth Republic had been dragged, and the infinitely preferable arrangements in England under Queen Caroline. Blackford, impatient for the more substantial course, groaned inwardly when Anthony affected to be primarily interested—more than in anything happening anywhere in the world—in the minutiae of French politics. They had drunk almost a full bottle before Anthony said: “But Madame, you cannot expect me to dispense all this political wisdom before such a small audience? Shouldn’t we seek to educate Doucette and Michelle?”

  “But of course,” Mme. Pensaud rose, and left the room.

  Blackford said in a whisper: “Listen, Trust, you discuss French politics one more minute and I’m going to smash this champagne bottle over your fucking head. Goddamn, Anthony, we’ve been here twenty minutes, and my … metabolism won’t take it.”

  “Patience, Oakes. You must learn civilized ways of doing things. Otherwise you will stand out as a rube in Buckingham Palace, and blow your cover.”

  “Blow your own—cover, Talleyrand. No wonder the French population is declining if this is the rate at which they go at things.”

  Suddenly the girls were there. They smiled and shook hands, and sat down sedately, and Anthony suggested another bottle of champagne, which came in with two glasses.

  “Well, Blackford,” Anthony spoke in English, “say something.”

  Blackford raised his glass to propose a toast to the two voluptuous ladies, and froze. All he could think to say was: “Allons enfants de la patrie!”

  The girls and Mme. Pensaud roared with laughter, and from that moment on it seemed that everyone spoke simultaneously, and a third bottle of champagne was half empty before Anthony said, clinking his glass with his ball-point pen. “Ladies, let us take these festivities upstairs. You are too beautiful to resist.”

  The girls, excellently trained, instantly rose, and Madame, ringing for the maid, told her to take up the half-empty bottle. The four of them filed up the staircase. Upstairs, doors were open, one on the right, the other on the left, to bedrooms with jumbo-sized beds and dim table lights. Blackford darted into the room on the left and began to undress.

  “I see you managed to get what’s left of the champagne,” he shouted across the hall to Anthony. “No, no no no no no,” Doucette was giggling, pulling at Blackford, and, attempting English for the first time, saying: “We all go together!” Blackford and Anthony looked at each other in astonishment.

  “Now wait a minute,” Anthony began to say, but Michelle had already pushed him into the room on the right, and Doucette, taking advantage of his paralysis, his pants having dropped to his knees, was dragging Blackford in, pausing only once for a quick sally with her right hand down the front of his shorts. “Wheeeeee!” she said.

  As they struggled, Anthony, his savoir-faire finally ebbing, muttered, “How in the hell are we going to handle this situation?”

  Blackford, still resisting, but less forcefully, said fatalistically, “God knows. Maybe this way there’ll be some sort of symbiosis.”

  At that moment, Mme. Pensaud reappeared, carrying a silver tray with a fresh bottle of champagne. She was utterly unperturbed by the commotion, and the girls continued to push the men playfully toward the one bed. She put down the tray, looked up and said, “Symbiosis? Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?”

  “After you, Webster,” Anthony motioned to Blackford.

  “Well, well,” he said, with difficulty, because Doucette was now vigorously stimulating him, “that’s when—ah!—two things together get—oh!—along better than one.”

  Mme. Pensaud knitted her brow in thought. “I do not know that word. That is not a French word.”

  “Well,” said Blackford breathlessly, “I guess there’s nothing we can do about that.…” He noted that Anthony had now completely surrendered, and stretched himself out on one side of the bed while Michelle quickly undressed him, then herself, and descended on him making cluck-cluck noises with her lips on the way, and exposing that splendid bottom which Anthony had if anything underrated. Blackford sighed, and went over to the other side, glad to note that he was several feet separated from Anthony on that great expanse—and found himself looking across at a huge and solemn portrait of the young and stately and, indeed, ravishing Queen Caroline of Great Britain. In a moment Doucette was accompanying Michelle, and uttering squeals of delight at Blackford’s proportions, insisting on interrupting Michelle in order to display them. “Do you mind if I don’t join the inspection, old
chap?” Anthony commented, lying on his back, his eyes closed.

  “Yes,” Blackford groaned. “I mind greatly. Very poor sportsmanship.”

  At just that moment Mme. Pensaud opened the door without knocking, lorgnette in front of her eyes, a large Larousse in her hand, which she brought under the reading light next to Anthony who was horrified by the interruption. “I have found eet! I have found eet! Here is Larousse!” she exclaimed happily in English, and proceeded to read out, “Symbiose: coopération mutuelle entre personnes et groupes dans une société spécialement quand il s’agit d’une interdépendence écologique …” She looked up triumphantly, bestowed a motherly glance on the writhing bodies of her guests, and walked out, her head still bent slightly over the dictionary, repeating, thoughtfully, “coopération mutuelle entre personnes et groupes dans une société spécialement quand il s’agit d’une …” Her voice could no longer be heard, the door having closed quietly behind her.

  The boys went to the hotel, napped, and met for a midnight snack at Le Bon Laboureur, on the Left Bank. Their appetites so recently sated, they ordered soup, a salad, cheese, and the house wine.

  “Anthony, tell me what you are up to.”

  “No,” he said. “Except this. We’re worried as hell over what Stalin is up to. He has turned more secretive than ever. A purge, maybe of classic proportions, is under way. The tumbrils are full and, as usual, full of his own past intimates. At the last state funeral—Litvinov’s—our people found as many holes in the array of mourners perched on top of Lenin’s Tomb as there were mourners. There are terrific strains on Stalin. In the first place, it has become pretty clear that Mao Tse-tung is making his own decisions in the Korean War. We have reason to believe that some of those decisions have gone directly against the advice of Stalin. Stalin doesn’t know how to handle Communist parties that don’t do what he tells them to do—Yugoslavia is the perpetual stone in his stomach, and we gather he goes into periodic rages about it. He is so much convinced of his own infallibility that he quickly assumes that when something goes wrong, somebody has been unfaithful to him, and since it is not always possible to establish just which one man is responsible, he eliminates a whole category of men, just as he has begun eliminating—I’m sure he’ll keep after them until every last one of them is gone—the top Communist leaders in Czechoslovakia. He feels the most intensive need for physical protection. His own personal security is the tightest ever, and virtually nobody knows, at any particular time, where he actually is. There are doubles, and a couple of people have actually raised the question of whether the man who was at Litvinov’s funeral was actually Stalin. Meanwhile the apparatus, world-wide, is roused to a pitch of activity and suspicion. That part has in it things that work for us: We have had two or three very good defections in the past few weeks. We expect more. At the moment, we’re getting the word around that if they defect, we’ll see that they’re looked after. At one meeting in Washington we even considered setting up a branch of the International Rescue Committee to man a huge truck, with lettering in English and Russian, to wander around the U.N. and the Soviet mission, promising instant safety to anyone who wants political asylum. Acheson vetoed it, even though the IRC, which runs its own show, was willing, provided they could also offer the same protections to refugees from Spain and Argentina—the usual thing. One defector has alerted us to Stalin’s obsession over the bomb we’re building. It’s going to be a lulu, and the word is that we have got the toughest part of it licked—Truman, as you may know, is the personal sponsor of the project and has given its development top priority. The defector told us that Stalin won’t rest until he has copies of our schematics. We’ve made security really hard-boiled.” Suddenly he looked grave.

  “What is it?”

  “McCarthy. I had lunch, just before coming over, with a State Department guy at a restaurant in Washington. McCarthy’s going after the fags, as you know, and the department dropped about fifty people already this year. This guy said, ‘McCarthy’s got us so goddamn self-conscious, every time we buy a banana at the State Department cafeteria, we eat it like corn on the cob!’”

  Blackford wondered whether that was a story Helen Hanks might enjoy. Her father would not. The mere mention of McCarthy’s name excluded jokes in the presence of the ambassador. Black felt himself curiously affected by the invisible network being managed at one end by Joseph Stalin, the principal agent—now that Hitler was gone—of human misery; and, at the other, by Washington, D.C., a network of its own, protective of human freedoms in design, but, also, necessarily engaged in the same kind of business: lying, stealing, intimidating, blackmailing, intercepting. He smiled again as he recalled an aphorism written on the blackboard by Mr. Simon: Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi. He did not fully understand it then, but did now, and though he realized it could be used in defense of indefensible propositions, nevertheless, correctly applied, it was unchallengeable: That which it is permitted for Jove to do is not necessarily permitted for a cow to do. We might in secure conscience lie and steal in order to secure the escape of human beings from misery or death; Stalin had no right to lie and steal in order to bring misery and death to others. Yet, viewed without paradigmatic moral coordinates, simpletons would say, simply: Both sides lied and cheated—a plague on both their houses.

  “I feel the tension, somehow, Anthony, and I know that I’m part of it. But it is awfully hard to remind yourself, when you are out in a London night club, having carefully selected your company so that it reaches closer and closer to the hem of the court, that you are doing your best for your country.” His eyes were lowered, and Anthony had come to know that on such infrequent occasions, Blackford did not welcome wisecracks. He looked, by candlelight, like an innocent schoolboy still, of penetrating intelligence and seductive good looks, who was, somehow, lost; he looked as if he would have stayed there indefinitely, unless somebody thought to call for the check and leave. Anthony told him that though it was a banality that people serve their country in very different ways, no doubt his superiors knew what they were doing, and that, after all, it was only seven months ago that he was an undergraduate in New Haven, “drawing bridges, or whatever you people do”—how could he expect to have got his bearings? They left, and elected to walk across the bridge, up the Rue de Rivoli, and across to St.-Honoré. At the hotel they sat and had a brandy, and Anthony said he would not be free the next day and, whipping out a notebook, wrote down a few notes.

  “Here,” he said, clipping off the page. “Do what you want tomorrow before your plane. These are my suggestions, given the time you have. Get a driver in the morning and have him take you to Chartres, about forty miles, and—let me see how I can put this simply—it is the most beautiful man-made creation in the world. Then, on the way back, stop at Versailles. It’s being rebuilt by Rockefeller money, and you can’t see many of the apartments, but you can see the most splendid palace in Europe this side of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, I mean Leningrad. Then take a look at Napoleon’s tomb, and think what that little man did to Europe; and yet even he was a flop, alongside Alexander. Caesar wept, on viewing the bust of Alexander and meditating what it was that Alexander had accomplished by the time he was half Caesar’s age. Maybe Alexander wept, too, foreseeing how quickly the wops would take advantage of his great geopolitical consolidations. Then on the way back to the hotel, stop in at the Jeu de Paume, the old tennis court of the last emperor, where one hundred French Impressionist paintings are exhibited. It is a jewel house, dizzying, but it’s maybe one one-thousandths of the Louvre. Then tell your driver you’ll give him an extra thousand francs if he catches your flight, because you’ll be late. And here, in case you find yourself unsated, and with time to spare”—he retrieved the note paper and wrote down some figures—“is Mme. Pensaud’s telephone number. You might want to try it without symbiosis.”

  “Thanks,” said Blackford standing up and clasping Anthony warmly by the hand.

  “Be good, Blacky. And—oh, yes: If by a
ny chance you ever get to meet the Queen, Blackford, don’t forget to call her ma’am.” Black smiled at him and wondered whether he should bother to tell Anthony that it had not been all play and no work. By now, he knew as much about British protocol and British manners and British pecking order as the Lord Chamberlain.

  Who, as it happened, was the first person presented to him at Buckingham Palace. The men preceded their ladies down the receiving line. The Lord Chamberlain had had a long day, having previously assisted in preparing the Duke’s trip, representing his wife the Queen, on a sudden trip to Oslo, to attend the funeral of Queen Benedicta.

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Richard,” the Queen had said the preceding Friday when the news was brought of her second cousin’s death and word requested whether Her Majesty would attend the funeral on Tuesday morning or would dispatch someone else, “that the favorite occupation of royalty in Scandinavia is dying? I am seriously considering buying a little castle in the area, as a convenient base of operations for attending state funerals. And the papers are always talking about the high life expectancy of Scandinavians. Not if they go into the royalty business. Or—do you suppose?—perhaps Benedicta committed suicide? If I were married to Kaspar, I wouldn’t have lasted sixty years. Well anyway, Richard, I am not going this time. I cannot go to a ten o’clock funeral in Oslo and begin a state party for Margaret Truman at ten o’clock the evening before, not even if the air force—pardon me, my air force—jets me there in one of its two million guinea fighter planes. You go, and take Lord Stanley—he’ll keep you out of trouble. And remember, Richard, churches and funeral receptions aren’t ideal places to bemoan the slow rate of decolonization. Tell King Kaspar that Queen Caroline sends her deepest regrets, and cannot imagine that Benedicta is at this moment anything less than wild with liberty.” Richard, who always looked slightly pained when with Caroline, managed to look slightly more pained—they were driving to Westminster Abbey for the baptism of a niece—and stared, unsmiling, out the left window at the motorcyclists who wedged the way of the royal limousine. Caroline noticed he had a fresh decoration.