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  “It’s just that easy,” he now told the Director at tea. “You mustn’t be offended by this, Allen. Besides, you must find it consoling that your people will stay in power a good long time.” This conversation, taking place two months after the Democrats sacrificed for the second time the most conspicuous egghead in the Democratic party in the election against the universally popular liberator of Europe, there was a special sense of resignation in the fateful observation.

  “In some discursive reading the other day,” the former Secretary went on, “I found interesting collaboration for this thesis. It is from a speech by John Stuart Mill delivered, I believe, in the British Parliament.” With his left hand he extended his teacup to the maid, who refilled it as he adjusted his glasses with his right hand.

  “Mill said, ‘I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle’”—the Secretary raised his eyebrows in obeisance to the majesty of First Principles—“‘that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, had nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must’—take heart, Allen!—‘by the laws of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party.’”

  He smiled with great satisfaction and looked up again, as if to acknowledge yet another providential insight.

  The Director was more phlegmatic than his older brother, who would have retaliated massively. Allen Dulles satisfied himself with grunting: “If we had had one more brain at Yalta and Potsdam, Dean, the Russians would have got Westminster Abbey.”

  Four times, during the explosive events of October and November, they had met; and although the Secretary of State knew of these meetings and took discreet reassurance from the knowledge that his predecessor, whom he had come secretly to admire, was being regularly consulted by no less trustworthy a man than the Secretary of State’s own brother, under no circumstances would the Secretary have participated in any of them, no more than he would have invited the brainy Democrat to the White House whose tenant had, in any event, always been ill at ease with Acheson. “To put up with Acheson,” the Director’s deputy had once observed, “you have to be terribly bright and suave, or a political gunslinger governed by his gonads. Nothing in between. What we have in the White House is in between.”

  The visit was early in January, before the President’s State of the Union message. Outside it was wet gray snow, something like the national mood. “You will need,” Acheson said, stirring his tea, “to reformulate a foreign policy. The old business about ‘liberating Eastern Europe’ is no longer very persuasive.”

  “It may not be, but you’re not going to hear anything very different. Only the formulation is scheduled to change. We will be talking about ‘liberation by evolution.’ That’s the ticket.”

  “May I presume to suggest that that particular speech be delivered in the United Nations? The two were meant for each other.”

  The Director smiled, while puffing on his pipe, as if on the homestretch to orgasm. Pause. Then: “It’s not decided when or where. The timing is of some importance. The U.S. needs a leg up in international public opinion. It would be good if that declaration were to coincide with something that would resurrect our prestige.”

  “I hate to say it, Allen, but you are really suggesting the resignation of your brother.”

  The Director never rose to the fraternal bait. He smiled diplomatically, and went on. “We have something else in mind.”

  “May I inquire?”

  “We want an artificial satellite—before they get one. Beginning July 1, 1957, we get the eighteen-month International Geophysical Year, and our idea is to celebrate it with a satellite. The satellite is more than a stunt, as you no doubt know. Satellites will be able to see. See a bucket of water in an open field. They will open the scientific door to pinpoint ICBMs. They are the key to the next, probably definitive, generation of strategic weapons. But launching that first satellite is the ticket, as far as the military people are concerned—they know where to head, from that point on, with a reliable missile system. An orbiting satellite, the scientists know, simply validates the truism that the gravitational pull of the earth plus a complementary speed equals something on the order of a perpetual satellite.”

  “How’re we doing?”

  “We’ve got problems. So do they. What we haven’t got a line on is just what their problems are, and how we can help make them worse. We’re talking eight, ten, twelve months away, our people figure. But whenever: The world’s first satellite has got to be launched from Cape Canaveral.”

  The former Secretary put down his cup. “If we can’t beat them at the scientific level, we are in a bad way. Can’t we hire enough Germans to do it for us?”

  “Most of the Germans with rocket experience were whisked off to Moscow. During your administration, Dean. You might call it ‘The Brains’ Brain Drain.’”

  “Allen, you are getting polemical, and since you’re not as good at it as I am, I suggest you mind your manners.”

  Dulles ignored the taunt. “We did get Von Braun. And he’s working full-time. But our job—the Agency’s job—isn’t to help Von Braun. That’s for the Defense Department and related agencies. Our job is to hamstring the Reds, and we don’t know how to go about it, because we don’t know (a) what it is they need most, (b) whether we’re in a position to keep them from getting it, whatever it is, or—(c) for how long we can keep it from them if we can isolate their problem.”

  Acheson got up to go. “Let me think about it. Have you got any good news?”

  “Jean-Paul Sartre gave a speech yesterday denouncing the Communists for invading Hungary and canceling his membership in the party.”

  “Good news? Sartre turning to the West? We have enough problems.”

  The Director smiled. “He has his following, Dean.”

  “I suppose. Unlike your nephew, I’ve resisted any temptation to Romanism but the nearest I ever came to Poping was when the Vatican put Sartre on the Index.” He picked up his umbrella after fastening his coat. “As it is, my gesture to ecumenism is to obey the Index on Sartre. Good afternoon, Allen.”

  “Bye-bye, Dean.”

  The two men parted at the door, shaking hands.

  3

  “What were you actually doing in Budapest?” Sally asked as she poured him the gin and tonic from the kitchen shelf.

  “Sally?”

  “Yes, Blacky.”

  “Put a touch of Campari in that, will you? Something I learned from an Argentinian steward.”

  “Did he get killed for telling you?”

  Blackford managed a grin, but at the same time he sprang up distractedly from the sofa on which he had been characteristically draped, and walked toward the teeming bookshelf of the small apartment, without answering.

  “I said, Blacky, what actually were you doing in Budapest?” Her teasing, seductive coloratura sang through the open door.

  “Sally dear, your curiosity is supposed to carry you up through the first … third of the nineteenth century. When exactly did Jane Austen die?”

  “1867.”

  Blackford paused.

  “Oh yes, of course, I remember now. She died of grief over Seward’s Folly in purchasing Alaska.”

  “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 sai
d, 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 pie
ce 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.)