Saving the Queen Read online

  “First: At this end you’ll receive, in the next day or two, an order to report for an army physical. When you check in, you’ll be put through the usual routine. Your chest X ray, when developed, will show a tiny spot on the lung. You’ll be reassured that with modest precautions, it won’t keep you from living a full and vigorous life, but you will be instantly discharged from the reserves. This heartbreaking news you’ll make known to your friends”—Anthony now mocked his friend’s formal verbal formulations—“with an appropriate blend of joy and sorrow, a formula the Central Intelligence Agency is pleased to leave to your own devising. You will then approach the dean and tell him your doctor has recommended a year of relative leisure, and that you are therefore withdrawing your application for graduate school and going to England and the Continent for the next year. Say that you will advise the dean’s office next spring what the doctor says about the prospects of your re-entering school.

  “Now, here is a ticklish one. You must spend two months during the summer in Washington. There you’ll get whatever training the deep-cover people get—which is scant, in contrast to what the in-house professionals get. None of the specialists who handle you will see you for more than five consecutive sessions, and you won’t be in the same building—we call them ‘safe houses’—more than five times. Everyone will know you only as Geoffrey or Mr. Truax. While in Washington, you’ll be paid in cash. You are expected to pay the usual income tax and will list your salary—$4,400 per year, by the way—as ‘miscellaneous receipts.’ Now: We have been fussing over the question of what could plausibly take you to Washington, and though we have ideas in reserve, we’d like to come up with something better.”

  “Sally lives in Washington.” Blackford spoke for the first time.

  “Is she going to be there this summer?”

  “Yes. She has a job with a congressman. She’s doing a master’s in Congressional Government. She chose the biggest bore in Washington, on the grounds that she wanted her book to be authentic.”

  “Well, what about it? Why not follow her to Washington for a couple of months? Even if you’re not inclined to do so, would you be willing to give her the impression that that was why you wanted to go to Washington?”

  Blackford appreciated the way Anthony moved into the subject: delicately. A liaison with Sally in Washington had not quite yet got itself framed as a CIA directive, but it had all the makings of one.

  Yes, he thought. He could go to Washington. He wasn’t ready to marry Sally or even propose to her. And anyway, Sally would know he was too industrious by nature to go to Washington merely to be with her when the congressman wasn’t. He would have to concert the advantages of a summer in Washington: Sally plus something else.…

  “Is there a clinic or a specialist or somebody who could spend the summer nursing my poor lung?”

  “Washington isn’t a center of pretubercular research.” Anthony spoke as though to himself. He looked up: “But the doctor at New Haven could give you the names of a half dozen doctors associated with a half dozen clinics around the country and recommend you spend a couple of months with any one of them. You are left with a reason for choosing Washington—”

  “And I obviously have that reason with Sally there … though there should be something academic thrown in.…”

  The tension was drawing out of the room, and soon Black’s questions were asked without tension. Was he to tell his mother the same business about the lung? How could his stepfather actively co-operate without being brought into the conspiracy? To these questions Anthony had ready answers. His mother was to be told about the lung, but once across the Atlantic, the disability could safely be minimized, even ridiculed. The stepfather was a different problem. He was perfectly capable of informing Black that no research was necessary to establish that opportunities for young engineers in America were infinitely greater than in England, that in any case Black didn’t have English working papers and would need to associate himself with an American company actually to do any work, and so on. His stepfather, an indulgent type, wouldn’t much mind a leisurely year after college, but since Black had no other means of support, except for one of those episodic checks from his father on the infrequent occasions when he sold three DC-4s to the Paraguayans, it would be a little ungainly to have to ask the stepfather for a regular living allowance.

  It had all been anticipated.

  “A foundation here in New York will make you a grant to report on the effect of Point 4 on the English economy, with special attention to differences in historical British and American engineering techniques and theoretical inclinations. You’ll make the application to the foundation right after you see the dean at Yale. Here are the forms. They are already completed, needing only your signature. You will see that the foundation expects an application from you, and you will have to come up with letters of recommendation”—Blackford groaned at yet another raid on his friends on the faculty, but, after all, they would have saved copies of the letters they had already sent to the graduate school.

  “Now,” said Anthony, “there’s one more thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Greyburn.”

  “What does that have to do with this business?”

  “I don’t know. But I shouldn’t have concealed it. I had to fill out a form telling everything I know about you. Greyburn was important.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was a primal experience. You were shaken by it and it belongs in your psychological profile. I don’t know how much scar tissue is left, but I know there is some, and I honestly don’t know whether it will get in the way of your operating successfully in England. You haven’t been there since you left school, and I’ve heard you on the subject of some unpleasant characteristics of English institutional life. You still have a lot of passion.…”

  “I’ve still got a lot of passion about Dr. Chase. And Simon. And what they got away with—still do get away with, for all I know. I’d like to think the war wiped out the whole bloody lot of them. Sometimes I wondered in France: God! Do you suppose I’m here to save Dr. Chase?…”

  “That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Tell you what I’ve decided. I’m charged with writing on the record any ‘significant experiences’ I know you’ve had. I won’t. On two conditions: You ask me not to. And you tell me that you’re asking me not to because the experience is behind you.”

  Blackford was pale, and, hands deep in his pockets, slouching on the armchair, he pinched the flesh of his thighs sharply and answered in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “In answer to your first condition: Yes, I ask you not to. In answer to the second: You don’t put something like that ‘behind you.’ I’ve met a lot of English people since leaving Greyburn, and haven’t had any quarrel with them. Only once, when someone was preaching about the virtues of English public schools. Even then, I just left, without throwing up. To answer your question: It won’t impair my work.”

  Anthony said lightly, abruptly changing his tone: “Okay. But I know you, Blacky”—he smiled. “One of these days you’re going to say to yourself, ‘We’re even.’ I don’t know what will make you say that. What will it take? I’ve got no business worrying about it since I’m satisfied you won’t give English secrets to the Russians. And I don’t think the English have any secrets from anybody else. As far as I’m concerned, you’re at liberty to give the secret menus of Greyburn to the Soviet secret police.”

  “That would bring the Soviet revolution to a quick, constipated halt,” Black smiled, getting up.

  Three

  It worked, no hitches. His friends turned out to be less concerned over his health than happy for him that he was now safe from a war that was getting bloodier every month. The final days at Yale were carefree, and consisted in part of the nostalgic task of dismantling the accretions of four years, and attempting, shyly, to repay some special debts.

  Black felt a great, however unarticulated, affection for three of his professors.
He sat and wrote them, in his meticulous hand, the reasons why each one had meant so much to him, and in what ways. He had been afraid he would stifle that impulse, but he wrote out the letters all in a single night and was relieved to have done so. He went for the hundredth time to David Dean Smith’s to bargain-hunt for some of the 33 rpm records, and sent the three professors each a two-volume set of the Diabelli Variations, played by Leonard Shure, which he charged, giving his stepfather’s address. He sold most of his books and instantly regretted it. They yielded $110, had cost him six times that, and he suspected that one day he would like to be able to reach for the Antigone and find the passages he had marked, because they pleased, or perplexed, him. He attended two functions at the fraternity, one of them stag, the second open to Sally, who was girlishly happy at Black’s news that he would be spending the summer in Washington. For once she permitted herself to act, in public, as something less than a lofty graduate student crossing the tracks to condescend and minister to undergraduates. (Poor Sally, for all her academic seniority, she was only twenty-two. She hadn’t had to take time out to go to France to save England.) He looked at her with the mint julep Jud, the Negro bartender at Zeta Psi, specialized in for the rites of spring, and wondered if anywhere in the world there was at this balmy moment a girl more lovely, with her loose brown hair, wearing white, and pearls, and a glossy red belt, her lips barely separated, her eyes gazing at the mint julep, but directed at him, her conversation routinely bright, with the little cynicisms she affected distractedly. It was then that he saw the message, as vividly as if it had been sewn on her blouse: Blacky Oakes is deceiving me, Sally Partridge.

  She looked up at him squarely, and the banter stopped.

  “What’s going on?”

  He stood there, tall and tanned, the straw in his hair blooming after the long winter, his white pants and blazer and fraternity tie making him look suddenly like a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, his thin, molded features without sign of age or strain, his eyes relentlessly intelligent, discerning, blue-frank, blue-cunning. He said simply:

  “I bribed the doctor.”

  Her hand reached out and tightened on his.

  “Blacky, what if you are caught?”

  “I won’t be,” he said, “but I’m not going to give you any details.”

  “Then—you won’t be coming to Washington after all?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But I won’t be going in and out of clinics. I’ll be sitting in on some engineering courses at the summer school at George Washington.” In the two years he had known her, Blackford had never seen in Sally a scintilla of curiosity about anything scientific, and he felt safe involving engineering to abort any impulse to specific curiosity.

  “Blacky, I’m glad. It was just stupidity that you signed on for the reserve in the first place. You’ve done your tour of duty. You’re not dodging anything. But oh God, if you get caught.”

  “Look, I told you it’s not going to happen. At worst they’d discover that somebody else’s chest X ray was confused with mine. That has happened before.”

  “Well, why did you pull out of graduate school?”

  “I wanted to make the story sound right, and, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t mind a year off. And I have neglected Mother.”

  “So you’ll be neglecting me instead.”

  “Sally, next year you’ll be working toward your big degree, and you care about that more than about anything else in the world right now, including (a) me, (b) a victory in Korea, or even (c) the goddamn United World Federalists. There is a lot of time. Meanwhile, it’s not impossible that there’s going to be a very general and very grisly war, in which case each of us is going to end up taking orders from somebody.”

  He finished his drink, and felt sick and smooth, and supposed that as time went on, he would feel less sick and more smooth. He thought, Well: at least this lie around, I took the brunt of it. There are bound to be others, where the victim will be someone else. He wondered whether, at any of the sessions he would have with the CIA instructors, they would discuss ethics. He hadn’t studied ethics formally at Yale, and he was impatient with some of the niceties that preoccupied his Thomistic friends, particularly after two or three drinks. He tended to rely on instinct, and unlike Anthony, who was steeped in the literature of the Cold War, Blackford was content simply to know that there were the bad guys and the good guys, and that nit-picking about the good guys didn’t make the bad guys less bad, that the world was going through an ideological ordeal concerning which he intended to inform himself, and that events had conspired to give him an anonymous role in the struggle. He began, suddenly, to feel less the conscript of events. Though the idea might not have occurred to him to enter CIA if he hadn’t had the reserve hanging over him, now he wondered whether providence mightn’t have had a hand in it all—he liked the word “providence” because he thought it a respectable, New Englandish way to avoid the word “God,” which was altogether too personal and … intrusive, sort of. He didn’t like it much that, in the classrooms, God was pretty defenseless against the wisecracks of the teachers. But, he thought philosophically, God is used to a lot worse than he gets at Yale, and anyway, isn’t He overdue for a miracle if He really wants to engage our attention? Last November he had attempted to argue seriously with friends at Zeta that Yale’s victory over Harvard was that long-awaited miracle, but nobody was in the mood for Black’s frivolity.

  Later that night, in Sally’s car, they did it for the last time under the shadow of West Rock. She was silent, but prehensile. He was distracted, but taken by lust, and he had to remind himself to be tender, and was glad when the moon was suddenly blotted out by the huge stone because she would be opening her eyes any second now, and she wouldn’t be able to see, in his face, that he was thinking about subjects other than Sally, and the Last Copulation at West Rock.

  He rented a one-bedroom furnished apartment. An agitated landlord explained that if the apartment’s regular tenant were suddenly to return, some adjustment would have to be made respecting the furniture. But since Mr. Ellison hadn’t shown up for seven months, and was thereby six months behind in the rent, the landlord decided he would simply appropriate the use of the furniture until some sort of settlement was made, and he asked Blackford whether he didn’t think that was entirely reasonable since the landlord had made no effort until recently to rent the apartment, confident that Mr. Ellison would show up with an explanation and a lot of back rent. Blackford asked whether he had gone to the police, and the landlord said, Oh yes, and the Bureau of Missing Persons. What did Mr. Ellison do, Blackford asked, thinking of himself, God, I bet I know what racket Ellison was in. Mr. Ellison, said the landlord, was a winetaster, who took his duties very seriously. He pointed to a large closet.

  “I’ve locked this because there are a great many wines in the closet and Mr. Ellison told me some of the wines he tastes are worth fifty dollars a bottle, so I don’t want him coming back and telling me the tenants drank up a thousand dollars’ worth of wine.”

  Blackford said he was surprised that there were wine-tasters in Washington, but the landlord wasn’t surprised at all, or at least hadn’t thought about it, and when the police searched the desk, there was nothing there to give them a clue as to whom Mr. Ellison worked for or who his clients were.

  “On the whole,” he said, “he was an ideal tenant, except for his disappearing. I’ve never had a disappearance before, and they are very expensive. I suppose you can use his record library”—it was extensive, Blackford noted, and eclectic—“but you’ll be responsible for any damages. We have a detailed inventory of Mr. Ellison’s possessions. There, that’s a picture of Mr. Ellison. He doesn’t look like a winetaster, does he? Although,” he added pensively, “I’m not sure what winetasters look like.”

  Blackford turned to the framed picture of a man with slick hair and a mustache, Don Ameche slightly unfocused, a prim handkerchief in his jacket pocket, smiling lasciviously, as if he had just tasted a great burgundy
. The two rooms were vastly over-furnished, crowded with bric-a-brac and old issues of Life, Look, Time, Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s. Blackford wondered where the oenophiles’ journals were and thought Ellison must be a real sport to pass himself off as a winetaster, working in the sunkissed vineyards of Washington, D.C.

  He wondered when the landlord would stop talking and, thinking it might help, took off his coat and tie, complaining of the awful damp heat, which would in fact plague him during the next nine weeks.

  “Is there such a thing as an air-conditioned safe house?” he asked “Tom”—the instructors gave only a single name, a Christian name.

  “I’ve never been in one,” was all he could get out of Tom, whose specialty was Visual Identification. At their first meeting in the house on O Street, Tom greeted him economically, signaling to follow him into the adjacent room, where two card tables were set together. Tom closed the door:

  “Now, draw or list on that yellow pad everything you noticed in the living room we just walked through.”

  Black was always confident when in possession of a pencil and paper and under orders to sketch something. He had been born with the facility and it had developed into the craftsmanship that got him into trouble at Grey-burn and an A in mechanical drawing at Yale; but other than the window they had passed and, he thought, a bookcase on the left and some sort of a couch, he now remembered nothing. Finally he let the pencil drop.

  Tom was no censorious. He had seen it too often in his pupils.

  “An agent needs to notice everything. Not only the unusual. If I had led you through a room with a nude girl lying on the couch, I’d want you to notice the color and shape of the couch.”

  “You mean, not the color and shape of the girl?” Blackford asked; but Tom wasn’t the kind of instructor you make that kind of comment to, because all he said was, “Geoffrey, don’t smart-ass me. My job isn’t to tell you whom to screw. It’s to notice whom you screw, and where.”