Saving the Queen Read online

  Blackford learned that there are techniques for developing powers of observation, and after three long afternoons with Tom he was stuttering out details about the people he saw on the bus, and the advertising signs, and the beads of sweat that accumulated on the Washington Post merely from leaning over and reading it in that awful, hot summer. Blackford told Tom that at Yale he had signed up for a course in mnemonics taught, “would you believe it?” he asked Tom, who by the third day was indulging an occasional idiomatic familiarity, “by a freshman. The freshman had been a student of Bruno Fürst, who had written a book about developing your memory, and the freshman persuaded the chairman of the Yale Daily News to give him a big spread prior to a public demonstration.”

  Blackford and two hundred other curious students attended, and the freshman had two fellow students on the teaching platform with him—with a copy of the Life magazine that had been distributed that morning.

  “The freshman pointed to a member of the audience and asked him to call out a number between I and 160.

  “‘129,’ somebody said.

  “‘All right, Joe, what’s on page 129 of the current issue of Life?’ The trainee closed his eyes for a minute and said, ‘A half-page run-over story on Margaret Truman’s singing career and a half-page ad for Firestone tires.’ The freshman triumphantly opened Life to page 129 and held it out for the audience to verify.”

  “A stunt,” Tom said.

  Blackford said he had sensed that, but that he had taken the course, thirteen two-hour seminars for which he paid the freshman instructor thirteen dollars.

  “One of the sessions was devoted to how to remember somebody’s name, and the idea,” Blackford explained to Tom, “is to decide what individual feature in a particular person is most susceptible to caricature—

  “For instance, Tom, I’d say hair, in your case. Your hair is very—neat—so I would try to find an association between neat and Tom. And the more absurd the connection, the more it fastens in the memory. For instance”—Black was suddenly wondering whether he would be able to bring this off—“Tom has only two consonants, t and m. In the Fürstian system, t is the letter that corresponds to the number 1 and m to the number 3, so that if I can establish a relationship between neat and 13”—Blackford, beginning to perspire, was trying now to remember what Alan, the first instructor, had told him about never losing control of any situation—“I’d say to myself: It would certainly ruin the neatness of your hair if someone propped a great big wooden 13 on top of your head. Every time I saw you, I’d think of a 13 sitting on top of your hair. Then I would know that your name began with a t and ended with an m. I would then go quickly through the available possibilities, following the conventional vowel order—a, e, i, o, u: Tam, Tem, Tim, Tom, Turn. Two possibilities emerge, since we can reject the first, second, and fifth”—Tom was beginning to look at Blackford with a trace of concern, which he showed by running his hand through his hair, leaving it distinctly tousled, and damaging Black’s whole mnemonic construction—“so it boils down to your being Tim or Tom, and here”—Blackford’s relief was palpable—“here, at this stage, you have to rely a little bit on your plain memory, like, Tom, not Tim, is the man I knew with the neat hair and the wooden 13 perched on top of it.”

  “I see,” Tom said. “Whatever happened to the young man who taught the course?”

  “Oh yes, I forgot about that. Well, he taught the seminar during the spring, and that summer I ran into him on Park Avenue and we greeted each other, only he couldn’t remember my name, and I couldn’t remember his, though I couldn’t imagine him except on a rocking chair, but I couldn’t remember what a rocking chair was supposed to remind me of … I think it’s a system you have to practice all the time—no summer vacations.” Tom seized on the apparent consummation of the story to tell Blackford that the quality of observing things and people was something an agent never let up on, that it became a matter of habit. Other instructors, later in the month and in the next months, would keep prodding Truax on the point, to keep him alert.

  Actually, Blackford’s formal—as distinguished from his observational—memory was not only good, it was something of a phenomenon. As a child his father used to show him off by reading a verse, which Blacky would then repeat—word for word, syllable by syllable—with high seriousness, ignorant, at age three, of the meaning even of Hilaire Belloc’s kindergarten verses. Blackford had been wondering whether it would be vain in him to apprise Tom of this particular facility, and now decided that perhaps this was the opportune moment to come out with it.

  “When I signed on for the memory course,” he explained, “it was to learn the trick stuff. The simple act of memorization—figures, dates, poetry, that kind of thing—I’ve always been able to handle pretty well.”

  “Good,” said Tom, pulling out his note pad and scribbling something on it. Black wondered how many marines were required to protect the contents of Tom’s notebooks. Personal Observations of the Habits, Skills, and Idiosyncrasies of Deep-cover Agents I Have Known. Was there enough there, under Truax, to triangulate in on Blackford Oakes?

  He was given a dozen books to read, none of them technical. He supposed that if he was assigned to a dynamite-wielding mission, someone, somewhere, would pop up to acquaint him with the fashionable uses of dynamite, his introduction in that subject at Maxwell Field (“How to be useful if shot down and incorporated in the resistance movement”) having been cursory and, in any event, six years ago. Nor was he shown any fancy rifles or secret weapons or miraculous chemicals. He wondered—and at one point came close to asking “Harry”—whether he was, really, still on probation. He realized, at this point, that if at this moment he defected, went to the Soviet Embassy, and told them everything he knew, the Soviet Union would know nothing it didn’t know already except the addresses of three safe houses which in any case were abandoned as a matter of precaution every ninety days.

  The books, far from being esoteric, were in some cases recent best sellers. There was one about a young Nazi soldier who in an excess of conscience decides he is shooting at the wrong people. He makes his allegiance known to U. S. Intelligence, who use him to relay to the western front information he gathers at great personal risk inside Germany. It was a gripping story, and Blackford found himself wondering for the first time—why hadn’t it been a subject of conversation, or thought, when he was fighting in the war against Germany in France?—about the strange, corporately benumbed conscience of the German legions who fought bravely (most of them), dutifully (almost all of them), enthusiastically (an impressive majority) for an indefensible regime? These, surely, were sins of commission, yet the universality of the hypnosis, somehow, rendered it all passive. Here was a book about a Nazi soldier who, somehow had tripped on a shard of conscience, which magically reordered his perspective. Blackford wondered: Was there now—was there in prospect—a Western counterpart? He had not been moved purely by conscience to join the CIA, though Trust surely had, even if he would not put it so. Would there be books in the future, and if so how would the author contrive the moral drama that would put Trust in the kind of light that shone now so brightly on this young German? He wondered, too, how many such there were within the Soviet Union. Another book described in detail the fate of hundreds of thousands of Russians who, in the course of the war, during the high tide of Nazi military success, had been captured by the Germans and made to perform services, military, paramilitary, and menial. By Allied agreement with Stalin himself, these were forcibly repatriated to Russia in the months after V-E Day, even though they implored the British and the Americans to permit them to emigrate.

  “Nobody on our side believed,” “Alan” explained, “that they were anything but paranoid in insisting that they were being taken back to Russia to be tortured and slaughtered.”

  But that, according to this account, was exactly what happened. It was “Rudolph” who was most passionate on the implications of that theme. There was just a trace of accent there, and B
lackford could not guess its provenance, and of course would not have presumed to inquire. He suspected Rudolph of having an academic background, because he was given to academic formulations. “Violence in pursuit of a national objective is a social characteristic, not a social anomaly”—that kind of thing. But Rudolph, discussing Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, mostly in italics, told Blackford that it was necessary to recognize that Stalin operated without any predictable restraints.

  “That’s very hard for us to understand”—Rudolph spoke, unrelentingly, in weighted phrases—“because even the most cold-blooded of us know intellectually that it is wrong, for instance, to kill people wantonly, or torture them to no purpose. We know enough about Stalin to know that—on the contrary—he takes pleasure in killing and in causing pain. And he has a vehicle to justify what he does: the revolution.”

  Blackford asked why there weren’t wholesale defections from the system, and Rudolph explained that the principal reason was fear—fear of defiance and fear of the futility of individual gestures in the age of totalitarian sophistication.

  “But there’s something else, and it was expressed by Bukharin when he was condemned to death by Stalin’s court while absolutely innocent.” Rudolph stood, tapped his cigarette ash—too late as usual—in the general direction of the wastebasket, and walked excitedly to a bookshelf, pulled out a book, and looked at the index.…

  “Here,” he said, “listen—these are Bukharin’s words to the court. Now understand, Bukharin is innocent, but he makes a public confession of guilt. ‘I shall now speak of myself’”—Rudolph’s voice was grave with emotion—“‘of the reasons for my repentance.… For when you ask yourself: If you must die, what are you dying for?—an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for if one wanted to die unrepentant. This, in the end, disarmed me completely and led me to bend my knees before the Party and the country. At such moments, Citizen Judges, everything personal, all personal incrustation, all rancor, pride and a number of other things, fall away, disappear.… I am about to finish. I am perhaps speaking for the last time in my life.’”

  Rudolph looked up. His eyes were moist, and Blackford looked away.

  “There,” Rudolph said, “that’s why. The revolution is still a matter of faith, and if you haven’t that faith, you must stimulate it in yourself, otherwise you are living for nothing. Pascal posed much the same problem when he asked Christians to believe. Let’s eat.”

  He opened a brown paper bag, Blackford opened his, and they ate silently for ten minutes, and Rudolph took Coca-Cola from a refrigerator. In ten minutes they were back at work.

  Rudolph knew something about the history of the Soviet secret police, about the kind of training its agents got, the kind of assignments they carry out.

  “We in the Company spend several hundred million dollars a year collecting information about the Soviet Union the equivalent of which, about the United States, the Kremlin can get by subscribing to a half-dozen technical journals. In the Soviet Union everything is secret. Every crumb of information we have, we have wrenched out—and even, then, we cannot make projections. It isn’t just Stalin. There is a loose dynamo in the Soviet will, and you cannot tell where it is going to take us: Nothing is predictable. Though some things are nearly so, among them that—just to give you an idea—a copy of all Ivy League 1951 yearbooks”—Rudolph had taken a flying leap at Truax’s immediate past—“is in Soviet hands, and a record is being entered of names, faces, dates of birth.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes, all of them. They aren’t short of man power. And they know that maybe thirty-five to fifty members of the graduating classes ended up with us, and they will work years to try to find out (a) who and (b) what are they up to.”

  Black yearned to see Anthony. He needed to talk. Four weeks had now gone by, and his life had fallen—hardened—into a pattern. Two or three evenings a week he spent with Sally, the others reading. He began to feel a restlessness that neither books nor exercise nor sex could satisfy, and he couldn’t diagnose it, which worried him. He called Anthony on the phone not knowing exactly why. The obvious reason—that Anthony was still his closest friend—was blurred by an inchoate resentment that Black’s dissatisfactions, his awful feeling of emptiness, restlessness, directionlessness, were something General Trust was somehow responsible for. Black ruled against an introspective examination of his motives, deciding, simply, to call his best friend. In doing so he found himself conforming not resentfully, but with a combination of good sportsmanship and institutional pride, to the specified procedures.

  He made the call from a pay telephone in central Washington. He dropped the requisite coins in the slot, and the number rang. A strange voice answered, a man’s voice.

  “I want to speak to Mr. Trust.”

  “Who is calling?”

  He hesitated only slightly. “Mr. Truax.”

  Anthony’s voice came on in a matter of seconds. There was in it the formal strain (somebody-in-the-room). But the undisguised pleasure that flooded his clipped words was what Black most longed for and needed: He had had intensive corporate solicitude for weeks now, and wanted, now, individual solicitude, and the opportunity he still felt he needed to confide, confide with someone with whom his relations were of long standing, uncomplicated by sex, moodiness, petulance, jealousy. He struggled to make his request appear—if not exactly casual—at least something less than imperative.

  “Listen, I just called to ask—you coming this way soon?” He paused, but only for a moment, fearing that Anthony’s schedule might yield a negative before he could know the underlying urgency of the invitation. “If not, I’ll get up to New York to see you.”

  Anthony absorbed the whole of the message, as if through a single electrode. His hesitation was purely administrative. Though he did say, “Hang on a minute while I check my schedule,” Black knew that he would be seeing him about as soon as the transportation system between New York and Washington could get him there.

  It was less than a minute.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Geoffrey. But look, I can’t make it till nine. We’ll have a late dinner. It will have to be at your place. Buy a hamburger. Goddammit, buy a steak, you stingy bastard.”

  Blackford did more than that. Early in the morning, before his class on Contact with “Harry,” he went to the delicatessen and bought steak and caviar, potatoes, and vodka, two wines, French rolls, some celergy remoulade, and an ice-cream cake. When Anthony rang the bell, Blackford followed exemplary procedure. First he turned off the overhead light. Then he raised the curtain slightly, permitting him a view of the caller, two stories below. The curtain then went down, the light on, and the release button was depressed.

  Anthony put his arms around Black, bussing him, in the French manner, on both cheeks. It was late, so Black started directly with the vodka and caviar, and they talked until two in the morning. Anthony waited until Black talked and talked about his experiences, his questions, his doubts, his anxiety—what was the nature of the anxiety? What was the restlessness he felt? When oh when would he have some idea of what specifically he would be doing? How was he doing as far as the Agency was concerned? Did Anthony receive any reports on him? How do you measure progress? How do you keep from going crazy with loneliness?

  “Fortunately, I’m used to Sally never asking me anything about my work, because she decided some time after she learned long division that the limits of her scientific understanding had been reached. But at Yale I could talk to her about personal experiences, about the teachers, about other guys. Now I have to make all that up, and it’s driving me nuts. I invented a character called Costello who is allegedly taking a course in advanced structural physics with me, and I found myself night after night describing Costello and his general attitudes, and by God now she wants me to bring Costello to dinner next time, so tomorrow I’m going to have to kill the poor bastard off, or have him leave to see his sick mothe
r in Canada. It’s driving me crazy.”

  Anthony was soothing—and understanding, Blackford thought later. In a way, what he said was boiler plate. But what else could he say? He had seen it before, with other deep-cover agents. It won’t always be this way, he said, because precisely the point of a deep-cover agent is that he is destined to lead a normal public life, as in due course Black would be doing. And that life you can talk about as freely as you care to, and to anyone you like. The duties of such an agent are very carefully calculated not to occupy so much of his time as to run the risk of blowing the cover.

  “Some agents,” Anthony said, “have regular, full-time jobs, and what they do for us either is done after hours, or else is in some way related to the job they are holding down.… In your case, your work is for the foundation, to be done more or less at your own pace. If it becomes necessary to have physical evidence of the work you have done, that can be arranged. And remember, there will be one man in London you will see on an entirely candid basis—your superior. You’ll be talking to him as candidly as to me. More so, because he will know your assignment.

  “And”—this took Black a little by surprise, even as Anthony’s language did when it shucked off the aw-shucks integument he usually wrapped it up in—“you’ll find something strange. Something not so lonely. There’s a funny incorpprealized solidarity out there. You don’t know who they are, but you do know that you are all straining to achieve the same end, and a day comes when their invisible forms are as palpable as the members of your swimming team.

  “But,” he said, “that takes a while. It took me about a year, and I’m not a deep-cover agent. I’m not sure whether that means you’ll have it sooner or later. But you will have it.”