Saving the Queen

Saving the Queen

A Blackford Oakes Mystery

William F. Buckley, Jr.

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

F
OR
F. R
EID
B
UCKLEY

Exculpa me quod minxi in formam quam magnifice perfecisti

Prologue

His three friends, his closest professional friends, were there at dinner in part because they weren't the type of people you have to tell it is time to leave. They could have stayed on to discuss the business at hand indefinitely, but, really, it would have been repetitious. Sometimes it doesn't matter if you say the same thing again and again in three or four different ways: It is a subtle technique for advancing a position
—
dangling it high, so that you can look at it from different angles, letting all the facets shine. But there were objections to doing so tonight. For one thing, he was right up against the deadline, and had to save those final hours to make his own decision. For another, the alternatives had not been raised at the dinner table for the first time. They had been the center of conversation among the highest officials of the Central Intelligence Agency ever since it had been resolved that a special panel, headed by the Vice-president, would interrogate them deeply about the kind of thing the CIA had been doing
.

For a while it was expected, within the organization, that a party line would be laid down by the director. But as the days went on, it became clear that he was not intending to do anything of the sort
.

Perhaps in other days. But Watergate had just come and was not by any means yet gone. There a party line
had
been laid down, and it was only a matter of months before the people on the other side seized on the contradictions, charted them, computerized them
,
gloated over them: And then, almost every day in the right-hand column of the morning paper, someone else was indicted. At the opposite end of the paper, the headline reported the conviction of the poor wretch indicted six months earlier
—
for following the party line
.

Besides, no one in the Agency was going to urge him (a) to take an oath, and then (b) to tell a lie. If he wanted to, he could always plead the Fifth Amendment
.

“
I'm sorry, Mr. Vice-president, but I must decline to answer your question on the grounds that by doing so I might incriminate myself.”

“
That,” Anthony Trust had remarked around the little dinner table in the handsomely appointed dining room, “is a pretty elegant solution, you know. They can have you fired. But
would
they? And what if the rest of us did it? Right down the line? We'd be roasted by the press. But there's something of a corporate nobility in our
all
doing it
.…”

“
Anthony
”—
his host smiled
—“
you have a wonderful way of glamourizing things, which is one reason, I suppose, why you are a successful veteran in this accursed profession into which you corrupted me as an innocent twenty-four-year-old
.…”

Trust spoke with straight face: “Could we, please, cut the crap?”

He smiled at his oldest friend
—
still a bachelor, and at forty-six quickly becoming the most eligible one in town, tall, slim, with the dark glamour and bright, sudden smile, and the mysterious affinity for his work to which, indeed, he was married, as they say routinely of priests who are “married” to Mother Church
.

It wasn't known whether Anthony would be summoned before the panel. The Agency (the top people had long since ceased calling it “the Company
”—
that was for recruits, middle-echelon bureaucrats, and popular novelists) had distributed a directive announcing that it was the wish of the Rockefeller Panel that witnesses should not consult with one another either to co-ordinate strategy or to compare notes. It could not seriously be expected that such an order would be observed: No force on earth, that spring evening in 1975, at 3025 P Street, Northwest, could have kept him, and Anthony Trust, and King Harman, and Singer Callaway, from discussing the subject that quite naturally preoccupied them, so much so that he had sent his wife and youngest son to spend the week at the cottage at Martha's Vineyard. He had been told he should make no other appointments during the
entire
week, suggesting the possibility that he would be on the stand during the whole period, allowing for the lengthy recesses a panel of such eminence permitted itself, for the discharge of other duties. Still, the staff was always on duty
.

It had been different with the director. He had testified the preceding week rather briefly (presumably, the panel intended to recall him after listening to his subordinates). His associates assumed they would hear the gist of his testimony. Even if it failed to come in to them obliquely, through an intermediary, at least they could reasonably expect to read about it in the New York
Times,
to which, surely, one of the Rockefeller Panel would leak it
.

But there had been nothing
.

Nothing at all; and now, suddenly, it was his turn, and he had
no
knowledge of what his responsibilities were. When the original announcement of an investigating panel was made, he had gone straight to the director
.

“
What's the line, chum?” He tended to become increasingly idiomatic as tension increased. This had become something of a trademark, though he remained, really, without affectation, with the possible exception that he never labored to conceal his intelligence, which is so much the accepted thing to do that, acting naturally, intelligence sometimes becomes suspect as affectation. The director was not so much hostile as protective
.

“
Look,” he began. “There's a Hanging Party out there. Never mind who it is
—
let's stay professional, as we are trained to do, and keep our emotions out of it
. They
want the Rockefeller Panel to report that we have been
”—
he began to slur
—“…
lying, stealing, killing, bribing, forging … fornicating … as a matter of official foreign policy for twenty-five years. They're not interested in what takes up ninety-nine per cent of our time, which is studying the rainfall in the Ukraine. We're about to be examined by a
political
body. When a political body is convened, it has to satisfy political appetites. How to do that and do minimum damage to the country is something I-can't-write-a-directive-about. For one thing I am expressly forbidden to do so. For another, each of us has slightly different responsibilities and, predictably, a different way of explaining them to anybody who asks us to explain them
.

“
And, finally
”—
he walked away from his desk
—“
I am
not
going to suggest to anybody, let alone order him, to say something that will cause him to end up spending five years in jail as a reward for risking his life for his country.
”

He paused; distracted a moment ago, he now looked wizened, and cynical
.

“
There's no feeling anymore for the kind of thing we're doing, and there's no way, overnight, to stimulate that kind of feeling. I sometimes feel if the Washington Post's next edition revealed that at midnight I called the President and tipped him off that the entire firststrike resources of the Soviet Union were programmed to launch against us at 6 A.M., and the President persuaded Brezhnev against it after three hot hours on the hotline, the investigative reporter would give it out that the Agency had nearly triggered a nuclear war. Go away … by God, I'll be interested in how you handle them. I'll have the advantage of reading your transcript. Probably you'll never see mine. I don't know whether things will ever be the same after the hearings. Maybe we can use our remaining contact in Turkey and get jobs as eunuchs in the baths the congressmen patronize on counterpart funds.… Say, I wonder where I got that information. Take a note. Find out the name of the agent who gave me that information, and fire him. No, better still …” The director was now playing Ronald Colman, and flicked his fingers as if discarding an ash from a cigarette holder. “Better still
, get rid of him.”
But he permitted himself a smile as he shot out his trigger finger to the door, which was the director's way of saying, “Out
”—
to which there was no known demurral
.

After saying good night, his guests walked down the street toward Anthony's car. Singer said, “You know, I don't have
any
idea what he's going to do. I mean, I just can't guess what he's going to do. If they set aside a whole week for him, they've obviously decided to go over his entire period of service, to find out what one man, beginning at the bottom, and going up just about all the way, actually did.
”

Anthony Trust said, “They've picked on a man who got off to one hell of a start.
”

There was no comment. Harman, for one, knew nothing about the first assignment. Anthony knew more than he let on, but he didn't know it all, by any means. And it would greatly have surprised Singer Callaway to discover that not even he, who had been intimately involved in the operation, knew exactly how far the young man had got in, in the course of saving the Queen
.

One

Blackford Oakes was a good listener, but he had also developed skills at guiding any conversation in the direction he wanted to take it, including termination. Still, despite almost four years of practice with John Liebman, the skill tonight was offset by his roommate's lamentable condition: Though only 10:30, Johnny was quite drunk, and quite determined to tell Blacky in very considerable detail why, after all, he had decided
not
to marry Joan, the sufficient explanation of which Blackford knew but was careful not to reveal, namely Joan's antecedent decision not to marry John. Then Johnny, opening the window to reach for another can of beer sitting on the sill overlooking Davenport College Courtyard, discovered with horror that there were none left; and reaching into the cigarette box to dampen his frustration, discovered that he had simultaneously run out of cigarettes.

He turned to Blackford. “You and your goddamn … continence. I guess after graduation you'll go into training for the Graduate Engineering School lacrosse team and inflict on the next guy the necessity to go out into the wild night, in search of a normal room, with normal people, and normal supplies of the normal vices of this world.”

Johnny got orotund when he was tight, and Blackford smiled at the familiar chiding, but, mostly, at the prospect of Johnny's going out. It was safe to assume, in his present condition, that he'd be gone at least a couple of hours, and that would give Blackford the time to open and study the sealed envelope passed to him that afternoon by the assistant registrar, after receiving in the morning mail the unheard-of summons
Please report Wednesday, March 14, at 4 P.M
. (At Yale, mere registrars don't summon students thus peremptorily.) Out of sheer curiosity, Blackford had complied with the summons, rather than ignore it and wait for a conciliatory telephone call. Freshly returned from the war four years earlier, before Yale's bureaucracy became adjusted to dealing with war veterans, he once had been summoned—by the engineering dean himself—for missing a morning class. Engineering students were allowed no cuts. He appeared before the huge apple-cheeked, egg-bald bachelor who was rumored not to have left the Yale campus in forty years, except to take the baths in Germany during the summer.