Who's on First (10 page)

“What we say is obviously for Moscow to decide.”

“Of course. Moscow decides everything, from world war to whether you are paying too much for your mistress.” Silin blanched. Bolgin enjoyed occasional manifestations of his omniscience. “And that goes also for the question of whether to bring in the French police. I have my own opinion on the matter, but let me have yours: What are the chances of getting Sûreté Nationale without the press catching on?”

“I should think about fifty-fifty. The French sometimes effect discreet operations with considerable skill. They managed, you will remember, not very long ago to mount a fair-sized war in the Suez without the knowledge of either President Eisenhower or Comrade Khrushchev.”

Bolgin tensed at this reminder of the major delinquency of his career. Silin did not rub it in. He went on: “On the other hand, the censorship of Algerian events is very disorderly, and informers are well paid by the press. I can accordingly not make a judgment one way or the other. The arguments would, in my view, weigh heavily in favor of bringing in the French. They have their own informants in Algerian circles. Either we make an effort to liberate Kapitsa, which means bringing in the French, or we lie down and give them the arms.”

“Thank God for Moscow.”

“Thank who, Colonel?”

Bolgin rose. “I shall code Moscow directly.”

“Are you, Colonel Bolgin, formally relieving me of personal responsibility in this situation?”

“I am. Subject to Moscow's specifying your duties.” The ambassador rose, tripped the lock, and led the way out of the chamber.

Bolgin, alone in the code room minutes later, thought feverishly for a moment. He picked up the telephone and reached Sverdlov. “Establish immediately the deadline for personals in tomorrow's edition of
Le Monde
.” He put down the telephone and wondered—wondered what everyone wondered who initiated a distress call to Moscow: Would they blame him? Security arrangements for foreign trips are strictly the business of KGB-Moscow. But the advantage of being KGB-Moscow is that you can shift the blame to others. What hellish luck that he happened to be in Paris at the moment. Though they'd almost certainly have called him in from London in any case.

He went to work, using his personal code, and relaying the story in full.

11

József Nady had specified that Frieda and Erno should meet that night not at their regular meeting place, the restaurant L'Ancien Franz, but at his little apartment on Avenue Ingres. They convened frequently with other refugees of the Hungarian uprising at bars and restaurants, meetings at times lugubrious, at times buoyant, according as the mood, dictated by random rumor, was good or bad. The three were especially close, bound by personal ties to Theophilus Molnar, with whom they had matriculated at the university and conspired in the months and days before that glorious short-lived week in October. When the tanks came on the Sunday morning before dawn, they had been asleep. They made their way out of Budapest on Thursday, through the contact at the candy shop on Ferenc Street, the owner of which had passed on to them the day before the harrowing details of the execution of Theophilus. It was József who reasoned that manifestly Theo had been betrayed by the American, known to them as “Harry.” József told them he had defied the curfew the night of the execution. He told Frieda and Erno that if Harry had still been at the hotel, “there would be one less traitor alive in Budapest.” But Blackford Oakes had checked out. József managed to intimidate the concierge into letting him look at the registration book. József copied it down: “Harry E. Browne, 34 St. Ronan Street, New Haven, Connecticut. Passport number H 2452463, issued in New York on July 6, 1956.” The following night they assembled at Madame Zlaty's store near the university, where a contact from the resistance, driving a milk wagon, would pick them up at dawn the next morning. They emerged from the shop dressed as dairy workers. That night they spent on a farm twenty kilometers from the city. The next night they were in Vienna. Two weeks later they arrived in Paris, having deliberated—and rejected as too far distant from home—the United States as an alternative sanctuary. József betrayed an antipathy to the United States which he associated with the despised “Harry.” Frieda, listless since hearing of the fate of Theo, had smiled appreciatively, and put her arm around the shoulders of József, whose loyalty to her dead fiancé was so ardent.

Frieda and Erno arrived simultaneously. She was beginning to climb the stairs, tired after a long day at the typewriter of the firm of Coudert Frères. Erno, who worked the graveyard shift as a linotypist for
Le Monde
and was relatively fresh, greeted her affectionately.

“Wonder what's up?” he said as they climbed the stairs to 4A. She depressed the button using the old rhythmic dash dot dot dash they had used during the exhilarating months almost exactly a year ago. Instantly József opened the door, hugged Frieda, and offered his hand to Erno. He waved them into his small sitting room with the wilted couch and chair, disappeared into the kitchen, brought out a bottle of chilled white wine, poured, sat down, and said:

“Harry is in Paris and I know where he is!”

Both his listeners put down their glasses. “Tell us,” said Frieda quietly, her large brown eyes closing with concentration.

“I was delivering a radio we had repaired at the shop to the housekeeper of the Hôtel France et Choiseul. As I walked into the service entrance,
he
walked out of the guest entrance, and into a car, a gray Citroën. I have the license number.”

“Are you sure it was Harry?” Erno asked.

“Is there anybody else who looks like Harry?”

“That's true,” Frieda reflected. “Nobody else looks like Harry.… What shall we do?”

“We could turn him in to the French police,” Erno suggested.

“And what would
they
do?” József snorted. “In the first place we can't prove he's a Soviet agent. In the second place if we did, all they would do is kick him out of the country. After all, he's an American citizen.”

“We could tell the Americans about him.”

“Ah yes,” József said, “I agree. I think we should do that—after.”

“After what?” Frieda asked.

“After we avenge Theo.”

Erno's voice turned cold. “What do you propose, József?”

“I propose that we hang him by the neck until he is as dead as Theophilus. Then we will see to it that the United States—and the Communists—know that although Hungary is enslaved, not all Hungarians are slaves.”

Frieda thought back on her quiet and gentle Theo, a tiger on the soccer field and, sometimes, in her bed: but otherwise calm, purposeful, joyfully convinced of a future free of domination, of political trials, of torture, execution, exile. A great bitterness welled up in her, as she recalled József's account, taken from the concierge, of Theo's execution.

“I agree,” she said, uttering the words slowly, emphatically. “But on this condition: We must let him speak. Not like Theo. And—if he prays—give him time to pray, unlike Theo.”

József turned to Erno.

“I too agree. But how? Shooting him when he approaches the hotel is something we might arrange. But
hanging
him …”

“I have thought of little else since I saw him,” József said. “I tipped the doorman and told him I suspected the American was playing around with my girl, and I wanted to check her excuses, and would he keep his eyes on Harry. He promised he would. Then I called reception and said that the cuff links ordered by Mr. Harry Browne's mother from New Haven as a surprise gift for her son's birthday would not be ready for ten days; was that too late? He checked and told me Mr. Browne had reservations for the whole month of July.”

“That doesn't answer the question of how we will get hold of him.”

“I have that figured out. I'll go to the garage with a work order from the store to repair the radio in the gray Citroën Plate 467-H. The garage superintendent has his office in the entrance. The exit is at the other end of the building. After a half hour I will leave with my tool chest and wave good-bye to the superintendent. I shall reenter the garage from the exit side and go right to the car and lie on the floor of the back seat.”

“What if Harry sees you when he gets into the car?”

“He won't. If by any chance he did, I'd pretend I was sleeping off a drunk and wobble out with my tool kit. You will be parked in a rented car at the corner of Castiglione and St.-Honoré and when you see the gray Citroën with that license plate, you will follow us. I'll move on him within two minutes of the time he turns out of the garage and put this”—he lifted a .38 revolver from under the cushion of the couch—“behind the back of his neck and tell him if he wants to stay alive to follow my instructions exactly.”

“Where do we take him?”

“Do you remember the picnic on Independence Day when we drove to Fontainebleau?”

“Of course,” said Frieda. “Off the road and deserted. Perfect.”

Erno wondered whether they should bring along any more of their compatriots, but agreed finally with József that there was always a risk. “Besides, we three had a special relationship with Theo.”

And so it was left that József, having been tipped off by the doorman, would estimate the likeliest time of departure of Harry Browne from the hotel, and the plan would go instantly into action.

“You, Erno,” said József, “need to bring the rope. We will tie his hands behind him when we take him out of the car.” Frieda gave an involuntary shudder but bit her lips, and although she had tried for six months to drive out of her mind the picture of Theo swinging in the wind on the gibbet of the rattling truck, now she ushered the image back into her mind, and instantly recovered her resolution. József, sweating with excitement, pursed his lips and shook his head with its light blond hair ferociously. “Perhaps now they will learn something!”

Erno walked over to the bookcase, on top of which was a framed picture. It was taken of Theophilus holding the soccer cup in his freshman year. “To my great friend József, Theo.”

“I'm with you all the way,” Erno said.

“And I,” echoed Frieda.

12

Well, Bolgin thought as he put down the receiver: At least
something
isn't going sour! He looked at his watch. He didn't like to make appointments for 8
P.M.
That put off his dinner-vodka hour. But under the pressure of the Kapitsa matter he would in any event need to be alert until about ten, even though Moscow had ended a furious series of chaotic messages by saying that no communication would be ready for
Le Monde's
six o'clock deadline that day, Tuesday, for Wednesday's editions. The Algerian kidnappers would have to wait at least until Thursday. Meanwhile Viksne was instructed to advise the scientific delegation that the Kapitsas had been taken into the Soviet ambassador's residence, where Tamara was being treated for what appeared to be an acute dysentery from which her husband was also suffering slightly. His scheduled lecture at the Lycée the following day would be read, on his behalf, by one of his colleagues. The French police were
NOT REPEAT NOT
to be advised of the disappearance of Kapitsa. (Bolgin, after Stalin died, indulged himself in a parody on one occasion when he cabled Ilyich: “
THE APPROACH TO MENDES-FRANCE HAS NOT REPEAT NOT UN-REPEAT PREVIOUS REPEAT NOT BEEN SUCCESSFUL
.” The reply from Ilyich, who had been his classmate at the NKVD Academy a generation earlier, could roughly be paraphrased as: “
STALIN IS NOT DEAD
.” It had been transmitted in the person-to-person code, and had said, in earthy Russian, quite simply: “
BORIS
,
CUT THE SHIT
.” Boris Bolgin never needed to be told anything twice.)

The bus company was to be compensated fully, rendering any intrusion by insurance agents unnecessary. In short, no one not already aware of the disappearance of the Kapitsas should be made privy to it. The text to be given to
Le Monde
would be cabled the following morning after further deliberation in the Kremlin. Bolgin was advised that the
Chekhov
would depart Sebastopol on schedule. Whether it would turn east toward the Suez Canal and Indonesia after leaving the Aegean—or west toward Tunis—would be decided tomorrow, with appropriate instructions radioed to the captain. Meanwhile, the duty officer at the embassy should be apprised of Bolgin's whereabouts around the clock.

Fair enough, thought Bolgin, reaching for his fedora. By ten o'clock Paris time it would be midnight in Moscow. Now that You-Know-Who, with his lunatic passion for meetings at two, three in the morning, isn't running the country, the chances that anybody would want to be in touch with him after Moscow-midnight were too remote to worry about. Along about midnight, the alcohol would be lifting Boris from Dostoevski, like a secondary launch, rising—slowly, at first, then with a giddily accelerating velocity—into the stratosphere; and Boris would know blankness, peace, until he woke.

Meanwhile he had some heavy gloating to do. He looked at his watch in the dimly lit restaurant. He ordered black coffee and mineral water and took up the afternoon paper. But his mind wandered. Sverdlov—you had to give him credit—had done a good job. At three the dragnet had gone out. One of the agents, sitting in the lobby of the France et Choiseul, spotted Blackford Oakes leaving the hotel lobby that very afternoon. The agent followed him out and saw him get into the Citroën, whose license number he memorized. He was registered in the hotel under the name of Harry Browne. “Ah, Blackford,” Bolgin thought. “This time, my friend, I have got you, oh yes I do, my friend Blackford, oh yes I do!” He was very nearly smiling when the young man unobtrusively sat down beside him. To the waiter the young man said, “Do you have any Hungarian beer?”