Who's on First (22 page)

“It's been a busy week, Dean.”

“Indeed. May I assume that the Soviet claims for its ICBM tests are exaggerated?”

“You may do nothing of the sort. They are correct.”

“So that the skepticism expressed yesterday morning by the Department of Defense was—calculated?”

“Yes. The Soviets are not yet aware that our little skybug is working on all engines and monitoring their—quite dismaying, by the way—successes. A little skepticism throws them off the track.”

“Ah yes, but the results of your Paris venture are surely bearing fruit?”

“Indeed they are. At Houston, at Huntsville, and at Canaveral, the information turned them right around, and there is confidence we will work out the launch problem within months.”

“That is very good news. Have I congratulated you?”

“No. But it was a very clean operation. Rufus deserves great credit.”

“Ah Rufus, the indispensable Rufus. Yes. Tell me—if you care to—are we left with an active informant at Tyura Tam?”

“As far as we know. We haven't got in anything from him, but that doesn't especially surprise me. He warned our representative that his communications would be fitful. Besides, it will presumably be a while before he accumulates enough confidential information to warrant a message. We cleaned him out.”

“Splendid. The President used some rather—straightforward—language this morning in rebuking our friends the Soviets for declining to go forward with the disarmament proposals.”

“If you think that was straightforward, you should have heard the language he used in the Oval Office.”

“I must confess to you, Allen, it distresses me to hear as I do from time to time that the President actually
is
surprised by such maneuvers, by such … tergiversations.”

“It isn't so much that he's surprised, Ike just gets sore when he sees the sanctimony in which the refusals are invariably packaged.”

“Yes, well I see his point; that is unquestionably one of the most irritating aspects of public life, Communist rhetoric.”

“Did you see where Hsinhua in Peking accused him of ‘insufferable arrogance' for agreeing to permit U.S. newspapermen to tour China?”

“Yes. I confess to having been rather disappointed. I had thought that phrase reserved to describe me. I have not seen it used since I left office.”

“But Dean, you don't understand, it
was
true about you, but it's not true about Ike.”

“I question whether this pompano is fresh.”

The Director was pleased with his checkmate. “Your reply, Dean, was a classic example of
ignoratio elenchi,
as Joe McCarthy would have reminded you.”

“Joe McCarthy is, at this moment, otherwise preoccupied, I should imagine. I wonder, do you suppose in Purgatory they are making him sign on as a member of the American-Soviet Friendship Committee?”

“Dean, on the matter of your trip.”

“Yes?”

“I think under the circumstances you can be even more optimistic than you had planned on the matter of our being
first
up with the satellite. A little optimism is in order, particularly now that the Soviets have decided to be exhibitionistic with their ICBM technology. The French are in a fearful tizzy, and for one whole fifteen-minute period their ambassador left the subject of Algeria alone in talking to Foster, and asked him to level on the rocket business.”

“What did your brother say?”

“What you'd expect. And lengthily: We're getting there … we're having trouble with a tightwad Congress and myopic Democrats, but we have every confidence … etc., etc., etc.”

“That sounds like your brother.”

“This Chablis is very good.”

“That's why I ordered it.”

“Another thing. You'll be seeing Macmillan, of course?”

“Of course.”

“Tip him off. You saw yesterday he told Commons he was going to ask us to pool our H-bomb information with him? He's scheduled over here the last week in October, so you'll be seeing him ahead of time. Tell him
not
to bring up the subject with Ike. Ike's convinced the Brits haven't ferreted the Communist agents out of there, and I personally think he's correct. Anyway, Ike has said no, and it would be easier not to have to say no directly to Macmillan.”

“Yes, I see what you mean. Summit conferences that avoid sundering questions are always to be preferred.”

“I wish you had used a few sundering questions at Potsdam.”

“Ah, we did. And Stalin gave in on just about every point.”

“Good old Joe.”

“If you desire to tease me about a famous mislocution by a great Democratic President, you should do so at a time when I am relieved of such inhibitions as I labor under as your guest.”

“Jesus, Acheson, I bet you were insufferable even as a schoolboy.”

“My first name is Dean, not Jesus; and the answer to your question is: I was.”

They walked out together, the Director with his pipe belching out smoke, the former Secretary affecting to be asphyxiated by the fumes.

27

It had been a pleasant late afternoon, except for the airplanes. Blackford and Sally had listened to the outdoor concert on the Potomac. The Opera Society of Washington had given a recitalist-performance of
Madame Butterfly,
but the late summer wind direction brought air traffic on final approach directly over the five thousand people sprawled on the grass and sitting on the benches on the west bank of the Potomac and at one point it sounded as though Lieutenant Pinkerton had compounded his perfidy by bringing in the entire United States Air Force to retaliate for Pearl Harbor. But here and there the music broke through, and it was lovely, and so was Sally, in a white and beige summer dress, with the little pearls in her ears that peeked out through her sunny brown hair. They had not once mentioned Subject X, Blackford's profession as impediment to their marriage; moreover, she was greatly excited at having been invited that morning by the
Sewanee Review
to review two books on the eighteenth-century British novel.

“Will you read my review, after I've written it?”

“Of course.”

“I appreciate that. Especially since I don't read your obituaries after you kill people.”

“That really is a pity. I think I may have developed a new art form. And you may be the last to discover it. Wouldn't that embarrass you professionally?”

She couldn't answer, because she had just bitten off a large hunk of hot dog. He took the advantage: “Do you have time to do any extracurricular reading?”

“Of course. What now?”

“Have you read
Parkinson's Law?
”

“No, should I?”

“Yes. Everyone should. It may be the only thing that will finally destroy the Soviet Union—the weight of its own bureaucracy.”

He promised—in return—to read Boswell's
Johnson,
which, she had only recently discovered, unbelieving, he had never got around to reading; and they walked lazily to her apartment on F Street. “I won't ask you in tonight, Blacky. I've got a dozen papers to grade by 9
A.M
.”

“See you tomorrow?”

“Sure.” They kissed good night, and Blackford decided to walk the twenty blocks to his own apartment.

When he reached the reconverted old residence, which now had four apartments, the doorway was very dark. The streetlight at the corner, on which he generally relied to illuminate the keyhole, was for some reason not functioning. Not having a match, he had to use his fingers to probe the cavity. After some manipulation, he managed to introduce the key that opened the door. Normally he could flick on the hall light, and turn it off at the top of the stairs—nothing, literally nothing, enraged Mrs. Carstairs more than when one of her three tenants left the hall light on, and she had been known to conduct more than one summary court-martial to establish whether it was Blackford Oakes, the good-looking young man upstairs who worked for some engineering company or other; or the rear admiral opposite; or, on the ground floor, the deputy director of the Internal Revenue Service. The three men would take turns admitting guilt, knowing that nothing less than a formal finding would satisfy Mrs. Carstairs. It was thus very infrequently, nowadays, that the light was left on.

But tonight the light was on. Reaching the top of the stairwell, Blackford first inserted his apartment key, then turned off the hall light. It was a matter of three or four steps to the lamp switch, whose exact location he knew from extensive experience. Before reaching it, he sensed that the room was occupied. He drew breath, grabbed the lamp with both hands to use it if necessary as a bludgeon, and with his rump, turned on the wall switch. Seated in a chair opposite was Vadim Platov.

“
Goddam it,
Vadim!” Blackford restored the lamp to its position on the table. “Why in the hell did you have to spook your way in here? You could have sent me a—postcard.”

“Blackford”—for the first time, Blackford heard Vadim Platov refer to him other than as “Julian.” “I went through many pains to find you.”

“I hope so.”

“I used up, to the brim, all of my resources. I could not risk not having you see me, and you know, I am, under the contract with the—firm—not permitted into Washington, I break my own security arrangements, and of course finding you, I break others, but the cause is necessary; it is the most necessary cause of my life.”

“Okay, Vadim, okay. Let me get you something from the kitchen. What would you like?”

“Some tea.”

Blackford knew the problem must be grave. He put on the kettle, with its screeching device to call when the water boiled, brought in a pot with tea bags and two glasses, milk and sugar, took off his gabardine jacket, and sprawled on the couch. “What's up?”

Vadim withdrew an envelope from his wallet, and handed it to Blackford, who examined first the face of it, which revealed no sender's name or return address. The letter, addressed to “Anton Sokolin” at a post-office box in central New York State, had been airmailed from Stockholm on the first of September and received by Vadim on September 4. He opened it. The message was written in German on airmail stationery, in the meticulous script of a patient writer working in a foreign language. Blackford read it slowly.

Dear Mr. Sokolin:

I am advised by Tamara, whose message reached me through channels I have every reason to believe were intercepted, that only you and possibly an American named Julian can prevent the scheduled execution of her husband, my brother Viktor. The circumstances are not described why this should be so, and under the circumstances I have no explanation to make. Tamara tells me that unless you and Julian make available to one B-o-l-g-i-n [she separated the letters of the name with hyphens] that element which Viktor's patrons require in order to “consummate their enterprise”—her words exactly—Viktor will be executed. Already he has been tortured. They are kept apart, and Tamara does not therefore know how much he suffers. But the message, she says, is inescapably clear: Mr. Bolgin must have the information by September 10, or my brother will be dead. No words of mine, added to those of Tamara, can move you more than this message, unadorned. I do not know what is at stake, other than the life of my beloved Viktor, who has already suffered too much. And I know from the past that you shared his torment and saved him once. Yours prayerfully.

The letter was signed simply, “Vera.”

Blackford was summoned by the keening of the tea kettle. His mind was blurred with thought, anger, frustration, and his movements were entirely mechanical. He poured the tea as a robot might have done. “Sugar?… milk?” He paced back and forth. Vadim stirred his tea nervously. He looked very old, his broad shoulders seemed shrunken, and in his eyes the vitality of Paris was gone. There was a look there of fatalism, and trust. For minutes, neither spoke.

Blackford sat down. “So they fooled us. Did you know they
actually
handed over the shipment of arms to the Algerians?”

“Perhaps by then they did not know. Besides, Rufus's Algerian contacts boarded the
Chekhov
maybe before Viktor appeared.”

Of course, Blackford thought. Stupid! What had happened, obviously, was that they had tortured Viktor. But why? What had he done or said that made them suspicious?

“Do you know what they want, Vadim?”

“Yes, Julian. I mean, Blackford.”

Blackford looked up at him. “
How
do you know?”

“Because you told me. That morning, when we were both interrogating Viktor. It was before lunch, you remember, you were finishing with reading over your notebook and you … you were checking it to see if you asked all the questions your American scientists told you about asking, and it was then you read on with the notes, and you told me about—the Van de Graaff.”

Blackford looked hard at Vadim.

“Vadim, it's the middle of the night of September 9. This letter was received in Tivoli, New York, on September 4. That's five days ago. It took you five days to find me?”

“No, Julian. I am older than you, and sometimes breath-short, and your whereabouts are not being advertised, but it does not take me five days to find you, when Viktor's life is hanging on the balance.”

“So?”

Vadim looked down, forlorn.

“In five days,” he said, “I traveled to London and back. I met with Colonel Bolgin—we grew up in the same town, it happens—there was time for the little talk, too.”

Blackford grew impatient. “Time for small talk
during what?
”

“During the period when he waited for Moscow's answer.”

“
Moscow's answer to what?
”

“To whether they would release Viktor and Tamara if I gave them the secret for the transistors.”

Blackford jumped up from his chair. “What did they say?”