Last Call for Blackford Oakes (22 page)

Jake, his drink almost finished, signaled to the bartender for another.

“That's the kind of thing some people do, Jake. Right? Wife living in Mexico dies. After a while he's off on an assignment in Moscow. Comes back looking good as ever. Then—whatever happened … happened. He seems just to have quit life. You cut off your friends, tune out, and—”

“Try to drink yourself to death,” Jake said, draining his glass.

CHAPTER 40

There was no formal connection between the invitation to Philby to visit Cuba, and his wedding to Rufina. Sentimental acts weren't entitled to recognition, in the orthodoxy of the society Philby lived in and had spied for. The Soviet Union was big on rewards, not valentines. But the invitation to visit Fidel Castro's Cuba did in fact arrive a few days after the wedding and was delightedly accepted. Of course there would be burdens, duties to perform in Cuba, but there were burdens in all of life, and the ratio here of exertion to reward was favorable.

They had originally planned to leave February 2, but in the shock of Ursina's death, Rufina begged to postpone the trip. Shock, but also duty: Ursina had no surviving family. Rufina, her closest friend, saw to all that needed doing. But she would be glad to get away later in the month, she told Andrei.

They would travel on a freighter, non-stop, Leningrad to Havana. They would have a personal guide, Gennady, to look after them, and they would be looked after, upon arrival, by an official Soviet presence.

At sea for two weeks! Philby and Rufina treated this as if it were a honeymoon. Occupying one of the three staterooms on the freighter that carried goods for the straitened Castro regime, they would rise every morning and walk around the deck, discerning, whenever land was observable, just where they were on the globe. A very exciting moment came for Philby when the boat found itself within viewing distance of Eastbourne, on Britain's south coast. Through the morning fog, he thought he could make out his old school.

The crew was hospitable, and the couple's privacy was respected. It was surprising, given the sea traffic in the Atlantic, that they saw not a single other vessel after leaving the English Channel. There had been the one disturbing episode, an airplane overhead. A small plane, but it descended low enough to make the pilot visible. Gennady hustled his wards below. Did he really think there was any possibility of an alien force flying in that little airplane? Intending to do what? Call in a flotilla to wrest Philby back into the hands of Western justice? Silly. But Gennady was their escort officer and responsible for the success of the passage, so they followed his instructions.

They arrived in Havana after a fifteen-day passage and were greeted most heartily by the Cuban authorities. Examining the schedule they were given on landing in Havana, they were both pleased and appalled at the thoroughness of their itinerary, which would take them to all corners of Cuba. There were comfortable breaks, one of them in a luxurious setting in Baradero, with a beach stretching further than the eye could see in either direction. Philby declined to use that beach. He told Rufina he thought it a survival of capitalist degeneracy. But he did not deny her access to it, which she happily took.

Philby noticed that there was no place on the schedule that called for a personal meeting with Fidel Castro. His radio brought in daily BBC broadcasts, and he did not need to be reminded that Castro was fully occupied—for one thing, in simply feeding his people. That was a perpetual problem. There were specific distractions. Two men were arrested on suspicion of spying, both native Cubans, one of them an exile. And then there was the noisy defection of an influential general, who had flown himself in a Cessna, landed in Key West, and pleaded for asylum.

Never mind spending any time with Fidel Castro. But Philby did spend long hours, day after day, with Cuban officials who talked endlessly with him about the resources of the Communist world and about the inevitability, under Marxist direction, of victory.

Philby obliged his hosts most of the time, but now and again pressed his orthodoxy and gave rein to his crotchets. At Baradero he and Rufina were staying quite near the splendid Dupont Villa, open to tourists. Philby refused even to visit the grand palace, one more affront, a legacy of the period of capitalist exploitation. And when asked if he wished to see the house that Ernest Hemingway had lived in, his answer was that he had no interest in doing so. This did not involve a general boycott of Hemingway's haunts, however, and certainly not of the famous bar, the Floridita, renowned for its special daiquiris. The Philbys and their escorts were each served a daiquiri. One drink was never enough for Kim Philby, but when he motioned for a second, he got from his bearded Cuban escort lurid tales of the demonic strategic impact of this particular mix of lime and rum. The Cuban positively forbade the Philbys a second drink, even as he ordered another for himself and his two aides.

The only consumer item not rationed, Rufina noticed, was ice cream. All else was scarce. But she and her husband were not in Cuba to promulgate a commercial five-year plan, and their contentment was abiding that this critical island was in the hands of a Communist ally.

They weren't entirely sorry when, on the day they were supposed to depart, they were told that their sailing was postponed by two weeks because of a mix-up. The old familiar freighter had pulled away a day earlier than scheduled, which meant, for the Philbys, a fortnight more in Cuba, after which they were put aboard the
Yanis Lentsmanis
and set out for two weeks at sea, this time following a different route, Havana to Odessa.

There were the exciting moments and the sharp changes, from the tropical sun to the cold of early spring. When they entered the Bosporus there was snow, but it was dark, and they could only just make out the road and lights in the house windows, including the house where Philby had once lived and worked. He had never traveled there to verify it, but it had been reported to him that his old house now bore a plaque: “Kim Philby, outstanding intelligence officer, lived here 1941–48.”

CHAPTER 41

Dr. Vladimir Kirov was surprised by the nature of the call from Professor Lindbergh Titov. It wasn't surprising to be hearing from his old friend and fellow member of the Union of Scientists and Scholars. What surprised him was that the call hadn't been for the usual reason, which was, and had been for some years, to set a date for dinner and, often, on to the ballet. This time, Titov said he wanted a professional medical consultation. Kirov was in his early sixties, but had not slowed down as doctor and teacher.

“Of course, Linbek. I could give you an exact time to come in during the day. Or—you can come in any time after six. I stay in the office until just before eight.… Yes yes yes, we'll go for dinner after. I suggest the Hercole. The headwaiter there recognizes my eminence, and will take good care of us.”

Comrade Lindbergh Vissarionovich Titov was just sixty. He was hairless, as he had been, at age twenty-one, when Kirov first met him at the medical school. After a brief exposure to Titov, Kirov speculated jocularly that the absence of hair suggested a furnace of intellectual activity, activity of such intensity that
something
had to give out—in this case, Titov's body hair. But everybody quickly got used to it, and the thirty-five students in the medical-research department of the university medical school soon stopped paying any notice to the hair, or lack of it.

Yet Titov was self-conscious, and took every opportunity to put on his cap, or, in colder weather, his knitted woolen hat, striped in red and gold, which he took with him everywhere. “Everywhere” included the laboratory in which he worked under the tutelage of Nikolai Sokolov, the only living Russian Nobel laureate in science when Titov entered medical school. Nikolai Sokolov was seventy-eight. His widely hailed accomplishment in radiology—he was father of the Sokolovgram—had been done in his twenties.

Sokolov had slowed down, but no one would suggest he withdraw from the research division of the medical school, and he had no desire to do so. He merely intensified his longstanding resistance to regular student seminars. Rather than simply teach or conduct seminars, he liked to walk about the classrooms and laboratories, watching the students at work, listening to what they were saying, hearing about the problems they were addressing, the threads of exploration that engaged them. Then, year after year, he would single out one student for a close personal association. In the spring of 1950, he had shown interest in the hairless young man who asked penetrating questions and who spoke and laughed a lot when in company with his fellow students in the refectory, or at ease in the courtyard, with a smoke, wearing, usually, his red and gold hat.

In May, Professor Sokolov addressed a note to the young Titov. He asked him to come to his office at five the next afternoon.

Titov allowed himself to speculate that, just possibly, the great Sokolov would select him as his special student. It was known that a fresh selection would be made after the incumbent protégé, the dreamy, longhaired Stepan, graduated and left Moscow to join the radiology department at the university in Leningrad. Such an association with Sokolov meant academic preferment, but, more important, meant intensive exposure to someone whose mind had dazzled scientists even in other fields. Titov was breathless at the thought that he might be picked, and so he was, after one hour's conversation in the great man's office.

Sokolov had opened by asking a question Titov had frequently heard. “Let me begin, Comrade Lindbergh Vissarionovich, by asking for an explanation for your extraordinary first name.”

Titov very nearly blushed, as he sat, like a boy, answering that question. “Comrade Nikolai Semyonovich, my father was an aviator. He was in the Soviet Air Force. An accident in a fighter plane, the Ant-4—the first all-metal plane with two engines—resulted in the amputation of one leg. We were very poor, but we did have a radio, and my father's excitement in May of 1927 was—”

“You are going to tell me about Charles Augustus Lindbergh?”

Titov broke out in one of those ear-to-ear smiles that lighted entire rooms. “Yes, that is what happened. Now, although the English name isn't that hard to pronounce in Russian, people find it outlandish, so I've simplified the pronunciation to Linbek.”

“Very well, comrade Linbek Vissarionovich. I note that your patronymic is the same as that of our … august leader.”

“Yes, comrade. My mother felt it might give a little protection against any suggestion that we were pro-American because of my first name if she gave me the same patronymic as Comrade Stalin's. So she changed my father's name to Vissarion.”

Sokolov paused. “That is a burden in life.”

Titov did not reply directly. He simply smiled again, and admitted that in his dreams—“in my happy dreams”—he was an aviator.

After nine months superintending Titov, Sokolov went to the office of the dean. He recommended that the student Titov, now given the title Medical Scientist, be made a Fellow and excused from any formal obligations in the graduate-studies program. “He is a very rare bird, comrade. A free, unfettered, curious, imaginative mind. He is as familiar with the isotopes and the positron as with members of his own family.
Leave him free and unmolested
, Comrade Anton Dmitrievich.”

It was so, and Titov's freedom from constraints pleased him greatly, a manumission he hastened to tell Kirov about, his close friend, the classmate who had locked into urological studies. “Where is your research taking you, Linbek?”

“I am not certain. But I
am
certain that I must arrange to visit Hiroshima.”

Dr. Kirov now positioned his friend and patient over the special urological examining bench. Kirov's gloved fingers reached deep into him.

“Oy.
Oyyyyy!
”

“It's almost over.”

“You mean my life?”

Kirov chuckled. “I will need a culture, and some urine.”

Titov, dressing himself, asked, “What do you think it is, Volodya?”

“I think you have an enlarged prostate.”

“Does that mean I can't have more children?” he laughed.

“You have a fine son.”

“Yes. But after he was born, Nina had two ectopic pregnancies in a row. I think you knew that. I don't suppose anything you can do with my prostate could correct that!”

“Linbek, if the test is positive, then you will get treatment. There are basically two kinds. There is radiology, a specialty of yours, and surgery, a specialty of mine.”

“Let's not talk about it at supper.”

“As you like. But don't be tense about it. These things happen. Life goes on.”

“My prostate's life would not go on, would it?”

“That can depend. On the precision of the radiological treatment. Or on what the surgeon discovered there.”

The two scientists had finished their meal—Caucasian spiced chicken and rice, cake and coffee—and had almost finished the second bottle of wine. “You know something, Volodya?” Titov addressed his companion. “I have in my laboratory, I am convinced, the concept and the constituent parts of a procedure that would immunize against radioactivity.”

Kirov was startled. “You mean, someone who was immunized would never have to fear X-ray treatment?”

“Correct. And if exposed to nuclear radiation—even at the level of Chernobyl—would have the means of neutralizing it.”

“Is the work you are doing widely known?”

“Not widely. Two of my assistants are of course aware of what I am doing. So is Dr. Shumberg, our old classmate.”

Kirov's face tightened. He thought to bring up the matter of Ursina, but quickly changed his mind. He could not trust himself to contain his tears at the mention of Ursina. “That is exciting, what you tell me.”

“Yes, it is very exciting, but I must go home now. I am at the laboratory at six.”