Who's on First (6 page)

“You have money?”

They nodded. He uncovered the tray and they saw rolls, sausage, cheese; enough, Vadim thought, to bring the whole of their detachment to delirium.

“How much?” He struggled for urbanity.

Five kopecks bought them each as much as they could eat. That was not a great deal, because their stomachs rebelled at such unaccustomed richness. They finished just as the train began to move. They looked out the window. The sky was a curdled yellow, the ground specked by snow, the squat barracks gray and frostbitten and bleak. The ice dirigible had assumed a perfect symmetry.

Viktor looked at Vadim and said, “You were right, Vadim.” Vadim looked up curiosity, as if to say: Right about what? “You were right,” Viktor repeated. “We did survive. But I would not be here except for you,” and the tears came down again, and Vadim thought back on the boyish face of that very young man, in the other railway car, with the tears, which would take a lifetime to dry.

6

Blackford Oakes ordered a second coffee and the bill in French that obviously suffered from underutilization compounding undercultivation. He tilted back his chair and smiled. He recalled Sally's crestfallen self-esteem at this same outdoor café when, four years ago, they had vacationed together. She had been studying French intensively for her orals and was protective of her lover's manifest disability. It was their first lunch in Paris. Looking at the menu he told her he would take the
escalope de veau
. She said that she, not being hungry, would merely have a ham sandwich. She relayed his order to the waiter with aplomb but when she came around to her own, visible distress set in and Blackford suddenly heard her order “
Deux sandwiches de jambon
.”

“I thought you weren't hungry?” he commented as the waiter walked off.

“I'm not,” she snapped, arching her eyebrows in what he had come to know as her defensive look. “I couldn't remember whether
a
sandwich is masculine or feminine.…” Then she smiled. “When you get a little older, Blacky, and have a little more experience,” she said, mocking at once his French and his style, “you too will develop a little
savoir-faire
and syntactical ingenuity.”

How much he missed her, he thought as he glanced yet again at his watch, balancing the newspaper on his lap; and then reproached himself for missing anybody, or anything, on such a day as this in Paris in June. It was the kind of day Hollywood producers … produce, in order to star Audrey Hepburn in a poignant romance. The sky was just
that
shade of blue, the temperature warm but with that vernal energy of late spring. The wind played lackadaisically with the leaves on the trees that lined the ancient, lively street. He decided to walk and therefore set out earlier than he had planned. He paid the bill, left the change, and returned the waitress's smile: They all smiled at Blackford, in part because of his inviting informality of manner, in part because he seemed to so many women so endearingly at ease in every situation; but mostly, Sally had told him—amused, he remembered her words—“because you are disgustingly handsome, lover boy. It's a pity under the circumstances that all you know is how to build bridges and kill people.” That was her technique for getting him heatedly to deny that he was in fact engaged professionally in the business of “killing people,” which indeed he was not in the business of doing. But he knew that any denial was a step in the direction of isolating the truth: like Twenty Questions. So he had replied mock-solemnly, “If you're as good-looking as I am, people don't mind being killed by you—it's just that simple. The CIA thinks of everything.” He remembered her at the airport yesterday, the wind blowing her light brown hair across her forced smile, dressed in the green blouse and the white cotton skirt, with tiny pearl earrings, and somehow looking like freshly poured champagne. He put away any further consideration of the dilemma she had left him with, folded the newspaper in hand, and began to walk.

As a matter of routine now he walked alert, taking unobtrusive opportunities to try to ascertain whether he was being followed. He had been absolutely certain, in Budapest in October, that he had not been followed; and yet … He turned left at Rivoli, and right to traverse the Ile de la Cité, crossing between Notre Dame and the Palais de Justice on over the Pont St.-Michel, where he half expected to trip over Jean Dufy, whose favorite bridge it obviously was, and with good reason. As he walked up Boulevard St.-Michel through the university section and past the Luxembourg Gardens he gave thought, having read the paper, to the mind-boggling incapacity of the French to govern themselves, and then checked himself to examine whether he harbored any latent bias against the French, decided that in fact he did not, and therefore reregistered his dismay over the mind-boggling incapacity of the French to govern themselves. The incumbent—he had seen the figures in a profile in
Le Monde
—was the twenty-fourth Prime Minister since the war, and everyone was giving odds he wouldn't last through the summer. They were hopping mad, the politicians in the paper this morning, at Senator John Kennedy's having given a speech yesterday defending independence for Algeria. “Senator Kennedy,” one politician had declaimed on the floor of the Assembly, “will be recalled by those Frenchmen with mischievous memories as the son of the ambassador to Great Britain whose principal contribution to international diplomacy was to inform President Roosevelt, while serving him as ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1940, that the Nazis would surely win the war and that under the circumstances there was no point whatever in any intervention by the United States. The son clearly inherits his father's political acuity.” Hm. He might—Blackford mused as he shortened his pace to prolong his exposure to smells that billowed out from the bakery he was passing—at least have gone on to mention that the young Kennedy had fought in the Pacific, where he either got rammed by a PT boat, or rammed a PT boat, whichever is better; and apparently had behaved with commendable courage. Besides—Blackford's polemical energies were rising in reaction to a manifestly anti-American challenge—what Frenchman is in a position to reproach anybody, anywhere, on the subject of diplomacy? Here they were, stuck in Algeria—after being defeated in Indochina—after being defeated by the Germans—one generation after they'd have been defeated by the Germans save for the intervention of Mr. Wilson, two generations after losing to the Germans in 1870. Sheeyit. Lecturing us on foreign policy! He recalled the indignation of Eddie Condon at their last lapse into advice. “Do we tell the frogs how to jump on grapes?”

As he turned left on Port Royal, he instinctively looked to his left. He had developed, in six years with the Company, a fairly reliable capacity for detecting any unnatural synchronization of movement. A half-dozen times, in as many years, he had spotted it as clearly as, looking down on a stroboscope placed on a turntable, the eye would detect a clockwise or counterclockwise deviation, alerting you to whether the turntable speed was off-kilter. He noticed no one, but instead of staying on the side of the street where, one half block down, he would meet the man, he crossed it, and turned the corner of the little side street opposite. There he waited, as if examining the names on the doorway of the apartment building. Nobody went by; so, checking his watch, which read one minute past three, he crossed back over the street, into the doorway at No. 128, took out a key from his pocket, climbed one set of stairs, and used the same key to open the door to the first-floor apartment, tapping the doorbell lightly even as he opened the door. A voice from within a room beyond the narrow hallway said, “Come in, Blackford.”

Blackford knew in what situation he would probably find him: sitting in an armchair, behind a coffee table on which would be papers with markings on them no one but their author could hope to understand. Rufus would be slightly pale, slightly heavy, slightly formal, and—he supposed, several years having gone by—slightly older.

It was as he expected, in a comfortable old room with high ceilings and ceiling-high door-windows, a large comfortable living room, with even a little color, mostly from those artful gallery posters the French like so much to buy and frame. There were chairs and sofas enough for a dozen people.

“Well, Rufus,” said Blackford, extending his hand, “I see Mammon is looking after you. You'd have to pay fifty bucks a day for this at the Ritz.”

Rufus's efforts at small talk were undistinguished.

“I am glad to see you again, Blackford. I understand you have been busy.”

“Yeah. I helped lose Hungary, though—that was too bad.”

Rufus had experienced that tone of voice on another occasion, and changed tack. He rose and walked into the kitchen. “Coffee?”

“Thanks. Assassination?”

“No,” came the steady voice from the kitchen.

“Torture?”

“No.”

“Kidnapping?”

“Yes.”

Blackford yawned. “Well, I'm glad I didn't come all the way to Paris just to …” he paused:
Rufus really didn't like obscenity
—“muck about.”

He walked into the kitchen to give Rufus a hand.

It was nearly dark outside when Rufus was done briefing him. As was his habit, he suggested to Blackford that he put off any pursuit of the finer points of the plan until after he had had an opportunity to digest what he had been told. “It might even be better if we talked again only after you have met ‘Serge'”—he consciously pseudonymized the name—“and see Trust. They're both at St.-Firmin now, and you have your choice of going over there later on tonight or tomorrow morning. The telephone number”—he slowed his pace of talking and accentuated his syllables, which was a clue to Blackford that he was expected to memorize the number—“is … 682-583. You are to ask for ‘Mr. Tuck' and announce yourself as ‘Julian Booth.' What do you say?”

Blackford glanced at his watch. It was after seven and he felt restless; and besides, the prospect of seeing Anthony Trust again cheered him. “I've been to Chantilly. I ought to be able to find the Château St.-Firmin without any problem. What about a car?”

Rufus opened a drawer and gave him a key and a garage slip. “Give this to the doorman at your hotel and he'll pull up with a gray Citroën. The registration papers are in the car. An American friend of yours. Had to go back to the States suddenly, lent you the car. You plan to ship it to the States when you're through visiting in France.”

They made arrangements for the next meeting, and Blackford walked out of the apartment. Routinely he opened the front door a fraction, peered through the crack as best he could, and stepped out, battered newspaper in hand, and a block down the street hailed a taxi.

Before packing an overnight bag he placed the call. The operator presently rang back. “
Monsieur Tuck sur la ligne
.”

“This is Julian Booth. I thought I'd come around now, save time. Is it too late for dinner?”

“Not at all!” The reassuring voice of his old friend had not changed. “We'll expect you …?”

“Figure about nine.”

He studied the map in the car intensively and put it away. He would not need to look at it twice; and an hour later, passing by the park at Chantilly, he drove past those famous benches where, during World War I, the generals would pause after lunch during their afternoon promenade to consider strategy. Blackford assumed, judging from the historical results, that the plan likeliest to kill the largest number of Frenchmen was regularly the plan that most commended itself to the chiefs of staff. He turned, drove through the forest, and then took the right lane, over a bridge, past a hedgerow, through an open gate, and up a private drive to a building whose outline he could not easily make out. But the half moon played over a small lake at the bottom of a large lawn, and as he rang the bell, suitcase in hand, the silhouette of the building crystallized in the moon's wake, and he guessed the chateau to have about twenty rooms. Trust, dark, lithe, a year older—his oldest friend—opened the door, and they exchanged handshakes, quickly closing the door. Trust whispered. “We'll have to have our private reunion later. Our friend is sitting in there, and it's getting late for dinner.” He led Oakes into the room where the stocky crew-cut Russian with the weathered tan face and corrugated eyelids rose and extended his hand. “They call me Serge.”

“They call me Julian.”

The maid entered and announced dinner. Trust nodded, and said to Blackford, “She doesn't speak any English and in any case she's cleared. We can speak.”

“Tell me, Serge,” Blackford asked as he trimmed off a bit of cheese from the plate and applied it to his bread. “When last did you hear from Kapitsa?”

“I have not heard from my Viktor ever since I saw him in Moscow. I see him on New Year's Eve of 1954. We promised, when the train from Vorkuta came to Moscow and he went to Kharkov, and I to Kiev, that no matter nobody, we would spend New Year's Eve together. And, of course, we wrote letters to each other every week during the in-between, sometimes two, three times every week. Of course we were very careful in our letters. Not Viktor, not I, made any points at all about the authorities. We talked about our work—and even about these matters we were oh so very very careful, because we both are in highly secret work. (I burned in the fireplace every one of his letters before I left for Vienna.) When I saw him, on New Year's Eve, I say to myself, ‘Vadim'”—Blackford and Anthony now knew the real name of Serge, and their eyes met over the indiscretion—“‘you will wait for a few hours before you decide if to tell Viktor your plans.' You see, I have decided to defect. I wanted to know if Viktor was in the same mood. If he said yes, then I would have waited, if necessary for one, two, three years, to arrange that we should go together. But the official order to go to Vienna to take the six-week course with Dr. Kuehnelt-Leddihn on the telemetry gave me the opportunity I did not want to pass by.”