Who's on First (26 page)

“I'm sorry, darling. I'm distracted,” he responded.

“Do you want to tell me?”

“
No
.”

He was surprised by the apparent harshness of his rejection. But how could he begin …?

“I mean—I can't. I'd better go, Sally. I'm sorry.”

She got up, leaned over, kissed him lightly on the forehead.

Blackford went directly to his apartment and even noticed, with incommensurate relief, that the hall light was not on. He took off shirt and trousers, pulled out the portable Olivetti, and put it on the coffee table. Sitting on his couch, he batted out the letter to Benjamin, Benjamin being his administrative superior at the Central Intelligence Agency: indeed, the only identity within the CIA with whom he was continuously in touch, the others, like Anthony, coming into, and going out of, his life, depending on the assignment.

Dear Benjamin:

I am, beginning today (9/10/57), taking a leave of absence without pay. Inasmuch as I am not engaged in any project at the moment, and am spending my time wheel-spinning, as they
don't
put it in the bureaucracy (I am being ungrateful: in fact I am certainly enjoying, and probably profiting from, the extensive reading list handed to me), I am confident that I can do so without inconveniencing, let alone jeopardizing, the national security. Forgive me my arbitrary behavior, but my reasons are compelling. I expect, on my return, to submit my resignation, but I hope you will agree with me that no purpose would be served by upstreaming (I learned that word in a commercial manual included in the eclectic package assigned to me) my decision, or the reason for it. In particular, I would be disappointed if you felt it necessary to communicate it to Serge, Rufus, or A. Trust. I am going abroad, and cannot be reached. If there are reasons, and I cannot imagine what they could be, why empires might rise or fall depending on whether you can find me, leave word with Sally Partridge, who is the light of my life, and resides at 1775 F; or with my mother, Lady Carol Sharkey, 50 Portland Place, London W1.

With all good wishes,

Blackford   

He inserted another sheet of paper into the typewriter:

Dear Sally:

You were right, I am distracted. So much so that I must be off. I don't know for how long, a few weeks, probably. On my return I may have news for you of
profound
meaning for thee and me. If you feel like it, send me a carbon of your review in care of dear old mum, 50 Portland Place, you will recall. I'll check it out for historical and literary solecisms, to ensure that you don't embarrass the future Mrs.—

He signed formally, “Blackford Oakes.”

It was ten o'clock daylight in Washington, midnight local time aboard the
Mechta,
and 0200 in Greenwich. Seaman Second Mate Andrei Vlasov steadfastly maintained a course of 087 degrees steering from a bridge illuminated by three dome lights shining their rays through red-stained glass, the standard cockpit illumination of navigators at sea, and in the air. At his side, seated and working out a crossword puzzle under the port light, was First Officer Tyrkov.

“What's a nine-letter word for a Georgian cheese beginning with T-V?”

Pause. “I'm afraid I wouldn't know, sir,” the young sailor replied, which was how he always replied to First Officer Tyrkov, who, for some reason, continued to solicit his help with the puzzles during the tedious midnight watch they shared. The sky was overcast, the temperature outside brisk, but possibly it would clear and there would be stars in the morning. First Officer Tyrkov reflected that the only redeeming feature of this particular watch was that it relieved him of the responsibility of descrying those elusive little stars, which he would have been responsible for doing on the preceding watch, or the succeeding one. Of course—no stars, no sights. They proceeded under dead reckoning, and they could still bring in the Consolan signal from Nantucket, almost a thousand miles away, at 194 kh. In any case, navigation was the least of his concerns while still two thousand miles away from Gibraltar. But Captain Spektorsky was a stickler about these things, the kind of man who would expect you to take star sights astern even if you could actually see the Rock of Gibraltar ahead. First Officer Tyrkov wondered, suddenly, whether there was such a thing as a star-fetishist? Perhaps
that
would explain the captain's obsessive concern with the blasted stars, his drillmaster attitude toward his three watch officers in the matter of the stars, and navigation in general. In which connection, he thought to bestir himself to the starboard side of the bridge, to look at the radar screen. The radar boasted a range of thirty-two miles, but Tyrkov doubted the radar would spot the Himalayan Mountains if they were thirty-two miles away. He found it generally effective, really, only to a range of twenty-five miles. There was in fact a ship out there, eleven degrees north of the
Mechta
's course, twenty-two miles distant. No way of telling which way the ship was traveling until there was relative movement. He made a notation on the log, and said out loud to Vlasov, “Remind me to check the radar again in five minutes. See where the ship out there—one point off our bow—is headed.”

“Yes, sir.”

He returned to his crossword puzzle and lit a cigarette. He decided to see if he could penetrate the obdurate intellectual listlessness of Vlasov.

“What's a ‘metal,' six letters, the first four S-T-A-L?”

As usual, Vlasov paused—to give the impression that he had strained to find the answer. And then, as usual, “I'm afraid I don't know, sir.”

“Don't know!
Idiot!
Have you never heard of
Stalin?
Or did it never occur to you that
steel
was a metal? I am aware, Vlasov, that Stalin has been purged from official party favor, but no directives have come out of the Kremlin—or have I missed any?—decreeing that the metal alloy of which this ship is constructed is from now on going to be called
Khrushchev
.”

“Sorry, sir. For some reason I just didn't think.”

Tyrkov threw down his pencil. “Tell you what, let's play a quick game of chess. Stick her into automatic steering.”

“The captain frowns on that, sir.”

“The captain also frowns on insubordination—don't worry, we'll keep our eyes on the course. Which reminds me”—he walked over to the radar screen.

“Hm. Coming in this general direction. Nineteen miles out, still ten, eleven degrees off to port.” From under the huge pile of charts in the bottom drawer under the navigation counter he brought out a box, and spread out the chessboard, setting up the players.

“We'll see if you can do any better against me tonight than you did last night.” The night before, not feeling sleepy after being relieved, Tyrkov had invited Vlasov into Tyrkov's tiny little cabin, where he kept the vodka. They played a game and shared a half pint.

“Very well, Andrei Petrovich.” Vlasov engaged the automatic mechanism, checked to see that the prescribed course was being properly maintained, and then moved the chessboard, dragging over one of the tall stools to perch on.

At 0250 GMT, Tyrkov said: “We'll finish it below, in my cabin. You'd better boil the water now.” It was a traditional courtesy of a watch going off duty to boil water so that the watch taking over could set out with hot tea. Vlasov stepped back into the adjacent engineer's compartment where a kettle and an electric range were kept, alongside the little cabinet containing sugar, tea, cups, and a few spoons, while Tyrkov busied himself completing the log. He was still writing when, wearing a cap, a dark sweater, and baggy wool pants, his relief officer arrived, yawning.

“Any action, Andrei Petrovich?”

“No. Still overcast, doubt you'll be seeing the stars, heh heh heh—too bad, old thing. Wind picked up a little, force three from west-southwest, barometer steady.”

“Traffic?”

“Yeah. A big mama. And damned if she didn't go by without running lights or a masthead light. I logged her at 0250, heading west by north.”

“How far north of our track?”

Tyrkov pored over the log and looked again at the radar screen.

“I figure he must have been a half mile off when he went by.”

The relief officer went over to the radar. “Yes. She's six miles behind us now. I don't see anything else.”

“No, nothing else.”

“Anything over the radio?”

“Zilch.”

“How did you make out with the crossword puzzle?”

“Awful. S-t-a-l-i-n is no longer a metal. This puzzle book, Lieutenant Popov, will have to be turned in to security when we reach Sebastopol.”

Popov laughed, accepting the tea brought in by his helmsman, who looked sleepy.

Blackford, carrying a briefcase crammed with books and a heavy suitcase, caught the 7
A.M.
flight to La Guardia, taxied to Idlewild, and was an hour early for the daily flight to Stockholm. He checked in and read the New York
Herald-Tribune
. He found himself reading the paper back to front, as if to shield himself from the international news. Two books were reviewed. A new writer, Jack Kerouac, had published a book called
On the Road,
and the reviewer hailed it, or, more accurately, taxonomized it, as a “quintessential expression of the rootlessness of the World War II generation,” for many of whom sheer movement was a compulsion. Blackford reflected that young Kerouac's habit, as he understood it from the review, was much less expensive than his own. You could hitchhike to San Francisco a lot cheaper than what SAS charged to take you to Stockholm. John Bartlow Martin had completed a six-month tour of the Deep South, and
his
book was called
The Deep South Says Never
. There would never be racial integration of the schools in the South. Blackford hadn't given the subject much thought, though he supposed he should. There had been a Negro tapped for Skull & Bones while he was there, so Yale was ahead of Earl Warren—or behind, if you wanted to take the position of the people John Bartlow Martin had evidently been talking to. He turned impulsively to the front page. Adenauer had won in Germany, with his usual landslide. The General Assembly of the United Nations—what do you know—had condemned the Soviet Union's repression of the Hungarian revolt by 60 to 10 (the Soviet bloc plus Yugoslavia). Jolly good. Theo would like that. And it only took the U.N. ten months.

The flight was called, and he found the tourist section gratifyingly uncrowded, taking a window seat near the rear section of the Constellation. At lunch he ordered a scotch, contrary to his normal noonday habit, and in due course ordered a second. Why did he have to try to see Viktor? Was it to take personal satisfaction from seeing him alive? So what would that establish? Would it prove that he, Blackford, hadn't bloody-well taken U.S. policy into his own hands, disrupted an extensive operation, affected—if he was to believe the validity of the underlying analysis that had taken them all to Paris—history itself: to save Viktor? Yet he knew he had to see him. Perhaps—conceivably?—now that Viktor was permanently out of the Soviet Union, there might be some more useful information he might give Blackford? Which he could carry back to Washington, as a kind of valedictory gift?

Oh, he had had some wild thoughts on Monday night, after Vadim left. It was dawn before Blackford attempted sleep, dawn before he finally reached the excruciating decision to keep silent through the fateful hours during which the machine would be taken from friendly soil to the Russian freighter. Halfway through that bottle of scotch he had nursed a wildly heroic idea. He would go to Spain. He would rent an airplane. Perhaps he could get the use of any army plane at the U.S. base there: He certainly was skilled in manipulating connections. There wasn't a plane in use he couldn't fly after an hour's checkout, given his background in the Air Force. Then he would calculate when the
Mechta
would reach the Strait. He could figure that one out easily enough. That sort of thing was his profession, after all. He could fly out, having got a description of the
Mechta
from the documented merchant marine manuals, and anticipate by several hours its actual arrival at the Strait. Then—then what, Black baby?
Then you might kamikaze your way down into the hold,
is that what you're thinking? To his astonishment that
was
what he was thinking, however briefly. The engineer in him, combined with a certain biological imperative, caused him to think of more … platonic means of achieving the same end—say a torpedo? He didn't care
what
his Instant Popularity at the Air Force Base at Torrejón was, he somehow doubted that the commanding officer would say to him: “Here, Blacky, help yourself to a torpedo plane! Here's how you release the actual torpedo …” He could, he supposed, devise in time a crude but quite effective bomb which he could drop on the
Mechta
and, with luck, penetrate the deck, or cause an explosion, or contrive in some way to wreck that bloody machine. Or—was it possible that Official America would work something out? Ironic if he were summoned to play a role in such an operation. When he had called Vadim later that night to ask what had been the reaction of the Director when Vadim told him the machine was on a Russian freighter at sea, Vadim said: “He just hung up.” It was during that terse conversation with Vadim that Blackford had wrested from him the name and address of Viktor's sister in Stockholm. Though Vadim had sworn he would never give it out, he now tendered it to Blackford in dumb gratitude for his silence during that critical morning. Blackford didn't tell him he planned to go to Stockholm, and the conversation was brief, dribbling off with Vadim going on about how perhaps the Russians would not be able to master the machine in time. Blackford could not be harsh with him. He was hardly in a position to be harsh, though there was a kind of derivative cowardice, he thought, in Vadim's having shared the secret with him. But the weight had been too much for Vadim's shoulders. And, anyway, how could one stay angry with someone like Vadim? Who had experienced what Vadim had experienced? Blackford had simply wanted to terminate the conversation, and so he said, “Yes, Vadim. Maybe somebody will think of something. Let's hope so.”