Who's on First (28 page)

“I shall have to discuss the whole matter with Viktor, but I don't want to bring it up until after the operation.”

“Let's leave it this way. In two weeks I'll send you another message. Will you call me then?”

Her voice softened a little, and she said, “All right. But you had better make that three weeks. Good-bye, Julian.”

Blackford roamed the streets aimlessly, his attention infuriatingly fugitive. What
did
he want to speak to Viktor about? Why hadn't he succeeded in forcing himself to crystallize his thinking on this point? He tried the smorgasbord at the Opera Källaren, and managed three shots of aquavit, but he found it difficult to distract himself. He was asking himself such questions as: Is it a lie to decline to tell the truth? Or, more exactly: Is it a lie to decline to intervene with the truth? He supposed that the absolutists—he remembered Kant and St. Augustine in that context—would have said instantly, ‘Yes.' But then they would simply not have approved of covert operations under any circumstances, so of what use were they? Against Lenin? Hitler? Stalin?

He returned to his hotel room and took comfort, as he so often did, from semiscientific absorptions. He had brought the Nautical Almanac for 1957, and set out to calculate exactly the times of sunrise and sunset the next day, the thirteenth, at his location. His eyes turned to the chart … Latitude 59° 20' north, longitude 18° 5' east. He refamiliarized himself with the almanac, entered the figures, and extracted the interpolations. The sun would rise at 5:17–6:17 daylight time, which was local time; and, for all the talk of the land of the perpetual light, the sun would set, according to the almanac, at 7:15 daylight time, notwithstanding that technically there was still a week of summer ahead. While he was at it, he computed the hour at which the sun would pass overhead at his meridian: 12:43 local time. Well, he would rise early, and put down anchor early. He showered, and took a book to bed, Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged
. He had read, and enjoyed,
The Fountainhead,
and this sequel to it had been advertised as the revolt of the meritocracy against statism. He was attracted to experimental forms of nonorganized opposition to tyranny, and so he waded in, and was soon asleep.

Blackford had been sleeping several hours when, at 0300 GMT aboard the
Indianapolis,
Captain Y. Upsilon Jones, although he had begun drinking only at 0242, was rapidly approaching blotto. Lieutenant Plummer, at the wheel, had made the critical turn, and the collision was calculated for 0243, at which point Jenks received the frenzied signal from the radio operator. He yelled out “
Hard right rudder!
” to Plummer, then grabbed the intercom and in a hoarse whisper shouted to the perspiring captain, waiting in his cabin for the word to sound the general alarm:

“
It's off! Abort! Came in uncoded!
”

Jones gulped, relieved beyond measure—yet somehow wistful.

“What exactly was the message?”

“‘
URGENT INDIANAPOLIS ABORT ABORT ABORT WILL CONFIRM VIA IZN
.' A few seconds later Stagg brings in the code. I'll bring it down.”

By the time Jenks arrived Captain Jones had opened the safe, bringing out simultaneously the code book and a fresh bottle of bourbon. He poured the bourbon first, then addressed himself to transcribing the terse code.

“
CONFIRMING INSTRUCTIONS ABORT SCHEDULED MISSION. PROCEED PRESENT COURSE PENDING INSTRUCTIONS 1300 GMT. CINCLANT BURKE
.”

The two men were slouched in the two armchairs.

Captain Jones emptied his first glass. “Shee
yit!
What in
hell's
going on. We set ourselves up for a real cozy operation—”

Jenks interrupted him: “—and they're crazy enough to call it off?”

Captain Jones burped.

Jenks, twirling his glass, said: “I doubt poor Plummer will ever be the same again.”

“One of these days he'll break security, you bet. He'll tell his cronies at the locker room about the night—”

Jenks interrupted him again. “Don't worry about it, Uppy. They won't believe him.” He paused. “… Come to think of it, Uppy, might not be a bad idea if tomorrow you tell Stagg and Plummer the whole thing was an exercise, we knew about it ahead of time, but went through the”—he hated the word, but Uppy loved it, and it was a way of attracting him to any idea—“the simulations.”

“Ah yes.” Y. Upsilon Jones straightened up in his chair. “I already thought of that. Tomorrow, first thing.”

33

Three weeks later Blackford Oakes had excreted the lesser poisons of civilization: He went without liquor, fried foods, starchy desserts, late nights, sedentary days, hectic polemicizing. The weather, except for the two-day storm during which he and Sam took shelter in the tight harbor at Vispy, had been crisp, cloudless, bracing: twelve hours a day of salt air and bright colors and the sweet sounds of sea-ploughing and wind-whistling, followed by stillness. Every morning Sam, having looked at the barometer and the telltale, would suggest the day's outing, and except for the long run to Gotland at the end of the first week, he kept the
Hjordis
in waters in which she could take quick protection. Everywhere, in that water warren streaked by hills and grassy slopes, and little white farms and summer cottages, there were bights into whose loose embrace you could ease up, drop anchor, and experience instantly the sedative relief of the lee shore. There were here and there tiny slips, into one of which every other day Blackford would ease the cutter in, tie up, and walk with Sam to the local supply and grocery store, and occasionally take on water. He doubted they had used ten gallons of fuel during the twenty days, so generous were the winds, and so adroit Sam's maneuvering. In the evening Sam lit the little coal stove, and cooked. Usually it was fish, and usually Blackford or Sam had caught it. Blackford knew nothing about ichthyology: He could distinguish between a whale and a sardine, but everything in between was a blur, and so he needed to feign enthusiasm when Sam would announce excitedly, after Blackford had landed a fish, that that was a whatever, splendid-to-eat. And indeed it inevitably was splendid to eat. Fish and lemon and hard rolls and cheese and oranges and apples and, at breakfast, the strongest coffee Blackford had ever tasted outside of Turkey, coffee Sam took proprietary pride in making, putting in Blackford's mug the exact amount of sugar Sam deemed appropriate.

Sam talked about his career in Norway, as a commercial fisherman, and about his conscription by the Nazis during the war. They had put a superannuated German sergeant on board Sam's fishing vessel, which now had two functions: to bring in fish, the whole catch to be turned over to the Germans, who then remitted to Sam a salary the equivalent of a German corporal's; and the supplementary duty—to report on any shipping activity. To expedite this, Sam said, they had equipped his small boat with a sturdy radar, which had served him well after the war until, finally, it decomposed. But at about the same time, his wife had insisted they move to Stockholm where she could look after her senescent mother, who adamantly refused to leave the land of her birth. Sam used the proceeds from the sale of his boat to buy a little house on the water a few miles from Stockholm. As it happened the mother-in-law outlived the wife, and it was Sam who was at the bedside when the old lady finally died. The house was lonely, so he took in a young couple, clerks in the state-owned liquor store, who kept him company. He looked after the
Hjordis
for its owner, a cosmopolitan and permissive businessman who spent much of the year outside Sweden, leaving the
Hjordis
to Sam to maintain and to charter out. The German sergeant who had spent the war on Sam's boat—transmitting, by radio, coded information on adventitious encounters at sea with foreign vessels, and checking to see that the full catch of fish was duly turned over to the German quartermaster—had been ambushed by the resistance during the last days of the occupation, and shot. Sam said he felt very sorry about this, because Hans was an old German, not at all like the Nazis. Blackford would sometimes tune out during Sam's soliloquies; but Sam, even when he noticed, didn't really mind. He was enjoying the opportunity to revisit his use of the German tongue; and besides, he had taken a strong liking to the fresh and fetching American, whose graceful movements about the cutter, and keen interest in the details of its operation, excited paternal instincts in Sam, who was childless. It was not long before Sam discerned that Blackford was engaged in something other than a mere outing.

Sam could hardly fail to notice the concentrated austerity of Blackford's regime. Blackford's naked plunge into the cold seawater in the morning, and again in the late afternoon after they had anchored, was never failing, not even during the storm. After the second day Sam no longer went through the motions of offering Blackford a drink from the store of aquavit and beer, and at nights, while Sam sat in the main saloon (Blackford elected to sleep forward, in the fo'c'sle), listening to the radio and smoking, he would focus on the light shining down from the kerosene lamp on the bulkhead from which Blackford read. The cabin door was always open, giving Sam a view of Blackford's head, and the book that rested on his sweater, with which he warded off the night's chill. Sam noticed that sometimes an hour or more would go by, and no page would turn, even though Blackford was wide awake as witness that occasionally he would even call out to Sam—a civil effort at conviviality?—a remark about the music being broadcast; a question about the content of a Norwegian news broadcast; whatever. But Sam doubted he could be helpful to Mr. Oakes in wrestling with whatever Mr. Oakes was wrestling with—a girl, most probably—but where was the girl who would spurn such a man? So Sam devoted himself to wresting from the
Hjordis
everything she had. He would wait until the last moment to reef the mainsail, or contract the headsail. He took pains to steer Blackford to Sam's most private reserves, the two or three hidden inlets to which he never escorted those of his charterers who were … unfeeling. The deepwater run to Gotland had been one of those magical passages, superb, spellbinding, with wind, speed, sound, color, waves, interacting in exuberant harmony, the landfall at Kappelshamm coinciding with the setting of the sun, a seventy-mile passage begun before daybreak, in a following sea, with the storm spinnaker set all the way. That night Mr. Oakes had shown great animation as he ate his fish, his cheese, his apple, and drank the cold pure water from the container in the icebox. Mr. Oakes had said that one day, maybe soon, he would like to come back to the
Hjordis,
with a friend—he did not specify the sex—but would only do so on the condition that Sam was still with the
Hjordis,
and there and then he wrote down Sam's address and telephone number, and Sam was very pleased—proud, even.

Five days later they were back in Stockholm. They reached the quay at four and, thoroughly proficient by this time, Blackford backed the cutter under power expertly, after dropping the anchor two boat-lengths out into the bay. A little boy accepted the tossed docking lines and cleated them diagonally to the docking posts, as nonchalantly as though he were a professional seaman. Blackford's seabag was packed and, wearing his rugged sweater and topsiders, he extended his hand to the man for whom he had already written out the check, and said, “Thank you, Sam. I almost envy that German sergeant who spent so much time with you at sea.” Sam smiled, and said, electing for the first time to speak in broken English, “You come soon again, Mr. Oakes.”

Blackford jumped up to the quay, using the after pulpit as fulcrum, and Sam passed over the seabag and, pipe in mouth, waved a stoical good-bye.

34

After checking in at Reception, Blackford went to the gift shop, bought a waterproof watch for Sam, scribbled out a note, and addressed the envelope. He took a second sheet of paper and wrote a simple note to Tamara. “Am back, and waiting for your call, Room 322. Julian.” He gave the letter and the parcel to the concierge and went up to his room, to which his bags had been delivered, and placed a call to his mother in London. She received him, as always, affectionate and solicitous. He remembered to ask after his stepfather who, it transpired, was well, notwithstanding the episodic offensives of gout. Blackford then tensed to ask the question whether there were messages for him.

“Yes,” said Lady Sharkey, a cable had arrived that very morning. “I opened it, of course, but it doesn't mean anything to me. It must be
very
secret, darling.”

“Read it to me, Mother—whom is it signed by?”

“Well, that's mystifying, too, because the whole thing, including the signature, is in numbers. You know, like 1-2-3-4-5?”

“Well, Mother, does it say where it was sent from?”

“It was sent from Poughkeepsie, New York, at eight o'clock last night.”

“How long is it?”

“Do you mean, dear, how many numbers?”

“Well, yes.”

“I would say about fifty.”

“Mother, would you mind terribly just dictating those numbers to me? Dictate in lots of three numbers, and I'll repeat them.”

“Of course I don't mind, dear, but are you sure you wouldn't want me to take this down to the cable office and forward it?”

“No no no. I have a pad of paper. Go ahead.”

It wasn't that much of an operation, actually; in five minutes it was done.

In reply to her inevitable question, Blackford said he would make every effort to stop by London on his way back to the States, but could not promise either that he would manage or even predict exactly when he might get to London, assuming he did. She sounded warm and well and, as always after talking with her, reaching back to the dawn of childhood memory, Blackford felt refreshed for having done so; better disposed.