Last Call for Blackford Oakes

by Buckley, William F. ;

  She got little encouragement from her research on the question that most interested her, which was: Might her baby be saved? If the second Fallopian tube had to be severed like the first, and the fetus killed, that would be the end of the Titov household’s hopes for a larger family. She did find a reference to one or two historical successes of surgeons in saving the child. These were so rare as hardly to offer a realistic hope. But they had happened, in medical history, and after taking notes she made the appointment with Dr. Shumberg.

  “Ah, dear Nina Aleksandrovna,” said the polished surgeon, trained meticulously in his handling of patients, “you have again the cursed ectopic?” He did a physical examination and took blood and urine samples.

  “It is not an immediate problem, not an emergency, you are not bleeding. But we will have to proceed to surgery.” He looked at his calendar and called the operating-room nurse. “Friday 8 A.M.? Very good.”

  “But, Kirill Olegyevich, I wish to talk to you about this.” She pulled out her notes from her purse. “There have been cases where the surgeon has saved mother and child.”

  “Yes,” Shumberg said. “But for that to be even the remotest possibility requires that the fetus be specially situated and specially protected by the surrounding tissue.”

  “Can you attempt to do this for me, Comrade Kirill Olegyevich?”

  “Of course. In a way, that is always ‘attempted.’ But incidences of success are so rare, we don’t offer any hope to the mothers.”

  “You are a great doctor, and I will hope and pray that you can save the Titov child.”

  He did not succeed. Nina hadn’t told Linbek about her research, or about her conversation with Shumberg. She didn’t want him to have hope when none such realistically existed.

  Seated at the dinner table back home after his meeting with Kirov, Linbek related what Kirov had just reported to him. He told Nina of the death of Ursina Chadinov.

  Nina was perplexed. “Shumberg told me, when I raised the question of saving the baby, that there was virtually no chance of success. I wonder why this Ursina called him so specially? And when last did a mother die in an ectopic operation? According to my research, that would have been more than fifty years ago.”

  Titov chewed on his chop and took a glass of wine. After giving the matter some thought, he said: “I’m going to find out what day Shumberg will be coming to the laboratory. He comes usually once or twice a week. I will ask him about Ursina Chadinov.”

  Reaching the lab the next morning, he waited until nine, by which hour it was reasonable to expect Shumberg to be in his office and taking calls.

  Linbek got through. “Kirill Olegyevich, are you coming today to the laboratory? There is something I want to talk to you about.”

  That afternoon, Shumberg followed Titov to an empty classroom. “Kirill Olegyevich, I want to know about Ursina Chadinov, who was a friend of a dear friend.”

  “Yes, that was very sad.”

  “I know it’s sad, Kirill, when a forty-one-year-old woman dies. But I think it is more than sad when she dies under the knife of a very competent doctor.”

  “Linbek, staring hard at the tube when I had cut open her abdomen, I realized there was a critical difficulty with her breathing. I called out to the attendants. They did everything. But she was dead. There was no alternative than to assign shock as the cause of death.”

  “Kirill, what could have brought on the shock?”

  “Are you asking me a question fit for a medical-school quiz?”

  “No, a question fit for a famous surgeon operating on a woman in apparently good health.”

  “One can’t always know what induces shock. It can have been a vessel suddenly blocked—”

  “Is there anything you did that might have blocked an artery?”

  “No. The incision in the abdominal wall went very smoothly.”

  “Recount to me, Kirill, how it is that you got called into this case.”

  “I had a telephone call from Chadinov herself.”

  “Where?”

  He hesitated for a moment. “At my dacha.”

  “How is it she knew how to reach you at your dacha?”

  “I cannot answer that question, Linbek. She would hardly be expected to take time telling me how she got through.”

  “What did she say to you?”

  “She said she was scheduled for surgery that evening at the university hospital and she hoped I could perform that surgery.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, she said, she had heard of my special skills.”

  “Did you give her to understand that you might save the life of the child?”

  “I certainly did not ‘give her to understand’ any such thing. I did say of course that I would be willing to inspect the tube to see what could be done.”

  “Did you speak to the surgeon you relieved about your conversation with her?”

  “No.”

  “Did you speak with her in the operating room?”

  “She was already under anesthesia. I had told her I would come to her as quickly as I could, but could not guarantee my arrival in time for her 6 P.M. deadline.”

  “Why did you not recommend postponing the surgery?”

  “There was some fear that damage was being done. She was already bleeding.”

  “From whom did you know about that fear? Did you talk with the doctor you relieved?”

  “No. It was clear that the operation would proceed. He had been told he would be replaced.”

  “Told by whom?”

  “An assistant from my office, whom I advised that I would proceed to act on Chadinov’s wish for my services.”

  “So your office heard from you, not from her, that you would be in charge? If she called you at your dacha, she must have had the number from your office. Is there a record of her conversation there?”

  “My dear Linbek, you are being … well … intrusive.”

  “I may be intrusive. You are responsible for a dead woman. Did you order an autopsy?”

  “No. There were no next of kin, so she was cremated.”

  Titov lost control. “I think you killed her, Shumberg.”

  “You can go to hell, Titov. Or perhaps you would prefer a different temperature. A Siberian temperature?”

  Shumberg stormed out of the classroom.

  CHAPTER 44

  The car traffic on the spring evening was reduced, at that late hour, but it was not eliminated. Tony Morales had engaged a cab to take him to Merriwell. There was method at work here. If he was driving a rental car, and if Blackford Oakes was resolved to enforce his no-visitors rule, Tony could more easily be sent away. But if there was no car, Papabile was not likely to just order him out of the house. Outside 373 Merriwell, the cab having been sent away, was darkness—darkness. There were driveways and fields, neighboring houses only dimly in view. Expelling him would require calling a cab, and such a delay might cause Blackford to cool off.

  Tony looked up at the second story. The light was on in the master bedroom his mother had shared with Blackford for so many years. At the other end of the house there was no light. And looking up at the third floor, he saw no light from Josefina’s room. She would be asleep at this hour.

  He left his heavier bag in the garage, and walked with the little overnight pouch to the rear of the house. He pulled the flashlight from his pocket and inserted his key into the kitchen-door lock. There was a moment’s anxiety as he turned the key and feared the possible sound of an alarm. He couldn’t imagine that Blackford had wired the entire house against intruders. He hadn’t done so when Tony’s mother was alive; surely he had little reason to do so now. But all was not rational in his stepfather’s life these days.

  Inside, he turned on the light.

  Josefina kept a clean kitchen. The dinner dishes had been washed and stacked to one side. On the refrigerator door the familiar photographs were still scotch-taped. There were three pictures of his mother, a half dozen of himself. There
was even one, beige from age, of Tony’s father, whom Tony had never known. There were snaps of a few old friends. He recognized Anthony Trust and Singer Callaway. There was a picture of Blackford with CIA Director Richard Helms. Blackford Oakes was smiling and, in his left hand, concealing something. It was a medal, Tony knew, awarded to him by the agency. An off-the-record ceremony, celebrating one of Papabile’s adventures, about which Tony knew nothing.

  He and his mother would know only that Blackford’s absence had served “a useful purpose,” as he would put it on getting back. Or else that it had been “disappointing.” Once or twice there were flesh wounds bound for repair; one time, a cast on his left foot. Tony remembered finding the Washington Post with a line drawn next to a foreign dispatch, highlights set off with his stepfather’s characteristic little check marks. He remembered the checks around the sentence, “Premier Khrushchev declined to answer any questions on the withdrawal of the nuclear missiles from Cuba.” Tony had persuasively speculated, at age seven, that Papabile had had something to do with the detection and removal of the missiles. The picture in the Post of President Kennedy speaking to the large crowd in Berlin had also been ticked. Tony had allowed himself to wonder, with mock concern, whether such ticks were, perhaps, indiscreet. What had Blackford intended to do with these papers?

  Tony wanted to take a beer upstairs with him. There was the problem that there would be no bottle opener upstairs. He snapped off the cap using the opener tied to the refrigerator, and carefully tucked the bottle into his little canvas bag. It would not spill, wedged in as he had it.

  He turned off the light and, the flashlight rekindled, made his way into the hall. He was startled by the accumulation on the shelf above the radiator cabinet, and on the table next to it. Weeks, he judged, of unopened mail and unread magazines, and even some packages unexamined. His padre was in a bad way. But he knew that, and even knew why. After completing his registration forms for Georgetown six weeks ago, he had left to catch his flight back to Mexico. And he had called his father from the airport.

  When father and son had odd bits of information or comments to transmit to each other, beginning in Mexico City in Tony’s early years, they had taken to speaking them in Spanish. Tony heard from Blackford now, in a hollow voice, “Está muerta.”

  Just those two words. Tony in a flash knew what that must mean: that Blackford’s Russian fiancée, about whom he had spoken so ardently that night at dinner, was somehow, for some reason, dead. Tony thought to turn around and go back to Merriwell. But his father added only the words, “Regresa a Mexico. Yo te llamaré.”

  So he did. He returned to Mexico and waited day after day to hear from his father.

  He reported to the senior partner at Morales y Morales. Oscar Guzmán was studious and exacting. He was respectful in his references to the American who married Sally Morales after her husband was killed, but he never quite managed to excuse Oakes for embroiling Antonio’s father in that Cold War mess, which went on and on. And what was all the fuss about Castro dragging his Communist net over Mexico? Oscar Guzmán had made two trips to Havana on legal business. He did not pretend that Communism had done anything for the Cuban people except scare them to death, lighten their daily diets, and impose some pretty humiliating rules on what they could do, not do, read, not read. Cojones. He looked up at Tony. He was a dashing young man, as his father had been at that age, though there was the American mother there also, the blue eyes, the flirtatious smile.

  Tony told him what the procedures were at the Georgetown Law School and showed him the curriculum of the division that specialized in Hispanic law and, in particular, in U.S.–Mexican experiences. “They have like maybe one hundred books in the library on litigation over U.S.–Mexican-owned properties. I could see one whole shelf devoted to the expropriation of oil by Carranza.”

  “Yes. Your father had a little interest in one of those fields. Now his firm has a big interest in litigation over it. Ándale. It looks very good, Antonio. You will not regret the time spent in Washington. Only try, if convenient, not to fall in love with an American girl. We can’t continue forever diluting your Spanish genes.”

  Tony smiled. “I’ll report to Great-Aunt Felicia later today. I know she’ll be anxious to hear about my Papabile.”

  The days went by, and then weeks. There were only the weekend transmissions, Josefina González in Merriwell, to sister Beatriz in Coyoacán—to Tony. They told the same thing, that el señor was alive but not seeing anybody or taking any calls.

  Tony allowed this to go on for six weeks, hoping one day to pick up the phone and hear Papabile say—something. Yesterday, after much brooding, he had decided it was time to involve himself. So here he was, back in Merriwell, walking quietly toward his old room, opening the door and shutting it quietly behind him, though he remembered, from many raucous childhood experiences with boys from school who had come for a sleepover, how safely sequestered from his parents’ room, at the other end of the house, his own bedroom was.

  Tomorrow would certainly be another day. He had left a note for Josefina in the kitchen. “Wake me before he comes down to breakfast.” He had the impression, when Josefina shook him awake, that it had been only two minutes ago that he had fallen asleep. He jerked his torso up and returned Josefina’s embrace, as he had done when a little boy. “Ya viene pronto tu papá.” His father would be down soon.

  Tony, dressed and seated, was waiting for Blackford in the breakfast room.

  CHAPTER 45

  Tony caught a full view of his stunned stepfather, frozen at the doorsill, staring at his son, who was sitting there staring up at him.

  Tony would not forget that sight. His Papabile was unshaven, the face gaunt, hair uncut. He wore boxer shorts and a sweater. He paused just long enough to let his eyes dissipate the sleep and focus on Tony. He turned about and walked slowly back up the stairway.

  Tony closed his own eyes. Absentmindedly, he turned the pages of the morning’s newspaper, as if concerned for any other news than what he now had. He knew what would come next: Josefina.

  She spoke to him in Spanish, tearfully. “Your father says you are to take one of his cars—I have the keys to both in the kitchen—and go to the Merriwell Inn. He will call you there when he is ready.”

  “Nada más?”

  “No, that’s all. Está bastante enfermo.”

  “I can see that”—that his father was very sick.

  They tarried only a minute or two in the kitchen. Josefina simply insisted—treating him as she once had as his nanny—that he pause to take a glass of orange juice and a piece of toast. “We have to hope he will call you soon. Do you want to take some books?”

  “Thanks. I brought my own.”

  And he read them, page-turners like The Iberian Tradition in U.S. Law. At noon, he drove to Georgetown, met his cousin Adelaide Gutiérrez, and lunched with her at the Georgetown Medical School refectory. She had signed up as a volunteer for Michael Dukakis, who appeared likely to be the Democrats’ candidate, opposing George Bush. “On the other hand, it will obviously be Bush who’s elected. Unless Reagan gets us into a war.”

  “Gorbachev doesn’t want war, Adelaide.”

  “I know. But Reagan does want war.”

  “Maybe with Mexico. Not with Russia.”

  “I’m sorry you don’t vote in America, Tony. With your homegrown skills, if you voted here you could vote ten times for Dukakis.” He took down her phone number at the hospital where she spent so much time doing her field work.

  “Maybe I’ll call later. My … dad is sick.”

  “I’m sorry.” She gave him a kiss on the forehead.

  The rest of that day went by. Late the next morning his phone rang. He put down his book. It was Josefina. She spoke very quietly. She’d have been calling from the kitchen; his father was presumably upstairs. “El señor se afeitó.” His father had shaved himself. “Tal vez mañana.” Maybe tomorrow he would call. She put down the phone sharply. Perhaps he was comin
g down the stairs.

  Josefina called Tony the following day. Her words, exactly, were that his father would be grateful if he came by that afternoon at five, but that he might not have the strength to stay up for supper.

  Tony renewed his room reservation at the Merriwell Inn for two more nights. Driving his father’s Buick station wagon, he pulled in to the garage just before five. His heart was pounding as he walked around the side of the brick Georgian house to the kitchen, his usual access point. Josefina kissed him. “Te espera en la sala.”

  In the living room, Blackford rose to his feet. He did not spring to his feet, as he’d have done as recently as six weeks ago, Tony noted, returning the embrace.

  “You were good to come, Tony. I had just about thrown it all away.”

  “Bueno. Tell me the whole story.”

  “It is incomprehensible. I do not know what to tell. That day I heard—when you spoke to me from the airport—I had a cable, it was read to me from my office. It was sent by somebody in the USIA office, not anybody I knew. And it said simply—I memorized the message, you won’t be surprised—it said simply, ‘Moscow University Hospital, pursuant to instructions from the deceased, herewith reports the death in surgery of Ursina Chadinov. This information is to be delivered to Harry Doubleday, address, USIA American Embassy.’

  “That was it. The only thing I did was get Jerry Schwarzbach at the Russian desk to put in a telephone call to Ursina Chadinov at the hospital. An operator said that Professor Chadinov was deceased. What she was doing in surgery I can’t guess. I suppose it was a heart attack. It hardly makes any difference. How I wish you had known her. This seems strange to say, Tony, but how I wish your mother had known her. She was … a singular human being. Of course, so was your mother.”