Who's on First

by William F. Buckley

  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.”

  “What was Kapitsa’s mood when you saw him?”

  “You wouldn’t believe. We met together at six, at a friend’s apartment, then to a restaurant together, then walking over Moscow. He took me finally to the train. We talked, yes, about Vorkuta. And, yes, we talked about his work, his huge fascination with the physics of rocketry. But what he talked about most, what he talked about ninety percent of the time, was Tamara.”

  “Tamara?” Blackford asked.

  “Tamara—I can remember Viktor’s words—I have a good memory, you know, Julian—Tamara is ‘more beautiful than Juliet, more learned than Madame Curie, more gentle than the River Don’!”

  “Yes, but can she dance?”

  “What?” said Vadim.

  “She sounds okay,” said Oakes.

  “Okay! Viktor proves himself mad, crazy about his Tamara. He says to me, stopping right there, in the middle of Red Square, he says, ‘Look at me, Vadim’”—“Serge” himself recognized this breach of security procedures. He began again. “He said, ‘Look at me … Am I disgusting to a beautiful twenty-three-year-old girl?’ I took my beloved Viktor in my arms, and I say to him, ‘Viktor, you are thirty-six years old. Six months ago you looked like a corpse. Today you do not look thirty-six, that is true. But you have color in the cheeks. You have gained ten? fifteen? kilos. You are wise, you are brilliant, you are one of the finest men God ever made. If you want Tamara, she will be lucky to have you!’ Viktor was overjoyed, he was so happy—I could not even begin to tell Viktor what was my intention. But—we walked past Lenin’s Tomb, talking, and suddenly he winks at me and he turns most solemnly”—Vadim made the low bow of the Russian peasant—“toward the tomb, put me in front of him so no one can see, and does this with his middle finger.” Vadim executed the internationally recognized fico. “I whisper to him, ‘Do it once more for me,’ and he did—but that was the entire whole of the political conversation. If I told him I was intending to leave Russia it would only have done something greatly to hurt his happiness. Because he could not leave Tamara.”

  “What does she do?” Trust asked.

  “She was then a technical assistant. She too is a physicist.”

  “And that was your last communication?”

  Vadim, well into his second brandy, was well into prolixity. It transpired that, as prisoners, he and Viktor had developed a highly intricate code based on numerals. They used to practice it, for distraction, hour after endless hour. No such code, of course, is unbreakable, Vadim reminded them. “But I sent a letter on my way out of Vienna, to the apartment of Viktor’s friend who let us use it. It was a letter to say thank you, and of idle chatter about what I have seen in Vienna, written on a typewriter. I made the ribbon to stick, and then started pushing different numbers, putting the ribbon on, and off, as if to be fixing the ribbon. Then at the closing of the letter I asked my friend please to pass it along to Viktor. No one yet knew of my defecting. What I typed in our special code was: ‘My dear Viktor: I do what I do because I must. I shall not write you in case you suffer more, and do not write to me. Always your devoted …’” This time he paused. “I gave my name.”

  “Did he marry Tamara?” Oakes asked.

  Trust broke in. “We’ve put together”—he took a file from the drawer of an antique buffet and opened it as they walked into the formal living room—“everything we could find, every public reference, every bulletin; we did as much poking about in Moscow as we could. Our guy asked some routine questions here and there, and here it is: They were married in April 1954. Both Tamara and Kapitsa have had three promotions in the last two years. She is now a full-fledged associate at the aerodynamics laboratory, and he is one of its six research directors, working under General Bolknovitinov. The whole thing is under the general supervision of Academician Nesmayanov, then of Korolyov, the General Groves in the situation, who reports to the chiefs of staff and directly to the Kremlin.

  “The Kapitsas have an apartment at the Tyura Tam compound. No children. No notoriety of any sort, that we can come up with. And listen—Kapitsa and his wife have already been abroad. Last year, as part of a scientific exchange visit, Viktor went to Rome with a Russian delegation and delivered a lecture. Tamara was with him, and handled the slides during Viktor’s lecture. We found out, in Rome, that the group—there were thirty of them—traveled together everywhere, from the conference, to the hotel, to the sight-seeing places, to the restaurants. There were no incidents, no irregularities, nothing.”

  “And Tamara was with him,” Vadim said, as if to himself. “That is bad, that is very bad.”

  “Why do you say that?” Trust asked.

  “Because if Tamara was with Viktor, and both in a foreign country, it would have been good if they went for asylum, political asylum. If they didn’t, they were scared. Or”—he looked down—“or they do not want to leave Russia.”

  Trust got up. “It’s late, Serge—what the hell, Vadim. We’ve got a lot of detail to go over tomorrow. I’m going to go over a few things with … Julian, here.”

  Vadim rose. “I too am tired. But”—he looked mischievously at them—“not so tired as to not to take myself upstairs maybe a little vodka-soda. You wish me to bring you something from the kitchen?”

  “No thanks,” Blackford volunteered. “Maybe later.” Blackford found himself, rather unexpectedly, on his feet. The least he could do, he reasoned, in deference to someone who had spent eight years in Gulag, and emerged spiritually whole, so far as one could judge. And Blackford tended to judge quickly, though his judgments, while always impatient, were not always reliable.

  “I like him,” he said simply to Anthony, after Vadim had gone off noisily to bed.

  “I like him, too. There’s something about him I’d guess Gulag brought out.”

  “This one’s a pisser, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, the brass in Washington are entitled to be pretty desperate if they figure the Soviet Union is going to outperform us in space.”

  “Those goddam Russians,” Blackford mused. “Send people off to slave-labor camps and the next day put ’em to work creating a scientific breakthrough. Maybe we ought to tell them we bought the atmosphere fr
om the Indians, and we’re sorry, but No Trespassing.… You don’t suppose, Anthony, the Russians are superior to Americans?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe communism makes sense?”

  “Yeah, right: We might ask Rufus to conduct a seminar.”

  “Did you travel with Vadim?”

  “We came separately. We arrived two hours before you did. I’ve read his security record. Lives absolutely alone, orders everything he can get his hands on in Russian. He had become reclusive at his little farm in New York. Only Kapitsa could have brought him back into action. He’s never got over Vorkuta, the guys who grilled him told me, and I think it’s clear that’s true.”

  “It’s clear all right. So is the fact that we can’t let him operate in any undercover situation when the cover is off the brandy.” Blackford stood, looking down at his lanky, earnest friend—“Where’s my room?”

  7

  The voice from the loudspeaker on the AN-10 announced curtly that during the refueling stop at East Berlin passengers would remain in their seats. Viktor Kapitsa turned to Tamara—they occupied the rearmost seats and no one, in the half-empty airplane, was occupying the seats across the aisle from them—and winked. She returned the wink, lowered her head slightly, and smiled. She wore her hair in a bun, but it flowed back loosely over the sides of her face, so that there was movement, and a ripple of light, in her brown hair whenever she raised or lowered her head. Her smile was both young and wise: and cautious.