Who's on First

by William F. Buckley

  He went to work, using his personal code, and relaying the story in full.

  11

  József Nady had specified that Frieda and Erno should meet that night not at their regular meeting place, the restaurant L’Ancien Franz, but at his little apartment on Avenue Ingres. They convened frequently with other refugees of the Hungarian uprising at bars and restaurants, meetings at times lugubrious, at times buoyant, according as the mood, dictated by random rumor, was good or bad. The three were especially close, bound by personal ties to Theophilus Molnar, with whom they had matriculated at the university and conspired in the months and days before that glorious short-lived week in October. When the tanks came on the Sunday morning before dawn, they had been asleep. They made their way out of Budapest on Thursday, through the contact at the candy shop on Ferenc Street, the owner of which had passed on to them the day before the harrowing details of the execution of Theophilus. It was József who reasoned that manifestly Theo had been betrayed by the American, known to them as “Harry.” József told them he had defied the curfew the night of the execution. He told Frieda and Erno that if Harry had still been at the hotel, “there would be one less traitor alive in Budapest.” But Blackford Oakes had checked out. József managed to intimidate the concierge into letting him look at the registration book. József copied it down: “Harry E. Browne, 34 St. Ronan Street, New Haven, Connecticut. Passport number H 2452463, issued in New York on July 6, 1956.” The following night they assembled at Madame Zlaty’s store near the university, where a contact from the resistance, driving a milk wagon, would pick them up at dawn the next morning. They emerged from the shop dressed as dairy workers. That night they spent on a farm twenty kilometers from the city. The next night they were in Vienna. Two weeks later they arrived in Paris, having deliberated—and rejected as too far distant from home—the United States as an alternative sanctuary. József betrayed an antipathy to the United States which he associated with the despised “Harry.” Frieda, listless since hearing of the fate of Theo, had smiled appreciatively, and put her arm around the shoulders of József, whose loyalty to her dead fiancé was so ardent.

  Frieda and Erno arrived simultaneously. She was beginning to climb the stairs, tired after a long day at the typewriter of the firm of Coudert Frères. Erno, who worked the graveyard shift as a linotypist for Le Monde and was relatively fresh, greeted her affectionately.

  “Wonder what’s up?” he said as they climbed the stairs to 4A. She depressed the button using the old rhythmic dash dot dot dash they had used during the exhilarating months almost exactly a year ago. Instantly József opened the door, hugged Frieda, and offered his hand to Erno. He waved them into his small sitting room with the wilted couch and chair, disappeared into the kitchen, brought out a bottle of chilled white wine, poured, sat down, and said:

  “Harry is in Paris and I know where he is!”

  Both his listeners put down their glasses. “Tell us,” said Frieda quietly, her large brown eyes closing with concentration.

  “I was delivering a radio we had repaired at the shop to the housekeeper of the Hôtel France et Choiseul. As I walked into the service entrance, he walked out of the guest entrance, and into a car, a gray Citroën. I have the license number.”

  “Are you sure it was Harry?” Erno asked.

  “Is there anybody else who looks like Harry?”

  “That’s true,” Frieda reflected. “Nobody else looks like Harry.… What shall we do?”

  “We could turn him in to the French police,” Erno suggested.

  “And what would they do?” József snorted. “In the first place we can’t prove he’s a Soviet agent. In the second place if we did, all they would do is kick him out of the country. After all, he’s an American citizen.”

  “We could tell the Americans about him.”

  “Ah yes,” József said, “I agree. I think we should do that—after.”

  “After what?” Frieda asked.

  “After we avenge Theo.”

  Erno’s voice turned cold. “What do you propose, József?”

  “I propose that we hang him by the neck until he is as dead as Theophilus. Then we will see to it that the United States—and the Communists—know that although Hungary is enslaved, not all Hungarians are slaves.”

  Frieda thought back on her quiet and gentle Theo, a tiger on the soccer field and, sometimes, in her bed: but otherwise calm, purposeful, joyfully convinced of a future free of domination, of political trials, of torture, execution, exile. A great bitterness welled up in her, as she recalled József’s account, taken from the concierge, of Theo’s execution.

  “I agree,” she said, uttering the words slowly, emphatically. “But on this condition: We must let him speak. Not like Theo. And—if he prays—give him time to pray, unlike Theo.”

  József turned to Erno.

  “I too agree. But how? Shooting him when he approaches the hotel is something we might arrange. But hanging him …”

  “I have thought of little else since I saw him,” József said. “I tipped the doorman and told him I suspected the American was playing around with my girl, and I wanted to check her excuses, and would he keep his eyes on Harry. He promised he would. Then I called reception and said that the cuff links ordered by Mr. Harry Browne’s mother from New Haven as a surprise gift for her son’s birthday would not be ready for ten days; was that too late? He checked and told me Mr. Browne had reservations for the whole month of July.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question of how we will get hold of him.”

  “I have that figured out. I’ll go to the garage with a work order from the store to repair the radio in the gray Citroën Plate 467-H. The garage superintendent has his office in the entrance. The exit is at the other end of the building. After a half hour I will leave with my tool chest and wave good-bye to the superintendent. I shall reenter the garage from the exit side and go right to the car and lie on the floor of the back seat.”

  “What if Harry sees you when he gets into the car?”

  “He won’t. If by any chance he did, I’d pretend I was sleeping off a drunk and wobble out with my tool kit. You will be parked in a rented car at the corner of Castiglione and St.-Honoré and when you see the gray Citroën with that license plate, you will follow us. I’ll move on him within two minutes of the time he turns out of the garage and put this”—he lifted a .38 revolver from under the cushion of the couch—“behind the back of his neck and tell him if he wants to stay alive to follow my instructions exactly.”

  “Where do we take him?”

  “Do you remember the picnic on Independence Day when we drove to Fontainebleau?”

  “Of course,” said Frieda. “Off the road and deserted. Perfect.”

  Erno wondered whether they should bring along any more of their compatriots, but agreed finally with József that there was always a risk. “Besides, we three had a special relationship with Theo.”

  And so it was left that József, having been tipped off by the doorman, would estimate the likeliest time of departure of Harry Browne from the hotel, and the plan would go instantly into action.

  “You, Erno,” said József, “need to bring the rope. We will tie his hands behind him when we take him out of the car.” Frieda gave an involuntary shudder but bit her lips, and although she had tried for six months to drive out of her mind the picture of Theo swinging in the wind on the gibbet of the rattling truck, now she ushered the image back into her mind, and instantly recovered her resolution. József, sweating with excitement, pursed his lips and shook his head with its light blond hair ferociously. “Perhaps now they will learn something!”

  Erno walked over to the bookcase, on top of which was a framed picture. It was taken of Theophilus holding the soccer cup in his freshman year. “To my great friend József, Theo.”

  “I’m with you all the way,” Erno said.

  “And I,” echoed Frieda.

  12

  Well, Bolgin thought as he put down the
receiver: At least something isn’t going sour! He looked at his watch. He didn’t like to make appointments for 8 P.M. That put off his dinner-vodka hour. But under the pressure of the Kapitsa matter he would in any event need to be alert until about ten, even though Moscow had ended a furious series of chaotic messages by saying that no communication would be ready for Le Monde’s six o’clock deadline that day, Tuesday, for Wednesday’s editions. The Algerian kidnappers would have to wait at least until Thursday. Meanwhile Viksne was instructed to advise the scientific delegation that the Kapitsas had been taken into the Soviet ambassador’s residence, where Tamara was being treated for what appeared to be an acute dysentery from which her husband was also suffering slightly. His scheduled lecture at the Lycée the following day would be read, on his behalf, by one of his colleagues. The French police were NOT REPEAT NOT to be advised of the disappearance of Kapitsa. (Bolgin, after Stalin died, indulged himself in a parody on one occasion when he cabled Ilyich: “THE APPROACH TO MENDES-FRANCE HAS NOT REPEAT NOT UN-REPEAT PREVIOUS REPEAT NOT BEEN SUCCESSFUL.” The reply from Ilyich, who had been his classmate at the NKVD Academy a generation earlier, could roughly be paraphrased as: “STALIN IS NOT DEAD.” It had been transmitted in the person-to-person code, and had said, in earthy Russian, quite simply: “BORIS, CUT THE SHIT.” Boris Bolgin never needed to be told anything twice.)

  The bus company was to be compensated fully, rendering any intrusion by insurance agents unnecessary. In short, no one not already aware of the disappearance of the Kapitsas should be made privy to it. The text to be given to Le Monde would be cabled the following morning after further deliberation in the Kremlin. Bolgin was advised that the Chekhov would depart Sebastopol on schedule. Whether it would turn east toward the Suez Canal and Indonesia after leaving the Aegean—or west toward Tunis—would be decided tomorrow, with appropriate instructions radioed to the captain. Meanwhile, the duty officer at the embassy should be apprised of Bolgin’s whereabouts around the clock.

  Fair enough, thought Bolgin, reaching for his fedora. By ten o’clock Paris time it would be midnight in Moscow. Now that You-Know-Who, with his lunatic passion for meetings at two, three in the morning, isn’t running the country, the chances that anybody would want to be in touch with him after Moscow-midnight were too remote to worry about. Along about midnight, the alcohol would be lifting Boris from Dostoevski, like a secondary launch, rising—slowly, at first, then with a giddily accelerating velocity—into the stratosphere; and Boris would know blankness, peace, until he woke.

  Meanwhile he had some heavy gloating to do. He looked at his watch in the dimly lit restaurant. He ordered black coffee and mineral water and took up the afternoon paper. But his mind wandered. Sverdlov—you had to give him credit—had done a good job. At three the dragnet had gone out. One of the agents, sitting in the lobby of the France et Choiseul, spotted Blackford Oakes leaving the hotel lobby that very afternoon. The agent followed him out and saw him get into the Citroën, whose license number he memorized. He was registered in the hotel under the name of Harry Browne. “Ah, Blackford,” Bolgin thought. “This time, my friend, I have got you, oh yes I do, my friend Blackford, oh yes I do!” He was very nearly smiling when the young man unobtrusively sat down beside him. To the waiter the young man said, “Do you have any Hungarian beer?”

  The waiter nodded, “Dreher.”

  “Bien.” He turned to Bolgin, who addressed him in English.

  “Do I suppose it goes well with your friends?”

  “It went exactly as we planned.”

  “Very well. Now, let us reflect for a little moment. We know that Oakes was very indispensable to finance and to organize the contact points for Hungarian escapees. In six months we have exterminated three of them—yours, of course, we finished as soon as we got your message in Vienna. But we couldn’t get anything out of the old lady about the others. She did not know, or she would not talk: We’ll not know ever which at this point. Ah, a tough business, eh József?

  “Now, our friend Oakes, he will of course insist to your colleagues that he is innocent. Are you quite certain your … friends … they are convinced it was Oakes who gave us the address on Dohany Street?”

  “Quite certain—though they know him only as ‘Harry.’ I led them to that conclusion the very night of the execution. I told them that Theo had told me his American friend had given him a special address on Dohany, but that Theo never gave me the number on that street. They are absolutely convinced it was Harry.”

  “Good! To prove himself innocent it isn’t certain what he will attempt. But we know what we desire. Yes, of course, we desire anything you can get from him that would pleasingly surprise us. For instance, any special contacts in Paris. Information on any operations he might be doing. What would help is if he told you where the other contacts are in Budapest that are still operating. Because the girl Frieda and your other friend, I forget his name …?”

  “Erno. Erno Toth.”

  “… they might, Oakes will calculate, know that he is telling the truth if he gives the names and locations of the contacts—they might have heard about one or two or three of those contact points from other refugees.”

  “I doubt it. The refugees are all tight-lipped. You know that. I haven’t had any successes for you on that front.”

  “Well,” Bolgin said, sipping his glass of water, “a man gets pretty desperate when he is walking toward the hanging rope, eh József? I am certain Mr. Oakes will think of something worth you repeating to me.”

  József smiled. “What shall we do when he is talked out, Colonel?”

  “What shall you do? Why, my dear József, you will hang Mr. Oakes. Yes”—Bolgin raised his glass of mineral water as if to toast the idea—“Moscow would like that. In fact”—his eyebrows came together—“Bolgin would like that! You will of course take a photograph. You will say to your confederates it is essential for the morale of the ‘Freedom Fighters,’ eh? But also—and you will not say,” he chuckled, “essential for the morale of Moscow, and excellent for the morale of Bolgin. The morale of Bolgin is also worth some maintaining, is it not true, József?” Bolgin laughed almost convulsively. “Blackford Oakes, the picture-poster secret star of the great Central Intelligence Agency. Hanged as a traitor—by the Hungarian Freedom Fighters Oakes helped escape from Hungary! It is too delicious. We shall see that it gets leaked, gets worldwide leaked! Do you ever see the National Review, József?”

  József said that although he read several American periodicals, he did not read National Review.

  “It is edited by this young bourgeois fanatic. Oh, how they cried about the repression of the counterrevolutionaries in Budapest! But the National Review, it is angry also with the CIA for—I don’t know, not starting up a Third World War, maybe? Last week—I always read the National Review, it makes me so funny-mad—last week an editorial said”—he raised his head and appeared to quote from memory—“‘The attempted assassination of Sukarno last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everybody in the room was killed except Sukarno.’” Bolgin roared, and suddenly wished his mineral water were vodka. Should he order some? No! No, a thousand times no! He marshaled his thought. His features returned to pop-Bolshevik: “We will distribute that picture,” he said soberly. “‘Hungarian Freedom Fighters/Execute U.S. CIA Agent/Caught Collaborating with KGB.’ Such black eyes for our friends in the CIA, no, József?”

  “Yes! Terrific!… Say, Colonel. You know, it is getting very expensive, life in Paris. And I do need my own automobile. Renting one from time to time for specific missions, well, it isn’t entirely satisfactory.”

  Bolgin, prepared, reached into his pocket and extended his hand under the table.

  “What you find in this envelope there will be five times of when the photograph comes to me.”

  13

  “I am very sorry, Dean. Did Martha bring you tea? Ah yes; I see she did.” The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency poured himself a cup and sat down. “In the
situation I was in it would have been awkward to tell anybody ‘Please call Dean Acheson and tell him I’ll be late.’”

  “Pace. I know how those things are,” the tall distinguished figure with the waxed moustache replied in drawling Grotonian. “I have been enjoying the afternoon paper. It recounts the inside story of the shake-up in the Kremlin. Molotov led the fight against Khrushchev, charging that he had been a failure in foreign policy. Poor old Molotov,” the former Secretary sighed exaggeratedly. “Obviously the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact went to his head. As a perfectionist, he cannot stand lesser diplomacy.” His eyes were still on the paper. “Hmm … Molotov out. Malenkov out. Kaganovich out. At this rate, Allen, I shall soon be left without any personal friends in the Presidium.”

  The Director laughed, stirred his tea, and said then, gravely, “It was a very long meeting, Dean, and tension is building.”

  “Do you wish to tell me about it?” That obviously was exactly what the Director wished to do, else why would he have asked especially to see him after the National Security Council meeting?

  The Director stirred his tea for a minute, and got up to turn off the air conditioning. “You may remember my telling you after the May Day exhibition that our analysts were tempted to conclude that the next big phase in Soviet strategic armament would center on long-range bombers. They flew nine of those huge Bisons over Moscow in tight formation—that’s a hell of an airplane, the equivalent of our B-52. Some of our people projected they’d bypass rockets, for one armament generation in any case, and go heavy with the airplanes. So we sent out orders to our spotters: ‘Bring in as much information as you can to point us in the right direction.’ We want to know, for instance, how many Bisons have they actually got.”