Last Call for Blackford Oakes

by Buckley, William F. ;

  He flagged a cab and took her home, and kissed her goodnight.

  He reached Gus at just after midnight.

  “What brings this call on? Shall we converse in Swahili, or do you just intend a little midnight chat to keep me from going to sleep too early?”

  “Gus, I’ve got to knock off for three or four days. I think there’s no problem here, certainly nothing Gorky-related. On the other front, are you anticipating any moves in the next few days?”

  “Well, boss. Let me think. No—though if our young friend should visit his professional … masseuse … like, say, tomorrow, she might get some information we’ve been trying to get.”

  “Yes, but whatever he tells her wouldn’t trigger action by us, that I can see.”

  “No. Where you going, Dad?”

  “Actually, I could use a little clerical help here. I want to get to Sevastopol.”

  “Sevastopol? Looking after your health?”

  “Yes, in a way. Gus, this is very important to me. I want to get there tomorrow.”

  “Well, why not? You connect to Sevastopol via Kiev. Do you know where you’re staying?”

  “I’ve been looking at the new tourist guide. I want to book at the Sevastopol Hotel.”

  “Let me see what I can do. Do you mind when you leave?”

  “No.”

  “We’re talking a couple of hours to Kiev, one more to Sevastopol.”

  “I’m in your hands. Can I expect to hear from you by ten?”

  “Maybe earlier. I can use the embassy travel office.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  CHAPTER 16

  He knew it would be warmer than the icy cold of Moscow, but was surprised to find the air almost balmy. Well, that’s what the Crimean peninsula offered—warm air, saltwater bathing, wines, and health. A cab took him to the Sevastopol Hotel, completely rebuilt, he quickly learned, from the wreck of an eight-month siege which, in 1942, ended with Nazi occupation of the entire peninsula, recaptured by the Soviets two years later. He looked down at the local map exhibited at the desk. He found himself trembling with excitement: The Omega Sanatorium was a mere twenty minutes’ walk from the hotel, vindicating the guidebook he had devoured last night. He would have a swim, no less, and then walk over to the Omega.

  The Black Sea water was brisk, but he swam vigorously, and warmed himself in a few minutes. The lifeguard was reading the morning paper, seated on his platform, bullhorn at hand. But there were no children to call out orders to. That would come later in the season, Blackford reckoned. Swimming in December was for the stoics, though the sun, when he emerged from the water, felt comfortably warm.

  In his room, he napped for a half hour. He would set out at five. What would Ursina Chadinov be doing at five? What would she be teaching? He read in the hotel guidebook that the Omega Sanatorium was equipped for electrotherapy, arrafin and ozokerit applications, medical baths, and oil inhalations, all of this in a carefully controlled indoor climate. These therapeutic methods were especially useful for treatment of lung diseases, including asthma, and nervous, cardiovascular, and locomotor diseases. Where does urology come in? He would make it a point not to ask.

  Meanwhile, what to wear?

  When in doubt in northern latitudes, a blazer and gray flannel pants. In southern latitudes, khaki pants—and, again, a blazer. He took along a knapsack. A history of the Crimea, a novel by P. D. James, and a Russian dictionary. At a shop in the airport he had found perfume. Sally had liked Chanel No. 5. He would not buy that. These would not be moments in which he would welcome any reminder of Sally.

  The late afternoon was brilliantly clear, and the warmth hung on. He walked with a view of the sea, by a grove of freshly planted trees, a vineyard on the opposite side of the road. There was a receptionist at the desk, who served also as a telephone operator. Fat, with hair untended, she was not a prime exhibit of the health Omega was concerned to promote. He wished, he said, to speak with Professor Chadinov.

  “She is with the Moscow University seminar?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are no telephones in the rooms. I will get word to her; you can wait here. What is your name?”

  “My name is Vorontsov.” That was a little risky, Count Mikhail Vorontsov having, in the nineteenth century, descended on the Crimean coast with his huge wealth, building a palace that stayed on through cycles of war and rebellion as a landmark. Ursina would get it right away; the receptionist would probably not have expressed skepticism if he had given his name as Stalin.

  She was wearing a white pantsuit trimmed in yellow, darker than her hair, though not by much.

  “Last night I thought miraculously you’d come. Miracles do happen.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead as she spoke. “Though we do not believe in miracles, do we?”

  “What do you mean ‘we,’ Paleface?”

  Walking with her toward the terrace on the sea, he explained the joke. General Custer on the battlefield, lowering his field glasses and addressing his Indian aide, expresses his alarm: “We’re surrounded by Indians.” To which the aide replies: “What do you mean ‘we,’ Paleface?”

  “What’s ‘Paleface’?”

  He sat her down by the little table. “That’s the joke. ‘Paleface’ was used in basic Indian vernacular to refer to a white person.”

  “I see.” She laughed. “He was conveniently drawing attention to the fact that he was himself an Indian.”

  “Correct! And not correct that ‘we’ don’t believe in miracles. I am … living a miracle right now.”

  They thought it over and decided that comfortable though the Omega Sanatorium was, they would have more privacy at the Sevastopol Hotel. “Shall I get a cab?”

  “No. I’d enjoy walking. I will go upstairs and find a sweater.”

  Blackford sensed how the evening had to end.

  Three hours later Blackford lay on his bed, the yellow light from the little picture lamp hanging opposite only just reaching her eyes, closed, her breasts softly shaping the sheet that stretched toward Harry Doubleday. But the light didn’t reach his sex and the long, light fingers that enveloped it. His lips came together only enough to say her name. She responded by a further caress. His joy was unbounded, miraculous.

  She taught a seminar at nine, participated in one at eleven, felt a collegial obligation to share lunch with her associates at twelve thirty. “And after that, we are all on vacation.”

  At two thirty, he drove up in the rented car. Their tour of southern Crimea would begin at Alupka, at the Vorontsov Palace. “My great-great-grandfather’s,” Blackford said, his face contorted into gravity. She laughed and said she was pleased that the Bolsheviks hadn’t executed all the grandchildren. Two hours later they would marvel, as they took tea in the palace teahouse, at the great garden, and at the library and the art that had made their way through the Crimean War, the Revolution, the White Army holdout, and the Nazi occupation. “And the egalitarian frenzies.”

  “There were frenzies, as you say, Harry. But the fact that this palace survives in such splendid shape is a tribute to the care for the patrimony exhibited by the Soviet state. Granted, the original owners were dispossessed. But what that means is that I can visit the Vorontsov Palace. Otherwise, only you and other Vorontsovs would have access to it. Harry, have you ever been in Leningrad? If not you must go there, and see the reconstructed palaces, done over twenty years with such meticulous attention, putting together what the Nazis all but destroyed.”

  “I have read about Leningrad. Will you escort me around the palaces? Your native soil?”

  They drove past the Swallows’ Nest. Staring up at the fanciful medieval castle, perched on the cliff towering over the sea, Blackford expressed surprise that William Randolph Hearst hadn’t just bought the whole thing and transported it to San Simeon.

  Ursina was not up on Hearst, and he explained to her the lengths to which the great acquisitor had gone in his efforts to bring the treasures of
the world to his property in California. “San Simeon is on 250,000 acres—about 100,000 hectares—of land.” Looking down at his guidebook, Blackford noted that the Swallows’ Nest, which had achieved symbolic status in the Crimea, had been built in 1911–1912. “That’s just ten years before Hearst began the San Simeon enterprise. So, really, Hearst and Baron Schneigel, the builder of this, were contemporaries!”

  They drove on to Yalta, and walked hand in hand along the huge natural amphitheater surrounded by the mountain ridge that protected the seashore from cold northern winds. Another fashionable resort of the nineteenth century. They sat gratefully, after so much walking, opposite the white Livadia Palace, intended as a residence for the last Russian czar.

  There was a string quartet playing “the kind of music I guess the czar would have expected in his palace.”

  “Yes. Harry, we must listen to a lot of music together.”

  “You generate music … But I am sounding as young as I feel.”

  “Do you know, the Crimea is asking for a kind of autonomy. They won’t get it. The Ukraine would object first, then Moscow. And when Moscow objects, it is ‘Objection sustained.’”

  “Has Moscow ever got in your own way? I mean, other than the … privations of life in … Communist countries?”

  “I know what you are saying about privations. I remember the celebration when Rufina—she’s my roommate—and I got our own telephone. But of course the whole Communist idea is the commonweal. Well, you know all that. Have they got in my way specifically? Yes. And I burn up when my mind goes on to it. It is the barriers that prevent the circulation of research material and also of researchers who want to exchange information. My own book would have been completed two years earlier if I had had access to what I wanted. It is a standing complaint of the intellectual community.”

  “Though unvoiced?”

  “Yes.” She was silent for a moment. “Largely unvoiced. The result of generations of suppression. One complaint too many—and it becomes Gulag time, a suspicion of infidelity to the Party. I have a little journal I have not shown to anyone. I have there the times I have tried to get some material, or tried to communicate with some scientist abroad, or get some useful books, and run into state censorship.”

  “I hope you will not risk exposure of your journal.”

  “I think it safe. And the most sensitive parts of it are in a kind of code that would not be readily detectable as code. Harry, who pays your way? Your expenses? Your extravagances? Do you have extravagances? Well, I know you do, because I can smell the perfume I have on. Does USIA keep you in prosperous condition? Or do you have a private fortune?”

  “I don’t have a private fortune. I have thirty years of savings. Not much, but—I guess, by Communist standards, extortionately large.”

  “Do you hate Communism?”

  Blackford contracted his stomach, and then said it. “Yes.”

  “I like the directness of your language.”

  “Here is more directness. Will you marry me?”

  CHAPTER 17

  That Rufina would finally be marrying Andrei was convenient all the way around. The wedding had been held off for what seemed ages because passport numbers needed to be recorded on marriage licenses, and Andrei’s Soviet passport needed reissuing. There were delays, infuriating delays. But such was life in the Soviet Union, and Andrei was a complicated petitioner.

  Pending the marriage and the formal move to Andrei’s apartment on Uspensky Street, Rufina spent most nights with Andrei. This had the advantage of permitting Blackford and Ursina to pursue their own romance at the apartment on Pozharsky Street. But most nights, however late, Blackford would return to his hotel suite. Doing so avoided questions from his USIA contacts that he would rather not answer.

  It was not always convenient, leaving Ursina late at night. Usually he found a cab, sometimes he could not, and in late December there was the cold to cope with, and often the snow.

  It was a twenty-minute hike, but sometimes he found himself glad when no cab showed up. Then he could walk, unmolested, through empty streets in that fabled city from whose fortresses terrible despots had done so much to hurt so many.

  He reflected on some of the victims he had known and worked with personally, and occasionally helped. He thought back on his thirty-six years in the secret service of his country and how diligently he and others had worked to frustrate the enemy, so productively engaged, for so long, in its myriad enterprises, including death for millions, misery for other millions, laboring always to penetrate the defenses of the Western world, whether by actual or hypothetical weapons, or by electronic stealth. Or, with a terrible record of success, by the seduction of individual Westerners. Klaus Fuchs was illustrious in that roster. Fuchs had learned in New Mexico how to construct an atom bomb, and provided a steady stream of reports on the secrets of this ultimate weapon to the agents of Josef Stalin.

  But Oakes was seized one night by a quite different concern. What was it about Ursina Chadinov?

  He did not know, knowing only that he could not endure the prospect of life without her, or even the thought of life without her. There would be awful disruptions in constructing a new life with this Russian dynamo, who was twenty years younger than he, but he was moved now with a singleness of purpose that had moved him at other times in his life, toward ends to which he knew he had to yield. Sally, his love for so many years, would have been, if she were still alive, the main victim of this emotional compulsion. Sally. The obstinate, academic, intellectually brilliant adjunct professor at the University of Mexico, who had railed always against Blackford’s life in the CIA.

  The CIA—another casualty? Who knows? He couldn’t say. When would the agency feel the particular loss of the services of Blackford Oakes? Surely he would complete his present mission. Already he surmised that it was remote, the threat of the assassination of Gorbachev in a coup. There was no coup in the offing, so far as he could tell. There was practical work to be done, but an important part of that work would be done in a week or two, as the effort went forward to track down the crippled brother of the failed conspirator, and to illuminate the mysterious talk about … the general.

  So much to do. But every evening, for a part of the evening, he would be in the company, and in the arms, of Ursina, which was what mattered.

  There was never any doubt in Ursina Chadinov’s mind that she would be invited to the wedding celebration. The actual wedding, of course, would take place at a government office, but then the reception would be held at Andrei’s apartment, which would now be officially shared with his new wife, Rufina. What Ursina wasn’t altogether sure about was whether the invitation would extend to Harry Doubleday.

  She and Rufina had become best friends, in the years they had shared the Pozharsky Street apartment. Ursina was as independent and self-contained a friend as Rufina had ever experienced, but her full life—professional and personal—had never kept her from active and genuine interest in Rufina’s life and travails. Ursina respected the work her apartment mate did for the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, and she would occasionally actually ask Rufina to explain some of the statistical problems in which she specialized. Rufina kept nothing from her.

  Ursina, for her part, was always ready to talk about the work she was doing, both theoretical and clinical. But for all that she sometimes seemed to be harboring no secrets whatsoever, the identity of her clients (patients! No Soviet doctor had “clients”!) could not have been got from her under torture.

  Her induction as a professor contracted the list of patients she could treat. These were mostly men who had bladder problems. She would explore the vital organs herself—“Funny, many of the men are appalled at first that they should be examined by a woman. It is important in such circumstances for them to know that I have, well, an illustrious reputation as a urologist.” Rufina suspected that Ursina rather enjoyed the embarrassment she visited upon male patients. “What remains a problem is the occasional young
man who comes in for help with his sexual life. Especially when I discover, as I do every now and again, that the young man’s problem is that he has no real interest in the other sex.”

  One day Rufina gave her curiosity a long leash. “Does that mean sometimes that you have to tell them they are actually homosexuals?”

  “I have to gauge that question individually. If I think there’d be psychological damage, I attempt to avoid it. Not easy to do when, under certain observable stimuli, there is arousal.”

  Had she contributed a piece of scholarly medical knowledge, attributable to her own research?

  “Not absolutely my own. I would have to share credit with Vladimir Kirov, my beloved friend and patron, even as my uncle was his patron. We collaborated in the design of a catheter that is now widely used.”

  “The Chadinov–Kirov catheter!” Rufina laughed. “I sound as if I were teasing you. I do not intend to do that. What do you do for women?”

  “My specialty there is incontinence. There are many women who suffer from it, mostly older women.”

  “Well,” said Rufina, “I am going to suffer from it if I don’t get relief soon.” She rose and went into the bathroom.

  That was a problem in the Pozharsky Street apartment. There was a single sink, toilet, and shower for both occupants. And up until two years ago the male tenant in the adjacent apartment also shared the bathroom with them. At least now they had it to themselves.

  Over the years both women had entertained male visitors, requiring privacy. There was only the single entrance to their suite. When the visitor entered the apartment, he would find himself in the living room, with sofa and coffee table. The bathroom door opened immediately to the right of the entrance door. On the other side of the room was the door leading to the bedroom, which the two women had to share. Ursina, early in their joint occupancy, devised a clothesline. It rested, invisible, behind the window curtain, but could be quickly pulled out, attaching to a hook. Then a sheet would be hung over it, isolating the bedroom/bathroom end of the apartment, and permitting whichever of the occupants was entertaining the guest to use the living room. It was functional but cumbersome, and Rufina was pleased when her romantic life started being enacted at Andrei’s. And now that she would be moving in with Andrei completely, Blackford could come and go even without the clothesline in place.