“Aren’t you going to eat?”
“Later.” He waved, and made his resolute way through the crowd upstairs to where his coat hung. He put it on and walked down the street to Davenport College, entered the gate and then the portal to his room, climbing the single flight of stairs. He threw off his coat and reached in the bottom drawer where he kept catalogues and directories. He flipped open the Student Directory. Partell, Partissel—Partridge, Sally. “240 St. Ronan Street, Apartment 4.” Strange, Blackford thought. No home town given. Partissel, Dino, was listed as from Toledo, Ohio, Partell, Jonathan, from Naples, Florida. Yes, everyone had a home town. Except Sally. Could she be from New Haven? It sounded as though her apartment was also her home.
He opened the door on his steel desk, and the typewriter sprang up, mounted on the metal tray. He typed quickly, pulled out the paper, signed it, put it in an envelope. Leaving his overcoat on the chair he pulled a parka from his closet. Downstairs he unlocked his bicycle and headed in the light snow toward Prospect Street, past the Science Building, right at Edwards Street, turning left at St. Ronan. Number 240 obviously at one time had been a large single-family residence, but now was made over into apartments. He walked up the stone steps and looked at the mailboxes. She used only the name Partridge. He stuffed the note into her box and all the next morning, except for the hour’s religious service at Dwight Hall, he waited for the phone to ring. At five, he rang her.
“Yes?”—her voice was at once withdrawn and inquisitive.
“This is Blackford. Blackford Oakes. We met—Did you get my note?”
He heard her laugh, but it was not a derisive laugh. “Oh. Black Ford V-8. Hello. Yes, I got it. I meant to answer it. I will answer it.”
“Why didn’t you just—call? I left my number.”
“You are very impatient.”
“I’m only impatient to see you again. I’ve got to ask you a couple of questions. About what kind of crustaceans you can safely eat and what kind you can’t eat. Are you free for dinner?”
“No, I’m not.”
No explanation; Blackford frowned. “How about a late drink?”
“I don’t drink late,” she said, inoffensively.
“Do you ever have a hamburger late? Or is there whale meat in hamburgers?”
They agreed to meet at eleven, at George & Harry’s, fairly easy walking distance for both. Blackford was waiting for her in a corner booth. She wore a sweater under her dark red windbreaker and a yellow scarf around her neck. They both ordered a hamburger and a beer.
Blackford didn’t know what had got into him, but soon he was talking, talking almost without pause. He had no idea, the following day, what he had talked about, but it must have been after midnight before he consciously arrested his flow. But she wanted more. About his father, in the airplane business, or, more properly, “Dad is in the business of selling airplanes as an excuse to keep flying them.” About his divorced mother, “She’s a sweetheart. Now ‘Lady Sharkey,’ no less, lives in London.” About his stepfather, Sir Alec Sharkey, who had taken Blackford on at age sixteen and sent him to an English public school, Greyburn College. “Awful place.” About coming back to America after Pearl Harbor, about the Air Force, and a combat career aborted by hepatitis, “though I did shoot down a couple of Messerschmitts before I got sick.” Then there was the German surrender—and now Yale.
He insisted on walking her home, and the snow had begun again, heavy enough now to diffuse the mellow street lights. Tomorrow night, he said, she must do all the talking. She smiled and said, “No, not tomorrow night.”
“Tuesday, then?”
“No. I don’t go out on weekdays. I work. You should know, Blackford, that I am very serious about my work. The nineteenth century was a stretch of copious productivity in the English novel. In the next three years I shall have read practically all of them. I mean, most of them. Maybe five hundred novels.”
“Oh,” he said, fatalistically. “I understand.” Then: “Friday doesn’t count as a weekday, really. Let’s make it an outing. Go to New York. Do you want to go to the opera, or a concert, a play—what would you like?”
She paused. “I have only been to the opera—twice,” she said apologetically. And, accelerating her speech, “I’d like to go to the Met, whatever is playing,” suddenly grabbing him by the arm as they crossed the icy street.
“Leave it to me, Sally Partridge. I am majoring in Entertainment, did I tell you? I am taking a course this semester, Escort Servicing 105. Just leave everything to me, but be prepared to catch the four o’clock train. I’ll pick you up here at three-thirty, probably in a taxi.”
They parted outside her door, and he made no effort to kiss her, but they looked at each other a long moment before she turned her key.
Blackford slept very little that night, and the days until Friday were endless. But his plans were elaborately made, and required borrowing Richie’s car and driving to New York. They dined at Schrafft’s, and then to the Metropolitan, where Lucia de Lammermoor was sung by Lily Pons. Then he drove her to Nick’s in Greenwich Village, Blackford’s favorite jazz bar. There was a Dixieland band, and, in the fairly long intervals in between, the thin, colored, smiling pianist whose improvisations on popular tunes always excited Blackford and, he now learned, excited Sally equally. They reached New Haven at 3:30 in the morning, and during the slow drive back Blackford became the first person to hear from Sally all about Ronnie, her brother, and how she had adored him.
Blackford proposed that one day in the spring they drive to Lakeville, so that he might see the lake she described, and perhaps even call on the Landons, who had bought her old cottage, and on Hopp Rudd, maybe even have a sail on the Ronnie. When they reached the door Blackford said, “And where would you like to have dinner tomorrow?”
As she coaxed sleep, turning in her bed, the dawn already insinuating its way through the curtain cracks, she couldn’t actually believe what she had said. It was totally unlike her. What had got into her?
She had said, “Let’s eat here. I’ll cook.” And then the daemon moved her. She heard herself saying, “Dress lightly.”
Sally knew that at this time the next day she would no longer be a virgin.
At the same hour the next night, Blackford was back in his room, having just arrived. It had not been his initial experience, but he had never before deflowered, and when he discovered that this was in process he had felt a kind of tender concern which, together with his compulsive desire, emerged as an act of convulsive and transcendent love. She had showered and returned to him, and whispered that the pain was already gone, and that she knew her beautiful Blacky was unique, and they covered each other in caresses as, with infinite caution, he approached her again, feeling now the return of his passion, and the tenderness. He had sustained it this time a full half hour—or was it only five minutes? He didn’t know, knew only that his transporting pleasure had in some measure been shared by her.
Attempting to be quiet while reaching for his pajamas, he knocked over the standing lamp. Richie woke. “What in the hell are you doing up at this hour?”
“Up?”—Blackford could not make any sense of it all.
“Yes, dammit, up.”
Blackford paused. “I’ve been with the girl I’m going to marry.”
Richie told him to shut up and go to sleep.
BOOK III
13
Blackford and Rufus were in the private office of the Attorney General. The limber, inquisitive, vibrant young man hadn’t shaved that morning, his sleeves were rolled up just short of his elbows, and he wore no tie. It was late Saturday afternoon and the office was officially closed. The Attorney General, his feet on the desk, laughed. “Wants it from me directly, that you, Oakes, aren’t a double agent playing Castro’s game at the same time!” He laughed again. “Well, you’re not, are you?”
Blackford was amused. Rufus less so.
“But what does the sonofabitch want me to do, ride in a motorcade with you?
Be photographed giving you a medal? I mean—”
“Something less than that,” Blackford said. “This guy is playing with his life, Mr. Attorney General. Miami is full of our people, but it’s also full of their people. He doesn’t know the story of our work last year in the missile crisis, and obviously I’m not going to tell him that your brother, that the President, asked me personally to represent him in the negotiations with Che. But I have a feeling that no phony formality will satisfy him, and Pano is our primary link with AM/LASH. He won’t even mention LASH’s name, and of course we won’t either. But he has total confidence in you, and if you tell him to go ahead and cooperate with me on the LASH business, then he’s going to do it.”
“Well, do you have a procedure in mind?”
“Yes, actually.”
Robert Kennedy shot up from his chair and leaned back on the bookcase. “Tell me,” he nodded to Blackford.
“Okay. We specify a time. For the hell of it, let’s say it will be 11:35 next Tuesday. Pano’s in the room with me at my hotel in Miami and I tell him to pick up the telephone and ask the operator for Washington information. I tell him then to ask for the number of the Department of Justice. I tell him to dial that number and to ask for ‘Pearl’ in your office—whatever name you give me, of your private secretary. If the operator asks, ‘Who is calling?’ Pano will say, ‘Pearl’s brother-in-law, John Guzmán.’ Your operator has been told, and she flashes him to your secretary, who has also been warned, and you’re standing by—”
Robert Kennedy managed to look distracted.
“Don’t worry. What I’m talking about won’t take three minutes, soup to nuts. The secretary buzzes you, tells you this is the 11:35 call you’ve been expecting. You pick up, and say, ‘Pano? This is Robert Kennedy.’ Your voice is pretty recognizable. ‘We’re counting on you to work with Blackford Oakes. I know all about him, and he’s one hundred percent.’ Something like that,” Blackford concluded.
“Hmm. Sure you don’t want me to give him a little of your bio? What sports you played at school?”
But the Attorney General was smiling. He seemed to be ratifying the idea as workable. At that moment his red telephone rang. He picked it up. “Yeah, hi, Jack.” He motioned to Rufus, pointing to an anteroom. Rufus and Blackford had already got up; they walked into the room and closed the door. After a few minutes the door reopened, with that decisive slam with which the Attorney General tended to open, and close, doors.
He went to his desk and sat down again, motioning his guests to reoccupy their chairs. “First, on the Pano business. Okay.” He leaned over and made a notation on his calendar “for this coming Tuesday, April 2, for 11:35. My secretary’s name, the one he’s to ask for, is Angie. Now, I just talked with the President, told him I was meeting here with you and Rufus. And damned if he doesn’t want to see you both.” He got up and strode toward the window … The problems of the younger brother, seeking at once to execute his brother’s will and to defend him against any unnecessary exposure … He shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, he’s the boss. We’re to drive up to the southwest gate and—hell, just follow me.” He walked over to a closet and pulled out a jacket and tie.
At the southwest gate of the White House the guard, spotting the Attorney General, immediately waved the limousine on. The AG bounded out of the car, motioning Rufus and Blackford to follow him. The guard at the door opened it, they walked into the basement floor, up the staircase to the marbled floor behind the main entrance, up another flight of stairs to the family quarters, left and then right, into the Lincoln Bedroom, a large bedroom with chairs and a coffee table opposite the fireplace. “Sit down. I’ll tell him you’re here.”
Rufus and Blackford drove the twenty miles to Rufus’s house in the country and settled down with a drink in the living room, so familiar to Blackford.
“Goddammit, Rufus, you are amazing. You just sit there and tell the President of the United States yes to this, no to that—maybe the most powerful man in the world, and certainly the most magnetic; I don’t deny it. When he looks at you, cocks his head a little, and says something in that Boston drawl, you get the feeling, at least I do, that there’s something very special there, maybe unique. He’s so—well, so utterly appealing. Did you notice, when I tried to thank him for personally interceding with Castro for me, what he said was, ‘I think, Black, you’d do the same to save my life.’ Goddamn right I’d do the same, but I’m not the President. He is—well, he gives you the impression that he is really an anointed leader—”
Rufus raised his hand. “Nothing I said, Blackford, contradicts anything you’ve just said.”
“What you said, Rufus, was that you would go along with one and only one aspect of Mongoose: the political coup, and that you acknowledged that as things stood, assassination was necessary for any successful coup against Castro. But then, when Bobby came in with the business about the girl, and the poison, and how he had been assured by Hicock it was going to work, you said, ‘Hicock’s division and mine are different.’ Sounded like a bishop. You’re your own moral boss, Rufus, and you’ve made your position clear from the beginning. You’ll help expedite an assassination if it’s clearly based on political realities, the classical struggle to replace the tyrant—but you won’t involve yourself in plots to have Castro killed by an exploding cigar.”
“There is a distinction.”
“I’ll give you that, Rufus, but it isn’t one hundred percent clear to me what the distinction is. If Spartacus had risen against the Roman tyrant with only a poisoned wet suit at his disposal, I don’t see how the moral case for or against him would have been affected. I do think you’re absolutely right, it’s critical that the operation be a Cuban operation, but the girl Bobby was talking about is a Cuban girl, so I don’t see how that changes things.” Blackford thought back on the scene, the Attorney General beginning to look just a little bit affronted. “He came close, I think, to telling you that Mongoose was after all one operation, not bits and pieces of several operations. But then did you notice how JFK handled it?” Blackford sipped his drink with admiration. “Just raised his hand, real gentle-like”—Blackford imitated the motion—“and Bobby shut up. All the President said was, ‘We have to respect your distinctions, Rufus. But Mongoose has also got to work.’”
Suddenly Blackford laughed. “I wonder if there is another possible comment to make other than the one you then made!”
Rufus half-smiled. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve used it maybe twenty times in my life. No, there isn’t a substitute for it: ‘I’ll do my best.’”
Blackford lifted his glass. He felt elated. He had found something truly to preoccupy him. And his mission also served the purposes of the statesman he most admired. He was pleased that Rufus was ready to let the distinctions sleep. Or else coexist. “Your best is awful good, Rufus. Now, shall we get into the AM/LASH business?”
As Blackford and Rufus talked the President was, once again, alone on his rocking chair for the precious moments between the departure of the last visitor and the inevitable summons to social duties. He had come down to do some paperwork after the departure of Bobby and the two spooks, as Bobby regularly referred to any covert agent of the CIA.
A good combination, Rufus, Oakes. The Castro business is one hell of a mess. What are we going to tell the Soviet ambassador on Monday? It isn’t all that simple just to tell him we had nothing to do with the Cuban exiles’ raid on the Soviet ship coming out of Havana Harbor. The Balu, Baku, whatever it was called. He got up, walked over to his desk, and picked up the memorandum he had just read. The report, quoting the AP, gave the text of the official Soviet note: “By offering Cuban counterrevolutionaries its territory and material needs for organization of piratical attacks against Cuba, the U.S. is actually bringing about the dangerous aggravation of the situation in the Caribbean and throughout the world. Without the material support of the U.S. and without the supplying of American weapons and ships, the traitors to the C
uban people sheltering on U.S. territory would not be able to undertake these kinds of provocation.”
He returned to his chair. The trouble is, they’re exactly right. That’s why the other thing has got to move, and move fast, goddammit. Hmm. If Hicock can get that operation with the girl moving, that sounds good. Bobby tells me she is absolutely ready to go. Did a fuck-scene at a nightclub at age eighteen and Castro saw it. Practically the first thing he did after reentering Havana five years later was have her looked up, and screwed her, but this time she wasn’t paid for it.
God, it really can be useful to be a dictator.—Though I’m not a dictator, and I don’t exactly … starve to death. But of course that whole plan depends on whether the girl, back in Havana after one year in Miami, can make it back into Castro’s bed. Hicock tells Bobby no sweat, Castro adores her. Maybe it’s a good thing Blackford isn’t in on the Hicock part of Mongoose. She might see him and figure the hell with Castro. He’s got it, all right. Bet he has to fight ’em off. I’m glad I was able to spring him last October. Nice guy. Bright.
But what are we going to tell the Russians on Monday about the Cuban exile raids? Actually, dammit, it doesn’t matter so much what we tell the Soviets, or what we tell them up at the U.N., it’s one of those situations in which they know that we know and we know that they know that we know, and we just come up with boilerplate lies. We can’t possibly police all the activities of Chiquita Banana, every Cuban exile, and probably they’re getting money and help from inside Cuba. That kind of thing works in the diplomatic world, thank God.
But it doesn’t work in my press conferences. “Yes, Mr. Smith?” “Ah, Mr. Smith,” you say, “can I expect you to believe me when I say that the government is completely unaware of the activities of four different exile groups that have violated Cuban territory and inflicted damage on a Soviet troopship? Well, Merriman”—that’s a good technique, you start off calling them Mr. Snickers, and Mrs. Mars Bar, and then you slip, er, unconsciously, into calling them by their first names. God, they all love it. “Well, Merriman, there are five hundred thousand Cuban refugees, and they all want to hurt Castro and restore freedom to their country. Now that’s more people than we can conceivably keep track of. Yes, Sam?” Go quickly to Sam. He usually overstates his questions, and the sympathy flows quickly to me.
Mongoose, R.I.P. Page 11