Marco Polo, If You Can

by William F. Buckley

  Amanda compensated for this awful disability during her last two years at preparatory school and during her early years at Vassar by two means. She joined student peace movements wherever she could find them. She accustomed herself, without strenuous effort, to the relevant terminological protocols. On the whole, everything was “peace”-oriented, even when the Soviets were calling for second fronts or more intensive bombing raids. She learned how, in pursuit of peace, she should argue for war.… This wasn’t difficult, and she quickly learned to master the dialectic, mysterious to some, as when her roommate asked her why the Soviet Union should be so hot for us to strike a second front in Europe, while they failed to take action against Japan. To which Amanda was able to answer that the leaders of the Soviet Union were beyond infantile leftism, an answer that left her roommate, though not exactly satisfied, at least dumbfounded; and that was good enough for Amanda.

  On a typical weekend, enjoying the considerable liberty given to seniors on the honors list, she would take the bus to Hartford, and then head for Boston or New Haven or New York to convene with, or march with, those who demanded a second front; and, in due course, with those who demanded that the United States give up its nuclear monopoly; and soon after, though based now at Vassar, she would join those who demanded that the United States recognize the Soviet Union’s natural sphere of interest in Eastern Europe, and reject counterrevolutionary movements typified by Mikolajczyk in Poland, Stepinac in Yugoslavia, and, later, Masaryk in Czechoslovakia.

  By the time she was in Vassar, though a mere second-term freshman, she was elected secretary of the Vassar branch of the Young Progressives of America. One of her clandestine assignments was to join the school newspaper, Vassar Miscellany News, and use her influence—if possible, by becoming its editor—in order to cause the paper to endorse the presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace. She did not succeed in becoming the editor, but she was confident that her considerable passion for the transcendent imperative of peace and her encyclopedic knowledge of the militaristic and commercial background of the men who surrounded President Truman gave her a missionary’s touch in dealing with pagans. Her fellow students, while falling short, for the most part, of endorsing Wallace, were easily stirred by declamatory demands for a higher idealism that would bring an end to war.

  The second means by which young Amanda Gaither thought to aid the war effort was by being ever so obliging to soldiers, whether soldiers back on furlough or leave, or freshly discharged. She owed them a considerable debt, she reasoned. Moreover, if they were most acutely pleasured by familiarity with her body, she was prepared to make that “sacrifice”—to use the conventional formulation, which she decreasingly did. The first time was after a senior dance, away at Millbrook School. Her blind date was an attractive enough sixth-former who, however, for reasons she finally abandoned exploring, kept bringing up the subject of snakes. Jim had, it appeared, a considerable collection of snakes in the school zoo, each one of which—while Jim and Amanda ate, and while they danced—he would describe to her, including its eating habits, the do’s and don’ts of feeding them white mice, the age at which his boa constrictor would acquire the strength actually to choke the life out of a grown man (“not for at least three years”). Amanda had to keep reminding herself that Jimmy in a matter of weeks would go to midshipman’s school, and from there to roam alien seas, where the reptilian monsters that would strike at him would most likely do so from underwater, spitting out their toxic missiles in the North Atlantic, or in the South Pacific. Amanda could get very emotional, and she could see Jim gurgling his last, going down into the vasty deep, worrying about who would look after his snakes. Amanda became so carried away by this that she came very near to promising Jimmy that if anything ever happened to him, she, Amanda, would adopt his snakes. Fortunately, at just that moment, a young man in uniform cut in.

  “I’m Brian, Jim’s older brother. And the rules say a) you can cut in; and b) even if the rules didn’t say that, I’m bigger than Jim so I’d make up my own rules.” With which he swept her away, indeed quite off her feet.

  It was against the rules to return to Ethel Walker’s other than on the school bus, but by the next afternoon, when the time had come to leave, Amanda and Brian (he had more or less dismissed Jim, who resignedly spent Sunday morning at the zoo) had solved that problem to their satisfaction. Carol, Amanda’s seat-mate in the bus, would bend her head over as though playing a game of checkers with Amanda, which she frequently did, and when Miss Otis, going down the roster, called out Amanda’s name, Carol would answer, “Here.” Brian, who was headed for Hartford where he was attached to the Signal Corps unit at Bradley Field, would have Amanda safely back at Ethel Walker’s well before the bus got there, except that as it happened she was not “safely” back three hours later, but was a changed woman.

  Brian was easygoing, slight of face, quick to smile, a good listener, and his eyes were both amused and passionate. He was a second lieutenant, a station which hugely impressed Amanda, who studied his bars and emblems. He had the weekend off and decided to spend it at the school from which he had graduated the preceding year. He talked easily about the training he received, and the responsibilities he would inherit probably in Europe (“most of the Pacific Signal Corps people are training in California”) and, carefully watching her responses, he said he had of course to be fatalistic about his chances of returning whole. “The casualties among Signal Corps men,” he said as he drove sixty-five miles an hour up toward the Berkshires before swinging northeast toward Simsbury, “are very high, because among other things, we have to be there to give the signal to retreat!” He laughed, with genuine amusement Amanda thought, admiring extravagantly his debonair attitude toward a life that might, so soon, come to an end. Without slowing down, he reached over to the back seat and fished up a bottle of beer.

  “Want one?”

  Amanda had never tasted beer before. She found herself saying, “Of course.”

  The right hand disappeared again and came up with a second bottle. “The opener’s in the glove compartment.”

  They reached the outskirts of Simsbury one hour before the pokey bus would, and Brian asked if she knew any place they might park in privacy and “just talk.” Indeed there was; she knew the whole of the area, after four years, intimately. It was dark, but without difficulty she guided him by the farmers’ road to a forest, from a little clearing in which they could look up at the twinkling lights of the huge main schoolhouse, so grandly situated up the endless grass slope, and, beyond that, the house on the hill, still higher, where the senior girls lived.

  Brian then spoke in earnest about the impact Amanda had had on him. Up until knowing her, he had been lackadaisical about his future, but in the past few hours alone, his perceptions had changed. He must, he said—his arm around her neck, his fingers probing—he must go abroad with an entire memory of this beautiful girl.

  Amanda knew all about the techniques of love, knew that sooner or later she would be initiated in them, and resolved early on—she had said as much to her roommate—that when the time came, she would not feign a reluctance she did not feel, or a passivity assumed by nineteenth-century novelists to be the generic behavioral responsibility of the female species.

  “Do you see this?” Brian said, extricating a small package from his back pocket.

  Amanda fingered it.

  “They are condoms,” she said, her voice entirely steady.

  “Do you think you could take one and put it … on?”

  Amanda swallowed, her determination to be poised notwithstanding. She found herself saying, “Yes, but it’s dark.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Brian, his voice now hoarse. “You’ll see. I’ll guide you.”

  The deed was done, and he led her to the back seat, leaving his trousers and shorts in the front seat. Throughout, he talked to her, and told her that now he had a real reason for surviving the war. They caressed passionately. The wrench came suddenly and she cri
ed out, but only briefly, and felt no resentment for Brian; on the contrary, she returned his post-coital kiss ardently. He reached down, took the towel that had encircled the bucket of beer, and gently stroked her.

  “Brian,” she said, practically, “I’m going to have to have some light.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll turn on the car light, and walk away, and come back in a couple of minutes. That way you can tidy up.”

  She made maximum use of her two minutes, stuck the towel into the bucket, got into the front seat, and tapped lightly on the horn. Brian reappeared. He kissed her, started the engine, and drove her to the senior residence, telling her that she had made all military sacrifice tolerable. She was silent. By no means shocked, or resentful. She had not enjoyed herself, but for this she had been prepared by her reading. They agreed to meet again the following Wednesday night. She would sneak out during the late study hour, at 9:45, and come again to the identical place—could Brian find it? “A Signal Corps man,” he replied, “can find anything. Besides,” she could see the boyish, yet cosmopolitan smile on his face now as they approached the road lights, “your … body issues a little beep, and my … body could home in on it no matter where you were hiding.” They kissed. Amanda hid in the gym until the bus drove in, at which point she joined her class, mostly silent after the long ride, facing the decompression from a weekend at a prep school and long hours with algebra, Chaucer, irregular French verbs, and the Lincoln—Douglas debates. Amanda was visibly animated, her face flushed with excitement, and Carol said, “You look like you’ve opened a second front.”

  “I have,” said Amanda brightly. “I mean”—she checked herself—“I have a feeling we’ll open one soon.”

  At Vassar, Amanda’s promiscuity was somehow brought off with a kind of professional dignity. Her preference—not exactly advertised, but manifest—was for fellow workers in the Progressive Party movement. Her fastidious roommate Maureen pointed out to her that it was an awful pity that the young men who declared for Henry Wallace were not more attractive biologically, and Amanda replied that she knew more about them biologically than Maureen, thanks very much. Among her friends it was quietly accepted that Amanda—whom they were greatly attracted to by reason of her cheerfulness, her vivacity, her idealism, her openness, her spontaneity—was perhaps something of a “nymphomaniac,” but at one point, when the suggestion was raised, Maureen, who though not a Progressive was a feminist, denounced the very use of the word as signifying that women took pleasure from sexual union even as men did. “You can bet Johnny D [all the girls knew Johnny D] isn’t called a ‘satyr’ by his friends at Yale, yet the two words are complementary. Amanda is wholehearted in everything she does, and she enjoys everything she does. I doubt if she has had any more pleasure out of sex than she had when she deposited one thousand signatures with the Town Clerk to put Wallace on the ballot.”

  The humiliation of Henry Wallace had been crushing to Amanda. That spring, the Soviet Union had staged the Czechoslovakian coup. And during the summer, the news magazines came out with exposé after exposé convincing the majority that Henry Wallace had become the tool of the Kremlin (“Josef Stalin’s Mortimer Snerd,” Clare Boothe Luce had unkindly put it in her keynote address at the convention in Philadelphia that nominated Thomas E. Dewey). Suddenly the crowds thinned down, and at what was planned as a monster rally in Poughkeepsie in October, featuring the candidate himself and pitchman Frank Kingsley, plus one or two Hollywood speakers—victims of the House Committee on Un-American Activities such as Albert Maltz—the crowds had been discouragingly small. The organizer of the rally, a woman sent out from New York with experience in such matters, had noticed the wholehearted work and devotion of the enthusiastic and voluptuous junior. She asked Amanda whether she might manage to go to New York to meet her to discuss a matter “of vital importance to world peace.” Amanda, in her outgoing way, said this was easily arranged, took the name and address and the time of the meeting, and walked back from the rally all the way to the campus, instead of taking the bus. She reflected on the motives of “Andy,” as they all called the organizer. “I bet,” she thought, “that Andy will try to recruit me to join the Party.” She would certainly accept, she said to herself. Her disappointment with the rally, and her suspicion that the following Tuesday the candidate for whom she had worked so very hard would be crushed, were somehow discounted by her own resolution. Let the American public bend to the will of the usual types who have buggered up the century with world wars, racism, and materialism. Some people will stand up against it, and I’ll be one of them. She would, however, need to tell Andy that her membership in the Party would need to be surreptitious, because life at home would simply be impossible otherwise, and she had no particular ambition to embarrass her father, a prominent Washington architect, or her godfather, Dean Acheson; or her mother, whose interest in politics terminated with the death of Mussolini.

  She need not have worried. Andy, who introduced her to “Klaus,” had in mind for her something very different from public agitation. Indeed, it required that slowly, but convincingly, during the year and a half she had left at Vassar, she distance herself from her former political passions—not so difficult, since the migration away from the Progressive Party was, on the collegiate scene, very nearly total. Indeed, by the end of her senior year, she must associate herself not only with such causes as the United World Federalists, but with those wings within those causes that sought to exclude Communists from membership.

  Amanda traveled frequently to New York, always seeing Andy, sometimes seeing Klaus himself. And they told her that, after she had graduated, she would be given an assignment. To this she looked forward eagerly, and as she read the headlines—the heightening of the Cold War, the emergence of McCarthy, looming confrontation in Korea—she took solace from the knowledge that she had a secret, and that history would vindicate her. The commencement speaker was Mrs. Agnes Meyer, the wife of the publisher of the Washington Post. She urged the young ladies to face life boldly, to be willing to make personal sacrifice, to pursue their ideals.

  Amanda smiled. “She’s describing me,” she thought, contentedly.

  CHAPTER 16

  Rufus, who had permitted himself to wonder how it was that between October and February the FBI had not managed to come up with the mole, even though transcripts of the NSC documents passed through fewer than forty hands, had to admit that Mr. Hoover’s agents, moving in force now on the basis of the information in the letter to Michael, did so with a quite dazzling thoroughness.

  Happily, an acre-by-acre search for the photographer Steiner had not proved necessary, although, Mr. Hoover assured Rufus, even without the intelligence discovered by Maria Bolgiano, in due course, checking every commercial photography outlet, they’d have fingered Steiner—but that would concededly have taken time. As it was, two of their top agents cased his studio while a third, radio in hand, stood outside in the event Steiner should be seen returning. A fourth agent followed Steiner from time to time, satisfying agent No. 3, who satisfied agents No. 1 and No. 2 that Mr. Steiner was at this moment on a bus heading up toward Fordham. Any sudden materialization at 252 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, was ruled out.

  The agents admired the order in Steiner’s studio. His was no brummagem enterprise, light veneer for spy work. He had lists of patrons, carefully kept ledgers, considerable files containing copies of work accomplished. They found, without great difficulty, the Zapp microdot machine that permitted microdot photography. The mere ownership of such a machine would not, of course, constitute evidence of felony. A professional photographer is not obliged to describe the uses to which he puts esoteric equipment.

  They swept the place clean. In his upstairs closet they discovered a portable typewriter, and only after carefully studying its position in repose, including that of the zippers that enfolded the case, did they take it out to get samples of the typeface, as they had done with the principal typewriter below. They took fingerprint samples
as targets of opportunity; they had been told that the envelope bore no fingerprints of the sender. They searched in vain for an address book, for anything at all that might give them a clue to the extent of his apparently extensive network.

  “Let’s face it, Rhubarb”—agent No. 2, Ollie, was unaware that his colleague, the senior FBI investigator-technician in New York, had often ruminated on the probability that his failure to achieve more dramatic advancement traced to his inability to get anyone at all, even the Director, to call him other than by the preposterous nickname he had been given at age three, when he contracted chickenpox—“if this fellow’s got microdot technology and wants to hide a neat list of his agents, including home telephones, girl friends, and birthdays, he doesn’t need a nice red leatherbound appointment book.”

  “That’s right,” Rhubarb said. “At the same time, and for the same reason that microdots are useful, they’re delicate, and you’d go to considerable pains to keep them in some kind of classified shape. My guess is that they’re in the library, tucked into his books, and that he has somewhere a key to their location. But this isn’t anything we’re going to find out today. Realize this cat’s been operating twelve years! Oh, man, I can see the Director handling that one in the press!”

  Ollie, while looking tenderly under the blotter on the main desk, said in heroic accents, “FBI ARRESTS MASTER SPY. Washington. Director J. Edgar Hoover announced today before a crowded press conference that after twelve years of investigation, during which his agents had gone over an estimated 118 million pieces of information, using the most modern technological equipment in the inventory of counterintelligence, the FBI had arrested Hans Steiner, a German-American residing and doing business as a photographer at 252 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, charging him with violating eleven federal statutes governing stolen secrets and unauthorized traffic with a foreign country.…”