Saving the Queen

by William F. Buckley

  Saving the Queen

  A Blackford Oakes Mystery

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  FOR F. REID BUCKLEY

  Exculpa me quod minxi in formam quam magnifice perfecisti

  Prologue

  His three friends, his closest professional friends, were there at dinner in part because they weren’t the type of people you have to tell it is time to leave. They could have stayed on to discuss the business at hand indefinitely, but, really, it would have been repetitious. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you say the same thing again and again in three or four different ways: It is a subtle technique for advancing a position—dangling it high, so that you can look at it from different angles, letting all the facets shine. But there were objections to doing so tonight. For one thing, he was right up against the deadline, and had to save those final hours to make his own decision. For another, the alternatives had not been raised at the dinner table for the first time. They had been the center of conversation among the highest officials of the Central Intelligence Agency ever since it had been resolved that a special panel, headed by the Vice-president, would interrogate them deeply about the kind of thing the CIA had been doing.

  For a while it was expected, within the organization, that a party line would be laid down by the director. But as the days went on, it became clear that he was not intending to do anything of the sort.

  Perhaps in other days. But Watergate had just come and was not by any means yet gone. There a party line had been laid down, and it was only a matter of months before the people on the other side seized on the contradictions, charted them, computerized them, gloated over them: And then, almost every day in the right-hand column of the morning paper, someone else was indicted. At the opposite end of the paper, the headline reported the conviction of the poor wretch indicted six months earlier—for following the party line.

  Besides, no one in the Agency was going to urge him (a) to take an oath, and then (b) to tell a lie. If he wanted to, he could always plead the Fifth Amendment.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Vice-president, but I must decline to answer your question on the grounds that by doing so I might incriminate myself.”

  “That,” Anthony Trust had remarked around the little dinner table in the handsomely appointed dining room, “is a pretty elegant solution, you know. They can have you fired. But would they? And what if the rest of us did it? Right down the line? We’d be roasted by the press. But there’s something of a corporate nobility in our all doing it.…”

  “Anthony”—his host smiled—“you have a wonderful way of glamourizing things, which is one reason, I suppose, why you are a successful veteran in this accursed profession into which you corrupted me as an innocent twenty-four-year-old.…”

  Trust spoke with straight face: “Could we, please, cut the crap?”

  He smiled at his oldest friend—still a bachelor, and at forty-six quickly becoming the most eligible one in town, tall, slim, with the dark glamour and bright, sudden smile, and the mysterious affinity for his work to which, indeed, he was married, as they say routinely of priests who are “married” to Mother Church.

  It wasn’t known whether Anthony would be summoned before the panel. The Agency (the top people had long since ceased calling it “the Company”—that was for recruits, middle-echelon bureaucrats, and popular novelists) had distributed a directive announcing that it was the wish of the Rockefeller Panel that witnesses should not consult with one another either to co-ordinate strategy or to compare notes. It could not seriously be expected that such an order would be observed: No force on earth, that spring evening in 1975, at 3025 P Street, Northwest, could have kept him, and Anthony Trust, and King Harman, and Singer Callaway, from discussing the subject that quite naturally preoccupied them, so much so that he had sent his wife and youngest son to spend the week at the cottage at Martha’s Vineyard. He had been told he should make no other appointments during the entire week, suggesting the possibility that he would be on the stand during the whole period, allowing for the lengthy recesses a panel of such eminence permitted itself, for the discharge of other duties. Still, the staff was always on duty.

  It had been different with the director. He had testified the preceding week rather briefly (presumably, the panel intended to recall him after listening to his subordinates). His associates assumed they would hear the gist of his testimony. Even if it failed to come in to them obliquely, through an intermediary, at least they could reasonably expect to read about it in the New York Times, to which, surely, one of the Rockefeller Panel would leak it.

  But there had been nothing.

  Nothing at all; and now, suddenly, it was his turn, and he had no knowledge of what his responsibilities were. When the original announcement of an investigating panel was made, he had gone straight to the director.

  “What’s the line, chum?” He tended to become increasingly idiomatic as tension increased. This had become something of a trademark, though he remained, really, without affectation, with the possible exception that he never labored to conceal his intelligence, which is so much the accepted thing to do that, acting naturally, intelligence sometimes becomes suspect as affectation. The director was not so much hostile as protective.

  “Look,” he began. “There’s a Hanging Party out there. Never mind who it is—let’s stay professional, as we are trained to do, and keep our emotions out of it. They want the Rockefeller Panel to report that we have been”—he began to slur—“… lying, stealing, killing, bribing, forging … fornicating … as a matter of official foreign policy for twenty-five years. They’re not interested in what takes up ninety-nine per cent of our time, which is studying the rainfall in the Ukraine. We’re about to be examined by a political body. When a political body is convened, it has to satisfy political appetites. How to do that and do minimum damage to the country is something I-can’t-write-a-directive-about. For one thing I am expressly forbidden to do so. For another, each of us has slightly different responsibilities and, predictably, a different way of explaining them to anybody who asks us to explain them.

  “And, finally”—he walked away from his desk—“I am not going to suggest to anybody, let alone order him, to say something that will cause him to end up spending five years in jail as a reward for risking his life for his country.”

  He paused; distracted a moment ago, he now looked wizened, and cynical.

  “There’s no feeling anymore for the kind of thing we’re doing, and there’s no way, overnight, to stimulate that kind of feeling. I sometimes feel if the Washington Post’s next edition revealed that at midnight I called the President and tipped him off that the entire firststrike resources of the Soviet Union were programmed to launch against us at 6 A.M., and the President persuaded Brezhnev against it after three hot hours on the hotline, the investigative reporter would give it out that the Agency had nearly triggered a nuclear war. Go away … by God, I’ll be interested in how you handle them. I’ll have the advantage of reading your transcript. Probably you’ll never see mine. I don’t know whether things will ever be the same after the hearings. Maybe we can use our remaining contact in Turkey and get jobs as eunuchs in the baths the congressmen patronize on counterpart funds.… Say, I wonder where I got that information. Take a note. Find out the name of the agent who gave me that information, and fire him. No, better still …” The director was now playing Ronald Colman, and flicked his fingers as if discarding an ash from a cigarette holder. “Better still, get rid of him.” But he permitted himself a smile as he shot out his trigger finger to the door, which was the director’s way of saying, “Out”—to which there was no known demurral.

  After saying good night, his guests walked down the stre
et toward Anthony’s car. Singer said, “You know, I don’t have any idea what he’s going to do. I mean, I just can’t guess what he’s going to do. If they set aside a whole week for him, they’ve obviously decided to go over his entire period of service, to find out what one man, beginning at the bottom, and going up just about all the way, actually did.”

  Anthony Trust said, “They’ve picked on a man who got off to one hell of a start.”

  There was no comment. Harman, for one, knew nothing about the first assignment. Anthony knew more than he let on, but he didn’t know it all, by any means. And it would greatly have surprised Singer Callaway to discover that not even he, who had been intimately involved in the operation, knew exactly how far the young man had got in, in the course of saving the Queen.

  One

  Blackford Oakes was a good listener, but he had also developed skills at guiding any conversation in the direction he wanted to take it, including termination. Still, despite almost four years of practice with John Liebman, the skill tonight was offset by his roommate’s lamentable condition: Though only 10:30, Johnny was quite drunk, and quite determined to tell Blacky in very considerable detail why, after all, he had decided not to marry Joan, the sufficient explanation of which Blackford knew but was careful not to reveal, namely Joan’s antecedent decision not to marry John. Then Johnny, opening the window to reach for another can of beer sitting on the sill overlooking Davenport College Courtyard, discovered with horror that there were none left; and reaching into the cigarette box to dampen his frustration, discovered that he had simultaneously run out of cigarettes.

  He turned to Blackford. “You and your goddamn … continence. I guess after graduation you’ll go into training for the Graduate Engineering School lacrosse team and inflict on the next guy the necessity to go out into the wild night, in search of a normal room, with normal people, and normal supplies of the normal vices of this world.”

  Johnny got orotund when he was tight, and Blackford smiled at the familiar chiding, but, mostly, at the prospect of Johnny’s going out. It was safe to assume, in his present condition, that he’d be gone at least a couple of hours, and that would give Blackford the time to open and study the sealed envelope passed to him that afternoon by the assistant registrar, after receiving in the morning mail the unheard-of summons Please report Wednesday, March 14, at 4 P.M. (At Yale, mere registrars don’t summon students thus peremptorily.) Out of sheer curiosity, Blackford had complied with the summons, rather than ignore it and wait for a conciliatory telephone call. Freshly returned from the war four years earlier, before Yale’s bureaucracy became adjusted to dealing with war veterans, he once had been summoned—by the engineering dean himself—for missing a morning class. Engineering students were allowed no cuts. He appeared before the huge apple-cheeked, egg-bald bachelor who was rumored not to have left the Yale campus in forty years, except to take the baths in Germany during the summer.

  “Mr. Oakes, why did you miss your chemistry class last Tuesday?”

  “Diarrhea, sir,” Oakes replied, with great gravity. Even as he said it, he winced at the memory of Greyburn College, where he had tested the limits of insolence as a fifteen-year-old, and lost, very heavily. But he was twenty-one now, a freshman, a war veteran, something, in fact, of a minor ace, and in an instant, he knew he would win this one. The dean paused just long enough to divulge, helplessly, his despair at framing an appropriate reply. He mumbled something about the necessity for maintaining rigid attendance records in the engineering school, and Oakes left, and cut as many classes thereafter as he was in the mood to do, without ever laying eyes again on the dean, except when the vast old man led the academic parades, carrying the huge mace, and looking neither to the right nor to the left, nor ever, under any circumstances, in the direction of Blackford Oakes, 1951.

  Now, at the registrar’s, he was put through to the assistant who had summoned him. Blackford was given a large envelope, with instructions to open it there and then. Inside was a typewritten note, attached by paper clip to a second, bulky envelope. The note said: The person who has handed you this package is cleared. The attached envelope is to be opened when there is no possibility of your being seen or interrupted. Take the note you are now reading, detach it from the envelope, and return it to the person who gave you the package. Further instructions will be given to you in due course.” Blackford looked up at the registrar’s assistant, a freckled man in his thirties, probably a failed graduate student who had eased into the educational bureaucracy and had acquired one of those special clearances Anthony had told him about. There was nothing more to say, so he returned the note folded, thinking to himself that he was off to a good start by folding it so as to conceal the printed matter.

  “Thanks,” he said, and walked out past the secretary, and the four bookkeepers. He wondered vaguely which of them had written on his March bill: “Mr. Oakes: Your account is three months past due.” His stepfather paid all Blackford’s bills promptly, once they were ninety days overdue. Sometimes, when he wanted a bill paid on time (his stepfather gave him fifty dollars a month and paid all his bills unflinchingly), he would type or write in disguised hand over the face of the bill: PLEASE REMIT. NINETY DAYS OVERDUE. He mentioned this to Anthony Trust, at one of their frequent meetings in New York, and was faintly surprised to hear Anthony, so urbane in all matters, say, “Avoid petty deceptions.” To which Blackford had answered, “Avoid saying ‘Avoid’ anything,” and Anthony flashed that total smile, so specially appealing for its rarity.

  “When I ran out of money at Yale”—Trust had graduated a year earlier—“I bought a stamp: DECEASED. RETURN TO SENDER. It obviously didn’t work at places like Mory’s, where they would see me night after night—for them it was just a post office error. But it did work with lots of odd-lot accounts. Yet you see, Black, that was a major deception, and that’s all right. And besides,” he said, “when I get money”—this euphemism was standard for “when my mother dies”—“I’ll pay everyone back through a lawyer who will announce that young Trust, who died while a student at Yale, is the posthumous beneficiary of a legacy, part of which has been reserved for paying bills outstanding at the time of his death.”

  Anthony Trust was Blackford’s oldest friend. Blackford recognized that chronological seniority is an unreliable fix on friendship. He was surrounded by classmates who were fonder of classmates they had not known longer than a few months or years than they were of their own brothers or sisters, or of friends they had come upon as classmates at kindergarten, or grammar school, or high school. There is no correspondence between length of service as friend and intensity of friendship. But there with Anthony, the friendship had been both of long standing and of intensity. They had met as schoolboys during a period, in England, that had a gruesome climax. But that climax, although no doubt it annealed their friendship, did not bring it about. Black found himself situated to recognize, in Anthony, a quality he did not describe. But once or twice, in free-wheeling conversations with Sally, he ventured to say that, when all was said and done, there were those students at Yale who cared primarily about themselves, even if you interpreted this widely enough to include girls, grades, dogs, wives, children natural and unnatural, and dependent grandmothers—the whole lot. And others, who—somehow—felt, as automatically as anyone starting a long motor trip would feel the necessity to check the fuel gauge, the necessity to meditate regularly on the human condition. Anthony did this in a most natural way—rather like St. Theresa, with her worldly, workaday concern for the comfort of the sick sow and the dangers to the immortal soul of the King of Spain. (“Black! How dare you come out in favor of the Mundt-Nixon Act without asking yourself what its likely consequences are for lambs in the State Department who have strayed?”) Anthony, for one thing, though formal of speech, was incapable of pomposity. Besides, he cared more about effective relief for those who suffered than about bombastic relief for those who formed committees. Often, the main purpose of “humanitarian” groups wa
s to relieve themselves of effective concern for those who suffered. Anthony shrank from any form of reductionism: If you made the mistake, after the sixth beer at Mory’s, of asking him to identify the principal source of evil in the modern world, he would pretend he didn’t understand you. He disliked theoretical formulations. But, increasingly, those who knew him came to know what it was that principally horrified him. He said to Black, late one night at a beer joint on Park Street, “After Hitler, and Stalin, you had to say to yourself: Things have got to get better.”

  Trust influenced Blackford—more than that, had something of a hold on him—from the time they were at school together in England just before the war, and Trust was in the fifth form and Blackford a callow third-former. And now Trust had talked him into chucking plans for graduate school and, instead, applying for an altogether different line of work. Blackford’s reasoning, at first, had been straightforwardly self-serving: The Korean War was beginning to go badly, he had received a note instructing him not to leave the country, his reserve unit was on stand-by notice. Unless he entered the FBI or a paramilitary research institute, or developed a sudden, gratifying disability, he might very well go from graduation to a quick refresher course in the latest fighter planes, with which he was dangerously current, having spent a month last summer mastering the new jet, and from there to Korea.

  “Korea!” Trust said. “You thought France was a dull place to return to after a mission.” Blackford had arrived in France in December 1944, fought several rather spectacular missions (he contacted, and destroyed, three Kraut ME109s) out of Rheims, contracted, and did not defeat, hepatitis in January, and celebrated V-E Day at the hospital in Maxwell Field.

  “I have been to Korea,” said Anthony. “Unlike MacArthur, I shall not return.”

  Blackford knew that of course Anthony would return, if told to do so. Either that, or he would quit. But he would not be likely to quit, at such a time, an organization he was selling to Blackford, even if he stressed, in their early conversations, only the advantages of the CIA over the United States Air Force in Korea. Blackford sensed the other factor on the following Saturday. They had been ushers at a wedding and were driving together to New York with that bleary after-party feeling that makes ritual conversation unbearably irrelevant, inducing great bouts of deep-talk. Soon he realized that Anthony felt himself a member of a brotherhood. His distinctive individualism had been already conspicuous at seventeen, at Greyburn College: Though a prefect, Anthony was never a member of the prefecture. In the naval air force, he would contrive to go to a movie whenever there was a squadron social function, or a threat of one. At Yale he was asked to join, and declined: a fraternity, an honor society, a secret society, and a literary society. His only apparent extracurricular involvements were an occasional letter to the Yale Daily News, acerbic, polished, and conclusive in the sense of unfailingly suggesting that any contrary opinion should not presume to expect from him any rebuttal, and membership in the Political Union and debating team, whose meetings he generally missed. But in those letters there was a strain of idealism. He did not believe in cheating, which wasn’t that unusual; but it was awfully unusual to say so, in public: and rarer still to combine moralism with a debonair style. He thought the coup in Czechoslovakia the most devastating development in European history since Hitler’s march on the Sudeten-land, and he was savage in his destruction of the local fellow traveler in the History Department who had dismissed it at a college forum as a natural pre-emptive Soviet maneuver against a fascist resurgence. The candidacy of Henry Wallace aroused his supreme scorn, and he actually tabulated the Communist fronts to which Wallace’s most conspicuous backers had belonged, and on one occasion even defended, at a formal debate, the proposition: “Resolved, fellow travelers are worse than the real thing and should go to jail until they are old and gray.” Sarah Lawrence won, defending the negative, and everyone cheered, and Anthony remained unimpressed. Although he was studying as an exchange student at Oxford when the Wallace movement realized its fiasco in November, he was amused by the virtually unanimous pleasure that defeat had given to campus spokesmen for liberalism—Blackford had sent him a copy of the Yale Daily News. “They caught up with me,” he told Black.