Saving the Queen

by William F. Buckley

  Blackford tore open the envelope. He fingered then the longest form he had ever seen. Forty pages. Leafing through it, he realized it would take him a full dull day’s work to complete. The questions were of a dogged thoroughness that made the comprehensive form for flight school in 1943 look like a driver’s license application.

  Blackford was methodical, and neatly put away in a file case a foot from his typewriter, all the necessary autobiographical documents reposed: birth certificate, draft card, discharge papers, curriculum and grades dating back to early childhood. He had neatly recorded the date of his mother’s birth in Buffalo, and of his father’s in Akron, and even the basic figures on his stepfather. He could see that he would have to explain in some detail the reason he spent the night in jail in Cambridge, but he thought the circumstances innocent enough—or was the CIA made up only of people who never attended a bachelor party? He had never belonged to any political organization of any sort, though he would certainly have joined America First if they had accepted fourteen-year-olds; and other than the air force reserve, there was only the fraternity at Yale, and the senior society, in response to any mention of which, he smiled, he would dutifully leave the room, as tradition prescribed. He knew how many countries he had visited, how long he had spent there, even if some of these countries he could not remember—he had been too young. Anyway, his father junketing about the world to exhibit and sell airplanes, it was natural, until the divorce, that Black should have jogged about with the family. He knew exactly whose names to give as references, though he would not give the name of Dr. Chase at Greyburn or of Mr. Simon, but—yes, he would give the name of Mr. Long, the athletic director, with whom, in the last ten years, he had exchanged discreetly worded Christmas cards. Filling out the form would be an ordeal, but Blackford had an engineer’s aptitude for recognizing the necessity of painstaking detail: All progress, someone had written, is made by the taking of careful measurements. He realized about himself that he could become an accountant without any great strain on his spirit—provided, of course, there was plenty of after-hours activity.

  Within three days he managed to complete the form by carefully synchronizing his work on it with Johnny’s frequent absences from their little suite, and then he stuffed it into the envelope (plain) addressed to someone he had never heard of, in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

  Two months later he became anxious and called Anthony, who said that there was no way he could help him, that it was altogether possible that he would never officially know whether Black had been accepted: that there was literally nothing to be done, inasmuch as the CIA people already knew from the covering letter that if it didn’t act before the United States Air Force did, they would either lose Blackford to the air force or face the intricate job of extricating him from his unit without, so to speak, anybody noticing. This the CIA knew how to do, but since it was always something of an operation, it was preferable to act quickly, pre-emptively.

  “If they turn me down, how will they do it?” he asked Anthony.

  “You’ll never hear from anybody again.”

  So Blackford completed his application for graduate school rather listlessly; convinced, correctly, that he would never matriculate during this bellicose season—they were eating up fighter pilots in Korea. He felt rather bad about asking the two professors to write long enthusiastic letters of recommendation, but after all he was an honor student, with very high scores on the aptitude tests. Perhaps when it was all over he would go back to engineering. He found it especially vexing that he couldn’t talk to anyone, except Anthony, about the application: The terms were laid out matter-of-factly. Any leak would disqualify him. Conversations with Sally about his future became wooden, and once, late on a Friday afternoon, before he took the seven o’clock train to New York, with Johnny safely departed for Poughkeepsie, she said to him, slouching on the sofa listening to the new phonograph that played 33 rpm, that he was beginning to sound like an Erector Set. On which remark Blackford made a ribald pun, naturally, and Sally, who was nicely spontaneous, eased up her skirt, a bare but unmistakable inch, which was her signal for encouraging his ardor. Even then, blissfully distracted, he found himself wondering, in medias res: Would his future duties require him to … seduce women routinely? He had been reading intensively in the general literature of intelligence and remarked that the old melodramatic idea of the spy whose achievements were done mostly through sexual manipulations and passenger pigeons had gone through a generation’s literary disparagement. The subject came up these days only for the purpose of poking fun at it (“Spy work consists in eight hours a day with a dictionary and a basketful of foreign-language newspapers and magazines available at any cosmopolitan newsstand,” one ex-OSS graduate student had told him). But his blood had quickened when Anthony said one day that that was only largely true, that the other stuff was also true, and that a month didn’t go by that someone, “one of ours, one of theirs,” didn’t get—“eliminated.”

  “Or seduced?” Blackford asked.

  Anthony looked disgusted and changed the subject.

  Blackford had whispered to Sally, audaciously, that she was such an accomplished seductress, “you ought to become a foreign spy.” Sally replied unnervingly, How did he know she wasn’t one?

  “I admit,” she said later, her eyes sparkling, an unlit cigarette in her mouth, “my accent is so American you wouldn’t be expected to guess what my real country is.…”

  He took her cigarette, lit it clumsily, and said in the accents of Humphrey Bogart, “All right, baby. The game’s up. Don’t try anything, because the police are outside.” Then he inhaled deeply, but spoiled the intended effect by coughing convulsively for ten minutes. It was the first ingestion of tobacco smoke since the vow he took along with the freshmen swimmers four years ago, hope-to-die, he said looking the coach in the eye, no cigarettes as long as I swim.

  Later he sat down in the dining car and, textbook in front of him, gave his order—frankfurters and beans. He could not charge this dinner to his stepfather. A flannel-suited type sat down opposite him, and Blackford raised his eyes briefly, hoping it wasn’t a college friend who would interrupt the hour-and-a-half New Haven-New York run he coveted for his book. It was nobody he knew, and in any case the bulky man was obviously as anxious to read his Journal-American as Blackford was to read his book. Neither engaged in any way a third man who was slowly eating his cheese, washing it down with red wine and complaining to the waiter that it had been chilled. After the main course was removed, dessert rejected, the dinner paid for, and the disgruntled cheese-taster finally gone, lecturing the porter on the way out, the flannel man leaned over and passed the sugar, which Blackford had not requested. He said in a quiet monotone:

  “Mr. Oakes, your application has been acted on. We are familiar with your schedule, and you should not have any problem in coming in to see us tomorrow morning at 10:06. Press the button with the name Lawrence Dickering, at 23 West Twenty-fourth Street. You will need to put aside about two hours. You are to advise no one that you have been approached.” He folded his paper, stood up, and said, “Good night.”

  Blackford took the subway and headed straight to Anthony’s apartment.

  “That’s a bit goddamn much! How long have you creeps been following me around? I wasn’t sure what train I’d take till this afternoon. No wonder they’re recruiting all over America. They must need millions of people. Now I know what my job’s going to be—to ride the rails until I see through my special prismatic lenses the invisible ink on somebody’s lapel, and sit down and tell him to go to 23 West Twenty-fourth Street and ring old Larry Dicky’s number, so that we can get one more guy to ride another railroad and keep Dicky—”

  “Dickering.”

  Black paused. “How did you know?”

  “Forget it,” said Anthony. “Remember, other people’s rituals always seem strange. We’ll talk about it later, a lot later, and you can tell me then what happens and how you would run things if you were
head of CIA.” He rose and left, saying good night mechanically. Though the door to the hallway stayed open, and the elevator took a full minute to come, he said nothing else, nor did Anthony.

  Blackford walked to the party, a dozen blocks away, down Park Avenue in waning June light, the spring song of the trapped little islands soothing his spirits. He passed the Soviet legation on Sixty-seventh Street, and stopped. As he looked through the iron rails into the courtyard, he thought of the time, three years before, when a Soviet schoolteacher had landed there after leaping. He looked up at the great vertical distance between the stories of the old mansion—to the third floor, where she had been detained. The police and ambulance arrived and she protested her imminent deportation to Russia, where, she said, she was destined for liquidation because she had inadvertently revealed her disillusionment with communism to her boyfriend, who turned out to be an MGB agent. Moments after arriving at the hospital, Soviet musclemen materialized, guarding her room. The Soviet ambassador announced flatly to the press that Madame Kosenkina would fly to Moscow immediately on being released from the hospital, that she was a Soviet civil servant whose behavior was none of America’s business. An ingenious New York attorney woke up a judge and got a court order giving her a habeas corpus authority over her own movements, and she limped out of the hospital, under the glare of her immobilized captors, to an undisclosed haven causing, it was somewhere reported, a splendid storm of outrage late at night when the news was timidly given to Stalin himself. Blackford wondered if the CIA had been involved in any way. Then a policeman approached him. “You’ll have to move on. No loitering here.”

  Blackford did as he was told, but—the habit was ingrained in him—only after that slight hesitation that causes doubt, and not a little apprehension. The policeman was relieved when the young man suddenly strode off, because his build, though slim, was pronouncedly athletic, and deep in his eyes there was an anarchic stubbornness, which policemen detailed to guarding the Soviet legation were experienced enough to spot, and, as necessary, make provision for.

  Two

  He had intended to ask Anthony whether “10:06” was an affectation, but forgot, and accordingly took pains to be punctual. This required him, it being Saturday and the subways uncrowded, to walk at an exaggeratedly slow speed, having arrived at the Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue subway station at 9:48 (the last thing he did before bunking down at Aunt Alice’s apartment was dial ME 7-1212 and set his watch exactly). There was a newsstand on the corner and he lingered there, wondering whether, in the CIA, they teach you the art of lingering unself-consciously. He remembered the story his father had told him when he was a little boy about the old man with the beard who was asked one day did he go to sleep with the beard under the covers or outside them, and the man said, You know, I don’t remember, and that night he tried it first with his beard under, then over the covers, couldn’t sleep, and in due course died of fatigue. (How Blackford had mused on that!) It occurred to him now that all his life he had loitered at book shops and newsstands without the least self-consciousness, but now he was absolutely convinced he was being watched, and accordingly he couldn’t finger a newspaper or a pocketbook or a magazine casually, though he amused himself by thinking that maybe if old Dickering was watching him through his window with binoculars, Blackford should ostentatiously pick up a newspaper and read it upside down.

  Why did his heart begin to beat, and his mouth dry up? I am twenty-five years old, a week away from a magna cum laude degree at Yale University, I shot down planes in combat in a world war, I have faced down deans and generals and brothelkeepers, and I am suddenly nervous at meeting a GS-14 in a New York apartment.…

  He put down the newspaper, buttoned the bottom of his seersucker jacket, and strode purposefully to the door he had already, by a process of side-wise visual elimination, calculated as, necessarily, being No. 23. There were eight buttons to choose from in the dingy exterior. Dickering’s was First Floor, Rear. He pushed the bell and, as he did so, looked at his watch and cursed himself. Only 10:05. The buzzer sounded, and he pushed open the door and walked through the dark corridor with the old linoleum on the floor toward a green door. Well below Blackford’s eye level was a card, LAWRENCE DICKERING. He looked for a bell but there wasn’t any, so he knocked, and Anthony Trust opened the door.

  Blackford was at once relieved, intrigued, and enraged. He said nothing as he walked into a room with two armchairs and a sofa, a desk of sorts, and a fireplace that probably hadn’t been used in years. The walls were papered, and two or three prints of Olde New York hung haphazardly, here and there. There was a coffee table, with the morning’s New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and a large bookcase, with books but no book jackets, as though they had been accumulated over a number of years, none of them recent. The door leading presumably to a bedroom was closed. On the floor the carpet was brown, and old.

  Blackford sat down on one of the armchairs.

  Trust stayed standing, and began to pace up and down the room. A minute or two passed.

  “This wasn’t my idea,” he said; and, after another pause, “But I suppose it’s not such a bad idea. But I didn’t volunteer.”

  Blackford remained silent.

  “Blacky, this is going to take time, and only part of it is my fault. Look. In the Company—the CIA—there are lots of categories and distinctions. One of them is between the deep-cover agent and the agent who is—well—something else. The decision was made in your case—don’t ask me why—to accept your application and to train you as a deep-cover agent. Now this means a lot of funny things happen to you, like the business last night on the goddamn train. He knows who you are for the simple reason that he was the principal leg man checking out your background. He knows everything about you—well, he doesn’t know the Greyburn bit; but he even poked around Cambridge and checked out the drunk charge at Bailey’s wedding.

  “Now”—Trust had obviously done this before, and Blackford wondered how many times—“get a load of this. He knows you’re headed into the Company; I obviously know it; but apart from the two of us, there is exactly one other human being who knows it. A committee of men know you exist, in the sense that they know the qualifications of a certain applicant. But before they went over these qualifications, all identifying figures were removed or disguised. They decided to take on, as a covert agent, a young guy, freshly out of college, competent in French, highly skilled in engineering and theoretical physics, with a mother living in London, with her well-connected and prosperous husband, a British businessman. Subject’s father is a sort of commercial gypsy fly-boy genius in the airplane brokerage racket. Subject is well regarded by faculty and students, is healthy and smart, physically attractive, indeed is known to have been irresistible to several ladies, was an officer and an ace during the war, is said to be well adjusted, tenacious, and coolheaded, and—forgive me this, Black—fond of his country and of its liberal institutions.

  “They know you as Geoffrey T. Truax. By the way, Black, you may as well commit that to memory, since that is now your ‘name.’ You’ll be assigned under that name to some mission, nature undisclosed and, for all I know, unformulated. This much I have been told: that you will be sent to England. Deep-cover agents need above all things a convincing cover. A mother who lives in London is considered good natural cover. You haven’t really visited with your mother much since the war. It’s natural you should join her, and since your stepfather is both wealthy and an architect, it makes sense that he should vaguely welcome you to England for a year or so, maybe to see whether a young Yale-trained engineer could make out in London. Details to be worked out.