From that point on, it was conventional—convivial, really, because the two men had without any sense of strain evolved a most cordial relationship over the years. Robinson, moreover, felt under no time pressure, having satisfied himself respecting security. So Boris gave him a leisurely account, suitably bowdlerized, of his trip to Moscow, and stressed and restressed the anxiety felt there (Boris used Stalin’s name as infrequently as possible when talking to Robinson—it was, wherever possible, “Moscow”) on the matter of the hydrogen bomb.
“You have been very ingenious, Robinson, in the matter of getting information useful for world peace and the socialist cause, but—”
Robinson interrupted him.
“Boris, old boy, I have told you before. I am entirely committed to the grand historical purposes of our cause, but (a) I despise, as you know, your leader Stalin, though I recognize his strengths and his usefulness; and (b) I find the repetition of the cant phrases of communism altogether depressing. I recognize that they are necessary, even as the Baltimore Catechism is necessary, but I would not expect in a serious conversation with a cardinal about great affairs that he would punctuate his message with bits and pieces of Christian doxology. You may proceed, Boris.”
Boris recomposed himself and told Robinson, frankly, that Boris had to come up with more information and that the focus of Stalin’s—or, rather, Moscow’s—concern, was the hydrogen bomb.
“I’ve given you a great deal on the subject already.”
“I know, I know. But we must have more, a great deal more. I need, Robinson, to pass a few pages of paper to you. If it is agreeable, when you leave I’ll have the corner of my envelope jutting out, and you can pick it up and pocket it. It is the result of many hours spent with Sakharov and contains the specific questions for which they do not have the answers. These may or may not be too difficult for your understanding. But they are not too difficult for the understanding of your contact or contacts who are getting their information, presumably, from America.”
“Boris, I have asked you not to speculate about my sources.”
“I’m sorry, Robinson. I really wasn’t doing that. I mean, I wasn’t intending to do that. I say only that the pieces of paper I hand you won’t, maybe, be intelligible to you—that’s all.”
“I shall worry about that, Boris.”
Boris found himself wondering, as he had before, several times, whether Robinson was himself an atomic scientist. But he thought it unlikely: Robinson’s language was too casual, too makeshift, when passing along to Boris technical information he certainly must have picked up from someone else. Boris was permitted to take notes on what Robinson told him, but, however poetic the formulas sounded on reaching Moscow, they never sounded, from Robinson’s lips, quite like a poem of his own devising.
“On the other hand, the second sheaf of papers I will be giving to you are easily understandable. They aren’t scientific in any difficult way, Robinson. These are very practical questions. The eternal question—about when the first test will be made. Questions about when, assuming the test is successful, production will begin. Questions about the weight of the prototype bomb. About the weight of the production bombs. The kilotonnage—that is the kind of thing.”
Robinson already guessed that Boris was quoting his superior. Boris’s superior … Robinson knew it could not, under the circumstances, be anybody less than the director of the NKVD. He had allowed himself to wonder, when he began passing along secrets of the first magnitude of importance, whether Boris might be reporting directly to the odious Stalin himself, but the reservation was theoretical. When James Peregrine Kirk decided to follow the course he did, he consciously determined to discount these factors, even as Miss Oyen had done, so that his personal loathing of Stalin proved much less an inhibition than—he comforted himself—it had proved to Churchill and Roosevelt, both bourgeois, in their dealings with Stalin during the war.
“Now, Robinson, I cannot begin to tell you how these matters press. Obviously you must not endanger your contacts. But you must not permit them to adopt a … bourgeois’s timetable. The socialist response to the challenge of the warmongers requires that we have the hydrogen bomb within months—not years—of the development by the imperialists.”
“There, there, Boris,” Robinson said. “I can imagine the pressures you are under. And I will do what I can. And Boris, just as I don’t like you to repeat things unnecessarily, I don’t like to repeat things. But I am going to tell you this again, and probably I’ll tell it to you again in six months or so, and six months after that. If I have so much as a suspicion that an effort is being made to fix my identity; I will do two things. One, I will disappear, as far as you and your principals are concerned, from the face of the earth. And two, an anonymous but highly detailed letter will find its way to the NKVD chronicling our relationship and suggesting that I have grounds for believing that you are a double agent, and that it was for this reason that I finally suspended my meetings with you. I have kept back one or two secrets—not of great objective importance, but the kind of thing Comrade Stalin, pausing from his preoccupation with the historical tides of socialism, likes very much to see—dirty, personal stuff, for instance—which I shall report having passed along to you, along with a professed concern that these critical insights into the minds of Western leaders in fact had gone no further … that kind of thing.
“Now, Boris, I have become very fond of you, but although Marx and Lenin did not devote much of their theoretical attention to the abstract need for individual survival by those who help history along toward its final resolution, these are problems that necessarily engage the individual attention, and, no doubt, have individually absorbed your attention. I would not blame you. Indeed, if I were in your shoes, I do not know how I would operate, feeling the insecurity you necessarily feel as an agent not only of a grand historical enterprise, but also, coextensively, of Joseph Stalin.”
“Ah, Robinson, how well I understand you. But how poorly you understand poor me. I did not intend to tell you, but it is true in Moscow they asked me to take, ah, steps, to establish your identity. My reply was: Only if I am ordered over my written protests. Ilyich instantly capitulated. Your anonymity is, in fact, the most valuable possession of mine. I would never seek to penetrate it. And it is impenetrable except through me. I assume, always, that you operate only through me.…”
“Your assumption is correct, Boris. And I understand that we have personal interests in common. But you must also understand that from time to time I shall require confirmation that the information I go to such pains to provide you is making its way quickly to the intended source. So far I am satisfied that it is; so the arrangement is sound, and will continue.
“Now, as regards the questions you ask. I shall, as usual, be in touch with you when I have something useful to communicate. In the meantime, let me give you this casual political impression. The leadership of the Labour party in England is increasingly in the hands of the anti-Communists. One or two of them—Herbert Morrison is one—have been apprised of the Prime Minister’s surreptitious promises to Harry Truman respecting the use of the atomic bomb to enforce any settlement in Korea. I know that you have been agitating for a mass-member peace party and that the idea of such a thing caused certain popular commotion. But you must not count on it to effect anything more than a very minor influence on the Labour party. So do not report to Moscow that you can count on significant parliamentary strength in England. Not yet. Later. It will come some time after you have developed the hydrogen bomb, my dear Boris; and maybe even some time after you have developed a missile for delivering it. And probably it will have to await the eventual collapse of the Amercian will, than which there is nothing I nor Marx count on more confidently. But although that is sure to happen, its happening is not a vulgar correlation of the development of the hydrogen bomb, a point, Boris, I would not expect you to try to explain to Ilyich, let alone to the great Stalin.”
“Thank you, Robinson.
” Boris always retreated, under this kind of vernacular ideological pressure, to familiarity. Poor Boris, Robinson thought; and to think I am helping his oppressors. But they are right—eternally right—
“—I shall pass along your advice, and we will, all of us who desire a great new world, count on you.”
Robinson despaired of attempting any further refinements. And anyway, he thought, maybe Boris already understands—completely.
So Robinson pronounced, in public-schoolboy accents, “Ego te absolvo, Tovarich Boris, and say a good act of contrition.”
He slipped out of the confessional after parting the curtain, cautiously to survey the surrounding area of the church. As he slid by Boris’s compartment, he took the envelope, whose tip barely projected, pocketed it, left by the side door of the church, looked at his watch, walked down Brompton Road across to Harrods, took the elevator up to the shirt department, asked by name fot a salesman with whom he talked about the necessity of a strategic plan for replenishing his supply of French silk shirts, which were only now, ever so slowly, making their way back to the English market, after the endless period during which they were available only in America, and other porcine countries that had accumulated by military and geopolitical opportunism their squalid surplus of the world’s hard currency. Robinson resented the little indignity, even as, after his occasional rendezvous at the Bag of Nails, he resented it that he was expected to leave his little tart, as a tip, a gen-nyu-ine United States five-dollar bill.
Twelve
Late on Tuesday afternoon, having spent three endless days with Rufus probing explosive mysteries he had barely touched on in his theoretical work at Yale, and committing to memory abstruse formulations at a speed that astonished his tutor, Blackford felt tired, restless, and vaguely apprehensive. He wrote a long letter to Sally, full, he thought to himself as he read it, of crap. His letters to her, however keenly he missed her, were becoming inexorably wooden, so that when he finished he was even more restless. The telephone rang. It was his father—jovial as ever, but this time with a little less of the rodomontade, a great deal more of the furtive purpose and quiet authority Blackford had associated with his father many years ago, when there was the Hero, and the Son, and nothing very complicated in between.
The news was good! All good! Tom Oakes was so awfully sorry he had not been in touch with Blacky for so many months but he hoped Black had received his telegram on his commencement from Yale. (Black hadn’t.) He had been traveling, mostly in the Far East, and now he was making a tour of European capitals. He had become the senior salesman and exhibitor for the new Sabre F-86 fighter—“the most magnificent fighting plane in the world, believe me, Blacky, and I don’t care what the British say about their Hunter IV. I’ve been taking up sixty-five-year-old generals and twenty-one-year-old kids and putting it through its paces, and letting them handle the controls. They are smitten by it, they swear by it, they want to make love to it!…”
They met for dinner, the father, from some access of undisclosed insight, having specified the Connaught. He asked about Blackford’s mother and was pleased to learn what he obviously knew, that she was happy.
“She would never have got that dowdy kind of life with me, but that’s what she wanted. I’ve been seeing a very nice girl in Baywater, Long Island, Blacky, not far from the Sabre people. A war widow with a grown-up daughter who is married to a Sabre engineer, and we plan to marry this spring—if I am one half as successful as I think I will be!” He pulled his chair closer to his son’s, waving away the waiter who had brought an assortment of pastries—he took it for granted that his splendidly proportioned son routinely turned away the pastry dish.
“I’m operating now on a guarantee—twenty thousand dollars, plus a commission of twenty-five thousand per airplane, diminishing in five-thousand-dollar leaps to five thousand, minimum, per plane. I could sell five planes in Paris on Tuesday. And I’m going from there to Rome, Oslo, Copenhagen, and then all through Latin America. The English, of course, are dogging me, and everywhere I show up, their people are there in five minutes pushing the Hunter and asking for a mano a mano, theirs against ours, and I’m disposed to okay it—for next Monday—if I can persuade the home office we’d come out of it the winner.” Tom Oakes lifted his wineglass to his incumbent mistress, with whom, for all his talk of the alluring, expectant widow in Long Island, he was utterly engrossed. But right now, he sat happily at the Connaught, his wallet easily capable of paying the expensive bill for the dinner of a son he had so frequently neglected as, for so long, he had neglected his son’s mother. The hell with it, his mistakes were in the past. He looked proudly across the table at a creation for which—he often thought of his hero Lindbergh’s persistent interest in genetics—he, Tom Oakes, was at least one-half biologically responsible. A fierce love for his son seized him, and hoping that he wasn’t just going through the usual, sentimental routine, which he had heard so often at the bar from the middle-aged fly-boys—awful fathers, but usually, after a while, contritely awful fathers—he thought: I would do anything for Blacky. A thought germinated in his mind.
“I’m confident of my model, though the Hunter does have a couple of special features. But here is my surprise for you, Blacky. Tomorrow, I’ll take you up in the Sabre and you will fly it. After all, you were a certified ace on the previous model. You haven’t forgotten how, have you?” Tom Oakes laughed, as if he had asked his son whether he had forgotten how to read.
“Dad, I haven’t flown a jet fighter since the summer before last in the reserve. I’d love to try this new one. Where do we go, and at what time?”
“Eleven o’clock, Northolt Air Force Base—that’s fifteen miles west of London. Go out on Western Avenue. Go to the tower building and ask for your old man. You’re in for a ride I think will surprise even you.” Tom Oakes had become accustomed to his son’s blasé acceptance of geewhiz experiences, and had never accompanied him to the Café Tipperary.
Blackford made a quick calculation. “Dad, I’ll have to leave the base not a minute later than three forty-five.”
“Why?” his father asked, clearly crestfallen. He had imagined the entire day with his son.
“I’d change it if I possibly could. But you know I’m here on this foundation project involving a study of engineering techniques. Through a contact, I was able to arrange to examine the library at Windsor Castle, which is the repository of all the old and modern sketches for the famous British buildings, cathedrals, bridges, that sort of thing. The keeper is laid on to begin looking after me at five P.M., and will stay with me through the early evening, and again the next two days. I’m afraid I just can’t budge it. But you’ll be back in London before going to Latin America? And if the Monday contest goes through, you’d be back for that, wouldn’t you?”
“Back for that! I’d probably fly the plane. But if I didn’t, I’d be hustling for it with the brass. Whatever happens, Blacky,” his father said softly, “I wouldn’t leave Europe without seeing you again.”
He became more matter-of-fact. “I’m going to leave two Sabrejets at Northolt Base, so that the English aviators can fly them—and weep. We’ll leave a couple of American pilots to stand by to take up prospective purchasers. The third plane, I’ll fly over myself, with a copilot, to Paris on Thursday. Maybe I’ll just go on over late tomorrow afternoon, since you’re going to be tied up.”
They had a good evening, and Black found his father depending less, than on previous occasions, on booze for animation. But Black also acknowledged—his objectivity seldom deserted him—that, undoubtedly, he had himself become easier to talk to as he drew away, with apparent success, from the adolescence his father (let alone the faculty at Greyburn) had had such great difficulty in handling. His father, who retained his leathery good looks and happy-go-lucky smile, recalled, with lascivious pleasure, the hours they had spent together, flying every kind of airplane, to the desperation of his mother.
“Do you realize you weren’t seven years old
when you took the controls of a plane, and that you made your first solo landing at ten? I remember when we arrived home and told your mother you had landed in an airplane by yourself, and she shut the door in our faces and wouldn’t speak to me for a week! I told Charlie Lindbergh that story, and he said he had the identical experience when he taught Jon to fly. I remember the letter you wrote me after your first week as a flying cadet. The idea that any army instructors could teach Tom Oakes’s son how to fly!”
“I didn’t get all that much combat flying done in the war, Dad.”
“Whoever said aces can’t be grounded by hepatitis? You shot down three planes in three missions. The Germans were just lucky hepatitis was on their side.”
Tom Oakes called for the bill and paid it, leaving a generous, though not exorbitant, tip.
“Oh, Blacky, I have a delayed commencement present for you. I didn’t know what to buy you, because I never know what your mother or … Mr. Sharkey … is giving you, so I thought the thing to do was to let you decide. I’ve been saving this from my first big pay check three months ago, and I am really happy for you to have it.”
Saving the Queen Page 18