Blackford’s face expressed his exasperation.
“Listen, Rufus, this girl is tough, and she believes in me. She’s not going to lead me to the slaughter.”
“Correction. She’s not going to lead you willingly to the slaughter. What restaurant did she propose?”
“Chez Anna near Palais de Chaillot. What do you propose?”
“Simple. Write a note”—he handed a piece of paper to him, leaned back, and began dictating as if to his secretary. “‘Dear Frieda: For purposes of security I have reason to believe we should meet at another restaurant. The name and address of it are sealed in the enclosed envelope. Don’t open it until you get into a taxi. I’ll be waiting for you.” Inside the second envelope write down, ‘Voltaire, 27 Quai Voltaire.’ We’ll have the envelope delivered to her at Chez Anna. If she opens the first envelope, takes it with her and leaves the second envelope unopened when she walks out of the restaurant—alone—and if she is not followed, then it is reasonable to assume she is neither actively colluding with someone nor being followed.”
“Who will know?”
“I will,” said Rufus. He yawned. “It occurs to me that right about now, I have absolutely nothing to do until tomorrow. Kapitsa is back with the Soviet delegation, Punky will be leaving here in five minutes, and I don’t mind in the least taking a little exercise myself in the simple disciplines. Good practice. If she opens the second envelope—gives any sign at all of looking into the second envelope, or if she is followed out, or if her cab is followed, I’ll call you at Voltaire’s, and when she arrives, she will find you absent—and safe.”
Blackford smiled. “Okay, Rufus. You really do think of everything.” The admiration was genuine: Here was the great master intelligence strategist, willing to do a gumshoe’s work.… Well, Blackford supposed, Rubinstein probably plays nursery tunes for his grandchildren. He went back to badinage. “Got any ideas what we ought to eat?”
“I have ideas about what you shouldn’t eat, Blackford, but they are old-fashioned and unlikely to appeal to you.”
In the living room, Punky’s tie was on and his seersucker jacket. He carried his overnight bag, and Blackford guessed it would require a professional wrestler to loosen the grip he had on it and its sacred contents.
“So long, y’all. Don’t forget, next time you’re in Cocoa Beach, you look for Punston Hirsch. It’s not in the phone book, but,” he winked, “you can get it either by calling the White House or askin’ any of the girls in town where Punky lives.” He grinned boyishly, shook hands, and walked out. Rufus watched through the window until Punky’s driver pulled away.
“You know something, Rufus? It probably takes somebody who finds 290 miles per hour caterpillar-slow to devise a satellite that will travel at 17,000 miles per hour.”
Rufus signaled to Blackford. “Let’s go. I’ll drop you at Voltaire’s and go on to Chez Anna.”
It was just after 8:30 when Blackford spotted her. He sat in a table in the womb of a concave booth of which there were a half dozen in a row in the slightly shabby Empire-style main dining room. Blackford had been sipping a kir and reading the newspaper, beret and glasses in place, having given a name to the maître d’hôtel in the event of a telephone call. Frieda sat down quickly, before Blackford had time to rise and help her. She wore a simple blouse, starch-white, and a fine gold chain necklace, and around her wrist a knitted cotton bracelet, interweaving the colors of the Hungarian flag. She wore only a trace of lipstick, and her dark eyes were liquid.
Blackford began. “I’m sorry about the precautions. The problem is whether József’s friends are following you.”
“They are not,” she snapped, “but they are anxious to.”
Blackford signaled the waiter, and she asked for a dry vermouth, and “le menu.” Blackford said make that two. “Tell me about it?”
“That afternoon, after we came back, I went first to work—I had called in the morning and said I was sick. After the office closed I couldn’t get József out of my mind, so I went to his apartment and told the landlady—she’s Hungarian, and recognizes me—that József had called me from out of town, and asked me to collect some things. She let me in, and closed the door. The first thing I did was take the picture of Theo out of the frame.” She opened her purse, and brought it out. Blackford winced at seeing a picture of a face he had last seen hanging from a rope and swinging in the cold Budapest wind of November.
“I decided to search the apartment. I found in the drawer of his desk a book, a book of addresses and telephone numbers. I have it here.” She produced it from her purse. “I began leafing through it. I recognized the names of many people we both know. The book dates back to … last fall. Then I looked for the Paris numbers—there weren’t so many of those. There were familiar names, mine, Erno’s, many others. But then there was a number”—she opened the book and held it so that Blackford could see—“that seemed unusual. It’s two numbers, very neat, but opposite no name, in the ‘B’ section. One is a foreign number. The other, a Paris number.
“Well, I have a friend. Her grandparents were Hungarian, and still live there, though Madeleine went to school in Paris, and works for the telephone company. I asked her to find out for me whose telephone it was, and yesterday morning she gave me the answer: It is the private telephone of the military attaché of the Soviet Embassy.”
Blackford whistled. “On the other hand I guess that shouldn’t surprise us.” Frieda had begun to eat her soup, and Blackford ordered some white wine.
“No, not now after what we know now about József. But I conceived a plan, and I have reached a part where I didn’t think I should go on with it without first consulting you.”
Blackford looked at her in a different light. Theophilus had always spoken of her shyly, protectively. That day, at the barn near Fontainebleau, her role had at first been passive, leaving it to the men to do the wrangling. But having made up her mind, it was she who had been the decisive factor. Blackford sensed the alarming possibility of a crossed circuit. He had a score to settle with Bolgin, all right; but he had no desire to distract him from his present preoccupation with Algerian kidnappers.
“Consult me about what you are going to do, or about what you have done?” Blackford asked.
“About what I have done.”
“Oh my God, Frieda,” he said, without volunteering any elucidation.
“Oh my God what? I realize you were the specially selected victim of the operation the other day. But first they took my country, then they hanged my fiancé, then they tortured to death the woman who got me out of the country, and now they tried to use me as a member of an execution squad to assassinate an American who tried to help Theo. And who did help me.” She looked up, and her eyes were full, as she extended her hand to Blackford, grasping it warmly, passionately.
“What have you done?”
“I called the number, and a voice answered. I said: ‘I wish to speak to the military attaché.’ The voice replied, ‘About what?’ I said, ‘About József Nady.’ He said, ‘What about József Nady?’ I said, ‘Do you or do you not wish to have information about him?’ There was a silence, and I could hear that the telephone was being switched off. Then the voice came back, and it was much more pleasant. The man said, ‘Are you where I can call you back?’ I said, ‘No’—and offered no alternative arrangements. I am aware that there are techniques for tracing telephone calls—I was using a public phone, away from my apartment and office. So I said, ‘If you wish to know where you can find József Nady and the American, you will have to follow the instructions I will give you on this telephone.’ He said: ‘When will you call?’ I said, ‘I will call you tomorrow at 10 A.M.’”
“What,” asked Blackford with increasing awe, “do you propose to say tomorrow at 10 A.M. to Colonel Bolgin?”
“Is that his name?”
“Yes,” he said. “Boris Bolgin. He is the top KGB official in Europe. I’ve actually met him. He’s good with the soft exterior, b
ut he’s been trained to do the kind of thing that Stalin approved of. The business last Wednesday shows a certain imagination: stringing me up for betraying Theo—and using Theo’s fiancée as part of the execution squad. Not bad. What do you have in mind to say to him?”
“I don’t know,” she said simply. She dropped her fork on her plate, looked up at him, and smiled with manifest pleasure at her decision: “I shall say to him whatever you like! At one end of the table,” she said matter-of-factly, “we could arrange to kill him. At the very least, we could … well, get you your money back. But it occurred to me that perhaps there was something you might specially want from Bolgin.”
Right, Blackford thought. He would like Bolgin’s balls, just, well … for instance.
Frieda sipped her coffee and downed her liqueur. “I think it would be useful—and amusing—to think about it, and I suggest we do that”—she looked at him now directly in the eye—“at my apartment.” Blackford’s pause was only barely noticeable. “I think,” he said, summoning the waiter, “that we would have privacy there,” and he returned her gaze directly, “to do whatever we want.”
“I am prepared,” she replied quietly, “to do whatever you want.”
“I think,” he said, feeling that tell-tale tightness in his throat, but smiling, “that we should agree to act jointly.”
“In that case,” she said getting up, “we had better begin.”
He came upon a terrible hunger. He had difficulty, in the climax, in holding her firm the more so through his own wild excitement as, in the dim light that perforated her underthings, strewn in her haste over the little bed lamp, he peered into her eyes. She was looking at him now with exhibitionistic passion as her pale, full breasts broke out in splotches of mottled light brown while her thighs gripped him and with her hands she stroked him, with a desperate milking action. Throughout, he gave himself totally, and once, in his writhing imagination, felt himself caught tightly, finally, in her noose, which drew him together suffocating, exhilarating, released only just in time for air; and then renewing its threat, its black, exacting embrace. It was midnight before, tenderly, he relaxed his hands, and bent over her face, to kiss her gently above the always-open eyes, and whisper to her, inquisitively, unchidingly, “Was that me, or Theo?”
“It was you. It was you, acting for myself. And acting also for Theo.”
It had become possible for her to mention Theo other than in tones that required an empathic shudder of deferential solemnity; and Blackford too—for the first time—could think of the young Theo, with the wistful, trusting, beardless, dark-skinned boy face, talking, smiling, with a mug of beer in front of him, blotting out the convulsive, tortured death mask that had planted itself permanently in Blackford’s inventory of nightmares.
She went on. “I should have known. I would have known. We were all three of us together, what, three, maybe four times? After ten minutes with you, I should have known it wasn’t you who betrayed him. Revolutions—counterrevolutions—counter-counterrevolutions—they take away your judgment. We know Theo was not good at seeing through people. How can I say I was any better at it? Both of us believed in József. So did Erno, and the others. But my belief in József was … different.” She lay back on the pillow, talking up at the ceiling. Impatiently she kicked the bed sheet aside, and now their bodies were entirely illuminated by the soft, eccentric light from the bed stand. She continued speaking as he, with his left arm under her neck, used his right hand to stroke her breasts gently. “It was Theo’s purity that made everyone associated with him, by that association, pure. Do you know that—Erno told me this—in Theo’s presence, in the locker room, there were certain stories they just wouldn’t … tell? I mean, stories—you must know—about what so and so did with this girl or that girl the night before? The kind of story Theo wouldn’t ever talk about.… The kind you wouldn’t ever talk about; I expect”—she did not move her head—“that you are … a little that way yourself, Harry.” He found it a strain to be called Harry, a surrealist reminder of realistic vicissitudes—Blackford, shifting the frame of his thought, had a hard time believing the ribald story existed that hadn’t been told in his presence. “Theo was not—as beautiful as you”—she turned, coquettishly, and ran her hand over his profile, slowly, from the top of his head to near his toes—“but he was beautiful all over. He was the best thing in Hungary, and one day there will be a monument in the public square. Do you think so, Harry?”
“I think there ought to be,” said Blackford, though that part of him that was the engineer paused to wonder whether there were enough public squares to commemorate the martyrs of that revolution. Or would the job need to be done collectively? What an awful concession to the Communists. But then they did use up their victims at a rate that made individual commemoration so very difficult. What does one do, when one hears of 15 million prisoners in a slave camp? Perhaps someone, someday, in a great book, would give life to those anonymous victims of ideology and evil. He declined to cop a plea by adding the qualifier, “and insanity.”
Frieda rose, walked with aplomb out of the room, and returned in a few minutes wearing a beige nightgown and carrying a tray. She apologized for her quarters—the bedroom served also as the living room. “Don’t bother with the bed; come, sit here.” She pointed to the armchair alongside her own, with the coffee table between, on which she had set down the wine and glasses. Blackford located his shorts and began to put them on.
“Don’t dress. Come as you are. Isn’t that what you say?” He smiled, walked over, and sat down. She said it first.
“What are we going to do about Bolgin?”
Blackford, accepting the glass and raising it silently to her, said, “We haven’t had time to give it much thought.”
Now Frieda smiled impishly; and sipped the wine lasciviously. “Oh!”
“What’s the matter!”
“I just thought of something!”
“What is it?”—instinctively, Blackford had risen.
“I have some caviar! I’ve had it since my birthday!”
“Your birthday has got to be today, right?”
“Of course!”
It had been a gift from the wealthy godparents of her friend at the telephone company, Hungarian expatriates, and she had thought it too shamefully expensive to consume.
“Harry, you know, the money?”
“Let’s change the subject.”
“I spent half of it. When I needed it desperately. The other half I don’t need. I cashed it this afternoon.” She opened the desk drawer and took out an envelope.
Blackford hesitated, and then took it, tossing the envelope in the general direction of his discarded jacket. “All this and caviar!”
She opened the jar and brought out butter and French bread.
“Listen to me, Frieda,” he said as he applied the caviar with the faded table knife. “Colonel Bolgin, as I’ve told you, is the chief KGB operative in Western Europe. His decision to use, to my terminal disadvantage, the momentum generated by the execution of Theo wasn’t aimed merely at one CIA operative who had been working Budapest. He happens to have some old scores to settle with me, and I guess it’s safe to say that his hostility reflects the … well, consolidated hostility of his service. They have been tracking me—that we know. Otherwise they wouldn’t have known to inform József that I was staying at the France et Choiseul. They had a dragnet out for me, still do. Now I simply don’t know why, other than what I’ve told you—the settling of old scores. But from all of this we can deduce several possibilities. One of them is that by now Bolgin knows either that József is dead, or that he is detained—or that he has defected. József was probably capable of becoming a double agent, of double-crossing the KGB; but not—I’d guess—in your presence, or Erno’s. He would never have acknowledged to you that—hah hah hah—he was actually the guy who hanged Theo. If instead of killing him I had merely overpowered him, and then driven him away in a car … who knows whether money would ha
ve brought him around? We’ll never know.
“Now let’s assume Bolgin deduces the obvious—that something went wrong in Operation Hang Harry. He’s still going to want to know whether József is alive or dead. He’s going to want to know how much if anything he has … spilled.”
“There is a third possibility,” Frieda interrupted.
“What?”
“That somehow you overpowered József from the beginning, in the car.”
“In which case—how did you happen to dial Bolgin’s number directly? How, unless you were suspicious, would you have known to say into the telephone what you did—that if the military attaché was interested in knowing the whereabouts of József Nady, you were in a position to give out that information?”
“All right. I agree. He figures I know what happened. That could mean I know where you are—or that I don’t. You might be dead.”
“Correct. So—stay with me. Bolgin will attempt, over the telephone, to arrange a rendezvous. He would certainly dispatch to that interview a subordinate. The head of KGB-Europe isn’t going to walk into something he hasn’t cased out, something blind. You can also assume that whoever he sends to that meeting will be followed by one or more agents. So from that moment on, they would know (a) exactly who you are; (b) where you live. From that moment on—whatever happened during the interview—you’d be a sitting target on their list.”
“I assume I already am. I attend all the anti-Communist rallies, all the Free Hungary Committee meetings.”
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