Saving the Queen (8 page)

“As I was saying, they have to watch their step in England, and they do. But when they get desperate, they act all the more ruthlessly. We had two men in the field missing this last year, no explanation, no record, no trace. The two had been on the trail of Klaus Fuchs. Both were deep-cover agents with satisfactory and plausible public identifications. We were able to put routine heat on Scotland Yard through the ambassador. The decision hasn't yet been made whether to tip off MI-6. That's one of the questions Dulles and Acheson will have to settle. The circumstances are pretty convincing. The two operatives were bearing down on Fuchs from different directions—they didn't even know about each other. One of them left his flat to go to work on a Monday, at an engineering firm used by the government to check out research done within the secret atom laboratory. He never reached his office. The other worked as an accountant in the firm that handled Fuchs's personal affairs. He got a phone call the following Tuesday and asked permission to take an extra half hour for lunch because he had to make an appointment a few miles away. Exit.”

“Did you try the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool?” Black asked. Almost instantly he regretted doing so. He realized that, for Alistair, and the others—even for Anthony—it wasn't a couple of characters out of E. Phillips Oppenheim who had disappeared, but two men who four months ago, were alive, who might have sat where he was now sitting, listening to Alistair even as Blackford was now doing.

“No comment,” said Alistair. “You will come to know, Mr. Truax, that although what frightens normal people may or may not be something frightful, in this case it is. Because the people we are struggling against take orders from a monster crazed by a frightful system. There are no bearable jokes about Vorkuta, any more than there could be jokes about Anne Frank. A single night, half frozen in a Soviet jail, knowing you probably will never see anybody again you care for, and that nobody knows where you are, or will
ever
know, is enough to change the texture of one's feelings about what this is all about.”

Black knew suddenly that he was talking to someone who had had such an experience. He wished he could ask him about it, but knew he couldn't. Perhaps Anthony would satisfy his curiosity, if Anthony knew Alistair, or about him. Once more he strained at the silence with his colleagues and wished that he had been selected to sit behind a desk, behind a door lettered B
LACKFORD
O
AKES
, E
SQUIRE
, U. S. Representative,
Central Intelligence Agency
. Then it occurred to him that the engineer, and the accountant, must have heartily wished the same thing at that moment in London when, looking up or sideways or down, they suddenly realized that they had come, irreversibly, to the end of the road. He knew now, even from his limited and abstract experience, and his few weeks' training, that almost certainly they had been betrayed. In central London. The heart of civility in the civil world.

He left with his bundle of English papers, and he read solidly into the night, and, before turning off the light, he found himself reading even the Court Circular in the
Times
.

“This afternoon, Her Majesty Queen Caroline graciously received His Excellency Mr. Jonathan Hanks and accepted his credentials as ambassador to the Court of St. James's from the United States of America.”

Five

He arrived on the last day in September, and as the Super Constellation circled the field, he was not surprised that the neat hedgerows and the green green, and the light mist and tidy cottages and factories were as fresh in his memory as the campus at New Haven. The ten years since his last arrival in England had been among the most tumultuous in world history, and he had participated in them, in a minor way, landing in France from North Africa, and fighting—brilliantly: His prowess as a pilot, who had soloed at age twelve, was legendary in his outfit—established in a few tangential air engagements until his transparent physical weakness got him ordered to the sick bay, and home. But these events hadn't changed the landscape, though he had never seen it from the air, because the first time was on the train from Southampton, in the chaotic weeks at the end of his fifteenth year.

When the letter from his mother arrived he was at Camp Blakey, in Maine. He opened it eagerly, in the presence of his tent mates, and read. His eyes blurred so that he couldn't see, not even his two silent companions, but when his vision returned, he streaked out—by the Old School-house, along the shore of the lake, past the dozen tidy canoes, into the forest, whose shadows slightly slowed him down, but never to a walk—the whole two miles to the main highway where, breathless, he stopped, sticking up his thumb with that supernal confidence of the young that he would not, by that Providence he had grown up with on such companionable terms, be kept waiting, which he wasn't. The farmer who picked him up took him as far as Bath. Then, in minutes, he was on a truck headed for Boston. The driver stopped for gas and food and asked Black if he was going to eat anything, and. Black said no, he wasn't hungry. He was very hungry, and he had no money in his pocket, only the letter, lodged permanently in his memory, word for word, after that one reading. The driver returned with two sandwiches, ate one slowly as he drove, and told the boy to toss the second one out at the next garbage can, because one had satisfied him after all. Black said that although he wasn't hungry, maybe he would eat it himself rather than waste it, and the driver said suit yourself. The driver asked Black no questions about himself, but volunteered copious details about his own humdrum life, confessing that he rather hoped the United States would get into the war, since he was still young enough to join the army or preferably the navy in the event of a general draft, and would like to see something of the world besides the run from Portland to Boston before he got any older, and, frankly, he didn't think his wife would mind it all that much if he went away for a while. Black woke from his trance at this and sternly discoursed on the illogic and immorality of the United States getting involved in a European war, recapitulating with considerable skill, analytical and mimetic, the phrases and paragraphs he had so often heard his father so earnestly intone. The driver retreated, leaving the impression that his desire for war was at most a velleity and turned to other matters. Black listened, and commented as necessary, dozed off, wondering, detachedly, how he would get from Boston to New York—to his aunt's house—before dying of hunger.

He arrived in the late afternoon, the beneficiary of random highway philanthropies including a plate of frenchfried potatoes from the Howard Johnson waitress who, when he had sat down after his driver dropped him to go north to Hartford, and asked, at the counter, for a glass of water, said he was cute, which, suddenly, he realized selfconsciously, he probably was, wearing trim white shorts, and a T-shirt marked
CAMP BLAKEY
, and white socks and tennis shoes, a rope belt and a watch with an Indian bead band he had sewn himself. At 5'7” and 120 pounds he was growing fast, but not in those mutant leaps and bounds that leave the mid-adolescent looking like a gazelle. His hair was a dark blond, with the same yellow-white strains that even now came out on the least touch of the sun. Though his lips were normally set, he was quick to smile, a charming and precocious smile, somehow wise and amused, and he smiled when the waitress, varying very little from the basic gambit of the truck driver, said there were excess potatoes, that a dumb cook had prepared too many. But after eating only a few, suddenly his stomach was narcotized by his mind's return to the letter, and he walked quickly to the men's room and wept silently in the toilet compartment, wedging his weight against the door because there was no lock. When he regained control, he left through the back way, and resumed hitchhiking, out of sight of the waitress, whose generous impulse he could not trust himself to acknowledge without betraying himself, or embarrassing her.

He flagged a taxi at 125th Street and Lexington—awful extravagance—but he did not feel strong enough to walk to 69th Street, and he knew of no other vehicle that would deliver him collect. He said nothing to the driver, and on arriving asked him to wait. Georgianna opened the door, black and dour as ever, but instantly docile when he said, “Georgy, lend me a dollar quickly.”

He came back from the cab: “Is Aunt Alice here?”

No, but she would be back for dinner.

He went upstairs, not needing Georgianna's guidance, nor soliciting her permission, and took a bath in his cousin's room, lay down and slept until Alice Gonzalez prodded him awake. He reached to the chair and pulled the letter out from his shorts and gave it to her. She went to the end of the room to catch the light and read it.

“Did you know, Aunt Alice?”

“No,” she said. “But I'm not surprised. At least, not by the first part.”

The first part was his mother's information that she had secured a divorce from his father in England, where his father's work had taken them in May. “Darling, there's no reason to tell you
why
, and I don't want to say
anything
that would injure your father, or
you
, or your
relations
with your father. You'll just have to take
my
word for it that I
couldn't
go on.”

The second part was her announcement that she had remarried.

“His name is Alec Sharkey. He is, in fact, Sir Alec Sharkey. His first wife died in a car crash a year ago, with their daughter. He is an architect, and a very kind man, and I pray that you will grow to love him. I know that you will like him—I promise you—and he knows already that he will like you.”

There followed what he could only take to be instructions. He inferred that his mother was in charge of him. He knew, generally, that that was how it worked after divorces. Besides, he had had no communication from his father—which didn't surprise him because he was always bad about writing—and anyway, his father had set out in June for a trip to the Far East to look into the possibility of brokering some airplanes to the beleaguered Chinese, and the mail from the Orient was problematic.

Blackford's instructions were to take the S.S.
Wakefield
, sailing from New York on September 9. “Your stepfather has enrolled you in Greyburn College, his alma mater. It is very old, and very famous; you will get a fine education there before going to college, either here in England or in America.” She gave the name of a lawyer in New York whom he was to write or telephone after Camp Blakey closed. “I will write your Aunt Alice tomorrow and tell her what has happened and ask her if you can stay with her over the Labor Day weekend before sailing.”

Black and Aunt Alice cried together. She was like Blackford's mother, sentimental, passionate, and generous. Clearly her sympathies were with her sister, but she wouldn't criticize Tom Oakes. Black knew that his Aunt Alice had been in love with his father before her younger sister, Carol, met him—after he had won the stunt pilots' prize at the same airport in Long Island from which his closest friend, Lindbergh, would set out a few years later on the great flight. The courtship had been ardent and overwhelming. Carol had gone to her older sister to tell her weepingly that Tom Oakes and she were engaged and would marry within the week. Alice's parents were at once relieved that Alice had got rid of Tom Oakes and distressed that Carol had fallen prey to someone who, however dashing and handsome, was manifestly irresponsible. But better Carol than Alice, they thought, since she was the stronger of the two. At one session they pooled their resources and tried throughout one wracking evening to dissuade her, predicting divorce “within a year.” They were way off. Carol was glad that her husband's work took him around the world, away from New York and the reproaches of her parents, who however were both dead now and could not take satisfaction from the realization, however belated, of their prediction. Alice meanwhile landed on her feet, happy with her husband and his steady job at the bank, and with her son, a year younger than Blacky, off now at a dude ranch near the Rockies.

“Frankly,” said Black at dinner, to his aunt and her phlegmatic, ever-silent husband, “the idea of going to school in England gives me the creeps. Don't you have to dress like an ambassador? And don't they beat you all over the place?” His aunt soothed him and told him he would have a great experience, which was correct.

His mother was waiting for him at Waterloo Station, and they hugged like lovers. The schedule provided for three days at home, and his stepfather had tactfully left London for the first of these to permit the reunion between mother and son without the restraint of an alien presence. Black realized quickly that his mother was not going to talk about his father, and indeed she never brought up his name again, though on the infrequent occasions when Blacky gave her news about him, she was affectionately attentive. Black stopped mentioning his father. During the war years, he saw him less than once a year. On those occasions, and while Blackford was at college, there was a strained man-to-manness, a lot of bluff advice, which grew progressively vinous as the evening wore along. Yet however, desultorily, his father always kept in touch with him, and the more easily as his son grew older, and the two, though apart, did not grow apart.

Mother and son went by taxi to 50 Portland Place, a comfortable house in a fashionable area by Regent's Park, a block or so from Queen's Hall. A cook, a butler, and a maid were in attendance, but the butler had given notice—the War Office required him to take a war-related job. It was expected that the same would happen soon to the maid. The cook, old and devoted to Sir Alec, would stay.

Black was struck by the signs, paraphernalia, and scars of modern war. The streets were filled with martial posters, cluttered with soldiers and sailors. Half the air raid wardens were women. The next morning, he had been advised at Southampton, he would be required to be fitted for a gas mask. He passed several areas of recent devastation—from fire bombs, mostly; and he noticed how dim the lights were, how dark the central city as they drove through it.