Who's on First (2 page)

Blackford Oakes, taller than Theo by several inches, older by eleven years, with hair lingeringly blond, his blue eyes expressive, the tiniest crease of experience visible at the corners, bore himself in the relaxed manner of the perfectly proportioned young American male, totally relaxed physically. But he replied in a voice tenser than Theo was used to hearing: “Don't count on it.”

“Wouldn't the Americans help?”

“What could they do?”

“What could they
do?
Harry, what could they
do!
The Americans control the world! One word from the White House and that's it!”

“Theo. Listen. Listen hard. If One Word from the White House were all that was needed to free Hungary, that word would have been uttered a long time ago. The White House can't give any words until internal conditions are ripe.”

“What I'm telling you,” Theo said excitedly, “is that those conditions are ripe
right now
. I meet twice a week with …” He paused. Embarrassed, Theo looked down at the breadstick and finished his interrupted sentence “… people. People who know. The Americans won't make the mistake of missing
this
signal. It will be
very
clear.”

“But Theo. What if the White House gives the magic word and the Russians ignore it?”

“There will be chaos, stretching from Danzig to Trieste. The Russians can't contend with chaos.”

Blackford said nothing. Then he thought, and spoke quietly, but the tone of voice was decisive: “Be careful about yourself. Now repeat this.” Theo looked up, curious, tense, silent. “Repeat after me: 41 Dohany Street, Room 4C.” Theo understood, and his clean-shaven face was perfectly solemn when he said, as though an acolyte, “41 Dohany, Room 4C.”

“
Don't mention that address to anybody
.”

“I won't.”

Blackford rose and shook hands. Theo felt the slim cold object, and deftly he slipped the key unobserved into his pants pocket. Three days later Nagy made his move, two days later the statue of Stalin was ripped down from its imperious domination of the Kossuth Square, to the shouts and cheers of what must have been half the population of Budapest, though not including Blackford Oakes, who had been given strict instructions not to move from his hotel in the event.…

Blackford closed his eyes briefly and prayed that the convoy would pass by. The lead jeep stopped twenty meters down the road to his right and the soldiers jumped out and deployed opposite 41 Dohany. A detail of three men approached the entrance. Finding the door locked, the leader first rang the bell, then banged on the door, motioning one of his men to enter the abutting building, giving him instructions Blackford could hear distinctly, but did not understand. In a moment a white-haired woman dressed in black and wearing a white apron opened the door, stiffened, and stepped back. The officer pushed her to one side and, followed by his subordinates, charged into the building. There was a silence. Ten seconds? Thirty seconds? A single shot rang out. The soldiers in the street tensed. Crouched behind their weapons, they looked like statues in a war memorial. Two minutes later the detail filed out, dragging their quarry, who was dressed in faded brown corduroys and a blue shirt, his pale hands tied behind him. Although Theo had evidently not shaved in a day or more, his face still looked like that of a growing boy. The official dressed in civilian clothes stepped down from the jeep, adjusted his spectacles, and read out loud from his clipboard in a humdrum voice three or four paragraphs from which Oakes recognized only the words “Theophilus Molnar.” He was led forthwith to the back of the half-track and hoisted by the shoulders to the platform. Blackford was not thirty-five feet from him. Theo's face was calm, his eyes closed. Now he raised his eyes and spoke in his soft voice to the senior officer. It must have been a request, because the answer was unmistakably negative. The assistant adjusted the noose around Theo's neck, and shouted out to the driver, and Blackford heard a gear engage. Whereupon, slowly, the hydraulic motor racing, the long arm of the portable crane began to rise, tugging up, slowly, the body of Theophilus Molnar, which, when his toes left the platform, began convulsively to thrash about, a whine of sorts issuing from the throat. Blackford had seen him play soccer, and the hideous parallel in the physical body motions, at play and in death, convulsed him. It required over three minutes before the twirling line hung down straight again, the boy's head bent over like the end of a shaggy black mop. A soldier pulled, from a stack of identical placards banked at the forward end of the platform, one on which had been printed certain words in Hungarian. He exhibited the placard to the half-dozen silent witnesses who had ventured out of their houses, and then tied it about Theo's waist with a coarse line he handled like apron strings. The order went out, and the convoy resumed its promenade down the street, Theo's body a mobile exhibit. The officer in the back seat was staring again at the map.

Blackford Oakes went to his door, unlocked it, and walked down the staircase to the concierge. He asked hoarsely: “What does the sign say?”

“Death to counterrevolutionaries.”

“What did … the young man ask the officer?”

“If he might be permitted to make the Sign of the Cross.”

2

Although it had been four years since he served as Secretary of State, he still used a limousine. Indeed it would have been easier to imagine Queen Victoria changing the tire of her car than Dean Acheson climbing out of a taxi, let alone driving himself to the old house in Georgetown which he had visited so frequently when his duties were official. For an interval, the Director of Central Intelligence, a Republican, had observed the mandate of the election of 1952 with punctilio, and so for a year or two the two men, who had conferred on so many crises, saw less of each other. But notwithstanding that his own (
extremely
Republican) brother was now the incumbent Secretary of State, the Director found himself missing the mordant analyses and geopolitical clairvoyance of this infuriating man, who had recently published a book called
A Democrat Looks at His Party,
in which he had calmly announced that the distinction between a Republican and a Democrat is that Democrats tend to be bright and Republicans tend to be stupid.

“It's just that easy,” he now told the Director at tea. “You mustn't be offended by this, Allen. Besides, you must find it consoling that your people will stay in power a good long time.” This conversation, taking place two months after the Democrats sacrificed for the second time the most conspicuous egghead in the Democratic party in the election against the universally popular liberator of Europe, there was a special sense of resignation in the fateful observation.

“In some discursive reading the other day,” the former Secretary went on, “I found interesting collaboration for this thesis. It is from a speech by John Stuart Mill delivered, I believe, in the British Parliament.” With his left hand he extended his teacup to the maid, who refilled it as he adjusted his glasses with his right hand.

“Mill said, ‘I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle'”—the Secretary raised his eyebrows in obeisance to the majesty of First Principles—“‘that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, had nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must'—take heart, Allen!—‘by the laws of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party.'”

He smiled with great satisfaction and looked up again, as if to acknowledge yet another providential insight.

The Director was more phlegmatic than his older brother, who would have retaliated massively. Allen Dulles satisfied himself with grunting: “If we had had one more brain at Yalta and Potsdam, Dean, the Russians would have got Westminster Abbey.”

Four times, during the explosive events of October and November, they had met; and although the Secretary of State knew of these meetings and took discreet reassurance from the knowledge that his predecessor, whom he had come secretly to admire, was being regularly consulted by no less trustworthy a man than the Secretary of State's own brother, under no circumstances would the Secretary have participated in any of them, no more than he would have invited the brainy Democrat to the White House whose tenant had, in any event, always been ill at ease with Acheson. “To put up with Acheson,” the Director's deputy had once observed, “you have to be terribly bright and suave, or a political gunslinger governed by his gonads. Nothing in between. What we have in the White House is in between.”

The visit was early in January, before the President's State of the Union message. Outside it was wet gray snow, something like the national mood. “You will need,” Acheson said, stirring his tea, “to reformulate a foreign policy. The old business about ‘liberating Eastern Europe' is no longer very persuasive.”

“It may not be, but you're not going to hear anything very different. Only the formulation is scheduled to change. We will be talking about ‘liberation by evolution.' That's the ticket.”

“May I presume to suggest that that particular speech be delivered in the United Nations? The two were meant for each other.”

The Director smiled, while puffing on his pipe, as if on the homestretch to orgasm. Pause. Then: “It's not decided when or where. The timing
is
of some importance. The U.S. needs a leg up in international public opinion. It would be good if that declaration were to coincide with something that would resurrect our prestige.”

“I hate to say it, Allen, but you are really suggesting the resignation of your brother.”

The Director never rose to the fraternal bait. He smiled diplomatically, and went on. “We have something else in mind.”

“May I inquire?”

“We want an artificial satellite—before they get one. Beginning July 1, 1957, we get the eighteen-month International Geophysical Year, and our idea is to celebrate it with a satellite. The satellite is more than a stunt, as you no doubt know. Satellites will be able to see. See a bucket of water in an open field. They will open the scientific door to pinpoint ICBMs. They are the key to the next, probably definitive, generation of strategic weapons. But
launching
that first satellite is the ticket, as far as the military people are concerned—they know where to head, from that point on, with a reliable missile system. An orbiting satellite, the scientists know, simply validates the truism that the gravitational pull of the earth plus a complementary speed equals something on the order of a perpetual satellite.”

“How're we doing?”

“We've got problems. So do they. What we haven't got a line on is just what their problems are, and how we can help make them worse. We're talking eight, ten, twelve months away, our people figure. But whenever: The world's first satellite has
got
to be launched from Cape Canaveral.”

The former Secretary put down his cup. “If we can't beat them at the scientific level, we
are
in a bad way. Can't we hire enough Germans to do it for us?”

“Most of the Germans with rocket experience were whisked off to Moscow. During
your
administration, Dean. You might call it ‘The Brains' Brain Drain.'”

“Allen, you are getting polemical, and since you're not as good at it as I am, I suggest you mind your manners.”

Dulles ignored the taunt. “We did get Von Braun. And he's working full-time. But our job—the Agency's job—isn't to help Von Braun. That's for the Defense Department and related agencies. Our job is to hamstring the Reds, and we don't know how to go about it, because we don't know (a) what it is they need most, (b) whether we're in a position to keep them from getting it, whatever it is, or—(c) for how long we can keep it from them if we can isolate their problem.”

Acheson got up to go. “Let me think about it. Have you got any
good
news?”

“Jean-Paul Sartre gave a speech yesterday denouncing the Communists for invading Hungary and canceling his membership in the party.”

“Good news? Sartre turning to the West? We have enough problems.”

The Director smiled. “He has his following, Dean.”

“I suppose. Unlike your nephew, I've resisted any temptation to Romanism but the nearest I ever came to Poping was when the Vatican put Sartre on the Index.” He picked up his umbrella after fastening his coat. “As it is, my gesture to ecumenism is to obey the Index on Sartre. Good afternoon, Allen.”

“Bye-bye, Dean.”

The two men parted at the door, shaking hands.

3

“What were you actually
doing
in Budapest?” Sally asked as she poured him the gin and tonic from the kitchen shelf.

“Sally?”

“Yes, Blacky.”

“Put a touch of Campari in that, will you? Something I learned from an Argentinian steward.”

“Did he get killed for telling you?”

Blackford managed a grin, but at the same time he sprang up distractedly from the sofa on which he had been characteristically draped, and walked toward the teeming bookshelf of the small apartment, without answering.

“I said, Blacky, what actually were you doing in Budapest?” Her teasing, seductive coloratura sang through the open door.

“Sally dear, your curiosity is supposed to carry you up through the first … third of the nineteenth century. When exactly
did
Jane Austen die?”

“1867.”

Blackford paused.

“Oh yes, of course, I remember now. She died of grief over Seward's Folly in purchasing Alaska.”