High Jinx

High Jinx

A Blackford Oakes Mystery

William F. Buckley, Jr.

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

For Alistair

Renira

Camilla

1

Six hours a day were given over to physical exercise, and Blackford Oakes decided he might just as well take the training along with the Special Platoon, the name given to designate the commando group Blackford had been instructed to help prepare.

He had just spent a year in Germany helping to reconstruct a small private chapel. His real purpose in Germany had engaged him in the most heinous postwar assignment he had ever been given—the most heinous imaginable, he had told himself a dozen times during the past two months, waking at midnight in physical and moral sweat. His mind and spirit had had extensive exercise during these weeks, but not his body; so he thought what the hell he might as well get back into prime physical shape, and here was a way to do this in the company of commandos. At the age of twenty-eight he wasn't yet willing to defer to any presumptive physical preeminence in any group, never mind that over half of them were five years younger and that his sedentary months in Germany might show him up during the first few days. So what?

Actually they didn't. He found himself able to do the forced marches without strain, as also the night work under the barbed wire, the push-ups and the pull-ups, the bayonet work, the whole arduous business. He studied jujitsu for the first time, greatly admiring the resourceful instructor, an English sergeant who had spent the war as a prisoner of the Japanese in Malaya where he had learned the martial art from a fellow prisoner, an Oriental who had earned the black belt.

The commandos were a cheerful lot and the groaning they indulged in when suddenly awakened in the middle of the night to be given emergency drills in the chill and wet air of late winter in England was all ritual. They were, however young, all of them experienced, all of them veterans of combat, either in the late days of the war or subsequently in Korea. The men did not know what their mission was, only that it would be dangerous (they were volunteers), but they knew from the intensity of their exercises that it would take place soon.

The afternoons were devoted to specialised training. Six men, one each from the six squads, went to Demolition. Six men, again one each from the six squads, to Radio Communications. Six to Medical First Aid. Six to Special Weapons. The balance—the officers—went with their leader, known to them only as ‘Henry,' into a single-chambered room within the heavily guarded compound.

From the outside the shed looked like an abandoned theatre. And indeed, inside the shed the two dozen chairs were arranged in theatrical dimension, forming a circle, the stage in the centre. The diameter of the arena was twenty-four feet, and they stared, every day under relentless instruction, at a doll-house version of the city of Tirana, the capital of the little country squatting west of Yugoslavia and above Greece, a million and a half wretched people so Stalinised by now ‘as to make Stalin and Mao Tse-tung' (as the first lecturer on that first day put it) ‘weep in jealousy.' Operation Tirana intended, no less, to liberate Albania, the little communist enclave in the Adriatic which, providentially, abutted against no other communist country, now that Tito had declared the independence of Yugoslavia. There were five Albanians, two of whom spoke fluently in English; the other three spoke it well enough to make themselves understood. They would disperse—one Albanian with each of the parachute drops to cope with problems of language, though the operation was designed to make this only a very brief problem—on the way to the sudden change in government. There would be no end of native Albanians at their disposal, the political trigger having been pulled.

One evening at the officers' club Henry sat down with Blackford Oakes at a table by the little bar sequestered for use by the Special Platoon. It was rather like a railroad car in shape. The bar bisected it two thirds of the way down its length, the larger section for the enlisted men, the smaller for the officers, the same barman serving the lot. Henry, though English, sent back his whisky and soda. ‘Put more ice in that, old man,' he said to the barman, Angie, who had been brought out of retirement for brief and very special duty. And to Blackford, known at Camp Cromwell only as ‘Ernie,' Henry said:

‘I am aware, Ernie, that I am not to ask you anything about your background, and you are not to ask me anything about my background. Shall we practice?'

Blackford poured his beer into a glass and smiled at the large, rangy, weather-beaten, self-assured man in his thirties, with the black straight hair worn longer than commando style, with the teeth white, spasmodically visible given the cigarette he dangled from his tight lips.

‘Yes,' Blackford responded. ‘I don't suppose I should even tell you that I am practiced in deception?'

‘You may. But you must remember that I am not to take for granted
anything
that is told me here, unless it is told me by Colonel Mac or Joe Louis.' Henry's voice was public school English with, as becomes the accent of a professional commando, a light varnish of Humphrey Bogart. ‘Colonel Mac' was how the company addressed the Ulsterman in charge of the Special Platoon while at Camp Cromwell, the officer who presided over their administrative schedule and their physical training. Joe Louis, the second in command, was a huge West Indian major who was supposed to be addressed as ‘Major Joe,' but cheerfully yielded to just plain Joe Louis when the similarity in appearance between him and the American champion was remarked, on the first day, by Henry. Joe Louis's brother, commando Isaac Abraham Ezra, couldn't, under the rules, fraternise with his older brother at the officers' end of the building, a problem they solved by taking their mugs of beer outside where, impervious to the cold notwithstanding their early life in the tropics, they sat together hour after hour, laughing, talking earnestly and, when the dinner gong sounded, walking together toward the mess hall, parting only at the bifurcation that separated the officers from the men.

‘I suppose,' Blackford volunteered, ‘I could talk to you about the stock market and you might believe I was not deceiving you?'

‘The stock market? I say, what's that?' Henry asked, taking a gulp from his glass, stirring the ice with his index finger and rubbing the same finger thoughtfully up the cleft of his bristly chin (Henry was always about one day late in shaving). He reached now into his fatigue jacket and brought out a packet of cigarettes. It was empty. He leaned over to the bar and said to Angie in his distinctively peremptory style: ‘A packet of Virginia Rounds.' He took the pack without comment. Angie knew better—after his initial experience six weeks earlier when he had presented the chit for Henry to sign—than to repeat a gesture that had got from Henry on that first day a frosty, ‘
You
sign it. I have other things to do.' Henry now opened the packet and offered a cigarette to Blackford.

‘Thanks, no … Virginia Rounds! I'll be damned. My father smokes those things. Didn't know you could find them in this part of the world.'

‘I'd kill for Virginia Rounds,' Henry said. ‘On the other hand, that doesn't say very much, does it, since I kill as a matter of course.' He smiled his tight smile and then added, ‘It's true you can't find them just anywhere, but they're about. I told Angie to lay in a store.'

Blackford: ‘You were asking about the stock market? You don't know what it is? Well, the stock market is the instrument through which Wall Street dominates all life west of the Democratic Republic of Germany, and east of the People's Republic of China.'

‘Funny,' Henry smiled, drawing on his cigarette, ‘that under the circumstances I haven't heard of the stock market. Next time you run into it, say hello.'

They spent a relaxed hour talking about this and that, with that odd sense of total relaxation engendered by the knowledge of great tension directly ahead. Blackford was dealing, he soon knew, with a commando much experienced, whose conversation revealed traces of general knowledge not associated with bayonets or explosives. And, he saw, the commando chief was by nature impatient. But impatient men can, as his mentor Rufus once remarked, sublimate impatience into the kind of patience required of men engaged in clandestine activity. Someone impatient to find his prey is prepared to await his appearance patiently, hour after hour. When the dinner gong sounded, Henry in midsentence rose to its summons. They ate together, a dinner positively memorable (sole, steak, mince pies), Blackford commented to Henry after dessert, by military standards.

‘Ha! I have you!' Henry said with mock excitement. ‘How would you know it was memorable by military standards unless you had spent time in the military?'

Blackford laughed. He decided he could go autobiographically even a little further without endangering the operation. ‘Yes. I was a fighter pilot. While I am at the business of divulging my past, I'll go further and say that this dinner is epicurean by comparison with what you poor English boys have to eat at your fashionable schools, and how do I know that? You guessed it, Henry, I was indentured in one.'

‘When?'

Blackford paused, but only briefly; security was security, but after three years he found himself worrying less about security than about being ridiculous in pursuit of security.

‘I was in school here.' He was careful not to disclose that he had been at Greyburn. ‘My parents divorced in 1941 and my mother was remarried, to an Englishman who took me and my education in charge just before Pearl Harbor.'

‘So that's where the Japs hid you on the Day That Will Live in Infamy. Trust old Tojo. I mean, don't trust old Tojo. I mean, what do you say we take a walk?'

During those briskly cold weeks in January and February Blackford and Henry became friends. They followed the formal rules closely enough so that, under hypothetical torture, neither could reveal anything comprehensively identifying about the other. They experienced each other as professionals with a common cultural background. Henry, Blackford guessed, might have served in a prewar cavalry unit—certainly he had spent time on horseback. He was, oddly, an addict of American baseball who knew and loved more things about the New York Giants than interested Blackford. And he had a clear strategic sense of the importance of the forthcoming enterprise. He was diligently—on occasion brutally—insistent on quality performance from his men. No letting up. No unnecessary physical exposure. No compromise with the camouflage on their faces and hands. Late one afternoon Blackford came on him slapping with open hand and with full force first the right cheek, then the left cheek of one of the younger commandos whose performance had evidently dissatisfied Henry. He was administering corporal punishment, no less, and the junior commando was expected to submit without protest. Blackford's fleeting impression was that the discipline was being exerted with inappropriate gusto. But these were Brits, he reminded himself. And those of them who went to public schools were used to rough treatment and submissive behaviour. Though the episode was distasteful, Blackford accepted it rather as in the spirit of Sparta than of de Sade. He walked by without comment, and though Henry saw him later in the day as they met for a drink and supper, no mention was made of the episode.