Saving the Queen (5 page)

He wondered when the landlord would stop talking and, thinking it might help, took off his coat and tie, complaining of the awful damp heat, which would in fact plague him during the next nine weeks.

“Is there such a thing as an air-conditioned safe house?” he asked “Tom”—the instructors gave only a single name, a Christian name.

“I've never been in one,” was all he could get out of Tom, whose specialty was Visual Identification. At their first meeting in the house on O Street, Tom greeted him economically, signaling to follow him into the adjacent room, where two card tables were set together. Tom closed the door:

“Now, draw or list on that yellow pad everything you noticed in the living room we just walked through.”

Black was always confident when in possession of a pencil and paper and under orders to sketch something. He had been born with the facility and it had developed into the craftsmanship that got him into trouble at Grey-burn and an A in mechanical drawing at Yale; but other than the window they had passed and, he thought, a bookcase on the left and some sort of a couch, he now remembered nothing. Finally he let the pencil drop.

Tom was no censorious. He had seen it too often in his pupils.

“An agent needs to notice everything. Not only the unusual. If I had led you through a room with a nude girl lying on the couch, I'd want you to notice the color and shape of the couch.”

“You mean,
not
the color and shape of the girl?” Blackford asked; but Tom wasn't the kind of instructor you make that kind of comment to, because all he said was, “Geoffrey, don't smart-ass me. My job isn't to tell you whom to screw. It's to notice whom you screw, and where.”

Blackford learned that there are techniques for developing powers of observation, and after three long afternoons with Tom he was stuttering out details about the people he saw on the bus, and the advertising signs, and the beads of sweat that accumulated on the Washington
Post
merely from leaning over and reading it in that awful, hot summer. Blackford told Tom that at Yale he had signed up for a course in mnemonics taught, “would you believe it?” he asked Tom, who by the third day was indulging an occasional idiomatic familiarity, “by a freshman. The freshman had been a student of Bruno Fürst, who had written a book about developing your memory, and the freshman persuaded the chairman of the
Yale Daily News
to give him a big spread prior to a public demonstration.”

Blackford and two hundred other curious students attended, and the freshman had two fellow students on the teaching platform with him—with a copy of the
Life
magazine that had been distributed that morning.

“The freshman pointed to a member of the audience and asked him to call out a number between I and 160.

“‘129,' somebody said.

“‘All right, Joe, what's on page 129 of the current issue of
Life?
' The trainee closed his eyes for a minute and said, ‘A half-page run-over story on Margaret Truman's singing career and a half-page ad for Firestone tires.' The freshman triumphantly opened
Life
to page 129 and held it out for the audience to verify.”

“A stunt,” Tom said.

Blackford said he had sensed that, but that he had taken the course, thirteen two-hour seminars for which he paid the freshman instructor thirteen dollars.

“One of the sessions was devoted to how to remember somebody's name, and the idea,” Blackford explained to Tom, “is to decide what
individual
feature in a particular person is most susceptible to caricature—

“For instance, Tom, I'd say hair, in your case. Your hair is very—neat—so I would try to find an association between
neat
and
Tom
. And the more absurd the connection, the more it fastens in the memory. For instance”—Black was suddenly wondering whether he would be able to bring this off—“
Tom
has only two consonants,
t
and
m
. In the Fürstian system,
t
is the letter that corresponds to the number 1 and
m
to the number 3, so that if I can establish a relationship between
neat
and 13”—Blackford, beginning to perspire, was trying now to remember what Alan, the first instructor, had told him about never losing control of any situation—“I'd say to myself: It would
certainly
ruin the neatness of your hair if someone propped a great big wooden 13 on top of your head. Every time I saw you, I'd think of a 13 sitting on top of your hair.
Then
I would know that your name began with a
t
and ended with an
m
. I would then go quickly through the available possibilities, following the conventional vowel order—
a, e, i, o, u: Tam, Tem, Tim, Tom, Turn
. Two possibilities emerge, since we can reject the first, second, and fifth”—Tom was beginning to look at Blackford with a trace of concern, which he showed by running his hand through his hair, leaving it distinctly tousled, and damaging Black's whole mnemonic construction—“so it boils down to your being
Tim
or
Tom
, and here”—Blackford's relief was palpable—“here, at this stage, you have to rely a little bit on your plain memory, like,
Tom
, not Tim, is the man I knew with the neat hair and the wooden 13 perched on top of it.”

“I see,” Tom said. “Whatever happened to the young man who taught the course?”

“Oh yes, I forgot about that. Well, he taught the seminar during the spring, and that summer I ran into him on Park Avenue and we greeted each other, only he couldn't remember my name, and I couldn't remember his, though I couldn't imagine him except on a rocking chair, but I couldn't remember what a rocking chair was supposed to remind me of … I think it's a system you have to practice all the time—no summer vacations.” Tom seized on the apparent consummation of the story to tell Blackford that the quality of observing things and people was something an agent
never let up on
, that it became a matter of habit. Other instructors, later in the month and in the next months, would keep prodding Truax on the point, to keep him alert.

Actually, Blackford's formal—as distinguished from his observational—memory was not only good, it was something of a phenomenon. As a child his father used to show him off by reading a verse, which Blacky would then repeat—word for word, syllable by syllable—with high seriousness, ignorant, at age three, of the meaning even of Hilaire Belloc's kindergarten verses. Blackford had been wondering whether it would be vain in him to apprise Tom of this particular facility, and now decided that perhaps this was the opportune moment to come out with it.

“When I signed on for the memory course,” he explained, “it was to learn the trick stuff. The simple act of memorization—figures, dates, poetry, that kind of thing—I've always been able to handle pretty well.”

“Good,” said Tom, pulling out his note pad and scribbling something on it. Black wondered how many marines were required to protect the contents of Tom's notebooks.
Personal Observations of the Habits, Skills, and Idiosyncrasies of Deep-cover Agents I Have Known
. Was there enough there, under Truax, to triangulate in on Blackford Oakes?

He was given a dozen books to read, none of them technical. He supposed that if he was assigned to a dynamite-wielding mission, someone, somewhere, would pop up to acquaint him with the fashionable uses of dynamite, his introduction in that subject at Maxwell Field (“How to be useful if shot down and incorporated in the resistance movement”) having been cursory and, in any event, six years ago. Nor was he shown any fancy rifles or secret weapons or miraculous chemicals. He wondered—and at one point came close to asking “Harry”—whether he was, really, still on probation. He realized, at this point, that if at this moment he defected, went to the Soviet Embassy, and told them everything he knew, the Soviet Union would know nothing it didn't know already except the addresses of three safe houses which in any case were abandoned as a matter of precaution every ninety days.

The books, far from being esoteric, were in some cases recent best sellers. There was one about a young Nazi soldier who in an excess of conscience decides he is shooting at the wrong people. He makes his allegiance known to U. S. Intelligence, who use him to relay to the western front information he gathers at great personal risk inside Germany. It was a gripping story, and Blackford found himself wondering for the first time—why hadn't it been a subject of conversation, or thought, when he was fighting in the war against Germany in France?—about the strange, corporately benumbed conscience of the German legions who fought bravely (most of them), dutifully (almost all of them), enthusiastically (an impressive majority) for an indefensible regime? These, surely, were sins of commission, yet the universality of the hypnosis, somehow, rendered it all passive. Here was a book about a Nazi soldier who, somehow had tripped on a shard of conscience, which magically reordered his perspective. Blackford wondered: Was there now—was there in prospect—a Western counterpart?
He
had not been moved purely by conscience to join the CIA, though Trust surely had, even if he would not put it so. Would there be books in the future, and if so how would the author contrive the moral drama that would put Trust in the kind of light that shone now so brightly on this young German? He wondered, too, how many such there were within the Soviet Union. Another book described in detail the fate of hundreds of thousands of Russians who, in the course of the war, during the high tide of Nazi military success, had been captured by the Germans and made to perform services, military, paramilitary, and menial. By Allied agreement with Stalin himself, these were forcibly repatriated to Russia in the months after V-E Day, even though they implored the British and the Americans to permit them to emigrate.

“Nobody on our side believed,” “Alan” explained, “that they were anything but paranoid in insisting that they were being taken back to Russia to be tortured and slaughtered.”

But that, according to this account, was exactly what happened. It was “Rudolph” who was most passionate on the implications of that theme. There was just a trace of accent there, and Blackford could not guess its provenance, and of course would not have presumed to inquire. He suspected Rudolph of having an academic background, because he was given to academic formulations. “Violence in pursuit of a national objective is a social characteristic, not a social anomaly”—that kind of thing. But Rudolph, discussing Koestler's
Darkness at Noon
, mostly in italics, told Blackford that it was necessary to recognize that Stalin operated without any
predictable
restraints.

“That's
very hard
for
us
to understand”—Rudolph spoke, unrelentingly, in weighted phrases—“because even
the most cold-blooded of us
know intellectually that
it is wrong
, for instance, to
kill people
wantonly, or torture them to no purpose. We know enough about Stalin to know that—on the contrary—he
takes pleasure
in killing and in causing pain. And he has a vehicle to justify what he does:
the revolution.
”

Blackford asked why there weren't wholesale defections from the system, and Rudolph explained that the principal reason was fear—fear of defiance and fear of the futility of individual gestures in the age of totalitarian sophistication.

“But there's something else, and it was expressed by Bukharin when he was condemned to death by Stalin's court while absolutely innocent.” Rudolph stood, tapped his cigarette ash—too late as usual—in the general direction of the wastebasket, and walked excitedly to a bookshelf, pulled out a book, and looked at the index.…

“Here,” he said, “listen—these are Bukharin's words to the court. Now understand, Bukharin is
innocent
, but he makes a public confession of guilt. ‘I
shall now speak of myself
'”—Rudolph's voice was grave with emotion—“‘
of the reasons for my repentance.… For when you ask yourself: If you must die, what are you dying for
?—
an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for if one wanted to die unrepentant. This, in the end, disarmed me completely and led me to bend my knees before the Party and the country. At such moments, Citizen Judges, everything personal, all personal incrustation, all rancor, pride and a number of other things, fall away, disappear
.…
I am about to finish. I am perhaps speaking for the last time in my life.
'”

Rudolph looked up. His eyes were moist, and Blackford looked away.

“There,” Rudolph said, “
that's
why. The revolution is still a matter of
faith
, and if you haven't that faith, you must stimulate it in yourself, otherwise you are living for nothing. Pascal posed much the same problem when he asked Christians to believe. Let's eat.”

He opened a brown paper bag, Blackford opened his, and they ate silently for ten minutes, and Rudolph took Coca-Cola from a refrigerator. In ten minutes they were back at work.

Rudolph knew something about the history of the Soviet secret police, about the kind of training its agents got, the kind of assignments they carry out.

“We in the Company spend several hundred million dollars a year collecting information about the Soviet Union the equivalent of which, about the United States, the Kremlin can get by subscribing to a half-dozen technical journals. In the Soviet Union
everything
is secret. Every crumb of information we have, we have wrenched out—and even, then, we cannot make projections. It isn't just Stalin. There is a loose dynamo in the Soviet will, and you cannot tell where it is going to take us:
Nothing is predictable
. Though some things are nearly so, among them that—just to give you an idea—a copy of all Ivy League 1951 yearbooks”—Rudolph had taken a flying leap at Truax's immediate past—“is in Soviet hands, and a record is being entered of names, faces, dates of birth.”