Tucker's Last Stand (13 page)

Blackford reflected in silence—the only (prayerful) state appropriate when sitting in a car being driven by Tucker Montana—that Anthony Trust was the one living human being Blackford would permit to propose such an agenda.

At thirty-nine, Trust was one year older than Blackford. He had developed hedonistic habits, and managed with skills not readily matched to combine duty to the Agency he had worked for since leaving college with hard concentration on earthly delights: wine, women, and song, of course, but also relaxed and relaxing reading usually having no bearing on the problems that consumed most of his working day. His mother having left him a considerable legacy, he had no problem in financing his extravagances. He did not begrudge those of them that had to do with the opposite sex; indeed, he was capable of clinical examination of relative costs. One of his themes was that sexual romance was never really “free” because when it was nonprofessional, the maintenance cost, so to speak, was every bit as high, over the long term, as a succession of pleasant evenings with pleasing women who did that kind of thing for a living. He would never marry, he had told Blackford years before, because—well, because he feared that his nature would not make possible what he considered the serious monogamous obligations of marriage. Anthony Trust really did not approve of adulterous behavior. He saw enough of it, both among his companions and among those he was being paid to observe, and he understood that the call of the flesh often overrides moral commandments.

True, Blackford could remember three times when Anthony, blissfully content with his latest companion, in a relationship of several days, even weeks, had said he was reconsidering the question of marriage; but after a while Blackford would smile, and wait until the inevitable happened: Anthony Trust with a new friend.

On the other hand, he reflected, Anthony had every reason to think the same thing about Blackford, whose unrealized betrothal to Sally almost justified the assumption that it was unrealizable. It was Anthony who had broken the news to Blackford, a year ago, that Sally had married in Mexico, and even over the telephone Blackford's dismayed reaction had made Anthony worry for his health: that total desolation on hearing the most unexpected news imaginable. But Anthony knew also that Blackford's reserves of strength were considerable, as was his dogged determination, at times of crisis, to have his own way. As praepostor at the British public school it had fallen to Anthony Trust to help hold down young Blackford, age fifteen, over one end of a sofa as he received a serious flogging from the headmaster. After which Blackford had calmly asked Anthony to order him a taxi: and he left the school. It had been a very long friendship, begun a few months before Pearl Harbor when Blackford went to Greyburn College, and now, twenty-three years later, they were closest friends.

“Why Baltimore?” Blackford said as Anthony, tall and slim, his brown eyes lit with fun and curiosity, his hair straight and ample, dressed in a polo shirt and white ducks, opened the door of the apartment.

“You ass!” Anthony took Blackford's briefcase from him and motioned to him to remove his jacket. “Why Baltimore indeed! First, some of the best beer on the East Coast is made here. Second, much of the best seafood in the East is found here. Third, there is pulchritude at hand here second to none. Fourth, because Baltimore is exactly thirty-five miles away from Aberdeen, which is where administrative action has already begun to bring together the ‘Jason Summer Study Group' to create your facility at Nakhon Phanom. I've been made head of the recruiting cadre. I've got a staff of six, and we'll spend all tomorrow with your pal Tucker Montana and start rounding up anybody who has skills we don't already have at Aberdeen. So how you like that, Black: we're working on the same project again!”

“Well,” Blackford accepted the glass of beer, “not exactly. I've been moved. To the Gulf.” He waited instinctively, to feel out whether Anthony knew about 34-A. The rules on the subject were so often stressed that they became instinctive: You did not tell another agent something that other agent did not need to know.

Anthony, seated in an armchair, looked up. “Ah. The business on the Gulf. I've run across the trail of that operation, but am not formally briefed. So let's be proper and drop the subject. Leave it that we're both working on projects designed to help the same country.”

“Designed to help the Western alliance, is how it's been put to me.”

Anthony shrugged his shoulders as he stretched out his legs on the coffee table. “Yeah. And I think that's right, by the way. Only the subject is so mixed up in presidential politics, let's face it, it would require a polygraph expert to tell you whether to believe anything you hear from the White House these days. And,” Anthony sighed rather dramatically, “the same goes for the Pentagon, to tell you the truth. But sure I think it has to do with the Western alliance. The doctrine of containment is exactly what we fought for in Korea. Not the most popular war in the history of the U.S. No war in the Pacific ever would be. America needs a little more time for the memory of our Oriental Exclusion Acts to fade away. But there isn't any difference, Korea–Vietnam, except that the North Vietnamese have succeeded in persuading the persuadable that it's a civil war within the South. Well, it isn't. It isn't another Greece 1946, either, or even another Huk rebellion. This one, if I read it right, and you can correct me, is sustained as directly by current flowing in from North Vietnam as that air conditioner over there is by this electrical outlet. Yank that cord and the air conditioner stops. Takes a gulp or two going out, but that's all.… So. Tell me. How is she?”

“She's fine,” Blackford began. He stretched back in the deep armchair, and allowed his eyes to look up toward the ceiling. Easier that way, actually, than to look Anthony straight in the face as he spoke.

“First: There has never in the world been a more glorious-looking woman than Sally Morales. I don't know, but becoming a mother did something to her. That little tension we ran into every now and then? Gone. She is mistress of that household as if she had grown up there. Her spoken Spanish is—perfect: alongside the average Berlitz Spanish teacher, she sounds like Unamuno. When I drove in there were maybe seven or eight people in sight: gardeners, a butler, the chauffeur of course, and a couple of maids and the nurse with the baby. Sally really embraced me. Well, not quite the way she might have done it say in the moonlight, under the Yale Bowl. But it was obviously more than a cousinly greeting, and she planted the message right there, in front of everybody:
This is one of my dearest friends
, was her greeting. And it probably conveyed the thought: This is someone with whom I might well have had a romantic attachment—and may someday again have one. It gave me instant standing at the Casa Serena, which is what the spread is called, about four acres in the middle of Coyoacán, probably worth a couple of million dollars.”

“And then,” Anthony poured him a fresh beer.

“Funny—though maybe not, come to think of it—we didn't talk about ourselves, not at all. And though she made a few routine references to Antonio, she didn't even hint at the part the Agency and I played in his getting killed. Not a trace of it. She wanted to know, naturally, what I was up to, and I told her about Vietnam, with the usual circumlocutions, which of course she spotted, but which she let go.

“The baby? A cute little guy—it would help, I guess, if I could tell one two-month-old baby from another—and he is the light of her life. She has a routine which didn't vary during the three weekdays I was there: breakfast at seven, a half hour with the baby, then hard work on her lecture, departs for the university, which isn't far, you remember—on the road to Cuernavaca. On the road to Tres Marías.” Blackford's voice changed slightly; he spoke the words more slowly. “She is back in time for lunch except on the day she has office hours. After lunch we walked around the property, the first afternoon. Then we drove around the city, saw the new anthropology museum—gorgeous!—shopped in Sanborn's. Back at five, and she spends an hour with the baby and another hour or two correcting student papers, then at eight we meet, and she serves dinner at nine-thirty.”

“Any guests?”

“She asked me, Did I want any old friends to come in? I said, ‘At this point I don't know one other living soul in Mexico City, don't want to know anyone but you and your child. I don't even know the name of the CIA official here.' But then I asked if
she
wanted to have some people in. Indeed she did. She wanted Antonio's uncle—he's only about sixty, a lawyer, like Antonio, and part of the firm; sort of the reigning behind-the-scenes Morales, though the bulk of the estate, I gather, is in the name of the child, with plenty of income for Sally for the rest of her life, though she has to give up Casa Serena when little Anthony gets married.

“Anyway, she wanted the uncle, Don Álvaro. She wanted Antonio's best man, Pedrito Alzada, and his wife; and a cousin of Antonio, a goddamn Spanish goddess, I am telling you—I didn't know until after she had left that she is in the movies under the name María Estada: she is the Mexicans' Rita Hayworth, but she behaves more as one would expect Katharine Hepburn to behave: a little withdrawn, beady intelligence, captivating charm. Speaks good English, by the way, and I caught her speaking French to Don Álvaro. She has been married and divorced, not a popular thing to do in Mexico, not among that class, but everybody apparently agreed that her husband was a drunken bounder. She has gone back to her maiden name, just plain María Morales.”

Anthony didn't want Blackford to go on other than at his own gait, but still was ready to press him just slightly. “How were you introduced? Other than merely as a—former friend?”

“Oh yes. It was not the kind of thing I expected, not at all. They all came promptly, nine
P.M
., and champagne was served after formal greetings. She raised her glass and said, ‘I am so glad that you, my best friends in Mexico, are here to meet my best and oldest American friend. In fact over the years it often seemed that we would end by being husband and wife. But we had a few competitors.' She let the suspense grow before she went on. ‘Mine was Jane Austen. Blackford's was his country's diplomacy'—I had been introduced as a professional diplomat—‘and then, of course, there was the main entry in my life.' She turned to Don Álvaro: ‘Your nephew.' She turned to María Morales: ‘Your cousin.' She turned to Pedrito: ‘Your best friend.' And then she looked up at the eighteen-foot ceiling and blew a little kiss up in the direction of the nursery with her left hand, brought the champagne glass to her lips, and said softly, ‘Your father.'”

“Well,” said Anthony, putting aside his half-consumed drink, “now
that's
what I call an icebreaker! Did it work?”

“It worked like a charm. I was treated from that moment on as Sally's brother.”

“Is that what you were looking for?”

Blackford smiled, got up and walked over to the bar and, this time around, poured himself a scotch. “No. Not exactly what I was looking for, though it increased my admiration of her.”

“Your
admiration
of her?”

“Yes. That and the love I feel for her.”

“Does she feel the same thing for you?”

“She says she does. Says it very convincingly.”

“Did she, er, demonstrate that love?”

“Don't be coy. No. I made an advance, two nights before leaving, and she said no. And the worst of it is, I understood. I mean, in that environment. It would have been like making love in church, I really mean it. She just said—‘Later. I mean, in other circumstances.'”

“When you're married?”

“When we're married.”

“Will that happen?”

“I don't know for sure. I hope so. We have, as usual, a tentative date. By the way, it would be out of the question, in the Spanish tradition, to remarry less than a year after Antonio's death.”

“So you're talking the end of the year?”

“Yes. And I think she means it. And I know that I mean it.”

“Meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile,” Blackford downed his scotch and smiled. “Meanwhile, I guess I'm free to act as I've been used to acting, and I know she knows this, expects it to be that way. She said something interesting about Antonio at one point when the subject came up; she said that when he died, he had been the center of her life. And then she said, I quote her, ‘I can't reasonably expect, Black, that he was ever the center of
your
life—why should he be; it wouldn't be natural.' There wasn't much I could say, and then she said, ‘And I don't think I can reasonably ask you to co-mourn his death along with me.' What do you mean, ‘co-mourn,' I said? She smiled. ‘I don't expect you to take a vow of celibacy. But when we marry—if we do, and I hope we will—it has got to be very different, and I want you to tell me you understand that.'”

“And you said?” Anthony asked.

“I said I understood that. She changed the subject.”

It was after dinner that Anthony told Blackford he had invited two girls to come in “for a nightcap.” He paused. Would Blackford veto the idea? He looked at him. His old friend looked up, and Anthony spotted that distinctive smile he had seen on other joint adventures.

“A nightcap?”

Anthony shrugged his shoulders. “I know that ten days ago you were hacking your way up the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and I gather that ten days from now you'll be facing the sharks in the Asian waters of Tonkin. There ought to be something in between to lift your … spirits!” He didn't give Blackford another opening. Instead he dialed a number, looked at his watch, and Blackford heard him say, “Nine-fifteen will be just fine, Alice.” And then, to Blackford, “Alice is a very old friend, and Mayday is one of Alice's oldest friends—they're both twenty-two—and they'll be right along.”