Saving the Queen Read Free

climax, although no doubt it annealed their friendship, did not bring it about. Black found himself situated to recognize, in Anthony, a quality he did not describe. But once or twice, in free-wheeling conversations with Sally, he ventured to say that, when all was said and done, there were those students at Yale who cared primarily about themselves, even if you interpreted this widely enough to include girls, grades, dogs, wives, children natural and unnatural, and dependent grandmothers—the whole lot. And others, who—somehow—felt, as automatically as anyone starting a long motor trip would feel the necessity to check the fuel gauge, the necessity to meditate regularly on the human condition. Anthony did this in a most natural way—rather like St. Theresa, with her worldly, workaday concern for the comfort of the sick sow and the dangers to the immortal soul of the King of Spain. (“Black! How dare you come out in favor of the Mundt-Nixon Act without asking yourself what its likely consequences are for lambs in the State Department who have strayed?”) Anthony, for one thing, though formal of speech, was incapable of pomposity. Besides, he cared more about effective relief for those who suffered than about bombastic relief for those who formed committees. Often, the main purpose of “humanitarian” groups was to relieve themselves of effective concern for those who suffered. Anthony shrank from any form of reductionism: If you made the mistake, after the sixth beer at Mory’s, of asking him to identify the principal source of evil in the modern world, he would pretend he didn’t understand you. He disliked theoretical formulations. But, increasingly, those who knew him came to know what it was that principally horrified him. He said to Black, late one night at a beer joint on Park Street, “After Hitler, and Stalin, you had to say to yourself: Things have got to get better.”
    Trust influenced Blackford—more than that, had something of a hold on him—from the time they were at school together in England just before the war, and Trust was in the fifth form and Blackford a callow third-former. And now Trust had talked him into chucking plans for graduate school and, instead, applying for an altogether different line of work. Blackford’s reasoning, at first, had been straightforwardly self-serving: The Korean War was beginning to go badly, he had received a note instructing him not to leave the country, his reserve unit was on stand-by notice. Unless he entered the FBI or a paramilitary research institute, or developed a sudden, gratifying disability, he might very well go from graduation to a quick refresher course in the latest fighter planes, with which he was dangerously current, having spent a month last summer mastering the new jet, and from there to Korea.
    â€œKorea!” Trust said. “You thought France was a dull place to return to after a mission.” Blackford had arrived in France in December 1944, fought several rather spectacular missions (he contacted, and destroyed, three Kraut ME109s) out of Rheims, contracted, and did not defeat, hepatitis in January, and celebrated V-E Day at the hospital in Maxwell Field.
    â€œI have been to Korea,” said Anthony. “Unlike MacArthur, I shall not return.”
    Blackford knew that of course Anthony would return, if told to do so. Either that, or he would quit. But he would not be likely to quit, at such a time, an organization he was selling to Blackford, even if he stressed, in their early conversations, only the advantages of the CIA over the United States Air Force in Korea. Blackford sensed the other factor on the following Saturday. They had been ushers at a wedding and were driving together to New York with that bleary after-party feeling that makes ritual conversation unbearably irrelevant, inducing great bouts of deep-talk. Soon he realized that Anthony felt himself a member of a