Saving the Queen Read Free Page B

the last ten years, he had exchanged discreetly worded Christmas cards. Filling out the form would be an ordeal, but Blackford had an engineer’s aptitude for recognizing the necessity of painstaking detail: All progress, someone had written, is made by the taking of careful measurements. He realized about himself that he could become an accountant without any great strain on his spirit—provided, of course, there was plenty of after-hours activity.
    Within three days he managed to complete the form by carefully synchronizing his work on it with Johnny’s frequent absences from their little suite, and then he stuffed it into the envelope (plain) addressed to someone he had never heard of, in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
    Two months later he became anxious and called Anthony, who said that there was no way he could help him, that it was altogether possible that he would never officially know whether Black had been accepted: that there was literally nothing to be done, inasmuch as the CIA people already knew from the covering letter that if it didn’t act before the United States Air Force did, they would either lose Blackford to the air force or face the intricate job of extricating him from his unit without, so to speak, anybody noticing. This the CIA knew how to do, but since it was always something of an operation, it was preferable to act quickly, pre-emptively.
    â€œIf they turn me down, how will they do it?” he asked Anthony.
    â€œYou’ll never hear from anybody again.”
    So Blackford completed his application for graduate school rather listlessly; convinced, correctly, that he would never matriculate during this bellicose season—they were eating up fighter pilots in Korea. He felt rather bad about asking the two professors to write long enthusiastic letters of recommendation, but after all he was an honor student, with very high scores on the aptitude tests. Perhaps when it was all over he would go back to engineering. He found it especially vexing that he couldn’t talk to anyone, except Anthony, about the application: The terms were laid out matter-of-factly. Any leak would disqualify him . Conversations with Sally about his future became wooden, and once, late on a Friday afternoon, before he took the seven o’clock train to New York, with Johnny safely departed for Poughkeepsie, she said to him, slouching on the sofa listening to the new phonograph that played 33 rpm, that he was beginning to sound like an Erector Set. On which remark Blackford made a ribald pun, naturally, and Sally, who was nicely spontaneous, eased up her skirt, a bare but unmistakable inch, which was her signal for encouraging his ardor. Even then, blissfully distracted, he found himself wondering, in medias res: Would his future duties require him to … seduce women routinely? He had been reading intensively in the general literature of intelligence and remarked that the old melodramatic idea of the spy whose achievements were done mostly through sexual manipulations and passenger pigeons had gone through a generation’s literary disparagement. The subject came up these days only for the purpose of poking fun at it (“Spy work consists in eight hours a day with a dictionary and a basketful of foreign-language newspapers and magazines available at any cosmopolitan newsstand,” one ex-OSS graduate student had told him). But his blood had quickened when Anthony said one day that that was only largely true, that the other stuff was also true, and that a month didn’t go by that someone, “one of ours, one of theirs,” didn’t get—“eliminated.”
    â€œOr seduced?” Blackford asked.
    Anthony looked disgusted and changed the subject.
    Blackford had whispered to Sally, audaciously, that she was such an accomplished seductress, “you ought to become a foreign spy.” Sally replied unnervingly, How did he know she wasn’t one?
    â€œI admit,” she