An Affair of State by Pat Frank
3
He was at her apartment in an hour, exactly. She took his black homburg, smiled as she smoothed the new felt, and dropped it on a bookcase. Then she turned and raised her eyes to his, directly, as if to ask an important question, but all she said was, “Drink?”
“Please.”
“Rye, right?”
“Right.” She seemed different. It wasn’t her dress alone. She wore a white blouse with a gold pin at her shoulder, and a black ballet skirt that seemed to possess rhythm of its own, and that eddied and swirled with her smallest movement. As she moved to the teak bar he noticed that her hair was different. It was loose and smooth like dark velvet brushing her shoulders.
Then he noticed that the room too was different. A room changes with the character of its owner, so slowly and subtly that it is always noticed first by the stranger, not by the one who lives there. Exactly how it had changed was difficult to say. Some pieces had been added, some subtracted. He believed the rattan occasional chair was new, but he could not be sure. The room seemed more colorful, yet it was bare of pictures. Even the photograph of the Marine Corps colonel was gone from the end table.
He sensed that this night would be different from the last time, and that there would be no need to persuade, flatter, cajole, or arouse her. He walked to her side at the bar. He took the just-made drinks from her hands and set them down on the dark wood. He put his arms around her, and he could feel her hands, wet and cold from the ice, at the back of his neck. She strained herself close, and he marveled that she could fit so perfectly and tightly against him. He held her like that until he had to catch his breath, and then he kissed her eyes and her mouth and her ears and the base of her throat and her breasts under the loose, silken blouse.
“You’re ruining me,” she said finally. “There isn’t any hurry, Jeff.”
“Yes there is,” he said. “I’ll be on an airplane in eleven hours.”
“That’s time enough.”
“It’s no time at all.”
“At least we can have our drinks. I dressed very carefully for you, darling, and I’d like to keep my clothes on for another five minutes.”
“Okay,” he agreed. “Five minutes.”
But it really wasn’t that long.
Some time later—it must have been much later for the traffic noises were infrequent outside on the avenue—he awoke and started to rise. Her arm was across his shoulders, and the arm pressed him back. He lay still for a moment, reveling in the delicious relaxation, and her nearness, and his pride of mastery and possession. Then he said, “I’m hungry. I want a cigarette.”
“Hush,” she said. “In a while.”
“What time is it?”
“About one.”
“Six hours more. I don’t want to go.”
“Less than six. We’ll have to leave here at five if you’re going to make that plane.”
“I’m hungry,” he insisted. “I was planning to take you to Hall’s again tonight.”
“I made sandwiches,” she said. “Wrapped them in wax paper so they’d be fresh.”
“How did you know we weren’t going to eat out?”
She put her head on his chest and laughed. “Do you want whiskey,” she asked, “or milk?”
“Both.”
Then for a time it was Susan who slept while he remained awake. He propped his head on one hand, and smoked, and looked down on her, breathing slowly and quietly, her skin pale ivory in the reflected light of stars and street lamps.
At four he woke her with his lips, and she responded to him, her eyes still closed.
“One for the road?” she whispered.
“One for the road.”
4
They left her apartment at five, at an hour when all else in the city was still, and even the drying August leaves slept silent, waiting for the morning breeze from the river to shake them into life. They walked together without speaking, their footsteps strangely distinct on the empty pavement, her hand under his elbow, her shoulder pressed close to his arm. Jeff’s legs felt hollow and numb. They didn’t feel like part of him. They moved of themselves.
He thought, this is a dream. I’m going to wake up in a minute and find I’ve got what’s left of the night to toss and want her, and try to bring back this dream. She didn’t call me. I didn’t possess her all the night. Girls like her don’t do things like that for guys like me.
He saw a bus stop ahead, on Dupont Circle, and heard the squeal of its brakes. This was real, all right, but it didn’t seem credible that she should be walking at his side now, and in twenty-four hours he would be in Budapest. It was unreal and frightening that he might never have her again. He would not come home for three years, and in that time anything could happen, and something was almost sure to happen. Now that she had overcome her fear, conquered her phobia, she might find someone else. Probably would. Almost certainly would.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing.”
“I was thinking of nothing, too. It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?”
“It’s going to be rough.” Her understanding was part of this miracle, this sense of joining, of union, of oneness.
Yet there wasn’t any possibility of marriage. The Department disapproved of love, altogether. Love was a force operating beyond the bounds of directives, protocol, rank, regulations, act of Congress, and even the taboos of nationality and race. It was an unpredictable plague that could smite a distinguished Career Minister, as well as a Class VI FSR, cause him to ship his family back home, and set him to doing the rhumba in a third-rate Rio dive. It caused couriers to forget their crossed bags, cryptographers to chatter of their codes, and Division Chiefs to make fools of themselves over Washington debutantes.
The Department took a dim view of marriage. If an FSO wanted to marry a foreign girl he had to submit his resignation, and usually he could count on its being accepted. And in that day there weren’t many American girls loose outside their own land, except in Departmental staff. And it was absolutely forbidden that he marry a girl within the Department, a hangover from the Hoover economy years when it was considered a dangerous drain on the Treasury for both husband and wife to draw salaries from the government.
The Department trusted that an FSO would not marry until he was a Class II or III. Then it was hoped that he would go back to his home town and choose a wife who would not only be socially acceptable but who would have an adequate private income. A Class V, completely dependent upon his salary, and still in his probationary period, could not ask a girl to quit a job that paid as well as his own, and join him in a career that marriage would automatically limit and cripple. He wondered whether Susan had thought at all of marriage. He didn’t dare ask.
They turned into Riggs Court, and Susan said she’d wait at the Circle and try to stop, and hold, a cab. He said that was fine. He knew that was a delicate way of saying she didn’t want to go to his rooms, where Stud Beecham would see her, and know where his roommate had spent the night.
The apartment displayed the relics of a party—overflowing ash trays, glasses with water melted from ice cubes standing in their bottoms, the debris of sandwiches, olive stones. He shook Stud out of sleep. Stud said, “What time is it? Where the hell have you been?”
“It’s five-thirty. I’ve been out.”
“I’ll say you’ve been out. We had a party for you. A surprise going-away party. All the old gang. The surprise was you didn’t turn up.”
“I’m sorry,” Jeff said.
“Woman?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I guess you’ll have to be excused. Who was she?”
Jeff was strapping the four-suiter. He grunted.
“If you wait a minute,” Stud said, “I’ll pull on my clothes and help you out with that stuff and take you to the airport.”
“Oh, no. You stay in bed. I can handle it fine.”
“She must be waiting downstairs,” Stud said.
&n
“Why don’t you take her with you?”
“You go to hell.”
“I’ll bet I know who it is,” Stud said. “I’ll bet I know!” He got out of bed and looked out at the sky. “Going to be good flying weather,” he decided. “But I’m glad it’s you, and not me. I hate airplanes. Airplanes are strictly for the birds. Man wasn’t meant to fly. What are your stops?”
“Gander,” Jeff said, “Shannon, Prague, Vienna.”
“And sometimes,” said Stud, “they stop in the middle of the ocean.”
They carried the bags to the bottom of the stairs, and then a taxi driver appeared to help him. “Goodbye, chum,” Stud said. “Remember to brush your teeth every day, and mail your laundry home Fridays.”
“So long,” said Jeff. “See you in three years.”
“The lady,” said the taxi driver, “says for you to hurry.”
5
They didn’t talk much on the way to the airport. He said the Lincoln Memorial was always beautiful at this time in the morning. She said wasn’t it, but she thought the Jefferson Memorial was more graceful. He said he liked the Jefferson Memorial too, particularly when the cherry blossoms were coming out around the Tidal Basin.
They swung down to the Mount Vernon Highway, and she grabbed his arm tightly, on the curve, and clung to him. “That’ll be in April,” she said.
“What’ll be in April?”
“The cherry blossoms. I wonder where you’ll be in April, who you’ll be with, what you’ll be doing?”
“I wish I could be right here,” Jeff said.
“But you can’t.”
“No, I can’t.”
Then they were at the National Airport, clean and fresh from its pre-dawn scrubbing and yet surprisingly busy for the hour, and the porters had his luggage. They walked to the Pan-American counter, the uniformed ticket agent checked his name on the manifest, and he found himself caught up in the smooth conveyor belt that in twenty minutes weighs and loads exactly fifty-six thousand pounds of passengers, luggage, mail, and freight on a trans-Atlantic plane. He exhibited his ticket, his virgin diplomatic passport, his government immunization register. His next of kin, he was forced to recall, was Aunt Martha, in Chicago, whom he had neglected to write for six months, and who had no idea he was on the way to Europe.
“I suppose you’ll carry your dispatch case with you, Mr. Baker,” the ticket agent suggested.
“Oh, yes, of course.” It had been stupid of him to forget that an FSO never checked his dispatch case along with the other luggage. A dispatch case was part of a man.
The agent brought it out from behind the counter. Its handle felt good in his hand.
Not until then did he realize Susan was no longer at his side. He was searching for her, his eyes sweeping the rows of benches facing the great windows looking out on the runways, when an airline captain touched his arm. “You’re Mr. Baker, of the State Department?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Bill Judson. I take your flight as far as Shannon. If you get bored, come on up front and I’ll show you how our new flying machine works.”
Jeff smiled. “Thanks very much. That’s awfully good of you.” He knew he had received the equivalent of a five-gun salute. He felt good all over.
Over the captain’s shoulder he spotted her. Her arms were loaded, and she was looking for him. “You’ll excuse me,” he told the pilot, and then shouted across the waiting room, “Hey, Susie!” The pilot grinned, and other people turned and stared. But she heard.
She’d shopped the magazine stand. She said she thought he ought to have plenty of magazines—“They’ll be welcome in the Mission so don’t throw them away.” And the new H. Allen Smith book. And cigarettes.
“Five cartons!” he said. “I don’t know whether they’ll let me carry that many through customs.”
She dropped everything on a bench, and then tapped his dispatch case. “That’s what this is for. Didn’t you know?”
“I’m learning,” he said. He sat down beside her, put the dispatch case across his knees, unsnapped the locks, and fitted the cartons inside.
“That’s a lovely thing,” she said, rubbing her fingers along the perfect grain of the leather. “I hope some day it carries—I’m not sure what. But something thrilling. Something extra wonderful. Something for all of us. Something to wipe our fear away.”
“I thought you’d got over it.”
“I’ve rationalized it, some, but I can’t get rid of it. Who can? There isn’t a person in this country, Jeff, who at least once each day doesn’t think of war. It’s a permanent hazard, tangible as a fog that never blows away. It colors everything we do. Nobody can make a decision—business or personal—without considering it.”
“Susan, what’s going to happen to us from here in—I mean you and me?”
She looked at the clock. “There is so much we could talk about—and no time. I don’t think we’d better plan—do you, Jeff?”
“No, I guess not. I just want you to sit quiet. I want to memorize you.”
She looked down at her fingers, locked together in her lap. “There’s something else I have to say.”
“Go ahead.”
“I just wanted to tell you you don’t have to worry.”
“Worry? About what?”
“About last night. No remorse. No obligations.”
He leaned over, and kissed her hair, and said, “I want obligations, darling,” and the loudspeakers began to whine, and somebody coughed into the microphone. Then the loudspeakers said Flight 86 was loading at Gate 3 for Shannon, Prague, Vienna, and Budapest.
They rose and moved together towards the gate, becoming part of a funnel of people, the spout of which ended under a sign saying, “Passengers Only.”
They were pushed close together, and she said, “I guess this is the end of the line for me.” She kissed him once on the lips, lightly so as not to smear him.
The gate opened, and he was carried through it with the stream of people, and she was left outside.
CHAPTER SIX
1
JEFF BAKER GOT his assignment his first night in Budapest. He had, of course, reported to the Minister the morning of his arrival; that is, he reported to Morgan Collingwood, the Consul General, who was senior Foreign Service Officer, and Morgan Collingwood had presented him to the Admiral, which was the proper procedure.
Mr. Collingwood’s manner didn’t fit his resounding name. Mr. Collingwood was a slight, balding man who looked like the oldest and most inconspicuous vice president in a bank—the one who sits farthest from the rail, and approves all the important loans. But the Admiral looked like an admiral. His hair was white as the crest of a breaker, his face red as if he had just stepped off a gale-swept bridge, and his eyes a deep and startling blue, as if they had absorbed the pigment of smooth tropic seas and unclouded tropic skies.
The Legation’s offices spread through three floors of a modern stone and concrete and chrome and glass building on Szabadzag-tér off Bathory Utca. It was not far from the Parliament, the Bourse, and the Palace of Justice, and had once been occupied by the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Admiral’s office was on the topmost of the three floors. He sat behind an executive desk that might have been imported from America, and the desk was framed between the Stars and Stripes and the two-star flag of his rank. On the wall behind him were pictures of Theodore Roosevelt, reviewing the Great White Fleet, Franklin Roosevelt when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and the battleship Wyoming. If you could shut out the view of the Danube with its shattered bridges dangling their broken steel arms in the water, and ruined Buda on the other bank, the office could have been in Washington.
Mr. Collingwood said, “This is Mr. Baker, just in this morning from Washington. We had a cable about him a few days ago.”
“Oh, yes,” the Admiral said. “Glad to have you aboard, Baker.”
On the Admiral’s desk were tiny, per
“Todd met the plane at Matyasföld, as usual,” said Collingwood.
“Young Todd,” the Admiral said, “makes an excellent flag secretary. Fine for the housekeeping chores. He’ll show you around. Speaks the language. You don’t, do you?”
“No, sir,” Jeff said. “I’ve got Italian and French and German, but no Hungarian. I was going to take lessons.”
“Won’t need to,” said the Admiral. “It’s the same here as every place else. All the educated people speak English. Now you take me. I’ve been every place in the world. Spent my whole life traveling around the world. Never had to speak anything but English.”
The Admiral asked how things were at home, and Jeff told him things were about the same, and the Admiral shook his head as if that were bad, and said, “I want you to come up to my place for dinner tonight. I want a first-hand picture of the situation in the States. Like my intelligence fresh. Besides, Fred Keller will be there. I want you to work with him. Sort of a special project.”
“Is Mr. Keller in the building?” Jeff asked.
“You know him, don’t you?”
“Yes, we’ve met.”
“He mentioned it. He’s not in the building. You see, Baker, he has a very, very special job. Very delicate. He operates entirely outside the Legation. Deals with people who can’t afford to be seen going in and out of here. You understand, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, sir. You mean the Atlantis Project.”