Free Who's on First by William F. Buckley Page A

français pour leur retourner l’hommage qu’ils nous offerent .” He folded the note neatly, put it in his pocket, and proceeded down the corridor followed by his delegation, without any further thought given to the press.
    â€œWhat did he say?”—Viktor had trouble with French spoken rapidly—he asked Tamara.
    â€œThe usual business. Thanked our hosts, said we democratic scientists have a lot in common, and we will be glad to see them in September.”
    Viktor said nothing. As requested, he handed his own and Tamara’s passports to Viksne, who muttered in Russian that he would return them on the plane going back. “You won’t need them until then.” And there, as always, was the bus, parked only a few paces from the baggage compartment.

8
    Boris Andreyevich Bolgin was in Paris on his monthly visit from London and, as ever, occupied the office of the military attaché, who obligingly moved—somewhere; Bolgin did not bother to ask and did not care where. Everybody was obliging to Bolgin, ambassadors included, because Bolgin’s dispositions tended to be accepted in Moscow as final. The wonder of it was that he had survived the purge of Beria, notwithstanding Bolgin’s high standing as chief of KGB counterintelligence for Western Europe and therefore his presumed closeness to his boss. Twelve long years earlier, when Stalin reinstated the katorga and appeared hungry to send there everyone who ever worked for him, Bolgin had reached a calm decision, the fruit of that serenity uniquely disposed of by many who had already experienced katorga, as Bolgin had, during a purge in the thirties. He never traveled without his cyanide pill; that was his daytime rule. His nighttime rule: Never go to sleep sober. A corollary of this rule was: Never seek companionship, male or female, at dinner or later. As a younger man he liked to talk, and he liked especially to talk when he was well lubricated. When they let him out of the camp, requiring as they did his language skills in the war, he was a changed man, receiving stoically the news of his wife’s divorce and disappearance with their child. He simply went to work, using his skills as a linguist and his cunning as a spy, and then spymaster. He had made it a rule to resist as forcefully as he could any promotion. In that way he never troubled his superiors or his peers. He pleaded with Ilyich not to give him all of Western Europe. But Ilyich had insisted, and Bolgin reluctantly accepted the assignment, on the understanding that all disciplinary arrangements would be made by Moscow, directly. In that way he survived, combining an apparent fair-mindedness with absolute personal privacy and that mysteriousness that came from nobody’s knowing, as ambassadors and agents came and went, whether they had been summoned to Moscow, for reward or for punishment, as the result of one of Boris Andreyevich Bolgin’s personal communications.
    He was one of six Soviet agents in Europe who had the privilege of a personal code. When he elected to use that code, which was frequently, he would eject the operator from the encoding room and tap out his message himself. He would be brought replies, or instructions, from Moscow in the same code, undecipherable except by himself.
    When he cabled from London the number of the flight on which he would be arriving, all the customary arrangements had been made. He was met by a KGB embassy guard in an unassuming Renault, his little hotel suite at the Montalembert was booked, and the locked suitcase, stored in the embassy in his absence, was in the room waiting for him. In it he kept a dozen paperback copies of Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Pushkin, Gogol, and several liters of vodka, in plastic containers.
    He ordered the cable traffic from European capitals, and from Moscow and Washington, brought in. One, from Moscow, was addressed to him personally. It read: “ DID WE PICK UP BLACKFORD OAKES IN PARIS