“Sergeant Buck is something of a phenomenon in this division,” his superior wrote in evaluating his work. “Not only does he know the Russian language flawlessly, but when it comes to interpreting a new colloquial phrase, in which Russian abounds, Buck’s interpretation is invariably correct.” After several paragraphs of praise the letter closed by recommending him for training as an officer in rather negative terms. “This person should be sent to OCS because his virtuosity in the language makes it somewhat embarrassing for his superiors to treat him as an enlisted man.”
Buck was aware that others in the division had reservations about him, and he knew why. Everyone else in the division was deeply interested not only in the Russian language, but in Russian politics, personalities, weaponry, economic conditions, and even Russian gossip. Buck did not conceal the fact that he was enormously bored with Russia. He was much more interested in a small red MG which he had brought to a high pitch of mechanical perfection, a soft-spoken girl from Georgia with the name of Sarah, and cool jazz.
There would be days when everyone in the division was in a paroxysm of excitement because some member of the Soviet Presidium had been demoted. They spent hours trying to tease out the significance of this. When they asked Buck his views, he shook his head and said, “No comment.” He was not rude, he was simply not interested. The division traced the rise and fall of obscure Russian bureaucrats, they speculated on Russian agricultural production, they argued bitterly about whether Stalin had been a Marxist or an opportunist. Buck’s very sense of noninvolvement was at first puzzling and then finally unbearable, His sheer flawless ease in translation, the fact that he was the only person in the division who never needed a dictionary, did not make him popular.
At the end of a year of Pentagon duty Buck was ordered to OCS. He emerged a second lieutenant with orders to report to an infantry division in Germany. He sold the red MG with regret, but left the Pentagon with pleasure. He was relieved to escape the tyranny of his strange and unwanted Russian skill. He liked the long war games in which he and his platoon crept through the dark German forests, their rifles tipped with eight inches of bayonet, the rumble of tanks just ahead of them, the occasional crashing sound of a simulated land mine giving the maneuver an element of excitement.
Occasionally he went with other members of the platoon into a nearby town and got drunk on the excellent German beer and ate huge quantities of various German sausages. His spare time was devoted to the care and maintenance of a Porsche coupe which he bought because it was incredibly cheap for an American soldier and he loved its lines. He also wrote a letter a day to Sarah. The Porsche was a miracle of mechanical perfection. Buck tuned it to an exquisite level of adjustment. Occasionally he would take it for a workout on the beautifully intricate forest roads of the nearby mountains. He thrilled to the dangers of the abysses which underlay each hairpin turn, but never pushed the car to its ultimate capacity. After such trips he carefully washed the car, wiped the leather with saddle soap, retuned the motor, and covered the coupe with a red parachute.
After two years of duty, Buck was discharged from the Army. He and the Porsche were returned to America on the same ship. Two weeks after he arrived in New York he married Sarah and took a job as translator at the United Nations. Two years later only two things had changed in Buck’s life: they had a four-months-old son, and Buck had discovered the law.
He had started to read a casebook on the law of torts that someone had left in the translators’ room at the UN building and did not stop until he had finished the whole book. It was a stunning discovery. There was something so symmetrical and neat and perfect about the organization of the law, it seemed so logical and majestic, and so awesome in its certitude. It was like a new complex foreign language with its own special vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Buck found it irresistible.
Sarah, a girl who combined a low metabolic rate with a rare sweet face and a gentle nature, encouraged Buck in his enthusiasm for the law. The only problem was how to support his family and go to school at the same time. Through the network of translators, he heard of an opening on the White House staff for a Russian translator. The job was reputed to make very little demand upon the translator’s time. He merely had to be there in the unlikely case that the President needed to speak directly to a non-English-speaking Russian. The last man who had the job had held it for five years, had not seen the old President and quit out of boredom when the new President took office. Buck had applied for the job and in the competitive examinations had been 14 points ahead of his nearest competitor.
He and Sarah and the child and the Porsche made their way to Washington. Sarah set up housekeeping in Arlington. Buck began to go to Georgetown Law School at night. During the day he spent his time reading law books in his office and occasionally glancing through the heap of Russian documents which were automatically circulated through his office.
A hard-driven student could have gotten through Georgetown Law School in four years while occupying an outside job, but Buck was in no hurry. He loved his law courses and worked at them carefully and patiently, much like a jeweler determined to give a lapidary finish to a rare stone. His law-school professors regarded him as intelligent, hard-working, a perfectionist for detail, and completely lacking in what they called “legal imagination.” Once Buck had asked a professor why he was given only a C on a paper in which he had answered a very long and involved question in the most specific detail.
“Mr. Buck, I agree with you that your answer to that question probably deserved an A,” the professor said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes. “But we are in the business of training practicing lawyers who will be able to think on their feet and in a constantly changing legal context. Your answer was the perfect textbook reply. I could not have done better. But it lacked any flair, any feel for anything outside of the law. Perhaps, Mr. Buck, it is your vocation to be a professor of law rather than a lawyer.”
Buck was thrilled by this answer. He would like nothing better than to spend his life immersed in the intricacies of legal scholarship. Slowly, methodically, with the pure pleasure of the utterly committed, Buck learned the law. The classes came and went but Buck stayed on year after year. He knew that at some point he would finish his legal education and would then become a law professor. Until that time he found life very full,
The White House job took very little time. Over the years he came to regard the White House as a place where he went to study, a kind of refuge which also gave him an income. It was true he had seen the President, but never on business. In the first month after the new President took office he had wandered into Buck’s room, introduced himself, and sat down. Buck was impressed by the President’s youth, his relaxation, the way in which he put his feet up on Buck’s desk and rambled over Buck’s background. It was only later that Buck realized that behind that boyish manner and seeming relaxation was a tough and analytical mind. The pleasant informal meeting had really been a disguised examination. Buck knew he had passed. The President had coolly lopped a half-dozen old- timers from the White House staff and told them bluntly it was for incompetence. He had told them face to face, not through another person.
Despite the President’s toughness Buck had a lingering doubt about the man. Being the scion of a wealthy family, having easy access to politics, and marrying a beautiful woman did not, Buck thought, really equip him to deal with his adversary in the Soviet Union. The Russian leaders, Buck had gathered, were hard to the point of ferocity, committed to a degree that was unbelievable to an American-especially a wealthy American.
Buck’s doubts about the President’s capacity made his own slow-paced and easy job somehow more justifiable to himself.
This particular morning Buck had finished his quick scanning of Pravda and Izvestia and was turning with pleasure to one of Maitland’s essays on the corporation’s personality. He opened the book, began to make careful marks on the margin and entries in his notebook.
Buck was so absorbed in Maitland that the shrill sound pierced through the office for several seconds before he was aware of it. He had never heard the sound before, but instantly he knew where it came from. In the second drawer of his desk there was a red telephone. When he had been given the office and his instructions, he had been told that this telephone would ring only in case of emergency and was never to be used for ordinary communications. The black telephone on top of the desk was to be used for normal business. He had also been told that when the red phone did ring it would not give the short intermittent rings made by an ordinary telephone, but would give off a steady sharp sound until it was answered.
Someone at the White House switchboard had made a mistake, Buck thought. He had been in this office for three years and the red telephone had never rung. Buck was convinced it never would. He pulled open the drawer and instantly the sound of the telephone became more shrill.
Once he saw the red phone something began to nag at his memory; he felt a sharp sense of unease. Then he remembered: the official who had installed him in the office had also given him a logbook labeled “Red Phone Log Book” with instructions to log the precise time that the red phone rang… if it ever rang. Buck had not seen the
