Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Now, I cannot say that these headaches were responsible for the ongoing fantasy of my childhood, but it is true that I began to spend many an afternoon after school alone in my room making drawings of an underground city. It was, as I look back on it, a squalid place. Beneath the ground in a set of excavations, I penciled in clubhouses, tunnels, game rooms, all connected by secret passages. There was an automat, a gym, and a pool. I giggled at how the pool would be full of urine, and installed torture rooms whose guards had Oriental faces. (I could draw slant eyes.) It was a warren of monstrous and cloacal turns, but it brought peace to my young mind.

  “How are your headaches?” asked my father at the bar at Twenty-One.

  “No worse,” I said.

  “But they don’t get better?”

  “They don’t, I guess.”

  “I’d like to reach in and pull out what’s bothering you,” he said. It was not a sentimental remark so much as a surgeon’s impulse.

  I shifted the subject to Rough and Tough. They were now Knickerbocker Grays, and doing well, he told me. I was tall for my age, almost as tall as my father, but they gave every promise of outstripping me. As he spoke, I knew there was some other matter on his mind.

  It was his inclination to pass me tidbits about his work. This presented curious debits to his duty. In his occupation, you were supposed to encapsulate your working life apart from your family. On the other hand, he had formed his reflexes for security, such as they were, working for the OSS in Europe during World War II. Nobody he knew then had been all that cautious. Today’s secret was next week’s headline, and it was not uncommon to give a hint of what one was up to when trying to charm a lady. Next day, after all, an airplane was going to parachute you into a strange place. If the lady were made aware of this, well, she might feel less absolutely loyal to her husband (also away at war).

  Besides, he wanted to fill me in. If he was not an attentive parent, he was at least a romantic father. Moreover, he was a team man. He was in the Company and his sons ought to be prepared as well: While Rough and Tough were a foregone conclusion, he could hardly swear on me.

  “I’m all riled up today,” said my father. “One of our agents in Syria got shot on a stupid business.”

  “Was he a friend of yours?” I asked.

  “Neither here nor there,” he replied.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m just so goddamn mad. This fellow was asked to obtain us a piece of paper that wasn’t really needed.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll tell you, darn it all. You keep this to yourself.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “One of those playboys at State decided to be ambitious. He’s doing his Ph.D. thesis on Syria over at Georgetown. So he wanted to present a couple of hard-to-get details that nobody else has. He put through a request to us. Officially. From State. Could we furnish the poop? Well, we’re green. You could grow vegetables with what they scrape off our ignorance. We try to oblige. So we put a first-rate Syrian agent on it, and there you are—lost a crack operator because he was asked to reach for the jam at the wrong time.”

  “What’ll happen to the fellow in the State Department?”

  “Nothing much. Maybe we’ll slow down a promotion for that idiot by talking to a guy or two at State, but it’s horrifying, isn’t it? Our man loses his life because somebody needs a footnote for his Ph.D. thesis.”

  “I thought you looked upset.”

  “No,” he said quickly, “it’s not that.” Then he hoisted his martini, stepped off the stool, raised his hand as if calling a cab, and the captain was there to bring us to our table which was, I already knew, in his favored location against the rear wall. There my father placed me with my back to the room. At the table to my left were two men with white hair and red faces who looked like they might have gout, and on the right was a blond woman with a small black hat supporting a long black feather. She was wearing pearls on a black dress and had long white gloves. Sitting across from her was a man in a pencil-thick pinstripe. I mention these details to show a facet of my father: He was able, in the course of sitting down, to nod to the two gentlemen with gout as if, socially speaking, there was no reason why not to speak to one another, and freeze the man in the pencil-stripe suit for the width of his stripes while indicating to the blond lady in black that she was blue ribbon for blond ladies in black. My father had a gleam in his eye at such times that made me think of the Casbah. I always supposed a Levantine would come up to you in the Casbah and give a flash of what he had in his hand. There!—a diamond peeked out. That made me recollect Cal Hubbard rolling with Mary Baird on the carpeted floor, which in turn caused me to look down quickly at my plate.

  “Herrick, I haven’t seen a superior hell of a lot of you lately, have I?” he asked, unfolding his napkin, and sizing up the room. I wasn’t too happy being placed with my back to everyone, but then he gave a wink as if to suggest that he had his reasons. It was incumbent on his occupation, as he once explained, that he be able to eye a joint. I think he may have picked up the phrase from Dashiell Hammett, with whom he used to drink before word went around that Hammett was a Communist. Then, since he considered Hammett smarter than himself, he gave up the acquaintance. A loss. According to my father, he and Dashiell Hammett could each put down three double Scotches in an hour.

  “Well, there’s a reason I haven’t seen a lot of you, Rick.” He was the only one to call me Rick, rather than Harry, for Herrick. “I have been traveling an unconscionable amount.” This was said for the blond woman as much as for me. “They don’t know yet whether I’ll be one of the linchpins in Europe or the Far East.”

  Now the man in the pencil-stripe suit began his counteroffensive. He must have put a curve on what he said, for the woman gave a low intimate laugh. In response, my father leaned toward me across the table and whispered, “They’ve given OPC the covert operations.”

  “What’s covert?” I whispered back.

  “The real stuff. None of that counterespionage where you drink out of my teacup and I drink out of yours. This is war. Without declaring it.” He raised his voice sufficiently for the woman to hear the last two phrases, then dropped back to a murmur as if the best way to divide her attention was to insinuate himself in and out of her hearing.

  “Our charter calls for economic warfare,” he said in a highly shaped whisper, “plus underground resistance groups.” Loudly: “You saw what we did in the Italian elections.”

  “Yessir.”

  He enjoyed the yessir. I had broadcast it for the blond lady.

  “If not for our little operation, the Communists would have taken over Italy,” he now stated. “They give the credit to the Marshall Plan but that’s wrong. We won in Italy in spite of the money that was thrown around.”

  “We did?”

  “Count on it. You have to take into account the Italian ego. They’re an odd people. Half sharp, half meatball.”

  By the way in which the man in the pencil-stripe reacted, I suspected he was Italian. If my father sensed that, he gave no sign. “You see, the Romans themselves are civilized. Minds quick as stilettos. But the Italian peasant remains as backward as a Filipino. In consequence, you mustn’t try to motivate their self-interest too crudely. Self-esteem means more to them than filling their bellies. They’re always poor, so they can live with hunger, but they don’t want to lose their honor. Those Italians really wanted to stand up to us. They would have derived more pleasure spitting in our face than sucking up to us with their phony gratitude. Nothing personal. The Italians are like that. If Communism ever takes over in Italy, those Red wops will drive the Soviets just as crazy as they’re driving us.”

  I was feeling the wrath of the Italian man next to me. “Dad, if that’s what you think,” I blurted out, scurrying to save the peace, “why not let the Italians choose their path? They’re an ancient and civilized people.”

  My father had to ponder this. Allen Dulles may have said that the happiest week of Ca
l Hubbard’s life was spent seducing secretaries, but I expect no period could have been equal to the year he spent with the partisans. If Italy had gone Communist in 1948, my father would probably have gone right over to form an anti-Communist underground. In recesses of his brain so secret he could not even reach them in his dreams, I believe he would have enjoyed a Communist takeover of America. What an American underground he could have helped to set up then! The thought of dynamite Americans waging an underground war up and down our countryside against an oppressive enemy would have been a tonic to keep him young forever.

  So my father may have been on the edge of saying “You bet,” but he didn’t. Instead, he answered dutifully, “Of course, we can’t afford to let the Russians in. Who knows? Those guineas might get along with the Russians.”

  We had an interruption here. The man next to us suddenly called out for his check, and my father immediately stopped our conversation in order to look appreciatively at the blond lady.

  “Weren’t we introduced at Forest Hills this fall?” he said to her.

  “Nah, I don’t think so,” she answered in a muffled voice.

  “Please tell me your name,” said my father, “and I’m certain I’ll recollect where it was.”

  “Think of nowhere,” said the man in the striped suit.

  “Are you trying to give directions?” asked my father.

  “I heard of people,” said the man, “who lose their nose by poking it around the corner.”

  “Al!” said the blond lady.

  Having stood up abruptly, Al was now putting money on the table to cover his tab. He dropped each new bill like a dealer snapping cards, signally upset that one of the players had called for another deck. “I’ve heard of people,” repeated Al, and now he looked sideways at my father, “who stepped off the curb and broke a leg.”

  Into my father’s eyes came that diamond of the Casbah. He, too, stood up. They each took a long look at the other. “Buster,” said my father in a happy, husky voice, “don’t get tough!”

  It was his happiness that did the job. Al thought of replying, then thought better. His jaw did not work. He folded his napkin as if folding his tent, looked for the opportunity to throw a sneak punch, did not find what he was looking for, and gave his arm to the blond lady. They left. My father grinned. If he couldn’t have her, he had at least broken a couple of eggs.

  Now my father began to talk a good deal. Any victory over a stranger was kin to triumph over rival hordes. Al was out there with the Russians. “There are six million soldiers in the Red Army,” said my father, “and only a million of us. That’s counting NATO. The Russians could take all of Europe in two months. It’s been true for the last three years.”

  “Then why haven’t they?” I asked. “Dad, I read that twenty million Russians were killed in the war. Why would they want to start one now?”

  He finished his drink. “Damned if I know.” As the waiter sprang for the refill, my father leaned forward: “I’ll tell you why. Communism is an itch. What does that mean, to have an itch? Your body is out of whack. Little things take on large proportions. That’s Communism. A century ago, everybody had their place. If you were a poor man, God judged you as such, a poor man. He had compassion. A rich man had to pass more severe standards. As a result, there was peace between the classes. But materialism came down on us. Materialism propagated the idea that the world is nothing but a machine. If that’s true, then it’s every man’s right to improve his piece of the machine. That’s the logic of atheism. So, now everybody’s ears are being pounded to bits, and nothing tastes right anymore. Everybody is too tense, and God is an abstraction. You can’t enjoy your own land so you begin to covet the next guy’s country.”

  He took a long, thoughtful swallow from his drink. My father could always bring a cliché to life. Many have been described as taking long thoughtful swallows of their drinks, but my father drank like an Irishman. He took it for granted that real and true spirits were entering with the fire of the liquor. He inhaled the animation around him and could breathe back his own excitement. Emotion must never be wasted. “Rick, keep clear on one matter. There’s a huge war brewing. These Communists are insatiable. We treated them as friends during the war and they’ll never get over that. When you’re older, you may have the bad luck to get into an affair with an ugly woman who happens to enjoy what you offer but has never been on daily terms with a man. She’s too ugly. Fellow, you’re going to have trouble on your hands. Before long, she’s insatiable. You’ve given the taste of the forbidden to her. That’s the Russians. They got ahold of Eastern Europe; now they want it all.”

  He did not halt long at this place. “No,” he said, “it’s not a good analogy. It’s really worse than that. We’re in an ultimate struggle with the Russians, and that means we have to use everything. Not only the kitchen sink, but the vermin that come with the sink.”

  My father was interrupted at this moment by the two white-haired gentlemen seated on his right. They were getting up to leave and one said, “I couldn’t help hearing what you were explaining to your son, and I wish to say, couldn’t agree more. Those Russians want to crack our shell and get all the good meat. Don’t let them.”

  “No, sir,” said my father, “not one knuckle will they get,” and he stood up on that remark. The rich compact that comes from a common marrow guarded us all. Honor, adventure, and sufficient income was in the air of Twenty-One. Even I could prosper there.

  When we sat down again, my father said, “Keep this most strictly to yourself. I’m going to trust you with a weighty secret. Hitler used to say, ‘Bolshevism is poison.’ That idea is not to be rejected out of hand just because Adolf said it. Hitler was so awful that he ruined the attack on Bolshevism for all of us. But the fundamental idea is right. Bolshevism is poison. We’ve even come to the point”—and here he dropped his voice to the lowest whisper of the lunch—“where we’ve got to employ a few of those old Nazis to fight the Reds.”

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “There’s hardly a choice. The OSO is not all that competent. We were supposed to put agents in place all over the Iron Curtain countries and couldn’t even seed it with birdfeed. Every time we built a network, we discovered the Russians were running it. The great Russian bear can move his armies anywhere behind the Iron Curtain, and we don’t have an effective alert system. If, two years ago, the Soviets had wanted to march across Europe, they could have. We would have gotten out of bed in the morning to hear their tanks in the streets. No reliable intelligence. That’s fearful. How would you like to live blindfolded?”

  “No good, I guess.”

  “It came down to this: We had to use a Nazi general. I call him General Microfilm. I can’t reveal his name. He was top intelligence man for the Germans on the Russian front. He would weed out the most promising of the Russians captured by the Germans and manage to infiltrate them back behind Russian lines. For a while, they honeycombed the Red Army, even worked a few of their boys into the Kremlin. Just before the war ended, this general, prior to destroying his files, buried fifty steel boxes somewhere in Bavaria. They were the microfilm copies of his files. A voluminous product. We needed it. Now he’s dealing with us. He has built up new networks all through East Germany, and there isn’t much those East German Communists don’t tell his West German agents about what the Reds are planning to do next in Eastern Europe. This general may be an ex-Nazi, but, like it or not, he’s invaluable. That’s what my business is about. You work with the next-to-worst in order to defeat the worst. Could you do that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You might be too liberal, Herrick. Liberals refuse to look at the whole animal. Just give us the tasty parts, they say. I think God has need of a few soldiers.”

  “Well, I believe I could be a good one.”

  “I hope so. When you broke your leg, you were a great soldier.”

  “Do you think so?” This moment alone made the lunch superlative for me. So
I wanted him to say it again.

  “Not in question. A great soldier.” He paused. He played with his drink. His free hand made a rocking motion on the table from thumb to little finger. “Rick,” he announced, “you’re going to have to pull up your gut again.”

  It was like coming in for a landing. My focus moved closer to my father’s with every instant.

  “Is it medical?” I asked. Then answered myself. “It’s the tests I took.”

  “Let me give you the positive stuff first.” He nodded. “It’s operable. There’s an 80-percent likelihood it’s benign. So when they take it out, they’ve got it all.”

  “A benign tumor?”

  “As I say, they are 80-percent certain. That’s conservative. I believe it’s 95-percent certain.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “You may have bad headaches but the powers that be aren’t ready to lift you from the board. It makes no sense.”

  “Maybe the whole thing makes no sense,” I said.

  “Don’t you ever believe that. I’d rather you took a dump right here in public, right in the middle of my favorite restaurant, than that you descend into that kind of sophomoric nihilism. No, look at it this way. Assume the Devil made a mistake and put all his eggs in one basket concerning you”—again my father was whispering as if any loud statement of Satan’s name could summon him to your side—“and we’re going to remove him all at once. Excise him. Rick, your headaches will be gone.”