The thwap came back from the cell at the far end of the corridor.
“Confess,” said Rosen’s interrogator. “You are not a citizen of the German Democratic Republic.”
“I am Hans Krüll,” said Rosen, “born in Männernburg.”
“You are a piece of filth. Tell the truth or we will use the filth that comes out of you to stuff your nose. Why did you try to climb the fence?”
“I am Hans Krüll,” Rosen repeated.
Now two truncheons were being used, one at each end of the corridor.
My sense of reality had not disappeared, but it was frayed. We were in Camp Peary, not East Germany, but I did not feel safe. Even as a casual vacation trip can remind one that death, too, is a journey, so did I now feel as if insanity did not exist across the sea from reality, but could be visited on foot. It was down the road.
My ears had never seemed more acute. I could hear Rosen arguing in his irritating, supercilious, nasal whine. Yet I could also hear his enormously developed sense of self-importance, ugly as gross riches, but nonetheless his kind of strength. “You are trying to throw me off the track,” he was saying, “and it will not work. I submit my case to the legal guarantees substantiated by Order of Law 1378, Division Three, Chapter B, in the new Constitution of the German Democratic Republic. Look it up. It is there. My rights are being transgressed.”
Yes, he had risen to the occasion! What a diversion! Now the interrogator was out of his book! Later I would learn that Rosen, in preparation, had gone to the Farm library three nights earlier to study the new Constitution of East Germany, thereby picking up enough to offer this exceptional gambit.
My interlocutor came back. Again, he began to question me from the beginning. I was led from detail to detail about the year the trees were cut down on Der Schönheitweg. Again, we passed through the railroad foundry and the aborted climb of the chain-link fence.
“It was because we were lost,” I said, “and I wished to look for the lights of Männernburg.”
“Your partner has told that story already. We have disproved it.”
“I am telling the truth.”
“Earlier you claimed that you did not know it was the border.”
“I knew it was the border.”
“You lied to me before?”
“Yessir.”
“Why?”
“I was frightened.”
“You claim you blundered into West Germany through an unfenced portion of the woods, and were now climbing back into East Germany.”
“Also a lie.”
“And now you are climbing the fence to look for the lights of Männernburg?”
“That is the truth.”
“You have confessed to lying, but now you tell the truth?”
“Yessir.”
“In fact, you are a liar, and an agent of the West German government.”
A siren went off. It resounded through the corridors and cells of the building. My interrogator gathered his papers and sighed.
“It’s over,” he said.
“It is over?”
“I wish I’d had another fifteen minutes.” He looked angry. Indeed, he still looked like a policeman.
“Well, it’s been weird,” I said.
“You did all right,” he said.
“I did? How do you know?”
“I could kill you. When you make me feel like a cop, you’ve been good.”
I stood up.
“Yeah, you can go,” he said. “There’s a truck to pick you up.”
“I think I’ll walk back to camp. Is that okay?”
“Sure. You’ve got the day off now.”
“I think I need the walk.”
“You bet.”
We shook hands.
I did the two miles back to the parade ground and the barracks. New trainees were taking their first jumps through the mock-up of the C-47 door on the thirty-eight-foot tower. In another six hours my training would be over and I would go back to Washington to work in the I-J-K-L by the Reflecting Pool; then, presumably, I would be assigned overseas. As I made my way to the cafeteria for breakfast, I felt an epiphany near. I had passed through a dark wood full of midges and ticks, was captured in fatigues filthy with the slime of a border ditch, my fingers raw and newly scabbed from the chain-link fence, my eyes aching from the glare of the reflector lamp in an eight-by-eight-foot cell, and I had told lies all night in the face of prodigies of attack on a contrived memory, yet I felt clean and full of the virtue that greets one at the end of a rite of passage. It had been the most exciting eight hours I had spent in CIA; I had never been so happy. Something in these hours of interrogation confirmed my training. I had found the realm where I could spend my working life. To labor every day for the security of my country appealed to every breath that was deeded over to one’s sense of the responsible and the appropriate. As for the other side of me, not yet worldly enough to go seeking for spiritual explorations and carnal adventures, it could be fascinated all the same by the arts of deception and the war against evil. It was certainly intrigued with games and the no-man’s-land of those who were ready to play such games. So it was also in accord. I had my epiphany. Happiness was that resonance one knows in the heart when the ends of oneself come to concordance in the morning air.
11
THE CANAL HOUSE PURCHASED BY HUGH MONTAGUE AFTER HIS WEDDING to Kittredge was situated on the bank of the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that passes through Georgetown. This waterway, if I recall correctly, was a thriving artery in 1825, floating down its fair load of coal from Appalachia to the Potomac, the barges then towed back with a cargo of such assorted sundries as flour, gunpowder, bolts of cloth, and axes. After the Civil War, however, the canal could no longer compete with the railroads. The mills on the riverbanks had long been empty, the locks were still, and the canal bed was a trickle.
Hugh’s house, built as a stable for tow mules, was also graced with a second-floor loft where bargemen could sleep in the hay. The little building, already renovated by successive owners when the Montagues purchased it, had something like seven or eight rooms, and had become a modest but charming house for those who could abide child-sized chambers and low ceilings. One would have assumed that Hugh and Kittredge were too tall for the place, but the canal house revealed a side of them I might not otherwise have perceived. The nature of their separate professional tasks had this much in common: Their labors were often lonely, and rarely void of anxiety. So they tucked themselves into their canal house which they called—no great surprise—the Stable, and if there was a century-old effluvium of straw and mule-balls embedded in the floorboards, why, the better. Coziness was their connubial marrow. Since they were both, as I soon discovered, tough with a dollar, I think it helped that their little find had cost but $10,000. (Late in 1981, in a stroll one afternoon in Georgetown, I discovered that the house, sold by them in 1964 and several times again by subsequent owners, was now up to nothing less than an asking price of $250,000. That had to inspire some sour reflections on the changes in our American republic these thirty years.)
It also provided a half hour of melancholy. The Stable came back to my memory as it used to be in 1955.
I used to love their small living room, small dining room, and very small study for Hugh. In those former mule mangers, Kittredge showed something of her father’s inclination for collecting antiques. Given a childhood in Boston and Cambridge, she had to perceive Washington as a Southern city. Why, then, not look for rare originals by colonial cabinetmakers from Virginia and the Carolinas? Listening to her speak of her acquisitions, I became half-familiar with names I had never encountered before, and was not to meet often again: Such colonial artisans as Thomas Affleck, Aaron Chapin, John Pimm, Job Townsend, Thomas Elfe, went in and out of her conversation until I did not know who had designed what, nor from where. I could hardly be concerned whether her cherrywood dining table and handwrought chairs with doe feet (which were, indeed, touchingly carved), her poplar sugar
chest, her planter’s table, her candlestand, were choice samples from North or South Carolina. It was enough that they had pedigree. Like show dogs, these pieces were not the same as other beasts. In the dining room on a panel between the mantel and the fireplace was a scene, neatly painted, of woods and houses and the canal; whiskey taken by the fire, then fortified with her pâté, could taste awfully good.
Harlot’s study was another matter. Kittredge had furnished it to his choice, and I, feeling a pang at how well she understood his desires, suffered sentiments of disloyalty to Hugh in the midst of all my honest feelings. Since there were no two people I cared for more, I had an insight into the true attraction of treachery. It felt as bright as a spring leaf. Treachery helps to keep the soul alive—a most awful thought! What if it is true?
Harlot’s study consisted of not much more than a massive dark oak desk and a leviathan of a chair. Victorian furniture, circa 1850, obviously satisfied Harlot’s idea of a companionable style. A taste for the substantial gave solemnity, Harlot would explain, to the subterranean and lewd endeavors of the period. That is a large thought for one piece of furniture, but his grand seat was of mahogany and nearly five feet tall. The top of the chair-back was framed by a gothic arch full of quatrefoil fretwork. When you consider that this chair-back had been added to a sturdy Chippendale design for the arms, seat, and legs, the result was as baroque as a cathedral rising from an English manor.
The other rooms I never saw. Let me correct myself. The kitchen was an old pantry off the dining room with its share of cast-iron pots and trivets, and I was in there often, chatting with Kittredge while she cooked for the three of us, but Harlot had an upstairs library I was never asked to enter, and they had two or three bedrooms where the loft used to be. I was not invited to stay over. Perhaps they had a finely honed householder’s fear that if I achieved entrance upstairs, I might work up some way to live with them.
What evenings we had! While I never went over without telephoning first, and there were more than a few nights when they were out, or had company they did not choose to have me meet, I still encountered an odd collection of people at their small dinners. (Indeed, I was too young to know how curious and mutually unsuited some of their dinner guests were.) The columnist Joseph Alsop, for one, proved to be overpoweringly patriotic, even for me, and I must say he breathed heavily whenever military or Company matters were discussed. The thought of young American men in such pursuits was obviously moving to him. Alsop also proved prodigious in his snobbery. I was paid no attention until he discovered that Boardman Hubbard was my father, and then Alsop asked me to dinner, an invitation which I, suddenly acting much like Cal, took pleasure to refuse.
Actually, I was lonely on those evenings when I did not have a welcome at the Stable. Graduated from the Farm, I had been bunking with four other Junior Officer Trainees in a furnished apartment in Washington. One or another roommate was invariably preempting the living room in an attempt to seduce his date, usually a secretary from the I-JK-L, and I, looking to think a few things through, took long walks at night.
No wonder, then, if invitations to the Stable meant much to me. I felt not unlike an unemployed curator who, once or twice a week, is permitted to visit the museum’s private collection. There was no doubt Harlot knew extraordinary people. Since many of them had to do with OSS, I never judged by appearances. One hard-looking man with a limp and an off-accent who talked about horses all night turned out to have been one of the guerrilla leaders of the Chetniks—the Mikhailovitch group that lost to Tito. I was impressed with his Balkan manners. When he toasted Kittredge—which he did frequently—he not only raised his glass but curved his knee, as if the good leg were a bow and he was flexing it. Another guest was a formidable old lady with a grand manner, porcelain blue eyes, and white hair, a half-Bavarian, half-Italian countess who had run an underground safe house in Rome for Jews during the Occupation.
Twice Kittredge had a girl there for me, each the younger sister of Radcliffe classmates, and both young ladies proved no better than I at petting on a couch somewhat later that night in my crowded apartment. We got awfully drunk to do it, and roommates would come through the door or go out, and my romances were without wings. I was becoming seriously concerned about the intensity of my sexual dreams compared to the lukewarm manifestations of it I was able to offer the dating world.
One evening the Montagues had a guest who most certainly brought out the best in Harlot. Given the size of the dining table, they never sat down to more than six, and this night we were four, but it looked like five. Their guest was a red-faced British general six feet seven inches tall, of magnificent bearing, with four rows of ribbons six inches wide on his chest, and he sat at his quarter of the table and drank all night and nodded wisely to all Harlot said. It seemed he had been in the SOE, and served on sister missions with the OSS, parachuting into France with Harlot. After which they became, as he put it, “good fellow sots” in London. Since the General contributed no more than his immaculate and immense presence, his lineage—which went back eleven hundred years—his title, Lord Robert, and his remarkably impressive uniform which he wore, he murmured, “in Kittredge’s honor,” conversation was left to Harlot. He did not flag. I had never known anyone to speak as well on so many matters; if Harlot had a conversational vice, it was his preference for monologue. Sir Robert suited him. “What,” the General asked, after listening to other matters for a half hour, “is the history of this place? Looks quaint. What do you call it? Georgetown? Has to’ve been named after one of the kings, hope not the Third.” That was Lord Robert’s longest speech of the night. Harlot reimbursed his guest with a disquisition on Georgetown after the war—the Civil War. “Nothing but camps and government corrals and a few bone factories. An awful lot of the horsemeat put into tins for the Union troops was processed just a few streets down. You can still smell dead animals in the fog.”
“Hugh, you can’t,” said Kittredge.
“Darling, I can sniff them out,” said Hugh, the reflections on his eyeglasses dancing from the candlelight.
“It must have been an awful place for a little while,” admitted Kittredge. “Full of diphtheria and brothels.”
I had the distinct impression that Lord Robert perked up. Dead horses one hundred years gone might not waken much appetite, but old brothels did!
“All the same, it was a thriving work town,” said Hugh, “full of flour mills and corn mills, and hammers hitting the adze in the coopers’ shops, a good sound.”
“Good,” agreed Sir Robert.
“Saws and planing machines,” Hugh went on, “anvils dinging away. Such stuff. On a still night, I can hear echoes. Raucous bars. Canalmen fighting. A few of those taverns have made it all the way down to our time, and boys like Herrick, who work in the government, go to drink there now.”
“What did you say your name was?” asked Lord Robert.
“Herrick Hubbard, sir.”
“His father is Cal Hubbard,” said Harlot.
“Yes, a man of very strong opinions, your father,” said Lord Robert, as if mental life on his own promontory six feet seven inches high offered few people who would voice their opinions up to him.
“Hugh has got it wrong,” Kittredge said. “Georgetown used to be, for the most part, a darling place. The houses had porticoes and gabled dormers. Slathers of gingerbread in the eaves.”
“Kittredge, you miss the essence,” said her husband.
“Do I?”
Two spots of anger showed in her cheeks, an unhappy color. It was the first time I had seen her looking harsh. It gave me a sense of the reason they did not invite me to sleep over: They would need the space to raise their voices.
Hugh, however, was not about to go to war with the General and myself as linesman and judge. “She’s right,” he said, “so am I. We happen to be talking about opposite ends of the town.”
“Never knew a place that didn’t have its up street and its down,” Lord Robert said.
“Yes. Funny story. I was reading about Georgetown last night in a local history.” Hugh began to laugh. His mirth was powerful enough to suggest that a good deal of anger had just been packed away. “Quotes a newspaper account from 1871. A resident of this town, Thaddeus Atwater, walking down Q Street one March morning, slips on the ice. His cane flies out of his hand and hits a hog strolling by”—a look at Kittredge, who put her tongue out at him and took it back so quickly that the General, if he had seen it, might have thought his eyes were up to tricks—“whereupon the injured pig roars like a bull and bolts into the nearest open cellar door. That happens to be a carpenter shop with shavings on the floor. It’s filthy dark down there, and they’ve set a candle on a stand which, of course, the beast knocks over into the shavings and so starts one hell of a fire. Enter Red Hat . . .”
“Red Hat?” inquired Lord Robert.
“The local firehorse. A giant steed. Red Hat is pulling the Henry Addison fire wagon in unison with his mate, Dora Girl. The firemen drop hose into an adjacent brook, begin to pump, and manage to quench the fire, although they are all the while slopping so much water over Q Street that it soon becomes a frozen pond. By evening, the townspeople are out to try their ice skates. I enjoy that period,” said Harlot.
“Yes,” I said, “I guess events had more influence on other events, then.”
“Yes,” he said, “you’re not a dull boy, are you? You see the metamorphoses.”
“Just so, metamorphoses,” Lord Robert remarked. He seemed to be coming out of the trance Hugh’s story had left him in. “Do you know, there’s talk of sending Philby to Beirut. Going to give him a journalist’s job.”
“Oh, no,” said Harlot. “It’ll play like hell over here. Do your best to stop it. It’s hard enough to keep the FBI off MI6, without your people giving Philby a plum.”
“Be bad for you personally, won’t it?”
“No,” replied Harlot, “all is forgiven.”
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