Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Hope so. I used to think it was your Waterloo.”

  “Not at all,” said Kittredge. “They need Hugh much too much.”

  “Good to hear that.”

  “The mark of a great man is that his mistakes are also great,” Kittredge declared.

  “Well, damn Philby, I say,” said Lord Robert. “Let’s drink to his damnation.”

  “To Philby,” answered Harlot, holding high his glass. “Damn him for eternity.”

  I had no idea what they were talking about. Yet its importance permeated the room. The shadow of things unsaid was on our evening. Once again I was content with my profession and the mysteries it would yet disclose. Philby. I was even stirred by the way they said his name; they could as well have been speaking of an old fort where drear losses had been taken.

  One night there was a small gentleman at dinner named Dr. Schneider who, I was informed, had achieved some recognition in Europe as a concert pianist. He remained determinedly vague about whether he was Austrian or German, but was quick to express the most extreme monarchist opinions: Hitler, he insisted, might have been able to win the war if he had only been wise enough to restore the Hohenzollerns. “After all,” Dr. Schneider said, “the monarchy could have underwritten the crusade against Bolshevism.”

  Dr. Schneider wore dark glasses and had large, pointed ears. He sheltered himself behind a thick, gray mustache. His hair was white, and he looked to be more than sixty. Given his opinions, he must have gone through some fancy footwork when the war ended, since he now spoke of giving recitals in the Soviet zones of Germany and Austria. I wondered if he had been a spy for Harlot. All the same, I found him unsavory and wondered why the Montagues treated him with respect. On second examination, I could detect that Dr. Schneider was wearing an expensive white wig, well placed on his head, but I had my mother’s eye for masquerade and so was intrigued with his desire to present himself as an older man. I hardly knew how I felt about sitting at table with what might be a crypto-Nazi.

  After dinner, Harlot sat down to a game of chess with Dr. Schneider, and I decided that Hugh liked to enjoy people by their pieces and parts. “Watch the play,” Harlot confided to me. “Schneider is phenomenal in the endgame. He falters occasionally with openings, but unless I’m two pawns up after the middle game, I’m far from home.”

  The pianist would rub his hands and croon or moan after every one of Harlot’s moves. “Oh, you are a devil, Mr. Montague, you are a clever fellow, the trickiest, aren’t you, oh, oh, oh, you have me in a pickle, you do, sir, a fiend with your knights you are, yum, yum, yum, yessir,” after which, nodding his head, albeit still groaning, “Punkt,” he would say, and move a pawn. As Harlot predicted, Dr. Schneider did well in the endgame and brought off a draw. It was the only time I ever saw him at the Stable.

  After he left—and I did notice that he and Harlot shook hands at the door like old comrades—Harlot asked me to stay. While Kittredge was doing the dishes (with which I usually helped her, although, on this night, by Harlot’s insistence, signally not) he took me into his study, pinned me down on a small wooden chair to face his presence in the Cathedral Chippendale, and proceeded to give the first reasonably full deployment of his mind that I had received since the night he told me to give up rock climbing.

  I was ready to talk to him about an unhappy situation at my new work (about which he had never made one inquiry) but, then, I did not dare. What if he had no interest?

  At this moment he said, “Your father is coming back. We’ll go out to dinner, the three of us.”

  “That sounds terrific.” I kept myself from asking where my father had been. No word had come from him in months, so I did not see how I could inquire.

  “Do you find CIA a large place?” Hugh Montague inquired.

  “Enormous.”

  “We weren’t always so big. In fact, the baby almost didn’t get born. J. Edgar Hoover did everything he could to stop us. Didn’t want his FBI put in competition. Hoover may be the most fear-ridden man in Christendom. We refer to him, by the way, as Buddha, J. Edgar Buddha. If the fellow you’re talking to doesn’t follow, then he is not one of us.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know whether us now referred to all of CIA or but a small part.

  “What with Foster Dulles owning Eisenhower’s mind, Allen has us in good shape. We’re certainly expanding.”

  “Yessir.”

  “To do what?” he asked. “What is our purview?”

  “To supply the President with intelligence, I suppose.”

  “Do you have a vision of what that intelligence ought to be?”

  “Well, first to catch up with the KGB.”

  “We can do that. We may have to do a little better than that. It is not just the Russians, you see. We can probably work their mainspring loose, disembarrass them—even if it takes a half-century—of their Marxism, but the war will go on. Right here. Right here, it’s taking place. Across all the face of America. The secret stakes keep going up. The active question is whether this Christ-inspired civilization will continue. All other questions fade before that.”

  “Including the bomb?”

  “It’s not the bomb that’s going to destroy us. If it ever gets down to the nuclear people, then we’re merely incinerating the corpse of all that’s been destroyed already. The bomb can’t be used unless civilization dies first. Of course, that can happen. Our continuing existence depends on not falling prey to false perceptions of reality. The rise of Marxism is but a corollary to the fundamental historical malady of this century: false perception.”

  What a man of the cloth he would have made! The value of his words was so incontestable to himself that he did not question the size of his audience. I could have been one parishioner or five hundred and one: The sermon would not have altered. Each word offered its reverberation to his mind, if not to mine.

  “It’s sad,” he said. “For millennia, every attempt at civilization foundered because nations lacked the most essential information. Now we lurch forward, overburdened by hordes of misinformation. Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information will eventually choke us. Harry, are you beginning to have some concept of how much our people here have to amount to?”

  I managed to mutter, “I’m not sure I see where you’re heading.”

  “You just don’t welcome it.” He swallowed his brandy. “Our real duty is to become the mind of America.”

  I nodded. I had no idea whether I was ready to agree with him, but I nodded.

  “There’s absolutely no reason,” he said, “why the Company can’t get there. Already, we tap into everything. If good crops are an instrument of foreign policy, then we are obliged to know next year’s weather. That same demand comes at us everywhere we look: finance, media, labor relations, economic production, the thematic consequences of TV. Where is the end to all we can be legitimately interested in? Dwelling in an age of general systems, we are obliged to draw experts from all fields: bankers, psychiatrists, poison specialists, art experts, public relations people, trade unionists, hooligans, journalists—do you have a good idea how many journalists are on contract to us?—do observe a little hush-hush on that one. Nobody knows how many pipelines we have into good places—how many Pentagon pooh-bahs, commodores, congressmen, professors in assorted think tanks, soil erosion specialists, student leaders, diplomats, corporate lawyers, name it! They all give us input. We’re rich in our resources. You see, we had the great good luck to start all at once.” He nodded. “For a bureaucratic organization, that is usually a disaster, but it happened to work for us. Not only were we seeded with some of our best OSS people, but we attracted good ambitious men from all over the place, State, the FBI, Treasury, Defense, Commerce—we raided them all. They all wanted to come to us. That created a curious situation. Organizationally speaking, we were set up in a pyramid. But our per
sonnel, as measured by their skilled experience, gave us the shape of a barrel. Enormous amounts of talent in the middle ranks. And they had no way to rise. After all, the people at the top were also young. Relatively young, like myself. So a good many of the men who rushed to join our ranks five years ago had to sign out again. Now, they’re all over the place.”

  “All over Washington?”

  “All over America. Once you’ve been in the Company, you don’t really want to quit it altogether. It’s tedious to work in those financial worlds and business worlds. I tell you, we have liaison into every game that’s going on in this country. Potentially, we can give direction to the land.” He smiled. “Feeling tired?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Didn’t wear you out with the size of the mural?”

  “I’ll be up all night.”

  “Good for you.” He smiled. “Let’s have one more drink before you go. I want you to understand something. I don’t get confidential very often, but from time to time, I will. You see, Harry, everyone in this Pickle Factory has a weakness. One fellow drinks too much. Another screws around heedlessly. A third is a closet queer—either he brazened it through the polygraph, or turned queer later. A fourth smokes marijuana on the sly. My vice, old Harry Hubbard, old before your years, is that I tend to talk too much. So I’m obliged to choose people I can trust. One does get the feeling, speaking to you, that it all goes down into the deepest vault you’ve got. So, yes, I’ll tell you a thing from time to time, and Heaven help you if you don’t keep it to yourself.”

  He took a full draw on his Churchill and let the smoke surround him. “What did you make of our Dr. Schneider?” he asked.

  I had the sense to be brief. “I would,” I said, “read him as an ex-Nazi in a wig. I think he must be ten years younger than his false white hair, and he may know less about concert recitals than dead drops.”

  “It’s tempting,” said Harlot, “to tell you more. But I’m afraid I can’t let you in.”

  “Despite what you just said?” I was as suddenly hungry for secrets about Dr. Schneider as a hound called back from his food.

  “Well,” said Harlot, “there’s no remedy. Perhaps you’ll discover him for yourself one of these days.” He took a puff again. He was enjoying my frustration. “Harry,” said Harlot, “keep the faith.”

  12

  LET ME DESCEND FROM THE HEIGHTS OF HARLOT’S CONFIDENCE IN ME TO the low information of how I spent my working day. If I had finished training with high hopes for my immediate future, having spent many a night at the Farm discussing the best station to be sent to; if the merits of Vienna and Singapore and Buenos Aires and Ankara and Moscow, Teheran, Tokyo, Manila, Prague, Budapest, Nairobi, and Berlin had been weighed for their qualities as the most lively spot for commencing one’s career, I, in common with most of my class, was assigned to a job in Washington, D.C.

  Then came another disappointment. I was not selected for any of the foreign desks. That was the usual prelude to getting an overseas post. An assistant to the Iran Desk in Washington could assume he was learning the ropes for Teheran. Ditto for the Congo Desk and the Japanese, the Polish Desk, and the Chilean. It was generally agreed among Junior Officer Trainees at the Farm that if you had to begin in Washington, Assistant to the Desk Officer was the best job.

  Now, I was not an ambitious young politician, but I had enough of my mother’s social sense to know I had been invited to the wrong party. I landed in the Snake Pit, also known as the Boiler Room and/or the Coal Bin. On an unrewarding job, synonyms proliferate. In a huge room whose fluorescent lights droned away under a relatively low ceiling, in the very small draft of a few modest air conditioners situated in little windows on a far-off wall, we bumped and maneuvered around one another down aisles that were always too narrow for their human traffic. It was hot, unseasonably hot for October. On either side, six feet high, were old-fashioned wooden cabinets with shelves and file boxes.

  We had a Document Room next door, a large chamber stuffed with stacks of papers as yet unfiled. The stacks grew to the ceiling. The names encountered in each pamphlet, station report, agent report, magazine reference, newspaper reference, trade journal, or book were supposed to be set down on a card with a summary of the information contained. After which, the card could be filed, and the document stored more permanently. The theory at the core of such labors was to be able to look at all the information available on any person the Company might be interested in. By such means, telling profiles could be formed.

  It was chaos, however. Documents accumulated faster than we could card them. The Western Hemisphere Division was soon six months behind their tower of paper in the Document Room; Soviet Russia was four months back; China (given the difficulty of ideograms) a year and a half. For West Germany, to which I was assigned, only three months were in arrears. It was enough, nonetheless, to bring stress to every endeavor. I spent much of my time squeezing my way down aisles, or wiggling my fingers into a file box. Once in a while, there was honest panic. One morning, for instance, the Chief of Base in West Berlin sent a cable requesting vital information on one VQ/WILDBOAR. Since hordes of such requests came in, and the turnover of personnel at my low level was considerable, such chores were assigned by lot—you took the cable on the top of the pile at the Incoming Queries Desk.

  Then you worked your way through traffic, doing your best not to collide with the body, its nose in a file, that was blocking your path down the aisle. The odor of sweat was ubiquitous. It might as well have been summer. The air conditioners had small lungs, and each one of us clerks—were we better, for all our training, than clerks?—was carrying his own anxious stir. It was not enough to find WILDBOAR for Chief of Base, Berlin; one had to find him quickly. The cable had been frantic: NEED ALL RECENT ENTRIES ON VQ/WILDBOAR. URGENT. GIBLETS. Yes, the Chief of Base had signed it himself.

  I had had to wait in Records Integration Office down the corridor to obtain access to the PRQ-Part I/Part II/201-File Bridge-Archive, which hopefully was up to date and so could tell me who VQ/ WILDBOAR might be. On this morning, VQ/WILDBOAR did translate into Wolfgang-from-West-Germany, last name unknown, last address Wasserspiegelstrasse 158, Hamburg. That, at least, was a start. Back in the Snake Pit, I could continue my search through the two file boxes—each twenty inches long, each containing something like eighteen hundred index cards, stuffed with Wolfgangs who had been sufficiently inconsiderate to provide us with no last name. Wolfgangs who offered the courtesy of a last initial, a Wolfgang F., or a Wolfgang G., took up another three file boxes. Wolfgangs with a whole last name occupied ten. I did not know that so many Wolfgangs were interesting to us in West Germany!

  Then I discovered they were not. My Wolfgang-from-Hamburg had been entitled to one card in the Snake Pit for the occasion on which he was arrested in 1952 after heaving a brick during a street demonstration in Bonn. Yet he had nothing less than fifteen such entries, carded from fifteen separate West German newspapers which reprinted the same West German wire service story. Absolutely invaluable stuff on my Wolfgang might well be lying somewhere in the Document Room at the other end of this interminable shed, but it had not yet been carded. I was, by now, irritable. In the lunch break, I sent back a cable to the office of Chief of Base, West Berlin. NOT ABLE TO SATISFY REQUEST FOR RECENT ENTRIES RE: VQ/WILDBOAR. SEND BETTER ADDRESS. KU/CLOAKROOM. It was my first cable out. My first use of my own cryptonym.

  At end of day, an answer was routed back to me. CABLE 51—(SERIES RB 100 A). TO KU/CLOAKROOM: MOST RECENT, REPEAT AND UNDERLINE, MOST RECENT INFORMATION ON VQ/WILDBOAR IS OF THE ESSENTIAL, REPEAT, ESSENTIAL. FILE-RAT, ARE YOU INEPT? COME UP WITH YOUR OWN BETTER ADDRESS. VQ/GIBLETS.

  The Chief of Base in Berlin was famous for his short fuse. Yet I had no idea where to look. If I didn’t respond to his cable, I could conceivably receive a Notice of Censure. It left me full of unspoken rage at Harlot. Why had I been left at the Snake Pit? Others in my training group were sited already at some of the best desks in Washingto
n. Rosen was in Technical Services, a supersecret plum—was that due to his performance on the night of interrogation? Worse, Dix Butler, as I learned by way of Rosen, was actually operating out of West Berlin.

  Just when my mood felt condemned to brood through the night—where is Wolfgang, and what would I do tomorrow?—I received a phone call from my father. Heading up something big and unnameable in Tokyo, as I learned from his first remarks, he was reporting back to Washington after a visit to stations in Manila, Singapore, Rangoon, and Djakarta. “Join me for dinner,” he said right off. “We’ll celebrate your release from the Farm. Montague will be there.”

  “Terrific,” I said. I would have preferred to see my father alone.

  “Yes,” he said, “watch Hugh tonight. He knows I’ve got the jam on a lot of doings in the Far East. He’ll be dying to know. Keep an item away from Hugh, and he carries on like you’re picking his pocket.”

  Well, we had a rich dinner at Sans Souci, and a good deal of maneuvering did go on between Cal and Harlot. I could hardly follow the shoptalk about Sumatra, and SEATO, and the rigors of getting a little intelligence out of Singapore without ruffling the Raj. When Harlot asked, “How do you plan to hold Sukarno’s feet to the fire?” my father leaned forward, touched my elbow with his, and replied, “Hugh, that’s just what we won’t get into.”

  “Of course not. You’ll listen to some total fool out there who’s covering every base and hasn’t idea one on how to proceed, but you won’t take a chance with me.”

  “Hugh, I can’t.”

  “I see where it’s leading. I sniff it. You’re going to try to photograph Sukarno in one of his circuses.”

  “Throwing no stones,” said my father, “he’s certainly got a few going.”

  “You’re on squander-time. It’s madness. You can’t trap Buddhists with sex. They place it somewhere between eating and evacuating. Part of the comedy of what goes in and comes out. You’ll need more than photographs to get Sukarno into your pouch.”