Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Yes,” I said, “I know that.” Was it ten years ago, sitting at lunch at Twenty-One, that my father had spoken of a German general who had been able to strike an agreement with U.S. Army Intelligence after the war? “Yes, I heard of him,” I said.

  “He also,” said Butler, “got the word out to all the fellow ex-Nazis who worked with him on the Russian front. A lot of those guys jumped at the chance to find a good-paying job in postwar Germany. After all, the work is easy now. Anybody in your family who finds himself in the East Zone can furnish you information. But that’s all right. Analyze the SSD, and you’ll find East German Communists running it at the top, and half the Gestapo underneath. It’s all bullshit, friend, and I’m having the time of my life.”

  Butler did not offer a word on what my work might be. I was left to discover such details bit by bit. For my first few days in Berlin I was occupied with obtaining accreditation for my cover job, and a cryptonym: VQ/STARTER. Considerable time was left to spend in our once-grand and now cavernous apartment. The furnishings depressed me. The bed in which I slept had a monumentally heavy mattress, as damp as an old cellar, and the pillow bolster could have been mistaken for a log. I could see why Prussians had stiff necks. The substantial if leaky throne in the bathroom was two-tiered, offering a flat shelf within the bowl. Not since infancy had one been obliged to pay so much attention to what one had just accomplished, a testament, I decided, to the love of civilized Germans for primitive studies.

  My cover job proved so clerical I hesitate to describe it—I had a desk in a Department of Defense supply unit and was expected to show up once a day to make certain that no papers requiring real administrative disposition had by any mischance been routed through me. The quarters were cramped, not so cramped as the Snake Pit, but tight enough for my relatively empty desk to look inviting to more legitimate workers. Before long they began to take squatter’s rights. By the second week, not only my drawers but my tabletop was being appropriated. Warned in advance that CIA personnel working in State Department or Department of Defense offices inspired resentment, I was still not ready for the intimacy of the irritations. By the end of the second week, I made a point of sweeping from my desk all the unauthorized paperwork, and dropping it into one large carton which I left in the aisle when I went out to lunch. There was a hush in the room as I returned.

  That afternoon, a committee of three approached me. Following a twenty-minute conference on the merits of the situation, my desk was divided, by mutual agreement, into zones as fully demarcated as Berlin under four-power occupation.

  Our treaty probably worked better than most, but no one in this office was ever at ease with me again. It hardly mattered. I needed no more than a place where people whom I could not inform of my real work might get in touch by phone or mail.

  My more legitimate labors were performed Downtown. That was the name of a shed surrounded by barbed-wire fence, one of the numerous Company offices. The rest were located, by no particular logic I could untangle, all over the city, including Chief Harvey’s home, a large white stucco house which not only doubled as an office but, under heavy sentry guard, was fenced about and sandbagged. Its machine-gun emplacements trained fields of fire down the neighboring streets. The place was certainly a redoubt, and might have kept the flag flying for a few hours if the Russians came over from East Berlin.

  I spent my first week on the telephone at Downtown, aspiring in my intensely crammed German to pick up surveillance reports from the doorman, the barman, the headwaiter, and the portier of each leading hotel. In the beginning, it had not been routine for me to make a phone call on the basis of a quick orientation by a colleague—at last, I had colleagues!—and begin true spy work. So, for a time it was fun. Yes, the doorman at the Bristol, or the Kempinski, or the Am Zoo would tell me (usually in English considerably better than my German) yes, of the four people whose activities he had been asked to watch, Karl Zweig, for one, had stopped by in his Mercedes to pay a visit to room 232. The doorman would have the name of the occupant of room 232 when I called again that afternoon. Heady stuff. I felt as if I had, at last, entered the Cold War.

  After a few days of checking twice daily through my long list of headwaiters and barmen for their pieces of information, the task brought my early enthusiasm down to the sober responses we bring to a chore. Nor could I always divine whether Karl or Gottfried or Gunther or Johanna was East German or West German, one of ours or one of theirs. If the barman had overheard a conversation of interest, I had to dispatch a memo to the appropriate desk. A case officer with more experience than myself would be sent out to debrief the bartender. Indeed, I did not even know yet whether this was done by way of a drink, or both men repaired to a safe house. Be it said that Dix Butler was doing such work. My new ambition was to get off the telephone (where I was beginning to feel like a man who sold space for classified advertising) and get out, be a street man.

  On I stayed, however, at my telephone for ten days, until a call came for me to report to FLORENCE at VQ/GIBLETS. VQ/GIBLETS, I knew already, was Base Chief William King Harvey’s home, the white stucco fort I had heard so much about. Harvey, as my colleague on the next telephone informed me, thought of this well-guarded house as Little Gibraltar, or Giblets, and FLORENCE was “C.G.”—Clara Grace Follich was her name. She was William King Harvey’s new wife.

  “Wonder what it’s about?” I asked.

  “Oh, you’re on the Ivory Soap trolley,” he said. “C.G. gets around sooner or later to all the new people on base. Looks them over.”

  I learned quickly enough about the trolley. C.G. had been a major in the WACs and administrative assistant to General Lucien Truscott. Now married and semiretired, she watched over the maintenance of the safe houses. She and I took a tour of Berlin that day in a modest van with no identifying flag or marks, and I carried towels and sheets and toilet paper and caustic cleansers, plus beer and wine and bread and sausage and cartons of cigarettes and boxes of cigars up flights of stairs or in and out of old elevators with clanging gates, and took out soiled towels and sheets (leaving food remains and trash and empty bottles for the chambermaid), and so serviced something like seven safe houses in as many neighborhoods. If three of them were new and clean with Swedish blonde-wood furniture and picture windows in new apartment houses, four looked just like the seedy stained-carpet hideout my father had taken me to in Washington.

  C.G. was not a woman with much small talk, but then you were rarely in doubt of where her mind might be. She had a practiced hand at taking inventory of what was left in each safe house, and I noticed that she gave a different knock to each entrance door before inserting her key, presumably to alert any case officer inside who might be debriefing an agent. At no place, however, on this day was there a response. Seven safe houses, empty of occupants, were in this fashion processed.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said when we were done. “That’s a lot of safe houses to be lying idle.”

  “I guess I was telling myself something like that.”

  “When we need them, we really need them.”

  “Yes, Major.”

  “You didn’t see any chambermaids today, Hubbard?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “If you had, you would have noticed that they are not spring chickens. Can you tell me why?”

  “Well, if one of our agents has to hole up for a few days, and the chambermaid is young, he might get into a relationship.”

  “Please expand on that.”

  “Well, suppose one of the KGB agents who are trained lovers”—we had been given orientation about such KGB agents—“was to exercise a hold on the chambermaid, why, the KGB could obtain all kinds of access to the safe house.”

  “Believe it or not,” she said, “you’re one of the few juniors to understand that right from the get-go.”

  “Well, I think I’ve had more than the average background,” I volunteered. “My father is an old OSS man.”

  “Hubbard? Not
the Cal Hubbard.”

  “Yes, Major.”

  “My husband knows your father.”

  “My father has a lot of respect for your husband.” All the while, I was wondering if Cal had sent his letter. I decided he had. There was something in the way she said, “Not the Cal Hubbard.”

  “I’m going to talk to my husband about you,” C.G. added.

  No call to visit the Chief came back over the next week. In compensation, my work grew more interesting. Another Junior Officer came to us from the States. Since I was senior to him, if only by two weeks, he was soon on my telephone, and I was moved to agent traffic, where I kept a log on which Communist officials were traveling back and forth from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany to East Berlin. This involved using agents’ reports, and so offered a good picture of our network of observers in East Berlin: taxi drivers, newsstand operators off the Unter den Linden, the Friedrichstrasse, and the Stalin Allee, our East Berlin police—how many Vopos were in our pay!—our East Berlin hotel personnel, even a towel boy in the one important East Berlin brothel. This variety of input was fortified by daily reports from just about every established madam in West Berlin. In 1956, there was as yet no Berlin Wall, and so officials from the Eastern bloc were always crossing over for an evening of adventures in the West!

  These were passive networks. Any recruiting of new agents was beyond the purview of my job: I could not even say whether the information we collected went back to Washington and the Document Room, or whether our people in West Berlin were already implementing new actions because of what was learned that day.

  A call came through at last. VQ/BOZO wished to see me. VQ/ BOZO was William Harvey. As was VQ/GIBLETS-1. As was VQ/ COLT. The cryptonym changed with the place where you were going to meet Mr. Harvey. VQ/GIBLETS-1 was the private office in his home; VQ/BOZO his main office off the Kurfürstendamm; and VQ/COLT was the turnaround in back of his house. He had had the tennis court paved in asphalt to provide a quick turnaround for vehicles and limousines. Should the message be signed off as VQ/COLT, one had to be ready to tear up in one’s Jeep, jump out, and leap into Harvey’s moving (and armored) Cadillac. Of course, that did not always happen. I had heard stories about juniors like myself who dashed over to the tennis court on the call from COLT, whipped out of their vehicle on arrival, jumped into his Cadillac, and then waited forty-five minutes for Chief to saunter out of GIBLETS (which villa, I add, even bore a physical resemblance to him when he wore, as he usually did, his bulletproof vest). Still, there could be that one time when you came roaring up twenty seconds late.

  Today, in the main office at BOZO, it would be easier. Many were scheduled to see him. How many was another matter. Installed in a private cubicle, the size of a walk-in closet, you waited in isolation until your call came; then you were led by a secretary down an empty corridor to his door. The idea, presumably, was that none of us, new arrivals, case officers, American officials, and/or West German officials were supposed to get a look at one another.

  Waiting in that cubbyhole, I tried to prepare myself. I had been warned that Mr. Harvey would probably be sitting behind his large desk with his coat off, the butts of his two revolvers poking from his shoulder holsters. It was also legend, however, that he would never appear in public without his jacket, no matter how hot the day. Sweat might lave his cheeks like water on a horse’s belly, but FBI training gave you decorum forever; he was not about to expose those shoulder holsters to the public.

  I had also been warned that soon after meeting him, he might take out either gun, spin the cylinder, remove the bullets, pull back the hammer, aim in your direction, and click the trigger. My father had remarked that only an ex-FBI man could be party to such opera.

  On the other hand, we were all, by Mr. Harvey’s orders, obliged to carry firearms when out on an operation, no matter how minor. The Russians, it was estimated, had pulled off twenty kidnappings in West Berlin over the last year. Of course, the victims were Germans. The KGB had not abducted any Americans, no more than we had trafficked with them, but if the Soviets were going to break this rule, it seemed to be Harvey’s assumption that he was the man they would choose.

  I was not old enough to know how pervasive such a fear could become. All I felt, when led into his office, was his power to intimidate. There were enough firearms on the wall to fill a gallery in a museum. Harvey sat at his desk, a phone to his ear, vest unbuttoned, the butts of two revolvers growing like horns out of his armpits. Wide in the middle, he looked heavy enough to waddle when he walked, and he reeked of gin and Sen-Sen tablets.

  Nonetheless, he gave an impression of strength. Rage came off him. He hung up the phone and looked at me with one full wad of suspicion. I had the instinct to guess that he looked at each new man in the same way. We knew more than we were supposed to know, and he wanted to find out what it was.

  Of course, he was right. A moment later, I knew exactly how much knowledge was too much. I had been told of the Berlin tunnel, and I knew about Guy Burgess’ drawing of his ex-wife, Libby. I had once been KU/CLOAKROOM. I had reason to feel uncomfortable.

  Harvey nodded. A cop has his preferences, and one of them is to meet people who are aware of his force. By looking uneasy, I had just passed the first test. From those small, well-curved lips, advertised in advance by Kittredge, issued his voice, a low, resonant burble. I had to lean forward in my seat to hear Base Chief Harvey speak.

  “My wife says you’re okay,” he stated.

  “Oh, she’s a fine lady,” I answered quickly. Too quickly. His suspicion of me was in order: My instinctive reflex was to lie to William Harvey. C.G., I had already decided, was from the Midwest, and there is a prejudice buried as deep as a taproot in the Hubbard fold. Midwesterners can have their share of virtues, but the fine ladies are all accounted for by the time western Massachusetts reaches New York State.

  All the same, C.G. had approved of me. I was enough of a slop to think it was one of the best things about her. Then I took a second look into Harvey’s protruding bloodshot eyes. I was dealing with no ordinary husband. Jealousy was as natural to him as bread and butter.

  It was ill founded. For all her friendliness, C.G. sent out one clear instruction: She was a married woman. Of course, I was not about to try to tell him this. I had just noticed on top of each of the three large safes in this office three prominent thermite bombs. At his right hand was a panel with many buttons. Within his drawer must be other buttons. On the desktop were a red phone and a black-and-white-striped phone that looked not unlike a landing craft just come in from Mars. I did not know which one of these buttons and instruments could trigger the thermite bomb device, but it was evident to me that the room could be set ablaze in two-fifths of a second.

  “Yeah, kid,” he said, “she likes you.” He breathed a bit heavily, his eyes fixed on me with the intentness that accompanies a man who wants to take a drink but is holding off. “She don’t like many.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Do not say ‘yessir’ around me unless you’re feeling insubordinate. ‘Yessir’ is what people say when they think you’re full of shit, but are still ready to put their tongue up your ass.”

  “Okay,” I managed to get out.

  “I called you in here for a talk. I need a couple of juniors to do a couple of jobs for me. But I’d rather find such capability in one amateur, not two.”

  I nodded. I had never wanted to say “Yessir” so much in my life.

  “C.G. seems to think you can do it, so I looked up your 201. The training grades are respectable. For me there’s only one beeper in your file. You went from training to Technical Services but no saddlebags come with your 201.” That was the fearful word I had been awaiting. Saddlebags were cryptonyms. “What the hell did you do at Technical Services?” he asked.

  “Well, Mr. Harvey, I didn’t get an assignment, so in a short while I was transferred to the course in Intensive German. There was never a need for me to pick up a cryptonym.”

&n
bsp; “It’s off-chart to land in Intensive German before you even know where you’re going to be assigned. I’d hate to dive into Kraut-talk and end up in the Philippines.” He burped. “In fact, language is not the initial necessity here at Base. Let’s remember that we won the war, not the Heinies. You can get along with poco German. I do.”

  He did. I may have just met him, but for the last two weeks the pool had been informing me: Harvey’s German was one of the best jokes at Base. He held up the revolver for the first time, and aimed to the left of my ear. “Seems to me, you knew you were coming here.”

  “Well, Mr. Harvey,” I said in reply, “I had reasons to think so.”

  “What allowed you to know more about your future than Personnel?”

  I hesitated, but only to make the point. “I was given the idea by my father.”

  “The old family fix?”

  “Yessir.”

  “‘Yessir?’ You’re feeling insubordinate, huh?” he chuckled. The sound was raspy and full of phlegm, like an automobile starter kicking around. “Let me hand it to your father,” he declared. “The Oh-So-Socials may not run as much of the Company as they used to, but your father hangs in. I guess he can still get his son assigned where he wants.”

  “He seemed to think Berlin was where I should be.”

  “Why?”

  My cheeks were red. I hardly knew what turn to take. “He said that’s where the action is.”