Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “I never tried to save any of that money. Once I got so lucky I walked out with eight hundred dollars from a single cash register, and there wasn’t any way to spend such a sum on a girl and drink, so I bought a good used Chevy, and sent my father a telegram. ‘Your car is parked on 280 North Thirtieth Street in Russelville, Arkansas. Keys under the seat. Don’t look for me. I’m gone to Mexico.’ I giggled like a looney-bird writing that telegram. I could see my old man on his gimp leg searching for me in Matamoros and Vera Cruz, every low bar. One of his teeth was like a broken fang.”

  There were more stories. Robbery followed robbery, and each girl was described for my benefit. “I don’t want to get your clap stirring around too much, Hubbard, in your poor detumescent young nuts, but this lady’s pussy . . .” He was off. I knew everything about female anatomy except how to picture it truly. A grotto of whorls and looplets glistened darkly in my imagination.

  Then his life altered. He lay over in St. Louis for a few months and lived with a couple of newfound buddies. They would have parties, and exchange girlfriends. I could not believe their indifference to questions of possession. “Hell, yes,” he would say. “We used to take turns putting our dicks through a hole in a sheet. The girls would then give samples of oral technique. You’d have to guess which girl was on the chomp. Not easy. Leave it to chicks. They could mix their styles. Just to confuse us.”

  “You didn’t mind that your girl was doing such things to another guy?” I admit to asking.

  “Those chicks? Incidental. Me and my buddies did jobs together. We shared a half-dozen houses we thoroughly looted. I can tell you—there’s nothing like home-burglary. Better than robbing a store. It ticks off crazy things. Cleans out any settled habits you might believe you have. For example, one of these dudes always used to take a shit right on the middle of the carpet in the master bedroom. I tell you, Herrick, I understood it. If you’d ever entered a medium-sized house in the middle of the night, you’d know. It feels large. You are aware of every thought that’s ever passed through those walls. You might just as well be a member of the family. Me and my two buddies had a bond that was closer than any girlfriend.” Now he fixed my eyes by staring into them, and I was obliged to nod. “None of this is to be passed on—you hear me?” I nodded again. “People ask about me,” he said, “tell them I served in the Marines for three years. It’s true. For fact, I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” He looked at me as if I were impertinent. “Because you have to know when to make your move. Hubbard, in years to come, keep an eye on my path. I talk a lot, but I get it done. Sometimes people who brag the most are the ones who accomplish the most. They have to—they’ll look like fools if they don’t. Since the Company is a clam-bar, I expect to have enemies up to here,” he said, raising his hand well above his head, “but I will prevail. Comprehend why? Because I commit myself wholly to an endeavor. Yet I also know when to move. These are contradictory but essential favors. The Lord grants them to few. We were being pulled in,” he went on without transition, “every week by the police. They had nothing on us, but they kept putting us into lineups as cannon fodder. It is no picnic to be in a lineup. The people who are trying to recover their memory as to who robbed them on their own street corner are often hysterical. They could select you by mistake. That was one factor. The other was my sixth sense. The war had just ended. Time to move. So I got drunk one night and enlisted in the morning. Lo, I was a Marine. Three years. I’ll tell you about that sometime. The rest is history. I got out, went to the University of Texas on the GI Bill, played linebacker from 1949 to 1952, and thereby—help of certain alumni—was able to avoid being called up as a reserve for Korea, to which I could have gone and come back in a coffin or as a hero—I know such things—but I had my eye on professional football. I finished college and tried out for the Washington Redskins, but I smashed my knee. Whereupon I followed Bill Harvey’s advice and signed up with my peers—you and the rest of the intellectual elite.”

  “Is that when you first knew Bill Harvey?”

  “More or less. He liked my style of play on special teams. I got a letter from him when I was still with the Redskins. We had lunch. You could say he recruited me.” Butler yawned suddenly in my face. “Hubbard, my attention is wandering. My tongue is turning dry.” He stared around the room, his restlessness licking at my calm. Then he signaled, and we left for another bar. If the evening proved in the end to be without incident, I attribute it to the wisdom of the Germans. They knew when to leave him alone. I found it a very long night. I could not get away from the knowledge that the search for KU/CLOAKROOM was going to be with me through every drinking bout and hangover for quite some time.

  5

  CABLES WERE SENT BACK AND FORTH. I WAS ABLE TO INFORM MR. HARVEY that KU/CLOAKROOM had been changed to KU/ROPES. Now we had to decide whether to wait seventy-two hours to pick up the next shift of cryptonym, or put a push on Bridge-Archive:Control. Harvey told me to wait. Three days later, I was able to inform him that we were in South Korea, courtesy of DN/FRAGMENT.

  “That is going to hold us up for two weeks,” he said.

  “I can,” I offered, “hit Bridge-Archive hard.” Already, I was beginning to count on a contrary reaction to every move I proposed.

  “No,” he said. “I want to mull this one around. Just initiate a request for DN/FRAGMENT. With all we’ve got to do, two weeks will pass before we can turn around.”

  It was the truth. There was a lot to do. If, for the first few days, my role as aide-de-camp to William King Harvey had meant not much more than waiting for him to get into BLACKIE-1 (our bullet-resistant Cadillac), the job soon expanded to on-hand note-taker, intraoffice communicator of unhappy orders from the boss, plus monitor of the wastebasket product of significant hotel rooms in West and East Berlin delivered by chambermaids on retainer. There was also covert bookkeeping of our disbursements for special operational expenses, and various other payoffs that case officers passed over to me as chits with code names. I do not wish to suggest that I was on top of any of it. I had a little to do with a great many things, but most of the time I could give no close account of what was going on; it made more sense to recognize that we had a large-sized factory operation spread over the 341 square miles of West and East Berlin, and information of all varieties came in as raw material, was processed in our various intelligence shops and mills, and went out as product via cable and pouch to Headquarters back at the Reflecting Pool and other relevant offices in Washington. I was comparable to a clerk in the superintendent’s office who could brag that he had a desk near the boss. It was no boon. Harvey worked as hard as any man I ever met, and, much like Harlot, saw sleep as the interruption of serious activity. Daily, he would go through the hundreds of cargo manifests that had come in the day before at Schönefeld Airport, and since he could hardly read German, this cost us the output of a couple of translators who had to work through the night at CRUMPETS to number the apples and rifles. Harvey could make out flights, time and place of departure and arrival, and the amount of product; he knew the German words for cartons and cases, containers, and off-category loads; he had a vocabulary for kilograms and cubic meters. That was his linguistic limit. Because he could not recognize the names of the variety of different arms and commodities flown into East Berlin from Moscow, Leningrad, the Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, Hungary, et al., he had ordered his translators to assign a number to each kind of item. Since this included, as I say, everything from apples to rifles, and there were ten kinds of apples and several hundred varieties of small arms, Harvey had put together a vest-pocket code of several thousand numbers. In lieu of a dictionary, he kept a private black book with each number listed, but he did not have to refer to text often. He knew his numbers. Riding in BLACKIE, sipping on his martini, his other hand, one stubby finger extended, would be guiding his eye down a cargo manifest to which the translator had affixed the required numbers. Sometimes, when he wished to take notes, he wo
uld put the martini glass in its holder, or worse, pass it to me, and with his color-coding pen underline items in red, blue, yellow, or green, so that on the second pass through these pages, relations between various Soviet forces stationed in Berlin would start to speak to him. At the least, this is my supposition. He never explained any of it, but he certainly hummed like a handicapper reading the racing form. His mutterings sputtered in my ear with the agreeable sound of cracklings in a frying pan. “Twenty-six eighty-one, that’s got to be some kind of Kalashnikov, but I’ll look it up”—over came the martini to my hand, out came his black book—“damn, it’s a Skoda, not a Kally, should have known that 2681 is the Skoda Machine-Pistol Series C, Model IV. Wasn’t that discontinued?” He looked up. “Hubbard, take a note.” As I fumbled for my notebook and pen with my free hand, while holding his martini in the other, he took back his glass, drained it, set it in the holder, and dictated: “Sovs either dumping outmoded Skoda Series C, Model IV on Vopos and ilk, or starting up Model IV again. Or, option three, preparing a caper. Latter most likely. Only ninety-six Skodas in shipment.” He filled his martini glass from the shaker. “Put it in the Womb Room,” he said.

  That was an extra large closet the size of a jail cell off his office at GIBLETS. The sides had been covered in cork to give him a four-wall bulletin board. On it he tacked every unanswered question. Sometimes he would taper off from a sixteen-hour working day by snooping around in that cork cavern, dwelling among his enigmas.

  My day, then, was generally lived within parameters. I had a desk adjacent to each of Mr. Harvey’s offices at GIBLETS, BOZO, and Downtown, and I traveled with him, gathering together—if I could anticipate when he was ready to saddle up—all the papers I was working on, stuffed them, file folder and all, into my flunky-bag (the term he delighted in applying to my attaché case), and sprinted down one or another corridor after him. Off we went in BLACKIE, arsenal-style, driver, bodyguard riding shotgun, second shotgun (myself ), plus Chief, and if he wasn’t working on the radio-telephone, or extracting the essence from another swatch of papers, he would tell stories.

  I once dared to remark to him that every leader I had known in the Company told stories. While the vast experience backing this remark was limited to Mr. Dulles, my father, Harlot, and Dix, Mr. Harvey did not ask for substantiation, but contented himself with replying: “It’s biologically adaptative.”

  “Explain that, would you, Chief?” I was managing at last not to use “sir.”

  “Well, the work assigned to the kids in this particular army is unnatural. A young stud likes to know what’s going on. But they can’t be told. It takes twenty years to shape a trustworthy intelligence operative. Twenty years in America, anyway, where we all believe that everybody from Christ—our first American—on down to the newspaperboy is trustworthy. In Russia or Germany it takes twenty minutes to get a new operator ready to trust nothing. That’s why we go into every skirmish with the KGB under a handicap. That’s why we even have to classify the toilet paper in the crap house. We must keep reminding ourselves to enclave the poop. Still, you can’t put too many limitations on the inquiring mind. Hence, we tell tales. That is the way to pass a big picture down in acceptable form.”

  “Even if the stories are indiscreet?”

  “You’ve put your finger on it. We all have a tendency to talk too much. I had a relative who was an alcoholic. Gave it up. Never touched the stuff. Except once or twice a year, he’d break down, go off on a toot. It was biologically adaptative. Something worse would probably have happened to him if he didn’t break out and drink. I guess I believe that in the Company it’s good once in a while if a secret gets told over a drink.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Now that I’ve said it, no! But we are living in two systems. Intelligence and biology. Intelligence would permit us to tell nothing unauthorized. Biology suffers the pressure.” He nodded at his own words. “Of course, there are discernable variations in our top men. Angleton is a super-clam. So is Helms. Director Dulles may talk a little too much. Hugh Montague, way too much.”

  “How would you classify yourself, sir?”

  “Clam. Three hundred and fifty days a year. Magpie for two weeks in summer.” He winked.

  I wonder if this was not a prelude to informing me about VQ/CATHETER. I think he was beginning to find it difficult to live next to me every working day yet not be able to brag about his number-one achievement; besides, I was developing a need to know. My presence certainly got in the way of CATHETER-related conversations on the car radio. So there came a day when I was given clearance, and a new cryptonym, VQ/BOZO III-a, to classify me as an assistant in the high-clearance shop of BOZO himself.

  It took another week to get to the tunnel. As I had surmised, Harvey made his visits at night, and often with visiting military celebrities, four-star generals, admirals, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Harvey did not bother to restrain his pride. I had not seen such pleasure in an achievement since my father introduced me in 1939, at the age of six, to William Woodward, Sr., whose stable had won the Kentucky Derby with Omaha in 1935. Four years later, Mr. Woodward was still glowing at the mention of Omaha’s name.

  In turn, Harvey was not about to downgrade the beauty of his operation. I heard him describe it for the first time on an evening which commenced with me riding shotgun in the front seat of BLACKIE. We had a three-star general in the rear (who was, so far as I could make out, on a tour of NATO facilities for the Joint Chiefs) and Mr. Harvey took pleasure in interrupting our drive on a side street of Steglitz. We pulled into a parking shed, changed the Cadillac for a bulletproof Mercedes, and took off again with Harvey now behind the wheel, his driver riding shotgun, myself in the rear with the General. “Finger the turns,” said Harvey, and his driver thereupon took up the duty of giving directions; we drove quickly through the outskirts of Berlin with much doubling back on side streets to make certain there was no tail. Twelve kilometers soon became twenty, and we passed through Britz and Johannisthal twice before coming to Rudow and its open fields.

  All the while, Bill Harvey kept telling the General about problems faced in the building of the tunnel, sending this monologue over his shoulder. I was hoping the General’s hearing was good. Familiar with Harvey’s voice, I could barely pick up his words. Since the General managed, however, to share a rear seat without giving any acknowledgment that I was present, I soon began to enjoy his difficulties with this muffled orientation. The General reacted by helping himself to the martini pitcher.

  “This was the only tunnel to my knowledge that had a sister tunnel built at the White Sands Missile Proving Ground in New Mexico to a length of four hundred and fifty feet, as opposed to our fifteen hundred feet, and for one reason,” said Harvey nonstop. “The soil bears comparison to the white-pack sand soil we were facing in Altglienicke. The softness was the problem, said our soil engineers. What if you dig the tunnel, putting in one steel ring after another to support it all the way, but the disturbance to the earth produces some small depression on the surface? That could appear as a rogue-line in a photograph. We can’t have an unaccountable phenomenon showing up in the Soviet’s aerial surveys. Not when we’re tunneling into East Berlin.”

  “There was a lot of concern about that at the Joint Chiefs,” said the General.

  “You bet,” said Harvey, “but, what the hell, we took a chance, didn’t we, General Packer?”

  “Technically speaking, it’s an act of war,” said the General, “to penetrate another nation’s territory whether by air, sea, land, or in this case, from below.”

  “Isn’t that a fact?” said Harvey. “I had a selling job here to Christmas. Mr. Dulles said to me, ‘Can we refer to this behemoth as little as possible in writing?’” Harvey kept talking and driving, pushing his tires through many a tight turn with as much aplomb as a symphony man clashing his cymbals in a well-timed accord.

  “Yessir,” said Harvey, “this tunnel demanded special solutions. We had close to in
superable problems of security. It’s one thing to build the Taj Mahal. But how do you slap it together in such a way that your next-door neighbors have no clue? This sector of the border is heavily patrolled by the Commies.”

  “What was it that somebody did with the Taj Mahal?” asked the General in a half-voice as if he could not decide whether it would prove more embarrassing to be heard or unheard. Having set down his glass, he then, on reflection, picked it up again.

  “Our problem,” said Harvey, “was getting rid of the immediate construction product—tons of soil. To dig the tunnel we had to excavate approximately fifty thousand cubic feet of dirt. That’s more than three thousand tons, equal to several hundred average truckloads. But where do you dispose of that much earth? Everybody in Berlin has 360-degree vision. Every Kraut can count. Heinie is looking to supplement his income through the power of his observations. Okay, say you spread your dump all over West Berlin and thereby reduce the amount visible in any one place, you still have the truck driver to contend with. Ten truck drivers are ten highly vulnerable security packages. We came up with a unique solution: We would not truck tunnel dirt away from the site. Instead, we built a large warehouse right near the border of Altglienicke in East Berlin, and put a parabolic antenna on the top. ‘Ho ho,’ says the SSD, ‘look at those Americans pretending to build a warehouse, when they have an AN/APR9 on the so-called warehouse roof. And, look, Hans, the warehouse is heavily protected by barbed wire. The Americans are putting up a radar-intercept station. Ho hum, one more radar-intercept station for the Cold War. That makes no big history.’ Well, General, what the East Germans and the KGB didn’t know is that we built this large warehouse with a cellar that happens to be twelve feet deep throughout. Nobody worries about any dirt we cart away while we’re building the cellar for the warehouse. Not even the truck drivers. Everybody knows it’s a radar station pretending to be a warehouse. It’s only when we’re done with the trucks that we commence excavating the tunnel. Our cellar space proved adequate to receive the fifty thousand cubic feet of dirt we had to dig out. That, General Packer, was an elegant solution.” He whipped around a car, cut back in the face of an oncoming truck.