Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “So be it,” said Gehlen. “He will remain unless you decide it is unwise, or I deem our colloquy concluded.”

  “Yes,” said Harvey, “we take it step by step.”

  “Have a smoke,” said Gehlen.

  He took out a pack of Camels, extracted three cigarettes, and laid them on the desk in front of Harvey. “Dear Bill,” he asked, “which one of these coffin nails might distinguish itself to you?”

  Harvey examined the offering. “Can’t tell without the lab,” he said.

  “Why don’t you,” suggested Gehlen, “light the one on the left? Two full puffs. Then, put it out.”

  “It’s your toy. You take it through the hurdles.”

  “Well, if you are not in the frame of mind to pick up on a sporting chance, I must.” The General lit his prize, took the puffs, put it out, and handed the long stub over.

  Harvey stripped the cigarette paper carefully. On the inside was a message. Chief read it, nodded casually, as if not much impressed, and handed it over to me.

  A short, neatly printed communication was visible:

  base chief berlin to pullach

  to discuss security of catheter

  “Good guess,” said Harvey, “but that is not why I am here.”

  “All the same, are we able to discuss CATHETER?” He looked at me.

  Harvey waved a hand in my direction. “Hubbard is cleared.”

  “Then sooner or later you will tell me the motive for this visit?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Let me now hear what I am doing so unhappily.”

  “Kidding is kidding,” said Harvey, “but I want you to get your ass off my pillow.”

  Gehlen giggled suddenly. It was a high-pitched giggle which leaped like a trapeze artist from grip to flying grip. “I will remember that. I must remember that. English is the treasure, a—what do you phrase it?—the treasure trove of rude and grossly vulgar remarks that are—isn’t it so?—bissig.”

  “Biting,” I said.

  “Ah, you speak German?” said the General. “You are one of those rare birds among your countrymen familiar just ein bisschen with our foreign tongue.”

  “Don’t count on it,” said Harvey.

  “I will not. I will put myself in your hands by limping along in my lame English. May I hope it is not also halt and blind.”

  “It’s practically perfect,” said Harvey. “Let’s go to background.”

  “Yes. Educate me, then I will educate you.”

  “We may even be in the same place.”

  “Zwei Herzen und ein Schlag,” said General Gehlen.

  “Two hearts and one beat,” I said hesitatingly after a look from Harvey. “Can we agree,” said Harvey, “on your losses in East Germany these last six months?”

  “I think your young man’s valiant efforts in German are charming, but I am not prepared to discuss material relevant to BND while he is among us.”

  “What,” asked Harvey, “do you think we talk about in Berlin?”

  I could not remember Chief Harvey discussing the BND with me, but Gehlen shrugged, as if that must be an undeniable if disagreeable fact. “All right,” he said, “we have had our losses. May I remind you? Before I and my Org entered the picture, 90 percent of all American intelligence concerning the Soviets proved false.”

  “Your statistic goes back to 1947. We’re in 1956. In the last year, your Eastern networks have been devastated.”

  “Such ravages are more apparent,” said Gehlen, “than actual. The situation in Berlin tends to misguide one’s estimate. Admittedly, Berlin shows interpenetration between BND and SSD. I would have to warn you myself if you did not warn me. The mixture of information and disinformation could approach the chaotic unless”—he held up one fine finger—“unless one possesses my foundation in the tradition of interpretation.”

  “You know how to read what you get and I don’t?”

  “No, sir. I am saying that Berlin is a study in the use and abuse of counterespionage. It is an evil city when there are more double agents than agents. Double espionage is equal in difficulty, I always say, to Kubismus. Which planes push? Which ones pull?”

  “Cubism,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Harvey, “I got it.” He had a fit of coughing. “It is not,” he said thickly, “your handling of double agents that bothers me. We have a little saying in my office: If it calls for an expert to handle one double agent, Gehlen will take on three and triple them.”

  “Triple them. Yes. Yes. I like that. You are a demon with your compliments, Mr. Harvey.” Again I heard that odd intake of breath, somewhere between moaning and crooning, that Dr. Schneider had exhibited once over a chessboard.

  “It is not your abilities we question,” said Harvey, “it is the goddamn situation. You now have a large number of BND operatives in West Germany who have no instruments to play in the East. A large orchestra with no sheet music. So your boys are getting into mischief.”

  “Whatever are you saying?” asked Gehlen.

  “I’m calling it as I see it. In Poland, you’ve taken a whipping from the KGB; in Czechoslovakia, you have bogged down; and now the SSD has rolled you up in East Germany.”

  Gehlen held up a hand. “Not true. Simply not true. You are drenched in gross misapprehensions. That is precisely because you listen with one ear, not two. Take away your CATHETER, and you are deaf, blind, and dumb. Since you do not have reliable Intelligence of your own in Germany, you contracted with the English to construct CATHETER. With the English, Mr. Harvey! The English, who are so feeble a presence these days that they cannot even slap Mr. Philby on the wrist.”

  “Let’s leave the British out of this.”

  “How can you? British Intelligence is a sieve. MI6 might just as well be based in Moscow. It would be more convenient for everyone. As for MI5, well, I will sit down with you on one of these days when we are absolutely alone and fill you in on their real masters. MI5 is not so healthy as they pretend.”

  “Are you? Am I?”

  “You may be the worst. With your CATHETER! To depend entirely upon intelligence received from such an outrageously over-extended venture. To live with a paucity of corroboration from other sources! It is like going into an enemy hospital, lying down on their bed, and hoping that the intravenous they pump into you is glucose, not strychnine.”

  “I’m the one who’s studying the input,” answered Harvey, “and my professional reputation is committed to the validity of this product. I testify to the primacy of the conversations we tap into. A gold mine of stuff, Gehlen. You’d love to see it. You’d wallow in it.”

  “I should, indeed, have the opportunity. I am the only man alive on our side who has the accumulation of experience to interpret what is there. My skin starts to crawl when I think of the insights you are obliged to miss because you do not possess the background, nor the backup personnel, nor the German patience to put your hindquarters into a chair and sit there for a year if that is what it takes to come up with the well-balanced answers. All the same, I can think myself into the nature of this operation. Boxes and cartons of transcripts from your CATHETER always accumulating because CATHETER never stops spewing and spitting out tapes. Rooms full of dejected people over in your Hosiery Mill, yes, your room T-32 in Washington, all those poor people trying to make sense of it. And from that, you pick what you please, and choose to . . . to sneer, no, to . . . to . . .” and he barked at me, “anschwärzen. Translate, please.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was in some panic. “Pinch nipple?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Gehlen, “denigrate us. Denigrate us with your very much biased selection of useful-for-you trinkets out of a mountain of ore. We at the BND are not in the dire straits you paint us. I have agents of a caliber,” said Gehlen, “that no one can match. At the Soviet Union desk—”

  “You mean III-f?” asked Harvey.

  “I mean right in our III-f, I have one superior soul. At counterespionage, he is outstanding.”r />
  “The fellow you call Fiffi?”

  “Yes. You know what you know, and I know what I know, so you have heard about Fiffi. You might give your eyeteeth to have Fiffi. He produces for us what others cannot. Here, Harvey, you are the great American in Berlin, you know every secret of the city, but one. You cannot tell me anything dazzling about KGB Headquarters in Karlshorst, can you? There they are, the sanctum sanctorum of the KGB for all of Eastern Europe, right across the line in East Berlin, not twelve kilometers away from you, yet what can you tell me that I cannot learn from an air photograph?”

  General Gehlen walked over to what looked like a very large rolled-up movie screen on the wall. From his pocket, he took a key, inserted it with ceremonial precision into a lock on the case enclosing the screen, and pulled down a carefully drawn plan in many colors about eight feet wide by six feet high. “Karlshorst,” said Gehlen, “from soup to nuts. My bird Fiffi has acquired his information of this place feather by feather, straw by straw. He updates it. He adds to details. I can, at present, point out for you by name each parking space on their lot for each KGB officer. Here,” he said, moving his finger with a quiver of pride and much sense of ownership, to another area, “is the lavatory used by General Dimitrov, and this”—he now walked his fingers over the plan—“is the conference room of the East German Ministry of State Security.”

  “We,” replied Harvey, “obtain transcripts of telephone calls going from that room to Moscow. But, proceed! Tell me about the chairs they put their Red asses on,” said Harvey.

  “We, by way of Fiffi and his informants, can give a comprehensive weekly report on the state of SSD and KGB intelligence operations, while you are still packing up mountains of undigested slag and shipping them over in cargo planes to the Hosiery Mill. The rapier, not the avalanche, let me remind you, is the appropriate instrument of Intelligence.”

  “I believe your Fiffi is the best thing,” said Harvey, “since Phineas T. Barnum.”

  “I believe I understand the reference. It is insulting. Every item in Fiffi’s map of KGB headquarters that we have been able to corroborate is exact.”

  “Of course it is,” said Harvey. “It’s too exact. The KGB is handing it to Fiffi. I can’t believe this. You Krauts go crazy over shit-holes. Just because you know where General Dimitrov drops his load in the morning, you think you’re holding the crown jewels.” He pretended to ponder this. “And your other big act,” said Harvey. His face was getting a good deal of color now. “Washington! Let’s get into that. You’ve been sending beaucoup material to Washington from your high source, as you term him, in the Central Committee of the Socialist United Party. I don’t believe you command that kind of guy in the highest ranks of the East German Communists.”

  “Dear Mr. Harvey, since you do not have ingress to my files, you certainly cannot demonstrate how my output is fiction.”

  “Your large assumption, buddy. I might just have a songbird in the BND. Maybe I know what kind of all-out bluff you’re running.”

  “You have a source in the BND? It is a comedy how many sources we can put into focus concerning your show at Berlin Base.”

  “Yes,” said Harvey, “I’m sure you know which one of our juniors has just gotten a dose from a German fräulein, provided said junior has been idiot enough to go to a private doctor. But my key people are clean. My office is sanitized. You do not have the inner picture.”

  “I ask you to invite your friend Mr. Hubbard to leave us alone for a moment.”

  “No, we take it as it comes,” said Harvey. “I’ve already discussed this with my aide, and it’s shocking. I know you’ve been telling Washington that CATHETER can be penetrated.”

  “Of course it can,” said Gehlen. “Of course it can. CATHETER is so unstable that even hoi polloi of the lowest sort, the riffraff and trash of the agent pool in Berlin can pick up items on CATHETER. One day, at one of our minor desks in Berlin, who walks in from the street but one of the lowest Berlin riffraff, a piece of total abomination. He knows something about something, he announces to us, and he wants to sell it. My man at the desk in Berlin knew nothing about CATHETER that morning, but by evening, once he had finished debriefing your piece of filth, he knew too much. My man came running to me in Pullach by the night plane. I had to emphasize the solemnity of the classification for him. He is reliable, my man, he will not talk about CATHETER, but what are we to do with your bottom-level agent? He has a history to terrify a psychiatrist.”

  “Let me see if we are talking about the same fellow,” said Harvey. “The father of this so-called riffraff was a pornographic photographer who worked for Nazi officials in Berlin?”

  “Continue as you will.”

  “And the photographer ran into a little trouble?”

  “Say what you mean.”

  “In 1939, he was put into a mental hospital for murdering several of the young women he had photographed.”

  “Yes, he is the father of the agent in question.”

  “The agent is young?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too young to fight in the war?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not too young to be a Communist, an anarchist, a student revolutionary, a possible SSD agent, a homosexual, a cellar-bar pervert, and now he is committed to you and to me.”

  “To you. We wouldn’t touch him.”

  “I’ll trade with you. We call him Wolfgang. Cryptonym WILDBOAR. What do you call him? Now that he’s walked into your office?”

  “Actually, his name is Waenker Lüdke and the name he gave you, Wolfgang, is too close, in its consonants, to his real name, how otherwise? Agents have no sense.”

  “And the cryptonym?”

  “I am already familiar with the cryptonym WILDBOAR that your office bestowed on him. So I do not feel obliged to exchange on this item. You cannot expect me to give something for nothing?”

  “You didn’t complain in time,” said Harvey. “A bargain is a bargain.”

  “So, you have to possess our cryptonym? For part of your stamp collection? Here—RAKETENWERFER. You like it?”

  “Rocket-launcher,” I translated.

  “You give your word as a German officer and gentleman that you are telling the truth?” asked Harvey.

  Gehlen stood up and clicked his heels. “You honor my sense of honor,” he said.

  “Horseshit,” said Harvey. “I happen to know that you flew over to Washington with this tale about Wolfgang. You wanted the National Security Council to decide that CATHETER had been penetrated. You tried to scourge my backside. I happen, however, to know the real story. This so-called riffraff, this Wolfgang, happens to be one of your best Berlin agents. You had the consummate gall to steer him onto one of our people working in CATHETER.”

  “You dare not advance this scenario. It will not hold.”

  “You, General Gehlen, being one of the eighteen Intelligence officers, American, English, and German, privy to the conception of CATHETER . . .”

  “That was originally. By now, it’s one hundred and eighteen, two hundred and eighteen.”

  “Keep to my point. You, General Gehlen, were in a position to put one of your best penetration agents onto one of my CATHETER technicians.”

  “How would I know who are your technicians? Have you no security at all?”

  “General, now that the BND has messed up in East Germany, your Berlin officers have so little to occupy them that they keep an eye on every last one of my Berlin people. Child’s play for you to point your pervert of an agent at my sorry little faggot of a technician, get the two of them photographed in the act, then try to squeeze my sick little fuckup of a fellow into telling just enough about CATHETER so that your top agent, my WILDBOAR alias your RAKETENWERFER, can go into your General Agency and fool some deskman there, thereby giving you credibility enough to run screaming to Washington with the tainted scenario you just tried to palm off on me.”

  “Diabolical slander!” shouted Gehlen.

  “How da
re you mislead the Joint Chiefs and the National Security Council about my operation?” Harvey bellowed.

  “I must warn you,” said Gehlen. “I do not have a high tolerance for being screamed at. Not in the presence of junior assistants.”

  “Let me lower my voice,” said Harvey. “It seems to me that the nitty-gritty right here—”

  “Nitty-gritty?” asked Gehlen.

  “Die Essenz,” I said.

  “The essence,” said Harvey, “of the matter is that my American technician may be a pervert, but he was also enough of an honorable American to confess to us that Wolfgang was trying to mulct the secret out of him. So, Wolfgang didn’t get information. Not unless you told him. Here, therefore, are the alternatives. Either you lied to Washington in the first place, and CATHETER is secure. Or you primed Wolfgang with the essence. If that is so, I will bring you up on charges with your own Chancellory.”

  “My dear sir,” said General Gehlen, coming again to his feet, “you are free to get up and give your chair a break! I can assure you. It needs it.” With that, he pointed to the door.

  It was the end of the meeting. Back in our limousine, Harvey spoke only once. “Mission accomplished,” he said. “Gehlen is scared.”

  13

  SAM WAS LEFT TO DRIVE BACK WITH THE VEHICLE. WE RETURNED TO BERLIN on an Air Force plane and Bill Harvey was as silent as if curfew had been imposed. C.G. sat next to him and held his hand. So deep was his reverie that he soon began to utter fragments of ideas into the open air. “Yeah . . . won’t work . . . tricky payoff . . . don’t add up . . . fry Wolf-gang’s nuts . . .” That was the limit of the sounds that came out of him for the first half hour after takeoff. Then he spoke at last to me. “Get that tape off your back.”

  I nodded. In the rear of the cabin, I removed the apparatus, and returned to them. So soon as I handed over the tape recorder, however, Harvey raised his protruding bloodshot eyes. “Kid, how many tapes did I give you?”

  “Two, sir.”

  “Where’s the other one?”

  “In my travel bag.”

  “Get it.”