Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Mr. Harvey, it’s in the car with Sam.” The bag might be, but the tape of C.G.’s voice describing Mr. Hoover’s relations with Mr. Harvey was in my pocket.

  His telepathic powers must have been going their ruminative round, for he growled, “There isn’t anything recorded on the backup reel, is there? No incidental remarks?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Just a good clean empty tape?”

  “Has to be.”

  “Let’s see what you have here.” He turned on the beginning of the interview, and ran the fast-forward to Gehlen’s last speech. The recording, however, was muffled and offered odd doublings of resonance. Sometimes it sounded like the creak of a rocking chair.

  “At the Farm, they didn’t teach you to sit still when you’re wearing a sneaky?”

  “Well, sir, they didn’t.”

  “What I hear best is the twitches in the crack of your ass.”

  “Do you want me to do a transcript?”

  “Is there a typewriter in your apartment?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’ll drop you off there.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier at the office?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but I’m dropping you at your apartment.” He commenced a careful study of me after this remark.

  “Hubbard,” he said, “do yourself a favor.”

  “Yessir?”

  “Don’t leave your apartment.”

  I looked at C.G. She merely nodded. None of us spoke for the rest of the flight. Nor did he say good-bye when his car left me at the door.

  Three hours later he telephoned. “Done the transcript?” he asked.

  “Halfway through.”

  “Can you read the voices?”

  “Eighty-five percent.”

  “Try to do better.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Sam phoned in from Bad Hersfeld. Trip report is routine. No BND is following him.”

  “Yessir.”

  “I told Sam to inventory your traveling bag.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “He found no tape.”

  I was silent.

  “Provide an explanation.”

  “Sir, I have none. I must have lost it.”

  “Stay in your apartment. I’m coming over.”

  “Yessir.”

  As soon as he hung up, I sat down. A fiery twinge passed through the canal of my urethra, sharp as a needle from hell. I had been taking oral penicillin in so much quantity that any unpleasant thought was sufficient to make me retch. I was in a pit of gloom, exactly one of those deep and dripping caverns that the dark shadows of Berlin streets seem to propose as one’s final lot. My apartment worsened this mood. I had never spent any time in the place. With the exception of Dix Butler, my other roommates and I were almost wholly dissociated, since we were invariably off at work, away at play, or asleep in our separate bedrooms. I knew the scents of their shaving soap in the bathroom better than their voices. After three hours, however, of reconstructing my way through Harvey’s interchanges with Gehlen, I could no longer keep to my seat. I began to explore the apartment and learned more about my roommates in twenty minutes than in two months. Since I have not stopped to describe them previously, I will not elaborate on them now except to say that there was a unique combination of neatness and slovenliness present in each of them. One fellow, a code clerk, Eliot Zeeler, punctilious in appearance, had a wholly slovenly room with stale underclothes mixed up with stale sheets and blankets in a tangle with shoes; another had all of his mess—dried orange peels, sweatshirts, newspapers, unopened mail, black-ringed coffee cups, laundry cartons, beer bottles, whiskey bottles, wine bottles, an old toaster, a discarded golf bag, and a ripped bolster—all carefully piled into a pyramid in one corner of his room—a social light was this fellow, Roger Turner, well turned out for every party and function that the social resources of the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Company could offer in West Berlin. I used to pass him coming or going in his dinner jacket. His bed, however, was made, his windows were spotless (which meant he went over the panes himself ), and his room was immaculate except for that pyramid of detritus. By contrast, Dix Butler’s room was as formally kept as a midshipman’s quarters. I said to myself, “I’m going to write Kittredge a letter about all of this,” but thinking of her brought me back to Harlot, and thus to Harvey, and my own present and intimate mess. No wonder I was studying the order and disorder of my roommates—I must be looking for a few guidelines to my own. Never did the dilapidated and once prosperous dimensions of these large rooms with their heavy doors, massive lintels, overhanging window-moldings, and high ceilings bother me more. The death of ponderous, middle-class Prussian dreams permeated the odor of these color-deadened carpets, these stuffed chairs with broken arms, the long bier of the living-room sofa with its claw feet, one missing, replaced by a brick. “Couldn’t any of us have contemplated the commonweal long enough to put up a painting or a poster?” I asked myself.

  Harvey appeared. He had a neat knock. Two quick raps on the door, a pause, two quick raps. He came in with a look for each of the rooms much like a police dog sniffing through a new abode, then sat down on the broken couch, and took a Colt revolver out of his left shoulder holster. He rubbed his armpit. “It’s the wrong holster,” he said. “The regular one for this piece is over at a Kraut shoemaker. Being resewn.”

  “They say you own more handguns than anyone in the Company,” I offered.

  “They can go kiss my royal petunia,” he said. He lifted the Colt from where he had set it beside him on the couch, broke it open, revolved the cylinder, took out the bullets, looked at each one, put each one back, closed the breech, pulled back the hammer far enough to turn the cylinder one round over, then eased the hammer back. If his thumb had slipped, the gun would have gone off. This ceremony succeeded in lifting me right out of my depression and into his adrenaline. “Do you want a drink?” I asked.

  He belched for reply. “Let’s see the Gehlen transcript.” He took a flask from his breast pocket, nipped it, offered me none, and put it back in his jacket. With a pen that wrote in red ink, he corrected the errors I had made. “For conversation like this,” he said, “I have total recall.”

  “It’s a faculty,” I offered.

  “You did a decent job.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “All the same, you are marooned in dogshit.”

  “Chief, I really don’t understand. Does this have to do with SM/ONION?”

  “Your nifty little scenario does not seem to be holding up. My MI5 man in London thinks Crane was offered a carrot by MI6 and started chewing on it.” He belched again and took another nip from his flask. “You dumb stupid son of a bitch,” he said, “how did you get into all this?”

  “Chief, bring me back on course. I can’t follow.”

  “You are insulting my intelligence. That’s worse than outright disloyalty. Have a little respect.”

  “I do. I have a lot.”

  “Certain games cannot be tried on me. Know what you need for this profession?”

  “No, sir.”

  “An understanding of light and shadow. When the light shifts, the shadow had better conform. I kept shifting the lights on Gehlen and the shadow didn’t move properly. Almost, but not right.”

  “Will you explain?”

  “I’m going to. You work for the wrong people. You have potential. You should have hooked up with Uncle Bill right here. Like Dix has. I’ve needed a good inside man for years. It could have been you. Now, it can’t. Don’t you see, Hubbard, how obvious it was to me that somebody collateral to the immediate picture had to have told Gehlen to let you stay in the room? Gehlen made moves to get you out, but they weren’t real. The shadow didn’t conform to the light. Do you believe Gehlen would allow that much talk about the BND in front of a Company Junior? Do you think an old fox like Gehlen couldn’t spot a sneaky on a beginner like you? Buddy, if I had really needed a transcript, I would
have put the sneaky on me and hid it in a way that would never be picked up. I put it on you to see if he’d choose to flush it. He didn’t.”

  “You’re not suggesting that I am linked in any way with Gehlen?”

  “You are somewhere in the floor plan.”

  “Why would he ask for me to be brought down to Pullach if he were working with me?”

  “Double gambit, that’s all. Hubbard, there’s a time to talk. It’s getting close for you.”

  “I’m bewildered,” I said. “I think games are going on, and I don’t even know which piece I am. I have nothing to tell.”

  “I’ll give you something to digest. You are under surveillance. You dare not leave this apartment. You have my permission to go quietly crazy here. Drink all you want. Get the DTs, and then come to me. In the interim, offer up a little prayer. Every night. Hope and pray that CATHETER stays secure. Because if it blows, people are going to be up on charges all over the place, and there is no way you won’t be one of the candidates. You could end with your keister in a military can.”

  He stood up, returned his Colt to the holster that chafed, and left me alone. I tried to compose myself by going to work on a transcript of C.G.’s tape.

  It took a couple of hours, and I had barely finished before the first of my roommates arrived from work. Then, for the next couple of hours, they were coming and going. Roger Turner was engaged to an American girl who worked for the overseas division of General Motors in Berlin, and he was excited. Her parents, in Europe on a visit, were meeting him tonight. Dressed in a pinstripe gray flannel for this occasion, he was taking them to a cocktail party at the Danish Embassy; Eliot Zeeler, out to improve his colloquial German, was on his way to the UFA Pavilion on the Kufu to see Around the World in Eighty Days, which had just won an Academy Award, and was being presented, Eliot assured me, with German subtitles, thereby offering an enjoyable means of improving one’s colloquial competence. Did I wish to accompany him? I did not—I didn’t tell him that I couldn’t. My other roommate, Miles Gambetti, whom I rarely saw, phoned in to ask if there were any messages. He had described himself on the one occasion we talked as a “glorified bookkeeper,” but Dix upgraded that. “He’s the accountant who watch-dogs our Berlin proprietaries. The KGB would take a crack at Miles if they knew what he did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because once you pick up on how the money is allotted, you can draw a good picture. KGB can name our banks here, and our airline, the religious groups we fund, the magazines, the newspapers, the cultural foundations, probably even the journalists we pipe into, and they have a window on the labor union officials we own. But how much do we allot to each? That shows the real intent. Hell, if I was KGB, I would kidnap Miles.”

  I was thinking of this conversation now that the night was on me and I was alone in the apartment. Indeed, in curious fashion, I clung to Dix’s remark, and pondered the work and functions of Miles Gambetti (who had a most neutral presence, neither handsome nor ugly, neither tall nor short) because I now needed some sense of the size of all our activities, not only in Berlin but in Frankfurt and Bonn, in Munich, in all the Army bases where we had dummy working slots, all the American consulates in Germany, all the corporations where we might have a man or two, I needed some sense of my work as small and in its place, not large, not damned, not doomed. So I prayed that Chief ’s powers of exaggeration equaled his bulk and I was but a passing mote in his eye. Alone in the apartment, I felt as alone as I had ever been.

  Dix dropped by to change his clothes. He was off for the evening. He invited me along. This time I explained that I was restricted to quarters. He whistled. He looked sympathetic, so sympathetic in fact that I began to distrust him. He was Harvey’s man, I reminded myself. I, who had always been able to calculate my loyalties and the loyalty of the members of my family as closely as a table of organization (so that it never mattered if you liked a particular cousin or not—depending on the preordained relation you would call upon, or pay out, whatever sum of loyalty was involved) now felt as unattached as a bubble in a bowl of soup.

  I also knew that loyalty was of small concern to Dix. Tomorrow he might turn me in, but tonight he could feel compassion.

  “You had to fuck up big,” he said, “to buy a house arrest.”

  “Can you keep it to yourself?”

  “How not?” He repeated this with pleasure. “How not?” That had to be a new phrase. Picked up from a drunken Englishman, no doubt. A month ago, he had traded quips with a Russian tank colonel at the Balhaus Resi who spoke only enough English to keep saying “Of course! Vy not?” Butler had loved that. You could ask him anything for the next two days. “Will we win the Cold War?” “Should we have Irish whiskey with our coffee?”—dependably, he would reply, “Of course! Vy not?” So I knew now that I would hear “How not?” for the next week—if there was a next week. I might be coming to the end of all such weeks as this. I might be out of a job—I saw my father’s eyes. I might be in jail—I saw my mother’s picture hat on visiting day. I was like a man who has been told by his doctor that the disease is, all odds carefully reviewed, incurable. This verdict keeps returning in quantum packets. One plays solitaire, one chats, one listens to music—then, the dire news washes back like haze over one’s mood.

  I clung to the five minutes Dix Butler would be in the apartment.

  “Well, what is up?” he insisted.

  “I’ve thought it over. I can’t tell you. I’ll fill you in when it’s over.”

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll wait. But I am wondering.” He looked ready to leave. “Anything I can do for you? Want me to bring Ingrid over?”

  “No,” I said.

  He grinned.

  “If you run into Wolfgang,” I said, “talk him into coming here.”

  “Dubious.”

  “Will you try?”

  “Since you ask, yes.” I had the feeling he would not try.

  “One more thing,” I said. I felt as if someone who had lived alone in this large apartment for years had died here, and it had been a long and lingering death. No one had been at peace in these rooms since. “Yes, one more thing,” I said. “You mentioned that you would let me see Rosen’s letters.”

  “Why do you want them now?”

  I shrugged. “For diversion.”

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s right. All right.” But I could see he was reluctant. He went to his room, closed the door, came out, locked the door, and handed me a thick envelope. “Read it tonight,” he said, “and when you’re done, slip it back under the sill.”

  “I’ll read in this room,” I said, “and if anybody unfamiliar knocks, anyone official, that is, I’ll put the letter under your door before I go to answer.”

  “Approved,” he said.

  14

  Dear Dix,

  Well, here I am on hotshot duty in TSS, and there you are, honcho number one to the big man in Berlin. Congratulations. The old training group PQ 31 is doing all right for itself, even if PQ has to stand for peculiar—which is what I can say about my work now. Dix, procedure for this letter and any other I send you, is BAP (which in case you forgot is Burn After Perusal). I don’t know if work at TSS deserves to be as hush-hush as is presented to us here, but it is certainly a special place. Only geniuses need apply—how did they ever miss you? (Before you get too pissed off, recognize that I mean it.) The overseer for all us Mensa types is Hugh Montague, the old OSS legend, and he’s an odd one, remote as Mt. Everest, confident as God. I can’t imagine what would happen if you ever tangled with him. Anyway, TSS is but part of his demesne, which I deliver as a gift to your love of big words. (Demesne is the etymological origin of domain, that is, the lands belonging to the Lord for which he pays no rent.) Montague, so far as I can see, pays no rent. He reports only to Dulles. Over at Top Sanctum Sanctorum (true meaning of TSS), we tend to be savage in our opinions of everybody, but on Montague, we agree. Unlike many in the Company, he is no dedicated brown-noser.

>   Which reminds me. Are you the guy, confess! Are you the guy who wrote on the latrine wall at the Farm, “Rosen is the anagram for Noser, as in Brown-Noser. Keep your nares clean, Arnie.” That one ticked me off, I admit it. I’m sure it was you, you see, because of the use of “nares.” Dix, you are one cruel son of a bitch. I know how much I value our friendship because I choose to forgive you. I would not forgive anyone else. But I want you to recognize that the allegation is unfair. Because, whatever I am, abrasive, unfeeling of the sore spots of others, too pushy (New York Jew with a lot to do—I know!), but whatever I am, whatever my faults, I am not a brown-noser. In fact, I defeat myself by being rude to superiors. We’re alike that way. And I do not forgive most people who bitch me. I like to think they live to regret it.

  Anyway, I don’t want to be boring on this. I recognize your ambition. I even believe that some day, we two outriders, very much on the flank, having not been born with a silver espionage spoon in our mouth like Harry, may own two big pieces of the Agency. Equal to Montague and Harvey when our time comes.

  Montague fascinates me. I’ve only seen him a few times, but his wife is an absolute beauty, and they whisper around here that she’s the only true genius the Company has got, in fact, they say she’s made Freud twice as complicated as he used to be, although of course that’s hard to believe. One of the Company ills I’m beginning to observe is too much self-exaggeration of our own worth. We’re not in a position to measure ourselves, after all. In any case, nobody can say to a certainty what Hugh Montague does. His working moniker—I don’t believe it’s a cover name or cryptonym, or any one of the variants for cable use—but they do call him Harlot. I guess it’s because he’s involved in so many things. A true demesne. No rent, no bureaucratic accountability. He’s got his own piece of Counter-Intelligence which drives the Soviet Russia Division crazy, and then, he has other people spotted all over the Company. His enemies in TSS say he’s trying to be a Company within the Company. Dix, you have to spend time in Washington to learn the ropes. You see, in theory, the Company, bureaucratically speaking, is all posted territory, but Dulles is soft on old OSS heroes and friends, and besides, he doesn’t really like bureaucracy. So he creates independent movers and shakers. Knights-Errant, he calls them. They are empowered to cut across categories. Harlot is most definitely a Knight-Errant. They say he is looked upon as the spook’s spook in the Company. The inner poop that we get over at TSS (where we’re supposed to know!) is that Dulles speaks of him as “Our Noble Phantom.” Dix, I have to hand it to you. I used to laugh in the beginning at the way you were gung ho about certain words, but I’m beginning to see the light. Where I went to school, everyone knew the words, so my education may have left me a little too complacent about the real powers of vocabulary. I’m beginning to think le mot juste is the Archimedean lever that moves the world. At least, this is true for the Company, I swear.