Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Gordy has learned that Gómez gambles nightly at the casino in Carrasco, and always needs money. On Tuesday nights, however, he does go to visit his mother at her home near Parque José Batlle y Ordóñez, which is the large park adjacent to our Embassy.

  We ordered in our mobile surveillance team. AV/EMARIA-1, 2, 3, and 4 took turns trailing Gómez’s car. On the last trip to his mother’s house, Gómez drove into the park, got out of his vehicle, and went for a walk. The paths being sparsely lit, Gordy was able to trail Gómez discreetly on foot, but gave up such pursuit when his target disappeared into a clump of bushes. A few minutes later, Gómez emerged, and crossed to a nearby path where he righted a park bench that had been tipped over, obviously a signal that he had serviced his dead drop. After which, Gómez left the park and drove home. On the following Tuesday, just after dark, we staked out the area around these bushes. Porringer, Sonderstrom, and Morewood had a considerable wait, but at ten in the evening, a man Sonderstrom recognized as an attaché at the Russian Embassy came sauntering along, inserted an envelope into the hollow cleft of a tree, and, strolling by the same park bench, stopped just long enough to knock it over. Gómez appeared in the next quarter of an hour, took the envelope from the dead drop, righted the park bench, and went back to his car.

  Much of the following week was spent in discussion of what to do. Cable traffic mounted. There was considerable discussion about whether to keep using Morewood. He had charged us a good deal already on these matters, and besides, Sonderstrom has his pride. So, instead of enjoying a Friday afternoon foursome with the Chief of Police and his assistant, Gus just took them to lunch. Over coffee, Sonderstrom introduced the defalcations of Plutarco Roballo Gómez. The Chief of Police, Capablanca (yes, same name as the old Cuban chess champion), was even angrier than his deputy, Peones, and offered to spit in the milk of Gómez’s mother. Plans were made to catch Gómez in the act, then arrest him. Sonderstrom came back to the Station in an excellent mood. Not Porringer. Before long, he and Sonderstrom were going at it. Their voices carried through a closed door. Soon, the door flew open and Sonderstrom waved in Gatsby and Barry Kearns and myself to monitor the debate. I would guess he wanted reinforcements.

  Porringer argued that Gómez was one of President Luis Batlle’s hand-picked protégés, and so the Chief of Police wouldn’t make the arrest.

  Sonderstrom agreed this was a bothersome element in the equation. “Still, you learn something about a man while playing golf. Capablanca hates missing a shot he should be able to make. I see our Chief of Police as a professional.”

  “My instinct,” replies Porringer, “tells me to go slow.”

  “I don’t know that we can,” says Sonderstrom. “Capablanca is laying in the first steps right now. We can’t make him look like a fool to his own people.”

  “That’s right,” said Gatsby. “Latins are as high on saving face as Orientals.”

  “I agree,” said Kearns.

  “In South America,” Porringer said, “the jefe can always change his mind. It just means his money is coming from a new direction.”

  “Who,” asked Sonderstrom, “is in favor of going for the arrest?”

  Kearns’ hand went up, and Gatsby’s, and Sonderstrom’s, of course. I was ready to follow suit, but some instinct held me back. Kittredge, it was the oddest sentiment. I had the feeling Porringer was right. To my amazement, I voted with him. I am linked with Oatsie.

  Well, we had an answer. On the next Tuesday, I couldn’t join my associates on stakeout in the park because that is the night for AV/ ALANCHE, but I certainly heard about it afterward. Sonderstrom, Porringer, Gatsby, and Kearns spent a couple of hours in the appropriate bushes with a squad of Uruguayan police. The Russian attaché came sauntering in about the same time as on the previous occasion, which is poor tradecraft. (The local KGB obviously feel far enough away from Moscow to be pretty casual about security.) In any event, he went immediately to the dead drop, primed it, tipped over the bench, and left. By radio came the word that Gómez had parked his car, was approaching on foot. He was actually within twenty yards of the tree when a police car, top light revolving, sirens screaming at the moon, came tearing down a park road toward the stakeout. Gómez, of course, took off instantly. With a great blast of tire dust and screech, the patrol car stopped right by the tree. Out stepped Capablanca. “Oh,” exclaimed our law and order worthy, striking his forehead with a mighty sledgehammer of a hand, “I cannot accept this. The radio told me that our man was already apprehended.”

  In the general confusion, Porringer managed to slip over to the dead drop and withdraw the envelope. Next day, Sonderstrom presented it at the Central Police Station. The note listed each document that Gómez was supposed to photograph in the following week. Sonderstrom stated that this ought to be enough to commence a full-scale investigation.

  No, sir, we cannot, Capablanca told him. It is now obvious that some unknown foreign power was indeed spying on the Uruguayan government, but, then, nations always spied on host nations. One needed more than evidence such as this to proceed. Owing to the unfortunate lapse in communications on Tuesday night, for which he, Salvador Capablanca, would take full responsibility, he could see no way to move against Plutarco Roballo Gómez. He would, however, keep an eye on him. I can hear Gordy Morewood cackling away!

  It is now 3:30 A.M. and I am tired. I’ll sign off, and wait for your next letter. Do write soon.

  Besitos,

  Herrick

  4

  THREE DAYS LATER, AN OPEN COMMERCIAL CABLE CAME FROM HARLOT.

  NOV. 20, 1956

  CHRISTOPHER, EIGHT POUNDS ONE OUNCE, BORN AT WALTER REED ARMY HOSPITAL AT 8:01 A.M. MOTHER FINE, SENDS LOVE, FATHER TRANSMITS FOND REGARDS.

  MONTAGUE

  NOV. 21, 1956

  SPLENDID NEWS. GODFATHER BEWITCHED.

  HARRY

  I raided my checking account and ordered four dozen long-stemmed red roses to be sent to Walter Reed by way of the Agency Commissary in Washington. Then I went home early from work, stretched out on my mattress (which reeked of insect repellent), and stayed in bed at the Hotel Cervantes from six in the evening to six in the morning feeling as if I had been stomped on by a platoon of Marines.

  Indeed, I did not write to Kittredge until a letter came from her about a month after the birth of Christopher. I no longer knew—if I ever did!—what she wanted from my letters, and I did not recognize the calm, hardworking young man who stepped forth in my handwriting. He had rattled on about his work as if he knew it inside out when, indeed, he only pretended to. Was that how I wished to be seen? The birth of Christopher mocked such vanity.

  December 20, 1956

  Harry dearest,

  My child is a month old today and I, who was raised by my father to believe that iambic pentameter is the only suitable meter for the passions of murder and love, have decided to throw over his dictates, and become a devotee of the one-step. Thirty days old, Christopher weighs eight pounds, five ounces. Is fed every four hours. Is as beautiful as the heavens. Like a fixated witch, I stare at this blue-eyed creature with his minuscule hams of hands, pink and succulent. Watch! They seek his mouth. I examine his incomparable alabaster skin. My ears dwell on his gurgle of innocence. But I know better. All these corny palimpsests of infantitude hide from us the fact that infants look bitter, mean as rue, and eighty years old in the first minute they’re born, and are covered with enough welts and streamers of blood to have been in a car crash. Of course, that face soon disappears, not to be seen again for eighty years. At present, Christopher shines like an angel cherub. I am the only one to remember where he came from—that “shuddery penetralia of caves.”

  Does the phrase toll a bell? The only time I attended a High Montague Thursday, Hugh was talking about the ineffable interrelations of counterespionage. Leave it to my doughty warrior, he actually said, “Our studies move into penetralia. We search for that innermost sanctum, ‘the shuddery penetralia of caves’—for which inimitable ph
rase, gentlemen, I am indebted to a Mr. Spencer Brown who is so quoted in the OED.”

  At that moment, Harry, I didn’t know if my mustachioed Beau Brummel was the acme of audacity or asininity. I did think it was crass to oblige all you young crew-cuts to listen to such smelly stuff. I didn’t go back to the Thursdays. I am becoming more and more like my mother, especially these days. I look at Christopher and am transported to bliss, then, as quickly, am dropped right back into the darkness of our human roots—damn shuddery penetralia. Harry, I can’t tell you how much your generous letters have meant. Station work, for all its mediocre sleazy contacts and its tedium and frustration, still seems more sensible than all those highly slanted endeavors with which Hugh keeps himself and his helpmate, me, busy. So, don’t stop writing. I love the details. Some of your items nourish me through the worst of the p.p.d.’s. Yes, p.p.d.’s. You, male lummox, probably don’t know that I am speaking of postpartum depression. You can’t conceive of how ill equipped a new mother is at shaping up for the daily grind until you go through these doldrums. Even when I lift my baby out of the crib, and this warm little tenderness of spirit is in my arms, I bawl. For I begin to realize the cost and the beauty of motherhood. Everything within me is being rebuilt on new terms, and who knows how stern and exacting these terms will prove? Hugh comes in from some twelve-hour flap at Technical Services, sees me in the teary mopes, claps his hands, says, “Dammit, Kittredge, Christopher is thirty days old. That’s long enough to put up with one leaky faucet of a woman.”

  Well, I want to kill him. It’s simple again. I bless Hugh in my divided heart because anger does lift you up for a while, but, oh, Hugh is such a large part of the p.p.d.’s. As are you. I read your letters, all there, everything given to me, and think, “Why can’t I dwell among these idiot station men with their sacred procedures?” So I start to miss you. Keep writing. I do enjoy your epistolary gifts. Your detailed sendings bring light and shadow to the dreamlike two-dimensionality on which my feeble work is projected. Besitos, estúpido. Yours, for more Spic-talk.

  Hadley K. Gardiner Montague (Mrs.)

  P.S. The roses were aces, bearcat, corkeroo! Mille baisers. You are the dearest gnat’s whistle.

  5

  Jan. 3, 1957

  Lovely mother,

  I can’t keep from studying the snapshots you enclose. Christopher’s cherubic sense of himself pushes right through the silver iodide. I must say he looks a good deal like Winston Churchill, and that delights me. Not every day does one become surrogate godfather to Old Winnie!

  I also thank you for my Christmas present. It’s summer here now, but the gloves will be most useful come July. I’m glad the roses got to Walter Reed. Did the brooch arrive, however, at the Stable? Don’t tell me I was extravagant. Perhaps I was, but so soon as I looked into the antique shop window, I had to buy it for you. The ornament spoke to me of heavy old Uruguayan gentility, and yet, I don’t know why, it reminded me of some inaccessible part of you. Can you possibly comprehend what I mean? In any event, don’t count me extravagant. In truth, I wasn’t. My mother, to my amazement, had just sent me a voluptuous check—it even felt plump and lustful in my bone-dry wallet. (Since I sympathize with your passion-to-know, I will not torture you needlessly.) Five hundred smackers! Sent along with a one-line note—“It’s Christmas, so do it up properly, darling.” She didn’t even bother to sign. Her stationery is her signature. I must say I feel uncharacteristically full of love for her. Just as one grows to resign oneself one more time to her basic stinginess of sentiment, lo, she knows what you are thinking, and comes across with a flashing stroke. Someday I will write a Charles Lamb–like essay on The Multitudinous Vagaries of the Bitch.

  Well, I certainly must be full of gelignite and lyddite, peter and soup, to speak of my mother in such fashion. (Actually, I can’t resist listing these explosives. I hear them all the time.) We Station hands certainly don’t use the stuff very often (once a decade?), but we do know how to throw the cordite and nitro jargon around. Bang juice is the latest favorite. Obscene enough to do the job. We naturally passed through a host of Christmas parties these last two weeks, each of the married couples (which involves Mayhew, Sonderstrom, Porringer, Gatsby, Kearns) plus Nancy Waterston and myself as singles, giving an evening at their homes. I, still ensconced in my all-but-fleabag hotel, reciprocated by inviting four couples and Nancy Waterston (Mayhew doesn’t show up at any party but his own) to dine, all ten of us, in the grand and overpriced dining room of the Victoria Plaza. In the course of after-dinner drinks, we all got off for some silly reason on bang juice. Kept passing the term around, looking for new connotations—which came down, predictably, to the old connotation. But we had a merry time formulating such bang juice toasts as: “Blessings and bang juice to Augustus Sonderstrom, our own Gus, banging his big woods and juiced-up irons, and may all the bang juice be wiped off his hard-hitting putter,” yes, it got as elaborate and stupid as that. From Porringer, of course.

  Anyway, I had one insight into Sally and Sherman late that evening. At the end of dinner, about the time we were all thickening up—you can’t call it sobering up—they happened to be alone for a moment at one end of the table, and she was looking sour, and he was full of bilious, much-compacted anger. (I know he had to be upset that his elaborate golf-and-bang-juice toast did not go over.) So the Porringers sat there like a warning to all who might contemplate marriage, old before their time. It’s awfully sad, because she has a perky little face. Maybe she was a cheerleader in high school, for certainly she has a nice body.

  At any rate, I began to notice what the Porringers were doing with their napkins. It told the tale. Sherman had squeezed his piece of linen and released it, squeezed it and released it (with his thighs, I assume) until now, laid on the table, it looked like a piled-up thundercloud. Hers, to the contrary, appeared to have undergone a regimen of successive flattenings from the palm of her hand. Still, the cloth kept rising. Her poor trapped heart?

  I think the Porringers are both from the Southwest, college sweethearts perhaps, I seem to recollect that he went to Oklahoma State. The point to this, I expect, is that each of them touches me in the oddest way. Ever since I voted with him against Sonderstrom, his relations toward me have been a study. Stop-and-go. Brusque; friendly. Highly critical of my work, followed by a clap on the back. Superciliously superior, then helpful. I, in turn, don’t know if I like him any better. I mention this because he did pass on a plum of a job to me. Right in front of Sonderstrom, he said, “Rick can field this one better than Gatsby, and you and I just don’t have the time.”

  Do you know, I realize that all of this letter has been a preamble to a serious decision. Everything I’ve disclosed up to now can be seen as venial, but if I fill you in on the new job, and am discovered, I’m in the soup. As are you. So, let us wait a couple of days. I’ll write again before the week is out. It’s 3:00 A.M. once more. Apologies for this abrupt ending. I have to think this out for myself. It’s of too much consequence to rush into.

  Love,

  Harry

  I was not telling the truth about Sally Porringer. We had begun an affair, and it was already into its second week on the night I invited my good Agency associates to dinner. So, the sadness I felt on watching Mrs. Porringer flatten her napkin was more complex than simple sorrow, and not without a tinge of fear. I lived among trained observers, after all, and the affair, if ever discovered, would look dreadful. Having helped me to get an important assignment, Sherman Porringer had been given a set of horns for Christmas.

  Nonetheless, I fell asleep with no difficulty. Encountering the cold center of myself was not unreassuring. It suggested that I might be well equipped for the more difficult tasks I would face. I certainly felt cold enough to recognize that a very small part of me, which was nonetheless quintessential, would never forgive Kittredge for having another man’s child.

  Jan. 5, 1957

  Dearest Number One,

  I’ve weighed out the contingencies.
As you may have supposed, I am going to tell all. Our operation is called AV/OCADO, and if it works as well as we hope, there’s a good deal of entrée. I suppose you could say it’s in fulfillment of one of our two major objectives. Ideally, according to the Missions Directive, the Priority is to effect a penetration into the Soviet Embassy, and next Priority is to get into the higher ranks of the PCU. (That last, if you recall, is the Uruguayan Communist Party.)

  Well, this second objective is well along. Thanks to Porringer, it’s become my baby. I’m inheriting a Priority Task, and I am going to take you into it, for I may need advice farther down the line. I can tell you—I don’t want any repetition of that embarrassing Berlin period when I was on the secure phone every other day with our mutual friend. This time I am going to bring the job off on my own.

  Let me provide the filler. Did I mention that we have two contract agents? Besides Gordy Morewood, there is Roger Clarkson. He’s also done good work for us, and his cover is excellent. He not only works for the most prestigious public relations firm in Montevideo (which handles the accounts for most of the U.S. corporations here), but has put in a lot of time with the local Anglo-American drama group. You would think that is not a particularly fertile place to pick up our kind of information, but it certainly is where the winds of gossip blow. Many upper-class Uruguayans gravitate to the Montevideo Players on the pretext that they wish to improve their English, whereas, actually, the Players has become a classy arena for the great South American upper-middle-class sport—infidelity. Roger Clarkson has served as our facsimile of a KGB joy-boy. He’s tall, good-looking, straight nose, blond hair, Princeton—a splendid example of what we’re advertising to the rest of the world. In the course of his activities, he’s picked up a lot of what is going on at the Legislative Palace. No great haul, but indispensable bits to corroborate or refute the information we receive from our heavier sources—the usual Uruguayan legislators, journalists, businessmen, etc.