Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  I turned to my typewriter and sent the following into the Encoder-Decoder.

  ICANN OTDOA NYTHI NGTOR ESOLV ETHIS IMPAS SEIWI LLALT ERMYE STIMA TEOFP ROBAB ILITY OFREC OLLEC TIONO FTHEN OTEFR OM80% TO95%

  There was a long pause. Omaley sat there shaking his head slowly from side to side like a metronome oscillating alone in a vault. It was late at night and we were the only two people left in our wing of the Embassy.

  FINAL, asked the E-D.

  FINAL, I typed back.

  This time the pause was short. DOYOU AGREE TOTAK INGAL IEDET ECTOR TEST

  Omaley looked happy for the first time in three days.

  INPRI NCIPL EYESP ROVID EDJUR ISDIC TIONA LHEGE MONIE SDONO TOVER RIDET HEPRI NCIPL E

  “In principle, yes,” read Hjalmar over my shoulder, and very much aloud, “provided jurisdictional hegemonies do not override the principle.” He laughed. “What would you suppose are the probabilities that your Chief of Station will enable you to avoid the flutter box? Fifty percent? Forty percent?”

  There was a high-pitched note so hateful in his voice that I came very close to hitting him. I was still smarting from the tap on the back of my head.

  21

  “PREPOSTEROUS,” SAID HOWARD NEXT MORNING, “OUTRAGEOUS. YOU HAVE been doing your best to stay afloat with a KGB heavyweight, and they want to flutter you because they are not happy with the results? You are absolutely right. This is jurisdictional. I’m not letting any paranoid peacocks drive a truck right through the middle of my Station.”

  “I’m ready to take the test if it comes to it,” I said.

  “Glad you said that, but I’m here to protect my people fully as much as I am ready to expose them to appropriate risk-taking.” He paused. “I want all the tarps tied down on this one, however. Are you really 95-percent sure of your accuracy about this note? That’s what ticked them off, you know. You can’t get cheeky with their evaluation process. It’s like defiling the Torah or the Koran.” He looked most carefully at me. “Between us, cozy as thieves, what is your real estimate?”

  “Ninety percent.”

  “Okay. I have to buy that. But why is Masarov’s message so anemic? The name of the game is to maim someone’s name.”

  “Howard, I put it in my report. I have a theory that no one gives credence to: Just a couple of weeks ago, on February 2, the Russians asked for a summit meeting. I think Masarov wanted me to bear the same message that the Russians are sending in a thousand different ways all over the world. ‘Give the summit a try, Khrushchev is okay.’ Part of their personal propaganda approach.”

  “All right. Those lines of possibility do stand out in the transcript. But why confuse matters? Boris is an old pro. He knows the cardinal differences between a clandestine note and a political pitch—which, by the way, I don’t trust for one minute, those Sovietskys don’t want peace ever, just a breathing space to find a new way to screw us.” He paused. “But, all right. Boris gives his sermon. We can all cry for the Soviet Union. Countless-countless killed. Yes, and how about the five thousand Polish officers Masarov helped to shoot in the back of the head, and the other ten thousand Polish officers that remain missing? Stalin knew what he was doing. He was killing the cadres of a possible future independent Poland, yeah, those Sovs want peace—I’ll believe that when pimps stop taking their cut.” He tapped his desk as if it were a podium.

  “You ought to be in politics, Howard,” I said.

  “I could have been in many things. It kills me to look at the properties you could develop out in Carrasco. We pay a stiff price, Harry, for giving our allegiance to the Company. A CIA man makes a whole financial sacrifice for life. But that’s another matter. Let’s keep the target in our sights. Explain to me one more time your understanding of Masarov’s note.”

  “Howard, I think Boris was drunk and full of misery, half ready to defect and knows he won’t—unless he does—he’s a Russian, after all, he’s half crazy, he loves his wife, he’s sinking in guilt, he has a lot on his conscience, he wants to save his soul, and if you add it all up, he must be very self-destructive. He loves Dostoyevsky. I think he wanted to hang himself with that meaningless note, but then he changed his mind and burned it.”

  “So you buy his speech at face value?”

  “I think I do. Why else write a meaningless note?”

  “God, you’re young.”

  “I guess I am.”

  Actually, I was amazed at the felicity with which I was able to lie. How much of my mother was in me after all. For the first time I understood her pleasure in little creations. Lies were also a species of spiritual currency.

  “Well, I’m going to bat for you,” said Howard.

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Kid, do you have any idea how expensive this could prove for yours truly?”

  “I think a lot of people up and down the line will respect you for taking a tough stand,” I said.

  “Yes. How much won in respect, and how much lost to future deep-dyed, unalloyed enmity. Yes. Tell me, Harry, why are you reluctant to take the test?”

  “I’ll take it, Howard. I’m ready to. I’m innocent. It’s just that they get you feeling so goddamn guilty once they put those electrodes on.”

  “Say that again. I remember my indignation when they asked me if I were homosexual. Years ago. I controlled myself long enough to say no—when in doubt, observe the proprieties—but, I tell you, fellow, if any man was ever crazy enough to try to put his pecker in my mouth, and I don’t care if that man is a buck nigger, six feet six inches tall, I would bite his masterpiece off at the root. So, yes, I can hook on to your feelings. I hate lie detectors too. We’ll stop those bastards right where they live. This is, after all, my Station.”

  I caught a whiff of his breath. He had had a few belts, and that was certainly not his habit for the morning. It was possible that he was more agitated than me.

  Howard left soon after to keep a date for lunch with one of his Uruguayan friends. “I’m going to hold the line,” he said.

  As if to show his trust in me, he quit his office while I was still in it. That was not customary. He usually locked his door. Now, he merely left it ajar so that from her desk just outside, Nancy Waterston could certainly check on whether I was looking into any of his drawers. Just then, the secure phone in the locked closet began to ring.

  “Nancy,” I said, “do you hear that?”

  She did after a moment.

  “I think,” I told her, “we had better answer it. Do you have a key?”

  She did. She made a point of unlocking the closet door herself. By the time she lifted the receiver, there had been twelve rings. “Yes,” she said, “he’s here. Who wishes to speak to him?” A pause. “Oh, it’s classified. Oh, I’m afraid I don’t know the protocol on classified secure phone referrals.” Meanwhile, she was stabbing her finger directly into the air between us. “For you,” her finger was saying.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, covering the mouthpiece, “who is asking for you.”

  “Never fear. It’s more routine than you’d expect.”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated, “who is asking for you.”

  “Nancy, I could, if necessary, tell you what this is all about, but I won’t. You are interfering with a priority.”

  “All right,” she said, then added as she handed me the phone, “it’s a woman.”

  “Hello,” I said into the mouthpiece.

  “Is that other person standing at your elbow?” said Kittredge in my ear. “More or less.”

  “Banish her.”

  “It’ll take some doing.”

  “All the same!”

  “Nancy,” I said, “this is a secure phone. I’d like privacy. That is the designated purpose of these phones.”

  “Only intended for use,” said Nancy, “by the Chief of Station.”

  “In his absence, I have entitlement. This involves something codeveloped by Howard and
me.”

  Nancy receded, but grudgingly, like a tide not yet ready to accept its summons back from high water. She left Howard’s door still ajar. I, in turn, did not feel ready to close the closet. Under these exceptional circumstances, Nancy might feel emboldened to listen at the keyhole. So, through two half-opened doors, we managed to keep an eye on each other even as I spoke in the lowest tones.

  “Are we clear?” asked Kittredge.

  “Yes.”

  “Harry, I love your letters. I know I haven’t been responding lately, but I love them. Particularly the last one. It’s invaluable.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Couldn’t be better. It’s all turned around now. I’m in splendid shape.”

  Her voice, however, was coming to me out of the long reverberations of the secure phone. All I could determine about her state of being was that she was speaking quickly.

  “Yes,” she said, “I want your permission on a small but precise fabrication.”

  “You’ve got it,” I said. Given the proportions of the Abominable Omission, why deny anything small and precise?

  “I’m not ready to inform Hugh we’re corresponding, because that would upset him much too much, but I do ask for your permission to tell him that you were sufficiently concerned by what took place on your Soviet picnic to place a call to the Stable’s secure phone. He was out, I’ll say, and so you told me all. Then you and he can get together tonight on this same lovely red phone.”

  “The first thing wrong with your proposal,” I said, “is that your call right now has already ticked off a nasty response. Unless I can come up with a feasible explanation, I’ll never be able to get a second call out tonight on my lovely red phone, which, incidentally, dear lady, is housed in a stifling closet—”

  “Don’t talk so much,” she said, “there’s an off-putting echo.”

  “The second difficulty,” I said, “is that I don’t believe you. I think you’ve told Hugh already.”

  “I have,” she said.

  “About my last letter?”

  “No, never the letter. About Masarov’s crazy note. Your letter arrived yesterday, yes, yesterday, Wednesday, and I made up the story of your phone call, said it was at 4:00 P.M., and Hugh was sufficiently exercised—”

  “Speak more slowly. Did you say exercised?”

  “Exercised, not ex-or-cised. Hugh tapped into his source over at Soviet Russia Division, and, yes, the Sourballs are agog. Darling boy, you must have tampered with the message. Hugh gave me the wording. It’s not what you put in the letter to me. They must be trying to sweat the last gamma globulin—”

  “Slower, please.”

  “Not getting their last bit of fat, are they?”

  “No.” Pause. “What does Hugh think of what I did?”

  “Thinks your natural instinct has a touch of the divine tar.”

  “Divine tar?”

  “Harry, that’s Hugh’s accolade. The stuff God filched back from the Devil. Divine tar.”

  “Well, Kittredge, you’ve left me impressed with myself.”

  Suddenly, however, all amusement was gone. “Oh, Harry, it just occurred to me. When you speak to Hugh, do get our little story straight. When you phoned me yesterday, you did impart the missing contents to me.”

  “Yes, I’ll keep the new chronology in place,” I said.

  “I think you’re wonderful. However, that’s not what’s at issue. How are you and my spouse going to speak if you can’t get a secure phone?”

  “I guess,” I said, “that Hugh should ring me at eleven o’clock tonight,” and I gave the number of a street phone near my hotel that I sometimes used to call Chevi Fuertes.

  “Is it virgin?” she asked.

  “Hell, no.”

  “You must select another pay phone you’ve never used before. Then phone us at home around eleven tonight on any pay phone. Hugh will pick up. Don’t speak to him by name. Just give the color code for the selected phone and hang up. Of course, you had better skew the color code.”

  “By how many digits?”

  “Choose a number.”

  “Four . . .”

  “I just picked two. Make it three then,” Kittredge said.

  “Three.”

  “Skewed by three.”

  “Shouldn’t it be a continuing skew?”

  “Agreed.”

  “By the way, only six digits on phones here, not seven,” I said. “And I will call at eleven o’clock. If I can’t make it, then by midnight.”

  “Agreed,” she said.

  “By the way, they want to put me in the flutter box.”

  “Hugh will probably get you out of that.”

  “How?”

  “Harry, be content.”

  She hung up before I could say good-bye.

  It was a long afternoon and made more nervous by thoughts of the skew. My recall of the color code for phone numbers was still absolute—on that I could feel well trained. Zero was white; 1, yellow; 2, green; 3, blue; 4, purple; 5, red; 6, orange; 7, brown; 8, gray; 9, black. A full skew turned zero into 9, 1 to 8, 2 to 7, so forth. A skew of three changed 3 to 9, 4 to 8, 5 to 7, 6 to 6, 7 to 5, so forth. But continuing skew was a misery. The first digit in the telephone number was skewed by three, the next by three more, or six, the third by nine, the fourth by three again, the fifth by six again, the sixth by nine once more. One didn’t dare do it in one’s mind but reached for pencil and pad. The virtue of the continuing skew, however, was that anyone tapping in on the first conversation who happened to be familiar with the color code would still, if he did not know the continuing skew, need time to break down the number. By then, presumably, the pay phone would have been used and never employed again.

  Hunt returned from lunch and locked his door. I surmised he was on the phone to Washington. Then he called in Hjalmar Omaley, who looked expressionless when he came out. It took no great acumen to recognize that the demand by SR Division for a lie-detector test was not going to be decided by Hunt, but back in Cockroach Alley. The Encoder-Decoder was certainly silent.

  Porringer went home at five, ditto Gatsby. Nancy Waterston quit at six, which was as early as she had left in several weeks. Hjalmar soon followed; I had the idea he and Nancy would meet for dinner tonight.

  Hunt stopped at my desk as he was leaving. “What was that secure phone call about? More illness in the family?”

  “Yessir.”

  He lost his temper. Mean storm warnings passed across his face. “I don’t want you using the red box again.”

  “I won’t.”

  He slammed out of the office. I understood his fury. He was not going to circle the encampment with our wagons after all.

  Alone in the office, I felt gainfully employed for the first time since Sunday afternoon. My regular meeting with Chevi Fuertes was scheduled for Friday at the safe house, and I had to go over his file. Then my accounts with AV/ALANCHE, sadly screwed up. I had not been out with them in two weeks and they were in a state of disarray from a couple of bloody street fights. My undone account books concerned not only AV/OCADO and AV/ALANCHE, but AV/OUCH-1, AV/OUCH-2, and AV/ERAGE, all on my desk to be brought up to date for Nancy Waterston. As I sat alone in the office, I could even feel AV/ERAGE, my homosexual society journalist, sulking—I had not met him this week for a drink. Yet the thought of all these unaccomplished tasks was curiously soothing as if I could wrap them about myself like a poultice against the raw adrenaline of the last three days.

  That evening, after choosing the critical phone for my serious conversation with Harlot, I ate alone in a trucker’s café in the Old City, an uneasy but pleasurable anticipation suffusing itself into my broiled meats and wine as if I were getting ready to meet Sally on a good night for me. I obtained from the waiter a fistful of change, and my pants pocket, on leaving the restaurant, lolled concupiscently against my thigh.

  By ten-thirty, I had chosen the phone booth for the first call, and at ten of eleven, I called the international ope
rator, gave her the number of the Stable in Georgetown, and deposited my coins. When I heard Harlot’s voice, I said, “In front of a yellow wall is a white table with a purple lamp. A man in a brown jacket, yellow pants, and red shoes is standing. There is no chair.”

  “Repeat in brief,” said Harlot’s voice.

  “Yellow, white, purple, brown, yellow, red.” That would convert to 10-47-15.

  “Twelve to fifteen minutes,” said Harlot and hung up.

  Ten-47-15 was but the immediate conversion. Calculated for a continuing skew of three, it would come out to 15-45-45.

  I had chosen to receive the second telephone call in a nearby bar of reasonable decorum. It had two phones in private booths and thereby offered less likelihood that some stranger would be kept waiting if our conversation should take a while. Indeed, I was in the booth five minutes in advance with the phone up to my ear and my other hand on the hang-up lever so that the apparatus would be able to ring.

  In the fourteenth minute, it did.

  “Well,” said Harlot, “back to the old rigamarole. I dislike pay phones quite as much as you do.”

  “This one has been interesting,” I said.

  “Time-consuming.” He paused. “Here is the hygiene. If necessary, for purposes of clarity, names are permissible. Should we, for any reason, disconnect, hold your place and I will call again. If you don’t hear in five minutes, wait until midnight. I’ll call then.”

  “Make it eleven-forty,” I said. “This place shuts down at midnight. I’ve asked.”

  “Good fellow. Now, purpose of my call. Verification. There is no doubt in your mind that your drinking pal named the Soviet Russia Division?”

  “Zero doubt,” I said.

  “Why did you not report it?”

  “My drinking partner had obviously set me up to do so. I thought I’d spike his game.”

  “Presumptuous of you.”

  “I can only say that my deepest instinct told me to follow such a course,” I said. “I had a hunch you would want me to follow such a course.”

  “This is amazing,” said Harlot. “Do you know, if you had consulted me, I would have told you to do just what you did. The real object of the Russian’s billet-doux was not SR Division, but closer to home.”