Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  So soon as I approached that, however, he cut me off. “Forget all about a vacation,” he said. “Your request for leave is canceled.”

  “What?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, oh, oh,” he said.

  “I can’t bear this,” I told him. “Give me some notion.”

  “It’s your mother. Your mother prevents your trip to Maine.”

  “My mother? Jessica?”

  “Yes.”

  “She can’t.”

  “Well, she’s the reason, although she’s not the executor of the decision.”

  “Who is the executor?”

  “Let’s say it’s your father.” A pause. “Yes. Paradigmatically speaking.” Another pause. “And your host sends deep regrets at being unable to send the plane fare.”

  I thought I could glimpse a picture, then wondered if I could. “Arnie, hit me once more.” We could have been trading favors for futures.

  He was so good at this game. “Well,” he said, and he did say well as if he were opening a door, “I, for one, would never be allowed to go to those woods.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re too anti-Semitic in Maine.”

  That offered enough. There was reason to feel the answer was going to make its way to me.

  “Yes, and how is Kittredge?” I asked. “Have you and she made up?”

  “Well, I’d love to, but she is far away.”

  “How far away?”

  “Think of Australia and you’ll be wrong. Ditto Poland. I wish I could tell you where.” He hung up.

  A box of Churchills arrived via embassy pouch two days later. Inside was a card in Harlot’s immaculately small handwriting: “Your errant godfather.” I had solved the question by then. Even as Hugh is Harlot to some, so Angleton is Mother to many. But he is not my mother, Jessica Silverfield Hubbard. Rosen, doubtless, was reminding me that I was one-eighth Jewish. As for my father? Paradigmatically speaking! That had to refer to Company policy. Of course. The Company would not send a Jewish case officer to Israel. Conflict of interest. I had no idea if this originated as an Agency determination, or came by request of the Mossad, or had been agreed upon by both. In any event, Kittredge, your own peerless Harlot had forgotten that a little part of me was Jewish until Personnel, bless them, probably reminded him. For a few days, Kittredge, I must say it was curious to think of myself as Hebraic.

  On the other hand, even though I have been up to my neck with RATHOLE, I now have difficulty believing that I am wholly in Uruguay. I must confess to you that I have a private teleology. I still believe I was born for a purpose and will strive to reach a certain end, even if I can neither see the end nor name it. Forty-eight hours in the scenario-factory of my mind had been spent coming to the conclusion that I must accept a dubious, and conceivably career-smashing, job because I was fated to go to Israel. Then, abruptly, I discovered I wasn’t destined at all. Knocked out on a technicality. It has left me awfully detached about RATHOLE. And don’t you know, Kittredge, that may be just as well. RATHOLE seems in danger of decomposing even as we deal with it.

  The Sourballs, you see, won the battle. Their decision prevailed: We have to try to get a defector out of this, and the consensus settled on Varkhov. Masarov, the old hand, it was agreed, would simply prove too difficult, too outraged. So Station discussed approaches to Georgi. Porringer is for tailing Varkhov’s chauffeured car with one of the cabs from AV/EMARIA. Sooner or later, Varkhov will stop at a café for lunch, and then Omaley and Gohogon, bulked up by Porringer or myself, can be summoned by radio via AV/EMARIA to move in on Varkhov, hand him the tape and a phone number, and tell him to play it for himself alone. We-can-all-be-friends will serve as the theme of this pageant. Hjalmar, however, hates such an outright approach, and SR Division is behind him. Meetings, they argue, must be kept to a minimum. We could, of course, just mail it to Varkhov directly at the Russian Embassy, but how would we know he received it?

  I suggest we use one of our villa keys to leave the tape in Varkhov’s love nest. If the locks have been changed by him, we can hire a locksmith. Disadvantage: The locksmith could attract the notice of the neighbors. If that happens, the operation is blown.

  Of course, once we leave a tape, the love nest goes into terminal, anyway. I propose that we send AV/ALANCHE-1 (leader of the sign-painters and a most trustworthy kid) over with our keys. We can do this at a time when we know, via GOGOL, that Varkhov’s car is parked on the street back at the Russian Embassy. AV/ALANCHE-1 need merely try the lock. Whether the keys work or not, he must depart immediately. At least we will know then whether we can open the door.

  First rate. My idea is implemented on a Friday afternoon, and we learn that the lock has not been changed. After the weekend, then, we will make our move. We’ve discovered by now that no matter how many times a week our villa on Calle Feliciano Rodríguez is used by Varkhov, he always has a tryst on his Monday break for lunch (because, as we learn from the tape, he has spent the weekend with his wife and is heartily sick of her!). We decide, therefore, to leave the spool with a tape recorder sitting next to it right on the table in his entrance foyer. An accompanying note will suggest a place and time of meeting. All he has to do for assent is to substitute a blank piece of paper, also provided, in place of the note. All stated in immaculate Russian, thanks to Hjalmar. There is a concept behind this. The House of Love on Feliciano Rodríguez Street (as we now with a curious mixture of superiority and embarrassment term the theater of operations for this sticky caper) is always approached and entered by Georgi a half hour before Zenia. To prevent his chauffeur from getting a glimpse of her, the limousine is always dispatched right back to the Embassy. Then Zenia arrives by cab and stops a block away. Walks to the door. Georgi, given his advance half hour, is out of his clothes and hungry as a Russian bear. But she delays him. Sometimes, she makes him put his clothes on again. “We must start as equals,” she tells him. Fascinating, but the point is that we do have a predictable half hour at the commencement when he is alone.

  Come Monday morning, therefore, our Company gift is deposited on the foyer table, and Gatsby, who is the least likely to be familiar on sight to either of our Russians, is waiting in a surveillance cab half a block away. Fifteen minutes later, Georgi, right on time, enters the House of Love. Ten minutes later he comes out. He is perspiring visibly. He starts to pace the street. These perambulations become progressively longer to and fro until they take him right past Gatsby, who is still sitting in the parked taxi. Oh, my God, Georgi recognizes Jay. He stops on the sidewalk, salutes him, sticks his thumb to his nose, waggles his fingers, raises a mallet-like fist, smashes it down on the hood of the taxi hard enough to bestow a sizable dent in the metal, and then, seeing Zenia, strides off to meet her, whereupon they enter the house again. Gatsby, in a perfect perspiration of his own, waits in the taxi and has to haggle with his driver over what it will cost to repair the damaged hood. A half hour later, Zenia, distraught, leaves with Georgi, and they hail a cab. When Gatsby attempts to follow at the book-approved distance, Georgi, at a red light, has his own vehicle back itself up a full hundred yards, all the way to Gatsby’s car, gets out, leaves a second dent on the other side of the hood, and jumps back into his cab. Realizing, I think, that discretion is somewhat pointless by now, Varkhov even drops Zenia on the Rambla one building away from her high-rise, and returns to the Embassy where he pays off the driver and shakes his fist at Jay Gatsby even as the latter drives off.

  There’s always the chance Varkhov will notify the police that his apartment was entered, but that will take time. So soon as Jay calls in, I’m sent over quickly with Gohogon to see what has been done to Don Bosco’s property. It’s a nightmare. First of all, Georgi has broken off his key in the front door so we can’t get in. Fortunately, there’s a rear entrance he has overlooked in his rage, and we also have the key to that. He has done a job. The four-poster bed is smashed, the tape recorder is smashed, the tape, unspooled,
is in and out of the toilet bowl and all over the bathroom floor like a slither-pit of tapeworms, the living-room furniture has hordes of stuffing ripped out, a couple of the walls show dented plaster (from those mallet-like fists)—no need to go on. I feel the fires of the Russian heart burning through the icy Russian winter. I jest, but then I don’t. It gives me a glimpse of the terror Europeans hold of the barbaric passions waiting out in the East for them.

  Naturally, all hope for a defection is now lost. Hunt, backed by Western Hemisphere Division and the Groogs, is arguing that a defection was never in the cards, and the alternative is to use our demopos. “Speed is of the essential,” he cables to Washington and in return is given the go-ahead. There is very little to lose. Duplicate tapes are mailed to Masarov at the Embassy, and delivered to the doorman in his high-rise apartment. At a party given by the Swedish Embassy, a third duplicate is left in Masarov’s overcoat pocket. Given Ambassador Woodward’s injunction that State Department presence at embassy functions be unsullied, none of us have been invited, but Porringer does know the Uruguayan hatcheck girl employed by the Swedes well enough to induce her, by way of half a week’s wages, to plant the tape. All of this is at a desperately low level of tradecraft, but, of course, it no longer matters. Saturation is the only way we can be certain Boris receives the goods. No note, of course, is sent. No need for that now. Let Masarov and Varkhov battle it out.

  We sit back and wait. Days go by. No apparent results. The Russians then notify us of a reception for Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a young and apparently outspoken new Russian poet. Enclosed is the information that Yevtushenko gives readings in Moscow and Leningrad to stadium crowds of as many as twenty thousand people. While not a singer, his popularity is comparable to the American Elvis Presley’s. All personnel at the American Embassy, states the invitation, are specifically invited. So Woodward feels obliged to bring along Hunt, Porringer, Kearns, Gatsby, Hubbard, and Waterston in addition to his own stodgy crew. Since it’s the heart of winter now, the party is given inside and is formal enough to remind you of czarist receptions.

  Varkhov and Masarov head up the receiving line. Zenia and Mrs. Varkhov, a fat lady, are between them. They are all a tad nervous, but then, so are we. Varkhov makes a point of clicking his heels when Jay Gatsby goes by with wife, Theodora. I could swear that Masarov winks at me, or was it an involuntary twitch? Zenia, flushed, and looking most vulnerable, as if she is about to weep or to laugh, but can provide no warning, even for herself, of which it will be, is nonetheless looking more beautiful than I have ever seen her. Forgive the crudity of this next thought but it did occur to me that shame bestows a rich light on a woman’s flesh. Exposed, she is also, despite herself, oddly triumphant. Wherever you are, Kittredge, do not become too furious at this.

  At the height of the evening, Yevtushenko is asked to read from his work. Easily as tall as me, he is not bad-looking. Has the sinewy build of a ski instructor. Loudly, he reads his poetry like a young baritone doing a full-voiced récitatif. His Russian seems to be full of onomatopoetic effects. It’s hammy acting, but Zenia’s eyes gleam like gems. “New spirit of Russian people,” she confides to me, as if I were not one of the agents of her attempted downfall. Later, the Belgian Ambassador was to whisper to Hunt that Zenia and Yevtushenko are having an affair.

  I wonder. Yevgeny Yevtushenko is quite a fellow. Speaks a harsh English, but practices it assiduously. Draws me aside and wants to know how far I can swim.

  “Oh, two miles, anyway,” I tell him.

  “Can swim ten. In ice-cold water.” His eyes are wild and blue and stare at you with peremptory force, as if he can bend you to his will inasmuch as his will is pure and only wants your friendship. I have no idea whether he’s up to something. “Are interested in wedding customs?” he asks of me.

  I shrug.

  “Siberian wedding custom fascinating,” he says. “Siberian groom pisses glass until full of urine. Bride drinks urine. Barbaric, yes?”

  “Sounds a bit nyet kulturny.”

  My use of Russian does not reach him. “Barbaric, yes, but wisdom, yes. Yes, also! Because! What is marriage for poor people? Babies, wet diapers, ca-ca. Stinks. Small stinks. Good wife must live with such. Hence, Siberian custom. Good beginning for marriage.”

  “It’s unfair,” I said. “The bridegroom doesn’t drink the piss.”

  “Agree. I agree. Unfair to women. You show sense of justice for era of tomorrow. Let me shake your hand. I salute you.”

  He shook my hand, his eyes stared wildly into mine. I had no idea if he was a talented poet, Zenia’s new lover, a KGB joy-boy, or, first of all, entirely mad. I did not even know how much he knew of what we had been up to. But he made me feel cheap, that son of a bitch—I don’t even know how.

  Kittredge, I miss you so much I could cry in my beer, at least, if I were the demonstrative sort, like Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

  Love,

  Harry

  34

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER I SENT MY LAST MONTHLY LETTER TO KITTREDGE ON July 1, an envelope bearing a postmark from Arlington, Virginia, arrived at my hotel addressed directly to me. It contained no message, only a key wrapped in a tissue. The next day another letter, with a Georgetown postmark, contained a letterhead from a bank in Arlington on which was written the number of a safety deposit box. A third envelope brought a receipt for the first payment on the box, plus a notice that it was to be maintained by quarterly payments. A few days later, the pouch finally brought me a full letter from Kittredge with, as always, the name of Polly Galen Smith substituted for her own on the return address.

  July 26, 1958

  Beloved Harry,

  I am back in Georgetown and will be heading up to Maine in a few days. Now that you have received your key and box number, let me inform you that when you return to Washington and open your Arlington box, you will find about thirty strips of 35mm negative in an envelope, and each strip contains ten to twelve exposures. Your letters to me are on that microfilm. I propose you take my letters through the same photographic process, then deposit them in a Montevideo box until you are stateside where you can lay them to rest with the Arlington cache. In the interim, of course, you must keep paying the stipend on the rent for the P.O. box. It will be worth it. Someday, when you and I are old, the letters might be worth publishing. The impersonal parts, that is.

  Harry, you have no idea how close your correspondence came to being destroyed. In the closet of the little bedroom where you used to sleep over on occasion, there is a rough baseboard molding that I was able to pry off and re-nail without any great show. Behind that board was a suitable space, and over the last year and a half whenever your mail collected, I would get out my hammer. Of course, for short periods, it was simpler to interleaf your more recent communications between the pages of some book or magazine that Hugh would never pick up. The ABC of Crochet. Such stuff. Of course, about the time last month’s copy of Vogue was looking a bit pregnant, I would make sure I had recovered every one of your pages, and then would pop the trusty baseboard loose, squirrel away your letters, and nail back the board.

  Hugh, however, has antennae that reach into God knows which cubbyholes, so he’s given my heart a start now and again. Once he even picked up the very copy of Mademoiselle which held your latest letter, rolled it into a cylinder, and began rapping his thigh with this improvised phallic instrument until, to my relief, he dropped the magazine to the floor without opening it, and pulled out a rock-climbing newsletter from the magazine rack. Some squeak. I thought I was in a suspense film. Another time he spent a weekend with a hammer going over boards in the house. Thank heaven for my own tendrils. I had touched up the paint on my battered baseboard nails just the week before. I couldn’t decide whether I anticipated him, or he was reacting to microscopically subtle shifts in the house. It’s frightening to live with a man who has the sensory apparatus of a cat. It’s also thrilling, and certainly helps to make up for the wretched, if most manly (ugh!), smell of Hugh’s breath after C
ourvoisier and Churchills. Smoking a cigar is the most intimate insult a man can offer to a woman. If you ever have a wife and want to lose her, just puff away in her antique bed on one of those giant tobacco-turds. How transparent are people’s vices.

  I digress, but then I’m highly distractable these days. It’s only two weeks since I’ve come home, and in another ten days, we return to the Keep, where I intend to stay all summer, with or without Hugh. I need the Maine air more than my mate at this point, because, God, Christopher has gone into an awful slump while I was gone. He kept waking up out of frightful nightmares, in response, I think, to what his mother was going through thousands of miles away, and now my little boy looks awfully pale and sort of seedy, like a worried ten-year-old rather than his year and a half. His mother feels as if she has aged commensurately. The work I was doing taught me one terrible lesson: Things can go wrong! So the act of hiding your letters in Hugh’s domain no longer gave me wicked pleasure. The possible consequences were too large to take on any longer. As a result of my experience on the Project, I have passed from believing for the most part in good outcomes to expecting the worst. And the worst, I have discovered, lays waste to all that is good in oneself. How innocent I have kept myself to discover this only now! But I have, and your letters, your beloved letters, offered the naughtiest warmth all this time, and enabled my marriage to breathe. Carnally considered, I have always had an unholy high passion for Hugh—I don’t know any other men, but there can hardly be another so phallic. (He’s like the knobs and pistons of the Almighty Engine itself.) All to the good for a piece of frozen New England steel like me, but then there are also his deadening cigars, and his glacial powers of concentration on anything but me (until I happen to come around to his attention again). There, in the middle were your letters, a tender leavening agent. I could betray Hugh just a little and thereby feel loyal to him.