Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “No, sir,” I said, “my father Cal Hubbard is not a fathead,” and the memory of the day I broke my leg skiing came over both of us at once. And we beamed at one another like explorers who have crossed a continent together and now share a view of a hitherto unglimpsed sea.

  “Rick, I need an assistant down here,” he said, “and I expect you’re the guy. I was hoping you would be, and now I believe that you are.”

  “I believe that too,” I said. I was thinking of Modene. I had never loved her more. I knew more about her than anyone else in the Agency, and I did not know anything about the lady other than that I adored her, and she had given me some kind of strength I had never quite felt before. “Give me a tough job,” I said, “and I’ll be there with you.”

  “This one is tough enough,” he answered. “First of all, it is absolute hush-hush. So let’s start with that. I like everything about you, but for one element.”

  “Name it.”

  “Your friendship with Hugh Montague.”

  I cannot pretend that I was not surprised, but all I said was, “I don’t know if we’re all that friendly these days.”

  “Why was he having lunch with you at Harvey’s Restaurant, then?”

  “I needed his help on exile welfare.” I went into explanations. My father’s eyes were hard on me all the way in much the way they had kept up with my movements as we boxed. I do not know if he was wholly satisfied when I finished, and I was rueful that our splendid beginning for this day had now been bent to this degree, and was doubly rueful at the collateral intelligence provided by simple Washington gossip: I knew my father well enough to understand that he wanted a vow from me. “Anything you say,” I told him now, “will not be repeated or in any way hinted at by me to Hugh Montague.”

  He held out his hand and shook mine with the grip he used to get at the marrow in your finger-bones. “All right,” he said. “I’ll brief you on Hugh. He’s a great man, but at present, he worries the hell out of me. I can’t prove it, but Allen may be feeling the same way. Bissell, of course, just can’t abide Hugh Montague. They’re a built-in cockfight. The trouble is that Hugh knows too much about everything going on. God, he’s sitting on every crossroads in the Company. It’s Allen’s fault. Right from the start, Allen wanted one of us free and clear of all the others to keep an eye on everything, and report directly to Allen. That way Allen would have a hedge against our own bureaucracy running things without him. In consequence, Hugh has security overrides that allow him to pipe into what-all. His fief has become a goddamn spiderweb, an empire within the empire. And he is unalterably opposed to the Cuba op.”

  “Well, I am for the Cuba op.”

  “You damn well better be.”

  I was debating whether to inform my father about the work I was doing for Hugh, and decided I would not. A new instinct, immediately and incredibly alert, was telling me to work with Hugh and Cal, work with them both—each in his own enclave. It might be the first time in my life I could lay claim to a driver’s seat. If I was appalled by the extradimensionality I was taking on for myself, I was also growing enamored—I confess this—with what might be the ultimate possibilities of myself. No, I had not fainted on the doorstep.

  “In fact,” said Cal, “I’m so opposed to Hugh’s attitude at this point that when Allen asked me to take on a most special task, I told him that I would on the proviso that Hugh Montague not be given one whiff of it. Allen promised to go along with that.”

  I nodded.

  “The line of communication,” Cal said, “goes from Allen to Bissell to me. Now it’s going down to you. I do have a case officer working New York and Washington, but now I need one in Miami. I will add you to the team. Circumscribed, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yessir.”

  He squinted at a fishing boat bucking a chop in the channel between two far-off Keys. “Rick, I must admit that I am feeling very respectful of this operation. I haven’t been off my feed as much since I was fourteen and knew I was going to start my first varsity football game at St. Matthew’s, the youngest student ever to make the first team varsity there, I’ll remind you. So, yes, if I wake up in the middle of the night, just between us, I’ll tell you—yes, I do gulp air. Because the core of the Cuban op—and I can give it to you in one sentence—is that Allen has now decided that Fidel Castro is definitely to be eliminated.”

  Had he forgotten my secure telephone call to him? “That’s common gossip around here,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Cal, “you’re dealing with Cubans. Any possibility, no matter how macabre or extravagant or sensational, is everyday gossip to them. But no Cuban believes deep down that he can knock Castro’s hat off. We can, however. We can do just that, and we will.”

  “What about Toto Barbaro?”

  “For now, ignore Barbaro. He has enough of a nose to want to get near to me. Follow no leads with him, therefore. Think of him as doubled. He probably is.”

  “Yessir.” I paused. “Is there a timetable?”

  “Castro is to be gotten out of the way by early November.”

  “Before the election?”

  He looked at me. “Exactly.”

  “Can I ask how high up this goes?”

  He shook his head. “Son, it’s a lifework to understand this Company. You never stop learning how the gears fit. But there’s one sense you must develop. We all gossip a little more than we should, and we are not above trying things out verbally to hear how they fall on someone’s ear. Only, there are certain inquiries not to make. Real security depends on a key, one simple key. Unless you are told where a project was initiated, don’t go looking for the source. You don’t want to know. Because when you get down to it, we cannot trust ourselves. So I don’t want to be informed whether this started with President Eisenhower, or Richard Milhous Nixon, or Allen himself. It’s come down with enough force for me to think Allen cannot be the initiator, and I would warrant it is not Bissell. He prefers to take a clear order and work out the filigree. All right, you say, if they are talking of November, it must be Nixon. He’s Action Officer for Cuba, after all, and he’s bound to win the election if Castro is off the board by then and we have Cubans fighting in the hills. Still, we don’t ask. Because it could be Eisenhower. When Patrice Lumumba came to Washington last month, the State Department treated him like Mr. Africa. They talked Ike into putting Lumumba up at Blair House—hoping to impress him with the fact that he was squatting in the shadow of the White House—but Mr. Lumumba is a revolutionary, and he didn’t feel all that impressed. He and his people smoked marijuana constantly, and left their butts smudged all over the State Department seal in the ashtrays. Then Lumumba had the consummate moxie to ask the State Department if they would provide him with a white prostitute, preferably blond. He wanted a little feminine company at Blair House. Well, Eisenhower is reported to have said, ‘Castro and Lumumba have to be right out of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Can’t someone do something about these people?’”

  My father now shrugged. “That may have been all it took to kick off our Castro op, Nixon taking his cue off that remark, but all I have received from Allen is the go-ahead to talk to Bissell. And all I got from the latter worthy was that a decision had been made to work with underworld figures who have lost their casinos in Havana. Top hoods with an investment in Cuba would be likely candidates for such a job. No one outside our ranks would suspect that they were the trigger men for more than their own good and sufficient reasons. ‘All right,’ says Bissell, ‘fill in the blanks.’ ‘Wouldn’t care to send us a clue on how to start?’ I ask. ‘Up to you,’ says Bissell, ‘you know a good many people.’ Indeed I do, but are any in category? I had a ridiculous couple of days, Rick. I’ve been in the Far East so long that I can find you a Hong Kong mechanic adept at pulling out toenails a millimeter at a time, but the sad truth is that I have a paucity of skilled low-life contacts in the U.S. I didn’t know where to start. When it came down to it, I didn’t know the right Americans. I even thought—and I�
��ll disinherit you if you repeat this to anyone—that I might call on my old friend Lillian Hellman. She had an affair years ago with Frank Costello of which she is still very proud, and I thought maybe she would give me an introduction to the old tiger gangster boss. Lucky for me, I looked into it first. Costello is pretty much out of it these days. Along about then, I was called in by Bissell and handed the plumbing. I am to work with Bob Maheu, he tells me. Well, that’s another matter. You’re going to meet Maheu in Miami, I expect. Used to be FBI, now he’s Howard Hughes’ man. Has also done work for us. I teamed up with Bob Maheu years ago in the Far East and he’s one incredible fellow.” My father spent a moment contemplating his palms. “That’s about the size of it. Hierarchically, I’ve got all the responsibility; operationally, I sit on the sidelines and wait for Maheu to report to me. It’s not a situation I instinctively enjoy. And as for where it all started, well, Howard Hughes comes to mind as quickly as Nixon. But I can’t pretend that I’m happy. Hell, let’s get the bill and drive back.”

  When we were on the road to Miami, he did expatiate a bit. “There are going to be a few meetings soon,” he said. “I may or may not attend them. Maheu has his down and dirty contacts but I, of course, have to maintain some hygiene.”

  “Where is the role for me?” I asked.

  “Harry, I can’t promise in advance whether this job will occupy you for an hour, a week, or whether it will consume you. I honestly don’t feel as if I have my own hands on it yet.”

  “I’ve never seen you so pinch-mouthed about things,” I said. It was a large remark for me to make, but his gloom brought it forth.

  “It’s hellish breaking up with Mary,” said my father.

  We drove in silence for a while.

  “It’s all my fault,” said Cal. “Mary had learned to live with my infidelities, but she couldn’t bring herself to forgive me after I took the maid into our bed in Tokyo one fine afternoon when I thought Mary would be out shopping until evening.”

  “Christ Almighty,” I said. “Why did you ever do that?”

  He sighed. “I guess sex without risk can get to be an uncomfortably intimate transaction. Besides, every Hubbard is one part mad. Know what I’m proudest of? On New Year’s Eve, just fourteen years ago, 1946, first New Year’s Eve of the peace, just before I turned forty, I had sexual intercourse standing up with a girl I’d met that night at a party at the Knickerbocker Club.” He paused, with enough pent-up confidence to extract my compensatory “Yes? What is so special about that?”

  “We were doing it at four in the morning on the uptown end of the Park Avenue island that runs from 62nd to 63rd Street with about two thousand windows looking down on us, and I felt as strong as I have ever felt. A police car came along, and this Irishman stopped and stuck his head out the window and said, ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ and I answered, ‘Fornicating, officer. We’re fornicating till the cows come home, and a Happy New Year to you.’”

  “What did he do?”

  “Just gave one disgusted look—pure New York cop!—and drove on.” My father began to laugh with the sheer enjoyment this memory would never cease to radiate from his past into his future, and when he stopped, the road still went up from the Keys, and I could feel him brooding again about the rupture of his marriage. When he spoke, however, it was of something else.

  “You know, son,” he said, “I happen to feel equal to what they’re asking on this job. Once in the OSS, I was obliged to do away with a partisan who had betrayed us. I ended up having to kill him with my bare hands. A gunshot would have been too loud. I never told anyone until today.” He looked at me. “Today is the day. Maybe I’ve lost a wife and gained a son.”

  “Maybe you have.” I didn’t trust myself to say more.

  “What I mean by I never told anyone is that I never spoke before of the sense of realization you can get killing another human, I mean, that intimately. I didn’t know if I was a good man or an evil man for a long time after. But, finally, I realized it didn’t matter—I was just a hellion. So it isn’t what we’ve got to do that gives me pause, it’s that I don’t have my hands on it. Not yet.”

  20

  ON THE SAME NIGHT, AFTER MY FATHER FLEW BACK TO WASHINGTON, I HAD a late date with Modene. She was returning to Miami on an evening flight, and we were going to a safe house. She did not like hotels. “Miami Beach is a very small world to its residents, and I am highly noticeable among them,” she had told me.

  After that, I chose a small but elegant place on Key Biscayne that had been leased to Zenith by a wealthy Cuban who would be in Europe for the summer. I was ready to gamble that it would present no problem for a few meetings. I used to pick her up at the airport in my white convertible and wheel us over Biscayne Bay along Rickenbacker Causeway to the villa off North Mashta Drive. We would spend our nights in the master bedroom, and waken in the morning to a view of royal palms, white habitations, mangrove shore, and pleasure boats in Hurricane Harbor.

  I was, of course, balancing a set of lies between Harlot and the safe-house desk at Zenith, but the risk seemed small. Hunt was the only intelligence officer in South Florida who had the right to ask me what I was using the safe house for, and while he would be routinely notified of the fact each time I signed a chit for safe-house use (and Hunt was the man to know a good address by its name—North Mashta Drive would certainly alert his attention), still, I was protected by our procedural restraints. The villa, for purposes of signing out, was merely listed as Property 30G. If I was using it a good deal, Hunt, if curious, would still have to look up its address and owner by way of a classified in-house manual; why bother? Given our hordes of Cubans, we were using safe houses all the time. So, I had little to fear. Once, in a dream, I did awaken long enough to see Hunt’s ski jump of a nose peering around the master bedroom door to take in the sight of Modene and myself in carnal clutch, but that was a dream. I was impressed by how little distress I carried compared to what I would have gone through if it had been my first year in the Agency. Perhaps I was beginning to live with Harlot’s dictum that in our profession we learn to get along with unstable foundations.

  So I could feel pride in my illicit use of La Villa Nevisca. The stucco walls were as white as any edifice on the South Florida shore, and its name in English, House of the Light Snowfall, proved worth repeating to Modene who exhibited such naïve pleasure in the translation that I began to wonder how long it had taken her father to get accustomed to his money. Sometimes, when her precise way of speaking—the product of years of elocution lessons—began to pall on me, I confess that I began to see all Midwesterners as simple. In defense of such large prejudice, I must say that whenever a building was possessed of charm, or a touch of history, she was too impressed. She liked windows with odd shapes, wood filigree porches, pastel-colored edifices in general, and romantic names—La Villa Nevisca was perfect! She was even impressed with replicas of Southern mansions in Key Biscayne. (It became important to me, therefore, not to compare her in any way to Kittredge.) All the same, I could not keep from envisioning Modene’s childhood on well-to-do Grand Rapids streets and concluded that her contempt for my low station in life—“I guess you’re the poorest man I ever dated”—was more than equalled by her bottomless awe of my attainments: Yale, and a profession I could not talk to her about. I did not even try to tell her about St. Matthew’s.

  I am being unfair. She knew what she knew, and her self-confidence was absolute on certain matters. She loved to dance, for instance. After a couple of evenings in a nightclub, however, we more or less gave it up. I was adequate on the floor, and she could have been a professional. If she showed me variants of the samba and the merengue, the cha-cha and the Madison, if she could go into a triple lindy off a double lindy, it was only to demonstrate her skill: She had no desire to raise my abilities through collaboration—it would make her feel silly, she explained. The aristocratic reflex of an artist was in her rejection: One does not wish to dull one’s talent. In pref
erence, forswear the art.

  On the other hand, I came to recognize that my accent fascinated her. She declared that she could listen to it all night with as much pleasure as if Cary Grant were speaking. I came to recognize that Cary Grant was her point of reference for people whose minds were occupied with niceties, and I understood then why she would not teach me how to dance, no, no more than I would spend a part of my life teaching her to speak. She spoke well enough. If it could pall at times on my ear, well, she had other virtues.

  Once she said to me (and I heard echoes of Sally Porringer), “You’re such a snob.”

  “Do you know,” I said, “so is your dear friend Jack Kennedy.” Then I could not resist the cruelty—“Wherever he is.”

  “He’s trying to win an election,” she answered, “so how could he have time for me? Of course, he doesn’t.”

  “Not even for a phone call.” My jealousy was scalding my heart as directly as boiling soup on a tender lap.

  “He’s not a snob,” she said. “He has an intense interest in everyone around him. Unlike you, he’s the best listener I ever met.”

  I was not. She would start to speak and my mind would wander over to her carnal virtues. I never saw her but in a cloud of sexual intent. I did not have to listen to her—she was so much more than what she was saying. Soon, we could go to bed, and then I would find her brilliant again, and delicate, deep and fierce, yes, dear, greedy, generous, warm, and her heart would be ready to melt in sorrow and joy, all this for me on any night when we could transcend each and every annoying impasse of the evening and get to bed. Then I did not have to worry whether I knew how to dance.

  Libido may be inner conviction, but libido rampant is megalomania. My mind would tell me that I was the greatest lover she had ever had; somewhat later, libido, by three parts out of four consumed, I became again the man who did not know how to dance. Sinatra knew how. So did Jack. They knew.