Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “You’re mad,” she would say to me. “Jack Kennedy has a bad back. He got it in the war. We never danced at all. It didn’t matter. I wanted to listen to him when he talked and I loved to talk while he listened.”

  “And Frank? Frank doesn’t dance?”

  “It’s his profession.”

  “Dancing?”

  “No, but he understands it.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “Come here.” Lying in bed, she would kiss me, and we would commence again. I would scourge the fourth part of my libido. Next morning, I would be in a towering depression. It would seem to me that I was nothing but a pit stop in the middle of a race. Kennedy would be back; Sinatra might always return, and Giancana was waiting. How crude were my emotions now that they were exposed to myself!

  I do not know how well I was prepared, therefore, when a communication came in from Harlot on August 1.

  SERIAL: J/38,854,256

  ROUTING: LINE/ZENITH—OPEN

  TO: ROBERT CHARLES

  FROM: GLADIOLUS

  10:05 A.M. AUGUST 1, 1960

  SUBJECT: BABYLONIAN PARTOUSE Call me on SEEK.

  GLADIOLUS

  His conversation was brisk: “Harry, I had one hell of a time collaring this transcript. It’s BLUEBEARD–AURAL on July 16th of convention week in Los Angeles. Buddha has kept it not only in Special File, but Select Entry. Still, I plucked it forth. Pressure points pay off.”

  “How soon,” I asked, “can you get it over to me?”

  “Will you be at Zenith four o’clock today?”

  “I can be.”

  “Expect my man at your desk on the dot.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Are you mermaid-witting yet?”

  “No, sir,” I lied, “but on the way.”

  “If it takes too long, it will accomplish less when you get there.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Partouse. It’s Parisian slang, isn’t it?”

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  At 4:00 P.M., a man I recognized as one of the two baboons who had been in Berlin with Harlot four years ago, came into my office, gave a short nod, handed over an envelope, and left without requesting my signature.

  “July 17, 1960. AIRTEL TO DIRECTOR FROM FAC SPOON-OVER, subject SELECT, recorded July 16, 7:32 A.M. to 7:48 A.M. Pacific Time.”

  MODENE: Willie. Please listen. It just blew up with Jack.

  WILLIE: It just blew up? It’s nine-thirty in the morning here. So it must be seven-thirty your time. What’s happened? Not one phone call all week.

  MODENE: What I mean is it blew up last night at three in the morning, and I haven’t slept since. I’m waiting to get on a plane. I’m at the airport. I didn’t sleep.

  WILLIE: What did he do?

  MODENE: I can’t tell you yet. Please! I’ve got to be orderly about it.

  WILLIE: You really are upset.

  MODENE: He put me up at the Beverly Hilton all week and said I was his guest, but I felt awfully tucked away. I never knew if I was going to be alone with room service or he would call me out late at night.

  WILLIE: Did you go to the convention?

  MODENE: Yes. He had me in a box. Only, I think it was the number-four box. There was the Kennedy family in the first one, and more family and friends in another, and then there was a third where I saw a good many important-looking people in the box next to mine, but my box was odd. Some of Frank’s friends were installed there, whereas Frank was in the Kennedy family box. My box was second-rate people, I don’t know how to describe them. Boston politicians maybe, gold teeth practically, although not that crass. And one or two women I most certainly did not like the look of. Very expensive hair-jobs, like, “Do not ask who I am. I am the mystery woman.”

  WILLIE: But you did see him?

  MODENE: Of course, nearly every night.

  WILLIE: How many nights did he miss?

  MODENE: Well, three out of seven. I used to wonder if he was with one of the women in my box.

  WILLIE: He must have been feeling equal to dynamite.

  MODENE: One night he was so tired I just held him. A wonderful glow came off him. So deeply tired, so happy. One night, he was wonderful. Full of energy. His back, which usually bothers him, was feeling absolutely relaxed. Jack Kennedy is one man who should have the right to go around with a healthy back, because it’s just right for him.

  WILLIE: He probably had a shot of painkiller. I’ve heard that rumored.

  MODENE: It was a consummate night and I had nothing I wanted to keep in reserve for myself. But then I didn’t see him for the next couple of nights. Then, the day they chose Lyndon Johnson for Vice President, Jack was very tired and I just held him, but last night . . . (pause) Willie, I don’t want to turn the faucet that opens the waterworks.

  WILLIE: If you can’t cry around me, you are in double-duty trouble.

  MODENE: I am in a public place. At a pay phone. Oh, damn, it’s the operator.

  OPERATOR: Will you deposit seventy-five cents for the next three minutes?

  WILLIE: Transfer the call to my number, Operator. It’s Charlevoix Michigan. C-H-A-R-L-E-V-O-I-X, Michigan, 629-9269.

  MODENE: On the last night, the parties went on forever. Toward the end, Jack took a group to a friend’s suite at the Beverly Hilton and he whispered to me to stay, so I hovered around the edges, and that is an embarrassing position. I stayed as long as I could in the bathroom fixing my hair, until it was down to a few of his top political workers and himself and me, then I drifted into the bedroom, and he came in and sighed, and said, “At last, they are all gone,” and I went into the bathroom again to undress. When I came out, he was in bed, and I couldn’t believe it—there was also another woman, one of the ones I had seen in the convention box. She was just about out of her clothes.

  WILLIE: My God, is he taking lessons from Frank?

  MODENE: I went right back into the bathroom and dressed and by the time I came out, the other woman was gone. I couldn’t stop shaking. “How did you ever find the time to manage all this?” I asked. I was awfully close to screaming. I couldn’t bear it that he was so calm. He said, “It did take a bit of juggling,” and I came very near to slapping him. He must have seen the look in my eye because he said he hadn’t done it to offend me, he just thought this part of life was an enhancement. “An enhancement,” I said. “Yes,” he said, “it’s an enhancement for those who can appreciate it.” Then he told me that he once loved a French woman very much who delighted in such arrangements, even had a name for it—la partouse. P-A-R-T-O-U-S-E. If you were ready for it, there was no harm done, he said, although obviously, as he could see by my reaction, he had certainly made an egregious error.

  WILLIE: Egregious!

  MODENE: Yes. I said, “Jack, how could you? You have everything,” and he said, “It’s all over so soon, and we do so little with our lives.” Can you believe that? He’s such an Irishman. Once they get their mind fixed, you need a pickax to break into the concrete. He started to fondle me, and I said, “Let go, or I am going to scream.” And I left him there. I went to my room and drank Jack Daniel’s until dawn. I didn’t answer the phone.

  WILLIE: Oh, Modene.

  MODENE: I’m not even drunk now. I am cold sober. There is too much adrenaline in me. He had the gall to have eighteen red roses sent up to my room with a bellhop. Just before I checked out. It had a note: “Please forgive the stupidest thing I’ve ever done!” Well, I want to tell you, I spent well over a hundred dollars and ordered six dozen yellow roses to be delivered to him right away, and signed, Modene. He’ll get the message.

  WILLIE: Does he know about Sam’s yellow roses?

  MODENE: Of course he does. I made a point of telling him. I liked to tease him about that.

  WILLIE: It sounds to me like you’re cooking up a welcoming party for Sam.

  MODENE: No, not Sam! Not now! I have to see what kind of mood I’m in when I get back to Miami.

  WI
LLIE: We’re going to have some crazy time if this guy gets elected president.

  MODENE: Willie, I’m hanging up. I don’t want to start crying.

  I had an odd reaction. I asked myself whether I would ever try to bring another woman into bed with Modene, and knew I would not, but that was only for fear of losing her. If she ever brought a woman to our bed, well, that I might like very much. There were times, especially lately, when—St. Matthew’s be damned—I thought we were here on earth to feel as many extraordinary sensations as we could; perhaps we were supposed to bring such information back to the great Debriefers in the sky.

  Soon enough, however, I began to recognize how much real anger I was holding. It seemed to me it was all Sinatra’s fault, and I could understand my father’s propensity for terminating life with one’s bare hands. What a pity that Sinatra would not come through the door of my cubicle at Zenith at this instant—my rage was in my fingers and as palpable as a ball of clay. I muttered to myself, “Modene, how could you have done this to us?” as if she was as responsible for her past as for her present with me.

  Yet, time, soon enough, picked up: We pretended Jack Kennedy did not exist. It was almost a viable proposition. I did not know whether she saw me as a dressing station in the great hospital of love’s wounded, and I was the pallet on which she could recover, or whether she loved me magically, which is to say, had been struck by love on the night she returned to Miami, and I was her man. She kept speaking of how good-looking I was until I began to peruse my face in the mirror with the critical self-interest of a speculator going over the daily listing of his stocks each morning.

  All the while, I was trapped in work and fearful of the day when the baboon would show up at the desk with new transcripts from Harlot and I would learn that she was seeing Jack Kennedy again.

  21

  ABOUT THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST, HUNT MADE A MOVE HE HAD BEEN PREparing for some time, and our Frente leaders transferred their headquarters to Mexico. It was considered by Quarters Eye a necessary piece of camouflage for the oncoming operation, and Hunt welcomed it. His children, having finished their school term in Montevideo, were soon coming back to America with Dorothy, and I think he had been facing the difficulty of locating good lodging in Miami where costs were prohibitive. Now he and Dorothy might find a villa in Mexico City. Besides, he could feel once again, as he had in Montevideo, that he could run his own show.

  Back at Zenith, left in charge of the Political Action Section, I actually moved up to a larger office with a window. If it looked out across a crabgrass lawn to our wire fence, our guardhouse, and our gate, and there was no more to see across the road than a spread of low, flattopped modern buildings belonging to the University of Miami, and so, qua window, was but a mean gain, still, I had taken my first step on the rung of hierarchical ascension.

  Otherwise, the new job was no boon. I now had to watch over Hunt’s unfinished business in addition to my own. This included public relations concerning the Cubans who were arriving daily in every kind of boat. Given the ties we had developed to individual reporters on the Miami newspapers, we now could count on a feature story every few weeks about exiles who had just floated over from Havana on rafts news-worthy for the crudity of their construction. Some consisted of no more than a platform of two-by-eight planks lashed to oil drums welded together, and the thought of this journey across one hundred and eighty miles of open water from the port of Havana to Miami was awesome, and so diverted attention from the less exceptional fact that the great majority of our exiles were still coming in on airlines from Mexico and Santo Domingo. Then, late one moonless night, while out on the patio of La Nevisca, I watched a powerboat tow a full load of people and two rafts out to sea, the sight barely visible by starlight, and next morning, lo, the rafts had floated in again, the press was called, and one of the people I had personally registered two weeks ago at Opa-Locka, a particularly engaging curly headed young Cuban, would grin at me the following day from the front page of the second section as if he had just arrived. I was learning that in publicity it was obscene not to lie. Of course, I felt no great moral stirrings—I just wished that Hunt had briefed me better. The virtue of military operations, I was deciding, was in the whole simplicity of the decision to win.

  Meanwhile, Hunt stayed in touch by cable and phone. From across the Gulf of Mexico, he still attempted to control the work handed over to me. I was now nominally in charge of his sector of agent recruitment, but many of our activities bore few dependable returns. It was easy to find agents who would take our pay, but how many in our pool of gossip-mongers, student idealists, petty criminals, unsuccessful pimps, marginal businessmen, new Cuban shopkeepers, boatmen of all varieties, exiles waiting to be shipped out for training, ex-soldiers from the Cuban army, and Cuban-Americans from the U.S. Army, plus a superstructure, if you could call it that, of Cuban journalists, lawyers, respectable businessmen, and career revolutionaries could give us accurate information? “Our agents,” as Hunt pointed out, “tell us what they think we want to hear.”

  Meanwhile, in August, hurricanes were building in the Caribbean, Calle Ocho was springing Spanish signs in neon, new arrivals were sleeping on our recruiting-house porch in downtown Miami, and Quarters Eye circulated a handbook among Zenith personnel listing the hundred and more exile organizations in the Miami area, a work of redundancy, since we had made the same compilation at Zenith. I was also sitting in on committee meetings with other case officers trying to work up an operative procedure that would shape the exiles into self-policing groups who might weed out the Castro agents in the exile community. FBI reports, which we also circulated at Zenith, put the number of such DGI men at two hundred. It was an in-house joke. Three months ago, the number had been the same. There was every expectation that three months from now the FBI would still be speaking of two hundred DGI agents running amok in Miami.

  Then, early in September, another envelope banded about with strapping tape came in the Quarters Eye pouch.

  It began:

  I’m enclosing a letter from Bob Maheu. If you can’t bury it in a safe place, destroy it. I have a copy.

  Dear Mr. Halifax,

  This is to inform you that I have met with a well-recommended top banana of the Mafia who calls himself Johnny Ralston. Since he has his own expropriated investments to recoup, he is, to say the least, well motivated.

  Naturally, I went into this lunch as a representative of some wealthy figures who are willing to pay for an authoritative stroke to the tune of $150,000. Well, the Ralston gentleman can be acerbic. He threw back the name of Meyer Lansky. “Meyer has a price out,” he said, “of one million dollars for the same job.”

  “Yes,” I assured him, “but once you are successful, you have to collect it. Do you care to be the man who has to ask Meyer Lansky for that amount of money?”

  Since I taped the conversation, let me give you the rest directly.

  R: How can I trust your people to be good for one-fifty?

  M: We will put it in escrow.

  R: Why are you in this?

  M: Because of my sense of serious obligation to this country. I have been told that you have similar feelings of patriotism.

  R: I will lay it on the line: I feel so patriotic I would like to obtain my citizenship. Fuck your hundred-fifty thousand bucks—I want those citizenship papers. I am tired of being pulled in by immigration officials.

  M: Your citizenship can be arranged.

  R: Yes, and I have been doublecrossed before.

  M: There is no way such an arrangement can be promised in advance. After the event, you would have every leverage for obtaining your desired result.

  At this point in the lunch with Ralston, there is a malfunction in the recording that goes on for a few minutes. Probably I pressed too severely against the back cushions, a regrettable hitch to be avoided next time.

  While I cannot recall in detail what transpired over this gap, I can assure you that I did my best to convince him he could dep
end on “my people” to get what he wanted.

  Son, let me cut in here. Never trust Maheu altogether. He’s enough of an old hand to know how to flex his butt while wearing a sneaky. I suspect he excised some of the tape. I would presume it covers his admission to Ralston that the “wealthy figure” he’s representing is the Agency. Obviously, it is to Maheu’s advantage to let Ralston in on such a matter because the Company is better situated than private individuals to obtain his citizenship. (Although, God knows, we could have trouble there with Immigration.) In any event, once Maheu returns to the tape, Ralston is considerably more amenable and agrees in principle to come aboard. He does, however, tell Maheu that he wants to meet “the guy who talks to you. I want to shake hands with the real stuff.”

  This enclosure is merely to keep you advised. If any observations are stimulated, pass them along. I do wonder what Ralston’s real name might be.

  HALIFAX

  The next morning, I received a coded memo from Harlot sent over a medium-security circuit.

  Buddhists report that one Johnny Roselli, a close associate to RAPUNZEL, met with Robert Maheu for lunch at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills. Unfortunately, no reliable sources were available. That most curious meeting leaves us therefore in Ponder Gardens.

  GREENHOUSE

  “Reliable sources” were tape recordings. Obviously, the FBI had been able to do no more than take note of the luncheon. Hugh, however, had given me a leg up on my father. Once again, I walked down the hall, obtained access to VILLAINS, and punched into it for Johnny Roselli. A good deal came back.

  JOHNNY ROSELLI aka Johnny Ralston, aka Rocco Racuso, aka Al Benedetto, aka Filippo Sacco. Born in Italy (Esteria) in 1905, immigrated to the US in 1911, grew up in Boston, is reputed at age 12 to have assisted a relative in burning down a house to obtain the insurance.