Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Out of a silence, I asked, “Are you still with Bill Harvey?”

  “I might be.” He took a full pause. “I might not.”

  “What is Bill up to?”

  “Count on it,” he said. “Whatever it is, it is crazy enough for King William.”

  We laughed—somewhat experimentally.

  “I assume,” I said, “that he’s now in Washington.”

  “Decent assumption.”

  “Are you working for him?”

  “Is your name Arnie Rosen?”

  I had forgotten how powerful was Butler’s jab.

  “In fact,” said Dix, “that’s how I found you. Through Arnie Rosen. Ask him what I’m doing. He probably knows.”

  “I assume you are working for Bill Harvey.”

  “I might say no. My work is peripatetic.”

  He was wearing an expensive gold watch and a tropical silk suit that must have cost five hundred dollars.

  “Can you tell me where you’ve been the last three years?”

  “Laos.”

  “The Golden Triangle?”

  “It’s the mark of an asshole to keep asking questions,” said Dix.

  “If,” I said, “you told me what you are here for, I might be able to help you.”

  “You can’t,” he said. “I’m looking for a couple of Cubans who can handle weapons, steer a boat, live off the jungle, fear nothing, manage their rum, and thrive in filth. Got any recruits?”

  “You’ll find them.”

  “Let’s wipe this conversation.” He literally passed his hand over his face before he said more equably, “I have a couple of appointments to get to.”

  “Good,” I said.

  He stuck out his hand. I shook it. He did not try to destroy my metacarpals. He contented himself with staring into my eyes. I suspected he had been drinking since morning. “We’re all in it together, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you respect Castro?” he asked.

  “I think I do.”

  “I hate the son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “He is a year younger than me, and he has done more than I have done so far.”

  I thought of making a joke, but he was too serious. “Look,” he said, “at any given moment, there are something like twenty superior people on earth. Castro is one of them. I am another. God, or whoever it is—it could be a fucking committee for all I care—has put us twenty down here on earth.”

  “Why?” I asked. “To torture you?”

  He laughed at that. He was merry for a moment the way a lion would be merry if the wind blew in one good unexpected whiff of carrion. “You,” he said, “are making decent efforts not to be stupid.”

  Well, indeed, I was glad I had not brought Modene.

  “Still,” he said, “you have it backwards. We are put on this earth to entertain the gods. By our contests. I respect Fidel Castro, but I am not overawed by him. I have a prayer: Put Fidel and me in the jungle together, and I am the one who will come out alive.”

  After that, he was silent. Then, he was morose. When I finished my drink, he barely nodded as I left the table.

  I called Rosen from the nearest pay phone, and woke him up. It was his night to catch an early sleep, but he did not grumble; in fact, he was quick to ask, “Did the big fellow look you up?”

  “Certainly did. And certainly has a number of things he doesn’t care to talk about.”

  “Yes,” said Rosen.

  When he said no more, I waited before I asked: “Could you fill me in?”

  “I could,” said Rosen, “but why should I? Our relations, Harry, are becoming a one-way street.”

  I was more drunk than I realized. I almost made a long speech to Rosen. It would have said that in our work, the little piece one held of the whole was such an intense and crystalline piece of information that it created a tension, even a thirst in oneself to be filled in on, yes, the collateral data, so, of course, we all gossiped and wanted to know more. If we laughed at Arnie, it was envy, yes, Rosen, I said in my mind, it’s a form of respect, when all is said, that we call you to find out, but all I managed to mutter after what must have been a not wholly ineffective silence was, “I suppose, Arnie, if you don’t tell me, I won’t sleep as well.”

  “So instead you woke me up.” This made him laugh, even gave him a good one, as if it suited his notion, after all, of our relations, and he said, “The big guy had to leave Berlin under a cloud.”

  “Because of Iron-Ass Bill?”

  “No. Because of an Inspector General. Iron-Ass actually saved him. Got him transferred to Laos.”

  “And that’s all.”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “How can you presume to make that remark?”

  “Because I know as much as you. I know he was in Laos.”

  Rosen found this funny as well. “God, are you drunk,” he said.

  “Yes, I had bourbon for bourbon with the butler.”

  “Oh, you don’t want to do that. Butlers are notoriously ramrod, if you know what I mean.”

  “What I mean is, what is the big guy doing now?”

  “I won’t tell you. Not under these auspices. I will only say—so that you don’t feel obliged to suck your thumb through the night—that he is associated once more with William the King, and it’s so hush-hush that it’s vanguard, supersecret, a fence, let us say, around the fence. Please do not ask me any more.”

  “I won’t, because you don’t have that much to offer.”

  “You are absolutely right.”

  “Tell me then about the Inspector General who came to Berlin.”

  I could feel his relief. This news was, after all, less sensitive. “Well the big guy had an ex-Nazi agent whom he no longer trusted, so he strung the fellow up and put turpentine on his genitals. Said it was to get a little closer to the truth.” Rosen began to laugh. “I know, it’s painful, but I have to laugh because the big guy said, ‘I made the Kraut hop. Think of all the Juden, Rosen, that this Nazi once kept hopping.’ And it was true, according to Dix—oh, hell, I’ll use his name. My phone is safe. I make certain it is. And you’re at a good pay phone, right? Dix says he, personally, always kept a double standard. That meant less mercy to ex-Nazi agents who had gotten naughty than run-of-the-mill agents who had gone bad. Only, Dix made one mistake. These ex-Nazis have a network. The turpentine victim complained to an influential friend in the BND. Bad luck for Dix. We had an Inspector General in Berlin that week who has a permanent burn on one side of his face. Naturally, the IG had sympathy for another burn victim. Dix was in the worst trouble of his life until Bill Harvey used his weight to get our big guy transferred to Laos.” Rosen sneezed. “You’ve done it again. I’ve told you all.”

  “My blessings,” I said.

  Later that night when I filled Modene in on a few modest things about Dix, and confessed that I had not wanted her to meet him, she was pleased. “You have nothing to fear from a man like that,” she said. “I could never be attracted to him.”

  “Care to tell me why?”

  “If he is the way you say he is, he is fixed in his mold of life, and I could not change him. I can’t be too attracted to a man I cannot change.”

  I was about to say, “Can you change Jack Kennedy or Sam Giancana?” but I held back. Instead, I said, “Do you believe that you can alter me?”

  “Oh,” she said, “it’s just difficult enough to be interesting.”

  28

  AS THE PRELUDE TO A COUPLE OF BAD WEEKS FOR MY FATHER AND FOR ME, Nikita Khrushchev took off his shoe one afternoon at the United Nations and began to hammer on his desk with it. That same date, October 12, Robert Maheu received word in the morning that the pills to poison Fidel Castro had reached their final destination in Havana. I had an odd reaction. I began to wonder whether some mute sensor in the Premier’s brain was telepathic and Khrushchev had stirred into anger without quite knowing why.
If such speculation came under the head of what my father called “freestyle thinking—costs nothing, accomplishes nothing,” I could still hear the echo of that shoe. In my ear, it tolled like a bell announcing the end of Castro’s life; in advance, I mourned him and concluded that Castro had betrayed something grand in himself. Such contemplation of one’s enemies produces rich melancholy.

  Of course, he was not exactly dead, not yet, and my work continued, and my nights with Modene. I never slept during those weeks without expecting a phone to awaken me with an announcement of Castro’s demise, but the phone never rang.

  At the end of the third week in October, a letter, via pouch, came from my father. It was not Hunt’s habit to pass by my cubicle first thing in the morning, but the old Chief-of-Station instinct may have been working. Hunt, in fact, was sitting in my chair, the letter held between two fingers as I came in. Standing up, he passed it over to me wordlessly. The heading read: ROBERT CHARLES EYES ONLY.

  “May I ask whom this is from?”

  It was within his prerogative to ask. Technically speaking, anything that passed under my eyes belonged to his eyes as well. I might run a small and secret operation, but I was not supposed to keep it secret from him, not on demand.

  “Oh, well, it’s Cal’s,” I said. “He likes to correspond in this fashion. Uses it for personal correspondence.”

  “Is that really so, Robert?” He called me Robert whenever we were at Zenith. I called him Ed. Howard deemed it necessary.

  “It’s true, Ed.”

  “Well, it’s also unheard of. I could bring your father up on charges.”

  “What are you saying? Come on!”

  “I wouldn’t, of course. But a Senior Officer has to set an example.”

  “I won’t pass that remark on to him.”

  “No, of course not. It’s something for me to bring up with the man if I feel so inclined.”

  “I wouldn’t bring it up at all.”

  Hunt looked furious at my impertinence, and then he shrugged. “One more rogue elephant on my watch.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” I said. “It is personal correspondence.”

  When he was gone, I read the letter. Many another important message has become no more than a line of summary in my memory, but I recall all of this letter. It is burned into my brain by the livid attention I gave to it; I could not help but shudder at the thought of Howard reading it.

  Oct. 25, 1960

  Start BONANZA on RETREAD. No need for personal contact yet. Just have him dig into RETREAD’s accounts. If, as I expect, they are spread over several banks, BONANZA may have to contact a few friends in rival institutions. This is not an uncommon practice among young bankers, I can tell you. (They never know where they’ll be looking for work next.)

  That, son, will constitute the good news. Now, prepare yourself for a shocker. But first, let me describe the messenger. Richard Bissell, one’s immediate boss these days, is an impressive figure of a man. Not for physicality, mind you. He is a big man, but I could bounce him off a wall. It is his mentality. He is at home in fine and contemplative halls of mentality. You are familiar with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in New York? Of course you are. St. John’s is a wondrous center for meditating upon the monumentality of thought itself. And to me, Dickie Bissell is the embodiment of that spirit. I want you to picture him. He is six feet six at least, imposing in height even for you or me, and, for fact, when you are sitting down with him, he still seems somewhat overhead. At a desk he will listen to person after person most attentively while he bends paperclips slowly and thoroughly in his long white fingers. Otherwise, he gives you all his attention, his head towering above his pale long hands—Rick, I have to tell you they are as white as good breeding itself, an odd remark to make, except that when I was a boy, that’s how I saw good breeding—pale, long hands. Bissell keeps toying with paperclips as if they are tactics and operations, little endeavors down on the plain, so to speak, particularities, and he, great massive white man, hovers above, great white massive brain power embodied in white, puffy establishment body—Lord, he is the archetypal dean of Harvard, huge, gentle, wholly removed from all the goddamned dirt of operations. His features are delicate. Son, he’s almost beautiful in the chiseled perfection of his chin, his lips, his nostrils, and the shaping of his eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses.

  Well, isn’t the above just as pretty a piece of writing as I’ve ever sent your way? Did I tell you that for a year after World War II, I thought of trying to become a writer, then gave up? All that rich personal material from OSS, but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. Besides, writing gets you looking at your wife out of the corner of your eye. About the time Mary would remark, “It’s getting to be picnic-weather time again,” I would be ready to add, “she said,” so I decided to put my art into my letters, ha, ha.

  At any rate, here I am resolutely straying from the point. I have reason: Bissell, whom I obviously could revere (if only he didn’t have a bit of potbelly, but a thunderously good boss all the same), called me over from Quarters Eye to K Building this morning and handed me a memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover to Richard Bissell.

  During recent conversations with several friends, Giancana stated that Fidel Castro was to be done away with very shortly. When doubt was expressed regarding this statement, Giancana reportedly assured those present that Castro’s assassination would occur in November. Moreover, he allegedly indicated that he had already met with the assassin-to-be on three occasions. Giancana claimed that everything has been perfected for the killing of Castro, and that the “assassin” had arranged with a girl not further described to drop a “pill” in some food or drink of Castro’s.

  Bissell looked at me and said, “All right, Cal, how did Mr. Hoover obtain such information?”

  Son, if you ever get in one of these situations—sooner or later, we all do—start by enumerating all personnel in the know. It gives you time to think. It also separates out the likely possibilities. I started by naming the Director, which produced a baleful look from Bissell. “The Director,” he said, “is not associated with this. Begin with me.”

  I didn’t argue. After Bissell, I came next. We could trust ourselves. Then Sheffield Edwards. Ditto. It was Bullseye Burns’ turn. He had been an FBI man but could probably be vouched for. Besides, he had not been at the Fontainebleau.

  “Your son,” said Bissell, “is touchy ground for us. But I will accept your evaluation. Can you vouch for him altogether?”

  “Yessir,” I said. “One hundred percent. That is one good young man.” (I did not tell him that the family vice is hyperbole.)

  Which left Maheu and our three Italians.

  “I see no reason for Maheu to play a double game with us,” said Bissell. “It might sweeten future associations for him over at the Bureau, but look at how much he loses here if the job doesn’t come off.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” I said.

  “Is Roselli sincere in desiring citizenship?”

  “Maheu swears to that.”

  Which left Giancana and Trafficante. We agreed that I needed a sit-down with Maheu to go over their bona fides.

  The key to the problem is, how much has Hoover really picked up? Bissell’s thesis is that so long as the FBI does not know of our relation to Giancana, Hoover’s memo cannot hurt us. Yet why is Buddha sharing his information with the Agency? Does he have more, or does he wish us to believe he has more?

  When Maheu came up to Washington, I learned that Giancana has a girlfriend named Phyllis McGuire. She’s one of the McGuire Sisters, who sing on TV for Arthur Godfrey. There was some sort of gutter splash a year and more ago when Julius LaRosa and Dorothy McGuire were getting a little too open about their hanky-panky, at least for Godfrey’s taste—that monumental hypocrite! Godfrey couldn’t live without fast and fancy sex is what I happen to know, but won’t let his minions enjoy same. Remember? He said Julius LaRosa was lacking in humility.
If this country ever goes under, it will be for needless, egregious hypocrisy. At any rate, the McGuire Sisters are lively girls apparently. Phyllis owed, I was told, a marker in the neighborhood of $100,000 at the gaming tables of the Desert Inn; Giancana was gallant enough to tear it up for her. What a nice way for a romance to begin! Our Giancana, Maheu now assures me, is close to insanely jealous of Phyllis McGuire. It seems the lady has a soft spot for one Dan Rowan of the comic team of Rowan and Martin—can you keep up with these people? Maheu’s first hypothesis is that Giancana told Phyllis about the Castro project in order to impress her; then Phyllis, in her turn, told Rowan. Somewhere in all those links, the FBI has a taping, and it could be on McGuire.

  Now to Maheu’s backup thesis: Giancana is deliberately shooting his mouth off to any number of cronies. Reason: He wishes to sabotage the operation. Motive? Maheu shrugs. Giancana might be advertising his ties to the Agency in order to get the Department of Justice off his back. He is certainly not to be trusted.

  Next comes Maheu’s read on Trafficante: For years, Santos was the mob’s number-one man for gambling operations in Havana, and still has the best networks there. After the revolution Castro kept him in jail with a suite of rooms, a TV set, visitors, special food. It sounds like one hell of a protracted negotiation. Trafficante’s claim is that he promised the moon to Castro, but has not delivered since he got back to Tampa. So, he is anxious to eliminate the big Cuban before the compliment is returned. All the same, I suspect that Castro is doing business with Trafficante, and Toto Barbaro is in on it. Just an intuition here, but I have come to trust such instincts.

  Let us get to your role. I have, as you may have noticed, more than filled your need to know. Do take exceptional care of this letter. Indeed, give it to the shredder if you do not have an endroit. Or get one. They’re worth the expenditure. For years, I confess to you, I’ve had a safe deposit box in a remote little bank up north. Another in Boston. One in Washington, of course. Think on these lines. If you can preserve my letters, do so. Some decade, long after I’m gone, Agency barriers may come down, and you might want to do a memoir of your old man. Assuming he’s worth the portrait. If so, these letters will help to flesh it out. For today, and this week, however, I believe you do have real need to know all this, since I will be less easy to reach. My next ten days have to be spent on direct military matters. I can tell you that working with Joint Chiefs staff is about as agreeable as transferring from Yale to Indiana State.