The Company

by Robert Littell

  “My life is too crowded with emptiness for there to be room for you in it, Jack-of-all-trades and master of none.” She sipped her raspberry-flavored beer and licked her lips, which had turned the color of raspberry, with her tongue. “Since you live and work in the universe of secrets I will add to your collection of secrets: The moments I treasure the most come when I wake up from a drugged sleep and I do not know where I am or who I am—I drift for a few delicious seconds in a gravity-less void. At such moments I dance like I have never been able to in my earthbound life. I dance almost the way Melissa Hayden danced before our eyes this night.”

  Returning home after the ballet, RAINBOW was picked up by the Fallen Angel as she turned into a street behind the Gorky Theater lined with vacant lots filled with rubble bulldozed into giant heaps on which children played king of mountain. Dozens of wild cats, meowing furiously, prowled the wargutted buildings stalking emaciated mice. In the middle of this devastation a single structure stood untouched. Set back from the street, it was planted in the midst of a small park whose trees had all been cut down for firewood. Giant steel girders shored up the side walls that had once been joined to the adjacent buildings. The Fallen Angel watched from the shadows of a deserted kiosk as Lili took a latch key from her purse. She looked back and, seeing the street was deserted, unlocked the heavy front door and let herself into the vestibule.

  The building was pitch-dark except for a large bay window on the second floor. The Fallen Angel snapped open a small telescope and focused it on the window. An older man could be seen parting a filmy curtain with the back of his left hand and peering down into the street. He had snow-white hair and wore a shirt with an old-fashioned starched collar, a necktie and a suit jacket with rounded lapels. He must have heard a door opening behind him because he turned back into the room and spread wide his arms.

  Through the gauzy curtains Lili could be seen coming into them.

  Jack burst into the Sorcerer’s office the next afternoon. “…right about SNIPER…scientist…much older than RAINBOW,” he cried excitedly, raising his voice to make himself heard over a grating 78-rpm rendition of Caruso singing an aria from Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles.

  “Simmer down, sport. I can’t understand your jabberwocky.”

  Jack caught his breath. “I took your advice and tried out the address on your Mossad friend—the Rabbi leafed through some very thick loose-leaf books and came up with two names to go with the address. RAINBOW’s real name is Helga Agnes Mittag de la Fuente. Mittag was her German father; de la Fuente was Mittag’s Spanish wife and RAINBOW’s mother. The Rabbi even confirmed there was a Spanish journalist named Agnes de la Fuente who was caught spying for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and put in front of a firing squad.”

  “What about SNIPER?”

  “The Professor is Ernst Ludwig Löffler. He teaches theoretical physics at the Humbolt University Institute of Physics. Before the war, when Humbolt was still known as the University of Berlin, Löffler hung out with Max Planck and Albert Einstein.”

  Torriti settled back into his chair and stirred a whiskey and water with his forefinger. “A fucking theoretical physicist! Wait’ll the Wiz gets wind of this.”

  “That’s only the icing on the cake, Harvey. There’s more. Right after the war Grotewohl’s Socialist Unity Party let several small parties into the National Front for window dressing—that way he could claim East Germany was a genuine democracy. One of these parties is the Liberal Democratic Party. SNIPER is deputy head of that party and a deputy prime minister of the German Democratic Republic!”

  “Eureka!” exalted Torriti. “Do me a favor, sport. Put a teardrop in SNIPER’s wall.”

  “Why do you want to bug him? He’s sending you whatever he gets his hands on.”

  “Motivation, sport. I want to know why he’s sending it.”

  “A teardrop.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  5

  BERLIN, TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 1951

  HIS FACE SCREWED UP IN REVULSION, THE SORCERER SPILLED INTO the whiskey and water the sodium bicarbonate his Night Owl had bought back from an all-night pharmacy. He stirred the mixture with his pinky until the whitish powder dissolved.

  “Down the hatch, Mr. Torriti,” Miss Sipp coaxed. “It won’t kill you. Think of it as one for the road.”

  Harvey Torriti pinched his nostrils between a thumb and forefinger and drained off the concoction in one long disgruntled gulp. He shivered as he scraped his mouth dry on the wrinkled sleeve of his shirt. Stomach cramps, constipation, loss of appetite, a permanent soreness in his solar plexus, the end of one dull hangover overlapping the beginning of another even when he cut back to one and a half bottles of booze a day—these were the plagues that had afflicted the Sorcerer since the aborted exfiltration of the Russian Vishnevsky. Slivovitz from the water cooler tasted tasteless, cigarette smoke burned the back of his throat; on any given night he would come wide awake before he actually fell asleep, sweating bullets and blinking away images of a heavy caliber pistol spitting hot metal into the nape of a thick neck. The short Russian with his central casting Slavic mask of a face, the mind-scarred veteran of the four brutal winters that took the Red Army from Moscow to Berlin, had deposited his life in the Sorcerer’s perspiring hands. Also his wife’s. Also his son’s. Torriti had put in the plumbing for the defection and come away with zilch. In the days that followed he had agonized over the Berlin end of the operation to see if there could have been a weak link; he had scoured the personnel folders of everyone who had been within shouting distance of the operation: Jack McAuliffe, Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel, the Night Owl, the code clerk who had enciphered and deciphered the messages to and from Angleton.

  If Vishnevsky had bought it because of a leak, it hadn’t originated in Berlin.

  The Sorcerer had dispatched a discreetly worded message to Mother suggesting he take a hard look at his end of the operation. Angleton’s vinegary reply was on his desk the next morning. In two tart paragraphs Angleton informed Torriti that: (1) it wasn’t clear the exfiltration had fallen through because of a leak; Vishnevsky could have been betrayed by his wife or son or a friend who had been let in on the secret; alternatively, Vishnevsky could have given himself away by words or actions that aroused suspicions; (2) if there was a leak it had not originated in Mother’s shop, which was uncontaminated, but rather in the Berlin end of the operation. Period. End of discussion.

  In plain English: fuck off.

  Several days after the debacle the Sorcerer—staggering into the office after another sleepless night—had stumbled across hard evidence that someone had, in fact, betrayed Vishnevsky. Torriti had been rummaging through the “get” from one of his most productive operations: a teardrop-sized high-tech electronic microphone secreted in the wall of the communications shack of the Karlshorst rezidentura. The KGB communicated with Moscow Centre using one-time pads which, given the limited distribution of the cipher keys and the fact that they were utilized only once before being discarded, were impossible to break. Very occasionally, to speed up the process, two KGB communications officers did the enciphering—one read out the clear text as the other enciphered. The night of Vishnevsky’s aborted exfiltration two KGB officers had enciphered an “Urgent Immediate” message to Moscow Centre that had been picked up by the Sorcerer’s minuscule microphone. The translation from the Russian read: “Ref: Your Urgent Immediate zero zero one of 2 January 1951 Stop Early warning from Moscow Centre prevented defection of Lieutenant Colonel Volkov-Vishnevsky his wife and son Stop Berlin Station offers sincere congratulations to all concerned Stop Volkov-Vishnevsky his wife and son being put aboard military flight Eberswalde Air Force Base immediately Stop Estimated time of arrival Moscow zero six forty five.”

  The reference to an “early warning” in the congratulatory message from Karlshorst to Moscow confirmed that the KGB had been tipped off about the impending defection. The $64,000 question was: tipped off by whom?

  Vishnev
sky’s words came back to haunt the Sorcerer. “I am able to reveal to you the identity of a Soviet agent in Britain,” he had said. “Someone high up in their MI6.”

  Torriti checked out the distribution of the ciphered messages that had passed between Angleton in Washington and Berlin Station but could find no evidence that anyone from MI6—or any Brit, for that matter—had been in on the secret. It was inconceivable that the Russians had cracked Angleton’s unbreakable polyalphabetic ciphers. Was it possible…could the Soviet agent high up in MI6 have gotten wind of the defection through a back channel?

  Finding the answer to the riddle—avenging the Russian who had trusted Torriti and lost his life because of it—became the Sorcerer’s obsession. His mind sprinting ahead, his aching body trailing along behind, he began the long tedious job of walking back the cat on the aborted defection.

  He started with the Israeli Mossad agent in West Berlin who had picked up a “vibration” (his shorthand for a possible defection) from East Berlin and immediately alerted Angleton, who (in addition to the counterintelligence portfolio) ran the Company’s Israeli account out of his hip pocket. Known to the local spooks as the Rabbi because of his straggly steel wool beard and sideburns, he was in his early forties and wore windowpane-thick glasses that magnified his already bulging eyes so much his face appeared to be deformed. He dressed in what the spook community took to be a Mossad uniform because nobody could recall seeing him wearing anything else: a baggy black suit with ritual zizith dangling below the hem of the jacket, a white shirt without tie buttoned up to a majestic Adam’s apple, a black fedora (worn indoors because he was afraid of drafts) and basketball sneakers. “You see before you a very distressed man,” the Rabbi confided once Torriti had successfully lowered his bulk into one of the wobbly wooden chairs lining the wall of Ezra Ben Ezra’s musty inner sanctum in the French zone of Berlin.

  “Try sodium bicarbonate,” the Sorcerer advised. He knew from experience that there would be a certain amount of polite prattle before they got down to brass tacks.

  “My distress is mental as opposed to physical. It has to do with the trial of the Rosenbergs that began in New York this morning. If the judge was a goy they would get twenty years and be out in ten. Mark my words, Harvey, remember you heard it here first: the miserable protagonists, Julius and Ethel, will be sentenced to the electric chair because the federal judge is a Jew-hating Jew named Kaufman.”

  “They did steal the plans for the atomic bomb, Ezra.”

  “They passed on to the Russians some rough sketches—“

  “There are people who think the North Koreans would never have invaded the south if the Russians hadn’t been behind them with the A-bomb.”

  “Genug shoyn, Harvey! Enough already! The North Koreans invaded the south because Communist China, with its six hundred million souls, was behind them, not a Tinkertoy Russian A-bomb that could maybe explode in the bomb rack of the airplane as it rattles down the runway.”

  The Rabbi stopped talking abruptly as a young man with shaved eyebrows came in carrying a tray with two steaming cups of an herbal infusion. Without a word he cleared a space on the Rabbi’s chaotic desk, set down the tray and disappeared.

  Torriti gestured with his head. “He’s new.”

  “Hamlet—which, believe it or not, is his given name—is Georgian by birth and my Shabbas goy by vocation. There are things I cannot do because someone in my position, which is to say a representative of the State of Israel, albeit a secret representative, is expected to be observant, so Hamlet turns on the lights and answers the telephone and kills people for me on Saturdays.”

  The Sorcerer suspected that the Rabbi was passing the truth off as a joke. “I didn’t know you were religious, Ezra.”

  “I live by the Mossad manual: eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”

  “But do you actually believe in God? Do you believe in life after death or any of that rigmarole?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “In what sense are you Jewish, then?”

  “In the sense that if I should happen to forget, the world will remind me every ten or twenty years the way it is currently reminding the Rosenbergs. Read the NewYork Times and weep: two dumb but idealistic schleps pass the odd sketch on to the Russians and all of a sudden, Harvey, all of a sudden the number one topic of conversation in the world is the international Jewish conspiracy. There is an international Jewish conspiracy, thanks to God it exists. It’s a conspiracy to save the Jews from Stalin—he wants to pack the ones he hasn’t murdered off to Siberia to make a Jewish state. A Jewish state on a tundra in Siberia! We already have a Jewish state on the land that God gave to Abraham. It’s called Israel.” Without missing a beat the Rabbi asked, “To what do I owe the pleasure, Harvey?”

  “It was you who got wind of the Vishnevsky defection and passed it on to Angleton, right?”

  “‘Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’ I am quoting from the gospel according to that major poet and minor anti-Semite, Thomas Stearns Eliot. The Company owes me one.”

  “The exfiltration went sour. There was a leak, Ezra.”

  The Rabbi sucked in his cheeks. “You think so?”

  “I know so. Any chance one of your Shabbas goys moonlights for the opposition?”

  “Everyone here has walked through fire, Harvey. Hamlet is missing all the fingernails on his right hand; they were extracted by a KGB pliers when he declined to reveal to them the names of some local anti-Stalinists in Georgia. If there was a chink in my armor I wouldn’t be around to guarantee to you there is no chink in my armor. I run a small but efficient shop. I trade or sell information, I keep track of Nazi missile engineers who go to ground in Egypt or Syria, I doctor passports and smuggle them into the denied areas and smuggle Jews out to Israel. If there was a leak, if Vishnevsky didn’t give the game away by stammering when he asked for permission to take his family out for a night on the town, it took place somewhere between Mother and you.”

  “I took a hard look at the distribution, Ezra. I couldn’t see a weak link.”

  The Rabbi shrugged his bony shoulders.

  The Sorcerer reached for the herbal tea, took a whiff of it, pulled a face and set the cup back on the desk. “The night I vetted Vishnevsky he told me there was a Soviet mole in Britain’s Six.”

  The Rabbi perked up. “In MI6! That is an earthshaking possibility.”

  “The Brits were never brought into the Vishnevsky picture. Which leaves me holding the bag. There are eighty intelligence agencies, with a tangle of branches and front organizations, operating out of Berlin. Where do I grab the wool to make the sweater unravel, Ezra? I thought of asking the French to give me a list of SDECE operations blown in the last year or two.”

  The Rabbi held up his hands and studied his fingernails, which had recently been manicured. After a while he said, “Forget Berlin. Forget the French—they’re so traumatized from losing the war they won’t give the winners the time of day.” Ben Ezra pulled a number two pencil from an inside breast pocket and a small metal pencil sharpener from another pocket. He carefully sharpened the pencil, then scrawled a phone number on a pad open on his desk. He tore off the page, folded it and passed it to Torriti. The Rabbi then tore off the next page and dropped it into a burn bag. “If I were you I’d start in London,” he said. “Look up Elihu Epstein—he’s a walking cyclopedia. Maybe Elihu can assist you with your inquiries, as our English friends like to say.”

  “How do I jog his memory?”

  “Prime the pump by telling him something he doesn’t know. Then get him to tell you about a Russian general named Krivitsky. After that keep him talking. If anyone knows where the bodies are buried it will be Elihu.”

  Luxuriating in the relative vastness of the British public phone booth, the Sorcerer force fed some coins into the slot and dialed the unlisted number the Rabbi had given him.

 
; A crabby voice on the other end demanded, “And then what?”

  Torriti pushed the button to speak. “Mr. Epstein, please.”

  “Whom shall is say is calling?”

  “Swan Song.”

  Dripping with derision, the voice said, “Please do hold on, Mr. Song.” The line crackled as the call was transferred. Then the unmistakable whinny of Torriti’s old OSS friend came down the pipe. “Harvey, dear boy. Heard on my grapevine you were hoeing the Company’s furrows in Krautville. What brings you to my neck of the British woods?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Do we? Where? When?”

  “Kite Hill, overlooking the bandstand on Hampstead Heath. There are benches facing downtown London. I’ll be on one of them admiring the pollution hovering like a cloud over the city. Noon suit you?”

  “Noon’s wizard.”

  On the slope below, a very tall man in a pinstripe suit played out the line that trailed off to a Chinese dragon kite, which dipped and balked and soared in the updrafts with acrobatic deftness. An Asian woman stood nearby with one hand on the back of a bench, trying to clean dog droppings off the sole of her shoe by rinsing it in a shoal of rainwater. Somewhere in Highgate a church bell pealed the hour. A shortish, round-shouldered man, his teeth dark with decay, strolled up the hill and settled with a wheeze onto the bench next to Sorcerer.

  “Expecting someone, are you?” he asked, removing his bowler and setting it on the bench next to him.

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” the Sorcerer said. “It’s been a while, Elihu.”

  “Understatement of the century. Glad to see you’re still kicking, Harv.”

  Elihu Epstein and Harvey Torriti had been billeted in the same house for several months in Palermo, Sicily during the war. Elihu had been an officer in one of Britain’s most ruthless units, called 3 Commando, which was using the former German submarine base at Augusta Bay as a staging area for raids on the boot of Italy. The Sorcerer, working under the code name SWAN SONG, had been running an OSS operation to enlist the Mafia dons of the island on the side of the Allies. Making use of his private Mafia sources, Torriti had been able to provide Elihu with the German order of battle in towns along the mainland coast. Elihu had given the Sorcerer credit for saving dozens of 3 Commando lives and never forgotten the favor.