The Company

by Robert Littell

  Leo sensed that more was riding on the manner in which he answered Swett’s question than the answer itself. Adelle was impulsive but he doubted she would marry someone against her father’s will. He needed to be smart; to grab the bull by the horns, as Swett put it. “How much do you earn a year, sir?”

  Adelle held her breath. Her father took several staccato puffs on his cigar and scrutinized Leo through the smoke. “Roughly one point four million, give or take a couple of dozen thousand. That’s after taxes.”

  “I make six thousand four hundred dollars, sir. That’s before taxes.”

  A weighty silence filled the room. “Tarnation, I’m not one to pussyfoot around, son. It’s not the money that worries me—when I got hitched I was making forty a week. Here’s where I stand: I’m dead blast set against mixed marriages. Mind you, I got nothing against Jewish people but I figure Jews should marry Jews and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants need to go and marry white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.”

  “When you get right down to it, all marriages are mixed,” Leo said. “One male, one female.”

  Adelle rested a hand on his shoulder. “They sure are, Daddy. Look at you and mom. More mixed, you’d melt.”

  “Sir,” Leo said, leaning forward, “I’m in love with your daughter. I wasn’t aware that we were asking your permission to marry.” He reached over and laced his fingers through Adelle’s. “We’re informing you. We’d both prefer to have your blessing, me as much as Adelle. If not”—he tightened his grip on Adelle—“not.”

  Swett eyed Leo with grudging respect. “I’ll give you this much, young fellah—you have better taste than my little gal here.”

  “Oh, Daddy!” cried Adelle, “I knew you’d like him.” And she bounded across the room into her father’s arms.

  The wedding was performed by a female justice of the peace in Annapolis on the young couple’s first anniversary, which was to say one month to the day after they had met in the waiting room of the veterinary hospital. Adelle had squirmed and wriggled into one of her kid sister’s lace Mainbochers for the occasion. Adelle’s sister, Sydney, was the maid of honor. Bill Colby stood up for Leo. Adelle’s employer, Lyndon Johnson, gave away the bride when Philip Swett, who had been dispatched by Truman to mend political fences in Texas, couldn’t make it back in time for the ceremony. Adelle’s mother broke into tears when the justice of the peace pronounced the couple man and wife until death did them part. Colby broke open a bottle of New York State Champagne. As Leo was kissing his mother-in-law goodbye she slipped an envelope into the pocket of his spanking new suit jacket. In it was a check for $5,000 and a note that said, “Live happily ever after or I’ll break your neck.” It was signed: “P. Swett.”

  The couple had a one-night honeymoon at an inn with a majestic view of the sun rising over Chesapeake Bay. The next morning Leo reported back to work; there were choke points in Norway waiting to be classified according to their vulnerability and assigned to stay behind cells. Adelle had been given three days off by Lyndon Johnson. She used the time to shuttle back and forth, in her two-door Plymouth, between her apartment in Georgetown and the top floor of the house that Leo had rented on Bradley Lane, behind the Chevy Chase Club in Maryland. The last thing she brought over was the wedding present from her boss, the Senator. It was a baby kitten with a gnarled snout. Adelle had instantly dubbed her new pet Sour Pickles.

  In short order the newlyweds settled into a rut of routines. Mornings, Leo caught a lift to the Campus with Dick Helms, a Company colleague who lived down Bradley Lane. Helms, another OSS alumnus who was working in clandestine operations under the Wiz, always took a roundabout route to the Reflecting Pool, crossing Connecticut Avenue and going up the Brookville Road in order to mask his destination. On the drives into town they talked shop. Leo filled Helms in on Colby’s stay behind operation. Helms told him about a chief of station in Iran who was “ringing the gong”—warning that an Arab radical named Mohammed Mossadegh was likely to take over as premier in the next few weeks; Mossadegh, the head of the extremist National Front, was threatening to nationalize the British-owned oil industry. If that happened, Helms said, the Company would have to explore ways of pulling the rug out from under him.

  One night every two weeks Leo pulled the graveyard shift, reporting to work on the Reflecting Pool at four in the morning as the Clandestine Service’s representative to the team producing the President’s Daily Brief. For the next three hours he and the others sifted through the overnight cables from bases overseas and culled the items that ought to be brought to Mr. Truman’s attention. The Book, as it was called—an eight- or ten-page lettersize briefing document arranged in a newspaper column format and marked “For the President’s Eyes Only”—was delivered by the senior member of the Daily Brief committee to the White House every morning in time for Mr. Truman to read it over his oatmeal breakfast.

  One Sunday morning not long after Leo’s marriage the officer who was supposed to deliver the Book got a last minute phone call from his wife. Labor pains had begun and she was on her way to the hospital. The officer asked Leo to stand in for him and raced off to witness the birth of his first child. Leo’s Company credentials were checked at the south gate of the White House. A secret service officer led him through the First Family’s entrance under the South Portico and took him up in a private elevator to the President’s living quarters on the second floor. Leo recognized the only person in sight from photographs he’d seen in Life magazine; it was Mr. Truman’s daughter, Margaret, just back from a concert she’d given in New York. Of course she’d be glad to take the book in to the President, she said. Leo settled onto a couch in the corridor to wait. Soon the door to what turned out to be the President’s private dining room opened a crack and a short man wearing a double-breasted suit and a dapper bow tie gestured for him to come on in. Quite startled to be in the presence of the President himself, Leo followed Truman into the room. To his surprise he saw Philip Swett sitting across from Margaret Truman at the breakfast table.

  “So you work for the Pickle Factory after all,” Swett growled, his forehead wrinkling in amusement.

  “You two gents know each other?” Mr. Truman inquired, a distinctly Midwestern twang to his nasal voice.

  “He’s the fellow who upped and married my girl, which I suppose makes him my son-in-law,” Swett told the President. “First time we talked he had the gumption to ask me how much I earned a year.”

  Mr. Truman looked at Leo. “I admire a man with mettle.” There was a playful twinkle in the President’s eye. “What did Phil reply?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember, sir.”

  “Good for you!” Mr. Truman said. “I am a great admirer of discretion, too.”

  The President took out a fountain pen, uncapped it and started to underline an item in the briefing book. “When you get back tell Wisner I want a personal briefing on this Mossadegh fellow.” Truman scribbled cryptic questions in the margin as he talked. “Want to know where he comes from. What the heck do these Islam fundamentalists want anyhow? What kind of support does he have in the country? What kind of contingency plans are you fellows working up if he takes over and tries to nationalize British Petroleum?”

  The President closed the cover and handed the briefing book to Leo. “Adelle’s a fine woman,” Mr. Truman said. “Know her personally. You’re a lucky young man.”

  From the table, Swett observed in a not unkindly tone, “Lucky is what he sure as shooting is.”

  7

  WASHINGTON, DC, THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 1951

  IN THE SMALL PITCHED-CEILING ATTIC STUDIO ABOVE KAHN’S WINE AND Beverage on M Street at the Washington side of Key Bridge, Eugene Dodgson, the young American recently returned from backpacking in Scandinavia, clipped one end of the shortwave antenna to a water pipe. Unreeling the wire across the room, he attached the other end to a screw in the back of what looked like an ordinary Motorola kitchen radio. Pulling up a wooden stool, he turned on the radio and simultaneously depres
sed the first and third buttons—one ostensibly controlled the tone, the other tuned the radio to a pre-set station—transforming the Motorola into a sophisticated short wave receiver. Checking the Elgin on his wrist, Eugene tuned the radio dial to Moscow’s 11 P.M. frequency and waited, hunched over the set, a pencil poised in his fingers, to see if the station would broadcast his personal code phrase during the English language cultural quiz program. The woman emcee posed the question. “In what well-known book would you find the lines: ‘And the moral of that is—The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours?’” The literature student from Moscow University thought a moment and then said, “Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland !” Eugene’s heart literally started pounding in his chest. Suddenly he felt connected to the Motherland; he felt as if he were on one end of a long umbilical cord that reached from the Motorola across continents and seas to remind him that he was not alone. He jotted down the winning lottery number that was repeated twice at the end of the program. A feeling of elation swept through Eugene—he leapt from the stool and stood with his back flat against a wall that smelled of fresh paint, breathing as if he’d just run the hundred-meter dash. He held in his hand the first message from Starik! Laughing out loud, shaking his head in awe—all these codes, all these frequencies actually worked!—Eugene tuned the radio to a popular local AM music station, then carefully coiled the antenna and stashed it in the cavity under the floorboard in the closet. He retrieved the “lucky” ten-dollar bill (with “For Eugene, from his dad, on his eighth birthday” scrawled across it in ink) from his billfold and subtracted the serial number on it from the lottery number in the Moscow broadcast.

  What he was left with was the ten-digit Washington telephone number of his cutout to the rezident. When he dialed the number from a pay phone at the stroke of midnight, the cutout, a woman who spoke with a thick Eastern European accent, would give him the home phone number of the Soviet agent he had come to America to contact and conduct: the high-level mole code-named PARSIFAL.

  The Atlantic crossing—eleven days from Kristiansand to Halifax on a tramp steamer bucking the Brobdingnagian swells of the North Atlantic—had not been out of the ordinary, or so the ship’s bearded captain had explained the single time his young American passenger managed to join the officers for supper in the wardroom. The tablecloth had been doused with water to keep the dishes from sliding with each roll and pitch of the ship’s rusted hull; Eugene Dodgson’s plate hadn’t moved but on one wild pitch the boiled beef and noodles on it had come cascading down into his lap, much to the amusement of the ship’s officers. When Eugene finally staggered down the gangway in Halifax, it took several hours before the cement under the soles of his hiking boots ceased to heave and recede like the sea under the vessel.

  Strapping on his backpack, Eugene had hitched rides with truckers from Halifax to Caribou, Maine in four days. At the frontier a Canadian officer had stuck his head into the cab and had asked him where he was from.

  “Brooklyn,” Eugene had replied with a broad smile.

  “Think the Giants will take the pennant this year?” the Canadian had asked, testing Eugene’s English as well as his claim to be from Brooklyn.

  “You are not being serious,” Eugene had burst out. “Look at the Dodger lineup—Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese cover the infield like a blanket, Roy Campanella has the MVP in his sights, Don Newcombe’s fast ball is sizzling, the way Carl Furillo is going he’s bound to break .330. The pennant belongs to Brooklyn, the Series, too.”

  From Caribou, Eugene had caught a Greyhound bus to Boston and another to New York. He had taken a room at the Saint George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights. From a nearby phone booth he had dialed the number Starik had obliged him to memorize before he left Moscow. The disgruntled voice of someone speaking English with an accent came on the line.

  “Can I speak to Mr. Goodpaster?” asked Eugene.

  “What number you want?”

  Eugene read off the number he was calling from.

  “You got a wrong number.” The line went dead.

  Seven minutes later, the time it took for the man on the other end to reach a pay phone, the telephone rang in Eugene’s booth. He snatched it off the hook and said, “If you dine with the devil use a long spoon.”

  “I was told to expect you three days ago,” the man complained. “What took you so long?”

  “The crossing took eleven days instead of nine. I lost another day hitchhiking down.”

  “Ever hear of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden?”

  “Sure I have.”

  “I’ll be sitting on the fourth bench down from the main entrance off Eastern Parkway at ten tomorrow morning feeding the pigeons. I will have a Leica around my neck and a package wrapped in red-and-gold Christmas paper on the bench next to me.”

  “Ten tomorrow,” Eugene confirmed, and he severed the connection.

  Eugene instantly recognized the thin, balding, hawk-faced man, a Leica dangling from a strap around his neck, from the photograph Starik had shown him; Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel had entered the United States the previous year and was living under deep cover somewhere in Brooklyn. The colonel, tearing slices of bread and scattering the crumbs to the pigeons milling at his feet, didn’t look up when Eugene slumped onto the park bench next to him. The Christmas-wrapped package—containing the Motorola, an antenna and a flashlight that worked despite a hollowed-out battery concealing a microdot reader; the passport, driver’s license and other documents for Legend B in case Eugene needed to adopt a new identity; a hollowed-out silver dollar with a microfilm positive transparency filled with Eugene’s personal identification codes, one-time cipher pads and phone numbers in Washington and New York to call in an emergency; along with an envelope containing $20,000 in small-denomination bills—was on the bench between them.

  Eugene started to repeat the code phrase: “If you dine with the devil—” but Abel, raising his eyes, cut him off.

  “I recognize you from your passport photograph.” A forlorn smile appeared on his unshaven face. “I am Rudolf Abel,” he announced.

  “Starik sends you warm comradely greetings,” Eugene said.

  “No one can overhear us but the pigeons,” Abel said. “How I hate the little bastards. Do me a favor, talk Russian.”

  Eugene repeated his message in Russian. The Soviet espionage officer was eager for news of the homeland. What had the weather been like in Moscow when Eugune left? Were there more automobiles on the streets these days? What motion picture films had Eugene seen recently? What books had he read? Was there any truth to American propaganda about shortages of consumer goods in the state-owned stores? About bread riots in Krasnoyarsk? About the arrest of Yiddish poets and actors who had been conspiring against Comrade Stalin?

  Twenty minutes later Eugene got up and offered his hand. Colonel Abel seemed loath to see him leave. “The worst part is the loneliness,” he told Eugene. “That and the prospect that the Motherland will attack America and kill me with one of its A-bombs.”

  Eugene spent ten days at the Saint George Hotel, roaming through Crown Heights to familiarize himself with the neighborhood, drinking egg creams in the candy store he was supposed to have hung out in, visiting the laundromat and the Chinese restaurant he was supposed to have frequented. One drizzly afternoon he took the F train out to Coney Island and rode the great Ferris wheel, another time he caught the IRT into Manhattan and wandered around Times Square. He purchased two valises at a discount store on Broadway and filled them with used clothing—a sports jacket and trousers, a pair of loafers, four shirts, a tie, a leather jacket and a raincoat—from Gentleman’s Resale on Madison Avenue. On April Fool’s Day, Starik’s newest agent in America packed his valises and sat down on one of them to bring him luck for the trip ahead. Then he settled his bill at the Saint George in cash, took the subway to Grand Central and boarded a train bound for Washington and his new life as a Soviet illegal.

  From Washington’s Union Station
, Eugene made his way by taxi to the Washington end of Key Bridge and arrived at the liquor store just as Max Kahn was locking up for the night.

  A short stocky man in his early fifties with a mane of unruly white hair, Kahn looked startled when he heard someone rapping his knuckles on the glass of the front door. He waved an open palm and called, “Sorry but I’m already—” Then his expression changed to one of pure delight as he caught sight of the two valises. He strode across the store and unlocked the door and wrapped Eugene in a bear hug. “I thought you would be here days ago,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Come on in, comrade. The upstairs studio is at your disposal—I repainted it last week so it would be ready for your arrival.” Plucking one of Eugene’s valises off the floor, he led the way up the narrow staircase at the back of the store.

  When he talked about himself, which was infrequently, Kahn liked to say that his life had been transformed the evening he wandered into a Jewish intellectual discussion group on upper Broadway in the early 1920s. At the time, enrolled under his father’s family name, Cohen, he had been taking accounting courses in Columbia University night school. The Marxist critique of the capitalist system had opened his eyes to a world he had only dimly perceived before. With a degree from Columbia in his pocket, he had become a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party and had joined the staff of the Party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, selling subscriptions and setting type there until the German attack on the USSR in June, 1941. At that point he had “dropped out”: Acting under orders from a Soviet diplomat, he had ceased all Party activity, broken off all Party contacts, changed his name to Kahn and relocated to Washington. Using funds supplied by his conducting officer, he had bought out an existing liquor franchise and had changed its name to Kahn’s Wine and Beverage. “Several of us were selected to go underground,” he told Eugene over a spaghetti and beer supper the night he turned up at Kahn’s store. “We didn’t carry Party cards but we were under Party discipline—we were good soldiers, we obeyed orders. My control pointed me in a given direction and I marched out, no questions asked, to do battle for the motherland of world socialism. I’m still fighting the good fight,” he added proudly.