The Company

by Robert Littell

  Kahn had been told only that he would be sheltering a young Communist Party comrade from New York who was being harassed by FBI. The visitor would be taking night courses at Georgetown University; days he would be available to deliver liquor in Kahn’s beat-up Studebaker station wagon in exchange for the use of the studio over the store.

  “Can you give me a ballpark figure how long he’ll be staying?” Kahn had asked his conducting officer when they met in a men’s room at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution.

  “He will be living in the apartment until he is told to stop living in the apartment,” the Russian had answered matter-of-factly.

  “I understand,” Kahn had replied. And he did.

  “I know you are under Party discipline,” Kahn was saying now as he carefully poured what was left of the beer into Eugene’s mug. “I know there are things you can’t talk about.” He lowered his voice. “This business with the Rosenbergs—it makes me sick to my stomach.” When Eugene looked blank he said, “Didn’t you catch the news bulletins—they were sentenced today. To the electric chair, for God’s sake! I knew the Rosenbergs in the late thirties—I used to run across them at Party meetings before I dropped out. I can tell you that Ethel was a complete innocent. Julius was the Marxist. I bumped into him once in the New York Public Library after the war. He told me he’d dropped out in forty-three. He was being controlled by a Russian case officer working out of the Soviet Consulate in New York. Later I heard on the grapevine that they used Julius as a clearing house for messages. He was like all of us—a soldier in the army of liberation of America. He would receive envelopes and pass them on, sure, though I doubt he knew what was in them. Ethel cooked and cleaned house and took care of the kids and darned socks while the men talked politics. If she grasped half of what she heard, I’d be surprised. Sentenced to death! In the electric chair. What is this world coming to?”

  “Do you think they’ll actually carry out the sentences?” Eugene asked.

  Kahn reached back under his starched collar to scratch between his shoulder blades. “The anti-Soviet hysteria in the country has gotten out of hand. The Rosenbergs are being used as scapegoats for the Korean War. Someone had to be blamed. For political reasons it may become impossible for the President to spare their lives.” Kahn got up to leave. “We must all be vigilant. Bernice will bring you the newspapers tomorrow morning.”

  “Who is Bernice?”

  Kahn’s face lit up as he repeated the question to emphasize its absurdity. “Who’s Bernice? Bernice is Bernice. Bernice is practically my adopted daughter, and one of us—Bernice is a real comrade, a proletarian fighter. Along with everything else she does, Bernice opens the store, I close it. Good night to you, Eugene.”

  “Good night to you, Max.”

  Eugene could hear Max Kahn laughing under his breath and repeating “Who’s Bernice?” as he padded down the steps.

  Shaving in the cracked mirror over the sink in the closet-sized bathroom the next morning, Eugene heard someone moving cartons in the liquor store under the floorboards. Soon there were muffled footfalls on the back steps and a soft rap on the door.

  “Anyone home?” a woman called.

  Toweling the last of the shaving cream from his face, Eugene opened the door a crack.

  “Hi,” said a young woman. She was holding the front page of the Washington Star up so he could see the photograph of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  “You must be Bernice.”

  “Right as rain.”

  Bernice turned out to be a lean, dark Semitic beauty with a beaklike nose and bushy brows and deep-set eyes that flashed with belligerence whenever she got onto the subject that obsessed her. “Purple mountain majesty, my ass,” she would cry, knotting her thin fingers into small fists, hunching her bony shoulders until she looked like a prizefighter lowering his profile for combat. “America the Beautiful was built on two crimes that are never mentioned in polite conversation: the crime against the Indians, who were driven off their lands and practically exterminated; the crime against the Negroes, who were kidnapped from Africa and auctioned off to the highest bidder like so many cattle.”

  It didn’t take Eugene long to discover that Bernice’s rebellion against the capitalist system had sexual implications. She wore neither makeup nor undergarments and laughingly boasted that she considered stripping to the skin to be an honest proletarian activity, since it permitted her to shed, if only for a while, the clothes and image with which capitalism had tarred and feathered her. She described herself as a Marxist feminist following in the footsteps of Aleksandra Kollontai, the Russian Bolshevik who had abandoned a husband and children to serve Lenin and the Revolution. Bernice, too, was ready to abandon the bourgeois morality and offer her body to the Revolution—if only someone would issue an invitation.

  Bernice was nobody’s fool. Eugene made such a point about having been born and raised in Brooklyn that she began to wonder if he was really American; several times she thought she caught trivial slips in grammar or pronunciation that reminded her of the way her grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Vilnus, had talked even after years of living in the States. She found herself drawn to what she sensed was Eugene’s secret self. She assumed that he was under Party discipline; she supposed he was on a mission, which made him a warrior in the Party’s struggle against the red-baiting McCarthyism that had gripped America.

  “Oh, I have your number, Eugene,” she told him when he parked the station wagon in the alley behind the liquor store after a round of deliveries and slipped in the back door. She was wearing flowery toreador pants and a torso-hugging white jersey through which the dark nipples of her almost nonexistent breasts were plainly visible. She sucked on her thumb for a moment, then came out with it: “You are a Canadian Communist, one of the organizers of those strikes last year where the longshoremen tried to stop Marshall Plan aid from leaving Canadian ports. You’re on the lam from those awful Mounted Police people. Am I right?”

  “You won’t spill the beans?”

  “I’d die before I’d tell anyone. Even Max.”

  “The Party knows it can count on you.”

  “Oh, it can, it can,” she insisted. She came across the store and kissed him hungrily on the mouth. Reaching down with her left hand, she worked her fingers between the buttons of his fly. Coming up for air she announced, “Tonight I will take you home with me and we will do some peyote and fuck our heads off until dawn.”

  Eugene, who had spurned one Jewess in Russia only to find himself in the arms of another in America, didn’t contradict her.

  Eugene discovered the X chalked in blue on the side of the giant metal garbage bin in the parking lot behind Kahn’s Wine and Beverage the next morning. After class that evening (on the American novel since Melville) he drifted over to the Georgetown University library reading room, pulled three books on Melville from the stacks and found a free seat at a corner table. He pulled a paperback edition of Melville’s Billy Budd from his cloth satchel and began to underline passages that interested him, referring now and then to the reference books he had opened on the table. From time to time students in the reading room would drift into the stacks to put back or take down books. As the clock over the door clicked onto 9 P.M., a tall, thin woman with rust-color hair tied back in a sloppy chignon slid noiselessly out of a chair at another table and made her way into the stacks carrying a pile of books. She returned minutes later without the books, worked her arms into the sleeves of a cloth overcoat and disappeared through the exit.

  Eugene waited until just before the 10:30 closing bell before making his move. By that time the only people left in the reading room were the two librarians and a crippled old man who walked with the aid of two crutches. One of the librarians caught Eugene’s eye and pointed with her nose toward the wall clock. Nodding, he closed Billy Budd and put it away in his satchel. With the reference books under his arm and the satchel slung over one shoulder, he made his way back into the stacks to return what he had bo
rrowed. Sitting on the shelf in the middle of the Melville section was a thick book on knitting. Checking to be sure no one was observing him, Eugene dropped the knitting book into his satchel, retrieved his leather jacket from the back of his chair and headed for the door. The librarian, peering over the rims of reading glasses, recognized him as a night school student and smiled. Eugene opened the satchel and held it up so she could see he wasn’t making off with reference material.

  The librarian noticed the knitting book. “You must be the only student in the night school studying Melville and knitting,” she said with a laugh.

  Eugene managed to look embarrassed. “It’s my girlfriend’s—“

  “Pity. The world would be a better place if men took up knitting.”

  Max had loaned Eugene the store’s station wagon for the evening. Instead of heading back to the studio over the store, he drove into Virginia for half an hour and pulled into an all-night gas station. While the attendant was filling the tank, he went into the office and fed a dime and a nickel into the slots of the wall phone. Bell Telephone had recently introduced direct long-distance dialing. Eugene dialed the Washington number that Starik had passed on to him over the shortwave radio.

  A sleepy voice answered. “Hullo?”

  Eugene said, “I’m calling about your ad in the Washington Post—how many miles do you have on the Ford you’re selling?”

  The man on the other end, speaking with the clipped inflections of an upper-class Englishman, said, “I’m afraid you have the wrong p-p-party. I am not selling a Ford. Or any other automobile for that matter.”

  “Damn, I dialed the wrong number.”

  The Englishman snapped, “I accept the apology you didn’t offer” and cut the connection.

  The order for four bottles of Lagavulin Malt Whisky was phoned in at mid-morning the next day. The caller said he wanted it delivered before noon. Was that within the realm of possibility? Can do, Bernice said and she jotted down the address with the stub of a pencil she kept tucked over one ear.

  Piloting the store’s station wagon through the dense mid-morning Washington traffic, Eugene took Canal Road and then headed up Arizona Avenue until it intersected with Nebraska Avenue, a quiet tree-lined street with large homes set back on both sides. Turning onto Nebraska, he got stuck behind a garbage truck for several minutes. A team of Negroes dressed in white overalls was collecting metal garbage cans from the back doors and carrying them down the driveways to the sidewalk, where a second crew emptied the contents into the dump truck. Eugene checked the address on Bernice’s order sheet and pulled up to number 4100, a two-story brick building with a large bay window, at the stroke of eleven. The customer who had ordered the Lagavulin must have been watching from the narrow vestibule window because the front door opened as Eugene reached for the bell.

  “I say, that’s a spiffy wagon you have out at the curb. Please d-d-do come in.”

  The Englishman in the doorway had long wavy hair and was wearing a baggy blue blazer with tarnished gold buttons and an ascot around his neck in place of a tie. His eyes had the puffy look of someone who drank a great deal of alcohol. Drawing Eugene inside the vestibule, he remarked in an offhand way, “You are supp-p-posed to have a calling card.”

  Eugene took out the half of the carton that had been torn from a package of Jell-O (it had been in the hollowed-out knitting book he’d retrieved from the stacks the night before). The Englishman whipped out from his pocket the other half. The two halves matched perfectly. The Englishman offered a hand. “Awfully glad,” he mumbled. A nervous tic of a smile appeared on his beefy face. “To tell the truth, didn’t expect Starik to send me someone as young as you. I’m P-P-PARSIFAL…but you know that already.”

  Eugene caught whiff of bourbon on the Englishman’s breath. “My working name is Eugene.”

  “American, are you? Thought Starik was going to fix me up with a Russian this time round.”

  “I speak English like an American,” Eugene informed him. “But I am Russian.” And he recited his motto in perfect Russian: “Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!”

  The Englishman brightened considerably. “Don’t speak Russian myself. Like the sound of it, though. Much prefer to deal with Starik’s Russians than one of those antsy American Commies.” He took four exposed Minox cartridges from his pocket and handed them to Eugene. “April Fool’s present for Starik—do pass the stuff on as quickly as you can. Took some awfully good shots of some awfully secret documents spelling out which Soviet cities the Americans plan to A-bomb if war starts. Got some goodies for me in exchange?”

  Eugene set the bottles of Lagavulin down on the floor and took out the other items that had been in the hollowed-out knitting book: a dozen cartridges of 50-exposure film for a Minox miniature camera, new one-time cipher pads printed in minuscule letters on the inside cover of ordinary matchbooks, a new microdot reader disguised as a wide-angle lens for a 35 millimeter camera and a personal letter from Starik enciphered on the last of the Englishman’s old one-time pads and rolled up inside a hollowed-out bolt.

  “Thanks awfully,” the man said. “Will you be getting in touch with the rezident anytime soon?”

  “I can.”

  “I should think you had b-b-better do that sooner rather than later. Tell him we have a bit of a headache looming. Angleton has been on to the fact that we have had a mole in the British Foreign Service, code-named HOMER, for donkey’s years.” The Englishman’s stutter dissipated as he became caught up in his tale. “Yesterday he told me that his cryptoanalyst chaps have broken an additional detail out of some old intercepts: when HOMER was posted to Washington he’d meet twice a week in New York with your predecessor, his cutout. It won’t take Angleton long to work out that this pattern corresponds to Don Maclean—he used to go up to New York twice a week to see his wife, Melinda, who was pregnant and living there with her American mother. Maclean’s running the FO’s American Department in London now. Someone has got to warn him the Americans are getting warmer; someone has got to set up an exfiltration if and when. Can you remember all that?”

  Eugene had been briefed by Starik about Angleton and HOMER and Maclean. “Where is Burgess hanging his hat these days?” he asked, referring to Philby’s old Trinity College sidekick, the long-time Soviet agent Guy Burgess, who originally recruited Philby into MI6 during the war.

  “He’s been using me as a B and B, which has come to mean bed and booze, since he was posted to the British embassy in Washington. Why do you ask?”

  “Burgess is an old buddy of Maclean’s, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “Starik said that in an emergency you might want to think about sending Burgess back to warn Maclean.”

  Philby saw the advantages instantly. “Wizard idea! What could be more natural than the two of them going for a pub crawl? If things get cheesy I suppose Guy could tear himself away from his poofter DC friends long enough to head home and give Maclean a warning holler.”

  “Cover your trail—if Maclean runs for it someone might work backward from Maclean to Burgess, and from Burgess to you.”

  The Englishman’s shoulders heaved in resignation. “Guy can bluff his way out of a tight corner,” he guessed. “Besides which I have a sensible line of defense—last thing I’d do if I were really spying for the Russians would be to give bed and booze to another Russian spy.”

  Eugene had to smile at the Englishman’s nerve. “You ought to pay me for the whiskey,” he said, handing him the invoice.

  Kim Philby counted out bills from a woman’s change purse. “B-b-by all means keep the change,” he suggested, his stutter back again and, along with it, the brooding filmy gaze of a tightrope artist trying to anticipate missteps on the high-wire stretched across his mind’s eye.

  8

  HEIDELBERG, MONDAY, APRIL 9, 1951

  FROM THE NARROW STREET, THE PROPYLÄEN, AN INN NAMED AFTER THE periodical founded by the German poet Goethe, looked dark and desert
ed. A stone’s throw from Heidelberg’s austere time-warped university, its restaurant normally offered students a city-subsidized potato-and-cabbage menu. Now its metal shutters were closed, the naked electric bulb over its sign was extinguished and a hand-lettered notice tacked to the door read, in German, English and French, “Exceptionally Not Open Today.” Ebby had rented out the inn’s dining room for a farewell banquet for his Albanian commando unit and supplied the alcohol and canned meat from the Company’s PX in Frankfurt. In a back room flickering with candlelight and warmed by a small coal-burning stove, he sat at the head of the long table, refilling brandy glasses and passing out filter-tipped cigarettes. The thin clean-shaven faces of the seven young Albanians and two female translators on both sides of the table glistened with perspiration and pride.

  At the other end of the table, Adil Azizi, the commando leader, a beautiful young man with smooth skin and long fine blond hair, was peeling an orange using a razor-sharp bayonet. The man next to him, who wore a black turtleneck sweater, made a comment and everyone laughed. The translator sitting at Ebby’s elbow explained: “Mehmet tells Adil not to dull his blade on orange skin but save it for Communist skin.”

  A grandfather clock near the door struck midnight. One of the candles, burned down to its wick, sizzled and died. Kapo, at twenty-four the oldest member of the commando and the only one to speak even broken English, pushed himself to his feet and raised his brandy glass to Ebby. The second translator repeated his words in Albanian for the others. “I can tell you, Mr. Trabzon, that we will not fail you or our American sponsors or our people, for sure,” he vowed. Mehmet coached him in Albanian and Kapo rolled his head from side to side, which in the Balkans meant he agreed. “I can tell you again of my father—a member of the before-war regime who was trialed and decided culpable and locked in cage like wild animal and thrown from deck of ship at sea. All here tell alike stories.”