The Company

by Robert Littell

  “The Lion and Last in Kentish Town?” the Sorcerer was shouting into the phone. “Can you hear me? I need to speak to a Mr. Epstein. Elihu Epstein. He eats supper in your pub weekday nights. Yeah, I’d certainly appreciate that, thanks. Could you shake a leg? I’m calling from a very long distance.”

  The Sorcerer drummed his fingernails on the table top. Then the drumming stopped. “Elihu, you recognize my voice? I’m the chum you didn’t meet on Hampstead Heath. Ha-ha-ha. Listen up, Elihu—you remember who we were talking about that day…the joker who got hitched to the Communist broad in Austria…I need to get a news bulletin to him but I don’t want it to come from me…you told me you speak to him on the phone two or three times a week…yeah, people have been heard to say I got a memory like an elephant’s…could you sort of slip my bulletin into the conversation next time you talk to him…tell him an old pal from your 3 Commando days in Sicily called you to pick your brain, he wanted to know how the apparatchiks at MI5 would react if he delivered an atomic bomb of a serial into their hot hands. Your man in Washington will ask if you have any idea of the contents of the serial. You hem and haw, you swear him to secrecy, you tell him it’s way off the record, you tell him that your pal—be absolutely sure to give him my name—your pal says he can identify the Soviet mole who tipped the KGB off to the Vishnevsky exfiltration…Of course it’s a barium meal, Elihu…Me too, I hope I know what I’m doing…Sorry to interrupt your supper…Shalom to you, Elihu.”

  The Sorcerer’s people had gone on a war footing. Torriti’s automatic weapons had been taken down from the wall racks and set out neatly on a makeshift table in the corridor; Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel stuffed bullets into clips and taped them back to back so the weapons could be reloaded rapidly. Jack and Miss Sipp tried out a spanking new miniature walkie-talkie system that employed a tiny microphone attached to the inside of their collars and a hearing-aid-size speaker in their respective auricles. “Testing ten, nine, eight, seven, six,” Jack whispered, speaking into the collar of his shirt. The Night Owl’s voice, sounding as if it originated at the bottom of a mineshaft, came back tinny but crystal clear. “Oh, swell, Jack. I am reading you loud and clear.”

  Several of the newer Berlin Base recruits who happened on the sub-basement preparations wondered if it meant the Russians were about to invade. “Sir, how will we know when to set off the thermite bombs in the safes?” one of them asked Jack. The Sorcerer, washing down his grub with some water-cooler slivovitz, overheard the question. “Loose lips sink ships,” he bellowed down the corridor. “Don’t forget to jab yourself with a poison needle so you won’t be taken alive.”

  The recruit nodded dumbly.

  “He is making a joke,” Jack said.

  “Un-huh.” The young Company officer, a Yale midterm graduate who had turned up at Berlin Base only days before, beat a hasty retreat from the sub-basement madhouse.

  For two days and two nights Torriti and his people—catnapping on couches and cots, surviving on sandwiches the Night Owl brought down from the canteen, shaving at the dirty sink in the small toilet at the end of the corridor—waited. The Sorcerer kept his office door ajar; aria after aria reverberating through the corridor and up the staircase. Every time the phone rang Jack would duck his head into the office to discover Torriti talking into the receiver while he fussed with his pearl-handled revolver, twirling it on a trigger finger, cocking and uncocking it, sighting on a bird painted on a wall calendar. “That wasn’t it,” he would say with a shake of his head when he had hung up.

  “How will you know which one is it?” Jack asked in exasperation.

  “My goddamn nose will twitch, sport.”

  And then, at the start of the third day, it did.

  “Otto, long time no see,” Torriti muttered into the phone he had just plucked from its hook. When Jack turned up at the door, he waved excitedly for him to pick up the extension. “Where have you been hiding yourself?” the Sorcerer asked the caller.

  Jack eased the second phone off its hook. “…phone line secure?” said the voice at the other end.

  “You are actually asking me if my line is secure? Otto, Otto, in your wildest imagination do you think you could reach me on a line that wasn’t?”

  “I may have something delicious for you, my dear Harv.”

  “Ach so?” Torriti said, and he laughed into the phone.

  Otto laughed back. “You are again—how do you say it?—pulling my leg with your terrible German accent.”

  “I am again pulling your leg, right. What’s the something delicious you have for me?”

  “One of my people is only just back from a highly successful mission in the East. You have heard of the poisoning of seven thousand cows at a cooperative dairy near Fürstenberg, have you not? That was the work of my agent.”

  “Heartfelt congratulations,” Torriti gushed. “Another blow struck against fucking international Communism.”

  “You are being ironical, correct? No matter. You fight your war your way, my dear Harv, we fight our war our way. Before returning to the West my agent spent the night with a cousin. The cousin has a female cousin on his wife’s side who works as a stenographer in the office of the chief of the Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit, what you call the Stassi. She takes dictation from Anton Ackermann. She must raise money quickly to send her husband to the West for an expensive eye operation. She is offering to sell Thermofax copies of all of Ackermann’s outgoing letters for the past three months.”

  “Why don’t you act as the middleman, Otto? Middlemen clean up in this dry rotted city.”

  “Two reasonments, my dear Harv. Reasonment number one: She wants many too many US dollars. Reasonment number two: She flatly refuses to deal with a German. She will only talk with the chief of the American CIA in Berlin. With Herr Torriti, Harv. And only if you come alone.”

  “How come she knows my name?”

  “Ackermann knows your name. She reads Ackermann’s mail.”

  “How many US dollars does the lady want, Otto?”

  “Twenty-five thousand of them in small and very used bank notes. She offers to come across tonight and meet you in the British sector, she offers to supply you with a sample. If you like the quality of what she is selling, you can arrange a second meeting and conclude the deal.”

  Looking over at Jack, Torriti twanged at the tip of his nose with a finger. “Where? When?”

  Otto suggested a small Catholic church off Reformations Platz in Spandau, not far from the Spandau U-Bahn station. Say about eleven.

  “If this works out I’ll owe you,” Torriti told the caller.

  “Harv, Harv, it is already in the ledger books.”

  Using his thumb and forefinger, the Sorcerer lowered the phone back onto its cradle as if a sudden gesture would cause it to explode. “Harv, Harv, it’s already in the goddamn ledger books,” he cheeped, mimicking Otto’s voice. “I fucking know what’s in the ledger books.” A flaccid smile of utter bliss plastered itself across his limp jowls. He took a deep breath, peered at the wallclock, then rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “All hands on deck!” he bawled.

  “What is it about Otto that makes your nose twitch?” Jack wanted to know.

  The Sorcerer was happy to fill in the blanks. “My friend Otto is Herr Doktor Otto Zaisser, the second in command of an organization called Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit—Fighting Group against Inhumanity —set up, with a little financial help from their friends in the Pickle Factory, maybe two, maybe three years back. They work out of two tumbledown stucco houses in a back street”—Torriti waved his hand in the general direction of the American Sector—“crammed with packing crates. The packing crates are filled with index cards; each card contains the name of someone who’s gone missing behind the Iron Curtain. If we need to get a line on someone in particular, Kampfgruppe can be useful. Otto himself specializes in pranks. Last year he counterfeited goddamn postage stamps bearing the portrait of Joe Stalin with a noose around his neck
and stuck them on thousands of goddamn letters mailed eastward. On quiet months Kampfgruppe sends in agents to blow up the occasional Communist railroad bridge or poison the occasional herd of Communist cows.”

  “You still haven’t explained why your nose twitched,” Jack noted.

  “If Otto could really put his hands on Thermofax copies of Anton Ackermann’s outgoing letters, he would have begged or borrowed the twenty-five thousand and bought them himself, then turned around and peddled the collection to the Rabbi for a cool fifty grand. The Rabbi would have passed the stuff on to us for a modest seventy-five grand; he would have offered to give it to us free if we could tell him where in South American he could put his paws on Israel’s Public Enemy Number One, the former head of the Gestapo’s Jewish section named Adolf Eichmann.”

  “The Thermofaxes could be real—you won’t know for sure until you see one.”

  With a twinkle in his eye, the Sorcerer shook his head. “I happen to know that Comrade Ackermann doesn’t dictate his letters to a secretary—he is paranoid about microphones, he is paranoid about leaks, so he writes them out in longhand and seals them in envelopes that leave traces if they are tampered with.”

  “So your friend Otto is not your friend?”

  “Knowingly or unknowingly, he’s baiting a trap.”

  “What do you do now, Harvey?”

  “I walk into it, sport.”

  Torriti, the tradecraft shaman capable of blending into a nonexistent crowd, shed the lazy pose of a fat man who drowned his sense of doom and gloom in PX booze and swung into action. The two Silwans and the four others chosen for the mission, along with Jack, were convoked. Miss Sipp produced a large map of Spandau, located in the British zone of Berlin, and taped it to a wall. “We have six hours to play with,” Torriti told them. “All hardware will be carried out of sight. When it gets dark you will trickle one at a time into the area and take up positions. The Silwans, dressed in sackcloth and ashes, sawed-of shotguns hidden under their scapulars, will be inside the church; when I turn up I expect to see you on your knees praying for my salvation. You four will install yourselves in the darkest doorways you can find on the four corners outside the church. Jack, wearing a beat-up leather jacket and a cloth cap so that anyone spotting him will not mistake him for a Yale graduate, will drive the taxi. You’ll drop me off at the door and pick me up if and when I come out. You’ll have an M3 and a pile of clips on the seat next to you covered with a raincoat. Everyone will be connected to everyone by the gizmos that Miss Sipp, bless her delicate hands, will now attach to your lapels. Questions?”

  Sweet Jesus wanted to know if he could take his lap dog with him.

  “Priests don’t usually go around with dogs on a leash,” Torriti told him.

  “Are we going to draw hazardous duty bonuses for this operation?” Sweet Jesus inquired.

  “If there is gunfire.”

  Sweet Jesus persisted. “For the purposes of the bonus, will the gunfire be considered gunfire if we shoot and they don’t?”

  “You’re squandering your natural talents in espionage,” the Sorcerer told him. “You’re cut out to be a lawyer who chases ambulances.”

  “I completed three years of law studies in Bucharest before the Communists came to power and I ran for it,” Sweet Jesus reminded him.

  “So much for my elephant’s memory,” Torriti told Jack. But nothing could dampen his high spirits.

  Jack eased the taxi to the curb in front of the Catholic church as the bells in the tower began tolling eleven. He angled his jaw down to his shirt collar and said, “Whiskey leader—everyone outside set?”

  One by one the Watchers in the street reported in.

  “Whiskey one, roger.”

  “Whiskey two, roger.”

  “Whiskey three and four, on station.”

  “How about inside?” Jack asked.

  There was a burst of static. “Whiskey five and six, ditto.”

  Torriti, wearing an old loose-fitting raincoat and clutching a bottle of gin in a paper bag, pushed open the back door of the small taxi and stumbled onto the sidewalk. He tilted his head, downed what was left in the bottle, tossed it into the back seat and slammed the car door shut with his foot. Jack leaned over and rolled down the passenger window. Torriti dragged a wallet from the hip pocket of his trousers and, holding it close to his eyes, counted out some bills. “Wait for me,” he barked, gesturing with a palm.

  Jack asked, “Um wieviel Uhr?”

  “Later, goddamn it. Später.” Torriti straightened and belched and, walking as if he were having trouble keeping his balance, staggered toward the double door of the church.

  Pulling his cap down low over his eyes, resting his hand on the stock of the M3 hidden under the raincoat on the next seat, Jack settled back to wait; from under the visor he had a good view of the two side view mirrors and the rear view mirror. From the tiny earphone he heard the progress reports:

  “Whiskey two—he’s gone in,” one of the Americans across the street said.

  “Whiskey five—I see him,” Sweet Jesus was heard to mutter.

  “Whiskey six—me, too, I see him,” said the Fallen Angel.

  Inside, the Sorcerer stopped at the shell-shaped font to dip the fingers of both hands in and splash water on his face. Shuddering, he started down the center aisle. There were a dozen or so people scattered around on the benches, praying silently. Two slender men in cowls and scapulars could be seen rocking back and forth in prayer, kneeling on either side of the aisle beside the last row; Torriti made a mental note to tell them that their style of communing with God made them look more like Hasidic Jews than Roman Catholics. As the Sorcerer headed toward the altar, a woman bundled into a man’s faded green loden coat, wearing a scarf over her head and sturdy East German walking shoes, started back up the aisle. When they came abreast of each other the woman whispered, “Herr Torriti?”

  The Sorcerer mimicked answering a telephone. “Speaking,” he said. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”

  The woman said, “I am speaking some little English. Where can we go to be talking?”

  Tugging at the elbow of her coat, Torriti led her into the shadows of an altar at the side of the church. He surveyed the people praying on the benches; only the two cowled figures in the back row seemed to be paying attention to them.

  The Sorcerer said, “A mutual friend told me you might have some delicious goodies for sale.”

  “I will exhibit you zvei samples,” the woman said. She seemed very ill at ease and anxious to get through the business at hand as quickly as possible. “You are liking what you see, we are meeting again and performing the exchange—my letters, your twenty-five thousand American dollars.”

  “How can you be sure I won’t take the letters and refuse to pay you?”

  The woman puckered her lips. “You are doing such, you are never seeing more letters, ja?” She thought a moment, then added, “Twenty-five thousand American dollars billig for what I bringing you.”

  “Cheap my balls,” Torriti grunted, but he said it with a humorless smile and the woman half-smiled back.

  Reaching under her coat, she pulled two folded sheets of paper from the folds of her thick skirt and handed them to Torriti. He glanced around again, then opened one and held it up to the light of a candle burning before the statue of the Madonna. He could make out a clean typescript that began with a businesslike salutation to Comrade Ulbricht and ended with the German for “Comradely greetings.” The name A. Ackermann was typed at the bottom of the letter. Over the typed name was Ackermann’s clearly legible signature. The second letter was addressed to the deputy Soviet rezident at Karlshorst, Comrade Oskar Ugor-Molody, and ended with the same comradely greetings over Ackermann’s signature.

  “Smells kosher to me,” the Sorcerer said, pocketing the two letters. He looked around again and saw two older gentlemen leave their seats and start up the center aisle toward the back of the church. The two Silwans must have noticed them at the same mome
nt because they began fingering the stiff objects hidden under their scapulars; Torriti knew it wasn’t erections they were caressing. When the two older men reached the last row, they turned to face the altar, genuflected and crossed themselves and then, whispering intently to each other, left the church. Torriti said to the woman. “Where? When?” He scraped the bottom of the barrel for some high school German. “Wo? Wann?”

  “Hier,” she replied, pointing to the Madonna. “Tomorrow nacht. Okay? Do you comprehend?”

  “I comprehend,” Torriti said. He blinked rapidly and put a hand on the statue as if to steady himself.

  The woman wasn’t sure what to do next, which led the Sorcerer to conclude she was a neophyte; someone hired for a one-shot mission. She backed away, then stepped forward and offered her gloved hand. The Sorcerer scooped it up to his lips and kissed it. The woman appeared stunned. Giggling nervously, she fled between the benches and disappeared out a side door. In the back row, Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel looked at each other uncertainly.

  The tiny speaker buried in the Sorcerer’s ear purred. “Whiskey three—a female just now came out the side entrance. Subject is walking very rapidly in the direction of Breitestrasse. Wait—an old Mercedes has turned in from Breitestrasse and pulled up alongside her—she’s gotten in, the car’s making a U-turn, it’s picking up speed, it’s turned into Breitestrasse. Okay, I’ve lost it.”

  “Whiskey leader —what’s next on the menu?”

  The Sorcerer muttered into his collar: “This is Barfly—if something’s going to happen, now is when. Stay on your toes.”

  He reached under his raincoat and patted the pearl handle of his revolver for luck, then ambled a bit drunkenly across the stone floor toward the double door of the church. He didn’t bother to look behind him; he knew the two Silwans would be covering his back. In his ear he could hear one of the Watchers burst on the air. “Whiskey one—two males have turned in from Carl Schurzstrasse,” he reported breathlessly. Jack’s voice, unruffled, came over the earpiece. “Whiskey leader—everyone keep calm. I see them in my sideview, Harvey. They’re passing under a street light. One is wearing a long leather coat, the other a leather jacket. They’re walking toward the church very slowly.”