The Company

by Robert Littell

  The Sorcerer remembered Jack’s jittery comportment the night they were waiting for Vishnevsky to turn up in the safe house over the movie-theater. He’d ripened on the vine in the four months since then; Torriti’s original judgement—that Jack was a cut above the usual cannon fodder that came out from Washington—had been on the money. Torriti growled softly into his microphone: “Whiskey three and four—come around behind them but don’t crowd them. I want them to make the first move.”

  Pushing through the doors into the darkened street, Torriti saw the two men passing under another vapor lamp about fifty yards down the road; light glinted off the bald crown of one of them. They must have spotted the Sorcerer because they separated slightly and quickened their pace. Shuffling his feet, Torriti drifted toward the taxi parked at the curb. He could make out Jack; he seemed to be asleep behind the wheel but his right arm was reaching for something on the seat next to him. Whiskey Three and Four turned the corner and appeared behind the two figures coming up the street.

  The two men were only yards away when the Sorcerer arrived at the rear door of the taxi. As he grasped the door handle one of the two pulled something metallic from his belt and lunged clumsily toward him. Moving with the grace and lightness of a fat man who had survived more street brawls than he could count, Torriti bounded to one side and melted into a crouch. The pearl-handled beauty of a revolver materialized in his fist and kicked back into it as he pulled the trigger. The shot, amplified by the darkness, reverberated through the cobblestone street as the bullet punched into his attacker’s shoulder, sending him sprawling. A butcher’s knife clattered to the gutter at Jack’s feet as he came around the back of the taxi, running low with the M3 under an armpit, and sighted on the second man, who had the good sense to freeze in his tracks. Whiskey Three and Four, pistols drawn, came up on the run. One of them kicked the knife away from the wounded man, who was sitting with his back against the bumper, whimpering. The other frisked the bald man, standing stock-still with his hands raised over his head, and relieved him of a handgun and a small walkie-talkie.

  “This was the attack, Harvey?” Jack shook his head in disbelief. “It was amateur hour—“

  A small car with a blue police light flashing on its roof suddenly appeared at the end of the street. It sped toward the taxi and, with a screech of brakes, came to a stop a dozen yards away. Two doors were flung open and two men wearing the dark blue uniforms of West German Polizei came toward them. Both had Schmeisser submachine pistols tucked under their arms and their fingers on the triggers.

  “How’d they know to get here so fast?” Jack whispered.

  “Maybe it’s not amateur hour after all,” Torriti said under his breath.

  “You having trouble?” one of the policemen called.

  Jack would forever be proud of the fact that he noticed they weren’t speaking German at the same instant the Sorcerer, with incredible laziness, remarked, “They’re talking the King’s English, sport. Shoot them.”

  Jack’s M3 and Torriti’s revolver opened fire as the two policemen, separating their feet to absorb the kick of their Schmeissers, started shooting. Jack’s bullets cut down one of them, Torriti’s single shot took out the other. The bald attacker standing with his hands over his head grasped his stomach and sank to his knees, hit by a stray bullet from a Schmeisser. Along the street shutters clanged open.

  “Was ist hier Los?” someone shouted.

  “Schliesse die Fensterläden—das geht uns nichts an,” a woman cried.

  “Rufen Sie die Polizei,” a man yelled.

  “Das ist ein Polizeiauto,” a teenage girl in another window yelled back.

  “Time to skedaddle,” the Sorcerer ordered, an elated smile spreading across his face.

  “Why do you look so pleased with yourself?” Jack demanded.

  “Don’t you get it, kid? The fuckers tried to kidnap me!” He threw himself onto the front seat alongside Jack as the taxi sped away from the curb and, skidding around the corner, vanished into the ghostly stillness of the Berlin night.

  13

  BERLIN, FRIDAY, MAY 11, 1951

  HOLDING THE FORT IN THE SORCERER’S ABSENCE, JACK HAD TO RAISE his voice to be heard over the aria playing on the phonograph. He was describing the showdown in the street outside the church to two newcomers who had reported for duty in Berlin Base. “It’s an old East German ruse that you should know about,” he was saying. He pushed two tumblers filled with Torriti’s PX whiskey across the desk, raised his glass to salute them and downed his drink in one go. “Some heavies menace you, you fight them off or beat a hasty retreat, then a police car or a taxi or an ambulance arrives on the scene, you naturally run over to it for help, they pick you up—and that’s the last anybody sees of you in the Western sector. Next thing we know you are appearing before a news conference in the Soviet zone, your eyes glassy from drugs, to tell the world you have asked for political asylum in Joe Stalin’s proletarian Shangri-la.”

  “I never came across anything like this in the newspapers,” remarked one of the new recruits, his eyes wide in wonder.

  “There are too many kidnappings for the newspapers to cover them all—dozens every month in Berlin alone. And they almost always follow the same pattern.”

  “Will that thermonuclear reaction we just set off at Eniwetok change anything in Berlin?” the other recruit asked.

  “The Russians broke our monopoly on the atomic bomb,” Jack said. “It won’t take them long to break our monopoly on the H-bomb. Don’t worry, the Cold War’s not going to end before you’ve gotten your feet wet.”

  “How long you been here?” the first recruit inquired respectfully.

  Jack loosened his tie and let his sports jacket fall open as he sank back into the Sorcerer’s chair. He had recently taken to wearing a shoulder holster in addition to the one in the small of his back. The mahogany grip of an Italian Beretta projected from it. “A week shy of six months.” He shook his head. “Damnation, time does have a way of flying here in Berlin.”

  “Are there any…you know, distractions,” the first recruit asked.

  “There are some night clubs on the Kurfürstendamm but you want to watch your ass—the place is crawling with Russians and East Germans.”

  Miss Sipp came in with the morning’s transcripts from the Watchers monitoring assorted microphones scattered around East Berlin from the safe house near Checkpoint Charlie. “If you have questions, problems, whatever, the door is always open,” Jack called. As the two recruits departed he began to leaf through the transcripts, looking for the take from the teardrop the Hungarian plumbers had embedded in Herr Professor’s floorboards. There had been long rambling SNIPER transcripts every morning since the microphone was put into service twelve days before; of limited value from an intelligence point of view, the transcripts had come out of the Watcher’s typewriters looking vaguely like dialogue for a radio soap opera. This morning, inexplicably, there was zilch from SNIPER. Jack sat up straight and went through the transcripts again.

  “How come there’s nothing from the SNIPER microphone?” he hollered out to Miss Sipp.

  She stuck her head in the Sorcerer’s door. “I was curious, too, so I got one of the Watchers on the horn—he said that particular teardrop has dried up.”

  “Check again, huh?”

  “Still no joy,” Miss Sipp reported later in the morning. “They’re telling me there are two possibilities. Possibility number one: Someone discovered the microphone and removed it. Possibility number two: RAINBOW and/or SNIPER may be in the hands of the KGB.”

  “The sons of bitches left out possibility number three,” Jack blurted out, his words infused with seething irritability. “The microphone and/or one of the transmitters may be defective.”

  “They tested the material before they installed it,” Miss Sipp said quietly. Ironing out the wrinkles in her skirt with a palm, she came around the desk and touched her finger tips to the back of Jack’s wrist in a sisterly way. “Face th
e music, Jack. You’ve become emotionally involved with your courier. This is definitely not a healthy situation.”

  Jack shook off her hand. “I never figured out why Harvey wanted me to bug them in the first place—he’s getting everything SNIPER knows spelled out on pieces of silk.”

  “Mr. Torriti is a very methodical person, Jack. Count on him to cover angles others don’t know exist.”

  Jack turned up early at the rehearsal hall on Hardenbergstrasse for the regular Friday night rendezvous with Lili, only to discover a hand-printed sign taped to Aristide’s cubbyhole. It announced that Lili’s dance classes had been cancelled until further notice. At wit’s end, Jack dispatched an all-points enquiry to Berlin Base’s army of informers asking if anyone had gotten wind of an important arrest in the Soviet sector. The answers that came filtering back reassured him slightly: There had been no visible signs of any earth-shaking arrests. The KGB officers at Karlshorst were preoccupied with a new Moscow Centre regulation requiring officers being rotated back to the Motherland to pay a stiff duty on furniture, clothing, automobiles, motor scooters and bicycles imported from the German Democratic Republic; there even had been some talk of circulating a petition but the rezident, General Ilichev, had chewed out the ringleaders and nipped the proto-rebellion in the bud. Still not satisfied, Jack got hold of the Berlin Base listening-station logs recording radio traffic into and out of Karlshorst. Again, there was nothing out of the ordinary. He read through the last few days of reports from Watchers keeping an eye on Soviet airports. There were the usual flights, all scheduled. Jack even had the Fallen Angel check the private dance school on Alexanderplatz where Lili taught mornings; a note on the concierge’s window said that, until further notice, Fraülein Mittag’s class would be taught by Frau Haeckler. On the way back to the American zone the Fallen Angel had dropped by the caretaker’s flat under the Professor’s apartment to see if her spanking new Czech radio was functioning properly; to see, also, if he could pry out of her news of the whereabouts of the couple who lived overhead. The radio, the Fallen Angel told Jack, had been tuned to the Radio Liberty wavelength in Munich. The arthritis medicine hadn’t had much of an effect on the pain. The people who lived upstairs were away. Period.

  Hoping against hope that there was an innocent explanation for RAINBOW’s dropping from sight, Jack went to the Tuesday night rendezvous. The sign posted on Aristide’s cubbyhole cancelling dance lessons was gone. As suddenly as she had disappeared, Lili reappeared. Watching from the shadows of the doorway across from the stage entrance, Jack monitored her arrival. Nobody seemed to be following her. Two hours later her students duck-walked off after the class. Rushing into the narrow corridor that reeked of sweat and talcum powder, taking the steps three at a time, Jack burst into the top floor rehearsal hall to discover Lili standing with her back arched and one long leg stretched out along the barre.

  Gripping her wrist, he pried her away from the barre. “Where have you been?” he demanded harshly.

  “Please, you are hurting me—“

  “I was afraid you’d been—“

  “I could not think of how to get word to you—“

  “If you’d been arrested—“

  Jack let go of her wrist. They both took a deep breath. “Jack-in-thebox,” Lili whispered. She placed the flat of her palm on his solar plexus and pushed him back and shook her head once and then, sighing like a child, folded herself into his arms. “Herr Professor’s brother died suddenly…we had to go to Dresden for the funeral. We stayed a few days in order to help his wife put things in order…there were bank accounts, there was an insurance policy. Oh, Jack, this is not possible. What are we to do?”

  “Give me time,” he said. “I’ll think of something.”

  “What permits you to hope that time exist for us?” she murmured, breathing words into his ear that were as moist and as warm as a square of silk.

  Jack crushed her to him. “Spend a night with me, Lili,” he pleaded. “Only one.”

  “No,” she said, clinging to him. “I must not…” Her voice trailed off weakly.

  Lili twisted in the narrow wooden bed so that her back was toward Jack. Pressing into her, he buried his mouth in the nape of her neck and ran a calloused palm along the curve of her hip. Her voice, husky from hours of love-making, drifted back over a lean shoulder. “Did you ever notice how, when a train goes very quickly, everything close to the tracks becomes blurred? But if you blink your eyes rapidly you can stop the motion for an instant, you can freeze the images. You are going by me tonight with the speed of light, Jacklight. In the eye of my mind—“

  “In your mind’s eye—“

  “Yes, in my mind’s eye I blink to stop the motion and freeze the images of us copulating.”

  Jack could feel the sleekness and hardness of a dancer’s muscles along her thigh. “Describe what you see.”

  “I have, of course, experienced physical love before…but it has been a long long while since…”

  Jack thought of the Fallen Angel snapping open his small telescope and seeing Lili fall into the embrace of an older man with snow-white hair. “Start at the start,” Jack said. “We’ll relive tonight together.”

  Lili shuddered. “I consent, the last time we see each other in the rehearsal hall, to meet you at this small hotel for voyagers in the French sector. I tell Herr Professor I am spending the night with my childhood girlfriend in Potsdam; I am surprised not so much by the lie as the fact that it passes effortlessly through my lips. I do as you instructed me—I walk the wrong way down single-direction streets to be positive I am not being followed. Then, my heart beating wildly, I walk directly here.”

  Jack laughed into her neck. “I also made sure you weren’t being followed.”

  “The clerk at the desk smiles knowingly when she gives me the key but I do not feel embarrassed. The opposite is true—I feel proud…proud that someone as beautiful as you, Jackstraw, has so much desire for me.”

  “Desire is a weak word, Lili.”

  “I wait in the room until I hear the sound of your steps on the landing. I have listened for them so many times in the theater that I recognize them immediately. I open the door. This is the precise point at which things began to move quickly…to blur.”

  “Blink. Describe the snapshots.”

  “Snap? Shots?”

  “That’s what cameras do—they freeze images. We call them snapshots.”

  “I will attempt it. I see me, unable to find words with which to greet you, reaching up to unfasten my earrings.”

  “The gesture took my breath away, Lili. It seemed to me that all life can offer in the way of intimacy begins with you taking off your earrings.”

  “I see you pulling your shirt over your head. I see you removing an ugly object from your belt and sliding it under the pillow. I watch you unbuttoning my dress. I fold my garments as you take them off and place them carefully on a chair, which amuses you—I can suppose, in the style of Americans, you would prefer to have me throw them on the floor. I feel the back of your hand brush against the skin of my breast. Oh, I see the melting together of our clothes-less bodies, I see your eyes wide open as you press your mouth against my mouth—“

  “Your eyes must have been open to notice.”

  “I did not want to miss any part of the ballet.”

  “Give me more images, Lili.”

  “More snapshots, yes. I possess images for a lifetime of remembering. You carry me to this bed, you loom over me in the faint light coming from the left-open door of the closet, you caress my unused body with your enormous hands and your famished mouth.” Lili sighed into the pillow. “You enter slowly into me, you manipulate me this way and that, now you are facing me, now you are behind me, now I am on top of you or alongside you. You are very good at this business of love-making.”

  “It is the woman who makes the man good at the business of love-making,” Jack said, discovering a truth when he heard himself say it. “We are good lovers with a ver
y few, unremarkable lovers with most and lousy lovers with some. It is not something to be taken for granted, being a good lover. It is never for sure.”

  “We do not have a long time together,” Lili warned him.

  “Whatever time we have is enough to persuade me that your images are more powerful than my fantasies.”

  They dozed for a while, then came awake as the first sounds of traffic reached their ears and the first gray streaks of dawn reached their eyes. Jack started to make love to her again but she murmured that she was sore and he was hurting her and he stopped. Lili got out of bed and washed at the bidet behind the screen in the corner of the room and dressed. They had breakfast, stale rolls and margarine and jelly and hot chocolate made with powdered milk, in the small room behind the concierge’s office.

  Out on the sidewalk Lili’s face darkened. “And how shall we say goodbye?”

  “We won’t,” Jack said. “When I was a kid my mother used to take me to Atlantic City every Thanksgiving. I remember standing on the beach at the edge of the ocean, my knickerbockers pulled up above my knees, watching as the tide washed the sand out from under my bare feet each time it receded. It left me feeling dizzy, lightheaded. Your going, like the tide’s, gives me the same feeling.”

  “I am the sand under your bare feet.” Lili turned away to look at men with blackened faces, who were carting sacks of coal from a truck into the basement of an apartment building. “Life is an accumulation of small mistakes,” she said suddenly.