The Company

by Robert Littell

  It irritated him that he couldn’t tell whether it was a left eye or a right eye.

  He concentrated on composing pertinent questions. He didn’t bother with the answers; assuming they existed, they could come later.

  How long had he been in custody?

  Had he said anything during the interrogation to compromise his cover story?

  Would the Americans at the Gellért notice he was missing?

  Would they inform the embassy?

  At what point would the embassy cable Washington?

  Would Arpád discover he had been arrested?

  Could he do anything about it if he did?

  And, of course, the crucial question: Why had the Hungarians arrested him? Had the AVH infiltrated the Hungarian Resistance Movement? Did they know the CIA had sent someone into Budapest to contact Arpád? Did they know that he was that someone?

  Formulating the questions exhausted Ebby and he drifted off, his chin nodding onto his chest, into a shallow and fitful sleep.

  The squealing of hinges startled him awake. Two men and a massive woman who could have passed for a Japanese sumo wrestler appeared on the threshold of the cell, the men dressed in crisp blue uniforms, the woman wearing a sweat suit and a long white butcher’s smock with what looked like dried blood stains on it. Grinning, the woman shambled over to the wooden plank and, grasping Ebby’s jaw, jerked his head up to the light and deftly pressed back the eyelid of his unswollen eye with the ball of her thumb. Then she took his pulse. She kept her coal-black eyes on the second hand of a wristwatch she pulled from the pocket of her smock, then grunted something in Hungarian to the two policemen. They pulled Ebby to his feet and half-dragged, half-walked him down a long corridor to a room filled with spotlights aimed at the stool bolted to the floor in the middle of it. Ebby was deposited on the stool. A voice he remembered from the previous interrogation came out of the darkness.

  “Be so kind as to state your full name.”

  Ebby massaged his jaw bone. “You already know my name.”

  “State your full name, if you please.”

  Ebby sighed. “Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt.”

  “What is your rank?”

  “I don’t have a rank. I am an attorney with—“

  “Please, please, Mr. Ebbitt. Last night you mistook us for imbeciles. It was my hope that with reflection you would realize the futility of your predicament and collaborate with us, if only to save yourself from the sanctions that await you if you defy us. You have not practiced law since 1950. You are an employee of the American Central Intelligence Agency, a member of the Soviet Russia Division in Mr. Frank Wisner’s Directorate for Operations. Since the early 1950s you have worked in the CIA’s station at Frankfurt in Western Germany running émigré agents, with great persistence but a notable lack of success, into Poland and Soviet Russia and Albania. Your immediate superior when you arrived at Frankfurt was Anthony Spink. When he was transferred back to Washington in 1954, you yourself became head of the agent-running operation.”

  Ebby’s mind raced so rapidly he had trouble keeping up with the fragments of thoughts flitting through his brain. Clearly he had been betrayed, and by someone who knew him personally or had access to his Central Registry file. Which seemed to rule out the possibility that he had been betrayed by an informer in the Hungarian Resistance Movement. Shading his open eye with a palm, he squinted into the beams of light. He thought he could make out the feet of half a dozen or so men standing around the room. They all wore trousers with deep cuffs and shoes that were black and shining like mirrors. “I must tell you,” Ebby said, his voice rasping from the back of a sore throat, “that you are confusing me with someone else. I was with the OSS during the war, that’s true. After the war I finished my law studies and went to work for Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard and Irvine at number two Wall—“

  Ebby could make out one set of black shoes ambling toward him from the rim of darkness in a kind of deliberate duck-walk. An instant later, a heavy man dressed in a baggy civilian suit blotted out several of the spotlights and a short, sharp blow landed in Ebby’s peritoneal cavity, knocking the wind out of his lungs, dispatching an electric current of pain down to the tips of his toes. Rough hands hauled him off the floor and set him back on the stool, where he sat, doubled over, his arms hugging his stomach.

  Again the soothing voice came out of the darkness. “Kindly state your full name.”

  Ebby’s breath came in ragged gasps. “Elliott…Winstrom…Ebbitt.”

  “Perhaps now you will tell us your rank.”

  It seemed like such an inconsequential question. Why was he making such a fuss? He would tell them his name and rank and pay grade and they would let him curl up on the wooden plank in the damp cell that smelled of urine and vomit. He would open his good eye and peer up at the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling and remember the sun swinging back and forth like a pendulum high over the mast; he would feel the calming lift and slide of the Atlantic ground swell under the deck, he would taste the salt of the sea breeze on his lips. “My rank—“

  Suddenly he caught a glimpse of his ex-wife’s flinty eyes boring into him. He could hear Eleonora’s throaty voice laced with exasperation. “Whatever you do,” she said, “you’ll never catch up to your father unless someone stands you in front of a firing squad.”

  “My father has nothing to do with this,” Ebby cried out. Even as he uttered these words, he understood that his father had everything to do with it.

  “Why do you speak of your father?” the soothing voice inquired from the murkiness beyond the spotlights. “We are not psychoanalysts—we only want to know your rank. Nothing more.”

  Ebby forced words one by one through his parched lips. “You…can…go…to…hell.”

  The baggy civilian suit started toward him again but the soothing voice barked a word in Hungarian and the heavy man melted back into the shadows. The spotlights went out and the entire room was plunged into inky blackness. Two hands wrenched Ebby off the stool by his armpits, propelled him across the room to a wall and propped him upright. A heavy curtain in front of his face parted, revealing a thick pane of glass and a spotlit room beyond it. There was a stool bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, and a ghostly porcelain figure on the stool. Ebby blinked his open eye hard. With the languidness of underwater motion the figure swam into focus.

  The guide from the museum, the wife of a Hungarian named Németh, the lover of the poet Arpád Zelk, sat hunched on the stool. She was naked except for a pair of dirty faded-pink bloomers that sagged over one hip because of a torn elastic waistband. One arm was raised across her breasts. The fingers of her other hand played with a chipped front tooth. The dark figures of men standing around the room were obviously questioning her, although no sound reached Ebby through the thick glass. Elizabet fended off the questions with a nervous shake of her head. One of the figures came up behind her and, grabbing her elbows, pinned her arms behind her back. Then the massive woman wearing the long white butcher’s smock lumbered up to her. She was brandishing a pair of pliers. Ebby tried to turn away but strong hands pinned his head to the glass.

  Elizabet’s swollen lips howled for a release from the pain as the woman mutilated the nipple of a breast.

  Ebby started to retch but all that came up from the back of his throat was phlegm.

  “My name,” Ebby announced after two men had dragged him back to the stool, “is Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt. I am an officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. My pay grade is GS-15.”

  Barely concealing his sense of triumph, the interrogator asked from the darkness, “What was your mission in Budapest? What message did you bring to the counterrevolutionist Arpád Zelk?”

  The spotlights caused tears to trickle from the corner of Ebby’s open eye. Blotting them with the back of a hand, he detected another voice murmuring in his brain. It belonged to Mr. Andrews, the one-armed instructor back at the Company’s training school. “It’s not the pain b
ut the fear that breaks you.” He heard Mr. Andrews repeat the warning over and over, like a needle stuck in a grove. “Not the pain but the fear! Not the pain but the fear!”

  The words reverberating through his brain grew fainter and Ebby, frantic to hang on to them, reached deep into himself. To his everlasting mystification, he discovered he wasn’t afraid of the pain, the dying, the nothingness beyond death; he was afraid of being afraid.

  The discovery exhilarated him—and liberated him.

  Had his father experienced this exhilarating revelation the day he was lashed to the goal post of a soccer field? Was that the explanation for the smile on his lips when the Germans bayoneted him to death because they were short of ammunition?

  Ebby felt as if a great malignant knot had been extracted from his gut.

  “The message, if you please?” the voice prompted him from the darkness. “I want to remind you that you do not have diplomatic immunity.”

  Again Ebby forced words through his lips. “Fuck…you…pal.”

  4

  WASHINGTON, DC, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1956

  THE MOOD IN THE CORRIDORS OF COCKROACH ALLEY WAS SUBDUED. Junior officers milled around the coffee-and-doughnut wagons, talking in undertones. There was a crisis brewing. Details were scarce. One of the Company’s people somewhere in the field appeared to be in jeopardy. Leo Kritzky, whose recent promotion to the post of deputy to the head of the Soviet Russia Division in the Directorate for Operations had coincided with the birth of twin daughters, knew more than most. The DCI, Allen Dulles, who had been woken at three in the morning by the duty officer reading an “Eyes-Only” CRITIC from the CIA station chief in Budapest, brought key people in on Sunday for an early morning war council. Leo, standing in for his boss who was away on sick leave, attended it. Leaning back into the soft leather of his Eames chair, his eyeglasses turned opaque by the sun streaming through a window, Dulles brought everyone up to speed: E. Winstrom Ebbitt II, on a mission to Budapest under deep cover (and without diplomatic immunity), had failed to turn up at his hotel the previous evening. A check of hospitals and city police precincts had drawn a blank. The Hungarian AVH, which as a matter of routine monitored visiting Americans, was playing dumb: yes, they were aware that a New York attorney named Ebbitt had joined the State Department negotiating team at the Gellért Hotel; no, they didn’t have any information on his whereabouts; it went without saying, they would look into the matter and get back to the Americans if they learned anything.

  “The bastards are lying through their teeth,” Dulles told the men gathered in his spacious corner office. “If for some reason Ebbitt went to ground of his own accord, first thing he’d do would be to send us word—before he left Washington he committed to memory the whereabouts of a Hungarian cutout equipped with a radio and ciphers. Christ, we even laid on emergency procedures to exfiltrate him out of Hungary if his cover was blown.”

  Half an hour into the meeting the DD/O, Frank Wisner, came on the squawk box from London, his first stopover on a tour of European stations, to remind everyone that the Hungarian AVH were the step children of the Soviet KGB. “Bear in mind the relationship,” he advised from across the Atlantic in his inimitable drawl. “If the KGB sneezes, it’s the AVH that catches cold.”

  “The Wiz may be on to something,” Bill Colby allowed when the squawk box went dead. “We won’t get to first base with the AVH. On the other hand the KGB has a vested interest in preserving the unspoken modus vivendi between our intelligence services.”

  The department heads kicked around ideas for another twenty minutes. The State Department would be encouraged to file a formal complaint with the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, though none of the people who had pulled up chairs around Dulles’s desk held out hope that this would produce results. A channel would be opened, via the Hungarian cutout, to determine if Ebby had actually met with this Arpád Zelk fellow and other members of the Resistance Movement. A sometime-asset in the AVH would be contacted through his handler in Austria but this would take time; if the Hungarians had snagged Ebbitt, the asset might have gotten wind of it. Leo, still junior enough in the presence of the DCI and the various department heads to raise a finger when he wanted to say something, felt Dulles’s hard gaze lock onto him when he came up with the idea of putting the Sorcerer on the case; he could meet in Berlin with his KGB counterpart and point out the disadvantages to both sides if they allowed their client services to take scalps, Leo suggested. One of the analysts wondered aloud whether an approach to the Russians on behalf of Ebbitt would undermine whatever chance he had of sticking to the cover story about being a New York attorney.

  Leo shook his head thoughtfully. “If they’ve seized Ebbitt,” he said, “it’s because they’ve penetrated his cover story. The problem now is to extricate him alive and in one piece.

  Behind a cloud of pipe smoke, Dulles nodded slowly. “I don’t recall your name,” he told Leo.

  “Kritzky. I’m standing in for—” He named the head of the Soviet Russia Division.

  “I like the idea of Torriti explaining the facts of life to the Russians,” Dulles announced, eyeing Leo over the top of his glasses. “Coming from the Sorcerer, the menace of reciprocity would carry weight with the Russians; Torriti doesn’t play games.” Dulles hiked a cuff and glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s early afternoon in Berlin. He might be able to get something off the ground today. Write that up, Kritzky. I’ll sign off on it.”

  Torriti’s corpulent body had slowed down over the years but not his head. The deciphered version of Dulles’s “Action Immediate” reached his desk when he was slumped over it, snoring off a hangover from a bottle of monastery-aged Irish whiskey he’d finally gotten around to cracking open; it had been a gift from the Rabbi to celebrate the Jewish New Year. (“May 5717 bring you fame, fortune and a defector from the Politburo,” he had written on the tongue-in-cheek note that accompanied the bottle. “Barring that, may you at least live to see 5718.”) Shaking himself out of a stupor, fitting on a pair of spectacles that he had begun to use to read printed matter, the Sorcerer digested Dulles’s orders, then bawled through the half open door to Miss Sipp, “Get ahold of McAuliffe—tell him to get his butt down here pronto.”

  “From Washington, it probably looked like a cakewalk,” Jack—now the second-in-command at Berlin Base—remarked when he’d read through the Action Immediate. “One of our people’s fallen into the hands of the AVH in Budapest. We’re going to hold the KGB’s feet to the flame if anything happens to him. So far, so good. But Jesus H. Christ, how does Dulles expect us to get in touch with the KGB rezident at Karlshorst on such short notice—I mean, it’s not as if you could pick up the phone and dial his number and invite him over to West Berlin for tea and sympathy.”

  “Knew you’d come up with a creative idea,” Torriti said. He dragged the telephone across the desk, then laced the fingers of both hands through his thinning hair to make himself presentable for the phone conversation he hoped to engage in. From the pocket of his rumpled trousers he produced a small key attached to the end of a long chain anchored to his belt. Squinting, he inserted the key in the lock of the upper right-hand desk drawer, tugged it open and rummaged among the boxes of ammunition until he found the small notebook German children used to keep track of class schedules, which he used as an address book. “Does Karlshorst begin with C or K?” he asked Jack.

  “K, Harvey.”

  “Here it is. Karlshorst rezidentura.” The Sorcerer fitted his trigger finger into the slots on the phone and dialed the number. Jack could hear the phone pealing on the other end. A woman babbling in Russian answered.

  Torriti spoke into the phone cautiously, articulating every syllable. “Get me some-one who speaks A-mer-i-can Eng-lish.” He repeated the words “American English” several times. After a long while someone else came on the line. “Listen up, friend,” Torriti said as patiently as he could. “I want you to go and tell Oskar Ugor-Zhilov that Harvey Torriti wants to speak to him.�
�� Pleats of skin formed on the Sorcerer’s brow as he spelled his name. “T-O-R-R-I-T-I.” There was another long wait. Then: “So, Oskar, how the fuck are you? This is Harvey Torriti. Yeah, the Harvey Torriti. I think we need to talk. No, not on the phone. Face to face. Man to man. I got a message from my summit that I want you to deliver to your summit. The sooner, the better.” Torriti held the phone away from his ear and grimaced. Jack could make out the tinny sound of someone with a thick Russian accent struggling to put a coherent sentence together in English. “You have to be making a joke,” Torriti barked into the phone. “No way am I going to put a foot into East Berlin. I got another idea. Know the playground in the Spandau Forest in the British Sector? There’s an open-air ice-skating rink that sits smack on the border. I’ll meet you in the middle of the rink at midnight.” The KGB rezident grunted something. Torriti said, “You can bring as many of your thugs as you like long as you come out onto the ice alone. Oh, yeah, and bring two glasses. I’ll supply the whiskey,” he added with a titter.

  The Sorcerer dropped the phone back onto the receiver. Jack asked, “So how do you figure on playing it, Harvey?”

  Torriti, cold sober and thinking fast, eyed Jack. “Not for laughs,” he said.