The Company

by Robert Littell

  A line of students, formed into an impromptu firing squad, cut down the two men with a ragged volley of rifle fire.

  Arpád came up to Ebby. “Elizabet—do you know where she is?” he asked breathlessly. The question came across as half plea, half prayer.

  Ebby said he had caught a glimpse of her in prison. He explained that there was an entrance to the sub-basement garage under the prison on a nearby side street. Brandishing the rifle over his head, Arpád shouted for the students to follow him and, gripping Ebby under an arm, headed for the AVH prison. As they approached the garage, they could hear the demonstrators massed around the corner in front of the main entrance chanting slogans as they tried to break through a steel fence. The student who had retrieved the machine pistol from the dead AVH officer in the car stepped forward and shot out the lock on the garage door. Eager hands tugged at the metal door and pushed it open overhead. From inside the garage pistol shots rang out. A girl with long dark hair plaited with strands of colorful wool turned to stare with lifeless eyes at Ebby and then collapsed at his feet. The students spilled down the ramp into pitch darkness. Ebby tried to keep up with Arpád but lost him in the melee. Shots reverberated through the garage. A Molotov cocktail detonated under a car and the gas tank caught fire and exploded. Flames licked at the concrete ceiling. In the shimmering light, Ebby saw some students herding half a dozen men in disheveled AVH uniforms against a wall. The students stepped back and formed a rough line and Arpád shouted an order. The whine of rifle shots echoed through the garage. The AVH men cowering against each other melted into a heap on the floor.

  With Arpád leading the way and Ebby at his heels, the students flooded up the steel staircase and spread out through the building, cutting down any AVH men they discovered, opening cells and liberating prisoners. In a basement toilet, the insurrectionists discovered three AVH women, including the one who looked like a sumo wrestler, hiding in stalls; they pulled them out and forced them into urinals and finished them off with pistol shots to the necks. Ebby pulled Arpád through a heavy double door that separated the administrative offices from the cells. Finding himself in a corridor that seemed familiar, he started throwing bolts and hauling open doors. Behind one door he recognized his own cell with the plank bed and the window high in the wall. At another room he spun a chrome wheel to retract the lockset and swung open a thick door and felt the chill from the refrigerated chamber.

  Against one wall, Elizabet was dangling from a meat hook spiked through the collar of a torn shirt, her bare legs twitching in a macabre dance step. Her mouth opened and her lips formed words but the rasps that emerged from the back of her throat were not human. Arpád and Ebby lifted her free of the meat hook and carried her from the room and laid her on the floor. Arpád found a filthy blanket in a corner and drew it over her to hide her nakedness.

  Two young men—one Ebby recognized as Mátyás, the angry student who had been at the meeting in the Buda safe house—appeared at the end of the hall, prodding ahead of them the woman doctor with coarse gray hair and an older man with the gold bars of a colonel general on the shoulder boards of his AVH uniform. One of his arms hung limply from his shoulder and he was bleeding from the nose. Ebby told Arpád, “She is a doctor.”

  Jumping to his feet, Arpád gestured for the woman to attend to Elizabet. Only too glad to be spared the fate of the other AVH people in the building, she dropped to her knees and began to feel for a pulse. Arpád pulled a pistol from his waistband and motioned for Mátyás to bring the prisoner closer. The AVH officer stared at Ebby and said, in English, “For the love of God, stop him.” A gold tooth in his lower jaw glistened with saliva. “I have information that could be of great value to your Central Intelligence Agency.”

  Ebby recognized the voice—it was the one that had emerged from the darkness of the interrogation chamber to ask him, “Be so kind as to state your full name.”

  “His name is Száblakó,” Arpád informed Ebby, the pupils of his eyes reduced to pinpricks of hate. “He is the commandant of this prison, and well-known to those of us who have been arrested by the AVH.”

  Ebby stepped closer to the AVH colonel general. “How did you know I was CIA? How did you know I work for Wisner? How did you know I worked in Frankfurt?”

  Száblakó clutched at the straw that could save his life. “Take me into your custody. Save me from them and I will tell you everything.”

  Ebby turned to Arpad. “Let me have him—his information can be of great importance to us.”

  Arpád, wavering, looked from Elizabet on the floor to Száblakó, and then at Mátyás, who was angrily shaking his head no. “Give him to me,” Ebby whispered, but the muscles around the poet’s eyes slowly contorted, disfiguring his face, transforming it into a mask of loathing. Suddenly Arpád jerked his head in the direction of the refrigerator room. Mátyás understood instantly. Ebby tried to step in front of the colonel general but Arpád, rabid, roughly shoved him to one side. Száblakó, seeing what was in store for him, began to tremble violently. “It was the Centre that told us,” he cried as Arpád and Mátyás dragged him into the cold room. A shriek of terror resounded through the basement corridor, followed by the mournful whimpering a coyote would make if one of its paws had been caught in the steel teeth of a bear trap. The whimpering continued until Arpád and Mátyás emerged from the refrigerator room and swung the heavy door shut. They spun the chrome wheel, driving home the spikes on the lockset.

  Once outside the room, Arpád cast a quick look at Elizabet, stretched out on the floor. For a fleeting moment he seemed to be torn between staying with her and dashing off to lead the revolution. The revolution won; grabbing his rifle, Arpád strode away with Mátyás. The prison doctor busied herself disinfecting Elizabet’s wounds and, with Ebby’s help, dressed her in a man’s flannel shirt and trousers that were tugged up high and tied around her waist with a length of cord. Elizabet eyes flicked open and she stared dumbly into Ebby’s face, unable at first to place him. Her tongue measured the gap in a chipped front tooth. Then her right hand clutched her left breast through the fabric of the shirt and her stiff lips pronounced his name.

  “Elliott?”

  “Welcome back to the world, Elizabet,” Ebby whispered.

  “They hurt me…”

  Ebby could only nod.

  “The room was so cold—“

  “You’re safe now.”

  “I think I told them who you were—“

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Ebby noticed a filthy sink with a single faucet at the far end of the hallway. He tore off a square of cloth from the tail of his shirt and wet it and sponged her lips, which were caked with dried blood.

  “What has happened?” she asked weakly.

  “The insurrection is underway,” Ebby said.

  “Where is Arpád?”

  Ebby managed a bone-weary grin. “He’s trying to catch up with the revolution so he can lead it.”

  As streaks of gray tinted the sky in the east, rumors spread through the city that Russian tanks from the 2nd and the 17th Mechanized Divisions had already reached the outskirts of the capitol. Ebby spotted the first T-34 tank, with the number 527 painted in white on its turret, lumbering into position at an intersection when he and Elizabet were being taken in a bread delivery van to the Corvin Cinema on the corner of Ulloi and Jozsef Avenues. A skinny girl named Margit, with veins of rust bleached into her long blonde hair, was behind the wheel of the van. Ebby sat next to her, Elizabet lay curled up on a mattress in the back. On Kalvin Square, five tanks with Russian markings stenciled on the turrets had formed a circle with their guns pointing outward and their commanders surveying the surrounding streets through binoculars from their open hatches. Ebby noticed that three of the tanks had small Hungarian flags attached to their whip antennas; the Russians clearly weren’t looking for a scrap with the students, many of whom were armed with Molotov cocktails.

  Ebby scribbled down an address on Prater Street that he had memor
ized back in Washington—it was the apartment of the Hungarian cutout equipped with a radio and ciphers—and Margit managed to make it there using only side streets and alleyways, avoiding the intersections controlled by Russian tanks. The cutout turned out to be a happy-go-lucky young gypsy named Zoltan with sickle-shaped sideburns that slashed across his smallpox-scarred cheeks and two steel teeth that flashed when he smiled. Ebby had no difficulty convincing Zoltan to come along with him; the gypsy didn’t have anything against Communism but he was aching to get into a fight with the Russians who occupied his country. He brought along a backpack with a transceiver in it, a long curved knife that his father’s father had used in skirmishes against the Turks and a violin in a homemade canvas case.

  “I understand about the radio and the knife,” Ebby told him as they squeezed into the front seat of the van. “But why the violin?”

  “Not possible to make war without a violin,” Zoltan explained seriously. “Gypsy violinists led Magyars into battle against goddamn Mongols, okay, so it damn good thing if gypsy violinist, yours truly, leads Hungarians into battle against goddamn Russians.” He crossed himself and repeated the same thing to Margit in Hungarian, which made her laugh so hard it brought tears to her eyes.

  On Rákóczi Street the van was suddenly surrounded by students who had thrown up a roadblock of overturned yellow trolley cars placed in such a way that an automobile had to zigzag through the gaps between them. Overhead, electric cables dangled from their poles. The students wore armbands with the Hungarian colors and brandished large naval pistols, antiquated World War I German rifles and, in one case, a cavalry sword. They must have recognized Margit because they waved the van through. From the sidewalk, an old woman raised her cane in salute. “Eljen!” she cried. “Long life!” On the next corner, more students were carrying out armloads of suits from a big clothing emporium and piling them on the sidewalk. A young woman wearing the gray uniform of a tram conductor, her leather ticket pouch bulging with hand grenades, shouted to a group of passing students that anyone joining them would be given a suit and five Molotov cocktails. Half a dozen students took her up on the offer.

  The Corvin Cinema, a round blockhouse-like structure set back from the wide avenue, had been transformed into a fortress and command post for the five hastily organized companies of the so-called Corvin Battalion. A poster in the lobby advertised a film entitled Irene, Please Go Home; someone had crossed out “Irene” and substituted “Russki.” In the basement, girls manufactured Molotov cocktails by the hundreds, using petrol from a nearby gas station. The movie theater itself, on the ground floor of a four-story block of flats, had been turned into a freewheeling assembly patterned after the popular “Soviets” that had sprung up in Petrograd during the Bolshevik Revolution. Delegates from schools and factories and Hungarian Army units came and went, and raised their hands to vote while they were there. At any given moment a speaker could be heard arguing passionately that the object of the uprising was to put an end to the Soviet occupation of Hungary and rid the country of Communism; merely reforming the existing Communist government and system would not satisfy the people who flocked to Corvin.

  Students wearing Red Cross armbands carried Elizabet off on a stretcher to a makeshift infirmary on the third floor. Ebby and his gypsy radioman set up shop in an office on the top floor of an adjoining apartment house that was connected to the Corvin Cinema by a jury-rigged passage through the walls of the buildings. “If goddamn Russian tanks start shooting, this safest place to be,” Zoltan explained with an ear-to-ear grin. “Because those cannons on the goddamn T-34’s, they can’t aim so high in narrow streets, right.” Zoltan shinnied up a stovepipe on the roof to string the shortwave antenna, then set about enciphering Ebby’s first bulletin to the Company listening post in Vienna. It reported briefly on his arrest and the arrival of a KGB officer who tried to spirit him away from the AVH station, only to wind up in front of an impromptu firing squad as the insurrectionists raided secret police buildings. Ebby described sighting the first Russian tanks and the telling detail that many of them displayed Hungarian flags. He also pointed out that the Russian armor that had taken up positions in Budapest was not accompanied, as far as he could see, by ground troops, which meant that the Russians were incapable of putting down the revolution without the assistance of the Hungarian army and regular 40,000-strong uniformed police force. And as of dawn on this second day of the insurrection, he said, the Hungarian army and the regular Budapest police had either gone over to what Ebby called the freedom fighters (a phrase that would be picked up by the press) or had declared neutrality.

  6

  VIENNA, MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1956

  AS REBELLION ROCKED HUNGARY, CIA REINFORCEMENTS POURED INTO Vienna from Company stations across Europe. Jack McAuliffe, on detached duty from Berlin, reported to the dingy six-story hotel that the Company had leased on the edge of the Danube Canal in the blue collar suburb of Landstrasse. Directing a task force working out of a warren of rooms on the fourth floor, Jack began to set up an infrastructure for screening the refugees starting to trickle across the Austro-Hungarian frontier; if the situation deteriorated, that trickle was expected to turn into a flood and the Company had to be ready to deal with it. The Austrian Red Cross had opened reception centers in villages near the frontier. Jack’s brief was to make sure that middle or high level Communists, as well as ranking military and police officers, were weeded out and interrogated; to make sure, also, that the Company kept an eye peeled for refugees who might be recruited as agents and sent back into Hungary.

  Late in the afternoon of the 29th, Jack received word that his refugee screening net had pulled in its first big fish: a regular army colonel who had been attached to the Hungarian general staff as liaison with the Soviet 2nd Mechanized Division had come across the frontier with his family during the night and had exhibited a readiness to trade information for the promise of political asylum in America. Jack was signing off on an in-house memo on the subject when one of his junior officers, fresh out of the S.M. Craw Management course in Alexandria, Virginia, stuck his head in the door. There was going to be a briefing on the latest developments in Hungary in twenty minutes.

  Jack was settling into one of the folding metal chairs at the back of the banquet hall on the hotel’s top floor when a young woman pushed through the swinging doors from the kitchen. The officer sitting next to him whistled under his breath. “Now that’s someone I wouldn’t kick out of the rack,” he said.

  “If she’s the new briefing officer,” a meteorologist quipped, “they’d better rent another truckload of seats for the hall.”

  Jack pushed up his tinted aviator’s sunglasses with a forefinger and peered under them to get a closer look at her. The young woman seemed vaguely familiar. She was wearing a soft blue skirt that fell to the tops of her ankle-length boots, a white shirt with a ruffled front and a riding jacket that flared at the waist. Her mouth was painted with raspberry-pink lipstick. She strode across the room to the podium, propped up her briefing folder and scratched a very long and very painted fingernail across the microphone to see if it was turned on. Then she stared out at the ninety or so Company officers crowded into the banquet hall. “My name,” she announced, her take-charge voice cutting through the background noise of unfinished conversations, “is Mildred Owen-Brack.”

  Of course! Owen-Brack! A lifetime ago, back at the posh Cloud Club in the Chrysler building in Manhattan, Jack had been dumb enough to make a pass at her but she hadn’t been in the market for a one-night stand. Byebye, John J. McAuliffe, and good luck to you, she’d said, batting eyelashes that were so long he’d imagined they were trying to cool his lust.

  At the podium Owen-Brack was providing a rundown on the latest news from Hungary. The Stalinist old guard in Budapest had been booted out and Imre Nagy, the former Hungarian premier who had once been imprisoned as a “deviationist,” had emerged as the new head of government. Nagy, who favored a system that Communist intellectuals d
ubbed Marxism with a human face, had informed the Russians that he couldn’t be held responsible for what happened in Hungary unless Soviet troops were pulled out of Budapest. Within hours the Soviet tanks guarding the major intersections had kicked over their engines and started to re-deploy. A long line of ammunition carriers pulling field kitchens, some with smoke still corkscrewing up from their stovepipes, had been spotted heading east through the suburbs. The population, convinced that the revolution had triumphed, had spilled into the streets to celebrate. Nagy, under pressure from militant anti-Communists, appeared willing to test the limits of Russian patience; one of the uncensored newspapers quoted Nagy as saying privately that he would abolish the one-party system and organize free elections. The political counselor at the American embassy guessed that, in a genuinely free election, the Communists would be lucky to poll ten percent of the vote, which would spell the end of Socialism in Hungary. This same counselor had heard rumors that Nagy was toying with the idea of pulling Hungary out of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Military Pact.

  The $64,000 question, Owen-Brack suggested, was: Would the Soviets sit on their hands while Nagy eased Hungary out of the Soviet orbit? Were the Russians pulling the 2nd and 17th Mechanized Divisions out of Budapest in order to buy time—time for Soviet reinforcements, known to be massing in the Ukraine, to cross the pontoon bridges over the Tisza and reoccupy the entire country.

  After the briefing, Jack lingered to discuss some of the finer points of the refugee screening program with his younger staffers, then wandered over to the bar at the back of the banquet hall. Owen-Brack was already there, chatting with two visiting firemen from the House Armed Services Committee. Jack ordered a whiskey sour, then edged closer to Owen-Brack. Turning toward the bar for a pretzel, she caught him sizing her up.