The Company

by Robert Littell

  Shortly before four in the morning Arpád lumbered through the double door of the theater and looked around. He spotted Ebby and strode across the auditorium to sink wearily onto the seat next to him.

  Ebby came awake instantly. “Are the rumors true?” he demanded.

  Arpád, his eyes swollen from lack of sleep, nodded gloomily. “You must radio the news to your American friends in Vienna. Pál Maléter and the other members of the delegation were invited to continue the negotiations at the Russian command post on the island of Tokol in the Danube. Sometime after eleven last night, Maléter phoned to say everything was in order. An hour later his driver turned up at the Parliament and reported that Maléter and the others had been arrested. The KGB burst into the conference room during a coffee break. Maléter’s driver was napping in the cloakroom. In the confusion he was overlooked. Later he managed to slip out a back door. He said the Russian general negotiating with Meléter was furious with the KGB. He’d given him his word as a soldier that the Hungarian delegation would be safe. The leader of the KGB squad took the general aside and whispered something in his ear. The general waved his hand in disgust and stalked out of the room. The KGB threw burlap sacks over the heads of our negotiators and led them away.”

  “This can only mean one thing,” Ebby whispered.

  Arpád nodded grimly. “We are betrayed by everyone,” he said dully. “There is nothing left for us except to die fighting.”

  From beyond the thick walls of the Corvin Cinema came the dry thud of cannon fire; it sounded like someone discreetly knocking on a distant door. Somewhere in Pest several artillery shells exploded. Around the auditorium students were climbing to their feet in alarm. A shell burst on Ulloi Avenue, shaking the building. Everyone started talking at once until an Army officer clambered onto a stepladder and shouted for silence. He began issuing orders. Grabbing their weapons, filling their overcoat pockets with Molotov cocktails, the students headed for the exits.

  Elizabet was on her feet in the row behind Ebby and Arpád, shivering under the greatcoat pulled over her shoulders like a cape. Clutching her mutilated breast, she listened for a moment to the distant thunder and the explosions. The blood drained from her already pale lips. “What is happening?” she whispered.

  Arpád stood up. “The Russians have come back, my dear Elizabet. They have declared war on our revolution.” He started to say something else but his voice was lost in the burst of a shell between the Corvan Cinema and the Kilian Barracks across the street. The explosion cut off the electricity. The lights in the cinema blinked out as a fine powdery dust rained down from the ceiling.

  Around the auditorium flashlights flickered on. Ebby buttonholed Zoltan and the two of them made their way by flashlight to the makeshift passageway that had been cut in the walls between the Cinema and the adjoining apartment building, and climbed up to the top floor room that had been turned into a radio shack. With the stub of a pencil Ebby started printing out a CRITIC to Vienna Station. “Don’t bother enciphering this,” he told Zoltan. “The most important thing now is—“

  The whine of Russian MiGs screaming low over the rooftops drowned out Ebby. As the planes curled away, he heard the dry staccato bark of their wing cannons. Racing to a window, he saw flames leaping from the roof of the building next to the Kilian Barracks across the intersection. Zoltan, his face creased into a preoccupied frown, wired the transceiver to an automobile battery and fiddled with the tuning knob until the needle indicated he was smack on the carrier signal. Then he plugged in the Morse key. Ebby finished the message and passed it to Zoltan, and then held the flashlight while the gypsy radioman tapped out his words:

  soviet artillery on buda hills began shelling pest 4 this morning explosions heard throughout city one shell landed street outside corvin soviet jets strafing rebel strongpoints according unconfirmed report kgb arrested nagy defense minister pal meleter and other members hungarian negotiating team last night hungarians at corvin preparing for house to house resistance but unlikely prevail this time

  Bending low over the Morse key, working it with two fingers of his right hand, Zoltan signed off using Ebby’s code name. Ebby caught the sound of tank engines coughing their way down Ulloi. He threw open the window and leaned out. Far down the wide avenue, a long line of dull headlights could be seen weaving toward the Cinema. Every minute or so the tanks pivoted spastically on their treads and shelled a building at point blank range. As Zoltan had predicted when they installed the radio shack on the top floor, the Russian tanks were unable to elevate their cannons in the limited space of the streets. So they were simply shooting the ground floors out from under the buildings, and letting the upper floors collapse into the basements.

  “I think we’d better get the hell out of here,” Ebby decided.

  Zoltan didn’t need to be told twice. While Ebby retrieved the antenna attached to the stovepipe on the roof, he stuffed the battery and the transceiver into his knapsack. The gypsy led the way back through the deserted corridors to the apartment that connected to the Corvin Cinema. The first Russian tanks started blasting away at the ground floor of their building as they ducked through the double hole in the bricks and made their way down a narrow staircase to the alleyway behind the cinema. The clouds overhead had turned rose-red from the fires raging around the city. Groups of Corvin commandos, boys and girls wearing short leather jackets and black berets and red-white-and-green armbands, crouched along the alleyway, waiting their turn to dash out into the street to hurl Molotov cocktails at the tanks that were blasting away at the thick concrete walls of the Cinema and the fortress-like façade of the massive barrack building across the avenue. Someone switched on a battery-powered radio and, turning up the volume, set it atop a battered taxi sitting on four flat tires. For a moment the sound of static filled the alleyway. Then came the hollow, emotional voice of the premier, Imre Nagy.

  Gesturing with both hands as if he himself were giving the speech, Zoltan attempted a running translation. “He says us that Soviet forces attack our capital to overthrow the legal democratic Hungarian government, okay. He says us that our freedom fighters are battling the enemy. He says us that he alerts the people of Hungary and the entire world to these goddamn facts. He says us that today it is Hungary, tomorrow it will be the turn of—“

  There were whistles of derision from the crouching students waiting their turn to fling themselves against the Russian tanks; this was not a crowd sympathetic to the plight of a bookish Communist reformer caught between the Soviet Politburo and the anti-Communist demands of the great majority of his own people. One of the young section-leaders raised a rifle to his shoulder and shot the radio off the roof of the taxi. The others around him applauded.

  There were sporadic bursts of machine gun fire from the avenue. Moments later a squad of freedom fighters darted back into the alleyway, dragging several wounded with them. Using wooden doors as stretchers, medical students wearing white armbands carried them back into the Corvin Cinema.

  The students nearest the mouth of the alleyway struck matches and lit the wicks on their Molotov cocktails. The freckled girl with pigtails, who looked all of sixteen, burst into tears that racked her thin body. Her boyfriend tried to pry the Molotov cocktail out of her fist but she clutched it tightly. When her turn came she rose shakily to her feet and staggered from the alleyway. One by one the others got up and dashed into the street. The metallic tick of Russian machine guns drummed in the dusty morning air. Bullets chipped away at the brick wall across the alleyway and fell to the ground.

  Zoltan picked up a bullet and turned it in his fingers; it was still warm to the touch. He leaned close to Ebby’s ear. “You want an opinion, okay, we need to get our asses over to the American embassy.”

  Ebby shook his head. “We’d never make it through the streets alive.”

  In the stairwell inside the doorway to the cinema Arpád and Elizabet were arguing furiously in Hungarian. Several times Arpád started to leave but Elizabet clung t
o the lapel of his leather jacket and continued talking. They stepped back to let two medical students haul a dead girl—the freckled sixteen-year-old who had broken into tears before she ran into the street—down the stairs to the basement morgue. Arpád waved an arm in dismay as they carried the body past, then shrugged in bitter resignation. Elizabet came over to kneel behind Ebby. “Remember the tunnel that runs under the street to the Kilian Barracks? I talked Arpád into going with us—there are hundreds of armed freedom fighters still in the barracks, plenty of ammunition. The walls are three meters thick in places. We can hold out there for days. Even if the rest of the city falls we can keep the ember of resistance alive. Perhaps the West will come to its senses. Perhaps the Western intellectuals will oblige their governments to confront the Russians.” She nodded toward the knapsack on Zoltan’s back. “You absolutely must come with us to send reports of the resistance to Vienna. They will believe messages from you.”

  Zoltan saw the advantages immediately. “If things turn bad at Kilian,” he told Ebby, “there are tunnels through which you can escape into the city.”

  “The reports I send back won’t affect the outcome,” Ebby said. “At some point someone with an ounce of sanity in his brain has to negotiate a truce and stop the massacre.”

  “You must send back reports as long as the fighting continues,” Elizabet insisted.

  Ebby nodded without enthusiasm. “I’ll tell them how the Hungarians are dying, not that it will change anything.”

  The four of them descended the steel spiral stairs to the boiler room and then made their way single file along a narrow corridor into a basement that had been used to store coal before the cinema switched to oil, and had been transformed into a morgue. Behind them the medical orderlies were carrying down still more bodies and setting them out in rows, as if the neatness of the rows could somehow impose a shred of order on the chaos of violent and obscenely premature death. Some of the dead were badly disfigured by bullet wounds; others had no apparent wounds at all and it wasn’t obvious what they had died of. The smell in the unventilated basement room was turning rancid and Elizabet, tears streaming from her eyes, pulled the rolled collar of her turtleneck up over her nose.

  Threading their way through the bodies, the group reached the steel door that led to the narrow tunnel filled with thick electric cables. On one large stone someone had carefully chiseled “1923” and, under it, the names of the workers on the construction site. About forty meters into the tunnel—which put them roughly under Ulloi Avenue—they could hear the treads of the tanks overhead fidgeting nervously from side to side as they hunted for targets. Arpád, in the lead, pounded on the metal door blocking the end of the tunnel with the butt of his pistol. Twice, then a pause, then twice more. They could hear the clang of heavy bolts being thrown on the inside, then the squeal of hinges as the door opened. A wild-eyed priest with a straggly gray beard plunging down his filthy cassock peered out at them. Several baby-faced soldiers wearing washed-out khaki and carrying enormous World War I Italian bolt-action naval rifles trained flashlights on their faces. When the priest recognized Arpád, he gave a lopsided smile. “Welcome to Gehenna,” he cried hysterically, and with a flamboyant gesture he licked his thumb and traced an elaborate crucifix on the forehead of each of them as they passed through the door.

  10

  VIENNA, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1956

  THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR OPERATIONS HAD LANDED RUNNING. Moving in with his old Georgetown chum, Llewellyn Thompson, now the American ambassador to Austria, the Wiz had set up a war room in the embassy’s paneled library and started poring over every scrap of paper he could get his hands on. Millie Owen-Brack commandeered a tea wagon to ferry in the reams of Company and State Department cables and wire service ticker stories; pushing the wagon through the swinging double doors of the library, she would pile up the material on the table in front of Wisner until he disappeared behind the mountain of paper. Groggy from lack of sleep, his bloodshot eyes darting, his shirt damp with perspiration, the Wiz attacked each new pile with a melancholy intensity, as if merely reading about what was going on across a border a few dozen miles away would allow him to dominate the situation. The day before, Dwight Eisenhower had won a second term in a landslide but the Wiz had barely noticed. “Mongolian units are reportedly searching neighborhoods block by block, house by house, hunting for the ringleaders of the rebellion,” he read aloud from one operational cable that had originated with the political officer at the Budapest embassy. “Thousands of freedom fighters are being thrown into boxcars and carried off in the direction of the Ukraine.” Wisner crushed the cable in his fist and added it to the small mountain of crumpled messages on the floor. “Mother of God,” he moaned, noisily sucking in air through his nostrils. “Here’s another one from Ebbitt dated five November. ‘Kilian Barracks still holding out. Teenagers are tying sticks of industrial dynamite around their waists and throwing themselves under the treads of Soviet tanks. Ammunition running low. Spirits also. Freedom fighters have propped up dead comrades next to windows to draw Russian fire in hope they’ll run out of ammunition. Everyone asks where is United Nations, when will American aid arrive. What do I tell them?’”

  Tears clouding his eyes, Wisner waved Ebbitt’s cable at Owen-Brack. “For six years—six years!—we encouraged the suckers in the satellites to rebel against their Soviet masters. We spent millions creating covert capabilities for just such an occasion—we stockpiled arms across Europe, we trained émigrés by the thousands. My God, the Hungarians in Germany are breaking down the doors of their case officers to be sent in. And what do we do? What do we do, Millie? We offer them goddamn pious phrases from Eisenhower: ‘The heart of America goes out to the people of Hungary.’ Well, the heart may go out but the hand remains stashed in its pocket…”

  “Suez changed the ball game,” Owen-Brack said softly but the Wiz, plowing through the next message, didn’t hear her.

  “Oh, Jesus, listen to this one. It’s a cable from the Associated Press correspondent in Budapest. ‘UNDER HEAVY MACHINE GUN FIRE. ANY NEWS ABOUT HELP? QUICKLY, QUICKLY. NO TIME TO LOSE.’ Here’s another. ‘SOS SOS. THE FIGHTING IS VERY CLOSE NOW. DON’T KNOW HOW LONG WE CAN RESIST. SHELLS ARE EXPLODING NEARBY. RUMOR CIRCULATING THAT AMERICAN TROOPS WILL BE HERE WITHIN ONE OR TWO HOURS. IS IT TRUE?’” Wisner threw the cables aside and plucked the next one off the stack, as if he couldn’t wait to hear how the story would turn out. “‘GOODBYE FRIENDS. GOD SAVE OUR SOULS. THE RUSSIANS ARE NEAR.’” The Wiz rambled on, reading disjoined bits of messages, flinging them to the floor before he had finished them, starting new ones in the middle. “‘Summary executions…flame throwers…charred corpses…dead washed with lime and buried in shallow graves in public parks…Nagy, hiding in Yugoslav embassy on Stalin Square, lured out with promise of amnesty and arrested…”

  Ambassador Thompson pushed through the doors into the library. “You need a break, Frank,” he said, wading through the swamp of crumpled papers scattered on the floor, coming around the side of the table and putting an arm over the Wiz’s shoulder. “You need a square meal under your belt, a few hours shut-eye. Then you’ll be able to think more clearly.”

  The Wiz shook off his arm. “Don’t want to think more clearly,” he shouted. Suddenly the energy seemed to drain from his body. “Don’t want to think,” he corrected himself in a harsh whisper. He drew another pile of papers toward him with both hands, as if they were a stack of chips he’d just won at a roulette table, and held up the first cable, this one with deciphered sentences pasted in strips across a blank form. It was from the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles. “Here’s the word from Washington,” Wisner snarled. “‘HEADQUARTERS ADVISING VIENNA STATION THAT COMPANY POLICY IS NOT TO INCITE TO ACTION.’ Not to incite to action! We’re witnessing the Mongol invasion of Western civilization but we’re not to incite to action! The Hungarians were incited to action by our pledge to roll back Communism. The Russians were incited to action by the Hu
ngarians taking us at our word. We’re the only ones not incited to action, for Christ’s sake.”

  Thompson looked at Owen-Brack. “Don’t bring him any more paper,” the ambassador told her.

  Wisner climbed to his feet and reared back and kicked the wire wastepaper filled with crumpled cables across the room. Thompson’s mouth fell open. “You run the goddamn embassy,” the Wiz told his friend icily, pointing at him with a forefinger as his hand curled around an imaginary pistol. I run the CIA operation here.” He gestured with his chin toward the tea wagon. “Bring more cables,” he ordered Owen-Brack. “Bring me everything you can put your hands on. I need to read into this…get a handle on it…find an angle.” When Owen-Brack looked uncertainly at the ambassador, Wisner glared at her. “Move your ass!” he roared. He stumbled back into the chair. “For God’s sake, bring me the paper,” he pleaded, blinking his eyes rapidly, breathing hard, clutching the edge of the table to steady himself. Then he pitched forward and buried his head in a heap of cables and silently wept.