The Company

by Robert Littell

  Out of the blue the Wiz announced that he wanted to see the Hungarian refugees streaming across the frontier into Austria for himself. Heartache, like the common cold, needed to be fed, he said. The chief of station, alerted by the ambassador, gave him the runaround but finally provided wheels when the phone calls from the Wiz turned ugly. Millie Owen-Brack persuaded Jack McAuliffe, the officer who had laid in the screening operation at the Austrian Red Cross reception centers, to tag along as chaperon.

  The exodus from Hungary had started out as a trickle but had quickly turned into a torrent when the Russians came back in force. Each night hundreds of Hungarians braved the minefields and the Russian paratroopers who, in some sectors, had replaced the regular Hungarian Army border patrols because they tended to look the other way when they spotted refugees.

  Twenty-five minutes out of Vienna, the car-pool Chevy and its chase car (filled with Company security men) pulled up at the first in a string of reception centers. This particular one had been set up in the lunchroom of a small-town Gymnasium. The roughly two hundred Hungarians who had come across the previous night—young men and woman for the most part, some with children, a few with aging parents—were stretched out on mattresses lined up on the floor. Many sucked absently on American cigarettes, others stared vacantly into space. In a corner, Austrian Red Cross workers in white aprons handed out bowls of soup and bread, steaming cups of coffee and doughnuts. At the next table a nineteen-year-old American volunteer, wearing a nametag on his lapel that identified him as B. Redford, was helping refugees fill out embassy requests for political asylum. The Hungarian-speakers that Jack had recruited wandered through the crowded lunchroom armed with clipboards and questionnaires, They knelt now and then to talk to the men in quiet whispers, jotting down tidbits on specific Soviet units or materiel, occasionally inviting someone who expressed an interest in “settling accounts with the Bolsheviks” to a private house across the street for a more thorough debriefing.

  The Wiz, bundled into an old winter coat, the collar turned up against nonexistent drafts, a University of Virginia scarf wound around his neck, took it all in. Shaking his head, he uttered the words déjà vu—he’d seen it all before, he said. It had been at the end of the war. He’d been the OSS chief in Bucharest when the Red Army had started rounding up Rumanians who had fought against them and shipping them in cattle cars to Siberian concentration camps. Did anyone here know Harvey Torriti? he inquired, looking around with his twitching eyes. When Jack said he worked for the Sorcerer, the Wiz perked up. Good man, Torriti. Thick-skinned. Needed thick skin to survive in this business, though there were times when thick skin didn’t help you all that much. Harvey and he had winced when the screams of the Rumanians reached their ears; with their own hands Harvey and he had buried prisoners who had killed themselves rather than board the trains. Déjà vu, Wisner murmured. History was repeating itself. America was abandoning good people to a fate literally worse than death. Rumanians. Poles. East Germans. Now Hungarians. The list was obscenely long.

  A small boy wearing a tattered coat several sizes to large for him came up to the Wiz and held out a small hand. “A nevem Lórinc,” he said.

  One of Jack’s Hungarian-speakers translated. “He tells to you his name is Lórinc.”

  The Wiz crouched down and shook the boy’s hand. “My name is Frank.”

  “Melyik foci csapatnak drukkolsz?”

  “He asks to you which football team you support?”

  “Football team? I don’t get to follow football much. I suppose if I had to pick one team I’d pick the New York Giants. Tell him the New York Giants are my favorite team. And Frank Gifford is my favorite player.”

  Wisner searched his pockets for something to give to the boy. The only thing he could come up with was a package of Smith Brothers cough drops. Forcing one of his gap-toothed smiles onto his stiff lips, he held out the box. The boy, his eyes wide and serious, took it.

  “He’ll think it’s candy,” Wisner said. “Won’t hurt him any, will it? Hell, we can’t hurt him more than we already have.”

  The smile faded and the Wiz, rolling his head from side to side as if the heartache was more than he could bear, straightened up. Jack and Millie Owen-Brack exchanged anxious looks. The Wiz glanced around in panic. “I can’t breath in here,” he announced with compelling lucidity. “Could someone kindly show me how one gets outside?”

  The Hungarian restaurant, in a glass-domed garden off Prinz Eugenstrasse, one of Vienna’s main drags, was abuzz with the usual after-theater crowd when the Wiz and his party turned up after the tour of the border. Corks popped, Champagne flowed, the cash register next to the cloakroom clanged. Viennese women in Parisian dresses with plunging necklines, their musical laughter pealing above the din of conversation, leaned over candle flames to light thin cigars while the men pretended not to notice the swell of their bosoms. The Wiz, presiding over an L-shaped table in the corner, knew Vienna well enough to remind his guests—they included Ambassador Thompson, Millie Owen-Brack, Jack McAuliffe, a correspondent from the Knight-Ridder newspapers whose name nobody could remember and several CIA station underlings—where they were: where they were, Wisner announced, stifling a belch with the back of his hand, was a stone’s throw from the infamous Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte, where Adolf Eichmann ran what the Nazis euphemistically called the “Central Office for Jewish Emigration.” The Wiz swayed to his feet and rapped a knife against a bottle of wine to propose a toast.

  “I’ve had too much to drink, or not enough, not sure which,” he began, and was rewarded with nervous laughter. “Let’s drink to Eisenhower’s victory over Stevenson—may Ike’s second four years turn out to be gutsier than his first four.” Ambassador Thompson began to climb to his feet to deliver a toast but Wisner said, “I’m not finished yet.” He collected his thoughts. “Drinking their health may violate State Department guidelines but what the hell—here’s to the mad Magyars,” he cried, raising his glass along with his voice. “It’ll be a great wonder if any of them are left alive.”

  “The mad Magyars,” the guests around Wisner’s table repeated, sipping wine, hoping that would be the end of it; the Wiz’s sudden shifts in mood had them all worried.

  Several of the diners at nearby tables glanced uncomfortably in the direction of the boorish Americans.

  Wisner cocked his head and squinted up at the dome, searching for inspiration. “Here’s to a commodity in short supply these days,” he plunged on. “Different folks call it by different names—coolness under fire, gallantry, mettle, courage of one’s convictions, stoutness of one’s heart but, hell, in the end it all boils down to the same thing.” Stretching the vowel, Southern-style, he offered up the word in a gleeful bellow. “Balls!”

  Jack said solemnly, “Damnation, I’ll drink to balls.”

  “Me, too,” Millie agreed.

  Wisner leaned across the table to clink glasses with them. Jack and Millie toasted each other; the three of them were on the same wavelength. Nodding bitterly, the Wiz tossed off the last of his wine. “Where was I?” he inquired, his eyes clouding over as he slipped into a darker mood.

  Ambassador Thompson signalled for the bill. “I think we ought to call it a day,” he said.

  “Let’s do that,” Wisner agreed. “Let’s call it a day. And what a day it’s been! A Day at the Races, featuring the brothers Marx—no relation to Karl, Senator McCarthy. A day in the life of Dennis Day. A day that will live in infamy.” He melted back into his seat and turned the long stem of a wine glass between his fingers. “Problem with the world,” he muttered, talking to himself, slurring his words, “men think, for their ship to come in, all they need to do is put to sea. Lost the capacity for celestial navigation. Lost true north.”

  11

  BUDAPEST, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1956

  IN THE SMALL CHAPEL OFF THE CENTRAL COURTYARD OF THE KILIAN Barracks, Elizabet, gaunt and drawn, wearing woolen gloves with the fingertips cut off, stirred the cauldron
simmering over an open fire. Every once in a while she would feed pieces of furniture into the flames to keep them going. This was the third soup she had made from the same chicken bones. From time to time, one or two of the eighty-odd survivors would make their way down to the “Kilian Kitchen” and fill their tin cups from the cauldron. Crouching next to the fire to absorb some of its warmth, they would sip the thin broth and crack jokes about the restaurant Elizabet would open once the Russians had been kicked out of Budapest. The day before they had killed the last dog in the barracks, a pye-mongrel nicknamed Szuszi; one of the boys had held its front paws while another cut its throat so as not to waste a bullet. A soldier who had been raised on a farm skinned and eviscerated it, and roasted the meat on a grill. Talk of trapping rats in the sub-basements under Kilian ended when the soldiers discovered that the Russians had flooded the tunnels with sewage. Elizabet was just as glad. She could barely swallow the dog meat, she said.

  In an inside room under the roof, Ebby scratched out another message for Vienna on a blank page torn from a manual on close order drill and passed it to Zoltan, who tuned the radio to the weak carrier signal. The car battery was running down and the gypsy radioman figured this would be their last dispatch. In any case it was clear that Kilian—completely ringed by Russian paratroopers, pounded by tank cannon, raked by machine gun fire—could not hold out much longer. Zoltan began working the Morse key:

  situation no longer desperate now hopeless scraping barrel bottom for food ammunition pain killers russian loudspeakers promising amnesty for those who lay down arms survivors debating whether to fight to finish or negotiate surrender everyone agrees russians after betrayal of nagy maleter not trustable but options narrowing if they surrender I plan to pass myself off—

  The power indicator on Zoltan’s transceiver flickered for a moment and then blinked out; the battery had run dry. The gypsy picked it up and shook it and tightened the contacts, and then tried the Morse key again. He shook his head grimly. “Goddamn battery gone dead on us, okay,” he announced.

  From the avenue outside came the whine of a single high-powered sniper bullet. On the hour, the nine tanks facing the barracks fired off two rounds each at the thick walls and then, backing and filling in the wide avenue, ceded their places to another line of tanks; given the thickness of the barrack walls, the Russians had long since abandoned the idea of bringing the structure down on the heads of the defenders but they wanted to make sure that none of them got any sleep. Which was why, when they weren’t shooting, they continued broadcasting appeals to surrender from a loudspeaker mounted on one of the tanks.

  While sharpshooters kept the Russian paratroopers at bay by firing at anything that moved in the street, most of the survivors, including the walking wounded, assembled in the courtyard outside the chapel. His thick hair matted, his eyes receding into his skull with fatigue, Arpád passed out cigarettes to those who wanted a smoke, and rolled one for himself with the last of his tobacco. Lighting up, he hoisted himself onto a railing and searched the anxious faces. Then, speaking quietly in Hungarian, he summarized the situation.

  “He is telling them that the Corvin Cinema fell to the Russians last night,” Elizabet translated for Ebby. “Firing can be heard in the city, which suggests that hit-and-run squads are still operating out of basements, though with each passing hour there seems to be less shooting. He says to us falls the honor of being the last pocket of organized resistance in the city. We have run out of food. We have hundreds of Molotov cocktails left but only twelve rounds of ammunition for each fighter. The inevitable question can no longer be put off. With the tunnels flooded, escape is cut off. Which narrows the choices down to fighting to the end or taking the Russians at their word and seeking amnesty.”

  There was an angry exchange between several of the young soldiers, which Elizabet didn’t bother translating—it was clear from the tone that some of them thought the time had come to lay down their arms while the others wanted to go on fighting. Two of the soldiers almost came to blows and had to be separated. Arpád kept his own council, watching the young fighters through the haunted eyes of someone who had made tragic miscalculations. Finally he signaled for quiet.

  “He is calling for a show of hands,” Elizabet explained.

  By twos and threes the hands went up. Arpád concentrated on his cigarette; he was obviously against surrendering. Elizabet kept her hands tightly at her sides; she had no illusions about the Russians and preferred a fight to the finish to a Communist prison.

  Arpád looked over at Ebby. “You have earned the right to vote here,” he said.

  Ebby raised his hand. “I belong to the live-to-fight-another-day school.”

  One of the young soldiers climbed onto a crate and counted the votes. “

  The majority wants to test the Russians,” Elizabet told Ebby; it was clear that she was bitterly disappointed. “Arpád will go out under a white flag and negotiate the terms of the amnesty. Then he’ll take out the wounded. If all passes well the rest of us will surrender tomorrow.”

  From the far corners of the enormous barracks, the wounded were brought to the arched enceinte leading to the narrow passageway with the steel door set in a bend, back from the street. Many limped along on makeshift crutches. Those who could walk aided those who couldn’t. Arpád attached a soiled white undershirt to a pole. Several of the freedom fighters, blinded by tears, turned away as Arpád, with a last ferocious glance at Elizabet, threw the bolts on the armor-plated door and slipped around the bend in the passageway, out into the street.

  Ebby and Elizabet hurried up to the third floor to watch through a narrow slit in the wall. A Russian officer wearing a long gray greatcoat with gold glittering on the shoulder boards stepped out from behind a tank and met Arpád halfway. The Russian offered the poet a cigarette, then shrugged when he refused. The two men talked for several minutes, with the Russian shaking his head again and again; he obviously wasn’t giving ground. Finally the poet nodded his assent. The Russian held out his hand. Arpád looked at it for a long moment in disgust, then, thrusting his own hands deep into the pockets of his leather jacket, turned on a heel and made his way back to the barracks.

  Moments later he emerged into the street again, this time at the head of a straggly procession of wounded fighters, some of them carried on chairs, others dragging their feet as comrades pulled them toward the line of Russian tanks. The gray-bearded priest, his head swathed in bloody bandages, leaned on a girl wearing a Red Cross armband. Halfway to the line of tanks Arpád stopped in his tracks and the others drew up behind him. Several sank to the pavement in exhaustion. From the slit in the wall, Ebby could see Arpád angrily stabbing the air in the direction of the Russians on the roofs across the avenue; several dozen of them could be seen steadying rifles fitted with telescopic sights on the parapets. Arpád shook his head violently, as if he were awakening from a deep sleep. He tugged the heavy naval pistol from a jacket pocket and stepped forward and pressed the tip of the long barrel to his forehead. “Eljen!” he cried out hoarsely. “Long life!” and he jerked the trigger. A hollow shot rang out, blowing away the lobe of the poet’s brain where speech originated. Arpád sprawled backward into the gutter, one ankle folded under his body at a grotesque angle, blood gushing from the massive wound in his head. The wounded milling around him started to back away from the body. From the roof across the street a whistle shrilled. Then a sharp volley of sniper fire cut them all down. The several who were sitting on chairs were knocked over backward. It was over in a moment. Elizabet, too stunned to utter a word, turned away from the slit and stood with her back pressed against the wall, white and trembling. There was a moment of deathly silence. Then a primal animal howl emerged from the slits and windows of the barracks. Several of the young Hungarians began shooting at the snipers on the roof until someone yelled for them not to waste ammunition.

  “But why?” Elizabet breathed. “Where is the logic to all this death?”

  “The Russians must
have panicked when they heard the shot,” Ebby guessed grimly.

  Hugging herself tightly, Elizabet stared out at the body of Arpád lying on the gutter in a pool of blood. She recalled the line of Persian poetry that had inspired one of his early poems, and sought what comfort was to be had in the words. “The rose blooms reddest where some buried Caesar bled,” she murmured. She pulled the ancient Webley-Fosbery from her belt and spun the cylinder. “I have four bullets left—three are for the Russians, the last is for me. I could not face torture again…”

  Ebby went over to a body covered with pages of newspaper and retrieved the rifle next to it. He batted away flies as he searched the pockets of the dead soldier for bullets. He found two, inserted one and, working the bolt, drove it home. “I will fight alongside you,” he said.

  From somewhere above their heads came the melancholy moan of a gypsy violin; it was Zoltan, summoning the Hungarian freedom fighters in the Kilian Barracks to the last stand against the invading Mongols.

  Somewhere around two forty-five in the morning Ebby, dozing fitfully with his back against a wall and the rifle across his thighs, felt a hand gently shake his shoulder. Opening his eyes, he discovered Zoltan crouching next to him.

  “There is a way to escape,” the gypsy whispered excitedly. “Through the tunnels.”

  Curled up in a blanket on the cement floor next to Ebby, Elizabet came awake with a start. “Why do you wake us?” she said angrily. “The tanks haven’t fired off their three o’clock rounds.”

  “Zoltan thinks we can get out,” Ebby whispered.

  “The boys and me, we been working with crowbars for hours,” Zoltan said. His white teeth flashed in a proud grin. “We broke through the bricks at the lowest point in one of the narrow back tunnels and drained off most of the sewage into the basements, okay. In a quarter of an hour it will be possible to pass through. Everyone is getting ready to slip away in the night. How did you say it when we voted, Mr. Ebbitt? We will all live to fight a different day, right? Don’t make noise. Follow me.”