The Company

by Robert Littell

  Changing buses twice, Eugene made his way downtown to New York Avenue. Prowling the back streets behind the intra-city bus station, he noticed several prostitutes huddled in doorways, stamping their feet to keep them from turning numb.

  “Cold out tonight,” he remarked to a short, plump bleached-blonde wearing a shabby cloth coat with a frayed fur collar and Peruvian mittens on her hands. Eugene guessed she couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen.

  The girl pinched her cheeks to put some color into them. “I can warm it up for you, dearie,” she replied.

  “How much would it set me back?”

  “Depends on what you want. You want to hump and run, or you want to go ‘round the world?”

  Eugene managed a tired smile. “I’ve always loved to travel.”

  “A half century’ll buy you a ticket ‘round the world. You won’t regret it, dearie.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Iris. What’s yours?”

  “Billy, as in Billy the Kid.” Eugene produced one of the folded $50s from his jacket pocket and slipped it inside the wristband of her mitten. “There’s a second one with your name on it if I can hang out with you until morning.”

  Iris hooked her arm through Eugene’s. “You got yourself a deal, Billy the Kid.” She pulled him into the street and stepped out ahead of him in the direction of her walk-up down the block.

  Iris’s idea of “around the world” turned out to be a more or less routine coupling, replete with murmured endearments that sounded suspiciously like a needle stuck in a groove (“Oh my god, you’re so big…oh, baby, don’t stop”) whispered over and over in his ear. In the end the prostitute had other talents that interested her client more than sex. It turned out that she had worked as a hairdresser in Long Branch, New Jersey, before moving to Washington; using a kitchen scissors, she was able to cut Eugene’s neck-length locks short, and then, as he bent over the kitchen sink, she dyed his hair blond. And for another half-century bill she was talked into running an errand for him while he made himself breakfast; she returned three-quarters of an hour later with a used but serviceable black suit and an overcoat bought in a second hand shop, along with a thin knitted tie and a pair of eyeglasses that were weak enough for Eugene to peer through without giving him a headache. While she was out Eugene had used her safety razor to shorten his sideburns and to shave. At midmorning, dressed in his new finery and looking, according to Iris, like an unemployed mortician, he ventured into the street.

  If he had owned a valise he would have sat on it for luck; he had the sensation that he was embarking on the second leg of a long voyage.

  Strolling around to the front of Union Station, he made a point of walking past two uniformed policemen who were scrutinizing the males in the crowd. Neither gave him a second glance. Eugene picked up a Washington Post at a newsstand and carefully checked to see if there was a story about a Russian spy ring. On one of the local pages he found a brief item copied from a precinct blotter announcing the arrest of the owner of Kahn’s Wine and Beverage, along with one of his employees, on charges of selling narcotics. They had been arraigned the night before; bail had been denied when it was discovered that both the girl and Kahn had been living for years under assumed names, so the article reported.

  To kill time, Eugene bought a ticket for a bus tour that started out from Union Station to visit historical houses dating back to Washington’s Washington. When the tour ended in mid-afternoon, he ate a cheese sandwich at a coffee shop and then made his way on foot to the Loew’s Palace on F Street. He sat through Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which he had seen with Bernice the previous week. Remembering how she had turned away from the screen and buried her head in his shoulder when Janet Leigh was hacked to death in the shower, he had a pang of regret for what Bernice must be going through now. She had been a good trooper and he had become attached to her over the years; chances were she would wind up doing time in prison for aiding and abetting a Soviet agent. Eugene shrugged into the darkness of the theater; the front line soldiers like Max and Bernice were the cannon fodder of the Cold War.

  The film ended and the houselights came on. Eugene waited until the theater had emptied and then pushed through a fire door at the back into the alleyway. It was already dark out. Heavy flakes of snow were beginning to fall, muffling the sounds of traffic from the street. Feeling his way along the shadowy alley, he came to the large metal garbage bin behind a Chinese take-out restaurant. He put his shoulder to the bin and pushed it to one side, and ran his hand over the bricks in the wall behind it until he came to the one that was loose. Working it back and forth, he pried it free, then reached in and touched the small metal box that he had planted there when he first came to Washington almost ten years before. He had checked it religiously every year, updating the documents and identity cards with fresh samples provided by the KGB rezident at the Soviet Embassy.

  Grasping the packet of papers—there was a passport in the name of Gene Lutwidge filled with travel stamps, a Social Security card, a New York State driver’s license, a voter registration card, even a card identifying the bearer as a member in good standing of the Anti-Defamation League—Eugene felt a surge of relief; he was slipping into his second skin, and safe for the time being.

  The phone call to the Soviet embassy followed a carefully rehearsed script. Eugene asked to speak to the cultural attaché, knowing he would fall on his secretary, who also happened to be the attaché’s wife. (In fact, she was the third-ranking KGB officer at the embassy.)

  “Please to say what the subject of your call is,” intoned the secretary, giving a good imitation of a recorded announcement.

  “The subject of my call is I want to tell the attaché”—Eugene shouted the rest of the message into the phone, careful to get the order right—“fuck Khrushchev, fuck Lenin, fuck Communism.” Then he hung up.

  In the Soviet embassy, Eugene knew, the wife of the cultural attaché would report immediately to the rezident. They would open a safe and check the message against the secret code words listed in Starik’s memorandum. Even if they hadn’t noticed the item in the police page of the Washington Post, they would understand instantly what had happened: Eugene Dodgson had been blown, his ciphers were compromised (if the FBI tried to use them to communicate with Moscow Centre, the KGB would know the message had not originated with Eugene and act accordingly), Eugene himself had escaped arrest and was now operating under his fallback identity.

  Precisely twenty-one hours after Eugene’s phone call to the wife of the cultural attaché, a bus chartered by the Russian grade school at the Soviet embassy pulled up in front of Washington’s National Zoological Park. The students, who ranged in age from seven to seventeen and were chaperoned by three Russian teachers and three adults from the embassy (including the attaché’s wife), trooped through the zoo, ogling the tawny leopards and black rhinoceroses, leaning over the railing to laugh at the sea lions who ventured into the outdoor part of their basin. At the Reptile House, the Russians crowded around the boa constrictor enclosure while one of the teachers explained how the reptile killed its prey by constriction, after which its unhinged jaw was able to open wide enough to devour an entire goat. Two of the Russian teenagers in the group were carrying knapsacks loaded with cookies and bottles of juice for a late afternoon snack; a third teenager carried a plastic American Airlines flight bag. In the vestibule of the reptile house, the Russians crowded around as the cultural attaché’s wife distributed refreshments from the knapsacks. Several of the boys, including the one carrying the flight bag, ducked into the toilet. When the boys emerged minutes later the flight bag was nowhere to be seen.

  Its disappearance was not noticed by the two FBI agents monitoring the school outing from a distance.

  When the Russians returned to their bus outside, dusk was settling over Washington. Eugene, coming through the reptile house from the other direction, stopped to use the toilet. A moment later he retraced his steps, going out the other doo
r and heading in the opposite direction from the Russians visiting the zoo.

  He was carrying an American Airlines flight bag.

  Back in the tiny apartment he had rented over the garage of a private house in the Washington suburb of Tysons Corner, he unpacked its contents. There was a small General Electric clock radio and instructions on how to transform it into a shortwave receiver; an external antenna coiled and hidden in a cavity inside the back cover; a microdot viewer concealed as the middle section of a working fountain pen; a deck of playing cards with ciphers and new dead drop locations, along with their code designations, hidden between the faces and the backs of the cards; a chessboard that could be opened with a paperclip to reveal a spare microdot camera and a supply of film; a can of Gillette shaving cream, hollowed out to cache the rolls of developed film that would be retrieved from SASHA; and $12,000 in small-denomination bills bunched into $1,000 packets and secured with rubber bands.

  That night Eugene tuned into Radio Moscow’s 11 P.M. shortwave English language quiz program. He heard a contestant identify the phrase “Whiffling through the tulgey wood” as a line in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. “ Whiffling through the tulgey wood” was one of Gene Lutwidge’s personal code phrases. At the end of the program Eugene copied down the winning lottery number, then took his lucky ten-dollar bill from his wallet and subtracted the serial number from the lottery number, which left him with a Washington phone number. At midnight, he dialed it from a phone booth.

  “Gene, is that you?” the woman asked. To Eugene’s ear, she sounded half a world and half a century away, a delicate bird whose wings had been clipped by age. She spoke English with a heavy Eastern European accent. “I placed an advertisement in the Washington Post offering for sale a 1923 Model A Duesenberg, the color of silver, in mint condition, one of only one hundred and forty sold that year.”

  “I understand,” Eugene said. Starik was notifying SASHA that Eugene Dodgson had dropped from sight and Gene Lutwidge had taken his place; the cryptic advertisement would automatically activate an entirely different set of dead drops, as well as the code names identifying them.

  “I received nine responses,” the woman continued. “One of the nine inquired whether I would be interested in trading the Duesenberg for a black 1913 four-door Packard in need of restoration.”

  “What did you say?”

  The woman on the other end of the phone line sighed. “I said I would think about it. The caller said he would phone again in two days’ time to see if I agreed to the trade. The appointed hour passed at seven this evening but he never called.”

  Eugene said, “I hope you find a customer for your Duesenberg.” Then he added, “Goodbye and good luck to you.”

  The woman said, “Oh, it is for me to wish you good luck, dear child,” and hung up.

  Back in his apartment, Eugene consulted his new list of dead drops. A black 1913 four-door Packard in need of restoration—that was the code phrase indicating that SASHA would be leaving four rolls of microfilm, fifty exposures to a roll, in a hollowed-out brick hidden in the bushes behind the James Buchanan statue in Meridian Hill Park.

  Bone-tired, Eugene set the clock radio’s alarm for six and stretched out on the bunk bed. He wanted to be at the park by first light and gone by the time people started walking their dogs. He switched off the light and lay there for a long time, concentrating on the silence, staring into the darkness. Curiously, the specter of his mother, a ghostly figure seen through a haze of memory, appeared. She was speaking, as she always did, in a soft and musical voice, and using their secret language, English; she was talking about the genius and generosity of the human spirit. “These things exist as surely as greed and ruthlessness exist,” she was saying. “It is for Lenin’s heirs, the soldiers of genius and generosity, to vanquish Lenin’s enemies.”

  The battle was, once again, joined. Eugene Dodgson had disappeared from the face of the earth. Gene Lutwidge, a Brooklyn College graduate who had been raised in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and was struggling to make a living writing short stories, had taken his place and was now operational.

  The tall, rangy Russian with a scraggy pewter beard ducked through the door of the Ilyushin-14 and, blinded by the brilliant Cuban sunlight, hesitated on the top step of the portable stairs. The thin metal dispatch case in his left hand was attached to his left wrist by a stainless steel wire. Descending the steps, the Russian caught sight of a familiar figure leaning against the door of the gleaming black Chrysler idling near the tail of the plane. As the other passengers headed in the direction of the customs terminal, the Russian broke ranks and started toward the Chrysler. Two Cuban policemen in blue uniforms ran over to intercept him but the man at the car barked something in Spanish and they shrank back. The Cuban stepped forward from the Chrysler and embraced the Russian awkwardly. Tucking an arm behind his visitor’s elbow, he steered him into the back seat of the car. A bodyguard muttered a code phrase into a walkie-talkie and climbed into the front seat alongside the driver. The Cuban translator and a middle-aged secretary settled onto jump seats facing the Russian and his Cuban host. The driver threw the Chrysler into gear and sped across the tarmac and the fields beyond toward an airport gate guarded by a squad of soldiers. Seeing the Chrysler approaching they hauled the gate open. A lieutenant snapped off a smart salute as the Chrysler whipped past. The car jounced up an embankment onto an access road and roared off in the direction of the Havana suburb of Nuevo Vedado. Its destination: the tree-shaded villa two houses down the street from Point One, Castro’s military nerve center.

  Speeding along a broad boulevard lined with flame trees and bougainvillea, Manuel Piñeiro, the chief of Castro’s state security apparatus, instructed the translator to tell their guest how pleased the Cubans were to welcome Pavel Semyonovich Zhilov on his first visit to Communist Cuba. Starik caught sight of a group of elderly men and women doing calisthenics in a lush park and nodded his approval; this was the Cuba he recognized from dozens of Soviet newsreels. Turning back to Piñeiro, he offered an appropriate response: it went without saying that he was delighted to be here and eager to be of service to the Cuban revolution. The two men filled the quarter-hour ride to Nuevo Vedado with small talk, chatting—through the interpreter, a diffident young man hunched forward on his seat and nodding at every word—about what they’d been up to since they’d last met in Moscow. They brought each other up to date on common acquaintances: the German spy chief Marcus Wolf, who had achieved considerable success infiltrating Reinhard Gehlen’s West German intelligence organization; a former Soviet ambassador to Cuba, who had fallen afoul of Khrushchev and been sent off to manage a shoe factory in Kirghizstan; a gorgeous Cuban singer, who was rumored to be having a lesbian affair with the wife of a member of the Soviet Central Committee. Piñeiro, an early and ardent Fidelista who had been educated at New York’s Columbia University before joining Castro and his guerrillas in the Sierra Maestras, wanted to know if the stories in the American press about Leonid Brezhnev, currently chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, were accurate. Had Brezhnev set his sights on succeeding Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Party? Did he have supporters in the Politburo? How would the tug-of-war between the two factions affect Soviet policy toward Cuba?

  It was only when the two men and the young translator were alone in the “secure” room-within-a-room on the top floor of Piñeiro’s villa that they got down to the serious business that had brought Starik to Cuba.

  “I have come to alert you to the critical danger that confronts the Cuban revolution,” Starik announced. Producing a small key, he unlocked the stainless steel bracelet, opened the dispatch case and took out four manila folders with security notations marked on the covers in Cyrillic. He opened the first folder, then, eyeing the translator, frowned uncertainly. Piñeiro laughed and said something in Spanish. The young translator said in Russian, “He tells you that I am the son of his sister, and his godson.”

  Piñeiro said,
in English, “The boy is my nephew. It is okay to speak in front of him.”

  Starik sized up the translator, nodded and turned back to Piñeiro. “The information we have developed is too important, and too secret, to risk sending it through the usual channels for fear the Americans may have broken our ciphers, or yours. For reasons that will be apparent to you we do not want them to know that we know. The American Central Intelligence Agency”—Starik remembered Yevgeny teaching him the English words for glavni protivnik, and used them now—“the principal adversary…” He reverted to Russian. “…is arming and training a force of Cuban exiles, recruited in Miami, for the eventual invasion of Cuba. This force includes a brigade of ground troops and several dozen pilots of B-26s expropriated from a fleet of mothballed bombers near the city of Tucson in the state of Arizona. The CIA’s B-26 bombers differ from your Cuban air force B-26s in as much as they are fitted with metal nose cones where yours have plastic nose cones.”

  Piñeiro extracted some deciphered cables from a thick envelope and ran his thumb nail along lines of text. “What you say does not come as news to us, my dear Pasha,” he said. “We have, as you can imagine, made an enormous effort to develop assets in Miami; several of them actually work for the CIA’s Miami Station, located on the campus of the University of Miami. According to one of my informants the Cuban mercenaries, known as Brigade 2506, are being trained by the Americans at Retalhuleu in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Guatemala and now numbers four thousand.”

  Starik, an austere man who, in a previous incarnation, might have been a monk, permitted a weak smile onto his lips; the expression was so rare for him that it somehow looked thoroughly out of place. “The number of four thousand is inaccurate,” he told Piñeiro. “This is because they began numbering the exiles starting with twenty-five hundred to mislead you. The mercenary bearing the number twenty-five-oh-six was killed in a fall from a cliff and the brigade adopted his number as its official name.”