The Company

by Robert Littell

  “There’s no news,” Ebby told her. “But there could be bad news.”

  “Oh, Elliott, it’s turning out the way you said it would—it’s Budapest revisited.”

  Adelle was waiting at the curb when Elizabet came by. The two had grown very close over the years but they barely uttered a word on the way over to Millie’s. They went around to the back and, pushing through a screen door, found Jack’s wife sitting in the kitchen. She was staring at a daytime television quiz program, waiting for it to be interrupted with the latest news bulletin. An open bottle of Scotch was within arm’s reach. There was a mountain of unwashed dishes in the sink, dirty laundry heaped on the floor in front of the washing machine.

  Millie jumped up and looked at her friends with dread in her eyes. “For God’s sake don’t beat around the bush,” she pleaded. “If you know something, tell me.”

  “We only know what’s on the news,” Elizabet said.

  “You swear to God you’re not hiding anything?”

  “We know it’s a disaster,” Adelle said. “Nothing more.”

  “Jack’s on the beach,” Millie said.

  The three women hugged each other. “You can bet they’ll move heaven and earth to get him off,” Adelle assured her.

  “There’s been no mention of an American in the bulletins,” Adelle pointed out. “Surely Castro would be boasting to the world by now if he had captured one of ours.”

  “Where’s Anthony?” Elizabet asked.

  “My mother came around and took him and Miss Aldrich over to her place the minute she heard what was happening.”

  Millie poured out three stiff shots of Scotch and clinked glasses.

  “Here’s to the men in our lives,” Elizabet said.

  “Here’s to the day they’re so fed up working for the Company they get nine-to-five jobs selling used cars,” Millie said.

  “They wouldn’t be the same men we married if they worked nine-to-five selling used cars,” Adelle said.

  The women settled down around the kitchen table. On the television screen, four housewives were trying to guess the price of a mahogany bedroom set; the one who came closest would win it.

  “The Company really screwed up this time,” Millie said. “Dick Bissell and the Director are going to be drawing unemployment.”

  To take her mind off the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Elizabet asked Millie how she and Jack had met. Millie smiled at the memory as she described the brash young six-footer sporting a Cossack mustache and wearing a three-piece linen suit who had made a pass at her on the sixty-sixth floor of the Chrysler Building. I thought you met in Vienna during the Budapest business, Adelle said. He propositioned me in New York, Millie said. I said yes in Vienna five years later. Never hurts to keep ’em waiting, Adelle said with a laugh. They talked for a while about Elizabet’s daughter, Nellie, and about Ebby’s boy by his first marriage, Manny, who had turned fourteen and was at the top of his class in Groton. Adelle described how her twin girls had giggled when they caught sight of a pregnant woman in a store the week before. When Adelle started telling them about the birds and the bees, Vanessa had interrupted. Oh, mommy, we know all about thingamabobs turning hard and getting shoved into thingamagigs and the whatsit swimming up to fertilize the egg and stuff like that. Where on earth did you learn about thingamabobs and thingamagigs? Adelle had inquired with a straight face. The two girls had explained how their school chum Mary Jo had swiped a Swedish sex education book filled with photographic illustrations of naked people actually “doing it” from an older stepsister, and then spent the weekend poring over the pages with a magnifying glass. Oh, they do grow up fast these days, Elizabet said. Don’t they, though, Adelle agreed.

  And then the phone rang. Elizabet and Adelle exchanged looks. Millie lifted the receiver. The blood drained from her lips when she heard Dulles’s voice.

  “Yes, speaking,” she said…“I see,” she said…“You’re absolutely sure? There’s no chance you’re wrong?”

  On the television screen a woman was laughing deliriously because she had won the bedroom set. Adelle went over and snapped off the set. The pinpricks of light disappeared as if they had been sucked down a drain.

  Millie said into the phone, “No, I’ll be fine, Director. I have two friends here with me…Thank you, Director. I am proud of Jack. Very. Yes. Goodbye.”

  Millie turned to her friends. Tears welled in her eyes. She was too choked up to speak. Adelle, sobbing, came around the table and hugged her tightly.

  “It’s not what you think,” Millie finally managed to say. “Jack’s safe and sound. They got him off the beach. A destroyer picked him up from a raft–” Tears were streaming down her cheeks now. “His paratrooper boots turned white from the salt water. His hands were covered with blisters. He has shrapnel wounds—the Director swears they’re scratches, nothing more.” She began laughing through her tears. “He’s alive. Jack’s alive!”

  Lights blazed late in the West Wing of the White House Wednesday night. A very tired secretary dozed at a desk immediately outside the President’s office. Even the four Secret Service agents posted in the corridor were swallowing yawns. Inside, silver trays with untouched finger sandwiches filled a sideboard. Committee chairmen trudged in and huddled with a shaken President and departed, wondering aloud how such a smart man could have gotten sucked into such a cockamamie scheme in the first place. Shortly after eleven Leo came by with the most recent situation report. Jack Kennedy and his brother Bobby were off in a corner, talking with McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor. Waiting inside the door, Leo caught snatches of conversation. “Dulles is a legendary figure,” the President was saying. “It’s hard to operate with legendary figures—he’ll have to fall on his sword.”

  “Bissell will have to go, too,” Bobby said.

  “I made a mistake putting Bobby in Justice,” Kennedy told Bundy. “He’s wasted there. Bobby should be over at CIA.”

  “That’s about as logical as closing the barn door after the horse has headed for the hills,” Bobby observed.

  Bundy agreed with Bobby but for another reason. “To get a handle on a bureaucracy you need to know what makes it tick. The CIA has its own culture—“

  “It’s a complete mystery to me,” Bobby admitted.

  “You could figure it out,” Kennedy insisted.

  “By the end of your second term I ought to be able to,” Bobby quipped.

  The President spotted Leo at the door and motioned for him to come in. “What’s the latest from Waterloo, Kritzky?”

  Leo handed him a briefing paper. Kennedy scanned it, then read bits aloud to Bobby and Bundy, who had come up behind him. “A hundred fourteen dead, eleven hundred thirteen captured, several dozen missing.” He looked up at Leo. “Any chance of some of these missing being rescued?”

  Leo recognized the PT-109 commander from World War II brooding over the safety of his men. “Some of our Cubans made it into the swamps,” he replied. “The destroyers have been picking them off in ones and twos. A bunch escaped in a sailboat and were rescued at sea.”

  As Kennedy sighed aloud Leo heard himself say, “It could have been worse, Mr. President.”

  “How?” Bobby challenged; he wasn’t going to let the CIA off the hook anytime soon.

  Leo screwed up his courage. “It might have succeeded.”

  Kennedy accepted this with a dispirited shake of his head. “A new President comes to the job assuming that intelligence people have secret skills outside the reach of mere mortals. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”

  “The problem now is Khrushchev,” Bobby said. “He’s going to read you as a weak leader, someone who doesn’t have the nerve to finish what he starts.”

  “He’s going to assume you can be bullied,” Bundy agreed.

  Kennedy turned away. Leo, waiting at the door to see if the President wanted anything else from the CIA that night, heard him say, “Well, there’s one place to prove to Khrushchev that we can’t be pushed around, t
hat we’re ready to commit forces and take the heat, and that’s Vietnam.”

  “Vietnam,” Bobby said carefully, “could be the answer to our prayers.”

  The President plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his suit jacket and strolled through the French doors into the garden. There was the distant murmur of traffic and, curiously, the first unmistakable scent of spring in the air. Kennedy tramped off into the darkness, lost in thought as he tried to come to terms with the first political disaster of his life.

  7

  WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, MAY 5, 1961

  BOBBY KENNEDY, HIS SHIRTSLEEVES ROLLED UP, A LAMINATED SECURITY pass flapping on the outside of his breast pocket, was picking Leo’s brain in the war room on the ground floor of Quarters Eye. The giant maps of Cuba and the overlays with tactical information had been removed. Enlarged U-2 reconnaissance photos of the beaches on the Bay of Pigs taken after the debacle were tacked to the walls in their place. They showed shattered tanks and trucks and Jeeps half-buried in drifts of sand, the wreckage of several LCUs awash in the surf off shore and an enormous Cuban flag streaming from the neon sign atop Blanco’s Bar. Bobby had spent most of the last ten days at the CIA, trying to read into the culture; Jack Kennedy had abandoned the idea of having his brother run the Company, but he had decided it would be prudent if an emissary from the Kennedy clan took a closer look at its inner workings.

  “My own feeling,” Leo was saying, “is that we’re in a Catch-22 situation. If we reach out for more opinions, what we gain in expertise we lose on security. When too many people know about an operation you can be certain it will leak.”

  “If you’d brought more people in on the Bay of Pigs could the disaster have been avoided?” Kennedy wanted to know.

  Leo shook his head. “Look, can I speak frankly?”

  Kennedy nodded. “If you don’t we’re both in trouble.”

  Leo scratched behind an ear. “The big problem wasn’t a lack of expertise—we had plenty of that even though we limited access drastically. There was dissent expressed, and vigorously, in this room. The big problem was that the President, having inherited an Eisenhower operation that he was then reluctant to cancel, was half-hearted. Dick Bissell, on the other hand, was one-and-a-half hearted. The nature of the beast was that there would have to be compromises if the two visions were to be compatible. Compromises killed the operation, Mr. Attorney General. Moving the landings from Trinidad was a compromise. Using those old surplus B-26s was a compromise. Cutting back on the first air strike was a compromise. Cancelling the second air strike was a tragic compromise. I think I understand why the President was tailoring the operation; as the commander in chief he’s obliged to take a global view of the Cold War. If he committed American planes or ships in Cuba, Khrushchev might move against Berlin. Our problem here was that, at some point, someone should have bitten the bullet and said we’ve made one compromise too many. The risk-benefit scale has tipped in favor of the risks. The whole thing ought to be cancelled.”

  Bobby fixed his ice blue gaze on Leo; he thought he had tapped into the Company culture at last. “What stopped you?”

  Leo considered the question. “There are two mentalities cohabiting under one roof here. There are those who think we’ve been put on earth to steal the other side’s secrets and then analyze the secrets we steal. Implicit in this mindset is the belief that you can discover the enemy’s intentions by analyzing his capabilities. Why would Hitler mass barges on the English Channel if he didn’t intend to invade England? Why would the Chinese mass troops on the Yalu if they didn’t plan to attack the Americans in North Korea? That sort of thing. Then there are others who want this organization to impact events, as opposed to predict them—rig elections, sap morale, promote rebellions, bribe officials in high places to throw monkey wrenches into the works, eventually eliminate political figures who frustrate us. The people holding this second view ran the show during the Bay of Pigs. Once the cards were dealt, once they drew a halfway interesting hand, they weren’t about to fold.”

  “And which side do you belong to?”

  Leo smiled. He had heard scuttlebutt that Bobby, during his ten-day short course, had become intrigued with clandestine operations; with the gadgets and the dead drops and the safe houses. “I have a foot in each camp,” he finally told the Attorney General.

  “Playing it safe?”

  “Playing it smart. Why fight the Cold War with one hand tied behind your back?”

  Bobby’s eyebrows arched. “You’ve given me food for thought, Kritzky.” He looked at the wall clock, then got to his feet and strolled across the war room to join several staffers who were watching a television set with the sound turned down low. Earlier in the day, Commander Alan Shepard had rocketed off from Cape Canaveral in a Mercury capsule to become the first American in space; assuming that Shepard was recovered alive, the United States—the Kennedy administration—could take credit for catching up with the Russians in the space race. On the TV screen Walter Cronkite was reporting that Shepard had reached the apogee of the flight, a hundred and sixteen miles up. A wire ticker next to the television set was spitting out a long tongue of paper. Bobby absently let it slip through his fingers, then, intrigued, leaned over the machine to read the text. The plain language message had been routed, using a secure intra-Company channel, from the communications center in another building on the Reflecting Pool, where the original cable had been deciphered.

  TOP SECRET

  WARNING NOTICE: SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION

  Intelligence sources and methods involved

  FROM:

  Mexico City Station

  TO:

  Kermit Coffin

  SUBJECT:

  Rumors from Castro-land

  1. Mexico City station has gotten wind of rumors circulating in left-wing circles in Latin America that Castro might be willing to trade prisoners captured at Bay of Pigs for $50 million, repeat, $50 million, worth of food and medicine.

  2. Cuban cultural attaché here overheard on tapped phone line telling Cuban wife of left-wing publisher that deal could be negotiated with private humanitarian groups if this arrangement more palatable to Kennedy administration.

  Excited by this nugget of intelligence, Bobby ripped the communiqué off the ticker and started toward the door.

  Harvey Torriti, just back from one of his two-martini coffee breaks and in a foul mood, noticed the Attorney General heading for the exit with the top secret message in his hand. He planted his body in the doorway. “Hey, where you going with that?” he demanded.

  Bobby, his eyes smoldering, stared at the obese man blocking the exit. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

  The Sorcerer’s jowls sagged into a sneer. “I’m talking to you, sport. Newspapers say you’re the second most powerful man in the District of Columbia, which may or may not be true. Whichever, you’re not getting out of here carrying paperwork crawling with Company indicators and operational codes. No fucking way, pal.”

  “I don’t like your tone, Torriti—“

  The Sorcerer duck-swaggered closer to Bobby, grabbed his wrist with one hand and pulled the message free with the other. Around the war room people froze in their tracks, mesmerized by the dispute. Leo came rushing across the floor. “Harvey, you’re overreacting—the Attorney General knows the rules—“

  “You and your brother fucked up,” Torriti snapped at Bobby. “The Bay of Pigs was your fault. The Cuban freedom fighters are rotting in Castro’s prisons because of you.”

  Bobby’s face had turned livid. “You’re out,” he snarled. He turned on Leo. “I want him out of this building, out of this city, out of the country.”

  “Fuck you,” the Sorcerer shot back. He waved five fat fingers in Bobby’s direction as if he were trying to flag down a taxi. “Fuck him,” he told the staffers in the war room. He belched into his fist. Then, with his flanks scraping the sides of the jambs, he pushed through the doorway and lumbered off down the
corridor.

  “You ought to have seen it,” Jack whispered to Millie. “It was like Moses catching a glimpse of the Promised Land he would never live in. Everyone understands Dulles’s head has to be lopped off. All the same a lot of us felt bad for him.”

  Scabs had formed over the shrapnel wounds on Jack’s thigh. Millie ran her fingers lightly over them in the darkness of the bedroom, then fitted herself against his lanky body. “I haven’t slept through the night once since you’re back,” she whispered in his ear. “I keep waking up and checking to make sure you’re actually here, and not a figment of my imagination.”

  Jack held her tightly. “I wasn’t a figment of your imagination tonight, was I?”

  She ran the tip of her tongue along the inside of his ear. “I love it when you’re inside me, Jack. I wish you’d stay there forever.”

  “I want it to last forever. Orgasms are the enemy. They remind me of The End that flashes onto the screen when the movie’s over.”

  “We can always start again.”

  “You can always start again. Mere mortals like me need to rest up for a few hours.”

  “There are things I can do to bring you to a boil sooner.”

  “Like what?”

  Millie could feel him getting hard. “Like talking about the things I can do to bring you to a boil.”

  They laughed softly into each other’s necks. Over the intercom Jack had strung between bedrooms they could hear Anthony tossing in his sleep. Millie said, “You started to describe Dulles.”

  “He put on a good show. He was the perfect gentleman. You’d never have known that he was about to be replaced by some rich Catholic shipbuilder friend of JFK’s. He took Kennedy around the new digs, pointing things out with the stem of his pipe—“