The Company

by Robert Littell

  “You won’t believe me if I tell you.”

  “Try me.”

  “I read spy stories. I finished one yesterday called The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by someone name of le Carré.”

  “And?”

  “He gets the mood right—he understands that Berlin was a killing field. He understands that those of us who lived through it were never the same again. People could learn more about the Cold War reading le Carré than they can from newspapers. But he loses me when he says spies are people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. What a load of bullshit! How about you, sport? How’s tricks?”

  “Can’t complain,” Jack said.

  “So what brings you to Santa Fe? Don’t tell me you were just passing through and wanted to chew the fat. Won’t swallow that.”

  Jack laughed. “I wanted to see how retirement was treating the honcho of Berlin Base, Harvey.”

  Torriti’s red-rimmed eyes danced merrily, as if he had heard a good joke. “I’ll bet. What else?”

  “You read the newspapers?”

  “Don’t need to. Anything concerning my ex-employer turns up in the news, one of my poker pals fills me in.” The Sorcerer plucked an ice cube from the glass and massaged his lids with it. “I heard about the joker from NSA you traded for one of ours, if that’s what you want to know. Newspapers said he was a low-level paper pusher, but I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  Jack leaned forward and lowered his voice. “He was a mid-level analyst working on Russian intercepts—“

  “Which means the Ruskies knew what we were intercepting, which means they were filling it with shit.”

  Jack took a sip of Scotch. He wondered if the Sorcerer broke down and ordered solids at lunchtime. “But they didn’t know we knew. Now they do.”

  “How’d you trip to him?”

  “We got a walk-in at the Russian embassy. He wanted to defect but we talked him into spying in place until his tour was up. He gave us two important things, Harvey—the NSA mole and a series of serials that led Jim Angleton to SASHA.”

  The Sorcerer rolled his head from side to side, impressed. “Where’s the problem?”

  “What makes you think there’s a problem?”

  “You wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t.”

  “Something’s bothering me, Harvey. I thought, if your twitching nose was still functioning, you might help me sort through it.”

  “Try me.”

  “Like I was saying, based on the walk-in’s serials, Angleton identified SASHA. He told us he’d been closing in on him, that it was only a matter of time before he narrowed it down to two or three. The walk-in’s serials speeded up the inevitable, that’s what Mother said.”

  “You want to go whole-hog.”

  Jack was whispering now. “It’s Kritzky. Leo Kritzky.”

  A whistle seeped through Torriti’s lips. “The Soviet Division chief! Jesus, it’s Kim Philby redux, only this time it’s in our shop.”

  “Angleton’s been giving Leo the third degree for four months and then some, but he hasn’t cracked. Leo claims he’s innocent and Angleton hasn’t been able to make him admit otherwise.”

  “Seems open and shut, sport—everything depends on the walk-in inside the Russian embassy. Flutter him. If he’s telling the truth”—Torriti’s shoulders heaved inside a very loud sports jacket—“eliminate SASHA.”

  “Can’t polygraph the walk-in,” Jack said. He explained how Kukushkin’s wife and daughter had suddenly flown home to be with her dying father; how Kukushkin had followed them back to Moscow the next day.

  “Did the father die?”

  “As far as we can tell, yes. There was a funeral. There was an obituary.”

  Torriti waved these tidbits away.

  “That’s what we thought, too, Harv. So we sent Kukushkin’s controlling officer to Moscow to speak to him.”

  “Without diplomatic cover.”

  “Without diplomatic cover,” Jack conceded.

  “And he was picked up. And then he confessed to being CIA. And then you traded the NSA mole to get him back.”

  Jack concentrated on his drink.

  “Who was the controlling officer?”

  “Elliott Ebbitt’s boy, Manny.”

  Torriti pulled a face. “Never did like that Ebbitt fellow but that’s neither here nor there. What did Manny have to say when he came in?”

  “He was at Kukushkin’s trial. He heard him confess. He heard the verdict. Kukushkin turned up in his cell to ask him to acknowledge being CIA in order to save his family. That’s what Manny’s so-called confession was all about—it was in return for an amnesty for the wife and kid. That night he heard the firing squad execute Kukushkin—“

  “How did he know it was Kukushkin being executed?”

  “He cried out right before. Manny recognized his voice.”

  The Sorcerer munched on an olive, spit the pit into a palm and deposited it in an ashtray. “So what’s bothering you, kid?”

  “My stomach. I’m hungry.”

  Torriti called over to the Hispanic woman sitting on a stool behind the cash register. “Dos BLT’s sobre tostado, honey,” he called. “Dos cervezas también.”

  Jack said, “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish, Harvey.”

  “I don’t. You want to go and tell me what’s really bothering you?”

  Jack toyed with a saltcellar, turning it in his fingers. “Leo Kritzky and I go back a long way, Harv. We roomed together at Yale. He’s my son’s godfather, for Christ’s sake. To make a long story shorter, I visited him in Angleton’s black hole. Mother has him drinking water out of the toilet bowl.”

  The Sorcerer didn’t see anything particularly wrong with this. “So?”

  “Number one: He hasn’t broken. I offered him a way out that didn’t involve spending the rest of his life in prison. He told me to fuck off.”

  “Considering the time and money you spent to come here, there’s got to be a number two.”

  “Number two: Leo said something that’s been haunting me. He was absolutely certain our walk-in would never be fluttered.” Jack stared out the window as he quoted Leo word for word. “He said Kukushkin would be run over by a car or mugged in an alleyway or whisked back to Mother Russia for some cockamamie reason that would sound plausible enough. But he wouldn’t be fluttered because we would never get to bring him over. And he wouldn’t be brought over because he was a dispatched defector sent to convince Angleton that Kritzky was SASHA and take the heat off the real SASHA. And it played out just the way Leo said it would.”

  “Your walk-in wasn’t polygraphed because he rushed back to Moscow for a funeral. After which he was arrested and tried and executed.”

  “What do you think, Harvey?”

  “What do I think?” Torriti considered the question. Then he tweaked the tip of his nose with a forefinger. “I think it stinks.”

  “That’s what I think, too.”

  “Sure that’s what you think. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “What can I do now? How do I get a handle on this?”

  The Hispanic woman backed through a swinging door from the kitchen carrying a tray. She set the sandwiches and the beers down on the table. When she’d gone Torriti treated himself to a swig of beer. “Drinking a lot is the best revenge,” he said, blotting his lips on a sleeve. “About your little problem—you want to do what I did when I ran up against a stone wall in my hunt for Philby.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is get ahold of the Rabbi and tell him your troubles.”

  “I didn’t know Ezra Ben Ezra was still among the living.”

  “Living and kicking. He works out of a Mossad safe house in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Saw him eight months ago when he was passing through Washington—we met in Albuquerque and he picked my brain, or what was left of it.” The Sorcerer took a bite out of his sandwich, then produced a ballpoint pen and scratched an address and an unlisted phone number on the inside of an
East of Eden Gardens matchbook. “A word to the wise—it’s not polite to go empty- handed.”

  “What should I bring?”

  “Information. Don’t forget to say shalom from the Sorcerer when you see him.”

  “I’ll do that, Harvey.”

  The midday Levantine sun burned into the back of Jack’s neck as he picked his way through the vegetable stalls in the Nevei Tsedek district north of Jaffa, a neighborhood of dilapidated buildings that dated back to the turn of the century when the first Jewish homesteaders settled on the dunes of what would become Tel Aviv. The sleeves of his damp shirt were rolled up to the elbows, his sports jacket hung limply from a forefinger over his right shoulder. He double-checked the address that the Sorcerer had scribbled inside the matchbook, then looked again to see if he could make out house numbers on the shops or doorways. “You don’t speak English?” he asked a bearded man peddling falafel from a pushcart.

  “If I don’t speak English,” the man shot back, “why do you ask your question in English? English I speak. Also Russian. Also Turkish, Greek and enough Rumanian to pass for someone from Transylvania in Bulgaria, which is what saved my life during the war. German, too, I know but I invite Ha-Shem, blessed be He, to strike me dead if a word of it passes my lips. Yiddish, Hebrew go without saying.”

  “I’m looking for seventeen Shabazi Street but I don’t see any numbers on the houses.”

  “I wish I had such eyes,” remarked the falafel man. “To be able to see there are no numbers! And at this distance, too.” He indicated a house with his nose. “Number seventeen is the poured-concrete Bauhaus blockhouse with the second-hand bookstore on the ground floor, right there, next to the tailor shop.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Thanks to you, too, Mister. Appreciate Israel.”

  The stunning dark-haired young woman behind the desk raised her imperturbable eyes when Jack pushed through the door into the bookstore. “I need help,” he told the young woman.

  “Everybody does,” she retorted. “Not many come right out and admit it.”

  Jack looked fleetingly at the old man who was browsing through the English language books in the back, then turned to the woman. “I was led to believe I could find Ezra Ben Ezra at this address.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Ezra Ben Ezra, when I called him from the United States of America. You’ve heard of the United States of America, I suppose.”

  “You must be the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

  “That’s me.”

  The woman seemed to find this amusing. “At your age you should have become a full-fledged Sorcerer already. Remaining an apprentice your whole life must be humiliating. The Rabbi is expecting you.” She hit a button under the desk. A segment of wall between two stands of shelves clicked open and Jack ducked through it. He climbed at long flight of narrow concrete steps that bypassed the first floor and took him directly to the top floor of the building. There he came across a crewcut young man in a dirty sweat suit strip cleaning an Uzi. The young man raised a wrist to his mouth and muttered something into it, then listened to the tinny reply coming through the small device planted in one of his ears. Behind him, still another door clicked open and Jack found himself in a large room with poured concrete walls and long narrow slits for windows. The Rabbi, looking a decade older than his sixty-one years, hobbled across the room with the help of a cane to greet Jack.

  “Our paths crossed in Berlin,” the Rabbi announced.

  “I’m flattered you remember me,” Jack said.

  Ben Ezra pointed with his cane toward a leather-and-steel sofa and, with an effort, settled onto a straight-backed steel chair facing his visitor. “To tell you the terrible truth, I am not so great at faces any more but I never forget a favor I did for someone. You were running an East German code-named SNIPER, who turned out to be a professor of theoretical physics named Löffler. Ha, I can see by the expression on your face I hit the hammer on the head. Or should that be nail? Löffler finished badly, if my memory serves, which it does intermittently. His cutout, RAINBOW, too.” He shook his head in despair. “Young people today forget that Berlin was a battleground.”

  “There were a lot of corpses on both sides of the Iron Curtain back then,” Jack allowed. “When we met in Berlin you were dressed differently—“

  Ben Ezra rolled his head from side to side. “Outside of Israel I dress ultra-religious—I wear ritual fringes, the works. It is a kind of disguise. Inside Israel I dress ultra-secular, which explains the business suit. Can I propose you a glass of freshly squeezed mango juice? A yoghurt maybe? Iced tea, with or without ice?”

  “Tea, with, why not?”

  “Why not?” Ben Ezra agreed. “Two teas, with,” he hollered into the other room where several people could be seen sitting around a kitchen table. Behind them two tickertape machines chattered unrelentingly. The Rabbi focused on his American guest. “So what brings you to the Promised Land, Mr. Jack?”

  “A hunch.”

  “That much I know already. The Sorcerer called me long-distance, charges reversed, to say that if I heard from someone claiming to be you, it was.” The Rabbi produced a saintly smile. “Harvey and me, we cover each other’s backsides. He said you had a tiger by the tail.”

  A dark-skinned Ethiopian girl, wearing a khaki miniskirt and a khaki Army sweater with a revealing V-neck, set two tall glasses of iced tea tinkling with ice cubes on the thick glass of the coffee table. A slice of fresh orange was embedded onto the rim of each glass. She said something in Hebrew and pointed to the delicate watch on her slim wrist. Ben Ezra scratched absently at the stubble of a beard on his chin. “Lama lo?” he told her. He pulled the slice of orange off of the glass and began sucking on it. “So you want to maybe tell the Rabbi what’s bothering you?”

  Jack wondered if Ben Ezra was recording the conversation. His career would come to a sudden stop if the Rabbi played the tape for Angleton, who had run the Mossad account for years and still had admirers here. The Rabbi saw him hesitating. “You are having second thoughts about sharing information. I am not indifferent to such scruples. If you would feel more comfortable taking a rain check on this conversation…”

  In his mind’s eye Jack could see Leo Kritzky scooping water out of the toilet bowl with a tin cup and deliberately drinking from it. He could hear the defiance in Leo’s voice as he rasped, “Go fuck yourself, Jack.” What the hell, he thought. I’ve come this far. And he began to walk the Rabbi through the circumstances surrounding the defection of Sergei Klimov (a.k.a. Sergei Kukushkin). “When Kukushkin was suddenly recalled to Moscow, we sent someone in to contact him—“

  “Ah, I am beginning to see the handwriting on the wall,” the Rabbi declared. “That explains what some crazy bones was doing in Moscow without diplomatic cover. Your someone was arrested, Klimov-Kukushkin was tried and executed, you swapped the Company arrestee for the NSA mole at the Glienicke Brücke.” Ben Ezra pointed to the two glasses of iced tea. “We should drink up before they get warm.” He raised one to his lips. “L’chaim—to life,” he said and sipped noisily. “You think the trial and execution of this Klimov-Kukushkin could have been staged?”

  “He wasn’t polygraphed,” Jack insisted.

  “I am not sure how you think I can help.”

  “Look, Angleton is convinced Kukushkin was caught and tried and executed, which makes him genuine and his serials accurate. You people have assets in Russia that we only dream about. I thought you might take a second look. If Kukushkin was executed there ought to be a grave somewhere, there ought to be a grief-stricken wife and daughter scraping to make ends meet.”

  “If he was not executed, if the whole thing was theater, there ought to be a Klimov-Kukushkin out there somewhere.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Where in your opinion should one start one’s inquiries?”

  “Just before the two of them were arrested, Kukushkin told our guy he was living in a three-room apartment in a hotel reserved for
transient KGB officers.”

  Wrinkled lids closed over the Rabbi’s bulging eyes as he searched his memory. “That would be the Alekseevskaya behind the Lubyanka on Malenkaia Lubyanka Street. I suppose, correct me if I am wrong, you have brought with you photographs of this Klimov-Kukushkin and his wife and daughter.”

  Jack pulled an envelope from his breast pocket. “These are copies of the State Department forms filed by foreign diplomats when they arrive in Washington—I’ve thrown in several FBI telephoto mug shots for good measure. If your people came up with anything I would be very grateful.”

  Ben Ezra’s eyes flicked open and focused intently on his visitor. “How grateful?”

  “I’ve heard that one of the Nazis on the Mossad’s ten most wanted list is Klaus Barbie—“

  The Rabbi’s voice came across as a wrathful growl now. “He was the Gestapo chief in Lyons during the war—many thousands of Jews, kiddies, women, old men, innocents every last one of them, were dragged off to the death camps because of him. The Butcher of Lyons, as he is known here, worked for the US Army in Germany after the war. He fled Europe one jump ahead of our agents—where we don’t know. Yet.”

  “A file has passed through my hands…in it was the name of the Latin-American country where Barbie is believed to be living.”

  The Rabbi pushed down on his cane, levering himself to his feet. “You would not like to make a down payment for services certain to be rendered?” he inquired. “It is not as if your people and mine are strangers to each other.”

  Jack stood, too. “Barbie is in Bolivia.”

  Ben Ezra pulled an index card and a ballpoint pen from a pocket and offered them to Jack. “Write, please, a private phone number where I can reach you in Washington, Mr. Jack. We will for sure be in touch.”

  Sometime after midnight a frail, gray-haired woman wearing faded silk Uzbek leggings under her ankle-length skirt pushed the cleaning cart through the double doors into the lobby of the Hotel Alekseevskaya. She emptied the ash trays into a plastic bucket and wiped them clean with a damp cloth, rearranged the chairs around the coffee tables, replaced the dessert menus that were torn or stained, polished the mirrors hanging on the walls. Using a skeleton key attached to her belt, she opened a closet and took out the hotel’s old Swedish Electrolux. Plugging it into a wall socket, she started vacuuming the threadbare carpets scattered around the lobby. Gradually she worked her way behind the check-in counter and began to vacuum the rugs there, too. The night porter, an elderly pensioner who worked the graveyard shift to supplement his monthly retirement check, always went to the toilet to sneak a cigarette while the Uzbek woman vacuumed behind the counter. Alone for several minutes, she left the Electrolux running and rummaged in the wooden “Mail to be forwarded” bin on one side of the switchboard. She found the small package easily; she’d been told it would be wrapped in brown paper and tied with a length of yellow cord. The package, which had been dropped off by a courier too late to be forwarded that day, was addressed to a recent resident, Elena Antonova Klimova, Hotel Alekseevskaya, Malenkaia Lubyanka Street, Moskva. At the bottom left of the package someone had written in ink: “Pereshlite Adresatu—please forward.” The day clerk at the hotel’s reception desk had crossed out “Hotel Alekseevskaya” and written in an address not far from the Cistyeprudnyi metro stop. The cleaning woman slipped the small package into her waistband and went back to vacuuming.