The Company

by Robert Littell

  When she quit work at eight the next morning, she brought the package to the small used-clothing store on a side street off the Arbat run by the Orlev brothers. It was the older of the two, Mandel Orlev, dressed in the dark suit and dark raincoat associated with operatives of the KGB, who had delivered the package to the hotel the previous afternoon. Mandel, elated to discover that their scheme appeared to have worked, collected his briefcase and made his way to Cistyeprudnyi by metro and then on foot to the address written on the package. Taking a book from the briefcase, he sat reading for hours in the small neighborhood park separated by a low fence from the entrance to number 12 Ogorodnaia. A dozen people came and went but none of them resembled the description of Klimov-Kukushkin or his wife, Elena, or their daughter, Ludmilla. When it started to grow dark Mandel’s brother, Baruch, relieved him and hung around until after ten, by which time he was too cold to remain any longer. The next day, and the day following, the two brothers spelled each other watching the entrance to number 12 Ogorodnaia. It wasn’t until the morning of the fourth day that their patience was rewarded. A Zil driven by a chauffeur pulled up in front of the door and a man with long, vaguely blond hair and the heavy shoulders and thick body of a wrestler emerged from the back seat. He used a key to open the front door of the building and disappeared inside. Three quarters of an hour later he reappeared, followed by a short, heavy woman with close-cropped hair that was beginning to turn white. The two talked for a moment on the sidewalk until a slender girl of about eight came running out of the building behind them. The parents laughed happily.

  In the park, Mandel Orlev positioned his battered briefcase and tripped the shutter of the West German Robot Star II camera hidden under the flap.

  10

  WASHINGTON, DC, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1974

  OUTSIDE, RAZOR-EDGED GUSTS CURLING OFF THE CHESAPEAKE flayed the trees, giant waves lashed the shoreline. From his room on the third floor of the private sanatorium, Leo Kritzky watched nature’s riot through the storm window. His wife, Adelle, was brewing up a pot of coffee on the electric plate. “You look much better,” she was saying as she cut the banana cake she’d baked and handed him a wedge. “The difference is night and day.”

  “No place to go but up,” Leo said.

  “You planning to tell me what happened?” she asked, her back toward him.

  “We’ve been through all that,” Leo said. “Can’t.”

  Adelle turned to face Leo. She had suffered also, though nobody seemed much concerned about that. “The United States Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act over President Ford’s veto today,” she told him. Try as she might she couldn’t keep the anger out of her voice. “Which means ordinary citizens can sue the CIA to get at your secrets. But my husband disappears for four months and one week and turns up looking like he survived the Bataan death march and nobody—not you, not the people who work with you—will tell me what’s going on.”

  Leo said, “That’s the way it has to be, Adelle.”

  From things Jack had said—and not said—Adelle had figured out that the Company had done this to Leo. “You can’t let them get away with it,” she whispered.

  Leo stared out the window, wondering how trees could be pushed so far over and still not break. He had been pushed over, too; like the trees, he had not broken. There had been days when he’d been tempted to sign the confession that Angleton left on the table during the interrogations; the morning he discovered the dead body of the Sphinx of Siberia, he would have killed himself if he could have figured out how to do it.

  It was one month to the day since Jack and Ebby had turned up in his padded cell, a doctor and a nurse in tow, to set him free. “You’ve been cleared, old buddy,” Jack had said. His voice had choked with emotion. “Angleton, all of us, made a horrible mistake.”

  Tears had welled in Ebby’s eyes and he had had to look away while the doctor examined Leo. His hair, or what was left of it, had turned a dirty white, his bruised eye sockets had receded into his skull, a scaly eczema covered his ankles and stomach.

  “Where are we here—Gestapo headquarters?” the doctor had remarked as he was taking Leo’s pulse. He had produced a salve for the eczema and a concoction of vitamins in a plastic container, which Leo began sipping through a straw. “What in God’s name did you guys think you were doing?”

  Leo had answered for them. “They were defending the Company from its enemies,” he had said softly. “They only just discovered I wasn’t one of them.”

  “We were led up the primrose path,” Ebby had said miserably. “Somehow we have to make it up to you.”

  Leo had plucked at Jack’s sleeve while they were waiting for the nurse to return with a wheelchair. “How’d you figure it out?” he had asked.

  “You figured it out,” Jack had said. “You predicted the walk-in would never be fluttered. He wasn’t. The Russians pulled him back to Moscow on a pretext, just the way you said they would. Then they arrested him. There was a trial and an execution. Only it all turned out to be theater. We found out the walk-in was still among the living, which meant his serials were planted. For some reason they wanted Angleton to decide you were SASHA.”

  “Trying to throw him off the scent of the real SASHA,” Leo had guessed.

  “That’s as good an explanation as I’ve heard,” Jack had said.

  “And Angleton? Does he admit—“

  “His days are numbered. Colby is offering him a Chief of Station post to get him out of Washington. Angleton’s hanging on to counterintelligence with his fingernails. He’s mustering his troops but there aren’t many of them left. Skinny is the Director’s trying to work up the nerve to fire him.”

  “Not Angleton’s fault,” Leo had said.

  Leo’s lucidity had unnerved Ebby. “After what you’ve been through how can you, of all people—“

  “Heard you say it more than once, Eb. If something’s worth doing, worth doing badly. Can’t run counterintelligence wearing kid gloves. It’s a dirty job. Mistakes inevitable. Important not to be afraid of making them.” Leo had been helped to his feet by Jack and Ebby. Before allowing himself to be taken from the room, he had shuffled over to the toilet and reached down behind the pipes to recover the corpse of the moth he had hidden there. “If only you’d held out a bit longer,” he had whispered, “you would have been set free.”

  Now, in the third-floor room of the private sanatorium, Adelle filled two cups with steaming coffee. She gave one to Leo at the window and pulled over a chair to sit next to him. “I wasn’t going to hit you over the head until you’d had a chance to mend,” she said. “But I think we have to talk about it—“

  “Talk about what?”

  “Your attitude. Jack let slip that the legal people came by to offer you a package settlement.”

  “Jack ought to learn to keep his lips buttoned.”

  “He and the others—they’re all kind of awed by your attitude. You seem to have waived any claim to compensation.”

  “In any combat situation soldiers are wounded or killed by friendly fire all the time. I’ve never heard of any of them suing the government.”

  “There’s no war on, Leo—“

  “Dead wrong, Adelle. You were close enough to Lyndon Johnson to know there’s a hell of a war raging out there. I was wounded by friendly fire. As soon as I’m well enough I plan to return to the battle.”

  Adelle shook her head incredulously. “After what you’ve been through—after what they put you through—after what I and the girls have been through!—you still refuse to quit the Company.” She gazed out the window. After a while she said, “We honeymooned not far from here.”

  Leo nodded slowly. “We watched the sun rising over Chesapeake Bay…”

  “Our life together began with two deaths—your dog and my cat. And then we turned our backs on death and went forward toward life.” She started to choke up. “Everything happening at once…my father dying…you disappearing without a trace. I couldn’t
sleep, Leo…I stayed up nights wondering if you were alive, wondering if I’d ever see you again. All those nights, all those weeks, I felt that death was right behind me, looking over my shoulder. It can’t go on like this, Leo. You have to choose—“

  “Adelle, this conversation is a terrible mistake. You’re too emotional. Give it time—“

  “You can only have one of us, Leo—the Company or me.”

  “Please don’t do this.”

  “I’ve made up my mind,” she announced. “I tried to bring up the subject several times before you disappeared for four months. With you recovering in this clinic, I was only waiting for the right moment.”

  “There is no right moment for such conversations.”

  “That’s true enough. So here we are, Leo. And I’m asking you the wrong question at the wrong moment. But I’m still asking. Which will it be?”

  “I’ll never quit the Company. It’s what I do for a living, and what I do best—protecting America from its enemies.”

  “I loved you, Leo.”

  He noticed the past tense. “I still love you.”

  “You don’t love me. Or if you do, you love other things more.” She stood up. “You can keep the house—I’ll move into Daddy’s. If you have a change of heart…”

  “My heart won’t change—it’s still with you, Adelle. With you and with the girls.”

  “But you’ve got this zealot’s head on your shoulders and it overrules your heart—that’s it, isn’t it, Leo?” She collected her duffle coat from the foot of the bed and headed for the door. She looked back at the threshold to see if he would say something to stop her. They eyed each other across the chasm that separated them. Behind Leo nature’s riot whipped angrily at the panes of the storm window. Flicking tears away with a knuckle, Adelle turned on a heel and walked out of her twenty-three year marriage.

  Nellie, looking radiant in a flaming-orange body-hugging knee-length dress with long sleeves and a high collar, clung to Manny’s arm as the Justice of the Peace carefully moistened the official seal with his breath, and then stamped and signed the marriage certificate. “Reckon that ’bout does it,” he announced. “Never could figure out at which point in the ceremony you’re actually hitched but you sure as shootin’ are now. You want to put the certificate into one of these leather frames, it’ll run you ten dollars extra.”

  “Sure, we’ll take the frame,” Manny said.

  Nellie turned to her mother and Ebby, who were standing behind them. “So the dirty deed is done,” she told them with a giggle.

  Jack, Millie, and their son, Anthony, came up to congratulate the newlyweds. Half a dozen of Manny’s friends from the Soviet Division, along with their wives or girl friends, crowded around. Leo, on a day’s furlough from the private sanatorium, waited his turn, then kissed the bride and shook Manny’s hand. He nodded at them and it took a moment or two before he could find words. “I wish you both a long and happy life together,” he said softly.

  Elizabet called out, “Everyone’s invited back to our place for Champagne and caviar.”

  “I’m going to get high on Champagne,” Anthony announced.

  “No, you’re not, young man,” Jack said.

  Anthony, showing off for his godfather, persisted, “Don’t tell me you never got drunk when you were a teenager.”

  “What I did when I was fourteen and what you do when you’re fourteen are two different kettles of fish,” Jack informed his son.

  Elizabet handed out sachets of birdseed (on the instructions of Nellie, who had heard that rice swelled in the stomachs of birds and killed them), and the guests bombarded the newlyweds as they emerged from the front door. The wedding guests brought around their cars and, horns honking, followed Manny’s Pontiac with the empty beer cans trailing from the rear bumper back toward Ebby’s house. In the last car, Anthony eyed his godfather’s white hair, which had grown back into a stubbly crew cut. “Dad says you’ve been through the ringer, Leo,” the boy said. “How much can you tell me?”

  Leo, concentrating on the road, said, “Jack’s already told you more than I would have,”

  “I don’t have a need to know, right?”

  “You’re making progress, Anthony.”

  “Yeah, well, as I plan to make the CIA my life’s work I’ve got to learn the ropes early.” He watched Leo drive for a while, then said, “There are four or five of us at my school who have parents working at Langley. Sometimes we get together after school and trade information. Naturally, we make sure nobody can overhear us—“

  With a straight face, Leo asked, “Do you sweep the room for microphones?”

  Anthony was taken aback. “You think we ought to?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past the KGB—bug the kids in order to find out what the parents are up to.”

  “Do you guys do that in Moscow with the kids of KGB people?” Anthony waved a hand. “Hey, sorry. I don’t have a need to know. So I take back the question.”

  “What did you find out at these bull sessions of yours?”

  “We read about Manny being traded for the low-level Russian spy in the papers, so we kicked that around for a while. One kid whose dad forges signatures said he’d overheard his father telling his mother that the Russian spy was much more important than the CIA let on. A girl whose mother works as a secretary on the seventh floor told her husband that a task force had been set up to deal with something that was so secret they stamped all their paperwork NODIS, which means no distribution whatsoever except to the Director Central Intelligence and a designated list of deputies.”

  Leo said, “I know what NODIS means, Anthony.” When he returned to Langley he would have to circulate a toughly worded all-hands memorandum warning Soviet Division officers not to talk shop at home. “What else did your group discuss?”

  “What else? A girl I know’s father who is a lie detector specialist said that someone code-named Mother had called him in to polygraph a high-ranking CIA officer who was being held in a secret—“

  Suddenly Anthony’s mouth opened and his face flushed with embarrassment.

  “Held in a secret what?”

  Anthony went on in an undertone. “In a secret cell somewhere in Washington.”

  “And?”

  “And the person’s hair had become white as snow and started to fall out in clumps—“

  A stoplight on the avenue ahead turned red. The car in front ran it but Leo pulled up. He looked at his godson. “Welcome to the frontier that separates childhood from adulthood. If you really plan on joining the CIA some day, this is the moment to cross that frontier. Right here, right now. The problem with secrets is that they’re hard to keep. People let them slip out so that others will be impressed by how much they know. Learn to keep the secrets, Anthony, and you might actually have a shot at a CIA job. We’re not playing games at Langley. What you’ve figured out—nobody has a need to know.”

  Anthony nodded solemnly. “My lips are sealed, Leo. Nobody will hear it from me. I swear it.”

  “Good.”

  Ebby and Elizabet were handing out long-stemmed glasses filled with Champagne when Leo and Anthony finally arrived. Leo helped himself to a glass and handed a second one to Anthony. Jack said, “Hey, Leo, he’s only a kid—he shouldn’t be drinking.”

  “He was a kid when he started out this afternoon,” Leo replied. “On the way here he crossed the line into manhood.”

  “To the bride and groom,” Ebby said, raising his glass.

  “To the bride and groom,” everyone repeated in chorus.

  Leo clicked glasses with Anthony. The boy nodded and the two of them sipped Champagne.

  Later, as Manny was struggling to open another bottle, Ebby came back downstairs from his den. He was carrying a small package wrapped in plain brown paper, which he handed to his son. “This is my wedding present to you,” he told him. With everyone looking on, Manny tore the paper off the package to reveal a beautifully crafted mahogany box that Ebby had had made to order
years before. Manny opened the box. Fitted into the red felt was a British Webley Mark VI revolver with “1915” engraved in the polished wood of the grip. Manny knew the story of the weapon—it was the revolver that the young Albanians had presented to Ebby before they set off on their fatal mission to Tiranë. He hefted the weapon, then looked up at his father. Watching from the side, Elizabet brought the back of a fist to her mouth.

  “Consider this a sort of passing of the torch,” Ebby said.

  Manny said, “Thanks, Dad. I know what this gun means to you. I will never forget where you got it. And I will always be true to it.”