The Company

by Robert Littell

  “The Sorcerer is drinking himself into a grave in East of Eden Gardens.” He spotted the puzzled narrowing of Leo’s eyes. “That’s a retirement village in Santa Fe.”

  Leo sipped his espresso; he didn’t appear to notice that it had grown cold. “What about the Devisenbeschaffer? If the putschists don’t get Gorbachev on the first try, they’ll still have the bankroll in Dresden. They can cause a lot of pain with that amount of money.”

  Jack brightened. He obviously had an idea. “Okay, I’ll see what I can concoct. Give me a meeting place in Moscow. Let’s say six P.M. local time one week from today.”

  “I won’t talk to anyone from your Moscow Station—the embassy is riddled with microphones.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of sending in someone from the outside.”

  “Does the person know Moscow?”

  “No.”

  Leo thought a moment, then named a place that anybody ought to be able to find.

  Jack and Leo stood up. Jack glanced at the bill tucked under the ash tray and dropped five francs onto the table. Once outside the café, both men looked at the river. The sculls were gone; only a gray skiff with two fishermen in it was visible on the gray surface of the water. Leo held out a hand. Jack looked down at it and slowly shook his head. “There’s no way I’m going to shake your hand, pal. Not now. Not ever.”

  The two men eyed each other. Leo said softly, “I’m still sorry, Jack. About our friendship. But not about what I did.” With that he turned on his heel and stalked off.

  His shoes propped up on the desk, one thumb hooked under a striped suspender, Ebby heard Jack out. Then he thought about what he’d said. Then he asked, “You believe him?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  The DCI needed to be convinced. “To our everlasting grief, he’s demonstrated his ability to deceive us,” he reminded his deputy.

  “I don’t see what he’d have to gain,” Jack said. “He used to work for the KGB—he still may be carried on their books in some sort of advisory capacity. That’s what happened to Philby after he fled to Moscow. So it’s hard to see why he’d tell us about a KGB plot to oust Gorbachev unless…”

  The green phone on Ebby’s desk rang. He raised a palm to apologize for the interruption and, picking it up, listened for a moment. “The answer is no,” he said. “If a Soviet Oskar-II sub had sortied from Murmansk into the Barents, we would have picked up its signature on our underwater monitors…No way, Charlie—the Barents is a shallow sea so there’d be no possibility of running deep…Anytime. Bye.” Ebby looked up. “Pentagon received a report that a Norwegian fishing boat saw a submarine snorkel in the Barents yesterday.” He picked up the thread of the conversation. “You don’t see why Kritzky would tell us about a KGB plot to oust Gorbachev unless what?”

  “I racked my brain for possible motives for hours on the plane home,” Jack said. “Here’s my reading of Leo Kritzky: in part because of his roots, in part because of what happened to his father, in part because of that eternal chip on his shoulder, he was taken in, like a lot of others, by the utopian rhetoric of Marxism and enlisted in the struggle against capitalism out of a kind of misplaced idealism. His problems began when he reached the Soviet motherland and discovered that it was more of a hell-hole than a workers’ paradise. You can imagine his disenchantment—all those years on the firing line, all those betrayals, and for what? To support a Stalinist dictatorship, even if Stalin was no longer alive, that babbled endlessly about equality and then quietly and quickly silenced anyone who suggested that the king was parading through the streets in ratty underwear.”

  “So the bottom line is that Kritzky feels guilty. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “He feels betrayed, even if he doesn’t put it into so many words. And Gorbachev is the last, best hope that he may have been fighting all his life for something worthwhile after all.”

  “In other words, Kritzky’s telling the truth.”

  “For sure.”

  “Could the conspirators have taken him into their confidence—is that how he knows what he knows?”

  “Not likely. First off, Leo was a KGB agent but the chances are good that, like Philby before him, he was never a KGB officer, which means he was never an insider.”

  “And he is a foreigner.”

  “And he is a foreigner, right. In the back of their minds the KGB people must be haunted by the possibility that he might have been turned.”

  “Who’s feeding Kritzky the information on the conspiracy, then?”

  “Search me,” Jack said. “We can assume that it’s someone who trusts him with his life.”

  “All right. We have true information. I take it to George Bush and I say, Mr. President, there’s a putsch being hatched against Gorbachev. Here are the names of some of the plotters. Bush was a director of the CIA back in the seventies, so he knows enough not to ask me how we got our hands on this stuff. He knows I wouldn’t tell him if he did ask. If he believes it—a big if—the best he can do is to write a letter to Gorbachev. Dear Mikhail, some information fell into my lap that I want to share with you. Blah-blah-blah. Signed, Your friend, George B.” Ebby swung his feet to the ground and pushed himself off the swivel seat and came around to settle onto the edge of desk. “See anything else we can do, Jack?”

  Jack avoided his friend’s eye. “Frankly, I don’t, Ebby. Like you always say, we more or less have our hands tied.”

  Jack checked the little black notebook that he always kept on his person, then pulled the secure phone across the desk and dialed a number. He reached a switchboard that put him through to the clubhouse. The bartender asked him to wait a minute. It turned out to be a long minute, which meant that the Sorcerer had been drinking heavily. When he finally came on the line, his speech was slurred. “Don’tcha know better than t’interrupt someone while he’s communing with spirits?” he demanded belligerently.

  “I’ll bet I can give you the brand name of the spirits,” Jack retorted.

  “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! If it isn’t the man his-self, Once-down-is-no-battle McAuliffe! What’s up, sport? Is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in over his head again? Need the old Sorcerer to pitch you a lifesaver?”

  “You got something to write with, Harvey?”

  Jack could hear the Sorcerer belch, then ask the bartender for a pen. “Shoot,” Torriti bellowed into the phone.

  “What are you writing on?”

  “The palm of my hand, chum.”

  Jack gave him the number of his secure line and then had Torriti read it back. Miraculously, he got it the first time.

  “Can you get to a pay phone in Santa Fe?”

  “Can I get to a pay phone in Santa Fe?”

  “Why are you repeating the question, Harvey?”

  “Matter of being sure I have it right.”

  “Okay, drink a thermos of strong coffee, take a cold shower, when you’re dead sober find a pay phone and call this number.”

  “What’s in it for yours truly?”

  “A break from the drudgery of retirement. A chance to get even.”

  “Even with who?”

  “Even with the bad guys, Harvey, for all the shit they threw at you over the years.”

  “I’m your man, sport.”

  “Figured you would be, Harv.”

  It was already dark out by the time Jack and Millie picked up Jack’s car in the underground garage at Langley and drove over (running two red lights) to Doctor’s Hospital off 20th Street. Anthony, all smiles, was waiting for them in the lobby, a dozen long-stemmed red roses in one hand and a box of cigars in the other. “It’s a boy,” he blurted out. “Six pounds on the nose. We’re arguing about whether to call it Emir after her father or Leon after my…well, my godfather.”

  “The baby’s not an it,” Millie said. “How’s Maria?”

  “Tired but thrilled,” Anthony said, leading them toward the staircase. “Oh God, she was absolutely fantastic. We did the Lamaze thing until the
end. The doctor offered her a spinal but she said no thanks. The baby came out wide awake and took one look at the world and burst into tears. Maybe he was trying to tell us something, huh, Dad?”

  “The laughter will come,” Jack promised.

  Maria, now a network anchorwoman, was sitting up in bed breast-feeding. Millie and Maria tried to figure out which of the baby’s features had been inherited from the mother’s side of the family and which from the father’s. Anthony claimed that the only person the baby resembled was Winston Churchill. Jack, a bit flustered at the sight of a woman openly breast-feeding an infant, made a tactical retreat to the corridor to light up one of his son’s cigars. Anthony joined him.

  “How are things at your shop?” Jack asked his son.

  The State Department, impressed by Anthony’s experiences in Afghanistan, had lured him away from the Company three years before to run a hush-hush operation that kept track of Islamic terrorist groups. “The White House is worried sick about Saddam Hussein,” he said.

  “In my shop we’re walking a tightrope on this one,” Jack said. “Nobody quite knows what we’re supposed to be doing about Saddam, and we’re not getting guidance from State or the White House.”

  “It figures,” Anthony said. “They’d like to get rid of him, but they’re afraid that Iraq will break apart without him, leaving the Iranian fundamentalists with a free hand in the region.” Anthony looked curiously at his father. “Were you out of town at the beginning of the week, Dad? I tried to call you a few times to tell you about the countdown but your secretary handed me the standard He’s away from his desk at the moment routine, and you never called back.”

  “I had to jump to Switzerland to see a guy.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What does un-huh mean?”

  “It means I’m not about to ask any more questions.”

  Jack had to smile. “I’ll answer one of them—but you have to keep it under your hat. Even from Maria. Come to think of it, especially from Maria. The last thing we need is for some journalist to nose around trying to sniff out a story.”

  Anthony laughed. “I am a tomb. Whatever you tell me goes to the grave with me.”

  Jack lowered his voice. “I went to Switzerland to meet your godfather.”

  Anthony’s eyes opened wide. “You saw Leo? Why? Who initiated the meeting? How did you know where to find him? What did he have to say? How is he? What kind of life does he lead?”

  “Whoa,” Jack said. “Simmer down. I only wanted to tell you that he is alive and more or less well. I know how attached you were to him.”

  An attendant pushing a laundry cart came down the hallway. “This here is a no smoking zone,” he said. “Whole hospital is, actually. You have to go outside to smoke.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Jack said, and he stubbed out the cigar on the sole of his shoe and then slipped it back into its wrapper so he could smoke it later.

  Anthony asked, “How did Leo get out of Russia?”

  “Don’t know. He could have gone out to Sofia or Prague, say, on his Russian passport, and then flown to Switzerland on a phony Western passport—they’re a dime a dozen in Moscow these days.”

  “Which means he didn’t want the KGB to know he was meeting you.”

  “You’re one jump ahead of me, Anthony.”

  “In my experience, Dad, whenever I reach someplace interesting, you’ve already been there.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

  “Are you going to see him again?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Did he…express any regrets?”

  “He’s sorry about Adelle. He’s sorry about not seeing the twins.” Jack took off his eyeglasses and massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and middle finger. “I suspect he’s sorry he spent thirty years of his life fighting for the wrong side.”

  “Did he say something to make you think that?”

  Jack put his glasses back on. “No.”

  “So how do you know it?”

  “You can’t live in the Soviet Union—especially after having lived in the Unites States—and not realize it’s the wrong side.”

  Anthony looked hard at his father; he could see the pain in his eyes. “He hurt you a lot, didn’t he?”

  “He was my coxswain when I crewed at Yale. He was my best friend then and afterward. He was the best man at my wedding and the godfather of my son. What the hell—I loved the guy, Anthony. And I hate him for betraying the bond that was between us, not to mention his country.”

  Anthony gripped his father’s arm hard, then did something he hadn’t done since childhood. He leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “I was attached to Leo,” he said quietly. “But I love you, Dad. You are one great guy.”

  Jack was rattled. “Jesus H. Christ.”

  “You can say that again,” Anthony agreed.

  Laughing under his breath, Jack did. “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Walking with the aid of two canes, his bad hip thrusting forward and around and back with each painful step, Ezra Ben Ezra, known to various intelligence services as the Rabbi, approached the fence. Harvey Torriti ambled up behind him and the two stood there inspecting the bombed-out ruins of the Fravenkirche, the Church of Our Lady. “Fire and brimstone was the malediction of Dresden,” the Rabbi mused. “The city was burned to the ground in fourteen hundred something, again during the seven year war in seventeen hundred something, then Napoleon had a go at it in eighteen hundred something. In February of ’44 the allies transformed the city into a burning fiery furnace with their fire bombs. The Germans, being German, built everything in Dresden back up after the war except this church. This they left as a reminder.”

  “So what does a Jew feel when he looks at the reminder?” the Sorcerer asked his old comrade-in-arms.

  Leaning on his canes, the Rabbi considered the question. “Glee is what he feels. Ha! You expected remorse, maybe. Or worse, forgiveness. The reminder reminds me of the six million who perished in German death camps. The reminder reminds me of the churches that did nothing to stop the killing factories. You see before you a man weighted down with more than bad hips, Harvey. I travel with baggage. It’s called the Torah. In it there is a formula that instructs victims on how to survive emotionally. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a burning for a burning.”

  Ben Ezra cranked his body into a hundred and eighty degree turn and started toward the black Mercedes that was circled by Mossad agents busily scrutinizing the rooftops across the street. Torriti winced as he watched his friend struggling with the canes. “I’m sorry to see you in such pain,” he said.

  “The physical pain is nothing compared to the mental. How many people you know live in a country that may not exist in fifty years? Genug shoyn!—enough already! What am I doing here?”

  “You’re here,” the Sorcerer said, “because Israel is getting some fifteen thousand Jews out of the Soviet Union every month. You’re here because you don’t want this emigration and immigration to dry up. Which it would if Gorbachev is kicked out by a gang of right-wing nationalist thugs, some of whom happen to be anti-Semites to boot.”

  Torriti walked the Rabbi through the details of the plot to oust Gorbachev. From time to time Ben Ezra interrupted with pointed questions. Why wasn’t the CIA approaching the Mossad on a service-to-service basis? What should the Rabbi read into the fact that the Sorcerer, languishing in spirituous retirement, had been summoned back to the wars? Was the Company, or an element inside it, contemplating an operation that was outside the CIA’s charter?

  “Ha!” snorted Ben Ezra. “I thought so—how far outside?”

  The two men reached the limousine and the Rabbi, with considerable difficulty, managed to lower his buttocks onto the rear seat and then swing his legs in, one after the other. The Sorcerer went around to the other side and, wheezing from the exertion, maneuvered his carcass in alongside Ben Ezra. The Mossad agents remained outside,
their backs turned to the car, sizing up through opaque sunglasses the people and cars passing on the avenue.

  The Rabbi (only months away from retirement; his successor as head of the Mossad had already been designated) sighed. “They are scraping the bottom of the barrel when they recruit us.”

  “The alcohol at the bottom of the barrel is the most potent,” Torriti pointed out.

  “Correct me where I have gone wrong,” the Rabbi said. “You want us to identify and eventually neutralize a German national known to you only as Devisenbeschaffer.”

  “For starters, yeah.”

  “You want us to somehow get a foot in the door of the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce in order to take possession of the assets the Devisenbeschaffer may have deposited there.”

  “There’s a pretty penny in the bank,” Torriti said.

  “What do you call a pretty penny?”

  “Somewhere between three hundred and five hundred million, give or take.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Would I have come out of retirement for yen?”

  The Rabbi didn’t blink. “If I succeed in looting the bank we will split the money fifty-fifty, my share going into a fund to finance the continuing immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel via Austria, your share to be deposited in a series of secret Swiss accounts, the numbers of which will be supplied in due time.”

  One of the Mossad agents rapped his knuckles on the window, pointed to his wristwatch and said something in Hebrew. Ben Ezra wagged a fatherly finger at him. The agent turned away in frustration and barked into a tiny microphone on the inside of his right wrist. “This new generation—they are too impatient,” Ben Ezra told Torriti. “They confuse motion with movement. In my day I used to stake out houses in Berlin for weeks on end in the hope of catching a glimpse—a mere glimpse, Harvey, nothing more—of a German on Israel’s ten most wanted list. Where were we?”

  “We are where we always were, my friend,” Torriti said with a gruff laugh. “We’re trying to figure out how to save the world from itself. There’s one more thing you can do for me, Ezra.”