The Good Assassin

by Paul Vidich

  Thudding mortar fire came a second time far off and it was mixed with short bursts of rifle fire.

  “Rebel mortars,” Graham said. “Soldiers returning fire. Listen. Long bursts, shooting into the dark. Fear firing. Rebels don’t have the ammunition to waste like that. Let’s go. No need to run.”

  They approached the pool of light that illuminated the checkpoint. Graham restrained Mueller’s arm when they came to the light’s perimeter. “We don’t want them to think we’re sneaking up on them. They are more frightened than we are.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “We ask to spend the night. It’s too far to walk to the ranch.”

  “I could make it.”

  A guard emerged from the door at the top of the outside stairs and waved them forward.

  “Now we don’t have a choice.”

  Graham called out a greeting in his fluent Spanish, and Mueller understood most of the conversation that followed, including Graham’s explanation that they’d run out of gas. The two Americans stood before the steel counterweighted stanchion that lay across the road, and Mueller felt himself the target of the soldier’s raised weapon.

  “Okay,” Graham said. “They’ll let us stay until morning.”

  Mueller felt Graham’s hand on his waist. “Don’t let them see that.”

  Mueller had taken the Colt pistol Jack kept in the Land Rover, but now he stuffed it under his shirt. Mueller followed Graham up the concrete steps to the waiting sergeant, who’d lowered his bolt-action Springfield rifle, stock gripped in one hand, barrel angled to the floor. Mueller knew the outposts were manned by a second class of soldier pressed into service with little training, given uniforms harvested from dead comrades. He saw this in the young soldier’s eyes, dark, anxious, uncertain, pretending authority over his ten square meters of command. Mueller understood enough Spanish to recognize Graham’s exaggerations. It didn’t matter. The sergeant didn’t need the actual story, just a credible account that made it feel safe for him to host two strangers.

  Light Mueller had seen through the slatted window came from a propane burner’s flickering flame. Two soldiers, teenagers, Mueller guessed, sat on haunches and stirred a pot of black beans. A fourth soldier sat on the concrete floor, back against the wall, legs splayed. The room was bare except for rifles, a few rolled blankets, the sputtering burner, and a hint of urine.

  Eight hours to dawn. “We’re better off walking,” Mueller said.

  “And risk getting shot?”

  The soldiers were young, skinny, in ill-fitting uniforms with the dulled affect of men accustomed to endless waiting. The sergeant’s shoulder patch was one sign of rank, his black boots the other. His men wore sandals. Machetes and two Springfield rifles stood by the door.

  Graham slid against the wall with the bowl of beans he’d been offered, and fed himself with his fingers. Mueller passed on the meal.

  “See the guns?” Graham said. “Appeal to your sense of irony? The embargo has turned Batista’s army into a pathetic fighting force. You see the result. Army in name only. All the weapons go to SIM and Policía Militar. You know the result.” Graham nodded at the scar on Mueller’s forehead.

  They sat quietly, each looking at the boy soldiers eating, eyes watching suspiciously, and Mueller again looked around the room, but there was nothing he had missed in his first survey, and the only change was in the soldiers’ faces, done feeding themselves with cupped fingers.

  Graham offered to share his bowl with Mueller. “It might be your last meal.”

  “I’ll take my chances.” This was the Graham Mueller remembered. The joking choice of mortal outcomes carelessly thrown out like a dare. This was the man he’d known, whom he’d come to grudgingly respect even when he didn’t like him.

  Mueller gazed at him at home on the floor, using his fingers to eat. He reflected upon this son of the American South, a redneck born in the Mississippi delta whose salesman father was a part-time con artist who moved the family to a farm in Ohio to build a better life, and then abandoned his wife and son. Graham’s neck tanned whenever he spent an hour in the sun, and Mueller had seen it happen on summer days in Austria organizing farmers, when his ruddy neck and arms simply got redder.

  Mueller thought him a runty man when they first met, Mueller’s lanky frame rising a head above Graham, but it was Graham who commanded. His unusual physical stamina and equally unusual assertiveness made up for his lack of stature. He had always been the one who worked long hours—longer than most—putting in twelve-hour days and surviving on five hours of sleep in the field.

  His assertiveness didn’t show in his soft tenor voice, but if he got excited, and Mueller had seen him very excited at times, particularly when he saw laziness in others, Graham had a brisk way of letting you know he was displeased. He always seemed to Mueller the kind of man who knew what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to go about doing it.

  Details fascinated Graham. He prized facts. He absorbed great quantities of them and when he needed more to complete a picture, he searched relentlessly until confident he had all the facts needed to solve a problem or make a judgment. He was of a class of deeply optimistic men, Mueller knew, and he knew this because he recognized himself in Graham, who had lived through World War II, who believed in the power of an idea—who believed that any challenge could be overcome by willpower, and by money, intellect, and when necessary, covert action.

  Hungary, Austria, Guatemala. He’d been on the bayonet borders of the Cold War. He’d driven mountain roads in Guatemala that no one else would drive just to prove they could be driven, and in the process he’d been shot at twice, wounded once. Stories collected around Graham. He took risks that frightened other men. The odds, he boasted, didn’t apply to him.

  Mueller was not jealous of Graham, or only occasionally so, when he stood at the mirror, a little resentful of life, unhappy he’d grown older without any proud successes, perhaps his own fault, to be sure, but luck too had been against him. In those moments Toby Graham came to mind as the schoolmate who’d come close to fulfilling his early promise. He’d kept at it and hadn’t let disappointments sap his resolve. Mueller admired Graham for staying in the game—chalking up enough promotions to keep admirers whispering. If Mueller had felt better about himself he wouldn’t have given in to envy. But, he resented Graham because he was naturally good at his job—good at most things—good with women who found him attractive because he wasn’t caught up in boasts, or weighed down with sorrows, and he seemed indifferent to fame and failure. And yes, Mueller resented the poor farm boy Graham, who made good and made success seem easy. Mueller smiled at Graham’s predicament, but he didn’t take satisfaction in his misfortune. He’d stayed in the game and tried to make a difference, and Mueller admired him for that. There it was. Ripe jealousy and its twin—reluctant admiration.

  • • •

  “You can’t imagine what this war has become, George.”

  Mueller had closed his eyes. He found Graham fully awake, alive in the silence of the room, his mind restlessly engaged by the quiet. The old spirit fatigued.

  “American reporters want a good story—and some of them want to believe Castro is a hero. They’ve invented him, you know, the Times did, when Matthews found him alive in the Sierra Maestra miraculously resurrected. And now it’s hard to book a hotel in Havana. Newsmen are flying in to witness Batista’s fall. Everyone wants to be there when the end comes.”

  Graham looked at Mueller. “I’m surprised they sent you down as a travel writer. It shows how out of touch they are, thinking a journalist assigned to cover casinos in a war zone is a credible cover. Christ, George, now you know what I’m up against.”

  Mueller waited for Graham to add to his outburst, but he saw that he’d used up his rancor. This was the field officer’s complaint. Headquarters never understood the dynamics on the ground. Desk men preferred the elegant, but utterly impractical operation that fit nicely into a memorandum. You were told to accompli
sh a goal and it was understood the methods used were whatever the situation required so long as the Agency’s involvement, if discovered, could be plausibly denied.

  Somehow they’d gotten on to another topic. Mueller heard a change in Graham’s voice, a drop in register that sounded like the prelude to an admission.

  “I was there, you know.”

  Mueller looked at Graham, confused. Had he missed something? “Where?”

  “Guatemala City. The last days of PBSUCCESS. It was the same type of thing we ran in Vienna, rolling up communist networks and collaborators. We were to take out Árbenz and install Castillo Armas, which we did. It was done well, like a flawless production of Richard II.” Graham winked. “A corrupt man infused with self and vain conceit.”

  “I didn’t know.” A lie.

  “Four years ago. We ran a radio station that broadcast from a ship anchored two miles offshore. We used call letters of a Spanish-language station in Miami, so it sounded like a real radio station, and the radio announcer read news reports of a large invading army entering Guatemala from the north whose goal was to unseat Árbenz. The announcer reported that a B-26 bomber hit an oil refinery outside the capital, and an armor-led, air-force-backed army was invading. It scared the bejesus out of Árbenz.

  “We had a good time writing the scripts for those broadcasts,” Graham said. “We turned one rickety bomber and a pathetic squad of fifty-six poorly trained soldiers into a Roman legion. Well, it worked. Árbenz fled.”

  Graham paused. “We knew we didn’t have a good shot at a coup. We had no resources and Árbenz had been democratically elected, so there was no chance we’d foment a popular uprising. What’s the saying? If you have the law, argue the law. If you’ve got the facts, argue the facts. If you have neither, raise your voice and pound your fists. Well, we had no army, no air force, no popular support, but we had a radio transmitter and a clever copywriter. We hired the press relations guy from United Fruit. He wrote the script. He was an old radio guy who remembered Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, and he came up with the idea. It was a bright shining lie.”

  Graham laughed. “They thought we could do the same here, but Castro works the press better than we do. Matthews’s front-page piece in the Times said Castro was alive and he had a well-armed force. Remember that? Well, Castro marched the same six rebels around the mountain camp in different hats so Matthews became convinced there were a hundred well-armed men.”

  Graham paused, eyes alert to sounds. Full-throated croaking frogs drifted in from outside. Soldiers had dozed off. Even the sentry on guard duty at the door had closed his eyes.

  “I was lucky,” Graham said, voice deeper, quieter. Thoughts stirred by his account nested in his mind. “Our radio victory meant we didn’t have to create ‘K’ groups. The killers.” Graham paused again. He looked at his clasped hands.

  “Some things changed in the Agency after you left. I saw it in Berlin. There was coldness in the thinking. The planning. A sterility. Violent methods. New bureaucrats hired to fill desk jobs—and they played the game without ever having been in the field. Artichoke interrogations were done in teams of three. We used sodium amytal, sodium pentothal, and LSD, often together with beatings. Artichoke explored whether a man under drug influence and hypnosis could be made to assassinate a target. Interrogations used electric shock to produce convulsions and eventually, they hoped, amnesia, wiping out the memory of murder. I was there. I was in the room. Men died. It was all concocted by ambitious men thinking they were playing a Cold War board game. Do you know what I’m talking about? It was a feeling I got—hard to put into words—these perfectly decent Ivy Leaguers at their desks writing memos on extreme interrogation and assassination. We were given a manual on the best ways to extract a man’s eyes to keep him alive, but blind, one eye at a time, to get a confession. Decent men, ambitious men, who were asked to rationalize assassinations, so they wrote a manual on the most effective way to kill. I got the manual in Guatemala.

  “The tone of the manual was appalling. Assassination is a terrible, horrible choice. A last resort. None of that came through. It laid out the best way to kill a popular and democratically elected head of state. This may seem like a small distinction, but the memo crystallized for me the changes I’d seen in the Agency. Too many men thoughtlessly representing the popular prejudices, the political rhetoric, doing what they thought would get them promoted, if you want to be cynical, and gone from the Agency were the good men—like you, George—good men with built-in, shockproof shit detectors. Where was respect for human decency?”

  Mueller was surprised by Graham’s righteous tone. He turned to look. He saw in Graham’s eyes, in his clasped hands, heard in his voice, the struggle of a man suffering the moral hazards of his work. Mueller knew he was the closest thing Graham would have to a confidant.

  So, Mueller thought. These were the opinions the director wanted to uncover. A man at war with himself. Good men were expected to question the work from time to time, and if they didn’t they probably weren’t fit for the job. It wasn’t the doubt that interested Mueller. Doubt was a healthy tonic. But what had Graham done with his doubt?

  • • •

  It was past midnight when Mueller awoke. In his sleep he had drifted in and out of consciousness, his mind still working, but dulled, asking itself what to make of Graham. Asking itself if he was asleep even as he slept, aware of sounds of soldiers shifting position, and the tremor in the concrete from a far-off mortar shell. His mind catalogued each sound without opening his eyes.

  Mueller lifted his head off his knees and saw Graham was gone. Mueller found him just outside the open door, gazing into the night. Distant tiny fires glowed where the canopy of darkness met the ambiguous horizon. A hint of smoke hung in the air. Mueller looked at Graham, quiet and still, like a sentry at a gate.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Graham said. “Look at this.” He nodded up at the evening sky. “You won’t see those stars in New Haven.”

  Mueller followed Graham’s line of sight through the gathering clouds, but seeing nothing to keep his attention he looked at the surrounding brush. Mueller listened. It had to be late. He glanced at his watch and saw that dawn was hours away. They stood side by side, silent under the entombing sky.

  “What were you looking for?” Mueller asked. “When I came out I saw you looking at something.”

  Graham shot a glance back into the room. One soldier was slumped against the wall, another gazed at them—big eyes, bare feet, hands clutching a rifle.

  “I don’t want us caught here if a mortar round is lobbed in.” Graham undid his pants and peed off the balcony. Graham spoke quietly over the sound of his urination. “They don’t have a clue.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “Can I ask you a question, George?” Graham hitched up his pants. “It’s easy and useful to do what is expected of you however many doubts you might have, but you know in this business regrets accumulate and you get to that point in your life, at least I have, when actions don’t align with consequences. I don’t want to sound foolish, but you get to a point where it’s hard to stomach the hypocrisy of it all, the self-serving commandments from Headquarters.” He looked at Mueller. “Is that what you want to hear? That what they worry about? Why they sent you?”

  Mueller said nothing.

  Graham turned back to the ambiguous darkness and the sounds of bleating frogs and continued in a confessional tone. “I could pretend it doesn’t bother me. The ineptitude. State Department embargoing arms to feel good about themselves when they go to Sunday church service. Pryce poking around like a coroner, looking to embarrass us. And the work here—hedging our bets against the wrong outcome. I can dress myself up in lies as well as the next man; blind myself to the hypocrisy. Disloyal?”

  Mueller looked at Graham.

  “Disloyal?” Graham repeated. “Perhaps. Disloyal to what? To lies and hypocrisy? I will die, as we all will, each of our lives bracketed by sleep. We all want to
die well, to be relaxed about it, and hope to leave this world a good-looking corpse.” He added, “I want my epitaph to read, ‘Here lies a good man.’ ”

  “It’s too late for that,” Mueller snapped.

  “Perhaps.” Graham took the Colt pistol from Mueller’s belt. Darkness hid his movement from the room. “I’ve unwound a coil of doubt that only this will succor.”

  Mueller stiffened. He saw Graham point the gun at his chest. The two men were close enough to feel the warmth of their breath. He felt Graham place the cocked pistol against his heart.

  Graham whispered, “You know things that make you dangerous to me.”

  The two men gazed at each other, one moment becoming two. Mueller went cold.

  “I could shoot you, George.” Graham smiled. “Violence is what I know. And I suppose I do have a gripe against you—coming down here on the pretense of, what? Making me into a traitor?”

  “Are you?”

  “Traitor?” Graham coughed his laugh. “Nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so, George. You know the line. You’re the expert. Think of me as a mortal soul who knows only the vocabulary of violence, and has now found a way to put that talent to a good purpose.”

  Mueller listened.

  Graham leaned forward. “Think, George. Think. Who is the enemy here? You were good at that. You were the one who told me it’s never who you think it is. Remember Vienna? The gunshot. Our ‘blind date’ with the KGB walk-in. Not who we thought she was.”

  Graham slipped the Colt back into Mueller’s belt. He smiled again. “People don’t like what I’m up to. Remember who I am.” He turned back from the sleeping soldiers. “The challenge for me—for us when you were working for us—is the persistent contemplation of evil, and that’s what we do, we start with the notion that we are in a battle with the forces of evil. The human problem is that it leads to pessimism and pessimism weakens the soul. I have seen the darkness—and I’ve felt its gravitational pull. I have trained death squads. Did I pull the trigger? No. But men died. I gave them the gun and showed them where to place the finger. It was my job.” Graham suddenly quieted. “It happened to you, George.”