Morde, meanwhile, was transferred to the Maritime Unit of the OSS, where he spent the rest of the conflict.
“I’M ON THE wagon,” he wrote in a report from Livorno, Italy, not far from Genoa on the Ligurian Sea. He had begun drinking recently but now decided it was time to wind it down for fear it was turning him upside down.
Livorno had been wrecked by the war. Bridges were out, the roads full of ruts; the harbor was a graveyard of sunken ships, the coast a minefield waiting to explode.
As in the jungle, it rained a lot, and Morde’s existence there was a rugged hell. “We lay down on a pile of rubble on a chewed-up pier. . . . Half the men are down with colds,” he wrote one week.
The air stank of smoke. He spent a lot time on the sea, where his wandering life had started. In Maritime Intelligence (MI), he headed up an eighty-five-foot patrol boat that chased submarines, inserted agents behind enemy lines, planted mines underwater, collected naval intelligence, and engaged in amphibious sabotage. By 1945, Morde was an OSS chief.
Occasionally, his mind drifted to life back in the States and what it might actually be like to have a place he could, for once, call home. In a letter that winter to the Explorers Club, he wrote, “The war has provided me with many fine experiences, including an opportunity to complete another trip (during the past fourteen months) around the world. One doesn’t get any younger, however, and I look forward with pleasure to a few months of settled existence in the U.S.”
Still, while other agents complained about their uncomfortable bases, the wandering, the bad weather, the constant danger, Morde mostly seemed to relish the adventure at hand. One year, he wrote in a memo to the Washington bureau, “I’m having the time of my life.”
FOR HIS FINAL assignment, in July 1945, he headed for the Japanese-held island of Weichow, twenty-three miles south of the Gulf of Tonkin. It was the rainy season. As he and his two men fought high seas on a small fishing boat, they suddenly encountered twenty-four Japanese junks that opened fire on them.
He probably should have retreated but instead fought back for two days. Eventually, a thick fog provided him with enough cover to slip past the enemy line and onto the island. The men made camp and went off in different directions, scouting the land for intelligence. But when Morde returned to camp, after clearing debris from a runway so U.S. Army Air Forces planes could land, he found one of his men beheaded. It was an ambush. With the Japanese opening fire, the men scrambled to their boat and the man beside Morde was shot in half.
For his efforts, Morde was awarded the Bronze Star. But the violence would haunt him. After World War II ended, he resigned from the OSS, noting in a classified memo that he had taken “no sick leave.”
In a final letter to the secretary of the Explorers Club, Donald B. Upham, in the winter of 1945, Morde recalled his five years of duty overseas and, with a note of fatigue, said that his future plans were now up in the air. He didn’t know what he was going to do next. “There will come a day when I hope to be able to visit you frequently,” he wrote to Upham, somewhat dreamily, seeming to imply that he desired to visit with other explorers there and figure out a way to return to his lost city. “It is possible that I will take part once more in the world of exploration, but it is too early to decide at present.”
Journey to the Crosses
THE VOICE SAVED me.
“You okay?” It was Chris. He had doubled back. I looked at him. How much time had passed was hard to say. His face was a mess of mud, and his glasses were fogged.
“I hate this,” I said and enumerated. I hated the walking. I hated the Clif Bars. I hated the beans and rice. I hated my two sets of clothes. I hated carrying my backpack. I hated Pancho’s radio that gave us only bad news about the coup and dead people. I hated the acrid iodine-infused water. I hated the malarial fog in my head. I hated the jungle. I hated the goddamn lost city.
Chris nodded. “I know. It’s rough.”
I felt an urge to punch him.
I stood up, and for a moment we remained there. Angel and Pancho had returned. Chris had been telling Pancho we were headed in the wrong direction, and finally Pancho had figured out that we had been circling the mountain for hours instead of climbing it.
“We have to keep moving,” Chris said now. “It’s getting dark.”
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, trying to suppress the hate, and forced myself to go on. We slogged for another five or six hours through miles of up-and-down muddiness, keeping an eye out, as ever, for snakes and jaguars.
Night came. At one point I begged to stop, but Pancho began worrying about bandits.
Feeling the hate coming back again, I tried to imagine myself somewhere else—on a beach or a lake or just on the couch at home, comfortable, settled, living a conventional life. But the jungle kept intruding, like an enemy that won’t let you go even when you are dying and long past saving. On one steep descent through a canyon, my pant leg snagged on a tree trunk and ripped up the seam. I nearly lost my pants. Two minutes later, I stepped into a bog and toppled over. I had warm mud in my nose, mouth, down my underwear, up my shirt, dripping from my beard, my hair. I felt the smooth carapace of a sizable insect and tasted bug. Standing, I took two more steps and fell again, the hate pouring back into me.
“You gonna make it?” Chris yelled.
The mud had by now infiltrated every pore of my body. I had nothing left inside me. I couldn’t laugh or cry if I wanted to. I didn’t think I could move.
Then I felt something on my neck. It was Pancho, in his perfectly pressed blue button-down shirt, his hand lifting me out.
I don’t really know how I made it. I wrapped a piece of string around my leg to keep my ripped pants together and went on. For an hour or so Pancho had been claiming that he heard dogs, suggesting a settlement, but I didn’t hear anything and thought he was just trying to give me hope. But he was right. Eventually, we came to a tiny village called Cielo Azul, or Blue Sky.
The village of some half-dozen huts straddled a valley. At the first one, a Ladino man in his fifties, with his sombrero tilted forward on his head and a pistol on his belt, invited us in to eat. “You are welcome,” he said. I thought I was dreaming.
HIS WIFE SERVED us the usual, and we ate the beans on a crude wood bench outside. Somehow Pancho had found batteries for his radio, and news of the coup filled the damp night air; little had changed. The death toll had risen to seven, and there were new rumors that younger officers in the military might rebel against the coup leader. I tuned the news out. I was grateful to be at rest and grateful to be alive. Even the beans were okay.
Above us the stars were bright and close, the moon’s giant whiteness flooding the valley. The air smelled of pine. The owner of the hut asked where we were going. No Americans had ever passed through here. When Chris pointed west, the man said, “Las Crucitas,” the Crosses. He said the area was considered a burial ground. “We don’t go there,” his wife said. She had emerged from the hut and now stood beside him in a white dress and flip-flops. “Strange things go on there,” she said.
Other people from the village began to appear, drawn in by our voices echoing in the night. “There are many large mounds around there. Tall as that,” the owner of the hut said, pointing at a thirty-foot palm tree next to us.
Another man, with a handlebar mustache and muscular shoulders, materialized from the shadows. “The ones who lived there were giants. The giants built those mounds,” he said. “Who else could move those big rocks? Have you seen the pottery scattered out there? It’s huge.” All eyes were on him, the butt of a 9-millimeter jutting from his dirty white jeans.
He suggested that the giants were buried in the hills and made a rocketing gesture at the midnight stars. “There are green lights that shoot up from the mounds. We see them sometimes. The lights go up, and then they are gone.”
That night we slept in our hammocks next to a stream. Because there was an open pasture nearby, I managed to get a signal on the satellite phon
e. My daughter picked up, and her small voice sent my mind back to my agony hours before. I told her how sorry I was that I’d missed her birthday, how sorry I was to be away, that it had been so long since I’d seen her, that I thought about her every day and wished I was home with her. I was so happy to hear her voice. But she didn’t want to talk about any of that.
“Have you seen any snakes?” she asked, cutting me off.
I said I had.
“Are they scary, Daddy? What do they look like? Are they slippery?”
I told her that I’d seen an orange one and that sometimes they scared me.
“Have you seen Curious George?” she asked.
Amy came on. The first thing that came out of my mouth was “Did the raccoon come back?”
She said it hadn’t, but she didn’t sleep in our room anymore. She had duct-taped the window, and the woman upstairs had helped her screw a slatted steel window guard into place. At night she left the lights on. “I’m sleeping on a blow-up mattress in Sky’s room,” she said. “I’m tired.”
I began to apologize to her too, but she cut me off. “Listen,” she said, “we’ve been worried about you.”
We had been at odds about this trip, and now it sounded as though she had gone through her own process of thinking.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I tried to tell her everything that had happened, but there was no time. “It’s just good to hear your voice,” she said. We spoke for about ten minutes, and then I told her I was coming home. “We miss you,” she said.
“From Journalist and Explorer and Spy to a Father”
WHY DIDN’T THEODORE MORDE ever go back to the lost city? How did his life come apart? Did he die by his own hand, or was one of his enemies taking revenge? It’s impossible to answer those questions. What’s certain is that his life was turned upside down when he met a girl at a New York City party in the summer of 1948.
Gloria Gustafson was a model: blond, leggy, with a sparkling white smile that “turned heads,” as Morde told his family. She was twenty-two and had been staying at the Barbizon Hotel for Women at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Sixty-third Street. A kind of finishing school, it was home to countless fashionable young women over the years, from Grace Kelly to Joan Crawford and Edith Bouvier Beale.
Morde had taken a “consulting” job in 1947 with the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, which may or may not have been an informal intelligence mission. The last year had brought him writing assignments and radio shows, and, later, when the Arab-Israeli conflict erupted in the late 1940s, he made a twenty-eight-minute black-and-white documentary of the Gaza strip, Sands of Sorrow, about the suffering in Palestinian refugee camps.
What the two talked about at the party in Manhattan is lost to time, as is much of their short life together. Family members remember, though, that Morde fell for Gustafson almost immediately—something that hadn’t happened to him before. He had spent his life running away to far-flung parts of the world, and it seemed as though he’d forgotten about love or that love had forgotten about him. But she drew him in, and he kept looking at her. He liked the fact that every man in the room was gawking at her slender figure and her lipsticked smile. “I’m visiting some friends in the Hamptons over the weekend,” he had said, according to family. “Do you want to come?”
Maybe she laughed and turned a little red in the face, maybe she looked down at her feet or off across the crowded room of revelers. Maybe she just broke the news: she couldn’t come, she was about to marry another man.
But that didn’t stop Morde. He was ardent. He pleaded with her to give him a chance.
“You don’t get it, do you?” she likely said. “I’m getting married.”
Morde favored bespoke suits and ties knotted tight to his neck, and he seemed to know everyone who mattered. That’s what Gustafson would remember, according to family. Over the years, when he returned to Manhattan, he had become recognizable among New York’s society circles. He was a regular on sailing trips with the Vanderbilts. Some would say it had been his job as a spy to mingle in society circles and he just kept it up after the war. It was a natural fit for a hero who knew how to tell a good story. Maybe that’s why Gustafson ultimately changed her mind: she sensed that the man standing in front of her was different from all the others who had tried to seduce her over the years. “I’ll go,” she said. What the hell.
Three weeks later, on August 11, they were married—but not before Morde warned Gustafson about his wanderlust. “Look,” he might have said, “I have an unusual lifestyle. I travel—a lot.”
Gustafson surely grinned. She had done her fair share of traveling as a model. “Okay with me! What are we waiting for?”
They traveled to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, where Morde introduced her to some of his old life. They spent some time in Washington, D.C., and made at least two boat trips from New York to the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria. At one point, they lived on a seventy-foot double-masted wooden sailboat, moored along the Nile River. Morde did some freelance writing, a mixture of hard foreign reporting and softer travelogues.
Then he became a father. Christine was born in the spring of 1951 and Teddy two years later. Gustafson stopped modeling and gave herself over to motherhood. They returned to the United States and lived for a time in Alexandria, Virginia, in a house with a view of the Potomac River, and then settled down in a one-story brick waterfront house in Stamford, Connecticut. Morde’s downfall came soon after.
ONCE THE FAMILY moved to Connecticut, Morde stopped traveling so much. It reminded me of when my family picked up everything and moved from Manhattan to sleepy Brooklyn. It was jarring. Amy and I were scared. We painted the walls, bought new furniture, put up pictures—a way of settling in, trying to make the place our own. The first few months we walked around the five rooms, marveling at how much more space we had. We sat in the living room at night with the windows wide open and couldn’t believe the quiet. When we had been living in the East Village, the streets had been so loud all night we’d had to shut the windows to sleep. The quiet was our new world.
In 1952, likely feeling the pressures to provide for his new family, Morde did the unthinkable. At forty-one years old, for the first time in his life, he accepted a true nine-to-five office job—as the head of the recently launched television division at the Associated Press. For most people, such a job would have been the start of the prime of life, when the future crystallizes and prosperity is suddenly within reach. Not so for Morde. “The last few years of his life were a downward spiral,” his grandson Joseph Essaye III told me. Gustafson wouldn’t talk to me about Morde, but Essaye spoke to his grandmother for me. “He went from journalist and explorer and spy to a father. That was very hard on him,” Essaye recalled. I said I understood. Adulthood seems a great compromise.
For Gustafson and Morde, the honeymoon was over. The couple argued, and it didn’t help that she didn’t get along very well with his mother, according to his extended family. There were days when husband and wife hardly spoke. Their marriage was crumbling.
The disappointments compounded the troubles. When he lost out on a top news job at CBS in New York, Dave Morde told me, he blamed it on his documentary Sands of Sorrow, which had received some negative press for its controversial embrace of the Palestinians. He grew taciturn with friends and loved ones, as though his mind was somewhere else, and he spent much of his free time alone.
Some days, when he wasn’t working at the Associated Press, he walked down to Seaview Harbor, rigged up his sailboat, and steered it into Long Island Sound. It was a gorgeous boat about fifty feet long, black as onyx, with two towering masts. Once out, there was nothing like the open water. That was freedom—the feeling that you could point the boat toward the distant horizon and keep going, as he had done when he’d stowed away on that steamship when he was a teenager. On the water, away from his screaming kids, the salty wind blowing against his cleanly shaved face, Morde had time to think.
What had happened to his life? Where had he made a wrong turn? Could he really be one of those people who settle down?
ALL ALONG HE continued to dwell on the Lost City of the Monkey God. More than a decade had passed since his expedition to Honduras, and it was getting increasingly hard to summon up the more intimate memories. According to some family members, he grew concerned that people doubted his discovery. If he had found something as amazing as he’d described, why hadn’t he returned? What was he hiding?
But Morde, as the years passed, simply couldn’t return. He was a different person, with a family and a job he couldn’t leave behind to spend months in the jungle. He had bills to pay, a household to keep afloat. He was trying to stay focused, according to family, to keep his life on track, to be a good husband and a good father to his children, a common struggle. But it was not a struggle that came naturally to Morde—or one that would find a happy resolution.
It was sometime around 1953 that he finally confronted Gustafson about all of it. “I can’t do this right now,” he told her, according to family. “I have to go.” There was talk of separation. He was drinking heavily again, a habit that was anathema to his Christian Scientist mother. Whatever mystery he owned about his life, both lived and unlived, whatever regrets or secrets he kept, curdled deeper inside of him.
Eventually he moved out and stayed at his parents’ summerhouse in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. His mother and father had recently moved to Florida, selling his childhood home in New Bedford. But he was in Dartmouth only briefly before he departed again, a decision that seemed to baffle his father, who couldn’t keep track of his son.
In December 1953, Albert Morde wrote to the Explorers Club: “It is uncertain at this writing as to what [Theodore’s] next address will be. . . . You had better [write] him at my address here, and I will take care of the forwarding of your notices and letters, same as I did over a period of years past. Then if and when he again gets an address to which you should send mail, I will let you know.”
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