Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “But as you said, won’t they put it into Bridge-Archive:Control—Senior?” I had a moment of panic, wondering if he would think I was picking this up too quickly, but he was moving on.

  “They will. Bridge-Archive:Control—Senior is inevitable. But by then, we ought to have some funny facts. We may lose at Senior—that’s one committee I have minimal input with—but, all the same, we will have dropped a very bad smell in those marble halls. One egg-shaped fart, in fact, will be floating around in the perfumery. I’ll teach those guys to fuck with me.”

  “Sir, may I speak frankly?”

  “Save time. Just talk.”

  “If I understand, you are saying you will never obtain the name of CLOAKROOM. Whoever managed the changes is, you believe—as I follow you—a member of Senior. He will also be on the warpath by then. Is it okay for you to have a determined enemy when you can’t even find out who it is?”

  “Hubbard, you miss the point. Senior is not composed of cretins. They’ll have a good idea at their end of who might be playing their game for them. And whoever it is will lose a few inches of height to his peers. That’s my payback.”

  “Won’t you lose also?”

  “Kid, I invite anybody to trade punches with me. We’ll see who’s standing at the end.”

  “I have to hand it to you, Mr. Harvey. You’re not timid.”

  “Working under Hoover, you pinned a little fear on your heart every morning when you went in to work. I got tired of that.”

  “What kind of man is J. Edgar Hoover?”

  “A low, cowardly, ungrateful son of a bitch. Excuse me, I’m speaking of a great American.” He burped and filled his martini glass again. “All right,” he proceeded, “I said we were going to have a two-pronged attack. From one side, pressure all the way up to Senior; on the other, let’s see how good your own network is.”

  “Sir?”

  “I have a hunch that KU/CLOAKROOM is a recent trainee. He has to be. His cable was that stupid. You might even know him. I want you to get in touch with a few members of your training group at the Farm. Before long, you ought to be able to pick up a description of who was assigned to the Snake Pit.”

  I could feel perspiration starting behind my ears.

  “I can obtain a couple of names,” I said, “but will I be able to request their cryptonyms from Bridge-Archive? That looks like an odd request for a junior to put in.”

  “Candidly, it’s not even comfortable for me to ask for too many cryps from Bridge-Archive. Not unless we score. And, of course, I don’t know that in advance. I certainly don’t want to attract beaucoup attention on a dud mission. But, kiddo, we won’t go to Bridge-Archive. We’ll use the Bypass.”

  “I’m not familiar with the Bypass,” I said.

  “You’re not familiar with the name,” he said, “but you’re probably part of the process. None of you juniors ever admit to revealing your saddlebags to each other, yet half of you go around collecting them like autographs. Studies show: Half of the Americans in combat in the Second World War couldn’t fire at an enemy soldier. Too much of the Ten Commandments in their nervous system. And half the new people in this cockeyed Company can’t keep their own secret. Treachery comes with mother’s milk.” He reflected. “And father’s bullshit.” That was worth a sip. The martini glass did a dipsy-doodle over some bumps. “Just call in your favors,” he said. “Get those saddlebags from your friends.” He nodded. “By the way, what was yours?”

  “You know that, Chief. It’s VQ/STARTER.”

  “I mean, what was it in TSS? Don’t keep trying to tell me that you didn’t have one.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t reveal it.”

  He nodded. “Wait’ll we torture you,” he said.

  3

  BERLIN, SEEN THROUGH THE DARK WINDOWS OF CHIEF HARVEY’S CADILlac, provided at high noon a vision of late afternoon shadow. The pale lots cleared of rubble, and the amputated backs of buildings presented themselves in hues of lavender-gray, the official tone for tinted glass in bulletproof limousines. It might be a sinister view of the world, but on this particular morning, I saw little enough of it. I was giving too much attention to each word Bill Harvey uttered.

  As Mr. Harvey finished laying out those procedures I was to use for a venture that could only produce success by the final entrapment of myself, the voice to come out of my throat, if hoarse, did not betray me further. I felt not unlike the way I would soon feel on being able to get into bed with a woman for the first time. It might be strange, but sex was an activity I had been waiting to engage in for a long time. A part of me told myself: “I was born to do this. Being a double agent is natural for me.”

  I was under no illusion that I was anything better. Hugh Tremont Montague and William King Harvey might serve the same flag, but I was already a different person for each of those men; that was the essence of the condition. To be a double agent working for West Germans and East Germans might be more dangerous, but whether BND against SSD, or Montague versus Harvey, one’s balance was still equal to one’s wit. An unholy stimulation.

  Of course, my inner life had its ups and downs. Back at my desk, outright rage at the unfairness of things passed through me so intensely that I had to go to the men’s room and pat cold water on my face. Yet in the mirror above the sink no strain showed. Looking back at me was the seamless Hubbard expression. My older cousin, Colton Shaler Hubbard, custodian of the family legends, once said, “With the exception of Smallidge Kimble Hubbard, and possibly your father, there’s nothing particularly special about the rest of us. We’re just about down there with l’homme moyen sensuel. Except for one faculty, Herrick. We Hubbards never show a thing. It’s a bossy advantage, I tell you.”

  For practical purposes, he was right. In the midst of all this perturbation, an alert young man looked back at me from the mirror, life in my eyes, optimism on my mouth. I thought of other occasions when I had felt calm within, rested, and full of life, but my reflection appeared sullen, as if yesterday’s fatigues were still on my skin. Could I assume that the agreeable face I now presented to the mirror was protective coloration? One did well to look lively when exhausted.

  That night, ready to step away from a few of these concerns, I went out with Dix Butler. We made the rounds of his nightclubs. Over the last couple of weeks, I had traveled with him at night often enough to pick up a sense of how he worked. He had a contact in every club we visited. Of course, he had not recruited them, he had not been in Berlin long enough, and his German was inadequate for such a purpose, but his job put him on the scene. He served as a cutout between two of our case officers at BOZO and those of our German petty agents who could speak English. If Dix enjoyed full cover from one of our business subsidiaries, presenting himself to the natives as an American executive from an import brewery—“Just call me a beer salesman, Putzi,”—the staff at the clubs we visited had small illusion clouding their clear Berlin minds that Dix Butler, cover name Randy Huff (for Sam Huff, the New York Giants linebacker), was anything but one more species of CIA man.

  The axiom that intelligence officers and agents must be kept apart, inculcated in me throughout training, did not, as Dix warned, seem to apply in this milieu. Not only was he highly visible, but anyone who talked to him would come under suspicion from Germans who were anti-American. Since his agents did not seem to mind, I was certain most of his people had been doubled by the SSD.

  Dix, however, was without concern. “It oughtn’t to work, but it does,” he said. “I get more information from my boys than any other officer, CIA or BND, working these streets.”

  “It’s tainted.”

  “You’d be surprised. A lot of agents are too lazy to lie. They end up telling more than they’re planning to. They know I can shake it from them if I have to.”

  “Dix,” I began.

  “Huff,” he said, “is the name. Randy Huff.”

  “Everything you get from them is, at the least, steered by the BND.”

  “Pu
t away the book. My people are earning a living. They’re street stuff. Of course the BND runs them. You don’t think West German Intelligence would encourage us to get down and dirty with any Kraut that didn’t belong to them first? It’s a comedy. Everybody is paying for information, the British, the French, the West Germans, the Soviets. We happen to be paying the most, so our job is the easiest. Take the subway and go over to East Berlin, to Café Warsaw. That’s the place where they all hang out—agents, informers, contact men, cutouts, couriers, principals, even Russian and American case officers. Rodents go scurrying from table to table looking for the best price. West Berlin may be a spy market, but East Berlin is a bigger joke. Everybody is doubled and tripled. You can’t even remember if they’re supposed to be yours or theirs, and you know, buddy, it doesn’t matter. They make up the stuff if they don’t have it.”

  “Aren’t you concerned that the SSD is polluting your input?”

  “The SSD can’t begin to pay what we do. Besides, I know who’s working for them, and I know what to feed them.” He was bored with this, just as bored as any lawyer giving legal information to his friends on Sunday. “Forget it, Charley Sloate,”—which happened to be my cover name at the Department of Defense desk—“just look at that redhead over there!”

  We were in the Balhaus Resi at a corner of Grafenstrasse, and I am afraid it is exactly that legendary place where telephones sit on every table. You can call a woman across the room by dialing her table number. The process worked equally well in reverse, and our phone kept ringing. Women wished to speak to Dix. He was executive and cut off any female who could not converse in English. For those able, the advanced course was waiting.

  “Angel,” he would say, “wave your hand, so I’m certain I know whom I’m speaking to.”

  A blond lady across the room would now wag her finger into the smoke.

  “You’re fabulous,” he would tell her. “Don’t thank me. It’s the truth.” All this while, he would be drumming his knuckles on the table. “Helga. A nice name. And you say you are a divorcée. Good for you. Could you answer a question for me, Helga?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you care to fuck?”

  “Don’t you get slapped a lot?” I asked him once.

  “Yes,” he said, “but I get laid a lot.”

  If Helga hung up, he would shrug, “One dried-up wildcat.”

  “What if she’d said yes?”

  “I might have lubricated her screech.”

  Women did not always say no. He made dates for later. Sometimes he kept such dates. Sometimes his mood turned bitter at the very idea of women. He’d get to his feet and we would move to another club. At Remdi’s, on Kantstrasse, the categorical imperative was to obtain a ringside table and use the fishing poles furnished by the management to lift pieces of loose clothing from the stripteasers. Homage to Immanuel Kant! We’d drop into the Bathtub on Nürnberger Strasse, a cellar pit for jazz, then on to the Kelch in Prager Strasse. There, a great many men dressed as women. I hated that, hated it with all the Puritanism lurking in the family blood, but Butler enjoyed it. Then we would move on. He was always in conversation, a hand on a girl’s hip, a piece of paper going into his pocket from a waiter, a whisper from the hatcheck girl, a quick notation in his pad which he ostentatiously tore off to send to the bartender. Seeing how displeased I was at his technique, he began to laugh. “Go back to the manual on black propaganda,” he said. “That bartender is working for the East Krauts. Pure SSD. I want to embarrass him.”

  So it went. One night out offered enough excitement to fire my fantasies for a month. Yet I went along on his rounds several times a week. I had never had such a sense of ferment in myself. I did not know if we were in a cellar or a zoo. Life was promising precisely because life had become dark and full of evil. We were in West Berlin and surrounded by Communist armies on all sides—we might live for a day or a century, but vice twinkled like lights in an amusement park. One night a middle-aged waiter said to me, “You think this is something now?” I nodded. “It is nothing,” he said.

  On impulse I asked, “Was more going on when the Nazis were here?”

  The waiter looked at me for quite a while. “Yes,” he said. “It was better then.”

  I was left wondering how it was better. At far-off tables, people might be depressed, but around us, a fever was rising. Dix’s physical presence was never more overpowering than at 1:00 A.M. in a Berlin club. His features, merry and cruel, his blond hair, his height, his physical force, his clear-cut lust for plunder must have spoken to that other, victorious time when the dream of godlike power imbued with pagan magic lived in many a Berliner’s mind. Dix always looked as if he had never been in a better place at a more appropriate time.

  One might have supposed that with the number of women who came his way, I would have caught some of the overflow, but as I soon discovered, I was not ready. I had never been in so many situations to point out how terrified I was of women. I had always thought it was the best-kept secret of my life. I had even managed to hide it from myself. Now I was obliged to recognize that I was afraid of young ladies who looked no more than fourteen, and of women remarkably preserved at seventy, and we need not speak of the spectrum between. To know that some of these working girls, divorcées, single women, and wives on the loose wanted me aroused the same kind of panic I used to feel in my first years at the Buckley School when I did not know how to fight, and so believed I might be seriously injured for too little. Now it seemed to me as if sex were the fiercest human transaction of them all; one gave away large parts of oneself in order to receive one knew not what, and the woman could walk off with your jewels. Your spiritual jewels. I exaggerate my fear in the hope to explain it. When a woman sat next to me on those nights, I felt the most abominable, if well-concealed, panic. Something in my soul seemed about to be stolen. I might give away secrets God had entrusted to me. This was even more devout, I must admit, than the Episcopalianism imbibed at St. Matthew’s on the true force of Christ, courage, and responsibility.

  On the other hand, I still felt competitive toward Dix Butler. I don’t know if it was the cold showers of prep school, or the sinews in the family synapses, but it irked me not to be able to enter the lists against him on the field of female conquest. I wanted to be able to boast that I would yet be more of an artist at making love than Mr. Randy Huff, but the Hubbard common sense was also in my way; one reason I had until now been able to evade these terrors was due to the simple fact that in college I had spent my time paying attention to girls who for one reason or another were never available. This ironic light was now obliged to be cast as well on my love for Kittredge. A trapdoor had been opened to my dungeon. I hardly wished to come face to face with the depth of the problem now; it defaced the portrait I liked to keep of myself as a well-balanced young CIA officer.

  I had to put some face, however, on this obvious rejection of all the women who came my way. Any tale I might offer to the effect that I wished to stay faithful to a girl back home would open me to every harassment in Dix Butler’s book, so I told him I had a venereal disease. Clap, I muttered.

  “You’ll be all right in a week.”

  “It’s a strain resistant to penicillin.”

  He shrugged. “Every time I caught a dose, I’d get evil,” he told me. “I used to love sticking it in a woman, drip and all.” He fixed me with a look. There was, as always, an extraordinary light in his eye when he talked about how low he was. He never looked more splendid than at such times. “You know, that was when I would try my damnedest to get into respectable women’s pants. I loved the idea I was passing on my infection. Do you think I’m crazy?”

  It was my turn to shrug.

  “I attribute it,” he said, “to the fact that my mother left my father and my brother and me when I was ten years old. My father was one hell of a drunk. Used to beat the bejesus out of us. But when we got older, we would count up how many of Dad’s bitches we fooled around with behind his back.
I hated those bitches for never providing me—when you think of all the women resident on this earth—with one good mother. Old King Bill, over on his little hill in GIBLETS, is the nearest I ever came to having a decent mother. Only, don’t tell him I said that. He’ll start to look at the overruns on my per diem. Don’t want to get into that.”

  Dix mixed pleasure with official rounds and charged off his personal bar bills. When he offered to put in for my expenses as well, I refused. The rules he broke were not there for me to bend. From the attitude of the more sober officers I had worked with Downtown, it took no wise man to see that unauthorized use of one’s expense account would be a bad debit to get listed on one’s 201. We were signed up to cheat enemies, not our own folk.

  Dix acted, however, as if his status were privileged. He showed more disregard for rules than anyone in CIA I had encountered so far. On the night I spent with my father in Washington, I had talked about Dix, but Cal was not impressed. “One like him comes up every month from the Farm,” he remarked. “A few get through. Most go down in flames.”

  “He’s exceptional,” I told my father.

  “Then he’ll end up running a small war somewhere,” Cal replied.

  I was interrupted from thinking of this conversation when Dix remarked, “What’s on your mind tonight?” I was not about to confess it was the assignment to unmask KU/CLOAKROOM. I merely smiled and looked around the Balhaus Resi. What a polyglot of human resources! I had never seen so many people with odd faces. Of course, to be a Berliner was not unequal to having one’s features set at a slant—the collective physiognomy was reminiscent of the sharp edges on a cabinetmaker’s tools (not to speak of the entrepreneurial glint you could find in the dullest eye). The band at one end of the dance floor had the mien of musicians who have played through the burning of the Reichstag, the death of von Hindenburg, the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, the Allied bombardments, the Occupation, the Berlin Airlift, and they had never had to change expression. They were musicians. In ten minutes the set would be over and they could smoke or go to the bathroom—that was more meaningful than history. Now, having played their way through such American hits as “Doggie in the Window,” “Mister Sandman,” and “Rock Around the Clock,” which last succeeded in chasing even the most libidinous of the bourgeoisie off the floor—I was thinking that only prosperous Germans with stiff collars could bring to vice the dignity of a serious pursuit—the band moved on to an oompah waltz with a tuba. That, in turn, swept all the wildly dressed young criminal element back to their tables, plus all the younger women with pink and purple wigs.