Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Have I?”

  “Oh, yes. You don’t know how opposed was your father to the idea of sending you to Berlin. But I told him you’d come out all right, and better prepared. Of course, you mightn’t have gotten through it without me, but then you wouldn’t have been parboiled if I had not been the chef.”

  “I don’t know that I’m altogether out of it yet.” My gonorrhea gave a mocking twinge. As I sipped my drink, I remembered that liquor was supposed to be antipathetic to penicillin. To hell with that. There was unexpected warmth in the slivovitz.

  “I’ll get you a room at the Am Zoo for tonight,” said Harlot. “Do you have a lot of things at your apartment to take home with you?”

  “Only the clothes I brought. There hasn’t been time to buy anything.”

  “Go by your place tomorrow after I’ve seen Harvey, and do the packing then. After all, if Harvey finds out tonight that you’ve left the premises, he could send a couple of baboons to pick you up.”

  “Yes,” I said. I was feeling anesthetized by the liqueur. I had thought I was full of a good many feelings for Bill and C. G. Harvey, but now they did not seem to exist. I didn’t know the beginning of what I was doing, nor would I now know the end. Intelligence work did not seem to be theater so much as the negation of theater. Chekhov once said that an audience who saw a hunting gun above the mantel in the first act expected it to be fired by the last act. No such hope for me.

  “Why are you opposed to CATHETER?” I asked.

  He looked around. CATHETER was still a dubious subject for conversation in a public room.

  “There’s a movement now in climbing,” he said, “that I abominate. A team tackles a straight wall that offers no holds. But they take along a hand-drill and screw a bolt into the rock. Then they cinch themselves up and drill a hole for the next bolt. It takes weeks to do something major, but any farm boy who can bear the drudgery now becomes an important climber. There’s your CATHETER,” he whispered.

  “I must say that your friend General Gehlen did not like what CATHETER was able to tell us. Especially what it had to disclose about the weaknesses of the East German railway system.” Now I was whispering.

  “The state of East German railroad yards is not what Communism is about,” said Harlot in reply.

  “But isn’t it our priority in Europe to know when the Soviets might attack?”

  “That was a pressing question five or six years ago. The Red onslaught, however, is no longer all that military. Nonetheless, we keep pushing for an enormous defense buildup. Because, Harry, once we decide that the Soviet is militarily incapable of large military attacks, the American people will go soft on Communism. There’s a puppy dog in the average American. Lick your boots, lick your face. Left to themselves, they’d just as soon be friends with the Russians. So we don’t encourage news about all-out slovenliness in the Russian military machine.”

  “Bill Harvey said virtually the same thing to me.”

  “Yes, Bill’s interests are contradictory. There’s no one more anti-Communist than Harvey, but on the other hand, he has to keep speaking up for CATHETER even when it tells us what we don’t wish to hear.”

  “I’m confused,” I said. “Didn’t you once say that our real duty is to become the mind of America?”

  “Well, Harry, not a mind that merely verifies what is true and not true. The aim is to develop teleological mind. Mind that dwells above the facts; mind that leads us to larger purposes. Harry, the world is going through exceptional convulsions. The twentieth century is fearfully apocalyptic. Historical institutions that took centuries to develop are melting into lava. Those 1917 Bolsheviks were the first intimation. Then came the Nazis. God, boy, they were a true exhalation from Hell. The top of the mountain blew off. Now the lava is starting to move. You don’t think lava needs good railroad systems, do you? Lava is entropy. It reduces all systems. Communism is the entropy of Christ, the degeneration of higher spiritual forms into lower ones. To oppose it, we must, therefore, create a fiction—that the Soviets are a mighty military machine who will overpower us unless we are more powerful. The truth is that they will overpower us, if the passion to resist them is not regenerated, by will if necessary, every year, every minute.”

  “But how do you know you are right?”

  He shrugged. “One lives by one’s intimations.”

  “And where do you get them?”

  “On the rock, fellow, high up on the rock. Well above the plain.” He drained his slivovitz. “Let us get some sleep. We’re traveling tomorrow.”

  As he said good-bye in the elevator, he added, “It’s a very early breakfast for Harvey and me. Sleep until I call.”

  I did. My faith in his ability was large enough to let me. And if I was confused as I put my head to the pillow, well, confusion, when profound, is also an aid to slumber. I did not stir until the phone rang. It was noon. A long sleep had come to me with the reprieve.

  “Are you awake?” said Harlot’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Pack. I’ll pick you up at your apartment in exactly an hour. The hotel bill is paid.” Then, he added, “You are going to learn a few things in the next year.”

  My education commenced not a minute after I returned to the apartment. Dix Butler was alone and pacing about in a fearfully bad mood. “What’s happened to Harvey?” he asked. “I’ve got to see him, and he won’t even pick up the phone.”

  “I don’t know a thing,” I said, “except that I’m going home free and clean.”

  “Give my respects to your father,” he said.

  I nodded. There was no need to explain that on this day one might also take into account my godfather. “You,” I replied, “seem somewhat upset.”

  “Well,” he announced, and this was all the preamble he offered, “Wolfgang is dead.”

  I thought my voice was coming forth, but it wasn’t. I asked, “Violent end?” I did manage to say that.

  “He was beaten to death.”

  Silence came down on both of us. I worked at packing. Several minutes later, I stepped out of my bedroom to ask, “Who do you think did it?”

  “Some old lover.”

  I went back to my valise.

  “Or,” said Butler, “them.”

  “Who?”

  “BND.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Or,” said Butler, “us.”

  “No.”

  “Sure,” said Butler, “it was Harvey’s order, and this arm. I did it.”

  “I’ll send you my new address in Washington,” I told him.

  “Or,” said Butler, “it was the SSD. In matters like this, you call upon Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He said, ‘Whom? Whom does this benefit?’”

  “I don’t know whom,” I said. “I don’t even know what was happening.”

  “Isn’t that the God’s truth?” replied Dix Butler.

  16

  ON THE FLIGHT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, HARLOT WAS IN A SPLENDID MOOD. “I must say,” he told me in the confidential tone of a dean passing on a rich whisper at commencement, “it proved to be quite a meeting with your friend BOZO.”

  By the twinkle in his eye, however, I had the uneasy intimation I would not be satisfied by how much he would impart. A merry light in Harlot’s eye often ended as a mote in mine.

  “Well,” he said, “never forget—Bill Harvey began as an FBI man, and they do tend to be paranoid about their personal safety. How could they not? J. Edgar Hoover is always offering the prime example.” Harlot dropped his voice even more for the next. “I’ve heard that Hoover won’t allow his driver to take a turn to the left if he can also get there by making three right turns around the block. Whenever I used to ponder Bill Harvey’s odd behavior with those pistols, I would usually decide J. Edgar Buddha had infected him. One day, however, not too many months ago, not long before we arranged for you, dear boy, to go to Berlin, I had an intuition: What if those damn pistols were not just Bill Harvey’s passages of paranoia? Suppose they were, in
fact, a real response to some true danger? What if he had managed to get into something bad?” Harlot extended his forefinger. “Give me a vigorous hypothesis every time. Without one, there’s nothing to do but drown in facts.

  “So I looked into Harvey’s file. Right there, in his 201, is a full account of how he was obliged to resign from the FBI. You know the story. You recorded all that stuff from C.G.’s own lips. But I can see by the way you nod your head that you recall it all. So do I. Every detail that C.G. imparted to you proved to be precisely the same as the version in his 201 file. I anticipated that would be the case when I put you on to C.G. in the first place. Consider what it means. Her version of events, as related in 1956, coincided perfectly with his account in 1947 when he first came to the Agency. It’s as if an overlay had been traced over the original version. He obviously spoon-fed the 201 version to his new bride when they got together, and I suspect he reinforced it by repeating the same story to her from time to time. There’s the clue. One of the few rules you can count on in our work is that a story will conform in every detail to its earlier version only if the initial account has been artfully fabricated and carefully repeated.”

  “That’s all very well,” I said, “but when you arrived in Berlin, you couldn’t know whether I had had the opportunity to speak to C.G.”

  “I was coming over,” said Harlot, “ready or not. Your situation was obviously falling apart. Besides, there was all that friction between Harvey and Pullach. Gehlen was playing an awfully fancy game. So, I had to take the trip even if I had no more in hand than my preconceptions. So C.G.’s transcript proved to be wonderfully fortifying. A talisman. I kept it in my breast pocket all through breakfast with Bill. It gave me further conviction that I knew the man I was dealing with.

  “Harvey and I had our meeting, by the way, in the Lounge of the Am Zoo. He knew I wouldn’t meet him on Harvey home turf. And my hotel would normally have been seen in the same light. But he must have calculated that with all his assets, he could slip a sneaky into the Lounge. After my little talk with you, however, I spoke to the hotel management and arranged for my two surveillance men to spend all of last night in the Lounge. While they could not do any wiring for me, at least no one of Harvey’s people was going to slip anything down the flue. We met next morning, therefore, with no recording devices available to either of us other than what paltry instruments we could bring in on our own person.”

  “How could you ever tape Harvey?” I asked. “He must have known you were wired.”

  “I had a sneaky on me I did not expect him to locate. A KGB toy the Russians have been testing in Poland. You install it in the hollowed-out heel of your shoe. Battery, microphone, the works. But we’re ahead of ourselves. Point is that breakfast—Campari and croissants for Bill, one soft-boiled egg for me—didn’t tarry too long on the amenities. We soon moved over to the opening insults. ‘Hey, buddy,’ he tells me, ‘I cut my teeth on dark-alley operations in Hell’s Kitchen while you Oh-So-Socials were eating crumpets with English buggers! Ho, ho, ho!’ Tells me he’s a three-martini man at lunch, ‘a double, a double, and a double, ho, ho, ho!’ I ask him which gun he’s laying on the table. He says, ‘It’s not the gun, it’s the hollow-nose bullets. I’ll change my gun,’ he informs me, ‘before I’ll change my shirt.’”

  At this point, Harlot took a few pages of transcript from his breast pocket, peeled off the first two, and held them up. “Well,” he said, “it’s there now. Typed it myself soon as he left. Always get your tapes on paper as quickly as you can. It clarifies what happened. As I look at this little text, I keep thinking of Bill’s buttercup mouth, so much at odds with the vile spew he spits. Oh, was he primed to go! He thought he had me.” With that, he handed over the first two pages. “Figure out the dramatis personae for yourself,” he said.

  SON-IN-LAW: Now that we’ve bicycled around the mulberry bush, tell me, why breakfast?

  GHOUL: I thought it was time to see who was holding the cards.

  SON-IN-LAW: That’s good. You’re talking about cards and I’m ready to talk about egg on your vest.

  GHOUL: Don’t believe I’m the one who’s dribbled.

  SON-IN-LAW: You are covered with protégé juices. Your protégé is, to be precise, in one fuck of a lot of trouble. You see, I know who SM/ONION is by now. Protégé confessed. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

  GHOUL: When I decipher what you are mumbling about, I will subject myself to your moral examination.

  SON-IN-LAW: Well, I send this in the open: I’m ready to bring charges on you and General Bat-Ears. For endangering CATHETER. Would it interest you to know I have proof? At this moment, a certain piss-bar pervert named Wolfgang is in custody. He is being debriefed. He has told us a lot.

  GHOUL: Nobody has confessed. Nothing to confess to. This Wolfgang person is not in your custody. I received a call at 6:00 A.M. from the south of Germany. The so-called piss-bar pervert is dead.

  (Long silence.)

  SON-IN-LAW: Maybe a lot of people are going to be nailed to a lot of masts.

  GHOUL: No, friend. That’s jawboning. Even if you and I were to go head to head with the hand you are holding and the hand you think I am holding, you could do no better than bring both of us down. Nothing could be proved. Both parties irretrievably tarnished. So let’s talk instead about the cards I actually am holding. They’re stronger than you think. You could not squeak through if you were fluttered.

  I had come to the bottom of the second page of the transcript. “Where,” I asked, “is the rest?”

  Harlot sighed. I must say the sound was as resonant as a low full note on a woodwind. “I recognize,” he said, “the extent of your curiosity, but I cannot let you see any more. You will have to wait on the rest of the transcript.”

  “Wait?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Oh,” said Harlot, “years.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You may appreciate it more in time to come. It’s rich enough.” He looked about the plane and yawned fiercely. This seemed transition sufficient for him. “By the way,” he said, “I settled the bill at the Am Zoo. Your share, breaking down the Deutschmarks, comes to thirty-eight dollars and eighty-two cents.”

  I started to write a check. The sum was a third of my weekly salary. “Doesn’t the Company cover things like this?” I asked.

  “For me, yes. I’m traveling. But Clerical will contest your Am Zoo chit. After all, you have a stipend for your lodging.”

  Of course, he could have put it on his account. I remembered a night when Kittredge and I were doing dishes at the canal house with a bar of laundry soap. “Hugh,” she murmured to me, “may have the leanest wallet in the Company.”

  “Yessir. Thirty-eight seventy-two,” I said.

  “Actually, it’s thirty-eight eighty-two,” he said, and with no transition, added, “Do you mind if I elaborate on a point I was attempting to make last night?”

  “No,” I said, “I’d welcome it.” If I had been hoping to hear something more about Harvey, I received instead a sermon on the subtleties of evil in the realm of Communism. All the while I was obliged to listen, my balked curiosity remained as painful as a venereal twinge.

  “I would remind you,” said Harlot, “that the true force of the Russians has little to do with military strength. We are vulnerable to them in another way. Burgess, Philby, and Maclean proved it. Can you conceive how badly it sat in me that Bill Harvey was right about that gang and I was wrong? Yet I had to recognize that Bill perceived something I missed, and in time it became one abominable thesis: The better your family, the more closely you must be examined as a security risk. For the Russians are able to get their licks in on whatever is left of the Christian in many a rich swine. It goes so deep—this simple idea that nobody on earth should have too much wealth. That’s exactly what’s satanic about Communism. It trades on the noblest vein in Christianity. It works the great guilt in us. At the core, we Americans are even wors
e than the English. We’re drenched in guilt. We’re rich boys, after all, with no background, and we’re playing around the world with the hearts of the poor. That’s tricky. Especially if you have been brought up to believe that the finest love you will ever come near goes back to the sentiments of Christ washing the feet of those same poor people.”

  “How would you feel,” I asked, “if I said these things? Wouldn’t you wonder which side I was working for?” My thwarted curiosity still lay like lead on my stomach.

  “If I thought I was on the wrong side,” he answered, “I would feel obliged to defect. I do not wish ever to work for evil. It is evil to recognize the good, and continue to work against it. But, make no mistake,” he told me, “the sides are clear. Lava is lava, and spirit is spirit. The Reds, not us, are the evil ones, and so they are clever enough to imply that they are in the true tradition of Christ. They are the ones who work at kissing the feet of the poor. Absolute poppycock. But the Third World buys it. That’s because the Russians know how to merchandise one crucial commodity: Ideology. Our spiritual offering is finer, but their marketing of ideas proves superior. Here, those of us who are serious tend to approach God alone, each of us, one by one, but the Soviets are able to perform the conversion en masse. That is because they deliver the commonweal over to man, not God. A disaster. God, not man, has to be the judge. I will always believe that. I also believe that even at my worst, I am still working, always working, as a soldier of God.”

  We were silent. But I could take no comfort sitting beside him in silence. “Ever read Kierkegaard?” I asked. I wanted so much to drill one small hole into the steel plate of Hugh Montague’s certainty.

  “Of course.”

  “What I get from him,” I said, “is modesty. We cannot know the moral value of our actions. We may think ourselves saintly at the exact moment we’re toiling for the Devil. Conversely, we can feel unholy and yet be serving God.”