Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Oh, don’t you know. All that is subtended by faith,” said Hugh. “The simple subtends the complex. If not for my faith, I could wield a damned good Kierkegaardian dialectic. Why not say that the U.S.S.R., because it preaches atheism, is in no position to corrupt religion? So, unbeknownst to itself, it is the true bulwark of God. Religious conviction in a Communist environment has to be luminous in its beauty. After all, you have had to acquire it at such personal cost. Russia, therefore, has the social climate to create martyrs and saints, whereas we spawn evangelists. Harry, give in to Kierkegaard’s dialectic just once and you’re in a lot of trouble. It’s worrisome. The possibility that we will all be terminated in a nuclear opera does make our average citizen go all out for pleasure. The truth is that the West builds pleasure palaces faster than churches. A secret desire begins to grow: Maybe there will be no judgment! Should the world blow up, God’s faculties will also be atomized. Such may be the unconscious belief. So, the quality of work deteriorates. Everywhere, work deteriorates. Eventually, that has to hurt us much more than it will hurt the Russians. Lava has no need of quality.” He sighed again—a long meditative note on the instrument of his voice, and was silent, then cracked his knuckles. “In any event,” he said with a smile, “it is wise to celebrate a victory by reviewing morose thoughts. That keeps the devils away.” He reached over and thumped my knee. “I’m nervous,” he added, “because I feel twice blessed. That, dear boy, is asking for it. You see, quite beyond my good morning with Harvey, there’s another matter. I’m your godfather, am I not?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Been a good one?”

  “Superior.”

  “Well, now, return the favor.”

  “Hugh?”

  “Yes. In about seven months, Kittredge and I are going to have a child. I want you to be the godfather.”

  The plane flew on.

  “That’s splendid news,” I said, “and a great honor.”

  “You are Kittredge’s choice fully as much if not more than you are mine.”

  “I can’t tell you how I feel.”

  I was numb. I felt nothing. I wondered if I was going to die before I found out what happened with Bill Harvey. Indeed, it would take more than eight years before I would get to know the contents of the full transcript.

  PART THREE

  WASHINGTON

  1

  THIRTEEN DAYS AFTER I CAME BACK TO THE UNITED STATES, A RUSSIAN PATROL located our tap on the Altglienecke-to-Moscow cable. If I had still been in Berlin, reverberations from the loss of the tunnel would have been all around me; in Washington, the event was only a far-off rumble. I had returned to a series of changes in my daily life.

  The first was in relation to Kittredge. As putative godfather, I was now all but a member of the family. At times, I felt like a first cousin of no particularly healthy sort—which is to say that we felt awfully healthy with each other. Pregnant, she was more of a flirt than ever. On greeting and on farewell, she would kiss me with moist lips. I hardly knew how to measure such affection. Collegiate lore at Yale had hardly been as authoritative as the sexual wisdom of St. Matthew’s. There, boys who had gone in for the heaviest petting over summer vacation would come back in the fall to instruct those of us less fortunate: When a girl’s lips are wet, and stick to yours just a little, why, fellow, a full-fledged sexual attraction is brewing.

  It was brewing. Kittredge, nearly always a happy sight to my eyes, had never appeared more beautiful than in these first months of pregnancy. Her fine features were now enriched by the livelier colors of her character. I could feel the woman within—by which blank check of a phrase I try to pass over the more intimate grasp I now had of what it might mean to go to bed with Kittredge. My night with Ingrid had given some necessary dollop of gross sophistication—I knew that Kittredge was not only this ineffable array of the loveliest manners and graces, but had a body that could shape itself to mine and (here was the gross wisdom) this body might even offer up its secret odor; I assumed that would prove superior to Ingrid’s stingy, catlike purchase on the cosmos.

  Yes, I was in love, if love is the happy condition of feeling one’s hours remarkably well spent even when one does no more than sit in company with the beloved and her husband and listen to a record player while it offers such musical events as Leopold Stokowski conducting the New York Philharmonic through Boris Godunov. It was Harlot’s contention that Moussorgsky gave infallible insights into the turmoil of late czarist Russia.

  Kittredge’s taste these days inclined more to My Fair Lady. Word had come to Washington that this was the ticket for the season on Broadway, and pregnant Kittredge was now uncommonly interested in hot tickets. To counter Moussorgsky, she gave us Lerner and Loewe. We listened to “I Could Have Danced All Night” until Montague finally asked, “Does a pregnancy circumscribe you all that much?”

  “Hugh, stow it,” said Kittredge, and the predictable two red spots came to her white cheeks.

  “Darling,” he said, “you never seemed to care about dancing until now.”

  And I, traitor to their hearth, was happy that I understood one side of her better than he, and hoped she knew it.

  All the same, he was certainly taking close care of my career. I had not been back half a week before he arranged to get me into Intensive Spanish. I was being moved onto the Argentina-Uruguay Desk in the Western Hemisphere Division as my preparation for transfer to the station in Montevideo.

  “Why Uruguay?” I asked.

  “Because it’s small, and you will learn a lot.”

  Since Montevideo had to be thousands of miles away, it also occurred to me that he might want his godson somewhat separated from his wife after the baby was born.

  “You need a place to learn your trade,” he told me. “Uruguay is fine for that. You’ll come to know the diplomatic community, meet a few Russians, run a few agents, get a feel for the nuts and bolts. I’m looking down the line to years ahead when you’ll be working more closely with me. But first you have to pick up the grammar—all the everyday housekeeping that goes into Station work and some of the dos and don’ts in espionage proper.”

  I confess that if I had heard espionage and counterespionage used more than a hundred times in the last year, I still did not know that I had mastered the distinction. “Can I train with you now,” I asked, “while I’m at the Uruguay Desk?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but you’ll have to wait. I won’t be starting up the Thursdays until we get back from the Keep this summer.”

  “That’s two months away.”

  “Time spent at the Argentina-Uruguay Desk will be invaluable.”

  Perhaps it was. I did not think so at the time. I was too busy absorbing whole fat loose-leaf books of geographical, political, economic, cultural, and trade union material. Soon enough, I learned that Uruguay was a small coconut-shaped nation on the Atlantic coast, and considerably further to the south than I had expected, for it was lodged between Brazil and Argentina. Uruguay was temperate in climate—hurrah!—void of jungle—fine with me!—the Switzerland of South America—ugh!—a semisocialist welfare state—paugh!—a land of pampas and cattle with only one large city, Montevideo; the entire country, somewhat under four million people, lived on the export of beef and hides, mutton and wool.

  Most of my labor at the Argentina-Uruguay Desk went into coding and decoding cables. It was relevant work for it introduced me to operations I would soon be handling myself. For the rest, I slaved away at Intensive Spanish, suffered the heat of Washington through June and July, waited for Harlot and Kittredge’s three weeks at the Keep to be over and his mysterious Thursdays to commence, and amused myself in the interim by copious speculations about the appearance of the officers and agents at the Montevideo Station. Since our cable traffic used AV/ as the digraph for Uruguay, we did not have to put up with such broken-backed orthographic presences as SM/ONION or KU/CLOAKROOM; now we could employ AV/ALANCHE, AV/ANTGARDE, AV/ARICE, AV/ENGE, AV/IATOR, AV/OIDANCE, AV/OWAL,
AV/OIRDUPOIS, AV/UNCULAR, and, my favorite, AV/EMARIA. You never knew. AV/ANTGARDE could be a bellhop, and AV/EMARIA a chauffeur in a foreign embassy. I could, of course, given my desk accreditation, have checked their cryptonyms against the 201 file we kept in one corner of the large office room that constituted our Argentina-Uruguay Desk in Cockroach Alley, but there was no need to know, and I felt too new to push it. Older desk officers were introducing me to complex tasks grudgingly, as if they might lose a piece of their substance. I was content to wait. It was calm work after Berlin, and I had small interest. The summer in D.C. was hot. The Thursdays were what I waited for.

  They were certainly talked about. Over lunch in the cafeteria one hot day, two senior officers, friends of Cal, offered me disparate evaluations: “Much ado about nothing,” said one. “He’s so brilliant it’s unholy,” said the other. “Why, you don’t know how fortunate you are to be selected.”

  The class, now in its third year, had been commenced as a seminar on Thursday afternoons for some of Harlot’s staff plus young officers who had been recommended for a few of his projects. Those were Low Thursdays, but once a month, on what soon came to be called the High Thursdays, important guests showed up by invitation, as did visiting professionals whose Company labors had brought them back to D.C. from various lairs abroad.

  On all occasions, we would meet around the conference table in Hugh Montague’s outer office, a large room on the second floor of the yellow brick villa that Allen Dulles used for his headquarters. Situated on E Street, well away from the Reflecting Pool and Cockroach Alley, it was an elegant building larger than most of the foreign embassies in Washington. Harlot was one of the few high-ranking officers to work in such proximity to Dulles, and so an added zest was brought to the occasion by the importance of our surroundings. Indeed, Allen Dulles would keep popping in and out, a beeper in his breast pocket prodding him back to his own office, and once, I remember, he made a point of letting us know that he had just gotten off the phone with President Eisenhower.

  The lectures on High Thursday were, of course, the most exceptional. Harlot’s voice became even more commodious then, and he could not have been more unabashed in his use of rich syntax. How much one learned directly, however, is not easy to measure. He gave no assignments. He might recommend a book from time to time, but never pursued our diligence, no, it was more a matter of sowing the seeds. A few might sprout. Since the Director himself was not only our peripatetic guest but had obviously given his imprimatur, and would often nod at the sheer wonderful glory of the subject—“Ah,” one could almost hear Mr. Dulles say, “this wonderfully shrewd and metaphysical and monumental world of Intelligence itself!”—it took no vast acumen on my part to recognize that come a High Thursday, Harlot would teach our group from the top down. His preference was to stimulate his equals: On such occasions, the rest of us could scramble how we might. Low days were of more use to us. Then, the course served, as Harlot once remarked, “to rev up the Mormons.” There were five of them, Ph.D.s from state universities in the Midwest, and they were always taking notes, always in crew cut, white shirt with short sleeves, pens in the breast pocket, dark thin ties, eyeglasses. They looked like engineers, and I recognized after a time that they were the galley slaves over in Montague’s counterespionage shop at TSS, marooned in prodigiously demanding tasks of cryptography, file-searching, estimate-vetting, etc. To me it reeked of the Bunker, although obviously more purposeful, more lifelong—you could see it in their faces: They were signed up for a career of the highest level of clerking. I was, I admit, snobby, but then, as the son of a Bold Easterner, and thus, by titular descent, a Junior Bold Easterner, Ivy League out of Andover, Exeter, Groton, Middlesex, or Saints Paul, Mark, or Matthew, how could I not begin to feel well installed while listening to Hugh Montague? At full throttle on a High Thursday, he could employ rhetoric that was equal to high adventure. Since memory, for all its vicissitudes, can also be immaculate, I am tempted to swear that, word for word, this has to be close to the way he offered it.

  “An understanding of counterespionage presents difficulties to which we must return again and again,” he would remark, “but it helps for us to recognize that our discipline is exercised in the alley between two theaters—those separate playhouses of paranoia and cynicism. Gentlemen, select one rule of conduct from the beginning: Too much attendance at either theater is imprudent. One must keep shifting one’s seat. For what, after all, are our working materials? Facts. We live in the mystery of facts. Obligatorily, we become expert observers on the permeability, malleability, and solubility of so-called hard facts. We discover that we have been assigned to live in fields of distortion. We are required to imbibe concealed facts, revealed facts, suspicious facts, serendipitous facts.”

  Rosen had the temerity on this particular High Thursday to interrupt Harlot long enough to ask, “Sir, I know the meaning of the word, but not its application here. What are serendipitous facts?”

  “Rosen,” said Harlot, “let us search for the answer.” Harlot paused. I was all too aware of the way he played with the name. There had been just a hint of mournful woe in the long o of Rosen. “Rosen,” he said, “assume that you are on a tour of duty in Singapore and a scrumptious blonde, a veritable bagatelle, happens to knock on your hotel room door at 2:00 A.M., and she is—let us say it is 90-percent verifiable—not employed by the KGB, but chooses to knock because she likes you. That, Arnold, is a serendipitous fact.”

  Guffaws popped forth. Rosen managed to smile, indeed, I felt his gleam of happiness at arousing the wit of the master. “I thrive on derision,” said his manner.

  Harlot resumed. “Gentlemen,” he declared, “in the more advanced regions of our work, sound judgment is paramount. Is the apparently unsuccessful operation that we are trying to analyze no more than an error by our opponents, a bureaucratic fumble, a gaffe, or, to the contrary, do we have before us an aria with carefully chosen dissonances?” He paused. He glared at us. Just as a great actor can give the same soliloquy to beggars or kings—it does not matter—he was here to expatiate on a theme. “Yes,” he said, “some of you, on such occasions, will be in an unholy rush toward the Theater of Paranoia; others will leave their name at the Cinema of Cynicism. My esteemed Director”—he nodded in the general direction of Mr. Dulles—“has sometimes assured me that I hold forth at times too long over at Paranoia House.”

  Dulles beamed. “Oh, Montague, you can tell as many stories on me as I can on you. Let’s assume there’s nothing wrong with suspicion. It tends to keep the mind alive.”

  Harlot nodded. Harlot said: “The man with talent for counterespionage, the true artist,”—now using the word with as much nesting of his voice as an old Russian lady saying Pushkin—“draws on his paranoia to perceive the beauties of his opponent’s scenario. He looks for ways to attach facts properly to other facts so that they are no longer separated objects. He tries to find the picture that no one else has glimpsed. All the same, he never fails to heed the warnings of cynicism.

  “For cynicism has its own virtues. It is analogous to the oil that wells up from every crushed seed, every damn plan that went wrong.” Sitting near Allen Dulles on this day, I heard him grunt in pleasure. It was a small but enjoyable sound. “Hear, hear,” he said softly, and I heard him. “Do not,” continued Harlot, “attempt to comprehend the KGB, therefore, until you recognize that they have some of the most flexible and some of the most rigid minds in intelligence work, and their people clash with each other, even as some of ours have been known to do. We must always feel the play of forces in our opponent’s scheme. It teaches us to beware of divinations that are too comprehensive, too satisfying. Cynicism teaches you to distrust the pleasure you may feel when previously scattered facts come into a nice pattern. If that happens just a little too quickly, you may have come upon your first hint that you are dealing with a precalculated narrative. In a word, disinformation.”

  Advanced were the High Thursdays, awfully advanced for the Lows.
I would ponder some of his conclusions for many a year. If Montague’s method of discourse on such days threw the more inexperienced of us over such high hurdles as the Theater of Paranoia and the Cinema of Cynicism, he could on any Low Thursday return us to the threading of a rusty nut to a dirt-grimed bolt. Indeed, the first day of the first Low had us working for two hours to construct a scenario on the basis of a torn receipt, a bent key, a stub of pencil, a book of matches, and a dried flower pressed into a cheap unmarked envelope. These items, he told us, happened to be the pocket litter left by an agent under suspicion who had decamped in unholy haste from a furnished room. For two hours we fingered these objects, brooded upon them, and offered our theories. I forget mine. It was no better than the others. Only Rosen was to distinguish himself that day. Once all the others had finished their expositions, Arnie continued to look unhappy. “In my opinion,” he said, “too many pieces are missing.”

  “This is the sum of your contribution?” asked Harlot.

  “Yessir. Given the paucity of facts, no viable scenario is available.”

  “Rosen,” Harlot told us, “is on the nose. These objects were selected arbitrarily. A correct solution does not exist.”

  Explanation: The exercise was to alert us to the risk of autointoxication when formulating scenarios. Deductive passions could be loosed all too easily by a dried flower, a cheap envelope, a stub of pencil, the bent key, the torn receipt for $11.08. Our first lesson had been designed to make us aware (in retrospect) of any subtle discomfort we had ignored in the course of working up our explanation. “Respect that subtle hollow,” Harlot told us. “When a scenario feels absolutely right, it is usually right, but if your story feels almost right, yet just a little empty, well, then, it’s all wrong.” The next Low, he told us, would be devoted to espionage itself. Espionage, plain and simple, as opposed to counterespionage.