Gatsby, whom I don’t believe I’ve described to you, is sandy-haired, scrub-featured, freckled, and, in a word, not very describable. He was never exactly noticeable, not even with a mustache that happened to be dark enough to contrast with his light hair. But Hunt convinced him to shave it off. Now he is truly inconspicuous.
Last note on stink-bombs. AV/ALANCHE-1 through 7 have been armed with pellets. Hunt claims these Who-Me’s will beef up morale for my kids. To my surprise, it does. Last time AV/ALANCHE 1–7 went out, they actually got into a pitched battle with a left-wing gang they had been wary of before, but the pellets apparently did the job. On their next sally, they intend to paint MARXISMO ES MIERDA on a warehouse wall near the center of town.
The next sally reminds me that the Porringers are also going to the Soviet garden party. I feel like Anthony Trollope. Will Herrick Hubbard convince Mrs. Porringer to dance with the Russians?
Your own Harry
April 15, 1957
Kittredge,
I wish I hadn’t dispatched that letter yesterday. Now you are expecting news I can’t offer. The Russians called off their garden party. The excuse is that their residentura, Samoilov, is ill with flu. It’s nonsense. We know better. A quick check with the Bosqueverdes confirmed that Samoilov has been in and out of the Embassy several times this morning.
Whom, you may ask, do we dare to send to the Bosqueverdes’ door in broad daylight? It’s an ingenious piece of work—another nice touch from the unpopular Mr. Morewood. Gordy calls on a twelve-year-old nephew of the Bosqueverdes whenever he wants Hyman to come out to a pay phone. Since the boy lives near the villa, he merely saunters over in his skullcap to pay, ostensibly, a visit to his Hebrew teacher. Of such pointillisme is the complete spy’s palette. I wish one could like Gordy more—there is so much to learn from him.
By such means, Hyman Bosqueverde did relay to us the news that Samoilov was walking about and healthy. Why the party was canceled we cannot answer yet. We notified the Groogs, who took it up with Soviet Russia Division. Their analysis is that Khrushchev’s friendly gestures of late toward the West are intended to slow down the nuclear buildup in NATO. The invitation to us here in Montevideo was one of the far-flung expressions of such a gambit. Something, however, went wrong overnight, and they pulled back the olive branch. A worldwide checkout on Soviet Embassy parties reveals that the Montevideo bash, plus a party in Johannesburg to which our Embassy people were also invited, seem to have been the only two canceled.
Our best readout after a three-way cable interchange is that the Russians were indicating that a minor, not a major, chill is taking place. As evidence, the entire party was called off, which is far better, on balance, than merely disinviting the American Embassy. God, what a way to waste a day. I’m at raw ends. And Barry Kearns is in a worse state. He had to spend the entire morning and afternoon on the Encoder-Decoder with Soviet Russia Division. When Kearns makes even the smallest error in routing, which is not hard to do, the Sourballs become awfully nasty. (Merely to reach them, however, calls for invoking an entry code that changes with the hour.) Kearns forgot that Washington, of late on Daylight Saving Time, is no longer sixty minutes behind us—well, contemplate the return vituperations. Kearns’ error cost the Sourballs some ninety minutes in the Great Bin of Lost Messages until they located his cable. Here is part of their reply:
NEXTT IMESH OWYOU RCERT IFICA
TEOFI DIOCY
I’ll spare you the rest of that billet-doux. The SR Division has to be composed of thick-spectacled creatures with half-bald heads, woodpecker noses, and wholly splenetic dispositions.
Poor Kearns. I haven’t described him to you, but he’s our misfit. Six-four, he weighs much too much, maybe one of the heaviest people in the Agency, lardlike, even soft. I don’t know how he played golf for Sonderstrom, although I hear he had some ability to drive a long ball and was a finicky but reasonably dependable putter. His golf bag, however, is gathering dust. Under Hunt’s baleful supervision, Kearns’ inadequacies are beginning to show up. He panics, and can easily blow a communications procedure. Kearns also has a heavy hand when trying to joke with the Groogs. There’s a cable protocol, I could even call it a cable panache, that he lacks. Whereas, Hunt has it. This is what Howard sent last week to the Argentina-Uruguay Desk: NOBODY TOLD ME BUT I BELIEVE TODAY TO BE THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF OUR URUGUAY STATION. GIFTS AND CONGRATULATIONS WILL BE GRATEFULLY RECEIVED. DO NOT REMIT CASH.
I can see how such humor won’t translate over to you, but given our oft-strained relations with the Groogs, it was a funny cable. They sent back the following reply: WOULD YOU CONSIDER THIRTY THOUSAND AMERICAN PENNIES TO ACCOMPANY THE USUAL FELICITATIONS FOR A JOB PRETERNATURALLY (AS ALWAYS) HALF-BAKED TO A PERFECT TURN.
Well, I’m feeling psychic across six thousand miles. I sense your Furies stirring. Kittredge, do try to forgive the disappointment this letter must be.
Harry
April 19, 1957
Harry,
I believe that I am a case officer manqué. I know that when I expect information and don’t receive it, I have to hold on to a temper so terrible that I am convinced my Gardiner forebears own a touch of Druid’s blood. Your last letter, to put it kindly, reads like drool from Fathead Lane. What do I care about your third-rate Chief of Station and his Napoleonic urinations into the pee-pot of Uruguay? His cables are equal to his mentality. Your appreciation of such mediocrity inspires me with horror.
As I write this, I am sitting at Harlot’s desk looking at your brooch. Note that this is the first time I have ever called Hugh by the name for which he is famous. I wonder what Christopher’s proud cryptonym is yet to be? STRUMPET? TOMBSTONE?
The baby is crying. Again. Again. It is because I called him TOMBSTONE. His life is part of my future death.
Brooch
Your brooch
April 20, 1957
Dear Harry,
Forget yesterday’s letter if you can. I mailed it immediately upon completion, and that is all I remember. Whatever was in it cannot possibly be more than half true. I suffer attacks like migraine, except my head does not hurt. It’s just that I undergo temporary amnesia.
Have you given up your brothel girl or are you deep in the slop-pits with her?
I fear the worst.
I really do not wish to correspond with you anymore.
This is an order.
Cease all communications with me.
Hadley Kittredge Gardiner Montague
If I had sworn that I would not use the secure phone to reach Harlot, the oath had to be broken. Our Station’s secure phone was kept, however, in a locked closet in Howard Hunt’s office. He was not sympathetic to my request.
“Howard,” I told him, “I must have use of it.”
“Could you provide the reason?”
“Personal.”
Howard sat behind his desk and shrugged. “In that case, why don’t you find a pay phone on the other side of town?”
“This is Company business. The man I want to reach won’t speak unless the line is secure.”
“Hugh Montague. Is he the gentleman?”
“Yessir.”
Howard put his elbows on the desk and looked at me from the tent of his upraised and slanted fingers. “Harry, I think you ought to know,” he said, “that Harlot is a legend in the Agency for six good reasons and eight bad ones. One of the bad ones is that you can’t have a decent conversation with the guy unless you’re using a secure phone.”
“I accept the fact that Hugh Montague is a man full of quirks. But this happens to be a family matter of first importance.”
Howard showed his temper. “The secure phone is placed in my hands as Chief of Station. You are asking me to abuse this serious privilege.”
“For God’s sake, I was able to use a secure phone all the time I was in Berlin. It happened to be located right at the end of a corridor in the Department of Defense. Anyone could use it.”
“Berlin,” said Howard, �
�is an orgy. A goddamned out-of-control orgy.”
“Yessir.”
“I can’t allow you to use my secure phone for a private matter. That’s cutting a hole in the membrane.”
“Yessir. But I do have to talk over a family matter.”
“I thought we passed that stop.”
“Howard, I am godfather to the Montagues’ child, Christopher. Upsetting news came to me this morning by way of a letter.”
“Isn’t Hugh Montague your godfather?”
“Yessir.” But I could not hold back the question. “How did you know?”
He touched his thumb with his forefinger several times to indicate a duck quacking. “I had lunch back in Washington with Arnie Rosen.”
“Rosey,” I said, “is better than an old-fashioned telephone operator.”
To my surprise, Hunt laughed. “Here!” He reached into a vest pocket and withdrew a small key. “Help yourself. Maybe I know what it is to be worried about a kid.”
“Thank you, Howard.”
“And when you’re done, not today, but soon, I have a couple of things to talk to you about. Don’t ask who, but a couple of people warned me off of one Harry Hubbard. Told me you fucked up in Berlin.”
“Maybe I did.”
“Well, everybody messes up under Bill Harvey. The real bad word, if you want to hear it, is that you’re locked in with the wrong rabbi.”
I made no reply. I was damn angry by now and trying to be as calm as stone.
“We can,” said Hunt, picking it up, “talk about it over drinks or dinner.” He looked at his watch. “Hey, I’m late for one big lunch. This office is going to be yours. Leave it as you found it.” He laughed to subdue the edge of his last remark, and was gone.
Using a secure phone proved difficult in Montevideo. I had to pass through relays of operators from Buenos Aires to Mexico City to Washington. It took a half hour to learn that Harlot was not in his office, nor at home, but another call to Location Inquiry-Secure directed me to WILD GARLIC, the cognomen given to Harlot’s phone at the Keep. An hour had been spent in Howard Hunt’s closet to reach a man I dreaded speaking to.
“Are you calling about Kittredge?” Harlot said for greeting. Once again came the impression of hearing a voice from the other end of a long tube.
“Yes,” I said, “just what I am calling about.”
“How the hell did you get to Howard’s phone? Have to give away a piece of yourself?”
“Probably.”
“Doubtless too much.”
“Hugh, is Kittredge with you at the Keep?”
“She’s all right. Under some sedation, but fine.”
I could not see how someone who was under sedation was fine, but he must have heard what I did not say, for he added, “I’m with her. She’s not alone.”
“Yessir.”
He was silent for the longest time, and when he spoke, it was as if he had made a whole decision to tell me more.
“Harry, she didn’t go out of her head, you know. It was overload.”
“I’ve been worried,” I said.
He snorted. “Worried? I’ve been grinding a few teeth. Do you know? She was still trying to nurse the baby, and keep up at work, and with it all, most unfortunately, experimenting with a substance. At such times, of course, she would not nurse the baby. Not when the substance was in her.”
I could hardly believe what he had said. “The what?”
“Kittredge would never test others before jumping in the pool herself. But her timing was ill advised.”
“Is she all right?” I asked.
“I told you. She is mending. She is under sedation. A good doctor-friend of mine is supervising her recovery. Friend of Allen’s.”
“Did she go to the hospital?”
“Of course not. A psychotic episode in your 201 is about as desirable as joining the Communist Party in your youth.”
I could feel his desire to talk. In what a state must he be!
“Hugh, forgive this question, but are you certain she shouldn’t be seeing a very good psychiatrist?”
“I know the lot,” said Montague. “We run them in and out of TSS in relays. I comprehend Kittredge far better than ever they could. They are not qualified to deal with her fine mind. She is all right, I tell you. In another week, she will be herself. Of course, she must not work for a time, and in future has to forswear any ingestion of substances whatever. It’s her ambition, don’t you see? The only part of the girl that is not balanced. They don’t recognize the stature of her work sufficiently. That’s enough to drive a sane mind wild.”
“May I speak to Kittredge?”
“She is sleeping. I would not wake her.”
“May I call back?”
There was a full pause. I waited, but he did not reply.
“Is Christopher with you?” I asked.
“Naturally.”
“And a nurse?”
“A good Maine woman who comes in by the day. I get up with Christopher if he wakes at night.” He was silent after that.
I wanted to ask about his office. Who was covering? Kittredge had once spoken of two assistants who were absolutely dependable. They would be guarding the doors at GHOUL. I had a small but inescapable panic that my time on the phone was running out. I would be alone in Uruguay so soon as he hung up.
“May I call later?” I asked again.
His telephone silence, teeming with static, seemed equal to the babble of a myriad of infinitesimal creatures.
“Harry, look into yourself,” said Harlot. “You’ve been a son of a bitch. I want your correspondence with Kittredge to cease.”
My first reaction was to wonder whether he had read the letters, or merely knew of their existence.
“Dear God, Hugh,” I said at last, “I think that ought to be Kittredge’s decision.”
“Harry, the birth of a baby is as incapacitating to an ambitious, talented woman as the hole left by a spear. She needs to mend. So cease this correspondence. That is my wish and it is hers.”
“I’m going to ask for a leave.”
“You may get it, but I won’t permit you to see her.”
“Hugh, don’t cut me off. I’m six thousand miles away.”
“Well, you’re going to discover the stuff of which you are made. My uneasiest sentiment, now that we are perforce joined by truth for a moment or two, is that you, Harry, are not tough enough. Not for the life work you have chosen. Prove me wrong. Plunge into your job. Take a sabbatical from us until we come around.”
With that, he hung up.
13
SINCE IT WAS NEAR MY HOTEL, I HAD THE HABIT OF STOPPING BY THE CENTRAL Post Office each morning on the way to work. Sally Porringer would leave letters for me there. Her notes, as one could anticipate, were functional—“Oh, Harry, I miss you so much, I’m just aching for you. Let’s figure out something for Saturday,” is a fair sample.
It was nice, however, that someone was aching for me. In the month after the last letter from Kittredge, I made love to Sally in a cold fury. It was unfair, but I held Sally responsible for the loss, and copulated in hate, which may have had the obverse effect of melting some icy moraine in her, for she kept telling me I was wonderful. Sexual vanity with its iron-tipped fingers kept clawing me forward, therefore, into more performance, even as I kept asking myself why I couldn’t act like other Americans and just find women and forget them. Porringer, for example, was always ready to regale Gatsby and me about his nights in Montevideo brothels. If Sherman, with a wife, two children, and all of the duties of a Deputy COS, could still disport “like the happiest hog on the hind tit,” as he put it himself—somber, blue-cheeked, paranoid Porringer—why could I not enjoy it? The irony is that I was even beginning to feel a bit of loyalty to Sally. The paradox of sex is that it always negotiates some kind of contract with love—no matter what, love and sex will never be entirely without relations. If I had added to my clandestine jamborees with Sally all the anger I felt at exercising m
y brains right out of my head with the wrong girl, and so felt more and more separated from the only woman I could adore like a goddess—strong words, but I was suffering my loss—all this anger had to live nonetheless with my sexual greed. Loss had left me a displaced person in the land of love.
So love slipped over, if only by a little, into my feelings, and I did not despise Sally quite so much, and had compassion for the awful loneliness of her life in a land where the only people who understood her at all were maniacal old lady bridge players, a young, grim, and much detached lover, and a husband who understood her so well he did not comprehend her at all. “Does he think it makes me feel good,” she complained once, “for him to announce to company, ‘Oh, Sally’s a good old girl,’ as if I was his 4-H Blue Ribbon in the prize sow contest? I hate Sherman sometimes. He’s so needful and inconsiderate,” and she began to weep. I, holding her, felt the first beginnings of compassion move out from me and into her. I still looked upon her with a great measure of contempt, but there were limits to how long I could keep my best feelings—that inner chalice of tender compassion—reserved entirely for Kittredge Gardiner Montague when I ached within from every bruise she had bestowed.
Besides, it was too painful to think of her. Was she mad? There was not a night when I did not curse myself for failing to get leave to go back to America. Yet it was hopeless. Harlot was never less than his word. Besides, he could be right. It might be one’s duty to suck up the slack.
Nonetheless, I still felt treacherous toward Kittredge whenever Sally and I put in our raunchy hours. Sex with Sally grew more appealing despite myself. I would lie in her arms afterward wondering if Kittredge were on the mend, or had I, across six thousand miles, just sent another thundering blow to the head?
Suck up the slack, yes. I felt like a strip miner through all of May and June. The mild winter of Montevideo might as well have been spent in an Eastern coal pit. I was alone in Uruguay with no letters to write. So I took on work as Harlot had advised. I saw Chevi Fuertes twice a week, and AV/ALANCHE once, AV/OUCH-1 and 2 at Travel Control and Passport Control were on my route, and AV/ERAGE, the homosexual journalist on the society beat, was also given to me now that Gatsby had been put onto Porringer’s old trade union contacts. And there were always the Bosqueverdes (who spent their winter photographing the passage of live souls in and out of the Soviet Embassy gate). They were mine. And Howard Hunt gave me Gordy Morewood as well, and I had to deal with his unrelenting demands for cash. On certain mornings, every face was an irritant. Sometimes when Porringer and Kearns and Gatsby were all together in our big office room with its four desks, I knew again how faceless were everyday faces. And how intimate! Every misgrown nostril hair!
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