Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Lately, I’ve been having my troubles in this direction. Howard’s concept of emblazoning MARXISMO ES MIERDA in six-foot letters on every available town wall has escalated into a small war. If Marxists have their own kind of religious feelings, then connecting Marxism and shit to each other certainly awakens something explosive. The toughest leftist street gangs in Montevideo come from the dock area, and their leaders are high cadre in the MRO, an ultra-left group. Such boys are tough. In fact, they proved so rugged that our kids in AV/ALANCHE were getting chewed up by the street fights. It was no fun, I tell you, to sit in my car a half mile away, and hear nothing but a brief “Emboscada!”—ambushed!—over my walkie-talkie, then, fifteen minutes later, see the team come straggling back with an unholy number of bloody heads—four out of seven one night. Then, worse: one boy in the hospital, soon another. Howard called on Peones to beef up our troops with off-duty cops handsomely paid from the Special Budget. Well, AV/ALANCHE won a few fights, only to see the MRO come back with reinforcements of their own. These nocturnal encounters have grown into medieval battles.

  In the last year, a small operation of seven kids who did their wall painting once a week, and fell into a skirmish perhaps one night a month, has grown into a series of massive encounters with thirty or forty people on either side using rocks, clubs, knives, shields, helmets, and one bow and arrow, yes, such items were actually found on the street after the last ruckus we won, and finally, a boy on our side was killed about a month ago. Shot dead through the eye. Peones ran a dragnet through two working-class neighborhoods, Capurro and La Teja, searching for the gun and the gunman, and informed Hunt that the killer was taken care of without a trial (which we are now free to believe or disbelieve), but, as you can see, the character of the event is significantly altered. Peones keeps two police cars waiting in the wings to charge in should the battle go poorly. AV/EMARIA, with their infrared camera, were actually used on one occasion to patrol up and down the surrounding streets photographing any and all youths approaching the scene, an absurdly over-weighted venture (speak of expense!) which Hunt did call to a halt once he saw that the results, apart from the labors of identification, were technically inadequate. (You couldn’t discern the faces on the film, let alone identify them.) I could have told him as much.

  At any rate, the MRO is now on the offensive. YANQUI A FUERA! is getting painted on many walls, and in good Catholic neighborhoods, too. The MRO people seem to have a better sense of where to strike than we do. Hunt decides that one of Peones’ cops must be secretly aiding the MRO, and wants Chevi to furnish us with detailed information on the MRO cadres so we can get more a line on this.

  Fuertes refuses the request outright. He is a serious agent doing serious work, he says, and we are asking him to inform on street youths. “My pride is that I betray those who are situated above me, not beneath me.”

  “Ayúdame, compañero,” I exclaim.

  “I am not your compañero. I am your agent. And insufficiently paid.”

  “Do you think you will get a raise by refusing us?”

  “That is a matter of no significance. You will, in either case, continue to treat me like a puppet, and I will attempt to exert whatever autonomy is left to me.”

  “Why don’t we cut through the crap and get to the bone,” I tell him.

  “Quintessentially American. Get to the bone.”

  “Will you fulfill our request?”

  “I betray big people. Stupid, stuffed-shirt bureaucratic Communists who have sold out their own people for the power they can now exercise at a desk. They are upper filth, and I associate myself with them every day, and become an upper bureaucrat like them. But, I do not delude myself. I have betrayed my people and my roots. I am a viper. Nonetheless, I am not so degraded that I wish to poison those who are smaller than myself. The MRO street boys who come out from La Teja to fight at night are nearer to me than you can ever be. I grew up in La Teja. I was cadre myself in the MRO during university days. But, now, as an entrenched bureaucrat in the PCU, I no longer have the contacts you need. You see, the MRO does not trust the PCU. They view it as too established and too penetrated.”

  Well, at least I have a plausible report to bring back to Hunt. I am writing it in my mind as I listen: Profound internecine mistrust between MRO and PCU. Cannot determine Left police sources without penetrating MRO.

  That will use up a month of debate between Station and Groogs. By then, Hunt may be on to something else, or—and now I have an inspiration. The key to working with Chevi is to save mutual face.

  “All right,” I say, “you will not do it, and I will not threaten you. I accept your version; PCU and MRO lack umbilical connection.”

  “Put that in the bank,” says Chevi. He bends toward me and whispers, “They hate each other.” He giggles.

  “All right,” I say, “point made. Now, I want you to help me. My people are going to need a penetration into the highest places in the MRO.” I point upward with my finger to emphasize that I am in tune with the AV/OCADO ethic of punching up, always up. “I want you to provide me with a list of possible high personnel for penetration.”

  This is the kind of bargain that can be struck.

  “I will need two weeks,” he says.

  “No, I want it for our meeting next week.” I am thinking that I will get together with Gordy Morewood and go over the names Chevi brings in. Gordy may even know how to make the approach. All this will take months, but my rapidly aging young backside will be covered. Oh, Kittredge, this was the moment when I knew I was a Company man.

  “Next week,” Chevi agrees.

  With that, he stepped into the hall, raised his hand in greeting, I suppose, to the retired tarts peeking out at him, and, waddling just a trifle in obedience to his increasing avoirdupois, made his way to the elevators.

  That son of a bitch. I can assure you, he probably had the names already. By the next week, he came forth with a short list of three figures in the MRO, and Gordy Morewood was on the stick. In turn, by the following week, Fuertes had asked for a raise. And will probably get it.

  Yes, Masarov has been only one element in these busy days. Write to me. I need it.

  Love,

  Harry

  24

  March 15, 1958

  Beloved Man,

  I am so glad you seem to have accepted my sermon on patience, since I cannot tell you any more at this point about Dracula’s Lair. I have taken too many vows of silence concerning the matter and am just not able to find the sanction in myself to fill you in. Yet, I am still dying to send you letters. When is devotion ever so alive as in wholly private correspondence? Which we have, dear friend.

  You took your courage delicately in hand and asked me about Alpha-Ego and Omega-Ego. I must have frightened you in the past for stepping on my preserves! How decent it is of you to live with my theories when everyone else has decided they are last year’s intellectual fashion.

  Well, it is interesting that you fix on this aspect of my work. Do you know that is where I began? The first crude questionnaires I laid out to try to locate the separate properties of Alpha and Omega did focus on their separate egos. I had an insight at the time, you see: The best approach would be by way of memory tests.

  It was an interesting concept. Memory, after all, is often sinister. Nothing within ourselves betrays us quite so much as memory, and ego, I came to decide, was the overseer of memory. It does not matter what we may retain at deeper levels; the ego controls the surface and so will distort a recollection if that is necessary to maintaining the ego’s view of things.

  Well, contemplate the hurdles to be faced with two egos, one for Alpha, one for Omega. No wonder people could not bear my theories. Yet, one characteristic was soon clear to me. Because Alpha and Omega maintain separate banks of recollection, memory was not going to be at all identical in them. Their respective egos have too many separate needs, and, given enough need, memory becomes no more than a servant of the ego—which, I expect, is exa
ctly why the memoirs of successful men are usually so awful.

  The easiest route, I concluded, to uncovering the distinctive properties of Alpha and Omega would be, then, to study the respective development of their egos. I would offer each subject some material to memorize, then question him on retention. I expected to discover patterns of recollection coupled with the most surprising lack of recollection, and I did, but I also found that my test did not work with certain kinds of strong and ruthless people engaged in high-level work. They consistently broke the pattern. They had what I came to call ultra-ego. They could remember a hideous deed perfectly, and with no large signs of disturbance.

  Consider, for example, the indescribably powerful psychic force that enabled monsters like Hitler and Stalin to live with the millions of deaths they left in their wake. At a more modest level, but not vastly more comprehensible, are those responsible for the deaths of thousands. It occurs to me not all too comfortably that Hugh can aspire to that category. Taken by intimate measure, Hugh’s ultra-ego is curiously intoxicating to me, and feeds, I suspect, the impulse now driving this girl to become one of Dracula’s ladies—an outrageous exaggeration, and yet not altogether. You see, I have never lost completely my presentiment that the transactions of the spirit underworld are very much connected to us here. In this vein, a man named Noel Field is most relevant to my fears. Do you know that I have days when I cannot think of Allen Dulles without invoking Noel Field’s image, for he has been incarcerated in Soviet prisons for years and Allen put him there back in 1950. Very much with the help of Hugh.

  Believe it, my dear husband did confide in me about this exploit. Allen, I learned, was made to look a hell of a fool by Noel Field back in Zurich during World War II. For some reason, Allen trusted Field enough to add his personal recommendation to the names of a number of Europeans proposed by Field for important jobs with the Allied armies. Many of them turned out to be Communists, and Noel, who had more or less known that, never informed Allen of their political bent. (Like many another Quaker, Noel Field did go in, I fear, for the most overweening permissiveness in dealing with Communists.) Well, Allen paid for that mistake in a number of ways, and never forgave Noel. But it took Hugh, in company with Frank Wisner, to come up with an idea how to pay this enterprising Quaker back. In 1949, we managed to get the word out to a few high Soviets that Noel Field was CIA. Pure disinformation. Hugh handled that part and, you may be certain, left no American signature on it. I expect Dulles, Wisner, and Montague assumed that just as soon as Field took his next Red Cross or CARE trip over to Warsaw he would be imprisoned as a spy and some of his close Communist cronies might have to suffer a bit along with him. It went, however, a lot further than that. Stalin was hopelessly insane by then. Field was thrown incommunicado into a Warsaw jail cell, and before the affair was over just about every Communist with whom he had had dealings, plus their numerous circles of cohorts, were either shot, tortured, or imprisoned for confessing to deeds they had not committed. Some put the number of Party victims at a thousand dead; some at five thousand. When I inquired of Hugh, he shrugged and said, “Stalin gave us another Katyn Forest massacre.”

  Well, I never knew whether to be proud of my husband’s skills in this matter or aghast, and, of course, the Agency now engages in levitations that can be seen as amusing or scandalous, depending on one’s point of view. Over these last years, we have certainly financed a number of liberal but resolutely anti-Communist organizations who set up a programmatic hue and cry to free the American martyr, Noel Field, from Soviet-Polish oppression.

  Later, Harry, during that awful time when I passed through the loneliness of living with my own career failure, I began to think about all those Polish Communists who were falsely executed as traitors. Here was one more example of an evil masterpiece committed by us in the name, and, I believe, ultimately, in the cause, of good, but, oh, the anguish of the victims. I began to wonder if we had not touched some vulnerable edge of the cosmos. I hope this is not so, but I do fear it. I think of the frightful way Herr Adolf massacred millions of people in clean places. They walked into the gas chambers believing they were going to bathe their dirty, tired bodies. Get ready for hot showers, they were told. Then the fatal vents were opened. As I was going under in my own Easter madness, I used to feel as if I could hear those victims screaming in rage, and I began to brood on the possibility that when a death is monstrously unfair, it can send out a curse upon human existence from which we do not necessarily recover in full. Not altogether. Some days when the smog in Washington is inhumanly bilious I wonder if we are not breathing some baleful message from the beyond. You can see how disturbed I am still. Which of course leads me to brood on your dealings with your agent, Chevi Fuertes. What about his life? How responsible are you for what is happening to him? And to the people around him.

  Well, I’ve gotten into awfully solemn stuff, have I not? Let us say I am feeling nervous about my upcoming venture, which may prove no picnic either.

  Would you divert me? I know it seems like a small request, but if Howard has indeed gotten around to taking you to one of those estancias, would you write to me about that little event? I like the social comedies you get into, and am certain any description of Howard Hunt cavorting with rich Uruguayans will be milk and honey for me—certainly much better than my paranoid fantasies that you are off on brothel expeditions.

  Really! We all have to lie so much that a straightforward account is balm to the soul.

  Love to you, dear man,

  Kittredge

  25

  I DID NOT KNOW IF I WISHED TO HEAR ANY MORE ABOUT LIES. KITTREDGE’S letter disturbed me, and I began to wonder whether some manifestations of ultra-ego were not often present in more minor matters. After all, I, who still saw myself as an honest man, had been lying concertedly to Hugh Montague, Kittredge, Howard Hunt, Chevi Fuertes, Sherman Porringer, and, worst of all, to Sally. For I had made the mistake, all those months ago, of hinting that love along some future tree-lined street was not wholly impossible. Of course, I was hardly in possession of any large funds of ultra-ego, since in her case, I certainly had to pay the price. My lie exploded on the day she saw a headless ghost gallop across my face in the instant I learned she was pregnant. After which, it did not matter what I tried to say; I was confirming what she knew already.

  Our abandoned carnal relations began to rear up in my memory like a burned-out building. Sally made a point, when meeting at embassy parties, to be concertedly nasty. Such parties were now the sum of what I had for social life in Montevideo. On those even more frequent nights when I was alone in my hotel room, it would occur to me all too bitterly that I could not even boast of a bar I frequented regularly. We were not encouraged to—CIA men were always potential targets for kidnapping and torture, or, at least, so went the premise. On those occasions when night work or an Embassy function did not have me occupied in the evening, I did not always know what to do with myself—people who work sixty hours a week usually don’t. And now there were no late-night options for chancy play with Sally. Before her pregnancy, there had been evenings when Sherman, kept late at the office, would thereby free Sally and me to meet in my hotel. Now, at parties, she would choose a corner to rake me over with a quick speech or two. “Harry,” she would say, “Sherman’s become a hellion in bed.”

  “They say marriages go through stages.”

  “What could you know about marriage?” Sally would reply, and with a bright smile for the rest of the room, as if she were recounting the saga of a three no-trump, doubled and redoubled, she would add, “I bet you are a faggot. Deep down!”

  Deep down was where she had just wounded me. I had enjoyed her protestations that no other man ever made love to her so well. Now I had a momentary struggle to keep the tears out of my eyes. Manifest injustice always affected me in such manner.

  “You’ve never looked more attractive,” I said, and stepped away.

  I saw her soon after at the next Russian Embassy party. As
evening came to the garden, we were left again with our natural colleagues, the Soviets. In a reprise of our earlier evening, Hunt and Porringer and Kearns and Gatsby and their wives, and Nancy Waterston and myself, were still around at the end, and on this occasion Hunt obtained a long-held wish. Poking one stiff finger into Varkhov’s chest, he said, “Georgey boy, I hear you are going to charm our socks off and take us on a tour of your Embassy.”

  “Soxoff?” said Georgi, “I do not think I know him.” But I was able to pick up the smallest flick of a look he sent in Boris’ direction, followed by a slow opening of Masarov’s eyes to indicate assent, for Varkhov now said, “Yes, into the Embassy, of course, why not? Everybody,” and we trooped in to take a tour of the rooms permitted, which were four in number and grand enough to suggest a museum. The gold and white furniture in these reception chambers seemed suitable for a lady-in-waiting to Louis XIV or Catherine the Great. That turned out to be not a bad guess, for Varkhov now murmured to Hunt, “Furniture from excess at Hermitage in Leningrad.”