Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  I would never have divined all this without the briefing. The Colonel was tall, showed a pronounced limp, wore an eye-patch, and was so soft-spoken that he seemed almost hollow. There could be no explanation for him without Alpha and Omega.

  I expect that Colonel King’s wealth did Hunt no harm. Ambassador Woodward had put such phrases on the record as “flamboyant preening, unsuitable for government servants.”

  “You must have had to put up a strong defense,” I told Hunt afterward.

  “I didn’t defend myself,” said Howard. “I attacked. I told Colonel King how effective I had been in getting Nardone in. Why, at the victory party on election night, I was the only American official to be invited from the Embassy. Woodward had even predicted that Nardone could not win. The only way he ever did get to meet Benito before the inauguration was to ask this humble servant to arrange the introduction. Mr. Woodward cannot forgive me for that favor. You may be certain I got my story across to J. C. King. ‘Woodward can go to blazes,’ he said before he left. He didn’t even admonish me to lower the profile. In fact, the Colonel says he has an interesting prospect for me.”

  Soon after, Hunt was called to Washington. On return, he invited me once more to Carrasco for dinner, and in the study, over brandy—no longer did I smoke cigars—he told me of the new order of business. “Just when you think your luck is down, it takes a turn. I’ve been invited to participate in a major move. This one will be a lot larger than Guatemala.”

  “Castro? Cuba?”

  He pointed his index finger at me to show I was on target. “We’re going in for a jumbo move. Cuban exiles to win back their land. Hellaciously covert.” The light in his brandy snifter seemed to be radiating from his face. “I’m to help stage it. Before we’re done, we will stock more groceries than the Agency has ever put up on the shelf. Yet, all sequestered. Fabulously sequestered. Ideally, there won’t be one overt piece of evidence to show U.S. involvement.” He ran his finger around the rim of the glass long enough to induce a clear note. “Would you care to come aboard as one of my assistants?”

  “I can’t think of anything I would like more,” I said. I meant it. Under twenty wrappings of apathy, I felt a first stirring of anticipation. Part of my depression might well be due to not knowing where to go after Uruguay. No longer could I see myself in one of Harlot’s mills. To live in Washington, and avoid Kittredge? No. I said to Hunt, “I would very much like to work with you.” Yes, the fires of the vow gave promise of blazing in me again.

  “Let me state from the outset,” said Hunt, “nothing is going to be off-limits on this one.”

  I must have shown some lack of clear focus, for he brought his head forward and mouthed the next few words. “It might get wet out there.”

  I nodded silently. “All the way?” I murmured.

  He took his time before pointing a finger to the ceiling.

  36

  MY WORK CAME ALIVE. THERE WAS MUCH TO TURN OVER TO THE NEW officers. A year ago, I would have found it difficult to say good-bye to AV/ALANCHE-1 through 7, but my street gang was larger now, and half of it was composed of Peones’ cops. Indeed, he virtually ran it from his office. An important man was Peones now that Nardone was leader of Uruguay.

  Nostalgia, all the same, proved able to grow in the thinnest soil. It actually moved me that I would no longer oversee AV/OUCH-1 and AV/OUCH-2 in their task of checking off the travelers who went through Passport Control, nor did I have to lose an evening now and then appeasing AV/ERAGE, our society journalist, when he had been ignored for too long. AV/EMARIA-1, 2, 3, and 4 would not be there to call when I was in need of a surveillance cab, and poor GOGOL was about to be shut down. The take at the Russian Embassy was now deemed too small to warrant expenses. The Bosqueverdes would be looking for smaller quarters. Nor could Gordy Morewood phone my desk on Monday morning to haggle over accounts. My replacement would deal with AV/OIRDUPOIS now.

  I also had a few sentimental farewells to offer the Montevideo brothels. I was fond of several girls; to my surprise, they were fond of me. Show business, I told myself. But then it occurred to me that prostitutes and clients were not unlike actors in a play. For the little while that they lived together, it did not have to be wholly unreal.

  There was AV/OCADO to deal with. The after-effect of Libertad had been to give me an overdose of case officer’s caution. I had done no more for many months than bring out my weekly list of questions to the safe house and wine him and dine him there. I had even learned how to cook. The days when we argued over whether it was safe to meet in restaurants were done.

  Chevi’s work did go on. I cannot say whether it became less important, or only seemed so in the slog of my long depression, but I began to wonder at the value of all the detailed answers we received about projects undertaken in the Partido Comunista de Uruguay. Was it worth the effort? I hardly knew if I cared. It used to irritate me that Fuertes, who was heavier by the week until he was in every danger of growing obese, was also becoming more timorous about his safety. He swore that he did not see Libertad any longer, yet on each visit he seemed to worry a little more about the volume of Peones’ rage should our Police Chief ever discover the facts. “You do not know the man,” Chevi insisted. “He is a fascist. Much like Nardone. His cruelty develops in proportion to his power. Why else be a fascist?”

  “We will not let him hurt you,” I said.

  “Then you admit that you control Peones?”

  “No.”

  “In that case, I have much reason to be afraid,” he said.

  I did not know how to reply. Chevi provided the answer.

  “You do control him,” he said. “That is why you believe you can protect me. It would be better to draw a circle around my name and inform Peones he is not to enter such an area.”

  “It would be equivalent to telling his office that you are connected to us. Members of the PCU, even if you have not been able to locate them, have certainly penetrated his office.”

  “You do not need to tell him why you wish to protect me,” said Fuertes. “The police are used to providing dispensation in the midst of ambiguity.”

  “Chevi, I can no longer follow what the hell you are talking about. I think there is something else.”

  “There is,” he said. “The solemn fact is that Libertad called me last week to issue a warning. She said Peones had heard recently that she was seen in public with me. Many months ago. But he is insanely jealous. It could have been the lunch with your Chief of Station.”

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “She said Peones had been prepared to work me over, but that she commanded him to give up such ideas. She told him that we had always been chaste. If he touched me, she would never see him again. It was a passionate speech delivered with voluminous depths of feeling. She could not love me more, she declared, if I were her brother. That does not mean Comandante Peones believed her. But we are people who respect the authority of passion whether it is directed toward carnality or loyalty. Pedro understood. He would suffer the price if he doubted her speech.”

  “Then you have nothing to fear.” I could not even begin to estimate the damage as yet.

  “I have everything to be afraid of. He has no need to strike at me directly. His people will do that.”

  “Won’t he have to face Libertad?”

  “No. He will disavow the policeman who injures me. He may even punish the man. I assure you, such histories are easily blurred. Libertad will not give up the advantages she obtains from Peones if his guilt is imprecise.”

  “Imprecise? Only Peones could be the instigator.”

  “Not necessarily. Torture is becoming more of a practice. Nardone hates Communists. He hates them even more than J. Edgar Hoover. Many wounds of self-esteem have been laid on Nardone by the Communists. So he has an intellectual position that is equal to a sadistic faith. Nardone believes that the left is a cancer which can only be extirpated through torture. The martyrdom of Anarchists and Communists is upon us.”
>
  “By whose authority? By which laws? Tell me of such situations. I don’t believe it.”

  “A policeman can always arrest you. For crossing the street in the wrong place. But now, once you are arrested, it is a different drama. There is no left wing inside the police station to protect you. Three people high in my Party ranks have been cruelly treated in the last month. Crippled, no, but neither will they feel like fucking their women for a year.”

  “Verdad?”

  He began to laugh. Was it because my answer had been sufficiently shocked to come forth in Spanish?

  “I exaggerate,” he said.

  “Do you, or don’t you?”

  He shrugged. “I am now afraid of torture.”

  We agreed upon the following: If he had any advance warning of arrest, he would make a call to me. If he could not speak himself, his message would contain the word RAINFALL.

  Two weeks before I was scheduled to leave Uruguay, a man telephoned the office late one afternoon to say he was calling for RAINFALL. He would not identify himself, although he stated that Señor Fuertes had been arrested in the last hour and was now being held at Central Police Headquarters. Only a cop on the scene would be privy to such facts. It was equivalent to saying that Fuertes had bribed the man to call me and thereby had blown his cover.

  I was furious. I was more of a case officer than I had supposed. I did not feel concern for Chevi so much as outrage at his panic. Was he squeaking for too little? “Dammit to hell,” I shouted as I hung up the phone.

  There was no way not to recognize, however, that Chevi’s situation was serious. I had a large moment of anxiety but decided to take the calculated risk and ask Hunt to accompany me. Howard would probably not bother to wait until Chevi was released.

  Hunt was, however, predictably upset. “Of all the goddamn fiascoes. Our best agent’s cover splattered all over Montevideo. His usefulness to us is over.”

  “I know, but it’s happened.”

  “It’s personally embarrassing. Archie Norcross is coming in Monday to take over from me. Instead of handing the man a nicely run Station, I’ve got to help him wipe up this broken egg.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We should have alerted Peones on the need to protect AV/OCADO.”

  “Howard, we couldn’t. Chevi’s cover would have been jeopardized.”

  “Well, I’ll call Pedro now. One phone call can do it.”

  Would it? I had another bad moment. Peones, however, was out of Uruguay. There was a policeman’s convention in Buenos Aires.

  Howard looked at his watch. “I’m due for a dinner at the country club. We can take care of this in the morning.”

  “You don’t want to wait for morning. A lot of damage can be done to a man’s body in a night.”

  “You think it will really make a difference if I go down with you to the jail?”

  “Howard, I’ll be seen as a minor official in the State Department. But they will know who you are. It will work. You can leave as soon as they get the message.”

  He threw up his hands. “I’ll call Dorothy. What the hell. I lose an hour at most. Tonight is only one more round in the farewell festivities.” He pulverized his cigarette. “That dumb dodo, Chevi Fuertes. Calling us in.” He sighed. “Well, we can at least set an example of how well we take care of our agents.”

  Police Headquarters was in the Municipal Court Building, an eight-story edifice put up around the turn of the century for new and expanding commercial ventures. Now the shades of failed enterprise lingered in the lobby. The law and the police had taken over.

  We did not even go by the jail. It was in the rear of the lower floors, and I suggested that we go searching instead for Peones’ assistant. His office, we discovered, was six flights up, and the elevator was not functioning.

  The stairs were wide and double-banked between each landing. I had time to contemplate the gloom. What capital disappointments had collected in these vaulted silences, what dank smells lingered on the courthouse stairs. Wherever they had failed to reach the cuspidor, cigar butts lay like swollen beetles on a field of old linoleum.

  We were so intent upon conserving our breath so as not to fall short-wind of the other that we actually walked on past the sixth floor to the seventh and were turning down the main corridor before we realized that something was wrong. The entire floor was empty. Office doors stood open to rooms void of furniture. The evening light entered through soot-coated, unwashed, ten-foot windows. It was as if we had missed a bend in our life. I had time to wonder if death was like this, a dirty, unoccupied hall with no one to receive you.

  “Can you believe it?” asked Hunt. “We’ve gone too far.”

  Just then, damped by steel, beams of timber, and thick plaster, came cries from the floor above. They were much reduced in volume but sounded nonetheless like the unsprung whimper that comes from a dog run over by a car. The sense of loss reverberates to the horizon. Neither Hunt nor I could speak. It was as if we were in someone else’s home, and incredible groans of intestinal strain were coming through a bathroom door.

  “I must say it,” whispered Howard, “those sounds do go all the way in, don’t they?”

  Afterward, once we reached the sixth floor and found Peones’ assistant and introduced ourselves, Hunt’s name inspired the Deputy to come to his feet and offer a salute. Our work went quickly. It was fortunate we had come when we did, the Deputy assured us; no investigative activities had yet commenced. Señor Eusebio Fuertes would be released in our custody.

  “No, in his,” said Howard, pointing to me. “I’m late for an engagement.”

  I waited, in fact, more than an hour for the release, and when I saw Chevi, he was silent and we did not speak until we reached the street. Then he did not cease speaking for the next four hours, by which time I had had to promise him vast tracts on the moon. He offered a delineation of his condition: He was in peril and besieged on both sides—at the mercy of Peones; at the mercy of the PCU. They would be inclined toward revenge. “I am a dead man,” he said.

  “The PCU would not murder you, would they?” I was, I confess, commencing a report in my mind on “Termination Policies of the PCU.”

  “They,” he said, “would merely expel me from the Party. Then it would be up to the Tupamaros. Extremists in the PCU would speak to the Tupamaros. That can be equal to elimination. There is only one solution. You must get me out of Uruguay.”

  I spoke of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. Too dangerous were both, decided Chevi. I offered him the rest of South America, Central America, Mexico. He shook his head.

  “Then where?” I asked.

  “Miami.” He would leave his wife and family. They were too Communist. He would go to Miami alone. We must obtain him work in a decent place. A bank, for example. A man who spoke Spanish, but was not Cuban, could be most useful in dealing with Cubans, who were all notoriously unreliable concerning money.

  “I shall never be able to get you terms as good as that.”

  “You will. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate. To protect myself, I would have to seek the Montevideo newspapers. Such publicity would be more horrendous for me than for you, but I learned one thing in this jail—I do not wish to die. To underwrite my safety, I would be ready to dive into the hell-hole of public exposure.”

  In twenty-four hours, we obtained false papers, passport, and a visa to America. He went to work in a Miami bank. One of our proprietaries. I would not have bet on it that night, not after eight consecutive hours on the Encoder-Decoder with the Groogs (for that provided me with ample reason to be sick of him), but there would come a time in Miami when Chevi and I would work together again.

  PART FIVE

  THE BAY OF PIGS May 1960–April 1961

  MIAMI

  1

  AFTER HOWARD HUNT DEPARTED, I REMAINED IN URUGUAY FOR SEVERAL weeks and did not return to America until the beginning of May. Owed several weeks of vacation, I went up to Maine, expecting to pass thro
ugh Mount Desert and drop in on Kittredge at Doane.

  I never found the courage. If she rebuffed me, what would be left for fantasy? The romantic imagination, I was discovering, is practical about its survival.

  I went further north, instead, to Baxter State Park and hiked up Mount Katahdin. It was a dubious venture in May. The black flies proved near to intolerable, and I was not free of them until I reached the winds that blow across the high, open ridge that leads to the summit.

  That ridge is called the Knife Edge. To walk it is no great feat, but still, it is a mile long, and plunges a thousand feet on either side. While the route is never less than several feet wide, the ice in May has not melted altogether from the Knife Edge, and later, descending the north slope, one is left in deep shadow at three in the afternoon. I slogged through gullies filled with snow and began to feel as if I were not only alone on the mountain, but a solitary citizen of the United States. It came upon me like a revelation that the state of my ignorance on such large and general matters as politics could be deemed appalling. Was I an anomaly in the Agency? Berlin had passed me by, and in Uruguay I had become active in a country whose politics remained strange to me.

  Now I was ready to go to work on Cuba. It was incumbent to do research. I went back to New York, found an inexpensive hotel off Times Square, and spent a week in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library trying to bone up on our Caribbean neighbor. I read a history or two, but retained little—I fell asleep over the texts. I was prepared to overthrow Castro but did not wish to acquire any history of his theater. I contented myself with studying back issues of Time, on no better ground, I fear, than that Kittredge had once informed me that Mr. Dulles, when he wished to float a point of view favored by the Agency, often used the magazine. Besides, Henry Luce had come to dinner at the Stable.