Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Castro’s first year as leader, however, remained hard to follow. There were so many quarrels in Cuba. Blocs of ministers seemed always to be resigning in protest over newly promulgated laws. Before long, another item took my eye. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts made the announcement on January 31, 1960, that he was going to seek the presidency. He looked young to me. He was not twelve years older than myself, and I certainly felt singularly young. Two weeks of leave had almost done me in. On the other hand, every saucy girl I saw on the streets of New York looked ravishing.

  I ended by inviting my mother to lunch. I had not known if I would see her; my implacable absence of feeling for her sat like a gasket on my diaphragm. I could not forgive her for I hardly knew what. Still, she was ill. Before I left Montevideo, a letter came from her which mentioned in passing that she had had an operation, a quiet statement of fact, no more, after which she offered news of relatives on her side of the family I had not seen in years, then followed that up with open hints. “I have a good deal of money now, and so little idea of what to do about it—of course, a few foundations do offer flirtations.” It took no acumen to recognize that she was saying, “Damn you, pay attention or I will give the caboodle away.”

  If I knew nothing about politics, I cared in those years even less about money. Out of pride itself, I felt indifferent to such a threat.

  There was, however, a last page in the letter with a very large P.S. Her writing hand itself had extorted what her will was not ready to admit—“Oh, Harry, I really have been ill lately,” she burst forth. “Don’t flinch, son, but I’ve had a hysterectomy. It’s all gone. I don’t want to talk about that ever again.”

  All up the warm forested spring flanks of Katahdin with the thousand nips and stings of the no-see-ums, down the out-of-season freeze of late afternoon, through the hours of drowsing at library tables, one guilty imperative kept working away beneath my lack of feeling for my mother. I realized that I was anchored to a pang of love. Now it kept dragging on me to call. I finally invited her to lunch at the Colony. She wanted Twenty-One instead, that male redoubt! Was it to take possession of my father?

  Her hysterectomy, I saw on greeting her, was already—full capital loss—marked on her skin. She looked shocking to me. Not yet fifty, defeat—the pale shade of defeat—sagged into the lines of her face. I knew, even as she came toward me in the anteroom off the entrance of Twenty-One, that she had indeed lost all that she said was gone. With it had foundered the game of love at which she had been adept for thirty years, and all the empty pockets of the heart given up to such games.

  Of course, I did not think too long in such directions. She was my mother. Indeed, I was struggling with contradictory feelings. While I hugged her on greeting and felt to my surprise some true sense of protection for the small, leathery, middle-aged woman she had become since I had last seen her at the Plaza three years ago, I did not trust such tenderness. All too often, the whores of Montevideo had brought out in me a perverse sense of their poignancy, and I had embraced them with equal concern. As I held her now, she gripped me back so fiercely that I soon felt confusion and was no longer near her at all.

  Over lunch she brought up my father. She knew much more about his life at this moment than I did. “His marriage is in trouble,” she assured me.

  “Is that a fact or a supposition?”

  “He’s in Washington—yes, he’s back—and very much on top of some venture, or whatever you term those things, and he’s alone.”

  “How do you know? I don’t even know.”

  “New York has scores of sources. He is in Washington, I tell you, and she has chosen to remain in Japan. Mary, that big white dutiful blob. She’s not the sort to camp out in a foreign country unless she’s got herself a lover.”

  “Oh, Mother, she could never take her eyes off Cal.”

  “A woman like that has got one big move in her. I’ll bet she’s fallen in love with a small, respectable Japanese gentleman who’s very rich.”

  “I don’t believe any of this.”

  “Well, they’re separated. You’ll find out soon enough, I expect.”

  “I wish he’d gotten in touch with me,” I blurted out, “now that he’s back.”

  “Oh, he will. Whenever he gets around to it, that is.” She broke a breadstick and waved the little piece she kept for herself, as if she were now going to let me in on a secret. “When you see your father,” she said, “I want you to tell him that I said hello. And if you can, suggest to him, Herrick, that my eyes sparkled as I spoke.” She gave an uncharacteristic cackle, as if visualizing a pot that would soon be on the fire. “No,” she said, “maybe you’d better not say that much,” only to murmur, “Well, perhaps you may. Use your judgment, Rickey-mine”—I had not heard that little name in years—“You have gotten even better-looking,” she added, and was less good-looking herself as she said it. The operation weighed on her like a social humiliation she simply could not lift from herself. “Rickey, you are beginning to remind me of the young Gary Cooper, whom I once had the pleasure of inviting to lunch.”

  I could feel only one small twinge of tenderness, but at least it was pure. After our farewells were taken, I had a drink by myself in a midtown bar, savoring the emptiness of the off hour, and pondered the nature of love, yes, weren’t most of us who were in love no more than half in love? Could Alpha and Omega ever come to agreement? Harboring kind thoughts for my mother made another part of me feel colder than ever. How could one forgive Jessica for commencing to lose her looks?

  That night, all too depressed, I realized that I had given up my identity as a case officer in Montevideo, and now had nothing to replace it. One matures within an identity. One regresses without it. I picked up the phone and called Howard Hunt in Miami. He said, “If you want to cut your vacation by a few days, I sure as hell could use you. I have a few wonders, and one or two horrors, to relate.”

  2

  HOWARD LOOKED LEAN, KEEN, AND VERY MUCH IN HIS ELEMENT. SINCE THE night was warm, we ate at a little open-air restaurant on SW 8th Street, which thoroughfare, he quickly informed me, was called Calle Ocho by the Cuban exile community. Our restaurant, sporting an awning, four tables, and a charred barbeque grill, had only a plump little Cuban woman for cook, and a large fat husband to serve, but the menu of blackened beef, hot peppers, plantains, beans and rice was considerably tastier than Uruguayan grub.

  Hunt had just been on assignment to Cuba to get a quick feel for the land. He had picked up his operational alias, drawn his travel advance, and connected with a flight to Havana, where he had checked into the Hotel Vedado. “After which,” said Hunt, “I took deliberate survey of my most cheerless room, and having determined to my satisfaction that there were no sneakies in the mattress, and no bugs on the telephone, I embarked on a tour of the Cuban capital. Barbudos everywhere, Harry. God, I hate those bastards with their sweaty skin and those dirty beards. Their filthy fatigues! They all carry Czechoslovakian burp guns, and God, they show off—that variety of cheap macho pride when a bully has a new toy. Harry, you can smell the mentality of these cheap murderous hoods in the way they throw those weapons over their shoulders. Any angle they choose. It makes you wonder if they know enough to put the damned safety on.

  “And the women. Cacaphonous as a tribe of she-goats. Ugly manifestations come out of women when you put them in uniform. A surprising number of old girls are in the milicia now, and they throng the streets, with no better purpose than to assault your ears with their cadence: ‘Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, viva Fidel Castro Ruz!’ Humorless, those ladies. Lousy cadence.”

  “Sounds awful.”

  He took a solemn measure of his beer. “It was even worse than I knew it was going to be. Half of Havana is trying to skip. Lines of people at our Embassy trying to get visas to the U.S. They want to get away from all the louts and vulgarians who have floated to the top.

  “I went to visit Sloppy Joe’s,” he said. “I do, whenever in Havana. It used to be a l
ighthearted pilgrimage. After all, my father made his dramatic entrance there thirty years ago to get back that money his partner had absconded with. So, I’ve always seen Sloppy Joe’s as a brawling, warm-spirited place where you might encounter Hemingway at one end of the bar, although, truth to tell, old Ernie doesn’t show up much anymore. I also popped into the Floridita, but no luck there either. Both are desolate. Sullen bartenders, Harry, dead air. The only place still going is the bordello above the Mercedes-Benz showroom. That much for Castro’s pompous pronouncements about national purity. Why, there are more prostitutes and pimps on the street now than ever in Batista’s time. Old Fulgencio could at least police Havana. But now the whores come out like cockroaches in the hope that some tourist will toss them a morsel of business.”

  “Did you provide any?” I was tempted to ask, and then to my surprise, voiced just that remark. In Uruguay, I might not have dared, but tonight I felt as if a new era was beginning for Howard and me.

  Hunt smiled. “You’re not supposed to ask such questions of a happily married fellow,” he said, “but I will suggest that if anyone ever inquires why you think you’re qualified to be in espionage, the only proper response is to look them in the eye, and say, ‘Any man who has ever cheated on his wife and gotten away with it, is qualified.’”

  We chortled together. I don’t know if it was the fleshy odor of cooking oil coming off that little barbeque griddle, or the divided message of the tropical sky above our awning, sullen and accommodating at once, but I could sense the nearness of Havana. Already, on my first night in Miami, watching Cuban exiles pad up and down Calle Ocho, I felt an edge of sinister exhilaration. Rum and the intoxication of dark deeds lay ahead.

  “Every night,” said Hunt, “outside my hotel window at the Vedado, I could hear barbudos cackling to each other on the street. All the sounds you associate with street gangs. The worst elements of the Havana slums. Only now they swarm around in police cars. I could hear them popping into buildings, bang bang on the door if it didn’t open quickly enough—conceive of the reverberations—those massive old wooden doors in those great old Havana walls. God, it stirs the phantoms of the Caribbean. Then these barbudos come out with some poor wretch, and every mother’s son of them has unslung his burp gun just to intimidate the crowd before they drive off, siren going, flasher going. It’s sad. Havana nights used to awaken sensuous suggestions in a fellow. Something in the very sultriness of the nights. Those beautiful stone arcades on the Malecon. But now, it’s all revolutionary justice. You can’t walk on a Havana street without hearing loudspeakers inflicting hours of unwanted propaganda on the unwilling ears of the masses. People are dispirited.”

  “Did you speak to many Cubans while you were there?”

  “My assignment called for me to look up a few people on some classified lists. They all have the same sad story. Worked with Castro, fought with him, and now they’d like to gut the hell out of him.”

  He looked around our restaurant as if to make certain we were wholly alone, a formal gesture, no more. It was 11:00 P.M., and we were the only customers left. The cook had closed her griddle; her husband, the waiter, was asleep.

  “As soon as I came back to the States,” said Hunt, “I made the following recommendation to Quarters Eye: Assassinate Fidel Castro before or coincident with any invasion. Let this be a task for Cuban patriots.”

  I heard myself whistle. “Quite a recommendation.”

  “Well, back in Uruguay I wasn’t just vocalizing about going for the head. The problem is to get rid of Castro in such a way that we cannot be blamed. That, I would say, is tricky.”

  “How did Quarters Eye respond to your suggestion?”

  “I would say it is very much in the hopper.” Hunt gave off a ground wave of implacable piety. “In fact,” he said, “my suggestion is being considered right now by your father.”

  “My father?” I asked all too simply.

  “Hasn’t anyone told you how important your father is to all this?”

  “Well, I suppose not.”

  “I applaud your father’s sense of security.”

  I didn’t. It was one thing not to hear from Cal for a year at a time, but it was humiliating to learn in this fashion that he was part of the operational hierarchy for Cuba. I did not know if I was sadly dented, or crushed.

  “How well do you get along with Cal?” I now asked Hunt.

  “We’re old familiars. I worked for him in Guatemala.”

  “I never knew.” Why couldn’t I keep family pains to myself? “Cal gave me to believe he was always in the Far East.”

  “Well, he was,” said Hunt, “except for the Guatemala op which he did for Richard Bissell. I must say, Harry, our security is like one of those English maze gardens. Intimates can pass within a few feet of each other, and never know that a dear friend is just on the other side of the hedge. Your father has to be one of our aces at keeping security.”

  I was passing through a bitter thought: The only reason Cal didn’t tell me anything about himself was that I never won his attention long enough to receive a confidence. “Yes,” said Hunt, “I always assumed we didn’t talk about your father because you were trying to impress me with how good you were at security.”

  “Down the hatch,” I said and swallowed more beer.

  I was appalled, and I was overstimulated. My relation to everyone else in the Cuban project, including most certainly Howard Hunt, was now turned on its head. I had been supposing that Hunt had chosen me to come along with him because I had proven to be a first-rate young officer in Uruguay. That composed at least half of my affection for him. Now I had to face the likelihood that he saw me as a grip up the greasy pole of advancement.

  On the other hand, I did feel a reflexive surge of family pride. Whom had they chosen, after all, for such a difficult and dangerous project but my father? I felt ready to get drunk on dark rum, and, in corollary, felt much impressed (and surprised) by the weight of the readiness for murder that sat in me. Much closer to the heart than I had expected. Yes, I was all for rum, dark deeds and the intoxication of the Caribbean.

  3

  HUNT HAD SPOKEN OF A MOTEL OUT ON CALLE OCHO WHERE A FEW NOTORIOUS Cuban exiles used to hide out after their attempts to assassinate President Prio and President Batista had failed. Since the motel’s name was the Royal Palms, I expected a modern hostelry with four or more stories and picture windows in aluminum casements. Instead, I found a damp tropical patio surrounded by an equally small motor court, low in rent, one story high, and painted dark green to hide water stains on the stucco. A couple of moldy palm trees showed infestations of insects around their scabrous base. I was no lover, I discovered, of stunted palms, fallen fronds, and rotting shrubs. Indeed, the courtyard was so cramped that you had to park your car around the corner. Although each of the rooms off the patio was in perpetual shadow, the motel caught my reluctant rent money; I seemed to have a tropism for dank living quarters. A corner of myself seemed to insist on the lower depths. I used to go to sleep at night thinking of all those frustrated Cuban gunmen who had perspired on the same mattress as myself.

  Living in the kind of place Raymond Chandler might have chosen for Marlowe to visit long enough to knock on one sleazy door, I did not learn as much as I expected. Single men were occupying some of the rooms and whole families squatted in others, all Cuban; the management consisted of an old lady, blind in her right eye from glaucoma, and her dark and gloomy son. He was missing almost all of one arm but nonetheless proved dexterous with a broom, tucking the end of the handle into his armpit. At night, accompanying the sounds of many a quarrel, I would hear a good deal of Cuban music issuing out of portable radios, and the din would have been sufficient to keep me from sleeping if I had not learned from reading a few books that the Afro-Cuban blood of the drummers was speaking directly to the gods—to the African gods and all their attached and saintly Catholic ghosts. In the ears of the gods, therefore, would I fall asleep as my neighbors turned up their rad
ios. The air smelled of garlic and cooking oil.

  I slept easily. I was happily tired. My early work in Miami harbored an astounding parade of faces and locations. If I was still, by gross description, an office worker, I now spent half of many a day driving my government-issue Chevrolet Impala at high speeds over the endless, welcoming boulevards and causeways of Miami and Miami Beach, not to speak of field trips out to the Everglades and the Keys. We were seeding an operation in Southern Florida that would extend from north of Fort Lauderdale two hundred miles down to Key West, and from Dade County across Big Cypress Swamp to Tampa and the Gulf. Since we also had to be able to disavow the operation, we needed safe houses that could never be recognized as such, and many of them, in consequence, were loaned to us by wealthy Americans or Cubans living part of the year in Miami. Later in my career, I would learn that the Company was not above keeping castles on the Rhine, chateaux in the Loire, and temples in Kyoto, but those were exceptions: The best security, by standard rule, was inconspicuous safe houses, austere and functional.

  In Florida, that law was broken many times over. If I saw my fill of cheap hotel rooms and seedy apartments, I also met with Cubans in houses flanked by large lawns and swimming pools. Outside the picture window, cinched to the dock, was the launch that belonged to the residence. In this empty house, the half dozen Cubans who had been brought together for a meeting were temporarily fumigating any aura of excessive wealth with an around-the-clock smoke-out of cigars.