Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  GALILEO

  I sat at my desk for a half hour. I hesitated to move. To the livid landscape of my brain was now added the irremovable image of Kittredge on her knees, Gardiner moon up before the priapic commemorations of Hugh Montague. I did not know whether to be in a rage, full of concern for Hugh’s mental condition, or obliged to recognize I had just been handed my leader’s conception of a joke.

  I still had a full day’s work ahead of me to be followed by the nightly stint on HEEDLESS. I decided to ignore Harlot’s message. One would have to live with the possibility that he was now teetering on some far-off balance board, yes, Hugh Montague, my guide to fortitude, spirit, Christ, grace, dedication, and master of the rare art of Intelligence, was also a priapic wahoo!

  Besides, I was full of my own fury. The sexual lavishness of Modene’s life! My past seemed so paltry. What had I to muster but Montevidean whores, plus one sordid affair with Sally Porringer? Modene’s description of Sinatra—“gentle, active, earthy”—cut into me like a stiletto. There was one question I did not care to ask myself. Could I make a better lover? The answer had to be: Not likely! Not with the Hubbard synapses!

  I made a visual study of my surroundings for the next few minutes. It was a mode of procedure I often employed for restoring concentration. If I have not described any office I have worked in through these years, there has been little need. The walls are always white, off-white, yellow, tan, or pale green. The furniture is metal and gunboat-gray. The desk chairs are white, brown, gray, or black, offer pads for your seat, and can swivel from desk blotter to typewriter stand. The visitor’s chair is plastic: yellow, red, orange, or black. The floor, when not covered in gray linoleum, offers green or brown carpeting. The choice of photographs is unofficially limited. If I had a good snapshot of Modene, I would not have kept it on my desk. It would have stood out more than a bottle of ketchup. I did have a map of southern Florida on one wall, a map of Cuba on the other, and on the partition between was a calendar with twelve photographs of Maine harbors. I had a dark green wastebasket, an oak end table with an ashtray, a mirror near the door, a metal bookcase with four shelves, and a small cast-iron safe. In addition to fluorescent lighting plugged into a rack overhead, I had a desk lamp. I had had offices like this in every place I worked for the Agency, and I was yet to have an office of my own where the walls reached the ceiling. On my floor at Zenith, in a large loft-sized space, were eighty such stalls.

  Sometimes I would decide that the purpose of such installations was to keep the mind working when the brain was ready to come apart. My gray, partitioned walls looked back at me like a pale blackboard on which all the writings had been many times erased. I took up my work again. Not until evening did I return an answer to Montague.

  SERIAL: J/38,762,554

  ROUTING: LINE/GHOUL—SPECIAL SHUNT

  TO: GHOUL-A

  FROM: FIELD

  11:41 P.M. JULY 12, 1960

  SUBJECT: HEEDLESS

  Aware of your reactions, I will try to be more succinct.

  On March 4, 5, 8, 11, and 14, there are phone calls, IOTA to BLUEBEARD, from Concord, New Hampshire; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Indianapolis; and Detroit. Long-stem roses, eighteen to a bouquet, are delivered every day. The conversations address themselves warmly to their next meeting.

  On March 17, however, comes a shift in tone. A phone call, IOTA–BLUEBEARD, is received at the Willard Hotel in Washington. Transcription is, I fear, seriously garbled.

  IOTA: Has Frank called you?

  BLUEBEARD: Not recently.

  IOTA: I tried to get you in Miami Beach last night.

  BUEBEARD: What a pity. I happened to be out.

  IOTA: I hope it was with a good friend.

  BLUEBEARD: Oh, just a stewardess I work with.

  IOTA: (garbled)

  BLUEBEARD: (garbled)

  IOTA: (garbled)

  BLUEBEARD: (garbled)

  IOTA: Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t you want to go to the opening of Frank’s show at the Fontainebleau?

  BLUEBEARD: I have been looking forward to it.

  IOTA: How long will Frank be in Miami?

  BLUEBEARD: Ten days.

  IOTA: What a good opportunity to see him.

  BLUEBEARD: (garbled)

  IOTA: I want to plan a date for us at the Waldorf on the 26th. Will you arrange your flight schedule around that?

  BLUEBEARD: Of course. But . . .

  IOTA: Yes?

  BLUEBEARD: The date seems so far away.

  IOTA: (garbled)

  The rest is garbled. (Mar. 17, 1960)

  From March 18 to March 31, while Sinatra is playing an engagement at the Fontainebleau, BLUEBEARD makes four round-trip flights between Miami and Washington. When off-duty, she stays at the Fontainebleau. During this period, there are no transcripts of calls from the candidate, but we do learn from BLUEBEARD–AURAL Mar. 31, that STONEHENGE, soon after BLUEBEARD arrived, sent a man called The Exterminator over to her room to unscrew her phone and reassemble it. Queried about this by BLUEBEARD, STONEHENGE replies: “I’m getting cautious in my old age.” We can assume a Buddhist phone tap was found and removed. This may account for the absence of BLUEBEARD–IOTA transcripts during the March 18–31 period.

  Nonetheless, we do have two calls (March 21 and March 31) from BLUEBEARD to AURAL. The likelihood is that a separate phone tap was put in by the Buddhists at AURAL’s home in Charlevoix, Michigan. Part of the conversation of March 21 is worth quoting at length.

  MODENE: I never know in advance whether Frank will be Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, but when he chooses to be nice, the stars, Willie, do fall on Alabama. I have to tell you that living front and center does appeal to me after all these weeks of hole and corner with Jack. I adore Jack, but Frank, on stage, is another kind of human altogether. It’s close to overpowering. For the dinner show, I sat at a table with some of his friends, and all eyes were on him.

  WILLIE: Who was at the table?

  MODENE: Oh, Dean Martin and Desi Arnaz are the ones you’d know. But who cares? All eyes were on Frank. He snaps his fingers to establish the beat and pandemonium takes over. Every wife in the audience was ready to run away with him. And during the love songs, it’s the husbands who start to cry.

  WILLIE: What did he sing?

  MODENE: I can’t name it all. “Love Letters in the Sand,” “Maria,” “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “Just in Time.” It couldn’t have been better. He ended with “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

  WILLIE: Have you started up with Frank again?

  MODENE: Miss All-Knowing, you happen to be wrong. He’s mad about Juliet Prowse. She’s with him all the time.

  WILLIE: That might not keep him from trying to say hello to both of you at once. (Mar. 21)

  At this point, Modene hangs up without warning. There is another transcript dated one minute later, of Willie calling the Fontainebleau. The desk clerk tells her that Miss Murphy, by request, is receiving no outside calls.

  That is all we have until there ensues a long conversation with Willie on March 31, initiated by Modene. Much of this, in my opinion, is worth inclusion.

  WILLIE: Where is the candidate these days?

  MODENE: Away. Campaigning.

  WILLIE: You didn’t see him in New York?

  MODENE: No.

  WILLIE: I thought you were going to see him on March 26th?

  MODENE: Well, I didn’t.

  WILLIE: Did he break the date?

  MODENE: I missed the plane.

  WILLIE: You what?

  MODENE: I missed the plane.

  WILLIE: What did he say?

  MODENE: He asked why, and all I told him was, “I miss flights. I have to make so many at work that when I’m on my own, I miss flights.”

  WILLIE: That must have been the end of you and Jack.

  MODENE: Not at all. Jack and I spoke the day after, and we’re going to meet in Washington on April 8th, after the primary in Wisconsin on April 5th.

  WI
LLIE: Then he wasn’t upset?

  MODENE: He was cool about it. But I believe he thinks, just like you, that I started up with Frank again. Sometimes I wonder if the only reason he took up with me in the first place is because he wanted to see if he could take a girl away from Frank.

  WILLIE: On what will you swear that you didn’t go back to Frank again?

  MODENE: You can’t uncover a fact if it is not there to be found.

  (silence)

  WILLIE: What were you wearing at the Fontainebleau’s farewell party for Frank?

  MODENE: I chose a turquoise blue for my gown, and shoes to match.

  WILLIE: Oh, my God, with your black hair! It had to be stunning. I can see your green eyes setting off that turquoise blue.

  MODENE: It took some thought.

  WILLIE: I’m so envious. Did you meet anyone new at the party?

  MODENE: Frank introduced me to a man named Sam Flood who seemed unbelievably sure of himself. Everybody at his table was in total deference to him. I enjoyed the table. The men around him all looked like they belonged in a musical comedy.

  WILLIE: Were they that handsome?

  MODENE: No. I mean a Guys and Dolls sort of musical. One of them must have been six-feet-six and over three hundred pounds. And another was meaner-looking than a jockey. The rest came in about five sizes. But the moment this man Sam Flood sat me next to him, the others didn’t even dare to look up from their plates. Then the Clan made a point of coming up to the table. They all had to say hello to this man, Sam Flood. He sat like a king. Sometimes he didn’t even bother to acknowledge the person. Sammy Davis, Jr., walked over with a big smile and Sam Flood waved the back of his hand in dismissal. Sammy just fled. “Don’t you know who that is?” I asked Mr. Flood. “I know,” he said, “who that is. That is the two of spades. Forget him.”

  WILLIE: What does this Sam Flood look like?

  MODENE: Average size. Almost ugly. But kind of attractive. He’s well dressed and has a good suntan. He looks manly, although in a quiet way. Maybe he’s president of General Motors.

  WILLIE: Ha, ha.

  MODENE: When Frank walks into a room, everybody jumps. But Sam is like the pope. I will say that something very heavy comes off him. He’s both attractive and repellent at the same time.

  WILLIE: Fascinating.

  MODENE: Exactly.

  WILLIE: Did he make a date with you?

  MODENE: He tried to, and I explained that I couldn’t because my job had me flying to Washington at eleven in the morning. He said, “I’ll have you switched to a better flight.” I said that I wanted to go as slated. I didn’t tell him how furious everyone at Eastern is by now with my sweetheart schedule.

  WILLIE: How did he take the rebuff?

  MODENE: He said, “I’ve been brushed before, but never with such nifty strokes.” Then he started laughing at his own joke. I swear, Willie, this Sam Flood is one gentleman who likes himself.

  WILLIE: That was all you saw of him?

  MODENE: That, I fear, is only the beginning. When I got back to Miami two days later, there were twelve dozen yellow roses in my room, six dozen for the day of my arrival, and six dozen for the day before.

  WILLIE: Don’t yellow roses signify jealousy?

  MODENE: If they do, he’s making a very large point. There have been six dozen yellow roses every day since.

  WILLIE: Do you think Frank told him about Jack?

  MODENE: Isn’t that the question? (Mar. 31, 1960)

  Yours,

  FIELD

  I went back to the Royal Palms after work. It was close to midnight, and if I was over the worst of my hangover, I began nonetheless to brood over Giancana and his yellow roses. Sleep became hallucinatory. The large old air conditioner would start up like a hippo lumbering to its feet, only to settle down again with a grunt. The heat came back. In sweats and chills, I drowsed, and awoke in the morning with a sense of dread, for I now had the conviction that I ought to call my father.

  15

  PART OF THE PROBLEM WAS HOW TO REACH HIM. I KNEW NEITHER HIS CALL numbers nor his cryptonym. Still, he had to be working directly under Richard Bissell. There would not be more than two or three officers at such a level in Quarters Eye. When I came into Zenith later that morning, I consulted our table of organization and found SPINE, GUITAR, and HALIFAX on the appropriate plateau.

  One was not supposed to select a cryptonym on the basis of its agreeability to oneself, but my father was bound to ignore such a rule. At the age of seventeen, he had won a sailing race for junior skippers that ran from Bar Harbor to Halifax (in Nova Scotia), and that was near enough for me.

  Using the closed-circuit telephone to Quarters Eye, I had only to dial the three digits belonging to HALIFAX, and my father’s secretary, Eleanor, answered. I recognized her voice at once. She was a woman I had met on a few occasions, a trim and somewhat grim young spinster who had grown middle-aged in his service and wore her hair in a bun. Stationed with him everywhere—which is to say, Vienna, the Near East, the Far East, and, for all I knew, Honduras during the Guatemala operation—she had acquired her own office renown. It was rumored, Kittredge had once told me, that Eleanor was Cal’s mistress.

  I paid more attention to Eleanor, therefore, the next time I saw her. She was not conspicuously friendly. Her lips were preternaturally tight, and her eyes were ablaze. She kept the secrets. Indeed, it occurred to me so soon as I heard her voice on the line today that I did not know whether Eleanor was her first name or a Company sobriquet.

  “Eleanor,” I said, “this is Robert Charles down at HAWTHORNE. If you’ll check it out against the Quarters Eye Manifest, I think you’ll agree that I can be allowed phone ingress to HALIFAX.”

  “We can dispense with the Manifest,” she answered. “I know who you are, Robert Charles.”

  “That saves a stitch.”

  “Dear boy, do you expect this girl to run down the hall every time a new voice chimes in from Zenith? It’s easier to memorize the lot of you.”

  What a second wife, I was thinking.

  “Well,” I said, “is target in?”

  “Is the route open, confide, or seek? You have to specify, Robert,” she was happy to remind me.

  “Seek.” That would be the secure phone.

  “He’ll call you back in an hour,” she declared, and hung up.

  While I waited at my desk, there were memos to catch up on. Since I had begun work on the transcripts for Harlot, my desk at Zenith had become a bottleneck in memo flow. As many as fifty memos collected on occasion. While half of such notes could be filed or thrown away, not every memo could wait. Coming back to my desk after a day away at the recruiting stations, I never knew whether to get ready for amusement or woe. I was, therefore, leafing through the accumulation when the pool secretary buzzed. I was wanted on the secure phone.

  The booth at Zenith was a sweatbox. Seek would not function until you closed the door, and then the air-conditioning was cut off. You could perspire in geometrical progression to the time elapsed on the call. I heard “Robert Charles,” uttered originally, I am certain, in a loud, hearty voice, but thanks to the scrambler-descrambler it entered my ear like the hollow of a tomb. “Are you the character Eleanor claims you are?”

  “Definitely on duty, sir.”

  “Ha, ha. Did you think I didn’t know where you were?”

  “I was considering just that possibility.”

  “Eduardo filled me in. Son, you won’t necessarily believe this, but I was planning to chew some bread with you next time down. Hell, we could even break a cup.”

  “I look forward to that.”

  “Okay, what are we about?”

  I knew him well enough to get to the point in three seconds. “The word here,” I said, “is that you’re planning to squench a certain big guy.” Squench happened to be our old summer word for running over a Maine jackrabbit. “My source,” I added, “is in the Frente.”

  “Boy, this is a secure phone. Will you damn well te
ll me which one of those windbags you are listening to?”

  “Faustino Barbaro.”

  “I’ve heard of the gentleman. One fat politician.”

  “Yessir.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That he wants to talk to you.”

  “Many people do, including my own son. But they don’t always get around to explaining what they’re up to.”

  It was no more comfortable than it had ever been to arouse my father’s wrath. I could see his blue eyes blazing. All the same, I was not going to bypass the message.

  “Barbaro has connections with the mob,” I said, “and claims a couple of them are saying that you assigned them the job of eliminating Fidel Castro.”

  “No truth to it,” he replied instantly. There was a pause and then he said, “How long have you been living with this foul rumor?”

  “For two nights. As you can see, I didn’t give it so much credence that I rushed to the phone.”

  “Well, you ought to know. It’s not my style, nor is it Mr. Dulles’, nor Mr. Bissell’s, to go in for a rotten load of clams.”

  “Wouldn’t seem so, would it?”

  “Who are those guys Barbaro named?”

  “He refused to tell me—insisted he must speak to you.”

  “Damn it, I may have to follow up.” He coughed. I expect he was about to hang up, but realized I was still his son. “Are you nicely sited on your job?” he asked.

  “Yessir.”

  “Working hard?”

  “I know how to work.”

  “I’ve heard that. Hunt put in some good reports on you during the Montevideo stretch. Except for that KGB provocation some joker tried to leave on your watch. Hunt may have waffled a bit there.”