Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  At the other extreme of these logistics, nearby to Zenith headquarters (which JM/WAVE now occupies), we keep a large warehouse to supply our raiders with everything from barbudo-like false beards, to the latest Cuban army uniforms. Every variety of ordnance that the Soviets and Eastern-bloc countries are now providing to the Cubans—mortars, machine guns, submachine guns, handguns, bazookas, flare-guns, what-all, is available in our warehouse. I wish you could watch the play of expression on the face of a true warrior like my not undisturbing friend Dix Butler’s when he goes through the fifty-four illustrated pages of our catalogue. You can peer over the lip then into the real cauldron of combat soup.

  Now add to this diorama of JM/WAVE all the apartments, hotel suites, motels with cooking facilities, plus the University Inn of the University of Miami (which we’ve just about appropriated for middle-level transient officers), include the DuPont Plaza in downtown Miami (for the higher grade ratings), and we have a small city within the city for Agency personnel and their families. Do our case officers come to five hundred in number? Six hundred? You don’t get to count noses. We are dealing with something like 2,500 Cuban agents, part-time agents, subagents, messenger boys, flunkies, and job-holders who do the cooking in places like Elliot Key. The number grows. We pay them each about $300 a month on average out of a foolproof system of special checks that can be cashed only at a couple of special windows in the First National Bank of Miami’s main branch on Biscayne Boulevard.

  Given the closeness with which some of us work together, we tend to eat and drink together as well. I won’t describe the pubs and joints: The names will furnish their own decor—the Lounge at the Three Ambassadors Hotel; the Stuft Shirt Lounge; the 27 Birds—all I can say is that for the first time since training at the Farm, I go out drinking with my confreres at large, and every night. We go hunting for women less than you might expect. The true phenomenon is the size of the operation we are all engaged in, and deep on my third or fourth bourbon I come to realize why I am ready to work hard for Harvey despite his foul strictures and foul moods. Lansdale has nice ideas, but is, I fear, steering an unfamiliar ship, whereas Harvey has given us a government unto ourselves. Our proprietaries and dummy corporations come to more than fifty by now—detective agencies, gun shops, boat repair outfits, sport fishing fronts—all that you might expect, but we also have a Caribbean Research and Marketing office on nothing less than Okeechobee Road, and our own realty agency to front for our safe houses, our own travel agency to field the monthly outlay on airline travel, our import-export firm to handle the logistics of every kind of supply, our printing shop to take care of a variety of jobs, an employment agency for our exile personnel, not to mention our electronics maintenance shop and our fish and hunt club for weapons training. We haven’t even reached the Agency guts located at Zenith. There, our intelligence mill acquires more space every month, and the photo labs process the daily U-2 flight-take over Cuba. The post office in Zenith, large as a ballroom, vets the mail between Miami and Havana, and there is the clippings room where world press reaction on the U.S. and Cuba is collated, and, not least, Sanctum South, where the file cabinets keep gathering reports from thirty or forty branches of the Cuban underground. Harvey, with his mistrust of networks that he has not built himself, calls it the Sanctum Maleficarum.

  Perhaps the best way to give you a conception of our power and emplacement here is to note the state and national laws that we are ready to bend, break, violate, and/or ignore. False information is given out routinely on Florida papers of incorporation; tax returns fudge the real sources of investment in our proprietaries; false flight plans are filed daily with the FAA; and we truck weapons and explosives over Florida highways, thereby violating the Munitions Act and the Firearms Act, not to speak of what we do to our old friends Customs, Immigration, Treasury, and the Neutrality Act.

  Under Harvey’s firm sense of how to deal with newspaper editors, we also control, for practical purposes, most of what gets printed locally concerning Cuba. Our work with the local journalists is often done over drinks and is pleasant enough. Harvey’s policy is “never lie to a reporter until you have to.” In effect, our publicity department writes the stories. The local Fourth Estate doesn’t have to work much, in consequence, and should they choose to resist us, we cut off the pipeline. “Hell, we’re no worse than a company town,” says Harvey. He likes having the media under his seat.

  Such is my purview of JM/WAVE. Yet if I try to explain the mood and morale of the enterprise, I come up short. It is not like anything I have known in the Agency since my early fantasies at the Farm when I thought we’d be engaged in high-risk activity every moment. It’s not that we are now, but we do live in the glow of such work. Dix Butler, for instance, was assigned by Harvey as an observer on the day the Green Berets put on a spectacular at Ft. Bragg for Jack Kennedy, and the reports he brought back were luminous with excitement for us, as if the plethora of stunts and physical feats that the Green Berets can pull off is analogous to the boldness of some of our own plans.

  The concept of the Green Berets, as I’m sure you know, is to provide special fighting men who can deal with radical guerrilla forces in Third World countries like Laos and Vietnam. Some of the younger mentalities in the Pentagon, plus the President, and Maxwell Taylor, plus, most certainly, Bobby Kennedy, are excited by this training. I will add that in Bobby’s book, The Enemy Within, there is a telling sentiment: “The great events of our nation’s past were forged by men of toughness” and to exemplify it, he offers quick sketches of Merrill’s Marauders and Mosby’s Raiders, Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox—in short, our guerrilla heroes. The Green Berets are the natural follow-up to this, and on the day Jack Kennedy visited, he was taken out to McKellar’s Lake where an absolute hellzapoppin was put on. Scuba divers swam underwater to fight on shore with waterproofed firearms; skydivers dropped onto the lake beach from free-falls fifteen thousand feet up. Trailing colored smoke, they crisscrossed repeatedly to festoon the sky, only opening their parachutes at the last moment to avoid a fatal splat on impact; judo teams whipped through hand-to-hand battle, and other Green Berets climbed high poles that the Engineers had pile-driven into the lake and then took a great slide down on cables set at steep angles. Caribou and Mohawk helicopters made very low-level passes in front of the Presidential stand, and something like a thousand men who had managed to keep perfectly concealed in the bush on the other side of the lake jumped out with sudden war cries and shot off hand flares—a mock-up of how an infiltration force might assail you. For climax, a man stepped from an airborne helicopter carrying some sort of rocket-pack on his back, and skittered through the air to set down right in front of Jack Kennedy. Then a covey of eight Caribous dropped untold thousands of leaflets over the staging area. Every last one had the President’s picture on it.

  As I write, I can feel your outrage. It is not that they are doing all that—perhaps it is necessary, you will say—but why, Harry, I can hear you thinking, are you all this excited about it? Well, I am. Dix Butler was even thinking seriously of a transfer to the Green Berets, and I realized that I had joined the Agency on the supposition that my active life would be like that. Perhaps it’s due to living with Cal’s OSS tales. Life in the Agency is not dull, yet a more adventurous side of myself does feel the need for physical action, and yes, a taste for combat.

  Now, you ought to know I am not about to desert Intelligence—never! I feel, on balance, a happy man. I am doing what the greater part of me wants to do. How many can say that? The Green Berets, however, do have a special, even a clandestine cachet for a good many Agency officers that colors many an attitude here in JM/WAVE. Dix Butler has his brothers.

  For example: the coyotes. Dix is liaison to them. I have discovered that there is a grapevine running from Alaska to Miami and all points between. There must be a couple of thousand ex–football players, ex–rodeo riders, ex-stuntmen, bikers, ex-cons, ex-cops, ex-boxers, unemployed bartenders, itinerant ski bums and surfers, wh
o have all heard a piece of news about JM/WAVE and/or the craziness of some of our Cubans; and they come down here for the action. You would think they would go to the Green Berets but that is too military for them. They don’t want to take all that many orders. All the same, they would like to hook up with the Agency; they would choose to become case officers. If I think about it, I do feel sorry for them. “The first requirement,” I would have to tell them, “is to learn how to use a typewriter.” Of course, I just smile when they ask about applying to the Agency, and say, “Well, contract work right now may be more in your line,” and when they ask how to get that, I reply, “Don’t try. People will come to you.”

  I hear your question: How do they know that I am associated with the Agency? Officially, they don’t. I keep telling them I am in electronics to which they nod wisely, but, of course, such conversations only occur when I am out for a night of barhopping with Dix Butler. He is the jolly friar of this gang and must have good contact with more than a hundred. He can tell you the athletic record and/or court file on each one of them, and this, while congenial work for Dix, is at Harvey’s behest. Butler, I have discovered, is once more doing for Harvey what he did so well in Berlin—he keeps Harvey in touch with all of the possibilities in the wider social environment.

  Since we are not using Americans on the raids or infiltrating (to my knowledge) any Agency men into Cuba itself, there are not too many contracts for the coyotes. Dix uses them for the occasional irregular job. Most of their work, however, does not come from the Agency. Since they tend to band together in various shacks and boardinghouses around town, a gang of them will often be hired by one Cuban exile group to lean on another; they become enforcers. More immediately for us, they hire out as gunmen on proposed missions to Cuba for certain wealthy Cubans and/or wealthy Texans who want to put on their own war theatricals. In practice, there is a hell of a lot of talk, a few hours of casual training, a weekly trip to a rifle range, many plans drawn and redrawn on the proposed mission, and then it is invariably scrubbed because passions run down and the wealthy Cuban loses his nerve. (There is always fear of a DGI reprisal on family members left in Cuba.) Or else, the coyotes just take the money and, if they lack respect, fail to show up. And, of course, the coyotes also deal in marijuana and some of the harder drugs.

  For Harvey, they are an excellent source of intelligence on what the less approved exile groups are up to. A few even qualify for contract work and find boats for us, or repair them, or run a scuba diving school for our putative Cuban frogmen.

  I have spent evenings with Dix in one or another coyote abode. We sit on packing crates, or on the floor, or I, as an honored guest, am given a dangerously flexible old rocking chair, and Dix holds court while we pass around the bottle of bourbon we’ve brought and then drink out of their jug of red wine and toke up. Bourbon, red wine, and marijuana produce a sledgehammer of a hangover, but I can’t say I don’t take to the mixture of off-beat relaxation and high tension. There is gossip aplenty in these evenings. One hears about what all the heavy hitters are doing—Fiorini, Masferrer, Kohly, Prio Socarras, the mob. Knowing remarks are made. “Brickbat has got to be Trafficante’s boy,” or “Zero-Zero Group is buying bazookas—they want to pulp one of Fidel’s tanks.”

  “Who is running the purchase?”

  “Tiger Turk.”

  “Tiger Turk is no fire-eater.”

  “Strictly a wax-nose.”

  “Well, anybody can get bull-horrors when the feds are on your case.”

  “Hell, men,” says another, “the feds are right here. They’re getting ready to fuck all of us raff.”

  This is a reference to Dix and to me. Dix loves it. He takes a toke, passes it on, speaks while exhaling, “Why don’t you little-wigs stop bitching about John Fate?”

  Laughter comes up on this. Of course, the evening is not entirely without risk. If there are twenty men in the room, Dix could handle most of them, but there are a few . . . “I might have to extend myself,” he says.

  I feel like a weak sister. I assume—I can only assume—that I might have a chance with a third to a half of this crowd, but then you are dealing with fellows who run from six feet six and three hundred pounds to a Mexican dwarf named Goliath, nickname Golpe, who is reputed to be an absolute monster with a knife. (Who could protect his legs in a knife fight with Golpe?) Dix, however, dares his vengeance every time. He calls him Adobe, much to Golpe’s distaste. Adobe is one more word for Mexican around here.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Well, then, how about Cuspidor?”

  Uneasy laughter.

  It is a curious world. We, at the opposite end of existence in the Agency, are, by contrast, so neat. Yet occasionally, a bona fide cowboy will come out of these coyotes, a contract agent we can count on.

  “Gerry H. is pecker, he’s paw-paw,” is the accolade. Translation: “Nobody has bigger balls.”

  Most of them are doomed to drink, doomed to blow themselves up. They have female strays whom they call “groupies”—a new word for me. If the woman is a little older and has some personal force, as do some of the bikers’ women, they are called “earth mamas.” I feel like General Lansdale discovering anthropology.

  When you get down to it, not that many nights end in personal warfare or blood (although I have witnessed two in the last month), but there is no such thing as an evening that does not obey the unity of the three themes, drinking, fighting, and (in respect for you) fornication; the only debate is which of the first two might be more important. People come in and out of the shack all night and receive a greeting which, unless there are old friendships or enmities involved, is in direct proportion to whether they have brought more or less wine and booze than they will drink. You have to be mud to come empty-handed.

  Why am I so taken with this language and these people? Is it because they live their lives with no schedule for tomorrow? Their sense of the present is truly intense. One evening when just a few of us were drinking in a smaller pad (another word I like, for God, you do feel a sense of how much humans can act like caged animals), a former stuntman named Ford (who had broken his leg in several places and thereby was out of the one lucrative profession he had found) happened to be fooling around with a newly sharpened bayonet. He kept making knife passes at his best friend, Jim Blood, a.k.a. Oxey, and Oxey, taking a dislike to the implicit threat, punched Ford in the chest whereupon the bayonet flew up into the air and came down on Ford’s shoulder. He bled like a just-slaughtered beast on a marble altar. We got towels, newspapers, old shirts—nothing could stop the flow.

  “Shit, it’s a vein, not an artery,” said Ford. “Sew it up.”

  There was talk of getting a doctor. But a doctor, any doctor, might report it. “Sew it up,” said Ford. “It’ll be all right.”

  So, Oxey Blood, just as drunk as Ford, got black thread and a straight needle, sterilized it with a match, and sewed the wound. It took a while. His fingers were smudged with carbon from the needle, and there were false starts, and once a stitch, half into Ford’s deltoid, had to be pulled out again, and all the while I was becoming more and more aware of the stink surrounding the house. We were out in the boondocks twenty miles south of Miami on the edge of a mangrove swamp where the odor of rotting vegetation and dead marine life is strong enough to steer the mind into visions of gangrene. Since the needle had no curve, the stitches had to go straight across for more than an inch, and all you could hear was the grinding of Ford’s teeth. He was not going to cry out; between stitches, he drank the last of some oversweet brandy that the rest of us were magnanimous enough to let him have for his own while the job was done. Six stitches. It still oozed blood along a three-inch gash, and will get infected and will scar up like a hump beside a ditch, but the evening was a good one for Ford. He had not cried out. Which we all talked about afterward. In prison, they say you have nothing but the standing achieved by your courage to stand up to other people. Courage may be your only capital, but that buys all the nu
trients you need for your ego. I admire the simplicity, and the strength it takes to be that free a man.

  Of course, this freedom can prove unrelenting. Dix Butler is suffering from the frustration that he cannot go out on raids with the Cubans he oversees for Harvey. He loves a few of the boatmen. There is one named Rolando (real name Eugenio Martínez) who is a consummate small boat pilot. Rolando, no, let me call him Eugenio, since everyone down here knows him by his real name, is a contract player on a high level, an intelligent, dedicated Cuban who has to be the equivalent of a World War I ace flying many missions. Martínez will take a boat out five or six times a month, and if another trip is needed, there he is, walking through the front door of 6312 Riviera Drive. Now, the standard operating procedure, as worked out in Harvey’s basement at Langley, is that the prácticos, that is, the boat pilots, are never supposed to see the faces of the Cubans they are bringing in for a landing. The hoods are worn throughout.

  Like all projections on paper that involve the exiles, this procedure breaks down. Cuban families are endlessly related. So, in the case of Eugenio Martínez, one of his cousins is often one of his raiders; the two even make jokes about the hood. Dix also knows the cousin, and just before a particularly wild mission, where they were going to set a tire factory ablaze, which could involve a firefight and more than a few casualties, Dix yelled to the cousin as he stepped on board the boat, “Amadeo, bring me back an ear.”

  “What’s it worth to you?”

  “A hundred bucks,” said Dix.

  Amadeo returned with two ears.

  Butler pretended to complain, but in fact he came up with $200, whereupon Amadeo took him off to a Cuban restaurant in Key Largo where they spent Dix’s money on a feast with two hookers, and accounted for a lot of broken dishes.

  I don’t know that I should have told you this. Setting the bare facts down on paper can be misleading. I await your answer. I will not say there is no uneasiness in this quarter.