Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Harry

  4

  A HALF YEAR WENT BY BEFORE THE CALL CAME, BUT COME IT DID.

  He knew why I was in Rome. He had sent a limousine to meet me at the airport and a man to take me through Customs. When I entered his office that evening, he was dressed, I remember, very much as I was. We were both wearing dark-gray flannel single-breasted suits. We had on white shirts and repp ties. Mine was red and blue; his was green and black. We sat down in his office at 8:00 P.M. with the understanding that we would go out for dinner at 9:00. A quart of bourbon, an ice bucket, and two glasses were on a tray. We drank for the next seven hours and never saw dinner. A second bottle was emptied. It may have been the most intense drinking I have ever done and I flew back to the U.S. with a hangover potent enough to keep me away from hard liquor for the next few months.

  At the time, however, the booze went down like water, or, to be accurate, like gasoline. My adrenaline was in full supply. If I was burning the liquor almost as fast as I drank it, I may have been enabled thereby to enter the high-octane nervous system of William Harvey. I certainly came to understand how he could take it down in the quantities he did: William Harvey had not had an hour in his life when he was free, by his own measure, of outside menace.

  We began quietly enough. “I know why you’re here,” he said in his low voice, “and that’s all right. You were sent to do another man’s job.”

  “I’m not here because I want to be,” I answered, “but I know why I was assigned. It’s because I, at least, know what you’ve achieved, and what you stand for.”

  “You were always good with the horseshit.” He chuckled, an uncommon sound to come out of him. “Back in Berlin, you drew some circles on my ass, SM/ONION.”

  “I was scared stiff all the way.”

  “Of course. Everybody who works for Hugh Montague is scared.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Now you’re here to fire me.”

  “That’s not the word.”

  “Well, it will become the word because I’m not going to go.”

  “I believe the decision has been made.” I was taking as long a pause as I could with each reply.

  “In case you don’t know,” he said, “you are only a towel boy in a whorehouse.”

  “I always wondered what I was.”

  “Ha, ha. Right now, Cal Hubbard is in Washington trying to hold back his royal shits. He told you to call him the minute you’re done with me, right? Any hour at all, right?”

  “Of course. He’s concerned over you.”

  “Never trump horseshit with bullshit. Cal Hubbard is defecating green. He is afraid that I will take out my handgun and fire a bullet through my eye into the occipital. He’ll be blamed for the suicide.”

  “They want to find the right slot for you. The high-level appropriate slot. My father, more than anyone, feels you were treated most unfairly by John McCone.”

  Harvey beamed. “Can I see the letter he wrote to John McCone?”

  It went on this way for an hour. I absorbed his abuse, his irony, his indifference to dinner. Somewhere in the second hour, he began to talk in longer bursts. “You are here to get me to agree to come back,” he said, “and I am here to state that I am ready to return in the first body-bag that can be passed through a pig’s asshole. It is harder, Hubbard, to pass through a pig’s asshole than through the eye of a needle. So we don’t have much to negotiate. On the other hand, let us talk. I want to get to the bottom of why there is a difference of opinion in how I am bringing off this job. You see, I never received any cooperation. I have come to decide I was sent to the wrong place on purpose—to grind Wild Bill right on down to his pension. Fuck all of you. I don’t retire. I was not given the cooperation I was promised, and that is why Rome has produced no results. Did you know that Hugh Montague has Italian sources in this town at the overhead level?”—he raised his palm horizontally far above his head—“yay-high agents he put in place and built up years ago, dagos with a Minister’s portfolio. Hugh Montague furnishes me no access to them. ‘You’ll have to get along with the pussies you’ve got,’ is his message—Hugh Montague, for whom I did more than I ever did for anyone else. The man is a study in the monumental thanklessness of senior-level ingratitude. You, Hubbard, have always been his towel boy.”

  “Have another drink,” I said, “it will make you more mellow.”

  “Fuck you. I am not a party to any cosmic appreciation of the depths to which I have sunk. That is not the readout I provide myself.” He reached into his shoulder holster and took out a Magnum. I did not know if it was a Colt or a Smith & Wesson revolver, and I debated whether to ask him but could not see what purpose the question would serve. He sighted it, then broke it open and inspected the cylinder. With his handkerchief, a clean one, he wiped it down.

  “People say,” said Harvey, “‘There he goes again.’” He swung the cylinder back in and pointed the gun thoughtfully at me. “They have come to the conclusion that this is an act, and what they do not recognize is that I feel a real inclination which goes right down into the most honest part of me to pull that trigger and blow somebody’s name right out of their body. Give them back to the great compost heap. The only reason I have not squeezed the little bitch up to this date is that there has never been a proper matching-up. When I feel the impulse most keenly, as now, the recipient has not been worthy of entering into history with me. So, I have not squeezed the trigger. If Hugh Montague were here tonight, however, he would be a dead man,” and Harvey took aim now, and did pull the trigger on an empty chamber. “If it were your father, I might flip a coin. But you—you are relatively safe.” He set the handgun down on the desk. “Sit back,” he said. “Let us talk of other matters.”

  That was the first time he had aimed at me that night, but it would not be the last. We would come back to the gun. The longer it sat on his desk, the more it took on the presence of a third party who chose not to speak.

  “I would ask you,” he said, “what do you think of Lee Harvey Oswald?”

  “I think there may be a few things to find out about him.”

  “Shit, Hubbard, you call that an answer? Have some bourbon.” He poured for us both. “I was asking the question because Oswald’s name intrigues me. As you may know, I hate that son of a bitch Bobby Kennedy with an odium that can bring me to my feet, gun in hand, out of a deep sleep. An old Bureau reflex. I could pop Bobby Kennedy where he stands if he were sitting where you are now. And this Lee Harvey Oswald—he hated Bobby too. The brother who is left receives the full hatred of the bullet. So I played with the idea of Oswald, but not as an Agency man—I did not ask myself who was running him, or was he an espontáneo, no, I just played with the name, Lee Harvey Oswald, a bizarre moniker. Then it struck. Take off the Oswald, that is not a name I can comprehend, but keep the Lee Harvey. When I was a boy they called me Willie Harvey. Do you think God is trying to tell me something? I began to explore the background on Lee Harvey. Amazing stuff. Do you know his favorite TV show when he was an adolescent? It happened to be: I Led Three Lives, which was that Philbrick piece of crap about the FBI. Well, shit, Lee Harvey, so did I, William King Harvey, lead three lives for the FBI. I say there is more than coincidence here. I have pondered it, Hubbard, and I have come to a profound conclusion. There is opposition to entropy. The universe may not necessarily wind down. There is something forming that I would call new embodiment. Entropy and embodiment may be as related as antimatter and matter.” He belched reflectively. “Yes,” he said, “the forms deteriorate and they all run down to the sea, but other possibilities come together in their wake to seek embodiment. Blobs are always looking to articulate themselves into a higher form of blob. There is a tropism toward form, Hubbard. It counters decomposition. I tell you this because I felt an invisible bond between Lee Harvey and me, a bond that reinforces my notion of embodiment. A nascent embodiment. It was looking for more form. Is that clear, Hubbard?” He belted another bourbon.

  He talked. There wa
s one hour past the middle when he did not stop for all the hour. He spoke of how it felt to know that one had had a purchase on genius and lost it, “had it leached out of me, inch by vicious inch through your godfather, Hugh Montague—by God, there’s almost reason to shoot you,” and he picked up the gun again.

  It happened twice more. On the last occasion, he held the gun in a line with my head for ten minutes. I concentrated on exhaling my breath. I knew that if I could get all the bad air out of me, the good air—or what was left of it—would take care of itself on the way in. Sited in his line of fire, I was returned to one of the last days of the two weeks of rock climbing I had done in that summer half my life ago, in the fortnight I met Harlot, and I remembered how on one of the very last days I stood on a rock ledge six inches wide for almost half an hour, while Harlot, all but trapped, was making delicate essays above to find a way through a particularly unaccommodating overhang, and all the while I did not believe that I would be able to belay him if he fell. I was anchored to my face of rock, but I did not like the anchor.

  In that half hour, I came to know what it was to spend one’s existence on a vertical rather than a horizontal plane. I remember that I looked out on all the flat land below and it was as removed from me as the vanished continent of Atlantis. Now, sitting across from Bill Harvey, with his gun pointed in my direction, I came to know what it was like to live on a line, and I did not take it at all for granted that I would be alive when the dawn came up, which was, I knew, the most powerful safeguard I possessed to keep Bill Harvey from committing his finger to the trigger. It was too close to smile.

  Toward the sixth hour, Harvey began doing imitations of Fidel Castro. They were hopelessly broad, and no two men could have looked more unalike, but Harvey may have been searching for embodiments. Or was it the conjunction of the hour, the bourbon, and our mutual adrenaline? I could sense the moment when he was ready to allow me to laugh, and I actually could chortle at the vast farce of William Harvey deeming to present himself as Fidel Castro. “‘I can forgive you,’” said Harvey, thrusting his FBI nose upward in profile to his unseen witness in the heavens, “‘you of the United States for trying to kill me. For I have discovered in the course of your failures that capitalism is more inept than I supposed.’ Has that got the tone, Hubbard?”

  “Keep going.”

  “‘I am ready to forgive such concentrated if impotent efforts, but I cannot overlook the way you had your imperialist colleagues ship us boatloads of tainted motor oils that corroded our engines whereupon you proceeded to mock the inefficiency of our socialist system.’ Have I got the son of a bitch down pat?”

  “Close.”

  “‘Yes, I can forgive your attempts to assassinate me, but I am obliged to tell you that the American spirit, from our Cuban point of view, is bizarre. LSD is sprayed in a broadcasting studio in the hope I might inhale its effects and begin to sound ridiculous to my people, plans are made to dust tubercular bacteria into my diving suit, there is talk of cigars dipped in poison and exploding seashells. Who was the progenitor of all these ideas? My friends, I discovered the source of such inspiration. It came from the British literary character James Bond. I became curious about this agent James Bond who seemed such a fool, such an impostor of a man of action. I had research done, therefore, in our excellent University of Havana facilities on the character of the author of James Bond and discovered that this gentleman, Ian Fleming, is a worn-out asthmatic Lothario with a wheezing heart and exhausted loins. Of such men are your American legends concocted,’” concluded Harvey in his embodiment of Fidel Castro, and bent over double with a terrible coughing attack. When he was done, he put the gun away.

  He would take it forth one more time, but the tide of the night was moving out. At last he stood up and said, “Let’s take a walk. I’ll make up my mind on the walk.”

  We strolled around the Embassy. Harvey said: “The KGB tails me all the time. When it comes to petty viciousness, they are as small as goat turds. Why, I even believe they were the guys who let the air out of my tires the other day when I parked near the Spanish Steps.” He wheezed. “Somebody could take a shot at me right now, I suppose. I am still a target. But that’s all right.” He wheezed once more. “Okay, Hubbard,” he said, “I will go back. But first I want to throw myself one hell of a party. I’ll have a fountain—I figured it out—a fountain to spurt champagne, then recover it and jet it out again. To renew the fizz, we will insert a CO2 cartridge in the plumbing.” He beamed. “Tomorrow, I will send out a cable to all Stations worldwide that I am going back to Washington. Let me add the codicil that I will haunt you, and yours, if anyone or anything indicates I am returning in disgrace.”

  “There won’t be any suggestion of that,” I said.

  “Oh, there better not be.” He put his arm on my shoulder. “You hold your liquor, Hubbard. You seem able to keep your seat. Maybe you have your father’s moxie.”

  “Never a chance.”

  “I wish I had a son,” he said. We had come back to the American Embassy and strolled by the sentry at the gate. He took me on a tour of the back wall. “I have one thing to tell you,” he added.

  “Yessir.”

  “I am the man who uncovered Philby.”

  “We are all witting of that.”

  “But after I uncovered him, I began to wonder if it was the Russians who decided to blow his safety. If so, I told myself, there is only one answer. They were looking to protect something larger. Someone larger. Now, the question I pose is who? It remains the question. I’ll ask you to guess who the big guy is.”

  He said no more, but one part of my brain was singed forever with the fear that it was Harlot.

  Harvey ended these hours of alcoholic festivity by urinating all over a piece of the back wall of the American Embassy in Rome. In the middle, he said, “Hubbard, you will never know how close I feel to Jesus Christ when I take one good piss like this.” Then he butted heads with me to say good-bye, a last gift, a headache to take home with the hangover.

  MOSCOW, MARCH 1984

  THAT SINGULARLY ANTICLIMACTIC phrase, “a headache to take home with the hangover,” brought me to the last page I had written for Alpha. I had carried the memoir no further. Sitting on my bed in my narrow room off the airshaft on the fourth floor of the old Metropole in Moscow, staring up at an absurdly high ceiling whose proportions gave an echo of the larger space which must once have existed in the reign of the last Czar, I knew only that I had not wanted my manuscript to end, I did not wish to be done. Those two thousand and more frames of manuscript on microfilm had been equal to money in my pocket—a primal safeguard against the rigors of a strange and hostile land. Now my capital had been consumed. I was out of the book, and on my own, off on a mission whose purpose I could not name but for the inner knowledge that I knew it. For if the answer was not alive in some cloaked corner of my mind, then why would I be here?

  I thought of Harlot then, and of his incommensurable vanity. An old legend came back to me. In the days of the Reflecting Pool, there had been a night when Harlot entered the office of an assistant who was quartered in the I-J-K-L, and standing there in the dark, looked across the intervening distance between himself and the next building. In a lighted office across the court he saw one of his colleagues kissing a secretary. Harlot promptly dialed that office, and as he watched, the man separated himself from the embrace long enough to pick up his phone.

  “Aren’t you appalled by yourself?” Harlot asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “God,” said Harlot and hung up.

  The last time Hugh Montague had spoken to me about God was the last time I had taken the trip from Langley to his farmhouse on the eyebrow of the four-lane truck road. He had expatiated that afternoon on the theory of Creationism, his brilliance, one can certify, not at all diminished.

  “Would you say, Harry,” he inquired, “that two such words as ‘sophisticated fundamentalist’ make one oxymoron?”

  “Can’t
see how it wouldn’t,” I told him.

  “Intellectual snobbery,” replied Harlot, “is your short suit. You would do better to ponder the meanings that can be extracted from apparent folly.”

  As so often, a flick into the eye of your ego was the price you paid for obtaining the products of his mind.

  “Yes,” he said, “Creationists rush to tell us that the world, according to the Bible, was commenced five thousand and some hundreds of years ago. It makes for merriment, don’t it? Fundamentalists are such whole fools. Yet I said to myself once, ‘What would I do if I were Jehovah about to conceive of this creature, man, who, as soon as I create him, will be hell-bent—given the equal opportunity I have offered Satan—to discover My nature. How can that not become man’s passion? I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’”

  “A cover story?” I did not wish to repeat his words, but I did.

  “A majestic cover story. Nothing vulgar or small. Absolutely detailed, fabulously complete. Just suppose that in the moment of striking that agreement with Satan, God brought forth the world complete. Five thousand and some hundreds of years ago, we were given an absolutely realized presentation of the world. God created it ex nihilo. Gave it to us complete. Everyone began to live at the same instant of Creation. Yet all were given a highly individual background. All had been put together, of course, from nothingness infused with divine genius. The creation of this imaginary past was God’s artwork. All who lived, all men, women, and children of all varying tribes and climates, the eighty-year-old, the forty-five-year-old, the young lovers, and the two-year-old were all created at the same instant that He placed the half-cooked food on the stone-hearth fire. All of it appeared at once, the animals in their habitat just so much as the humans, each creature possessing its separate memory, the plants in command of their necessary instincts, the earth bountiful here and unfulfilled there, some crops even ready to go to harvest. All the fossil remains were carefully set in the rock. God gave us a world able to present all the material clues that Darwin would need fifty-odd centuries later to conceive of evolution. The geological strata had all been put in place. The solar system was in the heavens. Everything had been set moving at rates of orbit to encourage astronomers to declare five thousand and more years later that the age of the earth was approximately five billion years. I like this notion immensely,” said Harlot. “You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”