The Company

by Robert Littell

  Inside a sputtering candle splashed quivering shadows onto the peeling wallpaper. One of the shadows belonged to Stella. She was wearing one of Leo’s sleeveless Yale rowing shirts and slouched on the bed, her back against the wall, her long bare legs stretched out and parted wide. Another shadow was cast by Jack. He was kneeling on the floor between Stella’s silvery thighs, his head bent forward. Sifting through the murky images, Leo’s sleep-fogged brain decided it had stumbled on Jack worshipping at an altar.

  In the half-darkness, Leo could make out Stella’s face. She was looking straight at him, a faint smile of complicity on her slightly parted lips.

  Working out of an empty office that his old law firm put at his disposition whenever he came to Manhattan, Frank Wisner wound up the meeting with E. (for Elliott) Winstrom Ebbitt II and walked him over to the bank of elevators. “I’m real pleased Bill Donovan made sure our paths crossed,” he drawled, stretching his Mississippi vowels like rubber bands and letting them snap back on the consonants. The Wiz, as Wisner was affectionately nicknamed in the Company, was the deputy head, behind Allen Dulles, of what some journalists had dubbed the dirty tricks department of the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. A ruggedly handsome OSS veteran, he favored his visitor with one of his legendary gap-toothed smiles. “Welcome aboard, Ebby,” he declared, offering a resolute paw.

  Nodding, Ebby took it. “It was flattering to be asked to join such a distinguished team.”

  As Ebby climbed into the elevator, the Wiz slapped him on the back. “We’ll see how flattered you feel when I kick ass over some operation that didn’t end up the way I thought it should. Cloud Club, sixteen thirty tomorrow.”

  Ebby got off the elevator two floors below to pick up a briefcase full of legal briefs from his desk. He pushed through the double doors with “Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard & Irvine” and “Attorneys at Law” etched in gold letters across the thick glass. Except for the two Negro cleaning ladies vacuuming the wall-to-wall carpets, the offices were deserted. Heading back to the elevators, Ebby stopped to pen a note in his small, precise handwriting to his secretary. “Kindly cancel my four o’clock and keep my calendar clear for the afternoon. Try and get me fifteen minutes with Mr. Donovan anytime in the morning. Also, please Thermofax my outstanding dossiers and leave the copies on Ken Brill’s desk. Tell him I’d take it as a favor if he could bring himself up to speed on all the material by Monday latest.” He scribbled “E.E.” across the bottom of the page and stuck it under a paperweight on the blotter.

  Moments later the revolving door at Number Two Wall Street spilled Ebby into a late afternoon heat wave. Loosening his tie, he flagged down a cab, gave the driver an address on Park and Eighty-eighth and told him to take his sweet time getting there. He wasn’t looking forward to the storm that was about to burst.

  Eleonora (pronounced with an Italian lilt ever since the young Eleanor Krandal had spent a junior semester at Radcliffe studying Etruscan jewelry at the Villa Giulia in Rome) was painting her fingernails for the dinner party that night when Ebby, stirring an absinth and water with a silver swizzle stick, wandered into the bedroom. “Darling, where have you been?” she cried with a frown. “The Wilsons invited us for eight, which means we have to cross their threshold not a split second later than eight-thirtyish. I heard Mr. Harriman was coming—“

  “Manny have a good day?”

  “When Miss Utterback picked him up, the teacher told her Manny’d been frightened when the air raid siren shrieked and all the children had to take cover under their little tables. These atomic alerts scare me, too. How was your day?”

  “Frank Wisner asked me up to Carter Ledyard for a chat this afternoon.”

  Eleonora glanced up from her nails in mild interest. “Did he?”

  Ebby noticed that every last hair on his wife’s gorgeous head was in place, which meant that she’d stopped by the hairdresser’s after the lunch with her Radcliffe girlfriends at the Automat on Broadway. He wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to the eager girl who’d been waiting when the banana boat back from the war had deposited him on a Manhattan dock draped with an enormous banner reading “Welcome Home—Well Done.” In those days she had been filled with impatience—to have herself folded into his arms, no matter they hadn’t seen each other in four years; to climb into the rack with him, no matter she was a virgin; to walk down the aisle on her father’s arm and agree to love and honor and obey, though she’d made it crystal clear from day one that the obey part was a mere formality. During the first years of their marriage it was her money—from a trust fund, from her salary as a part-time jewelry buyer for Bergdorf’s—that had put him through Columbia Law. Once he had his degree and had been hired by “Wild” Bill Donovan, his old boss at OSS who was back practicing law in New York, Eleonora more or less decided to retire and begin living in the style to which she wanted to become accustomed.

  Across the bedroom, Eleonora held up one hand to the light and examined her nails. Ebby decided there was no point in beating around the bush. “The Wiz offered me a job. I accepted.”

  “Is Frank Wisner back at Carter Ledyard? I suppose that Washington thing didn’t work out for him. I hope you talked salary? Knowing you, darling, I’m sure you would never be the first to raise the ugly subject of money. Did he say anything about an eventual partnership? You ought to play your cards carefully—Mr. Donovan might be willing to give you a junior partnership to keep from losing you. On the other hand, Daddy won’t be disappointed if you go to Carter Ledyard. He and Mr. Wisner know each other from Yale—they were both Skull and Bones. He could put in a good word—“

  Ebby puffed up two pillows and stretched out on the cream-colored bedspread. “Frank Wisner hasn’t gone back to Carter Ledyard.”

  “Darling, you might take your shoes off.”

  He undid his laces and kicked off his shoes. “The Wiz’s still in government service.”

  “I thought you said you saw him at Carter Ledyard.”

  Ebby started over again. “Frank has the use of an office there when he’s in town. He asked me up and offered me a job. I’m joining him in Washington. You’ll be pleased to know I did raise the ugly subject of money. I’ll be starting at GS-12, which pays six-thousand four-hundred dollars.”

  Eleonora concentrated on screwing the cap back onto the nail polish. “Darling, if this is some sort of silly prank…” She began waving her fingers in the air to dry her nails but stopped when she caught sight of his eyes. “You’re being serious, Eb, aren’t you? You’re not becoming involved with that ridiculous Central Agency Mr. Donovan and you were talking about over brandy the other night, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I’m afraid I am.”

  Eleonora undid the knot on the belt of the silk robe and shrugged it off her delicate shoulders; it fell in a heap on the floor, where it would stay until the Cuban maid straightened up the room the next morning. Ebby noticed his wife was wearing one of those newfangled slips that doubled as a brassiere and pushed up her small pointed breasts. “I thought you’d grown up, Eb,” she was saying as she slipped into a black Fogarty number with a pinched waist and a frilly skirt. Taking it for granted that she could talk him out of this silly idea, she backed up to him so he could close the zipper.

  “That’s just it,” Ebby said, sitting up to wrestle with the zipper. “I have grown up. I’ve had it up to here with company mergers and stock issues and trust funds for spoiled grandchildren. Frank Wisner says the country is at peril and he’s not the only one to think so. Mr. Luce called this the American century, but at the halfway mark it’s beginning to look more and more like the Soviet century. The Czechoslovak President, Mr. Masaryk, was thrown out of a window and the last free East European country went down the drain. Then we lost China to the Reds. If we don’t get cracking France and Italy will go Communist and our whole position in Europe will be in jeopardy.” He gave up on the zipper and touched the back of his hand to the nape of her neck. “A lot of the old OSS cr
owd are signing on, Eleonora. The Wiz was very convincing—he said he couldn’t find people with my experience in clandestine operations on every street corner. I couldn’t refuse him. You do see that?”

  Eleonora pulled free from his clumsy fingers and padded across the room in her stockinged feet to study herself in the full-length mirror. “I married a brilliant attorney with a bright future—“

  “Do you love me or my law degree?”

  She regarded him in the mirror. “To be perfectly honest, darling, both. I love you in the context of your work. Daddy is an attorney, my two uncles are attorneys, my brother has one more year at Harvard Law and then he’ll join Daddy’s firm. How could I possibly explain to them that my husband has decided to throw away a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar-a-year position in one of the smartest firms on Wall Street for a six-thousand-a-year job—doing what? You’ve fought your war, Eb. Let someone else fight this one. How many times do you need to be a hero in one lifetime?” Her skirt flaring above her delicate ankles, Eleonora wheeled around to face her husband. “Look, let’s both of us simmer down and enjoy ourselves at the Wilsons. Then you’ll sleep on it, Eb. Things will look clearer in the cold light of morning.”

  “I’ve accepted Frank’s offer,” Ebby insisted. “I don’t intend to go back on that.”

  Eleonora’s beautiful eyes turned flinty. “Whatever you do, you’ll never match your father unless someone stands you in front of a firing squad.”

  “My father has nothing to do with this.”

  She looked around for her shoes. “You really don’t expect me to transplant Immanuel to a semi-attached stucco house in some dingy Washington suburb so you can take a six-thousand-a-year job spying on Communists who are spying on Americans who are spying on Communists.”

  Ebby said dryly, “It’s sixty-four-hundred, and that doesn’t include the two-hundred-dollar longevity increase for my two years in the OSS.”

  Eleonora let her voice grow husky. “If you abandon a promising career you’ll be abandoning a wife and a son with it. I’m just not the ‘Whither thou goest’ type.”

  “I don’t suppose you are,” Ebby remarked in a voice hollow with melancholy for what might have been.

  With a deft gesture that, as far as Ebby could see, only the female of the species had mastered, Eleonora reached behind her shoulders blades with both hands and did up the zipper. “You’d better throw something on if you don’t want us to be late for the Wilsons,” she snapped. She spotted her stiletto-heeled pumps under a chair. Slipping her feet into them, she stomped from the bedroom.

  The Otis elevator lifting Ebby with motionless speed to the sixty-sixth floor of the Chrysler Building was thick with cigar smoke and the latest news bulletins. “It’s not a rumor,” a middle-aged woman reported excitedly. “I caught it on the hackie’s radio—the North Koreans have invaded South Korea. It’s our nightmare come true—masses of them poured across the thirty-eighth parallel this morning.”

  “Moscow obviously put them up to it,” said one man. “Stalin is testing our mettle.”

  “Do you think Mr. Truman will fight?” asked a young woman whose black veil masked the upper half of her face.

  “He was solid as bedrock on Berlin,” observed another man.

  “Berlin happens to be in the heart of Europe,” noted an elderly gentleman. “South Korea is a suburb of Japan. Any idiot can see this is the wrong war in the wrong place.”

  “I heard the President’s ordered the Seventh Fleet to sea,” the first man said.

  “My fiancé is a reserve naval aviator,” the young woman put in. “I just spoke with him on the telephone. He’s worried sick he’s going to be called back to service.”

  The operator, an elderly Negro wearing a crisp brown uniform with gold piping, braked the elevator to a smooth stop and slid back the heavy gold grill with a gloved hand. “Eighty-second Airborne’s been put on alert,” he announced. “Reason I know, got a nephew happens to be a radio operator with the Eighty-second.” Without missing a beat he added, “Final stop, Chrysler Cloud Club.”

  Ebby, half an hour early, shouldered through the crowd milling excitedly around the bar and ordered a scotch on the rocks. He was listening to the ice crackle in the glass, rehashing the waspish conversation he’d had with Eleonora over breakfast, when he felt a tug on his elbow. He glanced over his shoulder. “Berkshire!” he cried, calling Bill Colby by his wartime OSS code name. “I thought you were in Washington with the Labor Relations people. Don’t tell me the Wiz snared you, too.”

  Colby nodded. “I was with the NLRB until the old warlock worked his magic on me. You’ve heard the news?”

  “Difficult not to hear it. People who generally clam up in elevators were holding a seminar on whether Truman’s going to take the country to war.”

  Carrying their drinks, the two men made their way to one of the tall windows that offered a breathtaking view of Manhattan’s grid-like streets and the two rivers bracketing the island. Ebby waved at the smog swirling across their line of sight as if he expected to dispel it. “Hudson’s out there somewhere. On a clear day you can see across those parklands trailing off to the horizon behind the Palisades. Eleonora and I used to picnic there before we could afford restaurants.”

  “How is Eleonora? How’s Immanuel?”

  “They’re both fine.” Ebby touched his glass against Colby’s. “Good to see you again, Bill. What’s the word from the District of Columbia?”

  Colby glanced around to make sure they couldn’t be overheard. “We’re going to war, Eb, that’s what the Wiz told me and he ought to know.” The pale eyes behind Colby’s military-issue spectacles were, as always, imperturbable. The half smile that appeared on his face was the expression of a poker player who didn’t want to give away his cards, or his lack of them. “Let the Communists get away with this,” he added, “they’re only going to test us somewhere else. And that somewhere else could be the Iranian oil fields or the English Channel.”

  Ebby knew the imperturbable eyes and the poker player’s smile well. He and Colby and another young American named Stewart Alsop had studied Morse from the same instructor at an English manor house before being parachuted into France as part of three-man Jedburgh teams (the name came from the Scottish town near the secret OSS training camp). Long after he’d returned to the states and married, Ebby would come awake in the early hours of the morning convinced he could hear the throttled-back drone of the Liberator banking toward England and the snap of the parachute spilling and catching the air as he drifted down toward the triangle of fires the maquis had ignited in a field. Ebby and Colby, assigned to different Jedburgh teams, had crossed paths as they scurried around the French countryside, blowing up bridges to protect Patton’s exposed right flank as his tanks raced north of the Yonne for the Rhine. Ebby’s Jedburgh mission had ended with him inching his way through the jammed, jubilant streets of the newly liberated Paris in a shiny black Cadillac that had once belonged to Vichy Premier Pierre Laval. After the German surrender Ebby had tried to talk the OSS into transferring him to the Pacific theater but had wound up at a debriefing center the Americans had set up in a German Champagne factory outside Wiesbaden, trying to piece together the Soviet order of battle from Russian defectors. He might have stayed on in the postwar OSS if there had been a postwar OSS. When the Japanese capitulated, Truman decided America didn’t need a central intelligence organization and disbanded it. The Presidential ax sent the OSS’s analysts to the State Department (where they were as welcome as fleas in a rug), the cowboys to the War Department and Ebby, by then married to his pre-war sweetheart, back to Columbia Law School. And who did he come across there but his old sidekick from the Jedburgh days, Berkshire, one year ahead of him but already talking vaguely of abandoning law when the Cold War intensified and Truman reckoned, in 1947, that America could use a central intelligence agency after all.

  “I heard on the grapevine that Truman’s flipped his lid at the CIA,” Colby said. “He blames them for
not providing early warning of the North Korean attack. He’s right, of course. But with the nickel-and-dime budget Congress provides, they’re lucky if they can predict anything beside Truman’s moods. Heads are going to roll, you can believe it. The buzz on Capitol Hill is that the Admiral”—he was referring to the current DCI, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter—“will be job hunting before the year’s out. The Wiz thinks Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff at Normandy, Bedell Smith, may get the nod.” Colby glanced at a wall clock, clicked glasses with Ebby again and they both tossed off their drinks. “We’d better be getting in,” he said. “When the Wiz says sixteen thirty he doesn’t mean sixteen thirty-one.”

  Near the bank of elevators a small sign directed visitors attending the S.M. Craw Management Symposium to a suite of private rooms at the far end of the corridor. Inside a vestibule two unsmiling young men in three-piece suits checked Colby’s identification, then scrutinized Ebby’s driver’s license and his old laminated OSS ID card (which he’d retrieved from a shoebox filled with his wartime citations, medals and discharge papers). Ticking off names on a clipboard, they motioned Ebby and Colby though the door with a sign on it reading, “S.M. Craw Symposium.”

  Several dozen men and a single woman were crowded around a makeshift bar. The only other woman in sight, wearing slacks and a man’s vest over a ruffled shirt, was busy ladling punch into glasses and setting them out on the table. Ebby helped himself to a glass of punch, then turned to chat with a young man sporting a Cossack mustache. “My name’s Elliott Ebbitt,” he told him. “Friends call me Ebby.”

  “I’m John McAuliffe,” said the young man, a flamboyant six-footer wearing an expensive three-piece linen suit custom-tailored by Bernard Witherill of New York. “Friends call me a lot of things behind my back and Jack to my face.” He nodded toward the thin-faced, lean young man in a rumpled off-the-rack suit from the R.H. Macy Company. “This is my former friend Leo Kritzky.”