The Company

by Robert Littell

  Lurking in the shadows of a doorway across Hardenbergstrasse, Jack kept an eye on the stage door of the ugly little modern dance theater. He had spent an hour and a half roaming the labyrinthian limbs of the S-Bahn, jumping into and out of trains a moment before the doors closed, lingering until everyone had passed and then doubling back on his route, finally emerging at the Zoo Station and meandering against traffic through a tangle of side streets until he was absolutely sure he wasn’t being followed. Mr. Andrews, he thought, would be proud of his tradecraft. At 8 P.M. the street filled with people, their heads angled into the cold air, hurrying home from work, many carrying sacks of coal they had picked up at an Allied distribution center in the Tiergarten; something about the way they walked suggested to Jack that they weren’t dying to get where they were going. At 9:10 the first students began coming out of the theater, scrawny teenagers striding off in the distinctive duck-walk of ballet dancers, great clouds of breath billowing from their mouths as they giggled excitedly. Jack waited another ten minutes, then crossed the street and let himself into the narrow hallway that smelled of perspiration and talcum powder. The watchman, an old Pomeranian named Aristide, was sitting in the shabby chair in his glass-enclosed cubbyhole, one ear glued to a small radio; von Karajan, who had played for the Führer and once arranged for audience seating in the form of a swastika, was conducting Beethoven’s Fifth live from Vienna. Aristide, his eyes shaded by a visor, never looked up as Jack pushed two packs of American cigarettes through the window. With the wooden planks creaking under his weight, he climbed the staircase at the back of the hallway to the top floor rehearsal hall and listened for a moment. Hearing no other sound in the building, he opened the door.

  As she always did after her Tuesday and Friday classes, RAINBOW had lingered behind to work out at the barre after her students had gone. Barefoot, wearing purple tights and a loose-fitting washed-out sweat shirt, she leaned forward and folded her body in half to plant her palms flat on the floor, then straightened and arched her back and easily stretched one long leg flat along the barre and then leaned over it, all the while studying herself in the mirror. Her dark hair, which seemed to have trapped some of the last rays of the previous night’s setting sun, was pulled back and plaited with strands of wool into a long braid that plunged to the small hollow of her back—the spot where Jack wore his Walther PPK. This was the fifth time Jack had met with her and the sheer physical beauty of her body in motion still managed to take his breath away. At some point in her life her nose had been broken and badly set, but what would have disfigured another woman on her served as an enigmatic ornament.

  “What do you see when you watch yourself dance in the mirror?” Jack asked from the door.

  Startled, she grabbed a towel from the barre and flung it around her neck, and with her feet barely touching the ground—so it appeared to Jack—came across the room. She dried her long delicate fingers on the towel and formally offered a hand. He shook it. She led him to the pile of clothing neatly folded on one of the wooden chairs lining the wall. “What I see are my faults—the mirror reflects only faults.”

  “Something tells me you’re being too hard on yourself.”

  She smiled in disagreement. “When I was eighteen I aspired to be a great dancer, yes? Now I am twenty-eight and I aspire only to dance.”

  The Sorcerer had purchased RAINBOW from a Polish freelancer, a dapper man in a black undertaker’s suit who pasted the last strands of hair across his scalp with an ointment designed to stimulate the folliculus. Like dozens of others who worked the hypogean world of Berlin, he made a handsome living selling the odd scrap of information or the occasional source who was said to have access to secrets. Warning Jack to be leery of a KGB dangle operation, Torriti—brooding full time over the aborted defection of Vishnevsky—had handed RAINBOW over to his Apprentice with instructions to fuck her if he could and tape record what she whispered in his ear. Tickled to be running his first full-fledged agent, Jack had set up a rendezvous.

  RAINBOW turned out to be an East German classical dancer who crossed into West Berlin twice a week to give ballet classes at a small out-of-the-way theater. At their first meeting Jack had started to question her in German but she had cut him off, saying she preferred to conduct the meetings in English in order to perfect her grammar and vocabulary; it was her dream, she had confessed, to one day see Margot Fonteyn dance at London’s Royal Ballet. RAINBOW had identified herself only as Lili and had warned Jack that if he attempted to follow her when she returned to the eastern zone of the city she would break off all contact. She had turned her back to Jack and had extracted from her brassiere a small square of silk covered with minuscule handwriting. When Jack took it from her he had discovered the silk was still warm from her breast. He had offered to pay for the information she brought but she had flatly refused. “I am hateful of the Communists, yes?” she had said, her bruised eyes staring unblinkingly into his. “My mother was a Spanish Communist—she was killed in the struggle against the fascist Franco; because of this detail I am trusted by the East German authorities,” she had explained at that first meeting. “I loathe the Russian soldiers because of what they did to me when they captured Berlin. I loathe the Communists because of what they are doing to my Germany. We live in a country where phones are allotted on the basis of how often they want to call you; where you think one thing, say another and do a third. Someone must make a stand against this, yes?”

  Lili had claimed to be courier for an important figure in the East German hierarchy whom she referred to as “Herr Professor,” but otherwise refused to identify. Back at Berlin Base, Jack had arranged for the patch of silk to be photographed and translated. When he showed the “get” from Lili’s Herr Professor (now code-named SNIPER) to the Sorcerer, Torriti had opened a bottle of Champagne to celebrate tapping into the mother lode. For Lili had provided them with a synopsis of the minutes of an East German cabinet meeting, plain-text copies of several messages that had been exchanged between the East German government and the local Soviet military leaders (Berlin Station already had enciphered versions of the same messages, which meant the Americans could work backwards and break the codes that had been used for encryption), along with a partial list of the KGB officers working out of Karlshorst. For the past six months Torriti had been running an East German agent, code-named MELODY, who worked in the Soviet office that handled freight shipments between Moscow and Berlin. Using the shipping registry, MELODY (debriefed personally by Torriti when the agent managed to visit the Sorcerer’s whorehouse above a nightclub on the Grunewaldstrasse in Berlin-Schoneberg) had been able to identify many of the officers and personnel posted to Karlshorst by their real names. Comparing the names supplied by Lili with those supplied by MELODY provided confirmation that Lili’s Herr Professor was genuine.

  “Who the fuck is she, sport?” Torriti had demanded after Jack returned from the second rendezvous with another square of silk filled with tiny handwriting. “More important, who the fuck is her goddamn professor chum?”

  “She says if I try to find out the well will go dry,” Jack had reminded Torriti. “From the way she talks about him I get the feeling he’s some sort of scientist. When I asked her where exactly the Communists were going wrong in East Germany, she answered by quoting the professor quoting Albert Einstein—something about our age being characterized by a perfection of means and a confusion of goals. Also, she speaks of him with great formality, more or less the way someone speaks about a much older person. I get the feeling he could be her father or an uncle. Whoever it is, he’s someone close to the summit.”

  “More likely to be her lover,” Torriti had muttered. “More often than not sex and espionage are birds of a feather.” The Sorcerer had dropped an empty whiskey bottle into a government-issue wire wastebasket filled with cigarette butts and had reached into an open safe behind him for another bottle. He had poured himself a stiff drink, had splashed in a thimbleful of water, had stirred the contents with his midd
le finger, then had carefully licked the finger before downing half the drink in one long swallow. “Listen up, sport, there’s an old Russian proverb that says you’re supposed to wash the bear without getting its fur wet. That’s what I want you to do with RAINBOW.”

  In order to wash the bear without getting its fur wet, Jack had to organize a tedious surveillance operation designed to track RAINBOW back into East Berlin and discover where she lived and who she was. Once they discovered her identity, it would be a matter of time before they found out who SNIPER was. If the Professor turned out to be a senior Communist with access to East German and Soviet secrets, some serious consideration would be given to using him in a more creative way; he could be obliged (under threat of exposure; under threat of having his courier exposed) to plant disinformation in places where it could do the most harm, or steer policy discussions in a direction that did the most good for Western interests. If he really was a member of the ruling elite over in the Soviet zone, the few people above him could be discredited or eliminated and SNIPER might even wind up running the show.

  The Sorcerer had given Jack the services of the two Silwans, the Fallen Angel and Sweet Jesus, and half a dozen other Watchers. Each time Jack met with RAINBOW, one of the Silwans would take up position where Lili had last been seen when she headed back toward East Berlin. No single Watcher would follow her for more than a hundred meters. Using walkie-talkies, members of the surveillance team would position themselves ahead of Lili and, blending in with the tens of thousands of East Berliners returning home to the Soviet Sector after working in West Berlin, keep her in sight for a few minutes before passing her on to the next Watcher. When the team ran out of agents the operation would be called off for the night. Each time Jack met RAINBOW the radius of the operation would be extended.

  On the first night of the operation, Jack’s third meeting with RAINBOW, the Fallen Angel had watched Lili buy some sheer stockings in one of the luxury stores on the Kurfürstendamm and tracked her to the gutted Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at the top of West Berlin’s six-lane main drag; Sweet Jesus, walking his muzzled lap dog, had kept her in sight until she disappeared in the crowd at Potsdamer Platz, where the four Allied sectors converged. She was last seen crossing into the eastern sector near the enormous electric sign, like the one in Times Square, that beamed news into the Communist-controlled half of the city. The second night of the operation one of the Silwans picked her up in front of the Handelorganization, a giant state store on the Soviet side of Potsdamer Platz, and handed her on to the second Watcher as she passed the battle-scarred Reichstag and the grassy mound over the underground bunker where Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide. Two uniformed policemen from the Communist Bereitschaftspolizisten stopped her near the grassy mound to check her identity booklet. Lili, glancing nervously over her shoulder every now and then to make sure she wasn’t being followed, turned down a side street filled with four-story buildings gutted in the war; the few apartments where Germans still lived had their windows boarded over and stovepipes jutting through the walls. The Watcher peeled off and the next Watcher, alerted by radio, picked her up when she emerged onto Unter den Linden. He lost her moments later when a formation of Freie Deutsche Jugund, Communist boy scouts wearing blue shirts and blue bandannas and short pants even in winter, came between them; drums beating, the scouts were marching down the center of the Unter den Linden carrying large photographs of Stalin and East German leader Otto Grotewohl and a banner that read: “Forward with Stalin.”

  On the night of Jack’s sixth rendezvous with RAINBOW on the top floor of the ugly little theater, Lili delivered the still-warm square of silk filled with writing and then offered her hand. “You have never said me your name, yes?” she remarked.

  “I am called Jack,” he said, gripping her hand in his.

  “That sounds very American to my ears. Jackknife. Jack-in-the-box. Jack-of-all-trades.”

  “That’s me,” Jack agreed with a laugh. “Jack-of-all-trades and master of none.” He was still holding her hand. She looked down at it with a cheerless smile and gently slid her fingers free. “Look,” Jack said quickly, “I just happen to have two tickets to a Bartók ballet being performed at the Municipal Opera House in British Sector—Melissa Hayden is dancing in something called The Miraculous Mandarin.” He pulled the tickets from his overcoat pocket and offered her one of them. “The curtain goes up tomorrow at six—they begin early so the East Germans can get home before midnight.” She started to shake her head. “Hey,” Jack said, “no strings attached—we’ll watch the ballet, afterwards I’ll buy you a beer at the bar and then you’ll duck like a spider back into your crack in the wall.” When she still didn’t take the ticket he reached over and dropped it into her handbag.

  “I am tempted,” she admitted. “I have heard it said that Melissa Hayden is not restricted by gravity. I do not know…”

  The next evening the Watchers, spread strategically through the streets surrounding Humbolt University at the end of the Unter den Linden, picked RAINBOW up coming from the direction of the Gorky Theater, behind the university. Queuing with a crowd of relatively well-dressed Berliners waiting for the Opera House doors to open, Jack was handed a note that read: “We are almost there—tonight should do it.”

  When the curtain rose the balcony seat next to Jack was still empty. Every now and then he cast a glance at the door behind him. In the darkness he thought he saw a figure slip in. An instant later Lili, looking ravishing in a helmet-like hat made of felt and a threadbare fur coat that dusted the tops of her flat-soled shoes, settled into the seat. Shrugging the coat off her shoulders, she smiled faintly at Jack, then produced ancient opera glasses and gazed through them at the stage. Her lips parted slightly and her chest rose and fell in quiet rapture. When the prima ballerina finally pushed through the curtain and curtsied to the audience, tears appeared in Lili’s eyes as she applauded wildly.

  Jack steered her through the crowd in the hallway and down the wide steps to a long bar on the ground floor. “I would very much like a Berliner Weisse mit Schuss—a light beer with raspberry syrup,” she informed him. She took a small change purse from the pocket of her fur coat. Jack smiled and said, “Please.” She smiled back and returned the change purse to her pocket. After he had ordered she leaned toward him and he could feel the feather’s weight of her torso against his arm. “In the east raspberries in winter are more expensive than gold,” she murmured.

  They carried their beers to an empty table. Lili hiked her long skirt and sat down; Jack caught a glimpse of gray cotton stockings and slender ankles. Lili said, “Given your occupation, I am in bewilderment to discover that you are an aficionado of ballet.” She cocked her head. “Perhaps you will tell me biographical things of yourself, yes?”

  Jack laughed. “Yes, sure.” He touched his glass to hers and drank off some of the beer. “I’ll start at the start. I was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania—you will never have heard of it—called Jonestown. My parents had a house with a wraparound porch where the town stopped and the fields of corn started. When I was a kid I thought the fields went on forever, or at least until they reached the edge of the flat earth. If the wind was right you could hear the church bells ringing in the convent beyond the corn, beyond a hill. My father made a small fortune producing underwear for the army in his factory up the road from our house. I learned to drive when I was fourteen on his 1937 Pierce Arrow. My father kept saddle horses in the barn next to the house and chickens in a shed behind it. My mother played the organ at the Catholic church in Lebanon, near Jonestown. Twice a year we vacationed in New York City. We stayed at a hotel called the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue. Every time we visited the city my father disappeared with some of his schoolmates and came back roaring drunk in the middle of the night. My mother took me to the ballet—I remember seeing Prokofiev’s Prodigal Son and his Romeo and Juliet performed at the Metropolitan Opera House.”

  “And how did you become what you are? How did
you…”

  He took another sip of beer. “There are Americans who understand that we are involved in a life and death struggle with the Communists. When it is over only one side will survive. I was invited by these Americans to join the battle.” He reached over and touched the fur on the collar of her coat with his knuckles. “Tell me about yourself, Lili. What is your real name?”

  She was immediately wary. “Lili is what my father always called me as a child because my mother often played the song ‘Lili Marlene’ on the gramophone. As for myself, there is not much to tell—I survived the Nazis, I survived your American bombers, I survived the Russian soldiers who rampaged like crazy people across Germany.” She pulled the collar of her fur coat up around her long neck. “With the assistance of these ancient squirrels I even survived the bitter winter of ’47.”

  “At what age did you begin dancing?”

  “There was never a time when I was not dancing. As a child I discovered a way to use my body to get outside my body, I discovered the secret places where gravity didn’t exist, I discovered a secret language that wasn’t verbal. The adults around me said I would become a ballet dancer, but it was years before I understood what they were talking about.”

  Jack blurted out very softly, “Jesus H. Christ, you are a wonderfully beautiful woman, Lili.”

  She closed her lids wearily and kept them closed for a moment. “I am not beautiful but I am not ugly either.”

  Screwing up his courage, Jack asked her if she lived alone or with a man.

  “Why do you ask me such a thing?” she demanded angrily. “I have told you, I tell you again, if you try to find out who I am, or who the Professor is, you will never see me again.”

  “I asked because I was hoping against hope you would say you lived alone, which could mean that there might be room for me in your life.”