The Company

by Robert Littell

  “What brings you London town?” Elihu inquired now.

  “The Cold War.”

  Elihu let fly one of his distinctive whinnies, a bleating that came from having perpetually clogged sinuses. “I have come around to the view of your General W. Tecumseh Sherman when he said that war is hell; its glory, moonshine.” Elihu, who was a deputy to Roger Hollis, the head of the MI5 section investigating Soviet espionage in England, sized up his wartime buddy. “You look fat but fit. Are you?”

  “Fit enough. You?”

  “I have a touch of that upper class malady, gout. I have problems with a quack pretending to be a National Health dentist—he takes the view that tooth decay is a sign of moral degeneracy and advises me to circumcise my heart. Oh, I do wish it were true, Harv! Always wanted to try my hand at moral degeneracy. To square the circle, there is a buzzing in my left ear that refuses to go away unless I drown it out with a louder buzzing. Had it since a very large land mine went off too close for comfort in the war, actually.”

  “Are you wired, Elihu?”

  “‘Fraid I am, Harv. It’s about my pension. I don’t mind meeting you away from the madding mob for a confabulation, just don’t want it to blow up in my face afterward. You do see what I mean? There’s an old Yiddish aphorism: Me ken nit tantzen auf tsvai chassenes mit ain mol—you can’t dance at two weddings at the same time. Our wonky civil service minders take the injunction very seriously. Cross a line and you will be put out to graze without the pound sterling to keep you in fresh green grass. If I can keep my nose clean, twenty-nine more months will see me off to pasture.”

  “Where will you retire to? What will you do?”

  “To your first question: I have had the good luck to snaffle a small gate-house on an estate in Hampshire. It’s not much but then every house is someone’s dream house. I shall retire to the dull plodding intercourse of country life where secrets are intended to be spread, like jam over toast, on the rumor mill. The local farmers will touch their hats and call me squire. I shall be so vague about the career I am retiring from they will assume I want them to assume I was some sort of spook, which will lead them to conclude I wasn’t. To your second question: I have bought half a gun at a local club. Weather permitting I shall shoot at anything that beats the air with its wings. With luck I may occasionally pot something. Between shoots I shall come out of the closet. I am a latent heterosexual, Harv. I shall serve myself, and lavishly, instead of the Crown. With any luck I shall prove my dentist right.”

  A scrawny teenage boy pitched a stick downhill and called, “Go fetch, Mozart.” A drooling sheepdog watched it land, then lazily turned an expressionless gaze on his young master, who trotted off to retrieve the stick and try again.

  “Old dogs are slow to pick up new tricks,” the Sorcerer remarked.

  “Heart of the problem,” Elihu agreed grumpily.

  Torriti badly needed a midday ration of booze. He scratched at a nostril and bit the bullet. “I have reason to believe there may be a Soviet mole in your Six.”

  “In MI6? Good lord!”

  Keeping his account as sketchy as possible, the Sorcerer walked Elihu through the aborted defection: there had been a KGB lieutenant colonel who wanted to come across in Berlin; to establish his bona fides and convince the Americans to take him, he told the Sorcerer he could give them serials that would lead to a Soviet mole in MI6; the night of the exfiltration the Russian had been seen strapped to a stretcher on his way into a Soviet plane. No, the Russian didn’t give himself away; the Sorcerer had a communications intercept—surely Elihu would understand if he was not more forthcoming—indicating that the Russian had been betrayed.

  Elihu, an old hand when it came to defections, asked all the right questions and Torriti tried to make it sound as if he were answering them: no, the Brits had been deliberately left off the distribution list of the cipher traffic concerning the defection; no, even the Brits in Berlin who had their ear to the ground wouldn’t have ticked to it; no, the aborted defection didn’t smell like a KGB disinformation op to sow dissension between the American and British cousins.

  “Assuming your Russian chap was betrayed,” Elihu asked thoughtfully, “how can you be absolutely certain the villain of the piece isn’t in the American end of the pipeline?”

  “The Company flutters its people, Elihu. You Brits just make sure they’re sporting the right school tie.”

  “Your polygraph is about as accurate as the Chinese rice test. Remember that one? If the Mandarins thought someone was fibbing they’d stuff his mouth with rice. Rice stayed dry, meant the bugger was a liar. Oh Jesus, you really do think it was a Brit. Achilles once allowed as how he felt like an eagle which’d been struck by an arrow fledged with its own feathers.” Elihu blushed apologetically. “I read what was left of the ancient poets at Oxford when I was a virgin. That’s why they recruited me into MI5…”

  “Because you were a virgin?”

  “Because I could read Greek.”

  “I’m missing something.”

  “Don’t you see, Harv? The ex-Oxford don who ran MI5 at the time reckoned anyone able to make heads or tails of a dead language ought to be able to bury the enemies of the house of Windsor.” Elihu shook his head in despair. “A Brit? Shit! We could muddle through if the Soviet mole were a Yank. If you’re right—oh, I hate to think of the consequences. A Brit? A yawning gap will open between your CIA and us.”

  “Mind the gap,” Torriti snapped, imitating the warning the conductor shouted every time a train pulled into a London tube station.

  “Yes, we will need to, won’t we? We will be consigned to Coventry by your very clever Mr. Angleton. He won’t return our calls.”

  “There’s another reason I think the leaky faucet is British, Elihu.”

  “I assumed there was,” Elihu muttered to himself. “The question is: Do I really want to hear it?”

  The Sorcerer slumped toward the Englishman until their shoulders were rubbing. Prime the pump by telling him something he doesn’t know, the Rabbi had said. “Listen up, Elihu: Your MI5 technical people have come up with an amazing breakthrough. Every radio receiver has an oscillator that beats down the signal it’s tuned to into a frequency that can be more easily filtered. Your technicians discovered that this oscillator gives off sound waves that can be detected two hundred yards away; you even have equipment that can read the frequency to which the receiver is tuned. Which means you can send a laundry truck meandering through a neighborhood and home in on a Soviet agent’s receiver tuned to one of Moscow Centre’s burst frequencies.”

  Elihu blanched. “That is one of the most closely held secrets in my shop,” he breathed. “We never shared it with the American cousins. How in the world did you find out about it?”

  “I know it because the Russians know it. Do me a favor, turn off your tape, Elihu.”

  Elihu hesitated, then reached into his overcoat pocket and removed a pack of Pall Malls. He opened the lid and pressed down on one cigarette. Torriti heard a distinct click. “I fear I shall live to regret this,” the Englishman announced with a sigh.

  The Sorcerer said, “There is a Soviet underground telephone cable linking Moscow Centre to the KGB’s Karlshorst station in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The KGB uses this so-called Ve-Che cable, named for the Russian abbreviation for ‘high frequency,’ vysokaya chastota. Russian technicians invented a foolproof safety device—they filled the wires inside the cable with pressurized air. Any bug on the wire would cause the current going through it to dip and this dip could be read off a meter, tipping off the Russians to the existence of a bug. Our people invented a foolproof way to tap into the wire without causing the pressurized air to leak or the current to dip.”

  “You are reading Soviet traffic to and from Karlshorst!”

  “We are reading all of the traffic. We are deciphering bits and pieces of it. One of the bits we managed to decipher had Moscow Centre urgently warning Karlshorst that its agents in the Western sectors of Germany
could be located by a new British device that homed in on the oscillator beating down the signal bursts out of Karlshorst.”

  “My head is spinning, Harv. If what you say is true—“

  Torriti finished the sentence for his British pal. “—the Russians have a mole inside the British intelligence establishment. I need your help, Elihu.”

  “I don’t see what exactly—“

  “Does the name Walter Krivitsky ring a gong?”

  Elihu’s brow crinkled up. “Ah, it does indeed. Krivitsky was the Red Army bloke who ran Soviet military intelligence in Western Europe during the thirties out of the Holland rezidentura. Defected in ’36, or was it ’37? Wound up killing himself in the States a few years later, though the Yanks did give us a crack at him before they lured him across the Atlantic with their fast cars and their fast ladies and their fast food. All happened before my time, of course, but I read the minutes. Krivitsky gave us a titillating serial about a young English journalist code-named PARSIFAL. The Englishman had been recruited somewhere down the line by his then wife, who was a rabid Red, and then packed off to Spain during the Spanish dustup by his Soviet handler, a legendary case officer known only by the nickname Starik.”

  “Were you able to run down the serial?”

  “‘Fraid the answer to that is negative. There were three or four dozen dozen young Englishmen from Fleet Street who covered the Spanish War at one time or another.”

  “Did your predecessors share the Krivitsky serial with the Americans?”

  “Certainly not. There was talk of having another go at Krivitsky but that was when he bought it—a bullet in the head, if memory serves me—in a Washington hotel room in 1941. His serial died with him. How could anyone be sure Krivitsky wasn’t inventing serials that would inflate his importance in our eyes? Why give our American cousins grounds to mistrust us? That was the party line at the time.”

  The Sorcerer scraped some wax out of an ear with a fingernail and examined it, hoping to find a clue to why good PX whiskey all of a sudden tasted tasteless. “Krivitsky wasn’t inventing serials, Elihu. I worked with Jim Angleton in Italy after the war,” he reminded him. “We rubbed each other the wrong way but that’s another story. In those days we had an understanding with the Jews from Palestine—they were desperately trying to run guns and ammunition and people through the British blockade. We didn’t get in their way, in return for which they let us debrief the Jewish refugees escaping from East Europe. One of the Jews from Palestine was a Viennese joker named Kollek. Teddy Kollek. Turned out he’d been in Vienna in the early thirties. I remember Kollek describing a wedding—it stuck in my head because the bridegroom had been Angleton’s MI6 guru at Ryder Street during the war; he’d taught him chapter and verse about counterintelligence.”

  Elihu tossed his head back and bleated like a goat. “Kim Philby! Oh, dear, I can feel my pension slipping through my fingers already.”

  “Happen to know him personally, Elihu?”

  “Good lord, yes. We’ve been trading serials on the Bolsheviks for eons, much the way children trade rugby cards. I talk with Kim two, three times a week on the phone—I’ve more or less become the go-between between him and my chief, Roger Hollis.”

  “The marriage Kollek described took place in Vienna in 1934. Philby, then a young Cambridge grad who’d come to Austria to help the socialists riot against the government, apparently got himself hitched to a Communist broad name of Litzi Friedman. Kollek had a nodding acquaintance with both the bride and the groom, which is how he knew about the wedding. Marriage didn’t last long and people never attached much importance to it. Philby was only twenty-two at the time and everyone assumed he’d married the first girl who gave him a blow job. He eventually returned to England and talked himself into an assignment covering Franco’s side of the war for The Times of London.”

  Elihu set the balls of the fingers of his right hand on his left wrist to monitor his racing pulse. “God, Harv, do you at all grasp what you’re suggesting—that the head of our Section IX, the chap who until quite recently ran our counterintelligence ops against the Russians, is actually a Soviet mole!” Elihu’s eyelids sagged and he seemed to go into mourning. “You simply cannot be serious.”

  “I’ve never been seriouser.”

  “I will need time to digest all this. Say twenty-nine months.”

  “Time is what’s running out on us, Elihu. The Barbarians are at the gate just as surely as they were when they crossed the frozen Rhine and clobbered what passed for civilized Europe.”

  “That happened before my time, too,” Elihu muttered.

  “The Iron Curtain is our Rhine, Elihu.”

  “So people say. So people say.”

  Elihu leaned back and closed his eyes and turned his face into the sun. “‘Move him into the sun—Gently its touch awoke him once,’” he murmured. “I am a great admirer of the late Wilfred Owen,” he explained. Then he fell silent, neither speaking nor moving. A couple of men Torriti tagged as homosexuals ambled up the walkway to the crest of the hill and down the other side, whispering fiercely in the way people did when they argued in public. Elihu’s eyes finally came open; he had come to a decision. “I could be keel-hauled for telling you what I’m going to tell you. As they say, in for a penny, in for a pound. Years before Kim Philby became involved in Soviet-targeted counter-intelligence ops he was an underling in Section V, which was tracking German ops on his old London Times stamping ground, the Iberian peninsular. MI6 had and has a very secret Central Registry with source books containing the records of British agents world-wide. The source books are organized geographically. On a great number of occasions Philby signed out the Iberian book, which was consistent with his area of expertise. One day not long ago I went down to Central Registry to take a look at the source book on the Soviet Union, which was consistent with my area of expertise. While the clerk went off to fetch it I leafed through the logbook—I was curious to see who had been exploring that sinkhole before me. I was quite startled to discover that Philby had signed out the source book on the Soviet Union long before he became chief of our Soviet Division. He was supposed to be chivvying Germans in Spain, not reading up on British agents in Russia.”

  “Who beside me knows about your source book saga, Elihu?”

  “I’ve actually only told it to one other living soul,” Elihu replied.

  “Let me climb out on a limb—Ezra Ben Ezra, better known as the Rabbi.”

  Elihu was genuinely surprised. “How’d you guess?”

  “The Rabbi once told me there was an international Jewish conspiracy and I believed him.” Torriti shook with quiet laughter. “Now I understand why Ben Ezra sent me to see you. Tell me something—why didn’t you take your suspicions to Roger Hollis?”

  The suggestion appalled Elihu. “Because I am not yet stark raving, that’s why. And what does it all add up to, Harv? A KGB defector who tries to whip up some excitement by claiming he can finger a Soviet mole in MI6, a marriage in Austria, a Russian General who dropped dark hints about a British journalist in Spain, some easily explainable Central Registry logs—Philby could have been gearing up for the Cold War before anyone else felt the temperature drop. Hardly enough evidence to accuse MI6’s next ataman of being a Soviet spy! Dear me, I hate to think what would happen to the poor prole who dropped that spanner into the works. Forget about being put out to pasture, he’d be disemboweled, Harv. Oh, dear me, his entrails would be ground up and fed to the hogs, his carcass would be left to rot in some muddy ha-ha.”

  “Pure and simple truth carries weight, Elihu.”

  Elihu retrieved his bowler from the bench and fitted it squarely onto his nearly hairless head. “Oscar Wilde said that truth is rarely pure and never simple and I am inclined to take his point.” He gazed toward London in the hazy distance. “I was born and raised in Hampshire, in a village called Palestine—had the damnedest time convincing the mandarins not to post me to the Middle East because they assumed I had an affinity for the
miserable place.” Elihu pursed his lips and shook his head. “Yes. Well. What you could do is feed out a series of barium meals. We did it once or twice during the war.”

  “Barium meals! That’s something I haven’t thought of.”

  “Yes, indeed. Tricky business. Can’t feed out junk, mind you—the Russian mole will recognize it as junk and won’t be bothered to pass it on. Got to be top-grade stuff. Takes a bit of nerve, it does, giving away secrets in order to learn a secret.” Climbing to his feet, Elihu removed a slip of paper from his fob pocket and handed it to the Sorcerer. “I take supper weekdays at the Lion and Last in Kentish Town. Here’s the phone number. Be a good fellow, don’t call me at the office again. Ah, yes, and if anybody should inquire, this meeting never took place. Do I have that right, Harv?”

  Torriti, lost in the myriad tangle of barium meals, nodded absently. “Nobody’s going to hear any different from me, Elihu.”

  “Ta.”

  “Ta to you.”

  6

  WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1951

  FIFTEEN EARNEST YOUNG SECTION HEADS HAD SQUEEZED INTO BILL Colby’s office for the semi-weekly coffee-and-doughnut klatsch on the stay-behind networks being set up across Scandinavia. “The infrastructure in Norway is ninety per cent in place,” reported a young woman with bleached blonde hair and painted fingernails. “Within the next several weeks we expect to cache radio equipment in a dozen pre-selected locations, which will give the leaders of our clandestine cells the capability of communicating with NATO and their governments-in-exile when the Russians overrun the country.”