The Company

by Robert Littell

BERLIN, TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 1951

  IN ORDER TO HAVE DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY, JACK—LIKE ALL COMPANY officers in Berlin—was carried on the books as a Foreign Service officer working out of the American consulate. With Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the architect of America’s policy of containing Soviet expansionism, passing through Berlin on a hit-and-run tour of front line consulates and embassies, Jack received one of the ambassador’s notorious “your presence is requested and required” invitations to a “happy hour” pour in the Secretary’s honor. Milling around with the other junior CIA officers, Jack listened as one of the Company’s Technical Service Division “elves,” recently back from Washington, described the new Remington Rand Univac computer being installed in the Pickle Factory. “It’s going to revolutionize information retrieval,” the technician was explaining excitedly. “The disadvantage is that Univac’s not very portable—as a matter of fact it fills a very large room. The advantage is that it can swallow all the phone books of all the cities in America. You punch in a name, the rotors whir and four or five minutes later it spits out a phone number.”

  “Damn machines,” someone cracked, “are going to take all the fun out of spying.”

  Jack laughed along with the others but only halfheartedly; his thoughts were on tonight’s rendezvous in the rehearsal hall with RAINBOW, his sixteenth meeting with her since their paths first crossed two months before. Over time the snatches of conversation between them had turned into a kind of coded shorthand; the things left unspoken loomed larger than the things said, and they both knew it. Tonight Jack meant to screw up his courage and say what was on his mind; in his guts. He wasn’t sure she would stand still long enough to hear him out; if she heard him out, he didn’t know if she would sock him in the solar plexus or melt into his arms.

  Drifting away from the group, Jack wandered over to the bar and helped himself to a fistful of pretzels and another whiskey sour. Turning back toward the room, rehearsing in his head what he would say to Lili if she gave him an opening, he suddenly found himself eyeball to eyeball with the austere Secretary of State.

  “Good afternoon, I’m Dean Acheson.”

  The American ambassador (who had helicoptered in from the embassy in Bonn), the consul general from Berlin, two senators and a bevy of high-ranking State Department political officers crowded around.

  “Sir, my name is John McAuliffe.”

  “What do you do here?”

  Jack cleared his throat. “I work for you, Mr. Secretary,” he said weakly.

  “I didn’t catch that.”

  “I work for you. In the embassy.”

  The ambassador tried to take Acheson’s elbow and steer him toward the buffet of popcorn and open sandwiches but the Secretary of State wasn’t finished quizzing Jack. “And what do you do in the embassy, Mr. McAuliffe?”

  Jack looked around for help. The two senators were staring off into space. The political officers were concentrating on their fingernails. “I work in the political section, sir.”

  Acheson was starting to get annoyed. “And what precisely do you do in the political section, young man?”

  Jack swallowed hard. “I write reports, Mr. Secretary, that I hope will be useful…”

  Suddenly the penny dropped. Acheson’s mouth fell open and he nodded. “I think I see. Well, good luck to you, Mr. McAuliffe.” The Secretary of State mouthed the words “Sorry about that” and turned quickly away.

  RAINBOW had come to look forward to her twice weekly meetings with Jack; living as she did in the bleak Soviet side of the city, locked into a relationship with a man twenty-seven years her senior, she savored the brief encounters during which she was made to feel desirable, and desired. For the past several weeks Lili had no longer turned modestly away when she reached under her sweat shirt and into her brassiere to pull out the small square of silk filled with minuscule handwriting. Now, for the first time, Jack snatched the silk, warm from her breast, and pressed it to his lips. Lili, startled, lowered her eyes for an instant, then looked up questioningly into his as Jack grazed one of her small breasts with his knuckles and kissed her softly on the corner of her thin lips. “Please, oh, please, understand that you have arrived at the frontier of our intimacy,” she pleaded, her voice reduced to a husky whisper. “There can be no crossing over. In another world, in another life…” She managed a forlorn smile and Jack caught a glimpse of what her face would look like when she had grown old. “Jack the Ripper,” she murmured. “Jackhammer. Jack rabbit.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, where do you discover all these Jacks?”

  “Herr Professor has a wonderful dictionary of American slang, yes? It has long been my habit to learn several new words every day. I was up to grab forty winks when I met you. I skipped ahead to the Jacks.”

  “Have you told Herr Professor about me?”

  “He has never asked me and I have not raised the subject. What he does—the information he sends to you—it is out of an antique idealism. Herr Professor wears shirts with studs instead of buttons, and old-fashioned starched collars that he changes daily; he is clearly ill at ease with the latest fashions in clothing and political ideas. He gathers the information and writes it out meticulously on the silk in order to turn the clock back. He counts on me take care of the details of the delivery.”

  “We could become lovers,” Jack breathed.

  “In mysterious ways we are already lovers,” Lili corrected him.

  “I want you—“

  “You have as much of me as I can give to you—“

  “I want more. I want what any man wants. I want you in bed.”

  “I say it to you without ambiguity—this can never be.”

  “Because of Herr Professor?”

  “He saved my life at the end of the war. In my dictionary gang-rape comes before grab forty winks. I was what you call gang-raped by drunken Russian soldiers. I filled the pockets of my overcoat with bricks in order to throw myself into the Spree, I could not wait for the dark waters to close over my head. Herr Professor prevented me…through the night he talked to me of another Germany…of Thomas Mann, of Heinrich Böll…at dawn he took me to the roof of the building to watch the sun rise. He convinced me that it was the first day of the rest of my life. I do not pretend, Jack, to be…indifferent to you. I only say that my first loyalty is to him. I say also that this loyalty takes the form of sexual fidelity…”

  Lili stepped into a skirt and peeled off her dancing tights from under it. She folded them into her satchel and reached to turn out the lights in the rehearsal hall. “I must begin back, yes?”

  Jack gripped her shoulder. “He lets you run risks.”

  Lili pulled away. “That is unfair—there is a hierarchy to the world we live in. Because he considers some things more important does not mean he needs me less.”

  “I need you more.”

  “You do not need me as he needs me. Without me—” She looked away, her face suddenly stony.

  “Finish the sentence, damnation—without you what?”

  “Without me he cannot remain alive. You can.”

  “You want to spell that out?”

  “No.”

  “You owe it to yourself—“

  “Whatever I owe to myself, I owe more to him. Please let me go now, Jack-o’-lantern.”

  Sorting through emotions that were not familiar to him, Jack nodded gloomily. “Will you come again Friday?”

  “Friday, yes. Depart ahead of me, if you please. We should not be seen coming out of the theater together.”

  Jack put a hand on the back of her neck and drew her to him. She let her forehead rest for a moment against his shoulder. Then she stepped back and turned off the lights and opened the door and waited at the top of the staircase while he descended the steps.

  He looked back once. Four floors above him Lili was lost in the shadows of the landing. “Lily of the valley?” he called. When she didn’t respond he turned and, hurrying past Aristide dozing in his glass-enclosed cubbyhol
e, fled from the theater.

  “Do me a favor, sport,” the Sorcerer had said as casually as if he’d been asking Jack to break some ice cubes out of the office fridge. “Put a teardrop in SNIPER’s wall.”

  Bugging the Professor’s house had turned out to be easier said than done. Jack had dispatched some German freelancers to scout the street behind the Gorky Theater. It was filled with war-gutted buildings and rubble and the single house standing in the middle of what had once been a garden. It took them ten days to work out when both RAINBOW and SNIPER were away from home. As a deputy prime minister, Lili’s Herr Professor went to a government office weekday mornings and taught seminars in particle and plasma physics at Humbolt University in the afternoons. Six mornings a week Lili took the U-Bahn to Alexanderplatz, where she taught classical dance classes at one of the last private schools in the Soviet zone; three afternoons a week she spent in a windowless Gorky Theater rehearsal hall taking lessons from a crippled Russian woman who had danced with the Kirov before the war. Even when both RAINBOW and SNIPER were away, there was still a stumbling block to the planting of a microphone: Herr Professor had a caretaker living in two gloomy ground floor rooms of the house, an old woman who had once been his nanny and now, confined by arthritis to a wicker wheelchair, spent most of her waking hours staring through the windowpane at the deserted street.

  Jack had brought the problem to the Sorcerer: how to get the caretaker out of the house long enough for a team to break into her rooms and install a bug in the ceiling?

  The Sorcerer, sorting through barium meals and the people to whom they would be addressed, had grunted. His eyes were puffier than usual, and heavy-lidded; he looked as if had come out second best in a street brawl, which in itself defied logic. Jack couldn’t imagine the Sorcerer coming out second best in anything.

  “Kill her?” the Sorcerer had suggested.

  For an instant Jack had actually taken him seriously. “We can’t just up and kill her, Harvey—we’re the good guys, remember?”

  “Don’t you know a joke when you hear one, sport? Lure her out of the house with a free ticket to a Communist Party shindig. Whatever.”

  “She’s an old lady. And she’s tied to a wheelchair.”

  The Sorcerer had shaken his head in despair. “I got problems of my own,” he had grumbled, his double chins quivering. “Use your goddamn imagination for once.”

  It had taken Jack the better part of a week to figure out the answer, and three days to lay in the plumbing. One morning, soon after Herr Professor and Lili had left the apartment, an East German ambulance with two young men in white coats sitting on either side of a muzzled lap dog had eased up to the curb in front of the house. The men had knocked on the caretaker’s door. When she opened it the width of the safety chain, they had explained that they had been sent by the Communist Party’s Ministry of Public Health to transport her to a doctor’s office off Strausberger Platz for a free medical examination. It was part of a new government social program to aid the elderly and the infirm. If she qualified—and judging from the wheelchair they suspected she might—she would be given the latest Western pills to alleviate her pain and a brand new Czech radio. The caretaker, her peasant eyes narrowing in suspicion, had wanted to know how much all this would cost. Silwan II had favored her with one of his angelic smiles and had assured her that the service was free of charge. Scratching the hair on her upper lip, the caretaker had thought about this for a long time. Finally she had removed the safety chain.

  No sooner had Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel carted the caretaker off to visit the doctor (hired for the occasion) than a small pickup truck with the logo of the East German Electrical Collective on its doors drew up in front of the house. Three of the Company’s “plumbers,” dressed in blue coveralls, carrying a wooden ladder and two wooden boxes filled with tools and equipment, went up the walkway and let themselves into the caretaker’s rooms; a fourth plumber waited in the driver’s seat. The pickup’s radio was tuned to the East German police frequency. A fist-sized radio transmitter on the seat buzzed into life. “We are operational,” a voice speaking Hungarian said, “and starting the work.”

  The team inside used a silent drill—the sound of the bit working its way into the ceiling was muted by a tiny spray of water—in case the KGB had planted microphones in SNIPER’s apartment. Jack’s people worked the bit up to within a centimeter of the surface of the floor, then switched drills to one that turned so slowly it could punch a pinhole in the floor without pushing any telltale sawdust up into the room. A tiny microphone the size of the tip of one of those new-fangled ballpoint pens was inserted into the pinhole and then wired up to the electric supply in the caretaker’s overhead lighting fixture. The small hole in the ceiling was filled with quick-drying plaster and repainted the same color as the rest of the ceiling with quick-drying paint. A miniature transmitter was fitted inside the fixture so that it was invisible from below, and hooked up to the house’s electricity. The transmitter, programmed to be sound-activated, beamed signals to a more powerful transmitter buried in the crest of the rubble in the vacant lot next door; this second transmitter, which ran on a mercury dry-cell battery, broadcast in turn to an antenna on the roof of a building in the American sector of Berlin.

  “Did you work something out, sport?” Torriti mumbled when he bumped into Jack in the Berlin-Dahlem PX.

  “As a matter of fact I did, Harvey. I sent in your Hungarian plumbers—“

  The Sorcerer held up a palm, cutting him off. “Don’t give me the details, kid. That way I can’t give your game away if I’m ever tortured by the Russians.”

  Torriti said it with such a straight face that Jack could only nod dumbly in agreement. Watching the Sorcerer lumber off with a bottle of whiskey under each arm, he began to suspect that the honcho of Berlin Base had been putting him on. On the other hand, knowing Torriti, he could have been serious.

  11

  FRANKFURT, MONDAY, APRIL 23, 1951

  LOOKING LIKE WITNESSES AT A WAKE, EBBY, TONY SPINK AND HALF A dozen other officers from the Soviet/Eastern Europe Division crowded around the bulky reel-to-reel tape machine on Spink’s desk. The technician, who had recorded the special radio program from Tiranë earlier that afternoon, threaded the tape through the capsun and locked it into the pickup spool. Spink looked at the translator who had been sitting next to Ebby the night of the farewell dinner for the Albanian commandoes in the Heidelberg inn. “Ready?” he asked. She nodded once. He hit the “Play” button.

  At first there was a great deal of static. “We had trouble tuning in the station,” the technician explained. “We had to orient our antenna. Here it comes.”

  Ebby could hear the high-pitched voice of a man speaking in Albanian. He seemed to be delivering a tirade. “So he is what we call the Procurator and you call the Prosecutor,” announced the translator, a short, middle-aged woman with short-cropped hair. “He sums up the prosecution case against the accused terrorists. He says that they landed on the coast from two small, motorized rubber rafts immediately after midnight on April the twenty. He says a routine border patrol stumbled across them as they were deflating and burying the rafts in the sand.” The translator cocked her head as another voice called out a question. “The chief judge asks the Procurator what the terrorists did when the border soldiers attempted to apprehend them. The Procurator says that the terrorists opened fire without warning, killing three border soldiers, wounding two additional border soldiers. In the exchange of gunfire four of the terrorists were killed and the three, on trial today, were apprehended.” The translator wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her finger. “Now the judge asks if incriminating evidence was captured with the terrorists.”

  “They sound like they’re reading from a goddamn script,” Spink muttered angrily.

  “The Procurator puts into evidence objects labelled with the letters of the alphabet. The labels arrive at the letter V for Victor. Items A and B consist of two American manufacture rafts
and seven American air force inflatable life jackets. In addition there are five British manufacture Lee-Enfield rifles, two American manufacture Winchester Model 74 rifles fitted with British manufacture Parker-Hale silencers and Enfield telescopic sights, three American manufacture Browning pistols fitted with primitive home-made silencers, one small leather valise containing a British manufacture Type A dash Mark Roman numeral two radio transmitter and receiver with Morse key and earphones, a map of Albania and another of Tiranë printed on cotton and sewn into the lining of a jacket, seven cyanide vials in small brass containers that were attached by safety pins to the insides of lapels…Here the chief judge interrupts to ask if communications codes were discovered on the terrorists. The Procurator says the terrorists arrived to destruct the envelope containing the codes before they were captured. He goes on to explain that the envelopes were coated with a chemical that made them burn immediately a match was touched to the paper. He says also…”

  The Procurator’s shrill voice, trailed by the muted voice of the translator, droned on. Spink pulled Ebby away from the tape recorder. “You mustn’t blame yourself,” he whispered. “It’s a dirty game. These things happen all the time.” He patted Ebby on the shoulder. Together they turned back to the tape and the translator.

  “…asks if the terrorists have anything to say.”

  A growl of anger from the public attending the trial could be heard on the tape. Then someone breathed heavily into the microphone. A young man began to speak in a robot-like voice. “He says—” The translator sucked in her breath. She unconsciously brought a hand to her breast as she forced herself to continue. “He says his name is Adil Azizi. He says he is the leader of the commando group. He says he and his comrades were trained in a secret base near Heidelberg, Germany by agents of the American Central Intelligence Agency. Their mission was to land on the coast of the Albanian Democratic Republic, bury their rubber boats, work their way across country to the capitol of Tiranë and, with the help of local terrorist cells, assassinate comrade Enver Hoxha, who holds the post of Premier and Foreign Minister. The chief judge asks the terrorist Azizi if there are mitigating circumstances to be taken into consideration before the court passes sentence. Adil Azizi says there are none. Adil Azizi says that he and the two surviving terrorists deserve the supreme penalty for betraying the motherland…The shouts you hear in the background are from people in the courtroom demanding the death sentence.”