The Company

by Robert Littell

  The technician punched the fast-forward button and kept an eye on the tape counter. When it reached a number he had marked on a slip of paper, he started the tape again. “The radio station played twelve minutes of patriotic music while the judges deliberated,” the translator explained. “Now is the sentence. The chief judge orders the three terrorists to stand. He says them that they have been convicted of high treason and terrorism against the People’s Republic of Albania and its supreme leader, Enver Hoxha. He says them that the court sentences the three terrorists to execution. Ah, I cannot continue—“

  “Translate, damn it,” Ebby snapped.

  “He says them there is no appeal in capital crimes. He orders that the sentence is carried out immediately.”

  “When they say ‘immediately,’ they mean immediately,” the technician warned. Several of the CIA officers drifted away from the table and casually lit cigarettes. Ebby noticed that the hands of one officer trembled.

  “Now is the voice of the radio announcer,” the translator went on very quietly. “He describes the three terrorist as shaking with fear when their wrists are bound behind their backs and they are led by soldiers from the courtroom. He describes—” The translator bit her lip. “He describes following them down two flights of steps to the rear door of the courthouse which opens onto the parking lot. He describes that there are no cars parked in the parking lot this day. He describes that a large crowd is assembled at the edge of the parking lot, that above his head all the windows are filled with people watching. He describes that the three terrorists are tied to iron rings projecting from the wall that were once used to attach horses when the building was constructed in the previous century. He describes a man in civilian clothing giving each terrorist a sip of peach brandy. He describes now the peloton of execution charging their rifles and one of the terrorists begging for mercy.”

  Unable to continue, sobbing into her sleeve, the translator stumbled away from the table.

  From the tape machine came the crackle of rifle fire, then three sharp reports from smaller caliber weapons.

  “Revolvers,” Spink said professionally. “Twenty-two caliber, by the sound.”

  “They were kids,” Ebby said tightly. His right hand dipped into his jacket pocket and closed over the wooden grip of the antique Webley revolver the young Albanians had given him in Heidelberg. “They never had time to liberate Albania, did they?”

  Spink shrugged fatalistically. “To their everlasting credit at least they tried. God bless them for that.”

  “God bless them,” Ebby agreed, and he came up with a sliver of a Byron poem that had once lodged in his brain at Yale:

  Let there be light! said God, and there was light!

  Let there be blood! says man, and there’s a sea!

  12

  FRANKFURT, WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 1951

  JACK HAD HITCHED A RIDE INTO FRANKFURT ON AN AIR FORCE FILM-exchange run to hand-deliver the Sorcerer’s “For Your Eyes Only” envelope into the fleshy hands of General Truscott, after which he was supposed to personally burn the contents in the Frankfurt Station incinerator and return to Berlin with Truscott’s yes or no. The General, in one of his foul moods, could be heard chewing out someone through the shut door of his office as Jack cooled his heels outside. The two secretaries, one typing letters from a dictaphone belt, the other manicuring her fingernails, acted as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. “And you have the gumption,” Truscott could be heard bellowing, “to stand there and tell me you launched five hundred and sixteen balloons into Russian air space and only managed to retrieve forty?”

  A muffled voice could be heard stumbling through an explanation. The General cut it off in mid-sentence. “I don’t give a flying fart if the prevailing winds weren’t prevailing. You were supposed to send reconnaissance balloons fitted with cameras and take photos of Soviet installations. Instead you seem to have spilled eight hundred thousand of the taxpayers greenbacks down the proverbial drain. From where I’m sitting that looks suspiciously like unadulterated incompetence.”

  The door opened and a drawn Company officer emerged from the General’s office. Truscott’s wrath trailed after him like a contrail. “Goddamn it, man, I don’t want excuses, I want results. If you can’t give ’em to me I’ll find people who can. You out there, Miss Mitchel? Send in the Sorcerer’s goddamn Apprentice.”

  The young woman working on her nails nodded toward the General’s door. Jack rolled his eyes in mock fright. “Is the front office in friendly hands?” he asked.

  The secretary bared her teeth in a nasty smile. “His bark is nothing compared to his bite,” she remarked.

  “Thanks for the encouragement,” Jack said.

  “Oh, you’re very welcome, I’m sure.”

  “What’s the Sorcerer cooking up that it needs to be hand-delivered?” Truscott demanded when he caught sight of Jack in the doorway.

  “Sir, I am not familiar with the contents.”

  He gave the sealed envelope to the General, who slit it open with the flick of a finger and pulled out the single sheet of yellow legal paper. He flattened the page on the blotter with his palms, put on a pair of spectacles and, frowning, began to read the message, which had been handwritten by Torriti. Glancing around the vast office, Jack took in the framed photographs showing Truscott with various presidents and prime ministers and field marshals. He thought he heard Truscott mutter under his breath as he jotted something on the blotter; it sounded like “Thirty, twelve, forty-five.”

  Truscott looked up. “Here’s what you tell him: The answer to his barely legible bulletin from Berlin is affirmative.”

  “Affirmative,” Jack repeated.

  “While you’re at it, remind him I’d take it as a personal favor if he’d learn to typewrite.”

  “You would like him to typewrite future messages,” Jack repeated.

  “Make tracks,” Truscott snapped. He brayed through the open door, “Goddamn it, Miss Mitchel, haven’t they deciphered the overnight from the Joint Chiefs yet?”

  “They said it’d be another twenty minutes,” the secretary called back.

  “What are they doing down in the communications shack,” the General groaned, “taking a coffee break between each sentence?”

  Jack retrieved the Sorcerer’s message from Truscott’s desk and made his way down a staircase to the second-level sub-basement incinerator room. The walls and doors had been freshly painted in battleship gray, and smelled it. In the corridor outside the “Central Intelligence Agency Only” door, curiosity got the best of Jack and he sneaked a look at Torriti’s note. “General,” it said. “I’ve decided to send out one last barium meal to my prime suspect saying Torriti knows the identity of the Soviet mole who betrayed the Visnevsky exfiltration. At which point, if I’ve hit the nail on the head, my suspect will get word to his KGB handlers and the Russians will try to kidnap or murder me. If they succeed you’ll find a letter addressed to you in the small safe in the corner of my office. The combination is: thirty, then left past thirty to twelve, then right to forty-five. Copy the numbers on your blotter, please. The letter will identify the mole and spell out the evidence, including my last barium meal. If the attempt to murder or kidnap me fails I’ll fly to Washington and drive home the spike myself. Okay? Torriti.”

  Jack folded the Sorcerer’s letter back into the envelope and went into the burn room. An Army staff sergeant with sixteen years worth of hash marks on the sleeve of his field jacket hanging on the back of the door glanced at the laminated ID card Jack held up, then pointed to a metal trash bin. “Throw it in—I’ll take care of it.”

  “I’ve been ordered to burn it personally,” Jack told him.

  “Suit yourself, chum.”

  Jack crumbled the envelope, opened the grate of the furnace and dropped it in. “Talk about balls,” he said as the envelope went up in flames.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “No, nothing. I was just thinking out loud.”

 
With an hour and a quarter to kill before he could catch a ride back to Berlin on the film-exchange plane, Jack wandered up to the fifth floor cubbyhole occupied by Ebby. Finding the door ajar, he rapped on it with his knuckles and pushed through to discover Ebby sitting with his feet propped up on the sill. He was staring gloomily out over the roofs of Frankfurt as he absently spun the cylinder of what looked like an antique revolver. Ebby’s occasional office mate, a young CIA case officer named William Sloane Coffin, assigned at the time to a leaflet distribution project, was on his way out. “Maybe you can cheer him up,” Coffin told Jack as they brushed past each other.

  Ebby waved Jack into Bill Coffin’s chair. “Hey, what brings you down to Frankfurt?”

  Jack noticed that the lines around Ebby’s eyes had deepened, making him look not only grimmer but older. “Needed to ferry some ‘Eyes-Only’ stuff to your general.” Jack scraped Coffin’s vacated seat over to Ebby’s desk. “You look like death warmed over,” he said. “Want to talk about it?”

  Ebby gnawed on a lip. “I was the case officer for a team going into Albania,” he finally said. He shook his head disconsolately. “My Albanians, all seven of them, bought it—four were gunned down on the beach, the other three were hauled in front of judge and treated to a mock trial, then put up against a wall and shot.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Ebby. Look, I don’t mean to soft-pedal your sense of loss—“

  “—of failure. Use the right word.”

  “What I want to say is that we all take hits,” Jack said softly. He was thinking of the would-be Russian defector Vishnevsky and his wife strapped onto stretchers. He was thinking of Vishnevsky’s boy being pulled up the ramp onto a plane sobbing and crying out “papa.” “It comes with the territory.”

  “I lost the two guys I parachuted into Poland—we never heard from them again. I lost a kid named Alyosha whom we parachuted into the Carpathians. He radioed back using the danger signal. He still checks in every week or two but he always uses the danger signal—we figure he’s being played back. When they get tired of the radio game they’ll shoot him, too.” Ebby heaved himself out of the chair and walked over to the door and slammed it shut so hard the empty coffee cups on his desk rattled in their saucers. “It’s one thing to put your own life at risk, Jack,” he went on, settling onto the sill, leaning back against the windowpanes. “It’s another to send simple young men into harm’s way. We seduce them and train them and use them as cannon fodder. They’re expendable. I don’t mean to wax corny, honest to God, I really don’t but I feel—oh, Christ, I feel awful. I feel I’ve somehow let them down.”

  Jack heard Ebby out—he knew there weren’t many people his friend could talk to, and talking was good for him. From time to time Jack came up with what he thought would be a comforting cliché: You’re not the only one in this situation, Ebby; if you didn’t do it someone else would have to; we’ll only know if our efforts to roll back Communism are quixotic when they write about this period in the history books.

  Eventually Jack glanced at his Bulova. “Oh, shit, I gotta run if I don’t want to miss the flight back.”

  Ebby walked him down to the lobby. “Thanks for stopping by,” he said.

  “Misery loves company,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, something along those lines,” Ebby admitted. They shook hands.

  Back at Berlin Base late in the afternoon, Jack tore down the steps to the Sorcerer’s bunker only to be brought up short by the Night Owl standing in front of Torriti’s closed door with her arms folded across her imperious chest. From inside came the melodic strains of a soprano coughing her way through the Traviata end game. “He’s in a funk,” she announced; the way she said it made it sound as if the funk were terminal.

  “How can you tell?” Jack asked.

  “He’s drinking V-8 Cocktail Vegetable juice instead of whiskey.”

  “What caused it?” Jack asked.

  “I brought him a couple of bottles with his afternoon messages.”

  “I mean, what caused the funk?”

  “I’m not really sure. Something about barium meals giving him stomach cramps. You’re his Apprentice, Jack. You have any idea what that could mean?”

  “Maybe.” He motioned for her to let him pass and knocked on the door. When Torriti didn’t answer, he knocked louder. Then he opened the door and let himself into the room. Miss Sipp hadn’t been exaggerating about the Sorcerer’s funk: his thinning hair was drifting off in all directions, the tails of his shirt were trailing out of his trousers, his fly was half-unbuttoned, one of his cowboy boots was actually on the desk and the grips of two handguns were protruding from it. Traviata came to an end. Gesturing for Jack to keep silent until the music started again, Torriti swiveled around to his Victrola and fitted a new record onto the turntable. Then, angling his head and squinting, he cautiously lowered the needle onto the groove. There was a skin-tingling scratchy sound, followed by the angelic voice of Galli-Curci singing “Ah! non credea mirarti” from La Sonnambula.

  Sighting along the top of an outstretched index finger, Torriti—looking like an antiaircraft gun tracking a target—swiveled his bulk around in the chair. Jack turned out to be the target. “So what’d the General have to say?”

  “He said affirmative. He said you ought to typewrite your messages from now on.”

  “Hunt and peck is not my style, sport.” He refilled a glass with V-8 juice and drank half of it off in one long painful swallow. Then he shivered. “How the mighty have fallen,” he moaned. “When my Night Owl brought up the subject of vegetable juice, I thought the V-8 she was talking about was the new, improved German V-2 buzz bomb. What’s going on in Frankfurt that I ought to know about?”

  Jack described the dressing-down Truscott had delivered to a hapless subordinate who had been playing with balloons over the Soviet Union but Torriti, who normally relished Company gossip, didn’t crack a smile. Jack mentioned having looked in on Ebby. “You remember Elliott Ebbitt—he spent a month or two here before being reassigned to Frankfurt Station.”

  “He wasn’t reassigned to Frankfurt,” Torriti snapped. “He was sent packing by yours truly for shooting off his goddamn mouth about alcohol consumption. Good thing he’s not here now—he’d be shooting off his goddamn mouth about vegetable juice consumption. What’s the fucker up to these days?”

  “He was in mourning,” Jack reported. “The Soviet-East Europe folks just infiltrated a bunch of émigré agents and lost every one of them. Ebby was the case officer.”

  The Sorcerer, shuffling absently through file cards in a folder labelled “Barium Meals,” looked up, an ember of interest burning in his pupils. “Where did this happen? And when?”

  “Albania. Nine days ago.”

  Torriti mouth slowly slackened into a silly grin. “Albania! Nine days ago! How come nobody tells me these things?”

  “It was a Frankfurt operation, Harvey.”

  “You’re sure the émigrés bought it?”

  “That’s what the man said. Four died on the beach, three in front of a firing squad.”

  “Eureka!” cried Torriti. “That narrows it down to the Special Policy Committee that coordinates operations against Albania.” He drew his handguns out of the cowboy boot and fitted one into his shoulder holster, the other into his ankle holster. He pulled on the boot, combed his hair with his fingers, tucked his shirt back into his trousers, swept the V-8 bottle into the burn basket and produced a bottle of PX whiskey from the seemingly bottomless bottom drawer of his desk. “This needs to be anointed,” he exclaimed, splashing alcohol into two glasses. He pushed one across to Jack. “Here’s to the beauty of barium, sport,” he declared, hiking his hand in a toast.

  “Harvey, people were killed! I don’t see what there is to celebrate.”

  The Sorcerer checked his wristwatch. “London’s two hours earlier or later than us?”

  “Earlier.”

  “An Englishman worth his salt would be sitting down to supper in a pub
right about now,” he said. Torriti flailed around in a frantic search of his pockets, turning some of them inside out until he found what he was looking for—a slip of paper with a number on it. He snatched the interoffice phone off its hook. “Have the Fallen Angel bring my car around to the side door,” he ordered Miss Sipp. Knocking back his whiskey, he waved for Jack to come along and headed for the door.

  “Uh-oh—where we off to in such a panic, Harvey?”

  “I need to narrow it down ever further. To do that I need to make a phone call.”

  “Why don’t you use the office phone—the line is secure.”

  “Russians thought their lines out of Karlshorst were secure, too,” he muttered, “until I figured out how to make them insecure. This is fucking earthshaking—I don’t want to take any chances.”

  Torriti sat on the edge of an unmade bed in a top-floor room of the whore-house on the Grunewaldstrasse in Berlin-Schoneberg, the old-fashioned phone glued to his ear as he drummed on the cradle with a finger. From somewhere below came the muffled echo of a singer crooning in the nightclub. One of the prostitutes, a reedy teenager wearing a gauzy slip and nothing under it, peeked in the door. She had purple-painted eyelids and frowzy hair tinted the color of chrome. When Jack waved her away, the prostitute pouted. “But Uncle Harvey always has his ashes hauled—“

  “Not tonight, sweetheart,” Jack told her. He went over and shooed her out and closed the door and stood with his back to it, gazing up at the Sorcerer’s upside-down reflection in the mirror fixed to the ceiling over the bed.