The Company

by Robert Littell

  I am pleased with your voice, Yevgeny, she had told him.

  I am pleased that you are pleased, he had responded.

  2

  NEW YORK, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1956

  A COLD WAR-WEARY E. WINSTROM EBBITT II, BACK IN THE STATES on his first home leave in nineteen months, had a three-week fling with an attractive State Department attorney that ended abruptly when she weighed her options and decided on the bird in hand, which turned out to be a promotion and a posting to the Philippines. Weekdays, Ebby briefed Company analysts on the increasingly tense political situation in the satellite states in the wake of Khrushchev’s secret speech. (In June, Polish workers had rioted against the Communist regime in the streets of Poznan.) Weekends, he commuted to Manhattan to spend time with his son, Manny, a thin boy with solemn eyes who had recently turned nine. Ebby’s ex-wife, Eleonora, remarried to a successful divorce lawyer and living in a sumptuous Fifth Avenue apartment, made no bones about the fact that she preferred the absentee father to the one turning up on her doorstep Saturdays and Sundays to bond with Immanuel. As for Manny, he greeted his father with timid curiosity but gradually warmed to Ebby, who (acting on the advice of divorced friends, of which there were many in the Company) kept the meetings low-key. One weekend they went to see Sandy Koufax pitch the Brooklyn Dodgers to victory over the Giants at Ebbets Field. Another time they took the subway to Coney Island (an adventure in itself, since Manny was driven to his private school in a limousine) and rode the giant Ferris wheel and the roller-coaster.

  Later, on the way back to Manhattan, Manny was gnawing on a frozen Milky Way when, out of the blue, he said, “What’s a Center Intelligence Agency?”

  “What makes you ask?”

  “Mommy says that’s what you work for. She says that’s why you spend so much time outside America.”

  Ebby glanced around. The two women within earshot seemed to be concentrating on their reflections in the door windows. “I work for the American government—“

  “Not this Center Intelligence thingamajig?”

  Ebby swallowed hard. “Look, maybe we ought to discuss this another time.”

  “So what kind of stuff do you do for the government?”

  “I’m a lawyer—“

  “I know thaaaat.”

  “I do legal work for the State Department.”

  “Do you sue people?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  “I help protect America from its enemies.”

  “Why does America have enemies?”

  “Not every country sees eye to eye on things.”

  “What things?”

  “Things like the existence of different political parties, things like honest trials and free elections, things like the freedom of newspapers to publish what they want, things like the right of people to criticize the government without going to jail. Things like that.”

  Manny thought about this for a moment. “Know what I’m going to do when I grow up?”

  “What?”

  Manny slipped his hand into his father’s. “I’m going to protect America from its enemies same as you—if it still has any.”

  Ebby had to swallow a smile. “I don’t think we’re going to run out of enemies any time soon, Manny.”

  “He told me he wanted to protect America from its enemies but he was afraid there’d be none left by the time he grew up,” Ebby explained.

  The Wiz tossed off his Bloody Mary and signaled a passing waiter for two more. “Not much chance of that,” he said, chuckling under his breath.

  “That’s what I told him,” Ebby said. “He seemed relieved.”

  Ebby and the DD/O, Frank Wisner, were having a working lunch at a corner table in a private dining room of the Cloud Club atop the Chrysler Building. When two more drinks were delivered to the table, the Wiz, looking more drawn and worried than Ebby remembered him, wrapped his paw around one of them. “To you and yours,” he said, clinking glasses with Ebby. “Are you surviving home leave, Eb?”

  “I suppose I am.” Ebby shook his head in dismay. “Sometimes I feel as if I landed on a different planet. I had dinner with three lawyers from my old firm the other day. They’ve grown rich and soft—big apartments in the city, weekend homes in Connecticut, country clubs in Westchester. One guy I worked with’s been named a junior partner. He pulls down more in one month than I make in a year.”

  “Having second thoughts about the choice you made?”

  “No, I’m not, Frank. There’s a war on out there. People here just don’t seem concerned about it. The energy they invest in working out stock options and mergers…hell, I keep thinking about those Albanian kids who were executed in Tiranë.”

  “Lot of people will tell you it’s the folks in academia who’re wrestling with the really big questions—like whether Joyce ever used a semicolon after 1919.”

  The comment drew an appreciative snicker from Ebby.

  “Sounds to me like you’re ’bout ready to get back into harness,” Wisner said. “Which brings me to the subject of this lunch. I’m offering you a new assignment, Eb.”

  “Offering implies I can refuse.”

  “You’ll have to volunteer. It’ll be dangerous. If you nibble at the bait I’ll tell you more.”

  Ebby leaned forward. “I’m nibbling, Frank.”

  “Thought you might. The mission’s right up your alley. I want you to get your ass to Budapest, Eb.”

  Ebby whistled under his breath. “Budapest! Don’t we have assets there already—under diplomatic cover, in the embassy?”

  The Wiz looked off to the side. “All of our embassy people are tailed, their offices and apartments are bugged. Ten days back the station chief thought he’d shaken his tail, so he slipped a letter into a public mail box addressed to one of the dissidents who’d been supplying us with information. They must have emptied the box and opened all the letters, and that led them to the dissident. The poor bastard was arrested that night and wound up on a meat hook in a prison refrigerator.” Wisner turned back to Ebby. “I’m speaking literally. We badly need to send in a new face, Eb. Because of security considerations, because sending someone in from the outside will emphasize the seriousness of the message being delivered.”

  “Why me?”

  “Fair question. First off, you operated behind German lines in the war; in our business there’s no substitute for experience. Secondly, you’re a bona fide lawyer, which means we can work up a watertight cover story that gives you a good reason to be in Budapest. Here’s the deal: there’s a State Department delegation going into Hungary mid-October to negotiate the issue of compensation for Hungarian assets that were frozen in America when Hungary came in on the side of the Germans in World War II. Your old law firm has been representing some of the claims of Hungarian-Americans who lost assets when Hungary went Communist after the war—we’re talking about factories, businesses, large tracts of land, art collections, apartments, the like. Your old boss, Bill Donovan, has set aside an office and a secretary—the desk is piled high with the claims of Hungarian-Americans. The idea is for you to hole up there for a couple of weeks to establish a cover story while you familiarize yourself with the claims, after which you’ll go in with the State Department folks and argue that any settlement needs to include compensation for the Hungarian-Americans. Anybody wants to check you out, Donovan’s people will backstop you—you’ve been working there since Eve nibbled on the apple, so your secretary will tell anyone who asks.”

  “You haven’t spelled out the real mission,” Ebby noted.

  Wisner glanced at his watch; Ebby noticed a slight twitch in one of his eyes. “The DCI specifically said he wanted to brief you himself.”

  “Dulles?”

  “They don’t call him the Great White Case Officer for nothing. From here on out, Eb, we want you to stay away from Cockroach Alley. Dulles is expecting us to join him for a drink at the Alibi Club in Washington day after tomorrow at six.”

>   Ebby began chewing on a piece of ice from his glass. “You were pretty damn sure I’d accept.”

  The Wiz grinned. “I guess I was. I guess I counted on your commitment to protecting America from its enemies.”

  His brush mustache dancing on his upper lip, his eyes glinting behind silver spectacles, DCI Allen Welsh Dulles was regaling the men gathered around him at the bar of the Alibi Club, an all-male hangout in a narrow brick building a few blocks from the White House that was so exclusive only a handful of people in Washington had ever heard of it. “It happened in Switzerland right after the first war,” he was saying. “I got word that someone was waiting to see me in my office but I decided the hell with him and played tennis instead. Which is how I missed out meeting Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, whom you gents know by the name of Lenin.”

  Spotting the Wiz and Ebby at the door, Dulles waded through the crowd and steered them into a tiny office off the cloakroom that he often commandeered for private meetings. Wisner introduced Ebby and then took a back seat; he knew from experience that Dulles relished the operations side of the Company’s work.

  “So you’re Ebbitt,” Dulles said, motioning his guest toward a chair, settling into another so close to him that their knees were scraping. Puffing away on a pipe, he walked Ebby through his curriculum vitae; he wanted to know what universities he’d attended, what undergraduate clubs he’d belonged to, how he’d ended up in the OSS, precisely what he’d done during his mission behind German lines in France to win the Croix de Guerre. He quizzed Ebby about his two Company tours in Germany; about the agent infiltration ops into the Carpathians and Albania that had turned sour, about the possibility that Gehlen’s Org in Pullach had been infiltrated by the KGB. Then, suddenly, he changed the subject. “The Wiz tells me you’re volunteering for this mission to Budapest,” he said. “Do you have an idea why we’re sending you in?”

  “That’s above my pay grade.”

  “Take a stab at it anyway.”

  “I’ve been doing my homework,” Ebby admitted. “Khrushchev’s secret speech pulled the rug out from under the Stalinists in the satellite states. Poland is seething with insurrection. Hungary looks a lot like a powder keg waiting to explode—a totalitarian state run by an unpopular Stalinist with the help of forty thousand secret police and a million and a half informers. I assume you want me to get in touch with the Hungarian firebrands and light the fuse.”

  Dulles, who was jovial enough in social situations, could be icily shrewd in private. His eyes narrowing, he glanced at Wisner, then looked intently at Ebby. “You’re one hundred eighty degrees out of whack, Ebbitt. We want you to go in and tell these people to simmer down.”

  “Radio Free Europe has been encouraging them to rise up—” Ebby started to say.

  Dulles cut him off. “Radio Free Europe is not an organ of the United States government. The bottom line is: We don’t want Hungary exploding until we’re good and ready. Don’t get me wrong: roll-back is still the official line—“

  The Wiz put in a word. “You mean it’s still the official policy, Allen, don’t you?”

  Dulles didn’t take kindly to correction. “Line, policy, it amounts to the same thing,” he said impatiently. He turned back to Ebby. “We figure we’ll need a year and a half to lay in the plumbing. General Gehlen’s Org has a Hungarian Section up and running but it will take a while to organize arms caches inside Hungary, train and infiltrate teams of Hungarian émigrés with communications skills and equipment so that an uprising can be coordinated.”

  “You’re assuming that the firebrands can control their troops,” Ebby said. “From the background papers I’ve been reading, it doesn’t seem as if a spontaneous uprising can be ruled out.”

  “I don’t buy that,” Dulles shot back. “A demonstration on a street corner can be spontaneous. A popular uprising is another kettle of fish.”

  “Our immediate worry,” Wisner chimed in, “is that the firebrands may reckon that the United States will be obliged to come in and save their hides once they bring the cauldron to a boil. Or at the very least we’ll threaten to come in to keep the Russians at arm’s length.”

  “This would be a dangerous miscalculation on their part,” Dulles warned. “Neither President Eisenhower nor his Secretary of State, my brother Foster, are ready to start World War III over Hungary. Your job is to convince the firebrands of this fact of life. As long as they understand that, we’re off the hook if they decide to go ahead and stir things up. On the other hand, if they can keep the lid on for, say, eighteen months—“

  “A year would probably do it,” Wisner suggested.

  “A year, eighteen months, when the Hungarians—with our covert help—have an infrastructure in place for an uprising, the situation may be more propitious.”

  “There’s another problem you need to be aware of,” the Wiz said. “The situation in the Near East is heating up. Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal last July, his rejection last week of that eighteen-nation proposal to internationalize the Canal, are pushing the British and French into a corner. Israeli teams have been shuttling between Tel Aviv and Paris. They’re cooking up something, you can bet on it; the Israelis would do almost anything to get the French to supply them with a nuclear reactor. Cipher traffic between the Israeli Army central command in Tel Aviv and the French General Staff is way up. Feeling here is that the Israelis might spearhead a British-French attack on Nasser with a blitzkrieg across the Sinai to capture the Canal.”

  “In which case a revolution in Hungary would get lost in the shuffle,” Dulles said. He climbed to his feet and extended a hand. “Good luck to you, Ebbitt.”

  Outside the Alibi Club, a newspaper vender hawking the Washington Post was wading into oncoming traffic backed up at a red light. “Read all about it,” he cried in a sing-song voice. “Dow Jones peaks at five hundred twenty-one.”

  “The rich grow richer,” Wisner said with a sardonic grin.

  “And the soft grow softer,” Ebby added.

  3

  BUDAPEST, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1956

  THE PARIS-ISTANBUL ORIENT EXPRESS HURTLED ACROSS THE FLATLANDS bordering the chalky Danube toward Budapest. Drinking hot black coffee from a thermos lid, Ebby gazed through the window of the first-class compartment at the herds of squat, wide-horned cattle guarded by czikos, the Hungarian cowboys riding wiry horses. Stone houses and barns flitted past, along with neat vegetable gardens and fenced yards teeming with chickens and geese. Soon the first low brick-and-mortar factories came into view. As the train slipped through the suburbs of Buda, the narrow highway alongside the tracks became clogged with dilapidated open trucks spewing diesel exhaust from their tailpipes. Minutes later the Orient-Express eased into the West Station behind Castle Hill.

  Carrying a bulging attaché case and a leather two-suiter, Ebby discouraged the uniformed porter with a shake of his head and made his way through the glass-domed station and down the steps to the street. A fresh-faced embassy counselor waiting next to a car-pool Ford came forward to meet him. “Sir, I’ll wager you’re Mr. Ebbitt,” he said.

  “How could you tell?”

  “No offense intended but your luggage looks too posh for anyone but a New York lawyer,” the young man said with a broad grin. He took Ebby’s two-suiter and dropped it into the trunk compartment. “Name’s Doolittle,” he announced, offering a hand as he introduced himself. “Jim Doolittle, no relation whatsoever to the aviator of the same name. Welcome to Budapest, Mr. Ebbitt.”

  “Elliott.”

  “Elliott it is.” He slid behind the wheel of the Ford and Ebby settled into the passenger seat. The young counselor deftly maneuvered the car into traffic and headed in a southeasterly direction toward the Danube. “You’ve been booked into the Gellért Hotel, along with the delegation from the State Department. They flew in yesterday. Ambassador charged me to tell you if you need assistance in any shape or form, you only need to say ‘hey.’ The first negotiating session is scheduled for ten A.M. tomorr
ow. The State Department people will be ferried over to the Foreign Ministry in one of our minibuses. You’re welcome to hitch a ride. Do you know Hungary at all?”

  “Only what I read in my guide book,” Ebby said. “How long have you been posted here?”

  “Twenty-three months.”

  “Do you get to mix much with the natives?”

  “Meet Hungarians! Elliott, I can see you don’t know much about life behind the Iron Curtain. Hungary is a Communist country. The only natives you meet are the ones who work for the Allamvédelmi Hatóság, what we call the AVH, which is their secret police. The others are too frightened. Which reminds me, the embassy security officer wanted me to caution you to be wary…”

  “Be wary of what?”

  “Of Hungarian women who seem ready and willing, if you see what I mean. Of Hungarian men who are eager to take you to some off-the-beaten-track night spot. Whatever you do, for God’s sake don’t change money on the black market. And don’t accept packages to deliver to someone’s cousin in America—they could be filled with secret documents. Next thing you know you’ll be arrested as a spy and I’ll be talking to you through the bars of a prison.”

  “Thanks for the tips,” Ebby said. “All that spy rigamarole is not up my alley.”

  Doolittle glanced at his passenger with a certain amount of amusement. “I don’t suppose it is. I don’t suppose you noticed the small blue Skoda behind us, did you?”

  As a matter of fact he had but he didn’t want Jim Doolittle to know it. Ebby made a show of looking over his shoulder. The blue Skoda, with two passengers visible in the front seat, was two car lengths behind the Ford’s rear bumper. Doolittle laughed. “All of us at the embassy are followed all the time,” he said. “You get kind of used to it. I’ll be mighty surprised if you’re not assigned a chaperon.”