The Company

by Robert Littell

  The full moon flitting between the clouds had transformed the ice on the skating rink into Argentine marble. At the stroke of midnight two phantoms emerged from the woods on either side and started across the ice in short, cautious flat-footed steps. Oskar Ugor-Zhilov, a wiry man in his middle fifties, wearing baggy trousers tucked into rubber galoshes and a fur shapka with the earflaps raised and jutting, carried two wine glasses in one hand and a bulky Russian walkie-talkie in the other. The Sorcerer, bareheaded, held his ankle-length green overcoat closed with both hands (two buttons were missing) and clutched a bottle of PX booze under an armpit. As the two men warily circled each other in the center of the rink, a giant US Air Force transport plane roared over the tree tops on its way to Tegel Airport in the French Sector of Berlin.

  “We’re right under the air corridor,” Torriti shouted to his Russian counterpart.

  Ugor-Zhilov raised the walkie-talkie to his mouth and muttered something into it. There was an ear-splitting squeal by way of an answer. The Sorcerer waved the bottle. Nodding, the Russian held out the two glasses and Torriti filled them with whiskey. He grabbed one of the glasses by its stem and, saluting the KGB rezident, drank it off as if it were no more potent than apple juice. Not to be outdone by an American, Ugor-Zhilov threw back his head and gulped down the contents of his glass.

  “You got a family?” Torriti inquired, skating from one side of the Russian to the other and back again on the balls of his shoes. He was mesmerized by the small tuft of curly hair growing under Ugor-Zhilov’s lower lip.

  Torriti’s question amused the Russia. “You meet me at midnight in the middle of nowhere to find out if I have family?”

  “I like to get to know the people I’m up against.”

  “I am married man,” the Russian said. “I have two sons, both living in Moscow. One is senior engineer in the aeronautics industry, the other is journalist for Pravda. Or you, Gospodin Harvey Torriti—you have family?”

  “Had a wife once,” the Sorcerer said wistfully. “Don’t have one any more. She didn’t appreciate the line of work I was in. She didn’t appreciate my drinking neither. Say, Oskar—you don’t mind me calling you Oskar, right?—you wouldn’t want to defect, would you?” When the Sorcerer spotted the scowl on the Russian’s face, he laughed out loud. “Hold your water, sport, I was only pulling your leg. You know, kidding, teasing. Hey, you Russians need to loosen up. You need to be able to let your hair down. Take a joke.” Suddenly Torriti turned serious. “The reason I ask about your family, Oskar, baby,” he said, his head angled to one side as if he were sizing the Russian up for a coffin, “is…”

  Torriti offered Ugor-Zhilov a refill but was waved off with an emphatic shake of the head. He refilled his own glass and carefully set the bottle down on the ice. “Suppose you were to kick the bucket, Oskar—that’s American for cash in your chips, bite the dust, push up the daisies, buy the farm, die—would your family get a pension?”

  “If you are threatening me, I inform you that two sharpshooters have your head in telescopic sights even as we talk.”

  Torriti’s lips twisted into a lewd smirk. “If I don’t make it off the ice, sport, you can bet you won’t make it off the ice neither. Listen up, Oskar, I wasn’t threatening you. I was talking hypothetically. I’m concerned about what would happen to your family if we were to start killing each other off. We being the KGB and the CIA. I mean, we’re not vulgar Mafia clans, right? We are civilized organizations on two sides of a divide who don’t see eye to eye on things like what makes a free election free and due process due, stuff like that. But we are careful not to—“

  The throaty growl of a small propeller plane passing low over Spandau drowned out the Sorcerer.

  “Yeah, like I was saying, we are careful, you and me, your KGB and my CIA, not to start hurting each other’s people.”

  Ugor-Zhilov looked puzzled. “As far as I know we are not hurting any CIA people.”

  “You don’t know very far,” the Sorcerer retorted icily. “Fact is, you have one of our people in custody—“

  “I know of no—“

  “It’s in Budapest, sport. The person in question disappeared from the radar screen twenty-four hours ago.”

  The Russian actually seemed relieved. “Ah, Hungary. That complicates the problem. The Hungarian AVH are completely autonomous—“

  “Autonomous, my ass! Don’t hand me that crap, Oskar. The KGB runs the AVH same as it runs every other intelligence service in East Europe. You take a crap, they flush the toilet.” Over the Russian’s shoulder, a flashlight came on near the edge of the woods and described a circle and then flicked off. Torriti skated closer to Ugor-Zhilov. “What would happen right now if I reached under my jacket and lugged out a handgun and stuck it into your gut?”

  The Russian’s eyes narrowed; he was clearly a man who didn’t scare easily. “You would be doing a big mistake, Torriti,” he said softly. “Such a gesture would be a form of suicide.”

  Nodding, the Sorcerer finished the whiskey in his wine glass and noisily licked his lips and set the glass down on the ice. Then, moving very deliberately, he slid his right hand inside his overcoat and came out with the pearl-handled revolver. The Russian froze. The long barrel glistened in the moonlight as Torriti raised the revolver over his head so that anybody watching from either side of the rink could see it. Ugor-Zhilov held his breath, waiting for the crack of the rifle to echo across the rink. Smiling sourly, the Sorcerer thumbed back the hammer and jammed the business end of the barrel into the Russian’s stomach. “Looks like the turkeys backing you up have gone to sleep on the job,” he remarked. Then he pulled the trigger.

  The hammer fell onto the firing pin with a hollow click.

  “Goddamn,” Torriti said. “I must’ve forgotten to load the fucker.”

  Cursing Torriti in a stream of guttural Russian, Ugor-Zhilov started backing toward his side of the rink.

  “If anything happens to our guy in Budapest,” Torriti called after him, “I’ll load the pistol and come after you. There won’t be anyplace in Germany for you to hide. You reading me, Oskar? Like my friend the Rabbi says, our man looses a tooth, you lose a tooth. Our man goes blind, you go blind. Our man stops breathing, your wife starts collecting your KGB pension.”

  Torriti retrieved the wine glass and the bottle from the ice and poured himself a refill. Ambling in flat-footed steps back toward the woods, humming under his breath, he treated himself to a well-earned shot of booze.

  “So how many of the fuckers were there?” the Sorcerer asked Jack. They were squeezed into the back seat of a station wagon filled with agents from Berlin Base. Sweet Jesus was driving. A second station wagon trailed behind them.

  “Six. Two with sniper rifles, two with submachine guns, one with binoculars, one with a walkie-talkie.”

  “Did they put up much of a fight?”

  Jack smirked. “They were all very reasonable types, you could see it in their eyes when they spotted our artillery,” Jack said. He produced a small pair of Zeiss binoculars from the pocket of his duffle coat and offered them to the Sorcerer. “Thought you might like a trophy.”

  Torriti, suddenly weary, let his lids close over his eyes of their own accord. “You keep them, Jack. You earned them.”

  “I’ll keep them, Harvey. But we both know who earned them.”

  5

  BUDAPEST, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1956

  HANGING FROM A MEAT HOOK EMBEDDED IN THE WALL OF THE refrigerator room, his limbs numb from the cold, Ebby sank into a sleep so shallow he found himself drifting into or out of it with the twitch of an eye. When the lockset on the outside of the door was cranked open, he was wide awake and straining to make out the footfalls of his jailers before they entered the room. He was glad they were finally coming for him; between beatings, he would at least be thawed out by the spotlights in the interrogation chamber. One of the guards grabbed him around the waist and lifted his body while the other, standing on a crate, detached his jacket an
d shirt from the hook. With his bare feet planted on the icy floor tiles, Ebby raised his elbows so they could grasp him under the armpits and drag him off for another round of questioning. Curiously, the two guards who held him erect did so with unaccustomed gentleness, and Ebby understood that something had changed. The guards steered him, at a pace he set, out of the frigid room and down the corridor to an elevator, which sped him to an upper floor. There he was taken along a carpeted corridor to a heated room with a wooden bed with sheets and a pillow and blankets. Even more astonishingly, the room was equipped with a shaded table lamp that could presumably be switched off at night. There was a flush toilet and a small bathtub at one end, and a window with a slatted shutter on the outside through which Ebby could make out the sounds of traffic.

  The honking of a horn in the street below seemed like music to his ears.

  A short matronly woman with coarse gray hair and a stethoscope dangling from her neck rapped her knuckles against the open door and walked in. Smiling impersonally at Ebby, she began examining him. She listened to his heart and wedged a thermometer under his tongue and (obviously accustomed to dealing with prisoners being questioned by the AVH) checked to see if any of his bruised ribs were broken. Then she set about massaging his limbs to restore circulation to them. Before she departed, she disinfected the welts on his chest and spread a salve on his swollen lid, and set out on the table a glass of water and two pills, telling him in sign language that he was to take them before going to sleep. Another woman appeared with clean clothing and a tray of food—there was a bowl of clear broth, a slice of bread, a plate of goulash, even a piece of candy wrapped in cellophane. Ebby drank off the broth, which soothed his raw throat, and managed to get down a little of the goulash. Before stretching out on the bed, he hobbled over to the window and stared at the street through the slats. Judging from the fading light he reckoned it was the end of the afternoon. There weren’t many automobiles, but the street was packed with young people calling back and forth to each other as they hurried along in one direction. An open truck filled with students shouting what sounded like slogans and holding aloft large Hungarian flags sped past in the same direction.

  Steadying himself on the back of a chair piled high with the clean clothing, switching off the light as he passed the table, Ebby made his way back to the bed. Stripping to the skin, dropping his filthy clothes onto the floor, he slid under the sheets and slowly stretched out his aching limbs as he concentrated, once again, on composing pertinent questions.

  Why had the AVH started treating him with kid gloves?

  He could assume the State Department people at the Gellért had alerted the embassy when he didn’t return to the hotel; that the Company chief of station at the embassy had set off alarm bells in Washington. Would the Company have dared to broach the subject of its missing agent with the KGB? He knew there was an unspoken compact between the two intelligence services; there were exceptions, of course, but normally neither side went around shooting the other’s people. Had the AVH—an organization with a reputation for brutality—been operating behind the back of the KGB to root out local troublemakers? Had the KGB read the riot act to the AVH? Was he being fattened up for the kill or would he eventually be traded for one of the KGB’s officers who had fallen into American hands?

  And what about the mob of youngsters flowing through the street under his window? Were they hurrying to a soccer match or a Communist rally? If a Communist rally, how could he explain the bewildering detail that had caught his eye: the Communist coat-of-arms—the hammer and the sheath of wheat at the center of the white-green-and-red Hungarian flag—had been cut from the banners held aloft by the students riding in the truck.

  In the early hours of the next morning there was a soft knock on the door. A moment later the table lamp flickered on. Ebby struggled into a sitting position and pulled the blanket up to his unshaven chin. A dwarflike man—Ebby guessed he couldn’t be more than five feet tall—who wore a goatee and mustache and dark rimmed eyeglasses on his round face, scraped over a chair. When he sat down his feet barely reached the floor. He snapped open a tin case and offered Ebby a cigarette. When he declined, the visitor selected one for himself, tapped the tobacco down, and thrust it between extraordinarily thick lips. He lit the cigarette and sucked in a lungful of smoke and turned his head away and exhaled. “For purposes of this conversation,” he said, turning back, speaking English with what Ebby took to be a Russian accent, “you may call me Vasily. Let me begin by expressing my regret at the—what shall I call it?—the zeal with which some of my Hungarian colleagues questioned you. Still, one has to see their side. Insurrection is brewing in Budapest and across the country. It is understandable that my very nervous Hungarian colleagues would want to quickly learn what instructions you brought to the revolutionist A. Zelk, if only to better anticipate the direction he would be likely to lead the masses. You handled yourself with distinction, Mr. Ebbitt. Although we are adversaries, you and I, I offer you—for what it is worth—my esteem.” The Russian cleared his throat in embarrassment. “The English national who was taken into custody the same night as you was not able to withstand the persuasive interrogation techniques of the AVH. So we now know the contents of the message you delivered to A. Zelk.”

  “I saw the persuasive techniques of the AVH through a window,” Ebby noted caustically.

  “Mr. Ebbitt, your clients—your Germans, as opposed to ours—have used similar or even harsher interrogation techniques to persuade captured agents to divulge their small secrets. You are an experienced intelligence officer. Surely we can agree not to quibble over methods of interrogation.”

  “Is the woman still alive?”

  The Russian sucked pensively on his cigarette. “She is alive and continues to be interrogated,” he said finally. “My Hungarian colleagues are hoping, with her help, to be able to put their hands on A. Zelk before—“

  From somewhere in the city came the crackle of rifle fire; it sounded like firecrackers popping on the Chinese New Year. The Russian laughed bitterly. “Before the situation deteriorates into outright conflict, though it appears we are too late. I can tell you that there is unrest in the city. A. Zelk is reported to have read out revolutionary poems to a crowd of students assembled at the statue of the Hungarian poet Petöfi earlier in the day. Perhaps you saw the rabble of students heading in the direction of the Erzsebet Bridge and the Petöfi statue—“

  There was a burst of automatic weapon fire from a nearby intersection. Under Ebby’s window a car with a loudspeaker on its roof broadcast the national anthem as it sped through the streets. And it suddenly dawned on Ebby why the hammer and sheath of wheat had been cut out from the center of the national flag: the students were in open revolt against Communist rule in Hungary!

  “That’s not what I’d call unrest, Vasily. There’s a revolution underway out there.”

  A young Hungarian wearing a wrinkled AVH uniform appeared at the door and breathlessly reported something in a kind of pidgin Russian. Grinding out the cigarette under his heel, Vasily went over to the window and, standing on his toes, looked down between the slats of the shutter. He clearly didn’t like what he saw.

  “Dress quickly, if you please,” he ordered. “A mob of students is preparing to assault the building. We will leave by a back entrance.”

  Ebby threw on clean clothing and, moving stiffly, followed the Russian down four flights of steel steps to a sub-basement garage. The Hungarian who had alerted Vasily moments before, a bony young man with a nervous tic to his eyelids, was hunched behind the wheel of a shiny black Zil limousine, its motor purring. A second Hungarian, a beefy AVH officer with the bars of a captain on his shoulder boards and a machine pistol slung under one arm, slid into the passenger seat. Vasily motioned Ebby into the back of the car and scrambled in beside him. Throwing the car into gear, the young driver inched the Zil up a ramp toward the metal door slowly sliding back overhead. When the opening was clear, the driver came down hard on the
gas pedal and the Zil leapt out of the garage onto a darkened and deserted side street. At the first intersection he spun the wheel to the right, skidding the Zil on two wheels around the corner. The headlights fell on a mob of young people marching toward them with raised banners and placards. Vasily barked an order. The driver jammed on the brakes, then threw the car into reverse and started backing up. In the headlights, a young man armed with a rifle could be seen sprinting forward. He dropped to one knee and aimed and fired. The right front tire burst and the Zil, pitching wildly from side to side, slammed back into a lamppost. The AVH officer in the passenger seat flung open his door and, crouching behind it, fired off a clip at the rioters racing toward them. Several figures crumpled to the ground. There was a howl of outrage from the students as they engulfed the Zil. The AVH officer tried desperately to cram another clip into the machine pistol but was cut down by two quick rifle shots. The doors of the car were wrenched open and dozens of hands pulled the occupants into the street. The driver, Vasily and Ebby were dragged across the gutter to a brick wall and thrown against it. Behind him, Ebby could hear rifle bolts driving bullets home. Raising his hands in front of his eyes to shield them from the bullets, he cried into the night, “I am an American. I was their prisoner.”

  A voice yelled something in Hungarian. In the faint light coming from the street lamps that hadn’t been shot out, Ebby could make out the mob parting to let someone through.

  And then Arpád Zelk appeared out of the darkness. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a black beret and black leggings, and carried a rifle in his hand. He recognized Ebby and shouted an order. A young man holding a wine bottle with a cloth wick sticking from its throat darted forward and pulled Ebby away from the two Russians. Behind him, the young AVH driver sank onto his knees and started pleading in disjointed phrases for his life. The dwarflike Vasily, smiling ironically, calmly pulled the cigarette case from the pocket of his jacket and snapped a cigarette between his lips. He struck a match and held the flame to the end of the cigarette but didn’t live long enough to light it.