The Company

by Robert Littell

  “Crying shame to come all the way up to the top floor of the hotel and not take in the view,” he remarked. “From the window over there you can catch a glimpse of the blue Danube flowing toward Hungary.”

  Owen-Brack looked hard at Jack, trying to place him. Then she snapped her fingers. “New York. The Cloud Club. I don’t remember your name but I do remember you had a middle initial that didn’t stand for anything.” She laughed. “To tell the truth, I wouldn’t have recognized you without the mustache…you’ve changed.”

  “In what way?”

  “You seem older. It’s your eyes…” She let the thought trail off.

  “Older and wiser, I hope.”

  “If you mean by wiser, less cocky,” she said with a musical laugh, “you had no place to go but up.”

  Jack smiled. “Last time we met I offered you a cup of Champagne. You saw right through that—you said I wanted to get you into bed, and you were damn right.”

  Owen-Brack gnawed on the inside of her cheek. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll take you up on that drink you offered me in New York.” She held out a hand. “I’m Millie to my friends.”

  Jack took it. “John McAuliffe. Jack to you.”

  He bought her a daiquiri and they drifted across the hall to the floor-to-ceiling windows for a view of the Danube. Because of the chandeliers behind them the only thing they could see was their own reflection. “What’ve you been up to since that day at the Cloud Club?” she inquired, talking to his image in the window.

  “This and that.”

  “Where did you do your this and that?”

  “Here and there.”

  Owen-Brack’s brown eyes crinkled into a smile. “Hey, I’m cleared for top secret, eyes-only. I can read anything Allen Dulles can read.”

  Jack said, “I’ve been stationed in Germany. In Berlin.”

  “You work with that character Torriti?”

  “Yeah. I’m his XO.”

  “Berlin’s supposed to be a tough beat.”

  “So they say.”

  “Now I understand why your eyes look older.”

  Jack turned away from their reflection to gaze at her directly. He liked what he saw. “Harvey Torriti suffers from stomach cramps, loss of appetite, a more or less permanent ache in the solar plexus. Me, too. I guess you could write it off as occupational afflictions. But so far I’ve had Lady Luck on my side—I’ve managed to survive the skirmishes that killed your husband.”

  Millie was very moved. “Thanks for remembering that,” she said softly.

  They clinked glasses and drank to the skirmishes inside and outside the office they’d both survived. Jack asked her if she wanted to sample something beside hotel fare and when she said “Sure, why not,” he took her to dinner at a small Viennese restaurant two blocks away with a covered terrace jutting over the Danube Canal. They ordered trout fresh from the kitchen tank and grilled over an open fire, and washed it down with a bottle of chilled Rhine wine. Gradually Jack loosened up. He talked about his childhood in Pennsylvania and his education at Yale which, in hindsight, seemed like the four best years of his life. He talked about varsity rowing; how the few worries he might have had vanished when he concentrated on the intricate business of pulling a twelve-foot blade.

  By the time they cracked the second bottle of wine, Millie was rambling on about her adolescence in Santa Fe, where she’d spent most of her free time on horseback, exploring the endless ranges and canyons. There had been something that passed for an education at a state college and four years of law at a university in Colorado, then a chance meeting with a reckless man in his thirties who introduced her to a world that was a world away from the mysterious Anasazi canyons of New Mexico. There had been a wild trek across Thailand and Laos, an abortion, an angry separation, an emotional reconciliation. Because of his experiences in the Far East and his ability to speak Mandarin Chinese, her husband had been recruited by the Company, which is how she’d gotten her foot in the Pickle Factory door; for security reasons, the CIA liked to employ the wives of officers because it tended to keep the secrets in the family. Then one unforgettable day the DD/O, Allen Dulles, and his deputy, Frank Wisner, had turned up at the cubbyhole where she was busy writing contracts and had delivered some awful news: her husband had been ambushed and killed running saboteurs into China from Burma. Wisner had taken the new widow under his wing and she’d wound up working at various jobs in the DD/O. And here she was, briefing officers on the situation in Hungary while she waited for her boss, the Wiz, currently on a tour of European stations, to show up in Vienna.

  It was after eleven when Jack called for the check and started to count out bills from his wallet. Suddenly he raised his eyes and looked directly into hers. “I guess this is where I get to ask, your room or mine?”

  Millie caught her breath. “Are you dead sure you’re not pushing your luck?”

  “It’s not my luck I’m pushing.”

  She sipped the last of her wine. “I haven’t changed my mind about one-night stands.”

  “I have.” Jack came around to sit next to her on the banquette and reached down to finger the hem of her skirt. “I’m not as interested in them as I used to be.”

  It was easy to see she was tempted. “Look, I just met you. I mean, for all I know you could be a serial killer.” She laughed a little too loudly. “So are you, Jack? A serial killer?”

  He focused on the smudge of raspberry lipstick on the rim of her wine glass. It reminded him of the color of Lili’s lips the night he met her at the ballet and bought her a Berliner Weisse mit Schuss. Jack was still haunted by the memory of the slim dancer who had survived American bombs and rampaging Russian soldiers and the winter of ’47 but not the East German Stasi pounding on the locked door of the toilet; in his mind’s eye he could see her filling her mouth with water and inserting the small caliber pistol between her thin raspberry-pink lips.

  “I have killed,” he announced, his eyes never wavering from hers, “but not serially.”

  His answer irritated her. “If that’s your idea of a joke,” she retorted, “you’re registering zero on my laugh meter.” Then she noticed the faraway look in his eyes and she realized that he was telling her a truth.

  “God damn it!” she moaned.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Every New Year’s Eve I vow I’ll never get involved with someone who works for the Company.”

  Jack reached across to touch her knuckles. “We make New Year’s resolutions,” he said solemnly, “in order to have the satisfaction of breaking them.”

  7

  BUDAPEST, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1956

  FROM THE FIRST HOURS OF THE REVOLT TEN DAYS EARLIER, BANDS OF armed students had been combing the city in the blood hunt for members of the loathed Hungarian secret police. Tracked like animals to their hiding places in basements or subway tunnels, AVH men had been dragged out into the street and executed on the spot; sometimes their bodies were hung head-down from trees, with their pay slips (showing they earned many times more than the average worker) pinned to their trousers. Shortly after midnight on Friday, Arpád personally led a foray against a group of AVH men who had gone to ground in an abandoned police post in one of the Pest suburbs; there were rumors that two particularly brutal district Communist bosses were hiding there, too. Ebby, eager to take the temperature of the city for what had become his daily report to the Company station in Vienna, talked the poet into letting him tag along.

  Piling into six taxicabs parked in the alleyway behind the Corvin Cinema, borrowing an armored car from the rebel Hungarian soldiers occupying the Kilian Barracks across the intersection, the raiding party headed down Jozsef Avenue and onto Stalin Avenue. Ebby could see evidence of fierce fighting everywhere: shattered store windows, pitted façades, thousands of spent bullets, heaps of cobblestones that had been pried up and used to construct anti-tank strongpoints, the burned out carcasses of automobiles and yellow trolley cars, the black bunting draped from apa
rtment windows in sign of a recent death in the family. At Hero’s Park, the caravan skirted the giant statue of Stalin, now sprawling in the gutter. It had been cut down with acetylene torches in the early hours of the revolution; only Stalin’s hollow boots, filled with Hungarian flags, remained on the pink pedestal.

  At the other side of the giant city park, on a dark street lined with entrepôts and automobile repair garages, the taxis pulled up in a semicircle facing an ugly two-story cinderblock building that had served as a neighborhood AVH station, their headlights illuminating the darkened windows. The armored car sighted its cannon on the front door. From a radio in one of the taxis came the tinny sound of an accordion playing “Que Será, Será.” Standing behind the open door of his vehicle, Arpád raised a battery-powered megaphone and called out an ultimatum in Hungarian. As his voice reverberated through the street, he fixed his eyes on his wristwatch. The hand-rolled cigarette glued to his lips burned down until the embers scorched the skin but he barely noticed the pain.

  Moments before Arpád’s three-minute deadline expired, the front door swung open and a puffy AVH officer with crew-cut gray hair emerged, his hands thrust so high over his head that his white shirt cuffs protruded from the sleeves of his shapeless uniform jacket. Six other AVH men filed out behind him. Blinded by the headlights, the officer shaded his eyes with one hand.

  “Polgátárs,” he shouted.

  Arpád, his eyes ablaze with pent-up fury, spit the butt of the cigarette into the street. “After nine years of Communist rule we have suddenly become citizens,” he called over to Ebby.

  The AVH officer made an appeal in Hungarian, and then laughed nervously. A tall AVH man behind him held up a framed photograph of his three children and pleaded for mercy. Arpád looked over to the next taxicab and nodded at Ulrik, whose left arm was bound in a blood-soaked bandage. Ulrik, in turn, muttered something to the riflemen near him. Half a dozen of them steadied their weapons on the tops of open taxi doors. Ebby, watching from behind the open door of the last taxicab in the semicircle, turned away as the shots rang out. When he looked back, the seven AVH members lay crumpled on the ground.

  Several more men appeared at windows and began firing at the students. The windshield of Ebby’s taxicab splintered; flying shards scored the right side of his face. He pressed a handkerchief to his cheek to stop the bleeding as the students returned the fire, shattering windowpanes and pockmarking the cinderblocks around them. A headlight on one of the taxicabs exploded with a loud hiss. The cannon on the armored car blasted away at the front door of the building, filling the frosty night air with the stinging odor of cordite. A sole figure appeared through the haze of dust and rubble at the front door waving an umbrella with a square of white cloth tied to the tip. The shooting broke off. Seven AVH men and two AVH women in disheveled uniforms emerged to cower against the front of the building.

  “For God’s sake,” Ebby shouted to Arpád, “take them prisoner.”

  Suddenly an AVH major materialized in the doorway. He was holding a pistol to the head of a terrified girl and prodding her ahead of him. With tears streaming from her eyes, the girl, who couldn’t have been more than twelve, cried out shrilly in Hungarian. The AVH major, a thin man wearing sunglasses with only one lens still intact, waved for the students to clear a path for him.

  He made the fatal mistake of waving with the hand that held the pistol. The girl ducked and scampered away. From behind the blinding glare of the headlights, a rifle whispered. Clutching his throat, the major stumbled back drunkenly and then fell onto his back, stone dead. Behind him the other AVH agents panicked and started running in different directions only to be gunned down by rifle and pistol fire. One of the women had almost reached Ebby’s taxicab when a burst of automatic fire hit her skull, shearing off the top of it.

  From inside the police station came the muffled reports of individual pistol shots; Ebby guessed that the Communist Party district bosses remaining in the building had committed suicide. Students stormed through the front door and returned minutes later dragging out two bodies by their arms. Both were dressed in civilian clothing. One of them was bleeding from a superficial head wound but still very much alive. Ulrik and several others tied a rope around his ankles and hauled him across the street to one of the city’s ornate pre-war gas lampposts. Flinging the end of the rope over an iron curlicue on the lamppost, they strung him head-down above the sidewalk. American twenty-dollar bills spilled from the pockets of his suit jacket. The students piled the money, along with leaves and twigs and pages torn from a magazine, on the sidewalk under his head and touched a match to them. As the flames leaped up to singe his hair the man cried hysterically, “Long live world Communism.”

  A mad gleam dilating the pupils of his eyes, Arpád strode over to the torso twisting at the end of the rope. Holding his rifle with one hand, he forced the tip of the barrel into the man’s mouth and jerked the trigger. Turning away, the poet casually brushed fragments of bone and brain off of his leather jacket with the back of a hand.

  A ghostly calm—the kind that exists in its purest form at the eye of a hurricane—gripped Budapest. A light snow had blanketed the Buda hills during the night, dampening the churr of the yellow trolley cars that had been put back into service. In the morning, glaziers began fitting new glass into store windows shattered during the fighting; it was a point of pride among Hungarians that, despite the broken windows, there had been almost no looting. In churches across the city candles burned to mark All Souls’ Day, when the practicing Catholics of this largely Catholic country offered prayers for the souls of the dead in purgatory.

  By midday, the sun had melted the snow in Buda and blunted the whetted rawness of the wind sweeping off the Danube. Bundled in borrowed duffle coats, strolling along the embankment on the Pest side of the river, Ebby and Elizabet could hear church bells across the city tolling the end of the morning’s All Souls’ services. To Elizabet, at least, it sounded as if the bells were celebrating the triumph of the revolution and the start of a new epoch for Hungary, and she said as much.

  Ebby was less optimistic. There had been too much killing, he told her. It was true that the two Russian divisions had pulled back from Budapest. But if the Russians returned in force, the AVH and the Communists would come back with them, and there would be a bloody reckoning.

  Elizabet bridled. “For years they tortured us, they imprisoned us, they slaughtered us,” she said with great passion, “and you talk of them settling scores with us!” Since her imprisonment she tended to break into tears easily and took several deep breaths to head them off now.

  Stepping around open suitcases on the sidewalk, set out to collect donations for the wounded, they strolled on past walls plastered with poems and caricatures and the omnipresent slogan “Nem Kell Komunizmus”—“We don’t want Communism!” At one corner, Elizabet stopped to chat with two young journalists who were handing out free copies of one of the four-sheet independent newspapers that had sprung up in the early days of the revolution. Coming back to Ebby, she held up the hand-set Literary Gazette and translated the headline over the front page editorial: “‘In revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part is to invent the end’—de Tocqueville.” Crossing a street, Elizabet stopped to look at the two rows of fresh graves in a small triangle of grass at the middle of the intersection; each of the dozen or so mounds of earth was piled high with flowers and red-white-and-green ribbons. Tacked to sticks hammered into the ground at the heads of several graves were photographs of smiling young boys and girls, some dressed in school uniforms, others in makeshift battle fatigues.

  “The Russians won’t invade,” Elizabet predicted emotionally, “for the same reason they didn’t invade Yugoslavia all these years: because they know our young people are ready to die for the revolution, and they’ll take a lot of Russian soldiers with them.” Again her eyes teared; again she flung the tears away with the back of her finger. She looked across the river at the statue of the martyred Archb
ishop Gellért, his crucifix raised high, atop one of the Buda hills. “Purgatory is not big enough to contain all the Russian soldiers who will go to hell if the Soviets make the mistake of returning,” she said.

  She slipped a hand inside the duffle coat to massage her mutilated breast. Again her eyes filled with tears. “The truth is that I am afraid to cry,” she confessed.

  “You’ve earned the right to a good cry,” Ebby said.

  “Never,” she said, spitting out the word. “I am terrified that if I start I will never be able to stop.”

  While the wound on her breast cicatrized, Elizabet took to prowling the Corvin Cinema. She sat in on Council sessions in the movie theater or impromptu committee meetings in the rooms off it, or pulled Ebby after her down the long tunnel that connected Corvin with the Kilian Barracks across the street to chat with the officers of the 900-man construction battalion that had gone over to the revolution. Evenings they listened (with Elizabet providing a running translation) to the endless bull sessions raging in hallways that had been transformed into dormitories for the hundreds of students crowded into Corvin. Arpád occasionally was called upon to read one of his poems, but for the most part the discussions revolved around how fast and how far the students and workers dared push the new leadership, headed by the reformer Nagy, to break with the Soviet Union and the country’s Communist past.

  According to the radio, negotiations were already underway concerning the departure of all Soviet forces from Hungary; the Russian delegation, headed by the tall, humorless Soviet Ambassador, Yuri Andropov, and the Soviet Politburo idealogue, Mikhail Suslov, was demanding only that the troops be allowed to quit the country with their banners flying and bands playing to avoid humiliation. In the hallways of Corvin, the few voices brave enough to question the wisdom of withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and calling for free elections, two moves that were bound to test the patience of Moscow, were shouted down. The revolution had triumphed, Arpád proclaimed during one of the hallway discussions. What was the point of making concessions that undermine this triumph?