The Company

by Robert Littell

  “What if the Russians decide we have gone too far and invade Hungary?” a boy with long blond hair asked.

  “We will defeat them again,” Arpád responded.

  “And if they return with two thousand tanks?” another student persisted.

  “The Americans,” Arpád promised, stabbing the air with a hand-rolled cigarettes to emphasize his point, “will come to our assistance. NATO planes will bomb the Russian tanks before they reach Budapest. NATO airdrops will supply us with anti-tank weapons to deal with the few that get through the bombardment.” Arpád gazed over the heads of the students to stare defiantly at Ebby. “If we don’t lose our nerve,” he said, “we will soon live in a free and democratic Hungary.” Then, his Roman face burning with pious fervor, he pumped his fist in the air. “Ne Bántsd a Magyart!” he cried. And the students, clapping in unison, took up the refrain.

  “With soldiers like these,” Elizabet shouted into Ebby’s ear, “how can we possibly lose?”

  Ebby could only shake his head. He hoped to God that Arpád had gotten it right; hoped to God the Russians stayed in Russia. If they did come back, they would return in overwhelming numbers and with overwhelming fire power. And the world would not lift a finger to help as Arpád and others like him led the courageous Hungarian lambs to the slaughter.

  In the darkness one night, Ebby could hear Elizabet flinging herself from one side of the mattress to the other in the hunt for a position that would ease the ache of her injury. He wondered what time it was. A cheerful young mason with a bandaged ear had bricked in the sniper’s hole in the wall, which had the advantage of making the room less drafty but the disadvantage that Ebby was no longer woken up by the daylight. From time to time he could hear members of the Corvin Battalion stirring in the hallway, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was sunup; small groups of them came and went through the night, relieving others on guard duty or heading out to patrol the city on foot or in one of the commandeered taxi cabs. On the other side of the room, Elizabet scraped her mattress across the floor and propped half of it against the wall to create a makeshift chair; she seemed to suffer less pain when she slept in a sitting position.

  “Elliott—“

  Ebby propped himself up on elbow. “What is it?”

  “It hurts. I hurt. Can’t sleep. Can’t not sleep. Worried sick.”

  Ebby pulled his mattress over to the wall alongside hers. He felt her hand groping for his in the darkness and twined his fingers through hers.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she confided in a whisper.

  “Want to talk?” he asked.

  “I have a child…a daughter…”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Her Christian name is Nellie. She will be six in January.”

  “Is Arpád her father?”

  “Yes.” Ebby could hear her brushing tears from her eyes. I was still living with my husband when Arpád and I…when we…”

  “You don’t need to go into details,” Ebby said. “Where is your husband—what was his name again?”

  “Németh. Nándor Németh. His father was a high-ranking Communist. When we married, Nándor was an undersecretary in the Ministry for External Affairs. He was posted to the Hungarian embassy in Moscow two years ago. He knew about Arpád by then. I decided not to go with him…”

  “What happened to Nellie?”

  “She’s living with Nándor’s sister on a collective farm near Györ, about ninety kilometers from Budapest. Until all this started”—Elizabet sighed into the darkness—“I used to drive out to see her every other weekend. Before Arpád went underground, the AVH used to pick him up once or twice a month; sometimes they would question him for an entire week. When Arpád was in prison, I used to bring Nellie back with me to Budapest for days at a time.”

  “Why didn’t you bring her to Budapest when Arpád was here?”

  Elizabet thought about that for a moment. “You have to understand Arpád—he is an ardent fighter for the freedom of people in general, but individual freedoms, the right to bring your daughter to live with you, are subject to his veto.” She cleared a lump from her throat. “The fact is he doesn’t like children around. I was free to leave him, of course. I tried to several times. But in the end I always came crawling back. I am addicted to Arpád—he is like a drug habit that is impossible to kick…”

  The hollowness Ebby detected in the timbre of Elizabet’s voice frightened him. To distract her he told her he had a son three years older than Nellie. “His name is Manny, which is short for Immanuel. He’s a bright boy, bright and serious. He lives with my former wife…I don’t really know him all that well…I spend so much time abroad.”

  “It must be difficult for you—“

  Ebby didn’t say anything.

  Elizabet tightened her grip on his hand. “When all this is finished—the revolution, the killing, the hurting, the exhilaration—we must both of us spend more time with our children.”

  “Yes. We’ll find a way to do that.”

  “You look like you’ve been run over by a steam roller,” the young embassy counselor Jim Doolittle remarked to Ebby. It was Friday evening and the two were gazing out of a window on the second floor of the Parliament building, which had a splendid view of the vast square. There had been a furnace of a sunset earlier in the evening; now the last pigments of color in the sooty sky had been blotted up by the darkness. A bonfire burned in the middle of the square and a pick-up Tzigane orchestra stood around it playing gypsy melodies. Every now and then a small open truck would pull up and the gypsies would unload chairs swiped from neighborhood Communist Party offices, smash them on the pavement and feed the wood into the fire. Ebby could make out Zoltan dancing around the flames as he sawed away at the violin jammed into his collarbone.

  Did Zoltan have his own sources of information? Was the gypsy violinist warming up to lead the Hungarians into battle against the Russians?

  Doolittle turned away from the window to watch the American ambassador, along with his political chargé d’affaires (Doolittle’s immediate superior) and the Company’s chief of station talking in urgent undertones with the Hungarian premier, Nagy, on the other side of the large mirrored reception hall. In a corner one of Nagy’s aides fed documents into the fire burning in a marble fireplace. “Washington ought to have warned us you were Company,” Doolittle told Ebby. “We could have kept closer tabs on you. When you went missing we could have started ringing the gong sooner.”

  Ebby touched his eye, which was still tender. “Wouldn’t have changed anything,” he remarked.

  “I guess not,” Doolittle conceded.

  Arpád and a tall, lanky officer in a crisp uniform of the armored corps appeared at the double doors of the reception room and walked in lockstep across the marble floor to join Nagy and the Americans.

  “Who’s the guy with Zelk?” Ebby asked.

  “That’s Nagy’s minister of defense, Pal Maléter, the commander of the Kilian Barracks. He’s the one who’s been negotiating the Soviet pullout with the Russians.”

  The chief of station waved for Ebby to join them. Nagy was talking to Maléter in Hungarian. The premier turned to the Americans. “If you please, Mr. Ambassador, tell him what you told me.”

  The ambassador, an old-school diplomat who agonized over the situation in Hungary, tugged a message blank from the inside pocket of his double-breasted suit jacket. Pasted across the paper in strips was a deciphered top secret cable that had come into the embassy earlier in the day. “We have reports—” he began. He cleared his throat; he felt as if he were reading out a death sentence. “—reports that two trains filled with the latest model Soviet tank, the T-54, crossed the Hungarian frontier at Zahony, then off-loaded and dug in around Szolnok and Abony. We have intelligence that the old Soviet T-34 tanks that pulled out of Budapest a few days ago went no further than Vecses, nine miles from the city, where they turned around and blocked roads. French diplomats who flew out of Budapest in the last twenty
-four hours reported seeing Soviet tanks closing in on the three Budapest airports—Ferihegy, Budaörs, and Tokol. Finally, one of our own reconnaissance aircraft flying from a base in Austria spotted two hundred tanks and a long column of new Soviet armored personal carriers, designated BTR-152, heading in the direction of Budapest near Vac and Cegledopen.”

  Nagy puffed agitatedly on an American cigarette. Ashes tumbled onto one of the lapels of his brown suit jacket but he didn’t appear to notice. “We also have had information,” he told the ambassador, “indicating that a great many Soviet tanks have crossed the Tisza into Hungary.” He turned to his Minister of Defense and, speaking in English for the benefit of the Americans, asked, “Did you raise the subject of these sightings with the Soviet side at tonight’s negotiations?”

  “I did, Mr. Prime Minister,” Maléter replied. “Ambassador Andropov became enraged—he claimed it was a provocation of the American CIA designed to ignite full scale fighting between the Russian side and the Hungarian side before we could conclude the terms of the Soviet withdrawal. He cautioned us against falling into the American trap.”

  “Whom do you trust,” Ebby asked bluntly, “Andropov or us?”

  Maléter sized up Ebby. “I can say that we are obliged to trust him. The alternative is too tragic to contemplate. If the Soviets invade Hungary we will of course fight. But for us there can be only one issue—death with honor.”

  Arpád Zelk added grimly, “We harbor no illusions about surviving—without American intervention we have no possibility of defeating the Russians if it comes to full scale war.”

  “Do you, sir, believe the Russians will invade?” the American chargé d’affaires asked Nagy.

  The premier took his time before answering. “If one judges from history,” he said finally, “the response must be yes. The Russians always come in.”

  “Let us look at this realistically,” Maléter said. “There are bound to be some in the Soviet superstructure who will argue that if Hungary is permitted to remove itself from the Soviet sphere, other satellite states will follow.”

  Nagy became aware of the ashes on his lapel and flicked them away with his fingernails. “History will judge us harshly if we went too far, too fast,” he confided in a gruff voice. He concentrated on his cigarette for a moment. “It comes down to this: In the event of war what will the Americans do?”

  “We have been clear about this from the start,” the ambassador said. “Mr. Ebbitt here, at great personal risk, brought an unambiguous message to Mr. Zelk. The day you assumed the powers of premier, I delivered the same message to you, Mr. Nagy. Neither the Americans nor NATO are prepared to intervene in Hungary.”

  “What if we were to provide a casus belli for the Western powers to intervene by taking Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact and declaring neutrality?”

  The ambassador said, “It would not alter anything—except perhaps infuriate the Soviets even more.”

  “Our only hope, then, rests on the Russians being unsure of the American attitude,” Maléter said. “As long as they are in doubt, there is always a chance that Khrushchev and the doves on the Soviet politburo will restrain Zhukov and his hawks.”

  As the Americans were leaving the Parliament building, the chief of station pulled Ebby into a vestibule. “I think it might be wise if you came back to the embassy with me. We’ll supply you with diplomatic cover—“

  “What about Zoltan, my radioman? What about Elizabet Németh?”

  “If word gets out that we’re giving asylum to Hungarians we’ll be swamped—mobs will beat down our doors.”

  “A lot of these people went out on the limb for us.”

  “What they were doing, they were doing for Hungary, not for us. We don’t owe them anything.”

  Ebby said, “That’s not how I see things. I’ll stay with them.”

  The chief of station hiked his shoulders. “I can’t order you. Officially, I don’t even know you’re in Budapest—you’re reporting directly to the DD/O. For the record, if the Russians do invade I strongly urge you to change your mind.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “Advice is cheap.”

  Ebby nodded in agreement. “The advice you gave me is cheap.”

  8

  WASHINGTON, DC, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1956

  AT SUNUP, BERNICE SHIFTED ONTO HER SIDE IN THE NARROW BED, pressing the large nipples of her tiny breasts into Eugene’s back. The previous night he had turned up at her third-floor walkup later than usual—the candles she always lit when she knew he was coming had almost burned down to their wicks—and their love-making had lasted longer than usual. He hadn’t wanted to do any peyote; he seemed to be walking on air without it.

  “So are you awake?” Bernice whispered into his neck. “I think there’s something you need to know, baby.”

  Stirring lazily, Eugene opened an eye and, squinting, played with the sunlight streaming through slits in the window shade. “What do I need to know?”

  “I figured out where you don’t come from.”

  “Where don’t I come from?”

  “Canada is where you don’t come from, baby.”

  Eugene maneuvered onto his back and Bernice crawled on top of him, her long bony body light as a feather, her fingers reaching down to comb through his pubic hair.

  “If I don’t come from Canada, where do I come from?”

  The tip of her tongue flicked at the inside of his ear. “You come from …Russia, baby. You’re Russian.”

  Both of Eugene’s eyes were wide open now. “What makes you think that?”

  “You mutter things in your sleep, things I don’t understand, things in a foreign language. “

  “Maybe I’m speaking Canadian.”

  Bernice’s body trembled with silent laughter. “You said something like knigi.”

  “Knigi sounds Canadian to me.”

  “Max speaks pigeon Russian from when he visited Moscow before the war. Hey, don’t worry—I told him I overheard two customers speaking what I thought was Russian. Max says I must have been right—he says knigi means ‘book’ in Russian.”

  “Book?”

  “Yeah, baby. Book! So don’t act innocent. You say other Russian-sounding things, too. You say something that sounds like starik. Max says starik is Russian for ‘old man.’ He says Starik with a capital S was Lenin’s nickname. Almost everyone around him was younger and called him ‘the old man.’ Honest to God, Eugene, it gives me goose pimples thinking about it—I mean, actually talking to Comrade Lenin in your sleep!”

  Eugene tried to pass it off as a joke. “Maybe I was Russian in a previous incarnation.”

  “Maybe you’re Russian in this incarnation. Hey, there’s more. Reasons why I think you’re Russian, I mean.”

  Eugene propped himself up in bed, his back against a pillow, and reached for a cigarette on the night table. He lit it and passed it to Bernice, who sat up alongside him. He lit a second one for himself.

  “So you want to hear my reasons?”

  “Anything for a laugh.”

  “Remember when Max lent us the station wagon two weeks ago and we drove down to Key West? You did something real funny before we left—after you packed your valise you sat down on it.”

  “I was trying to lock it.”

  “It was locked when you sat down on it, Eugene, baby.”

  Eugene sucked pensively on the cigarette.

  “After we left, you remembered you’d forgotten the antenna for your Motorola. Shows how dumb I am, I didn’t even know Motorolas needed antennas. Long as we were going back, I went up to pee. You found the antenna in the closet and then you did something funny again—you looked at yourself in the full-length mirror on the wall next to the john.”

  “That doesn’t make me Russian, Bernice. That makes me narcissistic.”

  “Remember me telling you about my grandfather coming from Vilnus? Well, he always used to sit on his valise before setting out on a trip—us kids used to kid him about i
t. He said it brought good luck. He flat-out refused to go back across the threshold once he started out—he said it meant the trip would end badly. And if he absolutely had to, like the time when my grandmother forgot the sulfa pills for her heart, he did what you did—he looked at himself in the mirror before starting out again.” She reached across Eugene’s stomach to flick ashes into a saucer on the night table. “I don’t know how you got to talk American with a Brooklyn accent but if you’re not Russian, Eugene, I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

  Eugene regarded his girlfriend of five years. “This started out as a joke, Bernice, but it has stopped being funny.”

  Leaning toward him, Bernice pressed her lips against his ear and whispered into it. “When I was vacuuming your apartment over the store yesterday, I discovered the hiding place under the floorboards in the closet. I found the antenna. I found packs of money. Lots and lots of it. More money than I’ve ever seen before. I found stuff—a miniature camera, rolls of film, a small gizmo that fits in your palm and looks like some kind of microscope. I found matchbooks with grids of numbers and letters on the inside covers.” Bernice shuddered. “I’m so proud of you, Eugene, I could die. I’m proud to be your friend. I’m proud to fuck you.” She reached down with her right hand and cupped it protectively over his testicles. “Oh, baby, it takes my breath away when I think of it. It’s the bee’s knees. It’s the cat’s pajamas. It’s completely colossal! You’re a spy for Soviet Russia, Eugene! You’re a Communist warrior battling on the front line against capitalism.” She began sliding down his body, sucking on his nipples, planting moist kisses on his stomach, pulling his penis up toward her lips and bending to meet it. “You don’t need to worry, Eugene. Bernice would die before she tells a soul about you being a spy for the Motherland.”