The Company

by Robert Littell

  Marton took it and nodded and said something in Hungarian. Elizabet said, “He tells you: Remember Hungary, please, after you leave it.”

  “Tell him I will never forget Hungary—or him,” Ebby replied.

  Marton swung onto his horse in an easy motion. Clucking his tongue at the stallion, pulling its head around, he set it walking back into Hungary. Zoltan took over the lead and started toward the stuccoed farmhouse. The group was halfway across the sloping field when there was a disturbance up ahead. Five figures in hooded arctic greatcoats loomed out of a drainage ditch. Each carried a rifle at the ready in mittened hands. Zoltan reached for the handle of his curved knife. Ebby lifted Nellie off his shoulders and set her down behind him, then pulled Elizabet’s English revolver from his overcoat pocket. In the stillness he could make out the Jewish professor mumbling a Hebrew prayer. One of the five soldiers came up to Zoltan and asked him something.

  Elizabet breathed deeply in relief. “He speaks Hungarian,” she said. “He says there are no Russians in this sector tonight. He asks if we have cigarettes. He wishes us Godspeed.”

  The soldiers saluted the refugees with stiff-armed waves as they lumbered off to finish patrolling the zone.

  Four young Austrians emerged from the farmhouse to help the refugees over the last fifty meters. Inside, a fire was burning in an old potbellied stove and soup was simmering in a cast-iron pot on top of it. The refugees, massaging their frozen toes, warmed themselves with cup after cup of soup. Before long, four more refugees made it to the house. And still later, two couples with three children joined them. Zoltan thawed out his hands in front of the stove, then slipped on woolen gloves with the fingertips cut off and began playing sentimental gypsy melodies on his fiddle. Gradually the tenseness on the faces around the room faded into tired smiles. Hours later, with the eastern sky ablaze with a fiery dawn, one of the Austrians guided them all down a sunken dirt path toward the village. Ebby, carrying Nellie on his shoulders and the puppeteer’s enormous valise in one hand, had just caught sight of the church steeple when he spotted figures standing on a rise.

  One of them raised a hand and waved at him. “Ebby!” he called, scrambling down the rise to the road.

  “Jack!” Ebby said. The two men thumped each other on the back.

  “The Wiz is up there—” Jack turned to call up the rise. “It is him.” He turned back to Ebby. “Frank’s taking this very personally,” he said, gesturing with his chin toward the refugees stumbling down the rut of a road. “We’ve been coming out here mornings hoping against hope…damnation, are you a sight for sore eyes.” He grabbed the valise from Ebby. “Here, let me give you—Jesus H. Christ, Ebby, what do you have in here?”

  “You won’t believe me if I tell you.”

  Jack, falling into step alongside him, laughed happily. “Try me, pal.”

  “Marionettes, Jack.” Ebby turned to look back in the direction of Hungary. “Marionettes.”

  12

  WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1956

  THE COMPANY’S COUNTERINTELLIGENCE BAILIWICK HAD GROWN BY quantum leaps since James Jesus Angleton set up the shop in the early years of the decade. Three full-time secretaries now guarded the door to his office; in the last twelve months alone thirty-five CIA officers had been added to Mother’s ever-expanding roster. Despite the chronically severe shortage of office space on Cockroach Alley, counterintelligence had managed to pull off what in-house wags nervously referred to as “Angleton’s Anschluss”—it had commandeered a large windowless stockroom across the hall and crammed it full of unpickable Burmah-lock diamond safes to accommodate the paper trails that Angleton’s prodigies hacked through the tangled Central Intelligence copse. Despite this expansion, the heart of the heart of counter-intelligence was still Angleton’s permanently dusky sanctum sanctorum (one school of thought held that Mother’s Venetian blinds had been glued closed), with its spill of three-by-five index cards flagged with red priority stickers.

  “Nice of you to stop by on such short notice,” Angleton told Ebby, steering him through the maze of boxes to the only halfway decent chair in the room.

  “Except for the pour with Dulles late this afternoon, I have no pressing engagements,” Ebby said.

  “Jack Daniel’s?” Angleton asked, settling behind the desk, peering around the Tiffany lamp at his visitor. The last vestiges of a migraine that had kept him up most of the night lurked in the furrows of his brow.

  “Don’t mind.”

  Angleton poured two stiff drinks into kitchen tumblers and pushed one across the desk. “To you and yours,” he said, hiking his glass.

  “To the Hungarians who were naive enough to fall for all that malarkey about rolling back Communism,” Ebby shot back, his voice a low rumble of crankiness as he clinked glasses with Mother. Sipping his bourbon, he winced at the memory of the Torkoly that had scalded the back of his throat the first time he met Arpád Zelk. Angleton’s Jack Daniel’s was a lot tamer. Everything in Washington was a lot tamer.

  “You sound bitter—“

  “Do I?”

  Angleton was always uncomfortable with small talk but he made a stab at it anyway. “How was your plane ride back?”

  “How it was, was long—twenty-seven hours, door to door, not counting the day and a half holdover in Germany while the Air Force cured a coughing propeller.”

  “I heard on the grapevine you came back with a woman—“

  “A woman and a kid. A girl. She’s practically six and not afraid of the dark. The woman is practically thirty-three and very much afraid of the dark. Of the light, too, come to think of it.”

  “Manage any R and R after you got out of Hungary?”

  “The Wiz laid on ten days in a Gasthaus near Innsbruck for the three of us. Long walks in the Bavarian Alps. Quiet evenings by a roaring fire. While we were there another twelve thousand Hungarian refugees came across.”

  Angleton’s well of small talk dried up. He lit a cigarette and vanished for a moment behind a bank of smoke. “I read through”—there was a hacking cough—“through the notes the debriefing team made in Vienna…”

  “Thought you might.”

  “Especially interested in your suspicions about a Soviet mole—“

  “What I have isn’t suspicions—it’s certainty.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I told the debriefing people pretty much all I knew.”

  “Want to walk me through it once more?”

  “I went in under deep cover—I was backstopped at my old law firm in New York in case anybody tried to check up on me. The AVH people picked me up—“

  “After or before you made contact with Arpád Zelk?”

  “It was after.”

  Angleton was thinking out loud. “So you could have been betrayed by one of the Hungarians around Zelk.”

  “Could have been. Wasn’t. The AVH colonel general who interrogated me seemed familiar with my Central Registry file. He knew I was assigned to Frank Wisner’s Operations Directorate; he knew I was in the DD/O’s Soviet Russia Division. He knew I’d worked out of Frankfurt station running émigrés into Poland and Soviet Russia and Albania.”

  Behind the smoke screen, Angleton’s eyes were reduced to slits of concentration.

  “Then there was the business about Tony Spink,” Ebby said.

  “There’s no mention of Spink in the transcript of your debriefing.”

  “It came back to me during one of those long walks in the Alps—I went over and over the interrogation in my head. When I slept, I dreamed about it—dreamed I was back in that room, back on the stool, back in the spotlight, back at the window watching them torture Elizabet…”

  Angleton tugged the conversation back to where he wanted it to go. “You were talking about Spink.”

  “Spink, yes. Comrade Colonel General knew that Tony Spink was my immediate superior at Frankfurt Station. He knew that I was kicked upstairs to run agent ops when Spink was rotated back to Washington in 1954.”
<
br />   “He knew the date?”

  “Yeah. He said 1954.” Ebby closed his eyes. “Just before Arpád Zelk dragged him into the refrigerator room and hung him from a spike, the colonel general cried out that the Centre had told them about me…”

  Angleton leaned forward. “In the wide world of intelligence there are many Centers.”

  “He meant Moscow Centre.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “I just assumed—” Ebby shrugged.

  Angleton scribbled notes to himself on a three-by-five card flagged with a red sticker. One of the telephones on his desk purred. He wedged the receiver between a shoulder and his ear and listened for a moment. “No, it’s not a rumor,” he said. “My Cattleya cross flowered, and eighteen months ahead of my wildest dreams. It’s a raving beauty, too. Listen, Fred, I have someone with me. Let me get back to you.” He dropped the phone back onto its cradle.

  “What’s a Cattleya cross?”

  Angleton smiled thinly. To Ebby, eyeing him from across the desk, the Company’s edgy counterintelligence chief almost looked happy. “It’s a hybrid orchid,” Angleton explained with unaccustomed bashfulness. “I’ve been trying to breed one for years. Son of a gun flowered over the weekend. I’m going to register it under my wife’s name—it’s going into the record books as the Cicely Angleton.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Angleton didn’t hear the irony. “Thank you.” He nodded. “Thank you very much.” He cleared his throat and glanced down at the index card. When he spoke again there was no hint of the orchid in his voice. “Anything else you forgot to tell the debriefing people in Vienna?”

  “I can think of a lot else. Most of what I can think of comes across as questions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as: Why did all those émigré drops go bad after June 1951, which is when Maclean and Burgess skipped to Moscow and Philby got sacked? Why did we lose those double agents in Germany two years ago? How did the KGB know which of the diplomats working out of our Moscow embassy were Company officers servicing dead drops? The list is a long one. Where did the leaks come from? How could the Hungarian colonel general be so sure I worked for the Wiz? How did he know I’d stepped into Spink’s shoes when he was called home? If he was tipped off by the KGB, how did the Russians find out?”

  Angleton, his shoulders bent under the weight of secrets, stood up and came around the desk. “Thanks for your time, Elliott. Glad to have you back safe and sound.”

  Ebby laughed under his breath. “Safe maybe. I’m not so sure about sound.”

  When Ebbitt had gone, Angleton slumped back into his chair and helped himself to another dose of Jack Daniel’s. Ebbitt was right, of course; the Russians had a mole in the CIA, most likely in the Clandestine Service, maybe even in the heart of the Clandestine Service, the Soviet Russia Division. Angleton pulled the index card on Anthony Spink from a file box and attached a red sticker to the corner. Spink intrigued him. Unbeknownst to Ebbitt and the others at Frankfurt Station, Spink hadn’t been rotated back to Washington in 1954—he’d been pulled back by Angleton because he was sleeping with a German national who had a sister living in East Germany. At the time Spink had passed the polygraph test, but if you took enough tranquilizers anybody could get past a polygraph. It wouldn’t hurt to bring Spink in and flutter him again. As long as he was taking another look at Spink, he might as well flutter the two desk officers who had known about Spink’s affair and covered for him at the time. And there was the deputy head of station in Prague who had deposited $7,000 in his wife’s account in an upstate New York bank. And the cipher clerk in Paris who had made seven telephone calls to Istanbul, supposedly to speak to a vacationing daughter. And the secretary in Warsaw who had received flowers from a Polish national she’d met at a concert. And the Marine guard at the Moscow embassy who changed dollars into rubles on the black market to pay for the services of a Russian prostitute. And the contract employee in Mexico City who had been spotted coming out of a transvestite nightclub that the local KGB was known to use for secret meetings. And the young officer working under diplomatic cover in Sofia who had smuggled three priceless icons back to the States in a diplomatic pouch. And then, of course, there was E. Winstrom Ebbitt II. What if he had been “turned” in prison? What if he had never been in prison? If Ebbitt himself were the Soviet mole, the spymaster Starik might have instructed him to raise the specter of a Soviet mole in the CIA—to tell Angleton what he already knew!—in order to divert attention from himself? Clearly, this was a possibility that had to be looked into.

  Angleton brought his palms up and pressed them against his ears. He had detected the distant drumbeat of the migraine—a primitive tattoo summoning Starik’s specter to prowl the lobes of his brain, keeping sleep and sanity at bay for the time the visitation lasted.

  Drifting with postcoital languidness, Bernice hiked herself onto a counter stool at the Peoples Drugstore, a short stroll from her apartment. “So what are you hungry for?” she asked Eugene as he slid onto the next stool.

  “You.”

  “Me you just had,” Bernice said. “I’m talking supper, baby.”

  “Maybe sausages,” Eugene decided. He called over to the Greek behind the counter. “Sausages, Lukas. A frying pan full of them. With hash browns and one of your Greek omelets with lots of eggs and onions. And coffee.”

  “Looks like you two lovebirds worked up an appetite again,” Lukas said with a lecherous smirk. He’d seen them at the counter often enough to know they were always ravenously hungry after they had sex. “What about the little lady?”

  “Ditto for me except for the hash browns,” Bernice told the Greek. “I’ll have a Coke with, and a raspberry milkshake after.”

  “Coming up,” Lukas said, neatly cracking eggs into a bowl with one hand.

  Thirty-five minutes later Lukas collected the empty plates and Bernice attacked the milkshake, noisily sucking it through two straws. When she came up for air she raised her head and squinted sideways at Eugene. “You’ve been looking pretty pleased with yourself the last few weeks, baby. It makes me happy to see you happy.”

  Eugene glanced at the Greek, who was scouring frying pans at the far end of the counter. “There’s a lot to be happy about. Counterrevolution got a bloody nose in Hungary. Colonialism got a drubbing in Egypt. It was a good month for socialism.”

  “Oh, you kill me, Eugene—even out of bed you’re passionate. I’ve known a lot of socialists in my life but you’re the cat’s whiskers.” She took another sip of milkshake. “Eugene, baby, correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, her expression suddenly very intent, “but when communism triumphs, when America goes socialist, you’ll be heading home.”

  Eugene stirred sugar into his second cup of coffee. “I suppose so.”

  “So can you?”

  “What do you mean, can I?”

  “After living here all these years, after getting accustomed to all this”—she waved at the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the avenue behind them—“can you go back to communal living?”

  “I haven’t been corrupted by materialism, Bernice.”

  “I didn’t say you were, baby. I only mean, like, the transition could be hard.” She smiled at a thought. “You ought to go back slowly, like a deep-sea diver coming up to the surface.”

  He had to laugh at the image. “You’re something else, Bernice. I’m not a deep-sea diver!”

  “In a way, you are. You’re a Russian deep-sea diver, braving sharks and stingarees to explore the capitalist wreckage in the murky depths.” She spotted the scowl in his eyes and said quickly, “Hey, Lukas can’t hear us.” She smiled wistfully. “Pretty please—take me with you, Eugene, when you go home.” She checked on the Greek and, turning back, went on in a whisper, “I want to live with you in Mother Russia, baby. It’s my dream.”

  “It’s not the way you think it is,” he said quietly.

  “How is it?”

  “There’s a big housing shortage�
��two or three families sometimes share one apartment. There are long lines in stores—you have to stand in three of them before you can buy anything.” He tried to think of what else he could say to discourage her. If he ever did go back, who knows, he might be able to pick up where he’d left off with Azalia Isanova. Assuming she wasn’t married. Assuming she remembered him. Even after all these years he could still reproduce her voice in his head. We will together explore whether your lust and my desire are harmonious in bed. “Another thing you wouldn’t like, Bernice,” he added seriously, “there’s no jazz in Russia.”

  Unfazed, she murmured, “But the proletariat owns the means of production, which means the workers aren’t exploited by the capitalist classes. The way I see it, having to share a toilet is a small price to pay. Anyway, the communal apartments and the lines and the no jazz, that’ll all get straightened out once they’ve moved past socialism to actual communism. Isn’t that so, baby?”

  “They may fix the apartments and the lines. I don’t know if they can fix the jazz.”

  “I’d be willing to go cold turkey on jazz if it meant I could live in the Socialist motherland,” she said gravely. “It’s a hypothetical, sure, but it’s important to me, Eugene. So yes or no, will you take me with you when you go back?”

  Eugene could see she wouldn’t let go until he gave her an answer. “Both of us are under Party discipline, Bernice. Which means that even if America goes communist, the Centre might not want you to abandon your post. They’ll need people like you here to keep track of things.”

  Bernice looked miserable. “So I might have to stay in America for the rest of my life, is that what you’re saying?”

  “You and Max are front-line soldiers,” Eugene explained. “When America goes communist, streets will be named after you. Hell, you’ll probably be promoted to important positions in the superstructure.”

  “Like what?”

  “Someone with your track record could be assigned to the White House, for all I know.”