The Company

by Robert Littell

  “Start with your father.”

  “Jim, for God’s sake…” Leo glanced at the whirring reels of the tape recorder, then, shuddering, took a deep breath. “My father’s name was Abraham. Abraham Kritzky. He was born in Vilnus, in the Jewish Pale, on the twenty-eighth of November 1896. He emigrated to America during the 1910 pogroms. He got a job in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory sewing bands inside hats—he was there when the famous fire broke out in 1911, killing almost a hundred and fifty seamstresses. My father got out with his sewing machine strapped to his back when firemen hacked open a locked fire door leading to an alleyway.”

  “Did the experience make him bitter?”

  “Of course it made him bitter.”

  “Did it turn him against capitalism?”

  “What are you looking for, Jim? I went over all this when I was recruited. There are no secrets hidden here. My father was a Socialist. He worshipped Eugene Debs. He joined Debs’s Socialist Party when it was formed in 1918. He picketed when Debs was jailed, I think it was around 1920. He read the Jewish Daily Forward. His bible was the ‘Bintel Brief’ letters-to-editor column, where people poured out their troubles; he used to read the letters aloud to us in Yiddish. My father was a bleeding heart, which wasn’t a federal offense until the House Un-American Activities Committee came along.”

  “You were born on the twenty-ninth of October 1929—“

  Leo laughed bitterly. “The day the stock market crashed. Are you going to read something into that?”

  “Your father had a small business by then.” Angleton turned to another page in his loose-leaf book. “He manufactured and repaired hats at an address on Grand Street in Manhattan. The crash wiped him out.”

  “The banks called in his loans—he’d bought the brownstone on Grand Street. We lived upstairs. His business was on the ground floor. He lost everything.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Can I have some water?”

  Angleton nodded toward the tin cup on the floor next to the toilet. “There’s water in the bowl.”

  Leo shook his head in dismay. “You’re out of your goddamn mind, Jim. You’re crazy if you think I’m going to drink out of a toilet.”

  “When you’re thirsty enough, you will. What happened after the stock market crash?”

  When Leo didn’t respond Angleton said, “Let’s understand each other. You’re going to stay in this room until you’ve answered all my questions, and many times. We’re going to go over and over your life before and after you joined the Company. If it takes weeks, if it takes months, it’s no skin of my nose. I’m not in any particular hurry. You want to go on now or do you prefer that I come back tomorrow?”

  Leo whispered, “Son of a bitch.”

  Angleton started to close the loose-leaf book.

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll answer your damn questions. What happened after the stock market crash was that my father killed himself.”

  “How?”

  “You know how.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “He jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. They found his body washing around under the docks under Brooklyn Heights the next morning.”

  “What was the date?”

  “March 1936.”

  Angleton said, “Seven March, to be exact. Between the stock market crash and his suicide, did your father become a Communist, or was he one already when he came over from Russia?”

  Leo laughed under his breath. “My father was a Jew who believed, like the Prophet Amos—writing eight centuries before Jesus Christ—that you were a thief if you had more than you needed, because what you owned was stolen from those who didn’t have enough. Luckily for Amos there was no Joe McCarthy around in those days.” Leo looked away. In his mind’s eye he could see his father reading from a worn Torah, and he quoted the passage from memory. “‘For they know not to do right, saith the Lord, who store up violence and robbery in their palaces.’ That’s Amos 3:10, if I remember correctly, Jim.”

  “You seem fixated on Joe McCarthy.”

  “He was a shit.”

  “Did you agree with Amos and with your father? Did you think that what you own is stolen from those who don’t have enough?”

  “In an ideal world such a sentiment might have a shred of validity. But I long ago moved on into the imperfect world.”

  “Did capitalism kill your father?”

  “My father killed himself. Capitalism, as it was practiced in America in the twenties and thirties, created conditions that caused a great many people to kill themselves, including the capitalists who threw themselves out of Wall Street windows in 1929.”

  Angleton lit a fresh cigarette. There was a fragment of a smile clinging limply to one corner of his mouth and volcanic ash in the pupils of his eyes. Leo remembered that Angleton was a devoted angler; the word was that he would spend endless hours working the Brule in the upper watershed of northern Wisconsin, casting with a flick of his wrist a nymph fly he had tied with his own fingers and letting it drift back downstream, waiting with infinite patience to snare the mythical brown trout that was rumored to hide in the currents of the river. It hit Leo that the counterintelligence chief was working another river now; casting hand-made flies in front of Leo in the hope that he would snap at the hook, fudge a truth, lie about a detail, after which he would carefully reel in the line.

  Flipping through the pages of his loose-leaf Angleton ticked off an item here, underlined a phrase there, scratched out a word and wrote a new one above it. He wanted to know how Leo felt about Soviet Russia during the Second World War. He was only a kid then, Leo said; he didn’t remember thinking about Soviet Russia one way or the other. “You joined Ethical Culture after the war,” Angleton noted. He’d never actually joined Ethical Culture, Leo replied; he’d gone to evening meetings in Brooklyn, mostly to play chess. “What kind of people did you meet there?” Leo had to laugh. He’d met chess players, he said. “You met a girl there, didn’t you?” Angleton asked. “Named”—he moistened a finger and skipped ahead several pages—“named Stella.” Yes, Leo agreed. He remembered Stella. She had the infuriating habit of taking a move back after she took her hand off the piece; eventually he’d been the only one who would play with her. Angleton asked, “Do you recall her family name?” Leo thought a moment. No, he said, he didn’t. The fragment of a smile turned up again on Angleton’s face. “Could it have been Bledsoe?” he wanted to know. That rings a bell, Leo agreed. Bledsoe sounds familiar.

  Angleton’s voice was reduced to a purr now as he worked the rod, letting the fly skid across the surface of the water. “There was a Bledsoe, Stella, named by Whittaker Chambers as a fellow traveler whom he’d met at Communist Party meetings after the war.” When Leo didn’t say anything Angleton looked up from his notes. “Was Stella Bledsoe a Communist?” Leo snickered. She was a social worker, and a lot of social workers were Socialists, so she might have been, too. If she was a Communist when I first met her in the forties I never knew it. Sucking away on his cigarette, Angleton said, “She espoused the party line—unilateral nuclear disarmament, abandoning Berlin to the Russians—which makes her a Communist, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Does it matter if I agree?”

  “It doesn’t, Leo. But it would make things easier.”

  “For whom?”

  “For yourself. For me. For the Company.”

  Pushing himself to his feet, clutching the waistband on the pajama bottoms, Leo shuffled over to the toilet and stared down at the water in the bowl. He swallowed hard to relieve his parched throat and returned to the chair. “Where are we here?” he asked, waving toward the padded walls. He thought he knew; there was a former Naval Hospital on 23rd Street, a group of yellow buildings across from the State Department, which the CIA used for secret research. Because the place was so secure the Company occasionally debriefed defectors there.

  Angleton looked up at Leo. “As far as you’re concerned we could be on another planet,” he said. There was
no malice in his voice, only cold information.

  “My wife will start asking questions when I don’t turn up at home.” Angleton glanced at his wristwatch. “By now,” he said, “the Director will have phoned up Adelle and apologized profusely for packing you off to Asia on such short notice. ‘Something has come up,’ he will have told her. ‘You’ll understand if he didn’t provide details.’ Your wife will have taken the news bravely; will have surely inquired when she might expect you to return home. The Director would have been vague. ‘It could take time,’ he would have said. ‘He has no clothing,’ your wife will have remarked. ‘Can you pack a bag and I’ll send a car around to pick it up,’ the Director will have said. ‘Will he call me?’ Adelle might have asked. ‘I’ve instructed him to maintain radio silence,’ the Director would have answered. ‘But rest assured I’ll personally call you when I have more to tell you.’ ‘Will he be in any kind of danger?’ Adelle would want to know. ‘None whatsoever,’ the Director would tell her. ‘You have my personal word for that.’”

  Leo felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him again. “I never really understood until now what a bastard you are,” he murmured.

  Unperturbed, Angleton turned back to the first page in the loose-leaf book and stared at the single word printed on it. Leo concentrated on the capital letters, trying to read them upside down. The letters swam into focus. The word was: SASHA.

  Angleton closed the loose-leaf book and stopped the tape recorder. He put them and the ash tray into a brown paper shopping bag and, without a word, went to the door. He rapped twice against it with his free hand. The prizefighter opened the door and let him out and closed it again. Leo found himself regretting that Angleton had gone. At least he was someone to talk to. He spread the blanket and doubled it and tried to doze. The three naked bulbs were brighter than before—Leo realized that they worked on a rheostat and had been turned up to deprive him of sleep. Lying there on the blanket, curled up in a fetal position, he lost track of time. At one point the door opened and someone slid a tin plate inside, then the door slammed closed again. Clutching his waistband, Leo shuffled over to the door and stuffed bits of cold cooked cabbage into his mouth with his fingertips. Tears came to his eyes when he realized that the cabbage had been salted. For a long time he stood staring at the toilet. Finally he went over to it and dipped the tin cup into the water and sipped it. He gagged and crouched, jamming his head between his legs and breathing deeply to keep from vomiting. When he felt better he stood up and urinated into the toilet and flushed it, and stretched out again on the blanket, his eyes wide open, thinking.

  SASHA.

  Agatha Ept was categoric: Today was not the moment for a Capricorn and a Virgo to undertake new projects. “I’d be thrilled to explain why,” she said,” backing toward the bedroom. “To begin with, Pluto is squaring Mars—okay, okay, I can take a hint.” And she disappeared through the door.

  “She is a crazy American lady,” Sergei Kukushkin told Manny when they were alone, “if she is seriously thinking that stars decide our fate.”

  Manny had come to like Kukushkin. His open features, the worry lines that creased his brow whenever they talked about his wife or daughter, even the anxiety betrayed by the metronome-like clicking of his fingernails—they all appeared to support the notion that AE/PINNACLE was a genuine defector bearing genuine information. Manny wished it were otherwise; wished that Sergei wouldn’t look him straight in the eye when he talked, wished that he could detect in his handshake a holding back, a hesitation, a hint of something other than forthrightness. Because if Kukushkin was genuine and Jim Angleton was right, Leo Kritzky was SASHA.

  “Did Elena Antonova pick up the pills this morning?” he asked Kukushkin now.

  A smile lurked in the Russian’s eyes. “She took the first two immediately she returned to the embassy,” he said. “Elena said me that she felt relief in minutes.” Kukushkin’s fingernails fell silent, a sign that a particularly important question was on his tongue. “And SASHA? What has happened with SASHA?”

  With an effort Manny kept his eyes on Kukushkin. “Mr. Angleton claims he has discovered his identity.”

  The Russian asked in a whisper, “And has SASHA been taken into custody?”

  Manny nodded.

  “You do not look happy about this.”

  “Arranging meetings with you, establishing codes and signals that you can use if the circumstances change, relaying questions and bringing back your answers, this is my job. What happens with the serials you give me is in the hands of others.”

  “And do you honestly think, Manny, that the SASHA in custody is the real SASHA?”

  “It’s Thursday,” Manny said. “According to your information SASHA has been back at his desk at Langley since Monday. It is true that only a handful of our people know your identity. But a number of people from various departments are involved in this—monitoring phone lines, disguising pills for your wife, watchers and handlers keeping track of you and your wife, that kind of thing. Word that there is a high-level defection in the works is bound to seep out. If you are right about SASHA—if he is someone important—he would have heard about it by now. Did you notice your SK people taking any particular precautions?”

  Kukushkin shook his head.

  “Did your wife think she was followed when she went to the dentist this morning?”

  “If she was followed I am not sure she would see it.”

  “We would see it, Sergei. She was clean when she came out of the subway at Dupont Circle. She was clean when she went back into the subway. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary at the embassy? Anyone paying particular attention to you?”

  “The rezident called me in and opened a bottle of Scotch whiskey and offered me a drink.”

  “He’s pleased with the patent reports you bring back?”

  Kukushkin thought about this. “I would say he is satisfied, yes. He was in trouble with Moscow Centre last December. A KGB officer at the embassy was recalled to Moscow for claiming he ran an American defector who gave him radar secrets—it developed that this same information was available in aviation magazines. A month later a KGB colonel, working under diplomatic cover, wrote a ten-page report on a conversation he had with your Secretary of Defense Schlesinger when he only shook his hand in a receiving line.” The Russian raised his palms. “We are all under great pressure to produce secrets.”

  Manny judged the time had come to pose the question he had been instructed to ask. “How about it, Sergei? Will you risk it? Will you stay in place now that SASHA is no longer a menace to you?”

  “And if I agree…”

  Manny understood that the Russian wanted to hear the terms again. “We’ll bring you all over at Christmas when you and your family go down to visit Disney World in Florida. There will be a lump sum payment of two hundred fifty thousand dollars sitting in a bank account, and a monthly consultant’s stipend of fifteen hundred for a minimum of ten years. There will be a completely new identity and American citizenship, and a two-story house in a residential area of Florida to be decided on by you. There will be a four-door Oldsmobile parked in the driveway.”

  “What if I sense that they are closing in on me before December?”

  “We’ll devise emergency signals and procedures to pull you and your family out immediately.”

  Kukushkin inspected his fingernails, then looked up. “I think I am crazy like the American lady in the bedroom, Manny, but I trust you. I do not think you would lie to me. I do not think you would betray me. I will do it—not for the money, although I will be happy to provide security to my family. I will do it to prove to your organization that I am who I say I am—that I am loyal to America.”

  Manny reached over and the two men shook hands. “You won’t regret it, Sergei. I promise you.” He looked at his wristwatch. “We still have three quarters of an hour.”

  Kukushkin himself started the tape recorder and pulled the microphone to the edge of the kitchen table
. “I will begin today by telling you what was in the message that I deposited in the men’s room of the Jefferson Hotel for the agent that the rezidentura is running inside your National Security Agency.” When the Russian hesitated, Manny smiled encouragingly. “So, I have already told you that the rezident gave me an enciphered note rolled up inside the top of a fountain pen. Because the contents did not concern operational information, Borisov boasted to me what was in it. The message said, ‘Congratulations on the Second Man.’ You must apprehend that KGB agent-handling guidelines call for paying careful attention to the personal lives of American agents. The contents of this particular message suggests that the wife of the American spying inside your NSA gave birth to a second son, probably sometime early in the month of January…”

  4

  MOSCOW, SUNDAY, JUNE 9, 1974

  ASIDE FROM THE WRINKLES FANNING OUT FROM HIS EYES AND THE eight or ten pounds around his waist, PARSIFAL hadn’t changed all that much since Yevgeny had met him on the Gettysburg battlefield twenty-three years before. “Awfully good of you to stop by,” mumbled Harold Adrian Russell Philby, leading his visitor down a narrow corridor that smelled of disinfectant to the glass doors opening onto a small living room crammed with furniture and piles of books and magazines. A Westinghouse air conditioner fixed into the bottom of one window hummed in the background. “B-b-bloody things make a hell of a racket but at least they keep the corpus from overheating. Do I have it right? Last time our p-p-paths crossed you were called Eugene. What do I call you now?”

  “The Russian equivalent—Yevgeny.”

  “Well, old b-b-boy, you haven’t gone to seed like some people I know, I’ll give you that. Been living in America all these years, have you?”

  Yevgeny raised his eyebrows apologetically.