13

AFTER DINNER, MY FATHER PROPOSED THAT I STAY WITH HIM FOR THE night. He was living, he told me, at a friend’s apartment off K Street and 16th, “an old hand in an old apartment,” my father said in passing, and when we went up, I was struck with how shabby were the furnishings. It spoke of small income for an old hand without private funds; it also reminded me of how pinch-fisted we Hubbards could be. My father was certainly able to afford a decent hotel, yet chose to bunk here instead—I hardly knew if he was saving expense money for the CIA or himself. On second look, however, I realized his story was not true. The spartan lack of amenities—one gray sofa, two gray chairs, one old carpet, one pitted metal ashtray on its own stand, no drapes, and a bureau with cigarette burns, a refrigerator, as I soon discovered, with three beers, a tin of sardines, a box of crackers, and half-empty old jars of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise—was enough to tell me that no one was living here. There was no personal clutter. Not one picture or photograph. This couldn’t be a friend’s apartment. We were in a safe house. I was visiting my first safe house. Naturally my father would choose to stay in one. It fit the loneliness he liked to wrap around himself whenever he was not back in his Tokyo home with warm reliable Mary Bolland Baird Hubbard.

My father now waved me into one of the two dusty armchairs, and brought forth from a kitchen cupboard a half bottle of cheap Scotch which we drank with water, no cubes. He had turned on the refrigerator, however, and it was humming loudly enough to discourage any microphone hidden anywhere about. I was, at this point, highly sensitive to the possible presence of sneakies, inasmuch as one of the courses back at the Reflecting Pool had been in electronic surveillance, and I wondered if my father’s quick tapping of his fingernails against the end table by the side of his chair came from nervousness, fatigue, or his long-trained habit to send out sufficient noise to discourage any but the most advanced listening devices. Of course, I had even less idea whether I was being too paranoid or insufficiently so.

“I want to talk to you about Hugh and Bill Harvey,” said my father. “Hugh means a good deal to me, but I have to tell you—he’s not perfect. It’s damnable, because he’s almost perfect, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, when people get up to 98 percent, it hurts out of proportion if they can’t reach those last two points. Hugh may be the best man we have in the Company. He’s the most brilliant, and certainly one of the more scholarly, and he has guts. He’s a real cross between a panther and a mountain goat. Don’t get him angry, and don’t dare him to leap.”

“Yessir,” I said, “I have a very high opinion of him.”

“I don’t mind if he takes his own leaps, but I’m not sure he isn’t asking you to go along with him on this one.” My father threw up his hands as if to apologize for not being able to tell me more.

“Does any of this concern the larger-than-life secret?” I asked.

He coughed heavily with an unhappy subterranean sound. A considerable mucus must have been ravaging his powerful chest. My father was still in his late forties, but the sound of this cough, filled with the gravel of booze and nicotine, seemed to have come from a much older man concealed within that powerful body. “Yes,” he said. “Hugh should not have brought the matter up. I know I won’t tell you, and I wouldn’t even if I could because I don’t want you to bear the responsibility of holding such a weighty secret, a true secret of state. Tell me, then, why Hugh figures he can feed it to you as part of your orientation?”

There was obviously no answer to that.

“He will certainly tell you,” my father went on. “Don’t repeat this to a soul, but he lets more secrets out than anyone in his position ever should. It’s as if he’s making a bet on his own judgment. I suppose it gives him the grandest feeling.”

I think my father may finally have had his fill of drink, for I could feel him meandering away from me in his mind. Then he sat up with a jerk. “The point is, Hugh has no right to trust anyone. Not after Philby. You’ve heard about Kim Philby?”

“A little,” I said. I was trying to recall Lord Robert’s comments on the subject.

“Philby came very near to being Hugh’s nemesis. Philby was so thick with Burgess and Maclean. Ever hear of them?”

“Wasn’t it a newspaper story? They were British Foreign Office stationed over here, weren’t they?”

“Damn right,” said Cal. “When Burgess and Maclean pulled their disappearance back in 1951 and ended up in Moscow, everybody here divided into camps. Did Philby tell Burgess and Maclean to decamp, or did he not? Old friends weren’t speaking, not if one thought Philby was guilty and the other didn’t.”

“Which camp were you in?”

“Pro-Philby. Same as Hugh. Kim Philby was a friend of Hugh’s, and he was a friend of mine. We used to drink together in London during the war. You’d swear Philby was the peachiest Englishman you ever met. Had a stammer. But very funny when he could get the words out. Which he could, when drunk.” After which my father suddenly went silent.

I waited, but he said no more. Then, he yawned. “I’m ready to turn in,” he said. “I caught this bug in Djakarta—a hellzapopper of a bug. I wonder what it looks like under the microscope.” He smiled in superiority to his own physical defects, and added, “Let’s not get into Kim Philby now. It’s too depressing. The point is, Hugh ended up looking pretty bad when it was over. The anti-Philby people clearly won out. That was Bill Harvey’s doing. When Hugh tells the story, and I think he will if you ask him, he’ll pretend to be half-fond of Harvey. He has to. By now, we’re just about certain that Philby was working for the KGB. So Hugh has to say half-decent things about Harvey. Don’t believe him. He hates Bill Harvey.”

Then why am I being sent to Berlin? I wanted to ask.

“All the same,” said my father, as if I had in fact spoken aloud, “Berlin’s a good idea. I will write that letter. You could use some roughing up. Bill Harvey’s the man to give it to you.”

With that, I was left to turn in for the night. There were two single beds in the next room and sheets and blankets of a sort. I lay there listening to my father cry out from time to time in his slumber, a short barking sound, and I finally slept in a half-coma which commenced with visions of Bill Harvey through Kittredge’s eyes. She had certainly described him once. “We know a man in the Company, awful person, who carries a handgun in a shoulder holster even when he comes to dinner. Isn’t that so, Hugh?”

“Yes.”

“Harry, he’s built like a pear, narrow shoulders and a relatively thick middle. His head’s the same way. Pear-shaped. He has goggle eyes. An absolute frog, this man, but I couldn’t help noticing—he has the prettiest little mouth. Small and nicely curved. Very well shaped. A glamour-girl’s mouth in a toad’s face. That sort of thing gives even more clues to Alpha and Omega than the right and left side of the face.”

Had it been Bill Harvey who confronted me at the edge of sleep? I had a curious experience that night, and it was far from wholly unpleasant. I felt West Berlin coming nearer to my life. My first foreign tour awaited me. Even this grim safe house with its olfactory echo of old cigarettes and wet cigar butts, its memories of men waiting for other men to arrive, was a harbinger of the years to come. My loneliness could serve much purpose. The mean appurtenances of our gray apartment, spectral by the streetlight that came through the window shades, as brown by now as old newspapers, gave me a sense of why my father chose to stay here rather than at a hotel. A safe house was the emblem of our profession, our monk’s cell. Perhaps that was why my father had produced the transparent fiction that this was a friend’s apartment. In the act of penetrating his cover story, I would see a safe house with eyes of discovery. Many a rendezvous in West Berlin would look like this, I supposed, and I was to prove right.

Let me describe the bizarre vanity of the meditation that followed. Lying in this habitat, I felt equipped to travel through dark spaces and engage in deeds not free of the odor of burning sulphur. A few feet away was my father’s troubled body, and I, sensitive to the specters that would bring a man as strong as himself to cry out in barking sounds as though to warn off nocturnal enemies, thought of my old taste for caverns, including that underground city of excavated rooms whose plans I had drawn as a boy. That brought me to contemplate once more the cavern in my own head. It had been left in place of whatever half-formed monsters of harsh tissue or imperfect flesh had been uprooted from my brain. Did that unfilled volume now draw me toward many a strange situation I would yet encounter?

At that moment I thought of Harlot with whole admiration. He believed that our work could shift the massive weight of historical drift by the only lever our heavens had given us, the readiness to dare damnation in our soul. We were here to challenge evil, negotiate its snares, and voyage out into devious activities so far removed from the clear field of all we had been taught that one could never see the light at the end of such a crooked tunnel. Not when one was in the middle.

On just this thought, I fell asleep. I did not know that my reverie had produced a kind of revelation. The larger-than-life secret of West Berlin alluded to on this night was nothing less than a fifteen-hundred-foot tunnel dug in holy secrecy, under Harvey’s supervision, into East Berlin for the purpose of tapping Soviet military headquarters’ long telephone lines out to Moscow.