6
ONCE WE WERE BACK IN GIBLETS, AND INSTALLED IN HIS LIVING ROOM, Mr. Harvey’s fatigue offered its manifest. He would fall asleep as we were talking, the glass undulating in his hand like a tulip in a summer breeze. Then he would awaken with a well-timed swoon of his wrist to compensate for the near spill of his liquor.
“I’m sorry my wife couldn’t stay up tonight,” he said, as he came out of a ten-second snooze.
She had greeted us at the door, made our drinks, and tiptoed out, but I could feel her moving about upstairs, as if, after my departure, she would come down to steer him to bed.
“C.G.’s a wonderful woman. Top of category,” he said.
The injunction not to say “Yessir” cut off the easiest response to many of his remarks. “I’m sure,” I said at last.
“Be double sure. Want to know the kind of individual C.G. is? I’ll give you an idea. A woman living in the Soviet sector left a baby on the doorstep of a Company officer down the street. Right outside his home! I won’t tell you the fellow’s name because he went through a lot of flak. Why did this East German woman pick a CIA man? How did she know? Well, you can’t clear yourself on a crazy drop like that, so let’s forget his side of it. What’s essential is that the woman left a note. ‘I want my child to grow up free.’ Enough to turn your heartstrings, right?”
“Right.”
“Wrong. You don’t take anything for granted. Not in our work. But my wife says, ‘This baby could have been dropped on us from Heaven. I won’t let her go to an orphanage. Bill, we have to adopt her.’” He shook his head. “Just the night before, I was sitting with C.G. looking at an East German TV newsreel to see if I could pick up a couple of clues about their order of battle from the outfits who were in their military parade—never feel superior to your source, no matter how mundane—and one of their bands went by. An entire platoon of glockenspiels. I looked at the ribbons they put on those glockenspiels—real Heinie froufrou—and I said to C.G., ‘Why don’t they hang prison-camp skulls on these instruments, ha, ha,’ and next day, she picks me up on it. If I hate the Sovs all that much, she informs me, then it’s my duty to adopt the baby.” He burped, gently, sadly, fondly. “Make a long story short,” he said, “I have an adopted baby daughter. Phenomenal, right?”
“Right,” I said. I did not wish to echo him in order to be contradicted again, but he just grinned and said, “Right. My daughter is lovely. When I get to see her.” He stopped. He looked at his glass. “Fatigue is your mother in this kind of work. You’d think it was a waste of time with the General, but it wasn’t. You know why I was selling CATHETER so hard?”
“No, Mr. Harvey.”
“The Director asked me to. I received a call from Allen Dulles just this afternoon. ‘Bill, fellow,’ he said to me, ‘give their three-star General Packer the tour. We need to fluff a few feathers.’ So I dedicated myself this evening to selling CATHETER to General Asshole. Do you know why?”
“Not yet, exactly.”
“Because even the Joint Chiefs’ flunkies live high on the military hog. They have battleships to visit and nuclear warning systems. It’s hard to impress them. They’re used to touring underground facilities as huge as a naval station. Whereas, we have just a dirty little tunnel. Yet we’re picking up more intelligence than any operation in history. Any nation, any war, any espionage endeavor ever. Got to remind them of that. Got to keep them in their place.”
“I could hear some of the things you said in the car. You were certainly keeping him at bay.”
“It wasn’t hard. The fact of the matter is that he didn’t really want to know what we’re picking up. Right here in Berlin we don’t spot-check more than one-tenth of one percent of our total take, but that’s enough. You can re-create the dinosaur from a few bones in the tibia. What we know, and the Pentagon hates to hear this, is that the state of the railroad tracks over on the Sov side of the line through East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland is execrable. Only word for it. And their rolling stock is worse. The Russians just don’t have the choo-choo trains to invade West Germany. There’s not a blitzkrieg in sight for years. Well, I hate to tell you how tight the Pentagon would sit on that news. If Congress ever got wind, it could strip the Army of billions of dollars in tank contracts yet to be allocated. And General Packer happens to be in tanks. He’s touring NATO scared. Of course Congress won’t even get wind unless we break a little over in their direction, and we won’t fart unless the Pentagon goes out of their way to insult us. Because the bottom line, Hubbard, is that it’s highly improper that Congress be given any inkling. They’re too malleable to public reaction. And it is a mistake to reveal any Russian weakness to the American public. They do not have the appropriate background in Communism to appreciate the problem. Do you perceive, then, the parameters of my double game? I have to scare the Pentagon into thinking that we might shoot their future budget ducks right out of the water, when actually, I’m prepared to protect said ducks. But I can’t let them know I belong to their team, or Pentagon won’t value us. Anyway, it may be academic, Junior. The Hosiery Mill that General Asshole was talking about is already two years behind in translating the gross product we send them from CATHETER, and we’ve only been in existence one year.”
He fell asleep. The life in his body seemed to move over into his glass, which perambulated further and further out to the side until the weight of his extended arm woke him up.
“Which reminds me,” he said. “How are we doing with CLOAKROOM? Where is he now?”
“In England.”
“From Korea to England?”
“Yessir.”
“What’s the new cryp?”
“SM/ONION.”
Harvey sat up straight for a moment, put down his drink, grunted, reached over his belly to his ankle and raised his pants leg. I saw a sheath knife strapped to his ankle. He unhooked it, drew it, and began to pare his fingernails, all the while looking me over through bloodshot eyes. It had been a couple of weeks since he had put me to squirming in his presence, but now I could not say if he was friend or foe. He grunted.
“I guess,” I said, “SM/ONION may be a way of telling us to keep peeling the layers.”
“Fuck that noise.” He set down the knife to knock back half of a new martini. “I don’t intend to wait another two weeks to discover that this son of a bitch has still another cryptonym. Either he’s a heavyweight, or somebody’s in total panic of me. I smell VQ/WILDBOAR in the woodshed.”
“Wolfgang?”
“You bet. Do you think Wolfgang could be with ONION in London?” He mused on this long enough to snort. “All right. We’re going to tie you in to a couple of our effectives in London. Tomorrow morning, you start calling them. If KU/CLOAKROOM assumes that he can hide in London, he is going to learn what a ream-job is all about.”
“Yessir.”
“Don’t look so unhappy, Hubbard. Hard work never killed an honest intelligence operator.”
“Check.”
“See me here for breakfast seven o’clock.”
With that, he put the knife back in its sheath, picked up his glass, and fell asleep. Sound asleep. I could be certain of this because the hand that held his martini did a quarter-roll of the wrist and emptied out his drink on the rug. He began to snore.