10

AT THE MILITARY INFIRMARY WHERE I WENT FOR TREATMENT, I SAW DIX Butler. It was the first time I had encountered him since our night on the town, and he offered a quick guide to sexual etiquette: No reference was made to the episode in the safe house. For social purposes, it did not exist. Instead, he offered a joke about our mutual ailment, and I was relieved that he took it lightly. I didn’t. I had hesitated to come to an American infirmary because my name would be recorded. On the other hand, our regulations carried serious demerits for failure to report a venereal disease. Ostensibly, no notation of this visit would go into my 201, but I was dubious.

If I did choose the official route, it was due to the medical orientation given Junior Officers on reaching Berlin. We were told it was inadvisable to seek out a West Berlin doctor since one never knew when such a person might not also be an East German agent. The SSD kept an up-to-date list of State Department and Agency personnel. Since local doctors had to report all venereal diseases to West Berlin health authorities, and since such files might as well be regarded as open to the East German police, your case could end in the hands of the SSD. They could blackmail you because of the failure to report your infection to the Agency facility in the first place. That proved to be one convincing argument.

All the same, it violated a sense of privacy to introduce CIA to my infected member. I wanted to be alone in all my shame and pride (it was, despite all, a manly disease!) and I did not wish to offer the particulars of my night. At the infirmary, moreover, I was asked to name the woman who had passed it on to me. “I don’t know,” I replied. “There’ve been a few.”

“List them.”

I delivered a few names—an imaginary Elli, Käthe, Carmen, Regina, Marlene—and located them in different bars.

“Better slow down with your sex life,” said the medic.

“You’re only young once.”

“You come back venereal again, and it goes on your 201. Second time puts the tag in the file.”

“Check.”

I was tired of saying “Check.” Dix Butler’s presence reassured me. He had come to the infirmary, too, and knew presumably how to act in this sort of matter.

“Did you ever mention to Bill Harvey that I was at the Snake Pit?” I asked as we were sitting in the waiting room.

“I did.”

“When?”

“Three, four days ago. Uncle Bill phoned to ask me.”

“You know, I was only over at the Snake Pit to establish cover.”

“Is that a fact? What were you covering?”

“You won’t repeat it?” I said.

“Not unless there’s another inquiry. I’ll tell you, boy, I take my lead from Uncle Bill. He picked me for this slot over a bagful of other trainees.”

“Well, I was over at Technical Services.”

“With Rosen?”

“I never saw Rosen.”

“I keep getting letters from Rosen. Long as manuscripts. He goes on about his work. It’s certifiably insane. He spent time watching a whore in San Francisco through a one-way mirror. She had to slip different drugs into johns’ drinks to see which drops would get the dupe to blab the most.”

“Would you let me look at Rosen’s letters?”

“If he’s fool enough to put it in writing, why can’t I show it to you?”

And, presumably, since I was fool enough to tell Dix about my job at Technical Services, he would see no reason not to repeat it to Harvey. I felt as if I had brought off a nice pocket-sized maneuver.

I was encountering a few changes in myself. If I had fallen from favor with King Bill, I did not feel weak so much as the possessor of a peculiar kind of strength. I do not know if the annealing of my conscience from iron to steel was already well begun, but I felt not unlike a soldier who has trained with considerable trepidation for a year, is now in combat, and finds it, to his surprise, a superior life. One could be dead in a day, or in an hour, but one’s worries, at least, were gone. One’s senses were alive. Small relationships took on meaning. I might never see Ingrid again, but the urge to protect her was instinctive. Combat, I was discovering, left me close to laughter, and full of sorrow for the brevity of my life (in this case, my career) but I was feeling cool.

Harvey had established my new status on the morning after my last nocturnal telephone conversation with Hugh Montague. “Kid,” he told me, “I’m putting a crimp in your access.”

“Yessir.”

“Can’t say how long this will ride. I hope it’s resolved soon. There is one piece of luck for you, anyway.”

“Sir?”

“Crane was on the line at eight this morning. He spent the last two days arguing with MI6. At first they gave no return. Then they assured him there was not one drop of onion juice on the floorboards. Six hours later, 6:00 A.M., London time, they woke him up with a phone call to his home. ‘Hold off,’ they told him, ‘it’s complicated. Can’t say more.’”

“So SM/ONION is in MI6,” I said. At a minimum, Harlot had made one crucial phone call.

“Looks like it, don’t it?” Harvey said.

“Well, sir, I’ll hang out in chancery as long as you want me to, but I can’t see—”

“Kid, hold your water.”

“Mr. Harvey, if there’s nothing more forthcoming from MI6, and there probably won’t be, I could be out on a limb for keeps. You might as well saw it off now.”

“Don’t estimate what I can and cannot determine.”

I had an inspiration. “May I advance a guess?”

“You probably won’t get an answer.”

“You’re going to put MI5 onto MI6.” Of course. He would know any number of people in MI5 from his days in the FBI.

“I may take a reading or two,” he confessed. I was amazed, given his new suspicions, that he would tell me this much, and yet I felt as if I understood him. He liked me. I had been a good pupil. If he was forever asking me to expatiate, the truth was that he did a good deal of it himself.

By late afternoon, Harlot moved again. A cable came to me from Washington listing the names of three people who worked in the Snake Pit. Their cryptonyms accompanied them. It decoded as QUALITY EQUALS SMITH, RUNDOWN EQUALS ROWNTREE, EASTER EQUALS O’NEILL. KU/ CHOIR.

KU/CHOIR was one of my old Washington roommates, Ed Gordon. I was appalled at the open nature of Harlot’s message and the effectiveness of the move. Ed Gordon, if queried, would of course deny that he had sent the cable, but, indeed, who would believe him? Supposing he had satisfied my request for a few Bypass cryptonyms, could he admit it? Poor Ed Gordon. I had never liked him much. He was half-bald at twenty-eight, had a deep blue shadow from a heavy beard, shaved twice a day, and had spent a lot of time at Villanova debating whether to apply to CIA or FBI. He was also pedantic and refused to lose an argument. Poor Ed Gordon. His testicles could be lost in this argument. Yes, I felt as hard-nosed as a combat veteran. And good. I had food to feed King Bill before concluding work for the day. He looked over the three cryptonyms, and grunted. “How did this stuff reach you?” he asked.

“Sir, you don’t want to know.”

“Maybe I don’t.” He handed them back. “Can you get any more?” he asked.

“Not from my primary source.”

“Try for a secondary. My Washington people can eyeball a couple of these boys after we vet their files. But since the real actor looks to be over at MI6, it will have to wait. I’m taking off tonight to see a man in southern Germany.”

I had the notion that Bill Harvey was going to Pullach, just below Munich, where General Gehlen kept the BND Headquarters.

“You won’t be airborne for long,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’m driving. It can be done at night under five hours, checkpoints and all, but you have to keep to 150, 160 kilometers most of the way. The martinis don’t hurt. A little sleep, and I’ll be ready for my man in the dawn.”

“I wish I could go with you,” I blurted out.

“Kid, let’s not get delirious.”

“Who do you have for my replacement?”

“There’s one backup I always count on.”

“C.G.?”

“She’s coming along.” He made a point of shaking hands with me. “See you in a couple of days. Have some product for me.”

“Mr. Harvey?”

“Yessir?”

“Please don’t tell C.G. that I’m persona non grata.”

“Kid, you’re a fucking prize,” he said.

I left him at his desk under the thermite bombs. They were now as familiar to me as the expressions of lugubrious relatives.

I had not, however, been back at my apartment for more than a few minutes when the phone rang. It was Harvey. “Pack a bag,” he said. “You’re coming.”

I started to thank him, but he cut me down. “Hell, no,” he said, “it’s not me. It’s the fellow I’m going to visit. He requested that I bring you along. Says he met you in Washington.”

“He did?” Now I couldn’t conceive of who it was. Might it be Harlot? Had he arrived and gone directly to BND Headquarters? Was he, in effect, declaring our liaison? Harvey’s next speech, however, took this supposition away.

“How you met him is more than I can figure out,” he said. “The Kraut don’t get to Washington that often.