15

I WAITED THROUGH AN ODD TWENTY MINUTES, ALL TOO AWARE OF HOW the films one had seen could, on occasion, command as large a part of one’s brain as family and upbringing. I expected the two men on the street to knock at any moment on my door. I waited for Bill Harvey to arrive. I could also visualize Dix Butler coming into the living room accompanied by Wolfgang. Ingrid now entered the movie of my mind with the clear announcement that she had quit her husband for me. I listened with whole attention to the oaths of a drunk in the street below, but nothing ensued. Just the hoot of a lout. Time went by. When the twenty minutes were almost gone, I took C.G.’s transcript and went downstairs.

Harlot drove up in a Mercedes. “Get in,” he said. “I’m Harry.” He moved for only a few feet before stopping beside one of the men in the surveillance team. “It’s all right,” he told them. “Go home now. I’ll call you as soon as I need you.”

Then we accelerated down the street. “I’m debating whether we can talk at my hotel,” he said. “It’s reasonably safe and they don’t exactly know who I am, although it never pays to underestimate anyone in Berlin, as I’m sure you’ve discovered by now.”

We drove in silence for a time. “Yes, let’s go there,” Harlot decided. “We can drink in the Lounge. There’s no way the management would ever put up with the installation of any bugs. The woodwork is too precious. In the bedrooms, yes, but never the Lounge, not at the Hotel Am Zoo. It’s an old place,” said Harlot, “and nicely reconstructed. The portier is an exceptional fellow, I can tell you. Why, the last time I was here, there were no places available on commercial planes flying out of Berlin. And, for reasons of no concern to you, I did not wish to use the Air Force. Not that week. So I asked the portier to see what he could do. Two hours later, I came by his desk and he was beaming. ‘Dr. Taylor,’ he tells me, ‘I managed to get you the very last seat out of Berlin, Lufthansa, this afternoon. In Hamburg you will connect with Scandinavian Airlines directly to Washington.’ He was so obviously pleased that I had to ask him how he did it. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I told the ticket office that you, Dr. Taylor, are the famous American poet, and it is absolutely essential that you be able to attend the Gisenius concert in Hamburg this evening! The rest is easy. Scandinavian Airlines has boodles of seats for America. You will be able to stretch out.’ Yes,” said Harlot, “that sort of skill is disappearing all over the place.”

“And Dr. Taylor was your cover name?”

“Obviously.” He seemed annoyed that I had not enjoyed his story more. “What impresses you about the choice of Dr. Taylor?”

“Schneider is the word for tailor. Are you that close to Gehlen?”

Harlot looked to be at a rare loss. “Do you know,” he said, “it could have been unwitting.”

I made no reply. I was not sure of anything I felt. “Well,” he added, “Gehlen is awful, and I really can’t bear that slippery sort of complacency you find in ex-Nazis who’ve gotten away with it. They carry such a subtle strain of self-pity. But all the same, Harry, I work with Gehlen closely. He’s good at his job, and you have to respect that. The task is Sisyphean in its difficulties.”

“I’m not sure he’s all that good anymore,” I said. “In my opinion, he is no longer a match for Harvey.”

“Oh, dear, you will always be loyal to whomever you work for. It’s that Cal Hubbard strain. Pure bulldog. Except you’re mistaken. I happen to have gone over the transcript Gehlen sent me, and I can promise you, given what each man had to lose and gain, Gehlen came off well. Harvey was an impetuous fool to tip his hand on Wolfgang.”

“I still don’t understand how you can put up with Gehlen.”

“Oh, anyone else with such a life would show no redeeming qualities. I choose to breathe on the ember of humanity I see in that little German.”

We had come to the hotel. He left the car for the doorman, and steered me directly to the Lounge. “I had,” I said as soon as we sat down, “a talk with Mrs. Harvey. It’s here in this transcript. I think it’s what you want.” He pocketed the papers and the tape without looking at them. That annoyed me. I may have been reluctant to do the job, but I wanted to be praised on how well I had brought it off. “She’s loyal to her husband,” I said. “So I don’t know that you’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for.”

He smiled—was it condescendingly?—and brought forth the pages he had just put away, reading them with an occasional tap of his finger. “No,” he said on finishing, “it’s perfect. It confirms everything. One more arrow in the quiver. Thank you, Harry. Good work.”

I had the feeling, however, that if I had not nudged his attention back to the transcript, he would not have looked at it for quite a while. “Is it of real use to you?” I persisted.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve had to move without it. In the event, what with a few things speeding up, I have had to proceed on the assumption that C.G. would say just about what she did say. So, we’re all right. Now, let’s have our drink—two slivovitz,” he said to the waiter coming up. It obviously did not occur to him that I had no love for the drink he ordered.

“I want to get you ready for the next step,” he said on the waiter’s departure.

“How much trouble am I in?”

“None,” he stated.

“For certain?”

“Ninety-five percent.” He nodded. “Tomorrow morning Bill Harvey and I have an appointment.”

“Will I be there?”

“Most certainly not. But it will go the way I expect it to go, and in the late afternoon, you and I are booked to take the Air Force shuttle to Frankfurt and connect there with Pan American overnight for Washington. You’ll be one of my assistants until we decide what you should do next. Congratulations. I cast you into the pit and you’ve survived.”

“Have I?”

“Oh, yes. You don’t know how opposed was your father to the idea of sending you to Berlin. But I told him you’d come out all right, and better prepared. Of course, you mightn’t have gotten through it without me, but then you wouldn’t have been parboiled if I had not been the chef.”

“I don’t know that I’m altogether out of it yet.” My gonorrhea gave a mocking twinge. As I sipped my drink, I remembered that liquor was supposed to be antipathetic to penicillin. To hell with that. There was unexpected warmth in the slivovitz.

“I’ll get you a room at the Am Zoo for tonight,” said Harlot. “Do you have a lot of things at your apartment to take home with you?”

“Only the clothes I brought. There hasn’t been time to buy anything.”

“Go by your place tomorrow after I’ve seen Harvey, and do the packing then. After all, if Harvey finds out tonight that you’ve left the premises, he could send a couple of baboons to pick you up.”

“Yes,” I said. I was feeling anesthetized by the liqueur. I had thought I was full of a good many feelings for Bill and C. G. Harvey, but now they did not seem to exist. I didn’t know the beginning of what I was doing, nor would I now know the end. Intelligence work did not seem to be theater so much as the negation of theater. Chekhov once said that an audience who saw a hunting gun above the mantel in the first act expected it to be fired by the last act. No such hope for me.

“Why are you opposed to CATHETER?” I asked.

He looked around. CATHETER was still a dubious subject for conversation in a public room.

“There’s a movement now in climbing,” he said, “that I abominate. A team tackles a straight wall that offers no holds. But they take along a hand-drill and screw a bolt into the rock. Then they cinch themselves up and drill a hole for the next bolt. It takes weeks to do something major, but any farm boy who can bear the drudgery now becomes an important climber. There’s your CATHETER,” he whispered.

“I must say that your friend General Gehlen did not like what CATHETER was able to tell us. Especially what it had to disclose about the weaknesses of the East German railway system.” Now I was whispering.

“The state of East German railroad yards is not what Communism is about,” said Harlot in reply.

“But isn’t it our priority in Europe to know when the Soviets might attack?”

“That was a pressing question five or six years ago. The Red onslaught, however, is no longer all that military. Nonetheless, we keep pushing for an enormous defense buildup. Because, Harry, once we decide that the Soviet is militarily incapable of large military attacks, the American people will go soft on Communism. There’s a puppy dog in the average American. Lick your boots, lick your face. Left to themselves, they’d just as soon be friends with the Russians. So we don’t encourage news about all-out slovenliness in the Russian military machine.”

“Bill Harvey said virtually the same thing to me.”

“Yes, Bill’s interests are contradictory. There’s no one more anti-Communist than Harvey, but on the other hand, he has to keep speaking up for CATHETER even when it tells us what we don’t wish to hear.”

“I’m confused,” I said. “Didn’t you once say that our real duty is to become the mind of America?”

“Well, Harry, not a mind that merely verifies what is true and not true. The aim is to develop teleological mind. Mind that dwells above the facts; mind that leads us to larger purposes. Harry, the world is going through exceptional convulsions. The twentieth century is fearfully apocalyptic. Historical institutions that took centuries to develop are melting into lava. Those 1917 Bolsheviks were the first intimation. Then came the Nazis. God, boy, they were a true exhalation from Hell. The top of the mountain blew off. Now the lava is starting to move. You don’t think lava needs good railroad systems, do you? Lava is entropy. It reduces all systems. Communism is the entropy of Christ, the degeneration of higher spiritual forms into lower ones. To oppose it, we must, therefore, create a fiction—that the Soviets are a mighty military machine who will overpower us unless we are more powerful. The truth is that they will overpower us, if the passion to resist them is not regenerated, by will if necessary, every year, every minute.”

“But how do you know you are right?”

He shrugged. “One lives by one’s intimations.”

“And where do you get them?”

“On the rock, fellow, high up on the rock. Well above the plain.” He drained his slivovitz. “Let us get some sleep. We’re traveling tomorrow.”

As he said good-bye in the elevator, he added, “It’s a very early breakfast for Harvey and me. Sleep until I call.”

I did. My faith in his ability was large enough to let me. And if I was confused as I put my head to the pillow, well, confusion, when profound, is also an aid to slumber. I did not stir until the phone rang. It was noon. A long sleep had come to me with the reprieve.

“Are you awake?” said Harlot’s voice.

“Yes.”

“Pack. I’ll pick you up at your apartment in exactly an hour. The hotel bill is paid.” Then, he added, “You are going to learn a few things in the next year.”

My education commenced not a minute after I returned to the apartment. Dix Butler was alone and pacing about in a fearfully bad mood. “What’s happened to Harvey?” he asked. “I’ve got to see him, and he won’t even pick up the phone.”

“I don’t know a thing,” I said, “except that I’m going home free and clean.”

“Give my respects to your father,” he said.

I nodded. There was no need to explain that on this day one might also take into account my godfather. “You,” I replied, “seem somewhat upset.”

“Well,” he announced, and this was all the preamble he offered, “Wolfgang is dead.”

I thought my voice was coming forth, but it wasn’t. I asked, “Violent end?” I did manage to say that.

“He was beaten to death.”

Silence came down on both of us. I worked at packing. Several minutes later, I stepped out of my bedroom to ask, “Who do you think did it?”

“Some old lover.”

I went back to my valise.

“Or,” said Butler, “them.”

“Who?”

“BND.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Or,” said Butler, “us.”

“No.”

“Sure,” said Butler, “it was Harvey’s order, and this arm. I did it.”

“I’ll send you my new address in Washington,” I told him.

“Or,” said Butler, “it was the SSD. In matters like this, you call upon Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He said, ‘Whom? Whom does this benefit?’”

“I don’t know whom,” I said. “I don’t even know what was happening.”

“Isn’t that the God’s truth?” replied Dix Butler.