16

ON THE FLIGHT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, HARLOT WAS IN A SPLENDID MOOD. “I must say,” he told me in the confidential tone of a dean passing on a rich whisper at commencement, “it proved to be quite a meeting with your friend BOZO.”

By the twinkle in his eye, however, I had the uneasy intimation I would not be satisfied by how much he would impart. A merry light in Harlot’s eye often ended as a mote in mine.

“Well,” he said, “never forget—Bill Harvey began as an FBI man, and they do tend to be paranoid about their personal safety. How could they not? J. Edgar Hoover is always offering the prime example.” Harlot dropped his voice even more for the next. “I’ve heard that Hoover won’t allow his driver to take a turn to the left if he can also get there by making three right turns around the block. Whenever I used to ponder Bill Harvey’s odd behavior with those pistols, I would usually decide J. Edgar Buddha had infected him. One day, however, not too many months ago, not long before we arranged for you, dear boy, to go to Berlin, I had an intuition: What if those damn pistols were not just Bill Harvey’s passages of paranoia? Suppose they were, in fact, a real response to some true danger? What if he had managed to get into something bad?” Harlot extended his forefinger. “Give me a vigorous hypothesis every time. Without one, there’s nothing to do but drown in facts.

“So I looked into Harvey’s file. Right there, in his 201, is a full account of how he was obliged to resign from the FBI. You know the story. You recorded all that stuff from C.G.’s own lips. But I can see by the way you nod your head that you recall it all. So do I. Every detail that C.G. imparted to you proved to be precisely the same as the version in his 201 file. I anticipated that would be the case when I put you on to C.G. in the first place. Consider what it means. Her version of events, as related in 1956, coincided perfectly with his account in 1947 when he first came to the Agency. It’s as if an overlay had been traced over the original version. He obviously spoon-fed the 201 version to his new bride when they got together, and I suspect he reinforced it by repeating the same story to her from time to time. There’s the clue. One of the few rules you can count on in our work is that a story will conform in every detail to its earlier version only if the initial account has been artfully fabricated and carefully repeated.”

“That’s all very well,” I said, “but when you arrived in Berlin, you couldn’t know whether I had had the opportunity to speak to C.G.”

“I was coming over,” said Harlot, “ready or not. Your situation was obviously falling apart. Besides, there was all that friction between Harvey and Pullach. Gehlen was playing an awfully fancy game. So, I had to take the trip even if I had no more in hand than my preconceptions. So C.G.’s transcript proved to be wonderfully fortifying. A talisman. I kept it in my breast pocket all through breakfast with Bill. It gave me further conviction that I knew the man I was dealing with.

“Harvey and I had our meeting, by the way, in the Lounge of the Am Zoo. He knew I wouldn’t meet him on Harvey home turf. And my hotel would normally have been seen in the same light. But he must have calculated that with all his assets, he could slip a sneaky into the Lounge. After my little talk with you, however, I spoke to the hotel management and arranged for my two surveillance men to spend all of last night in the Lounge. While they could not do any wiring for me, at least no one of Harvey’s people was going to slip anything down the flue. We met next morning, therefore, with no recording devices available to either of us other than what paltry instruments we could bring in on our own person.”

“How could you ever tape Harvey?” I asked. “He must have known you were wired.”

“I had a sneaky on me I did not expect him to locate. A KGB toy the Russians have been testing in Poland. You install it in the hollowed-out heel of your shoe. Battery, microphone, the works. But we’re ahead of ourselves. Point is that breakfast—Campari and croissants for Bill, one soft-boiled egg for me—didn’t tarry too long on the amenities. We soon moved over to the opening insults. ‘Hey, buddy,’ he tells me, ‘I cut my teeth on dark-alley operations in Hell’s Kitchen while you Oh-So-Socials were eating crumpets with English buggers! Ho, ho, ho!’ Tells me he’s a three-martini man at lunch, ‘a double, a double, and a double, ho, ho, ho!’ I ask him which gun he’s laying on the table. He says, ‘It’s not the gun, it’s the hollow-nose bullets. I’ll change my gun,’ he informs me, ‘before I’ll change my shirt.’”

At this point, Harlot took a few pages of transcript from his breast pocket, peeled off the first two, and held them up. “Well,” he said, “it’s there now. Typed it myself soon as he left. Always get your tapes on paper as quickly as you can. It clarifies what happened. As I look at this little text, I keep thinking of Bill’s buttercup mouth, so much at odds with the vile spew he spits. Oh, was he primed to go! He thought he had me.” With that, he handed over the first two pages. “Figure out the dramatis personae for yourself,” he said.

SON-IN-LAW: Now that we’ve bicycled around the mulberry bush, tell me, why breakfast?

GHOUL: I thought it was time to see who was holding the cards.

SON-IN-LAW: That’s good. You’re talking about cards and I’m ready to talk about egg on your vest.

GHOUL: Don’t believe I’m the one who’s dribbled.

SON-IN-LAW: You are covered with protégé juices. Your protégé is, to be precise, in one fuck of a lot of trouble. You see, I know who SM/ONION is by now. Protégé confessed. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

GHOUL: When I decipher what you are mumbling about, I will subject myself to your moral examination.

SON-IN-LAW: Well, I send this in the open: I’m ready to bring charges on you and General Bat-Ears. For endangering CATHETER. Would it interest you to know I have proof? At this moment, a certain piss-bar pervert named Wolfgang is in custody. He is being debriefed. He has told us a lot.

GHOUL: Nobody has confessed. Nothing to confess to. This Wolfgang person is not in your custody. I received a call at 6:00 A.M. from the south of Germany. The so-called piss-bar pervert is dead.

(Long silence.)

SON-IN-LAW: Maybe a lot of people are going to be nailed to a lot of masts.

GHOUL: No, friend. That’s jawboning. Even if you and I were to go head to head with the hand you are holding and the hand you think I am holding, you could do no better than bring both of us down. Nothing could be proved. Both parties irretrievably tarnished. So let’s talk instead about the cards I actually am holding. They’re stronger than you think. You could not squeak through if you were fluttered.

I had come to the bottom of the second page of the transcript. “Where,” I asked, “is the rest?”

Harlot sighed. I must say the sound was as resonant as a low full note on a woodwind. “I recognize,” he said, “the extent of your curiosity, but I cannot let you see any more. You will have to wait on the rest of the transcript.”

“Wait?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Oh,” said Harlot, “years.”

“Yessir.”

“You may appreciate it more in time to come. It’s rich enough.” He looked about the plane and yawned fiercely. This seemed transition sufficient for him. “By the way,” he said, “I settled the bill at the Am Zoo. Your share, breaking down the Deutschmarks, comes to thirty-eight dollars and eighty-two cents.”

I started to write a check. The sum was a third of my weekly salary. “Doesn’t the Company cover things like this?” I asked.

“For me, yes. I’m traveling. But Clerical will contest your Am Zoo chit. After all, you have a stipend for your lodging.”

Of course, he could have put it on his account. I remembered a night when Kittredge and I were doing dishes at the canal house with a bar of laundry soap. “Hugh,” she murmured to me, “may have the leanest wallet in the Company.”

“Yessir. Thirty-eight seventy-two,” I said.

“Actually, it’s thirty-eight eighty-two,” he said, and with no transition, added, “Do you mind if I elaborate on a point I was attempting to make last night?”

“No,” I said, “I’d welcome it.” If I had been hoping to hear something more about Harvey, I received instead a sermon on the subtleties of evil in the realm of Communism. All the while I was obliged to listen, my balked curiosity remained as painful as a venereal twinge.

“I would remind you,” said Harlot, “that the true force of the Russians has little to do with military strength. We are vulnerable to them in another way. Burgess, Philby, and Maclean proved it. Can you conceive how badly it sat in me that Bill Harvey was right about that gang and I was wrong? Yet I had to recognize that Bill perceived something I missed, and in time it became one abominable thesis: The better your family, the more closely you must be examined as a security risk. For the Russians are able to get their licks in on whatever is left of the Christian in many a rich swine. It goes so deep—this simple idea that nobody on earth should have too much wealth. That’s exactly what’s satanic about Communism. It trades on the noblest vein in Christianity. It works the great guilt in us. At the core, we Americans are even worse than the English. We’re drenched in guilt. We’re rich boys, after all, with no background, and we’re playing around the world with the hearts of the poor. That’s tricky. Especially if you have been brought up to believe that the finest love you will ever come near goes back to the sentiments of Christ washing the feet of those same poor people.”

“How would you feel,” I asked, “if I said these things? Wouldn’t you wonder which side I was working for?” My thwarted curiosity still lay like lead on my stomach.

“If I thought I was on the wrong side,” he answered, “I would feel obliged to defect. I do not wish ever to work for evil. It is evil to recognize the good, and continue to work against it. But, make no mistake,” he told me, “the sides are clear. Lava is lava, and spirit is spirit. The Reds, not us, are the evil ones, and so they are clever enough to imply that they are in the true tradition of Christ. They are the ones who work at kissing the feet of the poor. Absolute poppycock. But the Third World buys it. That’s because the Russians know how to merchandise one crucial commodity: Ideology. Our spiritual offering is finer, but their marketing of ideas proves superior. Here, those of us who are serious tend to approach God alone, each of us, one by one, but the Soviets are able to perform the conversion en masse. That is because they deliver the commonweal over to man, not God. A disaster. God, not man, has to be the judge. I will always believe that. I also believe that even at my worst, I am still working, always working, as a soldier of God.”

We were silent. But I could take no comfort sitting beside him in silence. “Ever read Kierkegaard?” I asked. I wanted so much to drill one small hole into the steel plate of Hugh Montague’s certainty.

“Of course.”

“What I get from him,” I said, “is modesty. We cannot know the moral value of our actions. We may think ourselves saintly at the exact moment we’re toiling for the Devil. Conversely, we can feel unholy and yet be serving God.”

“Oh, don’t you know. All that is subtended by faith,” said Hugh. “The simple subtends the complex. If not for my faith, I could wield a damned good Kierkegaardian dialectic. Why not say that the U.S.S.R., because it preaches atheism, is in no position to corrupt religion? So, unbeknownst to itself, it is the true bulwark of God. Religious conviction in a Communist environment has to be luminous in its beauty. After all, you have had to acquire it at such personal cost. Russia, therefore, has the social climate to create martyrs and saints, whereas we spawn evangelists. Harry, give in to Kierkegaard’s dialectic just once and you’re in a lot of trouble. It’s worrisome. The possibility that we will all be terminated in a nuclear opera does make our average citizen go all out for pleasure. The truth is that the West builds pleasure palaces faster than churches. A secret desire begins to grow: Maybe there will be no judgment! Should the world blow up, God’s faculties will also be atomized. Such may be the unconscious belief. So, the quality of work deteriorates. Everywhere, work deteriorates. Eventually, that has to hurt us much more than it will hurt the Russians. Lava has no need of quality.” He sighed again—a long meditative note on the instrument of his voice, and was silent, then cracked his knuckles. “In any event,” he said with a smile, “it is wise to celebrate a victory by reviewing morose thoughts. That keeps the devils away.” He reached over and thumped my knee. “I’m nervous,” he added, “because I feel twice blessed. That, dear boy, is asking for it. You see, quite beyond my good morning with Harvey, there’s another matter. I’m your godfather, am I not?”

“Yessir.”

“Been a good one?”

“Superior.”

“Well, now, return the favor.”

“Hugh?”

“Yes. In about seven months, Kittredge and I are going to have a child. I want you to be the godfather.”

The plane flew on.

“That’s splendid news,” I said, “and a great honor.”

“You are Kittredge’s choice fully as much if not more than you are mine.”

“I can’t tell you how I feel.”

I was numb. I felt nothing. I wondered if I was going to die before I found out what happened with Bill Harvey. Indeed, it would take more than eight years before I would get to know the contents of the full transcript.