6

Jan. 18, 1957

Harry, dear,

It’s my turn to make a confession. I kept wanting to acknowledge the brooch, but couldn’t. You see, I’ve lost it.

There was the most unsettling premonition when I opened your little package—so small, so carefully wrapped, obviously your Christmas gift—and beheld that breast pin. I knew it had belonged once to some particularly nasty old family who suffered some horrid disaster.

I’ve always had psychic powers there was no sense talking about. They proved no use to me, and usually came at the oddest times and for the most inconsequential reasons. I even wondered why I possessed this one milligram of magic so altogether unconnected to the other hundred and twenty pounds of me. Since Christopher has been born, however, it’s come to focus. It’s a gift, a power of maternity, if you will. I developed an exceptional sense of what to have in our house for Christopher, and what should not be there. Dear Herrick, when I opened your package, I wondered if you had gone in for the cruelest kind of joke. It was as if I started to bite into a scrumptious éclair and a roach came swimming up out of the cream. I almost shrieked. That brooch was loathsome. I could not understand how you and I, so close in so many ways, could be so far apart on this one matter. I didn’t even want to keep your gift in the house. Yet, given my feelings, I couldn’t pass it on to a friend, and it’s dangerous, my instincts tell me, to throw away any object you consider evil. (Measure my true regard for you by the honesty of these remarks!) I decided finally to sell it. Filthy lucre can, at least, demagnetize the aura of awful things—after all, isn’t that what they invented money for? I thought I might wash that cash through another transaction or two, and get it back to you. Such was my plan. Instead, I discovered this morning that the brooch is gone. It has disappeared from the box I kept in a corner of the bookshelf. I can’t believe the nurse or the cleaning woman stole it. I’m in a state as I write this, and now hear the baby crying. I’ll have to continue in a while.

Two hours later

Well, he had colic. Full diaper. I submit that baby-doo doth smell as if the little creatures discovered corruption all by themselves—that much to back up Original Sin. Then, I had a salary negotiation with the nurse, who feels she’s underpaid and wishes to rewrite our original understanding. After which, I had to go shopping for formula plus three medallions of beef to show up in the Montagues’ Wellington tonight (two for Hugh), and shallots, and chanterelles—how he adores them! When I came home, I decided to clean Hugh’s study. (Which I hadn’t been near for a week.) First thing I saw was the brooch, hanging from a little metal knob on one of the cubbyhole drawers of his desk. I had never mentioned your gift to him, and now Hugh had appropriated it. He must have thought it was something I picked up in a flea market.

Harry, it’s odd. The moment I saw your gift among his papers, I knew it was all right. Hugh is so girded about with his own talismans that I believe he can, without having any idea at all of what he is doing, make wise decisions when it comes to handling these indefinables. Your petite Uruguayan monster is absolutely stripped of its powers so long as it is attached to his desk—oh, never believe this, you can’t, but just as I wrote these last words, I had one of those precious little fantasies it’s tempting to call a vision. In part, I saw the history of the brooch. The founder of the family who owned it was either a hanging judge or an executioner—some form of expediter of the bloodier social tasks.

Well, even as I wrote this, I stood up, crossed to his study, looked again at fearsome Miss Bijou, and realized it has now become a part of the world that communicates with me. Ninety-nine and ⁹⁹/₁₀₀ percent of such a world is composed of people, hurrah, but there is a tree here and there, and a bird I recollect from my childhood, as well as a pug my father gave me in adolescence. That dog was an absolute spirit; now, this bloody breast pin. Harry, the brooch just told me that you had better watch your step with your highly disturbed Latin Communist. This Fuertes. Do be careful. He could wreck your career.

And do forgive the gloves. Your Christmas, I keep reminding myself, is as hot as July.

Love, Kittredge

I had bought the brooch on the morning after I began my affair with Sally Porringer. Since I was, at the time of purchase, full of anticipation of a vigorous sexual future, and feeling some guilt toward Kittredge, I picked out the ornament by its price, and had the inner gall to pretend it had been bought on a deep impulse. Had I taken on one more of the mortal debts and curses?

Jan. 22, 1957

Dearest Kittredge,

I am now set up with AV/OCADO, and for the present it’s going a little better than one could have hoped. Sonderstrom was right. The changing of the guard has sobered up our Latin friend. Indeed, the transition went off well. We met in a safe house that the Station is maintaining in a brand-new apartment building on the Rambla above Playa de Los Pocitos. There are a good many similar such high apartment buildings now going up and when they’re finished, I’m sure the Rambla will look like one more bare, bleak version of Lake Shore Drive in Chicago; already you can feel that developer’s aura. In the safe-house flat, taking it in from our picture window on the twelfth floor, the cars below seem as small as dog-track rabbits whipping by the wide clay-colored beach and the greenish-brown sea. Half the adolescents of Montevideo seem to be sporting on that beach. Bikinis galore. Even from this distance, big Spanish hips on the girls. Once again, the 238 pounds of beef and pork per capita shows in this registry of buttocks.

Our safe house is uncomfortably bare. We’re paying whatever our substantial rent must come to, yet have purchased nothing in the way of furniture but for the bed and bureau in the sleeping alcove, and the folding couch-bed, plastic dining table, one armchair, one lamp, and a few bridge chairs set about the living room. Plus one discarded Embassy no-color-left rug. I don’t understand safe-house economics. If we’re anteing up for a luxury apartment, why not make it appealing? (Perhaps this mean agenda has something to do with keeping the agent’s stipend low.)

In any event, I don’t know how to describe Chevi Fuertes. In advance, I studied photographs of him, and know more of his formal biography than I do, say, of Sonderstrom’s, but I’m still not prepared for his presence. He is so alive that you want to shelter him. My first thought was: Kittredge would adore him. He’s dark, of course, and thin, with a hawklike nose and a full share of the stygian Spanish gloom that always makes me think of the body pits of undertakers—there! I’ve just vented my hitherto unconscious dose of resentment at being stationed here. All the same, Chevi takes you by surprise with his smile. The face picks up lights, and a tender if wicked youth peers out at you from the mask of the gloomy man.

Roger Clarkson, having made a point of introducing me brusquely, even perfunctorily, as Peter, proceeds to business. He tells Chevi that an emergency was calling him back to the United States and I would be the replacement. We would no longer meet at the Montevideo Players, but at this safe house.

Chevi said to Roger, “I do not believe your story.”

Roger waved his hand ambiguously as if to blend all that was false with all that was true. “Peter is here,” he said, pointing to me. “This is the fact.”

“I,” said Chevi, “do not believe you are returning to the United States.”

“But I am.”

“No,” said Chevi, “you are going to Europe to work with Hungarian refugees whom your people will send back to Budapest for works of sabotage.”

“I cannot go affirmative on that,” Roger replied. His powers of improvisation are obviously in fine shape. “But you ought to know, Chevi, that they could never put me onto those Hungarians. I can’t manage Magyar diphthongs.” He gave Chevi a wink. It carried the day. Fuertes obviously needed to believe that his acumen was on the mark. Roger took care of that with the wink. Yes, it said, you happen to be right, but I can’t tell you. Aloud, he said, “Why don’t we deal with the here and now of the transfer?”

After that, Fuertes listened soberly and answered the detailed questions of our debriefing with long answers. I won’t bore you, Kittredge, with the product of these several hours. It was technical, procedural, and relatively smooth. Even as Fuertes gave us the Table of Organization of the PCU and the names of the leaders and section heads, my initial compassion for him began to deepen. He was so obviously divided. Perhaps 51 percent of the man had decided to go with us, but the other 49 percent is still attached to a network of old friendships closely woven into his childhood, adolescence, and university days, his Party work and his marriage, even his old neighborhood.

It was, we all knew, preparatory. One of the tips Sonderstrom had passed along to Roger and myself was to interview Chevi at length about his childhood and young manhood. “It will,” said Gus, “initiate a positive bond. He’ll feel important. People aren’t used to other people taking them that seriously.”

Do you know, Kittredge, once again Sonderstrom was right. As Chevi spoke into our tape recorder, I could feel resignation settle in over his gloom. It was as if he had embarked on a boat and was watching the shore of the past recede from the rail. When we were done and the cash payment had taken place, which I, not Roger, disbursed per Sonderstrom’s instructions—Chevi is getting fifty dollars a week—I noticed that he literally winced as the money touched his palm. (Do you know—I was perspiring from the effort of counting it out in front of him. It is humiliating to be obliged to humiliate a fellow human being.) I must say paper money had never felt so dirty.

Clarkson then did something subtle and proper. While Chevi had to be aware that we would discuss him in detail so soon as we were alone with each other, still, Roger had the courtesy to leave first. He gave an abrazo to Chevi, said, “I’ll send a postcard from the Balkans,” and walked out the door.

My brand-new agent and I must now have looked like freshmen who will be rooming together for the year to come. We were standing an uncomfortable yard apart.

“I am going to make my first request to you, Peter,” he said.

“Whatever it is, I will do it,” I replied. I figured the request would not be unpalatable.

“I wish you to ignore every conception Roger has implanted in you about the lineaments of my character. I would prefer that you come to know me by yourself.”

“I comprehend,” I said.

“I would hope you do.” We shook hands on that.

Well, that was a couple of weeks ago. Since then I’ve seen him twice. We make progress slowly. Chevi may have told me that it would not prove laborious to get to know him, but no one at the Station or back at the Groogs (which has become our exasperated name for our Washington overseers at the Argentina-Uruguay Desk) is ready to buy such an avowal. The Groogs are making us check out everything, from Chevi’s legal probity to his hemorrhoids. For fact. Sonderstrom has Gatsby and me looking up police, medical, and school records. We discover that Eusebio Fuertes was an honor student, but was also arrested, when seventeen, for riding around with friends in a stolen car—sentence suspended.

The heavy work, however, begins with cross-referencing of the take. We check out everything he tells us about the PCU against the knowledge we already have about their personnel. While our local files bear no comparison to the Snake Pit, still, files have a tendency to become files. Nothing is more demoralizing than to creep one’s fingers over hundreds of folders trying to chase down a confirmatory fact that comes to seem less and less essential as the lost hour slips by. Well, I won’t make you suffer with me.

There is also infernal cable traffic with the Groogs. They’re terrified that Soviet Russia Division, with all its maniacally suspicious people, will come charging down the hall if we decide that AV/OCADO is a KGB dangle. So, without quite admitting it to ourselves, we’re looking to decide he’s not, and what he tells us does fit our fact list. At least so far. Of course, we haven’t asked him yet to bring back something we can really use, and when I propose that we do, I’m shot down at once. Until we are confident he is not a dangle, we don’t dare to show what we are looking for, since that could feed the KGB.

Besides, Sonderstrom informs me, it is still too dangerous. Chevi is not yet ready, and we must not imperil our agent needlessly. I’m becoming impressed with Gus. Big, bald, red-faced ex-Marine, yet his underlying passion is to be virtuous. It makes me think about Americans. You know, the French, they say, have a passion for financial security, and the English, according to my father, care only about manners. You can be a swine and get away with it if your manners are either good, or, better, interesting. But in America, we have to be virtuous, don’t we? Even the pimps and the drug dealers have their code, I hear. Roger certainly felt virtuous, going off to marry his moneybags princess. Didn’t want the poor ugly girl to die of a broken heart. So, Sonderstrom. He worries about doing his job with decency. Even to throwing a golf game properly. Maybe it’s late, and I’m sipping too much fundador, but suddenly I love Americans.

I can’t say that I always do at the office. The inquiries on AV/ OCADO keep coming from the Groogs. It seems Fuertes is the agent-of-the-month, worldwide—I joke—but he is large enough to excite unholy interest back at Headquarters, and I am the one who talks to AV/OCADO, I know what he looks like. I am the point! (Of course, I tell myself, this is nothing to how they’re debriefing Roger right now in Washington.) Anyway, we move forward like an elephant on clogs. I don’t think you need worry yet about any quick perils to my career. What with the Groogs and Upper Whambo (Western Hemisphere Division) and Soviet Russia Division, also known as the Sourballs, nobody will allow me to get into trouble.

I will tell you something that may amuse. Maybe not. The cable presence most feared here, although not one inquiry has come from it, is an odd desk under the mysterious umbrella of your own TSS. It is called GHOUL. That office, or eminence, or whatever it is, reports only to Mr. Dulles. I hear via Porringer that even the Soviet Russia Division is leery of GHOUL. Should this mysterious desk ever suspect that AV/OCADO is a KGB dangle, our lives down here will become unmitigated cable hell. I’m told we’ll be on the Encoder-Decoder twelve hours a day answering questionnaires.

Of course, I presume to know who GHOUL is.

I left the matter there. I hardly knew what I was up to, but, then, I was feeling wicked. I wanted to tell Kittredge about Sally Porringer and knew I couldn’t, yet, all the same, I decided to try. Recognizing that I might change my mind in the middle of composition, I took up this theme on a new page.