15
PART OF THE PROBLEM WAS HOW TO REACH HIM. I KNEW NEITHER HIS CALL numbers nor his cryptonym. Still, he had to be working directly under Richard Bissell. There would not be more than two or three officers at such a level in Quarters Eye. When I came into Zenith later that morning, I consulted our table of organization and found SPINE, GUITAR, and HALIFAX on the appropriate plateau.
One was not supposed to select a cryptonym on the basis of its agreeability to oneself, but my father was bound to ignore such a rule. At the age of seventeen, he had won a sailing race for junior skippers that ran from Bar Harbor to Halifax (in Nova Scotia), and that was near enough for me.
Using the closed-circuit telephone to Quarters Eye, I had only to dial the three digits belonging to HALIFAX, and my father’s secretary, Eleanor, answered. I recognized her voice at once. She was a woman I had met on a few occasions, a trim and somewhat grim young spinster who had grown middle-aged in his service and wore her hair in a bun. Stationed with him everywhere—which is to say, Vienna, the Near East, the Far East, and, for all I knew, Honduras during the Guatemala operation—she had acquired her own office renown. It was rumored, Kittredge had once told me, that Eleanor was Cal’s mistress.
I paid more attention to Eleanor, therefore, the next time I saw her. She was not conspicuously friendly. Her lips were preternaturally tight, and her eyes were ablaze. She kept the secrets. Indeed, it occurred to me so soon as I heard her voice on the line today that I did not know whether Eleanor was her first name or a Company sobriquet.
“Eleanor,” I said, “this is Robert Charles down at HAWTHORNE. If you’ll check it out against the Quarters Eye Manifest, I think you’ll agree that I can be allowed phone ingress to HALIFAX.”
“We can dispense with the Manifest,” she answered. “I know who you are, Robert Charles.”
“That saves a stitch.”
“Dear boy, do you expect this girl to run down the hall every time a new voice chimes in from Zenith? It’s easier to memorize the lot of you.”
What a second wife, I was thinking.
“Well,” I said, “is target in?”
“Is the route open, confide, or seek? You have to specify, Robert,” she was happy to remind me.
“Seek.” That would be the secure phone.
“He’ll call you back in an hour,” she declared, and hung up.
While I waited at my desk, there were memos to catch up on. Since I had begun work on the transcripts for Harlot, my desk at Zenith had become a bottleneck in memo flow. As many as fifty memos collected on occasion. While half of such notes could be filed or thrown away, not every memo could wait. Coming back to my desk after a day away at the recruiting stations, I never knew whether to get ready for amusement or woe. I was, therefore, leafing through the accumulation when the pool secretary buzzed. I was wanted on the secure phone.
The booth at Zenith was a sweatbox. Seek would not function until you closed the door, and then the air-conditioning was cut off. You could perspire in geometrical progression to the time elapsed on the call. I heard “Robert Charles,” uttered originally, I am certain, in a loud, hearty voice, but thanks to the scrambler-descrambler it entered my ear like the hollow of a tomb. “Are you the character Eleanor claims you are?”
“Definitely on duty, sir.”
“Ha, ha. Did you think I didn’t know where you were?”
“I was considering just that possibility.”
“Eduardo filled me in. Son, you won’t necessarily believe this, but I was planning to chew some bread with you next time down. Hell, we could even break a cup.”
“I look forward to that.”
“Okay, what are we about?”
I knew him well enough to get to the point in three seconds. “The word here,” I said, “is that you’re planning to squench a certain big guy.” Squench happened to be our old summer word for running over a Maine jackrabbit. “My source,” I added, “is in the Frente.”
“Boy, this is a secure phone. Will you damn well tell me which one of those windbags you are listening to?”
“Faustino Barbaro.”
“I’ve heard of the gentleman. One fat politician.”
“Yessir.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That he wants to talk to you.”
“Many people do, including my own son. But they don’t always get around to explaining what they’re up to.”
It was no more comfortable than it had ever been to arouse my father’s wrath. I could see his blue eyes blazing. All the same, I was not going to bypass the message.
“Barbaro has connections with the mob,” I said, “and claims a couple of them are saying that you assigned them the job of eliminating Fidel Castro.”
“No truth to it,” he replied instantly. There was a pause and then he said, “How long have you been living with this foul rumor?”
“For two nights. As you can see, I didn’t give it so much credence that I rushed to the phone.”
“Well, you ought to know. It’s not my style, nor is it Mr. Dulles’, nor Mr. Bissell’s, to go in for a rotten load of clams.”
“Wouldn’t seem so, would it?”
“Who are those guys Barbaro named?”
“He refused to tell me—insisted he must speak to you.”
“Damn it, I may have to follow up.” He coughed. I expect he was about to hang up, but realized I was still his son. “Are you nicely sited on your job?” he asked.
“Yessir.”
“Working hard?”
“I know how to work.”
“I’ve heard that. Hunt put in some good reports on you during the Montevideo stretch. Except for that KGB provocation some joker tried to leave on your watch. Hunt may have waffled a bit there.”
“Howard Hunt is not perfect.”
“Ha, ha. I’ll see you a little sooner than you think,” he said, and hung up.