The Company: A Novel of the CIA (22 page)

"In the sense that if I should happen to forget, the world will remind me every ten or twenty years the way it is currently reminding the Rosenbergs. Read the New York Times and weep: two dumb but idealistic schleps pass the odd sketch on to the Russians and all of a sudden, Harvey, all of a sudden the number one topic of conversation in the world is the international Jewish conspiracy. There is an international Jewish conspiracy, thanks to God it exists. It's a conspiracy to save the Jews from Stalin—he wants to pack the ones he hasn't murdered off to Siberia to make a Jewish state. A Jewish state on a tundra in Siberia! We already have a Jewish state on the land that God gave to Abraham. It's called Israel." Without missing a beat, the Rabbi asked, "To what do I owe the pleasure, Harvey?"

"It was you who got wind of the Vishnevsky defection and passed it on to Angleton, right?"

"'Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.' I am quoting from the gospel according to that major poet and minor anti-Semite, Thomas Steams Eliot. The Company owes me one."

"The exfiltration went sour. There was a leak, Ezra."

The Rabbi sucked in his cheeks. "You think so?"

"I know so. Any chance one of your Shabbas goys moonlights for the opposition?"

"Everyone here has walked through fire, Harvey. Hamlet is missing all the fingernails on his right hand; they were extracted by a KGB pliers when he declined to reveal to them the names of some local anti-Stalinists in Georgia. If there was a chink in my armor I wouldn't be around to guarantee to you there is no chink in my armor. I run a small but efficient shop. I trade or sell information, I keep track of Nazi missile engineers who go to ground in Egypt or Syria, I doctor passports and smuggle them into the denied areas and smuggle Jews out to Israel. If there was a leak, if Vishnevsky didn't give the game away by stammering when he asked for permission to take his family out for a night on the town, it took place somewhere between Mother and you."

"I took a hard look at the distribution, Ezra. I couldn't see a weak link."

The Rabbi shrugged his bony shoulders.

The Sorcerer reached for the herbal tea, took a whiff of it, pulled a face and set the cup back on the desk. "The night I vetted Vishnevsky he told me there was a Soviet mole in Britain's Six."

The Rabbi perked up. "In MI6! That is an earthshaking possibility."

"The Brits were never brought into the Vishnevsky picture. Which leaves me holding the bag. There are eighty intelligence agencies, with a tangle of branches and front organizations, operating out of Berlin. Where do I grab the wool to make the sweater unravel, Ezra? I thought of asking the French to give me a list of SDECE operations blown in the last year or two."

The Rabbi held up his hands and studied his fingernails, which had recently been manicured. After a while he said, "Forget Berlin. Forget the French— they're so traumatized from losing the war they won't give the winners the time of day." Ben Ezra pulled a number two pencil from an inside breast pocket and a small metal pencil sharpener from another pocket. He carefully sharpened the pencil, then scrawled a phone number on a pad open on his desk. He tore off the page, folded it and passed it to Torriti. The Rabbi then tore off the next page and dropped it into a burn bag. "If I were you I'd start in London," he said. "Look up Elihu Epstein—he's a walking cyclopedia. Maybe Elihu can assist you with your inquiries, as our English friends like to say."

"How do I jog his memory?"

"Prime the pump by telling him something he doesn't know. Then get him to tell you about a Russian general named Krivitsky. After that keep him talking. If anyone knows where the bodies are buried it will be Elihu."

Luxuriating in the relative vastness of the British public phone booth, the Sorcerer force fed some coins into the slot and dialed the unlisted number the Rabbi had given him.

A crabby voice on the other end demanded, "And then what?"

Torriti pushed the button to speak. "Mr. Epstein, please."

"Whom shall is say is calling?"

"Swan Song."

Dripping with derision, the voice said, "Please do hold on, Mr. Song." The line crackled as the call was transferred. Then the unmistakable whinny of Torriti's old OSS friend came down the pipe. "Harvey, dear boy. Heard on my grapevine you were hoeing the Company's furrows in Krautville. What brings you to my neck of the British woods?"

"We need to talk."

"Do we? Where? When?"

"Kite Hill, overlooking the bandstand on Hampstead Heath. There are benches facing downtown London. I'll be on one of them admiring the pollution hovering like a cloud over the city. Noon suit you?"

"Noon's wizard."

On the slope below, a very tall man in a pinstripe suit played out the line that trailed off to a Chinese dragon kite, which dipped and balked and soared in the updrafts with acrobatic deftness. An Asian woman stood nearby with one hand on the back of a bench, trying to clean dog droppings off the sole of her shoe by rinsing it in a shoal of rainwater. Somewhere in Highgate a church bell pealed the hour. A shortish, round-shouldered man, his teeth dark with decay, strolled up the hill and settled with a wheeze onto the bench next to Sorcerer.

"Expecting someone, are you?" he asked, removing his bowler and setting it on the bench next to him.

"As a matter of fact, yes," the Sorcerer said. "It's been a while, Elihu."

"Understatement of the century. Glad to see you're still kicking, Harv."

Elihu Epstein and Harvey Torriti had been billeted in the same house for several months in Palermo, Sicily during the war. Elihu had been an officer in one of Britain's most ruthless units, called 3 Commando, which was using the former German submarine base at Augusta Bay as a staging area for raids on the boot of Italy. The Sorcerer, working under the code name SWAN SONG, had been running an OSS operation to enlist the Mafia dons of the island on the side of the Allies. Making use of his private Mafia sources, Torriti had been able to provide Elihu with the German order of battle in towns along the mainland coast. Elihu had given the Sorcerer credit for saving dozens of Commando lives and never forgotten the favor.

"What brings you to London town?" Elihu inquired now.

"The Cold War."

Elihu let fly one of his distinctive whinnies, a bleating that came from having perpetually clogged sinuses. "I have come around to the view of your General W. Tecumseh Sherman when he said that war is hell; its glory, moonshine." Elihu, who was a deputy to Roger Hollis, the head of the MI5 section investigating Soviet espionage in England, sized up his wartime buddy. "You look fat but fit. Are you?"

"Fit enough. You?"

"I have a touch of that upper class malady, gout. I have problems with a quack pretending to be a National Health dentist—he takes the view that tooth decay is a sign of moral degeneracy and advises me to circumcise my heart. Oh, I do wish it were true, Harv! Always wanted to try my hand at moral degeneracy. To square the circle, there is a buzzing in my left ear that refuses to go away unless I drown it out with a louder buzzing. Had it since a very large land mine went off too close for comfort in the war, actually."

"Are you wired, Elihu?"

"Fraid I am, Harv. It's about my pension. I don't mind meeting you away from the madding mob for a confabulation, just don't want it to blow up in my face afterward. You do see what I mean? There's an old Yiddish aphorism: Me ken nit tantzen auftsvai chassenes mit am mol—you can't dance at two weddings at the same time. Our wonky civil service minders take the injunction very seriously. Cross a line and you will be put out to graze without the pound sterling to keep you in fresh green grass. If I can keep my nose clean, twenty-nine more months will see me off to pasture."

"Where will you retire to? What will you do?"

"To your first question: I have had the good luck to snaffle a small gatehouse on an estate in Hampshire. It's not much but then every house is someone's dream house. I shall retire to the dull plodding intercourse of country life where secrets are intended to be spread, like jam over toast, on the rumor mill. The local farmers will touch their hats and call me squire. I'll he so vague about the career I am retiring from they will assume I want them to assume I was some sort of spook, which will lead them to conclude I wasn't. To your second question: I have bought half a gun at a local club. Weather permitting, I shall shoot at anything that beats the air with its wings. With luck I may occasionally pot something. Between shoots I shall come out of the closet. I am a latent heterosexual, Harv. I shall serve myself, and lavishly, instead of the Crown. With any luck I shall prove my dentist right.

A scrawny teenage boy pitched a stick downhill and called, "Go fetch, Mozart." A drooling sheepdog watched it land, then lazily turned an expressionless gaze on his young master, who trotted off to retrieve the stick and try again.

"Old dogs are slow to pick up new tricks," the Sorcerer remarked.

"Heart of the problem," Elihu agreed grumpily.

Torriti badly needed a midday ration of booze. He scratched at a nostril and bit the bullet. "I have reason to believe there may be a Soviet mole in your Six."

"In MI6? Good lord!"

Keeping his account as sketchy as possible, the Sorcerer walked Elihu through the aborted defection: there had been a KGB lieutenant colonel who wanted to come across in Berlin; to establish his bona fides and convince the Americans to take him, he told the Sorcerer he could give them serials that would lead to a Soviet mole in MI6; the night of the exfiltration the Russian had been seen strapped to a stretcher on his way into a Soviet plane. No, the Russian didn't give himself away; the Sorcerer had a communications intercept—surely Elihu would understand if he was not more forthcoming—indicating that the Russian had been betrayed.

Elihu, an old hand when it came to defections, asked all the right questions and Torriti tried to make it sound as if he were answering them: no, the Brits had been deliberately left off the distribution list of the cipher traffic concerning the defection; no, even the Brits in Berlin who had their ear to the ground wouldn't have ticked to it; no, the aborted defection didn't smell like a KGB disinformation op to sow dissension between the American and British cousins.

"Assuming your Russian chap was betrayed," Elihu asked thoughtfully, how can you be absolutely certain the villain of the piece isn't in the American end of the pipeline?"

"The Company flutters its people, Elihu. You Brits just make sure they're sporting the right school tie."

"Your polygraph is about as accurate as the Chinese rice test. Remember that one? If the Mandarins thought someone was fibbing they'd stuff his mouth with rice. Rice stayed dry, meant the bugger was a liar. Oh Jesus, you really do think it was a Brit. Achilles once allowed as how he felt like an eagle which'd been struck by an arrow fledged with its own feathers." Elihu blushed apologetically. "I read what was left of the ancient poets at Oxford when I was a virgin. That's why they recruited me into MI5..."

"Because you were a virgin?"

"Because I could read Greek."

"I'm missing something."

"Don't you see, Harv? The ex-Oxford don who ran MI5 at the time reckoned anyone able to make heads or tails of a dead language ought to be able to bury the enemies of the house of Windsor." Elihu shook his head in despair. "A Brit? Shit! We could muddle through if the Soviet mole were a Yank. If you're right—oh, I hate to think of the consequences. A Brit? A yawning gap will open between your CIA and us."

"Mind the gap," Torriti snapped, imitating the warning the conductor shouted every time a train pulled into a London tube station.

"Yes, we will need to, won't we? We will be consigned to Coventry by your very clever Mr. Angleton. He won't return our calls."

"There's another reason I think the leaky faucet is British, Elihu."

"I assumed there was," Elihu muttered to himself. "The question is: Do I really want to hear it?"

The Sorcerer slumped toward the Englishman until their shoulders were rubbing. Prime the pump by telling him something he doesn't know, the Rabbi had said. "Listen up, Elihu: Your MI5 technical people have come up with an amazing breakthrough. Every radio receiver has an oscillator that beats down the signal it's tuned to into a frequency that can be more easily filtered. Your technicians discovered that this oscillator gives off sound waves that can be detected two hundred yards away; you even have equipment that can read the frequency to which the receiver is tuned. Which means you can send a laundry truck meandering through a neighborhood and home in on a Soviet agent's receiver tuned to one of Moscow Centre's burst frequencies."

Elihu blanched. "That is one of the most closely held secrets in my shop," he breathed. "We never shared it with the American cousins. How in the world did you find out about it?"

"I know it because the Russians know it. Do me a favor, turn off your tape, Elihu."

Elihu hesitated, then reached into his overcoat pocket and removed a pack of Pall Malls. He opened the lid and pressed down on one cigarette. Torriti heard a distinct click. "I fear I shall live to regret this," the Englishman announced with a sigh.

The Sorcerer said, "There is a Soviet underground telephone cable linking Moscow Centre to the KGB's Karlshorst station in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The KGB uses this so-called Ve-Che cable, named for the Russian abbreviation for 'high frequency,' vysokaya. chastota. Russian technicians invented a foolproof safety device—they filled the wires inside the cable with pressurized air. Any bug on the wire would cause the current going through it to dip and this dip could be read off a meter, tipping off the Russians to the existence of a bug. Our people invented a foolproof way to tap into the wire without causing the pressurized air to leak or the current to dip."

"You are reading Soviet traffic to and from Karlshorst!"

"We are reading all of the traffic. We are deciphering bits and pieces of it. One of the bits we managed to decipher had Moscow Centre urgently warning Karlshorst that its agents in the Western sectors of Germany could be located by a new British device that homed in on the oscillator beating down the signal bursts out of Karlshorst."