The Company: A Novel of the CIA (26 page)

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Authors: Robert Littell

Tags: #Literary, #International Relations, #Intelligence officers, #Fiction, #United States, #Spy stories, #Espionage

BOOK: The Company: A Novel of the CIA
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A short stocky man in his early fifties with a mane of unruly white hair, Kahn looked startled when he heard someone rapping his knuckles on the glass of the front door. He waved an open palm and called, "Sorry but I'm already—" Then his expression changed to one of pure delight as he caught sight of the two valises. He strode across the store and unlocked the door, and wrapped Eugene in a bear hug. "I thought you would be here days ago," he said in a hoarse whisper. "Come on in, comrade. The upstairs studio is at your disposal—I repainted it last week so it would be ready for your arrival." Plucking one of Eugene's valises off the floor, he led the way up the narrow staircase at the back of the store.

When he talked about himself, which was infrequently, Kahn liked to say that his life had been transformed the evening he wandered into a Jewish intellectual discussion group on upper Broadway in the early 1920s. At the time enrolled under his father's family name, Cohen, he had been taking accounting courses in Columbia University night school. The Marxist critique of the capitalist system had opened his eyes to a world he had only dimly perceived before. With a degree from Columbia in his pocket, he had become a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party and had joined the staff of the Party's newspaper, The Daily Worker, selling subscriptions and setting type there until the German attack on the USSR in June, 1941. At that point he had "dropped out": Acting under orders from a Soviet diplomat, he had ceased all Party activity, broken off all Party contacts, changed his name to Kahn and relocated to Washington. Using funds supplied by his conducting officer, he had bought out an existing liquor franchise and had changed its name to Kahn's Wine and Beverage. "Several of us were selected to go underground," he told Eugene over a spaghetti and beer supper the night he turned up at Kahn's store. "We didn't carry Party cards but we were under Party discipline—we were good soldiers, we obeyed orders. My control pointed me in a given direction and I marched out, no questions asked, to do battle for the motherland of world socialism. I'm still fighting the good fight," he added proudly.

Kahn had been told only that he would be sheltering a young Communist Party comrade from New York who was being harassed by FBI. The visitor would be taking night courses at Georgetown University; days he would be available to deliver liquor in Kahn's beat-up Studebaker station wagon in exchange for the use of the studio over the store.

"Can you give me a ballpark figure how long he'll be staying?" Kahn had asked his conducting officer when they met in a men's room at Washington's Smithsonian Institution.

"He will be living in the apartment until he is told to stop living in the apartment," the Russian had answered matter-of-factly. "I understand," Kahn had replied. And he did.

"I know you are under Party discipline," Kahn was saying now as he carefully poured what was left of the beer into Eugene s mug. "I know there are things you can't talk about." He lowered his voice. "This business with the Rosenbergs—it makes me sick to my stomach." When Eugene looked blank , he added "Didn't you catch the news bulletins—they were sentenced today. To the electric chair, for God's sake! I knew the Rosenbergs in the late thirties—I used to run across them at Party meetings before I dropped out. I can tell you that Ethel was a complete innocent. Julius was the Marxist. I bumped into him once in the New York Public Library after the war. He told me he'd dropped out in forty-three. He was being controlled by a Russian case officer working out of the Soviet Consulate in New York. Later I heard on the grapevine that they used Julius as a clearing house for messages. He was like one of us—a soldier in the army of liberation of America. He would receive envelopes and pass them on, sure, though I doubt he knew what was in them. Ethel cooked and cleaned house and took care of the kids and darned socks while the men talked politics. If she grasped half of what she heard, I'd be surprised. Sentenced to death! In the electric chair. What is this world coming to?"

"Do you think they'll actually carry out the sentences?" Eugene asked.

Kahn reached back under his starched collar to scratch between his shoulder blades. "The anti-Soviet hysteria in the country has gotten out of hand. The Rosenbergs are being used as scapegoats for the Korean War. Someone had to be blamed. For political reasons it may become impossible for the President to spare their lives." Kahn got up to leave. "We must all be vigilant. Bernice will bring you the newspapers tomorrow morning."

"Who is Bernice?"

Kahn's face lit up as he repeated the question to emphasize its absurdity. "Who's Bernice? Bernice is Bernice. Bernice is practically my adopted daughter, and one of us—Bernice is a real comrade, a proletarian fighter. Along with everything else she does, Bernice opens the store. I close it. Good night to you, Eugene."

"Good night to you, Max."

Eugene could hear Max Kahn laughing under his breath and repeating "Who's Bernice?" as he padded down the steps.

Shaving in the cracked mirror over the sink in the closet-sized bathroom the next morning, Eugene heard someone moving cartons in the liquor store under the floorboards. Soon there were muffled footfalls on the back steps and a soft rap on the door.

"Anyone home?" a woman called.

Toweling the last of the shaving cream from his face, Eugene opened the door a crack.

Hi," said a young woman. She was holding the front page of the Washington Star up so he could see the photograph of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

"You must be Bernice."

"Right as rain."

Bernice turned out to be a lean, dark Semitic beauty with a beaklike nose and bushy brows and deep-set eyes that flashed with belligerence whenever she got onto the subject that obsessed her. "Purple mountain majesty, my ass " she would cry, knotting her thin fingers into small fists, hunching her bony shoulders until she looked like a prizefighter lowering his profile for combat; "America the Beautiful was built on two crimes that are never mentioned in polite conversation: the crime against the Indians, who were driven off their lands and practically exterminated; the crime against the Negroes, who were kidnapped from Africa and auctioned off to the highest bidder like so many cattle."

It didn't take Eugene long to discover that Bernice's rebellion against the capitalist system had sexual implications. She wore neither makeup nor undergarments and laughingly boasted that she considered stripping to the skin to be an honest proletarian activity, since it permitted her to shed, if only for a while, the clothes and image with which capitalism had tarred and feathered her. She described herself as a Marxist feminist following in the footsteps of Aleksandra Kollontai, the Russian Bolshevik who had abandoned a husband and children to serve Lenin and the Revolution. Bernice, too, was ready to abandon the bourgeois morality and offer her body to the Revolution—if only someone would issue an invitation.

Bernice was nobody's fool. Eugene made such a point about having been born and raised in Brooklyn that she began to wonder if he was really American; several times she thought she caught trivial slips in grammar or pronunciation that reminded her of the way her grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Vilnus, had talked even after years of living in the States. She found herself drawn to what she sensed was Eugene's secret self. She assumed that he was under Party discipline; she supposed he was on a mission, which made him a Warrior in the Party's struggle against the red-baiting McCarthyism that had gripped America.

"Oh, I have your number, Eugene," she told him when he parked the station wagon in the alley behind the liquor store after a round of deliveries and slipped in the back door. She was wearing flowery toreador pants and a torso-hugging white jersey through which the dark nipples of her almost nonexistent breasts were plainly visible. She sucked on her thumb for a moment, then came out with it: "You are a Canadian Communist, one of the organizers of those strikes last year where the longshoremen tried to stop Marshall Plan aid from leaving Canadian ports. You're on the lam from those awful Mounted Police people. Am I right?"

"You won't spill the beans?"

"I'd die before I'd tell anyone. Even Max."

"The Party knows it can count on you."

"Oh, it can, it can," she insisted. She came across the store and kissed him hungrily on the mouth. Reaching down with her left hand, she worked her fingers between the buttons of his fly. Coming up for air she announced, "Tonight I will take you home with me and we will do some peyote and fuck our heads off until dawn."

Eugene, who had spurned one Jewess in Russia only to find himself in the arms of another in America, didn't contradict her.

Eugene discovered the X chalked in blue on the side of the giant metal garbage bin in the parking lot behind Kahn's Wine and Beverage the next morning. After class that evening (on the American novel since Melville) he drifted over to the Georgetown University library reading room, pulled three books on Melville from the stacks and found a free seat at a corner table. He pulled a paperback edition of Melville's
Billy Budd
from his cloth satchel and began to underline passages that interested him, referring now and then to the reference books he had opened on the table. From time to time students in the reading room would drift into the stacks to put back or take down books. As the clock over the door clicked onto 9 P.M., a tall, thin woman with rust-color hair tied back in a sloppy chignon slid noiselessly out of a chair at another table and made her way into the stacks carrying a pile of books. She returned minutes later without the books, worked her arms into the sleeves of a cloth overcoat and disappeared through the exit.

Eugene waited until just before the 10:30 closing bell before making his move. By that time the only people left in the reading room were the two librarians and a crippled old man who walked with the aid of two crutches. One of the librarians caught Eugene's eye and pointed with her nose toward the wall clock. Nodding, he closed
Billy Budd
and put it away in his satchel. With the reference books under his arm and the satchel slung over one shoulder, he made his way back into the stacks to return what he had borrowed. Sitting on the shelf in the middle of the Melville section was a thick book on knitting. Checking to be sure no one was observing him, Eugene dropped the knitting book into his satchel, retrieved his leather jacket from the back of his chair and headed for the door. The librarian, peering over the rims of reading glasses, recognized him as a night school student and smiled. Eugene opened the satchel and held it up so she could see he wasn't making off with reference material.

The librarian noticed the knitting book. "You must be the only student in the night school studying Melville and knitting," she said with a laugh.

Eugene managed to look embarrassed. "It's my girlfriend's—"

"Pity. The world would be a better place if men took up knitting."

Max had loaned Eugene the store's station wagon for the evening. Instead of heading back to the studio over the store, he drove into Virginia for half an hour and pulled into an all-night gas station. While the attendant was filling the tank, he went into the office and fed a dime and a nickel into the slots of the wall phone. Bell Telephone had recently introduced direct long-distance dialing. Eugene dialed the Washington number that Starik had passed on to him over the shortwave radio. A sleepy voice answered. "Hullo?"

Eugene said, "I'm calling about your ad in the Washington Post—how many miles do you have on the Ford you're selling?"

The man on the other end, speaking with the clipped inflections of an upper-class Englishman, said, "I'm afraid you have the wrong p-p-party. I am not selling a Ford. Or any other automobile for that matter."

"Damn, I dialed the wrong number."

The Englishman snapped, "I accept the apology you didn't offer" and cut the connection.

The order for four bottles of Lagavulin Malt Whisky was phoned in at mid-morning the next day. The caller said he wanted it delivered before noon. Was that within the realm of possibility? Can do, Bernice said and she jotted down the address with the stub of a pencil she kept tucked over one ear.

Piloting the store's station wagon through the dense mid-morning Washington traffic, Eugene took Canal Road and then headed up Arizona Avenue until it intersected with Nebraska Avenue, a quiet tree-lined street with large homes set back on both sides. Turning onto Nebraska, he got stuck behind a garbage truck for several minutes. A team of Negroes dressed in white overalls was collecting metal garbage cans from the back doors and carrying them down the driveways to the sidewalk, where a second crew emptied the contents into the dump truck. Eugene checked the address on Bernice's order sheet and pulled up to number 4100, a two-story brick building with a large bay window, at the stroke of eleven. The customer who had ordered the Lagavulin must have been watching from the narrow vestibule window because the front door opened as Eugene reached for the bell.

"I say, that's a spiffy wagon you have out at the curb. Please d-d-do come in."

The Englishman in the doorway had long wavy hair and was wearing a snapppy blue blazer with tarnished gold buttons and an ascot around his neck in place of a tie. His eyes had the puffy look of someone who drank a great deal of alcohol. Drawing Eugene inside the vestibule, he remarked in an offhand way, "You are supp-p-posed to have a calling card."

Eugene took out the half of the carton that had been torn from a package of Jell-O (it had been in the hollowed-out knitting book he'd retrieved from the stacks the night before). The Englishman whipped out from his pocket the other half. The two halves matched perfectly. The Englishman offered a hand. "Awfully glad," he mumbled. A nervous tic of a smile appeared on his beefy face. "To tell the truth, didn't expect Starik to send me someone as young as you. I'm P-P-PARSIFAL-but you know that already."

Eugene caught whiff of bourbon on the Englishman's breath. "My working name is Eugene."

"American, are you? Thought Starik was going to fix me up with a Russian this time round."

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