The Company: A Novel of the CIA (30 page)

"I lost the two guys I parachuted into Poland—we never heard from them again. I lost a kid named Alyosha whom we parachuted into the Carpathians. He radioed back using the danger signal. He still checks in every week or two, but he always uses the danger signal—we figure he's being played back. When they get tired of the radio game they'll shoot him, too."

Ebby heaved himself out of the chair and walked over to the door and slammed it shut so hard the empty coffee cups on his desk rattled in their saucers. "It's one thing to put your own life at risk, Jack," he went on, settling onto the sill, leaning back against the windowpanes. "It's another to send simple young men into harm's way. We seduce them and train them and use them as cannon fodder. They're expendable. I don't mean to wax corny, honest to God, I really don't but I, feel—oh, Christ, I feel awful. I feel I've somehow let them down."

Jack heard Ebby out—he knew there weren't many people his friend could talk to, and talking was good for him. From time to time Jack came up with what he thought would be a comforting cliche: You're not the only one in this situation, Ebby; if you didn't do it someone else would have to; we'll only know if our efforts to roll back Communism are quixotic when they write about this period in the history books.

Eventually Jack glanced at his Bulova. "Oh, shit, I gotta run if I don't want to miss the flight back."

Ebby walked him down to the lobby "Thanks for stopping by," he said.

"Misery loves company," Jack said.

"Yeah, something along those lines," Ebby admitted. They shook hands.

Back at Berlin Base late in the afternoon, Jack tore down the steps to the Sorcerer's bunker only to be brought up short by the Night Owl standing in front of Torriti's closed door with her arms folded across her imperious chest. From inside came the melodic strains of a soprano coughing her way through the Traviata end game. "He's in a funk," she announced; the way she said it made it sound as if the funk were terminal.

"How can you tell?" Jack asked.

"He's drinking V-8 Cocktail Vegetable juice instead of whiskey."

"What caused it?" Jack asked.

"I brought him a couple of bottles with his afternoon messages."

"I mean, what caused the funk?"

"I'm not really sure. Something about barium meals giving him stomach cramps. You're his Apprentice, Jack. You have any idea what that could mean?"

"Maybe." He motioned for her to let him pass and knocked on the door. When Torriti didn't answer, he knocked louder. Then he opened the door and let himself into the room. Miss Sipp hadn't been exaggerating about the Sorcerer s funk: his thinning hair was drifting off in all directions, the tails of his shirt were trailing out of his trousers, his fly was half-unbuttoned, one of his cowboy boots was actually on the desk and the grips of two handguns were protruding from it. Traviata came to an end. Gesturing for Jack to keep silent until the music started again, Torriti swiveled around to his Victrola and fitted a new record onto the turntable. Then, angling his head and squinting, he cautiously lowered the needle onto the groove. There was a skin-tingling scratchy sound, followed by the angelic voice of Galli-Curci singing "Ah! non credea mirarti " from La Sonnambula.

Sighting along the top of an outstretched index finger, Torriti—looking like an antiaircraft gun tracking a target—swiveled his bulk around in the chair. Jack turned out to be the target. "So what'd the General have to say?"

"He said affirmative. He said you ought to typewrite your messages from now on."

"Hunt and peck is not my style, sport." He refilled a glass with V-8 juice and drank half of it off in one long painful swallow. Then he shivered. "How the mighty have fallen," he moaned. "When my Night Owl brought up the subject of vegetable juice, I thought the V-8 she was talking about was the new, improved German V-2 buzz bomb. What's going on in Frankfurt that I ought to know about?"

Jack described the dressing-down Truscott had delivered to a hapless subordinate who had been playing with balloons over the Soviet Union but Torriti, who normally relished Company gossip, didn't crack a smile. Jack mentioned having looked in on Ebby. "You remember Elliott Ebbitt—he spent a month or two here before being reassigned to Frankfurt Station."

"He wasn't reassigned to Frankfurt," Torriti snapped. "He was sent packing by yours truly for shooting off his goddamn mouth about alcohol consumption. Good thing he's not here now—he'd be shooting off his goddamn mouth about vegetable juice consumption. What's the fucker up to these days?"

He was in mourning," Jack reported. "The Soviet-East Europe folks just infiltrated a bunch of emigre agents and lost every one of them. Ebby is the case officer."

The Sorcerer, shuffling absently through file cards in a folder labelled Barium Meals," looked up, an ember of interest burning in his pupils. "Where did this happen? And when?"

"Albania. Nine days ago."

Torriti mouth slowly slackened into a silly grin. "Albania! Nine days ago. How come nobody tells me these things?"

"It was a Frankfurt operation, Harvey."

"You're sure the emigres bought it?"

"That's what the man said. Four died on the beach, three in front of a firing squad."

"Eureka!" cried Torriti. "That narrows it down to the Special Policy Committee that coordinates operations against Albania." He drew his handguns out of the cowboy boot and fitted one into his shoulder holster, the other into his ankle holster. He pulled on the boot, combed his hair with his fingers tucked his shirt back into his trousers, swept the V-8 bottle into the burn basket and produced a bottle of PX whiskey from the seemingly bottomless bottom drawer of his desk. "This needs to be anointed," he exclaimed, splashing alcohol into two glasses. He pushed one across to Jack. "Here's to the beauty of barium, sport," he declared, hiking his hand in a toast.

"Harvey, people were killed! I don't see what there is to celebrate." The Sorcerer checked his wristwatch. "London's two hours earlier or later than us?"

"Earlier."

"An Englishman worth his salt would be sitting down to supper in a pub right about now," he said. Torriti flailed around in a frantic search of his pockets, turning some of them inside out until he found what he was looking for—a slip of paper with a number on it. He snatched the interoffice phone off its hook. "Have the Fallen Angel bring my car around to the side door," he ordered Miss Sipp. Knocking back his whiskey, he waved for Jack to come along and headed for the door.

"Uh-oh—where we off to in such a panic, Harvey?"

"I need to narrow it down ever further. To do that I need to make a phone call."

"Why don't you use the office phone—the line is secure."

"Russians thought their lines out of Karlshorst were secure, too," he muttered, "until I figured out how to make them insecure. This is fucking earthshaking—I don't want to take any chances."

Torriti sat on the edge of an unmade bed in a top-floor room of the whorehouse on the Grunewaldstrasse in Berlin-Schoneberg, the old-fashioned phone glued to his ear as he drummed on the cradle with a finger. From somewhere below came the muffled echo of a singer crooning in the nightclub. One of the prostitutes, a reedy teenager wearing a gauzy slip and nothing under it, peeked in the door. She had purple-painted eyelids and frowzy hair, tinted the color of chrome. When Jack waved her away, the prostitute pouted. "But Uncle Harvey always has his ashes hauled—"

"Not tonight, sweetheart," Jack told her. He went over and shooed her out and closed the door and stood with his back to it, gazing up at the Sorcerer's upside-down reflection in the mirror fixed to the ceiling over the bed.

"The Lion and Last in Kentish Town?" the Sorcerer was shouting into the phone. "Can you hear me? I need to speak to a Mr. Epstein. Elihu Epstein. He eats supper in your pub weekday nights. Yeah, I'd certainly appreciate that, thanks. Could you shake a leg? I'm calling from a very long distance."

The Sorcerer drummed his fingernails on the table top. Then the drumming stopped. "Elihu, you recognize my voice? I'm the chum you didn't meet on Hampstead Heath. Ha-ha-ha. Listen up, Elihu—you remember who we were talking about that day... the joker who got hitched to the Communist broad in Austria... I need to get a news bulletin to him but I don't want it to come from me... you told me you speak to him on the phone two or three times a week... yeah, people have been heard to say I got a memory like an elephant's... could you sort of slip my bulletin into the conversation next time you talk to him... tell him an old pal from your old Commando days in Sicily called you to pick your brain, he wanted to know how the apparatchiks at MI5 would react if he delivered an atomic bomb of a serial into their hot hands. Your man in Washington will ask if you have any idea of the contents of the serial. You hem and haw, you swear him to secrecy, you tell him its way off the record, you tell him that your pal—be absolutely sure to give him my name—your pal says he can identify the Soviet mole who tipped the KGB off to the Vishnevsky exfiltration... Of course it's a barium meal, Elihu... Me too, I hope I know what I'm doing... Sorry to interrupt your supper... Shalom to you, Elihu."

The Sorcerer's people had gone on a war footing. Torriti's automatic weapons had been taken down from the wall racks and set out neatly on a makeshift table in the corridor; Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel stuffed bullets into clips and taped them back to back so the weapons could be reloaded rapidly. Jack and Miss Sipp tried out a spanking new miniature walkie-talkie system that employed a tiny microphone attached to the inside of their collars and a hearing-aid-size speaker in their respective auricles. "Testing ten, nine, eight, seven, six," Jack whispered, speaking into the collar of his shirt. The Night Owl's voice, sounding as if it originated at the bottom of a mineshaft, camel back tinny but crystal clear. "Oh, swell, Jack. I am reading you loud and clear. "

Several of the newer Berlin Base recruits who happened on the sub-basement preparations wondered if it meant the Russians were about to invade. "Sir, how will we know when to set off the thermite bombs in the safes?" one of them asked Jack. The Sorcerer, washing down his grub with some water-cooler slivovitz, overheard the question. "Loose lips sink ships " he bellowed down the corridor. "Don't forget to jab yourself with a poison needle so you won't be taken alive." The recruit nodded dumbly.

"He is making a joke," Jack said.

"Un-huh." The young Company officer, a Yale midterm graduate who had turned up at Berlin Base only days before, beat a hasty retreat from the sub-basement madhouse.

For two days and two nights Torriti and his people—catnapping on couches and cots, surviving on sandwiches the Night Owl brought down from the canteen, shaving at the dirty sink in the small toilet at the end of the corridor—waited. The Sorcerer kept his office door ajar; aria after aria reverberating through the corridor and up the staircase. Every time the phone rang Jack would duck his head into the office to discover Torriti talking into the receiver while he fussed with his pearl-handled revolver, twirling it on a trigger finger, cocking and uncocking it, sighting on a bird painted on a wall calendar. "That wasn't it," he would say with a shake of his head when he had hung up.

"How will you know which one is it?" Jack asked in exasperation.

"My goddamn nose will twitch, sport." And then, at the start of the third day, it did.

"Otto, long time no see," Torriti muttered into the phone he had just plucked from its hook. When Jack turned up at the door, he waved excitedly for him to pick up the extension. "Where have you been hiding yourself?" the Sorcerer asked the caller.

Jack eased the second phone off its hook. "...phone line secure?" said the voice at the other end.

"You are actually asking me if my line is secure? Otto, Otto, in your wildest imagination do you think you could reach me on a line that wasn't?

"I may have something delicious for you, my dear Harv."

"Ach so?" Torriti said, and he laughed into the phone.

Otto laughed back. "You are again—how do you say it?—pulling my leg with your terrible German accent."

"I am again pulling your leg, right. What's the something delicious you have for me?"

"One of my people is only just back from a highly successful mission in he East. You have heard of the poisoning of seven thousand cows at a cooperative dairy near Furstenberg, have you not? That was the work of my agent."

"Heartfelt congratulations," Torriti gushed. "Another blow struck against fucking international Communism."

"You are being ironical, correct? No matter. You fight your war your way, my dear Harv, we fight our war our way. Before returning to the West my agent spent the night with a cousin. The cousin has a female cousin on his wife's side who works as a stenographer in the office of the chief of the Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit, what you call the Stassi. She takes dictation from Anton Ackermann. She must raise money quickly to send her husband to the West for an expensive eye operation. She is offering to sell Thermofax copies of all of Ackermann's outgoing letters for the past three months."

"Why don't you act as the middleman, Otto? Middlemen clean up in this dry rotted city."

"Two reasonments, my dear Harv. Reasonment number one: She wants many too many US dollars. Reasonment number two: She flatly refuses to deal with a German. She will only talk with the chief of the American CIA in Berlin. With Herr Torriti, Harv. And only if you come alone."

"How come she knows my name?"

"Ackermann knows your name. She reads Ackermann's mail."

"How many US dollars does the lady want, Otto?"

"Twenty-five thousand of them in small and very used bank notes. She offers to come across tonight and meet you in the British sector, she offers to supply you with a sample. If you like the quality of what she is selling, you can arrange a second meeting and conclude the deal."

Looking over at Jack, Torriti twanged at the tip of his nose with a finger. "Where? When?"

Otto suggested a small Catholic church off Reformations Platz in Spandau, not far from the Spandau U-Bahn station.