The Company: A Novel of the CIA (43 page)

The students quieted down and Arpad, reciting in a droning matter-of-fact manner, launched into a long poem. "This is the one that made him famous," Elizabet whispered to Ebby. "It's called 'Ertelmisegi'—whicti is Hungarian for 'Intellectual.' Arpad wound up spending three years in a prison because of this poem. By the time he was released, it has been passed from hand to hand until half the country seemed to know it by heart. Arpad describes how he tried to slip across the frontier into Austria when the Communists came to power in 1947; he was betrayed by his peasant-guide and given an eight-minute summary trial and jailed at the notorious prison Vac where the dead are not buried but thrown to the vultures. When he was finally set free, at the age of twenty-nine, he discovered that his internal passport had been stamped with a red E for 'Ertelmisegi,' which meant he could no longer teach at a university." She concentrated on the poem for a moment. "In this part he describes how he worked as a mason, a carpenter, a plumber, a dish washer, a truck driver, even a dance instructor when he could no longer find literary magazines willing to publish his essays or poems."

The students crowded into the canteen appeared spellbound, leaning forward on the benches, hanging on the poet's words. When he stumbled over a phrase voices would call out the missing words and Arpad, laughing, would plunge on. "Here," Elizabet whispered, "he explains that in the prison of Vac the half of him that is Jewish—Arpad's mother was a Bulgarian Jew— transformed itself into an angel. He explains that Jews have a tradition that angels have no articulation in their knees—they can't bend them to someone. He explains that this inability to kneel can be a fatal handicap in a"Communist country."

The poem ended with what Arpad styled a postlude. Raising his arms over his head, he cried: "Ne bdntsd a Magyart!"

The students, each with one fist raised in pledge, leapt to their feet and began stamping the ground as they repeated the refrain. "Ne bdntsd a Magyart! Ne bdntsd a Magyart! Ne bdntsd a Magyart!"

Elizabet, caught up in the general excitement, shouted the translation into Ebby's ear. "Let the Magyars alone!" Then she joined the Hungarians in the battle cry. "Ne bdntsd a Magyart! Ne bdntsd a Magyart!"

As the bells in the Paulist monastery on Gellert Hill struck eleven, one of the AVH man in the blue Skoda spotted a male figure on the walkway of the Szabadsag Bridge. For a moment a passing trolley car hid him. When the figure reappeared the AVH man, peering through binoculars, was able to make a positive identification. The vacuum tubes in the transceiver were warm so he flicked on the microphone. "Szervusz, szervusz, mobile twenty-seven. I announce quarry in sight on the Szabadsag walkway. Execute operational plan ZARVA. I repeat: execute operational plan ZARVA."

Clawing his way out of an aching lethargy, Ebby toyed with the comfortable fiction that the whole thing had been a bad dream—the scream of brakes, the men who materialized from the shadows of the girders to fling him into the back of a car, the darkened warehouse looming ahead on the Pest bank of the Danube, the endless corridor along which he was half-dragged, the spotlights that burned into his eyes even when they were shut, the questions hurled at him from the darkness, the precise blows to his stomach that spilled the air out of his lungs. But the ringing in his ears, the leathery dryness in his mouth, the throb in his rib cage, the knot of fear in the pit of his stomach brought him back to a harder reality. Flat on his back on a wooden plank, he tried to will his eyes open. After what seemed like an eternity he managed to raise the one eyelid that was not swollen shut. The sun appeared high overhead but, curiously, didn't seem to warm him. The sight of the sun transported him back to his stepfather's seventeen-foot Herreshoff, sailing close hauled off Penobscot Bay in Maine. He had been testing the boat to see how far it could heel without capsizing when a sudden squall had caused the wind to veer and the boom, coming over without warning, had caught Ebby in the back of the head. When he came to, he was lying on the deck in the cockpit with the orb of the sun swinging like a pendulum high over the mast. Stretched out now on the plank, it dawned on Ebby that the light over his head wasn't the sun but a naked bulb suspended from the ceiling at the end of an electric cord. With an effort he managed to drag himself into a sitting position on the plank, his back against the cement wall. Gradually things drifted into a kind of two-dimensional focus. He was in a large cell with a small barred slit of a window high in the wall, which meant it was a basement cell. In one corner there was a wooden bucket that reeked from urine and vomit. The door to the cell was made of wood crisscrossed with rusted metal belts. Through a slot high in the door, an unblinking eye observed him. It irritated him that he couldn't tell whether it was a left eye or a right eye.

He concentrated on composing pertinent questions. He didn't bother with the answers; assuming they existed, they could come later. How long had he been in custody?

Had he said anything during the interrogation to compromise his story?

Would the Americans at the Gellert notice he was missing? Would they inform the embassy? At what point would the embassy cable Washington? Would Arpad discover he had been arrested? Could he do anything about it if he did?

And, of course, the crucial question: Why had the Hungarians arrested him? Had the AVH infiltrated the Hungarian Resistance Movement? Did they know the CIA had sent someone into Budapest to contact Arpad? Did they know that he was that someone?

Formulating the questions exhausted Ebby and he drifted off, his chin nodding onto his chest, into a shallow and fitful sleep.

The squealing of hinges startled him awake. Two men and a massive woman who could have passed for a Japanese sumo wrestler appeared on the threshold of the cell, the men dressed in crisp blue uniforms, the woman wearing a sweat suit and a long white butcher's smock with what looked like dried blood stains on it. Grinning, the woman shambled over to the wooden plank and, grasping Ebby's jaw, jerked his head up to the light and deftly pressed back the eyelid of his unswollen eye with the ball of her thumb. Then she took his pulse. She kept her coal-black eyes on the second hand of a wristwatch she pulled from the pocket of her smock, then grunted something in Hungarian to the two policemen. They pulled Ebby to his feet and half-dragged, half-walked him down a long corridor to a room filled with spotlights aimed at the stool bolted to the floor in the middle of it. Ebby was deposited on the stool. A voice he remembered from the previous interrogation came out of the darkness. "Be so kind as to state your full name."

Ebby massaged his jaw bone.

"You already know my name."

"State your full name, if you please." Ebby sighed.

"Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt."

"What is your rank?"

"I don't have a rank. I am an attorney with—"

"Please, please, Mr. Ebbitt. Last night you mistook us for imbeciles. It was my hope that with reflection you would realize the futility of your predicament and collaborate with us, if only to save yourself from the sanctions that await you if you defy us. You have not practiced law since 199*"! You are an employee of the American Central Intelligence Agency, a member of the Soviet Russia Division in Mr. Frank Wisner's Directorate of Operations. Since the early 1950s you have worked in the CIA's station at Frankfurt in Western Germany running emigre agents, with great persistence but a notable lack of success, into Poland and Soviet Russia and Albania. Your immediate superior when you arrived at Frankfurt was Anthony Spink. When he was transferred back to Washington in 1954, you yourself became head of the agent-running operation."

Ebby's mind raced so rapidly he had trouble keeping up with the fragments of thoughts flitting through his brain. Clearly he had been betrayed, and by someone who knew him personally or had access to his Central Registry file. Which seemed to rule out the possibility that he had been betrayed by an informer in the Hungarian Resistance Movement. Shading his open eye with a palm, he squinted into the beams of light. He thought he could make out the feet of half a dozen or so men standing around the room. They all wore trousers with deep cuffs and shoes that were black and shining like mirrors. "I must tell you," Ebby said, his voice rasping from the back of a sore throat, "that you are confusing me with someone else. I was with the OSS during the war, that's true. After the war I finished my law studies and went to work for Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard and Irvine at number two Wall—"

Ebby could make out one set of black shoes ambling toward him from the rim of darkness in a kind of deliberate duck-walk. An instant later, a heavy man dressed in a baggy civilian suit blotted out several of the spotlights and a short, sharp blow landed in Ebby's peritoneal cavity, knocking the wind out of his lungs, dispatching an electric current of pain down to the tips of his toes. Rough hands hauled him off the floor and set him back on the stool, where he sat, doubled over, his arms hugging his stomach.

Again the soothing voice came out of the darkness. "Kindly state your full name."

Ebby's breath came in ragged gasps. "Elliott... Winstrom... Ebbitt."

"Perhaps now you will tell us your rank."

It seemed like such an inconsequential question. Why was he making such a fuss? He would tell them his name and rank and pay grade and they would let him curl up on the wooden plank in the damp cell that smelled of urine and vomit. He would open his good eye and peer up at the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling and remember the sun swinging back and forth like a pendulum high over the mast; he would feel the calming lift and tide of the Atlantic ground swell under the deck, he would taste the salt of sea breeze on his lips. "My rank—"

Suddenly he caught a glimpse of his ex-wife's flinty eyes boring into him. He could hear Eleonora's throaty voice laced with exasperation: "Whatever you do," she said, "you'll never catch up to your father unless someone stands you in front of a firing squad."

"My father has nothing to do with this," Ebby cried out. Even as he uttered these words, he understood that his father had everything to do with it.

"Why do you speak of your father?" the soothing voice inquired from the murkiness beyond the spotlights. "We are not psychoanalysts—we only want to know your rank. Nothing more."

Ebby forced words one by one through his parched lips. "You... can... go... to... hell."

The baggy civilian suit started toward him again but the soothing voice barked a word in Hungarian and the heavy man melted back into the shadows. The spotlights went out and the entire room was plunged into inky blackness. Two hands wrenched Ebby off the stool by his armpits, propelled him across the room to a wall and propped him upright. A heavy curtain in front of his face parted, revealing a thick pane of glass and a spotlit room beyond it. There was a stool bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, and a ghostly porcelain figure on the stool. Ebby blinked his open eye hard. With the languidness of underwater motion the figure swam into focus.

The guide from the museum, the wife of a Hungarian named Nemeth, the lover of the poet Arpad Zeik, sat hunched on the stool. She was naked except for a pair of dirty faded-pink bloomers that sagged over one hip because of a torn elastic waistband. One arm was raised across her breasts. The fingers of her other hand played with a chipped front tooth. The dark figures of men standing around the room were obviously questioning her, although no sound reached Ebby through the thick glass. Elizabet fended off the questions with a nervous shake of her head. One of the figures came up behind her and, grabbing her elbows, pinned her arms behind her back. Then the massive woman wearing the long white butcher's smock lumbered up to her. She was brandishing a pair of pliers. Ebby tried to turn away but strong hands pinned his head to the glass.

Elizabet s swollen lips howled for a release from the pain as the woman mutilated the nipple of a breast.

Ebby started to retch but all that came up from the back of his throat was phlegm.

"My name," Ebby announced after two men had dragged him back to the stool, "is Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt. I am an officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. My pay grade is GS-15.'

Barely concealing his sense of triumph, the interrogator asked from the darkness, "What was your mission in Budapest? What message did you bring to the counterrevolutionist Arpad Zeik?"

The spotlights caused tears to trickle from the corner of Ebby's open eye. Blotting them with the back of a hand, he detected another voice murmuring in his brain. It belonged to Mr. Andrews, the one-armed instructor back at the Company's training school. "Its not the pain but the fear that breaks you." He heard Mr. Andrews repeat the warning over and over, like a needle stuck in a grove. "Not the pain but the fear! Not the pain but the fear!"

The words reverberating through his brain grew fainter and Ebby, frantic to hang on to them, reached deep into himself. To his everlasting mystification, he discovered he wasn't afraid of the pain, the dying, the nothingness beyond death; he was afraid of being afraid.

The discovery exhilarated him—and liberated him.

Had his father experienced this exhilarating revelation the day he was lashed to the goal post of a soccer field? Was that the explanation for the smile on his lips when the Germans bayoneted him to death because they were short of ammunition?

Ebby felt as if a great malignant knot had been extracted from his gut.

"The message, if you please?" the voice prompted him from the darkness. "I want to remind you that you do not have diplomatic immunity."

Again Ebby forced words through his lips. "Fuck... you... pal."

4

WASHINGTON, DC, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1956

THE MOOD IN THE CORRIDORS OF COCKROACH ALLEY WAS SUBDUED. Junior officers milled around the coffee-and-doughnut wagons, talking in undertones. There was a crisis brewing. Details were scarce. One of the Company's people somewhere in the field appeared to be in jeopardy. Leo Kritzky, whose recent promotion to the post of deputy to the head of the Soviet Russia Division in the Directorate for Operations had coincided with the birth of twin daughters, knew more than most. The DCI, Allen Dulles, who had been woken at three in the morning by the duty officer reading an "Eyes-Only" CRITIC from the CIA station chief in Budapest, brought key people in on Sunday for an early morning war council. Leo, standing in for his boss who was away on sick leave, attended it. Leaning back into the soft leather of his Eames chair, his eyeglasses turned opaque by the sun streaming through a window, Dulles brought everyone up to speed: E. Winstrom Ebbitt II, on a mission to Budapest under deep cover (and without diplomatic immunity), had failed to turn up at his hotel the previous evening. A check of hospitals and city police precincts had drawn a blank. The Hungarian AVH, which as a matter of routine monitored visiting Americans, was playing dumb: yes, they were aware that a New York attorney named Ebbitt had joined the State Department negotiating team at the Gellert Hotel; no, they didn't have any information on his whereabouts; it went without saying, they would look into the matter and get back to the Americans if they learned anything.