The Company: A Novel of the CIA (85 page)

"Oh, Daddy, Mom, welcome back," she cried, kissing her mother and then flinging herself into her father s arms. "How was the trip?"

"Great, except for the time your father didn't turn up at the chateau until eleven at night."

"I took a wrong turn and wound up in a village with a name I couldn't pronounce," Leo explained sheepishly. "And I didn't know the name of the chateau we were supposed to be going to."

"So what happened?"

"We actually called the police," Adelle said. "They found him drinking Calvados at a bistro twenty-two kilometers away. Was he red in the face when they brought him and his bicycle back in one of their fourgons."

"You guys are something else," Vanessa said admiringly. "When I tell my friends my parents are bike riding through France, they flip out."

Leo noticed a young man in a belted Burberry regarding him from the street door. The man approached. "Sir, are you Mr. Kritzky?" he asked.

Leo was suddenly wary. "Who are you?"

"Sir, I have a letter for Mr. Kritzky from his office."

"Why don't you mail it?"

The young man never cracked a smile. "I was told to deliver it by hand, sir."

Leo said, "All right, I'm Kritzky."

"Sir, could I see your passport."

Leo fished the passport out of his pocket. The young man looked at the photograph and then at Leo's face, and returned the passport. He handed Leo a sealed envelope.

"What's all this, Daddy?" Vanessa asked.

"Don't know yet." He tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter with a flick of the wrist. His eye went immediately to the signature: "Bill" was scrawled in blue ink over the words William Colby, DCI.

"Dear Leo" the letter began.

"Sorry to hit you over the head with business as you step off the plane, but something important has come up that needs your immediate attention. Would you come straight out to the campus—I'll fill you in when you get here."

"Sir," the young man said. "I have transportation waiting."

Leo studied the young man. "You know what's in the letter?"

"Sir, I only know what I'm told. What I'm told is to have a car and driver waiting to take you to the person who wrote the letter."

Adelle asked, "What's happening, Leo?"

"Bill Colby's asked me to come over to Langley," he said in a low voice. "Vanessa, you take your mother home. I'll make it back on my own steam. If I'm going to be delayed I'll call."

"Sir, if you'll follow me..."

Leo kissed his daughter on each cheek and smiled at Adelle, then fell into step alongside the young man in the raincoat. "Which Division do you work for?" he asked.

"The Office of Security, sir."

The young man pushed a door open for Leo and followed him through it. A gray four-door Ford sedan was waiting at the curb. The driver held the back door open for Leo, who ducked and settled onto the back seat. To his astonishment a burly man squeezed in next to him, pushing him over to the middle of the seat. To his left, the door opened and another man with the bruised face of a prizefighter climbed in the other side.

"What's go—"

The two men grabbed Leo's arms. One of them deftly clamped handcuffs onto each wrist and snapped them closed. Outside the car, the young men in the Burberry could be seen talking into a walkie-talkie. Up front, the driver slid behind the wheel and, easing the car into gear, pulled out into traffic. "Lean forward, with your head between your knees," the burly guard instructed Leo. When he didn't immediately do as he was told the prize- fighter delivered a short, sharp punch to his stomach, knocking the wind out of his lungs. Leo doubled over and threw up on his shoes.

"Oh, shit," the burly man groaned as he pressed down on the back of Leo's neck to keep him hunched over. The Ford was obviously caught in traffic. Leo could hear horns blowing around them. His back began to ache from his cramped position but the hand pushing down on his neck didn't ease up. Forty minutes or so later he felt the car turning off a thoroughfare and then slipping down a ramp. A garage door cranked open and must have closed behind them because they were suddenly enveloped in darkness. The burly man removed his hand from the back of Leo's neck. He straightened and saw that they were in a dimly lit underground garage. Cars were scattered around in the parking spaces. The Ford drew up in front of a service elevator. The burly man got out and hauled Leo out after him. The prizefighter came up behind them. The elevator door opened and the three men entered the car. The prizefighter hit a button. The motor hummed. Moments later the doors opened and Leo was pulled down a dark hallway and pushed into a room painted in a creamy white and lit by an overhead battery of surgical lights. Two middle-aged women dressed in long white medical smocks were waiting for him. The prizefighter produced a key and removed the handcuffs. As Leo massaged his wrists, the two men took up positions on either side of him.

"Do precisely as you are told," one of the women ordered. "When we tell you to, you will remove your clothing item by item, and very slowly. All right. Begin with your left shoe."

"What are you looking for?" Leo managed to ask. The burly man slapped him sharply across the face. "Nobody said nothing about you talking, huh? The shoe, Mr. Kritzky."

His cheek stinging and tears brimming in his eyes, Leo stooped and removed his left shoe and handed it to the man who had struck him, who passed it on to one of the women. She inspected it meticulously, turning it in her hands as if she had never seen this particular model before. Working with pliers she pried off the heel, then with a razor blade cut open the leather to inspect the inside of the sole and the underside of the tongue. Finding nothing, she cast Leo's left shoe aside and pointed to his right shoe. Item by item, the two women worked their way through every stitch of clothing on Leo until he was standing stark-naked under the surgical-lights. One of the women fitted on a pair of surgeons latex gloves. "Spread your legs," she ordered. When Leo was slow to comply the prizefighter kicked his legs apart. The woman knelt on the floor in front of him and began feeling around between his toes and under his feet. She worked her way up the inside of his crotch to his testicles and his penis, probing all the folds and creases of his groin. Leo chewed on his lip in humiliation as she inspected his arm pits and threaded her fingers through his hair. "Open wide," she ordered. She thrust a tongue depressor into his mouth and, tilting his head toward the surgical lights, inspected his teeth. "All rightie, lets take a gander at your anus, Mr. Kritzky."

"No," Leo said. The word emerged as a sob. "I demand to see—"

"Your asshole, asshole," the prizefighter said. He punched Leo hard in the stomach and folded him over with a deft judo lock on one arm. The woman stabbed a gloved finger into a jar of Vaseline and, kneeling behind him, probed his anus.

When he was permitted to straighten up, Leo gasped, "Water." The burly man looked at the woman wearing the surgical gloves. When she shrugged, he went out and came back with a paper cup filled with water. Leo drained it, then, panting, asked, "Am I still in America?"

The prizefighter actually laughed. "This is like the Vatican, pal—its extraterritorial. Habeas corpus don't exist."

One of the women dropped a pair of white pajamas and two scuffs onto the floor at Leo's feet. "You want to go and put them on," she said in a bored voice.

Leo pulled on the pajama bottoms; there was no elastic band and he had to hold them up. One by one, he slipped his arms into the top. His hands were trembling so much he had trouble buttoning the buttons with his free hand. Finally the prizefighter did it for him. Then, clutching the waist of the pajamas and shuffling along in the backless slippers, Leo followed the burly man through a door and down a long dark corridor to another door at the far end. The man rapped his knuckles on it twice, then produced a key, unlocked the door and stepped back. Breathing in nervous gasps, Leo made his way past him.

The room in which he now found himself was large and windowless. All the walls, and the inside of the door, were padded with foam rubber. Three naked electric bulbs dangled at the ends of electric cords from a very high ceiling. A brown army blanket was folded neatly on the floor next to the door. A lidless toilet was fixed to one wall and a tin cup sat on the floor next to it. In the middle of the room stood two chairs and a small table with a tape recorder on it; the table and both chairs were bolted to the floor. James Jesus Angleton sat in one of the chairs, his head bent over the loose-leaf book open before him. A cigarette dangled from his lips; an ashtray on the table overflowed with butts. Without looking up, he waved Leo toward the seat opposite him and hit the "record" button on the tape machine.

"You're Yale, class of fifty, if I'm not mistaken," Angleton remarked.

Leo sank onto the seat, mentally exhausted. "Yale. Fifty. Yes."

"What college?"

"I was in Timothy Dwight for two years, then I lived off campus."

"I was Silliman, but that was before your time," Angleton said. He turned to another page in the loose-leaf book to check something, then flipped back to the original page. "How about if we begin with your father."

Leo leaned forward. "Jim, it's me, Leo. Leo Kritzky. These goons abducted me from the airport. They roughed me up. I was strip-searched. What's going on?"

"Start with your father."

"Jim, for God's sake..." Leo glanced at the whirring reels of the tape recorder, then, shuddering, took a deep breath. "My father's name was Abraham. Abraham Kritzky. He was born in Vilnus, in the Jewish Pale, on the twenty-eighth of November 1896. He emigrated to America during the 1910 pogroms. He got a job in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory sewing bands inside hats—he was there when the famous fire broke out in 1911, killing almost a hundred and fifty seamstresses. My father got out with his sewing machine strapped to his back when firemen hacked open a locked fire door leading to an alleyway."

"Did the experience make him bitter?"

"Of course it made him bitter."

"Did it turn him against capitalism?"

"What are you looking for, Jim? I went over all this when I was recruited. There are no secrets hidden here. My father was a Socialist. He worshipped Eugene Debs. He joined Debs's Socialist Party when it was formed in 1918. He picketed when Debs was jailed, I think it was around 1920. He read the Jewish Daily Forward. His bible was the 'Bintel Brief' letters-to-editor column, where people poured out their troubles; he used to read the letters aloud to us in Yiddish. My father was a bleeding heart, which wasn't a federal offense until the House Un-American Activities Committee came along."

"You were born on the twenty-ninth of October 1929—"

Leo laughed bitterly. "The day the stock market crashed. Are you going t0 read something into that?"

'Your father had a small business by then." Angleton turned to another page in his loose-leaf book. "He manufactured and repaired hats at an address on Grand Street in Manhattan. The crash wiped him out."

"The banks called in his loans—he'd bought the brownstone on Q Street. We lived upstairs. His business was on the ground floor. He lost everything."

"And then what happened?"

"Can I have some water?"

Angleton nodded toward the tin cup on the floor next to the toilet. "There's water in the bowl."

Leo shook his head in dismay. "You're out of your goddamn mind, Jim. You're crazy if you think I'm going to drink out of a toilet."

"When you're thirsty enough, you will. What happened after the stock market crash?"

When Leo didn't respond, Angleton said, "Let's understand each other. You're going to stay in this room until you've answered all my questions, and many times. We're going to go over and over your life before and after you joined the Company. If it takes weeks, if it takes months, it's no skin off my nose. I'm not in any particular hurry. You want to go on now or do you prefer that I come back tomorrow?"

Leo whispered, "Son of a bitch."

Angleton started to close the loose-leaf book.

"Okay. Okay. I'll answer your damn questions. What happened after the stock market crash was that my father killed himself."

"How?"

"You know how."

"Tell me anyway.

"He jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. They found his body washing around under the docks under Brooklyn Heights the next morning."

"What was the date?"

"March 1936."

Angleton said, "Seven March, to be exact. Between the stock market crash and his suicide, did your father become a Communist, or was he one already when he came over from Russia?"

Leo laughed under his breath. "My father was a Jew who believed, like the Prophet Amos—writing eight centuries before Jesus Christ—that you were a thief if you had more than you needed, because what you owned was stolen from those who didn't have enough. Luckily for Amos there was no Joe McCarthy around in those days." Leo looked away In his mind's eye he could see his father reading from a worn Torah, and he quoted the passage from memory. '"For they know not to do right, saith the Lord, who store up violence and robbery in their palaces.' That's Amos 3:10, if I remember correctly, Jim."

"You seem fixated on Joe McCarthy."

"He was a shit."

"Did you agree with Amos and with your father? Did you think that what you own is stolen from those who don't have enough?"

"In an ideal world such a sentiment might have a shred of validity. But I long ago moved on into the imperfect world."

"Did capitalism kill your father?"

"My father killed himself. Capitalism, as it was practiced in America in the twenties and thirties, created conditions that caused a great many people to kill themselves, including the capitalists who threw themselves out of Wall Street windows in 1929."

Angleton lit a fresh cigarette. There was a fragment of a smile clinging limply to one corner of his mouth and volcanic ash in the pupils of his eyes. Leo remembered that Angleton was a devoted angler; the word was that he would spend endless hours working the Brule in the upper watershed of northern Wisconsin, casting with a flick of his wrist a nymph fly he had tied with his own fingers and letting it drift back downstream, waiting with infinite patience to snare the mythical brown trout that was rumored to hide in the currents of the river. It hit Leo that the counterintelligence chief was working another river now; casting hand-made flies in front of Leo in the hope that he would snap at the hook, fudge a truth, lie about a detail, after which he would carefully reel in the line.