Harlot's Ghost

  “That’s a telling point. We could move from a 10-percent possibility of suicide to 20 percent.”

  “Every bit helps,” I said. I was wretched. The drinks had turned on me again. I could feel the first warnings issue from another monster. Once or twice a year, no more, I would come down with a prodigious headache, royal cousin to a migraine, which would leave me next day with a short-term case of amnesia—I would be unable to remember the last twenty-four hours. Some such storm seemed to be mounting now in the tropics of my brain. Tropic of Cerebrum. Tropic of Cerebellum. “The key thing, Arnie,” I said, “is to keep your medulla oblongata clean.”

  “Harry, you’re a class act. It’s what you have to offer. Please don’t go off on tangents.”

  “The English,” I said, “have one test for vulgarity. It is: Do you descend the steps properly? Glenlivet, old pal?” I poured the Scotch. Screw the oncoming headache. Some hurricanes blow out to sea. I took the drink in two nips, filled my shot glass again. “All right. Murder. Murder by our people.”

  “Don’t dismiss the KGB.”

  “No, let’s talk of murder by our good people. It’s been on your mind, hasn’t it?”

  “I keep coming back to what you said,” Rosen now told me.

  Yes, I could feel how real it had been for him ever since I said it. “Billions,” I said. “Somebody who stands to lose a billion bucks and more.”

  “When the sums of money are that huge, individuals don’t get killed,” Rosen said.

  “Not individuals. Indians. Twenty or forty Indians. All gone.” Was I thinking of Dorothy Hunt?

  Something had happened, however, to Rosen. I thought he was having an outsize reaction to my last remark, until I realized someone was speaking to him from a walkie-talkie outside. His right hand pressed against the buff-colored earplug and he nodded several times, then reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a black wireless microphone the size of a fountain pen and said, “Are you certain?” listened, then said, “Okay, out.”

  Now Ned started to speak to me. His voice was not merely small in volume, but close to inaudible. He had begun to rattle the stem of his pipe against his whiskey glass in a disconcerting tattoo, a time-honored method for jamming any state-of-the-art electronics that might be tapping into the room.

  Why, however, had he begun to do it now? It seemed likely to me that one of the guards out in the rain would have brought along additional electronic gear to detect any unscheduled approaches. Rosen had just been fed an alert. That seemed the simplest explanation for his behavior. Certainly his voice emerged in a thin whistle as if weighty forces had descended on his chest. Finally, his speech became so impoverished that he took out a notebook, wrote a sentence on it, held it up to me to read, then threw the paper in the fire.

  “There is one man I can think of,” Ned Rosen had written, “who has acquired the kind of fortune you name while working with us. However, he’s not on board anymore.”

  I stood up to poke the logs. I felt timeless in my heart. Each beat of blood seemed to take its great and deliberate pause. I could feel the bellows of my lungs on their rise and on their fall. The confirmation of a hypothesis is one of the richest emotions left to our modern temper.

  There was one man Ned could name, but he was not about to. His breath would not permit it. The hound of fear was in his lungs. And I could not name the man, not yet. My memory bore too much resemblance to those old brass tubes which once carried the cash and change for one’s purchase up and down floors in department stores. The name might be already inserted in its tube and on its way, but, oh, my brain!—there were floors and floors to climb.

  Then the name of the man did come to me, and sooner than expected. There was an undeniable pop-out in my head.

  I reached for Rosen’s note pad. “Are you thinking of our old friend on the Farm?” I wrote.

  “PHENOMENAL!” Rosen printed in capital letters.

  “Can it really be Dix Butler?” I wrote.

  “How long since you’ve seen him?” asked Rosen aloud.

  “Ten years.”

  He picked up the pad. “Have you ever been to Thyme Hill?”

  “No,” I said aloud, “but I’ve heard of it.”

  Rosen nodded, threw the page into the fire, and as if fatigued by the weight of this transaction, lay back in his chair.

  I wondered at his travail. It is an odd word, but I think appropriate. He was reacting as if engaged in hard labor. It occurred to me that he must be carrying more than one full weight of anxiety. Until now, however, he had not shown the burden. Not until now. The significance of the three men in the woods redefined itself. They were not there for me. They were waiting for someone to arrive.

  Rosen sat up, nodded as if to assure me that all was well—what was well?—and then removed a silver pill box from his breast pocket, took out one white pill so small I assume it was nitroglycerine for his heart, and lay it under his tongue with a certain tenderness as if he were handing a small, carefully trimmed morsel of food to a pet. Then he closed his eyes to absorb it.

  Probably he had been waiting for Dix Butler all night. Why else would he write: PHENOMENAL!

  PRIMITIVE, I should have replied. Who was to say we do not receive messages from each other without signing the receipt? Had I begun to think of Dix Butler because Rosen was preoccupied with him?

  We sat there, each to his own, and who could know what was shared? Millions of creatures walk the earth unseen. The interval of silence lengthened once more.

  OMEGA–11

  I COULD SENSE MYSELF RAISING A BARRIER AGAINST EVERY FEAR THAT Rosen was communicating. I needed none of that. I had to be able to think about Butler. There was more than enough to contemplate. Butler had always been the most impressive man, physically speaking, of any group you found him in. He was powerful; he was—no other word—handsome. In training, instructors used to tell him that he had come to the wrong place, he should have taken his whack at Hollywood. He didn’t disagree. His arrogance was ready to agree. He had, after all, given up professional football after two seasons of injuries (linebacker, fourth-round draft, Washington Redskins) to join CIA. At the Farm, we had been assigned to the same group of thirty, and he had, of course, been a good distance ahead of us on all physical levels. Since he was also intelligent, he went on to blaze a career trail in the Company. I had run with Dix Butler in Berlin in 1956, and saw him in Miami in 1960 when Howard Hunt and I were helping to train exile Cubans for the Bay of Pigs, and I had an adventure or two with Dix in southern Florida in 1962 when the local Cuban community was riddled with Fidelista spies. One of our jobs was to weed them out. Questioning suspects, Butler was not above using the toilet bowl to prime a confession. “It’s the condign procedure for that kind of Cubano,” he said. “Different chokes for different folks.”

  Now I was attempting to recall what I had heard about him over the last ten years. He had left the Company and gone into business for himself, several kinds of business. That much I knew, not much more. If the gossip in large corporations is analogous to a river, then our whispering gallery is an underground river. Sometimes it even reaches the surface and talk flows freely among us about the marital difficulties of colleagues, or of a caper in Kinshasa that crashed so badly they were still scraping the egg yolk off the safe-house walls. But we knew when not to talk. Then the stream went into a cave and did not come out.

  Dix Butler cut his swath through the Company and came back from Vietnam a legend. After which, he gave his resignation to CIA, and made a fortune. Envy alone would have been sufficient cause to talk about him forever, but we didn’t. We weren’t too sure of what we were talking about. The news received could be naught but cover. He purported to be detached from us; he could be doing contract work: God knows what we really had him doing. Talk was, therefore, sensitive, just as sensitive as a tooth that will strike up a spasm if touched. So we were silent. We were tribal. Out in the great prairie (of the common-folk cafeteria at Langley) where the gossip
blew, we knew to distinguish the north wind from the south.

  It was acceptable, however, to speak in general terms of how successful he had become. He had purchased a bluegrass horse farm some hundred miles into Virginia, and raised Appaloosas there, or, at least, the stud-farm equipage working for him did, and Thyme Hill expanded over the years. One heard of ten thousand acres more often now than of one thousand acres, and once I listened to talk of a training center for mercenaries somewhere in his trees. Ten thousand acres, went the argument, was fifteen square miles, just about the size of Camp Peary, our old Farm. It was a weak argument. There might be a few of his favorite tiger-people from Nam housed out in those woods, but no power on American earth would dare to train a small army one hundred miles from the capital, no.

  Other stories seemed to reach us just long enough to go underground again. There were weekend parties on his grounds that owed more to the kind of whing-dings we used to give in Saigon than to diplomatic Washington. Lobbyists, senators, hot congressmen, hot industrialists, hot corporate raiders were joined by hot ladies. In Washington, enterprising people might give parties for corporate and congressional powers, but not with hot ladies. As a credible description of any reality I could comprehend, tales about Butler entertaining the right people and thereby amassing uncountable sums would have gone better on one of those honey-and-tycoon TV dramas that live it up for an hour a week by exploiting the true physics of gossip. That science calls for low specifics in the scenario, otherwise known as fairy tales for the horny. I was wise enough to know that the accumulation of money was too consuming a pursuit to be distracted by sex. Sex was but a sidebar for the young and cocaine-inclined. While there appeared to be no shortage of cocaine out at Thyme Hill, and some of the ladies, doubtless, were young, the scenario was wrong. If Butler was giving the wildest parties within a hundred miles of Washington, D.C., it was not to make deals, but to cover something larger.

  A symphony might be in the works. You could calibrate its size by the gossip at Langley. The gossip kept stopping short. No real nuggets came back with the stories. That was the telling clue. While speculation had Dix Butler running a gargantuan Venus flytrap, I did not see that as the prime operation. A Venus flytrap might be out there, but what was Dix putting behind it? Certainly, he was capable of anything. In Saigon, he had recruited his own small army of Vietnamese for improvisational hits on the Vietcong; that army had waged a few drug wars as well. One night, very drunk, under a Southern Hemisphere moon, Butler claimed to have started an enterprise or two with the profits. These monies, he assured me, would go back to the Company. That was important.

  “What is coming up?” he asked me solemnly. “I’ll tell you. Harry, this war is going to undress the CIA. Sooner or later they are going to rip off all our band-aids, and there won’t be blood for the great American public to look at.”

  “Yes? What will there be?”

  “Batshit. All the batshit we’ve been hiding. The great American public, and their elected cocksuckers, the Congress of these Disgruntled and Disunited States, are going to cut the CIA’s balls off when they discover all those tons of batshit. So we got to get ready. We need covert money, honey. Secret money nicely put away. Take a good look at me.” He showed his teeth. “I’m going to be the Agency banker.”

  Whether he had or had not become our covert banker, a Venus flytrap to catch key politicians in covertly photographed positions was still not likely. Not only was sexual blackmail illegal by our charter, it was also close to anathema for those fifteen thousand ribbon clerks, typists, experts, analysts, and programmers, all that human tonnage who made up 90 percent of our CIA personnel; they were as conventional as Pentagon folk. High-profile sex shops were not the soup of choice for good Company people who went to church on Sunday, read National Review, and believed we were the clean-living in the land, no, you could not have such people processing paper from Butler’s peephole operation, and besides, such a peephole sounded as large as a tunnel entrance. What, then, was going on? Why Thyme Hill?

  I looked across at Rosen. I do not know if it was the slow pace of my thoughts or the calm with which I waited—I had drunk enough Glenlivet by now to be calm at my own funeral—but he, too, seemed to be back in some facsimile of composure. He scribbled a line on a piece of notebook paper, tore it off and held it up for me.

  “I’ve been out to Thyme Hill,” was what I read.

  “Did you like it?”

  “I’ve never been to the Playboy mansion,” he wrote, “but Thyme Hill must make Hugh Hefner look like a spinster having a few lady friends in for tea.”

  He gave a wan smile and consigned such information to the fire. I gave a wan smile back. In those awful hours when you wonder if you have spent half your life in the wrong occupation, it was usually my estimate that much of our work would seem ludicrous to an impartial observer. Of course, we did our work on the assumption that God had small use for impartial observers.

  The fact is that we were in need of a high-level sex shop. The Intelligence services of other nations took such instruments of the trade for granted. Harlot had inveighed for years against our domestic bonds. In the U.S., we couldn’t begin to do what we needed to do. All too many delicate but local counterintelligence operations had to be handed over to the FBI, and they, from our point of view, were egregious bunglers. Their power, if you believed Harlot, had been maintained less by their proficiency than by J. Edgar Hoover’s special files. Hoover loved tidbits. He collected them. It had given him a wrestler’s lock on Congress and the presidency. J. Edgar, after all, kept encyclopedic files on every cabinet officer and senator who had anything to do with a woman not his wife, and should the wife go in for comparable excursions, Hoover was ready to have photographs of her navel as well. No president ever took him on. J. Edgar had already supplied them with too good an insight into the maverick inclinations of previous presidents. When it came, therefore, to reducing J. Edgar’s power at home, and increasing ours, his private files made the difference.

  We had tried to lessen the gap. We bestowed a few extra duties on our Office of Security. The O of S had access to the files of the Metropolitan Police in Washington, D.C., who had an officer, one Captain Roy E. Blick, who had a pipeline into a call-girl operation in a Washington hotel (the Columbia Plaza, if you would have the name). Blick had caught his share of significant folk in extremes of gay apparel, degradation, subjugation—I heard about such from Harlot in the days when he still maintained a clandestine but monitorial function over Rosen in Security. Poor Ned—not yet Reed—had to put in his hours with Captain Blick, which meant he had to do his best to keep Blick from sharing all the spoils with Hoover. “Ah, those names,” Harlot once exclaimed. “I tell you, Harry, people who work on the margins of propriety seem to have been given their monikers by Charles Dickens.” As if he were an outback tribesman repeating a sound he did not understand, he added, “J. Edgar Hoover. Roy E. Blick. J. Edgar Hoover. Roy E. Blick.” Then he sighed for Rosen. “Poor Ned. They do give him sorry jobs at Security. Catering to Blick!” And Harlot gave his wink. After all, Rosen, before moving to Security, had once been in charge of Harlot’s special files. Limited they might be, but as a point of professional pride, Harlot separated himself from Hoover’s grab-bag of slurs, innuendos, and Polaroids, and instructed Rosen not to pick up every piece of gumbo that landed on the beach. Content had to be evaluated.

  Still, Harlot had powers of anticipation. A friend of Kittredge’s, Polly Galen Smith, the former wife of a senior officer in one of our divisions, had begun a VIP affair with President Kennedy. (VIP affair is a descriptive of the prevailing arrangements: time allotted for entering, doffing clothes, taking one’s jump into bliss, showers, clothes back on, saying good-bye, is twenty minutes—“You don’t become VIP for too little,” remarked Harlot.)

  A year and a half, however, after the President’s assassination, Polly Galen Smith was beaten to death on the towpath of a Potomac canal. A possible assailant was found, tried, an
d acquitted. While her murder seemed to have no relation to us, the conclusion that we were not involved was not obvious in the immediate hours after the assault. Whom had the lady been taking to bed, after all, since Jack Kennedy? Harlot proceeded at once to her house, and—as an old family friend—was able to console the children. Rosen, whom he had brought along, thereby managed to slip up to the master bedroom where he lifted Polly Galen Smith’s diary from a small drawer in her kneehole desk and removed the sneaky Harlot had installed in the baseboard back of her bed. Montague had seen it as his direct if disagreeable duty to monitor the lady. At worst, there could have been hanky-panky with attractive Soviet officials in Washington.

  Relatively speaking, all that had been the petty improvisation of pioneering days. Now, in the eighties, by the thrust, at least, of the over-muted gossip, the question was whether we had constructed a Venus flytrap that would be the envy of the FBI. Or was that too unbalanced an assumption? It begged the question whether Dix Butler was still a loyal son of the grange. He could have made separate arrangements with the FBI and/or the DEA. Or, if they could afford it, the SIS, SDECE, and the BND (which, for those who would inquire, are respectively English, French, and German intelligence).

  I reached for the pad.

  “Did Harlot go out to Thyme Hill?”

  “On occasion.”

  “Do you know what he did there?”

  “No.”

  “Zero return?” I asked aloud.

  “Well, Harry, you could be making too much of it. A lot of people went out there. Sunday afternoon was not Saturday night.”

  I did not want to ask the next question, but need was greater than pride. I took the pad. “Did Kittredge accompany Harlot?”

  Rosen looked at me. Then he nodded.

  “How many times?” I asked.

  Rosen held up his extended hand. Five times, said his fingers. He was looking at me with compassion. I did not know whether to feel insulted or to admit that I was sufficiently bruised to accept his concern. I was certainly taken all the way back to a fistfight I had one summer in Maine with a cousin two years older, age eleven, and too large for me, really, to fight. He had landed a roundhouse on the side of my nose which sent a star rocketing from one end of my inner firmament to the other; the star so dislodged my balance that I went down to one knee. Drops of blood, heavy as silver coins, plopped from my nose to the ground. The recollection added old pain to new. I had to see Kittredge.