Harlot's Ghost

  P.S. I just realized that Howard Hunt, but for his beloved E, is also H.H., and God, are we different. Hugh, Harvey, Hunt, and Herrick Hubbard. I’ve always thought H was the most peculiar letter in English, and cite for evidence that the Cockneys never came to agreement with it, and they’re a practical people. H is the silent presence in “ghost” and the capital proprietor of Heaven and Hell. It is half-silent as in half, and changes error to horror.

  P.P.S. As you see, I’m as mad as you are.

  I dispatched the letter before second thoughts could commence. Then I went back to my hotel room and tried to sleep, but the sheets reeked of Sally, formaldehyde, and me. She always left behind a strong odor of herself, half carnal and half grudged out of existence by her deodorants, which didn’t always take care of the job.

  I hardly knew what to do about Sally. We were more intimate than our affection for each other. And my derelictions of duty were increasing. If Porringer was working triple-time under Hunt, I took time out from my own double-time to arrange a meeting with Chevi Fuertes which I knew would not take place. I had not notified him. Instead, I saw Sally. A week later, I did as much again. Professionally speaking, it was easy to conceal. Agents often missed meetings. Like horses, they bolted at the sight of a leaf blowing by. I had to file bogus reports, but they were routine, and bought two hours each time with Sally in my bedroom at the Cervantes. I, waiting for her, would have my clothes off, and my bathrobe on; she, knocking on the door with a tap followed by two taps, would be out of her shoes and off with her skirt even as we embraced in the first of her powerful kisses. “Glue sandwiches” I would have labeled them if not in the mood, but I was usually in the mood, and, naked in a streak, we grappled toward the bed, stealing handfuls of each other’s flesh en route before diving down into the song of the bedsprings, her mouth engorging my cock. There are a hundred words, I suppose, for a penis, but cock is the one that goes with fellatio, and her open marriage with lust, abandonment, and sheer all-out hunger for Hubbard’s Yankee prong gave that fellow a mind of his own, a hound off his leash, a brute pillaging the temple of her mouth, except who could call it a temple?—she had confessed to me in one of our postcopulatory conversations that from high school on, she had had a natural appetite, or was it thirst, for this outpost of the forbidden, and, God, it was out of control by the time she came to me.

  I, in my turn, was developing tastes and inclinations I did not know I had. Before long, she was presenting her navel and pubic hair toward me, and I, facing the contradictory choices of domination or equality, found my own head reaching to explore her sandy, almost weedlike bush. I am cruel enough to mention how wild and scraggly it looked because that came to mean little. It was the avid mouth behind the hair that leaped out to a part of me that did not know it existed until I was licking and tonguing away with my own abandon which I had never known could belong to my critical lips until they opened into the sheer need I knew to jump across the gap from one bare-ass universe to the next. The only way I ever felt close to Sally Porringer was when her mouth was on my cock and my face was plastered into the canyon between her legs. Who could know what things we had to tell each other at such times? It was not love we exchanged, I expect, but all the old bruises and pinched-off desires—how much there was of that! Lust, I was deciding, had to be all the vast excitement of releasing the tons of mediocrity in oneself. (Then, afterward, when alone in my bed, I would wonder if new mediocrity had been ingested just as much as the old had been purged.) I was discovering that I had the gusto of a high school athlete and the chill estimates of a man so noble in perception of each unhappy nuance as T. S. Eliot.

  Say this for the act. When we rose dripping from the sweet and sour mire of feeding on each other, my copulation came pounding happily out of me. To fuck fast was to throw one’s heart into the breach and pound enough blood to the head to banish Thomas Stearns of the Eliot family. One gunned the motors of one’s soul and the sugar of one’s scrotum—what a joy to discover that Hubbards also secreted scrotum sugar—up, up, over the hill, and into the unchartable empyrean beyond. That vision seemed to disappear almost as soon as it afforded its glimpse. I would be happy for a while to know I was a man and that she wanted me and I gave her pleasure. Soon enough she would be stirring once more. She was not insatiable, but near enough. By the third time, I would be thinking again of Lenny Bruce, and the worst of all this passion was not its successive blunting, but the knowledge that when we were done, we would not know how to talk. We were about as essentially happy with each other in this situation as two strangers who attempt to make conversation on a train.

  Whatever the shortcomings, two days later, I would want her again. It was hardly an environment in which to write to Kittredge, but some jobs have to be done.

  April 10, 1957

  Dearest Kittredge,

  Your delineation of Howard Hunt was of no uncertain help to me, even if I plead guilty to being the clod who did not acknowledge this earlier. But, Lord, angel, I have been busy. You have had a glimpse of the social side of EH2 (which is what we call Mr. E. Howard H. on occasions when he is not around) but we have been living with the professional end of the man, and he is a martinet for work. That is, the work he inspires us to perform. He takes a lot of time off to play golf, and hunt and fish. We, in turn, have to end up suspending judgment, because his outside recreation is invariably with important Uruguayans. Having taken over Minot Mayhew’s role, he stands in as nominal First Secretary of the Embassy at all those diplomatic functions, which, if you remember, Mayhew used to pass on to Sonderstrom, Porringer, and myself. So, that’s one change. Howard and Dorothy (who handles social credits and debits like a chief auditor, and manages the Embassy party life with skill comparable to any admiral steering the fleet) have already taken over an astonishingly large part of Montevideo society. We worked and scraped under Mayhew (via Sonderstrom) to eke out a few useful relationships, but Hunt puts all this to shame. He is off every weekend at some large estancia in the pampas hunting for perdiz and working his American charm on very rich landowners. As a small corollary of this, he’s thrown out the old intriguing AV/AILABLE and AV/IARY style of cryptonymming (if you’ll forgive my coining one more awful word) and has announced that any term we desire can now follow AV. His saddlebags, for example, come in as AV/HACENDADO. It’s a great switch for us traditionalists down here, but, do you know, he’s right. There aren’t that many AV words left, and according to Hunt, we’re going to need plenty for the operations he plans to set up.

  Needless to say, most of the new ops are still in the planning stage, but I mock him not. He laid out his credentials first day in the office. Normally one would get tired of listening to a man talk about his deeds, but Hunt left me feeling wistful for my own lack of an exciting life. While I know he can’t have done as much as Cal or Hugh, by God, he has had adventures and served in interesting places. All the envy I felt as an adolescent that I missed the OSS has come back. Hunt made me realize how young I am, and how much life experience you need to be a proper Chief of Station. So I ate up what he had to tell us. Kittredge, if you want to comprehend our scene here, forbear quick criticism. Men are more impressed by an action-filled life than women.

  On the second week after taking over, Howard made another speech to the effect that there was a power elite in Uruguay whom he had to cultivate: “There may be times when you will think I came down here on good Company money to hunt and fish up a storm for myself. Nothing is farther from the truth. I want you to trust me, so I’ll be frank. Yes, I do take pleasure in hunting and fishing. But, get it straight, men. These influential Uruguayans are also rod and gun folk. They like a man who can ride and shoot with them. A man who can bring in a fighting fish on sporting line. Hell, I may even go up to the Argentine Andes to ski with them come this July. But know what I’m up to. Envy is poison in a Station, so fix on this fact: A Station Chief is always working. In the midst of any social gathering, no matter how prestigious, I will be pursuing Company
business. End of sermon, gentlemen. Gather round. I have a small assignment for you.” Whereupon, he handed out copies of the same communication to all of us. It read:

  NGECL RBNEL XYEDE LYNYE SYRPJ

  NJLVS BFYED BXNBF DOLPN UDBUS

  BULZE YSGGD NPZVD MORYE ILPLU

  Kittredge, that’s not even half—there are thirty-six of these five-letter groups—but I promise you, I’m tired of copying it. He wouldn’t give us a one-time pad, said it was a clear one-for-specific-one, and we could work it out on the periodicity of the letters. “The text deserves it,” he said. “Lose an hour this afternoon, and learn again what we’re all about.”

  Well, you know, we were rusty. A clear one-for-one is not hard to decode, but it takes time. Porringer and Kearns were the driving force, and I put in my share. Sonderstrom sat in the corner and looked like he was going to have a stroke. I have never seen Gus’ face so red. He’s all thumbs on deciphering—even hates to use the Encoder-Decoder—and, of course, we did not have the use of one for this. Our COS had given us back-to-school homework.

  Here was the readout:

  IFTHE UNITE DSTAT ESIST OSURV

  IVELO NGSTA NDING AMERI CANCO

  NCEPT SOFFA IRPLA YMUST BEREC

  And here again, enough is enough. When we were done, Porringer insisted on reading aloud: “If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.”

  “My Aunt Mary,” said Sonderstrom, “he had us decoding the Doolittle Report.”

  Kittredge, can you imagine? Who among us is not familiar with such holy text, but Howard had us picking up the peas with a knife. Next morning, on the wall above each of our desks, Nancy Waterston, following his order, had tacked an eight-by-ten piece of white cardboard to the wall of each of our cubicles with the five-letter groups, all thirty-six, neatly typed. Presumably, we are to do our work for the rest of our two or three years here with the Doolittle Report staring at us in that Simple-Simon code. I didn’t know whether Hunt was a genius in the making, or a third-rate malefactor. The Doolittle Report! We had fun over beer that evening. “I promise to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies,” one of us would begin, “by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods,” the second would take up, “than those used against us,” would solemnly conclude the third. After which, Porringer, Kearns, and myself would solemnly recite, “Why ell are why ell—eks dee eff dee en—be why ee are why,” which is how the letters in the last three five-letter groups do sound. Barbarically collegiate, I know, but we were having fun. I even liked Porringer. He is an incisive type. He told me, “Sonderstrom is looking to get relocated.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  That was over two months ago—oh, Kittredge, I see now how long it’s been!—and I can only tell you that Porringer was absolutely right. Four weeks after Hunt came down to us from the Great White North, Sonderstrom managed to get himself transferred to Angola. It was tough on his wife, a fat Irish lady who hates hot climates and loves to sit on stuffed sofas—the wicker of cool African furniture is going to leave a checkerboard on her bland buttocks, I fear—but Angola was the only place that could use a Deputy COS immediately, and Sonderstrom has, he tells us, a real shot to move up to COS at the same Station after a year. Poor Sonderstrom. I’m not sure he has a real shot. He speaks no Angolese—whatever it’s called. And once he thought he would replace Mayhew. I’ve come to recognize how tough the Company can be, which is, of course, as it should be. In any event, I’m now not so much impressed by Porringer’s acumen as depressed by my lack of same. Of course Sonderstrom would look to move. Hunt has taken over all his functions, golf and social work, plus all the things Gus didn’t and couldn’t do, such as cultivating very rich ranch owners in the pampas. Moreover, it was clear by the end of Hunt’s first month that he had struck up a tighter, tougher relationship with Salvador Capablanca (the untrustworthy Chief of Police of the Gómez adventure, remember?) than Sonderstrom ever did. According to Porringer, Hunt seized the nettle. Took the Police Chief out to lunch, as any First Secretary of the American Embassy might (remember—this is Hunt’s cover title), but right after coffee, in answer to Capablanca’s condescending, “Mr. Secretary, now tell me, sir, how can one be of service for you?” Hunt replied, “Easy, Salvador, just tap a couple of embassy lines for me. Soviet, Polish, East German, Czech. That should be enough for starters.”

  Porringer says Capablanca lost his poise.

  “Oh, then . . .” he said, “oh, then . . . you are . . .”

  “Yes, I’m CIA,” said Hunt. “You don’t think I really look like one of those flapdoodles in the State Department, do you?” Flapdoodle was apparently one great choice of a word. Capablanca laughed as much as if he were having lunch with Bob Hope. (Incidentally, that’s what Hunt’s ski-jump nose reminds me of—Bob Hope!) But Porringer says Capablanca only laughed so much because he was frightened. Our CIA reputation casts a long shadow. Even the Chief of Police down here thinks we’re capable of disposing of people by a snap of our fingers. ( Just as well they don’t know how relatively law-abiding we are.) In any case, Hunt was playing on such fear. Next thing he said was: “Señor Capablanca, as you well know, such taps can be put in mit or mitout.”

  “Mit or mitout? Would you explain, Señor Hunt?”

  “Mit or mitout your help.”

  “Oh, I see.” Capablanca laughed again.

  “But if we do it together, the take can be shared.”

  “I would have to tell President Batlle.”

  “Cómo no,” said Howard, and they shook hands over that.

  On the drive back, Hunt listened carefully to Porringer. Oatsie’s read was that Batlle would be too anti-American to cooperate, but too spineless to get in the way of our taps. However, the Deputy Chief of Police, Peones, who was also at the lunch, was ready to be recruited. Porringer told Hunt that he had been working on Peones for nine months. (Why does it always take nine months to make an agent? Another one of our Station jokes.) Hunt shook Porringer’s hand solemnly. “That will be one A-OK coup,” he said. In fact, Kittredge, it now is. Peones has been in the fold since February. Brownie points for Porringer.

  After this lunch, Sonderstrom hastened his departure. He and Hunt were civil to one another, but they were not in tune. Now the Sonderstroms are gone and Porringer is, at present, Acting Deputy COS, and expects to take real title. His scrupulosity on detail and inside political savvy will back-stop Howard nicely.

  Incidentally, I spent an interesting evening at Porringer’s home just a couple of weeks ago. His wife is a serious bridge player, and in the States was working on her National Tournament Rating. Marooned here, she has joined a bridge club in Montevideo, which forces her to learn basic Spanish—“Yo declaro tres corazones!” The Porringers brought in a member of Sally’s local group for my date, a dolorous, much-wrinkled duenna of seventy or seventy-five who spoke passable English, and played real hot cards. I do an acceptable college rubber, and Porringer is slightly better, but that was the size of the evening. I pass, you notice, quickly over the meal. Sally is, alas, no cook, and we had pot roast that tasted like boiled beef in dishwater, sort of reminiscent of the old St. Matthew’s grub. Later, during bridge, the kids would stir once in a while in their all-American bedroom, bunk-bed small and stuffed with half-broken toys, as I discovered when sitting it out as dummy and thereby being the one free to walk the youngest back to her bed after she woke up for the usual nocturnal and fluvial reasons. Why do I tell you all this? It’s just that our American domesticity is so strange to me that I look upon it as Martian. (Confession: I envisaged Christopher’s bedroom in a few years. Please: no broken toys.)

  The banality of the Porringer evening was relieved by one astonishing insight into Sherm
an. His house looks as you would expect—gray drapes, and blonde-wood furniture, formica dining table and chairs, unpainted stack shelves jammed with books and papers—exactly the way a Midwestern graduate student’s apartment figures to shape up. Even a rug made of straw squares sewn together. And frayed. They brought all their furniture with them from Washington because it’s shipped at Company expense. (That gave me a sense of all our modest U.S. families deployed around the globe.) At any rate, in the midst of this predictable household is one glass case with eight hand-painted eggs within. They’re remarkably well done. A vista of tree and pond wraps around the shell in one. Another is a gothic castle with moonlight shimmering through a purple forest; they all are separate and exceptional—painted by someone who can use those fine brushes with one or two hairs. Then I learn they are in the glass case because, Sally tells us, Sherman has carefully sucked out the egg by way of a tiny hole he drilled. Once that is accomplished, he paints the fragile surface. Enjoys the risk of it. You can lose all you’ve put in with one careless move. “Would you like to see these gorgeous things up close?” asks Sally.

  Well, prepare yourself for the horror. Even as Sherman is passing the first of his eggs to me, said object falls between our fingers to shatter on the floor. I feel as if a baby bird has just croaked. Kittredge, there are clumsy accidents, and there are what I would call third-force accidents. This was in the latter category. The eggshell left his hand and I swear it took its own willful flip into space.

  Well, I apologized till I felt as if I were chewing aspirin, and he kept shrugging it off. A bull rage was stirring so deep in him that it will just bury another piece of his much suppressed soul. I’m sure five, if not ten, hours of immaculate work were lost, and nothing to do about it. He said at the end of a long time for me, but short enough, I suppose, for him to get his sentiments in harness again—“Well, don’t feel too bad. It’s my least favorite egg. I always take it out first if strangers are going to handle the stuff.” Given the circumstances, I must admit Porringer was being gracious. His blue-black shaven cheeks looked as funereal as the occasion.