Harlot's Ghost

  He must have arrived not long after I had made my call from the Bell Telephone icebox on the coast road. So he had been here when I came back. His walkie-talkie people had heard me approaching through the woods, had heard, conceivably, how my teeth were chattering with cold as I tried to find the key for my door. They would have reported this to the small button he kept in his ear.

  I got up to stir the fire and was able to verify that, yes, in his right ear was a buff-colored ear-piece.

  “What have you been doing since you arrived?” I asked.

  “Trying to think.”

  “Where were you doing this?”

  “Well, for the most part—in one of the guest bedrooms.” He took a puff on his pipe.

  “Are those your ladies-in-waiting outside?”

  “One would hope so.”

  “I counted two.”

  “In fact,” said Reed, “there are three of us out there.”

  “All for me?”

  “Harry, it’s a complicated business.”

  “Why don’t you invite them in?” I asked. “We have other guest rooms.”

  He shook his head. “My men,” he said, “are prepared to wait.”

  “Expecting more people?”

  “Harry, let’s not play ping-pong. I have to discuss a situation which is out of hand.”

  That meant no one at Langley had a clue what to do next.

  The tour I had made, Luger in fist, was still working like a spansule, calming to anxiety. I felt as if my wits had returned. Clear and overt danger was the obvious prescription for my spiritual malformations.

  “Ned,” I asked, “would you like a drink?”

  “Do you keep Glenlivet?”

  “We do.”

  He chose to go on about its merits. That was annoying. I did not need to hear any of the palaver he had picked up while motoring about Scotland and its distilleries one summer vacation with his gray Scotch bride. Withdrawing a bottle from the den cupboard, I served our Glenlivet neat—screw him if after all that praise he secretly wanted ice. Then I said, “Why are you here?”

  I could see he wanted to enjoy the fireplace and the Scotch a little longer.

  “Yes,” he said, “we have to get to it.”

  “I’m honored that they sent you,” I told him.

  “I may be dishonored in the morning,” he replied. “This trip is on me.”

  “Not authorized?”

  “Not altogether. You see, I wanted to arrive quickly.”

  “Well,” I said, “we won’t be playing ping-pong, will we?”

  It was out of character for him not to cover his delicate behind; no one knew better than Rosen that we can be the most paper-haunted bureaucracy of them all. So there are times when we pay a lot of attention to getting the right paper. We feel happier when unorthodox actions can be traced to a piece of the stuff. If, from time to time, we are obliged to move without a program, statute, directive, memo, or presidential finding, it is a naked feeling. Rosen had no paper.

  “I hope you are prepared to get into it,” he said.

  “You can start up,” I said.

  As a way of assent, he gave a grin. Since he was keeping his pipe in his mouth, it resulted in a grimace. “Did Kittredge,” he inquired, “provide any details about what she heard vis-à-vis Harlot?”

  “I’m afraid my wife was not coherent.”

  “Harlot,” said Rosen, “left his house three days ago, went out alone in his boat, which, as you may know, was not uncharacteristic of him. He was proud of his ability to skipper that boat solo, physical disability and all. But he did not return. This morning, the Coast Guard found the craft drifting, checked its registration, and called us. Would you believe it? The boat papers listed the Langley personnel office extension as the telephone number to ring for next of kin! Meanwhile, the body of a man in a considerable state of disrepair washed up on a mud flat in Chesapeake Bay. Coast Guard was notified, and soon after my office was on the scene. Just before lunch today.”

  “I understand you’re calling it a suicide.”

  “We will probably call it that. Hopefully, the press could decide that’s worth no more than an obituary.”

  “Is it murder?”

  “Can’t say. Not yet.”

  “How did you get here?” I asked. “Did you fly to Bar Harbor Airport?”

  “In my plane. I have added a pilot’s license to my small assortment of virtues.”

  “There’s always something new to learn about you, Reed.”

  My praise, you would think, was edged, but he couldn’t keep from showing his pleasure. Once after Richard Helms had rescued a few of Hugh Montague’s less savory chestnuts from a congressional inquiry, Harlot, in recognition of the debt, was quick to offer the Director a large compliment. “You, Dick,” Harlot had said, “are so aptly named. One small craft after another to skipper through the fearful breeze.” That was a little thick, I thought, but Helms, who looked as much to the point as an ice pick, and was certainly on guard around Harlot, still couldn’t keep from beaming at such homage to his now masterly moniker. Later, Harlot remarked, “Depend on it, Harry, the vanity of the high officeholder never bottoms out.”

  Ergo, I had gone my way to put Rosen on automatic feed. I was thinking to catch him while he was munching.

  “As you were flying up here,” I inquired, “you didn’t stop off in Bath, Maine, did you?”

  He went so far as to take his pipe out of his mouth. “Most certainly not.” He took his pause. “I must say,” he added, “the thought occurred to me. We are on to your friend Chloe.”

  “Was it the FBI who paid her a visit tonight?”

  “Not by way of us.”

  “How about the DEA?”

  “Ditto. I could swear.”

  “Who, then, ransacked her trailer?”

  “What?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

  “She called me. In panic. By her description, it was a thoroughgoing, insulting, highly professional job.”

  “I’m at a loss.”

  “Why are you interested in her?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that I am. Is she relevant?”

  “Ned, if we are to speak of my so-called friend Chloe, work with the facts. I happen to have coffee with her sometimes when I pass through Bath. And Chloe and I have no carnal knowledge of one another. Not at all. But, Ned, I’m desirous to know”—yes, the Glenlivet (after the Bushmills, after the Luger) was having an unanticipated effect; the good Scotch was making me testy—“yes, tell me, pal, what the hell has Chloe got to do with anything? She’s just a waitress.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  I was coming around the buoy a bit late. “Did you opera lovers tap the phone here in this den? I did have a phone call from her tonight. So what?”

  He held up his hand. I realized I was too angry. Was guilt getting into my voice? “Ease off, Harry,” he said, “ease off. Presumably your phone call with Chloe is on tape one place or another. I just didn’t have the means to tap into you directly. Nor,” he added, “the desire. I didn’t come here to strap you to the table and whip out the proctoscope.”

  “Although you wouldn’t mind a conversation in depth.”

  “I’d like to go equal to equal.”

  “Do you know what is in the back of my mind right now?” I asked.

  “The High Holies.”

  Rosen was showing how unequal we were after all.

  “Reed,” I told him, “I don’t know all that much about the High Holies.”

  “Not by yourself, you don’t.” But we both knew: Much that was meaningless to me might be a gift for him. He sipped the last of his shot glass, and handed it over. “Let me drink a little more of this splendid Scotch,” he said, “and I’ll get into kilts.”

  I managed to smile. It took a considerable rearranging of the local passions in my mouth.

  “This has to be a hellish occasion for you,” he said. “Whether you believe it or not, it’s a hellish occasion
for me.”

  Well, now we were talking about the same thing. He must have some idea of how much paper I had carried out of Langley. I had an impulse to tell him it had not proved bothersome to that complex fellow, my conscience. In truth, it was amazing. While there might be a day when I would have to pay up on these accounts, I virtually looked forward to the occasion. I have a lot to tell you, Ned, I nearly told him now, of my feelings in this matter: I feel righteous.

  Instead, I chose to be silent. Rosen said, “Harry, you’ve been mad as a boil for years. Maybe with reason. When a marriage breaks up, I think one has to say, ‘Don’t judge. Only God can apportion the fault.’ We’re all married to the Agency. If you’re ready for a separation, I’m not the one to sit in judgment. Not on you. Over the years, you’ve done work that would put us all to shame. Such bold and well turned stuff.”

  I was trying to conceal my unprecedented pleasure. “Bold and well turned” had left me outrageously agog. Just as vain as a high official.

  Rosen followed up by saying, “I’ll tell you in confidence that whatever lifting you’ve done, and I believe we have pretty good track on these rampages by now, still, fellow—” his voice had never been more resonant—“on my word, the sins are venial.”

  It was his way of telling me to cooperate. Rosen over the years must have supplied Harlot with a good deal of stuff the Office of Security preferred to keep for themselves. Venial sins went on all the time. Information slipped through the cracks between State and us, Defense and us, NSC—yes, especially NSC—and us: we were merely good Americans who had invested in Leak Gardens.

  Mortal sins were another matter. Mortal sins delivered papyrus to the Sovietskys, an incomparably less humorous business. While Rosen could not be absolutely certain that I was on the lower end of the venial-mortal scale, he was nonetheless making covert promises. Resignation from the service might be in order, he had all but said, rather than trial and/or discharge. Obviously, he needed my help. The questions surrounding Hugh Montague’s death were going to be orders of magnitude more vital than any of my peccadillos.

  Perhaps it was just as well that I would have Ned for my interlocutor rather than some high-ranking Security baboon who would not know how many generations of Hubbards it had taken to shape the dear, shabby quiddities of the Keep.

  OMEGA–8

  THE LIGHT FROM THE FIREPLACE WAS REFLECTED IN HIS EYEGLASSES. I EVEN saw the logs flicker as I spoke.

  “Let’s take it for granted,” I said, “that my separation from the service will be equitable.” I do not know if my voice sounded inadmissably smug in its assessment, or if Rosen had been playing me with a well-chosen fly, but now I could feel him taking in slack.

  His thin lips took on the severity of a bureaucrat about to land his trout.

  “Let us assume,” he said, “that concerted cooperation will permit separation on equitable terms so far as relevant guidelines allow.”

  Not everyone could speak bureaucratese. I nodded scornfully. I realized I was drunk. That didn’t happen often these days no matter how much I drank, but you do get to feel competitive about your command of the tongue after more than twenty-five years in the government.

  “Subject,” I told him, “to appropriate conjunction, we will engineer a collateral inquiry out of the competing contingencies.”

  I said this to get that highly domiciled little smile off his face, but he merely looked sad. I realized that Rosen was as full of liquor as myself. We had been running a small rapids on the great river of booze. Now the drop was over. The river was calm.

  He sighed. I thought he was about to say, “How could you have done it?” but instead he murmured, “We’re not ready to make deals.”

  “Then where are we?”

  “I’d like your overview.”

  I took a sobering swallow of Scotch. “Why?”

  “Maybe I need it. We’re in the middle of a disaster. Sometimes you see things more clearly than me.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “I mean it,” he said. I began to think he did.

  “What do we have?” I asked. “You are holding a body that is Harlot’s body?”

  “Yes,” he said, but reluctantly, as if ready to deny his own affirmative.

  “I assume,” I said, and I took another sip of Scotch before bringing my voice down this gravel path, “the remains are damaged and swollen by water.”

  “The body, ostensibly, belongs to Harlot.”

  We were silent. I had known it would not be routine to speak of Harlot’s death in any fashion, yet was still surprised at the engorgement of my throat. Sorrow, anger, confusion, and a hint of hysteria at my own confusion were all groping alike for a safe spot in my larynx. I discovered that it helped to look at the fire. I studied a log as it glowed into incandescence before collapsing softly upon itself, and I began to mourn Harlot—along with all else! Yet mortality, we learn from every sermon, is the dissolution of all matter, yes, all our forms flow down to the sea, and Harlot’s death was entering the universe. So, too, did my throat feel less impeded.

  I discovered I did want to talk about Harlot’s death. No matter how much had taken place this evening—or was it precisely because of all that had happened?—I felt as if I had finally retreated to the middle of myself, to the clear logical middle of myself, and if my emotional ends had been consumed, so was the middle stronger. If drunk ten minutes ago, I now felt sober, but then drunkenness is the abdication of the ego, and mine had just surfaced like a whale. I felt a considerable need to recognize all over again just how sane I could be, which is to say, how lucid, how logical, how sardonic, how superior to everybody’s weaknesses, including my own. Did Rosen look for analysis? I would give it to him. Something of the old days was coming back to me—the sense the two of us used to share of being Harlot’s best and brightest. And certainly his most competitive. It did not matter any longer how tired I was, I felt tireless in the center of my brain.

  “Ned, the first question is whether it’s murder or suicide.”

  He nodded.

  To myself I thought: Suicide could only mean that Harlot had been playing for large stakes and lost. The corollary was that the High Holies were mortally disloyal to the Company, and I was, therefore, in no small trouble.

  “Keep going.”

  “If, however, Harlot was murdered,” I said, and stopped again. Greater difficulties commenced here. I chose an old CIA saw: “You don’t lance a boil,” I told him, “without having some idea where the drainage will go.”

  “Of course,” said Rosen.

  “Well, Reed, if Harlot suffered a hit, do the sluiceways point east or west?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know whether to look for the King Brothers or closer to home.” He exhaled from the tension of having carried this by himself all these hours.

  “It can’t be the King Brothers,” I said.

  He tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth. It would be the next thing to mutual kamikaze if we and the KGB ever began killing each other’s officers. By unspoken covenant we didn’t. Third World agents, perhaps, and an occasional European, but not each other. “No, not the Russians,” I said, “unless Harlot was working a double game with them.”

  Rosen sighed.

  “On the other hand,” I proposed, “it could be us.”

  “Would you expatiate on that?” Rosen asked.

  “Harlot was riding one hypothesis fairly hard. He had decided there was an enclave among us using our most classified information as a guide to buy, sell, and invest all over the world. By his estimate, these covert finances are larger by now than our entire budget for Operations.”

  “Are you saying, then, that Harlot was killed by Agency people?”

  “They stood to lose billions. Maybe more.”

  I was partial to the thesis. For Harlot’s sake and for my own. If he was the good sentinel on guard against massive internal corruption, then to have worked with him might cast an honorable light on me.


  Rosen, however, shook his head. “It’s not productive to go in this direction yet,” he said. “You don’t know the worst-case scenario. There’s a hell of a roadblock in front of your thesis.”

  I poured a little more Scotch for both of us.

  “You see,” said Rosen, “we are not, in fact, sure it’s Harlot’s remains. Not what washed up in the Chesapeake.”

  “Not sure?” I could hear the echo in my voice.

  “We have what purports to be Montague’s body. But the labs can’t give 100-percent probability to the cadaver. Although the specificities are respectable. Good fit for height and weight. On his third finger, left hand, a St. Matthew’s ring. The face, however, is no help at all.” Rosen’s pale gray eyes, usually unremarkable, now looked awfully bright behind his eyeglasses.

  “I couldn’t get myself to tell Kittredge,” he continued. “The face and head were blown off. Shotgun muzzle pressed against the palate. Probably a sawed-off shotgun.”

  I did not wish to contemplate this image longer than I had to. “What about Hugh’s back?” I asked.

  “There is a severe back injury on the body. No perambulative functions would be possible.” He shook his head. “We can’t be positive, however, that it’s the Montague injury.”

  “Surely you have Harlot’s X-rays on file?”

  “Well, Harry, you know Harlot. He had all records transferred from his hospital treatment center to us. He would never allow information about himself to repose anywhere out of the domain.”

  “What do his X-rays tell you?”

  “That’s the roadblock,” said Rosen. “The X-rays can’t be found.” He took his pipe out of his mouth and scrutinized the progress of the char in his bowl. “We have a first-rate headache.”

  OMEGA–9

  I COULD ANTICIPATE ROSEN’S NEXT QUESTION: HAVE YOU, HARRY HUBbard, removed Harlot’s X-rays from the file?

  The trouble was, I couldn’t give an answer. I had no recollection of ever bringing anything to Harlot from his medical file. My powers of on-demand recollection, after thirty years of drinking, could show a gaping hole or two. It was not impossible that I had forgotten.