The Company

  Colby corrected her with a soft chuckle. “If the Russians overrun the country, Margaret. If.” He turned to the others, who were sprawled on radiators and green four-drawer government-issue filing cabinets or, like Leo Kritzky, leaning against one of the pitted partitions that separated Colby’s office from the warren of cubbyholes around it. “Let me break in here to underscore two critical points,” Colby said. “First, even where the local government is cooperating in setting up stay-behind cells, which is the case in most Scandinavian countries, we want to create our own independent assets. The reason for this is simple: No one can be sure that some governments won’t accept Soviet occupation under pressure; no one can be sure that elements in those governments won’t collaborate with that occupation and betray the stay-behind network. Secondly, I can’t stress too much the matter of security. If word of the stay-behind networks leaks, the Russians could wipe out the cells if they overrun the country. Perhaps even more important, if the public gets wind of the existence of a stay-behind network, it would undermine morale, inasmuch as it would indicate that the CIA doesn’t have much faith in NATO’s chances of stopping a full-fledged Soviet invasion.”

  “But we don’t have much faith,” Margaret quipped.

  “Agreed,” Colby said. “But we don’t have to advertise the fact.” Colby, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, swiveled his wooden chair toward Kritzky. “How are you doing with your choke points, Leo?”

  Leo’s particular assignment when he turned up for duty in Colby’s shop on the Reflecting Pool had been to identify vulnerable geographic choke points—key bridges, rail lines, locomotive repair facilities, canal locks, hub terminals—across Scandinavia, assign them to individual stay-behind cells and then squirrel away enough explosives in each area so the cells could destroy the choke points in the event of war. “If the balloon goes up,” Leo was saying, “my team reckons that with what we already have on the ground, we could bring half the rail and river traffic in Scandinavia to a dead stop.”

  “Half is ten percent better than I expected and half as good as we need to be,” Colby commented from behind his desk. “Keep at it, Leo.” He addressed everyone in the room. “It’s not an easy matter to prepare for war during what appears to be peacetime. There is a general tendency to feel you have all the time in the world. We don’t. General MacArthur is privately trying to convince the Joint Chiefs to let him bomb targets in China. The final decision, of course, will be Truman’s. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see the Korean War escalating into World War III if we send our planes north of the Yalu and bomb China. We’re on track with our stay-behind nets but don’t ease up. Okay, gentlemen and ladies, that’s it for today.”

  “Want to put some salve on the whip marks on your back, Leo?” his “cellmate” inquired when Leo returned to his corner cubbyhole. Maud was a heavyset, middle-aged woman who chain-smoked small Schimelpenick cigars. Four large filing cabinets and the drawers of her desk were overflowing with documents “liberated” from the Abwehr in 1945. New piles were brought in almost daily. Maud, a historian by training who had served as an OSS researcher during the war, pored over the documents looking for the telltale traces of Soviet intelligence operations in the areas that had been occupied by German troops. She was hoping to discover if any of the famous Soviet spy rings had had agents in England or France during the war—agents who might still be loyal to the Kremlin and spying for Russia.

  Leo settled down behind his second hand wooden desk and stared for a long moment at the ceiling, which was streaked with stains from the rain and snow that had seeped through the roof. “No matter how much we give Colby, he wants more,” he griped.

  “Which is why he is the leader and you are a follower,” Maud observed dryly.

  “Which is why,” Leo agreed.

  “Courier service left this for you,” Maud said. She tossed a sealed letter onto his desk and, lighting a fresh Schimelpenick, went back to her Abwehr documents.

  Leo ripped open the envelope and extracted a tissue-thin letter, which turned out to be from Jack. “Leo, you old fart,” it began.

  “Thanks for the note, which arrived in yesterday’s overnight pouch. I’m rushing to get this into tonight’s overnight so excuse the penmanship or lack of same. Your work in Washington sounds tedious but important. Regarding Colby, the word in Germany is that he’s headed for big things, so hang on to his coattails, old buddy. There’s not much I can tell about Berlin Base because (as we say in the trade) you don’t need to know. Things are pretty feverish here. You see a lot of people running around like chickens without heads. Remember the OSS lawyer-type we met at the Cloud Club—‘Ebby’ Ebbitt? He got the old heave-ho for saying out loud what a lot of people (though not me) were thinking, which is that the honcho of Berlin Base drinks too much. Ebby was palmed off on Frankfurt Station and I haven’t heard hide nor hair since. The Sorcerer, meanwhile, is going up the wall over a defection that turned sour—he is sure the opposition was tipped off. Question is: by whom? As for yours truly, I’ve been given my first agent to run. Luck of the draw, she’s what you’d call a raving beauty. Enormous sad eyes and long legs that simply don’t end. My honcho wants me to seduce her so he can tune in on the pillow talk. I am more than willing to make this sacrifice for my country but I can’t seem to get to first base with her. Which is a new experience for me. Win some, lose some. Keep in touch. Hopefully our paths will cross when I get home leave.”

  There was a postscript scrawled down one side of the letter. “Came across an old comrade (the term, as you’ll see, is appropriate) in a Berlin bar the other night. Remember Vanka Borisov? He was the bruiser rowing stroke for the Russians at the European championships in Munich in ’48. You, me, and Vanka spent a night bar-hopping, we picked up those Australian sisters—peaceniks who told us with tears in their eyes that our friendship was beautiful because it was sabotaging the Cold War. After you went back to the hotel the sisters took turns screwing us as their contribution to world peace. I had a broken rib so the girls had to do everything. Imagine a vast peace movement made up of gorgeous nymphets fucking to stop the Cold War! Vanka, who’s put on weight, knew about my working for the Pickle Factory, which makes him KGB. Looked around the bar but there were no Australian girls in sight!”

  Leo clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back into them. He almost wished he had landed an assignment in someplace like Berlin. Washington seemed tame by comparison. Still, this was the eye of the storm—he had been given to understand that this was where he could contribute the most. His gaze fell on the framed copy of National Security Council Memorandum 68, which had been drafted by Paul Nitze and called for a national crusade against global Communism. Leo wondered if the knights starting on the long trek to the Holy Land nine centuries earlier had been spurred on by equivalent papal memoranda. His gaze drifted to the government executive calendar tacked to the wall. Like all Fridays, March 30 was circled in red to remind him that it was payday; it was also circled in blue to remind him to take his dog to the vet when he got off from work for the day.

  With the ancient arthritic dog hobbling alongside, Leo pushed through the door into the waiting room of the Maryland Veterinary Hospital and took a seat. The dog, mostly but not entirely German Shepherd, slumped with a thud onto the linoleum. Reaching down, Leo stroked his head.

  “So what’s wrong with him?”

  He glanced across the room. A young woman, slightly overweight, on the short side with short curly hair that fell in bangs over a high forehead, was watching him. Her eyelids were pink and swollen from crying. She was dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, faded orange overalls with a bib top and tennis shoes. A tan-and-white Siamese cat stained with dried blood lay limply across her knees.

  “He’s starting to lead a dog’s life, which is a new experience for him,” Leo said morosely. “I’ve decided to put him out of his misery.”

  “Oh,” the young woman said, “you must be very sad. How long have you had him?”

/>   Leo looked down at the dog. “Sometimes it seems as if he’s been with me forever.”

  The woman absently laced her fingers through the fur on the cat’s neck. “I know what you mean.”

  There was an awkward silence. Leo nodded toward the cat on her knees. “What’s its name?”

  “Her full name is Once in a Blue Moon. Her friends call her Blue Moon for short. I’m her best friend.”

  “What happened to Once in a Blue Moon?”

  The story spilled out; she seemed eager to tell it, almost as if the telling would dull the pain. “Blue Moon was raised on my Dad’s farm in the Maryland countryside. When I got a job in Washington and moved to Georgetown last year I took her with me. Big error. She hated being cooped up—she would gaze out the window hours on end. In the summer she used to climb out the open window and sit on a sill watching the birds fly and I knew she wanted to fly, too. I sleep with my bedroom window open even in winter—I could have sworn I’d closed it when I left for work this morning but I guess I must have forgotten.” The young woman couldn’t speak for a moment. Then, her voice grown husky, she said, “Blue Moon forgot she was a cat and decided to fly like a bird but she didn’t know how, did she? You hear all these stories about cats jumping off tall buildings and landing unharmed on their feet. But she jumped from the fourth floor and landed on her back. She seems to be paralyzed. I’m going to have them give her an injection—“

  The vets took Leo first. When he came back to the waiting room ten minutes later carrying the still-warm corpse of his dog in a supermarket paper bag, the young woman was gone. He sat down and waited for her. After a while she pushed through the door holding a paper bag of her own. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Leo stood up.

  She looked at the paper bag in her hands. “Blue Moon is still warm,” she whispered.

  Leo nodded. “Do you have a car?” he asked suddenly.

  She said she did.

  “What are you going to do with Once in a Blue Moon?”

  “I was planning to drive out to Daddy’s farm—“

  “Look, what if we were to stop by that big hardware store on the mall and buy a shovel, and then drive into the country and find a hill with a great view and bury the two of them together?” Leo shifted his weight from foot to foot in embarrassment. “Maybe it’s a crazy idea. I mean, you don’t even know me—“

  “What sign are you?”

  “I was born the day of the great stock market crash, October twenty-ninth, 1929. My father used to joke that my birth brought on the crash. I could never work out how my being born could affect the stock market but until I was nine or ten I actually believed him.”

  “October twenty-ninth—that makes you a Scorpio. I’m a Gemini.” The young woman regarded Leo through her tears. “Burying them together strikes me as a fine idea,” she decided. Clutching her paper bag under her left arm, she stepped forward and offered her hand. “I’m Adelle Swett.”

  Somewhat clumsily, Leo clasped it. “Leo. Leo Kritzky.”

  “I am glad to make your acquaintance, Leo Kritzky.”

  He nodded. “Likewise.”

  She smiled through her tears because he had not let go of her hand. The smile lingered in her normally solemn eyes after it had faded from her lips. He smiled back at her.

  Leo and Adelle had what the screen magazines referred to as a whirlwind romance. After they buried his dog and her cat on a hill in Maryland he took her to a roadside tavern he knew near Annapolis. Dinner—fried clams and shrimps fresh from the Maryland shore—was served on a table covered with the front page of the Baltimore Sun bearing a banner headline announcing that the Rosenbergs had been convicted of espionage. Leo sprinted up a narrow flight of steps to the smoke-filled bar and came back with two giant mugs of light tap beer. For a time he and Adelle circled each other warily, talking about the Rosenberg trial, talking about books they’d read recently: James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (which he liked), Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp (which she liked), J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (which they both loved because they shared the hero’s loathing of phonies). After that first date they fell easily into the habit of talking on the phone almost daily. Adelle had earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and had found work as a legislative assistant to a first-term senator, a Texas Democrat named Lyndon Johnson who was considered a comer in Democratic circles. Johnson spent hours each day on the phone working the Washington rumor mill, so Adelle always had a lot of hot political gossip to pass on. Leo, for his part, claimed to be a junior researcher at the State Department but when she tried to pin him down about what exactly he researched, he remained vague, which convinced Adelle, wise in the ways of Washington, that he was engaged in some sort of secret work.

  Two weeks after they met Leo took Adelle to see a new film called The African Queen, starring Hepburn and Bogart, and afterward, to a steakhouse in Virginia. Over medium-rare inch-thick sirloins Adelle inquired with great formality whether Leo’s intentions were honorable. He asked her to define the word. She flushed but her eyes never strayed from his. She told him she was a virgin and only planned to sleep with the man she would marry. Leo promptly proposed to her. Adelle promised to think about it seriously. When dessert came she reached across the table and ran her fingers over the back of his wrist. She said she had given the matter a great deal of thought and had decided to accept.

  “Long about now you should be inviting me home with you,” she announced.

  Leo allowed as how he was kind of frightened. She asked if he was a virgin and when he said no, he had lived for a time with a girl some years older than he was, she asked: Then where’s the problem? Leo said he was in love with her and didn’t want it to go wrong in bed. She raised a wine glass and toasted him across the table. Nothing can go wrong, she whispered.

  And nothing did.

  There was still one height to scale: her Daddy, who turned out to be none other than Philip Swett, a self-made St. Paul wheeler-dealer who had moved to Chicago and earned a fortune in commodity futures. More recently he had become a heavy hitter in the Democratic Party and a crony of Harry Truman’s, breakfasting with the President twice a week, sometimes striding alongside him on his brisk morning constitutionals. To drive home that the young man courting Adelle was out of his depth, Swett invited Leo to one of his notorious Saturday night Georgetown suppers. The guests included the Alsop brothers, the Bohlens (just back from Moscow), the Nitzes, Phil and Kay Graham, Randolph Churchill and Malcolm Muggeridge (over from London for the weekend), along with several senior people Leo recognized from the corridors of the Company—the Wiz was there with his wife, as well as the DD/O, Allen Dulles, who most Washington pundits figured would wind up running the CIA one day soon. Leo found himself seated below the salt, a table-length away from Adelle, who kept casting furtive looks in his direction to see how he was faring. Dulles, sitting next to her, wowed the guests with one yarn after another. Phil Graham asked Dulles if his relationship with Truman had improved any.

  “Not so you’d notice,” Dulles said. “He’s never forgiven me for siding with Dewey in forty-eight. He likes to pull my leg whenever he can. I stood in for Bedell Smith at the regular intelligence meeting this week. As I was leaving, Truman called me over and said he wanted the CIA to provide a wall map for the Oval Office with pins stuck in it showing the location of our secret agents around the world. I started to sputter about how we couldn’t do anything like that because not everyone who came into the Oval Office had the appropriate security clearance.” Dulles smiled at his own story. “At which point Truman burst out laughing and I realized he was having fun at my expense.”

  After dinner the guests retired to the spacious living room, pushed back the furniture and began dancing to Big Band records blasting from the phonograph. Leo was trying to catch Adelle’s eye when Swett crooked a forefinger at both of them.

  “Join me in the study,” he ordered Leo. He waved for Adelle to follow them.
/>
  Fearing the worst, Leo trailed after him up the carpeted stairs to a paneled room with a log fire burning in the fireplace. Adelle slipped in and closed the door. Opening a mahogany humidor, Swett motioned Leo into a leather-upholstered chair and offered him a very phallic-looking Havana cigar.

  “Don’t smoke,” Leo said, feeling as if he were admitting to an unforgivable lapse of character. Adelle settled onto the arm of his chair. Together they confronted her father.

  “By golly, you don’t know what you’re missing,” Swett said. Half sitting on the edge of a table, he snipped off the tip with a silver scissor, struck a match with his thumbnail and held the flame to the end of the cigar. Great clouds of dusky smoke billowed from his mouth. Swett’s raspy sentences seemed to emerge from the smoke. “Grab the bull by the horns, that’s what I say. Adelle tells me she’s been seeing a lot of you.”

  Leo nodded carefully.

  “What do you do? For income, I mean.”

  “Daddy, you’ve seen too many of those Hollywood movies.”

  “I work for the government,” Leo replied.

  Swett snickered. “When a man ’round here says something fuzzy like he works for the government, that means he’s Pickle Factory. You with Allen Dulles and the Wiz over at Operations?”

  Leo dug in his heels. “I work for the State Department, Mr. Swett.” He named an office, a superior, an area of expertise. His offer to supply a telephone number was backhanded away.

  Swett sucked on his cigar. “What’s your salary, son?”

  “Daddy, you promised me you wouldn’t browbeat him.”

  “Where I come from man’s got the right to ask a fellow who’s courting his daughter what his prospects are.” He focused on Leo. “How much?”