The Company: A Novel of the CIA (24 page)

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 are 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. 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 roasted 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/0, 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?"

Leo sensed that more was riding on the manner in which he answered Swett's question than the answer itself. Adelle was impulsive but he doubted she would marry someone against her father's will. He needed to be smart; to grab the bull by the horns, as Swett put it. "How much do you earn a year, sir?"

Adelle held her breath. Her father took several staccato puffs on his cigar and scrutinized Leo through the smoke. "Roughly one point four million, give or take a couple of dozen thousand. That's after taxes."

"I make six thousand four hundred dollars, sir. That's before taxes."

A weighty silence filled the room. "Tarnation, I'm not one to pussyfoot around, son. It's not the money that worries me—when I got hitched I was making forty a week. Here's where I stand: I'm dead blast set against mixed marriages. Mind you, I got nothing against Jewish people but I figure Jews should marry Jews and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants need to go and marry white Anglo-Saxon Protestants."

"When you get right down to it, all marriages are mixed," Leo said. "One male, one female."

Adelle rested a hand on his shoulder. "They sure are. Daddy. Look at you and mom. More mixed, you'd melt."

"Sir," Leo said, leaning forward, "I'm in love with your daughter. I wasn't aware that we were asking your permission to marry." He reached over and laced his fingers through Adelle's. "We're informing you. We'd both prefer to have your blessing, me as much as Adelle. If not"—he tightened his grip on Adelle—"not."

Swett eyed Leo with grudging respect. "I'll give you this much, young fellah—you have better taste than my little gal here."

"Oh, Daddy!" cried Adelle, "I knew you'd like him." And she bounded across the room into her father's arms.