The Company: A Novel of the CIA (8 page)

Jack climbed to his feet to put on a new record. "Yeah, tell us about the unifying vision of Stalin."

"My central vision doesn't come from Stalin. It doesn't even come from Marx. It comes from Leon Tolstoy. He spent most of his life searching for a unifying theory, the single key that would unlock every door, the universal explanation for our passions and economics and poverty and politics. What I really am is a Tolstoyist."

Leo said, "The universal explanation—the force that conditions all human choice—turns out, according to Marx, to be economics."

Stella nudged Jack in the ribs with an elbow. "I thought sex was behind all our choices," she teased.

Jack wagged a finger in Stella's face. "You've been reading Freud again."

"Freud's mistake was to generalize from a particular," Yevgeny went on, bending forward, caught up in his own narrative. "And the particular in his case was himself. Don't forget that many of the dreams he analyzed were his own. Tolstoy moved far beyond himself—he caught a glimpse of a force, a fate, a scheme of things that was behind all of history; 'Something incomprehensible but which is nevertheless the only thing that matters,' as he has his Prince Andrei say."

Leo poured the last of their open bottle of cooking cognac into his cup. "Human experience is too complex and too inconsistent to be explained by any one law or any one truth."

Jack said flatly, "All visions which lead to concentration camps are flatout wrong."

Stella waved her hand as if she were in a classroom. "What about America's concentration camps? They're harder to identify because they don't have walls or barbed wire. We call them Negro ghettos and Indian reservations."

Yevgeny said, "Stella's got it right, of course—"

"What about the Iron Curtain?" Jack blurted out. "What about the slave nations imprisoned behind it? Damnation, a Negro can walk out of the ghetto any time he wants, which is more than you can say for a Pole or a Hungarian."

"Negro soldiers fought World War II in segregated units run by white officers," Yevgeny said sharply. "Your Mr. Truman finally got around to integrating the armed forces last year, eighty-four years after the end of your Civil War."

"Arguing with the two of you has a lot in common with beating your head against a wall," Jack said wearily.

Yevgeny climbed to his feet and produced another bottle of cooking cognac from behind a stack of books on a shelf and passed it around. The members of the troika each poured a shot of cognac onto the coffee dregs at the bottom of their respective cups. Yevgeny raised his cup aloft and called out his trademark slogan in Russian: "Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!"

"Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela,"Jack and Leo repeated.

Stella said, "You've told me before but I always forget. What's that mean again?"

Leo supplied the English translation: "To the success of our hopeless task!"

Stella swallowed a yawn. "Right now my hopeless task is to keep my eyes open. I'm going to hit the hay. Are you coming, Leo, baby?"

"Are you coming, Leo, baby?" Jack cooed, mimicking Stella.

Leo threw a dark look in Jack's direction as he trailed after Stella and disappeared into the room at the end of the hallway.

In the early hours of the morning, as the first ash-gray streaks of first light broke against the Harkness Quadrangle, Leo came awake to discover Stella missing from the narrow bed. Padding sleepily through the silent apartment he heard the scratching of a needle going round and round in the end grooves of a record in the living room. Yevgeny was fast asleep on the old couch under the window with the torn shade, his arm trailing down to the linoleum, the tips of his fingers wedged in Trevelyan's masterpiece on the American Revolution so he wouldn't lose his place. Leo gently lifted the needle from the record and switched offYevgeny's reading lamp. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he noticed a flicker of light under Jack's door on one side of the living room. Expecting to catch Jack burning the midnight oil, he gripped the knob and softly turned it and inched the door open.

Inside a sputtering candle splashed quivering shadows onto the peeling wallpaper. One of the shadows belonged to Stella. She was wearing one of Leo's sleeveless Yale rowing shirts and slouched on the bed, her back against the wall, her long bare legs stretched out and parted wide. Another shadow was cast by Jack. He was kneeling on the floor between Stella's silvery thighs, his head bent forward. Sifting through the murky images, Leo's sleep-fogged brain decided it had stumbled on Jack worshipping at an altar.

In the half-darkness, Leo could make out Stella's face. She was looking straight at him, a faint smile of complicity on her slightly parted lips.

Working out of an empty office that his old law firm put at his disposition whenever he came to Manhattan, Frank Wisner wound up the meeting with E. (for Elliott) Winstrom Ebbitt II and walked him over to the bank of elevators. "I'm real pleased Bill Donovan made sure our paths crossed," he drawled, stretching his Mississippi vowels like rubber bands and letting them snap back on the consonants. The Wiz, as Wisner was affectionately nicknamed in the Company, was the deputy head, behind Allen Dulles, of what some journalists had dubbed the dirty tricks department of the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. A ruggedly handsome OSS veteran, he favored his visitor with one of his legendary gap-toothed smiles. "Welcome aboard, Ebby," he declared, offering a resolute paw.

Nodding, Ebby took it. "It was flattering to be asked to join such a distinguished team."

As Ebby climbed into the elevator, the Wiz slapped him on the back. "We'll see how flattered you feel when I kick ass over some operation that didn't end up the way I thought it should. Cloud Club, sixteen thirty tomorrow."

Ebby got off the elevator two floors below to pick up a briefcase full of legal briefs from his desk. He pushed through the double doors with "Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard & Irvine" and "Attorneys at Law" etched in gold letters across the thick glass. Except for the two Negro cleaning ladies vacuuming the wall-to-wall carpets, the offices were deserted. Heading back to the elevators, Ebby stopped to pen a note in his small, precise handwriting to his secretary. "Kindly cancel my four o'clock and keep my calendar clear for the afternoon. Try and get me fifteen minutes with Mr. Donovan anytime in the morning. Also, please Thermofax my outstanding dossiers and leave the copies on Ken Brill's desk. Tell him I'd take it as a favor if he could bring himself up to speed on all the material by Monday latest." He scribbled "E.E." across the bottom of the page and stuck it under a paperweight on the blotter.

Moments later the revolving door at Number Two Wall Street spilled Ebby into a late afternoon heat wave. Loosening his tie, he flagged down a cab, gave the driver an address on Park and Eighty-eighth and told him to take his sweet time getting there. He wasn't looking forward to the storm that was about to burst.

Eleonora (pronounced with an Italian lilt ever since the young Eleanor Krandal had spent a junior semester at Radcliffe studying Etruscan jewelry at the Villa Giulia in Rome) was painting her fingernails for the dinner party that night when Ebby, stirring an absinth and water with a silver swizzle stick, wandered into the bedroom. "Darling, where have you been?" she cried with a frown. "The Wilsons invited us for eight, which means we have to cross their threshold not a split second later than eight-thirtyish. I heard Mr. Harriman was coming—"

"Manny have a good day?"

"When Miss Utterback picked him up, the teacher told her Manny'd been frightened when the air raid siren shrieked and all the children had to take cover under their little tables. These atomic alerts scare me, too. How was your day?"

"Frank Wisner asked me up to Carter Ledyard for a chat this afternoon."

Eleonora glanced up from her nails in mild interest. "Did he?"

Ebby noticed that every last hair on his wife's gorgeous head was in place, which meant that she'd stopped by the hairdresser's after the lunch with her Radcliffe girlfriends at the Automat on Broadway. He wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to the eager girl who'd been waiting when the banana boat back from the war had deposited him on a Manhattan dock draped with an enormous banner reading "Welcome Home—Well Done." In those days she had been filled with impatience—to have herself folded into his arms, no matter they hadn't seen each other in four years; to climb into the rack with him, no matter she was a virgin; to walk down the aisle on her father's arm and agree to love and honor and obey, though she'd made it crystal clear from day one that the obey part was a mere formality. During the first years of their marriage it was her money— from a trust fund, from her salary as a part-time jewelry buyer for Bergdorf's—that had put him through Columbia Law. Once he had his degree and had been hired by "Wild" Bill Donovan, his old boss at OSS who was back practicing law in New York, Eleonora more or less decided to retire and begin living in the style to which she wanted to become accustomed.

Across the bedroom, Eleonora held up one hand to the light and examined her nails. Ebby decided there was no point in beating around the bush. "The Wiz offered me a job. I accepted."

"Is Frank Wisner back at Carter Ledyard? I suppose that Washington thing didn't work out for him. I hope you talked salary? Knowing you, darling, I'm sure you would never be the first to raise the ugly subject of money. Did he say anything about an eventual partnership? You ought to play your cards carefully—Mr. Donovan might be willing to give you a junior partnership to keep from losing you. On the other hand. Daddy won't be disappointed if you go to Carter Ledyard. He and Mr. Wisner know each other from Yale—they were both Skull and Bones. He could put in a good word—"

Ebby puffed up two pillows and stretched out on the cream-colored bedspread. "Frank Wisner hasn't gone back to Carter Ledyard."

"Darling, you might take your shoes off."

He undid his laces and kicked off his shoes. "The Wiz's still in government service."

"I thought you said you saw him at Carter Ledyard."

Ebby started over again. "Frank has the use of an office there when he's in town. He asked me up and offered me a job. I'm joining him in Washington. You'll be pleased to know I did raise the ugly subject of money. I'll be starting at GS-12, which pays six-thousand four-hundred dollars."

Eleonora concentrated on screwing the cap back onto the nail polish. "Darling, if this is some sort of silly prank..." She began waving her fingers in the air to dry her nails but stopped when she caught sight of his eyes. "You're being serious, Eb, aren't you? You're not becoming involved with that ridiculous Central Agency Mr. Donovan and you were talking about over brandy the other night, for heavens sake."

"I'm afraid I am."

Eleonora undid the knot on the belt of the silk robe and shrugged it off her delicate shoulders; it fell in a heap on the floor, where it would stay until the Cuban maid straightened up the room the next morning. Ebby noticed his wife was wearing one of those newfangled slips that doubled as a brassiere and pushed up her small pointed breasts. "I thought you'd grown up, Eb," she was saying as she slipped into a black Fogarty number with a pinched waist and a frilly skirt. Taking it for granted that she could talk him out of this silly idea, she backed up to him so he could close the zipper.

"That's just it," Ebby said, sitting up to wrestle with the zipper. "I have grown up. I've had it up to here with company mergers and stock issues and trust funds for spoiled grandchildren. Frank Wisner says the country is at peril and he's not the only one to think so. Mr. Luce called this the American century, but at the halfway mark it's beginning to look more and more like the Soviet century. The Czechoslovak President, Mr. Masaryk, was thrown out of a window and the last free East European country went down the drain. Then we lost China to the Reds. If we don't get cracking France and Italy will go Communist and our whole position in Europe will be in jeopardy." He gave up on the zipper and touched the back of his hand to the nape other neck. "A lot of the old OSS crowd are signing on, Eleonora. The Wiz was very convincing—he said he couldn't find people with my experience in clandestine operations on every street corner. I couldn't refuse him. You do see that?"

Eleonora pulled free from his clumsy fingers and padded across the room in her stockinged feet to study herself in the full-length mirror. "I married a brilliant attorney with a bright future—"

"Do you love me or my law degree?"

She regarded him in the mirror. "To be perfectly honest, darling, both. I love you in the context of your work. Daddy is an attorney, my two uncles are attorneys, my brother has one more year at Harvard Law and then he'll join Daddy's firm. How could I possibly explain to them that my husband has decided to throw away a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar-a-year position in one of the smartest firms on Wall Street for a six-thousand-a-year job—doing what? You've fought your war, Eb. Let someone else fight this one. How many times do you need to be a hero in one lifetime?" Her skirt flaring above her delicate ankles, Eleonora wheeled around to face her husband. "Look, let's both of us simmer down and enjoy ourselves at the Wilsons. Then you'll sleep on it, Eb. Things will look clearer in the cold light of morning."

I've accepted Franks offer," Ebby insisted. "I don't intend to go back on that."

Eleonora's beautiful eyes turned flinty. "Whatever you do, you'll never match your father unless someone stands you in front of a firing squad."

"My father has nothing to do with this."

She looked around for her shoes. "You really don't expect me to transplant Immanuel to a semi-attached stucco house in some dingy Washington suburb so you can take a six-thousand-a-year job spying on Communists who are spying on Americans who are spying on Communists."

Ebby said dryly, "It's sixty-four-hundred, and that doesn't include the two-hundred-dollar longevity increase for my two years in the OSS."

Eleonora let her voice grow husky. "If you abandon a promising career you'll be abandoning a wife and a son with it. I'm just not the 'Whither thou goest' type."