The Company Page 2

  “I’m not here in this dry-rotted rain-wash of a city because it brightens my life,” the Sorcerer said, preempting the question an apprentice with balls would have posed by now. “I’m here because the goddamn Goths are at the goddamn gate.” He tugged a threadbare scarf up over his numb earlobes, tap-danced his scruffy cowboy boots on the floor to keep up the circulation in his toes. “Are you reading me loud and clear, sport? This isn’t alcohol talking, this is the honcho of Berlin Base talking. Someone has to man the god-damn ramparts.” He sucked on a soggy Camel and washed down the smoke with a healthy gulp of what he called medicinal whiskey. “I drink what my fitness report describes as a toxic amount of booze,” he rambled on, addressing the problem Jack didn’t have the guts to raise, articulating each syllable as if he were patrolling the fault line between soused and sober, “because the goddamn Goths happen to be winning the goddamn war.”

  Harvey Torriti, a.k.a. the Sorcerer, scraped back the chair and made his way to the single small oriel window of the safe house two floors above the East Berlin neighborhood cinema. From under the floorboards came the distant shriek of incoming mortars, then a series of dull explosions as they slammed into the German positions. Several of Torriti’s hookers had seen the Soviet war film the week before. The Ukrainian girl who bleached her hair the color of chrome claimed the movie had been shot, with the usual cast of thousands, on a studio lot in Alma-Ata; in the background she recognized, so she’d said, the snow-capped Ala-Tau mountain range, where she used to sleigh ride when she was evacuated to Central Asia during the war. Snorting to clear a tingling sinus, the Sorcerer parted the slats of an imaginary Venetian blind with two thick fingers of his gloved hand and gazed through the grime on the pane. At sunset a mustard-color haze had drifted in from the Polish steppe, a mere thirty miles east, shrouding the Soviet Sector of Berlin in an eerie stillness, coating its intestine-like cobble gutters with what looked like an algae that reeked, according to Torriti’s conceit, of intrigue. Down the block jackdaws beat into the air and cawed savagely as they wheeled around the steeple of a dilapidated church that had been converted into a dilapidated warehouse. (The Sorcerer, an aficionado of cause-and-effect, listened for the echo of the pistol shot he’d surely missed.) In the narrow street outside the cinema Silwan I, known as Sweet Jesus, one of the two Rumanian gypsies employed by Torriti as bodyguards, could be seen, a sailor’s watch cap pulled low over his head, dragging a muzzled lap dog through the brackish light of a vapor lamp. Except for Sweet Jesus, the streets of what the Company pros called “West Moscow” appeared to be deserted. “If there are Homo sapiens out there celebrating the end of the year,” Torriti muttered gloomily, “they sure are being discreet about it.”

  Suffering from a mild case of first operation adrenalin jitters, Jack McAuliffe, a.k.a. the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, called from the door with elaborate laziness, “The quiet gives me the willies, Harvey. Back in the States everyone honks their horns on New Year’s Eve.”

  The second gypsy, Silwan II, dubbed the Fallen Angel by Torriti after he detected in his dark eyes an ugly hint of things the Rumanian was desperately trying to forget, stuck his head in from the next room. A gangly young man with a smallpox-scarred face, he had been reading for the Rumanian Orthodox church and wound up in the business of espionage when the Communists shut down his seminary. “Blowing horns is against the law in the German Democratic Republic,” Silwan II announced in the precise accented English of someone who had picked up the language from textbooks. “Also in our capitalist Germany.”

  At the window, the Sorcerer fogged a pane with his whiskey breath and rubbed it clean with a heavy forearm. Across the roofs the top floors of several high-rise apartment buildings, their windows flickering with light, loomed through the murky cityscape like the tips of icebergs. “It’s not a matter of German law,” Torriti reckoned moodily, “it’s a matter of German character.” He wheeled away from the window so abruptly he almost lost his balance. Grabbing the back of the chair to steady himself, he cautiously shoehorned his heavy carcass onto the wooden seat. “I happen to be the god-damn Company specialist on German character,” he insisted, his voice pitched high but curiously melodic. “I was a member of the debriefing team that interrogated the SS Obersturmführer of Auschwitz night before the fucker was strung up for war crimes. What was his goddamn name? Höss. Rudolf Höss. Fucker claimed he couldn’t have killed five thousand Jews a day because the trains could only bring in two thousand. Talk about an airtight defense! We were all smoking like concentration camp chimneys and you could see Herr Höss was dying for a goddamn cigarette, so I offered him one of my Camels.” Torriti swallowed a sour giggle. “You know what Rudy did, sport?”

  “What did Rudy do, Harvey?”

  “The night before his execution he turned down the fucking cigarette because there was a ‘No Smoking’ sign on the wall. Now that’s what I call German character.”

  “Lenin once said the only way you could get Germans to storm a railway station was to buy them tickets to the quay,” ventured the Fallen Angel.

  Jack laughed—a shade too quickly, a shade too heartily for Torriti’s taste.

  The Sorcerer was dressed in the shapeless trousers and ankle-length rumpled green overcoat of an East German worker. The tips of a wide and flowery Italian tie were tucked, military style, between two buttons of his shirt. His thin hair was sweat-pasted onto his glistening skull. Eying his apprentice across the room, he began to wonder how Jack would perform in a crunch; he himself had barely made it through a small Midwestern community college and then had clawed his way up through the ranks to finish the war with the fool’s gold oak leaves of a major pinned to the frayed collar of his faded khaki shirt, which left him with a low threshold of tolerance for the Harvard-Yale-Princeton crowd—what he called “the boys from HYP.” It was a bias that grew during a brief stint running organized crime investigations for the FBI right after the war (employment that ended abruptly when J. Edgar Hoover himself spotted Torriti in the corridor wearing tight trousers and an untied tie and fired him on the spot). What the hell! Nobody in the Company bothered consulting the folks on the firing line when they press-ganged the Ivy League for recruits and came up with jokers like Jack McAuliffe, a Yalie so green behind the ears he’d forgotten to get his ashes hauled when he was sent to debrief Torriti’s hookers the week the Sorcerer came down with the clap. Well, what could you expect from a college graduate with a degree in rowing?

  Clutching the bottle of PX whiskey by its throat, closing one eye and squinting through the other, the Sorcerer painstakingly filled the kitchen tumbler to the brim. “Not the same without ice,” he mumbled, belching as he carefully maneuvered his thick lips over the glass. He felt the alcohol scald the back of his throat. “No ice, no tinkle. No tinkle, schlecht!” He jerked his head up and called across to Jack, “So what time do you make it, sport?”

  Jack, anxious to put on a good show, glanced nonchalantly at the Bulova his parents had given him on his graduation from Yale. “He should have been here twelve, fifteen minutes ago,” he said.

  The Sorcerer scratched absently at the two-day stubble on his overlapping chins. He hadn’t had time to shave since the high priority message had sizzled into Berlin Base forty-two hours earlier. The heading had been crammed with in-house codes indicating it had come directly from counterintelligence; from Mother himself. Like all messages from counterintelligence it had been flagged “CRITIC,” which meant you were expected to drop whatever you were doing and concentrate on the matter at hand. Like some messages from counterintelligence—usually the ones dealing with defectors—it had been encoded in one of Mother’s unbreakable polyalphabetic systems that used two cipher alphabets to provide multiple substitutes for any given letter in the text.

  TOP SECRET

  WARNING NOTICE: SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION

  Intelligence sources and methods involved

  FROM:

  Hugh Ashmead [Mother’s in-house cryptonym]


  TO:

  Alice Reader [the Sorcerer’s in-house cryptonym]

  SUBJECT:

  Bringing home the bacon

  The message had gone on to inform Torriti that someone claiming to be a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer had put out feelers that had landed in one of the several in-boxes on Mother’s desk. (In the Sorcerer’s experience everything landed in one of the in-boxes on Mother’s desk but that was another story.) Mother’s cable identified the would-be defector by the random cryptonym SNOWDROP, preceded by the digraph AE to indicate the matter was being handled by the Soviet Russia Division, and went on to quote the entire contents of the Company’s 201—the file in Central Registry—on the Russian.

  Vishnevsky, Konstantin: born either 1898 or 1899 in Kiev; father, a chemical engineer and Party member, died when subject was a teenager; at age 17 enrolled as cadet in Kiev Military Academy; graduated four years later as an artillery officer; did advanced studies at the Odessa Artillery School for officers; coopted into military intelligence at the start of Second World War; believed to be a member of the Soviet Communist Party; married, one son born 1940; after war transferred to the Committee for State Security (KGB); studied counterintelligence at the High Intelligence School (one-year short course); on graduation posted to Brest-Litovsk for four months; attended the KGB Diplomatic Institute in Moscow for one year; on successfully completing course assigned to Moscow Centre for six months as analyst in US order of battle section of the KGB’s Information Department; posted to Stockholm summer 1948–January 1950 where he believed to have specialized in military affairs; subsequent assignment unknown. No record of anti-Soviet opinions. Conclusion: considered poor candidate for recruitment.

  Always maternally protective of his sources, Mother had been careful not to identify where the original tip had come from, but the Sorcerer was able to make an educated guess when Berlin Base asked the Germans—“our” Germans, which was to say Reinhard Gehlen’s Sud-Deutsche Industrie-Verwertungs GmbH, working out of a secret compound in the Munich suburb of Pullach—for routine background traces on a baker’s dozen KGB officers stationed at the Soviet Karlshorst enclave in East Berlin. Gehlen’s people, always eager to please their American masters, quickly provided a bulky briefing book on the Russians in question. Buried in the report was a detail missing from the Company’s 201: AESNOWDROP was thought to have had a Jewish mother. That, in turn, led the Sorcerer to suspect that it was the Israeli Mossad agent in West Berlin known as the Rabbi who had been whispering in Mother’s ear; nine times out of ten anything that even remotely concerned a Jew passed through the Rabbi’s hands. (The Israelis had their own agenda, of course, but high on it was scoring Brownie points in Washington against the day when they needed to cash in their IOUs.) According to Mother the potential KGB defector wanted to come over with a wife and a child. The Sorcerer was to meet with him in the safe house designated MARLBOROUGH at such and such a date, at such and such an hour, establish his bona fides to make absolutely certain he wasn’t what Mother called a “bad ’un”—a dispatched agent sent across with a briefcase full of KGB disinformation—at which point he was to “press the orange” and find out what goodies he had to offer in exchange for political asylum. After which the Sorcerer would report back to Mother to see if Washington wanted to go ahead with the actual defection.

  In the next room the Fallen Angel’s radio crackled into life. Surfing on a burst of static came the codewords Morgenstunde hat Gold im Mund (“the morning hour has gold in its mouth”). Jack, startled, snapped to attention. Silwan II appeared at the door again. “He’s on the way up,” he hissed. Kissing the fingernail of his thumb, he hurriedly crossed himself.

  One of the Sorcerer’s Watchers, a German woman in her seventies sitting in the back row of the theater, had seen the dark figure of a man slipping into the toilet at the side of the cinema and mumbled the news into a small battery-powered radio hidden in her knitting bag. Inside the toilet the Russian would open the door of a broom closet, shove aside the mops and carpet sweepers and push through the hidden panel in the back wall of the closet, then start up the ridiculously narrow wooden stairs that led to the top floor and the safe house.

  The Sorcerer, suddenly cold sober, shuddered like a Labrador shaking off rain water and shook his head to clear his vision. He waved Silwan II into the adjoining room, then leaned toward the spine of God and Man at Yale—the Superstition of Academic Freedom and whispered “Testing five, four, three, two, one.” Silwan popped through the door, flashed a thumbs-up sign and disappeared again, shutting and locking the door behind him.

  Jack felt his pulse speed up. He flattened himself against the wall so that the door to the corridor, once opened, would conceal him. Pulling a Walther PPK from the holster strapped to the belt in the hollow of his back, he thumbed off the safety and held the weapon out of sight behind his overcoat. Looking across the room, he was unnerved to see the Sorcerer rocking back and forth in mock admiration.

  “Oh, neat trick,” Torriti said, his face straight, his small beady eyes flashing in derision. “Hiding the handgun behind you like that, I mean. Rules out the possibility of frightening off the defector before the fucker has a chance to give us his name, rank, and serial number.” Torriti himself carried a pearl-handled revolver under one sweaty armpit and a snub-nosed .38 Detective Special in a holster taped to an ankle, but he made it a rule never to reach for a weapon unless there was a strong possibility he would eventually pull the trigger. It was a bit of tradecraft McAuliffe would pick up if he stuck around Berlin Base long enough: the sight of handguns made the nervous people in the business of espionage nervouser; the nervouser they got the more likely it was that someone would wind up shooting someone, which was from everyone’s point of view a disagreeable dénouement to any operation.

  The fact of the matter was that Torriti, for all his griping about greenhorns, got a charge out of breaking in the virgins. He thought of tradecraft as a kind of religion—it was said of the Sorcerer that he could blend into a crowd even when there wasn’t one—and took a visceral pleasure in baptizing his disciples. And, all things considered, he judged McAuliffe—with his tinted aviator sunglasses, his unkempt Cossack mustache, his flaming-red hair slicked back and parted in the middle, the unfailing politeness that masked an affinity for violence—to be a cut above the usual cannon fodder sent out from Washington these days, and this despite the handicap of a Yale education. There was something almost comically Irish about him: the progeny of the undefeated bareknuckle lightweight champion of the world, a McAuliffe whose motto had been “Once down is no battle”; the lapsed moralist who came out laughing and swinging and wouldn’t stop either simply because a gong sounded; the lapsed Catholic capable of making a lifelong friend of someone he met over breakfast and consigning him to everlasting purgatory by teatime.

  At the door Jack sheepishly slipped the Walther back into its holster. The Sorcerer rapped a knuckle against his forehead. “Get it into your thick skull we’re the good guys, sport.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, Harvey, I know who the good guys are or I wouldn’t be here.”

  In the corridor outside the room, the floorboards groaned. A fist drummed against the door. The Sorcerer closed his eyes and nodded. Jack pulled open the door.

  A short, powerfully built man with close-cropped charcoal hair, an oval Slavic face, and skin the color and texture of moist candle wax stood on the threshold. Visibly edgy, he looked quickly at Jack, then turned to study through narrowed, vaguely Asiatic eyes the Buddha-like figure who appeared to be lost in meditation at the small table. Suddenly showing signs of life, the Sorcerer greeted the Russian with a cheery salute and waved him toward the free chair. The Russian walked over to the oriel window and peered down at the street as one of those newfangled East German cars, its sore-throated motor coughing like a tubercular man, lurched past the cinema and disappeared around a corner. Reassured by the lack of activity outside, the Russian took a turn around the room, running the
tips of his finger over the surface of a cracked mirror, trying the handle on the door of the adjoining room. He wound up in front of the cuckoo clock. “What happened to his hands?” he asked.

  “The first time I set foot in Berlin,” the Sorcerer said, “which was one week after the end of what you jokers call the Great Patriotic War, the Ring Road was crammed with emaciated horses pulling farm wagons. The scrawny German kids watching them were eating acorn cakes. The horses were being led by Russian soldiers. The wagons were piled high with loot—four-poster beds, toilets, radiators, faucets, kitchen sinks and stoves, just about anything that could be unscrewed. I remember seeing soldiers carrying sofas out of Hermann Goering’s villa. Nothing was too big or too small. I’ll lay odds the minute hand of the cuckoo clock was in one of those wagons.”

  An acrid smirk made its way onto the Russian’s lips. “It was me leading one of the wagons,” he said. “I served as an intelligence officer in an infantry regiment that battled, in four winters, from the faubourg of Moscow to the rubble of the Reichstag in the Tiergarten. On the way we passed hundreds of our villages razed to the ground by the fleeing Nazis. We buried the mutilated corpses of our partisan fighters—there were women and children who had been executed with flame throwers. Only forty-two of the original twelve hundred sixty men in my battalion reached Berlin. The hands of your cuckoo clock, Mister American Central Intelligence agent, were small repay for what the Germans did to us during the war.”

  The Russian pulled the seat back from the table so that from it he could watch both Jack and the Sorcerer, and sat down. Torriti’s nostrils flared as he nodded his chins toward the bottle of whiskey. The Russian, who reeked of a trashy eau de cologne, shook his head no.