The Hunting Trip (15 page)

“‘May I have a peek at that, Bill?' Victoria asked.

“‘I'd like nothing more than to show it to you, Victoria, but I'm afraid it contains some naughty words. Soldier talk, so to speak.'

“‘I'm a married woman now, Bill. And since our nuptials Fitzy has brought me up to speed on those few profanities, obscenities, and vulgarisms I somehow missed learning at Wellesley.'

“She put out her hand and Bill put the notebook in it. She read it. Then looked back at Bill.

“‘Well, my beloved Fitzy was really pissed off, wasn't he? In addition to being simply pissed in his bathtub, I mean. What was that all about, my darling?'

“‘If you think I was angry when I had that little chat with ol' Dave Bruce, my little dumpling, you should have seen me when I heard what Bill actually did when he went to Norway, leaving me behind.'

“‘And that was?'

“‘After skiing all over Norway's absolutely wonderful slopes for a
week, popping Krauts as he went, he ended up at a Kraut heavy water plant with a rucksack full of an explosive we called C-4. When Bill blew it up, there was what we in the profession call a secondary explosion. The next time the world heard an explosion and saw a mushroom cloud like that was when we vaporized Nagasaki, Japan, later in the war.'

“‘Well, I can certainly understand why you were a little miffed at being excluded from something like that, but as Alexander Pope has taught us, ‘to err is human, to forgive divine.'

“‘Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn what the Pope says,' I said.

“‘Not
the
Pope, Precious. Alexander Pope.'

“‘Oh.'

“‘What I want to know is why Bill is here in Detroit,' she said.

“‘And I want to know why his thug, who can't even get his .38 in his ankle holster, called him “Mr. Deputy Director.” Deputy director of what?'

“‘The questions are interrelated,' Bill said. ‘But I can't answer either until I get an answer to a question of my own. Fitzy, are you prepared to answer again the trumpet's call to duty and mount up and ride to the sound of musketry, the musketry this time being AK-47s, et cetera, in the bloodstained hands of the Red Menace, not Mausers and Schmeissers in the bloodstained hands of the Nazis, as was the previous case?'

“‘Didn't you ask me that before?'

“‘Yes, I did, and you didn't reply, so far as I can remember.'

“‘Bill, how far from Detroit is this place you're asking Fitzy to ride off to?' Victoria asked.

“‘A great distance, I'm afraid, Victoria. At this stage of the recruitment interview, I can only give you a hint. Across a wide, wide ocean.'

“‘We enlist,' Victoria said. ‘I can only hope you are referring to the Pacific Ocean, which is wider than the Atlantic.'

“‘In that case, welcome to the CIA, of which I am the deputy director for Soviet Affairs.'

“‘The what?' I said.

“‘The CIA. It is the successor organization to our beloved Oh, So Social. It stands for Central Intelligence Agency. Surely you've heard of it.'

“‘Now that you mention it.'

“‘And what did you say Fitzy and I will be doing for the CPA?'

“‘That's CIA, Victoria.
I
not
P
.'

“‘Whatever. What will my precious Fitzy be doing for the CIA once he rides off to wherever he'll be doing it, and where precisely will that be?'

“‘What he will be doing, Victoria, with your assistance, is causing senior Russian, Hungarian, and other Eastern Bloc officers to realize the error of their ways and change sides.'

“‘I don't have a clue how I could do that, and I don't think Fitzy does, either.'

“‘I'm afraid you underestimate your soul mate, Victoria.'

“‘I don't think that's possible, but I'm willing to be corrected.'

“‘I have seen his mind at work.'

“‘Give me an example.'

“‘Well, there are so many examples to choose between it's hard . . . Well, I suppose Cannes is as good as any.'

“‘As in Cannes, France?' she asked.

“‘That one. Try to picture this, Victoria. A bright early spring day in 1944. A month or so before D-Day. Fitzy and I are sitting in the sidewalk café of the Carlton in Cannes.'

“‘The one at 58 La Croisette in Cannes?' Victoria asked.

“‘That one. We are sipping at a very nice Sauvignon Saint-Bris, '38 if memory serves, our little gift to ourselves for just having blown a tunnel on the Paris-Cannes lines of Chemins de fer Français as a
train containing three sleeping cars full of senior German officers and their mistresses was passing through it.

“‘Two SS officers—you know, the ones who wore black uniforms and riding boots and carried riding crops although few of them had ever been near a horse—come to the table and with that exaggerated courtesy they thought was so clever say, ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. Perhaps you would be kind enough to explain what you are doing here wearing U.S. Army Paratrooper boots and carrying a bag full of what looks to me like Composition C-4.'

“‘What you have your dirty fingers in, Señor,” Fitzy replies, off the top of his head, “is the Buenos Aires empanada dough my wife prepared as a small gift to Herr Himmler, whom she calls Heinie Baby, and who really appreciates a good empanada. What my friend Señor Gonzalo and I have on our feet is what all we Argentine gauchos wear on the pampas. Is there anything else you'd like to know?”

“‘No, sir, I don't think so. Thank you very much, and pardon the interruption. If there is anything the SS can ever do for you, all you have to do is ask.”

“‘Your Fitzy, Victoria, was on a roll,' Bill said. ‘Fitzy went on: “
Hauptstandartenführer
, actually there is something you can do for me. Take that bag of empanada dough and have one of your underlings deliver it to Heinie Baby . . . Herr Himmler . . . in Berlin, thus sparing Señor Gonzalo and myself that boring train ride.”

“‘An hour later, still chuckling about what was going to happen in Berlin when Frau Himmler tried to bake, or fry, anything at all with the empanada dough—C-4 goes boom at 325 Fahrenheit—we were in the speedboat and on our way back, via Gibraltar, to Claridge's Hotel in London.'

“‘Good times,' I said. ‘I remember ol' Sterling . . . Whatsisname? The actor? Great big guy.'

“‘It's on the tip of my tongue, but . . .'

“‘Anyway,' I went on, ‘ol' Sterling was driving the speedboat that day. As I was saying, Bill, good times.'

“‘Yes, they were. But as I was saying, Victoria, I remembered Cannes and some other places where Fitzy had manifested his amazing talent to lie so convincingly off the top of his head and decided all he could do was say no if I tried to enlist him for duty again. And here I am.'

“And Victoria said, ‘When would you like us to leave Detroit for wherever Fitzy will serve his country? And where, exactly, is that?'

“‘It's Berlin, actually. And as soon as possible. How soon do you think you can work leaving Detroit into your schedule, Victoria?'

“‘How does thirty minutes fit into your schedule, Bill?'”

—

“And that's how
Victoria and I came to Berlin, Phil,” SSA Caldwell said.

“Fascinating story, sir. May I ask a question?”

“Certainly.”

“How do you get those senior Russian, Hungarian, and other Eastern Bloc officers you mentioned to realize the error of their ways and change sides?”

“In due time, I will tell you, of course, but right now what I want to do is get that
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idiot Brewster out here to retype the
Report of Successful Recruitment of NKGB Colonel Vladimir Polshov
now that you have uncovered the . . . how many was it?”

“If you're asking about ambiguities and grammatical errors, sir, I found a total of thirteen of the former and seventeen of the latter, plus six strikeovers.”

“Each
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one of all those
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errors which would have made me look like a horse's ass to ol' Bill, now Ralph, of course, had that report landed on his desk. It is painful for
a Harvard man, you will understand, to have ambiguities and grammatical errors pointed out to him by a
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Dartmouthian, even if they are old comrades-in-arms.”

“Yes, sir. But, sir, I am a CIC administrator who is supposed to do the typing of reports prepared by people like Special Agent Captain Brewster.”

“Not anymore, Phil. A new day has dawned on the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation. In this bright new world, you will find the errors, and Brewster and his
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ring-knocking buddies will do the typing.”

“Sir, if I may say so, I don't think Captain Brewster and his fellow West Point alumni are going to like that.”

“Good!” SSA Caldwell said.

[ TWO ]

O
ver the next several days and weeks, Phil learned SSA Caldwell's
modus
operandi
—which he knew from his Latin studies meant “mode of operation”—
vis-à-vis
getting senior Russian and other Eastern Bloc officers to change sides.

As he learned this, he also learned that in the smoke-and-mirrors world of intelligence, things were often not what they appeared to be, including CIC administrators Angus McTavish and G. Lincoln Rutherford.

“What I did, Phil,” SSA Caldwell explained, “when ol' Bill, who was now Ralph Peters, laid the heavy burden on my broad shoulders of getting these Commie chaps to change sides was do what Caldwell Automobile Fabrics International, Inc., calls Market Research.

“Between you and me, CAFI, Inc., actually did a good deal of the research for me, as I knew all those overpaid
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were doing was hanging around the Detroit Automobile Club soaking up booze on their expense accounts and had the time.

“Anyway, they did it. And giving credit where credit is due, they did a pretty good job. A good bit of what they learned was eye-opening. I confess that I had been taken in by the propaganda that what the Soviet and Eastern Bloc NKGB big shots did for relaxation from their labors in trying to enslave the world was go to the Bolshoi and other places where ballet was offered for cultural enrichment.

“They did—and do—spend a lot of time watching ballet, to be sure, but not for cultural enrichment, unless one considers ogling young women bounding around the stage in very brief costumes culturally enriching.

“Where the NKGB chaps actually went to relax was to the circus. This was true all over the Soviet Union but especially in Hungary. At first we had no explanation for this except to suspect they may have gone to the circus hoping to witness a lion tamer being eaten alive by his lions, or one or more of the high wire trapeze artists falling to their deaths, but whatever the reason, they went to the circus.

“The other interesting fact about these NKGB chaps that the CAFI, Inc., market researchers turned up was that most of them were married to Russian women, and we already knew that with very few exceptions Russian women tended to be built like Green Bay Packer tackles and had one or more stainless steel teeth.

“The exceptions to this rule, we came to conclude, were those attractive daughters of Mother Russia who were ballet dancers and high wire trapeze artists, who both performed their art wearing the very brief costumes I mentioned earlier.

“Once we'd gotten our thinking caps into the problem thus far, especially my thinking cap, things began to take shape.

“Why had previous attempts to get these fellows to change sides by appealing to their senses of decency, and when that failed, offering them lots of money, failed miserably? My predecessors had nabbed the odd NKGB captain, and once a major, but no colonels and no generals.

“Well, the answers seemed to me self-evident. They had no senses of decency, for one thing, and they weren't very much interested in money. So what were they interested in? Watching lion tamers being mauled and eaten? Was that why they were so circus-oriented? Or was it something else, and if so, what?

“Perhaps, I asked myself, they are interested in the high wire performers, the
female
high wire trapeze artists, in their abbreviated costumes. And if they were interested in young women in revealing costumes, that would explain their fascination with the ballet.

“That raised the question of how we might get the ballet dancers and the high wire trapeze artists on our side, and the answer to that was simple. They were female. Females will do anything for money; it's the nature of the beast.

“Instead of offering NKGB colonels, et cetera, money to change sides, I decided it would make much more sense to give ballerinas and high wire artists money to change sides. And once they were this side of Check Point Charlie, that we should offer them even more money to induce the NKGB colonels they had left back in Moscow, or Budapest, or Sofia, to change sides.

“Because I was obviously both too busy and too important to go behind the Iron Curtain myself, I asked Bill/Ralph for some skilled contractor people to help me. You can imagine what would have happened if I sent that
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
idiot Brewster to sweet-talk some Bolshoi ballerina into changing sides. The next thing you know he'd be seen on NBC television pirouetting around the Bolshoi stage singing ‘Army Blue' and wearing nothing but a jockstrap stuffed with handkerchiefs to keep his inadequacy in that area a secret.

“So Bill sent me two contractors, one released from Leavenworth and the other from Saint Elizabeth's.”

“Sir, I'm sorry, I don't fully understand. What's a contractor? And isn't Leavenworth a federal prison?”

“While the standards aren't as high in the CIA as they were in the OSS, we still try to keep out as many felons as possible, instead putting them under contract to do the dirty work necessary. Hence, contractors. And yes, Leavenworth is a federal prison. Saint Elizabeth's is a federal institution for the criminally insane. Rutherford was paroled to me from the latter, and McTavish from the former.”