On 16 June, Murphy’s terminal report came into the Outfit’s Washington headquarters from Tangier, where he was resting up in enviable luxury in one of those slick, new hallucinogenic resorts after his latest spectacular confrontation with what the Western press invariably referred to as “The Forces of International Communist Subversion.”
Murphy is a great performer, one of the best in the business. While I envied him the white sand beaches and those nubile Nubians and the five-hundred-dollar-an-hour selective neural stimulation, I did not begrudge it him. I regretted only that what he had done to earn it meant endless hours of nasty work for me, cleaning up after him.
I had barely skimmed Murph’s report — just enough to start my stomach aching — when my drab boss summoned me from my drab cubicle, presented me with a set of travel orders, and delivered his
customary words of good cheer: “Get your butt over there, Maxwell, and get that mess cleaned up. And if you spend one goddamn penny over authorization, you’ll be down in the file room when you get back.”
It saddened me how Jack’s threats had declined in beauty and vigor over the years. Maybe I was getting used to them, or maybe now I had so little to lose that no threat was very meaningful. After all, you make a man feel pretty large if you tell him he must do so-and-so or he will lose his shot at the Big Prize. You do nothing at all for his ego if you tell him he has to do it or lose the miserable job he already has.
But I took his comments, as I had for some years, with considerable charity. He too was a disappointed man. He too had waited all his working life with the Outfit for the big chance to be a Number One. And he was now too old to Hope.
At forty-three, I was very nearly too old myself. I was fully resigned to no greater expectations than to hang on to what I had and — at the most — to someday succeed Jack and snarl at other hopeless men, a far cry indeed from the glories we had both anticipated as young men.
So I didn’t stay to argue as I used to do, but went straight to Disbursing, signed my life away for a stack of hundred-doll a r travelers’ checks, and hurried to catch the subway to New York and the afternoon Superson to Berlin. I did not want to tarry for the pitying looks of my younger, still hopeful colleagues in the Office of Claims, Field Settlement Division. Thirteen years of cleaning up after the legendary Murphy ought to Have hardened me to those supercilious bastards. But it hadn’t. I found myself comfortable only in the presence of my boss, who as I have explained — was even farther down the road to permanent obscurity than I.
In the hovercab down the Potomac to the subway station, I caught myself laughing out loud, a bitter sort of laugh. What a state things had fallen into! There was a time when the Outfit recruited only men who had -the phrase ran-“a passion for anonymity.” Well, it had all changed. Guys like Jack and I had the anonymity and $14,000 a year; guys like Murphy had the passion, not a shred of anonymity, and upwards of $35,000 a year plus a virtually unlimited expense account.
Back when I had joined up — fresh' out of Vietnam, hungry to be a civilian again but unwilling to settle for the humdrum of business or academic life — the Outfit had seemed to promise an exciting and rewarding career. But then, about the time I got out of training, skilled in small arms, dead-drops, live drops, clandestine high-jinks of all kinds, the international espionage business went all to hell, at least as far as it involved the Americans and the Russians.
So you launch a major operation and find out the Sovs are deploying a brand-new multiple reentry fractional orbit bombardment system with’ a C.E.P. of a hundred yards and yields at the gigaton level.
So what? It doesn’t effect the balance of power a micro-minimilligram.
So you feed dozens of expendables to the opposition apparat and get hard information that there is going to be another Kremlin power struggle and the hard-liners will replace the soft- liners, or vice versa.
So what? The political inertia of a polarized world, the kill and over-kill, the second strike and third strike capability on both sides, makes intelligence information take on all the relevance and pertinency of medieval arguments about angels on pin heads.
The hovercab flopped down on the subway station apron like a landing gooney-bird, and I followed the rest of the passengers through the turnstile, down the drop-chute, and into the New York capsule. There was the usual muffled sigh, the gentle acceleration, and we plunged down the tube past the first sphincter. As it tightened behind us and we accelerated into the vacuum ahead, I tightened a few sphincters of my own. Tube travel frightens me. There is something of the claustrophobia c in all of us, and I never enter a capsule without remembering the holovision pictures of the Chicago pile-up in ’81.
I sought distraction in my previous train of thought. Espionage is like religion, I thought, which shows you what foolish things you think when you are frightened. And they lost pertinence at about the same time, I thought. And maybe there is some connection.
But granting that and Having determined that a god is dead, how do you dismantle his church?
The answer is, of course, you don’t. And the big-time espionage business is still just as big, still just as expensive. Only its purpose has diminished. Now it is a kind of international gladiatorial sport in which' all participants are as careful as they can be not to do each other serious damage. Accidents sometimes happen. But I couldn’t recall hearing of
a real assassination attempt against a professional on either side since way back in the bad old days of Stalin. And even the professionals who foul up and are taken prisoner can count cm all the headlines of a show trial followed by some sort of exchange on the old Powers-Abel model long before their prison pallor becomes very noticeable.
It is a grand game, if you are one of the few real players. Everyone in it recognizes it for the game it is. We benchwarmers, though, don’t have such a good time of it. We do our menial tasks and wait with vanishing hope for one of our first-stringers to get knocked out of the game or to retire from old age.
But what the hell! I thought as the capsule zipped along its chordal tube a hundred miles beneath Philadelphia. What the hell; it is $14,000 a year, and there are two kids in college and there is the mortgage, and there will be retirement in another dozen years or so (fifty per cent of my high five). And for a lot of years it hadn’t been so bad. There’d been the hope that maybe something would happen to Murphy, that maybe (contrary to all expectations) he’d grow tired of the big time, the limelight, the periodic performances, and retire while I was still young enough to step into his shoes. Well, he hadn’t. And I wasn’t any longer. But what the hell, it was a living.
I have always found East-West Supers flights disconcerting. You leave Berlin, say, at 3:00 PM and get into New York at noon. The other way is even worse. The stewardesses hardly have time to say “coffeeteaormilk,” and for the passengers, there is hardly enough time for the psilobennies to take effect, much' less wear off for the landing. But despite their lingering effect, I could not overcome the gloom of Tempelhof.
I hate jobs in Berlin. Not only has the whole population been raised on spy stories, but a considerable segment of it still lives in one way or another off tHe intelligence business. It may be still the best place in Europe to recruit expendables, but cleaning up after MurpH there is a real Augean job.
The little gray man at the Tempelhof Passkontrolle desk was familiar, and he recognized me from previous trips. He waved my passport back into my pocket and gave me one of those sly, conspiratorial Berlin smiles. ‘‘AH! Herr Maxwell! We have been expecting you!” His voice dropped to a stentorian whisper: “It is that the Murphy Has been busy again, nicht?" He held up the previous day’s edition of Der Morgenpost. There was a muddy picture of a group of policemen herding a gaggle of men in handcuffs into the back of a carryall ductor. Under* the picture was an italicized headline, leaning against a row of exclamation points and proclaiming: “Der Murphy hat wieder gesiegt!!!!!”
“Murphy again victorious!” Under it was a small cut of Murphy himself, bearded and fierce, and a two-column story on the roundup of another Soviet spy ring in Berlin followed by a box score of Murphy’s accomplishments against his opposite number, Yevgenyi Komiev. I noted that the Outfit’s P-R section, big and well financed as it was, had fallen down again. The paper put the score at seventeen-fifteen. And there was no mention of the affair in Belgrade in ’82, which actually made it eighteen for Murph.
“Wunderbar, the Murphy,” said the little man, the glint of the devoted, loyal fan in his eyes. “Such a record! And against the Korniev!”
“Yeah, wunderbar” I said. I returned the conspiratorial smile out of courtesy, without mirth. I did not want to get involved in a discourse on the relative merits of the greats of the past, although there was no doubt in my mind that Murph’ could have held his own with the very best of them.
The little man leaned toward me across his counter, laid a consoling hand on my sleeve, and let his angular face droop in good- natured sympathy. “But now, there will be much to do, nicht? Many, many people, Herr Maxwell. I do not envy you.”
“Yeah. Well, we’ll get it cleaned up.” I was getting so that I could no longer bear even the most heartfelt sympathy. I turned away abruptly. “I’ll be at the Hotel am Zoo if you come across anything.”
The little man snapped his heels and touched his cap, pride and pleasure on his face. "JawohlI Herr Maxwell.”
The first thing was to get an ad in the papers. I telephoned it from my room at the hotel. First Der Morgenpost and then the mass-circulation tabloid, B.Z.i
“Persons with valid claims for damages resulting from an incident at the former Sector Border, corner of Klemmke Strasse and Dannenwalder Weg, at about 0200 hours on 14 June, should contact Mr. Albert Maxwell, Room 243, Hotel am Zoo.”
Both papers would hit the streets in the morning; I had tKe rest of the day to relax and readjust my plumbing after the trans- Atlantic time change. I unpacked, bathed, dined on room service Wurst und Schrippen, and stretched out on the eiderdown with' a full bottle of Jameson to drink myself into a semblance of honest resignation, which' meant forgetting for a little while a Hundred other Hotel rooms, two kids in college, the mortgage, and what I knew was coming tomorrow.
The next morning, I was up, shaved, and breakfasted well before the first knock on the door.
The Germans are go-getting people and — like I say — used to dealing with intelligence
organizations. They get right on it, unlike the Italians and the Spanish. This is good, in a way. You can get an unpleasant job over with in very short order. The English are the worst. I’ve spent as much' as two weeks in London cleaning up after Murph’. The English’ are so goddam polite. And so law- abiding. They write letters first and call in their solicitors and telephone M16 or the War Office or Scotland Yard.
The first claimant was one of the easy kind. He had his ductor parked nearby, around the corner on John Foster Dulles Allee. I took the sidewalk there with him, photographed the hole in the right front pressure-shrouding of His ’81 Opel and measured it. He Had a claim, all right. The hole was from an old-fashioned .38 slug and not a nine millimeter rocket dart or one of those great big dumdum cannons the Soviets sometimes like to pack. I chipped his claim down from 200 marks to 60, paid him, got a receipt, shook his hand and exchanged conspiratorial Berlin smiles with him and rode the sidewalk back to the hotel. If only they were all that easy I
There was a line of people all the way down from my door to the bank of drop chutes. I groaned. Murph, the bastard, had outdone himself this time. Not ten o’clock and at least thirty people.
The first half dozen or so were broken glass cases. With German efficiency, they had all come with glazers’ estimates in hand, and I paid up with’ argument. In all likelihood I was paying for a hell of a lot of damage that the Outfit really wasn’t accountable for, but the time and effort of digging out all those slugs from baby carriages and Highboys and antique Biedermeier clothespresses was far too great. Better to pay up. Even knowing that most of those people would be eagerly scanning Der Morgenpost and B.Z. for signs that Federov or one of his people was in town settling claims for their side so they could double their profits. Sometimes I think that between them, since the espionage business went big-time and public, the Outfit and the
KGB have glazed half the windows in Europe.
I worked through the day and well into the evening settling claims. There were the usual flesh wounds and — of course — the beneficiaries of the expendables, and one unusual case of a man who claimed damages for involuntary coitus interuptus (which I paid, knowing damn well I’d have trouble with Disbursing over it), but no homicides showed up. I was grateful; but then it was only the first day. By eight o’clock I had finished 33 claims and paid out just over 8000 marks, which — in case you are not familiar with the rate of exchange— is about 2000 of your tax dollars.
I hung the Nicht Stören! sign on the door and went down to the dining room for a drink and some dinner.
Halfway through a greasy plate of ...
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