Free The Company: A Novel of the CIA by Robert Littell

Peppermill—off the Kurfiirstendamm, West Berlin's main drag sizzling with neon. The joint was crawling with diplomats and spies and businessmen from the four powers that occupied Berlin. On the small stage a transvestite, wearing what the Germans called a Fahne, a cheap gaudy dress, rattled off one-liners and then laughed at them so hard his stomach rippled. "For God's sake, don't laugh at anti-Soviet jokes," the comic warned, wagging a finger at an imaginary companion. "You'll get three years in jail." Raising his voice half an octave, he mimicked the friend's reply. "That's better than three years in one of those new high-rise apartments in Friedrichsmain." Some upper-class Brits drinking at a corner table roared at a joke one of them had told. The comedian, thinking the laughter was for him, curtsied in their direction.
    At a small table near the toilets Jack scraped the foam off a mug with his forefinger, angled back his head and, his Adam's apple bobbing, drained off the beer in one long swig. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he carefully set the empty mug down next to the two others he'd already knocked back. "Jesus H. Christ, Ebby, you're coming down too hard on him," he told his friend. "The Sorcerer's like a wild dog you come across in the field. You need to stand dead still and let him sniff your trousers, your shoes, before he'll start to accept you."
    "It's the drinking that rubs me the wrong way," Ebby said. "I don't see how a drunk can run Berlin Base."
    "The booze is his pain killer. He hurts, Ebby. He was in Bucharest at the end of the war—he served under the Wiz when Wisner ran the OSS station there. He saw the Soviet boxcars hauling off Rumanians who had sided with Germany to Siberian prison camps. He heard the cries of the prisoners, he helped bury the ones who killed themselves rather than board the trains. It marked him for life. For him the battle against Communism is a personal crusade—it's the forces of good versus the forces of evil. Right now evil's got the upper hand and it's killing him."
    "So he drinks."
    "Yeah. He drinks. But that doesn't stop him from performing on a very high level. The alcohol feeds his genius. If the KGB ever cornered me on an East Berlin rooftop, Harvey's the man I'd want next to me."
    The two exchanged knowing looks; Ebby had heard scuttlebutt about the close call on the roof after the aborted defection.
    On the other side of the room a middle-aged Russian attaché wearing a double-breasted suit jacket with enormous lapels staggered drunkenly to his feet and began belting out, in Russian, a popular song called "Moscow Nights." At the bar two American foreign service officers, both recent graduates of Yale, pushed themselves off their stools and started singing Kipling's original words to what later became the Yale Whiffenpoof song.
    We have done with Hope and Honor, we are lost to Love and Truth...
    Jack leaped to his feet and sang along with them.
    We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung...
    Ebby, who had done his undergraduate work at Yale before going on to Columbia Law, stood up and joined them.
    And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth, God help us, for we knew the worst too young.
    Half a dozen American civilians sitting around a large table in a corner turned to listen. Several added their voices to the chorus.
    Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence,
    Our pride it is to know no spur of ride.
    As they neared the end of the song others around the cabaret joined in. The transvestite comic, furious, stalked off the stage.
    And the Curse of Reuben holds us till an Allen turf enfolds us
    And we die, and none can tell Them where we died.
    By now Americans all over the cabaret were on their feet, waving mugs over their heads as they bellowed out the refrain. The Russian and East European diplomats looked on in amused bewilderment.
    GENTLEMEN-RANKERS OUT ON THE SPREE,
    DAMNED FROM HERE TO ETERNITY,
    GOD