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

made his way across the platform to his crew, who were pulling their duffle bags off a low baggage cart. Waltz rummaged in his trouser pocket for a dime and gave it to the Negro porter, who touched the brim of his red cap in thanks. "Anyone for a Green Cup down at Mory's?" Waltz said.
    "Mind if I take a rain check, coach?" one of the oarsman asked. "I have a philosophy oral at the crack of eleven tomorrow and I still haven't read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason."
    One after another the rowers begged off and headed back to college with their duffel bags slung from their shoulders. Only Jack and Leo and Leo's girl, Stella, took the coach up on his invitation. Waltz collected his Frazer Vagabond from the parking lot down the street and brought it around to the station entrance. Leo and Jack tossed their duffle bags into the trunk and the three of them piled in.

    Mory's was nearly deserted when they got there. Two waiters and a handful of students, all wearing ties and jackets, applauded the victory over the arch enemy, Harvard. "Green Cups for my people," the coach called as the four of them pulled up high-backed wooden chairs around a small table. For a while they talked about scull weights and blade shapes and the ideal length of the slide along which the oarsman travels with each stroke.
    "Is it true that Yale rowers invented the slide?" Jack inquired.
    "You bet," Coach Waltz said. "It was back in the 1880s. Before then oarsmen used to grease their trousers and slide their butts up and back along a wooden plank set in the hull."
    When the Green Cups arrived Coach Waltz raised his glass and saluted the two crewmen. Cocking his head, he casually asked them if they spoke any foreign languages. It turned out that Jack was fluent in German and could get by in Spanish; Leo, an ardent, angry young man who had been raised in a family of anti-Communist Russian-Jewish immigrants and was majoring in Slavic languages and history, on a full scholarship, spoke Russian and Yiddish like a native and Italian like a tourist. The coach took this in with a nod, then asked whether they found time to keep up with the international situation, and when they both said yes he steered the conversation to the 1948 Communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia and Cardinal Mindszentys recent death sentence in Red Hungary. Both young men agreed that if the Americans and the British didn't draw a line across Europe and defend it, Russian tanks would sweep through Germany and France to the English Channel. Waltz asked what they thought about the Russian attempt to squeeze the allies out of Berlin.
    Jack offered an impassioned defense of Truman's airlift that had forced Stalin to back down on the blockade. "If Berlin proves anything," he said, "it's that Joe Stalin understands only one thing, and that's force."
    Leo believed that America ought to go to war rather than abandon Berlin to the Reds. "The Cold War is bound to turn into a shooting war eventually," he said, leaning over the table. "America disarmed too soon after the Germans and Japs surrendered and that was a big mistake. We should be rearming and fast, for Gods sake. We need to stop watching the Cold War and start fighting it. We need to stop pussyfooting around while they're turning the satellite countries into slave states and sabotaging free elections in France and Italy."
    The coach said, "I'm curious to know how you men see this McCarthy business?"
    Jack said, "All right, maybe Joe McCarthy's overstating his case when he says the government is crawling with card-carrying Commies. But like the man says, where there's smoke, there's fire."
    "The way I see it," Leo said, "we need to put some pizzazz into this new Central Intelligence Agency that Truman concocted. We need to spy on them the way they're spying on us."
    "That's the ticket," Jack heartily agreed.
    Stella, a New Haven social worker seven years older than Leo, shook her head in disgust. "Well, I don't agree with a word you boys are saying.