“Well, there are the photographs. And Spendthrift has never lied to us, despite our lack of reciprocity in that department.”
“You really thought we should have backed him all the way, didn’t you?”
“Yes. He was better than any of the alternatives.”
“Wrong tribe. Wrong time.”
“He didn’t take it personally,” Christopher said. “He believes he’s going to be running this country someday, and so do a lot of other people. His relationship with me is political money in the bank.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” Hitchcock said. “You recoil in horror from giving any of these people guns-that’s the main reason Spendthrift struck out in ‘61. But if the world gets blown up, the bomb will be made with uranium and cobalt dug out of the Shinkolobwe by some black living in the Bronze Age.”
“It won’t be Spendthrift who drops the bomb.”
“Or gets blown up by it. How were things in Washington?”
“Ecstatic,” Christopher said. “The crisis managers are flying out to Saigon by the hundreds.”
“Terrific. I hope they take along a few of the ones we’ve got here. What time does your plane go?”
“Ten o’clock tonight.”
“Do you want to come out to the house for dinner?” Hitchcock asked. “I’ll send your scoop, manage a crisis or two, and pick you up at six.”
Hitchcock lived on the outskirts of Léopoldville in a large stucco house that still belonged to a Belgian trader. The Belgian fled to Brussels after Lumumba’s troops raped his wife during the mutiny in 1960. Hitchcock’s houseboys, three stocky men who laughed hysterically when he berated them in Lingala, were the same ones who had worked for the Belgian and opened the door to the drunken troops. One of the boys came into the darkened living room with a bottle of gin on a silver tray. He put it down and trotted across the tile floor, leaving the sweaty prints of his bare feet behind him. “Ice, glasses, tonic water, limes!” Hitchcock screamed. “We don’t drink the stuff out of the bottle, Antoine!”
Hitchcock’s wife flinched at the boy’s wild laugh. She was a frail woman with thinning gray hair; as Christopher watched her, she pulled the cloth of her dress away from her body and placed a wadded Kleenex between her breasts. “It’s the constant perspiration, it drives you mad,” she said. Her damp skin had a reddish shine, as though discontent had burned away its outer layers.
Hitchcock drank six glasses of gin and tonic before dinner. The boys served cold soup and a large grilled river fish whose muddy flesh was slightly bloody along the spine. “Do you enjoy uncooked food, Paul?” Theresa Hitchcock asked. “The boys are defeated by the electric stove. We’re all defeated.” She smiled brightly and pushed her limp hair away from her forehead. “You’ll excuse me? I have a headache.” She went up the stairs.
“I’m sending her home,” Hitchcock said. “She can’t cope here-I don’t know who can. My mother went mad as a hatter, you know. The old man told her to pray, but she thought the natives were going to gang her at any moment. Actually, they think white women are repulsive-like fish bellies.”
Hitchcock had escaped from God and the Congo when he was eighteen, on the last freighter to cross the southern Atlantic before the Germans began to torpedo Belgian ships. His parents were buried in Kasai, in the red dirt of their churchyard. Hitchcock had studied German and Russian. “My idea,” he told Christopher, “was to spend my life in cold climates. Whoever would have thought the Congo would become one of the hinges of American foreign policy? I grew up thinking uranium was good for curing cancer.”
In his mind, Hitchcock still lived in cold climates. He sat at the table with the remains of the fish congealing on his plate, and sweat blackening the armpits of his seersucker suit, and talked about Berlin. He had been a famous operative there in the postwar years. Hitchcock liked to deal with Germans-they were always on time and they liked to be trained.
“You get to Zurich, don’t you?” he asked Christopher. “There’s a guy there you ought to know-you can’t forget his name. Dieter Dimpel. I bought him a watch store in 1950-told ‘em it was owed to old Dieter. So he’s out of it. But go see him.”
“I will,” Christopher said. “I use up a lot of watches.”
“Listen, Paul. Dieter is a midget-I mean he’s a real midget. He’s one meter, twenty-five centimeters high. Comes from Munich. Walks like Goring-he’s got a big imaginary body he carries around with him. He used to sweep up in the beer halls. Knew Hitler in the old days, when the Führer would come in in his trench coat and mumble about taking over the world. They wouldn’t let Dieter into the party because he was a freak, right? So Dieter goes to a forger and has a party card made. He gets himself an armband with a swastika on it and goes to all the Nazi rallies. Around 1943, some storm trooper grabs him. The forger had asked Dieter what number he wanted on his card. Dieter said, ‘Oh, make it 555-that’s easy to remember.” Unfortunately, 555 is the number of Adolf Hitler’s party card. The storm trooper was nothing compared to the Gestapo when they got hold of Dieter. Forged credentials! A freak saying he’s a Nazi! Using the Führer’s party number!
“Off old Dieter goes to Dachau. He’s resourceful as hell, he becomes a trusty. He escapes five days before the Americans come. He heads east. The Russians grab him. Dieter is a bit light-headed after two years on the Dachau diet, so he tells the Russians he’s a Nazi. They put him in a camp. Well, of course he walks right through the wire and heads west again.
“I picked him up in Berlin in late ‘46-he’s sweeping up in a beer hall again, wearing tiny lederhosen. Dieter is a bitter little guy. He knows he’s smarter than Hitler, but he’s only four feet tall. He wants revenge against the world. Good agent material.
“At that time we were trying to figure some way to get into the headquarters of a certain occupying power. No way to do it-troops on every door, bars on every window, bells and sirens wired up all over the place. Miller was running the Berlin base then, and he was full of stories of the good old prewar days in the FBI, when they used to sneak into the German ambassador’s bedroom in Washington and come back with samples of his wife’s pubic hair.
“Miller thought he was the world’s champion burglar, but he couldn’t think of a way to crack the GRU. However, / had Dieter. I recruited him by giving a whore a few marks to pretend she couldn’t live without him. I gave him a cyanide pill to carry in a hollow ring-Krauts don’t think you’re serious unless you give ‘em a cyanide pill.
“I had Dieter trained in rope climbing, in judo, I turned him into an acrobat. Dieter was a very strong midget. I put him through a course in clandestine entrance. Safecracking, photography with infrared, the works. After six months, he was the best burglar in Germany. Then, one dark and moonless night, I sent him down the chimney with a camera. Dieter came out a fireplace on the second floor, cracked every safe in the place, photographed everything, put it all back, and came out the chimney again. For three years Dieter went down the chimney once a month and did his work. Never left even a finger print. We sent him all over the place, doing the same. He got more stuff than any agent in the history of Berlin.
“One night, Dieter was shooting some agents’ reports and one of their colonels came in, working late. He turned on the lights, and here was this sooty midget with a camera and an infrared light set up in his office and the safe spilling all over the floor. Dieter whipped out his gun and shot the Russian right between the eyes. He dropped everything but the camera and went up the chimney like a rocket.
“I’m waiting in the next street. Lights go on, sirens go off, soldiers start coming out the windows. Dieter spent twenty-four hours hanging on to his rope inside the chimney-they couldn’t find him, he couldn’t come down. Next night, he sneaked over the roof and got away. Still had the camera, but he forgot his rope and they found it, so that ended that. He wouldn’t have forgotten the rope, but all he could think about was taking a leak. The human element.”