I concluded he had chosen the kitchen because it had no windows. It was not a comforting conclusion.
Ritter said, “I swept it this morning. There are no bugs. I’m sorry if the precautions seem excessive, but nothing can be assumed to be private over here.”
He was one of those people who get too close: his nose was inches from mine and I could smell the tobacco on his breath. I sat down at the table to put breathing distance between us.
Ritter fixed me with baggy eyes. They were pale blue, rather watery. He turned to a cupboard and found a bottle of vodka inside. “Drink?” He seemed to feel a compulsion to act the host.
“Is this your apartment?”
“No.”
He seemed to be looking for drinking glasses; he wore a preoccupied look as if he couldn’t remember whether he had packed his underwear.
I said, “All right, damn it. Who the hell are you?”
“Me? I’m just a civil servant with a slight sinus condition.” The flash of a grin across his swollen face. He found tumblers and put them on the little table; sat down, took out a cigarette and flicked it against the back of his hand. Then he hung it in his mouth unlit and reached for the bottle to pour.
Finally he spoke. “It’s kind of a low-budget safe house. We borrow the place when we need it. The owner works days. He’s one of our people, works for my firm.”
“What firm would that be?”
He waved the cigarette. “Hell, you know.” Lit it with a wooden match and waved his hand to extinguish the match. “Just looking out for the interests of our citizens abroad.”
I was rigid with suppressed feelings. “I’m waiting.”
“Harry, you’re in trouble two ways. You know what they are.”
“Do I?”
“One, the Jews. The KGB already suspects you on that one. Two, the gold. They haven’t tumbled to that yet.”
I don’t know how well I concealed my consternation. He had chucked a hell of a big rock into the pond. I had to make an instant decision: how to reply, how much to give in.
His elbow was on the table and instead of lifting the cigarette he ducked his head to reach the cigarette with his mouth. His eyes were puckered by suspicion.
In the end I chose not to say anything.
He waited awhile; then he said, “Come on, Harry. You’re trying to hunt lion with a peashooter. You’re unimportant, you know that-you’re not hurting the Reds and you’re not hurting us. You’re just hurting yourself. A little while and Moscow’s going to have all the evidence they need to slap you in prison on some vague grounds and say it’s necessary in the interests of national security. You’d have a hell of a time proving it was a frame from inside a Siberian work camp. You’d just be an entry in a file someplace. And then they go to work on you with all those Manchurian Candidate techniques and whatever else they’re using to take the place of the rubber hose. When they start that you might as well give them everything you know because they’re going to get it out of you anyway. And then afterward they’re finished with you. You freeze to death or you have a fatal fall in the shower bath or you’re charged with assaulting a prison guard and attempting to escape, and they execute you. I could give you a list six pages long. Is that how you want it to end up? Don’t you see that you can’t …”
He blustered on until he heard himself; then he stopped, embarrassed because I hadn’t given him any visible reaction; I’d just waited him out.
Ritter dribbled ash on his coat; he brushed it off and sat back and crossed one fat leg above the other. It hitched up his trouser cuff: his sock had fallen down and the calf of his leg was pale and slightly hairy. “No comment? I’ll say this for you-you’ve got the balls of a brass gorilla.”
“Ritter, you’re certifiable, do you know that? I simply don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“A word of advice, Harry-the innocent act is contraindicated. It’s too late to do anything about the Mossad group, you’ve already been linked to them. Getting out of that mess would be like trying to get your virginity back. But the gold, that’s something else.”
“What gold?”
He shook his head in exasperation. “Look, as soon as you calm down and quit lying to me we’ll have a conversation.”
I said, “I find you amusing up to a point, Ritter, but you’ve passed it. I still don’t know what you’re talking about and I can only conclude that you’ve been making assumptions based on assumptions and you’ve reached some wild answers.”
But it wasn’t getting me anywhere and I saw I was going to have to put it so bluntly that he could not go on evading it without exposing the truth. I said: “You don’t seem to get this yet. I have no way of knowing who or what you are.”
“I told you. Just a civil servant trying to earn my gold watch.”
“All right, but whose civil servant?”
Suddenly he got it. Recognition was mirrored transparently in his eyes and his face dropped a foot. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’ve got to see some credentials.”
“I haven’t got any. I couldn’t very well, could I?”
“Then we’re at an impasse, aren’t we?”
I had only his word for it that he represented American interests. He could have been one of Zandor’s people trying to trip me up-testing me. Nothing he had said or done precluded that possibility. It would serve the interests of Zandor and his superior, Bizenkev in Moscow (who had opposed my visit from the beginning), to toll me into a trap by encouraging me to confess my anti-Soviet sins to a Soviet agent in the guise of an American.
He pushed his chair back against the little piece of wall beside the door; he sat with one knee bent, foot against the table, the other foot on the floor and his head resting back against the wall. He took a drink and then spoke in a voice made breathless by the vodka:
“What would it take to convince you?”
“I don’t know. That’s up to you.”
“The business about the Romanov gold reserves. I got that from Evan MacIver. The Russians don’t know about it yet.”
“Assuming we both know what you’re talking about, how would I have any way of being sure the Russians didn’t know about it?”
“If they did you’d be sweating out a torture cell right now.”
“And what am I doing right now?”
He smiled. “Your daddy must have been a lawyer.”
“What are you really doing here?”
“MacIver told me to bail you out.”
“What’s your title?”
“I’m a programming officer.”
“In the field?”
“Sometimes we work in the field.”
“What’s MacIver’s title?”
“Assistant Deputy Director of Programming.” He hacked out a dry smoker’s cough. MacIver was a heavy smoker too. “None of that proves anything, does it. I could have got all that from one of your books. Or if I was a KGB agent I’d know it. Look, I’d better spell it out for you.”
It was about bloody time.
Ritter was forty-nine years old. His parents had emigrated from Germany in 1937 when he was thirteen; they had settled in Boston and joined the German-American Bund, which he thought ridiculous. He broke openly with his parents at the beginning of 1942 when he was eighteen; he had not yet received his draft notice but he volunteered and was taken into the army.
According to what he told me, he was approached by OSS recruiters in 1943 but was turned down after an FBI security check revealed his parents’ affiliations. Ritter went into army intelligence instead and spent two years in Italy, France and Germany, mainly spying out soldiers who profiteered on the black market.
When the Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947 out of ragtag remnants of OSS, MI and other security groups he went in as a legman and was used extensively thereafter in foreign postings because with his German appearance and accent he was not likely to be taken for an American agent. But the fact that he was not a native American militated against his being promoted to any office of administrative importance within the excessively chauvinist agency.