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

thinks Elsenhower's Chief of Staff at Normandy, Bedell Smith, may get the nod." Colby glanced at a wall clock, clicked glasses with Ebby again and they both tossed off their drinks. "We'd better be getting in," he said. "When the Wiz says sixteen thirty he doesn't mean sixteen thirty-one."
    Near the bank of elevators a small sign directed visitors attending the S.M. Craw Management Symposium to a suite of private rooms at the far end of the corridor. Inside a vestibule two unsmiling young men in threepiece suits checked Colby's identification, then scrutinized Ebbys driver's license and his old laminated OSS ID card (which he'd retrieved from a shoebox filled with his wartime citations, medals and discharge papers). Ticking off names on a clipboard, they motioned Ebby and Colby though the door with a sign on it reading, "S.M. Craw Symposium."
    Several dozen men and a single woman were crowded around a makeshift bar. The only other woman in sight, wearing slacks and a man's vest over a ruffled shirt, was busy ladling punch into glasses and setting them out on the table. Ebby helped himself to a glass of punch, then turned to chat with a young man sporting a Cossack mustache. "My names Elliott Ebbitt," he told him. "Friends call me Ebby."
    "I'm John McAuliffe," said the young man, a flamboyant six-footer wearing an expensive three-piece linen suit custom-tailored by Bernard Witherill of New York. "Friends call me a lot of things behind my back and Jack to my face." He nodded toward the thin-faced, lean young man in a rumpled off-the-rack suit from the R.H. Macy Company. "This is my former friend Leo Kritzky."
    Ebby took the bait. "Why former?"
    "His former girlfriend crept into my bed late one night," Jack said with disarming frankness. "He figures I should have sent her packing. I keep reminding him that she's a terrific piece of ass and I'm a perfectly normal Homo erectus."
    "I was angry, but I'm not any more," Leo commented dryly. "I decided to leave the pretty girls to the men without imagination." He offered a hand to Ebby. "Pleased to meet you."
    For a second Ebby thought Jack was putting him on but the brooding darkness in Leo's eyes and the frown-creases on his high forehead convinced him otherwise. Never comfortable with discussions of other people's private lives, he quickly changed the subject. "Where are you fellows coming from? And how did you wind up here?"
    Leo said, "We're both graduating from Yale at the end of the month."
    Jack said with a laugh, "We wound up here because we said yes when our rowing coach offered us Green Cups down at Mory's. Turns out he was head hunting for—" Jack was unsure whether you were supposed to pronounce the words "Central Intelligence Agency" out loud, so he simply waved his hand at the crowd.
    Leo asked, "How about you, Elliott?"
    "I went from Yale to OSS the last year of the war. I suppose you could say I'm reenlisting."
    "Did you see action?" Jack wanted to know.
    "Some."
    "Where?"
    "France, mostly. By the time I crossed the Rhine, Hitler had shot a bullet into his brain and the Germans had thrown in the sponge."
    The young woman who had been serving drinks tapped a spoon against a glass and the two dozen young men—what Jack called the "Arrow-shirt-cum-starched-collar-crowd"—gravitated toward the folding chairs that had been set up in rows facing the floor-to-ceiling picture window with a view of the Empire State Building and downtown Manhattan. She stepped up to the glass lectern and tapped a long fingernail against the microphone to make sure it was working. "My name is Mildred Owen-Brack," she began. Clearly used to dealing with men who weren't used to dealing with women, she plowed on, "I'm going to walk you through the standard secrecy form which those of you who are alert will have discovered on your seats; those of you who are a bit slower will find you're sitting on them." There was a ripple of nervous laughter at Owen-Brack's attempt to break the ice. "When you