Matt Rooney

I've always enjoyed espionage fiction, especially the subgenre that centers on innocents/amateurs who get caught up in a situation they don't fully understand. I just finished Robert Littell's addition to this canon, "The Amateur," published in 1981 -- a moment, let's recall, when the Soviet bloc appeared to be thriving and powerful.

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Littell, Robert: The Amateur (1981)

 

Espionage

 

Charlie Heller is a CIA cryptanalyst engaged to Sarah Diamond, who is murdered by terrorists in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Munich. He agitates internally for the CIA to go after the killers, who are enjoying R&R in Czechoslovakia, but the hierarchy insists their hands are tied. Heller finds relief from his grief in deciding to go after them himself, and blackmails the CIA into helping by threatening to release to the press a number of compromising internal messages that he has unique access to thanks to his role as the cypher master. He is trained in firearms use and basic tradecraft at the farm, which his bosses drag out while they search for where he has hidden the messages. Impatient, Heller insists on leaving the training and being infiltrated into Czecho without delay – just as the CIA has tracked down Sarah’s father and found the messages hidden in the brass rails of her childhood bed (after exhuming her in a gruesome scene that causes a fatal heart attack in the father). The order to kill Heller arrives just as he is heading across the border. He frustrates the first attempt but can’t bring himself to kill the colleague who attacks him. The Agency instructs its Prague Station Chief to tip off the Czechs, beginning a two-pronged effort to track Heller down. Meanwhile, Heller has found reservoirs of savvy, made his way to Prague, and tracked down Elizabeth, a minor Czech spy with whom he was in touch while setting up her cyphers. Elizabeth, angry at the regime for killing her husband, gives Heller safe harbor in her home and helps him try to find the terrorists. By tailing the Soviet Station Chief, who is having an affair with one of the terrorists, he tracks down one of the terrorists and succeeds in killing her by bombarding her with x-rays during a medical procedure. He tracks the second to Karlovy Vary and kills him by shooting out the glass observation window in a hotel pool. Czech counterintelligence is on his heels, as is the CIA – Heller shoots and disables the CIA Station Chief, who has tried twice to kill him, on the margins of a Francis Bacon conference at the university. The terrorist kills Elizabeth’s uncle in Karlovy Vary, who took them in, and kidnaps Elizabeth. Czech CI follows but holds back, as the director wants to know why the CIA is so determined to kill these terrorists. In a confrontation at a warehouse literally full of mirrors, Heller learns that the CIA was protecting the terrorist as part of an op to infiltrate European terrorist networks. He finds within himself the will to shoot and kills the terrorist and rescues Elizabeth, only to be captured by the Czech authorities – who escort them to the border and put them on a tour bus bound for Vienna. The story ends with them in New York handing over the sequestered messages -- Heller having stashed a second copy of the incriminating messages -- and briefing the editorial staff. 

 

It is a great premise and pretty good plot. The characterizations are especially strong: Heller is a convincing innocent who finds moxie and unsuspected talents as the story unfolds, and the side characters are well drawn, especially Elizabeth and the Professor (head of Czech CI). Littell endows all of the key characters with quirks that are endearing and contribute to the plot:  Heller, who gave up smoking for Sarah, has a habit of bumming cigarettes that he feels and smells but doesn’t smoke (ultimately, he does smoke one, a symbol of his having recovered from his grief at Sarah's death), and has an obsession with finding cyphers in Shakespeare that confirm that someone else wrote his plays. Elizabeth mangles American sayings in ways that are funny, innocent and insightful. The Professor is a scholar of Francis Bacon, who shares Heller’s interest in the question of Shakespeare’s authorship. 

 

However, there are a couple of petty reality mistakes that undermine the book's power: the U.S. Consulate in Munich is referred to a couple of times as the U.S. Embassy, and the way Heller uses open phone lines to transmit coded messages through the U.S. Embassy switchboard to the station. More markedly, Heller makes no effort at all to conceal his relationship with Elizabeth or their movements. These are literally petty, of course, and most readers won't notice. More importantly, the pace is uneven and drags quite a lot, and Heller doesn’t even enter Czecho until just past the midpoint. Of course, Littell had to make his motivation believable, but that and the setup of the CIA’s pursuit of Heller could have been accomplished in less than half the book. Even once Heller is in Prague, the plot drags as the author lingers over Heller and Elizabeth’s relationship and establishing her character and motivations; the first terrorist doesn’t die until the 75% mark. The Professor and his staffer, Karol, are sympathetic and Littell lingers while establishing the Professor’s patience and calculation, but we don’t really know why he is being so patient as a CIA officer carries out three murders and one armed assault on his turf. The CIA pursuers are introduced as Heller is entering Czecho but then vanish for a hundred pages before popping up again, limiting the suspense of that subplot. The angle that the terrorist was a U.S. asset comes out of the blue – we know the CIA wants to stop Heller but we don’t really know why, and I missed any clues, until the last ten pages.

 

Not an entirely successful innocent-swept-up-in-espionage book.