HARLOT'S GHOST By Norman Mailer (Abacus, $152) THE light of a bedside table shines through the darkness of a Moscow hotel room projecting on to the wall microfilmed pages of Harry Hubbard's typed manuscript. It is March, 1984.
In March of the previous year, a badly-mutilated body was washed up on the mud-flats of Chesapeake Bay, Maryland.
The face had been blown away with a shotgun and fish had eaten the fingertips, making identification through prints impossible. But some teeth survived the shotgun blast and they matched the dental records of Hugh Tremont Montague, codename Harlot, one of the founding fathers of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Harlot and Harry Hubbard's father Cal had groomed Harry for a career in the CIA. When he recalls those salad days in the mid-50s after he joined the agency and compares it with the shambles of his present life, he sees he has left in his wake a trail of lies, betrayals, ruined hopes and needless deaths.
He even betrayed the man he most respected, Harlot, by stealing his wife Kittredge. Now on the run from the CIA, he must cope with the ghosts of the past as they rise up to meet him in this Moscow hotel room.
The pages on the wall comprise his unfinished autobiography, the writing of which was rudely interrupted by Harlot's death, if indeed it is Harlot's body and if the man who pulled the trigger was really from the CIA.
