Charlie Wilson's War by Crile George

Author:Crile, George [Crile, George]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: PGW - A
Published: 2008-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

Gust and the Eldorado

NO WASPS NEED APPLY

Avrakotos was not a morning person. By the time he left his row house in McLean, Virginia, and placed his plastic coffee cup on the special holder next to the driver’s seat, most of the Agency’s senior officers were already at their desks. It was just a four-or five-minute drive to Langley, and everyone would immediately recognize the Greek by his car. It was a 1976 emerald Coupe de Ville, the last of the truly big Cadillacs, with tufted green damask upholstery and a CB radio antenna jutting up from the back. Avrakotos had bought it in Philadelphia from “a Mafia teamster guy in a bar.” It was a strange sight, this would-be wrecker of the Soviet empire maneuvering into the line of spaces reserved for Chuck Cogan and the other understated senior officers running operations around the world.

Bill Casey would arrive in a chauffeur-driven car. Most of the other cars in the line where Avrakotos was authorized to park were BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, or Saabs. There were a Jaguar and a few Porsches, even a Ferrari. As far as Avrakotos could make out, there wasn’t an American car in the whole row.

The Greek took a perverse delight in pulling into his parking spot and greeting his fellow officers with excessive good cheer. The preposterous hubcaps on the Cadillac were priced at $200 each. He knew it embarrassed his well-bred colleagues to see a fellow officer in the kind of car, as he says, “that only gangsters and niggers drive.”

After work, Avrakotos would sometimes stop in front of the building to offer his secretaries a ride home. Susan, the beautiful black woman who always passed on information to him and who'd had a shouting incident with Alan Fiers, used to complain each time she got into the gaudy machine. “I hate it. Everybody’s looking at me. They think I’m some kind of whore. Why can’t you buy a white man’s BMW or something?” she’d ask him.

But the Cadillac was his badge of honor as well as a kind of shield. His mother had taught him about the evil eye, that ancient belief that certain people have the power to do all kinds of harm just by wishing ill on an enemy with a stare. Gust had more than his share of enemies, and the Cadillac was a kind of amulet, a message to all those who might have bad intentions that they shouldn’t screw with this street fighter.

He was now forty-seven. His entire adult life had been spent in the CIA; it was home. But once he left the car, Avrakotos only occasionally entered through the Agency’s front door, where lines of nameless stars—each commemorating an officer killed in the line of service—are chiseled into the white marble walls. He figured he had known almost half of the case officers on the wall—eight alone lost in the bombing of the Beirut embassy more than a year earlier, in April 1983. Gust had particularly mourned

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