“Yes,” he said finally. “Somebody did.”
The answer rattled her. Not an admission. An invitation to join sides, in the open.
“But not you,” she pressed.
“Why would I?” his father said calmly. “By that time it didn’t matter what she said. I was gone. Why would I want such a thing? A terrible death like that.”
“But so convenient.”
“Not for me,” he said, checking her.
“For everyone,” Molly said. “No more names. It must have been a relief. For everyone, I guess, except Welles. She was his only witness. Not so convenient for him.”
He stared at her, waiting, then moved. “Unless she was going to change her testimony.”
His voice, so reasonable, stopped her. She looked at him, surprised, as if he had turned the board around. “Why would she do that?”
“It’s possible. It would have been the easiest thing to do. It’s what I would have advised, if I’d been handling it,” his father said, a lawyer walking her through it. “She thought she’d recognized me, but now she wasn’t sure. It might have been somebody else. She couldn’t swear under oath. She wouldn’t want to do that, make a mistake. She’d been so nervous when they first talked to her-” He broke off, looking at Molly, who had sat back, letting him lead. “She was young, you know, younger than you are now. They were already worried about her. Communists weren’t supposed to be young and pretty, not real ones. She was just an impressionable girl-they took advantage of people like that. She didn’t know what she was doing, and when the committee first talked to her, she panicked. But now — Anyway, she could have done it. Of course, he’d still have her, but what was that worth? You didn’t get elected by locking up salesgirls, not when you promised a conspiracy. If he could lock her up. He knew about her, but how much? Enough to convict? I’m not sure. She might have walked away. And that would have ruined everything, made him look-unreliable. No conspiracy. So maybe it was convenient for him. With her gone, the smear would stand-I’d always be guilty, at least in the press, which is what mattered. The court of public opinion, always his favorite. You don’t have to prove anything there. You can build a career on it. But then I got away, so he ended up with nothing.” He glanced pointedly at Molly. “That was the only satisfaction.”
Molly said nothing, turning it over, and Nick saw that his father had shifted things again, that the story, just the possibility of it, was a kind of reproach.
“Of course, we’ll never know what she intended to do,” his father said.
Molly looked at him steadily, still examining the brief. “But why do that-to save you?”
“No. Herself.”
“Then why go to Welles in the first place? She was his witness.”
He looked at her curiously. “But she didn’t go to him. He went to her. She wasn’t an informer, you know. Did you think that?” he said, then shook his head. “She wasn’t the type. It was Welles. He hounded her until he got a name.”
“Yours.”
“Yes, mine. One. If she’d been a friendly witness, she’d have told him everything she knew. Why volunteer if you weren’t going to talk? Look at Bentley, or-who was the other one? Coplon. They couldn’t stop. She never wanted any of it-you could see it in her face. She was afraid of him. She made a bargain, and then she saw it wasn’t a bargain. He’d never let her alone. With that press? She was all he had. He had to keep squeezing. Once he knew about her-”
“How did he, if she didn’t tell him?” Nick asked.
His father nodded as if they’d finally arrived. “Well, that’s the great question. How did they know about anything? Hearing after hearing. Where did it all come from?”
“If you throw enough mud, some of it sticks,” Molly said.
“But how do you know where to throw? Where did Welles get his information?” He turned to Nick. “What does Wiseman say?”
“FBI files, usually.”
“Yes, usually. Hoover. Our own Dzerzhinsky. Helpful to a fault. As long as someone else took the credit. Which of course they were eager to do. Welles, the great inquisitor. Or McCarthy, when he was sober. Where would either of them have been without those files? There was plenty of mud there to go around.”
“And Hoover supplied it,” Molly said skeptically.
“I said usually. There were other sources. Subscriber lists, donations. Sometimes they got lucky-the mud would stick. But the Bureau was the best. It was all there. It’s not easy to set up a police state. Which is what they were trying to do. It takes time. Files. Secretaries. Field agents. Legmen,” he said, glancing at Nick. “A whole organization. I know a little about this-it’s the one thing the comrades are good at. The committees didn’t have those resources. Who were they? Lawyers, football players.” Another glance at Nick. “Politicians, not detectives. You have to remember the scope of all this. The hearings were only a part of it. Most of the time HUAC was operating as a personnel agency, giving information to employers. A vetting service to make sure you had the right people. God knows how many they ran checks on.”
“About sixty thousand,” Nick said. “Roughly.”
“Roughly,” his father repeated, taking it in. He looked at Nick. “I see. Wiseman. Think what it means, the work involved. And that was just HUAC, not the Senate committees, the state committees. All of them looking for information so they could run their own circus. People didn’t ask where it came from. Maybe they thought Welles dug it up all by himself. But where else? Only the FBI had that much. Those were Hoover’s committees. McCarthy’s especially, but Welles’s too. Hoover fed them, and then, when it suited him, he cut them off. The trouble was, they didn’t know what to do with the stuff. McCarthy, for God’s sake. Welles, always shooting from the hip and never hitting anything. Disappointing, the horses Edgar picked.” He paused. “But it came from him.”
“How?” Molly said, fascinated now.
“The usual ways. Hoover had to be careful. The leaks were illegal, for one thing, a small point. But there was his reputation-not a small point. He couldn’t be seen to be leaking information. Sometimes the field offices would help the local police. Then they could pass it off as their detective work. Sometimes a journalist would be tipped, one of the friendly ones. With the committees it was usually more direct-that was helping the government, after all. But in this case I think it might have come directly from him-he was close to Welles and this was sensitive, the sort of thing he liked to handle himself. He might not have wanted anyone else to know, even in the Bureau.”
“But does it matter? The fact is, they did know about her.”
“But how? Did you ever wonder why it started with her? That’s always been the strangest part of the whole business. She was the last person in the chain who’d be under suspicion. She wasn’t in the Government. No access. No history. You didn’t have to pass a security check to work at Garfinkel’s. Why investigate her? She should have been at the end of the trail, the small fry you round up with the others. But there weren’t any others. They never connected her to anybody except me. So what led them to her? How did they know to go after her?”
Molly said nothing, so Nick’s father answered for her.
“Somebody told them. That’s how it all started, all of it. That’s what I thought about on the ship,” he said, looking at her. Then he sighed, finished. “I still think about it.”
Dinner was roast pork and dumplings, whose lightness Anna demonstrated by slicing them with a string stretched taut between her forefingers, Czech style, but which then sunk back heavily in the thick gravy. Molly picked at her food, quiet and withdrawn, no longer interested in playing cat and mouse with his father. Instead she talked to Anna, complimenting her on the elaborate table setting, old china swirling with painted flowers spread across a stiff white tablecloth embroidered with gold thread.
“It’s all I kept from the house in Bubenec. My mother had three closets just for the linens. And dishes-she prided herself on her china. All the women did. Of course, they had maids. So different then. You know, I never cared about these things when I was a girl. It was just the way we lived. Now it seems so beautiful-it reminds me, I suppose. Of that life. We had a large house, a villa. A music room, even. A greenhouse in the back-we always had flowers. But that was before the war.”
“Is the house still there?”
“Oh yes. But my father was killed, so we had to leave. The Germans took it. My mother lost everything-all those closets. But she kept these.”
They were still talking about the world before Munich, all parties and piano lessons, when they heard the car in the driveway. The rain had gone, leaving only the sound of water dripping off leaves, and in the quiet the engine
