“They arrested him. It was a Harvard alumnus.”
III In the Name of Conrad
Chapter Nine
1
His name was Thomas Munk; he was fifty years old and was a Harvard-educated mathematician, the son of a well-to-do family of Polish immigrants. He had no criminal record, and his political ties were unknown. They’d arrested him in a remote, forested area in the mountains of Montana. He lived in isolation, in a rudimentary cabin that he’d built himself, six meters square, with no electricity, no running water, and no phone line, thirty miles from the nearest town, on the side of Route 223.
Parker had spent several days going through Munk’s past and his writings. With the office inactive due to the blazing New York summer, with the efficient new assistant who kept him up to date online and could reach him on his cell phone (the intercom, Parker called it), he’d taken advantage of his free time to put together a report on Munk for me and close the investigation.
“Detectives no longer solve cases, but we can tell stories,” he said later.
The two Munk sons were born in consecutive years, 1942 (Thomas) and 1943 (Peter), when their parents settled down for good in Chicago. The photo of the brothers in their high school yearbook showed two boys with birdlike faces, American-style haircuts and weary smiles. Hardworking and eager, simple of heart, with no traces of their European origins, the two brothers grew up in the fifties, when the culture of this country was, according to Parker, at once wonderful and appalling. They’re children of the Cold War, of the expansion of the automobile, of TV and rock ’n’ roll. Tom was the genius in the family, and his brother was to live in his shadow even though he became a fairly well-known writer and published several stories in the little reviews that circulated in the Village, aided by the success of Kerouac and the Beat Generation.
Thomas Munk decided on Harvard, maybe because his father thought it was the only American university that his friends in Warsaw would know. In 1958—at age sixteen—he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and began his academic career. In fact, he received the largest scholarship of any sophomore student in Harvard’s history.
He was “morally serious,” a solitary, pedantic, shy young man who never adapted to the rigid rules of the Ivy League. While his fellow students were going to class looking dapper in their Brooks Brothers suits and neckties bearing the colors of the university’s exclusive alpha beta phi clubs, Tom Munk was one of the first students to attend undergraduate classes at Harvard in jeans, a black T-shirt, and basketball shoes, as if he was a working-class American boy from Pennsylvania. In the winter he added a blue peacoat and a knit wool cap, the kind that only black men in the Boston projects were wearing back then.
He went to parties and dances but would sit by himself on the sidelines to drink beer and watch the Barnard butterflies fluttering around with their golden tresses and short skirts and making out in the corners with crude upper-class boys from Princeton and Yale. There was an entire brood of American girls with lovely legs and blossoming breasts who lost their virginity quickly and deliberately in the period from the end of the Korean War until the beginning of the Vietnam War. They looked like a forward platoon in the new women’s liberation army, and the boys called the girls The Viet Cong, according to Parker, surely thinking of his beloved Betty and the redhead she’d been, she too, of course, a veteran of war from Vassar.
Amanda, a beautiful “chick” in those days, recollected to the press that she’d traveled with Munk on a vacation to Canada in the summer of 1963. “What he liked most about me,” she stated, “was how I used to read novels and stories out loud, ones that ‘said something about the human condition.’” One night, as they lay stretched out on the tile floor of their hotel room to stave off the heat, she was reading a story about a shepherd who wore a black veil over his face, and Tom fell asleep. Amanda went on reading but soon began to forget about the story and switched to thinking aloud about the dormitory where she lived, the communal refrigerator padlocked shut and all the cartons of milk with their owner’s names written on them (Grete, Maria), and when she finally shifted to turn off the lamp, Tom opened his eyes and stared at her.
“You never blink,” she had said to him.
“No, not if I can help it,” he said.
He never lied; throughout his life he remained faithful to the criteria of truth that ruled the logic to which he devoted his efforts. According to his mathematical intuition, true concepts were real objects, not just forms of thought. He said as much during a class in his second year at Harvard, and the professor, John Maxell, one of the main references in the world of analytic philosophy in the United States, invited him to consider a proposition: At this moment there isn’t a cat in this room. When Munk refused to accept this description, the old professor bent down laboriously to look under each of the desks of the fifteen students who were participating in the seminar; his joints creaked, but this effort was intended to illustrate the effort that it cost to find evidence. While Maxell was verifying whether or not there was an animal in the room, Munk remained impassive, standing by the blackboard at the front of the room. “I haven’t
