The Redhunter (3 page)

Lord Herrendon was animated on a subject he and Harry had resolved by correspondence to pursue.

Herrendon eyed Harry. “It is very important to me that you were so intimately involved with Operation Keelhaul.”

Harry Bontecou had served in the U.S. Army division that was involved in the repatriation of Russian refugees right after
the world war. Three million Russians, against their will, had been sent back to the Soviet Union.

Herrendon addressed Harry. “Which division were you with?”

“The 103rd,” Harry replied.

“Have you written on your experiences in 1946?”

“No,” Harry said. “I never have.”

Herrendon sipped his drink. For a few moments there was silence. Neither spoke. Then Herrendon said, “I had a jolly difficult
time finding out where in the University of Connecticut to find you. Department of history, yes. But I did not know to put
down ‘Storrs.’ ” He sipped and suddenly he smiled. “I should have asked Marcus Wolf to advise me. You noticed the story in
the newspapers? He is angry at having run into some bureaucratic difficulty in getting a visa to visit America—” Harry nodded.
Yes, he had seen the story.

Another pause. And then, “I know about your late wife. I am sorry. But it is always easier, wouldn’t you agree—”he looked
up—“not to get into personal matters?”

“Yes,” Harry said, with some emphasis.

“So let me quickly get to the matter I wrote to you about. My book. But now let me ease into the subject. Let me talk to you
first, oh—permit an eighty-six-year-old historian to digress a little—talk a little about my Operation Keelhaul research,
which will be a part of my bigger book. It will perhaps interest you to know that I received a call from the new Russian ambassador
in February, telling me I would be receiving an invitation to visit the archives housed, as it happens, in Tolstoy’s estate—Leo
Tolstoy’s estate—with permission to examine for my own purposes the archives the Soviet authorities wouldn’t let Nikolai Tolstoy,
when doing his book on the question twenty years ago, look at.”

Harry nodded but said nothing.

“The offer came too late for Nikolai’s book. But they will be important for my own.” Harry looked at the eighty-six-year-old
gentleman, admiring his confidence and apparent good health. “Which is … one reason I wrote to ask you to meet with me. A
book about the Communist scene in the West—after the war. So I wrote back cautiously on the Tolstoy business. I am certain
to want Russian cooperation on the book I am planning.”

“You took the trip to Saint Petersburg?”

“Yes. The man who dealt with me was a General Lasserov. A scholarly gentleman. We spent some time together, and we surveyed
the estate—it is twelve hundred acres. The dwelling places—the main
house and the farmers’ quarters—will sleep four hundred souls. Non-dead souls. Aleksandr Lasserov, I would learn after several
evenings together, was as a young man in Gulag for four years, sent there by Brezhnev, for what infraction I forget. He is
eager to sort out the history of Soviet suffering and to analyze compliant responsibility for it by the West.”

“He is talking mostly about Operation Keelhaul?”

“Yes. Though not exclusively. He cares about American foreign policy and its neglect of Soviet suffering in the years that
followed Keelhaul.”

“You told him about your prospective book?”

“Yes.” Herrendon took a worn leather packet from his jacket and—“Do you mind?—”lit a small cigar. He stretched out his legs.

“So what exactly is his interest in your project?”

“Lasserov is an ethicist. He wants to try to understand why presumably moral people simply stand by when huge crimes are not
merely committed but institutionalized.”

“He wants you to figure that out?”

Herrendon smiled. “You have the point exactly, yes, Professor Bontecou.”

“—Harry.” Odd, Harry thought, to be asking Herrendon to call him by his first name.

Herrendon nodded and went on. “There are not many senior officials alive who took part in the operations. But, at a junior
level, you of course did. Most important, for me, is what came later. The great, turbulent, postwar Communist/anti-Communist/Red
scare/McCarthy period. You were in it, deeply in it. And you are a trained historian. And I am here to ask you to spend time
with me—as much time as is required—to help me to understand, retrospectively.”

Harry drained his glass. His wife, Elena, had often teased him about his impetuosity, sometimes reproachfully. He recalled
her summons to spend more time
deliberating
commitments he often made offhandedly. Accordingly, with a nod to her memory, he touched his napkin to his lips and said
with mock deliberation, “Let me think about it.” He was not ready to call him Alex.

He would say yes. Tomorrow. Actually—he was busy assembling supporting arguments for his decision—actually, he had nothing
else to do. He had no plans on how to spend the sabbatical suddenly sprung on him. And just one hour ago, reading the news
of Pol Pot, the old questions had stirred: Why? How come? He turned to Herrendon.

“I know. You want me to talk about Senator McCarthy.”

Lord Herrendon took a puff on his cigar. “Yes.”

“You probably know that I have never written about Senator McCarthy. You probably do not know that I have never spoken about
him.”

“I did know that. One of your students was a colleague in Cambridge. Jim Presley. He said he once tried to interview you for
the college paper.”

Harry paused. He had made his resolution in 1957, more than thirty years ago, and hadn’t diverted from it. But he felt now
not merely the weakening of an old resolve but an utterly unanticipated anxiety to reverse himself. The historian who shelters
historical material profanes his calling—the point had been made to Harry before, both by fellow historians and by survivors
of the great McCarthy wars, 1950 to 1954.

He spoke finally. “I’d need a lot of stuff.”

“I’ll bring over everything you want.”

“Nobody can put his hands on everything I’d want. Though I know a bit about his boyhood, and the war years. I collected all
that, way back then.”

“From the widow?”

“Well, Jeanie McCarthy and I were close. But she died in 1979. I’m talking about way back. Let’s put it this way—you can count
on me to help.”

“Even to telling all … telling everything you know about Joe McCarthy?”

Harry closed his eyes. “Even to telling about Joe McCarthy.”

“That is what I hope you can tell me about. When is your next appointment?”

“What’s the date today?”

“June thirtieth.”

“Well, I should get back to Storrs in a year or so.”

“In that case, we’d better get started.”

Joe McCarthy left on the school bus on the opening day of classes. He didn’t respond to the talk of his schoolmates, which
surprised them: Joe was the very best fifteen-year-old to swap stories with, discuss the virtues and weaknesses of the faculty,
all six of them. “What’s the matter?” Billy asked him. “Just thinking,” Joe said. “Well, I wouldn’t want to interrupt
that,
you agree, Moe?” Joe ducked his head and shot his right elbow back as if preparing to deliver a blow. But he laughed, and
when he turned his head again to the bus window, his companions left him alone.

When he descended the bus, the decision was made. He thought to take Billy to one side—it was 8:20, and class didn’t begin
for ten minutes. Take him aside and tell him what Joe had decided. Joe would tell him he wasn’t learning anything, he was
“bored out of my mind—”Joe had heard that formulation on the radio and thought it expressive. He would tell Billy that the
shortage of hands on the farm—his father’s, and also their neighbors’—meant there was need for extra help. And anyway, what
harm had leaving school done to his two older brothers?

But he quickly reflected that it would be disloyal to his parents to tell anyone before they learned about it. What he knew
he couldn’t do, having made up his mind, was to enter that classroom and wait until bus time at three
P.M.
to go home. So instead of making his case
to Billy, he leaned over and said, “I’ve got to go home, very important. Tell Miss Lockhart I won’t be there.” Billy tried
to interrogate him, but, lunch box in hand, Joe simply wheeled about and started his five-mile walk back to the farm.

He had rehearsed how to say it to Tim and Bid. He didn’t look forward to it, and delayed opening the door to the farmhouse
until the lunch hour, noon. He spent two hours in his old tree house, well removed from his father’s sight—he’d be tending
the farm over the brow of the hill. But he had to do it and thought, after much self-interrogation, to do it matter-of-factly.

Tim and Bid were seated at the kitchen table with the big bowl of soup, the loaf of bread, and the platter of butter. “What
you doing here at noon, Joe?” his mother asked.

Joe knew to direct the conversation to his father. “I’m sure you know, Dad, it’s one of those things, just like it was for
Steve and Bill.” Joe knew his mother would make a fuss, never mind that his older brothers had done the same thing. But he
knew also that his father would deal fatalistically with Joe’s decision. His brothers too had been fifteen and had said they
would join their father as farmhands, as now Joe was expected to do.

There was more of a problem with his mother. Bid closed her mouth tightly. But she knew instantly, knew from the way Joe had
given them the news and from her close study of him as a boy, that there would be no changing his mind. Bid got up, left the
table, and retreated to the bedroom, but returned moments later to the silent kitchen, neither husband nor son saying anything.
Bid fancied her son Joe as someone who
ought
to continue in school. Joe listened, and let his eyes dart over for comfort to his father. Tim McCarthy had finished his
soup and was now seated by the stove, idly petting the hound dog.

Joe was reassured: He could be confident that there would be no interference from that quarter. Joe rose and embraced his
mother, propelling her into a cheek-to-cheek dance, Joe humming the tune.

Bid stopped resisting. She couldn’t deny the handsome, dark, muscular boy whose school picture she always kept within reach.
When Bid visited her cousin at Fond du Lac she would put up on the mirror in the room she shared with her hostess a picture
of her husband, Tim. Tim never changed, neither in appearance nor in
dress: always the blue overalls and the straw hat with the old pheasant feather, faded after five years, sticking up from
the hatband that took icy snow in the winter and, in the summer, day after day of Tim’s sweat-soaked hair. And alongside it,
the picture of Joe, standing stiffly for the school portrait but unable to suppress entirely the smile that seemed always
to animate his face, as also his spirit.

What was special about Joe, Bid thought, was that in his view of life
everything
was marvelous and
everybody
was wonderful. Joe packed so much pleasure into his waking hours that he resented even the hours given to sleeping. He was
now, at fifteen, up earlier and earlier, going to bed later and later. Sometimes in the late hours he would read magazines,
occasionally a book. He would listen to the radio and comment on whatever he heard, laughing uproariously when Jack Benny
told a funny story. He took careful notes whenever the announcer gave the name of a product that could be had, free of charge,
by just mailing in a request for it. He had his own special wooden box that he kept in the barn. He had built the box himself,
though it was his brother Steve, three years his senior, who taught him how to use the lathe that made it possible.

Joe kept his box padlocked, and at age fourteen had announced to the family with some ceremony that it would be his own preserve,
its contents not to be seen by any other McCarthy. He had in the box his array of samples. Listerine, Colgate, Pepsodent,
Wrigley’s, Mum—all in tiny, one-ounce bottles or in tubes smaller than Joe’s thumb. There were specially wrapped single sticks
of gum, lozenges, small packages of Smith Brothers cough drops. The box contained one document, a holographic will leaving
his collection to his sister, Anna Mae, who was nine. Joe had got two of his teachers to witness his will. He did not want
any family to witness it, as they would then be privy to the secret object of Joe’s philanthropy.

His collection became something of a problem for him when, in the summer of 1923, the advertisers one after another changed
their policy. Now the samples were no longer free: they required a nickel. Plus postage. That meant eight cents. This was
a problem for Joe. His father paid him almost twice that sum for an hour’s work, but Joe had a difficult time saving money.
For one thing, he had taken to going to Billy’s house, two miles down the country road, unpaved, hemmed in by the luxuriant
Wisconsin green, speckled with tall oak trees. He
would do this two, sometimes three times a week. There he would play poker tirelessly and joyously with Billy and his older
brother Jerry. Sometimes Moe would join them, but Moe wasn’t very welcome—he tended to lose his temper when he lost.