The Redhunter (10 page)

But then they sized it all up, and there were yells, yells from everywhere. Some of the Russians refused to get out of bed,
so we had to prod them with our clubs. I lifted my right hand and stretched out my fingers, five—five minutes to pack, I pointed
to the bags in front of their beds. We prodded them to the camp gates. The trucks were there, a long row of them, engines
humming. They were loaded into them, and the trucks drove off.

The convoy clattered and swayed down the darkened roads. Harry was silent. He declined to order the Russians in the truck
he commanded to be quiet. At the end of the road, twenty miles distant, there was a hasty transfer to a train.

Under way, the train rattled on toward the east, a pale, cold light appearing now in the sky. Near the Czech frontier, beyond
Zwiesel,
the train halted in the stillness of the Bavarian forest. The Russian troops waiting for their cargo were wearing blue caps.

We shook hands. There was an interpreter. We didn’t say much, didn’t want to say anything. I signed the human invoice and
got a Russian invoice in return. The Russians were shepherded down by the railway track. I could see them down at the end
of the platform. Mostly they were trying to keep themselves warm. We got back into our train, to go back to Plattling. I looked
back, Mom. I saw Russians there waiting to be pulled to Russia, to go to the prison camps and the execution squads.

The tumult of Thursday and Friday left him no time, but on Sunday morning Harry rang the hospital telephone extension. “Major
Chadinoff, please.”

“Major Chadinoff is not here.”

“Where is he? This is Lieutenant Bontecou calling.”

“I don’t know,” the attendant said. “I mean I don’t know where he’s gone, but he’s no longer at Camp Plattling.” Harry went
to the door and opened it into the cold. I have known a real hero, he said to himself. If Chadinoff was gone, that meant he
had elected Alternative Two: formal, public resistance. Harry asked himself, Why wasn’t he there, alongside him, saying—doing—the
same thing?

He went listlessly to the mail room to dispatch his letter to his mother. There was a letter waiting for him. It was from
the registrar, admitting him to the Class of 1950 at Columbia University.

HANBERRY, 1991

Alex, Lord Herrendon, was proud of his mastery of the computer. “I suppose it’s obvious you know and use it, Harry?”

Yes, Harry said. He had in fact brought his own laptop from America and had it in the office provided for him. The two men
met for lunch and, four or five times a week, for dinner. First in the “garden room,” which was English boarding-room cold
year round; the evening meal in the small formal dining room that eased away from the very large dining room, whose table—for
twelve? twenty?—was covered by tablecloths. On top of it were photographs and, as their work progressed, more and more piles
of file material.

“Lovely quarters you have for me, Alex.”

“It’s a nice place,” Lord Herrendon said. Most—lordly manors—are, Harry thought. Not that he knew the insides of many such,
though he had had a professional look at several in Germany when he did the research on the Victorian cousins.

Herrendon walked Harry about in his impressive library, with volumes of material in varied folders. There were books, manuscripts,
transcripts of hearings, congressional records, Hasards. Harry had asked the first day, “Do you have a record of the Senate
hearings, the McCarthy hearings?”

Herrendon led him to a corner shielded from the sun by the heavy window curtain. He pointed to a dozen bound volumes. “I
have here the Tydings hearings on McCarthy, the Gillette-Monroney hearings on McCarthy, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and over
there the McCarran Committee hearings—he pointed to eight volumes. “And here,” there was a touch of pride in his voice, “are
transcripts of the two trials of Alger Hiss. In those three volumes there—” these were large volumes, suitable for filing
newspaper clippings—“are reports on the work of the Communist underground, beginning in Los Alamos and going through preliminary
revelations of the Venona files, the archive recording Soviet radio activity in and about America during the Second World
War. Did you have a chance last night to look over the outline of my proposed book?” It was the book Alex Herrendon dreamed
of writing. An account of Communist activity and public opinion in the West. How much was Western indifference traceable to
manipulation? How much to ignorance? How much to moral fatigue? How much to—insouciance?

Harry nodded, drawing up a chair from the long table with books scattered over it to the side of his computer desk. “In the
two pages with chapter headings having to do with McCarthy, I notice the ‘George Marshall Episode.’ I know a lot about that.”

“I supposed that you did. Let’s talk procedure here. At our next meeting, we can hope to get down to work. … If you don’t
object, I will bring the recording device—it is very good, very sensitive, you don’t need to hold a microphone to your lips,
nothing like that. But I will sit by your side and question you, rattle your memory, which I suppose is very keen—like mine.”
He gave a sly smile. “Depending on the volume of material, the transcriptions will require one or two days. We can be on to
other matters while they are being done. But shouldn’t we take first things first?”

Harry smiled too. “I was going to say. I’d like to hear what it was that drew you—Alex—to the Communist Party and what it
was that drew you away from it.”

Alex Herrendon was the only son of Lord Herrendon, who had been made a hereditary peer in the last days of Queen Victoria.
The first Lord Herrendon had been active on several civic fronts, stressing the education of poor children in major British
cities. As a young man he
went to South Africa and, together with a partner, prospected, with marked success, for diamonds. In young middle age he withdrew
completely from business, selling his holdings and joining the Socialist Party. He became a trusted friend and benefactor
of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the two leading Fabianists, who devoted their long lives to bringing socialism to Great Britain
without revolution. He contributed substantially to the Labour Party and was rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords by
Ramsay MacDonald.

Herrendon’s opening speech was widely noticed, causing amusement in some quarters, curiosity in others, sheer rage in some.
He said he would devote his career in the House of Lords to abolishing it. Every year he submitted a fresh bill. They got
nowhere but marked him as a regicidal character, in one sense the godfather of Willie Hamilton, who won a seat to Parliament
a generation later. But Hamilton had raised Herrendon’s ante, calling for the abolition not only of the House of Lords, but
also of the monarchy.

“My father informed me—he never consulted me, he always informed me—when I was in my last year at St. Paul’s here in London
that I was to go to America for my higher education. He had just acquired this castle. There wasn’t that much home life to
be sorry about, on the matter of going to the United States for college work. My mother had died, and Father did not remarry.
He crossed the Atlantic frequently, and on one visit to New York befriended Fulton Chapin—you know the name?—”

Harry nodded. “The American millionaire socialist.”

“Chapin had attended Columbia and easily persuaded my father to send me there. One month after I arrived in Morningside Heights
I was delirious with joy over my circumstances. I had a comfortable two-room apartment—Father didn’t practice socialism, he
preached it. I had total liberty of movement for the first time in my life. I was aflame with my father’s socialist cause.
I made several friends. I was worldlier than the average freshman. By the time I graduated, I had had two experiences that
greatly influenced my life. One was with a woman, the other with a student four years older than I. His name was Whittaker
Chambers, and when I was twenty, he took me—a dramatic journey involving your subway and then a long walk—to a little office,
the business and the dwelling place of one Ben Mandel. He was a party functionary. He wrote out a Communist Party card for
me
and told me that, pending the decision of my superiors, I was not to divulge to anyone—even my own father—the step I had taken.”

Harry looked up. “You knew Whittaker Chambers!”

“I must suppose that you did too.”

“I saw him just once, traveled out to his farm with Joe McCarthy. But we had a warm correspondence after that. I can’t imagine
at that age—he was, I guess, fifty—he died at fifty-seven—what he was like when you knew him.”

“Whittaker Chambers was twenty-four, muscular, good looking, quick to laugh, teeming with excitement over the last book he
had read, which would have been the one he picked up two hours before. I learned—mostly from him, in fact—of endless troubles
at home, eccentric father, alcoholic brother, the whole thing. He had decided to quit Columbia—he got into some kind of trouble,
carried off a bunch of books to his house in Long Island. The last time I saw him was, I think … 1925. He just disappeared.

“But I got a postcard a year or so later, just as I was nearing commencement. It was sent, I remember, to ‘Alex Herrendon,
Class of 1926, Columbia University, New York.’ But it reached me. A couple of sentences. Hoped-I-was-okay. He-was-keeping-busy.
‘Upholding the cause.’ There was no return address. I stayed in New York. My father got me a posting as assistant to the British
consul on Third Avenue, on the Upper East Side. I was there four years, then back to London four years, then to Washington,
with my—American wife and daughter—”

“Yes,” Harry interrupted. “I know about that. You will of course be writing about what you did in the underground for the
party. And I’m here to answer your questions. You wanted to know about Joe’s—I still think of him as Joe—about McCarthy’s
attack on Marshall. The background is curious.”

“May I turn on the recorder?”

“Of course.”

A week before the Christmas holidays at Columbia, the
Spectator,
the student daily, held elections. The eight-week competitive ordeal had been stiff and time consuming. The student contenders
for posts on the paper, by tradition, reported to the managing editor at John Jay Hall on Monday through Friday at one
P.M.
to receive their assignments. They had also to go out and sell advertising, the
Spectator’s
principal source of revenue. Harry Bontecou and his roommate, Tracy Allshott, were eager competitors. This proved convenient,
both because of the camaraderie of joint exposure to the rigors of the contest and because there were no complaints from one
roommate to another about lights being kept on late. Both needed to work extra hours on their studies after completing the
Spectator
assignments.

Tracy’s reserve was perhaps traceable to his absorption with the
Spectator
challenge, Harry conjectured. When his mother suggested inviting Tracy for lunch or dinner on Sundays, which Harry spent
at home, he said he thought it wise to put off the invitation until after the competition was completed. “Maybe later on in
the term, Mom.”

She looked up from her book. “You do
like
him, don’t you Harry?”

“Yes. I do.” Without great conviction.

Dorothy Bontecou could tell that the answer was ambiguous but knew not to ask for more. And of course she knew that if there
was festering incompatibility there, Harry and his roommate needed only to
wait until the end of freshman year to make other rooming arrangements. She would not make any further reference to Tracy
Allshott.

But Harry, it turned out,
did
want to talk about him.

“I wish I had a picture of him. I don’t, but there’ll be one in the freshman yearbook they’ll be distributing next week. You
know, Mom, I think maybe Tracy is, well, practically an albino. He doesn’t look absolutely bleached, but I mean his hair is
so blond it’s almost white. He’s very good-looking, imposing. Blue eyes, of course, maybe one hundred seventy pounds—a little
shorter than me, very intense, yet very—vague. Last week he was up all night reading up on Chaucer.”