The Redhunter (42 page)

“War and Peace?
I’m surprised you’re not still there. So then what?”

“Lucy. In July you told me you wanted to get a roomier place to live in but needed a roommate for the second bedroom. Is that
offer still open?”

Lucy was agreeably surprised. “Not only open, I’ve actually seen an apartment
perfect
for two people, two hundred twenty-five dollars, that’s one hundred twelve-fifty each—oh. It was
that
bad with your father?”

Robin nodded. A tear came to her eye.

“I couldn’t
understand
his vehemence. He went on and on about Senator McCarthy. Then he said that the photograph in the paper would make him the
laughingstock of the embassy—I mean, he went on and
on.
He finally said—this was after maybe an hour—I mean in just these exact words, ‘Robin. I want you to promise me not to see
Harry again.’ ”

She turned her head away. Lucy waited.

“I went to my room. And this morning I left for work early. We passed each other without talking. It’s never been that way
with Daddy. So I remembered what you said about looking for an apartment. It’s a perfect time anyway, because Daddy has to
go to London at the end of the week. When could we move in?”

“I’ll find out.”

Lucy went out to the public telephone. Senator McMahon did not permit office phones to be used for personal calls. She was
back in a few minutes, smiling broadly. But she checked herself.

“I shouldn’t be happy over your bad news. But the happy answer is we can move in tomorrow.”

Robin thought carefully about how to manage leaving. There would be no point in a dramatic removal of all her clothes and
belongings. She would insert into a large suitcase everything she’d need for a few days. Then wait to move her wardrobe until
her father had left. She hoped that in the few days remaining before his departure he would soften his opposition to Harry.

It didn’t help that the morning’s headlines carried updates on two lawsuits against Senator McCarthy, the first by columnist
Drew Pearson, the second by former Senator Tydings. The first charged libel and slander and asked for five million one hundred
thousand dollars. In the second, Millard Tydings charged that in the campaign for reelection he had lost in 1950, Senator
McCarthy and his aide Don Surine had: 1) libeled Tydings, 2) violated Maryland’s voting practices laws, and 3) knowingly distributed
a photograph of Communist Party head Earl Browder arm in arm with Senator Tydings, an alleged forgery. McCarthy’s comment
to the press was to the effect that he was surprised
Earl Browder
wasn’t suing, to protest his picture alongside “the late Senator Tydings.” Alex Herrendon cut the clipping out of the paper
and put it in an envelope for Robin, with the note, “Does your boyfriend also give the senator legal advice?”

Three days after settling down with Lucy at Eighteenth and M, Robin steeled herself to call her father. She was astonished
by the continuing intensity of his concern.

“Are you still seeing … seeing the McCarthy aide?” He sensed what the answer would be.

“Yes, Daddy, I am. I do wish you’d just—just agree to meet him.”

“He is not to come within ten feet of my—of our—house.”

Robin hung up.

She was crying. She didn’t call her father to wish him a safe journey.

Lucy giggled when, two weeks after they had installed themselves in the apartment, she pulled out from her briefcase the “Roommate
Protocols,” a mimeographed sheet someone, somewhere, had dreamed up. She posted it in the bathroom she shared with Robin.
It read,

Whereas——and——have agreed to take up joint residence at——, it is hereby agreed between the parties,

THAT checks for the succeeding month’s rent will be left in an envelope on the letter tray (if none exists, purchase one)
on the 25th of every month, marked “Rent money.”

THAT——will wash all dishes left in the kitchen from the
day before on even days of the month, and——will wash all dishes left in the kitchen from the day before on odd days of the
month.

THAT only when specifically requested to do so over the telephone will one party open a letter addressed to the other party.

THAT the living room will be reserved for exclusive use of the two parties on alternate weekends (Saturday, Saturday night,
Sunday day).

THAT telephone messages will be taken in behalf of the absent party, and left on the letter tray, without comment.

AND THAT no mention will be initiated by the party in residence when the other party does not occupy his (her) room any night
or nights.

What this meant, Robin smiled, for the first time in days, it seemed, and put her signature on the solemn instrument, was
that the nights she was spending with Harry would not be a source of conversation the next day.

On Herrendon’s return he asked at the embassy whether there had been any movement “on the security business.” Simon, friend
and golfing companion, detected his distress. He permitted himself to wonder whether Alex had in fact anything to worry about.
Was there something other than the silly consumers league petition in his past? Had his relations with Alger Hiss, with whom
Alex had traveled on the U.S.S.
Quincy
to Yalta, been other than entirely professional?

Simon put away his concern. But that was on Tuesday. At lunch with him on Friday, at the cafeteria, he thought to comment,
“Alex, you’re the gloomiest man in Washington these days. Anything I can do?”

Alex shook his head. “Just—family. Robin moved out three weeks ago. Quite right—a twenty-three-year-old shouldn’t be stuck
in a single house with her father for the rest of her life. But it’s lonely at the house without her.”

Simon accepted the explanation and they made their golf date.

That night Alex called the private investigating service. He had got the number from his lawyer, Eustace Meikklejohn. The
man Eustace had referred him to listened on the phone, paused, and said,
“Do you want to talk to our operative tonight? If so, someone can come to your house at nine.”

“Yes, tonight. Nine is fine.”

“He will identify himself as ‘Cal.’ He is to quote to you,” there was another pause, “the number 1311. No further identification
will be provided. But Mr. Meikklejohn has reassured you about our service.”

“Yes. I shall await … Cal.”

Cal arrived, they talked, and Cal departed.

Robin liked it when Harry slept on, after her own six o’clock rising. The whole McCarthy enterprise straggled into the office
in the morning. Everyone was there by ten, and not infrequently Senator McCarthy, who seemed never to need sleep, was there
at seven. But everyone worked late, including Harry; though when he spent the evenings with Robin, he was not really working
late.

But, he thought late, late at night, with Robin at his side in bed, that in the best sense of it, he didn’t believe that when
she was with him “work” was outlawed. He would talk happily about problems, questions, dilemmas.

If Joe comes out for a formal invitation to the South Koreans to assert sovereignty over the North, what does it accomplish?
Does it make, simply, a historical point, renewing a Geneva accord set aside, everyone seemed to agree, by the war?

He began to talk, on the third night together, about Joe McCarthy. The human being.

He said things he had said to nobody, doubted that he ever would. He began by telling her that she had to put aside the popular
legend, canonical among the predominant opinion makers, that Joe simply did not care about factual accuracy.

“Why does he make so many mistakes, then?”

“There are good reasons and bad. He exaggerates. That’s bad—but it is also apple-pie American. The priesthood didn’t get all
that mad at Harry Truman about what he said in 1948 when campaigning. He said that ‘powerful forces’ were working to ‘undermine’
American democracy, ‘like those that created European fascism.’ The whole business, the GOP was run by the real estate lobbies
and the National Association of Manufacturers; nobody seemed to mind. But another
reason is the fragmentary nature of the stuff that comes in to us. Reports, even rumors—he senses
something is
wrong, but the evidence doesn’t congeal. But when it pretty well does, he can’t seem to get anywhere with it. Look at Lattimore.
The McCarran Committee—and that’s not Joe’s committee, that’s a whole other committee, and its chairman, McCarran, as you
know, is a Democrat—did months and
months
of interrogation. And concluded—including six Democratic senators who signed the report—that “Owen Lattimore was a conscious,
articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.” That was
post
McCarthy. But Lattimore is still a hero out there. Besides, if McCarthy was all that wrong about loyalty/security procedures,
how come the Eisenhower administration has kicked out six thousand people on security grounds? Robin?”

“Yes.”

“You know what Mark Antony said to Cleopatra?”

“Are you asking me, Have I read Shakespeare? The answer is, Yawp.”

“He said—I mean, what comes to my mind right now—is, Antony said to her, ‘Do we have to talk about world affairs tonight?’
”

They kissed. And they breathed and loved each other. A half hour later she nudged him. “You can’t think you have disposed
of my problems about your Senator Joe.”

“That wouldn’t be easy to do.
I
haven’t disposed of them. White wine?”

She rose from the bed. “I’ll get it. You concentrate.”

“On what?”

“On my rear end.”

She walked pertly over to the little kitchen. He could hear her voice easily.

“How do you handle the charge that McCarthy has never come up with a
single member of the Communist Party?”

Harry rose, flipped up his shorts, and walked to his desk. “Okay, I accept the challenge. But only on the understanding that
we are dealing with a—synecdoche.”

“What’s that?”

He took the wine, sat down at his desk, and leafed through a file in his drawer. “It means one part, taken as representative
of the whole. ‘One thousand oars set out for Sparta.’ Means, one thousand
men, using one thousand oars, bringing on—how many?—maybe one hundred boats.”

“So who’s your sinektee?”

“That’s syn-ec-do-che. Now you’re being serious, right, Robin?”

“Mmm.”

“How about Edward G. Posniak, a State Department economist. Here is the
Congressional Record,
July 25, 1950, page 10928. Ready?”

“You may fire when ready, Bontecou.”

“ ‘An FBI agent who joined the Communist Party at the request of the Bureau—’ the Bureau, that’s the FBI—”

“Oh, really? Go on, Harry.”

“—the FBI agent who joined the Party ‘—in 1937 and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1948 and whose record as an informant
has been one of complete reliability, stated that [Posniak] was a member of the Communist Party and personally known to him
as such.’ ” Harry looked up.

Robin would not flirt her way out of the problem. “I read you,” she said. She sipped her wine and then: “Tell me about growing
up with your mom. Mine was divine.”

“So is mine.”

The intimacy he felt very nearly propelled him to tell her his big secret, about that day searching in his father’s trunk.
But he stopped.

Even as he did he sensed the totality of Robin for him, his absolute sense that no one else in the entire world could match
her company. Yes, he was greedily, hungrily, deliriously happy with her in bed. But before, and after, he sensed a congruity
of spirit that made him stop and clench his fists to keep from trembling.

He knew that he would need a more conclusive consummation than the overnight stands. He wouldn’t discuss it with her now,
though she welcomed discussion on any subject, brightly, inquisitively, playfully, sometimes. Who would ever have thought
that she, Robin Herrendon, late at night in his apartment, would hear out the case against Edward G. Posniak!—but he might
have been making out the case against Socrates. He’d have to think about the future. And there was the real problem of the
hostility of Alex Herrendon. How odd, his total, almost ferocious animosity, just because Harry Bontecou worked for Joe McCarthy.
Bloody Brit! Harry decided he’d try to console himself with indignation. Fucking Brit. He has no
business
intruding that way in internal American politics. … And after all: If McCarthy was waging the right battle, Great Britain
was also a beneficiary. The hell with it. The hell with him.

They went then to sleep, and when his little alarm rang, he rose with her, insisted she lie in bed with the morning paper
he retrieved. He brought her coffee and a croissant.

Two days later Alex answered the telephone.

Was he free that night, same time, to see Cal?

Cal arrived promptly in the summer drizzle, removed his raincoat, sat, and brought out a secretarial pad.

“Last night, Subject arrived at 1123 Fifth Street, N.E., at seven-forty-five. She carried a briefcase and a small handbag.
Subject did not leave apartment building until this morning at six-fifteen.”

Cal asked whether anything further was required.

No, Alex said, rising to take Cal’s coat from the rack. “Thank you. I will expect the bill.”

Cal left. Alex went to the telephone. He asked for New York information.

“Operator, I want the number, somewhere in the Eighties, West Side, for Mrs. Dorothy Bontecou.”