Authors: True Believers
I prick a finger, take my blood—59; still low—and eat a fourth sugar tablet.
I keep forcing myself to pay attention and take notes, then test my blood again: 100. The perfect round number always pleases me, as if I’ve won a gold star. My brain chemistry is once again objectively normal.
Now Stewart’s new facts begin snapping into place where they belong, mapped onto history and memory, contextualized, sense made, surprising and strange—and, in one respect, shocking—but no longer inexplicable and terrifying rogue objects shooting wildly through my mental galaxy.
“So,” he says, “that’s the briefing for today.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“You’re upset.”
“I just found out my father, the brave young Resistance journalist, was actually a Nazi collaborator. Yeah. I’m upset. It’s totally shocking and depressing.”
“I didn’t say ‘collaborator.’ He was publishing
anti
-Nazi satire in 1943, for Christ’s sake. Collaborators didn’t get put in internment camps, and he was definitely locked up in Frøslev for the last year of the war. He gave them some names of a few Communists. Period.”
“Oh, he just turned in some of his friends to the Nazis. That’s all?”
“Listen, this wasn’t some little bullshit HUAC Hollywood blacklist thing—they were gonna ship him east, to Germany, to Poland, to one of the
real
fucking camps. Which they did to a thousand Danes like him.”
“No wonder he never wanted to talk about the war.”
“The Danes were very, very practical during the occupation. They got along, didn’t go out of their way to piss off the Nazis, didn’t push their luck too far. Which, by the way, is why they managed to save ninety-nine percent of their Jews.”
Earlier in the conversation, when I was low, I hadn’t thought to ask Stewart what my father did after the war to endear himself to American intelligence and get fast-tracked for emigration and U.S. citizenship. “And the OSS liked him so much
why
? Because he named more names for
them
?”
“Actually, it turns out he named exactly the
same
six names he’d given to the Nazis. Most of them still alive and on their way from the camps back home to Denmark. And he provided nifty psychological profiles for each one.”
I suddenly remember Christmas 1992 with my parents in Wilmette, when Greta, at age seventeen, became the first of us to notice her grandfather’s Alzheimer’s symptoms. Or so we thought.
“What, you mean because of the vasectomy thing?” I asked her at the time. Dad had gotten it into his head at age seventy-one that he should get a vasectomy, what he called “the Steinach operation,” which his father had undergone as an anti-aging measure in Copenhagen in the 1920s.
“No,” Greta said, “much stranger and crazier.” My father and she had gone for a walk around the village on Christmas Eve to look at the decorations, and he’d started weeping about what the Serbs were doing to the Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, then wept about his own supposed war crimes. “Morfar thinks he was a Nazi during World War II.”
On the phone now with Stewart, I take a deep breath. Tears are running down my cheeks. “No wonder he wanted to escape, to go to America. He wanted to get away from the people he’d betrayed.”
“Could be. Also? He apparently fixed up his sister with the OSS station chief. I have a feeling that’s what got him the free pass.”
“Oh my God—that makes complete sense! My uncle Ralph!” My aunt Gaby was a Danish war bride who married Ralph, a U.S. Army major, in Copenhagen in 1946.
“That’s one reason I pulled my little VSA stunt, by the way. Your uncle was OSS in forty-five
and
Strategic Services in forty-six, so I thought you might’ve been an Agency asset in sixty-eight. Seemed unlikely. But you never know. He went to Yale.”
“Uncle Ralph was
not
in the CIA. He came home and ran his family’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina.”
“Check.”
After we hang up, I reread my three pages of legal-pad notes for a few minutes. I quickly Google some things. And I replay the events of 1968 through this new template. Now I understand why Alex wasn’t worried about being drafted. I understand why he never wanted to talk afterward about what had happened.
I feel pulled along in the rapids of the fresh information flow. I’ve been handed a piece of evidence, an important piece, and I want to show it off right
now,
to demonstrate that I have the means and methods and willingness to disinter the truth. It used to work for the police when they were interrogating my Legal Aid clients, and it used to work for me sometimes in corporate depositions, rattling a witness to encourage him to settle, or even enough to make him blurt out some new bad fact.
I stare at the phone in my hand. The longer I wait, the wimpier I will become. I also want to take my mind off my dad. I wish I hadn’t learned what I now know about my father. It makes me want to sob. I think of what Stewart told me when we first met, that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community were “America’s frontline Fausts,” makers of the country’s necessary deals with the devil, acquiring vast knowledge in exchange for eternal damnation. My brother will be undone when he finds out what Dad did.
I dial the home number first, but even there an assistant answers and tells me he’ll “see if I can get him.”
I listen to some nervous Philip Glassian music playing on his end, rising and falling cellos and saxophones. Perfect soundtrack.
“Have you rung me to curse some more? Or do I take this to mean your knickers are no longer in such a frightful twist?”
“Hello, Alex. Last time we talked,” I say, all sweet and reasonable, “you just surprised me. By having recollections apparently so different than mine.”
“You really did throw a bit of a wobbly, but no need to apologize. Memory plays tricks. Especially on people our age.”
I almost lose it at “apologize.” But I recover, force myself to smile so he can hear it. “You’re many months older than I am, Alex.”
“Ha! Remember that fight we had freshman year in Cambridge, about where we’d first seen that photo of Malcolm X holding the rifle, peeking out his window?”
“I haven’t thought of that since then.” But yes, I absolutely remember. Eating a very late dinner at Tommy’s Lunch, the two of us debating with an SDS boy what “by any means necessary” meant, Alex insisting he’d seen the Malcolm picture in
Life,
whereas in fact I’d found it in one of Violet’s copies of
Ebony.
This is good: proof, without any leading of the witness, that he suffers from no amnesia about conversations in early 1968 that involved guns and violence and radical politics. I make a note. “But Alex? I have a couple of things I need to tell you.”
“Of course, darling. What?”
“When the book comes out, you can deny everything I say. You can accuse me of writing fiction and pretending it’s nonfiction. You can say I’m insane. You can sue me if you want—”
“Here, steady on, you don’t want a libel action on your hands.”
“You can sue for libel, invasion of privacy, breach of confidence, whatever, take your pick. And you might even be able to get an injunction to prevent publication in the UK. But going behind my back to tell lies to my daughter, pretending you’re concerned about my mental health, trying to convince her I have dementia? That is really low. And stupid, because she’s not convinced. In any case, it’s not going to stop me.”
“This is why you rang?”
“No, why I called is to tell you that among the things I’ve discovered about you”—the tip-of-a-nonexistent-iceberg gambit—”is that you were a CIA informer.”
I wait for a denial, harrumph, a
“What?”,
some kind of response. Or the sound of a hang-up. Instead, I hear Alex walking. So I press on.
“Beginning in August 1967, on your way home from Belgrade. August twelfth, the day you arrived in Paris, after two CIA officers approached you at your hotel. And took you to an apartment, a CIA safe house, and spent all night convincing you to cooperate with them, to feed the CIA and the U.S. government information about your new boyfriend Darko Vidovic and other Yugoslavian Communist Party and government leaders. And you agreed”—here I am going out on a limb, but Stewart said he was fairly certain—”because they threatened to tell your parents and Harvard and everyone you knew that you were homosexual. Then, sometime later, you also started working for Project RESISTANCE, which was part of the CIA’s Special Operations Group. Which was run by a guy named Richard Ober, Harvard class of forty-three.”
I speak slowly and calmly and come to full stops. I learned this in doing depositions if my facts were good. It ratchets up the deponent’s sense of one’s omniscience. I have no idea if Alex ever met Ober, and I got his name off Google ten minutes ago, after Stewart mentioned Alex’s involvement in Project RESISTANCE, one of the CIA’s secret domestic operations that spied on people like us starting in 1967.
“And then”—this next is total inference—”you made sure the CIA knew what we were up to. That’s why you disappeared that whole morning in Washington, right? After the march on the Pentagon? To meet with your handlers ‘in Virginia’? And that morning in New York, right after we called off the attack and you disappeared for two hours? You went to brief them. To snitch.”
I feel a little bit like the self-satisfied Ian Fleming villain who, having captured Bond, shares way too much information about his scheme for world domination. My motivation isn’t hubris or a weakness for clunky exposition. I want Alex to know the secret I know, and to imagine that I know others so that he might reveal more of the truth or, in any event, realize that resistance is futile. Okay; maybe some hubris.
“You are really being a bit of a berk, Hollander. You do know that I am
very
friendly with members of your Board of Regents. And the CEO of the company that owns your publisher now, Gottfried? Is a friend of mine. A close personal friend. He’s sailed with me.”
So he’s not capitulating. He’s implying that he can get me fired from UCLA and have this book canceled. I’m relieved, almost delighted. He’s given up pretending that we didn’t do what we did in 1968, and he’s no longer claiming I’ve lost my mind. He’s moved on from the denial stage to something between anger and bargaining.
“There are other publishers,” I say, “whose owners don’t give a shit about you. There’s the Internet. I’m not a nobody. People will pay attention. So …” I hesitate and then go there: “Even if you threaten me, even if you were to have me killed, there’s no stopping this. It’s all written,” I lie. “All done and safely stored in a cloud.”
“It’s ‘
the
cloud,’ but Hollander, what fools we are, talking to each other this way! It’s stupid. Don’t be melodramatic! As though I’d
do
anything to you, for crying out loud. Or you to me.”
“No, of course not,” I say. Has he decided to relent, to let all the chips fall? Will he ask me to soften the edges, treat him nicely? And why do I have an inkling of déjà vu about this conversation? “Alex, the real reason I called is to ask if you wanted to, you know, fill in some of the blanks. Make it more truthful.”
“Right-o. Good. Because I do think you’re just a little mixed up about things.”
Shit. “No, Alex, I’m really not.”
“I’ll say it one last time: you should leave this thing alone, stop trying to be a policewoman, the last hero standing, opening up a very cold case. Besides, there’s no proof.”
I really feel as if I’ve had this conversation before. “Have you been listening? I’ve got secret government documents.” Not exactly; I’ve got notes of an oral summary of secret government documents pilfered by an anonymous source. “Your 201 file is very interesting.” I haven’t seen it; Stewart used the term. It’s what the CIA calls its files on individuals.
“You’re hell-bent on destroying the both of us, is that it, and Freeman as well? On sending your suicide package out into the world? This will now be the leads in our obituaries, Hollander. Is that really the legacy you want?”
“This isn’t going to destroy anybody. It’ll make you even more interesting. And I haven’t thought about my obituary,” I lie, again, “but the only ‘legacy’ I care about is being a truth-teller.”
“Ah,
truth-teller,
” he repeats. “It’s a far, far better thing you do than you’ve ever done?” Then he sighs and chuckles and sighs again. “I say legacy, you say
legacy,
you say truth-teller, I say
truth-teller.
Did our generation start that, inverted commas around everything—shorthand sarcasm in place of actual argument?”
Again he’s softening, so I soften. “Another modern bad habit that people our age can claim credit for.”
“I’m having a déjà vu,” he says, “some night in Wilmette, late, we were outdoors, and I was pissed at you both, you and Chuck, and we just kept flinging each other’s words back and forth at each other like turds.”
“Senior year, prom night, the Crawfords’ backyard.”
“
Yes.
I felt so abandoned. I was so angry at you for being a couple—for keeping it
secret
from me. For not telling the truth. We’d always done everything together. I thought there was nobody I could trust more.” After a long pause, he says, “You know, Hollander, what happened to Chuck was his own fault.”
“Yeah. But it was a game of chicken that we all started playing together. We’ve all got dirty hands.”
“If they make the movie, Malcolm McDowell can play me now. And I suppose Tommy Lee has to be old Buzzy.” He means Tommy Lee Jones, the football player two years ahead of us at college on whom Alex had had a secret crush. I’d thought of Tommy Lee Jones as Stewart. “So long, Hollander.”
I don’t know exactly how I expected that conversation to go, but not like it did. While I was talking with Alex, Waverly texted me again—
PLEASE call
—so now I do.
“What is it, sweetie? Is everything okay?”
“Grams, you’re going to hate me. I read your book. I’m so sorry. I feel horrible about it. I won’t tell anybody anything, I swear. I’m not a snitch. Don’t hate me.”