“We aren’t gonna go to the police,” Krellburger said once he felt confident to speak again. “Nathaniel Branden has a bedsitting room in Catford. He’s the only man who can stop them. He’ll know what to do.”
“And who is Nathaniel Branden?” I asked. I got a funny look.
“Branden is the second greatest philosophical genius the world has ever known,” came the assured answer. I shrugged and took another deep draw on the cigarette.
“If he’s only the second greatest,” I said at length, “who might be the first?” I got another funny look. Then Krellburger laughed.
“I thought Englishmen were better educated than that,” he said. I sniffed and flicked ash out of the window. “The greatest philosopher, of course, is Ayn Rand. You’ve heard of her?” I nodded. Even before that poor fool Greenspan had called it out, I’d heard that name. Who hadn’t? When I was in Chicago, she’d been denounced every day in the American newspapers. According to them, she was, among much else, a traitor, a lesbian, a German spy, a corruptor of youth. One of the taxi drivers had assured me she was a Jewish nymphomaniac and a poisoner of reservoirs. Someone else had blamed her for the new strain of locusts that was resistant to all but German pesticides. Before then, I’d read the generally shrill letters of denunciation she sent three times a week from Montreal to The Daily Telegraph. Before starting work for Richardson on that vast hymn of praise to the Fuhrer, she’d published an equally vast cycle of plays about the trial of Anslinger after some future American uprising. A cut down version had been played at the Old Vic, with Kenneth Williams as Anslinger. The critical derision it received had only made her Telegraph philippics more demented. Of course, I knew about Ayn Rand. If I hadn’t paid much attention to her books, I was in good company. And being told by some juvenile footman that she topped a list containing Plato and Aristotle put me in no mind to look further.
I changed the subject.
“Your people got me to bring in the Churchill Memorandum,” I said, because you thought I was the man to validate it when you used it against Anslinger.” He nodded. “So why don’t you just work openly with Macmillan and Foot? Letting them think they’ve infiltrated your movement, when you’ve actually infiltrated theirs seems a somewhat roundabout way of securing what you both obviously want.” I’d had some time to think matters through. It was worth taking the time now to clarify some of the more bizarre twists in whatever was going on.
“But we don’t wanna publish that document,” Krellburger insisted. “That would only provoke Anslinger to kill Miss Rand. All we want is to pressure him into releasing her so she can carry on her work. Big Mac wants to give the whole document to the papers. He’s sure it will bring Lord Halifax down and discredit everyone except him. He’s gotta be stopped!”
“So what’s in the rest of the document?” I asked. “Even if I were to swear on a stack of Bibles that it was in his handwriting—and no one would deny that it was—those parts I’ve seen of the Churchill Memorandum say nothing beyond the mildly embarrassing. All Halifax has to do is say there was no meeting, and that Churchill wrote the whole thing in a drunken haze. What makes it worth killing and dying for?” The answer was a shrug. From the longer reply that followed, I guessed Krellburger didn’t even know what was in the pages that I’d read with Pakeshi. He knew that Macmillan had the rest of it, but hadn’t caught sight of it.
I asked what could be in it for Michael Foot and the Russians. Another vague answer. I turned to asking who might be attending the meeting Macmillan had mentioned. He tapped his head and tried to look smug. Even so, he couldn’t keep the uncertainty from his face. So much for his claim to be Macmillan’s catamite. Either Macmillan was a great deal more reserved than he was supposed to be, or this part of the story was the fabrication that I suspected it to be.
“Well, I sighed, hoping for something in the way of hard information, “do I guess right that the raid on my flat was supposed to be foiled by armed policemen, who’d then bring me down here, bubbling with gratitude to Macmillan? That would explain why those two jokers who broke in didn’t know what they were supposed to take from me. Were the other two dead men working directly for Foot?”
It struck me as an entirely credible theory—my first unaided effort to understand what was happening. All I got, though, was another noncommittal shrug. Krellburger started the car and eased it through the lower gears. Sooner or later, we’d join one of the trunk roads to London. That would be in good shape, and we’d be in Catford perhaps shortly after lunch. I’d listen to this Nathaniel Branden. But I had no faith in American exiles. What little I’d read of them told me they were as loudmouthed and ineffectual as all the other refugee groups you saw raving away at Speaker’s Corner every Sunday morning.
I remembered what Stanhope had said to me outside Boots.
“Doesn’t your Ayn Rand preach that all sacrifice for others is evil?” I asked. “The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap,” I recited primly from one of Rand’s Telegraph letters. “I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine,” I added with a laugh.
There was a loud protest from the engine as Krellburger changed gear again. I glanced forward and to my left. It was raining softly and continuously. Even so, a couple of men were digging hard in a field. There was a horse-drawn cart pulled off the road near them. The horse looked up from nibbling at the grass as we bumped over another pothole on our journey past. Krellburger found the gear he was seeking and a look of intense concentration spread over his face.
“A man lives by values that he has freely chosen,” he said, evidently not quoting. “Freely chosen values are what distinguish a man from a slave. A man lives by these values, and that mean he may have to die for them.” He changed into top gear and leaned forward against the wheel to see more clearly ahead. “I believe in liberty,” he added. “I believe in America and the dream that inspired those brave, brave men so long ago in Philadelphia.” He prosed on enthusiastically about Jefferson and Franklin and the other rebels. I could have asked how many of the men who’d signed that Declaration had staggered out of the room for refreshments served by negro slaves. But I didn’t. It would have made for better conversation if I’d asked instead where he’d learned to drive. It wasn’t a skill you expected in one so young—especially not for a car of the older design. But I fell silent and lit another cigarette. As we drove on, he spoke with rising passion about how limited government and free enterprise were the only natural state for mankind. Though without the calm intensity of delivery, he sounded rather like Enoch Powell.
The road improved after East Grinstead. It even widened to four lanes, and there was a steady stream of electric and internal combustion traffic in both directions. We moved up to ninety, and then to a hundred, and I watched as the fast lane in front of us emptied of all the slower electric vehicles.
“Do you mind?” I asked, pointing at the car wireless. It was pushing midday, and I wanted to hear the news. Krellburger nodded. We swerved to avoid a police car that had unwisely moved out of the slow lane a hundred yards ahead. For a moment, I hoped it would flash us down. But its back lights went on instead, and it moved out of our way. I switched on the wireless and twiddled the running dial until I caught the last of the pips for the Home Service news.
The main item, as I listened through bursts of rhythmical interference, was the consecration of the new altar in Coventry Cathedral. The Queen and Prince-Consort were there, and about half the bulletin was taken up with the proceedings. The next main item was about the standing down of Japanese troops from the Russian border. I supposed the Russians were already pulling back, though nothing was said here. Then it was the Indian rioting, where nothing seemed to have worsened or improved. The only other home item was about the proposed shifting of the August Bank Holiday and the creation of another one in October. There was nothing about me or my supposed crimes. I didn’t know whether to feel pleased or slighted.