Saul Ansbach steepled his large, knobby hands and placed the point under his chin as if he were saying a prayer. “You recognize the reference, Charlie?”
“Yes,” Stone replied tonelessly. “The phrase ‘Lenin Testament’ came up during my father’s hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was never explained; it was never mentioned again.” In spite of himself, he found his voice growing steadily louder. “But I’d always assumed–”
“Assumed it was just some mistake, is that it?” Saul asked quietly. “Some glitch, some shoddy piece of research done by some young whippersnapper on the Committee’s staff?”
“No. The ‘Lenin Testament’ that I know about is no mystery. It was a document written by Lenin in his final days, in which, among other things, he warned about Stalin’s getting too powerful. Stalin tried to suppress it, but it came out a few years after Lenin’s death.” He caught Saul’s half-smile. “You don’t think that’s what they’re referring to, do you?”
“Do you?”
“No,” Stone agreed. “But why don’t you have HEDGEHOG find out more?”
“Because he was killed two days ago,” Saul said.
Stone’s eyes widened somewhat; then he shook his head slowly. “Poor guy. KGB got on to him?”
“We assume it was KGB.” He shrugged broadly. “Apparently, the hit was professional. As for how he was blown – well, that’s another troubling thing. We don’t know.”
“So you want me to find out what they meant by ‘Lenin Testament,’ if possible, right? Talk to my father, try to worm the information out of him, maybe? No, Saul. I don’t think I’d like that very much.”
“You know your father was set up. Did you ever ask yourself why?”
“All the time, Saul.”
All the time.
Alfred Stone, professor of twentieth-century American history at Harvard, had once been one of the stars in his field, but that was years ago. Before it had happened. Since then, since 1953, he was a broken man. He had published almost nothing. In recent years, he’d begun to drink too much. He was – it was a cliché, but in this case it was accurate – a husk of his former self.
Once, before Charlie was born, Alfred Stone had been a young, fiery lecturer and a brilliant academic, and in 1950, at the age of thirty-one, he was asked to join the Truman White House. He’d already won a Pulitzer Prize for his study of the United States and the end of the First World War. The president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, had asked him to serve as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but he decided instead to go to Washington. Winthrop Lehman, one of Truman’s assistants, and a holdover from the Roosevelt administration, had heard about this rising star at Harvard and had asked him to the White House, and Alfred Stone had accepted.
He should have gone on to become some sort of minor national celebrity. Instead, he returned to the Harvard campus in 1953 shattered, kept on at Harvard’s sufferance, never again to produce anything of any worth.
Charlie Stone had been ten years old when he first learned about his father’s tortured past.
One day, after school, he found the door to his father’s book-crammed study open and no one inside. He began poking around, exploring, but finding nothing of interest. He was about to give up when he found a large leather-bound scrapbook on his father’s desk. He opened it. His heart started pounding when he realized he had made a discovery, and he pored through the book with guilty pleasure and complete absorption.
It was a collection of clippings from the early 1950s concerning a part of his father’s life he had never heard about before. One article, in Life magazine, was titled “The Strange Case of Alfred Stone.” Another headline, in the New York Daily News, called his father “Red Prof.” Rapt, Charlie went through one yellowed clipping after another, as the mildewy, vanilla smell of the scrapbook enveloped him. Suddenly various bits of overheard conversation came together, things he had heard people say about his father, quick, nasty things, and arguments between his parents in their bedroom. Once someone had painted a large red hammer and sickle on the front of the house. A few times, he remembered rocks being thrown through the kitchen window. Now, finally, it made sense.
And of course his father had returned to his study suddenly and caught him at the scrapbook, whereupon he strode to the desk in a dark fury and snapped it closed.
The following day, his mother, the willowy, dark-haired Margaret Stone, sat Charlie down and gave him a brief, sanitized account of what had happened in 1953. There was a thing called the Un-American Activities Committee, she said, which was once very powerful before you were born. There was a terrible man named Joseph McCarthy who thought America was overrun with communists and who said they were everywhere, even in the White House. Your father was a very prominent man, an adviser to President Truman, and he was caught up in a battle between McCarthy and the President, a battle that the President wasn’t able to fight on all fronts. McCarthy dragged your father before his Committee and accused him of being a communist, a spy for Russia.
Lies, all of it, she told him, but our country was in a very difficult time, and people wanted to believe that our problems could be solved just by rooting out the spies and the communists. Your father was innocent, but there was no way of proving his case, you see, and …
Charlie replied, with the unassailable logic of a ten-year-old, “Why didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he fight them? Why?”
“But did you ever ask your father?” Ansbach lifted an earthenware mug from the top of a stack of green-and-white computer printouts and took a swallow of what, Stone felt sure, had to be tepid coffee.
“Maybe once, when I was a kid. It became immediately clear that that was none of my business. You just didn’t ask about that stuff.”
“But as an adult …?” Saul began.
“No, Saul, I haven’t. And I won’t.”
“Look, I feel funny even asking you. Exploiting your relationship with your father, with Winthrop Lehman, for Agency business.” Ansbach removed his black-framed glasses and polished them with a Kleenex he took from a box in one of his desk drawers. When he resumed speaking, he was still hunched over the glasses, polishing busily. “Obviously, if our agent hadn’t been killed I wouldn’t need to ask you, and I know it’s outside the realm of the pure analysis you’re hired to do. But you’re our best hope, and if it weren’t important–”
“No, Saul,” Stone said hotly. He itched to light a cigarette, but he had quit smoking the day Charlotte had left. “Anyway, Saul, I’m no field operative, in case it slipped your mind.”
“Damn it, Charlie, whatever this ‘Lenin Testament’ is all about, it’s clearly a key to why your father was thrown in jail in 1953.” Ansbach wadded up the Kleenex and replaced the glasses on his face. “If you don’t want to do this for the Agency, I should think at least you’d–”
“I wasn’t aware you cared so deeply about the personal lives of your employees, Saul.” The appeal to family: Saul was a master manipulator, and Stone felt a surge of resentment.
Saul hesitated for what seemed an eternity, examining the cluttered heaps atop his desk, running his fingers along the desk’s worn edges.