Desperate Measures (44 page)

"The obituary tells you nothing," Gable said. "It's been a matter of public record for mote than forty years. If there was anything incriminating in it, someone would have discovered it long ago."

Pittman raised his voice. "But only if someone knew what to look for." The faster his heart rushed, the more his lungs felt starved for oxygen. His reporter's instincts had seized him, propelling his thoughts, thrusting them against one another, linking what he already knew with what he had just now discovered, making startling connections.

"Duncan Kline died in 1952," Pittman said. "That was the year he suddenly appeared at the State Department, de to see all of you. July. Eisenhower had won the ican nomination for President. All of you were busy ru ning the reputations of your competitors while you prepared to jump ship from a Democratic administration to one that you were sure would be Republican. Your conservative, anti-Soviet attitudes were in tune with the times. The future was yours. Then Kline showed up, and he scared the hell out of you, didn't he?"

As yet, Pittman had no idea why the grand counselors had been afraid of Kline, but the intensity with which they listened to Pittman's insistence that they had indeed been afraid of Kline gave Pittman the incentive to follow that line of argument.

"You thought you'd buried him in your p"t," Pittman said. "But suddenly there he was, making a very public appearance, and yes, he scared the hell out of you. In fact, he scared you so much that in the midst of your determined efforts to convince Eisenhower and his people to bring you on board, you took time out-all of you-to go to a reunion at Grollier. That was in December. Kline must have put a lot of pressure on you since July, When he showed up at the State Department. Finally you had no choice. You all went back to the reunion at Grollier because it was natural for Kline to be there, as well. It wouldn't have seemed unusual for you and Kline to be seen together. While you tried to settle your differences without attracting attention."

Pittman's nervous system was in overdrive as he studied Winston Sloane's reactions, the old man's facial muscles tightening in a stressful acknowledgment of what Pittman was saying. For his part, Eustace Gable's expression provided no indication as to whether Pittman was guessing correctly. "Duncan Kline had retired from teaching," Pittman continued. "He was living in Boston, but this obituary says he died at a cottage he owned in the Berkshire Hills. I don't need to remind you they're in western Massachusetts, just south of Vermont. In December. Why the hell would an elderly man who lived in Boston want to be at a cottage in the mountains during winter? Under the circumstances, the best reason I can think of is that he made the relatively short drive to the cottage after he attended the reunion at Grollier. Because his business with all of you wasn't finished. Because you needed an isolated place where he and you could continue discussing your differences. "

Pittman stopped, needing to control his breathing, hoping that his inward frenzy wasn't betraying him. As frightened as he was, he felt elated that neither Gable nor Sloane contradicted what he had said. Imagining Bradford Denning climbing the slope outside, not daring to risk a glance toward the window to see how close Denning had staggered to the mansion, Pittman shifted toward a wall of bookshelves at the side of the room, desperate to prevent his - audience from facing the window and seeing what was happening outside.

Pittman pointed toward a section of the obituary he held. "Duncan Kline was English. He came to the United States in the early 1920s, after teaching for a time at Cambridge - "

Pittman's stomach tensed as he made another connection. British. If only I'd known earlier that Kline was British, that he came from Cambridge.

,I'm sure it must have been quite a coup for an Anglophile school like Grollier to have acquired an instructor from Cainbridge as one of its faculty members. Ironic, isn't it? Over the years, Grollier's students have gone on to be congressmen, senators, governors, even a President, not to mention distinguished diplomats such as yourselves. But for all its effect on the American political system, the school's philosophical ties have always been to Britain and Europe. I've seen the transcripts of the seminars you took from him. Kline's specialty was history. Political science.

Winston Sloane's face turned gray.

Pittman continued. "So a political theorist from Cambridge bonded with five special students and trained them for their exceptional diplomatic careers - The five of you provided the philosophical underpinnings for almost every administration since Truman. The theories Duncan Kline-instilled in you "No! When we were young maybe," Winston Sloane ohjected. "But we never carried through on Duncan's theofies! "Winston, enough!" Gable said.

"But listen to what he's saying! This is exactly what we feared! He'll destroyour reputations! We were never Communists! "

And that was it. What Pittman had fervently hoped, that one of the grand counselors would unwittingly volunteer information, had finally happened. The word Communists seemed to echo eerily . At once the room became disturbingly silent just as everyone in it seemed frozen in place.

Slowly Eustace Gable took out his handkerchief. He coughed into it in pain. Winston Sloane peered down at his gnarled hands, evidently ashamed of his lapse, realizing how severely he'd declined from having once been a great negotiator renowned for keeping his counsel.

For his part, Webley showed no reaction. He just kept pointing the .45 at Pittman.

Gable cleared his throat and put away his handkerchief. Despite his problems of health and age, he looked so dignified that he might have been conducting a meeting in the White House. "Complete your thought, Mr. Pittman . "In 1917, the Russian Revolution electrified anti-Establishment British intellectuals. Liberal faculty members at British universities, especially at Cambridge, became enchanted with socialist theory - The eventual results of that enchantment were the British spy rings-former students who'd been recruited by their professors at Cambridge-working for the Soviets to undermine England and the United States. Guy Burgess. Donald Maclean. Kim Philby. In fact, now that I think of it, Burgess and Maclean defected to Russia in 195 I. Philby was suspected of having warned them that they were about to be arrested as spies. The next year, Duncan Kline made his threatening appearance outside your offices at the State Department. I guess you could say that he was more advanced than Philby and the others. After all, Philby had been converted in the thirties, whereas Kline had become a Communist sympathizer a decade earlier, in the twenties. He must have been an exceptional seducer-sexually, politically. And after all, you and your friends were so young, so impressionable. You graduated from Grollier in 1933. You attended college, some of you at Harvard, others at Yale. Meanwhile, the Depression worsened. Kline's Communist theories presumably continued to be fascinating to you, given the chaos of the country. But eventually you stayed loyal to the capitalist tradition. Did it finally occur to you that if you followed Kline's theories and undemiined the Establishment, you'd be undermining yourselves, inasmuch as you were the next leaders of the Establishment?"

Pittman stared at Gable and Sloane, but neither man responded.

"I think you're opportunists," Pittman said. "If communism had taken control of the United States, you'd have insinuated yourselves into the highest levels of the new system. But once the Second World War started, communism lost its limited appeal here. The Soviets appeared to be as a threat as the Nazis. So you insinuated yourselves into upper echelons of the State Department. There, you not only jettisoned your former Communist attitudes; you also gained more power by eliminating your competitors, claiming that they were Communist sympathizers. " Pittman thought nervously of Bradford Denning clutching his pistol, struggling up the slope past fir trees, toward the mansion. "In the anti-Communist McCarthy hysteria of the early fifties, you built your careers on the sabotaged careers of other diplomats. Then Duncan Kline showed up and threatened to ruin everything. What did he do? Hold you up for blackmail? Unless you paid him to be quiet, he'd reveal that you were as vulnerable as the men you accused of being Communists, is that it?"

The room became so still that Pittman could feel blood pounding behind his eardrums.

Eustace Gable forlornly shook his wizened head. His tone was a blend of discouragement and disappointment. "You know far more than I expected. " The old man exhaled wearily. "You've demonstrated remarkable journalistic skills. That's why I permitted you 'to come here-so that I could judge the extent of your knowledge. But you're wrong."

"I don't think so."

"Duncan didn't attempt to blackmail us. He didn't want money," Gable said.

"Then what did he want?"

"For us to be true to the principles he'd taught us. He was appalled that we'd formulated such stern government policies against the Soviet Union. He wanted us to undo those policies and recommend cooperation between the two countries. It was nonsense, of course. The Soviets had been made out to be such monsters that there wasn't any way to change America's official attitude toward them. Any politician or diplomat who tried would be committing professional suicide. No, the only way to build a career was to be more anti-Soviet than anyone else.

"And after all, your careers mattered more than anything," Pittman said. "Of course. You can't accomplish anything if you're out of the loop." "So you balanced Duncan Kline against your careers. and . . - " l "Killed him," Gable said.

Pittman tensed, his instincts warning him. It wasn't Gable's habit to reveal information. Why was he doing so now? To hide his unease, Pittman frowned toward the obituary he held. "It says here that Duncan Kline died from exposure during a winter storm. " Dear God, Pittman thought. He finally understood. Involuntarily, he murmured, "The snow.

"That's right, Mr. Pittman. The snow. Duncan was an alcoholic. When we met him at his cabin, he refused to be budged by our arguments. He insisted that if we didn't soften our policy toward the Soviet Union, he would expose us as former Communist sympathizers. A blizzard was forecast. It was late afternoon, but the snow was falling thickly enough already that we couldn't see the lake behind Duncan's cabin. He'd been drinking to excess before we arrived at the cabin. He drank heavily all the while we tried to reason with him. I suspect that if he'd been sober, we might have had more patience with him. As it was, we used the alcohol to kill him. We encouraged him to keep drinking, pretending to drink with him, waiting for him to collapse. Or so we hoped. I have to give Duncan credit. After a while, even as drunk as he was, he finally suspected that something was wrong. He stopped drinking. No amount of encouragement would persuade him to swallow the scotch we poured for him. In the end, we had to force him. And I have to give Duncan credit for something else-all those years of rowing had made him extremely strong. Drunk and in his sixties, he put up quite a struggle. But he wasn't any match for the five of us. You helped hold his arms, didn't you, Winston? We poured the scotch down his throat. Oh yes, we did. He vomited. But we kept pouring." Pittman listened, repelled. The scene that Gable described reminded Pittman of the way in which Gable had murdered his wife. "At last, after he was unconscious, we picked him up, carried him outside, and left him in a snowbanks" Gable said. "His former students and faculty members knew how extreme his alcohol problem was. They thought that the reference to exposure was discreet, since privately many of them were able to learn the true nature of his death. Or what they thought was the true nature-that he'd wandered drunkenly outside in his shirt sleeves and passed out in the snowstorm. No one ever discovered that we had helped Duncan along. We removed all evidence that we'd been in the cabin. We got in our cars and drove away. The snow filled our tire tracks. A relative of his became worried when Duncan didn't return to Boston after the reunion at Grollier. The state police were sent to the cabin, where they saw Duncan's car, searched, and found his bare foot sticking out from under a snowdrift. An animal had tugged off his shoe and eaten his toes. "

"Aod almost forty years later, Jonathan Millgate began having nightmares about what you'd done," Pittman said. "Jonathan was always the most delicate among us," Gable said. "Strange. During the Vietnam War, he could recommend destroying villages suspected of ties with the Communists. He knew full well that everyone in those villages would be killed, and yet he never lost a moment's sleep over them. But about that time, his favorite dog had to be destroyed because it was suffering from kidney disease. He wept about that dog for a week. He had, it buried, with a stone marker, in his backyard. I once saw him out there talking to the gravestone, and that was two years after the fact. I think that he could have adjusted to what we did to Duncan, a bloodless death, falling ever more deeply asleep with snow for a pillow, the corpse preserved in the cold, if only the animal hadn't eaten Duncan's toes. The mutilation took control of Jonathan's imagination. Yes, he did have nightmares, although I assumed that after a time the nightmares stopped. However, a few years ago, I was surprised, to say the least, when he began referring to them again. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Instead of being jubilant, Jonathan reacted by saying that the fall of communism only proved that Duncan's death had been needless. The logic eluded me. But the threat didn't. When Jonathan began pouring his tortured soul out to Father Dandridge, I felt very threatened indeed."

"So you killed him, and here we are," Pittman said, "trying to come to terms with your secrets. Was it really worth it, everything you did to me, the people who died because of the cover-up? You're elderly. You're infirm. The odds are that you would have died long before the investigation led to a trial."