“Maybe that’s why you can’t see this evil, now, for what it is—”
“You simply have no idea—”
“—just because General Westmoreland doesn’t wear a swastika—”
“—no idea at all what you’re talking about.”
“—and the victims are incinerated in their homes instead of a camp.”
My mother left her empty rocking chair rocking as she got up and left the room without a word. My father buried himself in the Sun-Times. Peter turned the TV to channel 7 so he could watch the premiere of a new series about General Custer. I petted Curiosity and enjoyed my adrenaline high until dinner.
21
Trying to hail a taxi as I rush down the street, anxious about being late for a cable news appearance, checking email and watching a video of myself on my phone as I walk, I bump into a man on the curb passing out leaflets, who says, “Hollaender?”
I look up: it’s Chuck Levy, which doesn’t startle me, although I find my nonchalance surprising.
His flyers are laminated, and they’re covered with a single phrase, NO MORE LIES, printed hundreds of times. I don’t like his soul patch, but otherwise he looks fantastic.
“My God,” I say, “you haven’t changed a bit.”
He laughs and says, “You have no idea.” He looks around to make sure no one’s watching and lifts his leather jacket to show me a gun in a shoulder holster. “This has been a lifesaver. Thank you.”
I’m trying to figure out if he’s being sarcastic when a cab screeches to a stop right beside us, and I notice that it’s gray, not yellow. In fact, nothing—the sky, the sunlight, the buildings, Chuck’s face, my hands and blouse—is in color. Everything’s in black and white. Only then do I notice that the sidewalk and street are flowing with raw sewage.
Alex jumps out of the taxi. “Black and shite, you mean,” he says. Then he says, or sort of sings, “Ding dong, the bitch is dead, the bitch is dead!”
That’s the last of the dream I remember when I open my eyes and see Clarence Darrow on my pillow, staring at me, his face inches from mine. “Hello, cat,” I say softly.
Since I started writing this book, I’ve dreamed about Chuck a lot, maybe every other month, but I’m not sure I’ve ever in my life dreamed in black and white until just now. My daughter, Greta, once told me about a study in which they asked people how often they had black-and-white dreams, then compared the results to those from an identical study conducted in the 1940s. Seventy years ago, 71 percent of people dreamed in black and white, whereas nowadays only 18 percent do. The conclusion was not that the advent of Kodachrome and Technicolor and color TV had transformed the neurological essence of dreams. Instead, they think that people’s morning-after memories of dreams were mistaken in the 1940s, or are mistaken today, or possibly mistaken in both eras—that dreams are dreams, unchanging, but the mediascape of the waking world makes us jump to easy conclusions about the nature of our remembered dream imagery. I wonder if they’ll do the study again in another seventy years and find that people imagine they’re dreaming in 3-D.
Living in Los Angeles means that I arise most mornings with a backlog of electronic messages from the East Coast. And today I’m waking up late, so there’ll be even more. I have a text from Waverly: call me, grams? love you! I glance at the time, 9:19, and start to dial, but hang up when I realize Waverly will be in school, since the state of New York doesn’t recognize the birthday of César Chávez as a holiday. Chávez was an admirable person, and my assistant’s father worked for his United Farm Workers. But now that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln have to share a holiday, and the only other individuals the state of California celebrates with an annual twenty-four-hour vacation are Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesus Christ, does Chávez really deserve to be fifth in line?
I probably shouldn’t say these things. Writing this memoir has unbound me from various fetters and gags of discretion. Stewart says I’m turning into Bulworth, the crazily honest, suicidal U.S. senator Warren Beatty played when he was in his sixties.
For instance, this year I was appointed to a university committee looking at grade inflation, and at the first meeting I said the good news is that the trend is self-eliminating—since the average GPA rose from B-minus to A-minus during the last half century, in another fifteen years every kid will be getting straight A’s. I’ve just okayed a joint law school–medical school course that will speculate about the possible psychiatric disorders of U.S. presidents as well as of sitting members of Congress and the Supreme Court. During a panel discussion about immigration that I was moderating, I mentioned that in the 1960s and ‘70s, César Chávez and his union members lined up at the U.S.-Mexican border to keep Mexicans from entering the country illegally, and that they also turned in undocumented-immigrant farmworkers to the feds. An audience member accused me of “smearing a hero with falsehoods.”
If I were smart, I’d now be cultivating the left, preaching to the choir, gathering allies in anticipation of the shit storm my confessions are going to provoke. I know this book will be meth-laced catnip to some people on the right, told-you-so proof of the terrorist sympathies of the arrogant liberal elite who hate America. The fact that I have tenure at a public university and can’t (easily) be tossed out will feed the rage. I can see my platoons of enemies now, furious and sputtering, sending all-capital-letter emails to the chancellor and governor, on a thousand blogs and radio and TV shows demanding my banishment and prosecution. They’ll be convinced of their righteousness, and of the evil of the cabal that controls the Establishment, but thrilled to be scaring the hell out of it. In other words, they’ll be a lot like I was at age eighteen. It’s strange that so many people of my generation who didn’t throw political tantrums in the late 1960s, when we were young and it was fashionable, are letting it all hang out now that they’re old.
One of my new disposable cellphones rings. Stewart is calling.
“The last time we spoke, you said your Coast Guard pal served in Vietnam, right? Well, he didn’t. Never got as far west as Hawaii. Never saw action. From sixty-five to sixty-seven, Petty Officer Third Class Bernard Freeman ran a fucking lighthouse on the coast of Northern California.”
“Really? Wow. That makes me sad.”
“That’s unknown unknowns for you. You start turning over rocks, for better and for worse you almost always find secrets you weren’t looking for.”
I tell him I’ve received official responses to two more of my Freedom of Information requests, and then I start reading aloud from the FBI’s letter. “ ‘We conducted a search of the indices to our Central Records System. We were’—”
Stewart chimes in and recites along with me from memory: “We were unable to identify responsive main file records. If you have additional information pertaining to the subject that you believe was of investigative interest to the Bureau, blah blah blah, you have the right to appeal any denials in this release to the DoJ Office of Information and Privacy, blah blah blah, please fuck off and let us go back to the important Records Management Division business of watching porn and playing fantasy baseball.’ So feeb-y, right? ‘Responsive main file records,’ ‘pertaining,’ ‘the subject that.’ Such losers.”
“I also got one from the CIA.”
“No shit? Did they Glomarize you?”
“Uh-uh. But all they sent were three pages of notes about me being in Czechoslovakia in 1992.”
Let me digress. I spent several months in Prague helping the new government there draft a new constitution. It’s the legal-career accomplishment of which I’m proudest. I got the gig through a colleague at Yale—and, as Alex has reminded me repeatedly ever since, through Alex. In 1991 he recommended me to his friend Václav Havel, the playwright and first president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia.
“You were children of sixty-eight together, Alex and you?” President Havel said when we first met in Prague.
“Something like that. Although it wasn’t quite the same there as it was her
e in Europe.”
“Not so different. In May that year I was in America, in New York. The difference between us is, I came back here and they put me in prison.”
Havel’s underling with whom I mainly dealt spoke little English, and I assumed we’d rely entirely on translators to communicate. But we discovered we’d both had parents who forced us to learn Esperanto as children, which enabled us to have sidebar conversations about other people in the room that none of them could understand. President Havel said we reminded him of characters in his play The Memorandum, in which the totalitarian government bureaucracy adopts an artificial language called Ptydepe. I told him that in the spring of 1968, Alex and I happened to be in New York City together, and he had wanted to see that play.
“Synchronicity!” President Havel said.
I describe to Stewart the record of my CIA surveillance from 1992. “It’s got all the times I arrived and left the presidential palace, street addresses I visited, and this incredibly detailed report on a dinner conversation I had with a Czech newspaper reporter. It’s spooky.”
“That’s why they call them spooks. And the Cold War had been over for thirty seconds—that poor GS-12 in Prague had to do something to earn his six grand that month. But nothing about 1968, huh?”
“Nope. So do you think Buzzy not serving in Vietnam means he definitely wasn’t a defense intelligence agent in college?”
“Definitely? No. But army intel hiring some random Coastie would be weird. And I totally don’t buy that a guy like that, after he becomes a big-time right-winger, never blabs about having done his undercover duty for God and country fighting subversives in the late sixties.”
“So Alex was the snitch, working for the CIA.”
“For starters.”
“He was a spy for someone else, too?”
“Doubt it. But why did this whole thing get erased and deep-sixed as thoroughly as anything I’ve ever seen in thirty years in this racket? Like I’ve said from the start, there had to be multiple agencies fucking up multiply and simultaneously. Negative synergistic convergence. FUBAR panic times FUBAR panic equals FUBAR panic cubed.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“I think you must have had more than one federal asset embedded.”
“Wow.”
“It’s insane, right? But back then, the government had at least a couple thousand fake radicals working undercover all over America—the fucking army alone had a thousand, probably more. And you know the interagency coordination must’ve been totally for shit. I’m inclined for obvious reasons to eliminate Charles Levy as a candidate, so if there was a second embed, it probably was your lighthouse keeper, Freeman.”
“Wow. That’s amazing.” I think of how Alex and Buzzy have come to despise each other as adults. “So you think they didn’t know about each other at the time?”
He starts to say something, stops, then speaks. “I said probably Freeman. The other possibility, my darling, is you.”
“Ha ha.”
“Did you cooperate with any government agency during the years 1967 and/or 1968, in a paid or unpaid role?”
“What?” My throat tightens.
“Yes or no.”
“No,” I say. “But I thought you didn’t want me to tell you anything more than I already have. To keep your investigation ‘clean’?”
“That was then. I’m getting closer now. Different rules. I don’t care what your answer is, okay? I won’t think less of you personally either way. So: yes or no?”
“Yes. I had a federally guaranteed student loan, and a passport.”
“Don’t get cute. Did you have any ongoing relationship with a law enforcement or national security organization in 1967 and/or 1968?”
I take a deep breath. “No.”
He says nothing for a few seconds. “Okay, good,” he finally says. “My machine believes you’re probably telling the truth about not being an agent. Maybe Freeman is your second man after all.”
“On your phone, you’ve got a lie detector?”
“There’s no such thing as a lie detector. But I gotta say, this fifth-gen DVSA algorithm, it’s a Secret Service deal, is really a cut above. And your last gram is a nice, smooth, low hillock.”
“What the fuck are you talking about now?”
“A voice-gram, a line generated by digital voice stress analysis software. What you would call a lie detector. In order to eliminate the possibility that you were what you would call an agent provocateur.”
“You freak me out.”
“I know. Sorry. You started this thing. By the way, I got the full OSS file on your old man. But hey, I’ve buried the lead! Yesterday I found out the leverage they used to reel in Alexander Macallister the Third. On the twelfth of August, 1967.”
“ ‘They’ being the agency that I call the CIA, and ‘reel in’ meaning enlist as an informer.”
“Yep,” Stewart says. “Macallister was a regular Bond girl.”
While he tells me about Alex, I feel as if my brain is firing on too many cylinders, or too few, and I find myself scrambling to keep up, coherence slipping even as I carefully take notes. Why is Stewart talking about the CIA’s belief in 1963 that Castro had sent Oswald to kill JFK? I’m confused about whether I’m confused. I’m low. As I listen, I go to my desk drawer and pour three big sugar tablets directly from their plastic tube into my mouth.
“Honey, those were different eras,” Stewart says. He has just finished telling me what he’s learned about Alex, and started to tell me what he’s learned about my father, and his little commentary seems to concern both pieces of information. “People in extreme circumstances make choices they don’t expect to make. Especially when they’re young and times are weird.”
“Right.”
“When you’re young, you feel immortal, but that cuts two ways—it can make you brave, or it can make you terrified of fucking up that endless beautiful future spread out in front of you.”
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?”
&nbs
p; “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.
True Believers Page 26
