The Prodigal Spy

by Joseph Kanon

  The Prodigal Spy

  Joseph Kanon

  In a time of accusations, treachery and lies, some secrets were heartbreaking….

  Others were deadly.

  Once, Nick Kotlar tried to save his father. From the angry questions. From the accusations. From a piece of evidence that only Nick knew about and that he destroyed—for his father. But in the Red Scare of 1950 Walter Kotlar could not be saved. Branded a spy, he fled the country, leaving behind a wife, a young son—and a key witness lying dead below her D.C. hotel room.

  Now, twenty years later, Nick will get a second chance. Because a beautiful journalist has brought a message from his long-lost father, and Nick will follow her into Soviet-occupied Prague for a painful reunion. Confronting a father he barely remembers and a secret that could change everything, Nick knows he must return to the place where it all began: to unravel a lie, to penetrate a deadly conspiracy, and to expose the one person who knew the truth—and watched a family be destroyed.

  Joseph Kanon

  THE PRODIGAL SPY

  Part I

  UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES

  Chapter 1

  February 1950

  He was not allowed to attend the hearing. There was his age, for one thing, but he knew it was really the reporters. From his bedroom window he could see them every morning when his father left the house. Mr Benjamin, his father’s lawyer, would come for him-it was somehow unthinkable that he should make the short walk down 2nd Street to the Capitol alone-and the minute they were down the steps Nick would see the clusters of hats swooping toward them like birds. There was even a kind of ritual about it now. No one stood in front of the house. Usually they were across the street, or on the corner, drinking coffee from paper cups, exhaling little puffs of steam in the cold February air. Then the front door would open and they would stamp out their cigarettes, suddenly on duty, and surround his father, falling into step with him and Mr Benjamin as if they were joining them for a stroll.

  In the beginning there had been photographers, their hats pushed back on their heads as they popped flashbulbs, but now there were just the reporters. No one yelled or pushed. The ritual had turned polite. He could see his father in his long herringbone coat drawing the pack with him as he moved down the street, Mr Benjamin, terrier-like, hurrying to keep up. His father never ignored the reporters. Nick could see him talking-but what did he say? — and nodding his head. Once Nick saw one of them laugh. His father had said the whole thing was a goddam circus, but from up here in the window, watching the hats, it seemed friendly, a gang of boys heading for school. It wasn’t, though. At night, alone in the study, smoking in the light of the desk lamp, his father looked worried.

  His mother always left separately. She would busy herself with Nora, arranging the day, then stand in front of the hall mirror, touching her hair, smoothing out her wool skirt, while a cigarette burned in the ashtray on the table where they put the mail. When Nick came downstairs she would look surprised, as if she had forgotten he was in the house, then nervously pick up her lipstick to get ready. Her new dress, with its tight cinched waist and fitted top, seemed designed to hold her upright, every piece of her in place.

  “Have they gone?” she said, putting on the lipstick.

  “Uh-huh. Dad made one of them laugh.”

  Her hand stopped for a minute, then the red tube continued along her lip. “Did he,” she said, blotting her lips, but it wasn’t a question. “Well, I’ll give them another five minutes.”

  “They never wait for you, you know,” Nick said. It was one of the things that puzzled him. His mother walked to the hearings alone every day, not even a single straggler from the pack of hats waiting behind to catch her. How did they think she got there?

  “They will one day,” she said, picking up her hat. “Right now all they can think about is your father. And his jokes.” She caught the edge in her voice and glanced at him, embarrassed, then went back to the hat.

  “There was only one,” Nick said.

  “I know,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean- Check the window again, would you? And shouldn’t you be getting ready for school?”

  “I am ready,” he said, going over to the window. “I don’t see why I can’t go to the trial.”

  “Not again, Nicky, please. And it’s not a trial. For the hundredth time. It’s a hearing. That’s all. A congressional hearing.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Your father’s not a criminal, that’s the difference. He’s not on trial for anything.”

  “Everybody acts like he is.”

  “What do you mean? Has anyone said anything to you at school?”

  Nick shrugged.

  “Have they?”

  “They said he’s on trial for being a Communist.”

  His mother stopped fixing the hat and lowered her hands. “Well, he’s not on trial and he’s not a Communist. So much for what they know. Just don’t listen, okay? It only makes it worse. They’re looking for Communists, so they have to talk to a lot of people in the government, that’s all.”

  Nick came back to the mirror, studying them both, as if the world reflected would be his mother’s cheerful dream of before, when all they had to worry about was school gossip.

  “They want to hear what he has to say. That’s why it’s called a hearing. There,” she said, pressing the hat like a protective shell. “How do I look?”

  Nick smiled. “Beautiful.”

  “Oh, you always say that,” she said lightly, glancing at the mirror again and leaning forward. Nick loved to watch her dress, disappearing to the edge of her careful absorption. It was the harmless vanity of a pretty girl who’d been taught that how you looked mattered, that appearance could somehow determine events. She blotted her lips one last time, then noticed his expression. “Honeybun, what’s wrong?”

  “Why can’t I hear him too? I’m not a little kid anymore.”

  “No,” she said softly, touching the side of his head. “Maybe just to me. But ten isn’t very old either, is it? You don’t want to grow up too fast.”

  “Is he going to go to jail?”

  She knelt down to face him, holding his shoulders. “No. Look, I know all of this seems confusing. But it’s not about you, do you understand? Just-grownups. Your dad’s fine. You don’t want him to have to worry about you too, do you? It’s-it’s a bad time, that’s all.”

  A bad time. Nora, for whom Ireland was always just a memory away, called it troubles. “Before your father’s troubles started,” she would say, as if everything that was happening to them was beyond their control, like the weather. But no one would tell him what it actually was.

  “ You go,” he said stubbornly.

  “It’s different for me. You’re just a child-it has nothing to do with you. It’s not going to, either. I’m not going to let that happen,” she said, holding his shoulders tightly. “Do you understand?”

  He didn’t, but he nodded, surprised at the force of her hands.

  “You’ll be late,” Nora said, coming into the hall.

  His mother looked up, distracted. “Yes, all right. Come on, honeybun, time for school. It’ll be all right. You’ll see.

  “This won’t last much longer, I promise. Then we’ll go up to the cabin and forget all about it. Just us. Would you like that?”

  Nick nodded. “You mean out of school?”

  “Well, in the spring.”

  “Don’t forget you’ve got Father Tim coming over later,” Nora said. “You’ll want to be back. Last time he was halfway through the bottle before you were through the door.”

  “Nora,” his mother said, pretending to scold but laughing in spite of herself. “Listen to you. He’s not a drinker.”

  “No, t
he poor are drinkers. The rich just don’t mind if they do.”

  “He’s not rich anymore. He’s a priest, for heaven’s sake,” she said, putting on her coat.

  “The rich don’t change. Someone else’s bottle, that’s what they like. Maybe that’s why they’re rich. Still, it’s your bottle, and if you don’t mind I’m sure I-”

  “Nora, stop babbling. I’ll be back. Coast clear?” She nodded her head toward the window. “How about a kiss, then?” She leaned down to let Nick graze her cheek. “Oh, that’s better. I’m ready for anything now.”

  At the door she put on her gloves. “You remember what I said, okay? Don’t listen to the other kids if they start saying things. They don’t know what they’re talking about anyway.”

  “It wasn’t the other kids. About Dad. It was Miss Smith.”

  “Oh.” His mother stopped, flustered, her shoulders sagging. “Oh, honeybun,” she said, and then, as if she had finally run out of answers, she turned and went out the door.

  After that, he didn’t go to school. “At least for a while,” his mother said, still pretending that things were normal. Now, after his parents left, the house would grow still, so quiet that he would tiptoe, listening for the sharp whistle of Nora’s kettle in the kitchen, then the rustle of newspaper as she pored over his father’s troubles with one of her cups of tea. He was supposed to be reading Kidnapped. His mother said he was the right age for it, but after the wicked uncle and the broken stairs in the dark it all got confusing-Whigs and Jacobites, and you didn’t know whose side you were supposed to be on. It made no more sense than the papers. His father was a New Dealer but not a Communist, and not a Republican either, according to Nora. Then why was he on trial? Some terrible woman had said he was a spy, but you only had to look at her, all made up the way she was, to know she was lying. And a Catholic too, which made things worse. It was the Jews who loved Russia, not people like his father, even though she’d hate to think how long it had been since he’d seen the inside of a church. Still. And the things they said. But when Nick asked her to see the newspapers himself, she’d refuse. His mother wouldn’t like it.

  So he sat in the deep club chair in the living room, pretending to read but listening instead. While Nora had her tea there was no sound but the ticking of the ormolu clock. Soon, however, he’d hear the scraping of a chair in the kitchen, then the heavy steps in the hall as Nora came to peek in before she began her chores. Nick would turn a page, his head bent to the book he wasn’t reading until he felt her slip out of the doorway and head upstairs. After another few minutes, the vacuum would start with a roar and he could go. He would race down the back kitchen stairs, careful not to hit the creaky fourth step, and get the newspaper from behind the bread box, where Nora always hid it. Then, one ear still alert to the vacuum, he would read about the trial. KOTLAR DENIES ALLEGATIONS. COMMITTEE THREATENS CONTEMPT. MUNDT SET TO CALL ACHESON. NEW KOTLAR TESTIMONY. It always gave him an odd sensation to see his name in print. His eye would flash down the column, “Kotlar” leaping out as if it were in boldface, not just another word in a blur of type. But it was Kidnapped all over again. Whigs and Jacobites.

  The newspapers became part of the spy game. The point at first was to see how many rooms he could visit without Nora’s knowing-from the kitchen up to his father’s study, then past the bedroom where she was working (this was the best part) to his mother’s dressing room, then back down the stairs (carefully now, the vacuum having gone silent) and into the club chair with the open book before she appeared again. Not that she would have cared if he’d left the room-it was just the game. Stuck in the house, cocooned against the cold outside that kept promising snow, he learned its secrets, the noisy parts, the bad floorboards, as if they were bits of Braille. He could even spy on Nora, watching through the crack in the door, crouching halfway down the stairs, until he felt he could roam the house at will, invisible. His father, he knew, could never have done this. You always knew where he was, clunking down the hall to the bathroom at night, all his weight on his heels. His mother said you could feel him a block away. It was Nick who knew how to spy. He could stand absolutely still, like one of those movie submarines with the motors off, on sonar silence, waiting to hear something.

  Then one day, by accident, he finally saw his father at the hearing. Nora had taken him downtown to the movies, a My Friend Irma picture with Martin and Lewis. She crossed herself when the newsreel began with the Holy Year in Rome, long lines of pilgrims forming at the churches, some from Germany, some even from as far away as America. A crowded open-air mass. A year of new hope for a century half old. Fireworks exploded over St Peter’s. Then, abruptly, the newsreel shifted to Washington, and the announcer’s voice turned grim.

  “A different kind of fireworks on Capitol Hill, as the House Committee on Un-American Activities and combative congressman Kenneth Welles continued the probe into Communist subversion in our State Department. In the box again, Undersecretary Walter Kotlar, named by Soviet spy Rosemary Cochrane as one of the members of an alleged Washington ring.”

  He felt Nora move beside him and covered her hand to keep her still as the screen filled with his father walking down a corridor to the hearing room, wearing the familiar hat and herringbone coat. The reporters were more animated now, battering him with questions, as if they had finally thawed out from their morning vigil in the cold. Then he was seated at a polished table, several microphones in front of him, facing a long dais filled with men in suits who kept turning to whisper to aides who sat behind them like shadows, away from the lights.

  The man at the center, surprisingly young, was taller than the others, with a thick football player’s neck bursting out of a suit that stretched across his wide shoulders like a padded uniform.

  “Mr Kotlar, in 1945 you were a member of the American delegation that attended the Yalta Conference, were you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “In that capacity did you offer views on the political future of the countries of Eastern Europe?”

  “No. My views were not solicited.”

  “But you are Czechoslovakian, are you not?”

  “No, sir, I am an American.”

  “Well, Mr Kotlar, that’s fine. I meant by origin. Would you tell the committee where you were born?”

  “I was born in what was then Bohemia and is now part of Czechoslovakia,” Nick’s father said, but the carefulness of his answer had the odd effect of making him seem evasive. “I came to this country when I was four years old.”

  “But you speak Czechoslovakian?”

  Nick’s father allowed the trace of a smile. “Czech? No.” But this wasn’t true. Nick remembered his grandmother talking in her kitchen, his father nodding his head at the incomprehensible words. “I know a few words,” his father continued. “Certainly not enough to use the language in any official capacity. I know a little French, too.”

  This seemed to annoy the Congressman. “This committee isn’t interested in your knowledge of French, Mr Kotlar. Is it not true that as a member of the Yalta delegation, you had access to information the Russians considered very valuable?”

  “No. I was there strictly as an adviser on Lend-Lease and postwar aid programs. My information wasn’t classified-it was available to everyone.”

  Welles looked the way Miss Smith did when someone in class was being fresh. “That remains to be seen, Mr Kotlar,” he said. “That remains to be seen.” He paused, pretending to consult a paper but really, Nick knew, just allowing his words to hang in the air. “Lend-Lease. We’ve all heard about your generosity during the war. But after the war, you went right on being generous, didn’t you? Isn’t it true you wanted to give Marshall Plan aid to Czechoslovakia?”

  “The United States Government offered the Marshall Plan to all European countries.”

  “Maybe it would be more accurate to say that certain officials of the United States Government offered that aid. Officials like yourself. Or maybe you disagreed. Did you feel that such an
offer was in the best interests of the United States?”

  “It must have been. They turned us down.”

  This time there was real laughter, and Congressman Welles, leaning into the microphone, was forced to talk over it, so that when it stopped he seemed to be shouting. “May I remind our visitors that this is a congressional hearing?” There were a few flashbulbs. “Mr Kotlar, you may consider this a laughing matter. I assure you, the American people do not. Now, this aid you were so eager to hand out. A little money for the old country-even if it was now a vassal state of the Soviet empire.”

  “I think you have your chronology slightly confused, Congressman. At the time of the offer, Czechoslovakia was a democracy, and President Benes was eager to participate. Subsequently, of course, they declined.”

  Nick lost his father halfway through-it was Whigs and Jacobites again, too mixed up to sort out-and he could tell the audience wasn’t really following either. They could hear only the rhythm of Welles’s interrogation, the slow build and rising pitch that seemed to hammer his father into his chair. The momentum of it, not the words, became the accusation. The Congressman was so sure-he must know. It didn’t really matter what he said, so long as the voice rushed along, gathering speed.

  “Round two,” the voice-over said, introducing another film clip. “And this time nobody was pulling any punches.”

  “Mr Kotlar, I’m sure we’ve all been grateful for the history lessons. Unfortunately, anyone who changes positions as often as you do is bound to make things a little confusing for the rest of us. So let’s see if we can find out what you really think. I’d like to talk again about your background, if I may?” Welles swiveled his head to the other men at the long table, who nodded automatically, absorbed in the drama of where he might be going. “You are, I believe, a graduate of the Harvard Law School?”

  For a minute Nick’s father didn’t respond, as if the question were so unexpected it must be a trick. “That’s correct.”