The Innocents Club

by Taylor Smith

  He took a long swallow of the champagne, then set the glass on the wide armrest beside him and reached for the briefcase. When he snapped the locks and lifted the lid, Mariah’s Courier Express package slid across the laptop’s hard plastic case. He hesitated, then picked it up, turning it sideways. Three sheets of onionskin paper covered in spiky, densely packed handwriting tumbled out. A handwritten letter was a rare thing these days, he reflected, unfolding the pages to reread it. Either Professor Urquhart was a technology-resistant Luddite like himself, or the man hadn’t dared to trust what he had to say to a computer’s memory.

  A yellow Post-It note from Korman, the literary agent, was stuck to one corner of Urquhart’s letter.

  Mariah:

  This letter came in response to the press stories about your father’s papers. The allegations are news to me, but we’re going to have to decide what to do about them before we make a decision on publishing the novel. We’ll talk about this when you get here.

  Chap

  The attached letter was written on university stationery with the professor’s name and title embossed at the top: “Louis B. Urquhart, Professor of American Literature and Society, University of California at Los Angeles.”

  Dear Mr. Korman,

  Lynn Barnard, editor in chief of Workman-Brown, Benjamin Bolt’s publisher, was kind enough to give me your address. She may have told you that I am currently in the process of writing an in-depth retrospective of Bolt’s life and work. You may also know that I received a Pulitzer Prize for my biography of Jack Kerouac. I mention this only to underline the seriousness of my credentials.

  I understand from Ms. Barnard that you are in regular contact with Bolt’s daughter and sole heir, Mariah. I know she has refused interview requests in the past, but I am hoping you will agree to put me in touch with her. Obviously, I am eager to interview her for recollections of her late father. But at the same time, I feel certain she would wish to be apprised of new information I recently uncovered concerning his final days. Please assure her I am not looking to create scandal. Rather, it is my admiration for Benjamin Bolt and his work that makes it quite impossible for me to remain silent.

  Let me put what I am about to say in context:

  As you know, the early sixties, when Bolt produced the bulk of the writing for which he is remembered, was a period of intense political activism at home and tension abroad: the idealism of the Kennedy Administration, the Civil Rights movement, the cold war, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the beginnings of American involvement in Vietnam. There is little doubt these events influenced Bolt’s thinking and his work. None of his other biographies, however, make mention of a chance event shortly before his death.

  I am not even sure whether you, as his agent, were aware of his brief involvement with an organization called Writers for Peace. This international association of poets and authors was considered by many at the time to be a Communist-front organization financed by Moscow. While this has never been proven definitively, my research suggests that the Soviet leadership did, at the very least, consider WFP open to manipulation—an “innocents club,” to borrow a term from Soviet propagandists: liberal-minded intellectuals through whom a sympathetic view of the USSR could be channeled to the West.

  In June 1964, a WFP conference was held in Paris, attended by some sixty writers from various countries. President Kennedy had been assassinated a few months earlier. With this country slipping into the quagmire of Vietnam, and the Civil Rights movement turning violent in the South, the WFP conference showed every sign of turning into a strident anti-American event.

  Hoping to capitalize on that mood, and as a gesture of its alleged openness, Moscow took the unusual step of allowing a famous Russian writer, Anatoly Orlov, to attend the conference. A hero of World War II and officially lionized in the Soviet Union, Orlov had been little heard from since the end of the war. There were rumors his later writings had offended the Communist leadership. Some said he was living under virtual house arrest. That he received an exit visa to attend the WFP conference is probably the best evidence we have that Moscow felt it could control the agenda. Perhaps the Kremlin also calculated that, at seventy-two, Orlov was too old to stir up trouble, and his attendance would be a risk-free move.

  Few of the conference participants are alive today, but I managed to locate one source who reported that Anatoly Orlov and Benjamin Bolt not only met, but seemed to bond. A rumor even began to circulate that the two were planning a collaboration of some sort. But then, Orlov collapsed and was rushed back to Moscow. Three months later, his death was announced in Pravda. Orlov was given a state funeral attended by the entire Politburo. Thousands of ordinary Russians filed past his coffin where it lay in state in the Kremlin. To this day, however, not a single Orlov work written after 1945 has ever been published.

  Bolt, meantime, disappeared from view. This same source I interviewed said Bolt told friends he was working on a new novel, but he was vague about details, and few people saw him again after the WFP conference.

  Benjamin Bolt died in Paris on September 4, 1964—the same day Orlov’s death was announced in Moscow. I think this is no coincidence. I believe Bolt was murdered—as, I am certain, was Orlov.

  Mr. Korman, I have no desire to cause undue distress to Mr. Bolt’s daughter. For this reason, I have not told anyone, including his editor, what I believe to be the case: that the manuscript she reportedly discovered among papers he mailed from Paris just days before his death is not his work at all, but an English translation of a samizdat novel by Anatoly Orlov, smuggled out of the Soviet Union at the time of the WFP conference. My presumption is that Orlov entrusted it to Bolt for delivery to a publisher in the West.

  Sooner or later, the truth is bound to surface, especially with the fall of communism in Russia and the gradual opening of secret files there. If you allow the novel to be published under Bolt’s name, it will inevitably bring embarrassment to his family and an undeserved stain on the man’s excellent literary reputation.

  I think it is imperative that we meet very soon to discuss the best way to proceed on this matter. In the meantime, I strongly advise you to put the publication of the novel on hold.

  Yours sincerely,

  Louis B. Urquhart

  Tucker folded the letter slowly and put it back in the envelope.

  Chap Korman may not have known about Ben Bolt’s involvement with Writers for Peace, but the CIA had. Like most groups suspected of Communist sympathies at the time, WFP had been infiltrated by agency operatives, who had dutifully recorded the names of those “innocents” the Kremlin hoped to manipulate. The 1964 conference was a minor blip on the radar of the long, tense history of the cold war, but fifteen years later, it had surfaced again, in the course of Mariah’s recruitment into the CIA. It was then that her father’s flirtation with the WFP was uncovered during a routine security-clearance check.

  As the person most responsible for godfathering her into the Company, Frank Tucker had taken it upon himself to look more closely into the matter. In doing so, he’d come to the same conclusion as Louis Urquhart—that Ben Bolt may very well have been murdered by KGB agents sent to retrieve the manuscript Orlov was rumored to have smuggled out of the USSR. The Soviets had done a good job of burying the evidence—literally, it seemed, given the number of other witnesses who happened to pass away in the months after the WFP conference. Urquhart was right. Few witnesses of the Bolt-Orlov meeting survived. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out there was more than coincidence to so many nearly simultaneous deaths.

  Tucker had told no one about his suspicions, however. Not then, not ever. Because, in the course of investigating her as a possible recruit, he had acquired something more than professional interest in Mariah Bolt. The more he’d gotten to know about her and her past, the more her well-being had become a matter of personal interest to him. Her father had disappeared when she was only seven. She was estranged from his memory and contemptuous of his legacy. She had w
orked hard to overcome the handicaps of growing up poor and abandoned, suffering one family tragedy after another—first losing her father, then her younger sister, and then her mother. In spite of that, she’d soldiered on, acquired a good education and expertise the agency could use.

  Bottom line: Mariah had wanted the job, and Tucker had wanted her working with him. Except the security file stood in the way.

  In the normal course of things, no one whose parent’s allegiance was even remotely suspect would be allowed near classified work. Given her father’s involvement with the Soviet-funded group, Mariah’s application should have been dead in the water. But why, Tucker had reasoned, should Ben Bolt’s actions be allowed to forever cast a shadow across her life? It was ancient history, so he had set about to change it.

  The Navigator’s files weren’t the only CIA property Frank Tucker had destroyed in the course of his career. Rather than allow it to damage Mariah’s prospects, he had systematically expunged from her security file all record of her father’s brief association with Writers for Peace before anyone else in the agency had had a chance to know about it.

  Now, the past was coming back to haunt him—and Mariah. Before Urquhart, no one else had put the pieces of the puzzle together. But the truth was finally seeping out, and the results could be devastating. Tucker cared little about suffering the consequences himself of what he’d done eighteen years earlier. But Mariah—and Lindsay, too, he reflected—were another matter.

  It was time for damage control.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The roses in Mr. Korman’s sunny front courtyard were in bloom, a riot of pink and yellow and peach. Two thickly padded lounge chairs, similar to the ones on the deck upstairs, were well placed to catch their sweet, heady scent. The midday temperature was already pushing into the nineties. If this had been his place, Scheiber thought, he’d have been tempted to pop a cold one and settle into one of those puffy, blue-striped cushions for the duration. Hell, he was tempted to do it, anyway—except he didn’t drink anymore, so the cold one would have to be a soda.

  Both the choice of beverage and the urge to take it easy were measures of how far he’d come since leaving the LAPD. Here he was with a suspicious death on his hands—slightly suspicious, anyway, after that odd message from the daughter of the dead man’s client—and he felt none of the adrenaline rush that had come with every new call-out during his eight years in the Robbery-Homicide Division.

  He stood in the courtyard, smoothing down his mustache, working up the enthusiasm to go and interview the next-door neighbor. He didn’t feel the rush, but he remembered it. It was the kind of high junkies talked about, and when you were hooked, you needed that fix on a regular basis. The very first time was always the best, though. Like the addict’s first hit, the experience of a first big murder case was so intense you spent the rest of your days trying to recapture the headiness of it. It was a sucker’s game, though. You couldn’t do it with the job any more than with the needle. You got excitement and variety, because you never knew what you were going to find at a homicide scene. But you were never going to find that same pure adrenaline charge again.

  For as long as he was with the LAPD, he’d kept trying for it, anyway. He told himself he put in the time because he was a good cop, conscientious, attentive to detail. But his wife had seen right through him.

  She was back at school then, working on the psychology degree. God, how he’d hated when she practiced on him.

  “The job allows you to avoid emotional commitment. And you do it well, so it rewards you by validating the way you live. Gives you that sense of being indispensable. And, my vain darling, you even love the press scrums—your steely eyes and silver hair reassuring the City of Angels it can sleep soundly because Jim Scheiber, guardian angel, is watching over it.”

  He shook his head. “This is such garbage. You can psychoanalyze me all you want, Allison, but this is just my job.”

  “No, it’s not your job. It’s your life.”

  Scheiber had hated the fact that she was probably right. He hadn’t planned to be a lousy husband and father. He’d loved his wife. He was pretty sure of that, at least at the beginning. Later, after one too many arguments and one too many silences, it got harder to know what was love and what was just the memory of love. As for his daughter, there was no question. He’d die for Julie. But even on those nights he’d managed to circle home to sit for a while and have supper with her, his mind had still been working the cases, anticipating that next raw thrill of discovery.

  These days, their times together were few and far between. At thirteen, Julie’s life was getting busier and she was reluctant to leave her friends in Portland to come down here. She had also refused so far to say what she thought about him marrying her former dance teacher. She was always friendly enough to Liz, but her visits had started getting shorter right about the time he and Liz had begun dating. One of these times, he feared, she was going to call and say she couldn’t make it at all. He’d lost his daughter to the job, for all intents and purposes, Scheiber reflected, and he hadn’t felt the professional rush in a long time, either. Maybe there was a connection.

  He glanced back at the clapboard and bougainvillea-covered house on the harbor. Some rich old guy had croaked in his hot tub. Not even the fact that it might have been other than accidental was enough to ignite the old fire. He was thinking about his lost daughter and his new wife, and how soon he could go home. He wasn’t thinking about the hunt, or about playing the hero in the war on crime. But that didn’t change that Albert Jacob Korman—apparently called “Chap” by his friends—was on his way to the Orange County morgue. His house on the Balboa peninsula was locked and sealed with yellow plastic crime-scene tape. And, like it or not, his death needed to be investigated.

  The neighborhood, now that the commotion had died down, seemed determined to carry on with the summer day as if nothing had happened. The looky-loos had dispersed, and out on the water, boat boys were swabbing decks in anticipation of boat owners showing up for the extended holiday weekend.

  Overhead, a seagull squealed, drawing Scheiber’s gaze upward. The bird dived toward the water, just skimming the surface, then veered and came up to a perfect two-point landing on a striped channel marker. The marker bobbed gently under the sudden weight. Scheiber exhaled heavily. “Man! It’s a hell of a lousy day to die, isn’t it?”

  “Are there any good ones?” Eckert asked.

  Scheiber glanced over at his partner, whose gaze was locked on a departing sailboat. On the forward deck, two women in tiny thong bikinis were lounging in low deck chairs, taking turns slathering each other’s backs with sun-screen. One of them had untied the neck straps on her bikini top, and the miniscule yellow triangles of fabric looked in serious danger of slipping off their precarious perches. You wish, Scheiber thought, grinning at Eckert’s rapt, open-mouthed anticipation. The woman squeezed a dollop of white cream onto her hands, slicking lotion across her breasts with languid, circular strokes.

  “Jeez,” Eckert said, head shaking, “I don’t think I’m living right.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Ha,” Eckert said, reluctantly wrenching his gaze away as the woman on deck retied her top strings, dashing his hopes. “You’ve got nothing to complain about. A week on the beach with the beauteous Liz couldn’t have been any too shabby.”

  “It was pretty great,” Scheiber agreed. “We could’ve used a couple more, mind you. Would have made it at least two if Lucas’s father hadn’t up and buggered off at the last minute.”

  “Guy sounds like a real jerk. Didn’t he say he’d keep the boy while you were away?”

  “Yeah, but I think it’s the wife who rules the roost there. This surprise trip to Italy was just the latest stunt. She’s got a real talent for coming up with reasons why they can’t take Lucas half the weekends he’s supposed to be there. Like, they’re getting ready for a big dinner party. Or the floors have just been refinished and the varni
sh is still wet. Or the maid took the weekend off to visit her sick mama in Tijuana and there’s nobody to cook.”

  “Isn’t that why God invented Pizza Hut?”

  Scheiber unlatched the low picket gate and stepped out onto the walkway. “Guess the good news hasn’t reached Beverly Hills,” he said.

  Eckert followed him through. “So, how are you finding fatherhood?”

  “I’ve been doing fatherhood for thirteen years. I’d like it fine if I could see Julie more often. As for young Lucas…” He shrugged resignedly. “That’s going to take some time. Right now, we’re still jockeying to see who gets to be alpha dog around the house. He’s had his mom all to himself up to now. I’d hate me, too, under the circumstances. Anyway,” Scheiber added, “never mind my domestic arrangements. What’s with you and the lovely Mrs. Klassen? Haven’t I ever told you you’re not supposed to drool on the job, Dave? Mucks up the DNA evidence something wicked.”

  “Get outta here.”

  “Are we blushing?”

  “Chuck you, Farley,” Eckert said, plucking his shades from the pocket of his shirt and slipping them on.

  Scheiber grinned, but the smile faded as they reached Korman’s neighbor’s courtyard. “Well,” he said dryly, “this is certainly different.”

  Where the Korman house was all shingles and shutters and white picket fences, the place next door was a stark arrangement of concrete boxes in muted desert colors, set on top of one another at odd angles and irregularly pierced through by opaque glass bricks. A line of polished wooden ties ran all the way around the courtyard, except on the one side where Korman’s incongruous picket fence stood. The pickets had gotten there first, Scheiber figured, but they must have irritated the bejesus out of whoever had designed this place. An effort had obviously been made to camouflage them with a fountain that ran nearly the full length of that side of the property, a long, low wall of slate with water sliding over the top. Identical, mocha-colored slate squares covered the courtyard ground. Nature would have been too intimidated to dare throw up a shoot of grass between them.