The Pledge (21 page)

“I don't get rattled too easily.”

“All right. You're brave and decent, which means nothing in this den of thieves. You were telling me about a minefield you once walked through?”

“Yes.”

“And the procedure?”

“Yes.”

“Same thing here.”

The anteroom to the hearing room was a rather dismal place, two rows of chairs lined up against facing walls, with the door to the hearing room on the right as one entered. There were Venetian blinds on the windows at one end of the room, but no drapes, and the walls were painted what Bruce always thought of as government green, a dismal olive color. The chairs were the heavy oak institutional furniture that existed wherever the government paid the rent. A guard showed them into the waiting room, informing them that the quorum was already present. They were to wait.

There was no one else in the room. “Evidently, today is ours,” Bruce said. “Unless it's like a doctor's waiting room and fills up gradually.”

“Offer nothing,” Molly said. “Remember. Just answer questions. No hostility. You're an A-One American gentleman, which is why I love you.”

“Bullshit,” he whispered. The door to the hearing room was opening, and a tall, skinny, dour man came into the waiting room and introduced himself: “Gerald Crown. I'm counsel for the committee. You're Bruce Bacon?”

Bruce stood up and nodded.

“And this lady is your attorney,” pointing to Molly.

“No, just a friend.”

“You have no attorney? Or is he to show? Is he late?”

“No attorney. I understand that even with an attorney, he's barred from the room?”

“You can always step outside to consult. I'm afraid not with this lady. Was there difficulty in obtaining counsel?”

“No. I have nothing to hide from the committee. Why would I need a lawyer?”

Crown shrugged, turned to the door of the committee room, and bowed slightly. “We can start now, Mr. Bacon. If you would?”

Bruce entered the hearing room with much the same feeling with which Scrooge, in
The Christmas Carol
, had greeted the ghost of Christmas Past, as the result of something indigestible that he had eaten the day before. It was there and it existed and it was totally unreal, the oval table, the men seated around it, the American flag drooping in one corner, as if to apologize for its presence in such company, the large photo-portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on one wall, the even larger photo-portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the other wall, and the quiet, hunched-over stenotypist in the corner, his face impassively humble.

Five men sat around the oval table. Bruce recognized the faces of four of them. There was John S. Wood, co-chairman with Rankin, pudgy, comfortable middle America, taken from drugstore or haberdashery to confront strange creatures, and then Rankin, a face like an old hound dog, drooping folds of flesh, yellowed teeth, and a look of suspicious dislike. Richard Nixon, as improbable in appearance as Rankin, was a sort of balance. He was young, a terrier ready to leap and snap, his ski-jump nose and very dark shaven beard giving him the appearance of a cartoon character, made even more unreal by his cheeks, which puffed out as if each contained a Ping-Pong ball. He had accusatory beady little eyes, and Bruce could picture him standing before a mirror, trying to look stern and eliminate the youthful jack rabbit visage. There was another member Bruce could not place, and, finally, J. Parnell Thomas, a fat piggish face, tiny eyes encased in fat, thick neck, and fat body. Only he greeted Bruce with a silly grin, as if to play good cop to the others' bad cop.

Crown offered Bruce a seat at the head of the table, and asked him whether he had any objections to taking the oath.

“None.” He put his hand on the Bible and took the oath.

Crown walked away from him, took a small sheaf of notes from the table, and then faced Bruce, still standing, leaning against the wall and about halfway across the room, and said, “Would you state your full name and your address?”

“Bruce Bacon, and I live at One twenty-six East Seventy-sixth Street, in New York.”

“Is that your name?” Parnell Thomas asked sharply. “You are under oath, sir. I don't think that's your name.”

Nonplussed, Bruce groped for air. “Yes, sir. I don't know what you can be thinking. My name is Bruce Bacon.”

“I think Mr. Thomas is asking for your full name.”

“Oh, I see. I have a middle name. My name is actually Bruce Nathaniel Bacon. I haven't used my middle name for years. You all know who Nathaniel Bacon was, of course, and we have pretensions toward the same family. Of course, it's so hard to tell, since he did his thing three hundred years ago.” He knew that they didn't have the slightest notion who Nathaniel Bacon was and that they would be ashamed to ask.

Gerald Crown was playing a neutral role. That point had been made in the pamphlet Britain had given him. If, among the legislators, there were pros and cons, the counsel strove for a balance. But there were no pros here, only cons.

Crown said, “Thank you, sir. Now I will ask you: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?”

“Not ever and not now.”

“Very well. Have you ever been a member of a communist front organization?”

“You'll have to be more specific,” Bruce said. “I'm really not certain of what a communist front organization is. This is not a refusal to answer your question. I simply wish to be enlightened as to its breadth.”

“Very well,” Crown said, still wearing his amiable mask. “I'll give you an example. You spoke to a group called the Broadway Forum, at the Murray Hill Hotel. The Broadway Forum is on the Attorney General's list of communist front organizations.”

“I see.” Bruce nodded, unwilling to probe deeper into what was or was not a communist front organization. “I don't belong to the Broadway Forum, if indeed it has a membership. I was invited to speak to a group of journalists, and I did.”

“You haven't answered my question. Do you belong to or have you supported any other communist front organizations?”

“I think not,” Bruce replied. “Unless the Newspaper Guild is on the Attorney General's list. I am a member of the Guild.”

“Are you indicating that the Newspaper Guild is a communist front organization?”

“Oh, absolutely not.”

“Then you know it is not a communist front organization?”

“Well, yes —” Bruce paused, hesitated. Where was he headed? He was just beginning to recognize the pattern Crown was following in his questioning. It was not a simple case of answering or refusing to answer. He had not read the Attorney General's list. Suppose the Attorney General had listed the Newspaper Guild as a communist front organization. Now if he denied that it was a front organization, he was on a hook.

“As far as I know,” Bruce said.

“Oh?”

“I mean, as far as I know, the Newspaper Guild is simply a trade union. I belong to it as a member of a trade union. That's as far as my knowledge goes.”

“I see. And you are associated with no other communist front organization?”

“No.”

“Very well. We'll return to that.” He turned to John Rankin. “Sir?”

“I was told, sir,” Rankin said, “that when the Newspaper Guild was organized, certain communists played a major role in that process of organization. Can you tell us anything about that, son?” Rankin was from Mississippi, and his Southern accent was thick, his words slow. Bruce had the feeling that the accent was part of the persona Rankin assumed at hearings such as this.

“No, sir. If that was the case, I know nothing about it.”

“We had testimony here to that effect. How come you know nothing about it?”

“I was overseas during the war years, and as far as the Guild is concerned, I appreciate its role as a trade union, but I don't take part in any of its internal affairs. I should as a decent union man. I just haven't.”

Crown took up the questioning here: “Mr. Bacon, I am going to read a list of names. I want you to tell me which of these names you recognize.” He took a sheet of paper from the table. “I will ask for a comment with each name. We begin with Gautam Sharma. Do you know this man?”

“No.”

“Did you — well, allow me to put it this way. Were you ever at a meeting or a party where he was present?”

“Not so far as I know,” Bruce replied. “I presume these names relate to Bengal?”

“India,” Chairman Wood corrected. “India, sir.”

“Yes, sir,” Crown said. “Bengal is part of India.”

“Then let's stick to the whole, not the part.”

“Yes, sir,” Crown agreed. “Now, Mr. Bacon, I ask you about Chandra Chatterjee. Do you recognize the name?”

“Yes, if you mean the same Chatterjee who is a professor at the University of Calcutta. Chatterjee is a common name in Bengal.”

“I presume it's the same man. I've given you both his first and last name. Is he a member of the Communist Party of India?”

Bruce hesitated, telling himself at the same time that even hesitation is an answer of sorts. But how sure was he about Chatterjee? “I don't know,” he said.

Staring at a loose-leaf book, one such being in front of each of the five men around the table, and without looking up, Nixon snapped, “You spent an evening with him and you don't know whether he was a communist?”

“But Mr. Nixon,” Bruce said gently, “if you were a secret communist, I might spend an evening or even a weekend with you and never know it.”

“We'll have that stricken from the record,” Nixon said angrily, and, pointing a finger at Bruce, “That kind of smart-ass response will only get your ass in a sling!” And then to the stenotypist, “We'll keep that off the record as well.”

Crown smoothed the waters. He had not yet made a reliable assessment of Bruce Bacon; and the big, shambling writer, taller than anyone else in the room, but slightly stooped now as he stared at the men in the committee, squinting a bit behind his heavy horn-rimmed glasses, defied proper analysis. He could be an innocent, a boob, a smart red, or someone with his own game to play. The latter designation appealed to Crown. He continued, “Romila Thapar.” He spelled it out for the stenotypist. “Do you know this man?”

“No, sir.”

“You have never met him? You have never been in company where he was present?”

“No, sir. Not as far as I know.”

“Krishna Sinha?”

“No, sir. I don't know him, I never met him. I have never been in company where he was present.”

“You don't have to anticipate my questions, Mr. Bacon.”

“I'm sorry. I thought we might get on with it.”

“We will get on with it, Mr. Bacon.”

Bruce spread his hands and smiled slightly.

“Ashoka Majumdar,” Crown said. “Is that name familiar to you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you meet this man in Calcutta in nineteen forty-five?”

“Yes.”

“Is he a communist?”

“Is he?” Bruce asked. “You use the present tense. Does that mean that he's still alive?”

“Do you have reason to think otherwise? Do you maintain connections with Calcutta?”

Here, he had done it again, given Crown a lead down a path that didn't exist. “No, I have no connection with Calcutta.”

“Or with the Communist Party of India?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

Parnell Thomas's fat round face broke into a smile as he looked up from his loose-leaf notebook and said, “I been under the impression that all you Communist Parties are linked together. So how come you profess no knowledge at all about what goes on there in India?”

“I'm not a communist, Mr. Thomas.”

“Check.” He was still grinning pleasantly.

“Let's return to Ashoka Majumdar. What was your interest in him?”

“I was after information about a story I was working on.”

“I ask you again: Was Ashoka Majumdar a communist?”

“I suppose so. He made no secret of it, and he worked for a communist newspaper.”

“What was the name of that newspaper?”

“
Prasarah
— if I remember correctly.”

“Would you spell it, please?” the stenotypist said.

Bruce spelled it.

Rankin said, “Does this here communist paper have some connection with the
New York Daily Worker?”

“I can't imagine that it does, but there's no way in the world for me to know for sure.”

Crown said, “I take it from your answer that you also don't know that it doesn't.”

Bruce thought about that and nodded, telling himself, Careful, Bruce, careful. You have taken them for a bunch of malignant idiots, but when it comes to what they do they are damned sneaky and cunning.

“Mr. Bacon,” Crown said, “have you ever given an interview to the newspaper called
Prasarah?
Do I pronounce it correctly?”

“Yes, I'm sure you do. In answer to your question, no, I never gave them an interview. Overseas, I was a working correspondent. I looked for interviews, but why on earth would anyone try to interview me?”

“Why indeed? Here is a translation, provided to us by British Intelligence, of an early June nineteen forty-five edition of
Prasarah.
Let me quote from it: ‘The question I put to Mr. Bruce Bacon, a renowned American correspondent, is this: Do you believe that the famine was contrived in a conspiracy between the British and the rice dealers? His answer was that he suspects this to be the case, and hopes that he will find evidence to support his conjecture.' Wouldn't you call that an interview, Mr. Bacon?”

“I could have said that. Yes. But simply as an answer to a question, not as any part of an interview.”

“Son,” Rankin put in, “am I hearing that in the midst of a struggle to preserve the world from such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, you were ready to accuse our allies, the British, of aiding and abetting in the deaths of millions of people? Is that what I am hearing, son?”