Gods of deception, p.24
Gods of Deception, page 24
George pumped his fist, then shook his head, frowning.
“And Hermitage?”
As if the saving of Hermitage and the Judge’s reputation were one and the same.
He was a scientist, damn, it. And conspiracy theories went totally against his grain because they always stressed correlation over cause and effect. And even though the Judge had been there, in the cockpit of history, he seemed as incredulous and uncertain about his own narrative as anyone—if the memoir was to be taken at face value.
Or if Alice and Martha, not to mention his own mother, were to be believed, the Judge cared only about himself.
“Doubt.” Of all the Judge wrote, the evidence he presented, the quaver in his voice the night before, that was the most compelling thing: doubt. And so unlike him.
Doubt, uncertainty, curiosity—the ticket to every scientific advance in human history.
“Keep it simple, George,” he scolded himself.
The only certainty, the only logic he could count on was this: If just one or more of those cases of ambiguous death or disappearance could be proved to have been deliberate orchestrations by the KGB, the probability of George Altmann’s murder rose dramatically.
And with that proof, the necessity of reinterpreting Altmann’s late paintings.
“George, that’s the one thing you owe the world.”
Already he could sense Wendy holding his feet to the fire; she would insist on a revised catalog essay that spoke not just to the truth about Altmann’s death but also to the glory of the life force that had gone into the late work.
He looked up a moment at his reflection in the window, where his troubled moonlit eyes stared back at the not unappealing fantasy of a mysterious rock star for a father, something the teenager who had once inhabited this room might well have reveled in, and the soaring stature (how cool to be the love child of a celebrity rocker!) it would have given to his shitty high school years. He smiled sardonically at such a pathetic notion, at his ghostly face in the window above his laptop screen: dirtyblond hair in cowlicks, puffy dark-ringed eyes, overweight body, hardly rock star material, much less a biographer or editor of note, much less a gallerist or astrophysicist … just another empty vessel to be filled with all the improbabilities—Heisenberg’s phantom uncertainties conjured out of space-time, from before he was born … before any of them were born.
“What a pitiful joke you are, George.”
He rested his palm on the volume of Witness, feeling again the tug of his grandparents’ contest for the truth within its pages, the thing that had torn apart their marriage.
With that, with one click of his mouse, he reached into the ether of the past in the guise of Google search: eight names in the nine sketches.
Saturday, March 17, 1951, Drew Pearson on the Washington Merry-Go-Round: Duggan-Field link may be clue to seven unsolved disappearances or deaths following revelations in Alger Hiss case; whereabouts of Noel Field is No. 1 American mystery in Europe.
Frankfurt. The No. 1 American mystery of Europe continues to be the sudden and unsolved disappearance of four Americans in the Noel Field case after Field was named by Whittaker Chambers as a member of the communist cell in the U.S. State Department. This case is now being linked for the first time with another unsolved mystery in the United States—the strange death of Laurence Duggan, found in a snowbank 16 floors below his New York office. Duggan also was named in the State Department investigation, though cleared by the Justice Department.
The amazing thing is that a total of seven people, including Harry Dexter White and Marvin Smith, have now died mysteriously or disappeared even more mysteriously following revelations in the Alger Hiss case …
Heart pumping furiously, George read the rest of the article, uncertain if he was glad or disappointed to find that this thing—more abstract than real—had legs, that it wasn’t just the Judge’s obsession. He pulled up his spreadsheet and added in the new data.
Harry Dexter White: “Later it was reported that the real cause of his death was an overdose of digitalis, not heart failure … suicide or foul play rumored … buried hastily by a brother who was a member of the Communist Party”; “Walter Marvin Smith, Justice Department attorney found at the base of the Justice Department staircase where he had fallen, been pushed, or jumped on October 20, 1948 … wife insists: not a suicide; Smith was the only eyewitness to the transfer of the Hiss automobile to a Communist organizer”; “Strange death of State Department official Laurence Duggan. Falls sixteen stories with one galosh on, one off.”
And then there was William Remington, convicted by a jury in 1953 of lying about turning over secret papers to Elizabeth Bentley and sentenced to prison, where he was murdered by two inmates, one of whom used a piece of brick concealed in a sock to bludgeon him. Remington died two days later of his injuries, just days before Alger Hiss was released from the same Lewisburg prison. The motive for the murder remained unclear, although the two inmates claimed they were anti-Communists. The two young murderers were sentenced to life for their crime.
From the Washington Daily News: “William W. Remington now joins the odiferous list of young Communist punks who wormed their way upward in the Government under the New Deal. He was sentenced to five years in prison, and he should serve every minute of it. In Russia, he would have been shot without trial.”
The venom of that judgment, much less the fate of Remington, sent a chill down George’s spine.
Two highly improbable and unresolved deaths by falling. Surely, if such things had happened, fifty years later, something … someone would have turned up to tell the tale, or the truth been ferreted out by the ubiquitous Google.
“By now,” he muttered, furiously typing away in the Google search bar, as if persistence alone could wring answers out of the past.
As he pursued the subject, he found pages and pages of Google results, newspaper accounts of the day, many on conservative sites spelling out the evils of Hiss and his fellow conspirators, while leftwing sites dismissed the same charges as conspiracy theories cooked up by the lunatic fringe abetted by Nixon and Hoover. Even the New York Times, in its obituary of Hiss from six years before, described the charges against him of spying as unproven, circumstantial, and highly controversial. More than a little flavor of that opinion had flowed across the dinner table at Alice and Stan’s.
And yet, captured in this same gravitational field was the possibility of a series of diabolical crimes—utterly unresolved—now with implications for the death of his grandfather Altmann. This crime began to take on a real shape in his mind as he glimpsed more and more screaming headlines from newspapers of the period.
He reflected on a false narrative, to which he himself had contributed and perpetuated in his Altmann catalog essay. A potential error that Wendy, to give her credit, going purely by intuitive insight, had rejected out of hand without benefit of concrete knowledge of the circumstances: a clairvoyance that was in itself not a little troubling.
Now annoyed at his carelessness and confusion—his paralyzing indecisiveness—he clicked around on the Internet, scanning more newspaper stories on the figures in the Altmann sketches. In every case, the one consistent factor was ambiguity and inconclusive evidence, with the possible exception of Noel Field, fellow State Department colleague of Alger Hiss, who had so mysteriously disappeared before 1950, and who, according to recently released files out of Hungary, had confessed to the Hungarian secret police in the fifties that, yes indeed, he’d known Hiss was a fellow spy, and so had fled behind the Iron Curtain for fear of being arrested by the FBI.
George checked the citation on Field: Allen Weinstein’s The Haunted Wood.
“That’s it,” he almost shouted out, seeing his cell phone on the night before held up to the ship’s keel ceiling in the great room at Hermitage while the flames danced in the fireplace: the connection that had made all the difference.
“Allen Weinstein, archivist of the United States of America,” he read out loud, pondering each word.
He thought of Alice’s dismissive snort at the mention of Weinstein; and the almost paranoid description in the Judge’s memoir when he heard that the young Yale scholar had been blessed by the Hiss forces to write the definitive book on the trial. How extraordinary, this scholar, the Judge’s onetime nemesis … how Weinstein’s latest book had preserved the old man’s life with the final proof of Hiss’s guilt. To fight a final battle for redemption.
And yet the Judge either had trouble remembering who Weinstein was at dinner or couldn’t bring himself to admit it was the same author, or he fully recognized the significance of Weinstein’s new book coming twenty years after Perjury, proving not just the two charges of perjury from the thirties but also that Hiss had done even more damage as a spy during the much more crucial period of Yalta in 1945, when Stalin enslaved half of Europe. Had an inkling of that far graver offense prompted the Judge’s illegal raid on the defense files in 1968 to remove the Altmann sketches? Had he and Weinstein, irony of ironies, been on the same journey for decades?
And like a guilty reflex, he felt again the presence of Wendy Bradley, as she had grabbed his arm two nights before on Twentythird Street: George … if it’s not in the art, it’s not there. Trust me, I know about these things.
“Who the fuck is Wendy Bradley?” he spouted with indignation.
He picked up his phone, weighing it in his hand, nodding with guilt at his betrayal of her trust as he connected the phone again to his laptop and downloaded the photo he’d surreptitiously shot that afternoon, when he’d momentarily switched from her phone. He then deleted the jpg from his phone.
He stared at the enlarged photo on his screen, where she clung upside down on the overhang of the boulder, grasping an angle of a rocky ledge with her outstretched right arm, another grip at eye level with her left hand, her left leg bent to a hold waist-high, her right dangling in air, every muscle and sinew in her body stretched, her rib cage a tight concavity, with only the lovely curve of her left breast absent tension. Her ponytail dangling to the line of the indent of her bra strap, her taut skin iridescent with the approaching sunset.
Not a little annoyed at the stirring in his crotch, he typed her name into Google.
Top hit was her studio site. Obviously she got good search optimization and had lots of followers. “Wow …” The paintings were gorgeous, full of thick creamy impasto depicting the sheer sides of granite cliffs, out of which a woman’s figure, more abstract than realistic, emerged like a shadowy spirit from the rock face, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s half-completed sculptures emerging from the marble, still immured, specters longing to be fully born. The texture and faults in the stone merged seamlessly with the skin tones. “Fuck, she really can paint.” Pearlstein with a tad more fluidity and a model posed to exhibit strength and agility, not languid disinterest. Flipping through the site, he could tell she definitely had her shit together: a signature style, a feminist angle, a conceptualist handle, and commercial to boot—erotic and wild and dreamy—just plain stunning artistry.
Yale undergrad, summa cum laude in art history and philosophy, and MFA—both in European literature and applied arts. George R. Bunker Award in recognition of an outstanding student in painting/printmaking.
“Fucking brass ring.”
Her profile on the climbing school site listed all her professional accomplishments and teaching qualifications. She taught everything from Rock Climbing 101 and 102 to Top Rope Setup and Glacier Skills & Crevasse Rescue.
“Holy shit …”There they were, harrowing photos of her Everest climb in 1996, the deadliest season in history, when twelve climbers had died trying to reach the summit. He recalled her oddly dispassionate tale at dinner, how her party had just managed to avoid the blizzard that caught the party ahead of them, killing eight, including two legendary veterans of the mountain. At twenty, she’d been one of the youngest women—the youngest American woman—to reach the summit of Everest. How had she put it? “Sometimes patience, meticulous evaluation of risk, and keeping the testosterone on simmer make all the difference.”
He could find nothing about her childhood or high school years, nothing from before Yale. No mention of her parents on her Facebook page, or her “crazy” aunt and uncle, who had taken her in after her parents died. As if her life had only begun with Yale, like one of her figures, emerging from Jonathan Edwards College fully formed.
So he tried: Bradleys, accident, deaths …
Houston Post, September 26, 1989:
Bradleys Killed on Mount Wake, Alaska
Husband and Wife Climbing Team Fell to Their Deaths
The internationally renowned husband and wife climbing team of John and Sarah Bradley were killed yesterday climbing Mount Wake in Ruth Gorge, Alaska. Rangers and rescue crews found their bodies nearby at the bottom of a gully. Initial reports indicate that Sarah Bradley had fallen first in a rappelling accident, and that her husband had subsequently slipped or fallen in an attempt to reach or recover her body. An investigation is under way. The Bradley husband and wife team had climbed five of the seven summits, including Everest, Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro, and Mont Blanc. They were preparing for an assault on Mount McKinley next spring. The Bradleys are survived by Wendy Bradley, their thirteen-year-old daughter, at their home in Houston.
“Thirteen …” noted George, as if that bad-luck number represented some bizarre correlation of loss in their lives.
Not a little numbed, he read through the dozens of articles and glowing tributes to the Bradleys: rock stars of the climbing fraternity.
At a sudden knock on his door, he hurriedly closed his laptop.
“You’re still up. Were you talking to yourself?” Wendy stepped unprompted into his room and shut the door rather decisively behind her. She was wearing her spandex climbing tights and fleece vest. “Did anyone ever tell you your guest room is fucking freezing? I woke up a Popsicle. I could see my breath in there.” She lay back on his bed and pulled the comforter up around her.
“I think the boiler’s shot; it’s cold in here, as well.”
“Not as cold.”
“Why don’t I go down to the sofa? You take my bed.”
“Don’t be a baby; there’s plenty of room. And I’m not going to fuck you. Besides, I’ve got my fusion leggings on, polyester and spandex, and even if you were hung like an iron horse, you couldn’t penetrate these.”
She pulled the crazy quilt more firmly around her, giving him a friendly, if defiant, smile.
“Steam-powered, I don’t think so.”
“I think the dope gave me bad dreams.”
“No wonder, after a day like this,” he said only half-jokingly.
“I really like your mom; she’s nothing like your aunt.”
“The family flower child.”
“Like”—she gazed around his room, taking it all in—“so long ago.”
“You think? Sometime it feels, around here, like I was born yesterday.”
She eyed him with a compelling earnestness.
“I’m not a kid, George, not one of your millennial crybabies. You can’t be more than—what, five or six years older? Hardly a seducer of babes in the woods.”
“Oh, I was well trained by Princeton HR to keep my hands off the students.”
“I’m not trying to sleep my way into a gallery show, George. I have collectors; I have a following; I have a life.”
“I hadn’t gotten to your life—or your lack of representation yet.” He lied with a straight face, trying to repress the guilt in his voice. He pushed a lock of ruffled hair off his brow, smoothing down a cowlick, and gestured gamely. “And you said it yourself, the other night at the opening: You didn’t like what I wrote about George Altmann’s suicide.”
“That what’s got you hot and bothered—sleepless in the garden?” Her eyes went to his shelves as she continued her inventory. “All I know is what the art tells me, and it doesn’t tell me that—no way José.”
“So, I have a consensus problem, or perhaps a parallel universe problem. If George Altmann didn’t slip or fall or have an accident— which, the more I think about it, seems highly unlikely—and didn’t kill himself, then the alternative presents a whole host of unresolved, if not unresolvable, issues.” He tightened his jaw. “Kind of like the dark matter problem, how an invisible force, a particle—if that’s what it is—interacts or doesn’t with the strong and weak nuclear force, electromagnetism or just plain vanilla gravity, giving it a six hundred percent boost. Unless it’s in a class of forces we know nothing about, a parallel universe nudging ours around the edges.”
“You’re losing me, George. Come on, just spit it out for me.”
He went to his bureau and pulled out a Woodstock High sweatshirt and handed it to her. She gave it a sniff and put it on.
“Come, sit here next to me.”
He pulled up his spreadsheet of the Altmann sketches and all the other information he’d gathered, and spent half an hour clueing her in.
Well into his download, he sensed her stiffening, her stare riveted and eyes more attentive, as if moved by a deep sense of injustice in response to his rather tepid rendition of the circumstantial evidence as he knew it. He found it more than a little eerie that as he spoke, named the names, her fingers reached out time and again to the cover of Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, lifting the flap slightly, as if compelled to take a sounding within. And when she finally spoke, her tone of voice was no-nonsense, decisive, as if she were now back on Everest, deciding whether to wait for clearing weather or to go.
“So,” she said, resting her palm fully on the copy of Witness, as if taking an oath or trying to sum it up for the jury, “George Altmann might have been a witness to Hiss’s spying, or at least might have been able to confirm his membership in a Communist cell, which would have destroyed Hiss’s credibility during the trial.”
