Silas Timberman (20 page)

“So it's Bob Allen,” Amsterdam said, his wrinkled face bitter and bleak. “You never know, do you?”

“You mean you would feel better if it was an obvious scoundrel like Lundfest,” Alec Brady remarked.

“Yes. It hurts more when a youngster dirties himself. When you're an old man yourself, it hurts more.”

“I wouldn't jump to conclusions,” Silas objected. “He had some explanation at least, and he could have gotten the subpoena yesterday. I wouldn't condemn him until we know a little more.”

“On the face of it, there isn't much room for doubt,” Brady said.

“Except the man himself. You've got to admit that he's essentially a very decent chap—a liberal mind—my God, he's been at our house any number of times. You don't go to a man's house and do this.”

“Don't you?”

“Jesus, Alec, if we begin to suspect the whole world, we live in a nightmare! Bob and Sue Allen are friends of mine, good friends. He was a student of mine, and I persuaded him to go into the Humanities—went out of my way to help him, and both Myra and I talked to Lundfest about his instructorship. You don't spit in the face of something like that. Give the boy a chance.”

“We're all giving him a chance,” Brady murmured. “He has his chance. What I think won't change that.”

“Who is he? Tell me about him,” MacAllister said.

Then they talked about him on the way into Washington, but it was still a matter of speculation when they entered the Senate Office Building—nor was he present when the hearing began.

* * *

The hearing neither fell short of Silas' imaginings nor did it transcend them; it was just different. He remembered Washington as a city of white and shining beauty; somehow he had eliminated from his memory the slums, the rickety, ancient houses, the drab business streets, the jerry-built sheds for the expanding bureaucracy; and perhaps if he had come here under other circumstances, he would not have noticed these things at all. He remembered a smiling city, which was not smiling at all, and the basement floor through which they entered the Senate Office Building was a bare and gloomy place, lit fitfully with yellow overhead fixtures. They were directed up a flight of steps to the main offices of the committee, where a pink-cheeked, over-rouged young lady in a frilly white blouse, greeted them with a southern accent, accepted their subpoenas, made constant reflex motions toward her bleached blond hair, announced the number of the hearing room, and informed them that they were to return here for their expense money when the hearing had concluded. Evidently, the other four had already gone on to the hearing room.

Silas was not impressed by his first intimate contact with the committee function of government. The committee room was large and unattractive, divided into sections by woven hemp folding screens. The walls were painted a sour, pale green. There was an impressive display of filing cabinets, an eagle and George Washington on the walls in steel engraving, and a number of girls at desks, all of them in white blouses, each of them enough like the one he had spoken with before to be her sister, each of them equipped with an immobile face and unseeing blue eyes. On chairs tilted back against one wall, two men sat, square-faced, silent, obviously intent on relating their own images to something they had seen in the movies or read about in a magazine, never taking their consciously cold eyes off the little group of teachers.

“Land of the Pilgrim's pride,” thought Silas. He glanced at the others. Brady appeared thoughtful, Ike Amsterdam amused. MacAllister was business-like and competent, now that there was work to be done. He shepherded them out and led them down the corridor to the hearing room. There was quite a crowd in the corridor, among them Federman, Kaplin, Spencer and Edna Crawford. Federman, looped over his crutches, was talking animatedly to the others, immersed in what he was saying and indifferent to the strangers around them. He greeted Silas and the other three in his rich, full voice.

“Enter the other thieves. We thought we had lost you, and here's a three-ring circus. Have a look inside.”

Silas looked and agreed. The hearing room was some seventy feet long by thirty feet wide, the rear two-thirds consisting of a spectators' section and now jammed full of respectable-appearing, neatly dressed people, most of them elderly, most of them women, most of them obviously tourists who would see and long remember this example of the workings of government.

They seemed neither partisan nor impatient, but sat and waited with the same patient neutralism exhibited by the small army of sound men, cameramen, electricians and lighting experts who swarmed all over the place, connecting wires, testing microphones and lights, flooding the place suddenly with a murderous glare and then dropping the room into a contrasting semi-darkness. There were four huge cameras in the room, each with a different type of lens arrangement, and they were being swiveled and pointed and tested, while assistants crawled around the high, semi-circular desk which occupied the opposite end of the room from where the spectators sat. Silas noticed that this enormous desk arrangement was set on a platform with a dozen seats behind it, and concluded—correctly—that the senators would sit there, above the others and removed from the witnesses, less like committeemen than judges. The men with the light meters went from seat to seat, making sure that no senator would be cast in the shadow, and then they came down to the long mahogany table reserved for the witnesses, as was the first row of seats in the spectators' area. Between the two sections of the room was a line of press tables, already filling up with newspaper men, most of them wearing gray tweed and self-conscious attitudes of boredom and cynicism. After MacAllister had ushered his seven wards into the front row, a few of the newspaper men gathered around him with their pads to get names and other data. It seemed to Silas that MacAllister handled them very well, with just the proper mixture of respect and unconcern.

It was all as unlike anything Silas had expected as the trial of Alice by the playing cards in Lewis Carroll's wise fantasy would have been, a combination of forced hoopla and sated excitement, of the blatantly ordinary with the shamelessly extraordinary; as Federman had said, a circus, a setting for a vaudeville show, a cheap comedy implemented with ugly and irresistible power, with ignorance, boorishness and an eloquent lack of taste. Behind and over everything was the flag, the rich and lovely Stars and Stripes, draped for a background, draped like curtains—enough to make Silas want to weep with pity and anger.

MacAllister crouched among them for a few last words, even as the nationally known boy counsel of the committee strutted into the room, short and plump, like a little rooster, his pants creasing tightly over his fat buttocks, his flat nose, his mouth fixed in a sneer—for all the world reminding Silas of the hopeless and irredeemable characters who played the heavy parts in the books of his childhood. “So this is the famous Dave Cann,” he reflected, “the twenty-five year old wonder who blazed through the Justice Department like a new star on the horizon, and who is Brannigan's own strong right arm!” And as if in answer to Silas' thoughts, Cann turned and let his tiny eyes pass slowly over the seven teachers in what he unquestionably considered a look of cold and remorseless judgment.

Meanwhile, MacAllister was reminding them to be slow to anger, considered in their answers, and aware of the fact that he would be sitting beside each of them when they were called. “There is no hurry,” he assured them. “We have all the time we need. Think before you answer, and remember our little session on the Constitution of the United States. Also, remember that to be contemptuous of them, to tell them what you think and feel, does not constitute contempt of Congress. Only a refusal to answer a relevant question can be construed as contempt—and if you are in any doubt, let me decide what is relevant. Also, note that your friend, Bob Allen, is not present. If he should turn up to testify as a
friendly witness
, as they call them, don't be floored by it. Set yourselves to expect the worst.”

“And, of course, this is one bad dream we won't wake up from,” Kaplin observed, smiling ruefully.

“I'm afraid not. This now goes out by TV and radio to a whole world. It's part of Brannigan's calculated risk—open it up and count on cowing and terrifying witnesses into a public defeat. That's the way he plays, bold, and the stake is big. By all that is holy, play it back the same way, if you can! There he is now—the short, heavy-set man—that's Brannigan. Next to him is Kempleson of Illinois, and behind them Jack Patterson of California. The man taking his seat at the end on the left, the old man, that's Effingham D'Marcy, the chairman of the committee, but he will leave it to Brannigan. They will probably start with these four, and some of the others will join them later.”

With his first sight of Brannigan, Silas realized that photographs caught little of the man, a shell in repose; in motion, there was an animal that no photograph could do justice to, sleek, fleshy, poised, yet with the tension that the sight and smell of prey brings to the stalker. His breadth of shoulder suggested power; his head set squarely on a bull neck, his face large, his chin low and square, his thin hair combed carefully, his pale blue eyes veiled and lost and detached for the moment from reality—a detachment strangely at odds with his almost brutal masculinity. The net effect was an uncertain mixture which removed the man from the obvious. The body and face of a thug combined oddly with the eyes and attitude of a dreamer or a madman. He became the committee, he was the committee; all eyes were upon him, and the attitude of the other senators suggested a visible retreat into the background. Even when Effingham D'Marcy opened the proceedings by tapping with his gavel and calling the committee to order, the eyes of the audience were not upon him but upon Brannigan. Silas verified this by turning to look at them—and his guess was right. The old ladies and old men, the tourists and curiosity seekers—all of them were watching Brannigan.

“Who will the first witness be, Mr. Counsel?” D'Marcy asked Dave Cann, who rose, swished his hips in a little gesture that was almost feminine, allowed his beady eyes to drift back and forth over the seven teachers, and said flatly,

“Isaac Amsterdam.”

His voice grated unpleasantly. He was pompous without charm, whereas old D'Marcy was both pompous and charming, his voice resonant and scaled by long years of practice to that rising and falling undulation of pitch and tone so often affected by preachers. As MacAllister and Amsterdam took their places at the end of the mahogany table, facing Dave Cann, his assistant and the stenographer, D'Marcy continued.

“Mr. Amsterdam? Then will you raise your right hand, please? In this matter which is now in hearing before the committee, do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“I do,” Ike Amsterdam nodded.

Cann now began the interrogation, twisting his head after each question, so that he could watch the reaction of the senators above and behind him.

“What is your full name, please?”

“Isaac Aldington Van Dobberman Amsterdam,” smiling a little.

“Would you repeat that, please?” asked the stenographer.

He repeated it and then had to spell out most of it. Cann said,

“Are you now employed at Clemington University, Mr. Amsterdam?”

“I was until recently. I am now under suspension, as you no doubt know.”

“Please answer the questions as they are asked.”

“I'll answer them as I see fit to answer them,” he said unexpectedly. “You ask them, young man, and tend to that.” The lights of the television cameras came on suddenly. The chairman tapped with his gavel.

“Please answer the questions directly,” the chairman said.

“Until you were suspended, in what capacity were you employed, Mr. Amsterdam?”

“I was full professor of astro-physics, Mr. Cann—”

“Would you spell that, please?” the stenographer said. Amsterdam spelled it out, and then there was a little interval of silence, and then Ike Amsterdam gravely added, “The study of the various phenomena and the physical properties of celestial bodies.”

“And how long have you held that position—” Cann's voice trailed off, caught in indecision concerning titles.

“I have functioned in one position or another at Clemington for thirty-two years. Before that, young man, I spent three years at Antioch and seven years at the University of Chicago. I detail this because I want you to reflect on what it means to devote a long lifetime to the study of science and the teaching of youth—to have it knocked into a cocked hat by a pack of irresponsible—”

The gavel hammered away. Dave Cann hammered on the table with his fist, like a child in a tantrum. The cameras hummed. Through it Brannigan spoke for the first time, his voice throaty, almost lazy, yet peculiarly penetrating,

“This is not a soap box, Professor Amsterdam. If you came here prepared to make communist speeches, disabuse yourself of the idea!”

“I came here because I was subpoenaed, Senator Brannigan.”

“Then try to behave like a witness and a loyal citizen of this country—if you are one?”

“More loyal than many who preach loyalty.”

“And does that include membership in the Communist Party, Professor Amsterdam? Are you a member of the Communist Party?”

“I won't answer that question,” Amsterdam said. “It is no concern of this committee, no concern of yours, Senator Brannigan, what party I belong to!”

“For God's sake, cite the Constitution,” MacAllister whispered hoarsely.

“You will either answer the question or be held in contempt,” Brannigan said.

“I will not answer the question. I have certain rights specified by the Constitution, rights guaranteed in the First and Fifth Amendments.”