August 1948
Over the next few days Hiss showed the world how he was going to beat me. He was blazingly articulate, dignified, and kept a sharp eye on the mood of the room. He knew this wasn’t a legal trial but a testing of the political waters. He didn’t need to prove anything, only stay in the ring long enough for the press to get bored. I sat with Pat every night, going over the facts, talking about the performance, looking for the angle.
Another long afternoon ended with yet another round of yes-you-did-no-I-didn’t, and I followed the crowd out into the Commodore’s lobby, which was full of reporters and assorted hangers-on. I was shuffling through, nodding to well-wishers, when I saw Alger Hiss in angry conversation with a small, dark-haired woman. She laughed and he turned to go, brushing right past me.
I’d expected him to be holding forth to reporters, taking advantage of the day’s rhetorical gains, as he’d done on previous days. Instead he was almost shoving his way through the crowd, his features rigid in what looked for all the world like panic. I watched him cut through the mob, walking straight-backed and serious. On an impulse, I fell in behind him.
“Mr. Nixon? Mr. Nixon?” a man called after me. Tall, with a long face; it was the man who’d stood at the back of the hearing room. A reporter? I quickened my pace, keeping Hiss in view. I followed him out the door, expecting to see him hail a cab, but instead he rounded the corner and turned uptown. I knew he lived in far-off downtown. Where was he going?
There were a hundred reasonable answers—a doctor’s appointment, a drink with friends. I should have let him go but I couldn’t. I wanted to know what sort of person had been glaring at me across a room. I wanted to know, once and for all, if I was persecuting an honest man or a traitor.
He stopped abruptly, so much so that a large woman behind him almost walked into him. He studied a window display with what seemed like unnatural attentiveness. What was he looking at? Flustered, I stopped where I was and did the same a block behind him. A women’s shoe store, as luck would have it. How did they walk in those things? I glanced ahead just as he glanced back, and our eyes seemed to meet, but his face registered no recognition. In another minute he moved on. I passed the window he’d been looking at—a florist?
We went on like that for half an hour. Every four or five blocks he’d stop for a moment. Once he turned left and I hurried to follow. Three more turns and he’d circled the block. It was my first time following anyone, but were all people so suspicious?
We ducked and dodged through the late-afternoon crowd of gray-suited men and he led me five, then ten, then twenty blocks up Lexington Avenue, past the long, curving Buicks and Chevys of that year, past the elegant young men who’d gotten all those law jobs I’d applied for. I sweated through my shirt in the August heat. Plenty of time to think about what I’d say if he picked me out of the crowd. Should I feign an attack of conscience? Probably not. He was a lawyer and knew perfectly well how to make a circus out of it the following day.
Any real political operator would have had a private investigator do this. Jack Kennedy would have, Kennedy who was no doubt in the Hamptons while I straggled up Lexington Avenue in an ill-considered gamble for political gain. I already knew I was making a fool of myself. If I could just resolve what exactly Hiss was, at least I’d know which kind of fool.
Hiss was odd, damn it. His brittle demeanor, his strange, rigid unwillingness to acknowledge a man who obviously knew him well. And now this paranoia. He was under terrible pressure, anyone could see that, but what was its nature? A Soviet contact, a mistress, a hidden illness?
The shadows were getting longer as the sun went down over the Hudson, the moment when the north–south avenues were half in darkness, and the east–west streets became, briefly, tunnels of golden light. At Seventy-First Street he stopped, his long spindly shadow in front of him. He glanced back once before turning into a side street, and for a moment I was sure he’d seen me. It wouldn’t have been hard; I was puffing, red-faced, and squarely in the middle of the sidewalk. But he missed me or else he covered seeing me extraordinarily well.
I rushed to the spot where he’d turned and then hesitated, evening pedestrians streaming past me. He could be standing just around the corner, ready to confront me. No way to tell. I nerved myself and stepped into the side street just in time to see Hiss’s tall dark figure turning into a distant doorway. I hurried after him, trying to keep a fixed sense of which door it was.
It was an unremarkable building, brick, six stories. A sign above the lintel called it THE WEXFORD. I peered in at a tiny lobby: linoleum floor, stairwell, and a dark lift. Apartments or office building? I slipped inside and heard Hiss’s footsteps moving upward and out of reach. Was I really doing this? I had come this far. I pulled my shoes off and gingerly scrambled up the slippery marble steps in my frayed socks, past identical floors of identical hallways, doors receding in the distance. The footsteps stopped on the fifth floor and I stopped on the stairwell beneath, panting. I smelled pencil shavings, mimeograph liquid, old cigarettes. Whatever the mystery was, I was close to it.
It occurred to me fleetingly and too late that there might be actual danger here. If Chambers was right, there were people in the United States in 1948 who were sworn to a foreign power and ready to act against Americans. What if Hiss really was a secret agent? Would he kill to keep his secrets? He might. He could be executed for treason if caught. Communists were murderers and assassins, everyone knew that. I thought of the Czech foreign minister who had leaped or been pushed from a lavatory window out into the early-morning air, pictured vividly the few agonizing moments before he struck the pale stone streets of Prague.
I moved up a few more steps to look down the corridor. Hiss had stopped and was opening the last door on the left. It swung shut behind him. I crept close enough to read the number 519 on the door, cheap wood with a frosted-glass window sealing the mystery behind. I could hear Hiss moving around inside. Shuffling papers, typing. What now? The other offices seemed to belong to accountants, notaries, mail-order firms. The fourth floor was the same.
I walked away and came back and nothing had changed. I could feel in my gut just how bad an idea this was but couldn’t tear myself away now that I was so close. I thought about what I could do if I had proof of treason. Who could ignore me then?
The phone rang, and I heard Hiss pick up and begin speaking quickly, angrily, like a man at the end of his patience. I was leaning in closer trying to make out the words when he hung up and his footsteps came rapidly toward the door. I froze in embarrassment, stood there in the bare hallway as the doorknob rattled and the door swung open. I stepped back to avoid being hit in the face. What could he possibly think when he saw me? Words rose to my lips—an apology or a protest or an accusation, I’ll never know. Then the door began to swing closed and I saw Hiss’s narrow back. He was striding angrily away from me toward the stairs. I stared after him, flooded with adrenaline and animated by a strange idea. The door was still open; the answer to all my questions was just inside.
What I did next came from no conscious plan—my natural inborn genius for bad decision-making came to the fore and I made an uncharacteristically athletic and completely soundless leap forward, then lunged sideways through the closing door and into the unlit office beyond. The door swung to and clicked shut behind me. After that instant of frantic motion, the world became utterly still.
I stood in a small office consisting of one room with a single window fogged with dust that looked out onto an air shaft. I stood in the pale gray light, breathing hard from the sudden exertion, waiting for the moment Alger Hiss would come back. It was so perfectly possible—a forgotten wallet, a scrap of paper, anything at all. There would be nowhere to hide and no possible way to explain, but it was too late to think of that now.
And what had I found? It didn’t look like a lawyer’s office. A professor’s, perhaps, an antiquarian of a dozen disciplines.
A chipped wooden desk overflowing with papers; four high, overfull bookshelves crammed with old books, binders, and what seemed like small statuary; two gray metal filing cabinets. The walls were covered in papers of every description: maps, star charts, gravestone rubbings labeled with names of various New England towns.
The window was shut tight. It was still warm from the day’s heat. I breathed in the smells of old books and the sweat of a stranger working long hours in a tiny space. I carried a book to the window where I could read the title. An Englishman’s Solitary Walk Through the Ural Mountain Regions and the Dire Events There Witnessed. In succession I pulled down a heavily annotated copy of Bradford’s History of Plimoth Plantation, A Speculative Glossary of Early Etruscan, and the more recent Burgess Shale Anomalies: An Alarmist View, which bore the stamp of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. I leafed through that one, looking at fanciful reconstructions of animals with five eyes and disturbing symmetries. On the desk, mimeographs of scholarly works on geology, linguistics, paleontology. What kind of spy was Alger Hiss, exactly?
Finally, rummaging in the drawers, I discovered a notebook marked January–August 1948. A diary. The handwriting within was barely legible, and it grew more ragged as the account went on.
It is with the greatest trepidation that I now set down the disturbing events of the past three years and of my visit to the place known as the Pawtuxet Farm. But I question whether the world should know of this. Perhaps the veil of benevolent illusion that clouds our common understanding of the universe should remain undisturbed, for having seen these awful sights I shall never again sleep untroubled.
What was he getting at? More philosophical meanderings followed, none of which seemed too relevant. I turned the pages, looking for incriminating passages…since earliest childhood I have been susceptible to morbid tendencies of the mind…Was he a psychiatric case? That would explain a lot. The documents provided proved susceptible to the cryptographic methods of the ancients but the phrases I laboriously revealed created in me a nameless discomfort, a foreboding of…Jesus, this guy and his discomforts. Was he a spy or wasn’t he? I skipped ahead.
My newfound partners supplied me with promising information, but could they be trusted? The Smiling Woman in particular seemed capable of any violence or subterfuge in pursuit of her own interests, whatever they were. I had embarked down a dark and dangerous path in search of the truth but I couldn’t stop. All thought of a socialist future had ceased to concern me. I did my errands as usual but the abominable truth hinted at in that gentleman farmer’s writings were a more pressing concern. Could the two letters truly be in the same hand, a century and a half apart? What strange materials had arrived under cover of darkness on a Burmese sloop? And why had the Department of Defense issued a quarantine order?
Better! But it wasn’t a smoking gun. And his weird obsession with old letters didn’t add to the picture of a master conspirator.
I proceeded to the central building of which the letters had spoken, this one stone rather than wood or metal. I crept inside in search of the source of those awful cries, still feebly hoping Whittaker had been wrong. I don’t mind saying my hand trembled as it held the flashlight. The door seemed to have been damaged by an indescribable…
Enough already! I turned over more pages. Photographs of State Department documents. Cargo manifests coming through Boston Harbor. Aerial surveillance photographs showing a row of long white buildings in desert terrain, time-stamped a few months ago. Numerous documents in Cyrillic characters, meaningless to me. I picked up the last few pages.
I was stunned. I now must question everything that has gone before. Did the Soviets even care about the information I supplied them with? Did Moscow orchestrate this hideous journey? Or has [a name here was crossed out] forced me to risk my reputation and perhaps my fucking sanity for her own…
Finally. I had no idea what the rest of it meant, but crazy Alger Hiss was a damned Communist. I glanced around, unwilling to leave the treasure-house just yet. I copied down a phone number I saw written on a scrap of paper. I searched for a few more minutes until I discovered a spare key to the office in the back of a drawer.
As long as he didn’t know I’d broken in, he’d leave everything where it was and ready for my return. The important thing was, there would be an absolute triumph in the press. I didn’t even need to feel bad about it because Alger Hiss was a dirty Commie spy. Dick Nixon was a hero.