Pittman stared at Gable and Sloane, but neither man responded.
“I think you’re opportunists,” Pittman said. “If communism had taken control of the United States, you’d have insinuated yourselves into the highest levels of the new system. But once the Second World War started, communism lost its limited appeal here. The Soviets appeared to be as huge a threat as the Nazis. So you insinuated yourselves into the upper echelons of the State Department. There, you not only jettisoned your former Communist attitudes; you also gained more power by eliminating your competitors, claiming that they were Communist sympathizers.” Pittman thought nervously of Bradford Denning clutching his pistol, struggling up the slope past fir trees, toward the mansion. “In the anti-Communist McCarthy hysteria of the early fifties, you built your careers on the sabotaged careers of other diplomats. Then Duncan Kline showed up and threatened to ruin everything. What did he do? Hold you up for blackmail? Unless you paid him to be quiet, he’d reveal that you were as vulnerable as the men you accused of being Communists, is that it?”
The room became so still that Pittman could feel blood pounding behind his eardrums.
Eustace Gable forlornly shook his wizened head. His tone was a blend of discouragement and disappointment. “You know far more than I expected.” The old man exhaled wearily. “You’ve demonstrated remarkable journalistic skills. That’s why I permitted you to come here-so that I could judge the extent of your knowledge. But you’re wrong.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Duncan didn’t attempt to blackmail us. He didn’t want money,” Gable said.
“Then what did he want?”
“For us to be true to the principles he’d taught us. He was appalled that we’d formulated such stern government policies against the Soviet Union. He wanted us to undo those policies and recommend cooperation between the two countries. It was nonsense, of course. The Soviets had been made out to be such monsters that there wasn’t any way to change America’s official attitude toward them. Any politician or diplomat who tried would be committing professional suicide. No, the only way to build a career was to be more anti-Soviet than anyone else.”
“And after all, your careers mattered more than anything,” Pittman said.
“Of course. You can’t accomplish anything if you’re out of the loop.”
“So you balanced Duncan Kline against your careers and…”
“Killed him,” Gable said.
Pittman tensed, his instincts warning him. It wasn’t Gable’s habit to reveal information. Why was he doing so now? To hide his unease, Pittman frowned toward the obituary he held. “It says here that Duncan Kline died from exposure during a winter storm.” Dear God, Pittman thought. He finally understood. Involuntarily, he murmured, “The snow.”
“That’s right, Mr. Pittman. The snow. Duncan was an alcoholic. When we met him at his cabin, he refused to be budged by our arguments. He insisted that if we didn’t soften our policy toward the Soviet Union, he would expose us as former Communist sympathizers. A blizzard was forecast. It was late afternoon, but the snow was falling thickly enough already that we couldn’t see the lake behind Duncan’s cabin. He’d been drinking to excess before we arrived at the cabin. He drank heavily all the while we tried to reason with him. I suspect that if he’d been sober, we might have had more patience with him. As it was, we used the alcohol to kill him. We encouraged him to keep drinking, pretending to drink with him, waiting for him to collapse. Or so we hoped. I have to give Duncan credit. After a while, even as drunk as he was, he finally suspected that something was wrong. He stopped drinking. No amount of encouragement would persuade him to swallow the scotch we poured for him. In the end, we had to force him. And I have to give Duncan credit for something else-all those years of rowing had made him extremely strong. Drunk and in his sixties, he put up quite a struggle. But he wasn’t any match for the five of us. You helped hold his arms, didn’t you, Winston? We poured the scotch down his throat. Oh yes, we did. He vomited. But we kept pouring.”
Pittman listened, repelled. The scene that Gable described reminded Pittman of the way in which Gable had murdered his wife.
“At last, after he was unconscious, we picked him up, carried him outside, and left him in a snowbank,” Gable said. “His former students and faculty members knew how extreme his alcohol problem was. They thought that the reference to exposure was discreet, since privately many of them were able to learn the true nature of his death. Or what they thought was the true nature-that he’d wandered drunkenly outside in his shirt sleeves and passed out in the snowstorm. No one ever discovered that we had helped Duncan along. We removed all evidence that we’d been in the cabin. We got in our cars and drove away. The snow filled our tire tracks. A relative of his became worried when Duncan didn’t return to Boston after the reunion at Grollier. The state police were sent to the cabin, where they saw Duncan’s car, searched, and found his bare foot sticking out from under a snowdrift. An animal had tugged off his shoe and eaten his toes.”
“And almost forty years later, Jonathan Millgate began having nightmares about what you’d done,” Pittman said.
“Jonathan was always the most delicate among us,” Gable said. “Strange. During the Vietnam War, he could recommend destroying villages suspected of ties with the Communists. He knew full well that everyone in those villages would be killed, and yet he never lost a moment’s sleep over them. But about that time, his favorite dog had to be destroyed because it was suffering from kidney disease. He wept about that dog for a week. He had it buried, with a stone marker, in his backyard. I once saw him out there talking to the gravestone, and that was two years after the fact. I think that he could have adjusted to what we did to Duncan, a bloodless death, falling ever deeply asleep with snow for a pillow, the corpse preserved in the cold, if only the animal hadn’t eaten Duncan’s toes. The mutilation took control of Jonathan’s imagination. Yes, he did have nightmares, although I assumed that after a time the nightmares stopped. However, a few years ago, I was surprised, to say the least, when he began referring to them again. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Instead of being jubilant, Jonathan reacted by saying that the fall of communism only proved that Duncan’s death had been needless. The logic eluded me. But the threat didn’t. When Jonathan began pouring his tortured soul out to Father Dandridge, I felt very threatened indeed.”
“So you killed him, and here we are,” Pittman said, “trying to come to terms with your secrets. Was it really worth it, everything you did to me, the people who died because of the cover-up? You’re elderly. You’re infirm. The odds are that you would have died long before the investigation led to a trial.”
Gable rubbed his emaciated chin and assessed Pittman with eyes that seemed a thousand years old. “You still don’t understand. With all that you’ve been through and with all that we’ve discussed this afternoon, you still somehow fail to understand. Of course I’d be dead before the matter even got as far as a grand jury. I don’t care about being punished. Indeed, as far as I’m concerned, I did nothing for which I deserve to be punished. What I care about is my reputation. I won’t have a lifetime of devoted public service dragged into the gutter and judged by commoners because I eliminated a child molester, a drunkard, and a Communist. Duncan Kline was evil. As a youth, I didn’t think so, of course. I admired him. But eventually I realized how despicable he was. His death was no loss to humanity. My reputation is worth a hundred thousand Duncan Klines. The good I have done for this country is a legacy that I refuse to allow to be smeared because of a desperate act of necessity that protected my career.”