The audience had split into two camps, half of it booing angrily, the other half laughing and applauding. The congressman was hammering the gavel sharply and shouting 'Remove this man from the microphone,' but Petrosian's voice was still coming over the uproar. 'There are three hundred names on it, people like Gary Cooper and Daryl Zanuck at the top.'
The security men, big hulks of overweight menace, were bearing down. Petrosian stood up. At the door, he glanced back at the scene of bedlam he had created. Mr Arkansas was still hammering at the desk. Dodds-Himmler was staring through his steel-rimmed spectacles at the physicist as if he had just landed from a flying saucer. The nervous twitch in Alvarez's cheek was in full swing. Half a dozen reporters were scribbling furiously.
Powerful hands gripped Petrosian's elbows. His last view of the room was the clock. The interview, it had seemed to him, had lasted a gruelling three or four hours. He was astonished to see that it had taken only twenty-five minutes.
In the corridor, Lev was startled by a sudden blaze of popping flashlights. He found himself wedged in by a scrum of reporters. He pushed his way along the corridor, answering a babble of questions as politely as he could. In the playground, near the school entrance, another movie camera had been put in place.
As he drifted towards the street, dragging the entourage, a taxi stopped and disgorged a man and woman. The man was small, round-faced and nearly bald. The woman was about thirty, with long dark hair and dressed in a long green coat. She took the man's arm and they walked unnoticed in the direction of the school. It was some moments before Lev recognized her, but when he did the reporters and the microphones and the gabble faded away, and a lump rose in Lev's throat. Their eyes met briefly as they passed. Contact was impossible. She gave a brief, wan smile and then was gone, and Petrosian thought that, apart from a little extra weight around the hips and a few wrinkles around the eyes, Kitty had changed little in eight years, and as he fought back the tears he realized that he had always loved her and always would.
'You bloody fool,' Brogan said for the fourth time in an hour.
'I'm in love with your wife, Max,' said Petrosian, smiling over at her. She raised her eyebrows and rattled a skillet onto the big electric hotplate. 'It's her crawfish pie,' said Petrosian, helping himself to more.
'Then you'd better fill up on it. You won't get any where you're headed.'
A black waitress came in through the swing door, carrying a pile of plates on each arm. 'Nummer Four wann bare an fraid aigs an oyster po-boy with dirty rice, the main in One say is yawl gone fishin for ma baked grouper, an Three doan finish their bean stew,'
'Gombee faive mins for the grouper,' Mary Brogan called back. She poured Southern Comfort into the skillet, shook it, and flames leapt towards a burned-black patch in the ceiling.
Max waved his arms. 'Some grand gesture that achieves nothing, as in zilch, as in a big round frigging zero. What the hell got into you, Lev? A good career down the tubes and maybe a year in some godawful pokey.'
'Stuffed with queers and sadistic wardens,' Petrosian suggested.
'Why did you do it, Lev? Why did you throw away your future?'
Petrosian sipped at the Coca-Cola. 'Those creeps just got up my nose.'
'Lev, maybe you can afford the grand gesture, but I have kids to get through school. And what if people start to boycott this place? All it needs is some American Legion redneck to hand out leaflets at the door and we might as well rename this place The Commie Diner.'
'Mary's not a communist, is she?'
'Come on, Lev, what the hell has that got to do with anything? Association is all it takes.' Max's expression was pained.
Lev said, softly, 'Out with it.'
There was an unbearable stress in Brogan's voice. 'Look, Lev, I'm sorry. But maybe you shouldn't come around for a while. You know — career. Mary and the boys.'
Lev nodded sadly. 'I understand fully, Max. Don't worry about it. Nothing in our friendship says you have to stand up to the bad guys like Gary Cooper in High Noon. I'll stay away awhile.'
The relief was palpable. Brogan extended his hand and Lev shook it silently. The Texan looked quizzically at his friend. 'I finally get it.'
'What's that, Max?'
'Your testimony to these creeps. It was the absolute truth. You really do come from Saturn.'
15
The Super
'Don't stop,' Stefi ordered.
The Chinese take-away had grown cold in the kitchen, and Romella's voice was becoming strained with the translation. Stefi had found a long, silk dressing gown with a dragon motif in one of Doug's wardrobes and was wearing it over yellow pyjamas. She was sitting on the floor with her legs folded underneath her. A black marble clock, all Victorian angels and curlicues, was about to strike one a.m.
'All this red scare stuff,' Romella asked. 'Was there any substance to it?' The swollen flesh around her right eye had developed a yellowish-green hue.
'It was before my time,' Findhorn said. 'I think the hysteria peaked in the 1950s. You know, it was a sort of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers thing. Your neighbour may look just like you but his mind may be under alien control.'
'Or her mind,' Stefi said. She was resting her head wearily on her hands.
'But surely it wasn't all hysteria, Fred. The communists wanted a world ruled by Moscow. And there were spies. Hell, we've just been reading about Klaus Fuchs.'
'Sure there were spies, but the witch-hunters didn't find them. Their success rate was practically zero. Imagine shooting your neighbours at random on the off-chance that one of them might be a spy. With all that misdirected effort, I suspect the McCarthy era was a golden age for the KGB.'
'What about Petrosian?' Stefi asked. 'Was he really a spy? And why are people fighting to get their hands on the diaries? Why do they want to kill you and what's in the diaries worth millions and —'
'Okay. Stefi wants her ten per cent. Read on, Romella.'
Petrosian's habits were those of a quiet and studious bachelor. In the evening he would take something easy out of the icebox and stick it in a frying pan. While it was frying he would pour himself a Martini. He would eat whatever it was, and watch whatever was on his small black-and-white television set, without paying much attention to either. The rest of the evening would be spent reading, writing or marking student exercises. On Fridays, however, he let his hair down: he ate in Mary's kitchen, and played five-stud with Max and friends until the early hours, generally winning enough to pay for the beers he brought along.
But that was before the loyalty trials. Now a barrier, invisible and yet almost tangible, had come between Petrosian and his acquaintances.
This Friday evening, having had a last supper in the Sweet and Tart, he was sipping a cold beer on his porch, a light sweat on his brow and arms. It was a sultry thirty-two degrees. Down the road, through an open window, Ella Fitzgerald was 'Eating Baloney on Coney', but she was having problems being heard over the insect night life and a distant yelping dog.
Tonight, Lev had put his normally restless mind on hold; mentally drained, he was finding simple pleasure in watching a near-full moon drift behind the willow tree in his neighbour's garden. Satchmo took it through the branches and into a starry sky. The dog was still yelping.