“Why haven’t the FBI asked me themselves?”
“Because your wife killed herself in a bathtub.”
Billy’s strange feeling of relief returned. All taboo subjects were being raised at once. He almost felt loved.
“The FBI stood down temporarily,” Wilkie said. “Hannah bought you a short space of time before Kallenbach is cashiered by either the FBI or Moscow. If you don’t move in one direction or the other, then you will be indicted as an accomplice.”
“Let’s assume that’s true,” Billy said, turning back to Hillsinger. “Why should I deal with you instead of directly with FBI and/or the CIA?”
“If you go to them naked,” Hillsinger said, “they’ll automatically assume you’re under Kallenbach’s control.”
“I might take my chances.”
Hillsinger laughed.
“For a while there,” he said, “both the FBI and CIA thought I was under KGB control because Kallenbach called my house once. What chance do you have?”
“Same as you, I expect.”
“They know me. More important, they know that you’re my wife’s lover. They are in the business of understanding leverage.”
So, Billy thought, it was all out. He had been grotesquely overmatched all along. What kept him from capitulating right away, though, was the black cloud that had floated in his mind for years—the possibility that Hillsinger had informed on Hannah in the first place. On present evidence, he was more than capable of it.
“Tell me something,” Billy said.
“This offer is not negotiable.”
“John,” Billy said, turning to Wilkie, “who really sent you to us in Harlem in ’55? Who told you about the Board of Education summons that time you asked Hannah to resign?”
“If I tell you that,” Wilkie said, “do we have a deal?”
“I hesitate,” Billy said, “because that same person could also have told the FBI about Hannah’s Communist ties in the first place.”
“You think I’m playing both sides,” Hillsinger said. “Fair enough. The fact is that I told Wilkie about the Board of Ed summons.”
“You?”
“A contact at the FBI reached out to me, and I called Peregrine.”
“That was kind of you,” Billy said.
“It wasn’t.”
“How did they know about her in the first place?”
“Hannah was mentioned,” Hillsinger said, “in an informant’s report from 1947. However, she had enrolled in the Communist Party under her maiden name and therefore was listed in the reports as Hannah Blackwell. For a time, that protected her because her employment record with the School Board was under Hannah Quick. Remarkably, no one at the FBI made the connection. By the way, the informant who named her, ironically enough, was Bobby Sheppard, now a defector to East Germany but at the time a cartoonist. Later on, famously, he was a substitute teacher at Hannah’s school. When Sheppard defected, they reopened all of his old Harlem reports, and the penny dropped.”
Billy looked at Hillsinger for a moment. Their entire history suggested that this man was his enemy, but his strongest instinct now was to put himself in Hillsinger’s hands. Billy took a notebook and pen from a drawer, and sat down at the table.
“No,” Hillsinger said. “Handwriting can be traced.”
Billy stood up again, left the room, and returned with a typewriter and a stack of paper. He typed out a full page of names and addresses next to dollar amounts. There were twenty-two entries in all.
“I’m impressed,” Hillsinger said.
“All of it was in cash. If anyone asks, I’ll deny everything.”
Hillsinger looked at the list.
“These names are obviously aliases,” Hillsinger said, “but I should warn you that if even one of these entries is completely fictitious—i.e., if you are just making people up—I will know that, and our deal will be off. Also, if you alert Kallenbach to having given me this information, I will know that, too, and our deal will be off.”
“Understood,” Billy said.
Hillsinger left through the kitchen door and Wilkie followed, apologetically. Billy put the cast-iron pan in the oven for a few minutes to finish the steak. He was left with the clear impression that Jim Hillsinger had just traded his wife to him for a list of names.
87
The Old Man’s funeral was the next day. The family walked out the back door in a loose procession to the graveyard, which lay between the back pasture and the woods. At the top of the hill, Catta stood just behind a half-circle of people in the bright sun around a hole dug in the midst of the other headstones. The names on the stones were familiar: Hillsingers and Quicks and the minor offshoots. It was the kind of day his grandfather had loved, the sun was hot and the wind cool. Those days, he had said, confuse the body but clarify the mind. This gathering, these surroundings, even the idea of a service—it was all ridiculous when measured against his grandfather’s outsized rage and jubilation, the sheer force of his presence. That pine box could never hold the Old Man for five seconds, let alone for eternity.
Look, Catta, his mother had said to him that morning when he walked into the Hill House, scrubbed, brushed, wearing a borrowed tie. His mother’s hair was all pulled back, and she wore a black dress with an exploding white flower pinned to her chest.
Cyrus found us peonies, she had said.
Next to the grave, Cyrus and his sons, Matthew and Mark, and Edward Peck lowered the pine box into the earth using long ropes. They each held one end, and the casket was balanced on the ropes between them as they let them out hand over hand in unison. The Episcopalian minister from Jennings read out the service. “In the sure and certain hope of resurrection,” the minister said.
What do you know about it? Catta thought.
The day’s perfection and maybe the silent procession up the hill, with his own father coming last, were the only parts of this that were worthy of the Old Man. They should have thrown him into the sea.
Billy Quick arrived late and stood next to Catta with his girls.
“What’s in there?” Catta’s little cousin Barbara whispered to Billy, pointing at the casket.
“That’s Mr. Hillsinger,” Billy said.
The long ropes at last went slack, and Cyrus and Edward Peck pulled them back up. The minister from Jennings invited anyone to step forward and throw a shovelful of earth on the box. His father did it, but no one else. Lila turned halfway round, smiled, and then bent down and whispered something to Isa, who walked back and took—not Catta’s hand, as he was expecting—but the hand of little Barbara Quick, who stood next to him. Billy smiled, and the two girls stood there, at the edge of the circle, arms entwined, looking at the cows with their laughing bells.
88