Being reminded of the book she was holding extinguished the tiny spark of fondness she’d been so happy to welcome just now. She found her bookmark—a faded National Park Service ribbon given to her by a park ranger that summer she spent in Maryland as a girl—and flipped back to an earlier page. “A load of manure,” Margaret said. “See if you recognize it: A six-year-old boy, an ardent comic-book reader, fashioned for himself a cape and—quote—jumped off the cliff to fly as his comic-book heroes did. Seriously injured, he told his mother, ‘Mama, I almost did fly!’ A few days later he died from the injuries he had received.”
She held up the book: Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which was to be published next month and which was the basis for the special investigative hearing that Kefauver and Hendrickson hoped to hold in Charlie’s district in April.
“Have you actually read this, Charlie?” she asked. “No footnotes. No endnotes. No citations. Nothing.”
As academics, Charlie and Margaret had both developed healthy skepticism about anecdotes that proved too perfect. A rival of Charlie’s on the Columbia University faculty had been ignominiously terminated when it became clear that he’d massaged details in his book about Joseph Stalin. It had caused something of a stir, since the details that the professor had tweaked—and, in at least two cases, that he seemed to have created out of whole cloth—depicted Stalin’s actions during the Great Purge in an even more horrific light. The professor, a conservative, claimed that the faculty was compromised and was treasonously trying to cover up for their comrade. Charlie agreed that the faculty was jam-packed with Communists and socialists and liberals who didn’t take the evils of Communism seriously, but he happened to side with his pinko colleagues in this case when it came to academic standards.
“I’ve read it,” Charlie said. “And I agree with you.”
The book was filled with shoddy scholarship and twisted interpretations, a conclusion in search of evidence. Batman and Robin were “like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” Superman was a fascist, Wonder Woman a lesbian dominatrix.
“And yet you’re still actually participating in this hearing?” she asked. “Are you really helping them book the Foley Square Courthouse?” She shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t understand how you can be a part of any of this.”
He mumbled something about needing to work with Congress in order to be able to do some larger good. But it didn’t sound any more convincing than all the previous times he’d said it, and the look on his face told her the disappointment on her own devastated him.
Charlie walked into his congressional office just before eight thirty and was surprised to find LaMontagne standing there, smoking a cigarette and examining the various pictures and framed political memorabilia on the wall. Leopold, who had followed Charlie into the office with her ubiquitous clipboard in hand, emitted a sharp gasp of surprise.
“How did you get in here?” she asked. “What the—”
“It’s okay, Miss Leopold,” Charlie said. “Davis LaMontagne, this is Miss Leopold, who runs my office.”
They exchanged terse pleasantries before Leopold, still clearly unhappy about the intrusion, left the two men alone. Since their first encounter at the Alfalfa Club, they’d run into each other several times, never making plans to get together but often ending up in the same corner of a social event, swapping war stories and mocking the various displays before them. LaMontagne had advised Charlie to go along to get along, do what Kefauver and Carlin and others asked him to do. And it seemed to be working, with Kefauver singing his praises in an interview with the New York Herald Tribune and promising to give him a showy role during the comic-book hearings.
Charlie took off his suit jacket and loosened his Brooks Brothers tie while LaMontagne moved to the couch and held out his pack of cigarettes, offering one. Charlie nodded and LaMontagne tossed him the pack of Chesterfields. Charlie used his German lighter.
LaMontagne gestured toward the lighter. “Looks familiar,” he said. “I got one too, plucked it off a dead Jerry. So, listen, I’m here because I know something, and I thought you could maybe bring this information to the right people. But I need your discretion, of course.”
“Of course.” Charlie sat down behind his desk. “How can I help you?”
“A guy who used to work for us…”
“At Janus Electronics.”
LaMontagne nodded. “A few years ago we were told that he was a Communist.”
“In what way? Actively?”
“Exactly—what way,” LaMontagne said. “I don’t really care if someone believes in some pie-in-the-sky notion of equality in theory—we fought alongside Stalin’s army in the war, after all. But no, this was more than watercooler talk. He went to meetings. He distributed literature.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Jackass handed a brochure to one of our clients, who recognized him from a pitch meeting.”
“Pitch meeting?” asked Charlie.
“Yes,” said LaMontagne. “This wasn’t the guy who pushed the pastry cart. This was one of our main guys in R and D.”
“Working on what, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I really need you to keep this between us, Charlie.”
“Of course.”
“Surveillance technology,” LaMontagne confided. “It has commercial applications but the research is much more for the Pentagon and Central Intelligence.”
“Commercial applications?”
“They’re called baby monitors,” LaMontagne said. “Zenith invented them after the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping. A few years ago they introduced the Radio Nurse. When your baby is born, you and the missus will be able to sit in the living room while the sounds of your baby are piped in from his bedroom.”
“One-way, so the baby doesn’t hear you?” Charlie said.
“Right. A good idea, but the ones in the stores right now are clunky and the reception is awful. The signal is sent through your own electrical wiring in your home, so signals get crossed and you might all of a sudden pick up the latest Senators game. Plus, they’re pricey, like twenty bucks each, so they’re not exactly flying off the shelves. But we have a good model that’s about to hit the stores. I’ll get you one.”
“No need, but forget the commercial application—you want Central Intelligence to buy this baby-monitor technology for what? Listening devices at the Soviet embassy?” He’d meant it as a joke, but as soon as he said it, he realized it actually made sense.
“Bingo,” said LaMontagne, and he landed an elegant forefinger on his nose in approval. “But we didn’t trust that the Communist-leaflet guy, Boschwitz—that’s his name, Ira Boschwitz—wasn’t going to tip off his ideological brethren at the embassy. Or, even worse, give them the blueprints. So we fired him.”
“And how can I help?”
“Well, believe it or not,” LaMontagne said, stubbing out his cigarette, “Zenith hired him.”
“And McCarthy’s holding hearings right now on the Army Signal Corps.”
“That’s why I’m in town, they’re going after Leo Kantrowitz today. Zenith fired him as soon as he got subpoenaed.” Charlie had read in the morning paper—indubitably leaked by McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn—that prior to Zenith, Kantrowitz had done classified work for the Army Signal Corps while he was a member of the Communist Party. “But Kantrowitz is small potatoes,” LaMontagne said. “They’re missing the real problem.”
“Boschwitz?”
“Boschwitz.”
“Why haven’t you just gone right to the committee? I’m sure they’d be interested in hearing this.”
LaMontagne lit another Chesterfield. “Our in-house counsel advised us against direct coordination. We’ve attempted other avenues, but so far members of the committee have thought we were just bad-mouthing a competitor. Also we didn’t have any evidence other than anecdotal.”
He withdrew a manila folder from his briefcase and tossed it onto the coffee table in front of Charlie, who picked it up but didn’t open it.
“Are you just bad-mouthing a competitor? Is the fact that he went to Zenith a big part of this?”