The Thief of Time

by John Boyne

  Stina laughed, for Dorothy had uttered the phrase affectionately, rubbing her arm in a friendly manner as she spoke. Another habit of Dorothy’s was her random decisions to take a naif and forge that person in her own likeness. ‘You mustn’t mind me fawning all over your husband,’ she exclaimed. ‘But I’m the writer and without me he hasn’t got a show.’

  ‘Of course, Lee is the writer too,’ I added, teasing her gently. ‘And who among us can imagine The Buddy Rickles Show without Buddy Rickles himself, eh?’

  ‘Come with me, Stina, if that is in fact your real name,’ said Dorothy mischievously, winking at me as she took my wife’s arm and led her away. ‘I want to introduce you to a young man who I’m sure you’ll fall hopelessly in love with. And just think of the alimony you’ll be able to demand off this fellow when you finally cut him loose. Why, he must be getting ready to draw his pension any day now.’

  If only she knew, I thought, but felt pleased that she was going to introduce Stina around as it would have been ridiculous for a husband to introduce his wife to everyone in the room. Better for the hostess to do it and make something of a show of it. Stina would enjoy it, people would get to meet her and Dorothy would feel that she was performing one of her official functions.

  I made my way to the French windows and glanced outside, pleased to see Rusty and Buddy there – such American names, I thought – with an older couple, all of whom were engrossed in conversation. I decided to pester them and coughed slightly as I made my way through the doors. The lawn of the Jacksons’ house stretched out magnificently before me and the thin spotlights on either side sent a shiver of brightness on to the central fountain that illuminated it and made it a thing of beauty. The sound of trickling water, always a favourite with me, seemed perfectly right in the cool night air and I was glad to see that, rather than giving me an irritated look for pressing my way into the conversation, Rusty looked pleased and beckoned me forward.

  ‘Matthieu, there you are, good to see you,’ he said, shaking my hand.

  ‘Hello Rusty, Buddy,’ I said, nodding across at him and waiting for the introductions to the other two people who stood by my side, twitching nervously.

  ‘We were talking politics,’ said Rusty. ‘You’re a man of politics, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, barely,’ I said. ‘I try not to keep up. I find that whenever I involve myself in current affairs they drag me into their lair and make a prisoner of me.’ There was a silence and I wondered whether I should leave the rhetoric to Dorothy. ‘I keep myself to myself,’ I added quietly.

  ‘Well, we were just talking about McCarthy,’ said Rusty, and I groaned.

  ‘Do we have to?’ I asked. ‘We’re not at work now.’

  ‘We have to because it’s important,’ said Buddy firmly, which surprised me as I did not take him for a man with any political views whatsoever. Indeed, it would have surprised me if he could have named the occupant of the White House, let alone his state senators or congressmen. ‘If someone doesn’t act now, it’s going to be too late.’

  I shrugged and looked at the man and woman standing to my left and they both, as one, bowed courteously, as if they were Japanese, or I was a king. ‘Julius Rosenberg,’ he said, extending a hand towards me which I gripped tightly. ‘My wife Ethel.’ She reached forward and kissed my cheek, which was unexpected, but I liked her for it, particularly when she blushed slightly in its wake.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Matthieu Zéla. I’m one of the producers on The -

  ‘We know who you are,’ said Mr Rosenberg quietly, and he tapped his fingertips together quickly in a gesture which threw me off guard. I looked at Rusty, who immediately began talking again.

  ‘Look,’ he said, returning to his conversation, ‘I guarantee you that McCarthy will have Acheson’s head on a spike by Christmas. Metaphorically speaking, that is.’ We all laughed; given the chance, we suspected that Senator Joseph McCarthy would have eliminated the metaphor. ‘He needs support. Now, the question is, will Truman support him?’

  ‘Truman can barely support his local football team,’ muttered Buddy predictably, but I disagreed. I had never met President Truman and knew nothing of him save what I read in the newspapers and saw on the television but I took him for an honest man and one who would stand by his friends.

  ‘Look at Alger Hiss,’ said Mr Rosenberg after I had expressed this opinion. ‘Did he support Alger Hiss?’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s a very different case,’ I said. ‘It was up to Acheson to support Hiss, not Truman, and that’s exactly what he did.’

  ‘Which is why old Joe is getting ready to hang him out to dry,’ said Mrs Rosenberg in a deep voice, much deeper than her husband’s or any of ours for that matter. Indeed, the voice boomed out from so deep within her chest that I wondered whether she was indeed a woman at all. We all stopped talking and looked at her as she gave us her version of the Hiss case, a long and involved monologue which I suspected she had delivered on more than one occasion in the past.

  Her version of the events ran something like this: Alger Hiss had worked in the state department and had been recently convicted of espionage in a disturbing display of what the country could do when it got its teeth into something it feared. There was a growing feeling in Washington – we heard of it all the time – that communists were lurking at the heart of every major business, corporation and government department in the land, including the entertainment industry – especially the entertainment industry – and Joe McCarthy was making it his personal campaign to expose them, or to tag innocents with the name of Red. Ethel Rosenberg, while not an intimate of Hiss’s, had known him well enough to know that his only crime was lying at his first trial, a perjury which led to his conviction at the second, and believed that McCarthy would destroy the country through his crusade. Of course, both she and her husband were prominent communists – they admitted as much to us that night – and I suspected that their fanatical hatred of the House Un-American Committee was in itself McCarthyism by a different name.

  ‘It was that Californian congressman who did for Hiss,’ said Mr Rosenberg. ‘Everything would have been all right if it hadn’t been for that slimy little toad.’

  ‘Nixon,’ said Rusty, spitting out the name of the then little-known representative.

  ‘Now he’s as tied up with McCarthy as anyone and they’re out to get Acheson and the minute they do is the minute we all end up in jail.’

  ‘What’s Acheson got to do with it?’ I asked innocently, proving that I really hadn’t been paying attention to the times, for Dean Acheson was Truman’s secretary of state. He had defended Hiss after his arrest, to his considerable political and indeed personal peril, stating to reporters that, whatever the outcome of the trial, he would not turn his back on him, adding that his own friendship was not easily given and even less easily withdrawn. Naturally, both Nixon and McCarthy had had a field day with that one.

  ‘But I fail to understand why we need to involve ourselves in this,’ I said naively. ‘I’m sure the senator is a passing figure. He will have his day and, like any day, night will fall upon it.’

  Buddy laughed and shook his head as if I was an idiot and my eyes narrowed as I looked at him, wondering what exactly I was missing here. Rusty took me by the arm and steered me back indoors to the party as the troika behind me melted back into one.

  ‘Look, Matthieu,’ he said, ushering me to a corner where he spoke in a controlled, quiet voice. ‘There are those around you who are not communists but who will not stand by and let McCarthy do to their careers what he’s done to others’. You’ve seen the blacklists, you’ve -’

  ‘In the motion-picture industry, certainly,’ I protested. ‘But us?’

  ‘It’s coming,’ he said, pointing a finger at me cautiously. ‘Mark my words, Matthieu, it’s coming. And, when it does, we’ll all find out who our true friends are.’ His words chilled me slightly as I felt that I was a mere observer in a greater drama which was unfolding before me – n
ot an uncommon feeling for me – and I stood there, swallowing nervously, as he walked away.

  ‘You know what Hugh Butler said about Acheson?’ he asked me in parting, standing a few feet away from me now. I shook my head. ‘After Acheson defended Hiss, he stood up in the senate and virtually exploded, shouting “Get out! Get out! You stand for everything that has been wrong in the United States for years!” That’s what’s spreading around here, Matthieu. Not a fear of communists or Reds or whatever you want to call them. Plain old rhetoric, that’s what. You shout loud enough and forceful enough and sooner or later someone’s gonna come and string you up.’

  He winked at me, turned around and swept majestically into a waltz with Dorothy Jackson without so much as missing a beat. As I turned away I could see his head nuzzling in towards her ear as they danced, his lips whispering, her eyes paying attention to every word he said, analysing them and storing them away to consider later. A shiver ran though me and, for a moment, I recalled the Terror in Paris in 1793. This was how it had started.

  Over the course of the next year or two things grew progressively worse. Many of the writers and actors who I knew to be at the very top of their profession were brought before the HUAC and challenged about their patriotism. Some denied everything and got away with it; some claimed innocence and were jailed anyway; some pre-empted their questioning by making a great show of their Americanism. I recall opening a newspaper one morning during the presidential election at the very start of the witch hunts to see a picture of Thomas Dewey denouncing communism from his latest platform, flanked on either side by Jeanette MacDonald, Gary Cooper and Ginger Rogers, who didn’t allow the fact that she was from the same home town – Independence, Missouri – as Truman affect her rabidly republican, anti-communist viewpoint one iota.

  Stina did quite well at the Los Angeles Times and became a reporter in due course, covering at first tame, local interest stories that the more experienced reporters didn’t want to touch but in time her brief widened and she had the occasional stroke of good luck with regard to the stories she pulled down. She covered the three-month bus strike, focusing not on the politics of the drivers’ complaints, but on those whose lives were affected by it and succeeded in writing some quite moving profiles. She even won a local news award for a series of articles on impoverished schooling conditions in central Los Angeles, and it was around that time that she became interested in television news. Although she had no luck at first, for she refused to work at NBC as she considered she was being offered the position not on her own merits but on mine, she eventually got a spot with a local channel.

  The show had gone from strength to strength but eventually our audience plateaued out and we became as popular as we would ever be. Around this time, The Buddy Rickles Show was nominated for some Golden Globe awards and the whole team attended the dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, looking forward to some respite from the seemingly endless series of news stories and unsubstantiated rumours about what was taking place for our colleagues in Washington, the nation’s capital and supposed seat of justice.

  In the end, we didn’t win any awards, despite our four nominations, and there was a sense of gloom at the table as there was a good chance that the current season would be our last and we would all be looking for work again before very long. Marlon Brando was sitting at the next table, toying with his award for On The Waterfront, and I could hear Jane Hoover trying to draw him on the current spate of inquisitions which were taking place but he wasn’t going to bite; he was polite and gentle but had refused to discuss the HUAC since Elia Kazan’s testimony earlier in the year. I had heard that he was in a state of bewilderment, unable to reconcile a natural loathing for the act with an honest adoration of his mentor, and pitied him for his predicament, for Jane was not a woman who was going to be put off easily. I slipped away to the bar where I found Rusty Wilson drowning his sorrows over his lost awards.

  ‘This is the last time for us, Mattie,’ said Rusty and I winced slightly; he had taken to calling me that in recent times, despite my best efforts to make him stop, and it brought back memories of a time long since past. ‘We won’t be here this time next year, you’ll see.’

  ‘Matthieu, Rusty. And don’t be so pessimistic,’ I muttered. ‘You’ll have a new show. An even bigger hit. You’ll sweep the board.’ Although I was saying this, I didn’t really believe it. Rusty had introduced a number of new programmes to the schedule over the course of the last twelve months and all of them had failed; the smart money was on his being fired before the new season could begin.

  ‘I think we both know that’s not true,’ he said bitterly, reading my mind perfectly. ‘I’m finished around here.’

  I sighed. I didn’t feel like having this conversation go back and forth with his prophecies of doom countered by my optimistic sightings of the future. I ordered us both a drink and leaned back against the bar, surveying the hundreds of people mingling around the dance floor, a veritable Noah’s Ark of celebrities, air-kissing each other and admiring dresses and jewellery. I was a long way from opera houses now.

  ‘You heard Lee and Dorothy have been called,’ he said eventually, and I spun around, slamming my drink on the counter in amazement.

  ‘No,’ I said, my eyes opening wide. At that time, one didn’t need to expand on meaning any more than that; the simple phrase ‘X has been called’ said all that one needed to know about the state of one’s future career prospects.

  ‘Just today,’ he said, downing his whisky in one shot and contorting his face in pain as he did so. ‘They have to fly to Washington in two days’ time to give testimony. So that’s them out of the way. We may as well write the rest of the series ourselves.’

  I considered this latest piece of news, which was about as devastating an event as I could recall. ‘They never said anything,’ I told him, straining my neck to try to see our two writers at their seats at the table. ‘They never mentioned a word about this.’

  ‘Didn’t want to worry everyone, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Tonight of all nights.’

  ‘Still ... this is going to be very dangerous. I mean they’re not going to give an inch, either of them.’

  ‘You know Dorothy,’ said Rusty with a shrug. ‘They’re going to try to tie them in to the Rosenbergs.’

  I laughed. ‘Well, that’s just ridiculous,’ I said. ‘What connection could Lee and Dorothy possibly have to them?’

  He looked at me now in surprise. ‘You don’t remember, do you?’ he asked.

  ‘Remember what?’

  ‘The Rosenbergs. We all knew them. You met them yourself once.’ I looked at him in surprise for it was only after he explained that I recalled the curious little man and woman at the Jacksons’ party a couple of years earlier. Since then, however, they had become something of a cause celebre and their case, although now over, still generated much discussion. They had been brought down after being linked to Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who was found to be passing American atomic secrets to the Soviets. It was claimed that the Rosenbergs were communist spies intent on destroying the US nuclear system while helping develop a more powerful one on the Soviet side. Although it had been a difficult case to prove, the courts, filled with an anti-Red terror, seemed unconcerned about the necessity for such a thing, and convicted them both for treason. Not long afterwards, they were executed as enemies of the state.

  I found it hard to believe that the apparently harmless couple whom I had met at that party had been the now infamous Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and was amazed it had never occurred to me before although, in fairness, I had barely exchanged ten words with either of them.

  ‘So what’s their connection to Dorothy and Lee?’ I asked him and he looked around nervously, afraid that he might be overheard and dragged into the business himself.

  ‘They were friends, good friends,’ he said. ‘The Jacksons aren’t communists but they’ve dabbled in various political groups, certainly. But they’re not Reds. Not at all. More like a couple of
Off Pinks, to be honest. They like to dabble and find out about things but they’re too fickle to ever fully involve themselves. They have a colourful past between them and, if Joe McCarthy brings all that up, that’s the end of them. Not that it will be difficult for him to discover these things. He’s got spies everywhere. You watch. It’s only a matter of time before you and I get called.’

  I considered it. I wondered whether my French citizenship would protect me from the inquiries of the HUAC. In truth, the so-called colourful past of the Jacksons was nothing compared to my own; although I have never been particularly political – for I have witnessed the eventual transience of all political movements – I could not honestly say that I had no contact with any form of different civic system as I had in my time been associated with them all. I was not afraid of what was to come, but it worried me that so many people could find their lives and their careers ended by the zealous mania of one opportunistic man.

  ‘Are you going with them?’ I asked Rusty. ‘To Washington, I mean? For moral support?’

  He snorted. ‘Are you kidding? You don’t think I’ve got enough problems here without being tagged as a Red as well?’

  ‘But they’re your friends,’ I protested. ‘Surely you’ll take your chances in order to be able to show some sort of solidarity to the committee for your friends. You’re in a position of responsibility. If you stand up and say that they’re innocent, then -’

  ‘Listen to me, Matthieu,’ he said coldly, placing a hand on my arm as he dropped the diminutive this time. ‘There isn’t anything in this world which would make me get on a plane and fly to Washington right now. And there’s absolutely nothing you can say here to make me change my mind so I wouldn’t even waste my time trying.’

  I nodded and felt saddened; if this was how he treated two friends whom he had known a lot longer than he had known me, I could tell that there was no chance of his ever showing any loyalty to me either. Our friendship ended at that moment and I turned away from him.