“If you lie, we’ll find out. If you tell the truth now, it will count for you. If you tell half-truths, you’ll dig a deeper hole for yourself.”
Oscar Cohen, who had a habit of wandering in and out of the room and then suddenly planting himself in front of me, where I sat sagging in a chair. He spoke in a soft, gently insinuating voice. “It’s been my experience,” he said, “that the more complicated and bizarre a story is, the most apt it is to be a lie.”
When we left the building we were at an impasse. Newman wanted me back in the morning. There was talk of subpoenas, of a grand jury. I understood none of it. “Listen,” Marty said, hollow-voiced, standing in the dark street, hunting up and down the canyons for a cruising taxi, “I think they’re going to arrest you.”
I grabbed his arm. I had to get close to him so that he could hear my strangled voice. “Arrest me? For what?”
“There’s been a fraud committed in New York State. That’s for what. Either you defrauded McGraw-Hill of a lot of money, or Hughes has perpetrated a fraud by claiming under oath that he never met you and never got the money, or someone defrauded you by posing as Hughes and taking the money. Whichever it is, it’s a crime.”
By the time we reached Marty’s house his brother-in-law, a criminal lawyer, had arrived. So had Frank McCulloch and John Goldman. They had been waiting in the living room for two hours. “You’d better see them,” Marty said.
McCulloch and Goldman jumped up eagerly when I came in, with Marty trailing behind. “We’ve got some photographs,” Frank said. “We think one of these men is George Gordon Holmes.”
The charade had to be played. I leafed through the photographs. I spotted Robert Maheu easily, and one other face looked familiar. It was Gregson Bautzer, a Hughes lawyer.
I dropped the pack of photographs on the table. “None of them is Holmes.”
McCulloch’s face twisted with disappointment. “Take a good look at this one,” he said, again handing me the picture of a grinning, curly-haired man with slightly pop eyes. “Are you sure that’s not Holmes?”
“No way, Frank. I’m positive.”
“That’s John Meier. Goddamit!” McCulloch snapped. “I would have bet a hundred bucks on it.”
“Save your money.” I took a deep breath. “I’ve got something to tell both of you, but strictly off the record.”
They nodded agreement and I told them a brief version of the yarn I had already told twice that evening. “So save your time looking in that direction. Edith is the loyal servant.”
They stared at me, apparently unable to comment. I had only one more thing to say before they left. I knew they were conducting an unofficial joint investigation in order to track down the elusive Holmes as well as verify the meetings between me and Hughes. I had no idea how far they would go, or what resources they had, or what they would turn up, but there was one thing I feared — one thing that had nothing to do with the hoax but everything to do with my life.
“This is off the record, too,” I said. “I’m asking you as a favor to keep it quiet. You may find out, if you’re digging into my Mexican trip, that I wasn’t alone. There was a woman with me named Nina van Pallandt. If Edith finds out —” I shook my head dismally “ — I’m finished.”
The speech had taken some effort, and my voice sounded like gravel rolling down a distant slope. But Frank and John heard, and nodded. I trusted them, which was of course a mistake. They had trusted me, and I had repaid them in poor coin. Turnabout was fair play.
Marty and I stayed up until one o’clock, aimlessly debating what to do. “If you go before a grand jury and you’ve got something to hide,” he said, nervously, “then take the Fifth Amendment. If you’ve only got the truth to tell, tell it.” I had accepted that. I was still unable to tell him the whole truth. Had he not been my friend as well as my lawyer, I might have been able to do so; but I would have to confess to more than a hoax and what apparently was a crime — I would have had to confess to duping him personally, involving him and making a fool of him. To me he had never been anything less than loyal. Because I had assumed I could carry out the hoax to the end, and succeed, I hadn’t seen that I was paying him back with what could emerge as disloyalty. My introduction to the Autobiography had virtually dedicated the book to him. The tribute had been genuine, then; now it seemed a mockery.
He woke me at seven the next morning, buzzing my bedroom on the intercom. We met in the living room. Marty’s face was pinched with fatigue. “I don’t think I can help you with this one any more, kid. I’m a civil lawyer and I’m out of my depth. This is a criminal case and you need a criminal lawyer.” Later that day he repeated the statement to the press. To me, he added: “I’ve got you one of the best, a guy named Maury Nessen. He’ll be here in half an hour.”
It was the last time I would ever see Marty Ackerman. In the turbulence and embarrassment yet to come, his friendship was to vanish and turn to bitterness.
When Nessen arrived I was asked to wait in the study while Marty briefed him. Then I was hauled back to the living room. Maurice Nessen shook my hand. He was a slender, good-looking, trim man with unruly hair flowing to his collar. In a stylish, chalk-striped gray suit with a colorful bow tie, he looked as though he had come straight to Marty’s house from graduation exercises at Yale Law School. In fact, he was 45 years old, and he was not strictly a criminal lawyer, but more a litigator of civil cases. Whatever he was, he was my lawyer now. From behind steel-rimmed spectacles his dark eyes seemed to dart in four directions at once.
“Come on,” he said to me. “Let’s go.”
We talked briefly in the taxi on the way to Foley Square, reaching Leonard Newman’s office just before ten o’clock. This time the press was waiting. A mob confronted us with cameras, microphones, notepads; television cables stretched like snakes in all directions. “No comment,” Nessen hissed in my ear.
“I can’t talk,” I hissed back. We fought our way into the building and the press narrowly missed disaster when a waving microphone collided with a cop’s cheekbone. When we had hacked our way to the safety of the lobby, Nessen said: “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The confrontation in the office of the District Attorney lasted for about two hours. He had had no time, Nessen argued, to get more than a few words from his client, and even those words were rarely above a whisper. He came to me where I waited in an outer office.
“They wanted to arrest you,” he said, amazed. “But they finally agreed not to do it. Now they want me to tell you that if you’ll plead guilty, they’ll give your wife immunity from prosecution. Just tell me one thing. Are you guilty of a crime?”
“No,” I whispered.
“I’ve never let an innocent man plead guilty, and I’m damned if I’m going to start now. I’m going to accept a subpoena for you and we’re getting the hell out of here.”
He managed it, and an hour later — after confronting the press once more and confirming what they had already guessed, that Edith was the loyal servant — we were sitting in his office at 55th Street just off Third Avenue. I stared at the East River and the wasteland of Long Island City. I heard Nessen’s voice only dimly. “Go back to Lakeville tonight. I’ll drive up tomorrow with Harold Weinberger — he’s my associate. Get some sleep. Get your story straight. I’m going to ask you a lot of questions and I want a lot of answers. The truth,” he added, almost casually.
Before I left his office I made two telephone calls. I had already strained Marty’s hospitality to the limit and I knew that we would have to find somewhere else to stay. That morning a messenger had delivered a letter to me — it was from an old friend, a lawyer named Philip Lorber whom I had first met in Ibiza some sixteen years ago. He had written: “If you need a place to stay for a while, I have a house in Westport.” I called Phil and as best I could, considering my lack of voice and that I was on the edge of physical collapse, explained the situation.
“You’re going to need more than one attorney in this,�
� he said calmly. “I’ll be in Lakeville tomorrow afternoon by two o’clock.”
The second telephone call was to Edith. “I’ll be back on the night train,” I whispered.
“How did it go?” she asked tremulously.
I was about to say, “All right so far,” but the words stuck in my already crippled throat.
“We’re in trouble,” I said, and let it go at that.
The train jolted and bumped its way through the night toward Lakeville, and I dozed for a few minutes; then woke up in a fright, afraid I would miss the station. At midnight I collapsed into bed, after telling Edith the tale of what had happened in New York.
In the morning she telephoned Rudy Rohr in Zurich, and then Lieutenant Willi Ulrich, who was in charge of the investigation for the Swiss police. She repeated what I had told Leonard Newman: that she was Helga Hughes, and that the money was safe in Switzerland and Spain. Would she come to Zurich? Yes, as soon as the business was finished here in America.
Maury Nessen and Harold Weinberger arrived at noon. Harold was 25, good-looking, bespectacled, with a bushy mustache. Maury wore a duffel coat, an old sweatshirt, and stained blue trousers. Phil Lorber arrived at two o’clock: a grizzled, well built, gray-haired man of fifty-odd, calm, precise, ready to help in whatever way was possible. I greeted him as an old friend. And then the press arrived an hour later. We had already begun the interrogation when the telephone began to ring and the rapping sounded on both front and back doors.
Marty Ackerman’s distressed house servant took me aside. “I can’t keep them at bay, sir. And we have to live here after you’ve gone.”
“Get rid of them,” I said. “Please. Tell them to come back in an hour. Then we’ll go.”
“To Westport,” Phil ordered. “Once they’ve gone we can drive down to my house. You can spend the night there.”
Edith packed hurriedly, dressed Nedsky and Barney, and we piled into the two cars.
I had the feeling of flight, of running away from more than just the reporters who had tracked us down at Ackerman’s country house in Lakeville. Again we were refugees. The landscape was gray under a stone-colored sky. Last week’s snow had already turned black along the edges of the highway, and lay like patches of fungus on the brown fields among the leafless trees. I sat in the front seat of the Volvo, beside Harold Weinberger. Edith and Maury were in the back with Nedsky and Barney. Maury questioned me without letup, from the moment we left Ackerman’s until more than two hours later, when we all pulled up in front of Phil Lorber’s place in Westport.
“What did you and Hughes talk about in Mexico?”
“I already told you,” I croaked back angrily.
“I know you did,” Maury said. “Now tell me again.”
In a barely audible voice I told him once more how I had met Hughes in Oaxaca, how we had flown in Pedro’s private plane to Tehuantepec.
“Let’s go back a bit. These three letters you received from Hughes. You said they weren’t dated, and you stamped them with the date of arrival. Why did you do that?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you stamp them all at the same time or as they arrived?”
“For Christ’s sake, Maury, is this important? Can’t we get to the meat of it?”
Silence for a moment, then Maury’s light, insistent voice once more in my ear. “Didn’t Hughes complain about the secrecy clause in the contract you brought to Puerto Rico?”
“No, he didn’t complain about it. He insisted on it. I told you that.”
“Quite right. So you did.”
More silence, broken by a kind of sobbing inhalation from Edith. I looked in the rearview mirror. She was under terrible strain. It showed in the dark circles under her eyes, in her forced laughter, in Nedsky’s increasing crankiness. I shut my mind to it all and tried to push myself into a kind of trance, to become a vegetable for at least a little while.
But Maury would not let me. He picked at me until I felt myself beginning to bleed as I lied and lied and lied — and knew that I was getting nearer and nearer to the breaking point. I had never noticed before, but now, glancing in the rearview mirror, I did: Maury had teeth like a shark’s, slanted back into his mouth, unusually pointed. I began to hate him. For Christ’s sake, why wouldn’t he leave me alone?
Blessedly, the trip at last ended. Joan Lorber showed us to our room, and I went right to bed. Maury and Harold continued on to New York. Phil Lorber had followed us down from Ackerman’s in his own car. He came to the door and looked in, but Edith put her finger to her lips, indicating that I was asleep. I wasn’t, but I couldn’t face more questions. A good night’s sleep, I thought, and I’ll be able to cope with them again.
No way. Next morning Phil came into the bedroom. Edith was dressed but I was still in bed. I must have looked as weary as I felt. The night had been peopled with demons.
“I’m going up to see my son Brian at school,” Phil said. “It’s visiting day. But before I go, I want to tell you that I’ve been thinking about your story.” He smiled, a little sadly. “It doesn’t hang together. You know, I’ve known you a long time. I’ll give it to you straight.”
“Go ahead, Phil.”
“I think you’re full of shit.”
I lay there in stunned silence for a moment, then felt myself crack wide open.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s a hoax.”
The relief of confession was sweet beyond almost anything I had ever known. Phil Lorber had traveled ten miles up the Connecticut Turnpike toward his son’s school, then turned the car round to return to the house. “I just couldn’t let you go down there alone,” he said. “Call it conscience.”
We drove together to the city and dropped Edith and the two children at the Hotel Chelsea. Then Phil and I went to Maury Nessen’s office at 55th Street.
“Forget everything I’ve told you,” I said to Maury, “and get a good grip on your chair.”
For the next two days and nights, while Maury and Harold Weinberger prodded me with an occasional question, and a confidential secretary took down everything in shorthand, I told the story from beginning to end. I paced back and forth across the pegged pine floor of Maury’s office as I spoke hoarsely, gazing distractedly at the East River forty stories below. And as I talked, I saw how absurd the whole scheme was, how Dick and I had conned ourselves again and again. I saw our own gullibility. And yet beyond the naïveté and stupidity, beyond the vulgarity inherent in the amounts of money involved — beyond all this a certain grandeur had rooted itself into the scheme, and I could still spy a reckless and artistic splendor to the way we had carried it out.
Dick had once said to me that it was an act of anarchy. We were showing up the Establishment, he said, in all its corporate myopia, in all its craven worship of the golden calf. I had shrugged off the notion. It was a hoax, a magnificent jape — and maybe, in the end, a profitable one as well. But I recognized now that it was possible I had indeed taken part in an act of anarchy; I had indeed demonstrated, whether consciously or not, but in the most graphic way I could find, a cool contempt for the underpinnings of American society. Carried away by the euphoria of confession, I almost wanted to cry out: “Sure I did it. And I’m glad I did it. You want me to grovel? I can’t. You want me to feel guilty? I don’t. Because I enjoyed every goddam minute of it.”
But I wasn’t sure that was true; and another, more profound guilt nagged at me. That was Edith’s involvement, and her constant jeopardy. And beyond that lurked the fangs of revelations yet to come.
Throughout the two days and nights the secretary typed a copy of the confession from her shorthand notes. I began filling in the gaps, amending where I had made mistakes, and trying to dredge from memory all the names and dates. The revised version was typed and at two o’clock one morning we were finished.
“Those notes and that first version have to be destroyed,” Maury said.
I shrugged. “Tear them up.”
“Those repor
ters know we’re here. They’d go through the garbage to get that first draft of your statement. We’ll burn it,” Maury decided.
Even at the end, at a time when the mask of tragedy was being offered me, we were stalked by the comic muse. The notes to be discarded filled an entire wastebasket. Maury, Harold, the secretary, and I carried it into the Men’s Room of Nickerson, Kramer, Lowenstein, Nessen & Kamin. The law firm had thoughtfully provided a stall shower for its partners and associates who sweated through the days and nights on stipulations, affidavits, and briefs. Harold Weinberger poured lighter fluid into the wastebasket and Maury dropped a lighted match. The confession blazed merrily.
“You know,” I said, “I’ve had a lot of experience this past year at burning manuscripts. It takes a long time, and it’s not easy. You’ll see.”
Soon the blaze grew dull. Smoke came first in wisps, then in a thick white cloud, from the stall shower. Harold stumbled from the Men’s Room, coughing. In the hallway, the secretary wrinkled up her nose. “Let me poke it,” I said, but I was driven from the Men’s Room within thirty seconds.
I found Maury by the water fountain, his eyes shedding tears behind the glasses.
“Turn on the shower,” he gasped.
Harold, the youngest, blundered through the haze of smoke and found the handle, and the cold water streamed down. It took nearly an hour to reduce everything to charred and soggy pulp. Close to four o’clock in the morning, in the street outside 919 Third Avenue, the job was completed. I dumped the contents through the open grating of a sewer.
“I have a feeling,” Maury said, “that this is the beginning of a law case I’m not going to forget.”
Chapter 20
The Baroness Sings Off-Key
The Hoax Page 38