Blacklist

by Sara Paretsky

  be outraged. That’s what’s happening here: a few parents are fanning the flames of mob hysteria. Do they really want their children’s private thoughts to be the bedtime reading of FBI or INS agents?”

  Beth then took us inside the school so we could watch the parents discuss what they wanted school administrators to do. People were screaming at each other with the hearty venom of a hockey game. An angry man came to the center mike to say his daughter was a student at Vina Fields. “My child’s safety is paramount. I won’t have the school sheltering terrorists because of some First Amendment gobbledygook that puts my child’s life at risk.”

  Other parents jumped into the fray, then Renee Bayard came to the mike. She was still wearing the red dress, which stood out vividly against the gray suits and ties around her.

  “We all want our children to be safe in school, at home, on the streets, in the air. When our children are at risk, we don’t care about law, or justice, or abstractions, we only care about their safety. I’m the same way. And that’s why I don’t want police agents meddling in my granddaughter’s school records. I don’t want some private opinion my daughter put in an essay scrutinized by the FBI to see whether she’s a security risk. Adolescents think in extremes. It’s their nature. If they have to second-guess everything they write or read, then pretty soon we’ll have a country of robots. We won’t have the freethinking, creative young people who have the zest for experiment, even for risk, that makes American business lead the world.”

  The camera cut away during another angry salvo from the man who objected to First Amendment gobbledygook. “That was Renee Bayard, CEO of Bayard Publishing,” Beth said. “Her husband Calvin, a leading First Amendment advocate, fought memorable battles with Chicago lawyer Olin Taverner, who died today at ninety-one. Stay with us after the news for Chicago Talks, when we’ll be discussing Olin Taverner’s life and career. Renee Bayard will describe her husband’s clashes with Taverner in the House of Representatives. For now, I’m Beth Blacksin, live at Vina Fields Academy on Chicago’s Gold Coast.”

  A battery of commercials came on; Lotty muted the sound. “Could the FBI really have put that kid in custody without telling his mother or anyone at the school?” Max was troubled.

  I grimaced. “Morrell just did a story for Margent about a Pakistani

  immigrant who vanished from his Uptown apartment last October. His family searched frantically for him, but it was only after the guy died out in Coo’ hs prison that the Feds told his sons they’d been holding the father for eleven weeks. I did the local legwork for Morrell on that-it seems a neighbor had reported seeing a suspicious-looking van pull up on September 15 with a large box: turned out to be a new toilet, but by then the FBI had moved on, and INS didn’t think that bit of information was relevant.”

  “And this boy? They could do that to a child?” Lotty demanded.

  “He’s sixteen or seventeen. If he really is a terrorist, that’s plenty old enough to be planning something.”

  “So you believe the FBI or whoever it is has a right to turn the school upside down looking for him?”

  “I didn’t say that. Just that in the context of terror, kids younger than he is are making and using bombs. As to whether the Feds have the right-I don’t know what rights this Patriot Act gives them. If he’s an undocumented immigrant, the kid doesn’t have any rights under the new lawbut whether that extends to the place where he worked, well, I guess that’s why First Freedoms jumped in here. To test the act’s limits.”

  Max and Lotty looked at each other. They’d met in London as child refugees from Nazi Europe, where they’d seen their own families and friends arrested and killed without being charged or tried. Neither of them spoke, until Lotty quietly said she’d make me a hot drink to help my cold. When I started to follow her, Max shook his head at me. By the time she came back, with a mug of something soothing and lemony, the interminable weather report and endless commercials were over.

  Lotty returned as Dennis Logan gave his provocative introduction to his interview with Renee.

  “I didn’t realize this was a gossip show, Dennis:’ Renee responded. “It’s been many years since my husband saw Olin Taverner except to say hello. Of course, they grew up in the same milieu and knew the same people; you don’t walk out of a meeting with a senator or a governor just because you don’t like one of his other guests.”

  “But your husband must have felt strongly about seeing the man who tried to ruin him accepted at many of the same political and social gatherings you attended.”

  Renee leaned forward, her heavy brows meeting above her nose. “You know, Calvin and I were so busy building up Bayard Publishing, and then the foundation-looking after the First Amendment shouldn’t have to be such a full-time job, but it is-that we didn’t have time to think about Olin Taverner. Of course, we used to see him at the Symphony or the Chicago Club, but, once he moved into his retirement apartment, he stopped coming into the city. I hadn’t thought about him for a long time.”

  “You didn’t think about him even though some commentators-including your own son-have been urging us to revisit the McCarthy era and see people like Taverner, or Congressman Bushnell, as American heroes, trying to protect the country from internal enemies?”

  Dennis looked as earnest as if he knew or cared what he was talking about: what he really wanted was to provoke Renee into some on-air reaction. But she had her advice to Catherine well in hand: rise above it.

  “I think it’s dangerous when we start to turn people who want to subvert the Constitution into heroes. We need to think especially carefully about that these days, where we’re making it hard to hear any dissent from our current government’s policies. But unlike some of our talk-show hosts and editorial writers, I don’t believe those who disagree with me should be jailed, or hounded out of the country. All I want is for them to respect my right to hold differing views from theirs.”

  “Even though your own son has been among those leading the charge?” Renee Bayard’s smile grew wooden. “Edwards’s essays in Commentary and the National Review haven’t been leading a charge, Dennis. He takes a different tack on the issues than his father and I might-but at least I know that we raised a child who can think for himself. Child-of course, he’s a grown man now, with a daughter Calvin and I are incredibly proud of. She insisted on joining me in the studio tonight.”

  Dennis looked a little sour as the camera moved away from him to a glowing Catherine seated at the corner of the studio. He started talking to force the camera back to his face. “Speaking of jailing people who disagree with us, Renee, people have often wondered how your husband walked away from those hearings without either a contempt citation or a sentence.”

  “There was no reason for Calvin to be in prison. He committed no crime and he was never charged with one. However much our son dis

  agrees with our politics, I don’t believe he would claim his father should be put in prison.”

  “But Calvin was a member of the Committee for Social Thought and Justice,” Logan persisted. “And he refused to answer questions about it to Congress. That interview was shown on television; I found an old copy this afternoon when we were looking for footage on Olin Taverner”

  Renee looked startled as the grainy black-and-white tape began to run. It took us back to the old House hearing rooms, with men in the doublebreasted suits of the day. I recognized Calvin Bayard at once: his lean face, pale hair, even the good-humored smile with which he greeted someone behind him, were much as they’d been when he spoke to my law school class twenty years later. He sat alone at a table facing the committee, not even a lawyer at his side, his long legs stretched out in a pantomime of the man at ease. On a raised dais, six men faced him from behind a nest of microphones.

  Channel 13 had written the men’s names in white above their heads. Olin Taverner, austere, hair combed back from his forehead, looked like the model for the upright public man. In contrast, Congressman Walker Bushnell, the comm
ittee chair, had a face as round as a lollipop; his buzzcut hair turned him into the caricature of a thug.

  Taverner spoke first. “You were at a meeting of the Committee for Social Thought and justice on June 14, 1948, in Eagle River, Wisconsin, were you not, Mr. Bayard?”

  Calvin Bayard chuckled. “I attend a great many meetings, Olin, just as you do. I don’t remember all the names and dates. You must have an amazing calculating machine in your head if you can remember the exact date of meetings that far back.”

  Taverner leaned forward. “We have testimony from other witnesses whose memories are good that you were in Eagle River on June 14, 1948. Do you dispute this?”

  Bayard answered impatiently, “I can’t discuss the matter because I don’t know whether you had testimony or not, and I don’t know who did or didn’t provide it.”

  Taverner slapped the tabletop. “We have reliable testimony that you were at this meeting. Who else was present with you?”

  Bayard hooked his fingers in his belt loops and leaned back in his seat. “Mr. Chairman, when Mr. Taverner and I were boys in rural Illinois, we often found weasels and rats prowling around our henhouse. They like to slide through the cracks under cover of dark. The weasel doesn’t come out in broad daylight and meet you face to face the way a dog will.

  “Now, I wouldn’t like to characterize any of my distinguished friends in the publishing or entertainment industry this way, or even those serving this committee, because every man at the end of the day has to face his own conscience in the privacy of his bedchamber, and my conscience may tell me something different than what yours, or those of my friends’, do. But slithering around under cover of darkness, or under pretense of patriotism, why my dog would know what to do with a creature that acted like that.”

  A gasp went up among the spectators in the committee room. Taverner himself started to shout something, but Walker Bushnell silenced him by reaching across to put a hand over Taverner’s microphone.

  “So you refuse to tell this committee who was at the meeting with you on June 14, 1948,” Bushnell said.

  Bayard looked at him steadily. “Mr. Chairman, the greatest pleasure America’s enemies have is seeing her leaders attack our cornerstone, the right to free speech, a free press, free association. I will not give succor to our enemies by violating those rights.”

  The tape, ended there; the camera tonight flashed back on Renee Bayard. She was dabbing tears away from the corners of her eyes. I felt pretty sniffy myself.

  Dennis Logan said, “That was a fine speech your husband gave, but people are still left wondering why it moved Olin Taverner and Walker Bushnell. After all, your husband was the only person who ever got Olin Taverner to let go once he’d dug his heels in. But Calvin didn’t name names, he didn’t go to prison, he wasn’t even fined. What was his secret?”

  “Poor Calvin, with all the work he did to allow people like you to say whatever you want whenever you want-and all you want is to put him behind bars.”

  “Renee, that isn’t fair, is it? It’s a legitimate question. Now that Olin Taverner is dead, is there any harm in letting us know how your husband persuaded him to leave him in peace?”

  “Calvin always had a great deal of charm.” This time her smile held genuine warmth-even a touch of mischief, which made her seem suddenly appealing. “He charmed me right out of Vassar when I was twenty. He might have been able to charm Walker Bushnell, too, although it would have been heavy work. You’re too young to have known the congressman, weren’t you, Dennis? But I typed up some of the-“

  Logan could feel the interview slipping out of his control and hastily said, “We had hoped for a comment from Calvin on Taverner’s passing, but he wouldn’t come to the phone.”

  The heavy lines settled back in Renee Bayard’s face. “On Olin’s death, you mean? Calvin hates euphemisms for the most common acts of our bodies, and nothing is more common to us all than death.”

  Logan conceded defeat. “When we come back, more on Olin Taverner and the House committee he served, this time with a team of constitutional scholars. Renee, thank you for coming in. I know this can’t have been an easy evening for you.”

  The station shifted to a commercial before Renee’s answer came on. Lotty switched off the set.

  “I’d say game, set and match to the lady,” Max said. “He wanted something that he couldn’t get from her.”

  “It was very moving, that old piece they ran,” Lotty added. “I’d never paid much attention to those hearings. But how extraordinary that their son is betraying them.”

  “Not betraying them,” I objected. “They raised him to think for himself.” “He’s not thinking for himself,” Lotty said. “He’s echoing what every other rightwing lunatic in America is saying.”

  “What I want to know is why he’s living in Washington while his kid is in Chicago with her grandmother. And how he came to think so differently on politics from his parents. And why Calvin Bayard has no comment on Taverner’s death. And a lot of other stuff that’s none of my business. I’m going to take my sore nose home to bed, although whatever you put in this drink, Lorry, I feel a whole lot better. Thanks-for everything.”

  She and Max saw me to the elevator, their arms around each other. Riding down the elevator I felt both the assurance one gets from seeing others in love, and the pang of feeling separate from the world of lovers.

  CHAPTER 15

  House of the Dead

  Tome, the South Side has always meant the broken-down mills of South Chicago, where I grew up; when I got a scholarship to the University of Chicago four miles up the lake from my home, I used to scoff at Hyde Parkers, with their big yards and their kids in expensive schools and camps, for claiming to be South Siders-they might live below Madison Street, but they were more at home in the restaurants and theaters on the far side of the Loop.

  Bronzeville, where Marcus Whitby had bought a house, was yet a different South Side, one I only knew secondhand. I got there early enough to do a little exploring. Whether because of Lotty’s magic potion, or because Geraldine Graham let me sleep through the night, I’d woken early, with more energy than I’d had lately. I took the dogs for a brisk walk, went to my office to check messages and complete a report-and still reached Twenty-sixth and King, where Bronzeville starts, before eight-thirty. I paused in front of a statue commemorating the great wave of black immigration into the city. Driving on down King to Thirtyfifth Street, I passed the husks of the businesses that used to make up the so-called Black Metropolis. As Aretha Cummings, Whitby’s assistant, said yesterday, no one wants those old segregation days back, but it was painful to see the wreck of buildings that once had been the heart of a vital community.

  The same thing has happened in South Chicago; I can hardly bear to return to the scenes of my youth because of my old neighborhood’s rotting buildings. But South Chicago has forty percent unemployment and the highest murder rate in the city, while Bronzeville is on its way back. True, many of the businesses around me were dilapidated, but an art deco building on the corner of Thirtyfifth and King had been turned into an insurance company, and the stately mansions that lined both sides of the boulevard looked well maintained.

  Marcus Whitby had bought a town house on Giles, a short narrow street just west of King Drive. I found a parking space on the corner of Giles and Thirty-seventh, and walked back up the street to the address I’d found on Nexis. Some of the houses on Giles seemed to be teetering on their last beams, with broken windows and sagging roofs. Others had been restored even beyond their original beauty, with the addition of painted Victorian curlicues on the porches and window trim. Most, like Whitby’s own, fell somewhere in between.

  I stood on the pavement, staring at it, as if I could learn something about Whitby’s life from studying his home. It had been built high and narrow to fit on a small lot. The dark red brick was old, cracked in many places, but freshly mortared, the modest porch and wood trim around the windows patched and painted. Louvered
blinds were drawn on all three floors, making the house look forbidding, its empty eyes closed to the world.

  Children straggled out of the nearby houses, backpack laden, on their way to school. They flowed around me like fish parting around a piece of piling-I was a grown-up, nonexistent. For the adults heading to work, it was a different story: I stood out as a stranger, and a white one to boot. Several people stopped to ask i? I needed help. When I told them I was just waiting for someone, they eyed me narrowly: white suburbanites come into the black South Side to buy drugs, so they can keep their own little towns clean and crime-free. I’d dressed soberly, in my greenand-blackstriped wool, to look both respectful of the dead and professionally competent-but that didn’t prove I wasn’t a crackhead.

  If anyone probed further, I told them who I was, and asked what they knew of Marcus Whitby. People responded charily, not willing to discuss

  the dead man with a stranger, but I got the impression his neighbors hadn’t known him well. Oh, yes, he got on with everyone, but he kept himself to himself. Not that he was mean in any way, not at all-if you needed your car jumped, or help installing a window, he pitched in. He just didn’t sit out on the porch at night joining in the neighborhood chitchat.

  None of the adults who stopped remembered seeing Whitby on Sunday night, but a ten-year-old, waiting impatiently while her father questioned me, said she’d seen Whitby come home.

  “He was out all afternoon, then on his way home he stopped at the corner for milk. We saw him because me and Tanya went up there to get a Snickers bar. Then he went out again. About nine o’clock.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Me and Tanya were jumping rope, we saw him walking up toward Thirtyfifth Street.”

  “What? In the middle of the night?” her father thundered. “How many times-“

  “I know, I know,” I cut in hastily. “It’s dangerous, but you do it in the street because you can see under the lights-my girlfriends and I always used to, no matter how many times my mother yelled at us not to. So you saw Marcus Whitby leave?”