Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  “Gee, I’m not that important. Why should they care about a lapsed commie in a Negro university?”

  “I wish I knew. I don’t know why the pressure has ratcheted up since the Democrats took control of the Senate and Eastland became chair of that committee.” He rose, signaling that the meeting was over.

  “It’s a heads-up, Dr. Wrought. I’m leaving at the end of the spring term. If I can possibly find something for you in New York, I’ll do it. Meanwhile, if I were you, I’d start looking around. We’ve got our share of Uncle Toms, and Howard is just too vulnerable to political ill winds.”

  When my contract wasn’t renewed at the end of the academic year, I didn’t need to ask why. But I did. I sought a meeting with the president of the university, the venerable and rather venerated Dr. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson.

  I was received with cordiality but regret by the president. “I know why you have come, sir,” he said, offering me a seat in his rather spare office. “You want to keep your job.”

  “No, actually, sir, I just want to understand exactly why I have not been renewed for the fall.”

  “Well, it’s rather obvious, isn’t it, son?” He was old enough and august enough to make the word sound natural. “In this political climate, we can’t afford the controversy. Alas, we’ve had many white Southern donors, even some wealthy black ones, who have raised this matter over the years. But Dr. Franklin always said he’d quit if we fired you, and that was enough to protect you with the trustees. He’s gone now, Dr. Franklin is.” He stopped. “And I got this letter.”

  He slid a typewritten sheet across the desk to me. I read it quickly. It was on the letterhead of the US Senate, and below the heading in smaller letters was “Senate Judiciary Committee,” and below that “Internal Security Subcommittee.” It was addressed to Dr. Johnson, and it warned him that unless I was discharged by July 1, 1956, both he and I would be subpoenaed to testify before the committee staff and if necessary before the full committee in the fall session of Congress. When I got to the signature, suddenly the interest in a white assistant professor at a black college became clear. It was signed Vincent Folsom, chief investigator, assistant to Senator Eastland (D), Mississippi.

  I looked up at Johnson. “Well, Mr. President, it’s a small world.”

  “Oh, tell me.”

  “I know this man, the one who signed this letter. Fifteen years ago he was a lieutenant colonel in the quartermaster corps at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. I got his attention then because I had promoted several Negroes in my company. But I doubt he got my name or remembered it, if ever he had learned it. Then I ran into him in England, and again in France when I discovered that he was diverting fuel to the French black market. That’s when he learned my name, or at least started looking for me by name. At least I think it was him looking for me. Lucky for me, I got sent into combat with a lot of my men—first Negro draftees to see combat in the infantry, I’m proud to say. Not so lucky for most of them, though.” I stopped. “I guess he’s finally found me. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. You’ve solved a mystery for me. I won’t trouble you further.” I took his warm but rather limp hand and, after giving it a vigorous shake, left his office.

  Timing is everything. A week later the Pulitzer prizes for 1956 were announced. The winner in history was Thomas Wrought, What If the South Had Lost the Civil War? A few weeks later I received a letter from the master of Trinity telling me I’d been elected to a fellowship. So I had the last laugh. Barbara and I moved back to New York, spent the summer at Saranac Lake, and came to Oxford in early October 1957.

  I hope this helps. Liz knows everything else that could possibly solve our problem.

  Tom turned the page and wrote one more paragraph.

  Alice, there’s been an effort to read these composition books while I’ve been out of the cell for exercise. After the second time it happened, I started to carry them with me when I went out into the exercise yard.

  Alice had given Tom about four days to produce his “confessions.” She arrived back at Brixton on a wet and cold Wednesday. Tom rose as she entered the interview room. He could almost feel her presence lifting his mood. Before he could say anything more than “Miss Silverstone,” Alice began.

  “I’ve only got a minute actually. I just came for the composition books if they are done. I have two more blank ones for you.” She leaned down and drew two more marbled black-and-white books from her brief bag. But she did not sit.

  Tom picked up the two thick composition books he had now filled up, opening the first one to the page on which he had written out his suspicion that the book had been examined. Then he held it before her to read without saying a word. Then, underneath the original note, Tom wrote,

  Are they allowed to search the private writing of prisoners on remand? Is there a chance defendants’ discussions with their solicitors are monitored? Can you be sure what we say here remains confidential?

  Alice had started shaking her head almost violently before she had finished reading. She could not help herself blurting, “No, no, no. It can’t happen. Absolutely not.” Tom reached out a hand to her mouth and handed her his pen.

  She understood and began writing furiously below his note,

  What you suggest is happening would be a grave violation of law. I’ve never heard even of a suspicion that someone might be listening to conversations in these rooms.

  Tom now spoke. “Well, good. Maybe I’m just imagining things.” He looked at the two filled-in composition books she was holding, trying to convince himself she was right.

  Alice swept them into her bag and turned to leave. At the door she stopped. She was categorical. “Impossible.” Then she smiled. “Back on Friday for the next instalments.”

  Tom said no more. He decided to continue to write, but this time fiction, fables, falsehoods, and to leave the books in his cell in ways that his brief OSS training in Stockholm had taught him to detect unobtrusive searches.

  PART V

  January–March 1959

  Brixton in Winter

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Liz Spencer was sitting in Alice Silverstone’s crowded little office. They were both smoking now, Silverstone having finally announced that she had decided to give up trying to quit, for the duration of this case anyway.

  It wasn’t Alice’s smoking that troubled Liz, however. It was the needle marks that ran up her arm. Liz had recognized those tracks. She’d seen them close up, too close, on her own arm, before her year in a Toronto mental hospital. Was it too late to seek another solicitor? Could Silverstone control her habit? She had shown no signs of trouble yet. Liz had decided to watch and wait.

  Alice hadn’t noticed her interest in the marks. She had spent much of the weekend off the morphine, reading and rereading, trying to decide what steps Tom’s narrative dictated. Monday morning she’d taken the notebooks to the Abbey National on Baker Street for Liz to read. Now on Tuesday they met. Some of the leads, Alice knew, would be easy to follow—for a squad of Scotland Yard detective inspectors or a Soho Mafioso with a brace of solicitors on retainer. But Tom Wrought didn’t command such resources. All he had was a junior attorney . . . and Liz. How were they to cope? Alice looked at Liz, thinking, Defeatism is not what she wants to hear. Brazen it out, dearie!

  Squaring her shoulders, pulling down the sleeves of her silk shirtwaist dress, she adopted a confident tone. “Right. Now let’s review . . . there are several things about this whole case that are perplexing.” Alice paused. “We already know that the police have a very well-informed source, too well informed not to be involved, somehow, in your husband’s death. The source seems to have done all the police’s work for them.” Liz nodded. “Now, here is the second thing. Actually it’s something you observed last week when we first talked.”

  “What was that, Miss Silverstone?”

  The solicitor frowned. “If I’m to call Mr. Wrought ‘Tom,’ you’d better address me as ‘Alice.’” She reached across the table and squeezed Liz’s hand.
“Recall, you asked why whoever killed your husband didn’t just kill Tom, if it was Tom they wanted to get rid of.” Liz nodded. “Well, that question has bothered me all week. Then it hit me.” Silverstone’s sense of drama now made her pause. “Look, I don’t want to sound cruel, but consider this. Trevor Spencer is pushed onto the tracks. What kind of headlines would we expect in the tabloids? Well, ‘Tube Murder’ and then some follow-up on Tom’s arrest. The usual sordid little domestic murder story. But we didn’t see that, did we? There was almost nothing in the papers.” She paused.

  Liz filled the silence. “So?”

  “Bear with me. Now, suppose someone had pushed Tom Wrought onto the tracks, and he’d been killed. What would have happened?”

  She waited for an answer; hearing none, she continued. “We’d expect headlines: ‘Pulitzer Prize Winner Dies on Underground Track.’ ‘Oxford Don Killed in Tube.’ ‘American Author Pushed to Death in London.’ ‘Trinity Fellow Mystery Murder.’ There would have been a lot of bylines, reporters wearing out shoe leather trying to find a story. And they’d find one—slightly famous academic, Yank at Oxford, spurned wife, secret lover, cuckolded husband, something juicy enough to keep on the front pages for a while.”

  “Of course.” Liz now saw it. “In fact, if it had been Tom who was killed, it wouldn’t have been just reporters from the tabloids out after a story. Lindsey Keir, the master of Trinity, all the editors Tom was writing for, would have started asking questions.”

  “Exactly. Sir Isaiah ‘harrumph, harrumph’ Berlin would have called up his friends in the FO—”

  “FO?” Liz asked.

  “Foreign Office. And they would have asked their friends in the Home Office. Who knows, Michael Foot might have gotten Dennis Healy to ask a question in Parliament.”

  “I see. They needed to kill someone no one would be interested in and make it look like Tom had a commonplace motive for murder—a sleazy little love triangle.”

  “And even then they managed to prevent the story making the papers,” Alice continued. “Whoever framed Tom was also able to reach into Fleet Street and keep even the tabloids quiet.”

  Liz frowned. “Who’s got that much power?”

  “I don’t know. But whoever killed Trevor did it because they wanted Tom out of the way, not just dead.”

  Liz looked perplexed. “What do you mean, ‘Not just dead’?”

  “They could just as well have killed Tom the way they killed your husband, right?” Was this, Alice wondered, a little too brutal? There just wasn’t time to mince words. “They needed to discredit Tom, maybe even hang him. But they couldn’t risk a thorough Scotland Yard investigation of his murder.”

  Liz took it in stride. “So, Tom had to be a threat to someone; I see that. But it can’t be because of any of those things he did in the war, or after the war, in the States.”

  “Why not?” Alice asked, hoping that Liz would come to the same conclusion she’d come to. She was almost holding her breath.

  “Because, if he had been a threat back then, they would have acted sooner. It must be something he’s done since he got here. Something that scared someone badly enough to frame Tom for Trevor Spencer’s killing.”

  “Exactly. Now what has he done?”

  “Written a lot of disobliging articles and book reviews critical of the USA? Not enough of a reason to kill him.”

  “Right, but what if there is something in those articles and book reviews that has gotten someone scared, scared that Tom Wrought knows something, something very important, very dangerous, something that would make it worth trying to silence him by turning him into a common criminal and perhaps even hanging him. No one would believe anything a condemned man might say to save himself.”

  Liz brightened. “And that’s where The Confessions of Tom Wrought come in? You think that somewhere in those two composition books Tom wrote is the thread we need to pull on to unravel the mystery?”

  “Exactly.” It wasn’t very much to go on. But she felt the need to encourage Liz. “So, let’s begin. There do seem to be several threads to pull on.” She looked down at the two composition books.

  “Too many.” Liz paused. “Tom seems to have a habit of crossing people: there’s the Communists who didn’t want him to quit the party, the atom spies Tom knew before and after the war, the corrupt racist quartermaster he kept running into—the one who got him fired ten years after the war when Tom was at Howard University. Maybe the guy’s even got the same bent military police still working with him.” She stopped for a moment and then went on, “What about the officers who covered up the deaths of Cullen and Wilson, those Negro officer candidates?”

  “Liz, if it’s something Tom has said or done or written since coming back to England, we can exclude a lot of those people.”

  “Right.” Liz was glad to acquiesce.

  Alice went on matter-of-factly. “We can cross off the men involved in the deaths of Cullen and Wilson. Tom never made an effort to prove anything against them. And his commanding officer in OCS was killed during the war.” Liz was silent. “The way I see it, there are only two or three leads it would be worth following up.” She pulled a pad of scratch paper towards her and began writing. “First, we’ve got to read everything he’s written since he got here, very carefully, with an eye both to what it says and what it doesn’t say but merely suggests. Second, this American army quartermaster lieutenant colonel, Folsom, turns up too many times in Tom’s life. We need to find out a lot more about him. That’s going to be your job. Third, there are these interesting cases of mistaken identity, the Cohens or Krogers.”

  “How are we going to tackle this Folsom here in London?” Liz sounded slightly defeated.

  “Let me think about that and do a little research. Meanwhile, here’s a file from a clipping service. Everything Tom has written since September of last year. Take it home and read it. I’ll do the same. Let’s meet again day after tomorrow. I’m going to brief Tom tomorrow, and get the next two composition books.”

  Alice was beginning to feel some twinges. Time for some morphine. She rose, and Liz took the hint to leave.

  The next morning Alice arrived at the law office expecting the usual grunt of a greeting from Boyle, the firm’s sole clerk. Instead it was a slightly foreboding “Good morning, Miss Silverstone. Can I have a word?” Alice was the most junior of the solicitors in a practice ruled by its only clerk.

  Alice stopped at his desk, put down her briefcase, and waited as he sorted some briefs before him. “Thing is, miss”—he could never call her by her name; Alice suspected it was because he couldn’t bring himself to humanize a woman solicitor—“we may’ve had a bit of a break-in.”

  “Anything taken?” Alice expressed concern.

  “You’ll ’ave to tell me, miss, as it was mainly your office they had a look over.” He nodded to her door, visibly ajar down the corridor. “May’ve opened the office safe”—his eyes moved to the drawers beneath his desk—“though there’s nothing missin’.”

  “Why do you think they opened it, if nothing is missing?”

  “Oh, just one of my little quirks. There’s lots of little things to do so’s you can tell if someone’s monkeyed with a dial. But I can’t tell you, or it wouldn’t work. See what I mean?” Alice nodded. “Anyway, go along to your office and tell me if anything’s missin’, please.” He looked back down at his desk.

  A few minutes later Alice was back. “Can we get the lock on my door fixed, Boyle?”

  “Already ordered the repair, miss. Anything irregular?”

  “Can’t tell. Doesn’t appear anything is missing.” But Alice knew what they had been looking for. Tom’s suspicions had been right! The enormity of the violation of law took her breath away. Who could be so unscrupulous and so powerful as to reach into a remand prison, and then into a solicitor’s office? Not the crown prosecutors, not the Home Office, never.

  Who am I going to complain to about this breach? No one, no one will even believe
me . . . believe us. And now she recognized finally that she had been experiencing the persistent feeling that someone was interested in her—perhaps watching her, perhaps following—ever since the moment Liz Spencer had left the office the first time they met. Is it just my imagination, the tension of this case? Can people really sense when they’re being followed? No, not when it’s well done. But this is a clear signal, Alice. Watch out! Someone with the resources to open the office safe is interested in you. And then she felt a surge of anger. Whoever had the resources to open the office safe was much more powerful than that. They’ve been listening to privileged conversations between solicitor and client in the interview room of one of her Majesty’s Prisons. They can do anything they like!

  Fortunately, she had kept Tom Wrought’s composition books with her. But now she knew that was no wiser than leaving them in the office safe. She removed both from her case, put them in a brown envelope, and addressed it to herself at her home in St. John’s Wood. No one would be foolish enough to send something that valuable by the post. Tomorrow when the envelope arrived, she’d put both books in a valise and check it at the Left Luggage in Kings Cross Station. But, then, what should I do with the claim check? Worry about that tomorrow. In the end, she mailed the chit to Victor Mishcon’s secretary with a request that she hold it for Alice.

  It was warm and sunny when Alice Silverstone next arrived at Brixton Prison. There was actually a shaft of light shining down into the interview room where she waited for Tom to arrive. As she heard the door open, Alice rose and turned. Tom came into the room and clasped her hand. “Hello, counsellor.” He smiled, but she didn’t notice. Instead, she was feeling the bit of paper that had been slipped into her hand. She sat down, putting the note in her jacket pocket, thanking heaven that it had pockets.