The Second Confesion

“If this doesn't work,” he growled at me, as if it were all my fault, “there will be no other recourse. I have tried to twist it so as to leave an alternative if it fails, but it can't be done. We'll either get him with this or not at all On plain paper, double-spaced, two carbons.” “Heading or date?” “None.” He gazed, frowning, at the sheets he had taken from his pocket. “First paragraph: “At eight o'clock in the evening of August 19, 1948, twenty men were gathered in a living-room on the ninth floor of an apartment house on East 84th Street, Manhattan. All of them were high in the councils of the American Communist Party, and this meeting was one of a series to decide strategy and tactics for controlling the election campaign of the Progressive Party and its candidate for President of the United States, Henry Wallace. One of them, a tall lanky man with a clipped brown moustache, was saying: “ ‘We must never forget that we can't trust Wallace. While we're playing him up we must remember that any minute he might pull something that will bring an order from Policy to let go of him.’ “ ‘Policy’ is the word the top American Communists use when they mean Moscow or the Kremlin. It may be a precaution, though it's hard to see why they need one when they are in secret session, or it may be merely their habit of calling nothing by its right name.

“Another of them, a beefy man with a bald head and a pudgy face, spoke up.” Wolfe, referring frequently to the sheets he had taken from his pocket, kept on until I had filled thirty-two pages of my notebook, then stopped, sat a while with his lips puckered, and told me to type it. I did so, double spacing as instructed. As I finished a page I handed it over to him and he went to work on it with a pencil. He rarely made changes in anything he had dictated and I had typed, but apparently he regarded this as something extra special. I fully agreed with him. That stuff, getting warmer as it went along, contained dozens of details that nobody lower than a Deputy Commissar had any right to know about-provided they were true. That was a point I would have liked to ask Wolfe about, but if the job was supposed to be finished when Lon Cohen arrived there was no time to spare, so I postponed it.

I had the last page out of the typewriter, but Wolfe was still fussing with it, when the bell rang and I went to the front and let Lon in.