station. I sat at the fake-wood-grain desk in my room as snow fell outside and continued reading the diary under a bare bulb, trying to shut out the clattering of the elevator and the shouted drunken conversations outside my window.
I rented a car and made my way north and west, over the border to New Hampshire, along narrow roads that ran for miles and miles through pine forests. I stopped at Lowell to consult maps and ask directions, a succession of lefts and rights at the odd-sounding town names the indigenous world had left us—Mascuppic and Musquash. I found Pawtuxet just as the midafternoon sun tipped over toward evening and the buildings’ shadows seemed to lean into the street. I drove past a small village green with surly hangers-on trampling the snow into dirt; a church with a stunted-looking steeple; a market; a one-story motel.
I tramped through the snow of the parking lot to the front desk and was given a curiously appointed room, Victorian wallpaper and a towering chest of drawers in dark wood.
I sat down to read while I waited for the others. Did Hiss stay at this motel too? I found myself wishing he were here to talk to.
I read the last pages of his diary in the dimming light that filtered through a yellowing shade. The works of which I have obtained evidence defy belief, and yet the sober testimony of these trusted and brilliant sources cannot be entirely ignored. It has become necessary to begin researching on my own. And, if required, conducting my own experiments.
This was where Hiss revealed a surprising breadth of scholarship for a civil servant. He read monographs couched in arcane academic phraseology. Some concerned the recent rediscovery of works of a pre-Indo-European civilization in the Ural Mountains; others followed North African trade routes in the eighteenth century. He copied out long passages in Greek from medieval alchemical texts.
At the same time, his record of events became, if anything, even more overheated and elliptical. A passage read, I have obtained (with what trouble and expense I shall not record here) that true mixture of which the Syrian wrote. I believe his original text contained certain code words whose true meaning I have lately divined. The Baltimore night holds terrors I have not imagined, and I sleep perhaps one night in three . Was this a Middle East arms connection? Nuclear materials denoted by code words routed through Syria?
It was around this time that I myself started to be a feature in the diary, and I saw the hearings take shape from his point of view. I was a hired gun from the government’s secret committees, and Chambers was a fat pathetic tool making moon-eyes at him from across the room. I remembered his contempt for me in the hearings. I also remembered his icy cool and his genial manner most days, joking with the press and making light of himself as a hunted man. I’d seen more bravery than I thought.
There was no further mention of a Syrian, only more cryptic library visits, until this, just two days before I broke into his office.
At last I have tangible proof of what has henceforth been discussed in whispers. I have both spoken with the dead and looked at the horror that will walk this earth ten thousand millennia hence.
And then a single word set apart in a paragraph on its own.
CROATOAN.
I must learn why they died and why the others lived.
He seemed to have suffered a psychotic break. Or did he just have a night like the one I’d had? Either way, it’s no wonder the Reds were eager to be rid of him.
There was a knock at the door.
“Is Romanian whore you ordered!” Arkady bellowed.
“Just a minute!”
“She cannot wait for you! She has many clients!”
I opened the door.
“Shouldn’t you keep your voice down?”
“Relax, is Ukrainian accent. Locals suspect nothing.”
Just after sundown we set off, balding tires slewing sideways across a wide patch of ice as I pulled out of the motel parking lot.
I rented a car and made my way north and west, over the border to New Hampshire, along narrow roads that ran for miles and miles through pine forests. I stopped at Lowell to consult maps and ask directions, a succession of lefts and rights at the odd-sounding town names the indigenous world had left us—Mascuppic and Musquash. I found Pawtuxet just as the midafternoon sun tipped over toward evening and the buildings’ shadows seemed to lean into the street. I drove past a small village green with surly hangers-on trampling the snow into dirt; a church with a stunted-looking steeple; a market; a one-story motel.
I tramped through the snow of the parking lot to the front desk and was given a curiously appointed room, Victorian wallpaper and a towering chest of drawers in dark wood.
I sat down to read while I waited for the others. Did Hiss stay at this motel too? I found myself wishing he were here to talk to.
I read the last pages of his diary in the dimming light that filtered through a yellowing shade. The works of which I have obtained evidence defy belief, and yet the sober testimony of these trusted and brilliant sources cannot be entirely ignored. It has become necessary to begin researching on my own. And, if required, conducting my own experiments.
This was where Hiss revealed a surprising breadth of scholarship for a civil servant. He read monographs couched in arcane academic phraseology. Some concerned the recent rediscovery of works of a pre-Indo-European civilization in the Ural Mountains; others followed North African trade routes in the eighteenth century. He copied out long passages in Greek from medieval alchemical texts.
At the same time, his record of events became, if anything, even more overheated and elliptical. A passage read, I have obtained (with what trouble and expense I shall not record here) that true mixture of which the Syrian wrote. I believe his original text contained certain code words whose true meaning I have lately divined. The Baltimore night holds terrors I have not imagined, and I sleep perhaps one night in three . Was this a Middle East arms connection? Nuclear materials denoted by code words routed through Syria?
It was around this time that I myself started to be a feature in the diary, and I saw the hearings take shape from his point of view. I was a hired gun from the government’s secret committees, and Chambers was a fat pathetic tool making moon-eyes at him from across the room. I remembered his contempt for me in the hearings. I also remembered his icy cool and his genial manner most days, joking with the press and making light of himself as a hunted man. I’d seen more bravery than I thought.
There was no further mention of a Syrian, only more cryptic library visits, until this, just two days before I broke into his office.
At last I have tangible proof of what has henceforth been discussed in whispers. I have both spoken with the dead and looked at the horror that will walk this earth ten thousand millennia hence.
And then a single word set apart in a paragraph on its own.
CROATOAN.
I must learn why they died and why the others lived.
He seemed to have suffered a psychotic break. Or did he just have a night like the one I’d had? Either way, it’s no wonder the Reds were eager to be rid of him.
There was a knock at the door.
“Is Romanian whore you ordered!” Arkady bellowed.
“Just a minute!”
“She cannot wait for you! She has many clients!”
I opened the door.
“Shouldn’t you keep your voice down?”
“Relax, is Ukrainian accent. Locals suspect nothing.”
Just after sundown we set off, balding tires slewing sideways across a wide patch of ice as I pulled out of the motel parking lot.
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