“We know, but we need to know who besides the initial founders were there and what was discussed.”
“I don’t know!”
Mal threw an outside curve. “Are you still hot for Claire, Eisler? Are you protecting her? You know she’s marrying Reynolds Loftis. How’s that make you feel?”
Eisler threw his head back and laughed. “Our affair was brief, and I suspect that handsome Reynolds will always prefer young boys.”
“Chaz Minear’s no young boy.”
“And he and Reynolds did not last.”
“Nice people you know, comrade.”
Eisler’s laughter turned low, guttural–and supremely Germanic. “I prefer them to you, obersturmbahnführer.”
Mal held his temper by looking at Dudley; Mr. Bad Guy returned him the cut-off sign. “We’ll overlook that comment out of deference to your cooperation, and you may call this your initial interview. My colleague and I will go over your answers, check them against our records and send back a long list of other questions, detailed specifics pertaining to your Communist front activities and the activities of the UAES members we discussed. A City Marshal will monitor that transaction, and a court reporter will take your deposition. After that interview, providing you answer a few more questions now and allow us to take your journal, you will be given friendly witness status and full immunity from prosecution.”
Eisler got up, walked on rubber legs to his desk and unlocked a lower drawer. He poked through it, pulled out a leather-bound diary, brought it back and laid it on the table. “Ask your few questions and leave.”
Dudley moved a flat palm slowly down: Go easy. Mal said, “We have a second interview this afternoon, and I think you can help us with it.”
Eisler stammered, “Wh-what, wh-who?”
Dudley, in a whisper. “Leonard Hyman Rolff.”
Their interrogee rasped the single word, “No.” Dudley looked at Mal; Mal placed his left hand over his right fist: no hitting. Dudley said, “Yes, and we will brook no argument, no discussion. I want you to think of something shameful and incriminating indigenous to your old friend Lenny, something that other people know, so that we can put the blame of informing on them. You will inform, so I advise you to think of something effective, something that will loosen Mr. Rolff’s tongue and spare you a return visit from myself–without my colleague who serves so well to restrain me.”
Nathan Eisler had gone slab white. He sat stock-still, looking way past tears or shock or indignation. Mal thought that he seemed familiar; a few seconds of staring gave him his connection: the Buchenwald Jews who’d beat the gas chamber only to sink to an early grave via viral anemia. The memory made him get up and prowl the bookshelves; the dead silence kept going. He was scanning a shelf devoted to Marxist economics when Dudley’s whisper came back. “The repercussions, comrade. Refugee camps for your half-breed whelps. Mr. Rolff will receive his chance for friendly witness status, so if he’s an obstreperous sort, you’ll be doing him a favor by supplying us with information to convince him to inform. Think of Michiko forced to keep body and soul together back in Japan, all the tempting offers she’ll receive.”
Mal tried to look back, but couldn’t make himself; he fixed on Das Kapital–A Concordance, Marx’s Theories of Commerce and Repression and The Proletariat Speak Out. Quiet sank in behind him; heavy fingers tapped the table. Then Nathan Eisler’s monotone: “Young girls. Prostitutes. Lenny is afraid his wife will find out he frequents them.”
Dudley sighed. “Not good enough. Try harder.”
“He keeps pornographic pictures of the ones–”
“Too bland, comrade.”
“He cheats on his income tax.”
Dudley ha! ha! ha!’d. “So do I, so does my friend Malcolm and so would our grand savior Jesus Christ should he return and settle in America. You know more than you are telling us, so please rectify that situation before I lose my temper and revoke your friendly witness status.”
Mal heard the kids giggling outside, the little girl squealing in Japanese. He said, “Goddamn you, talk.”
Eisler coughed, took an audible breath, coughed again. “Lenny will not inform as easily as I. He has not so much to lose.”