Fellow Travelers Read Free

offered.
The Jesuits would love that, Hawk!
    To Fuller’s relief, the musical program was about to begin, peppy alternations of Cole Porter and Baltic folk songs that Ms. Boyle had helped to pull together. She was at it even now, setting out the enameled-eagle party favors they’d been unable to find all afternoon.
    After twenty minutes and a fast vodka tonic, and while the Russian phosphate boss applauded the conclusion of “Friendship”—
just a perfect blendship!—
Fuller left the room. He knew that Lucy would cover for him.
    In half a minute he was out on the cobblestones, stepping off into the night, happy with the autonomy—if not exactly independence—that he’d always taken as his right. Lucy might make him drive her to see the sights in Narva next week, and come June she’d have a houseful of dull friends over from the States to see the White Nights; but however late he came home tonight, it would be all right. She lived, he knew, in a perpetual White Night of her own, pushing the clock back to whatever hour she decided he had come in at after all.
    It was really too cold to be out, and Fuller was still wary of walking here at all. Hard to imagine there were no longer Soviet troops on patrol. Actually, there
were
still some, not due to leave for a year or two more, by which time the Estonians would also have gotten rid of the rubles they were using even now. Awfully good-looking, some of those Russian boys he’d seen. Sweet faces, trying to look so hard under their stiff caps. Alas, how quickly those faces aged and sagged, the way it was with every good-looking Jewish boy he’d ever had back home.
    Fuller looked up toward a small, pearl-onioned dome, not far from a stone staircase connecting the city’s old and upper towns. A strong wind was blowing across the gulf, maybe all the way from Finland, that country so like himself, for so long half free and quite comfortable, somehow exempt from the fuss of near-apocalypse.
    A young man was passing in the opposite direction. A student, Fuller supposed: slightly built, hands in big overcoat pockets, puffing a cigarette. Suggestive of another era; one imagined a book of censored poems inside the overcoat. Fuller looked back over his shoulder and, sure enough, found the young man doing the same. But Fuller’s smile unnerved the boy, who soon continued on, eyes front, toward his destination.
    Fuller was drunk enough that he might have nodded, tried his luck. But he’d realized, even before the young man averted his gaze, that all he himself wanted right now was to look at the small receding silhouette and imagine that it belonged to someone else, another boy, whose memory was proving persistent tonight, like that last Porter tune, which even here, in the darkness, he couldn’t quite dislodge from his head.
    He wondered what time it was in Scottsdale, and whether the embassy’s new phones were as good as Ms. Boyle said.

PART ONE
    SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1953
    In the era of security clearances to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking.
    — DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN

CHAPTER ONE
    September 28, 1953
    Tim counted four big fans whirring atop their stanchions in the newsroom. Every window here on the seventh floor was open, and summer had officially departed six days ago, but that was Washington for you. When air-conditioning might come to the
Star
seemed to be a perennial matter of sad-sack speculation among the staff: “When hell freezes over,” went one answer Tim had heard in his three months here. “Because then we won’t need it.”
    Miss McGrory, one of the paper’s book reviewers, arrived with a bottle of whiskey, which she set down next to the punch bowl and cake, whose single chocolate layer and frosted inscription, “Happy Trails, Sheriff,” would soon be cut into by the retirement party’s guest of honor, Mr. Yost, a pressman who’d been at the
Star
since 1912