“Is that why you sent the letter to the university demanding that they fire her?” Marc asked. “Because her emotions disgusted you?”

The muffled mike didn’t pick up everything Olin said, so the first part of his response was missing. “The University of Chicago deserved better than the Red faculty that infested the campus in those days. She was one I could prove to have an association with a Communist front. If I could have proved it about any of the others, I would have seen that they lost their jobs, too, young man. Don’t imagine this was about race or about sex. It was about the safety of America.”

“I’ve seen the photograph-it’s in the university archives. How did you know it was Ms. Ballantine? And how did you know where it was taken? I guessed it was her troupe because the masks were like those she’d brought back from French Equatorial Africa, but you couldn’t have known that.”

“I haven’t talked about this for forty-plus years, young man. Why should I tell you?”

“Because I’m going to write about it. If you don’t tell me your story, I’ll make assumptions about what you did and why you did it, and that will be the version that the whole world will know.”

The tape was muffled here, but then Olin called out to Domingo Rivas to help him get to his desk. I hadn’t seen Marc’s tape recorder anywhere, but he must have owned a good one, because it picked up the sound of Olin’s walker tapping across the floor. Marc apparently followed him, because I could hear Rivas’s soothing murmur, “Yessir, here we go, sir, a few more steps,” and then the noises of the lock in the drawer scraping open and Olin muttering what Rivas had reported when we spoke last week: “I am old and the time for holding on to secrets is past. Even the secrets that I’ve kept from myself.”

Papers rustled. It was maddening to sit in Marc’s car and not know what he’d been reading.

After a moment, Olin said, “I signed one copy, Calvin the other. Julius Arnoff witnessed the documents and put a third copy in Lebold, Arnoff’s vaults.”

Marc exclaimed, “But why did you sign it?” “Calvin signed one copy of what?” I screeched. “Mr. Bayard sent you the photograph?” Marc said. “He gave it to me. After Llewellyn sent me to him.” “Mr. Llewellyn?” Marc echoed. “Who owns T-Square?”

“Oh, you work in his organization, don’t you, young man? I had forgotten T-square was his precious magazine. Yes, he’d signed all those checks and we had him dead to rights. Bushnell wanted to lock him up: he hated Negro agitators even more than he hated Reds, and he figured Llewellyn as a Red-and-Black agitator. But I knew what kind of slippery bastard Calvin could be, so I believed Llewellyn. We called Calvin before the committee. He sat there smiling as though he owned the world. My God, I hated that smile more than anything else about him. I let him smirk his way through his testimony, and then I made a mistake.”