The Great American Novel (48 page)

“O.K. Ockatur,” said Gamesh.

“You mean—the dwarf who pitches for the Mundys?” cried Oakhart.

“The dwarf who pitches for the Mundys,” said Gamesh. “Formerly Captain Smerdyakov, a tank officer in the Leningrad Military Unit of the Red Army.”

“You met him, you're telling me, in
Moscow?
”

“He came to address the school.”

The words “Benedict Arnold” had undermined the General's confidence more even than he knew. It simply could not
be
that he who had devoted his entire life to defending the Rules and Regulations could go down in history as neglectful of his responsibilities to be vigilant, honorable, and upright! “Gamesh,” cried the aging warrior, “are you sure of this? Are you telling me the truth? Are you absolutely sure it wasn't some
other
dwarf?”

“After four years in the Communist underground, and four more at SHIT, you learn to be able to distinguish between dwarfs, General, easily enough. It was Ockatur. The fact of it is, I am here to spy on him as well as to become the manager of the Mundys.”

“Become
what?
”

“That is my mission. I was assigned here the very night news was flashed to the Kremlin of the death of Ulysses S. Fairsmith. ‘You will return to America, Comrade Gamesh. You will become the manager of the Mundys. The last there will ever be.' Those were Stalin's words. I said to him, ‘Comrade Stalin, that is more easily said than done.' To which he replied, ‘Where there is an iron will, Comrade, there is a way.' On my departure, there were those in my own faction who said that Stalin is grooming me to be his heir—on the other hand, there are those among my adversaries who maintain that whether I fail or succeed, my usefulness to the Party will have been exhausted and I will be earmarked for liquidation, precisely as Ockatur is now.”

“Liquidation? Ockatur?
Why?
”

“No complicated political motive there, General. Simple, in fact. Stalin is a heartless man who despises dwarfs. Of course, he is curiously drawn to them as well—undoubtedly for pathological reasons. As soon as a new dwarf appears in the Party, he is inevitably elevated with great rapidity to a position of trust in the Kremlin. And then even more quickly annihilated, so that not a trace of him remains. General, if the life of the ordinary citizen in the Soviet Union is fraught with danger and uncertainty, the life of a dwarf there is even worse. That is why you see so very few dwarfs these days in Russia. In the time of the czars, nearly every village and hamlet had at least one misshapen little gnome-like person, if not a dwarf, then a hunchback, if not a hunchback, at least a hydrocephalic or something along that line. Today there's hardly a trace of them. You can ride from one end of Russia to the other on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and look in vain for somebody, other than a child, under four feet tall. Either they have risen to the top in the Kremlin, only to be swallowed up in the void, or else, if they have any wits at all, they are in the forests, in hiding, living off nuts and berries, and there they will remain so long as this madman is the ruler over Russia. This madman, General, who would rule the world. And will—unless we stop him, here and now.”

“But—but—” There were a thousand questions, a million, a hundred million. And for a Douglas D. Oakhart who would not be a Benedict Arnold, the gravest of all:
what if this is so?

“But this letter?” said Gamesh.

“Well, yes! Among other things, this letter—from the grocer named McWiley. In Kakoola!”

“Colonel Raskolnikov of the Russian Secret Police.”

“You mean—
he
is a spy too?”

“He is
the
spy, General. Raskolnikov is the number one underground espionage agent in the United States. As President of CACA and Legal Director of ‘Keep America Free,' he's able to keep abreast of just who in the Middle West has information about the Communist conspiracy to destroy the American way of life. At the same time, his own humble position as a grocer, and his deliberately crackpot behavior, tend to give the whole anti-Communist crusade a bad name. But that's the least of his cunning. Every deadly plan begins with him. In the Soviet Union they say there has never been a hatchet man to match him. At SHIT, of course, his name is legend.”

“Mrs. Trust,” said the confused and demoralized General, “you—you know this? When you showed me this letter, you knew that William McWiley was in actuality—”

“Of course.”

“In other words, you deliberately deceived me!”

“As the Communists learned to their satisfaction a long time ago, to deceive the President of the Patriot League is not such a difficult task.”

“True enough,” said Gamesh. “Comrade Stalin himself said to me triumphantly at dinner one night, ‘Roosevelt in Washington, Oakhart in Massachusetts—as the great Russian proverb has it, When the farmer and his wife hold the jug too long to their lips, the wolf steals through the snow to sink his teeth in the throat of the cackling chicken.'”

The following phone conversation was monitored and recorded on the evening of March 16, 1944, by agents of the F.B.I. and subsequently introduced into the hearings of a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee, presided over by Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, and held in Room 1105, United States Court House, Port Ruppert, New Jersey, October 8, 1944.

SMITTY
: Why doesn't he go to the F.B.I.?

OAKHART
: He claims the F.B.I. is infiltrated from top to bottom with Communists and Communist sympathizers. He says he wouldn't get out of there alive.

SMITTY
: Why not Landis then?

OAKHART
: He doesn't trust him. Smitty, neither do I. Landis would use the scandal to make us look bad and himself like a hero. He'd use this thing to shut the league down once and for all. Exactly, Gamesh says, what the Communists would want him to do in the first place.

SMITTY
: Then why doesn't he go to the top?

OAKHART
: According to him, the Soviet agents in the War Department who arranged the leasing of Mundy Park are Roosevelt appointees. They'd bury it, he says—and him too.

SMITTY
: And the papers? What about talking to me? I know the son of a bitch.

OAKHART
: Because that would be premature. Right now he could finger only Mazuma and Ockatur—but there are others, just as highly placed, whose identities are a mystery even to him. Then there are the party members and fellow travelers among the players—

SMITTY
: And where does he find evidence for that, General?

OAKHART
: That's what he's
out
to find. As manager of the Mundys he'll appear to Stalin to be carrying out his mission, but in actuality he'll be in the best possible position to work in our behalf to uncover and expose the entire conspiracy. Up close, inside, managing the team that's been their number one target, he'll be right at the center, able to employ all the skills he's learned from them, against them. At SHIT he was first in his class, Smitty—so he tells us, anyway.

SMITTY
: Also at bullshit, my old friend.

OAKHART
: You don't buy it.

SMITTY
: Do
you?
The guy is crazy. Some lunatic off the street hired by that dried-up old slit. Whatever it is, it ain't on the level.

OAKHART
: You think it's not even Gamesh?

SMITTY
: Suppose that it is. Why would you believe
him,
of all people? If ever there was a grievance-monger with a score to settle, it's that maniacal bastard. “Sturgeon with Stalin. Cocktails with Molotov.” It's all too ridiculous.

OAKHART
: Ridiculous, yes—
but what if it's also true?
What if baseball
is
destroyed from within?

SMITTY
: When that happens, my dear General, it'll be a sad day indeed, but it won't be the atheistical materialistic Communists who will have done it.

OAKHART
: Who then?

SMITTY
: Who? The atheistical materialistic capitalists, that's who! A' course that's just one man's opinion, General—fella name a' Smith.

The following is excerpted from General Oakhart's testimony before the subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 8, 1944, in Port Ruppert.

THE CHAIRMAN
: General, would you tell the Committee why, having solicited the advice and opinion of your friend Mr. Word Smith, the well-known sportswriter, you decided the following morning to disregard it and to recommend the appointment of Gamesh as manager of the Mundys?

GENERAL OAKHART
: Well, Mr. Dies, it was because of that startling phrase that Mr. Smith used, “atheistical materialistic capitalists.”

MR. THOMAS
: In other words, General, until he used that phrase, it just had not entered your head at any time during the previous years that this man might have Communist leanings or might even be an outright agent of a foreign power dedicated to overthrowing our government by violent means.

GENERAL OAKHART
: Frankly, sir, I have to say no, it did not. I am afraid I had been completely taken in by him until that evening. Perhaps I might not even have been alert to the implications of the phrase “atheistical materialistic capitalists” if I had not spent those hours earlier in the day with Mrs. Trust and Mr. Gamesh. You must realize—indeed, I know you do—that I have not been alone in believing the Russians and General Stalin to be, in President Roosevelt's words, “our brave allies in the fight against Fascism.”

MR. THOMAS
: Along that line, General—would it be your opinion, as a former military man, that the war against the Germans and the Japanese has been used by the Communists to mask their subversive activities here in the United States?

GENERAL OAKHART
: Absolutely. There is no better example of that particular kind of Communist treachery than the cynical way in which patriotic feelings were manipulated by the Communist agents in the War Department in order to secure the lease to Mundy Park and drive the Ruppert Mundys from their home. I'd like to take this opportunity, if I may, Mr. Thomas, to inform the Committee that I was one of those who from the very outset opposed leasing Mundy Park to the War Department. At that time, of course, I had no idea that Communists had so thoroughly infiltrated the executive branch of the United States government, and that it was they who were plotting the destruction of my league. On the other hand, that destruction was imminent if the Mundys should be dispossessed from Mundy Park—well, that seemed to me a foregone conclusion.

THE CHAIRMAN
: General, following your March 16 phone conversation with Mr. Smith, in which he used the phrase “atheistical materialistic capitalists,” did you have any specific recollections of other catchphrases or slogans he had used in the past, either in conversation or in his writings, that had a subversive or propagandistic flavor?

GENERAL OAKHART
: Well, of course, his speech and his writings were peppered with phrases that caught you up short by their sardonic or barbed quality, but generally speaking, I shared the view of most everyone, that this show of irreverence was more or less in the nature of a joke, much like all that alliteration he's so famous for.

MR. MUNDT
: A joke at the expense of his country.

GENERAL OAKHART
: It seemed benign enough, Mr. Mundt, at the time. As everybody knew, he had been a pinochle-playing crony to several American presidents.

MR. THOMAS
: Did you know, General, that he has also been a ghostwriter for the present incumbent of the White House?

GENERAL OAKHART
: No, sir. I have only learned that through these hearings. But let me tell you, Mr. Thomas, that when he used that phrase, “atheistical materialistic capitalists,” I could not have been any more shocked had I known that the man who spoke such a phrase happened also to be a speechwriter for the President of the United States.

MR. THOMAS
: Well, I'm glad to hear that. Because it would have shocked
me
profoundly to learn that the hero of the Argonne Forest and the President of a major American baseball league could permit such a traitorous, slanderous, propagandistic remark to leave no impression on him whatsoever.

GENERAL OAKHART
: Well, you needn't be shocked, sir, because it didn't. It is not for me, Mr. Thomas, to describe the action I took within the next twenty-four hours as “daring” or “courageous” or “far-sighted,” but given the tone of your last remark, I feel I must remind the Committee that Angela Trust and myself, alone in the entire world of baseball, have been fighting tooth and nail against the hammer and sickle—and to this day,
to this day,
have earned little more than the scorn of our colleagues and the disbelief of the nation. Admittedly, it was not until that fateful night in March that I came to recognize the enemy for who and what he was, but since that time, as I am sure you know, I have been in the forefront of the battle against the Red menace, and no less than the members of this Committee, have done everything within my power to fight to preserve the Constitution of the United States and the great game of baseball against Communist subversion and treachery.

(
Loud applause. The Chairman raps his gavel.
)

THE CHAIRMAN
: I appreciate that the spectators may from time to time wish to express their admiration for a witness, but I must ask you to restrain your enthusiasm in the hearing room. I'm sure that General Oakhart, who just prior to this morning's hearings announced his intention to run for the presidency of the United States in the coming election, would just as soon you express yourselves through the ballot box anyway.