incessantly, made references to certain dates, certain dispatches, displaying, as always, total command, total recall, of the material, but Moran ceased to follow the exposition. He was settling over the edge of his stool, dribbling down the sides as Sapporo Ebisu beer worked its wondrous relaxation. Why was Guade talking so?
“With Davies and Service and to a certain extent Vincent, you catch enthusiasm for what seems to be a democratic regime run by Mao, but Atcheson is never interested in that. When Stalin suspends the Comintern Atcheson spends two pages explaining how this can be done under Marxist theory. I mean who was reading such a dispatch? Who could have cared? Alone among the China officers he seems mesmerized with dogma, theory, dialectics. It’s astonishing.”
“Of course. Of course,” Moran answered. “I never thought McCarthy had a shred of evidence against Service or Davies or Vincent, but against Atcheson, I thought there was a case and he never tried it.”
“Atcheson dies in August, 1947. McCarthy didn’t start ranting ‘till early 1950.”
“I know that. I guess you need living enemies. But Atcheson would have been the perfect target. He never even got mentioned.”
“Hurley accused him and all of them in 1945.”
“Hurley doesn’t count. Who cares about one bitter, Indian-bonneted Ambassador for chrissakes?”
“There’s more to Atcheson,” Guade hunched over, as if full of intrigue and revelation.
But Moran, after three large bottles of Ebisu, watched him from a perch about thirty feet overhead. Down below it seemed the Japanese squealed in abandon. A waitress moved on the outside of the semi-circle distributing more sake or beer to the increasingly noisy patrons.
“Essentially the dispatches raise significant questions and you have to answer why would somebody be writing such things? Why would somebody want to display control of Marxian theory as an interpretive prism of events in China?”
“I give up. Why?” Moran laughed. He liked the slow, mechanical way the chef brought the paddle to the grill and then slowly swung it toward the crowd revealing something to eat on the end. The paddle stopped at the correct orderer.
“I formed three hypotheses—“
“Just three?”
Guade looked carefully at Moran’s focusing eyes. “Yes, just three: One, he’d done some reading, maybe brushed up against Marxism, and was practicing to test his own comprehension of the schemes—bored in China. I know Foreign Service Officers do that, a kind of detachment from the impact of their own statements. Writing in the void and so to make some order you tend to test out theories that structure what you’re living in.”
“A kind of interpretation verging on apologia,” Moran said. He contemplated dipping his grilled onion slice in a side dish of raw beaten egg.
“Admittedly so, number two is that he was, after all, what Hurley thought he was, a Communist, committed, in a cell someplace and he merely analyzed the world, especially Russian actions, as a Communist might. Or three, he was an apprentice Communist filing dispatches to his mentor in the movement.”
“Ah, conspiracy!” Moran said, chomping on the mucusy onion. “I like that. Commies were everywhere you know. But you don’t exactly sound as skeptical as I imagined you would.”
“The data go elsewhere,” Guade said. “So you have to know more about him. What his background was, and who he reported to.”
“Gauss?” Moran asked.
“You know the answer to that,” Guade answered.
“Yes, indeed. Not Gauss. Blessed Clarence for once gets some benefit from being ignored.”
“Since I had to go back to D.C. anyway, I checked the archives and asked to pull his 123 file from State Department records.”
Moran has spent almost two hours going through Gauss’s 123 file. 123’s were usually fairly tame collections of innocuous personal documents—birthday greetings, letters from old friends concerning department business, sometimes photographs, occasionally a copy of a letter of recommendation, sometimes, if you were lucky, some diary entries that for one reason or another didn’t end up in the personal papers; often enough, only travel vouchers.
“But,” Guade went on, “it wasn’t there.”
“Someone had pulled it?”
“No. It was simply gone, disappeared. He had no 123 file. But that was unacceptable, so I asked to see the invoice of accessioned boxes when the stuff came over from State in 1957. And it wasn’t on the list. Ten packages of Foreign Service stuff, nine 123 files, none for Atcheson. It never came over. Lots of other Atcheson stuff, but not that. So I went over to State and said I wanted a trace on the Atcheson material before 1957. Where was it and who handled it?”
“All because of my joke in Kyoto?”
“You weren’t joking,” Guade said levelly. “Now follow this, pay attention and stop drinking your beer. In 1947, September of 1947, all of the Atcheson holdings went to an Air Force base in California, as part of the investigation of the plane crash that killed him. The holdings were requisitioned by a Lt. Kimball in charge of the Flight Accident Investigation, and the transfer was authorized by the Undersecretary, after consultation with the White House.”
“And they wouldn’t let you into the Air Force base?”
“Not funny. I haven’t been yet. I was more interested in why the investigation of a plane crash, the technical investigation of what it was that brought the plane down, required a review of all of Atcheson’s records.”
“Because he had a long history of fiddling with explosives?”
“The plane ran out of gas, ditched off Hawaii. No explosion.”
“Because Kimball was his brother-in-law? Because Atcheson had top secret clearance and any accidental death requires thorough investigation including the possibility of assassination?”
“Hardly,” Guade said, and then stopped abruptly.
Moran, who had gotten used to Guade’s recitation in the same way he had gotten used to inexplicable Japanese noises around him, was jolted by the silence.
“Wasn’t that an interpreter at the seminar?” Guade nodded in the direction of a Japanese toward the middle of the semi-circle. The fellow was wearing oversize tortoise shell glasses.
“Where?”
“Ten over, with the draft beer.”
“No.”
“He wasn’t up front. He was doing the simultaneous stuff from a booth in the back, behind you. I’m sure of it. You couldn’t see him unless you turned around, but I had to watch him all the time.”
“Maybe he’s a killer, a Japanese ninja.”
“Not funny. It’s just interesting he should turn up here, don’t you think? Maybe I should pass you the envelopes now.”
“Jesus, I am certainly sorry I said a word about Atcheson. In
