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John Carey watched their hot, buried anger rise to split his sons. They disagreed more often; championed different books or authors; grew more caustic in debate. With mixed pleasure and concern their father guessed the reason: Phillip feared that the unborn child which now trapped his brother might become the grandson that John Carey wished.
    But the strain seemed worst in Charles. In Alicia Carey’s eyes—which glinted but could not connect—John Carey saw the anguish of his son reflected. Charles’s confidence as a lover, unspoken and unflaunted, had fed his confidence as a man. A child bound him to the woman who had stolen it.
    Curiously, this time of unhappiness became in other ways Charles’s best. Finding a new black writer of rare eloquence and talent, Charles insisted that they publish his first novel, which now rode a crest of fine reviews. Three more of his young authors already had best sellers; now he acquired a novel of a Roman slave rebellion, which might become one more. Yet too often he was moody and distracted: with each month that his child’s birth drew closer, his judgment frayed …
    All at once, facing a stranger too rife with potential menace for the Careys to mishandle, John Carey saw how swiftly Charles’s nerve and courage might turn back upon them.
    The curiously unsettling Englehardt came from Washington, as emissary of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s literary witch hunt, to warn that those who published Charles’s slave novel were tools of Joseph Stalin.
    â€œDoes Stalin read much?” Charles asked him politely.
    They sat in the conference room at Van Dreelen & Carey—John Carey flanked by his sons—facing a crew-cut man with gray, lynx’s eyes and no taste for irony. Dressed in a bow tie and black bargain-basement suit, he seemed colorless, odorless and tasteless, like poison gas. By his lack of facial lines Englehardt could not be over thirty, yet his youth seemed long dead, and his strange, relentless monotone had become as excruciating as the repeated drip of water. John Carey, who feared little, instinctively feared this man. He leaned back, closely watching both Charles and Phillip.
    â€œYou fail to amuse,” the man replied to Charles. He had a cruel slash of a mouth and a bleak, level stare that took in the leather books and polished mahogany as though he wished them his. “Your list is riddled with left-wing writers …”
    â€œSuch as …?”
    â€œAside from this one?” Methodically and without inflection, the man named seventeen books by author, title and date of publication, specifying the reasons for their offensiveness. “You see,” he finished quietly, “I’m not here by accident.”
    â€œJust by mistake,” Charles shot back. “Although your memory is excellent.”
    â€œA professional requirement.” A pride close to arrogance flashed through his eyes, the first true emotion John Carey could detect. “And the mistake is yours: purchasing this piece of propaganda just when its author has publicly refused to give testimony before our Committee. We’re in a war of ideologies, and those of us who know this are curious as to which side you’re on. I think you may recall John Garfield …”
    â€œI recall.” Charles went pale with anger. “We ate at Downey’s two nights before he died, as you damned well know. In the eighteen months since your committee sicked the FBI on him he hadn’t had a part. His marriage had broken up, and he was much too thin. You’d read his mail and rousted his friends until there weren’t many left …”
    â€œWe were investigating …”
    â€œYou were sniffing through his life like a pervert through a drawerful of panties, until he had no grace or privacy—all for the crime of signing petitions. It’s as sick a way to break someone as Stalin ever dreamed