They were interviewed over three long days at the great library at Kykuit. The setting was itself a planned stroke, an intentional stroke of staging. The room, its two-story shelves of leather books, its cathedral-scaled ceiling, its baronial fireplace, was designed to give an impression of old-world gravitas, of intellectual weight and immovable solidity. Ezra was not some dirty industrialist being interviewed in an antibacterial office; he was a statesman granting an audience from his ancestral hall.
But, Harrison Lee was not to be dazzled by architecture. He was a reporter's reporter, an animal of skeptical, systematic doubt. He arrived with packing notes stuffed into his briefcase, eyes alert and critical, questions reduced to an edge. He regarded the majestic library as no seat of authority, but as an awfully big room where one man could try and hide some awfully big lies.
The duel began.
"Mr. Prentice," Lee started, his tone one of professional, calm neutrality, "Let's begin at the beginning of your... second act. People I've spoken to, people who knew you for years, speak of an immediate and deep change. They speak of your being an altogether different man from day to day. What can you say to account for it?"
This was the first blow, aimed at the very heart of Ezra's impossible secret. Ezra did not blink. He sat back in his large leather armchair, his face not defensive, but weary, as though recounting an anguishing and vexing memory.
"They are right, Mr. Lee," he replied, his voice a low, contemplative baritone. "There was a change. I would call it... a moment of terrible clarity. It was the early thirties. The world as I knew it, the world of disciplined markets and gentlemen's agreements, was crumbling. I saw the breadlines. I saw the desperation. And I saw something else. I saw the tempest gathering in Europe. I read their books, I studied their economic tracts. I saw the development of a nation, Germany, as an industrial war machine, and I knew, with an absolute certainty which was an illness, that there was to be a second, far nastier war."
He looked at Lee, his eyes shining with an eloquently assembled suffering. "You term that sort of foresight, Mr. Lee, a gift? A curse. The man I was, the reserved lawyer, was clearly not able to bear it. So yes, I changed. I was compelled to. I became tougher, sharper, nastier, perhaps. Because I knew I was racing against time to toughen up, and through me, my people, for the catastrophe I could foresee ahead. It was an awful night of the soul from which I emerged... resolute."
He made the unintelligible sound like some sort of patriotic, sorrowful awakening. It was an impressive performance.
Lee, unperturbed, moved to his next line of accusation. He produced a copy of the affidavit of the nurse. "Your valet, Thomas Riley. A nurse swears on oath that at the time of his death he said he was being 'interrogated' by your men."
Ezra's face impassive, but of grim necessity, not remorse. "Yes," he answered, his own voice dropping. "My security people interviewed him. It was an extremely regrettable necessity, and a decision that to this day troubles me." He gestured toward Sullivan, sitting silently in the room's corner. "We at the time had received trustworthy word from our people on the continent that there were German agents seeking to insinuate themselves amongst the domestic staffs of the great American industrialists. My work... my personal work... was of a nature that made me an ideal target."
He faced Lee. "We wanted to be sure our home was secure. Each of the employees was privately interrogated. It was an unpleasant enterprise, but the stakes were unimaginably high. Sullivan has a copy of the intelligence dossier we maintained handy that you can read." The dossier, of course, was an incredible and meticulous forgery, commissioned at the request of von Hauser and bursting with detail to be absolutely convincing.
"And it's just one dreadful coincidence," Lee insisted, his voice weighed down with skepticism, "that this man, whom you admit your team was monitoring, was found beaten to death in an alley days later?"
Ezra's face relaxed into an aspect of profound, weary sadness. He looked at his hands. "That, Mr. Lee, is the great and abiding tragedy of this entire story. A good, decent man happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. His death was nothing to do with us, but the fact of its timing... it has weighed heavy upon my conscience since then. I've oft wondered if the strain of our security interview could somehow have made him careless one fateful night. A question with which I shall be burdened for the rest of my days."
He had not repudiated the fundamental facts. He had only re-interpreted them, including the journalist's accusations as part of an overarching, tragic history of war-time necessity and personal regret.
Lee knew he was being skillfully maneuvered, but the story was too powerful, too self-contained to be ignored. He believed he had Ezra beat, admitting to questionable, morally questionable acts. It was at just this point Ezra moved, rotating the entire interview onto its side.
"But, Mr. Lee," he stated, his tone shifting, becoming angrier, authoritative. "To understand why precisely we were forced to exercise those extreme, and occasionally questionable, security measures... you must understand what it was precisely we were guarding."
Over the next two days, Ezra treated Harrison Lee to the history of a lifetime. He flung wide the gates to his underground kingdom. He led him through his central, personal role in the funding and providing the Manhattan Project. He gave him declassified (through his own high-authority sources at the government) reports chronicling his pre-war warnings of the German atomic program. He arranged for Lee to have tight, carefully orchestrated interviews with General Groves and David Sterling and others, all of them praising Prentice's "uncanny foresight" and "indispensable patriotic services." He walked him through blueprints of the A-1 Guardian, the bomb that saved the Pusan Perimeter.
He was drowning the dirty little story of the murdered valet in the big, furtive chronicles of the past quarter century. He was redefining himself from would-be murderer to misunderstood, anonymous national hero, a man who walked in the shadows, making the hard, dirty choices that kept the free world free.
Harrison Lee, the relentless investigator, was stunned. He came to Kykuit to investigate one dark corner of one man's life. He was being handed the keys to one secret history of the entire American Century, and at its very center, Ezra Prentice. The story of Thomas Riley, the valet, was no longer the story of the day. It was now one dark, and now ambiguous footnote to an epic of world stature.
In his safehouse, Baron von Hauser read the day's transcripts of the interview as presented to him by Sullivan. His earlier anger at Ezra's denial of his tidy, killing solution had been immense. It was an abdication of strength, of sentimentality. But as he read, his anger transmuted slowly, inexorably, to an expression of great, almost devout, wonder.
He acknowledged the genius of the move by Ezra. It was something more than ruthlessness. It was reality construction. Ezra was not eliminating the threat. He was digesting it, making the poison nourishment, an accusation the stuff of mythology.
"My God," whispered the Baron to the empty room, and he shuddered. "He isn't just playing to win the game."
He sat looking out the window, at a world he could no longer control, at a world being shaped by a mind far greater than his own.
"Now he's making it his coronation."
The Baron recognized that Ezra Prentice had expanded beyond being the lord of politics and of violence. He had advanced to an entirely terrible level of lordship: the power to censor reality itself, to compel the world to hold as truth the story he wanted it to hold as truth, by believing it with an adequate amount of fervor and authority to make all the others' renditions of the truth weak and insignificant next to it.