Escape the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

Charles, until they bore the country. That means no political controversy or cheap heroics.”
    â€œYou’re directing me to respond to peepers by hoping they approve of what they see? My God, that’s pitiful …”
    â€œYou’ve made yourself a liability, Charles.” John Carey measured his words. “It therefore falls on you to maintain a graceful silence, or to leave.”
    Phillip Carey felt shocked sympathy for Charles, and then a rush of anticipation made his skin tingle. Charles gone …
    Charles faced his father with a faint, sardonic smile. “I can leave right now,” he answered softly. “All you have to do, is ask.”
    His answer lay between them like a dare. Phillip turned to his father …
    John Joseph Englehardt held his breath with Phillip Carey.
    â€œAll you have to do,” Charles repeated, “is ask.”
    In the long silence that followed, the tape clicked off.
    Abruptly, Englehardt remembered that he was not sitting next to Phillip but alone in a shabby room in Georgetown, a single light bulb hanging over him.
    Wind and rain spattered the window.
    In anxious haste, he pushed the rewind button and turned up the volume, thinking that John Carey’s answer had been swallowed by the storm …
    The Careys had become much more than just a file; over months their lives and voices had seduced him. Slowly, inevitably, he had been drawn to their central drama, Greek in its explosive symmetry: the father was a tyrant, the sons locked in bitter contest for his place.
    He was helpless to resist.
    Since childhood, Englehardt had known that he was cursed with a diamond-hard brilliance he could neither turn to grace or charm, nor use to catch the pleasure of his father. But his father’s eyes had fallen elsewhere: like a snake, the younger son had drawn back. Alone as any Jesuit, he had seen that he must live through indirection, manipulating others in ways they did not see …
    Now, in subtle choreography, he was turning HUAC to a secret purpose: the tape, silently rewinding, had been stolen from its files. Rapt, he watched it spin …
    He had joined the Committee upon leaving Yale, armed with a useless doctorate and no prospects in his father’s business. From the beginning he had seen the congressmen he worked for as list-waving buffoons, stringing “secrets” they already knew into jerry-built conspiracies. The secrets he was using them to learn were deeper: the hidden workings of faceless institutions and of the minds of men. Knowing the fever fueling HUAC to be transient, he gained a deeper lesson from their hearings. As witness after witness crumbled beneath their petty crimes of thought, he learned that men, and thus the governments which were simply groups of men, shared a mystic fervor to exploit the secrets that belonged to others, and to protect their own.
    For two lonely, friendless years he had ferreted out the “sins” of writers for politicians to expose, hoping that their approval of this craven service would replace the affection he could never earn, and thus commend him to still others, more secret and more powerful. Inwardly, he writhed at this submissiveness, this prostitution of his brain to buy the favor of idiots. And then his fateful meeting with the Careys had driven him beyond servility, to feed his soul.
    This terrible need for power with which to touch the Careys was one secret the committee must never know.
    Having failed to block publication of the slave novel, he returned to Washington despising Charles Carey as the mirror of his inconsequence, the last legacy of his father. Yet the emotions that the Careys stirred were much more disturbing and profound: Englehardt felt their kinship pierce his years of solitude. He knew them, knew the father’s fierce passion to conserve their place, saw Charles as the object of his thwarted love, felt the pain in Phillip’s heart.
    This once, he would use