The Pledge Read online

  The Pledge

  Howard Fast

  Contents

  CALCUTTA

  NEW YORK CITY: Uptown

  NEW YORK CITY: Downtown

  THE SUBPOENA

  A WALL STREET LAWYER

  THE STAR CHAMBER

  AS SUCH THINGS GO

  A CURIOUS COURTROOM

  ENTER HERE

  MILL BOG

  GOING HOME

  “THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME”

  A Biography of Howard Fast

  Copyright Page

  CALCUTTA

  THE MANY TURNS, twists, and circumstances that led Bruce Bacon down the curious path his life took probably threaded back through all his years on earth. No one is constructed instantly — in terms of mind and outlook — any more than one is changed instantly. The making and the changing are part of a process. But there is no question that in Bacon’s case, the process climaxed in Calcutta in 1945. Bacon had been in Europe since the Normandy landing, writing for the New York Tribune, with the understanding that he could do magazine pieces for other publications, namely, The New.Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. His newspaper pieces were personalized and intimate, very much like the stuff that Ernie Pyle had been writing, and he had made a good name for himself, considering that he had just turned thirty.

  By the time Berlin fell to the Allied armies, Bruce Bacon felt that he had seen enough of war and a war-shattered Europe. He had heard vaguely, from an officer who had been transferred from India to France, that the British, fearing a Japanese penetration of Assam and India, where they might be welcomed as liberators, had cornered the rice supply and contrived a famine, which broke the will of the people in Assam and in part of Bengal. The rumor held that hundreds of thousands had already died of starvation, and that thousands more were now in the process of dying. Bruce decided that it was an interesting and important story, something very different from the war stories he had been sending home, and well worth investigating.

  Bruce returned to Paris with orders for Air Transport, and a few days later, after a stopover at New Delhi, a lumbering C-37 put him down outside Calcutta. He was quartered in a one-time rajah’s palace that had been assigned to the press corps, where a tiny room, the size of a jail cell, became his home. There was a small, hard bed, on which he spent an uneasy night under mosquito netting, half choking in the heat.

  Ignoring the advice of his colleagues, the old hands in Calcutta, he ventured out on his own. It didn’t surprise him that they were uninterested in the source of the famine. It was everywhere around them; they hated it; they hated Calcutta, where there was no war; and nobody ever made a name as a war correspondent without a war. They hated the heat, the filth, the poverty, the stench, the gentle and so often abject people, whom they called “wogs” without discrimination, and they found solace drinking with their British counterparts and rewriting the dull handouts of the local army press office.

  Bruce had the advantage of being new to it, and he was utterly entranced as well as horrified by the huge, throbbing, aching mass of humanity that was Calcutta. He walked miles through the streets; he rode the crowded streetcars for hours. He was enchanted by the big, ancient Buick touring cars that were the local taxicabs, each driven by two large, turbaned, bearded Sikhs, the clanging streetcars that were everywhere, the pools of water where the Bengalis washed and washed, endlessly observing their rite of cleanliness in very dirty water, the cows that wandered everywhere, worshipped and untouched by starving people, the thousands of peasant families living on the street, the focal point of their homes tiny charcoal fires, the dead mingled with the living. He saw the sleeping streets, set aside for the homeless to sleep on the pavement, and he saw them by night, when the broad streets were carpeted by living human beings, and he also saw them in the early hours of the morning, when the human skeletons that were alive had departed, leaving, scattered on the street, the human skeletons that had died during the night.

  Bruce Bacon was a healthy, large-boned man, six feet in height, well dressed, well fed. The people he saw were short, skinny, many of them in rags, yet he never found anger or hostile words directed against him. Himself a product of middle-class America, he had not suffered in the Depression, the time of his childhood years. His father was a New York physician. His growing-up had been managed and sheltered, as an only child, by two loving and intelligent people, and until he saw the aftermath of an air raid on London, he had never actually seen a dead person. Like millions of other American young men, he was fed innocent into a world of death and horror, and in the course of three years of witnessing and writing about the largest mass slaughter in the history of the human race, he had come to the conclusion that nothing man did to man could shock him. Calcutta shocked him.

  At the same time, it fascinated him. Essentially — like most men — he was a gentle person, fighting always for the macho that men were supposed to have and which women were blessedly exempt from. The things he saw in Calcutta ripped away the thin veneer of indifference that war had forced onto him, and he made the story he had come to write a sort of obsession. But no matter how many people he spoke to, no one could make the British connection for him. There was rice, millions of pounds of it, airplane hangars filled with bags of rice, warehouses of rice; but this, he was told, was the doing of the rich Muslim rice dealers, functioning within the doctrine that profits were not sinful, and that he who owned goods had the inalienable right to raise the price of those goods. But when he questioned why the British, who ruled the land, did not break the price, the answer was always that this was neither their right nor their function.

  Then a U.S. Army sergeant, one Hal Legerman, found Bruce in the correspondents’ palace, hunched over his typewriter in the smoking room, and said to him, “My name is Legerman, and if you’ll stand for a dry martini, I’ll put you on the track.”

  Looking at his watch, Bruce remarked that it was only four o’clock in the afternoon.

  “I haven’t had a martini in six months, so what the hell is the difference? I’m not allowed into this holy place; I bulled my way, and the Limeys don’t know what a martini is anyway and they don’t have vermouth, so just ask for straight gin.”

  “How come,” Bruce asked suspiciously, “if you’re that fond of gin, you waited six months?”

  “I been up in the hills with the Tenth Air Force.”

  “And just what track are you going to put me on?”

  “Jesus God, Bacon — you are Bacon, aren’t you? At least that’s what the guy at the bar said.”

  “I’m Bacon.”

  “OK. So you’re trying to put the famine and the Limeys together, right?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do I know it? Shit, man, everyone in Calcutta knows it by now. I don’t mean the people. I mean the assholes who run the place.”

  “Let’s have that dry martini without vermouth,” Bruce said.

  It turned out that Hal Legerman had spent more than two years in the China-Burma-India Theater, otherwise known as the CBI. He was a supply sergeant, with tours of duty that included Burma and over the Hump into China, and there was not much in Bengal that he didn’t know about. He was a conduit and a magnet for news, and when news came to him, he passed it on to the proper destination, as he saw it. He had friends at the local Yank office and at the two major Bengali newspapers, and he knew people in Karachi and Delhi and Bombay as well as in Calcutta. At home in New York, he had been a flack in a small public relations firm, but war does strange things to people, and now, sipping at his second gin on ice in the palace bar, he said to Bruce, “You’re looking for a connection between this famine and the Limeys, something you can print, but even if you get it, nobody back home is going to print it.”

  “Why?”
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  “They’ll tell you the war. That’s the reason for everything, right? They knew the Jews were being murdered by the millions and they didn’t do one damn thing. They wouldn’t even bomb the camps. The war. More important targets.”

  “I saw the camps,” Bruce said.

  “All right. You’re no fucken innocent. Do you know how many people have died already in this stinking famine?”

  “Thousands.”

  “Millions. They do a body count that’s as secret as a general’s brain, and the latest figure is over five million. It’ll be six million before it’s over.”

  Bruce stared at him in disbelief. “You’re kidding.”

  “Hell, no! I’m telling you the truth.”

  “That matches Hitler — damn near.”

  “You bet it does. And I’ll tell you something, Bacon; you can hang in here for the next six months and you won’t get anyone to verify that figure. Try to get your handle on any of this. Last week there was an argument between our local command and the Limeys that was pretty damn wild, considering that we’re supposed to be allies. You’ve seen the sleeping streets?”

  “I saw them. You can’t be in Calcutta and not see them.”

  “Well, the Limeys were picking up over a thousand bodies each morning — just the urban crop — and they didn’t have the trucks to handle it. So they demanded that we organize burial detail and use our trucks to help them out. Our CO told them to fuck off and pick up their own dead, not their troops, you understand, but the peasants who had poured into town when their food ran out, and it got ugly as hell.”

  “What happened?”

  “It went up to the High Command and in the end we used our trucks — shit, Bacon, it’s diseased, totally diseased. A human life around here is not worth two cents.”

  “You were going to put me on the track,” Bruce said. “All you gave me so far are dead ends and closed doors.”

  “I’m not cadging a lousy shot of gin,” Legerman said with annoyance. “I figured you for a good guy.”

  “Why? You don’t know me from Adam.”

  “I don’t know. You wear glasses. You look good. How the hell do I know? Maybe because you’re on this story. Nobody else is.”

  “And putting me on the track?”

  “OK. There’s a Professor Chandra Chatterjee, teaches at the university here. I’ll arrange for you to spend an evening with him. It should be profitable.”

  “He speaks English?”

  “Come on, Bacon. This is India. Practically every educated Bengali talks English, most of them better than I do.”

  Professor Chatterjee’s house, as Bruce saw it two days later, was a small stucco cottage, part of a cluster of such cottages near the university. It was pleasantly shaded by a large live oak and located at the opposite side of Calcutta, thus demanding a long twisting ride through an endless maze of streets and avenues. Fortunately, Bruce had the use of one of the three jeeps and a chauffeur, one of several that the army had assigned to the correspondents. When he reached the professor’s house, he was introduced to two small children, nine and eleven, both boys, and to Professor Chatterjee’s wife.

  Mrs. Chatterjee, a small, dark-eyed, pretty woman, returned to the living room after she had taken the children to another part of the house. Aside from Chatterjee, a grayhaired wisp of a man with an eager yet unassuming manner, gold-rimmed glasses, and a gentle smile of greeting, there were two other people present: one was Sergeant Harold Legerman, and the other a thin, tall man with a lined, serious face, an Indian dressed in dhoti and sandals, as was Professor Chatterjee. Bruce knew of the Indian habit of dining very late in the evening and he had been told that they felt Westerners disapproved of their style of eating in part with their fingers, and thereby invited only close friends to dinner. Since it was now only six o’clock in the evening, Bruce knew that they would leave before dinner, and he looked to Legerman to make the appropriate decisions, whether to go and when to go.

  Mrs. Chatterjee brought bottled water, glasses, and a tray of small fried cakes. Then she seated herself a bit apart from the four men. Legerman introduced Bruce to the professor and to the other man, whose name was Ashoka Majumdar. Majumdar shook hands heartily, smiling, an action that drove the gloom from his face and made it utterly enticing. It was Bruce’s first time in an Indian home, and he found it both strange and familiar. Aside from a few pieces of polished teak, it might have been a room in a small apartment in New York. There was a pleasant drugget on the floor, and on the wall two reproductions of Indian paintings, which reminded Bruce of pictures he had seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at home. Yet for all this, the room possessed a quality of nakedness, bareness, indeed, poverty.

  Noticing Bruce’s appraisal of the room, Professor Chatterjee said, “You may be thinking of the contrast between our place and the palace, where the correspondents are quartered. But ours is a land of contrasts, Mr. Bacon, the poorest people in the world cheek by jowl with the richest. That is India under the Raj.”

  “And before the Raj?” Bruce asked.

  “Not too different, and when the time of the Raj is over, it will take many years to change it.”

  “And that time — is it near?”

  Majumdar answered, “Oh, near, dear sir. Very near.”

  Bruce was sensitive to language, sensitive to sound and accent, and the strange musical accent of Indian speech and its unembarrassed formality charmed him. He was trying to place these people in the complex Indian social scheme, but it was not easy.

  “It is almost expectoration day,” Majumdar answered, and Mrs. Chatterjee made a small sound of protest.

  “A term my wife does not approve of,” Professor Chatterjee said, “but nevertheless a very colorful expression. You see, Mr. Bacon, for years we have been telling our people that if they would only learn to spit once together, there would be a wave of water that would wash the British into the sea.”

  “And now they have learned?” Bruce asked.

  “We think so. Yes, we think so. Very close. The time of the British Raj is over. But let us talk about you.” Mrs. Chatterjee poured a glass of water, interrupting her husband apologetically to assure Bruce that the water was safe. “We boil it at least five minutes.” She pressed one of the fried cakes on him, smiling tentatively. Her smile said that she would never have interrupted her husband under other circumstances. But he was a Westerner.

  “I mean,” Professor Chatterjee said, “that it is a shame that you had to be here so close to the terrible famine we have been through. Oh, Calcutta is not the most attractive place in the world, even without a famine, but there are qualities of life here —”

  “I know,” Bruce agreed. “Even under these conditions, I find it one of the most extraordinary cities I have ever seen.”

  “And horrible?” Majumdar wondered.

  “I’ve lived with the horrible for so long that it no longer horrifies me.”

  “But different, different,” Chatterjee said.

  “Yes, different.”

  Majumdar watched him thoughtfully. He’ll not be inappropriate, Bruce thought, and Majumdar said slowly, “In Europe you have been killing each other. Not you, of course, Mr. Bacon, but it has been the greatest killing since the beginning of time, over forty million I am told?”

  Bruce nodded. “That’s the latest estimate. Of course we don’t have very good figures out of Russia. They have lost better than twenty million.”

  “And here Mother India weeps over her own dead, as she has always wept, and who will remember?”

  “That’s something we’re trying to break through,” Legerman put in, more comfortable with practical talk.

  “Yes, in a moment. But tell me, Mr. Bacon, should we call you ‘Captain’? You wear the uniform.”

  “No, I’m not army. All the correspondents wear the uniform. They brevet us captain, but I write for the New York Tribune and for myself. Not for the army.”

  The Indians appeared to be relieved. Mrs. Chat
terjee smiled and offered her small cakes again. Bruce’s was still untouched. Hal Legerman took a second one and said to Chatterjee, “They got Mr. Bacon here on a merry-go-round and he’s been chasing his tail for days. He’s seen the rice stores that the dealers put away, but he can’t make a British connection, and the word’s out, and nobody will talk to him or give him the time of the day.”

  “Of course, you can say that the British could impound the rice and give it out,” Chatterjee said, smiling slightly. “And if you put that to them, they will say that the rice is not theirs to impound.”

  “And most of it came here only two weeks ago,” Majumdar added.

  “There was enough here six months ago,” Legerman said. “Enough to break the famine. Punjee’s warehouses were full of rice packs.”

  “My need is to find out whether it’s a conspiracy, and if it is, to get some proof.”

  “It is, it is, no doubt,” Majumdar said. “We know that, because the crop was good in so many places, and back when the Japanese had some push left and everyone thought they would overrun the plantations in the hills, the British decided they would break the people. You know, they were beginning to organize resistance in the hills, and with the Japanese to support them, well —”

  “I can hardly think of the Japanese as liberators,” Bruce said.

  “Point of view,” Legerman said.

  “Ah, well,” said Chatterjee, “you know, the British are very clever. A thing like this is done with whispered words, and the Muslims here are bitter against us. They would listen to the British. Ah, yes, certainly. But the British are very careful. The president of the university has excellent rapport with them, and they don’t like student demonstrations. He begged the British to seize the rice. But this war — any and all horrors are met with sighs of what must be done. It is the war, you know. You will get no proof, Mr. Bacon, nothing like a document summing up the intentions of the British.”

  “And why couldn’t you organize to seize the rice — I mean with all this death?”