THE LAST PUMPKIN PAPER

First-novelist Oeste offers a fresh fictive twist on a controversial old case (that of Alger Hiss)—a debut that, while likely to offend both liberals and conservatives, will leave less partisan readers delighted with the deliciously wicked way it resolves the issue of the convicted perjurer's guilt or innocence. Moving back and forth in time, narrator Joe Pope recounts how he and his commanding officer Victor Closky (a closet homosexual with ties to occupied Germany's black market) go to work as investigators for the House Un-American Activities Committee after their 1947 discharge from the Army. Although nominally employed by HUAC, the WW II vets give their real allegiance to Congressman Richard M. Nixon, an aggressive young lawmaker and committee member who seems to be going places. Then, in 1948, Hiss, a darling of the New Deal establishment who served as FDR's aide at Yalta and secretary-general of the UN's organizational conference, is accused by Whittaker Chambers of being a Communist spy. Pope details how he and Closky assemble the evidence (including documents Chambers had secreted in a hollow pumpkin at his Maryland farm), which put Hiss in the frame and Nixon on the path to the White House. More than 40 years after the Red Menace helped advance the vaultingly ambitious Nixon, he calls Pope away from a comfortable retirement and sends him back to Germany in search of papers his high-level sources allege the long-dead Chambers kept from HUAC. While neither Pope nor his aging colleagues can locate the incriminating records, they do stumble on clues suggesting that Hiss had much to hide. Precisely what secrets the discredited diplomat has been concealing are not revealed until a climactic stateside confrontation between the two over-the-hill antagonists. A jaunty, sure-handed replay of a cause cÇläbre, which, despite an arguably unexpected document, plays completely fair throughout.