The Other Traitor (2 page)

But why had it happened? Because her grandfather had been a monster or because it was convenient for people to believe he was?

Annette reached into the pocket of her jeans, pulled out the article she had torn from the newspaper, and looked at the smudged photo of Isaac Goldstein. His hooded eye glared at her. A monster?

She quickly read the two short paragraphs about the KGB agent’s memoir. According to the agent, Isaac Goldstein had no involvement in passing secret atomic-bomb information on to the Soviets.
Goldstein was never a major player in communist spy circles,
the agent had written.
He didn’t have access to crucial material. That all came from another source.

What if there was something to the Soviet agent’s story? Annette was a journalist, someone who didn’t accept things at face value, and yet that’s exactly what she had been doing all these years.

She took the album from her mother and looked again at the photo of the smiling bridegroom, a decorated army hero. Her real grandfather. Isaac Goldstein. He looked nothing like the smudged picture of the angry man from
Le Figaro
, a traitor with a squinty eye. The hateful photo had been on ‘Death to Goldstein’ posters in 1953 and was the one that popped up hundreds of times if you searched on Google Images. But did that make it true?

Who had this man really been? A hero or a traitor?

Annette put her arm around her mother, holding tight even as Mama shrank from her touch. Perhaps the truth about Isaac Goldstein could help Mama reclaim her life.

And then his granddaughter could finally reclaim hers.

Who the hell was this person? Everything about him was wrong.

Julian Sandman stared at his distorted reflection in the black lacquered door to his apartment. He’d been standing there for so long that the caked snow that had accumulated on his dress shoes during his walk home from his Midtown office had melted and soaked through to his feet.

Happy thirtieth b-day, man, whoever you really are.

A thumping bass beat leaked through the apartment door, which meant Sephora was probably inside getting dressed for her spinning class. Well, he’d made the first move and there was no going back. Might as well get this over with.

He jabbed his key into the lock, opened the door, and was hit by a blast of cold air from the open balcony door. Sephora preferred fresh air, even when it was freezing outside. He pulled off his soaked shoes and socks in the front foyer. His feet had turned white and crinkly and looked grotesque against the polished black marble floor.

But then, this entire apartment was grotesque. He and Sephora had been here a year, but it still felt more like a trendy hotel suite than a place where people actually lived. He took in the stiff black leather sofa, ebony brick wall, media console and giant flat-screen TV. A fake white Christmas tree with crystal ornaments stood in the corner of the room topped by a Jewish star, Sephora’s big concession to Julian. Beyond the open balcony door, the snow was coming down so thick it obscured the view of the Hudson River. Not that you could see the river even on a clear day, thanks to the new highrise that was under construction across the street. You didn’t get much for five thousand dollars a month in Manhattan’s West Village these days.

What the hell was he doing here?

He loosened his tie and dropped his wet cashmere coat, wool hat, and briefcase on the leather chair by the rarely used glass desk. The plain wood chess set Julian’s father had gotten him when he was five sat on a corner of the desk, though Julian never played chess anymore. There were lots of things he didn’t do anymore.

He followed the rhythmic beat of hip-hop music into the bedroom, recognizing Lil Wayne rapping.

Sephora sat on the bed, yanking on a pair of tight black high-heeled boots, her silky reddish-blonde hair falling across her face.

“It’s slippery out there,” he said. “Not high-heel weather.”

She tossed the hair out of her eye and stood up. “I’ll take a taxi.”

Julian watched her examine herself in the full-length mirror. Blue jeans over a black leotard. A body most guys drooled over, as he once did.

When they’d first met a couple of years before, Sephora had been one of the HR recruiters at the company’s corporate office and had taken him out to lunch. For two hours over martinis and tuna tartare, she had tried to impress him with what an amazing opportunity was in store for him with one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. The company invested more in R&D than any of its competitors, she’d told him, and that meant Julian would work in a state-of-the-art lab on projects that could transform the health and well-being of the world.

While Sephora hadn’t been the main reason he had accepted the employment offer, that lunch certainly hadn’t hurt. A few weeks after Julian joined the company, he and Sephora started dating. A year later, she moved in with him, and then dropped her corporate career.

“You’re home early,” she said, studying him in the mirror. She rubbed gloss on her lips with her pinkie. “Getting a head start on the big celebration?”

“Not exactly. Can we talk?”

“My class is in twenty minutes,” she said.

Lil Wayne’s voice pounded in the small room.

“Aww, come here, big boy. Let me give you a birthday hug.” Sephora pulled him toward her, swung her back against his chest in a spooning position, then crisscrossed his long arms around her breasts so that both their reflections were framed in the mirror. Her face was fresh and pink-cheeked, her green eyes sparkly. He, on the other hand, looked like he’d been dragged in from a shipwreck. Short black hair plastered to his skull like a swimming cap. His face a collage of pasty white skin, five o’clock shadow, and dark smudges around his sunken blue eyes.

“Lovely,” he said in a flat voice. “An award-winning couple.”

“You’ll feel better after you take a hot shower.”

“Can you skip your exercise class? I really need to talk to you.”

She dropped his hands and rubbed an invisible imperfection on her cheek that she must have noticed in the mirror. “We can talk when I get back. Should be around eight. We’re having dinner with Brent and Camilla at eight-thirty at a new restaurant in the Meatpacking District. I know you don’t want a big fuss over your birthday, but after that we’re meeting up with the rest of our friends at the Gansevoort bar.”

Her friends, she meant. “I’d rather we just stay home and order in a pizza or something.”

She cocked her head and frowned, as though he was speaking in a foreign language. “A pizza? For your birthday?”

“Or sushi. Whatever you want. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

She checked her watch. “I have to go.” She started across the room toward the dresser.

“I quit.”

She stopped and looked at him.

“I quit my job.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been miserable there with all the bureaucracy and bullshit.” He went over to the sliding glass door and watched the snow piling up on their balcony. The hibachi they’d bought and never used was almost completely buried. “This was never what I wanted to do with my life.”

“So you have something else lined up?”

He turned back toward her and shook his head.

She scowled and played with a strand of apricot hair. “I know some people at Pfizer and Merck. I’m sure they’d love to hire a brilliant guy like you. MD from Cornell, PhD in biophysics from MIT. Top of his class at both. Two years in new-product development.” She seemed to be warming to her subject, but she’d always had a knack as a recruiter.

“I’m leaving the corporate world.”

She glanced at her watch again. “I can live without the suspense. Where are you going? Some startup? Back to the academic world?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t gotten that far. Maybe I’ll take up painting again.”

She squeezed her eyes closed like she’d gotten a sudden headache pain, then opened them. “Painting? What, houses?”

He’d been stupid to hope she’d understand.

“Jesus, Julian. You’re working for one of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world developing products that will change the health and well-being of the world.”

“I’m making a goddamn face cream. I think the world can do without one more of those.”

She opened a dresser drawer, pulled out a black silk scarf, then slammed the drawer. “I just don’t know where you get off quitting your job without even discussing it with me.”

“I’m sorry. I would have talked it over with you first, but it just happened. I was sitting in my office filling out yet another useless report and I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ So I went in to give two weeks’ notice. They told me thanks very much, but company policy was for me to leave today. So I left.”

Sephora wrapped the scarf around her neck. He followed her to the living room where she grabbed her fur coat from the front closet.

“And what are you going to do about money?” she asked. “Or is your dream to be a starving artist?”

“I have a little saved.”

“But you have financial responsibilities, Julian. This apartment. Stuff. You know.”

“We’ll move someplace cheaper. Maybe Brooklyn. We can make this work.”

“Whoa, Brooklyn?” She held up her hand. “Since when did you become in charge of my life’s decisions? I happen to like this apartment.”

He felt a spurt of rage. “Then how about you going back to work to pay for it while I ‘find myself’ like you did this past year?”

Her nostrils flared as she held his stare. “So that’s how it is.” She pushed past him and opened the front door.

His reflex was to tell her he was sorry, but nothing came out.

She glanced down at his shoes and socks in front of the door. “Happy birthday, asshole,” she said, and then was gone.

He clenched his fists, quaking in the frigid air that blew in through the open balcony door. What had he been thinking? Sephora was interested in his earning potential, not in his happiness. He paced in his bare feet in his ridiculous apartment with its high ceilings, purported Hudson-River view, and ugly black furniture that Sephora had persuaded him to buy. How the hell had he gotten to this place in his life? In a hated career, an alien apartment, with a girlfriend he didn’t much like? Living an inauthentic life to please everyone except himself.

And then his fists relaxed. Sephora wasn’t the problem, and he knew it.

He picked up the black queen on the wooden chess board and turned it over in his fingers. One minute he’d been a happy kid playing chess with his dad, reading comic books, and sketching his favorite superheroes. Then Dad died and nothing felt right after that.

The chiseled face of the black queen stared up at him. For most of his life he had ignored the truth, but deep inside he knew exactly how he’d gotten to this place. Excelling in all the things he thought would please his mother. Trying to get her to finally notice him, maybe even love him.

Well, he was thirty years old. Time to grow up. But in order to go forward, he would first have to go back.

He set the black queen on its square and caught his reflection in the glass desktop. A little blurry, but he could almost recognize the person that hadn’t been there for a long, long time.

Himself.

Annette was jetlagged, woozy from fatigue. It was midnight back in Paris, seven pm here in Manhattan, and she knew she should try to get back on a normal schedule. Probably eat something and stay awake at least until ten.

She had called her mother when she’d landed at JFK. With Grandma Betty gone, Annette worried that Mama, who had no close friends, would be terribly lonely. Before she’d left, Annette had asked her to come to New York with her, but Mama had looked at her as though she’d gone insane. “New York?” She made it sound like a curse. “I’ll never go back.”

Annette sank against the blue-chenille sofa that doubled as the bed in her studio apartment, and checked her phone. Bill had texted her two hours ago.
Call when you get in. Dinner?
But she’d been too busy researching Mariasha and Aaron Lowe on the internet, looking for possible connections to Isaac Goldstein. Now, her eyes were practically crossing from staring at her computer screen and her stomach grumbled. She hit speed dial on her phone, hoping Bill hadn’t given up on having dinner with her. He was her go-to person when she had a problem, either personal or professional.

“Yo,” Bill said. “If it isn’t Annie-get-your-gun.”

Bill insisted that Annette resembled Annie Oakley. Probably the frantic blonde hair she occasionally wore in braids like the famous sharpshooter. Or maybe he was joking about Annette’s attitude about life.

“You still want dinner?” she asked.

“Absolutely. The Black Sheep?”

“Sure. See you there in fifteen minutes or so.”

She quickly straightened up the room, more out of compulsion than because she thought Bill might come back here later. She shoved her empty suitcase into the back of the closet and stowed away her grandmother’s clothes and tablecloth in a drawer of the armoire. Her grandmother’s photo album, brass candle holders, and coverless book of Jewish recipes and traditions now sat on top of the wood steamer trunk. She’d picked up the battered trunk at a flea market and used it as a table and to store the books she couldn’t fit on the two bookcases on either side of the bricked-in fireplace. She would have loved a working fireplace, but could appreciate that the building’s owner was concerned about a fire hazard.

Her apartment had originally been the front parlor of an 1890s brownstone in a neighborhood just north of Morningside Heights that was now on the verge of a comeback. Annette had moved in three years before, because the rent was cheap and it was pretty close to Columbia University. After she graduated last year with her master’s in journalism and started work as a freelance writer, she hadn’t wanted to move, loving the light from the large bay window, the original oak floors, and the proximity to laid-back restaurants, old bookstores, and vintage shops. Perhaps it also reminded her of Paris.

She slipped on a red ski jacket and a pair of well-worn Ugg boots over her jeans, and locked the apartment door behind her. Snow was falling lightly so she pulled the hood over her head and walked through slush to the restaurant three blocks away. Discarded Christmas trees with tangled tinsel lay on their sides near the gutter, shedding brown pine needles. The air smelled of smoke and fir and garbage.

She stepped inside the crowded entryway of The Black Sheep and stomped the snow from her boots. The restaurant was a former bar turned vegan restaurant with a full liquor license and still looked like a saloon with a tall bar and stools in front of a mirrored wall of booze. Along the opposite brick wall were oak booths with at least fifty years of initials and hearts scratched into the wood. Definitely not a white-tablecloth kind of place, which made it popular with students from Columbia and City College, residents and interns from St. Luke’s, and locals from Harlem and Morningside Heights.

All the barstools were taken and the booths occupied. Then Annette saw a large dark-skinned hand waving to her from a booth in the back. Bill gave her a smile and pushed his tortoise-shell frames up on his nose. He was wearing his usual nerdy-professor outfit—navy crew-neck sweater over a white button-down, and probably loafers, which she couldn’t see under the table. His prematurely gray afro was cut close to his scalp, like a low-pile carpet.

“Hey,” she said. She slid into the booth opposite Bill and shrugged out of her ski jacket. There was a pot of tea, a mug, and four used teabags leaking brownish liquid on a small plate. “How’d you score a booth?”

“I’ve been here for two hours holding this table.”

“
Mon dieu
! Seriously?”

“I figured you’d have to eat sooner or later.”

She waved at the teabags. “That’s all you’re drinking?”

He pursed his lips, as though considering what to tell her. “I thought it best to take a break. I had a little episode early this week.”

“
C’est affreux
,” she said, concerned for her friend. Bill’s dark moods had taken him to bad places in the past. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you. Are you okay?”

“I’m great,” he said. “Stop being a mother hen.”  He signaled to the waiter. “But you should have a drink. I understand their special tonight is a rum punch smoothie made with fennel and plums.”

Bill seemed okay, so she relaxed. “Sounds like the chef had too much leftover plum pie from Christmas.”

The waiter came over. Annette ordered a glass of sauvignon blanc, Bill asked for another pot of water and a couple more teabags, and they got a platter of tofu and black bean nachos and two brown rice avocado rolls.

Bill put the four used teabags into his mug and poured what was left of the water over them. He had the same purposeful expression she remembered from the first class she’d taken with him in Twentieth-Century Political Journalism. At the time, Professor Bill Turner had looked like another student, but the last year had aged him and he now seemed more than his forty years.

“Tell me about Paris,” Bill said.

“You’re in an awfully big hurry to make this about me. Can we first talk about what happened to you this week?” She wanted to know what had set him off on a drinking binge. “Was it Kylie?”

He took a sip of his tea and made a face. “Cold.” He put the mug down. A few tea leaves floated to the top. One of the teabags had broken open. “It’s not really her fault,” he said. “I blindsided her. Here she thought she was in a forever marriage and she learns that her husband has a sick alternative preference for men.”

“Stop acting like you have a disease,” Annette said. “There’s nothing wrong or immoral about being gay.”

The waiter set the wine, hot water and teabags on the table, then left.

“But if I had understood it sooner,” Bill said, “I could have avoided the pain I’ve caused everyone.”

“And you wouldn’t have your beautiful son.”

Bill took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, took in a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. “She doesn’t want me to see him,” he said. “She’s talking about moving away. She’s concerned I’m a bad influence.”

“That’s bullshit,” Annette said.

Bill waved his hand for her to keep her voice down.

“You’re a wonderful influence, Bill. A brilliant man and an amazing human being. Billy is lucky to have you for a father.”

He put his glasses back on and gave her a closed-mouthed smile. “Okay, Annie-get-your-gun. Pipe down. You don’t have to right all the wrongs of the world in one day. Let’s give Kylie a little time to adjust to the idea. The wound is still fresh.”

“It’s not a wound and it’s been almost six months.”

He smiled broadly this time, his strong, even teeth strikingly white against his dark skin. “I love you, Annette Revoir. I’m sorry I only gave you an A-minus.”

Annette let go of her anger and laughed. It was an ongoing joke between them. The A-minus on a paper she’d written about Alger Hiss that Annette felt should have been an A.

He pulled the old teabags out of his mug, put a fresh one in and poured water over it. This time it steamed. “Ah, better,” he said. “Now tell me about Paris and your mother.”

Annette took a long sip from her glass of wine as the waiter put their food down on the table. Bill was the only person Annette had entrusted with her secret that Isaac Goldstein was her grandfather. Bill knew about her shock when she’d learned of her grandfather’s existence when she was sixteen. Her shame when she searched the internet and learned Isaac Goldstein was a hated man who had betrayed his country. And her anger at her mother for never trusting her with the truth. He had told Annette to read beyond the headlines, to be a journalist and dig deeper. But Annette hadn’t wanted to learn more. Every time she read her grandfather’s name and thought about her roots, she felt dirty.

She stared at one of the hearts carved into the wood tabletop.
TJ Loves LM. ’83.

“I found a photo album that my grandmother had hidden away,” she said. “There were these incredible photos I’d never seen before. My grandparents’ wedding picture, pictures taken on their honeymoon, my mother as a little girl. The photos ended in 1950.”

“The year your grandfather was arrested.” Bill was widely read, especially in twentieth-century politics, but Annette was always surprised when he would recite what seemed to her to be arcane details. “Your mother was how old? Seven or eight when your grandmother took her to live in Paris?”

“Eight.”

“That’s tough. She not only lost her father that year, but she must have sensed he was someone she should be ashamed of.” Bill stared into his mug, as though he was trying to read the floating bits of tea leaves.

“It’s not the same thing as you and Billy,” she said. “Isaac Goldstein was viewed as one of the most hated men in America. A communist who passed on atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviets. An enemy to all that was good.”

“Hate and fear come in many different flavors, my Annie.” He gave her a sad smile. “Tell me more about the album.”

Bill was right. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t fix everything and everyone overnight.

“In the wedding photo, Isaac Goldstein was dressed in his military best with medals and ribbons,” she said. “The photo…” she searched for the right words. “It made me question everything I’d once accepted as irrefutable. Isaac Goldstein was a decorated war hero—how could he have been a traitor to his country?”

“An interesting dichotomy,” Bill said.

“He was also so normal-looking. I’d say ordinary, but that’s not quite right, because even through the photos I could tell he must have been very charismatic. And handsome. Nothing like the photo of him that’s plastered all over the internet. Death to Goldstein! That man looked like something straight out of Orwell’s
1984.
”

Bill raised an eyebrow. “You don’t believe that’s a coincidence, do you?”

Annette leaned against the hard booth, taken aback. She’d read
1984
in high school, the year before she’d learned about her grandfather. There was a character in the novel, Emmanuel Goldstein, who was used as the focal point of hatred. His ugly, distorted face was broadcast on all telescreens each day so the masses could yell and scream and direct their fury and resentment toward him in what was known as ‘Two Minutes Hate.’

“
Merde
,” Annette said. “Do you think the government created the ‘Death to Goldstein’ posters with that awful picture so people would identify him with Orwell’s monster?”

“I’ve always thought so,” Bill said. “
1984
was popular during the peak of the anti-communist frenzy. Everyone was reading it at the time your grandfather was executed. If Emmanuel Goldstein was ‘the number one enemy of the state,’ as he was called in the book, then wouldn’t people conflate his image with this other Goldstein?”

“So you don’t believe my grandfather was a spy?”

“I’m not saying that.” He swished his teabag back and forth in the mug. “He was a known member of the Communist Party. But I’ve told you before there’s a lot more to Isaac Goldstein’s execution than is taught in schools. Many theories and speculation. One supposition is the government was trying to create fear in the form of a communist threat in order to garner support for the Korean War.”

A group of burly young men had pushed in from outside and were crowding the bar to watch the football game on the hanging TV. They shouted and cheered.

Bill leaned closer to her across the table so as to be heard. “Even at the time, a contingent was against his execution. And now recently released KGB documents suggest Goldstein wasn’t as deeply involved as believed. A few political experts theorize he was executed as an example, because they couldn’t catch the real spy.”

“So you believe there was someone else?” Annette asked.

“Don’t know.” Bill pushed his glasses up. “Problem is no one’s ever identified anyone who might have done what Goldstein was accused of.”

“A memoir just came out by a former KGB agent,” Annette said. “He claims someone else was involved but doesn’t name names. Still, there may be something useful in the book. I’ll get hold of it tomorrow.”

“Good. I was wondering when you’d get off your ass and approach this like a journalist.”

“That’s not fair,” she said. “This hits too close to home. Especially when I saw how it scarred my mother and grandmother.”

“I know it’s not fair, but just because it’s personal doesn’t mean you should shy away from investigating. The key to being a good journalist is to be able to view any situation objectively.”