The Other Traitor (22 page)

Julian grabbed Annette’s hand and they ran for cover under a tarp at the pedestrian entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge. They were both drenched when they reached it. Rain drummed against the tarp. A train screamed by, causing the russet metal beams to shake.

He held her close, chilled by the rain and freezing air. Annette was hurting, but he might be able to help her. He wanted to help her.

“Do you still want to find out who the real spy was?” he asked.

She pulled back from his chest and looked up at him. The hood of her red ski jacket covered her head, but tendrils of hair clung to her wet cheeks and forehead. “I honestly don’t know anymore. The deeper I dig, the more I think my mother and grandmother were right to run away from the past.”

“So you’re good with leaving things where they are? With never finding out whom he was protecting?”

“Good with it? No, I’m not good with it. I’m angrier than ever that my grandfather hurt my family so much.” She frowned. “Why? Do you know something?”

“I’m not sure. Nana told me some things that might make more sense to you than to me.”

“About Isaac Goldstein?”

He shook his head. “No. She hasn’t mentioned him, but she’s told me about her brother Saul. He was a physicist involved with the Manhattan Project.”

He felt her tense. “Working on the atomic bomb?” she asked.

“Apparently.”  He took in a deep breath. “And he was approached to spy for the Soviets.”

“
Mince alors
! Did he do it?”

“Nana said he didn’t.”

“But how would she have known? Maybe her brother decided to spy and didn’t tell her the truth.”

He stared at the graffiti-covered girders. “It’s possible.”

“Then Saul may have been the spy Isaac Goldstein was protecting.”

Cars splashed by as they drove over the bridge.

Julian shook his head. “I think you’re reaching. We don’t know if Saul agreed to spy. Or if he did, if he provided the Soviets with any important information. Also, we don’t know if Isaac Goldstein even knew my great-uncle, so why the heck would he protect him?”

“But I’m sure this is an important connection.” Her lips were trembling. Excitement or the cold? “Saul worked on the atomic bomb. Isaac was good friends with Mariasha and Aaron Lowe. Saul was Mariasha’s brother.”

A train roared by overhead, shaking the bridge.

She was right. The connection was definitely there.

“Slugger,” Annette said. “Oh my god. I think I figured it out. Saul had wanted to play ball for the Yankees. The Louisville Slugger was a popular bat. It makes sense that Slugger would have been the code name he chose.”

“No,” Julian said, a bit too emphatically before he caught himself. Saul could very well have been an atomic-bomb spy. Maybe that was why he had died of guilt.

The thrumming of rain against the tarp subsided. A frozen mist floated in the air.

“I’m sorry,” Annette said. “I’m jumping to conclusions.”

He took her cold hands between his, rubbing them to make her warm. To make himself warm. “No,
I’m
sorry. You and I need to work together on this. We’re after the same thing—the truth about what happened in our families’ pasts. I need to know what my great-uncle did, and you’re trying to understand your grandfather. I think my grandmother has answers for both of us.”

Tiny beads of moisture had gathered on her lashes, surrounding her intense blue eyes. “You realize that one of us may be badly hurt by what she tells us,” she said.

“Yes.” He tightened his arms around her. “But whatever it turns out to be, we’ll still have each other.”

Annette sat at Mariasha’s kitchen table across from Julian, chilled by her rain-drenched hair despite the wool blanket over her shoulders. Mariasha hobbled around the small old-fashioned kitchen, ignoring an open jar of peanut butter and a plate of brown slices of apple—perhaps her uneaten lunch.

The old woman arranged chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies from a red cookie jar shaped like an apple, then set the platter down on the table. She had insisted that she didn’t want or need any help. Shakily, she carried two mugs of tea to the table, then finally sat down on a kitchen chair with a pillow behind her back. The fisherman’s knit sweater she wore was much too big for her and she had rolled up the sleeves two or three turns.

Julian held his mug of tea in both hands without drinking. “I know a lot of what you’ve been telling me is personal, Nana, but I really want Annette to hear about this.”

Mariasha’s eyes flitted toward her, then returned to Julian.

“I told Annette that Saul worked at Los Alamos,” he said.

“That’s going pretty far afield from my sculptures.”

“Well, she’s also interested in what was going on with the communist movement at that time,” he said before Annette could respond herself.

His grandmother frowned.

“I told her Saul had been approached to pass information on to the Soviets but he didn’t do it.”

Mariasha fingered one of her large gold button earrings. “That’s not exactly accurate.”

“What do you mean?” He looked as surprised as Annette felt. “You said he didn’t spy for them.”

“The situation wasn’t so cut and dried.”

“Sure it is,” he said. “He either provided the Soviets with what he knew about the bomb, or he didn’t.”

“Saul agreed to pass information to the Soviets.”

Annette let a tiny gasp escape. She covered her mouth with her hand.

Mariasha turned to her. “You think that made him a traitor?”

“I know that another man was executed in the electric chair for doing less.” Annette avoided Julian’s look of warning. On the way over, they’d agreed not to mention that Isaac Goldstein was her grandfather. But Mariasha had just admitted her brother had spied for the Soviets.

Mariasha took a cookie and picked off the chocolate shell. “You’re speaking about Isaac Goldstein.”

“That’s right.” The wool blanket was making her too warm. Annette shrugged it off her shoulders. “Did you know him?”

Mariasha looked up hard.

Annette’s heart was pounding. She didn’t want to reveal who she was, but she needed to learn the truth. “Goldstein lived in this neighborhood. You’ve said your family was sympathetic to the communist cause. I assume you may have met.”

Mariasha picked apart the cookie, separating the marshmallow from the vanilla wafer. She seemed to be deciding how to answer. “Yes,” she said finally. “I knew Isaac and his wife Betty. Their daughter Sally was friends with my daughter Essie.” She glanced at her grandson. “Julian’s mother.”

Julian’s face was tight. He simply nodded. He’d seen the photo of the two little girls in Grandma Betty’s album, but hearing his grandmother acknowledge this must have really brought the facts home. His grandmother had known the Goldsteins. Had known them well.

“Was Isaac Goldstein acquainted with Saul?” Annette asked, when what was really on her mind was,
Did Isaac Goldstein die for your brother, the real traitor
?

There was no sound in the kitchen except for a slow drip from the sink faucet.

“My brother was a hero,” Mariasha said, her voice so unexpectedly loud that it startled Annette.

Julian put his hand on his grandmother’s arm. “A hero because Saul believed he was doing the right thing to fight the Nazis?”

“Certainly not.” She looked down at her fingers. They were smeared with dark chocolate. “Saul gave the Soviets bad information.”

Ca alors
! Annette thought. Bad information?

“What are you talking about?” Julian asked.

“Saul altered the diagrams and formulas. The Soviets couldn’t have built a working bomb from what he gave them.”

“My god,” Julian said. “So he was a hero.”

Annette processed this. Saul had sabotaged the Soviets by deliberately giving them faulty data? It didn’t add up. “Then why didn’t Saul go to the government when Isaac Goldstein was on trial and admit what he had done? They would have honored him and set Goldstein free.”

Mariasha tilted her head, as though trying to see Annette from a different perspective. “Are you so naïve as to believe that’s what would have happened?”

Her comment ruffled Annette. “I suppose I am.”

Mariasha sighed. “You’re not unlike most people. Unfortunately those with special interests don’t care about doing the right thing.” She rerolled the cuff of her sweater, smearing it with chocolate. “In the early fifties, the government was on a rampage to execute an atomic-bomb spy. You see, the Russians had detonated their own bomb in 1949 and that was terrifying to Americans. Our government wanted to show we were a force to be reckoned with. If Saul had told them he’d undermined the Soviets, do you think it would have been advantageous to the U.S. to believe him?” She made a spitting sound. “They would have arrested him along with Isaac and murdered them both. They were on a witch hunt for traitors, not heroes.”

Annette opened her mouth to object, but wasn’t that what Arnie Weissman had also said? It had served the government’s purpose to unite Americans against a common threat, in this case, the Red Scare.

“I don’t know, Nana. I think I agree with Annette,” Julian said. “If Saul was heroic enough to risk his life passing bad information to the communists, then he would have spoken out to save Isaac Goldstein’s life, even if there was a chance he’d be vilified, as well.”

Mariasha studied him, something hard and unreadable on her face.

She wasn’t telling the whole truth, Annette was certain of that.

“Why didn’t he speak out, Nana? You’ve been telling me how smart and idealistic Saul was. Was that true, or was he really a coward?”

“Saul a coward?” she said softly. “No my darling Julian. I was the coward.”

Mariasha stared at the brown slices of apple on the kitchen counter, uncertain how much time had passed since Julian and the girl had left. A column of tiny ants marched from the edge of the sink to the apple slices. She crushed them with a sponge, watching several black dots wiggle and scatter.

One more time, she recalled the tight expression on her grandson’s face as he asked her questions she refused to answer: Why had she called herself a coward? Why hadn’t Saul spoken out? Why had he died consumed by guilt?

She had sat there mute, devastated by the realization that her words had been leading directly to an inescapable abyss, until at last Julian pushed out his chair and led Annette from the apartment.

She never should have told Julian about Saul. But once she’d begun, the memories and the words kept flowing and she was almost powerless to stop them. Why? So she could finally be free and die without the burden she’d carried inside for most of her life? But what about Julian, and Rhonda, and Essie? Was it fair to lay her burden on them?

The black column of ants was reforming, moving once again toward the brown apples. She picked up a slice. Brown and shriveled.

Guilt could do that to a person’s soul.

Mari sat on a bench beside a leafless oak tree and looked out over the snow-covered path that ran along the East River. The low Brooklyn skyline of her childhood was forlorn against the gray sky, and a stale fishy smell blew in off the river. She shivered despite the plaid blanket she’d wrapped around herself. She was cold, yes, but she was also filled with second thoughts about her plan. I promised Mama and Papa, she repeated like a mantra. I promised them. But was it right to put Yitzy at risk?

She heard him approaching. One firm step cracking through twigs and ice, followed by the swishing sound his bad leg made as he dragged it through the snow.

“Is this seat taken?” Yitzy asked, touching a spot on the bench beside her, his voice far too cheerful for the occasion. Of course, he didn’t yet know the reason for the rendezvous. Last Saturday night when they were leaving the movie theater with their spouses, she had found a moment to whisper to him. “Meet me at the East River Park next Friday at four?” She knew he got out of work early on Fridays for the Sabbath. Yitzy had simply nodded.

Now here he was, bundled in his overcoat, a tweed cap on his head, the tips of his ears and nose red from the cold, grinning like the time he’d first sat down at her table at Camp Kindervelt. He’d given her a bite of his apple. Now she was going to give him a taste of hers.

“I need to ask you for a favor,” she said.

Julian pushed into the subway car after Annette just as the doors closed behind them. They were packed in against dozens of other rain-drenched commuters. He leaned against the door for balance, his arms around her. Holding onto her tight, because he had lost his grip on Nana.

What the hell was his grandmother hiding, and why? Had she been uncomfortable opening up in front of Annette? But then why hadn’t Nana simply said she didn’t want to discuss family business instead of completely shutting down the way she had?

There was something she didn’t want them to know that would explain why Saul, after heroically tricking the Soviets, had chosen not to come forward to clear Isaac Goldstein. But Julian was pretty sure where he could get answers.

“Where are we going?” Annette asked over the screeching train noises. She’d pulled her hood down. Her hair had dried in golden ridges.

“Forest Hills.”

“Where you grew up?”

“That’s right. There’s something at my mother’s house I want to see again.”

“That might explain Saul’s actions?”

“I’m hoping.”

The train went through a tunnel. The lights went out, then came back on.

“Something occurred to me about Saul,” Annette said. “Maybe he didn’t come forward to clear Isaac because he was afraid the communists would zap him for double-crossing them.”

“That’s a good possibility,” he said. “And it would also explain Saul’s guilt and why he may have viewed himself as a coward.”

“But what about Isaac?” she said. “Why wouldn’t he have given Saul’s name to the government if he knew Saul had acted in the best interest of the U.S.?”

“Maybe he felt like Nana did. That the government wouldn’t believe him and they’d both end up dead.”

Annette held onto his arm for support as the train sped to the next station. “But my grandfather wasn’t just sacrificing himself by keeping silent. There was his wife and daughter. Did Saul have some kind of hold over him that would have kept my grandfather from turning him in?”

“Maybe Isaac didn’t know Saul was the spy.” The train lurched and Annette fell against him. He held her tighter. “Did your grandmother’s letter mention Saul?”

“No. My grandfather was cryptic. He’d said to Betty, ‘
This is a sacrifice I must make
.’ But why? For whom?”

“There are a lot of unanswered questions. For you and for me.”

The train took them into Queens, finally stopping at 71
st
Street in Forest Hills. They exited the station, preparing themselves for the onslaught of cold, stinging sleet, but a soft snowfall was coming down from the black sky, the flakes brightened by streetlights.

He led them away from the wide, heavily trafficked Queens Boulevard, past low-rise apartment buildings, then through the neighborhood of sprawling Tudors. The streets were covered with a rug of snow, which muffled the noises of traffic and their own footfalls.

He stopped on the corner and looked down the street at the house where he’d grown up. A couple of downstairs lights were on, but no smoke was coming out of the chimney. Why had he hoped there’d be a fire going in the fireplace? His mother probably wasn’t home, and even if she was, it was foolish of him to believe he’d gotten through to her the other day. His mother would never change. Her resentment toward Nana ran too deep, like the submerged portion of an iceberg.

“That’s where my mother lives. The white Colonial.”

“Different from the others,” she said. “I like it.”

“I doubt anyone’s home. My mother works late and it’s only a little after five.”

“She leaves lights on?”

“Maybe she doesn’t like coming home to a dark house.”

They walked up the snow-covered walkway. He was surprised to see footprints leading to the side entrance. He unlocked the front door and they stepped inside, stomping the snow from their feet. Voices were coming from the living room, but stopped abruptly.

“Essie?” he called. “I’m here with a friend.”

“You call her ‘Essie’?” Annette asked quietly.

“Yeah.” He took their jackets and hung them on a couple of low pegs. It was notably chilly in the house.

“Third time in one week. This must be a record.” His mother stood in the living room doorway, a glass of red wine in her hand. He was again surprised to find her drinking. She wore a black wool dress and black stockings. No shoes. Her cool blue eyes assessed Annette.

“Nice to see you, too,” Julian said.

His mother took a step forward and extended her hand to Annette. “I’m Essie Sandman.”

“Annette Revoir.” She shook Essie’s hand. “Good to meet you, Dr. Sandman.”

His mother was quite a bit taller than Annette, even in her stocking feet. “Rhonda’s here, by the way,” she said to Julian.

“Wonderful. Now I’m sorry I didn’t drag Nana along. We could have had a family reunion.”

His mother gave him a stern look, clearly not appreciating his sarcasm.

He guided Annette into the living room. Rhonda was sprawled out on the sofa, holding a glass of wine. Her wiry graying hair jutted out in all directions and she wore an unraveling rust-colored sweater over another sweater, over a wool jumper, and god knew how many other layers.

He noticed Annette surveying the room, taking in the corner game table, the bookshelves, the fireplace.

“This is my sister Rhonda. She’s a law professor, so she thinks she knows everything. Rhonda, my friend Annette.”

“Nice to meet you,” Annette said.

“You, too.”  Rhonda made no move to get up. An open bottle of wine sat on the coffee table next to her. “And I don’t think I know everything,” she said, her laconic voice conveying boredom. “But I certainly try my best to learn all the facts before reaching a conclusion.”

“Would you like some wine?” Essie asked, maybe to break up the sibling raillery.

“We’d love some, thanks.” He went to the painting over the mantel. “Saul made this,” he said to Annette.

She stepped closer, and studied the intense watercolor behind the non-reflective glass.

Essie handed a glass of wine to Annette, another to Julian. “Why don’t you give it a rest, Julian?”

“I wish I could, but it won’t seem to let go of me.” He took a sip of wine. “Nana’s been telling us some interesting things about Saul.”

“Both of you?” His mother sounded surprised.

“Annette’s a journalist. She’s very interested in the atomic-bomb spy rings in the early fifties.”

His mother stood straighter. “What does that have to do with Saul?”

“According to Nana, Saul spied for the Soviets during the war, passing them information about the bomb.”

Rhonda and his mother exchanged a look. He couldn’t tell if this was something they both knew, but they didn’t seem surprised.

Essie perched on the arm of one of the chairs and picked up her glass. “Yesterday you told me your grandmother said Saul refused to help the communists.”

“Right, but she hadn’t told me the whole truth and you knew it, didn’t you? You knew he’d been a serious atomic spy.”

She looked down at her glass.

“Did you also know that Saul doctored up the information he passed on to the Soviets, making it effectively useless?”

“Holy crap.” Rhonda lifted her feet off the sofa and set them on the floor. “He sabotaged what he gave the Soviets? Is that true, Mom?”

Essie continued staring at her glass.

“Saul may have been a spy, but he was also effectively a hero,” Julian said. “So why didn’t he come forward to clear Isaac Goldstein instead of letting him die in the electric chair?”

“My mother’s lying,” Essie said.

“No she isn’t,” he said. “She has no reason to lie.”

“How can you be so sure?” his mother said. “You think she’s a kindly old woman, but she’s the devil.”

His anger flared up. He felt Annette’s hand on his shoulder. He took a deep breath. Getting sucked into a fight with his mother wasn’t the best way to learn what he’d come here for.

“Let’s back up a second.” Rhonda plucked on her wiry curls. “Mom, is it possible Saul sabotaged the bomb information he passed on to the Soviets?”

Essie shook her head.

“Don’t reject it out of hand,” Rhonda said. “Saul spied for the Soviets in 1945.”

So Rhonda knew this, too.

“The Russians didn’t produce a working bomb until 1949,” Rhonda continued. “If what he gave them had been correct, it wouldn’t have taken four years.”

“He didn’t sabotage the Russians,” Essie said. “I don’t know why your grandmother made up that story, but Saul was a traitor during the war.”

Nana’s words came back to him.
Saul was a hero.
Julian glanced over at Annette. She seemed to be struggling to hold back her emotions. What was the truth?

He looked again at the painting, at the red mushroom cloud, the rotting black oval shapes, the neon green dots that seemed to glow like ghostly fireflies. “I think I understand,” he said. “Even if Saul had misled the Soviets, he also helped build the atomic bomb.” He turned back to his mother. “That’s why Saul felt guilty, wasn’t it? Because he was a traitor to himself.”

Essie drained the rest of her wine, then ran her finger around the rim of the glass. It made an eerie high-pitched noise.

“Why did he give you the painting?” he asked. “And why did Nana hide it?”

Essie reached for the wine bottle and refilled her glass. Her eyes met Annette’s. “Do you come from a close family?” she asked.

Annette tensed. “Not as close as I’d like.”

“That’s too bad. My mother and I have never been close.” Essie took a sip of wine. “I suppose that’s why I adored my Uncle Saul so much. He was my mother’s brother, but he was her antithesis. Warm, friendly, funny. A little man with curly red hair. He reminded me of a leprechaun and I always looked forward to his visits when I was a child.”

Interesting that Essie’s description of Saul matched Nana’s.

“I hardly recognized him when he showed up on my thirteenth birthday. He’d become as skinny as a starvation victim. His hair had fallen out and there was an awful sore on his lower lip.”

“He died shortly after,” Julian said.

“That’s right.” Essie looked him directly in the eye. “Radiation sickness.”

“Really?” Annette said. “From exposure at Los Alamos?”

Essie shook her head. “No, after that. He stayed with the Manhattan Project after the war when it became the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and they moved to the Sandia Base in Albuquerque.”

“Whoa,” Julian said. “Saul kept making bombs after the war? That makes no sense.”

Rhonda and his mother exchanged another look.

“Did Nana know he had continued making bombs? Was that why she was angry with him and hid the painting?”

Essie stared at her glass of wine. “Not exactly.”

“Then what the heck was going on? Why would Saul keep making bombs and put himself at risk of developing radiation sickness?”

His mother rubbed her leg. There was a run in her black stocking.

“Tell me, Essie.”

His mother wet her lips with her tongue. “Because it was the best way he could accomplish what he needed to do, and he was willing to accept the consequences.”

“Needed to do? What did he believe he needed to do?”

“Save the world,” Rhonda said. “Make it a safer place.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “By building bombs?”

“There’s no point in keeping this a secret, Mom,” Rhonda said. “I’m going to show them. It’s time.”

“You’re right,” Essie said softly. “It’s time.”

A chill ran through him. A secret. This couldn’t be good.

Rhonda got up from the sofa and shuffled over to the fireplace. She stared up at Saul’s painting for a moment, then turned back to Julian and Annette. “What do you see in this painting?”

They stepped closer. “I assume the spreading red is an atomic mushroom cloud,” Julian said. “The neon green probably symbolizes radioactivity.”

“And these?” Rhonda pointed at the black oval shapes piled up on the bottom of the canvas.

“They look like bombs,” Annette said. “Spent bombs?”

“Not spent. Duds.”

“Dud bombs?” Julian said.

Rhonda nodded. “From 1945 through 1958, Saul systematically sabotaged the United States stockpile of bombs by modifying their sensors so their nuclear cores wouldn’t go critical and produce fission.”

“You mean so they’d fail during detonation?” Julian said.

“That’s right.”

“Jesus! Saul sabotaged American bombs?” The idea blew Julian away. His great-uncle had undermined the United States government. “How could he do such a thing?”

“You have to understand the context,” Essie said from her chair. “Saul was traumatized by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He’d never imagined the magnitude of the atomic bomb when he helped build it. Then when the bombs were dropped, he became deeply distressed. He felt personally responsible for the more than two hundred thousand people who died from the explosions and from burns and radiation sickness. Years later, the effects of radiation were still visible in the survivors who developed leukemia and other cancers, in stillborn babies and in children born with birth defects.” Essie shook her head. “Such horrors.” She softened her voice. “Grotesque deformities. Babies with extra body parts, missing parts, distended brains. Saul had seen the photos.”