The Other Traitor (7 page)

And then it was all over.

On the bus ride home, she sat by herself and stared out the window. The trees went past her in a blur. She thought about Yitzy. How he had taken her into the woods while the other campers sat around the campfire singing Socialist work anthems. How they kissed over and over, his lips soft and full.

She touched her own lips now with her fingers. They felt bruised and sore. She sucked them in, and closed her eyes, remembering the way he tasted.

They had agreed to meet in two weeks. At the smokestack shaped like a giant baseball bat just outside Yankee Stadium. September 4
th
. Mari would bring Saul so Mama wouldn’t get suspicious.

That’s what she had to hold onto. Yitzy and Mariasha in two weeks.

But how could she live without him until then?

The bus became hotter as they got closer to the city. The smell of smoke and burning coal replaced the pine needles and fresh air. Then, there was Yankee Stadium and the giant baseball bat where she’d be meeting Yitzy in two weeks. Thirteen more days.

The bus turned off the highway. The buildings were taller, closer together, the air thicker. Her heart ached more than she believed possible. When Papa died, she’d been too young to fully understand her loss. And it hadn’t been sudden. Papa had been dying a long time, so she had already started to heal by the time the scab came off. But this—saying goodbye to Yitzy after only just getting to know him—felt like her heart had been ripped out.

The bus stopped by the building where she’d said goodbye to Mama and Saul the week before. The campers bundled off, hugging each other goodbye, then went toward their mothers and fathers.

No sign of Mama or Saul. Mari couldn’t wait to tell her brother all about camp. Next year he would come with her. Yitzy might even be his counselor.

She sat on a fire hydrant, her bundle of clothes on her lap. It was so hot that she couldn’t take a deep breath without feeling as though she was scorching her lungs. Everyone left. The bus pulled away.

Could Mama have gotten the date wrong? The time? She waited another half hour, then went to the subway station and took the train to Brooklyn. She walked the three blocks from Alabama Avenue, passing brick buildings she’d seen her entire life, but that now looked alien to her. She missed the thick green woods, the crisp blue sky, and cool sweet air. She missed Yitzy.

There was a black car double-parked in front of her apartment building.

She said hello to Mrs. Silverman, who was rocking her daughter’s new baby in the carriage. Mrs. Silverman shook her head and looked away.

Something wasn’t right.

Mari ran upstairs to their second floor apartment. A wave of heat hit her when she opened the door. The apartment smelled strange. Like medicine and sickness.

“Mama? Saulie?”

She dropped her bundle of clothes on the easy chair and searched the rooms. No one in the kitchen. Nothing cooking on the stove. She peeked into the bedroom she shared with Mama. The brass bed was made up with the bedspread Mama had crocheted before Papa got sick.

Then she heard Mama and a man talking quietly, just outside the little bedroom. The doctor who had taken care of Papa.

“There are new cures we can try,” the doctor said.

Mari stopped breathing.
Cures? No. Please. Not again.

She pushed between the doctor and her mother and looked into the spare bedroom. The room was dark. Saul was propped up on two pillows, his eyes closed, his curls dull like tarnished bronze. Even in the dim light, Mari could see the uneven flush of red on his cheeks.

Her abdomen convulsed, as though she’d been punched. Papa had stayed in this very room. She remembered sitting beside him, as he taught her to read letters and words. Then how he had closed the book and hugged her against him.
You are the strong one, my Mariasha. Promise me you’ll always take care of your Mama and little brother.

I promise, Papa.

Saulie opened his eyes and gave her a little smile. His breathing was ragged. “You know I love you, Mari.”

“I love you more,” she said, but he had already closed his eyes, as though he hadn’t heard her.

She stepped back into the hall, heart pounding. “What’s wrong with Saulie?”

“Shhhh,” Mama said.

“I’ll be back tomorrow, Mrs. Hirsch,” the doctor said, then left the apartment.

“Tell me,” Mari said, hearing the panic in her voice. “What’s the matter with Saulie?”

Mama perched on the edge of the pink sofa that no one was ever allowed to sit on. Streaks of gray wound through her reddish hair. She looked much older than when Mari had left a week before.

“His throat hurt,” Mama said, turning a button on her housedress around and around. “But Saulie always gets sore throats. Now the doctor says it’s something worse. Much worse.”

Worse? But then Saulie wouldn’t be able to go with her to Yankee Stadium. She wouldn’t be seeing Yitzy, after all. She clenched her fists, wanting to scream. This was all Saul’s fault. How could he do this to her?

“His heart may be ruined,” Mama was saying. “He could even die.”

“What are you talking about?” Mari felt her legs go weak. “Saulie can’t die.”

“He’s my baby,” Mama whispered, “and I don’t even have a picture of him.”

The edge of an icicle slid down her spine. Here she was thinking about herself when her brother might die. She had promised Papa she would take care of Saul, but she had forsaken him.

What if God punished her for her selfish, sinful thoughts? What if Saulie died because of her?

She had to make a choice. She closed her eyes and said a silent prayer.

Please, God. If you save Saulie, I promise never to see Yitzy again.

Sunday morning was glorious, which made Annette uneasy. It was the combination of an intense blue sky and crisp air that created the illusion that everything was clean and beautiful. As she walked through Central Park, even the snow blanketing the gentle hills seemed to sparkle in the sunlight.

Prime real-estate-selling weather
, her father had jokingly referred to it the Christmas she was seventeen. She’d been visiting him at his old rambling house in Danbury, Connecticut that backed up to a wooded lot. That’s when she noticed the discreet ‘House for Sale’ sign and her father told her he was marrying a wonderful woman with two great kids and moving into the woman’s house. That was the last time Annette visited him, and after that she’d grown to mistrust beautiful weather. Which she knew was silly. Today will be a glorious day, she told herself. Even though yesterday had been a near bust.

She was still annoyed about how she’d handled Julian Sandman. It was no wonder he had questioned her true purpose. She had done a lousy job with her attempt at subterfuge, trying to get him to talk about communism when she was supposedly interested in his grandmother’s sculptures. She had probably blown the chance of ever meeting Mariasha Lowe, but hopefully Bill would have some ideas on what she should do next.

She waited for a group of bicyclists to cross the winding path in front of her and took in a breath of cool fresh air. It was almost eleven and she had her regular Sunday date with Bill at the Reservoir, a one-point-six-mile running track that surrounded what had once been the source of water for Manhattanites, but now was a favorite gathering place for mallards, geese and joggers.

Bill was a far more serious runner than Annette and competed in marathons, so he liked to run the two miles from his apartment near Columbia University to another jogging trail in the park and end up at the Reservoir for his last leg. Annette lived a little farther away and preferred to walk rather than run to Central Park from home. She was usually satisfied with one lap around the Reservoir before she and Bill headed over to the Boathouse for coffee and cinnamon buns.

She reached the broad marble stairs at 90
th
Street and Fifth and climbed them to the Runners’ Gate. Bill was already running in place in front of the magnificent elm that had been there since the late 1800s. He wore a black jogging suit, emerald-green gloves and a red, green and white reindeer-patterned headband around his ears. Bill was still self-conscious about his recent “coming out” and she was pleased he was at least getting a bit more brazen with his accessories.

“Good morning,” he said. “You’re right on time.”

“I hate you,” Annette said. “You’re not even panting or sweating. And you’ve already gone what? Five miles?”

“Seven. I started early.”

“Nice jogging attire,” she said, “unlike me.” She glanced down at her red jacket, old Nikes, and purple leggings with a small hole in the knee. Her hair was in braids to keep it out of the way while she ran.

“It’s important to keep up the right appearances.” He adjusted his tortoise-framed glasses, held in place by a croakie. “Do you need to stretch or are you ready to go?”

“I’m good.”  She fell in beside him and they took off around the path. It was free of snow and ice thanks to the hundreds of jogging feet that kept it clear. On their left, the water looked like a giant lake and reflected the clear blue sky. Bill maintained a gentle, even pace so that they could actually hold a conversation. “You look happy this morning,” she said.

“I am. Kylie’s bringing Billy to the ice-skating rink at one. She said I can have him for the entire afternoon without supervision.”

Annette was frustrated by Bill’s acceptance of his ex-wife’s meager concessions regarding their son, but she didn’t want to ruin his good mood.

“And how are you doing?” he asked. “Did you meet the woman who’s going to tell you all about your grandfather?”

“Not yet, but I finished the book by the Soviet spy last night.” She’d tell him about Mariasha Lowe’s grandson later.

“And?” he asked.

They passed a copse of leafless trees. Just beyond, a couple of horses with bundled up riders were loping down the bridle path.

“I learned a lot about being a spy in the 1930s and 40s,” she said. “It was pretty unsophisticated. They actually did dorky things like greet each other with secret passwords. You know like, ‘Bobo sent me.’ They even cut up Jell-O boxes and matched up the pieces to confirm who they were. I thought that was just in Grade-B spy movies.”

“Spying’s become a lot more sophisticated in the last sixty or seventy years, thanks to technology and the internet. Anything in the book that ties to your grandfather?”

“Indirectly,” she said. “The author, Boris Yaklisov, worked for the Soviet Embassy in New York, but he was also a case officer for the communists. He went to college rallies and recruited students who were sympathetic to the communist movement.”

“That wouldn’t have been too difficult,” Bill said. “Back in the thirties, college students in New York were even more left-wing than today. City College and NYU were both fertile recruiting grounds for the communists.” A group of joggers going the wrong way forced her and Bill to squeeze to the right as they passed. “In fact, some of the most prominent people accused of being atomic spies came out of CCNY,” Bill continued. “Morton Sobell, Alfred Sarant, Julius Rosenberg.”

“Interesting,” she said. “Yaklisov recalled meeting Isaac Goldstein at a meeting around 1938. But Yaklisov wasn’t impressed with him. He called Goldstein a dilettante and didn’t think he had much value for the Party. He didn’t see him again until after the war. And then, only briefly.”

They passed the midway point around the reservoir and she looked across the water at the eastern and southern skylines of Manhattan, staircases of flat and pointed rooftops clearly visible behind the skeletal trees.

“I suppose Goldstein became more valuable to the communists after the war,” Bill said.

“What do you mean?”

“As you saw in your grandmother’s old photo, he was quite the war hero. He rescued a soldier from drowning and was seriously injured in 1943. He received the Soldier’s Medal, Purple Heart, and a medical discharge.”

Bill was right. Recruiting an American war hero would have been quite a coup for the Soviets.

“Then he went to work for the Army Signal Corps as an engineer,” Bill said. “His job was to inspect electrical equipment manufactured by defense contractors for the government. A couple of witnesses at his trial claimed Goldstein stole confidential information from the Signal Corps and passed it on to the Russians.” Bill took off his headband and gloves and stuffed them into a pocket. “Have you read anything about the trial?”

“I started reading the transcript, but it’s almost three thousand pages. I tried to find a concise summary, but there’s a ton of material out there. I can’t figure out what’s been verified and what’s been shown to be false.”

“It can be overwhelming,” he said. “But here’s one thing you may find helpful.” He slowed down to a fast walk. “The key witness against Goldstein was a woman named Florence Heller. She claimed Goldstein was the head of the spy ring she was part of and that Goldstein received documents from a contact in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the major work on the atomic bomb was done. She said Goldstein passed these documents on to the Russians. Most trial analysts now believe she lied to protect her boyfriend.”

“I read that. Could the boyfriend have been the spy?”

“Not likely. During the years after the trial, it was pretty much confirmed that no one in this alleged spy ring had access to any significant details relating to the construction of the bomb.”

They reached the end of the jogging path. “One other thing I wanted to ask you about,” she said. “Yaklisov claimed in his book that someone with the code name of Slugger was delivering vital atomic-bomb documents to the Soviets.”

“Slugger? How spylike.”

“I know,” she said. “Yaklisov insisted that Goldstein wasn’t Slugger, but wouldn’t say who was.”

“That’s interesting.” Bill took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses with a cloth from his pocket. “I’d never heard Slugger mentioned in connection with the Goldstein case.”

He put his glasses back on and they started down the winding road toward the Boathouse. “So where do you go from here?”

“Obviously, it would be great if I could track down this Slugger person, but I’m not egotistical enough to believe I’ll be able to decode something that stumped the FBI and CIA.” She took a sip of water from the bottle she had in her pocket. “For now, I’ll settle for trying to understand what kind of person my grandfather really was.”

“I checked into Aaron Lowe for you.”

“Oh good. Did you find anything?”

“He published a number of papers while he was at NYU. Mostly theorizing on how economic central planning would work in America.”

“So Aaron Lowe was a communist?”

“Probably.”

“That might explain why his grandson was a little rattled when I asked him if Mariasha Lowe had communist leanings.”

“Whoa.” Bill stopped walking and stepped to the side of the road to study her. “Back up. Grandson?”

“I met her grandson yesterday.” Her cheeks grew warm.

Bill scrunched up his eyebrows. “He’d be the son of the woman you said was friends with your mother. Essie Lowe?”

“Good memory.”

“I imagine he’s a lot older than you.”

Bill knew Annette’s mother had had her late in life. “Actually, he’s around thirty.”

“Ooooo.”

“Don’t start, Bill.”

“From the way you’re blushing, I’m guessing he’s not married and he’s hot.”

“It’s a nonissue,” she said. “I was hoping to use him to get to Mariasha, but I probably blew that.”

“I doubt that.”

“I’m not very good at lying,” she said. “He seemed to pick up that I wasn’t interested in Mariasha for her sculptures.”

“That’s what you told him?”

“Well, I didn’t think she’d talk to me if I came out and said I was trying to clear Goldstein’s name and did she happen to have any ideas who the real spy was?”

“Maybe not.”

“Oh come on, Bill. You’re the one who taught me to be cagey as a journalist.”

“Not cagey. Subtle.”

“Fine. I don’t think subtlety is the best approach here.”

“And what’s the deal with the grandson?”

“I think he was more interested in me than in giving me background on his grandmother.” She continued walking.

“And that’s a bad thing?” Bill got in step with her.

“I’m not interested in him.”

“Of course you’re not. You haven’t had a love interest since when? Oh that’s right. Since never. You write off every guy thinking he’s going to drop you like your father dropped your mom.”

“Enough,” she said. “How about we stay away from my love life and I promise I won’t give you life advice?”

He held up his hands in surrender. “Fine.”

They reached the Boathouse. There was a line of people buying coffee at the Express Café window. They went to stand at the end.

“Anyway,” Annette said. “His name is Julian Sandman. There’s a remote possibility he’ll contact you for a reference on me.”

“A reference?” Bill grinned. “I’ll tell him you’re very lovable, but you can be a real pain in the ass.”

“A professional reference,” she said.

“Really?”

“Since he didn’t seem to believe my story, I told him to check my references.”

“Next time don’t interview people in your Annie-Oakley braids.” He reached over and gave one of hers a tug.

“I had my hair down.”

“Then you probably looked pretty hot yourself.”

“
Ras le bol
!” she said. “Enough.”

“Okay, okay.”

They got to the take-out window and ordered two cinnamon buns and two coffees, then they sat at one of the outdoor tables that overlooked the lake. There were a few white swans gathered at the edge of the bank, basking in the sunshine. A short distance from them, a large duckling, or maybe it was a black swan, paddled alone in the tall brownish weeds.

“The thing is,” she said. “I hate lying about what I’m really after.”

Bill took a big bite of cinnamon bun, then licked his lips. “So tell him.”

She shook her head. “I think it’s better if I play it this way.”

Her cell phone rang and she dug it out of her inner pocket. She didn’t recognize the caller. “Hello?” she said.

“Hi. It’s Julian Sandman.”

“Oh, hi, Julian.” Her heart bounced. She glanced at Bill, who winked.

“If you’re free around one,” Julian said, “I’m planning on heading over to my grandmother’s. You can join us, if you’d like.”

“Yes, I would. Thank you.” The swans had waddled down into the water and were floating away. The black swan had joined them, hanging back just a little. The sky was even bluer. The air crisper.

“Do you eat pastrami?” Julian asked.

“Pastrami?”