The Dead Don't Bleed: A Novel

by David Krugler

  Crieve was the youngest son of a pedigreed New England family whose fortune had taken root deep in the holds of colonial ships carrying rum, molasses, slaves; in the 1850s, a great-grandfather had invested in railroads. Crieve, brilliant and restless, finished Dartmouth in 1930 at age twenty, when the Institute of International Education selected him to pursue postgraduate study in Paris. Arriving just as the Depression was biting hard into Europe and America, he embraced communism with the fervor of first love. Back in the States, he happily slummed in a coldwater flat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he taught at the Communist Workers School. In the mid-thirties, he quietly disappeared from the city’s thriving communist scene, a telltale sign he had been recruited for clandestine work. What, exactly, the Soviet handlers of the Communist Party of the United States of America thought Crieve could do for them was never quite clear to our intelligence agencies. Crieve failed to blossom as a spy, but he excelled at recruitment. The party sent him to Washington, where he circulated in the higher social circles, casting for his kind and fellow travelers, the “pinks” who fancied communism but could never quite bring themselves to pay dues.

  A year ago, he had suffered a breakdown and started imagining all sorts of conspiracies, assassins tailing him, the F.B.I. bugging him, the Kremlin sending him coded messages via shortwave radio. His paranoia—caused by schizophrenia—put a lot of people at risk; the party expelled him. Using hoarded trust-fund payments (and the party thought he was turning the full amount over to them!), he bought the dilapidated Victorian and turned his obsession with communism toward colored glass. By all odds, Crieve should have been killed, liquidated by the N.K.V.D., the Soviet secret police, but he had reputedly made extra copies of stolen documents and entrusted them with an unknown third party who would go to the F.B.I. and the press should he go missing.

  I knocked vigorously for five minutes before Crieve finally came to the door. He peered through a side panel (leaded glass, Prairie Style).

  “Who’re you and what do you want?” he demanded.

  “Ted Barston,” I said, slowly and loudly. “I need yer help.”

  “Who?”

  “Ted, Ted Barston. I just got outta da service, Navy.”

  He didn’t respond, just stared.

  “Can I come in?” I persisted.

  Long moment, then clink of a chain, thud of a turned bolt. I stepped in, he swung the door shut and locked it. Wordlessly beckoned me to follow him, through the parlor and dining room to an add-on constructed entirely of colored glass fitted to a skein of delicate narrow metal bars.

  I sat in a frayed wicker chair; he stretched out on a wooden bench and gazed up at his roof of rainbows. Another agonizing silence.

  “Big Bill’s son?” he finally said.

  “Yeah, yeah, dat’s right.”

  Now he looked right at me. “And you’re in the Navy?”

  “Naw. I just got out.”

  “I wouldn’t think the United States Navy would discharge an able-bodied seaman during wartime, would you, Ted Barston?”

  “Who said I was able-bodied?”

  That crack got me a snort of laughter, but he kept staring, expecting a straight answer. Difficult to look back, he was so filthy. Grime blackened his denim dungarees, the dirt on his bare feet was so engrained it could pass for a tattoo; he stank. Only his nose, arched and delicately equestrian, matched the handsome face in the photograph in Paslett’s file that I had once taken a long, stealthy look at.

  “I got a dishonorable discharge, okay?” I said defiantly.

  “For?”

  I told him.

  “Opiates, tsk, tsk, young Barston. What would your father think?”

  “He’s dead, he don’t care.”

  “Still accepting visits from Morpheus?”

  “Huh?” He meant was I still shooting drugs, but I didn’t think Ted Barston would get the reference to the God of Dreams.

  “Let me see your arms.”

  I rolled up my sleeves and showed him, trying to keep steady. The marks hadn’t fooled Terrance, would Crieve get—

  “These look fresh.”

  “Yeah, okay, maybe I took a shot last week. Whattya want—I just got outta da brig.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I remember you.”

  “From?”

  “Da nineteen thirty-four strike, in Hoboken. You came and spoke ta da boys.” So Paslett’s file on Crieve had told me.

  “One of my better speeches, too. My thinking on the class struggle was still callow—I was reading Kropotkin at the time, I recall, in what unfortunately proved to be a futile endeavor to link his early social theories to American industrial strife—but on that occasion I was able to rouse the workers by eschewing jargon and simply denouncing the bosses with parasitic imagery and metaphor. Very persuasive, didn’t you think?”

  “How da hell would I know—I was just a kid.”

  He laughed and said, “So you were. I vaguely recall you at your father’s side, enrapt by the scene—the ranks of strikers, the bob of their pickets, the police wielding truncheons, odor of oil and brackish water in the air—quite a lot for a young boy to experience, no?”

  “If you say so.” Shrugging.

  “I see you didn’t inherit your father’s rough-hewn eloquence. Rather like Lincoln, Big Bill was, with the autodidact’s predilection for brief declarative sentences. He was a useful interlocutor between the workers and the leader-thinkers such as myself.”

  The real Ted Barston wouldn’t say anything to that, and neither did I.

  “But you failed to directly answer my question, Barston. I asked how you found me, not how you knew about me.”

  “Dis house, it ain’t exactly hard ta find.”

  “That’s a dodge, not an answer.”

  “Paul Thiel,” I promptly said.

  “Who?”

  “Lester Thiel’s son. We grew up together, in Hoboken. His pop was da field secretary for da New Joisey—”

  “I know who Lester Thiel is. Was. But I don’t know his son.”

  “Sure you do. But you knew him as Ken Jenkins. What Paulie told me, just before he got drafted, was dat his Pop wanted him ta work for da party, but underground, so he got sent ta you, dis was in I wanna say forty-one, but Paulie didn’t like dat kinda work, so he quit and went back ta da docks.”

  So the Barston file had told me, without mentioning Griffin Crieve, whose file Paslett wouldn’t trust to even his pets in 7R. I was making a big leap, guessing that Paul Thiel/Ken Jenkins would have trained with Crieve, who supposedly had been the primary recruiter for the party in New York and New Jersey before being sent to Washington. If I was wrong, Crieve would throw me out.

  But I had guessed right.

  “Is that what young Thiel told you, Barston? That he didn’t like learning clandestine work?”

  “Yeah, dat’s right.”

  “More like the work didn’t like Thiel. The poor boy couldn’t even remember to answer to his new name when called. Even a puppy cocks his ear at his master’s voice. So I sent him home, to the docks, on the second day of training.” Now a wary look. “Why would that bumbler send you to me four years later?”

  “He didn’t. Last I heard, Paulie was in da Solomons. But da thing is, see, what Paulie told me was, cuz he knew I knew who you were, is dat you seemed ta know everybody on da Coast, I mean in da party, and—”

  “Stop rambling—what do you want?”

  “I need yer help, dat’s why I’m here.”

  “You want money, you mean. To pay your debt to Morpheus. You can leave now, Barston.” He straightened up and reached into his shirt, toward the bulge under his left arm I’d noticed right away. My guess, not much of a gat, probably a thirty-eight snubnose, but iron enough to decommission Ted Barston and Ellis Voigt.

  “I don’t need money, Crieve, I got a lead on work. But I was hoping you could help me get dat job.”

  Job. The word seemed to amuse him. Rich folk like Criev
e, even after they betray their class and fight for the working man, never get past their fascination with paid labor.

  “A character reference, is that what you need?” He laughed. “To Whom It May Concern,” he intoned, “I hereby declare Theodore Barston to have been an attentive young lad in nineteen thirty-four, on the one and only occasion that I met him—”

  “You know what goes on at H & H, dontcha?” I interrupted.

  “What, what did you say?”

  “Dat clipping service on K Street.”

  “What about it?”

  “Dat’s where I’m gonna ask for work.”

  “You? Is that what you learned in the Navy, how to wield scissors?” He gestured at my forearm. “Given your other skill with needles, Barston, perhaps you should consider a career as a tailor.”

  “I speak German,” I said hotly. In German.

  That got his attention.

  “How ever did you learn German?” he asked. In German.

  I told him about my mother teaching me the language as a toddler. Not a difficult tale to tell—that’s how I had learned.

  “The working class never fail to surprise me,” Crieve said, switching back to English. “But how does your facility with high German help you at a clipping service?”

  “What I hear is, dey clip a lotta foreign newspapers. What with da services taking any joe who speaks German, I figger I got a skill dey need.”

  “What I hear is,” he repeated mockingly. “You hear many interesting things, don’t you, Barston?”

  I took the jibe as a warning. “It’s no secret, huh? Ad in da directory says dat’s dare line.”

  “How could I possibly help you obtain a position there, Barston?”

  “See, da thing is, Paulie told me sometin’ else before da Marines got him. He told me da party was setting up clipping services ta, you know, help out.” Hard not to shirk from his stare. Or the stench that was getting worse in the airless room.

  “Is that what you want to do, Barston? Help the party?”

  I shifted uncomfortably, as I imagined Barston would have. “I never got mixed up in all’a dat, but I was just thinking, well, if dis H & H, if de’re doing what Paulie was talking about, den maybe dey could help out da son’a somebody who was loyal ta da party all his life. I was hoping, I guess, dat because’a how important you used ta be, you maybe could tell me how ta go in dare and talk ta ’em.”

  Crieve startled me by slapping the bench he was sitting on with his palm. “I just knew this conversation would lead back to Big Bill. You do realize what you’ve just done? Of course you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked. We see here the incipient bourgeois tendencies of an ignorant peasantry, or proletariat, in your case, asserting, however clumsily, familial ties for purposes of advancement. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating.”

  As much as Barston and I both wanted to punch Crieve in the face, I checked the anger and smiled awkwardly. The puppy cocking his ear at his master’s voice.

  “Very well, Barston, out of admiration for your brazenness in coming here, as well as out of pity for your rough manners, I’ll help you. But understand, and never forget this: I am important to the party. Not was, am. Verstehen?”

  I nodded dutifully and, with that, Crieve lurched up from the bench and began pacing the stone tile floor of his solarium, speaking so rapidly that I had difficulty following every word. No matter, because what I did catch was plenty.

  H & H (I learned) was a not-so-clever rendering of the monogram of the owner, one Henry Himmel, who had opened the clipping service in the mid-thirties. Himmel’s real name, though, was Pavel Nevelskoi, a Russian émigré who had come to the United States right after Roosevelt established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Just as Commander Paslett had guessed, based on the F.B.I.’s intelligence, the clipping service was a front. Most of its employees were legitimate—as far as they knew, they worked for a modestly profitable business—but accounts manager Nadine Silva and office manager Philip Greene were bred-in-the-bone Reds who worked closely with Himmel. Crieve claimed he had even trained Silva how to set up dead drops, run couriers, and carry out other basic tasks of espionage. Unfortunately, Crieve was less coherent in relating details of the spy ring itself.

  “ . . . who cloaks himself in clippings, cuttings, and scraps,” he was saying about Himmel. “Entirely without original ideas of his own, he slices up others’ thoughts and deeds. An ink-stained vulture.”

  “But d’you think he’ll help me?” I interjected.

  Crieve asked, with a withering look, “Have you been listening to a word of what I’ve said?”

  “Well, yeah, a’course, you was saying how you was really da one who found all’a da spies for Himmel and dose others, how dey didn’t know a thing about—”

  “Which means Himmel has accomplished little, if not nothing. Without my direction, one strains to imagine how these three—Greene, especially, is a fool, overly eager and painfully clumsy—could ever have guided their minions to gather anything of note for the party. As I was saying,” he added acidly.

  I kept quiet.

  “Indeed, Barston, it’s a wonder they haven’t descended upon Himmel’s klatch already and swept it away.”

  “Dey?”

  “The Bureau, of course.”

  “What Bureau?” I played dumb.

  “My God, have the opiates permanently addled your brain? The F.B.I.”

  “The F.B.I.’s on to H & H?”

  “I should think so.”

  “But how?”

  “Obviously, high-frequency transmissions are easily captured. I, for one, strenuously argued for sole use of couriers, but I was rebuked. Harshly, I will add. Although no reasons were given, they weren’t difficult to deduce: the Soviets’ complete trust in their cryptography and their inherent suspicion of human couriers. Let the Americans collect all our codings, they seemed to think, for the lot shall remain secure ad infinitum.” He stopped pacing and fixed me with an unsettling stare. “The Bureau’s been listening to me for years. They’re listening right now, of course. I’ve been bugged for years. They send messages, too, laughably awkward propaganda aimed at cracking me up.”

  They’re doing a damned good job of it, I thought, then said, “So I shouldn’t try ta get a job dare?”

  Crieve, now staring up at his glass roof, said, “It’s your risk, Barston. I believe the sky will soon fall on Himmel et al. Whether you want to be there when that happens is up to you. But if you decide you still want a job with those vultures, my advice is to stride into their storefront like you own it. Himmel, fool that he is, has a peculiar admiration for the strutting rooster.”

  Which had been my gut instinct all along. Kicked out of the Navy, broke, friendless, without family—was Ted Barston the kind of man who’d go hangdog or spit into the wind? Wasn’t a meek man who had beaten an officer senseless, wouldn’t be a meek man who asked—no, demanded—a job at H & H. For all his quirks, Crieve appeared to be a tough bird to hoodwink, but he’d bought me as Barston. And if I could fool Crieve, I could fool Himmel and his two helpers, Silva and Greene.

  I hoped. Told myself that I wouldn’t freeze on the stage, that I’d just finished Act 1 without flubbing a line or missing a cue. I was Barston, to my bones, and Lieutenant j.g. Ellis Voigt was merely the last role I’d filled, a likable enough character but nobody Barston would know. Or like, or respect, or obey. Strangely, voiding my real identity was exciting. All those fears of making a mistake belonged to Voigt, not Barston, who had no self-doubts, who didn’t care what anyone thought, who didn’t swerve out of others’ way.

  “Showtime,” Barston said with a grin.

  CHAPTER 11

  H & H WAS ON THE FIRST FLOOR OF A NARROW THREE-STORY BRICK building on K Street. A wide counter divided a small waiting area from the work space: long wooden tables brightly lit by hanging lamps, wire carts stacked with newspapers, file cabinets lining the walls. If not for the whisk and whir of scissor blades slicing
through one daily after another, you might think you were at the library. The clippers at the tables didn’t even glance up at the jangling bell that announced my entrance; their gazes remained fixed on the newspapers spread out like leaves on a forest floor.

  “Yeah, I wanna see Mister Himmel.”

  The girl at the reception desk gave me a look of annoyance and curiosity. She was young, probably six months out of school, with blond curls hooking under delicate ears. Eyebrows plucked into perfect half-circles set off her bright blue eyes. She was just on the wrong side of plump, but carried the weight well, in high, round breasts.

  “Who’re you?”

  “Ted Barston, and I’m here ta see him about a job.”

  She wet a stamp with a quick turn of her tongue and pressed it onto an envelope. “Mister Himmel doesn’t handle hiring, Miss Silva does. Anyways, we’re not hiring at the present moment.”