Rip the Angels from Heaven

by David Krugler

  Slater was wrong—Rosario hadn’t recruited me. The mission of revenge was all mine. Grief had consumed Rosario, he wasn’t even leaving home. Grief had overtaken me, too, but glimpsed through the blackness, I saw a path. Tell no one you were there … ask Rosario to back you up … find a way in … it’s the only way to hurt them for killing Delphine …

  “Your silence is pretty damning, Voigt,” Latham said.

  So was their posturing. If Paslett really was combing over my files, Slater and Latham would have waited to confront me until they had hard evidence, not the half-baked memories of people who knew me when I was a kid. And if Mara really was telling all, I’d be in a cell, the charges ringing in my ears. Her story was holding up, they hadn’t broken her. The surprise appearance of Slater, the opening salvo of blunt questions, the looming MPs—a bluff. A full-tilt Bureau squeeze, classic John Edgar, don’t let up until they squeal.

  “Want me to talk, how’s this: Slater’s little show here stinks,” I answered the colonel.

  “Bluster can’t save you,” Slater shot back.

  I ignored him, still talking to Latham. “How many times did he tell you the Bureau should take over this case?”

  “Now listen here,” Slater interrupted, but I continued.

  “With all due respect, sir, has it occurred to you that Slater’s here, waving laughable affidavits and painting me Red, just so the Bureau can get its foot in the door? Did he also arrive with a draft memorandum of understanding already signed by John Edgar to assign a permanent Bureau liaison team to Site Y to help you with security?”

  Bull’s-eye. Latham was nodding, Slater glowering. Dahlen looked dumbstruck. How’d he know?

  “If I’m a goddamned Red, why aren’t you arresting me?” I almost held up my wrists, but I was afraid they’d shake, so I kept my hands tight on my legs.

  “Colonel, remember what I said, Voigt’s a slippery one, you can’t trust a word he says—”

  “—Colonel, if I was a Red agent, why would I be here identifying the Russians’ number one spy?”

  “—this is exactly what I mean, Colonel! This is how Voigt operates, Jesus Christ himself would fall for his ‘I’m-as-pure-as-the-white-driven-snow’ act—”

  “—Colonel, if I’m a Red agent, would I say this to you now: Don’t let me near the spy after we do the lineup, don’t let me say a single word to him? Would I?”

  That clinched it for Latham. Slater started to sputter, but the colonel held up his hand. Looked at me, looked at Slater. Then ordered Dahlen: “Call McKibbin, see if the girl’s story checks out.”

  “Goddammit, Colonel, I told you the Reds will have her covered! We’ve got to keep pounding away at her til she cracks!”

  Bad move, cursing a senior Army intelligence officer. Latham glared at Slater, who finally had the good sense to shut up. Dahlen stood, exited.

  The next three minutes were agonizing. At least when the Russians had been torturing me, I’d blacked out briefly. No choice here but to sit still, try to control my breathing and clamp down on the growing quiver in my hands and legs. Slater busied himself scribbling in a notepad, no doubt recording my mendacity and Latham’s incompetence. The colonel simply closed his eyes, but he wasn’t sleeping—his chin was tilted up. Concentrating, thinking? I remembered his reference to Buddhism when we met—didn’t Buddhists meditate? Looked like a good idea, but I no more knew how to meditate than I knew how to fly an aircraft. So I kept my eyes on the scuffed tabletop and kept my thoughts firmly in the past, remembering the thrill, the exhilaration of our first kiss, Delphine and me, how we were seated on the sofa in her parents’ parlor, not working on our homework, how our hips were touching and her bare arm brushed up against mine and my heart was pounding and I swallowed hard as she murmured something about the play we were reading and her tongue nervously touched her upper lips and her lashes fluttered as I dared to lean my head closer and—

  The door swung open. I jolted out of my reverie, Slater stopped writing, Latham opened his eyes. We all looked at Dahlen.

  “She’s clean.”

  “No! No! Colonel, you’ve gotta let me question her, I know how these Reds operate, I know how they set up their covers, I know what they overlook. Take me down there, now!”

  First a curse, now an order—Slater was digging his hole deeper.

  “The woman’s committed no crime,” Latham said evenly. “What do you propose we do? Jail her without a charge?”

  “Charge her with prostitution, anything! Just please keep her detained til I can question her.”

  “This is the United States of America, Agent Slater. We don’t fabricate charges.” He looked at me. “We’ll do the lineup right now—Dahlen’s got the names of all male civilians and military personnel who had leave the first week of May.” To Slater he said, “You can observe the identification, but that’s it, understand?”

  Slater said yessir but he was looking straight at me. The hatred in his eyes had turned to cold, hard resolution. He was absolutely, positively convinced I was a fraud, a liar, a traitor, a Red. And I knew he wouldn’t stop until he had evidence.

  I’d wiggled my way out of this jam, but I was, for real, a fraud, a liar, a traitor, a Red. So how long did I have before Agent Slater proved it?

  CHAPTER 29

  WE DID THE INTERVIEWS IN A CRAMPED, WINDOWLESS OFFICE IN THE Administration building. Metal table, wooden chairs, blank walls. Latham, Slater, Dahlen, and the steno with brown hair sat facing the lone chair reserved for the suspect. Latham ordered me to lean against the wall behind the suspect. He didn’t want me watching the suspects’ faces, just listening.

  Fine by me. Despite my run-in with Mara and the arrival of Slater, my plan was working. As soon as I recognized the spy’s voice, Latham would immediately arrest him. I’d be ordered out of the room, of course, to appease Slater—didn’t matter. I wanted nothing to do with the spy, I truly wanted Latham to keep me away from him. Mara and the Russians would never know I hadn’t spoken with him, and where the spy would be going, he’d never be able to tell them we’d never talked. Latham would send me straight back to Washington, where I’d doctor the schematic the spy had originally delivered. Give it to the Russians, get them off my back—then I’d figure out what to do about Slater and the Bureau. And the Russians, too, when they finally realized the schematic was hooey. For now, my goal was not to drown—I’d find my way out of the water later.

  Six men on the list: Klaus Fuchs, Fred Dawes, Richard Feynman, Gary Ackerly, Paul Scheppel, and Mason Adams Brode. Latham didn’t tell me anything about the men except their names and that he and Dahlen were certain they were the only Site Y personnel who could have traveled to Washington in May. Again, fine by me. I knew my man’s voice, I knew what he looked like, even if I’d only peered at him through the window of the kitchen door at the Automat. I also knew—because he had boasted about it during the conversation I overhead—he had earned a Ph.D. in physics from Yale at age twenty-two. That fact I hadn’t shared with anyone. Not that I expected Latham to ask these men where they’d gone to school, but a guy who gets a doctorate one year after becoming old enough to vote sure wouldn’t talk like a mechanic.

  The first man, Klaus Fuchs, looked to be in his early thirties. Serious, almost forlorn expression on an otherwise blank face, notable only for big round eyeglasses and hair rippling back from a receding hairline. Trying hard not to look nervous. The man I’d seen hadn’t worn glasses and wasn’t losing his hair. Still, I wanted to hear him speak. It’s easy to alter an appearance using spectacles and a wig, much harder to disguise a voice.

  “Doctor Fuchs, we called you here because we’re investigating a possible breach of security in the Theoretical Physics Division,” Latham announced. “We’ve just a few questions for you, then you can get back to work.”

  So Fuchs had a Ph.D.—that caught my attention. He nodded energetically at Latham’s statement but didn’t speak.

  The colonel slid a stapled sheaf of papers across th
e table. “This is your signature here,” pointing.

  “Yes.”

  “Indicating the removal of the papers identified on the log from Safe TP Four on July seventh at twenty-two-thirty-five.”

  “Yes …”

  Dammit, Latham, get him to say something besides yes!

  “Why is there no time of return of the papers on this log?”

  Fuchs peered at the log, looked up, scanned the faces watching him, cleared his throat.

  “Well, I, er, I am not sure, certainly I returned the papers, but I must have simply forgotten to update the log, that is all, I did not—are the papers missing?”

  “No, Doctor Fuchs, the papers are secure. But you didn’t indicate when you locked the papers back in the safe. A failure to maintain timely and accurate logs for classified materials greatly undermines our security measures—”

  “Is it other papers that are missing? You said there is a breach. Because if there are, other missing materials I mean, I do not know anything about it.”

  I tuned out Latham’s response. Fuchs was rattled, speaking rapidly, but I’d listened long enough: He was not the man I’d seen and heard in Washington. Fuchs spoke with a German accent, and it wasn’t faked. My parents were immigrants from Germany; I’d grown up hearing English being spoken with almost the exact same inflection.

  “… you may return to work, Doctor Fuchs,” Latham finished.

  “Yes, thank you—I am terribly sorry about my neglect of the log, it will not happen again, Colonel, I promise you that.” Fuchs pushed his chair back and stood, eyeing me over as he hustled out of the room.

  As soon as the door shut, Latham looked straight at me. “Well?”

  I shook my head. “He’s not the spy. Fuchs is German, right—the accent? The man I heard at the Automat speaks one hundred percent American English.”

  “All right,” he said. He started to tell Dahlen to bring in the next man, but Slater piped up.

  “Hold on, Colonel, if you will. I think we should give this Fuchs another look.”

  “We?”

  “I mean your office, Colonel, of course. But just a quick glance at the file raises all sorts of red flags about Fuchs’s background. He was born and raised in Germany, at a time when the Communist Party there was quite active, and—”

  “Doctor Fuchs is now a British citizen. Last I checked, we’re still on the same side as the British.”

  Slater ignored the crack. “Be that as it may, Colonel, I think it prudent to continue questioning him.”

  “Fuchs went through a thorough security screening before he set foot on Site Y. And we just heard Voigt say he’s not the man who came to Washington.”

  Everyone—Latham, Slater, Dahlen, the steno—looked at me.

  “He’s not the spy,” I repeated.

  “What if he’s wrong?” Slater said, addressing Latham. Translation: What if he’s lying?

  The colonel’s expression of impatience suggested this wasn’t the first time Slater had raised the possibility. I had to admit, the F.B.I. agent had a point. If I was a Red spy, I might very well lie to protect the spy. But when I identified the spy, I’d throw that theory out the window.

  “Agent Slater, let’s get through the list as quickly as possible, as we agreed. If we need to bring Fuchs back in, we know where to find him.”

  Slater was unhappy, but he nodded. The second man on the list, Fred Dawes, was short and fat, his neck rippling over his collar like a melting pudding. He worked in metallurgy, so Latham asked him about the stock of aluminum bars. Sounded like a pretense—unlike during the questioning of Fuchs, Latham didn’t produce a log or an inventory, so his queries were broad. Have you ever had a problem with missing bars? How do you keep track of your stock?

  Problem was, Dawes wasn’t much of a talker. At all. Dunno. Couldn’t say. Nodded his head for yes, shook his head for no; I watched the fat rolls jiggle. Exasperated, Latham finally asked him to tell us, in his own words, how the aluminum was inventoried and stored.

  “Now look, Colonel, dis here’s a royal waste’a time, awright, dat alOOhmuNUM is locked down tighter dan virgins in a CAHNvent, you wanna know about how it gets inventoried, don’t waste yer time talking ta me, I gotta get back to work, I got a man already out sick, I got a lathe down …”

  Dis, dat, dan: Dawes was a Midwesterner like me, a city boy, not quite Chicago, but close, Rockford or Milwaukee. Wherever he was from, he sure hadn’t learned to talk like that at Yale. Latham dismissed him as soon as I shook my head.

  “Definitely not our man,” I said once Dawes was out of the room.

  Not even Slater disputed my appraisal. We waited in awkward silence as Dahlen fetched the next man. Latham appeared to meditate, Slater scribbled notes. I ached to light a cigarette, but we were all still abstaining because of the colonel’s tobacco allergy. My legs were starting to tire from standing, though I knew better than to ask if I could sit. Latham didn’t care for Slater, wasn’t going to let him shoehorn his way into Site Y; but that didn’t mean I’d become the colonel’s pet. Making me stand away from the table was a not-so-subtle reminder I was still the outsider, here to do one task and then get gone. Fine by me, I thought. My mantra for the evening, that phrase. I wondered if Latham’s men had released Mara yet. She was made of tougher stuff than I’d first thought—keeping her cover tight during a lengthy interrogation was mighty impressive. I hoped she knew she’d be followed all the way from Santa Fe. If she met with the Russians, as she was supposed to, then the jig was up, for sure. Felt my pulse quicken, my mouth go dry. Told myself not to panic, not to spin what-ifs. Mara had just fooled Army intelligence; she wasn’t about to make an amateur mistake.

  The arrival of the third man interrupted my worrisome thoughts. Richard Feynman came in smiling, confident, scanning the room like a Borscht Belt comedian sizing up his audience. He barely glanced at me as he took the lone chair facing his tribunal. He was thin and rakishly handsome, with arched eyebrows and dark eyes. His baggy brown trousers and white shirt badly needed pressing.

  “Time for Professor Quiz again?” Feynman said, still smiling.

  Latham smiled faintly at this crack about the radio show. “We’ve received more reports of tampered safes.”

  Both Slater and I perked up. Tampered safes? Was this for real or a ruse, like the story of the missing aluminum bars?

  “Well, I’m not your man,” Feynman answered, “no sir, I learned my lesson, you schooled me rightly, I keep my fingers off the dial, the safe dial that is. The radio dial I don’t dare touch. Take It or Leave It is even better than Professor Quiz, don’t you think, Colonel?”

  This Feynman was awful close to being insolent, but Latham didn’t dress him down. Why not? I wondered. The colonel had rebuked Fuchs for failing to sign a log, but Feynman wasn’t even getting chided for safe tampering (alleged). He must be awful important to the project, I decided, or else he’d seen right through Latham’s pretense and was having fun with the colonel.

  No matter—Feynman wasn’t the spy. The pitch of his voice was higher than the man I’d heard, and Feynman had a habit of stretching out one-syllable words. Keeeep, saafe. Latham told him he could go. He left—after making an exaggerated bow. Slater’s face reddened with anger. What tales he’d tell Hoover!

  “Well?” Latham asked.

  “Not him, sir.”

  “I see,” he answered cryptically, looking at me long and hard. I didn’t like his expression—at all.

  “Colonel, what’s this about tampered safes?” Slater piped up.

  “Don’t get excited, it’s not what it sounds like. We had a small problem with Feynman playing jokes. He’s so good with numbers he can crack the codes and open safes. He was leaving jokes on scraps of paper inside the safes he opened. Obviously, we put an end to that.”

  “What?!” Now the color drained from Slater’s face. “Good Lord, do you have any idea …” I tuned out the familiar Bureau bluster and Latham’s indignant response, Dahlen watching the
back-and-forth like a tennis match.

  Why the cold look from Latham? And that reply? I see. Three men had come and gone—I’d denied each was the spy. Was the colonel coming around to Slater, was he starting to suspect that I wasn’t going to identify the spy in order to protect him? I wasn’t going to do that, of course—but what if I couldn’t recognize the spy’s voice or his appearance? What if he had disguised himself when he came to Washington and now looked different? What the hell would I do then?

  CHAPTER 30

  TOLD MYSELF NOT TO PANIC, I HAD THREE MORE MEN TO OBSERVE, ONE of them had to be the spy. But now I couldn’t stave off the what-ifs, they swept in like locusts. What if the man I’d seen in Washington had just been a courier, pretending to be a hotshot scientist from Site Y? What if Latham had overlooked my man, what if he had found a way to get out of Site Y without leave? What if the spy was posted at a different secret site? If the spy wasn’t here, for whatever reason, Slater would sink his teeth in and shake me like a rag doll. I couldn’t claim Latham had made a mistake, all my credibility rode on this identification. More than credibility—my life. Because if I didn’t put the spy into the clink here, at Site Y, the Russians would be able to ask him if I’d made contact, as I was supposed to do, and when he said, What are you talking about? I’d be a walking dead man.

  Plan’s solid, stay steady, I told myself. A new mantra, those words. Plan’s solid, stay steady. Still, I wished I could smoke—a Lucky would have gone a long way toward smoothing my nerves.

  The fourth man, Gary Ackerly, was small and slight, with an angular face and a bristle brush of a mustache. Could he be the spy? I wondered. The man I’d seen in Washington had been thin and also had a sharp chin. No mustache, but he could have easily grown it since his return.

  Latham gave him the same line he’d used with Fuchs: there had been some security breaches, this time in the Experimental Physics Division. Another scientist—we were getting warmer.

  “What kind of breaches?” Ackerly calmly answered. Confident, like Feynman, but not cocky. Voice soft but clear, no accent.