Those colossal shoulders sagged. “I know and I am sorry.” His voice was so low I could barely hear him over the din of the restaurant. “I was taken by surprise, that is all. I did not look at the tickets before I gave them to you.”
“I had to learn your name by accident.” My scowl was black. “I wish you trusted me enough to tell me.”
“Keeping my name secret was an added layer of protection for you.” He flicked a dark curl from my shoulder. “I have never made a mistake like the one I made today. I think something—someone—is distracting me.”
I sharpened my gaze. “There’s a simple solution for that. Two, actually.” I stiffened my spine, recited in my head one last time the ultimatum I’d rehearsed so many times as I ticked off his options on my fingers. “One: Trust me and be with me. Two: Don’t be with me.”
Why did I say that out loud? My lungs burned as I waited for him to exit the restaurant, leaving me behind forever. This moment sat poised on a knife’s edge: either we would push further into our relationship than I’d ever gone with anyone—ever—or we would throw it all away. The choice depended on the man standing in front of me.
Golos tapped the gentleman in a bowler hat seated on the stool next to me, gestured for him to move down. Once seated, Golos placed both his hands on my knees. That simple touch was a lightning rod that sent an electric current straight to my heart. “It is no choice that you give me, Elizabeth. I must be with you.”
I nearly sagged with relief. “Then stop being sloppy.”
He smiled. God, I loved that smile.
I’d come here expecting my entire world to return to the dark abyss of loneliness I never wanted to face again. Instead, I would leave with Golos at my side, perhaps with a relationship forged stronger than before.
If I got the next few minutes right, that was.
“So,” I said. “What do I call you, O-Man-of-a-Thousand-Names? Timmy? Levin? Golos? I assume the latter is your surname, correct?”
His voice was so low against the din of the restaurant that I could barely hear him. “It means voice in Russian. Does the name sound familiar?”
“Should it?”
“That depends on how much you learned of Russian history before you abandoned the Party.”
I gave him a side-eye glance. “You mean the Party that my handler demanded I leave?”
He winked. “Your brilliant handler, yes.”
“Never heard of him.”
His eyes sparked as I popped one final bite of hot dog into my mouth and he paid my bill, then that blue fire guttered. “Golos,” he started, “Jacob Golos helped found the Communist Party of America and was one of the three-man Central Control Commission. A rezident here in the United States.”
I nearly choked on my last bite of hot dog. Felt those hands that I’d trusted—hands I’d let wander all over my body—thump me on the back.
Bent over, I held up a palm to stop him, needed to pause and catch my breath.
I’d been dating—and sleeping with—one of the behind-the-scenes manipulators who had given the orders in Russia’s Communist Party.
“Elizabeth, I understand if you want to walk out that door and never see me again.” Even I could see that those words cost him dearly. “But if you want to hear the rest of my story, you will find me on the sidewalk.”
I watched the man I loved disappear out the doors of Nathan’s Famous, felt him take a piece of me with every step. It was frightening to imagine what orders a man like Jacob Golos had given and perhaps even carried out himself.
It is better that you do not know me. At least not that part of me, anyway.
But I didn’t want to imagine anything. I wanted to know the truth. And I wanted to hear it from the man himself.
I met him on the sidewalk.
His eyes lit when he saw me, and the stiffness of his posture melted away. I knew then that this thing between us was no casual Party arrangement, that his feelings plumbed as deep as my own.
He actually feared I would let him walk away.
Together, we strolled in the settling twilight while he spoke of himself, the words coming slowly and deliberately, as if they had long ago taken root somewhere deep within him and were only now being brought to the surface.
“I was born Jacob Raisen,” he began, his fingers twining with mine. “But no one has called me Jacob in so long I doubt I would even answer if I heard it on the street. I was born to a Jewish family in the Ukraine, but I hardly remember them, was arrested for the first time at eight years old for distributing anti-czarist literature. My parents died soon after, and I was cared for by a printer. It was both the best and worst place for me—that Ukrainian Gutenberg was a rabid Bolshevik and I helped operate his press, soaked up every clandestine screed and bit of bile against the czar. At seventeen, I was discovered and sent to a Siberian prison camp.”
“Like Lenin.” Gooseflesh rolled down my arms, and my heart ached for the young man Jacob Raisen had been, the horrific conditions he had surely endured while in prison. I’d thought my youth difficult, what with the constant moving and my parents’ deaths, the crushing loneliness, but that was nothing compared to the suffering this man before me had survived. I wound my fingers tighter through his, and we continued walking, no destination in mind save the past.
“Two years later, I escaped on foot into China. My feet were bloody ribbons from walking by the time I arrived, but I had decided what I wanted to do. I could not return home, not with Czar Nicholas still on the throne, nor could I stay in China and wait for him to be overthrown. So, I worked a boat to Japan and from there, to America.”
“Land of the free and home of the brave,” I whispered. Just then, a taxi down the street blared its horn and made us both jump, the sound reverberating up the budding skyscrapers. America certainly wasn’t perfect, but it was a far cry from czarist Russia.
“America was better than Russia under the czar, and I became naturalized—and changed my name—while the Great War raged. However, when Nicholas was deposed during the February Revolution and Lenin returned, I knew it was time to return home. I became the foreman of a Siberian coal mine. No medals, but I received this during a cave-in.” He pointed to the jagged lightning streak scar on his arm. He glanced at me, his expression pained. “Are you sure you want to hear the rest?”
I imagined keeping such truths buried for so long—more than two decades—and knew there was only one answer.
“Tell me everything,” I said. “Every last bit.”
He hesitated, the same emotion I’d seen earlier in the day flickering deep in his eyes: fear. Whatever he was about to tell me terrified him. “From there,” he finally continued, “the Party took notice and asked if I would serve them as a member of the Cheka.”
I felt his gaze on me, shook my head for him to explain. “The Cheka was Russia’s secret police,” he said. “It is dissolved now—thank goodness—but they were infamous for persecuting deserters with tidy nape-of-the-neck executions at point-blank range. The better to minimize the bloody aftermath of executions.”
I barely stopped from gasping, my worship of this man flickering for the first time. What terrible crimes had Jacob Golos—my lover and mentor and friend—committed in the name of something larger than himself?
I held up a hand, a universal gesture: stop.
“Tell me one thing.” I felt myself waver, forced myself to plunge ahead. “Do you still do the things you did in the Cheka here? Do you hurt people?”
An emphatic shake of his head. “My days in the Cheka are over, and I never want to repeat them. I am a different man now, Elizabeth. I swear it.” His eyes carried another layer of that message: Please don’t ask me what I did back then.
I’d commanded that he tell me everything, but this . . . ?
Honestly, I had no idea how much more I could bear to know.
“I was part of the Cheka,” he continued, “but I got out as quickly as I could. After years at home working for the secret police, I followed the Party’s order that I return to the United States and found the Communist Party of America.” He paused, inhaled as if steeling himself for more. But how could there be more? “And then . . . I was married.”
“Married?” I reared back. How had I not known this, not thought to ask? I took a step back, needed the sudden distance between us. “And are you still married?”
His eyes were infinitely sad. “I am, but not in the way you imagine. I have no excuse for keeping such a thing secret. Celia was a fellow comrade in my unit. We were matched by the Center.”
“What does that mean?” I ground out. My fingernails dug into my palms. “You were matched by the Center?”
His shoulders slumped. “It is a common practice, especially with the Center’s most valuable members. Sometimes it is done to balance personalities. Other times, two people are paired so one can keep an eye on the other.”
“You’d spy on each other?”
“The Center is a well-oiled machine with many cogs. It recognizes that sometimes the machine requires a matched pair to keep those cogs operating properly.”
That seemed so cold, so clinical. “And where is Celia now?”
“In Russia.” He rubbed an overlarge hand across his haggard expression. “It has been years since I have seen her, Elizabeth, and I swear on everything I hold dear—my beliefs, my homeland, my love for you—that our marriage was in name only. I never thought I could have this happiness I have with you, thought I was born and would die to serve the Party. But now . . .”
“Wait . . .” I stopped, forced him to turn back. “You love me?”
His lips turned up, palms open at his sides. “I thought it was obvious—I am a fool for you, Elizabeth Bentley. Da, ya lyublyu tebya.”
Then he surprised me once again, kneeling before me on the sidewalk, his hands in mine and face turned up like a supplicant. Suddenly, I didn’t know what to do. “Get up,” I whispered, but he refused.
“You deserve far better than me, Elizabeth—I have done terrible things and I will never, ever deserve you. But if you walk away from me right now, I will go to my grave loving you. You are my other half, the wife of my heart.”
In that moment, with his eyes shining up at me with such naked honesty and hope, I might have absolved him of any and all sins. I’d never been loved like this, had never dared hope I’d find someone who worshipped me like this. It terrified me, yet so did the thought of spending my days without him.
“I love you, too, you big Soviet ox,” I managed to choke out. “Now stand up and kiss me.”
He did. By God, he did.
Until a passing businessman whistled and we broke apart, my cheeks flushed and Levin’s eyes glazed in that way that told me exactly what would have happened had we not been standing out on the streets of New York.
Once recovered, we kept walking, this time at a more languorous pace. Levin’s arm draped around my shoulders, and mine was around his waist, each of the two edges of our bodies seeking the perfect fit and warmth of the other. “Now I know what you did in the past,” I finally managed to say. “But what is it that you do these days?”
He ran his thumb over the back of my hand in a way that sent a delicious shiver up my spine. “Today I control the entirety of Party contacts here in America and collect all of the information gathered by our domestic targets.”
Dear God in heaven . . .
I stopped walking, gaped anew at the man beside me.
I wasn’t in love with a highly placed member of the early Party. I was with the man still in charge of the Party.
(Catherine, I would learn later that Jacob Golos was so highly placed that he attended all the top Communist meetings here in America while hidden behind a black curtain to keep his identity secret. Like a Bolshevik Wizard of Oz, only instead of smoke and chimera, he was masterminding intelligence gathering, covert operations, and espionage.)
He offered a sheepish smile. “As an American citizen I am uniquely placed to carry out a different sort of operation that no one else is suited for. Are you familiar with World Tourists?”
“You mean the travel agency on Fifth Avenue?” The only reason I’d heard of it in a city this large was because it was the lone American company allowed to make travel arrangements in Russia, which meant that every Party member I’d encountered who had traveled to Russia—or hoped to one day make the trip—had gone through World Tourists.
“Ah . . .” He patted my arm. “You only think it is a travel agency.” Suddenly, he raised his hand and hailed a yellow cab. “After tonight you will know everything. Come.”
It didn’t take much to guess that we were headed to Fifth Avenue.
Part of me wondered how I’d react after he let us into the empty agency—the business had closed for the evening, although there was still lukewarm coffee to be had—if he showed me a hidden basement or a secret passage. Or perhaps a room full of listening devices or a chest full of encrypted letters.
Instead, after thanking the elderly elevator operator and locking the office door behind us, Levin merely offered me a chipped mug of lukewarm Folgers followed by one travel brochure after another. “A one-month tour of Russia complete with three-day cruise down the Volga River,” I read between sips of mediocre coffee while he scribbled something. Levin handed me a fresh brochure, this time with a slip of paper bearing his handwriting tucked inside. It fluttered to the ground.
Ya lyublyu tebya.
Ti amo.
I love you.
I smiled, pocketed the paper. No matter the language—Russian earlier tonight, now Italian and English—there were no sweeter words. I still couldn’t believe this man had chosen to say them to me. “You’re distracting me.”
“I know not what you mean.” Yet the playful light in his eyes said otherwise. “Keep reading.”
“The ‘Great City’ tour or a one-week package sightseeing in Leningrad. ‘From the moment of his arrival, the visitor from abroad comes across entirely new human relationships and realizes he is in a society that has never before been known, a society whose members are bound together by the common idea of refashioning their own backward fatherland.’ ” I gestured to the travel posters and stacked brochures on every desk. “I’m going to have a difficult time believing you if you try to convince me this is a NKVD interrogation site, or even a Party headquarters.”
Golos took the brochures from me, left them fanned out on a desk. “This is all real and the profits are substantial. World Tourists supports all the Party’s East Coast enterprises, including the Daily Worker.”
I tapped a finger against my chin. “Let me guess . . . It’s also your cover.”
He winked. “Clever girl. Indeed, the front of World Tourists helps me secure American passports for Party members and the Comintern.”
Comintern. Also known as Communist International, which advocated world Communism. The connections this man possessed were staggering.
“To what end? Why do you do this?”
“My mission is simple: to build a better world. And the foundation of that goal is ensuring that Russia and America never fall to the Fascists.”
“But some people must know you’re a Party member. A high-ranking one at that.”
Golos started organizing the pamphlets, by both size and color. I could see his personality reflected here at World Tourists just as it was in his own appearance—his shoes might be worn and the linoleum scuffed, but everything was orderly and in its place.
“I admit, it is an untenable position,” he finally said, turning to look at me. “That is why I need you, Elizabeth, to know all of this and perhaps learn some of what I do in case . . .”
I didn’t like the way he trailed off. “In case what?”
&nb
sp; “One day my past catches up with me. It would not take much for the FBI to learn what I do here, if they only thought to look.”
I shuddered, unwilling to think of what could happen if the FBI came knocking on Jacob’s door. Spying on one’s country was treason, and no matter what nation you hailed from, there was only one sentence for traitors: death. That Jacob trusted me of all people meant that I hadn’t been wrong in choosing him—there was no question that I would do as he asked.
“Is that everything?”
His gaze plumbed to the very core of me. “Everything important.”
I bit my lip, set down my coffee. “You said earlier that Jacob doesn’t feel like you anymore. If that’s true, then I will call you something different.” I leaned against the desk and thought to my limited knowledge of Russian diminutives, mostly gleaned from slogging my way through Tolstoy and from what I’d picked up from Party members who’d adopted Russian monikers. “Yasha is the familiar form of Jacob, right?”
He nodded. “It is.”
“Then you shall be Yasha, but only to me. It will be my code name for you.”
“Yasha?” His smile this time reached his eyes. “Yes, Yasha and his umnitsa. I approve.”
“Umnitsa?” The Russian word tasted delicious on my tongue. “What does that mean?”
“It means clever girl. For you are my most clever girl, the only one I want by my side.”
He leaned over me, dipped his head. The kiss between us this time was hesitant, questioning. It left me wanting more. “Are you sure my story has not scared you off?” he asked.
“It will take far more than that to scare me off you.” In fact, I wanted nothing more than to be with him, right here and right now. I fisted his shirt, parted my knees, and tugged him so he had to stand between them, felt the crinkle of the love note he’d written in my pocket. “But no more secrets, Yasha. At least not important ones about who and what we are.” After all, I was under no illusion that Yasha would be able to tell me every specific about his operation’s day-to-day activities. “Those are my terms.”
A Most Clever Girl Page 11
