The servants were under the supervision of the lacquered, debonair, fur-and-feathered Howard Martin. A faint, wild, animal glint there. Martin, once Herb Winkelman, the cutthroat from the Bowery, Wink the Fink, Wink the Butcher, Wink the Harbor Pirate. If anyone recognized Wink, Ziggy said, “Yeah, he was a militant trade unionist. Ah, that’s ancient history.” The rat-faced woman by Wink’s side was Sonya Stein. Stalin sent her to New York in 1937 to help Wink mop up some class enemies. She was a well-trained student of mesmerism from the Motnia College in Leningrad. Ziggy knew Wink since 1934, when he’d met him on a Party-run ship in Hamburg. Wink supplied him with cameras and instructions for photographing American harbors.
Sarah Weissberger was busy entertaining her guests, skipping up and down the steps. In the second basement, the red-hot light, the machines churned away day and night. People flew up and down the stairs with telegraphic instructions. The noise of the radio transmitters, the photography and microfilming was deafening; the machinery clanking against other machinery; slabs of concrete falling to the floor from overuse. Counterfeit money and passports were an extra drain; it was too much to do at one time. It was a life of exhilaration; men with hot messages screaming, “Go for it.” The power made them horny; they plunged their faces into Sarah’s breasts.
On the central floor the guests, the judges, the justices, the diplomats, the journalists, the whole slew—the senator was standing there in his gray suit and shiny shoes requesting, if possible, if she pleased, an autographed picture of Sarah with one of those short-legged creatures for his den, for his wife, for his daughter, for Congress, for the president, if only, if she could, if she would.
Beneath piles of rubble were covers of wood. Beneath the wood were cavities twenty inches long, eighteen inches wide, six inches deep. Packages were inside. In the middle was a gray metal box, covered by polyethylene bags. The box, the size of a small attache case, was a radio transmitter that reached to Moscow. In another bag was a false torch battery with lenses to make microdots and a keying device for sending long messages quickly.
The transmitter had a single earpiece and no loudspeaker. It worked on a high-frequency band with a 150-watt output. It was used with the automatic keying device.
The photography equipment was superb: 35-millimeter cameras, a lens system, and the 35-millimeter negatives reduced to microdots. The microdots were inserted in letters, sealed behind the stamp on an envelope or sent out of the country in a book.
The Weissbergers visited the Rubells in the tower on the third day after the departure of the senator. “Be brave, be strong, it is too late to escape,” they told Solly and Dolly.
You will be legends, you will be history, they told them. You must go back now to your little East Side hovel and you must remain true to your convictions. We are invincible. History is on our side. We love you. Your contribution has been enormous. We will never abandon you. Stalin loves you. You are steel rods. You will not break.
Solly said, his voice a trembling green reed, “I love my babies.”
“Babies are born every minute, my dear Solly,” said Sarah. “And now they will be free.”
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Yaddo Corporation and the MacDowell Colony.
With special thanks to Erika Goldman, Michael Congdon, Richard Gid Powers, Judith Liss, and Alan Schwartz.
About the Author
David Evanier is the author of seven books. His work includes novels, story collections, and biographies of entertainment legends. Evanier’s work has been published in Best American Short Stories and has been honored with the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for short fiction. He is a former fiction editor of the Paris Review and a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, as well as a fellow of Yaddo and of the Wurlitzer Foundation. He has taught creative writing at UCLA and Douglas College. He lives in Brooklyn and is currently writing a biography of Woody Allen.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by David Evanier
Excerpts of Red Love have appeared in The American Spectator, Commentary, Confrontation, Journal of Contemporary Studies, New American Writing, and Witness, and in Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, edited by David Rosenberg.
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4976-4160-0
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Red Love Page 28
