Manhattan 62

by Nadelson, Reggie

  “I know Bounine’s friends, so to say, are across the street, because he would not otherwise choose the window, but he pretends this is only a social occasion. ‘I am so taken with this place,’ he says to me in Russian, and points out the old espresso machine, and the tin ceilings, and marble tops of the tables, and the dark Italian paintings on the wall. He relates to me that many poets and writers have spent time here, and he insists we have cappuccino. ‘This is the very best in New York, Maxim, you see, and you must join me in a cannoli pastry. My treat, of course,’ and then he calls for the waiter in Italian. He is, Pat, an ass, a spoiled man, what might be called a deviationist in my country.”

  Ostalsky was a good storyteller. I had noticed it before, this ability to remember details—he could say what kind of silk fabric was in a certain window he passed, or what the guy on a stool beside him was eating—for the way people talked. He played his part and all the others. Now I understood he had been trained for all this, a way to blend in, a way as he had put it when we were friends and he was telling me how he wanted to “swim” in American life. He had achieved it all, had fooled me with his sometimes bumbling efforts to learn the lingo and his laughing at himself; with them he had won over Nancy, and used her and her family.

  “So I am trapped in Caffe Reggio with Bounine, while he drinks several little cups of coffee.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “Bounine’s vanity. I have a small camera. I say I would like a photograph to send home, and I suggest Washington Square, where I make him pose under the arch, he removes his tweed jacket, and tosses it over his shoulder like a photograph of Frank Sinatra he has seen. Then he stops a woman passing and asks her to take a picture of the two of us. ‘We will always remember. We will be Max and Mike in Greenwich Village. I will be sure to make a copy for you,’ he says. I have no idea what the hell he wants, but we’re out of doors, and I get Bounine to walk to the university with me, and when he’s distracted, I slip into the building, and out of the side, into the next building on Washington Street, and then out onto Broadway among the crowds of people.”

  As he told his story, Max kept looking at the window, and around the warehouse, his face now covered with the pale clammy sweat of fear. It gave me the impression he was looking for a way out, but only in a theoretical sense, because he sat, almost passive, smoking one Lucky after the other, as if his life depended on them, tossing the butts onto the concrete floor and the matches into an empty pail.

  “Go on.”

  Max told me then that he kept walking down Broadway, passing 3rd Street, Bleecker, Houston, and on and on, not looking back, assuming the look of a busy man in a hurry, occasionally glancing up as if to locate the number on a door, or a particular loft building, a tool and dye company, a print shop, a fabric store with bolts of brightly colored material— gold, red, pink, yellow—cramming the window, he kept going, feeling in his pockets for change, for crumpled bills, wondering if he had enough to keep going. His green canvas book bag in his hand, he was glad he had put in a sweater, and heavy socks, the temperature was dropping.

  The further downtown he got, the easier it was to disappear into the crowd of workers coming out of the sweatshops, small factories, machine shops. Slipping through the crowds, he replayed all he’d been taught about losing himself in a foreign city. And he had wandered here before, and always liked the feel of this part of the city where things were made—garments, buttons, machine tools, printed matter. He liked the way there are Italian signs, and then Chinese signs. A few blocks from the University, it’s a different city.

  He didn’t look back, only sideways in the large glass windows of the fabric stores, to see if anyone was following him, his reflection full of the dread that comes from not knowing who’s behind you, or where to go.

  I’m with Ostalsky as he flees, I can feel his terror. He makes the story real. Is this how they teach them, how they instruct the agents—tell a good story, make your interrogator sympathetic?

  “I don’t look back at all, Pat. I just keep going, but I’m looking sideways, in the windows where there are bolts of brocaded cloth, gold cloth, silver cloth. In Chinatown, nobody looks at me, people in a hurry surge this way and that, in and out of restaurants, those pork buns in the window, the bronzed ducks hanging upside down. Old ladies are poking vegetables. I try not to run, Pat, I try. But I am scared.”

  Max kept talking to me, as if possessed.

  “It’s getting dark,” said Max. “I think where can I hide? Who will hide me? I can try Brooklyn, but I do not know Brooklyn, except for a story I have read by your Thomas Wolfe, it is titled ‘Only the Dead Know Brooklyn’. But I am already dead in Manhattan. I feel they are watching. Queens? The Bronx? These remain mysterious to me, Pat.”

  “Did you consider going to Nancy?”

  “It would be so harmful for her, and her family. I felt like a fugitive.”

  “What about coming to me?”

  He smiled. “Oh, Pat, that would not have been an option. For you. Or me.”

  “Your FBI tail was around?”

  “He had disappeared. ‘Ed’, my young tail, the one with the bad suit and the Bermuda shorts, he had gone.”

  “But there was somebody in his place.”

  “Yes, a squat thin man with eyes set low in the face, the whole face as if the features had to be set low, and he resembles some sea creature. A checkered flat cap.”

  “Car?”

  “Black.”

  “He was at Penn Station tailing Ustinov.”

  “My God.”

  “God?”

  “I eat a hamburger at Dave’s coffee shop on the southeast corner of Canal and Broadway. The thin guy with the red socks is on the street when I left Dave’s. Pat, if you should walk on a rubber floor in the middle of an earthquake, this is how I was feeling. I begin to run, into Chinatown, towards the river, through the Fish Market, and I see a man who’s keeping a few paces behind me, and now he is looking into the window of a shop selling eye-glasses.”

  “Your FBI tail?”

  “No. Stan Miller. Mr Miller, I’m absolutely sure, and he is wearing his tan raincoat, belted like a military man, and I think, perhaps he is only in Chinatown to buy something, an embroidered satin jacket for Muriel, or a pair of fancy rhinestone sunglasses.”

  “You were sure?”

  “Do you know once I saw him wearing his uniform that he keeps in a plastic bag in the hall closet. He was examining himself in the hall mirror, and I am, right then, opening my door to the apartment, the door between my room and the main apartment, I am intending to get myself a Coke from Mrs Miller’s refrigerator. When I see him, I retreat to my room. I didn’t want him to know I have watched him looking at himself. Watched him salute himself in the hall mirror.”

  “Christ, you think Miller is in this?”

  “Yes. Once I passed him on the 11th Street and he was using a pay phone, I could see him through the glass, bent over, as if it were something quite, you know, hush hush, and he saw me. Why would he do it, when he was a block from where he lives? ”

  “Maybe he has a girlfriend.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You had wondered why he had offered you the room, why he tried to get you to defect?”

  “Yes. I’m pretty sure he was watching me in Chinatown. He saw me, and stared for a moment, and turned into a doorway. I went the other way after that. It was getting cold. I left Chinatown, and I walked again, all the way to Greenwich Avenue where I went to a movie house. I must have fallen asleep because I stayed for two entire shows and I can’t remember what film I saw.

  “When I woke up it was very late, and the theatre was empty. Somebody was picking up empty popcorn cartons. I spent the rest of the night at the automat and a couple of bars. I learned to drink beer very slowly, I didn’t have much money left. By the morning I had a kind of plan.”

  “Go on.”

  “I walk to the Port Authority bus terminal, and I simply call the E
mbassy of the USSR in Washington DC and ask for the cultural attaché’s office. It didn’t take me long to discover that an old friend of mine would be in New York on Monday, to make some arrangements for the Bolshoi Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera house.”

  “Ustinov.”

  “Yes. He took the train to meet me. He knew enough to confirm my suspicions. To make me believe what Valdes hinted at might be true. He tells me to lie low for a few days, while he tries to make some calls, and then we go to the train station where he asks me if I have got a friend in New York I trust. I tell him about you. He says it might be worth a dime to telephone you.”

  “So he said. You should have rung my doorbell Saturday.”

  “Oh dear, my good friend, Pat,” said Max, and then he began to laugh. It was the crazy laugh of a man without any hope left. In the old warehouse, the laughter boomeranged off the walls and came back hollow. “How could I? You believed I murdered a man in this city. You would have to turn me in. But this is the irony, you see, you could not report it because nobody listens to you. Don’t you think I know that you are, what do they say, out of the loop? Cut off. Suspended. Bounine knew. Ustinov knows. You are, as they say, out in the cold. Like I am.”

  “How the hell do you know about it?”

  “I’m a spy.”

  “You bugged my phone?”

  “Does it matter? No. I didn’t. I would have, but I had no way to do this. I, too, was cut off.”

  What scared me wasn’t that he had bugged my phone—I didn’t see how he could have put the bug in, or when—but that somebody I knew had done it. I had thought about it before. I had forgotten to check the phone. Did somebody set me up? Ostalsky was still laughing.

  “You think that it’s comic?”

  “It is comic. It is terrible and comic. You find a murderer, or so you believe, but nobody will listen to you.

  “Pat, I believe Rica knew he was in danger, that he understood who the man was who would kill him. He always loved melodrama, but this was real. Now you know where I have been these days, you know everything I can tell you, that I myself know. I feel myself almost worn out.” He rubbed his face. “Now, I am wondering if you are going to kill me?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  October 24, ’62

  OUTSIDE, A SMUDGE OF gray light smeared the sky. In the distance, a rumble—a train, thunder, trucks in the Meat Market—I couldn’t tell.

  “What’s that? In the street? Pat, what’s the noise?” Max leaned forward, a crouch, a runner ready to move. He mumbled something in Russian, looked up at me, terrified now. “What is that?”

  In the street below, the noise came closer, sirens screamed through the early morning, ripping up the silence. Cops, or an alert that the war had begun, that they were going to drop the bomb. Again I listened.

  “It’s the cops,” I said.

  “Are they coming for you or me,” said Max.

  “We have to get out of here.”

  I kept the gun on him and yanked at his arm. He picked up the dark green book bag and I pushed him in front of me.

  “Now.”

  “How do we go?”

  I gestured to the street side door of the warehouse. He stumbled after me, grabbing my arm because he could barely see. We went down the four flights, the old boards creaking loud.

  I had parked in front of the warehouse. I opened the passenger side door, kept the gun on Max, pushed him in, then went around to the other side, cursing the bucket seats in the sports car. Thank God I had left the top up.

  “Close the goddamn door.”

  With one hand, I reach for the key. I fumbled with the gun. I was twisted like a pretzel. I knew I was losing control. The sirens were screaming closer.

  A pair of workers on their way to the docks, lunch pails in hand, stared at us. I could see them whispering, discussing if they should act. I had been yelling. They knew something was wrong. I fumbled with the handbrake.

  Then I lost it. I still had his gun, but my grip was loose. When I looked sideways at Max in the seat next to me, he also held a weapon.

  “You forget there were two guns,” said Max. “Yours and mine. You forgot that, Pat. I think it would be better if we go now.” He looked out the rear window.

  I stepped on the gas hard.

  “Why didn’t you use it?”

  He took the gun from my hand, where it dangled uselessly, and tossed both weapons in the back seat.

  “The assassination.”

  “I don’t believe it. It’s too crazy, man.”

  “I believe it. Please, can you go faster? There’s a car following us.”

  In the rearview was the two-tone Impala I had seen before, and a second car, a large black Plymouth, shined up like glass, with a driver in a checkered cap. It was the man who had been following Ustinov in Penn Station.

  “The Impala, I think it’s our people, my tail.”

  “The black car is ours.” Max slid further down in the seat, out of sight. “I think it’s the agent who followed me in Chinatown.”

  “You’re scared of your own people? They are yours, aren’t they?” I put my foot on the gas, not knowing where to go, not thinking about anything except losing the cars behind us.

  “Where are the police? The sirens?”

  “I’d bet they’re searching the warehouse.”

  “Somebody knew we were there?”

  “Maybe a lot of people.

  “Yes. I am scared of my people,” said Max. “Pat, do you think we can get to Harlem? Rica said he would leave something for me if there was trouble—he meant if he was dead, I think. I think he left a letter.”

  “He knew he was finished.”

  “I think, yes.”

  “We’ll go as soon as it gets dark. We have to lose these goons behind us. I’ll try. I have to make a phone call. Where was he?”

  “The Hotel Theresa. He knew of it because his delegation stayed there. Cubans love it because Fidel had stayed.”

  “Jesus Christ.” I kept my eye on the rearview while I went through the tunnel. I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t go anywhere at least until I lost the cops and the Russkis, and maybe after dark, I could find a way to get us to Harlem, but not now.

  “Are they still behind us?” said Max as we got close to the tunnel.

  “Stay down,” I said, ran out of the car, and picked up the newspaper. By time we got to Jersey, and I had turned off the main road, I had lost them. Near a building site where the countryside was being dug up to make new roads, I found a ramshackle gas station attached to a crummy-looking motel. I handed over six bucks for a room, told Max to go clean himself up, locked him in the room—I knew he could get out if he wanted to but where the hell would he go?—filled up the car, went next door to a diner. I ordered sandwiches and coffee, and looked at the papers.

  SOVIET CHALLENGES U.S. RIGHT TO BLOCKADE; INTERCEPTION OF 25 RUSSIAN SHIPS ORDERED; CUBA QUARANTINE BACKED BY UNITED O.A.S.

  It would begin at 10 a.m. Surface-to-surface missiles, bombers, bombs, air-to-surface rockets, guided missiles, all these had been authorized by the Defense Secretary. JFK had pictures of Soviet ships heading for Cuba with Ilyushin-28 bombers in crates. It was coming.

  On the counter was a small black and white TV. A few customers watched and ate breakfast. The line JFK had marked was five hundred miles off Cuba. American ships were to turn back any Soviet vessel suspected of carrying missiles to Cuba. Somebody leaked it to reporters that there was a Soviet submarine in the area.

  We were dead. The politicians would screw up, or those gung-ho generals would take charge, or there would be an accident. A meeting had been called at the United Nations for the next day, but it would be a joke, a lot of diplomatic fussing, while the bombers were already in the air.

  For a while I watched, staring at the screen where there were blurry photographs of the missile sites and maps depicting the position of the ships—ours, the Russians— out in the Atlantic. I drank some coffee.

  A shot
fired across the bow of one of their ships goes unanswered, maybe we board, maybe one of their sailors, a young kid, misreads all the signals or, encountering Americans, waves his pistol around. He doesn’t speak English. Worse, he thinks he knows some words and gets it wrong. His hand shakes. He’s shitting himself from fear. He fires too soon.

  Or it would be us. How many naval guys spoke Russian? How many wanted to take a potshot at the Reds? There were a million possibilities, and I had seen it all in Korea where mistakes had meant a hundred dead boys lying in the mud. This time it would be everyone, all of us, dead.

  Who said that it only took one sailor or a civilian translator, or a low-level spy, to start it, to push the trigger?

  Finally, incredibly, we were on the brink of a nuclear war, the thing we had all dreaded for most of our lives, that drove everything in my life from the time I finished high school and the Cold War began. Everything. The way my ma and pa looked at the world, their hatred for the Reds, the certainty if you didn’t live a decent family life, you were playing into the hands of the Communists, me going to Korea, my interest in the whole Commie thing.

  Before the Cold War, nobody had ever threatened the American mainland, unless you counted some crazy old Brits in red coats once upon a time. This was what we had been taught by Mr Roth, the history teacher—and the only Jew—at the parochial school I had attended, and the single teacher who had ever taught anything true about current affairs. “Red coats, Reds,” he used to say. “Maybe we have to watch out for this color, boys, what do you think about that? Anyone here want to venture a thought on the meaning of this? Could it be that by now red has become the color of fear? Why would that be?”