A Woman of Intelligence

by Karin Tanabe

  “But I didn’t. What I wanted was her. For our friendship to continue like it was.”

  Ava raised her eyebrows.

  “Except for the sex with all the wrong men,” I said quietly. “I understood that that had to end. For me, anyway.”

  “Because now you’re having sex with all the right men?” she asked, grinning. “Or at least one of them. The one who is not your husband.”

  “I plead the Fifth,” I said, putting my face in my hands.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s a woman’s right to do what she wants with her mind and her body. Even the UN says so.”

  I understood why a woman like Ava was attracted to the Communist Party. Maybe she believed in certain tenets, like the importance of a society that was motivated by factors other than sex and money. But for a woman as smart and dynamic as Ava, I suspected it was mostly that the Russians let her play the game. There were no female special agents in the FBI, but there were certainly women in the KGB. Maybe they had to go to bed a bit to do it, but at least the door was open. In America, that door was bolted shut.

  Perhaps the world’s women were all just very sick of having doors bolted shut.

  “Come on,” said Ava, grabbing my arm and standing us up. “I don’t want you to run into that French beast, or to get too caught up in the might-have-beens. You’ve got a good life now, and a purpose, too. Peace is lovely and it’s nice to spend your days rowing in Eden, but what America needs is an uprising. That’s what we’re contributing to. For now, let’s row to a bar instead, shall we?”

  “Let’s row,” I said, smiling, letting her pull me back to blue skies, to the present day, to a new New York.

  CHAPTER 28

  “Turner, I need to see you in person,” I said. I wanted to tell him all about Ava, about our two hours together, but I focused first on what the FBI had been waiting for. “Jacob asked me to go to Washington. For him. He finally asked.”

  “When can you meet?”

  I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock in the morning, and I was standing in the phone booth at Sixty-third and Madison. “Sometime in the next two hours.”

  Peter had woken up a half hour earlier. I’d gotten him back to sleep and hoped he’d now make it until the morning. Tom had seemed so exhausted from a four-hour surgery that I imagined he would, too. Gerrit never woke at night anymore, needing his energy to continue terrorizing upper Manhattan during daylight hours.

  “Where are you now?”

  “Near my apartment.”

  “I’m home, as you know, but I have to be downtown in a few hours anyway. Long story. Shall we meet at—”

  “City Hall?” I said instinctually.

  “Good. Meet me outside the Municipal Building. Leave now. You’ll beat me there, but I’m right behind you.”

  I reached the building in twenty minutes. I got out of the taxi and walked with my head down to one of the limestone arches. Just the sound of my heels on the ground made my heart twist with nostalgia.

  I stopped and listened for footsteps belonging to Ruby and Patricia, for the swish of our skirts. But Patricia had moved to Seattle and had four children. We only kept up with each other through Christmas cards and the occasional postcard. “Rina, I’ve been meaning to write, but Teddy accidentally broke my nose with his very firm skull. Can you imagine it! But who can blame the darling. In short, four children is a circus, but I wouldn’t trade it for a thing!” her last letter had said. She sounded nothing like the girl who’d screamed out bad poetry in Washington Square Park or mixed us drinks with 94 proof whiskey in our apartment while the heater rattled. “Enough of these, and that thing will sound as pleasant as a steel drum,” she’d say, grinning.

  Ruby had fought marital handcuffs longer, moving to Washington, D.C., to work for Margaret Chase Smith when she was elected to the Senate in 1948. But by the time Smith gave her famous anti-McCarthy speech in 1950, Ruby was already gone, busy having babies in Smith’s native Maine. She didn’t even bother to send Christmas cards anymore.

  A few minutes later, I saw a man in the shadows of one of the arches. There was no one else around. I heard him open a door. Without hesitating, I went toward it and stepped inside. It was Turner. He flicked open his lighter, which provided more atmosphere than illumination.

  “Be careful,” he said quietly.

  We walked down two flights of dark, dank stairs. Then he opened another door and I saw a familiar sign. We were in the City Hall subway station. It had been closed since the mid-forties, but it looked the same as it had when I exited there for work, with chandeliers and skylights, which let in sunshine during the day.

  “Are you all right?” said Turner, coming close to me.

  “Yes, I mean, I think so,” I said, my body responding to his presence. “I think what I am is happy.”

  “Good, then tell me everything.”

  I could not tell Turner everything that was running through my mind, but I could tell him about Jacob.

  “I spent three hours at Jacob’s apartment,” I said.

  In the faint light, I saw him smile. “I wish I could say ‘Give me the three-hour version,’ but it will have to be the fifteen-minute version.”

  “He told me some things you all know. His work at United States Shipping Incorporated, which is indeed a KGB front. He reports directly to the KGB in Moscow. He is the main point of contact for Ava and their Washington source. Or sources. He arranges the meetings and then gets the papers to Moscow. But he told me some things you maybe don’t know.”

  Turner raised his eyebrows. “Like…”

  “Like he used to be Ava Newman’s lover.”

  “How convenient. And his apartment still looks like a fire hazard? Wall-to-wall books, and a well-stocked bar?”

  “No, it was nearly empty.”

  He flicked his lighter open and closed and glanced at me. “The papers from Washington. They go to Moscow. You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Via the consulate.”

  “Names?”

  “None yet.”

  “He didn’t say Nick Solomon?”

  “No. Why?”

  “That’s who Ava Newman meets in Washington. He’s the only man we know about. He works at Treasury. But it seems like he can’t possibly be the biggest fish. She wouldn’t be making all those trips just for someone from Treasury.”

  “Hopefully I’ll be able to tell you about that soon. Jacob asked me to go back and forth to Washington in Ava’s place.”

  “Because she’s going to Moscow?”

  “Yes, by July. Ask me why she’s going to Moscow?”

  “Why?”

  “Because the FBI is tailing her, and he’s worried about her. Very worried. Especially since she’s American. He’s convinced she’ll be safer there.”

  Turner’s expression turned thoughtful. “But Max isn’t. He’s convinced she’ll be safer in Cuba.”

  “I don’t think she’s considering Cuba.”

  “What? Why the hell not?” said Turner angrily.

  “I don’t know,” I said, lowering my voice. “I don’t think she told Jacob about it, but she did tell him something else.”

  Turner looked at me.

  “That the CRC has a man in the FBI. The janitor. I told Ava. Now Jacob asked me how he can have access to him.”

  “Of course he did,” Turner said, smiling again. “I should have seen that coming.”

  “What will you do about it?”

  “We can leak something small. Something that will prove it’s true, but that’s not very damaging.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, Ava will be gone by July.”

  “By July. Jacob says he plans to follow her, when his health is better.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Considering he could barely rise to greet me, it won’t be July.”

  “And when are you going to Washington?”

  “Friday.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just t
hat he knows Ava’s being tailed by the FBI, and he knows he’s being tailed by the FBI.”

  “Well, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “He’s right,” he said, smiling. “But he doesn’t know that I’m also on his tail.”

  “No, he does not.” I looked up at the chandelier and reached my hand up. “How did you know to come down here?”

  “Sometimes this job requires you to hide with the rats.”

  “I did not feel like a rat when I worked at City Hall,” I said. “I felt like a grown woman doing important things. I loved that feeling.”

  “That was the best thing about being in the military, too,” he said. “I always felt like I was doing important things. Sometimes it was scary as hell, but it mattered, so you got over it.” He lowered his head and looked at me.

  “What you do now matters,” I said.

  “It does, but it’s more complicated.”

  “Than the military?”

  “Definitely. I never questioned what I was doing with the military. But now … The thing is, Rina, I like these men in the CRC. Paul Robeson is incredible. Talented and kind. His politics may be in the wrong place, but his heart is not. Same goes for Dashiell Hammett. He’s a good man. Some of these people in the CRC, most of them, have made one wrong decision and ninety-nine right ones. Does that make them good or bad?”

  “Depends what the bad decision was.”

  “Joining the Communist Party USA, joining CRC leadership, or giving the CRC money to defend, among others, communists.”

  “Then it’s bad.”

  He flicked the lighter open and closed again. “After all these years, I can say with conviction that it’s more stupid than bad.”

  “But you’re still reporting on them. You’re spying on them.”

  “I am, because I know they are doomed with or without me, and I’m searching for the light through the trees.” I smiled, remembering Jacob using the same phrase. “Or in Manhattan, let’s call it the streetlight through the alleys. I wake up and look out at this wonderful city and I want to move it ahead. Plenty of people where I live are going nowhere fast. These little boys—and girls,” he said glancing at me. “What does the future hold for Negro children? Dead-end jobs. Jobs, not careers. Never careers. Even with the Brown versus Board decision, that’s not going to change the jobs these kids get. They’re not all going to head to Harvard and Vassar in their letter sweaters after graduating from integrated schools. How many Negro girls were at Vassar with you?”

  “Zero.”

  “Columbia?”

  “A handful. A small handful. I remember three.”

  “Don’t you want Negro girls to go to those schools, to aspire to something other than watching your children so that you can go to work?”

  Both of us were well aware that Jilly was doing exactly that for me.

  I nodded and we stayed quiet for a minute.

  Finally, I smiled and said, “Shall I join the CRC, then?”

  “I can say unequivocally,” he said, grinning, “that we’d love to have you.” He flicked his lighter closed. “All this aside, I do believe communism is dangerous. It’s just another form of false hope. Of brainwashing. Of striking down independent thought. You can bet I sang that out when I met Hoover, and I meant it. And that conviction keeps me from letting lines in the Negro newspapers like ‘If a Negro doesn’t like communism, he should keep his mouth shut and not be a stooge for the FBI,’ really get to me. I know that what I’m doing is opening doors. And that the Negroes who did it before me, those seven other men, helped me get this far. I know that quiet fights, the kind where you have to say a lot of ‘yes, sir,’ and take on a diminished role because of the color of your skin, are still good fights. Worthy fights. Besides, selfishly, I like this job. It’s exciting, challenging.” He paused. “And sometimes the company I keep is pretty good, too.”

  “Lee Coldwell and his two-tone voice?”

  “No, I was thinking more of you.”

  Turner flicked the lighter open again and held it out to me.

  I rested a finger on it. If I moved it one centimeter I could have gripped his hand. I closed my eyes, willing the moment to last. When I opened them, his half smile had been replaced by a very different expression. In that brief moment, something shifted.

  I didn’t move. Neither did he. We just stood there, two people brought together by outside forces who had surely been unaware of what could ignite. I looked up from his hand to his face, to the eyes I’d wanted on me since I’d first seen them in Coldwell’s rearview mirror. Finally, I let go and he flicked the lighter shut.

  “Good for you, Rina,” he said softly.

  I turned away and went home to my boys.

  CHAPTER 29

  “I’m Hanna Graf.”

  I was standing behind the Lincoln Memorial, on marble stairs that descended to the Potomac River.

  I hadn’t been to Washington in years. I’d traveled there a few times as a child with my parents, usually because my father wanted to see an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. An expert in the Pre-Raphaelites, he would spend hours rhapsodizing about their hair: Flaming June, The Lady of Shalott, the red tresses of La Ghirlandata.

  On my last trip to Washington with my father, I finally saw Ophelia, John Everett Millais’s magnum opus. It was the end of the twenties, I was twelve years old, and I had long black hair that hung down to my waist. Straight as thread, thick as bread, my father used to say. But after seeing Ophelia moments before she drowned, I felt as if my hair was pulling me under. That night, I took my mother’s best sewing scissors and bobbed it, following a trend right before it went out of style.

  My parents were aghast. My brothers called it modern. “None of the girls have had long hair for a decade, Dad,” said Timo. My other brother, Anselm, agreed. “She looked as if she were about to leave in a wagon for the gold rush.” I hadn’t worn it long since.

  “Nick Solomon,” said the man who had just sat next to me.

  Jacob had described him as built like a bull, but with the stamina of a distance runner. He was a stocky, handsome man, with dark curls, a graying mustache, and an air of intelligence about him. Coldwell and Turner already knew Nick was a communist, supplying Jacob—and by extension, the KGB—with classified information from the Treasury Department and other agencies. What they wanted to know was who else was working with Nick to supply these documents, and what agencies they were in. How close to the White House or the Pentagon they were situated.

  In the bright sun, I squinted my eyes and said, “Glad to meet you.” Nick had a British accent, which Jacob had described, but I was expecting a hint, not full Eton. He was born in Russia, educated abroad by the British, and had become a naturalized American. Despite the jeans he was wearing, his look was certainly more Oxford than Leningrad State, even though he’d gotten his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford. On the phone I’d asked Coldwell how Russians were being hired at Treasury and he’d shrugged. “They saw an American with a Ph.D. from Stanford who worked at Agriculture, and they didn’t dig deeper.”

  Nick and I bantered about the weather, but he stopped short after I murmured some nonsense about a few crew boats gliding on the water.

  “Listen, I’m just going to get to what’s important, and I mean important,” he said quietly. “We’ve got a man, Ron Farmer, Jacob knows him well. He’s nervous. Dangerously nervous. During the war, he was outed as a communist. He almost had to resign until we were able to spin a case for his innocence. He’s convinced it’s going to happen again. Tell that to Jacob, okay? That’s the first thing you tell him.”

  “Okay,” I replied.

  “Let’s walk. There’s an overpass if we walk down these stairs. To the right.”

  We walked on the thin sidewalk under the stone bridge. There, in the shadows, he handed me a bag. “Documents. Negatives. Anything else?”

  “That’s all Jacob asked for,” I said quietly. “Though he did want to know if you w
ere going to start developing film again,” I said.

  “Developing film? Come on now, Hanna,” said Nick, walking out from under the bridge, to the sidewalk near the river. “Who the hell does Jacob think I am these days, Slim Aarons? I don’t have time to run a photography studio out of my house. What am I going to tell my fancy Georgetown neighbors when they pop over for a drink? Just ignore the clothesline with close-up shots of classified documents? Do you know how close I, all of us, have been to being found out lately? Just last week Ron had to shove aircraft production figures in his pants. Do you know what would happen to him if he was discovered with aircraft production figures glued to his ass?”

  “Nothing good.”

  “Yes, Hanna, that’s right. Like a life sentence, nothing good.”

  I nodded uncomfortably.

  “Hanna, have you ever hidden highly classified government documents in your pants? Do you know the risks we are taking? Do you get it?”

  “No,” I said evenly. “I have not.”

  “Sorry,” he said, leaning forward, putting his arms on the white stone. “I know you’re taking risks, too. I know you could get caught as well.”

  The biggest risk I was taking was with my husband, with my marriage, but the gamble was worth it. I had known that the moment I climbed into Lee Coldwell’s car.

  “I’m sorry I have to send it undeveloped,” Nick continued, walking again. “I have a man at Treasury with me that develops film for us when he can. But right now, it’s not possible. They can do it in New York. They prefer not to, but they can.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, very ready to run right back to Union Station. “They’d also like your party dues and an itemized list of what they might expect on each—”

  “You know what these Russians can do with their itemized list? They can take it and shove it up their—” He cut himself off and looked at me.

  “I know you’re new, but I don’t think you get it. Let me explain how things have escalated. They’re typing top secret documents in rainbow at Defense,” Nick whispered. “Three, four different colors. The text is pink. You can’t photograph any of it. That’s what our people are dealing with.”