“I just had to make sure you weren’t one of Weaver’s contacts before I approached you.”
“Contacts? What does that mean?”
“I know you told Mr. Weaver you don’t want to see him. We—the FBI—would like you to change your mind.”
“Wait. I’m confused.”
The waitress brings her hot water at last.
“Almost forgot, darlin’,” she says, yanking a tea bag out of her pocket, tearing off the wrapper, and plopping the tea into her cup before shuffling off.
“We want you to call that number he gave you. To start seeing him again.”
“Why?”
“Because he wants you back in his life. And we need to know what he’s up to. Do you recall the number he gave you?”
“Hyde Park 3-5806.”
“He said you’d remember.” He looks at her admiringly.
“What does the FBI want with Weaver anyway?”
“We think he’s involved with some ugly stuff. You’ve already seen how terrible I am at tailing people. Help me out here and I’ll tell you more.” He flashes her a crooked grin. So he can smile. He’s especially attractive when his face lights, even if it’s only a flicker, then gone. “You were close once,” he offers.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid.”
He nods knowingly. “I know it ended badly.”
She pretends to worry more out of the tea bag, dipping it in and out of the water. Ended badly? Weaver separated her from all that mattered in her life.
“What is it you think he’s done?”
“And may yet do,” he says.
“Something so bad you’d go to all this trouble?”
He nods, his eyes saying she doesn’t know the half of it.
“Couldn’t you just arrest him or hang him by his toes or whatever it is you people do?”
“We don’t want to arrest Weaver yet. We want him to reveal his contacts, then catch him in the act.”
“In the act of what?”
She looks up to see Szydlo blinking at her, weighing her trustworthiness.
“Do you still have an allegiance to him?”
“I hate the man.”
“Then maybe we could persuade you to help us out?”
“What is it you think he’s done? I deserve to know.”
His eyes catch hers and he looks at her for quite a while without a word.
“Catch him in the act of what?” she asks again.
“This isn’t a petty crime.”
“What isn’t?”
“Treason.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Ten thirty P.M. and the FBI halls are silent. Even the Polish cleaning ladies—who regularly offer up novenas that Charlie will marry one of their daughters—have stashed away their vacuum cleaners and headed home. The newly installed air conditioner has clicked off, and without its circulation, Charlie can smell the perfume of the last telephone operator. He yanks off the apparatus, walks over to the bank of windows, and shoves them open, one after another. Enjoying the damp breeze on his face, he takes in the dazzle of city lights, extends his hand beyond the sill to catch the needles of rain. The radio this morning warned that the temperature would drop tonight. It’s already colder.
He’s sat through phone surveillance more times than he can count, usually helped along by a good book, daydreams. Tonight, Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees hasn’t done the trick. The Tribune crossword puzzle went too fast. And all that’s left of the pork sandwich from Keeley’s are a few crusts smashed inside a ball of white paper. He’s growing irritated and jittery. Why hasn’t Miss Porter called Weaver? As they’d parted, he’d said, “Call him tonight, Miss Porter. Do it for your country.” She even smiled when he said that. Women. Jesus Christ. He doesn’t know how to make them do a damn thing.
After he returned from Mitsushima, when Linda—whom he’d counted on to be waiting—tore him in two, he joined the FBI to avoid women. Like the army, the FBI was a male bastion of facts and information. And a chance to do some good in a world that felt overwhelmingly evil. After the war, they took injured men if they could prove themselves at Quantico. That, too, was part of the appeal. To be better than the others, outperform expectations. Being athletic, naturally diligent, detail oriented, he’s good at what he does, and here, he barely has to confront a woman except for an occasional secretary.
They assigned him at first to Peoria. He didn’t know a job could be so boring. But he was still recovering from his years at Mitsushima, and the anonymity of Peoria suited him. No one knew him well enough to ask why he looked so gaunt, so exhausted. In Chicago, he’d blocked the pain from the war by staying busy: first by finishing law school in record time, then by training for the FBI. The sleepy silence of Peoria, however, invited pain. Those weeks of boredom gave him time to sweat his war experience out of every pore, to mourn a life of trust and innocence.
When he got the call that he was being transferred back to Chicago, he was surprised and relieved. He returned to the basement apartment at his sister Peggy’s house—the one he lived in during law school—and still, somehow, hasn’t left.
The transfer to Chicago came for one reason: because he spoke Polish. Most agents never return to their home offices. There’s something almost cruel about the way the Bureau assigns people to places they’d rather not go. But in Chicago, there are Polish gangsters to nab, Polish citizens who need protection, and they told Charlie his ability to translate would be invaluable. Then, after a mere two weeks of chasing Jimmy “Bananas” Banasiak, he was transferred to the newly beefed-up espionage squad, where he’s never once used his Polish. Now his only job is to catch Russian spies.
The FBI is at the forefront of the new Cold War, and Charlie’s on the front lines. For the last six months, Wisconsin Senator McCarthy has been proclaiming that even the State Department itself is infested with spies. The average citizen has started to expect Soviet spies to pop out of storm drains. Half the country’s beginning to glance sideways at the other parents at PTA meetings, questioning old friends’ loose talk over cocktails. There’s no one who hates Communists more than FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, but office rumor has it that even he is annoyed with the senator. “Lies and overstatements undermine the whole Bureau,” he’s said. It’s true: The new Red Scare is leading to a lot of dead ends.
But what Charlie’s working on—routing out the people who shared bomb-building information with the Russians—well, that is both real and urgent. When the Russians tested their version of the A-bomb last year—so much sooner than anyone expected—it shook the world. And now they’ve caught Klaus Fuchs, a German-born scientist who worked at Los Alamos. He’s been spilling what he knows, although the Russians made sure he was never told the names of other scientists who aided them. Fuchs reported, most alarmingly, that he heard another scientist has promised to pass information on the still hypothetical hydrogen bomb.
Charlie focused on Weaver for a number of reasons (timing, access, proof of early Communist sympathies), and last month, he felt certain enough to approach Binder with his plan to recruit Miss Porter. He planned to appoint someone else to tail and sweet-talk the lady scientist, someone like Dick Hazelmill. Dick always has a woman on his arm, albeit a flashy one who can’t put two sentences together. Binder scoffed and blew an enormous cloud of smoke right into Charlie’s eyes.
“A physicist? She’s too sharp for Hazelmill. You’re the brainy, sensitive type, Szydlo. A smart woman’s more likely to warm up to you.”
“I hardly think that’s me, sir. Besides, I’m too tall to tail anyone.”
“You’re the one. Get on it.” Before the war, his sister used to say girls were drawn to him like moths to a porch light. He played center on his high school basketball team, graduated top of his class, received a scholarship to Champaign. At the age of thirty-one, Charli
e thinks he’s the last one who should be assigned to handle a woman. He’s come to believe women exist to disappoint men. Besides, what girl would want a guy with a mutilated hand who glances away whenever a woman’s eyes meet his with interest?
Tonight, Rosalind Porter is living up to her sex’s penchant to disillusion. Calm down, he tells himself. It’s just a setback. So what if she hasn’t called Weaver yet? He’s angry at himself for feeling so disheartened.
After what he went through in the war, he should know better. He’s alive. He’s not in pain. He has a raincoat to pull on, shoes that aren’t torn and wrapped in burlap. For too long he didn’t have either. He’s eaten a good dinner—that sandwich from Keeley’s was delicious. In captivity, he ate nothing but tainted rice, an occasional morsel of fish old enough to stink. With so little in his belly, suffering from beriberi, after hours on a raised wood slab with only a rice-husk mat beneath him, he wasn’t sure that he’d wake any given morning.
* * *
—
He’ll never be warm again, doubts he’ll live until spring. It’s so cold, the flesh beneath his fingernails aches. His toes are blue. His skin, a dead lavender. Huddled beneath the blanket, knees to chest, one foot folded beneath the other. Damn blanket’s thin as a cobweb. As cold as he is, his muscles burn. All day he hoisted fifty-kilo sacks of cement from a freight train to a warehouse. The prisoners are building a dam for Nagoya. When he drops the sacks on the pile, the cement bags expel ghostly clouds of lung-irritating dust. He coughs them out now, moves closer to Harris. All the men share their pallets. It’s the only way to stay alive. They don’t care if their bed partners smell rank. If the bones of their bedmates press through their skin. Heat. Humanity. He coughs again.
“Can it, Szydlo,” Harris says. “I need my sleep.”
“Sorry.”
“I tell ya, when I get home, I’m going to sleep under that fat quilt my granny made in my own damn soft bed without you, pal.”
“Likewise.”
“And I’m going to turn up the radiators until everyone in the house wakes sweating and swearing. I don’t care what my ma says about the bill.”
“Yeah. Oh yeah.”
Charlie thinks of his own soft bed in his room at home, the pillowcases his mother embroidered with bluebirds, the crisp, ironed sheets, the warm eiderdown. What’s the likelihood he’ll ever see any of it again? Or his parents?
A few hours later, he wakes. Thin, blue mountain light is scratching through the small, high window. The guard they hate the most, whom they call Gargle for all his throat clearing, has opened the door. He’ll beat any man who doesn’t jump from his bed. Charlie’s shivering more than usual. Has the temperature dropped precipitously? Is he sick? He shoves Harris’s shoulder. “Bud, get up. Gargle’s here. Move it.”
Nothing.
Raising his head, he glances over. Harris lies there looking more comfortable than he has in months.
“Harris?”
The knowledge creeps up Charlie’s spine: He touches his bunkmate’s hand. It’s stone-cold.
Later, two other inmates carry the body away, no one supporting Harris’s head, so it flops from his neck like a fish on a line. Charlie wants to call out, Take me too! He’s sobered to realize that the idea of death gives him more hope than living.
* * *
Startled out of his thoughts when the light on the switchboard begins to flash—Miss Porter’s getting a call—Charlie grabs the headset and yanks it on. He shivers. The memory has left him with the same old question: Why has he lived when so many others died?
“Hello,” Rosalind answers. She sounds distracted, tired.
“Hello, Roz.”
That plummy British newsreel enunciation could only be Weaver. “It’s late. I’m sorry. I didn’t wake you, love, did I?”
“I was just . . . just getting ready for bed.”
“I know I’ve been a bore, calling too often,” Weaver says. “But I need to see you. If you’ll give me a single chance. That’s all I’m asking.”
“No.”
“But you don’t know what’s at stake for me.” Weaver sounds choked up.
“All right. What’s at stake for you, Weaver? Tell me.”
“My life’s been broken since I left you.”
“And mine hasn’t?”
“Listen. I know you’re angry. You have every right. But hear me out. See me one time. Let me tell you what really happened.”
Silence. Then: “Why should I trust you?”
“Because I have things to say that might change your mind. If you only knew the truth . . . you’d understand.” And then, lowering his voice into a covert whisper, he says, “I can’t say any of this over the phone.” Charlie sits forward. Does Weaver suspect the line is tapped?
“It’s late,” Miss Porter says. “I’m going to bed.”
Oh Christ! Say yes to him!
“Tomorrow night. I’m begging you.”
Miss Porter takes a breath loud enough for Charlie to hear. Maybe she’s too tired to resist. Maybe Weaver’s worn her down. Maybe she’s doing it because she believed Charlie when he told her that the world’s safety rests on her shoulders. For whatever reason, she says, “Fine, Weaver. Forget dinner, though. Forget wooing me. If you want to see me, come at eight P.M. tomorrow. Don’t stay more than an hour. And don’t expect me to feed you.”
“Thank God and thank you,” Weaver says. “Sleep well, Duchess.”
She hangs up without a good-bye. Charlie yanks off the earphones and laughs out loud.
* * *
Rosalind sits in the dark in her living room. On the ceiling, the lights from Lake Shore Drive dance and spin. She needs to go to bed. She needs to forget the phone call. How will she fall asleep with Weaver’s voice in her head? Weaver once was her drug—one that gave her pleasure, then left her desperate. Well, she’s clean now. With Weaver still living in Hyde Park, and Rosalind no longer traveling to the South Side for work, she’s managed not to run into him a single time. The last thing she wants is to be drawn back into her addiction. When she sees him, she’ll say to his face, Stop calling. Give it up. It’s over. I’ll never let you back into my life.
If Special Agent Szydlo was listening, how smug he must feel that she said yes. He even briefly suggested that seeing Weaver again gave her a shot at revenge. She’s never seen herself as a vengeful person. But she is curious. Could Weaver truly be the brute who’s put their entire world on edge?
As much as she once loved Thomas Weaver, there was always a wall of mystery around him. A silence, a darkness, the suggestion of secrets. Why has he been calling out of the blue? Why must he see her suddenly? What if, for just one night, she could tear down that wall, expose his secrets, and then, joyfully, set them aflame?
* * *
When Charlie gets off the L at Damen, the streets have puddled; the wind is merciless. Thank God he brought a raincoat this morning. In the first two blocks, he passes two drunks, a fellow in a waiter’s uniform, and a shivering young prostitute in a flimsy yellow dress. She asks, “Hej, chcesz się zabawić?” wondering if he’s looking for fun.
“Przepraszam, nie,” he says.
She’s clearly hungry and cold. There’s nothing about her that looks fun. There are so many Displaced Persons from the war now, souls battered by change and loss. Since the Jerries invaded, they say more Poles live in Chicago than any city outside of Warsaw. He’s ready to hand her the five-dollar bill in his wallet. But before he reaches her, a car sidles up and she gets in. He can’t help aching for her young life.
Walking down the side streets, all he hears are his own footsteps and the howl of an alley cat. Polish people go to bed early, get up early, work hard. His sister’s house is an 1893 worker’s cottage with a peaked roof, small and modest. Its location in Wicker Park is its asset. Her husband, Mack, often bends an elbow at the corner ba
r, Szczęście. The kids go to Burr School. Peggy can walk to St. Mary of the Angels near where their parents once lived in twenty minutes. She doesn’t miss a morning. She used to say, “Come with me, Charlie. You know. Say a few prayers.” But as one of the guys struggling to survive with him in Mitsushima used to say, “God and me ain’t pals no more.”
The house looks dark now; they must have all gone to bed. Charlie’s apartment is Peggy’s converted cellar, with its own door to the outside. Stone outer walls. A curtain separates his bed from the so-called living room. A makeshift john raised up a step and a shower with a drain in the floor. No kitchen. If he got home in time, he’d eat upstairs with Peggy and her family. He can’t remember the last time that happened. The first of every month, he stuffs twenty dollars into the jar on her kitchen counter, his share of the cost of food he never eats.
After changing into chinos and a sweatshirt, he climbs the steps to the kitchen hoping to grab a Hamm’s from Peg’s icebox. He always feels exhausted these days but still finds it hard to sleep. Sometimes beer helps. Sometimes nothing helps.
He’s startled to find Peggy sitting at the kitchen table.
“Oh, sorry,” he says. “Didn’t know you were up.”
“It’s your kitchen too.” She points to a bowl of fruit. “Want a peach?” She’s already bitten into one and is wiping the juice from her chin. He notes her golden brown hair is yanked tightly around prickly, netted curlers. Why do girls do painful things like sleep on rollers? Peggy’s hair is always perfect. Her clothes are immaculately ironed, her shoes polished.
“What I really need is a beer.”
“I wish you’d eat something.”
“What’d you make for dinner?”
“Stuffed cabbage. It was good.”
Atomic Love Page 3
