by Matt Eaton
Not yet.
“So... the CIA is tailing me,” she said. “Which is illegal. The agency isn’t supposed to be working on US soil.”
Menzel smiled. “You’re dancing with the devil and it’s breaking the law that worries you? That’s rich, kid, even coming from you.”
TWENTY THREE
Tuesday August 11, 1953
Edna was getting to know Washington’s public transit system intimately. She spent almost three hours catching trains and buses back and forth across the city, stopping off for lunch along the way and taking long walks through parks, a church yard and on one occasion, slipping into a crowded schoolyard as children were piling out to meet their parents at the end of the school day. She slipped out a side gate and hailed a taxi that delivered her three blocks from her destination. She was confident nobody could still be on her tail.
Bartholdi Park was a tiny triangle of land that had been named after the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, designer of the Statue of Liberty. It had been added into the adjacent Botanic Gardens in 1932, but was not visited as often as the main gardens. But it was just a short walk from here across Independence Avenue and past the grand glass conservatory to the Capitol Reflecting Pool, reputed to be one of Washington’s more favored locations for clandestine meetings.
Edna was perhaps half an hour late for the meeting and had half expected the Russian to have given up on her. But Polina was still there, waiting calmly on a shaded bench in the south-east quarter of the fountain precinct, a place where nobody could eavesdrop without being spotted.
“I was almost ready to give up on you,” Polina said.
“I’ve been doing my best to ensure I could turn up alone.”
“You’re assuming Mr Menzel won’t give you up.”
“I didn’t tell Donald where or when I was meeting you. But I take it you have people following me too.”
“You, Menzel, Father Paulson. You are of great interest to the Russian government. You and your strange alien man hiding in the Vatican.”
They seemed to know everything about her and Verus. It was, frankly, quite terrifying.
Polina stretched out her left leg and grimaced. She rose slowly to her feet and walked in a short circle. “I have arthritis in my hip. I cannot sit on hard seats for too long.”
“What happened to you?”
“I was shot. In Berlin. Not a serious wound, or so I thought at the time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Is no matter,” said Polina, sitting down again. “But I wanted to tell you more about myself,” she said, perhaps sensing Edna’s concern about the imbalance in their acquaintanceship. “My name is Polina Ilyin. I was born in Moscow, but began my career in Berlin with the Russian occupying forces. In 1947, I returned to Moscow and spent three years as an executioner of dissidents. Two years ago, I was forced to put a bullet in the head of the man I loved. He was accused of committing an act of treason. I knew he was innocent. I shot him anyway. He begged me to do it, knowing if I tried to spare him someone else would pull the trigger and the next bullet would be for me.”
Edna’s mouth was hanging open. She swallowed hard as Polina continued her story.
“Having proved myself to be a loyal Soviet citizen, I was stationed at the Russian embassy in America. My father and mother are both officers of the Russian secret police, which you call the MVD. They are loyal and above reproach. They raised me to respect and obey authority above all else. But they also taught me to think for myself, and to know the difference between right and wrong. The Soviet history they teach in our schools is a lie. Everybody knows this. But my family was in a position to know the truths behind the lies. They know I did what I had to do to stay alive. But every day I feel shame and know my parents feel the same, though they would never admit this to my face.
“It is why I am here today, Edna Drake. We are alike. We value the truth more than the people for whom we work.”
“Are you telling me you want to defect?”
Polina let loose a hearty laugh. “No. This is not what I am telling you. I am offering hand of friendship. You have nobody you can talk to, correct?”
Edna shrugged. She wasn’t in much of a giving mood.
“You don’t need to trust me. Just understand that I know everything about you and your work. There is nothing you can tell me I don’t already know. For you, this is good thing. You can speak without fear of betraying your country. And because you have no particular interest or skill in turning me into an American asset, I too can speak freely. It is a unique situation we find ourselves in.”
“For what purpose?” Edna asked her. “Why would we do this?”
“Because secrecy serves no-one,” said Polina. “I know you believe this. I am risking my career, perhaps also my life, by talking to you. But I know this risk is worth taking.”
Edna saw pain and fear in the woman’s eyes, but also strength. “Maybe you could start by telling me about your time in Berlin,” she suggested.
As Polina gave more and more of herself, tears now rolling down her cheeks, Edna wondered dimly if she might actually be the greatest Russian actress never to take the stage. Yet as Polina talked she also knew they shared an experience of war, atrocity and loss that would inevitably draw them closer together. Edna couldn’t help liking her. She wanted to believe Polina’s story was genuine. She couldn’t bring herself to imagine this open-hearted woman could be so brutally cruel as to tell these stories if they were not substantially true.
Yet Rome had made her wary. There was a still part of her that reserved judgment.
TWENTY FOUR
Wednesday August 12, 1953
At a dirty lowdown little dive called Tony’s on the edge of Chinatown, the smell of stale beer and quiet desperation permeated the carpet around the bar where Edna parked herself to sip on a martini, the bartender’s specialty. It wasn’t terrible either. Two seats away, a government worker in a cheap plaid suit was strip-mining the bar-top nut bowl for sustenance, having already been stripped of his weekly earnings by the hooker who gave him the blowjob of his life in the alley outside then picked his pocket for good measure. He’d been complaining loudly about it for 10 minutes and was showing no signs of letting up. The half dozen patrons with nowhere better to be had lost interest nine minutes ago. Edna didn’t mind so much — his complaints offered her some cover.
The phone rang behind the bar and, upon prior arrangement, the barman lifted it onto the counter, answered it to confirm the caller, then handed her the receiver.
“How much for the night?” Menzel asked her. He was trying to be funny, but it just came off as sleazy.
“I’m gonna pretend you didn’t say that.”
“Okay, fine. Sorry. How’s your Russian doll?”
“Talkative. She wants to be friends.”
“She’s fishing,” he said.
“I like her.”
“That’s great Edna, you being such a fine judge of character.”
“I’ve been sitting in a seedy bar and fending off indecent proposals to wait for your call. Why do I feel like there’s a bar stool here with your name on it, old man?”
“I take it your friend knows Sister Josephine?”
“Yes. And also claims to know everything about us.”
“Yes, well, I’m afraid that’s probably true.”
“They’re watching my hotel. You told me they were in disarray. I might not have done everything to your satisfaction, but that Roman holiday of ours was never going to work and you only have yourself to blame.”
She waited for Menzel’s response as the barman finally escorted the broke barfly out to the street.
“You are totally compromised, Edna. I’m sorry it’s come to this.”
It was as close as he would come to an admission of fault. “What do we do?”
“Damned if I know. But you need to step away. Right away.”
“What does that mean? You can’t fire me, you know that
, right?”
He snorted. “I can do whatever I goddamn want, young woman. Your ongoing freedom is entirely at my discretion.”
Menzel wasn’t admitting to a damn thing.
TWENTY FIVE
Friday August 14, 1953
Clarence had offered to go with her to New York. It was sweet of him, but there would be no way of explaining their relationship to her mother. Edna wasn’t even sure she could explain it to herself, apart from acknowledging he was yet another impossibility in her life.
She hopped off the bus to hear the all-too-familiar crash and grind of the Rockaways Playland rollercoaster on the other side of the road. It was the best welcome home she could have asked for. How many times had she stood here — beach and boardwalk on one side, Playland on the other. Now it was almost like she was seeing it for the first time. The sea air was both fond and familiar, and it was like all the years of absence simply melted away.
Alice Drake was waiting for her on the stoop of the bungalow that had been the only home Edna had ever known. Both were a welcome sight. She hugged her ma with a force that left the poor woman quite taken aback. “Goodness darling, how strong you are.”
“Great to see you mum. Ooh, something smells good!” The aroma of roast beef filled the living room, where she threw herself down on the couch with adolescent abandon.
“Dinner is in half an hour,” Alice said. “I’m out tonight, but your father will keep you company.”
“Where are you going?”
“Friday is canasta night. A group of us take turns at hosting. It’s my turn next Friday, if you’re here that long.”
Unlikely. “I’m not sure yet ma, we’ll see.”
There was the same awkwardness between them, but it had been there between them for so long that neither thought twice about it. A product of their views on life and death being so wildly divergent, together with the fact that Edna had always been daddy’s girl. Her mother had long since come to terms with this, along with what she once disdainfully regarded as her husband’s lack of ambition. Alice knew Edna would instinctively take her father’s side in every argument. Edna knew her ma loved her to the best of her ability and it was this she craved now, more than ever. But it broke her heart to think she couldn’t tell her family about the tumultuous events of recent months.
“You’re looking thin, dear.” This, in her mother’s eyes, was not a good thing.
“The senator keeps me on the hop,” said Edna. “But I’ve been learning a lot and making new friends.”
Mostly Russian, of late.
“Plenty of eligible bachelors on Capitol Hill,” her mother said.
Edna laughed and gave her mum another hug. “I think I’d rather marry a carny like you than a politician.”
Alice slapped her daughter’s arm. “Don’t call your father that. He’s a mechanical engineer.”
“Which is a fancy term for grease monkey,” Paddy Drake yelled, throwing his arms open to greet his girl.
“Dad!”
The familiar scent of engine oil filled her with joy. It was the smell of her father’s pride and joy — the Atom Smasher, the greatest rollercoaster ever built and still the best thrill twenty-five cents could buy. Paddy Drake designed the coaster himself and kept it rolling with the precision of a master craftsman.
At the end of a delicious but somewhat hurried evening meal, they lost Alice to the call of the cards. Paddy and Edna cleaned the kitchen and took a stroll along the boardwalk as the setting sun turned from lilac to purple and the last of the day’s beachgoers made their way off the sand to think about the night ahead.
Paddy could barely walk 10 feet without someone yelling his name or giving him a friendly tap on the shoulder. He knew everyone by name. “This is the part your mother never understood,” he told her. “It’s what I love, being out here in the world with everything and everyone familiar to me. She thinks it’s boring to see the same faces all the time. I couldn’t live without it.”
Edna threw her arm across his shoulders. “But you’re still together. You’ve found peace with one another.”
“They say familiarity breeds contempt. But if you wait around long enough, you slide right on into comfort and at our age that ain’t bad,” he said.
“But here’s something mum would never tell you: There’s no way you two would still be together if you’d done what she wanted and gone into banking or real estate. If you’d done that, contempt would have turned to loathing. Honestly pa, I don’t know how anybody stays together as long as you two. It’s a genuine mystery to me.”
The lights flickered on along the boardwalk like a chain of Christmas lights that stretched to infinity. Paddy Drake laughed. “I never get sick of seeing that.” He sighed, throwing his daughter a furtive look. “You telling me there’s no-one special in your life?”
“Special? Too soon to say. But I know ma won’t approve.”
“Is he poor? No prospects?”
“Worse. He’s a priest.”
Her father laughed in surprise. “Holy cow, Edna. You kiddin’ me? What kinda priest?”
“The Catholic kind,” she said. “But he’s not active. He’s sort of retired.”
“Retired? How old is this guy?”
“Early 40s. I think.”
“Is it serious?”
“Don’t think I know what that feels like,” she said, catching herself by surprise as tears began to roll down her cheeks.
Paddy pulled her close and gave her a hug. “What’s goin’ on kid? Something’s not right. Is he treating you bad, this priest? So help me, I’ll come down there and wrap his rosary round his throat.”
“Nothing like that. I’ve got a lot going on. Senator Ives keeps me on the hop and politics is a minefield. I’m making a lot of mistakes.”
“Is that right,” he said quietly.
She’d heard that tone before. “What dad? What is it?”
“I tried to call you the other day.”
“When?”
“Got through to the senator’s office. The nice young gal who answered the phone said you weren’t there. I asked when you’d be back. She said she didn’t know. I told her I was your dad and that it’d been a while since we’d spoken and I’d been trying to find you. I might have laid it on a bit thick, but I could tell she was holding back on me. Finally, she said, ‘I’m not supposed to do this, but give this other phone number a try.’ She wouldn’t tell me nothin’ more than that.
“So, I call the number, cos now I’m fascinated and a little bit scared. I had a feeling something strange was goin’ on. When I call this other number, a guy answers. I can hear office noises in the background, but all he says is ‘hello’. No business name, no nothin’. I give my name and say I want to speak to my daughter, Edna. And I can tell right away he knows your name. But he says nothin’ to me. He just hangs up the phone. When I try to call back, no answer.”
She wanted so much to open up to him. Could she take the risk? He’d keep her secret if she made him swear to it. But it was too much to ask, especially when so much was already coming apart at the seams. Except now the floodgates were open. The tears began slow at first, then came in torrents. She ran down the nearest stairs and onto the beach, not wanting anyone to hear and paranoid the CIA were still following her.
Paddy followed her to the water’s edge. “Tell me honey. What is it?”
“I can’t, dad. I’m not allowed.”
His mouth fell open in shock. But he saw the pain in his daughter’s eyes. “You can talk to me. I won’t tell no-one.”
She cried out in exasperation. “I know, dad. But I can’t. If I do, I’d be putting you in danger.”
“You’re scaring me, Edna.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.”
“Don’t be silly. We’re always here for you. Always.”
She hugged him again. “Buy me a beer. Put me on that crazy coaster, daddy.”
They crossed the road to Rockaway Playland.
The crunch of metal on wood and the screams of laughter and exhilaration were a tonic that filled the silence left by all the words she couldn’t say.
But by morning the silence in Rockaway was deafening. She wanted to stay longer, but her head could barely take the pounding from so many thoughts crashing into one another. She woke before dawn and knew it was time to leave.
TWENTY SIX
Saturday August 15, 1953
Clarence was knocking on the door to her hotel room within an hour of her arriving back in Washington. She let him in, but she was exhausted and made it clear he couldn’t stay. He looked like a slapped puppy and she apologized, blaming it on stress.
“How did you know I was here?” she asked, tapping the bed and urging him to sit down next to her.
He sat, looking very sheepish. Her hackles raised, she demanded he tell her what was up.
“It’s Paolo,” he said. “He pops in from time to time to look in on you. That’s how I knew you were back.”
“Jesus. Really? That’s creepy.”
“I’ll tell him to stop. But he does it because he knows I’m worried about you.”
“Yeah, well, my problem is I have people watching everything I do.” She leapt to her feet. “All right, that’s it. I’m getting out of here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m changing hotels. For all I know, this room is bugged. I know for certain it’s being watched by the Russians. The CIA too, most likely. They’re probably out there giving each other a wave as the shift changes.”
“Where will you go?”
“Not telling,” she said, taking a perverse pleasure in the cruelty of denying him the knowledge. “But you tell our little friend I’ll be calling and he’ll need to pay for wherever I end up.”
Two hours later, she had a suite at the Carlton. She called Menzel at home and cut him off mid-bluster, telling him bluntly to call her back at the hotel bar in half an hour. Which he did, though he was decidedly unhappy about it.