I perked up at that, somewhat appeased, and pulled from my knitting bag a pair of fake bifocals and an ash-blond wig, donning both as my soft disguise for the day. (A soft disguise was a simple facade, always recommended when meeting new contacts, be they up or down the underground ladder. People saw what they wanted to see, and after a life spent studying people and taking notes on their every action in my journal, now I became them. I preferred to age myself older—few suspected women of spying, and certainly no one expected a middle-aged knitter to be surreptitiously gathering intelligence. It was easy to slip into someone else’s skin for an hour or so—I enjoyed the disguises and playacting and being a woman whom no one suspected was strong enough or smart enough to manipulate a man. Oh, how wrong they were.)
Browder’s new summer cottage on a lake near Monroe was a perfectly elegant hideaway in which Yasha told me the CPUSA leader planned to rest and do some writing following his recent release from prison for passport fraud. (Apparently, Browder had thoroughly enjoyed playing chess with the other inmates but didn’t relish another term.) The cobblestone drive was framed by graceful flowering trees and possessed a lawn so flawlessly manicured I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a gardener measuring each blade of grass with a ruler. I forced myself not to gawk when a butler answered the door, the first time I’d seen such a thing outside novels or the occasional movie. Having servants didn’t quite scream equality, but my stomach was tied in too many nervous knots to quibble over philosophical matters.
“Comrade Browder,” Yasha said cheerfully once we’d moved beyond the entrance foyer. “This is Umnitsa.”
I couldn’t help beaming with pride just then. Yasha’s term of endearment—Clever Girl—had become his code name for me.
“I realize how important you must be to Jacob here and the Party,” Browder said to me between puffs on his pipe after he’d ushered us into the dining room, where a large table had been loaded with salads, meat, and cheese. Earl Browder was a big man well on his way to becoming corpulent, with a sort of Santa Claus appeal and a Kansas twang to his voice that made it impossible to find him threatening. Still, in spite of his general air of weariness and flabbiness, I sensed a deep current of vitality and energy pulsing beneath the surface. Yasha called him a good guy, but I suspected he was sharper than freshly shattered glass, given that he was the head of the entire CPUSA. “In all my years,” he continued, “Jacob has never introduced me to one of his operatives. Everyone else is just a code name on paper.”
There was no mistaking the pride in Yasha’s smile. “Umnitsa would do anything to help the Party in our quest to crush Hitler and the Fascists.”
I crossed one leg over the other. I’d worn new heels and had clipped a pair of fresh-out-of-the-package silk stockings to my waist-nipping girdle today. I would never be a heart-stopping beauty, but I had a passable—albeit a very upside-down-pear-shaped—silhouette and decent legs. “I would do anything, including helping with this Canadian job. Tell us what needs done and we’ll see it through, Mr. Browder.”
“Eager and enterprising.” Browder laughed. “I like this one, Jacob.”
“As do I. Umnitsa is very special to me.” Yasha looked at me over the rim of his gin and tonic, which I noticed he was only pretending to drink, the better to keep his wits. Plus, if it wasn’t pure Hennessy cognac, it may as well have been curdled milk to Yasha.
“I insist you call me Earl—Mr. Browder sounds like I have one foot in the grave. Still . . .” Browder rubbed his chin. “Normally, my wife is home to help me entertain, but I’m afraid she’s out organizing a benefit luncheon. I hope you’ll understand, my dear, when I ask you to wait in the garden. We’ve only just met, and I have sensitive information for Jacob.”
The request stung a little, but spies and secrecy and subterfuge were my life now.
“Please don’t be offended.” Browder showed me to the garden after asking if Yasha needed anything else for his comfort. I marveled for a moment at Yasha’s importance; Earl Browder was the head of the CPUSA, yet he was treating Yasha with a shade of deference. “I have the highest opinion of Jacob. Any man who can survive a firing squad at the age of eight by playing dead and then walk out of Siberia while still wearing his gulag chains has my utmost esteem.”
My heart stuttered and I didn’t know what to say, for I hadn’t heard those sobering details from Yasha’s youth. I suspected he was in no hurry to relive them.
“Jacob Golos is the best man I know,” Browder said. “And it’s clear he’s absolutely besotted with you.” I flushed with happiness, but the pleasant feeling didn’t last. “However, I have to wonder if this new liaison with you is making him sloppy.”
“In what way?”
“Jacob may not tell me your real name, but bringing you here today is a flagrant breach of procedure. Not to mention the Party’s first and foremost rule—”
“No relationships,” I muttered, having accused Yasha of breaking Party rules on the very drive over here. I fisted my hands in my pockets, where I’d taken to keeping Yasha’s love notes. No falling in love.
“Where do your loyalties lie?” Browder asked. “To Jacob? Or to the Party?”
“Both.”
Browder made a sound deep in the back of his throat. “In my experience, that’s not possible. A spy has only a single loyalty.”
What could I say to counter Browder’s accusation? The truth, I supposed. “We’re stronger together, Jacob and me. And together, we serve the Party.”
Browder rubbed his chin, seemed to ponder that. His expression wasn’t unkind, merely a mixture of concern and curiosity. “I hope that’s true, for both your sakes.”
Rolling the tension from my shoulders once he’d returned inside, I sat on one of the benches and forced myself to relax into the heat of the day and the scent of summer roses. Five minutes passed, then ten. The afternoon had exhausted me, and I was just considering stretching out along the bench when Yasha rejoined me.
“Are we all finished?” I asked.
“Earl has asked us to stay overnight. I told him it was up to you.” Yasha perched on the bench next to me, but I could see his mind was a thousand miles from this pleasant little garden.
Our legs were almost touching, and I scarcely resisted twining my fingers with Yasha’s. Except when I looked up, his expression was troubled. Glowering, actually. “What is it?”
He plucked a rose petal from its blossom, shredded the poor thing into angry strips that made the air heavy with its fragrance. “Browder needs sensitive information from one of the Canadian operatives I am meeting next week. Which means I must lure the man away from the rest of his ensemble. They believe they are coming to New York to make a routine handoff of information.”
“So? Follow him to the men’s room or something. Or get him drunk to loosen his tongue.”
“It is not so easy. Browder suspects the man knows more than he is saying. He works for the Canadian War Department, which is actively recruiting for Britain’s Royal Air Force. This man might know about the Luftwaffe’s capability—perhaps even their weaknesses—now that they are bombing Britain.” Yasha shrugged. “Or he might know nothing.”
Even without a declaration of war, it was obvious that America was against Germany, which meant we needed to be willing to do anything that would help defeat Hitler. That was what I’d signed up for, and I was willing to see this through. We’re stronger together. “This information will help us determine Hitler’s weak spots?”
“Correct.”
“I’ll help separate this man from his group. Then you can question him.”
I expected Yasha to smile at least. Instead he turned colder than a marble statue. “It will not work quite that way. You understand, this man has a certain susceptibility. To women.”
“A susceptibility to women?” I nearly choked on my laughter. “Isn’t that every man alive?”
&nb
sp; Yasha’s face told me this was no laughing matter. “What’s wrong?” Ice crackled in my veins. “Why don’t you want me on this job?”
Because it was obvious that Yasha was regretting the moment he’d gotten in the car this morning and driven me upstate.
“Browder believes you, not me, could get the information we need.”
“How so?”
“Because only you can work as a honey trap.”
I wrinkled my nose at the unfamiliar term. “What does that mean? A honey trap?”
Yasha held himself so still, so erect. “It means you would sleep with this man in order to get the information we need.”
If I hadn’t already been sitting, a breath of wind could have knocked me flat over. No close friendships and no unnecessary emotional connections, certainly no falling in love. “What?”
Now Yasha dared look at me, his voice tightly leashed. “Men will spill all sorts of secrets across a pillow. It is a common practice among the Party. Even Browder’s wife is a former GPU operative whose duty it is to keep him in line and report on him to the Center if necessary.”
My very skin crawled, and when I spoke, my voice was strung tighter than a piano wire, each word falling flat. “And have you ever forced one of your contacts to be one of these . . . honey traps?”
“Never.” Yasha must have read the doubt in my eyes. “I swear on the soul of my father. I have one contact who chose that line of work, but I would never, ever force such a thing on anyone.”
Still, my stomach roiled to learn that this was the task of some women in the Party, the same Party that crowed about equal rights for women. No matter how many rights women won or how many amendments were passed, our bodies were still exploited. And what happened when that commodity stopped being beautiful or desirable?
I folded my hands in my lap so tightly my knuckles went white, wondered whether Yasha could hear the coded message my thudding heart pounded out. “And do you want me to go through with Browder’s plan? To be a honey trap?”
Yasha’s eyes were hollow wells when he looked at me. Not for the first time, it amazed me that I was looking at one of the Party’s top operatives in America. Perhaps I would never know everything about Yasha—that mystique might be one of the reasons I loved him—but in that moment I could read every emotion on his face as if I were looking into a mirror. “How could you even ask?” he said to me. “I will never make choices for you, Elizabeth, but you must know that watching you with another man would kill me.”
My hands framed his face, my heart pounding into my throat as I pulled him near so I could breathe in the crisp, clean scent of him. The pine-and-snow scent that told me I was home. So long as I had Yasha, I would always have my true north, my compass point. “You silly Soviet fool,” I managed to gasp before I claimed him in a storm of a kiss that unsettled us both. “Then we’ll do things our own way. Like we always do.”
“Earl gave us two rooms for the night,” Yasha murmured between kisses that shattered my very breath, his insistent hands roving in a way that lit a devastating bonfire deep in my soul’s core. “Very proper—two beds.”
“Then we should use both of them.” I dragged a wanton hand along his thigh. “Unless you were planning on sleeping tonight.”
I’m not ashamed to say that we barely made it to the first room.
And yes, we used both beds that night.
Several times.
8
The meeting with the Canadians wasn’t for a few days, which meant that Yasha and I tailed the Russian diplomat who had stolen fifty thousand dollars all the way to Hoboken and got his license plate number, which led to his eventual return to Russia. Next, I did my bit meeting with the Remingtons, smiling sweetly when Yasha introduced us as Timmy and Myrna.
The Remingtons were a nice couple, really, perfectly middle-class Americans who blended in like beige at Schrafft’s restaurant on Fourth Avenue. Bill might have been a lanky high school football player, save for the thin wire spectacles he wore shoved close to his eyes and his penchant for clearing his throat whenever he was nervous, which was all the time. Bill’s wife, Ann—whom he called Bing—was short with hair the shape and color of a brown football. She seemed the steadier of the two.
“So, Ann,” I said when the waiter arrived with our plates of egg salad rolls and sliced liverwurst and tomato. (I’d lobby for a place that served hot dogs and hamburgers next time. Choosing the restaurant was a handler’s prerogative, after all.) While I stifled my envy as Yasha drew Bill into a far more interesting conversation about troop movements and munitions, I asked Ann, “What are your hobbies?”
“Well, Bill and I were just married a few months ago, so I particularly enjoy crocheting doilies for our new apartment.” Yawn. I might have carried a knitting bag with me everywhere I went, but that didn’t mean I wanted to spend an evening discussing garter stitches and crochet needles. However, the first part of my job was to distract Ann, to allow Yasha to hammer out the finer details of this new partnership with Bill. I contemplated bringing up recipes for homemade bombs, decided that topic was perhaps too avant-garde.
“So, is it true?” Ann leaned forward as if we were swapping recipes. “Are you really a Communist? And Timmy too?”
The way she looked at me, I might have been the bearded lady in a circus freak show.
It was one thing for Ann to know that her husband was supporting the hammer and sickle, another for her to learn that we were recruiting him to spy for Uncle Joe. Still, Yasha hadn’t said exactly how I was supposed to distract Ann. I took a sip of my water, entirely nonchalant. “Guilty as charged.”
“You must be clever, to be involved with that.” She gave a simple shrug. “I’m afraid I’ve never had a head for politics. Although Communism seems so . . . forbidden.”
She was waiting for a response, but I gave a carefully orchestrated titter of laughter. “Oh, it’s not as exciting as people want you to think. Mostly we just want everyone to have an equal shot at a good life. Rather dull, really.”
Says the woman who this morning learned how to forge American passports. Dull as watching paint dry, darling.
Thankfully, Yasha chose that moment to interrupt. “Bill and I have agreed that you’ll meet him on your trips to Washington, Myrna, bring him current Party literature and collect his dues. He’s especially interested in Russia’s aircraft production, allocation, and performance. So he can inform the War Production Board, of course.”
Yasha’s entire statement was coded and encrypted in doublespeak: dues meant data that Bill would smuggle out for us, and he would be the one informing us of America’s aircraft production, allocation, and performance, not the other way around. I reminded myself that this information would better inform Russia of where to funnel their massive resources, given that we would all unite in our shared goal of taking down Hitler.
“The War Production Board?” Ann’s perfectly plucked eyebrows drew together. “But, Bill, you work for the National Resources Planning Board.”
To which Bill offered his first genuine smile of the evening. “Except Timmy here has just found me a promotion. It’s perfect timing, what with the baby coming and all. We can certainly put the extra money to good use, right, Bing?”
Ann’s pregnancy wasn’t showing yet, but her hand stole to her flat belly anyway. I felt a pang of some foreign emotion and didn’t have a chance to ponder that before I lifted my water glass in a toast. “I suppose congratulations are in order, then.”
Yasha tapped his glass to mine, then to Bill’s and Ann’s. “To a long and fruitful partnership. May we enjoy many years working together.”
(Catherine, sometimes you look back on some innocuous moment in your life and see it for the ticking time bomb it really was. If I could go back and push Bill Remington in front of a bus when he stepped off the curb that night, I would. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
/> * * *
* * *
A few nights after meeting with the Remingtons, I managed to lure Yasha’s Canadian spy away from his dinner party at the Soviet pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. It was easy—I merely discovered over pickled herring rollmops (the man had a yen for Russian food and Vat 69 scotch whiskey) that he had a penchant for stamp collecting, which had been a hobby of my father’s. Or at least, that’s what I told him.
After ten minutes discussing the value of a Warren Harding full face perforated stamp versus a Canadian London to London flight stamp—no horizontal mambo necessary to interest this man—it was easy for Yasha to corner our mark and persuade him to part with information about the Luftwaffe’s aerial capabilities.
Now that felt good. Both the intelligence we passed on to Earl Browder about the Germans but also the knowledge that Yasha couldn’t have completed the job without me.
In fact, I was doing so well that Earl Browder had taken to singing Umnitsa’s praises in his official cables to Yasha. And to Russia.
Umnitsa. Clever Girl.
I loved everything about it.
So, it came as a terrible surprise when Yasha called my apartment one morning before I’d even had my coffee, demanding in hushed tones that I come to World Tourists.
“Immediately, Elizabeth,” he whispered. “I need you.”
Then the line went dead.
I was just getting out of my taxi—a horrific expense justified only by Yasha’s urgent and rare demand—when I balked at the scene before me.
Two uniformed US Marshals exited World Tourists, both lugging heavy brown filing boxes to two waiting trucks, which already contained at least a dozen other haphazardly stacked wooden crates. Four guards stood outside. Armed guards.
Shit shit shit shit shit.
Yasha kept all his contacts’ information coded and their identities secret from everyone—including the NKVD. Still, I wondered for a panic-stricken moment if one of those boxes contained a file labeled with my code name, whether the FBI would soon be breaking down my door. I’d been to World Tourists several times since Yasha had first exposed the inner workings of the Soviet front. My one relief at being seen there while the place was crawling with federal agents was that I’d had the wherewithal to don a black-haired wig, this time with sunglasses and a fashionable crimson scarf tied around my neck.
A Most Clever Girl Page 13