I offered her a saccharine smile. “We must take our laughs where we can find them. I actually have several names, but you may call me Miss Wise.”
This is a big job, Elizabeth. I could hear Yasha’s warning in my head. One that must go off without a hitch if Nathan is to trust you.
I wasn’t worried about Nathan. Helen, on the other hand . . .
“Do you have any children?” I asked Helen, searching for a safe topic of conversation. My question was a risk, but mothers did love to talk about their children, although Helen was obviously no ordinary woman. I realized I’d chosen poorly when Helen slanted her Russian-blue eyes at me until Nathan finally answered.
“One,” he said, offering a small framed photograph of a blond infant with Helen’s curls. “Spitting image of Helen. Yourself?”
“Just me,” I responded.
“Lud here is a photographer.” Thankfully, Nathan steered our chat into calmer waters. Bless you, Nathan. “If things go according to plan, we’re hoping to set up a darkroom in our basement. We’re not always able to smuggle out intelligence—top secret papers get noticed when they go missing—but photographs . . .”
Now that piqued my interest. “And you believe you’ll have pertinent information to pass on that might assist the war effort?”
“I’m s-s-sure of it.” When Nathan was excited, which I later learned wasn’t often, he tended to stutter. “Estimates of German military strength cross my desk on a regular basis.”
If I’d been one of Pavlov’s dogs, I’d have been salivating as he rustled through his top desk drawer, retrieved a thin folder of papers. Especially when he handed them to me. “Secret estimates of Germany’s current military strength. Oh, and it seems FDR might be willing to extend the terms of the Lend-Lease Act to Uncle Joe.”
Helen cleared her throat. “Nathan, that’s enough.”
I maintained a placid expression when I really wanted to tear into the folder and devour every word. “Why do you want to help the Party?” I asked calmly. “This is incredibly sensitive information you’re handing over.”
If it’s accurate, that is.
But my gut told me that Nathan Silvermaster was telling the truth. This first round of information would be carefully vetted, but any experienced contact would know that. Still, I wanted to understand his motivations.
(That’s critical in this manner of business, Catherine, but also in life. Get to the bottom of a person’s motivations, and you’ll be a puppet master making them dance the polka. Or the bunny hop. Whatever dance you want, really.)
“You know, there aren’t any medals for what we’re doing, but I wouldn’t want any even if there were,” Nathan answered. “When I die I want to know that at least I’ve had some part in building a decent life for those who come after me. America and Russia are allies—Helen has a brother fighting for the S-S-Soviets.” Agitated, Silvermaster paused when Helen rested a hand on his forearm, and took a deep breath from an atomizer of medicine he pulled from his pocket. Asthmatic, then. “Lud, my wife, and I are only doing what the US government should already be doing—sharing relevant intelligence with our ally. That’s the only way the world is going to achieve its paramount goal: to take down Adolf Hitler.”
Helen set down her drink and rose, my signal that I was being dismissed. “That’s if,” she said, “and I stress how big an if that is—we decide to move forward with this relationship. Because, Miss Wise, I, for one, have a feeling that you don’t quite fit in the Communist movement like the rest of us. And my suspicions are usually right.”
Helen’s words were a gut punch, probably because she wasn’t entirely incorrect. I had joined the movement for personal reasons first, but I also strove for a better America and had put my own neck on the line to keep my country from falling into the clutches of Fascism.
“Helen . . .” This time it was Lud Ullmann who nearly growled at Helen.
Just what is his role here? I swallowed an exhale of exasperation. Gentlemen, tell your guard dog to back off.
If the folder Nathan had so blithely handed over was any indication, there was a treasure trove of potential information here—documents and photos—if only I could make my way through the sticky morass of distrust Helen obviously held toward me.
As she said, that was a big if.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said over my shoulder as I buttoned my jacket and stepped into the entrance foyer of their apartment, Nathan’s manila folder safely ensconced at the bottom of my knitting bag. I hated leaving without a promise from the three of them, but Helen stepped past her husband and Lud, hand on the brass doorknob.
“Good-bye, Miss Wise.”
Then she shut the door in my face.
* * *
* * *
“What the hell did you do?”
I’d scarcely stepped inside my apartment when Yasha accosted me, the radio already playing to mask his raised voice. I kicked off my heels and set down my bag. It was lighter than usual with only Nathan’s folder hidden beneath my yarn and needles, but certainly that would change with future visits to the Silvermasters.
At least, I hoped it would.
“What do you mean, what did I do?” I took off my hat, a gaudy thing with gray feathers that had seemed perfectly lovely when I bought it but now appeared garish after Helen Silvermaster’s understated elegance. I tossed the hat on the table. “I took a train down to DC and met with the Silvermasters and Lud Ullmann. What’s their story, anyway? Some sort of ménage à trois?”
Yasha ignored my questions, started pacing his usual six-foot square. “Helen called here an hour ago. She is refusing to work with you and demands that the three of them deal only with me.”
His words hit me like a bullet to the face. That bitch.
“She thinks you work for the FBI,” he continued. “That you are trying to expose her husband and Lud.”
“You must be joking.” I almost laughed out loud. One look at Yasha’s face caused my laughter to shrivel and die.
“Do I look like I am joking?”
“No.” I swallowed. Hard. “You look like you want to wring my neck.”
“These are important contacts, Elizabeth, the most important contacts in our cadre outside of Mary Tenney. Your job was to make them trust you—”
The Bolshevik self-criticism Yasha had steeled me with meant that I should be able to view my own actions impersonally and judge right or wrong. And realized that perhaps this time I had aimed too high.
“So Helen Silvermaster hates me!” I pulled the lone file from my knitting bag and flung it across the table, which it skidded over before crashing to the linoleum, spewing the papers that still needed encryption across the floor. To hell with it—Yasha could encrypt them himself. “Did it ever occur to you that I wasn’t cut out to take over for you? Or were you too busy covering your own ass after the FBI cleaned you out?”
There it was. All my worries, all my insecurities and anxieties, laid bare for Yasha to see. Still, the ugly truth of my own words surprised me. Somewhere below us, my Lithuanian neighbors pounded a broom handle into their ceiling to demand that Yasha and I cease yelling.
“Did it occur to me?” Yasha’s voice was taut, fingers opening and closing into fists. I’d never seen him this way and I didn’t like it. “God, Elizabeth, if you knew how many sleepless nights I lay awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering what the hell I was going to do.”
Yasha never believed in me. He knew I was going to fail.
“I can’t believe you set me up like this.” My tone was feral. I wanted to throw things into my bag and slam the door in his face, but this was my apartment. If anyone was leaving, it was Yasha. (And yes, Catherine, I realize this all might make me sound petulant, but remember that I was young and American, and neither of those traits are conducive to tolerating criticism.) “You sent me to the Silvermasters knowing H
elen was going to hate me—”
“I most certainly did not.” Yasha’s tone was steel. “I put you in charge of this, Elizabeth—the Silvermasters, all my contacts, US Service and Shipping, everything—because you are the only person in this country who can run what has taken me years to build.”
I gaped at him, my anger deflating as I struggled to make sense of this about-face. “Well,” I said, scrubbing a sleeve across my nose, “I certainly proved you wrong today, didn’t I?”
“You can do everything right and still not get the result you wanted.” He placed those giant paws on my shoulders, anchored me. “That’s all.”
“That’s all? I walk in and you start yelling at me and that’s all?”
“Mne zhal’.” His apology and the kiss he pressed to my forehead did little to calm my nerves. He gave a ragged sigh. “I should not have gone off like that. It is only that Nathan Silvermaster and Lud Ullmann must cooperate with us.”
“They wanted to cooperate. It’s only that bitch Helen who hates me.”
In for a penny, in for a pound, it seemed. At least with the cursing.
“I will ring them tomorrow, inform them that it will be my final conversation with any of them—no exceptions.” Yasha gave a deep chuckle in the back of his throat as he bent down and helped me pick up the contents of Nathan’s folder. “And to answer your question, yes, Lud is having an affair with Helen. And with Nathan.”
“I knew it.” Helen Silvermaster had flustered me, but I was still a damned good read on people.
Except running the largest Soviet spy ring in the nation meant doing more than getting lucky guessing at a game of musical beds.
Right or not, I’d still failed. And I couldn’t afford any further failures.
* * *
* * *
I’m not sure Helen Silvermaster ever truly learned to trust me—we were never going to swap gossip like bosom buddies, but she grudgingly agreed to cooperate with me after Yasha’s telephone ultimatum.
So I worked to prove myself to the Silvermaster ménage visit by visit, went out of my way praising the documents Nathan and Lud fed me while also rewarding them with bits of nonsensitive intel about how they were contributing to the war effort. I also relayed requests from the Russian Secret Police about subjects or people they were particularly interested in—from performance tests on airplanes to secret deals between the Americans and various governments in exile, anti-Soviet elements in Washington, and Communists the Center was interested in recruiting. Sometimes I passed along the messages via shorthand I’d jotted down, but I often gave over the original Russian instruction sheet so that Helen could feel important translating them over steaming mugs of fragrant Russian chai at the long, wooden table in their kitchen.
I’d looked at Helen Silvermaster as a puzzle to be solved, had realized that her self-importance was the key to finding her good side. So, I kept her busy and thus off my back.
Between Nathan and Lud, we had access to extremely confidential data, which, while it could not be abstracted from the United States government files permanently, could be “borrowed” overnight, then returned first thing in the morning before its absence was discovered. Even better, I provided the men with a clandestine Soviet camera that was hidden in a man’s watch and able to produce eight exposures on a one-inch film disc, which they then developed in the darkroom that Lud set up in the Silvermasters’ basement. Despite such intriguing gadgets—inevitably, when people think of spies they envision phones hidden in shoes and smoking umbrella guns—in reality, being a real spy entails a long slog of visiting contacts and sifting through so much static, like a television station gone off the air. But then, sometimes you hit the jackpot . . . And I squealed like a schoolgirl on Christmas morning to see the microfilm specs of the B-29 Superfortress that Ullmann was able to photograph once he was assigned to the Pentagon as a major in the Material and Services Division of the Army Air Corps.
It was a fragile détente between the Silvermasters and me, but one I could work with.
And there were more contacts. So many more.
Yasha had turned over virtually all of his contacts to me, but he still kept one or two tucked up his sleeve, which I accepted because I wanted him to feel useful. I remember one distinctly, believed the man at the time to be entirely inconsequential . . .
It was 1942, just a month or so after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that had finally plunged the entire country into war. Yasha and I were driving through the Lower East Side, and it was mostly dark—the Army had ordered a dimout since the city’s lights silhouetted ships offshore and made them potential targets for enemy bombers—so Times Square and even the Statue of Liberty’s torch had been doused. Yasha had hooded the LaSalle’s headlights, and the streetlights were dimmed, but he still saw the contact hiding in the darkness. “Wait here while I meet with this one, Elizabeth,” he told me, and for once, I didn’t argue, given my exhaustion after running to meet contacts all day and so many other days prior.
I sat alone in the LaSalle once Yasha got out, my attention drawn to a government poster taped to a lamppost, a shadowed Uncle Sam shushing the viewer with a reminder: Don’t Discuss Troop Movements, Ship Sailings, War Equipment. It would have been funny, given that was precisely the information we were gathering on that street corner. I watched as Yasha spoke at length to a tall man wearing a trench coat and spectacles. I recall the spectacles—they caught the meager light from the streetlamp.
“Who was that?” I asked Yasha when he got back in the car.
“An engineer.” Yasha rested his arm on the seat back behind me, carefully reversed the LaSalle away from the sidewalk. “Julius is his name.”
“Julius . . . ?”
“Just Julius. I’m not sure what will come of it, but I gave him your telephone number so he can always contact one of us.”
(And wouldn’t you know it, Catherine, but that man woke me out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night whenever he called—I always wondered if Julius could read a damned clock. And I never did learn his last name. Honestly, I’ve thought more than once that it would have been better if I’d never learned he even existed.)
A life of at the center hub of a spy ring was a life fraught with secrecy and half-truths, shadows and lies. Of always second-guessing everyone.
Mary Tenney was another story entirely.
I’d never had a sister, or a brother for that matter. Hell, not even a cousin.
Mary Tenney was all that plus my friend, the school chum I’d never had during all those years of moving around with my parents. I found myself counting the days until my overnight visits at her apartment, of carefree nights spent eating sweet pickles out of a jar followed by chocolate Jell-O cake afterward, or whatever strange culinary sensations she had in her mostly empty icebox. (Mary couldn’t heat up a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, so it was fortunate that her contacts were happy to treat her at swanky restaurants. Otherwise, the poor woman would have starved to death.) Sometimes we’d go to a picture show, or stay up far too late varnishing our nails until Mary proclaimed us to be absolute Mary Pickfords. But my favorite moments were when we played chess. She’d taught me to play the game on her scratched wooden board—she always played white, I had black. “It’s just like spying, Elizabeth,” she said during our first game. “Be nimble and stay several moves ahead of your opponent. And remember, the queen is the most powerful piece in the game.”
Chess was like a mirror for my life. And I loved it just as much as I loved Mary.
So, I was worried when she called one Thursday afternoon and informed me she couldn’t make our regularly scheduled drop that weekend in DC.
“I’m going out of town for a little bit.” The pay phone’s line crackled, but I’d just checked it for bugs. “There’s something I have to take care of.”
“Next week, then?” I was disappointed not to see her, but perhaps I
could use the time to finally persuade Yasha to see a doctor. Or we could take Vlad for a drive upstate, stay at a bed-and-breakfast. Rest and relax for a change.
Mary hesitated. “Actually, I’m going to be indisposed for a little bit. Yasha usually let me take as many weeks as needed, but I’m not as young as I used to be. And things are a little more complicated this time.”
Understanding dawned.
Mary was only in her early thirties, but I could guess how many times she’d performed this same exact scene over the course of her life.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll send the Center a message that you’re spending a while in Bermuda getting your health back.” I’d need a good excuse, but perhaps I could play to Russia’s fears and tell them that I feared Mary was cracking up following her rejection by the Office of Strategic Services. That rejection part was true, for OSS had somehow discovered Mary’s “past Communist associations” and shattered her dreams by denying her the position she’d hoped for. This little twist of the truth, along with some concoction of personal difficulties while working for Walter Lippmann, should buy her some time.
“Will you be all right?” I asked. “Is there anything else I can do to help?”
Hold your hand and dry your tears? Just what comfort exactly was one expected to offer a woman about to do away with the child she carried?
There was a long pause. Finally, “Actually, there is something. But I’m not sure I could ask it of you . . .”
I waited for her to finish, realized she’d volleyed the conversation back to me. I’d promised her that she’d always have choices, and now she was extending me the same courtesy. Not only that, but I’d had to leave behind a lot of people over the course of this life. I didn’t want to leave Mary behind, not when she needed me. “Name it, Mary, and it’s done.”
* * *
NOVEMBER 23, 1963
A Most Clever Girl Page 18