Hoover continued his tirade. “And where the hell did the blond bit come from? If you’re blond, then I’m seven feet tall.”
In fact, I’d suggested to Nelson that a blond bombshell would make better headlines. And it wasn’t really a lie—after all, I’d worn a blond wig to meet my contacts. Once or twice.
“Who knows?” I merely shrugged. “Whatever sells papers, right?”
Or whatever would sell enough papers to make a woman so high-profile that the NKVD would never dream of offing her and outing themselves in the process. So high-profile, in fact, that her story would never, ever die.
I’d gone to the FBI for protection, but it hadn’t been enough. Going to the press now had served a double purpose: lock down the indictments while also providing me with a bulletproof layer of security.
“So, what does this mean?” I asked Hoover. “Are you ordering me not to speak to the press anymore? To cease and desist?”
Hoover rose and pushed in his chair, leaned toward me with two hands gripping the chair back. “You, Miss Bentley, are going to keep your mouth shut. Especially now that the Senate is gearing up for hearings. You’re going to promise not to make any more unauthorized contacts and swear that you’ll testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
“You have my word, Mr. Hoover.”
The half lie was forged before those words even left my red-rimmed lips.
* * *
NOVEMBER 23, 1963
7:19 P.M.
Cat was still blinking back tears for the dead dog—faithful little Vlad reminded her of a cocker spaniel she’d had as a young girl—when Elizabeth got up and went to the kitchen sink, scraped her plate into the trash. It wasn’t lost on Cat that Elizabeth had declared herself full after only a few bites, although she wasn’t sure if that was due to the quality of the casserole or the turmoil at the story she was reliving. Cat expected her to start a fresh pot of coffee—Elizabeth Bentley seemed like the sort of woman to drink the stuff until she finally collapsed into bed at some godforsaken hour—but was surprised when she instead popped two Alka-Seltzer tablets into a glass. “Are you feeling all right?”
An admittedly incongruous question, given that Cat had come here to kill her. At this point, Cat wouldn’t have been surprised if Elizabeth still kept Yasha’s switchblade in her brassiere. She was far less helpless than she looked.
Elizabeth shrugged. “Close enough. Stop treating me like an old woman.”
Except this time, instead of assuming her usual place at the kitchen table, Elizabeth folded herself onto the couch, an old green-and-white granny square afghan that had seen far better days spread across her lap. She looked as tired and frayed around the edges as the blanket—which Cat realized might well be from Yasha’s death—especially with the remnants of that signature scarlet lipstick now ossified into the lines that radiated from her lips. Still, there was almost something regal about Elizabeth Bentley as she leaned back against the couch pillows and sighed. “We’re getting closer to the important bits. Of course, after that, you’re free to kill me.”
Is she purposefully making herself look pitiful? In the hopes that I won’t kill her?
Which, honestly, Cat was having a harder and harder time even imagining doing. Not that it was impossible. “You sold people out, Elizabeth. People who had made the exact choices you had. Tell me about your testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
Because Cat had read just enough before she came here to know that was when Elizabeth really went off the rails. And she knew that was intricately tied up with her mother’s story.
Elizabeth nodded, her lips curled into a sinful sort of smile. “Ah yes, my role as the Red Spy Queen.” She paused long enough that Cat could tell she was remembering the past in all its Technicolor glory. “Did you know an actual hush fell over the chambers when I walked in—the galleries were packed tighter than sardines. I still remember the stunning white gabardine suit I wore, accented with the most perfect jaunty navy blue beret. Mary Tenney herself would have been proud.”
Irritated, Cat shook her head, even banged her open palm on the table. So much for feeling sympathetic toward Elizabeth Bentley. “That’s not what you wore, Elizabeth. I saw the photograph in the library. You were sitting in front of all the microphones, testifying. You wore a plain black dress, no hat. With understated earrings.”
Elizabeth had appeared calm and collected in the photograph, but Cat had wondered whether her armpits were sticky or her palms damp with sweat from nerves that roiled deep within as she testified toward charges of subversion in the federal government.
Elizabeth shrugged. “Does it really matter what I wore?”
Cat exhaled a puff of exasperation. “Yes, damn it. If you can’t tell the truth about something as small as what outfit you wore, then why the hell am I listening to you? Are you trying to convince me that you deserve to die?”
“Oh, I definitely deserve to die, but time will take care of that even if you don’t. And what if I have been lying all this time, Catherine?” She crossed her arms before her chest, leaned forward. “What if I’ve been lying about very important things?”
Cat’s frown deepened. “Then you’re an even more worthless woman than I suspected.”
Elizabeth looked infinitely sad then, but her expression was wiped clean before Cat could blink. Turned playful, even. “My dearest Catherine, no one cares if I wore a white suit or a black dress, so long as I wasn’t naked in the Senate chambers. Remember what I told you about the truth?”
“That there’s shades of truth? I say that’s bullshit.”
Elizabeth reached for the yellow glass ashtray from the end table behind her. “Shades of Truth. Now that would have made an excellent name for my memoir.”
“Or Clever Girl.”
She smiled at that—a real smile this time. “I was a most Clever Girl. Perhaps Shades of Truth could be a lipstick instead. Speaking of which, did you check your photograph for my lip color?”
Cat wasn’t sure what bearing her shade of lipstick had on anything. “Black-and-white, I’m afraid.”
“Grayscale again.” She fluttered a hand. “For what it’s worth, I was wearing Victory Red. It’s unsportsmanlike to attack them unprepared, you know.”
“What? Attack who?”
“My enemies. Red lips always lie, Catherine. At least, mine certainly do.”
Cat slanted her eyes at the remnants of that Victory Red lipstick. Has she been lying all this time? Instinctively, her hand sought out the revolver, its coldness grounding her burgeoning anger. God help her if she has . . .
“Don’t say you weren’t warned.” It was as if Elizabeth could read Cat’s mind as she smirked, struck a match, and lit the Lucky. Then she shifted on the couch and tucked the ratty afghan around her legs, reminding Cat of a much older woman. “Now are you going to let me tell my story, or not?”
Cat waved a hand, her eyebrows lifted expectantly.
* * *
I wore a simple black dress accessorized by fabulous silver earrings from Bermuda that Mary Tenney had once given me for Christmas. (At least that matches the description you gave me, Catherine.)
And, of course, a flagrant slash of Bésame Victory Red lipstick.
After all, this was war.
A savage murmur spread like a tidal wave throughout the room at the fact that the woman who had sounded the warning cry against Communists was neither svelte nor blond, but instead a nondescript brunette of a certain age. “Why, she’s not beautiful at all,” one senator muttered to another. I leveled an obsidian-sharp glare at them, rather enjoyed the way they shrank back.
(Don’t judge them too harshly, Catherine. I’d guess you felt the same way after you first saw me. Most people do.)
I didn’t mind the hurt feelings over my underwhelming appearance—I’d been playing parts and wearing a mu
ltitude of different faces since almost the day I’d become a card-carrying Party member. The important thing was that everyone, including the media and the public, kept coming back for more. Not only that, but I knew popular opinion would be on my side.
Just today, the front pages on my way to Capitol Hill had been packed with photographs of downtrodden Germans standing atop the rubble of Berlin with arms open as American planes dropped humanitarian relief packages to them, compliments of the Berlin Blockade in which Stalin had effectively cut off the city from all food and medical supplies. Once again, it fell to America to resist oppression and injustice, and I would do my part by exposing the crimes of the USSR here within our own borders. This testimony—my fait accompli—would ensure that no other Americans would be tempted to enter Communism’s candy-covered house and find themselves pushed into its burning-hot oven.
I would stop Communism here in America in its tracks.
The Senate hearing room was closed to the media once my testimony began. Blinking hard against the klieg lights, I took my place at the witness table alongside the stenographer, a half dozen clunky microphones waiting to capture my every word. It was a sweltering summer afternoon outside in Washington, DC, but inside, under those lights and facing the glares of the Silvermasters, Lud Ullmann, and Bill Remington, I felt pearls of sweat rill down my back, my palm slick as I stroked the golden cigarette lighter. I removed it from my pocket in an attempt to gain resolve from it.
Click click click.
Never again would I be a victim. Never again would I be weak.
To start, bulldog Joseph McCarthy threw me a surprisingly gentle round of questions. “Miss Bentley,” he began, “how old are you?” His timorous grin didn’t fool me. This spineless little man was an insipid impresario—no more than a performing monkey, really—who had nothing more than hot air to back up his list of 205 supposedly card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the State Department. Unlike my testimony, which would prove once and for all that there certainly were card-carrying, Stalin-loving Communists hidden deep within the US government. “Of course, if you don’t want to answer that question,” McCarthy continued, “it’s all right. That’s a woman’s privilege.”
Was it possible to roll my eyes so hard they hit the ceiling?
“The Red Spy Queen drops her mask today.” I may as well have hand-fed the newspapers their headline for tomorrow’s edition. “I’m forty years old.”
After that, McCarthy moved straight to my education and time in Italy before asking me to explain how I’d fallen out with Fascism before returning to America and getting mixed up in the CPUSA. During the hours that followed, I had no notes nor the benefit of any lawyers, relied on only my memories and recollections.
“Miss Bentley, while you were an underground agent, did documentary evidence exist verifying the fact that you were such an agent?”
I merely stared straight ahead, wiped my expression clean in order to protect the FBI. You scratch my back and all of that. “None, except in Moscow.”
Unless, of course, you ask Hoover about the VENONA Project . . .
“Did you feel that it was your business to make sure there was no documentary evidence?”
“Of course. I took every possible precaution.”
“It is common practice in all underground organizations to avoid documentation, is it not?”
“It very definitely is.”
This line of questioning worked out neatly for me, establishing that there would be no paper trail of anything I had to say, while proving that such a lack of evidence was actually a testimony to my superior ability as a spy and courier.
“And can you explain how you were pulled into this particular underground organization? The Communist Party of America?”
I folded my hands on the table before me, a coolness settling over me as I repeated the truths I’d rehearsed in my mind so many times. “We poor devils were a bunch of misguided idealists led astray by the cheap little men who run the Party.”
“And when did you find yourself fully in the Party’s clutches?”
“The point of no return was when the Party realized I had important access at the Italian Library. They turned me over to Jacob Golos—the perfect Communist with his selfless devotion to humanity.” I hesitated over the painful truth, plunged ahead. “I fell in love with him, couldn’t have backed out then even if I’d tried.”
A congressman from Louisiana leaned forward. “How old were you when you started this maneuvering, this espionage?” he asked.
“That was nearly a decade ago.”
His fingers drummed against his table. “I want to know whether or not you were a mature individual.”
Of course I was mature, you addlepated ninny. I was a grown woman in full possession of her faculties. Yet, I weighed my response carefully, sensed the sharp teeth hiding in the trap of his words. It was important that I remain in control of this interview, not allow them to turn this into an ad hoc trial about my activities. “I think you may be physically mature, but many times you are not mentally mature.”
“Didn’t it ever dawn on you during these secret meetings that you were doing a disservice to your country?”
My stomach curdled with fear. Disservice was a synonym for treason. The punishment for treason was the electric chair or firing squad.
It was up to me to avoid this trap, to sidestep the quicksand that threatened to engulf me.
“I did not think it was betraying my own government,” I said. “Communism is virtually a religion—one does not question, only follows.”
“Was it this Golos who spurred such emotionalism in you?”
Emotionalism . . . For God’s sake, I dare you to ask that question to any man in this seat.
That was what I wanted to say, but I could hear Yasha’s reprimand in my head. Don’t you dare, Elizabeth. Do what you must in order to survive . . .
“Yes.” I forced myself to scramble toward the path to solid ground they were offering, even if it somehow made me feel like I was cheapening my love for Yasha. “It was Golos.”
“Was it that you were devoted to him so much that you followed him and were blind to everything else?”
“Yes,” I replied, my voice hushed. Stepped more firmly onto bedrock. “Yes, it was.”
Please forgive me, Yasha, I thought, my eyes stinging with the blasphemy of painting the only man I’d ever loved as the villain of my life’s story. For I loved him and had loved what we had done together to help our country. Forgive me for my lies.
I’d escaped the trap that had been set for me. But my ordeal wasn’t over.
After that, I was forced to listen to the other subpoenaed witnesses cast me as both a liar and a fool. All the players of this comedic tragedy were there—William Remington, the Silvermasters, Lud Ullmann, the entire Perlo group. All save Mary Tenney.
Everyone except Remington invoked the Fifth Amendment. And every single one of them looked at me as if they wished they could disembowel me then and there.
“You understand that if you are not a Communist, there is no need for you to invoke the Fifth Amendment?” McCarthy asked Nathan Silvermaster at one point. His Russian battle-ax of a wife sat across the way; Helen leveled at me a glare that would have cut glass.
“I refuse to answer the question,” came Silvermaster’s reply. “I continue to invoke my right to refuse to answer the question posed to me by this witch hunt.”
He was smart, damn him. I clenched my fists, wondering if it was worth risking contempt of court to lash out at him. Fortunately, the Senate had the last word. “This committee isn’t so much interested in witch hunts as it is in rat hunts.”
Lud Ullmann looked straight through me when it was his turn. “The woman I knew as Myrna, or Miss Wise as she preferred to be called, was a neurotic nuisance of a woman. Helen, Nathan, and I wanted her to stop comi
ng around, but she was like a stray puppy that we’d made the mistake of feeding.”
I understood that my former contacts were trying to run to higher ground to save themselves. Hell, I’d just done the same thing myself. But still, lonely and broken as I was, I found myself pitying each and every one of them. That they could no longer see that Russia was the enemy, that we had been wrong to stay with them once they became America’s Cold War adversary.
Then William Remington took the stand.
William Remington, my former problem child with the specs for rubber made from garbage, was now chairman of the Commerce Department committee that allocated exports to the Soviet Union and had access to all manner of secret military information including airplanes, armaments, radar, and the Manhattan Project that had built the atomic bombs. That contact of mine who was redder than a red herring told the jury the bold-faced whopper that he had no idea I was connected to the Party.
“I never knew Miss Bentley was a Communist,” he lied. “Yes, I gave her money, but I thought she was Jacob Golos’s research assistant, and that Golos was a Dutch journalist interested in my work. I truly believed the money I’d given in exchange for Party literature was so I might examine it for myself—I was curious about the Party’s beliefs, you see.”
McCarthy had caught his scent. “Didn’t you find it odd that Golos and Bentley always met you somewhere different?”
“Why, yes, in retrospect, that was odd, but Miss Bentley always claimed to be hungry before she set up the meetings. You see, she worked uptown, far from my office, so we always met somewhere in the middle. I thought she just liked trying new places.”
“So, you’re telling me you never grew suspicious?”
Remington actually pulled at his shirt collar, a dead giveaway that he was nervous. And lying through his perfect teeth. “I did become suspicious of Miss Bentley’s motivations, which is why I fed her a crackpot scheme to make rubber out of garbage, as if I were some sort of mediocre alchemist. Honestly, I had no idea what she was up to—I suppose I was quite the gullible fool in those days.”
A Most Clever Girl Page 28