Brothman.
White.
Currie.
Miller.
Adler.
Halperin.
Collins.
People I’d only heard of in passing who happened to work for the government . . . I named them all. (Little did I know, but one of them was the great white whale the FBI was searching for. Words are bullets, Catherine, or in this case, one name was a giant harpoon.)
“Elizabeth Bentley, you are a reformed saint,” said a Louisiana congressman once we’d finished for the day. Except I didn’t feel like a saint, quite the opposite. “You are an American citizen who has had the courage to put herself in a highly dangerous position.”
Nixon added his two cents, no flimflam about it. “I commend you highly for coming here, for having had such a grueling time. Your ability to stand up the way you have is something to be proud of. In fact, I wish the entire country could hear what you have to say.”
I felt filthy dirty in more ways than one. And in terrible need of a martini.
I got that martini as soon as I left Capitol Hill, darted into the first corner bar I saw. And then I downed another one. And another.
Sometimes, not even an ocean of alcohol is enough to drown out your misery.
* * *
* * *
In the midst of all the grand juries and press interviews, I’d thought that the Center had forgotten me.
God in heaven, was I ever wrong.
Upon removing the wooden chair I always rigged beneath the hotel door handle, I found a fresh copy of the Daily Worker sitting atop my usual editions of the World-Telegram and the New York Tribune.
Once again, their headlines screamed my name. Only this time, I’d had no part in creating them.
FAUX SPY QUEEN ELIZABETH BENTLEY SPENT TIME IN MENTAL INSTITUTION:
Neurotic Pathological Liar & HUAC Informer Spins Web of Lies
Someone had wanted me to see this. And first thing in the morning too.
The following story was patently false—the dates I was supposedly in a mental institution (the NKVD insinuated several institutions, among them New York’s Payne Whitney Clinic) coincided with when I began my interviews with the FBI—and was obviously a fancy bit of malicious defamation. Still, there it was in print. It was likely that Al had started those wheels turning as soon as I’d named all my sources and before he’d even left the country, but now that I was testifying in public—as opposed to within the safety and security of the Senate or grand jury chambers—I was back on the Center’s radar.
Reeling from this new slander (Catherine, don’t you dare quibble that I actually had spun a web of lies), I locked myself inside my hotel room that day and ordered room service, including several martinis I’d certainly earned, even if I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to pay for them when the bills came due.
I’d thought the day couldn’t get much worse until a uniformed hotel attendant showed up with more bad news.
“Miss Bentley, the front desk asked me to bring up your mail.” He offered me a silver plate laden with several envelopes. “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”
I certainly did mind—I scowled at both him and the letters as if they might contain plague, then shut and bolted the door. Only when the chair was firmly wedged back under the doorknob did I tear open the envelopes.
The first was a hotel bill in a modest dollar amount that still had me wincing given that I was currently unemployed and no longer collecting a paycheck.
The next was a plain white envelope addressed from Massachusetts, a piece of yellow foolscap paper with pristine folds tucked inside.
Dear Betty, it read in a heavy-handed scrawl written in pencil, one that looked entirely male and left-handed. I scowled. I’d never allowed anyone to call me Betty without correcting them; my name was Elizabeth. One didn’t just go around amending people’s names, certainly not without permission.
Congratulations on your spy story. It will be the last story you will ever write. We will wright the last chapter.
Misspelling notwithstanding, the letter sent chills down my spine.
Death threats . . . What kind of person sends death threats to a woman they’ve never met?
The last was a letter from a law firm representing William Remington, informing me that he was suing me for libel. To the tune of one hundred thousand dollars in damages.
Shit, shit, shit.
I stopped opening the letters after that. Built up a fire in the fireplace and watched the flames devour them as I knocked back one straight shot of gin after another.
I was a target now, besieged by all corners of the board.
The least I could do was be a moving target.
* * *
* * *
It was a relief when the DC Police Department asked me to visit their headquarters the next morning. Perhaps they could provide me some protection; at the very least I could be relatively sure no one would try to harm me while I was surrounded by armed officers.
Except I left my hotel only to be confronted by an angry-faced mob who had apparently tuned in to my interview on Meet the Press. It was a small group—thank providence—but pockmarked with familiar faces.
Lee and her daughter, now grown.
Harold Patch. Marcel.
And several other people I recalled from my days with the Party.
Before I’d met Yasha. Before everything had fallen apart.
“There she is!” Patch’s angry sneer branded itself onto my heart. I suddenly knew how women throughout history had felt, condemned by an angry crowd before being dragged to waiting pyres and scaffolds. “Traitor! Liar!”
Panic fisted my throat as the mob’s tidal wave surged toward me, one woman—perhaps Lee’s daughter—grabbed my hair and tried to pull me down the stairs. I tumbled to my knees, scraped the heels of my palms, and felt something warm on my face. Until I was yanked backward by another set of hands.
“For Christ’s sake, leave Miss Bentley alone!” The bellhop’s voice bellowed out over the mob’s angry cacophony. “This is America, not some Fascist state where thugs terrorize people on the streets!”
He tugged me back inside, where I collapsed into a chair while he secured the door, then handed me a starched handkerchief from his pocket while fists pounded on the glass. “For your cheek.”
I dabbed my face, expecting the handkerchief to come away bloodied. Instead, it came away clean, save for a patina of saliva. Hysterical laughter bubbled in my chest.
Not blood. Just spit. I’d been spit upon.
I felt like the central figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, my world melting out of control around me while my sanity slipped through my fingers. Perhaps I was as neurotic and deranged as the papers claimed. “Thank you, Sam. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I’ve been attacked.” I recalled Al’s ambush in my hotel room, felt the familiar sharp stab of guilt at the remembrance of Vlad. “And that’s not counting the death threats.”
Once, a lifetime ago, my younger, lonely self had no one to talk to except an African violet, had recited a line from Coriolanus. Thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere.
Except this time, the world had turned its back on me.
“I hate to say it—the staff here appreciates what you’ve done for our country”—the bellhop lifted his hat, rubbed a hand over his slicked-back hair—“but perhaps it would be better if you left the hotel? And moved somewhere safer?”
When I left the Commodore Hotel an hour later for my meeting with the DC police, it was with my brown leather suitcase in hand, through the back door, down a narrow alley where a taxi was waiting. All my belongings—my entire life—fit in that one bag as I fled into the unknown. I didn’t know where I’d sleep tonight, but I couldn’t worry about that now.
One minute, one hour at a time.
“San Francisco?” My mind was still a whirlpool of worries from this morning. It took a moment to paddle out of those turbid waters and decipher what he was saying.
The lieutenant perused his notes in front of him. “A San Francisco highway patrolman made a discovery this morning on the Golden Gate Bridge. A pile of women’s clothing . . . and a red handbag.”
The detective clasped his hands in front of him. “Inside the handbag was a letter. It was addressed to you.”
Words I hadn’t heard in a long time haunted me. I swear I’d sooner jump off the Golden Gate Bridge than allow anything to happen to the child.
My voice suddenly didn’t work; I had to clear my throat—once, twice—to form the words properly. “What did it say?”
He glanced at a steno pad in front of him. “The letter wasn’t signed, just stated that no one would care about the writer’s name. Except you. The writer said she had suffered and that she didn’t want her baby girl to suffer with her so she’d taken her daughter with her.” He looked up at me, his voice softer. “Presumably off the bridge.”
“Do you have any details on the handbag?” I closed my eyes, not wanting him to read anything there. “You said it was red?”
He glanced at the pad again. “Reddish, scallop-shaped. Calfskin.”
I knew the rest without needing to see the bag.
Ruched. Louis Vuitton. Coral-toned, not red. With kitten heels to match.
When I opened my eyes, it was to find the detective studying me. Nothing fazes you, Elizabeth, I thought to myself. A nuclear bomb could detonate next door and you wouldn’t flinch.
“The San Francisco police believe this might be a hoax,” the lieutenant continued. “But it’s also possible that the writer jumped off the bridge. Along with her child. Authorities are searching for bodies now.”
I wanted to scream in panic but somehow forced myself not to react, allowing the silence to stretch until it became so taut that the detective felt the need to slice through it. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the story is already flying across the country via the wire service. Including the letter’s connection to you.”
From unknown spy to famous and infamous . . . How many mobs shall I expect tomorrow?
“Thank you for apprising me of the situation, officers. Please send word when you receive the verdict on the investigation.”
I left the precinct with my lone suitcase in tow, somehow kept my worries from clawing their way up my throat during what felt like the longest taxi ride of my life. To another new hotel, where I immediately locked the door and placed a call to the FBI. Demanded to speak to the director, and only the director. “I need you to investigate a possible suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge this morning,” I said once I’d finally been patched through to J. Edgar Hoover. “And I need to see the letter with my own eyes.”
Words, I thought when I finally hung up. I needed words to keep the monsters at bay.
Safety. Hiding. Bridge. Survival. Suicide. Death.
This time, the words failed to calm me.
* * *
NOVEMBER 23, 1963
8:22 P.M.
“Was it Mary Tenney?” Cat asked Elizabeth. If anyone else had just told her that story, she’d have immediately offered her sincerest condolences—hoax or suicide, it was an awful situation—but Elizabeth was a woman whose need for lies bordered on the pathological. And she had a feeling—what Elizabeth surely would have called a gut feeling—that Mary’s story was critical to her own. “With the handbag?”
“Of course, you daft girl,” Elizabeth snapped. “Who else would it be?”
“But Mary’s earlier letter said she had a son, and you said she named him Jacob after Yasha. Now she had a daughter?”
Elizabeth frowned, shot Cat a disappointed stare. Click click click went the golden lighter. “That was code, my dear, to keep the Soviet apparatus from piecing anything together. Mary’s main concern was that the Russian secret police never find her and, more importantly, that they never track down her illegitimate child to use as leverage against her. Her son. She covered her tracks. Multiple times, in fact. And then circled around again, just to be sure.”
Cat folded her arms, trying to think several moves ahead like a chess player. That would be rather smart, if it were true. Mary’s first accomplishment was hiding the existence of her child, making everyone think she’d had an abortion. Next came abandoning her position as a honey trap when it became clear Elizabeth was no longer a smoke screen against the Center. Moving cross-country and going deep into hiding, followed by faking her death and that of her child. Finally, a red herring regarding the child’s sex.
Layers upon layers. Cat wondered if Mary learned that from Elizabeth.
“I kept hoping she’d contact me,” Elizabeth continued, “but Mary was smart. She’d have known the Russians were watching my every move, that they’d likely be tracking down each of my contacts even just to deactivate them.” Elizabeth set down the lighter, folded her hands over it. “She wouldn’t have wanted the chance that she was going to be liquidated, or worse, that they’d use her child as collateral to keep her quiet. Remember, she’d slept with virtually every spy and Party member during the war. Also, there was the possibility that the FBI would have deciphered the much-sought-after identity of Muse and come pounding on her door.”
Cat winced, imagining what a life on the run would have been like. It made her childhood look downright rosy in comparison, despite her parents’ deaths.
“So . . .” Cat drew the word out, hoped Elizabeth would throw her a bone and not force her to ask the question. Of course, that hope was in vain. “Did Mary kill herself?”
The golden lighter clicked at a steady tempo. Click click click. “The FBI did their due diligence, even procured the suicide note that was found on the Golden Gate Bridge and sent it my way.”
“And?”
This time Elizabeth produced an envelope from inside a hollow book. Not War and Peace this time, but Anna Karenina. Apparently, Elizabeth really did have a vendetta against Tolstoy. The paper she held out was stamped with Elizabeth’s name in willowy handwriting. Inside, the note’s text repeated what Elizabeth had already told her. “I’m missing something, aren’t I?” Cat asked.
“Mary was a consummate spy. Anything strike you as odd?”
Cat frowned, turned the letter over and over. “No invisible ink, I assume?”
“No. Although I was ready to run it through lime juice before I figured out the solution.”
Cat’s attention returned to the envelope. And then she realized . . .
“It’s stamped.” Cat felt a rush of exhilaration, knew she was on the right track from the way Elizabeth’s lips quirked up. “But there’s no address. And this was found on a bridge; it was never going to be mailed.”
“Check the back. Carefully.”
Cat did as Elizabeth commanded, gently lifted up the stamp with her thumbnail. On its adhesive side was a hidden swirl of numbers written in pencil, a tiny universe of information.
“It’s coded.”
To which Elizabeth held up a finger, scrawled something on a scrap of paper before handing it to Cat. Just the letters of the alphabet with an assortment of out-of-order numbers beneath them.
“This was the code Mary and I had agreed to use when we initially set up our plans,” Elizabeth informed her. “Mary kept the original one-time pad—I memorized it.”
It didn’t take Cat long to decipher the simple code in front of her—it was just a matter of matching the numbers of the stamp with their coordinated letters. Although she could see how it would have been impossible to
decode without the key.
THQUNISTHMOSTPOWRFULPICINTHGAM.
Cat frowned. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“Remember my Royal typewriter? From my days at that wretched insurance office?”
“The one with the fiddly E?”
Another few moments and Cat had it.
“The queen is the most powerful piece in the game.”
“I should have burned the thing, but I wanted to keep it,” Elizabeth admitted, “to hold proof in my hand that my friend was still alive. That I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.”
“But this is nebulous.” Cat had been hoping for some message that Mary was alive and happy, preferably somewhere tropical. “Did she survive? She didn’t actually commit suicide, did she?”
“She wrote the suicide note, obviously, but no bodies washed ashore in San Francisco Bay. No, I assumed—as did the FBI—that this suicide note was a message meant to throw certain people off her scent, to keep them from putting together too many pieces of her puzzle. Just in case.”
“Those certain people being NKVD.”
Elizabeth’s eyes, usually so shuttered, flared with emotion for a moment. In those twin whirlpools, Cat glimpsed pain and perhaps guilt. Remorse too. “Hearing from Mary reminded me that I’d ruined more than my own life. That I hadn’t done enough to protect her.”
“Now you’re being dramatic, Elizabeth. Mary survived. Unlike everyone else that you sold downriver to the FBI.”
“Oh, the folly of youth.” This time Elizabeth’s expression was downright condescending as she snarled at Cat. “Remember, I told you there are worse things than dying. But here’s a little secret: there are different ways a person can die, Catherine, yet still remain breathing.”
17
AUGUST 1949
All of America was sweltering in the grip of summer’s heat when there came the terrible headline that slipped the noose from my neck and simultaneously terrified the rest of the world: TRUMAN SAYS RUSSIA SET OFF ATOM BLAST.
A Most Clever Girl Page 30