“The truth waits for no man. Or woman.” Donegan had taken off his trademark fedora and his suit jacket lay draped over his chair; sweat stained the armpits of his white collared shirt. “We must continue, Mrs. Remington.”
I frowned. Denying the woman sustenance seemed cruel and unusual punishment, but the counsel for the US government were bloodhounds on the scent. They weren’t about to let this woman escape.
Donegan continued. “I need you to replay for me whether Mr. Remington told you that he was paying party dues. To the Communist Party.”
“I’ve already told you.” Mrs. Remington’s cheeks were flushed, and tiny tendrils of hair had escaped from their perfectly set waves, giving her the air of a frazzled housewife. “Can’t we continue another day?”
“We’re right down to the issue. I need your answer. Now.”
“Well, I don’t want to answer.” Ann’s gaze flicked to the courtroom’s wood-paneled exit, and I could just imagine what mental gymnastics it took to tamp down the urge to flee. I’d felt it myself on occasion in court and before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but I’d willingly led myself to the slaughter. Remington’s wife was an innocent lamb. Or at least she was very convincing playing one.
Donegan towered over her on the witness stand. I eyeballed the judge, willed him to put a stop to this, but . . . nothing. Instead, the men in suits continued to batter this woman—wife and mother—on the stand.
“You have been asked a question, and you must answer it,” Donegan commanded. “You have no privilege to refuse to answer the question.”
Liar . . .
I stood, the word on my lips.
“Miss Bentley, sit down.” The judge lifted two bushy gray brows in my direction, gavel poised like a bludgeon. “You’ve had your turn on the witness stand.”
“Yes, but—”
This time it was Donegan who leveled a glare at me. “The Honorable Judge Leibell told you to sit down, Miss Bentley. You don’t wish to be found in contempt, do you?”
The message was clear. Sit down and shut up.
So, I forced my knees to bend, swallowed the argument on my lips. (Catherine, I regret that decision to this very damned day. Not that it would have made a difference, but honestly, sometimes a person has to try, especially when they have nightmares about the other people they’ve sentenced to die. Doomed causes and all that.)
A wife couldn’t be forced to testify against her husband, and even though the Remingtons were divorced now, they’d been married during the period in question, which should have given Ann some immunity. Of course, without counsel, Ann had no way of knowing that.
“Please answer the question, Mrs. Remington,” said Donegan, his back to me as he circled around to his prey. “We haven’t shown our teeth yet, and I don’t want to have to bite you. Did William Remington tell you he was paying dues to the Communist Party?”
It was a meager threat, but I could see the last frazzled nerve that Ann possessed stretched to its breaking point. Perhaps she was thinking of getting home to the children and the sitter, or wondering if they’d remembered to let the dog out. Hunger and dehydration might have been setting in as she thought of the dinner she still had to cook when she got home. Or perhaps it was one of a hundred other worries that plagued a single mother on any given day. Hell, maybe she simply lost the fight against her baser nature, had wanted to turn William in all this time in revenge but forced herself to take the high road until she simply couldn’t stand it anymore.
Whatever it was, that last nerve snapped with an audible twang.
“Yes.” Ann’s confession came out in a gust. “William told me he was paying dues. He was a Communist from my earliest acquaintance of him and the entire time he worked with Miss Elizabeth Bentley.”
In those two sentences, Ann proved her ex-husband’s perjury, confirmed every single thing I’d ever said about William Remington.
I should have been jubilant. Instead, I felt only a pickax of bone-deep guilt lodged in my lungs. That pickax lodged even deeper when the judge found Remington guilty of two counts of perjury and sentenced him to three years in prison at Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
With my testimony, I’d helped deprive a man of his liberty, a wife of her livelihood, two children of their father.
For what?
William Remington wasn’t the most important spy in my once-golden arsenal, and it wasn’t as if he’d ever have been trusted again—either by America or the Soviets—after all these trials. The poor idiot just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the only spy who still worked for the US government after everyone else had quit their positions and had the good sense to plead the Fifth.
A scapegoat.
An idiotic scapegoat who had made his own bed—and had caused me the added irritation of that obnoxious libel civil suit—but a scapegoat nonetheless. Yes, I’d wanted to take down the Communists who had infiltrated the American government, but now all was said and done, I knew justice hadn’t truly been served with Remington’s verdict.
I felt ill when I left the courthouse that afternoon. And the queasy feeling only intensified as I took the train back to Connecticut that evening.
* * *
* * *
I’d become a weapon the US government could point at anyone they wished. And if I wanted to keep my house and my livelihood, I had to perform.
This new and uncomfortable truth about my life plagued me on my way home to Connecticut that night until it was all I could think about. So, I did what I always did to drown out my guilt and discomfort and worries: I ordered a martini. Hell, I had two thousand dollars burning a hole in my pocket, so I ordered another. And another.
Three martinis that night was three martinis too many.
When I arrived at the New Haven station—whose brickwork floor seemed suddenly rather uneven—on the last train of the evening, it became apparent that John had forgotten to pick me up. I waited until the station had emptied and the parking lot too. And another twenty minutes after that.
Was it so damn difficult to be on time?
A pair of yellow headlights finally weaved toward me as I was stumbling my way on foot down the dark road. I could make out John behind the driver’s wheel of Yasha’s LaSalle. Yasha . . . Hellfire and damnation, I miss you. “Evening, Lizbeth,” John said when I opened the passenger door. “Sorry I’m late. I heard on the radio they’re locking away that Remington snake. Serves him right, the liberal lyin’ Commie.”
John’s insults toward Bill Remington—after all, I had been a Commie too—and the sour tidal wave of whiskey on his breath would have been enough to repulse me, but what had me near apoplectic with rage was the acrid scent of cigarette smoke that billowed out the car door. Inside, a glass ashtray perched on the seat with a still-glowing cigarette. And there were fresh burn marks on the leather that Yasha had painstakingly oiled.
John had defaced Yasha’s car, had been smoking in it, which Yasha had never allowed. After I’d forbidden it.
“There’s no goddamned smoking in my goddamned car.” I reached in, picked up the ashtray, and flung it across the road, heard it shatter with a satisfying crack.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“It’s my car, which means I’m driving. So, unless you want to walk home, you’d better get out. Now.”
I slid across the bench seat, peeled out in sheer frustration just as John sat down and before he’d even slammed shut the passenger door. I drove in enraged silence, my mind reeling from one problem to another with each mile that passed. I needed to stop drinking and get my finances in order. I sure as hell couldn’t do any of that with John around. “It’s time we end things.” My pronouncement fell like a gavel. “We’ve had a good run, but I want you out of my house by morning.”
“You don’t mean that, Lizzy.”
“I
do mean it, John. It’s over between us.”
“Like hell it is.”
The next thing I knew, his fist connected with my jaw. The right side of my face erupted in a white-hot streak of pain, and the car veered off the road, sending me careening into the driver’s door. A second explosion of jagged whiteness went off like a sonic boom in the lower half of my face. (Later, I realized it must have been the steering wheel. Or perhaps the dashboard. Thankfully, not the windshield.) I can’t remember the rest—I blacked out and woke to find the car tipped into an embankment, the front end slightly crumpled around the driver’s side wheel well. The passenger door was open, and John . . . ?
. . . was gone.
Something hot and wet streamed down my chin; my lower lip felt loose and terribly wrong. Numb fingers that probed my chin came away slicked with ruby-red blood as I tried to make sense of the new geography of my face.
Two teeth had punctured my lower lip. That’s going to leave a scar . . . Probing with my tongue, I discovered several of my teeth—top and bottom—were also loose.
A sound caught my attention, a low animal sort of moaning I was surprised to find coming from my own throat. It took me a while before I could will my teeth to stop chattering, mostly out of fear that they might fall out of my mouth entirely.
Somehow, I managed to back up onto the deserted street and reversed the battered LaSalle out of the ditch, prayed that Yasha’s beloved car would hold together long enough to see me home. I also prayed that I’d see John walking along the road.
The better that I might run the son of a bitch over.
Unfortunately, a woman can’t get everything she asks for.
* * *
NOVEMBER 23, 1963
9:02 P.M.
“I can’t believe John punched you.” Despite herself, Cat felt angry for Elizabeth, wished she’d killed the man in the crash. She thought of her best friend Shirley and the bruises she sometimes sported, and found herself wishing that Shirley had enough gumption to cut loose her worthless husband like Elizabeth had done. Of course, Elizabeth hadn’t married the man. “That dirty, rotten piece of garbage.”
Elizabeth’s meager smile drew taut the ugly scar below her lips. Cat realized that the thick line did indeed match the size of her two front teeth. “It would have been better if I’d gotten this taken care of right away.” She gestured to the scar. “I waited too long, let it get infected. There’s a metaphor in that, you know.”
“What happened with John?”
“He disappeared for a few days. I came home after finally going to the hospital—nursing a whopper of a bruise and a bandaged chin—to find him sitting in my armchair, watching The Lone Ranger with an open bottle of my favorite gin in one hand.”
“Please tell me that you called the cops and had him thrown him out.”
“How mundane, Catherine. No, I did far better than that.” A grin that could only be called diabolical crawled its way across Elizabeth’s face. “I marched myself to the nearest pay phone and called the FBI to go after him. They subpoenaed John and threatened him with federal charges for interfering with a government witness. I swear I’ve never seen a man disappear so fast.”
Cat gave a high yip of laughter before she could stop herself. “Elizabeth Bentley, you are an evil genius. Brilliant, even.”
Maybe I’ll have you talk to Shirley one of these days, teach her a thing or two.
Since causing a scene at her mother’s funeral and demanding that Shirley leave her husband hadn’t gone so well.
“Oh, Catherine.” Elizabeth looked at her sadly. “If only you knew.” Her chair scraped across the linoleum as she went to stand at the darkened kitchen window, chin drooping and elbows tucked in toward her ribs as if to take up as little space as possible. As if she was defeated. Or was trying to keep herself from flying apart.
And her final tell: fingers flicking that golden cigarette lighter in a manner Cat had come to recognize. Only faster, the tempo allegro.
Click click click. Click click click.
Elizabeth Bentley was nervous. Worse than nervous—terrified.
“What is it now? Spit it out, Elizabeth.”
The lighter fell silent, and she clutched it between both hands, knuckles gone white. “A doctor recognized my name when I was at New York Hospital getting my chin patched up, a psychiatrist from the Payne Whitney Clinic. He wanted me to see someone, someone who would change everything . . .” She stopped, shook herself. “No, there’s a proper order for everything. I’ll save that for the very end.”
“The Payne Whitney?”
Cat was entirely confused as to how that psychiatric ward fit into Elizabeth’s story. However, her confusion never seemed to matter, at least not to Elizabeth.
“Do you have a pen and paper?” She plowed forward. “Because this is the last bit I have to tell you, about your mother. And you’re going to want to remember every word.”
19
JUNE 1953
They say there’s no rest for the wicked. Well, there I was, case in point.
Some weeks after I’d sent John packing, I sat unwashed and undressed on the creaky bed of my spartan roach-motel room—my Moscow gold was gone, and I’d been forced to sell my Connecticut house to pay off mounting bills and those crippling back taxes—and listened to the evening radio broadcast that informed me that I was now an accessory to murder.
“We interrupt this broadcast to bring you breaking news that the US Supreme Court has overturned a stay of execution for both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The husband and wife are the first US citizens to be executed for espionage following their conviction for transmitting atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. While both continue to maintain their innocence, their execution via electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, is scheduled for fifteen minutes from this moment. This is a developing story and we will return with updates.”
Deep down, I knew that both Julius and Ethel were as guilty as I was. Guiltier, even. Yet, as I listened to the oaken mantel clock tick down the Rosenbergs’ final minutes, I was seized with icy cold dread.
What if I was wrong? What if it wasn’t Rosenberg that Yasha had met, but some other Julius? Why do they deserve to die and I don’t?
I was shivering and covered in gooseflesh by the time the radio announcer interrupted the broadcast again.
“Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison tonight. Neither husband nor wife spoke before they died.”
President Eisenhower then made an official statement over the crackling receiver, of which few words registered in my mind. Something about the Rosenbergs receiving every safeguard of justice that America could provide.
Perhaps they had, but perhaps not. So many other spies had gone free (yes, Catherine, including me, thank you for pointing that out); maybe the Rosenbergs were simply unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a scapegoat of sorts.
If so, they weren’t the only ones.
Bad news comes in threes. This time, so did deaths.
The headline of the New York Times delivered word of the final death I was responsible for.
REMINGTON DIES IN PRISON
Not executed—no, unlike the Rosenbergs, William Remington had the misfortune to be bludgeoned to death by a fellow inmate with an IQ of 61. What was left of my heart blackened into nothing when I read that the killer had confessed to murdering Remington because he was a damned Communist who wanted to sell us all out.
Still holding the newspaper, I fingered the red floral scarf Al had once given me and that I kept but no longer wore. Too flimsy. Instead, I eyed first the leather belt discarded from one of my dresses and then the light fixture studded into the ceiling. The belt was thin, but the fixture appeared sturdy enough to hold a woman my size for a few minutes. Long enough to do the job, at least.
> Death by hanging was surely better than a botched execution by electric chair such as Ethel Rosenberg had endured. They’d said she’d endured three electric shocks on Sing Sing’s Old Sparky before the prison officials ascertained that her heart was still beating. It had taken two more shocks to finally kill her, and by then, smoke was rising from her head.
It was a scene I relived in full gory detail in my newest nightmares.
I tried to escape it then, really I did. I paced my tiny motel room and thought of words, any words.
Yasha. Vlad. Mary Tenney. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. William Remington.
The nightmare wouldn’t stop, this time made worse by the names running through my mind. I could end this. In a world where I’d lost all power, that was the only thing I could still control.
When I tested the light fixture while standing atop the only chair in the room, the damned thing came off the ceiling.
I left it dangling from its wires, grabbed my bottle of gin, and found myself behind the LaSalle’s wheel. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what happened.
An endless sky of gray and uncaring trees and old dilapidated barns sped by on Route 79 as I pressed the pedal of Yasha’s old LaSalle to the floor while sipping liberally from the gin bottle until the nightmare that was my life started to fade around its edges. “You know, old girl,” I said to no one in particular, to the car, “I first spoke to Yasha in this very spot. Our first kiss happened after we dug you out of the snow. And I was sitting right here when he met with Julius.” I snorted. “Look at me now, a drunken old woman talking to an old heap of dented metal and rubber as if it was my only friend.”
I don’t know how the tears started, but once they began, they wouldn’t stop.
Unseeing, did I drift into the other lane? Or was it the other car that was somehow in my lane?
I suppose we’ll never know.
What I do know is that when the black blur of a car came barreling toward me, it was all I could do to swerve out of the way.
A Most Clever Girl Page 33