Something hard prodded his side. “Stick ’em up, copper.” He flinched and touched the gun under his jacket and then saw Mal Brown, an investment banker with Brown Brothers Harriman, former classmate, onetime pursuer of his sister Leah. His tie was down, his top shirt button undone, his suit coat open. His hair was mussed and he had one arm around a young woman. His free hand held a fountain pen stuck in Cassidy’s side like a gun. “Hey, Mike, have you met Rhonda? Rhonda works for the New York Post, so be careful. Anything you say will be read at breakfast tomorrow. Rhonda, this is Mike. Mike’s got a real gun, honey. You ought to ask him if you can see his gun.” He was just drunk enough to believe that anything he thought of was a good idea.
“Hello, Rhonda.” She was tall and slim, with a narrow face made striking by huge dark eyes. She wore a tailored suit that did not hide large breasts and narrow hips, and long, long legs, and she wore a chic black hat with a dashing red feather and a couple of inches of veil that hung toward her eyes, not to conceal them but to draw attention to them.
“I’ve seen his gun. He showed it to me once or twice. You were supposed to call me, Michael.”
“Uh-oh,” Mal said.
“I did call. You weren’t home.”
“Liar. I have one of those new answering services just in case someone who promises to call, calls, you rat.” She did not appear angry.
“I’ll let you two fight it out,” Mal said. “I’m going to go tell Red Smith what he doesn’t know about baseball.” Smith, the Herald Tribune’s sports columnist, was at his usual post at table number 1.
“I’m sure he’ll get a kick out of that,” Rhonda said.
“Bet your ass.” Mal tacked away through the crowd.
Rhonda watched Cassidy coolly.
“I thought you’d given up married men.”
“Yeah, well, what are you going to do? Old habits are hard to break. Besides, the good men are either taken or gun-shy. My mother keeps saying, Find a nice Jewish doctor, Rhonda, but I guess I’m looking in the wrong places. Why don’t nice Jewish doctors hang out in saloons? Are you going to buy me a drink?”
“Sure. What do you want?”
“A rusty nail. Can we get it at a table? I’ve been on my feet all day.”
* * *
They took a table in a corner away from the noise of the bar, and the waiter went off to get their drinks. Rhonda took off her hat and shook her black hair free. She leaned forward to accept a light for her cigarette, and then leaned back against the banquette’s red leather and turned so she could study Cassidy. “How’s the crime business?”
“Quiet. We’ve got New York pretty much cleaned up.”
“Yeah. I haven’t been mugged in a week.” The waiter brought drinks and went away. “How come we didn’t make it long term, Michael? I thought we were good together.”
“I don’t know. My fault, probably. What do you think?”
“I think definitely your fault. You’re kind, sweet sometimes, smart, sexy, but you do not let anyone in. You’re impenetrable. I never really knew what you felt, if you felt anything at all, or if you were just faking it.”
Cassidy tasted his drink and held up the glass. “Is this the right thing to be drinking with abuse?”
Rhonda laughed. “And you could make me laugh, but it was a way of holding me off. You need someone to break through all that. Do you think it’s going to be the girl I saw you with at Carlos Ribera’s the other night?”
“You were there?”
“Yes. Who is she?”
“A woman who lives in my building.”
“That’s all I get?”
“I don’t know much more. I just met her. She just moved in. She works for Ribera helping him build his sculptures. What were you doing there?”
“It’s part of my expanded beat: interesting social events, the people who go, the things they say and do. The kind of stories that are every girl reporter’s dream. Pretty soon they’ll even let me cross the street by myself, and then who knows, maybe I’ll get to do a story on why the mayor likes golden retrievers over poodles.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to do real stories, stories that count. I want them to look at me and say she’s a good reporter, not she’s a good reporter for a woman. I want the same thing any man wants. I want to be allowed to do the job I can do.”
“Why Ribera? Nothing else going on that night in the city?”
“Oh, no. Carlos Ribera is a hot property these days. He gives great parties. He’s one of those oversized personalities New Yorkers love. And he is rumored to be a Communist, but he’s kind of a safe Communist, because he’s an artist. Artists can get away with stuff.”
“Anarchist, not Communist. At least that’s what he told me.”
“Sure. And how many people at his party could define the difference? He’s perfect for the uptown slummers who want to rub shoulders with the real people but don’t want anything to rub off. So they all come, politicians, the Union Club hotshots, the society dames, the military brass, the artists and actors, the millionaire bohemians, and if they don’t all go home to their own beds, so much the better.”
“There was a dancer there, a guy from my father’s show.”
“Sure. What’s a party without pretty boys and pretty girls?” She raised her empty glass to the waiter.
“Do you want to do something for me?”
“What?”
“Find out who lives in a building on East Sixty-fourth Street.”
“Why?”
“It’s part of a case I’m working.” That sobered her. She waited for him to go on. “I can’t tell you about it now, but if it breaks, I’ll give you the story first.”
“Why don’t you go to the building and ask yourself? You’ve got a badge.”
“Sure. And they’ve got lawyers. I thought that if you went, maybe said you were interested in an apartment there—”
She interrupted. “Don’t tell me how to do my job, Mike.”
“Right.”
“What building?”
“I don’t know the number. East Sixty-fourth, the last one on the north side before Lex. I want to know who has apartments facing Sixty-fourth Street from the fourth floor through the eighth.” Just in case the hod carrier had miscounted the floor of the apartment where Alex Ingram danced naked.
“And I get the exclusive.”
“You get it when I can tell it.”
“Pinkie swear.”
“Jesus, come on, Rhonda.”
She stuck out her hand with her pinkie sticking up. He hooked it with his, and she pumped their hands up and down three times and grinned at him. “Nobody who grew up in the city would dare break a pinkie swear.”
The waiter delivered the drink she had ordered, but she ignored it. “Anything else I can do?”
“No.”
“Don’t jerk me around on this, Michael. I need this.”
“Okay.”
She got up. “Tell Mal he’s on his own. I’m going home.” She turned away and then thought of something and came back.
“I’m sorry about your father. I hope it works out. Half the time those guys are just fishing.”
“What about my father?”
“You don’t know?”
“Know what? Come on, Rhonda.”
“It was just coming in on the wires when I left the paper. The McCarthy subcommittee’s subpoenaed him to testify.”
“Testify about what?”
“Maybe communism in the theater business. I don’t know. You really didn’t know?”
“No.”
12
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations met on the eleventh floor in the Federal Courthouse at Foley Square. Cassidy showed his badge to the guard at the door and went to stand against the back wall. It was a large wood-paneled room. The windows were heavily curtained, but the room was brightly lit to accommodate the photographers and movie news cameras.
Members of the subco
mmittee sat behind a hedge of microphones at a long table that faced another long table where those called would sit to face their inquisitors. Aides leaned over the shoulders of the committee members and pointed out crucial passages in papers the august men shuffled importantly for the cameras. Senator McCarthy sat at the table’s middle. He had the heavy, florid face of a drinker, and even at ten in the morning his beard was dark. His dark, thinning hair was oiled to his skull, and his suit was rumpled. Roy Cohn sat at his shoulder and looked out over the crowd with his heavy lidded, empty eyes.
The subpoenaed huddled with their lawyers. There were few allies and supporters in evidence. Who knew how a friend’s toxic history might corrode your life? Better to stand clear.
Privileged spectators filled the seats in the gallery. There was the smell of blood in the air, and the crowd in the room was charged with excitement, like people waiting for a cockfight or an execution.
Tom Cassidy sat at the long table. His lawyer, Harry Gould, five feet three inches tall in his handmade shoes with built-in lifts, a bespoke suit, thick black rims on his glasses, and a head as bald and smooth as an egg, was next to him. Harry Gould never met a deal he couldn’t make, never met an angle he couldn’t turn to his client’s advantage, but he hadn’t been in a courtroom in twenty years, and bringing a show business lawyer to a McCarthy committee hearing was like bringing Tinker Bell to a street brawl.
“Stop worrying,” Tom had told Cassidy when they spoke on the phone the night before. “Harry’s just coming to make sure I don’t say something stupid. If he has to, he’ll step in and clear it up. You know, set them straight. This is America. I’ve done nothing wrong, so I’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Tom saw his son at the back of the room. He waved and smiled, and made a big wide-armed gesture that said, Hey, here we are, as if being called in front of a Senate subcommittee was arrival at a longed-for goal. And maybe it was for him, the immigrant boy. Cassidy remembered the talks with his father at the head of the dinner table, beaming down at his American family while his mother, Joan, her ancestors American for two hundred years, sipped bourbon and picked at her food and said nothing. “America,” his father would say, “the greatest country in the world. You can be anything here, anything you want, and no one can stop you. Look at me. I come from nothing.”
Brian, Michael, and Leah would roll their eyes at each other. Here we go again.
“From nothing, from less than nothing, and look at me now.” A sweep of the arm took in the dining room with its candlesticks, silver, crystal, and heavy china, serving plates with too much food, the American children, the American wife, the town house, and all beyond. “If I had stayed, I would have been a peasant picking at the fields, hungry, cold, poor, condemned by where I was born. Here you can be anything, anything. Freedom. Democracy. The greatest country in the world. Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh at this. You’ll learn I’m right.”
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Sit down. Your name is Thomas R. Cassidy?” McCarthy occasionally glanced at papers on the desk in front of him.
“Yes.”
“Please tell us what the R stands for, Mr. Cassidy.”
“Nothing. I just wanted a middle initial.”
There was laughter in the room. McCarthy grinned at the unexpected result of his question.
“You live at Fifty Central Park South?”
“Yes.”
“Please identify the man sitting to your left.”
“Harold Gould. Mr. Gould is my attorney.”
McCarthy looked to Cohn, who leaned forward and said in a flat voice, “Mr. Gould, you may sit with your client. You may consult with him, but you are not to participate in any other manner in the hearing. You are not to ask questions; you are not to cross-examine; you are not to make objections; you are not to argue. You may remain under these conditions. If you do not adhere to these conditions, you will be removed. Do you understand?”
Gould flushed to the top of his bald skull. He was not used to being treated with such dismissive arrogance, but he nodded and said, “I understand.”
McCarthy loved asking questions, because when he did, all eyes were on him. His pace was slow, his voice low and measured, and he had a habit of repeating a phrase to give the question gravity. “Mr. Cassidy, where are you from?”
“Like I told you, Central Park South.”
“Born, Mr. Cassidy. Where were you born? Please tell us where you were born.”
“I was born in a little town called Lvosk. Not even a town, really. Like a village.”
“And what country was this village in, Mr. Cassidy? Please tell us the country.”
“Well, sometimes Poland, sometimes Russia. Depending. Right there the border kept moving back and forth depending on who was stronger, Russia or Poland.”
“Yes, Russia. Communist Russia.”
“Not then. Not when I was born. I left there in 1915, and it was still the tsar then.”
“And what is your real name?”
“That’s my real name.”
“Cassidy?” He said it in a way that made the word a lie. “What name were you born with?”
“Kasnavietski. Tomas Kasnavietski.”
“Do you correspond with anyone from Lvosk, Mr. Kasnavietski?”
“I legally changed my name to Cassidy in 1928. I don’t know anybody in Lvosk anymore.”
“In Russia. Do you correspond with anyone in Russia? Please do not split hairs with me, Mr. Kasnavietski. Please do not prevaricate.”
Tom Cassidy shifted in his seat and rubbed his face, something he did, Cassidy knew, when he was under pressure. “Sure. I’ve got some cousins there. I send them things. Clothes, money. Things are tough for them over there, the war and all.”
“Isn’t it true, Mr. Kasnavietski, that the cousins”—again the word made a lie—“that the cousins live in Moscow, the seat of power of the Communist regime?” He pronounced the word “commonest.” “And that one of the cousins to whom you send money is a member of that regime’s secret police?”
Harry Gould leaned in to say something to Tom Cassidy, but he shook him off. “No it’s not. It’s not true.”
McCarthy held up a manila envelope. “I have here, Mr. Kasnavietski, a sworn affidavit that states that your cousin is a captain in the MVD, the Communist secret police.”
“No, no. He’s like a traffic cop. That’s what he is, a traffic cop.”
“I can only state the hard facts, and the hard fact is that he is a member of the secret police.”
Tom Cassidy half rose from his chair. Two guards pushed away from the wall behind the committee table in case he made a rush, but all he did was hold out a hand and say, “I’d like to see that.”
“No, sir. You will not see it. I will not give up the source of this information.” McCarthy was playing to the cameras. “I will not put in jeopardy the life of the brave American who testified to these facts. I will never give up the names of those courageous men and women in government who risk everything to bring these matters to light.”
“I thought in America if you were accused of something you got to see your accuser. I want to know who said this stuff about me.”
“You dare, sir, to come in here and talk to me about America? I am trying to protect the America your cousin and men like him are trying to tear down. I will not aid them by exposing the name of the patriot who gave me this information. I will not risk the lives of the brave men and women who step out of the shadows to help our fight to keep America safe. No, sir, you will not see the names.”
Tom Cassidy sank back into his seat.
McCarthy was not finished. “Mr. Kasnavietski…”
“My name is Cassidy.” It was a weak protest.
“… are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party or an organization affiliated with the Communist Party?”
“No. I have not, and I am not
. Never. I’m a Republican, for Christ’s sake. I voted for Dewey. I voted for Eisenhower.”
McCarthy picked up a sheaf of papers and held them high, playing to the audience. “I have in my hand the membership rolls of the American Theatre Alliance, an organization that has been deemed by the attorney general’s office to be an affiliate of the American Communist Party—”
“Now wait a minute,” Tom Cassidy said, outraged. “I was a member of the alliance in 1935, and I can assure you it had nothing to do with the Communist Party, and furthermore—”
McCarthy bulldozed him down. “I will not wait a minute. We do not have time to wait a minute while people like you continue to support the very enemies who are trying to destroy us.”
“I was a member for six months in 1935, and—”
McCarthy bulled over him again. “So you admit to membership in a Communist affiliate. Very well. Let’s move on. Mr. Kasnavietski, when you applied to become a citizen of this great country, you swore on your application that you had never been arrested, never convicted of a crime. Was that a true statement of fact?”
Cassidy saw Harry Gould put his hand on his father’s arm. The two men leaned together to confer in whispers. His father straightened and ran a hand over his hair to settle himself. “Mr. Chairman, under the protection of the Fifth Amendment, I respectfully decline to answer that question on the grounds that it might incriminate me.” He leaned back in his chair as if braced for a storm.
What the hell? Cassidy wondered. What was this?
McCarthy flung his hands up in disgust. “Once again we have before us a man who hides behind the very Constitution he seeks to destroy. Another Fifth Amendment traitor. However, Mr. Kasnavietski, you do not have to answer that question. I will answer the question.” He put his hand out, and Roy Cohn gave him a sheaf of papers, which McCarthy held above his head and shook so the papers rattled. “I have in my hand an arrest report from the Syracuse, New York, Police Department. It states that on April 28, 1926, a man going under the name of Tom Kasner was arrested for illegally transporting liquor. That he, and six other men, were arrested while driving trucks full of illegal liquor that had been smuggled across the border from Canada. The fingerprints of said Tom Kasner match the fingerprints you submitted when you illegally applied for citizenship in this great country. The photograph is clearly you. What do you have to say now, sir?”
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