by Sharon Potts
“It seems that way.”
“I’m sorry I ever got involved.”
“Are you?” Julian brought his arm around her, tightened it. “But then we never would have met.”
She rested her head in the crook of his neck and closed her eyes. Inhaled his smell, sweat and something like the licorice candy she loved as a child.
He took the cognac glass out of her hand. She heard the clink of glass against glass as he set it on the coffee table. Then his soft fingertips touched her face. Gently massaged her temple, her cheeks. Deeper.
Her breath quickened. No, she wasn’t sorry.
She leaned toward him, her mouth open. His sweet breath mixed with hers. Then his lips pressed against her lips. His tongue against her tongue. His chest against her chest. The ugliness of the last few days faded. Bill’s near death. Isaac Goldstein’s deception. Only one face remained.
Julian.
She dug her fingers into his back. Felt his kisses up and down her neck, behind her ear. His hands in her hair, squeezing her shoulders, running down her spine. Digging deeper, deeper. Kneading out her childhood loneliness and shame. Expelling the knots in her life as she flinched beneath his strong fingers.
Hot. It was too hot. Her sweater came off. His shirt. Her pants, then his.
Their naked bodies burned up against each other’s. Burned up the hate, the bitterness, the lies, the deception.
She cried out. A moment later, she felt him shudder, then lie still. She buried her face in his chest and drifted off to sleep, dreaming of licorice.
The sound of clicking fingernails awakened her. Against the windows, icy snowflakes, or perhaps hail.
A dull light filled the room. For a moment, she stayed perfectly still. Her head rested in a nest of soft hair and hard muscles. Julian was breathing deeply, his breastbone expanding and contracting. Gently, she pushed herself up and watched him sleep. His face was relaxed. The tension gone. Thick black eyelashes. Pale veins on his eyelids. Full lips. Tiny cleft in his chin. High forehead in a perfectly shaped head. She’d never seen him like this before. Hadn’t realized how beautiful he was.
She could make out the time on the microwave. 10:03. Had they only been asleep an hour? She blinked again. It was morning. And everything had changed.
Julian shifted beneath her. Opened his eyes. Blue and clear. He smiled. “Hello.”
“Good morning.”
He stretched. “Is it morning?”
“It is. We’ve been asleep for twelve hours.”
He pressed his hand against her heart. She could feel his pulse pounding along with hers. Then he kissed her. And the heat began again.
At some point, they realized neither one of them was going anywhere. They didn’t need to squeeze a lifetime into an hour. They showered. He made coffee. She poured juice and popped four frozen waffles into the toaster.
Julian, in gym shorts and a T-shirt, came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. “I like your shirt.” She was wearing one of his old jerseys, sleeves rolled. “But I’d like it better off.”
“First, we eat,” she said.
“Tough task-master.”
They carried the juice, coffee, and plates of waffles over to the glass coffee table and sat on the sofa.
Julian brought his last forkful of waffle dripping with syrup into his mouth. “Man. I was actually starving.” He leaned back against the cushions and gazed out toward the window. The snowflakes had formed a frozen shield making it impossible to see out.
“So cold out there,” she said. “I don’t want to leave our cocoon.”
He brought her close to him. “Then let’s not.”
She picked up her mug of coffee. The cognac glasses from last night were still on the coffee table. They reminded her that their cocoon wasn’t impenetrable.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I was just remembering my grandmother’s letter. I wish I could forget all about Isaac Goldstein.”
“Like your grandmother and mother did?” Julian said. “They tried to erase him from their lives and it didn’t work out very well for them.”
The room felt chilly. The magic gone. “What are you suggesting? That I invest more of myself in this bastard who brought nothing but pain to his family?”
“A few hours ago you labeled him a hero because he didn’t give Saul away.”
“A few hours ago, I didn’t know he’d sacrificed my grandmother and mother for another woman.”
“It’s got to make you wonder though, doesn’t it?” he asked, rubbing his thighs. His arms and legs were muscled like a runner’s.
“What?”
“How strong his love for the woman in black must have been.”
“Don’t romanticize it, Julian.”
“Can’t help it. I’m in that kind of mood.” He pushed her hair away from her neck and kissed her ear.
She wiggled away from him. “I understand about being in love, but he had responsibilities. A wife. A daughter.”
“He still may have been covering for Saul,” Julian said. “That would make him somewhat heroic.”
“Bien. Let’s leave it at that.”
“But something doesn’t make sense to me. How come no one seems to know of Saul’s career as a spy?”
“The Soviets knew,” she said. “Saul was Slugger.”
“Maybe. We’ve been assuming Isaac was protecting him, but in your grandmother’s letter, Isaac said he was dying for the woman in black.”
She folded her bare legs under her on the sofa and took another sip of coffee. As much as she wanted to move on from Isaac Goldstein, the analytical journalist side of her brain protested. Grandma Betty’s letter didn’t support their theory that Isaac Goldstein had been protecting Saul. “You’re right,” she said. “We need to figure out who the woman in black was.”
“And what she did that Isaac was willing to take the fall for.” Julian frowned. “You realize the significance of this. The woman in black was very likely the traitor.”
A crackling noise came from the window, as though the expanding ice was about to break up.
“Maybe,” she said. “But it’s also possible that Isaac was so guilty about loving her that he chose the electric chair as a form of suicide.”
“Suicide out of guilt?”
“Why not?” she said. “Saul effectively committed suicide through radiation poisoning. Bill tried to kill himself with pills. Both of them felt tremendous guilt.”
Julian shook his head. “Your grandmother’s letter said Isaac was making a sacrifice for the woman in black. That doesn’t sound like guilt.”
“True.” She thought about Betty’s letter. “The word sacrifice sounds more like he was covering for her.”
“I’m sure we can figure this out,” Julian said. “Nana’s told me stories relating to Saul and you’ve read about the communist movement and the players in the thirties and forties. Let’s pool what we know.”
The fear of discovering something else that would hurt her held her back, but the need to see this through won out. “Okay.” She put her coffee mug down on the table. “Let’s start with the known players in the spy ring. There was Florence Heller, who gave the most damaging testimony against Isaac.”
“Do you think she may have been the woman in black?”
Annette worked the possibility through. “Why would he be willing to make a sacrifice for Heller if she was pointing the finger at him?”
“Love can make a person do strange things.”
“True. But Arnie Weissman believes Heller was protecting Joseph Bartow.”
“Maybe there was a love triangle and Heller chose Bartow over Isaac. That may have been the reason he was willing to go to the electric chair.”
“There are other pieces that don’t fit,” she said. “Supposedly Albert Shevsky, who was working at Los Alamos, was the point person leaking the information, but he only had intermediate clearance, so it was highly unlikely that he would have had access to the atom
ic-bomb technology.”
Julian scowled.
“What?”
“I’m just remembering something Nana told me.” He rubbed his forehead. “She told me about a dinner Saul went to when he was at Los Alamos where he met the Soviet agent Dubrovski.”
“The one who was at the Popular Front meeting?”
“That’s right,” he said. “I’d assumed that was when Dubrovski recruited Saul, but now I’m wondering about the other people who were at that dinner.”
“Who?”
“Nana’s friend Flossie had organized it. She was in Albuquerque to take care of her boyfriend Joey, who was at a tuberculosis sanitarium. And Flossie’s cousin Bertie was working over at Los Alamos as a machinist with intermediate clearance.”
“Intermediate clearance,” she repeated. “Like Albert Shevsky.”
Flossie. Joey. Bertie. The names hung in the air as the ice on the window snapped. And then everything snapped into focus for Annette.
“Mon dieu. They’re nicknames. Flossie, Joey and Bertie are nicknames for Florence, Joseph, and Albert. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Florence Heller, Joseph Bartow and Albert Shevsky were part of the spy ring that Isaac was accused of masterminding.”
Julian rubbed his unshaven cheek. He looked disturbed about something. “Flossie, Joey and Bertie also all knew Nana’s friend Yitzy.”
Annette felt a spasm of nausea as a troubling idea came to her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You just got very pale.”
She picked up the mug of coffee and took a sip. It was icy cold. “I’m not sure I want to go there, but do you think Isaac was Yitzy?”
“That occurred to me, too, but let’s not jump to conclusions until we talk it through.”
She nodded, though she was terrified of where this was heading.
“Okay,” he said. “We know from Nana’s stories that Yitzy was her age, so he would have been born around 1918. He was an outspoken communist who attended City College in the late thirties and majored in engineering.”
Just like Isaac Goldstein, Annette thought.
Julian’s forehead was in a scowl, as though he was working through a math or logic problem. “Isaac, call him ‘A’, was friends with Florence, Joseph and Albert, call them ‘B’,” Julian continued. “And Yitzy, call him ‘C’, was friends with Flossie, Joey and Bertie, call them ‘D’. We’re hypothesizing that B equals D. So logically, if A is to B, as C is to D, and B equals D, then it follows that A equals C.”
Isaac equals Yitzy. Julian hadn’t needed to say it aloud. It was plain enough to her.
“It’s still just a theory,” he said. “There are probably lots of other ways all these pieces could make sense.”
She watched sections of ice slide down the windows, creating crevices of visibility. She didn’t want to look at it, but she couldn’t help herself. If Isaac had been Yitzy, there were implications to consider. Mariasha had been in love with Yitzy. But that had been a youthful infatuation. It wouldn’t have continued once they were married, or could it have?
“Let’s think about this hypothetically,” Julian said. “If Isaac was Yitzy, then everyone in the spy ring was connected, possibly as early as 1935.” Julian ran his hand over his cheek. “That’s when Nana and Flossie went to the anti-war demonstration at City College. Then later they all met Bertie and Joey and Dubrovski at the Popular Front meeting.”
Annette was only half listening. She remembered something in Grandma Betty’s letter. Betty had seen a woman at the prison who seemed familiar, but Betty couldn’t place her. A disturbing possibility was forming in her head. She needed to stop Julian, but he was too wound up, his grandmother’s stories suddenly coming together for him.
“But it goes back even earlier,” Julian said. “Nana became friends with Yitzy at summer camp. She was supposed to meet Yitzy at Yankee stadium by the baseball-bat smokestack, but Saul got sick and she never went.” Julian chewed on his lower lip. “My dad took me there when I was a kid. He told me the smokestack was patterned after Babe Ruth’s bat. The Slugger.”
No, Julian. Don’t go there.
“I wonder if the Slugger code name wasn’t a reference to the bat, but to the smokestack where Yitzy and my grandmother were supposed to meet.” He took in an abrupt breath as though startled by something. “Damn,” he said. “Yitzy may have been Slugger.”
“I don’t think so.” She didn’t want to say the words. Saying things aloud could make them true and the repercussions of this truth would be devastating. But she knew it was only a matter of time before Julian arrived at the possibility himself. “If my grandfather was Yitzy,” she said. “Then your grandmother was Slugger.”
“Nana?” he said, shaking his head. “Slugger?”
Annette felt the sting of her words just before they dropped from her mouth like hailstones. “Yes, Julian. And she was also very likely the mystery woman in black.”
CHAPTER 46
Slugger. The mystery woman in black. That person couldn’t be Nana, Julian thought. And Yitzy couldn’t have been Isaac Goldstein.
They had to be mistaken. Because if they were right, that would mean Isaac Goldstein had been in love with Nana and had sacrificed himself for her. And it also meant his grandmother had been the traitor.
“It’s impossible.” His voice sounded too loud in his own ears. “There has to be another explanation.”
Annette looked at him with sad-urchin eyes. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” he said, standing up to get dressed. “But I have a feeling my grandmother does.”
Julian could tell that Nana was perplexed when they arrived at her apartment. She smiled at him uncertainly. His gaze brushed over the crimson sofa, the turquoise chairs, the sculptures in front of the windows. It was all familiar, yet everything seemed slightly off, as though he was viewing it through a hangover.
Annette squeezed his hand. Whatever the truth turns out to be, we’re in this together, she had said as they walked over from his apartment. It was almost exactly what he’d said to her yesterday when she was confronting her grandfather’s demons. And now, they certainly would be in this together if their theories turned out to be correct. The truth hinged on whether Nana’s old flame, Yitzy, was in fact Isaac Goldstein.
A record was playing on the old Victrola. Over the scratches, a young man’s voice sang, sweet and trembling.
Believe me, deceive me
Darling, just don’t leave me.
Nana reached up and touched Julian’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Let’s sit down, Nana.”
She gave a little nod, then wobbled to her favorite chair, so shaky it seemed she would topple over. She hoisted herself into it. Her black sweater and black stretch pants hung on her tiny frame.
The woman in black? Impossible. Nana would explain everything.
You are the apple of my soul
If you love me, don’t let me go.
He and Annette sat close together on the sofa, their hands intertwined. He thought he could smell their lovemaking from a few hours before. Could Nana have had a love affair with Annette’s grandfather? Impossible.
“Nana.” His voice came out rough. He cleared his throat. “Nana, who was Yitzy?”
She started, like a bird hearing a loud noise. “Yitzy. I told you. He was the boy I met at camp. Then we met again in college.”
“What was his real name?”
She looked from Julian to Annette, then back to Julian. “He was a young man from my past. That’s all.”
“Did you stay in touch with him after college?”
Nana rubbed the arthritic bump on her pointer finger. “What difference does it make?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “If it doesn’t make a difference, why won’t you tell us?”
One promise I will make to you
Wherever I am, whatever you choose.
“That’s Yitzy.” She gestured with her chin toward the Victrola.
Th
e voice on the record. The boy from summer camp, and then from college. Why was she still playing his record? Unless she was the woman in black.
He could hear Annette’s strained breathing next to him. He didn’t dare meet her eye.
“What was Yitzy’s real name?” he asked his grandmother again.
“Certain things are better left unsaid.”
“Like what you didn’t tell me about Saul?”
His grandmother flinched, then turned to stare at the sculpture of Boy Playing Stickball. The boy seemed forlorn in the dull light coming from the window.
“I went to my mother’s house last night,” he said, his voice gentler. Attacking Nana wasn’t the best way to approach this. He was sure she’d have a logical explanation for all the half-truths she had told him. “We talked about the painting, Nana. The writing on the back. We also talked about the fact that Saul was sabotaging U.S. bombs after the war.”
His grandmother closed her eyes and became utterly still.
“Nana?”
She slowly opened her eyes.
“Did you know Saul was modifying the sensors of American bombs so they’d fail during detonation?” he asked. “That he’d incapacitated hundreds, maybe even thousands, of them?”
“Yes.” The word came out as a whisper.
“Whose idea was that?”
She didn’t answer. The radiator clanked off. “It was Saul’s,” she said. “I had no idea what he was doing until he told me shortly before he died. He also told me he deliberately exposed himself to radiation.”
“It wasn’t exactly deliberate,” Julian said. “The radiation was a consequence of modifying the bombs.”
“But he knew he was exposing himself,” Nana said. “Saul knew it would kill him. He did it anyway, even after all I’d sacrificed for him.”
After all Nana had sacrificed? What had she sacrificed for Saul? And then an unsettling possibility came to him. “What about during the war?” he asked. “Had it been Saul’s idea to alter the formulas in the documents he passed on to the Soviets?”