“Thank you, Simon. If I may call you Simon?”
“Of course.” What had she called me until then?
“I explained that I’d tried my hand at some sonnets about my life with Junchi. Amazing! What a coincidence! The congressman loved poetry! Oh . . . and . . . he hoped I wouldn’t repeat what I’d told him about Junchi’s background. Not to anyone. Was there anything he could do for me? I said nothing could make me happier than seeing my poems in print. He’d see what he could do. I didn’t feel wildly hopeful. But that same week Warren Landry called. He wanted to look at my poems, and then he called back and said he wanted to publish them. With a few changes. Improvements. You know how brilliant Warren is. I don’t have to tell you.”
“What kind of changes did Warren suggest?” I wondered what the poems were like before Warren’s edit.
Florence dipped her pita into the tzatziki and slipped it expertly into her mouth. “Simon, you’ve stopped eating. I can’t possibly finish all this marvelous food by myself.”
Obediently, I tore off some bread and dipped it in the sauce. The dill and mint were delicious, the yogurt slightly off.
“Warren was adamant about removing every mention of Junchi’s father. He said that politics and history made the poems seem shrill. Shrill was the last thing I wanted. I took those poems out. I had a metaphor about arms, about military armaments versus putting my loving arms around my son, but Warren cut that too. He said it would limit my readership. Controversy would keep my readers from being purely heartened by my sacrifice. If Warren didn’t like a metaphor, I was happy to lose it.”
An edge had come into Florence’s voice. She was making sure I understood that she was comparing me negatively to Warren. Why wasn’t I line-editing her book?
I wondered why he and the others bothered placating Florence. Who would believe a dippy middle-aged woman poet in a mouse-colored coat? Something about her must have scared them. It certainly scared me. In any case they had her now. Her son had gotten into trouble. She wouldn’t want that known. If I mentioned it, our amiable lunch would be over. I wished that being with Florence didn’t make me miss Anya so intensely, that being with a lonely person didn’t make me feel so alone.
Florence said, “The rest is in the poems. I was amazed my book did well. I think it touched a nerve in people who want to believe that something good came out of the war. I guess we don’t like remembering we dropped the bomb. Of course we had to do it to save millions of American lives.”
Why was I thinking of Ethel? Because the reporters had said that she and Julius had endangered millions of lives. Eisenhower said it, and so did the judge who sentenced them to death. Saving and losing millions of lives. Be careful when you hear that.
I said, “I’m glad you’re pleased with how we’re publishing you.” I hoped I sounded like an editor. I thought I sounded like a jerk.
“Am I glad that you’re publishing me? I’m just glad they haven’t killed me.”
Was Florence joking? I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t taken her for a joker. Who was going to kill her? Instinct told me: You don’t want to know. I knew too much already.
I let a silence pass, waited a beat, then laughed, and Florence laughed too. Ha-ha. Florence had been kidding about someone wanting to kill her.
In a novel like The Vixen, that would be when the hero asks, Florence, do you think you might ever want to tell someone that your book was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency? Why exactly do you think they want to keep you quiet about your son’s gangster–CIA puppet father?
But this was not a novel, and I was not its hero.
I said, “Your poems are wonderful! It’s an honor to work with you, Florence. I can’t wait for your book to come out.”
Chapter 13
It was hard to stay hopeful, and yet I continued to hope that the evidence piling up against Warren would turn out to be a misunderstanding. If not a simple misunderstanding, then a complicated one. Warren would prove that he was what I’d thought: A privileged, powerful, confident guy who loved literature and wanted to publish good books. Books from foreign countries. But even that phrase, foreign countries, suggested something sinister and more complicated after Preston’s accusations.
Florence had corroborated Preston’s story. Warren and his cohorts bought Florence’s bargain-basement silence. Why would poetry featuring a Japanese gangster with covert ties to the US arouse the attention of a politician who arranged to publish the book with targeted excisions? It was hardly the wildest thing that Preston told me. I wondered if Warren gave the operation one of his arty names. Operation Icarus.
I kept telling myself that the truth about Warren and The Vixen couldn’t be what it seemed. My memory of Preston was already blurring and receding. Nothing was proven. The meaning of Florence’s story depended on how (and if) you connected the dots between a yakuza and a suite of sonnets about a foreign adoption. For all I knew, Florence was as paranoid as Preston. I was still defending Warren, against all evidence and common sense, still telling myself that everything depended on the conclusions one drew from gossip and rumors.
The problem was still The Vixen. Whatever Warren had or hadn’t done in the past, The Vixen remained all too current and real. Of all the things that Preston said, the one that stuck in my mind—the one that seemed most probable—was that someone saw the novel as three hundred pages of pure propaganda.
Had I sensed that from the start? If so, I’d repressed it and clung to the official story: the project was all about money. How ironic that greed had become the best-case option, less loathsome than an effort to influence world opinion with cheap commercial fiction. Or was I just too undefended, susceptible to Warren, to Preston, to Anya, to anyone who told me what to think?
* * *
Once we know that something turned out all right, that we navigated a rough patch more or less intact, it becomes harder to pity our younger self or remember the grief and confusion, the dread of the disaster that didn’t happen, the panic of the deer frozen in the headlights of the car that stopped in time. Now I see my situation for what it was, but at that time it was everything. My past, my future, my work, my love. My entire life.
It all seemed so serious, perilous, and tragic. As if my mortal soul were in danger. Every small step forward might be a leap into the abyss. I believed my life would never change, that everything was final. In a way, a bad way, I had turned into Warren. Like my boss and his CIA buddies, I believed that The Vixen could convince the world that the Rosenbergs were guilty. I feared that millions might read it and accept its view of Ethel or Esther, or whatever the novel called her.
I believed that it was my moral duty to prevent The Vixen from seeing the light of day, at least in its present form. I owed it to Ethel’s memory. I owed it to my mother. And I needed to find out what happened to Anya. Who wrote the book if she didn’t? Was it a CIA plot?
If I threatened to expose Warren’s ties to the CIA and he fired me, he’d find someone else to edit the book, which would appear as is. While I, having stood on principle, would have ruined my life. I would be unemployed. Unemployable. After I was investigated by the appropriate committee, my name would go on a list. Dad would have to beg the sporting goods store to hire me part-time.
All night the numbers on my watch glowered at me in the dark. Hours pretended to be minutes. At least, not sleeping, I didn’t dream. My waking dreams were nightmares. Night after night I saw Warren’s thin lips unleashing a volley of insults. I saw his face swell into the giant mask through which you entered the Terror Tomb. I heard Anya whispering in my ear, Don’t move. Let them do the work. Who did she mean by them? The demons, the pirates, the ghosts? The poky little teacup rumbling over the track? Their voices were like tunes I couldn’t get out of my head. What tormented me most was: I would never see Anya again. I would never find her.
Just a week before, I might have figured out how to ask Elaine about Preston and Anya. But after getting Anya’s note, after talking to Presto
n and Florence, I didn’t trust anyone. I couldn’t tell if I was being paranoid or sensible, and not knowing scared me.
The only solution was to talk to Warren. It would require all my courage, but how else would I know if Preston was telling the truth? In the sagas, wise men give advice about how to find something out, on the sly. The bird and animal gods say: Go here, pretend you’re this person, ask for that person, say this, then say that. But how could I interrogate a trained spy, if that was what Warren was, and make it seem like conversation? Produce your half of the Jell-O box and see if the stranger’s half matches.
Florence’s explanation of how her poems came to be published neither convicted nor exonerated Warren, but it did echo Preston. I needed to meet with Warren, to hear what he said, to find a way, however circumspect, to find out what really happened.
In any case, I had a good reason for needing to see him. Our author had disappeared! That must be the definition of what an editor needs to tell his boss.
In private.
* * *
I’d only been to Warren’s office once before, when he’d welcomed me, my first day at work. The décor was British gentleman’s club circa 1930. Dark wooden bookcases, deep red carpeting, subtle lighting, portraits of hunting dogs at attention, waiting for the bugle’s call to terrorize a perfectly innocent fox.
A vixen.
That first time, I’d wondered if all those leather-bound books were real. Dry-mouthed and on edge, I imagined that some were hollowed out to conceal Warren’s premium liquor bottles. This time the books suggested dead drops for espionage exchanges, hiding places for guns, and the painted dogs seemed poised to hunt down a fugitive slave or secret Jew.
At one point Warren had casually mentioned that he hoped to place The Vixen at American libraries all over the world. Though I’d been uneasy about the prospect of an international readership for Anya’s novel, the library program had sounded worthy and pragmatic: spreading the products of American literary culture. But now the idea of the American libraries seemed less wholesome, more nefarious. Propaganda 101. The Rosenbergs’ crime would be freely available to read in, even borrow from, friendly libraries worldwide.
How did one find out if somebody worked for the CIA? Agents were trained to conceal their mission. I was not a spy or a detective. I was a student of literature, a graduate in Folklore and Mythology!
“My dear boy.” Warren half rose from his desk and waved me into a club chair. “What is so important that you needed to talk to me asap, as you so charmingly told my secretary. Wait. Don’t tell me. Is this about Anya leaving for Corfu?”
“Corfu?” That was what Preston had said. What Anya wrote in her letter.
“Corfu. With her understandably concerned parents. The child is brilliant, but she has periods of, let’s say, extreme behavior. As soon as her parents sense an episode coming on, they send her to that rest home where you met her. And if that fails, they spirit her out of the country to lie around on some delightful Mediterranean beach until she’s feeling better.”
“When what fails?”
“Her time in the . . . facility.”
“Do you know what made them think she was about to have an episode?” I tried to give the word the same stress as Warren, though I couldn’t tell if his tone was serious or ironic. It was the kind of question I would never normally ask, but my fears for Anya’s safety made me braver than normal.
“Ah yes,” said Warren. “The episodes. I believe there have been several. Some have lasted for quite a while. According to her poor parents, they begin with a rather dramatic uptick in the lies, the drug use, and the acting out.”
“The lies? The drug use?” I feared that I already knew about the acting out.
“Yes, I’m afraid. Diet pills are hardly the handmaidens of truth. Our vixen would make the most outrageous claims about what she had and hadn’t done.”
Had Anya lied about not writing the book? It was almost a relief. At least it made things simpler. Only then did I realize that Warren was talking about her in the past tense.
“Is she all right? Are you sure? Why wasn’t I told she was leaving?” I tried to make it sound like a series of questions and not accusations.
“Someone would have informed you. Sooner or later. We all have a lot on our plates, Simon. The world does not revolve around you. Your Vixen is not the only book on our list.”
So, it had become my Vixen. “And what now? What about Anya?”
“Don’t worry. Let’s assume she’ll be back as soon as someone wants to interview or photograph her. No one held a gun to her head to make her pose for that author portrait. Anyway, I’d be off to Corfu too if someone offered me a free trip. Wouldn’t you? Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that she’s back in time for publication. If not . . . Well, we’re fortunate to have that author portrait.”
I filled my lungs with air, exhaled, and inhaled again.
I said, “The last time I saw Anya, she told me she didn’t write The Vixen.”
Warren laughed. “My point exactly. Mental instability is hardly a rare thing in writers, as you’re about to find out.”
As I was about to find out? Meaning . . . if I stayed in publishing? Apparently, he wasn’t firing me. But did I want this job? Did I want to be the lowest-ranking, most underinformed agent of the CIA? I hated admitting, even to myself, that I preferred working for Warren and his evil associates to helping my father at the sporting goods store. That was how corrupt I was, how shallow. I wanted an interesting life more than I wanted to do what was right.
“Insanity comes with the territory!” Warren was practically crowing. “Anya wrote the blessed book. Scout’s honor. Trust me. Do what you’ve been doing and then leave the goddamn novel alone and let it do whatever it’s going to do. I assume it’s what Anya wrote only . . . a bit . . . smoother. I’ll take a quick look, if you want. Or not. Give it a light edit. Or not. Just ask me. Or not. I appreciate the work you’re putting in, Simon. We can basically print what I gave you all those months ago. I trust that by now you’ve made the novel into something no less commercial but more in line with something we might actually publish. Finish what you’re doing, and then we’ll just go ahead and put this sucker into production.”
“That’s great,” I said. “That would be great.”
Warren picked up some papers from his desk. Time to leave.
Was it Freud who said that the most trenchant insights occur when a session is ending? Journalists say they get the best material after they turn off the tape recorder.
I said, “I went out to that . . . sanitarium to look for Anya, and I had a sort of conversation with your former partner. Preston.”
“Thank you. Did you say Preston? I do know my former partner’s name. And what sort of conversation is a sort of conversation?”
I winced. “I meant conversation. We had a conversation.”
“Hilarious,” Warren said. “You really are the wittiest young man.”
“Preston is quite a character,” I said.
Warren did a stagy double take, then cackled. Part rooster, part lifetime smoker. “Okay. Hang on. I get it now. The emergency. Your tone. The bullshit about Anya. So Preston treated you to one of his rants about my crimes against humanity, and you want to know if it’s true. Am I a CIA superspy?”
I must have nodded.
“Well, let’s have a little liquid help with this top secret question.” As Warren stood and crossed the room, I was briefly transfixed by the costly beauty of his fawn-colored suit. I would never have a suit like that. How shameful that, with so much at stake, I was suffering over fashion.
Warren extracted a whiskey bottle from a scooped-out faux book. The pleasure of seeing my old fantasy confirmed was momentary, at best. He was the boss. He could keep a full bar on his desk if he wanted. But he liked the theater, the Prohibition-era drama. He filled two shot glasses so high that whiskey splashed my hand when I took it. I wiped my hand on my pants, which I hated for being so obv
iously cheaper than Warren’s.
“Cheers,” he said.
“Cheers,” I said.
We poured the whiskey down our throats. Everything depended on my not coughing.
He said, “So you want to know if I attached incendiary devices to starlings and dosed research subjects with psychedelic drugs and watched them jump out hotel windows. You want to know if I staged coups in Central America, overthrew legitimately elected governments, started civil wars, installed dictators. If I am responsible for the deaths of I-forget-how-many Albanians—”
“Eighty-seven,” I said, despite myself. “Eighty-seven Albanians.”
“My God. Old Preston really got to you, didn’t he? Well, okay. I’ll admit it about the Albanians. It haunts me still.” Warren grinned. “Imagining those Albanian broads in their last . . . Well! I take the blame for that, unless some journalist or senator gets nosy after all these years. In which case I have no idea what you’re talking about. Anyway, I’m kidding. You realize that, don’t you, Simon? I suppose I’m not busy enough—spying, ordering executions, overthrowing governments, spreading lies, and running the greatest literary publishing house in New York, if not the entire world. I suppose I have endless free time in which to publish propaganda disguised as fiction written to justify US policy and the flawlessly transparent trial and execution of two Russian spies?”
So much for the stealth inquisition. Warren knew everything Preston said and more. I chose to find it reassuring. A guilty man would never lay out the charges against him like that. He’d made it sound like the fantasy that it probably was.
Warren said, “You want to know one great thing about being American as opposed to, let’s say, Russian? One of the many great things about living where we live, one of the blessings, is that I don’t fucking have to tell you if I did those things or not. This is not a fucking show trial. No one’s forcing me to confess. I don’t have to say, Yes, old boy, I did this. No, dear fellow, I didn’t do that. I don’t have to tell you if I am a literary publisher or a secret agent. Unless you’re deposing me under oath, which means nothing, either. Any bottom-feeder can take the Fifth. One thing McCarthy got right: taking the Fifth doesn’t mean you’re innocent. ‘I invoke my privilege under the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer that question.’” Warren’s face contorted in savage mimicry of a noncooperating witness.
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