“Who is the other?”
“Bayard Rustin is his name. He’s close to that preacher who led the bus boycott in Montgomery, Martin Luther King Jr. The staff of the House Un-American Activities Committee has hounded him for a long time. I would expect Rustin’s learned the ropes around Congress. It’s the best I can do.”
Where had Liz heard that name before? She replied, “It would be a start, sir. We don’t have anything else to go on.” And then it came to her. Rustin was mentioned in Tom’s notebooks.
“I’ll be glad to call them.”
Liz brightened. “I’m planning to go on to Washington tomorrow. I’m booked into the Shorham Hotel, the one Folsom uses.”
“Well, neither Marshall nor Rustin would be able to meet you there.”
Liz looked at Franklin blankly. “Why not?”
“The Shorham is a segregated facility, Mrs. Spencer, as is most of Washington.”
Liz flushed. “How stupid of me. I never thought of that.”
“White people seldom do. Look, Howard University has a guest house. Let me make a call. I think you’ll be more comfortable there anyway.” He picked up the phone. “Leonore, get me long distance.”
“Thanks.” Liz sat still and listened as Franklin made three long-distance calls. When he had finished, he put down the receiver and handed her his notes.
“All arranged. We’re in luck. Rustin is actually meeting with Marshall day after tomorrow—organizing protests to implement school desegregation. I’ve arranged for you to have a few minutes with them.”
“That’s wonderful. You’ve been so helpful.” Then she thought. “One more small favour. Is there anywhere here I can cash a traveller’s cheque in British pounds? I’m down to my last thirty-five cents US.”
Franklin stood. Then he withdrew a billfold from inside his coat, opened it, and handed Liz a ten-dollar bill. “You’ll never find currency exchange between here and the UN Building on the East River. Please take this to tide you over till you can cash one of your cheques.”
“I couldn’t.”
He came around the desk and forced it into her hand. “I am confident you’re good for it. But I do have one question, Mrs. Spencer.” She nodded. “Why are you so sure Tom is innocent?”
“Because we’re in love.”
Franklin smiled and opened his door. “Is that really a good reason?”
Two days and a long Greyhound bus ride later, Liz was in the middle-class Negro neighbourhood of a still segregated city, the first one she had ever experienced—coloured washrooms, coloured drinking fountains, overdeference from the cabdriver, and the feeling of being both out of place and a bit of an honoured guest on the Howard University campus. In her room she was struck by a large framed photograph of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. The date on the frame was 1922. But it was clear that the audience stretching back along the mall to the Washington Monument was strictly segregated, whites to the right, blacks to the left.
Liz was ushered into a large room filled with law books, in the middle of which two men were seated at a table. One was light-skinned and dressed even more formally and more elegantly than Franklin had been, down to a monogrammed French cuff at which he was tugging. Though seated, he looked tall and unapproachable. This man looked like an advocate before the US Supreme Court. He had to be Thurgood Marshall.
The other man was dressed more casually and more modishly, she thought, had a moustache and goatee, longer hair, and flashed a smile of greeting absent from Marshall. He rose. “I’m Bayard Rustin. This is Mr. Marshall. We’re glad to meet you.” Somehow, Liz thought, Marshall doesn’t seem quite as glad as Rustin does. Quickly she discovered why. Rustin continued, “You are a friend of Tom Wrought’s?” Before she could answer he went on, “I suppose Tom told you that we knew each other back in New York before the war.”
“I did know that, yes.” Liz recalled the first pages of Tom’s Confessions. At last, she thought, a coincidence that might help Tom.
“Well, Thurgood here won’t want to hear it, but we were in the Young Communist League together at City College. We used to—”
“What can we do for you, Mrs. Spencer?” Marshall interrupted, pulling out a chair and offering it. He was evidently all business, unbending in his tone. Is it because I’m a woman, or white, or just because I’m an interruption imposed by having to do a favour for someone—Dr. Franklin?
“I’ll try to be brief.” Liz sat down. By now she had a cogent narrative of Tom’s predicament that didn’t take more than a few minutes, one that answered obvious and immediate questions. She finished, gulped a breath, and made her request. “What I need is some help trying to track down this man, Vincent Folsom, who is on the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee staff and used to work for the FBI. Then I’ll need to learn as much about him as I can.” Liz didn’t think she needed to add without his finding out about my interest. She opened her bag and pulled out the newspaper cutting with the photo of Senator Eastland and his aide. “Here is a picture.” She passed it across to Marshall, who gave it a cursory glance and brushed it along to Rustin.
Rustin looked up at Liz. Very slowly he said, “I know this man.”
Marshall was brusque. “Yes, I’m afraid we all know the egregious Senator Eastland.”
“No, it’s the other one,” said Liz.
Rustin looked at Liz, turned to Marshall, and was about to speak, stopped, and looked back at Liz. “I think this is a conversation we need to have alone, Mrs. Spencer, without Mr. Marshall. We’ll be done in about a quarter of an hour.” He rose and went to the door, gesturing Liz into the waiting room. “Perhaps you’d care to wait out here, Mrs. Spencer.” Liz took the hint.
Bayard Rustin and Liz Spencer were seated at a booth in a bar across the street and three blocks away from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s offices. “One of my favourite places in DC,” Ruskin began. “Hard to find a bar downtown that isn’t segregated. What will you have, Mrs. Spencer?”
Liz had no idea how to answer this question. “A sherry?”
“Not sure they have any; I’ll check.” He rose and walked to the bar. As Liz looked round, she saw she was the only woman in the place. But it wasn’t crowded, and she thought nothing much of it. Rustin turned back from the bar and shook his head. She thought for a moment, then had an idea. “Gin and tonic, please.” It seemed too early, but Liz had no taste for beer.
Rustin returned with a martini for himself and a gin and tonic. “Now, Mrs. Spencer, what I have to tell you is stuff that could complicate my life even more than it is already.”
“Complicate your life?”
“Make it even more difficult to do what I do for the movement—the civil rights movement. So, you can use it to trace out your leads, but don’t ever expect me to confirm it publicly.”
“Agreed.” She nodded her head.
“Well, I think I know your Mr. Vincent Folsom, but not under that name. I only knew him under the name Vinnie. It was in the late ’40s. We met in bars like this one . . .” He looked round. So did Liz, but she was evidently not seeing what Rustin had indicated by his look. He would have to explain. “You see, this is a . . . bar for men only. For homosexuals, queers, homos, the limp-wrist set . . .”
Why was he disparaging himself? she wondered. Liz had to interrupt. “I get it.”
“Well, it was just after the war, ’46 or ’47. I was much younger and better-looking, and Vinnie was a little skinnier than he is now. It was only twice we met . . .” He paused. “The first time, he was with an Englishman I had gotten to know pretty well, Guy Burgess. He was at the British embassy here in DC. Recognize the name?” When Liz shook her head, he shrugged and went on. “Very wild Burgess was. Reckless in fact. Flouted his diplomatic immunity. Said he could do anything, and then did it, just to prove he could. Drunk and disorderly, drove a flashy car, parking it anywhere he wanted, importuning in men’s rooms, cocaine along with booze. I got to know Guy Burgess well during the war.” He paused, as if to
ask, “Do I have to spell it out for you that Burgess and I were lovers, miss?”
Liz took out her pad and a pencil stub. Rustin gently took them from her. “No notes, please. Just commit what I am telling you to memory.” He handed the pad and pencil back to her, and she returned them to her purse. “Well, one night, must have been in ’46, I walked into one of these bars—can’t remember which. They don’t last long, get closed down by the cops pretty regularly. Anyway, there was my friend Guy Burgess, with this guy Vinnie. Not my type, I thought—too old, too Southern—but who was I to know what kind of trade Burgess liked besides me? He invites me to join them, which I did for a while.” Rustin took out a packet of Newport cigarettes and offered one to Liz.
“No, thanks.” She fished out a packet of Gold Leaf, took one out, and offered him the packet. “British. Try one?” He took a cigarette, lit hers, and then his. Blowing out the match, he went on.
“The next time I saw Vinnie was the last time, and I haven’t forgotten. It was later in the ’40s, or maybe it was 1950. I was alone in one of these places, and he came up to me, sat down, and offered me a drink, asked my name. He didn’t recognize me. You know how it is, one coon looks pretty much like another to a white man.” His low laugh had an edge. “I didn’t like his Southern accent, the way his flesh sagged out over his pants, the way he sweated and smelled. I didn’t like anything about him, right down to his suspenders and his double-breasted suit. I finished my drink and got up, thanked him, and was about to leave when he reached his arm over my shoulder and took hold of me. Then he began to talk in a whisper. ‘Why don’t you an’ me take a little walk . . . right over to the men’s room an’ find us a stall . . . ’ When I resisted he continued—offered me ten dollars, then twenty dollars. Finally I said no, it was illegal and we could get in trouble. That’s when he grabbed me by my necktie, pulled my face down to his mouth, and said, ‘Look, boy, you do what you’re told, and don’t be worried about the DC police. They ain’t gonna touch no friend of J. Edgar Hoover’s.’” Rustin decided he didn’t need to tell this nice lady what happened next. Liz silently agreed.
“Well, there’s just one more piece of the story that you obviously don’t know.” Their eyes met. “Guy Burgess made the headlines a year or so later, when he defected to the Russians along with another Brit named McLean.”
Liz now drew a breath. “So, Mr. Rustin, you’re telling me that a senior aide to this Senator Eastland was once an FBI agent who knew a Soviet spy, had homosexual relations with him, and claimed to be a friend of J. Edgar Hoover.”
“I guess you need to know one more thing, Mrs. Spencer. It’s the main reason I had to take you away from Thurgood’s office to speak to you. People in the homintern around DC all know that J. Edger Hoover is queer.”
“Homintern?”
“That’s a little British witticism. Play on ‘Comintern’—the Communist International, Stalin’s subversive network of Communist parties. Us gay men are supposed to be in a secret conspiracy to undermine western civilization—the homintern.” Liz laughed. “Now I am going to do one more thing. I am going to go back and ask Thurgood Marshall for a little favour. You see, like any good lawyer, Thurgood cultivates that bastard J. Edgar Hoover. That’s why he can’t know that Hoover is a pansy. If Hoover thought he knew, there’s no telling what he’d try to get on Thurgood. Anyway, I am going to try to prevail on him to pick up the phone and call his friend J. Edgar and just casually ask him if he knows this Vincent Folsom. I’ve tied your Mr. Vincent Folsom to a Russian spy. Let’s see if Thurgood can tie him to the head of the FBI. He might not, but it’s worth a try.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rustin. Thank you.”
“Tom Wrought deserves it. How long are you in town?”
“I can stay a day or so longer. This country is frightfully expensive.”
“Does Thurgood know where he can reach you?”
“I’m staying at the Howard University guest house.”
Liz spent the next morning as a tourist. When she came back to the Howard guest house, there was a message for her. Would it be convenient for Mr. Marshall to see you at five thirty at the guest house? She telephoned the NAACP Legal Defense Fund office and left word to say she’d be waiting.
There he was, precisely at five thirty, soberly but elegantly dressed, with brogues—what did they call them in America? wing tips—so polished they were blinding in the afternoon light. Liz came down the stairs, and Marshall indicated the sitting room to the right of the door. They took seats on either side of a bay window, but not before Marshall pulled the drapes enough so that they could not be seen from the street, Liz noticed.
“Thank you for meeting me again, Mr. Marshall; I know you’re busy.”
“I must be brief, Mrs. Spencer. And I fear I can’t answer any questions. But I do have something worth communicating. First, I have to say that my interests and Bayard Rustin’s are broadly the same. But we differ on some important matters. One of them is the role of Communist Party members in the civil rights movement. I think it would be catastrophic to give the bigots a red-baiting stick to beat us with. Bayard disagrees. He would, given his own background.”
“How does this relate to Tom, Mr. Marshall?” Liz tried hard not to sound impatient.
“Just at present I am trying to remove a Communist Party member from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle.” Marshall paused momentarily. Liz had no idea how to respond to this disclosure. Silence was her only recourse. She simply held his gaze and waited. Apparently gratified that she had asked no question, Marshall continued, “Well, my efforts are known to J. Edgar Hoover, and they provided a pretext to call him today. I asked him if the FBI was acquainted with this person I am trying to remove. He told me that they were.” Marshall was as precise as a witness on the stand, answering his own questions. “Then I asked whether Hoover was prepared to get in touch with the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee about this party member in Dr. King’s entourage. I suggested the mere threat of forcing this man to testify might lead him to resign from Dr. King’s inner circle. Hoover told me that this might be arranged. As I was hoping he might, he told me one of his best agents—a personal friend, Hoover called him—had left the bureau for Eastland’s staff. Hoover said he’d see to it that the idea of subpoenaing the red in Dr. King’s circle was conveyed by his friend to the senator personally. That former FBI agent must be your man, Vincent Folsom. I’m afraid I can’t say any more.” Marshall rose and offered her his hand. “Good luck to Mr. Wrought.” Then he turned and left the building.
Liz felt slightly exultant. She had forged links in a chain that now went from the head of the FBI all the way to Soviet intelligence. And it was a chain that went right through the British foreign service. But how was this chain attached to Tom?
The next morning she boarded a Greyhound to New York. It was easy to retrace her steps east to Grand Central Station, where she found her airport bus—she wasn’t calling it a “coach” any longer—to Idlewild Airport and the BOAC Comet IV back to London. This time there was a tailwind, and eight hours later the passengers were buckling their seat belts for the descent to Heathrow.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ruislip was a long tube ride, too long, on the Metropolitan line, almost to Uxbridge, a journey Alice had never made before. Since Harrow the train had been travelling in the open, and this gave Alice something to look at—grey clouds threatening to rain on the little back gardens of an endless line of suburban two-family villas. Hardly anyone was left in the carriage as the train pulled into Ruislip. Alice began to feel almost reluctant to alight.
Without any idea of what to expect, she had decided that paranoia was a good working hypothesis. Alice had left a note on her desk, saying exactly where she had gone, and put another one in the hands of Victor Mishcon’s secretary. It would have been better to tell Liz Spencer, but Liz was already in New York. Now she was glad she’d done it.
Well before she had arrived, she had tried on and discarded
half a dozen different approaches. She had very little to go on, and each one of the stratagems she tried on connected the little she knew to very far-fetched scenarios. Only one of them had any chance of helping Tom, and she was going to act on it. The Krogers were the Cohens. They’d been Russian agents in New York. Lona had to have been a courier carrying design secrets from the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos to New York for transmission to Soviet nuclear bomb scientists. She’d tried to recruit Tom to the work. They’d left when the FBI’s net had begun to close in on the Rosenbergs and were now working for the KGB in Britain. Finally, Alice recalled, Helen Kroger, as she now called herself, had been much too eager to insist that Tom had mistaken them for someone else, and Peter Kroger’s retreat the instant he saw Tom was much too precipitate. She would lay it out, brook no denial. If she was right, she had a good idea of how to use the fact to help Tom.
Imagine living out here, Alice thought as she clambered up the pedestrian bridge over the tracks and then down again to the station building. She pulled out a battered London A to Z(ed) and made her way through a few twists and turns to 45 Cranley Drive. When she got there, it turned out to be a white stucco bungalow behind a low brick wall at the end of a street of unpainted two-storey attached villas. Prewar? Postwar? She couldn’t be sure. Taking a breath, she rang the bell.
The woman who came to the door towered over Alice but smiled and invited her in. She appeared to be dressed for gardening, and the soil stain at her knees confirmed this. “I expect you’ve come for the Orwell. I’ve got it in the kitchen.” Helen Kroger spoke with a decidedly London accent, nothing like the way Lona Cohen, New Yorker, would have sounded. Her hair was covered by a kerchief tied behind her head, rather the way a Russian babushka might. Just the way a Russian spy would, Alice couldn’t help thinking. Russian spy with Mayfair accent? She followed the woman back to the kitchen, where Helen Kroger picked up a brown paper parcel, tied with string. “Do you want to open it and have a look?”
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