Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  “Put her through.” Alice waited for the transfer. There seemed to be an extra click before she heard Liz’s voice.

  “I’m at Heathrow. I’ve got news—”

  Suddenly Alice became paranoid about the extra sound she’d heard. “Can’t talk now, Liz. I’m with a client.”

  There was a momentary silence at the other end, telling her that Liz couldn’t understand why she was being put off. “I’ll be there in an hour. Will you be free?”

  “Yes, but let’s not meet here.” She thought for a moment. What was the name of Liz’s administrator at the Abbey National? Yes, she had it. “Let’s meet at Beatrice’s desk.” Would Liz understand?

  “Ah . . . Yes . . . uh, good. See you then.” It was clear she understood. Someone might be listening.

  No need to involve Beatrice Russell. Alice would intercept Liz in the lobby of the Abbey National if she could creep in by a rear door. It would also be more fun to try to discover if she was being followed as well as bugged. She walked to the tube station at Holborn, took the underground to Leicester Square, went into the ABC movie theatre, bought a ticket, and immediately left by the rear, found a cab, and jumped in. “Edgware Road tube station, please.” There she boarded a train for Baker Street. Emerging, she made her way to Siddon’s Lane and entered the Abbey National building from the rear. It had taken her twenty-five minutes, cost two quid, and she didn’t have the slightest idea whether anyone had followed her at all. But it had all been quite amusing. Yes, that was exactly the right word, amusing.

  When the commissionaire approached, Alice had a ready answer. “I’ve a meeting with Mrs. Russell.”

  The man touched his white cap. “Very good, miss. Not here yet.” She stood by his desk, and a few moments later he looked up. “There she is now, miss.” Beatrice Russell had entered the lobby and was making for the lift. Alice moved to intercept her.

  “Mrs. Russell, you don’t know me. I’m a friend of Liz Spencer. If she’s upstairs already, could you tell her Alice is downstairs?”

  “Certainly, but I don’t think she’ll be there. I don’t expect her at all today. She was in the West Riding of Yorkshire yesterday, visiting branches.” How nice, Alice thought, to have such an accomplished liar as a friend. Russell moved along to the lifts without another word. Now, would the officious commissionaire usher Alice out of the building?

  A few minutes later she saw Liz enter, carrying a small suitcase. When she was certain Liz had spotted her, Alice turned and went out the way she’d come, back into Siddons Lane. Liz followed. Up the lane they went, Alice twenty paces in front of Liz, out onto Glentworth Street and round the corner at St. Cyprian’s Church. Alas, it was not open that early. But next to it, on Ivor Place, was a thoroughly uninviting tea shop, small but crowded. Alice turned to see Liz still behind her. Then she entered the café. She was seated at a small Formica table facing an empty chair when Liz got there a few seconds later, put down her case, and removed her coat.

  “Sorry, I’m getting paranoid. I think the Russians are tapping my phone and following me round.”

  Liz didn’t seem surprised. “Maybe it’s the FBI.” She smiled.

  Alice laughed. “CIA.” She couldn’t help being slightly pedantic. “FBI’s not allowed to operate abroad. This is CIA turf. Same rules for Brits—MI6, intelligence, operates abroad. MI5, counterintelligence, operates at home.”

  “Too bad. What I learned in Washington concerned only the FBI. Maybe my trip was pointless.” She sighed. “Shall I tell you the gist, or give you all the details as near as I can remember them all?”

  “Tell me everything and then your conclusion. That way I may notice something you didn’t.”

  “Can I have a cup of tea first?” Alice signalled the waitress over. Then Liz began, introducing John Hope Franklin, her bus ride to Washington, DC, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund offices, Thurgood Marshall, Bayard Rustin, how they looked and sounded. Making Marshall’s acquaintance was something that impressed Alice, Liz could see. Was he that much of a celebrity among lawyers? Liz conveyed as much as she could remember of the conversation in what Rustin had called a gay bar, and then Marshall’s subsequent visit to the Howard University guest house.

  “So, is there a theory that puts together the pieces you found, Liz?”

  “Well, here’s one that I toyed with most of the flight back. It was Tom’s bad luck to have run-ins with Vincent Folsom in Louisiana and France during the war—just coincidence. After the war, Vincent Folsom gets a job in the FBI; maybe he even had improper relations with Hoover before he was hired. More likely, he became intimate with Hoover after joining the FBI. That’s not really important. Either way, Hoover trusted Folsom, or else was being blackmailed by him.” Alice nodded. “Now, Folsom was in the FBI when it was going after the atom spies in the ’40s. Maybe he was even involved in the Rosenberg case. Could he have come across Tom at that time?”

  Alice observed, “If he had, Tom would have mentioned it, no?”

  “That’s what I thought. Let’s assume they didn’t meet in New York. If they had, Folsom might have remembered looking for Tom in the war when he was on the Red Ball Express.” Liz stopped to be sure Alice was following. “But then it’s Folsom who writes a letter that gets Tom fired from his teaching post. Why Folsom? Just another coincidence? Can’t be. And why do they want him fired from a Negro college no one in power really cares about?”

  Alice suggested, “Communists in the civil rights movement?”

  Liz shook her head. “No. Tom didn’t have any personal contact with the civil rights movement in 1956, not that he’s told us about.”

  “Let’s assume it’s Hoover who wanted Tom fired, for reasons that have nothing to do with his being a Communist, and that Hoover couldn’t tell anyone about it except someone he shares other secrets with.” Alice paused.

  Liz asked the obvious question. “OK, but why would he want Tom fired?” Then she tried to answer her own question. “Because he doesn’t want Tom in Washington, DC. For some reason J. Edgar Hoover is frightened of Tom Wrought’s presence in the national capital.” This didn’t sound very plausible to Alice. Still, she let Liz continue. “But then, what could Tom know that would threaten Hoover? That Hoover is a pansy? No. He didn’t know that. That Hoover is protecting someone who got rich selling black-market gasoline to the French during the war? No. Hoover probably doesn’t even know about Folsom’s war.”

  “Is that it?” Liz nodded. Alice took a breath. “Here’s another theory. Let me tell you what I learned while you were gone.” Alice recounted her journeys to Ruislip.

  When she finished, Liz replied, “Your Russian spy theory is better. Protecting the Krogers gave them a motive to sideline Tom the moment he met them last fall.”

  “But their control said they never told him about running into Tom.”

  Liz pondered the objection. “Did you believe him?” Alice shrugged her shoulders. “At least we have a concrete reason why the Russians would want to frame Tom, instead of just some pretty thin speculation about a powerful man in Washington who doesn’t even know Tom Wrought.”

  “We’re missing something obvious. What is it?” Alice frowned. “There are whole parts of Tom’s story that we haven’t even thought about, let alone fitted together with anything we’ve learned so far.”

  Liz replied instantly, “And I can tell you what they are.” She paused to let Alice catch up. Simultaneously they said the word “Finland,” and then Alice observed, “Tom was there twice.”

  “Yes.” Liz paused. “Two trips, years apart.”

  Alice pulled Tom’s two composition books out of her brief bag.

  Liz began again, “And there is something else, something I couldn’t fit into my theory of Hoover or Folsom wanting to get Tom out of Washington.” She grinned as the pieces fell together in her mind. “Rustin said that he met Folsom after the war, together with someone named Burgess, who turned out to be a Russian spy.” She started to leaf through the pages of the s
econd book and reached Tom’s second trip to Finland. “Got it. Tom says he was there, in Finland, just after Burgess and the other spy, McLean, defected. Another coincidence?”

  “Of course! We’ve got Hoover connected to a Soviet spy through Folsom, just before a lot of British and American agents in Russia were blown by that very spy—Burgess.” They both paused at the thought forming in their minds. Now they had two theories to explore—Russians protecting their spies in Ruislip, or some link between Burgess, his friend in the FBI, and Tom’s trips to Finland.

  “I’m going home”—Liz yawned—“to call my kids in Birkenhead and take a bath.” She pushed her chair back.

  Alice grasped her wrist. “Look, I don’t think the Soviets know anything about you, but be careful. If you think you are being followed or someone is listening to your calls, we’ve got to know. If you need to get in touch, use a call box, and leave the number with my clerk or the answering service if I’m not at home.”

  They both rose and went out of the tea shop in opposite directions.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Walk with me, Miss Silverstone. Let’s make a few turns round the square. It’s not a bad day.”

  She’d been crossing Lincoln’s Inn field on the way back to the office from the Inns of Court when the man fell in with her pace. The voice was Russian, the same one she’d listened to in Ruislip five days before. Now it was deeper, more relaxed, but still, Alice realized, betraying an English learned in America.

  “My name is Feklisov, Alexandr Semyonovich Feklisov, and I’m a Russian spy.” He paused for effect. “Don’t worry about me, though; I have a diplomatic passport. In fact, I am the highest-ranking Soviet agent in England. You may ask about me at the Foreign Office or in the intelligence services if you know anyone there. My card.” He handed her a business card embossed with heavy ink in Cyrillic and English: COMMERCIAL ATTACHÉ, SOVIET EMBASSY. Alice said nothing as she matched his pace and trajectory back round the footpath a second time. He was a marvellously nondescript specimen, she thought. You’d pass him a dozen times and still not realize you’d seen him before. He was that plain. A man of about forty-five with a somewhat oval face, no angles, rounded cheeks, salt-and-pepper hair, wearing the sort of topcoat you might purchase off the peg anywhere. The only thing that marked him out was a nice smile, one that seemed genuine when he finally turned his head and looked at her.

  “I wish to repeat what I told you last week. We know nothing about the difficulties your Mr. Wrought has found himself in. But we don’t intend to allow these difficulties to compromise our”—he searched for the right word—“work.”

  “Well, Mr. . . . Feklisov?” Had she gotten his name right? He nodded. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can tell me why you think we had any hand in Wrought’s arrest and why you think we can help free him.”

  “I’ve been over that ground with the Krogers and with you. The KGB have a motive to frame Wrought, and surely you have the resources. Your denials are simply not going to change my mind.”

  “You mentioned a name to me up in Ruislip at the Krogers’. Philby, Kim Philby. What do you know of this man; how is he involved?”

  Now Alice was much more confident. She had been followed and had her phone tapped, but had not been threatened again. Perhaps it was because of this name, Philby, that had taken Feklisov’s breath away in Ruislip. If Feklisov was the most important agent in Britain, then it was this name, Philby, that had brought him to her side today. “I can only tell you this, Mr. Russian Spy, a man by that name called the editor of the Tribune, Mr. Michael Foot, to ask about two reviews that Wrought had anonymously written for the paper, one about the Rosenberg trial and the other about the Dr. Zhivago craze.” She stopped. “Now, you tell me who Philby is.”

  Feklisov ignored the question completely. “Ah, Miss Silverstone, you have solved a little mystery for me. It was your Mr. Wrought who wrote those two pieces? He is a very perceptive analyst. I assume you are in touch with him.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Well, ask him a personal question for me. How could he have been so sure that Ethel Rosenberg was innocent and David Greenglass’s wife was guilty?”

  “Why should I ask him?”

  “As I said, the question is personal—just a matter of curiosity.”

  “I will, if you call off the shadows and the wiretap. Fair exchange?”

  “I promise you, Miss Silverstone, we are doing neither.”

  “Then I can’t help you.”

  “Very well; tell your Mr. Wrought that his guesses are both correct. Ethel Rosenberg was innocent, and Ruth Greenglass was guilty. And it was us trying to make Pasternak into a CIA stooge. But they started it, flooding our country with the Russian language edition of Dr. Zhivago. Just ask him how he found out.”

  “And in return?”

  “I will see what I can do to help you—uh, him.”

  Would he really? That very much depended, Feklisov realized as he made his way back to the Soviet embassy, ensuring that there was no one very interested in his circuitous trajectory.

  Alexandr Feklisov was a child of the revolution, one who had literally accepted the omniscience, if not the omnipotence, first of Lenin, then of Joseph Stalin, along with his mother’s milk. He had grown to adulthood in the ’30s, experiencing the visible success of socialism in one country—not just in the official statistics but in the ways his mother’s life in Moscow improved from year to year. He had been a young pioneer, then a Komsomol, and finally a paid-up party member. Unassuming, visibly without ambition, he had been untouched by Stalin’s purges. So well had he learned the catechism that by 1934 he had begun to wend his way through the alphabet of Soviet intelligence agencies—the OGPU, the NKVD, the MVD, and finally the KGB. Trusted because he was thought to be a cipher, Alexandr Feklisov had been sent into the whirlwind of midcentury history. First Spain in its civil war, then New York in the ’40s, now London. He had hardly ever managed to get back to Moscow and his mother in twenty-five years. Alas, the years abroad had ruined him with the truth. It was no longer the motherland to which he was loyal, but his people, his agents, his spies, whose trust he would not betray.

  “I was in the neighbourhood and thought I’d drop by, Tom.” Alice tried to sound casual. “The psychiatrist said I missed a test question.” She could hardly keep a straight face. “So I thought I’d pop round to make it up.” She pulled the slates out of the brief bag and wrote,

  Things are looking up. Can’t discuss. Please tell me, how did you know that Ethel Rosenberg was innocent and Ruth Greenglass was guilty? That’s all I need at the moment.

  Tom began writing.

  Ethel could never type. Ruth was good at it. How do I know? Ruth typed my PhD thesis, and Ethel could never get a job that required typing. She was a singer and a filing clerk.

  Alice read the slate, pulled up the cellophane, and rose. “Thanks; that’s all.”

  Tom looked at her quizzically, as if to say, Can’t you tell me more? But all he said was, “Really.”

  It was all she could do not to scrawl that he had been right about Dr. Zhivago too.

  “Not very good at spotting a tail, are you?” It was Feklisov, catching up to her not a quarter of a mile along the Brixton Hill Road to the tube station.

  “How did you do that? I was watching the whole way. Out and back.” She was impressed.

  “A great deal of experience.” He laughed. “Actually I cheated. Since I knew where you were going, I didn’t bother tailing you here once I saw you leaving your flat.”

  “That’s a relief.” Alice gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I had no idea you were so eager for an answer to your idle question.”

  “Not idle, just personal, Miss Silverstone. May I have the answer?”

  “Tom says he knew that Ethel couldn’t type and that Ruth could. In fact, he says she typed his PhD thesis. Ethel Rosenberg is dead. Why is this so important to you, Mr. Feklisov?”

  “Perhaps you
don’t think espionage agents have feelings, Miss Silverstone. They shouldn’t, but alas, they do.” He paused. “I knew her husband, Julie Rosenberg, very well during the war. He was the best agent I ever ran. We were friends. So many years working together under conditions of extreme danger. You couldn’t help getting to know someone. And of course his wife, Ethel. I knew her too—and the children, two small boys. I knew the older one as a baby. But Ethel didn’t even know who I was, really, or what I was doing. So far as she knew, I was an immigrant garment cutter on Seventh Avenue, with a missing finger to prove it.” He held up his right hand to show a ring finger that ended at the first joint.

  Alice slowed their pace, then she turned to face him. “I don’t see where you are going, Mr. Feklisov, besides up the Brixton Hill Road to the tube station.”

  He took her arm and began walking towards the bullseye UNDERGROUND sign they could see a street away now. “The FBI knew Ethel was innocent,” he said, using her first name, “and they killed her anyway. Left two small children no one would touch—how do they say, with a barge pole? I hate those cruel men with a personal hatred, not just a professional one, Miss Silverstone. Do you understand?”

  Alice turned to face him again. “Does this mean you’ll help Tom?”

  “I am sorry, Miss Silverstone. How can I help him? We didn’t lock up your Mr. Wrought in Brixton Prison, and we can’t get him out.”

  Alice spoke calmly and slowly. “If you don’t find a way, we’ll have to let the British know about the Krogers up in Ruislip.”

  “Would it be worth your life and Mr. Wrought’s, and perhaps even mine?” He left the question hanging, climbed into a Hillman Minx parked at the tube stop, and drove away without again looking her way.

  It was the lunch hour, and they were sitting in the dingy tea shop on Ivor Place.

  “Can we force Feklisov to help us?” Alice wondered aloud. “He knows we can give the Krogers to MI5.”