Better Dead

by Max Allan Collins

  Another prisoner who’d maintained a sense of humor. Which would seem necessary, to maintain sanity, too. Not that Jack Benny had anything to worry about.

  “So,” Gold said, not loud, “what am supposed to tell you?”

  “The truth.”

  “What truth is that?”

  “Whatever truth you’re comfortable sharing.”

  He scratched an ear. His tongue poked inside a cheek. The eyes tightened. “Unless I know who I’m talking to and why, Mr. Heller, I’m not comfortable at all.”

  “Well, like you said, I’m Mr. Heller—Nathan—hired to take a last-ditch shot at clearing the Rosenbergs. Anyway, if we’re not wired for sound, what does it matter what I ask, and what you say?”

  He winced in thought. Maybe five seconds later, he said, “So ask.”

  “Okay. Part of what I’m up to is looking for new physical evidence.”

  “Not much of that in this case.”

  “Hardly any. But there’s been some controversy about whether you really went to New Mexico to see David and Ruth Greenglass at all. You have been known to tell stories.”

  His expression was slackly innocent. “Have I?”

  “Well, you invented a whole family for yourself.”

  He shook his head quickly. “That was a cover story. I was only a liar on the job. That’s what spies do, Mr. Heller—lie every day they’re out there spying. I did it for sixteen years and I’m glad that part of my life’s over.”

  “Was the New Mexico trip a lie? The hotel registration card the prosecution produced was a photostat, not the original. Wasn’t properly initialed and dated when the FBI agents checked it in. And the time-date stamp is off by a day.”

  He smirked. “So what story does that tell you?”

  “No story at all. But it is suggestive.”

  “Of what?”

  “The government needing to establish your presence in Albuquerque for the Greenglass document exchange. That hotel registration card could be an FBI forgery.”

  He had started shaking his head halfway through that. “Look, I got to Santa Fe on Saturday and went looking for the contact address, second-floor apartment on High Street. Nobody was home. So I went looking for a bed but all the hotels were booked. Finally I got floor space at a rooming house to sack out on. Knowing some lowlife might roll me and accidentally take what I had on me … documents from Fuchs, you know?… I didn’t sleep a wink. Morning comes, I drag my ass to the Hilton and get breakfast. Nice crowded place to disappear in, the Hilton. I registered under my own name, and got some real sleep before going back out to make contact with the Greenglasses. Which I did. That explain it, Mr. Heller?”

  “It does.”

  “And if that dope Manny Bloch had bothered to cross-examine me, it would’ve come out at the time.”

  He had a point.

  “Mr. Gold—”

  “Make it Harry, would you? You know, I think I will sit down.”

  I turned to ask the guard if I could have a chair. He nodded and went off to get me one.

  “I’m Nate,” I said, and now we shook hands. His grip was a little moist but not limp or show-offy, either.

  He was studying me, head to one side. “What master are you serving, Nate?”

  “Why, I’m a double agent, Harry. You must know about them, right?”

  He made a wry face. “I do, but they’re always really working for one side or the other. Which side are you?”

  My expression was pleasant. “I got in to see you, didn’t I, Harry?”

  He nodded three times. Was I supposed to nod back five times and whistle “Kalinka” and identify myself as a fellow Soviet agent? Maybe not.

  The guard was back with my chair. I sat.

  I asked, “Had you ever dealt with Julius Rosenberg before?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not in my circle—didn’t know him from Adam. I’d just been told to say that Julius sent me.”

  “But don’t Soviet spies use code names?”

  He waved that off. “This wasn’t a code-name situation. I guess that name was given to me because it would ring true with the Greenglass couple. Because Julius was their relative.”

  “But you didn’t know that then.”

  “No. I mean, it became clear, but … no.”

  “I heard you originally said ‘Benny sent me’ … or was it ‘Joe’?”

  He eyed me warily. “What am I supposed to say?”

  “I just wondered why that changed over time.”

  Anxiety flickered in his eyes. “When the FBI interviews you, it gets real in-depth, really intense. Things come back to you.”

  “Interesting. Because this particular thing that came back to you was important. It’s really all that links Julius Rosenberg to those atomic bomb documents. Everything else comes from his brother- and sister-in-law, who he was on the outs with.”

  He was frowning. “Mr. Heller, I think maybe we’re through here.”

  “Mr. Gold, if certain FBI files got out, you could be in serious trouble over these inconsistencies. If it got out that Roy Cohn gave you the idea to substitute ‘Julius’ for ‘Ben’ or ‘Joe,’ then—”

  “Then what, I’d be in trouble? I’m doing thirty years for chrissake! And don’t bad-mouth Roy Cohn to me—he’s working at getting me a reduced sentence.”

  “I’ll tell you what you’ll get, Harry. If the Rosenbergs go to the electric chair, and your perjury comes out? You’ll be an accessory to murder. You might even get the chair yourself.”

  “It doesn’t work like that. I’m not a fool.”

  And he wasn’t.

  I said, “Of course, maybe Cohn didn’t feed that to you. Maybe you and David Greenglass got your stories together at the Tombs.” I gave him a wistful sigh. “Bet you wish you were back there, Harry, in one of those Songbird suites. I hear the guards pass out cigars in the afternoon.”

  He lifted the weak chin. “It’s not so bad in here—mornings in the hospital, afternoons in the library. And a damn good library.”

  “I’m glad you’re happy, Harry.”

  For such a soft-looking man, he could summon a hard gaze. “Look. I don’t know who you’re really working for. But I will tell you this much. I did something bad, really goddamn bad, something I got manipulated into doing because I was confused, and misguided. But just the same, I’m ready to do my time.”

  Was the “something bad” handing over atomic secrets to the Russians? Or was it helping frame Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?

  He got up, pushing back the chair, which grated on the cement floor. “We are done.”

  I remained seated, leaning back, arms folded. “Thirty fucking years, Harry. Why did you settle for such a lousy deal?”

  He was almost to his cot; he turned and coldness stared back at me. “Because it’s better than Death Row.”

  So that was it—he’d committed treason, a capital crime, and they had him cold. Thirty years alive was better than forever dead.

  “Ethel Rosenberg is no spy,” I said. “She’s a housewife, Harry. You’re really okay with her dying so you can keep breathing, even in a concrete box?”

  Tiny sneer of a smile. “You tell me, Heller. Would you give your life for that dumpy dame? Not goddamn likely!” His shrug was dismissive. “Anyway, they won’t kill her. They’re just using her to get Rosenberg to talk, and I bet he’s got plenty to talk about.”

  That’s what he bet, but he wasn’t sure.…

  I stood and crooked a summoning finger.

  He frowned, staying where he was.

  “Come on, Harry. No, really. Come over here.”

  Very tentatively, Harry Gold returned to the bars of his cell, but standing back a ways, so I couldn’t reach in for him.

  I whispered, “You did fine, Harry.”

  And I winked at him.

  His head reared back and he blinked. Thought about it. And then he smiled and winked back.

  I was just moving away from the cell when he said, “You g
onna talk to Davey Greenglass while you’re here?”

  I halted and turned back to him. “I am.”

  “I don’t talk to that S.O.B. anymore.”

  “You fellas have a falling-out?”

  “I got sick of him at the Tombs. All he does is feel sorry for himself. You got to make the best of it when you’re inside. Anyway, I got the word not to talk to him in here.”

  “From on high?”

  “No. Down low. Right here in this star-spangled hellhole. Everybody’s shunning him, and if I do the same, I don’t get shunned so bad. They hate his fat ass.”

  “Because he sold out his country?”

  He shook his head. “Because he sold out his sister.”

  * * *

  Born in 1922, David Greenglass grew up in poverty on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He learned the trade of machinist at Manhattan Haaren High School and, after graduation, briefly attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, where he flunked every subject he took. The future spy—who would supposedly memorize intricate atomic bomb plans and diagrams—had no further higher education.

  He did pursue an interest in Communism—both he and his future wife, Ruth Printz (they met in their teens), became members of the Young Communist League, encouraged to participate by David’s sister Ethel and her husband Julius.

  When he was twenty and she was eighteen, David and Ruth were married, and, soon after, in 1943, David joined the U.S. Army, where within a year he rose to the rank of sergeant. He was assigned to the top-secret Manhattan Project, stationed first at the massive uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then reassigned to the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, where he claimed to have slept through the first atomic bomb test.

  Greenglass was in an adjacent wing that also segregated hardened criminals. His cell was identical to Gold’s, down to a folded-open hardcover on the green-blanketed metal bed, in this case A Dog’s Head by Jean Dutourd, a book and author I’d never heard of. When I arrived at his cell door, he was stretched out, propped by a thin pillow. He got up and went over to where he’d already positioned a chair facing the bars.

  He was easily my six feet but twenty or thirty pounds heavier—prison life hadn’t dropped the pounds off him the way it had Gold—with enough bulk to look imposing, only he didn’t. There was a softness to him, a layer of baby fat diminishing any threat, and a smirky baby face centered on the front of a bucket head on top of which sat a Medusa-like nest of black wavy curls.

  This time the guard had brought a chair along for me. Greenglass and I nodded at each other, since a handshake was out, and we both sat. Why was he smiling? Nervousness? Some private joke? Seemed to me the joke was on him, since I was the one on the right side of these bars.

  “I’m Nathan Heller,” I said. “You were obviously expecting me.”

  “Obviously.” His voice was higher-pitched than you’d expect from a man his size. Suddenly I thought of Curly Howard. But whose stooge was he?

  “You understand,” I said, “that I represent a committee of citizens who have asked me to look into the Rosenberg case.”

  “Sobell, too?”

  “I have an associate in California who’s arranged to visit Morton Sobell at Alcatraz, yes.” My L.A. partner, Fred Rubinski, was handling that. “But Sobell’s not the focus of my investigation.”

  The smirky smile in the baby face pursed to a near kiss. “Morty claims he barely knows Julie. A lie.”

  Testimony from an expert witness.

  “You understand,” I said, “the real significance of my being here.”

  He winked at me. “Oh, I got the word. You wanna be able to report back the same old stuff to your clients.”

  “Right. But, also, Mr. Greenglass—”

  “‘Davey,’” he said, and waved a plump hand magnanimously. “Everyone calls me ‘Davey.’” Little grin. “Well, back on the Lower East Side, it was ‘Doovey,’ but I won’t inflict that on you.”

  “Thanks. And I’m Nate.” I got out my notebook and ballpoint. “What we’ll go over is, as you indicate, very old news. But I’ve only been on this job for a little over a week, so it’ll be helpful for me to hear the, uh…”

  “Party line?” he said with a pixie smile.

  Maybe if you’re a guy who’d dodged the electric chair, and helped your wife avoid any charges at all, you had a right to be cheerful. But even when it took sending your sister to Death Row?

  Still, I stayed pleasant. I told him that I’d avoided a counsel room to be in a bug-free environment. He accepted that reasoning. Then I fed him questions and his answers were almost exactly what I’d read in the trial transcripts. It had been a while since he’d last performed this comedy, but he still remembered his lines.

  He folded his arms, leaned back in the metal chair. The infantile features were framed between bars.

  He said, “My wife visited me in Albuquerque on November 29, 1944. I can pull that date out of the air ’cause it was our second wedding anniversary. Ruth said that back in New York, Julie had asked her over for supper. He told her that I was working on the atomic bomb project, and that the people he worked for wanted me to get them inside dope for the Russians.”

  I frowned. “Ruth didn’t know you were working on the atom bomb? You’d never told her?”

  “No. She got it from Julie. I’d kept it to myself—it was top-secret. Anyway, I told Ruth I wouldn’t do it. Wanted no part of it. But she said Julie told her Russia was an ally and deserved to have the same information as we did … that is, as America did.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “Nothing at first. But I thought about it and it made sense to me. You know, the war was going on! The Russians were on our side, but here we were holding things back from ’em.”

  “What were you asked to do?”

  He shrugged. “Julie instructed Ruth to tell me that he wanted the general layout of the Los Alamos project—buildings, number of people, things like that. Also any names of scientists working there. That was the first thing I put together, a list of Oppenheimer and Urey and a few others. I was just a machinist—I didn’t know them all and anyway some were using fake names.”

  “On your next furlough,” I said, “in January ’45, you gave Rosenberg written information on the atom bomb?”

  The big bucket head nodded. “I did. That little list of scientists, and some sketches of flat-type lens molds—that’s sort of what makes the bomb tick … although it doesn’t really tick, of course.” He flashed a silly little smile. “Also, another list of some possible recruits among my fellow soldiers. Anybody sympathetic to the cause. The Communist cause, I mean.”

  “Those sketches, Davey—they weren’t available to the prosecution, so you did your best to re-create them, right?”

  More nods. “Facsimiles, yeah.”

  Hardly “best evidence”—drawings made years later by this expert with a high school education.

  I said, “So you went to the Rosenbergs while you were on furlough, and somebody came up with a recognition device for a courier to use, calling on you back in New Mexico.”

  This subject seemed almost to bore him. “Yeah, yeah, the Jell-O box thing.”

  I managed to keep a polite expression going. “Yes. The Jell-O box thing. Go over that.”

  His smirk turned humorless. “Julie, Ethel, and Ruth go into the kitchen,” he said, a schoolkid reciting a poem he’d been made to memorize, “while I stay in the living room. Five minutes or so later, they come back with one side of a Jell-O box, cut in two. Julie has one piece and Ruth has the other. Then he showed me how the pieces would fit together, like a puzzle, if a courier came around in Albuquerque. I said, ‘That’s clever,’ and Julie said, ‘The simplest things are the cleverest.’”

  “And eventually back in Albuquerque, Gold came calling.”

  “Yeah, in June 1945. A Sunday. I’d never seen him before. He says, ‘Julius sent me,’ and gets the piece of Jell-O box out of his wallet, and it matches up.�
�

  “Then you gave him the latest pilfered information.”

  “Sure, a packet of stuff. Sketches relating to the project, one showing the face of the flat lens mold.”

  “Which you drew up again for the prosecution, years later.”

  Tiny smile. “That’s what I did.”

  “You cut up a Jell-O box for them, too.”

  “You bet. To show what it was like.”

  I was looking at the guy who had fabricated all of the prosecution’s (secondhand) physical evidence.

  I jotted a few notes, then said, “Let’s jump to 1950.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your brother-in-law came to your apartment…?”

  “Yes, yeah, Julie told me the guy who’d come to our flat in Albuquerque was about to get arrested, and that I should leave the country. I told Julie I needed money to pay my back debts, and of course he owed me from the machine-shop business. He’d said he’d get me some money.”

  “Who from?”

  “His Russian pals. Eventually Julie said he’d get me five thousand dollars so I could settle my debts and then skip to Mexico. He told me I’d need a tourist card and a letter to avoid inoculations at the border. He’d fixed that up with a doctor. Plus, I needed to get passport pictures of Ruth and me and my family.”

  “Those were the pictures introduced at the trial?”

  “Right, those were the ones.”

  Only they weren’t passport pictures—they were typical family portrait–style pictures, David and Ruth and their two children, one a babe in arms.

  “Did Julius get you that five thousand?”

  “He did. One thousand to settle some personal debts, another four to skip to Mexico.”

  “Were you usually paid for your spying?”

  A shrug. “I got money for my services. Such as Gold giving me five hundred dollars. Not that much, considering the risk.”

  Atom bomb for five Cs—hell of a bargain.

  I checked my notes, then said, “Okay, that’s good, Davey. That’s fine.”

  He gave me a tiny grin. “Get what you needed, Nate?”

  I nodded, slipping the notebook away. “Got what I needed. Thanks.”

  For a guy in stir, he seemed awfully amused. “You just have to show your client, that committee, that you talked to me, huh?”