Better Dead

by Max Allan Collins

  “Why, Shep?”

  He flipped a hand. “First, the Russian threat isn’t domestic, it’s international, and that means we need to keep an eye on things and a hand in. Second, I wouldn’t trust the FBI with finding out whether my gardener is drinkin’ the beer out of the cooler I keep on the back porch.”

  That actually got a smile out of me; not much of one, but a smile. “Where does the U.S. Attorney’s Office come in on that list, Shep?”

  He drank some coffee and said offhandedly, “Well, let’s say the FBI feels about them the way I feel about the FBI, and with some justification. Saypol and that yappin’ terrier Cohn screwed this thing up royal.”

  “How so?”

  This smile was sly. “I believe you already know—you’ve been investigating. But let’s start with them suborning perjury, and wind up with railroadin’ a little Jewish mother into the death house.… Sure you won’t have some pie?”

  “No. But I’ll get myself some more coffee.”

  I did.

  I returned.

  We resumed.

  I said, “If you know a miscarriage of justice was perpetrated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, why the hell don’t you do something about it?”

  “What was that word you used? ‘Purview.’ I like that. Not our purview. And anyway, I understand that the government comin’ down heavy on the Rosenbergs—not to mention their own damn witnesses, Harry Gold and David Greenglass—might just serve as a deterrent. You know, to homegrown Commies who look up to Russia and want to help the ‘Movement.’”

  “A deterrent in that small sense,” I said, “but stupid in a bigger one. How does giving Gold and Greenglass stiff sentences encourage other reformed Reds to come forward?”

  “Well, of course it doesn’t, and you’re exactly right. Hell, even ol’ J. Edgar himself is against the death sentence for Ethel.”

  I blinked at that one. “Not for humanitarian reasons, surely.”

  “Oh, my no! Not hardly. But Mr. Hoover knew from the start how the winds of public opinion can change. A wife and mother, no previous criminal record, sentenced to die? And now, after a passage of time, there’s a considerable call for clemency.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass what spying Julius may have done during the war,” I said. “He and his wife were convicted on fabricated evidence. Under the law, that makes them not guilty.”

  “You don’t know how right you are, Nate.” He gestured with open hands. “And that’s why I’m here. To tell you a few things that even the trial prosecutors didn’t know.”

  “Why didn’t they?”

  He sighed. “Because the source of these things must be protected. And all I can tell you, Nate, is it’s not a source in the sense of a snitch or a whistle-blower. No. This is solid intelligence data.”

  Now who was dealing in secrets?

  I said, “I’m listening.”

  “The Ash woman wasn’t lyin’ to you, Nate. Julius Rosenberg operated a large espionage network during the war, handling recruitment of agents for himself and another, larger ring operating out of New York. He handled the data those agents collected—on jet planes, radar, all sorts of technical and scientific data.”

  “What about Ethel?”

  “Maybe she did do some typing. But is a brain surgeon’s wife automatically a doctor? Is a concert pianist’s wife necessarily a virtuoso musician? Still, she was probably at least, you know, vaguely aware of what her hubby was up to.”

  “But not enough to put her on Death Row. It took her brother to put her there.”

  The CIA agent chuckled; the strangest things amused him. “David and Ruth—particularly Ruth—played those prosecutors like con men workin’ marks. You know that sketch of Davey’s that Cohn told the jury was of ‘the atom bomb itself’? The one that Manny Bloch stupidly requested be kept out of the trial?”

  “To make the defense look patriotic?”

  He nodded matter-of-factly. “That’s the one. Well, our science boys say it was worthless. Imprecise, confused, garbled. Turns out, guess what? A high school graduate machinist wasn’t capable of condensin’ into a single diagram a two-billion-dollar development effort by the top technological minds. And the lens mold sketches Greenglass passed to Harry Gold in Albuquerque? Or anyway the facsimiles he made from memory? They were rough, rudimentary, worthless crap.”

  Even after all I’d learned, this staggered me. “So the atomic bomb spies didn’t really have the goods?”

  “No, and I assume you refer to the Greenglasses, not the Rosenbergs. Oh, Julius was a Soviet spy, no question, which makes it tough for even the likes of Nathan Heller to conduct an investigation that will clear him and his wife. You might get them a new trial, but as Miss Ash pointed out, that’ll only reopen the investigation.”

  I grunted a nonlaugh. “And if it comes out that Julius was a turncoat American who spied for the Soviets … well, he’ll be back on Death Row.”

  Shepherd’s eyebrows went up. “Maybe.”

  “Why maybe?”

  “Well, start with Ethel. She was involved with the Communist Party before her two boys came along, and she was probably somewhat aware of what Julius was up to.”

  “So she might deserve five years.” I shook my head. “But, Jesus—not the chair.”

  “And as for what sentence Julius really deserves? Fifteen years is as far as I’d go. Because the man had little or nothing to do with passin’ atomic secrets to the Soviets.”

  “You sound sure of that.”

  “Well, consider that the crucial family get-together of September 5, 1945—David’s delivery of secrets, the Jell-O box vaudeville, Ethel typing up the notes, all of it—is said to have happened after the Soviets fired Julius.”

  “What?”

  Shepherd allowed himself a smug smile. “You’re gonna love this, Nate. Seems in mid-February ’45, Julius Rosenberg got his ass fired by the Soviets. When the crimes he was convicted of took place, he wasn’t a spy anymore.… I’m having another piece of pie. Plenty more to tell you, Nate.”

  I went with him to the cafeteria counter and selected a shimmering red dish of Jell-O. Cherry. Seemed fitting somehow.

  * * *

  Two days later, Julius Rosenberg and I sat at the same small square scarred-up wooden table in the counsel room at Sing Sing. The light above cast the kind of jaundiced glow you got at the Waldorf Cafeteria. Again, he was in his prison grays with his left hand cuffed to a metal ring screwed into the table, his ankles shackled as well. He looked thinner and the circles under his eyes were a dark blue, not unlike the memory of a mustache that stood out in his five o’clock shadow.

  “I’m confident, Mr. Rosenberg,” I said, “that we’re not being recorded today.”

  He frowned a little, clearly skeptical, and pushed his wire-rim glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “Why would that be the case?”

  “I’m here in part as an emissary of a federal agency.”

  “Really?”

  “Not in their employ, mind you. Just passing along a kind of offer. It touches on aspects of the case that the government would not like to have recorded.”

  “I’m intrigued, Mr. Heller.”

  “I’m going to save that offer for last,” I said, “on the off-chance that someone might be listening in, ready to hit a switch once I’ve passed that offer along.”

  A small smile. “You have an admirable shrewdness, Mr. Heller. I take it there’s more to talk about than this mysterious entreaty.”

  I nodded. I told him about the console table and its discovery in plain sight. He shook his head at the bad luck that had kept it out of the trial, and bemoaned not having thought to suggest looking in his mother’s place himself. I told him that a furniture buyer at Macy’s had identified the markings on the underside of the table as the store’s, and identified the model number as a drop-leaf sold for approximately $20 plus sales tax. No sales slip tying it to the Rosenbergs existed, however, as the store’s sales and delivery records for
1944 and ’45 had been routinely destroyed. But the table’s evidentiary value seemed clear.

  In addition (I told him), exemplars of David Greenglass’s entirely legible handwriting had been procured. And while I had no new witnesses to bring forward, I’d learned from various interviews facts that suggested other avenues of appeal.

  For example, I’d suggested to attorney Bloch that affidavits be taken from prominent scientists as to their opinion of David’s capacity to sketch and describe an atom bomb from things he’d overheard as a machinist on the project.

  “David swore on the witness stand,” I said, “that at the time of his arrest, he disclosed all major espionage incidents involving you and Ethel. That strikes me as easily proven perjury. His story and Ruth’s just got richer and richer as time went by.”

  “Other than his own name,” Rosenberg said, “everything that came out of David’s mouth was perjury.”

  “There are other lines of inquiry,” I said, tossing a hand, “that your attorney can pursue, and I’ve suggested a few more, including some not entirely kosher. But as for me? I’m at the end of the line.”

  “You’ve done well, Mr. Heller. But why stop now?”

  “Well, I’ve earned the fee the Hammett committee put up and then some. The A-1 is not a charitable institution. So that’s part of it.”

  “There’s another part?”

  I nodded. “I’ve learned that you were the head of a spy ring for the Soviets. That you are—in that sense, at least—guilty.”

  He said nothing.

  Either he had no response or he suspected we were being recorded despite my assurance otherwise.

  “But,” I said, “I also know that if you had any role in the passing of atomic secrets, it was minor. Hell, man, Russia laid you off before all that atomic shinola really got going!”

  His eyes jumped behind the round lenses. “You … you know about that?”

  “Sure. Like I know that those so-called atomic secrets were worthless, were just ridiculously oversold to the jury at your trial.”

  He squinted at me, trying to bring me into focus. “I don’t understand, Mr. Heller.…”

  “Really nothing else to understand, Mr. Rosenberg. The government has known much of this all along. They have been prepared from the start to let Ethel walk and give you a relative slap on the wrist, just for your cooperation. And you’ve known that all along.”

  He didn’t deny it.

  I leaned forward and gave him a chummy smile. “Listen, I get it. This all started back in college for you, an idealistic lark, and when a few years later you got into the spy game, it was for what seemed like a good cause. And naturally when you went to assemble your network of industrious little Commies, you went to friends and even relatives. Selling these people out is anathema to you. I get that. But any of your people whose past actions would really put them in danger have already fled. Most are behind the Iron Curtain right now. The rest are prepared to take their chances.”

  “So you’re just like McCarthy,” he said, quietly bitter, upper lip curling back like the keyed lid of a sardine can. “McCarthy and HUAC and Nathan Heller. You’d have me name names, too. Betray friends. Family. You’d have me be no better than Greenglass and his shrew.”

  “In this case, I would, yeah.”

  His chin tilted up, Joan of Arc waiting for the first match. “Well, Mr. Heller, I’m not made that way. It disappoints me that you are.”

  “My feelings are hurt but I may get over it. Do you want to hear that offer? It’s from the CIA. A spook-to-spook proposal.”

  He shrugged, his lidded-eyed expression oozing contempt.

  “The good folks at the CIA would like you to talk to a council of rabbis, reps of various Jewish organizations, and some former Communists. They’ll share with you evidence that the Soviet Union is anti-Semitic and intent on wiping out the Jews within their borders. You and your wife would receive clemency for speaking out to Jews worldwide, and for inviting them to leave the Communist movement, as you’ve done, and to join with you to destroy it.”

  “My,” Rosenberg said.

  “The international Communist movement has built you and your wife up as heroes and martyrs, making it impossible to discredit you with any plausibility. Take it as a compliment, Mr. Rosenberg. It’s an acknowledgment that—whatever else anybody might think—you and Ethel have displayed immeasurable courage.”

  “I see.”

  “This council will also share with you evidence of Russian slave camps, where all kinds of daily horrors take place, and give you a full tour of Stalin’s bloody purges. Plus the inside dope on the Slanksy show trials, and the public hangings that followed. What do you think?”

  “I think the CIA has lost its collective mind,” he said. He was frowning so deep, his eyes barely showed. “Do they really think my Ethel and I might be so easily manipulated? That we would shill for them in exchange for our lives? Can they imagine that we haven’t already heard these ridiculous charges against Mother Russia, which are just so much capitalist propaganda?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought you’d say,” I said. “But I owed this particular Agency guy a favor, so … anyway, I think that wraps it up for us, Mr. Rosenberg.”

  He nodded, quickly regaining his composure. “I do thank you for your efforts, Mr. Heller. It does sound like you might get us a new trial.”

  “For better or worse,” I said with a shrug. “But as a father myself, what I don’t get is how you can put politics above your two boys … and the life of your wife.”

  “I don’t believe they will kill Ethel.”

  “Oh I think they probably will. And you’ll go first. They’ll sit you down and hope at the last second, if it comes to that, you’ll say you’ll cooperate if they spare the mother of your children. But if you stay mute, Mr. Rosenberg, remember—you’ve boxed them in. She’ll have to go.”

  He was studying me in horrified fascination. “You would name names, Mr. Heller?”

  “For my son? For a woman I love? You’re goddamn right.”

  “Then you’re as bad as David and Ruth.”

  “Maybe. I don’t think I’d sell out a sister for my boy. I’d find some other way. Of course, I don’t have a sister, so it’s a tough call. But I think we can agree that, as in-laws go, those two are the rat-bastard bottom.”

  I got up to knock on the door and let the guard know I was finished here. Rosenberg sat there staring at me, trying to understand me. He apparently hadn’t met anybody from Chicago before.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Dashiell Hammett’s apartment on West Tenth in the Village was a duplex, and I was let in up seven stairs by an attractive colored housekeeper who walked me across a large yet cozy area that was both living room and bedroom, with a fireplace and a view on a small garden. We stopped at the mouth of a wrought-iron spiral staircase.

  “Mr. Hammett,” she called down, “your guest is here.”

  Hammett’s voice came up: “Nate, join me.”

  I corkscrewed down to where he was sitting in an office that was as spare and cold as the upstairs had been warm. No framed celebrity photos, book jackets, or movie posters, just brick walls. There was something of a cell about it—a few wooden file cabinets, a cot, and a dark-wood desk, where he sat at a typewriter with a blank sheet of paper rolled in it. On the left of the typewriter were a dictionary and thesaurus, and a cup of pencils a blind beggar might have forgotten there; on the right were a box of white paper and an overflowing ashtray near a book of Stork Club matches and a pack of Camels. He had already swiveled so that his back was to his work, though there was no sign of any going on, and rose to shake hands.

  His grip was firm, particularly for a man so frail-looking, his mostly white shock of hair swept back, his posture casual, though the eyes behind the plastic-rimmed glasses were sharp. His skeletal frame swam in a short-sleeved pale yellow shirt and brown pants.

  He got me a hard chair from somewhere. Then I sat facing
him, filling him in on the discovery of the console table as well as much of what I’d learned. Natalie Ash and her anonymous friends from the art gallery I edited out.

  When all that was done, I said, “I was able to tap into some federal sources. I’m afraid I may have let certain parties in the government think I was working undercover for them.”

  “Oh dear,” Hammett said with half a smile, letting out a stream of smoke.

  “I can let you know what I learned,” I said, “but only if I have your word that none of it goes any further.”

  He nodded.

  From this man, that nod was all I needed.

  So I gave him all the rest of it, including most of what Shep Shepherd had shared last night. The writer listened quietly, with cool intensity, reacting not at all to the revelation that Julius Rosenberg had been a spymaster of sorts. He was halfway through another Camel before he finally interrupted.

  “Julius Rosenberg was fired by the Soviets?” His dark eyebrows had climbed, making his hair seem to stand up, like a comedian’s in a haunted-house movie.

  I doled out a nod. “Once Rosenberg was fired from his civilian job with the Signal Corps, and didn’t have the access to secrets he’d had, he was of little use … and since he’d been fired for denying he’d been a Communist Party member, that put a spotlight on him.”

  “And his Russian handlers couldn’t have that.”

  I turned a hand over. “Keep in mind Rosenberg had stayed active with the Party—kept up his dues, socialized with other party members, maintained friendships with those he’d recruited for spying … all against Soviet protocol.”

  Hammett shook his head. “So far in over his head, the poor bastard. Meaning well is just not good enough. Did Rosenberg have anything to do with the passing of atomic secrets?”

  “Very damn little. He wouldn’t have been David Greenglass’s handler at all if it hadn’t been for the accident of David getting assigned to Los Alamos.”

  “I doubt that was an accident,” Hammett said. “That’s the lead I would have followed if I were J. Edgar Hoover. Disgusting though that thought is.”

  I shrugged. “Well, as far we know, it was an accident. Either way, Rosenberg was David’s handler for maybe a month. That might involve the first batch of information that the world’s worst brother-in-law delivered on furlough—the names of a few scientists, the general layout of the Los Alamos facility.”