by Noel Hynd
“I didn’t want a lot of people,” Margot answered. “Couldn’t face it. And Dad wasn't much for making close friends,” she said. “He made a few, but they're all somewhere else.” She managed a long sigh and her voice steadied. “My mother's dead. My sister… We don't get on that well with the rest of the family. So I didn’t even notify them. They wouldn't have cared.” Cooper glanced at the rows of empty seats. “I just want this to be over.”
“Where’s your son?” Cooper asked.
“Away at school, remember?”
It took Cooper a moment. “Yes. I'd forgotten,” he said. “Prep school in Connecticut.” She nodded. Cooper took out a pencil and notepad from his jacket.
“There are a few personal details missing,” he said. “May I?”
Margot said, “Whatever you want. Just leave me as far out of it as you can, okay?”
They spoke for several minutes of the background of Stanley Rudawski: his career and home, likes, dislikes, loves and hates, plus a few of the other things that mattered.
“What are you doing about burial arrangements?” Cooper asked at length.
“He wanted to be cremated. I’m going to take his ashes to Paris and scatter them at Pere Lachaise. Paris was his favorite city.”
“May I write that?”
“I’d be pissed at you if you damned well didn’t,” she said.
He squeezed her hand and they both laughed.
Cooper leaned back in his wooden chair. “Often, I don't decide how I’m going to phrase things until I sit down to write,” he said. “Stanley Rudawski isn't my typical assignment. Your father posed more questions than he answered. I’ve been trying to confirm things.”
“Everything he told you was the truth,” she continued with sudden emphasis.
“Maybe so. But considering the nature of what he said, some confirmation would be nice. I tried to get in touch with one of his old associates.”
“Who?” she said.
“Brett Molloy at the C.I.A,” Cooper said.
She sighed. “You must know better than to trust those people in Virginia. They'll lie to you every time. If they don't stick a knife directly in your back.”
“I don't disagree,” Cooper said.
“If you don't want to print what my father told you,” she said, agitated, “you don't have to. You can forget the whole damned thing.”
“Didn't you think I'd try to confirm anything?”
She spoke very steadily. “You know what he told you. You know what my father's wishes were. That's all I can give you. I’ve had enough. I’m leaving now.” She stood.
“Margot?” he asked, making no attempt to detain her. She waited. “Something's wrong with this whole scene,” he said. “Like the write-ups I do in the newspaper. They fit the person and the occasion. This one doesn’t. Your father was a diplomat. An educated man. He was the head of a family. He knew people. He must have had friends. Yet, here we are: All by ourselves in a crappy bargain-basement funeral home. It makes you nervous that I would even do a little research. What aren't you telling me?”
“My father made himself unpopular with his theories,” she said. “As for this funeral home, it's what he told me he wanted. Just like getting in touch with you. It was not my idea. After months of terminal disease, it was what my father wanted. If you don’t like it, walk away from it. Honestly, I wish you would.”
She gathered her purse and moved away from him. He watched her leave the room. Cooper waited for her to return. He used the time to read through his notebook on Stanley Rudawski. But when Margot wasn't back by eight o'clock, his patience ended. He left the second row of chairs and walked slowly past the casket again. He paused. Yes, Margot's father looked very peaceful in death. Whatever trouble the dead man had started, or continued, he was free of it now. And he had successfully passed it along.
Chapter 18
In his office at nine o'clock on Monday morning, Cooper looked at what was on his desk. A hotel executive from Connecticut was dead at seventy-four. The former president of a local university had died of cancer—Cooper needed eight column inches for this one, or he'd hear from alumni. There was a Manhattan lawyer and a New Jersey banker. Five inches each, one column. He planned to farm out those two to his two assistant writers, one of whom had just won promotion to advertising sales. He would need to recruit a replacement. A theatrical stage manager who had been prominent in the 1950s had also died. Five more inches. Already it promised to be a busy day, but he would use Rudawski to anchor the page.
Topher Wilson, the copy runner who had been born and raised on West 127th Street, appeared in the office at ten a.m., looking for any early copy. There wasn’t any.
Cooper leaned back at his desk before Wilson could leave. “Hey, Topher.”
Wilson turned. “Yes, sir?”
“How long have you been here?”
“Almost two years.”
“Why are you still running copy? Haven’t you applied for promotion?”
“I’ve applied. It never happens.”
“You studied journalism at CCNY, didn’t you?”
“Yep.”
“You do good work. Why doesn’t the promotion happen?”
There was a simmering silence.
Cooper reached to his desk and grabbed the material on the theatrical stage manager. “On your lunch hour, go down to the morgue, and try to step on as few cockroaches as possible. Look this guy up, make some phone calls if you can, look at the format on our page and bring me four hundred words. If you’re interested.”
“I’m interested.”
“I need it by two thirty. Don’t make any mistakes.”
“You’ll have it.” Wilson disappeared.
Sam walked into the office toward eleven. “So?” Sam asked. Cooper, preoccupied, looked up after several seconds. “Want to have lunch today?” Sam asked. “I’m taking Lauren to someplace special. Horn and Hardart’s.”
“No, Sam. I can't.”
“Too busy for a friend, huh?” Sam asked. “Thanks, you Scotch-Irish jerkoff.”
“Anytime. Maybe bring me a sandwich on your way back.”
Sam winked and vanished.
Cooper looked back to his desk. He turned to the typewriter, thought for a moment, and constructed a headline:
STANLEY RUDAWSKI, 67;
NEVER SOLVED SPY
MYSTERY
No good. It didn't tell enough. No flair. It presupposed that the “spy mystery” really existed. So far, he had no corroboration. But at least he had something on paper.
He tried again, this time across two columns:
STANLEY RUDAWSKI, 67; EX-DIPLOMAT
MYSTIFIED BY SOVIET DEFECTOR
That was closer, but still wrong. Lukashenko never defected, as far as anyone knew. Cooper put up a third heading, this time over a single column.
He tried another angle:
SOVIET NEAR DEFECTION POSED
LIFELONG MYSTERY FOR…
He stopped. No good at all. This was an obit, not a news story. Or was it?
His telephone rang. It was the son of the university president. Cooper talked to him. When he was finished, he made two follow-up calls on the same man. By noon that obituary was complete. He returned to Rudawski. He went back to his notes and worked on it for too long: an hour. Soon it was two o'clock.
“Okay,” Sam said, appearing at the door. “A sandwich. But just this once. After all, we're not friends anymore. What do you want? American cheese on white with ketchup?”
“What do you really have?
“Pastrami.”
“I’ll take it.”
They ate in Sam's office. Lauren walked in and out, speaking to Sam, but not Cooper.
“See that pink fatty substance in your sandwich?” Sam said over lunch. “That's spelled suicide. Pastrami has probably killed more of my people than Hitler.” Sam paused. “You should have a special column on your obituary page about people who die from lunch meats. For example, 'So-and-so croa
ked today from acute cholesterol poisoning. He was thirty-eight and was home alone in the kitchen at the time. A bag of cookies and a six pack of Coca-Cola witnessed his death.’”
“No jokes today, Sam.”
“Are you Mr. God damned Sunshine today or what? Why is there a burr up your ass?”
“Rudawski. I can't get it the handle.”
“That's all, huh? Just the handle?”
“I don't know whether this defection ever took place. Or even the conversations he alleged in Paris in 1965. Look at these.”
He showed Sam his attempts at headlines.
“You got three headlines here, none of them good. Did he die three times? You want me to get serious about this? Help you?”
“Sure,” Cooper said. “Bail me out.”
“All right. You don't know from any Russian defector. All you know is what Rudawski said. See what I mean? You're a reporter. You met a man, he told you his story.” Sam shrugged. “A hearsay death notice. You know that, and that's your problem. If you were smart you'd just drop this bullshit defection stuff and run a regular obit. Who cares, anyway?”
Cooper thought about it. “I care,” he answered. “There’s something going on here.”
“Okay,” said Sam. “This is the Eagle, not the Times. You don't have to be smart. You don't have to be objective. But you got to entertain Kenny from Canarsie and Flora from Flushing. You got a hearsay obit? So that's what you write. Make that your angle, douche bag.”
Cooper thought about it and began to smile. “Thanks, Sam. You're right.”
Sam frowned and finished his salad. “You know everything I just told you.”
“I needed to hear it from you.”
“So you owe me one, right?” Cooper waited. “Next time this Margot Bradford pokes her pretty face around here, I want to see her.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know, this investigative stuff. It's interesting. Sports is just sports.”
“This is just an obit,” Sam.”
“Yeah,” said Sam, finishing his lettuce. “And I'm a candidate for Pope. If you're not hiding a piece of investigative work in the death page, then what are you going to Washington for? Or going to funeral parlors? Or riding around with strange women in cars?”
“You’ve got a point,” Cooper said.
“Of course I do,” Sam answered. “That’s why you love me.”
Cooper returned to his obituary. A new headline came into focus:
STANLEY RUDAWSKI, 67;
RETIRED DIPLOMAT;
TOLD OF SPY ENIGMA
It was still cumbersome. And one column didn't seem right. Cooper extended the headline and went for a second column. But he had the angle. He opened his notebook to the pages on Rudawski and began a draft. The account would need dignity with a certain amount of mystery. Couldn't be too flip. Or too cute. No Parachutist-Dies-in-Fall stuff.
Topher Wilson appeared in the office with copy on the theatrical manger. He handed it to Cooper, who quick-scanned it.
“This is good. Very good, in fact,” Cooper said, reading. “This doesn’t look like file stuff. Where did you get it?”
“I made some calls, like you told me. I got the lifelong companion of the dead guy on the line. He was sobbing but he wouldn’t shut up. He gave me everything.”
“Did you fact-check the stuff you referenced?”
“Yes, sir.”
“‘Frank.’ But don’t call the deceased ‘dead guys.’ Not even between us. It dehumanizes. Disrespect will creep into your writing.”
Wilson paused. “Is my name really going to go on this?”
“You wrote it, didn’t you? Good work. Now scram.”
Wilson laughed and departed.
Cooper went back to Rudawski, his concentration sharpened. He worked undisturbed at his quiet corner of the Eagle till four thirty, then he polished what his other staffers had done. He returned to the unfinished Rudawski draft by five. He dismissed his staffers and worked till six thirty. Sam waved goodbye and went home. At seven p.m., Cooper pulled the results from his typewriter. He reread it. Two minutes later he made a minor change in the headline.
Rudawski's passing would be noted across the top right of the necrology page. Two columns by eight inches. The space worked perfectly. Cooper juggled his stories, cut a column inch off the New Jersey banker, and assessed the new layout of his page. Now everything fit, even the advertisement for a mausoleum in Connecticut. Cooper was finally pleased.
With the text complete, he had his headline. Rudawski was ready for the typesetter.
STANLEY RUDAWSKI, 67; EX-DIPLOMAT
TOLD OF WOULD-BE SOVIET DEFECTION
By Francis X. Cooper, New York Eagle
Stanley Rudawski, a career diplomat who served during the administrations of six American Presidents, died Friday in New Rochelle, New York. Mr. Rudawski was 67 and succumbed after many months of ill health.
Stanley Rudawski was awarded bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard and Penn. He worked briefly for the late Governor George Pastore, Democrat of Rhode Island, then was hired by the U.S. Department of State in 1959. He served for a dozen years in the Foreign Service at several posts. The focal point of Mr. Rudawski's later years, however, was an incident Mr. Rudawski recalled from his tenure in Paris from 1962 until 1966. In his final years, Mr. Rudawski was haunted by a mystery, one which he spoke of at length through the final days of his life and which harkens back to the cold war days of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Mr. Rudawski accompanied an American intelligence agent, whom he knew as David Charles, to a remote cafe on Paris's right bank, where they met a man whom Mr. Charles identified as a would-be defector from the Soviet Union to the United States. Mr. Rudawski was introduced to the would-be defector by name and knew him to be a Soviet diplomat.
The defector alleged being in possession of vital Soviet intelligence documents, documents purported to contain a key to a series of previous Soviet defections—some fraudulent and some legitimate—that puzzled the Central Intelligence Agency. The defector maintained that he could provide the answer to the greatest intelligence secrets of the 1960s. But Mr. Rudawski maintained the defection was abruptly compromised through a leak in Western security.
After the meeting, the man known as “Mr. Charles” disappeared within hours and the defector vanished.
The unanswered questions surrounding the incident perplexed Stanley Rudawski until the day he died. He had cause to believe that the Soviet diplomat had been returned to Moscow and executed. Mr. Rudawski further suggested that incident contained the key to, as he termed it, “the greatest conspiracy of my generation.”
Officials in the Johnson administration have given it little credibility.
Mr. Rudawski died before he could personally prove his theories. An estranged family and a daughter survive him. Funeral arrangements are private.
In the next morning's edition of the New York Eagle, the account of Stanley Rudawski's passing appeared in a position of prominence on the upper right-hand side of page 34.
Cooper purchased a newsstand copy of the Eagle on his way to work. He turned to the obituary for Rudawski. Standing at the northwest corner of Ninety-sixth and Broadway, he reread. He was equally delighted that Topher Wilson had broken into print with his first by-line. The managing editor hadn’t noticed that a copy boy had written an obituary.
Cooper folded the paper under his arm, wondering how many days or hours would pass before the fallout from the Rudawski article would ripple back to him.
Chapter 19
As the 1968 Presidential campaign continued, George Wallace began a four-city swing through Michigan. No one could ignore him. Angry white steel and auto workers loved him. Those who saw him as an American Hitler came out to heckle and boo him. There were always fireworks at a Wallace rally.
Wallace now had more than a hundred reporters following him, most of them from the North. Martin Friedkin of The New York Eagle remained on the b
eat. Many of the reporters came equipped with cameras, microphones, recorders, and two-person sound crews. About two dozen, maybe more, were considered Hostiles, including two newcomers from Washington, two network types from New York, and three from the West Coast. They followed him in either a press plane or a bus as Wallace moved around Michigan on a World War Two vintage DC-4, leased from some remote company in the South. Secret Service agents accompanied him, as did a dozen Alabama State Troopers who were on the state payroll.
On flights, smoking was discouraged, liquor was not available. Wallace would sit up front on the aisle, nervous and twitchy. Wallace had flown multiple bombing missions over Japan in 1945. He had been later discharged from the U.S. Air Force with a medical disability. He remained uncomfortable flying, probably a reaction to the lurching, rocking and tumbling hours he had spent in B-29s amidst anti-aircraft fire over Japan while being shot at.
But there was no anti-aircraft fire these days over Michigan. The ponderous old DC-4 rumbled from city to city where Wallace would be met by hecklers who threw every form of vile obscenity at him and by those who saw him as something just short of the second coming of Jesus Christ. The pro-Wallace signs attested to the emotions he evoked:
America—Love It Or Leave it!
I worked to buy my house, George. Protect Our Home!
Law, Order and Wallace!
Give America Back to The People!
America First!
There were stops in Ann Arbor and East Lansing. Wallace wanted these venues because the universities provided hecklers. Wallace loved hecklers. They helped them to get his message across. Wallace made a speech in Kalamazoo where a young student continued to shout “Racist!” as him as he tried to speak. Wallace supporters surrounded the man and held up Stand Up For America signs in front of him so that the governor couldn’t see him. But the protester could still he heard. Finally, Wallace pointed to the youth and counterattacked.
“You’re never going to be promoted to the second grade if you don’t behave,” he said. The crowd loved that one.
The next day in Grand Rapids, a larger group came out to taunt Wallace. When their shouts threatened to disrupt him, he was ready. “Shout at me all you want,” he said. “You’ve gotten me half a million votes today.”