Suspect Red

by L. M. Elliott

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.” He nodded so forcefully that it knocked her hand away. “I’d love to paint some eggs.”

  The four teens cleared the table of books and afternoon breakfast while Teresa mixed her special dyes. She explained to Dottie what they would do.

  “Kraslice means ‘embellished egg,’ and we give them as special gifts at Easter because of a story about Mary Magdalene. She traveled to Rome to preach and had to bring the emperor a gift. Just like diplomats must do today.

  “Wealthy visitors gave the emperor jewels, but country people gave crops or game they’d caught. Mary presented Tiberius all she had—a humble white egg—and said, ‘Christ has risen.’ He responded, ‘Nobody could rise from the dead. It is as impossible as that egg turning red.’ And within that moment, the egg she held in her hand turned a rich crimson.”

  She put down bowls of red, green, and gold dye.

  “No blue? That’s my favorite color.” Dottie pointed to her eyes and batted her eyelashes.

  Natalia rolled hers.

  Vladimir turned red.

  Seeing her son’s mortification, Teresa hastened to answer. “No, no blue, dear.”

  Natalia added wickedly, “In the old country, blue represents death and suffering.”

  “What?” Dottie looked insulted.

  Teresa frowned at her daughter and then smiled broadly at Dottie. “Just Old World superstitions. These are the traditional kraslice colors: red is thought to ward off evil, gold is the color of harvest grains, and green reminds us of the rebirth of trees each spring.”

  She started melting a pot of beeswax. As Teresa stirred, she kept talking to Dottie, perhaps as a way of silencing her daughter from brewing trouble. “When we start painting, we don’t just dip eggs into those dyes. We divide each egg into sections and then draw designs in each field with melted beeswax. Eight-pointed stars, for instance.”

  “Oh, that sounds awfully hard to draw.”

  Natalia sighed heavily. But when Teresa shot her daughter yet another disapproving look, Natalia grudgingly said, “It’s not that hard. I’ll show you how.”

  Dottie beamed.

  Teresa lifted the pot from the stove. “Ready! Vladi, please get the hot plate from the dining room, so we can keep the beeswax warm and liquid. Richard, may I ask you go to my studio, please? On my drafting table there are half a dozen styluses I laid out already. We need those needle points to draw the designs.”

  Richard got up, happy to have a moment to breathe after his panic. As he left the room he could hear Dottie’s eeeeeewww as Teresa explained that they didn’t boil the eggs. They would prick each end and blow out the yolk and white so the unbroken shell could last for years.

  He tiptoed past the sleeping mound on the living room couch. All the curtains were drawn shut in the room, as well as in the adjacent enclosed porch, so Natalia’s friend could sleep. But even in the dim light Richard spotted the silvery, needle-tipped metal pencils. As he reached for them, his eyes fell on a pile of newspapers—Czech newspapers!

  Wait a second.

  Richard glanced over his shoulder before moving the newspapers a little to see them better. Underneath was a stack of letters addressed to Terezka Jacobowitz. Jacobowitz? Was that her maiden name?

  The letters lay next to an empty envelope, plus that map Richard had spotted months before. Now he could see that it was of Prague and its surroundings. It was bloodied with red circles and arrows. There was also a map of France, and a bunch of New York Times clips about the United Nations with the dates of the articles circled in red, plus a Life magazine.

  “Whoa,” Richard breathed. The magazine was opened and Teresa had drawn red horns and a beard and tail on a photo of a guy named Oatis.

  Richard recognized the name from news reports. He was that AP bureau chief in Prague who’d been accused by Communist Czechoslovakia of spying for the United States, and imprisoned for two years. He’d just been released. The headline: WHY I CONFESSED: “I AM NOT A SPY,” SAYS U.S. REPORTER BUT TELLS HOW REDS FORCED HIM TO SAY HE WAS.

  Teresa had also highlighted parts of the article—about his arrest by secret police, about the two days of sleep deprivation and the questions fired at him by “the Boss” about his bureau employees—three Czech reporters who’d been hauled off the month before. A quote attributed to the Boss’s interpreter, “Your boys are here today for interrogation,” was circled and circled and circled in red. The next paragraph was about the Boss grilling Oatis on articles written by the three Czech reporters and their source—a refugee living in Paris who returned to Czechoslovakia on “mysterious errands.” That, too, had been highlighted furiously.

  Richard leaned over to turn the page, reaching up to the lamp beside Teresa’s desk to switch light onto this obvious collection of evidence of…of…of what, he didn’t know.

  His gaze glued on the article, he groped his way to the lamp pull. When he felt what he thought was its cord, he tugged. But it caught and snagged. No light came on. With impatience, Richard glanced over at the lamp. Hanging down from the bulbs was the usual chain pull with a bell-like knob at its end, but right above it, dangling from the shade, was a dime-size disc suspended on a thin wire. His fingers had caught on that wire.

  Richard did a double take, squinting. But he already knew what the little black disc was. He’d seen a dozen of them on I Led 3 Lives.

  It was a tiny microphone.

  It was true. He’d been right. Those guys had planted bugs. They were listening in to every word the White family said. They were probably eavesdropping on his own movements at that very moment, wondering who was rustling around at Teresa’s desk. Involuntarily, he looked over his shoulder.

  Hands shaking, Richard reached up into the lamp and gently stuffed the bug back into a slight cut he detected in a seam of the shade’s lining. Vladimir’s joking warning to Natalia rang in his ears: “If the FBI had bugged our house, you might be on your way to the hoosegow, right now!”

  Richard swallowed hard, fighting off vomit. He was weirdly elated and riddled with a horrible sense of responsibility at the same time. He knew there was something suspect about Teresa. But he liked her. And what had he done potentially to Natalia? To the brother who loved her so much, his best friend?

  Not knowing what else to do, he hurried back into the kitchen, clutching the beeswax styluses—his ticket back into friendship and a simple afternoon of Easter holiday fun with his best friend’s family and the girl he still adored from afar. Richard was so rattled by what he’d seen, so shot full with guilt, he didn’t notice that the living room sofa was now vacant.

  But as he entered the kitchen, he stopped dead, halted by an awkward silence where once there had been animated conversation. Had someone seen him spying? Richard looked anxiously around the room, his eyes stopping on Dottie’s face. Her mouth was hanging open. He followed Dottie’s gaze.

  Natalia’s friend was now awake, taking a cup of coffee from Teresa. He was Black.

  “Richard!” Dottie’s voice was way too excited when she spotted him. She stood. “I am so sorry, Mrs. White, but I have to go. I forgot. My mother and Richard’s mother wanted us to…to…you know, do that thing, right, Richard? That Easter party thingie. At the church. We need to go. Right now.”

  Before Richard could protest, Dottie was beside him, tugging on his arm. “Come on, Richard, we have to go.” Richard managed to hand Vladimir the beeswax needles and to thank Teresa before Dottie dragged him away. As she yanked the front door open to shove Richard outside with her, he could hear Natalia say, “I told you, Vladi. She’s one of those.”

  Outside, the cherry trees lining the street shivered in a cool, about-to-rain April wind. The changing weather was ruining the blossoms. The trees shimmied and snowed pink petals down on them as Dottie hurried along the sidewalk.

  Finally, Richard could ask, “What gives, Dot?”

  She looked at him like he was a total idiot. “That man was a Negro.” She paused. “Good grief! You don’t th
ink Natalia is dating him, do you?” She frowned, her pretty face puckering into nasty-looking disapproval, and Richard couldn’t help being taken aback by it and her words.

  “You know, it’s one thing to be from Europe and kind of radical. To like weird books and jazz and to know a lot about old stuff. It makes Vladi kind of…sexy. But I bet that sister of his is one of those people Daddy calls an agitator. I mean, there are people fighting to get schools integrated. Black and white kids together in class! Can you imagine? Daddy says the Supreme Court is about to rule on some case allowing it. He says anyone supporting it is a Red, for sure.”

  She shook her head. “This goes just a little too far. It’s been fun to aggravate Daddy with a jazz-loving beau. But a real Red? From a family that marches and protests and thinks integration is a good idea? He’d pack me off to an all-girls boarding school in a heartbeat.” She paused to think. “I have to break things off with Vladi. Immediately.”

  Dottie slipped her arm through Richard’s. “My sister is making her debut in a couple weeks. And I have to have an escort.” She smiled up at him in a way that made his knees go to jelly. His misgivings about her obvious racism vaporized as she crooned, “Will you take me, Richard? Pretty please?”

  “WOW! That tanker is going to sail right under us!” Vladimir rolled down the car window and stuck his head out to peer down into the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and the top deck of an enormous freighter.

  Richard didn’t look. He hated crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. They used to take a ferry to get to Maryland’s Eastern Shore and the Delaware beaches, but the bridge had opened two summers ago and now everyone used it instead. The bridge was four and a half miles long and nearly twenty stories high at its midpoint to allow big ships to pass under. It gave Richard the willies to look over the edge from that high up.

  “Ooooo, I wanna see!” Ginny was sitting between the boys and clambered over Vladimir to poke her head out, too.

  “All heads inside!” Don called from the driver’s seat. But he laughed as he said it. The family was on its way to Rehoboth Beach for Memorial Day weekend, and he was in a jovial mood. Abigail’s aunt had a summer cottage there and always lent it to them for the three-day weekend. It was the first time Don had been able to join them in years. Usually, Hoover had him doing some undisclosed task on those days.

  Reluctantly, Ginny crawled back to the middle seat. “You know, Daddy, this is the third largest bridge in the world. The whole wide world! It’s just too exciting not to look.”

  Vladimir chuckled. “You kill me, Gin.”

  “Thanks, Vlad!” Ginny smiled up at him, charmed, like everyone seemed to be by him.

  At this point, Richard had learned to squash whatever sudden pangs of jealousy he felt about Vladimir, given the double life he was leading with him. Vladimir had also been way cool when Richard fessed up to escorting Dottie to her sister’s debutante ball.

  “No sweat, buddy boy,” he’d said. “She’s old news. We didn’t have anything in common, anyway. It wasn’t meant to be.”

  Nor were Richard and Dottie.

  Yes, the country-club ball had been as incredible a date as all his daydreams had promised. Dottie was beautiful, wearing another fancy sky-blue dress that accentuated her eyes and her increasingly womanly figure. The band was great. Richard stole his first sip of champagne. And he’d looked pretty darn swell in his rented tuxedo. His mom must have taken a gazillion photographs.

  But Richard hadn’t really talked with Dottie since. She even managed to dart out of Biology class so fast when it was over that he couldn’t catch up to her. She was always surrounded by giggling girls, who suddenly turned serious and whispered behind their hands when they spotted him in the hallway. Right around the time the Supreme Court banned school segregation as unconstitutional, he was shocked to overhear one of the girls say something about his being best friends “with one of those n——lovers.”

  So Richard wrote a song. About lost love. About insensitivity, humiliation, broken hearts. About love making a guy do things he knew were stupid. About popular girls stepping all over outsider boys’ souls.

  I’m on the outside looking innnn,

  Left broken and lonely from a heart made of tinnn.

  Why she did it I’ll never knowww,

  But Lord knows she left me feeling lowwww, so lowwww….

  Vladimir was almost done composing a saxophone melody for it. What he played so far ached with hurt and longing, bitterness and hope, and a sense of resignation. The song would be a total tearjerker. Like that Billie Holiday song “Fine and Mellow.”

  Richard had never heard of Billie Holiday before meeting Vladimir and Natalia. Now he was listening to her all the time, too.

  Interrupting Richard’s thoughts, Vladimir said, “Hey, Mr. Bradley, thanks again for asking me to come this weekend. I really appreciate it. I haven’t been to a real beach for a while.”

  “Sure, son. I know how tight you and Rich are. Besides, your being with us fleshes out the brotherhood, gives us a majority over the ladies.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Boy, Dad is in a good mood, thought Richard. He tried to assess Don’s expression from what he could see of his profile as Don glanced over his shoulder to talk to Vladimir. Was there a twinge of guilt in his face, too? Maybe inviting Vladimir was a way of making up for spying on his family. Or was it just Richard ladling his own discomfort onto his dad?

  That night, they all went to the boardwalk. After hours of riding bumper cars, shooting water guns into the mouths of cardboard clowns, laughing at their distorted images in wacky mirrors, and eating weird-colored cotton candy and saltwater taffy, Ginny announced she’d had enough. She wanted to go home. She was reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and had just gotten to the part where Edmund agrees to spy on his siblings for the White Witch in exchange for some Turkish Delight candy. “I’ve got to see what happens next. Can you believe? Agreeing to rat on his own brother and sisters and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. For candy!”

  Vladimir laughed. “Have you ever tasted Turkish Delight, Ginny? It’s a British favorite, with dates and nuts and jellies. It’s brilliant, it is, as my English mates would say. I can see it seriously tempting a guy’s soul. Legend says it is so delicious, it stopped a sultan’s wives from squabbling and brought peace to the palace!”

  “Humph. Well, I wouldn’t spy on my friends and family for the enemy,” Ginny said steadfastly. “No matter what.”

  Richard winced.

  Abigail took Ginny’s hand. “Come on, sugarplum.” As they walked away swinging their clasped hands, Richard could hear his mother begin to explain that C. S. Lewis wrote Edmund’s temptation as a metaphor for the disciple Judas, who betrayed Christ for money.

  “Oooooooohhhhhhh.” Ginny’s voice trailed off into the shadows of the dimly lit boardwalk.

  Was it the cotton candy that made Richard want to vomit or his suddenly feeling a parallel to Judas?

  “Okay, men.” Don clapped his hands together. “That’s a signal for us to take a walk on the beach and patrol for enemy subs!” He laughed at himself. “Seriously, let’s walk off that cotton candy glop. If we head toward the old World War II watchtowers, we’ll be away from all the surface light and have a great view of the stars.”

  So Don, Richard, and Vladimir strolled to the boardwalk’s end. “It’s hard to imagine today,” he said as they walked, “but Nazi U-boats trolled along here, unchecked. Right out there. In fact, in the first months of 1942, right after Pearl Harbor, Nazi subs sank nearly four hundred American freighters and tankers off our Atlantic Coast, most between here and North Carolina’s Outer Banks. None of those old tubs were armed. The Nazis called it the Great American Turkey Shoot, the SOBs. Thousands of our guys died.”

  They stepped onto the cool sand, and Don gazed out onto the dark waters.

  “My uncle rejoined the Merchant Marine during the war to keep supplies going to England. Trucks. Guns. Food. Medicines. A lot of old geezers re-up
ped. Percentage-wise, the Merchant Marine suffered the highest casualty rate of any of the Armed Forces. And people never think about them.” Don stopped and did a salute toward the sea. “Thanks, Uncle Jack.”

  They kept walking. For a long while, the only sound was the boom and fizz of waves slamming the beach, creating sudden shallow pools bubbling and sliding forward, then hissing sadly as they were sucked back into the ocean, making way for the next crash of surf.

  When they were illuminated only by moonlight, Don announced, “This is perfect.” They flopped onto a dune. Don pointed toward the Atlantic: “There’s Sagittarius, the archer. See? That arc of stars that looks like a bow? Low on the horizon, just above the ocean.”

  The boys nodded.

  “Above us, that lopsided W, that’s Cassiopeia’s chair. And over there,” he said, pointing slightly inland, “is Cygnus. Look for a cross of stars that makes a stick body. Can you see what looks like a swan’s outstretched wings?”

  Hushed, Vladimir and Richard looked to where he pointed. Gazing at the heavens was quieting the guilt Ginny had unwittingly poured on Richard. He barely breathed, worrying about distracting Don.

  “Now sit real still and focus, boys. Stay on Cygnus. See that very faint swath of gray white around it?” Don held up his hand and swept it from left to right.

  “Oh, yeah! I see it!” Vlad said quietly. He nudged Richard and pointed, and soon Richard found it, too.

  “That’s the Milky Way. Keep an eye out. Don’t move and you’ll eventually see something bright skip across it. That’ll be a shooting star.”

  Amazed by the unmistakable reverence in his dad’s voice, Richard glanced over and saw a quiet, peaceful smile on Don’s face.

  “I didn’t know you knew so much about stars, Dad.”

  “What?” Don frowned a little. “Yeah, I guess we haven’t had enough time for sitting and talking about stuff like this. That’s going to change, Rich.” He reached over and ruffled Richard’s hair without taking his eyes off the sky.