by Karin Tanabe
“He’s more than just a member,” said Wells.
“If you’re going to this much effort, he must be. But it’s still jarring. He was such a delightful person at Columbia.” I placed my empty coffee cup on the edge of the Formica table. “That’s the strange part.”
“People aren’t simple. I’m sure he was delightful,” said Wells. “And I’m sure some Nazis were a real belly laugh as well.”
“Good point.” I smiled. “I suppose that was an idiotic thing to say.”
“No. It wasn’t. Sometimes good people make terrible decisions.”
“To say the least.”
Wells left money on the table and gestured toward the door.
“Thank you for the coffee and sandwich. It helped, but I’m still terribly nervous,” I admitted as we walked out. “All I’ve done for the past two years is be a mother. I don’t know if I can even do this convincingly. I’m afraid I’ll hurt you all rather than help you. A simple conversation feels not so simple to me, even with someone I know—or knew—so well.”
Wells stayed quiet for a minute as the glass door shut behind us. “From what I’ve observed,” he said, “mothers are pretty good at most things.”
“Maybe your wife.”
“Definitely my wife. Probably you, too.”
“Do you enjoy it? I mean, what you do? Is this what you wanted to do as a child and all that?”
“Are you asking how they let a colored man into the FBI? And as a special agent?” he said, trying to hide a smile.
“No, I didn’t mean it like that. I—”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Edgeworth. Rina. I’m still wondering about it myself. I’m only the tenth Negro they ever let play the game. So, let’s go, you and me, and play the game while we’ve got the chance.”
He opened the passenger-side door of Coldwell’s car and I climbed in.
“Jesus Christ, there you are. I was about to drag you two out but didn’t think it would look right. Did you all have a three-course meal? A digestif? We’re tight on time now,” said Coldwell. As soon as the doors were closed, he started driving fast and talking faster.
“Jacob just sat down to lunch. Eating with the delivery girl who’s being restructured. Her name is Anne Palermo, but he calls her Ava Newman. All these comrades like to pop on some other identity when they pledge their souls to Russia.”
“What does that mean? Restructured?” I asked.
“Nothing good for her, even if she thinks it’s going to mean something good for her.”
Coldwell parked the car hastily on West End Avenue and got out. He slipped into the phone booth on the corner, placed a quick call, and hung up without saying a word. A few seconds later, the phone rang.
I watched him speak into the receiver, his head bent. Then I looked in the rearview. Wells was watching him, too.
“Gornev’s just finishing up at Vesuvius on Eighty-sixth. Some cheap Italian place,” Coldwell said when he got back in the car. “I’ll drop you at Eighty-fourth and you’ll start walking up Amsterdam. Quickly. You want to run into him outside the restaurant. That bastard sure doesn’t linger over linguini.”
We took off in the car and raced down eleven blocks.
“Get out. Good luck,” said Coldwell as he came to a stop. I looked at him, hesitating. He nodded at me in a way that was meant to be reassuring but fell far short. He took off as soon as I’d closed the door.
“It’s just a simple conversation,” said Wells as we stepped onto the sidewalk, our pace in sync.
“So I’ve heard.”
Wells coughed. I looked at him but he wasn’t looking at me. Ahead of us, I saw the sign for Vesuvius, illustrated with a very angry volcano.
“We should start talking again.”
“Okay.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Maybe I’ll talk, and you’ll listen. But be sure to laugh a little, even if I’m not being funny.”
I smiled.
“Better.”
I tried to think of something to say, but Wells didn’t let up.
“He is a very charismatic man.”
“Jacob? Yes, he is.”
“Are you angry that he lied to you?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, keeping my eyes on the restaurant. “I haven’t thought about it that much. I suppose it doesn’t feel like he was lying to me if he was lying to everyone. That was just his real life. A lie.”
Wells slowed. “It was. But the tables have turned. Because now it’s your turn to lie.”
I followed his gaze. Coming out of the restaurant were a man, still easy to recognize as Jacob Gornev, and a beautiful blonde woman who had to be Anne Palermo.
She was wearing a dress the color of a tangerine. Some people would have looked ridiculous in such a bright shade, especially before the heat of summer, but it looked perfect on her. It was a sheath of light wool, tight on her curves, with a thin belt made to match and a hem that touched right below her knees. Her beige heels were low but fashionable, her hair waved, framing her delicate face.
“Speed up. A little. Laugh loudly. A lot,” said Wells. “When’s the hardest you ever laughed?”
“College, I think,” I said, my steps quickening.
“Why?”
I smiled and shook my head no.
“Why?” he said again, now smiling with me.
“I can’t tell you,” I said, starting to laugh.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s inappropriate. Banned-books levels of inappropriate.”
“You’re about to approach a communist spy on false pretenses. One you had a romantic relationship with. You think whatever it is you’re remembering is the inappropriate part?”
“This whole day is inappropriate,” I said. “But right now, I don’t really mind.”
Wells nodded and smiled.
“Keep laughing,” he said. “He’s about to notice us.”
“Okay.” I let out another laugh, but this time it felt forced, so I just tried to hold a pleasant expression on my face. I approached Jacob Gornev as if he were still a young man in his twenties, smelling of coffee and borrowed aftershave, standing in front of Butler Library waiting for me so we could go drink cheap wine in the student bars.
I could sense the exact moment he saw me. I pretended not to notice. But then he said my name, the words bursting out of him, practically singing in his Ukrainian accent.
“Katharina?” he said. “Katharina West?”
I felt genuinely jolted. It was so seldom that my maiden name was used now. Even my childhood friends knew me as an Edgeworth, knew that everyone wanted to be an Edgeworth over a West. But Jacob had no idea I’d married.
With surprise battling pleasure on his face, he came toward me. My heart pumped, exhilaration winning out over my nerves. Even though my memories of him had become far more complicated, I was happy to see Jacob. It was like time traveling to my days at Columbia—a time when the world was in turmoil, but I was perfectly at peace.
“Jacob Gornev!” I exclaimed. “I can’t believe it. Is that really you? What a surprise. What an absolutely wonderful surprise.”
He had the same lanky frame, the same dark eyes and hair, cut a bit too long. He wore a beige wool cable-knit sweater with leather elbow patches and a pair of respectable enough navy-blue trousers, which fell a bit too short over his brown loafers. He still had the air of a university student, even though he was pushing forty. His nose was pointier than I remembered and his two dimples, one on each cheek, were as enchanting as ever. On such a sunny day, his eyes looked brighter, full of life. He always had that way about him. As if he were uniquely able to take in more of the world than others could.
“Katharina,” he said again, grasping my shoulders and kissing both of my cheeks. His smell was familiar, as was his grip—too familiar for me to feel any panic. But Jacob Gornev had been more than a friend. I could tell already that I would be too soft on him. This man did not seem like the enemy.
“More than ten years,” I corrected him.
“Wait,” he said, suddenly looking at Wells. “What is this! I know this man you’re with.” His smile widened as he looked at Wells. He put out his hand and shook Wells’s with gusto. “I was so focused on you, Katharina, that I did not see that you were with Mr. Turner Wells. What a small island it is. Katharina West with Turner Wells.”
“How are you, Jacob?” Wells said politely.
“I’m very well. In shock, complete shock, but well. I used to be good friends with this woman,” he said, looking at me with more surprise than pleasure now.
Wells nodded at Jacob’s companion.
Jacob turned to her and grinned, seeming to have forgotten she was standing there.
“Yes, of course. I am rude. Ava Newman, you know Turner Wells, and this is Katharina West. They’re a recent friend and an old friend.”
“It’s Katharina Edgeworth now,” I said, smiling at Ava and extending my hand to her.
“Ahh, married,” said Jacob, shaking his head. “Eine Tragödie. But how nice it must be for you. And your husband.” He put his hands on my shoulders again and looked at me as if I had just returned from a very long absence, which I suppose I had.
“You look the same, Katharina West. You do. Happy and beautiful and intelligent. I assume you’re still more intelligent than I am. I’d be disappointed if you were not.”
“In that case, of course I am.”
“Of course you are,” he said, laughing.
Happy, beautiful, and intelligent. Those were certainly not the words that came to mind when I considered myself these days. Manic, as Arabella had said. Drunk, as the Los Angeles papers had claimed. Unreliable, as my husband constantly repeated. Jacob was seeing a former version of me, but I didn’t mind. I missed her terribly.
“I was just headed home,” said Wells pleasantly. Easily. As if he were floating through Manhattan on the back of a breeze. “Rina, thank you for lunch.” I smiled at him. Of course he had remembered to call me Rina.
“It was lovely,” I replied earnestly. Nerve-wracking, but lovely.
“Jacob, good to run into you. And Ava, nice to see you again, too,” he said, bowing his head slightly toward her as he backed away slowly.
“I’ll telephone you, Turner,” said Jacob. “We can have a drink, yes?”
“Yes,” said Wells, smiling. “I’d like that.” He walked off. I watched him go but turned back to Jacob before he’d rounded the corner.
“Lucky me, alone with two beautiful women.” He looked from Ava to me.
“A drink, then? While we’re on the topic?”
“Not for me. I have to be off, I’m afraid,” said Ava, her voice full of New England money. Up close she looked as if she’d grown up on a regimen of country club crab bisque and tennis matches. “Thank you for lunch, Jacob,” she said. “And lovely to meet you, Mrs. Edgeworth. I hope to see you again soon.”
She smiled and walked away, looking absolutely nothing like a communist. But maybe that was the point. Jacob was far too smart to send a woman in a gray, functional sack with a hammer and sickle in her purse on the morning train to Washington.
Jacob didn’t watch Ava go, but I did. It was hard not to look at a woman with that much presence.
“Katharina West,” he repeated. He eyed me up and down and back again. I’d worn a low-cut dress with a flouncy skirt in dependable navy blue that emphasized the good and hid the bad. It seemed to be doing its job. “I still can’t believe it,” he said, taking a step back as if I were an abstract painting that required decoding. “Have you been in New York all these years, Katharina? Was the island so cruel as to keep us from each other? Or did you run off back to Germany? Or Switzerland, was it?”
“Switzerland—Fribourg—but no. I’ve been in New York all this time. As tempting as the world is, New York always convinces me she’s better.”
“That’s because she is.”
Jacob took a step closer to me. One more, and his body would be nearly touching mine.
“Then what happened? Why did we lose touch? Things didn’t end badly between us, did they? I seem to have only good memories.” He gestured for us to start walking. “I’m going downtown. Can we walk together for a while?”
“I was just heading home.”
“Where is home?”
“A few blocks south and east. Fifth Avenue and Sixty-third. Near the Central Park Zoo.”
“Ah, I see,” he said, grinning, showing off the slight gap between his straight front teeth. “You live in the zoo. That makes perfect sense to me. You spoke every other language, so you had to learn to speak hippopotamus.”
“I think I live in another kind of zoo.”
He nodded and said again, “Remind me, please. Why did we lose track of each other, Katharina?”
“I’m not sure. I think perhaps life just happened. I married after Columbia, and I suppose that changed things.”
“Ah, marriage. Of course it did. That’s why it’s not for me.” Jacob stopped suddenly in front of an Automat. “Katharina. I have a better idea than you going home. You’ll disappear into the zoo, the domestic zoo, and I might never see you again. You have just had lunch with Turner, and I have had a late lunch as well, but please say yes to a drink? I know a simple but very good place in the East Village. Do you have time? Do say yes.”
“I do say yes.”
“Good. Come, then. Let’s find a taxi, and you can tell me all about this thing they call marriage.”
“I can tell you all about that and more.”
After Jacob flagged down a cab, we sat in silence for a few blocks, until we crossed the park. “I have a restaurant,” he said as we turned on Sixty-fifth heading to the FDR Drive. “Truthfully, it’s my uncle’s restaurant, but I tell the girls it’s mine. Do you remember it? Did I ever take you? It’s on Second Avenue.”
“No, you never took me,” I replied, trying not to let my deep nostalgia for those college years pull me under. “You did cook for me, though. Sausage that tasted like a slice of heaven. And cabbage the color of eggplants. All sprinkled with vinegar.”
“That’s still what I cook. Everyone likes sausage and cabbage. Everyone.”
“Does your uncle serve it in the restaurant?”
“Of course he does. And the cook makes it even better than I do.”
“Then that’s what I’ll have.”
Jacob laughed, reached for my arm and wrapped it around his. “Good, Katharina. Good.”
I rolled down the window, thinking my nerves needed some air, but as soon as it was on my face, I realized they didn’t. It was my elation that needed to be brought down. I had checked the first box. I was alone with Jacob Gornev. And being alone with Jacob had always held the smell of excitement. We’d first crossed paths in the spring of 1940, when America was not yet in the war and New York still had its glow about it. And like Coldwell had said, he’d been in love with me, and though I’d tried to fight it, wanting to be attached to no one during those years, that love had been reciprocated.
The cab raced down the FDR and we got out on the corner of Second Avenue and Ninth Street. Together, we walked into a charmless office building, my heels clicking on the lobby’s cheap linoleum flooring. Paintings of small blue flowers in various stages of bloom hung on the wall of a long, narrow hallway. When I thought we were going to run into a dead end, Jacob opened a nearly hidden entry, and we descended a few stairs to a small foyer in front of a glass door.
“I have definitely never been here,” I remarked. “I would remember nearly walking through a wall.”
“That’s my mistake. But I was lazy back then,” he said, maneuvering around me in the small space. “Morningside Heights to the East Village felt like New York to Moscow. I preferred to stay in the neighborhood and eat Spanish chicken. Do you reme
mber how much I liked that Spanish chicken? The food in that restaurant was so fresh there were clucks coming from the kitchen.”
“That is not at all true. The only clucking came from drunk coeds.”
“You remember it your way, I’ll remember it mine. But I do know—and you can’t argue with this—the spiciness gave me the strength of a hundred men. Or at least one and a half.”
I rolled my eyes, and Jacob grinned as he opened the glass door. Before us was an unexpectedly large restaurant, given that we’d had to practically crawl through the air ducts to reach it. There were red leather banquettes on either side of the room, tables between. The floors were light-colored wood, the boards narrow and uneven. The middle tables were covered in starched pink tablecloths under glass toppers, each with a milk glass vase holding pink carnations. Wooden chandeliers with electric candles hung from the low ceiling, and decorative plates lined the beams.
“It’s a Ukrainian restaurant,” said Jacob, dropping my arm when the door clanged shut. “In case you were not sure.”
“It’s called Vladimir’s.”
“Could be Russian.”
“I do remember where you were born.”
“What else do you remember?” he asked, his dark eyes looking right into my darker ones.
“A lot,” I said honestly. “I think back to that time, to being a student at Columbia, quite a bit.”
“Those untroubled days. Intoothant.”
“Insouciant,” I said, happiness lifting the corners of my mouth. “But I remember. That’s how you used to say it at Columbia.”
“Intoothant.” He started laughing, throwing his head back with delight. “I said many things incorrectly back then, and you never seemed to mind.”
“Of course not. Languages are meant to be reinterpreted.”
Jacob caught the eye of a waitress, a petite blonde with hair like a pretty, flaxen helmet, and pointed to the back of the restaurant. She nodded, and Jacob gestured for me to follow him. It was a day for the back corners of restaurants, it seemed.