Better Dead (16 page)

“No! Hell, no.” He snorted derisively. “But, shit. They're not going to kill Ethel. No way in hell. Both she and Julie can clear themselves, if they just cooperate.”

“And if they don't?” I asked. “Are you man enough to sit by and watch your sister die?”

But I was thinking,
Are you worm enough?

“What,” he said, his smirk back in full force, “I'm going to come forward and call my
wife
a liar? It's not my sister I have sex with, Nate.”

So he did have standards.

“There's more to it than sex,” he clarified, maybe sensing how that had sounded. “I mean, my wife is more important to me than my sister. Or my mother and my father, okay? She's the mother of my children. Like Ethel is the mother of
her
children, and she and Julie should put those kids ahead of anything else. If Julie and Ethel want to be martyrs, that's up to them. Me, I just want to get out of here as soon as possible and be with my family. Find a job and disappear into a normal life. American dream, right, Nate?”

“Some people would say that's pretty cold, Davey.”

“Maybe. But handing over my sister is hardly the worst thing I ever did.”

“No?”

He smiled bigger than before, but this time with not a trace of amusement or smugness, either. “I helped build that bomb, didn't I? The one killing over a hundred thousand people? If I'm gonna lose sleep,
that's
what it'll be about.”

But somehow I thought that—even in here—this guy would sleep just fine tonight and any night.

Like the big baby he resembled.

 

CHAPTER

9

For a full morning well into early afternoon, Natalie Ash—looking much the Bohemian beauty in a loose peasant blouse, black skirt, black tights, and sandals—helped me conduct a canvass at Knickerbocker Village, where until a year or so ago she had lived.

Like a massive brick oasis in the midst of crumbling tenements and pushcart commerce, Knickerbocker Village covered an entire city block at Cherry and Catherine Streets. Two twelve-story buildings, each with a courtyard whose greenery shimmered on this sunny April day, offered up an impressive sixteen hundred apartments, one of which had been occupied by the Rosenbergs at the time of their arrests.

As we went up in a self-service elevator, Natalie said, “Back in the thirties, they tore down tenements to put this place up, in the name of a housing project, then chased out the former tenants with their high rent.”

“How high?”

“In today's money, fifty bucks a month for a three-room, one-bedroom apartment.”

“Not bad for Manhattan.”

“Sky-high for
this
area.” She shrugged, her dark hair bouncing on her shoulders; she had on hoop earrings that gave her a gypsy cast. “At least it's given some lower-end white-collar workers a decent place to live. Nursery school, playground, elevators, laundry facilities, steam heat, electricity.”

“Why did you leave?”

She gave me that nice wide grin; again her only makeup was bright red lipstick and a little face powder. “Well, it wasn't because of a shortage of socialists to talk politics with! Place is crawling with them.”

But her tone said that she felt they'd sold out.
Did she include the Rosenbergs?
I wondered.

Natalie shrugged, continuing, “The art gallery had apartment space above. Went with the job. Anyway, another thing this place has is hot-and-cold-running kiddies.”

She wasn't exaggerating. We mostly talked to mothers in their twenties and thirties who wore head scarfs like bandages, with little ones in arm and/or toddlers toddling. Glimpses of the apartments revealed fairly nice digs—parquet floors, small modern kitchens that we were sometimes invited into, and tiled bathrooms, a couple of which I sampled on this long tour of a blandly modern apartment building that was just beginning to show some age.

“She was stuck-up, that Ethel Rosenberg,” one young mom said, a cigarette dangling like Bogart in one of his early pictures. “Snooty. If she didn't already know you, she wouldn't speak. And them stupid hats with feathers! Lousy taste, that woman. And them brats of hers, particularly the older boy! She let that little monster get away with murder!”

A slightly older female resident said bitterly, “The
trouble
those Rosenbergs caused around here! We had FBI in our hair for weeks. And now there's a black mark on this place. Some places got a plaque that says, ‘George Washington slept here.' We ought to have ‘Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sold their country down the river here.'”

Those women, like a baker's dozen of others with similar views about their former neighbors, were not (Natalie assured me) among the many socialists and outright Communists who lived in Knickerbocker Village.

“Definitely two breeds here,” she said, lifting a well-shaped eyebrow as we walked to our next doorway. “The more conservative types kind of keep to themselves, or a close circle of friends. Lefties like to organize hobby groups—fencing, photography, singing. What can I say? Socialists like to socialize.”

“Ethel was active in the singing group, I assume.”

“She was. But like I said before, for your purposes, Nate, we need civilians—not anybody whose pink-hued background will either endanger them or make them easily dismissed.”

Not all reports were negative about Ethel and Julius. Though not outright friendly, Julius always said hello, according to some, and Ethel would at least nod. A mom in her mid-thirties with boys around the same age as the Rosenbergs' considered Ethel an enormously patient parent, even if she “overdid it with the Dr. Spock and
Parents
magazine stuff.”

“When my Andrew was young,” another woman in her thirties said, speaking with the temporary serenity of a mother during school hours, “all us moms would sit together in the courtyard tending our tykes, and smoke and talk, or maybe go for walks around here, pushing strollers and baby carriages. Mrs. Rosenberg tried to fit in, she really did, but that boy of hers was a crier, real darn fussy. You couldn't carry on a conversation! So she'd roll him away, kind of embarrassed. And as he got older, he was a
real
pill. Ethel never learned to do like in that one Bugs Bunny cartoon, remember? Use that Dr. Spock book as a paddle?”

The Rosenbergs had lived on the eleventh floor. Natalie and I hit not only that floor but the one above and below. No one reported seeing the Rosenbergs with either of the Greenglasses, much less having overheard an argument; in fact, few would have known David or Ruth by sight. The Rosenbergs were loners—despite what Natalie had said, these socialists didn't seem to have socialized much.

“Maybe we should come back in the evening,” Natalie said with a sigh as we left the building, “and talk to the men of the house.”

I shook my head. “With the Rosenbergs' notoriety, and all the stuff in the papers about the Greenglasses selling them out? There isn't a husband on the planet who wouldn't have told his wife about something interesting he witnessed between Julius and David.”

By mid-afternoon, we were in a very different sort of village—Greenwich. Different not just from the twelve-story Knickerbocker but just about anywhere else in New York City. No endless avenues cutting through skyscraper cliffs—you could see the sky in the Village—rather, meandering streets lined with comfy-looking brick or frame houses, cozy residences jammed together on side streets, and of course (surrounding and spilling over Washington Square) bars, boîtes, coffee houses. Some tourist traps, others genuine Bohemian haunts.

Natalie and I had burgers and fries at a small table by a window in the barely lit, publike White Horse on Hudson Street. I had a good view of the artistic types wandering by: long-haired women with no makeup, men in beards and boots. The view across the table was even better—this girl was a free spirit, as her peasant blouse proclaimed, braless breasts fighting under there like kittens trying to claw out of a burlap bag.

“I wish the morning had been more productive for you,” she said, after a sip of beer.

“Me, too. But that's the way my business works. You ask one hundred questions for every answer worth hearing. You knew or know Ruth Greenglass, right?”

She nodded, then took time for another sip before saying, “We were … you know, comrades. Haven't seen her in some while. Don't even know if she's living where she was at the time.”

My turn for a sip. “My understanding is she hasn't moved.”

“Same cold-water flat?”

“What I hear. Her husband's in stir, and a government snitch gets benefits but the pay stinks.”

She was smiling.

“What?” I asked.

“It's funny,” she said, “how you sometimes talk like a detective.”

“Well, I am a detective. Maybe that's why.”

“I mean a detective out of Dashiell Hammett or Mickey Spillane.”

Now I was smiling. “Well, I do try to avoid it, because it can sound kind of silly. On the other hand, some women seem to like it.”

Her throaty voice turned sultry—kidding-on-the-Washington-Square sultry. “You don't have to try hard with me, Nate. We're already…”

“Comrades?”

That rated a chuckle. “Maybe we can have a little cell meeting tonight, just the two of us. You haven't seen the gallery yet, or my apartment.”

“That sounds like a nice way to end the evening. But there's more work to be done. Private eyes get their best work done after nightfall, you know.”

“Such as what?”

I finished my beer. “Well, I think we're finished at Knickerbocker Village, don't you?”

“We are if you don't want to go back to talk to the men, or maybe hit the other floors.”

“I don't. Any other ideas, honey?”

That also made her smile. “I'm your honey now?”

“If I call you ‘baby,' you'll say I'm trying too hard. And anyway, I like ‘honey' better than ‘comrade.'” I leaned in and gave her what I like to think of as my wicked smile. “But that doesn't mean I won't come to your apartment later to go over your manifesto.”

She laughed till beer snorted out her nose. I smiled to myself.

You've still got it, Heller,
I thought.

Her laughter dissolved into giggles as she touched a napkin to her face and held a hand up for me to pause the conversation.

Then: “Nate, did you ever consider that maybe Julie and Ethel don't
want
to be saved?”

“Well, of course they want to be saved. Who doesn't want to be saved?”

She shrugged. “True believers.”

“Even when they leave two little boys behind? I don't buy it.”

“Maybe you've never believed in anything.”

“Sure I do.”

“Like what?”

“Survival. Doing a job well. Living good. Baby, zealotry pays even worse than snitching.”

She smiled a little. “You're doing it again.”

“Talking like a detective?”

She nodded. “And here you don't even carry a gun.”

“Not when I'm interviewing mommies at housing projects, I don't.” I leaned forward, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the bar clatter. “Listen, Natalie—I appreciate you helping me, I really do, but you don't have to. I can fend for myself.”

She thought about that, then said, with a little eyebrow shrug, “You might want to talk to Mrs. Rosenberg. Sophie Rosenberg. Julie's mom? She may have seen or overheard something.”

“Think that's worth doing?”

“I do. I know her well enough to set that in motion. Sophie's in Washington Heights.” She gestured to a pay phone on the wall back by the restrooms. “Should I try her now?”

I shook my head as I checked my wristwatch. “No, I have to get back to the hotel. I have a long-distance call to make in about an hour. Could you meet me at my room around six-thirty? Then we'll take a cab to Mrs. Rosenberg and then maybe catch a bite back down here somewhere. El Chico, maybe?”

That was fine with her—a little touristy but “good chow.”

She said, “We can catch the subway to Washington Heights near the Waldorf.”

I shook my head again. “No, cab is fine. I'm on an expense account, remember?”

The toothy smile flashed. “You
are
decadent, Nathan Heller.”

“Think you're the first one to notice?”

On the sidewalk she headed toward her art gallery with a wave, and I paused to watch the nice rear view for a few seconds, then hailed a cab, thinking,
If I must go Bohemian, let it be with a Bohemian dish like that.

*   *   *

Morton Sobell—another Lower East Side boy raised by leftist parents—claimed to have known Julius Rosenberg only slightly when they'd attended City College. An electrical engineer, Sobell and his friend/roommate Max Elitcher worked for the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Ordnance during the war, including design work on radar and advanced electronic devices. By 1947, he was working at Reeves Instrument in Manhattan on a computer for evaluating airplane and guided-missile designs.

When David Greenglass was arrested by the FBI, Sobell walked away from that high-paying job and took his family on an impromptu vacation to Mexico. Reports of Julius' arrest prompted Sobell to use false names as he made purchases and moved from hotel to hotel around Veracruz and Tampico. Finally he was delivered by Mexican police to the FBI just across the Texas border. He was charged with five counts of conspiring with the Rosenbergs to provide defense secrets to Russia, but the only evidence against him was the uncorroborated testimony of his “old friend” Elitcher, who claimed he and Sobell were members of a Rosenberg-led espionage ring.

As a codefendant, Sobell chose not to testify in his own defense. Currently he resided at Alcatraz, the federal penitentiary designed to house America's most hardened, hard-to-control, and notorious criminals. Mild-mannered, bespectacled mad professor Sobell fit only the “notorious” part. He was almost certainly incarcerated at the Rock in hopes he would crack and exchange information for a reduced sentence or parole.