Better Dead (22 page)

He leaned in and presented a hand for me to shake. I did. Like in
The Three Bears,
not too hard, not too soft, just right.

“I'm getting myself coffee,” he said, some Southern drawl in it, “and you seem to be out. Shall I refresh your cup?”

“No thanks,” I said.

He returned with coffee and a slice of apple pie with some cheese on it. “Hope you don't mind—I've been up a while, and could use a little boost of sugar.”

“Not at all.”

“Like a piece yourself? Happy to fetch it. My treat.”

“No. Thank you.”

He sat and doctored his coffee with cream and sugar.

“Name is Edward Shepherd,” he said. “But I hope you'll call me ‘Shep.' I'm hopeful we'll be friends, or at least friendly. May I call you ‘Nate'?”

“Sure.”

He leaned forward in familiarity. “Do you mind if I don't display my credentials here in public? There are likely individuals among us who would recoil at the sight of what appeared to be any kind of police identification.”

“I believe you're who you say you are.”

He had a bite of pie and waited till he'd chewed and swallowed it down before speaking again. “I apologize for the wait. You've had ninety minutes, nearly, to assess the situation yourself. Would you like to give me your thoughts, or shall I fill you in?”

I leaned back in my hard chair, folded my arms. “Why don't you eat your pie and I'll take a crack at it.”

The gap-toothed smile flashed. “You're very generous, Nate. Please. Tell me what you've gathered.”

He was keeping his voice down, so I did the same. But the loud talk and laughter of the boisterous regulars here gave us plenty of cover.

“You've had that art gallery under surveillance for some time,” I said. “Wired for sound?”

A nod as he chewed apple pie.

“But you weren't in the car or van yourself. Those three who burst in just a little too late, like the cavalry in a western movie …
they
were the surveillance team.”

Another nod, another bite of pie.

“You're either local or happened to be in town and are some kind of security chief. You were called, came right down, and while I cooled my tail here, you've been reviewing the playback of what turned an art gallery into a shooting gallery.”

He sipped his coffee, said, “Nicely thought through. Well put, too. Anything else?”

“You may have been following me during my inquiry into the Rosenberg matter. I'd like to think not, because it would mean I've been shadowed for several weeks and didn't catch it. Embarrassing.”

He chuckled as he forked another bite of pie.

“How about it, Shep? Care to confirm or deny any of that?”

“No,” he said. “What does it matter? We're here to help you out of a spot, and clean up that mess. I don't say
your
mess, Nate, because I kind of feel like that mess was imposed upon you.”

“What will become of the, uh … others?”

A shrug. “That hasn't been decided yet. Probably they're just not gonna be around anymore. The assumption'll be that they've fled behind the Iron Curtain. Several of the Rosenberg ring already have done so, as the late Miss Ash indicated.”

“Then Julius Rosenberg
was
the linchpin of an espionage ring feeding the Soviets information.”

He pushed the empty plate aside. “Durin' the war, yes. That I can confirm. I can tell you quite a bit more, but off-the-record, with no way for you to verify. You just have to take my word. And I would deny it all, naturally.”

“Why tell me
anything,
Shep?”

He only gave me half the grin this time. “You're a hell of an investigator, Nate. I think you have a right to know what is really going on in this business … at least as the Agency sees it.”

“And what's your agenda? Yours and/or the Agency's?”

“You mean, what do I hope to convince you to do? Well, that's up to you. I think you may want to walk away from this endeavor, at this point, but possibly not. Possibly not.”

“No agenda. That's tough to buy, Shep.”

He shrugged, sipped more coffee, shrugged again. “Let's talk a while before you decide.”

“All right. But first let me ask you something.”

“Shoot. Sorry. Poor choice of words.”

I frowned at him; his lightness about all this was starting to grate. “Very poor. I took four lives tonight. Three were strangers but that doesn't help much. One was a woman I liked and trusted.”

He made a noise in his cheek. “That kind of thing can shake a fella.”

“Yes it can.”

“Of course, from what I read in official files, you've dispatched rather more than your share of troublemakers in your time. And I'm guessing not all of the scores you've settled have made it into the official files.”

“Let's say you're guessing right, Shep. But before this conversation proceeds, tell me. What are you boys doing, working a case on U.S. soil? Isn't that J. Edgar's purview?”

His closed-mouth smile plumped his cheeks. “Well, now isn't that just precious, comin' from somebody as worldly as Nathan Heller.”

“
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.”