Manhattan 62 (31 page)

“Rush, is Ostalsky your real focus, because I can give you a list, places he likes to go, people he meets, Café Figaro, Gerdes Folk City, he talks with writers there, he plays chess in the park, he attends meetings, and square dances at Judson Memorial Church.”

“I've never cottoned on to the idea that the revolution would take place during square dancing, between you and me,” said McNeill with his idea of a chuckle.

“You see, Rush, I've been on this,” I said.

From his back pocket McNeill removed a notebook and pencil. “Any specific names?”

“Rush, you've been pretty frank with me, so let me repay the favor, what you may have thought about me is not exactly what it seems. You catch my drift? If you need to know more about Max Ostalsky and pals, I'm always willing to help. But I'd like to keep it quiet, at least for now. For instance, did you know that he has developed quite a liking for American whisky?”

“That so? Are you saying what I think? You've been working this from another angle? I parked across the street.” O'Neill groped in his coat pocket for his car keys. “I'm glad. I really am.”

“Nobody knows, not even my boss,” I said. “I report only to, well, you can imagine, I'm not even talking about the New York office.”

If he bought it, it would give me a day or two. Chances were we'd be in a war, and then dead; suddenly, I felt released from the creeping fear I'd felt when the FBI started tailing me. I began to embroider. “So to put your mind at rest, I haven't been hanging out with the Russki for the hell of it.” I said. “Why don't you give me your private number, Rush, I'll keep you in the loop best I can, but if word gets out, I'll lose my sources. You know how useful those damn student radicals can be.”

“You've been able to mix easily with the students at NYU, is that right?”

“Jesus, I must have been to more damn peace meetings, and the lectures, and the fights about Trotsky, and Stalin. Look, when I get the goods, you'll be the first to know. You can pick him up. Take the kudos,” I said. “You mentioned Nancy Rudnick?”

“What about her?” said O'Neill. “It's the father we want, like I said.”

“I see.” Even now, I worried about her. Even now I wanted to take care of Nancy, to protect her from this slimy bastard O'Neill.

“You're Nancy's friend, isn't that right?”

“I see her in the park. Sometimes I give her a lift.”

“I'm glad, she needs a real friend, not those pinkos she seems to be chummy with.”

Seems?
Seems?

“She mentioned you to me, so I'm going to share something with you. Nancy is a fine young lady, and a true patriot. I'm telling you because I'd like you to help make sure she's OK. She is vigilant, and helpful to us, but I feel in my heart Nancy needs the right fellow to look after her. These girls are too easy, too free with themselves. I was worried at first that she might fall for Ostalsky, you know? With some of our young ladies, we run the risk of them romanticizing the subject.”

Vigilant? Helpful?
My heart was pumping so erratically, I thought I was having a heart attack; I had begun counting the blocks to St Vincent's.

“Take good care of her, Pat. She is one of our best sources. She's bright. She has an excellent memory. She knows what's needed. The way she's involved in the Peace Movement and Civil Rights, she has real access. Half the Reds in New York show up at her father's parties, as you may know. I wanted to share this with you because I know you're her friend.”

He took his card from a pocket, handed it to me, put his key in the door of his car, which turned out to be a two-tone Chevrolet '59 Impala, blue and white with modified fins. “I'm afraid it's my car,” he said. “I'm sorry I was on your back, you won't see this car again any time soon. And don't worry, my wife hates the damn thing,” O'Neill added, and left me on the sidewalk not knowing if I should laugh or cry. Nancy was working for the FBI. She had been using Max Ostalsky. She didn't love him, after all.

Poor Saul Rudnick, I thought suddenly. I hated a lot of his views, but he said what he thought, and he loved his daughter. God help him now she was working for the FBI.

CHAPTER THREE

October 25, '62

I
N MY APARTMENT
,
O
STALSKY
sat on the couch beside Tommy, gently mopping the blood on his face. Tommy's eyes were closed. He had been badly beaten, face and hands bruised, eyelids black.

“What happened?”

Tommy tried to push Max away, failed and slumped back onto the couch. “He's a Russki, Pat.”

“He's a friend.” I took the cloth from Max and sat next to the kid, whose front teeth were missing.

Something occurred to me. I lowered my voice and said, “Is he the man you saw on the pier?”

“The devil man, you mean. I don't know. I can't say for sure, but I seen him in the papers. He's a Red. He's a dirty friggin' Red, get rid of him.” Tommy's words were blurred as he forced himself to sit up.

“Lie down and stop talking, kiddo. I'm calling an ambulance.”

He didn't protest, and I knew it was bad.

The lines were all tied up. I said to Tommy, “What happened, can you tell me?”

Breathing hard, he said that a big guy he never saw before banged on his door. His father had been at work; Tommy let the man in.

“When?”

“I don't know. Few hours, maybe.”

“Did you pass out?”

“I dunno. Maybe.”

“Anything else you remember? Don't talk if it hurts too much, but if you tell me, Tommy, I'll get the prick.”

“Pat, he asks me questions about you. Stupid stuff I don't understand, but I won't tell him, he punches me in the face. Pat, I can't see you right. Like everything's blurry. Am I blind? I don't wanna be blind.”

“OK, that's enough talking.”

There was blood in Tommy's mouth. I couldn't wait for an ambulance. I couldn't risk being seen with Ostalsky and I got him into the kitchen, told him where to meet me, figured he was smart enough to make his way—he's a goddamn agent, I told myself. “You'll do it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Help me down the stairs with Tommy, then go through cellar door, it leads out into the backyard, and from there you can get into the next building and out that way. Nobody will be watching for you there.”

“I'll do it,” said Ostalsky.

By some miracle, we got Tommy into the car. I was grateful I was still driving Clay Briscoe's Buick, which had a backseat big as a bed.

“Pat?”

“Stay quiet, kiddo,” I said, but I couldn't stop him talking as I drove to St Vincent's.

“I have to tell you this, Pat, this creep, he hits me, he says, ‘You're Wynne's kid, we know he's a fucking Red, so you better talk.' And I'm so mad, I say, ‘Yeah, I'm Wynne's kid, whadya gonna make of it, he's no fucking spy,' and they keep shaking me, and then one of them picks up my baseball bat, the one you got me at Joe DiMaggio Day at the stadium, geez, he almost killed me. He just kept whacking me with the bat.”

“Was he a Mob guy? Did he look like one of them?”

“No.” More blood was seeping out of Tommy's mouth and nose. “I don't know what he was. Fucking Commie, you know, or something, I can't remember, maybe he was talking some stupid foreign lingo, or maybe he was just cursing, I'm not sure,” he said, and then he was silent.

By the time we got to St Vincent's, Tommy was unconscious. He had suffered concussion and lost a lot of blood and I waited until they took him upstairs from emergency. One of the sisters on his floor gave me her name and a phone number. I tried to reach Tommy's father, who wasn't at work, or at home. I called his sister in the Bronx and gave her the message to call St Vincent's.

I couldn't leave Tommy. I couldn't do it. What difference did it make if some damn spies blew each other's brains out; who cared. I thought, fuck everything, I'm staying, and so I smoked a pack and drank four cups of coffee and sat, looking like a bum, not having slept all night, in the waiting room.

I must have dozed, and around ten in the morning a young doctor touched my shoulder, woke me up and told me Tommy was dead. His father had phoned to say he was on his way.

The concussion meant a blood clot had developed; it went to his brain. Too much damage to his skinny body, too many internal injuries.

Tommy was just twelve. He had been wearing the sweater I had given him; it was so drenched in blood the nurses had to throw it away. I waited for Tommy's old man, and then I left.

In my car, I started thinking about Tommy, how he told the bastards he was my kid, and I started to cry.

CHAPTER FOUR

October 25, '62

“
O
STALSKY?
Y
OU THERE
?
”

He wasn't there, wasn't at Uncle Jack's house on Mott Street when I got there from the hospital. It was noon. He wasn't there. I had told him where to find a key.

So far no blue and white Impala had appeared. Maybe Rush O'Neill had believed me. The TV played news, the crisis, the ships, the necessity for civil defense drills, how to stock our fallout shelters with canned goods.

I thought about people I loved, and some I liked, and I knew, by the next day or the day after, I'd never see them again. Even if the Russkis turned the damn ships around, there were still the nukes already in Cuba. If I knew about it, if Rica Valdes had known, for sure our government would see this—see there were nukes aimed at Guantanamo.

“I'm sorry I just got here, Pat.” Ostalsky had entered the house without me hearing him, and he was standing now in the doorway to the parlor, wearing a black overcoat and a gray hat. They were mine. Max looked like a priest. “I apologize for borrowing your clothes, but my own had probably been noted. I went back to your apartment to get them, forgive me, Pat.” He removed the hat and coat, and put them neatly on a chair near the door, along with a paper bag that contained his own clothes. “How is young Tommy?”

“He's dead. The bastards banged his brains out with a baseball bat.”

“I am very sorry,” said Max, and I saw his eyes fill, although maybe he was just weary.

“Where were you?”

“Do you think your aunt would mind if I ate something?”

“Help yourself.”

He returned from the kitchen with bread and cheese, salami and cookies, and a bottle of Coke.

“You're addicted. I have to make a call.” In the bedroom I called Jimmy Garrity on Aunt Clara's powder blue telephone.

“Anything?” I said.

“I can't talk.”

“Talk to me.”

“I'm on my way out, I'm going to meet up with my brother who's a firefighter. He's saying the Commissioner is asking for almost fifty thousand volunteers to register, in case of an ‘attack'. We have to get ready. I'll call if there's anything.”

“Jimmy?”

“I can't talk now.” He hung up in a hurry.

“Don't you think we should be doing something instead of watching TV,” I said to Max who was in front of the TV, finishing his bread and cheese.

“What kind of thing?”

“Finding the goddamn assassins. You people must know about that. Didn't they train you?”

“Where would we begin?” Max smiled. “Can I turn the TV louder?

“How did you get into the house?”

“You told me where the key would be.”

“Christ, it's in three goddamn days, if Valdes was right. I need some kind of weapon.”

“You have your gun.”

“I meant something a little more effective.”

“This means, you would like a surface to air missile? What kind of weapon can help us, Pat? By the way, I removed the bug from your telephone. I hope that's all right.”

“What damn Russian put that in?”

“I'm sorry to say, but it was an American wire.”

It's what I had thought. It scared me more because it was our people; it meant you couldn't trust even your own.

“Pat, look at the TV.”

Placid, balding, decent Adlai Stevenson had always been considered overly cautious, even a bit of an old lady. I'm a Democrat; I voted for Adlai; I still had a Stevenson campaign badge, a shoe with a hole in the sole. He wasn't JFK, though. “He's not going to get anything done, he's a decent man but he's weak. What can he do?”

“He is a good person,” said Max. “Watch the goddamn TV,” he barked. “Maybe something will come of this.”

At his desk at the United Nations, Stevenson sat, hands folded, face growing tighter and angrier. The Russians stared back.

“I don't take orders from you, man.”

“Sorry. I thought I saw somebody. Forget it.” Max reached for a can of Planters peanuts my uncle had left on a side table. He took a fistful and put them in his mouth. “I like these nuts.” He chewed them slowly, swallowed and lit a cigarette.

I went to the window again. The big Plymouth was outside. The Russians again, I thought.

But Max Ostalsky was on his feet. He hurried to the television, and squatted up close. His eyes were not good, and his glasses half-broken, and it made him squint and put his face almost on the screen. “My God,” he whispered.

On the TV, in the blurry black and white of a live broadcast, Adlai Stevenson is leaning forward now, angry, scowling at Zorin, the Soviet Ambassador, and he asks him point blank if his country is installing missiles in Cuba.

There is a lot of fussing around with paper, and the translators are holding tight to their earpieces as if they would otherwise fly off. Zorin fails to answer. His people look around, fool some more with paper, they whisper to their underlings and consultants, and tap their headphones, as if the translators had gone silent. And then Stevenson, with his icy patrician manner, gets furious. He says, very intense, very grand, “Don't wait for the translation, answer ‘yes' or ‘no'!” Zorin refuses. Stevenson comes back at him:“I am prepared to wait for my answer until Hell freezes over.” He shows Zorin some photographs of the missile sites in Cuba. No pussy that day: Adlai was tough, a man who accepts no horse shit. “Yes or no!”

“Zorin is, what would you say, a jerk, and I've heard the rumor that he is off his rocker,” said Max.

“Where did you hear it?”

Max had his face flat against the TV, intent on the screen.

I jumped up. “Listen, you tell me there's an assassination in three days, and now you want me to sit down and watch television. For Christ's sake, just tell me what the hell you're looking at.”

Max turned. “It's Ambassador Stevenson.”

“I can see that.”

“Please, enough sarcasm. I'm trying to tell you something important. The target is Ambassador Stevenson. Look at the row of men behind Stevenson.”

“So? A bunch of diplomatic big shots, what else?”

“Yes. What would you say, Pat? That they are diplomats? People from the State Department, is that right? A translator? A military envoy?”

“Right.”

“Can you imagine that there would be an ordinary citizen right there in the Security Council when the fate of the world is in the hands of these men, our people, your people, Stevenson, Zorin?”

“I guess not. Why, for Christ's sake?”

“You see that man, just at the edge of the screen, behind Stevenson and to his right? Thinning hair. Small head. Big, black-rimmed glasses that are very large for his face, don't you think so? Big and square, as if for him to hide behind.” Max reached for the cigarettes.

“You have one lit already.”

“I've met that man.” The cigarette hanging from his lips, Max removed his broken glasses and started cleaning the remaining good lens. “I met him in Moscow, at the American Exhibition, that was three years ago, Pat. I met him demonstrating large American refrigerators.” Then suddenly, Max burst into Russian. He looked at me. “Sorry. He told me he was a businessman. He gave me a card. He said he was from Florida. He said he sold refrigerators, and other appliances.”

Max said he had never met a real businessman, a true capitalist, and this one asked such good questions. He was a small man, with a pale pudgy face and heavy glasses. He wore a gray suit and white shirt, with a button-down shirt. But he wore a red silk tie, which Max, in his naivety, took to be a pleasant gesture towards his hosts. He had approached Max and, in a quiet voice, asked him many questions. Max was impressed with his curiosity, his interest in Moscow and the Soviet Union.

“What is your business?” Max asked.

“Ah,” said the man. “Nothing exciting, I'm afraid. You saw the kitchen where Vice President Nixon gave his talk? The refrigerator is from my company. I'm afraid that I sell refrigerators. They are useful things, but perhaps not too exciting.”

“Yes,” said Max.

“Excuse me, I can see my translator waving at me. Very nice to meet you,” he said and shook Max's hand.

Later, when he saw the man standing with Vice President Nixon, Khrushchev and the American ambassador, Max realized this was somebody important. “Then I made my report.”

“What report. Jesus, they're still talking. Maybe we should go to the UN and warn Stevenson.”

“No. They won't believe us, not yet. I want to see what happens at the session. Let's just watch.”

“What report. You said you made your report, on what, on refrigerators?”

“In a way. My superior officer asked me, ‘Did you find it appealing?' I said I did. I told him the American guides were excellent and open to questions and spoke correct Russian. He asked if we should do something like it. I say I think it is good for people to talk to each other. I announce—I was quite pompous in those days—that cementing international relations is an excellent thing, if it furthers the progress of the USSR. I say all these things, and because I am a good Soviet boy at the time, I also allow that I think it is shameful to see our own people lining up for plastic bags and small cups of Coca-Cola, which everyone knows is made of shoe polish. This makes an impression.”

“They'd be more surprised now you love the stuff.”

“But Pat, what astonishes me is that they never asked about the American who sold refrigerators.”

“The KGB?” I said.

“Yes. Six months later it was made known to me I could apply for KGB training.” Max crushed the cigarette, and got up and paced around the room, distracted, examining some of my aunt's paintings and the little blue glass objects she collected. “What do you say to this, Pat? What can it mean, a refrigerator salesman from the southern area of the state of Florida is at the United Nations next to Adlai Stevenson?”

“Is it Stevenson? Is he the target? Is that what Valdes told you? Christ.”

“I felt it must be somebody in the American administration. Rica thought so. He had heard there were hard-line Cubans who hated Stevenson because he was so soft, that he would never make a confrontation. He was a man of peace. It would be useful to get rid of him, and also use him to provoke a confrontation. At first, I went up a stupid garden path, is that the right expression? I thought this whole business was only about the Cubans. It was also about us. There are Soviets who do not love peace, who dislike Khrushchev.

“My refrigerator man you see on television here goes back and forth between the Soviet Union and Florida. He tells me he is an unofficial ambassador.

“I remember, I remember. Everything about this man comes back to me now, he even tells me to visit him if ever I come to New York, which seems so improbable, so crazy, that it will ever happen, but such a delightful fantasy that I even keep his business card. He tells me he lives in Greenwich Village, and this sounds so magical, I think about it quite a bit.”

“But you don't call him when you get here?”

“It seemed complicated. I wasn't sure who this man really was, and I knew my FBI fellow, Ed, you remember, with the bad crew cut, was watching, and I wasn't so interested by a refrigerator man. But I kept the card. It was the first one I had ever been given.”

“And you have it.”

From his pocket, Max pulled an engraved business card with a flourish, as if it were a sleight of hand. “Like magic, I still have this card. Mr Edward Forrester. 12th Street. Teddy. I heard somebody call him Teddy. He told me his wife teaches at the New School. This is the same man who whispers in the ear of Ambassador Stevenson, who also meets with our leaders so regularly, and so intimately.”

“You're saying that this Forrester is a Communist spy?”

“Who can say? All I know is that I met him in Moscow and now he sits with Ambassador Stevenson, whispering into his ear, and it would make sense for an assassin to be so close to his target.”

I got up.

“Where are you going?”

“I'm going to see him, this Mr Forrester. It's a very slim lead, barely a lead; it's nothing except a hunch you have, but we have less than nothing, so I'm going to find out how close he is to Stevenson, how close they are, where he was the Tuesday night when Valdes was murdered. I'm no spy, but I'm a pretty damn good cop, so sit down, Max, You'll get us both killed. What time is it? As soon as he's off TV, I'm going,” I said. “While I'm out, you'll stay here, won't you, Ostalsky? Take a shower. Get a little sleep.” In a bag I always kept in the car, I had some jeans and a gray sweatshirt with a hood I got working construction one summer long ago. “Here, take these,” I said, throwing Ostalsky the clothes. “Somebody might recognize that old suit of yours, and I'll need my coat and hat back from you.”

“I don't want to impose on your aunt and uncle for the shower.”

“You know we have plenty of hot water, you've been here long enough. This is America, man.”

“Then thank you. Perhaps it will help wash away the stink.”

I looked at him.

“This moral stink, Pat. The horseshit.”

“Wait.” I went into the kitchen and got us a couple of beers. “Listen, Max, we're probably going down together, so you want to confess to anything? Us Catholics, we got confession, so you get to offload stuff. What do the Russkis do?”

“Also, we confess. We admit our mistakes to our comrades. For some of us, there is also what the Greeks call catharsis.”

“You ever do anything you feel really bad about, I mean, personal stuff?”

He didn't laugh or make a crack about Catholics, just smoked silently for a while. “I did, yes, I did more than one bad thing. I had heard how the KGB conducted interviews from my friend; his name was Vassily. We were in our third year at university when he is summoned to a hotel room somewhere. I was nervous for him. I knew what this meant. Others had been interviewed. He has a willful streak, he says what he thinks, and likes to do things his own way.” Max gulped some beer. “I said, ‘Vasya, please, be careful,' but he is as cocksure as always, and later he tells me he went along, gave his name to the man outside the hotel room, and was told to go up. Afterwards, he told me, which was so dangerous for him, but he wanted to warn me. He was such a good friend.