Manhattan 62 (39 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

October 29, '62

B
OBBY
K
ENNEDY
.

For a second I was paralyzed. If I went outside to stop the Kennedys coming in, Miller would be free to come up behind us, to shoot me, and to shoot Bobby. Bobby was the target.

My head cleared, but he was already inside the church, making his way down the aisle with his mother, the priests keeping pace with them. The only way I could stop it was to get Miller. Get to him fast. Do what I could. Shoot him. Kill him. Strangle him. Anything to stop this. Stop it, I thought. Stop.

I saw Miller when he slipped behind the canvas tarps, under the scaffolding. He was trapped. Could I take him there? Quietly as I could, but fast, I moved along the church wall, staying flat against it, feeling the cold stone, making my way towards the scaffolding where Miller was hidden.

Mrs Kennedy was seated towards the back with the the Monsignor. But Bobby was walking, looking up at the vaulted ceiling, inspecting the old church, humming to himself. I heard him humming. I thought I heard it. Christ. If they got Bobby… I didn't think any more. When he was halfway down the church Bobby genuflected and slipped into a pew and knelt down to pray.

How much time did I have?

Sweat poured off me. I was high on the Benzedrine now; high and very sharp. And I made it to the scaffolding, yanked back the canvas tarp, and crawled under it. Bobby Kennedy's head had been down. Praying. He had not seen me.

Miller wasn't there. Where the hell was he? He had slipped away. Christ, I thought, where is he? Is he in the organ loft after all? The sacristy? Had I missed a sniper rifle he had hidden?

The noise came from close by. Gunfire? A car backfiring? Nobody in the church seemed to have heard it. I turned around and I knew. The sound had come from somewhere near the Mulberry Street exit.

In the narrow corridor between the church and the exit door, Stanley Miller lay on the floor, gun in his hand. I lunged at him, I began punching him, I was losing it when I heard a familiar voice. “He's dead, Pat. It's over,” said Max, kneeling down next to me. “It's over.”

CHAPTER SIX

October 30, '62

W
HEN I WOKE UP
at Uncle Jack's the next morning, I felt rotten. My Auntie Clara brought some breakfast and said I had passed out the night before. The Benzedrine, the lack of sleep, had done for me. “There was a letter through the door for you,” she said, and I knew that Max Ostalsky must have slipped the letter through the mailbox at the house on Mott Street.

Dear Pat,
I think I knew it would be Robert Kennedy for a while. I think I had guessed. People had said he was without Secret Service protection, and I found that alarming, but it was a clue that seemed to point to him as an easy target.

I am glad he is well. I saw an item on a local program showing him and his mother leaving Old St Pat's.

Don't ask too many more questions, my dear friend, Pat. I did what was necessary. There are times when the end justifies the means. Sometimes we do what we must.

I lay in bed and tried to understand.

Pat, all of this goes back a long time, a year and a half perhaps, even more. What I had understood finally was something my father would have known much sooner. In my country, there are people who hate Khrushchev, but how they hate him. Such hatred. The old Soviet leadership absolutely hates Khrushchev because of the de-Stalinization he initiated. They tried to take him down before, in 1957—but this is perhaps too much detail—these men who were Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich—and they failed. He kicked them out. My uncle was one of them. During Stalin he was an important general, he was happy, he had power, and a beautiful wife. Then he was nothing.

These guys are chess players, right? So they begin to plan. They want Stalin back, and if they can't have him, they'll put one of their own in place. They must have seen that to eliminate Khrushchev in normal ways, in other words by assassination, would not work. The people like this leader. Khrushchev adores Castro and calls him a little brother.

The men like my uncle, they say something like “So, Comrade, why don't we propose that you send some weapons to our little brother, Castro, and that will show the United States we mean business. They will stop bullying us in Berlin. They will stop showing off. We will put missiles on their doorstep, and we will do it in secret, and then you, Comrade, will go to Havana and ride in a parade and announce that you are the great protector of little Cuba."

Of course, Castro and the others were thrilled at the offer. They must have jumped up and down. But it was necessary that the Americans not spot the missile sites before this great parade.

But the men like my uncle, something the Americans did not know, and neither did most of the Politburo have, what would you say, a further plan in mind. They would provoke a war. The nuclear weapons would be in Cuba. The Americans would find out. A war would begin. These Soviets, who now had the biggest bomb, the Tsar Bomb, were deluded into thinking they had more power than the Americans, when in truth we had much less. What we had was propaganda. We had some operatives like Bounine who turned out to be useless, and Irina Rishkova at the United Nations who delivered messages between the Soviets and some of your people. Our four friends who revered General LeMay.

You see, the Stalinists had a great ally in the USA. There were generals who shared their views in a sense. Generals like Curtis LeMay. Edward Forrester was the liaison, for he knew his way around several intelligence agencies. Rushton O'Neill was his comrade from the war, and would do anything for him. Captain Logan's job was to cover up Rica Valdes' murder. Also, his hero, Bobby Kennedy had betrayed him.

I imagine each side thought it worth cooperating up to the moment for the pre-emptive strike, and each felt their side would get to it first. Poor little Cuba. We armed Cuba. We told them to stand up for themselves. They were like the first little ship in a convoy, where the weapons would be tested.

As for Stanley Miller, he was, I think, quite crazy. I knew there was something about him that was wrong. This day the assassination was planned, I went to the Millers. I waited, I followed them to the church.

I think that Muriel helped. She loved Miller and pitied him. Me? I just was handy. My uncle, the General, had urged certain of my superiors to send me to New York when that scholarship became available. There was no plan for me then, not at all. My uncle simply considered it useful to have a member of the family in place in the United States, and his contacts in the US suggested the Millers would be the right kind of hosts for a university exchange student.

Please let the police know they will find a body in the mortuary crypts below the church in the tomb of Thomas Eckhert. Say anything you like. Say he is a bum. A drunk. A dope fiend. He will be identified properly soon enough.

Please say goodbye to my friends. Anything in my room that you would like to keep, you're welcome to. Take care of Nancy. I hope some day to come back to New York, and to Greenwich Village, the most wonderful place I have ever been. Goodbye to you, too, Pat, my friend.

I put down the letter. I never saw Max Ostalsky again. I never knew what had happened to him. I made sure that young Jim Garrity received the call about a body in Old St Pat's mortuary crypt. They found a man with his throat neatly cut. It was noted by forensics that it was a very professional job. There was no identification on him.

Not long after the body was discovered at Old St Pat's, it was reported that Stanley Miller was missing. I knew the cops who put it together—the missing man, the body in the mortuary crypt. But nobody could identify the killer. A nephew claimed the body and buried it. Eventually Miller's file went over to Cold Cases; his wife Muriel left New York for France, and I was pretty sure she had been involved. That she had done it for Stanley, as Max had said.

The next year, JFK was murdered, and five years later, his younger brother. Whatever Bobby knew about that day or about the young Soviet who had saved his life died with him. There were no records of the incident in the church on Mott Street.

EPILOGUE

New York City, 2012

A
FTER
N
ANCY PASSED
,
I
found copies of Max Ostalsky's notebooks and his unsent letters among her things. They were photocopies in a locked light-blue Samsonite train case, the kind girls used back in the day, hidden in a closet on Hudson Street where Nancy had kept her paints. I never knew if she had taken those from his room, or if he had given them to her.

We had moved to Sag Harbor; I got a law degree and became a small-town lawyer. Nancy, who had become a pretty good painter, sometimes worked at my old apartment when she was in town teaching her course on art at NYU. I never gave the place up.

When she died, I decided to clean it out, maybe spend some time there now that I was on my own and while I could still get around pretty good. I'd maybe hang around the Village, and watch football with the other old guys on Sunday at the White Horse.

It was one of the few old places left, now that even the West Village, Hudson Street, Greenwich Street, where the tenements and warehouses had been, were inhabited by rich people and movie stars, and brats from NYU. Most everything was gone.

The old waterfront was full of high-rise apartments and yuppies on thousand-dollar bikes. All fixed up now, Pier 46 was populated by people who read the
New York Times.
The High Line has become the fanciest damn park you ever saw. Nice, though. I go up and hang around some of the time.

Nancy and me, after we got married in '63, we didn't mention Max Ostalsky much. When her father Saul died of cancer the following year, she told me everything about the FBI.

“I made a deal with the devil,” she said.

She had tried to spare her father when he was dying, to make his time easy. Anyway, I loved her. I always remembered Max telling me it didn't matter to him if Nancy had worked for the FBI. He loved her. That was all that mattered. We had a good life.

Some time in the early 90s, I think, I got a call from Jim Garrity who had become an enterprising detective and had, from time to time, taken up the case of Stanley Miller's murder. He contacted me. Something had been on my mind, on and off, and I offered Jim a deal if he agreed to keep mum about it. Sure, he said. Surely, Pat. I told him some of what I knew about Miller, although I left out the business about Bobby Kennedy; the information would have changed history and there was no reason, not now. In return, I asked him to get hold of Rica Valdes' stuff; his clothes had been stored in a plastic bag somewhere downtown. DNA matches had been perfected. I gave Jim those Russian puzzle dolls Max had given me, and asked him if he could match the DNA on it with that on Valdes' clothes and a cross that had been found around his neck.

There was a match, of course. There was more than one. The prints on the dolls belonged to the man who shot and killed Valdes; the other prints on the cross, the clothes, to somebody who cut out his tongue and sliced up his face. I was relieved it wasn't Max who had butchered him. Probably Bounine, I figured.

I guess I had always known that Max had killed Valdes; if he had not followed orders, they would have eliminated him, and he would never have been allowed to go home to Moscow. He was a good man, but he was loyal to his country; I would have done the same thing.

And that was it. Nancy and me, we never talked about it much at all. I never told how some of her actions almost caused the murder of Bobby Kennedy, whom she later came to believe would redeem America. In 1968, she sold Saul's house on Charlton Street, gave the money to Bobby's campaign, and worked her heart out for his election. When he was murdered, she was inconsolable.

On my own, I tried to find out what had happened to Max, but the Soviet Consulate had nothing to say. I always wondered. When the USSR went out of business in '91, I made a few inquiries, I read what I could, but, even in the tsunami of information and memoirs and articles that surged out of that now disappeared country: nothing at all. Everything passes.

Fifty years. And then, just around the anniversary of the missile crisis, when every damn station was showing old news reports, I got a call. A detective, who introduced himself as Artie Cohen, asked if we could meet. I said I'd be at the White Horse.

When he walked through the door, the minute I saw him, I knew he was Max Ostalsky's son. Although he was older than Max when I had known him, he was a dead ringer for his dad: tall, dark-haired, with the same blue eyes as his father, the same handsome, humorous face.

“Artie Cohen,” he said, and shook my hand. “My Russian name was Artemy Ostalsky.” He said he had received photocopies of his father's notebooks. A Russian official had given them to him, a guy name of Bounine, he said.

“Bounine?”

“Yes. In America he called himself Mike.”

“He's alive?”

“Until last year, yes. He had a long career with the KGB.”

“Tell me about Max.”

“In the notebooks, my pop mentions a detective called Pat, but the officials have blacked out the last name with a felt-tip pen, and much else. I couldn't read it,” said Cohen. “There were too many Pats on the force to figure it out, that's why I never got in touch before. Then I saw your wife's obituary, her name, your name, and it came together. You were friends.”

“Yes,” I said, and ordered some beers. “Is your mother named Nina?”

“Yes.”

“How is she?”

“Very old. And sick. She doesn't even know who I am.”

I took a deep breath and asked. “And Max? Your dad?” I guess I had been hoping that somehow we could get together, two old guys shooting the breeze about another time, and things only we knew and understood. Until I saw his boy, Artie, I had never realized how deep the longing was.

“He died in Israel after we emigrated from Russia,” said Artie. “He got on the wrong bus, and somebody set off a bomb. A long time ago.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I used to ask him about his time in New York. I knew he loved it, but he never talked about it. All he ever told me was that he had had a friend in New York, and when he returned to Moscow a few months before I was born, he had decided to name me for him. You see, I couldn't find anyone called Arthur or Artie or Art. In your wife's obituary it had your name as Patrick Arthur Wynne.”

“My second name. My ma loved Artie Shaw.”

“I see.”

“Did you know your pop loved jazz? He loved it when he heard it played live in the little clubs around the Village, he said it changed him. Funny, I used to try to get him into rock ‘n roll, and he was always willing, to please me, I think. He said music made him better, and that Greenwich Village made him better, too.”

“I know,” said Cohen.

“I never even knew if he made it back to Moscow. You say he went back because he got a letter your mother was pregnant?”

“Yes, and for his career. He was always a loyal man. He loved his country.”

“How long have you been in New York,” I asked.

“Almost thirty years,” said Cohen.

My eyes filled with tears for so many years lost. “Is there more? About your dad?”

“It's a long story,” he said.

“I have plenty of time.”