Part 12 (2/2)

”He's the fellow who upped and married my girl, which I suppose makes him my son-in-law,” Swett told the President. ”First time we talked he had the gumption to ask me how much I earned a year.”

Mr. Truman looked at Leo. ”I admire a man with mettle.” There was a playful twinkle in the President's eye. ”What did Phil reply?”

”I'm afraid I don't remember, sir.”

”Good for you!” Mr. Truman said. ”I am a great admirer of discretion, too.”

The President took out a fountain pen, uncapped it and started to underline an item in the briefing book. ”When you get back tell Wisner I want a personal briefing on this Mossadegh fellow.” Truman scribbled cryptic questions in the margin as he talked. ”Want to know where he comes from. What the heck do these Islam fundamentalists want anyhow? What kind of support does he have in the country? What kind of contingency plans are you fellows working up if he takes over and tries to nationalize British Petroleum?”

The President closed the cover and handed the briefing book to Leo. ”Adelle's a fine woman,” Mr. Truman said. ”Know her personally. You're a lucky young man.”

From the table, Swett observed in a not unkindly tone, ”Lucky is what he sure as shooting is.”

7.

WAs.h.i.+NGTON, DC, THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 1951.

IN THE SMALL PITCHED-CEILING ATTIC STUDIO ABOVE KAHN'S WINE AND Beverage on M Street at the Was.h.i.+ngton side of Key Bridge, Eugene Dodgson, the young American recently returned from backpacking in Scandinavia, clipped one end of the shortwave antenna to a water pipe. Unreeling the wire across the room, he attached the other end to a screw in the back of what looked like an ordinary Motorola kitchen radio. Pulling up a wooden stool, he turned on the radio and simultaneously depressed the first and third b.u.t.tons-one ostensibly controlled the tone, the other tuned the radio to a pre-set station-transforming the Motorola into a sophisticated short wave receiver. Checking the Elgin on his wrist, Eugene tuned the radio dial to Moscow's 11 P.M. frequency and waited, hunched over the set, a pencil poised in his fingers, to see if the station would broadcast his personal code phrase during the English language cultural quiz program. The woman emcee posed the question. ”In what well-known book would you find the lines: 'And the moral of that is-The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours?'” The literature student from Moscow University thought a moment and then said, ”Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”. Eugene's heart literally started pounding in his chest. Suddenly he felt connected to the Motherland; he felt as if he were on one end of a long umbilical cord that reached from the Motorola across continents and seas to remind him that he was not alone. He jotted down the winning lottery number that was repeated twice at the end of the program. A feeling of elation swept through Eugene-he leapt from the stool and stood with his back flat against a wall that smelled of fresh paint, breathing as if he'd just run the hundred-meter dash. He held in his hand the first message from Starik!

Laughing out loud, shaking his head in awe-all these codes, all these frequencies actually worked!-Eugene tuned the radio to a popular local AM music station, then carefully coiled the antenna and stashed it in the cavity under the floorboard in the closet. He retrieved the ”lucky” ten-dollar bill (with ”For Eugene, from his dad, on his eighth birthday” scrawled across it in ink) from his billfold and subtracted the serial number on it from the lottery number in the Moscow broadcast.

What he was left with was the ten-digit Was.h.i.+ngton telephone number of his cutout to the rezident. When he dialed the number from a pay phone at the stroke of midnight, the cutout, a woman who spoke with a thick Eastern European accent, would give him the home phone number of the Soviet agent he had come to America to contact and conduct: the high-level mole code-named PARSIFAL.

The Atlantic crossing-eleven days from Kristiansand to Halifax on a tramp steamer bucking the Brobdingnagian swells of the North Atlantic-had not been out of the ordinary, or so the s.h.i.+p's bearded captain had explained the single time his young American pa.s.senger managed to join the officers for supper in the wardroom. The tablecloth had been doused with water to keep the dishes from sliding with each roll and pitch of the s.h.i.+p's rusted hull; Eugene Dodgson's plate hadn't moved but on one wild pitch the boiled beef and noodles on it had come cascading down into his lap, much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the s.h.i.+p's officers. When Eugene finally staggered down the gangway in Halifax, it took several hours before the cement under the soles of his hiking boots ceased to heave and recede like the sea under the vessel.

Strapping on his backpack, Eugene had hitched rides with truckers from Halifax to Caribou, Maine in four days. At the frontier a Canadian officer had stuck his head into the cab and had asked him where he was from.

”Brooklyn,” Eugene had replied with a broad smile.

”Think the Giants will take the pennant this year?” the Canadian had asked, testing Eugene's English as well as his claim to be from Brooklyn.

”You are not being serious,” Eugene had burst out. ”Look at the Dodger lineup-Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese cover the infield like a blanket, Roy Campanella has the MVP in his sights, Don Newcombe's fast ball is sizzling, the way Carl Furillo is going he's bound to break .330. The pennant belongs to Brooklyn, the Series, too.”

From Caribou, Eugene had caught a Greyhound bus to Boston and another to New York. He had taken a room at the Saint George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights. From a nearby phone booth he had dialed the number Starik had obliged him to memorize before he left Moscow. The disgruntled voice of someone speaking English with an accent came on the line. ”Can I speak to Mr. Goodpaster?” asked Eugene.

”What number you want?”

Eugene read off the number he was calling from. ”You got a wrong number.” The line went dead.

Seven minutes later, the time it took for the man on the other end to reach a pay phone, the telephone rang in Eugene's booth. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it off the hook and said, ”If you dine with the devil use a long spoon.”

”I was told to expect you three days ago,” the man complained. ”What took you so long?”

”The crossing took eleven days instead of nine. I lost another day hitchhiking down.”

”Ever hear of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden?”

”Sure I have.”

”I'll be sitting on the fourth bench down from the main entrance off Eastern Parkway at ten tomorrow morning feeding the pigeons. I will have a Leica around my neck and a package wrapped in red-and-gold Christmas paper on the bench next to me.”

”Ten tomorrow,” Eugene confirmed, and he severed the connection. Eugene instantly recognized the thin, balding, hawk-faced man, a Leica dangling from a strap around his neck, from the photograph Starik had shown him; Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel had entered the United States the previous year and was living under deep cover somewhere in Brooklyn. The colonel, tearing slices of bread and scattering the crumbs to the pigeons milling at his feet, didn't look up when Eugene slumped onto the park bench next to him. The Christmas-wrapped package-containing the Motorola, an antenna and a flashlight that worked despite a hollowed-out battery concealing a microdot reader; the pa.s.sport, drivers license and other doc.u.ments for Legend B in case Eugene needed to adopt a new ident.i.ty; a hollowed-out silver dollar with a microfilm positive transparency filled with Eugene's personal identification codes, one-time cipher pads and phone numbers in Was.h.i.+ngton and New York to call in an emergency; along with an envelope containing $20,000 in small denomination bills-was on the bench between them.

Eugene started to repeat the code phrase: ”If you dine with the devil- but Abel, raising his eyes, cut him off.

”I recognize you from your pa.s.sport photograph.” A forlorn smile appeared on his unshaven face. ”I am Rudolf Abel,” he announced.

”Starik sends you warm comradely greetings,” Eugene said.

”No one can overhear us but the pigeons,” Abel said. ”How I hate the little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Do me a favor, talk Russian.”

Eugene repeated his message in Russian. The Soviet espionage officer was eager for news of the homeland. What had the weather been like in Moscow when Eugene left? Were there more automobiles on the streets these days? What motion picture films had Eugene seen recently? What books had he read? Was there any truth to American propaganda about shortages of consumer goods in the state-owned stores? About bread riots in Krasnoyarsk? About the arrest of Yiddish poets and actors who had been conspiring against Comrade Stalin?

Twenty minutes later Eugene got up and offered his hand. Colonel Abel seemed loath to see him leave. ”The worst part is the loneliness,” he told Eugene. ”That and the prospect that the Motherland will attack America and kill me with one of its A-bombs.”

Eugene spent ten days at the Saint George Hotel, roaming through Crown Heights to familiarize himself with the neighborhood, drinking egg creams in the candy store he was supposed to have hung out in, visiting the laundromat and the Chinese restaurant he was supposed to have frequented. One drizzly afternoon he took the F train out to Coney Island and rode the great Ferris wheel, another time he caught the IRT into Manhattan and wandered around Times Square. He purchased two valises at a discount store on Broadway and filled them with used clothing- a sports jacket and trousers, a pair of loafers, four s.h.i.+rts, a tie, a leather jacket and a raincoat-from Gentleman's Resale on Madison Avenue. On April Fools Day, Starik's newest agent in America packed his valises and sat down on one of them to bring him luck for the trip ahead. Then he settled his bill at the Saint George in cash, took the subway to Grand Central and boarded a train bound for Was.h.i.+ngton and his new life as a Soviet illegal. From Was.h.i.+ngton's Union Station, Eugene made his way by taxi to the Was.h.i.+ngton end of Key Bridge and arrived at the liquor store just as Max Kahn was locking up for the night.

A short stocky man in his early fifties with a mane of unruly white hair, Kahn looked startled when he heard someone rapping his knuckles on the gla.s.s of the front door. He waved an open palm and called, ”Sorry but I'm already-” Then his expression changed to one of pure delight as he caught sight of the two valises. He strode across the store and unlocked the door, and wrapped Eugene in a bear hug. ”I thought you would be here days ago,” he said in a hoa.r.s.e whisper. ”Come on in, comrade. The upstairs studio is at your disposal-I repainted it last week so it would be ready for your arrival.” Plucking one of Eugene's valises off the floor, he led the way up the narrow staircase at the back of the store.

When he talked about himself, which was infrequently, Kahn liked to say that his life had been transformed the evening he wandered into a Jewish intellectual discussion group on upper Broadway in the early 1920s. At the time enrolled under his father's family name, Cohen, he had been taking accounting courses in Columbia University night school. The Marxist critique of the capitalist system had opened his eyes to a world he had only dimly perceived before. With a degree from Columbia in his pocket, he had become a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party and had joined the staff of the Party's newspaper, The Daily Worker, selling subscriptions and setting type there until the German attack on the USSR in June, 1941. At that point he had ”dropped out”: Acting under orders from a Soviet diplomat, he had ceased all Party activity, broken off all Party contacts, changed his name to Kahn and relocated to Was.h.i.+ngton. Using funds supplied by his conducting officer, he had bought out an existing liquor franchise and had changed its name to Kahn's Wine and Beverage. ”Several of us were selected to go underground,” he told Eugene over a spaghetti and beer supper the night he turned up at Kahn's store. ”We didn't carry Party cards but we were under Party discipline-we were good soldiers, we obeyed orders. My control pointed me in a given direction and I marched out, no questions asked, to do battle for the motherland of world socialism. I'm still fighting the good fight,” he added proudly.

Kahn had been told only that he would be sheltering a young Communist Party comrade from New York who was being hara.s.sed by FBI. The visitor would be taking night courses at Georgetown University; days he would be available to deliver liquor in Kahn's beat-up Studebaker station wagon in exchange for the use of the studio over the store.

”Can you give me a ballpark figure how long he'll be staying?” Kahn had asked his conducting officer when they met in a men's room at Was.h.i.+ngton's Smithsonian Inst.i.tution.

”He will be living in the apartment until he is told to stop living in the apartment,” the Russian had answered matter-of-factly. ”I understand,” Kahn had replied. And he did.

”I know you are under Party discipline,” Kahn was saying now as he carefully poured what was left of the beer into Eugene s mug. ”I know there are things you can't talk about.” He lowered his voice. ”This business with the Rosenbergs-it makes me sick to my stomach.” When Eugene looked blank , he added ”Didn't you catch the news bulletins-they were sentenced today. To the electric chair, for G.o.d's sake! I knew the Rosenbergs in the late thirties-I used to run across them at Party meetings before I dropped out. I can tell you that Ethel was a complete innocent. Julius was the Marxist. I b.u.mped into him once in the New York Public Library after the war. He told me he'd dropped out in forty-three. He was being controlled by a Russian case officer working out of the Soviet Consulate in New York. Later I heard on the grapevine that they used Julius as a clearing house for messages. He was like one of us-a soldier in the army of liberation of America. He would receive envelopes and pa.s.s them on, sure, though I doubt he knew what was in them. Ethel cooked and cleaned house and took care of the kids and darned socks while the men talked politics. If she grasped half of what she heard, I'd be surprised. Sentenced to death! In the electric chair. What is this world coming to?”

”Do you think they'll actually carry out the sentences?” Eugene asked.

Kahn reached back under his starched collar to scratch between his shoulder blades. ”The anti-Soviet hysteria in the country has gotten out of hand. The Rosenbergs are being used as scapegoats for the Korean War. Someone had to be blamed. For political reasons it may become impossible for the President to spare their lives.” Kahn got up to leave. ”We must all be vigilant. Bernice will bring you the newspapers tomorrow morning.”

”Who is Bernice?”

Kahn's face lit up as he repeated the question to emphasize its absurdity. ”Who's Bernice? Bernice is Bernice. Bernice is practically my adopted daughter, and one of us-Bernice is a real comrade, a proletarian fighter. Along with everything else she does, Bernice opens the store. I close it. Good night to you, Eugene.”

”Good night to you, Max.”

Eugene could hear Max Kahn laughing under his breath and repeating ”Who's Bernice?” as he padded down the steps.

Shaving in the cracked mirror over the sink in the closet-sized bathroom the next morning, Eugene heard someone moving cartons in the liquor store under the floorboards. Soon there were m.u.f.fled footfalls on the back steps and a soft rap on the door.

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