“Right.” They ate in silence for a while. She waited him out, mainly because she had nothing to say.
He finally cleared his throat. “That note you left for me at the library, you mentioned you’d met someone else. Who was he?”
She couldn’t lie anymore. What was the point? “There was no other man. I didn’t want to see you. Floyd Jenkins had just jumped to his death. I was there when it happened. I couldn’t take it anymore.” Her sentences came out short and sharp, like Morse code. “I wanted to stop fighting, stop everything. Live my life like a normal person, whatever that is. So I left that note, knowing it was the only thing that might stop you from reaching out.”
He sat back, looking like he’d been hit. “It wasn’t true?”
“No.”
“Oh.” The look on his face reminded Hazel of a sped-up clock, whirling away. “You lied.”
“I did. Why didn’t you come back sooner, Charlie? Where were you for five months, not calling or writing, leaving me to fend for myself?”
He took a moment before answering, as if gathering courage. “My father had me hospitalized upstate, supposedly for my epilepsy, but basically he wanted to keep me out of the way. I’d made too much trouble.”
“You were involuntarily committed?”
“Yes. They drugged me, I had no idea where I was, or what day it was. As soon as I got out, I tried to contact you through Mr. Bard—I figured the FBI was still tapping the phones. Then, at the library, I got your note.”
For years, she’d assumed he’d deliberately stayed away, repulsed by her toxicity, like so many others. Her heart broke for him, for both of them. “I thought you were keeping your distance because you didn’t want to be associated with me.”
“I should have been clearer in my letter, but I was worried they’d find out somehow and come after me again. After I got your answer, I just took off. I traveled abroad for a time, before coming back and getting a job with the government. Not as a federal agent—the hospitalization dashed any hope of that—but I worked my way up, and it’s a decent job, a good one, to be honest.”
“What exactly do you do?”
“I work for an agency that tries to decipher Russian codes.”
After all this time. “So you’re still obsessed with Russian spies?”
“I am.” He pushed aside his plate. “To be honest, that’s why I reached out.”
He hadn’t come to declare his love, then. Of course not. She chided herself for even considering the possibility.
“We recently uncovered some Soviet cables. It turns out a Soviet agent called Silver was the linchpin of all the activity that was going on back in 1950: Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass, Harry Gold.”
Other than Rosenberg, who’d been executed along with his wife in ’53, the names meant little to her.
Charlie continued. “I saw your interview in The New York Times and I realized you might be able to shed light on some questions I have.”
“I doubt that. I don’t know anything about those people.”
He tapped a finger on the table. “In that article, you mentioned that Maxine convinced you to cast her in the play when you were both in some tunnel under the Chelsea Hotel.”
The journalist had pushed Hazel for stories about her and Maxine during the original production, catching Hazel off guard. She wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise, but he’d seemed to love the drama of it.
She nodded.
“I wouldn’t have thought twice about it,” Charlie explained, “except that it brought back strange memories, of after we’d been ambushed. I remember being pushed through a long, dark passage. There were bare light bulbs and a dank smell. Was that the tunnel?”
“Yes. That’s how we got you to the ambulance, to avoid the press.”
“Where is it, exactly?”
“It runs between a town house on Twenty-Second Street and the hotel on Twenty-Third. Before that, we’d used it to avoid the photographers lurking out front for Maxine.”
Charlie, unable to contain his excitement, knocked over his water glass. He waited until after the waiter cleared up the mess with a dish towel to continue. “One of the cables discussed a near miss one night, back in 1950, when the Feds were on the trail of Silver, but then he disappeared. On Twenty-Second Street. I looked up the FBI’s reports, and they say Silver went into a town house and vanished into thin air. They staked it out for days, but never saw him leave.”
“You think he went into the tunnel and out through the hotel?”
“That’s what your article made me wonder. How did you get access to the town house?”
“David Bard gave Maxine a key.”
“Did he give any other residents a key?”
“For God’s sake, Charlie, I have no idea.” She noticed him flinch, and regretted her harsh tone. “You think that maybe this Silver was connected to the hotel in some way?”
“I wondered about it.”
“In that case, he could be any of the commies who lived on the first floor in those days. The place was full of them.”
“He wouldn’t have been that obvious.” Charlie looked around, as if he was worried someone was watching them.
She almost laughed. As if anyone cared at this point. The world was full of tragedy, on the brink of disaster, if you read the newspaper headlines. Charlie’s hunt for a communist spy was almost quaint. Poor guy was stuck in the past. His colleagues probably ridiculed him. Hazel considered herself lucky she’d been able to move forward with her life, even if it had been stunted, instead of living in the past the way he was.
He lowered his voice. “One of the ways the spies confirmed each other’s identity, when they first made contact, was with a Jell-O box top that was ripped in half.”
A vague memory of Charlie talking about Jell-O box tops drifted back to her. She played along. “Right, they each had a section. Proof they were on the same team.”
“You remember!” He sat back, pleased. “As I was reading that article, something else occurred to me. Do you remember the man Maxine dated, Arthur something?”
“Arthur. Right. I don’t recall his last name.”
“Arthur was in food packaging.”
She couldn’t help it, a bubble of laughter escaped. “As were several hundred thousand other people at that time. Arthur was an ass and a manipulative son of a bitch, but he was just a boring corporate guy in the end. Nothing special about him.”
“Which would make him the perfect spy.”
She pushed her plate away. “You’ve got to be kidding.” Now she was no longer hungry, and exhaustion overcame her. All she wanted was to go back to her room and sleep. How disappointing Charlie had turned out to be. It would have been better if he’d never come back, so she could retain her memories of their glorious affair without this melancholy overlay. “Why would you care about a spy from years ago? He’s probably dead by now, or gone back to Russia.”
“Because we’ve connected Silver’s identity with that of an agent who’s still going strong, according to recent cables. Different code name, but all our data points to it being the same guy. We know he’s in his mid-fifties now, which would make him around thirty-seven or -eight back then. If we can identify him, we’d bring down an entire network.” He paused, eyes steady on hers. “I was wondering if you might remember the night in question, when they lost Silver’s trail, in case you maybe saw the person but didn’t know it.”
“I can’t remember what happened last year, never mind in 1950.”
“It was July third.”
Ben’s birthday. Every so often, Hazel wondered what it would have been like if her brother had lived. She would have had someone by her side during the crisis, the kind of guy who’d have charmed Laurence Butterfield within five minutes and in the next breath convinced him to invest in the production. Then again, if her brother had been alive, she doubted she would have achieved the heights that she did, writing and directing a show on Broadway. That drive had sprung from her need to live up to the family legacy but had been replaced by ambition of her own, ambition that she never even knew existed. The taste of success had been delicious, but left her grasping for more, just as Ben’s death had taken a chunk out of her heart.