Manhattan 62 (12 page)

“What is this, an interrogation? You look terrible, Pat. Don't you ever sleep?

“Who was he?”

“Nobody. You saw you got a nice mention in the piece about Max, didn't you? I want a cigarette, please. Let's go outside.”

So we stand in the street, and I light her cigarette. “I'm bored with Max Ostalsky.”

“You do look awful,” says Nancy. “Is it the case? It must be wearing you out.” She touches my arm. “Come on, let's eat something. What about pizza?”

“I don't want pizza and I don't want to talk about the case.”

“You're really down in the dumps.”

“I'm tired. Fed up.”

“With me, Pat?”

“Been seeing our friend Max a lot, then? Why don't you come clean with me.”

“You just said you were bored with the subject. Come on, my treat, I'm taking you out to eat, and that's it. OK? Come on.”

“Let's go to your place.”

“Don't be silly, you have to eat something. You know I can't cook.”

“Maybe you should learn, didn't your mother tell you the way to a man's heart is through his stomach?”

“Please, just spare me. We'll go to Waverly Place, they're open all night,” and saying it, Nancy heads briskly for Sixth Avenue, and into the coffee shop on Waverly where we climb into a booth in the back, and the weary-looking waitress, a pencil in her tangle of dyed blonde hair, comes over. Smiles when she sees Nancy.

“Hello, Nancy, doll, what can I get you?”

Nancy greets her by name, and Mary, her name is Mary, goes for food. Without paying attention, I wolf down a hamburger and French fries, and coffee.

“Better?”

“Thank you. How come you're being so nice?”

“I'll always take care of you, you know that. We're friends, aren't we?”

I bite my tongue and shake out a fresh pack of smokes, and light up, lean on the table, look through the plate glass to my right, where I see a man in front of the apartment building opposite us. Nancy picks at her cherry pie; I ask for lemon meringue.

“What's up, darling?”

“There's a man across the street, I think he's watching us. The one in the blue denim jeans and a white T-shirt, you see, smokes are rolled up in the shirt sleeve?”

“Like he thinks he's Kerouac. Or Brando or something. Maybe he's just a jerk. You're paranoid, Pat. You are,” she says, but she's nervous, she slides lower in her seat. “You need to get off this case. You need to just cool it.”

The pie comes. The man across the street walks away, but he comes back, a newspaper in his hand.

“I don't think he's anything,” says Nancy. “Too obvious.”

“This is stuff you're familiar with?”

“You can bet on it. They've been following my family for a long time.” She pushes her pie away. “People think the FBI resemble agents in a movie, you know? Crime fighters. G-Men. They think ever since McCarthy, that son-of-a-bitch, got what he deserved, lost his power, then died, it ended. Nobody scared of Reds. Nobody spooking students, or kids who go on peace marches, or old men who once went to a socialist gathering thirty years ago.

“It goes on and on, Pat. Somebody like you, you don't always see them, the good ones dress up just like regular people, they infiltrate NYU got up as college boys. Some of them
are
college boys. They go to class, they go to parties and dances and clubs with the other students. You think that I'm paranoid, don't you?”

“No.”

“You know what I am?”

“What?”

“I'm scared, Pat. I'm scared all the time. At first when I met Max, I noticed an agent who was around a little bit. I knew any Soviet would be watched. But lately, it's been different. The dorky-looking fellow who dresses like a student, crew cut and all, stopped me at Chock Full O'Nuts and offered to buy me a donut, and asked about an assignment in my French history class, but I'm not taking a course on the French revolution, so I walked away. I know the game. I knew he wanted to pump me about Max, but I made sure he couldn't get to me.”

“Nothing's up then, with Max. Nothing to tell the FBI?”

“Max is our friend. I thought we could all be friends together.”

“Nice. The three of us, you, me and Max, like that French movie, is that what you thought, the one we saw last winter?”

“What's wrong with it?”

“I bet your pop likes him.”

“He does like Max. Sure, why not?”

“ Is he feeling better?”

“Who?”

“Your father.”

“When did you see Daddy?”

“Didn't he tell you? I went by to ask him about a case involving Cubans.”

“Oh God, yes, of course he did.”

“I needed some information.”

“About what?” She leans across the table “Just tell me, I won't get mad, not about this, but I need to know.” She pushes her pie away.

“I went to see him about a Cuban connection on the case I'm working.”

“Leave him alone, Pat. Please. Leave him be. Is your case that important? We've had enough from you and the FBI, enough of the terror.”

“Can't you get over it? McCarthy's been dead five years.”

“No. It's never over. Ever since McCarthy hauled Daddy in, it's never stopped. They watch him, they follow him, his wife is a Negro, my Uncle Nate was blacklisted. Did I ever tell you that Uncle Nate went on TV on ‘The $64,000 Question', people really liked him, and then the FBI got in touch with the show and made him give the wrong answer to a question everybody knew.” Nancy shakes out a pack of Kents, and lights her own. “It's like falling into a bottomless pit, it never stops. They've been doing it since I was in 7th grade. Didn't you guess?”

“I didn't think much about it.”

“How naive you are.”

“Go on.”

“The fear destroyed my parents. My parents had another child, and my mother wanted to name her Rosa. My grandfather put his foot down. Rosa was a communistic name, he said, said it would hurt all of us.”

“What happened?”

“Rose—they called her Rose, Rose was OK—she died from polio in 1948. I was eleven. She was only two. My mother couldn't handle any of it, and she died the year after, around the time the goddamn FBI started following Daddy. I would do anything to get the goddamn FBI off Daddy's back now.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“You weren't the type to understand.”

“Why now?”

“Because he's got some horrible lung cancer, and they can't do anything much, and I want him left in peace. You hear me? It's all I want. I want my father to die in some kind of peace.” Silently, Nancy starts to cry, enormous tears— you wouldn't think anyone could produce such big tears —running down her cheeks in a flood.

“Do you think that's one of them, across the street, white T-shirt?”

“I don't know. I can't always tell, some of them look so normal, they even smile. They're the scariest ones.”

For a while we sit without talking much, and she lets me hold her hand, until she's cried out. “It's like this, Pat, sweetie, since you asked, Max is a comfort for Daddy, somebody he can shoot the breeze with, who admires him, tells him stories about the great revolutionaries Daddy admires, people Max's grandfather knew. He doesn't get in Daddy's face, like his crazy friends who are all Trots and stuff, never mind, you have no idea what I'm talking about.”

Across the street, the man with his newspaper, the man in the white T-shirt has gone. I never saw him go.

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“Don't be such a prude. What difference does it make?”

“You're a fool. Max is married.”

“He's separated.”

“He has to go back. He's not going to defect for you, honey. He loves his damn country. He's a patriot. You know what, Nancy, if you go on like this, just screwing every man, you'll end up on the shelf.”

“That's crude and it's cruel. What do you want? You want me to be a dopey character in
Father Knows Best?
I see the girls I went to Vassar with, with their nicey little husbands and their nicey babies, and most of them, all they do is cook and knit. It's not me. I'm going to be a great painter and a teacher. Max is a fine teacher. My father was a teacher.”

“You are thinking about it. Marrying him. What, you'd go live over there? The Second Mrs Ostalsky?”

“I don't know.”

“You can't marry some Commie spy.”

“He's not a spy. He's a scholar.” She looks out of the window. “God, it's hot this year. I can't wait to get to the beach.”

“What beach?”

“Fire Island, we go every year, I told you once, the whole family.”

“And Max? You're taking him on the family vacation?” I tossed a fiver on the table. “Nancy?”

“What?”

“I'm sorry. Let's not fight.”

“I don't want to fight.” She touches my hand. It makes me wonder if she'll invite me home with her, to that little apartment on West 4th Street, with some candles lit and music on her portable gramophone, and the rest of it. “I don't want to fight, and I know your case is driving you nuts. I want to help, Pat, darling. I want to make you feel better. OK?”

“How about I take you to dinner tomorrow, somewhere nice?”

“I'll think about it.”

“I'll pick you up after your class, you finish at seven, right?”

“You know my schedule?”

“Yeah.”

“You stalking me?”

“Only when I have to. Be a good girl and say yes.”

“Not tomorrow.”

“When?”

“Maybe the day after, I have to think about it. Why don't I give you a buzz, Pat? Let me call you.”

“I'll wait for you outside your building.”

“Like a proper suitor.”

“Of course. Wear something special.”

“I'm always special.”

But it's three weeks until she calls me and says we can meet, and on the night I dress up nice, new cream linen jacket, new dark blue shirt. I plan to take Nancy somewhere nice for dinner after her class finishes at 7, somewhere air conditioned, maybe even to Charles on Sixth Avenue, though it will cost a bundle.

In the park, even at dusk, people sit still, fanning themselves, having a cold soda or a languid smoke, the smell of the pot rising into the humid night.

For a while I sit on the steps of NYU, smoking and waiting for her. She never comes. It turns dark, and I know she's left, hasn't come to her class, or gone out another exit. I want to drink.

My car is parked on Waverly, and I head over to it. Nancy lied to me. She had no intention of meeting me. I'm a fool. A dope.

In the park nearby, somebody is playing classical music on a guitar, playing really well, so it catches my attention, and I turn and see them, Nancy and Max. She had left the NYU building by a back entrance, maybe to avoid me where I had been waiting.

Now they're sitting on a railing, their backs to me, eating Good Humor ice creams on a stick, unaware of anyone but each other. The jealousy that's been eating me for a lot of the summer punches me in the face now, whacks me so hard I lose my bearings.

Did she do it on purpose? Did Nancy agree to see me, and then change her mind?

Does she want me to see them? Does he? Did she whisper about me to him, and did they laugh about it? Right then, half subconsciously, I make up my mind to get something on Max Ostalsky. To nail him for something.

I look over at the park. Their heads are together and they're laughing like a couple, like people who just want to touch each other. She leans to him, puts her mouth to his ear. He touches her hair. He strokes it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

October 18, '62

T
HE
FBI
AGENT
I
had spotted near the High Line, the young guy with the butchered blond hair,
was across the street from Ostalsky's building on 10th and University. I got there around five. All day, since I returned from Jersey, I'd been going at the case of the dead man on Pier 46, this Riccardo, working it in my mind, figuring similarities to Susana Reyes last July. Make the connections, I thought. But the connection I wanted was Max Ostalsky. I wanted evidence that he had been involved in both cases. I wanted to get him, to nail him. So I went to pay him a visit.

The agent glanced over at me. The Feds could never see what was in front of them; me, if I was running the show, I'd have two heavyweights parked regular outside Ostalsky's building. If I knew he had killed Riccardo on Pier 46, how come they were clueless?

Made me sick that J. Edgar Hoover, who had been a hero, who had run an FBI devoted to hunting down criminals, was now only obsessed with Commies. I'd heard there were ten times as many agents working the Reds as working crime. Hoover was nothing but a fat old man who, they said, wore ladies' dresses and lived with another man.

Nobody answered the bell for apartment 8D when I rang the intercom. I buzzed the super, who appeared suddenly, and opened the heavy door into the lobby for me.

“I'm looking for a Mr Ostalsky,” I said. “He stays with the Millers in 8D, wonder if you've seen him.” In my hand were two crisp bills.

“None of them's here,” the man said. “The Millers gone out of town, the other fellow, that Max, the young Russian, you know? I saw him leave.”

“When?”

“Don't know. Maybe yesterday morning.”

Wednesday. The morning after he had murdered Riccardo, the morning I was lying in bed sick as a dog.

“You ever see a young lady visiting up here? Tall? Dark hair?”

“Saw somebody like that with the Russian coming up the street one time, arm in arm. Looked to me real cozy.”