Public Burning (62 page)

Once we'd pulled out and started to roll north out of the city, I'd begun to feel better. It always helped to move. Connected me with time somehow, made me feel like things were in mesh. Like that time I came flying back from the Caribbean to find all those microfilms in Whittaker Chambers's pumpkin patch. Or my wedding day when Pat and I struck off for Mexico City, the whole fantastic world out in front of us, timeless, borderless, ripe and golden as the unspecified fortune sought by all of the poor but honest boys of the fairy tales. Motion—even random movements—made me feel closer to reality, closer to God. Not that I ever thought much about God—but I knew what I was talking about. Ask the man in the street and he'll tell you that God is a ‘“Supreme Being.” But “being” is only the common side of God—his transcendent side is
motion
. Monks on hilltops know nothing about contemplation, all that's just idle daydreaming. I knew a lot about that, too, I'd spent a lot of time flat out in the back yard staring off into infinity, but I knew you had to keep moving if you wanted to find out who you really were and what the world was all about. It was the real reason I'd always loved trains—not to escape west or east or any other direction like that, but to pull back from the illusions of fixed places so as to make the vital contact. If I'd had time for theology, I might have revolutionized the goddamn field.

It had felt spooky being all alone on the train—the echoey emptiness had seemed to emphasize the essential loneliness of all critical decision-making, to set me apart in some awful way—but I'd been grateful for the chance to relax, take off my hat and sunglasses, my shoes, unbutton and stretch out a little, without having to worry about what other people might think. I'd tried the moustache on. It had felt funny. Stiff. Ticklish. I'd stuffed it in my pocket. It's not enough to break the play open with one face, I'd thought, saving the other one to use later in case it didn't work. If I was going to do this thing at all, I had to do it as Richard Nixon—and not even as Richard Nixon, which was already, even in my own mind, something other than myself, but as just…me. I'd realized that in some obscure way, through my contact with the Rosenbergs, even as remote and unintentional as it was, I had somehow become tainted myself—as though I'd had some ancient curse laid on me (though I didn't believe in curses, I was getting carried away by those stories from my childhood, the ones our hired girl used to tell, and by this train, its lonesome whistle, the daydreaming—contemplation, I mean): in short, I was in a lot of trouble and I'd stay in trouble unless I could somehow absorb this contact, intensify it, and turn it finally to my own advantage. In a sense I was no more free than the Rosenbergs were, we'd both been drawn into dramas above and beyond those of ordinary mortals, the only real difference between us being the Rosenbergs' rashness and general poor judgment—but then wait: if that was so, was my breaking out a part of the script, too? Oh shit! but then—I hadn't wanted to think about this, I'd pushed it out of my mind, forcing myself to concentrate on the Rosenbergs instead, how I was going to approach them, what kind of strategy I might best use, what in the end I wanted out of them.

Julius was the weak one, I knew. I'd start with him, and if he cracked, Ethel would have no choice. This was the great thing about conspiracies: you punch a little hole and a whole flood of accusations and counter-accusations comes pouring out. It would probably break up their marriage, but that'd be their problem. They might be looking for a good excuse anyway. And at least they'd still be alive. When things had died down, they'd probably thank me for it. Not that it would be easy. Weak or no, Rosenberg had had two years to shore up his defenses—all those public declamations: he'd thrown up a real stone wall. Mere reason was useless in the face of it, as were threats or cajolery. He'd repel all frontal attacks, I had to sneak over that wall somehow, catch him by surprise from behind.

So what was the angle? To agree with them maybe about the entrapment, the frame-up? I could tell them I'd been the victim of smear jobs, too, I knew what they were up against. But if we were going to make it work, they had to trust me, they had to tell me everything. Of course, if they really were who the FBI said they were, then we were back to square one again. Or if they were really as innocent as they claimed to be: same problem—I had to have
something
to take down to Times Square tonight. But I was convinced the truth lay somewhere in the middle: the Rosenbergs were guilty of something, all right, but not as charged. And if the Rosenbergs could deliver their half, I could probably deliver mine. The FBI had let the word out in a thousand ways that they had the goods on the Rosenbergs locked away in their files, but their repeated declarations on this subject were themselves cause for suspicion—like the Rosenbergs dropping their
Daily Worker
subscription, it could be read two ways. Those guys over there still hadn't grown out of their gangbusting days and the Junior G-Men Clubs, they'd built up a fantastic image for themselves in that Golden Age, and now it scared them that somebody might catch them in a fuck-up. I'd met a lot of them, depended on them in fact for my inside dope over the years, but I had to say that most of them are pretty far removed from reality. Putting on disguises and snooping about after other people makes them think everybody else is doing the same thing only better, even their fellow agents, they get very paranoid, and that filing system of theirs with all those tedious and intertangled dossiers has got them more cloistered than a bunch of goddamn medieval monks. And in spite of all their files and snoopers and crime labs and privileged access, they still crack most of their cases because some guy rats on another, in effect using the FBI as his own trigger, or because some agent plays a lucky hunch. Maybe just because a guy
looks
like a crook. Or a Commie. This is true. They still believe they can identify criminal tendencies by the bones in the face—they run a regular goddamn seminar down there over John Dillinger's death mask! And Julius Rosenberg had a very unlucky face. He looked like the stoolies, the finks, the unsympathetic first-reel victims of all those old gangster movies -once they saw him, they probably didn't think twice. After which, the dossier grew and grew. Like Pinocchio's nose.

Certainly, through all this, one thing became clear. At the heart of this worldwide conflict and crisis lay a simple choice: Who was telling the truth, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or two admitted Reds? At the trial, in the press, in the appeal courts, there was no contest: for what chance did the Rosenbergs have? Kaufman knew this in advance: every juror at the Easter Trial had had to swear under oath that he'd give the same weight to testimony of either an FBI agent or a member of the Communist Party. Of course this was just bullshit, you couldn't
find
twelve decent Americans who'd believe a Commie as easily as a G-man, it was simply Kaufman's way of protecting himself from a mistrial and assuring the prosecutor of a jury willing to fudge a little, but it showed Kaufman knew what the case would ultimately rest on.

Saypol, free from such scruples, could throw the whole weight of the FBI legend against these ghetto outcasts: “There came a day, however, that a vigilant Federal Bureau of Investigation broke through the darkness of this insidious business…” He heaped praises on the FBI. So did Kaufman. So did the President, the press and radio, the Attorney General, the nation's civic clubs and leading politicians…and me, too, for that matter. So did the FBI itself in its own frequent and popular press releases. Not even the Rosenbergs' own lawyer could stop himself! What did Kaufman and Saypol really believe? Probably that the Rosenbergs were indeed guilty. Why? Because the FBI said so. Hoover himself had flatly announced the Rosenbergs' guilt in the nation's press, who was going to say it wasn't so? Maybe Edgar believed it all himself, locked away in his inner sanctum, reading all those eager-beaver reports from ambitious agents, fluttering through all those inventories and interviews, surveillance reports and signed confessions. Sometimes the entire FBI file on the case read like a strange remote dialogue between Gold and Hoover—a speaker, reaching for the truth, a hearer, avidly sanctifying the revelations: a sinner and his distant God. At the time of the trial, the newspapers were full of front-page stories announcing that “meantime, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is following other leads on wartime espionage.” Saypol hinted that there was a lot of FBI material he wasn't free to use because of these continuing investigations (presumably protecting, for example, some new Herbert Philbrick down in the ranks I, but if he could, the stuff would nail the Rosenbergs to the wall, and who in the courtroom or all America doubted this? There probably wasn't one American in a thousand who had even paused to think about it. No, if Irving Saypol held up a handful of FBI reports and told them to imagine Julius Rosenberg “reaching out like the tentacles of an octopus,” then an octopus is what everyone willingly saw, surprised only that it had a moustache and wore double-breasted suits.

But maybe they were all wrong. Maybe the case constructed against the Rosenbergs had been a complete fabrication, beginning to end, maybe Greenglass was the Herbert Philbrick of this investigation and he'd simply fucked it up, had had to agree to the invented meeting with Gold in order to validate many years of otherwise fruitless effort, save the Old Man's job. Or worse: maybe even the FBI didn't know what had happened. Maybe the whole trial had been just an elaborate smoke screen thrown up by the Phantom to conceal the real ring. Perhaps Gold, wilier than anyone had thought, had surrendered to throw the FBI off the track, and the Rosenbergs, innocent of the spying but in on the cover-up, had constructed their tenacious defense to waste Uncle Sam's energies and draw the FBI into a blind alley. Maybe they were even supposed to have pleaded guilty but chickened out at the last moment—certainly this would explain why until a few months ago they'd been completely disowned by the Communist press and abandoned by their old left-wing friends. So was that it, a calculated deflection? A bit crackpot maybe—or as T
IME
would say, psychoceramic—but even those clowns over at the FBI had noticed Rosenberg's “quixotic behavior,” once they'd shown themselves and let him know they were on his tail: they'd reported that he'd continued to traffic with the very characters who later got arrested with him, had made ludicrously elaborate preparations for other people to escape while lingering on himself, had made all manner of furtive and suspicious moves while at the same time bragging openly to complete strangers about his undercover exploits. The FBI planted informers in jail with him after he was arrested and following his conviction, and even there he kept right on blabbing away. In effect, in order to satisfy themselves he was indeed the man they wanted, they'd had to conclude he was a nut. Maybe he was. That story he allegedly told the passport photographer about Ethel inheriting an estate in France was pretty far out after all, nearly as good as Harry Gold's invented family. Providing Rosenberg had ever actually said such a thing: there were a lot of lively imaginations in the FBI, too. But to me all that “quixotic behavior” looked more like a snow job by a couple of con artists, two experienced actors diverting the overeager G-men's (and later the whole nation's) attention away from the real thing.

In short, they seemed to be taking the rap for somebody else. Yes, I was convinced of this now. Maybe they knew who this somebody else was, maybe they didn't, but this was what I had to find out. I could only guess. Maybe Sobell and Greenglass had talked them into it. Maybe even their supposed antipathy toward David had been feigned, David getting the tragic part, as it were. Maybe
they'd
been conned into thinking such a ring existed and were taking the rap for nobody. Pawns in a Cold War maneuver that only Uncle Sam and/or the Phantom knew about. Maybe their own lawyer was setting them up—Bloch, I knew, was close to a lot of hardline Commie causes and had helped to orchestrate the publicity on the case in the Red press, maybe
he'd
masterminded the whole thing. Whatever the case, they'd convinced me of two things: they weren't who or what the FBI said they were, but they did know something, even if they'd only got it, like me, from a backstage glimpse.

And so that was my handle. Exposure of the FBI in exchange for confessions, a partnership in iconoclasm. I had a lot of contacts over at the Bureau, and I knew what kind of crazy and dangerous place it was—Hoover was in many ways a complete loony, arbitrary in his power and pampered like a Caesar, and if he dreamed up a spy network one day, then by God it
existed
. Doubt was out. It was an agent's job to increase the Bureau's “statistical accomplishments” and “personally ramrod field investigations of ‘major cases' to successful conclusions,” and never to question the remote wisdom of the Director, and I assumed if we moved fast enough, before they had time to tidy up after all the desperate excitement, we could probably find enough deception and confusion over there to blow this case wide open. The Rosenbergs would have to consider it, I was their last best hope. Might get a lot of their friends in trouble, but it'd be, from their viewpoint, for a higher cause, and so justified. And if it worked, if they talked, and if we went after the FBI and the Justice Department, what then? Could the American people take it? The incorruptibility of U.S. agencies and institutions—above all, the FBI—was an article of faith in this country: could the people brook an attack on that faith? Would they even listen? Well, it'd be risky like all great power plays, might even drive the whole nation into dangerous paranoia, but if it worked I'd have them in the palm of my hand. They'd have to believe in something, and I'd be all they had left, not even Joe McCarthy with his assaults on the Army and the State Department could match it. Even Uncle Sam would have to toe the goddamned line! And it wasn't for myself I'd be doing this, and not even just for the nation. Let's face it, the survival of the whole fucking world depended on us, and I was the only guy in the country who could make it work. And I would, too, I'd give everything I had to it. The government would function, truly function, for the first time since the eighteenth century. Then who could stop us? We could do good wherever good needed to be done!