PROLOGUE
* * *
Washington, DC, 1956
“Don’t make jokes.”
It was the first and last thing the lawyer instructed. No one was allowed to laugh at the proceedings. Especially a woman.
As she looked up at the panel of men seated at the high table, glaring down at her, she thought she’d never felt less amused. She couldn’t even comfort herself that the accused women in Salem had faced worse. She didn’t want to go to prison.
It was like a television play. A script she’d tried to write and then discarded as too absurd. But this was all too real.
The gavel banged, the room fell silent, and the interrogator locked eyes with her.
“Phoebe Berneice Adler. Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”
It didn’t matter that they already knew the answer was no. That wasn’t the point. It never was. The hearing was just for show. Pure theater. And she had to play her part.
She clenched her hands together to keep from wiping them on her skirt. She took a deep breath, and leaned toward the microphone.
CHAPTER ONE
* * *
Greenwich Village, New York City, Spring 1955
THE GANGSTER CORNERS MOLLY IN THE ALLEY.
GANGSTER
Give it up, sister, you’re through.
MOLLY
You ain’t got me yet.
MOLLY SCRAMBLES UP THE FIRE ESCAPE. SHE’S FAST, BUT HE’S GAINING.
SHE TAKES OFF A SHOE AND FLINGS IT AT HIM, HITTING HIM IN THE FACE. IT ONLY BUYS HER A FEW SECONDS. HER OTHER SHOE FALLS OFF AND HE CATCHES IT, TAKING NOTE OF THE POINTY HEEL.
HE SMILES AS HE CLIMBS STEADILY, ABOUT TO REACH HER AS SHE’S WRIGGLING INTO AN OPEN WINDOW.
Phoebe slammed the typewriter carriage back and pulled out the page. She read the scene several times, trying to view it through Hank’s eyes. He was a discerning story editor with a heavy hand. Phoebe grudgingly conceded that his edits improved her scripts, but she always strove to have fewer edits each time, and she was gaining on him as readily as this murderer was gaining on his victim. She needed Hank to see her as his best writer. He was going places. Phoebe wanted to go there too.
She added the page to the pile and took several deep breaths. She always needed a break before writing the final scenes. The final murder, the final arrest, the final quip. Goodness and decency prevailing. A sameness she had to make different every time she wrote it. Television—or, at least, the fourth-rate detective show she wrote for—followed a rigid formula. There were better shows, though, with opportunities for real invention, and Phoebe was clawing her way to a spot on one of them. It didn’t matter how many ridiculous murders she had to write to get there.
She leaned back, giving herself over to ambient sounds. The grunt of the wooden chair’s spine. The faint hum of Anne’s radio in the apartment across the hall. A news program. Phoebe thought she could hear the announcer saying something about Communists and the Soviets. She couldn’t remember the last time a news broadcast didn’t talk about the “Communist threat” and the “Red Scare” and the efforts of the House Un-American Activities Committee and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to keep America safe from Red Russia and the Reds that were assumed to be crawling all over the country, especially in Hollywood and unions and wherever Negroes were organizing. The House committee was in the news so often, it was referred to by one and all as HUAC. Phoebe wondered how Anne could concentrate with such accompaniment, but Anne said the best artists kept up with current events.
“How the heck is it current?” Phoebe demanded once, when Anne was listening, enthralled, to Senator McCarthy’s yowls. “Those HUAC hearings started in 1947, for crying out loud!”
“And now it’s in the Senate, too, isn’t it?” Anne answered. Though McCarthy himself actually had gone away, censured and disgraced after the Army-McCarthy hearings. People still used the term “McCarthyism,” but only because it was a useful shorthand, with more zip than “HUACism.”
Phoebe stacked up her newspapers, all folded open to local crime reports, and put up another pot of coffee. She lit a cigarette and sat on the makeshift window seat, wrapping her stockinged toes around the jamb and letting her skirt flutter outside the open window in what she hoped looked very devil-may-care without being too saucy. It was warm, and many windows up and down Perry Street were open. Phoebe took long, luxurious drags on her cigarette, reveling in all the street sounds. Other typewriters, of course, clacking away, and music everywhere, some single instruments, some groups, rehearsing or creating or teaching. Next door was the Disorderly Theatre Company, a clutch of young men in a living room, shouting scenes from a political play that even the bohemians of Greenwich Village would say was laying it on a touch thick. But there was always the chance it would blossom into something that would make the world sit up and take notice. That happened.
Shop doors were open, and Phoebe watched the steady flow of commerce in and out of the butcher’s, grocer’s, and fishmonger’s. If she leaned out a touch farther, she could see the regulars draped over the outside tables of the Coffee Nook, where the proprietors Floyd and Leo made cappuccinos more addictive than cocaine. It was a sign of being a true Village artist if one was allowed to give a reading or play music any night at the Nook, especially a Thursday. Floyd and Leo presided over the lineup with a severity that would have been the envy of Stalin.
The bread seller came down the street on his bicycle, accosted on all sides by housewives vying for the freshest loaves. The artists tussled for the best day-old bread. Phoebe was tempted to run down for a loaf, but was too comfortable in the sunshine. It was like being in an Italian film. Those first early scenes where everyone is poor but happy, scraping along and dreaming big. Anything could happen over the next hour and a half.
“Hey, Adler!” Jimmy shouted up at her. Phoebe sighed. In a film, the neighbor from across the road might or might not turn out to be her true love—the very idea of which Phoebe found snort-worthy—but he would at least be charming. He would keep the audience guessing. Though Jimmy wasn’t without his usefulness. Phoebe had written three different scripts in which a scrawny, moonfaced buffoon of a young man turned out to be a criminal mastermind.
Not that she really minded Jimmy. As she said to Anne, “He’s charmless, but harmless.” “That’s as may be,” Anne replied. “But I wish he’d try to close his mouth when he’s around me. Not even a bloodhound drools that much.” There was no use in pointing out that all men drooled around Anne. Jimmy’s insistence on being friends with Phoebe was mostly based on her friendship with Anne. Phoebe’s comparative writing success and general cheerfulness might be other reasons, but they were a distant second.