“We don’t want to arrest Weaver yet. We want him to reveal his contacts, then catch him in the act.”
“In the act of what?”
She looks up to see Szydlo blinking at her, weighing her trustworthiness.
“Do you still have an allegiance to him?”
“I hate the man.”
“Then maybe we could persuade you to help us out?”
“What is it you think he’s done? I deserve to know.”
His eyes catch hers and he looks at her for quite a while without a word.
“Catch him in the act of what?” she asks again.
“This isn’t a petty crime.”
“What isn’t?”
“Treason.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Ten thirty P.M. and the FBI halls are silent. Even the Polish cleaning ladies—who regularly offer up novenas that Charlie will marry one of their daughters—have stashed away their vacuum cleaners and headed home. The newly installed air conditioner has clicked off, and without its circulation, Charlie can smell the perfume of the last telephone operator. He yanks off the apparatus, walks over to the bank of windows, and shoves them open, one after another. Enjoying the damp breeze on his face, he takes in the dazzle of city lights, extends his hand beyond the sill to catch the needles of rain. The radio this morning warned that the temperature would drop tonight. It’s already colder.
He’s sat through phone surveillance more times than he can count, usually helped along by a good book, daydreams. Tonight, Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees hasn’t done the trick. The Tribune crossword puzzle went too fast. And all that’s left of the pork sandwich from Keeley’s are a few crusts smashed inside a ball of white paper. He’s growing irritated and jittery. Why hasn’t Miss Porter called Weaver? As they’d parted, he’d said, “Call him tonight, Miss Porter. Do it for your country.” She even smiled when he said that. Women. Jesus Christ. He doesn’t know how to make them do a damn thing.
After he returned from Mitsushima, when Linda—whom he’d counted on to be waiting—tore him in two, he joined the FBI to avoid women. Like the army, the FBI was a male bastion of facts and information. And a chance to do some good in a world that felt overwhelmingly evil. After the war, they took injured men if they could prove themselves at Quantico. That, too, was part of the appeal. To be better than the others, outperform expectations. Being athletic, naturally diligent, detail oriented, he’s good at what he does, and here, he barely has to confront a woman except for an occasional secretary.
They assigned him at first to Peoria. He didn’t know a job could be so boring. But he was still recovering from his years at Mitsushima, and the anonymity of Peoria suited him. No one knew him well enough to ask why he looked so gaunt, so exhausted. In Chicago, he’d blocked the pain from the war by staying busy: first by finishing law school in record time, then by training for the FBI. The sleepy silence of Peoria, however, invited pain. Those weeks of boredom gave him time to sweat his war experience out of every pore, to mourn a life of trust and innocence.
When he got the call that he was being transferred back to Chicago, he was surprised and relieved. He returned to the basement apartment at his sister Peggy’s house—the one he lived in during law school—and still, somehow, hasn’t left.
The transfer to Chicago came for one reason: because he spoke Polish. Most agents never return to their home offices. There’s something almost cruel about the way the Bureau assigns people to places they’d rather not go. But in Chicago, there are Polish gangsters to nab, Polish citizens who need protection, and they told Charlie his ability to translate would be invaluable. Then, after a mere two weeks of chasing Jimmy “Bananas” Banasiak, he was transferred to the newly beefed-up espionage squad, where he’s never once used his Polish. Now his only job is to catch Russian spies.
The FBI is at the forefront of the new Cold War, and Charlie’s on the front lines. For the last six months, Wisconsin Senator McCarthy has been proclaiming that even the State Department itself is infested with spies. The average citizen has started to expect Soviet spies to pop out of storm drains. Half the country’s beginning to glance sideways at the other parents at PTA meetings, questioning old friends’ loose talk over cocktails. There’s no one who hates Communists more than FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, but office rumor has it that even he is annoyed with the senator. “Lies and overstatements undermine the whole Bureau,” he’s said. It’s true: The new Red Scare is leading to a lot of dead ends.
But what Charlie’s working on—routing out the people who shared bomb-building information with the Russians—well, that is both real and urgent. When the Russians tested their version of the A-bomb last year—so much sooner than anyone expected—it shook the world. And now they’ve caught Klaus Fuchs, a German-born scientist who worked at Los Alamos. He’s been spilling what he knows, although the Russians made sure he was never told the names of other scientists who aided them. Fuchs reported, most alarmingly, that he heard another scientist has promised to pass information on the still hypothetical hydrogen bomb.
Charlie focused on Weaver for a number of reasons (timing, access, proof of early Communist sympathies), and last month, he felt certain enough to approach Binder with his plan to recruit Miss Porter. He planned to appoint someone else to tail and sweet-talk the lady scientist, someone like Dick Hazelmill. Dick always has a woman on his arm, albeit a flashy one who can’t put two sentences together. Binder scoffed and blew an enormous cloud of smoke right into Charlie’s eyes.
“A physicist? She’s too sharp for Hazelmill. You’re the brainy, sensitive type, Szydlo. A smart woman’s more likely to warm up to you.”
“I hardly think that’s me, sir. Besides, I’m too tall to tail anyone.”
“You’re the one. Get on it.” Before the war, his sister used to say girls were drawn to him like moths to a porch light. He played center on his high school basketball team, graduated top of his class, received a scholarship to Champaign. At the age of thirty-one, Charlie thinks he’s the last one who should be assigned to handle a woman. He’s come to believe women exist to disappoint men. Besides, what girl would want a guy with a mutilated hand who glances away whenever a woman’s eyes meet his with interest?
Tonight, Rosalind Porter is living up to her sex’s penchant to disillusion. Calm down, he tells himself. It’s just a setback. So what if she hasn’t called Weaver yet? He’s angry at himself for feeling so disheartened.
After what he went through in the war, he should know better. He’s alive. He’s not in pain. He has a raincoat to pull on, shoes that aren’t torn and wrapped in burlap. For too long he didn’t have either. He’s eaten a good dinner—that sandwich from Keeley’s was delicious. In captivity, he ate nothing but tainted rice, an occasional morsel of fish old enough to stink. With so little in his belly, suffering from beriberi, after hours on a raised wood slab with only a rice-husk mat beneath him, he wasn’t sure that he’d wake any given morning.