I reared up with a start. Where was I? I glanced about: the office was empty. Just the documents scattered about. Ah yes, the Rosenbergs…. I gazed blearily at all the litter, wondering what Pat might have back home in the icebox. What a mess. What if somebody came in here and saw me like this? I thought. At least I should sit up straight, be seen to be thinking, concentrating. The Spartan look. But I was too tired. My back was stiff and my butt hurt. I wondered if I’d got blisters from sitting too long. Or boils — didn’t that happen to somebody famous? My old butt ain’t so ironic as it used to be, I mused to myself as I got to my feet and staggered off to take a piss. I grinned at this and said it out loud: “My old butt’s not as ironic as it, uh, used to be…” It didn’t sound as funny out loud. Like Saypol’s puns at the triaclass="underline" “Did you say ‘a Russian business’ or ‘rushing business’?” Even Bloch pretended to enjoy that one, and Judge Kaufman said: “Try to restrain your desire to be another Milton Berle.” Which might sound like a scolding, but which in fact was a gentle compliment, drawing an affectionate link between himself, the comic, and Saypol, and serving in its embracing humor to unite Judge, jurors, lawyers, spectators, the outside world — indeed everyone except the two outcast defendants, suddenly more isolated than ever — while at the same time subtly providing a bit of promotion on the side for Uncle Miltie, one of Kaufman’s former clients and oldest friends, setting him up as the very paradigm of American wit and humor.
I checked the refrigerator again. For the fortieth time. Nothing there but an empty cigar box, empty cottage cheese carton, half a bottle of ketchup, and a tin of maple syrup, almost empty. I uncapped the syrup, tipped it up — it took forever draining down, and then all I got from it was a long stale lick. I threw the can in a wastebasket, did a few deep knee-bends, trying to stir the dead cells, get alert enough to bring this thing to a close, make conclusions, clean it up. Late. Very quiet. Spooky in fact. I could hear voices very far away, chanting. I knew the National Gallery Orchestra was performing some new work celebrating the Old South this week, but it didn’t sound like “All Quiet Alone the Potomac Tonight.” Too late for that anyway. The demonstrators probably. They’d been infiltrating the Capital all week. Clemency vigils tonight at the Odd Fellows Hall. Could be dangerous out there. I should get home and get to bed. Cabinet meeting tomorrow morning early. But in fact, to tell the truth, I liked staying up all night. Got in the habit back in high school when I had the bell tower to go to. I was always more efficient at night, something about the pressure in the air, and I liked the dark down around me. So did Kaufman, apparently. He liked to brag he slept only ninety minutes a night during times of stress. And visited the synagogue several times a day. For meditative catnaps probably. I yawned.
Jesus! I realized I was stretched out again, this time on the leather couch. I scolded myself angrily, did three fast sit-ups there on the cushions, then sprang to my feet and resumed my pacing, throwing short shadow punches like Rocky Marciano. Unff! Unff! All right, wrap it up, I said to myself. Something’s bugging you, what is it? Something about the linkages. If you walked forward through all this data, like the journalists, like the FBI invited everybody to do, the story was cohesive and seemed as simple and true as an epigram. The Soviets tested an A-bomb in 1949, sudden proof they’d stolen the secret from us. The nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, arrested in England by Scotland Yard, verified the theft and led the FBI to his courier Harry Gold, who confessed that his Russian contact was Anatoli Yakovlev. Yakovlev had sailed away to Russia with his wife, two kids, and all relevant secrets aboard the S.S. America some time earlier. Journalists tended to find the name of the ship deeply ironic. Gold also put the finger on David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos and former Communist, and Greenglass in turn, his wife Ruth collaborating, turned state’s evidence against his sister Ethel and Ethel’s husband Julius Rosenberg, also ex-Commies. Or maybe not ex. Other witnesses substantiated this charge and widened the ring to include Morton Sobell, who had fled to Mexico, but who with the help of Mexican police had been “returned” to the U.S. and captured. There were no doubt others — the Rosenbergs and Sobell seemed like small-time operators at best — but so far none of these three had said who the people behind them were. Or, if Hoover was right and Rosenberg was the Master Spy, who the others in his ring were. Which was why maximum pressure was being applied, although in fact the FBI already had plenty of evidence on other members of the conspiracy. They said.
Okay. So far so good. The Crime of the Century, by J. Edgar Hoover. But working backwards, like a lawyer, the narrative came unraveled. All that the minor witnesses really substantiated was (1) that people were indeed spying for the Russians in this country, as everybody knew, and (2) that Julius Rosenberg was a left-winger, probably a Communist or at least a sympathizer. But no links between (1) and (2), no hard evidence that the Rosenbergs themselves were spies. The principal evidence against Sobell was his wild flight to Mexico. This was pretty peculiar, all right, but who knew what he was actually fleeing from? He’d been a Communist, after all, and that by itself was a federal crime. The FBI had not been able to connect him in any way to the theft of the bomb secrets, only to a ring of City College classmates with unhealthy opinions, including Rosenberg. So forget Sobell. Yakovlev had been out of the country for years and wasn’t apt to come back to the U.S. to deny the FBI charges, and as for Harry Gold, not only was he a notorious fantasist, but his testimony in any case had nothing to do with the Rosenbergs, only the Greenglasses. Moreover, though I got the impression from the files that Gold seemed to know Yakovlev all right, this FBI legend of Fuchs leading them to Gold and Gold to Greenglass just didn’t hold up. Gold had hardly begun to speak vaguely of some “unknown individual in Albuquerque” but what the FBI had Greenglass under questioning. Where did they find him? The files didn’t say. But they did show that as soon as Gold — with FBI assistance—“remembered” this contact, the FBI showed him a list of twenty possible names and David’s was already on it. And prior to that, the FBI had descended on Gold long before getting any help at all from Fuchs. In fact, Fuchs had told them time and again that Gold was not his courier, in spite of Harry’s signed confession. But the agents working on him in England were very persistent fellows, and Fuchs may well have gone along with them finally just to get them off his back. So, if anything, it was Greenglass to Gold to Fuchs.