Better Dead (15 page)

Tiny sneer of a smile. “You tell me, Heller. Would
you
give
your
life for that dumpy dame? Not goddamn likely!” His shrug was dismissive. “Anyway, they won't kill her. They're just using her to get Rosenberg to talk, and I bet he's got plenty to talk about.”

That's what he
bet
, but he wasn't sure.…

I stood and crooked a summoning finger.

He frowned, staying where he was.

“Come on, Harry. No, really. Come over here.”

Very tentatively, Harry Gold returned to the bars of his cell, but standing back a ways, so I couldn't reach in for him.

I whispered, “You did fine, Harry.”

And I winked at him.

His head reared back and he blinked. Thought about it. And then he smiled and winked back.

I was just moving away from the cell when he said, “You gonna talk to Davey Greenglass while you're here?”

I halted and turned back to him. “I am.”

“I don't talk to that S.O.B. anymore.”

“You fellas have a falling-out?”

“I got sick of him at the Tombs. All he does is feel sorry for himself. You got to make the best of it when you're inside. Anyway, I got the word not to talk to him in here.”

“From on high?”

“No. Down low. Right here in this star-spangled hellhole. Everybody's shunning him, and if I do the same, I don't get shunned so bad. They hate his fat ass.”

“Because he sold out his country?”

He shook his head. “Because he sold out his sister.”

*   *   *

Born in 1922, David Greenglass grew up in poverty on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He learned the trade of machinist at Manhattan Haaren High School and, after graduation, briefly attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, where he flunked every subject he took. The future spy—who would supposedly memorize intricate atomic bomb plans and diagrams—had no further higher education.

He did pursue an interest in Communism—both he and his future wife, Ruth Printz (they met in their teens), became members of the Young Communist League, encouraged to participate by David's sister Ethel and her husband Julius.

When he was twenty and she was eighteen, David and Ruth were married, and, soon after, in 1943, David joined the U.S. Army, where within a year he rose to the rank of sergeant. He was assigned to the top-secret Manhattan Project, stationed first at the massive uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then reassigned to the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, where he claimed to have slept through the first atomic bomb test.

Greenglass was in an adjacent wing that also segregated hardened criminals. His cell was identical to Gold's, down to a folded-open hardcover on the green-blanketed metal bed, in this case
A Dog's Head
by Jean Dutourd, a book and author I'd never heard of. When I arrived at his cell door, he was stretched out, propped by a thin pillow. He got up and went over to where he'd already positioned a chair facing the bars.

He was easily my six feet but twenty or thirty pounds heavier—prison life hadn't dropped the pounds off him the way it had Gold—with enough bulk to look imposing, only he didn't. There was a softness to him, a layer of baby fat diminishing any threat, and a smirky baby face centered on the front of a bucket head on top of which sat a Medusa-like nest of black wavy curls.

This time the guard had brought a chair along for me. Greenglass and I nodded at each other, since a handshake was out, and we both sat. Why was he smiling? Nervousness? Some private joke? Seemed to me the joke was on him, since I was the one on the right side of these bars.

“I'm Nathan Heller,” I said. “You were obviously expecting me.”

“Obviously.” His voice was higher-pitched than you'd expect from a man his size. Suddenly I thought of Curly Howard. But whose stooge was he?

“You understand,” I said, “that I represent a committee of citizens who have asked me to look into the Rosenberg case.”

“Sobell, too?”

“I have an associate in California who's arranged to visit Morton Sobell at Alcatraz, yes.” My L.A. partner, Fred Rubinski, was handling that. “But Sobell's not the focus of my investigation.”

The smirky smile in the baby face pursed to a near kiss. “Morty claims he barely knows Julie. A lie.”

Testimony from an expert witness.

“You understand,” I said, “the
real
significance of my being here.”

He winked at me. “Oh, I got the word. You wanna be able to report back the same old stuff to your clients.”

“Right. But, also, Mr. Greenglass—”

“‘Davey,'” he said, and waved a plump hand magnanimously. “Everyone calls me ‘Davey.'” Little grin. “Well, back on the Lower East Side, it was ‘Doovey,' but I won't inflict that on you.”

“Thanks. And I'm Nate.” I got out my notebook and ballpoint. “What we'll go over is, as you indicate, very old news. But I've only been on this job for a little over a week, so it'll be helpful for me to hear the, uh…”

“Party line?” he said with a pixie smile.

Maybe if you're a guy who'd dodged the electric chair, and helped your wife avoid any charges at all, you had a right to be cheerful. But even when it took sending your sister to Death Row?

Still, I stayed pleasant. I told him that I'd avoided a counsel room to be in a bug-free environment. He accepted that reasoning. Then I fed him questions and his answers were almost exactly what I'd read in the trial transcripts. It had been a while since he'd last performed this comedy, but he still remembered his lines.

He folded his arms, leaned back in the metal chair. The infantile features were framed between bars.

He said, “My wife visited me in Albuquerque on November 29, 1944. I can pull that date out of the air 'cause it was our second wedding anniversary. Ruth said that back in New York, Julie had asked her over for supper. He told her that I was working on the atomic bomb project, and that the people he worked for wanted me to get them inside dope for the Russians.”

I frowned. “Ruth didn't
know
you were working on the atom bomb? You'd never told her?”

“No. She got it from Julie. I'd kept it to myself—it was top-secret. Anyway, I told Ruth I wouldn't do it. Wanted no part of it. But she said Julie told her Russia was an ally and deserved to have the same information as we did … that is, as America did.”

“What did you say to that?”

“Nothing at first. But I thought about it and it made sense to me. You know, the war was going on! The Russians were on our side, but here we were holding things back from 'em.”

“What were you asked to do?”

He shrugged. “Julie instructed Ruth to tell me that he wanted the general layout of the Los Alamos project—buildings, number of people, things like that. Also any names of scientists working there. That was the first thing I put together, a list of Oppenheimer and Urey and a few others. I was just a machinist—I didn't know them all and anyway some were using fake names.”

“On your next furlough,” I said, “in January '45, you gave Rosenberg written information on the atom bomb?”

The big bucket head nodded. “I did. That little list of scientists, and some sketches of flat-type lens molds—that's sort of what makes the bomb tick … although it doesn't
really
tick, of course.” He flashed a silly little smile. “Also, another list of some possible recruits among my fellow soldiers. Anybody sympathetic to the cause. The Communist cause, I mean.”

“Those sketches, Davey—they weren't available to the prosecution, so you did your best to re-create them, right?”

More nods. “Facsimiles, yeah.”

Hardly “best evidence”—drawings made years later by this expert with a high school education.

I said, “So you went to the Rosenbergs while you were on furlough, and somebody came up with a recognition device for a courier to use, calling on you back in New Mexico.”

This subject seemed almost to bore him. “Yeah, yeah, the Jell-O box thing.”

I managed to keep a polite expression going. “Yes. The Jell-O box thing. Go over that.”

His smirk turned humorless. “Julie, Ethel, and Ruth go into the kitchen,” he said, a schoolkid reciting a poem he'd been made to memorize, “while I stay in the living room. Five minutes or so later, they come back with one side of a Jell-O box, cut in two. Julie has one piece and Ruth has the other. Then he showed me how the pieces would fit together, like a puzzle, if a courier came around in Albuquerque. I said, ‘That's clever,' and Julie said, ‘The simplest things are the cleverest.'”

“And eventually back in Albuquerque, Gold came calling.”

“Yeah, in June 1945. A Sunday. I'd never seen him before. He says, ‘Julius sent me,' and gets the piece of Jell-O box out of his wallet, and it matches up.”

“Then you gave him the latest pilfered information.”

“Sure, a packet of stuff. Sketches relating to the project, one showing the face of the flat lens mold.”

“Which you drew up again for the prosecution, years later.”

Tiny smile. “That's what I did.”

“You cut up a Jell-O box for them, too.”

“You bet. To show what it was like.”

I was looking at the guy who had fabricated all of the prosecution's (secondhand) physical evidence.

I jotted a few notes, then said, “Let's jump to 1950.”

“Okay.”

“Your brother-in-law came to your apartment…?”

“Yes, yeah, Julie told me the guy who'd come to our flat in Albuquerque was about to get arrested, and that I should leave the country. I told Julie I needed money to pay my back debts, and of course he owed me from the machine-shop business. He'd said he'd get me some money.”

“Who from?”

“His Russian pals. Eventually Julie said he'd get me five thousand dollars so I could settle my debts and then skip to Mexico. He told me I'd need a tourist card and a letter to avoid inoculations at the border. He'd fixed that up with a doctor. Plus, I needed to get passport pictures of Ruth and me and my family.”

“Those were the pictures introduced at the trial?”

“Right, those were the ones.”

Only they weren't passport pictures—they were typical family portrait–style pictures, David and Ruth and their two children, one a babe in arms.

“Did Julius get you that five thousand?”

“He did. One thousand to settle some personal debts, another four to skip to Mexico.”

“Were you usually paid for your spying?”

A shrug. “I got money for my services. Such as Gold giving me five hundred dollars. Not that much, considering the risk.”

Atom bomb for five Cs—hell of a bargain.

I checked my notes, then said, “Okay, that's good, Davey. That's fine.”

He gave me a tiny grin. “Get what you needed, Nate?”

I nodded, slipping the notebook away. “Got what I needed. Thanks.”

For a guy in stir, he seemed awfully amused. “You just have to show your client, that committee, that you talked to me, huh?”

“Right.” I sat forward, lowering my voice, darkening my expression. “But, Davey … for my
other
client? There's some things I need to go over.”

The grin faded. “Well, I gave you everything. I'm not supposed to say any more.”

“This is off-record.” I leaned close to the bars and almost whispered. “Davey, we have a problem. There's at least one leak in the Justice Department. I need to ask you a few questions, just between us, so that I know what I might be up against.”

His tiny eyes flared. “Christ, I haven't heard anything
about
this.…”

“What could an FBI agent or some U.S. Attorney's Office whistle-blower know?”

Fat hands made fat fists. “Shit. They'd know I didn't mention Julie or Ethel or the Jell-O box or any of that stuff till way into the interviews with Cohn. I didn't
want
to involve Julie. Well, not so much Julie as my sister. I didn't mention her
at all
for the longest time.”

“Why not?”

“Are you kidding? Why involve my sister if I didn't have to? But they didn't have
anything
on her. I don't know how they got away with arresting her. Hell, we were two weeks out from the trial before Cohn comes to me and says, ‘Ruth tells me your sister was there, that Ethel typed up the atom bomb notes.' So
I
said that, too.”

“
Did
Ethel type the notes?”

He shook his head, and the nest of black snakes on top stirred. “I don't honestly remember. But probably Ruth typed them. She's a professional typist, you know. I'm not sure Ethel was even in the room.”

“What role
did
Ethel play?”

“Well, she's married to Julie. She knew what he was doing with his life. She'd have to, right? I
tried
to protect Ethel, but when it came right down to it … Look, the feds had Gold and were pulling other people in, too, including Julie. First guy who says he'll cooperate, who says he'll talk, is in the best of the bad spots. I told them, ‘I'll give you the story, but my wife has to be completely out of this.'” He shrugged. “And they stuck to that bargain.”

“The leaker says when you were first interviewed, you implicated Ruth—said she was in the room when Gold came to your apartment to pick up documents. But in court you said she wasn't around.”

“That's right. Cohn let me change that. The FBI was easy about it, too. They had
me
. Why did they need Ruth?”

I'd gotten a little loose with my questioning, so I shifted into the mode he would expect, saying, “You're not going to weaken, are you, Davey?”