Better Dead (7 page)

I gathered the file folder and the one-page contract, took one last cookie, and was nibbling it and leaving when he said,
“Nathan!”

I paused in the doorway.

“You'll need to exert extra caution. There are dangerous people involved in this, and Cohn and McCarthy may be the least of it. The prosecutor, Saypol, is in the mob's pocket, for one thing, and he surely wouldn't like his headline-making case overturned. And the Soviets would like nothing better than to make martyrs out of the Rosenbergs and close this matter. Then there's the FBI, who probably manufactured or concealed evidence, and God knows
what
the CIA is up to.”

“Where is it you stay in New York, Drew? Waldorf, isn't it?”

I smiled and waved and went out.

Her name was Maureen, by the way, and she got off at nine. And again at midnight.

 

CHAPTER

4

In Manhattan, on July 17, 1950, Julius Rosenberg, thirty-two—electrical engineer and civilian employee of the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the war—was arrested by the FBI on suspected espionage charges. A month later, after the prisoner refused to cooperate with his questioners, his wife Ethel, thirty-five, was also arrested.

The couple was indicted and tried for conspiracy to transmit classified military information to the Soviet Union, chiefly on statements made by Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, and his wife, Ruth. The Rosenbergs were said to have persuaded David in 1944 and '45 to provide them with top-secret data on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where David had been an army sergeant working as a machinist. They also were said to have involved Ethel's sister-in-law, Ruth.

The arrest of Ethel, mother of two young sons, seemed obviously designed as a cudgel to make her husband talk. No one seemed to believe her role in the espionage reported by her brother was anything but minor. Still, after a relentless prosecution, both husband and wife were found guilty on March 29, 1951, and sentenced to death days later.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had said little since, stoic in their Death Row cells. A codefendant, Morton Sobell, received a thirty-year sentence, as did Harry Gold, another alleged conspirator who testified against the couple, not terribly convincingly. David Greenglass got fifteen years. Ruth was never charged despite a role significantly larger than what the government claimed had been Ethel's.

The public seemed evenly divided between those who felt the world would be better off with this pair of Commie spies dead and those who felt the political climate had poisoned the jury pool. After all, the Rosenbergs had been arrested shortly after the start of the Korean War, their trial conducted in the shadow of McCarthy's Red-hunting crusade.

Others felt the trial itself had been a travesty—the only really incriminating evidence had come from a confessed spy willing to sell out his own sister, and few considered the death penalty called for, particularly in Ethel's instance.

For two years the case had been appealed over the constitutionality and applicability of the conspiracy charge, as well as the impartiality of a trial judge who, in pronouncing sentence, accused the Rosenbergs of a crime “worse than murder.” Seven appeals were denied by the Supreme Court, and pleas for executive clemency were denied, first by President Truman and then by Dwight Eisenhower.

Now it was down to me.

Call it a Hail Mary pass or a last-ditch effort. Either way, if I succeeded, the A-1 would have a hell of a new slogan.

When Harry and Ike fail you, call Nate Heller.

*   *   *

In my suite at the Waldorf in Manhattan, I spent several days going over Pearson's fat file of clippings, trial transcript, and other background material. As promised, the columnist had arranged through Manny Bloch, their attorney, for me to meet with the Rosenbergs—individually, as prison protocol required.

Though not prisoners of New York State, the couple awaited execution at Sing Sing—the Federal Bureau of Prisons apparently fresh out of electric chairs.

So on a cool overcast Wednesday afternoon, I took the train from Grand Central Terminal for a quick trip north to Ossining. The scenic hamlet nestled on the east bank of the Hudson, which had given rise to the phrase “up the river,” or anyway the famous prison there had.

A cab at the modest train station delivered me to where formidable brick-and-stone walls encased a fifty-some-acre sprawl of brick and stone buildings overseen by lighthouse-like towers where guards cradled rifles, spotlights craved sundown, and built-in machine guns bided their time.

I spoke into a mounted box and a uniformed guard with a badged cap but no gun emerged from a door near the gate. He looked over my letter of introduction, driver's license, and Illinois private investigator's license. This rated a shrug from him, but he let me in. There he patted me down thoroughly before leading me up a gentle slope to a low-slung tan-brick building with stone trim and a row of arched windows recessed into blackness, labeled “ADMINISTRATION BUILDING.”

“Wait here,” he said. His first words to me.

I wasn't going anywhere.

He went inside while I stood near a row of parked cars and took in the dreary landscape of walled-in brick buildings so quiet they might have been abandoned. Within three minutes the guard returned with another guard. Trained observer that I am, I couldn't have identified which was the one who'd let me in if that were my only way out.

But he identified himself by heading back to his post near the main entry, leaving me to the other guard, who indicated the rider's side of a black Ford sedan. I got in. We rode along in no hurry, the whole complex consisting of rough roads and weathered buildings on a hillside, massive walls stair-stepping down, assorted trees trying to make the surroundings less bleak without success. This might have been a factory complex, but really was a succession of warehouses.

This guard was chatty. He played tour guide, pointing out older buildings whose ancient marble was local stone used by long-ago prisoners forced to build their own hellish housing.

“Them old-time cells,” he said, “didn't have no plumbing. Just a bucket. Older fellas here say it stunk to high heaven.”

“Bet it did.”

He chuckled. “Every morning, the prisoners got marched down, buckets in hand, to the river, and set their turds free.”

I had a feeling this was his “A” material. Or maybe Cell Block “A” material.

We were rolling along by an endless several-story, windowless brick wall. This was the lower area of the prison. Must have driven half a mile before the black sedan pulled up to a two-story brick building facing a cement apron in a stunted, squared-off C, the side wings windowless, the central slab with half a dozen barred windows. My driver pulled in next to a half a dozen other cars and got out.

So did I.

My driver walked me inside, checked me in at the first office, where my credentials were again inspected and I got another efficient frisk. Then he escorted me through several locked metal doors, keeping up a running commentary, nodding to various guards as we went.

“East wing's six cells, west wing's six cells,” he said, echoing slightly, “all boys. The girls got half a dozen cells upstairs. There's a lawyer room on the second floor, too. That's where you're going.”

I said nothing. Sounded like I didn't have any more choice than the other inmates.

“Now your buddy Rosenberg,” he said, “we keep him in the dance hall.”

Apparently I was supposed to ask, so I did: “What's the dance hall?”

He chuckled again and threw me a sadist's smile. “Half a dozen cells, three on either side of the death chamber door. That's where your pal is, dance hall, 'cause his death date's been set.”

“He's not my pal or my buddy,” I said. “I'm an investigator. A guy doing a job, just like you.”

“For that Commie's lawyer?”

That was an oversimplification, but I nodded.

“Well if you ask me,” he said cheerfully, “and you didn't … that's one dirty damn job you got there, fella.”

At a wall of metal bars with a door made of more metal bars—oddly labeled “NO LOITERING” (what else could a prisoner do; or was that for the guards?)—we went up a wide flight of stairs to a corridor where a wooden door said “COUNSEL ROOM,” outside of which two armed guards were posted. One unlocked the door and nodded for me to go in.

Julius Rosenberg was waiting for me.

He was seated at a square, heavy, scarred wooden table in the small, stuffy, windowless space, the unadorned walls a faded institutional green, the single overhead light casting a jaundiced glow. No guard to eavesdrop. Rosenberg wore a typically ill-fitted gray prison uniform, his left hand cuffed to a metal ring screwed into the table, his ankles shackled. They had shaved off his mustache, which made him look a little like Wally Cox on the
Mr. Peepers
TV show, and about as dangerous.

He got to his feet—or nearly so, as best as his circumstances would allow. I'd gotten the impression from newspaper photos that he was tall, but now I made him at around five seven or eight. He summoned a slight smile, his eyes languid behind steel-rimmed glasses. His dark hair was combed back, face a narrow oval, forehead high, chin weak. His five o'clock shadow rivaled Joe McCarthy's, though he was otherwise prison-pale.

“Mr. Heller, I presume.” This in a mellow second tenor.

“Don't get up for me,” I said with a nod.

“Frankly, Mr. Heller,” he said, taking his seat, “sitting down is nothing I much look forward to these days.”

This I took as a wry reference to what lay ahead for him, in the room off the dance hall. But it made me like him immediately. He still had a sense of humor and I admired that coming from a guy in a tough spot.

I went to him and we shook hands. His was a firm if clammy grip. Then I took my hat off and sat opposite him at what was little bigger than a card table, the result neither intimate nor removed.

From the Pearson papers, I knew both Rosenberg and his wife Ethel had been raised on New York's impoverished Lower East Side, his father in dry-cleaning, hers a sewing-machine repairman. They had graduated from the same high school (though were not acquainted there), she becoming a clerk, he going on to City College, where in his New Deal enthusiasm he'd gotten involved in unionism. He'd met Ethel Greenglass at a Seamen's Union fund-raiser in a Delancey Street hall where the budding opera singer was a featured entertainer. That was 1936 and they would marry in '39. By 1950 they were raising two sons and living in a three-room apartment in Knickerbocker Village, a federal housing project.

“Mr. Heller,” he said, “my attorney says I should cooperate with you. Answer any questions you may have. And I'm grateful for your willingness to help out, but—”

“I'm not helping out, Mr. Rosenberg. I'm a hired hand here, working for a group of anonymous supporters of yours. People mostly in the arts and entertainment fields whose names you'd recognize.”

His dark eyes were understandably guarded. “What are your politics, sir?”

“I vote straight Democratic ticket. And my old man was a unionist going back to Wobbly days. But don't get too impressed. I'm also a former cop.”

A smile twitched under the blue ghost of his late mustache. “Are you trying to talk
yourself
out of this, or discourage
me
from cooperating?”

I glanced around, including looking up at the light-fixture globe above us. Then right at him.

“You'd be well advised to provide me only limited cooperation, Mr. Rosenberg. The lack of a guard here is meant to give us a false sense of security, and privacy. This room is almost certainly wired for sound. But I'm guessing you already know that.”

He flicked half a smile. “We'll do what we can, Mr. Heller. As I understand it, the idea is … you're looking for new evidence.”

“I am.”

A tiny head toss released a comma of dark hair onto his forehead. “I believe you are likely on a fool's errand—not meaning that personally. I believe clemency, thanks to continued public clamor, is our best, perhaps only, hope at this point.”

“Not meaning it personally,” I echoed, “you're a fool if you think there are any get-out-of-jail-free cards in your future.”

“Even if there were,” he said dryly, “I wouldn't have the two hundred dollars.”

I liked that. I wasn't pulling any punches, and he wasn't ducking them. And despite what seemed a naturally morose countenance, he did have that wry sense of humor.

“You've been living this nightmare for a very long time,” I said, leaning forward, elbows on the table, hands clasped. “I've only just taken a crash course over the last several days. So I'm afraid I'll be asking you some fairly rudimentary questions.”

He lifted a shoulder and put it back down.

“I'm going to go over a lot of what was covered in the trial. If you feel comfortable going into more detail here, that would be fine … keeping in mind where we are.”

He glanced quickly up, then nodded.

From inside my suit coat pocket, I got out the notebook and ballpoint pen that had been allowed in with me. I flipped to a blank page, turned the notebook toward him, and gestured with my pen—giving him a look that said private communications could be made this way.

He nodded again.

“Keeping in mind,” I said, “that I'm playing catch-up—is it fair to say the government's case against you and your wife rests almost entirely on the testimony of her brother, David Greenglass, and his wife, your sister-in-law, Ruth?”

“More than fair,” he said quickly, almost clipping my last word. “One of the few things about this case that
can
be characterized as such.”

I'd started taking notes but in my personal shorthand, maintaining eye contact as much as possible.