Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's Page 3

  Cooper gathered his mail, then took the stairs up to his apartment. He glanced at his mail. Bills and a few ads. He dumped it in his living room and walked to the bedroom. There was a solid table to the right of where he slept, the lower part of it like a bookcase. He lifted a catch hidden on the side of the table. A row of shelves unlatched and swung loose like a gate. Cooper knelt. On the steel safe hidden within, he worked a quick combination. The safe opened.

  In a yellow chamois cloth lay the snub-nosed six-cylinder Smith & Wesson revolver. It was in a small clip-on holster. Cooper checked the weapon. He loaded five bullets into the revolver, leaving the chamber above the pistol's hammer empty—no use blowing off his hip accidentally. He returned the remaining bullets to the safe, which he closed and locked.

  Cooper's pistol permit was in his wallet. Friends in the police department had helped him obtain it back in the early 1960s. He clipped the loaded pistol to his belt on the left side, hidden beneath his sports jacket.

  He left the light on. Moments later, he hit the street again. He stopped and looked both ways. Margot was waiting in a dark green Mercedes 220. Brand new. Typical. Quiet understated elegance: that was Margot. He eased into the Benz with her.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Cooper checked the passenger’s side rear view mirror as they pulled out into traffic. One never knew. All clear. A nervous tic: he patted the pistol underneath his jacket.

  Margot drove assertively but with caution, gliding in and out of Manhattan traffic. She turned a few corners and pulled onto an access ramp of the northbound West Side Highway. The dashboard radio softly played a piano concerto from WQXR.

  He looked at her from the corner of his eye. She should have been married to a banker, but instead she was married to no one. “How’s your son?” he asked.

  “Tony? He’s good,” she answered without looking at him. Cooper noticed that she was working the rear-view mirrors, also. She was a conscientious driver—or she too was paranoid about being followed. “He’s very good, actually,” she said. “Thank you for asking.”

  Tony, her son, was the one person she liked to talk about. Tony went to one of the top prep schools in Connecticut, one with a hefty annual price tag. Tony rowed on Lake Quinnipiac in the fall, she said. He played ice hockey in the winter and tennis in the spring. He also maintained an A-minus average. Margot had shown Cooper photographs on occasion. During the most recent Christmas vacation, he had even met Tony face to face at a chance meeting in Saks Fifth Avenue where Margot was shopping for “clients,” as she called them.

  As they talked, Cooper tried to note the route she was taking. They were out of the city proper in twenty minutes and they continued north on the Saw Mill River Parkway. She fell silent, and so did he. Daylight was gone. When less than an hour had passed, Margot left the highway and drove onto a dark, winding two-lane road, still going north: Cooper could tell by the stars. She drove through a stretch of orchards and rambling old houses, one long narrow road for twelve minutes at thirty miles per hour. There was a right turn past a picket fence. Three minutes on an unmarked two-lane road. No houses. No signs indicating a town, but he recognized buildings. They were in Chappaqua.

  Finally, she spoke again. “My father has had cancer for two years. Among other things. He's come home to die,” she said.

  “Whose home?”

  “His. That's where we're going.”

  “Who takes care of him? Your mother?”

  “I'm his only family.”

  “Presumably a dying man is not waiting alone.”

  “We have nurses around the clock.” She paused. “It won't be too much longer.”

  For a moment, Cooper thought she was talking about travel time. Then he realized she was talking about her father. Headlights appeared behind them and threw light into the Benz. Cooper was instantly on edge.

  “My father is giving up,” she continued. “Deteriorating eyesight. Horrible back pain. Feels sick all the time. How long do you think a man can go on like that?”

  “Obviously, he has something important on his mind. Do you have any idea what it is?” Cooper asked. The bright beams behind them swept away and disappeared. She turned onto a wet narrow road. A sudden shower had come through, and the smells of a late summer seeped through the car window. They were within sight of houses again.

  “Do the names Igor Popov or Michal Goleniewski mean anything to you?” she asked.

  “Oh, God,” he answered. Confusion mingled with anger. “This again?”

  “My father said you’d know the names,” she answered. “Who are they?”

  “You don’t know?” he asked.

  “I know they’re Russians,” she said.

  “Popov and Goleniewski were Soviet intelligence officers. Each defected to the United States about the time the Berlin Wall went up. 1961.”

  “My father said you wrote a long investigative report on the CIA in 1965. You covered a pair of Soviet defectors named Nosenko and Golitsyn,” she said.

  “That’s correct,” he said.

  “I read it yesterday. My father showed me a clipping. You worked for the New York Daily Mirror back then.” As she spoke, she made a sharp turn.

  “I thought you only knew me as an obit writer.”

  “Don't you think I might have heard of one of the better investigative reporters in New York?” she asked.

  “Well,” he answered, “it’s not what I do any more.”

  “Remember much about Popov and Goleniewski?”

  “It was a long, involved case,” he said. “Nosenko and Golitsyn were a separate pair of Soviet intelligence officers. Golitsyn was a legitimate defector and Nosenko was a fake. Or maybe it was the other way around. I don't remember. Or maybe no one really knew. They’re both still alive, by the way.”

  “Still have your notes?”

  “I destroyed them. Most reporters working hard news destroy their notes,” he said, surprised she didn't know. “That way they can't be subpoenaed.”

  “Smart,” she said.

  “Not so much ‘smart’ as ‘not stupid,’” he said.

  Margot smiled. “I like you, Frank. You’re a cultivated smart-ass.”

  She turned off the road and was on gravel. High trees hung over a driveway. Dark hedges rose on each side of the car. It was dark inside the car, aside from the dim green glow of the instrument panel. Lights appeared, then the rear of a building. Then more lights and the outline of a large, rambling house.

  Margot parked the car. The world suddenly was very quiet. They stepped out of the vehicle. Cooper was conscious of wet leaves ticking together. He glanced behind them but saw no one. A breeze came up. A large hedge by the driveway murmured as if it were alive.

  They entered the house through a sparsely furnished kitchen. Somewhere in the house a television made a low, monotonous rumble. Margot led Cooper to a drawing room. He seated himself. Cooper noted the surroundings: A desk in a corner with a wooden chair. An anonymous portrait on the wall and two mismatched sofas. No photographs. No reading material. There was a fireplace which was clean. The room conveyed the sense of having been hastily assembled.

  Margot vanished for several minutes. Distantly, Cooper heard Margot discussing something with the nurse. There was the sound of a door shutting. Cooper heard voices approaching—that of Margot and an older man.

  A door opened.

  Margot wheeled a frail man into the room. He wore pajamas and a heavy robe. His hands were bony. His thin ankles disappeared into a heavy pair of slippers. He looked at Cooper with steady anxious eyes.

  “You’re a fine writer,” the man said in a voice that rasped.

  “I'm flattered, sir.”

  “Did my daughter tell you anything about me? My name perhaps?”

  “No more than that, sir,” Cooper answered.

  “Well, good. We can start from the top.” He glanced to her approvingly. “My name is Stanley Rudawski,” he began, “a
nd I worked in the State Department from 1953 until this year. I've got a story to tell you. I hope you'll print it after I'm dead. But that will be your decision.”

  “Why are you telling it to me?” Cooper asked.

  “In the past, I liked your investigative work,” the man said. “Now I like your obituaries. Perfect blend.” A flicker of a smile crossed the old man's face. “Plus, I've got the inside dope on the biggest secrets of the 1960s. Of course, you'll have to fill in the missing pieces. Do some digging. Maybe literally. So far, no one in my lifetime has the brass cajones to touch the story.”

  “Maybe I won't, either,” Cooper said.

  “Ha!” Cooper's host laughed. “Of course you will. You're a troublemaker.”

  “I'm a retired troublemaker.”

  “Oh, yes?” the old man snorted. “Well, I'm giving out a death-page notice that's going to stir things up after I'm gone. We're made for each other, aren't we?”

  Cooper reached into his jacket and withdrew a small notebook. He readied a felt-tipped pen. Simultaneously, Rudawski reached for a glass of water with thin unsteady fingers. Margot's hand rested on her father's shoulder. He sipped and set the glass down again.

  “Let me ask you something as we begin,” Rudawski asked. “Do you speak any Russian?”

  “None. Sorry,” Cooper answered.

  “Then I will explain something. In Russian, there are two words for ‘truth.’ The word for truth in Russian that most Americans know is Pravda. This is the truth that seems obvious, the one that is superficial. It is philosophically subjective. It can be bent. The ‘news’ in the newspaper can be bent, in other words. Politicians, all of them, are adept at spinning pravda to their own advantage. But the real truth of things is called istina in Russian. You can fiddle with the pravda all you want, but you can’t change the istina.”

  He paused, as if to make sure Cooper was following.

  “Since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917,” Rudawski continued, Russians have bent, warped, transfigured and mangled the relative truth better than any other society that has ever existed in human history. Better than the Nazis. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir. You are. I’ll remember that,” said Cooper.

  “When dealing with Russians, don’t ever forget it,” Stanley Rudawski said. “Or it could cost you your life.” He took another sip of water. “All right. Now let’s talk,” he said.

  Chapter 5

  That same evening, before twenty-one thousand people at a football field within the rust belt of northern Indiana, George Corley Wallace stood at the center of a stage. It was a warm night, late summer in the American heartland, and Wallace was making it even warmer. A local band played Dixie when Wallace took the stage. Lights and flags framed the former governor of Alabama and ardent segregationist, both American and Confederate. Bullet-proof Plexiglass shielded him from his adoring public.

  The small stadium was packed. The Wallace staff distributed five thousand dime store Confederate flags bearing the slogan Wallace For President. Outside, several dozen anti-Wallace pickets delivered a counter-message, cordoned behind a line of disinterested local police.

  George Wallace might have gone down in history with the other notable race-baiting southern governors of the Twentieth Century: Huey Long, Cotton Ed Smith and Theodor Bilbo. But in 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States decided a case called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the plaintiffs charged that the education of black children in separate public schools from their white counterparts was unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education meant that the University of Alabama had to be desegregated.

  In the years following, hundreds of African-Americans applied for admission, but all were turned down. The university worked with police to find any disqualifying qualities, or when this failed, intimidated the applicants. In 1963, three African-Americans with perfect qualifications applied and refused to be intimidated. In early June of 1963 a federal district judge ordered that they be admitted and forbade Governor Wallace from interfering.

  On June 11, two African-American students, James Malone and Vivian Hood, arrived to register. Wallace personally blocked the entrance to Foster Auditorium. Flanked by federal marshals, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach—dispatched by Attorney General Robert Kennedy—asked Wallace to step aside. Wallace refused, giving a speech on states' rights instead. Katzenbach phoned President John F. Kennedy, who federalized the Alabama National Guard. Guard General Morton Graham commanded Wallace to step aside, saying, “Sir, it is my sad duty to ask you to step aside under the orders of the President of the United States.”

  Wallace moved. Malone and Hood registered.

  That quickly, George Wallace was a national figure.

  Now, on this night in Indiana George Wallace carefully drew himself up to his full five-foot seven height. He wanted that not just his head but also his shoulders be seen above the podium. He began with a few local references and words of gratitude, but then viciously attacked his usual targets.

  “My good friends, it is a sad day in our country that you cannot walk in your neighborhoods at night or even in the daytime because both national parties have kowtowed to every group of leftwing anarchists that have roamed the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles and throughout the country. Now they have created themselves a Frankenstein monster, and the chickens are coming home to roost all over this great country.”

  A heavy ripple of applause and approval floated through the stadium. Wallace paused for it. “So here’s where I’m different,” he continued. “I am an Alabama Democrat, not a national Democrat. I’m not kin to those folks in Washington. The difference between a national Democrat and an Alabama Democrat is like the difference between a Communist and a non-Communist. So, yes, they’ve looked down their nose at you and me a long time, while meanwhile in Washington they can’t even park a bicycle straight. They’ve called us rednecks. Well, we’re going to show ‘em that there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country because they are finished after I get elected!”

  The audience surged to its feet in vigorous agreement. Wallace continued his attacks. On hippies and beatniks, “The only four-letter words they don’t use are W-O-R-K and S-O-A-P,” government waste and overspending, “Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?”

  Then there were the federal government regulations, “Look at all the buses now that want exact change. I figure if I give them exact change, they should take me exactly where I want to go,” anti-war demonstrations, “If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it'll be the last car he'll ever lay down in front of,” the national Democrats in Washington, “They're building a bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia,” and in a special smirking taunt to a few young liberal-left hecklers who made it into the stadium and called him a fascist, he taunted, “I was killing fascists when you punks were in diapers.”

  Next, his favorite target, the “leftwing national media.” Those “self-proclaimed experts and scribblers,” as he called them, they reckoned that they knew what is better for America than the average American. That was why they were against him, he explained. That was why they printed “lies and fake made-up news” against him.

  “My friends, this is why a pinko scribbler for the New York Times named Tom Wicker calls me ‘the Alabama demagogue.’ These arrogant folks in New York and Washington and Los Angeles have a vested stake in seeing that a little guy, an outsider, a man who stands up for America and American values, doesn’t deserve entry to the White House,” he explained.

  “Those people in the press, those knights of the keyboard, those overpaid pretty faces you see on your TV screen, those people who don't get upset at muggers in your neighborhood or foreign gas in your car or your tax dollars being wasted, they say George Wallace shouldn't get in the back door of the White House.”

  He folded his arms and surveyed twenty acres of
prospective voters. “Well, sir, guess what!” he ranted. “We're going in the front door of the White House and you, the righteous American people, are going to make it happen!”

  He bellowed. He stabbed the air with a finger and slashed it with a hand to punctuate his sentences. When he ripped the press corps, his loyal legions stood and screamed at the reporters present.

  George Wallace was as straightforward as a punch in the nose, as subtle as a belch. He was an American original, something mean and angry that reared up one night from the darkest underside of the American psyche. Wallace touched every imaginable nerve or fear of many average voters. He brought millions of people to their feet.

  “People today are afraid to say what's on their minds. So I say it for them,” he told his crowd. Wallace liked this line. “You how where I stand,” he said, “because I talk plain common sense without the ten-dollar words. And that's why you know I'll never double-cross you.”

  Wallace's message was bringing angry white voters to the polls. Some said that he was even creating millions of new angry white voters with the vehemence of his message. This Wallace denied. “I don't make people angry,” he said. “The state of our republic makes people angry. If they vote for me, it's a free country.”

  He was, much of the mainstream press insisted, the wrong man at a dreadful time. The political pendulum of the twentieth century was swinging again. Wallace presided from a podium surging with American flags but with Stars and Bars nestled among them. He wore a dark suit and a red, white and blue striped necktie.

  Those whom he didn't thrill, he terrified. Anyone who saw the performance at the football field this night had to know that the two major parties in the United States would have their hands full this year. Wallace was vying for neither party's nomination, having gained the nomination of the far-right American Independent Party.

  The AIP had been a fringe nut-case joke a year earlier when it was founded in California. Detractors were not laughing anymore. In a three-way race there was a chance that George Wallace, with his independent Stand Up For America candidacy, could throw the election into an electoral deadlock to be settled in the US House of Representatives—or even possibly, if absolutely everything broke the right way, capture the Presidency of the United States.