He’d arrived at West 145th Street. Parking the car, Yates wound up the window. His was one of only four cars on the street – the kind of Harlem street where no one would notice if a home had been left to ruin and the occupant was a crazy woman who didn’t get out of bed. This was the kind of neighbourhood where Diane belonged. She didn’t deserve their home. There was no greenery here, no parks for the children to play in. The children ran about the streets, jumping in and out of hopscotch chalk outlines that covered the summer-hot tarmac as if the streets were built for them and not for cars. Yates took pause every time he saw these kids. No space to play, no future, no hope – what made him mad were the men sitting around in the doorways, doing nothing, when they should be working, they should be trying to get these children a yard, a front lawn. But they never did anything, huddled in conversations, as though they had important matters to discuss. It was a joke, the seriousness with which the dropouts would sit around and talk while old women, as old as seventy, carried heavy bags of shopping. Yates never saw them move to help, never saw them offer to carry the bags or open the door. He was convinced they looked down on work. Work was beneath them. It was the only explanation.
Stepping out of the car, the heat was oppressive. The redbrick houses soaked up every bit of the sun but the summer wasn’t pleasant like it was in Teaneck, it was a sickly heat, like a tropical fever. If the main streets were dirty, the alleys were something else, piled up with trash like they were waiting for a flood to wash it all away. Not such a bad idea, Yates thought, a flood, an almighty deluge, maybe it could take some of these layabout losers at the same time. He crossed the street, feeling everyone’s eyes on him, hundreds of eyes squinting at him in the sunlight. Kids stopped playing. Men stopped their conversations, following him with controlled dislike, not expressive enough to get themselves into trouble, just enough to make it clear they hated him. Let them hate him! Let them think his opinions had to do with the colour of their skin. But the truth was that he didn’t care what colour their skin was: he cared what kind of men they were – the colour of their soul. And a man worked. He tried to make his country a better place. He wanted to tell them that a man without a job wasn’t a man, and yet he was sure that they wouldn’t get it. They were alien to him, as surely as those Soviet Communists were.
Yates had worked for COINTELPRO, the FBI Counter-Intelligence Program, since its inception in 1956. Over the past nine years he’d become one of the programme’s leading agents, making his name hindering the efforts of the National Committee to Abolish HUAC – the House Committee on Un-American Activities. A committee tobolish a committee: but those activists hadn’t the wit to even spot the ridiculousness of their name, let alone their entire enterprise. They were too busy arguing for the rights of traitors, engaged in an abstract academic debate about how the individual’s rights were more important than the well-being of their society. He would’ve thought Communists would understand that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. They had no interest in the fact that there were real plots intended to do real harm against his country. They dismissed those arguments as scaremongering. Their complacency disgusted him. He’d seen the plots, the plans – he understood their way of life was hated by a powerful enemy and needed protecting.
He’d been rapidly promoted to dealing with CPUSA, the Communist Party of America. The party’s membership was in decline. He wasn’t sure whether this was due to new members being ordered underground. They weren’t taking any chances. COINTELPRO wanted the party dead. Nothing else would satisfy them. The new leader of CPUSA, Gus Hall, had been trained at the International Lenin School in Moscow and COINTELPRO had no intention of giving him the space to expand the organization’s public profile, or create a secret network that could better evade the range of measures deployed against it. There were several methods open to them: infiltration, psychological warfare, legal harassment – such as tax, sending in the IRS to go over every scrap of paper, searching for the smallest of mistakes. They could deploy the local police force and finally but importantly use non-legal harassment. He didn’t get involved in that: it was farmed out to retired officers or people with no connection to the FBI. He had no qualms with it, of course. According to Hoover:
The purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.
As COINTELPRO officers they were tasked with pinpointing and neutralizing troublemakers before they could exercise their potential for violence. And Yates was one of the best.
Entering the stairway of a redbrick five storey, the temperature seemed to jump. It was so hot Yates had to stop, taking out a handkerchief and mopping his brow. The smells were bad, mingled odours he didn’t want to think about too much. Walking up the stairs, his pores seeping alcohol from last night, he surveyed the cracked plaster and broken floorboards, the shabby pipes and doors held together with mismatched planks of wood and cardboard, no doubt kicked apart in some argument or other. Yates could sense the hostility from the people in the walkways, people milling in the communal spaces, with no jobs to go to, no skills to offer, just an inbred sense of injustice. They’d talk for twenty-four hours a day about how they’d been wronged and how their country had failed them. At least twenty per cent of CPUSA membership was estimated to be Negro, far higher than the Negro proportion of the national population – that was their solution to not getting a job, ripping down the whole edifice of their nation. He smiled at them as he passed, knowing full well it would drive them crazy. Hatred radiated from their faces like heat off hot coals. If they thought it bothered him they were wrong. He wanted to ask the young man perched on the window:
You think your hatred matters?
Of all the hatred in the world, theirs mattered the least.
At the top of the stairs, Yates knocked on the door. He’d been on the threshold of this apartment before although he’d never been invited inside. He would have authorized a search of the premises but it was impossible to do anything without the neighbours knowing, they all lived on top of each other, in and out of each other’s apartments. Personally, he didn’t care if they knew. He didn’t see any need to be subtle about it. He’d been tempted to authorize it anyway, not expecting to find anything, but as part of the psychological warfare. The issue of race had stopped him. He was told that an illegal search might inflame relations between the community and the police. They couldn’t even make it look like a burglary since realistically no one would rob a shit-hole like this.
He knocked again, louder this time. He knew the apartment was small, no more than a single room. No matter what they were doing inside it should only take a second to reach the door. Perhaps they could recognize the sound of his knock – angry, impatient – perhaps no one else in this building knocked that way. Finally, the door opened. The man who stood before him had been codenamed by the FBI: Big Red Voice. Yates said:
— Hello, Jesse.
Bradhurst
Harlem
West 145th Street
Same Day
Agent Yates leaned against the frame of the door, as close to the inside of the apartment as he could physically manage. As though in response, Jesse Austin’s wife stepped forward, joining her husband, shielding as much of their apartment from view as possible – a human barricade. The gesture amused Yates. He knew there was nothing illegal that they wanted to hide, no dope or stolen property like most of the other families around here. This was defiance for the sake of it; the pair were fighting for privacy – a splinter of dignity – pitifully trying to assert themselves against his authority.
Jesse was a big man, tall and broad. Once strong, not any more, his back was hunched, muscle had turned slack – tightness turned not to fat but baggy flesh. In contrast, his wife had lost weight. Fifteen years ago she’d been beautiful with a full figure and elegant curves. Now she was manual-labour thin, skin drooped under her eyes and deep lines ran across her forehead. As for the apartment, it wasn’t
much to be protective about: a bedroom that doubled as a living room, a living room that doubled as a kitchen, a kitchen that doubled as a dining room. There were only a couple of paces from the bed to the stove and a couple more to the bathroom. To be fair, it was a little neater and nicer painted than some of the other rat-infested slum apartments he’d seen in his time. The stand-out difference, the only sign that this apartment had a story to tell, was the occasional expensive items of furniture like museum pieces salvaged from the wreck of a sunken career. Out-of-place antique cabinets and decorative side-tables, fallen on hard times, wept for their former Park Avenue homes.
Yates directed his attention at Jesse’s wife – Anna Austin. She was too composed and too savvy to lose control. He admired this lady, he really did. She had been beautiful once, photographed at prestigious events, dressed in furs and jewels like a princess, hanging off her traitor husband’s arm. Looking at the photos Yates could’ve sworn her teeth were carved out of ivory, a perfect smile, unnaturally white. How the mighty had fallen, reduced to this – from diamonds to dust, splendour to squalor. Despite this hardship, this self-imposed poverty, this unnecessary misery of Jesse’s creation, she was still hooked to her husband’s arm. Except now she was more like a broken Christmas decoration, a cracked bauble that had lost its glitter and sparkle.
Yates watched as Jesse reached down and took hold of Anna’s hand. Was that a way of reminding him that they were together despite everything he and his colleagues had thrown at them – including rumours about adultery and accusations that he’d molested white girls? Those allegations had been easy to manufacture. There were plenty of photos of Jesse after concerts, surrounded by admirers, most of them female, some of them young. He was a tactile man, always putting his hands on people’s shoulders, wrapping arms around pretty young girls. The dirt had stuck. Enough newspapers had run with the story, enough girls had come forward claiming he had behaved inappropriately. Of course, they’d only done so after a little encouragement from Yates’s men, a nudge, a threat, worried they’d be accused of being a Communist sympathizer. Anna had never wavered, calling them liars every chance she’d got, publicly pitying them for not having the moral courage to stand up to the FBI. If only she’d been a weaker person, if only she’d left Jesse then he would’ve been broken for sure. She’d stayed true, steadfast and constant – values a woman should show to her husband. Still in love, still by his side, still holding his big hand as if it could protect her. She needed to get real: those big gentle hands hadn’t protected her, they’d done more damage to her than if they’d slapped her. Jesse and Anna were so proud of their love, so proud of their relationship, that it was as though someone had told them about Yates’s useless, crazy wife. Speaking his thoughts aloud, Yates said:
— Who fucking cares?
They both looked at him like he was as strange as he was scary. Yates liked the idea that he was scary.
He felt his pocket for cigarettes. They were in the car. He realized he was still a little drunk from the night before.
— Big Old Jesse, tell me, you got any plans to hook up with your Soviet friends while they’re in town? They’ve been trying to make contact with you, over and over again. Letters, invites . . . We intercepted them but there’s always a chance one or two slipped past. Or maybe they sent someone in person?
Jesse’s face was blank. In the absence of a cigarette, Yates took out a match, picking his teeth.
— Come now, no games, you and me go back too far. You trying to tell me you don’t know about a bunch of Soviet Communist kiddies singing their hearts out at the UN tonight? They’re singing about peace and world harmony and all the things we know Communists love. I thought I’d stop by, see if you were going to make an appearance.
Anna replied:
— We don’t know anything about that.
Yates turned his face close to hers, forcing her to step back into the apartment.
— You don’t?
Jess answered:
The— No, we don’t. You have no right to interfere with our mail.
Jesse had answered but Yates kept his eyes on Anna.
— I normally find you attractive when you’re being coy, Mrs Austin. Might even have worked twenty years back, when you strutted around town with your long fake eyelashes, attending galas and making the magazines. I might have fallen for it. I’m a sucker for a pretty lady. I would’ve struck a deal with the Devil and fucked you just to take the heat off your husband. I bet you would’ve enjoyed it but told yourself, as your nails scratched my back, that you were doing it for him.
Yates noticed Jesse’s fist was clenched. Anger was bringing the old man to life. He didn’t move, didn’t dare step closer. Yates said:
— Go ahead, Jesse. Stand up for her. Be a man. Take a swing. Might even make up for this shit-hole apartment you’ve forced her to live in.
Jesse’s face quivered with hatred, like a cello string being plucked. He managed to keep his cool, just about, repeating what Anna had already said:
— We no longer have any contact with the Soviet authorities. We know nothing about their arrival here, or their plans.
Yates nodded condescendingly.
— You don’t even read the papers? You probably don’t even know where Russia is, am I right? Soviets singing? What could be more your taste, Jesse, than a bunch of pretty young Communist girls singing songs? Am I right in thinking you used to sing? Didn’t you used to do something along those lines?
— I used to, Mr Yates, you put a stop to that.
— Nothing to do with me. It’s no crime to sing a song. Just so happens that some songs are popular and some songs, your Communist-loving songs, don’t seem to get any audience these days. Times change, tastes change: people are forgotten, don’t you find, Jesse? It’s sad. Don’t you find it sad? I could cry a river, there’s so many sad things going on in the world. Careers coming to nothing, talent going to waste, sad, sad, sad, so very fucking sad.
Anna flinched, her eyes on Jesse, sensing that her husband might say something imprudent. Yates certainly hoped so. She said:
— Why are you here, Mr Yates?
— I could almost be offended. I don’t think you’re listening to me very carefully. The Soviets have invited you to this concert. We might have intercepted a couple of their attempts to make contact but they don’t give up easily. They want you there. I want to know why. It’s my job to keep an eye on men like you—
Jesse interrupted:
— And what kind of man is that?
Yates grew tired of the playfulness.
— What kind of man am I talking about? A man who went on record saying that he’d refuse to fight for America if war broke out with the Soviets, a man who lives in this country and expresses his disloyalty to it every chance he gets. What kind of man am I talking about? A Communist, that’s the kind of man I’m talking about.
Yates lookd down at Jesse’s shoes. They were old, worn, but excellent quality, maybe Italian, or something fancy, another relic from the days when he earned a lot of money, more money in a year than Yates would earn in his life. But who would know it now? Still looking at the shoes, he said:
— Jesse, you know what really makes me angry?
— I’m sure a lot of things make you angry, Mr Yates.
— That is true. A lot of things get me hot under the collar. But more than anything else, it’s people who have done well in this country, people like you, coming from nothing, making all this money, having all this success, people who turn around and get into bed with another regime. The Soviets have given you nothing. They can’t even feed their own people. How can you love them and not us? How can you sing about them and not about us? You’re the American dream, Jesse: don’t you get it? You’re the American fucking dream. And what a shame that is.
Yates wiped his brow. His heart was thumping hard. This wasn’t fun any more. He breathed deeply.
— So hot in here, I don’t know how you sleep. I don’t know how
you breathe. Must have different sort of lungs.
Anna replied, her voice soft:
— We breathe the same as you do, Agent Yates.
Yates curled his lip, as though he wasn’t convinced.
— Your last place had air conditioning? You must miss that.
Neither of them replied and Yates lost interest in goading them further.
— Listen, I’m done here. I’m going to leave you two alone. Before I go, I have a final question, a philosophical question, for us all to think about. In the Soviet Union do you think there must be people who hate their country? Don’t you think the world would be a whole lot simpler if those people lived here and you went and lived there?
Jesse said immediately:
— Mr Yates, insult me any way you want. But you can’t tell me this country isn’t my home as much as yours. It’s—
Yates interrupted, turning to leave.
— Not only am I going to tell you that, Jesse, I’m going to make you understand it too. And take it from me: you’d be smart to keep far away from that concert. You’d be really smart.
Manhattan
Same Day
To stop her hands from shaking, Elena clenched her fingers into a fist. Her heart was pounding in her chest, double beats to the second. She needed to calm down. The first part of their plan had worked. She’d slipped out from the hotel without being seen. Her lover, Mikael Ivanov, had studied the layout of the Grand Metropolitan, identifying a vulnerable area: the pool and outside sundeck on the fifth floor, monitored only from the main entrance. The American secret police had wrongly assumed there was no other way out.