New York City, 1953
Ellie had been there from the start, helping him to work through all the files of the grand jury presentations and the special investigator’s findings. She was one of the new assistant DAs, in the same class as his. One of only a handful of women lawyers in the office, and the only one who didn’t look as though she had come direct from the Seven Sisters. She had olive skin, hair and eyes dark as a plum, and she wore bright red or black dresses that seemed a little too sharp, popped a little too much for anything like a courtroom.
She didn’t appear to care, continually adding some little adornment—a silver pendant, a bracelet, long earrings—that made her stand out all the more. One of her hips was slightly higher than the other, just enough to put a sway in her walk that men couldn’t help but notice. She didn’t possess the sharp-chinned hauteur of the other women ADAs, padding along Mr. Hogan’s deep-pile carpeting with their designer skirt sets and their daddies’ money. What she did have was a pair of laughing eyes, and full breasts, and that sway in her walk, an easy sensuality that had every man in the office looking after her.
Three months into the job, they had been pawing through the files for almost ten hours straight when Tom finally called a break. Looking at her face, he knew she was ready and willing to continue, but he made her stop as much for his own weariness as for hers.
“Don’t you know? We have to work twice as hard,” she said later, taunting him, the small, roguish smile that made him love her playing around the ends of her lips. “Don’t you ever notice the hours the other women put in? Or the colored lawyers? We’re still here when everyone else has gone. But then of course you don’t notice much. You’re a man.”
He took her out to the Schrafft’s on Maiden Lane. At lunch the place was packed with the secretaries and the stenos from the courthouses around Foley Square, but now, an hour before closing, it was all but deserted. A teenage girl came staggering by under a wide tray, offering them an array of pickles and relishes and a basket of small, warmed walnut muffins. Tom picked one up and held it contemplatively in his hands.
“Don’t worry, it won’t bite,” Ellie said, laughing, and drawing out a cigarette. “I don’t suppose you get in here much, do you?”
“Well, it is sort of a ladies’ tearoom,” he ventured.
“Sure. That’s why I love it. I like to come here after work sometimes, and watch the old dears drinking gin from their teacups at the counter,” she said, blowing the smoke out through her nose, the little pirate’s grin still playing about her mouth. “Sometimes I drink it with them. Though tonight, I think I’ll have a manhattan.”
“We still have work to do, y’know,” he warned.
“Oh, don’t worry. I have some speed in my desk back at the office,” she said, and smiled again when he looked startled for a moment. He bit into the little walnut muffin, which was delicious, and studied the menu for a moment to hide his embarrassment.
“So what’ll it be? Cup of coffee and a chicken salad sandwich?” he asked, trying to rally, and to his relief she burst into a genuine, full-throated laugh.
“My God, if I never smell those two things again it will be too soon!” she said, referring to Mr. Hogan’s invariable lunchtime order from Schrafft’s, imitated ad nauseam around the office.
A gaunt and ancient woman, dressed in a black skirt and blouse with a spotless white apron and cap, came over to take their order. Ellie greeted her by name.
“Hello there, Katie. They’ve got you on the lobster shift, too? How’re the feet holding up?”
“They’re murderin’ me,” the waitress said in a brogue thicker than anything Tom had heard back in County Mayo, much less the States. “If I lose the fight, I want you to indict ’em for homicide, dearie. This here a new boyfriend, or just some informer?”
“We like to call them witnesses, Katie.”
“If it helps your conscience, dear. So he’s a love interest, then?”
“I’m not sure. What do you think, Katie? Does he have husband potential, do you think?”
She looked him over dourly.
“Skinny as a hoe pole. And Irish as Paddy’s pig’s lawyer. Careful, y’know, they drink.”
“Tom O’Kane,” he said, extending a hand to Katie, who continued to scrutinize him carefully through glasses that looked as if they had originally been cut for a telescope. “Late of Bohola. And sober as a judge, I swear it. I work with Miss Abramowitz.”
Katie tisked. “Worse an’ worse,” she said, while Ellie beamed across the booth at him. “Y’ll not have a bit a fun with this one.”
Ellie ordered a turkey club with her manhattan, and he felt obliged now to have a coffee with his hamburger. Watching Katie shuffle off, stockings thickly bunched over blue swaths of varicose veins, he saw that she was by no means the oldest waitress in the establishment.
“My God, it looks like the Ancient Order of Hibernians’ Ladies’ Auxiliary Retirement Home in here.”
“I should’ve warned you. It’s best not to order something hot,” she said. “But they do have some stories.”
“So you really do drink gin with them at the counter.”
“Sometimes. It’s fun. And they know everything that goes on, feds to the magistrate’s court.”
“Is that what you talk about, too, when the rest of us are gone? The ladies of the office, I mean, and Franklin and Lawrence?”
“No,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette, her large, violet eyes staring frankly at him. “Mostly we talk about you.”
“Me?” he said, genuinely surprised, though when he heard it he found that he wanted to laugh for some reason. “What could there possibly be to talk about concernin’ me?”
“What you’re doing here. What you must’ve had on Hogan to get hired.” Her smile teasing around the edges of her mouth again.
“All I’m here for is what you see me doing,” he told her, the weight of it descending on him again. “Just trying to make this case.”
“Because you think it will clear your brother’s name.”
“It will,” he said, his eyes challenging her across the table. She looked right back, drawing out another cigarette and lighting it.
“What if it doesn’t?”
“It will. You’ll see. But I’ll tell you the same thing I told Mr. Hogan. I won’t bend a hair of the truth to do it. I won’t have to,” he said just as confidently.
Thinking, even as he did, of that note tucked inside the autopsy report. The one that had slid out of the file so easily, unnoticed over all these years, just like the key that Reles had to his own room. Clearly written in the hand of Dr. Robillard, the medical examiner: “Withhold information by order of DA.”
The DA—meaning Charlie. This one clue he had never shown to anyone, not even Hogan. And now not her. Beginning each relationship with a lie. Unless it wasn’t a lie. Unless he could prove there was a perfectly good explanation for it, which there surely was. Though the question remained: Why would Charlie order the medical examiner not to release an autopsy report to the press?
“Really?” Ellie said, looking unimpressed. “Because I wouldn’t trust you within ten feet of this case.”
“You don’t think he’s innocent?”
“I think you think he’s innocent.” She paused, as if stopping herself from saying something more.
“I have a sister,” she said instead. “And I know that if she’d done something—anything—I’d destroy every piece of evidence I could get my hands on. Even if it meant going to jail myself.”
“She must be a wonderful sister.”
“She is.”
“You know she would never do anything that bad. She would never do anything truly bad at all. You know that as surely as you know anything in the world.”
“I do.”
“Well, so do I.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, the smoke from her cigarette dangling in the air.
“I know Charlie’s faults,” he said at last. “I know what he’s like. He trusts people too much, and he lets things slide. He always will, and he always has. He’s sloppy around the details, and sometimes he doesn’t like to look a thing in the face. But I know he would never do anything like . . . like this.”
Katie brought them their meals, all business this time, and hustled off as soon as the food was on the table, picking up on the charged silence between them.
“Well,” Ellie said, and smiled again. “That’s how I feel about my sister.”
He smiled back at her. “I know you do.”
“There’s one more thing I’d like to ask you.”
“Fire away.”
“Did you really run guns to the Haganah?”
She grinned as she asked it, and he had to laugh again.
“I plead the Fifth, Counselor. But let me say that I do have knowledge of certain suspicious containers that made their way from the Chelsea docks to Haifa.”
“I can’t wait to introduce you to my parents. They’ll adore you.”
“Am I going to meet your parents, then?” he said, and was pleased to see that she blushed faintly. “I’m sure they’re as fine as your sister.”
“They are. They’re the best people I know.”
“They live in the City?”
“Ever since they came over as kids. Down on Orchard Street, where I was born, too. They’re up in East Tremont now—or at least they will be until Robert bloody Moses gets to tearing down their block.”
“Ah, the great man.”
Her face turned serious, and angry—an anger he liked, too.
“What he’s doing up there is obscene.”
“I know it. But good luck stopping him. I know I tried to often enough, back when Charlie was mayor.”
“But how? How can a whole neighborhood be wiped out for a highway? On the say-so of one man?”
“But you’re fighting it?”
“My mom is. I help when I have time. Which isn’t often.”
“What’s Mr. Hogan got you on? I mean besides my brother?”
“Oh, the Jelke case, mostly,” she said, looking down to toy with her drink.
“The margarine playboy?”
“Go ahead and laugh. He thought it needed a woman’s touch.”
“And does it?”
She picked up her cigarette, then put it down, waving the smoke away impatiently.
“Mostly it’s just sad. This poor little girl from the Lower East Side, trying to pretend she’s part of café society. While he sells her to his rich friends at the Stork Club, just for some kicks.”
“Jesus—excuse me—that does sound sad.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, and chuckled. “It’s not my Jesus. How about you?”
“The point-shaving stuff. Pretty sad, too. Buncha kids, first in their families ever to get to college, going in with gamblers to shave points off a basketball game for a few bucks. Throwin’ away their lives for fifty bucks a game.”
“Are they going to jail?” she asked somberly.
“Some of them, if we have anything to say about it.” He sighed. “And they’ll lose their scholarships, an’ be expelled. All so we can uphold the integrity of basketball tournaments in Madison Square Garden.”
“Does it make you wish you hadn’t signed up?” she asked.
“Sometimes. That’s what you get when you work for the state. Even when it’s right, the law’s like one of your Mr. Moses’s steam shovels. It cuts through anything that gets in its way.”
“What made you decide to stay?”
“It was Hogan himself.”
“Me, too. I thought he was purest corn at first. With that great big plaque on his desk for the press: COURTESY IS THE GOLDEN KEY THAT OPENS EVERY DOOR. ”
“Yes! But then he gave us all that talk—”
“‘Courtesy is an appreciation that this is a public office, and the public is entitled to be served,’” she recited by heart, as he knew probably every assistant DA in the office could. “‘Not as a matter of grace or condescension, but because of a man’s or woman’s basic human worth. You have to know what a shattering experience it is to come into this office, either as a victim of a crime or a defendant.’”
“I liked it when I heard it, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked it,” he said quietly. “He really does run this office for the people. And he runs it better than my brother ever did in Brooklyn.”
They were both quiet again then, looking at each other—the silence no longer awkward but anticipatory.
“So . . .” she said slowly, that smile working its way out around her mouth. “I think I’m beginning to understand why you ran guns to Israel.”
“Do you? I’m still not sure,” he said, smiling himself. “I guess I just got tired of all the big men, and the big countries, deciding for everyone, and nobody else havin’ a fighting chance. Especially after I met some of the people from the camps Charlie got into the country, when he was at the War Refugee Board. For people to go through that, an’ still not have a home—”
He remembered their bodies like wraiths, all the ones Charlie had first gathered in Italy and seen to it they were brought over. Forced to rush them right from the piers over to Hoboken, then up to Oswego, by order of the State Department. Watching them go, in the Red Cross overcoats, and the suits and dresses that hung off them like old clothes off a scarecrow. Reduced to this, looking as sallow and underfed as Bowery bums, and he had expressed his shock to Charlie when he looked over their papers.
“And all of them shopkeepers and housewives back in Vienna and Prague. Even musicians and artists. Reduced to bums,” he’d said—adding hastily, “Not that it would’ve mattered if they were bums.”
“But that’s what was done to them. That reduction of all they were, and all they’d worked their whole lives to be,” Charlie had said softly. “And we fought to save them from it, which is why we owe them now.”
“I’m beginning to see why you think so much of him,” Ellie said, serious now.
“Right from the start, when I came off the boat not knowin’ what the hell I was talkin’ about, he opened my eyes. Protected me whenever he could,” he said earnestly. “He showed me how to get something done in the world, when I was all talk. If he’s in a little trouble now, it’s the least I can do to help him.”
She leaned over the table and kissed him. Just a quick peck, on one cheek. The brush of her lips, and the mixed smell of the manhattan, cigarette smoke, and the trace of her perfume suddenly against his face.
“What was that for?” He tried to laugh, embarrassed and thrilled and surprised at the same time.
“For explaining your brother to me. For talking to me like I’m a fellow adult instead of a little girl. For being what you are, Tom.”
Katie came up on them as quietly as a Fifth Avenue bus wheezing into a stop.
“Ah, Jesus, a sober prosecutor! Yours’ll be a fightin’ household,” she said, leaving the check. “You won’t have a moment’s peace!”
“Katie, we have all the peace we need sooner or later,” she said, grinning at Tom as she snatched the check away from. “My treat. Just as it has been all evening. Race you back to the office.”
They put in another two hours just for form’s sake, and because it needed to be done, and out of fealty to Mr. Frank Hogan, gone home at a normal hour for once but with his office door still yawning accusingly open at them. When they had gotten through the thirtieth or thirty-first box of files on the day, he took it out of her hands, put it to the side, and kissed her full on the mouth, putting his hands along the side of her face and gently pulling her to him. She kissed him back, the two of them standing there in his office together for a long time, her head resting against his chest.
They took a taxi up to the quietest bar he knew, in the West Village, one where there was no television or jukebox, or—even rarer in the Village—no drunken writer or artist pontificating. They ordered beers, and talked for hours, telling each other about themselves, and their families, and everything they wanted, and everything they intended to do in this life. The place wasn’t very far from where she lived, in a basement apartment on Charles Street, and he walked her home and was about to try for another long kiss beneath her stoop when she unlocked her door and took his hand.
“Ellie—”
“Like I said, I’m a grown woman,” she told him, looking him in the eyes. “I’m not drunk, and I’m old enough to know what I’m doing.”
He hesitated for a moment more, until she kissed him again.
“At this rate, you never would’ve gotten those guns to Haifa.”
She pulled him inside, into her kitchen. They kissed again there, for a long time, as she ran her hands all over the muscles of his back and shoulders. Then she undid the clasp on her skirt and pulled the zipper down, letting it pool around her feet. He could see the lace of her slip, blue in what moonlight filtered down to them, and then she was leaning down to slip off her shoes as well, pulling him back from the windows.
“Let’s spare the neighbors a performance of Wonderful Town,” she said, grinning again, and he thought then that it was a grin he would like to see every day.
They kissed more, moving back through the tiny living room and into her bedroom as he took over undressing her, delighted with each new part of her he uncovered, her full breasts and her bottom, the hips he had watched swing through the office for so many days, the lovely whiteness of her skin. She pulled him into bed, on top of her, and she grinned then, too, shocking him a little when she whispered, “I’ve been thinking about this.” And then later, when he rejoined her in the blissful confusion of a strange bed, and a strange apartment, and the gloss of a few drinks, she whispered to him, “Such a good man.” To which he could only think, Another lie.