AS HE DROVE south along the Lake, it began to snow. Flakes the size of night moths spooled across his windshield, then stuck like pasty glue. The wipers in Stacey’s car moved a beat behind, and he drove with his eyes staring until they felt strained as the road ahead alternately receded then emerged from the swirl of snow. He wanted to concentrate on his driving, but the mystery of Stacey’s return was haunting him.
Was he the other guy her mother had mentioned? If so, how could Stacey in LA decide that she loved a man she hadn’t seen in years? It seemed incredible. There must have been some other reason why she sought him out, something which had precipitated her flight from LA. He didn’t want to believe it was because Stacey was following NKVD orders. But then what else could it have been?
He found Diane on the ground floor, working behind one of the perfume counters. Nessheim hung back, inspecting the potions and lotions arranged on an adjacent glass-topped counter until Diane came across to him. She wore the store uniform of white blouse and brown skirt that did her figure no favours. She was about his own age, with a doughy face and dull almond-coloured eyes.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked without enthusiasm.
‘Are you Diane?’
Her eyes showed her surprise. ‘Who are you?’
‘I was a friend of Stacey’s. I wonder if we could talk for a minute.’
‘Why do you want to talk to me?’ She sounded upset.
‘She said you were an old friend.’
Nessheim took his ID folder out from his jacket pocket. He flipped the badge holder open, with his photo beneath it and his name in bullet type – ‘SPECIAL AGENT JAMES NESSHEIM’.
She glanced at the badge. ‘I don’t have to talk to you.’ Her tone was only semi-defiant; she was scared.
‘Look at my ID, please, Diane.’
‘I can read. It says you’re a Fed.’
‘Read the name below the badge.’
Reluctantly she looked down. Then she picked up the badge holder and stared at it with disbelief.
‘You’re Nessheim?’ Her voice was incredulous.
‘Yes,’ he said mildly.
Her face relaxed. ‘I thought you were supposed to be a student now.’
‘I am. She knew I was a Fed as well. There were never any flies on Stacey.’
‘There sure weren’t.’ She added wistfully, ‘Not even a cobweb. My break’s in ten minutes if you can wait.’
He waited in a coffee shop around the corner, where he sat in a booth in the back facing the door. She came in twenty minutes later, and he saw she’d touched up her make-up and brushed her hair.
She slid awkwardly into the booth and sat across from him. She said nervously, ‘I want to go to the funeral but I don’t know when it is.’
‘Next Thursday at eleven in Highland Park.’ He named the church.
‘Did you get that from Stacey’s mom?’
‘Yeah. I just came from her.’
‘How is she taking it?’
He shrugged. ‘Hard to say. She was half-cut when I arrived. She must have started when the sun couldn’t even see the yardarm.’
Diane gave a small smile. ‘I haven’t seen her since high school. She and Stacey weren’t exactly close.’
She paused for a moment. ‘I never would have dreamed Stacey would take her own life. It’s hard for me to believe. Stacey was moody, yes – mercurial you might call it. But never really down. Something must have got to her for this to happen.’ She was looking at him warily again.
‘Maybe she didn’t go out the window of her own accord.’
Diane’s expression didn’t change but her eyes widened. ‘Do the police think that?’
‘Yes, they think she was pushed.’
‘Why would anyone do that?’
‘That’s what I wanted to ask you. Stacey told me you’d both been Party members for a while. The Party doesn’t like people to leave.’
‘Not much,’ she acknowledged. ‘But I only joined for the social life. Some social life,’ she added tartly.
Had this woman really thought she’d find a boyfriend courtesy of the Comintern? Nessheim imagined a series of sad seductions conducted by earnest young men, who actually preferred just talking about Engels’s contribution to the theory of surplus value.
He said, ‘Stacey didn’t stay in the Party either.’
‘No. But she left for a real reason. She followed Trotsky, not Stalin, and that was unacceptable. She grew to hate the Soviets almost as much as the Nazis. That’s why she went to the Fourth International.’
‘The fourth what?’
‘International. It was a world meeting of Trotsky’s followers in ’38, held in Paris. Stacey told me she attended the congress sessions during the day, and went to nightclubs at night.’ She laughed. ‘Typical Stacey. That’s where she met Tweedy. He wasn’t a Trotskyist, or a Communist for that matter. He was just rich and he fell for her. Like a lot of men,’ she said pointedly.
‘So he took her to LA?’ When Diane nodded, Nessheim added, ‘I thought she lost her faith in politics.’
‘Not then. Why do you think she went to Mexico?’
Why indeed? He’d assumed she’d moved on to another man. That was standard procedure for the Stacey he had known years ago. He started to say as much, but Diane cut him off. ‘She wasn’t Trotsky’s lover if that’s what you’re thinking. She loved him only in the way a Baptist girl loves Jesus. She thought he could save the movement Stalin had betrayed – it was as simple as that.’
‘Did she see him down there?’
‘Yes. Often.’
He didn’t know what to say. Diane was looking at him without suspicion now. She could see that Nessheim was feeling overwhelmed by what he was learning.
He asked, ‘Was she there when Trotsky was murdered?’
‘No. She left months before that.’
‘Why did she leave?’
Diane looked thoughtful. ‘You know, most people are looking to be loved, but Stacey was always looking for someone to love. She told me Trotsky was a good man, but completely unrealistic. She said that given the choice between theorising about an ideal world and actually trying to make a better one, Trotsky would always go for nirvana. She said she woke up one morning in Mexico City and decided that he might be making a contribution to political theory, but none at all to history.’
Nessheim said, ‘So she went back to LA, where she was unhappy with Tweedy and didn’t like his friends. That doesn’t explain why she came back to Chicago, or why she enrolled in law school.’ For the first time Diane looked hesitant. Nessheim said, ‘Her mother thought it was on account of some guy, but that couldn’t have been me. I don’t think she even knew I was here.’
‘She knew, all right.’
‘But she hadn’t seen me in years.’
Diane said emphatically, ‘She came back because of you.’
‘Why? She didn’t know me any more. She wasn’t a fantasist.’
‘I didn’t say she was. But she was scared.’
‘Of what? The Communists?’
Diane nodded.
Nessheim said, ‘Why would they want to hurt her? She wasn’t any threat to them.’ He paused momentarily. ‘Unless she helped them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, helped them get to Trotsky.’
Diane was shaking her head.
Nessheim pressed her. ‘I was told that Stacey rejoined the Party while she was in LA. If she were scared of the Soviets, that wouldn’t have happened.’
‘It wouldn’t have happened because it didn’t happen. Whoever told you that is lying. It’s bullshit.’
‘So why was she scared?’
‘Because she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know.’ Diane hesitated, then saw Nessheim’s stricken face and continued. ‘The man who killed Trotsky calls himself Jacques Mornard. Most people think he was acting on Stalin’s orders and that Mornard is an alias. But nobody knows who Mornard really is.’
‘Except the Russians,’ said Nessheim.
Diane said quietly, ‘And Stacey.’
It took a second to sink in. ‘What?’
He was the agitated one now, as Diane began to talk calmly, like a patient teacher talking to an ignorant class.
It seemed that when Stacey was in Paris she’d made friends with a fellow Trotskyist named Sylvia Ageloff. Both cut glamorous figures and both knew this; they leavened their socialist principles with a taste for the high life. Stacey was seeing George Tweedy, the wealthy heir to a vast canning-company fortune. Sylvia Ageloff, by contrast, fancied fiery types for her lovers, though she had an equal weakness for the well-heeled ones. Among the latter was a Belgian named Jacques Mornard, a good-looking upper-class man who in a less politicised time would have been a playboy.
Stacey hadn’t liked Mornard. She didn’t know why, she later explained to Diane, but something about him didn’t ring true. She’d found him smarmy, in authentic and untrustworthy. She avoided him as much as possible, which was difficult given her friendship with Sylvia; to make matters even trickier, Mornard befriended Tweedy, who was flattered to be taken up by this dashing Continental type.
Stacey’s suspicions of Mornard would never have been confirmed if it hadn’t been for a chance occurrence. Among the Fourth International’s attendees were Republican veterans of the Spanish Civil War, some of them American, including a former U of C student named Harry Glazer whom Stacey had known when they were both undergraduates. Running into each other at the Congress, which was held in a suburb of Paris, they agreed to meet for lunch the next day at a café near the city’s Luxembourg Gardens.
When Glazer arrived at the café he seemed strangely shaken. Stacey asked what was wrong, and he explained that he felt as if he’d seen a ghost. Passing through the gardens he had found himself walking towards a Spanish man he’d last seen when they’d been fighting on the Aragon front. During the fiercest battle, they found themselves side by side in a dugout, holding a forward position for the Republican side. The Spaniard, whose name was Ramón Mercader, had been shot in the arm by a sniper just as the Francoist forces were starting to retreat, and he had been put on a stretcher and eventually shipped back to a hospital in Barcelona. That was the last time Glazer had seen the man – until ten minutes ago.
When he’d gone up to greet his old comrade in arms, however, to Glazer’s astonishment the man had denied being Mercader, and insisted he was a Belgian named Jacques Mornard. Glazer initially thought it was a joke, but when he pressed him, the man grew angry and threatened to call a policeman if Glazer didn’t leave him alone. When Stacey asked Glazer whether he could have been mistaken about the man’s identity, he said that would normally have been perfectly possible. But this ‘Belgian’ had a small shaving scar on his chin – in the exact place where Mercader had had a scar as well.
The congress ended shortly thereafter, and Stacey moved to LA with George Tweedy. She lost touch with Sylvia Ageloff, and would probably have forgotten all about Jacques Mornard, if she hadn’t gone to Mexico.
Growing disaffected there, Stacey had decided to leave when one day who should show up but Sylvia Ageloff, with Jacques Mornard in tow. Stacey only talked to them briefly – they were rushing off to meet the Great Man and she was getting ready to leave the country – but they seemed happy enough to see her.
Then four months later Stacey looked at the Los Angeles Times at the breakfast table and saw that Trotsky had been murdered. The assassin had been arrested at once: it was Jacques Mornard. Now sitting in a Mexican prison, the killer continued to insist he was Mornard, and claimed to have killed Trotsky in a fit of rage when Trotsky didn’t approve of his plans to marry Sylvia Ageloff. Everyone was sure that Mornard had been acting on Stalin’s orders, but nothing could be proved when no one knew who Mornard really was.
Nessheim interjected then, pointing out again that Stacey had left Mexico months before Trotsky’s murder. Why would the Russians think she knew anything about it?
Because, Diane said, Stacey had done something very stupid: she had confided in her husband, since she thought that, with all his money, he could protect her. But Tweedy thrived on gossip; he liked to show he was in the know. So Stacey’s secret didn’t stay secret for long.
Nessheim asked, ‘Did Stacey know that Tweedy blabbed about it?’
‘Not at first. But then someone tried to run her car off the road on the Cajon Pass. She said it was a miracle she wasn’t killed.’
‘The coupé?’
‘That’s right. Fire-engine red. She drove it here from California.’
Nessheim sat back, trying to make sense of her story. ‘Okay, but we’re back to square one. Why did Stacey come here? Her mother wasn’t going to protect her.’
‘No, you were.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. Stacey had always carried a torch for you – you were the only man she regretted giving the heave-ho. But she wasn’t being sentimental. She wasn’t coming here because she was in love, but because she was scared. She said you wouldn’t be scared of the Russians. It sounded like bravado to me – I didn’t realise you were a G-Man.’
‘So I was her cover then, her muscle.’ It wasn’t really a question, and he could not hide his dismay.
‘At first. But that all changed. That’s why she came to see me. She was so excited she didn’t know what to do. She told me it was completely unexpected.’
‘What was?’
‘Her feelings. She said she’d suddenly found herself falling in love with you. I’m not sure she’d ever felt that way before. She told me you two were going to live in Wisconsin after the lousy war ends.’ She gave a little snort. ‘Stacey in an apron with four kids. I never thought I’d live to see it, but then I never thought Stacey wouldn’t either …’ She faltered, trying to check her emotions.
Nessheim was warmed by the thought that Stacey’s dream of life with him had been sincere, but he also felt jealous of Diane’s superior knowledge of Stacey’s life.
She seemed to sense his ambivalence. ‘I wasn’t her best pal, you know. Our worlds were too different for that. But I was her oldest friend. In third grade I pulled her hair and made her cry.’
Diane’s own eyes were openly teary now. She said, ‘I wasn’t telling you the truth before, when I said I joined the Party to meet guys.’
‘Oh?’
‘No. I joined because Stacey did. To make sure I would get to see her.’ Her eyes dipped briefly, then rose to meet his.
‘And that’s why when she left Chicago, you …’
‘I left the Party. Yes.’ She sighed. ‘You’re the one person who will know how I feel right now. I hope you don’t think less of me for that.’
He was unwilling to share Stacey with anyone just yet; he forced himself to remember Stacey’s fondness for her friend. As warmly as he could, he said, ‘I loved Stacey, Diane. How could I think less of anyone who loved her too?’