Chapter 33
“I think we need to take a field trip tomorrow,” Fields said as we pulled away from Patricia’s building to fight rush hour traffic up to Silver Spring.
I looked at him askance. “We are. We’re going to Off the Record.”
“No, I mean during business hours.”
“Is the bar even open then?”
He shook his head. “No. We need to go to the library.”
I was confused. “Why?”
“I want to verify Maricela’s information if we can.”
“How would we do that at the library?”
“Newspaper archives. If we go through Cuban newspapers from before and during the revolution, we can make sure Maricela is who she says she is and—if we’re lucky—find something on this Alejandra de Bernal.”
He wasn’t wrong. We couldn’t run a story based on one woman’s word—especially if we didn’t know she was a rock-solid source.
I trusted her. And I believed her reaction to seeing the woman she called la diabla was genuine.
But Fields’s assertion that if she worked for Batista, she had done unsavory things—which she had basically admitted to me as well—did make her story slightly shakier.
But there was no way I was going to be able to go to the library with him during business hours without losing my job.
“Can’t we do it after work? Or at lunch?”
“It’ll take longer than a lunch break. And the library is closed after work.”
“What library closes at five?”
He smiled. “This one does.”
“Then I can’t go. Miss Kelly will fire me.”
Fields glanced over at me and laughed. “Stop pouting. I have a plan.”
“I’m not pouting.” Okay, I had been. But only because it wasn’t fair. This was my story. And because I was a woman, I didn’t have the freedom to leave during the day and research it like he did.
The next morning, I was working my way through the edits on an article about the Alcatraz escape—debris had been found that was believed to be from the prisoners, but no bodies had been recovered yet—when Fields strode through the typing pool, a paper in hand.
I sat up a little straighter, only to see him walk right past my desk and to Miss Kelly, who was lecturing Helen over something I couldn’t quite make out.
“Good morning,” he said to her jovially. I had to strain to hear over the clacking typewriters.
“What do you want today, Mr. Fields?” she asked.
“I need someone to take notes on some research.”
“No.”
He held out the paper in his hand. She pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose and looked it over, then scowled. “My girls shouldn’t have to work harder just because you don’t warrant a secretary.”
He shrugged. “Take it up with upstairs. I wouldn’t object to a secretary.”
She glared over her glasses. “You can take Gladys.”
My shoulders dropped. Gladys had the biggest mouth. She would tell everyone what he was researching.
But Fields shook his head. “I need Judy.”
Miss Kelly crossed her arms. “I just bet you do. Well, you’re not getting her.”
“Miss Kelly, you and I both know Judy is the fastest typist you have. With the highest accuracy. I need both of those today.”
“Which is exactly why I need her here if I’m going to be down a girl. Besides, she doesn’t know shorthand.”
“Yes, I do,” I volunteered from across the room. Then I bit my lip. It didn’t help that I had clearly been listening in.
“Since when?”
“I had to learn it in college.”
“It wasn’t on your résumé.”
“I—didn’t think I was applying to be a secretary.” She stared at me for several seconds, but I kept my expression neutral.
Finally Miss Kelly handed the paper back to Fields, then pointed a finger at him. “If I find out there’s any funny business going on here—”
Fields mimed crossing his heart. “No funny business at all. Just good old-fashioned investigative research.”
She shook her head. “In my day, reporters got their own hands dirty,” she muttered. But then she turned in my direction. “I want you back here before the day ends.”
“Yes, Miss Kelly,” I said, pulling my handbag from my desk drawer. She resumed berating Helen on whatever the poor girl had done wrong, and I headed toward the elevators.
“Hope you called my doctor,” Patricia whispered as I passed her desk. I made a face at her.
Safely downstairs, I warned Fields that Miss Kelly would be watching us like a hawk now.
“Let her.”
“She put that newspaper with our picture on my desk yesterday. She thinks we’re up to something.”
He leaned in conspiratorially. “We are up to something.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. But as long as you don’t wind up like Louise, we’ll be okay.”
I could feel my cheeks coloring as I followed Fields toward his car.
My mouth dropped open when I looked up at the library he had meant. “The Library of Congress?”
“I doubt the one on Colesville Road has Cuban newspapers on microfiche.”
I had never been inside the Library of Congress, and I looked around in awe as we walked into its hallowed halls.
No, this was nothing like the library where I had finally come off the waiting list for Marilyn Kleinman’s novel, which was still on all the bestseller lists six months after publication.
The palatial-looking reading room had a huge domed ceiling, with desks arranged in a circle, and archways all around the surrounding walls, going up multiple levels to balconies where people walked with the important air of researchers.
What were we doing here?
Fields strode confidently up to a librarian, who directed us to a much smaller room downstairs, where an older man wearing Coke-bottle glasses sat at a desk.
“Help you?” he asked.
Fields introduced himself and then me. “We’re looking for Cuban newspapers from 1957 through 1959.” The man went to the card catalog behind him, opened a drawer decisively, and removed a stack of cards for us.
“You’ll want to take these next door, and they’ll pull the films for you. Then you can look through them at a reader in the microfilm room. Make sure you bring them back when you’re done.”
We followed his directions to another librarian, who asked if we wanted English only or English and Spanish, then pulled the reels we had requested, explaining which newspaper was on which reel. He then showed us how the reader worked, instructing us to call him if we had any questions.
“Is there a way to make a copy of anything if we need it?” Fields asked.
“There is,” the librarian said, his face lighting up. “Used to be much harder. But we got one of those new Xerox printers. Makes a copy go real quick.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was good to know regardless.
Fields offered me the chair at the screen, then fed a different reel into the reader next to mine. “Faster if we split the job,” he said.
I agreed and began scrolling. But it was going to be a long process. “What exactly am I hoping to find here? This is a needle in a haystack.”
“Not necessarily,” Fields said. “Maricela said she was famous in Cuba. Look for either a headline that mentions a singer, or pictures that could have her in them. We just need to look in the front and entertainment sections—she’s only going to appear before the revolution really got going, so I think 1957 is our best bet.
Let’s confirm she’s who she said she was first. Then we look for revolutionaries. ”
We scrolled in silence for nearly an hour. It was an effort to keep my eyes from blurring, and it began to feel hopeless. Every issue had multiple articles on Batista, but nothing stood out. Then suddenly—“Fields! I found her!”
He came around to my screen. “You found more than that.” He tapped the screen. “She’s with Batista.”
“Then she was telling the truth.”
“Looks that way. Let’s see what the article says.” We moved the image on the screen to read the article, which said she was a frequent performer at the presidential palace. “We should print this.”
He started to stand up to get the librarian, but I put a hand on his arm and shook my head. “Don’t print this one.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not worth it. We can’t name her in the article.”
“She didn’t tell us anything was off the record.”
“She didn’t have to,” I argued. “If we name her, we put a massive target on her back. You didn’t see her face when she talked about this Alejandra. She was scared of her.”
He looked at me for several seconds, then eventually nodded. “Fine. But be aware that we could get interrogated on this one.”
“By who?”
Fields shrugged. “I doubt it goes to court. They won’t want the publicity. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the Secret Service or FBI wanted our source.”
“Do we have to give it to them?” The rules were clear when it came to being subpoenaed to reveal a source.
Any reporter worth their salt would refuse to name names, then either pay a fine or spend a night in jail for contempt of court, both of which won you bragging rights.
If you named a source who had been promised anonymity, you would never work in journalism again.
But I had no idea what happened if you refused the FBI or Secret Service.
Was there an American version of a gulag that we would get thrown into?
“Legally, no. And the courts have upheld that. But federal agencies don’t always go through the legal channels. And with the Cold War . . .”
“We’re in uncharted waters.”
“Exactly.”
I thought about the reading room we had passed through to get down here, just behind the US Capitol, and took a deep breath, exhaling loudly. “I believe in the First Amendment,” I said. “We protect our source.”
He shook his head slightly but was smiling. “You might just be a journalist yet, Greenberg.”
He hadn’t used my last name unless he was mad or there were other people around. But I recognized it as a badge of journalistic honor that he referred to me as he would to a male reporter.
“I told you I was.”
Fields rolled his eyes. “Don’t go getting cocky on me. We still need to find this devil. Let’s skip to the late 1958 and early 1959 films. That’s when we’ll find articles on the revolutionaries.”
“Maricela said she was with Che Guevara’s troops.”
“Then we look for those stories. They’re the ones who took Havana on New Year’s in 1959. Castro took a few days to arrive.”
He pulled the film from my machine first and loaded a new reel, then took care of his own. And we went back to work.
This one was harder, as when we did find pictures of revolutionaries, we had to scan every grainy face to find one that we had only seen in passing Sunday night. Neither of us spoke for a long time as my eyes grew tired and practically crossed from the constant scrolling.
I went through two reels, Fields through three. “This is hopeless,” he said, standing up and stretching out a crick in his back. “They probably sent her here because she doesn’t exist on paper.”
I thought for a minute. “What about Life magazine?”
“What about it?”
“There was a spread after the revolution, wasn’t there? I think I remember that some American photographer flew down to Cuba that day.” I scrunched up my face trying to remember. A journalism professor had talked about it. “Burt something.”
“Glinn,” Fields said, his eyes wide. “I remember that. He heard the revolution was happening and hopped on a plane—got the best pictures of Havana falling.”
He got up, heading for the librarian’s desk. The librarian pointed upstairs and Fields returned. “Come on. They have paper copies.”
“Don’t we have to return the microfilms?”
Fields grinned. “He said he’d take care of it. I may have made it sound like I was going to mess everything up.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
He took a bow, pretending to sweep off a hat. “At your service. Now come on.”
We went upstairs and talked to another librarian, who brought out a bound volume of Life magazines from 1959.
Walking back into the rotunda of the reading room, we sat at a desk, our heads together, flipping pages until we got to the issue from mid-January 1959 that covered the events of two weeks earlier, the newly installed dictator, who was too young to actually be president, speaking passionately into a microphone on the cover.
Turning to the section on Cuba, we pored over pages and pages of photographs together. Then I gasped. “There.” I touched the page in front of us. “That’s her!”
Fields squinted. She had dark hair then, the bottom of her face slightly obscured by a man’s arm.
But there was no denying it. She wore fatigues and had a rifle pointed at someone off camera.
There was no identifying information, no way to find her name.
And she appeared in no other photographs that we could find. But it was her.
“I’ll be damned,” Fields said. “You found her.”
“We found her. I wouldn’t have thought to come here.” I gestured to the grand space we inhabited.
Fields pulled a notebook and pen from his pocket, writing down the issue number, date, page, and photographer’s name. “I don’t know Glinn, but someone at the newspaper will be able to get permission to reprint this. Hell, he may have more of her that didn’t run.”
“Should we ask him?”
“Let the editors worry about that. They’re more connected than we are. Besides, we have enough evidence that she’s a Cuban revolutionary now.”
I thought of Pullman. Some of them were more connected than we knew. “So tonight we try to confirm she’s having an affair with the vice president?”
“We do.”
I looked again at her picture. The ferocity in her face as she pointed that gun. We were dealing with a dangerous woman.
But it was going to make a hell of a story.
I smiled. “Lay on, Macduff.”