The Briar Club

Chapter 7 Grace

It was the view out the window that made Grace March fall in love with Briarwood House.

That very first day nearly four years ago, she’d looked right past the endless steep stairs to the fourth floor and the room’s hideous slanted lime-green walls, not to mention the sheer nerve of Doilies Nilsson trying to call a dollhouse-size icebox with a hot plate on top “the kitchenette”—instead, Grace had walked straight to the gabled window overlooking the square, and thought Yes .

Here was a broad ledge where she could brew sun tea, a window seat where she could curl up on cold mornings with the first cigarette of the day, a place she could raise the creaky sill and lean out and watch .

Observing people was Grace’s favorite occupation by a country mile—watching the world go by on that busy intersection of Briar and Wood, the endless palette of humanity laid out before her like a moving tapestry...

Even after six years, Grace still found American life fascinating.

So she’d turned around with a wide smile and said, “I’ll take it,”

already knowing this was the kind of landlady who would enforce pointless rules and snoop through her things, but not particularly caring. Let her snoop; there was nothing to find.

Grace had been kitted out to the last tag in her clothes the first time she disappeared, and she’d done an even better job the second.

Dear Kitty , Grace had written her little sister on the back of a postcard showing the Washington Monument, sipping an ice cream soda in the booth of the Crispy Biscuit that very first day in the square, I’ve found the perfect place to hide.

I can disappear here and they’ll never find me in a thousand years. I only wish you were here too.

But Kitty wasn’t ever going to join her in Washington. Kitty was a handful of bones in a hastily buried ammunition crate and had been for twelve years.

Strange to think she’d be Nora’s age now—Grace still thought of her as a lanky child with chestnut-brown plaits.

I never see you mailing any of those postcards you’re always scribbling , Nora had said once, and Grace had just smiled.

The postcards went into a shoebox under her bed; writing them kept something of Kitty alive in this shiny new world her little sister hadn’t had the luck to see with her own eyes.

“It’s not even eight,”

a man’s voice said sleepily from Grace’s bed. “Are you already up? It’s Saturday...”

“I like to watch the square wake up.”

Grace had already wrapped herself in her threadbare robe with its Chinese dragons, turned on the hot plate under the kettle, and padded over to the window with her morning cup of tea.

She’d have liked to stir in a spoonful of jam the way she always did growing up, but she had trained herself out of that habit long ago.

Dead giveaway , her trainers had said. Americans put sugar or honey in their tea, so get used to it. Grace sipped slowly now, curled up on the window seat watching the world below.

Pete, running out the door toward Moonlight Magnolias... That boy should be in school, not working full-time; he wasn’t even seventeen. Grace had a few thoughts about that, most of them unprintable.

There was Nora, clipping off toward the National Archives in one of her slim suits, working even on a weekend...

Her gangster still liked to ask after her whenever Grace joined the poker table at the Amber Club on late weekend evenings (American poker was an absolute gift to the wallet for someone who had been trained how to lie for a living).

There went Fliss in her blue Alice band, swinging Angela by the hand as they came down the steps after Nora... Fliss had more bounce in her step these days;

she was counting the weeks until her Dan came home from Japan. And then, Grace supposed with a wistful pang, they’d be gone and she’d have a new neighbor in 2A.

Fliss and Angela turned right as they came to the sidewalk—Prospect Park, then.

Grace had considered the name another good omen, moving into the neighborhood, although if she had to be honest a stroll to Prospect Park—the sandlot, the sedate playground, the pigeon-decked statue of Councilman Smoot—was not precisely a stroll down the Nevsky Prospect of her childhood.

(T. Nealey Smoot wasn’t exactly Peter the Great, was he?)

Grace didn’t even have to close her eyes to see the Nevsky Prospect, so vividly: not as it had looked during the war, gray and wrecked, gripped by soot-flecked snow and implacable ice, but warm and bustling, the endless butter-yellow and icing-pink facades of the vast pre-Revolution palaces rearing up overhead, eating hot chebureki stuffed with ground lamb and black pepper, the just-fried crust searing through mittened fingers.

Kitty swinging from her hand, Mama behind with the shopping in a string bag, shouting Galina, don’t let go of your sister. Yekaterina, listen when I call you!

Mama sometimes called Yekaterina Katya or Katechka , but only Grace had called her Kitty. After Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya in Anna Karenina , of course!

“Jesus—”

The male voice from Grace’s bed sounded much more awake, and much more panicked. “I need to get out the door. Where are my pants?”

“By the dresser.”

Grace smiled and sat back as Harland Adams started frantically flying around the tiny room.

An FBI agent , she could hear her trainers approving.

An excellent source, see what you can get out of him.

But he wasn’t a source, he was a friend.

A somewhat heartbroken one, too, since he’d recently proposed to Bea (for the third time) and been turned down (for the third time) and had come stamping out of the Briarwood House parlor swearing he was done with women who wore trousers and swore like sailors and smithereened a man’s heart to pieces before just heading out like it was nothing so they could scout pitchers in Pittsburgh.

Clearly a man in need of a listening ear, so Grace had taken him upstairs once Doilies Nilsson’s back was turned, poured him some sun tea, and duly listened.

“Bea went on a date with another scout last week!”

Harland burst out after the second glass. “She didn’t even try to hide it. She told me I should find someone else to keep my bed warm, too; she wouldn’t mind a bit!”

He was so distressed Grace reflected she could probably get the secret of nuclear fission out of him if he had it, so it was a good thing she was out of the spying business.

“Bea never said she’d be your girl and yours alone, so stop trying to clip her wings,”

Grace told him briskly. “She’s got her dream job at last; you think she’s in a hurry to change things up? You really want to net that one, play the long game. Stick around, let her know you love her, but for heaven’s sake stop proposing marriage. And you really should find someone else to have a little fun with while you’re waiting for her to slow down and smell the coffee, so—”

And Grace leaned forward and kissed him, because he really was a good-looking fellow, and her bed had been empty for a while. JD had joined the pitching staff for the Dodgers, Claude Cormier was playing drums at the Cotton Club in Harlem, Joe next door had a girlfriend right now, and Grace didn’t poach men who were taken.

“I shouldn’t have stayed over last night,”

Harland said now, looking faintly tortured, or at least as tortured as a man could look while hopping on one foot trying to pull on a sock. “I didn’t mean to lead you on, Grace. I don’t want to make things awkward with you and Bea—I don’t want you thinking—”

“I’m thinking we had a very nice time and that’s all there is to it.”

Grace rose, glided over to the hot plate where her kettle was still warm, and poured out a cup of tea for him. “Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”

He couldn’t entirely hide his relief. “You mean it?”

“You had a lot to get off your chest, G-man. Glad I could help.”

“You won’t be able to call me that much longer,”

he said suddenly, almost mumbling. “I-I’m leaving the bureau. It’s not what I ever imagined...”

Darling, the things I could tell you , Grace reflected. “Can’t say I’m surprised,”

she said, passing him a chipped mug. “Tapping phones so you can learn people’s secrets to use against them doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a Virginia gentleman like you is all that comfortable with.”

“Grace, if you knew the half of it...”

Grace knew considerably more than half of it.

She and Kirill had rolled an FBI agent on vacation in a Los Angeles bar during their first eight months in the States: a bottle of bourbon and a little shameless flirtation had netted some absolutely startling allegations, some of which Grace sincerely wished she could wipe from her mind (the image of J.

Edgar Hoover in a garter belt?!).

But she wasn’t interested in extracting information from Harland.

She brushed her lips across his instead, comradely rather than loverlike, and grinned privately at the irony of comrade .

He wouldn’t be too amused, this soon-to-be-ex G-man, knowing he’d just rolled out of bed with Comrade Galina Stepanova of the USSR.

Former, anyway.

“Come on,”

Grace said, “let me scout the way downstairs so you can sneak out without Nilsson spotting you.”

Harland looked stricken. “I’m a thoughtless bastard, Grace, I never even thought about the trouble you’d get in if I stayed over. If we get caught, will you be thrown out?”

“Honey,”

said Grace with complete truth, “I never get caught.”

In her training days, everyone knew only the best would be sent over. The most dedicated, the most loyal, the true believers. ( How on earth did someone like me slip through the cracks?

Grace sometimes wondered, but never aloud.) No one in their carefully vetted class of recruits would ever turn, not when they had all been so closely screened, so minutely monitored.

The very idea was treason, spoken of only in whispers as they practiced their marksmanship, their ciphers, their American slang.

There was no such thing as a deep-cover operative who turned traitor, oh no.

Only those who were caught, and even they would never go to an American prison.

You’d exercise your suicide option before that happened.

And if you were less than perfectly loyal to the Motherland, someone would put a bullet in your brain long before you were ever sent overseas.

But if someone did turn...

Grace remembered a young man in her class saying.

He was from Vorkuta and looked like he came from Peoria, and he glanced behind him before he went on, bent over a worksheet where he was learning to count out American change.

If someone turned, what would it take? What kind of torture?

None, Grace could have answered.

Despite all her lip-service loyalty, she’d already been ripe to abandon the country that thought it owned her body and soul, the country she’d never entirely thought of as home.

All it had taken to start the process of her defection, once she landed on these shores, was an American grocery store.

“You must never appear shocked by the abundance,”

her trainers had warned her.

That was why the engineered towns where the candidates drilled were equipped with American labels; Grace had spent two years wandering aisles stocked with cans blazoned Campbell’s and Niblets as she trained herself to think in Imperial rather than metric and learned a soft Iowa drawl from a linguist born and raised in Irkutsk.

She was prepared for American grocery stores by the time she and Kirill were finally inserted.

Only she hadn’t been: she’d taken herself out for that all-important American housewife ritual of the afternoon shop, her friendly smile ready for deployment, her introduction cued up (“Betty McDowell, Bob and I are new here!”) and...

well, she’d ended up wandering around the store looking outwardly composed, but with her mind in a complete daze.

It wasn’t that she didn’t know what Betty Crocker’s Softasilk Cake Flour was when she saw it on the shelf, or a bag of vibrant California oranges.

But in her training days the oranges were just painted wooden balls and the flour behind the Betty Crocker label was the same half-sawdust rubbish Grace had queued for in Leningrad growing up.

Here was the real thing: real oranges, real flour, stacked high in such opulent quantities—and anyone here could buy such things.

There was no line of desperate people snaking out the door, no one checking ration cards, no one arbitrarily refusing to sell because they’d heard your grandfather was a kulak .

There was enough here.

Later, of course, Grace realized it wasn’t quite that simple. Claire told her a little, tersely and without self-pity, about the Hoovervilles where her family had been reduced to living during the thirties; the breadlines and the shacks and the desperate people queuing up at churches for charity aid. America was not really, Grace knew now, the land of unlimited plenty open to all. But on her first afternoon in a grocery store it had looked that way, and it had rocked her back on her heels.

“Disgusting,”

Kirill said under his breath. “They share nothing, they hoard it all for themselves. It’s as terrible as the trainers said it would be.”

But what did Kirill know about terrible? He’d sat out the war in safety, one of the privileged deemed too important to be sent to the meat grinder fronts where Hitlerites were (regardless of what the propagandists said) mowing down Russian regiments like wheat. He’d sat in an NKVD office during the war, and Grace doubted he’d ever spent a night hungry—because hoarding wasn’t something only the capitalist Western pigs did, oh no. Grace had survived the Leningrad siege during the war, and that was probably the first mistake her recruiters had made, recommending her for the deep-cover program. The second mistake had been to think that the Ukrainian half of her heritage was somehow eclipsed by the Russian half; the third mistake was to send her over paired with Kirill. But that first mistake...

You don’t need to be smart to serve the Motherland , one of her trainers had said. Plenty of slots in the machine for dull cogs. But for our program—hiding in plain sight, among the enemy for years, undetected—to serve that way, you need a brain. Well, Grace had a brain. She also knew what it was to be hungry, so hungry you ripped the leather backing off a chair and boiled it with a handful of frozen weeds for soup, so hungry the teeth grew loose in your head and you watched your breasts shrivel and your weight drop to eighty-seven pounds at five foot six. To know hunger in your bones, in your blood, as part of your heritage.

Never recruit someone into deep cover when they know what it is to starve , Grace thought, buying a pastrami on rye at Rosenberg’s Deli next door to Briarwood House.

Because if you’d ever been forced to the knife-sharp edge of that terrible cliff—living day after day knowing you were being slowly dragged over that edge toward death—it drew a stark line within your soul.

On one side of that line were the things worth starving, suffering, dying for, and on the other side was everything else.

Grace had willingly suffered those pangs for Kitty, for her family, for survival, and she would do it again in a heartbeat.

Some things were worth it.

But even as she was pulled into the deep-cover program she already knew that Joseph Stalin—the man who, long before the Leningrad siege, had starved every single one of her mother’s family in Kharkiv to death before Grace was fifteen years old—was not one of them.

If you had brains enough to know that, and you yourself also knew what it was to starve—you didn’t think Disgusting when you saw a grocer’s shop stocked with everything under the sun and no rules at all to stop anyone from buying what they wanted.

You thought, in that soft Iowa drawl that was now second nature even inside your own head, They said it would be terrible, but it’s marvelous .

You thought, I could get used to this .

And most importantly, you thought: I wonder what else about this country they lied about .

Quite a lot, it turned out. All that propaganda she’d grown up with, about how Westerners would sell their children for a loaf of bread and prostitute their daughters on street corners for a mug of beer— that certainly hadn’t turned out to be true, either. And once you went looking for the lies, you found them everywhere. You looked around at a land you’d been told your entire life was filled with enemies and evil and found it instead to be a land of plenty and peace. And then?

Well.

You’d come to realize this country had more to offer than well-stocked grocery stores.

You’d come to realize you did not have it in you to cause harm to the people here.

You’d come to a breaking point.

And when that point came—say, on the afternoon a certain manila folder came to hand, and you realized what was in it and what it meant for the country you now thought of as your own...

You’d take every skill they taught you during training, every trick you’d absorbed, every weapon they’d given you, and use it . So that a year after being inserted in your California ranch house near Edwards Air Force Base, about halfway toward the assigned goal of getting your “husband,”

Bob McDowell, hired as an engineer on the flight program that was so very interesting to the higher-ups in Moscow, Bob/Kirill would wake up and find that his wife, Betty/Galina, was gone, gone, gone. Headed east with a new set of identification papers their higher-ups knew nothing about, headed east under the name Grace March , headed for a brand-new future without ciphers, without dead drops, without missions.

Headed into the land of the free.

Not that the land of the free was a perfect land.

“Thank god you’re here, Grace.”

The other typists in the Department of Commerce steno pool fell on Grace the moment she walked in the door Monday. “That man Morrow called for some filing to be done!”

“Heavens, how dare he,”

Grace said mildly. “I’ll go right over.”

A concerned hand on her shoulder. “Do you want one of us to go with you? It’s better to go in pairs, you know. Around them .”

“I doubt Mr.Morrow will eat me,”

Grace said and took herself off to the shoebox-size office where the higher-ups had deigned to stash a man of the stature of E. Frederic Morrow, former writer for CBS, former Major of Artillery, current adviser to the Department of Commerce. “Good morning, sir.”

He glanced up, light shining off his dark face. “Mrs.March, good of you to come in.”

The days she didn’t, he wasn’t likely to get any filing or typing done. The last time one of the steno pool girls volunteered (“feeling herself impelled by a sense of Christian duty”

was how he put it, dryly), she’d burst into tears the first time he had to cross to her side of the room, then she ran straight out of the office. “Start with those folders over there, please,”

he said now. “And if you wouldn’t mind, leave the door open.”

Why? Grace probably would have asked a few years ago. Now she knew why. He doesn’t want any talk about white women in his office behind closed doors was how her ex-lover Claude would have put it in his Louisiana drawl. You leave that door open if you don’t want to cause trouble for him, chère . D.C. ain’t Deep South but it’s South enough. Dating Claude had been a profound eye-opener for a woman who hadn’t seen a For Whites Only sign before coming from Leningrad to the land of the free. Grace missed him. I hope he’s getting nothing but standing ovations at the Cotton Club.

She transcribed her way efficiently through the pile of folders, powered through a stack of filing, reorganized some paperwork. “Anything else, Mr. Morrow?”

He’d blinked the first time she called him mister and sir but didn’t now. “That will be all, Mrs.March. Much appreciated.”

“I do believe you’re wasted here, Mr.Morrow.”

His chuckle, as she bowed herself out, was somewhat grim. “I do believe you’re wasted here yourself, Mrs.March.”

“A lady has to pay the bills.”

Grace didn’t care much what she did for a living as long as she had a little money in her pocket, and there were plenty of ways to earn money in a town full of politicians. The cover for which she had been trained was simply housewife , but she could pass as an artist as well: she’d learned to sketch as a child, taught by her mother, who used to paint colorful birds and ferns and flowers around the windows of their Leningrad apartment. “Like your grandmother taught me in the house where I grew up,”

she’d said, folding Grace’s chubby fingers around a brush. Grace had never dreamed of doing anything with it for a living (dreaming wasn’t exactly encouraged in the USSR) but she’d been instructed during deep-cover training to learn more, simply because artist was a good cover occupation.

Artists never attract attention coming and going at all hours, or for keeping irregular company , her trainers had explained, signing her up for painting classes once her skills were discovered. Grace didn’t have Reka’s instinctive, outlandish flair with a brush but she’d found illustration work as soon as she arrived in Washington: the odd sign here or mural there, supplemented with anything else she could find. And last year, she had found the Department of Commerce.

“Head there and ask for Mr. Morrow, if you have secretarial skills and want to make a little cash,”

Claire had said last year, telling the Briar Club about her own stint subbing while Congress was out in August. “None of the girls at the office steno pool will be secretary to a Black man, and he’ll pay out of pocket for a few hours of typing and filing every week.”

Grace had signed up for a course that winter and now came into Mr. Morrow’s office every few days. It backed up the library job and the sign painting nicely... at some point she’d have to think about a real position with a proper salary, but for now she was happy to drift through the months with a patchwork collection of odd jobs.

When you had spent so much of your life just surviving, it was such a pleasure to drift. Such a strange sensation to be able to thrive .

Grace took her lunch at one of the local Hot Shoppes, a thirty-five-cent cheeseburger and a delicious slush of sherbet and orange juice called an Orange Freeze.

There’d been a near-identical Hot Shoppes restaurant in the replica American town where she’d trained, a fact that amused Grace no end.

Two years she’d spent there, being immersed with the rest of her classmates during cultural indoctrination, and it had been like living on a movie set.

The details were all correct—the cars that passed on the streets were Packards and Chevrolets; the street signs were all in English and the parking meters full of American dimes and nickels—but everything was just a little too pristine.

The stools at those diners didn’t squeak as they spun, and the hamburgers still tasted like ordinary Moscow mystery meat, not American beef.

None of the seats sagged at the replica American movie theater showing Life with Father and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer .

The streets where smartly suited young men called out Hi, Jim! and Nice day, Bill! in flawless American accents didn’t have a single person over the age of forty-five, only those sharp-eyed young men whose NKVD fathers and good linguistics had vaulted them into the deep-cover program.

Those green parks with pristine swing sets had no children playing in them, only young women like Grace with razor nerves and white gloves, learning how to coo Did you see the article in McCall’s ?

and I’ll bring over a casserole as though they’d been born and raised in the Rockies, not the Urals.

Trust Russians, Grace reflected as she took a big bite of her cheeseburger, to get the big picture right but the details so completely wrong.

Living in a fake American town for several years hadn’t prepared her for living in America, not one bit.

Because the biggest difference between Americans and Soviets, she’d realized her first month in this country, didn’t lie in the vowels, the clothes, or how you sweetened your tea.

It was in the shoulders.