Chapter 7 - 7
“I was here because I was hiding .”
Grace gestured up at the ceiling, in the direction of her partner lying dead three floors above them. “Hiding from him . I didn’t want anything but to be left alone.”
“Like we’d believe that!”
Arlene’s voice was shrill; her eyes glittered like shards of broken glass. “You’re a Commie spy like Ethel Rosenberg—”
And Ethel Rosenberg’s fate is probably going to be mine , Grace thought. Tried and sentenced to execution, all because of a photograph taken at a baking contest. A high price to pay for honey cloud cake.
“Do what you want with me,”
she said, cutting across Arlene’s rising voice, Harland’s furious questions. “I can’t stop you. Because I’m not an assassin, I’m not a villainess out of Pete’s comic books who can... I don’t know... shoot kryptonite from my fingertips. I am just Grace March, and yes, I had another name growing up: Galina Pavlovna Stepanova. I was given a job and sent here, but I didn’t have much choice about taking that job or not. If I hadn’t, I’d have gotten a bullet in the brain or lived the rest of my life being worked to death on the Arctic Circle, so I came here. And, yes, my partner and I passed information for a while in California. It was done with an encryption cipher and an identification code, everything placed in dead drops around town so someone we never met could collect it and pass everything back to Moscow. But it was never anything more than details on flight programs and—”
Grace cut herself off as she heard her voice rise. “I never hurt anyone,”
she said, more quietly. “Not until today.”
Xavier Byrne spoke up, very quiet, his eyes very dark. “Why are you running from your own people?”
Grace looked at him as though he were crazy. “Because they are not my people. Not really. My father might have been Russian but my mother was Ukrainian, and she told me what the Soviets did to her home—”
“Russian, Ukrainian, what’s the difference?”
“Oh, fuck you,”
Grace spat. “There’s a difference. I’ve never seen it, I was born in Leningrad but my mother’s family came from Kharkiv and they were all starved to death on Stalin’s orders, so what goddamned loyalty do you think I feel for him? I knew enough to keep my mouth shut about that, just keep my head down and parrot the party line, because I didn’t want to end up dead or in a gulag, but Leningrad wasn’t really my home. I’ve never had a home, until I came to this country.”
The silence was absolute.
Grace drew a gulping breath. “When I came here I looked around and thought I never want to leave . You wouldn’t want to, either, if you’d been living in a city where one and a half million people died in a nine-hundred-day siege, where the survivors murdered one another for ration cards and bread. A city where you drank water out of shell craters on your hands and knees, and when your one surviving uncle brought home a lump of meat and said not to ask what it was, you cooked it and ate it without asking because no one in your family had eaten in four days. A city where I had to watch my little sister starve to death before my eyes and there was nothing I could do .”
Grace felt the tears begin to slide. Let them fall. Let it all fall. “And then I come here. And it isn’t a cesspit of capitalist evil the way I’d always been told my entire life, it’s a wonderland. Not a perfect place, maybe, but compared to the secret-police-infested wasteland I left behind, it is paradise . And I realized that all I want is to stay here, make a life here, get a job and pay taxes here, so I did. I made a life. I walked away from everything I was and made a home around a room with green walls, and sun tea, and Thursday night suppers on a hot plate, and friends .”
She looked at them, from face to face. “I have been your friend,”
she said to Pete, the first person she’d met at Briarwood House. Hammerin’ Pete with his battered Mickey Spillane paperbacks and his thirteen-year-old blushes and stammers. “I have been your friend.”
Looking at Nora, with whom she’d shared a landing bathroom for four years and given advice when she fell in love with the gangster who now had a protective arm around her waist. “I have been your friend”—to Reka, Attila the Hungarian, scowling on the couch—“and your friend”—to Fliss, who she’d hauled out of a nightclub riot full of bigots—“and yours, and yours, and yours.”
To Bea and Claire and Sydney, Harland and Joe. “I have always been a friend. To all of you.”
“If you wanted to stay, why didn’t you go to the nearest embassy and defect?”
That was Joe, very quiet.
“With McCarthy starting up his rants about Reds?”
Grace let out a harsh bark of a laugh. “I might as well strap into the electric chair and flip the switch myself.”
“You could still turn yourself in.”
Harland looked like a man groping for a lifeline. “Immunity in return for everything you know—”
“I don’t know anything useful. They make sure we don’t. I can’t tell you where any other spies are, or who collected from my dead drop. I don’t even know where my old training facility is; they took us there blindfolded in trucks—”
“You tell us you never hurt anyone here with your spying, but how do we believe that?”
Harland folded his arms.
Because I love this country , Grace thought. I can speak my mind here without being arrested; I can walk these streets a free woman without worrying I’m going to be hauled away in a van; I can earn money and decide for myself what to do with it. Why wouldn’t I love this place? Why would I ever want to harm it?
But they wanted proof.
“Behind the bureau in my room,”
Grace said. “Third board, the one with the crack—you’ll need to pry the nails out. Look inside. You’ll find a manila folder.”
Waiting, then. Blinking tiredly, as feet tramped upstairs and then down again. Seeing the folder in Harland’s hands, his face over it growing slowly white. “What the...”
he said softly, flipping pages, and the others crowded close, reading over his shoulder .
“What’s Skunk Works?”
Nora said blankly.
“A department of Lockheed Martin,”
said Grace. “The kind of department that isn’t publicized.”
The plan from Moscow had been to get Kirill hired there. Grace had found a back door—befriending the secretaries, the women no one noticed who had access to so much.
Harland was flipping pages more rapidly now. “This is— Jesus, this is their proposed development plan for the next ten years of supersonic aircraft. Project names, rudimentary designs, material sciences advances...”
“What’s a ramjet?”
Bea asked, reading over his elbow.
“Some kind of engine for bombers or fast-strike aircraft or—”
Grace spoke up. “I got my hands on those pages spring of ’50. I knew as soon as I saw it that I wasn’t telling Kirill about it, I wasn’t taking it to the dead drop for collection, I wasn’t turning it over.”
“How do we know that?”
Harland shot back. “You could have just copied this and sent the information on; how is this proof that—”
“Because the first thing the Soviets would have done with this information if I’d handed it over back in ’50 was rub the West’s nose in it, because that’s what they do . They know they’re behind in aviation and engineering; the West stole their scientists left, right, and center after the war. They’re desperate. If they got hold of that”—indicating the folder—“they’d be rushing to brag how far ahead they were for once.”
She looked around the circle. “Have you seen a single headline in the newspapers over the last four years that said anything like that?”
Glances back and forth among the Briar Club.
“When I got my hands on that report, I ran.”
Grace remembered her frantic clandestine scramble for a new name, new identity, new papers behind Kirill’s back. “I didn’t know what to do with it, whether I should destroy it or try to return it somehow, so I just... hid it. I guess it’s your problem now, Harland.”
“There’s not a government I can think of that wouldn’t paint the walls red to get their hands on this,”
Harland said softly, closing the file. They all edged away from it as though it were radioactive.
Grace looked between her friends again, from face to shocked face. “Do what you want,”
she said. “I can’t stop you. But someone turn off the oven. Because the turkey’s burning.”
Grace March let her face drop, let her hopes drop, let the tears drop. “Happy Thanksgiving.”