Robert Coover - Public Burning

But then suddenly Scotland Yard of Great Britain arrests a high-domed bespectacled atomic scientist named Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs, and Fuchs confirms the darkest of Patriot visions: while working on the Manhattan Project in New York and Los Alamos, he stole atomic secrets for the Russians! It’s all true! As Newsweek says: “…the fantastic is beginning to be accepted as fact. There are men like Fuchs and Hiss!” Fuchs describes his U.S. contact as a man “from 40 to 45 years of age, possibly five feet ten inches tall, broad build,” and the FBI promptly arrests a soft little five-foot-six Russian immigrant ten vears younger than that named Harry Gold, who quickly acknowledges that he is Dr. Fuchs’s mystery man. His family is amazed by this confession of a romantic double life, since Harry, who likes to amuse himself through the long nights with a little parlor baseball game played with a deck of cards, has never really left home. TIME say:

why had harry gold done it?

he could only mutter a line which

a thousand sinners had muttered

before “I must have been crazy”

While Harry embroiders on his saga and crystal-balls the American League pennant race for his captors, other agents interrogate a young ex-GI, a ne’er-do-well ghetto Jew and ex-Commie (pieces all falling into place), suspected of stealing uranium and other valuables during his days as a mechanic at Los Alamos. He doesn’t want to talk about the thefts, but he is willing, when invited, to say he spied for the Russians. In prison, Harry Gold confers with the FBI and then tells his lawyer that he thinks there’s going to be something extra about a GI in Albuquerque: “Ah… This event, as I said, was — I’m not being — I’m being deadly serious when I say it was an extra added attraction. I use the term, as I said, not in any joking manner — because this is no joking matter — but simply because I believe it best describes the affair… Yakovlev told me that…after I had seen Klaus Fuchs I was to see another man. I don’t remember the name of the street. We, uh, I think that their principal talk…concerned the difficulty of getting Jewish food, delicatessen, in a place like Albuquerque and a mention by the man that his family or possibly her family regularly sent them packages including salami… Yakovlev said we could forget all about him…apparently the information received had not been of very much consequence at all…” He doesn’t remember the GI’s name, some kind of mental block, but a couple of days later, after David Greenglass has been formally arrested, it comes to him: David Greenglass. Also, perhaps he was wrong about what Yakovlev said, probably. David is very contrite. He says his sister Ethel and her husband, Julius Rosenberg, made him do it. They had a kind of power over him. Harry Gold had forgotten about this connection, but with the FBI’s help he begins to remember. Maybe that’s who was sending the salami.

The net goes out and draws in Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, described by J. Edgar Hoover in one of his daily press releases as “important links in the Soviet espionage apparatus”—Rosenberg, Hoover declares the day he arrests him, had “aggressively sought ways and means to secretly conspire with the Soviet Government to the detriment of his own country!” Fuchs to Gold to Greenglass to Rosenberg — quadruple play! — and now what next? Praise pours in. “No finer body of men in all of the world,” says a new federal judge. The FBI is getting its biggest headlines since the vintage years of the 1930s, and the Boss is exultant. He’s reminded of a recurrent dream in which he’s pulling on a kind of rope coming out of the ground, something like a navel-string, and the more he pulls out, the more there is. “We’re going to need a new building, Clyde,” he titters, and cracks open a celebrative bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Walter Winchell invites him out to dinner at the Stork Club. People smile wherever he goes. Cabdrivers give him racing tips. Waiters bow. The cigarette girl thanks him from the bottom of her heart: “We’re all praying for you, sir!” “You do that, miss,” he replies gravely. “Suppose every American spent a little time each day, less than the time demanded by the Communists, in studying the Bible and the basic documents of American history, government, and culture? The result would be a new America, vigilant, strong, but ever humble in the service of God! All we need is faith, miss, real faith!” She swoons at his feet. As he steps around her, he thinks: This is a lot better than being a Presbyterian minister, I’m glad I changed my mind about that, after all. Only one momentary snag spoils an otherwise perfect evening: the Rosenbergs don’t seem to know what everybody is talking about. But they give themselves away: they keep insisting on their “rights.” Well, remind them they can rightfully get the chair for this, see what that does for their memory.

Meanwhile, former friends and ex-classmates of Rosenberg are tailed and questioned. Not much happens until it’s discovered that one of them, a radar man named Morton Sobell, has apparently whipped off to Mexico in a wild blue funk: aha. Can’t risk extraditing him, he might slip behind the Iron Curtain before those dumb greasers have got the papers processed, a goon squad has to be used. A bit irregular maybe, but when you’re up against the Phantom, the rulebook goes out the window. Sobell is snatched and dragged, kicking and screaming like Jimmy Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces (they have to bludgeon the hijo de puta to keep him in line), across the Rio Grande in the dead of the night to Laredo, where he’s delivered to a waiting G-man—“Knock knock!” Eh? Who dere? “Grassy!” Grassy? Grassy quién? “Grassy-ass, amigos! Mooch-ass grassy-ass!” Ha ha, de nada, jefe!

They took ’im by the tail an’ wagged ‘im to a log,

An’ swore by gum! he’s a hell-of-a-’hog!

Carried ’im to the house an’ skinned ’im out to bile,

I bet you forty dollars you could smell ’im fifty mile!

Smell him maybe, but you can’t hear him: he’s as adamantly uncooperative as the Rosenbergs — but no more kid gloves, no more time for pussyfooting, for Sam Slick is suddenly in a pot of trouble himself, more hogs than even he can boil: not only has the Phantom got Eastern Europe, China, veto power in the U.N., and the atomic bomb, but on the 24th day of June, 1950, precisely at two p.m. in the middle of Uncle Sam’s Big Roundup, hot war has broken out in Korea! “Yowee! take thy beak from out my heart!” yelps Uncle Sam. “Blow the strumpet to arms! Strike up the band! We gotta raise the beacon-light o’ triumph, snouse the citadel of the aggressor, and press onward to liberty and the Injun Ocean before that bluebellied bloodsuckin’ scalawag snatches us bald-headed! Whoo-oop! Hang onto yore hats, boys, we’re ridin’ a tiger!”

Hastily, the Seventh Fleet hightails it out of Pearl Harbor, a trial date is set, troops are rushed to Korea. Greenglass and Gold are lodged together on the eleventh floor of the Tombs prison in New York, where they can help stimulate each other’s recall powers. The Rosenbergs are separated for, obversely, the same reason. An ad appears in The New York Times: “From now on, let us make no mistake about it: the war is on, the chips are down. Those among us who defend Russia or Communism are enemies of freedom and traitors to the United Nations and the United States. American soldiers are dying…every man’s house will be in a target area before this ends!” The Yankee Peddler, turning to meet this new challenge in Asia, is knocked reeling — invading North Koreans cross the 38th Parallel and roll south; Americans land at Inchon, cross the 38th Parallel, and roll north; the Chinese People’s Volunteers cross the Manchurian border and roll south — and by the time the clerk in Room 110 of the Foley Square Courthouse in New York City is ready to step forward on Tuesday morning, March 6, 1951, to call out the case of “the United States versus Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, and Morton Sobell, et al.,” the whole scene is in great disarray, Uncle Sam doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going, the Mongol hordes of Red China have overrun Tibet as well as Korea and are pressing out in all directions like a bursting waterbag, the Russians are arrogantly lighting up the sky with atomic-bomb tests, the President and his General are at loggerheads, and Nightmare Alley — the escape route out of the Korean hills to the south — is littered with frozen American dead. “We have met the enemy,” cries Uncle Sam, gasping for breath, “and bile me fer a seahorse if I wouldn’t ruther crawl into a nest o’ wildcats, heels foremost, than be cotched alone in the nighttime with one o’ them heathen buggers again!” TIME’S Mother Luce, who, perhaps inspired by the early successes, has been urging her son to push the idea of living with perpetual war as part of the American Way of Life, now writes despondently: