Mysterical-E

He Said, She Says

THE TANGO QUEEN

By Albert Tucher

“Those two are strictly nose to the grindstone,” LoSchiavo said.

“Beats talking to each other.”

“Why’s that?”

“Mrs. Gelb is a Viennese Jew,” I said. “Got out just in time.”

“Nineteen thirty-eight?”

“Give or take. Mrs. Kaposi left Budapest in a big hurry in ‘forty-five.”

“Meaning,” he said, “people in the old country might have some scores to settle with her. Maybe including Mrs. Gelb. That could be fun.”

We were breaking in place. There wasn’t much to entertain us, other than the two women sitting back to back in the Catalogue Department with no more than six feet between their desks.

“Well,” he said, “when hostilities resume, we’ll have a ringside seat.”

“I’ve lost my appetite for that kind of stuff.”

We killed our cigarettes in the standing ashtray and went back to work as Widener Library’s beasts of burden. Our job was delivering new books from the Order Department to the cataloguers. We spent our day pushing wheeled shelves that the librarians called “trucks.” The name was apt, because it took a driver’s skill to negotiate the turns between the tightly packed desks.

LoSchiavo had half-seriously asked me for a map of the huge room.

With the ten dollars a week that I earned, and my GI benefits, I could just about swing Harvard. But I was single. I wasn’t sure how LoSchiavo planned to make do.

“What’s with the Eastern European Mafia?” he said. “They seem to run the place.”

“There is no Mafia. J. Edgar Hoover said so.”

“If you believe anything he says.”

I didn’t answer. Lately he was saying too many things along those lines.

“Now that’s more like it,” he said.

A younger woman passed in front of us. She didn’t acknowledge LoSchiavo’s scrutiny, but he would take that as a challenge.

“Just don’t say ‘Hubba, hubba,’ Joe.”

“Who is she?”

“Anne Belwyn. She’s a reference librarian. Married. Like you.”

He didn’t flinch.

“You know her?”

“I’ve been to her home and met her husband, so don’t embarrass me.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

Which meant he would.

LoSchiavo had brown bagged it for lunch. I went to the Freshman Union for a solitary tuna sandwich, if wedging myself into a crowd could count as solitary. Like everything at Harvard, the Union was jammed. The University ran straight semesters, without summers off. Demobilized GI’s mixed with eighteen-year-olds, who looked like a different species.

LoSchiavo learned the job quickly. That was good, because it hadn’t been easy to keep it open for him while he waited for his discharge. I waited for us to settle back into our friendship, but it was different when we didn’t depend on each other for survival.

I started to notice things that he said and did. He didn’t seem to understand how two years of peace had changed everything.

He moved easily among the library staff. The various lunch and coffee cliques welcomed him whenever he chose to join them. That was why I noticed when he spent time talking with Mrs. Kaposi. It happened quite a bit, but I never picked up on any hostility between them. Maybe he had changed his first opinion of her.
I decided to keep watching.

It was Mrs. Gelb who first asked me if my friend was a Communist. Her tone was curious rather than horrified.

“You’ll have to ask him. We’ve never had time to talk politics.”

She nodded. Several times I saw the two of them spending a coffee break together. Mrs. Kaposi avoided Joe when Mrs. Gelb was with him, but I wouldn’t have expected anything else.

I never saw him socializing with Anne Belwyn, which should have worried me.

One evening, as I was about to leave work, LoSchiavo found me at my staff locker.

“Want to get a beer?”

I didn’t, but I also didn’t want us to drift further apart.

“Sure.”

In Cronin’s bar on the Square we got dimies and looked for a place to sit. A quartet of seniors thought about racing us for the last table, but they sized LoSchiavo up and let us have it.

“So,” he said, “how do you like the job?”

“It’s a job.”

“Pay is pretty bad,” he said. “In fact, I’m not sure it’s even legal.”

“It just supplements my benefits.”

“You’re a veteran. Not some peasant from Calabria.”

I had once seen him handle a Marine who had made a similar comment.

“What’s your point?”

“Some of us are looking into getting organized.”

“You mean, like a union?”

“Exactly. A real union. Not like the tame ones in this country.”

I said nothing, but he must have read my lack of enthusiasm on my face.

“It’s a basic right,” he said.

“I’ve got nothing against unions, but that’s not what I’m here for. I just want to get my degree and move on.”

“Still aiming for the State Department?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re diplomatic enough. But sometimes you have to chuck diplomacy and take a stand.”

“Joe, enough people are already thinking you’re a Red.”

“That’s always the first thing they think of. The first and the last.”

“Are they wrong?”

“Let’s just say that Dachau and Sachsenhausen opened my eyes.”

“When you say, ‘Some of us,’ who is that, exactly?”

For a moment he lost his momentum. I knew I had guessed right. That made two reasons why he didn’t want to be seen with Anne Belwyn.

“It was capitalism that made the war happen,” said LoSchiavo. “No capitalism, no tyranny.”

“I’d be careful about that,” I told him. “The Soviets aren’t allies anymore. A lot of people are working hard to forget they ever were. And a lot of other people are listening in on conversations like this one.”

“There’s time for you to see what’s happening in this country,” he said. “Not a lot, but there’s some.”

He drank the last of his beer and stood.

“Got to get home.”

He hefted his battered briefcase, which looked heavy. He saw me noticing.

“I get most of my work done on the train.”

“What is that, like an hour and a half?”

“Each way.”

He started to move away.

“How is she?” I said.

I never wanted to ask, but I always broke down. I never said her name, though.

Katrina.

LoSchiavo always pretended that there were no depths to the question.

“Going a little crazy. Harvardevens is way out there. And she says the place makes her feel like a patient.”

“Stands to reason.”

The new married student housing had been a military hospital attached to the old Fort Devens, which the Army had turned over to Harvard.

“See you Monday.”

On that Monday LoSchiavo and I worked eight to noon. He took his ten minutes with Mrs. Kaposi. I wasn’t the only one who noticed that she didn’t return from her break. No one could remember her missing a minute of work. In just one afternoon books in Hungarian, Romanian and Russian began to pile up noticeably on her shelves.

Back at the dorm I had intended to eat a sandwich at my desk as I studied before class. But someone knocked on my door. When I opened it, I found a timid freshman poised to try again.

“You’re, uh, Sass?”

“That’s right.”

“Phone for you.”

I went downstairs to the lobby. The voice I heard was unfamiliar.

“My name’s Smithson. I handle security at Harvardevens. Joseph LoSchiavo has you down as an emergency contact.”

“That figures.”

“There’s been trouble in his apartment. Gunshots, bullet holes in the living room wall.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“Not that we can tell.”

“Why are you calling me?”

“We can’t find him. Can you come out here?”

“This sounds like police business."

“I’m not letting them in.”

“What’s going on, Mr. Smithson? Why wouldn’t you let the police in?”

“It’s a matter of principle. We’re within the Shirley town limits, but we don’t belong to them. I’ve told the local government that over and over. It’s Federal property, leased to Harvard.”

“Why do you care about that?”

“Have you seen the Shirley police?”

“That can’t be the whole story.”

“I don’t want to make trouble for LoSchiavo. He’s okay.”

I thought it over. Sooner or later it would occur to Smithson to call the FBI.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Thirty minutes later I sat on the train to Shirley and restrained myself from getting out to walk. The train seemed to stop every three minutes. No wonder the trip took so long.

I disembarked and joined the crowd going to Harvardevens on foot. Soon we came to a gate and a guard hut. Beyond them I saw three one-story buildings that looked too much like an Army barracks to please a veteran like me. A loop road curved out of sight around the whole village and returned from the other direction. I waited at the gate for attention, while security men with pistols on their belts faced down four Shirley police officers. The local cops leaned against their patrol cars in poses that combined pugnacity with indecision.
A man in his forties verified identities, mostly by sight, and waved people into the village. When my turn came, he shook his head.

“Residents only.”

“Smithson?”

“You’re Sass.”

I nodded toward the local law.

“Who called them?”

“Must have been a resident. I knew this would happen. Months ago I tried to get the FBI to admit it was their territory before anything serious happened, but they couldn’t be bothered.”

“Too busy hunting Communists.”

“I guess.” He studied me. “You and LoSchiavo were with the U.S. Constabulary?”

“That’s right.”

“I was an MP.”

At his age he must have been the “Pops“ of his unit. Every outfit had one.

“You know the wife?” he said.

“I knew her before he did.”

That was true by a few seconds. I was the one who had spotted her coming out of the Soviet zone.

“We don’t know who was shooting at who,” said Smithson.

“What does she say?”

“A whole lot of German.”

Katrina spoke better English than some GI’s I had known. That had been true even before she came to the United States. She was waiting for someone, and no one could find Joe. That left me.

“So you don’t know if the shooter is still in there.”

“My guess is no,” he said. “A number of people left before we knew what was going on. We couldn’t hear the shots from the gate.”

I frowned. They really did need some law enforcement here.

Smithson saw my expression.

“I’ll send one of my men in with you. I already have somebody with the wife.”

Smithson left me and went to the guard hut, where he conferred with another security man. The second man came out and beckoned me to follow him. We said nothing as he led me into Harvardevens.

“This one,” he said. “Twenty-six Eliot Street.”

He left me and started back to the gate.

With my fist poised to knock, I froze. It was strange, but in my mind I saw Katrina grimy with road miles and emaciated from post-war privation. These days she had the plumpness that many German women develop at the first opportunity. It suited her, but apparently I preferred a time before she had chosen LoSchiavo over me.

I had no choice. I knocked, and the door opened. Another middle-aged Harvard man faced me. Again I identified myself.

He led me through the kitchen, which was small but newly painted. A lot of student wives bragged about the new two-burner stove and oven that came with each apartment.

I had seen enough bullet holes to recognize them. About three feet from the floor, two fresh ones marred the new paint job beside the door to the living room.

The living room was as small as the kitchen. Two huge radiators filled much of the available space. If they ever got going, even hospital patients would have found the heat too much. The furniture looked cheap and mismatched, but new. Katrina and Joe probably rented it from the University.

“Johann,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”

She said it in German. For the moment I decided to go along with her.

“You want to tell me what happened?”

“I heard a knock on the door. I asked who was there. A woman asked me to open up. I said again, who is there? She begged me, so I opened.”

“Just like that?”

“Well, she spoke in German. I suppose that made me homesick. And careless.”

“Anything noticeable about her German?”

“Viennese. Not dialect, but with the accent.”

“Okay, you opened the door. Then what?”

“There was a woman in the hall. She pushed me, hard. I did not expect it, and I stumbled backwards and fell. She stood over me, and I saw a gun in her hand.”

“What kind of gun?”

“Not one of ours, that’s all I know. Not a Luger or anything like that.”

“What did she want?”

“I still don’t know. She kept saying, ‘Who have you told? Who have you told?’"

“Then what?”

“I have seen guns before. I did not like how desperate she was. It could make her shoot without meaning to. Fortunately for me, she was too close. So I kicked her ankle. She fell on top of me, and we wrestled for the gun. I was younger and stronger, and I know how to fight. But while we were fighting, she pulled the trigger twice.”

That agreed with what I had seen.

“Then she jumped up and ran back outside.”

Katrina had survived the war in the east. For many displaced persons, the first days of peace had been even deadlier. If she knew how to handle an assailant with a gun, it didn’t surprise me.

“You must have let her go.”

“Yes. She wasn’t a real killer. I know what they look like.”

“Do you have any idea what she meant?”

“None.”

“Did you know her?”

“No.”

“What did she look like?”

Katrina described half of the middle-aged women in Central and Eastern Europe. Brown hair, brown eyes, strong cheekbones.

A knock sounded on the front door. The middle-aged man asked who was there.

“FBI,” I heard even in the living room.

They didn’t need to show credentials. J. Edgar’s boys travel in pairs, and they have to qualify their stern looks every year along with their marksmanship. These two were the real thing. One looked to be in his forties, while the other, trailing behind, was twenty years younger.

“We’re looking for Joseph LoSchiavo,” said the older one.

I glanced at Katrina. She was letting me handle it.

“Not here.”

“Mind if we check?”

The younger partner was already heading for the bedroom and bathroom. He took a remarkable amount of time to search such a small range of possible hiding places.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

That was technically true.

“You are?”

“John Sass. A friend.”

“Ma’am?”

Katrina shrugged.

“His wife,” I said. “She’s not speaking English.”

If they concluded that she couldn’t, that was their mistake.

“So you’re taking jurisdiction after all,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“I assume this is about the shooting.”

“What shooting?”

“Bullet holes in the kitchen.”

“If LoSchiavo wasn’t here, it’s not our business. If you hear from him, we want to know.”

The younger agent handed me a card. Apparently he handled the details. I glanced at the Boston address and phone number.

They left without wasting more words.

Katrina and I sat without speaking. The Constabulary had taught me a cop’s intimidating stare, but Katrina wasn’t impressed. Nobody could intimidate her anymore, least of all a man who had wanted to marry her.
“I notice,” she said, “that you’re not asking me where he is.”

“But you know. Or have an idea.”

“It’s that union business.” She twisted her mouth. “Business. He has a habit of mixing business with pleasure. But you would know that.”

“If the FBI is involved, it’s about Communists. Joe has been talking like one lately. And I don’t think the Federals get the difference between a labor agitator and a Communist.”

“This is America. It’s supposed to be different here.”

I shrugged.

“Communists are the new Nazis. I suppose we need an enemy.”

“And he married someone from the East. That makes him more suspect.”

“That’s probably part of it. But if Joe was already a Red in the Constabulary, he could have helped other people come out of the east. People the Soviets wanted to infiltrate into this country.”

We looked at each other. We both remembered who had actually let her across the border with the Soviet zone. I had plucked her off the barbed wire, and I had wanted to care for her for the rest of my life.

“You’re still his friend,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“After … I made my choice. That‘s very European of you.”

“I’m not a European. I’m a soldier. Joe and I served together. I had his back and he had mine.”

“Johann, I can understand it if you lie to me, but tell yourself the truth.”

“Oh, I do. Every day.”

“There’s some other reason why you protect him from everything he does.”

“There you’re right.”

She could guess, but she would guess wrong.

I stood to go.

“You might as well start speaking English again. It doesn’t look as if the local police will be coming.”
Back at the checkpoint nothing had changed. I nodded at Smithson.

“The shooter is gone. She got out by hiding the gun and looking like somebody’s mother.”

“I figured something like that. What do we tell the Shirley boys?”

“Let’s go talk to them.”

Reluctantly, he came with me. As we approached the Shirley officers, I looked for a vet among them. Three were obvious 4F’s, but the officer who seemed in charge had the hard, watchful look of a survivor.
I introduced myself, and we exchanged brief resumes. The Shirley officer had been at Guadalcanal with the Marines.

“I think we all want the same thing here,” I said. “LoSchiavo is one of our own. I’m hoping we can work something out here.”

The Shirley cop looked as if he knew I had cornered him and didn’t appreciate it.

“We could call it accidental discharge of a firearm,” I said. “Nobody got hurt. My friend brought it back from Europe. Didn’t we all do something like that?”

A slight nod from the Shirley cop.

“Any way you can let this slide?”

He and Smithson studied each other. I decided it was time to let them work things out.

Trains back to Porter Square ran infrequently, but I caught one just as the doors closed.

I knew what to expect, and I didn’t want to be there for it. I had something more important to do. But the two FBI agents were quicker than I had expected. It had to be them at the door of my dormitory room. Even their knock sounded Federal. I stood aside for them to enter. Anything else would have aroused more suspicions.
“We’re still looking for LoSchiavo.”

“If he isn’t home, I don’t know where he is.”

“I’ve heard about you Constabulary guys. Recruited from the cream of the Army. Encouraged to reenlist when everybody else was getting demobbed at top speed."

“Your point?”

“You’re supposed to be incorruptible Texas Ranger types.”

“I’m still waiting.”

“We think LoSchiavo became a Communist convert while you were policing the eastern border of the American zone. He might have let some very bad people in.”

“Not while I was watching.”

“How did his wife get in?”

“She was trying to cross, and some Ivans were trying to drag her back. We made them stop. But after that we weren’t just going to hand her over.”

“Was that procedure?”

“Exercising our discretion was procedure.”

“How about here at Harvard? Anyone he’s especially friendly with?”

“Me.”

“You wouldn’t cover for him, would you?”

“He’d do it for me.”

“Are you?”

“Any chance you can let it all be ancient history? That’s what the war feels like to me, anyway.”
“Maybe, but the Russians aren’t. We know they have Harvard in their sights. People here advise the government on policy. Scientists work on classified projects. Students could become influential down the road. The Soviets want assets who can tell them what their targets are thinking and doing. We’re appealing to your patriotism here.”

“LoSchiavo talks a Red game, but that’s all it is--talk.”

“It would help if we could ask him ourselves.”

“Now we’re back where we started. I don’t know where he is.”

They exchanged stern Federal looks and left.

I didn’t know for sure where Joe was, but I had a good idea where to look. It was an apartment in North Boston. Anne Belwyn opened the door. She was dark where Katrina was fair, and slender where Katrina was buxom, but she would turn any male head. Trust LoSchiavo to go for the best.

“Oh,” she said. “John.”

“Anne, you need to get Joe for me.”

“Why would he be here?”

“I don’t have time, Anne. You’re really digging yourself into some trouble here.”

“What do you mean?”

“This isn’t the time for talking like a Red. It’s also a very bad time for humiliating your husband until he decides to call the FBI on you.”

I didn’t need to raise my voice, but I did anyway.

“Joe, I know you can hear me.”

He came out of what I assumed was a bedroom.

“I’m serious, Joe. Go back to your wife. This is no time for amateurs.”

“Amateurs didn’t live to come home.”

His remark reinforced my point. He and Anne didn’t understand what they were involved in.
I didn’t have time to wait and see what they would do. I had another stop to make, and the FBI agents had already proved that they were quick.

I knew this address also. It was only blocks away. The landlady claimed to speak only Italian, but I was getting tired of that tactic.

“She’ll see me,” I told her.

The landlady let me pass.

Mrs. Kaposi opened the apartment door as if she had expected someone, but I surprised her. She recovered quickly and stepped aside for me.

She had a single room with a half kitchen. The bathroom would be down the hall. In the corner farthest from the kitchen sat a cot. A wooden table with two armless chairs completed her furnishings. I had seen it before among refugees. They had lost everything once and didn’t plan to accumulate anything that they could lose all over again.

She and Mrs. Gelb might never exchange a word that wasn’t library business, but the other woman probably lived in similar style.

My hostess indicated one of the chairs, but instead of joining me, she went and sat on the cot.

“Mr. Sass.” She gave it the Hungarian pronunciation: Shahsh. “You speak Magyar?”

“Yes.”

“How is that?”

“My parents spoke Hungarian with each other and German to my grandmother.”

“Which is why you knew to come to me. Mrs. LoSchiavo told you I sounded Viennese.”

Mrs. Kaposi smiled.

“Vienna and Budapest. I had so many friends in both cities, before the war. We used to go back and forth like sisters who live next door to each other.”

She couldn’t maintain the smile. I had seen similar listlessness among soldiers after a brutal battle, when they had spent the violence in them.

“But it still could have been Gelb. Or have you already spoken to her?”
“I didn’t need to. I knew it was you.”

“My husband was in the Hungarian Second Army.”

“I know.”

Her eyes had turned inward, and she missed my admission.

“Most of the men died at Stalingrad. Then their Soviet captivity killed most of the rest.”

“But Joe LoSchiavo played a nasty trick on you. He said he had news about your husband. Is that it?”

“He told me that his wife had traveled with some men who had escaped from a Soviet camp. It was a cruel thing for him to do.”

“He planned to give you hope that your husband was still alive. But it wasn’t hope at all. You’ve known all along that the Soviets have him.”

“Why did he do such a thing?”

“I think he planned to come back with more news, this time that your husband was dead. He would have expected it to crush you, but it actually would have given you hope of getting free of the Soviets.”
“I ask you again, why?”

“He thinks you’re a Nazi sympathizer.”

“No more than I am a Communist. He has no idea how things were. We did what we had to do. Everybody did. We still do.” She controlled herself. “As soon as I saw his wife, I understood he was lying. She knows nothing.”

Mrs. Kaposi focused her eyes on me. My words had finally broken through.

“How is it that you know all this?” she said.

“Tango Queen,” I said.

Mrs. Kaposi sat back. Her expression reminded me of a German infiltrator I had once seen waiting to be executed by firing squad.

“Yes,” she said. She sounded like the infiltrator when he agreed to a blindfold. “The password is Tango Queen. It was an especially cruel choice on their part. My husband called me his Tango Queen, after my favorite operetta by Lehar. That is how I knew they had him. Or rather, that you have him.”
I could have resisted the slightest hostility in her voice, but her tone stayed level, almost kind. In her place I could never have done as well.

“Not me,” I said. “They.”

I paused. There was still time for me to stop explaining. Even a particle of self-respect would have allowed me to maintain my heartless facade. But I had none left.

“Suppose a young man had a brief period of Marxist fervor. Suppose he met the wrong people, and suppose he tried to move on. And they said, ‘Not so fast, pal. We own you now.‘ They never let go of anyone. And now our own government is saying the same thing--once a Red, always a Red.”

I stood to go.

“We never had this conversation. I should never have had to reveal myself to you. Now you know I’m your handler, and I will have to pass you on to someone else.”

I waited for her to nod.

“Do nothing. That’s what you should have done in the first place. I hope I can keep us alive. And out of prison.”

At the door I turned back to her.

“You were right about one thing. We all do what we have to do. Maybe you and I are better off than some, because we know it.”