On the subject of Itzik Feffer, she allowed herself a harsher tone. She told Subotin that Feffer had treated being selected to sail to America with Mikhoels as a personal triumph rather than an assignment. That he’d lorded this “achievement” over other members of the JAFC. She was careful not to accuse Feffer of any actual crimes—he might still be alive. But no matter how much she disparaged his character, quoting gossip she had heard from others, Subotin did not look satisfied. His expression was bored as he continued to record what she said. Then he brought up the Crimean Plot. As Subotin described it, the conspiracy involved leaders of the JAFC who “promised” parts of the Crimean Peninsula as a beachhead for imperialist military actions to the Americans with whom they had contact. According to “information possessed by the investigation,” the leaders of the Jewish cabal had already started distributing key positions of this imperialist foothold among themselves. He now expected Florence to tell him which positions had been distributed secretly, and who would hold them.
She wanted to press a hand to her mouth. Why, the idea would make a cat laugh! She had never heard of such a plot. It implied that a tiny group of poets had coordinated a plan to topple the mighty Soviet government. She’d known only of a suggestion, floated briefly and entirely publicly, of settling Jewish refugees who’d lost their homes in Crimea. She tried to study Subotin’s face to determine if he believed what he was saying. If he did, he was surely a fanatic willing to believe anything; but if he didn’t, it meant only that he was a total cynic, and so her efforts to dissuade him would be just as pointless. As all of these thoughts darted through her head at lightning speeds, strategy and philosophy became mixed. Who was more dangerous, a fanatic who believed hideous falsehoods, or a cynic who only pretended but was willing to make them true if it was necessary? She reminded herself that she could not get embroiled now in a denial of the existence of this alleged plot. Her only way out was to claim to know nothing of it, to tell Subotin that the Jewish Committee members were a cozy little gang, and if such a plot existed, she would have had no knowledge of it.
As soon as she said as much, Florence could see that her answer was less than pleasing.
“I see,” he said, without putting down his steel pen, “you tell me they carp and backstab and elbow each other for power out in the open, yet when it comes to this plot you suddenly claim they were ‘a cozy little gang.’?”
He was telling her that he’d given her rope to play dumb long enough.
“I only meant I know nothing about it. I’m not ruling out that they talked of this plan to others.”
“Others, such as…Seldon Parker?”
She’d heard the name in her head even before he spoke it. How could she have been so stupid as to think he would demand nothing of her if she continued to act foolish and na?ve? Of course, Subotin had had a target picked out for her all along.
“Yes, it’s true,” she said, “that we shared two small rooms in Kuibyshev with Seldon Parker, in evacuation. We did not do this by choice. As you can guess, housing was nearly impossible to come by in Kuibyshev. We were assigned our quarters. When we were evacuated, we were living twenty to a room in a frozen schoolhouse. So when the SovInformBuro offered us the two rooms, we were grateful. Seldon lived in the smaller of the two. We saw him every day, shared meals and so on. As for how well we came to know him—that is a different question. He’s a difficult person to get to know. He is very private and plays his cards close to his vest. What I mean is, he’s quite gregarious, well spoken, and so on; he can give a good toast, tell a joke. But sometimes I had the feeling I did not know him very well at all. I am not sure how to explain this.”
But her denials would not save her, that much she knew. She needed strategy, as Leon said, not just tactics. She could hear Leon’s words in her head. They were all tied with the same rope and would all get pulled into the same noose.
At this moment, Seldon’s plan for escape no longer struck Florence as mad. It offered as much chance for survival as would doing nothing. The question now—and this was the only part of the game over which, she believed, she still had any control—was how to stall Parker’s arrest. How to suggest to Subotin that she might wheedle out of Seldon Parker the necessary information he was after.
“He did have a…special talent,” she said now, and permitted a small smile to cross her face.
She could see, under Subotin’s immobile mask, a subtle but not imperceptible uptick in interest. “What was it?” he said, sternly.
“He could always obtain alcohol. You may think this was easy, but vodka was quite expensive in evacuation, and no one could get his hands on wine. At the bazaar it was five hundred rubles a bottle! One could get it by other than the official means, but that isn’t something I’ve ever known very much about. In any case, he always had a way of getting it—vodka, Georgian wine, even sherry. I don’t know how, but it made him very popular among the higher-ups in the committee. I’m sure they weren’t suffering from any lack of rations. But Seldon was always good for a bottle.”
“You’re saying he drank with them.”
“He did, occasionally. He liked the good life. In this way he made friends inside the committee. I know he liked to stay up drinking with some of them. What sorts of things got spoken during those wet hours, I can’t say exactly. Sometimes he dropped hints. Once, he said that Feffer told him he was finally going to ‘get a little relief, see a little paradise,’ when he visited America. He’d quote little things people might say when they drank.”
“And you never asked him more?”
“He prided himself on knowing these people personally, calling them friends. I’m no gossip, and I don’t like to flatter people by rising to their bait when they show off.”
“It seems to me that a person who talks that way is asking you to ask.”
Hook. Bait. Swallow. She’d gotten him.
It was a risk, she knew, to suggest that Seldon might have inside information on any plot—real or imagined—hatched up by the committee. A suggestion like that was cause enough for the NKVD to move in and arrest him. And yet her instincts told Florence that if they’d wanted to arrest Seldon they would have done it by now. No, whatever elaborate fraud this “investigation” was concocting, it still needed some credible information with which to pry out further confessions. It alarmed her how instinctively she’d started to understand how this crude and unsophisticated game was played. Great lies would be ransomed with small truths.
“I suppose,” she said, “I could ask him now. It was three years ago. It would take some work for me to get Parker to talk about those times. But, then, he does enjoy telling stories.”
“How you do it is up to you,” Subotin said flatly. Still, she perceived an undertone of encouragement in his affected indifference.
She had bought herself time.