The streets outside Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station were being pounded with torrential rains, and taxicabs were scarce. When Charlie finally found one, the grizzled hack wouldn’t consider any sum to make the drive all the way out to the bridge to Susquehannock Island. “Never,” he said, chomping on his cigar. “And you ain’t gonna find no one willing to do it in this weather. Not no one.” The prediction proved correct, and soon enough Charlie was at the local Hertz auto-rental office, where he was offered a black 1951 Studebaker Commander.
The last time I was in a Studebaker was that night in Rock Creek, Charlie thought. And then he corrected himself, since he now knew he hadn’t been in the car that night at all.
When he was here a month ago, the journey via taxi had taken an interminable three and a half hours. Driving himself, he could theoretically drive faster and more recklessly, but with accidents and flooding from the storm, it took him five hours—an insufferably frustrating trek that reminded Charlie of a recurring nightmare he’d had in high school in which no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t reach an object that he desperately needed to.
As he neared the bait shop, he saw in the distance not only his car, which Margaret had driven there, but three others parked on the shoulder between the store and the footbridge. One car had its lights on and was still running. Charlie turned off his lights and pulled over to the side of the road.
At first Margaret didn’t recognize the woman. Her head was shrouded in the hood of a dark poncho; she looked like a sinister nun. But then the woman lowered her lamp and came closer, and Margaret realized who had just shot Gwinnett.
“Make sure he’s dead,” Catherine Leopold said.
Stunned, Margaret obeyed, hustling to the thicket where Gwinnett had fallen. She reached into the brambles and pulled him up by the back of the neck. His head was heavy and lifeless. No breath, no movement, no pulse. She gently released him back into the bush.
What on earth is happening? she thought. Why is Miss Leopold holding a gun?
“He’s dead,” Margaret said, still reeling from the intensity of the night, all ending with the shock of seeing Leopold. She was of course relieved that Gwinnett was no longer chasing her down, but why did Leopold shoot him, and who was she with?
Leopold turned to two other figures standing behind her, men that Margaret hadn’t focused on until now. “Go find the others,” she told them, and they hustled past Margaret onto the island.
From under her poncho, Leopold produced a cigarette, but she struggled to light it in the rain. She finally ducked completely into the poncho like a turtle and then reemerged with it lit.
Margaret braced herself to ask. “Why—”
“He was a threat to you, your Dr. Louis Gwinnett,” Leopold interrupted, exhaling her cigarette smoke. “He wanted the dossier, of course. Where is the dossier, Margaret?” No more “Mrs. Marder”; such formalities were no longer called for, apparently.
Margaret had so many questions.
“At the house,” she replied. “The dossier is at our house. We made a photocopy; Charlie has the original.”
Leopold nodded.
It all seemed impossible, this scene: Catherine Leopold holding a gun while they stood there soaking wet, minutes after the ponies stampeded. Gwinnett, who just hours ago had gone from seductive to menacing, dead in a bush just feet away. Margaret tried to make sense of it but couldn’t. She tried to appeal to Catherine, figuring it was her only chance.
“Thank you for saving me, Catherine,” she said. The rain poured down on her face as if she were standing beneath a fire hose. “He and his…goons were chasing me all over the island.”
“Gwinnett was a Communist agent,” Leopold said. “Did you know he was a Communist?”
“Yes. No. I mean, I suspected he had those sympathies from comments he’d made here and there. But frankly, it’s not all that unusual in academia. I never thought he took any action. But then a few hours ago I overheard someone on a radio telling him to get the dossier and to get me, so I ran and hid.”
Leopold took a deep drag of her cigarette.
“We’ve been following him for the past month, since we picked up shortwave radio chatter about you,” she said. “You must have heard some of that as well.”
“‘We’?” Margaret asked. “‘We’ve’ been following him for the past month?”
“Hoover,” she said. “I should be more precise. The FBI. Hours ago they picked him up talking to a Soviet agent; he was told to get the file at any cost. The Feds put out an APB for him, and of course Chairman Carlin and the others were also alerted. Through the club. I knew his whereabouts because we’ve also been monitoring you. And your house.”
“Can we get out of the rain?” Margaret asked. She shivered.
“In a minute. We need to wait for them to finish the job.”
They stood there in the darkness, rain beating on them relentlessly. Leopold flicked her cigarette into the brush. “You put yourself, your husband, and your country at great risk today.” She stared at Margaret with her enormous blue eyes, which right now conveyed fury. “I don’t mean to sound harsh, but you are a very foolish woman.”
From a distance came a bang and then the echo of a gunshot. Then another one, seemingly from the other side of the island. Margaret was terrified; her mouth was dry and her limbs felt heavy. Worried about her baby, Margaret touched her abdomen underneath her shirt again. “I don’t understand,” said Margaret, trying to keep the conversation friendly, trying not to sound alarmed. “All three of them were Communist agents? I thought Kessler and Cornelius were just grad students.”
Leopold shrugged. “The Bureau has been monitoring Gwinnett since the late 1940s; he’d been recruited years before, likely by Hiss. He’d been recruiting and had also been tasked with pursuing, er, friendships with susceptible young women in proximity to power. Your father-in-law was the long-game target, we assume, but then Charlie was appointed to Congress and your star rose even higher.” She gestured with her left arm, indicating the landscape. “This entire research project was funded by Mother Russia so Gwinnett could get close to you while Charlie was in Congress.”
“But why? Charlie’s just a freshman.”
“The Reds have tentacles throughout the government. Everywhere. And Charlie’s been the focus of a lot of groups. Clubs and associations. The Commies, the Hellfire Club, other competing interests. Folks want to be close to the son of Winston Marder. And when Charlie tried to stop the funding to Goodstone, he showed a certain egoism, a selfishness, early on that Chairman Carlin and others in the club knew needed to be stopped.”
“Can’t have too many folks trying to do the right thing, I suppose,” Margaret said.
“You and your idiot husband wouldn’t know the right thing if it bit you squarely on the nose,” Leopold said. “You think you’re keeping us safe? From what? The engine of our economic boom? From the makers of weapons that will protect us and prevent Communism from spreading here? I know your kind. You sneer at Joe McCarthy while he ferrets out the traitors in our midst. You turn your nose up at the workers who slave away at General Kinetics plants, but you enjoy their products and the safety they afford you and your unborn baby.”
Margaret felt her heart skip a beat. Is this really Catherine Leopold? A trained killer? She wondered if Leopold’s smiling, efficient, aging-beauty-queen persona had ever been legitimate. Margaret tried to appeal to her vanity by treating her like an expert.