Red Love by David Evanier Page A

pants. Dolly went up to him and told him very gently so he shouldn’t be embarrassed, and he put it back in. She loved her father to the very end.”
    Hermie, Sophie’s husband, said, “And how that witch Ruth tormented Dolly.” Dolly’s mother Ruth had come to the death house only to put pressure on Dolly to confess, was buddy-buddy with the F.B.I., and didn’t even go to the funeral. “I don’t go to political rallies,” she said.
    They were the children of Seward Park High School, CCNY’s engineering school, the Y.C.L. and the Steinmetz Society, old pals. Who says children cannot kill?
    They had escaped the net. They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry: Solly, Dolly burned to death, unimaginable suffering; Maury Ballinzweig caught in Toronto after fleeing from New York; Bobby Metzger in jail for five years on a perjury conviction (only Wilfred Fuller and Joe Klein escaped to the Soviet Union)—and here they were, guffawing with relief, sucking candies, afraid to speak out loud, but free: “Ain’t this an amazing bitch?” said Max Finger in a half-whisper. He’d been in it up to his eyeballs.
    “Look, I don’t know what they got,” Renée Finger said, “but I do know what they could have had when they went through my stuff.”
    “Darling,” whispered Sophie Rich, “I had a camera that was no bigger than my garter.”
    They had done the microfilming in this room. Once they had spent seventeen hours in a row photographing classified aerodynamics stuff Bobby Metzger had filched overnight from his Columbia University physics prof—he’d been entrusted with the combination to his personal safe. Then they’d collapsed in nine sleeping bags on the floor.
    There had been drama in this room, soirees, good fucking, lectures on child rearing and string quartets that Solly had hired. Bobby Metzger had learned to play the guitar here. Dolly had sung arias here; they had celebrated Rosh Hashanah here by singing Christmas carols and roasting delicious suckling pigs and candied apples, rinsing them down with Riesling wines and Soviet vodka. Then they had watched porno movies, a thing they did only on Jewish holidays. There were glory days to reflect on; nobody could take them away from them.
    The great Negro tenor Radford had been flown in from Holland one beautiful night; that booming voice, those eyes that were worldwide: “THE LIGHTS OF WALL STREET BURN BRIGHT ALL NIGHT LONG, COMRADES: WE MUST KEEP OUR LIGHTS BURNING TOO.”
    Josh Moroze began softly strumming “The Peat Bog Soldiers.” Sure enough, Hermie’s lips moved and he was singing not the original words to the concentration camp song, but the words that Dolly had penned in her cell:
“We’re on our way, death house defiers
    To remove you from their midst, those fascist liars.
    Up and down we hear them marching
    Millions, millions by our side —
    Those who live and those they buried
    Shall no longer be denied.
    “Until at last the death house defiers
    Wait not in terror for that dark and lonely chair.”
    Renée Finger ran from the room, weeping.

Do We Ever Really Know Anything?
    Define “ever”.
    —G. L.
    I
    Six days after Solomon Rubell’s arrest in 1950, Sophie Rich had been sent by Solly’s friends from Manhattan to Bobby Metzger in Pittsburgh, where he was working for NACA. To Bobby’s amazement, Sophie had knocked at his door, walked in (her finger to her lips), sat down on the couch, took out $3,000 in bills, and wrote out a message in longhand on a pad of ruled paper. The message from Solly gave Bobby instructions on how to flee the country through Mexico. Declaring aloud, “Begone, stranger, I know not what thou seeketh, you must be nuts,” Bobby slammed the door on his old friend and flushed the message down the toilet.
    Only a few days before Sophie’s visit, the F.B.I. had called Bobby in for a chat about the Perry Street apartment, and he was now sure they knew of Sophie’s visit. He panicked, and went to the Pittsburgh