Public Burning

Public Burning Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Public Burning Read Online Free PDF
Author: Robert Coover
Tags: The Public Burning
dere? Police! Police who? Uh, police tuh meet yuh, lady. Thistle be quick. Chester routine inquiry. Hassan a body here seen a spy ring? We all aspiring, mister, it’s a Mary kin way! Clem the ladder of success, you know? Gopher broke. Hokay? Well, yeah, but… C’mon, Thomas money, copper, and Eisenhower late as it is! Yes’m, Czar Rhee tuh bother yuh. Dewey have your pardon? Sure, son, Hiss all right, to err is Truman. Better luck on the—knock knock!—Nixon…
    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. T IME 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
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

Red Mesa

Aimée & David Thurlo

Seven Dirty Words

James Sullivan

A Sea of Purple Ink

Rebekah Shafer

T.J. and the Penalty

Theo Walcott

The Dolls’ House

Rumer Godden

Kydd

Julian Stockwin