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Page 25.

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The need for secrecy in l’affaire du main en bois (the wooden hand of Ivor Crane) ground to a halt with Stalin’s death in 1953, but these things have a way of leading a life of their own, in the darkness, for decades afterward. Stalin was already a sick old man by 1945, and the world was a far better place with his demise (from smoking, stroke, and sheer malignancy) barely eight years later. Uncle Viktor said that Stalin kept a picture of my father and his three women in his office toilet, to remind him, as he shat, that this was the man who took the atomic bomb from him in 1945 when he thought he first had it in his grasp. A man and two women got away, but my mother (sometimes called the third woman in the relevant espionage circles) was the unlucky one. Who knows how things might have turned out if she had not been traded by certain U.S. agents to the NKVD on that foggy night in San Francisco.

Detective Howard Lemon delivered her to the NKVD on this dock near Hunter’s Point with her one little suitcase, when she was pregnant with me. Mr. Lemon did this with true American outrage over injustice—sadly, even angrily.

Howard Lemon would later tell people you could hear sirens whispering on the distant oceanic horizon, ships calling each other far out at sea, which reminded him of those wartime radio broadcasts from London, by Walter Winchell, that always began with “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border, and coast to coast, and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press…”

And to press we shall go, my little journal.