"353 West 57" is published in Drunk Monkeys magazine

 

an excerpt from the 2022 story of a radical woman who disappeared in 1937..... Now online in Drunk Monkeys latest issue

I was standing there taking pictures with my iPhone when I heard a kind of moaning sound. Turning my head, I saw a woman holding her hands to her face. When she lowered her arms and I could see her face, I felt a huge shock. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind. I had seen pictures of her on the internet.

I immediately recalled the words with which Whittaker Chambers, my go-to author for that era, had described her: “a heavy-set, dark, softly feminine woman in her late forties.”

 “Juliet?” I said. “Miss Poyntz?”  

“Are you…” she started to say. “What has…I mean to say…who?”

I stared into her terrified eyes and pronounced the name of the man whom Tresca said had lured her out of the tiny room where she had hidden for weeks: “Schachno Epstein.”

A smile appeared and vanished. “Who? Why isn’t he here? Has something happened to him?”

“He’s fine,” I assured her. It was obvious to me that some kind of time warp had occurred. In the course of my extensive historical research, I had come to believe that such things were possible.

If this woman was indeed waiting for her onetime lover, Schachno Epstein, who could she be but Juliet Poyntz? Who else would even recognize the name of the totally forgotten Epstein, who had shuttled back and forth between Russia and the U.S. under a variety of names, doing the dirtiest of work for Stalin, setting up other people for the kill, never pulling the trigger himself? 

and who was this mysterious person? Whittaker Chambers, the onetime communist agent turned informer for the McCarthy Committee, says this about Juliet Poyntz, who was last seen in June 1937 in a Women's Hotel at 353 West 57th Street in New York City:

"She was living in a New York hotel. One evening she left her room with the light burning and a page of unfinished handwriting on the table. She was never seen again. It is known that she went to meet a Communist friend in Central Park and that he had decoyed her there as part of a G.P.U. trap. She was pushed into an automobile and two men drove her off.

                                                                                    - Whittaker Chambers, Witness  (1952):

For more on the historical record of her disappearance and almost certain murder, see my sources at:  The Disappearance of Juliet Poyntz in 1937

Also of interest is the recent study of the Poyntz case and its political uses by historian Denise Lynn, reviewed here:     Who Was Juliet Poyntz?