Breeding Ground (9 page)

But it didn't look to Alan as though she meant it. And then she asked Spence what else he was making for dinner, as though it were a foregone conclusion that he'd be the only one cooking.

Alan walked into Jack Freeman's hospital room half an hour later, and pulled a chair closer to the bed, as he told Jack who he was – thinking that Jack looked ashen and weak, and probably shouldn't be trying to talk.

“Jo was here this morning. She stopped in to see me on her way to pick up her uncle. She said I seemed much improved.”

“Good.” Alan paused and laid his hands on his thighs, and told himself if that were true, he might as well get on with it. “So. I hear she told you I knew Tom.”

“Yes.” Jack pushed himself higher on his pillows and pulled up his covers.

“She said you came to talk to him about what happened to you in France, and ask if he could help.” Jack didn't say anything and Alan tried again. “Tom was in Holland and Germany. I was in France like you. Before and after D-Day. She said we were both in Wild Bill Donovan's outfit. So maybe I can help.”

“What did you do?”

Alan didn't answer right away. He took off his jacket and laid it in his lap and leaned back in his chair. “I was personally recruited by Donovan. I'd spent time in France, I spoke French, and I'd been trained as a chemical engineer. They stuck me in R&D to begin with, then moved me to an O.G. group and dropped me into France two weeks before D-Day. When the Allies were moving east after D-Day they attached me to an American army to help establish local governments.”

“Why had you spent time in France?”

“My mother's French, and we visited her family.”

“Where were you wounded?”

Alan smiled and asked, “Where or how?”

“How.”

“I got in the way of a grenade that was thrown by a Resistance hothead after we'd taken his town.”

“F.T.P.? Tied to Soviet intelligence?”

“Yep. How'd you guess?”

“They did everything they could think of to take control of France after the war.”

“Exactly.”

“Fortunately they didn't.”

Alan and Jack looked at each other, but neither said anything else.

Jack drank some water, his face sunken and tightly controlled, his eyes fixed on the window. “Donovan's people recruited me because they needed agents to send into France to prepare for the Allied Invasion who'd be able to—”

“Agents who were undercover? Not in uniforms like we were?”

“Yes. I wasn't French, but I'd lived there as a boy, and had spoken French all my life.” Jack started coughing.

Alan asked if he could get him anything.

Jack shook his head, and struggled to catch his breath before he spoke again. “I was parachuted into France three months before D-Day to organize supply for the Resistance groups in my area. Those who didn't live on farms were starving. All the French in cities were—”

“Yeah, everywhere you turned.”

“And the Resistance desperately needed arms. I was to help coordinate their efforts, too. German battle order had to be documented constantly, and communicated back to O.S.S. Prostitutes helped with that. Noticing uniform insignias, and steering pillow talk to what we needed—”

“Since war makes strange bedfellows.” Alan smiled.

Jack said, “Yes,” and smiled behind his tubes. “I was also to help establish priorities for the Resistance in preparation for the invasion when—”

“That's not to say you were in charge?”

“Absolutely not. The Resistance groups had far more experience than we did. But I could be somewhat persuasive because they needed our materiel.”

“Where were you located?”

“The Loire Valley. Outside Tours. I used the undercover name of Maurice Clement, and worked with the local Resistance for almost a month.” Jack scratched his chin and reached for a Kleenex. Then turned toward the window without saying more.

“Was it a Resistance coalition? Not one predominant group?”

“Yes. Moderates, leftists, and rightists.”

“Which didn't necessarily make it easier.”

“True. Where was I?”

“You'd been in France a month.”

“Yes. A routine meeting was scheduled at which I was to initiate planning for specific acts of sabotage. They were to be implemented just before the invasion, once radio messages from O.S.S. came through instructing immediate action.” Jack stopped and turned even paler.

Alan waited before he asked, “So what happened then?”

“The local Resistance leader, a moderate from F.F.I., he arranged the meeting as usual, using well-established precautions. Only he knew the location ahead of time. Every security procedure was followed. Nothing was left to chance. But when we'd gathered in the café—” Jack coughed and sat up straighter and wiped his mouth again.

“A café in Tours?”

“Yes. We came in singly, or in predetermined pairs. We made sure all was as it should be, watching the room for signs that we were being watched. Waiting till we received a signal to go upstairs to a private room – when all hell broke loose.

“An informer had alerted the Gestapo, and they swarmed in with the Vichy police. They shot the F.F.I. leader as he tried to escape and rounded up the rest of us.”

Jack couldn't stop moving, pushing his hair back, adjusting his oxygen tubes, his hands tugging at his sheets, till he finally sat up on the edge of bed facing away from Alan. “Everyone was thrown into prison and tortured more brutally than… Every one of them. Except for me.”

Jack couldn't say anything else for a moment. He finished the rest of his water and poured himself another glass. “I didn't know who the traitor was. But they…”

“What?”

“They… I was deliberately incriminated. The only American. The only one who… I can't discuss it now. I can't.”

“That's okay. Whatever you want to do.”

“There was no way I could clear my name. The O.S.S. had to pull me out immediately. And I spent the rest of the war in Europe under a cloud of half-hidden criticism translating for Allan Dulles at headquarters in Switzerland.”

Both of them sat in uncomfortable silence till Alan finally cleared his throat and picked his words with care. “It must've been even harder to find out what happened once you got home.”

“Impossible. No matter how I tried.”

“And that's when you moved up north? Jo told me you were living near the Canadian border.”

Jack nodded, and sat for a minute, his back slumped, his hands by his sides, his face hidden from Alan. “Until I could prove I'd been wrongly accused, I didn't want to live near anyone who knew who I was, or where I was from, or anything about my family. I didn't want anybody pitying me. Or watching me drink, and thinking what a shame it was.”

“And that's why you came to find Tom.”

“Yes. I thought perhaps together, with the people he knew at O.S.S. who went to the C.I.A. as soon as it was formed, that he could help me uncover the truth.”

Neither of them said anything else as a nurse brought in a new pitcher of water, till Alan leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, staring hard at Jack. “You know it's still impossible, for all practical purposes.”

“Probably. Unless—”

“If you couldn't find out then, it'll be even harder now. There's been a deliberate, persistent cover-up in France ever since the war. I mean, think about the blind eyes that've been turned toward collaborators. And the countless thousands who weren't in the Resistance claiming now that they were. The waters are thoroughly muddied.”

“I know.”

“The national government's locked away all the records that had to do with all the Vichy governments in every city and town, and a great deal more as well. Police records are sealed away. Execution records. Collaborator investigations.”

“I know.”

“So what do you think you could do?”

“I don't know. First, I need to get a job. And build up a nest egg. And then perhaps—”

“I don't see how you can find out much of anything unless you go to France.”

“I realize that.”

“And if you were hated then and accused of being an informer, who would help you now?”

“I don't know. No one I know.”

“It'll be dangerous to look into it too. The real informer won't stand by and watch. That's the kind of crime someone today would still kill to keep hidden.”

“I realize that, but—”

“Is that what you meant when you said you didn't want Jo to be harmed? That getting her involved in some kind of investigation would put her at risk?”

“Yes. I was so ill at the time I said more than I intended.”

“You didn't say anything you shouldn't have said, although—”

“Perhaps there are O.S.S. records or occupying army records that could show me where to start.”

Alan didn't say what he was thinking, that the chances of that were slim to none. He chose to change the subject. “So what kind of job will you look for, once you get out of here? If you went to college—”

“I did. But I can't work inside. I don't care what I have to do, as long as I'm able to be outside.”

“Well, first you've got to get well. And then find a place to stay.”

Jack nodded and leaned back in bed as though he didn't have the strength to sit up any longer.

“I've rented a house in the country. It's got a second bedroom, and if you want to try that for awhile, I'm willing to put you up.”

“You'd do that?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.” Jack sat silent for a moment as he wiped his forehead with a Kleenex. “I don't know what to say.”

“You've told me drinking's an issue for you, so that's my one condition. You start drinking again, you move out.”

“I understand.”

“When do you think they'll release you?”

“Perhaps day after tomorrow.”

Alan stood and put his jacket on, then wrote his home number on the back of his business card. “Call me when you know for sure and I'll come pick you up. Let's talk more about France when you're feeling better.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“We were both friends of Tom's. I'm renting a house that's bigger than I need—”

“But—”

“And when someone gets put in front of you that you can see how to help, I think you're supposed to try. Don't you? Wouldn't you do it for me?”

Excerpt From Jo Grant's Journal:

…So now I'm whining. Unlike Toss. When I've got more than most have to fall back on. A house I actually own, because of Mom's insurance. The horse business too, putting food on the table. Plenty of folks would fight for both. But I keep looking out in front to the rest of what I think I want.

When I get it, if I do, I smile for a second and move on to something else. It's not that working and striving and dreaming are bad. Art and science and inventions come out of that. But there's something underneath how I cope that must be out of balance. Dad would say “Count your blessings and get to fixin' the fence.”…

A
lan drove home from the hospital through the darkening dusk, past dozing horses and sheltering hills on narrow winding roads. He turned north on Pisgah Pike and slowed on the curve by a small stone church, spare and classic and clean, that pioneers had built on that wooded hilltop as soon as they'd come from Virginia.

He braked again to take the tight turns that led down to a strip of valley, then crossed a shallow stream, and climbed alongside the pasture that belonged to the house he rented.

He turned left into the long drive and drove up the low hill, crawling through hard-packed ruts, once it curved to the left on the ridge past a creosoted tobacco barn and a shed filled with tractors. He parked in a gravel patch sheltered by trees, and walked down the grassy slope toward the back of his house.

He hadn't expected it near Lexington, a small stone and clapboard cottage like the ones he'd seen in England; a Cotswold cottage hunkered below the hilltop in almost twenty acres. The whole property was more than two hundred, but a farmer grew crops and ran cattle on the rest of it around Alan's fenced-off parcel.

The owners had built the house after visiting England, but were old now and had moved into town, leaving the house they'd intended to die in because the stairs couldn't be climbed and driving had gotten too dangerous.

They were friends of Alan's boss, Bob Harrison, and they'd wanted a renter like Alan, who wouldn't ruin their furniture and would let them visit when their family brought them out to sit and watch the wind in the fields and talk about the past.

It was blowing out of the west that night and Alan stopped to adjust the tarp on his black Triumph Bonneville, then walked into the kitchen side of the big downstairs room. He laid his coat on the butcher-block island, deliberately inhaling the scent of wood smoke that lingered from years of hardwood fires in the two-story stone fireplace in the living room on his right.

He felt like himself downstairs. It was upstairs he felt like a giant. Climbing the wooden turret stairs too, that turned so tightly and were made so narrow his shoulders grazed the outside wall and his feet only fit sideways.

His bedroom, above the low-ceilinged kitchen, was small but fitted with bookshelves and storage, and full of light in the daytime from two skylights and a set of French doors that opened to a balcony big enough for one.

Half of one wall was open to the living room, above a white wooden fence-like partition, and it made the bedroom seem bigger and kept Alan from getting claustrophobic.

But that night, he stood by the balcony, after he'd thrown on old cords and a sweatshirt, and stared out at the silhouettes of cattle wandering the ridge.

He didn't notice the way he usually would. He was riding a wave of foreboding – watching Tara Kruse again, watching Spence and his mother, while she tried to get her way.