Louise's Blunder (3 page)

Ada and I had a special bond. One night she confessed to me that she had married a German Lufthansa airline pilot before the war. He’d left her to return to Nazi Germany to join the Luftwaffe. She didn’t dare begin divorce proceedings. If anyone knew she was married to a Nazi she might well be interned. Her late nights partying, all her beaus, the dyed platinum blonde hair and wardrobe full of divine clothes disguised the terror she lived with every day. I know she prayed for her husband’s death, I heard her at night through the wall between our bedrooms. After that first conversation we had never spoken of her husband again. She trusted me to keep her secret and I would. I kept plenty more. I was beginning to think of myself as the Fort Knox of secrets!

The front door was unlocked at this time of day so I went straight into the small entry hall and hung my straw fedora on the hat stand. I pulled off my cotton gloves and tossed them and my pocketbook on to the small chair in the hall next to the table that held our telephone. The mail rested on the hall table. I flipped through the envelopes. There was nothing for me and I felt my eyes begin to sting. But I shook off my disappointment and forced the tears back. Joe couldn’t write every day, he was busy, he was doing important work. That was why he’d been transferred to the New York office of the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish organization dedicated to rescuing and finding refuge for Jewish refugees. Of course no one besides me in this house knew that was his job. Teaching Slavic languages at George Washington University had been his cover story. I’d found out his real work by accident. Supposedly Joe was in New York City to teach a class of second-generation Slavs to speak their native languages so fluently they could translate once the Allies invaded their countries. Another secret!

Following the tantalizing odor of dinner cooking I made my way back to the kitchen, Dellaphine’s domain. Sure enough she was standing at the stove barefoot, stirring a pot of simmering chicken parts, her milk chocolate face damp from the steam.

‘Welcome home, Miss Louise,’ she said. ‘How was work?’

‘Same as always,’ I said. ‘You?’

‘Me too.’

She drew a letter from her apron pocket and handed it to me. ‘Here’s a letter for you, from Mr Joe, I sneaked it just as soon as the mailman came. I figured you wouldn’t want Mr Henry or Miss Ada to see it so soon after you got the last one.’

I wrapped my arms around her skinny body and hugged her hard.

‘You’re an angel and a pearl above price,’ I said to her.

‘Get away, silly girl, I got work to do and you are in my way.’ She gave me a friendly push and went into her pantry looking for flour for her dumplings.

I headed outside, but not before pulling off my socks and saddle shoes so I could walk barefoot in the grass. I slipped down the back stairs and under the dark staircase before I ripped open the letter.

Joe, who was Czech, though he had a British passport, wrote English rather formally.

He began ‘My Dear Louise’, and finished with ‘Most Sincerely Yours’. It wasn’t a love letter at first. He wrote as though to a friend, newsy paragraphs about meeting new people and exploring New York City. From his borrowed flat he could see the Williamsburg Bridge over the East River and walk to Broadway. But his last sentence was personal. ‘Louise, my love, please save me from my misery and tell me that you are coming to visit me soon.’

Joe and I had come very close to becoming lovers while he lived here. But we were afraid Phoebe would discover us and be so shocked she’d send me away and I couldn’t afford an apartment on my own. Washington was just too crowded. And I was worried about my job.

Having an affair with a foreign refugee was not a good way for an OSS employee to keep her Top Secret clearance and her job.

So Joe’s transfer was at first a relief to both of us. But when we discovered that an old friend could lend Joe his flat in Williamsburg we realized that I could travel to New York for weekends and could enjoy our affair in anonymity. Of course I had agreed. I just didn’t know when I could go. I felt a hot flush spread from my groin upward until my face burned. Misery, indeed!

I shoved the letter into my pocket just in time.

‘Louise,’ Ada said. ‘What on earth are you doing standing under the staircase? And in your bare feet! It’s so damp. You’ll catch a cold.’ Ada had just come home from playing clarinet for a tea dance at the Willard. She was still wearing a silk dress and heels.

‘Don’t be silly, city girl!’ I said, wiggling my toes in the cool earth. ‘It feels good! And I am going into the basement to check on the baby chicks.’

‘You can get into the basement from the kitchen.’

‘I went to look at the garden first.’

Henry, our male boarder, and I had dug up every last bit of the back yard that got enough sun to grow vegetables. We’d already eaten spring greens from it – early lettuce and spinach – and the tomatoes, corn, squash and potatoes were coming along nicely.

‘Come see the chicks with me, they’re so sweet,’ I said to Ada.

The previous winter had been too severe for last year’s flock of chickens to survive outside in their coop. We’d had no choice but to sacrifice them to Dellaphine’s cast-iron skillet. This spring Phoebe and I had bought twenty baby Plymouth Rock chicks to replace them. I loved the adult Plymouth Rocks’ black and white stripes. Right now they were just soft fuzzy black babies.

As soon as Ada and I went into the basement I heard the chicks peeping. We were raising them in a cage near the boiler until they were large enough to go outside into the chicken coop. They had plenty of food and water. Henry had rigged up a light bulb to keep them warm.

‘God, do they ever stop peeping?’ Ada asked.

‘Not until they’re grown,’ I said. I scooped a tiny bit of chirping fluff up into my hand. Its peeping ratcheted up a couple of notches. ‘Just touch her,’ I said. Ada reached out a hand and patted the chick’s head. ‘She’s so soft and tiny,’ she said.

‘I think we got a healthy batch,’ I said, placing the frantic chick back in the cage with her sisters. ‘We’ve only lost one. And there’s just one rooster.’ We’d requested all hens but it was difficult to sex baby chicks and the seller couldn’t guarantee every chick was a female. We’d have the rooster for Sunday dinner once he began to crow and annoy the neighbors.

The pathologist lit a cigarette after he pulled a sheet over the victim’s head.

‘So, doc, what’s the scoop?’ Detective Royal said. ‘Did he drown, or what?’

‘Oh, he drowned all right,’ the pathologist said. ‘His lungs and airway are full of water. But I can’t say for sure it was an accident.’

Royal stubbed out his own cigarette on the steel examining table before pulling a narrow notebook and pencil from his topcoat pocket.

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ the pathologist answered. ‘It’s the lump on the back of his head that concerns me. His skull was fractured. Now he could have fallen and hit his head on a rock and rolled into the water. The shoreline of the Tidal Basin is sloped and lined with rocks. Or he could have been blotto, there’s some alcohol in his bloodstream. But it could also be that he was intentionally hit on the head and thrown into the water.’

‘You can’t tell if he got the head injury before or after he went into the water?’

The pathologist shook his head. ‘That’s not within my power. Sorry.’ He flicked off the bright examining light and flung the stark morgue into dimness. The only natural light in the room came from a tall glass window with a red stained-glass cross embedded in it. The red shaft of light lit up the long room of refrigerated metal drawers that lined the morgue wall opposite the window.

Royal stopped taking notes. ‘Seems to me that this can’t be an accident since his pockets were empty. Where was his wallet?’

‘That’s your area of expertise, not mine,’ the pathologist said. ‘Your fingerprint guy was here earlier by the way, he said he got good prints.’

‘Yeah,’ Royal said, ‘we sent them off to the FBI. Their fingerprint girls are the best. If his are on file we should know within a week.’

Royal was an old-fashioned detective, trained long before the FBI had begun to analyze blood and hair and laundry marks. He knew that once the victim was identified all he had to do was retrace the victim’s previous twenty-four hours to find out what had happened to him. It wasn’t always easy, but it worked.

‘Churchill arrived today,’ Henry said, helping himself to a steaming bowl of Dellaphine’s chicken and dumplings. ‘I read he’s staying at the White House, not at the British Embassy with the rest of the delegation.’

‘I’m surprised by that,’ Phoebe said. ‘Eleanor Roosevelt cannot stand the man. He drinks all day, and those awful cigars!’

Churchill and an assortment of British lords, admirals and generals, including Lord Louis Mountbatten, had just arrived in Washington for the Trident Conference to plan an invasion of Europe. In April the American and British navies had driven the Nazi submarine fleet back to its den at Saint-Nazaire for good, clearing the Atlantic for allied transport and supply ships. It was time to make plans to conquer Italy, bomb Germany into dust and take Europe back from the Nazis. That was one reason the Reading Room was jammed with OSS staff. They were answering queries coming in by the hour from the American delegates to the Trident Conference.

Every single power involved in this war desperately wanted to know what the Americans and British were discussing at Trident, even their allies. Obviously the conference was the target of dozens of spies. Which might be why OSS Security was so interested in the files Paul Hughes had been reading.

‘The
Washington Post
seems quite optimistic about the course of the war,’ Ada said. ‘One of the editorials predicted we’d invade soon.’

Not for a year at least, I thought. If then. The effort required would be unprecedented.

‘Things are looking up,’ Henry said. ‘I just hope Roosevelt listens to Churchill.’

Looking up only in the sense that planning for the real war could begin. Yes, Rommel had been defeated in North Africa, the North Atlantic shipping lanes were clear, but Germany had an iron grip on Europe. What did they call it? Fortress Europe?

‘I heard,’ said Ada, who’d changed into a black dress for her gig that night, ‘that Churchill sleeps until noon and has a scotch and water even before he gets out of bed! And that he wanders around his rooms naked after his bath!’

I’d been told the same story at work. Apparently President Roosevelt surprised the Prime Minister after his bath, rolling quietly into Churchill’s bedroom in the middle of the afternoon. ‘Well, Mr President,’ Churchill had said, ‘at least there’s nothing coming between us.’

Phoebe tapped her glass with her spoon and cleared her throat.

‘I’d like to tell you all something I’ve been keeping quiet about for a long time.’ she said, ‘because I’m so excited about it I didn’t want to jinx it.’

‘Hurry up and tell us, then,’ Henry said.

‘Yes, Phoebe, please do!’ Ada said.

What was this, I wondered?

Still Phoebe hesitated, as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to say such wonderful words.

‘I told you that Milt Junior was injured at Guadalcanal,’ she said. ‘Not seriously. He’s been in a hospital in Adelaide. Well, he’s coming home! For two weeks leave!’ Phoebe twisted her napkin into a ball and beamed.

‘Oh, Phoebe, I’m so happy for you,’ I said. ‘That’s grand!’

‘How thrilling,’ Ada said. ‘You must be so excited!’

Henry nodded, agreeing. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting the boy,’ he said. ‘When does he arrive?’

‘I don’t really know yet,’ Phoebe said. ‘I’ll get a telegram in the next few days.’

Dellaphine brought a tray into the room and began to load up our dirty dishes.

‘Did you know about Milt?’ Ada asked her.

‘Yes ma’am,’ Dellaphine said. ‘It’s mighty good news.’

We could all only guess at the worry Phoebe had experienced since her sons had been in the Pacific. She’d lost weight in the year and a half I’d been living here. And it seemed she took more and more Nembutal as the weeks went by. Sherry evenings were more frequent too. Dellaphine was concerned, I could tell by the way she looked when the Peoples Drug Store van delivered Ada’s prescription. Phoebe must be so relieved. Tom, her younger son, was safeguarding military supplies on some remote Pacific island behind the lines. And now Milt was coming home on leave.

Dellaphine brought in the dessert, green grapes suspended in red cherry Jell-O. I ate it because I was hungry, but Jell-O was on my list of foods never to eat after the war ended, ever!

After Phoebe and Henry went into the lounge Ada caught me up in the hall. She took me by the arm.

‘My taxi’s waiting, I have to get to work,’ she said. ‘I hate to sound selfish, but where is Milt going to sleep?’ The same question had crossed my mind. Surely Phoebe wouldn’t want Milt to sleep up in the attic bedroom with Henry. That left our rooms.

‘It’s just for a couple of weeks,’ I said. ‘We could take turns sleeping on the sofa.’

‘I have a friend I might be able to crash with for a while,’ Ada said. ‘I would hate to lose my room here.’

‘Me, too,’ I said.

‘Do you think we could share an apartment?’ she said. ‘Our different hours might drive us both loony, though.’ If Ada and I shared a two-and-a-half, which would be all I could afford, it would have one living room, one bedroom and a kitchenette. We’d have to share the bedroom. Ada could afford an apartment of her own, but the District Housing Authority wouldn’t be likely to approve it.

‘Let’s just hope it works out so we can stay here,’ Ada said. ‘It’s hard to imagine living somewhere else now.’

Ada went out the front door to her waiting taxi and I went into the lounge to join Phoebe and Henry. The sherry service was on the table and Henry and Phoebe were already raising glasses to toast Milt’s homecoming. I was happy to join them.

When I got to work the next morning Pat, the messenger, was sitting on the corner of my desk waiting for me.

‘Mrs Pearlie,’ he said, ‘Don’t put down your things. You’re wanted in Mr Lewis’s office right away.’