Louise's War (16 page)

Cold-eyed, fists clenched, she glared at me. ‘There’s not one American over there yet, and people are dying every day. Every day! When in God’s name are we going to invade Europe?’

Betty tried next. ‘It takes time,’ she said, ‘we’ve got to train soldiers, build airplanes and ships . . .’

‘Do you know what’s on page one of this worthless excuse for a newspaper?’ she said, gathering up the morning edition of the
New York Times
and shaking it at us. ‘Not starvation, not the refugee crisis, not cold-blooded murder, it’s all about Governor Lehman donating his tennis shoes to the war effort! With everything that’s going on in the world! The Governor’s tennis shoes! And if I have to hear one more time about how Fala sacrificed his chew toys to the scrap-rubber drive I’ll strangle the spoiled little beast with my bare hands!’

I wondered if Barbara was having a nervous breakdown. I’d never witnessed one before, but this appeared to fit the bill. I didn’t know what to do. Should I call the security guard? Don? If I did that, what would happen to Barbara? And her child?

Barbara opened her pocketbook and removed her powder compact and lipstick. She calmly repaired her face. Then she replaced her cosmetics, snapped shut the pocketbook, slung it over her shoulder like a rifle and strode out of the room.

‘Aren’t you going to do something?’ Betty asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not. Let’s see if she comes back today. Or tomorrow. I’ll put her down as sick. If she doesn’t show up on Monday, I’ll report it.’

‘By then she might have left town with the baby,’ Ruth said.

We were civilians, but OSS reported to the Joint Chiefs, so we were disciplined like soldiers. Leaving OSS without permission was tantamount to going AWOL.

‘I know, I know.’ I said. ‘I’m still going to wait. For now let’s get this mess cleaned up, before somebody comes in and sees it.’

The three of us stacked and sorted until Barbara’s desk looked normal, like she’d be back from the ladies’ room any minute. I wondered how soon we could replace her if she didn’t return, there was an awful shortage of clerical workers. I didn’t want to think about dividing her work up among the three of us.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I need coffee. Hold the fort for me for fifteen minutes, then I’ll come back and you two can go.’

I joined Roger Austine at a table in the cafeteria. He was alone, so I got right to the point.

‘Roger,’ I said. ‘What’s happening in Vichy?’

‘Good morning to you, too! Why do you want to know?’

‘One of my girls had an attack of nerves after reading the
New York Times
this morning.’

‘Oh. I’m so sorry. Well, the news is bad, of course. I expect by Fall Vichy won’t exist, the Germans’ll occupy it. With all that entails.’

‘What are we doing about it?’

Roger shrugged. ‘We sit on our fannies and research and write newsletters and circulate reports and memos and issue recommendations. What General Donovan and General Marshall and the Big Chief do with all that, they decide, not us.’

He lowered his voice. ‘Have you heard?’ he asked.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Dora’s lost her Top Secret clearance.’

I was stunned. ‘You’re joking.’

‘I wish I was. I think Guy had something to do with it, that fascist. Not only that, I think Don, with Guy’s connivance, didn’t protest.’

‘Why? She’s brilliant! Everyone says so!’

‘Dear girl, she’s Red and sleeps with women. So much more important than the quality of her work. Remember, our beloved nation was founded by Puritans, and they still move among us!’

‘She’s not Red.’

Roger shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she did favor a very deep pink. The question is, is she untrustworthy? I don’t think so.’

‘Donovan admires Dora, so maybe he’s trying to protect her.’

Roger raised an eyebrow. ‘You thought of that, too? If she doesn’t have access to secrets, she can’t be suspected of passing them. At any rate, she was quite calm about it. Packed up her books and notes and toted it all over to the Library of Congress. She commandeered a table in the reading room and got right back to work.’

‘Her Catholic University students are working there already.’ I tried to picture Dora spending every day with a couple of seminarians. Would they be wearing monks’ robes? Or black cassocks? I stifled a giggle brought on by nerves as much as amusement.

One thing you had to credit to the Nazis, they’d united a lot of very different sorts of people in opposition to them. I wondered if that camaraderie would last after the war.

Roger left and Joan joined me. She looked stricken.

‘You heard about Dora?’ she asked.

I said I had. ‘Roger implied that Guy might have had something to do with it.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’ She stirred her coffee compulsively. ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘looking around, I wonder how that lost file of yours figures into all this.’

I felt my heart rate pick up speed.

‘What do you mean?’

‘General Donovan asked me today if the file had been found. Very unusual for him. He’s too busy to worry about such things. It wasn’t but ten minutes later that I heard Dora had lost her clearance.’

‘It could be a coincidence. If you think about it, it’s not surprising she lost her clearance,’ and I stopped without finishing my sentence, wondering if I should.

‘Why?’

‘She’s not most people’s idea of a regular American.’

Alone in the office for the few minutes that Ruth and Betty were at their coffee break, I laid my head on my desk and permitted myself to feel overwhelmed; by Barbara’s despair, by Dora’s demotion, by my ambiguous feelings for Joe, and my fears with Rachel’s safety.

I alone knew that Bloch’s file had been stolen, not lost. Someone had taken advantage of Holman’s death to swipe that file and to steal Bloch’s index card, wiping him off OSS radar. Why? And who? A mole, or a sleeper, here at OSS, who wanted to neutralize Gerald Bloch’s usefulness to the Allies? I didn’t much care about Gerald, truthfully, I just wanted Rachel and Claude to escape France, find safety somewhere until the war was over.

What more could I do? Without documents to forward to the OSS Projects Committee there was no hope that any attempt would be made to rescue the Bloch family.

Receiving Rachel’s postcard had reconnected us after years of silence, in a cascade of emotion that reminded me of our friendship so poignantly, and made me more determined than ever to help her if I could.

In a single flash of inspiration, it came to me, the entire preposterous scheme. This city was one gigantic file cabinet. If we had a file on Gerald Bloch because he was a prominent hydrographer who might be useful to the Allies, some other government office might have one too.

I would reconstruct the Bloch file from paperwork I located elsewhere, pretend I had found the missing file and present it to Don to forward to General Donovan and the Projects Committee.

I was congratulating myself on the genius of my plan when Don appeared at my door.

‘Hi there,’ he said, smiling at me.

‘Hi.’

He sat on a corner of my desk.

‘I had a very nice time last night,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. I was in a tough position here. This man was my boss. I wished to be polite, but not encouraging. I couldn’t directly say I didn’t want to date him again.

‘I was wondering if you were busy on the Fourth?’ he asked. ‘I thought we could go sailing on the river, take a picnic.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve already made plans.’

‘You can’t break them?’ he said, clearly disappointed.

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Perhaps the following weekend?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

My coolness made Don frown, but thank God, Ruth and Betty came into the office before he could speak. Betty’s face lit up with speculation.

‘Thank you, Mrs Pearlie,’ Don said, politely, on his way out of the office.

‘You’re welcome, Mr Murray.’

I should never have necked with the man. I should have parted from him yesterday evening with a handshake, a conveni ent widow accompanying her boss to an important party.

‘Oh, calm down,’ I said to my girls, as they erupted in giggles after Don was out of earshot. ‘I am not interested in Don. Don’t you dare spread it around that we’re an item.’

Betty felt my forehead.

‘No fever,’ she said. ‘So you’re not delirious. You must be bucking for a goofy discharge instead.’

‘Stop it,’ I said.

‘We heard in the cafeteria, from some of the other girls, that Mr Murray told Roger Austine that you’d be a perfect wife for a man with ambition. That you knew how to dress and when to join in a conversation and when to be quiet, and that you were a real sport when he left you alone so he could hobnob with the big shots.’

That reminded me of a recent Dorothy Dix witticism – I read her newspaper column without fail – that a man likes a woman with a brain as long as she only brings it out in an emergency.

‘He does have money, too. I checked the social register. His mother is a Gibbs, they own People’s Drug,’ Ruth said.

‘I’m not attracted to him,’ I said, ‘at all.’

‘Don’t you want to have a home and children?’ Betty said. ‘Belong to a country club? Do you want to work in an office for the rest of your life?’

I thought of Joan’s lovely apartment, her car and her clothes. Did I long for the same comforts enough to marry someone for his money? Marriage was difficult enough when you loved your husband. But who knew if I’d be able to work after the war, after the men came home to their old jobs. And if I could work, would I have to live in a boarding house for the rest of my life?

‘Enough of this,’ I said. ‘We need to get busy. If Barbara doesn’t come back, we’ll have to do her job too.’

Still clucking like a couple of matchmaking hens, Ruth and Betty went back to their desks. I retreated behind my partition to think, putting Don out of my mind. Where could I find more information about Gerald Bloch?

The original scribbled note about Bloch came to us from an operative in France through the OSS London office by way of a locked OSS diplomatic pouch, so there’d be no copies in Codes and Cables. No one had the keys to those pouches except David Bruce in London and General Donovan. General Donovan’s files were unavailable to me, Joan had made that clear.

When I received the memo and original request for information from Donovan’s office and added it to our subject file on Bloch I created the only OSS file on the man, and it was gone. I did find one document in another file, the program from the 1936 Edinburgh conference where Charles Burns and Marvin Metcalfe had first met Gerald Bloch. Metcalfe gave me a second copy of that program and reprints of three of Bloch’s obscure journal articles when I visited him. That was a start, but it wasn’t enough.

It was possible that the State Department had a dossier on Bloch, especially as he had applied for a visa, but I certainly couldn’t attempt to penetrate the State Department. Security was much tighter than at OSS. If I got past the squads of military guards, I’d never get out the building with any official papers. Even if I had one of those nifty matchbox cameras Eastman Kodak developed for photographing documents, which I didn’t, I needed original materials to make the file look authentic.

I needed to acquire actual documents, and the best place to find them? The embassy of Vichy France. It leaked like a sieve already. With Nazi record-keeping as obsessive as it was, it seemed likely to me that the Vichy embassy would have information on Gerald Bloch. He was a prominent scientist, a Jew who’d applied for a visa to leave France on more than one occasion; perhaps the Gestapo already knew he’d approached the Resistance. And I had a contact there, Lionel Barbier, who’d told me to call him if I needed anything, anything at all.

I prayed I was right when I sensed that he was anti-Vichy.

Joan and I had arranged to meet for lunch at the drugstore on the corner, but I arrived early, sliding onto a stool at the soda counter. I ordered a Coke and a grilled-cheese sandwich from the soda jerk.

Joan joined me. She looked uncharacteristically tired. Black circles rimmed her eyes.

‘I’m not all that hungry,’ she told the soda jerk, ordering vegetable soup. That was odd, too. She usually ate a cheeseburger, French fries and a vanilla milkshake, with gusto.

‘Look, Louise,’ she said, then stopped.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Nothing.’

‘What’s wrong, Joan? Are you okay?’

‘Why is it I’m always attracted to the wrong men?’ she said.

‘Like who?’ I asked, knowing what she would answer.

‘Charles Burns,’ she said. ‘The creep.’

I thought he was a creep, too, but I wondered how she’d come to that conclusion.

‘I ran into him outside my hotel last night and suggested we have dinner together. He accepted, we had a good time I thought – hell, I even picked up the check, since I’d asked him. You know what? He didn’t even walk me upstairs to my room! Much less kiss me goodnight.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘How rude.’

I didn’t tell her that Charles had made a pass at me minutes after he’d turned her down after that afternoon we’d spent at her apartment.

‘If you were a man, and some girl was making a fool out of herself over you, wouldn’t you be a gentleman and tell her you weren’t interested, instead of accepting bridge and dinner invitations?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I would.’ Perhaps Burns thought a connection to General Donovan’s secretary might be useful to him, I thought, but I kept that to myself.

‘I think he’s interested in you,’ Joan said.

‘What?’

‘He asked me lots of questions about you. Don’t be surprised if he calls.’

‘I wouldn’t go out with him if he were the last man on earth,’ I said. I suspected that Burns was after sexual adventure, not marriage. He couldn’t seduce Joan, she was wealthy, from a prominent family who could damage his career, and besides, Joan would expect an engagement before Charles got her in bed. Me, on the other hand, I was an insignificant widow; who would care if he lured me into an affair? No one would expect him to marry me, and having already surrendered my virginity, I was past ruination.