Louise's War (25 page)

I yawned in reply.

I didn’t even think of looking at the documents I’d stolen. I was too exhausted. I stripped, tossing my clothes into a pile on a chair, threw on a nightdress and dropped onto the bed, falling into a sound sleep.

When I awoke the next morning sunlight blazed into my room. I glanced at my alarm clock. It was ten o’clock! I couldn’t remember when I’d last slept this late. I had so much to do. I got out of bed and dressed quickly, in trousers, a red-checked shirt and rope sandals. I slipped down the stairs, starving and thirsty. I heard voices on the porch, but thankfully no one noticed me. I didn’t want to deal with anyone yet today.

A pan of biscuits and a pot of hot coffee sat on the stove. I poured a cup of coffee, grabbed a biscuit and crept back upstairs. I could hardly wait to see what I’d brought back from the Vichy French embassy.

After I returned to my bedroom, for a minute I thought my pocketbook, with the purloined documents inside, was missing. My heart thudded, and my imagination instantly pictured either Ada or Joe as foreign spies. Then I caught sight of a corner of my bag sticking out from under the pile of clothes I’d tossed onto a chair last night before going to sleep. I took a huge, deep breath of relief, and reached for the bag.

I sat on my bed with my handbag’s contents spread out neatly before me. One paper I recognized was a photostat of Bloch’s request for an American visa in 1940, thank God. I couldn’t reconstruct the file without it. There was another photostat of a single-spaced memo in German, with the SS crest on the letterhead. The predatory eagle perched on top of a swastika gave me the creeps. Since I couldn’t read German I had no idea what it said.

The only document in French was a short typewritten note on Vichy French letterhead. I fetched Milt Jr.’s French dictionary.

The gist of the note was that Gerald Bloch was a valuable resource on the hydrography of the North African coast, and that by no means was he to be issued an exit visa.

I added the documents Joan and Metcalfe gave me to the papers I’d stolen from the embassy. I now had two copies of Donovan’s memo and the translation of the Resistance contact’s note, reprints of Bloch’s scholarly articles I’d gotten from Metcalfe, the ones whose titles I’d translated at the public library, Metcalfe’s photograph of himself, Bloch, Rachel, Burns and others in a pub in Edinburgh in 1936, two programs from the 1936 hydrographic conference in Edinburgh, one of the 1939 conference in DC, which Bloch did not attend, a photostat of Bloch’s visa request in 1940 identical to the one in my original file, the Vichy French letter and the SS memo.

I had all the documents I needed to reconstruct a file, an even more complete file than the original, in fact, for me to ‘find’ at work tomorrow, a thought that made the hair on my neck prickle and sweat bead on my upper lip.

I had no intention of telling OSS that Gerald was no longer with his family. Gerald’s original request was to rescue his family, not him, and free him to help the Allies. If OSS knew Gerald had already joined the Resistance, there’d be no need to help his family escape.

Then I realized I couldn’t include the Gestapo document in Bloch’s new file. If the original file had contained it, I would certainly have mentioned it to Don after its loss. Besides, I didn’t know what it said, although I could guess, and if I got caught smuggling it into OSS, I could never explain how I came into possession of it.

I decided to recreate the original file with a set of Joan’s carbons, the journal reprints, the Edinburgh photograph, the visa request and copies of both the 1936 and 1939 conference programs. If this didn’t convince the Project Committee to extract Bloch’s family from Marseille I didn’t know what would. Would they even have time? I knew the Gestapo would arrive in Marseille on Tuesday – God, that was only two days away!

What to do with the extra documents? Burn them? I chewed on a pencil. What else could I do to improve Rachel’s chances of escape? Again I tried to convince myself this quest of mine wasn’t just personal. Bloch appeared to be an important person who could play a critical role in the coming invasion of North Africa. If he knew that his family was safe, he would be free to help the allies. I didn’t know who in the office took advantage of Bob Holman’s death to steal the file, and I didn’t know whom to trust. That left me with the responsibility to do something, anything.

A knock on my door startled me.

‘Honey,’ Ada said. ‘You awake? Dinner’s ready.’

Sunday dinner was important to our little jerry-rigged family. Phoebe insisted on preserving this bit of pre-war civilization, even though she and Dellaphine were the only ones in the house who attended church regularly. Dellaphine always cooked us a hot meal, although we’d have been happy with much less. Most boarding houses didn’t offer Sunday meals, so all over the city folks were making Spam sandwiches for themselves.

When Phoebe and Dellaphine brought in platters of fried chicken and sliced tomatoes, bowls of mashed potatoes and butter beans, and pitchers of iced tea and lemonade, I realized I was hungry. I hadn’t had a full meal since lunch the day before.

‘How was the pool party?’ Ada asked me.

‘Oh,’ I said, lying extravagantly, ‘it was swell. The Wardman pool is in the shade, so the water was cool. We had cocktails and my friend who lives there barbecued steaks and corn on the cob.’

‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ Ada said. ‘You must have stayed late.’

She wasn’t pumping me, I didn’t think, but her questioning made me apprehensive.

‘After the pool closed we went to my friend’s apartment and listened to the radio,’ I said.

‘What program?’ Joe asked.

Was he pumping me, too? He wasn’t looking at me, instead regarding his forkful of butter beans quizzically, as he often did American food, before eating it.

‘There was a Gershwin program on, then
American Hit Parade
,’ I said. Thank goodness I’d looked at the newspaper before leaving yesterday. ‘And thanks, everyone, for leaving me some ice cream. It was delicious.’

‘You’re more than welcome,’ Phoebe said. ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it.’

‘You’ll have to take an extra turn cranking the next time we make it,’ Henry said.

‘Done,’ I said.

Joe pushed his plate away.

‘Don’t get up yet,’ Phoebe said. ‘Dellaphine has a surprise for you all.’

Phoebe and Ada took our plates back to the kitchen and came back with dessert plates and forks, followed closely by Dellaphine, beaming, with a peach pie.

‘I had all these peaches left over from the ice cream,’ she said, slicing the pie carefully into equal slices and placing them on plates. Henry finished his before she was through dishing up the rest. Joe ate slowly and deliberately, and I followed suit.

‘Will there be any sugar left for the rest of this month?’ Ada asked.

‘Peach pie don’t take much sugar,’ Dellaphine said. ‘Besides, we already used most of our ration in the ice cream.’

‘Worth every grain,’ I said.

‘I hope you and Madeleine saved some of this for yourselves,’ Joe said, rounding up crumbs from the piecrust with his fork for a final tiny mouthful.

‘We made us a little tart from the extra fruit and pastry,’ Dellaphine said. ‘We’re going to have it with our coffee after we clean the kitchen.’

‘I’ll help you,’ I said.

The words slipped out of my mouth. I wasn’t sure who looked the most shocked, Phoebe, Henry, Ada or Dellaphine. Joe smiled behind his hand, like he always did when amused by American customs. For a minute I was astonished, too. Had I just offered to help the colored cook clean up the kitchen?

I folded my napkin and left it at my place.

‘Since I didn’t crank,’ I said, ‘and you saved me ice cream, it’s the least I can do.’ I helped Phoebe and Dellaphine clear the table, and went back into the kitchen. Phoebe gave me a perplexed look before she left and went to join the others in the sitting room. Madeleine, who was scraping food scraps from our plates into a bowl to take out to the chickens, stopped to watch me put on an apron and pick up a dish towel.

‘I’ll dry,’ I said, as Dellaphine plunged her hands into a sink full of suds and dirty dishes. We worked quickly, talking about the weather and war news, and not how I was helping them with the dishes. When we were done I hung up my apron and went upstairs, ostensibly to take a nap.

When I got to my room I met Ada coming out of it.

TWENTY

‘
H
i, dearie,’ she said, ‘I borrowed some face cream, hope you don’t mind.’ She had my blue jar of Pond’s in her hand. I was surprised that she would go into my room alone, and it must have shown on my face, because she quickly apologized.

‘You were busy downstairs, and I just ducked in,’ she said. ‘I want a bath, and I couldn’t find my own cream.’

That seemed unlikely to me. The woman had enough creams and lotions scattered around her room to moisturize a battalion of WACS. I put on an unconcerned face.

‘Of course, Ada, you can borrow anything you like.’

She crossed the hall to the bathroom. Ada did have a towel and robe with her, I noted, but if she were a German spy, she would be prepared to back up her bath story.

Ada a German spy, what nonsense. My imagination was working overtime.

I went into my room and closed the door, leaning against it. What an idiot I had been not to lock my room when I went down to dinner, with all those papers spread out over the bed. We usually did lock our rooms, Phoebe insisted, but on the weekends, when we were all in the house together, it didn’t seem so necessary.

I sat down on my bed and crossed my legs. The papers seemed undisturbed, thank God. And the German memo was face down, so the Nazi letterhead wasn’t visible. If Ada had caught sight of that while crossing the room she would surely have stopped and looked at it, anybody would. I couldn’t remember turning the memo on its face, but I must have done, mustn’t I?

I put Ada out of my mind and concentrated on the task at hand. I began by leafing through the programs for the 1936 and 1939 hydrological conferences. I’m not sure why I took the 1939 program from Metcalfe, since Bloch didn’t attend, but maybe I could use it to illustrate the importance of hydrography to the war effort. I scanned the 1939 document. Our own Charles Burns had made quite a bit of academic progress in the years between the two conferences. In 1936 he and Metcalfe together had presented ‘An Analysis of Recent African Atlases’. Three years later, in 1939, Burns alone offered ‘Mediterranean Sea Circulation and the Algerian Gyres’. No wonder he’d been recruited to the OSS Map Division. But something about that title rang a distant bell in my head.

I turned to Bloch’s journal reprints. I’d roughly translated their titles in the library after getting them from Metcalfe, on the same day that I saw those awful pictures in
Life
.

For a few minutes I could hardly breathe, much less think. At last I understood exactly what had happened to the original Bloch file. The implications of the discovery stunned me. Gerald Bloch might well be a valuable Resistance recruit, but his file wasn’t stolen for political reasons. The thief who capitalized on Bob Holman’s death to steal Bloch’s file had a purely personal motive.

If I had looked closely at the 1939 conference program, as soon as I’d got it from Marvin Metcalfe at our second meeting, I would have known who stole Bloch’s file before I even thought of breaking into the Vichy embassy.

I still had to figure out how to help Rachel. I hadn’t risked my career, maybe my freedom, involved Joan and Dora, to stop plotting now.

I decided what to do with the ‘extra’ documents. I folded a carbon of the Resistance note, the SS memo and one of the 1936 conference programs into an envelope, tucked it into my pocket book and went downstairs to find Joe.

Thank God he was alone in the lounge. ‘I can’t sleep,’ I said to him. ‘It’s too hot. I think I’ll walk down to the park and sit under the trees in the shade for a while. Maybe get a Coke on the way. Want to come?’

Joe looked up from the Sunday newspaper. ‘Sure,’ he said.

We stopped at the filling station on the corner and got two ice-cold Cokes out of the red chest refrigerator.

The first shady park bench we passed was occupied by a sleeping GI who must have missed the last Saturday night bus to Fort Myers. He clutched an empty bourbon bottle and a paper lunch bag with a USO label to his chest, snoring. We didn’t disturb him. He was already AWOL and another couple of hours wouldn’t make a difference to his sergeant.

We picked a bench under a cherry tree, its blossoms long gone, leaves limp with thirst, and watched the traffic go by on Pennsylvania Avenue.

‘Before the war this city would be quiet on a Sunday,’ I said. ‘No traffic, no restaurants open, that filling station where we got our drinks would be closed. Doing anything except going to church was sacrilege.’

‘I wasn’t living here then,’ Joe said. ‘This has been my only experience with the States. It’s like a beehive. Even London is quieter.’

‘I wonder what life will be like after the war,’ I said. ‘It can’t return to the way it was.’

‘You have more hope of that here than we do in Europe,’ Joe said.

‘Joe,’ I said, summoning all the courage I had, ‘I need to talk to you about something. Or rather, someone.’

Joe pulled out his pipe and began the ritual of loading, lighting and smoking it by knocking it on the corner of the bench to loosen the ash.

‘All right,’ he said.

I withdrew the precious envelope from my purse, turning it around and around in my hands while I talked.

‘I saw you on Friday,’ I said, ‘when you went into that house with the black door.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he answered, drawing on his pipe, very calmly, I thought, under the circumstances.

‘I was on my way home from an errand at George Washington University. You went into an unmarked house. I believe that’s where you work.’