A Covert Affair (14 page)

Their instant camaraderie was rooted in shared intellectual passion. They could talk for hours about art, books, and politics, and she could more than hold her own on any topic. She was still curious about life and had the gusto and force of character he admired in a woman. He found her an immensely attractive, talented, and stimulating person, despite her various eccentricities. Shortly after arriving, she had rescued a tiny chipmunk, which had fallen out of a tree; improvised an incubator; and lovingly nursed it with milk administered with an eyedropper.
She called it Christopher and carried it around in her pocket. She's “a fine sort,” Paul assured his brother. “She adores animals and people, draws with great style, and is worldly and often witty.”

Deeply fastidious by nature, his behavior modified at all times by a certain discipline and sense of decorum, Paul could not help but marvel at the breathtaking spectacle Jane made of herself. She was a lusty, independent creature, the sort who spooned her soup too noisily, slept outside because she loved the smell of the flowers, and clambered on top of an elephant with the gleeful abandon of a toddler mounting a rocking horse. Her capriciousness, like that of a spontaneous child, was both disarming and slightly alarming. To illustrate his point, Paul wrote of a “typical Janie gambit”:

She began telling me about a dinner-party she went to last night, starting with a wild spate of description, about the middle of the evening, not identifying anybody, with loose narrative threads flying all over the place. I said, “For God's sake Janie, wait a minute. Go back to the beginning and give me the full history.”
“Oh,”
says she, in a heavy Russian accent,
“so you vant the story of my laif? Vell, mister, I vasn't always a prostitoot …”
And I got ten minutes of charming and funny
histoire
, invented on the spot, and growing by leaps as she got her mind into the new idea. This, while she sat on the bed, skirts up to her hips, a chipmunk sitting on her shoulder, and drinking from a bottle of 3.2 beer.

In the meantime, various men dropped by Jane's room, including a young Malaysian who apparently spoke no English and a strapping Australian flight lieutenant whom “she had apparently collected somewhere or other in the last week.” While they endeavored to have a conversation in a pastiche of Malay, English, Australian Cockney, and, of course, her faux Russian, a steady stream of servants came in bearing cups and teapots and black-market scotch, apparently procurable at five minutes' notice from the Malay doorman downstairs. All around them lay dozens of Jane's ink drawings spread out to dry, covering every
surface and a good part of the floor, along with half-written letters, blouses, negligees, and other intimate gear tossed carelessly about the room. “The funny mistress of five or six accents,” Jane regaled them all with the story of her dinner party, successively taking the part of a lecherous old Oxonian who was trying to pinch her bottom, a drunk Ceylonese official, and a dry old colonial widow with a lorgnette. She topped off her performance by claiming that by the end of the dinner, pretending to be drunk herself, she shocked them “with descriptions of her early life (this in a thick brogue) in a family of 15 Irish in which the mother fought over the back of the fence with another lady.”

Paul was alternately drawn to and repelled by her whimsicality and wantonness. At heart, he knew himself to be far too shipshape a personality to put up with such prodigality for long. They were such opposites that any initial spark of sexual attraction he may have felt soon faded, though a certain fascination remained. To Paul, marooned in Ceylon, starved of company and conversation, Jane was like the circus coming to a remote town. She restored his good humor and revived his spirits. While he found their rundown hotel, with its incompetent staff and terrible service (“they make you wait three days for toilet paper and soap!”) wildly infuriating, she dubbed it “SNAFU Mansions” and laughed at its inadequacies. Similarly, the British-dominated war zone's thickets of red tape that drove him to distraction, to say nothing of the “the stupid, arrogant, stubborn” stiffs the British called officers, were for her a source of endless amusement. For all her flightiness, there was seemingly nothing she could not get done by sleight of hand or obtain, if occasionally at shocking black-market prices. She always knew exactly whom to cajole, bully, or bribe. When in a particularly black mood he decided to demand a raise from the OSS, it was Jane who helped him craft “a masterpiece of a memo,” having at some time in her the past made “a special study of the loopholes, strictures, and legal verbiage of the Civil Service.”

Even in the narrow confines of the camp and hotel, she regularly managed some mischief. Every other day brought a new Janie escapade, another epic triumph or near disaster. The whole chaotic comedy of her life, he wrote his brother, was enormously diverting:

Yesterday her chipmunk fell out of the hotel window onto the slanting iron roof over the servants' quarters, one story below. This roof is about forty feet above the ground but she was out of the window like a flash and down the drainpipe to the roof, her mind wholly on her pet. Picture to yourself the horror of the several stodgy British military characters who, hearing an unwonted scrabbling and clucking on the roof, looked out, and there saw Janie on all fours, a banana in each fist (for bait), chasing a squirrel, and alternately cursing and cooing in English and Malay. She's the type who finds herself in such crazy situations all the time, as if by some Natural Law.

A few days later, as they were leaving the dining room, Christopher escaped from her pocket and disappeared under Stratemeyer's table. Jane, in hot pursuit, dove under the table and, not seeing her precious pet, started feeling up the general's pant leg. Stratemeyer ducked his head under the tablecloth and demanded,
“Young lady, may I ask
what
you are doing?”
Grinning like an embarrassed schoolgirl, she replied, “Looking for my chipmunk, General.” Just then she spied the little devil cowering by his shoe, crammed it in her pocket, and rushed from the room. After that, she stopped carrying Christopher around, and locked it in her office at night, where she made it a bed out of a typewriter cover.

Jane had a long history of such misadventures. She liked to tell the story of how she ended up babysitting a nine-week-old panda in Shanghai, going to absurd lengths to make sure the little black-and-white bundle of fur was out safely of harm's way. The bear belonged to Mrs. William Harvest Harkness Jr., a wealthy American socialite whose explorer husband had captured it during an expedition in western Szechuan province and planned to sell it to Chicago's Brookfield Zoo for a large sum of money. Her husband then died, leaving her to complete the mission. The problem was, Ruth Harkness had taken ill and needed someone to help take care of the cub, which she named Su-Lin, Chinese for
“a little bit of something cute,”
and kept in a wicker laundry basket in the corner of her room at the Palace Hotel. The other
problem, according to Jane, was that Mrs. Harkness needed to keep a low profile,
“as it was forbidden, even in those days, to export pandas from China, although it was probably the best known ‘secret' in all of China at the time.”
Naturally, Jane volunteered to give the baby panda its bottle and burp it by walking up and down the hotel room and repeatedly slapping it on the back. Every time the cub belched, Jane recalled,
“Mrs. Harkness would emit a croak, ‘Thank God,' and fall back on her pillows.”
Eventually the lady was well enough to travel, and with the help of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who, in return for what Jane suspected was a hefty commission, helped smuggle the small creature out of the country.
*

Julia, too, found Jane's stories
“fascinating,”
and she looked up to her adventurous friend despite her occasionally “scatterbrained” behavior.
“She was terribly funny,”
said Julia. “All kinds of ridiculous things would happen to her. Everyone adored her because she was just so amusing.”

It did not take Jane long to become a popular figure in Kandy. She had a special faculty for making friends in high places, so that almost at once she seemed to know all sorts of important people in both the American and British commands. She was the only female member of their OSS unit to be honored with an engraved invitation to one of Mountbatten's elegant dinner-jacket affairs. Lord Louis and his staff had taken over the King's Pavilion, a delightful miniature white palace that had been the summer residence of the colonial governors. The royal residence had originally been built in 1829 for Mountbatten's godmother, Queen Victoria, in the event she graced the island with a visit. (She never did.) Famous for its airy style and the graceful proportions of its architecture, from the regular colonnades to the wide, graveled drive that led to its imposing arched entranceway, it was said to be the finest structure in all Ceylon. The manor house was surrounded
by ornamental gardens and extensive grounds, including a golf course that went down to the sea, and save for an array of flags and a few military trappings appeared to be a throwback to the heyday of British colonialism. The fast-growing HQ was informally laid out along roads named Fleet Street, Ludgate Circus, Times Square, and Broadway to reflect the Anglo-American spirit of the enterprise, with a lavish array of thatched messes, clubhouses, and living quarters situated along the banks of a river. The supreme commander—“Supremo” in the local shorthand—had arrived at his idyllic new headquarters that April, and he had immediately decreed Kandy
“probably the most beautiful spot in the world.”

The OSS bashas were just beyond Mountbatten's gardens. The juxtaposition of the two headquarters provided a ready-made drama for Jane quite apart from the war itself, and she reveled in the expertly contrived entertainment. The admiral's fledgling command was already earning quite a reputation for luxury and high living and had come under fire from the home office for its extravagance. There was the small matter of carving an airstrip out of Kandy's misty mountains, and the staff—Mountbatten had originally planned to make do with 4,100—was reportedly growing by leaps and bounds. (The final tally would be nearly 10,000.) Drawn mostly from British aristocracy, they were an impossibly well-groomed lot in their trim khaki uniforms and could be seen coming and going in their shiny staff cars or saluting in stiff parades worthy of Buckingham Palace.
“Lovely Louis,”
Jane recalled, using the American general's nickname for him, “liked to be surrounded by handsome men and beautiful women.” The women, many of them titled, were mostly WRNS or FANNYs—members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps. The latter outfit, according to Jane, was ostensibly an aid organization dating back to World War I but had, over the years, become an auxiliary of British intelligence. Hence, beware of beautiful FANNYs!

Despite her anticolonial prejudices, which shone through in her constant mocking of the declining empire and her Marxist cracks about
“the mangy British lion,”
Jane was allowed entrée into their social enclave. She was the only American invited to join their Shakespeare
group, and at their amateur theatricals the British would roll in the aisles at her pronunciation of words like “clerk” and “Berkeley.” She met Mountbatten on several occasions and considered him the most charming man she had ever met, recalling,
“He had the great and wonderful gift, during conversation, of making you feel that all his life he had been waiting for your pearls of wisdom, and he was sincere, for the moment at least.”
Perhaps it all came down to her being such a determined flirt, but as a result of her close contacts among the khaki-clad set she knew more about what was really going on than almost anyone on the island. Guy Martin, another Donovan lawyer turned OSS lieutenant, was not surprised at Jane's progress. She was
“the jolliest girl on land and sea,”
he said, and “the only Communist with a sense of humor.”

Every morning at eight sharp, Paul, dressed like a British major in shorts and an open-neck bush jacket with rolled sleeves, herded them into a weapons carrier outside the Queen's Hotel, which ferried them to the OSS camp. Their little group usually included Jane, Julia, her roommate Peachy, Cora, Ellie, Gregory Bateson, and a gaggle of secretaries. Bateson, whom Jane once accused of
“having a genius for making the obvious obscure,”
was a rather batty, absent-minded English academic. Moose-tall and gangly, he had a huge head and sparse hair, and went about in a pair of abbreviated American shorts, his sadly inadequate wool stockings bunched around his ankles. He was not only an Oxford PhD but had lived for years in remote regions with native tribes, and had absorbed altogether too much of their habits and cultures. He was forever urging them to go crocodile hunting, and spoke with nostalgia of this great sport, having last indulged in it in some far-off section of Sumatra. He reminisced about
“bagging the beasts”
in very deliberate, richly accented English, which Paul described as a cross between
“an Oxford don and the-visitor-from-Mars.”
Julia had quite a crush on him, but it may simply have been because at six foot six he was one of the few men who towered over her.

While in Ceylon, Bateson came up with the bright idea of turning the great Irrawaddy River in Burma a putrid shade of yellow. The Irrawaddy, a mighty river some thirteen hundred miles long, was a way into Burma and of great strategic importance. He had stumbled across
a Burmese legend that, roughly translated, promised,
“When the waters of the Irrawaddy turned as yellow as the
pongyis
' [monks'] robes, the foreign enemy will leave Burma.”
While the “foreign enemy” in the legend was almost certainly the British, Bateson was confident that the term could apply to the Japanese as well. Used as part of an MO whisper campaign, he argued, the ghostly yellow river would be a sure sign to the superstitious Burmese that the Japanese had to go and would incite insurrection. He applied for and received permission from P Division (originally the Paranormal and Psychic Phenomena Division of Naval Intelligence, it became the covert psychological unit of OSS, code-named “Delta Green”) and with great difficulty procured several cans of a yellow oil designed to create “slick smears” for downed planes trying to attract rescue teams. Just before arranging for the Air Force to drop the dye into the river, he tried pouring a sample of the stuff into his bathwater to see how it worked. It immediately sank to the bottom of the tub, producing no telltale smear. Unfortunately, on closer inspection, the instructions on the can read:
“For use in salt water only.”