Louise's Dilemma (16 page)

Ordinarily, I would have jumped to spend time alone with him. Instead I recoiled – not visibly, thank God, but emotionally. I was so surprised by my response that I had to grip the stair banister for support.

‘It’s late,’ I said, glancing up the staircase.

A flicker of disappointment showed in Joe’s eyes, then disappeared. ‘You must be very tired,’ he said.

‘Yes, I am.’

Hand in hand we went up the staircase until we reached the first landing, where we’d part: me to my second-floor bedroom, and Joe to climb another flight to his third-floor attic room.

He leaned over and kissed me, his soft beard caressing my cheek.

‘Tomorrow we’ll be together all night,’ he said softly into my ear. ‘I’m living for it.’

‘Me, too,’ I said, as my knees turned to jelly. Oh my God, it was tomorrow! Our first weekend in the houseboat!

Later, when I lay awake in the deep cold dark, clutching my pillow as if it was a life preserver, I faced the truth. I wasn’t just nervous about having an affair with Joe. I was afraid.

Despite Joe’s affection for me, and mine for him, I was alone in this little escapade. No one would care that he was shacked up with me. But I … I was terribly vulnerable.

I depended on my job for everything that had become vital to me. My independence, my own money, never living in my parents’ back bedroom ever again.

I never had to marry again if I didn’t want to. I made my own decisions.

But I was a government girl with Top Secret clearance at the Office of Strategic Services, America’s spy agency, involved, even if sometimes my work seemed deadly dull, with critical espionage documents. If it was known that I was having an affair with a Czech refugee I could lose my job.

Joe’s work with the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish charity that struggled to help European Jews survive and escape the tragedies that overwhelmed them, had once been legitimate and overt. But since war had been officially declared, all Allied companies and organizations had been forbidden to operate in Europe. So the JDC was now a covert agency too.

If Collins decided to ‘report’ my relationship with Joe to OSS, I couldn’t help but think my new life would be over. I could probably explain a friendship with a fellow boarder, but not an affair. Sex and love raised the possibility of pillow talk, blabbed secrets, or even blackmail.

And I was expendable. Just another government girl. One who sometimes fooled herself that she could work in the field successfully. Who tried to find danger in a simple innocuous postcard so she could stay out of an oppressive file room for another day or two. Who’d alienated two men who would undoubtedly be considered more valuable than she was.

No wonder I was frightened.

I
waited on a corner for Joe, about halfway to his office but out of my way. I’d ducked out of the house early, pleading the need to get to my office, so that I could intercept him here.

I spotted him immediately in the crowd of war workers streaming east, despite the fact that everyone was bundled up to their eyebrows in scarves and hats. Joe had one of those fur hats that I called a ‘Cossack’ hat, with flaps that covered his ears. It looked like his grandfather had herded sheep in it, it was so old and moth-eaten. That hat, a deeply creased leather briefcase and cheap resoled shoes were important parts of his threadbare professorial cover story.

‘Good morning,’ I said, reaching out to him and taking his arm.

‘Why, Louise,’ he said, taking my arm in his, ‘what on earth are you doing here?’

‘I need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘In private.’

‘Of course. Let’s go into that café, the breakfast rush is over.’

We unwrapped layers of coats, scarfs, and gloves, piled them all on a chair, and ordered coffee.

‘I should have thought of this,’ Joe said, after the waitress brought us our order. ‘We need to plan for tonight. We should leave separately for the houseboat. What time do you think you can get away from work? Should I get us some food, or do you want to risk going out to dinner?’

I managed to keep myself from taking both his hands in mine. ‘Darling Joe,’ I said, ‘I’m not coming.’

He flinched as though I had struck him, and I felt tears welling up behind my eyes.

He searched for an explanation that wouldn’t be painful. ‘Something’s come up,’ he said. ‘Work. You’ve got to go out of town again. I understand.’

‘No. I’ve decided, well …’ I forgot my speech, and could only squeak out, ‘I can’t be with you like that.’

‘Louise, darling,’ he said, ‘I’m not free to marry, we’ve talked about this.’

‘You think I’m trying to pressure you into marriage? You think I would do that? I don’t want to get married either.’

‘Then what has happened?’

I told him, and there was no way to avoid the harsh truth. I cared more about protecting my job and my new life in Washington than consummating our love affair.

‘You’ve given this a lot of thought,’ he said.

‘If only I could have you and feel safe,’ I said. ‘But I can’t. I can’t bear the thought of going back to the way my life was before the war.’

‘I see. You came to this conclusion rather late, didn’t you? You couldn’t have decided this a few weeks ago?’

‘When we ran into Collins last night ice-skating is when I first realized the chance I was taking. The man dislikes me and would like revenge. And there might be others.’

Joe leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. ‘I’m taking a risk, too,’ he said, ‘in my work. We do so much that’s illegal now.’

‘But what would happen to you if an affair became public?’ I said.

‘I expect I would get transferred to the New York office. Or maybe Lisbon.’

‘Exactly. You would be transferred. I could be fired.’

I was speaking normally, but tears trickled hotly down my cheeks. Joe wasn’t crying, but he looked stricken, and dark shadows cut deeply into his face.

‘Fine,’ he said. And then he got up and left. Leaving me alone.

I waited until I was sure he was on his way, sipping at the bitter dregs of my coffee. My eyes stung from the effort to keep from crying.

The waitress stopped by our table with the bill. ‘He’s not worth it, honey,’ she said.

‘Oh, I think he might be,’ I said.

I bundled up and left, turning down the nearest alley, almost running to the end of it before spewing onto a pile of filthy ice.

‘Are you all right?’ Joan asked. She was at the counter, turning in file request slips for General Donovan, when I got to work.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I broke it off with Joe.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but it was the right thing to do.’

‘Well,’ I said, stripping off my coat, scarf, hat and gloves, ‘it’s done.’

Back at my desk I drew on my fingerless gloves and took the first document from my inbox to read and summarize. It was a complex job, and by the time I was done with my synopsis it took up three index cards.

I went to file the index cards and tossed the document itself on Ruth’s cart. Ruth pushed back a straggling hair, her hands heavily bandaged.

‘I wonder if I will ever do anything other than this again,’ she said. ‘I dream about the alphabet at night. Just a year ago my biggest worry in life was if a rich Yale man would invite me to the Heart Ball and whether my mother would let me borrow her sable coat.’

On a quick break I found the one public telephone we were allowed to use and called the courthouse in Frederick, Maryland. It turned out that the chief clerk was a woman who introduced herself as Linda Sundt.

‘I’m looking for a marriage license,’ I said, ‘and whatever supporting documents might be filed with it.’

‘I can pull the license for you,’ she said, ‘but I can’t give you any information over the phone. You’ll have to come to the office to see it.’

‘But I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m working in Washington.’

‘If you can get here tomorrow morning I’ll be here. We’re on a forty-eight-hour work week now, like the President said, “fight or work”.’

Why not? I could drive to Prince Frederick tomorrow morning. I was sure Phoebe would let me use her car. It wasn’t like we didn’t have jerry cans of gasoline sitting around the garage! I could fill up the car and stash another can in the trunk. It would be good to get out too, instead of moping around the boarding house.

I hadn’t thought of what it would be like to live in the same house with Joe now. I wondered if one of us would have to move. It would be almost impossible to find another room in the city. But how could we share space in the house together? I’d need to stay in my cold room by myself.

‘I’ll do my best to be there tomorrow,’ I said.

‘I’ll pull the file. What’s the name?’

‘Martin,’ I said. ‘Richard Martin and Anne Venter.’

‘I remember where I know you from,’ Agent Gray Williams said.

He was waiting for me outside the door to the OSS cafeteria wearing an OSS visitor’s badge.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘I don’t remember you.’

‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘It was last summer. You were dating a man from the Vichy French embassy, and I had to warn you to stay away from foreigners. Don’t worry, I don’t fault you for not reminding me. It can’t be pleasant for a woman to remember her mistakes.’

I felt so worn out and jaded, I didn’t even get angry. ‘I took your advice,’ I said. ‘I avoid men with accents at all costs now.’

‘Smart girl. Listen, let me take you to lunch. My boss says I can brief you on the Martin murder. We’ve arrested Dennis Keeler.’

‘The ferryman? Has he confessed?’

‘Of course not, it’s a capital crime.’

Only to hear more about the Martins would I spend another second in this man’s company.

We found an empty booth at the café across the street, ordering coffee, open-faced turkey sandwiches with gravy, mashed potatoes and peas. The peas were canned, but the turkey and gravy were hot and tasted homemade.

‘Remember when Constable Long insisted we leave the Cooke farmhouse so he could talk to Frank? Well, Frank told him everything. He, Leroy Martin and Dennis Keeler had been smuggling beef to a butcher in Alexandria.’

‘Selling it for more than the established price,’ I said.

‘Exactly. Then the butcher sold the prime cuts for a fortune and disguised the lesser cuts as prime, too. Long didn’t tell us because he figured it was a local crime, none of our business. He’d warn them off, and that would be the end of it.’

‘Until I found Leroy Martin’s body.’

‘Yeah, that was something Long didn’t expect, for sure.’

Williams gestured for the waitress. ‘Do you have any dessert?’ he asked her. ‘Real dessert, not Jell-O.’

She hesitated. Williams showed her his FBI identification.

‘I can find you a slice of coconut cake,’ she said.

Williams glanced at me questioningly.

‘None for me,’ I said. ‘I’m not very hungry.’

‘Anyway,’ Williams said, ‘Frank came home from the naval base a couple of nights a week. He and Leroy butchered one of Frank’s beeves in the tobacco barn. The FBI lab verified the blood on the floor was bovine, by the way.

‘Frank and Leroy dressed the carcass, threw the waste into the Patuxent, loaded up Leroy’s truck with the beef, and hauled it to Dennis’s ferry landing. Dennis met them and ferried them across the river so they could avoid the main roads. For a price. He wasn’t a full partner. Then Leroy and Frank drove the beef to the butcher in Alexandria and both got back home in time for breakfast.’

I drew patterns in my leftover gravy with my fork, until I remembered my table manners and placed it correctly on the side of my plate. Sometimes I wished I could smoke; it seemed to soothe my friends wonderfully.

‘There must be hundreds of people doing the same thing all over the country,’ I said. ‘Mostly obeying the law, but not quite. But they don’t murder each other.’

‘Ah,’ said Williams. ‘Here’s where the plot thickens. After you found Leroy’s body, Constable Long told me what Frank had confided to him. It seems that two of them were considering quitting. Both Leroy and Frank were worried about the strict penalties attached to the new rationing laws. Then, when you and Collins, and then me, showed up at the Martin cottage with questions about the postcard from Leroy’s cousin in France, they got really rattled. Not about the postcard itself, but about all the attention they were getting from the government. Anne was pressuring Leroy, too.’

‘Did Anne know about the smuggling?’

The waitress brought Williams’s cake, a big enough piece for two people. He stabbed at it with his fork.

‘She says not, just that she knew Leroy was doing something he shouldn’t. Anyway, Dennis was furious. The money was so good, and he wanted a bigger piece of the action for himself. He owned a truck, but it was up on blocks because he didn’t have the money to fix it. Frank told Constable Long that Dennis was going to ask Leroy for a loan, and then they could double the business. I figure that Leroy said no, so Dennis killed him. Maybe he figured he could take Leroy’s place.’

In between bites of cake Williams told me the rest of the story.

While I was discovering Leroy’s body and freeing Anne from the shed, Long and Williams searched for Dennis to question him about the smuggling operation. He wasn’t at home – in fact his wife was furious because several paying customers had driven up to the landing who had to be sent away because her son couldn’t operate the ferry by himself.

She directed Williams and Long to Dennis’s favorite bar, but he wasn’t there. Nor was he at the café drinking coffee and griping.

Their search was interrupted when I found Leroy’s body and they were called to the scene. Anne couldn’t identify her assailant; she insisted he had grabbed her from behind and blindfolded her with her scarf. No, she hadn’t noticed his clothing, or his height, or anything else about him.

Anne wasn’t surprised to learn that Leroy had been smuggling beef, nor that he and Dennis had been arguing over the past few days. She didn’t like Dennis, she said; she felt he was a bad influence on her husband.

Williams scraped up every last crumb from his cake plate.

‘It was Frank who finally found Dennis, in a roundabout way,’ Williams said. ‘He saw lights in his old tobacco barn and called Constable Long. When we got there Dennis was wrapped up in canvas to keep warm and most of the way through a bottle of cheap bourbon.’