Louise's Dilemma (3 page)

‘Maybe he’s staying with a friend,’ Ada said.

‘He would have called,’ I said, remembering the morning newspaper’s account of two frozen bodies found sitting upright on a bus stop bench a couple of days ago. ‘Is the telephone still working?’

Henry went out into the hall and picked up the telephone receiver. ‘Dial tone,’ he called back to us as he hung up. ‘It’s working.’ So why didn’t Joe call?

Then we heard Joe’s key turn in the front door lock and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

Phoebe and I met him in the hall.

‘Well, this is a nice welcome,’ Joe said in his Czech accented English, which I found so appealing in spite of myself, stripping off his gloves and scarf. Ice crusted his dark beard, and when I took his hands they were so cold! Automatically, I began to rub them, then stopped when I remembered Phoebe’s presence.

‘We were worried about you,’ Phoebe said, taking Joe’s coat.

‘I almost stayed with a friend, but then a taxi passed by. Naturally, the heater wasn’t working.’

‘I’ll go hang this in the kitchen, it’s warmer there,’ Phoebe said, carrying Joe’s coat down the hallway.

In the seconds between Phoebe turning her back to us and Henry coming out of the lounge, Joe brushed his lips against mine and whispered in my ear. ‘I found a place,’ he said.

M
y heart thrummed. Joe could only mean he’d found a place where we could be alone!

We had no privacy whatever. We worked long hours even before President Roosevelt ordered the forty-eight hour workweek for everyone who worked in a war-related capacity, which was practically everyone in the country. We lived on separate floors in a boarding house with six other people. Neither one of us could afford an apartment on our own. Phoebe was fond of both of us, but she wasn’t a ‘modern’ woman, and wouldn’t tolerate a love affair under her roof.

In short, Joe and I had had about as much physical contact as a teenage couple courting on their parents’ front porch!

As much fast partying as went on in Washington these days, it still wasn’t considered appropriate for a single woman, even a mature widow like myself, to have a sexual relationship outside of marriage. Not a public one, anyway.

‘Joe,’ Henry said, after gripping Joe’s arm, a friendly gesture very unlike him, ‘we built a fire in the lounge. Come get warm.’

Henry offered Joe his chair near the fire, and Phoebe brought him a shot of whiskey from her late husband’s diminishing stash. Color returned to his face and hands.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You are all very kind.’

He offered no explanation for his late return. The fewer lies he told the easier it was for him to protect his cover.

I arrived at work early the next morning. Joan had picked me up in her commandeered Jeep, announcing her presence with a couple of honks and a bellow.

I’d poured myself one of the last cups of coffee from the OSS cafeteria. It contained too much chicory for my taste, but it was hot. I drank it quickly so that I wouldn’t spill it on the files and papers that crowded my tiny desk, which I swear the government had commandeered from a third-grade classroom.

It was time to get to work on Lt. Collins’s suspicious postcard. I slid it out of its protective cellophane sleeve.

I must have examined a hundred pieces of mail since I started my new job, and I knew the drill. First I had to verify the picture on the front of the postcard, making sure it wasn’t someplace strategic that could figure into a covert message. According to the tiny caption on the back of the postcard, the image was Rodin’s drawing of the Romanesque Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in Nantes.

A quick check of the Encyclopedia Britannica confirmed the existence of the monastery, illustrated with the same photograph that appeared on the postcard.

The reverse was crowded with ‘Richard’s’ message, a half dozen postage stamps hailing from Vichy France, Portugal and Great Britain, and the circular impressions of numerous postmarks and censors’ stamps. The postcard appeared to have been routed properly through Thomas Cook’s Post Office Box 506 in Lisbon, passed by both Nazi and British censors, until an American censor noticed the mark that might be an ‘h’.

Thomas Cook Travel Agency operated an accommodation address in Lisbon so that private and family notes could be sent between residents of Allied countries and Axis occupied countries. It was expensive: about fifty cents for Thomas Cook’s service, in addition to postage. Seemed a lot for just a postcard. Why hadn’t ‘Richard Martin’ mailed a full letter?

The Nantes’s postmark read January seventeenth, 1943. Nantes, occupied by the Nazis in 1940, was on the Loire River, just upstream from Saint Nazaire, the base of operations for the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy. Saint Nazaire had been firebombed and burned to the ground by the Allies on January fourteenth, just a few weeks ago. The heavily fortified U-boat submarine pens had escaped damage, their thirty-foot thick concrete walls impenetrable to Allied bombs. The U-boat Wolf Pack couldn’t be destroyed when docked in the pens, and in the open sea the submarines were impossible to locate.

Mailing a letter or postcard through Cook’s neutral mail service was an expensive process, and the message seemed inadequate to the complicated process of sending it. Of course, I didn’t know Leroy, Richard, or Anne, did I? Perhaps it was life and death to them. If the postcard was innocent, the sooner I finished with it the sooner the Martins would receive it so I could get back to my real job.

My main work now, and the work of most of my colleagues in the Registry, was to index the vast amount of raw intelligence OSS received so that it could be accessed quickly. We analyzed cables, telegrams, maps, charts, and other documents, and summarized the contents on detailed index cards, sometimes as many as eight per document, so that the material could be retrieved when needed. Only when index cards were completed could materials be filed.

Before Lieutenant Collins enlisted my help yesterday I’d finished typing an index card description for an intelligence document I’d reviewed. The card read:

Report from captured personnel and material branch, giving information from captured German troops and officers about German suffering on the Russian front, about Russian hatred of the English, about the failure of the Germans to complete their only aircraft carrier, the Graf, Goering’s addiction to drugs. A small Paris prison is kept for wives of industrialists; there were corpses in it! Also R. G-2. 4 pp., 2/18/43.

Our indexing system was invented by Wilmarth S. Lewis, a private scholar at Yale. Being a private scholar meant he was wealthy and could study any subject that took his fancy without having an actual position at the University. I’d seen Mr Lewis once. He was a dandy in tweeds who smoked a meerschaum pipe. According to rumor Lewis once wrote ‘nothing is better reading (except a good index) than footnotes’.

Mr Lewis’s life’s work was collecting and publishing the letters of Horace Walpole. In order to keep track of the thousands of letters he kept in a dedicated library on the grounds of his estate in Connecticut, he devised a filing and indexing system to help him retrieve any letter he wanted. Lewis was recruited to the Central Information Division by his friend Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress, to organize the filing system at OSS. Which is why the Office of Strategic Services, America’s spy agency, had adopted a filing system based on one designed to keep order in the personal papers of Horace Walpole, an eighteenth century art collector and novelist. Walpole wrote
The Castle of Otranto
, the British gothic novel which influenced Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. I had never heard of Walpole before joining the OSS, and I had no plans to make his acquaintance.

My job title was Research Assistant, however, so in addition to cataloging and indexing intelligence reports, I had research duties. Which is why Lieutenant Collins requested my help with a puzzling postcard flagged by the U.S. censor’s office.

I found Olga Albright hunched over one of our microfilm readers, a big grey machine with a lighted screen that would ruin your eyesight in no time. Olga was, like me, older than most government girls. She was a third generation German-American who had taught French and German at a private girls school here in Washington. Now she spent her days combing microfilmed German newspapers smuggled out of Europe by Allied spies for any hints of Nazi troop movements or casualties.

‘Olga,’ I said, touching her shoulder to break her concentration, ‘I need your opinion on something.’

Olga looked up from an obituaries page in
Das Postes
. ‘Of course, dearie,’ she said, taking off her thick glasses and rubbing bloodshot eyes. ‘What can I do?’

‘Look at this,’ I said, handing her the postcard and indicating the mark wedged between the ‘n’ and the ‘a’ in ‘Leonard’. ‘Do you think that’s an “h”?’

‘Let me see,’ she said, directing her desk lamp on the card. ‘Well, perhaps. I assume you are wondering if the writer is a native German speaker? That he might have written ‘Leonard’ as ‘Leonhard’ and then tried to erase it?’

‘Is it possible?’

‘Of course. But,’ she said, peering at the postcard, ‘it’s not clear to me that this isn’t just an ink blob, or some kind of stain.’

I agreed with her. After all, the card had gotten through the Vichy French, Portuguese, and British censors before our zealous American censor questioned it.

Joyce Curran was secretary to the Chief of our Communications Branch. She knew as much about codes and ciphers as anyone else in her office.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Joyce, interrupting her cataloguing the contents of a battered canvas courier bag.

Joyce took the postcard and peered at it, stopping to pull on a green eyeshade to block the glare of an overhead light. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s clearly not a cipher. And as for a code, the entire postcard isn’t coded. That’s clear too. That leaves us with the option that just a few words are in code, and I think that’s a real possibility.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Well, there’s the word “Mother”. It seems oddly placed here. “Mother” could well refer to a specific person, an agent, or even an operation. Then there’s the date. Why include the date? This Anne person must know the date of her own birthday.’

‘It bothers me that this postcard came through Box 506 in Lisbon. So far both the Allied and Axis powers have respected the neutral mail services.’

‘Me, too. That counts against it being a coded message, though; the censors are trained to spot those. A true coded message would pass through a covert mailbox. Do you know who this Richard Martin is? Or the Leroy Martins?’

‘No. Finding out is my next job.’

I checked the card files for Richard Martins who had attracted the attention of OSS. There was half an index file drawer full, from a plumber in New York who displayed a swastika on his truck before war was declared, to a French minor aristocrat who lived in the Statler Hotel. There was no Richard Martin whom I could identify as the writer of this postcard.

But I should be able to find our Leroy Martin, if he existed and owned a telephone, with no problem. Our telephone book collection filled three rooms.

In the phonebook for the western shore of Maryland, where St Leonard was located, I found him.
Leroy Martin, RR Box 12, St Leonard, Maryland
. I checked the map in the back of the phonebook, and saw that St Leonard was in Calvert County on the Chesapeake Bay just a few miles north of the mouth of the Patuxent River.

Okay, I’d found Leroy Martin exactly where the postcard said he’d be. So, if Richard Martin was his cousin, as the postcard stated, perhaps Leroy was a recent immigrant, or first generation, in which case he might be found in the files of the Foreign Nationalities Branch.

FNB had been inherited from the original Office of the Coordinator of Information, OSS’s precursor agency. It was tasked with monitoring foreigners in the United States and recruiting them for OSS operations if possible. Covertly, it also followed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds – hyphenated Americans, you might call them – and their newspapers and political organizations. FNB was the only branch of OSS empowered to act within the United States, and it clashed with the FBI, whose antipathy toward foreigners and rivalry with OSS was legendary. General Donovan and J. Edgar Hoover loathed each other.

After Pearl Harbor, FNB asked all foreign nationals to voluntarily register, and thousands did.

There was no Leroy Martin listed in the index files of FNB.

Just on a hunch, I checked the files for his wife, Anne Martin, and struck pay dirt. Anne Venter Martin had voluntarily written to FNB early in 1942. She’d emigrated from South Africa in 1902 after the Boer War, arriving at the age of twelve with her grandmother. She stated in her letter that she was unsure if she should register, as she had never been naturalized, believing that her marriage in 1913 to Leroy Martin made naturalization unnecessary. She was correct. A foreign woman who married an American citizen before 1922 automatically became a citizen.

A FNB form clipped to Anne’s letter stated that she had been interviewed and was of no intelligence use. At fifty-three she was considered too old, had lost her language, and had no useful contacts.

So what could I report to Collins about the Martins? I’d learned that Anne was foreign born, but now married to an American citizen. She had emigrated from South Africa in 1902 at the age of twelve. Her parents and grandmother had been dead for many years. Her husband, Leroy, was an oysterman who apparently had a French cousin. The couple lived near St Leonard on the Chesapeake Bay. The word ‘Leonard’ on the envelope may or may not have been spelled ‘Leonhard’, but it was impossible to say for sure. It was quite odd that the word ‘Mother’ was mentioned in the way it was, and the inclusion of Anne’s birthday was even clumsier. This was all I had to tell Lieutenant Collins. I typed up a page of notes and clipped it to the cellophane sleeve containing the postcard. I’d take it by the Photographic Field Office to be photographed for our files and then deliver it to the FN Branch before I left for the evening.