Louise's Gamble (2 page)

‘Near Palermo,’ she said. ‘But I cannot say more.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry. I’m from Wilmington, North Carolina, myself.’

‘The South? Where the cotton plantations are?’

‘Wilmington’s on the coast. We make our living from shipbuilding and fishing.’

‘You came here to work for the government?’

‘Yes, soon after Pearl Harbor.’ Washington, DC, once a sleepy southern city, was now a boom town crammed with soldiers and sailors. Washingtonians repeated constantly the wisecrack that DC was an occupied city – occupied by its own troops! Not to mention thousands of government workers, job seekers, drifters, prostitutes, con men, pickpockets and just plain hoodlums. Washington’s homicide rate was more than twice New York City’s!

‘So, busy as you must be with your job, what inspired you to take up knitting?’ Alessa asked.

Smile crinkles formed at the corners of her brown eyes, and her mouth turned up in an impish grin. Despite her troubles Alessa still had a sense of humor!

‘Because I’m so good at it?’ I grinned back. ‘You’re awfully nice to correct my mistakes every single week!’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you are very competent . . . at something else!’ We both laughed out loud.

‘Oh, I don’t know why I bother,’ I said, ‘but there’s all this talk about the need for socks in Europe. Maybe I should switch to scarves. They’re easier.’

‘It doesn’t matter what your socks look like,’ she said, ‘as long as they are warm.’ Without knowing it Alessa repeated what Joe, the refugee Czech who boarded with me at ‘Two Trees’, said every time he noticed me struggling with my knitting needles and yarn.

There were people waiting for our table, but I wasn’t ready to head home yet. I wondered what the two of us could do for fun this afternoon. I could hardly ask Alessa to go shopping with me; it was obvious she had little money. I wondered if she’d let me treat her to a movie ticket.

Alessa noticed me glancing at the queue of people waiting for a table. ‘We should go,’ she said. ‘But first.’

She leaned far across the table toward me, took my hand, and lowered her voice.

‘I know where you work,’ she said.

‘Pardon me?’ I said. Stunned, I felt my heart leap with alarm. Had I slipped up somewhere? Dropped a clue in the midst of some random conversation?

Alessa sat back in her seat and rummaged in her handbag, pulled out a stubby pencil, and printed three letters on a clean napkin. She turned the napkin toward me, and I saw . . .
OSS
. The Office of Strategic Services.

‘How did you know?’ I asked.

‘It was easy,’ she said. ‘I followed you to your boarding house after knitting circle ended last week. Then Monday morning I got up quite early, stationed myself outside the house, and followed you to work.’

‘The building’s not marked.’

‘I stopped at a diner across the street and asked the waitress who worked in your building. She said it was full of spies! Besides, there’s an army camped outside!’ That would be the Army squadron that bivouacked on OSS grounds to guard us. Attracted attention to us, too!

The chatter of the customers, Benny Goodman blaring from the jukebox, the clatter of pots and pans, and the shouted orders of the waitresses to the cooks all receded, until it was just Alessa and me, as if we were crowded together in a phone booth on an empty street. I was aware of no emotion except caution. Who was this woman, and what did she want from me? My training kicked in.

‘I’m a just file clerk,’ I said.

‘Dear Louise,’ she said, ‘you are not an ordinary government girl. You’re educated. And older. You have an important boss, no?’

Why pretend? ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I have something you must give to him.’ She pulled a thin leaflet, folded in half, out of her bag and handed it to me. ‘Here is the knitting pattern I promised you,’ she said, so loudly that I guessed she wanted our neighbors in the next booth to hear. Of course I reached for the leaflet, and she pressed it into my hand, gripping it for a second before she turned it loose.

Alessa got to her feet and struggled into her heavy coat. ‘So I’ll see you Friday night, for the knitting?’ she said.

‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

She strolled calmly out of the diner, leaving me astonished by her audacity.

By now the waiting diners huddled inside the door were glaring nastily at me, so I hastened to leave my booth, tucking the leaflet carefully into my handbag.

When I tossed a dime on the table for Jonesy’s tip I noticed that Alessa had left half of her burger uneaten.

TWO

A
s I turned into the tiny front yard of my boarding house, I reflexively checked the front window to see if both the stars taped on it were still blue. My landlady, Phoebe Holcombe, had two sons in the Navy in the Pacific fighting the Japs. We all dreaded coming home one day to find a gold star in her window.

Inside I hung up my coat and stowed my galoshes under the coat tree. Instead of dropping my handbag on the hall chair I kept it over my arm, instinctively protecting Alessa’s note. I could hear my fellow boarders talking in the lounge with the radio playing quietly in the background, but I was too unnerved to make small talk with them. I slipped down the hall toward the kitchen, Dellaphine’s domain, where I found her ironing one of Phoebe’s housecoats.

‘Hello, Mrs Pearlie,’ Dellaphine said. ‘Did you have a nice lunch?’

‘Yes, I did,’ I answered. ‘The diner had hamburgers.’ My voice cracked a bit, and Dellaphine looked at me curiously.

‘You all right?’ she asked.

‘I don’t feel well,’ I said. An understatement, considering a foreign refugee I barely knew had figured out I worked for OSS and given me a message to take to my superiors. And there was not a damn thing I could do about it until I went to work on Monday morning.

‘You look like you seen a ghost.’

‘Dellaphine, could I have a shot of bourbon? Please?’

‘Sure. You do look peaked.’ Dellaphine winked at me, then pulled a key ring out of her apron pocket and unlocked the pantry cabinet that stored an impressive stash of the late Mr Holcombe’s favorite bourbons and Phoebe’s sherry. Phoebe wouldn’t permit her boarders to bring their own liquor into the house, but she allowed Dellaphine to dole out what alcohol she locked in the pantry.

Dellaphine handed me an orange juice glass with about a jigger of Old Grand-Dad in it and then relocked the cabinet. She went back to ironing without asking me any more questions.

I drained it in two swallows.

‘Better?’ Dellaphine asked.

‘Definitely,’ I said. I went over to the kitchen sink and washed the glass, leaving it on the drainboard to dry.

‘I’m going to my room to lie down,’ I said.

‘You get some rest. You work too hard.’

Once in my room I sank on to my bed and rummaged through my handbag for the leaflet Alessa had given me. It was a knitting pattern, all right, but tucked inside was a small envelope. It wasn’t sealed, so I removed and unfolded a page torn from a pad of school-ruled paper. Tiny words in Italian, written in blue ink with one of those new ballpoint pens, crowded the page. No letterhead, no salutation, no signature, just sentences crammed on to the page from top to bottom and edge-to-edge. A few more sentences, also in Italian, written in pencil in a different hand, squeezed into the narrow margin at the bottom of the page. I couldn’t understand a word of it.

My mind raced with curiosity. If I had any brains I’d be scared, I told myself. This Alessa woman knew who I was and where I lived, and that I worked for America’s spy agency.

‘Louise?’ Ada’s voice followed her tap on my door. ‘Dearie, are you all right?’

Quickly, I refolded the paper, stuffed it into its envelope, and slid it back into my pocketbook.

‘Sure,’ I answered, ‘come on in.’

Ada was on her way to work at the Willard Hotel where she played in the house band. She wore expertly applied make-up and a sea green silk dress. A snood glittering with rhinestones enclosed her shoulder length dyed platinum blonde hair. She carried an evening bag and her clarinet case.

‘Dellaphine said you didn’t feel well,’ Ada said.

‘I’m OK. A little under the weather.’

‘I was hoping you might come over to the hotel later on,’ she said. ‘I get a few hours off between the tea dance and our evening gig. We could have a couple of Martinis and dinner.’

‘Ada, you know how I feel about that.’

‘You’re so old-fashioned!’

‘Look, when women sit around in a bar without a date you know what men think.’

‘So?’

‘I don’t like being propositioned by drunken soldiers and traveling salesmen.’

‘You’d rather scramble an egg and read some mystery book?’

‘Yes, I would.’ Especially if Joe was around.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘It’s your life.’

Yes, it is, I thought to myself as I listened to Ada click down the stairs in her high heels. And I intended to live it my way. I liked Ada, but I didn’t want to be drawn into her life of cocktails and never-ending stream of boyfriends. Sometimes I wondered if she wanted me around so she could keep an eye on me for fear I’d blurt out her secret. In a moment of despair she’d confided in me that before the war she’d married a German commercial airline pilot who was now a Nazi officer in the Luftwaffe. She was terrified of being discovered and imprisoned in an internment camp. She didn’t dare even file for divorce.

Hers wasn’t the only secret I kept. When we were alone, which was rare, I teased Joe that he was ‘undercover’. The others thought he was a language teacher – he made a big show of writing lectures and grading papers. By accident I’d found out that he worked for a humanitarian agency, raising money, scrounging for ship berths, and supplying safe houses, all to help European Jews escape the Nazis. He’d constructed an identity as a language teacher to protect his family still in Czechoslovakia. Prager wasn’t his real name. It was Czech for ‘Prague’.

And, of course, I’d locked my memory tight shut on the foolish risks I’d taken to help Rachel Bloch and her children escape from Vichy France hours before the Gestapo entered Marseilles. If anyone at OSS knew what I’d done I’d have at least lost my job and possibly wound up in the federal women’s prison in West Virginia. Which I might actually prefer to going home and back to gutting bluefish and frying hush puppies at my parents’ fish camp on the Cape Fear River.

Luckily, I’d always known how to keep my mouth shut.

THREE

E
nzo kept the deepest secret of Alessa’s life: one that if revealed would ruin her and perhaps cost her brother his life. And all for only three dollars a week!

Alessa had met Enzo when she’d come upon him on a cigarette break outside the hotel near the servants’ entrance. His hands were filthy, and he wore a hotel apron stiff with silver tarnish. Normally, she wouldn’t have spoken to him, but she was desperate for a cigarette herself. When she asked him for a light in Italian, he answered her in Sicilian. After he lit her cigarette they talked. He was an illiterate tradesman’s son from a tiny village near her home in Ficuzza. He’d immigrated to the United States almost ten years ago. With thousands of others he’d fled Sicily in the thirties, when Mussolini consolidated his power on the island. His uncle had found him a job in the hotel. Alessa realized immediately that Enzo was a man of honor, who valued the Tradition above all else, and because of that he would protect her secrets without hesitation. As long as he got his three dollars. So she told him what she needed from him.

Enzo toiled in the vast sub-basement of the massive hotel in the silver room, where he polished hundreds of pieces of silverware and silver plate every day. He procured a key to the servants’ entrance and a secluded employee’s locker for her use.

After lunch with Louise Alessa walked back to the hotel, ducked into the servants’ entrance and went to her secret locker. She changed out of her thrift shop disguise and into a tweed suit and pumps, slipped on her rings and bracelets, pulled on leather gloves, adjusted her hat, and applied a bit of make-up. She hung her old clothes neatly in the locker and locked it.

Alessa waited outside the door to the street until no one was in sight, then slipped out of the servants’ entrance and on to the sidewalk. Quickly, she went around the corner on to De Sales Street and into the residents’ private entrance. The doorman opened the door for her, and she approached the concierge’s desk.

‘Good afternoon, ma’am,’ he said, bowing his head slightly.

‘And to you, Hays,’ she said. ‘Can you tell me if my husband is in?’

‘Yes, I believe he is. But your mother-in-law has gone to the lounge for tea with friends, I believe.’ Alessa suspected sherry was more likely.

Thank God, Alessa thought. Perhaps Orazio would be out on one of his many errands too. It was rare these days for Alessa to have time alone with her darling husband Sebastian.

FOUR

A
clang sounded from the cold water pipe that ran down a corner of my bedroom from the sink in Joe and Henry’s attic room all the way to the cellar. Since Phoebe would have evicted us if she ever found either me in the attic or Joe on our floor, he and I communicated through the water pipe. One clang meant: ‘Can you meet me downstairs?’ Two meant: ‘No.’ Three meant: ‘Good night, darling.’ The darling part was my own interpretation, you understand.

Of course, we used our code only if Henry wasn’t upstairs with Joe in the bedroom they shared. He would have informed on us for sure. I tapped the pipe twice. I had too much on my mind to deal with Joe and my confused feelings for him tonight.

I waited in my room until I heard Joe and Henry leave the house to find dinner. That left the house nearly empty. Phoebe and I ate scrambled eggs alone in the dining room while Dellaphine and her daughter, Madeleine, fixed themselves ham sandwiches and ate in the kitchen.

On Saturday nights I had the lounge to myself to enjoy the Grand Ole Opry. I liked Glen Miller and Tommy Dorsey and swing and crooning and all, but I was a country girl and I missed the Carter family, Patsy Cline, and Roy Acuff. While lying prone on Phoebe’s threadbare davenport, I closed my eyes and listened to Hank Williams sing ‘Lovesick Blues’. As I relaxed my head cleared and I was able to think calmly about my lunch with Alessa.