Louise's War (10 page)

‘He was a Republican. We all know that he opposed opening a second front in Europe this year. You don’t think that Miss Bertrand might want to help her pals the Soviets by removing an influential opponent of a second front?’

‘That’s a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?’

‘Because she’s a lesbian she’s vulnerable to blackmail. Maybe her Red friends threatened her, forced her to kill Holman. You know my office has advised the clandestine services not to hire homosexuals.’

‘Miss Bertrand makes no secret of her political leanings or her homosexuality. She is extremely competent. If she weren’t a woman she would be a section head already. I don’t care who she sleeps with, if she can help us defeat Hitler.’

Tolson flinched, but Hoover’s expression remained inscrutable.

‘Then we have Guy Danielson. Did you know his last name used to be Danielovich?’

‘Several generations back, I believe.’

‘He’s a monarchist. He’s contributed money to the political machine of the Count of Paris, the pretender to the French throne.’

‘Which means?’

‘That he might be amenable to killing someone who favored de Gaulle as the head of the French state in exile. Holman was a de Gaulle enthusiast, wasn’t he?’

Donovan didn’t answer.

‘Then, we have Roger Austine. He is engaged to a colored woman, a foreigner.’

‘I know. I have met Miss Lebron.’

‘We can assume that Austine is subject to blackmail, too.’

‘He doesn’t broadcast his engagement, but he makes no secret of it, either. Why should he?’

Hoover shrugged, gave the file back to Tolson, took a cigar out of his pocket and lit it, symbolically turning the floor over to Donovan.

‘I see no reason to single out these three persons on the basis of their politics,’ Donovan said, ‘or their sex lives. We, as you know, have been conducting our own investigation.’ He turned to Huntington and nodded.

Huntington opened his own thick file and cleared his throat.

‘We’ve determined that Mr Holman was murdered less than an hour before his body was discovered. As you said, he was stabbed with a thin blade, like an ice pick or letter opener, in the back of his neck. We haven’t been able to find the murder weapon.’

‘You agree that a woman could have struck that blow?’ Tolson asked.

‘Absolutely,’ Huntington answered. ‘Now, we questioned our security officers and our employees who have offices in the same hall as Holman’s. Here is a list of personnel who were seen there during the hour before his murder.’

‘We know all this,’ Hoover said.

‘Bear with us, please,’ General Donovan replied.

‘Guy Danielson, Roger Austine, Dora Bertrand, Donald Murray and Mrs Louise Pearlie. Their offices are all in the hall.’

Hoover shifted, impatient.

‘Also, passing through on various errands, General Donovan’s secretary, Miss Joan Adams, Dr Linney, the branch head, Mr Charles Burns from the Map Division, four Negro messengers, all with appropriate identification, and of course Mr Holman’s wife,’ Huntington said. ‘And I must point out to you that others could have come down the back staircase and returned that way, so the sergeant wouldn’t have seen them. His job is to clear visitors, not impede my staff.’

‘I would suggest,’ Donovan continued, ‘that the motive for murdering Holman need not be political. Perhaps Mr Murray, who is an ambitious young man, seized an opportunity for advancement. Then there’s Holman’s wife. They are known to have argued because she wanted to work. She could have murdered him herself, and then sounded the alarm. My point, Director Hoover, is that we still have no idea who killed Bob Holman, or why they did it. Until we do, we at OSS are keeping our minds open to all possibilities. And I must insist that you do not use this murder as a weapon of political persecution. I won’t have it, not at OSS.’

Thank God for cross-referencing. I eagerly removed a file labeled ‘International Association of Hydrological Sciences’ from a file cabinet a floor away from where I’d found Gerald Bloch’s file. It contained the program of the 1936 conference Bloch had attended and nothing more. But now I possessed proof that the man existed, and I intended to keep it safe from whoever had stolen the original file and reference card.

I tucked the empty file jacket back into the file cabinet and folded the program into an armful of other papers and strolled back into my office, the picture of nonchalance. Once behind my desk I locked the conference program away in my desk drawer. My heart pounded and I felt elated as I pinned the tiny key inside my bra. I suppose I fancied myself a real spy, a ‘glamor girl’, on a dangerous mission to unearth a spy within OSS and maybe save a few lives in the process.

At coffee break I carried my cup of steaming hot coffee, black, I’m sorry to say, over to the table where Roger Austine, Dora Bertrand and Guy Danielson sat. Guy and Roger must be speaking to each other today.

Coffee break was less hierarchical than other OSS events, so no one seemed too surprised when I joined them. Joan, at a table across the room, raised an eyebrow at me, a gesture that meant she knew exactly what I was doing, and she didn’t approve at all.

‘Hello, dear,’ Dora said, scooting over so I could slide a chair next to her. If my parents suspected this middle-aged woman, mousy in a gray dress, was a professor, a socialist and shacked up with another woman, and that not only was I drinking coffee at the same table with her, but also that I admired her, they would link hands and jump off the roof of the First Baptist Church of Wilmington, North Carolina.

And what would they make of Roger Austine? He slicked his hair back with brilliantine and wore a flower in his lapel. Or of Guy Danielson, a cynical misanthrope who would tell anyone who would listen that a benevolent monarchy was the highest form of government, and the excesses of Hitler and Mussolini were entirely due to their low social origins?

Guy sipped from his cup and grimaced. ‘Coffee should be like a beautiful woman,’ he said, ‘blonde and sweet!’ That took Dora and me out of the running, but neither man noticed the gaffe, and we didn’t care.

‘I hear you received a stack of French underground newspapers this morning?’ Guy asked Roger.

‘Yes. You know, every day I think the news can’t get any worse,’ Roger said, shaking his head. ‘And every day I stand corrected. Now that Pierre Laval is Prime Minister of Vichy France, I think that Vichy will be overrun with Nazis very soon. He’s already ordered Vichy Jews to wear the yellow Star of David. So much for unoccupied France. What a charade.’

‘Your family?’ Dora asked.

‘Still living in Toulouse,’ Roger said. ‘You know that my uncle is Monsignor Saliège, Archbishop of Toulouse. That protects my mother and sisters. They live with him in the archbishop’s palace.’

‘I understand that the Gestapo in Paris is deporting Jewish families to labor camps,’ Guy said.

Roger wiped his face with his handkerchief before responding. ‘Yes,’ he said, his voice wavering. ‘Aided and abetted by the French police. Thousands have been shipped east by cattle car.’

‘I don’t understand why the Nazis are sending women and children, too,’ Guy said. ‘What use will they be in labor camps?’

Dora clenched her fist in her lap.

‘They need the women to take care of the men, and I suppose the men will work harder if their families are with them,’ Roger said, shrugging.

I finished my coffee quickly and excused myself, taking refuge in the women’s bathroom to collect myself. What had I been thinking? I wasn’t a spy. I was a file clerk. What on earth could I do to prevent the Nazis from shipping Rachel and her entire family wherever they pleased?

Rachel and her father had always made so much of being more French than Jewish. I remembered my first visit to Rachel’s New York home. We took a horse-drawn carriage down to the seaport, passing by Battery Park Place, where the Nazi consulate stood facing the green park lawn. A huge red flag, centered by a black swastika, hung over the door.

‘Doesn’t that frighten you?’ I asked Rachel. ‘The things the Nazis say about Jews are so horrible.’

‘Papa says Hitler is a clown who won’t survive another year as Chancellor,’ Rachel answered. ‘Besides, we’re perfectly safe. We’re French.’

Barbara and Betty might as well be chained to their typewriters, they were pounding the keys so intently to catch up from their absences. Ruth was gone, and so was our rolling file cart, so I assumed she was toiling in the file rooms. I sat down at my desk, unlocked my desk drawer and removed the file containing the program for the hydrology conference that Gerald Bloch had attended in Scotland in 1936. It was the only clue I had. I read every word over and over until my eyes ached. I had no idea that water aroused such scholarly passion.

I uncovered a couple of useful facts. The name of the George Washington University academic who sent in the materials about Bloch in the first place was one Marvin Metcalfe. If he still taught at GWU I might be able to speak to him. Even better, I saw that Joan’s so-called friend from the OSS Map Division, Charles Burns, spoke at the conference. Here was someone under the OSS roof I could ask about Gerald Bloch, but I still had to be circumspect. I needed to question Burns in a way that wouldn’t arouse his suspicion. The best approach, I decided, was to go to him just as myself, a file clerk with nothing more on her mind than an overflowing in-box. That wouldn’t take much acting.

I trudged up two steep flights of steps to the Map Division. When I opened the door I was halted in my tracks by a frightening image, a world map tacked to the wall. Almost all of continental Europe was soaked in bloody red ink centered by a giant black swastika rolling west toward England. Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden were islands of neutrality scattered within the colossal territory already conquered by Germany. How long could they hold out?

Libya, an Italian colony also drenched in Axis red, pierced Africa between the French colonies of Algeria and Morocco, and British Suez. Japan’s red ink oozed into China, the Philippines and Indonesia and pooled a few short miles away from Australia. And someone had hand-drawn a black swastika over the capital of Brazil, a hot bed of Nazi influence in South America, in our own hemisphere.

TEN

T
hat bloody map frightened me as much as any horrifying newsreel footage or shocking newspaper story about the war I’d seen yet. The preacher at our church in Wilmington consistently railed about the coming of the Antichrist and Armageddon. If Hitler and this war didn’t qualify I didn’t want to think about what nightmare conflagration would.

I inhaled deeply to steady myself and went into the office to search for Charles.

Lord knows I was accustomed to the mess caused by the massive influx of information OSS collected, but the chaos here flabbergasted me. A young clerk was actually climbing, or maybe scaling would be a better word, a tower of leather-bound folios that rose above his head smack in the middle of a huge room. He picked a volume off the summit, slid down to the floor, and carried it over to a work table where a dozen young men and women wearing green eyeshades and black cuff-protectors labored to catalog thousands and thousands of maps. Towering shelves, clogged with files, folios, books and document boxes, surrounded them, lining the walls. I hoped the shelves were screwed into the walls. They looked unsteady to me. If one fell it would cause carnage among the platoon of clerks.

I found Burns, pouring over a Shell Oil road map of Algeria. When my shadow fell over him, he grimaced.

‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘Get out of my light. It’s bad enough as it is.’ He looked up and saw me, wedged between his desk and a bank of file cabinets, and softened his tone. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘sorry, I didn’t recognize you. What is it?’

‘I’ve been clearing up Bob Holman’s office,’ I said.

‘So?’

‘It was a mess. And I found this loose on the floor. It had your name in it, so I thought you might know what it’s about, so I could file it properly.’

‘Let me see,’ he said, taking the 1936 conference program from me.

He leafed through the brochure.

‘It’s just what it says it is. A program from a hydrology conference. Listing presentations from expert hydrologists and hydrographers. Like me. Before I became a map librarian. I’m sorry, I don’t have any idea why this was in Holman’s office.’

‘You didn’t send it to him?’

‘No. Look, I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to hand over a preliminary list of North African maps to a typist, if I can find one who’s free, in an hour, and I have a God-awful headache.’

‘Have we got any good maps of North Africa?’

‘Not really. The British Admiralty charts of Egypt and the Suez Canal are excellent, but we need the French colonies, Algeria and Morocco. For them we’ve only got a National Geographic map, two oil-company road maps and some tourist guidebooks, only one in English. They show nothing of strategic value. We’ll have to rely on the local Resistance for information, and those damn Arabs, they’re almost as shifty as the Japs.’

I threaded my way between stacks of books and desks out of the office and into the hallway. What now?

I wondered if Marvin Metcalfe still taught at George Washington University and if I could invent a plausible pretext for visiting him.

Lying proved to be easier than I thought. I told my girls that I had a severe toothache and had to leave work to go to the dentist. No one questioned me when I left the building.

After waiting an hour for the bus, I gave up and walked north. George Washington University was on ‘G’ Street, south of my boarding house, within easy walking distance despite the heat. Uniformed men of all ages and scores of businesslike young women crowded the campus sidewalks, hurrying to class. I envied those women. If the war had come earlier, if I was younger, or if my aunt’s bequest hadn’t shrunk during the Depression, I might be in a real college now, too, learning something meatier than secretarial skills. I stopped an army captain toting an armful of engineering textbooks and asked directions to the geography department.