Shining Through (33 page)

“Are you cold?”

“I’m okay.”

“Tell me what Norman Weekes said to you.”

“Oh, God!” I said. “Please.”

“I’m not talking about his…advances toward you. It’s obvious he finds you…whatever.”

“He makes me want to throw up!” I suddenly said. Edward examined the painted wood of the fence. “I apologize,” I said.

“That just slipped out.”

“Understandable,” he muttered. “He makes me want to throw up too.” I stared at him. “Norman Weekes is a foul human being.

Now that we have that established, please go on.”

So I told him. I told him about Norman’s saying how lucky he was to have me as a secretary. Naturally, Edward didn’t say, Well, at least Norman’s right about one thing. He just waited for me to continue. “Look,” I said, “this isn’t my favorite kind of conversation.”

“I’m sorry, Linda. I have to know what he said.” He waited.

And he knew how to wait, until you became so uneasy with the silence that you’d do anything to stop it.

“He wants John to come and work for him.”

“Goddamn it! All right. What precisely did he say about John’s leaving me to work for him? Don’t waste my time, Linda. I know when you’re…when someone’s holding back on me.” I gazed out at the field. “As you know, I have a very full schedule today. Don’t make it more difficult.”

“You’re being unfair,” I blurted out. But I didn’t take it back.

“I told you what’s important.”

“It’s all important.”

“Some of it’s personal stuff.”

“I want to hear it.”

“Why?”

“Because Norman Weekes would like nothing better than to destroy me.” He glanced at me and said, “You look cold. Let’s walk.” He chose the direction: farther down the dirt road. “I suppose you’d like an explanation.”

244 / SUSAN ISAACS

“Only if you want to give me one.” I took a deep breath of cold air. “Don’t you know I’d take anything you said on faith?”

“I appreciate that.” He walked fast, and I had to hurry along the road to keep up with him. Finally he spoke. “For years, Norman’s been doing business with a banker in Munich. A conservative, a Catholic and, according to Norman, a man contemptuous of the Nazis. And yet this man has been close to the government—through his contacts at Krupp, United Steel, I. G. Farben. In late ’39, he met Norman in Switzerland with a briefcase full of documents—page after page of statistics on industrial production. He swore to Norman he was a good German, a good Catholic, and precisely because of this he was morally obliged to take a stand against Hitler’s regime. He told Norman: I know you have friends in Washington. Please see that these fall into the right hands.”

I stopped for a second to take off my shoe and shake out some gravel. “The statistics—were they important?”

“If they were accurate, they were an invaluable picture of German industry—and from that, we could derive quite a clear idea of their military strength. And so, throughout ’39 and ’40, we accepted these figures—and passed them on to the British.

And Bill Donovan asked Norman to come to Washington and do more of the same.”

“But he wants to
destroy
you. So you must have found out that his statistics…?”

“I did my homework. To this day I don’t know what made me do it. A hunch. And through the years I’ve come to trust my hunches. I had John and an economist compare this banker’s information with data we’d gotten from different sources. Linda, none of it gibed. The figures were grossly understated. The Germans were far stronger than we had been led to believe.”

“Did you go to Norman?”

“Not right away. I did some checking on this man from Munich—nothing terribly difficult; the sort of investigation someone in Norman’s position ought to have done.”

SHINING THROUGH / 245

“But he hadn’t.”

“No. He was so damned sure of this friend of his, this honorable, refined, old-money banker. When I finally brought my findings to him, he told me, ‘Ed, please. The fellow’s wife’s a von Schleicher, for Chrissake.’” He stopped and turned to me.

“How was my accent on von Schleicher?”

“Terrible,” I told him. “As usual.” I paused. “What finally happened?”

“Ultimately, Norman did himself in with his own arrogance.

He went to Donovan and issued an ultimatum: Either Ed Leland goes or I do. Well, the next day the three of us got together for a drink. Bill was being congenial, trying to minimize our differences; Norman was saying his honor was at stake, and that his source was a Catholic. He looked right at Bill when he said it.”

“Real subtle.”

“Yes. And then I did what I’d come prepared to do: I handed Bill my documentation and said, ‘Forget the statistics. Look at the pictures.’”

“You got pictures?”

“Yes. Some photos of Norman’s friend with
his
good friends: high Nazi officials—including Göring.”

I tucked my hands under my armpits to keep them warm, but it wasn’t just the weather. “Where did you get the pictures, Ed?”

“Linda, everyone remarks what a bright girl my secretary is.

So you tell me: Where did I get the pictures?”

“You had someone go into the man’s office or house—”

“Very good. His house.”

“And they stole—”

“I prefer to say appropriate.”

“How did Donovan react when he saw them?” I asked.

“Gracefully. The we-all-have-our-bad-days approach.”

“But Weekes must have looked like something less than a bargain.”

“Considerably less. Bill had relied on Norman, on his judgment, and it was faulty—in the extreme. And we simply cannot afford that. Look, you’ve seen how we’ve had to 246 / SUSAN ISAACS

operate. Until last week, when we declared war, we were the most rudimentary operation. We had no great network of agents, no committees to assess intelligence. All we had was a few men.

Norman Weekes was one of them. Still is. But no longer, shall we say, the force he once was.”

“You’re right,” I said. “He does want to destroy you.”

“Yes. But look on the bright side. If he succeeds, you’ll have time to read or go to the dressmaker or whatever it is working for me keeps you from doing.”

I didn’t smile. “The scary thing about Norman Weekes is that he’s very smart, but he’s not intelligent. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes. I’ll tell you what it is. He sees small pieces with…well, amazingly acute vision. But he has no sense of the big picture—or even that there is one.” He paused. “Now, Linda…will you tell me what he said about John?”

“I’ll tell you because you have to know what this guy is doing, what knife he’s going to stick in your back.”

“Thank you.”

“But I hate doing it. I want you to know that.”

“I understand.”

“He said counterespionage was boring, and that John would be better off with him. Not just because of the boring part. Because…he said…John can’t be the man he could be if he’s…working for you.”

Edward’s voice was much colder than the frigid air. “The implication being that I somehow…what?”

“Take away John’s independence. He looks up to you too much to be his own man.”

“And?”

“And…the family business. That maybe it’s—you know—awkward for me because John was married to your daughter.”

“What else?”

“That’s it.”

“No. There’s more. You and he were talking a long time.”

And that’s where I decided to stop. I wouldn’t tell him.

SHINING THROUGH / 247

Hey, Norman tells me someone besides Santa Claus may be coming to town. “That’s all.”

He turned abruptly and we hurried back along the long dirt road to the main road, and the car. We didn’t have anything else to say. But when we reached the car, Edward stood at the rear of the car and put his foot on the bumper. “You know, I used to close my eyes at night, and in two minutes I’d be sound asleep. Now…sometimes I’m up for hours. It’s not just the business about Norman. The whole damned COI is filling up with men like him, men who are still playing Cowboys and Indians. Norman says, Trust my blood brother…and look what happens.

“Last August, he had a boy, fresh out of college in Maine.

French-speaking parents. He sent him into occupied France, someplace outside Paris where a German official kept a mistress.

He tells the boy—a good-looking youngster—to seduce the mistress and get all he can on the German. It was an idiot plan…created by Norman but approved with great enthusiasm by two of our top men. Well, the boy was caught the first day.

Caught and killed. And Norman says, ‘At least we tried. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.’”

I wished I could have taken his hand and held it. “I’m sorry.”

“I meet with men like myself, men who should know better, and they’re hatching half-baked schemes. Playing games. I like games. I’m good at them. Golf, bridge, chess…But these games they’re playing use people as pawns. I sit at a conference table and hear things that make me sick, and when I object, I’m told, Ed, old man, you’ve lost your nerve.” He looked at me and suddenly aimed his finger at my heart. “Bang! You’re dead!

Cowboys and Indians. That’s how these lawyers and bankers and businessmen are going to win the war. With clever strategies.

Games. Bang! But when the Germans and Japs go bang…”

“You really are dead,” I murmured. He nodded. “But the 248 / SUSAN ISAACS

other men in COI…some of them are like you, aren’t they?”

“Some of them are.” He stared straight and motioned me to the car door. Before he opened it, he said, “I don’t know if we’ll ever make the omelet, but we’re going to have dozens—hundreds of dozens—of broken eggs before this war is over. Linda, it’s going to be a mess.”

1 7

J
ohn had a new office, but that was only to be expected. He was now running the counterespionage operation in Germany and France—that part that could be run from behind a desk in Washington. Technically, of course, the entire world was still the Edward Leland Show, but Edward was busy flying around, not only looking for concealed enemies but also trying to calm down a close-to-berserk J. Edgar Hoover and his pet politicians, who were convinced that anytime anyone from COI breathed in the United States, he was stealing the oxygen, the life, out of the FBI.

The American flag behind John’s desk, with its thick pole topped by a gold eagle, the long view of the Capitol dome from his window, and his executive secretary, who was fluent in French as well as German, showed just how far John had come.

Okay, the office was only slightly larger than an orange crate, but it had a carpet. And while his secretary was a strange, bent-over woman with coarse, shoulder-length brown hair, who resembled a grizzly bear, she did have a Phi Beta Kappa key from Barnard College.

“Edith,” John said to her, “this is my wife…” He paused for a fraction of a second. Normally, as wife, I’d be introduced to a secretary as “Mrs. Berringer.” But since Edward had flown off for three weeks of mysterious meetings in secret places, I’d been sent over to work for John. “…Linda Berringer,” John said, leaving it up to Edith what to call me.

“I am pleased to meet you, Mrs. Berringer.” Actually, she said

“Frau Berringer.” John was going to spend the morning 249

250 / SUSAN ISAACS

interviewing refugees from Germany, and we were warming up our German.

The refugees were key pieces of the puzzle Edward’s unit was trying to put together. The more information we had—on everything from changes in train schedules to the extent of the flour shortage in eastern Germany—the better we were able to get a picture of how their war effort was going and, just as important, to check if our sources were giving us accurate accounts.

“I’m glad to meet you, Edith. And please, call me Linda.” Her small, too-wide-spaced eyes fluttered a little when she heard my accent. She spoke the same educated
hoch Deutsch
John did.

“Edith,” John said, “would you be good enough to take down the preliminary background information for Herr Doktor Schwerin? Also, you might want to offer him some coffee.” Edith nodded, did an about-face and walked out the door, to the anteroom where John’s visitors waited. Walked is maybe too normal a word for what Edith did. Her legs were heavy, short and strangely far apart, so her progress was more like an animal’s lope. If she’d growled or scratched the scalp under her thick hair instead of saying “Yes, Mr. Berringer,” it wouldn’t have seemed out of character.

“Poor girl,” I said, after she shut the door. “To look like that.

I wonder if she’s ever had a boyfriend. I mean, do you think some guy can see beyond her homeliness?” John shrugged.

Edith’s love life was obviously not an item on his agenda. “Is she a nice person?”

“I don’t know. She’s all right, I suppose.”

“Is she madly in love with you, John?”

He let himself go enough to smile for a moment. “Probably.”

He was behind his battleship of a desk; it took up three quarters of the room. I left the straight-backed chair I’d been in and went to sit on the edge of his desk. He motioned me to come over further and pulled me onto his lap. I rested my head against his shoulder. He massaged the back of my neck, then slid his hand down the back of my blouse and

SHINING THROUGH / 251

stroked my skin. “Edward’s let you sit in on all his meetings with Schwerin?” he asked.

“Yes, he needs me there. Schwerin doesn’t speak a word of English. What could he do? Play charades? Can you see Edward pantomiming ‘panzer divisions’?”

“Your hair smells nice. I wish you’d wear it loose.”

“It doesn’t look right at work.”

“I guess not.” John kissed me.

The more Edward trusted me, the more attentive—and affectionate—John became. “Schwerin’s not one of these refugees you should get all teary-eyed about,” I murmured into the woolly lapel of his navy chalk-stripe suit. “He’s a two-bit Berlin lawyer who happened to be at the right place at the right time—and did the wrong thing. He got involved in some sleazy black market stuff—selling silk that was going to be used for parachutes to a company that made ladies’ panties. He’s lucky he got out.”

John’s deep-blue eyes blazed at me with such intensity they seemed to be lit from within; he was madly, passionately in love with my inside information. At first, John could barely believe that I was allowed to sit in while Edward made phone calls to Donovan. Or that, riding around in the Packard, Edward would analyze the differences between the French and Dutch resistance movements—or tell me about the love affair between Wendell Willkie and the book review editor of the
New York Herald
Tribune
. John had gaped when I told him: The Democrats got hold of some of Willkie’s letters to her! “Dolly notes,” they were calling them, and they were actually going to release them, except the Republicans found out that Wallace, FDR’s running mate, was tied in with some weird Russian mystic and had written some crazy religious-nut letters. John had asked, “He
tells
you all this? Or do you overhear it? He tells me, I’d answered. You know, when we’re driving around, or sometimes when it’s slow, like when we’re waiting around for a transatlantic call.