A Covert Affair (13 page)

It was a glorious four-hour journey, the train huffing and puffing its way up through steep mountain valleys and dense, verdant jungle, the brilliant green leaves on the coconut palms and giant acacia so shiny they looked hand-polished. They passed trees full of fruit bats the size of pigeons and pineapples as big as water buckets, and fields dotted with tame elephants both large and small helping to work the land. There were waterfalls, terraced rice paddies, rubber and tea plantations, little villages, and temples, the Buddhist monks outside in their brilliant saffron robes. In the stations, slim women in tight sarongs, babies casually slung on one hip, smiled and waved. Lest anyone mistake
it for Eden, the roads were roaring with weapons carriers, trucks, jeeps, and command cars—all reminders of the ugly business of war and the burgeoning Anglo-American presence.

At noon, Jane arrived in the Kingdom of Kandy, which had been a planters' oasis before the war and was picture-postcard pretty with its eponymous lake and famed Temple of the Tooth, a shrine dedicated to Lord Buddha's preserved incisor. It was clear at a glance that her new home was no hardship post. Nestled high in the hills twelve hundred feet above sea level, the ancient upland capital was known for its temperate climate and was perceptibly cooler than Colombo. The air was sweet and fragrant but still so sultry it clung to her face like a damp washcloth. Jane was met by jeep and was whisked into the center of town. She was billeted at the Queen's Hotel, a great white wedding cake of a building in the British colonial style, the aging interior and period furniture redolent of faded grandeur. The shabbiness extended to the upper floors, but Jane was relieved to discover that she had a room of her own. It was not much more than a
cubbyhole
, furnished with a small dresser and a four-poster bed cloaked in the requisite mosquito netting. Due to the ancient plumbing, there was no running water in the rooms. She was informed that at six each morning, a Sinhalese boy would bring tea and a pitcher of hot water to splash into the basin.

She discovered that the hotel was teeming with WACs (members of the Women's Army Corps) and WRNS (members of the Women's Royal Naval Service) and all manner of female officers. She was puzzled by the presence of so many women until a cheerful WAC explained that most of the male officers were billeted across the lake at the Hotel Suisse. This setup was apparently established by the British authorities, who, with infinite foresight, deemed it undesirable to have their young colonels and old brigadiers (some of whom were now entering “their second youth”) in close quarters with the opposite sex. Also billeted at the Queen's were Julia and the contingent of OSSers who had crossed on the
Mariposa
, including two male colleagues, Gregory Bateson and Paul Child. Jane was glad to see the two men's familiar faces, now sporting deep India tans, and the men seemed equally glad to see her.

She caught a ride with them in a jeep to their camp, which was
located only six miles outside Kandy but ended up being a bumpy, half-hour trip on narrow, crowded roads full of Ceylonese drivers devoid of traffic sense. Beyond the gates of an old tea plantation lay Detachment 404, a group of primitive-looking structures that were scattered down the hillside from what must have been the original house on the estate, a spacious bungalow with palm-thatched walls and roof, now occupied by the detachment's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Richard P. Heppner. The plaited-bamboo outbuildings, called “bashas” or “cadjans,” were connected to the main building by narrow cement walks that, she soon discovered, became rivers of gurgling red-brown water and debris after every rainstorm. Bordering the tea fields were the grass huts that served as quarters for other officers and male civilians, as well as a thatched mess hall where lunch was served. Close by, a well-kept tennis court gave the encampment a touch of class. She had to hand it to the OSS, they really knew how to fight a war with style. The whole spread had the flavor of a titled Englishman's island retreat.

After being shown her MO cadjan, Jane was introduced to some of the more senior officers. The thirty-three-year-old Heppner, a junior partner in Donovan's law firm, was reportedly one of the OSS's bright young stars, a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law School who had directed special ops in London and had participated in the North Africa invasion. In addition there were S. Dillon Ripley, a tall, attractive Harvard ornithologist who was head of the Secret Intelligence Division; Carleton “Scofie” Scofield, a psychologist from Yale who was the head of MO; Edmond Taylor, a well-known journalist and author of a book on psychological warfare called
Strategy of Terror
, who was in charge of coordinating Allied clandestine and propaganda activities in the theater; and John Archbold of the Standard Oil family, whose claim to fame was having explored, by plane, remote parts of Western New Guinea.

On learning that most of her female colleagues were still in the hospital, Jane decided it would be a good idea to pay a sick call. She had no fear of catching dengue fever as she believed that once having had it “one was immune.” She took a jeep up to Kandy's hospital, housed in an old Franciscan monastery, and found them all prostrate in a row of beds
in a large ward. Cora was
“red from head to foot, even the whites of her eyes were red.”
In the bed next to her was Virginia Webbert, a girl from the Deep South with a lilting southern accent whom Jane had nicknamed “the Magnolia Blossom,” looking as pale and wilted as a day-old corsage. Two nights later, Jane came down with “violent chills and aches all over” and almost fainted into a plate of Chinese food at dinner. Some officers helped her back to the Queen's Hotel, but the next morning she joined her friends in the infirmary. (One's immunity, it turned out, lasted only a matter of months.) The U.S. Army cure-all at the time was the A.P.C. tablet—a mixture of aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine. After being “stuffed” with pills for several days, she began to recover.

Jane soon discovered that the reason all the women fell ill with dengue was that
“the drains of the Queen's hotel had been neglected for years and were a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes.”
The men, despite their deep tans, were not in much better shape. The whole of India was a bacterial breeding ground, and many of the original members of their OSS team, who had spent weeks if not months in Calcutta or Delhi before moving to Ceylon in April to set up camp, had contracted bacillary dysentery. By the time they arrived, they were all sick as dogs. Carleton Scofield and Paul Child had spent many days on their beds of pain, suffering an ailment popularly known as “Calcutta Crud” or
“Delhi Belly.”
(The CBI was rife with pseudonyms for dysentery: in Burma, it was known as the “Rangoon Runs”; in Thailand, the “Bangkok Blahs”; and in Ceylon, the “Kandy Canters.” The award for creativity went to the OSSers in China, who came up with the “Yangtze Rapids” and “Chiang Kai-shits.”) They all had a hard time getting cured; they still tired easily and had lost a lot of weight. Paul reported having lost close to twenty pounds since arriving in India in January.

One of the most difficult aspects of adjusting to life in Kandy was reconciling their hotel's fancy appearance with the multitude of insects that infested their rooms. Even the intrepid Cora DuBois had developed a raging phobia of cockroaches that kept her awake at night rigid with fear. It began after she was washing up one evening and reached for a towel to dry her face, only to have a giant, glossy roach skitter off the back of the cloth and across her cheek. Late that same night, clad
only in her nightgown, she was sitting on the bed writing letters when a roach dropped from an envelope onto her thigh. She let out a shriek and jumped up, slapping at the cursed bug, but as she had her fountain pen in hand she ended up burying it in her leg, breaking off the point and covering herself in ink. Now when anything brushed one of her extremities, she became momentarily unhinged, shuddering and cringing and completely unable to control her horror for a long time afterward. Another one of the girls found a live tarantula on her dressing table, and when she screamed for the room-boy to kill it he responded in what must have been the local Buddhist fashion by covering it with a towel and then carefully shaking it out the window. For her part, Jane learned the hard way not to get up in the night when she once switched on the light to find a large lizard on the wall above her head. The lizard was a good five inches long and reacted to the sudden glare by making a disturbing noise Paul later likened to a spoon scraping the bottom of an aluminum pan. After that, she stayed safely cocooned in her netting and did not stir until she heard the room-boy at her door with the early tea.

Jane fell into the habit of meeting Paul for a proper breakfast every morning in the hotel dining room, where they established their own private table. An austere-looking bachelor in his early forties, Paul was finicky and set in his ways but endowed with an engaging, slightly offbeat sense of humor. After discovering they both hated pre-coffee prattle, they settled into a routine of sharing the full English buffet in companionable silence, each happily engrossed in
The Ceylon Times
. Neither of them would “utter a word” until the plates were cleared and the papers thoroughly digested. They looked for all the world like an old married couple. One morning as they were breakfasting, they glimpsed “an apparition,” as Jane put it, “a buxom girl, very sexy in a tight black satin dress and black satin high-heeled shoes, with long red fingernails, plus a high Pompadour hairdo.” General George E. Stratemeyer, the Far East Air Force commander, was so transfixed by her appearance that he just sat there “drooling egg down his chin” as she sashayed past his table. Paul looked up over his glasses and broke his silence for the first time. Inclining his head slightly, he murmured, “Ah, the Black Tulip!” Jane smiled knowingly at the reference to the Alexandre Dumas novel about
a fierce competition to grow Holland's most coveted flower. From then on, they referred to the bodacious OSS assistant by that “Dumas title,” and on such a slender reed a mutual understanding was formed.

Paul had only recently written to his twin brother, Charles—who had landed a cushy job in Washington as advisor on art and music to the Department of State—complaining about the paucity of female companionship in Kandy. He was
“lonely,”
and he longed to meet a woman who was his equal, “an intimate, intelligent, and understanding companion.” Paul saw himself as a connoisseur of the fairer sex and lamented that his high standards only exacerbated the problem: “I am really spoiled for other women and I realize it over and over.” For seventeen years, he had been involved with a woman named Edith Kennedy, living with her first in Paris and then in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was twenty years his senior and tremendously dynamic and sophisticated. He regarded her as the great love of his life and was devastated by her death from cancer in 1942. By the time he joined the OSS, he had recovered sufficiently to date Jeanne Taylor, a young graphics designer in his department, and had reluctantly bidden her adieu before shipping out.

Very much on the prowl for a new girlfriend (confessing that he had more or less given up hope of seducing Nancy Toyne, the sometime mistress of his married friend Tommy Davis, whom he had met in Delhi), he sent his brother long, highly descriptive letters analyzing all of the available women, commenting on everything from their appearance and figures to their subtlety, individuality, and allure. While Paul technically honored the OSS injunction against keeping a diary, he wrote his brother that he considered his letters an “extension of his journal,” explaining that he jotted down notes during the day and “treasured up” anecdotes and apt phrases for the finished product, which he considered every bit as much as an art as his painting. When not discoursing on his health—he suffered from a host of ailments, from bad migraines following a serious car accident before the war to an array of allergies, an ulcerative stomach, sleeplessness, hives, and other nervous disorders—he elaborated his “dream” type of woman. She was a
“Zorina,”
in honor of the famous ballet dancer Vera Zorina, who
possessed, besides beauty and a goddesslike body, “what is lacking in this warring, man-ridden world: a sense of the continuity of life and perpetual sympathy, fellow-feeling, and consolation.” Since arriving in Ceylon, Paul had accompanied Julia and a flock of chattering girls on a day's excursion to the cave temple at Dambulla, but he was not particularly taken with any of them (not a Zorina in the bunch). In the narrow margin of one letter, he scribbled an aside that Julia had a “somewhat ragged, but pleasantly crazy sense of humor.” Most of the OSS girls were “soft-headed dopes,” who, he wrote, “with their uncomprehending sex appeal and limited understandings, have almost no magnetism for me, except in a very surface fashion.”

Then, on July 27, Paul wrote Charles that he was pleased to report the arrival at last of
“a new and interesting gal named Janie,”
adding that they had immediately bonded. “She's an artist, intelligent, talkative, and a comfort to me.”

After their acquaintance had stretched to several weeks, he sent his brother a long letter about his new friend, filling several pages with descriptions of her delightful, if slightly mad, character and antics.
“Janie is sweet and warm,”
he began, singing her praises. Though not conventionally pretty, she had a freckled, piquant face “with lively attractive blue eyes and a ready grin.” Comparing her to the much-admired wife of a friend, he wrote, “Many of her phrases and attitudes are exactly those of Margaret Gerard. The difference is great, however, as Janie is undisciplined emotionally, and though she has a better mind her feelings are always crashing around. She is sloppy physically, and given to wild hair and a messy room,” though some of this could be forgiven on the grounds that she was “a true Bohemienne.”