A Covert Affair (19 page)

Having carefully considered the matter, he concluded that she was altogether too inexperienced and overwrought for a randy old goat like him—“it would be too much for Dr. Paulski to risk attempting.” Julia had potential, he continued, but was in need of “training and molding and informing.” She enjoyed good food, art, music, and literature and would doubtless develop a taste for the finer things if they were in her orbit. She was eager and pliable, but just thinking about all the work it would take made him tired. Referring to his earlier treatise on the Zorina, Paul reminded his brother that his ideal type was confident and refined, someone “who has been hammered
already
on life's anvil and attained a definite shape.”

As for when his dream woman would appear, Paul was still in the dark. After a deep malaise following the death of Edith, his longtime lover, he had sought the advice of an astrologist. Her name was Jane Bartleman, and he was so impressed with her powers of foresight that he paid her more than one call in Washington before going overseas. Paul had written down her prediction word for word and pinned all his hopes to it. He quoted bits of it often in his letters to his brother, as if convincing himself of its truth, almost willing it to happen. The New Year, Bartleman had advised, would bring “many changes, sudden moves, unexpected shifts,” and with them heavier professional responsibilities. There would also be great changes in his personal life. He would fall
“heavily in love.”
The woman in question would be “intelligent, dramatic, beautiful, a combination of many facets,” someone who can keep house, yet is a modern woman.” As Bartleman's predictions about the path his career would take had always been “onthe-button,” Paul took heart that her promise of romance would also prove true.

In the meantime, he would have to make do with his little fan club. Not long after departing for China, he wrote Charles that he had received the
“best birthday present imaginable”
in the form of a batch of mail, his first since leaving Ceylon, including greetings from “my three Jays”—Jane, Julia, and Jeanne. In another letter, he good-naturedly scolded his brother for having trouble keeping track of the many girls mentioned over the months of correspondence—
“Your confusion concerning … Janie, Julie and Peachy is prob'ly natural: only names to you”
—adding, “I suggest you adopt the system I used when I read
War and Peace;
keep a chart.”

Although married, Betty was not insensible to her friends' plight. She, too, felt the nagging loneliness when she returned to her room at night and no one was there to warm her bed. There was small comfort in the wedding band on her finger. Her long-distance relationship with Alex seemed more painfully stretched and tenuous with every passing month. The war had disrupted all of their lives, and there was a natural tendency to look for affection and tenderness close at hand. Under the stress of work, and the instability of their surroundings, all kinds of alliances—however impetuous and fleeting—developed. In contrast to Julia, who had confided a degree of anguish about her situation, Jane was suspiciously silent on the subject, all the while appearing more carefree and buoyant than ever. If she read her friend's character correctly, Betty had to hazard a guess that Jane was enjoying the attentions of someone in Ceylon—someone whose identity she had her own reasons for wanting to keep secret. Betty could well imagine why.

When confronted, Jane confessed all. Shortly after arriving in Kandy, she had met a thirty-seven-year-old American navy officer by the name of Manly Fleischmann, the handsome son of a Jewish father and Quaker mother who had in adult life opted to become Episcopalian. He was a Harvard graduate and a successful lawyer in civilian life,
“but not one of Donovan's.”
In 1943, he joined the OSS and was sent to Mountbatten's theater in Ceylon. He led a hundred-man mission to Japanese-occupied Burma, where he helped direct espionage operations behind enemy lines. He was in Colombo organizing additional intelligence-gathering schemes, and he boasted that he had
recently managed to enlist a Burmese postman to steal Japanese mail sacks and rifle the contents for war plans, the disposition of troops, and other helpful bits. Jane liked him right away. He was brilliant and witty, if
“a bit of an intellectual snob.”
He joked that he and Jane were the two smartest people in the OSS but that sometimes he had his doubts about her.

He was married, of course. Worse, he had a child. When he and Jane realized all too quickly that what had begun as a roll in the hay had turned into a full-blown affair, they agreed they would
“be true to each other”
during the war but would make no claims on each other when it was over. For the time being, however, they were very much a couple, enjoying all the conjugal benefits without the complications of the Real Thing. Jane liked pretending to be the captain's wife and keeping house, at least in their little Sinhalese home port. No model of domesticity, she admitted that every time he got promoted she would endeavor to sew another stripe on his uniform,
“unevenly, of course.”
None of this came as a shock to Betty.
“There was a lot of that sort of thing going around,”
she said years later with shrug. “The war was hard on a lot of marriages.”

Manly was often called away on missions to India, Burma, and Assam. In his absence, Jane kept up a pretense of going out with other men but in practice kept to a “virtuous” monogamy:
“No one else ever crawled under my mosquito netting, except [her chipmunk] Christopher.”
They kept up a funny, fond correspondence, trusting the services of an odd selection of
“fleet-footed couriers, firemen, and tourists who plied the Colombo-Arakan route”
to be, in his words, their “Cupid's messengers.” He would write her when he expected to be coming her way so she could arrange to be free, making almost no effort to disguise his lascivious intent from the army censors. After one reunion, he wrote,
“I can hardly tell you how much I enjoyed our brief interlude. I am bound and determined that they will never say that all work has made MF a dull boy, and my ruthless will is now fixed on a repeat junket ere many moons.”

Jane tried to be discreet for obvious reasons, not the least of which was that
“the U.S. armed forces did not officially recognize sex.”
After
receiving one of her messages, Manly teased her for going to absurd lengths to safeguard their privacy.
“It is not necessary to enclose them in stamped, air-mail envelopes,”
he wrote. “My ancestral blood boils at this proof of your Basically Bourbon nature. It is such conduct that makes COMMUNISTS, or worse.” They thought they had everyone fooled until the morning Manly crept out of her bedroom at the Queen's Hotel and across the lobby with her
“red-and-white dressing gown trailing from his back pocket.”
He was halfway in the jeep when his GI driver pointed out the incriminating peignoir.

At the end of two weeks, Betty's TD (temporary duty) was up, and Jane drove her to the airport for her flight back to Calcutta. Tired of teary goodbyes, they made funny faces and grinned back and forth foolishly. It was easier to make light of the occasion. Betty would shortly be headed to Kunming along with a number of their colleagues from Detachment 404, including Paul, Julia, and Ellie. With so many of her old pals gone, Jane was in need of new playmates. It was the only way to endure the ludicrous monotony of life in Kandyland. She soon found pleasant diversion in the person of Peggy Wheeler, an OSS colleague she had befriended in Washington, who was the administrative secretary to Colonel Coughlin, along with her father, “Speck” Wheeler, who was now the top American commander in the theater. Peggy, by virtue of being
“the only child and the apple of her father's eye,”
as Coughlin wrote in a cautionary memo to Donovan, had rather unusual status and privileges. “While an ardent supporter of OSS,” she saw all incoming and outgoing messages from Washington—except those marked “eyes only”—and it was understood, Couglin added, that Wheeler would “depend on her to keep him informed.”

Jane immediately endeared herself to the general by persuading Peggy to abandon her tiny room at the Queen's Hotel for his much-larger suite at the Hotel Suisse across the lake. In recent months, conditions at the Queen's had gone steadily downhill. In addition to the dicey plumbing, the power was frequently on the fritz. They had all grown accustomed to running up and down the stairs carrying flashlights, trying to dress and apply makeup by the light of one spluttering candle, and more or less camping out indoors. Peggy had at first refused to
leave, gamely insisting she would stick it out with the rest of her OSS pals. Jane finally convinced her to go by arguing that if she moved in with her father it would be to their advantage, as she could then invite them all over for hot baths. Even Peggy could not counter the obvious wisdom of this argument, and she relented. As a result, Jane enjoyed her first really good scrub in months and swore she emerged several shades lighter.

Wheeler, the new deputy supreme Allied commander, was rumored to have an entertainment allowance of ten thousand dollars, and he was generous with his hospitality. Jane was frequently invited to the general's dinner parties, and she enjoyed being wined and dined at Uncle Sam's expense. Wheeler was a top army engineer, intelligent and humane, and was popular with both his fellow officers and the troops. As a young West Point graduate he had worked on the construction of the Panama Canal and had spent the better half of a century tackling the army's heaviest jobs, building roads, railroads, harbors, and dams in almost every part of the world. He was the kind of tough-minded pioneer they could count on to get it done, no matter how hellish the conditions.

Stilwell assigned him the tremendous task of completing the Ledo Road, a two-hundred-mile lifeline hacked through jungle and swamp, connecting India and China. After the Japanese cut the Burma Road in 1942, the Allies were forced to airlift the majority of war matériel to the Chinese over the Hump, so establishing an alternate land route from Assam to Kunming was a priority. Wheeler directed fifteen thousand American soldiers and some thirty-five thousand local laborers, laying down a winding double-track road across steep mountain passes, roaring torrents, and sheer drops. The worst section, a series of hairpin turns following a narrow trail across the Patkai Range, was nicknamed “Hell Pass.” Altogether, it was an amazing engineering feat. The job won him an oak-leaf cluster for his Distinguished Service Medal, and the British named him an Honorary Knight Commander. Touched as he was by the honors, Wheeler confided to Jane that the work he was proudest of was the salmon ladder of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River. Apparently, a side effect of this great barrier taming
the river had been that the salmon could no longer swim upstream to spawn, so Wheeler, with his customary ingenuity, had conceived of a series of steps that the fish could traverse.

Tall and lean, with a bristling mustache and horn-rimmed glasses, the general, Jane thought, looked like a
“straight-backed Groucho Marx.”
He had punctilious but easy manners and a nice dry sense of humor. The story was that on his first visit to Burma, Wheeler asked Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Williams, aka “Elephant Bill,” the famed British elephant wrangler, how long the gestation period was for a baby elephant.
Two years
, he was told. A little while later, he saw a teak forest and commented on how convenient it was that teak—a valuable wartime resource used for everything from the decks of combat ships to docks—was in such ready supply, and just “rolled into the river and floated downstream.” He was informed that teak had to be dried for three years before it would float. That evening, he observed to his British counterpart: “If it takes two years to produce a baby elephant and three years for teak to float, I have a feeling things are not going to happen very rapidly on this front.”

Despite his daughter's job, Wheeler took a dim view of the OSS and the inexperienced civilians it attached to the military units of SEAC and elevated to positions of authority. For the most part, Jane recalled, he viewed the OSS as
“a useless organization”
and its employees as “a bunch of mavericks.” Peggy and Jane would protest (“as loyal OSS types”), but to no avail.

Wheeler's suspicions were frequently reinforced by the odd behavior exhibited by some of Donovan's more eccentric ivory-tower types. In one unfortunate incident, S. Dillon Ripley, one of the country's outstanding authorities on birds of the Far East, was shaving in his basha prior to joining an outdoor cocktail party already in progress on the other side of a row of tea bushes bordering his hut when he caught sight of a rare
Picus chlorolophys wellsi
(a small green woodpecker). In mid-lather, sporting only a bath towel, he grabbed his gun and rushed out to bag the specimen for the Smithsonian. As he ran to retrieve the bird, his towel gave way, leaving the thirty-year-old Ripley exposed to all the festivity, which was being hosted by Wheeler. It was at this point that
the general noticed the OSS intelligence chief—who at six foot three and a half was an arresting sight in the nude—attracting the attention of a number of officers and ladies, mouths agape and martinis in hand. Not the least bit put out, Ripley dressed and rejoined the party a few minutes later, whereupon he
“modestly advised Mountbatten, who had greeted him a trifle coolly, that the Picus, though up to then unrepresented in his collection, was not unknown to science.”
Ripley's contacts and experience in the region may have made him useful to Donovan, but his civilian garb, languid air, and frequent birding expeditions into sensitive border areas were an endless irritant to the military. According to Jane, Wheeler
“never forgave the OSS for harboring such characters.”