Gone to Soldiers (23 page)

He moved into the first room he could find in the overcrowded city, with a family of noisy Kentuckians who drove him crazy. Finally one of the men in his section asked him if he would like to share a tiny apartment out near Maryland in the Third Alphabet of streets, a long way from the Capitol and from work, but an apartment that would be his and Rodney's only. He accepted without seeing it. That was just as well, as it was dark, tiny and hot under the third-floor roof, a walk-up with a view of the next roof suitable for anyone wishing to launch an intensive study of pigeon mating habits.

They had only two rooms and a kitchenette. Rodney, who had found the apartment, had already claimed the bedroom. Daniel got the Murphy bed in the living room. That felt just like home, for it was as lousy a bed as he'd had in the Bronx. He decided to leave the Murphy bed in its closet and sleep on a mattress on the floor. One corner of their living room thus consisted of his mattress with a heap of odd pillows on it, including the woven bamboo lion headrest he had always had on his bed since Shanghai. Over it he hung the scroll he had bargained for with a friend's help in Soochow. “Very bohemian,” Rodney grumbled, but as he did not want to give up the bedroom, matters remained stalemated. Rodney scarcely spoke to Daniel unless drunk, when he would maunder on garrulously about his problems seducing women.

Washington was not a vast cosmopolitan hive like New York and Shanghai, not a center of intellectual life like Boston. It was an overgrown southern city that moved at half the pace of New York. Many of the younger men and women went bareheaded, while everyone in New York wore hats. There wasn't a skyscraper in town. Everything was segregated and marked for colored or white. It struck him as not only rude but silly, close to hysterical behavior. The colored population of Washington was large and seemed quite varied, although almost universally ill-housed, some in what were called alley houses, built behind the houses on the street in a teeming warren that made him think of the seamier parts of Shanghai.

Every day he took the streetcar to the Navy Building at Eighteenth and Constitution Avenue, went past the Marine guards up to the third deck—the first thing he had had to learn here was to call floors decks, walls bulkheads and other Navy nonsense—and checked into signals intelligence. OP-20-G was not a quiet place of intense study, not a happy family, not a place where you were welcomed in and shown your part as a jolly cog in a great operation. It was a nut farm. People who had been there before the war seemed to feel guilty that Pearl Harbor was to some large extent a Navy fuck-up and thus a naval intelligence fuck-up. They worked in a frenzy. Their boss screamed, yelled, rushed them, hovered to make sure any conversation occurring was in regard to work and work only. In one corner sat the former head of the department, with Pearl Harbor hung around his neck like the albatross about the ancient mariner. No one wanted to look at him, and he seemed to have little to do besides an endless postmortem report.

Daniel had no idea how he came to inherit being liaison, a fancy word for messenger boy, to William Friedman, but the previous contact person had been sent out to the Hypo unit in Pearl Harbor, where there was another cryptanalytic unit. Nobody explained that to him. Nobody actually explained that what they were working on were Japanese codes. The unit seemed to operate under the same assumptions with which he had noted Boston street signs were erected: as a notation to those who knew already, and with a clear suspicion of strangers, a rooted conviction that if you didn't already know where you were, you had no business being there.

William Friedman headed the Signals Intelligence Service in the Army, down one building along the Mall in another maze of rooms called the Munitions Building, up and back on the third floor there—where floors were floors. Daniel liked going over. Friedman was a paternal figure, not only to him but to his own people. He was not a jolly father but a cool, remote, omniscient father, who saw carefully to the training of his personnel. His desk and his mind appeared always in order. Daniel found the atmosphere in the Army signal intelligence unit at once bracing and soothing. They worked just as hard as the Navy, but the atmosphere was clear, rational and benign.

Friedman was a small neatly made dapper man, a wearer of spats, elegantly tailored three-piece suits, shoes that shone not brightly, for the leather was too fine and supple, but with an inner glow, like old money: but Friedman was a Jew. He had been born in Kishinev, in what was now the Soviet Union, and emigrated as an infant. He spoke with no accent other than an
o
sound Daniel associated with Pittsburgh. Friedman was a genius. The very vocabulary in which Daniel's new profession was discussed had been coined by Friedman, down to the term that described his job: cryptanalyst.

Friedman had a wife, Elizabeth, who was almost as renowned as he was, generally ranked second in that profession they had mostly invented. They had been in Washington since the twenties, setting up codes for most government departments needing them, from the Army to the Treasury and Coast Guard and Colonel Donovan's new swashbuckling intelligence operation. They had broken codes and served as witnesses in numerous trials. Friedman was reputed tight with his wife, crazy about her. No hint of scandal had ever touched their intimacy. But Friedman had been discharged from the Army before Pearl Harbor and was now a civilian. It was said that the strain of breaking the Japanese diplomatic code, called Purple, had caused him to have a nervous breakdown, and the Army had chosen that moment to punish him for his eccentricity and style. Whatever it was, there was something faintly sad about Friedman, Daniel thought, as if he had seen too much—a philosophical sadness underlying the austere and ceaseless brilliance.

Friedman had looked hard at him the first time he arrived as errand boy, a shrewd glance Daniel suspected was related to the Navy having picked one of the few available Jews to send to Friedman. Then Friedman had seemed to take several mental steps backward and judge Daniel carefully in their next few encounters. Finally he had become interested in him: not friendly, exactly, although there was a friendliness in that regard. Friedman was a man who used formality as a weapon, as in this military milieu, he must often need protection. Jew-baiting and anti-Semitism were rampant in Washington. Daniel sometimes wondered whether only the small number of Jews kept the city from establishing a third category of lavatories and schools.

It was the end of April before he began to understand what they were really doing, even as he noticed Washington changing around him, bristling with uniforms and suddenly years younger in its street crowds. Nobody read him into the large picture; it seemed to be policy not to. He had to infer the meaning of their work as he had to build up the meaning of the partially deciphered messages he must complete deciphering if he could and translate.

The Japanese used a machine to do their coding for them, a machine with many rotors. None of them had ever seen this machine. Signal intelligence consisted of plucking radio signals from the air and noting them down. Friedman's group had succeeded in building a working facsimile of the Purple machine late in the summer of 1940, and had begun to break the code. Purple was only one code. The Japanese army and navy used a multitude of other codes, which must also be broken. However, Purple was the diplomatic code, a mine of information on Japanese intentions and thought processes and observations worldwide. The Navy and the Army had been working on Purple decrypts alternate days, then sharing their results. Daniel spent his working life staring at clumps of letters that read like this:

XYBLG IRGUB NZZCU IRFLB USKLM

He was sorry when the Joint Chiefs decided the Navy should abandon Purple deciphering to the Army, because that meant he would not see Friedman regularly. He had a crush on the dapper little man with the formal manner and the air of not quite belonging. He was glad he had something good to carry to Friedman, the latest from the Baron Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin. Oshima's wires home to Tokyo were an excellent source of information on the Germans, for since the Tri-Partite Pact had been signed between Germany, Italy and Japan, the Nazis had been showing Oshima their preparations and war plans. The baron was the best agent the Americans had in Berlin. Through Oshima, they had known in advance that Hitler was planning to invade the Soviet Union, Daniel learned, but American attempts to warn the Soviets had been stymied by Stalin's absolute refusal to believe.

Friedman was sitting at his desk with his lips pursed staring into inner distance, his small fragile-looking hands playing with a pencil. When Friedman finally noticed him, he seemed almost embarrassed to have been so abstracted, but he had trained Daniel as well as his own staff not to bother him when he was working through a problem. Daniel would have stood there all day sooner than interrupt.

“When is your move scheduled?” Friedman asked, scanning the sheaf of papers rapidly. The Navy was moving to one girls' school, Mount Vernon, as Friedman's operation was moving to another, Arlington Hall. There seemed to be an excess of former finishing schools around Washington, Daniel thought idly. Perhaps all the girls had been finished off.

“We hope to move next month, if hope is the word. There aren't even screens on the windows out there.”

“Then you'll have more employees than you counted on, and ninety-nine percent of them will have six legs and bite. You should equip yourself with a good entomological field guide and enjoy the swarm.”

Daniel was not sure Friedman was joking, as his face remained sober, still scanning the runoff. He made some marginal notes. “I've just been thinking,” he said, “that perhaps Jews are quick at learning languages, because we learn several early regardless of our place of birth.”

Daniel felt a little rattled. He had been expecting a comment on the baron's wire, but Friedman's mind was running on Daniel's study of Japanese, which Friedman had told him he regretted not having the time to learn. Daniel adjusted. “Oh, you mean because of learning Hebrew. And Yiddish or Ladino or whatever is spoken at home. Then the language of the country. Within my own family, my father's four brothers and their families must speak ten languages. Maybe more.” He started counting them mentally.

Friedman finished the sheaf. “This strikes me as more a wish list of Hitler's than anything real, but I presume it's gone up through channels?”

“Yes, sir, of course.”

“You've been working on Purple since you arrived. Too bad we can't simply transfer you over here.”

“I'd love that,” Daniel said frankly. “More than anything. But I can just imagine the Navy saying, Sure, go work for the Army. We'll transfer you tomorrow because it's a rational choice.”

“Sometimes they behave as if their worst enemies are the other forces.” Friedman sighed. “They used to be poor relations, all the services, going to Congress cap in hand asking for fodder for their mules and paint for their old rusting ships. They've taken to power in an amazing fashion.”

“Doesn't war automatically do that? Give all power to the military?”

“The British and the Soviets haven't given over ultimate power to the military, but the politicos run the show—whether for good or ill. Alone among the allies, we leave what ought to be decisions of political policy to the generals.”

Dismissed, Daniel went back happy. At least Friedman would take him if he could, and that was the highest compliment he had ever received. Later that same day he saw Friedman standing with a group of the top Army brass outside the Munitions Building, three and four star generals all hefty, beefy men, with whom he had obviously just been at some quasi-historic meeting. Friedman was standing to the side with a slightly bemused half smile. He looked as if he had wandered among the generals by accident, a sleek Oriental cat, a Siamese, caught suddenly among a herd of snorting bulls, careful to avoid their hooves and not sure in what language to address them. Yet Daniel knew that when Friedman gave the military a presentation, they listened. He did in fact know how to talk to them so that they understood, for he had been educating their officers for years. He had created their whole educational system in signals and codes.

Getting rid of Purple did not lessen the pressure in OP-20-G; the tension increased until the office was shimmering with it. It was as if a high-pitched voice whined out of the ceiling,
Got to, Got to, Got to
, all the time. They must crack the Japanese naval codes yesterday; they must decipher and translate those vital messages. So much of the American fleet had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor, there was not one battleship to fight with and only four aircraft carriers. Admirals King and Nimitz had to know what the Japanese were going to do before they did it, so they could move their few pieces across the vast blue board to the right spot. Even then they would be outgunned, but without that advance knowledge, they would have no chance at all of preventing further Japanese invasions.

Therefore they worked without ceasing, shorthanded until more young officers should be discharged from the language programs in Boulder and Harvard. Therefore they worked all night. Therefore they worked a seven-day week. Therefore Daniel found himself sitting one Saturday night in a restaurant with a menu of southern cooking before him trying to decode it and unable to believe it meant what it said and unable to remember what those words that seemed to be dissolving into component letters and then into black marks might stand for.

The tension got to everyone. The normally soft-spoken Rodney threw his dictionary on the floor and swore, while the hotter tempered crypt-analysts spat insults at each other. One of the older women, Sonia, wept and Ann barricaded herself behind a wall of books in self-protection over which her sleek Oriental beauty could no longer be glimpsed. Ann never lost her temper; she merely shrank from the excesses bursting like ripe boils. Several people had requested transfers, and some of the Navy men got them, heading happily for an assignment on a ship and action.