Louise's Blunder (13 page)

‘Of course,’ I said, pushing my chair back from my little desk, so crowded with thick files, document stamps, a calendar, index cards and notepads that I barely had space to work. I’d been analyzing an intelligence document written in such tiny handwriting I’d needed a magnifying glass to read it. The notes had been scribbled on a playing card and concealed in a deck of cards that was smuggled out of Germany. I was getting a headache. A cup of coffee and a couple of aspirin were just what I needed.

But why did Spencer Benton want to talk with me? I barely knew the man.

It was a little late for coffee hour so the cafeteria was almost empty. We had a table to ourselves. Spencer stirred milk into his coffee. I wished I had more than one teaspoon of sugar in mine. I washed down my aspirin with a couple of gulps.

Spencer looked utterly careworn. Being exhausted was standard for us all, especially during the week, but he looked as though he hadn’t slept in days. He kept stirring, as though postponing a conversation.

‘I want to talk to you about something personal,’ he said. ‘Peggy. And those other girls, Rose and Sadie.’

‘What about them?’ I said.

‘I want Peggy to stay away from them. And I think you should keep away from them, too.’

I bit my tongue. The idea that this man could tell me who my friends should be!

Or his wife’s too, for that matter!

‘They’re pinko, you know,’ he said.

‘Really,’ I said, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.

‘It reflects badly on me,’ he said, ‘for my wife to be friends with someone like Rose Dudley.’

‘I don’t see why,’ I said.

‘She was a reporter during the Spanish Civil War. She had an affair with Walter Roman, the Romanian Communist who fought in one of the International Brigades.’

Last I noticed it wasn’t a crime to have an affair with someone who fought Franco. But I kept my mouth shut, just like always. ‘She passed the OSS screening process, didn’t she?’ I said. OSS was fully staffed with Communists, anarchists, socialists, monarchists and God knew who else. There must be more to this than politics.

‘That’s not the point,’ he said. ‘I don’t want her filling Peggy’s head with all those crazy ideas about women’s rights. She’s my wife. It’s OK for her to work now – we’re at war – but afterwards she’ll have plenty to do when I go back to Yale. We’ll buy a nice house and we’ll have to entertain a lot if I have a hope of being chairman of my department. We’ll have kids too. She’ll have more than enough to do.’

So that was it. Spencer was afraid Peggy was becoming too independent.

‘I went to the Capital Yacht Club for an important reception a couple of weeks ago and she wouldn’t go with me! Said she wanted her Sunday off for herself. She was going to the library! If she’s not at Rose’s apartment she’s at the damn library. She’s my wife, she should spend her time at home.’

‘Spencer, I don’t know Peggy well enough to talk to her about something so personal. I need to get back to work,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’

The audience stood as one and applauded. Many of us were crying. The Movietone newsreel had brought us all to our feet in a rush of emotion and optimism about the war. Footage of the victory parade in Tunis, accompanied by triumphant military music and Lowell Thomas’s familiar voice, made patriotic goose bumps pop up and down my arms. The victorious generals, Monty, Ike and Andy, led the procession, followed by rank after rank of allied troops, including free French Arabs wearing their native clothing.

After the parade the newsreel switched topics to the first anniversary of the WAACs, showing us rank on rank of uniformed women marching in formation. If this wasn’t enough to inspire our confidence in victory, the next few segments showed us the hundreds of tanks that were rolling off production lines, artillery practice off the California coast and a clip of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sitting on the White House lawn, smiling and smoking equally large cigars, looking confident of victory.

The allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic and defeated the Axis powers in North Africa. The talk around OSS was that conquering Italy wouldn’t be a big obstacle for the allies. Most Italians hated Mussolini and Hitler and were not about to die for them. The Germans were expected to abandon Italy and retreat to the north.

Invading Fortress Europe was the allies’ next, massive, objective. Both Churchill and Roosevelt publicly agreed that it would take at least a year to prepare a cross-channel invasion.

Taking Italy would be a diversion, the means to take some of the pressure off the Soviet Union and the Second Front.

The newsreel switched to footage of waves of RAF bombers taking off from Malta, and I felt tears forming. My dear friend Rachel Bloch, a French Jew, had escaped with her children from southern France just days before the Germans occupied Vichy Marseilles. She’d taken refuge in Malta. For a year Nazi bombers in Sicily and British bombers in Malta engaged in daily bombing of each other. I knew Rachel and her children were well. I had received several letters from her. What a relief it would be for her, and the rest of Malta, to see the Nazis driven from Sicily so they could enjoy quiet spring days on their battered but lovely island. Perhaps now I could get some relief packages to her.

Clark brought me out of my reverie by tapping my arm. ‘Help me eat this popcorn,’ he said. ‘The movie’s about to start.’ The popcorn was good even though it was drenched in melted margarine instead of butter.

A very long hour and twenty minutes later the theater curtain closed and the lights came on to a smattering of applause.

‘So, what did you think?’ Clark said, as we jostled our way outside and through the throng of people waiting for the second show.

My instinct for self-preservation and job security kicked in. I wasn’t about to tell him what I really thought. The movie was about the best example of white propaganda I had ever seen. I understood why the movie was made. The Soviet Union was our ally now, and it was important to rally a suspicious public around the alliance.

Without the Soviet Union tying up the Nazis on the Second Front, we probably wouldn’t have been able to beat Rommel in North Africa. But for Walter Huston, who was playing Ambassador Davies, actually to stand up and declare that it was reasonable for Stalin to invade Finland, and to explain away the Party purges, was too much for me to accept. Without Spencer’s help I had already figured out that Rose, Sadie and Clark, and probably the late Paul Hughes, were left-wingers. I wondered if they were sympathetic to the Communist movement. That was OK with me; lots of people at OSS were. I might be too, I suspected, if that meant being against segregation and for equal pay for women. But I wanted to keep my job so I measured my words carefully, just in case Clark was as loose-lipped at work as he was within our little group.

‘The acting was really good,’ I said.

‘But the message was the most important thing,’ Clark said. He opened the car door for me and I tucked my tailored skirt under me as I slid in. I hadn’t had time to change from my work clothes.

‘I see that,’ I said carefully. ‘The American public knows so little about the Soviet Union. And it’s important that they understand why Stalin made a non-aggression pact with Hitler before the war started.’

Clark nodded. My answer had been sufficient.

He shifted his car into gear and we moved out into the crowded streets.

‘How about a drink?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Maybe some other time. I’m beat.’

First thing Saturday morning I hopped a bus to the Bureau of Engraving, but I had no intention of catching a streetcar. When I got off the bus, directly ahead of me to the south was the Tidal Basin, but I turned north on ‘D’, past the Department of Agriculture, an annex and a heating plant. I turned on to 12th Street and found the Western Union office.

Inside controlled bedlam reigned. A long counter stretched across the front of the office.

Four girls helped customers who waited in long lines with their telegraph forms already filled out. The girls took the customers’ money and recorded the transaction in a ledger. In the back of the store the telegraph operators, all men, clacked continuously, sending telegrams as fast as they could from the stacks of forms the girls put into their in-boxes. They wore earphones or they couldn’t possibly have concentrated well enough to tap out the dots and dashes correctly. In another part of the office several women, also wearing earphones, pulled strips of paper out of teletype machines, glued them to telegram forms and handed them to one of a score of boys in caps and worn shoes to deliver. Another man sat at a switchboard receiving telegram requests by phone from customers with accounts. It was a remarkable system, really. You could communicate with anyone in the world within minutes.

I waited patiently in line until it was my turn at the counter.

A young girl with blonde wavy hair styled like Barbara Stanwyck’s waited on me.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. I pulled a badge out of my pocketbook, a District Police badge, number twenty-three, issued to Donna Munro. ‘I’m a policewoman,’ I said. Apparently Miss Munro owed Detective Royal a favor – a really big one – and allowed him to borrow her badge on her day off.

The telegraph girl, whose name was Minnie according to her name badge, slapped her hand over her mouth. When her surprise abated she removed her hand and said, ‘I didn’t know girls could work for the police.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘There are almost a hundred of us.’ Now, District policewomen only did chores like guarding arrested women and caring for lost children and such, but Minnie didn’t need to know that.

‘I think that’s grand!’ Minnie said. ‘Are you investigating something?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said. ‘I need to find out the return address on a telegram we have as evidence in a case. We know it was sent from this office. The return address wasn’t printed on the telegram. I was wondering if you kept a record of it anyway?’

‘Oh, yes!’ Minnie breathed. ‘In case a customer’s check bounces or something! Do you have our code from the telegram?’

‘I do,’ I said, and recited it to her from memory.

Minnie wrote down the code on the back of a telegraph form and hurried over to a nearby door. When she opened it I saw shelves of canvas ledgers stacked one on top of the other.

She went inside, and when she returned she handed me a scrap of paper with the address – 710 ‘E’ Street SW. Maybe ten blocks from where I was standing.

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘this will be so helpful.’

Minnie clasped her hands in front of her and, still breathless, said, ‘Can you tell me if you’re investigating, well, a murder? Like Ellery Queen!’

I wanted to make Minnie happy, but I just couldn’t.

‘I can’t say, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Regulations.’

I walked north toward the address Minnie gave me and shortly found myself in a street lined with tiny storefronts. I passed a laundry with a sign that read ‘No New Customers’ out front, and a café with a hand-lettered note taped to the front door that read ‘Help Wanted, Colored May Apply’, before I found myself in front of the address I was looking for, a newsagent with a sign over the door that read ‘Zruchat’s News and Sundries’. Another door next to the entrance to the store led to a staircase going up to the second floor. The door was locked. An American flag placard rested in one of the two windows. I shivered despite the warm day. Whoever sent the telegram that claimed Hughes was ill might live in the rooms over the shop. I might be one move away from solving the mystery of his death.

An old-fashioned bell over the door tinkled when I entered the store.

The shop couldn’t have been more than ten feet square. It was packed with cheap merchandise. There was a rack of magazines, newspapers and comic books. A shelf crowded with sundries like aspirin and mouthwash and safety pins. A short counter stretched along the back. Dusty canned goods and beer bottles lined the shelves behind it.

A small man sat on a stool behind the counter. He was hunched over like an old man but his face was smooth and unlined. His stone grey hair hung long, reaching down to his collar in back but pushed neatly behind his ears. His faded blue eyes were huge behind thick round spectacles.

‘Good afternoon, madam,’ he said in a heavy Russian accent.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said to him, stretching my hand over the counter to shake his. It was surprisingly firm for an old man.

‘What can I get for you today?’ he asked.

‘I’m not actually shopping,’ I said. ‘I’m from the Western Union Company. My name is Patsy Mason.’ Really, Sergeant Royal should work for OSS. He’d given me great cover identities.

‘And I am Lieb Zruchat,’ he said. ‘I am a shopkeeper, as you can see. So what does a great company like Western Union want with me?’

I leaned on the counter and pretended to refer to a small notebook I’d pulled out of my pocketbook.

‘I’m conducting a survey of our customers,’ I said. ‘Do you mind answering a few questions about our service?’

Zruchat shifted on his stool and grimaced, clutching his back.

‘Apologies,’ he said. ‘An old war injury, from an old war! The Great War. Now we got another one, we call the first World War One.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘What,’ he said, ‘will there be a World War Three? Only after I am dead, I hope. But lady,’ he continued, ‘I have never sent a telegram. Not ever in my life.’

‘It could have been the person who lives upstairs,’ I said.

‘Lady, the person who lives upstairs is me. And my cat Leo.’

‘Really?’ I said, glancing down at my notebook prop. ‘But according to my notes you sent a telegram very recently. A couple of weeks ago.’

Zruchat shook his head emphatically. ‘No, lady,’ he said. ‘I got a telephone.’ He nodded at the antiquated instrument sitting on the shelf behind him. ‘Why spend a dime if I can just call?’

‘You’re sure?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I know if I send a telegram or not.’

‘Well, it must be a mistake, then,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to have bothered you.’

He shrugged. ‘Time I got. No customers will come this time of day.’ He pointed to the magazine rack. ‘Don’t you want the new issue of
Photoplay
? All about George Stevens in
The More the Merrier
.’