Louise's Dilemma (22 page)

I did as I was told. The lot was empty except for our car.

‘What are we doing here?’

‘Waiting until it’s good and dark,’ she said.

For what, I wondered. Why was she delaying her escape? It was still possible that Eastern Command would capture those Nazi submariners on the eastern shore of Maryland and learn she wasn’t with them. And I dearly hoped someone was missing me enough to do something about it.

‘I took a course here when I started working at the St Leonard Library,’ Anne mused. ‘The Town Council paid for it. It was the best week of my life. I stayed at a boarding house a couple of blocks away and walked here every day for classes. I didn’t cook a single meal. Look,’ she said, rummaging around in her purse, ‘I kept the key to the staff entrance.’

So, she was going to kill me and dump my body in the library, where my corpse wouldn’t be found until tomorrow morning.

She caught my frightened expression.

‘Don’t look so stricken. This is the perfect place for me to lock you up until I’m out of the city and for me to wait for a bus where no one can see me.’

Anne seemed almost feverish as she grabbed something in her purse and held on to it so I couldn’t see it.

‘Guess what this is,’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

She drew the object slowly out, grinning wickedly at me as she waited for me to recognize it.

‘It’s a German stick grenade,’ I said, with as calm a voice as I could muster. ‘Anne, what are you going to do?’

‘Do you know why it’s called a stick grenade?’ she asked, brandishing it. ‘Because the stick attached to the grenade lets you throw it so much further, and I’ve been practicing. My best throw was twenty-seven feet.’

‘Anne, what are you going to do?’ I repeated.

‘Kill as many limeys as I can before I leave town,’ she said, shoving the grenade back into her pocketbook. ‘I’ve got it all figured out. There’s a bus stop outside the front of the library. I can wait for it at the door so no one notices me waiting on the street. I’ll hop off at the British Embassy. Did you know those fools don’t even have a wall around most of the embassy? I can just walk right up to the backside of the compound, where the offices are, and heave this grenade through a window into any room with lights on and people in it.’

‘They’ll catch you, and you’ll hang for it!’

‘No, they won’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll run south through the park until I get to Wisconsin Avenue. I can pick up a streetcar there and be on my way before the smoke clears at the embassy and the night watchman rousts the Royal Marines.’

She was right, she could pull it off.

‘Tomorrow morning after the library opens you can tell the FBI and Lord Halifax, if he’s alive, why I did it.’

‘I’ll tell them,’ I said, desperate to know her entire story before she left, ‘but I’ll need some answers first.’

‘More questions,’ Anne said, sighing. ‘You’re determined, aren’t you?’

‘I just want to understand,’ I said. ‘I’m guessing Richard Martin was a Nazi agent?’

‘Yes, he recruited me when he visited us before the war. The cousin thing was a complete invention. Leroy fell for it. He was not a bright man. I met Martin a couple of days later at a hotel in Annapolis, and he gave me the suitcase radio. I kept it under the bed, and Leroy never noticed it. Martin said that I’d get a postcard when I was needed. Then I was supposed to start monitoring the radio frequency he had me memorize for my instructions. The date was just one we settled on so that I’d know the postcard was authentic. Then you hand-delivered the postcard to me! And I started monitoring the frequency that very day.’

‘You killed your husband,’ I said.

She shrugged. ‘I had to. He kept asking me why I lied about my birthday. And I couldn’t figure out how to get him out of the house. Originally, the submarine was going to land the team on the eastern shore, on the Atlantic side. I was going to meet them and drive the saboteurs to Annapolis. But then the captain saw his chance to penetrate the Bay, and he couldn’t resist it.’

‘How did the Nazis know about you?’

‘Between us my grandmother and I must have written a hundred letters, to the British, to the United Nations, to the Netherlands government, trying to get restitution from the British for the loss of our farm. The Germans found some of my letters in Hague after they conquered the Netherlands. You know how the Nazis love to riffle through other countries’ file cabinets.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘That’s enough now,’ she said. ‘Time to go.’

Anne kept the Luger at my back while she unlocked the staff entrance, which was in the rear of the library on the lower level. Once inside, the halls were dimly lit by a few random light fixtures, just enough to guide our way into the building. The back of the library held the book stacks and staff work rooms for cataloguing and such. The windows here were just slits, in case a bookshelf toppled. Of course, I’d never been in this part of the building.

With the rest of the public I spent my time on the first level, where the open, high-ceilinged reading rooms and the L’Enfant Map Room were located. But Anne knew her way around down here, and most of the way along the back hall she stopped in front of a door with ‘bookbindery’ lettered on it.

My heart began to pound. I didn’t believe she intended to let me live. Anne opened the door and shoved me inside. I turned to face her, fully expecting her to shoot me. But, just as she had said, she spared me, closing the door on me. I heard the key turn in the lock. I was so relieved that my head spun and I sank to my knees on the cold marble floor while I listened to her footsteps recede.

Anne had said she would wait for the bus inside the library, near the front door. That meant she’d cross the building and climb the first flight of the Grand Staircase up to Literary Hall. From there she could station herself by one of the tall arched windows and watch for the bus. That would minimize her time standing in the street.

From there she’d go to the British Embassy to murder as many English men and women as she could. What a horrific scenario! Not just for the people who died, but for the United States government. Anne was an American citizen. Imagine the newspaper headlines in London!

Could I possibly escape this room and stop her?

I collected myself, felt for the edge of a table, and pulled myself up off the cold floor. It was pitch black. I found the door and turned the doorknob, not expecting success and not having any. Then I felt around the door until I found the light switch and flicked it on. Nothing happened, which I also expected. Most of the power to the building would be cut off to save electricity, except for a few lights scattered around the building.

Okay. This was the bookbindery. Could there be another entrance that Anne didn’t know about? With an unlocked door? I doubted it, but I needed to find out. I felt my way around the perimeter of the room, running into bookshelves and tables that interrupted the walls as I went.

As I felt my way around one table I came across some tools of the bookbinders trade. A wooden press with an oversized screw, a sticky jar of glue, cardboard and leather rectangles, and then my fingers clasped an awl. It was about four inches long with a sharp point and a wooden handle that fit neatly into the palm of my hand. I slid it into my pea coat pocket. It wouldn’t be much defense against a Luger but it was better than nothing.

The palms of my hands moved across empty wall again, until I came across a dumbwaiter. I knew that’s what it was, there was no mistaking it. I felt around the edges. It was about four feet tall and a bit narrower, say three and a half feet. The door was divided horizontally with the two halves meeting in the middle. There were three buttons on a side panel. Lower Floor, First Floor, and Second Floor. I grabbed the door handle and pulled it down. Both halves of the door flew open with a loud clang. About halfway through the process an automatic function engaged and the door opened completely without any more leverage from me.

The dumbwaiter must be on a separate electric circuit from the lights.

The normal process for using the dumbwaiter was to close the doors and then select the floor. But I would need to do it backwards, pushing the button for the floor before pulling the door closed from inside. I didn’t know if the dumbwaiter would even work with those two functions reversed.

My eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dark. Inside the dumbwaiter a shelf divided the space. I couldn’t possibly fit inside. But when I grasped the shelf and pulled, it came out of the dumbwaiter and dropped on the floor with an echoing crash.

I climbed about halfway in before I felt panic hit. This was a tiny space. I’d have to fold myself into it to fit. How could I mash the button for the dumbwaiter to rise before the automatic door slammed on my arm? Would the dumbwaiter door rip my arm off if it was caught? Could I get the door open from inside? What if I was trapped inside until morning! I felt sweat begin to prickle between my shoulderblades.

I backed away from the dumbwaiter until I hit the edge of a table. I wasn’t going up in that thing. It wasn’t meant for people.

I completed my patrol around the edge of the bookbinding room. There were no other doors. I was stuck here.

Had Anne left the building yet? Even if she had, it was a long bus ride up to the British Embassy. There still might be time to stop her if I could get out of this room and find a telephone. Here in Washington I knew whom to call – the D.C. Metropolitan Police. Patrol cars were out on the streets all night, and they could get to the embassy quickly, find Anne and arrest her.

It was the dumbwaiter or nothing.

I didn’t know until then that I was afraid of small dark enclosed places. Looking into the open dumbwaiter made me shudder with apprehension. I forced myself to climb inside, contorting myself into a position that left my hands free to work the controls of the dumbwaiter. Once inside I rehearsed. I was afraid I’d fracture a wrist if I didn’t move decisively enough.

I stretched an arm around the front of the dumbwaiter and found the buttons by feel, since I wasn’t about to poke my head out. I pushed the button for the first floor, then immediately grasped the top half of the door with both hands, gripping the edge with my palms facing toward me, and yanked the door down, drawing my hands inside as quickly as I could. Even then I felt the door graze my fingertips.

In the dark space I waited for the elevator to move, for what seemed like so long I thought its power was cut off too. Then, with a jerk, the dumbwaiter began to move upward. As I tried to calm my jangling nerves I told myself it would only be seconds until I reached the first floor, but then to my shock the dumbwaiter didn’t stop! It kept climbing. I must have hit the wrong button. It didn’t matter. I’d still be out of that coffin within minutes. Above me I heard the brake engage as the dumbwaiter stopped at the second floor of the library. Eagerly, I reached towards the door, only to find its surface completely flat, with just a crease to tell me where the halves met. I scrabbled at the crack in the door, trying to get enough purchase to force it open and up. The door didn’t budge. I couldn’t get out! How could I remain in this tiny space until morning and keep my sanity?

My chest heaved with apprehension, and I caught myself pummeling the metal door in frustration. The only thing that kept me from losing complete control was the thought that Anne might still be in the library and might hear me screaming and beating on the dumbwaiter door.

Working myself into a slightly more comfortable position, I curled up in a ball facing the door of the dumbwaiter. Here the staff of the library would find me tomorrow morning. How humiliating. I’d be the laughing stock of the entire city! I could just imagine the headlines. ‘Failed would-be girl spy trapped in dumbwaiter overnight.’ How mortifying.

Even worse, the British embassy would be counting its dead. Granted, Anne had a right to be angry, very angry, about British crimes during the Boer War. But that happened decades ago, and Lord Halifax and the men and women who worked at the British embassy today weren’t responsible. Neither were the British people, who were suffering privations we couldn’t imagine to keep Hitler at bay.

I shifted my position and felt something round and hard in my coat pocket. The awl I’d picked up in the bookbindery! I grabbed it and forced its blade into the crease between the two halves of the dumbwaiter door. Using the awl I pried the doors apart until I could grasp the edge of the top half and push it up. In the position I was in getting enough purchase seemed impossible at first, but then I put both feet up against the wall and shoved again.

The door flew open, and I tumbled out onto the marble floor, banging my knee in the process.

I didn’t have time to recover. I had to find a telephone!

I was in the stacks surrounded by tall bookshelves, which loomed over me in the dark. I might have never found my way out, but a light on in a distant hall led me to a corridor lined with small offices. Telephones! The first door wasn’t locked, but when I rushed for the telephone on the tiny desk there wasn’t a dial tone.

The next office was locked.

The telephone was dead in the next office, too.

So the power to the telephone system must have been cut off when the electricity was shut off for the night. Maybe outside the building I could find a pay telephone that was working.

But I didn’t have a key to the building!

At least I wasn’t trapped in the dumbwaiter all night.

Then I remembered that on the first floor of the library, where the reading rooms were, there were two pay telephones, outside the L’Enfant Map Room. It was just possible they were on a different circuit than the library’s telephones.

I followed the dim lights ahead of me, and after a short flight of marble stairs I found myself in a spacious foyer facing the Grand Staircase that led down to the first floor.

The staircase began its descent directly ahead, but shortly split in two, each half curving along the front wall of the library across the huge iron-framed windows that fronted the entrance of the building. The two staircases met at the small foyer inside the main door of the library. If Anne were still in the building she’d be waiting there for her bus.