Louise's War (8 page)

‘They’ll all be dead before Christmas,’ Ruth said. ‘Hanging, most likely.’ Ruth was a Mt. Holyoke girl who wore her pearls to work every day. Her typing wasn’t much, but she could file faster than any of us. I swear she could recite the alphabet backwards in thirty seconds.

Barbara didn’t join the conversation, as usual. She was a war widow on a mission. Each day she pored through the Washington newspapers, typing index cards for every person mentioned, her contribution to winning the war that had taken her young husband at Pearl Harbor and separated her from her child. She didn’t allude to her background otherwise, but a tiny Star of David on a gold chain hung around her neck. Mostly she wore it under her clothes, but sometimes you could catch a glimpse of it if she wore a scoop-necked blouse.

Because of Barbara’s absence her stack of newspapers reached from the floor to the top of her desk.

I didn’t have to wait until coffee break to talk to Joan. She stopped by my office a few minutes after I arrived at work, appearing at the door and crooking an index finger at me.

‘Mrs Pearlie,’ she said.

‘Yes, Miss Adams?’ I answered, rising from my desk.

‘General Donovan would appreciate it if you’d help me straighten up Mr Holman’s office this morning.’

‘Of course.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, as we walked down the hallway together. ‘Now I can look for that file.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ she said, lowering her voice to an uncharacteristic whisper. ‘Guess who’s taking over Holman’s desk?’

‘Who?’ I whispered back.

‘Donald Murray,’ she said. ‘Isn’t he your beau?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘definitely not. I haven’t got any beaux. Don’t want any either.’ That remark, about not wanting a beau, surprised me. It slipped out, and I wondered if I was just being defensive, or if I really meant it.

‘Wish I could say the same,’ Joan said.

I did allow the thought to cross my mind that Don’s promotion might be useful to me, and then chastised myself for such a cynical thought. Anyway, I’d find it easier to talk to Don about the Bloch file than if Holman’s replacement was someone I didn’t know.

Don sat at Holman’s desk, smoking his pipe. He nodded a greeting at us. ‘Must have been some heart attack, huh?’ he said.

The desk, which had been piled high with documents and folders when I last saw it, was almost bare. Files and papers littered the floor. A file cabinet lay on its side, its contents spilling out of open file drawers.

‘Okay,’ Joan said, all business. ‘Why don’t Mrs Pearlie and I go through the papers and sort them, reconstruct the files, then pass them to you so you can familiarize yourself with Mr Holman’s work.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Donald said.

Two hours later Joan and I had reassembled Holman’s scattered files and stacked them on Don’s desk. I’d rummaged quickly through the undisturbed file cabinets, too. The Bloch file was nowhere to be found.

Joan went to get Donald coffee. Now that he was a desk head, God forbid that he’d sit in the cafeteria with the rest of us.

‘Mr Murray,’ I said, as casually as I could.

‘Yes,’ he answered, without looking up.

‘Friday afternoon I brought a file to Mr Holman. It concerned a hydrographer, a Frenchman in Marseille, an expert on the North African coast.’

‘Sounds interesting. Where is it?’

‘Mr Holman reviewed it and placed it in the Projects Committee box. I can’t find it now.’

Don leaned back in his chair.

‘Maybe he took it upstairs himself,’ he said. ‘Or changed his mind and sent it back to the main file. It’ll turn up.’

‘Do you want me to look for it?’

Donald frowned. ‘If you have time,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t interfere with your other work.’

I didn’t want to press the matter any further. He fiddled with a pen for a second before addressing me again, as if he was nervous.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘about Wednesday night. Can you come to the cocktail party with me?’

‘I’d love to,’ I said. I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no, and since he’d asked me I’d gotten excited about going.

Joan came in with Don’s coffee, and the two of us left him and went across the street to the cafeteria for our own coffee break.

We were later than usual, so we sat at a table by ourselves. Joan sipped from her cup, and made a face. ‘I can’t get used to drinking coffee without sugar. I’m going to buy a pound from Mr Black this weekend, and I don’t care how much it costs or how unpatriotic it is.’

I poured cream into my own cup, watching it swirl around as I stirred it.

‘That file I told you about is definitely missing,’ I said. ‘I’ve looked everywhere.’

‘As much paper as stuffs this building it’s not surprising.’

That was an understatement. The girls in my office needed ladders to reach the top rows of the card files alone, and those were just our branch’s indexes. Many of the three-by-five cards contained only a couple of typewritten names or a single sentence that directed us to one subject file, others referred to dozens. Those subject files filled every available wall, nook and cranny in our building, including conference rooms, bathrooms, offices, stairwells, hallways and broom closets. Only six months after Congress declared war, our branch of OSS had already moved twice, from an annex at the Library of Congress, to an abandoned ice-skating rink, to our current quarters.

‘You don’t suppose the FBI lifted Bloch’s file while they were in Mr Holman’s office, do you,’ I asked.

‘Why would they? Europe’s not their territory – they’re domestic and South America. When are you going to tell me why you are so interested in this file?’

I scanned the nearly empty cafeteria, and lowered my voice. I had decided to tell Joan the truth. ‘The subject of the file, Gerald Bloch, is the husband of a dear friend of mine from junior college. My room-mate.’ How could I explain my friendship with Rachel to Joan? Rachel and I were both outsiders at St Martha’s. Rachel because she was Jewish, me because I was ‘middle class’. Oh, the other students and the faculty were politely kind to us, but we didn’t fit in. For two years we just had each other. I got really good at mah-jongg, and Rachel learned to listen to the Carter Family singing ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’ without putting her fingers in her ears.

‘Oh, no,’ Joan said. ‘I am so very sorry. You must be worried sick.’

‘It such a coincidence that I’d find Rachel’s husband in an OSS file,’ I said. ‘Hard to believe.’

‘Not really. Lots of us here have friends and family still in Europe. Did you hear what happened to Julia Cuniberti?’

‘The clerk on the Italian desk?’

‘Her family’s Italian American, and she speaks the language. Well, she learned through the documents and cables she filed that the Nazis had commandeered her uncle’s lodge in the Apennines and forced his family, including four children, to live in the attic! The Italian partisans identified the lodge as a Resistance target, and Julia couldn’t do a thing to warn her uncle. All she could do was pray for them. The lodge was bombed twice! She had to file all the intelligence about it!’

‘Oh, my God! What happened?’

‘She has no idea. None of the reports mention her family.’

Neither one of us spoke for a few minutes.

‘Maybe Mr Holman took your file upstairs himself before he died,’ Joan said.

‘Maybe.’ I took a breath. ‘Joan, could you look for it in General Donovan’s office? He’d have to initial it, wouldn’t he, before it could go to the Projects Committee?’

Joan crossed her legs and lit a cigarette, the flame leaping from an engraved silver Tiffany cigarette lighter.

‘I must warn you, Louise.’

I knew what she was about to say.

‘We can’t let our feelings get in the way of our work here. There are thousands of unfortunate families in Europe. We can’t save each one. Besides, going behind the backs of your bosses to help your friend could lose you your job.’

‘I understand.’

‘But I don’t like the idea of files in this office going missing, for any reason. I’ll take a look around General Donovan’s office. Only a look, mind you.’

‘Thank you. That’s all I ask.’

It was easy for Joan to caution me. She couldn’t possibly understand what I owed Rachel – so much more than friendship! But I’d promised Rachel never to speak of it to anyone, and I still felt bound by that promise.

EIGHT

I
spent the rest of the morning mimeographing reports to send to agencies all over Washington, where undoubtedly they’d be filed in more file cabinets. I did slip out once to check the ‘B’ files to see if the Bloch file had found its way home. It wasn’t there.

At noon Joan and I walked to the Water Gate Inn on Rock Creek Drive, where the huge, puffy popovers were heaven sent, for lunch. The dining room was hot and crowded, overhung with a fug of cigarette smoke, so we lounged outside at a picnic table by the Potomac River, shaded by a cottonwood tree drooping with thirst. A small colored boy fished on the riverbank below us.

‘Much against my better judgment,’ Joan said, ‘I did check around my office for the Bloch file. It wasn’t in the Project Committee’s box. I got a look at the General’s desk, too. Not there.’

She saw my speculative look.

‘Don’t jump to conclusions,’ she said. ‘What is that word? Don’t get paranoid. That file may have been mislaid, thrown away even, we don’t know what state Mr Holman was in before he died. He may have been quite confused before his heart attack. Who knows what he did with it.’

‘I guess you’re right.’

‘Anyway,’ Joan continued, ‘I talked to Dora this morning, and she told me the whole story about what happened Friday. She didn’t want to go into details outside the office. She, Don Murray, Guy Danielson and Roger Austine were having a late meeting about some report or another, and having their usual disagreements, when they heard Mr Holman’s wife screaming bloody murder. They rushed to Holman’s office and found him dead with our security guards standing over his body, guns drawn. The guards shooed everyone out of the office, including the widow, and waited there until three FBI agents showed up. The Capitol police arrived, but they weren’t allowed into the office either, so they left. A while later a doctor arrived, examined the body, and then men from a funeral home showed up and removed the corpse.

‘What about the FBI agents?’

‘Two went with the body and the special agent stayed behind in the office for a while, arguing with General Donovan and Dr Linney. The special agent was one of the G-men at the wake, the one with the feather in his hat. Finally everyone was allowed to go home. Dora said there were GIs still standing guard all around the building when she left.’

The little colored boy, dejected, packed up his fishing gear, a bamboo pole and a tin can of worms, and climbed up the riverbank toward us.

‘Any luck?’ I asked him.

‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘It’s too hot.’

Joan watched the child walk off before she spoke to me again, her voice lowered.

‘There is something else,’ she said. ‘Now don’t work yourself up over this.’

‘What?’

‘We keep copies of every communication from the London office in General Donovan’s personal files.’

I felt my pulse quicken. ‘What do you have?’ I asked.

‘A typewritten translation of the original note from the Resistance operative and a carbon of the memo forwarded to your branch requesting what information you might have about Bloch.’

So there was still some tangible evidence of Gerald Bloch at OSS.

‘I don’t suppose,’ I began.

‘No,’ Joan said, pursing her lips tightly. ‘Absolutely not. I can’t remove one of General Donovan’s files. Only he and I have keys to the file room. I’d lose my job, at the very least.’

‘Of course not,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do such a thing.’ I would, actually, but I understood it wasn’t possible.

‘And I can’t make photostats,’ she said. ‘They are terribly expensive and every use has to be authorized. Besides the damn machine takes up an entire room and has its very own guard.’

‘Enough,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to do anything risky.’

Once back in my office I felt encouraged by Joan’s discovery of copies of some of the Bloch documents in General Donovan’s files. I wondered if even more information might be found elsewhere in the building.

I remembered the index card where I’d first located Gerald Bloch’s name. I didn’t recall that it had referred to any other file than the one I originally retrieved and gave to Holman, but I thought I’d double-check. I rolled out the library ladder and climbed up to the ‘B’ drawer. I drew out the drawer and leafed through it. Twice. Bloch’s reference card was gone.

NINE

T
he only piece of Bloch’s card that remained was a shred left behind when someone had ripped it from the metal rod that held it in place.

Oh, outwardly my world stayed pretty much the same. Betty, Ruth and Barbara worked away industriously below me, Betty smacking her gum while she forced a thick wad of typing paper and carbon paper into her machine, Barbara bent over her typewriter. The fan twirled overhead, moving bars of shade across the office walls.

But I gripped the ladder with white knuckles. Someone had deliberately stolen that card. I climbed down the ladder, cautiously, as I felt a bit woozy, and ducked behind my partition to think. It was conceivable that the main file had been lost in the commotion following Holman’s death, but clearly, clearly to me anyway, the index card had been stolen from the file drawer.

Who had taken the card, and why?

I had no idea. And because I had no idea, I couldn’t trust anyone at OSS. Not Don, Dora or even Joan. I didn’t know what to do, but I had to do something. Letting this lie wasn’t an option for me.

But I couldn’t act rashly. I didn’t know what I was up against. I’d go home, rest, think and sleep on it, then decide.