Night Soldiers (39 page)

Robert Eidenbaugh and his friend shared a brotherhood of vocational anguish. Van Duyne had trust funds sufficient to fall into a sultan's leisure, but, as he put it, “things aren't done that way in my family.” Nonetheless, his restlessness led him to leaving peculiar telephone messages (call Mr. Lyon at Schuyler 8-3938—which of course turned out to be the Central Park Zoo) for his associates and, once, after a particularly arid day, distributing dry ice in the Morgan Guaranty urinals. He was becoming, he'd said, “rather too trying at the bank.” But, until Robert met him on Sunday morning, he had evidently seen no way through the briar patch of the Family Obligations.

At Schrafft's, however, his ears were bright red and he could barely sit still, buttering rolls and slurping coffee like a Chaplin machine gone mad. Robert honored his mood as long as he could, but at last curiosity forced him to pry. The answer surprised him. Van Duyne was evasive, and offered only a partial explanation.

He was leaving Morgan, had been for weeks on the trail of something that—he could hardly believe it—had actually come from the family. They had taken pity on him at last and, when the proposition had been put, he'd leapt at the chance. “I'm too young to dry up and blow away,” he said when the eggs arrived, “and that's an old Van Duyne tradition, unfortunately. We have a tendency to
molder.”

Breakfast over, they walked through the stiff wind off the Hudson to Riverside Drive and there took a bus north toward the Polo Grounds. It was a bright, frigid day, December 7, and by the time they boarded the bus their eyes were teary from the cold. They got off at 145 th Street and walked east toward Coogan's Bluff.

From the point of view of the Giant fans, it wasn't a very satisfying game. The packed crowds, wrapped up in overcoats and mufflers, their breaths visible in the winter air, groaned more than they cheered. Tuffy Leemans, the Giants' fullback on offense and halfback on defense, their most productive running back, was having a difficult day with the Dodger defensive line, and the fleet Ward Cuff seemed unable to hold the forward passes thrown him. Meanwhile, Ace Parker, the Dodger tailback and safety, was on target all through the first quarter, while Pug Manders was ripping through large holes in the Giant defensive scheme. Late in the first quarter, with the score tied
7
-7, a little after 2:00
P.M.
, Manders took Parker's handoff on a spinner play and galloped twenty-nine yards to a Brooklyn first down at the Giant four-yard line. As the legion of Brooklyn fans made themselves heard, a static-punctuated announcement came from the loudspeaker system: “Attention, please. Attention. Here is an urgent message. Will Colonel William J. Donovan call Operator Nineteen in Washington, D.C.”

The effect of the message on Van Duyne was extraordinary. He sat dead still in his seat, and for a moment Robert thought something was wrong with him. Then he scrabbled at the pocket of his fur-collared overcoat, produced a silver flask, and took an extended swig, passing the comfort on to Robert, who discovered himself with a mouthful of excellent Scotch whisky.

“Well, what is it?” Robert said. “Have you bet the family bonds on the Giants?”

Van Duyne shook his head.

“Then what is it, Andy?”

“I'm not sure. Something important, I'll tell you that.”

“The announcement?”

“Yes.”

Pug Manders crashed over the Giant middle guard for a touchdown. The Dodger fans roared their approval.

“Now look here, Van Duyne, either tell me what's going on or sit back and watch the game. I feel like a character in a Phillips Oppenheim novel.”

Van Duyne swiveled toward him, oblivious to the crowd rising for the Dodger kickoff. “Robert, I may be able to do something for you, especially if it's all gone mad in Europe—something to do with our being in the war, at last.”

“Ah-ha!” Robert said. “You're going to Canada to get into the fighting.”

“No, it isn't that. But how would you feel about leaving Thompson, doing something completely different?”

Robert stared into his friend's eyes through the thick spectacles and saw that he was serious. “No pranks?” he asked, always a little leery of Van Duyne's elaborate ruses.

“No pranks. On my honor.”

“You're serious.”

“Yes.”

“Then I'm your man.”

“It could be dangerous.”

“No more so than Mr. Drowne.”

“Not kidding, Bob.”

“Nor am I,” he said. “Believe me, Andy, I'm ready for something—how did you put it?—‘completely different.' ”

“I can,” Van Duyne said, “pretty well promise you that.”

MEMORANDUM
April 19, 1942
$$
TO:
Lt. Col. H. V Rossell
Office of the Coordinator of Information Room 29
National Institute of Health Washington, D.C.
FROM:
Agatha Hamilton
Office of Recruiting—COI 270 Madison Ave. New York, New York
SUBJECT:
Robert F. Eidenbaugh

In an interview arranged by my friend, Mr. Carter Delius, Vice President for Personnel, the J. Walter Thompson Company, on March 30, I spent over two hours with Mr. L. L. Drowne, copy chief, in my capacity as Member of the Board, the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. I told Mr. Drowne that the hospital fund-raising committee was seeking a professional copywriter to aid in its fall campaign to build a new wing for the hospital. He mentioned several other candidates before the name of Mr. Eidenbaugh (hereafter RFE) was brought up. Mr. Drowne seems to like him well enough, though he does not believe that RFE will make much of a mark in advertising. Subject was described as “completely honest” and “extremely bright,” but “very much a self-starter.” My overall impression was that RFE's heart isn't much in the Thompson company—they like him, but are not really sure what to do with him.

On April 3, as the parent of a prospective student, I visited the Brearley School and contrived to interview Mary Ellen Walker, RFE's fiancée, who teaches Fourth Form (10 th grade) English and History and assists in the coaching of the field hockey team. I came on as quite the “Bolshy heiress,” though her sympathies clearly do not lie in this direction. She was very polite about it all, representing the school as “more than fair to all sorts of girls, from all sorts of families.” Appearing to be charmed by her (I was not, in fact), I asked a few personal questions. Miss Walker perceives RFE as brilliant and dashing, though not yet situated in a position appropriate to his abilities. I would guess that, following marriage, she has plans to situate him in the family business.

An April 7 digest of reports (Attachment “A”) is enclosed, including credit reports from the following: Consolidated Edison, Chemical Bank and Trust, Sheffield Dairies, Joseph Silverman, D.D.S., and the 414 West 74 th Street Management Company. Also appended (Attachment “B”), RFE's Columbia University transcript and letters of recommendation. (See esp. Professor Horace Newell, Department of English, who praises RFE's intelligence and ability and mentions a tendency “to stay somewhat in the background.”)

On April 14 RFE attended a party, given at my behest by Mrs. Cleveland Van Duyne, at her apartment at 1085 Park Avenue. I was accompanied by my friend, Mme. Maria de Vlaq, who reports that RFE's French is “excellent,” “fluent” and “almost native.” My personal impression of RFE was of a man with a certain charm that comes naturally to him. I flirted with him a little and found him courteous and responsive, though without any interest in pressing his “advantage.” He is no snake in the grass. He does fade into the background, being slightly built and neither especially handsome nor unattractive. He is the sort of man who will be liked by all classes of people and who will not engender in others feelings of spite or envy. He drank moderately at the party, circulated well, and made no attempt to press himself forward. I represented myself as the wife of a man who was about to start a new advertising company and encouraged him strongly to become interested in the possibilities for his own career. He did, at last, agree to meet my “husband” for luncheon later in the week.

The New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has, once again, been dragging its feet and is as unresponsive in this project as it has been in all others. No report from that office to date on RFE, but same will be forwarded once it arrives—if it ever does. Can't Col. Donovan do something about this?

On April 17 I telephoned RFE at his office in the guise of Mr. Hamilton's secretary and arranged a lunch for the following Monday, April 20, at Luchow's. According to the headwaiter, he asked for “Mr. Hamilton's table” and waited twenty minutes before asking the headwaiter “if Mr. Hamilton had called.” (He had been given no “Hamilton” telephone number.) He was told that Mr. Hamilton had telephoned the restaurant, apologizing for the inconvenience and requesting that RFE meet him for lunch at the Coleman Hotel on East 23 rd Street and Fifth Avenue. On arriving at that location and discovering no such hotel, he consulted a telephone directory and proceeded to Coleman's, a restaurant on East 25 th Street, where he asked for “Mr. Hamilton.” Informed that no such person was there, he made a telephone call (in all probability to his office, since “Hamilton's secretary” had reached him there earlier), then ate lunch at the counter and left the restaurant, returning to work.

My recommendation is to accept this candidate for further COI screening.

Signed: Agatha Hamilton

COI—New York

April 24, 1942

P.S. Hub, my friend Maria de Vlaq is someone you might consider taking to lunch when you are next in New York. She is formerly the Countess Marensohn—Swedish nobility—divorced two years ago, and moves easily in society. She rides and shoots excellently, is lethally charming and of a rather daring disposition. She is of Belgian citizenship and descent, and I believe would be amenable to recruitment. Her connection to Belgian, German, and Swedish circles remains strong, and her relationship with her former husband, and his family, is cordial.

P.S.S. Not to end on a sour note, but here it is April and there is only silence from Washington on my February vouchers. While it is the case that fortune has smiled on me in this world, I cannot by myself assume the cost of the war effort.

In Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Colonel H. V. Rossell leaned his elbows on the scarred wooden desk and stared at the man seated on the other side. Eidenbaugh, Robert F. His fourteenth interview of the day. He knew that if he were charming and likable the candidate would be put at ease, and the consequent forthrightness would help in making a proper decision. But he simply hadn't the strength for charm. He'd been working twenty-hour days since Pearl Harbor, and his initial burst of high-tension energy was long since dissipated. He was out of gas. What he really wanted to do was push his lips into an extended pout and make ishkabibble sounds by flapping them with his fingertips. That would prove
everybody
right. Since Colonel Donovan had persuaded Roosevelt that America needed an intelligence service, life had come to resemble a lunatic asylum. Rossell had some considerable experience in this work, a career in army intelligence going back ten years. As early as 1937—when war had seemed inevitable to him—he'd run small preparatory operations when his superiors would allow it, stockpiling European clothing, for instance, by purchasing it from incoming refugees, then storing it in a warehouse under squares of cardboard marked
DO NOT CLEAN!
Because of his foresight, agents going into Europe would, at least, not be dressed by Brooks Brothers.

But if he knew his way around the profession, few others did. Above him were Donovan and a bunch of Ivy League lawyers, bankers, and Wall Street types. They would, he knew, work out well over time. Once these people got going, the Axis powers would be subject to ferocious trickery of every kind, the sorts of things lawyers and bankers might do if they were able to give in to their cruelest fantasies. Now they were being encouraged to do that very thing. Just that morning, a memo had crossed his desk recommending that a million bats be put aboard a submarine, then released off the Japanese coast in daylight, each one equipped with timer and minute incendiary bomb. They would fly into the dark spaces of a million Japanese homes and factories and, he supposed, blow up, spattering everyone in the neighborhood with exploded bat. He could just hear one of his superiors giving him the good word: “Oh, Rossell. Be a good fellow and get me a million bats, will you? By lunch? Thanks loads!”

But that wasn't the worst of it. Donovan—with Hoover and the FBI fighting him every step of the way—was in the process of acquiring an extraordinary zoo of people. “The successful intelligence service,” someone had said, “is one which can best turn eccentricity to its own advantage.” Well, they'd have
that
, all right. They'd hired Marxists, led by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Playwrights—Robert E. Sherwood and others. Academicians, recruited by Archibald MacLeish. John Ford, the film director. A young actor named Sterling Hayden who would, he thought, eventually be sent to fight with Yugoslav partisans. Then there was John Ringling North, of the circus family, and a large, vivacious woman named Julia Child. There was Virginia Hall, about to be parachuted into occupied France with her artificial leg held under one arm lest it break when she landed. The pile of file folders on his desk climbed toward the sky. Tom Braden, Stewart Alsop, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, Arthur Goldberg. Ilya Tolstoy and Prince Serge Obolensky, the hotel baron married to an Astor. He had them from Standard Oil and Paramount Pictures, he had Mellons and Vanderbilts, Morgans and du Ponts. Union organizers and tailors. He had everything. And more coming in every day.

Meanwhile, they had just been renamed. COI, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, was now to be called the Office of Strategic Services—OSS. Which local wags lately referred to as Oh So Silly, Oh So Secret, and Organization Shush-Shush. Even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, had got in on the fun. Knowing that the OSS offices were next to the experimental labs at the National Institute of Health, he had stated in a recent radio broadcast that the organization was composed of “fifty professors, twenty monkeys, ten goats, twelve guinea pigs—and a staff of Jewish scribblers!”
Hey, Dr. Goebbels
, Rossell thought,
you left out the bats
.