The Deadly Embrace (3 page)

“Here?” she said, glancing around the tiny office.

He laughed.

“In one of the offices downstairs.”

“What will I actually be doing?” she asked.

“Right now, there are no active investigations pending, but I don’t expect that to remain the case. In the meantime, you can start with a sensitive task that we all have to share around here—reading each other’s mail.”

“You mean censoring people’s personal letters?”

He finished the chocolate bar.

“In a nutshell, the Germans know we’re coming,” he said. “The question is where and when. That invasion plan is the most important secret we have over here, and we’re responsible for its protection. So far, General Manigault’s command has provided security clearances to four hundred and sixty-two officers and support staff who are involved in planning the invasion. Presumably, none of them are security risks. All of them were thoroughly checked out. But every one of those people knows the proposed target date, and they also know where we’re going in. Do you understand?”

“Yes, of course,” said Liza.

“If just one of them were to betray that information, perhaps inadvertently or unknowingly to German agents, Hitler would put enough panzer divisions behind those landing beaches to drive us right into the sea. The whole invasion force could be wiped out on the first day. So we read everyone’s mail.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Maybe you can use your deductive powers to help plug any leaks,” he added almost kindly.

“Yes, sir.”

“Just a couple more things,” he said.

For the first time, he sounded a little unsure of himself.

“I don’t know exactly how to say this…. Look, you’re young and you’re pretty. Around here that usually means you’re being used as a mattress by somebody … and those somebodies usually have ‘General’ or ‘Admiral’ in front of their first names.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” she said emphatically.

“I won’t, but you should be prepared for it, and the fact that you may receive propositions that...”

“I understand.”

“One more thing,” he said, softly, as she stood up to leave.

“Yes sir?”

“Sit down,” he said, and she did.

“You’re Jewish.”

She waited several moments for him to continue.

“So?” she said, finally.

“How important is your religion to you?” he demanded.

She imagined her gray-haired father looking over her shoulder, thin and rumpled, with his metal-rimmed spectacles perched on the tip of his nose, a gentle smile on his face.

“My father is a rabbi,” she said.

“Yeah … I saw that in the folder. Conservative, right?”

She nodded.

“I caused him great pain when at seventeen I told him I was no longer a practicing Jew and wouldn’t be going to temple.”

“And what did he say?” asked Taggart.

“He was wise enough to say that he respected my decision as an honest questioning of my faith…. And why is any of this relevant to my job?” she demanded, with rising color in her cheeks.

“What do you think about a homeland for the Jews in Palestine?” he asked.

“I haven’t thought about it,” she said.

“What about all the rumors of Hitler massacring the Jews?”

“I think they’re probably true,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons my brother and I volunteered after Pearl Harbor.”

Taggart nodded and said, “You should know that the top brass doesn’t trust Zionists. If it turns out you’re an agitator, you’ll be transferred out of here in a heartbeat. For your own good, I suggest that you keep matters like that to yourself.”

“I’m not an agitator,” she said.

CHAPTER 3

A
t five the next morning, Liza walked to work along streets hazy with the acrid smoke of burning buildings. There had been another Luftwaffe attack the previous night, although none of the bombs had landed near her hotel in Pimlico. The morning sky was still dark when she arrived at Saint James Square. After passing through the heavy security detail in front of SHAEF, she went searching for her new office.

The massive building was a rabbit warren of dark corridors, all of them lit every twenty feet with bare lightbulbs hanging from tin conical shades. She found her subbasement office buried at the end of a long, dank hallway about twenty feet below ground level.

The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and was about fifteen feet square, with brick walls painted a glossy white. An overworked iron radiator clanged in the far corner, vainly attempting to battle the cold and dampness. Four wooden office desks were clustered in the center of the room, each topped with a brass table lamp. Banks of wooden filing cabinets covered two of the walls.

Three of the desks were already occupied. A young British Army officer sat at one of them with his chair tipped backward, his feet resting on the blotter, and a cigarette dangling from his wide, fleshy mouth. He looked up from his copy of the Times and said, “Welcome to the dungeon. I hope you’ve brought some new whips and chains. We’ve worn out the old ones.”

“Something is worn out, Charlie, and it’s your jokes,” said a buxom woman with blue eyes who was applying her makeup at the desk closest to him. She was wearing a Women’s Army Corps uniform just like Liza’s and spoke with an American accent. A second woman sat at the desk opposite the young man, typing a document with calm proficiency. She wore the blue naval uniform of a British Wren officer.

When the young man stood up and came toward her, Liza saw that he was enormous, at least six and a half feet tall, with broad, powerful shoulders and a large head covered with a shock of prematurely white hair.

“Charles Wainwright, resident misogynist,” he said with a leering grin, extending his hand. She took it in hers. It was heavily calloused, as if he had been a day laborer in civilian life.

“Liza Marantz,” she said. “I believe I’m supposed to be working here.”

“Another American,” he said, absorbing her accent. “Thanks to General Eisenhower, we are all one big happy family, British and Americans shoulder to shoulder in common purpose to rid the world of Nazi tyranny. All except the Frogs. We can’t trust the Frogs, can we?”

“The Frogs?” repeated Liza, confused.

“The French, my dear girl, the frog eaters,” he said in a disparaging tone. “They’ve packed it up, sitting around drinking wine and smoking Gauloises until we come over to save them.”

“Charlie’s just jealous because the Free French officers in London are so attractive to the Englishwomen,” said the large-breasted American girl as she applied bright-red lipstick. Behind her false lashes and face powder, Liza could see signs of premature aging in the faint ridges around her eyes, mouth, and forehead. Although she was still in her early twenties, there were already gray streaks in her hair, at the temples. In spite of her brassy manner, Liza sensed something oddly tragic about her.

“My name is Janet Barnes,” she said, snapping her compact mirror shut and pursing her new red lips into a tissue. “Call me J.P.”

“Hello,” said Liza.

“And this sweet young example of English virtue is Lieutenant Jocelyn Dunbar,” said Charlie. “Unfortunately, the lovely Joss focuses on work to the exclusion of all else.”

“You just say that because she won’t go out with you,” said J.P.

Joss was boyishly slim, with short blond hair and a lovely, innocent face. Her desk was piled with handwritten notes that she was transcribing into formal documents. She had not looked up from her typing since Liza arrived.

“I have forsaken all women,” said Charlie. “Love is a disease.”

“Oh, Charlie likes women, all right,” said J.P “It’s just that women don’t want anything to do with him, even after he tells them all he was a champion rower at Oxford.”

That explains the callused hands, thought Liza.

“No, it’s true,” shot back Charlie. “As Gauguin said, or maybe it was Maugham actually women are strange little beasts. Treat them like dogs, beat them till your arm aches, and they’ll love you all the more.”

Looking up at his liquid, spaniel eyes, Liza decided he was totally harmless. She sat down at her desk and began organizing the office supplies she found in the drawers. She was putting a new ribbon in her typewriter when a downy-cheeked military courier came through the open door carrying a large green canvas sack.

Looking at the three women in turn, he asked, “Lieutenant Marantz?”

“That’s me,” said Liza.

He fished a sheet of onionskin paper from his uniform blouse and extended it toward her along with the key to a small padlock that secured the top of the sack.

“Please sign here, ma’am,” he said.

She signed the form and handed it back to him, then opened the padlock and emptied a portion of the bag’s contents on her desk. Carefully sifting through the pile, she discovered that it contained the personal letters and private communications from almost two hundred officers involved in planning the Overlord campaign.

“Another paragon of censorship, I see,” said Charlie Wainwright.

“I didn’t ask to be,” mumbled Liza as she began sorting through the pile.

Major Taggart had told her to read every letter as thoroughly as possible, flagging with an adhesive sticker any passage that might represent a potential security breach. Someone further up the intelligence food chain would then review the cited material and determine if it warranted elimination.

“How do I decide what a potential security breach might be?” she had asked him, having absolutely no knowledge of the Overlord plan.

“Just imagine that you’re a German Abwehr intelligence agent looking for compromising material,” said Major Taggart. “Deduce it.”

After reading the first few dozen letters, Liza began to feel almost voyeuristic, learning the most private thoughts of people working alongside her in the offices of SHAEF. Particularly graphic were the love letters, filled not only with words of longing, but with detailed descriptions of the lovemaking that could be anticipated upon that officer’s arrival home.

Even more shocking to her was the amount of gossip routinely included in letters going back to wives, fathers, and other family members. Although few of the writers revealed anything embarrassing about themselves, they exhibited no reluctance in betraying the peccadilloes of others, particularly the most senior officers.

One of the first letters she read was five single-spaced pages long, and written by a U.S. Army Air Corps officer on the staff of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, the deputy supreme commander to General Eisenhower. The American was writing to his wife about the air marshal’s girlfriend, who was nicknamed Tops.

“The air marshal is besotted with her and bends to her every wish,” he wrote. “Here he is with a whole army quaking at his feet, and he is like putty in her hands. I saw something just before we flew up here from North Africa that you wouldn’t have believed. There we were on the runway, four lieutenant generals and all the staff cooling our heels, waiting for old Tops. Finally, a two-ton truck pulls up next to the plane and she gets out. Would you believe that the truck was filled with antique furniture, Persian rugs, drums of olive oil, and a load of other things blacklisted in England according to the King’s regulations? Well, it was, and she was bent on smuggling it all back. Sir Arthur stood there begging her to relent, but when she threatened not to go he had me round up some enlisted men to load it all into the cargo bay. I just hope the IG doesn’t get word of it.”

In another letter, a senior staff officer declared to his wife that General George Patton had been having an ongoing affair with his niece, Jean Gordon, ever since he had been stationed in Hawaii before the war. According to the officer, she was on her way over to England to work as a doughnut girl at one of the canteens and to resume her affair with the general.

Still another letter revealed that General Eisenhower was romantically involved with his Irish limousine driver, Kay Summersby.

It was astonishing to Liza that Americans were apparently so guileless about keeping secrets. After considering the matter, Liza decided not to flag any of the passages, concluding that gossip was probably endemic in every army, and that it was of no strategic value to the Germans. Besides, if she began flagging all the gossipy revelations, she would have run out of the adhesive stickers before lunch.

As the day wore on, she learned that Charlie liked the room very cool, and J.P. liked it very warm. Depending on which one had last adjusted the hot-water intake to the radiator, the room alternated between a dank chill and stuffy airlessness.

At lunchtime, two elderly ladies came down the corridor with a large tea cart loaded with urns of tea and coffee, along with a selection of lunch items, including soup, pork pies, Cornish pasties, cut sandwiches, and bread, all of it available for a few shillings.

J.P invited Liza to join her at lunch in the canteen upstairs, but Liza decided to stay and work at her desk after buying soup and a beetroot salad from the trolley. She read letters all that afternoon, taking one more break at four o’clock, when the trolley came back down their corridor laden with tea and scones.

At six o’clock, people started filtering down the corridor and heading home in the London darkness. At seven, Liza was the only one left in their office. She thought about going back to the hotel, but there was nothing of interest waiting there for her. She decided to stay and work.

As the hours passed, it became a matter of personal pride to watch the tall stack of unread letters slowly melt away on top of her desk. She was in the middle of a long missive about the romantic yearnings of a Brooklyn dental officer when she looked up to see a two-star American general staring at her from the doorway. He was the first general she had ever met, and she leapt to attention.

“Can I help you, sir?” she asked, not sure whether to salute him, since he was holding his cap in his hand.

“Just continue your work,” he said gruffly, in a voice used to command.

Even with the poor illumination from the corridor, Liza could see the simian quality in his excessively long arms and prognathous jaw. She watched his eyes slowly train down the front of her uniform. Sitting back down at her desk, she picked up the last letter she had been reading. Even without looking back toward the doorway Liza knew he hadn’t left. A few seconds later, she heard one of the office chair legs squeak as he brushed past it.