The Last Embrace (2 page)

October 11, 1949

L
ily Kessler stood at the open window and breathed in the tart green oils riding the breeze. The desert had given way to citrus groves when the train hit Riverside. The glass was warm to the touch, the sky an azure dome with only a few tattered clouds. All of it bathed in a pure intoxicating white light. Lily had forgotten about the quality of the light in Southern California, how it illuminated the landscape. She hadn’t seen this kind of brilliance for five years in Europe, except on the Greek islands, where the sun reflected off the glittering Aegean.

But the Santa Fe Super Chief was still two hours inland, miles to go before pulling into Union Station downtown, and Lily knew that the Pacific Ocean tossing in restless slumber off the coast reflected only vast cold depths. Images of her hometown washed over her. Los Angeles. With its sugar-white beaches, pastel bungalows with red tile roofs, hillsides already parched and brown by early autumn. Lily had never intended to return—the place held ghosts and shadows that no amount of sunshine could dispel. And yet here she was.

It was all because of Joseph. She’d met U.S. Army Major Joseph Croggan while working at the OSS London office during the Blitz and they’d started a torrid affair, aware that each night might end in flames, each morning might mean good-bye. Following the German surrender, they’d tracked down Nazi spies and collaborators across the Continent, then stayed on with the new Central Intelligence Agency and made plans to marry. Instead, Joseph was dead, killed eight months ago in a freak car accident in Budapest. Reckless and reeling with grief, Lily had begged for a new mission. Instead, she found herself exiled to a desk job. Lady spies weren’t needed anymore, thank you very much. With Hitler vanquished, the Old Boys were reasserting control.

By the summer of 1949, Lily knew she had to go home. She saw Joseph’s silhouette on every street corner, envisioned a dreary career filing the reports of less experienced male spies. So she’d quit. Arriving back in the United States only a week ago, her first stop had been the cornfields of Champaign, Illinois, where she’d delivered Joseph’s effects to his widowed mother. Lily had planned to stay three days, then take the train to New York City, where a former OSS colleague had offered a couch and a job lead.

Then her plans had crumbled to dust once more.

The train rushed forward, beating a conga line of syncopation in her head. Lily let it envelop her, swaying to its rhythms, hurtling through space while she pondered the mission bringing her back to Los Angeles. She imagined the rails stuttering
Doreen Croggan, Doreen Croggan, Doreen Croggan.
A girl she’d never met who would have become her sister-in-law. A girl who’d come to Hollywood dreaming of stardom in 1944, around the same time Lily had fled in the opposite direction. A girl who’d graduated from walk-on roles to a studio contract, changed her name to Kitty Hayden, and seemed awash with prospects, right up until last week when she’d disappeared into the L.A. air.

After five years of living in bombed-out Europe, the midwestern tranquillity of Illinois had seemed like another planet. Lily found it hard to stop looking over her shoulder as she and Mrs. Croggan walked to the cemetery to lay flowers on Joseph’s grave. On the way home, Lily examined people on the street for hidden weapons while Mrs. Croggan pointed out landmarks: the quarry where Joseph and his kid sister, Doreen, swam each summer, the hill where Joseph crashed his bike and chipped his front tooth, the market that sold the coldest pop and creamiest strawberry ice cream.

After dinner, Mrs. Croggan brought out a pitcher of lemonade and they flipped through photo albums. Joseph had been a serious child. Doreen was a leggy, pigtailed tomboy with a mischievous smile who could shimmy up trees like a monkey and outrun all the boys. Here she was with an oriole perched on her shoulder. Lily recognized the photo—Joseph had carried a dog-eared copy in his wallet.

“You’re going to love my sister,” he’d said, pulling it out one night in a Vienna coffeehouse and giving her that earnest, crooked smile. “I can’t wait for you to meet her. You remind me of her, she’s absolutely fearless, and she hates like hell to see people get pushed around. This little bird.” Joseph stroked the photo, chuckling. “God, I remember him. Orville the Oriole. She found him half-dead in the yard, being stalked by the neighbor’s cat, and nursed him back to health. He’d perch on her shoulder and when he finally died, she made us dress up and hold a funeral. I played ‘Taps’ on my trumpet and Doreen recited a poem by Emily Dickinson. She threw flowers on the grave.”

Joseph had already been overseas when Doreen had blossomed into the sloe-eyed beauty who was voted Miss Champaign 1944, and his tomboy stories bore little resemblance to the glossy head shots Mrs. Croggan now brought out, the soft studio lighting accentuating Doreen’s cheekbones, her almond-tilted eyes, her glossy waved hair. She’d been in seven movies already, including
The Bandit of Sherwood Forest
with Cornel Wilde, Mrs. Croggan said with pride.

By her third day in Illinois, Lily itched to book her ticket to New York. From the big easy chair in the parlor where she sat flipping through a magazine, she watched a rabbit hop across the lawn. The aroma of pot roast drifted in from the kitchen. Soon dusk would fall and fireflies would appear. Half-asleep, Lily barely noticed the car parking out front, the man getting out. Later, she’d call up her training and remember he’d worn a uniform and held a letter and rang the bell.

She must have dozed off. She heard Mrs. Croggan talking on the phone in the kitchen, but she didn’t fully awaken until the older woman was standing before her, saying something awful had happened.

“The telegram said she’s been missing for three days,” Mrs. Croggan said with a glassy calm, cooling herself with an ivory fan that Joseph had sent her from Florence.

Lily tried not to sound alarmed. “Did you call the police? What did they say?”

“That it’s not unusual for starlets to take trips with gentlemen friends. I didn’t like the insinuation in his voice. I told him Doreen was raised to know the difference between right and wrong.”

“And what did he say about that?” Lily asked, slipping into the interrogative rhythms of her previous life.

“He made a filthy comment about a long audition. Then I called Doreen’s roommate, the one who sent the cable, and she sounded more worried. She wondered whether Doreen had some kind of breakdown and came home without telling anyone.”

Mrs. Croggan unfolded the telegram and read the block letters aloud.

Joseph’s mother looked suddenly fragile, and much older. She placed the telegram on the coffee table and smoothed it with shaking fingers.

“After Joseph, I couldn’t bear…Dear God, let her be okay. It would be too much…” Eyes brimming with pain and bewilderment, she shook her head. “I just don’t understand. Doreen told one roommate she had a date that night. She told another girl she had a film shoot.”

“A date with whom?”

“Nobody knew.”

“What picture was she filming? Where was the shoot?”

“I don’t know.”

Lily leaned back in her chair and sighed. “What studio was it?”

“I forgot to ask. I wasn’t thinking right.” Mrs. Croggan shuddered. “Oh, why did I ever let her go? She has no idea what people can be like. She’s too trusting. It’s not like she’s crisscrossed the world and seen the depravities that people are capable of.” Mrs. Croggan clasped a dish towel in her hand, twisting until her fingers turned white.

“Not like you, Lily,” she said. “You
have
been out in the world.”

Lily wanted to point out that Doreen had been out in the world for five years.

“You grew up in Los Angeles and know your way around,” Mrs. Croggan said thoughtfully. “You could track her down. Joseph always said how smart you were. How clever at your job.”

“Please, Mrs. Croggan. I was a file clerk.”

Back in 1944, when she’d joined the Office of Strategic Services, Lily had been warned that her work was classified top secret. She was not to speak of it. Ever. She was to take the stories to her grave. “OSS is an undercover organization authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” a steely-eyed lieutenant in Washington had told her. “We are anonymous. If people ask what you do here, tell ’em you’re a file clerk. Nobody’s interested enough in file clerks to ask questions.”

Mrs. Croggan’s lower lip trembled. “You loved my son, Lily, and this is his sister. He’d want you to do this. Besides, Joseph once suggested…he gave me the impression…” Mrs. Croggan’s voice dropped and she glanced nervously behind her. “Joseph said the two of you had ways to find things out. Special training and such.”

Lily hid her surprise. She’d taken an oath and intended to keep it. Clearly Joseph hadn’t felt the same.

“Maybe he did, but I just filed and typed,” Lily said, falling back on her cover story. “Do you really think they’d let girls parachute behind enemy lines? Carry secret messages and do surveillance?”

Mrs. Croggan gave her an odd look and Lily realized she’d said too much.

“Joseph loved you,” the older woman said stubbornly, “and that’s enough for me.”

Lily’s heart went out to this widow, who’d already lost one child. She wanted to ask why Mrs. Croggan didn’t go herself, but she knew. Joseph’s mother was a small-town homemaker wary of big cities—she’d once gotten hopelessly lost in Wichita. She was cowed by authority, suspicious of strangers, and yet ultimately too trusting. In a big chaotic city like Los Angeles, she’d be taken advantage of and lose her bearings and her nerve. And if real trouble had befallen Doreen…

“I do worry about you getting sucked into all that intrigue and danger,” Mrs. Croggan said. “You’ll have to stay away from Errol Flynn. I’ve read all about his wicked ways in
Confidential
magazine.”

Lily laughed. Hollywood was a playground compared to what she’d been through. She’d had so many aliases that sometimes she’d forgotten who the real Lily was. But the thought of going back to L.A. made her uneasy. She hadn’t kept in touch with any of her school friends, was estranged from what distant family remained. There was nothing there for her.

“I can handle myself,” she said.

“I know you can. And I’d be ever so grateful if you’d check on Doreen.”

Joseph’s words echoed in her head.
You’re going to love my sister. I can’t wait for you to meet her.
And in her mind, she saw not glamour-puss grown-up Kitty, but a fierce kid of twelve, nursing a wounded bird.

“I’ll go for a couple of days, Mrs. Croggan. But then I really have to get to New York.”

“Oh, Lily, thank you,” Mrs. Croggan said, clasping her in a hug. “I know you’ll find her.”

She left the next day.

Lily made her way back to her train cabin and sat down. Brown smog lay like a shroud over the San Gabriel Valley. Signs sprouting from bare fields where farms had recently stood signaled the new westward expansion:
MOVE IN WITH NO MONEY DOWN; ALL MOD CONS; PERFECT FOR YOUR GROWING FAMILY.

In Pasadena, a number of people got off and the train entered the final leg. When Lily saw the old East Side neighborhood of Boyle Heights, she thought she was back in Europe. Entire city blocks had been reduced to rubble. Along the alluvial plains east of downtown where vineyards planted by European immigrants had once sprawled, bulldozers were grading highways of dirt. Concrete pillars soared into the sky, steel rods protruding like carrot tops. From them hung Lilliputian figures that hammered, building the new American autobahns. At least the tall white spire of City Hall still stood—L.A.’s fusty dowager, the tallest game in town, surrounded by her constellation of courthouses, movie palaces, and department stores.

With a jerk and a hiss, the train arrived at Union Station. A porter got her luggage and Lily marveled at the cacophony of voices echoing in the huge vaulted rooms—the staccato of Brooklyn, the twang of Oklahoma, the broad vowels of the Upper Midwest, the singsong of Spanish. She noticed the watchful silence of others—gaunt émigrés clad in rough black clothes; an Asian family carrying parcels wrapped in twine, marching single file.

There were babies and toddlers everywhere, sleeping in prams, holding tight to their mothers’ hands, riding like General MacArthur astride luggage carts. Lily felt a tightness in her chest. Joseph had wanted a family. She felt his absence most acutely at times like this, alone amid the crush of rejoicing relatives.

“Will it be a taxi for you, miss?” the porter asked. He was old and black, smart in his livery, and spoke with the liquid warmth of the South.

Lily nodded. She had $150 in crumpled bills that Mrs. Croggan had given her plus the $290 she’d cashed from her paychecks. She could afford to splurge.

Another train pulled in and an ash-blond creature in dangly earrings and a satin gown got off, clutching the arm of a man dressed for a night at the Mocambo. People crowded around. Lily saw a flash, heard cameras pop as newsmen shouted. Wincing, she ducked. That was the last thing she needed right now, to show up in a newspaper photo. She wasn’t anxious to broadcast her return to prying eyes, had hoped to slip in and out unnoticed. The last five years had taught her that these tiniest unforeseen details could scupper an entire operation.