Louise's War (9 page)

I could hear raised voices even before I opened the front door. Joe met me in the hall, finger to his lips.

‘Dellaphine and Madeleine are at it again,’ he said, ‘and Mrs Knox isn’t here to referee.’

Madeleine stomped into the hall, brandishing a folded newspaper. She was livid; I could see the flush rising up her dark neck into her face.

She shook the newspaper in my general direction, then at the ceiling, toward heaven, I supposed.

‘It says right here,’ she said, slapping the paper, twice. ‘Secretaries wanted; high-school diploma only requirement. Does that sound to you like only white girls need apply? No it don’t! I get to this office, and some prissy Miss Anne receptionist tells me all the jobs are full! Well, watch this.’

She picked up the hall telephone and dialed, tapping a pencil on the table as she waited impatiently for an answer.

‘Good evening,’ she said sweetly. ‘I understand that you have secretarial openings? Yes? How many? Well how come when I was just down there you said they were full? Oh, you remember me now, do you!’

Madeleine slammed the receiver down.

‘I’m sorry, honey,’ I said.

Joe started to say something, but Madeleine gave him a look that would curdle cream, so he retreated into the lounge, taking his pipe out of his pocket as he went.

Dellaphine emerged from the kitchen.

‘Sugar, you should have known them jobs weren’t for you,’ she said.

‘Momma, please!’

‘You got a good job.’

‘Keeping children at a day nursery for white women who work the jobs I’m better trained to do!’

‘You don’t got to clean toilets or nothing, do you?’

‘I graduated Dunbar High School with As in typing, shorthand and bookkeeping. I didn’t spend all those hours studying to end up raising white people’s children!’

‘That’s part of your problem, Maddy,’ her mother said, one hand on her bony hip, waving a wooden spoon with the other. ‘You come across asterperious. You got to act humble and grateful.’

‘Momma!’

‘Honey, I know you’ll find a good job soon,’ I said. ‘I see more colored girls working in government offices every day.’

‘When this war is over, I’m going to go live in Paris, and be and do whatever I want – like Josephine Baker!’

‘You do that, baby.’ Dellaphine said. ‘In the meantime calm down, come get you a glass of ice tea and help me get dinner on the table.’

Madeleine rolled her eyes, and stomped down the hall after her mother.

I followed Joe into the sitting room, where he’d lit his pipe and lifted a stack of papers out of his briefcase.

I could think of no excuses, so I dragged my knitting basket from under the cocktail table. I raised the lopsided sock I was knitting to the light, and found a new dropped stitch. Resigned to imperfection I ignored it, and started the edging. Besides, if I didn’t knit, I’d have to talk to Joe. Or worry about Rachel.

Joe had the radio tuned to some opera. He’d know everything about it, including the composer, the performers and how it differed from the interpretation he’d once seen in London, and I’d have to admit I didn’t even know the name of the blasted thing, and I’d sound like I’d fallen off a turnip truck on the way through town.

‘Like it?’ he asked.

‘What?’ I said.

‘
La Bohème
,’ he said.

‘The music is wonderful,’ I said, pausing in my work, since it was all I could do to knit tolerably when I wasn’t talking, ‘but I know nothing about opera.’

‘Would you like to go to a concert with me sometime? It wouldn’t have to be the opera, if you’d prefer something else.’

I choked on my heart in a way I hadn’t when Don asked me to Evalyn McLean’s party.

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’d love to, and opera would be fine,’ bending with new concentration over my knitting needles.

‘How about Friday?’ he said. ‘Let me check the newspaper and see what’s coming up.’

‘Okay,’ I said, lightly, I hoped. I thrashed around for something else to say.

‘How was your day?’ Lame, lame, lame!

‘The usual,’ he said. ‘The students are distracted by the war. Most of them are waiting for draft notices or duty assignments. And your day?’

‘I’m a file clerk,’ I said. ‘That pretty much covers it.’

We were silent again, until Dellaphine called us to dinner – fried haddock, creamed potatoes, more squash and honey cake. I pushed the haddock around on my plate so it looked like I’d eaten some.

After dinner I didn’t go back into the sitting room with the others. I needed to think. Instead I settled into a wicker rocker on the porch and watched the heat lightning flare over the city.

I was convinced that something questionable was going on with Gerald Bloch’s OSS file. It wasn’t misplaced during all the confusion of Holman’s death, because someone had deliberately ripped out the reference card from the index files in my office. The two events had to be linked. And my files weren’t secure from anyone in my building during office hours. With my girls out sick last week, anyone could have come into my office when I wasn’t there.

I pictured the layout of our first-floor wing of the huge old apartment building that accommodated the Research and Analysis branch of OSS. Once it contained three apartments. The first, a two-bedroom unit to the right of the front door, housed me and my three clerks and our towering index-card files. On the left, what had once been a doorman’s room was now our security office, staffed by the army. Most days one Sergeant Corcoran stayed in the office, checking the credentials of visitors; the front entrance was manned by Private Cooper, and the side door by a Private Herndon. Up the hall on the left was Holman’s office, once a studio apartment. Further down the hall on the left a stairway rose to the upper floors. The side entrance to our hall, Private Herndon’s station, faced the staircase.

Four researchers shared a two-room unit in the rear of our wing. Dora and Roger Austine crammed their desks into one room. Roger was a French-language professor from Tulane. His mother was French, and after his American father’s death she and his sisters returned to southern France, where they still lived. His uncle was the Archbishop of Toulouse, so they were quite safe from the Nazis. At least for now. Roger was a fervent admirer of Charles de Gaulle.

Don, before his promotion to Holman’s job, shared an office with Guy Danielson, a European historian from Princeton. Guy was older than most of us, more conservative, even reactionary. He and Roger despised each other. Fluency in French was the only trait they shared.

For months they’d been arguing about who should lead the French government in exile. Roger tried to convince Bob Holman that de Gaulle was the reincarnation of Napoleon, while Guy insisted that the Count of Paris, the old charlatan who claimed to be the King of France, was the man with the credentials.

A small bathroom served their offices, but Dora usually walked down the hall to use ours.

Once past the security guards, anyone who worked for the Research and Analysis branch, and any authorized visitor for that matter, had free access to all the offices in the building. Anything that needed to be restricted, like our precious London telephone book, was locked up.

The Research and Analysis branch of the OSS, which everyone in the know called R&A, was more like a college campus than a government office. Ex-professors wandered about laden with books and notes and documents, cooperated and argued in endless meetings, frequently decamping to the Library of Congress to do their research. They wrote thick reports, which we clerks typed, distributed and filed endlessly. When under a deadline our scholar/spies stayed up all night working, smuggling wives and girlfriends in to type. Often they took papers and files home to study.

Not until the end of the day did we stow away our stacks of papers, remove the pins from wall maps, secure secret files and lock our office doors. Much of the time we did that not only for national security’s sake but to keep raiders from other government agencies from stealing our typewriters and mimeograph machines.

Bob Holman’s heart attack presented an unexpected opportunity for someone to steal Bloch’s file. How long had Holman been dead before his corpse was discovered? Who went in and out of his office before his wife raised the alarm? In the confusion that followed the discovery of Holman’s body, could the thief have left our hall through the either of the two entrances that the guards abandoned when they rushed to Holman’s office? Not to mention the staircase that led to the second floor. Of course, if the thief worked for OSS, which seemed likely to me, he could simply return to his office and hide the file amongst his own papers.

The words ‘spy’, ‘traitor’, ‘quisling’, and ‘mole’ crossed my mind for the first time.

And why Gerald Bloch’s file? I wasn’t sure that Bloch had any skills or knowledge that dozens of other men living on the French or North African coasts didn’t have. Gerald, Rachel and little Claude were just flotsam and jetsam floating in the ocean of a worldwide war.

But this wasn’t only about the fate of one French Jewish family. If Bloch’s file was stolen deliberately, and I was sure it was, something larger must be at stake. I felt justified, even responsible, for trying to find out what more I could.

Who could I report all this to? Anyone at OSS could be the culprit. Don? He could have been in Holman’s office after his death. Dora? Ditto. Joan? Should I trust her because she was my friend? What about Guy or Roger? Dr Linney, our branch head? If I went over Don’s head to speak to Linney, everyone in the branch would know about it within minutes, and the culprit would be forewarned. Same thing if I went straight to General Donovan. Now that would really create an uproar and send the thief scampering underground. It seemed to me that the only way to find him was to keep quiet about what I suspected was theft of OSS information. Unless the file was lost or misplaced, in which case I would make a spectacle of myself.

Which reminded me that I had no independent proof that I had actually given the file to Holman in the first place, that it had disappeared, or that the index card had been stolen. I could have stolen the file and the card myself, and made up the story of their loss as cover!

I decided to keep what I knew to myself until I had more evidence that the file was stolen. Keeping my mouth shut was a specialty of mine.

I wondered if General Donovan would be at Evalyn McLean’s party, and if I might have a chance to speak to him alone. I could tell him about the file without the entire office knowing I had talked to him. Would he believe me?

Thinking about the McLean party brought up the confusing issue of my love life. I had never been out on two dates in one week before, except the week Bill and I got engaged, when we went to our church homecoming picnic on a Friday and the movies the next day. And this week I had not only two dates, but I was going out with two different men! And that didn’t count Charles Burns offering me supper and a ride home from Joan’s. I didn’t understand it. I was way, way past my prime, almost thirty years old.

‘Beady little eyes’ was a description that might have been invented just for J. Edgar Hoover, General Bill Donovan reflected. Those black, tiny eyes set in the FBI Director’s heavy swarthy face betrayed him as the autocrat he was. Donovan couldn’t stand the man, but ever since Congress had passed the Hatch Act, giving the FBI the authority to search for spies and saboteurs within the United States, Donovan had been forced to work with him. They’d been meeting daily since Bob Holman had been found murdered at his desk. The murder had been hushed up successfully for now, but the murder investigation itself was going nowhere fast. Hoover’s G-men and the OSS Security Office had clashed continually since the start of the investigation. They were meeting tonight at the Cosmo Club because it was neutral territory. Neither Hoover nor Donovan would agree to meet at the other’s office.

A waiter appeared silently and set their drinks before them – smoky amber liquid in highball glasses filled with ice, grease for squeaky wheels.

Hoover sipped from his drink, set it down, and took a thick file from his assistant, Clyde Tolson. The nature of Hoover and Tolson’s friendship had aroused gossip for years, but Donovan preferred not to speculate. He had more than enough to do spying on the Nazis.

Hoover tapped the folder on the table in front of him.

‘What we know,’ he said. ‘Bob Holman was murdered, stabbed in the base of his neck, from behind, with a thin-bladed weapon, like an ice pick or a letter opener. Holman must have been working in his undershirt at the time, as was his habit, because it seems that his killer dressed him in his shirt and jacket to hide the fatal wound. Gave him a bit of time to cover his tracks, since we didn’t know Holman had been murdered until the doctor arrived and examined him. We decided,’ Hoover continued, ‘to keep the murder a secret for now.’

‘You decided,’ Donovan said.

Hoover peered at Donovan over the sheaf of papers he was skimming. ‘Maybe you don’t care if the country knows OSS security is so lax someone could be murdered right under your nose, but I do.’

Donovan shrugged.

‘Suspects,’ Hoover continued.

Donovan’s security chief, Colonel Ellery Huntington, shifted impatiently beside him.

‘Let’s hear what you have,’ Donovan said.

‘We’ve established that any number of people in OSS could have had access to the murder victim. Your internal security is laughable. Your people wander about like bees in a beehive. But there are three people who had a strong motive to murder Mr Holman, as well as access.

‘Go on.’

‘Dora Bertrand.’

Donovan scowled. ‘Why her?’

‘She’s a socialist and a lesbian.’

‘Those aren’t motives for Holman’s murder.’

‘Holman was head of the Europe/Africa desk, correct?’

‘Yes.’