Doublespeak--A Novel

by Alisa Smith

  “Dass, could you get us some sandwiches?”

  Dass nodded and walked up to the house. He was a strangely elegant sight in his billowy trousers, white jacket, and pink turban.

  I felt somehow lighter with his hovering presence gone. I had a thousand questions to ask Bill, like the nature of what he did here that made him so rich. But this was a new curiosity, and I would satisfy the older ones first. I had all the time in the world, apparently, since I was roped up to stay awhile.

  “How did you get out of New Westminster jail? It was never reported, even though it was your biggest escape.”

  “Not mine. I have a benefactor.” He spit out the word. His face had a dark and frightening look which revealed the old Bill was still in there, even off the coke. “Which turns out to be the worst thing that could happen to a man. It’s slavery.”

  “Not so bad as that, surely. You were sentenced to death and instead you have all this.” I swept my outstretched arm to take in the grounds and ended by pointing my hand, palm up like a vaudeville host, at the mansion.

  “I’ll grant you that.” He smiled now. He poured more liquid from the pitcher for me, and I realized I was getting pretty drunk. “I like this place. It was built by a wealthy Siamese businessman who fell in love with a handmaiden at the royal court. He wanted this mansion to woo her, and it worked. They lived here until they died within a year of each other, not long before the war.”

  “So who’s your benefactor?”

  Bill sat there silently, though he downed the rest of his drink and refilled his glass to the brim. The breeze through the palm trees made them rustle like dry husks. “This stuff packs a punch,” he said. “You like it?”

  I supposed I shouldn’t have asked about the benefactor. Anybody that could hold power over Bill must be pretty fearsome. It was probably in my best interest to steer clear of him.

  “Yes.” We’d moved on from martinis to gin and tonic, which made me think of quinine, and then malaria. Could you get malaria here? I thought so. I’d wanted to ask my doctor about it before I left but my destination was supposed to be a secret. I drew circles on the condensation left on the glass surface of the table, following the intricate patterns of the dark wood carving visible underneath. “That stuff I wrote about Lena. I thought I was going to die or I wouldn’t have said it.”

  “Anybody would be crazy not to want her. She was one hell of a gal. But only one man got her and that’s Bill Bagley. Since you laid it all out there I saw that she never cheated. That’s all I care about.”

  I could not help glaring at him. I was over her. Time saw to that. If we do not die of something, we will heal. But he didn’t have to point out that she never gave a sweet damn about me. He put his feet up on a stool and leaned back, his hands cupped behind his head, utterly comfortable and in control, like the old Bill had always been. I was sweating like a dog in this unfamiliar heat, even in the shade, but Bill looked cool as the Canadian fall. I should get a Panama hat like his, I reckoned.

  “Look, if you want me to write your chronicles, here are my conditions. I need to be free to write how I want. That means I’ll hide my journal, and I’ll do a better job of it this time. So don’t even bother trying to find it.”

  “I don’t want no one to find it. I’ll take it out of your hide if they do. You got to learn to be more suspicious. This country is full of snakes. Don’t trust no one except me. Deal?”

  He held out his hand to me, and after a moment’s hesitation, I shook it.

  “We’re partners again, By God.”

  “Partners,” I said, raising my glass to him and smiling.

  Partners in what? It struck me that I didn’t know. Guess I already helped him rob banks back in the day, so it couldn’t be worse than that. Could it? I thought, uneasily, as I looked at his palazzo and its grand archways. Maybe riches came cheaper here.

  “So,” Bill said, pressing a cool glass to his cheek. “To complete the mending of my past mistakes, I’m inviting Lena here to join us.”

  “Lena?” I repeated. The thought of seeing her again set off an alarm clock in my soul, and it was a call I did not want to hear. I’d been head over heels, but for her it was all Bill, Bill, Bill. Getting over her had taken a long time, and it had made me look too critically on all the other women I had met since. She’d done me no good. A thousand objections to Bill’s scheme came to mind, but I landed on the safest one.

  “She thinks you’re dead.”

  “That’s fixed easily enough. You thought I was dead too.” He smiled. “Have I ever looked more alive to you?”

  Glumly, I thought he looked pretty much as good as when I first met him, even if more than ten years had passed. You could read it in his features, those years, but he had kept his resemblance to Clark Gable, when he smiled. I studied him from the corner of my eye. He’d already stopped smiling and looked nervous instead. Bringing her here seemed to be a big deal for him. I didn’t want him to get Lena back. He’d done her too many wrongs. My back felt stiff in the rattan chair and I shifted uncomfortably.

  “Why would she come? Been a long time.”

  Bill took my blunt statement without blinking, his blue eyes cold and unreadable. “I consider every possibility, By God. That’s why I succeeded at robbing banks. I have some bait to bring her here.”

  I wondered if that bait was me and my heart leapt. Would she come for me? I told myself quickly not to be stupid. Bill was staring into the distance, through me. I was not it. I was never it. The drongo bird squawked again from the tree and I thought its voice ugly now. I swatted the mosquitos plaguing my ankles through my thin socks, then made myself fold my hands together in my lap, calmly.

  I sat and waited for him to tell me who or what was so interesting, when I was not.

  CHAPTER THREE

  AMERICA’S NAZIS

  WHEN THE WAR was still on, the airmen on Shemya assumed, quite naturally, that my radio unit was listening to Japanese communications. But that duty was left to the team on Adak Island. We simply forwarded the Japanese news from them to maintain our cover, because my unit, the 1085th Signals Service Company, was attached to the wartime Office of Strategic Services. I was designated the Canadian liaison, which gave me an ambiguous status that Miss Maggie found useful. In fact, I reported only to her.

  I had started to share her paranoia about the Soviets. Even during the war, when the lines were more clearly drawn and our countries were united against Nazi Germany, Russia remained neutral to our other enemy, Japan. From the Shemya airfield, we sometimes ran bombing missions to Paramushiro, a Japanese island base, and the Russians let us fly over Kamchatka on the way. But due to their pact with Japan, they interned any American pilots who went down over Russian terrain. After confiscating their winter gear for Soviet soldiers to wear on the Eastern Front, they shipped the Americans to Siberian camps. They were freezing in their replacement rags and always short of rations. It was not much better than how enemy soldiers were treated.

  One lost B-25 stood out in my mind. I did not normally pay attention to the comings and goings of the bombers, since it happened so often. But that night I could not sleep because, for once, there was no fog muffling the base. A distant noise woke me up, a man yelling on the runway, clear as though he was just outside my hut. The dawn blued the dorm windows just after 4 a.m., since it was June. I went for a walk in the unfamiliar brightness and watched them arming the bombers. One man I noticed in particular because he looked nervous—the seasoned pilots had learned to swagger to hide their natural fear of death. This man must have been a civilian in a non-combat specialty because he was carrying photographic equipment. I had the sudden thought that this B-25 was on an aerial reconnaissance of Russia, and the Japanese mission was merely a pretext. The rest of the squadron returned, but not that plane. It was shot down by the Japanese, they said. A crew went out later, searching, and located the plane on the ice at Petropavlovsk. The men were not in it, no sign of blood, but they never answered their porta
ble radio. They were the only downed pilots in Kamchatka that had never been found alive or dead. Around that time, Russian cables arrived that I was not able to decipher. They had changed their coding system. I was sure they had captured our pilots, and that was when I realized Miss Maggie was right: the Russians were the enemy for the coming days.

  I had to admit I enjoyed the Russian work. I was in my element. I was fluent in Russian, while my Japanese had only ever been tolerable after six months of training, so that I depended on the language specialists when I was stationed in Victoria. I was not alone in that. Most of the cryptanalysts had not been fluent speakers—the government had not trusted the naturalized Japanese in North America. We had been chosen for our skills in cracking puzzles and our ability to pick up language quickly. Some of the girls were Oxford mathematicians and I was intimidated by them. But I had studied Russian for five years before the war, and now the other cryptanalysts came to me. Well, not all of them. Some of the men had not wanted me over them as lieutenant. I knew that. The blue braid on my sleeve would always be a reminder that they need not treat me equally. The men of my rank wore gold.

  I paused my pencil over my decoding sheet. It was a cable to Moscow from a Soviet agent in Germany. After the surrender, every Allied nation carved out its piece of Berlin, and the Nazis were being interrogated. Americans, British, French, and Russians all had their teams on the ground, hunting them down. There was a trial underway at Nuremberg about the death camps. It would be a new era of justice, where war crimes would be punished not by mob mentality but by rule of law. Ruthless acts would be banished forever from mankind.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  I put down my pencil and wiped my hands over my face. Since the surrender, the Soviets had been massing their armies and spies in Eastern Europe, and I was convinced they had dreams of empire. Meanwhile, in their coded cables, they claimed that the Americans were trying to recruit Nazi secret service agents. I hadn’t believed it, at first. It ran counter to the directives of the brass in US army intelligence, who wanted to round up every single Nazi for trial. I had told myself it was just Russian paranoia, but now the details were getting too specific to brush aside. Army intelligence was a different creature than the OSS had been. I read the cable over once more.

  BERLIN—Accelerate operation POLE CAT. Agent 37 recruited von Roth, an SS officer with access to Politburo files during occupation of Ukraine. Urgent to retrieve him from American sector.

  I picked up the sheet of paper scrawled with my decryption and walked across the room to Marguerite’s desk. Sergeant Hall was not here, which was good, because he did not have clearance for the Berlin cables. He only worked on Romania, which chafed him because it was less important and he knew it.

  “It’s about POLE CAT,” I said.

  She stared at the sheet of paper until I got tired of holding it and put it on top of her cluttered desk.

  “Agent 37. That is one of ours in Berlin,” she said finally.

  I slumped into the chair beside her desk. “The whole point of this damn war was to destroy the Nazis.” I pulled at my lapel to look at the new silver bar above my pocket. “Aleutian Islands Campaign” was embossed on the metal along with a lightning bolt. I had felt a surge of pride when I pinned it on the month before—I had served my country as well as any man. Our unit had gotten a letter from President Truman too, though the service we were congratulated for was left vague. We were the secret service, after all. “And now we’re recruiting them?”

  It seemed beyond belief. The war was barely over, and already the Allies were enlisting Nazis for their own spy agencies. Fighting over them, in fact, such that at least one SS officer, though stationed in faraway Berlin, was already my colleague. From my front-row seat in decryption, I knew that allegiances were shifting by the hour. The war was moving from the battlefield to the backrooms. No nation, or person, was permanently classed as friend or enemy. I had come to terms with this. But to make allies of ranking Nazis from the notorious SS was too much for me. They had embraced a doctrine of pure evil, which made systematic torture and murder a norm. They had crossed over to a dark place and I did not believe they could return. I pulled off my campaign medal and shoved it in my pocket. If this was what my work had been for, I had no pride in wearing it.

  “The Soviets could be lying,” Marguerite said. “If they show a paper trail that we recruited the Nazis first, then they can use them too, while making us look like the bad guys.” I was grateful to her for trying to find some better explanation. But I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t think she did either. Shortly after we got our medal, there was an executive order disbanding the OSS—officially, at least. Those of us in decryption and espionage were left in a holding pattern, transferred to the War Department under a smaller division now called the Strategic Services Unit. It was a fight to survive. Who was still relevant?

  Marguerite tipped a cigarette pack and pulled one out, leaning back in her chair as she lit it. She squinted against the smoke. I noticed for the first time that her eyes looked hard. She was not the same naïve French girl I had met on the navy base in Victoria four years ago.

  “Merde,” she said. “Everything is different now.”

  * * *

  I DIDN’T FEEL any better for having slept on the news. Winter had returned, and mornings in the Quonset hut were hard to take. Not just cold, but lonelier now. Marguerite and I had a dorm to ourselves since the other women who served on Shemya went home the month before, to become wives and mothers again. For some of them, I thought, that existence would feel pale against the urgency of their wartime mission. I dipped a facecloth in the can of water I’d put on the oil stove last night to warm, so I wouldn’t have to shock myself awake. Cold air poured through the cracks of the wood-panel floor and into the soles of my slippers. It was ironic that much of the timber for the Alaska bases came from Russia. Alaskan mills had not been able to supply wood at the pace demanded. Russia’s economy had been decimated by the war on the German front and they would take anything they could get. So now their wood became houses for the people who would spy on them.

  “Has Miss M said anything about that cable?” Marguerite asked as she brushed her hair. She must have been thinking about it all night, as I was.

  “Yes.” I had received a message from her in our private code, for which we each had matching one-time pads.

  “And?” she paused her brush, and the engraved silver shone in the flickering light from the drum stove.

  “She said not to tell Colonel Topping about it yet. We should just keep monitoring the situation.” Sometimes I wondered what Colonel Topping’s purpose was, since I never reported anything of interest to him. I supposed he had to be there so there was not a woman in charge—like me.

  I whipped off my pajamas and changed as quickly as possible into my uniform to keep the freezing air off my skin. First thick wool tights, then the double-serge skirt. I buttoned up the collar shirt and knotted the tie. I had requested casual khakis like the men’s, though I tailored my skirts shorter than regulation length after they arrived. These were the small advantages of my obscure posting. Since women officers had never before served as Canadian liaisons in the American forces, I could invent my own uniform. At my request, Miss Maggie had sent it from New York, along with one for Marguerite. She included a sarcastic note about couture garments not being part of the budget, but I knew that her budget grew as the war grew.

  It did not matter your nationality or branch of service: mountains were quietly moved. We were pulled from the army, navy, and air force; from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Valuable civilians were made officers overnight. Marguerite said there were six thousand OSS personnel working stateside, mostly out of Washington and New York, and eight thousand more served overseas. I had no idea who Miss Maggie herself reported to, but the head of the OSS, General Donovan, reported only to the President. We were a shadow army.

  “Do you think that means she’s ok
ay with it?” Marguerite asked.

  Neither of us could bring ourselves to say the word Nazi out loud. Of course, we had developed a natural circumspection after years in secret work, but there was something particularly ominous about all this. If it was true that Nazis were being recruited, the person who ran the operation was cold beyond anything we had ever seen. Millions of murders were nothing to this spymaster. But the more I thought about it, the more I believed it. No one knew the Soviets better than the Nazi intelligence service, since they had occupied parts of the USSR for almost three years. The Western allies were watching Communist Russia with growing suspicion, and no one was more anti-Communist than a fascist. It was a grim logic.

  “Who ever knows what she’s thinking?” I said.

  I did not mention that Miss Maggie had opened a new private channel of communication with me for anything about the Nazi development. That did not tell me, though, whether she was for or against it.

  “You going to the runway?” Marguerite asked as she shimmied into her tights.

  “Of course. I’ll meet you there when I hear the plane.” I knew she had the day off, while my shift was starting in ten minutes. But everyone dropped what they were doing when the transport arrived, even though it was often random what supplies were on it and how much time had passed since they were ordered. We didn’t care. It was our only connection to the outside world.

  I walked across the base. The Quonsets were scattered like overturned oil drums, many unoccupied, adding to the sense that my existence was a sort of rubbish. Now that the war was over, I wondered, where would the money come from to continue our work? The Russian cables were stepping up. Every country they liberated in Europe they considered fair game as wartime spoils. The Soviets were rounding up ethnic Germans and shipping them to Siberian work camps in retaliation for the invasion of Russia. Here on Shemya, I was closer to Siberia than I was to my home in Victoria. This nearness to the gulags made the future feel grim and grey.