Doublespeak--A Novel

by Alisa Smith

  As I entered the empty “L” Hut, the sad remnant of my decryption unit, I wondered if they would ship all the extra desks back to the Lower 48, or if it wasn’t worth the bother and one day soon we’d just pile them in a heap and burn them. I guess the Japanese work I did before was something anyone could be proud of, since we won the war against them. But really, was that not the result of dropping atom bombs? All my cleverness was just so much fancy dancing. Sitting down at my desk, I drew flowers idly in the corner of my decryption sheet, and I sighed. Since President Truman shut down the OSS and demoted us to the Strategic Services Unit, or SSU, no one knew exactly what we were supposed to do. Well, maybe Miss Maggie did, but she wasn’t telling.

  From the corner of my desk I grabbed the day’s cables, which I’d retrieved from a locked cabinet on my way in. The process we had to reverse had three steps. First, the Soviet agent would consult his master codebook, where each word had a four-digit number assigned to it. Then, he would pick a page out of a second book of randomized four-digit numbers, called the additive keys, and match each master number of the message with this new number, going by sequence on the page. Finally, he would add together these two numbers, dropping any extra digit, in a technique called modulo zero. In this world, eight plus four equalled two. In that way, each word’s code remained four digits long. These random four-digit sequences were supposed to be unbreakable if you didn’t have the matching book of additive keys, but luckily for us, the Soviets sometimes used the same page twice. A new book could not always be obtained in war conditions, or people just made mistakes. We found the reuse by painstaking searches for common openings and closings, like “To Moscow” or “Part 2 of 2.” That gave us depth, so if we could find common four-digit numerals between two messages, we could determine the underlying code for those words. Then, we might wrestle out a few more based on context. We had quite a few listed in the master codebook we were constructing, which would one day mirror the Soviet’s entirely. Probably they would change encryption methods before then, but one could dream. It was my pride to fill in another page, though this might take weeks or even months of work. Sometimes we received solved batches from a unit in Berlin. A woman there was very good, and I felt competitive with her from afar. Did she also tally the number of words she unscrambled compared to me?

  I was distracted by a young corporal from HQ standing in the doorway, clearing his throat.

  “Ma’am?” he said, clutching his cap at his stomach, like a shield. When had I become so terrifying?

  “Yes?” I stared up at him. His face was pink. It wasn’t so bad to make people uncomfortable. They knew who was boss.

  “Telegram for you.”

  “Leave it there.” I waved at the corner of my desk.

  He approached cautiously, dropped the envelope on top of a heap of papers, and hurried off.

  A telegram. No one liked personal telegrams in the war. It always meant bad news—loved ones dead and gone forever. But I had no loved ones. I ripped open the envelope to see that the note inside was handwritten.

  Honeylamb.

  That was the first word, and my eyes froze there. Only one person had ever called me that, and he was dead. Hung as a criminal three years ago. Bill Bagley, the only man I’d ever truly loved. The only man I’d ever truly hated, too. He turned out to be violent and crazy. He’d have killed me, I think, if I hadn’t left him when I did. Young girls don’t know how to spot these things until it’s too late. I steeled myself to read on.

  “Honeylamb. I have changed. No longer on the drugs. So you should not be surprised I got out of that place in the nick of time. Made a perfect plan and did it. I can tell you about it when you come see me. In the Far East. Get to the Honolulu docks and a man will take you here. Is your mind hesitating? Reconsider. I found someone else you will want to see. You worked with him at Esquimalt until he got shipped out. He was in your line of work. Captured by the Japs but I freed him. Keeping him safe until you arrive. Couple Russkies want to speak to him but I won’t let them. Don’t like their looks. He is not well. Hurry.”

  Only Bill could have written such a message. He was alive.

  Where had this letter come from? I went to the door, looking for the corporal, but he was nowhere to be seen. Who was he, anyway? I returned to the desk in a daze, reminding myself the letter had been sealed. And if it wasn’t, surely it would be meaningless to anyone else. Wouldn’t it? Damn it, Bill was putting me at risk again. The room felt hot and I removed my cap. There were too many shocks in this message. I didn’t know if I would cry from happiness or frustration or fear. It sounded like Link was alive, too. A burden of guilt lifted from my shoulders. My report to Miss Maggie had not meant Link’s death. Not yet, at least. Bill said he was not well. The paper was damp against my fingertips. What exactly did the Russians say to Bill? What did he say to them?

  Bill was meddling, of course. That’s what he did.

  Somehow Bill knew about Link, and they were in the same place. This was alarming. I read the message through again, and there was no one else he could mean by it. How much did Bill know about what I’d done? I did not like to think of them together. Bill could get a stone to confide in him.

  I crushed the letter into a ball.

  Bill made it sound like an offer of help, but the last time I heard from him he had wished me dead. I had not managed a pardon for his case, despite his blackmail. He had threatened to unravel the respectable life I’d made for myself in the military. He’d been the trap Miss Maggie used to make me spy on my colleagues—on Link. If it wasn’t for Bill, I’d never have written the report that got Link in trouble in the first place.

  Now it turned out Bill hadn’t even needed my help. He’d found someone else to free him. I wanted to scream.

  Was this his elaborate plan to ruin me, by having me caught going AWOL? Or might he dangle Link in front of me and then throw him to the wolves, these Russians he spoke of, in some sadistic game?

  I knew Bill valued loyalty above all, and I had failed him in that. He could still hate me despite his freedom.

  I did not cry, but I could not trust my face. My lip was quivering, I could feel it, and I bit it lightly to still it. Luckily no one else was in the room, since most of the soldiers had been shipped out. I had to be composed, though, in case someone arrived and observed me.

  How did Bill escape from jail? I supposed he had done it at least a couple of times before. It was hard to know how much to believe of his embroideries, but it was in the newspaper how he’d broken out of Walla Walla with a weapon he had made, and exited San Quentin with a fake gun waved at a guard he’d conveniently bribed to believe in it. Well, that last part was left out of the newspaper accounts. They did not like the public to know the rot was from within. Probably Bill bribed somebody at New Westminster, too, and the humiliation of losing a death-row prisoner made them suppress the news of his escape. He must have quit the coke not long after I last saw him, shaking and jittering in the New Westminster jail’s visiting room. He was not humble, but what he said in the message was true. The old Bill would have had no trouble concocting an escape plan. He’d been the mastermind of the Clockwork Gang, after all. The Dunsmuir mine payroll heist from the Royal Bank was the biggest robbery in the history of the Pacific Northwest.

  I remembered the old Bill. When we met, he rescued me, in a way. I was a teller in the bank when the gang struck. I was poor and struggling, with a lecherous boss determined to bed me or fire me. When Bill left the bank with the loot, I went with him. At first, Bill took pains to learn everything about me. When he discovered my father had been a postman who lost his job in the Depression, because no one could afford to send mail any longer, it had broken Bill’s heart. He was funny that way, sentimental for the troubles of regular folk. In the month leading up to my twenty-first birthday, to show his solidarity with the postman, he sent me a letter by express every day even though we were living together. He’d stand over my shoulder as I tore open the envelope stu
ffed with little scraps of paper that spilled out like confetti, each one printed in his boxy unschooled hand: I love you. Then he would hug me tightly. But that was not the Bill I fled thirteen years ago.

  The “Russkies,” Bill said. His slang made them sound harmless, like ice hockey players on a field trip. Did Bill understand how dangerous they were? Whatever they wanted with Link, it was bad news. From the cables, I’d seen how they operated in Germany. There were only three possibilities: They wanted to interrogate him. They wanted to recruit him. They wanted to kill him.

  I was stuck in Alaska, half a world away. I had to get to Honolulu. Could Bill really be off the drugs? What would it be like to see him again? I stood up, smoothed my skirt, and fetched a glass of cool water. Finishing it, I set it on a coaster with a picture of a duckling. How had this ridiculous piece of whimsy made it into the room? It wasn’t mine. I was not sentimental. I didn’t want to see Bill—but I had to help Link. That was a matter of honour. I was the reason he’d been a prisoner of war, even if my missteps were ones anyone might have made. When I had reported his meeting with the Spanish Consul to Miss Maggie, I little believed that simple thing was really “spying.”

  It had seemed a dirty word, then. Now I spied on our allies, the Russians, for a living. My adopted country of America was recruiting Nazi agents to be my colleagues in this enterprise. What was the meaning of anything?

  All I knew was that if Link died, it would be my fault. I could not leave him to the Russians, or to Bill for that matter. I knew too much about both.

  I resolved to be on that transport the next day.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DECEMBER 7, 1945—AFTERNOON

  COCKTAIL HOUR WENT on and on, just like at my bar back in Sequim. The chamber of commerce had convinced me to delay opening until 12:01 p.m., so they could truthfully say no bars opened in the morning in our upstanding town. Of course, after the Ponderosa locked its doors at night, I let anybody stay in and drink past sunrise if they wanted, leaving the bar in business most of the twenty-four hours in a day. It was a technicality but it kept everybody happy.

  “So there’s this fellow called Lieutenant Link Hughes.” Bill said the name with no great relish while he patted the table dry with a napkin. He’d spilled some of his drink. “Let me back up a bit.”

  I sighed a little to myself. Bill had taken to speaking in fragments. This was not like the old Bill who was chatty and confiding with his friends. Perhaps he did not trust me yet. After all that happened back in Washington State, I understood that I might have to prove myself again.

  As I waited for Bill to explain, Dass made the long approach across the lawn carrying a silver tray that seared my eyes with the midday sun reflecting off it. Bill watched him as though it was the most interesting thing in the world right now. I was pretty hungry, I realized. It had been a long trip and a strange day. At least I was rid of that Shively fellow. I wondered where he hid himself while in Bangkok if he did not live with Bill. I imagined there was no shortage of dens of iniquity here.

  Dass put the tray down beside us and Bill gestured at me to take a sandwich. I thought it tasted a little gamey but did not say so.

  “How do you like it? It’s water buffalo,” he said, and I almost spit it out. But on second thought, when I recalled the monkey he mentioned earlier, this didn’t seem so bad. I wasn’t entirely sure what a water buffalo was anyway.

  “Great,” I said, giving him a thumbs up.

  “I’ve had to adjust myself to the strange ways of this country,” he said, taking a sandwich for himself. “But it’s better than Europe during the war. Couldn’t get meat of any kind.”

  “Were you a soldier?”

  Bill ate all the crusts off first, which was not something I remembered him ever doing before. He seemed to have grown more particular. “Not exactly,” he said. He chewed for a very long time, longer than even the stringy meat would warrant. I took it the subject was closed.

  “I arrived here a few weeks after the Japs surrendered,” Bill said, brushing some crumbs off his pants. “In August.”

  From where he came or why he did not say. In any case, he had imported jeeps and covered trucks for his business, and the ownership of these vehicles had thrown him in with the British against his will.

  When the British liberated Siam they learned about the prisoner of war camps along the Burma–Siam railway, which the Japanese had built to shorten their supply lines. Around twenty thousand Allied prisoners had been conscripted at appalling loss of life. The British had the job of finding the remaining camps and recording as many of the graves along the way as they could. Long story short, Bill said, was that there weren’t many vehicles in the country that could handle rough roads, so they requisitioned all of his.

  “I travelled with the Limeys because I wanted to keep an eye on my jeeps. But I wish I’d never seen what I seen. Prisoners still alive were just sacks of bones. The dead ones, some were piled in pits, others the Japs just let rot where they fell.” He slumped in his chair and pulled the brim of his Panama hat down lower. “Don’t think I’ll ever get used to the sun here,” he said.

  He had followed the British convoys to a field hospital at Nakom Paton, just outside Bangkok, where the British sent the prisoners for treatment. He talked to some of the men—those who were at least capable of speech. There he met a Canadian who said he had served at the Esquimalt naval base before being transferred overseas. “That word Esquimalt is a strange one, sticks in your head. As soon as he said that, I thought to myself, does he know Lena somehow?”

  “She was there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you find her?”

  Bill held up a finger for silence, and I followed his gaze to a man on the riverside path just outside the palazzo’s iron fence. Bill had told me he’d like to block it off, but such a move would incite outrage because it was part of a public access route along the river from ancient times, and as a foreigner in Siam he could not afford bad feelings. Somehow the grumblings would get back to the chief of police, whom he needed to keep jolly. In any case, the man walking by looked harmless, a bare-chested local in a faded blue sarong. He led a goat on a string, which shook its grey and white head, a bronze bell jangling.

  “Shively came across her,” Bill said, once the man had disappeared. “He has his uses, hey? He was an old ship hand, so he volunteered for the navy in the war. They took him on at Esquimalt to free up the young ones to fight. Anyhoo, Lena was there. Shively saw her sometimes talking to a lieutenant. Link Hughes.” He took another slug of his drink. “Lena thought I was never gonna get out of jail.”

  I felt sorry for Bill, and tried not to look at him. It would just make him mad. Even after all these years, Lena was still in the front of his mind. It seemed more like a fixation than love, but maybe those were nearly the same thing.

  The drongo cackled from its perch. “Shut the fuck up,” Bill yelled. He was certainly drunk now. He wiped the sweat from his brow with a silk handkerchief.

  “She wasn’t the only one who had people wanting them,” he said. “I got outfoxed by a mountain girl when I was up in Burma.”

  “A mountain girl?”

  “They’re wild ones. Ride a horse like nobody’s business. Anyhoo, her parents made a ruckus about her soiled honour. They saw I was rich and made me pay her bride price.” He looked at me sidewise. “We’re not really married. No paper, no priest. But I don’t have the heart to throw her out of my house in Kengtung. It would ruin her.” He kicked his feet against the chair legs, an angry drumbeat.

  “The family doesn’t bother you when you’re away?”

  “Men can go off as they please.”

  I guess I couldn’t expect him to live like a priest all the time he waited for Lena, though it made me wonder if he loved her enough. I stared up at the clouds, frail things being frizzled up by the white hot sun. Of course Bill’s problem was getting rid of a girl. Maybe I should go to Burma, I thought, and see if one might latch
onto me.

  “By the boo, if Lena hears about this, I’ll know who told her,” he said, leaning forward to poke me in the chest.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, smiling in what I hoped was a trustworthy way. It made me nervous to hear him use that cute expression because he used to talk like that when he was at his most crazy.

  “Dass, we need some more goddamn ice,” he bellowed. He sat brooding until Dass returned from the pool house, the glass bowl he set down frosted with the blessed coolness.

  “Back to business,” Bill said, dropping some cubes into our empty glasses. “The British made lists of these POWs we found, and Lieutenant Hughes’s name was on it.”

  I stared at Bill, uncomprehending.

  “You’re making this a goddamn trial.” He took a deep breath and poured us each another drink from the side table. He gazed at the pale blue water in the pool, which earlier had been smooth and taut as a sheet. Now the rising wind mussed the surface. “Lena will want to see him. I’m not the only one who needs to do a patch job. And that’s when I make my case,” he said. “She’ll see how I’ve changed. She thought well of you, By God. So you’ll be there to greet her when she gets to Siam. To smooth things over.”

  “Me?” I kept my voice even, but did not trust myself to say more. The ice clattered in my glass and I saw my hand was shaking. Carefully, I put my drink down on the table. I wanted to be the first one to see her, very much. And wouldn’t she be glad to see an old friend? I didn’t have to follow Bill’s instructions to the letter. I’d be on my own, at first. I could say whatever I wanted.

  As always, he appeared to know my thoughts and cocked an eyebrow at me. “I trust you,” he said, making me ashamed of my internal treacheries. “Anyways, that won’t be the hard part. First we got to extract this Link Hughes from a certain situation. The Russians know where he is, and they’ll move on him soon, most likely.”