by Alisa Smith
“Russians? Aren’t they our allies?”
“Six months ago they hated Hitler as much as we did, but that’s about it. Now that the war is over, the whole world’s a chessboard. Except the game’s gone underground.”
This sounded far more dangerous than robbing banks. “I don’t know this Link Hughes from Adam. Why do we have to play chess with the world?”
Bill laughed and laughed, until I became concerned he might choke, and then he wiped the tears from his eyes. “That’s a fucking good question. Turns out it’s good fun though.”
Dass must have heard his cue, because he approached to hand Bill a scroll. Bill smoothed it out on the table, using our glasses to hold down two corners. It was a map with hatches of railway lines leading out of Bangkok. Bill drew a finger to the west. “That’s Nakom Paton. It’s not far.” He tapped the spot with a satisfied air. He’d always loved maps, whether the close-up of a vault’s innards or the byways of Washington State. The boys in the gang used to say he had every road in the Pacific Northwest stored in his brain.
He leaned back and smiled. “This is going to be easy-peasy. I got some friends in high places who can keep everybody occupied while we get Hughes. The police, no less.”
He saw my doubtful look and laughed. “Don’t worry, all the police are crooked. You just got to pay the right price. Why do you think I love Siam so much?” He handed me my glass, and the map rolled itself up with a thwap and fell on the paving stones. Dass picked it up silently and tucked it under his arm. “Your ice is melting already,” Bill said. “Drink up before it gets warm. Enjoy life. Tomorrow we’ll have work to do. You’re going to help me capture Lieutenant Hughes.”
“Capture?”
“Let’s call it a rescue. Except the man being rescued maybe won’t come willingly.”
CHAPTER FIVE
FOGS AND WILLIWAWS
THE HUM OF the propellers grew louder, and I pushed my seat back from my desk. I knew it was the transport with its low deep rumble. The bombers were smaller and revved at a higher pitch. I took the pencil from my mouth, staring at the marks I’d chewed into the yellow paint, revealing bare wood underneath, and shoved it in my drawer. I grabbed my parka off the hook by the door and zipped it up. There was something about crazed winds and the roar of propellers that made me want to run, so I did, though the transport was still at the far end of the runway. It hulked over the fighter planes as it rolled past them, fat and slow with its load. It was three days late, since the weather paid its schedule no heed. Experienced pilots said that Shemya had the worst weather in the world. The arctic and temperate air masses constantly collided there, causing the fierce williwaws. This also created strange fogs. The fighter pilots spoke with more dread about the weather than being shot down by the Japanese. The nearby islands had large mountains that pilots crashed into when fog descended. There were more weather graves than war graves in the Aleutians.
When I got to the plane, Marguerite was already waiting at the open door to the hold. “There’s a crate for you. It must be your champagne.”
“About time,” I said. I had ordered bubbly, the real stuff, in August when they announced the surrender of the Japanese. The war was over. We’d all run out onto the airstrip to listen to the loudspeakers, and I’d hugged Marguerite. Unknown pilots hugged us both. Then we retreated to our dorm. There were not many women so we were careful to stay away from any excitement.
The airman knew I always came for the Canadian newspaper, so he passed me The Globe and Mail. I looked for news of Link, as I always did. After the Japanese surrender, there were stories of men returning home who had been reported missing in action—their wives believed them dead but then they were not. They had been sheltered by the local resistance when their planes went down, or they swam to shore from sinking boats. These Lazarus soldiers returned home to great fanfare: the town would put up bunting and a band would play.
Link was one of these miracles, but there would be nothing in the paper about him. His existence was still secret, and it would be up to me to go to him. Why was I even imagining he would forgive me? I supposed unreasonable hopes were like wet wood fires: stuttering and small at the beginning, but once they take hold, raging hot until even falling rain evaporates in the heat, and they are unquenchable.
“Here’s your crate, Miss,” the airman called down from the lip of the hold.
I folded shut my paper and sighed. I had given up on making the men address me by rank. Most of them didn’t mean anything by it, they were just flummoxed. Their brains could not conceive I was anything important. And mostly in this war, women weren’t. I had heard of OSS women being sent home from the field if their parents got worried and demanded it, as though they were still children. Married women were denied overseas postings because separation was an affront to the husband’s authority. I was lucky, I supposed, to have neither parent nor husband holding me back. I was free to make my own reckless decisions. I was owed a one-month leave for my past service, and I thought it would be possible to make it to Siam. Getting back on time was another story.
“You need help with that?”
“No thanks.” I smiled to myself, thinking he was so obliging because he knew champagne was inside my crate. I grabbed the heavy box off the ledge and rested it against my hip. I’d ordered twelve bottles. Well, I could cellar it. Is that not what one did with fine vintages? If I didn’t come back, Marguerite could toast my memory.
“When are you leaving?” I asked him.
“Tomorrow morning at 0700. Weather permitting. But I have no plans for tonight.”
He called out those last words as I was walking away.
* * *
ALONE IN THE dormitory, the champagne safely locked in my steamer trunk, I straightened the artificial flowers in the vase by Marguerite’s bed. They were red silk carnations she had bought at ridiculous expense in Anchorage. I myself kept no such frivolous objects, but their prettiness pleased me anyway. I wished they needed watering so that I could contribute to their existence. I was as useless as these fake flowers. Even less useful, in fact. No one needed me, and I gave no joy to anyone.
I picked up the broom in the corner by the door and swept up the sand the wind had blown into the Quonset. This was an eternal job, the wind constant and the sand infinite. I shook the dustpan out the door, and a little blew back inside. I should have stepped further out the door, but it had felt so cold.
My hands clasped behind my back, I stared out the window at the brown airstrip, the dead flat island, the grey clouds. The loose edges of the aeroplanes’ canvas shelters flapped in the williwaw. The makeshift structures only covered the noses, because there was not enough lumber available to build a full hangar. The mechanics huddled under the canvas, trying to stay out of the icy gusts as they worked on the engines. I didn’t know why they bothered. The planes rarely flew since the war ended.
I turned the globe on my bedside table. Halfway between Alaska and Siam was Hawaii. A convenient stepping stone, and a destination that no one would think twice about for a leave. I put my coat on and marched across the base to Colonel Topping’s office. Standing outside his door, I composed my face into what I hoped was innocent eagerness to make my request.
My knock went unanswered, but that was not uncommon. Colonel Topping was often napping. “Sir, may I come in?” I asked, and opened the door a crack to peek inside.
Sitting at his desk was a woman with a severe grey bun, steel-rimmed spectacles, and ramrod posture. Instinctively I took a step back from the door.
It was Miss Maggie. I had not seen her in person since she sent me here, three years ago. Her orders simply arrived by cable, as through by the hand of God.
“Please do,” she said in her booming voice, which I had witnessed unsettling even an admiral.
I had forgotten how horrible the damage to the left side of her face was. There was a white scar running from her left cheek to her chin, and that side of her face sagged like a curtain missing hooks
. The rumour mill said it was from a car accident when she was young. But the one thing she had confided in me, for reasons of her own, was that the man she loved had beaten her severely. It was not the first time. She chose not to get surgery so her own face would remind her every day not to trust anyone.
I looked at the wall beside Colonel Topping’s desk, where a map of the South Pacific was still covered in white and red pins. These had been meant to make our unit look busy with the war on Japan, and nothing had changed since the surrender. The space inside the Soviet border, where we really focused our efforts, was left unmarked.
Miss Maggie followed my gaze and smiled coldly.
“That old fool has the subterfuge of a toddler, hiding his head under a blanket and believing he’s disappeared,” she said. I laughed, mostly from relief that she was not tearing into me immediately.
“By next year, if I have my way, the Russian sector will be the one full of pins, with all hands on deck,” she said. “That is the coming war.”
“Yes, I see that in the cables. They want to take Eastern Europe.”
“In Washington, there are only a few believers so far.”
I clasped my hands, but realized this looked nervous. I dropped my arms to my side. Why hadn’t Marguerite warned me Miss Maggie was here? She must have come off the transport before I got to the runway.
I didn’t know how old Miss Maggie was, but she looked no different from three years ago. Lithe and strong, like a shaman who could be dumped in the middle of the desert and walk for a hundred days unscathed, through trials that would kill lesser people.
“Tell me about this Nazi business,” she said, leaning her elbows on the Colonel’s oak desk. “Leave nothing out.”
I had already reported everything to her through our private channel, but I went through it again, keeping my tone neutral since I didn’t know where she stood. From my decryption, I knew at least one cell of the former OSS was trying to recruit Nazi secret service officers, especially those who had served behind the Soviet border during the occupation. Agent 37, whoever he was, had got hold of a Nazi known as von Roth.
“What do you make of it?” she asked.
“I took off my pin.” The words came out of my mouth unconsidered—I had been too long away from the presence of any real authority figure.
She laughed.
Was her laughter approving or scornful? I could not tell. This was her genius, I supposed. I felt my admiration for her returning, along with my uncomfortable desire to please her. She was the most formidable woman that decryption had ever seen.
“Why did you come to see the Colonel?” she asked, staring at me over the top of her spectacles.
It was just like jumping into a Canadian lake, I told myself. A shock and then it’s over.
“I was going to ask for my leave,” I said. “I have a month owed. But I had no idea you’d come to Shemya.”
“That’s a long time,” she said. She studied me even more closely. “Where would you go?”
“Hawaii. I’d like some heat after this place.”
“No doubt,” she said, and to my surprise she stood up and went over to the steel-green filing cabinet, her starched A-line skirt immobile above her legs as she walked. She rifled through a drawer. “He needs to work on his filing,” she muttered to herself. “Ah, here it is.”
She sat down again and pulled a gleaming black fountain pen from her jacket pocket. She placed a blank leave pass on the desk and leaned over it. “And when would you go?”
“The transport is leaving tomorrow, and they don’t come often, with the weather. So I thought, why not tomorrow? But I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Enjoy yourself,” she said, pushing the signed pass across the desk.
“There’s a path that goes around the island, near the sea,” I blurted. “Just follow the rock piles. You can’t get lost. There’s no forest or anything.”
“Sounds delightful,” she said, ironically. “You may go.”
Why did I always say silly things around her? Feeling like a child released from detention, I clutched my leave pass to my chest as I hurried out the door and down the hall. Outside, the williwaw nearly snatched my pass away. I jammed the paper into my pocket, keeping my hand there to feel it, to keep it safe. The wind swirled my hair about in tendrils and I figured I must look like a madwoman. I didn’t care. I thought: I’m really leaving.
Back in the empty dorm, I put my suitcase on the bed. I’d bought it last year in Anchorage. It was expensive but not stylish, like everything in the North. I wasn’t certain whether to feel rewarded or stung by Miss Maggie’s actions. How long would she stay on Shemya? What had she come here to do? I hadn’t seen her in three years, and she didn’t even care if I left. She didn’t need me. I shoved my clothes into my bag without bothering to fold them. To hell with military discipline. To hell with Miss Maggie. The idea of escaping Shemya was pure relief.
I snapped shut the first clasp, but my hand stilled over the second. What if I went all the way to Bangkok and Link would not see me? What if he hated me and blamed me for whatever terrible things happened in Burma? He must be seriously injured if they weren’t sending him home yet. Based on the reports I’d seen, everyone fit to travel had left. I couldn’t stand it if he were to die before I had a chance to fix what I had done.
Of course, I also wanted to know why Link had betrayed me and, even worse, the Captain. The Japs learned the location of our sigint operation through Link, when he tipped off the Spanish Consul in the record shop. As a result, the Japanese bombed the Esquimalt radio tower and killed the Captain, the sweetest man I’d ever known.
I still couldn’t believe Link had intended for the Captain to die. Even if he was indifferent to national loyalties, he had cared about the Captain, too, I was sure of it. Maybe the Spanish Consul had deceived Link. And I wanted to know if Link had used me coldly, or if he had really felt something for me. I could not go so far as to say love, because love belonged to knowing a person. Unless you believed in love at first sight. Did I? I didn’t think I loved Link when I first saw him. Maybe Bill, I had.
Bill. Thinking of him would do me no good. He had strangled my love in a thousand ways when we were together. I was not born a thief—but he was. I had just been a silly romantic who saw Robin Hood where there had only been a vicious thug. So why, despite everything, did I sometimes imagine a world in which there was a happy ending for us?
Fairy tales have lives of their own.
* * *
I DUCKED MY head to keep out of the propeller’s range as I boarded the Liberator at 0700. I strapped myself into one of the four seats in the hold—this was not a passenger craft, so the trip would be cold and noisy. I looked out the hatch at the Quonset huts spread across the desolate sand flats and the tundra beyond, where the cliffs dropped away to the sea. Marguerite had come to the runway to see me off, and I pressed my palm against the plane’s metal skin in a gesture of farewell. Startled at the chill, I drew my hand away. I was leaving the perpetual winter of the Aleutians, but not quite yet. I tucked my scarf into the edge of my collar and put my gloves back on for the flight.
The two other men in the hold seemed little inclined to talk. That suited me. One was reading the newspaper, and the other guzzled from a large bottle of bourbon. While the postings on Shemya were as random as anything else in the war—men raised in sweltering Texas were sent here, and men from snowy Colorado went to the tropics—it seemed to attract a particular breed of solitary eccentric. Or maybe Shemya just made them that way if they stayed too long. Like me.
Their presence made me wonder if Miss Maggie would tail me. Why would she need to do that, when she herself had granted my leave to Hawaii? She knew exactly where I was going, or at least she thought she did. Maybe she wanted to make sure. Miss Maggie’s strength was in trusting no one and learning everything. She had had me followed to great effect before, since it led to her discovery of my criminal life with Bill. This was the source of her
power over me. I looked uneasily at the men in the hold and wished I knew more about them. Directly across was a young base mechanic whose name I could not recall. His cap was askew from tipping his head back to drink the bourbon. He looked convincingly celebratory. Maybe his tour of duty was over. I could see the backs of the pilot and co-pilot where they sat in the cockpit, which was open to the body of the plane. They had their headphones on and fiddled with the dials in front of them, readying the plane for take-off. They would have a hard time paying much attention to me. The second passenger, an officer from HQ whom I recalled was named Tex, wore a ratty wool sweater and had a cigarette hanging from his lips as he read the newspaper, a week old. Who was more likely to be a spy: a man who feigned inattention or a man who pretended drunkenness? Either, I supposed. It would depend on the man’s personality. I committed both their looks to memory. Tex had brown hair worn long and in a tuft across his brow, rather dashing. He had a manly face with a broad nose. I studied the mechanic next, who actually appeared weirdly similar to Tex. His hair was the same shade of brown, worn longer and wavy also, but it was as if the same man had been made goofy instead of serious. His hair was pushed back underneath his cap, which was barely clinging to his head now. One of these two could be Miss Maggie’s agent. Well, there was only one way to leave Shemya, so I would just have to keep my eyes open.
The co-pilot closed the hatch, and the plane sped up the runway and lifted into the sky. My stomach lurched a moment before I settled into the lightness of flight. There were no windows in the hold, and I briefly wished I could see Shemya disappear beneath me as I left it, perhaps for the last time.
CHAPTER SIX
DECEMBER 12, 1945
ON THE TRAIN to Nakom Paton, I shared a first-class compartment with Bill, so he could “make sure nothing happened” to me, which I didn’t like the sound of. What was he imagining? He had boarded the train ten minutes before me. His alarming associate Smile Chang was in a separate compartment, disguised in a monk’s orange robes. There was apparently a large temple in the town, so this would help him blend in. But he was the toughest-looking holy man I’d ever seen. As I settled in, Bill adjusted the worn red velvet curtains so there was not a single crack of light. “Protection from the heat, and prying eyes,” he said. “No one will remark on it, because everyone shuts the curtains in the tropics.” Bill then sank into silence. Was it possible he had doubts about this job? I couldn’t let myself believe it. He’d always been the still centre of every tornado.