Dear Miss Kopp

by Amy Stewart

  “That’s fine, then,” I said. “Your mother’s fallen ill and you must rush to her side. You expect to be back in three weeks. She might take a turn for the worse, but don’t even suggest that.”

  “Yes, let’s not think of it,” Miss Bradshaw said, already looking a little worried about her mother.

  “We want him to believe that yours is but a brief leave-taking, most easily filled with the replacement you suggest. Even if the new girl is a disaster, she’ll be gone quickly.”

  “And you’re to be the new girl?”

  “Precisely. Shall I be your cousin or one of the girls here at the boarding-house?”

  Now she was enjoying herself! She grinned playfully at me, cocked her head to the side, and said, “We look nothing alike, but cousins often don’t. He knows where I live, so if I tell him you room here, you’d have that much more pretending to do.”

  He knows where she lives? I didn’t like the sound of that. “There’s a Mrs. Wilmington, is there not?”

  She caught my meaning right away and shook her head vigorously. “Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest—no, no, it’s nothing of the sort. He often asks me to run little errands for him after work. He doesn’t want to send me too far out of my way, so . . .”

  She’d grown flustered, trying to explain it, but I didn’t think she was lying. The landlady wouldn’t allow a male visitor regardless. “He wanted to know where you live so he could send you on errands along your route.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” she said, relieved.

  That’s all there was to it. We arranged to meet the following evening so that she could brief me on the particulars of my new position, and I could brief her on her new role at the War Department. More as I know it.

  I see the American Protective League men ran another slacker raid in Paterson last night. They sent forty men off to jail, leaving a real mess for the police to sort out. Every one of them was registered for service—they just didn’t have their papers with them. You should know that these raids are testing the patience of the police here, who are already stretched thin with so many of their men in France. Their view is that the League is made up of overzealous office men frustrated that they’re too old for the draft. (I should know, my brother is one of them. If you get a report from a Francis Kopp of Hawthorne, you’ll know you have half the Kopp siblings reporting to you.)

  Yours very truly,

  Constance A. Kopp

  Bielaski to Constance

  August 29, 1918

  Dear Miss Kopp,

  Afraid you’re right about the League men. This business of citizens spying on citizens started small but came on strong, like a bout of tapeworms. At first we had a few upright and trustworthy men offering their automobiles and their business connections in any way that might serve the nation. Now they’re holding recruiting fairs, issuing membership cards, and swearing in new members every week. I hate to turn down the manpower, but they’re unruly.

  Never mind, though—that mess is mine to worry about. You keep your eye on this Wilmington. I like the sound of the Bradshaw girl. You ought to watch out for girls like that. If she’s quick-witted, discreet, and self-reliant, she’d make a promising agent. I wouldn’t mind bringing on a few more lady recruits if they’re up to your standards.

  I will write to Mrs. Bailey at the War Department regarding Miss Bradshaw’s assignment. Look for a copy for your own files.

  Yours very truly,

  A. Bruce Bielaski

  Bielaski to Mrs. Bailey

  August 29, 1918

  Dear Mrs. Bailey,

  I’m sending you a Miss Bradshaw, lately of Paterson, New Jersey, for any secretarial post you might have available. She has been temporarily removed from her current place of employment due to a sensitive matter under investigation by the Bureau. She can return to her old position within a few weeks if she chooses, but you may wish to keep her on. We regard her as trustworthy and professional and expect you will too.

  Yours very truly,

  A. Bruce Bielaski

  cc: Constance A. Kopp

  Constance to Bielaski

  September 2, 1918

  Dear Mr. Bielaski,

  I’ve installed myself at the Hudson Printing Company. The place consists of a red brick warehouse fronted by a cramped office of the usual type: high dingy windows, a metal door with a name-plate, and an old coal-stove for heat. A dozen men work in the print shop. The office is staffed by Mr. Wilmington himself, a man at the counter named Sam Archer, and a secretary.

  Now I’ve taken the secretarial post. On my first day I presented myself promptly at nine o’clock, under an assumed name. (Winifred Sedgewick, chosen from the New York City directory by my sister Fleurette the last time she was in town. She picks ten names at once, and this was the next on the list.)

  I walked in and found myself in a shabby little foyer. The walls are plastered in samples, which in this case means invoice blanks and fire alarm calendars. The only furnishings are a single wooden chair whose cushion has long been discarded, a garish electrical light dangling overhead, and a floor of chipped tiles. Behind the narrow counter is a rack where the print jobs wait to be retrieved, and behind that a secretary’s desk. The door to the owner’s office sits just out of sight so that no customer can see, from the counter, whether the man in charge is in.

  I’m sorry to say that I proved to be quite a disappointment to Mr. Wilmington and Sam Archer, both of whom are too old for the draft and regard it as a consolation prize that they might enjoy the comforts of a warm office and a pretty secretary while the young men have their adventures in the trenches.

  “Miss . . . Miss Sedgewick?” asked Mr. Archer when I introduced myself, perhaps hoping he’d heard me wrong.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m Miss Bradshaw’s cousin.”

  Hearing me announced, Mr. Wilmington emerged from his office. If he is in fact a traitor or a spy, he is as bland as they come: a narrow face and a high forehead, hair of an indeterminate beige, ink-stained fingers, and rumpled gray tweeds nearly worn through at the elbows.

  His expression and his voice are so mild that he didn’t register shock the way Mr. Archer did. Instead he marshalled his good British manners and welcomed me properly.

  “Miss Sedgewick, of course,” he said, “and right on time. We were terribly sorry to hear about Miss Bradshaw’s mother. I take it she’s your aunt?”

  “My very favorite aunt,” I said. “I pray for her quick recovery.”

  “As do we,” he said, rather fervently. “There’s a desk for you here”—he stepped aside, a little awkwardly, to wave me toward the desk I’d already spotted—“and I believe you’ll find things in order. Miss Bradshaw said you’d worked in printing before?”

  “Advertising, mostly.” The less said about my invented past as a secretary, the better. That seemed to satisfy him.

  “Well. I’ll leave you the morning to get settled. Can you work a telephone?”

  “Certainly,” I said.

  “That’s fine. Tell them I’m out, unless it’s my wife or Thomas Edison. On second thought, I only want to speak to Mr. Edison.”

  He smiled eagerly: it was apparently a joke he enjoyed. Mr. Archer laughed on cue.

  Miss Bradshaw kept meticulous records and left everything in perfect order, so there was little to do but to step in and take up her system of filing, ledger entries, correspondence, and so forth. It’s not terribly difficult work, which leaves me plenty of time for ferreting out bomb-makers, spies, and Bolsheviks.

  Operations seem unremarkable so far. Sam Archer stays busy behind the counter, taking in a steady stream of orders for any sort of printed good a company might require, from crate labels to packing slips. He is visited by clerks and delivery boys, none of whom have done a thing to raise my suspicions. Mr. Wilmington works at his correspondence and goes back to the shop every hour or two with some question for the printer.

  The men in the print shop are all American-born and (like your League me
n) eager to serve but sidelined for one reason or another. What comes off the presses is so mundane it would put you to sleep. If you’re having difficulties in that area, let me know and I’ll send you a batch.

  Yesterday I volunteered to man the counter for an hour while Sam sorted out a botched order back in the print shop. I went through every package awaiting pick-up and scoured all the boxes and bags under the counter for anything of a suspicious nature—a note, a diagram, a German flag (I’m kidding about the German flag)—and saw nothing. I have been walking through the print shop every day, on the flimsiest of pretenses, and likewise find nothing there to be out of order.

  At night I’ve taken to strolling by at odd hours to look for any signs of activity within, thinking that perhaps a surreptitious print run at two in the morning is what I’m meant to find. The shop is always closed, the windows dark, with no tell-tale hum of machinery within.

  I’ve only one more trick up my sleeve, and that is to read the correspondence that Mr. Wilmington sends out himself. While I type his business letters, he does write out a few notes by hand. None are addressed to private residences: they’re all being sent to business concerns in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York and seem to me to be ordinary correspondence that he, for whatever reason, prefers to handle himself.

  Commencing tomorrow, I’ll take his letters to the post office on my lunch break. Fortunately, I live nearby, so I can bring them straight back to my room and steam them open. I have enough acetone and copper arsenate but haven’t another drop of fusel oil. Is there an alternative that might be easier to find in Paterson? The chemists seem to have run short on everything a Bureau agent requires to do her job.

  Yours very truly,

  Constance A. Kopp

  Bielaski to Constance

  September 4, 1918

  Dear Miss Kopp,

  You’ll have to go in to New York for fusel oil. Robertson’s on Lexington still serves as our chemist. Tell him you’re one of Bielaski’s men and he’ll hand you everything you need out the back door and won’t charge you for it.

  Yours very truly,

  A. Bruce Bielaski

  P.S. My secretary asked me to change this to “one of Bielaski’s ladies,” but that sounds all wrong, and Robertson will know what you mean regard-less.

  P.S.S. Speaking of ladies, I had a good report about that Miss Bradshaw. She might not want to return to the print shop when your job is completed. Have a word with her.

  Constance to Norma

  September 5, 1918

  Dear Norma,

  Yours of July 8 just turned up, looking as though it had walked across the Sahara to get here. We all grumble endlessly about lost and delayed letters, but in the middle of war, no one can stop to organize a better postal system. We will take what we can get.

  I was quite stricken to hear that your program is “unraveling” and that no one seems to recognize the necessity of it. I would offer to go and speak to General Murray myself, but you say that you are writing to him directly. I trust that you will tell him all that you have told me.

  As two months have already passed, there’s little I could say that would do you any immediate good. I can only tell you what Sheriff Heath used to say to me: We can only do our part. We cannot, as individuals, put a stop to crime or mayhem or even war. (Especially war.) We won’t, in any final sense, ever win. There will always be a police department, or a sheriff’s office, or an Army and Navy, because there will always be another criminal, another battle, another belligerent nation. All we can do is to get up every day and to stand on the side of justice and fairness. In this war, we are all standing on the side of a free Europe and a free world.

  You will do your duty to the best of your ability. I know you will. Others might not come around to your point of view. They often don’t. But what matters is that we are all fighting toward the same end.

  I wish I could be of more use! I hope to have a batch of letters from you any day now that tells me that you’ve put everything right again. You haven’t telegrammed to say that you’re returning on the next ship, so I can only hope that you’ve found a way out of your predicament.

  I just returned from Sunday dinner with Bessie and Francis and the children. The meal was, as always, a war-time conjuring trick. I don’t know how she makes half of a baked ham stretch all week, even when she isn’t feeding her ravenous sister-in-law. This time she even came into a bit of sirloin, bartered through the kind of elaborate network that springs up among housewives in trying times. Thanks to our laying hens (it was smart of you to install them in her backyard, and you were right, the neighbors don’t complain as long as they get their share of eggs), she’s able to swap eggs with Mrs. Foster, two doors down, whose uncle has an apple orchard. With the fruit she earns on that exchange, she keeps a bit for the family and barters the rest with Mrs. Quackenbush across the street, whose son is a butcher and supplies Bessie with ham-bones and the butt-ends from his best cuts.

  In this way she assembles a bit of this and a bit of that, bakes it all with noodles and cabbage like you used to do, and covers the whole of it in mashed potatoes, cheese, bread crumbs, and whatever else she can put together. I’m pretty sure there was a crust of stale corn flakes tonight, which sounds appalling but was, in fact, a minor culinary triumph.

  Did you know that we’re now saving nut-shells and fruit pits for gas mask filters? Frankie Jr. has joined the local collection committee. He goes up and down the street every Tuesday to pick up from the neighbors. Francis wants to impart upon him a sense of his duty. You see in the two of them the frustrated efforts of sidelined men: Frankie Jr., still just a boy, and Francis too old, at 43. Both of them wish desperately for a uniform and an obligation. Frankie has found a sense of purpose in his weekly rounds (Bessie embroidered a flag on his cap, and he wears it like a uniform), and Francis finds his purpose in his League activities.

  It’s a good thing that neither of us can talk too much about our work, because I fear we might come to fisticuffs. He’s part of that crowd of Paterson businessmen intent upon ferreting out anti-American leanings on the part of any new arrival, or even the son of an immigrant, which is of course precisely what he is—what all of us are. I hadn’t noticed, before the war, how far he’d gone in turning his back on Mother’s Austrian roots, but now that I think on it, I can see the ways he’s scrubbed himself of anything that isn’t entirely American.

  For instance, have you ever heard him speak a word of German? He understood Mother perfectly, but he always answered in English, didn’t he? And when he and Bessie moved to Hawthorne and filled their bungalow with new oak furniture, straight from the department store, I thought he was simply embracing the “new” and the “now,” but I wonder if he just wanted nothing to do with those old carved chairs and bureaus, bearing the finger-prints and wax polish of a century’s worth of Viennese grandmothers. He wanted to sit on an American chair, milled from American oak in a factory just over in Pennsylvania. And he never liked it, did he, when Bessie tried to make Mother’s dumplings or even those little sugar-dusted cookies she used to bake when we were children.

  Nothing of the Old World appeals to him, in short. I always thought that he merely wanted to look ahead, and to see himself as a man of the twentieth century and of this country. Now I wonder if he didn’t see something dirty, something shady and suspicious, in Mother’s old ways—if he didn’t so much step into the new as he rejected the old. It’s a wonder he hasn’t changed his name from Kopp to King and tried to pass his heritage off as British.

  For that matter, it’s a wonder he hasn’t changed his age. If Francis hadn’t grown so jowly and stout in the last few years, he might’ve tried to pass himself off for a younger man and run off to war anyway. (Bessie would never stand for it, of course, not with two children at home who depend upon him, but I wouldn’t put it past him to try.)

  What I mean to say is that I see a bitterness in him now. For so many men the war seems to provide a ready-made se
nse of purpose where one was missing before. It’s as if he has, for the first time, seen what his life was meant to be, and lost it before he ever took hold of it, due entirely to an accident of his birth-date. There’s a vacancy behind his eyes that was never there before.

  I don’t mean to worry you. The war affects us all. The men left behind here are wounded in their own way, but it’s nothing compared to what you see in France.

  As for my own work, I’m in that watch-and-wait stage that might lead somewhere or it might not. I do hope I get a good arrest out of it. Mr. Bielaski, for all his fine qualities, still tells me that he’ll “send in the boys” if arrests are to be made. He knows full well what I can do, but he’s simply in the habit of sending the boys in to do it. Of course I’m not wishing for a saboteur with a suitcase full of dynamite, but I wouldn’t mind an opportunity to toss someone into jail, just to remind him (and myself) that I can.

  Yours,

  Constance

  Constance to Bielaski

  September 9, 1918

  Dear Mr. Bielaski,

  Fusel oil in hand, letters steamed open per protocol, but it makes an awful stink. My landlady, the formidable Mrs. Spinella, complained about it even though I kept a window open. At times like this an agent really could use an office. Doesn’t the Bureau have anything in downtown Paterson?

  I found nothing unusual in the letters. Mr. Wilmington writes congenial notes in longhand to his most favored customers, those who’ve been with him the longest and given him the most business. I scrutinized the letters for code, passed them over a candle, and held them up to the light, but I see no indications of secret ink or hidden messages.