I had no idea where we were, except we had passed under no bridges, which meant that we must be south of the railway bridge.
We drew alongside a small sailboat moored in the sheltering arm of a short peninsula off the Virginia coast somewhere. There were several other boats moored nearby, but not nearly as many as clustered on the District side. They all seemed unoccupied. Clark cut the motor and tossed a rope over one of the sailboat’s cleats and pulled the two boats together.
‘Get into the sailboat,’ he said. I complied and he followed me, lashing the two vessels together. The sailboat itself was tiny. The deck was just large enough to hold four people seated on the two wooden benches, one on each side. The small sail was neatly furled and the boom secured. A hatch sealed with a heavy padlock led to below decks.
I knew what Clark intended to do.
‘Don’t, Clark, please,’ I said. ‘Don’t leave me down there!’
‘You’ll be perfectly safe,’ he said, drawing a key from an inside pocket. ‘There’s a lantern and some tinned food.’
‘So,’ I said. ‘This is your solution to your problem? Leave me here to die?’
‘You stupid girl,’ he said. ‘I’m hiding you where no one can find you until I figure out a way out of this mess. No one I have ever tried to recruit has turned me down. Why didn’t you agree, at least until Gachev was gone? I’ve not seen him look like that before. Brutal.’
He was right. I’d made another stupid mistake. I should have agreed to join the spy ring, then turned Leach in to Wicker as soon as possible. Instead I was so irate I refused his offer and found myself in another dangerous mess.
Clark unlocked the padlock and opened the hatch to the cabin and, grasping my arm, shoved me inside. There were only four wooden steps down, but I stumbled and fell, hoping I could take Clark off guard. No luck. He jumped down from the ladder and hauled me to my feet. The cabin was so small we could barely stand upright together.
Clark gestured to the only bunk. ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘I’ll be on my way.’
I tried again to stall him. ‘How did you even meet Gachev?’ I asked.
‘At a Communist Party of America dinner. Don’t look at me like that. The CPUSA is a legal organization. General Secretary Browder spoke. Gachev and I were at the same table and we became friends. Later he asked me to help funnel useful intelligence to the NKVD. I was happy to do it. I still believe in the cause,’ he said, staring me down. ‘The current world political and economic system won’t survive the war. So I recruited Paul and Rose. Rose brought in Sadie and Paul brought in Peggy.’
‘Not Spencer.’
‘No. Spencer is a capitalist through and through. When Rose met you she thought you were a possibility.’ Because I believed in the same things Eleanor Roosevelt did – desegregation, women’s rights and the labor movement – this amateur spy thought I was traitor material. Good God.
A vicious lightning bolt, visible through the port light, cracked through the sky, then lit up the night. Thunder rumbled and the boat’s gentle rocking motion grew more agitated.
Heavy raindrops spattered on the boat deck, sounding loudest on the hatch door.
‘There’s a thunderstorm coming, Clark!’ I said. ‘I could die here!’
‘Don’t be foolish. It’s just another spring storm. This boat has been moored here for two years. You’ll be fine.’
Clark turned and climbed up the ladder to the deck, closing the hatch behind him. He turned the key in the heavy padlock and I heard the lock engage.
I pulled myself up the short ladder and screamed at him through the hatch. ‘Liar! Traitor! You’re not coming back to get me! You know I’ll turn you in to OSS Security! You’re leaving me here to die! I’ve got a pen in my purse!’ I screamed. ‘I’ll write down everything! All over my body if I have to! When they find me it’ll all be there! They’ll hang you!’
‘Louise,’ Clark shouted at me, ‘Don’t be so melodramatic! I’ll be back for you! I just need time to think!’
Shortly I heard the runabout’s engine engage and the boat pull away. Leaving me in the dim sailboat cabin alone.
The cabin was bigger than a coffin and smaller than the bathroom I shared at ‘Two Trees’ with Ada and Phoebe. I felt panic rise for a minute, shivering fear coursing through my body, as I wondered if I would ever see ‘Two Trees’ again. Or my parents, whom I hadn’t written in a month. Or Joe! To think I’d hesitated to visit him! What a little fool I’d been.
I suppose it was possible that Clark did intend to come back for me, but I wasn’t going to count on it. So I explored my diminutive prison for supplies and maybe a potential escape route.
First I smacked my head on a kerosene lantern swaying overhead. I heard liquid sloshing and found matches in the only drawer in the cabin, one next to the tiny two-burner propane stove. The flame rose in the lamp and cast its light over the warm wood that paneled the cabin and instantly I felt more hopeful. There was something about the light that was reassuring. In contrast there was very little light coming in now through the two narrow port lights, one on each side of the cabin. Even if they hadn’t been rusted shut only a cat could have got through them.
The only bunk stretched along one side of the cabin. Opposite it was the tiny galley with a sink and the stove. A shelf that held a few cans of beans and soup and a jar of instant coffee restrained by a rope ran along the cabin wall over the stove. Thank God for the coffee.
A narrow door at the rear of the cabin opened into the head. The toilet hadn’t been pumped out recently but I had smelled worse. And there was toilet paper.
If I was convinced that Clark was returning to me the facilities were bearable for a couple of days. But I was not convinced.
I noticed one encouraging prop. A life preserver hung on the wall next to the door to the deck. So, I thought optimistically, if I could get out of here I could paddle to Virginia safely. But not during a storm. I would need to wait until it passed. And I had no clue how to get out of the cabin with the hatch closed so securely. I edged myself as far back in the cabin as I could. The rear hatch, which opened so a winch could raise the sail, was locked from the outside too. It was too small for me to climb through anyway.
A giant crack of thunder made me jump while a lightning strike coursed across the bit of sky I could see through the port light. Wow, I thought, that wasn’t far away. The boat’s rocking intensified. I hoped I didn’t get seasick. That was all I needed.
The trapdoor to the hold took up much of the cabin floor. I grasped the ring handle and pulled the door up easily. Holding the lantern over the dark opening, I saw what seemed to me to be a normal amount of water sloshing around. Closing the hold I hung the lantern on its ring on the ceiling again. The light swayed as the boat rocked, more than it had just a few minutes earlier.
I wasn’t afraid of the water. I was born and raised on the coast of North Carolina and had been in so many boats, sometimes in stormy weather, that I couldn’t count them. And I swam like a fish. What concerned me, what terrified me, was the prospect that this little sailboat couldn’t withstand this storm, and that locked below I wouldn’t have a chance to escape.
I forced myself to be calm, reassuring myself that Clark was right. This boat had weathered many a tempest right here in this anchorage. It would be unpleasant to be locked down here during a thunderstorm, but after it was over maybe I could think of a way out.
Royal stared down at Clark Leach’s corpse. It lay face up, eyes wide open, legs tangled around a chair that had toppled over when he fell. The bullet had entered his skull precisely between his eyes. Whoever had executed him had done this before.
The deceased was easily identified by his driver’s license and an OSS identification tag. The thought that the dead man was OSS, like Paul Hughes, made Royal feel tired.
The woman who owned the little café, just four tables in the main room of her row house, waited in the kitchen with a policewoman. Rain pummeled the metal roof of the house and a flash o
f lightning lit the dim room briefly.
‘I do not need to have restaurant license,’ she said to Royal immediately. ‘Small. Only four tables. I cook for homesick Russians.’
‘Ma’am,’ Royal said. ‘I am not interested in your business. I just want to know what happened here. Now, what is your name?’
The woman was not young but still handsome, her dark hair bundled on top of her head and covered with a knitted cap. She had a good, if matronly, figure under her spotless apron. Her grey eyes hadn’t left his face yet. She wasn’t afraid, she simply didn’t want to give Royal her name. She came from a place where the police were thugs.
‘You must, you know,’ the policewoman said to her.
‘My name is Ekaterina Korobkina,’ she said. ‘May I have a cigarette?’
‘Of course,’ Royal said. ‘Would you like one of mine?’
‘No thank you,’ she said. ‘I smoke Sobranie.’ She pulled a single cigarette wrapped in black paper out of her apron pocket. Royal offered her a light and she accepted it.
‘You’re Russian,’ Royal said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My husband and I emigrate to America in 1937, from Novgorod.’
‘Where is your husband?’
‘At work. He has a night shift.’
‘Please tell me what happened.’
‘Two men came in to eat. The one that is dead and another. They ordered pirozkhi. While I am cooking I hear them arguing. Then a gunshot. I call the police. I hide in the pantry with a stool shoved under the doorknob until I hear police siren. That is all.’
‘Did you know the men?’
‘No I did not,’ she said. ‘I have never seen them before.’
‘Mrs Korobkina,’ Royal said. ‘The dead man isn’t Russian. You cook Russian food for exiled Russians. I will bet you my pension that the other man, the murderer, is Russian and that he has been here before. What is his name?’
She shrugged, crossing her arms. ‘I do not know him,’ she said. Royal didn’t interrogate her further. He could tell from her expression that she’d rather go to an American jail than reveal the man’s name.
The crime team arrived, a photographer and a fingerprint expert. The morgue wagon parked at the curb, waiting to receive the body. Royal directed the policewoman to sit with Mrs Korobkina until her husband came home from work. He left the constable who had answered the original call with him to keep everyone except Mrs Korobkina’s husband out of the house. Then he dashed across the street in the rain to wait in his police car so he could take some weight off his bad knee. Once inside he stretched across the front seat and lit his own cigarette.
A Buick sedan with government plates drew up in front of him. A broad man in an Army uniform got out of the car.
Damn it, Royal thought, the Army! He should have realized the military would intrude, with Russians and the OSS involved. This would be yet another case where the Feds would tell him to go find lost dogs instead of solving a cold-blooded murder.
The man ran over to Royal’s car and knocked on his window. Royal rolled it down, letting the man stand in the rain.
‘I’m Major Angus Wicker, OSS Security,’ the man said.
Flip you a dead fish, Royal thought. He dropped his cigarette and shook hands with Wicker. ‘Sergeant Harvey Royal, District Police, homicide.’
‘Can we talk?’
‘If we must.’
Wicker went around the car and slid into the passenger seat, after Royal drew his legs back under the steering wheel.
‘I know the deceased is Clark Leach,’ Wicker said. ‘One of ours. The chief of police telephoned us after you called it in. Do you know who shot him?’
Royal shook his head. ‘No. The woman runs a small café out of her house cooking for the Russian émigré community. She refused to identify the Russian man our victim was eating dinner with. Don’t think we’ll be able to get her to, either.’
‘Wise woman,’ Wicker said. ‘She doesn’t want to get mixed up in whatever is going on.’
Royal wanted to go home and have a couple of stiff bourbons to ease the pain in his knee. But he needed to ask the question.
‘Don’t suppose you’d be willing to help us out here, would you?’ he asked Wicker.
Wicker stared across the street at the Korobkina house.
‘Can I go inside? See the body?’ Wicker asked.
‘Sure. Why not?’
The two men hurried across the street and into the front room of the house. The police photographer was picking up the light bulbs he’d ejected while photographing the body. The fingerprint expert was packing all his little bottles and brushes into a leather case. Wicker stood over the corpse and stared at him.
‘Let’s go back outside,’ Wicker said, abruptly turning away from the dead man. ‘Better yet, let’s get a drink. We can take my car.’
‘Constable,’ Royal said to the policeman. ‘When the crime scene guys are finished you may release the body to the morgue. Ask if you can help Mrs Korobkina in any way. The policewoman will stay with her until her husband arrives home. Then you may release the scene and leave.’
‘Yes sir,’ the policeman said.
Wicker and Royal ran, their trench coats pulled over their heads to protect them from the rain, into a brightly lit pub. The barman gestured them toward the bar, but Royal flashed his badge and he and Wicker took the only empty booth. Both men ordered double bourbons.
‘Clark Leach was a big shot,’ Wicker said, after their bourbons arrived. ‘Far East specialist. Close to General Donovan.’
‘Oh my God,’ Royal said. ‘You don’t happen to know who killed him?’
‘Pretty sure it was Lev Gachev, Russian émigré, a spymaster for the Soviet Union. Runs a couple of small spy rings inside the government. He turned Leach.’
When Royal recovered from his astonishment at Wicker’s confidences he suggested that the District Police could put out an All Points Bulletin on Gachev.
‘No, he’s long gone. Abandoned his cover – a little shop, I just came from there. He’s either tucked up at the Soviet Embassy or in another safe house.’
‘So is that it?’ Royal asked. ‘You guys are planning to cover this up too, I suppose.’
Wicker paused, staring at Royal as if sizing him up, then said ‘We believe Gachev murdered Paul Hughes too. Hughes was a member of the same ring that Leach ran. We think that Hughes had just met with Gachev. They must have had a disagreement. The Tidal Basin is just a few blocks from what was Gachev’s shop.’
‘Sounds reasonable.’
Royal gestured the bartender for another double bourbon. Wicker declined with a shake of his head.
‘Who sent the telegram from Hughes’ “mother”?’ Royal said, sipping instead of gulping his second drink.
‘We assume Gachev,’ Wicker said. ‘His shop’s address was recorded at the local Western Union office. Incredible he would make such an error.’
‘So both cases are solved,’ Royal said. Louise would be glad to know this, he thought.
He hoped her job was safe.
‘Not exactly. We have a very loose end to tie up,’ Wicker said.
‘What?’ Royal asked.
‘Do you know the whereabouts of Mrs Louise Pearlie? We’ve lost track of her.’
EIGHT
Get enough size variations in [ … ] uniforms that each girl can have a proper fit. This point can’t be stressed too strongly as a means of keeping women happy.
‘1943 Guide to Hiring Women’, Mass Transportation magazine, July 1943.
Royal sipped his bourbon to buy a few seconds to think.
‘Louise who?’ he asked.
‘Louise Pearlie,’ Wicker said. ‘You don’t need to dissemble. We know you’ve met with her regarding the Hughes murder.’
‘Yes,’ Royal said. He sucked on his cigarette again, stalling, not knowing what to tell Wicker. He’d promised not to inform on Louise to OSS, but he didn’t know what to make of this situation.
‘Let
me begin,’ Wicker said. ‘Mrs Pearlie is a file clerk, but she’s done some commendable fieldwork in the past, so we asked for her help in resolving some small issues in the Hughes case. Apparently you approached her too?’
‘Yes,’ Royal said, giving in to his concern about Louise. ‘She gave her real name to Hughes’ landlady, Mrs Nighy. Once you people put the kibosh on my investigation of Hughes’ murder, I used her mistake to get her to work for me. You see, my superiors had closed the Hughes’ case, but I was sure he was murdered.’
‘She investigated for us at the same time,’ Wicker said. ‘Playing both ends against the middle. She’s a smart woman.’
‘Mrs Pearlie never told me anything I couldn’t have found out myself if I’d been authorized to investigate the case.’
‘Forget about all that,’ Wicker said. ‘We have more than that to worry about. The last time Mrs Pearlie was seen she was with Clark Leach.’
‘No!’ Royal said. He felt his throat constrict.
Wicker leaned forward. ‘This is complicated, so I’m just going to hit the high spots. While all this commotion over the Hughes murder was going on, a woman at OSS approached Mrs Pearlie, under the guise of offering her friendship. She introduced her to a group of friends, including Clark Leach. Paul Hughes was a member of the circle before he died. Another friend is the wife of yet another big shot at OSS. The group met every week for drinks at the apartment of two of the women. They went out to a nightclub. Leach took Mrs Pearlie to a movie.’
‘How did you know this?’
‘We’ve suspected Leach for some time. We’ve had a tail on him for weeks. Mrs Pearlie has a sterling record so we allowed the ring’s attempt to recruit her to continue.’
‘I don’t suppose you had the grace to tell her.’
‘No, strategically we felt the operation would work better if she wasn’t briefed.’
‘And all this intertwines with the Hughes murder?’ Royal asked.
‘Yes. Figuring it all out is like trying to untie a fisherman’s knot with one hand,’ Wicker said.
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