The Fighting Agents

by W. E. B Griffin

  Charity nodded her understanding, glanced at the card, and tucked it in the breast pocket of her uniform tunic.

  “That, except for the question of your billet, is it,” Jamison said. “You have two choices. You can have a private room in the female officers’ wing on the second floor, or you can move in with Captain Stanfield in the servants’ quarters on the third floor.”

  “I’m in what used to be the apartment provided for . . .” she hesitated just perceptibly, and then went on, “the Duchess’s personal maid. There are two bedrooms and a sitter, and a private bath with a bathtub. There are only showers in the female officers’ quarters.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Charity said, “and I think I’d prefer that. But it raises a question.”

  “What’s that?” the Duchess asked.

  “You’re my very first duchess,” Charity said. “I knew a baroness one time, at school. But I don’t know what to call you.”

  “Elizabeth, or Liz, will do just fine,” the Duchess said.

  Stevens had told her, the Duchess decided. Or David Bruce. Or possibly she had known even before she had arrived in England that the Imperial General Staff Liaison officer to OSS Whitbey House Station had before the war occupied the house as the Duchess Stanfield.

  “I’m perfectly prepared,” Charity said with a smile, “to curtsy . . . for that matter to prostrate myself . . . if it means access to a hot bath. What I had in London was a trickle of rusty tepid water. More like a bad leak than a shower.”

  The Duchess laughed.

  “Well, come on, then, we’ll get you a hot bath. And you won’t have to prostrate yourself, either.”

  The Duchess was surprised, almost astounded, to see what Charity Hoche’s heavy suitcases contained. There was one spare uniform and several spare shirts, but the rest of the space was filled with cosmetics, soap, perfume, underwear, and silk stockings.

  Charity saw the surprise on the Duchess’s face.

  “We have a marvelous old sailor in Washington,” she said. “Chief Ellis. He told me what to bring. He said that I could get anything GI over here without any trouble, but that if I wanted ‘lady-type things,’ I should take them with me.”

  “You were given good advice,” the Duchess said. “That’s the first time I’ve seen more than three pairs of silk stockings at once in years.”

  “Help yourself,” Charity said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” the Duchess said.

  “Oh, I wish you would,” Charity said. “Sooner or later, there will be a chance for you to scratch my back. And there’s three dozen pair, more than I can possibly use before Mommy sends me some more.”

  “Would you like me to prostrate myself now, or later?” the Duchess asked.

  They smiled at each other, and the Duchess understood that her snap judgment of Charity Hoche had been on the money. A good woman, and a nice one. Charity handed her a dozen pair of silk stockings.

  “Wear them in good health,” Charity said.

  Charity went to the tub, put in the stopper, and started to fill it. She then somewhat discomfited the Duchess by taking off all her clothes and walking around the bedroom starkers as she loaded her treasure of “lady-type things” into a chest of drawers.

  Then she got into the tub. The Duchess went to her room, threw away with great pleasure her remaining two pairs of silk stockings—which had runs in them—and put on a pair that Charity had given her. They made her feel good.

  Then she saw her own hoard of “lady-type things.” It primarily consisted of twenty-two jars of Elizabeth Arden bubble bath. Her eyes teared. Just before he’d gone off wherever the hell he was, Jimmy Whittaker had helped himself to her last half-tin of bubble bath, and she had been furious.

  Not too furious, she recalled, to accept his invitation to join in the bubbles. In fact, she’d probably really been more sad than angry. She had resigned herself to doing without bubble bath as she had resigned herself to doing without Jimmy Whittaker.

  And then Bob Jamison had called her into his office, handed her a U.S. Army package from the National Institutes of Health, Washington, D.C.—which was how the OSS identified its packages—stamped URGENT AIR PRIORITY SHIPMENT and a shipping label reading “Crystals, Soluble, Non-Explosive,” and addressed to the “Officer-in-Charge, Agricultural Research Facility, Whitbey House, Kent.”

  “I think this is for you,” Jamison had said.

  It was a case of twenty-four bottles of Elizabeth Arden bubble-bath crystals.

  God, how I miss Jimmy!

  And to hell with thinking about the illegal use of scarce air-freight facilities and interfering with the war effort.

  The Duchess took one of the bottles and carried it into the bathroom. Charity was slumped down in the tub, so that only her chin and her nipples broke the surface of the water.

  “How about a little bubble bath?” the Duchess asked.

  “Oh, I see it got here,” Charity said. “I was afraid to ask.”

  “You know where it came from?”

  “Yes,” Charity said, “I know.”

  “I won’t ask where Jimmy is,” the Duchess said.

  “I’m glad, because I can’t tell you,” Charity said.

  The Duchess filed that away, professionally. Charity Hoche was privy to upper-echelon secrets. And knew how to keep them. And then she was a little ashamed for being professional.

  “Actually, I had something specific in mind before,” Charity said, “when I said there would come a time when you could scratch my back.”

  “Tell me,” the Duchess said.

  “How would I get Lieutenant Colonel Peter Douglass, Jr., on the telephone?”

  “Doug’s a friend of yours?”

  “Understatement,” Charity said. “At least on my part.”

  “The way we do that,” the Duchess said, “is I get on the telephone, and when I have Colonel Douglass on the line, I bring the phone in here to you.”

  “Oh, nice!”

  Two minutes later, the Duchess went back into the bathroom.

  “Colonel Douglass is not available,” she said. “He will not be available for the next thirty-six hours. I’m sorry.”

  “Damn,” Charity said. She sat up abruptly, splashing water. “That means he’s out spreading pollen.”

  “I don’t think so,” the Duchess said.

  “Oh, come on,” Charity said. “He doesn’t know I’m here. And if you know him, you know he’s just like the others. I’m not complaining. If I was in his shoes, I’d probably be doing the same thing. ‘Live today . . .’ ”

  “I would guess that he’s off somewhere getting drunk,” the Duchess said.

  “Oddly enough, that would make me happy. Compared to what I really think he’s up to. Why do you say that?”

  The Duchess hesitated.

  “Oddly enough, it’s classified,” she said.

  “Oddly enough,” Charity said, “I’m cleared for anything going on around here. Didn’t Jamison tell you?”

  “No,” the Duchess said. “Are you really?”

  “Yes, I am,” Charity said. “Does that mean you’re not?”

  “I am accused,” the Duchess said, “of being the resident spy for the Imperial General Staff. There is a grain of truth in the accusation. But I know about this.”

  “I really am cleared,” Charity said. “Am I going to have to get Jamison up here to confirm that?”

  “He’d love that, dressed as you are.” The Duchess chuckled. “We’d better not.”

  Charity Hoche was obviously telling the truth.

  “Probably because of his father,” the Duchess said. “Or maybe just because he’s Dick’s good buddy, and Dick just uses that for an excuse, whenever Doug goes off on a mission, Eighth Air Force tells us. And they tell us when he comes back. TWX to Berkeley Square with info copy here. He flew a mission today. He made it back, but his executive officer was killed. I saw the TWX just before you got here. Under the circumstances, I don’t think he’s o
ut . . . how did you put it? . . . ‘spreading pollen.’ ”

  “Thank you,” Charity said, almost solemnly.

  “You want the bubble bath?” the Duchess asked.

  “What I would really like is a drink,” Charity said, suddenly standing up and reaching for the flexible-pipe showerhead to rinse herself off. “I’ll save the bubble bath for sometime when it’ll be useful.”

  “That I can offer,” the Duchess said. “We have a nice bar here, and sometimes even a piano player.”

  3

  Lieutenant Ferenc “Freddy” János, the piano player, was a very large man. Which was, he thought, the reason he had broken his ankle. If one was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, one could not expect to be lowered to the ground by parachute as gently as could someone who weighed, say, one hundred sixty pounds.

  And it wasn’t really that bad. The doctor had, perhaps predictably, told him that it “could have been a lot worse.” It had hurt like hell on the drop zone, and while the medics, heaving with the exertion, had carried him to the ambulance. But once they’d gotten a cast on it, there had been virtually no pain. A maddening itch under the cast, but no pain.

  And the X rays had shown a simple fracture of one of the major bones; he’d been told that “knitting, for someone of your age and physical condition,” would be rapid. It was an inconvenience, nothing more. It had, of course, kept him from going operational. The bad landing and the resulting broken ankle had taken him off the team. He had been replaced by a lieutenant flown hastily from the United States.

  Going operational would have to wait until they took the cast off—in three days; today was Tuesday, and the cast would come off on Friday—and probably for a couple of weeks after that; a week to become intimate with a new team, and however long it took after that to schedule and arrange for a mission.

  The major problem that faced Lt. Ferenc “Freddy” János, as he saw it, was arranging to get laid between the time the cast came off and the time he went operational. That would require getting to London, and that was going to pose a problem, for the OSS did not like its people going into London once they had been made privy to a certain level of classified operational information.

  He had been made privy to that level of classified information two days before the bad landing. It had then been intended that the men on his team parachute into Yugoslavia three days later. They had been taught—and had committed to memory in case the drop had not gone as planned—several alternate means to establish contact with the guerrilla forces of Colonel Draža Mihajlović.

  This information was quite sensitive, and those in possession of it could not be trusted to go off and tie one on in London, or for that matter, anywhere off the Whitbey House estate. Freddy János understood the reasoning, for lives were literally at stake, and he was perfectly willing to grant that liquor loosened tongues, especially his. But he thought it would be a truly unfortunate circumstance if he had to jump in Yugoslavia following a long period of enforced celibacy. God alone knew how he could get his ashes hauled in Yugoslavia.

  It wasn’t that there were not a number of females here at Whitbey House—including two leaning on the piano at that moment as he played—who could with relatively little effort be enticed into his room. But he had what he thought of as his standards. For one thing, he did not think officers should make the beast with two backs with enlisted women.

  This belief had not come from The Officer’s Guide, which had euphemistically dealt with the subject, but from Lt. János’s own experience as an enlisted man. He had been enraged when he had suspected that his officers were dazzling enlisted women into their beds with their exalted position, and he was unwilling to enrage the enlisted men here by doing the same thing himself. He had even gone further than that. He had had a word with several officers about the matter; he had let them know their behavior displeased him, and that when he was displeased, he sometimes had trouble keeping his displeasure nonviolent.

  There were three American female officers and one British at Whitbey House, but the American WACs did not measure up to Freddy János’s standard for a bed partner, and the British officer, Captain the Duchess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Stanfield, WRAC, whom Freddy János would have loved to know much better, had proven to be the exception to the rule that upper-class women, when he looked at them with his large, sad, dark eyes, usually wished to comfort him with all the means at their disposal.

  Freddy János had learned about the effect of his large, sad, dark eyes on women when he was fifteen. At fifteen, he was already nearly six feet tall and pushing one hundred eighty pounds. He had been accepted as a “protégé” piano student at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. He had still spoken with something of an accent then, his father having brought them from Budapest to accept an appointment as concertmaster of the Cleveland Symphony only four years before.

  Arrangements had been made for him to stay with friends of the family in a large and comfortable apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River. The friends had also been Hungarians and musicians, and it was their custom to hold Sunday-afternoon musicales, in the European manner, sometimes trios, sometimes quartets, sometimes quintets; and he was naturally asked to play when a piano was required.

  After one musicale, Mrs. Lizbeth Vernon, the lady in 6-B, one floor up, a tall, lithe woman of thirty-four, whom he had noticed smiling softly at him when he played, came to him and told him how much she had enjoyed his playing. And she went on to say that sometime when he had a few minutes, she hoped he would drop by her apartment and see if her piano was in tune. She had just had it tuned, but it didn’t sound right, and she wanted a second opinion before she called Steinway & Sons and complained.

  When he went to her apartment the next day after school, Lizbeth Vernon answered the door in a thin silk robe and told him that she had been under the sunlamp and hoped he wasn’t embarrassed. Lizbeth also told him that she thought he was lonely, that she had seen it in his eyes, and that she understood his loneliness, because her husband, a regional manager for Merrill Lynch, the stockbrokers, was on the road from Monday to Thursday, so she was lonely herself.

  There were a couple of awkward moments that afternoon, after Lizbeth learned that not only was he only fifteen but that he had never been with a woman before.

  “Jesus Christ,” Lizbeth said, horrified, as they lay sated in the biggest bed he had ever seen.

  But she quickly recovered.

  “Well, I’ll say this,” Lizbeth said, laughing deep in her throat as she grabbed him, “you are big for your age. And you are a protégé, aren’t you?”

  And Lizbeth told him that what had “driven me crazy” from the first moment she’d seen him was his eyes.

  That had been, from beginning to end, a fine relationship. And it had lasted long after his “protégé” status had ended. Two years at Juilliard had convinced everybody, his father included, that despite his “early promise,” he just didn’t have what it would take to become a concert pianist.

  He had often come down to Manhattan to visit Lizbeth—when her husband was out of town over a weekend, when Freddy had been at Yale, working toward a degree in European history with a minor in Slavic languages—and there’d been harsh words between them only twice: once when she had come to New Haven to surprise him and had found him in bed with a red-haired, white-skinned, Irish Sarah Lawrence student who had amazingly freckled breasts; and the other, in January 1942, when he had told her that he was going to enlist rather than wait until he graduated the following June.

  Lizbeth had told him—actually screamed at him—that he was going to regret it when he woke up and found out what the Army was all about. If he had any sense at all, he would at least stay in school until he graduated and could get an officer’s commission.

  The Army had sent him to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for basic training, and then to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for tank training. He had loved all of it, even basic training. There was
something about it that had made him feel for the first time in his life—out of bed—like a man. Piano protégés play pianos, not baseball or football, and as lousy as the Yale football team was, there had been no place on it for someone even of his size who had never handled a football.

  He had made expert with the Garand rifle in basic training, the first firearm he had ever touched, and to his great delight and satisfaction had proven to be just as skilled firing the 75mm tube on the M4A3 tank on the ranges at Knox. His record, education, and physical condition quickly got him into Officer Candidate School, and he was the Honor Graduate of his class of “ninety-day wonders.”

  But instead of being ordered to a tank company, Second Lieutenant Ferenc János was ordered to the 576th Military, Government Detachment at Fort Benjamin Harrison, at Indianapolis, Indiana. There, a very military lieutenant colonel who four months before had never worn a uniform crisply informed him he was an officer now, and the Army made the decision about officer assignments. He spoke Hungarian and Croatian and German, and his services would be required to govern a defeated Germany and/or a defeated Hungary.

  He had been compiling a list—because of his musical background—of German, Austrian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Moravian, and Yugoslavian church organs of historical and/or cultural importance when he had seen a notice on the bulletin board at Fort Benjamin Harrison that applications from officers speaking any of a list of foreign languages would be accepted for an unspecified assignment involving “great personal risk.”

  The lieutenant colonel who had told him that the Army made the decisions about officer assignment now told him that his application “bordered on the disloyal” and that he felt he should tell him that he would do everything in his power to have the application disapproved.

  Two weeks later, Freddy János had found himself reporting to a requisitioned estate in Virginia, known as OSS Virginia Station. As far as Freddy János was concerned, it was even better than Forts Dix and Knox. Here he was taught really fascinating things, such as how to blow up bridges, and parachute from airplanes, and kill people with your bare hands.