Louise's War

by Sarah Shaber

  Huntington opened his own thick file and cleared his throat.

  ‘We’ve determined that Mr Holman was murdered less than an hour before his body was discovered. As you said, he was stabbed with a thin blade, like an ice pick or letter opener, in the back of his neck. We haven’t been able to find the murder weapon.’

  ‘You agree that a woman could have struck that blow?’ Tolson asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Huntington answered. ‘Now, we questioned our security officers and our employees who have offices in the same hall as Holman’s. Here is a list of personnel who were seen there during the hour before his murder.’

  ‘We know all this,’ Hoover said.

  ‘Bear with us, please,’ General Donovan replied.

  ‘Guy Danielson, Roger Austine, Dora Bertrand, Donald Murray and Mrs Louise Pearlie. Their offices are all in the hall.’

  Hoover shifted, impatient.

  ‘Also, passing through on various errands, General Donovan’s secretary, Miss Joan Adams, Dr Linney, the branch head, Mr Charles Burns from the Map Division, four Negro messengers, all with appropriate identification, and of course Mr Holman’s wife,’ Huntington said. ‘And I must point out to you that others could have come down the back staircase and returned that way, so the sergeant wouldn’t have seen them. His job is to clear visitors, not impede my staff.’

  ‘I would suggest,’ Donovan continued, ‘that the motive for murdering Holman need not be political. Perhaps Mr Murray, who is an ambitious young man, seized an opportunity for advancement. Then there’s Holman’s wife. They are known to have argued because she wanted to work. She could have murdered him herself, and then sounded the alarm. My point, Director Hoover, is that we still have no idea who killed Bob Holman, or why they did it. Until we do, we at OSS are keeping our minds open to all possibilities. And I must insist that you do not use this murder as a weapon of political persecution. I won’t have it, not at OSS.’

  Thank God for cross-referencing. I eagerly removed a file labeled ‘International Association of Hydrological Sciences’ from a file cabinet a floor away from where I’d found Gerald Bloch’s file. It contained the program of the 1936 conference Bloch had attended and nothing more. But now I possessed proof that the man existed, and I intended to keep it safe from whoever had stolen the original file and reference card.

  I tucked the empty file jacket back into the file cabinet and folded the program into an armful of other papers and strolled back into my office, the picture of nonchalance. Once behind my desk I locked the conference program away in my desk drawer. My heart pounded and I felt elated as I pinned the tiny key inside my bra. I suppose I fancied myself a real spy, a ‘glamor girl’, on a dangerous mission to unearth a spy within OSS and maybe save a few lives in the process.

  At coffee break I carried my cup of steaming hot coffee, black, I’m sorry to say, over to the table where Roger Austine, Dora Bertrand and Guy Danielson sat. Guy and Roger must be speaking to each other today.

  Coffee break was less hierarchical than other OSS events, so no one seemed too surprised when I joined them. Joan, at a table across the room, raised an eyebrow at me, a gesture that meant she knew exactly what I was doing, and she didn’t approve at all.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ Dora said, scooting over so I could slide a chair next to her. If my parents suspected this middle-aged woman, mousy in a gray dress, was a professor, a socialist and shacked up with another woman, and that not only was I drinking coffee at the same table with her, but also that I admired her, they would link hands and jump off the roof of the First Baptist Church of Wilmington, North Carolina.

  And what would they make of Roger Austine? He slicked his hair back with brilliantine and wore a flower in his lapel. Or of Guy Danielson, a cynical misanthrope who would tell anyone who would listen that a benevolent monarchy was the highest form of government, and the excesses of Hitler and Mussolini were entirely due to their low social origins?

  Guy sipped from his cup and grimaced. ‘Coffee should be like a beautiful woman,’ he said, ‘blonde and sweet!’ That took Dora and me out of the running, but neither man noticed the gaffe, and we didn’t care.

  ‘I hear you received a stack of French underground newspapers this morning?’ Guy asked Roger.

  ‘Yes. You know, every day I think the news can’t get any worse,’ Roger said, shaking his head. ‘And every day I stand corrected. Now that Pierre Laval is Prime Minister of Vichy France, I think that Vichy will be overrun with Nazis very soon. He’s already ordered Vichy Jews to wear the yellow Star of David. So much for unoccupied France. What a charade.’

  ‘Your family?’ Dora asked.

  ‘Still living in Toulouse,’ Roger said. ‘You know that my uncle is Monsignor Saliège, Archbishop of Toulouse. That protects my mother and sisters. They live with him in the archbishop’s palace.’

  ‘I understand that the Gestapo in Paris is deporting Jewish families to labor camps,’ Guy said.

  Roger wiped his face with his handkerchief before responding. ‘Yes,’ he said, his voice wavering. ‘Aided and abetted by the French police. Thousands have been shipped east by cattle car.’

  ‘I don’t understand why the Nazis are sending women and children, too,’ Guy said. ‘What use will they be in labor camps?’

  Dora clenched her fist in her lap.

  ‘They need the women to take care of the men, and I suppose the men will work harder if their families are with them,’ Roger said, shrugging.

  I finished my coffee quickly and excused myself, taking refuge in the women’s bathroom to collect myself. What had I been thinking? I wasn’t a spy. I was a file clerk. What on earth could I do to prevent the Nazis from shipping Rachel and her entire family wherever they pleased?

  Rachel and her father had always made so much of being more French than Jewish. I remembered my first visit to Rachel’s New York home. We took a horse-drawn carriage down to the seaport, passing by Battery Park Place, where the Nazi consulate stood facing the green park lawn. A huge red flag, centered by a black swastika, hung over the door.

  ‘Doesn’t that frighten you?’ I asked Rachel. ‘The things the Nazis say about Jews are so horrible.’

  ‘Papa says Hitler is a clown who won’t survive another year as Chancellor,’ Rachel answered. ‘Besides, we’re perfectly safe. We’re French.’

  Barbara and Betty might as well be chained to their typewriters, they were pounding the keys so intently to catch up from their absences. Ruth was gone, and so was our rolling file cart, so I assumed she was toiling in the file rooms. I sat down at my desk, unlocked my desk drawer and removed the file containing the program for the hydrology conference that Gerald Bloch had attended in Scotland in 1936. It was the only clue I had. I read every word over and over until my eyes ached. I had no idea that water aroused such scholarly passion.

  I uncovered a couple of useful facts. The name of the George Washington University academic who sent in the materials about Bloch in the first place was one Marvin Metcalfe. If he still taught at GWU I might be able to speak to him. Even better, I saw that Joan’s so-called friend from the OSS Map Division, Charles Burns, spoke at the conference. Here was someone under the OSS roof I could ask about Gerald Bloch, but I still had to be circumspect. I needed to question Burns in a way that wouldn’t arouse his suspicion. The best approach, I decided, was to go to him just as myself, a file clerk with nothing more on her mind than an overflowing in-box. That wouldn’t take much acting.

  I trudged up two steep flights of steps to the Map Division. When I opened the door I was halted in my tracks by a frightening image, a world map tacked to the wall. Almost all of continental Europe was soaked in bloody red ink centered by a giant black swastika rolling west toward England. Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden were islands of neutrality scattered within the colossal territory already conquered by Germany. How long could they hold out?

  Libya, an Italian colony also drenched in Axis red, pierced Africa between the French colonies
of Algeria and Morocco, and British Suez. Japan’s red ink oozed into China, the Philippines and Indonesia and pooled a few short miles away from Australia. And someone had hand-drawn a black swastika over the capital of Brazil, a hot bed of Nazi influence in South America, in our own hemisphere.

  TEN

  That bloody map frightened me as much as any horrifying newsreel footage or shocking newspaper story about the war I’d seen yet. The preacher at our church in Wilmington consistently railed about the coming of the Antichrist and Armageddon. If Hitler and this war didn’t qualify I didn’t want to think about what nightmare conflagration would.

  I inhaled deeply to steady myself and went into the office to search for Charles.

  Lord knows I was accustomed to the mess caused by the massive influx of information OSS collected, but the chaos here flabbergasted me. A young clerk was actually climbing, or maybe scaling would be a better word, a tower of leather-bound folios that rose above his head smack in the middle of a huge room. He picked a volume off the summit, slid down to the floor, and carried it over to a work table where a dozen young men and women wearing green eyeshades and black cuff-protectors labored to catalog thousands and thousands of maps. Towering shelves, clogged with files, folios, books and document boxes, surrounded them, lining the walls. I hoped the shelves were screwed into the walls. They looked unsteady to me. If one fell it would cause carnage among the platoon of clerks.

  I found Burns, pouring over a Shell Oil road map of Algeria. When my shadow fell over him, he grimaced.

  ‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘Get out of my light. It’s bad enough as it is.’ He looked up and saw me, wedged between his desk and a bank of file cabinets, and softened his tone. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘sorry, I didn’t recognize you. What is it?’

  ‘I’ve been clearing up Bob Holman’s office,’ I said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘It was a mess. And I found this loose on the floor. It had your name in it, so I thought you might know what it’s about, so I could file it properly.’

  ‘Let me see,’ he said, taking the 1936 conference program from me.

  He leafed through the brochure.

  ‘It’s just what it says it is. A program from a hydrology conference. Listing presentations from expert hydrologists and hydrographers. Like me. Before I became a map librarian. I’m sorry, I don’t have any idea why this was in Holman’s office.’

  ‘You didn’t send it to him?’

  ‘No. Look, I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to hand over a preliminary list of North African maps to a typist, if I can find one who’s free, in an hour, and I have a God-awful headache.’

  ‘Have we got any good maps of North Africa?’

  ‘Not really. The British Admiralty charts of Egypt and the Suez Canal are excellent, but we need the French colonies, Algeria and Morocco. For them we’ve only got a National Geographic map, two oil-company road maps and some tourist guidebooks, only one in English. They show nothing of strategic value. We’ll have to rely on the local Resistance for information, and those damn Arabs, they’re almost as shifty as the Japs.’

  I threaded my way between stacks of books and desks out of the office and into the hallway. What now?

  I wondered if Marvin Metcalfe still taught at George Washington University and if I could invent a plausible pretext for visiting him.

  Lying proved to be easier than I thought. I told my girls that I had a severe toothache and had to leave work to go to the dentist. No one questioned me when I left the building.

  After waiting an hour for the bus, I gave up and walked north. George Washington University was on ‘G’ Street, south of my boarding house, within easy walking distance despite the heat. Uniformed men of all ages and scores of businesslike young women crowded the campus sidewalks, hurrying to class. I envied those women. If the war had come earlier, if I was younger, or if my aunt’s bequest hadn’t shrunk during the Depression, I might be in a real college now, too, learning something meatier than secretarial skills. I stopped an army captain toting an armful of engineering textbooks and asked directions to the geography department.

  Inside the squat stone building it was refreshingly cool and dark. I had to wait a few seconds while my vision adjusted from the intense light outside to the dim interior. A secretary seated at a metal desk kept watch inside the doorway. She was an older woman, at least forty, with minimal typing skills, as I could see as she pecked at the antique Remington on her desk.

  She tilted her eyes over her reading glasses and looked me up and down. When she spotted my OSS badge she deigned to speak to me. ‘Yes?’ she asked.

  ‘Can you tell me the way to Professor Metcalfe’s office?’

  ‘He’s not a professor,’ she said. ‘He’s an instructor. Down that hall, last door on the right.’

  I saw right away why Metcalfe wasn’t in the military. He wore a brace on his left leg, which he stuck straight out along the side of his desk. Polio, I supposed, like so many. Otherwise Metcalfe lived up to my image of a college instructor. He needed a haircut, his collar was frayed, and the leather briefcase that rested on the floor was creased with wear. Metcalfe looked up from a stack of blue books when I tapped on his open door.

  ‘And you are?’ he asked.

  ‘Louise Pearlie,’ I said. Damn, I thought, should I have used an alias? I hadn’t given a cover story any thought at all. And my OSS ID tag still dangled from my collar. I was stuck with myself. ‘Sorry to interrupt you at your work,’ I said, ‘but my boss –’ that was a stupid thing to say, please God, don’t let him call Don – ‘sent me to ask you some questions,’ I said, ‘about a hydrology conference you attended in 1936, in Edinburgh?’

  ‘What, you people don’t have telephones?’

  ‘I was in the neighborhood anyway,’ I said. ‘On my way to the dentist.’ Another mistake. I should have checked to see if there was a dentist’s office nearby.

  Metcalfe rolled his eyes, as if my inanity was the best he could expect from a female government clerk.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘what about it?’

  I was ready for this question.

  ‘One of our division heads died a few days ago,’ I said. ‘We found the program for a hydrology conference that took place in 1936 loose on his desk. Your name is listed as a participant. We don’t know why it was on Mr Holman’s desk, and we hoped you could tell us why it might be important.’

  ‘It was the last international hydrology conference held in Europe. The 1939 conference was here, in Washington. Of course there won’t be any more until this bloody war ends. Not that it matters. I have no time to work on my research, much less my dissertation, what with the teaching load I’m carrying. I sent the program to the OSS back when they asked our department for the names of important people in our field.’

  ‘Did you know any of the other speakers well?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got another copy of the program. Let me refresh my memory.’ He pulled a folder out of his desk file drawer, the program out of the folder, and glanced through it. ‘This Burns fellow. He’s with you people now. We shared an office one semester when he was in graduate school here. Somehow he managed to finish his dissertation before the war started. And Gerald Bloch, he’s a Frenchman, but he speaks very good English. We had dinner in Edinburgh one evening. His wife was with him. Lovely woman. Can’t remember her name. Bloch wasn’t here at the 1939 conference. Couldn’t get out of Europe, I suppose.’

  ‘Might his wife’s name have been Rachel?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I believe that’s correct.’

  ‘And Bloch’s expertise?’ I asked. ‘For our files, you see.’

  ‘The Mediterranean,’ Metcalfe said. ‘The North African coast particularly.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I appreciate your time.’

  Metcalfe withdrew several brochures from the folder. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘I have some reprints of some of Bloch’s journal articles. We all exchange reprints with each other at these
conferences. Do you want them?’

  ‘Sure.’ I stuffed them into my bag.

  I left the building with my stomach knotted into a tight ball. I’d been dangerously unprepared for my meeting with Metcalfe. He didn’t seem suspicious, but if I planned to continue to investigate the missing Bloch file without OSS permission I needed to be more cautious. Ruthlessly I suppressed the apprehension that surfaced whenever I thought of Rachel and her family in peril. I couldn’t help them if I was crippled by my fear for them.

  It was nearly lunchtime, and my stomach growled. When I saw the foreign-languages building ahead of me I thought of a distraction. Why not drop in on Joe? My errand gave me a good excuse to be here, and we could go to lunch. Have a meal away from the boarding house and talk without anyone else around.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Pearlie.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re mistaken,’ I said. ‘Mr Prager teaches Slavic languages here. He’s Czech, has a dark beard, medium height. Wears a gold pocket watch.’

  The secretary, younger than the watchdog at the geography department but no less authoritative, closed her notebook with an impatient slam.

  ‘There is no Joseph Prager working here,’ she said. ‘Not in foreign literatures, not in languages, not in the day or the evening colleges.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps this fellow fed you a line,’ she said, as only a twenty-year-old blonde wearing a fraternity pin could say to an older woman with no ring on her most important finger and thick eyeglasses. I couldn’t think fast enough to reply with equal condescension, and wound up leaving the building with a flush creeping up my neck.

  I took refuge in Quigley’s Pharmacy at the soda fountain. I ordered a grilled-cheese sandwich and a Coke, which was exempted from sugar rationing because the government considered it indispensable to the war effort. Right now it was indispensable to me. The ice-cold, sweet surge of flavor braced me to mull over what I’d learned.