by Sarah Shaber
‘Perhaps we should linger,’ Lionel said, ‘won’t it seem odd if we don’t conclude our assignation?’ I couldn’t help but notice that Lionel was aroused. I’d never seen an uncircumcised man before, and was not inspired to prolong the experience.
‘Come on!’ I said, reaching for my clothes.
Lionel grasped my arm again.
‘My darling Louise,’ he said, ‘you do not look sufficiently satisfaite. This is not acceptable. I have my reputation to consider.’
‘Your reputation will survive,’ I said.
He pulled me toward him, wrapping his arms around me, pinning mine to my side, his intentions obvious. Lionel was much stronger than his foppish appearance suggested. I was as angry as I was frightened. If I resisted, fighting and screaming, it might bring the guard back. If I didn’t it wouldn’t be rape.
‘Let me go, Lionel, please,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to do this.’
‘Ah, but I do,’ he said. ‘And I’ve risked my life to bring you here. I expect some reward. One instant of ecstasy in this terrible world that is almost intolerable for me to live in otherwise. Is that too much to ask?’ He pinned my arms behind my back with one hand, and with the other began to caress my flank.
‘I’ll scream,’ I said, ‘I will.’
‘Why? You’re not a virgin,’ he said. ‘An act of reluctant love would be much more bearable than arrest, would it not?’
He was correct, of course. He knew that when he brought me here. That I would submit in order to escape exposure, a cheap price for a chance to rescue Rachel’s family.
Then I knew.
‘You have it,’ I said.
Lionel raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I fetched it as soon as you told me of it.’ He released me, knowing I could hardly escape while still naked. He opened a desk drawer and drew out an envelope file secured with a thin red ribbon. ‘Monsieur Gerald Bloch, hydrographer of Marseille, husband of Rachel? That’s him, is it not?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Give it to me.’
‘I have been through it many times,’ he said. ‘With a fine-toothed comb, as you say, and I find nothing remarkable.’
‘Why the charade?’ I asked. ‘Why bring me here, pretend to search, when you had the file all along? Why put yourself in danger of being caught with me?’
Lionel shrugged. ‘I hoped you might have some good intelligence to share with me, some nugget I could relay to my superiors, that you would give up at the last minute to help your friend.’
‘I thought you loathed Vichy.’
‘I do. More than you can imagine. So much I do not want to set foot in France until the war is over. So I wish to ingratiate myself with the ambassador to preserve my own position here. As for your precious file, I might still give it to you, if . . .’ and he gestured to the sofa.
Well, why not? Women all over the world were sleeping with men they despised for scraps of information that might help defeat Nazism. Honey traps, they called them. What made me so special, my body so precious? Lionel was right, I wasn’t a virgin, and although I loathed being intimidated, sleeping with Lionel wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me. If I was discovered, arrested or lost my job, that would be unbearable.
He smiled at me, kind Lionel again. ‘Who knows, you may not regret it.’ He reached for me.
A bell sounded, three times. It echoed in the hall outside Lionel’s office door.
‘Merde!’ Lionel said. He drew aside the window curtains. I caught a glimpse of three black Cadillacs motoring up the drive.
‘It’s the ambassador, the collaborateur,’ Lionel said. ‘Why is he here, on a Saturday? Get dressed, quickly!’
He didn’t have to suggest it twice. We both threw on our clothes.
‘This is a catastrophe,’ he said, with an ear to the door. ‘He never arrives without an entourage, deputies, bodyguards. They will guard all the doors.’
‘How will we get out?’ I asked.
‘It’s you, not us,’ he said. ‘No one will care if I am here, the guard will never report that I entertained a guest.’
Simultaneously we looked toward the window. Lionel’s office was on the third floor, but I remembered the thick ivy that shrouded the embassy.
Lionel shoved the sofa aside, and the two of us struggled to raise the sash. It creaked and shuddered, but finally rose. Lionel held it open.
‘Out,’ he said, ‘quickly, quickly!’
‘Please, Lionel, give me the file!’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t risk it, if they capture you with it, they’ll know I helped you steal it! Without it we could still pretend we were lovers looking for a quiet spot to spend the evening.’
‘Please!’
‘No! Get out!’
I swung myself onto the ledge of the window. I’d climbed enough trees and vines during my childhood that I figured the ivy could hold my weight. And it did, mostly. I edged my way down the wall, grasping thick ropes of ivy, feeling with my feet for footholds, and easing my way down. Once a vine did give way, tearing free of the stone wall, but I only slid a few inches before I caught hold of another.
I reached earth safely. The vast rear grounds of the embassy were empty. I looked up at Lionel’s window, overwhelmed with anger and frustration. I picked up a rock and threw it towards the window, imagining it crashing through glass and cracking Lionel’s skull.
‘God damn you!’ I screamed at him, uselessly.
I was livid with Lionel and furious at my own naiveté. If I’d had a gun I swear I would have shot him dead.
The rock I threw bounced off a mullion, and to my surprise the window opened. Lionel leaned out and dropped a file envelope towards me. It fell, drifting a bit, at my feet. I retrieved it, ripped off the ribbon that tied it closed and drew out a handful of papers. I saw Gerald Bloch’s name, stuffed the papers back into the file and looked for a way out of the still empty back grounds of the embassy.
Lionel leaned out the window and screamed at me.
‘Run, idiot!’ he shouted. ‘Run!’
As I turned the guard’s huge Alsatian, dragging his leash, careened around the corner, not barking, but running flat out straight at me. His intensity was terrifying.
NINETEEN
The dog bounded toward me, his ears flat back and teeth bared, his handler nowhere to be seen. I searched the ground and selected the largest rock I could find. If I could stun the dog, I could still escape. I wondered how close I should let him get before I struck. Then he was just a few yards away from me, and I could feel my bowels lurch and blood rush to my heart.
Then I heard Lionel screaming.
‘Couché! Couché!’ he shouted. The dog skidded to a halt, confused, and looked up at Lionel, who leaned out of his window. ‘Viens ici!’
A shower of peppermints dropped from the window. The dog considered his choice, looking at me, then at the peppermints scattered under Lionel’s window. If I hadn’t been terrified, his confusion would have been amusing. The Alsatian decided in Lionel’s favor, trotting over to the treats.
‘Bon garçon!’ Lionel screamed to the dog. ‘Au pied! For Christ’s sake, Louise, run!’
I ran pell-mell across the rear grounds of the embassy, so fast my lungs burned. I tore across the dry brown lawn, past an empty garden shed and wood house, and through a back service gate onto Kalorama Road.
Once outside I forced myself to walk. Casually I went down the street and crossed into the Sheraton grounds. I had the key to the hotel room Lionel had rented, and I saw no reason why I shouldn’t go there to collect myself. Besides, I’d left my jacket and headscarf there and I badly wanted to cover myself.
Once inside the hotel room my nerve abandoned me. I sat on the bed and began to sob. I couldn’t stop trembling. My arm hurt. A deep black bruise was forming where Lionel had twisted my elbow.
After a few minutes I ran out of tears. In the bathroom I soaked two towels and washed the sweat of fear and heat and exertion from myself as best
I could.
I remained in the hotel room in case the embassy guard raised an alarm, but from the window I saw that the embassy was dark and quiet. I’m embarrassed to say that instead of instantly examining the documents I’d stolen, or rather ‘liberated’, as real spooks said, I fell sound asleep.
When I awoke it was pitch black. I could just detect a murmur of voices from the hotel lobby. I washed what was left of my make-up off my face, put my jacket on over my blouse and wrapped the scarf around my head. I slipped out of the room, went down the back stairs and out into the street. By God, I’d gotten away with it.
I unlocked the door of my boarding house and tiptoed into the dark hall. I’d been lucky to find a taxi at this late hour. Otherwise I would still be walking, fending off sailors and soldiers on weekend leave looking for a bed for the night.
I was starving, so I felt my way back to the kitchen, where I hoped I could find something in the refrigerator to hold me until breakfast. I didn’t want to turn on any more lights than I had to. I wasn’t in the mood to make up any stories about the Fourth of July party I had supposedly attended.
A dark shape that rustled when it moved rose up in front of me and we collided. Madeleine and I both managed to stifle our exclamations. She reached for the light switch on the stove, which cast the dimmest of glows.
She looked beautiful. Her chocolate skin gleamed against the topaz of the party dress Ada had given her. Whatever you called the color of her lipstick, it was perfect with her complexion.
‘Where have you been?’ I asked. ‘It’s very late.’
‘I could ask you the same thing!’
‘At my pool party.’
‘You don’t look like you’ve been swimming.’
‘No, I guess I don’t.’
‘I’ve been to a jazz club on “U” Street. Cab Calloway was playing. He was jumpin’ tonight.’
‘By yourself?’
‘No. My man drove me. He has a car.’
‘Does your mother know about this?’
‘I’m eighteen. Besides, she got a Nembutal from Mrs Knox on account of she hasn’t slept well for the last few nights. She doesn’t even know I’m gone.’
I let it go. Madeleine was a grown-up working girl, and smart, and looking out for her was not my job. I started to root around in the refrigerator, but the pickings were slim. Pickles and leftover hotdog rolls didn’t sound appetizing to me.
‘There’s peach ice cream in the freezer,’ Madeleine said. ‘Mr Joe insisted we save some for you.’
I reached into the freezer compartment and pulled out a bowl of ice cream covered with a dish towel, way more than I could eat.
‘Have some with me,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ Madeleine said.
We found spoons and sat at the kitchen table and ate out of the bowl together. The ice cream was sweet, creamy and cold. Every now and then I’d bite into a frozen chunk of fresh peach. Between us we finished the entire bowl.
‘Well,’ Madeleine said, stretching her arms. ‘To bed.’
I yawned in reply.
I didn’t even think of looking at the documents I’d stolen. I was too exhausted. I stripped, tossing my clothes into a pile on a chair, threw on a nightdress and dropped onto the bed, falling into a sound sleep.
When I awoke the next morning sunlight blazed into my room. I glanced at my alarm clock. It was ten o’clock! I couldn’t remember when I’d last slept this late. I had so much to do. I got out of bed and dressed quickly, in trousers, a red-checked shirt and rope sandals. I slipped down the stairs, starving and thirsty. I heard voices on the porch, but thankfully no one noticed me. I didn’t want to deal with anyone yet today.
A pan of biscuits and a pot of hot coffee sat on the stove. I poured a cup of coffee, grabbed a biscuit and crept back upstairs. I could hardly wait to see what I’d brought back from the Vichy French embassy.
After I returned to my bedroom, for a minute I thought my pocketbook, with the purloined documents inside, was missing. My heart thudded, and my imagination instantly pictured either Ada or Joe as foreign spies. Then I caught sight of a corner of my bag sticking out from under the pile of clothes I’d tossed onto a chair last night before going to sleep. I took a huge, deep breath of relief, and reached for the bag.
I sat on my bed with my handbag’s contents spread out neatly before me. One paper I recognized was a photostat of Bloch’s request for an American visa in 1940, thank God. I couldn’t reconstruct the file without it. There was another photostat of a single-spaced memo in German, with the SS crest on the letterhead. The predatory eagle perched on top of a swastika gave me the creeps. Since I couldn’t read German I had no idea what it said.
The only document in French was a short typewritten note on Vichy French letterhead. I fetched Milt Jr.’s French dictionary.
The gist of the note was that Gerald Bloch was a valuable resource on the hydrography of the North African coast, and that by no means was he to be issued an exit visa.
I added the documents Joan and Metcalfe gave me to the papers I’d stolen from the embassy. I now had two copies of Donovan’s memo and the translation of the Resistance contact’s note, reprints of Bloch’s scholarly articles I’d gotten from Metcalfe, the ones whose titles I’d translated at the public library, Metcalfe’s photograph of himself, Bloch, Rachel, Burns and others in a pub in Edinburgh in 1936, two programs from the 1936 hydrographic conference in Edinburgh, one of the 1939 conference in DC, which Bloch did not attend, a photostat of Bloch’s visa request in 1940 identical to the one in my original file, the Vichy French letter and the SS memo.
I had all the documents I needed to reconstruct a file, an even more complete file than the original, in fact, for me to ‘find’ at work tomorrow, a thought that made the hair on my neck prickle and sweat bead on my upper lip.
I had no intention of telling OSS that Gerald was no longer with his family. Gerald’s original request was to rescue his family, not him, and free him to help the Allies. If OSS knew Gerald had already joined the Resistance, there’d be no need to help his family escape.
Then I realized I couldn’t include the Gestapo document in Bloch’s new file. If the original file had contained it, I would certainly have mentioned it to Don after its loss. Besides, I didn’t know what it said, although I could guess, and if I got caught smuggling it into OSS, I could never explain how I came into possession of it.
I decided to recreate the original file with a set of Joan’s carbons, the journal reprints, the Edinburgh photograph, the visa request and copies of both the 1936 and 1939 conference programs. If this didn’t convince the Project Committee to extract Bloch’s family from Marseille I didn’t know what would. Would they even have time? I knew the Gestapo would arrive in Marseille on Tuesday – God, that was only two days away!
What to do with the extra documents? Burn them? I chewed on a pencil. What else could I do to improve Rachel’s chances of escape? Again I tried to convince myself this quest of mine wasn’t just personal. Bloch appeared to be an important person who could play a critical role in the coming invasion of North Africa. If he knew that his family was safe, he would be free to help the allies. I didn’t know who in the office took advantage of Bob Holman’s death to steal the file, and I didn’t know whom to trust. That left me with the responsibility to do something, anything.
A knock on my door startled me.
‘Honey,’ Ada said. ‘You awake? Dinner’s ready.’
Sunday dinner was important to our little jerry-rigged family. Phoebe insisted on preserving this bit of pre-war civilization, even though she and Dellaphine were the only ones in the house who attended church regularly. Dellaphine always cooked us a hot meal, although we’d have been happy with much less. Most boarding houses didn’t offer Sunday meals, so all over the city folks were making Spam sandwiches for themselves.
When Phoebe and Dellaphine brought in platters of fried chicken and sliced tomatoes, bowls of mashed potatoes and butter beans, and
pitchers of iced tea and lemonade, I realized I was hungry. I hadn’t had a full meal since lunch the day before.
‘How was the pool party?’ Ada asked me.
‘Oh,’ I said, lying extravagantly, ‘it was swell. The Wardman pool is in the shade, so the water was cool. We had cocktails and my friend who lives there barbecued steaks and corn on the cob.’
‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ Ada said. ‘You must have stayed late.’
She wasn’t pumping me, I didn’t think, but her questioning made me apprehensive.
‘After the pool closed we went to my friend’s apartment and listened to the radio,’ I said.
‘What program?’ Joe asked.
Was he pumping me, too? He wasn’t looking at me, instead regarding his forkful of butter beans quizzically, as he often did American food, before eating it.
‘There was a Gershwin program on, then American Hit Parade,’ I said. Thank goodness I’d looked at the newspaper before leaving yesterday. ‘And thanks, everyone, for leaving me some ice cream. It was delicious.’
‘You’re more than welcome,’ Phoebe said. ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it.’
‘You’ll have to take an extra turn cranking the next time we make it,’ Henry said.
‘Done,’ I said.
Joe pushed his plate away.
‘Don’t get up yet,’ Phoebe said. ‘Dellaphine has a surprise for you all.’
Phoebe and Ada took our plates back to the kitchen and came back with dessert plates and forks, followed closely by Dellaphine, beaming, with a peach pie.
‘I had all these peaches left over from the ice cream,’ she said, slicing the pie carefully into equal slices and placing them on plates. Henry finished his before she was through dishing up the rest. Joe ate slowly and deliberately, and I followed suit.
‘Will there be any sugar left for the rest of this month?’ Ada asked.
‘Peach pie don’t take much sugar,’ Dellaphine said. ‘Besides, we already used most of our ration in the ice cream.’
‘Worth every grain,’ I said.