by Susan Isaacs
“Hello,” he said. “What are you doing down here?”
Like he didn’t know. My bet was, this was a trick he pulled more than once, catching someone who had an appointment with him waiting, nervous, off guard. “I’m waiting.”
“Why didn’t you come upstairs?”
“Because I would have been early. I gave myself an extra ten minutes so I wouldn’t be late, because if you’re even part German, being late is a major felony, but being early isn’t terrific, either. I spend half my life hanging out in lobbies or on street corners so I can be precisely on time. Does that answer your question?”
“Fully,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“A walk?”
“You don’t want to walk?”
“Do you?”
“That’s not what I asked, Linda,” he snapped.
I couldn’t figure if he was grouchy from the weather or was giving me a hard time for fun. Or not for fun. For work. To see if I could take the heat. I didn’t know if I wanted it. For the first time in my life, I was doing nothing except being female, and I was really liking it; I wasn’t going to trade it in for a steno pad and a boss, scary enough to begin with, who was going to give me a hard time.
But why was he giving me such a rough time about going for a walk? Hah! It was another Edward Leland Test: How far would you go for him? How fearful of his power were you that you couldn’t say, “Listen, in all this heat I’d rather not?” How many miles would you trudge by his side? Because one look at Edward, with his tough face and tougher, massive build, and you’d know that he could—and would—walk forever.
“Okay,” I said. “The answer is, I don’t want to go for a walk because it’s over a hundred degrees and the sidewalk feels like it’s starting to melt and I even have a little headache, but if you insist on it I’ll go because I’m the secretary and you’re the lawyer.”
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
His workroom was not some government-issue cubicle but an office in someone’s law firm, larger than he had in New York but with the same lawyery leather and wood and Oriental rug, except this version was all brown and yellow and gold, with brocade drapes that were so beautiful you figured the Washington lawyer had given his wife the green light and a blank check.
There was no fan, but it was cooler than the lobby. Edward offered me a chair in a couch-chair-coffee table setup across the room from his desk. “You’re always two steps ahead of me, Linda,” he began. “I suppose you know why I wanted to speak with you.” He sat across from me, on the couch.
“You need a secretary.”
“Yes.”
He stopped talking and just stared at me. Not stared, but probed. Then his eyes moved downward, and I thought: He wants to see if I’m pregnant. “I’m not pregnant,” I announced. This time he did stare. “Well, you were…you seemed to be looking…”
“I was not.”
“Okay, so I have an overactive imagination,” I said.
“I think you do.”
There was a long, uneasy silence. I’d overstepped the invisible, unknowable bounds. Finally I stood up. “Listen: This isn’t going to work.” He crossed his arms and glared up at me. “I can’t be a secretary anymore.”
He stood up too, slowly. “I see.” Boy, was he cold. “You’ve forgotten how to type.”
“No. I’ve forgotten how to be a sweet, obedient girl. I can’t be what I was. I can’t—”
“Sit down!” he barked at me. I sat. Then he did too. “I really don’t give a damn whether you’re sweet or not. I’m not in the market for a subservient little creature who gets the vapors every time I raise my voice. I need someone efficient, someone with a brain, someone I can trust and someone who is fluent in German. Period. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
“Do you want to tell me about the job?”
“No.”
“I’ll just show up one day and you’ll have a typewriter and confetti? Like a surprise party?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Linda.” Boy, did that remark make me feel lousy. And he knew it. “You need some additional security clearance. It will take another few days.”
“They’re already working on it?”
“I took the liberty of assuming you’d agree to help me.”
“Can you tell me what the hours will be?”
“Long.”
“Will I be working here?”
“Now and then.”
“Will I be working for anyone besides you?”
“Perhaps.”
I took a deep breath. “Are you always going to act like this, or are you going to get nicer?”
For a minute he didn’t react at all, but then suddenly he started to smile. “I’m going to get nicer.”
“When?” I asked.
“Tomorrow. Friday. I can’t say with any certainty.”
I stood up again. “Well, I’ll look forward to it.”
“To what? An improvement in my disposition or to working with me?”
“Both,” I said.
“Good.” He got up, reached across the table and shook my hand. “Welcome aboard, Linda.”
16
I’d never thought my life could be so interesting, but working for Edward Leland, it was. To begin with, this wasn’t any “Take a letter to Herr Teufel re issuance of convertible debentures”; a girl can get just so enthusiastic about convertible debentures.
This was war: ugly, but real. I took down every word of a meeting at COI headquarters between Edward and a Herr Kaufmann, who’d once been a rich industrialist in Düssel-dorf and was now a poor old Jew with a pitiful cough and an incredible, near-total recall of the location and layout of every machine-tool factory in Germany—at least as they were until 1936, when the Reich had seized everything he owned and then imprisoned him for “crimes against the Fatherland.” (Herr Kaufmann had been lucky to have a cousin in St. Louis who’d managed to move enough money into the pockets of enough German officials so that he’d been released and “deported” in 1939.)
He and Edward pored over maps, while a simultaneous translator rendered English into German and vice versa, so the men could have an easy exchange. I sat in the corner, a quiet, conscientious, invisible stenographer, taking down the English version. I only spoke once, when I said, Excuse me, Mr. Leland, could you repeat that, please.
When Herr Kaufmann and the translator left, Edward said, Poor old fellow. Still doesn’t comprehend what hit him. Probably never will. And I changed the subject: The translator’s no good. What do you mean? he demanded. So I told him: He’s accurate when he’s translating Kaufmann’s information about factories in major cities. But listen, he’d have to be; anyone, even you, would have spotted it if he’d translated “north Stuttgart” as “west Frankfurt.” Even I would have…I mean, he thought I was just another dopey American stenographer who could hardly speak English, much less German.
Then I explained how the translator, precise about city manufacturing, had been way off when it came to the countryside. He doubled, tripled or, once, halved the number of kilometers of a factory from a town, and did the same with the capacity of a factory. Edward demanded, Are you sure they’re not just careless errors? No. Listen: I may not have the biggest vocabulary, but I know German well enough—and have been typing contracts for industrial deals long enough—to know that Dieselkraftstoff isn’t a small truck, it’s diesel oil, and Kaufmann’s next three or four sentences—about underground oil tanks and their storage volume—the translator just ignored. See, in the beginning he was testing you—making sure you had no knowledge of German. If you’d known anything beyond auf Wiedersehen, he wouldn’t have taken the risk. Edward said, But it was rather clear I’m abysmally ignorant. I smiled and said, Yeah. Abysmally.
Edward said, We’ll have to take care of him. Make him disappear? I breathed. For God’s sake, Linda, you’ve got to stop going to the movies. So I asked, What else do you guys do
with someone like him? You know he’s bad, probably SD. (That was the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi Party’s intelligence service.) Edward said, Well, since, um, forced disappearance strikes me as something of an overreaction, how about we stop using him as a translator? I said, That’s it? No, Linda, that’s not it. We’ll turn him over to the FBI. Of course, he said, looking disgusted, they’re the ones who recommended him in the first place.
We’d gone down to the car by then, to drop Edward off at the State Department to meet with John and to take me to the office he used. We talked about the rivalry between COI and the FBI, and then, because I asked, he told me what he thought about J. Edgar Hoover (brilliant bureaucrat, monumental ego), and then he asked me if I still had such an inordinate fondness for Roosevelt, and I said yes, I was crazier about him than ever, and added that if Willkie had won, he’d have folded under isolationist pressure—that had been clear enough in the campaign—and instead of being in Washington, we’d all be at some lawyers’ dinner party on Beekman Place, saying, Tsk-tsk, isn’t it too bad about those nice little English schoolchildren being forced to say Heil Hitler. He told me I’d make a poor lawyer because I always overstated my case, and I told him I’d make a great one because I always picked the right side (like Roosevelt’s), and what he called overstatement was actually a forceful presentation of the truth. The car stopped at State, and then, instead of saying goodbye, he smiled and said, See you in court, counselor.
Most of the time it was like that. Working for him was at least worthwhile and interesting, usually fascinating and sometimes fun. And always hard. He was the head of counterespionage for a country that believed that gentlemen do not open other people’s mail; his responsibility was to seek out enemies pretending to be friends on behalf of a government that wasn’t at war.
He was an honest man doing an underhanded job in a deceitful world. He had to be more flexible, more alert, had to move faster than the enemy: the Germans, of course, and the American officials who didn’t want a new intelligence service.
The car became Edward’s main office; he said he didn’t want to build an empire—a central organization with easy-to-spot telephones, secretaries, bookshelves and staplers. Empires, he said, are apt to be infiltrated or overthrown. So he spread his people out, and we went from meeting to meeting, from his borrowed law office to government buildings to, now and then, the backs of stores, mansions in Virginia or, once, a shack in rural Maryland.
One day we were in the car, a big old Packard he had somehow managed to seize for himself from the government. But this time it wasn’t interesting or fascinating or fun.
Edward’s voice had an edge—a sharp one: “Don’t tell me! There are actually limits to what Linda Voss—excuse me, Linda Berringer—can do?”
“Just one limit,” I replied lightly, trying to convince myself the edge wasn’t there. A cold November rain streaked the windshield. Everything looked distorted, like when you try on someone’s too-strong eyeglasses. “One per secretary isn’t so terrible.” I’d finally gotten up the courage to tell him I couldn’t take dictation in the back seat of his car. “I’m sorry, but it makes me carsick.”
“I find it hard to believe that we’ve been driving all over Washington for the past few months with you feeling ill.” He paused and leaned forward to his driver, a man named Pete with a deeply lined red neck, who always wore a Washington Senators baseball cap. I thought he’d say something like: Easy on the sharp turns and the brakes, Pete, with Mrs. Berringer here, but instead he told him, “While we’re at COI, double back to my place. I forgot my evening clothes. They’re in a black garment bag, probably still hanging on the door of the closet.”
“Yes, sir,” Pete said in a happy, snappy voice. He’d retired from the navy a few years before, and always seemed thrilled to be subjected to unreasonable demands. Edward would say, Pete, would you mind picking me up at 3 A.M. I have to meet with someone in a coal mine a hundred miles into West Virginia, and Pete would declare, Yes, sir! With other lawyers and government officials, Edward commanded respect—usually mingled with a little awe and sometimes fear. With Pete, he commanded unqualified obedience—and probably love.
He sat back and peered at me. “Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” I murmured.
“It’s not as if you’re a shrinking violet.”
“No. I mean, I’m not.”
“And I’m not some sort of ogre.” When I didn’t respond instantly, he snapped, “Well, am I?”
“No. But…”
“But what?”
“Sometimes…you’re kind of…”
“Kind of what?”
“Formidable.”
Ninety-nine point nine percent of other formidable men would have said, Me? Formidable? Don’t be ridiculous. Edward didn’t go anywhere near the I’m-a-regular-guy routine. “I really don’t see what my being”—he shook his head in annoyance—“formidable has to do with your unwillingness to tell me that the work I’m asking you to do is making you feel ill.”
I turned from him and stared out the window. People were huddled in raincoats and taking small, cautious steps, as if the sidewalk was icy. Pete, of course, sped along. “I didn’t want a…a minor problem of mine to interfere with you,” I explained, still gazing out, not wanting to face him. “Anyway, it’s not that bad.” It was.
“Then why mention it?”
I swiveled around and probably glared at him. “I’ll be damned if I know.” I flipped my pad back open and added, “Go ahead. Dictate.”
“So you’re going to grin and bear it after all?”
“Right.” He looked straight ahead, at the back of Pete’s neck. “Come on,” I said. “I know you want to get out that memorandum on Pharaoh.” Pharaoh was the code name of the valet of the German ambassador to Spain. He’d approached a third secretary of the American Embassy in a café and offered to photograph documents. He didn’t want any money; he claimed to be anti-Nazi, said that the Gestapo had arrested and then murdered his niece. No one, including Edward, had yet decided whether the valet was for real or a plant.
“The memorandum can wait,” Edward snapped.
“I told you I really don’t mind—”
“Enough!” He reached over, swatted shut the cover of my steno pad and resumed staring at Pete’s neck. The bad side of his face was toward me, so there was no expression I could read. But I could feel his anger.
I thought: If he only knew how miserable these fights—or whatever they are—make me feel, maybe he wouldn’t start. They happened every few weeks, and I never knew precisely what I’d done to trigger him. The same kind of remark he’d normally be neutral about—or even amused by—would set him off. His temper would flare up for a minute, but then, even worse, he’d withdraw into cold, silent fury.
Once I’d gotten up my courage and touched his sleeve, about to say, Is it really what I said or is it that they cut the thirty thousand dollars from the cryptographic budget? but I never got my words out. Leave me the hell alone! His teeth were clenched, and if I hadn’t heard his words I wouldn’t have believed he’d said them; they were so harsh, and his rejection of me was complete, final.
I tried to tell myself at these times that he had terrible pressures on him, decisions to make that were truly life-and-death, and he had no one to blow up at. Was he going to call Nan in New York and fume? Was he going to blow up at John, at one of the other geniuses who were working for him? At Donovan? At the President? Was he going to start screaming at one of the society beauties he was always squiring around to wherever men need women?
Maybe he picked on me, I thought, because I was almost always available, and what the hell, for eighteen hundred bucks a year, Linda Berringer could take a little temper. Or maybe over time I was too great an irritant; I kept going a little too far, being too wise-guyish, too outspoken, too relaxed—even happy in his presence. I’d forgotten who I was.
For days after one of these blowups, I�
�d feel unbearably low. Going to work, facing Edward, wasn’t the only struggle. Just getting out of bed was; I’d put my feet into my slippers and my throat would close up and I’d walk past John, who was busy getting dressed, with my head lowered, so he couldn’t see that my eyes had filled up. And not breaking into tears during work was a monumental effort. We’d sit in the car a day or two later, everything seemingly friendly and jolly again. Edward would smile, say, Excuse me, and bury himself in a report. I’d gaze out the window and be overcome by sadness, which seemed stupid—even to me—because Edward, having blown off steam, seemed to have no recollection of the incident that still had the power to make me feel cold, alone, without hope.
Well, this definitely was one of those incidents. Pete drove around to the back entrance of COI headquarters—we never used the front—and Edward got out of the car. I slid across the seat to follow him upstairs, and he slammed the car door in my face. Then he hurried through the cold rain into the building.
Pete sat straight in the front seat, silent. He was Edward’s man. I never knew what he listened to or what he thought.
“See you later, Pete,” I made myself say.
“Okay.”
So I took a deep breath, stuffed my pad and pencil into my pocketbook and got out of the car. The rain had turned to sleet, and it pelted my face and dripped down my neck. I stood there shivering. Then Pete pulled away, and the tires spun out a thick spray of dirty, icy water all over my stockings.
I had a choice then: to do what I wanted to do or what I ought to do. So I didn’t stand there in the sleet and sob. I said, “Oh, shit!” and kicked a puddle of freezing water with one of my new suede shoes. Okay, maybe I had tears in my eyes when I did it. But then I went back to work.
The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a Sunday, and everybody in Washington kept asking everybody else: Where were you when you heard the news?