by Susan Isaacs
I hardly saw John. He’d called me late on the night after he hadn’t come home, six hours after the meeting where I’d volunteered to go into Berlin. I waited for him to say, How could you humiliate me in front of all those people by interrupting, by pushing yourself where you know you don’t belong? Or: How could you suggest anything so stupid? What he actually said was, “I have to be honest with you. Nan and I still haven’t resolved matters. I don’t know when I’ll be home.” I didn’t even feel like crying. I wrapped the phone wire around my finger, tight, and said to him, “Do you think it matters?”
I made up a bed for myself in the second bedroom. John didn’t notice, because he didn’t come home for two days. I was in the kitchen when he walked in. You here for a clean shirt before you go back to talking? I asked. I was peeling a carrot and didn’t bother to look at him. Linda, he said, I know how hard this has been on you. But it will be resolved. Soon. I swear. He came up behind me and just rested himself against me. But in a minute he was rubbing and pushing me hard against the sink. His arms went around me. I need you, he exhaled into my ear. How long do you have? I asked. I’m going to stay the whole night, he replied. Oh, God, I have to have you. I peeled a long curl of carrot peel into the sink. No more, I said. Did you hear me? Get off me! Come on, he insisted, you have to have it as much as I do.
But I didn’t! I couldn’t believe it. I turned around. He was just another pretty face. It took me a second to catch my breath. Was this another loss? There I was, right on the verge of crying, but a second later, I found myself staring at the sink drain, trying to fight off a giggle. He was trying his Tragic Eyes routine, where dark blue eyes mist over, open wide, gaze at me; he was going to break my heart with his beautiful damp eyes, show me his infinite pain, his suffering. Except now I realized he could do it at the drop of a hat. I realized I’d seen Tragic Eyes about four hundred and seventy-two times. I glanced up. Well, I told him, if it’s true—if I have to have it—I’ll have to get it someplace else.
At first I thought it would be smart to give Norman Weekes just what he wanted—a throaty, promising voice and an even more promising dress—so he’d give me what I wanted. But in the end I put on brown oxfords, an old gabardine skirt and a white cotton blouse that showed nothing more than how well it was ironed. I wore no makeup. I pulled back my hair into a loosely pinned mess that could barely be called a bun.
“Oh,” Norman said, as he lifted his behind from his desk chair when I walked in. I could see whatever his desire for me had been evaporating; it was a wonderful sight. “Please, sit down.”
I came right to the point. “Look at me. Do you think anyone in the foreign office would look twice?”
His eyebrows did one of those Aha! movements. “Edward has said ‘Absolutely not,’ you know.”
“I know.”
“And your husband?”
“John has never said no.”
Norman cocked his head; his mouth hung open a bit. He was obviously dying to hear more about me and John. All of a sudden, I felt queasy, thinking: Oh, God, people know about John and me…and Nan. The whole OSS may know, and when everyone came up to me after I got back after my mother’s funeral, offering sympathy, they were really—
Norman demanded, “I really must know. How would he feel if you put—let me be perfectly forthright about this—if you put yourself in, well, a rather perilous situation?”
“How does a wife feel when her husband goes off to war? She doesn’t want it, but she understands.”
“I see.” A bubble of saliva formed on the side of his mouth and then burst.
“And I’m sure you also see, because it’s your job to see, well, everything, that things aren’t so great right now between me and my husband. If I went off, it wouldn’t be like you were tearing apart the perfect marriage. I think John could probably learn to adjust to my absence.”
“I rather assumed…some distance…from his lack of…objections when we contemplated the possibility of your working for us at that meeting. But I didn’t want to be presumptuous.”
He was waiting for more, a dose of scandal he could murmur about at his club. He’d light a cigar and say, Leland’s secretary, Berringer’s wife, told me…But I just said, “Let me be straight with you. I know I’m your best shot. Your only shot.”
He grinned. With all that money, you’d think he could have afforded a decent toothbrush. “That may be true, but we have that little problem with Mr. Leland.”
I gave him a bigger, and whiter, grin. “But Mr. Leland is out of town—probably out of the country—for four weeks.”
“I can’t.” His office was bare in that old-money, New England way, but his desk was a mess. He tried to put down his elbow so he could make a platform with his hand to rest his chin on, but he had to shove over a stack of bound top-secret reports to find the room. The reports looked unread. His desk was like him: an important, repulsive mess. “Forgive me for being profane, but if you went into Berlin, there would be hell to pay when Ed returned.”
I flashed a you’re-so-damnably-attractive smile and managed not to gag. “What’s a little hell to a man like you? And…please, I want to be honest with you.”
“Oh, do.”
“I know you and Edward Leland are…well, at odds. I want you to understand I feel a great loyalty to him. Not only as my former employer but as the man who’s really been my husband’s…patron.” Wow, was that a great word. “But I also know he’s not right all the time. He’s a human being. He makes mistakes.” Norman nodded. “Lots of mistakes.”
“Yes,” he said. His upper lip curled into something just under a sneer. I’d been right. I’d sensed that puffing myself up as Miss Espionage 1942 wouldn’t get to Norman Weekes the way a betrayal of Edward would. You’ve been right all along: That would be my unwritten message, aimed directly at Norman Weekes’s limitless vanity. He’s been wrong. You’re strong. He’s soft, muddleheaded. Norman would love the message and, hopefully, the messenger.
“Edward Leland is a very decent man, the way he cares about people. But he’s—” I stopped cold. “Please. No matter what happens, I hope this conversation—”
He cut me off with an impassioned “Of course. Never to be repeated.” He leaned forward, expectant, thrilled.
I made myself as comfortable as I could in that small, stiff wooden chair. “He’s too cautious. Look, I know what I want to do is dangerous. I wouldn’t be worthy of the job if I didn’t have that much sense. But just because it’s dangerous doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.”
“You’re a smart girl. But Ed would go running to Donovan and…”
“You’ve, um, disagreed with Edward Leland and—let’s be honest—has Colonel Donovan ever handed you your walking papers?” Norman gave a small, self-satisfied, yellow smile. “Please,” I urged, “don’t say no.” I offered him a little bit of a husky voice so he’d pay attention, but not so much as to distract him. “Say maybe. Give me a week at Assessment School. You know they won’t let me go if I’m not fit. But if I am, you’ll have your man….” We both smiled. “Your man in Berlin. And I promise you, it’ll be worth it.”
The next five weeks were the hardest I’d ever lived through, and the worst of it was that all along, everybody’s expression said: You think this is bad? Wait.
My name was Lina Thiele. On Monday, the last day of August, 1942, I entered the OSS’s Assessment School. The hunched-over man who let me in had a frighteningly flabby face with near-shoulder-length jowls. He looked like the door-keeper in a Dracula movie. For a second I thought he was part of the process of terrifying recruits, but he just called out, “Judy!” His jowls jiggled, and a girl about five years younger than me, with a lot of frothy Maureen O’Sullivan hair, came into the hall and said, “Follow me, please.”
We walked down a steep flight of gray cement steps to the basement, and she led me into a curtained cubicle and said, “Please take off all of your clothing except your underwear.” As I got undressed, she took my clo
thes and folded them.
Finally, when I was standing in my underpants and brassiere, she pulled a scissors out of the pocket of her shirt. I forced myself not to flinch, and reasoned: The United States of America is not going to stab you. This girl is here to test you. And so, even though all the light in the room seemed to be shining on the silvery point of that scissors, I made myself stand motionless, all calm and collected. And Judy said, “I have to cut out any name tags or laundry marks on your underwear.”
“Oh. There aren’t any. But there may be labels from the department store. Do you want to…”
“No,” Judy said. She really had very little interest in me. She kept squinting into a small, splintered triangle of mirror that was hung on the wall, obviously deeply involved with her eyebrows. “When…whenever…if you go, they’ll give you stuff from…wherever.” She licked her pinkie and wiped off the penciled end of her left eyebrow. She turned to me. “How does that look?”
“Better,” I said. “Terrific.” Oh, boy, I thought, the OSS in action.
“Good. Now, these are the rules. Nobody gets to know your real name. I’m going to take your clothes and your shoes and your pocketbook with me when I go out. You know, your whole identity.”
“I’m supposed to walk around in my underwear?”
Judy rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, geez! I forgot. Wait here.” And she slipped out from behind the curtain and a few minutes later came back with clothes. Some clothes! Men’s army fatigues and a pair of boots so heavy I had to use both hands to lift them. They’d probably been designed for combat conditions in Antarctica.
Then Judy led me upstairs—which was some trick in itself with the two-ton boots—and out a back door. The next thing I knew, I was in the back of an army-green, canvas-covered truck, with four men dressed in the same outfit I was wearing. None of them spoke, and, like me, not a single one of them looked like an American GI.
My advantage was, having worked for Edward so long, I had a fair idea of how the OSS operated. In fact, once we bumped onto a hilly road ten minutes into Virginia, I knew exactly where we were headed. I’d been down that same road in the Packard; it led to an estate in Fairfax, with acres of open field surrounded by a thick forest, and, in the middle, an old white mansion dripping with honeysuckle charm. But if I remembered right, the interior smelled as though the mildew had been in flower inside the walls since the founding of the Confederacy.
I remembered right. We were herded in through the front door and stood under a giant brass chandelier. The hallway itself was so wide and high it seemed more like the main aisle of a giant church. It ran the length of the mansion; at the far end were two glass doors that opened up on a sloping green lawn.
We never got there. We heard a theatrical “Ahem” and glanced up. A man with a red face and a golf shirt was walking down the stairs very slowly. He would have looked like he was making believe he was a bride, except that instead of gazing straight ahead, he was looking down, scrutinizing us. This threw one of the four men I’d driven out with; he turned his eyes away from the red-faced man and started to smile nervously at all of us, as if we were his pals and would back him up. Then he wiped his palms—obviously sweating—on his fatigues.
When Red-Face reached us, he said, “I’m Mr. Jones.” That seemed to be the limit of his conversational skills. He just stood there and eyed the five of us. Not a word was said for at least ten minutes, and when you’re standing around in army boots in a southern mansion on a hot day with someone you know isn’t really named Mr. Jones staring at you, that’s a long time. The guy with the sweaty palms finally broke the silence by asking if there was a men’s room. The sound of a voice was so unexpected that another one of the men flinched. “Down the hall, second left, first door on your right,” Mr. Jones said. As the man headed off, I thought: He’s not going to make it. And I probably wouldn’t put my money on the flincher, either, I decided.
“Lady and gentlemen,” Mr. Jones said, when the nervous guy finally got back. “Welcome. And now, down to business. A few rules. You are never to deviate from your cover story. Never. You’ll see a friendly face, and he’ll say to you, ‘Is that an Oklahoma accent I hear?’ and just as you say, ‘Why, it sure is!’ you’ll be out on your butt.
“Now, most of you have foreign covers. Stick to the story we’ve invented, but unless we direct you to do otherwise, speak English. Not all of us can speak Hungarian or Japanese or what have you, so you’ll save that for later, for the specialists.
“Let me warn you that our purpose here is to get rid of you. You’ll be under almost constant surveillance. We want to make you break your cover. We want to be there when you forget you’re supposed to be a waiter and start talking like the truckdriver you really are. We’re going to test you. We’re looking for sweat. We’re sniffing out weakness. Your weakness.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t take it seriously. I did. But I also knew that it was a kind of game—a rough one, but with one basic rule for winning: Don’t show you’re scared.
By the end of the first hour, I knew the easiest way to hide your fear was to keep your mouth shut except when asked a direct question. And there were plenty. I had intelligence tests and psychological tests every day. “What does this inkblot look like to you?” they asked. I told the psychologist that it looked like a butterfly, and when he said, “Look again and tell me what else you see,” I told him I saw a couple of big vases between the wings and the body. “Is that all?” he demanded. He was a small, mousy man, and he seemed unsatisfied. I told him, yeah, that was all.
There were physical tests, and not just someone with a tongue depressor and a stethoscope. After the first examination, I had to run for fifteen minutes. I thought I would drop dead, but I managed to do it. Then, after the doctor took my pulse, he told me to do ten push-ups. I stopped after three. “More!” he ordered. I told him I couldn’t. “I said more!” I stood up, looked him straight in the eye and said, I can’t. The next day, another doctor took me to a chinning bar and told me to do as many pull-ups as I could. I couldn’t even do one. “Christ,” he said, really disgusted, “just look at you. You sit behind a desk all day and you’ve got no muscle tone.” I told him I didn’t sit behind a desk. I was a housewife. “What does your husband do?” I was a widow, I said. My husband had died the year before, in June, on the Eastern Front. “Your husband’s a German soldier?” Yes. “Where was he killed?” Somewhere near Gorodishche. He waited, but I kept quiet. “What was his name?” Johannes. “Johannes what?” Thiele. “I thought that was your name?” It is. My married name. “What was your maiden name?” Fritsch.
Then he smiled at me. “Look, I don’t like doing this. I’m really a nice guy.” He put out his hand. “My name’s Richard Peterson.” He was Hollywood handsome. Maybe he was the in-house tempter for potential female agents, or maybe they’d brought him in special for me—my security clearance revealing a weakness for gorgeous guys. “But I want you to call me Dick, okay? By the way, I’m from Tampa. Before all this hullabaloo, I had a nice practice down there. Internal medicine.” He shook my hand, holding it, naturally, a little too long. “Now I want to know everything about you.” My name is Lina Thiele, I said. “Aw, come on, honey.” I didn’t respond. Someone should have told him that “Aw” and “honey” didn’t necessarily work on New York girls. He smiled. I didn’t. He gave me a nasty look. “Why the hell can’t you do even one pull-up, Lina?” I don’t know, I told him. “You’re soft,” he shouted. “I’ll tell you right now, you’re not going to make it. You’re no good. You’re too weak.” I just stood there. “Get out of here,” he said at last.
It was all a game. They’d said it would be hard, and it was, but not in the way they meant. I wasn’t that scared by a bunch of Americans playing tough guys. Well, sometimes a little scared. But working for Edward, I’d seen the victims of the real thing, and I knew there was a world of difference. What made it so hard was, first of all, the fatigue. For a week, they kept you going day and night
with tests, with jobs designed to frustrate you, exhaust you, make you sit down and cry.
One afternoon they led us to the bank of a stream and gave three of us a bunch of boards, a pulley and a rope, then handed us a rock about the size of someone’s head. “This is a very delicate communications device. You have to get it across the stream without jarring it or getting it wet.”
The boards were too short to go across the stream. One of the men kept trying to lasso a tree on the far bank with the rope, so he could Tarzan his way across. The other guy and I tried to get him to help us, but he wouldn’t, so the two of us worked on making a bridge by overlapping the boards. We had ten minutes. All the time, the three OSS men with us were hollering, “Come on!” “Time’s running out!” “Hey, you lady. Don’t you know what a pulley is?” I didn’t. “Your time’s almost up!” They started counting down: “Sixty seconds, fifty-nine…” At forty, I took the rock, lifted it over my head, told the guy who wasn’t playing with the rope to try and stay right beside me, and walked into the stream. It was cold, but I made myself go slow, so I wouldn’t slip. Soon though the water came up to my neck. You jerk! I thought. Why didn’t you let the guy carry the damn rock? I hadn’t realized it was so deep, and I called out to the guy, who was a little behind me, Hey, catch up! I can’t swim, so get ready to grab this thing. Just then the OSS men on the bank called out, “Nine! Eight!” Talk about tripping up: The guy stumbled. I heard his splash, but I kept picking my way over the slick, moss-covered stones on the bottom of the stream. I didn’t look back. On “Three!” I got to the other side. I was gasping, freezing and wanted to curse—shriek out filthy things to the OSS pigs, but since I couldn’t catch my breath, I didn’t have to practice any self-control. A minute later, one of them shouted, “Come back, Linda.” I stood up and managed to call out, My name’s Lina. Then I stepped back into the icy water.