Before the Dawn

by Candace Camp

  “You mean you want me to go home and go to parties? Ian, no! That’s not what I mean. I want to do something real, something important.”

  “You said you wanted to work against the Nazis.”

  “I do! But I don’t want to go back to the United States and sit out the war in safety while all of you are risking your lives.”

  “Tell me, Alyssa, are you interested in really helping or in presenting a romantic and noble picture of yourself?”

  Alyssa’s cheeks flamed. “I’m not trying to appear noble. But I have skills you may not have thought about. Skills that would make me valuable in France. I’m an actress; I’m good at pretending to be something I’m not. And I can speak French well.”

  “I have other people who speak French.”

  “Like Englishmen,” Alyssa retorted.

  Ian smiled. “We’re working on that. My dear, I fully realize your skills. I might be able to use you in France. But the fact is that we have almost nothing set up there yet.”

  “Then make a beginning—with me.”

  “I don’t question but what you are willing to risk the danger. More than that, I think you want to risk the danger. I don’t think you much care whether you die. You’ve been badly hurt, and you’re reckless. That makes you dangerous—to us. We need careful people, those who are concerned with protecting themselves and their fellow workers. Not people who are concerned with derring-do. Not those who are hurt and enraged and trying to get back at what’s hurt them.”

  Alyssa bit her lip. She didn’t like the way he described her, but she had to admit there was some truth in it. Perhaps her emotions would make her careless. Still… how could she bear calmly to return to a nation that was not only not at war, but determined not ever to be, a nation that didn’t even want to help Britain when the country’s back was to the wall?

  Ian went on calmly, “Besides, you have something that none of the other people who work for me do—an entrée into diplomatic circles in a neutral nation. Working there might not seem as brave as sneaking about an occupied country, but, frankly, at the moment you’d be far more useful to me. It will no doubt be harder for you. You will have to keep silent about your sympathy for Britain. You will have to smile at the Nazis despite your dislike. Flirt with them and feed their egos. You will have to be cheerful and pretend that your mind isn’t on the suffering over here. It won’t be an easy task, but it is most definitely an important one. Men have looser tongues around beautiful young women, particularly when they’ve had a little to drink. You could find out a great deal for me.”

  Ian paused, watching Alyssa. Alyssa stared back at him. This wasn’t what she wanted to do, but she realized the truth of his words. It wouldn’t be easy. She would hate the inactivity and having to present a smiling face to the enemy. But she could do it. Her chin thrust out a little. She could do it well. It would be fighting back in the best way she could.

  “All right,” she said quietly. “I’ll go to Washington.”

  Chapter 10

  Three days later Alyssa left for the United States. Jessica knew better than to ask why she went. Alyssa hugged Jessica tightly, and her heart ached at the separation from her friend. During the past few months, they had helped each other through the worst period of their lives, giving unstinting support and friendship when it was most necessary. They had cried together and listened to each other talk without criticism or advice, only sympathy. They had endured the Blitz. For years they had been good friends, but they were far closer than that now. Alyssa felt like a traitor, leaving Jessica to face the bombs and the misery of Alan’s death by herself.

  It was odd to be back in New York City. Much as she had always loved New York, she felt a stranger to it now. At nights there were lights everywhere; she’d never noticed before how many there were, nor how bright. She found herself waiting for the frightening screech of the air raid siren, and she had to remind herself that she would not hear it again. After the months of rationing in London, it was strange to walk into a grocery and find bins full of oranges, apples, and grapefruit, or to see butcher shops loaded with meats. There were no buildings in ruins, no homeless, hungry children, no lines of fear etched on the faces of the people. Alyssa felt sick with guilt at being in such comfort and safety.

  She stayed in New York only long enough to pack several trunks of clothes for her stay in Washington and to contact her agent. He clucked over her long absence, bewailing the multitude of plum parts she had lost. When she told him she planned not to act for a while, he argued and protested. At last he accepted her decision grudgingly and promised to check around for someone to sublet her apartment.

  Alyssa sent a telegram to her father, telling him that she was coming, and the next morning she boarded the train to Washington, D.C.

  She was waiting in her father’s Georgetown home that afternoon when he came in from work. Three large steamer trunks and several suitcases sat beside the staircase leading to the second floor. Grant Lambert eyed the pile of luggage curiously, but managed not to mention it as he went forward to kiss Alyssa on the cheek. “Thank God you’re home. You have no idea how worried I was about you. When you telegraphed me that you were in London, I was sure you’d taken leave of your senses.”

  “No, I was just… I wanted to see Jessica again before I came home.”

  “Was it terrible?” He sat down on the couch beside her and took her hand in his. “You look paler, thinner. When I think of you living through that bombing…” He shook his head, unable to express the enormity of his fear for his child.

  “I wasn’t hurt. Jessica and I always went into the shelter. I was caught out of the house only once—during a daylight raid—but I went down into the Aldwich Tube Station.” She managed a teasing smile. “As for being pale, you try living in London for several months and see how much color you have!”

  “I don’t know. You look different… almost ill.”

  “Thanks a lot. Don’t you know you aren’t supposed to tell a woman she’s not looking her best?”

  This time he accepted her playful dismissal of the subject. “My dear girl, even not looking your best, you outshine any other woman.” He paused and glanced toward the baggage in the hallway. “Have you come for a long visit, or do you plan to wear all that this weekend?”

  “I’ve come to live with you.”

  “What!”

  “You said you would be posted in D.C. for several months, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yes, maybe longer, but—“

  Alyssa grinned. “Don’t look so dismayed. I’ll think you don’t want me to stay.”

  “Of course I do! You know it isn’t that. I’d love to have you here with me all the time.”

  “I can be your hostess, and you’ll have someone to escort to parties without causing gossip.”

  “You’d be a great advantage to me. There’s no question of that. But what about you? Why do you want to do this? Is there something wrong? What about your career?”

  Alyssa shrugged. “My career has been at something of a standstill the past year or so. I’ve gotten stuck in the same kind of part. Lately I’ve begun to wonder whether the stage really holds any future for me. So I’ve decided to take a break from acting.”

  Her statement was the farthest from the truth in all of what she told her father, Alyssa was to discover. Over the course of the following months, she used her acting skills more than she ever had before. In the privacy of her father’s home, she worried about England and Jessica and scanned the newspaper for every bit of news about the London Blitz. But when she emerged from her house, she appeared frivolous and carefree. At night she often cried herself to sleep, heartsore over Philippe. She was interested in no man. Yet every evening she put on makeup, slipped into a beguiling dress, and went forth to entrance every man she met.

  She started attending parties with her father and giving them as well, and she was quickly the social hit of the season. Alyssa was invited everywh
ere; her presence was said to “make” a party or dinner. She listened carefully to every conversation, committing it to memory—her former script memorizing skills enhanced by the importance of her new task—and, when she returned home, she wrote it all down in a notebook.

  After a week, she began to wonder what she was supposed to do with all this information. Ian had told her that she would have a contact in Washington, an agent to whom she could give the material she gathered, but so far she hadn’t seen a sign of him. One evening, at a dinner party given by a senator’s wife, a young English attaché took an interest in her. He was a handsome man, though his forehead was deeply scored by a wide, flaming scar that his hair only half hid, and he walked with a pronounced limp. He seemed a brooding sort who made small talk only with effort. Alyssa was surprised when he drifted over to the group with whom she was conversing and even more surprised when he outstayed everyone else. She made no effort to encourage him; she had no interest in any man except for the information he could give her, and there was no likelihood of an Englishman giving her the kind of information she needed.

  However, he stubbornly stuck to the group through the cocktails and jumped in to escort her to the dinner table, beating out the other single man in the group. Alyssa gave him a perfunctory smile as she took his arm. They walked across the hall into the formal dining room. The man, who had been introduced to her as Everson Blakely, bent his head to hers and murmured, “Ky sends you his regards.”

  Alyssa raised her head, surprised. “Ky? You know Claire and Ky?”

  “Yes. He and I flew together in the RAF—for a while, at least. I was shot down in August.” He gestured toward his bad leg. “They won’t let me fly anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.” Alyssa had been around Alan enough to know that was the fate every pilot dreaded.

  He smiled bitterly. “Got me a cushy job in Washington.”

  “If that’s what you want…” Alyssa replied neutrally.

  “What I want and what I do have little in common,” he replied. They were almost at the table, and he changed the subject swiftly. “I’d like to see you again. Perhaps lunch tomorrow?”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Alyssa demurred.

  He interrupted her softly, “My mother raised lavender in her garden.”

  Alyssa was too good at her job to change her expression, but inside her nerves stood on end. Blakely had uttered the sentence she had been waiting to hear since she arrived in Washington, the code phrase that would establish her contact’s identity. “I see,” she replied smoothly. “I’d be happy to meet you, Mr. Blakely.”

  He smiled and seated her, then went to his own place at the table. Alyssa poked down some food and tried to listen to the conversation of the men on either side of her. Suddenly, what she was doing seemed a great deal more real than it had before.

  Alyssa successfully hid her impatience when Blakely didn’t seek her out after dinner. She suspected that he was testing her to see if she gave away her interest in him or any anxiety. As he was leaving, Blakely stopped to say good-bye to her. Alyssa turned to him, taking a step or two away from the man with whom she had been talking, and Blakely smiled down at her. He looked at her with undisguised admiration, as most men did, but it was relaxing to know he didn’t mean it.

  “Do we have a date, Miss Lambert?” he asked, and Alyssa gave him a dazzling smile for show.

  “I believe we do, Mr. Blakely.”

  “One o’clock? In the restaurant at the Mayflower Hotel?”

  Alyssa nodded her agreement.

  The next day she dressed for her date and ripped the filled pages from her notebook, folding them and tucking them into her purse. She ate a pleasant luncheon with Blakely and discreetly slipped him the folded notes. They arranged to meet a week later at a particular party, and he gave her a telephone number where she could contact him if she had something to impart that was too important to wait for their regular meetings.

  As the weeks passed, Alyssa pursued her acquaintance with the members of the German, Italian, and Vichy French embassies. She grew more and more skillful at meeting the men who could give her information, deciding who could be manipulated, and milking them for information. She assessed each man, then acted in the way she thought would most appeal to him. With some she was wildly flirtatious and empty-headed. With another, she was a sultry siren. And to others she appeared a perfect lady, calm and beautiful, or a woman of great style and dash. But with each, her goal was the same: to coax information from them.

  Alyssa hated every minute of it. There were times when she despised herself almost as much as she despised the men she deceived. Yet she knew she had to do it. Everything she learned could help England in its struggle—and perhaps her own country, eventually.

  She met Blakely every week or two, always in a casual way at a party or an accidental meeting on the street, and gave him the material she had gleaned from her sources. Blakely and his superiors soon became aware that Alyssa was excellent at her job. She was cool, intelligent, and an adept actress. Blakely began to direct her toward specific areas of interest to them, and Alyssa began not only to listen to her enemies, but to dig out information.

  She flattered a German military attaché into revealing how effectively the Vichy French government was gathering information in the United States for the Nazis. With another member of the Germany embassy staff, she used the opposite approach—pricking his pride by undervaluing German achievements in science—to lead him to talk about the strides Germany had made in radar aboard their U-boats.

  She was most adept at discovering the weakest link, the person who could be duped or bribed into giving information, the person who had something to hide and upon whom pressure could be put. Alyssa was a seasoned people watcher, studying mannerisms, looks and emotions to use as an actress. She put these observational skills to use now in analyzing the people she met at parties. She picked up on every stray bit of gossip that floated around, often finding the women’s room at such functions a veritable gold mine of information. Alyssa also discovered that men were quick to drop disagreeable bits of information about possible rivals for her affections.

  What she found hardest was encouraging men to talk to her without letting them into her bed. She was sickened when she had to allow her various suitors to kiss her or steal a caress. Since Philippe she had had no interest in any man, let alone any of these. She flirted and teased, yet remained eternally elusive. She knew she was at best acquiring a reputation for being a shocking flirt, a ‘fast’ woman, or a ‘tease.’ At worst, she knew gossip circulated that she was having an affair with one man or another. It didn’t bother her. Being an actress, she was used to such speculation, and there was no one here about whom she cared enough to worry what was thought of her.

  Except her father. Alyssa caught him looking at her strangely from time to time, and once he commented that he had heard some unpleasant rumors about her. Alyssa flashed him a smile. “Now, Father, you shouldn’t listen to gossip.”

  He frowned. “It isn’t just the gossip. There’s always plenty of that about everyone around D.C. It’s the changes I’ve seen in you that worry me. You seem… almost hard. Cold.”

  Alyssa glanced away to hide the flash of tears in her eyes. “Sometimes I feel hard and cold,” she admitted.

  “Why? What happened?”

  Alyssa shrugged, keeping her face turned from him. “Maybe it was what I saw in France and London—the death and fear. I don’t like myself for being here in comfort while they’re dying and suffering over there.”

  “Just be thankful for being an American.”

  Alyssa swallowed and summoned up a smiling, sophisticated mask for her father. “Maybe a man made me the way I am,” she went on lightly. “That’s what usually is to blame, isn’t it?” Alyssa started toward the door. “Sorry, I have to run. I’m due at a coffee at Teresa Brugman’s house in thirty minutes.”

  Christmas passed, and soo
n it was the dead of winter. Alyssa snuggled into her long, mahogany mink coat, fully aware of how it set off her dark beauty, and continued her social whirl, struggling to keep her mind only on her job. Trying not to think about London and how Jessica was faring. Trying not to think about Philippe.

  That was almost impossible. Hardly a day went by that something didn’t remind her of him or that she didn’t feel a spurt of longing. She cried less often now; time was slowly soothing the sharp pain of loss. But its passing left behind only dullness and apathy. There was no happiness for her. They had been so close, she had loved Philippe so deeply that it was as if a piece of her was gone.

  The first time she met a man from the Vichy French embassy, it was all she could do not to turn and run, so heartbreakingly familiar was his soft, slurred accent. It was an agony to deal with the French, but as the weeks passed, it was precisely that embassy on which she had to concentrate.

  “We must prove that the Vichy are working for the Nazis,” Blakely told her emphatically at a tête-à-tête in an empty hallway of a Washington hotel while hundreds of people whirled in the ballroom beyond them. “Both in Canada and here in the U.S. They’re passing information on British ships in U.S. harbors and putting pressure on Canada through French descendants there. They’re using French money and French business to influence American businessmen, threatening to cut off their trade if the U.S. continues to aid Britain. Their spies and sympathizers are everywhere; we have to find out who they are and be able to prove it to the Canadian and U.S. governments.”

  “I’m not sure. I—“

  “Alyssa, this is extremely important. We also need Vichy visas, documents, blank passports, rubber stamps, etc., to give validity to the people we send into France. You have to establish a line into the Vichy staff.”

  Alyssa closed her eyes. Obviously she would not be able to avoid this. “All right. I met a young man a couple of weeks ago. Paul Chermé. He seemed interested in me. I’m not sure what he does.”