Her shoulder dipped and the large rosette diamond at the center of her trademark propeller-shaped pin winked at me from the lapel of her plum-colored suit. The chic getup and glitzy adornment made me think of another runway incident.
Uniforms, like so many other things, were in short supply. Miss C, presented with cast-off WAC suits to outfit her new unit, pronounced them “hideous,” and promptly headed off to Bergdorf Goodman’s in Manhattan. With her own funds, she authorized the design of a WASP uniform. She’d run the prototype, a Santiago blue suit with a cute beret, by me, but I wasn’t enrolled to help sell it. For this, she recruited a Pentagon employee who might otherwise pass for a fashion model, and had someone less alluring don a WAC hand-me-down. The trio marched, Miss C in the lead, directly into General Marshall’s office, demanding he choose.
“Well, I like the one you’re wearing, Miss Cochran,” he said.
“You can’t have this one,” she replied, explaining the simple but expensive suit had been purchased in Paris before the war.
“The blue one is best,” Marshall then admitted. “You’ll get your uniforms.”
Now, inside the Ford, Miss C jutted out her prominent jaw, examining its reflection in the rearview mirror as if searching for a flaw. “You said you couldn’t find a ride when you got here?” she asked archly. “What’s that about? Part of a cover you’re practicing?”
“What?”
“Sure had me buffaloed. Never would have expected someone so dedicated to country and to flying would”—she fluttered a hand—“run off, take an extended break from her duties like that.”
I bit my lip. She hadn’t yet bothered to explain why I’d been summoned, but surely she had not dragged me here to slap my wrists for the OSS training stint?
Another angle hit me like a severe blow. Was she jealous that I’d been singled out for the specially tailored course? That our government had in mind giving me the occasional home front undercover girl assignment? I looked over at her. All the while I’d been thinking she’d summoned me here to discuss a mission. Was the opposite true? Did she hope to toss a monkey wrench into the government’s plans?
“I wasn’t away for long,” I said, a little too sharply. “It was a condensed course. I was out of action for just three weeks.”
With the lift of an eyebrow, she returned to the mirror.
Diplomacy was not my strong suit. I’d learned to live with the effect my directness had on some, but Miss C had never been among those unstrung by it. Not hardly. She respected standing up for your rights and was bothered by women who were “blahs.” So what had her so peeved? What was my sin?
Life as a PK, Pastor’s Kid, can be tricky. There’s a pressure, especially in public, to maintain an image. But I was always more chaff than seed. And trying to be what I wasn’t wore on me. In my teens, I started imagining scenarios from my future life as a commercial pilot. We lived in Chilton, a one-horse suburb of Cleveland, and dreaming big in a small town was not that easy. At least until Civilian Pilot Training came to our community college. Eventually I earned my pilot’s license, but while I’d always pictured myself one day ferrying passengers to Africa or Alaska, too soon I discovered that, as a woman, my dream to fly professionally was just that: a dream. A degree in journalism was my hole card. With it, I planned to make a living the way other lady pilots did, by writing for magazines about flying.
A position knocking out spec sheets at an aircraft factory followed. I had begun to accept that I would be eternally chained to a desk, when along came the WASP. I owed my luck to Miss C, the program’s founder. In hindsight, how could I have been so thick-headed as to miss why she was so upset?
“Miss C,” I began softly. “I hope you don’t think I applied for intelligence school behind your back. I would never do that. There was an oversight, wasn’t there? My orders came through OSS channels, direct. They ought to have come through you. I’m sorry. I should have realized sooner.”
Her dark eyes bored into mine. She didn’t speak, but I knew I’d hit home.
She smoothed a wave in her perfectly permed hairdo. “Forget it, Lewis. Not your fault. There was no clear line for you to follow. But you’re right. I should have been involved.” She leaned back with a shrug. “Well, boys will be boys. Guess one of them wanted to be sure I remembered it’s still the men who run the show.”
A company bus pulled up at the sidewalk in front of us. The doors parted and our attention momentarily shifted to watch the passengers, all of them factory workers, spill out. The flow stopped while a small man, around four feet tall, making a slow descent, hopped off the bottom step.
This must be one of the dwarfs Twombley had told us about while describing an early production problem involving the Lib’s main wing. The interior space was so cramped, he’d said, that an average-sized person could not get in there to buck the rivets needed to fasten the outer wing to the center section near the end of the assembly process. He had solved the problem by creating a highly specialized team made up of a mix of women and dwarfs, recruited mainly from the entertainment business.
The small man yawned and stretched out his arms before starting down the sidewalk. Fair-skinned, his blond hair trimmed in a bowl cut, he was clad in dungarees and a short-sleeved chambray shirt. He vectored toward a side entrance to the factory and I stared after him, wondering if I might recognize him from a movie.
Two men, one with a pug nose and small protruding ears, the other with prominent nostrils and a scouring-pad mustache, got off the bus last. “Hey, Chaplin, wait for us,” one of them called, racing to catch up with the small man.
Miss C had been eyeing the dwarf, too. “Where were we?” she asked, turning to me. “Oh yeah, the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Did you enjoy it, then?”
Did Tuesday follow Monday? Microfilm, invisible ink, ultraviolet light, secret weaponry, disguises, codes—what could be more exciting?
“It was swell,” I said delicately. “I liked it fine, thanks.”
Modesty had its rewards. “Let’s cut to why you’re here,” she said. “Day before yesterday, I was in Washington planning my trip back to the ranch. Decided to break up the flight, surprise my girls at Romulus Field. Got in yesterday. Had barely touched down when a call came in, asking me to route you here.”
“Really? Who called?”
Miss C had raised her voice to counter the noise of an approaching Lib. I was nearly shouting, too, but it was hopeless. We cranked up our windows. The sound was still deafening. While we waited, Miss C began twisting the cord of a two-way radio mounted on the dash between us. The radio’s presence startled me. That I hadn’t noticed it before seemed to underscore just how on edge I had been since entering the Ford.
A St. Christopher medal and a horseshoe charm hung from a chain looped over the rearview mirror. Odd enough to be meeting in a car in the first place, but whose car was it? For sure not Miss Cochran’s.
Quiet again, we rolled down our windows. My queries about the caller went ignored. “You won’t regret not going overseas with the others?” she asked.
OSS was responsible for intelligence work behind enemy lines. It was why candidates accepted into the program had to meet a foreign language requirement. It was also why I had been surprised when OSS approached me. I’d never mastered a second language.
“Who wouldn’t want to go to the front?” I replied honestly. “But going in, I knew it wasn’t an option.”
My walk on the shadow side had opened up an entirely new approach to life in which suddenly everything that had once been forbidden now became a way of thinking in wartime. Heady preparation, but I had never been tested under fire. For that, I needed an assignment. A home front assignment. The dead spy with a knife wound in his neck lying on the floor of the garage at the opposite end of the factory was a ready-made prospect. “Miss C,” I blurted, exasperated. “I’m happy staying stateside. I feel lucky and proud to be a WASP, but—”
Miss C appeared to reach some kind of resolution. “Goo
d. You’re an excellent pilot. I need you. But for the moment, the FBI needs you more.”
My heart pounded. “Oh?”
“They handle domestic intelligence.”
I knew that.
“They’ve got trouble here. Something to do with German spies operating from inside this plant.” A movement outside the car drew her attention. “Ahh, here’s Agent Dante. We drove over together. He’ll do the explaining.”
Chapter Two
The Ford Deluxe was Agent Dante’s, courtesy of the FBI. Miss C had ignored my attempt to tell her about the body in the alleyway. We stepped out to greet the G-man and I was about to disclose that the agent and I had already met when a second car pulled up. It was Miss C’s ride back to Romulus. The driver and Miss C shoved off, and I waited on the sidewalk while Dante, begging privacy, contacted his office using the car radio. Finished, he explained that he had expected to take me back to headquarters for my briefing. But now as things had become complicated by “an unexpected turn of events,” before he could divulge certain aspects of my assignment, additional clearances were required. He’d made a hurry-up request and it was churning its way through channels.
“No sense driving into town until we have the go-ahead. How about we sit over there, get acquainted, maybe cover some basics?” He gestured to a bench under a pair of shady maples, standing watch like Queen’s guards, beside the administration building’s front staircase. “It’ll be cooler than waiting in the car.”
My curiosity over why the FBI had singled me out was piqued so high I would have sat just about anywhere. “Great.”
The bench was positioned far enough from the building so that passersby, funneling in and out of the entrance, would not be able to hear our conversation. Dried leaves and bark scraps littered the bench. Dante brushed them off. Removing his suit coat, he flung it in the air, gracefully lowering it over the slats.
“Madame?” he said, inviting me to sit.
General Marshall had promised, but our official WASP suits had not yet been delivered. In the meantime, we wore the men’s Army uniforms, choosing between olive drab and officer’s pinks. This trip, I’d worn the pinks, actually a light khaki, a regrettable choice for the neutral-colored fabric picked up dirt like a vacuum cleaner. I looked down. Rorschach-patterned black marks, collected in the Lib, stained my pant legs.
“Thanks, but no need. And why wrinkle it?” I lifted the jacket, the weight of the badge in its breast pocket a sobering reminder that the man I was about to “get acquainted with” was FBI.
Dante had been turning up a sleeve of his once-crisp white shirt. He paused, mid-roll. “Suit yourself.” His voice strained with what sounded like phony approval. “It’s how you like doing things anyway, isn’t it?”
I smiled. “Yes, I like doing things my way, Agent Dante. But these days I’m part of a unit serving the Army Air Forces. It’s not about what I want, it’s about what our government wants from me.”
Dante seemed to ponder that. Then he smiled. “Name’s not actually Agent Dante. It’s Dante Cavaradossi.” My jaw dropped. He laughed. It was a good laugh. From the soul. “Cavaradossi is too long,” he added, “and too hard to pronounce. People never seem to get it right. So Dante is easier.”
Elocution had nothing to do with why my mouth was flapped open. It was kismet. In my favorite opera, Tosca, the heroine bargains with the villainous Scarpia trying to convince him to spare the life of her artist-lover, Mario Cavaradossi.
I drew a wobbly breath. “Great. Then Agent Dante it is.”
“Just call me Dante, why don’t you.”
He dug into his jacket pocket. A crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes emerged. He offered me one. I refused, then watched him press one of the smokes to his lips, letting it dangle as he patted pockets in search of a light. He flipped the cover of a matchbook and froze. My mind ricocheted back to enemy agents and the purpose of our meeting. Had someone left a secret message there? Leaning back, I strained to see.
The cover shut with a snap. “Shame on me. I quit two weeks ago.” He wedged the smoke behind his ear but kept the matchbook in his hands, twisting it with his fingers. “Pu-ucci,” he said, drawing out the syllables as if relishing the sound. “Where’d you get a name like that?”
He had read the FBI dossier. Surely it contained my full name, even the history behind my nickname, Pucci. I stifled a sigh. The only names we ought to be discussing were those of the spies skulking around the factory. Why were we lingering on me?
The “why” did not matter. He wanted to hear me tell it. I began by explaining that my uncle, Chauncy “Chance” Lewis, was a globetrotter and curio shop owner. His store in Chilton, Trinkets and Treasures, was chock-full of exotic items he’d collected on his adventures. I was a born listener, Uncle Chance was a natural storyteller, and the treasures in his shop were tickets to countless tales. One day, a Tosca poster taped to the front window stopped me in my tracks. A striking woman, draped in an elegant evening gown, was bent over a male corpse, also in formal wear, lying in a pool of blood. A knife protruded from the dead man’s chest and candles circled his head. The candles’ flickering flames highlighted the eerie calm in the woman’s expression as she placed a crucifix over the man’s heart. I was only ten at the time and was smitten by the high drama, glamour, and mystery of the scene. All the more mysterious because of the boldface foreign words printed along the poster’s lower border.
My uncle was inside the shop. I dragged him outdoors. “Ahh, my latest. A Puccini direct from Venice. Performance at La Fenice. Magnificent opera house!” He clapped his hands and beamed. “Bene.” I couldn’t seem to peel my gaze from the poster. He noticed. He spoke in a grating whisper. “The dead man is Scarpia, the opera’s villain. He deceived Tosca so she killed him.” I continued to stare, the image etching into my brain what a woman with her back to the wall was capable of. Could I kill someone under certain circumstances? I imagined I could, and felt both empowered and ashamed at the thought.
Later, Uncle Chance recounted the entire storyline of the opera and the hook set. I wanted to know about the dramas underscoring all of Puccini’s operas.
“But it will take weeks,” he protested, struggling to contain his delight.
At some point in the process he began calling me his “little Miss Puccini.” Later we agreed Pucci was better. Pucci Lewis.
“And no more Ruth Esther,” Dante said, smiling.
As always, at hearing my real name I cringed. “Right.”
Dante’s gaze had drifted to my saddle shoes. Something about the way he was staring made me wonder if he knew they had once belonged to Amelia Earhart. Uncle Chance had come across the shoes at a charity auction, later giving them to me as a present. Was that tippy-top secret in my FBI dossier? Did they know about Miss C’s obsession with them as well?
Antsy, I crossed one ankle over the other. Blood rushed to my cheeks. My ankle holster. I’d left it on. Inside was a non-regulation double action derringer. Quickly, I recrossed my feet.
Dante had removed the cigarette he’d tucked behind his ear and was rolling it between his thumb and fingers, studying it. “OSS issue?” He didn’t bother looking up.
“No, gift from my grandmother.” His eyebrows lifted inquiringly. “WASP graduation,” I said crisply.
Whenever I’m assigned a plane with specialized equipment, radar, for example, a .45 is issued, along with my orders. But a .45 is heavy, cumbersome, and difficult to store in a P38’s tight quarters. So I’d developed the habit of carrying Gran’s derringer on my flights. Compact, lightweight, stowed at my ankle, it was handy for any emergency. Normally, though, I would have removed the holster, squirreling it away inside my B-4 bag before exiting my plane. This morning, my mind awhirl over Miss C’s summons, I’d forgotten.
Dante chortled. “When I first heard about you, I thought you might be too skittish for our job. Now I’m sold. You can hold your own.” His acceptance of me was evidently deep enough to warrant a security briefing.
“We began monitoring espionage suspects long before Pearl Harbor, even while the majority sentiment was to keep out,” he said, “the task evolving, step by step with the inevitable—that we’d join the war.”
Investigations were at an average of forty cases a year in ’37, he told me, but leaped to over 250 in ’38 when discreet checks on subversive groups, like fascists and communists, were sanctioned. The burgeoning workload resulted in a shoring up of the Bureau’s staff. In ’39, there were roughly 800 Special Agents on the government’s payroll. Last year, in 1942, nearly 5,000 agents had been assigned to over 200,000 national security matters.
I whistled softly. “A lot of manpower.”
“Necessary if we expect our home front to remain safe. We’ve also beefed up our record-keeping. Besides maintaining a Watch List of naturalized citizens from Axis countries, we’ve begun keeping files on all die-hard anti-Americans, monitoring those likely to be dangerous in time of war.”
“Likely to be dangerous?”
“Those with family remaining in the old country, people who might have mixed loyalties, anyone affiliated with known fascist organizations or clubs.”
“Ahh.” I knew that without the appropriate approvals, Dante was weighing what he could and couldn’t tell me, but I was doing some juggling of my own. What about an individual’s right to privacy? The principle was part of the bedrock of our nation’s foundation. Or was it okay, in wartime, to simply dismantle such civil liberties, toss them out the window temporarily? But then who decided where and when to draw the line? The FBI?
Provocative issues. But this was not the time—or the person—to try to engage in a debate. “Organized fascist groups are openly meeting, here, on U.S. soil? That surprises me.”
Dante had left his hat inside the car. Without it, his hair was an unruly mop. He raked the thick mass with his fingers. “What do you know about the German-American Bund?”
Lipstick and Lies Page 2