Across from me, Connelly’s thin mouth had twisted into one of his schoolboy smirks. His arrogance made Dante’s latest challenge suddenly irresistible. I accepted. My reward, Connelly’s incredulous look, was instantaneous.
Chapter Eighteen
I left the conference room with Dante, who told Simmons and Connelly he wanted to discuss the breakin with me, in private. When we were alone, he suggested we continue our discussion outdoors. Given the FBI’s propensity for eavesdropping, and sensing that there was a second sub rosa layer yet to be disclosed, I scuttled two steps ahead of him to the elevator.
Downstairs in the main lobby, uniformed guards stood beside the bank of doors at the main entrance. They each gave Dante a discreet nod as we passed.
Outside, I grabbed his arm. “I got a tip Roy Jarvis is in town. He’s G-2. Was he the rep who was supposed to be in the meeting but cancelled?”
Dante stared at me. “I’ve been in contact with Jarvis several times in the last twenty-four hours, but let’s find someplace more private first. Over here.”
We strolled to the far end of the portico, pausing beside a limestone column in the corner. I searched Dante’s face. “What’s going on? Do you know something about Liberty?”
“She’s disappeared.”
“I know. We were together just before it happened. Last night, shortly before midnight.”
Dante looked surprised. “You saw her last night?”
I nodded, hurriedly filling him in on my surprise encounter with her at the Club. I described her changed appearance, stifling a grin as I repeated the nom de guerre she’d selected for her wartime role as a manicurist. The light moment ebbed as I reported her disturbing absence from work that morning.
“Her disappearance, is it connected to the sting? Is she all right?”
Dante stared over my head, looking perplexed.
“It’s okay,” I assured him. “Liberty told me she was working for G-2.”
He came back to earth. “She what?”
I should have known he’d be upset with us for confiding in one another. I rushed on. “She had to. We were both at the same club, undercover. We suspected there’d been a mix-up and that we’d been assigned to the same case. We figured we needed to come clean with one another or risk botching things up altogether.”
Dante remained eerily still.
“We didn’t go into detail,” I added. “She revealed just a little about her—uh, G-2’s—side of the case, and I barely had the chance to admit I’d been sent by the FBI.”
“Which case?”
I squinted up at him. “The case that placed Liberty in the Cosmos Club, posing as a fascist sympathizer, testing the admiral’s wife to see if she could get her to steal a map,” I replied impatiently.
I watched a school of pigeons pecking the cement on the steps below. I shook my head. “I can’t believe that an admiral’s wife would want to sell out her own country. Why is she doing it, do you know? Has a loose screw? Needs money? Husband do something unforgivable?”
Dante had no ready answers and my list of troubling issues still held an important straggler. “Simmons…ONI…they have it all backwards. Why does G-2, and now you, the FBI, want them to think Clara Renner is the femme fatale? Why aren’t all agencies leveling with one another, like you’re supposed to?” Out of breath and out of questions, I paused.
“We are leveling with each other.”
“No you’re not.” The words echoed hollowly in the surrounding silence.
“We are. Clara Renner asked the admiral’s wife for a map of Grosse Ile Naval Station.”
“But that’s not what Liberty said. Where is she? What’s happened to her? And why wasn’t Roy at the meeting?”
Dante’s gaze caught mine and held. “Roy Jarvis is in Washington D.C. juggling a host of unsolved national security matters, recently upgraded to top priority. Liberty—by the way, I never heard of her before Jarvis brought me in on the matter—went out on a field test in the Washington area a month ago. Never returned. The incident hit his desk yesterday.”
“But I just saw her—” I paused, letting what Dante had said sink in. “A month ago? But that’s when I completed training.”
He nodded. “Right. But you were enrolled in an accelerated course. She had weeks of instruction remaining.”
A tiny spasm pulsed in front of Dante’s ear. There was more. “What?” I asked, cautiously.
“The Countess and her ring of spies were arrested a month ago. Liberty vanished the day after.”
My stomach dropped. “What are you saying? You think she’s an enemy agent? Not possible. She’s a good person, the daughter of missionaries. She was recruited by OI. She passed OSS security checks—”
Dante placed a hand on my arm. “Liberty’s your friend, you have a bond. But think a minute. She was working undercover as a manicurist at the Cosmos Club. She told you G-2 placed her there. That Jarvis was running her assignment. They didn’t. He wasn’t. What do you suppose is going on?”
I sighed. “She lied to me. Why?”
“Not sure. What I do know is, after she went AWOL, an investigation launched by her trainers led them nowhere. G-2 was contacted and asked to cover matters domestically. Jarvis took the reins yesterday. He contacted the parents and they pointed him here. He also checked her records, saw you listed as her former roommate. He followed up with Miss Cochran, hoping to contact you for some insights.”
“She told him I was in Detroit and he contacted you…”
Dante slipped a finger under his shirt collar, tugging it away from his neck. “Let’s walk.” He bounded down the stairs. His long strides and my fitted skirt made it impossible for me to keep up. He waited on the sidewalk.
Tall commercial buildings formed a canyon around us. Earlier, when I’d entered the Federal building, the air had seemed oppressive. Now it positively brimmed with the exhaust and grime spewing from passing automobiles. I unfastened my jacket; Dante loosened his tie and undid the button under its knot. We started down the block.
I looked over. “You mentioned Liberty’s parents. Do they know she’s missing?”
Dante nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“They must be worried sick.”
“They don’t have much contact with her.”
“That’s strange. Liberty and her parents have always been very close.”
Dante shook his head. “Not according to the Leaches. They told Jarvis they’ve hardly spoken to one another in years.”
“Years?”
“Uh-huh.” He paused and looked over. “Pucci, did you know Liberty was adopted?”
“Adopted? Nooo…”
A malaise moved through me and my bones felt weak while bit by bit he revealed her background.
When she was only hours old, Liberty had been left in a box on the Leaches’ doorstep. The couple, both medical professionals, she a nurse, he a doctor, had no children of their own. After a futile search for the baby’s mother, they decided to adopt.
The pivotal moment came when Liberty was fourteen. A typical teen, more willful and mischievous than most, she had already pushed her parents’ tolerance to the brink. On one particularly trying day, in a fit of frustration and anger, Mrs. Leach lashed out at her husband, saying, “She’s a wicked little brat! Maybe we shouldn’t have adopted her after all!”
She regretted her words the instant they left her mouth. A million times more once they learned Liberty had overheard them. Shocked by the discovery of her adoption, she pummeled them with vengeful outbursts that went on for days. Once she had calmed down enough to listen to reason, Mrs. Leach tried to make amends. But by then something in Liberty had changed. She told her mother she had never felt connected to them, had no desire to be like them, and now, having at last learned the truth, she felt a new sense of inner peace and freedom. According to Dr. Leach, after that her behavior regressed even further. She became surly, sullen, and completely antisocial.
My mind reeled. How could my friend h
ave told me something so different? Why?
I tried to make sense of it. “And so, unable to think of anything better, they sent her off to boarding school in Europe…” I hesitated. “Her mother’s sister is in Switzerland. Liberty lived with her aunt and uncle, learned all those languages there. That part of her past is true, right?”
“Yes, but putting an ocean between them did little to mend the familial relationship. Communication remained next to nil even when she returned home on breaks.”
“But she was adopted, never knew her real mother, had never been told…the trauma—”
I was feeling a little shell-shocked myself, the sensation suddenly magnified by the haunting image of my mother, her blank green eyes bulging with the terror of her free-fall from the church loft. The sick despair I’d felt afterwards, kissing her unresponsive cheek, came flooding back. “I’m sorry,” I’d whispered, my tears flooding the planes of her immobile face, running to catch in the crook of her twisted neck. Sorry for saying I didn’t want to go to practice with her that afternoon; sorry for refusing to leave the house until she gave in and let me wear my patent leather Sunday shoes, not the high-top brown oxfords prescribed to correct my pigeon-toed feet; sorry for making her angry, making her late, making her rush so that she was distracted when she got up in front of the choir, turned her back to the railing… Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Dante must have sensed the anguish churning within me. He clasped my elbow, drawing me close. “The Leaches might not have been perfect parents, but they loved their daughter. They made a mistake and did their best to mend it. They gave her opportunities—Swiss boarding school, summers abroad until the war started. Later, when she wanted to attend Vassar, they helped arrange it.”
I nodded, but my brain whirled and I felt slightly nauseous. We walked in silence.
“Liberty’s parents directed Roy to Detroit,” I said after a while. “Why was that?”
“They thought she might be visiting a young man who was part of the crowd she ran with in Europe.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “A group of young radicals, according to the Leaches. Supposedly, this chum immigrated here in the fall of ’41.”
“Fall of ’41? That’s when the Countess arrived. Immigration control would have a record.”
“Right. He registered as an alien—Tazio Abbado—and we’ve followed the trail to his last known address. No sign of him, though. Or Liberty. But we’re still digging.”
It wasn’t getting any better. “Tazio Abbado?”
“Uh-huh. The same guy the Countess told you is a known fence.”
He didn’t say it, but we both knew Liberty’s pre-war job at the Oral Intelligence Group involved interviewing refugees and screening for agents provocateurs. She was at the organization in 1941, when both the Countess and Abbado would have passed through.
“Was he put on the Watch List?” Dante shook his head. I swallowed. “Has Liberty been identified as the OI agent who cleared him through?”
“No. But our office has been on the case for only a day.”
We hovered near the curb of an intersection, waiting for the light to change. “I know things don’t look good for her,” I began softly, “but I’m wondering. If she’s crossed the line, why was her room ransacked? Who would have done it? It wouldn’t have been Liberty. Who then? Could it have been someone involved with Renner?” I waited while a car with a faulty muffler rattled past. “She had a midnight meeting to go to. What if the appointment was a ruse? Maybe she was lured somewhere, shanghaied by someone from Renner’s group. It’s possible, right?”
I had been watching Dante’s expression closely. “You’re not completely convinced she’s with the enemy either, are you? Is that why you didn’t mention her disappearance to Simmons? You wanted to shield her?”
He lifted his shoulder in a half-shrug. “Let’s just say I’m not prepared to throw one of ours to the lions before it’s clear what’s going on.”
A snarl of pedestrians had formed around us. I pressed closer to him and felt the thick muscle of his upper arm tighten. I glanced up. Our eyes met and I recognized the tenderness that made my heart go zing. I squeezed his forearm.
The light turned green and we were swept into the crosswalk. We strolled, and I raised a different aspect of the case that was nagging me. “Do you know the investigator who visited Liberty’s landlady at the boarding house?”
Dante bobbed his head. “Yes.”
“Are you aware that he went to the Cosmos Club and questioned Clara Renner?”
He nodded again.
“And supposedly by then she had already asked the admiral’s wife for a map of the base, correct?”
“Pucci, there’s no supposedly. Mrs. Renner asked for, and was given, the map.” He read my startled expression. “Not an accurate map,” he explained, softly. “Things the enemy would be looking for—runways, storage tanks, barracks, and the like—they’d all been redrawn.”
False map or not, Clara Renner was in the soup. Right up to her mascara-laden lashes. And I had thought she was innocent. What had happened to my ability to read people?
I viewed the crowd around us with an Impressionist’s eye, melding the forms into a blur of soft shapes and colors, and quietly groaned again. First Liberty had duped me, now guileless Clara appeared to be aligned with the enemy. Imagine! After telling me she loved her beauty parlor work and that she wanted to grow her business so that her husband could retire.
I clenched Dante’s arm. “I don’t want to think the worst,” I began, haltingly. “And I can’t believe I could be so wrong about her—”
“Who?”
“Clara. She confided that she had some money secretly squirreled away. Said someone—not her husband—was advising her, helping her make private investments.”
“And…”
I lowered my voice. “Could it be by investments she meant gathering U.S. secrets and maps? Selling them to you-know-who?”
Dante stared at me like he thought I had finally come to my senses. “Sounds like you’ve struck gold, now you need to mine it.” He thought for a second. “She trusts you. In the morning, we’ll arrange it so she’s left for work before we pull Renner in. That way, you’ll have another chance to talk to her, find out what you can about this adviser before she hears we’ve got her husband.”
It was my turn to stare incredulously. But I didn’t object.
We hadn’t yet discussed the black-bag job. We’d been keeping an eye out for a decent place to have a bite to eat and talk. The clang of an approaching streetcar inspired a different venue entirely. Our eyes met and we moved quickly, dodging through two lanes of stalled traffic. I had placed one foot on the bottom step, propelling my body forward as I lunged to leap aboard. Dante grabbed my arm, yanked, and pulled me back.
I stumbled and he righted me, apologizing and explaining that he was in the habit of conducting periodic checks for tails. Such evasive maneuvers had been covered in my training, but his sudden execution of one had caught me off guard. Which was the whole idea.
Another streetcar approached from our left. A blur of red and ivory, its polished glass and brass trim winked in the fading light. Behind us, the lanes of traffic cleared. A small group had been huddled curbside, waiting to cross. Now they scurried toward us.
We climbed aboard. The first bench beyond the rear doors offered the privacy we were after. We wouldn’t have anyone in front of us and there were only three rows, including a long bench spanning the width of the car, in back.
“Do you know Merriman?” I asked, as the trolley lumbered off.
“Who?”
“Merriman,” I repeated. “The night doorman at the Cosmos Club.”
I quickly described the theft of Liberty’s note, getting knocked to the floor, and finding the warning on the mirror. I concluded with my suspicions about Merriman being the intruder, and indicated that he was probably the last person to talk to Liberty before her secret meeting.
Dante was in the dark abou
t the man. If G-2 or ONI had assigned someone masquerading as Merriman to work inside the club, he had not been informed. He assured me that he would look into the matter once we were back at headquarters. At the mention of headquarters, I at last remembered to thank him for including me on the breakin team.
“No thanks necessary. You deserve the chance, you earned it.” His dark eyes glimmered. “Besides, a woman who can hold her own with Connelly deserves every privilege she can get.”
The next few moments passed in silence. The rod riding the cables above clacked periodically and I envisioned the sparks flying from them while I contemplated what it would be like visiting Renner’s domain for a second time. I imagined myself treading through a minefield of possible traps. Of course, Dante would be there, leading the way. Strong, wily, courageous, handsome…
An explosion—actually a spark arcing down from the wires—suddenly obliterated Dante from my vision. Now I led a team. All women. We stole into Renner’s office. I crept to the safe…
Dante leaned forward to glance out the window. “Let’s hop off next stop, grab another trolley back downtown. You’ll need to stop by the requisition room, pick up the clothing and equipment you’ll need for tonight. I’ll bring you up to speed about the mission along the way.”
Chapter Nineteen
Back at the Cosmos Club, with nearly four hours to kill, I longed to do what every other red-blooded woman dreamed of doing after an exhausting day on her feet. Take a bath. But other than breakfast, I’d consumed only one Hershey bar throughout my entire crazy day. I was famished!
I emerged from the Club’s elegant dining hall following a superb meal of Dover sole smothered in a lemony white sauce. The chocolate mousse dessert had been tempting, but I resisted, downing two cups of thick black java instead.
My room was one flight below. Feeling recharged, I started down the corridor, heading for the interior stairwell. A familiar figure approached from the opposite direction. Newly coifed and all dolled up, the woman didn’t register until after she had passed. It was Dee. She had introduced the Countess to her fiancé, Nelson Butler, and the breadth of her relationship with the former spy remained open-ended. I made a snap decision. I would rest later. If not before the breakin, then after.
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