Louise's Lies

by Sarah R. Shaber

  ‘Cal!’ I called out to the barkeep. Cal got to me after depositing two beers on the counter for other customers first.

  ‘Change your mind about that drink, ma’am?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but I do have a question for you. How many people have keys to the back door of this place?’ I leaned my chin on my hand and waited.

  Cal blanched. ‘Just me,’ he said. ‘And the boss.’

  ‘Really? That’s all? This place has been around for years. Are you sure?’

  That scared rabbit look that Cal had the night of the murder returned. Sweat beaded on his forehead and grey shadows gathered around his eyes.

  ‘Please, ma’am!’

  ‘Tell me. I won’t tell anyone, even the sergeant.’ I’d already lied to Harvey once, what was another one?

  ‘OK,’ Cal said, lowering his voice. ‘There’s one on the ledge outside over the back door. I put it there in case I forgot mine. The boss would fire me if he knew.’

  ‘Anyone else know about that key?’

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone.’

  I removed my chin from my hand. ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Go on back to work.’

  Cal scurried down the length of the bar. So he kept a spare key above the back door. And where did anyone look for a spare key? Above the door. And I remembered what Sergeant Royal had told me. That we didn’t know for sure what happened here before Joe and I walked in that night.

  Outside on the sidewalk I stared at the black hulk of the old German embassy across the street. The moon was waning, but it still shed some decent light. On a street full of opulent mansions, including the Maxwells’, the embassy’s only dramatic architectural quality was its size. I decided I would call it ‘Victorian ugly’. The façade was flat and unrelieved except for a mansard roof and a small tower. Large square windows, without any adornment, stared blankly out at the world. The building rose up for three tall stories not counting the basement. I’d heard it had seventy rooms, so it had to extend back for many feet. Even the door was unpretentious. It was blocked from my view by an ordinary squat brick portico, built to shelter cars that pulled up to the front door.

  The embassy seemed vulnerable to me. Two soldiers with war dogs were assigned to guard it twenty-four hours a day, but I saw no sign of them tonight. Perhaps it was simply too cold to post anyone outdoors. I knew from Miss Osborne that a Swiss caretaker lived in the building, but I saw no lights on the second floor, which I assumed held all the bedrooms. I wondered that it was so unprotected. It must be full of expensive furniture, art and even personal possessions left behind by the German occupants after they were rounded up and detained in Virginia. And the third floor, again according to Miss Osborne, was rumored to be the prewar headquarters for the Nazi espionage network in the United States. It was the US Army’s responsibility, and the Swiss legation’s, to see that the embassy was undisturbed until after the war. The same procedure protected our empty embassies in the Axis nations and occupied countries.

  Despite having downed two martinis after a tough day I was wide awake and had no desire to go home. My worries about Joe resurfaced and caused my chest to contract and my heart to pound. I wondered when I would hear from him, or see him again. The amount of luggage he took with him meant to me that he expected to be gone a long time. If he was on his way to Lisbon, or another neutral city in Europe, I might not see him until the end of the war, if then. I knew this could happen. It was one reason we didn’t discuss marriage.

  My life would have been so much easier if I’d fallen for some 4-F government bureaucrat!

  I still saw no army patrol in front of the embassy. My curiosity overwhelmed me, and I walked across the street and right up to the building’s portico without anyone hailing me. Three more steps and I was at the double mahogany door. Just because I could, I grasped the fist-sized doorknob and tried to turn it. Of course the door was locked.

  I went down the steps and around the side of the building and found a narrow veranda decorated with reproduction classic urns full of dead plants. Two leaded glass doors led inside from the veranda, both locked. Curtains were pulled over the doors and I couldn’t see inside.

  Still no guard. I would circle the building, and if I didn’t find a soldier and a dog on my walk I’d tell Miss Osborne tomorrow, General Donovan would call the army and then there’d be hell to pay. Freezing weather or not, someone should be guarding this building.

  Behind the building a short flight of steps led down to a basement door. A back drive ended there, so it must be a service entrance. Basement windows lined the rear of the house, peeking above ground level, but they were heavily barred, so at least there was some protection from entry. Overhead a fire escape descended from the roof down the rear wall, ending far over my head at a window on the second floor. I assumed that if it was needed one of those extension ladder gizmos could be dropped from the second floor to the ground.

  Still no patrol. By now I’d pushed Joe’s absence and Floyd Stinson’s murder out of my mind and was just concerned. The German embassy appeared unguarded. I went down the stairs to the basement door and turned the doorknob. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and saw a narrow hall leading into darkness. Quickly I closed the door again and sat down on the steps outside to think.

  EIGHT

  The German embassy was wide open. There was no sign of the army. The Swiss caretaker apparently forgot to lock the basement door. This would be a scandal if the newspapers got wind of it.

  Of course I planned to report this to Miss Osborne in the morning. But I was fighting a powerful urge to go inside the building. There was no one to stop me. Blackout curtains at the windows blocked the view of the interior. I should be able to explore freely, on the downstairs floor anyway. And if I was spooked at all there were more than enough windows to escape through if I couldn’t get to the back door.

  I worked for OSS. I was practically a spy myself. Any operative worth his or her salt would take advantage of this opportunity. Who knew what I might find? As far as I knew, Stinson could only have searched the embassy during daylight hours, when the Swiss caretaker was up and about. Perhaps I could even get into the third floor!

  What would Miss Osborne say? I knew her well enough to be sure that if I was successful she would think it was a grand idea. If I wasn’t there would be hell to pay and I could find myself back home in Wilmington gutting fish in no time.

  I stood up and brushed off my trousers. Looking around one last time, I went down the short steps, opened the door, went inside and closed the door behind me. Moonlight didn’t penetrate the blackout curtains and it was dark inside. Pulling my army penlight (another souvenir of my training course) out of my purse I switched it on after clicking the red lens into position. I was in a short hall with two elevators directly ahead of me. I turned to my right and walked into a kitchen large enough to serve a hotel. It was furnished with a double range, two refrigerators and a metal sink as big as a bathtub. Pots and pans hung from ceiling fixtures. Bowls and baking dishes lined a hutch. I skirted the long wooden worktable and opened a door to find a pantry bigger than my bedroom. It was empty except for a box of toilet paper and a pile of neatly folded rags.

  I crossed the hall to the other side of the building and found myself in a butler’s pantry lined with cabinets and drawers. Sparkling crystal winked at me in the light of my flashlight. A set of gold-trimmed fine china filled a wall of glass-fronted cabinets. It must have had fifty place settings. I pulled out a drawer, gently, in case it squeaked. Tarnished sterling silver flatware, stamped with the pre-Nazi German imperial eagle, filled it to the rim. Several more doors opened off the room. I opened one; it appeared to be a large servant’s room, probably the butler’s. Another was an office crammed with several roll top desks and file cabinets. Excitedly I pulled out drawers, only to find them empty or filled with useless housekeeping records.

  I went back the way I came, through the kitchen and into a long narrow hall lined with doors. I opened one on to
what had to be a servant’s room. It contained an iron bedstead and a small dresser. Dark wallpaper in wide stripes of burgundy and brown closed in the space and there was a tiny coal fireplace. I opened several more doors and found similar rooms, none with any personal possessions in sight.

  I paused in the narrow hallway, covering my flashlight lens with one hand, and listened. I heard nothing. Training my flashlight on the floor I went further down the hall and opened a large door. I sensed rather than saw a massive space beyond me.

  Taking a deep breath I shone the full light of the flashlight ahead of me into a huge, elegant room. The ceiling must have been thirty feet high, the walls sheathed in dove-grey silk. Three heavy chandeliers overhead, now wrapped in sheets, would have lit the room for receptions and parties. I could hear tiny tinkles coming from the crystal drops as the fixtures swayed slightly overhead. Above a set of tall mahogany double doors maybe twenty feet high perched a gilt eagle, its wings stretched over the door lintel, its talons clutching a swastika. An oversized red-and-black Nazi flag, which hung from the ceiling to the chair rail, dominated another wall.

  The room was decorated in a more modern style than the servants’ quarters. I sat down on a curved, sleek davenport upholstered in maroon raw silk and covered my flashlight lens again.

  This was the embassy drawing room, where the German ambassador would have welcomed guests from all over Washington and the world. I saw oil paintings stacked one on top of the other against the walls and occasional tables crowded with objets d’art. Crystal decanters, highball glasses and tumblers filled a bar counter in a corner.

  As a working-class American girl I felt overwhelmed by the abundance of it all. I’d once been to a party at Evalyn McLean’s mansion, but this felt different. McLean’s house was lavish, but this was decadent.

  I waited for my nerves to settle while I decided whether I was going to continue to search. I was no longer sure why I was here. I was stunned by how unguarded all this opulence appeared to be. I still heard nothing, just the tinkle of the chandelier crystals overhead as the fixtures swayed.

  On the cocktail table in front of me a group of miniature silver and ivory clowns pranced. They were exquisite. One in particular attracted me. The little clown wore a silver top hat on his ivory painted head and held a real lace parasol overhead. He had one foot on the ground and the other raised a bit, as if taking a step. Under his other silver arm he carried an ivory ball. His tiny collar was made of lace too. He was so precious I had to restrain myself from picking him up.

  My God, there was a gold cigarette lighter the size of a deck of cards resting on the cocktail table next to an inlaid cigarette box. Surely it wasn’t solid gold? I hefted it. It could be, it was heavy enough. Think of how much it was worth! I set it back down on the table.

  Since all the windows were hung with closed blackout curtains I decided to continue my progress through the rooms downstairs. I appeared to be completely alone. If anyone was spending the night in the house he was probably in a second-floor bedroom and as long as I was careful and didn’t trip over a silk ottoman he wouldn’t hear me.

  So I went on through the double doors guarded by the Nazi eagle and into the front foyer. It was just as overwhelming as the drawing room. A black marble mosaic of a swastika was embedded into the center of a Carrara marble floor. I skirted around it as I went into the next room, the library.

  Hundreds of books filled the built-in bookcases, which were carved with pillars and lintels to look as if they were freestanding. Two delicate writing desks with pens, inkwells and stationery at the ready stood under windows. An overstuffed sofa and several club chairs suitable for reading completed the furniture arrangement. I went over to a display case that contained what appeared to be antique books. I reached in and took out a small leather bound volume. I couldn’t read the title, but the author was Friedrich Nietzsche. His signature was scrawled below his name on the title page.

  By the time I found the dining room I was so repulsed by the excess of my surroundings I just glanced at the long dining room table with chairs lined up like soldiers, another gilt-and-crystal chandelier the size of an armchair and several sideboards crammed with sterling silver. I felt almost dizzy from the emotional impact of being inside this place and imagining what had gone on here. I leaned against the back of a chair to regain my composure.

  Then I heard it. A tiny sound, way too much like the noise of a squeaky door opening and closing a few rooms away for my liking. I froze in place, my grip on the back of the chair tightening, ready to pick the chair up and fling it at anyone who found me. Every sense I had, especially my hearing, focused on the distant spot where I’d heard that sound.

  I’d been a fool to come inside the embassy. I was too tired, and had drunk too many martinis, to make a sensible decision. After I’d found the back door unlocked I should have made my way home and told Miss Osborne in the morning. And let the Swiss, the army and the FBI handle the problem. If I got caught in here I would be their problem!

  Then I heard the sound again. Nearby this time. Definitely the noise of a swinging door on hinges being quietly pushed open, then slowly closing. Sweat trailed down my backbone. I had both hands on the chair now, ready to lift it over my head.

  There were two entrances to the dining room. One set of French doors from the hallway that stood open and one leading from what I suspected was a butler’s pantry, where the servants would organize platters and such before bringing them in to serve guests. I heard a tiny scraping sound at the pantry’s swinging door, saw it move slightly and then settle back. Another tiny scratching sound, the door opened again and a calico cat pushed through. When he saw me his tail jerked straight up into the air and he crouched as if to pounce on me, his fur standing on end. I have never felt such relief, setting down the chair and almost falling into it. I’d been terrorized by a watch cat patrolling for mice!

  I wanted out of this nasty place as soon as possible.

  I walked quickly, or as quickly as limited light and caution would allow, back through the house into the kitchen area. I reached for the back doorknob and turned it. The door was locked.

  I tried the lock again. It was definitely engaged. After my initial shock I told myself that there was a reasonable explanation. The Swiss caretaker, who I’d begun to picture in my mind as a blond, three hundred pound man in a nightshirt, had come down in the elevator to check the doors and finally locked this one. The man would be back in bed by now.

  Thank God I’d been so quiet. Thank God I’d used the red lens on my flashlight. Thank God I hadn’t interrupted the caretaker while he was downstairs. Thank God the cat was just a cat.

  But now what? How was I going to get out of here?

  I wandered back into the vast drawing room to sit on the davenport and think. I found tears welling up in my eyes, why I couldn’t exactly say. I found myself wondering how much of this display of wealth was stolen from people the Nazis had persecuted. And I thought of all the influential Americans, like the Maxwells and Henry Ford, wooed here at glittering parties by the German ambassador. And how close I’d come to being discovered.

  But before I even started to plan my escape my eyes fell on the cocktail table and I noticed the prancing clowns had been rearranged. Not just rearranged. One was missing. The one I’d admired so, the one with the lace parasol and the ivory ball. And the heavy gold cigarette lighter was gone too.

  In the time it had taken me to explore the foyer, library and dining room someone had stolen them. And it wouldn’t be the caretaker. Or the cat.

  I’d been trained to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Which, in this case, was that I’d interrupted someone in the process of burglarizing the embassy, someone with a key, who’d entered before I arrived and left before I returned, locking the door behind him. Someone who’d been nearby the entire time I’d been inside the embassy. Or maybe he had simply locked the door and was waiting for me around a corner?

  Then I did something they didn’
t teach me at The Farm. I would have run away, but there wasn’t anywhere to go, so I hid. I found a closet, with coats still hanging, and curled up inside. Slumped right down to the floor with my back to the wall, I drew my knees up and wrapped my arms around them while I tried to compose myself. I recognized the telltale signs of panic. Ringing in my ears, a pounding heartbeat, sweat trickling down my backbone and spots in front of my eyes.

  Then my training kicked in and I remembered my instructor at The Farm. I had to force myself to take deep, slow breaths while counting. By the time I’d counted to twenty-five I was able to think rationally. I figured the intruder was gone. Surely he wouldn’t want to encounter me any more than I wanted to meet him. The last thing either of us wanted was to rouse the caretaker, who wouldn’t hesitate to call the police. He was probably armed, too.

  Who would have a key to this embassy? The Swiss were supposed to control the building.

  The custodian! Of course, the custodian would have keys! Floyd Stinson, who’d been the custodian here since 1931. Whom the Swiss had kept on. Who’d known Al Becker for years. That must have been Al’s motive! Al had murdered Floyd for his keys to the embassy and had been pilfering from it ever since. Including tonight. But Al had left town. Hadn’t he? Was he here tonight?

  Had he left the embassy and locked the door behind him? Or was he still inside?

  I don’t know how much time passed before I suppressed the physical symptoms of fear and could focus on what I needed to do. I had to get out of this building. It shouldn’t be difficult, I told myself. The basement windows were barred, but the main-floor windows weren’t. I would climb out one of them.

  I left the coat closet and flicked on my torch, again using the red lens. I went through the kitchen and into the first servant’s room I came to. Edging around the bed in the tiny space I found the window lock and unlatched it. Grabbing the lower sash I shoved upward. The window didn’t budge. It must not have been opened in years. I put my full weight into my next shove. The window creaked and shuddered but still didn’t open. It must be painted shut, damn it!