Louise's Dilemma

by Sarah R. Shaber

  And I was expendable. Just another government girl. One who sometimes fooled herself that she could work in the field successfully. Who tried to find danger in a simple innocuous postcard so she could stay out of an oppressive file room for another day or two. Who’d alienated two men who would undoubtedly be considered more valuable than she was.

  No wonder I was frightened.

  EIGHT

  I waited on a corner for Joe, about halfway to his office but out of my way. I’d ducked out of the house early, pleading the need to get to my office, so that I could intercept him here.

  I spotted him immediately in the crowd of war workers streaming east, despite the fact that everyone was bundled up to their eyebrows in scarves and hats. Joe had one of those fur hats that I called a ‘Cossack’ hat, with flaps that covered his ears. It looked like his grandfather had herded sheep in it, it was so old and moth-eaten. That hat, a deeply creased leather briefcase and cheap resoled shoes were important parts of his threadbare professorial cover story.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said, reaching out to him and taking his arm.

  ‘Why, Louise,’ he said, taking my arm in his, ‘what on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘In private.’

  ‘Of course. Let’s go into that café, the breakfast rush is over.’

  We unwrapped layers of coats, scarfs, and gloves, piled them all on a chair, and ordered coffee.

  ‘I should have thought of this,’ Joe said, after the waitress brought us our order. ‘We need to plan for tonight. We should leave separately for the houseboat. What time do you think you can get away from work? Should I get us some food, or do you want to risk going out to dinner?’

  I managed to keep myself from taking both his hands in mine. ‘Darling Joe,’ I said, ‘I’m not coming.’

  He flinched as though I had struck him, and I felt tears welling up behind my eyes.

  He searched for an explanation that wouldn’t be painful. ‘Something’s come up,’ he said. ‘Work. You’ve got to go out of town again. I understand.’

  ‘No. I’ve decided, well …’ I forgot my speech, and could only squeak out, ‘I can’t be with you like that.’

  ‘Louise, darling,’ he said, ‘I’m not free to marry, we’ve talked about this.’

  ‘You think I’m trying to pressure you into marriage? You think I would do that? I don’t want to get married either.’

  ‘Then what has happened?’

  I told him, and there was no way to avoid the harsh truth. I cared more about protecting my job and my new life in Washington than consummating our love affair.

  ‘You’ve given this a lot of thought,’ he said.

  ‘If only I could have you and feel safe,’ I said. ‘But I can’t. I can’t bear the thought of going back to the way my life was before the war.’

  ‘I see. You came to this conclusion rather late, didn’t you? You couldn’t have decided this a few weeks ago?’

  ‘When we ran into Collins last night ice-skating is when I first realized the chance I was taking. The man dislikes me and would like revenge. And there might be others.’

  Joe leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. ‘I’m taking a risk, too,’ he said, ‘in my work. We do so much that’s illegal now.’

  ‘But what would happen to you if an affair became public?’ I said.

  ‘I expect I would get transferred to the New York office. Or maybe Lisbon.’

  ‘Exactly. You would be transferred. I could be fired.’

  I was speaking normally, but tears trickled hotly down my cheeks. Joe wasn’t crying, but he looked stricken, and dark shadows cut deeply into his face.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. And then he got up and left. Leaving me alone.

  I waited until I was sure he was on his way, sipping at the bitter dregs of my coffee. My eyes stung from the effort to keep from crying.

  The waitress stopped by our table with the bill. ‘He’s not worth it, honey,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I think he might be,’ I said.

  I bundled up and left, turning down the nearest alley, almost running to the end of it before spewing onto a pile of filthy ice.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Joan asked. She was at the counter, turning in file request slips for General Donovan, when I got to work.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I broke it off with Joe.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but it was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, stripping off my coat, scarf, hat and gloves, ‘it’s done.’

  Back at my desk I drew on my fingerless gloves and took the first document from my inbox to read and summarize. It was a complex job, and by the time I was done with my synopsis it took up three index cards.

  I went to file the index cards and tossed the document itself on Ruth’s cart. Ruth pushed back a straggling hair, her hands heavily bandaged.

  ‘I wonder if I will ever do anything other than this again,’ she said. ‘I dream about the alphabet at night. Just a year ago my biggest worry in life was if a rich Yale man would invite me to the Heart Ball and whether my mother would let me borrow her sable coat.’

  On a quick break I found the one public telephone we were allowed to use and called the courthouse in Frederick, Maryland. It turned out that the chief clerk was a woman who introduced herself as Linda Sundt.

  ‘I’m looking for a marriage license,’ I said, ‘and whatever supporting documents might be filed with it.’

  ‘I can pull the license for you,’ she said, ‘but I can’t give you any information over the phone. You’ll have to come to the office to see it.’

  ‘But I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m working in Washington.’

  ‘If you can get here tomorrow morning I’ll be here. We’re on a forty-eight-hour work week now, like the President said, “fight or work”.’

  Why not? I could drive to Prince Frederick tomorrow morning. I was sure Phoebe would let me use her car. It wasn’t like we didn’t have jerry cans of gasoline sitting around the garage! I could fill up the car and stash another can in the trunk. It would be good to get out too, instead of moping around the boarding house.

  I hadn’t thought of what it would be like to live in the same house with Joe now. I wondered if one of us would have to move. It would be almost impossible to find another room in the city. But how could we share space in the house together? I’d need to stay in my cold room by myself.

  ‘I’ll do my best to be there tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll pull the file. What’s the name?’

  ‘Martin,’ I said. ‘Richard Martin and Anne Venter.’

  ‘I remember where I know you from,’ Agent Gray Williams said.

  He was waiting for me outside the door to the OSS cafeteria wearing an OSS visitor’s badge.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘I don’t remember you.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘It was last summer. You were dating a man from the Vichy French embassy, and I had to warn you to stay away from foreigners. Don’t worry, I don’t fault you for not reminding me. It can’t be pleasant for a woman to remember her mistakes.’

  I felt so worn out and jaded, I didn’t even get angry. ‘I took your advice,’ I said. ‘I avoid men with accents at all costs now.’

  ‘Smart girl. Listen, let me take you to lunch. My boss says I can brief you on the Martin murder. We’ve arrested Dennis Keeler.’

  ‘The ferryman? Has he confessed?’

  ‘Of course not, it’s a capital crime.’

  Only to hear more about the Martins would I spend another second in this man’s company.

  We found an empty booth at the café across the street, ordering coffee, open-faced turkey sandwiches with gravy, mashed potatoes and peas. The peas were canned, but the turkey and gravy were hot and tasted homemade.

  ‘Remember when Constable Long insisted we leave the Cooke farmhouse so he could talk to Frank? Well, Frank told him everything. He, Leroy Martin and Denn
is Keeler had been smuggling beef to a butcher in Alexandria.’

  ‘Selling it for more than the established price,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. Then the butcher sold the prime cuts for a fortune and disguised the lesser cuts as prime, too. Long didn’t tell us because he figured it was a local crime, none of our business. He’d warn them off, and that would be the end of it.’

  ‘Until I found Leroy Martin’s body.’

  ‘Yeah, that was something Long didn’t expect, for sure.’

  Williams gestured for the waitress. ‘Do you have any dessert?’ he asked her. ‘Real dessert, not Jell-O.’

  She hesitated. Williams showed her his FBI identification.

  ‘I can find you a slice of coconut cake,’ she said.

  Williams glanced at me questioningly.

  ‘None for me,’ I said. ‘I’m not very hungry.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Williams said, ‘Frank came home from the naval base a couple of nights a week. He and Leroy butchered one of Frank’s beeves in the tobacco barn. The FBI lab verified the blood on the floor was bovine, by the way.

  ‘Frank and Leroy dressed the carcass, threw the waste into the Patuxent, loaded up Leroy’s truck with the beef, and hauled it to Dennis’s ferry landing. Dennis met them and ferried them across the river so they could avoid the main roads. For a price. He wasn’t a full partner. Then Leroy and Frank drove the beef to the butcher in Alexandria and both got back home in time for breakfast.’

  I drew patterns in my leftover gravy with my fork, until I remembered my table manners and placed it correctly on the side of my plate. Sometimes I wished I could smoke; it seemed to soothe my friends wonderfully.

  ‘There must be hundreds of people doing the same thing all over the country,’ I said. ‘Mostly obeying the law, but not quite. But they don’t murder each other.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Williams. ‘Here’s where the plot thickens. After you found Leroy’s body, Constable Long told me what Frank had confided to him. It seems that two of them were considering quitting. Both Leroy and Frank were worried about the strict penalties attached to the new rationing laws. Then, when you and Collins, and then me, showed up at the Martin cottage with questions about the postcard from Leroy’s cousin in France, they got really rattled. Not about the postcard itself, but about all the attention they were getting from the government. Anne was pressuring Leroy, too.’

  ‘Did Anne know about the smuggling?’

  The waitress brought Williams’s cake, a big enough piece for two people. He stabbed at it with his fork.

  ‘She says not, just that she knew Leroy was doing something he shouldn’t. Anyway, Dennis was furious. The money was so good, and he wanted a bigger piece of the action for himself. He owned a truck, but it was up on blocks because he didn’t have the money to fix it. Frank told Constable Long that Dennis was going to ask Leroy for a loan, and then they could double the business. I figure that Leroy said no, so Dennis killed him. Maybe he figured he could take Leroy’s place.’

  In between bites of cake Williams told me the rest of the story.

  While I was discovering Leroy’s body and freeing Anne from the shed, Long and Williams searched for Dennis to question him about the smuggling operation. He wasn’t at home – in fact his wife was furious because several paying customers had driven up to the landing who had to be sent away because her son couldn’t operate the ferry by himself.

  She directed Williams and Long to Dennis’s favorite bar, but he wasn’t there. Nor was he at the café drinking coffee and griping.

  Their search was interrupted when I found Leroy’s body and they were called to the scene. Anne couldn’t identify her assailant; she insisted he had grabbed her from behind and blindfolded her with her scarf. No, she hadn’t noticed his clothing, or his height, or anything else about him.

  Anne wasn’t surprised to learn that Leroy had been smuggling beef, nor that he and Dennis had been arguing over the past few days. She didn’t like Dennis, she said; she felt he was a bad influence on her husband.

  Williams scraped up every last crumb from his cake plate.

  ‘It was Frank who finally found Dennis, in a roundabout way,’ Williams said. ‘He saw lights in his old tobacco barn and called Constable Long. When we got there Dennis was wrapped up in canvas to keep warm and most of the way through a bottle of cheap bourbon.’

  The waitress cleared our plates and poured us fresh coffee.

  ‘But Dennis says he didn’t kill Leroy?’

  ‘He put on a damn good show of being shocked by the course of events,’ Williams said. ‘Outraged that we suspected him just because he and Leroy had argued.’

  ‘Were there any fingerprints on the oyster knife?’

  ‘Nope. Wiped clean. But we’ll get the goods on him. Dennis is not a bright man. He will have made mistakes, and we’ll find them.’

  We finished our coffee and turned down refills.

  ‘So you see,’ Williams said, ‘that French postcard of yours meant nothing at all. I’m surprised your office bothered, actually. But then they didn’t send a real agent.’

  I kept my mouth shut. I needed Williams out of my life. I could take no chances that he would find out about Joe.

  Williams threw a few coins onto the table for the tip. ‘You’re very competent, Louise. But I expect you’d rather work in the office than get mixed up in something this disturbing again, wouldn’t you?’

  I shook hands with Williams, praying this would be the last time I ever saw the man, and turned down the street towards OSS. Before I got there I stepped off into an alley I knew ended in a tiny park to have a good cry.

  I wasn’t the only one looking for a private spot.

  Seated on a stone bench was a middle-aged man with his head in his hands. He heard my footsteps and raised his head from his hands. His face was streaked with tears.

  I didn’t know what to do. Should I pretend I hadn’t seen him and walk away? I had my own problems. But how could I do such an unkind thing as walk away from his distress!

  He smiled at me wanly, and I pulled my own ravaged heart together and went over and sat down next to him. The stone seat was ice cold.

  The man wore a checked wool cap and a heavy duffel coat. A hand knit scarf kept his neck warm. His hair was an ordinary dirty blond with grey around the temple and ears. In one of his calloused workingman’s hands he held a black-rimmed telegram.

  Oh my God.

  ‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘Can I help in any way?’

  He shook his head. ‘Too late for any of that, Ma’am. I’m sorry you had to come upon me like this. I thought I was all right, but then, well, I felt myself giving way and ducked down the alley to compose myself.’

  ‘Your son?’ I whispered, feeling my heart clutch.

  His eyes welled up again. ‘You’d think so, the way I’m carrying on. No, my dog Bonnie.’

  For a minute I thought I’d misunderstood him.

  ‘She was such a good dog. My grandchildren adored her.’

  ‘I don’t think I understand.’ It sure looked like the black-rimmed paper the man held in his hand was an official Army telegram. Perhaps he wasn’t quite right in the head.

  ‘When the war started – my name’s Alec Newton, by the way – the Army needed more military dogs than they could possibly raise and train from puppies. So they asked citizens to give up their pets, as long as they were healthy and under four years old. They called it “Dogs for Defense”. If the dog did well in boot camp, it was in the Army. The washouts went home.’

  ‘So Bonnie …?’

  ‘Did real good. Graduated at the top of her class! ’Course, I’d trained her already. She rode with me on my milk truck every day. I couldn’t do anything else for the war effort, I’m too old to enlist, got no skills especially. So I gave Bonnie to the Army. Other people willingly sacrificed their sons. The least I could do was donate my dog.’

  ‘She’s dead?’

  ‘Yeah, in Greenland. So far away! Sh
e patrolled the perimeter of one of our bases there. Here …’ Newton pulled a crumpled photograph out of his pocket. It showed a young soldier, bundled up like an Eskimo, in a frozen landscape, kneeling next to a small mostly black German shepherd with one floppy ear.

  ‘I got her for free because of that ear,’ Newton said.

  Bonnie was clothed just as warmly as her soldier. Fur and canvas boots laced up to her knees. A heavy padded canvas coat encased her small body.

  ‘Bonnie’s soldier sent me this picture when they first got to Greenland. I hope he’s going to write and tell me what happened to her. The telegram just says “in the line of duty”.’

  The man burst into tears. I put my arm around his shoulder, and before I knew it I was crying uncontrollably with him. The two of us sat together on that cold hard concrete bench and just plain sobbed our eyes out. Not just about Bonnie, of course. About everything else that was so tragic about this awful war.

  Newton dried his eyes with his scarf. ‘Now I got to tell my wife and daughters and the grandkids.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, gulping back my own tears. ‘You should be so proud of Bonnie.’

  ‘I am,’ he said, tucking the telegram and photo away into his pocket. ‘I hear the dogs that die in action get a special medal. I hope so.’

  I did, too.

  I was wrung out when I got home. What had gone on that day had knocked me to my knees more than once. I was on my feet now, but teetering. What I wanted to do was slip upstairs and climb into bed under my covers with my bottle of gin. But I couldn’t do that, after what I had done to Joe – I had to face him.

  I stripped off my coat, scarf, gloves and hat and threw them over the chair in the hall. Behind me I could hear Phoebe, Ada, and Henry in the lounge. But not Joe’s accent. Maybe he wasn’t home yet, or was brooding in his room.

  Phoebe came out into the hall. ‘Louise, I’m so glad you’re home! What an awful week it has been. Come sit down by the fire with us. I made cheese straws today, and Henry brought home a bottle of Buffalo Trace. We are determined to be gay!’