It was time to do something about my own disordered condition. Get back to Lenore’s and clean myself up. I hoped I could get upstairs without her seeing me. I would need to call Williams and make myself available to the FBI for debriefing. And I’d make a verbal report to Lawrence Egbert at OSS first thing in the morning and then write a written report for, what else, the files! It made me queasy to think of General Donovan or even the President reading it, but that was inevitable. I would tell no lies. I’d realized the French postcard file was incomplete, even though we’d closed the investigation, and perfectionist that I was I decided to verify Anne’s birthday while on a holiday weekend trip. I found a German submarine docked at her cottage and notified the Coast Guard as soon as possible. End of report. Signed Mrs Louise Pearlie, OSS Registry Research Assistant.
But the Martins’ cottage, so quaint and picturesque in its clearing, beckoned to me. The FBI would be crawling all over it in a couple of hours, after Eastern Command was sure the submarine was out of the Bay, looking for clues to the targets of the saboteurs. FBI photographers would snap pictures of every square inch of the place but I’d earned the right to see it for myself first.
The door to the cottage wasn’t locked. It swung open, and I went inside. Clearly, twenty men had spent twelve hours here. The floor under my feet in the entry was caked with dirt and mud. In the once tidy kitchen, plates, glasses, and cups were stacked on every surface. Greasy pots and pans were piled in the stone sink. Toast crumbs and coffee grounds crunched under my feet. A half-empty milk bottle rested on a window sill, and I had to edge around a crate of empty beer bottles to get to the sitting room, where blankets and pillows were strewn all over the floor, sofa and chairs.
The bathtub looked as if all twenty of the Nazi seamen had bathed and washed out their allotted two pairs of underwear in it.
It seemed the seamen had stayed out of the bedroom and that Anne had slept alone. The bed was unmade but not tossed, one of the drawers in the dresser was ajar, and the picture of her family and her pearls were indeed missing. Other than that the room was orderly.
I was done here for good. It was time for me to go.
ELEVEN
Anne sat in Leroy’s desk chair with her legs crossed as if she was at a tea party. I started as if I’d seen a ghost.
‘What, no questions for me?’ she asked. ‘No interrogation about postcards and such?’
‘Where did you come from?’ I asked.
‘The shed. I was waiting there to see if you’d come out of the woods. It took you long enough. I got cold, and I wanted a cigarette.’
Anne had altered her appearance significantly. If I’d caught sight of her somewhere else I don’t know if I’d have recognized her. She’d dyed her hair a deep brown and twisted it into a bun at the nape of her head. Perched on her head was a stylish grey fedora that matched a wool coat thrown over the arm of her chair. She wore a smart dove-grey flannel suit and pumps that matched her roomy black pocketbook. Thick make-up – eyeshadow, rouge, and lipstick – coated her face.
‘Where was the radio?’ I asked. She must have had a suitcase radio.
‘Hidden in the skipjack under the canvas,’ she said. The one place Williams and I hadn’t searched. ‘It has new owners now.’
Anne must have handed over the radio to the team of spies and saboteurs the submarine had brought. What an efficient use of assets.
I would have happily lunged at her then, but couldn’t because she pulled a Luger out of her handbag and trained it on me. She motioned me over to her, stood up, and patted me down, finding the Colt and my knife in the pockets of my coat. She tucked them into her large handbag.
‘Sit down next to me,’ she said, sitting on the sofa and patting the cushion next to her. ‘You must be tired. You look like you washed up on the beach from a shipwreck.’
I perched on the arm of the sofa instead. ‘You expected me,’ I said. ‘How did you know I was here?’
‘Lenore called last night about midnight. She said she was worried that you hadn’t come home from visiting me. I told her you’d fallen asleep on the sofa and I didn’t want to wake you up. Oh, and we’re spending the day together. You’re going to help me clean out Leroy’s things and take them to a thrift shop in Washington for me.’
‘Richard Martin’s postcard was your signal that the submarine was on its way, wasn’t it?’
‘So many questions,’ she said. ‘What a curious young woman you are. But we don’t have time to go into all that right now.’
‘I expected you to leave with the Germans,’ I said.
She made a disgusted face. ‘Live in Germany? That awful place! What a nauseating culture the Nazis have created. I’m not a Nazi!’
‘You’re doing a damn good imitation of one. Are you going to kill me?’
‘Not if you do exactly as I say. It’s so convenient that you have a car. Let’s find you some clothes, though, before we leave. You’d attract the attention of a blind man looking the way you do.’
‘Good lord,’ she said, as I stripped down to my underwear in her bedroom. ‘You’re creative, I give you that.’
Anne was a bit heavier and taller than me, but with the help of a belt notched in its last hole I gathered a pair of her wool trousers around my waist. When she saw my feet she grimaced, but I just shrugged and pulled on a pair of Leroy’s heavy socks. I added a flannel shirt, buttoned my new blueberry sweater over it, and pulled on my sea boots again.
On our way out of the front door Anne found me a pea coat to replace the Navy-issued parka Jarvis had given me. I was warm for the first time in hours.
‘Here.’ She handed me a wicker basket waiting by the door. ‘Sandwiches and coffee,’ she said, as if we were going on a picnic. ‘We won’t want to stop anywhere public to eat.’
She urged me down the path to the shed and nudged the door open with her foot. ‘Get one of the cans of gas,’ she said.
It was heavy, and I struggled back up the path ahead of her with both the basket and the gas can, her Lugar just inches from my back.
This wasn’t going to end well for me. Once we got out into the country Anne could put a bullet in my head and dump my remains into some stream or river. She’d had more rest and food than I had and no injuries. She’d have Phoebe’s car. She could escape as cleanly as if she’d left on the submarine.
‘Wait a minute,’ Anne said. Keeping the Luger trained on me she edged over to the dock, drew Jarvis’s Colt from her bag and threw it into the water.
When we got to the car, Anne gave it the once-over. ‘This will do,’ she said. ‘Fill the gas tank.’
I did, and she flung the empty can into the woods. When I opened the car trunk to stow the basket she noticed the gas can I’d brought from Phoebe’s.
‘Any left in that one?’ she asked.
‘Almost full,’ I said.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘You don’t need to know that right now,’ she said. She sat in the passenger seat next to me with the Luger cradled in her lap. ‘Just turn right on St Leonard Road.’
North. If we stayed on Solomons Island Road we could be in Annapolis, or even Baltimore, by tonight.
We cruised through St Leonard, shut down tight on this Sunday morning, past the Esso station and Bertie Woods’ café.
The first floor of Lenore’s guesthouse was bright with light. I imagined Lenore baking bread or muffins, with Lily at her feet hoping for a bite.
‘If you’re not going to kill me, why take me along with you?’ I asked.
‘I need someone to tell my story when this is all over.’
‘So what is your story? You told me you were proud to be an American, that you were happy here.’
‘Oh, I am, and I was. I’m going to start a new life somewhere else in the United States. The Nazis provided me with documents.’
‘That makes no sense. You must be insane!’
; ‘Not at all. I just hate the British more than I love the United States.’
I shifted gears as I braked at the stoplight on Courthouse Square in Prince Frederick. ‘You did this because you hate the British? How does that work?’
‘If the Allies lose, Hitler will rule Great Britain. What a glorious, splendid thought!’
‘Why!’
‘The British destroyed my life. During the Boer War.’
‘That seems farfetched to me.’
‘Farfetched,’ she said, taking her eyes off the road and turning to me. Her eyes burned into mine. ‘Farfetched! The British army burned our farmhouse to the ground. They salted our fields and butchered our livestock, even our pets. My father and older brother died fighting in the war. My mother and younger brother died of typhoid fever in Bloemfontein concentration camp. We’d been a wealthy family, but when my grandmother and I arrived here we shared one room at a boarding house. She worked as a seamstress to support us.’
‘It’s terrible what happened to you and your family,’ I said. ‘But think what this war is doing to innocent American families. You’ve set Nazis loose in our country!’
She shrugged. ‘War is ugly,’ she said. ‘People die. Are you hungry? You must be. There’s a lane coming up we can turn down.’
I drove about a mile down a dirt road canopied with bare oak trees and shielded from the main road with chokeberry bushes. The lane ended at a rusty metal gate that hadn’t been opened in years.
We had our picnic – there was no other good word for it – in the car. I hadn’t eaten since dinner yesterday. Anne had made ham and cheese sandwiches with plenty of mayonnaise and homemade bread, leftovers from the feast she’d prepared for her German guests. The sandwiches were delicious. With a cup of coffee and food my dizziness disappeared, but I was exhausted.
‘You look all done in,’ Anne said to me. ‘I was up all night too. We’ll nap here until dusk.’
Anne tied my hands to the steering wheel with a length of rope she’d packed into the picnic basket. Did she really think I could sleep here?
I woke up with my head resting on the steering wheel.
Anne was awake and already outside, opening my door, untying my wrists, and gesturing me over to a bush to take care of my business, her Luger in her hand.
‘Hurry up,’ she said, ‘and we’ll be on our way. We’ve slept all afternoon.’
Twenty miles later we turned east on Maryland State Road Four, towards Washington. Inside the city it became Pennsylvania Avenue.
‘Turn north on Second Street,’ Anne said.
Union Station! That must be Anne’s plan. If she didn’t intend to kill me, she could tie my hands to the wheel again and leave me in Phoebe’s car in a deserted alley. I wouldn’t be found until morning, and by then she’d be long gone, her destination unknown. That sounded like a good plan to me, and I clung to it.
Instead we turned on Massachusetts.
‘Please tell me where we are going,’ I asked. My nerves were taut, and I wondered what she planned to do with me. The more time I spent with her, the more unbalanced I thought she was.
‘You’ll see.’ Anne seemed edgy, even excited. She gripped her handbag as if it held a sack of gold coins.
We passed the Post Office and the Government Printing Office. Six blocks later we reached Mt. Vernon Square, where the Washington Public Library, with its stunning marble façade, sat regally, ruling over the entire square. When I first lived in DC I’d spent many Saturdays reading magazines and newspapers from all over the world in the War Reading Room.
‘Go around to the back of the library,’ Anne said. ‘There’s a staff parking lot down a ramp, on the lower level. Park the car there.’
I did as I was told. The lot was empty except for our car.
‘What are we doing here?’
‘Waiting until it’s good and dark,’ she said.
For what, I wondered. Why was she delaying her escape? It was still possible that Eastern Command would capture those Nazi submariners on the eastern shore of Maryland and learn she wasn’t with them. And I dearly hoped someone was missing me enough to do something about it.
‘I took a course here when I started working at the St Leonard Library,’ Anne mused. ‘The Town Council paid for it. It was the best week of my life. I stayed at a boarding house a couple of blocks away and walked here every day for classes. I didn’t cook a single meal. Look,’ she said, rummaging around in her purse, ‘I kept the key to the staff entrance.’
So, she was going to kill me and dump my body in the library, where my corpse wouldn’t be found until tomorrow morning.
She caught my frightened expression.
‘Don’t look so stricken. This is the perfect place for me to lock you up until I’m out of the city and for me to wait for a bus where no one can see me.’
Anne seemed almost feverish as she grabbed something in her purse and held on to it so I couldn’t see it.
‘Guess what this is,’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’
She drew the object slowly out, grinning wickedly at me as she waited for me to recognize it.
‘It’s a German stick grenade,’ I said, with as calm a voice as I could muster. ‘Anne, what are you going to do?’
‘Do you know why it’s called a stick grenade?’ she asked, brandishing it. ‘Because the stick attached to the grenade lets you throw it so much further, and I’ve been practicing. My best throw was twenty-seven feet.’
‘Anne, what are you going to do?’ I repeated.
‘Kill as many limeys as I can before I leave town,’ she said, shoving the grenade back into her pocketbook. ‘I’ve got it all figured out. There’s a bus stop outside the front of the library. I can wait for it at the door so no one notices me waiting on the street. I’ll hop off at the British Embassy. Did you know those fools don’t even have a wall around most of the embassy? I can just walk right up to the backside of the compound, where the offices are, and heave this grenade through a window into any room with lights on and people in it.’
‘They’ll catch you, and you’ll hang for it!’
‘No, they won’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll run south through the park until I get to Wisconsin Avenue. I can pick up a streetcar there and be on my way before the smoke clears at the embassy and the night watchman rousts the Royal Marines.’
She was right, she could pull it off.
‘Tomorrow morning after the library opens you can tell the FBI and Lord Halifax, if he’s alive, why I did it.’
‘I’ll tell them,’ I said, desperate to know her entire story before she left, ‘but I’ll need some answers first.’
‘More questions,’ Anne said, sighing. ‘You’re determined, aren’t you?’
‘I just want to understand,’ I said. ‘I’m guessing Richard Martin was a Nazi agent?’
‘Yes, he recruited me when he visited us before the war. The cousin thing was a complete invention. Leroy fell for it. He was not a bright man. I met Martin a couple of days later at a hotel in Annapolis, and he gave me the suitcase radio. I kept it under the bed, and Leroy never noticed it. Martin said that I’d get a postcard when I was needed. Then I was supposed to start monitoring the radio frequency he had me memorize for my instructions. The date was just one we settled on so that I’d know the postcard was authentic. Then you hand-delivered the postcard to me! And I started monitoring the frequency that very day.’
‘You killed your husband,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘I had to. He kept asking me why I lied about my birthday. And I couldn’t figure out how to get him out of the house. Originally, the submarine was going to land the team on the eastern shore, on the Atlantic side. I was going to meet them and drive the saboteurs to Annapolis. But then the captain saw his chance to penetrate the Bay, and he couldn’t resist it.’
‘How did the Nazis know about you?’
‘Between us my grandmother and I must have written a hundred letters, to th
e British, to the United Nations, to the Netherlands government, trying to get restitution from the British for the loss of our farm. The Germans found some of my letters in Hague after they conquered the Netherlands. You know how the Nazis love to riffle through other countries’ file cabinets.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘That’s enough now,’ she said. ‘Time to go.’
Anne kept the Luger at my back while she unlocked the staff entrance, which was in the rear of the library on the lower level. Once inside, the halls were dimly lit by a few random light fixtures, just enough to guide our way into the building. The back of the library held the book stacks and staff work rooms for cataloguing and such. The windows here were just slits, in case a bookshelf toppled. Of course, I’d never been in this part of the building.
With the rest of the public I spent my time on the first level, where the open, high-ceilinged reading rooms and the L’Enfant Map Room were located. But Anne knew her way around down here, and most of the way along the back hall she stopped in front of a door with ‘bookbindery’ lettered on it.
My heart began to pound. I didn’t believe she intended to let me live. Anne opened the door and shoved me inside. I turned to face her, fully expecting her to shoot me. But, just as she had said, she spared me, closing the door on me. I heard the key turn in the lock. I was so relieved that my head spun and I sank to my knees on the cold marble floor while I listened to her footsteps recede.
Anne had said she would wait for the bus inside the library, near the front door. That meant she’d cross the building and climb the first flight of the Grand Staircase up to Literary Hall. From there she could station herself by one of the tall arched windows and watch for the bus. That would minimize her time standing in the street.
From there she’d go to the British Embassy to murder as many English men and women as she could. What a horrific scenario! Not just for the people who died, but for the United States government. Anne was an American citizen. Imagine the newspaper headlines in London!
Could I possibly escape this room and stop her?
I collected myself, felt for the edge of a table, and pulled myself up off the cold floor. It was pitch black. I found the door and turned the doorknob, not expecting success and not having any. Then I felt around the door until I found the light switch and flicked it on. Nothing happened, which I also expected. Most of the power to the building would be cut off to save electricity, except for a few lights scattered around the building.
Louise's Dilemma Page 17