Okay. This was the bookbindery. Could there be another entrance that Anne didn’t know about? With an unlocked door? I doubted it, but I needed to find out. I felt my way around the perimeter of the room, running into bookshelves and tables that interrupted the walls as I went.
As I felt my way around one table I came across some tools of the bookbinders trade. A wooden press with an oversized screw, a sticky jar of glue, cardboard and leather rectangles, and then my fingers clasped an awl. It was about four inches long with a sharp point and a wooden handle that fit neatly into the palm of my hand. I slid it into my pea coat pocket. It wouldn’t be much defense against a Luger but it was better than nothing.
The palms of my hands moved across empty wall again, until I came across a dumbwaiter. I knew that’s what it was, there was no mistaking it. I felt around the edges. It was about four feet tall and a bit narrower, say three and a half feet. The door was divided horizontally with the two halves meeting in the middle. There were three buttons on a side panel. Lower Floor, First Floor, and Second Floor. I grabbed the door handle and pulled it down. Both halves of the door flew open with a loud clang. About halfway through the process an automatic function engaged and the door opened completely without any more leverage from me.
The dumbwaiter must be on a separate electric circuit from the lights.
The normal process for using the dumbwaiter was to close the doors and then select the floor. But I would need to do it backwards, pushing the button for the floor before pulling the door closed from inside. I didn’t know if the dumbwaiter would even work with those two functions reversed.
My eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dark. Inside the dumbwaiter a shelf divided the space. I couldn’t possibly fit inside. But when I grasped the shelf and pulled, it came out of the dumbwaiter and dropped on the floor with an echoing crash.
I climbed about halfway in before I felt panic hit. This was a tiny space. I’d have to fold myself into it to fit. How could I mash the button for the dumbwaiter to rise before the automatic door slammed on my arm? Would the dumbwaiter door rip my arm off if it was caught? Could I get the door open from inside? What if I was trapped inside until morning! I felt sweat begin to prickle between my shoulderblades.
I backed away from the dumbwaiter until I hit the edge of a table. I wasn’t going up in that thing. It wasn’t meant for people.
I completed my patrol around the edge of the bookbinding room. There were no other doors. I was stuck here.
Had Anne left the building yet? Even if she had, it was a long bus ride up to the British Embassy. There still might be time to stop her if I could get out of this room and find a telephone. Here in Washington I knew whom to call – the D.C. Metropolitan Police. Patrol cars were out on the streets all night, and they could get to the embassy quickly, find Anne and arrest her.
It was the dumbwaiter or nothing.
I didn’t know until then that I was afraid of small dark enclosed places. Looking into the open dumbwaiter made me shudder with apprehension. I forced myself to climb inside, contorting myself into a position that left my hands free to work the controls of the dumbwaiter. Once inside I rehearsed. I was afraid I’d fracture a wrist if I didn’t move decisively enough.
I stretched an arm around the front of the dumbwaiter and found the buttons by feel, since I wasn’t about to poke my head out. I pushed the button for the first floor, then immediately grasped the top half of the door with both hands, gripping the edge with my palms facing toward me, and yanked the door down, drawing my hands inside as quickly as I could. Even then I felt the door graze my fingertips.
In the dark space I waited for the elevator to move, for what seemed like so long I thought its power was cut off too. Then, with a jerk, the dumbwaiter began to move upward. As I tried to calm my jangling nerves I told myself it would only be seconds until I reached the first floor, but then to my shock the dumbwaiter didn’t stop! It kept climbing. I must have hit the wrong button. It didn’t matter. I’d still be out of that coffin within minutes. Above me I heard the brake engage as the dumbwaiter stopped at the second floor of the library. Eagerly, I reached towards the door, only to find its surface completely flat, with just a crease to tell me where the halves met. I scrabbled at the crack in the door, trying to get enough purchase to force it open and up. The door didn’t budge. I couldn’t get out! How could I remain in this tiny space until morning and keep my sanity?
My chest heaved with apprehension, and I caught myself pummeling the metal door in frustration. The only thing that kept me from losing complete control was the thought that Anne might still be in the library and might hear me screaming and beating on the dumbwaiter door.
Working myself into a slightly more comfortable position, I curled up in a ball facing the door of the dumbwaiter. Here the staff of the library would find me tomorrow morning. How humiliating. I’d be the laughing stock of the entire city! I could just imagine the headlines. ‘Failed would-be girl spy trapped in dumbwaiter overnight.’ How mortifying.
Even worse, the British embassy would be counting its dead. Granted, Anne had a right to be angry, very angry, about British crimes during the Boer War. But that happened decades ago, and Lord Halifax and the men and women who worked at the British embassy today weren’t responsible. Neither were the British people, who were suffering privations we couldn’t imagine to keep Hitler at bay.
I shifted my position and felt something round and hard in my coat pocket. The awl I’d picked up in the bookbindery! I grabbed it and forced its blade into the crease between the two halves of the dumbwaiter door. Using the awl I pried the doors apart until I could grasp the edge of the top half and push it up. In the position I was in getting enough purchase seemed impossible at first, but then I put both feet up against the wall and shoved again.
The door flew open, and I tumbled out onto the marble floor, banging my knee in the process.
I didn’t have time to recover. I had to find a telephone!
I was in the stacks surrounded by tall bookshelves, which loomed over me in the dark. I might have never found my way out, but a light on in a distant hall led me to a corridor lined with small offices. Telephones! The first door wasn’t locked, but when I rushed for the telephone on the tiny desk there wasn’t a dial tone.
The next office was locked.
The telephone was dead in the next office, too.
So the power to the telephone system must have been cut off when the electricity was shut off for the night. Maybe outside the building I could find a pay telephone that was working.
But I didn’t have a key to the building!
At least I wasn’t trapped in the dumbwaiter all night.
Then I remembered that on the first floor of the library, where the reading rooms were, there were two pay telephones, outside the L’Enfant Map Room. It was just possible they were on a different circuit than the library’s telephones.
I followed the dim lights ahead of me, and after a short flight of marble stairs I found myself in a spacious foyer facing the Grand Staircase that led down to the first floor.
The staircase began its descent directly ahead, but shortly split in two, each half curving along the front wall of the library across the huge iron-framed windows that fronted the entrance of the building. The two staircases met at the small foyer inside the main door of the library. If Anne were still in the building she’d be waiting there for her bus.
My feet were sore and I needed to move quietly, so I had a momentary fanciful urge to slide down one of the winding mahogany bannisters, but figured I’d fly off at a curve and break my neck.
If one can tiptoe down a staircase, that’s what I did, clinging to the bannister for support and stopping every few steps to listen. I heard only silence echoing. When I got near the bottom I sat down on a marble step and peered through the bannister railings. No one waited by the front door. I crept the rest of the way down, and then there was nothing else to do but step into the entrance foyer for a go
od look around. No one was there.
I felt relief course through my system, then remembered that what was good for me wasn’t good for the British Embassy. If Anne had caught a bus shortly after locking me in the bindery, she would be most of the way there by now.
Two pay telephone booths stood across the wide hall next to the double doors of the L’Enfant Map Room. I ran across the marble floor, pulled open the mahogany door to one of the booths and grabbed for the telephone receiver. Thank you, Lord, a dial tone!
But I didn’t have a nickel! Damn it, my pocket book was in Phoebe’s car! Frantically, I searched through the pockets of the borrowed pea coat and trousers I was wearing. Not even a penny! I couldn’t call the police. What now?
I heard a door slam nearby. Through the glass of the booth I saw Anne come out of a rest room across the foyer, her handbag clutched tightly to her side. She hadn’t left yet after all. So there was still hope I could stop her.
Oh, she had a Luger, my switchblade, and a Nazi stick grenade, but I had a bookbinding awl, didn’t I?
I slid onto the floor of the phone booth to hide and think.
Then I heard her footsteps. They were, step by step, inexorably coming my way! She must have seen me! And there I was, crouching on a telephone booth floor, so vulnerable. I was exhausted, and my feet were terribly sore. I was no match for her.
Anne would shoot me this time, I was sure of it.
As she came closer I could imagine her pulling the Luger out of her oversized pocketbook, her left hand reaching for the door of the box, and finally standing over me with her gun to my head.
Instead, I heard the door of the box next door open. Anne was making a telephone call! I squeezed tightly up against the wall next to her booth and strained to catch her words.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘It’s late. I’ve been waiting for almost an hour.’
She’d called the bus terminal!
‘Are you sure it’s running only ten minutes late? Yes, I know it’s still icy in places. All right, of course I’ll wait, I have no choice.’
I heard Anne hang up the telephone, and as she left the booth, I burst out of mine and tackled her from behind.
Taken completely by surprise, she landed flat on her stomach on the hard marble floor. I could hear her gasp as the air was knocked out of her lungs. Her pocketbook skidded across the floor, and I scrabbled over her to grab it.
Anne wasn’t so easily defeated. She seized one of my sore feet with both hands, and I squealed in pain. She dragged me back towards her, and as I kicked back as hard as I could with my other foot she feinted backwards, letting go of me.
She was on her feet quickly, more quickly than I, and as I struggled to stand up to face her she slapped my face hard, knocking me to the side. I kept myself from falling flat by breaking my fall with my hands.
I rolled away just as she aimed a kick at my head.
If Anne hadn’t missed that kick and lost her footing I’d be dead today, no question. It certainly wasn’t skill that won me that fight. Anne lost her balance and toppled back against one of the telephone booths with one hand smashing back against the door.
I don’t have a clear memory of what happened next, but the next thing I knew Anne was pinned to the door of the booth with a bookbinding awl piercing her hand. Blood trickled down her arm.
Anne didn’t scream, but made soft moaning sounds while I went through her bag looking for the rope she used to tie me up in the car. When I found it I pulled the awl out of her twitching hand and tied her to a cast-iron grate in the wall. Blood gushed out of her wound, but I couldn’t have cared less.
I found a nickel in her purse and called the police.
Anne hadn’t gone meekly. She fought and screamed all the way to the paddy wagon. It took four policemen to force her inside and lock the door. I rode in another police car to the DC Jail behind the paddy wagon. The jail was a famously hideous building, its plaster façade painted an odd blue to resemble stone, which it didn’t at all.
Inside the stark police infirmary a medic cleaned and bandaged my feet and legs.
‘Your lacerations and bruises aren’t serious,’ he said, ‘but there are lots of them. You’ll need to rest and stay off your feet for at least a week. I’ll send some laudanum tablets home with you. You won’t need them for more than a couple of days.’
I managed to nap for a couple of hours until Agent Williams showed up to debrief me. I told him the entire story, except for the part about how terrified I was of being trapped in the dumbwaiter.
‘We caught the saboteurs,’ Williams said. ‘They were boarding a train for Chicago in Baltimore when one of them dropped the suitcase radio. It fell open on the platform, and the four of them were tackled by a bunch of GIs traveling in their car.’
The Navy and Coast Guard were scouring the bay for any sign of a scuttled Nazi submarine. If they located it they’d destroy it completely, so that the American public would never know that Germans had made their way into the Chesapeake Bay. Close watch was being kept on the coast of the eastern shore of Maryland, in hopes that the submariners could be captured trying to escape.
‘Eastern Command gave us permission to search the Martin property yesterday mid-afternoon,’ Williams said. ‘While we were there Constable Long came driving like a maniac down the driveway. Some Coastguardsman had called him, wouldn’t give him a name, crazy worried that he’d left you alone at the Martins. His HQ had forbidden him to report it, trying to keep the scene under wraps. Then Constable Long talked to Mrs Sullivan, who said Anne had called her and told her the two of you were together.’
Constable Long and Williams had searched for me, and Anne, in the vicinity of St Leonard for hours, until the DC police called them to tell them that Anne and I had been found.
‘I suppose they’ll charge her with treason?’ I asked.
‘I should think so. She’s a citizen who aided an enemy of the United States, with intent to adhere to the enemy’s cause.’
‘Will she hang?’
‘Nah. DC has an electric chair.’
EPILOG
I hobbled to the front door of ‘Two Trees’, with the support of a DC policeman on each arm.
Phoebe opened the door, and she and Ada rushed out into the cold to hug me.
‘You poor girl!’ Phoebe said.
‘Louise, we’ve been so worried!’ Ada said.
I winced as I moved to the door, and they both looked down at my bandaged legs and feet.
‘Oh, my Lord!’ Phoebe said.
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ I said.
I thanked the policemen, one of whom had driven Phoebe’s car home, miraculously without a scratch on it, and with Ada and Phoebe’s help I limped inside the house.
‘Baby,’ Dellaphine said, standing in the hall with a tray holding a mug of hot cocoa and a plate of ham biscuits, ‘what on earth happened to you?’
‘I was walking on the beach after dark,’ I said. ‘It was so stupid of me. I tripped over a stone jetty and fell. I thought it would be smart to take off my shoes, to give me more traction, but then I stepped into a pile of oyster shells and fell again. I twisted my ankle and couldn’t walk. I’d still be there, I think, if Mrs Sullivan hadn’t called the local constable when I didn’t return to her guesthouse.’
‘Girls shouldn’t be out walking any beach alone at night,’ Henry said, coming out of the lounge.
Joe was behind him. I tried to read his expression and didn’t see any anger there.
‘Here,’ he said, with a faint trill to the ‘r’, ‘let me take you the rest of the way to the sofa.’ He edged Ada and Phoebe aside, slid one arm under my shoulders and the other under my knees, and carried me into the warm lounge.
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Louise's Dilemma Page 18