279 i dont know where your going with this
617 [inaudible] the index itself
279 yes/but can you protect [BLACKED OUT] going to run for the senate in [BLACKED OUT] is still his law partner at [BLACKED OUT] cromwell/itd be a disaster for [BLACKED OUT]/never mind break [BLACKED OUT] heart
617 i know how safehaven worked/but without the index i cant protect him/the state files alone run into the hundreds/i ran the hollerith cards through for the post files/and you realize theres all kinds of collateral filings at s.s.u. [FOOTNOTE] too/the military side as well /six seconds silence/
279 how bad is it
617 i think the political implications are pretty awful/its enough to end his career/whatever it does to [BLACKED OUT]/the state files ive seen are pretty clear/he was trying to free up swiss ig farben securities for pennies/for himself and his clients/using his connections in bern with the/ENDS
[DISK CHANGE/456/457]
279 [inaudible] to the end/hes my [BLACKED OUT] /12 seconds silence/
279 without the index/you cant find a thing/its just paperwork on shelves
617 thats what im thinking
279 where
617 the safehaven state liaison files/the central index to states holdings
279 how many other indexes are there
617 safehaven packed up so fast ours here appears to be the only one left/only one i know of /10 seconds silence/telephone ring
279 hello/oh hello norton/no the yugoslav consular officer is a croat named pejakovic/hes reliable/certainly/no id ask [BLACKED OUT]/hes seen that material/fine/goodbye /three seconds silence/
279 where was i/you said there were bigger fish
617 [BLACKED OUT] for sure/and [BLACKED OUT]/ive seen the banking files/they came across my desk more than once/so you see its very big/bigger than [BLACKED OUT]
279 the democrats would have something like this page one from coast to coast mish
617 yes/hang on/dont say anything/ill write it down /six seconds silence/
617 nod if you agree /nine seconds silence/
279 my god/thats bold
617 what do you think /nine seconds silence/
279 cant you just lose the evidence
617 its all we have
279 I need to think /knock on door/
279 one moment [inaudible] /22 seconds inaudible conversation/
279 i feel sick mish/i feel physically sick/i feel heartsick/this is my [BLACKED OUT] were talking about
617 i couldnt believe it either
279 i need to talk to [BLACKED OUT]
617 fine but i have to move fast/you understand/theres almost no time /scrape of furniture/
/13 seconds inaudible conversation/
ENDS
LII
SAG HARBOR, NEW YORK
APRIL 1947
It was an hour before sunset, with the party at its height, the porch deck full of chairs and tables, the tablecloths fluttering in the shore breeze, the lanterns awaiting the dusk. Eleanor and Foster left the party separately, making their way to the dock where the thirty-footer lay moored. A cloud of fireflies curled close to shore and their dancing light reflected off the waxed hull. Aboard, they had no need to speak; they each went about their separate duties in silence. Six years it had been, the summer of 1941, since their last sail together, the last summer of America’s peace, on the Chesapeake, on a beautifully rigged boat someone had lent Foster for the weekend.
She brought up a pair of Scotches from the galley and sat herself on the bench seat to her brother’s left, at the tiller. They clinked glasses and she broke the silence between them.
“Treasury has had a project called Safehaven up and going since the fall of 1944. It’s a vacuum cleaner of a thing, taking in all kinds of evidence, good, bad, and indifferent, about German financial connections. It’s Morgenthau’s brainchild.”
“Heard so,” Foster replied. “You know, Ellie, if Truman’s boys spent half as much time trying to figure out how to get Germany back on her feet as they do looking for Nazi loot, we’d all be further ahead.”
This was old territory; Eleanor chose not to argue with him. “The thing of it is, Foster, Safehaven had a large team in Bern during the war.”
Foster looked down at her over the top of his spectacles and raised his eyebrows. “Heard that. There’s a shop in London too.”
Ellie nodded. They were half a mile from shore already and it was a startlingly beautiful sunset on Lake Ontario. The lake’s wave tops were paved with egg-yolk yellow light. The clouds huddled around the crest of the setting sun, and the bobbing of the boat was all she’d ever needed to calm herself.
“They wanted to send Allen home, you know,” she said. “I saw the file at State, from the Bern post files. Safehaven’s after him.”
Foster was immobile. He had that set to his jaw, though, that meant he hadn’t liked what he’d heard. If Foster hated anything, it was hearing something he hadn’t known about beforehand. “Sent home for what? What’ve you seen?”
“The Treasury people don’t like me and I don’t like them, Foster,” Eleanor began by way of preamble.
“Doesn’t matter a damn who’s behind it,” her brother replied. “What matters is what they’ve got to show the President. That’s the name of the game.” Foster steered the boat to the northwest with a practiced swing of the tiller. “What’ve you seen, Ellie? What have they got?”
“They had enough to send him home. Looks to me like they caught Allen red-handed, with his hand in the cookie jar.”
“Specifically? What exactly?”
“I think Allen was cutting a deal with IG Farben while the war was still on. Him and that smoothie Hungarian sidekick of his, Gero whatever.”
Foster said nothing, the thoughts working their way across his impassive face. “Did you see any reference in what you read to evidence describing who the vendors actually were?”
“No. The Safehaven people seem to have figured out he wanted to piece off the Farben Swiss subsidiaries. He knew the right banks to ask, I’m told.”
Foster nodded. “Well, that’s something. At least he wasn’t paying the SS cash on the barrelhead,” Foster said, grim-faced. Then he caught the look of horror on her face and broke out a rare laugh.
Eleanor flushed and straightened. “Foster, you may not want to take this seriously, but I could lose my good name, maybe my career at State, if this gets out. I’ve worked too damn hard for too damn long to be brought down by that man.” She sat there, her jaw out, Foster’s feminine double, and he looked down at her and saw his own reflection in her anger. “You’re not a woman stuck in a man’s world, Foster, with just about everyone around you waiting to see you fail. I don’t need to give them a reason, Foster, believe me.”
“I understand,” Foster said, his voice too hoarse to be heard over the flapping of the sails as he began to tack into the dying evening breeze. “Believe me, I do. I’ve decided to run for the Senate, Ellie. Not to mention I’m on the delegation at the UN on the Palestine file.”
“Palestine. There’s another kettle of fish.”
“We’re near the sandbar. Let’s haul up for a bit, Ellie, shall we?” Foster asked. They reefed in the sails, dropped anchor, and let the sailboat yaw in the waves of Long Island Sound.
“Foster, if this gets out,” Eleanor announced, “Allen’s going to bring us all down, along with everything we’ve ever worked for, gone.”
Foster propped his moccasins up on the taffrail. “Truman’s going to die a quiet death in the next election. And we should be at the head of the line when President Dewey hands out the spoils. Question is, how can what Treasury have on Allen upset the applecart? First, what have they got? Second, where have they got it? Third,” Foster asked, counting his points off on his fingertips, “who the hell is looking after it? Always best if your opponent’s bullets are in your hand and he’s pointing an empty gun at you.”
On the shore, the first lights were coming on, barely visible in
the full light of the sunset, and the trees of the lakeshore forests had merged to a single rough hedge against the sky.
Eleanor listened, but she wasn’t there. A kernel of resolution about Misha’s overture had taken root in her. With all her might she stared at the last of the sun, remembering Clover’s long-ago remark, the one about sharks.
LIII
WASHINGTON, D.C.
MAY 1947
A week later. She’d paced her office, distracted and jumpy, from half past eight onwards, working up her nerve. How do criminals do it? she wondered, staring out her window. No wonder they look so hunted. She’d worn her gray twinset this morning, wanting to blend into the woodwork, seeking camouflage.
After waiting for the mail clerk to clear the floor’s morning post and send the elevator back up, Eleanor took the elevator to the basement, thankfully alone, her big book bag in front of her like armor.
“Mornin,’ Miz Dulles,” the guard at the archive door drawled, unlocking the electric gate with a practiced fingertip on the Open button. “Nice to see y’all. Havin’ a wander, are you?”
“You can open that gate sight unseen, Mr. Carlson,” Eleanor said, and showed him the authorization she had typed herself, to view the southwestern Europe post files.
“Oh, you know me, Miz Dulles,” Carlson replied vaguely, then signed off on the clearance panel, handed her an orange chit, and filed Eleanor’s dummy authorization in his routing tray. “Don’t need to tell you where the department’s Austria files are, now, do I, Miz Dulles?”
“I’m sure you don’t, Mr. Carlson,” Eleanor replied brightly. She shifted her book bag against her side and felt the big binder nudge against her ribs. She nearly gave up, then and there. Her heart was pounding; a caterpillar of sweat zigzagged down her back.
“Good luck, ma’am. Looks like you got a pile to do.” He was practically doffing his cap, Eleanor noted with satisfaction. “Can I carry that big green feller for you, ma’am?”
“Oh, no, thanks, there’s life in the old gal yet.” He favored her with a Southerner’s chuckle as she hoisted her knit book bag over her shoulder and turned toward the archives room. “Never ends, does it, Mr. Carlson?” she asked over her shoulder, and he laughed again.
Instead of turning right, for Austria, Eleanor strode across the main aisle then took a sharp left, where an old black-on-green metal sign read Treasury Liaison.
The State Department’s basement archive was nicknamed “the vault” but was in fact a single vast room, perhaps a hundred feet long and half as broad, filled with a maze of filing cabinets jammed together in quadrangles to form the walls of small rooms of cabinets and even smaller alcoves; some of the alcoves had a massive head-high safe forming one wall. It was rather like being in a medieval labyrinth except the hedge was green metal, not leaf and limb. Eleanor double-checked the serial number for boxes upon boxes of State’s Safehaven accession, moved here to the department’s basement trove when OSS vanished into thin air a year ago. “No one will want to read these files but you, trust me,” Misha had told her. “No one will be the wiser. The trick will be …”
Eleanor knew what the trick would be: she found the right alcove and double-checked the citation on her paper slip.
The filing cabinets stood shoulder-high to her; amongst them waited a simple desk and chair. She laid the big olive binder down, then scanned the cards indicating the holdings of the filing cabinets around her. She started on her left, determined to move clockwise until she found the index. She opened the first filing cabinet.
As the drawer rumbled to its full extension, Eleanor’s mind spun furiously. She glanced away, taking a deep breath. Indeed what she’d planned on was impossible: the Safehaven index was on punch cards, thousands of them, hanging from Hollerith racks. The cards swung slowly back and forth, mocking her. She put her hand on them to stop the swinging.
It had never occurred to her, because she’d seen all kinds of indices before in State’s neat binders containing neat columns of cross-references and file locators, that Safehaven was an octopus, sucking in tens of thousands of leads for thousands of potential investigations around the globe. She should have guessed that the scope of the filings meant a huge index, with thousands of cross-filings.
She reached for the worn wooden chair, steadying herself with a hand on the chair back.
Eleanor forced a deep breath into the deepest part of her lungs, the way she did when white water lay ahead and she had to work her faltboot through the treacherous currents around the rocks. I must think.
She discarded several options and then realized that sitting there was a dead giveaway. She was at work, this was a place she knew, where she was respected, where she had made herself useful. She had damn well better look the part.
She pulled a fresh legal pad in front of her and opened her fountain pen. You have to dig a hole, start somewhere.
From the third drawer—until the day she died she would never be able to explain why she picked the third drawer—she pulled at random some three dozen cards and fanned them out on the tabletop.
TEHRAN/CONFERENCE/PROCEEDINGS
TELEGRAPH/DECRYPTS
TELEPHONE/WIRETAPS/SOURCE
TELEXES/OTHER
TRANSCRIPTS/WIRETAPS
TRANSFERS/CABLE/DECRYPTS
She stopped.
They tapped Allen’s phone in Bern.
She reached for the Hollerith needle in the tray atop the cabinet, standing on tiptoe to get it, her back cracking as she stretched. Replacing the cards at the head of the queue of hundreds in the third drawer, she opened the first drawer and looked for the D section.
There it was, a sub-archive card that read: DECRYPTS/SOURCE/ REPORTS/BERN and LONDON and a dozen other cities, including New York and Rome and Lisbon. Safehaven had been tapping the bank transfers.
Certain she had found the shorthand “handwriting” of the financial investigators, Eleanor lifted the card and looked at its back.
Blank.
She bit her lip.
Think: Safehaven needed evidence.
If you knew the accounts, you knew the principals involved … and that’s the way indictments are built, name by name, date by date.
She carefully inserted the pin through the punch card hole for Accounts and was rewarded with a rich trove of decrypt filings. They were all in a single box: 287–0003/D098.1.
She looked at her watch. Ten-twelve. It was, Eleanor knew, Carlson’s habit to ask her if she wanted coffee from the canteen, something they shared at his counter for a few minutes, catching up on the department gossip. She had six or seven minutes. A scrape of ladder on linoleum and a flicker of light: several aisles over, the janitor plied his trade, changing the fluorescent tubes.
Eleanor pried her shoes off, leaving them neatly paired beneath the worktable. She checked her note against the alcove’s holdings and felt her heart quicken: the decrypts were in the next alcove.
Some filing clerk had grown bored or lazy or both—her target lay there on the floor, propping up a carton of General Electric government-issue fluorescent tubes. She lifted the lid off the box and took out the first file folder. It was the subindex for all the liaison decrypt files, from stations all over the world, destined for the Safehaven team from non-Treasury sources.
And it was at least two inches thick, hundreds of pages.
Eleanor returned to her press binder in the first alcove and removed the binder’s five hundred blank pages, her hands shaking. She squared off the subindex and slid the block of paper into her binder.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
The decrypt subindex was far, far too thick.
She stared at the ceiling. Long tracks of fluorescent lights flickered and hummed overhead.
Eleanor needed a pretext, in case the janitor grew suspicious, so she drew several files at random from the cabinet next to the worktable and made the notes of a madwoman, scrawling names and dates in such a hodgepodge no one could ever decipher her handwriting.
&nb
sp; She took up her fountain pen and pad and returned to the second alcove.
It couldn’t be.
In the box that held the old, discarded fluorescent tubes upright, in splendid chaos, lay a half dozen steel tins, each numbered by hand on strips of masking tape, the lighting tubes jammed amongst them, throwaways.
Eleanor did not dare move. She made herself take a silent deep breath and then carefully moved the glass tubes apart and, one by one, lifted the tins out and pressed them between her notepad and her bosom.
After sliding the tins into her book bag, she checked her watch.
Ten-nineteen: coffee time.
In a fever of triumph, Eleanor put her shoes back on, jammed her pen behind her ear, and took a pair of coins from her change purse, marching to Carlson’s station. “My turn for coffee today, Mr. Carlson,” she declared, passing him at full tilt. “To repay a gentleman’s kindness.”
“Why, thank you, Miz Dulles. Right kind of you.”
Double cream, no sugar. She had tea. The round-trip took twelve minutes.
She refused Carlson’s nickel for the coffee and returned to the first alcove. In the distance she could hear the rubbery squealings of a pushcart: the lighting repairman, back at it.
Even better, she thought; she was getting a taste for the game.
She stepped out of the decrypts alcove, just in Carlson’s sight line, and where her own doings would stay out of the repairman’s view. “Excuse me,” she called out as he came down the aisle. “There’s a bulb or whatever you call it out here, sir. The buzzing’s making me crazy.”
He was dark and sullen and not pleased to have a short woman in glasses order him around. “Yes, ma’am,” he muttered, then something else Eleanor couldn’t make out.
A minute later she struggled down the aisle to Carlson’s post, her cardigan, Waterman pen, and legal pad under one arm, the binder balanced awkwardly atop the rest.
“Oh, Miz Dulles, please,” he called out, and strode around his counter to help her. “Let me take that for you, Miz Dulles. Half as big as you are, begging your pardon, ma’am.”
The Witness Tree Page 41