Louise's Chance

by Sarah R. Shaber

  ‘Have you found out anything about Rein?’ she asked, her voice low.

  ‘I’m sorry, nothing at all. It turns out I just don’t have that kind of access,’ I said.

  She buried her head in her hands.

  ‘I don’t think I can live like this,’ she said, looking up at me, her eye shadow smeared down her cheeks.

  I felt so terribly sorry for her. I took her shaking shoulders in my hands and forced her to sit up straight.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you mustn’t worry so. You’ll make yourself ill. It’s so unlikely that your husband will wind up in a prisoner-of-war camp in the States. And why would he reveal his marriage to you? You haven’t heard from him in, what, four years?’

  ‘So I’m to hope he’s simply forgotten about me, that he doesn’t still despise me for refusing to live in Germany with him?’

  ‘Yes, why not? He’s a Luftwaffe pilot, a big shot, he may be a colonel by now. He’s probably surrounded by dozens of Wintergarten showgirls when he’s in Berlin. Heck, maybe he’s divorced you in Germany, have you ever thought of that?’

  ‘What a lovely thought,’ she said. ‘But you didn’t know Rein. He won’t forget that I rejected him.’

  I decided to change the subject.

  ‘Who did you go out with tonight? Did you have fun?’

  Ada shrugged. ‘Some middle-aged fellow. I think Bert was his name. He came up to me after my last set and asked me to go to Sans Souci with him. And no, it wasn’t much fun. He was some kind of salesman. I can’t remember what he sold though, something the army buys a lot of.’

  ‘Condoms?’

  Ada actually laughed then. ‘No, I would have remembered that!’

  ‘Go on and get some sleep,’ I said. ‘You can’t do anything about Rein, so there’s no point in worrying about him.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ Ada said, easing off my bed. ‘You’re not looking at the inside of a German-American detention camp.’

  I got ready for bed and climbed in, turning off my bedside light after sticking a bookmark in The Robe. I put Ada out of my mind. There was nothing I could do for her except keep her secret.

  Merle and I met with Miss Osborne in her office the next morning.

  ‘Merle,’ Miss Osborne said, ‘can you finish reviewing the rest of the paybooks today?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Easily.’

  ‘And the two of us,’ she said, turning to me, ‘we can finish summarizing the prisoners’ papers by noon, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So many of them are incomplete anyway.’

  She nodded. ‘Then let’s meet back here about three o’clock to get organized for our trip to Fort Meade on Monday. Now, I expect we’ll need to be there a full week, so pack accordingly, but still as lightly as possible. I don’t know if we can catch an airplane flight or not.’

  Merle, who’d been sitting on the corner of Miss Osborne’s desk, hopped to the floor, ready to go to his office.

  ‘Oh, wait, I almost forgot to tell you,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘The FBI caught Marek, the escaped Polish prisoner, last night.’

  ‘Where?’ I said. ‘How far did he get?’

  ‘Baltimore,’ she said. ‘He was at a brothel.’

  ‘No kidding!’ Merle said.

  ‘He tried to pass himself as a Dutch refugee, but the girl he was with noticed the Iron Cross tattooed on his bicep and called the police. He had a bag full of strudel from the bakery down the street with him.’

  ‘So he spent his take from selling Nazi souvenirs on food and girls,’ I said. Agent Williams would be disappointed, I thought, not to find fuses and plastic explosives on Marek. There was no glory in capturing a man starving for strudel and a woman.

  By noon Miss Osborne and I were finished with our work. She looked at her watch and shuffled through some papers on her desk. I knew she was thinking about what other business we could complete before meeting Merle at three o’clock. This was my chance.

  ‘Miss Osborne,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, looking up at me.

  ‘About the two men who were murdered, Muntz and Aach. I know you’re concerned about their deaths. Whether or not they were murdered, I mean.’

  Miss Osborne intertwined her hands and pursed her lips.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am. Very. If they were murdered it could impact our operation negatively, for two reasons. First, the prisoners of war could be intimidated by knowing that there’s a killer in the camp. Depending on who it is, and why the murders were done, they might be reluctant to volunteer for our operation for fear of reprisal. Then there’s the possibility that we might unknowingly recruit this killer for our operation, and I don’t like the possibilities there. The man might run for his life when he lands in Italy, or inform the Germans about our black propaganda operation. Our work is so important to winning the war, we have to find the right people to send.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a few hours until we need to meet Merle. Why don’t I go over to the Registry and search the files for information on these two men? I could find my way around the place in a blackout. Since I don’t work there anymore I’d need a note from you, but once I present it no one will question me. I know everyone. I’d have full access to the files, the Reading Room, the Map Room, even the telephone directory archive.’

  At this she smiled at me. ‘You’re going to look up their telephone numbers?’

  ‘All right, that was silly, but you don’t know what I might be able to find out. What if these two were in contact with a resistance group, or had some other strategic value? And then there’s Reichenberg itself. I know it’s a long shot, but we keep noticing that the two men lived at the same address. What do we know about Reichenberg? Maybe Muntz and Aach lived next door to a munitions factory, or something that would suggest a motive for their murder. I know I’m exaggerating, but it’s just a few hours.’

  ‘That’s a very long shot,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘you’re right, it’s worth a try. What should I say in the note you need?’

  When I presented Miss Osborne’s note to my old boss, Jesse Shera, he read it and then handed it back to me. ‘Pick up a visitor’s pass, and make sure you return it at the end of the day. Use whatever you need, God knows you know your way around here.’

  It felt odd to find myself back at the Registry, the Central Information Division of OSS. I’d only left it a few days ago, but mentally I felt as though I’d been gone a year. I took in the immense archive crammed with row upon row of wooden file cabinets and index files containing the vast knowledge collected by the scholars of the Research and Analysis branch of OSS. Need to find out the gauge of railroad tracks in Algeria? You could find it here. Or where pre-war Mercedes-Benz automobile production plants were located in Germany? Want a tourist guide to Italy to mine for cultural information to educate the Allied troops that would occupy it? It was neatly tucked away under ‘Italy, Travel Guides, Pre-war’.

  For the first year and a half of my life in Washington DC I spent my days indexing, filing and distributing all that knowledge to the people who needed it, from the President to soldiers in the field. It was work important to the war effort, but boring and pedestrian. I was so happy to be away from it.

  I’d forgotten how much my fingertips could hurt after an hour flipping through index cards and file folders. Muntz and Aach weren’t listed in our files anywhere. They weren’t journalists, or avant-garde artists, or aristocrats, or Jews, or Communists, or wealthy playboys, or resistance members. Neither of them had ever contacted an Allied agent. No newspaper or magazine clippings mentioned them. Neither had graduated from a German university recently. And yes, I checked the Reichenberg telephone book. It was an old one, from 1939, that looked like it had had an entire pot of coffee spilled on it, but neither man had a listing.

  Muntz and Aach were nobodies. Just two young Czech men, ethnic Germans, who were drafted into the
Wehrmacht and died mysteriously on the Abel Stoddard, ferrying prisoners of war to the United States, damn it.

  Now to get familiar with Reichenberg, which had its own hefty file. I lugged it over to a free spot at a table in the Reading Room. The space was just as I remembered it. Industrial ceiling lights struggled to illuminate the tables through the fug of cigarette smoke that floated over them. Maps of the world’s war zones wallpapered the room. Files, pencils, papers and overfilled ashtrays crowded the tables. Mostly men, most in uniform, pored over stacks of files looking for buried gems of information that might have some strategic value. Clerks, mostly girls, hovered around the tables, collecting request slips and ferrying discarded files back to the file rooms.

  I slid into a hard wooden chair and shook papers, photographs, clippings and pamphlets out of the Reichenberg file. Reichenberg was located in the northern tip of the Sudetenland. It had been the capital of Bohemia, a province of Czechoslovakia. It wasn’t far from Dresden and was inhabited by ethnic Germans. In fact the city had been the unofficial capital of German Czechoslovakia.

  No one could say that the Sudetenland had resisted German annexation. The recession had devastated its industries. Hitler offered the Germans who lived there the same prosperity he’d brought to the Reich, with the added advantage of being part of a powerful, successful German state. European leaders like Neville Chamberlain were eager to appease Hitler. Czechoslovakia’s protests were ignored. Between the first and the tenth of December 1938 the Sudetenland became part of the Reich without a shot being fired. Reichenberg became the capital of the new German province of Reichstag Sudetenland.

  By March of 1939 what was left of Czechoslovakia had been conquered and occupied by the Nazis. And my lover, Joe Prager, was teaching Slavic languages at the University of London at the time, or so he said.

  I borrowed a magnifying glass from the army captain sitting next to me and examined the dozen or so photographs included in the file. Reichenberg’s buildings were typically Eastern European, thick and bulky, at the most twenty stories or so tall, constructed in baroque or neoclassical styles. Nazi flags flew from the tallest buildings. There weren’t many cars, but a few horses pulled wagons through the streets. Tram tracks ran down the center of the main streets. One photograph was of a group of German officers, several of whom were SS, lounging on the steps of an official-looking building. I inspected the officers’ faces, but recognized no one from the Fort Meade camp.

  The few newspaper clippings came from American newspapers that reported on the Sudetenland crisis. One described an exodus of the Jewish population when German armed forces occupied the city. Another showed the burned out ruins of Reichenberg’s synagogue, torched during Kristallnacht. There was nothing remarkable in anything I read.

  Until I reached the last paper in the sheaf that had been contained in the file. It was a page from a Reichenberg newspaper, with the date November 3, 1933, at the top. What I saw just about singed my eyebrows.

  When I grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, there were just two definitions of sex. Until marriage sex was holding hands and stealing kisses on the porch swing of a girl’s parents’ house. After marriage sex was conducted quickly in the missionary position. My late husband, Bill, and I found married life quite exciting, but then we didn’t know anything else.

  When I arrived in Washington early in 1942 to work as a government girl I discovered that men and women could have unmarried sex without being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, although girls could still lose their reputations, jobs and lodging if it became public knowledge. I also learned that some men could love men and some women could love women without the earth cracking open beneath them and dumping them instantly into the flames of hell. What with drinking martinis, going to jazz clubs and opening a charge account, I considered myself quite worldly these days.

  But my confidence in my sophistication faded when I saw the half-page advertisement for a Reichenberg nightclub. I couldn’t read the German text, but the heading showed a martini glass with a tiger cub curled around it, his cat’s eyes entranced by the hedonism that unfolded in the photograph below.

  And what a spectacle it was. The nightclub, lit by extravagant gas chandeliers, was jammed with partygoers wearing sparkling evening gowns and wide-lapelled tuxedos, flourishing cigarette holders and champagne glasses. At the corner of a long polished bar, backed with a mirror that reflected row after row of liquor bottles, a crowd of young men, their hair slicked flat over their foreheads, played cards, a stack of paper money piled in the middle of the table. A blonde woman wearing a tiara, with a skirt slit halfway up her thigh, sat on the other end of the bar, flirting with three men who surrounded her. In the foreground a small orchestra made up of colored men dressed in white tails played for a dozen or so dancing couples. The orchestra was a long way from home. The name displayed on its drum set was ‘Savannah’s Finest Jazz’.

  In the background of the photograph I could see an opulent stage with performers posed on it. Using my trusty borrowed magnifying glass I peered at the performers, beautiful young men and women, heavily made up and without a stitch of clothing on above their waists, being ogled by a crowd of men and women who clustered below the stage. Under the scrutiny of the magnifying glass it was clear that some of the oglers in evening gowns were men and some of the tuxedos were worn by women.

  What struck me the most about the photograph was the look of abandon and pleasure on the participants’ faces. No one cowered in a corner. Not one of them was afraid. Of being recognized, of losing a job or a home. I’d heard plenty about the wild cabaret culture of pre-war Germany, but this was the first time I’d seen it illustrated. When I returned the magnifying glass to my neighbor I hoped he didn’t notice the heat rising on my neck and cheeks.

  I shoved the items from the file back into its folders, embarrassed that I’d been so distracted by the nightclub ad. Now that the Nazis were in power in Reichenberg I doubted the club was still there.

  When I left the Reading Room I tossed the Reichenberg file on to the return table. So far I had learned nothing of our two dead prisoners of war.

  After Pearl Harbor, as the nation geared up for war in Europe and the Pacific, the United States government sent out a request to the entire country for the printed materials that could help us win the war. If you were an economics professor and had a collection of German textbooks Uncle Sam asked you to mail them to the government right away. If you owned foreign journals, magazines or newspapers your uncle wanted those too. Been on holiday overseas recently? Send the OSS your guidebooks, maps and postcards. It was no exaggeration to say that the best map resources available to our military when the war started were the maps included in the National Geographic Magazine.

  The public responded. When I first visited the OSS Map Room months ago donated maps filled the center of its workroom in a pile that must have been ten feet high. Clerks opened the mail and tossed donated maps on to the pile, and more clerks grabbed the nearest map and cataloged and filed it. The indexed collection now held a half-million sheets, all neatly tucked away and easily found.

  The young man at the map reference desk was so short and slight I had a good view of the top of his head. There was a height requirement for military service and I was pretty sure he didn’t reach it.

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’ he asked.

  ‘I need a map—’ I began.

  ‘Really,’ he said, waving his arm about the room. ‘Well, since this is the Map Room, you’ve come to the right place.’

  ‘Don’t be short with me,’ I said. ‘I’m not having the best day.’

  ‘Me neither. Sorry. What are you looking for?’

  ‘I need a city map of Reichenberg, Germany. Used to be in Czechoslovakia.’

  ‘I know it. Near Dresden. Let me look.’

  He vanished through a door behind the desk. I could see rows of metal shelves filled with file boxes before he closed the door behind him.

  A few minute
s later he came back to the desk with a folded map. I had Muntz and Aach’s address written on my notepad and I drew it out of my pocketbook in anticipation. The clerk unfolded the map on top of the counter and my enthusiasm vanished.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘This is nothing like what I need.’

  The map laid out before me must once have hung on a Czech schoolroom wall. It showed most of Bohemia, with a circle representing Reichenberg plunked in the middle of it, surrounded by garish illustrations that represented the area’s industries – textiles, glassblowing and papermaking. The circle that represented the city was dominated by a purple cathedral and a statue of some hero perched on a horse. In the countryside a couple of cows and a goat grazed contentedly in fields that held a haystack or two. There wasn’t even a road marked on the map, much less a street.

  ‘This won’t work,’ I said. ‘I need a city map, with the streets marked. Or an A to Z.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This is all I got.’

  ‘OK, thanks,’ I answered, shoving my notepad back into my pocketbook.

  I’d hoped to be able to pinpoint the location of our two dead prisoners’ address, but that was impossible now. If there wasn’t a map of the city here there wasn’t one anywhere in North America.

  I checked my watch. I had forty-five minutes before I was to meet with Miss Osborne and Merle back at the MO branch. Maybe time enough for a personal errand. An unauthorized personal errand. I wasn’t sure where to start looking, but since ‘prisoners’ started with a ‘p’ I headed for the ‘P’ files. The aisle was dim, lit only by the green-shaded lamps on top of the file cabinets, but I didn’t turn on the overhead light, hoping to retain some anonymity. I opened a file drawer and began to flip through it, feeling soreness returning to my fingertips again.

  ‘Returning to the scene of your crimes, I see,’ a voice said just a few feet from me. I hadn’t heard anyone approaching and, fearing the voice belonged to someone who might report me, I slammed the file drawer closed. On my left hand.