Louise's Chance Read online

  I’d been reassigned to the Morale Operations branch of OSS. I wasn’t sure of my job description. Major Wicker had been reticent when he offered me the position, but he had assured me it wouldn’t be just clerical.

  I opened the door to the building, noticing a half-inch gap between the doorframe and the door itself. In the winter this place would be cold. I almost collided with a spare woman in a trim navy blue suit, white blouse and neatly knotted white-and-blue-striped bow tie, who was waiting at the door. She grabbed my hand and pumped it firmly.

  ‘I saw you get off the bus,’ she said. ‘You are Louise Pearlie, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.

  The woman radiated confidence and authority. She wasn’t old, but she wasn’t young either. A few grey hairs streaked through her dark hair, which was pulled back into a strict knot at her neck. She wore thick round eyeglasses similar to my own and no makeup, not even lipstick.

  ‘I’m Miss Alice Osborne,’ she said, slipping her arm into mine and propelling me forward. ‘I see you’re in civvies. Thank God you’re not in the military. Some days this place looks like an army base.’

  Miss Osborne led me through a madhouse masquerading as a large workroom. Art supplies, typewriters and desk lamps crowded several long wooden tables. German and Italian posters, newspapers, pamphlets and letters wallpapered the room, fastened with common nails hammered deeply into the wooden walls. One poster displayed the German alphabet in the antiquated style preferred by Adolf Hitler. Another was an artist’s color wheel. Pencils lay scattered on the floor where they’d rolled off the tables and remained where they fell.

  ‘Most of our artists work here,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘They design our “black” propaganda materials. They must be realistic and completely believable,’ she said. ‘Our agents in Europe send us as many samples of authentic German printed materials as they can.’ There must have been twenty people, mostly men, crammed into the workroom, intent on their projects. None of them looked up at us as we walked through the space.

  Black propaganda. I knew the Morale Operations branch had been organized to distribute fake news, demoralizing rumors and forged printed materials to enemy soldiers and citizens. I was eager to know what work I would do here. I didn’t know any foreign languages except a little French, and I wasn’t one bit artistic.

  Once through the workroom we entered a long narrow hall with doors ranging down its length on both sides. Halfway down the hall Miss Osborne flung a door open.

  ‘This is your office,’ she said to me, standing aside so I could enter.

  There must be some mistake, I thought. This was a real office – well, all right, a closet. Crammed into it were a desk and chair, a file cabinet and a new Remington Rand typewriter on a dented metal cart. It looked like the office was all mine. No trying to concentrate with someone smoking or slurping coffee at my elbow! It had no windows, but that was a small price to pay for privacy.

  ‘Here,’ Miss Osborne said, thrusting a thick bound manual toward me. ‘Read this. I don’t have time to start training you yet, I’ve got to go to a meeting. I’ll check back with you later.’

  She closed the door behind her, leaving me standing behind my new desk feeling like a whirlwind had dropped me there. Before I could sit down the door opened again.

  ‘Miss Pearlie,’ Miss Osborne began.

  ‘Mrs,’ I said.

  ‘Mrs Pearlie, did I tell you officially that you are my assistant?’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ I said.

  ‘My office is right next door,’ she said, nodding at the wall my desk faced. ‘If you hear me knock on the wall come on over. I’ll arrange for you to meet the staff later.’ As the door closed behind her she said, in a muffled tone I could barely hear, ‘You study that manual.’

  The door opened again immediately and Miss Osborne leaned in, gripping the doorframe for support.

  ‘If you want coffee the nearest coffee station is further down this hall in the anteroom to the general conference room,’ she said. ‘Sometimes people bring food.’

  Then she was gone again. I still stood, waiting, and when I decided she wasn’t going to pop back in I sat down to start my new job.

  I wondered who exactly my new supervisor was. I knew her name, but not her title. For that matter I wondered what my title was, what exactly I would be doing and how much I would be paid. Would it be more than I was getting at the Registry? There was no sound coming from Miss Osborne’s office next door. I wondered when I would see her again.

  Opening the manual to the title page I read ‘Morale Operations Field Manual’. I skimmed the first few pages of the guide. Just a few months old, MO was charged with spreading ‘black’ propaganda throughout the Mediterranean and Pacific theaters of war. MO’s mission was to spread false rumors, false news reports, fake pamphlets and anything else that would demoralize the enemy. Bribery, blackmail and forgery were MO’s most powerful tools. I was aware of MO because most of the OSS staff at the Research and Analysis branch complained when General Donovan first announced its formation. The academics who worked at R&A firmly believed that the United States should be above such nasty, ungentlemanly behavior. They insisted that information transmitted to German soldiers and citizens should be absolutely factual, ‘white’ propaganda. They weren’t alone. A big percentage of the rest of OSS felt that American democracy could win the war using methods based on its ideals, not on the kinds of appalling psychological tactics used by the Nazis themselves.

  But General Bill Donovan, Director of OSS, and President Roosevelt were men who believed ‘the ends justified the means’. They were willing to do anything that would help us win the war. Anything.

  My good friend Joan Adams, one of General Donovan’s two secretaries, when she heard about my new assignment at lunch last week, seemed almost embarrassed. She ducked her head and leaned into me over her coffee.

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘how are we different from the Nazis, if we behave just like them?’

  I didn’t say so, but I thought there was enough moral space between the United States and Nazi Germany that we could sacrifice some of that territory to win the war as quickly as possible. Before Europe was demolished and half its citizens cold in their graves.

  I studied the glossary section of the manual first, which defined terms like Mission, Task, Operative, Agent, Cutout and such. I was familiar with most of them, except for guerrillas, which I had never heard before. Guerrillas, pronounced ‘gorillas’, were ‘an organized band of individuals in enemy-held territory, indefinite as to number, which conducts against the enemy irregular operations of a military or quasi-military nature’. Whereas Resistance Groups focused on sabotage, espionage and non-cooperation. This wasn’t a distinction I’d been aware of.

  An hour later I’d read half the manual, pausing after the sections on bribery and blackmail. A headache gathered its strength, like a storm rising, at the back of my neck. I needed a cup of coffee and a couple of aspirin.

  I ventured out of my closet office and down the narrow hallway, searching for the anteroom where the coffee was supposed to be. I came to the end of the building, past a dozen or so offices, and went around a corner. The coffee table sat outside the door of an occupied conference room. I could see the outlines of its inhabitants through the mottled glass window of the door and hear typewriters clacking, and even some arguing, as I made a beeline toward the coffee urn. A rangy man wearing scuffed cowboy boots and a leather belt with a big silver buckle moved away from his place leaning against the table.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, in a Texas drawl. At least it sounded Texan to me. Not that I would know, except from Western movies. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m Louise Pearlie,’ I said. ‘This is my first day here.’

  ‘I’m Merle Ellison,’ he said. He reached out a large hand and we shook. ‘Call me Merle,’ he said. ‘Get yourself some coffee. There won’t be a new pot until after lunch. I’m sorry though,’ he said, noddi
ng toward a crumby paper plate, ‘I ate the last cookie.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘You don’t know where I could find some aspirin, do you?’

  Merle reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny red tin of Bayer aspirin.

  ‘Take two,’ he said. I accepted, popping them into my throat and washing them down with coffee. ‘So, what are you going to be doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ I answered. ‘I’m working with Miss Osborne, but I don’t know what her title is or anything. She hasn’t had time to talk with me yet. I’m reading the MO manual right now. What do you do here?’

  ‘I’m a forger.’

  The door to the conference room swung open, revealing a long table packed with people, mostly in uniform, mostly men, surrounded by coffee cups and mounds of paper. Like the workroom, its walls were plastered with maps, posters, German newspapers and other material I couldn’t read from where I stood. Miss Osborne, who was sitting near the door, spotted me. She came out of the room and grabbed my arm.

  ‘Good, you’re here, she said. ‘Come with me, I’ve got a job for you to do. Bring your coffee, if you like.’

  I gestured a goodbye to Merle with my coffee cup and he nodded back, grinning.

  Miss Osborne propelled me through an exterior door and guided me across a concrete pad to another tempo. We went inside and she took me into a small workroom furnished with a scarred wooden table and chair. Stacks of thick cardboard covered the table.

  ‘We’re cutting out stencils for our operatives in Germany to use to fake graffiti, see?’ she said, picking up a completed stencil lettered in old-style German. She pointed to a sample sprayed directly on to the wall in black paint, revealing its message. ‘It says “Will your son be the next to die?” We need another fifty of these. They need to be hand cut, or they won’t look authentic. A little sloppiness is OK, it looks more natural.’

  She handed me the master; the edges of its cut-out letters were razor sharp. ‘Don’t be so precise when you cut your letters. Like I said, the graffiti needs to look natural. And don’t waste cardboard.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ I said.

  ‘You can take an hour lunch today, anytime between noon and one,’ she said. ‘I’ll join you later and we’ll pack these up.’

  She went off without any further chitchat, leaving me by myself to cut the stencils.

  I still didn’t know Miss Osborne’s title or my own, or if I would get a raise, but at least I wasn’t typing index cards and filing in a room the size of an airplane hangar.

  Cutting out the stencils was more difficult than I expected. I had to use both hands to force my scissors through the thick cardboard. My hands and forearms throbbed. After an hour I was only half done. I checked my watch. It was time for lunch. I was joining Joan at the OSS cafeteria. She’d want to know everything I felt comfortable telling her about my new job.

  TWO

  Joan had saved me a place in the cafeteria line just outside the door. A placard mounted on the wall nearby informed us that the special today was ham and macaroni bake. More pasta! If spaghetti and macaroni were ever rationed we would all fade away to nothing.

  Joan bent down – she was quite tall – and pecked me on the cheek.

  ‘I would kill for some beef,’ she said, in her deep, throaty voice.

  ‘I think they’ve got meatloaf,’ I said.

  ‘Not that! I want steak! I want to gnaw on the bone!’ Joan had a hearty appetite, but she had plenty of money to buy good restaurant meals, if she wanted to. Her parents gave her an allowance of a hundred dollars a month to augment her OSS salary. She had a studio apartment in the Mayflower Hotel and a green Lincoln Continental cabriolet. It was a good thing I liked her so much or I’d have been consumed by envy.

  We picked up our trays. I selected the macaroni and ham special with canned peas and corn. I detested Jell-O so I skipped the three colorful varieties offered and picked up an apple for dessert. Joan had the meatloaf after all and cherry Jell-O with canned grapes suspended inside.

  We found seats for ourselves in a far corner of the cafeteria. It was crowded as always with a motley assortment of soldiers, spies, scholars and clerical staff, and the din allowed us to put our heads together and talk quietly. Here on the OSS campus we could speak more openly than we could outside its gates.

  ‘How’s the new job?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m allowed to say about it. I haven’t typed or filed all day. I have my own office, with a door and everything. Those are all encouraging. I’m somebody’s assistant, but I don’t know my title or my salary yet.’

  ‘A new branch, it’s bound to be a madhouse,’ she said. ‘Who is your boss?’

  ‘I don’t know if I can tell you,’ I said. ‘But madhouse is right.’ I thought of the frantic workroom and the raised voices I heard behind the doors of the conference room.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me any more?’ she asked.

  ‘Joan, it’s my first day. I don’t know the lay of the land there yet. Let me settle in.’

  Joan stirred her coffee. ‘OK, OK. You are known for your reticence and I applaud you for it. What else is new with you?’

  ‘Nothing much. You?’

  ‘Me neither. I am working night and day.’ Joan was an assistant to General Bill Donovan. He relied on her and she was intensely loyal to him.

  ‘Have you heard from your Czech friend? Joe … was it Prager?’ she asked.

  Joe. I could feel the flush climbing up my neck and into my face at the mention of his name.

  ‘You’re still infatuated with him, obviously,’ Joan said. ‘You know you shouldn’t be seeing him!’

  Joan disapproved of Joe. He was a Czech refugee who traveled on a British passport. He worked, secretly, for a Jewish refugee organization, the Joint Distribution Committee, which helped Jews escape from Europe and settle into new lives wherever they could find a country that would admit them. Once Germany declared war on the United States, the JDC became a covert organization. Supposedly Joe taught Slavic languages at George Washington University. I had suspected his university job was a cover story a year ago when I discovered that his glasses had plain glass in their frames. So what did I do? I went to his department at GWU to ask him to join me for lunch. The receptionist had never heard of him. The next morning I followed him to an anonymous row house near campus. Cornered, he had to tell me the truth.

  When I confronted Joe he insisted that his work was charitable and that he posed as a language professor only to protect his Czech family. The truth was he could have an entirely different job, one not so benign, which is what Joan feared. He could even be a Communist. Many East European refugees were. Whatever Joe’s work, I knew in my heart he was one of the good guys. He had a real academic background, he’d been teaching Slavic literature in London when the war broke out. He’d joined the battle against the Nazis just like the rest of us. Having secrets didn’t disqualify him from my affections. Washington was full of men and women with secrets. I kept secrets too.

  And I’d been attracted to Joe from the minute I’d met him, and he to me. ‘You know how risky it is to be seen with a foreigner,’ Joan said. ‘If OSS finds out you could lose your Top Secret clearance.’

  ‘I’m not dating him,’ I said. No, I wasn’t dating him exactly, I was shacking up with him! I’d sneaked up to New York, where Joe had a temporary assignment, for a few weekends over the summer. Joe had the use of a friend’s apartment and lived alone, something almost impossible to do in overcrowded Washington. At last we had the privacy that was impossible to find while we lived at ‘Two Trees’ together. The first weekend I’d visited him I’d jumped into his bed with alacrity and without feeling a bit guilty. I didn’t even think about marrying him. I didn’t know him well enough. Before I came to Washington, the idea of having relations with a man outside of marriage would have shocked me profoundly.

  It still amazed me how far I’d traveled from my conventional
life in Wilmington, North Carolina, where such a thing as an affair would be unthinkable. Run out of town on a rail unacceptable. But away from the scrutiny of my family, neighbors and the Baptist church I found I could do what I wanted, even have an affair with someone I didn’t intend to marry.

  In fact I hadn’t been to church since I arrived in Washington. At first I told myself that because of work I needed to rest on Sunday, but as the months went on I realized how liberating it was not to have a Southern Baptist congregation keeping its collective eye on me.

  ‘Joe’s coming back to Washington soon,’ I said to Joan. ‘His assignment in New York is finished.’ Joe couldn’t live at ‘Two Trees’ since Milt had returned home to stay. It was just as well; it was so difficult to live in the same house and not give away our longing for each other.

  ‘Stay away from him, Louise,’ Joan said. ‘You really must.’

  I’d tried, I really had. But I was crazy about him, so we simply had to be as circumspect as possible.

  I spent over an hour after lunch finishing the stencil job. My right arm was sore from my shoulder to my wrist. I’d need to keep a bottle of aspirin in my desk if most of my workdays were like this one.

  The door opened and Miss Osborne leaned in, a pose I was beginning to get used to.

  ‘Done?’ she asked

  ‘Almost,’ I said.

  She wheeled a hand truck into the room. ‘When you’re done load the stencils up and come to the conference room. We need to pack them up.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  She left without another word – until she opened the door again.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ she said. ‘Bring the stencil master too.’

  The door closed again.

  I was getting used to her sudden appearances and disappearances.