Louise's Lies

by Sarah R. Shaber

  But none of this helped us with our current project, devising a simple ground operation that would demoralize the German people and soldiers and could be implemented before the holidays.

  By lunchtime we’d gone through every file folder on the table and were still stumped for a new idea. MO was already disseminating fake letters, pamphlets, rumors and newspapers, as fast as we could recruit operatives to distribute them. Our radio stations blanketed much of Europe already. Until we were deeper into Europe I didn’t know what else we could do.

  ‘All right,’ Miss Osborne said, removing her glasses. ‘Let’s break for lunch. Any ideas?’

  She was met by our silence. ‘Me neither,’ she said.

  ‘I’m starving,’ Merle said. ‘But the last thing I want to do is go over to the cafeteria, where flu germs are rampaging.’

  ‘I’ll go out and get sandwiches,’ I said. ‘I’d like the walk.’

  ‘If you’re willing to brave this cold it’s fine with me,’ said Miss Osborne. ‘Do you think you can find a café open?’

  ‘The one across the street from the south gate is open. I had breakfast there this morning,’ Merle said.

  ‘That’s close by,’ I said. ‘What does everyone want?’

  Since we never knew exactly which items on a menu would actually be available, we ordered by exclusion.

  ‘As long as it’s not peanut butter and jelly I’m fine,’ Miss Osborne said.

  ‘You know how I feel about cheese and pickle sandwiches. I guess I’d prefer ham,’ Merle said. ‘And get some potato chips.’

  ‘Maybe an apple,’ Miss Osborne added.

  The temperature dropped precipitously as I moved out of the warm conference room into the hallway, and I walked quickly toward my office. Pulling on my coat and the rest of my heavy clothing, I ventured outside, nodded at the guard at the gate and hurried across the street.

  I stood at the counter and perused the menu. ‘Three grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, please,’ I said to the woman behind the counter. ‘No pickles. And three bags of potato chips. To go.’

  ‘Coming right up,’ she said, passing the order through the kitchen window behind her. I unwrapped my scarf so I could breathe while I waited.

  The bulky bundle alongside turned to me. ‘Mrs Pearlie,’ he said, in a voice muffled by his turned-up greatcoat collar, ‘I thought I recognized your voice.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Mr Becker.’

  ‘Please call me Al,’ he said.

  ‘I’m Louise.’

  I wasn’t exactly pleased to see one of my fellow witnesses to the discovery at the Baron Steuben Inn, but as he was waiting for his lunch too, I had no choice but to stand with him at the counter for a few minutes.

  ‘I hope you are doing well,’ he said. ‘After Saturday night.’

  ‘As well as I can be,’ I said. ‘You?’

  Al shrugged. ‘It’s difficult to stop thinking about.’

  ‘We should probably not discuss it in public.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘You’re a long way from the zoo,’ I said, awkwardly changing the conversation.

  ‘I’m on my way back from delivering a stack of mail and memos to the Director’s office at the Smithsonian Castle. If we sent them by interdepartmental mail they’d take a week to arrive. I have a car, so it is easy for me to drop them off during my lunch hour. I like to stop here to pick up lunch. The egg salad is delicious.’

  The woman behind the counter slapped the bell and held out our paper lunch bags to us. We paid for them and rewrapped ourselves in our scarves.

  Al held the door open for me as we left.

  ‘Louise,’ he said, just as I was about to cross the street.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I remember you said how much you enjoy the gorillas at the zoo.’

  ‘I do, very much.’

  ‘Well, we have a new baby. His name is Daudi. The public cannot view him yet, but if you come by sometime I can show him to you.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. I was sorely tempted. On the one hand I felt I shouldn’t pursue a friendship with this man, especially as Sergeant Royal suspected his story, but on the other hand, well, a baby gorilla! How could it hurt?

  ‘Just come by the administration building at the zoo any time,’ he said. ‘That’s where my office is.’

  ‘I will if I can,’ I said. A gust of wind blew down the street; we hunkered down into our coats as we parted, Al walking toward his car while I crossed the street.

  By the time I got back to the conference room the sandwiches were cold and I had an idea.

  If the old German embassy was dead then the Maxwell mansion was very much alive. The upper floor was dark; Royal assumed it had been shut off to save fuel oil. But the draperies in the floor-to-ceiling ground-floor windows were wide open and the interiors blazed with light, giving Royal and Dickenson a glimpse of gleaming mahogany furniture and oil paintings stacked one on top of the other from the chair rail to the ceiling.

  An elderly butler opened the door and looked down his nose at the two of them.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Royal and Officer Dickenson to see Mr Leo Maxwell,’ Royal said. ‘He should be expecting us.’

  ‘Come in,’ the butler said. ‘I shall tell Mr Maxwell that you are here.’

  The butler left them standing in the hall to contemplate several marble statues that stood around the round foyer. A half-dozen candelabra taller than Royal stood ready to light the hall for parties. A staircase carpeted in red curled away and above them.

  ‘Dickenson, close your mouth,’ Royal said. ‘You’re gaping.’

  Dickenson pressed his lips together. ‘Sir, isn’t the butler supposed to show us to a parlor or something?’

  ‘Not us. The police are considered tradesmen.’

  The butler reappeared.

  ‘This way, please.’

  He led them into a sitting room still reeling from an Art Moderne decorating spree. A breakfront with brass pulls had more curves than Ava Gardner. The curved sofa and matching club chairs, with wood trim painted black and dove-grey upholstery, reminded Royal of an elegant man’s suit. No busy flowered wallpaper here. A coffee table trimmed in brass reflected light in patches on to peach-colored walls.

  Maxwell leaned against the fireplace mantel. He was wearing tweed trousers, a white dress shirt with the cuffs unbuttoned and a black-and-grey Argyle sweater. To Dickenson’s surprise, Gloria Scott reclined on the davenport. Her elegant lounging pajamas were cut much like Mavis Forrester’s, but Scott’s were silk decorated with black Chinese pagodas and red macaws, nicely accessorizing the room itself.

  Royal reached for Mrs Scott’s hand, which she extended to him with a nod. ‘Mrs Scott,’ he said, ‘I must say that I am glad to see you here. Saves the police from running around all over the city looking for you.’

  ‘It’s important that no one knows she is here,’ Maxwell said. ‘If at all possible.’

  ‘You see,’ Scott said. ‘I am divorcing my husband. My attorney tells me I should behave like a saint until the decree is final. It’s bad enough that I was present at the scene of a murder that was plastered over the crime pages of all the newspapers in the city. I would hate for news that I am here with the Maxwell family to reach the papers.’

  ‘My parents have offered Mrs Scott shelter in our home,’ Maxwell said. ‘Until the fuss dies down, you see. She and I are engaged. I do hope you can keep her whereabouts a secret.’

  Could a couple be engaged, Dickenson wondered, if one of them was still married?

  ‘This fuss, as you call it, is a murder investigation,’ Royal said. ‘Neither one of you should have avoided the police. We need your statements. I see no reason to reveal your whereabouts to the press, but I expect your full cooperation. I have questions that you simply must answer.’

  ‘Fire away,’ Maxwell said. He didn’t offer them a seat, but Royal and Dickenson each took one anyway. Royal pulled out his ever-present notebook.

  ‘When
did you arrive at the bar? And by the way, why that bar?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘It’s close by, just across the street. No one we know goes there. There are often photographers outside this house. You have no idea what it can be like.’

  ‘We arrived separately,’ Gloria Scott said, curling her legs up under her on the davenport. ‘I took a taxi from my hotel and went in the back door. Leo met me there.’

  Royal paused in his note taking. This made no sense to him. Surely these two could get a private drink somewhere other than a beat-up neighborhood bar. At a private club, or in a nook at Scott’s hotel. He didn’t say anything to them but filed the thought away for future reference.

  ‘What time did you arrive?’

  ‘Perhaps eight thirty,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Who was there before you?’

  ‘Everyone except the other couple. The woman with the glasses and the dark bearded man. They came in after we arrived.’ Louise Pearlie and Joe Prager, Dickenson thought.

  ‘Did you see anything suspicious at all before the body was discovered?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘No, not at all.’ He looked pointedly at Scott. ‘What about you, darling?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Mrs Scott,’ Royal continued, ‘you said you came in the back door, correct?’

  ‘Yes. So I wouldn’t be seen with Leo.’

  ‘You would have passed by the storeroom door. Did you notice if it was open or shut? Did you pass anyone in the alley on your way to the back door? Or see anyone leave the bar out the back?’

  Scott frowned, then smoothed the skin between her eyes with a thumb, as if she could prevent frown lines from forming. ‘I believe the storeroom door was closed,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t see a soul in the alley.’

  ‘Did either of you know the murder victim? Or anyone else at the bar that night?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell and Scott said, almost simultaneously.

  Royal shut his notebook and stood up. Dickenson followed suit.

  ‘All right,’ Royal said. ‘I’ll get these typed up and a police officer will bring copies by for you to sign. Please tell your servants to admit them. The police aren’t delivery boys.’

  Maxwell nodded and Royal moved forward to shake his hand. Instead he picked up a large photograph that sat on the mantelpiece near Maxwell. It showed a handsome middle-aged man dressed in white tie and tails standing next to the former German ambassador, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, in an opulent drawing room. A large Maltese-style cross with a red ribbon hung from his neck.

  ‘The resemblance is striking,’ Royal said. ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell said. ‘He received the Order of the German Eagle in 1937. You do understand, other prominent Americans received these medals too. Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were two of them. Father regrets it today, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Royal said. He doubted it. Otherwise he wouldn’t still have the picture displayed.

  Once outside in the car Royal scribbled again in his notebook. ‘We need to know about the Order of the German Eagle, why it was given to Maxwell Senior. And where exactly the Maxwells get their money,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think maybe they’re Nazi sympathizers?’

  ‘They were before the war, that’s obvious from the picture. But so were plenty of other big shots. Let’s not make any snap judgments. Find out the facts first.’

  SIX

  ‘Why reinvent the wheel?’ I said, finishing the cup of hot coffee I’d poured to drink with my lunch.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Miss Osborne said, neatly wiping her mouth. Merle tossed his wadded-up sandwich wrapper into a ball and threw it into a trash can across the room.

  ‘Let’s adapt something that already works,’ I said.

  Merle crossed his legs, showing his tooled leather cowboy boots. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like this,’ I said, flipping through the stack of folders we’d been through for the file I needed. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘“The Devil’s Brigade”. They leave these calling cards with the German soldiers they’ve killed.’ The Devil’s Brigade was the nickname of the First Special Service Force, an elite American–Canadian commando unit trained to fight in winter conditions. At this moment the brigade was deployed at the German winter front line in the mountains of Italy. Breaking through that line would allow the Allied forces to advance to Rome.

  A commander of the Devil’s Brigade had devised his own bit of propaganda warfare. On the corpse of every German soldier his troops left a calling card, a cardboard square printed with a red arrow, the emblem of the brigade, and the phrase Das dicke Ende kommt noch! – ‘The worst is yet to come!’.

  Miss Osborne read the contents of the folder, passing each page to Merle. When she finished she looked up but past me, thinking. Merle finished reading and shoved the last page back into the file folder. ‘But this isn’t a Devil’s Brigade operation,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘We’ll just steal the idea.’

  ‘But the Germans know perfectly well the Devil’s Brigade is in the mountains of Italy, not in France or Denmark or anywhere else.’

  ‘We’ll adapt it,’ I said. ‘We’ll use the phrase and change the symbol to something universal. Then we’ll distribute the cards to the resistance in Europe. French, Danish, Greek, wherever our operatives can get the cards. That way they’ll be distributed all over the continent.’

  ‘Louise, this is good,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘Very good. We’ll scatter these all over Europe and the Germans won’t know who is responsible for them. Do you have an idea for a symbol?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ I said.

  ‘A bomb falling?’ Merle asked.

  ‘Too specific,’ Miss Osborne said.

  ‘An explosion?’ I said.

  ‘It needs to be really scary,’ Merle said. ‘Evocative. Like the boogeyman.’ He spread apart his hands in frustration. ‘I don’t know enough German psychology to suggest anything.’

  ‘Something that a German would recognize as terrifying,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘We’re going to need to take advantage of your research skills here, Louise. I’ll take this idea to General Donovan so he can present it to the Planning Committee. Merle, you get to work on the layout, and Louise, find us a symbol!’

  The reading room of the Registry, the library of OSS, my old stomping ground, was as empty as the rest of the capital city. For once it was easy to find a seat at one of the long tables without waiting. It was lovely to be a visitor, requesting files and books, instead of one of the girls who fetched, returned and filed all day.

  Right away I found a good candidate for a symbol for the cards Miss Osborne would suggest to the Planning Committee as morale-busters on the ground in Europe.

  Krampus, a horned, devil-like creature with a long pre-Christian folklore history, punished naughty children at Christmas. Hairy, black, with one cloven hoof and one human foot, he had the horns of a goat and a long red pointed tongue that hung from his mouth. He carried a bundle of birch rods or a whip to beat children with, and sometimes a washtub for carrying them off to Hell. He was a direct descendant of the pagan Horned God of Witches, then assimilated into Christian folklore as a variation of the Devil. He was an ugly, evil-looking creature, and one the German people would remember from terrifying childhood folk stories. I thought he would do nicely.

  I traced a drawing of Krampus from the book on German folklore I’d been reading, so that Miss Osborne and Merle could get an idea of how ghastly a creature he was. If we decided that Krampus was indeed the symbol we were looking for, Merle could come to the reading room himself and find examples to copy.

  It had taken only an hour for me to find my symbol, and I felt as though I could take a short break and do some research of my own. I was curious about the Maxwell family. The proximity of the Baron Steuben Inn, the old German embassy and the Maxwell home had begun to prick my overactive imagination, and I wondered just how much time the Maxwells had spen
t with their Nazi neighbors before the war.

  I didn’t want to request the Maxwell file formally. It would be better if there was no record in the logbooks of my interest. So I went off into the maze of file cabinets myself. No one knew them better than me anyway. I had an official visitor badge and was well known to everyone who worked in the Registry. Because of the shortage of workers it wasn’t strange that I would be looking through the files myself.

  I pulled a thick file labeled ‘Maxwell family’ out of an ‘M’ file cabinet. It was filled with newspaper and magazine clippings. In short order I learned that Leo’s parents’ names were Gene and Lola and that he had twin sisters, Anne and Mary, both married off to appropriate husbands. The photographs of their double wedding in the society pages of the Herald were just stunning. The girls, as they were called in the article, wore matching designer gowns of satin and lace with flapper-style rhinestone headbands. Leo was a handsome best man in his tuxedo, standing between the grooms. He was described as a ‘championship tennis and polo player’. Apparently he neither attended college nor worked. The wedding had taken place at the Lutheran church around the corner from the Maxwell mansion. The reception was held in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel.

  Another clipping showed the German ambassador pinning a medal on Gene Maxwell. A small group of men looked on. Including, I noticed, Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, both prominent Nazi sympathizers before the war. Lindbergh had met with Hitler and almost moved to Germany in l938, but public criticism of him by President Roosevelt compelled him to resign his Army Air Forces commission and remain in the United States. In the 1920s Henry Ford published an anti-Semitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and was mentioned with admiration by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. Now both men, of course, had changed their minds about Hitler. Lindbergh was distinguishing himself in the Pacific war and Ford claimed he knew nothing of the content of his newspaper.

  As for the Maxwells’ fortune, they made it in the Midwest growing feed for cattle and hogs. In the late thirties they sold their acreage and feedlots and moved to DC, where they were welcomed into society and went to parties at, among other places, the German embassy.