I moved out of that room and went into the next. When I tried to open its window the same thing happened. The window simply wouldn’t shift. Taking a chance, I trained the flashlight beam on the window and inspected it. The window had been nailed shut.
After trying a dozen windows on the ground floor, one after the other, I gave up. The embassy wasn’t as vulnerable as I thought. With the basement windows barred and the ground-floor windows nailed shut, the building was impregnable so long as all the heavy doors were locked. The second floor, the bedroom floor, was many feet above ground and besides, the custodian slept upstairs every night. No wonder the army only posted two guards with dogs and withdrew them when the weather was frigid!
I was trapped inside the embassy. It would be amusing if it wasn’t so serious. I didn’t think that the Swiss legation would appreciate it much if an OSS employee was found here, sleeping on a davenport in the drawing room, in the morning.
I was less afraid than I was when I first discovered the back door locked. It seemed to me that whoever had been inside the embassy with me, who’d stolen the items from the drawing room, had locked the door behind him when he left. If it was Al, as I thought it must be, there was no good reason for him to stay behind and confront me. He was wanted for murder. He’d want to escape and avoid me, so no one would know he was still around. He certainly wouldn’t want to dispose of my body!
I had to get out of this place myself. I wondered if my Schrade switchblade could pry out the nails from one of the smaller windows in a servant’s room. But that would leave marks that might be found and signal that someone had been in the building. I considered hiding until daylight, hoping that someone would open up the place, the Swiss guardian would leave for the day and I’d have an opportunity to escape. Even if I did, in daylight someone might see me.
My only option left was the fire escape.
The window where I’d seen the first escape route to the fire escape was on the second floor. I’d have to go up to the bedroom floor and hope I didn’t disturb the sleeping Swiss caretaker. I now pictured him as carrying a handie-talkie with a direct line to the FBI and armed with a Furrer submachine gun. I hoped he was a heavy sleeper.
I took off my shoes and stuck them in my pocketbook. Staying close to the wall to avoid squeaks, I slipped up to the head of the stairs without revealing myself, to be brought up sharp by Adolf Hitler’s face staring down at me! I gasped and dropped my flashlight before I realized I was looking at a portrait. I froze, hoping the caretaker hadn’t heard me.
But I heard distant snoring, so the watchman must be asleep. And I was grateful that the sound was on the other side of the house, away from the fire escape.
Tiptoeing down the hall to the back bedrooms I counted doors and windows until I thought I had found the correct room. Gently I opened the door. I was correct. I could see the metal work of the fire escape at one of the room’s windows. I went inside and carefully closed the door, leaning against it in relief when the latch clicked softly shut.
This room was quite modern. A large bed stood against a wall paneled in leather. A luxurious art deco wool rug in abstract grey and black covered the floor. A black Barcelona chair sat next to a cocktail table covered with magazines. And in the corner rested a shiny chrome-and-porcelain bathtub large enough for two people. I wondered if this had been the ambassador’s room. Or perhaps an impressive guest room for important visitors from the Reich?
I padded across the rug to the window, shoved my flashlight into my bag and grabbed the lower window sash. To my intense relief I raised the window with no trouble. Climbing out on to the steel balcony, I turned around and closed the window behind me. I had escaped, and relief flooded over me. If only I wasn’t twenty feet off the ground!
In the light of the waning moon I still saw no one patrolling the grounds.
The hinge of the movable ladder that I needed to release to reach the ground had rusted. I had to work on it for a few minutes with my knife before it would move. Jiggling the ladder gently, I was pleased not to hear a lot of noise. So I lowered it carefully to the ground and climbed down. When I reached the bottom I put my shoes back on and ran. I moved as quickly and quietly as I could, eager to get away from that shut-up building, like a raccoon that had worked its way out of a trap.
Without looking where I was going I plunged on to the sidewalk on Massachusetts Avenue and smack into Leo Maxwell. I almost didn’t recognize him. A scarf wrapped around his hat and neck concealed part of his face. He grabbed at me to prevent me from tripping over his feet.
‘Mrs Pearlie! What in God’s name!’ he said, keeping a hand gripped around one of my arms. I pulled away from him.
‘I was just out walking,’ I said, lying like a professional. ‘Through the back gardens at the Lutheran church.’
‘Dear, you were running like a maniac. And it’s late. Shouldn’t a working girl like you be home in bed?’
The best lie is the one that is mostly true. ‘I had a couple of drinks at the Baron Steuben,’ I said. ‘Then I took a walk to clear my head. And I saw something move. It startled me so I ran toward the street. It was probably a cat.’
‘You came out of the alley beside the German embassy,’ he said. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, shook one loose and lit it. He seemed intent on having a conversation and I wanted to avoid one at all cost.
‘Is it against the law to use the alley to get to Massachusetts Avenue from “N” Street?’
‘Of course not,’ he said.
‘Why are you out here, anyway?’
He grinned at me, blowing smoke and frozen breath into the space between us.
‘I live just a few houses down the street,’ he said, ‘and I never go to bed until after midnight. I often take a late walk.’
‘It is late, and I do need to go,’ I said, buttoning my heavy coat and winding my scarf, which had come loose during my flight, close around my neck and face.
‘Look, my car is parked on the street in front of my house. Let me drive you home.’
‘That’s not necessary,’ I said. ‘I can get home on my own.’
‘Don’t be a little fool,’ he said, taking my arm again. ‘It’s late at night and freezing, and you’re alone. And you said yourself you’ve been drinking. Anything could happen. Let me run you home. Where do you live?’
I pulled my arm away from him again, but he was right. I was cold and exhausted. I had no idea if I could find a taxi at this hour.
‘Near Washington Circle,’ I said. ‘And thanks. I guess I could use a lift.’
It didn’t occur to me until we were inside Maxwell’s expensive but aging vehicle that he could have been the person who was inside the German embassy with me. Maybe he had a tiny silver clown and a gold cigarette lighter stashed in his coat pockets. If his family needed money as much as I thought they did, and he was as familiar with the building as he’d implied, burglarizing the embassy made some sense. Did he have a key to the back door? If he’d been in the embassy with me, had he seen me? Did he leave the building before me, locking the back door after him? Was it a coincidence that he was waiting on the sidewalk for me when I ran into the street?
I stared at Maxwell’s handsome profile as he pulled away from the curb, shifted gears and headed down the street. God help me if Maxwell was the burglar and had seen me! He could be taking me anywhere. Somewhere lonely, where he could strangle me and dump my body, leaving him free to loot the German embassy at will.
‘What are you snickering about?’ Leo asked.
‘I’ve been reading too many Agatha Christies,’ I said.
Of course Leo Maxwell drove me straight home. Our trek through the dark, empty Washington streets was uneventful. We talked about who in our households had been sick, when President Roosevelt would be back in the country and whether the whiskey ration would be lifted soon.
When we stopped outside ‘Two Trees’ Maxwell turned off his car’s engine. ‘Mrs Pearlie,’ he said.
&
nbsp; ‘Yes?’ I wasn’t paying close attention to him. I was as tired as I had been in my life. I just wanted to crawl into my bed with a hot-water bottle. Morning would come way too soon to suit me.
‘I was wondering, would you like to have dinner with me sometime?’
Exhaustion must be causing me to hallucinate, I thought.
‘What?’
‘Dinner. Could we have dinner together? Maybe this weekend?’
How ludicrous! Me, an aging government girl who grew up at a North Carolina fish camp, going out with a playboy like Leo Maxwell? I knew what this was about. He wanted to pump me about what I knew about Floyd Stinson’s murder.
‘Aren’t you engaged to Gloria Scott?’
Maxwell fiddled with the gear stick. ‘Not formally. I mean, she’s still married. She’s in Chicago for a couple of weeks. It’s just dinner.’
How could I pass up the opportunity to pump Maxwell about that infamous night at the Baron Steuben Inn myself?
‘Sure, why not,’ I said. I scribbled my phone number on the matchbook cover he handed me.
I practically fell into the hallway of ‘Two Trees’. I was so tired my bones and muscles ached for relief. Phoebe appeared out of the lounge in a heavy bathrobe with her face framed in pin curls.
‘Louise!’ she said. ‘I’ve been so worried. Where have you been all this time?’
‘You wouldn’t believe,’ I answered.
‘Louise!’ I awoke from a dream in which I spent hours crossing and recrossing the Taft Bridge to find Miss Osborne standing over me. Despite three cups of strong coffee I’d fallen asleep at my desk with my head pillowed on a stack of paper. I was horrified that Miss Osborne had found me like this.
‘Ma’am,’ I said. ‘I am so sorry! It’s no excuse, but I was out late last night. I need to tell you what happened. It has to do with Floyd Stinson’s murder.’
‘So tell me,’ she said, dropping a stack of file folders on my desk so she could stand with her arms crossed and look severe. ‘You’ve been quite distracted lately.’
‘You might want to sit down,’ I said.
She sat, crossing her thin legs and resting her chin on one hand. ‘Make it snappy,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a lot of time.’
I told her everything that had happened to me since I’d last seen her, except for the part about Joe leaving town, of course. My conversation with Mavis at the Baron Steuben, my escapade in the German embassy, my theory that Floyd Stinson had been murdered for his keys to the embassy and that Al Becker might be using those keys to steal from the embassy, my narrow escape and encounter with Leo Maxwell. I concluded with Maxwell’s invitation to dinner.
Miss Osborne didn’t seem in a big hurry after all. She uncrossed her legs and leaned toward me, with her hands flat on my desktop.
‘Good work, Louise,’ she said. ‘Excellent work!’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Especially since you didn’t get caught. If you had been you’d be in the DC jail this morning and we’d have to pretend we didn’t know you.’ She grinned at me when she said that, but I knew it was the truth.
‘What should I do now? Should I tell Sergeant Royal my theory about the keys?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It would be fortuitous for OSS if Stinson’s murder was solved without involving us, without anyone knowing Stinson was one of our operatives. Very fortuitous. But I must talk to General Donovan first; this is too complex to make a snap decision about. We must consider the reaction of the Swiss legation, too. They’ll be answerable to the Germans for allowing the embassy to be penetrated, and I expect their reaction will be most unpleasant.’
She stood up and smoothed down her skirt. ‘And as for you, Louise, I want you to take the rest of the day off. You’re no good to me in such an exhausted state.’
‘But Miss Osborne, there’s so much to do!’
‘You heard me, go home. By tomorrow General Donovan and I will have discussed all this and I will give you your instructions.’
I had no intention of going back to ‘Two Trees’. Although the prospect of a nap was inviting I rarely had time off during the week, and I wanted to answer a question that had been niggling me since I saw Mavis Forrester crossing the Taft Bridge. She’d told me she was on her way to meet friends for dinner. I wanted to know for sure that was true. Yes, Harvey Royal was right and I was wrong. Al murdered Floyd Stinson for his keys. I needed to inform Sergeant Royal about this, but when I spoke to him I wanted to be able to tell him whether Mavis’ story about the day I saw her on the bridge was true.
I got off the bus on the south side of the Taft Bridge. I wanted to cross it the way Mavis had to get to the restaurant, and see if that lined up with my observation at the time. Besides, I liked walking across the Taft Bridge. The view was gorgeous, even in the winter, to the north part of Rock Creek Park where the zoo was located, to the south into an overgrown wooded section of the park. I leaned over the rail briefly and noticed, as on the last occasion I was here, a Park Service horse van on the shoulder of the road that followed the creek. The rear gate was down. I assumed, as before, that a park ranger was patrolling the area on horseback. There wouldn’t be another good way to cover much of the area.
Before I set off I looked up the address of the Bistro Français. It was on Woodley Road, which ran behind the apartments that made up part of the Wardman Park Hotel. Although the weather wasn’t as frigid as it had been the last time I crossed the bridge it was still very cold. I leaned into the wind and held on to my hat as I soldiered across the street.
As I reached the spot where I had lost sight of Mavis, I realized that she’d bypassed the shortest route to the restaurant, going down Calvert toward Al’s building instead of up Connecticut. I felt a rush of energy. Had she been lying, then? But when I turned the corner past the apartment building, I realized that I couldn’t see what direction she’d been going in. So I went toward Woodley, and sure enough there was the Bistro Français on the corner.
The restaurant was open and packed with the lunch crowd.
A tiny maître d’, bald with a tonsure like a monk’s, was dressed in a tuxedo despite the time of day. He bowed to me at the entrance, menu in hand.
‘Madame,’ he said, ‘can I show you a table?’
Why not? I hadn’t had lunch yet and I was famished. Besides, if I was a paying customer maybe he would be willing to answer my prying questions about his clientele.
‘Mais oui,’ I said, in my schoolgirl French.
He answered me in a stream of rapid French that I couldn’t follow. He must have been able to tell this from my expression, so he switched to English.
‘I hope madame is hungry,’ he said, taking my coat, hat and scarf from me and hanging them on a nearby coatrack.
‘Always,’ I said.
He showed me to a table for one nestled in the bay window that looked out on to the street and brought me a menu, a glass of water and a half-loaf of crusty French bread accompanied by a large pat of butter stamped with a fleur-de-lis. I guessed that French restaurants got extra butter rations.
As I cast my eye down the menu I saw my bank account shriveling. To pay for this meal I’d have to forgo buying a war bond this month. Which made me wonder if someone bought Mavis’ meals here or if she paid for them herself.
There was no beef or veal on the menu. I detested most fish and we had chicken all the time at home, so I selected grilled lamb with compote de pommes. Just when I’d decided, a waiter, whose embroidered nametag read ‘Benny’, appeared to take my order. When he spoke to me his Georgia twang about knocked me over.
‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘what a good choice. So few people order lamb, the chef loves to prepare it. What wine would you like to have with it?’
Wine? In the middle of the day? Well, why not? One glass couldn’t hurt. As long as I was here I might as well enjoy myself.
‘A glass of the house white wine, please,’ I said.
I tucked into the warm Frenc
h bread and used up every smidgen of butter. Although thinking of things French made me wonder about Rachel, my French Jewish friend who’d found refuge in Malta when the Nazis occupied Vichy France and her husband joined the resistance. I liked to think that I had something to do with her escape from Marseille, but I couldn’t be sure. What I did know, thanks to her letters, was that she and her two children were safe on Malta. With the Allies now in Sicily and southern Italy, Malta was spared constant bombardment. Food was more plentiful, and Rachel wrote that she even had a job in the dispensary at the RAF base. Her landlady kept her children during the day. It wasn’t the life Rachel had expected, but she was grateful for it. One of my fantasies was that I would be able to visit her, in a liberated France, after the war. I would give anything to see her face and hear her voice again.
The maître d’ interrupted my reverie when he brought me the wine. He cradled it in a starched white napkin and presented it to me. I was surprised to see a California label. He noticed my expression.
‘Yes, madame,’ he said, ‘our house wines are from California or New York. Shipments from France have been disrupted, as you can imagine. But this is a French varietal grape, and I think you will like it.’ He poured a swallow into my wine glass and I sipped it.
‘It’s quite good,’ I said. He filled my glass, then held out the bottle.
‘Is madame sure she will not want more?’ he said. ‘You can take an unfinished bottle home with you.’
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I said. He bowed and retreated gracefully.
The waiter brought me my lunch and I tucked into it. How, I wondered, can the French cook something as simple as lamb chops with stewed apples and do it so much better than anyone else?
Louise's Lies Page 15
