Comes the War

by Ed Ruggero

“I’m sure that’s what it looks like from Moscow,” Kerr said.

  “Do you work with the Soviets?” Harkins asked. “Is that a normal part of your duties?”

  “I have in the past, but it’s not part of my portfolio.”

  “Portfolio?” Harkins asked.

  “My normal list of responsibilities.”

  “What is in your … portfolio?”

  Two other men in suits drew closer to their little group, retainers hanging on Kerr’s every word.

  “Government policies of all sorts. I recently wrote a paper on what the British, maybe even we Americans, can learn from the Soviets about a centralized economy.”

  Kerr glanced around, smiling a little, enjoying the attention.

  “Perhaps you’ve read it,” he said. The line drew a few laughs. Harkins and Wickman were the only ones in uniform in the entire room. Apparently, no one assumed they were readers.

  “I’m just a cop,” Harkins said, smiling. “I mostly stick to the funny papers.”

  There was a little crowd now, Harkins, Wickman, and Stowe pressed into the corner.

  “What’s the short version?” Harkins asked.

  “Well, the Communists clearly don’t have everything figured out. But I’d say that the Great Depression was the death knell for the kind of free-market, all-out capitalism that’s dominated the west since the Industrial Revolution.”

  One of the suits standing behind Kerr said, “Exactly!”

  “Roosevelt himself has shown interest in Stalin’s collectivization,” Kerr went on. “Of course, FDR is a bit of a socialist himself, but he knows a good idea when he sees one.”

  “So you and Batcheller talked about some of these ideas? You thought the Soviets were … let me see here.” Harkins made a show of looking at his notes, though he knew the exact phrase Kerr had used. “You said the Soviets are doing most of the heavy lifting. I assume you mean in fighting the war. You two argued?”

  “I wouldn’t call it an argument,” Kerr said.

  “A fight, then?”

  Kerr polished off his drink in one gulp. “Nothing quite that dramatic,” he said. “And, I’m afraid, nothing pertinent to your investigation. Sorry I couldn’t be of more assistance.”

  Kerr turned to Stowe. “Annie,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll see you later.”

  Kerr had already turned away when Harkins said, “So Gareth Jones had it all wrong?”

  Kerr stopped, turned back around to face Harkins. His gaggle of followers bumped into one another, looking a little like Keystone Kops.

  “I see that you read more than the funny papers,” Kerr said.

  Harkins shrugged.

  “Jones has been sufficiently discredited. Every western journalist in Moscow all but called him a liar.”

  “Maybe we’ll find out some day,” Harkins said. “After the war, I mean, since we’ll be all chummy with the Soviets.”

  Kerr smiled at Harkins. “I think I’ll get another drink.”

  When Kerr had gone, Stowe said to Harkins, “I knew you two would hit it off right away.”

  “Who the hell is Gareth Jones?” Wickman asked.

  “A journalist. He walked across Ukraine when Stalin was starving all the peasants. This is back in ’32, ’33. He saw the beginning of a famine. The Soviets were taking all their food, but no one was reporting on it. Jones had to wait until he was out of the country before he could write about it.”

  “And he was discredited?” Stowe asked.

  Harkins turned to face her. “The whole foreign press corps in Moscow could only send out dispatches that were approved by the Soviets. Everything the journalists had or did—apartments, access to officials, cars, food, travel permits—all of it was in jeopardy if they criticized the regime, so they turned on Jones instead.”

  “Jesus,” Wickman said. “They just took the food away from starving people? And these are our allies?”

  Stowe studied Harkins for a long moment.

  “Just like the British took food out of Ireland during the hunger, right?” she said.

  Harkins nodded. “Something like that.”

  “That was pretty impressive,” Stowe said. “How you pulled that name out of thin air.”

  “So you thought I was just another pretty face?” Harkins said, trying for levity. Stowe did not smile.

  “You surprised, me, that’s all. Lionel isn’t a bad guy, just a know-it-all, maybe a bit of a dandy. He comes by it honestly. Went to one of those fancy New England prep schools. I think he grew up rich in Connecticut.”

  “Is there any other way to grow up in Connecticut?” Harkins said.

  “Where are you from, Annie?” Wickman asked.

  “Atlanta,” she said, maybe leaning on her accent.

  “Just like Scarlett,” Wickman said. “Did you lose your plantation in that misunderstanding? I think they call it ‘The War of Northern Aggression’ down in Georgia, right?”

  Stowe looked down, sipped her drink.

  “Sorry,” Wickman said. “Did I put my foot in my mouth?”

  “My family was comfortable,” she said. “We didn’t live at Tara, but my father did very well. My sister and I—I’m a twin—we got horses for our twelfth birthday.”

  Harkins figured Stowe was about his age, and he turned twelve in 1929, the year the market crashed.

  “By 1931 pretty much everything was gone. Daddy was desperate to make money, get us back the lifestyle we had. He eventually went to Argentina, some cattle-ranching scheme. He died of a fever down there. We didn’t know for months.”

  She shook her head slightly as if to clear it.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s been a rough two days. But what is it Scarlett says? Fiddle-dee-dee?”

  “But you continued with your education?” Wickman asked. He looked like he wanted to hug her.

  “Yes, yes. I was always the smart girl in school. My sister and I both. We came here to England, actually. Then I went back to Cambridge—to Boston—for my graduate work in mathematics.”

  “You went to Harvard?” Wickman asked, a little too surprised.

  “Try not to look so shocked,” Stowe said. “No, I went to MIT. Harvard only admitted women in the School of Education then.”

  “And now you do math for the OSS,” Harkins said.

  “Good try, Lieutenant.”

  “Please,” he said. “Call me Eddie.”

  One corner of her mouth turned up in an almost-smile. Her glass was empty, so Wickman took it from her and scooted off to the bar for a refill.

  “You’re not a drinking man?” Stowe asked.

  Harkins shrugged. “Another surprise, right? An Irish cop who reads and doesn’t drink.”

  She smiled, let out a breath, maybe exhausted by grief.

  “Was there more to Kerr and Batcheller than he let on?” Harkins asked.

  “I don’t know,” Stowe said. “I think they had an actual argument, but I wasn’t there. I only heard about it.”

  “Who was there?”

  “There was a guy Helen dated for a while. A Navy guy. Lieutenant named Frank Payne. He might know something.”

  Harkins wrote the name in his book.

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Oh, he got moved. Portsmouth, I think. Or Southampton.”

  “Down on the channel, then,” Harkins said. “Getting ready for the invasion.”

  Stowe put her index finger to her lips, a smile behind it. “Shhh.”

  “Right,” Harkins said. “Loose lips and all that.”

  * * *

  “Don’t be upset, love,” the woman said, propping herself on one elbow and pulling her other hand from beneath the sheet. “Happens to every fella now and again.”

  “Not to me,” Sinnott lied.

  “I’m sure you have a lot on your mind,” she said. “People have started making plans pending.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there was a handbill about a dance coming up, to be hosted by some regim
ent or other, and at the bottom of the page it said, ‘pending.’ I asked my girlfriend what it meant, and she said, ‘pending the invasion.’ The regiment might not be around for a dance. Since then I’ve seen it in a couple of places.”

  Sinnott put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling, where a water stain was shaped a bit like Lake Michigan.

  “Shall we wait a few and try again?” the woman said. Her name was Elizabeth, but that had been Sinnott’s grandmother’s name, so he called this woman “darling” or nothing at all.

  “What? No,” he said, rolling over on his side and reaching for his trousers. He fished his money clip out of the pocket. It looked significantly depleted, which meant he’d gone through more than he’d planned for the night, no doubt buying drinks for everyone within earshot. He peeled off some bills, including enough for a generous tip. He wasn’t sure this would encourage the woman to be discreet, but it might mean she’d give him another chance over the weekend. She was quite attractive, in a pouty-lipped, Greta Garbo kind of way, and she had her pick of overpaid Yanks. He held out the money.

  “Thanks, love. Would you mind putting it on the chair?”

  Sinnott had forgotten that she didn’t like the money handed to her. Everybody had a favorite delusion. Hers was that she wasn’t a prostitute.

  She stood up and began to dress, Sinnott studying the small of her back, the lovely curve set off by a small birthmark.

  “You must leave work at work,” she said. “You’ve got to give yourself permission to unwind a bit.”

  Sinnott leaned back again. She was right, but it wasn’t the invasion on his mind. It was goddamn Eddie Harkins, the persistent little bastard. He’d solved the case in half a day, but he wasn’t happy with that.

  “Have you heard the new ditty the Piccadilly Commandoes are singing?” the woman said.

  “Piccadilly Commandoes” was the name the press had given the legions of streetwalkers who did business near Piccadilly Circus, sometimes servicing their soldier and airmen customers while standing upright in alleys or doorways.

  “No,” Sinnott said.

  “It’s called ‘Into the Tube.’ Isn’t that naughty?”

  “What a clever metaphor,” Sinnott said, sounding more sarcastic than he’d intended.

  “I only know bits of it,” she said. She stood there in her camisole, held her hands in front of her, batted her eyelashes, and sang to him.

  “Bombs falling; it’s Adolph a-calling.

  Slip into the Tube, my dear!

  “Where it’s deep and it’s warm,

  And you can ride out the storm,

  Far away from the chaos and fear.

  “No gin to be found anywhere.

  Meals are grim, and they’re frightfully spare.

  “In the Tube you’ll find bliss,

  It all starts with a kiss.

  And it only gets better from there.

  “You’ll feel swell, I’ll be flush,

  And if it ends in a rush,

  Please come back, the Tube will be here!”

  Sinnott pulled his hands from behind his head and applauded. “You’re too adorable,” he said.

  She curtsied, then slipped into her dress, which was much too fancy for the places he took her.

  “And you drink too much, my love. You’re a good customer and seem like a nice enough fellow, but our appointments would be more enjoyable if we could follow through.”

  Dressed now, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, like she was tucking him in for the night, and in the same motion palmed the money from the bedside chair. When she was gone, he got out of bed and went to the armoire, where he had a new bottle of real Kentucky bourbon. He’d paid an OSS courier a small fortune to bring it from the States. He poured two fingers into a glass and tossed it back, feeling the heat spread through his chest. No sense getting sober if it just meant a massive headache before morning.

  His demotion had started him on this spiral. For ten of the most exciting, terrifying, and fulfilling months of his life he’d been a field agent, building a network of Resistance members to smuggle downed Allied airmen across the border from occupied France to neutral Spain. Then he discovered that two of the people in his network—a married couple—had been turned by the Gestapo and had given up the names of at least four others in the cell. He got the news from a trustworthy source at dusk one evening. In the course of that single night Sinnott had gone from house to house to warn his people, bicycling, running, crawling, moving in the shadows, setting in motion the contingency plans he’d created to get them out of the area ahead of the Germans.

  At every farmhouse he expected to see the Gestapo come tearing up in their black sedans. He visited the turncoats last, knocking on their door just as first light was breaking over the mountains. The husband had greeted him coolly, though middle-of-the-night visits were not unusual. But the wife knew immediately why Sinnott was there.

  He didn’t ask them any questions—they would have denied everything anyway. Instead, he picked up a pillow, turned on them, and fired his pistol through it, scattering feathers and muffling the report. He hit the husband in the left chest and the man went down instantly, his heart exploded. The wife turned, probably reaching for a gun, and Sinnott’s first shot punched her in the hip, driving her to her knees, her upper body on the bed as if for nighttime prayers. Sinnott was on her in two steps and pushed the now smoldering pillow against the side of her head and fired again. He left the house through the kitchen, where the table was set for breakfast, two plates and a child’s bowl.

  The Gestapo made the rounds that morning, and the only two people they found were the dead informants. But the Germans turned the execution into a propaganda coup, putting pictures of the murdered couple and their unharmed infant in newspapers throughout France. One headline Sinnott saw read “The Resistance Kills Its Own.”

  Sinnott got his recall four weeks later, walking across the Pyrenees into Spain with a half-dozen American and British airmen who’d been shot down over France and Belgium.

  Now, in his dingy rented room, he sat back on the bed, sipped his whiskey, and thought about the invasion. Everyone in Britain and on the continent knew it was coming. Certainly, the Resistance would play a part; the Allies had dropped tons of weapons and explosives by parachute to equip the cells for sabotage and direct attacks on Germans. They’d be screaming for trained and experienced OSS officers at the front once things really got rolling. The trick was landing a plum job. He didn’t want to end up in some front-line division as an interpreter—he spoke both German and French—interviewing civilians and prisoners. He wanted something bigger than that.

  He poured himself another double. He thought it was only his second, but the bottle was almost half empty.

  The problem was that no one at OSS headquarters wanted to take a chance on him, and no one owed him a favor. But when he contacted Eighth Air Force to let them know that Cushing was in custody, another possibility opened up. The air force brass had been itching to get rid of the pilot, and they had the perfect attack dog in the hyper-ambitious Gefner, who was sure that Cushing’s downfall would lead to his—the lawyer’s—promotion, maybe a cushy assignment in London. Gefner had been even more excited when Sinnott handed over the report Cushing had been carrying. Gefner was sure they could put Cushing away for good, and the lawyer hadn’t flinched when Sinnott suggested a quid pro quo, maybe a job as the OSS liaison to Eighth Air Force. If Gefner could get a few air force generals to ask for Sinnott by name, Sinnott’s boss would probably go along with it.

  It would all work out if he could just get Harkins to play ball, to stop looking for ways to clear Cushing. The bastard’s doggedness might eventually lead him to the Soviets, and that would not be good for Richard Sinnott.

  He went back to the armoire, poured another two fingers of bourbon. One of his summer-weight uniforms was on a hanger inside. He’d been promoted to major in the fall and had not worn it since, so the right collar po
int still had the railroad-track silver bars of a captain. Harkins was still a first lieutenant.

  Maybe, Sinnott thought, I can buy him off with a promotion.

  It had worked before.

  Impressed with his own ingenuity, he lifted his glass to toast the reflection in the armoire’s small mirror, then drank the remaining bourbon in a single gulp.

  He went to the bedside table, found his money clip, which held less cash than he expected. He rarely remembered where it went. More to the point, where would he get more?

  “Fuck.”

  He rifled through the pockets of his trousers again, then his raincoat, then the uniform he’d worn earlier that day. He found a single, badly stained pound note. Payday was two and a half weeks away, and if the invasion happened before that, payday might be postponed.

  “Fuck,” he said again.

  He’d have to go back to the Russians, the bastards.

  12

  22 April 1944

  0630 hours

  When Harkins came downstairs in the morning, Beverly Ludington was already dressed, sitting with a pot of tea and a book.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant. Care for some tea?”

  “Yes, please. What are you reading?”

  She closed the book so he could see the cover. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth.

  “Lowell mention that book to you?” Harkins asked.

  “She did, though I read it before, years ago. Young Lowell has been quite upset by Brittain’s latest writings about the bombings.”

  “I have a feeling we’re all going to be astonished, once the war is over, to see what we’ve done.”

  Ludington looked at him for a long moment, gave him a gentle smile.

  “Sorry,” Harkins said. “Didn’t mean to get all philosophical.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I think you’re right. Things we do in the moment, the expedient things, may look different when we have time to reflect.”

  Harkins sat at the small table, his knee bumping hers. She wore a dress more suited for warmer weather, and a tiny gold locket lay against the pale skin of her throat. Harkins admired how gently she managed the tea service with just one hand, and it must have showed.