The traitor beside her, p.13
The Traitor Beside Her, page 13
He raised his glass and said, “Yes, it’s Machiavelli, and that’s what he’s saying. Very good.”
She raised her own glass and tapped his with it. “Thank you, Professor. A few minutes back, I noticed that you credited me with a Machiavellian streak. I’m not sure whether to be flattered or insulted.” Then she took the smallest sip and locked eyes with him over the rim of her wine goblet. “But I hope you didn’t ask me out just to talk professor talk.”
She leaned against the back of her chair and crossed her legs, taking her time about it. This seemed to Justine like a pose that Marlene Dietrich might strike when she got to the seductive part of the evening. At the very least, she hoped she didn’t look foolish doing it.
“No.” He leaned toward her. “Oh, no. I asked you out because I enjoy a woman with a fine mind. And a shapely pair of legs.” She felt his palm cup her knee. “But that is absolutely not the same thing as wanting her for a student.”
Justine was startled by how quickly and directly he’d responded to her leg-crossing maneuver. It was too early in the evening to let his hand stay where it was—where would it go next?—but she didn’t know how Marlene Dietrich would get a man’s hand off her knee.
Flailing around for a smooth, sexy way to do that, she said, “I think we should dance,” and rose. If he rose, too, he would have a hard time reaching her knee.
He did rise, although his hand lingered a little too long and rose a little too far before he released her leg. With his palm on her shoulder blade, he steered her to the dance floor and, because the music was slow, into an embrace. He was so tall, and he held her so close, that she could feel her soft handbag in his breast pocket beneath her cheek. Inside it, she felt the Stinger that could put a single bullet in him, or in her, or in somebody.
“Don’t believe everything Karl tells you,” he said, rocking her gently from side to side in time to the music.
“Should I believe what you tell me?”
“At work? Sure. When two people are on the same side—like bridge partners—and I believe we are, why would they lie to each other? We both want the war to be over, don’t we?”
“But aren’t Karl and I on the same side?”
Instead of answering, he raised his hand and led her into a spin that left her dizzy and wrapped in his arms, her back to his chest. She could no longer see his face, but he could whisper in her ear.
“But you’re probably wondering whether you should believe what I tell you now, when I’m talking about you and me. If you want what I want, then I think you should.”
“How can I know what you want unless you tell me?”
He raised his hand again and twirled her around to face him with her entire body pressed to his. Cupping the back of her head in one big hand, he tilted it back. Then, still swaying to the music, he leaned down and brushed his lips across hers.
“You don’t need me to spell out what I want, and you don’t need me to say it in code, either. You know what I want, but I’m in no hurry. Romance is a game and it’s a dance. It moves to its own rhythm, and it takes its own sweet time.”
* * *
Washington still looked like a cross between a fairy tale and a history book as the Buick rolled along its streets in the late-night quiet. The radio still murmured quiet horns over a smooth bass line. Justine was only a little tipsy.
As they passed over the Potomac, Ed said, “Don’t forget what I said about Karl. There’s a reason he goes through assistants so quickly, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Does he fire them? Is he so hard to please that they quit?”
“Oh, he’s fired a few, although he’s so ecstatic over your work that I think you’ll escape that. At least for a good long while.”
“I’ve got a lot of perseverance. It would be hard to make me quit.”
“I’m not so concerned about the ones he fires or the ones who throw a screaming fit and walk out on him. He’s a hard taskmaster. Everybody knows it. There’s a reason that the people around Arlington Hall call him ‘Killer Karl’—or they did until Bettie’s death caused that nickname to stop being funny. I’m far more concerned about the women who work for Karl until they…well, until they disappear.”
Her head whipped his way so hard that her neck hurt.
“What did you say?”
“They just leave. We come to work, and we find that Karl’s been left to his own devices. And then the word comes from somebody on the military side of things that they’ve been ‘reassigned.’ It’s happened at least twice. The women don’t say goodbye. We don’t see them at all. Their roommates say that they come home that day to find an empty closet. The women are just gone. It’s happened at least twice that I know of.”
“Does Karl know where they went?”
“If he does, he doesn’t say.”
He downshifted as the car climbed the hill where Arlington Farms sat. Higher up the flank of the hill, the graves of Arlington National Cemetery began. Somewhere, a great war was making more bodies to be buried in more graves.
“He may not know. One of my employees left the same way, and I don’t know where she went.”
“You’re not talking about Bettie, are you?”
“No.” His voice wavered oddly, and he stopped talking to clear his throat. “No, Bettie’s not missing. She died. We know that for sure.”
“She was the one who was—” Her own voice felt unsteady.
“The one who was murdered? Yes. That was Bettie, and we miss her every day. She was soft-spoken and sweet, and everybody in the room considered her their friend. She wasn’t as obviously brilliant as you are, but she had everything a code breaker needed.”
“Perseverance, careful analytical methods, intuition, and luck.”
Ed gave her a sad smile. “You’ve read Hitt. Yes. Bettie had those things. She broke some messages that saved lives—a lot of lives. It was another of my employees, Mabel Hennessey, who was, according to the Army, ‘reassigned,’ like Karl’s two assistants.”
“Do you think she’s safe?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. All I can do is hope that it was a simple case of the government moving her someplace where her skills will do even more to help us get to the end of this war. More than that, I hope she’s okay.”
He parked the car and fumbled in the pocket where he’d put her purse. She presumed that he was going to pull it out and return it to her. Instead, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one. “Do you smoke?”
She shook her head.
“Mind if I do?”
“No, not at all.”
He lit it, took a drag, cracked the car window, and held the burning cigarette outside the car.
He said, “You intrigue me. I’d like to see you again,” as he leaned over to give her a kiss that was a little less brief than the one they’d shared on the dance floor. His lips tasted of tobacco smoke, and Justine was surprised to find that she didn’t mind.
Still pretending that she was Marlene Dietrich acting in a not-too-scandalous movie, she reached a hand up as he kissed her, brushed it across the exposed back of his neck, and slid it along his jawbone before he pulled it away. The hand gripping her shoulder said more than the kiss did.
She said, “Yes. I’d like to see you again, too,” and it was possible that she meant it.
Now that he had secured the promise of another night of romance, Ed flicked a short length of ash out the window and shifted the conversation to other things.
“Let’s see. I’ve told you to be careful of Killer Karl. What else can I tell you about your new job? Well, there’s this.” He leaned over to whisper in her ear. “Take great care of your mind.”
This advice caught Justine off guard. She’d always been able to rely on her mind, and she’d never given a second thought to its care. Now, in the very same day, Karl and Ed were both insistent that she understand the risks inherent in the work that she was doing for them.
“The work we do—the work we all do—will crush us eventually. The small successes just don’t make up for the day-to-day failures. The frustration of staring at pages of gibberish for days, sometimes weeks, will break us in the end. The SSA doesn’t care what the work does to us, as long as we remain able to keep doing it. I know this, because I spend a lot of time propping up employees who are brilliant but not especially stable.”
Justine thought of Nora and her refusal to step on cracks. She thought of Ike, wearing his winterwear indoors in a well-heated room and living in a body cruelly damaged by the war. Ed might be exaggerating when he suggested that all of his employees had mental or emotional vulnerabilities, but there seemed little doubt that some of them did.
“Success in our business is about numbers,” he said. “How many people with the right mind for cryptanalysis can we find and keep on the job? How many encrypted messages can each of us crack before we crack? How many fake messages can we create to bend reality for the enemy? How many uncoded messages can we scramble before we scramble our own minds?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
He shook his head, blowing tobacco smoke in a half circle around his head. “I think there is no number that will satisfy them. Their goals for us are infinite. We do a meticulous job on each and every task, but nothing we do is ever enough.”
A bitter, choked laugh escaped him along with the tobacco smoke.
“It’s rather like working for my father. A college degree, a doctorate, an Ivy League job. None of them were ever enough, and a responsible wartime position isn’t enough now. ‘Why can’t you play football? Why can’t you make more money? Why can’t you pick up a gun and fight for your country like your brother?’”
He sucked in another puff of smoke.
“I can’t even tell my father what I do. My country would execute me if I breathed a word to him. But don’t you think he might be able to infer that what I do is important, since it’s keeping my body—a body that’s young enough and plenty strong enough to be cannon fodder—off the battlefield? I guess that’s the real joke. My contribution to the war effort is using logic to infer truths that I can’t learn any other way, but he’s not capable of inferring that my work is critical to winning this war. I suppose I could make him proud if I died for my country, but I wouldn’t know about it, and isn’t that a joke?”
He turned his eyes from the red tip of his cigarette to Justine. “But none of that is about you, the very lovely you. If you’re a quarter as capable as Karl says you are, he’ll spread around some of the work he’s using to drown the rest of us. He’ll give some of it to you, and then maybe the rest of us will be able to take an easier breath or two.”
He took the final drag of the cigarette, sucking the smoke as deep into his lungs as he could. The lit tip of the cigarette reflected in his eyes, revealing something that she’d already heard in the quaver of his voice. He was blinking back tears.
He crushed his cigarette butt in the ashtray tucked under a tiny metal flap on the dashboard, and said, “My guess is that we will breathe a little easier when Karl shifts some of our assignments to you, but only for a while. He’ll give us more work, different work, and he’ll pile more and different work on you. He’ll tell you that the work must be done perfectly and instantaneously, or men will be mowed down by machine guns and blasted apart by bombs. But why must he tell you that, when you already know it, right down to the marrow of your bones? That knowledge, and Karl, will crush you, too. Eventually, Karl and this damn war will crush us all.”
* * *
“Want a couple of aspirin?” Georgette said as Justine trudged through the door. “I got a glass of water waiting for you. And I wrote you out some new things to learn. That’s unless you had too many cocktails to learn anything tonight. Hey! Maybe those cocktails mean you’ll go easy on me tonight.” She pointed to the slate where Justine wrote her algebra problems.
The slate was sitting on the bedside table beside the glass of water, and it was inscribed with Justine’s nightly Choctaw lesson. Just to make things fun, Georgette had encrypted it with the private cipher they saved for messages nobody else should read. Justine’s head was throbbing, so she downed the aspirin tablets at one gulp. It was possible that she’d indeed had too many Clover Clubs to come up with an algebra lesson for Georgette.
She willed her eyes to focus on the words and phrases that Georgette wanted her to learn. After applying the private cipher, she read:
YAKOKE
ANT PISA
NA YUKPA
* * *
Turning the slate over, she read the words’ translations.
THANK YOU
COME AND LOOK
HAPPY
Georgette sat in bed reading, her hair tied up in rags and her face oddly shiny and slick. “I went down to Linda’s room to find out more about that cold cream she’s so crazy about. It felt so good when I rubbed some on my hand that I bought a jar off her. I think she buys it by the case, so she had more than plenty. Why don’t you use a little dab of it when you take off that pancake makeup, so you can see if you like it? Just remember that it don’t take much. I only used the tiniest bit, but I feel like I rubbed my whole face all over with lard.”
Justine kicked off her shoes, peeled off the velvet dress and its underpinnings, put them away, and wrapped herself in a cotton gown. “You’re so good to me,” she said. “I’ll pay you back next time Jerry takes you out. You’ll come home to everything you need to keep a hangover away.”
“That’ll be swell, but you’ll be paying me back right now when you tell me all about your evening. Was he nice?”
“Yes. I guess? He was a perfect gentleman. Well, not perfect, but there’s no fun in that. He showed me a nice time. Dinner was delicious, and so were the drinks. He was pleasant to talk to, but other than the fact that his work is hard and he doesn’t get along with his father and he likes to play cards, I’m not sure I found out very much about him.”
Georgette lowered her voice to a whisper. “That sounds like a date with a spy.”
Justine whispered back, “I certainly didn’t volunteer anything about myself, and I’m a spy.”
“I prefer the term ‘agent,’” Georgette said in a low, husky voice.
This was Paul’s personal motto, and Georgette sounded so much like him that Justine nearly fell off her bed laughing.
“We’ll have some privacy to talk more tomorrow,” Georgette whispered. “Too many ears here.”
“If we’re still going to Gloria’s, maybe we can find someplace to take a walk. Like a park. A quiet sidewalk.”
“Oh, we’re going to Gloria’s. And we’re getting privacy. Just wait and see. Now take this cold cream and wipe off them Marlene Dietrich eyebrows. You look like a dish, but you don’t look like you.”
Chapter 10
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1944
Justine had imagined Gloria and her lab in one of the buildings that had sprung up in downtown Washington in the years since the Pearl Harbor attack. Where else would the government put the fancy, modern lab that Paul had promised Gloria?
It seemed that the answer to that question was not “downtown Washington.” According to Jerry, who had arrived bright and early to ferry them wherever they were going, Gloria’s brand-spanking-new laboratory was at an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp, way out in the Maryland countryside.
“Get comfortable,” Jerry said as he adjusted a set of hand controls that he must have installed himself. “We’ll be going about sixty miles, and they’re not all highway miles.”
Georgette leaned forward and poked Jerry in the shoulder. “Just last night, I told Justine that we’d have some time to talk about secret stuff. I bet she didn’t guess that we’d have such a handsome driver while we was doing it.”
He barked, “Watch it! I’m driving,” and swatted her hand away, but not too hard.
Georgette had left Jerry sitting all by his lonesome in the front seat, so that she could sit in the back and talk to Justine. They didn’t have any secrets from him—at least, they didn’t have secrets from him that were related to work—but they needed to make the best use possible of this time when they could speak freely. They had so very little of it.
“Now let me tell you what I learned last night while I was gettin’ us a jar of cold cream.” Georgette brushed her hand over her own cheek as if hoping that Linda’s face cream had worked magic in a single night.
“You learned that neither of us is going to be getting a permanent wave, because we can’t afford to go to the hairdresser?”
“Yes, I did learn that, and also your hair is curly enough that you don’t need one. Lucky you. But I also learned that Sally used to room with a woman named Doris Goldberg. Until…poof! Doris was gone, up and left without a word. That’s when Sally moved in with Thelma. Can you believe she lives with that sourpuss? She must really miss Doris. I ain’t heard nothing but nice things about her.”
“Did Doris have my job working for Karl?”
Georgette looked impressed. “She did. How did you guess?”
“Ed said that at least two of Karl’s assistants have left without a word. She must be one of them. Did anybody look for Doris?”
“Karl told people she got transferred. That’s all anybody knows.”
“That’s exactly what Ed told me. He seemed to be trying to tell me not to trust Karl, but he admitted to having a former worker named Mabel who left the same way.”
“So Karl and Ed have both lost employees who disappeared?”
“Yes. But Ed told me about it—warned me about it, actually—and that makes him seem more trustworthy. I’ve been working closely with Karl for two days, and he hasn’t breathed a word.”
“But maybe Ed told you about it on purpose, so’s you’d trust him.”
This could be true. Justine had seen enough of Ed to believe that she’d only heard what he wanted her to hear.
“Also, Bettie was working for Ed when she got killed,” Georgette pointed out. “Maybe it was a coincidence and maybe it wasn’t.”
