Lipstick and Lies (13 page)

She might be all lace and pearls with the fellas, but I put some English on my lob. She caught it with ease of the Girls Professional League’s all-star catcher, Bonnie Baker.

A small mirror hung on the wall behind her. She turned and rubbed at the spot. Her discerning eye swept my uniform. I returned the once over. In the past year, I’d grown accustomed to throwing on standard military garb for every occasion. My counterpart, in a knockout blouse and slacks, had put more energy into her appearance.

The fashion plate dropped the soiled rag on the counter and extended her hand. “Hi, I’m Liberty Leach.”

“Pucci Lewis.” I ignored her hand and eyed her dead-on. “I heard you in the hallway. You deliberately seduced our escort into revealing classified information. What’s the big idea?”

She looked startled. Then she laughed. It was a pleasant, tinkling laugh. “I was having a little fun, that’s all.” She read my expression. “You don’t believe me? Look around. What do you see? A bunch of prospective spooks. And why are we here? To learn and practice duplicity. It’s the name of the game.”

I stared. What had the lieutenant said? Three weeks from now I’d be a pro at using rumors, lies, and deception to gain the advantage? “B-b-but,” I began haltingly, “the escort is one of us. What was the point of tricking him into disclosing the location of the Message Center?”

“
Trick
him? Didn’t you hear that clacking noise? Teletype machines. And what about that clattering sound, a few paces earlier? A rotary press, you can bet churning out the black pamphlets and leaflets they’re so famous—or infamous—for producing here.”

Now that she mentioned it, maybe I had heard the sound of a press. I wouldn’t have placed it, though, on my own.

I smiled. “Sorry. Guess I got us off on the wrong foot. I have an active imagination. Tends to run amuck at all the wrong times.” I glanced around. “Say, what if we’ve been under surveillance? They’ll be on to you—”

“
On to me?
Being sneaky is what it’s all about.”

“So sneaky you arrived as a student agent, fully trained?”

Another musical laugh. “Now you’re trying to flatter me.
Pucci?
Where’d you get a name like that?”

I smothered a sigh and explained.

“Ahhh. Puccini, Pucci,” she said. “Got it.”

“What about Liberty? That’s not exactly a common name either. Sounds patriotic.”

Like her outward appearance, Liberty’s name evolution was alluring. Her parents had been in China during the last Great War. The conflict had begun winding down when she was born. Consumed with hope for the country’s future, the couple decided to name her something symbolic. They chose Liberty, or Liu, a Chinese family name that could also be used as a first name for girls. When she was twelve, her parents decided it was time she experienced life and an education in the States. They moved back to Connecticut where her father still had ties. Soon afterwards, her name was Americanized.

The fingerprinter was at work on yet another pair of hands, giving us the chance to extend our tentative friendship feelers a little farther. Naturally, we both wanted to know what had brought the other to Q. I went first and admitted to being a ferry pilot.

“It’s a great job, my dream job,” I added, confiding that while no one had actually come right out and said so, I suspected my recruitment had to do with a special stint in Hollywood.

A few months earlier, I had been dispatched there by Miss Cochran to serve as her liaison, overseeing the making of a documentary on our unit. Things became complicated when in the course of my duties I stumbled upon some thieves pilfering military film for Axis propaganda purposes. Certain aspects of the case were still pending and I was prohibited from discussing particulars, but I did let Liberty know that Lieutenant Roy Jarvis had been tracking the ring and he had enlisted my help in capturing them. Jarvis was with G-2, the War Department’s Army Intelligence arm. At least I thought he was. In the entire time we worked together, he had not actually confirmed it.

The adventure left me wanting to test my sleuthing skills further, though I never expected anything to come of it. Then, back in Long Beach, the special orders had arrived.

Liberty had received the identical cable. “Marshall doesn’t mince words, does he?” she laughed.

Continuing in hushed tones, she quickly retraced her path to OSS, beginning with the fall of 1941 when she joined the highly confidential Oral Intelligence Group at the offices of the Coordinator of Information, the nation’s peacetime intelligence agency, in New York. Major General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan ran COI, and later OSS, building both organizations quickly, from scratch, by recruiting heavily from a close circle of friends and acquaintances. And it was through her father, who knew someone who knew Donovan, that Liberty had managed to secure a coveted desk job at OI.

In June 1942, there was an agency reshuffling. COI was dismantled and, in the aftermath, half of the organization’s permanent staff was transferred to the Office of War Information, while the other half joined ranks with the newly formed Office of Strategic Services. As part of the change, Liberty was moved to OWI. She had been perfectly content there, she said, until a major representing OSS approached her with whispered overtures about dark adventure and a “behind the lines” assignment. This had happened just a few days earlier and Liberty was about to explain why it had taken some arm-twisting from the major to get her to make the leap, but the fingerprinter interrupted. Calling us over and pronouncing us “officially recorded,” he directed us to security, where our women’s indoctrination would continue.

***

Dreamboat reappeared. Liberty and I trailed him through another labyrinth of underground corridors, at last arriving at a harshly lit sprawling office space where the tone of the secret service organization we were joining was tactfully and tastefully set with posters such as:
A Slip of the Lip Will Sink a Ship
, rendered by a sea of exploding U.S. battle cruisers; and
Someone Talked
, illustrated by the image of fallen, badly injured GIs. Printed messages, peppering desks and walls, were equally subtle:
Are the safes secure? All secret papers put away? All unnecessary lights turned out?

A droopy-eyed second lieutenant, chewing on a wooden toothpick and seated at a desk in front of a large poster of a pink ear superscribed with
The Enemy Is Listening
, beckoned us with a meaty hand. “All right girls, raise your right hands and solemnly swear…”

The lieutenant spoke rapidly, the bobbing toothpick in his mouth distracting me so completely that I missed most of what we were solemnly swearing to, but the gist was something along the lines that we would never, repeat!,
never
reveal what went on behind the OSS velvet curtain.

We chorused, “I promise.” The lieutenant removed his pick.

“OSS is an undercover organization authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he said, jabbing the air with the wooden sliver as he spoke. “We’ve got three main divisions. R&A—that’s research and analysis—they prepare area surveys and intelligence studies for operational groups. Then there’s SI, secret intelligence. Our SI boys infiltrate enemy lines and siphon information back to headquarters. And, SO…” The lieutenant paused to study the splintered chew marks on his pick. “SO is sabotage operations. Men in SO muck about with organized guerrilla bands in enemy territory and engage in irregular warfare.

“We are anonymous,” he added, this time lunging the sliver at us. “If people ask you what you do here, you’re file clerks. People aren’t interested in file clerks, not enough to ask questions. Remember, there are enemy agents in Washington. They’re here to listen. One slip and a dozen of our agents could be dust within hours. What branch you girls in?”

“Morale Operations,” Liberty and I said jointly. We were in the same unit! We looked at one another and grinned.

A prisoner of my Protestant standards and provincial reserve, I longed to be more urbane. We had just met, but hearing about Liberty’s background, seeing the way she handled herself and dressed, I had to believe that in the days ahead, learning the tricks of a new trade with her, some of the sophistication and panache I craved might rub off on me. The good news had hardly sunk in when the security officer drew a deep breath, then exploded.

“Propagandists! Your group was added just a few months ago, but already it has the worst security record of the entire organization.”

Then, because he felt so strongly about Morale Operations, the man spent the next half hour—not in the line of duty—telling us how essential it was to take things seriously, in spite of how loosely our branch was run. The lieutenant’s tirade was also a welcome first peek into the inner workings of our strange and terrible group. From him we learned that MO operators plied their trade in hundreds of tricky ways. Acting on the assumption that the enemy would more readily believe rumors coming from within its own country and from its own people, MO faked newspapers and clippings supposedly printed in enemy territory; distributed leaflets behind Axis lines supporting underground unrest; and manufactured rumors, or whispering campaigns, suggesting such calamities as the collapse of the German home front or the insanity of its leaders.

The creation of material designed to misinform and create division behind enemy lines called for imagination and knowledge of the region, culture, and language. Also a certain amount of artistic skill. Such a broad array of talents required a diverse band of characters, selected to complement one another, and referred to as “MO Types.”

The lieutenant began grousing about the difficulties associated with having every nationality and every sort of occupation on the payroll, and I ventured a glance at Liberty. But she was grinning, obviously tickled pink like me at having been recognized as a good match for the merry pack.

Next up was Psychological Assessment, or S School, a sort of mental clinic run by a team of nationally famous psychologists and psychiatrists who screened OSS candidates using carefully crafted “live” situations designed to uncover the very core of a recruit’s personality. The tests were conducted at a colonial mansion, complete with a sweeping verandah, on a 118-acre estate near Fairfax, Virginia. The setting was meant to give the illusion of a country weekend party, with perhaps some skeet shooting thrown in, instead of what it really was: a proving ground where your gray matter was picked apart by a tweedy group who wanted to know what you would do under major pressure, how you made friends, and what situations frightened you.

Liberty and I began by sharing quarters at S and remained roommates in the following weeks. We had already clicked during indoctrination and now we were inseparable, sharing class notes, clothes, confidences, things far beyond the fingerprint towel that first brought us together. At orientation the number one order of business had been the warning not to discuss
anything
with
anyone
. Liberty and I, though, were hard pressed to keep little, if anything, from one another. Especially at night when, before nodding off, we amused ourselves by imagining various scenarios of breaking and entering the men’s quarters, two floors above. At S, student agents were required to be incognito. To heighten our entertainment, we compared notes about the male students’ real identities, a big no-no as we were supposed to be making our own deductions. The exchanges seemed harmless and were private so no one was ever the wiser. Except us. And it was these small acts of sharing and helping one another drew us closer, although some of the trust between us was built-in. Like mine, Liberty’s father had been called by God and sometimes at night we swapped family stories. Not that our experiences were anything alike. My father had been called by a small town parish; global adventure had beckoned hers, a medical missionary. The serendipity—I was a PK, she was a missionary kid, MK—was not lost on us.

Liberty adored her parents, both fun-loving adventurers. Tales of her family’s days in China were always the best. My favorite involved an expedition she and her father took to the Great Wall of China. Her descriptions of the people and surroundings, the grandeur of the structure, were exotic, captivating. “This is an actual chip from the Wall,” she’d confided on one occasion, pointing to a tiny dark stone set in a dangly earring. She held it up, eyeing it wistfully. “I had pair specially made. But I lost one. Still, I’m glad to have a memento of the trip. Holding it, I always feel close to Dad.”

My father had been more distant and while I adored him, I couldn’t help envying Liberty’s chummy father-daughter relationship. One incident, though, not only underscored his devotion to me, but changed my life. It was just after my mother had died. Wracked with guilt, I refused to talk; barely ate; would not budge from my room. How could I? That fatal evening if I hadn’t been so stubborn, if we hadn’t fought, she would not have been late for practice. She would still be alive. But we arrived at church. She rushed, out of breath, up the stairs to the loft. “She wasn’t herself”…“Distracted,” several of the choir members said after the fall.

Weeks of seclusion and mourning were interrupted when Dad decided to take me on a sightseeing flight along Lake Erie leaving from the Cleveland airport, not far from our home. He had chosen the air tour not because he was a pilot or some sort of thrill seeker. He was a preacher. And by nature he never did anything on a lark. But he was desperate. Anything to lift me from the cistern of depression I’d sunk into. Up and away we went, closer to heaven, and to Mom. The outing sealed my fate. I made peace with her; I also decided one day I would be a pilot. War, and Miss C, had bumped up the flying opportunities. More recently, with Liberty, I had been plunged into a different slice of what would be normally a man’s world.

Two days of examination under the “S-scope” later, we emerged: me, properly humbled after my subconscious desires and character weaknesses had begun appearing like a bad case of measles under the strain; and Liberty, who, I had come to discover, was a natural-born actress, none the worse for wear.