Louise's Gamble (12 page)

Good-time girls, pick-ups, victory girls, whatever you wanted to call them, were just one tryst away from disease, pregnancy, or a ruined ‘reputation’ that would follow them the rest of their lives. The men? They were heroes who couldn’t be expected to turn down a fling before going to war, egged on by suggestive pin-ups, barbershop magazines, and movies. At the same time women, from USO hostesses to factory workers, were admonished to dress up and be ‘nice’ to our fighting men.

Coffee, apple pie, and time calmed me down. I couldn’t do a damn thing about most of this, but maybe I could help Betty survive. If she wasn’t infected, that was.

TWENTY

I
t was almost dusk, but Alessa felt quite safe, even if she was sitting smack dab in the middle of Central Park on a bench under a cluster of evergreen trees. It was a mild day for New York City in November. The park was full of servicemen walking with their sweeties and nursemaids pushing carriages. Men and women strolled home in pairs with their tennis rackets or croquet mallets over their shoulders. Besides, the Swedish Cottage, with its charming peaked roof and arched windows, was just around the pathway bend. It housed the Civil Defense headquarters of New York City. If she screamed, which she certainly would have no need to, dozens of men with batons and helmets would rush to her defense.

Turi slid on to the bench beside her. ‘
Cara mia
,’ he said, embracing her.

‘It makes me so happy to see you,’ Alessa said, holding on to him tightly.

The two untangled themselves, and Turi lit a cigarette.

‘So,’ he said, ‘how is it going?’

‘Fine,’ Alessa said. ‘Louise has no idea who I am. After I hand over the name you give me, she’ll take it to her handler – that’s a spy word.’

‘I know,’ Turi said, smiling at her.

‘Then it’s over.’ She took his arm. ‘Turi,’ she asked, ‘please can I keep going to the knitting circle? I would stay in my disguise. Louise is the first real friend I’ve made here.’

Her brother shook his head and squeezed her hand. ‘It’s far too dangerous,’ he said. ‘When you told me you lived in Washington, well, I saw the chance to get this information to the authorities without getting me and my family killed. I don’t want anything to happen to you either.’

‘If you insist,’ she said, patting his hand. ‘It’s worth it to be able to do something important. I felt so useless sitting around the apartment waiting for the war to end.’

‘Here,’ he said, handing her an envelope and a folded sheet of paper. She took it, but he wrapped both of his hands around hers.

‘Dear one,’ he said, ‘you must never, ever, say this name aloud. For the rest of your life.’ He released her hand, and she read the name on the paper. Blood drained from her face.

‘Oh, Turi, I’ve seen his name in the newspaper,’ she whispered.

‘Oh, many times, I’m sure.’ Turi grimaced. ‘He’s a powerful man.’

‘I don’t understand. Turi, he’s Mafia.’

‘He’s a
capobastone
, an underboss, and I am one of his
capodecina
.’

‘No! You promised father!’ Alessa pulled her hand from his arm and struck him. ‘You’re not! Why!’

Without speaking, Turi pulled a thick rolled up wad of bills from his pocket and showed it to her, then stuffed it back into his shirt.

‘How could you risk your life so!’

‘Pfft. It’s not dangerous. Unless you overhear your
capobastone
talking to a German in a restaurant bathroom. They spoke Italian, but the stranger had a strong German accent, so I raised my feet above the floor and kept silent. They thought they were alone. What they said froze my blood. I learned that my
capobastone
is a traitor. He is giving the Germans information about our convoys.’

‘Oh, Turi!’

‘You see, the Mafia run the docks and the unions,’ he said. ‘“Socks” Lanza, he made a deal with the Office of Naval Intelligence to keep the East Side safe for American shipping. Then “Lucky” Luciano, he does the same for the West Side. Dock workers, stevedores, stewards, and fishermen, we’re proud to be patriots and spies for the US of A. Except for the sleepers Mussolini and the Nazis planted before the war even began.’

‘I thought Luciano was in jail.’

‘Yeah, and he doesn’t like it much, even though he has his own personal chef. He wants parole. Meyer Lansky is running his operation for him while he’s inside. Christ, Lansky hates the Nazis. He’s a Yid, you know. Sometimes I think there’re more Yids in the mob than Italians!

‘Your
capobastone
, why does he do this?’

Turi shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘And if he suspected I knew his plans . . .’ Turi drew an invisible knife across his throat.

‘Don’t do that!’ Alessa said.

‘Now because of you I don’t have to watch this awful man feed information to the Nazis.’

‘But if,’ Alessa said as she looked around to see if anyone was nearby, ‘the man is guilty, why would anyone hurt you?’

‘Wouldn’t matter. You know of
omertà
, the code of silence? If I break it, I am a rat. Rats die. So,’ he said, ‘you give that name to your friend Louise and forget you ever saw it.’

‘When am I going to see you again? Meet your wife and children?’

‘Soon,’ he said. ‘After all this is ended.’

TWENTY-ONE

T
he District of Columbia jail was ugly when it was built in 1895. Now that its facade was coated with years of grime and soot it looked like an abandoned factory, except for the police cars and paddy wagons lined up outside. Even here you could tell there was a war on. A couple of Army jeeps manned by military policemen parked among the police cars. I supposed they were there to pick up soldiers who’d gotten arrested the night before.

I attracted plenty of notice as I walked up the broad cement steps and into the lobby. I was the only woman in sight. Resolutely, I ignored the stares of the policemen and the crowd of crime reporters and photographers who sprawled on benches around the lobby. I presented myself at the reception desk, a heavy wooden counter topped with bars that reached to the ceiling.

‘Yes, ma’am?’ the sergeant on duty asked.

‘I want to visit a prisoner,’ I said. ‘She works for me, and I just learned today that she’s here.’

‘I’m sorry, but it ain’t visiting hours,’ he said.

I focused on keeping my voice calm and steady. ‘I understand that she was arrested for possibly having venereal disease.’

‘Oh,’ the sergeant said, wrinkling his nose as though he’d gotten a whiff of a bad odor. ‘One of them girls. They ain’t exactly arrested, just taken into custody.’

What was the difference, I wondered?

‘They’re in a special ward. You can go on back there. Mike,’ he called out to a policeman walking through the lobby, ‘take—’ and he looked at me questioningly.

‘Mrs Louise Pearlie,’ I said.

‘Take Mrs Pearlie back to the women’s quarantined ward,’ he said.

Mike was white-haired and stooped. I guessed he’d be retired if it weren’t for the war. He led me through a vast hall four stories tall, stacked with barred cells from floor to ceiling, all reached by what looked like fire escapes. There was a large blackboard in the middle of the hall surrounded by metal chairs.

‘That’s where the illiterate prisoners are supposed to learn to read,’ Mike said. ‘Most of them don’t do too good. But Mrs Roosevelt is big on rehabilitation, so we got to try to teach them something.’

Through a door at the far end of the vast space we found ourselves in a one-story corridor that led to a wall of bars with another door set into it. Mike rang a bell, and another guard appeared.

‘Mrs Pearlie here wants to see one of the sluts,’ he said. If Mike was expecting a rise from me, he didn’t get it. It wouldn’t help Betty if I made a scene. If I was to help her slip back into a normal life, the less memorable we both were the better.

Officer Runyan, according to his name tag, led me past a couple of cells. There were no female guards that I could see. We reached one occupied by four women lying on the bare mattresses of two bunk beds. There was nowhere else to sit.

The guard put a key in the lock and opened the door with a clang. ‘Betty, girl, you got a visitor,’ he called out. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said to me.

Betty instantly sat up from where she was curled up on a lower bunk. Two other women, wrapped in blankets, rolled over on their bunks to get a look at me, then rolled back to go back to sleep.

I sat down next to Betty, and she burst into hysterical sobs. I took her in my arms. She hadn’t bathed in days. Her hair was filthy and stringy, and dirt showed beneath her fingernails.

‘How did you find out?’ she said, between sobs.

‘I went to your boarding house, and Myrna told me,’ I said.

‘I want to kill myself,’ she said, ‘I really do. I’m ruined!’

I took her by both arms and shook her. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘You’re only ruined if you allow it to happen.’

‘That sailor lied! I didn’t sleep with him! He was getting back at me for dumping him!’

I resisted the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her again, this time until her teeth rattled. ‘I don’t care if you’ve screwed a dozen men,’ I said. ‘If that test comes back negative, you pull yourself together and come back to work. You can bet that’s what he’s doing; he’s not giving you, or the fact that he had clap, a second thought. He’s going on with his life.’

‘You won’t tell?’

‘Why would I do that? You’ve been ill. After you recover you’ll return to work.’ I took her face in my hands. ‘Tell me the truth,’ I said. ‘Do you think you’ve got it?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any of the symptoms.’ She burst into tears again. ‘No one will ever marry me now.’

‘Shut up,’ I said, ‘and listen to me. When you get your test back tomorrow, if it’s negative, what happens?’

‘They release me, and I go jump off the Washington Monument.’

‘Be serious.’

‘They release me, and then I don’t know.’

‘Do you have any money?’

She shook her head.

‘Here,’ I said, digging into my handbag. ‘Here’s five dollars. Get a taxi and go back to your boarding house.’

‘I can’t. I can’t face my friends. You don’t know what it was like! They put me in a paddy wagon with prostitutes and drunks!’

‘Stop it, or I’ll walk out of here right now. I mean it! Here,’ I said, giving her my clean handkerchief.

Slowly, Betty stopped sniffling.

‘You go back to your boarding house tomorrow,’ I said. ‘You tell everyone that you’ve been horribly wronged. This soldier—’

‘Sailor,’ she interrupted.

‘This sailor you dated, he turned you in to get back at you for not putting out, get it? You stick to that story, understand? And cry a lot. No one can prove it’s not true.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Gary, that’s his name, had to give girls’ names to the pecker-checker, or he would have been sent to the brig. So he got back at me!’

‘That’s it. He’ll be shipped out soon, if he hasn’t been already.’

‘With luck he’ll get shot in his dick. That’s what he deserves,’ one of the other women said, without turning around to face us.

‘When you get home clean yourself up,’ I said to Betty. ‘You’ll feel better. Myrna and Lil will help you. Myrna has the number of my boarding house, and she’ll call me to let me know you’re home. Then the next day, you come to work, maybe still feeling a little poorly.’

She cringed. ‘I don’t know if I can,’ she said.

‘If you don’t show up by nine thirty, I’m coming for you in a taxi, and I’ll drag you back to the office by your hair. Got it?’

‘Do you think it will work?’

‘Of course it will work. Your girlfriends won’t let you down. And any possible record you might have is buried deep in a file cabinet in a basement somewhere. After the war they’ll make bonfires of all that paper.’

Betty wiped her eyes with the dingy sleeves of her striped prison housecoat. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Forget it.’

Betty’d been a little fool, but she was a damn good typist, and I didn’t want to even think about how difficult it would be to replace her.

TWENTY-TWO

‘
H
ow’s Betty?’ Brenda asked.

I needed to be careful about what I answered. I couldn’t lie to anyone at OSS, but I wanted to give Betty a chance to return.

‘Not well,’ I said. ‘But I hope she’ll be back soon.’

‘Don wants you in his office,’ Ruth said. ‘You sure you two aren’t an item again?’

‘Never! Don’t even let that cross your mind! It’s that special job I did for him, sorting the postcards, you know? Apparently, I’m now the go-to girl for all his projects.’

Melinsky waited for me alone in Don’s office. He wore his tailored uniform today. With his legs crossed, puffing on one of his imported cigarettes, he could have been sitting in the morning room of an estate, waiting for his steward to brief him on the progress of the spring lambing.

Melinsky stubbed out his cigarette and gestured for me to sit down. ‘We need to discuss tomorrow night,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason to think anything untoward will happen, but we must make plans for every eventuality.’

‘All right,’ I said. My pulse quickened.

‘First, what we know about the Oneto family.’ Melinsky proceeded to brief me on the contents of the Oneto OSS file, which I’d already read, while I nodded as if it was news to me.

‘Of course, we have done some additional research,’ Melinsky said. ‘We’ve found that here in Washington the Onetos live at the Mayflower hotel.’

‘Really?’ I said. My friend Joan’s studio apartment was in the Mayflower.

‘The Onetos rent a big apartment there,’ Melinsky said. ‘The household includes Count Sebastian; his wife, Alessa; his mother, Lucia; a maid; and a private secretary. All with unsurprising backgrounds. Typical exiles waiting out the war in safety, although the Count has tried to enlist, I’ll give him that. Flunked all his physicals. Terrible vision and a heart murmur.’

I wondered what sort of man Alessa was married to. She was a good, brave woman, and I hoped the Count was worthy of her.

Two Army privates wrapped in greatcoats, their breath steaming, passed by the window with their guns at the ready. They were part of the detail that protected our grounds, and they couldn’t have overheard us, anyway, but Melinsky waited for their footsteps to fade away before he spoke again.