Louise's War Read Free

on my way to the ‘B’ main file, and looked back at Don. He didn’t even remove his pipe from his mouth. He tapped the phone book with his pencil.
    ‘I’ll guard it with my life,’ he said.

TWO
    T hree floors up, in yet another gutted apartment, I pulled Gerald Bloch’s dossier out of a file cabinet. The Manila jacket contained few papers, and I flipped through them quickly, until I saw a Bloch listed on the program for an international hydrography conference held in 1936. Must be the same man. How many French hydrographers named Bloch could there be in the world, and what was hydrography, anyway?
    Back in my office I’d barely settled down to read the Bloch file when Don closed the London phone book with a final slap. After giving it back to me he took the pipe out of his mouth and leaned back in his chair.
    ‘Louise,’ he said, ‘I was wondering. There’s a cocktail party at Evalyn McLean’s next week. I can get us in. Want to go?’
    ‘Gosh, Don, I don’t own a dress I could wear to a party like that.’ Maybe Betty was right. Don must have social connections, and money, if he could wangle an invitation to Friendship House. I wanted to go, just for the fun of it. But that might encourage him, and I didn’t want that, though I was supposed to be finding my second husband. My parents made that clear barely three months after Bill died.
    ‘Girls wear anything to parties now,’ Don said, ‘even Red Cross uniforms.’
    ‘I’ll get back to you,’ I said. ‘Depends on work – whether my girls are back from sick leave.’
    I’d be thrilled to go to one of Evalyn McLean’s parties. All the rich, famous and important people in town went to her soirées. I read all about them in the society columns. Last week Gene Tierney and Oleg Cassini were in town and went to Evalyn McLean’s and then on to three more parties in one night. Of course I’d met lots of celebrities already. John Ford directed our Field Photography Unit, and I once saw Sterling Hayden in the cafeteria, eating chipped beef on toast just like the rest of us.
    After Don left and I’d returned the London phone book to the safe I sat down with the dictionary and the Bloch file. I had some privacy even when my clerks were in the office. My desk, as befitted my title, which entitled me to one hundred and eighty dollars a year more than my subordinates, sat apart from the others behind a partition knocked together from two-by-fours and plywood. I could even lock my desk drawers. When the desks were delivered to this room, government workmen pried out the locks on the others.
    Hydrography was the science of charting the oceans, I learned. Wet geography. Humor aside, I figured that hydrography would be critical to winning a world war that was fought on the sea as well as on land and in the air.
    Bloch’s file contained a letter from an instructor in the geography department at George Washington University, one Marvin Metcalfe, who’d met Bloch at that international conference in 1936, and thought he fit the OSS description of a ‘foreign expert’. He’d enclosed the program from the conference, which listed Bloch as a speaker.
    That wasn’t all. The file contained a photostat of a letter from Bloch dated in May of 1940, as the Germans advanced on Paris, to the American consulate in Marseille. My French, and his handwriting, wasn’t good enough for me to translate it, but I did recognize the words émigrer and demande de visa . Bloch had been trying to escape France for some time. The final document in the file was an article from a Marseille newspaper, probably clipped by an OSS employee at the Bern office combing old French newspapers. The piece was brief and in French, of course. I gathered that Bloch received some sort of award. A photograph accompanied it.
    Bloch was a slender, fair man with a thin mustache. His wife, holding their baby son, stood next to him proudly. I felt my chest contract and my stomach roil. Bloch’s wife was