Louise's War: A World War II Novel of Suspense (The Professor Simon Shaw) - Hardcover

Shaber, Sarah R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0727880403 ISBN 13: 9780727880406

Verlag: Joffe Books LTD -Severn House Books, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

1942. Louise Pearlie, a young widow, has come to Washington DC to work as a clerk for the legendary OSS, the precursor to the CIA. When, while filing, she discovers a document concerning the husband of a college friend, Rachel Bloch, a young French Jewish woman she is desperately worried about, Louise realizes she may be able to help get Rachel out of Vichy France. But then a colleague whose help Louise has enlisted is murdered, and she realizes she is on her own, unable to trust anyone . . .

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah R. Shaber is the author of the popular 'Simon Shaw' novels and the 'Louise Pearlie' historical mystery series. Sarah lives in North Carolina with her husband and children.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Louise's War

A World War II Novel of Suspense

By Sarah R. Shaber

Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2011 Sarah Shaber
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7278-8040-6

CHAPTER 1

June 26, 1942
'Two Trees', a boarding house
Washington, DC

I slept naked last night, like everyone else in this city. But despite lying flat out on my bed in my birthday suit with the fan blowing straight on me, I couldn't cool off enough to fall asleep.

The heat wasn't the only thing keeping me from my rest. The Top Secret document I'd locked in the office safe before I'd left work worried me to the point that I'd been fretting about it all evening and into the night. Before I'd slid the document onto the shelf inside the safe, I'd noticed the surname on the memorandum subject line: Bloch. My stomach seized and a shiver of apprehension scurried down my spine. It couldn't be Rachel's family, could it? Bloch was a common French surname, there must be thousands of families named Bloch trapped in France.

I managed to banish my worries for Rachel until morning, telling myself I could do nothing until I got to work. But around two in the morning I realized that without relief from the smothering heat I might well be awake all night.

Finally I got out of the bed, slipped a cotton housecoat over my sticky body, pulled the top sheet off the bed, went into the bathroom, opened the bathtub tap, and soaked the sheet in the tub. I wrung out the sheet until it stopped dripping, carried it back to my bedroom, and stretched it between the tall bedposts at the foot of my bed, tying the corners to the bedpost caps so that the sheet hung its full wet length down to the floor. I turned the fan on high, trained it directly on the sheet and stretched out on my bed. Cool air brushed my body, drying my skin. For a few minutes I listened to fat June bugs popping and buzzing against my window screens and the rhythmic clicking of a loose fan blade, until, blessedly, I fell asleep.

The morning queue at the bus stop was so long I figured I had no hope of catching a bus anytime soon. So I walked the ten blocks from my boarding house on 'I' Street to the agency's headquarters in Foggy Bottom. I shaded my eyes from the harsh glare with a straw fedora and my first pair of prescription sunglasses, and soaked three handkerchiefs sopping up perspiration from my neck and any other part of my body I could reach without exposing myself.

The security officer at the front entrance to my building stopped me at the door. He was an army private who compulsively shrugged every few minutes to resettle his rifle on his shoulder, as if he wasn't comfortable with it yet. Private Cooper knew me well by now, but he still squinted at my ID badge. Satisfied that I was the same person I'd always been, the soldier opened the door to the anonymous building, a converted apartment house at the corner of 23rd and 'E' Street without a sign or a street number, and nodded at me to enter.

'Good morning, Mrs Pearlie,' he said. As he did nearly every day, he looked down at my feet, sensibly shod in cotton anklets and canvas shoes, and said, 'I know it's hot, but I wish you girls would start wearing stockings and heels again.'

I didn't respond. I'd decided a long time ago that it was best not to say out loud much of what crossed my mind. I could think what I liked, though, and I thought the guard would wait a long time before he'd catch me wearing stockings in one-hundred-degree heat ever again.

I was here to work, not be whistlebait for teenaged GIs.

The heavy wood doors that opened off the hall of the old apartment building weren't identified or even numbered. The first one on the right led to my office, which I'd worked in alone for the last few days, since the three girls who clerked for me got food poisoning at a USO picnic last Sunday. Doing their jobs as well as my own was exhausting, though it was a relief to have some respite from the incessant clatter of typewriters and mimeographs.

I switched both floor fans on low, to keep the breeze from blowing papers everywhere, and raised the shades in what was once the living room of a two-bedroom apartment, now crowded with four desks, banks of index-card file cabinets, and a massive Yale floor safe.

I went straight to the safe, entered the combination, twirled the dial and used both hands to haul open the heavy door. Top Secret files and papers crowded it. I extracted a thin file off one shelf and shut the safe door behind me. The lock engaged with a solid click.

As the only clerk in the Research and Analysis branch of the Office of Strategic Services with a Top Secret clearance, all documents referred from General Donovan's office came directly to me, stamped 'your eyes only' in red. Oh so secret, and oh so silly, as the pundits editorializing in the Republican newspapers often described our infant spy agency. I wished I could put those jerks to work in my office. I'd make them file index cards until their fingers bled!

The document I held had arrived at General Donovan's office from London OSS headquarters by way of a creased leather diplomatic pouch, but the message originated with an intelligence operative in Marseille, deep inside Vichy France.

The original French message was scrawled on a fragment of brown waxed paper, the kind a village charcuterie might use to wrap up a housewife's breakfast bacon. A typed translation, single-spaced to conserve paper, was clipped to the original. The message read: 'Met with Gerald Bloch, of the Marseille Hydrography Office, expert on the coastline of French North Africa, free to work with the Resistance if OSS evacuates his family to safety.' That was all. A memo from General Donovan's aides directed us to forward the file and any information about Bloch we could find to the Europe/Africa desk for further study.

Gerald Bloch. My dearest friend in the world, Rachel Foa, had married a Gerald Bloch after she and her father, an officer of the New York branch of a French bank, returned home to Marseille in 1933. I'd last heard from Rachel in the summer of 1940, when France fell to the Nazis. She wrote to tell me that her father had died of heart failure after the Nazis occupied Paris and seized his apartment and his bank accounts. She reassured me that she was safe in Marseille, but I was desperately worried about her.

The Nazis occupied half of France, including Paris. But France was supposedly free and independent with a president, Marshal Pétain, and an administrative center in Vichy. For political and diplomatic reasons it suited the Germans to allow a puppet French state to exist, for now, anyway.

I'd known Rachel was Jewish before I met her, since the Dean of St Martha's, the junior college we attended, wrote and asked me if I had any objection to rooming with a French Jewish girl. Of course I didn't. I felt so blessed to go to college, especially during the depression, I would have roomed with a Hottentot. As it happened the only thing about Rachel that appeared remotely Jewish to me was that she didn't eat bacon on Saturday and played mah-jongg obsessively.

Could the Gerald Bloch of this file be Rachel's husband? Surely it was a coincidence. I forced myself to stay calm and read the file as if the name Bloch meant nothing to me.

This Bloch must be Jewish, too, or he wouldn't be trading his expertise for his family's escape from Vichy France. And French North Africa would soon be the target of a massive Allied campaign, the first offensive in the Mediterranean theater since the United States entered the war six months ago....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Joffe Books LTD -Severn House Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0727880403
• ISBN 13: 9780727880406
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 206
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland