LOVE WAS ENTWINED WITH a good cause, and the cause looked stronger than ever. Rommel was smashing across North Africa. The Japs had been routed at Midway, but the Japanese only confused the issue. If Japan sued for peace, maybe Americans would see the situation in Europe more clearly. After all, it wasn’t Hitler who bombed Pearl Harbor. The early summer evening was beautiful.
Blair Rice boarded the Fifth Avenue bus at Seventy-Second Street, went up to the upper level and took a seat toward the back, as he had been instructed. He wore a straw boater this evening, as instructed. He disliked the unfashionable hat—it made him feel like his father—but it was the last week of June and his family and their acquaintances had left New York for the summer, war or no war. The city was his. The bus floated Blair through the city, past the enormous, blue-shadowed chateau of the Plaza where he had danced with debutantes. Past the sun-bronzed Savoy where he met his mother for tea, Bergdorf’s where his mother bought her prettiest clothes, Scribner’s where his father bought books on Egyptology. This was Blair’s city and today he felt more important than ever, full of love, charged with secrecy, entrusted with a mission. There was an opened pack of Luckies in his inside coat pocket. A piece of paper, rolled tight as a toothpick, had been slipped inside one of the cigarettes. What a cunning man Anna’s father was. Blair would show he could be as cunning. Part of him felt he was only playacting, but that was just the old observer in him, the Olympian intellectual, the connoisseur of action. Well, today he was not just appreciating an act, he was committing one.
Bands of gold, dusty sunlight crossed the avenue at each cross street. Except for a soldier and girl who cuddled at the front of the open deck, Blair floated alone above the shop windows and thin, dinner-hour traffic. His contact was to get on the bus somewhere in the Forties. It would be a woman. Anna hadn’t told him who the woman was or how they knew her or what she would do with the information in the cigarette. He wasn’t even told what the information was and only guessed it might be more cargo lists and shipping schedules, bits gathered by Anna in her conversations with sailors. Blair still disliked the easy way Anna had with other men, even if it were for a good cause. Blair loved the cause as much as he loved Anna, but it hurt his pride and propriety to see her so friendly with the hoi polloi.
He reached Forty-Second Street without anyone new climbing to the upper deck. The bus idled at a stoplight and Blair watched the river of hats in the crosswalk below. Footsteps clocked their way up the metal stairs just as the bus lunged forward. A woman stood at the top step and gripped the railing while she looked at the empty seats. Thirtyish, she wore a floral print dress and white gloves. It had to be her. She took the seat in front of Blair’s.
Blair waited for her to turn around and ask about his hat. That was the password. Instead, she twisted sideways in her seat and pretended to watch the buildings glide past, while she took in Blair from the corner of her eye.
Blair stared at her, waiting for the woman to face him.
She slipped a hand into the wide neck of her dress and mopped her sticky back and shoulder. There was a gray handprint of sweat and dirt on her glove. Then she looked straight at Blair and smiled. “Was so hot in my apartment, had to get out. Get some air,” she said. “Nice and cool up here.” A few strands of hair blew loose from her bun.
“Yes,” Blair announced. Why didn’t she mention his hat? Had she forgotten? He adjusted the brim, to remind her. The waffled straw felt like a thick, stale cracker.
“Such awful weather we’re having. Not the heat so much as the humidity. But you certainly look cool as a cucumber.”
A subtle reference to his hat?
“We used to get out of the city in the summer, my husband and I. But now that Bill’s off in the Army…” She sighed and gazed at Blair, patiently, as if expecting something from him.
It had to be her. Blair couldn’t imagine any other woman talking to a complete stranger like this, except a floozie. This woman looked and sounded like a dull, proper housewife.
“When we first met, my husband had a hat just like that. You don’t see many men wearing them anymore.”
“May I offer you a cigarette?” Blair said.
“Don’t mind if I do. Why, thank you.”
Blair reached into his pocket, found the pack, then found the cigarette. He turned it over in his fingers, saw the faint pencil mark and passed the cigarette to the woman.
Her red nails brushed his fingers when she took it. But instead of dropping the cigarette into her purse, she stuck it in her mouth.
Was she only faking for the benefit of anyone watching? But there was nobody up here to see them.
She looked at him, waiting. Then she said, “That’s okay,” opened her purse, took out a lighter and flicked the lighter with her thumb.
Blair watched in horror as the tip of the cigarette caught fire. She wasn’t the woman. He should snatch the cigarette from her lips before she smoked its secrets, but Blair was too stunned to move.
“Perfect,” sighed the woman, smoke pouring from her mouth and vanishing in the airstream. “A little breeze, a cigarette and a handsome young stranger.”
How could he have been so stupid? He wanted to get off immediately, but what if the cigarette didn’t draw right or went out and the woman noticed paper ash inside? He had to sit there and watch while this harlot smoked it down to nothing.
“Something the matter? You don’t look too good.”
“The atmosphere,” Blair mumbled.
“They have the right idea,” said the woman, pointing the cigarette at the couple towards the front. “That’s the only way to feel comfortable on hot, lonely evenings.”
She had almost smoked the cigarette down to her red fingernails, when she suddenly flicked the butt into the air. The bus was wheeling around the Washington Square Arch, turning in the traffic circle in the center of the park. Blair leaped up and grabbed the railing by the steps.
“You’re not going?” said the woman. “One more trip up the Avenue? Keep me company?”
Blair raced down the curved steps and jumped to the pavement as the bus slowed for the next stop. He didn’t look back to see if the woman got off to follow him. He crossed the circle to the curb where the butt would have landed.
He snatched up one butt, then another, then a third, then saw that the stone gutter was sprinkled with cigarette butts, tattered cigar ends, waxy candy wrappers. Where the hell were the street sweepers? He leaned over to grab up a cluster of butts and the hat dropped neatly from his head. It landed upside-down on its flat crown. He grabbed up the hat with both hands. Then he crushed it together between his hands, tried pulling it apart, then crushed it again. He stood at the curb, mangling and cursing the hat, trying to rip it in two, while Jewish couples and solitary bohemians glanced at him and continued their evening strolls. Finally, he took the hat, broken but whole, flung it into the bottom of a trash barrel and stepped angrily up the street, cursing the city, the war, himself.
It took him forever to find a taxi. The war spoiled even that, and the driver who finally picked him up was an unshaven clod who had to be told where the Yale Club was. Blair was meeting Anna there. He rode uptown dreading her. She was going to think him an idiot, a fool.
Looking perfectly sweet with her white purse and white polka-dotted blue dress, Anna sat in a leather chair in the wainscotted bar of the club, smiling and sniffing at a sloe gin fizz. An army officer sat in the next chair, chatting with her. Blair winced when he recognized the officer as a classmate.
“Darling. Hello.” Anna stood up and went up on her toes to kiss Blair on the cheek. “I was wondering what was keeping you. Luckily, I had Captain Jervis here to keep me company.”
Blair nodded at the captain. “Evening, Jervis.”
“If it isn’t old Puffed Rice. This delightful lady is yours? I never would’ve guessed. And why are you still here?”
“I decided to summer in the city this year.” Blair checked out Anna’s shoes and stockings, assuring himself she hadn’t worn anything that might embarrass him with a classmate.
“What I mean is, why aren’t you in uniform? Everybody else we know is. Except for Donald, of course. And we know about Donald. Uncle Sam reject your hide?” He was gloating over the possibility, Jervis, who had been too busy chasing waitresses in New Haven to know Abyssinia from Czechoslovakia.
Blair’s asthma, which had saved him from having to compromise himself, shamed him at moments like these. So he lied. “The Government couldn’t spare me for active duty. They felt I was more important where I was.”
“Which is…?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Hush-hush, huh?” Jervis hid his awe with a light laugh. “Well, if they can find uses for scrap metal, Puffey, I guess they can find a use for you.”
Blair produced a pained smile. At times like these, there was a terrible urge to tell smug fools what he was really doing. But tonight the urge only reminded him of his failure. He noticed Anna lightly frowning at him as she sat down again.
The waiter came over, silver tray under his white-jacketed arm. “What can I get you, Mr. Rice? We’ve been requested to push the rum, on account of the war, but the bar is still fully stocked.”
“Nothing for me, Ben. Thank you.” The waiter left and Blair turned to Anna. “Time for us to go, darling.”
“Can’t I finish my drink first?” Anna sweetly asked. “Captain Jervis was just telling me about his assignment to England. I’d love to see England. You did say England, didn’t you?” She picked up her drink and leaned toward Jervis.
“Did I?” Jervis lightly laughed again. “I should watch what I say in front of our government man here. Loose lips, right? But ‘over there,’ yes.”
Blair sat in the chair across from Anna, whose jaw was now set against him while she coldly looked at him.
Jervis remained carefully coy about his orders and Anna had to content herself with chitchat while she sipped half of her drink. She eventually bid the captain good night and said she hoped their paths crossed again before he shipped out.
“Without my old college chum, I trust,” said Jervis with a wink. “I think the two of us could have a high old time together.”
Blair bid Jervis good night and hurried Anna down to the street and the warm darkness.
“Oh, darling,” she murmured. “Why did you tell him you were with the Government? He was a real chatterbox until you got there.”
“He’s a silk-tie wolf, a Don Juan. I don’t think you should see him again.”
Anna sighed and took Blair’s arm. She held on to him affectionately as they walked, but also so they could speak to each other as softly as possible. “Don’t be jealous, dear. He’s no different from the others. I thought we’d cured you of being jealous.”
“I’m not jealous. I went to school with him and don’t trust him.”
“If you could be a little friendlier with your classmates, dear, I wouldn’t have to flirt with them.”
They were walking west, along another blacked-out cross street, the only light coming in patches from shop windows, the shadows of closed gates fanning over the sidewalk.
“Dim-out,” scoffed Blair. “Brownout, ration cards, war bonds, rum. None of it’s necessary. Nothing but a ruse by the Government to involve people in the war. If New York were bombed, that would wake people up.”
“How did it go?” asked Anna. “The meeting.”
Blair swallowed to clear the dryness in his throat, only there was nothing to swallow. “The woman never showed up.”
“Oh, God. You’re sure you were on the right bus?”
“Yes, it was the right damn bus! The woman just never got on it!”
“Don’t get angry, dear. I believe you.” She patted his shoulder with her free hand. “Papa’s been having a terrible time with those people. Luckily, he has better ways of getting his information out. We’ll just give the cigarette back to him and he’ll take care of it. Give it to me and I’ll put it in my purse, so we don’t forget.”
“I don’t have the cigarette. I destroyed it.”
“You…?”
“The woman never showed.” But he couldn’t tell her what really happened. “There was a man on the bus. Who kept watching me. He might have been a plainclothesman. So when the woman didn’t show, I decided better safe than sorry. I smoked the cigarette.”
“Blair,” she whined. “Who would follow you? Nobody’s going to—”
They had come to Fifth Avenue and could not continue talking. There was more light. Handfuls of pedestrians strolled past the clinging couple that stood on the corner, waiting for the traffic light to change. Blair looked down at Anna. She was scowling at the gutter. They crossed and were alone again in the shadows.
“The man kept looking at me,” Blair repeated. “Maybe it was nothing. But we can’t be too careful.”
“Papa spent so much time making up that cigarette,” said Anna sadly. “You sure you didn’t get nervous, want a cigarette and smoke that one by mistake?”
“No! Do you think I’m an idiot? I smoked it deliberately. I don’t smoke otherwise.” He preferred she think he did the wrong thing deliberately, not by accident or out of helplessness.
“I know you’re not an idiot. I love you,” Anna whispered. “I do. It just worries me what Papa’s going to say. He doesn’t trust you, sweetheart. He thinks you’re arrogant and have no common sense. He wonders if you’ll be any use at all to us.”
He tried to be angry with Anna’s father, a voice in the darkness, but it was like trying to be angry with Anna. Blair’s anger turned against himself and he felt ashamed. “I get you into the Yale Club,” he meekly reminded her.
“You do. But you shouldn’t be so arrogant with your friends. Or jealous,” she added, as kindly as possible.
“Jervis is a braggart. You can’t believe half of what he tells you.”
“Half is good enough for Papa. He mentioned ‘Sledgehammer’ tonight. If you hadn’t come in when you did, he might’ve dropped more clues about exactly what that is.”
“Sorry,” Blair murmured.
“Oh, dearest. What are we going to do with you? You have to learn to forget your pride. We’re involved in something much bigger than either of us.”
Yes, there was that. Blair’s pride was all tangled up in a need to prove himself to Anna and her father. He proudly wanted to be humble.
“Where are we going now?” he asked.
“I’m going to the Canteen. See what I can pick up there tonight.”
“Take me with you.”
“Why? You don’t like that ‘element,’ remember?”
He didn’t. Blair had been to the Stage Door Canteen once with Anna and hated it. But he burned to do something tonight, even if it meant being friendly to enlisted men.
“Please, Anna. Give me another chance. Let me try to make up for some of the mistakes I made tonight.”
He pleaded with her until she finally said, “Okay. On the condition that you don’t tag after me like a puppy. Or big brother.”
“I promise. I won’t let you down, Anna. I’ll be humble and charming and…”
“Once we’re inside, we have to work alone. Okay? But good. Yes. It’ll be good for me too. Knowing that the man I love is somewhere in the room.”
They worked their way through the crowds and traffic of Times Square to the Stage Door Canteen. There was a line of soldiers and sailors beneath the awning out front, but Anna and Blair went straight to the door. A woman there knew Anna as a weeknight volunteer and let the two in, warning them it wasn’t a very good show tonight.
Anna became very quiet and breathy in the rose-colored front lobby. She seemed to be willing herself into becoming the kind of girl who could flirt with strangers. She drew one final breath, smiled wanly at Blair and told him to run along, she’d be fine. She hurried past the cloakroom into the big room and disappeared into the crowd that lined the dance floor.
Blair stood in the doorway and looked the place over. A full orchestra with voluminous Latin American sleeves packed the tiny stage. The dance floor was packed with dancing couples, most of them doing the samba, but a few ignoring the beat and merely stepping about with their arms around each other. The air was warm and full of smells—harsh, rusty sweat and sickly sweet perfumes. A few large fans on floorstands buzzed near the windows, barely keeping the streamers tied to their grills aloft. Soldiers and sailors of all heights were wedged between the pillars along the dance floor, watching the orchestra or looking for unattached girls. Every girl there was dancing. Anna reappeared, already dancing with a skinny, baby-faced marine. The two moved badly together, the marine because he concentrated on getting as close as possible to his partner, Anna because she wanted to keep some distance between them, and because her thoughts were somewhere else.
Blair was in love with her. He was certain of that. But it was like being in love with a whore. No, he refused to think of Anna like that. And he did not feel as jealous seeing her with servicemen as he had been earlier tonight, seeing her with Jervis. Jervis was of his class and these people were so far beneath Blair he refused to be threatened by them. What threatened him was Anna’s success here. She was a sweet little college girl who loved her father, and yet she ran circles around these people, learning what she needed to know. She had to think Blair was an idiot, a fool. He was in love with her, but he was also in competition with her. He was determined to prove to Anna that he could be as good a spy as she was.
“Nice band tonight,” he said to the sailor who stood beside him.
The sailor chewed gum in time to the music. “They stink,” he said. “Xavier Cugat and his Waldorf Has-Beens. I came here to see some stars.”
“You just get into port, sailor?”
“Nyaah.”
“You on a ship?”
“Yup.”
Blair summoned up a little patience. “But you’ve been in port a while then?”
“Uh huh. Drydock.”
“What’s the matter with your ship?”
The sailor looked over at Blair for the first time. “Look, buddy. I’m tryin’ to listen to the music, see? Ya want to cheer me up, cheer me up by scrammin’.”
“Yes. Of course. Sorry.” Blair edged away from the sailor, thinking, “Plebeians.” He tried to look at ease, but he was self-conscious anyway, surrounded by so many men in uniform. Even the singer stepping up to the microphone on stage was in uniform, a boyish, black-haired soldier with his overseas cap tucked under the tunic’s shoulder strap.
“And now,” announced the bandleader, “welcome one of your own. Private Frank Nashe of Brooklyn, New York.”
The soldier leaned into the microphone. “This one’s for Helen,” he said. In a clear tenor voice, he crooned “White Cliffs of Dover,” the Latin band accompanying him with maracas and muted horns.
Blair noticed only a handful of male civilians, mostly volunteer workers. There was a fat man in a white suit who obviously didn’t work here—he was on crutches and had one leg in a bulbous plaster cast—but such company did not make Blair feel any better. Blair worked his way back from the dance floor, looking for men who weren’t interested in the music.
“You just get into port, sailor?”
A sad-eyed, freckled boy sat on a windowsill near the refreshment table. He was more polite than the first sailor, although his eyes kept darting away to check out the room. He was from Missouri, was a machinist on a troop transport and thought Rita Hayworth was one classy dame. His ship was to be in New York another week before they made their next trip.
The fat man on crutches slowly vaulted past them, looking Blair up and down as he went by. His look made Blair nervous. Was the man FBI? Blair waited until the man was gone before he asked his next question.
“Is your next trip with Sledgehammer?”
“Naw. The Fort Snelling. Same ship I’ve always been on.”
If they had never heard the name, there was nothing else Blair could ask without making them suspicious.
“Y’know, it’s nice having someone to talk to, mister. But it’s only fair I warn you—I like girls.”
“Of course,” said Blair. “Who doesn’t?” What an odd non-sequitur.
“Okay. So long as you know I won’t go off with you. No matter how much money you might offer.”
“Certainly.” What was the fellow talking about?
“Just out of curiosity, do the people at the door know what you are? Or do they just look the other way?”
Blair froze. The sailor knew he was a spy. How?
“Just wondering. I’m hep.” The sailor sounded anything but threatening. “But they frown on that kind of stuff back where I come from. I was curious how they treated it up here.”
“Treated what, sailor?”
“You being a homo. Beg your pardon.”
Blair relaxed. He was so relieved the sailor didn’t think he was a spy that a moment passed before he recognized what the sailor did think he was. “A homo? I’m not a homo.” He suddenly felt nauseous.
“I thought you were. But okay.” It didn’t seem to faze the sailor.
Blair told the boy good-night and hurried off along the wall. They thought he was a pansy? He looked down at his light-gray suit, then at all the white or khaki uniforms and instantly felt everyone thought he was a nance. Idiots. If they only knew. Let them laugh. Torpedoes guided by what he learned tonight would kill them all. And thinking that suddenly made the idea bearable. Better than bearable, because there was something to be gained from being seen as a pansy. A harmless, limp-wristed pansy. No sailor would think twice about what he told a fairy. He saw Anna out on the dance floor, faking a naughty laugh. Yes, he told himself, I can be as cunning as she is. His nausea vanished. He stood in a corner with his back to the room, practiced flipping his wrists, then looked for another potential talker.
“Hello, sailor. Enjoying the music?” But it didn’t sound as queer to Blair’s ear as it had sounded in his head. There had been a pansy or two at Yale—theater types like Donald—but Blair had always avoided them.
“Something the matter with your hands, mister?”
“My hands? No, they’re this way naturally.”
“I got an uncle with palsy. His hands sometimes get like that.”
“No, my hands are fine, thank you.” Blair wasn’t doing something right.
“He soaks his in hot water and epsom salts. That relaxes them.”
“Let’s not discuss my hands. Let’s discuss you.”
But the sailor was too concerned about Blair’s hands to talk about anything else, even after Blair tucked his hands into his coat pockets. Blair thanked him for his concern, wished him a pleasant evening and walked away. It wasn’t going to work. Maybe he was too manly to pose successfully as a pansy.
He was resentfully eyeing Anna—she danced with two soldiers now—when he heard something thud and skid up beside him. He turned. It was the fat man on crutches.
“Good evening,” said the man. He looked and sounded Italian. His round, sweaty face and oiled, black hair reflected spots of light from the bulbs overhead.
Blair only nodded at him. Was the man some kind of detective?
“Nice night, no? Good to see our boys enjoying themselves.”
Blair muttered an assent. The man’s white suit was soiled. There were enormous stains under his arms where he hung on his crutches. The left leg of his trousers was slit up to the knee to make room for the gray, swollen cast. It was awfully elaborate for a disguise.
“I have watched you,” said the man. “I see you like sailors.”
“Yes, well…” Blair decided to appear banal. “They’re serving their country. The least we can do is come down here and make them feel appreciated.”
“Good, clean boys,” the man said admiringly. “If you like, I could introduce you to a few.”
“That won’t be necessary.” But a detective wouldn’t talk like this.
“Maybe. But I have seen you strike out many times with the boys here. The boys I know want to be appreciated.”
“Where?” Maybe the man was some kind of Canteen host, spotting lonely sailors and searching out people to talk to them.
“Not here. The boys I know are in a place where you will have the privacy to appreciate them to their fullest.”
And the light finally went on in Blair’s head. “You think I’m a pansy.”
“We don’t have names for what some men like. Manly men who prefer the company of manly men.” The fat man shrugged.
“You’re talking about a brothel,” Blair said distastefully. “For pansies?” He had never heard of such a thing.
“Shhhhh,” went the man. “Not really. More a hotel, really. A little hotel. Where men meet each other, for drinks and conversation. And there are rooms available. For those who need to spend the night.”
The existence of such a place disgusted Blair. And this man was its pimp! “No thank you. Not interested. I’m only here to talk to sailors.”
“We have nothing but sailors,” the man insisted. “Good, clean boys, away from home. Homesick boys. Manly boys with nothing to do while they are in port. If you only want conversation, no problem. The friendliest sailors in all the city come to this place.”
Blair’s disgust remained, but his feelings of revulsion only challenged him. A place full of talkative sailors? “I would only want to chat with them.”
“No problem. We are as much a social club as we are…the other thing.”
It made sense. By going to such a place he could prove to Anna, and her father, that he could rise above personal feelings to serve the cause. And he would be going to a place where she could never go.
“Okay,” said Blair. “Is it near here?”
“Very near. We can go by taxi. I trust you have money.”
“Of course!” Blair looked around the room for Anna. “If you’ll just wait a minute, I’ll be right back. I have to tell someone where I’m going.”
The fat man smiled and shook his head. “Uh, I prefer you not do that. We cannot trust everyone, you understand.”
“I guess not. No.” Blair saw Anna chatting with a thin sergeant. He had wanted to see the look on her face when he told her where he was going, but that could wait until tomorrow—when he had tons of valuable secrets to share with her.
The fat man told Blair to go first and he would meet him outside. “It is better we not be seen leaving together. And besides, this damn leg.” He tapped the plaster with his crutch. “Badly lit stairs.”
Blair watched Anna as he walked toward the door, wanting her to see him leave. She finally saw him. He gave her an okay sign with his thumb and index finger, signaling her that he was doing something good. She looked puzzled, then reluctantly nodded and waved goodbye with just her fingers, as if she thought he was leaving out of boredom, nothing more.
He would show her. Anna would never think the same of him after tonight.