ANNA LOOKED UP AGAIN and saw the person she never dreamed she could be: a beautiful woman with a mouth like a red diamond, penciled crescents for eyebrows, hair perfectly scrolled along the sides, a shiney dress, a plunging neckline and skin like cream. Behind that beautiful woman was the perfect setting: a night club with night-blue walls, white satin palm trees, tiny colored lights in the ceiling and seats upholstered in zebra stripes. The room in the mirror was full of elegant men and women who rubbed elbows here just as they did in the columns of the society pages. A velvety orchestra played in the dining room upstairs.
Unfortunately, also reflected in the mirror over the bar was Teddy, Anna’s date for the evening, flopping on the next stool.
“Decadent brats, all of them. I got this friend who says his girlfriend knows someone who says Bitsy Rockefeller’s a hophead. Errol Flynn, too.”
Teddy was drunk. He had lied to her when he said they knew him at El Morocco and he and she would be mingling with café society. The best the bribed maitre d’ could offer were two stools at the bar, by the entrance to the famous room. Teddy’s noise managed to spoil even the pleasure of that. When Anna turned away, embarrassed, he began to harangue the bartender with his gossip and hearsay.
Anna had met worse in the past two months. Enlisted men were especially bad, feeding you lines about how they were giving their lives for their country, and the least you could give in return was one last, happy memory. Anna had learned how to evade their paws while pumping them for rumors and stray details. Teddy was a civilian who said he worked with the Foreign Information Service. Drunk tonight, he let slip that he didn’t work there yet, that he only knew someone who knew someone who might get him a job there. Anna should have expected as much from a “writer” met at Sammy’s on the Bowery.
In her two months as a spy, Anna had learned much about the world. She had learned to like cocktails and how to talk to men without seeming like a tart. She had discovered she was attractive. She had also found that, while her father might be the center of her world, he was not the center of their spy ring. Before Pearl Harbor, Simon had worked alone, which had protected him when the FBI swept up agents associated with the German bunds in Yorkville. Simon mailed his findings directly overseas, using the packets he received from the American Ordnance Association. Anna, when younger, often helped Papa steam open the packets in the kitchen after Aunt Ilsa went to bed. Simon slipped his additional information inside with the association’s latest news about weapons, re-sealed the envelopes and forwarded them to an address in Lisbon. The packets looked so official they were never opened by inspectors in peacetime. But America’s entry into the war closed that route and Simon had to tie himself in with other agents if he wanted his material to reach Germany.
He never sat down with his daughter and explained who their bosses were. “The less you know, the better,” was Simon’s constant answer to questions. Anna was used as a messenger a few times, giving skittish strangers folded squares of rice paper or frames clipped from newsreels that were wrapped in foil to look like sticks of gum. Simon hated using her for that; there was always the chance the contact wasn’t really one of them. He did not trust the competence of his colleagues. Once, walking in Riverside Park with his daughter, they had run into a Mr. Eisman, who Simon introduced as a friend of his. Simon had no friends and Anna immediately sensed that this smiling man with a vandyke and dachshund was someone important, that this encounter was no accident. Simon looked uncomfortable; Mr. Eisman put his homburg over his heart and said he was most pleased to meet “the little lady.” After they parted, Anna knew better than to ask if Eisman was their boss or even one of them. The newspapers suggested New York was riddled with spies, but there was no way of telling who was and who wasn’t.
Teddy wasn’t, of course, and he had revealed himself as useless to her. Anna wished she could forget Teddy and her father tonight and just enjoy her glimpses of sophisticated people. There was no romance in her work, only bums who talked and bums who didn’t know anything.
Various couples and parties were escorted to the bar and asked to wait until their tables were ready. They chatted among themselves and paid no attention to the two nobodys, no matter how loud Teddy became. A handsome young man with perfect hair and a perfect chin waited alone next to Teddy, languidly leaning against the bar, as at home here as in his own livingroom. He had the world-weary eyes of someone whose photograph had been taken many times for the newspaper.
“The usual, Mr. Rice?”
Mr. Rice made a slight hum and a tall glass full of ice and amber immediately appeared at his elbow. He cut his eyes at Teddy for a split second—Teddy was ranting about what was wrong with Hollywood—then looked out at the room, coolly, beautifully bored.
The fellow was so suave he made Anna’s stomach hurt. He wore his tailored black clothes like a second skin and sipped his drink as lightly as he would a cigarette. The double corners of his display handkerchief were pure geometry.
“Eleanor Powell’s another!” Teddy crowed. “Eleanor Powell’s a goddamn dancing horse! No wonder she’s Adolf Hitler’s favorite movie star.”
Mr. Rice turned and glared at Teddy.
“It’s true,” Teddy insisted. “Old Schickelgruber never misses an Eleanor Powell movie. The Gestapo smuggles ’em in now through Switzerland.”
“And what does that prove?” Mr. Rice said angrily, surprisingly passionate.
“What’s the matter, buddy? You pals with horsey Eleanor or something?”
Anna sighed and looked away. This was too embarrassing.
Mr. Rice leaned forward. “Miss? Is this man annoying you?”
Anna’s heart leaped into her mouth. The man had noticed her? “Yes, but I…”
“You don’t need to protect him. Gus!” he called out, snapping his fingers for the maitre d’. “What’s happened to this place? There’s a drunk making a nuisance of himself and you let him sit here?”
“Sorry, Mr. Rice. I’ll take care of it immediately. Sir?” The maitre d’ took Teddy’s arm and helped him off the stool. “If you’ll come with me, please.”
“What are you?…Hey!” Teddy was so drunk it took him a moment to understand what was happening. “Let go of me! My money’s as good as his!”
“This place is getting as common as Grand Central Station!” said Mr. Rice. “I wonder if you want to keep my patronage, Gus.”
“I don’t know how he got in, sir.” The maitre d’ called for a waiter to help him hustle Teddy to the door.
“Let go, you apes. I’m a writer. Ask my girl there. Tell ’em I’m a famous writer, Annie.”
Mr. Rice stared at Anna.
Anna wanted Mr. Rice’s respect. And Teddy deserved this for leading her on. “I never saw this man in my life. Until he started annoying me.”
“You lying bitch!” Teddy cried as he was hauled away. “See if I ever go out with you again!”
Anna watched Teddy disappear around the corner and breathed a sigh of relief, already hoping that thanking the manly Mr. Rice might give her a chance to meet him. “How can I ever repay you, Mr…?”
“Rice. Blair Rice. Pleased to have been of service.” He shook her hand like a gentleman. His fingers were smooth and manicured.
“I was waiting for a friend, and that drunk started talking to me. But one dislikes making a fuss. Oh, my name’s Anna. Anna Cromwell.”
“Pleased to meet you. With so many men away, one finds it necessary to step in now and then. Damn riffraff. Uh, beg your pardon.” He looked at her, as if noticing she was beautiful. He nodded goodbye and faced forward again.
Anna hoped he was only being polite. She was determined to continue this. “Do you know Eleanor Powell?”
“What? Oh. Not at all. She’s in musical comedies, right?”
“Why did you come to her defense?”
Mr. Rice studied Anna. “I simply don’t like hearing riffraff run down anyone at the expense of, uh, the Germans. The Hitler and Schickelgruber jokes. Despite what’s happened, I still have a special fondness for things German.”
Anna was overjoyed. She was German. She was immediately curious about how deep this fondness went. “I don’t know much about politics,” she ventured, “but sometimes I almost feel we’re fighting the wrong people.”
Mr. Rice’s blue eyes widened slightly. He promptly sat on the stool vacated by Teddy. “Yes. You’re right to feel that way. So few people do. It’s the right war, but we’re fighting on the wrong side. The Communists are our real enemy. We should be helping Hitler crush the Communists, instead of the other way around.”
Anna noticed the bartender frowning while he dried a glass, only Mr. Rice was clearly much too important a personage for anyone to contradict. She never thought about politics and her father never discussed Nazism, but she wanted to explore Mr. Rice’s admiration of Hitler, wondering if she could parlay it into an interest in her. She had to be very careful. “The newspapers tell us things, but I never know what to believe. The Jews and all.”
“Oh, that,” said Mr. Rice. “Grossly exaggerated. And it’s not as though we don’t have anti-semitism here, too. Just look at our country clubs and resorts. Anti-semitism is so declassé, but it’s being used to discredit the National Socialists’ good work.”
She let Mr. Rice do all the talking, staring into his stern blue eyes without incriminating herself. He spoke at length on the question of whether Roosevelt was a fool or a knave, betraying his class the way he had. He then compared the leveling effects of Bolshevism and democracy.
The maitre d’ reappeared. “Your table’s ready, Mr. Rice. I apologize for the disturbance earlier, sir.” He did not look at Anna, who he knew had arrived with the “disturbance.”
Mr. Rice merely nodded and turned back to Anna. “It’s so rare one gets to meet someone so intelligent, I hate to end this. You said you’re waiting for someone?”
“Yes, but they’re already a half hour late. I wonder if I’ve been stood up.”
“Would you care to join me? For another drink maybe? Until your party arrives.”
“Your wife or girlfriend won’t be joining you?”
Mr. Rice laughed. “Hardly. I’m unmarried and quite unattached.”
Anna hid her joy by resisting his kind invitation a moment longer, then accepted his arm; she left the bar with Mr. Rice.
The room seemed finer than ever when she actually entered it, and on the arm of such an important, elegant man. He nodded at a table they passed, grudgingly. The maitre d’ led them to a banquette on a dais in the corner, zebra-striped seats around a white tablecloth. Anna asked Blair—she thought of him as Blair now—if there were anyone here tonight she should know about.
“Not really,” he said, looking over the tables. “Whom do you see here?”
Anna explained she rarely went out, what with being away at Bryn Mawr.
“It was much nicer last year. So many men from good families have caught war fever and enlisted. The idiots. In their place you get these social climbers in uniform.” He angrily nodded at an Army officer laughing at the next table.
Anna suddenly wondered if Blair was one of them. They were everywhere, so why not this wealthy young man who admired Hitler and hated the war? But an agent would not be as outspoken about his beliefs as Blair was. That was a pity, because it would be wonderful working with such a man, the two of you bound together in your shared secret. Which gave Anna an idea. It was a dangerous idea, but it would not go away.
After they ordered their drinks, Blair talked more about himself—Yale and Park Avenue, his doddering father and once wonderful mother, his misery during the Nazi-Soviet pact, his elation the day Hitler invaded Russia.
A man with a bloodshot nose came up to their table, accompanied by a pretty girl with bare shoulders and a pale, half-familiar face. They were selling raffle tickets to benefit the Red Cross. Blair politely refused, saying he had already donated his mother to that organization.
“Oh, please, Blair. Pretty please with ice cream on it,” whined the girl.
And Anna recognized who she was.
“You old fud,” said the girl when Blair remained adamant. She then sailed off to the next table, dutifully followed by the little man.
“Wasn’t that Brenda Frazier?” Anna whispered. “The debutante?”
Blair made an apologetic hum. “I once took her out when I was in college.”
Such connections took Anna’s breath away. She assumed all famous people knew each other—Brenda Frazier, movie stars, congressmen and presidents. She wished her father were here to hear this, but Anna was on her own. “You must know scads of important people,” she began.
“Not really. Well, I suppose some might think the people I know are important.”
“Have you ever thought about, oh, using your position to do good?”
“What can I do?” said Blair. “That’s my tragedy. Knowing what’s right and not being able to do anything about it.”
“I’m sure there’s something you could do.”
Blair narrowed his eyes at her. “What a funny girl you are.” He lightly laughed. “Anyway, blowing up bridges and things is hardly my line.”
“But you probably hear things that would help the men who blow up bridges.” Anna knew of no saboteurs, but that seemed to be the language Blair understood.
“Perhaps. I do hear things.” He smiled, sheepishly. “It has crossed my mind. Once or twice, when I read about such goings-on in the newspaper. But how does one make himself available? There’s no listing in the phone book for Nazi spy rings. Unlike the Communist Party.”
Anna hesitated. She glanced around the room, then reached beneath the table and found Blair’s hand.
It was her usual act to keep a sailor or merchant marine talking, to lead them on. But when Blair’s hand slowly turned over and his fingers lightly pressed her fingers into his cool palm, she was the one who felt changed. She had to do this; it was the right thing to do.
Blair gently smiled, then stared at their clasped hands. When he looked up at her, his cool, handsome face was tense with understanding, doubt and hope.
“Blair?” she whispered. “Can you keep a secret?”
Two weeks later, Thomas Blair Rice, III, of El Morocco, the Stork Club and 21, sat in a saloon off the boardwalk at Coney Island. The sidings were down, but the breeze that blew in from the darkening beach and ocean was not enough to clear away the saloon’s stink of beer, cigars and b.o. He wished Anna had chosen a nicer place for him to meet her father. He had certainly taken her to enough nice places since the night they met. Even their bench in Central Park would have been better. They were late and Blair was nervous enough already. If they didn’t come before the blackout, they would never find him.
Out in the twilight, people clattered in herds along the wide, bare boardwalk. In the smokey light inside the saloon, they drank, yammered and laughed, as if they didn’t know there was a war, not even the handful of men in uniform. The only sign of the war was the jukebox, raspberrying the room again with “In Der Fuhrer’s Face.” Cattle, Blair thought. Luckily for them, he was coming down from his tower of intellect and class to save them from their leaders.
“Nine o’clock! Lights out!” Wardens shouted up and down the boardwalk. The saloon went black. Even that was a lark for the masses. They giggled and hooted; someone made ghost noises. To the right of his table, a man and woman shamelessly moaned together. Blair was disgusted by his picture of what they might be doing. He was infuriated over wasting an hour here without meeting Anna or her father. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. The ocean and sky were two dark shades of blue beyond the partially blackened globes of the streetlamps outside. Cigarette ends winked around the room. Someone struck a match, held it high and called for more beer. Blair thought about getting up and feeling his way out.
“You’re Anna’s young man?”
Blair jumped an inch off his chair. He had not heard anyone sit at his table.
“Yes. Of course. Is that you, Mr. Krull?” Anna had told him her real name at their second meeting.
“Speak softly. I can hear you.” The man’s voice came from the side of the table toward the wall, so there was no silhouette, only a low, softly accented voice. There was a whiff of sen-sen when the man leaned closer. “Anna’s told me much about you. You want to help us?”
“Yes. Where is Anna?”
“She’s here. She pointed you out to me. She will join you, after I leave.” A sigh. “Sad when a father and daughter cannot be seen together too frequently.”
“Anna speaks very highly of you. I respect that in a woman.”
The man ignored the compliment. “I want to discover what you can do for us. You were at Yale?”
“Class of Forty,” said Blair.
“And you were in—What club? Skull and Crossbones?”
“Skull and Bones,” Blair corrected him. “And not a club, a society.”
“Then you are close friends with some very prestigious people?”
“Close, no. I haven’t stayed in touch with anyone from school. They were too naive, too ignorant.” So ignorant they never accepted him in Skull and Bones, but Anna and her father didn’t need to know that.
“Surely you kept one friend from then?”
“No. Everyone I knew were Popular Front dupes or worse. None of them understood how Hitler had saved Germany from Bolshevism, or how—”
“Admirable principles,” the voice said sharply. “But we must keep them to ourselves. People get ideas.”
Blair was sorry. He had looked forward to talking politics with a real Nazi.
Anna’s father wanted to talk about Blair. “Friends? Family? Surely you know someone highly placed in the government.”
“No. My family, God bless them, has never dirtied its hands in politics. Cousin John’s in the Navy, but we stopped speaking to each other a year ago.”
“Hmmm. And what line of work are you in?”
“None at present. I was in advertising briefly, but I couldn’t bear the dishonesty.”
“What a difficult young man you are.”
Blair laughed. “Not difficult. Just principled.”
“You’re not what I expected.”
“Thank you.”
“Nevertheless, I think you can help us. People above suspicion are rare, and a man of your class? I understand you belong to several exclusive clubs?”
Blair proudly listed them.
“You are attracted to my daughter?”
The question took Blair by surprise. “Yes. Yes, I admit I find Anna attractive, sir.”
“Would you say you are in love with her?”
Blair opened his mouth, but couldn’t say anything. He cleared his throat. “I like your daughter, yes. Uh, isn’t this awfully personal?”
“I want only to understand your feelings for her. But you do care about her?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Then you must be very careful in your talk. Not just for your sake, but for Anna’s. We do not want anything happening to her. A little loose talk and—”
“You can trust me with Anna,” Blair said. “I’m very careful about what I say. And my feelings for her are of the highest—”
Before Blair could finish, the chatter around them broke into shouts of “Look!” “Out there!”
Out on the horizon, faint sparks of color flashed, red and yellow scratches of light at the line where the sky met the ocean. A ship had been torpedoed outside the Narrows.
Silence passed over the room as everyone looked out in wonder. There was only a trumpet solo on the jukebox, then a faint rumble like thunder. All at once, people started talking again, questioning, guessing, laughing nervously.
Blair turned back to Anna’s father. “Uh, some of your work?”
No answer.
Blair realized he no longer smelled sen-sen. He cautiously reached into the darkness and—felt the ribs of an empty chair.
“A light, my love?”
A woman’s voice on his left! Anna’s?
Blair fumbled with his matches and finally struck one. Anna’s face flared up beside him, black-lashed blue eyes and white skin. She was comfortingly beautiful.
“Thank God,” he said. “You startled me.”
She smiled as she steered his hand over and lit her cigarette on his match. “Thank you.” She blew the match out, but her small hand held on to his in the dark. “Did you have a good talk with Papa?”
“Very much. I wish we could’ve spoken longer. But he never gave me an assignment.”
“There’ll be plenty of time for that. I hope.”
“Oh, yes. I think the three of us will get along beautifully.”
Anna’s hand clutched tighter. Each time she drew on her cigarette, a soft red face glowed beside him. Without the colors of her makeup, Blair could see the young girl she really was. She never smoked in front of her father, she said. She was still her father’s girl, which pleased Blair. The war had loosened the morals of so many women, but not Anna’s. He occasionally thought about sleeping with her and was relieved to know she could never sink to that.
She was unlike any woman he had ever met, neither a giggly tease nor an obsequious tramp, and Blair thought he was in love with her. Or maybe it was the cause and world behind her that he loved. When she first told him what she was, he feared she was making fun of him, or that she was another screwball trying to make herself interesting. But she was real, it was real. After being alone with his wisdom for so long the wisdom had turned sour, Blair found Anna, who brought love and political action into his life, in a single glorious explosion. He already thought about marrying her, only he did not know enough about her background.
“Let’s get away from here,” he said. “Catch a cab back to Manhattan. Go someplace where I can be myself again.” He missed the shell of composure the right kind of nightclub gave him.
“Can we wait a little first? We shouldn’t leave too soon after Papa.”
“Of course.”
There was a new thudding out over the ocean, deep and steady. Destroyers hunted for a U-boat, their depth charges detonating below the horizon.
Anna sighed and squeezed his hand again. “Poor guys,” she said. “All of them.”
Blair admired her pity and decided he felt pity too. It was as sad as it was shameful that men who should be fighting side by side were killing each other. If it took defeat to shake his country awake, Blair was willing to do all he could to bring about that defeat. But one did not have to be vicious.
They held hands in the dark and listened to explosions deep beneath the ocean. It was wonderful. They had each other and the great task before them.