At that moment, Louise was entering Max Hamilton’s office. Finding Arnie through Pietari Varila and his friends was possible but not even close to a sure thing. She needed as many possible ways of finding Arnie as she could think of. She was sure—once she explained to Max Hamilton how important it was—that he would want to help.
After exchanging pleasantries with Hamilton’s secretary, Helmi, and the usual three-sentence conversation with Pulkkinen, who was sitting in a chair with a newspaper waiting for an assignment, she waited until Helmi ushered her into Hamilton’s office.
Hamilton nodded to the chair in front of his desk. She sat. She started to speak, but he held up a finger and said, “Before you go any further, Louise, I’d like you to read this cable.” He moved the cable across the desk toward her. “It just came in. If you hadn’t initiated this visit”—he paused and looked at her over the top of his glasses—“I would have.” He settled back in his chair. “Perhaps you can clear things up a little for me.”
The cable was from the State Department in Washington, DC, in fact from the Office of the Secretary. In dry, bureaucratic language, it asked if the envoy extraordinary minister plenipotentiary of the American legation could shed any light on the below excerpts from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and the Daily Worker. It further stated that a request for information had come from the Soviet embassy in Washington. In addition to Hamilton’s name on the address list, there were two names she did not know but whose address was the War Department. The news stories were all similar, probably picked up from the AP or Reuters. They were about the highly decorated former Tenth Mountain Division expert skier who was neck and neck “somewhere in Finland” with a Communist opponent. All the stories were about America racing the Soviet Union, not Arnie racing Mikhail. Only toward the end of just one story was there any mention of a raffle and attempt to raise “international relief money” for Finnish orphans.
She looked up when she’d finished reading.
“I’ve made some calls,” Hamilton said. “All of this started with some press releases?” He left the “written by you” unsaid. “Since you seem to be the public relations expert, what should I tell Washington?”
“The newspapers are blowing it out of proportion.”
“Oh, God, Louise, what in the world did you expect?” Hamilton placed his hand on the cable. It would be out of character for him to slap his palm on his desk, but the anger was clearly communicated. “What Arnie did was foolish. What you did was exceedingly foolish. If you’d at least have had the courtesy—” He stopped. His left cheek showed a slight tremor. “Why didn’t you come to me first? I could have spun it as an American-Soviet goodwill stunt. Included all sorts of sad orphan stories.” He sighed loudly. “Now we’ve totally lost control of the narrative.” He was still clearly angry but was now speaking to her in a kinder tone. “It’s a diplomatic mess, Louise. Not my first, but I usually don’t get them landed on my desk by my own people.” Louise just worried her lower lip with her teeth. “Instead of allies working together to help Finnish war orphans,” Hamilton continued, “it’s democracy versus Communism. Worse, it’s Finland versus Russia and the Russians are probably looking at these same news articles and fuming.” He gathered the cables back. “It is not in the interest of the US government to have the Soviets fuming.”
Louise, who’d been looking at the desktop, raised her eyes to his. She wanted to shout I only had the idea and wrote the release; Kaarina caused all the trouble. Instead, very softly she said, “I’m sorry.”
Hamilton shook his head. “I’m afraid we’re beyond apologies.”
“I know that,” Louise said. “That’s why we’ve got to find Arnie and get him to throw the race.”
“What? You think losing the race is going to smooth things over in Washington? Louise, we don’t like our Soviet allies fuming, but we really don’t like losing to them, no matter what the contest.”
“If Mikhail Bobrov loses, I’m worried they’ll punish his whole family.”
“It’s certainly a worry, but why is it my worry?”
She lost control. “They could kill him. Natalya and the children would be—”
He held up his whole hand this time. “Stop right there. Yes, the Soviet Union is a brutal dictatorship that punishes its people with little regard for their lives. We are trying to help those Finns who don’t want to live under such a dictatorship. This”—now he slapped the cable—“is not helping those Finns.”
She bit her lip. “Mr. Hamilton, I know. But if we can find Arnie and get him to throw the race, it will help four innocent people. Please.” She started to plead using her hands, but then put them back in her lap. “I messed this up. It can’t make any difference to … The Soviets would be happy if Arnie lost the race.”
Hamilton softened. “Louise, I’d like to help, really, but—”
Louise blurted, “There must be something you can do to find him. You must be able to get an airplane. We have thousands of them over here.”
“We, Louise, is the United States Army Air Corps, not the State Department.”
“But surely, the army is there to support State.”
“That’s the way it used to be, yes, before the war. It’s the other way around now,” he said. “The nearest Air Corps field is in Germany. They’ll calculate the fuel and maintenance costs and stack that up against a mission of finding a single army skier, presumably on his own time, in a country with which we’re still officially at war. Oh, and just a small detail, they’ll have to get permission to even fly over that country, from a massive bureaucracy called the Soviet Union. I give it two chances. Slim and none.”
“What about the Finnish government giving permission? It’s their airspace, not the Russians’.”
“One chance. None. It is their airspace only in theory. Also, they would never say it aloud, but many of them will be rooting for your husband.”
“A private plane?”
“And, what? Drop him a note tied to a rock? There’s a good chance he’ll never find it in the snow. There’s even a chance that the pilot could drop it to Bobrov, thinking he’s your husband. And if Arnie does get it, I can just see your husband sharing cocktails at the officers’ club back at Fort Bliss, explaining why he purposefully let the US Army get beaten by the Red Army.”
“It’s just two people, Mikhail and Arnie, not two armies,” Louise said.
“It was just Mikhail and Arnie until it went to the papers.”
Again, Louise had no answer.
“Louise,” Hamilton said, making sure he had eye contact. “You do know why your husband is here, why I’m here.”
Louise had never thought about it much. “To represent us in Finland? To get military intelligence on Soviet and Finnish forces?”
Hamilton looked at her without emotion. Then, as if struggling to make something complex clear to a child, he said, “We are here for two things. One is to keep Finland from disappearing behind what Winston Churchill last year called the Iron Curtain. If Finland goes Communist, into the camp of the Soviet Union, this legation will have failed, and the world will be just that much more dangerous for the United States. Make no mistake, the only thing that keeps the Soviets from taking over all of Europe is convincing them that they’ll lose the war.”
Louise nodded. Hamilton was silent, watching her. “And two?” she asked.
Hamilton nodded slightly. “The second,” he said, “is to secure free markets with transparent and fair rules for Americans to do business in.”
Louise nodded again. It was fundamentally quite simple in concept. Up until the past couple of days, she’d somehow seen international relations as the government equivalent of making friends. “I see,” she said quietly.
Hamilton let out a breath. “Given that we can’t stop the race, and I wish to God we could, can you please explain how getting your husband to throw the race can lead to either of those goals?”
Louise simply looked down at the desk.
After a moment, Hamilton asked, “Do you need a ride home? You can use Pulkkinen.”
She smiled, nodded yes, and felt like crying.
Hamilton followed Louise out to ask Pulkkinen, who was already standing and putting on his coat, to take her home. This made Louise wonder if Pulkkinen heard everything that went on in Hamilton’s office, but she was too tired to care. She slumped into the back seat weary and discouraged, saying nothing.
When they arrived in front of their building, Pulkkinen didn’t immediately rush around to open her door. Instead, he looked at her in the rear mirror. “I’ve read about Colonel Koski’s race with the Russian,” he said.
“Yes,” Louise answered. “It’s in all the papers.” She smiled ruefully.
“I hope he stays safe,” Pulkkinen said.
Louise perked up. “Not the Russian?”
“The Russian, too,” Pulkkinen answered.
Louise hesitated. “Pulkkinen,” she started, “can I ask you a personal question?”
“Yoh.”
“Did you fight in the war?”
“Yoh.”
She was used to this.
“You must have been quite young.”
“Yoh.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
She did the math. If he started with the Winter War, he’d have been sixteen.
“That’s young to be in the war.”
“You age,” he said.
She waited a moment after that. “You must not like Russians.”
Pulkkinen’s chin raised as he looked back at her in the mirror. In that narrow slit of a mirror, in the dark interior, she couldn’t read him. He didn’t answer.
After a beat, she started to open the door and he scrambled to help her out. She looked him in the eye—and he looked right back. She took a chance. “I know that if I ask you if you’re a spy and you are one, you’ll answer no, and if you aren’t one, you’ll answer no.”
Pulkkinen actually smiled. “Yoh,” he said. Then he shut the car door behind her. “Good morning, Mrs. Koski.”
She didn’t go into the building but rather stood there, watching the car pull away down the gloomy street. She reached into her purse and pulled out a pack of Chesterfields. She lit the cigarette, taking in its hot, acrid smoke. She coughed, unused to it, steeled herself to take another puff, did so, and coughed again. She tossed the only partially smoked cigarette on the sidewalk. It wasn’t the smoking that gave her courage. It was the not smoking.
The words of her grandma Lowe had come to her. “When one door shuts, another one always opens.”
She went directly to the orphanage.
She outlined her idea of trying to find Arnie using Pietari and as many friends as he could get to Kaarina. “It’s our only hope,” she finished.
“It’s your only hope,” Kaarina said, somewhat clipped.
“It is Natalya’s and her children’s only hope,” Louise answered.
That softened Kaarina. “OK. I’ll talk to Pietari this afternoon. Why don’t you come over this evening? I made fresh nisu last night.”