CHAPTER 4
THE SWALLOW
“Remember the snake?” Walter Anderson asked, balancing his champagne over the railing of the Miss Christin, spilling it into the Potomac. Red-cheeked, more from the booze than from the brisk fall air, Anderson was holding court in front of six people who’d heard the story many times, myself included.
“Who could forget the snake?” I asked.
“Certainly not you, Sally.” He gave me an exaggerated wink.
I loved teasing Anderson, and he loved dishing it right back. We’d both been stationed in Kandy during the war, working Morale Operations to steer the message toward the greater good. In other words, we were propagandists. Back then, he’d given his all to trying to get cozy with me, and when I rebuffed him for the tenth time, he settled into a big brother role.
“Got something in your eye?” I asked. Most people found him obnoxious, but I thought Anderson was harmlessly corny.
The crowd ate it up. It was always like that: any time we all got together, the old stories would start up as the drinking wound down. After the war, most of them had moved on, creating new stories they were forbidden to speak about. So they told the old stories—the stories they’d told a hundred times before. The snake tale was an old standby of Anderson’s. After his time in the OSS, rumor had it he’d attempted to write scripts in Hollywood. We’d heard he’d worked on a series of Cloak and Dagger meets It Came from Outer Space type treatments that got him some early meetings with producers but never got off the ground. He’d then decided to spend his days perfecting his backswing at the Columbia Country Club, but that got boring, and after a month or two, he knocked on Dulles’s door—his actual door, in Georgetown—and asked for a job at the Agency. In his early fifties, Anderson was given an administrative role, although he’d begged to be put back into the field.
The old gang had gathered to celebrate an anniversary of sorts. Eleven years earlier, we’d left our posts in Ceylon, the war already over. The future of the OSS and American intelligence had remained uncertain. It’d be two years before the Agency would be created—two years before a home would be given to wayward OSS officers who’d grown tired of raking in the dough at their New York law firms and brokerage houses and wanted, even more than to serve their country again, the power that came from being a keeper of secrets. It was a power that some, myself included, found more intoxicating than any drug, sex, or other means of quickening one’s heartbeat. We’d planned on celebrating our tenth anniversary, but it was postponed again and again until someone just set a date.
“Anyway,” Anderson continued. “Honest to God, the fucker was nine meters long.”
“Twenty-nine feet?” one of the younger Agency men piped in.
“That’s right, Henry, my boy. Mark my words, she was a man-eater. Killed half a dozen Burmese by the time I got called in.”
“How do you know she was a she?” I asked.
“Believe me, Sally, only a female could’ve wreaked such havoc. And they needed a man to put her in her place.”
“So why were you called in?” I said.
“Community relations,” he said, straight-faced. “The snake was a menace. I’m telling you, she was something out of a horror flick. That snake still makes the occasional cameo in my nightmares. Just ask Prudy.” He pointed to his wife, a petite woman with large yellow plastic earrings that made her earlobes droop, keeping warm inside the yacht’s saloon with the other wives. She looked out the window and gave a little wave. “Anyway, she wouldn’t come out of her hole—”
“Like this story!” someone yelled from the back of the crowd.
“It was more like a cave than a hole, really,” he continued, ignoring the heckler. “She’d be in there for months. Sleeping, waiting. Then one day, she’d slither out and saddle up next to a cow. Then bam!” He clapped his hands for effect. “She’d drag the poor bovine back down the hole without so much as a moo. Really put a hurting on the village’s economy. And we didn’t want that, right?”
“Wouldn’t be a horrible way to go,” Frank Wisner said, joining the group. The circle split so the boss could take a front-row seat for Anderson’s story. Frank was the one who’d paid for the boat we were standing on, the alcohol we were drinking, and the shrimp cocktail we were eating. “Wouldn’t know it was comin’,” he continued in his Mississippi lilt. “Just standing in a grassy field somewhere, chewin’ on some cud, perhaps contemplating whether to go down to the stream for a drink, and then—”
“Don’ be morbid, Frank,” Anderson said. “Jesus.”
Anderson had started slurring his words—and when he slurred his words, the words he did manage to get out usually got him in trouble. With the boss in the mix now, I motioned for him to hurry up and finish the goddamn story.
“I oversaw the whole operation.”
“Operation Kaa?” my friend Beverly asked. She half-laughed, half-hiccuped, and the crowd tittered.
“For the love of God, can I please go on?”
“No one’s holding you back,” Bev said, her voice high and throaty, indicating she was one too many glasses of bubbly over her limit. She was wearing a black Givenchy sack dress, bought on a recent trip to Paris. After the war, Bev had married an oil lobbyist, who kept her dressed in the latest fashions as long as she turned her head when he came home smelling like bourbon and knock-off Chanel No. 5. She hated the guy’s guts, so she made sure the trade was as even as possible by buying everything as soon as it stepped off the runway, not to mention having the occasional dalliance of her own with her old OSS beaux. The sack dress did nothing to flatter her figure, but I gave her credit for attempting it.
Someone handed Anderson a flask. He took a swig and coughed. “Anyway. I brought ten men with me to the cave, hole, whatever you call it. Plan was to smoke her out, then bag her.”
“What kind of bag’s gonna hold a thirty-foot snake?” Frank asked. He was smiling, egging Anderson on. They’d entered the OSS together, but Frank had risen to the top while Anderson stayed stuck in the middle. Frank was still handsome, still maintained the physique of the college track star he’d been thirty years earlier. He was the kind of man who believed anything was possible—especially with himself at the helm. But there was something off about him that night. Twice I’d seen him standing apart from the guests, looking out over the slowly churning Potomac. I wondered if the rumors were true that he’d suffered a breakdown after the Soviets put an end to the Hungarian uprising he’d helped orchestrate.
Anderson took another swig from the flask and cleared his throat. “Good question, boss. We sewed a bunch of burlap sacks together, then rigged a giant zipper down the middle.”
Frank grinned. He already knew the ending, of course. “And it held?”
Anderson took another swig. “I had five guys holding the bag, two to zip it up when the snake came out, two standing by with pistols, and me supervising—just in case something went wrong.”
“What could go wrong?” I asked.
“What couldn’t?” Frank said, and the crowd laughed louder than the boss’s joke warranted.
“I’ll tell you!” Anderson answered. But before he could continue, the Miss Christin lurched and the engine stopped. Someone went to ask the captain what was going on and found him not on the bridge, but enjoying a drink in the saloon surrounded by the wives. The captain went to check with the engineer, who confirmed that a fuse had blown and said he’d call the marina for a tow back to the dock. Frank told the captain to wait another hour before calling, and the party continued, unmoored.
As we bobbed along, Anderson continued. He said they smoked the snake out of its hole with a tear gas canister and when the snake came out, they zipped her up in the bag, but the snake, a fighter, busted out within minutes. But not to worry, Anderson was standing by with his pistol. “Right between the eyes,” he concluded.
“Poor thing,” I said.
“Bullshit,” Frank said.
Anderson placed his hand over his heart. “Swear to God.”
Fact was, Anderson’s wife, Prudy, had corroborated the story the first time I heard it—over a steak dinner at the Colony—confirming that the snakeskin was indeed stored away in their basement, slowly disintegrating in an old refrigerator box. “Why he ever brought that nasty thing home, I have no idea,” she’d told me.
I squeezed Anderson’s arm and excused myself and joined Bev on the stern.
She leaned in and lit my cigarette. “Hey, stranger,” she said. “Story over yet?”
“Finally.”
The Jefferson Memorial was lit up in the distance, the District asleep behind it. Under the orange night sky, the city looked peaceful, the power plays and constant angling at rest for the night.
“This isn’t so bad, is it?” Bev asked.
“Not bad at all, Bev.” I’d surprised myself by actually having a good time. After the war, I’d come back to Washington with the promise that I could land a job at the State Department. And I did. But instead of a cushy job at State with my own office, they stuck me in the basement sorting records. I could only take it for six months before I quit, after which I distanced myself from the old boys’ club.
I’d been many things, but I was no record keeper. I couldn’t even pretend. I’d been a nurse, a waitress, an heiress. I once posed as a librarian. I’d been someone’s wife, someone’s mistress, fiancée, lover. I’d been Russian, French, and British. I’d been from Pittsburgh, Palm Springs, and Winnipeg. I could become just about anyone. I had one of those faces—the wide eyes, the ready smile that suggested I was an open book, someone who had no secrets to keep, and if she did, wouldn’t be able to keep them anyway. That and, with the rise in popularity of actresses with more generous waistlines like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, my figure, which I’d attempted to diet away as a teenager, worked to my advantage in prying secrets out of powerful men.
I walked right out of there with my head held high, then rallied the girls for drinks followed by dancing at Café Trinidad until closing—which, in D.C., was unfortunately at midnight. But the next day, after I nursed my hangover with a cold compress and a Bloody Mary, I had a minor breakdown at the realization I had no job, no income, and no savings. The latter due to one of my blessings and curses: a heightened appreciation for beautiful things. The blessing was that my innate sense of style made people think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth in a place like Grosse Point or Greenwich, and not a clapboard row house in Pittsburgh’s Little Italy. The curse was that my good eye often exceeded my means.
I knew I needed to formulate a plan before my bank account dwindled to Code Red level. There was no running to Mommy or Daddy, as some of my friends had the luxury of doing when times got tough. That evening, I’d flipped through my little black book and set up a stream of dates with the D.C. lobbyist and lawyer set, an occasional diplomat, and one or two congressmen. The dates were tedious and exhausting, but at the end of the day, the rent was paid on my Georgetown apartment, I’d gotten some nice dinners out of them, and the men whose company I’d pretended to enjoy kept me in couture that rivaled Bev’s. I was not attracted to them, and yet how easy it had been to convince them that I was.
That line of work suited me fine. But after a while, I grew bored with the taxi, dinner, hotel, taxi, dinner, hotel rotation. That and the high level of personal upkeep were wearing me out. The brushing, tweezing, plucking, dyeing, waxing, bleaching, squeezing—even the endless shopping—were beginning to take their toll.
I thought of becoming a stewardess. For one, I’d look great in Pan Am’s signature blue. Plus, I loved to travel. It’s what I liked most during the war—the possibility of being uprooted to a new place every few months. But they’d take one look at my age—thirty-two if I was being honest or thirty-six if I was actually honest—and say I was “overqualified” for the position.
The truth was, I missed intelligence work, missed being in the know. So when Bev rang one last time to beg me to go to the party, I said yes.
“So many familiar faces,” Bev said, scanning the crowd. The music had started up again and people were dancing and spilling their gin fizzes on one another. I spotted Jim Roberts across the deck, breathing down some poor girl’s neck. Jim had once cornered me at an embassy party in Shanghai, putting his hands around my waist and saying he wasn’t going to let me go until I gave him a smile. I did smile, then I kneed him in the groin.
“Maybe a few too many familiar faces.”
“I’ll toast to that,” she said. Bev leaned over the rail and brushed a piece of her dark brown hair out of her face. Bev was the kind of woman whose beauty came late, passing over her high school years, college years, and early twenties entirely, only to arrive in her late twenties and not reach its full glory until her thirties. Bev had had many Jim Roberts experiences herself. “But still,” she continued. “I wish all the girls could’ve been here.”
“Me too.” Bev and I were the only two of our old crew still living in Washington. Julia was in France with her new husband, Jane was in Jakarta with someone else’s husband, and Anna was in either Venice or Madrid, depending on what mood she was in that month. Our group had first met on the Mariposa, a former luxury liner recommissioned to shuttle GIs to the front line. The only women on board, we shared a cramped cabin outfitted with metal bunks, one toilet, and a tub that sputtered cold salt water. Despite the camp-like conditions and the seasickness, we all got along famously. We were in our early twenties and ready to take on the world. We were the kind of girls who’d grown up reading Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, then graduated to H. Rider Haggard’s She in high school. We bonded over the belief that a life of adventure wasn’t reserved for men, and we set out to claim our piece of it.
Most important, we shared a similar sense of humor, which went a long way when sharing one toilet with questionable flushing abilities—especially when the ship hit rougher seas. Julia loved to play pranks and once started a rumor that we were a group of Catholic nuns headed to Calcutta. The men, who’d been catcalling us any chance they could get, became reverent when passing us in the corridors. One soldier had even asked if we’d pray for his sick dog. I made the sign of the cross and Bev burst out laughing.
By the time the Mariposa made landfall in Ceylon, we were inseparable, and held tight to each other in the back of a thick-wheeled truck that jettisoned us through the jungle to the port at Kandy. Surrounded by tea plantations and electric-green terraced rice paddies that spilled down from the hills, Kandy, though just across the bay from the terror unfolding in Burma, felt as far away from the war as one could get.
Many of us would remember our time in Kandy fondly. And when we’d write each other—or, if we were lucky, catch up in person—we’d reminisce about the many nights spent under a sky so large and so dark the stars would reveal themselves in layers. We’d recount slicing papayas off the trees surrounding the thatch-roofed OSS offices with a rusty machete, or the time an elephant got into our compound and had to be enticed out with a jar of peanut butter. We’d recall the all-night parties at the Officers’ Club, dangling our legs in blue-green Kandy Lake and yanking them back out when we disturbed some bubbling creature lurking beneath. There were the throngs of monks making their way to and from the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, the sweaty weekends in Colombo, the leaf monkey we’d named Matilda who’d given birth in our food hut.
I’d started out as MO support staff—filing papers, typing, that sort of thing. But my career trajectory changed when I received an invitation to attend a dinner at Earl Louis Mountbatten’s lavish residence up on the hill, overlooking the OSS compound. It was the first of many parties I’d attend and the first time I’d discover that powerful men would willingly give information to me, whether I asked for it or not.
That’s how it started. That first party, I’d squeezed myself into a low-cut black evening gown Bev had packed “just in case,” and by the end of the night, a Brazilian arms dealer who’d been chatting me up let slip that he believed there was a mole within Mountbatten’s staff. I reported the tip to Anderson the next day. What the OSS did with that information, I have no idea. But I was soon inundated with more dinner invitations, set up with visiting people of import, and given questions to ask loose-lipped men.
I got good at my new job—so good I was given a stipend to purchase gowns we’d have shipped in with our toilet paper, Spam, and mosquito repellent. The funny thing was, I never thought of myself as a spy. Surely the craft took more than smiling and laughing at stupid jokes and pretending to be interested in everything these men said. There wasn’t a name for it back then, but it was at that first party that I became a Swallow: a woman who uses her God-given talents to gain information—talents I’d been accumulating since puberty, had refined in my twenties, and then perfected in my thirties. These men thought they were using me, but it was always the reverse; my power was making them think it wasn’t.
“Wanna dance?” Bev asked.
I wrinkled my nose as Bev shimmied her hips. “To this?” I yelled over the Perry Como. Bev didn’t care. She took hold of my arms and moved them back and forth until I gave in. Just as I was getting into the swing of things, someone shut off the record player with a scratch. From the back of the crowd, someone clinked his fork against a glass, and the rest of the crowd joined in until the entire boat sounded like a chandelier in a windstorm.
“Oh boy,” Bev said. “Here we go.”
The men began with the toasts: To Frank! To Wild Bill! To the Old Standby Stooges! To the Otherwise Sad Sacks! Then came the songs we used to close out the night with back in Kandy: “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Lili Marlene,” followed by their not-so-secret clubs’ songs from Harvard and Princeton and Yale. Bev and I always snickered at the drunken musicale that rounded out every party—but that night, we couldn’t help but link arms and join in.
The toot of an approaching tugboat come to tow us back to the marina interrupted the third round of Yale’s “ ’Neath the Elms.” We yelled for the tug captain to come join us for a nightcap. Not very happy to be dragged out of bed to come and rescue the drunken lot of us, he and another man went to work tethering the Miss Christin.
Back on dry ground, the men debated whether to head to the Social Club on Sixteenth or the twenty-four-hour diner on U Street. Bev and I said our goodbyes in front of the black sedan her husband had sent, promising not to let so much time pass before seeing each other again. “Are you sure you don’t need a ride?” she asked.
“I could use the air.”
“Suit yourself!” She blew me a kiss from the open window as the car pulled away.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Can I walk with you?” asked Frank. “I could use some air too,” he said, his breath minty with a hint of tobacco. He seemed perfectly sober. I wondered if he’d been sipping Coca-Cola the whole night. “We’re going in the same direction, right?”
Frank lived down the street from me, but in terms of real estate, his Georgetown town house was light-years away from my small apartment above a French bakery. “Indeed we are,” I said. Frank wasn’t the kind of man who’d ask to walk a girl home with ill intentions; he’d never made a pass at me as long as I’d known him. If Frank said he wanted to talk, he usually wanted to talk business. He signaled to his driver, who was standing by the open door of his black sedan. “I’ll be walking tonight,” he called out. The driver tipped his hat and closed the door.
We walked away from the Potomac, through downtown Washington’s sleeping streets. “I’m happy you came,” he said. “I hoped Beverly could talk you into coming.”
“She was in on it?”
“Is she ever not in on it?”
I laughed. “No, I suppose not.”
He was silent again, as if he’d forgotten why he’d asked me to walk with him.
“You could’ve told your driver to go home earlier, before making him wait all night.”
“Didn’t know I was gonna want to walk,” he said. “Not until I made up my mind.”
“Made up your mind?”
“Do you miss it?”
“All the time,” I said.
“I envy that. I really do.”
“Do you wish you’d stopped? After the war?”
“I never used to think about the what ifs,” said Frank. “But now…I’m not so sure. Things aren’t as black-and-white as they used to be.”
We arrived at the bakery. The lights were on, the morning baker already loading baguettes into the oven. I’d chosen to live there not only because it was in my price range when I started at State, but also because I love the smell of fresh-baked bread even more than I like eating it.
“I hear you’re looking for a new line of work.”
“Can’t keep a secret from you, Frank.”
He laughed. “No, you really can’t.”
“Why? Have you heard of something?”
He gave a tight-lipped smile. “Well, I’ve got something that may be of interest.”
I tilted my ear toward him.
“It’s about a book.”