Louise's Blunder Read Online Free PDF

an apartment of her own, but the District Housing Authority wouldn’t be likely to approve it.
    ‘Let’s just hope it works out so we can stay here,’ Ada said. ‘It’s hard to imagine living somewhere else now.’
    Ada went out the front door to her waiting taxi and I went into the lounge to join Phoebe and Henry. The sherry service was on the table and Henry and Phoebe were already raising glasses to toast Milt’s homecoming. I was happy to join them.
    When I got to work the next morning Pat, the messenger, was sitting on the corner of my desk waiting for me.
    ‘Mrs Pearlie,’ he said, ‘Don’t put down your things. You’re wanted in Mr Lewis’s office right away.’
    I glanced over at Jesse Shera, my boss, who stood nearby. He nodded his OK to me.
    Once more I walked across the street into the main OSS compound and up the wide stairs of the former naval hospital to the top floor hall where the OSS big shots had their offices. Lewis’s secretary barely acknowledged me as she waved me into his office.
    Lewis wasn’t there. Instead Major Angus Wicker waited for me in one of the leather chairs. His uniform was even more wrinkled than it had been yesterday.
    ‘Good morning, Mrs Pearlie,’ he said. ‘Please sit down.’
    I sat, feeling oddly uncomfortable with my hat and pocket-book in my lap.
    ‘I need your assistance again today,’ he said.
    Oh goody. Making lists of files was only slightly more interesting than cataloguing and filing and would lose its appeal to me very soon.
    ‘Mr Hughes isn’t at work again today,’ he said. ‘And he hasn’t called us.’
    ‘What do you think has happened?’ I asked.
    ‘We have no idea,’ Wicker said, ‘and it concerns us.’
    He uncrossed his legs and leaned toward me.
    ‘You saw yesterday that some of the files he checked out of the Reading Room were, shall we say, not in Mr Hughes’ area of study. We don’t suspect him of anything yet, not at all. But with the Trident Conference in town, let’s just say that allied intelligence is a valuable commodity.’
    I could feel the pulse beating in my temple. Was Hughes passing OSS intelligence? If so, to whom? Ally or enemy?
    ‘I need a jolly girl such as yourself to drop by Mr Hughes’ boarding house,’ he said. ‘Talk to his landlady. Just say he’s been missed at work and there’s concern about his whereabouts. You can pretend to be a secretary sent by his boss. You won’t need to say what office you’re from, no one expects that these days.’
    ‘There’s no telephone at his boarding house?’
    ‘The landlady doesn’t have one.’ That wasn’t unusual. It took months to get permission from the War Production Board to buy a telephone.
    ‘All right, of course,’ I said. ‘Right now?’
    ‘Right now. As if you’d gotten to work and your boss sent you out right away. Here’s the address.’ Wicker handed me an index card. It read ‘905 25th Street’; that was in Foggy Bottom, a neighborhood north of OSS headquarters and west of my own. I tucked the card in my pocketbook.
    ‘And this,’ he said, handing me another slip of paper, ‘is my direct telephone number. If I don’t answer it, my secretary will. Memorize it.’
    I did, and gave the paper back to him.
    ‘And,’ he said, giving me an envelope and a form, ‘some cash for the bus and lunch. Please sign the receipt.’ I did so and began to feel my heart rate surge. An adventure loomed!
    Maybe few people would think that taking the bus to a boarding house and asking a landlady the whereabouts of a boarder was exciting, but I did! As the bus wound its way through the streets of Foggy Bottom I found myself picturing wild scenarios about Hughes for which I had no evidence whatsoever.
    Hughes could be a German mole, planted in the United States years ago, who’d mined the OSS files for intelligence, slipped it to the Nazis, and now had fled. Maybe to Mexico. I had previous experience with an embedded Nazi spy, so I knew it wasn’t