“Very nice,” he said, looking around the empty room with satisfaction because the last thing he wanted was a boarding house full of nosy spinsters. Mrs. Gilpatrick appeared to have the place to herself this morning. “I have not read the newspapers this morning. What is new?”
“We’re pushing the Krauts back out of Italy, for one thing,” Mrs. Gilpatrick said happily.
“Ah.”
“I’ve got a daughter in the WAVES and a son in the Marines,” she added. “I keep up on the war news.”
“Your son, where is he stationed now?”
“Somewhere in the Pacific,” she said primly. “I can’t say where. He’s not allowed to tell me where he is when he writes. Loose lips sink ships and all that.”
“You must be proud,” he said.
“I am.” He saw that Mrs. Gilpatrick actually drew herself a bit taller. “So, Mr. Brinker, is it?”
He nodded pleasantly.
“Where are you from, Mr. Brinker? If you don’t mind me asking. That’s quite an accent you have.”
“I am Dutch,” he said, still smiling. “Well, it has been many years since I have been in this country. I recently was hired at Sterling Optical down the street. Do you know it? I am a lens grinder by profession.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Gilpatrick said with a satisfied note, as if he had just answered all her questions. “Well. I suppose now I should show you the room.”
“Do you have many other boarders here?” Hess asked.
“Just Mr. Hargrave right now, who works in the procurement office. He’s hardly ever home. He just sleeps here, to tell the truth.” She added pointedly, “Boarders don’t generally loaf around the house.”
They climbed four flights of stairs and Mrs. Gilpatrick showed him a space with a low ceiling, tucked under the roof. A bit cramped, but freshly painted a blinding shade of white and spotlessly clean. It was also so cold that Hess could see his breath.
“There’s no heat, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Gilpatrick said. “I’ve kept it closed off but if you leave the door open it warms up soon enough.”
“I like the cold,” he said.
Hess looked out the windows. Two old double-hung windows in the back wall overlooked the alley below. He could see the rooftop of a kitchen addition just below. Out front was a view of Pennsylvania Avenue. They were well above the treetops. Cars crawled along the street below, and people walked quickly down the sidewalk, hurried along by the winter wind. Down the street, he could plainly see people getting in and out of taxicabs in front of the Metropolitan Hotel.
Hess smiled.
Mrs. Gilpatrick joined him at the window to admire the view, and she looked at his face, awaiting his reaction. She knew the view from the fourth floor was quite good, and in the past some boarders had overlooked the lack of heat — or the stifling overabundance of it in summer — on account of the stunning vantage point offered of the street. But the look in Mr. Brinker’s eyes was neither admiring nor dreamy. He seemed to be lost in calculation, like a batter who steps up to the plate and judges the distance to the back fence. She found his glance unsettling as he turned to her and said, “I will take the room.”
The man hurrying down the street had more giving wings to his feet than the winter wind. He shoved his thin fists deeper into the pockets of his wool overcoat and tried to walk faster. Once or twice he looked over his shoulder. He was on his lunch break and he didn’t want to be gone more than an hour. An absence of an hour might raise a few eyebrows, because Bill Keller was famous for his fifteen-minute lunches that consisted of a cup of coffee and a hamburger at a nearby diner. He was at his desk by 8 a.m. sharp and wasn’t one to put on his coat and hat promptly at 5 p.m. No, sir. Not Bill Keller. When other clerks showed up late — even hung over — or took too long for lunch, the supervisor invariably said, “Why can’t you be more like Bill Keller?”
It was just the sort of comment that made him hated by his co-workers. He thought they would be amazed to know that he was on his way to see a movie star.
At forty-eight, Keller was old to be a clerk in the War Department, doing nothing more than shuffling papers and reviewing forms. He had worked there for twenty years. He had hoped that the war might offer an opportunity for advancement and change, but the trouble was that Keller was a civilian. Every wet-nosed kid who came along with sergeant’s stripes or even those pushy young WACs thought they could boss around the short, bespectacled man who rarely looked up from the stack of papers on his battered wooden desk. Keller wasn’t even at the new Pentagon building across the river in Virginia, which had quickly become the center of military activity. He still labored in the temporary Munitions Building on the National Mall — then again, that was where General Marshall still chose to make his headquarters. Marshall claimed that he and his staff didn’t have time to move.
Keller was too old to enlist. Nobody wanted a middle-aged man with glasses and a slight build. And the truth was that Keller wasn’t so enthusiastic about the war. He could understand fighting the Japanese — sneaking yellow bastards that they were, attacking Pearl Harbor like that. But the Germans were different. They represented order and common sense in Keller’s mind. Why, Keller’s own grandfather had been German. Very briefly, a few years before the war, Keller had joined a group called the German-American Bund, led by a charismatic German immigrant named Fritz Kuhn. Kuhn and his Bund members were sympathetic to the new order arising in Germany. To Americans like Keller, sick of the poverty of the Depression and the way that the average man was kept down, Adolf Hitler seemed like a prophet. His message rang true. Rise up! Take pride! It’s not your fault — it’s the Jews! In the Bund, Keller found the sort of camaraderie he had longed for all his life.
The Bund denounced President Roosevelt as a pawn of the international Jewish conspiracy. Keller had quit when the Bund started handing out uniforms and making the Nazi salute. That was just asking for trouble. And Keller wanted to keep his job with the Department of the Army. So he had gone back to his desk and his quiet ways, watching the rapid promotion of others. In 1940, he had followed the news about Fritz Kuhn being imprisoned for embezzlement and forgery. Keller wasn’t all that surprised. He doubted that the charges were even true. But the government had wanted Kuhn locked up. It was a lesson that wasn’t lost on Keller and other former Bund members. They kept their heads down and their mouths shut.
Keller had met Eva Von Stahl one day several months before when she sat on the stool next to him at the diner where he was eating his hurried noontime sandwich. He had recognized her instantly — the glamorous German movie star! One of his passions, which he never discussed with his co-workers, was going to the movies. Eva caught him staring, and they struck up a conversation. He had even made her laugh, which pleased Keller more than anything, because deep down he knew that he possessed the sort of dry wit that went unappreciated. The actress was sophisticated enough to understand him.
Not that Keller’s interest in Eva Von Stahl was purely intellectual. He would have to be a dead man not to notice a figure that seemed to have been poured into her dress. Her hair was a pale blond, almost platinum, and Eva’s eyes were the deep blue of a fall sky. She had a way of looking at him with those eyes as if whatever he said was the most interesting thing she had ever heard. Half the time, looking into those eyes, he forgot what he was saying halfway through a sentence. After all these long, lonely years, Keller finally felt that he was appreciated.
She also seemed interested in his work. “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers,” Keller told her. “If you really want to know where the army is going next, you just have to follow the paperwork. Food, munitions, gasoline — those are the things that keep an army going. When you see where those supplies are headed you know where the next campaign is going to be.”