Louise's War by Sarah Shaber Read Free Book Online Page A

the wake who wasn’t either a clerk or someone’s wife. She was the first woman I’d ever met who had a PhD.
    Dora told us she’d been in the office when Holman’s wife found his body. We pried as many details as we could from her, keeping our voices lowered out of consideration of the somber occasion.
    Dora whispered that she’d run down to Holman’s office when she heard his wife screaming, closely followed by Austine, Don and Danielson. ‘The four of us were reviewing a report that General Donovan wanted to read over the weekend. That’s why we were working late.’ She’d seen the corpse and everything. ‘He couldn’t have been dead long,’ she said. ‘We’d all seen him alive within the last couple of hours or so.’
    ‘It’s not surprising he had a heart attack, as fat as the man was,’ Joan said. ‘His face was always red. That’s a sure sign of a heart problem.’
    ‘I’m amazed his death got into the newspaper,’ I said. ‘What with it happening at OSS and all. You’d think the government would have suppressed it.’
    ‘When Mr Holman’s wife screamed, well, the best word to describe it was piercing,’ Dora said. ‘Most of the civilian staff had gone home for the day, but security came running from everywhere. Our guards arrived first, then soldiers from the bivouac on Navy Hill, then the Capitol police, then the FBI. The soldiers kept us out in the hallway, but the office door was open and we could see Holman’s body.’
    ‘What happened next?’ Joan urged.
    ‘I’m not supposed to talk about it,’ Dora said, lowering her voice, ‘but I will say that when the FBI appeared, two agents and a deputy special agent, they ran off our security and the police. In fact,’ she said, lowering her voice even more, ‘that agent over there, the one with the yellow feather in his hat band, he’s the deputy special agent who was on the scene. Roger, Guy, Don and I had to stay at the office to be interviewed. For hours, without dinner. I about starved.’
    ‘Was General Donovan there?’
    ‘Sure. And Dr Linney. Watching the G-men’s every move,’ Dora said. ‘It was quite entertaining. You’d never guess we were all on the same side.’
    Dora was a socialist, but General Donovan made it clear he didn’t care what anyone’s political inclinations were as long as he or she could help defeat the Nazis. The same couldn’t be said for everyone in the office. Generally speaking the economists were Marxists, the administrators were dollar-a-year Republicans and the historians, and most everyone else, were New Dealers. The foreigners at OSS ranged from exiled European royalty to Communists. If it weren’t for the war they wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room with each other.
    ‘Around ten o’clock,’ Dora went on, ‘General Donovan came and told us that we could all go home, that the doctor had said that Mr Holman died from a heart attack.’
    We stopped gossiping as we drew near to the head of the line. When it was my turn to speak to Mrs Holman, she gripped my proffered hand firmly. She looked tired, but her eyes were clear.
    ‘So sorry about your husband,’ I murmured. I really was. Even though I hadn’t been close to the man. No one, especially someone with young children, should have to die in the prime of his life.
    ‘Thank you, dear,’ she said, but she didn’t ask how I knew her husband, and her attention had already moved on to the next person in line.
    Dora, Joan and I returned to the buffet. No one ignored free food in Washington, especially on a Sunday, when many restaurants were closed and boarding houses often didn’t serve meals. Mine was an exception, but I still wouldn’t get dinner at ‘Two Trees’ that night.
    Joan reached over the platter of deviled eggs for a ham biscuit. She was a big woman, over six feet tall, with an appetite to match. She had a deep, easy laugh and a jolly sense of humor, which might explain why she had lots of friends but no