Mr. Churchill's Secretary: A Novel Read online

  “No, the handwriting inside the letter has to match the outside,” Pierce replied. “Don’t forget that all mail’s opened and read now—we don’t want anything to tip off the government censors.”

  Claire reread the words in front of her, then began copying, her handwriting decidedly feminine. “I don’t understand. It just seems like a regular letter to me—the weather is good, the food is terrible, hope you’re well.…”

  “Ah, look carefully, my dear,” Pierce said.

  Claire read and then shrugged her shoulders.

  He rose to his feet and came around behind her. “What do you see if you read down the left-hand margin?”

  Claire scanned her eyes down the left side of the page. “It’s in code!” she exclaimed. “ ‘Reinforcements for the enemy expected,’ ” she read slowly.

  “Exactly,” he said, placing his hand on her shoulder. “And this innocuous letter, in your charming handwriting, will go to some of our dear friends in France and let them know what’s coming. They’ll pass word on to Berlin.”

  “How did you get this information?” Claire asked, eyes wide, lips parted.

  “Can’t reveal my sources,” said Pierce, stroking her hair. “Let’s just say I have it on good authority.”

  David wanted Maggie to succeed at No. 10; after all, he was her friend, and also the one who got her the job. He felt a strange kinship with her. She was American, female, and a bit of a bluestocking. He was Jewish and slept with men—he knew he was tolerated because he kept his love life a secret, his Jewishness to himself, and had charm, wit, and style to spare.

  David had also studied mathematics at university and, like Maggie, was fascinated by numbers, logic, and game theory. He was intrigued by Maggie’s acceptance at M.I.T. for graduate work and asked endless questions. “So what about number theory?” he asked one late night in the office. “Do you know Alonzo Church’s work? What about Wittgenstein’s? Have you heard of Alan Turing? Brilliant fellow, from Cambridge. Wrote ‘Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals.’ ”

  Maggie, John, and David were in Mr. Churchill’s study in the Annexe, a cozy, wood-paneled book-filled room that reeked of cigar smoke. The P.M. was preparing for another British foray into Norway, and much of the evening’s discussion was about guns. After the debacle of the first Norwegian invasion, when the Royal Marines were proved unprepared, it was determined they needed rubber sheaths to protect their gun muzzles from the cold. A pharmaceutical company had developed and delivered the prototype, a sample of which John handed to the P.M. He picked it up and looked at it, then looked at the packaging, and then the box.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Won’t do. Won’t do at all.” John and David looked at each other in dismay. They’d worked hard to make sure everything was in order.

  “Sir, what won’t do?” John asked, his mouth tightening. “They’re long enough for the muzzles, ten and a half inches, just as we discussed.”

  “Labels!” Mr. Churchill said, pounding his fist on the table.

  “Labels?” David asked, looking confused.

  “Yes, labels,” the P.M. insisted. “I want a label for every box, every carton, every packet, saying ‘British, size medium.’ That will show the Nazis, if they ever recover any of them, who’s the master race!”

  Maggie raised one eyebrow. Does he really mean …?

  The P.M. cleared his throat. “My apologies, Miss Hope.”

  He does, he does indeed. She shot a look at John and was pleased to see that he’d colored slightly and was pretending to be engrossed in his notes. Nelson, who’d been curled in an unused chair, decided to roll over and clean his paws.

  There was a knock at the door. It was Snodgrass, with his sloped shoulders and dusting of dandruff. “Sir, Mr. Frain is here to see you.”

  “Send him in!” roared the P.M.

  In walked a tall man with black slicked-back hair and cold, gray eyes. He wore a carefully tailored yet understated suit. He was broad-shouldered and trim through the waist, and walked with a quick and confident stride.

  “Good evening, Prime Minister,” the man said. “I hope you remember me. We met at Chartwell a few times—”

  “Damn it, man! Of course I remember you,” the P.M. said. “Peter Frain, head of MI-Five. I hear that in your younger days at Cambridge, you were quite the chess player. Scotch?” he said, pouring himself a tumbler. “Macallan. Only twenty-two years but not bad.”

  “Neat,” Frain replied, taking a seat opposite Mr. Churchill’s large and imposing mahogany desk. “Yes, I used to play a bit.”

  “More than a bit, I heard,” the P.M. continued. “Brilliant, cold-blooded, ruthless—that’s how you’re described.”

  Frain accepted his glass. “Before I became a professor at Cambridge. Although academia could be described by those words as well.” Maggie’s lip twitched as she remembered Aunt Edith’s battles for tenure.

  “What was your field of expertise? Egyptology?”

  Frain nodded before taking a sip. Mr. Churchill looked over to John, David, and Maggie. “Young men, that will be all for tonight. Miss Hope, I’ll need you to take notes.”

  John and David left silently. Snodgrass followed, turning and closing the heavy door. As Maggie took a moment to unkink her neck before starting in with note-taking again, she noticed Frain looking at her. It wasn’t a salacious look but instead the kind of look he might give a jigsaw-puzzle piece or a particularly interesting crossword clue.

  “A chess player,” the P.M. reiterated. “That’s what we need in times like these. You know, the Lord God told Moses to spy in the land of Canaan. And He told Moses to recruit only the best and brightest. If that advice was good enough for God, it’s good enough for me.” He took a swallow of Scotch.

  “But if you recall, sir,” Frain said, “the intelligence gathered by Moses’s spies wasn’t used well. And so the Jews spent forty years wandering the desert.”

  “Touché.” He reached for a fresh cigar, cut off the end, and lit it with a flourish. “What news?” he puffed.

  “As you know, all of the mathematicians and the like have been gathered to crack German ciphers. We’re recruiting more and more—Cambridge and Oxford men, to be sure—but we’re also running crossword puzzles in the newspapers. The winners get more than the ten-quid prize—they get an all-expenses-paid trip to Bletchley Park.”

  “Good, good,” the P.M. said. “What else?”

  “Of course, there’s the usual danger posed by spies and fifth columnists—not to mention our old friends the IRA. Our ministers of propaganda have been doing their best to alert the public to the threat.”

  “Yes, ‘Keep mum—she’s not so dumb’—good one, that,” the P.M. said, chewing on his cigar. The poster in question featured a blonde in a low-cut gown.

  “And now local law enforcement agencies are being buried in reports of spy sightings—everyone wants to catch one. We’re getting reports about hushed conversations in German, smoke signals, blinking shore lights. We even had one report of a Nazi parachuting right into a woman’s victory garden.”

  “What happened with that one?” the P.M. asked.

  “False alarm.”

  “Any truth to any of it?”

  “No, sir,” Frain replied. “We have yet to follow up on a credible threat. However, I do believe that they’re out there. There are undoubtedly sleeper spies here in England, disguised as patriots, just waiting for that one message from Berlin to tell them their mission.”

  “Good hunting, Mr. Frain.” They clinked glasses.

  Frain cleared his throat, looking over at Maggie, working quietly in the corner.

  “Ah, yes,” the Prime Minister said. “Miss Hope—you may be excused.”

  Maggie gathered her papers and rose to leave. “Thank you, sir.”

  When the thick oak door had closed behind her, Churchill leaned forward. “Any news on that other matter?”

  Frain sighed. “We have a witness to the murder of Diana Snyder. He
r flatmate saw a man lurking outside the flat the day and approximate time of the murder.”

  “Who is he?”

  “She didn’t get a good look. It was night, and he was wearing a hat.”

  “Jesus Christ, man. All this and the goddamned Nazis, too.” The P.M. pronounced the word in his own idiosyncratic way, Nazzi. He took another sip of Scotch and gestured to the door. “And Miss Hope?”

  “So far, no IRA connection we can see. Although there is that matter … about her father.”

  “Doesn’t know, does she?”

  “Not a clue, sir.”

  “Well, let’s keep it that way, then, shall we?” He raised his glass. “At least for the time being.”

  SEVEN

  THE P.M. OFTEN worked so late into the night that overnight shifts were required.

  Bunking down in the Dock, the underground dormitory housing of the War Rooms set aside for junior staff working late, was one of Maggie’s least favorite parts of her job. Lying on the hard, narrow cot, she covered herself with the rough, brown army blanket and looked at the little alarm clock she’d brought from home. It was nearly five in the morning, only two hours until she had to get up and start the whole routine over again. Listening to the dull roar of the subbasement’s air-conditioning, she turned out her flashlight and tried to will her body into sleep. But she was still too keyed up after her marathon day. Her thoughts were racing.

  She remembered about the classified paperwork she’d seen, the civilian casualties predicted, the hundreds of thousands of cardboard coffins the government had on standby that no one except the highest-ranking officials knew about. What would happen if the Germans invaded—would there be hand-to-hand combat in the streets? Would there be a secret police set up with tribunals and hangings? Would the prettier Englishwomen become the concubines of the conquerors, trading in their self-respect for better rations and safety?

  She thought about the P.M.’s conversation with Frain. Would the war be lost because of a spy who’d managed to infiltrate some government office and obtain that one crucial piece of information that would change the course of history?

  Maggie thought about numbers. Numbers weren’t evil. Numbers, points, curves, fractions—they all existed independent of human thought and action.

  She missed math. She loved the order, the cool logic, the joy of solving its inevitable steps. Now the numbers she saw were of the dead and wounded, of planes, ships, and U-boats downed. The black numbers against the white paper, once the source of so much pleasure for her, were now like tiny insects, signifying death. Sometimes she dreamed of numbers at night—dark, swarming digits flying with iridescent ebony wings. They’d swarm around her, nesting in her hair, crawling up her nose, into her eyes. She’d wake up in a cold, metallic sweat with the bedclothes in a pile at her feet.

  The idea that this kind of violence and horror existed shook Maggie to her core. It was one thing to study war—it was another to live it. What have I been thinking of my whole life? Columns of equations had always made sense—that was what Maggie had always loved about them. Now that it was abundantly clear that there was no order, she felt empty. Cheated. Robbed.

  The latest reports she’d read had turned her stomach. After invading a particular French town, Nazis had ordered the Jewish men to line up in front of their wives and children, then made them strip down and shave their private parts. A delousing program, or so it was called—really an exercise in power and humiliation. And they submitted. Because the alternative was being shipped off to one of the camps or being shot in the streets.

  Learning all the sick and twisted details of the war, Maggie was starting to hate, hate with a ferocity she never knew she had within her. Could I kill a Nazi? she thought. Before, she would have said no. Or maybe—but only if she was in a kill-or-be-killed situation. But now she felt she could do it easily, with a song in her heart if it meant getting even. She could even picture drawing it out, adding to the suffering until they begged for it to stop, before she caught herself. What’s happening to me? Am I turning into a monster? One of them?

  Earlier that evening, David had taken her out to dinner, one of the government-sponsored British restaurants redolent with the odors of fried onions and oily fish. After the waiter brought their plates to the table, Maggie asked him what he thought. She was desperate for someone to pull her back to civilization. David seemed to be the best prospect.

  “The nature of evil?” He’d laughed as he tucked into his corned beef hash. “Now, that’s a festive topic of conversation!”

  “I’m serious, David. You must have thought about it.” Maggie played with her cutlery as her dry and tasteless bangers and mash became cold. She knew she needed some kind of rational perspective.

  “My grandparents were German Jews and left for England in the late 1880s. But I have relatives who got out as late as ’thirty-seven—and they could only escape to somewhere like Shanghai. That’s where they are now.”

  Maggie had no idea. “David. I’m so sorry—”

  A muscle in his jaw twitched. “At least they’re out of there and relatively safe.”

  She tried to imagine Aunt Edith, stripped of her life’s work, wearing an armband with a pink triangle, confined to a ghetto. It was too much to envision. She reached over and took David’s hand. “I’m glad they’re safe. And I’m sorry it happened.”

  “Me, too,” he said, his face inscrutable. “On both counts.” The fate of his relatives must be weighing on David in a way that Maggie could never really know.

  “But going back to your original question, no, I don’t think Germans are inherently evil. However, I do think Hitler is, and he’s surrounded himself with any number of madmen who probably grew up pulling wings off flies and drowning kittens for jollies. Like the Boss, I don’t believe in so-called pariah nations. I see this as a war against Hitler and Nazism, not against the German people.”

  “But why?” Maggie insisted, images of the bombing—and now David’s family—impossible to clear from her mind.

  “The Germans must be made to feel they’re not pariahs. They own and have produced much that’s admired, and their former enemies must be willing to trust them and the new government they’ll choose to elect. If this can be done, then I believe they’ll respond in kind.”

  He finished his hash and put down his fork and knife. “Germany’s given us Goethe’s Faust, Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy,’ Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor, and, and”—he paused to think—“sauerbraten and Sacher torte … or is that Austrian?” He shook his head. “Regardless. It’s just lost its way. For now.”

  Maggie considered what he said and wondered if he could be right. Maybe it was the only way to stop the cycle of violence and hatred. But it wouldn’t be easy. “You do realize convincing other people—the French and the English, especially—this is the best way to go after the war will be difficult, if not downright impossible?”

  “Oh, I do,” he said, snagging one of the untouched, cold bangers from her plate.

  “And you sincerely feel what you’ve described is the only way to spare future generations endlessly recurring wars?”

  He grinned. “Have I convinced you?”

  “I can see where you’re going with it, but it requires a superhuman amount of compassion, don’t you think?” Maggie looked at him. “I might just have to start calling you Saint David, if you keep this up.”

  “Still Jewish,” he said sweetly. “Why does no one ever remember?”

  The board outside read Church of the Holy Apostles—Repent Ye, for Judgment Day May Be Close at Hand, with the times of the Masses and confession in chipped gold-painted Roman lettering. Claire climbed the steep stone steps and pulled open the imposing iron-hinged doors.

  The interior was silent, cavernous, and dimly lit, with banks of votives flickering, making shadows dance along the walls. A statue of the Virgin with a halo of gold and robes of forget-me-not blue presided over a side altar.

  Claire dipped h
er fingers in holy water, made the sign of the cross, and genuflected to the carved wooden altar, then walked down the aisle, her heels clicking on the black marble tiles. She made her way past ruby, sapphire, amber, and emerald stained-glass windows to the dark wood confessional boxes that stood to one side. The sweet smell of smoky incense lingered in the air.

  Besides Claire, the church was empty—not surprising, since confession was listed as hours away.

  She resolutely made her way to the confessional farthest from the altar, went inside, and took a seat in the shadows.

  Then waited in silence until she heard the grille slide open.

  “Yes, my child?” she heard a low voice say.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  There was a long pause. Even though she had done this many, many times before, Claire held her breath.

  Then she heard his voice.

  “I’ll say you have.” The light switched on in the box.

  “Michael!” she exclaimed, her face beaming.

  “In the flesh, me love,” the man replied.

  Claire put her hand up to the grille, and Murphy covered it with his. They stared at each other a moment, and then she laughed.

  “What?” he said, his dark eyes now stern.

  “It’s just—I can’t get over the sight of you like that.”

  Murphy was dressed in a priest’s black robes and white collar, with the traditional purple stole draped over his wiry shoulders. “What? Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s just—don’t you feel bad? Wearing the collar and not really being one?”

  “I’ve done a lot worse in the name of our cause. And besides,” he continued, “it makes the old birds happy—handsome priest listening to their petty little sins. I swear, some of the nuns stretch out their confessions just to sit in the dark and—”

  “Michael!”

  “That’s Father Murphy to you, my child.” His eyes became serious. “So, what news?”

  Claire took a breath. “Well, I’m in. They had me write and address a letter. Oh, it was innocuous enough—the weather and the horrible food and all, but there was code in it. Code about troops moving into Norway.”