When Stars Light the Sky (The Women of Midtown #2)

Chapter 8

8

Over the coming days, the crush of Americans desperate to leave Germany intensified, challenging Inga’s ability to swiftly send and receive telegrams. There wasn’t a line outside the embassy each morning; it was a mob. They weren’t violent, but thousands of desperate Americans packed the front of the embassy every day.

In the first week of the war, she sent out over two hundred telegrams to cities all over the United States, seeking verification of people’s citizenship. Soon the replies started coming in, and she was now fielding as many incoming telegrams as outgoing ones. Almost all the incoming messages were positive, affirming citizenship and allowing Benedict to grant a passport.

Sending and receiving Morse code demanded complete concentration, but a niggling worry tugged at the back of her mind. Could her lack of citizenship be a problem? She had lived in America for sixteen years but never bothered to apply for it. Why should she? It cost four dollars to take the test, and there wasn’t any need for it. It wasn’t as if women could vote or serve on a jury, so why waste the four dollars to become a citizen?

Andrew assured her that a lack of a passport wasn’t a problem for her, although he might not know she wasn’t an American citizen, and Mr. Gerard was too busy for her to ask. He was completely distracted by meetings as one nation after another got sucked into the war. It felt like the whole world was going to war, and Inga gave thanks to God and President Wilson for keeping America out of it.

Two weeks after the outbreak of war, the chaos at the embassy began to ease, and Inga hoped to find time during her lunch break to ask Mr. Gerard about her citizenship problem, but he was busy posing for a formal portrait in the ballroom. It was an odd portrait because the ballroom had been transformed into a workaday office to handle passport duties. Mr. Gerard posed before a huge gilt mirror and pretended to survey the ongoing operations like a general reviewing the troops. The photographer posed him at several different angles, some close up and others back far enough to capture the entire room.

“Why such a strange portrait?” she asked Mr. Gerard after the photographer completed his work.

“We are living through a momentous time,” Mr. Gerard said. “Someday it shall be pleasing to remember these things.”

It was already pleasing for Inga because she’d never felt so needed in her entire life, but it was hard to smile when she was so nervous about her legal status.

“When you have a moment, can I ask you a question in your office?”

“You can have a moment right now, my dear.”

She followed him through the gilded halls into the less imposing privacy of his walnut-lined office. It was blessedly quiet after the echoey ballroom with its harried voices and the incessant clatter of typewriters. Now all she could hear was the thudding of her own heart.

“I’m sorry to disturb you with my piddly, insignificant problems,” she began.

“Ha! Inga, you’ve been bothering me with your problems since I found you in that church, and have I ever minded? Out with it!”

She clenched her fists and stared at a spot on the wall as she confessed her lack of American citizenship, but mercifully, Mr. Gerard waved her concerns away.

“You are under my protection,” he assured her. “I can easily vouch for your long-term residency in the United States.”

Her heart warmed with fondness. If she lived to be a hundred, she would always be grateful for this man’s openhearted generosity and good humor. And yet she’d feel better if she could get her citizenship. Mr. Gerard could be recalled by the president at any moment, and then what?

“Could you help me become a citizen while we’re here in Berlin?”

The humor faded from his face. “Confidentially, I can’t do anything that will rock the boat. I’m already on thin ice at the German chancellery. They’ve been in a bad mood ever since the war broke out and have been demanding concessions I have no authority to grant.”

“Such as?”

His shoulders sagged. “They want the United States to stop trading with the British and cut off food supplies to the French. We’re a neutral nation, but they view our trading as siding with the enemy, even though we still trade with Germany too. The ice is getting thinner and thinner beneath us. But enough about that! What’s this I hear about some mechanical copying machine about to arrive? Larry said it was your idea.”

She nodded with a smile. “The mimeograph is arriving later today. We’re constantly running out of blank forms because the printer says he’s been deluged with war work, and our business has become a low priority for him.”

With luck, the mimeograph machine might even force Benedict to finally admit that Inga had good ideas and was a worthy secretary for the American Embassy.

Benedict wished there was anyone else in the universe he could ask for help setting up the new mimeograph machine, but Inga was the only person at the embassy who’d ever used one. The machine had already been set on a table in the butler’s pantry, which had been converted to a storage closet since the outbreak of the war. The walk-in closet had a large table that was formerly used for polishing silver, but now held the bulky new machine. The floor-to-ceiling shelves intended for bottles of wine and crystal goblets now held office supplies. The butler’s pantry had plenty of space for one person, yet it was cramped with him and Inga. She was so close, he couldn’t escape the lemony scent of her hair.

The mimeograph machine was about the size of a horse saddle, with a paper tray, a hand-turned crank, and a rotating metal drum.

“The ink goes into this chamber, where it will soak a pad,” Inga began, looking impossibly lovely in a sage-green suit with a spray of lilies of the valley pinned to her lapel. When she had the time to clip flowers from the garden was a mystery, although hardly relevant at this point.

Larry haunted the open doorway. “The smell of that ink is giving me a sinus headache. I don’t think I’m going to be able to use that thing.”

“The ink is odorless,” Inga said. “What you’re smelling comes from the waxed-paper stencils we’ll use to make the master copy for printing. See?”

She held up a blank page backed with carbon paper, then explained how she’d use a typewriter to turn the carbon page into a stencil. Once made, the waxy master copy would be wrapped around the rotating drum. A clerk would crank the drum, and rubber wheels would roll blank pages against the master stencil. Inga boasted she could make two hundred freshly inked copies of any document they needed in five minutes.

“I’ve already typed up a test stencil, and as soon as I’ve got the machine filled with ink, I can give everyone a lesson on how to make copies.” She smiled at him in that relentlessly cheerful way, as though she expected him to return her sunny enthusiasm.

“I’ll let you and Larry finish setting it up,” he said, anxious to get away from her. Being trapped in this confined space stirred too many uncomfortable thoughts, and he needed to send another batch of messages to the foreign office.

He hadn’t gotten very far when Inga’s panicked voice stopped him.

“Help!” she cried out, and he dropped the paperwork to run back to the butler’s pantry. Inga stood aghast beside the new machine, her hands held out and dripping with ink that splattered on the hardwood floor. A tin funnel rolled in the puddle of ink on the floor, creating a half-moon ink stain.

“It wasn’t my fault!” Larry said. “You should have let me use the funnel.”

“I didn’t need the funnel,” Inga retorted. “You shouldn’t have shoved it at me once I started pouring the ink!” Inga looked at Benedict in desperation, her hands stretched out and still dribbling ink. “Please help. This suit cost more than I earn in a month.”

“Don’t move,” Benedict said, hurrying into the kitchen for a rag.

“Stop, come back!” Inga called out after him. “I need you here .”

He ignored her while soaking a rag beneath the kitchen tap. What sane woman would handle a gallon of ink while wearing such fine clothing? He squeezed the rag out and grabbed a stack of dry ones before heading back to the pantry.

“Where did you go?” she demanded. “The solvent for cleaning this is right here in the box of carbon stencils.”

How was he supposed to know that? “Let me have your hands,” he said, enveloping them in the damp towel. Inga kept complaining he wasn’t doing it right, that the machine came with a whole gallon of cleaning solvent and water wouldn’t work, and if he hadn’t disappeared so quickly, she would have explained that.

He peeled the towel back to inspect her hands. The inky stain remained, but at least her suit was no longer in danger.

“Your suit is fine,” he said bluntly, which was better than his own shirt. Somehow his left cuff got a smear of ink against the snowy white linen, and it would probably never come out. He tossed the ruined towel into the wastebasket, then reached for the jug of solvent. It released a pungent stink after he twisted the cap off.

Larry recoiled. “That stench is making me dizzy. I need to get out of here.”

“Wait, check your feet first,” Benedict ordered because he had stupidly stepped into the puddle of ink on the floor and tracked it into the kitchen. Now he had a ruined pair of shoes too.

“My feet are fine,” Larry said. “My sinuses are not.”

“Then go,” Benedict ordered. The more people near that puddle of ink, the bigger problem they’d make. He glared at Inga as he held the jug of solvent in one hand, a rag in the other. “How am I supposed to use this stuff?”

“I have no idea.”

“You just howled at me that I was wrong to get the rags, and you don’t even know what you’re doing?” He squinted to read the tiny print of instructions on the jug of solvent. It didn’t need to be diluted, and it was perfectly fine to use on skin, just dab and swipe.

“Hurry up,” Inga ordered. “If you hadn’t abandoned me with Larry, this never would have happened.” Friendly, kind Inga was gone, replaced by angry, snippy Inga. He was the one with the ruined shirt and shoes. He ought to be working on salvaging his expensive Italian leather shoes instead of rushing to her rescue. He tipped a little cleaning solvent onto a new rag, then reached for her hand. Getting the ink off wasn’t as easy as the instructions implied. Some of the ink smeared onto the rag, but her hands were still stained.

“We’re standing on a handmade parquet floor,” he grumbled. “Do you know how much work goes into the creation of a parquet floor? It’s been here since the palace was built in 1790. It’s survived fires and civil wars and Napoleon’s march through Berlin, but it couldn’t last two months with you living here.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Inga defended. “Larry shoved the funnel at me while I was already pouring.”

“Why didn’t you take sixty seconds to outline your procedure instead of barging ahead without warning? Getting this machine was a stupid idea.”

“Ha!” Inga retorted. “You were using a nineteenth century printing press to make your essential office documents. Think about that !”

“Shut up, Claudia.” He instantly caught his mistake and corrected it. “Miss Klein.”

Inga sucked in a quick breath. “Who is Claudia?”

“She’s nobody,” he bit out, working the cloth a little faster and praying Inga would let his gaffe pass. The only time in his entire life he’d ever been reduced to shouting matches with a woman had been with Claudia, and it was mortifying that her name had slipped from his lips. She and Inga couldn’t be more different, except that Claudia was dead and Inga was very much alive and there to torment him every hour of each day.

He forced his breathing to remain calm, marveling at how tiny Inga’s hands felt inside his palms, and wishing this solution would work faster so he could get away from her. He soaked another rag with more solution and kept working.

“Tell me how those stencils are going to be made,” he said, desperate for something to latch on to other than Claudia, or the way Inga’s head nestled right below his jaw and how perfectly she would fit against him.

“You’re not going to talk about Claudia?”

“Very perceptive, Miss Klein. Who’s going to type the stencils?”

“I am.” He only half listened as she explained that carbon paper was expensive and mistakes were difficult to correct, so only a skilled typist should be charged with the task.

The ink finally began dissolving from her fingers. It required rubbing the rag slowly. Too fast and it wasn’t effective, but a slow wipe with just the right amount of pressure seemed to work as he pulled the rag down each finger. A little more ink vanished with each pass. Such long fingers she had. Maybe that’s why she was such a fast typist.

Footsteps sounded down the hall, and Larry appeared. “We’re out of passport applications,” he announced.

Benedict released Inga’s hand and gave her the rag. It wouldn’t do to be seen helping Inga with something she could manage on her own.

“Inga, type up a passport application stencil,” he ordered.

Benedict returned to his office, trying to forget about how perfectly her slim hand fit within his own.