Chapter 21
“So what’s the lead?” Fields asked.
I glanced over my shoulder. Patricia was deep in conversation with her congressman. I didn’t exist any longer.
“You swear I’ll be on the byline? And Mr. Pullman will never find out where you learned about this?”
Fields’s brow furrowed. “Pullman?”
“Swear it.”
“I swear on my life,” he said solemnly. “And my mother’s.”
“That doesn’t mean anything to me. Your mother could already be dead. Or awful.”
He chuckled. “I assure you my mother is alive and well. And I love her very much.”
I studied him for any tells that he wasn’t serious but saw none. If he was lying, he was good at it. I turned and looked around the room again. I did need help. I didn’t know what I was looking at on my own. He clearly did. Especially if he knew about that room upstairs.
But suddenly I was nervous. It wasn’t much more than a hunch. If he laughed at me—I bit the inside of my lip and looked down at my drink. The napkin it sat on had a quote on it, “With great risk comes great reward,” attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
Buoyed, I took a deep breath and leaned forward. In a low voice I said, “Mr. Pullman’s secretary left suddenly last week. Miss Kelly had me fill in.”
“Myrtle?” he asked. “Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. Miss Kelly said she won’t be back though.”
His brows came together as he thought about this. “Louise and Myrtle in the same week. That seems—”
“Do you want to know about the lead or not?”
“Go on.” He leaned back against the booth, amused.
“Anyway, Miss Kelly had me fill in, and after Mr. Pullman left on Tuesday, the phone in his office rang.”
Fields sat up straighter. “Pullman never takes calls.”
“Well clearly sometimes he does, because I took a message from that phone, and it landed me back in the typing pool.”
“What was the message?”
“This is where it gets weird—the man had a Russian accent. And he said to tell Mr. Pullman, ‘Havana is with Texas, mass goal in sight.’”
He repeated the phrase to himself, his lips moving silently.
“The man said he will know what it means. Except it was definitely a Russian accent. He vill know vhat it means. And he made sure I was his secretary before telling me. Does that mean anything to you?”
He shook his head. “What happened when you gave Pullman the message?”
I sighed. “He dressed me down for going into his office, then he read it, ripped the paper into tiny pieces, and pocketed them. Then told me it was nothing. When I mentioned the Russian accent, he yelled at me. By the end of the day, I was back in the typing pool.”
Fields scratched his forehead. “Sure doesn’t sound like nothing if he reacted like that.”
“That’s what I thought too. But I can’t make heads or tails of it. Originally I wondered if it might mean something about an invasion—”
“Not after how the Bay of Pigs ended,” he said, leaning forward.
“Between you and me, they’ve moved on to smaller-scale attempts on Castro himself.
But if you tell anyone I told you that, I’ll deny it.
” He thought for a moment. “Why would Pullman know anything about an invasion anyway? We should assume it’s a journalism tip, not national security. ”
“It could be both. What if the Russian is giving Mr. Pullman the scoop on a huge national security story?”
“Maybe. But why a Russian accent?”
“Double agent?” It sounded stupid once it came out of my mouth.
But Fields didn’t laugh at me. He shook his head, his brow furrowed. “Something doesn’t add up there. Not with giving it to a newspaper.”
“What if it’s a misdirect? We publish something wrong, and it gives incorrect information to the enemy?”
“But Pullman said it was nothing. He wouldn’t even throw the pieces away. He doesn’t want this to run, whatever it is, or you’d still be answering his phones. Unless you made his coffee wrong or something like that?”
“I can make a cup of coffee competently,” I said, wounded. He didn’t need to know that another secretary had to teach me how.
“Okay,” he said, moving on. “So why do you think it’s the vice president?”
“Patricia and some of the other girls said the president and vice president pick up girls here. And they came Friday night and met a nightclub singer from Havana and . . . I don’t know. It just felt like too much of a coincidence to not mean something.”
Fields wasn’t sold. “I think that might be too much of a reach,” he said gently.
“Fine,” I said, standing, hoping I could get away before he saw the ashamed blush rising in my cheeks. “I’ll solve this myself. Thank you for nothing, Mr. Fields.”
“Smooth your ruffled feathers,” he said. “I’m still on board. I just want to make sure we’re not missing something else.”
I sat back down, arms crossed.
“You look like I tugged your pigtails when you make that face,” he said, but he was smiling. “And if we’re going to be partners, you should probably call me Jack. Now tell me about this singer.”
“I wasn’t here. But the girls said she invited them to come see her sing at the Bohemian Caverns.”
He nodded. “Okay, so she’s a real singer if she’s performing there.
I think I’d have heard whispers if the vice president was involved with someone high profile though.
Don’t get me wrong—he’s a dog. He goes after women of high and low rank equally.
But the well-known liaisons are more talked about for obvious reasons.
” He thought for a moment. “You’re not off base about him using the bar though.
His secretary comes down here hunting frequently.
And he has had mistresses wait at the bar while he finished other meetings in the past. I just don’t think he would do that with someone well known. ”
“It might not be her specifically. I just started thinking that maybe the Texas and Havana parts were people, not places.”
“Not a bad idea,” he conceded and took a sip of his own drink, which was brown liquor in a low glass. “What’s the mass goal, then?” His eyes were on mine.
“I don’t know. I can’t figure that part out. It’s strange wording, isn’t it?”
His head tilted. “Maybe. Language barrier?”
“Could be. But it sounds foreboding. Like mass graves.”
Fields shook his head again. “I can’t see the vice president doing anything nefarious. He’s not who I’d choose for president, but I can’t see him working against the United States. He’s a patriot.”
“Or a good actor?”
“No,” Fields said. “I’d need a lot more evidence to get behind that one. But I’m with you on it being a woman. That does fit his character to a T.”
“So a Cuban woman, trying to get information out of him for some bigger goal?”
He leaned back. “Hell of a story if so. We’d need evidence.” He swirled his drink, looking into it. “But we have a bigger problem if it’s true.”
“What’s that?”
“Pullman, who has to give us the go-ahead to run it, is implicated.”
I hadn’t thought about that part. And I swore loudly enough for a neighboring patron to turn his head.
“You can say that again.”
I mouthed an apology to the man two tables over. “I’d rather not. What do we do, then?”
Fields finished his drink. “We go over his head. Or we take it to The Washington Post. Hell, if we get enough evidence that he’s in on something like this, we give him to the FBI.”
“You know people in the FBI?”
He grinned. “You do too. You just don’t know it yet.” I stared at him as he held up his hand to the bartender for another drink. “Welcome to Washington, Judy Greenberg. You have a lot to learn.”