We asked Irina if she wanted to join us, because she was finally talking and we wanted to keep her talking. To our surprise, she agreed, even though we’d seen her put a sandwich in the break room fridge that morning.
On our way out, Teddy Helms and Henry Rennet were coming in. We liked Teddy, but Henry was another matter. The men at the Agency thought we were just sitting in the corner typing away quietly. But we weren’t just taking memos—we were also taking names. And Henry’s was at the top of our list. Why Teddy and Henry were friends, we hadn’t a clue. Henry was the kind of man whose confidence, not his looks, got him much in life—too much. Women, a high-ranking job right out of Yale, all the right Washington invites. Teddy was his opposite—someone who thought before he spoke, who was pensive and a little mysterious.
“You haven’t introduced me to the new girl,” Henry started in, even though we’d avoided eye contact with him. Teddy stood beside him, his hands in his pockets, looking sideways at Irina.
“The sharks have already begun to circle,” whispered Kathy.
“Were you expecting an invitation to her coming-out party?” Norma asked, not exactly disguising her disdain for Henry. The previous summer, there’d been a rumor circling SR that he’d slept with Norma after a barbecue at Anderson’s house. In reality, Henry had offered Norma a ride home and, at a stoplight, reached under her skirt and grabbed her. Norma didn’t say a word. She just opened the car door and stepped out into the middle of traffic. Henry yelled out the window for her to stop being stupid and get back in the damn car as other drivers honked for her to get out of the way. She ended up walking the four miles home, and she didn’t tell us for months about the incident.
“Of course,” Henry said. “It’s my business to know everything going on here.”
“Is it?” Judy asked.
“I’m Irina.” She extended her hand and Henry laughed.
“How quaint,” Henry said, shaking her hand in that bone-crushing way of his. “Henry. Pleasure.” He turned to Norma. “Now, that wasn’t too hard, was it?”
“Teddy,” Teddy said, extending his hand to Irina.
“Pleasure to meet you.” It was clear Irina was just being polite, but judging from Teddy’s shuffling schoolboy posture, he seemed smitten from the get-go.
“Well,” Norma said, tapping an invisible watch. “Our lunch hour is now our lunch half hour.”
Outside, we were met with a blast of wind. We tightened our scarves and Irina draped a fringed shawl over her head, then wrapped it around her neck. We wondered just how much of the old country was left in her. We wanted to warn Irina about Henry and also find out what she thought of Teddy right away but, not wanting anyone else to hear, decided to save it for Ralph’s.
Christmas wreaths and garlands on every lamppost had already replaced the last traces of fall. We passed Kann’s and stopped to watch as a young woman put the finishing touches on an elaborate winter wonderland display in the store’s window. She placed individual pieces of silver tinsel on a bare cherry blossom branch, then stood back to admire her work. “So pretty,” Irina said. “I just love Christmas.”
“I thought Russians don’t celebrate Christmas?” Linda asked. “The no religion thing and all?”
We looked at each other, unsure if Irina was offended by the remark. She tightened her shawl around her face, then said in a thick Russian accent, “Well, I was born here, wasn’t I?” She smiled. We laughed, and felt the subtle walls of our group begin to expand.
CHAPTER 4
THE SWALLOW
“Remember the snake?” Walter Anderson asked, balancing his champagne over the railing of the Miss Christin, spilling it into the Potomac. Red-cheeked, more from the booze than from the brisk fall air, Anderson was holding court in front of six people who’d heard the story many times, myself included.
“Who could forget the snake?” I asked.
“Certainly not you, Sally.” He gave me an exaggerated wink.
I loved teasing Anderson, and he loved dishing it right back. We’d both been stationed in Kandy during the war, working Morale Operations to steer the message toward the greater good. In other words, we were propagandists. Back then, he’d given his all to trying to get cozy with me, and when I rebuffed him for the tenth time, he settled into a big brother role.
“Got something in your eye?” I asked. Most people found him obnoxious, but I thought Anderson was harmlessly corny.
The crowd ate it up. It was always like that: any time we all got together, the old stories would start up as the drinking wound down. After the war, most of them had moved on, creating new stories they were forbidden to speak about. So they told the old stories—the stories they’d told a hundred times before. The snake tale was an old standby of Anderson’s. After his time in the OSS, rumor had it he’d attempted to write scripts in Hollywood. We’d heard he’d worked on a series of Cloak and Dagger meets It Came from Outer Space type treatments that got him some early meetings with producers but never got off the ground. He’d then decided to spend his days perfecting his backswing at the Columbia Country Club, but that got boring, and after a month or two, he knocked on Dulles’s door—his actual door, in Georgetown—and asked for a job at the Agency. In his early fifties, Anderson was given an administrative role, although he’d begged to be put back into the field.
The old gang had gathered to celebrate an anniversary of sorts. Eleven years earlier, we’d left our posts in Ceylon, the war already over. The future of the OSS and American intelligence had remained uncertain. It’d be two years before the Agency would be created—two years before a home would be given to wayward OSS officers who’d grown tired of raking in the dough at their New York law firms and brokerage houses and wanted, even more than to serve their country again, the power that came from being a keeper of secrets. It was a power that some, myself included, found more intoxicating than any drug, sex, or other means of quickening one’s heartbeat. We’d planned on celebrating our tenth anniversary, but it was postponed again and again until someone just set a date.
“Anyway,” Anderson continued. “Honest to God, the fucker was nine meters long.”
“Twenty-nine feet?” one of the younger Agency men piped in.
“That’s right, Henry, my boy. Mark my words, she was a man-eater. Killed half a dozen Burmese by the time I got called in.”
“How do you know she was a she?” I asked.
“Believe me, Sally, only a female could’ve wreaked such havoc. And they needed a man to put her in her place.”
“So why were you called in?” I said.