“Community relations,” he said, straight-faced. “The snake was a menace. I’m telling you, she was something out of a horror flick. That snake still makes the occasional cameo in my nightmares. Just ask Prudy.” He pointed to his wife, a petite woman with large yellow plastic earrings that made her earlobes droop, keeping warm inside the yacht’s saloon with the other wives. She looked out the window and gave a little wave. “Anyway, she wouldn’t come out of her hole—”
“Like this story!” someone yelled from the back of the crowd.
“It was more like a cave than a hole, really,” he continued, ignoring the heckler. “She’d be in there for months. Sleeping, waiting. Then one day, she’d slither out and saddle up next to a cow. Then bam!” He clapped his hands for effect. “She’d drag the poor bovine back down the hole without so much as a moo. Really put a hurting on the village’s economy. And we didn’t want that, right?”
“Wouldn’t be a horrible way to go,” Frank Wisner said, joining the group. The circle split so the boss could take a front-row seat for Anderson’s story. Frank was the one who’d paid for the boat we were standing on, the alcohol we were drinking, and the shrimp cocktail we were eating. “Wouldn’t know it was comin’,” he continued in his Mississippi lilt. “Just standing in a grassy field somewhere, chewin’ on some cud, perhaps contemplating whether to go down to the stream for a drink, and then—”
“Don’ be morbid, Frank,” Anderson said. “Jesus.”
Anderson had started slurring his words—and when he slurred his words, the words he did manage to get out usually got him in trouble. With the boss in the mix now, I motioned for him to hurry up and finish the goddamn story.
“I oversaw the whole operation.”
“Operation Kaa?” my friend Beverly asked. She half-laughed, half-hiccuped, and the crowd tittered.
“For the love of God, can I please go on?”
“No one’s holding you back,” Bev said, her voice high and throaty, indicating she was one too many glasses of bubbly over her limit. She was wearing a black Givenchy sack dress, bought on a recent trip to Paris. After the war, Bev had married an oil lobbyist, who kept her dressed in the latest fashions as long as she turned her head when he came home smelling like bourbon and knock-off Chanel No. 5. She hated the guy’s guts, so she made sure the trade was as even as possible by buying everything as soon as it stepped off the runway, not to mention having the occasional dalliance of her own with her old OSS beaux. The sack dress did nothing to flatter her figure, but I gave her credit for attempting it.
Someone handed Anderson a flask. He took a swig and coughed. “Anyway. I brought ten men with me to the cave, hole, whatever you call it. Plan was to smoke her out, then bag her.”
“What kind of bag’s gonna hold a thirty-foot snake?” Frank asked. He was smiling, egging Anderson on. They’d entered the OSS together, but Frank had risen to the top while Anderson stayed stuck in the middle. Frank was still handsome, still maintained the physique of the college track star he’d been thirty years earlier. He was the kind of man who believed anything was possible—especially with himself at the helm. But there was something off about him that night. Twice I’d seen him standing apart from the guests, looking out over the slowly churning Potomac. I wondered if the rumors were true that he’d suffered a breakdown after the Soviets put an end to the Hungarian uprising he’d helped orchestrate.
Anderson took another swig from the flask and cleared his throat. “Good question, boss. We sewed a bunch of burlap sacks together, then rigged a giant zipper down the middle.”
Frank grinned. He already knew the ending, of course. “And it held?”
Anderson took another swig. “I had five guys holding the bag, two to zip it up when the snake came out, two standing by with pistols, and me supervising—just in case something went wrong.”
“What could go wrong?” I asked.
“What couldn’t?” Frank said, and the crowd laughed louder than the boss’s joke warranted.
“I’ll tell you!” Anderson answered. But before he could continue, the Miss Christin lurched and the engine stopped. Someone went to ask the captain what was going on and found him not on the bridge, but enjoying a drink in the saloon surrounded by the wives. The captain went to check with the engineer, who confirmed that a fuse had blown and said he’d call the marina for a tow back to the dock. Frank told the captain to wait another hour before calling, and the party continued, unmoored.
As we bobbed along, Anderson continued. He said they smoked the snake out of its hole with a tear gas canister and when the snake came out, they zipped her up in the bag, but the snake, a fighter, busted out within minutes. But not to worry, Anderson was standing by with his pistol. “Right between the eyes,” he concluded.
“Poor thing,” I said.
“Bullshit,” Frank said.
Anderson placed his hand over his heart. “Swear to God.”
Fact was, Anderson’s wife, Prudy, had corroborated the story the first time I heard it—over a steak dinner at the Colony—confirming that the snakeskin was indeed stored away in their basement, slowly disintegrating in an old refrigerator box. “Why he ever brought that nasty thing home, I have no idea,” she’d told me.
I squeezed Anderson’s arm and excused myself and joined Bev on the stern.
She leaned in and lit my cigarette. “Hey, stranger,” she said. “Story over yet?”
“Finally.”
The Jefferson Memorial was lit up in the distance, the District asleep behind it. Under the orange night sky, the city looked peaceful, the power plays and constant angling at rest for the night.
“This isn’t so bad, is it?” Bev asked.
“Not bad at all, Bev.” I’d surprised myself by actually having a good time. After the war, I’d come back to Washington with the promise that I could land a job at the State Department. And I did. But instead of a cushy job at State with my own office, they stuck me in the basement sorting records. I could only take it for six months before I quit, after which I distanced myself from the old boys’ club.
I’d been many things, but I was no record keeper. I couldn’t even pretend. I’d been a nurse, a waitress, an heiress. I once posed as a librarian. I’d been someone’s wife, someone’s mistress, fiancée, lover. I’d been Russian, French, and British. I’d been from Pittsburgh, Palm Springs, and Winnipeg. I could become just about anyone. I had one of those faces—the wide eyes, the ready smile that suggested I was an open book, someone who had no secrets to keep, and if she did, wouldn’t be able to keep them anyway. That and, with the rise in popularity of actresses with more generous waistlines like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, my figure, which I’d attempted to diet away as a teenager, worked to my advantage in prying secrets out of powerful men.