I walked right out of there with my head held high, then rallied the girls for drinks followed by dancing at Café Trinidad until closing—which, in D.C., was unfortunately at midnight. But the next day, after I nursed my hangover with a cold compress and a Bloody Mary, I had a minor breakdown at the realization I had no job, no income, and no savings. The latter due to one of my blessings and curses: a heightened appreciation for beautiful things. The blessing was that my innate sense of style made people think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth in a place like Grosse Point or Greenwich, and not a clapboard row house in Pittsburgh’s Little Italy. The curse was that my good eye often exceeded my means.
I knew I needed to formulate a plan before my bank account dwindled to Code Red level. There was no running to Mommy or Daddy, as some of my friends had the luxury of doing when times got tough. That evening, I’d flipped through my little black book and set up a stream of dates with the D.C. lobbyist and lawyer set, an occasional diplomat, and one or two congressmen. The dates were tedious and exhausting, but at the end of the day, the rent was paid on my Georgetown apartment, I’d gotten some nice dinners out of them, and the men whose company I’d pretended to enjoy kept me in couture that rivaled Bev’s. I was not attracted to them, and yet how easy it had been to convince them that I was.
That line of work suited me fine. But after a while, I grew bored with the taxi, dinner, hotel, taxi, dinner, hotel rotation. That and the high level of personal upkeep were wearing me out. The brushing, tweezing, plucking, dyeing, waxing, bleaching, squeezing—even the endless shopping—were beginning to take their toll.
I thought of becoming a stewardess. For one, I’d look great in Pan Am’s signature blue. Plus, I loved to travel. It’s what I liked most during the war—the possibility of being uprooted to a new place every few months. But they’d take one look at my age—thirty-two if I was being honest or thirty-six if I was actually honest—and say I was “overqualified” for the position.
The truth was, I missed intelligence work, missed being in the know. So when Bev rang one last time to beg me to go to the party, I said yes.
“So many familiar faces,” Bev said, scanning the crowd. The music had started up again and people were dancing and spilling their gin fizzes on one another. I spotted Jim Roberts across the deck, breathing down some poor girl’s neck. Jim had once cornered me at an embassy party in Shanghai, putting his hands around my waist and saying he wasn’t going to let me go until I gave him a smile. I did smile, then I kneed him in the groin.
“Maybe a few too many familiar faces.”
“I’ll toast to that,” she said. Bev leaned over the rail and brushed a piece of her dark brown hair out of her face. Bev was the kind of woman whose beauty came late, passing over her high school years, college years, and early twenties entirely, only to arrive in her late twenties and not reach its full glory until her thirties. Bev had had many Jim Roberts experiences herself. “But still,” she continued. “I wish all the girls could’ve been here.”
“Me too.” Bev and I were the only two of our old crew still living in Washington. Julia was in France with her new husband, Jane was in Jakarta with someone else’s husband, and Anna was in either Venice or Madrid, depending on what mood she was in that month. Our group had first met on the Mariposa, a former luxury liner recommissioned to shuttle GIs to the front line. The only women on board, we shared a cramped cabin outfitted with metal bunks, one toilet, and a tub that sputtered cold salt water. Despite the camp-like conditions and the seasickness, we all got along famously. We were in our early twenties and ready to take on the world. We were the kind of girls who’d grown up reading Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, then graduated to H. Rider Haggard’s She in high school. We bonded over the belief that a life of adventure wasn’t reserved for men, and we set out to claim our piece of it.
Most important, we shared a similar sense of humor, which went a long way when sharing one toilet with questionable flushing abilities—especially when the ship hit rougher seas. Julia loved to play pranks and once started a rumor that we were a group of Catholic nuns headed to Calcutta. The men, who’d been catcalling us any chance they could get, became reverent when passing us in the corridors. One soldier had even asked if we’d pray for his sick dog. I made the sign of the cross and Bev burst out laughing.
By the time the Mariposa made landfall in Ceylon, we were inseparable, and held tight to each other in the back of a thick-wheeled truck that jettisoned us through the jungle to the port at Kandy. Surrounded by tea plantations and electric-green terraced rice paddies that spilled down from the hills, Kandy, though just across the bay from the terror unfolding in Burma, felt as far away from the war as one could get.
Many of us would remember our time in Kandy fondly. And when we’d write each other—or, if we were lucky, catch up in person—we’d reminisce about the many nights spent under a sky so large and so dark the stars would reveal themselves in layers. We’d recount slicing papayas off the trees surrounding the thatch-roofed OSS offices with a rusty machete, or the time an elephant got into our compound and had to be enticed out with a jar of peanut butter. We’d recall the all-night parties at the Officers’ Club, dangling our legs in blue-green Kandy Lake and yanking them back out when we disturbed some bubbling creature lurking beneath. There were the throngs of monks making their way to and from the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, the sweaty weekends in Colombo, the leaf monkey we’d named Matilda who’d given birth in our food hut.
I’d started out as MO support staff—filing papers, typing, that sort of thing. But my career trajectory changed when I received an invitation to attend a dinner at Earl Louis Mountbatten’s lavish residence up on the hill, overlooking the OSS compound. It was the first of many parties I’d attend and the first time I’d discover that powerful men would willingly give information to me, whether I asked for it or not.
That’s how it started. That first party, I’d squeezed myself into a low-cut black evening gown Bev had packed “just in case,” and by the end of the night, a Brazilian arms dealer who’d been chatting me up let slip that he believed there was a mole within Mountbatten’s staff. I reported the tip to Anderson the next day. What the OSS did with that information, I have no idea. But I was soon inundated with more dinner invitations, set up with visiting people of import, and given questions to ask loose-lipped men.
I got good at my new job—so good I was given a stipend to purchase gowns we’d have shipped in with our toilet paper, Spam, and mosquito repellent. The funny thing was, I never thought of myself as a spy. Surely the craft took more than smiling and laughing at stupid jokes and pretending to be interested in everything these men said. There wasn’t a name for it back then, but it was at that first party that I became a Swallow: a woman who uses her God-given talents to gain information—talents I’d been accumulating since puberty, had refined in my twenties, and then perfected in my thirties. These men thought they were using me, but it was always the reverse; my power was making them think it wasn’t.