in the mirror,” Canidy said.
She blushed.
By the time the City of Birmingham landed at Cleveland, Canidy’s silver flask was almost empty. They had a drink waiting for the plane to be refueled, and he was able to refill it at the bar in the airport terminal.
Between Cleveland and Washington, she told him all about how Tom had been a rotten sonofabitch almost from the beginning. And he seemed to understand. He patted her hand comfortingly.
When they got to Washington, he confessed that he didn’t know where he was going to stay, but that he would call her when he found a hotel room someplace. She replied that he didn’t have any idea how hard it was to find a hotel room in Washington these days, and that what he should do was come with her to her apartment and use her phone to call around. Otherwise, he might wind up sleeping on a park bench.
While he was calling around to the hotels, she told him she certainly didn’t want him to get the wrong idea, but she absolutely had to have a shower and get into something comfortable.
She was not surprised when he came into the bathroom and got into the shower with her. The only thing that surprised her was that she didn’t even pretend to be furious. When she thought about it later, she decided it was all the Scotch she’d had on the airplane. Plus the fact that she had left Tom six months before, and she had the usual needs of a human being. Plus, in a flash of real honesty, she admitted that she had found it really exciting when she saw him naked.
3
THE ST. REGIS HOTEL
NEW YORK CITY
APRIL 4, 1942
When the ten gentlemen—the group known as the Disciples—gathered to brief and be briefed by Colonel William Donovan, they found him in pain in bed in his suite at the hotel. He had a glass dark with Scotch in his hand, and there was a Scotch bottle on his bedside table.
Though Colonel Donovan, a stocky, silver-haired, ruddy-faced Irishman, was not a professional soldier, neither was he a Kentucky colonel, nor the commanding officer of a National Guard regiment. He had earned both his silver eagle and the Medal of Honor for valor on the battlefields of France in World War I. Between wars, he had become a very successful—and, it logically followed, very wealthy—attorney in New York City, and a power behind the scenes in the Democratic Party, not only in New York but, even perhaps especially, in Washington.
He was again in government employ, this time at an annual stipend of one dollar, as the Coordinator of Information, which meant he ran a relatively new government agency. Donovan reported directly to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Most people, to Donovan’s joy, believed the COI was the United States government’s answer to Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry.
COI did, in fact, have an “information” function—in the propaganda sense—headed by the distinguished playwright Robert Sherwood. But it also had another “information” function, headed by Donovan himself, which had absolutely nothing to do with whipping the American people into the kind of patriotic frenzy that would impel them, for the sake of the “war effort,” to abandon “pleasure driving” and donate their aluminum pans to be converted into bombers.
The kind of information that Donovan was charged with coordinating is more accurately described as intelligence. Each of the military services had intelligence-gathering operations, as did the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and even the less warlike agencies of the federal government like the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Treasury, and Interior.
Despite sincerely made claims of absolute objectivity, President Roosevelt realized that when, say, the Chief of Naval Intelligence made a report on a problem together with a proposal for a solution, that solution generally involved the use of the U.S. Navy. Similarly, the Army seldom recommended naval bombardment of a target. Heavy Army Air Corps bomber aircraft were obviously better suited for that.
It was the Coordinator of Information’s duty—which is to say Colonel William J. Donovan’s—to examine the intelligence gathered by all relevant agencies, and then to evaluate that intelligence against the global war effort. If asked, he would also recommend a course of action. This course of action might well be implemented by an agency different from the one providing the original intelligence.
To assist him in this task, Donovan intended to gather around him a dozen men, each of extraordinary intelligence and competence in his area of expertise. Like