Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,6

introduced her at their supper party, which had been arranged for that very purpose.

What Charlie and Martha Bartlett didn’t know was that Jackie had met Jack Kennedy once before. As she drove away from Merrywood, her stepfather Hugh Auchincloss’s Virginia estate, and headed for the Bartletts’ home in Georgetown, Jackie remembered that first random meeting with the young congressman from Massachusetts. She was on a train returning to her junior year at Vassar with a classmate when Jack and his assistant invited themselves into her compartment. Their conversation was all a blur now—mostly flirtatious bantering on Jack’s part and tolerant amusement on Jackie’s. But what stuck in her mind was Jack Kennedy’s indisputable allure. He was matinee-idol handsome, wickedly funny, and fiercely ambitious, yet charmingly shy. Back at Vassar, she had dashed off a letter to a friend, describing what an insistent flirt the congressman had been but admitting that she felt an absolute attraction to him all the same.

Now, as Jackie crossed the Chain Bridge in the 1947 black Mercury convertible given to her by her father, her pulse quickened at the thought of meeting Jack Kennedy again.

Within minutes, she pulled up in front of 3419 Q Street, the typical narrow, brick row house where the Bartletts lived. Jackie had driven with the convertible’s top up so her hair wouldn’t get mussed, but she didn’t bother locking the car. Georgetown, the oldest neighborhood in Washington, D.C., was a safe one. Besides, if the car did get stolen, her mother would be thrilled. She thought that a convertible was unsafe and had been badgering Jackie’s stepfather to buy her a Buick sedan. The fact that the convertible had belonged to Black Jack—her mother’s philandering ex-husband, who still made her blood boil more than a decade after their divorce—was an even bigger strike against it.

At the front door, Jackie smoothed out the Dior outfit that she’d bought in Paris, took a deep breath, and announced her arrival with the brass knocker.

“Hi, Jackie, we’ve been waiting for you,” Charlie Bartlett said, smiling broadly as he opened the door and gave her a quick peck, appropriate for an old flame who was now a married man with a baby on the way.

“I’m not late, am I?” Jackie asked.

“No, no, you’re right on time,” Charlie said, squeezing her hand in a way that reminded her of their dates two and half years ago. Jackie had been an impressionable nineteen-year-old college student then, and he was a twenty-seven-year-old wunderkind journalist who had opened the first Washington bureau for the Chattanooga Times, a sister paper of the New York Times. Their romance fizzled when Charlie said that he could never give Jackie the exciting high life she coveted, but now he was determined to find a more appropriate suitor for her. Who better than Jack Kennedy, one of Charlie’s closest friends and the most eligible bachelor in Washington?

A year had gone by since Charlie had married his perfect mate—Martha Buck, the daughter of a wealthy steel mogul—and now he wanted to help Jackie find the same marital bliss with Jack Kennedy. Little did he know that Allen Dulles, deputy director of the CIA, was even more eager for the two to hit it off.

For a moment, Jackie saw herself back in Dulles’s office receiving her assignment, and she again heard his cajoling voice speaking to her about Jack Kennedy. “We’re not asking you to marry him,” Dulles said. “We would just like you to go out with him a few times and use your considerable beauty and intelligence to persuade him to become a friend of the CIA.” Jackie felt a pang of conscience. What would the Bartletts think if they knew the real reason why I’m here?

“Let me introduce you to everyone,” Charlie said, cutting into Jackie’s thoughts and leading her into the living room. Guests were milling around in the small room, which was modestly decorated with a pair of antique armchairs, some inexpensive furniture, and a few nondescript prints on the ivory-colored walls.

Jackie turned to Charlie and gave him an anxious look. “Is he here?” she whispered.

“No, Jack hasn’t come yet,” Charlie whispered back, “but he’s always late.”

Martha Bartlett, a visibly pregnant redhead, emerged from the kitchen with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette aloft at a jaunty angle in the other.

“Jackie, you look divine,” she said, air kissing her on both cheeks, European-style. She turned to her husband. “Charlie, why don’t you fix Jackie a drink, and I’ll