"In times of war, you do what you must, become what you must. Some embrace it, some try to resist it, and others abuse it. I am guilty of all three."
Virginia Carroll has been fighting her whole life, against herself and against what she is drawn to...
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April, 1942
My walk home and the minutes, hours, and months thereafter continued to perpetuate the dread that had settled into my stomach. My presence upon returning to the house hadn't eased my mother's frantic smoking and, when the bottle of gin had been released from the cupboard, I excused myself upstairs. She was angry, hands shaking, but I wasn't sure if it directed at me or the world around us.
Dad's eyes were haunted, showing a war and scars that I often forgot he had fought in. He never let the trenches show on his face, carved between his eyes and cheeks but now they were visible, harsh, and brutal. Sitting on the top of the stairs like I should have done on December 7th, I watched the eighth day of December slide into darkness and before long, December bled into January. None of this was supposed to be happening. none of it should have happened. The war, the fear, and my own Pearl Harbor continued into early spring.
My own Pearl Harbor proved to be the final blow to what little of a relationship I had with my mother, blowing it into smithereens. The tension and the suppressed emotion on both sides caught like pitch and it wasn't long until we avoided each other like the plague, not ready to send smoke into the air once again. I had never understood what my mother had done during those four years in Germany, where she had met Lawson, and where she had been given marring scars. I wasn't meant to understand, or even to know, as she kept everything under lock and key. The little pieces that I had was a tattered German primer, a hamsa that strung tight around my neck like a noose, and a codebook, stained and inscribed with the name of a girl I had never met: Sadie Goldschmidt.
Mothers, in my limited experience, were usually caring and nurturing figures. Warm hugs, soft handkerchiefs, and delicate hands. My mother wasn't like that. She was all rough, calloused hands and gruff words mixed with cigarette smoke and booze. My earliest memory is of listening to the door to our house shut and her keys hit the table. It was late, she hadn't come up to say good night and she was gone the next morning. On good days, when the raids had gone well, she slipped into my room smelling of speakeasy cigars and booze and said good night. When raids went south, I would listen for those keys to know she was safe. She was private, even to her own daughter. I knew she had grown up in Leipzig, Germany. I knew that she never called herself German. She was British, she said, or American. She didn't speak of siblings, she didn't speak of how she got to Britain. She didn't speak of a lot of things. For Miriam Carroll, the four years between 1914 and 1918 didn't exist, blotted from her mind and our family conversation.
The key to the secrets Miriam kept close to her chest wasn't found in my own home but in an escort to a door and the ringing of the telephone.
It was very rare that Lydia called me in my own home. We were friends of circumstance, brought together by family ties and the fierce poker competitions between my father and Aunt Mollie.
"Watch out," She started off, ominously. "Black suits left our place."
This was something Lawson and Dad had been warned of. Whispers of a new government branch, an intelligence office that would train and deploy agents had been a constant since December. it would only make sense that they would employ experienced agents to their offices. Lawson White was one of the best agents in Chicago, maybe even the Midwest. He had been interim director of the Chicago office and had, with Miriam, been on fire in the '20s, filling up cells nightly. Lawson White was good. Of course they would want him.
