Page 36 of When Stars Light the Sky (The Women of Midtown #2)
35
F EbrUARY 1917
Inga’s first day back at the embassy felt as though it would never end. The journey back from Bavaria had left her exhausted, and Mr. Gerard was unusually caustic. He barked out orders and hosted a nonstop series of meetings with representatives from the other neutral embassies. Inga sat in the corner of his office, taking notes and trying to calm her growing alarm over America’s rapidly deteriorating relations with Germany.
Benedict attended most of the meetings. Despite their closeness while in Rosendorff, he slipped back into diplomatic austerity like a puzzle piece snapping into place. Once she’d been frustrated and intimidated by that demeanor, but now it represented stability as Mr. Gerard’s temper careened between anger and aggression. The situation worsened throughout the month as German losses at sea made them eager to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. It was only President Wilson’s resolute stance on freedom of the seas that prevented the Germans from unleashing their most powerful weapon.
The staff usually left the embassy around dinnertime—except for Benedict, who often remained locked in meetings with the ambassador long into the night. On such occasions, Inga stayed because she and Benedict were a team now and therefore she wouldn’t leave without him. Besides, the quiet of the embassy in the late hours gave her time to transcribe her notes from the marathon of meetings earlier in the day.
One evening in the middle of February, Mr. Gerard tapped on her office door around eight o’clock.
“I know it’s been a long day for you, but please go upstairs to check on my wife,” he said. “She’s still down with a chest cold and could use some company. Benedict and I need to finish the report for the president tonight. Can you sit with her until we are finished?”
“Of course,” she answered and headed up to the Gerards’ apartment on the third floor. The tapestries and crystal chandeliers were reminders of the German princess who once lived in this opulent suite of rooms. Inga’s footfalls echoed on the hard marble and high ceilings as she headed for Mary’s open bedroom door.
“James?” Mary’s voice sounded weak but hopeful.
“It’s just me,” Inga said. The bedroom featured hand-painted murals and elaborate crown molding. Silk hangings from a cornice suspended over the bed made Mary look tiny in the queenly bed.
“It’s freezing in here,” Mary said. “Can you stoke the fire?”
Inga obliged. It was cold in the room, and the fireplace at the far side of the room wouldn’t help much. Why did aristocrats build their palaces with such tall ceilings? She added wood to the fire, then returned to Mary to arrange the comforter tighter around her shoulders.
“How is poor James doing?” Mary asked.
“He and Benedict are working on a report for President Wilson,” she replied as she drew up a spindly gilt chair. “How are you holding up?”
Mary sagged against the pillows. “I want to go home. I didn’t know it was going to be this hard.”
Had any of them? Yes, they lived in the lap of luxury, but the weight of the war was on everyone’s shoulders. Reading about dead and wounded men was demoralizing regardless of which side they fought for.
“I can’t wait to leave,” Mary said. “Mrs. Torres called on me to bring me a nice silver cup as a farewell gift. She’s going home next week, along with all the other wives from the Argentinian Embassy. I envy them.”
Inga caught her breath. “Have you thought of going home?”
“Every day,” Mary said. “I don’t want to leave James, but I’m beginning to hate it here. As soon as I’ve shaken this terrible cold, I’ll probably sail home. And, Inga...” Mary wiggled to sit higher among the pillows, her expression urgent. “No one will take it amiss if you want to come with me. So many of the wives are returning home, so it won’t hurt Benedict’s reputation if you leave.”
Temptation clawed at the surprising suggestion. Serving the American Embassy had been both the hardest and best thing she’d ever done, but she longed for home. Could she really leave with Mary? Just thinking about it lifted an invisible weight.
The telephone clanged, sounding unnaturally loud in the quiet of the night and making Inga jump from her chair. “I’ll get it,” she said to Mary and hurried toward the telephone anchored to the wall near the kitchen.
“Inga, get down here,” Mr. Gerard barked the instant she lifted the receiver.
“What’s wrong?”
“The telegraph machine is spitting out a message. It’s been thumping out an endless stream of code ever since you left. It’s coming from London. Something important must be going on, and I need you down here at once.”
“I’m on my way.” She hung up the telephone receiver and rushed back to the bedroom. “That was Mr. Gerard,” she told Mary. “Will you be all right if I pop down to decode a message?”
“Heavens, yes. Your work never stops, does it, poor dear?”
Inga’s footsteps clattered in the stairwell, and she was breathless by the time she arrived at Mr. Gerard’s office. He and Benedict stood in the center of the office as the telegraph machine continued shooting out the strip of paper. Yards of it piled onto the floor, filled with dots and dashes.
Benedict handed her the beginning of the message. “I’m afraid this is going to take a while,” he said, looking almost apologetic as he cleared a space for her at the secretarial table. Inga reached for a notepad while Benedict shifted the mound of paper toward the table.
She began decoding as quickly as she could, her stomach plummeting with each word she transcribed onto the notepad. The cable had come from the American ambassador in London, reporting that the British government had intercepted a dangerous message between Germany and Mexico.
It was unbelievable. Her hand started to shake, a chill racing through her, but she kept writing out each terrible word. Mr. Gerard had gone back to conferring with Benedict as she worked. The peppery scent of cigar smoke filled the office as she wrote out line after line of the horrifying message.
At the end she simply stared at the transcribed words in disbelief.
“Well?” Benedict asked from across the room.
Inga tried to speak in a calm voice. “Britain’s Secret Service Bureau intercepted a communication from the German foreign minister to the ambassador from Mexico.”
She handed the notepad to Mr. Gerard. Benedict stood over his shoulder, and she watched as both men read the information she’d written on the notepad. Benedict’s face went white while Mr. Gerard’s darkened with rage.
Germany had confided in the Mexican government their plan to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. They acknowledged that this was likely to provoke the U.S. into declaring war on Germany. In such an event, Foreign Minister Zimmermann wanted Mexico to attack Texas to distract Americans from a European war. In return, Germany would help Mexico reclaim their lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Mr. Gerard threw down the notepad and let out a string of curses as he began pacing the office. Inga looked at Benedict, whose expression was coldly furious.
“Is this as bad as I think it is?” she asked.
He nodded. “There’s no way we can stay out of the war now.”
“It’s time to break diplomatic relations,” said Mr. Gerard.
Inga swallowed hard. Breaking diplomatic relations was viewed as an insult by the host country, and their trying to back away from that precipice would be almost impossible. It was the final step before going to war.
Benedict shook his head. “We can’t break diplomatic relations without the president’s authorization. We need to verify the truth of what the British have told us.”
“You think the British would lie?” Mr. Gerard demanded.
“No,” Benedict answered, “but we can’t gamble a million American lives on it. It may take a while before our intelligence agency can confirm the authenticity of this information.”
“How could the British have intercepted this message from Germany?” Mr. Gerard asked. “If the Germans sent a communication to Mexico, it had to have been sent by way of an undersea cable owned by the United States.”
“The British intelligence agency has been tapping the wires of all the neutral countries,” Benedict said.
Inga gasped. “The British are spying on us ?” Inga could scarcely believe it, but Benedict didn’t seem surprised.
“I’d be disappointed if they were not,” he said. “Britain’s cryptographers are the best in the business.”
Mr. Gerard collected the notepad he’d flung across the room. Inga watched as his eyes traveled over the message line by line. He seemed to have calmed down by the time he returned to sit behind his desk.
“We can’t do anything until Washington sends us orders,” the ambassador said. “I hate sitting here helpless while Germany is getting their ducks in a row by conspiring with Mexico to attack Texas.”
The thump of Inga’s heart felt so strong she feared the whole room could hear it. “What are we going to do?” she asked Benedict.
“We prepare to evacuate,” he said, his voice so clinically cold and detached it sent a chill clear to her bones.
Inga was grateful for the huge range of tasks Mr. Gerard asked of her the following morning in preparation for leaving Germany. The ambassador chartered a train to take them to Switzerland, but Inga needed to pick up the paperwork. He wanted her to visit a jeweler to commission personalized engravings on platinum cigarette cases to be used as farewell gifts. He wanted a two-month supply of the medicinal drops Mary used, which seemed excessive to Inga. Surely it wouldn’t take them two months to get home, would it? And yet Inga had to visit three separate pharmacies to find enough.
It wasn’t unusual for there to be a shortage of drugs in the pharmacies. What was odd was the lack of American newspapers. Mr. Gerard wanted Inga to buy a copy of every German and American newspaper she could find for them to monitor the worsening sentiments between the two nations. Inga had no difficulty finding the German-language newspapers, but there were no American newspapers anywhere, not even at the finest newsstand in Berlin.
The war meant shops were understaffed, and only a single worker manned the cash register. She waited in line to speak with the overworked clerk. “Have any American newspapers come in?” she asked when she finally got to the front of the line.
“We canceled our order,” the clerk replied. “Nobody wants to read one-sided propaganda.”
“Could I place a special order for the New York Times ? I am willing to pay an extra fee.”
Her request triggered hostile comments from others in line. “The Americans have been siding with the British all along,” a woman wearing widow’s weeds said behind her. “We should never have trusted them.”
The clerk agreed with the widow. “We shot ourselves in the foot by bowing to Wilson. Our submarines are the best in the world, and we’d have total command of the seas if we hadn’t been hobbled by that stupid agreement with the Americans.”
“My husband drowned because of President Wilson,” the widow said, and the teenaged boy beside her seemed just as hostile.
“Go back home if you want to read American newspapers.”
Inga felt their angry eyes boring into her back as she hurried from the shop. The encounter bothered her during the entire walk back to the embassy, where she delivered Mary’s medicine before heading to Alton House. She’d missed dinner but didn’t have much of an appetite after the dispiriting encounter at the newsstand.
She looked with fondness at the stately, honeyed stones of Alton House as she meandered up the front path. How much longer would she be here? She’d always felt safe on this street filled with embassy staff and wonderful old linden trees. She would miss this place if they had to leave.
As she reached the front door, banging from inside ratcheted her already tense nerves even higher. It sounded like hammering, and she rushed inside to see what was going on.
The noise came from the study, where Benedict was sitting on the sofa, his face bleak as he hammered a lid onto a crate.
“Your encyclopedias?” she asked.
Benedict didn’t look up as he continued hammering. “Yes. We’ve got time to prepare, so a shipping crate for the whole set seems the best option to get them home.”
His words smothered what little hope she had left. “There’s no chance for a peaceful solution?”
He lowered the hammer and drew a heavy sigh. “I doubt it,” he said. “Everything is pointing to war. I’ve failed.”
She sat on the crate and put a comforting hand on his knee. It was odd to see Benedict so despondent. He was the one who always had an idea for the next tactic or a solution to whatever crisis was at hand. Now he was packing up to retreat.
“You did the best you could, and under very difficult circumstances,” she said. “You helped keep the peace for more than two years. And it’s not over yet, is it? A miracle could still happen.”
He sighed again. “It’s over, Inga,” he said, then began tracing a pattern on the back of her hand. “It will be hard on you, going to war against your native land.”
She looked away. He was already speaking as if it were a foregone conclusion, and she refused to believe it. President Wilson had kept them out of war before; he could do it again.
“I can’t believe it’s going to happen,” she said, and if anything, Benedict’s face looked even sadder as he laid a gentle hand on her cheek, regarding her with a look of pained sympathy. How could she have ever thought him cold? He might be the most tender man in the world.
A man she might have to leave soon. If war broke out between the United States and Germany, she would have to return to New York, and he’d be off to some other diplomatic post.
She pressed a kiss to his palm, desperate to escape his searching gaze. Then the slamming of the front door startled her, and she rose. Benedict did as well.
Colonel Reyes strode into the study, his expression grim. “Germany has just announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare,” he said. “President Wilson has ordered that we break diplomatic relations, close the embassy, and return home.”
The downward spiral into war had begun.