The Poet in the Code Room

By John Kimmey

Merriam Press Mystery

A war and spy novel as well as a mystery, this is the story of a poet recruited in the spring of 1943 to write poetry for coding and decoding messages in the OSS.

Jake Finny, a college senior in the reserves, finds himself dealing with a series of unexplained deaths in the Message Center.

As he moves from Washington to Algiers to Italy, fearing for his life.

He goes AWOL and seeks those committing these crimes, aided by the Italian girl his friend wanted to marry.

As the pressure on him intensifies, he is haunted by the head of Counterintelligence, a famous poet whom he can’t determine whether he is sympathetic to him or thinks he is implicated in these deaths.

He has talked to him about the connection between poetry and counterintelligence and only later realizes to his sorrow what an important part the man has played in his life.

The novel is not only about Jake and his situation but also about the workings of OSS and the conditions in Italy during the war.

4 photos

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781300438786

Book preview

The Poet in the Code Room

The Poet in the Code Room

By John Kimmey

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D:\Data\_Templates\Clipart\Merriam Press Logo.jpg

Historical Fiction 3

Bennington, Vermont

2012

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First ePub Edition (2012)

First published in 2012 by the Merriam Press

Copyright © 2012 by John Kimmey

All rights reserved.

Additional material copyright of named contributors.

The views expressed are solely those of the author.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Book design by Ray Merriam

ISBN 978-1-300-43878-6

Merriam Press #HF3-E

This work was designed, produced, and published in the United States of America by the Merriam Press, 133 Elm Street Suite 3R, Bennington VT 05201

The Merriam Press publishes new manuscripts on historical subjects, especially military history and with an emphasis on World War II, as well as reprinting previously published works, including reports, documents, manuals, articles and other materials on historical topics.

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WARNING

The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

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Dedication

To Jane

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Disclaimer

The story and characters, except for the General, who is used historically, are fictional, products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. The OSS did use briefly original poems for coding and decoding messages.

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Quote

....Monsieur and comrade,

The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines...

Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

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Chapter 1

When you start writing poetry, anything can happen. You can become famous and give interviews, go crazy with rejections and wind up teaching or in a nuthouse, or just make a damn fool of yourself. Or like me join the army and keep turning out the good stuff for the war effort and not end up a poet manqué despite getting involved in four murders and two suicides.

My introduction to the mayhem began romantically enough when I read Shelley in high school and then Whitman and Eliot in college and poured out reams of vague, violent, melancholy stuff about death and rebellion and God. Somehow at Dartmouth I won a prize and the next thing I knew I got this telephone call from a Washington recruiter on campus interviewing for a super-secret intelligence agency. He wanted to talk to me. I jumped at the chance. After all it was the spring of ’43, my junior year, and I was in the Army Reserves and about to be called up and had to find something kinder and gentler than the infantry. So far all my efforts to get in Meteorology, the Navy V-12 program, and language school had failed. Not enough math and science, no 20/20 vision, and a deaf ear for anything but English.

The funny thing was when I went to McNutt Hall to see this lanky, blond, suave guy in a double-breasted suit, Charlie Lane class of ’39, he knew all about me. He had seen my grades, read my poems in the Jack 0 Lantern, and announced I was just what he was looking for, a poet. He wanted to know if I’d like to join OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. Even though I hadn’t the foggiest idea what it was, I said, gosh, yes. He promised I’d go overseas pretty quick after some training in Washington and asked where I’d like to be stationed as if he were a travel agent inviting me to select my vacation spot with the army picking up the tab. He had a map on the wall. I had my choice of England, North Africa, Egypt, India, China, and possibly Russia. How about Tahiti? I pointed to the Mediterranean, the wine-dark sea, cradle of poets. No problem. The FBI would check me for security. If everything was okay, I was in. Hot dog, I wasn’t going to die in my twenties like Keats after all.

He never mentioned what writing poetry had to do with the agency. Could I be turning out propaganda? No, that was MO, Morale Operations. I was joining Communications. But poetry doesn’t communicate; it expresses and has nothing to do with spies. Little did I know. But what the hell, at least I wouldn’t be going where a bullet had my name on it. How lucky can you get!

I found out soon enough after taking basic training at North Camp Hood, Texas, home of the Tank Destroyers. They had a higher rate of casualties than the infantry. And for awhile I thought I was stuck in that doomed outfit with a fierce-looking tiger for a shoulder patch. Telegraphing Lane in Washington every couple of days to get me out of this paradise lost. And, wow, was it ever the Infernal Pit, sandstorms, marching ten miles with full field pack in 100 degree heat, up every morning under the stars, chopping wood all night for the company mess, twenty-four hour KP, hand-to-hand combat. No time to think about Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day. Losing faith in Lane, I went to see the chaplain to ask if I could be his assistant. I had read Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, all two volumes, and that spring had gone to see my minister about putting on the collar. We got down on our knees in his study and prayed for me and then went to lunch to discuss divinity schools. Son, the chaplain said, How old are you? I guess not old enough to stop peeing in my pants at the thought of somebody shooting at me.

Then miraculously on July 4th came the transfer to Washington. I was ecstatic and so was Moe Jacobs, my best friend, also recruited by Lane at Dartmouth, another English major. Was he ever! His duffel bag contained a virtual Great Books library, everything from Shakespeare and Dostoevsky to Proust and Joyce. We had a ball discussing them, mocked by most of the company as college kids who didn’t know our ass from a hole in the ground. When we refused to attend a boxing match one night, the captain made us police the area on our hands and knees. But what the fuck(boy, did I ever get tired of hearing that word), these guys didn’t know Shakespeare from shit. The transfer stunned everybody. How come we were chosen? I didn’t say because I wrote poetry and Moe didn’t boast because he read the classics. So I explained I spoke French and stumbled though a version of Now is the time to come to the aid of your countrymen. Some smart aleck rattled it off like a native. So I claimed I could type 60 words a minute, another test I failed at the Camp Upton induction center on Long Island.

But all that didn’t matter. We were out of the frying pan and didn’t think of the fire. While everybody was going out on bivouac there we were boarding the train at Waco for Dallas, St. Louis, and the Nation’s Capital like a couple of kids playing hooky.

Washington was still waking up from a deep Southern sleep and hadn’t gotten used to all the military madness. Fortunately we found a quiet place to sack out on F Street between 20th and 21st not far from the White House with shade trees and little traffic. Mostly shabby genteel rooming houses run by frowzy landladies like Madame Duquette from Canada who never wore anything but a kimono and told us not to iron, it interfered with her radio, or urinate out the window. One roomer hit a woman passing and she threatened to sue. It wasn’t far from OSS either at 25th and E in the old National Institute of Health complex located in a rundown corner of the city by the Potomac dominated by twin rusty gas containers, ramshackle tenements, and a brewery with a green cooper roof. More like an area for a hush-hush house of ill-repute than a seraglio for spies.

Actually where we trained reminded me of a college campus with its cluster of brick and limestone buildings and professors pussyfooting around and crammed into cubicles full of books and maps and filing cabinets. Everybody from some Ivy League school and nobody saluting or paying attention to military protocol except when drilling in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Talking about fraternities and the Winter Carnival and going to burlesque shows at the Old Howard in Boston during the Harvard football weekend.

The Message Center where we lived like moles for two months working with codes had a different atmosphere. It was in the basement of A Building where the General hung out. You showed your badge at the side door to a sleepy old guard by the water cooler and an American flag and tiptoed down a dim stairwell to a partitioned off area and rang a bell. A slot opened and a face identified you. It was like entering a speakeasy with no bar or music, just typewriters, IN and OUT baskets stacked with confidential and top secret messages, filing cabinets, a green carpet and florescent lights that added to the claustrophobia of the series of narrow windowless rooms. On the tables metal boards each with twenty-five numbered strips full of random letters with a center bar for lining up what was to be coded or decoded. And in the back a large black machine called Big Bertha for banging out messages to and from London on reams of yellow paper. The whole place had the feel of an underground bunker in touch with clandestine operations all over the world, Berne Algiers, Cairo, New Delhi, Lisbon, Istanbul, you name it.

Moe and I worked most of the time in the training room with a Latin professor from Columbia, Maurice Constance, a pudgy little bald bachelor who always wore a blue suit and a bow tie and had a high-pitched voice. Although he had written a book on codes, his main interest was the Latin satirist Persius whose cryptic poems he was translating. One phrase he kept quoting, Vive memor leti, Live mindful of death, that we mimicked as Vive memor coiti, Live mindful of sex. The poor guy probably never had a woman, afraid of the old superstition that every time you make out you shorten your life by one day.

We spent all July and most of August learning codes, especially my favorite, double transposition. Using graph paper, you put a message in a box under a key phrase, numbering the letters and repeated letters beginning with A and then place the numbered columns horizontally in numerical sequence into another box. Next starting with column 1, you write out five-letter groups for transmission. It’s scrambling the plain text twice and creating gibberish and then unscrambling them twice in reverse and creating military lingo.

When we weren’t at OSS, we were roller skating at the stadium down by the Potomac or attending dances at the USO on Lafayette Park and the girls asking us what we did and both of us saying it was too secret to talk about. Or best of all walking down dimmed-out Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House wondering what Franklin and Eleanor were up to and discussing Dostoevsky and Joyce.

So far no poetry except the whole business of coding and decoding was a kind of poetry. You encode what you want to say and someone deciphers it and decides what it means. Anyway we had a great time playing word games and being privy to secrets like the approximate date for opening the Second Front and the whereabouts of the General’s Trojan condoms left in the medicine cabinet of his bathroom at Claridge’s in London.

And no suspicious death until one night everything changed, changed utterly, a terrible tragedy was born and pursued me for two traumatic years.

It happened on my 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift. I noticed the door to the training room was closed. I knocked, thinking maybe the professor had decided to do his translating there instead of in his room on G Street where he complained rowdy sailors disturbed his concentration. No answer. I opened the door and went in and found him sitting at the table, his head down as if asleep. I called. He didn’t stir. When I walked up and touched his shoulder, he felt stiff and wasn’t breathing. Dumbstruck, I froze for a minute and then ran to the front to get the officer on duty, Lt. Sharpe. He sent for Security and summoned an ambulance. Everybody said it was a heart attack except the color of his face had a strange gray tinge. That’s what we officially heard the next day. But a rumor sprang up that he had swallowed the infamous L-pill, the potassium cyanide capsule given to spies to take if they’re caught. It was manufactured for OSS by E.R. Squibbs Pharmaceutical.

At first I dismissed the report as Hollywood stuff that was supposed to go along with this OH-SO-Secret organization. Only to realize there could be something to it when an officer came around to question me about finding the body. Next Drew Pearson got into the act with a note in his Merry-Go-Round column in the Washington Post on the mysterious death in the OSS Message Center. Questions about the professor circulated. Was he a spy? Had he been found out and decided to end it all? Was he murdered? Investigators searched his room on G Street and talked to his landlady and her roomers. They began digging into his background, questioning colleagues at Columbia and those in the cryptography profession who knew his work. His favorite verse from Persius haunted me along with another he often cited; O curas hominum, O quantum est in rebus inane. I translated it as Oh, the cares of man, Oh, how much vanity is there in human affairs."

The episode threw a pall over the whole Center. I began to wonder if some people I was working with were enemy agents. Though it was hard to believe guys from Dartmouth and girls from Smith or two who did the paraphrasing of messages, one a pianist who used to be with Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood and the other the son of the composer John Philip Sousa, were feeding information to the enemy.

What made things even tenser was losing my badge that had a blue-bordered picture of me with the red 11099651 at the bottom and a black OSS at the top. I had to report to Security and listen to a lecture on how if anyone found it he could gain access to the agency and steal top secret stuff. My double could be out there spying on us.

I became a nervous wreck. Moe said take it easy. Nobody was accusing me of anything. But I couldn’t help feeling I was being watched. I even wondered if my mail was being opened and my telephone calls to Jan O’Brien in Albany were being monitored. I hated to think somebody could be snickering at all the romantic junk we were feeding each other. She wanted to get married before I went overseas. And I was hoping for a furlough. I needed a week or more since I had to take instructions from the priest, not being Catholic. Another basic training session.

When I went to see Lane, now second in command of the Message Center and presto a first lieutenant Washington style, about getting time off he acted hesitant. He said he would try to arrange it. A lot depended on the departure of the troopship from Newport News. I knew, didn’t I, about attending Camp C and taking weapons training? Was I going to have to defend myself over there? He smiled and said I had to be prepared for anything, even putting on civilian clothes. I’d be issued a .45. Then I wouldn’t be protected by the Geneva Convention if captured, would I? What was I getting into?

Sir, could I ask you something?

Sure, go ahead, Jake. If it’s about Professor Constance, don’t believe all you hear about his taking the L-pill. Drew Pearson is always writing sensational stuff about us. We’re the hot topic in town right now. It was a heart attack.

About my poetry. You said I’d be writing some.

When you get to Algiers. I can’t say anything about it now. I’ll be over in a couple of months to check on things. They have big plans and you’re going to be part of them.

You mean my poetry?

Right. You’ll be firing rhymes like they were coming out of a machine gun, couplets and quatrains and iambic pentameters. He chuckled. Just like good old Shakespeare.

No blank verse? He frowned.

One more thing, sir. I lowered my head, afraid to look him in the eye. Am I being watched because I lost my badge and discovered Professor Constance’s body?

He grinned in that unctuous way of his. Gosh, I began to wonder how I could ever trust guys around here like him. What the hell was going on? What did stuff like battle orders and secret agents and resistances movements have to do with poetry, especially my poetry?

Why, Jake, would anybody want to tail you?

They might think I had something to do with the professor’s death.

Forget it. You just found him, that’s all. He’s going to be hard to replace. One of the key cryptographers in the country. He paused and then said in a confidential voice, And, Jake, let me tell you this war is going to be won in the Message Center, not on the battle field, and by professors like Constance and poets like you.

When I came back to the room that night, Moe wanted to know how it went with Smiley, Lane’s nickname.

They also serve who only stand and bullshit.

Anybody suspect you of anything?

I don’t know, Moe. I just wish I hadn’t lost that badge and found Constance. I bet they think I gave it to somebody and I had something to do with his death.

Yeah, you slipped him the L-pill. He laughed.

I knew it was crazy to be worrying about everything that had happened. But when you write poetry, you develop an imagination of disaster. You can’t help thinking of the worst scenario. And it wasn’t hard to do in an agency that developed explosives masking as flour, pens that shoot steel darts, and guns that didn’t make a noise when fired. Yeah, and that recruited ominous figures from wrestlers and union organizers to Communists and Mafia types. You wondered about your safety not to mention your sanity.

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Chapter 2

Talk about sanity, there Moe and I were on Monday dressed in fatigues in an army truck riding out of the circle in front of A Building past the brewery on our way to Camp C for weapons training when the sergeant pulled down the canvas flaps. He didn’t want us to see where we going. And he didn’t lift them until we were on a dirt road in a pine grove. Suddenly we came to a headquarters shack where a loudspeaker was blaring out names like D-3, Lupo, and Cyclops. It was as if we were on a movie set. We jumped out with our duffel bags and took off for a cabin in the woods near a swamp. Someone said it used to be a camp for unwed mothers. Boy, I bet they unloaded fast to get out of that mosquito-festered no-man’s land.

After the initial jolt everything seemed normal, the touch football games, the target practice with the .45, the carbine, and the Thompson sub-machine gun. How we would ever get the chance to use one of them I couldn’t imagine. A room full of radio operators with headsets on appeared to be just another college class except most looked like foreigners and didn’t speak much English.

The third day I met someone who heard I found Professor Constance’s body. He called himself Peter Quince, a tall, hefty pfc parachutist. He looked more like Thomas Wolfe than a guy from Wallace Stevens country who played the clavier. He repeated the lethal pill story as if it were all over the agency. He was from North Carolina, played the guitar, majored in psychology at the university with a minor in English, loved hunting and flying. He had trained at Fort Bragg and volunteered for a dangerous mission, not knowing he was getting into OSS. He was supposed to jump behind enemy lines with a SSTR-1 radio either in France or Italy and blow up bridges, tunnels, and rail lines. He couldn’t wait. Stuff like that had excited him ever since he was a kid. He was flying to Algiers in a couple of weeks and training at a secret parachute base on the coast, Club des Pins.

I wanted to know how he ever heard about me. Some guys were talking the other day about being caught by the Germans and wondering what they would do and the cyanide thing came up. Would they use it or not? Then somebody mentioned a Professor Constance in the Message Center.

And knew I found him?

Somebody named Jake Finney. That’s you, ain’t it? You’re a poet and you go by the code name of Persius.

I told him I only discovered the body. I didn’t know the man except as my cryptographer instructor.

That’s not what I heard.

You mean there’s a story going around about me?

Didn’t you lose your badge and had to wear that big dummy around your neck that said ‘I AM A SPY’?

It said ‘I LOST MY BADGE.’

Moe started laughing and so did the pfc. Here I was the talk of the agency both as a sinister character and a buffoon and didn’t even have an inkling.

It made me nervous all over again. Even Moe, usually the cool, calm, laconic one began showing signs of apprehension. Was Constance really an enemy agent who swallowed the capsule? Afraid of being caught and confessing, he took the easy way out. Or was he indirectly murdered? And lying in bed that night with the creepy swamp silence broken only by weird bird noises and by the loudspeaker blaring out more of those crazy names, this time Raven, King Kong, and Weasel, I started conjuring up all kinds of spooky goings on associated with Poe and Frankenstein.

Moe thought I was overreacting. Maybe there was something, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought. They just wanted me to think so to make me more security conscious.

Yeah, but even if they’re just playing games, why were they doing it?

Hey, you’re a poet. They’re having fun with you.

I got a feeling I’m being singled out for something.

Yeah, poet laureate of OSS.

With not even a week’s furlough before going overseas there wasn’t time for a wedding, just a brief meeting with Jan in New York. I made reservations at the Astor for Mr. and Mrs. Finney. Servicemen got a suite for six dollars a night. We went to see Arlene Francis in Dough Girls at the Lyceum, danced on the Astor Roof to the music of Ina Ray Hutton and her all-girl orchestra, had drinks at the Astor Bar, dinner at Keen’s Chop House and Dinty Moore’s. The crowds in Times Square were huge, raucous, and giddy. What a festive air! Hard to believe a war was going on despite so many uniforms. Another one of those exhilarating late summer nights in the fabulous city with everybody celebrating being alive, maybe for the last time.

Jan took the canceled wedding hard. She had everything arranged in Albany from the priest and the service at seven in St. Vincent’s Rectory since I wasn’t Catholic to Joan Walters for a bridesmaid and dinner downtown at Keeler’s. A real down-to-earth girl, a Wellesley senior majoring in Economics and heading for Wall Street. She was a little squeamish about