,And I am to report to you, as head of a French/French North West African desk that is somehow involved in intelligence?”
“Yes.”
,All right Baker said.
,Would you be offended if I said that I am not surprised? That, in fact, I have already arranged an office for you?” Douglass Baker thought that over. asked.
“No,” he said.
“What is the highest security classification with which you are familiar, aside from Presidential Eyes Only?”
“Secretarial Eyes Only, I suppose,” Baker said. “Until we run you through the administrative process around here, I’m afraid I can’t let you take this out of the office,” Douglass said. “But I want it running through your head while you’re over at State this afternoon cleaning out your desk.”
“That quick?”
Douglass ignored the question. “The classification of this-we haven’t come up with a satisfactory classification system yet, frankly-is somewhere below Presidential Eyes Only and somewhere above Secretarial Eyes Only, Only those Cabinet members with a need to know have access to it.”
He handed Baker a file. “There’s as much information as we have on a man named Louis Albert Grunier in there Douglass said. “The first thing we have to do is find him, and the second thing we have to do is figure Out the best way to get him here without arousing the suspicions of the Germans.”
A quick glance at the first couple of lines showed Baker that Louis Albert Grunier was a French national who was last known to be an employee of Union Mini6re in the Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo. His present whereabouts were unknown.
“May I ask why this man is valuable?” Baker asked.
“Grunier knows the location of a certain raw material that is : ITS W. E. URRIPIP11V considered of great importance. We think he will be able to help us get our hands on it.”
“You’re not going to tell me what kind of material? Or what it is to be used for?”
Baker asked.
“No,” Captain Douglass said. “But I’ll tell you what I want You to do: indulge your imagination and make guesses. Come in here at nine in the morning and tell me what you’ve been thinking.”
SEVEN Summer Place 1)eal, New Jersey 10:30 A.m., December 7, 1941
Chesley Haywood Whittaker, Sr., had built Summer Place in New Jersey in 18 89 because the senior Whittaker did not like Long Island or Connecticut or Rhode Island, where most of his peers had their summer places. He was neither a Vanderbilt nor a Morgan, he said to his wife, just a simple bridge and dam builder; and he could not afford to copy in Newport or Stockbridge a Florentine palace. So she would just have to deal with Deal. The play on words amused him.
The names his wife suggested for the new summer house (twenty-six rooms on three floors, sitting on ten acres which sloped down to the beach of the Atlantic Ocean) also amused him. She proposed Sea View and Sea Breezes and The Breakers and Ocean Crest and Sans Souci (and the English translation, Without Care).
“”Careless’would be all right, Mitzi,” Chesley Haywood Whittaker told his wife. “It would memorialize my foresight in hiring Carlucci.- Antonio Carlucci and Sons, General Contractors, had built the house, graded the dunes, and laid the grass, driveways, and a sixhole putting green for what Chesley Haywood Whittaker, Sr., considered an outrageous ninety-seven thousand dollars.
Esther Graham “Mitzi” (for no good reason) Whittaker was alone with the father of her three sons in the privacy of their bedroom in their brownstone on Murray Hill in New York City. There were no children or servants within hearing.
“Call it what you damned well please, you ass!” she flared. “But there had damned well better be a sign up by next week!”
The house, not quite two miles from the railroad station in Asbury Park, could not be seen from the road. Mitzi’s sister and brother-in-law had ridden in a hack for two hours up and down the road before they found it. It was, Mitzi pointed out to her husband, the only one of more than two dozen summer places nearby that had neither a gatehouse nor a sign.