Free The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

her lip but didn’t say anything. Up until recently, only a handful of women survived in the European press corps, but more and more women were pushing their way into serious wartime reporting, coming over with assignments to write about French hemlines and simply staying, sending back copy on bombs and breadlines instead.
    “Matter of fact”—Dowell exhaled, looking around the room—“seems the number of war tourists has hit a record high in here.”
    “It’s wet outside, Jim, that’s all,” retorted Harriet.
    “In any case, plenty of Americans don’t want to enter the war.” Dowell continued the point he’d started before the girls appeared in the door. “Over eighty percent plenty.”
    “Never mind.” Pankhurst waved the point away. Round-faced and sweating and impossible to overestimate—he played the goof so well, people had the habit of telling him more than they thought they had—“never mind that. The vote to reelect Roosevelt ended up being a vote to fight.”
    “And the Germans are putting all their pegs in place now,” Dowell agreed. “Way I heard it over there, Admiral Dönitz plans on having his subs in Boston Harbor this time next year.”
    “Crap,” Pankhurst answered. “The Krauts have got the upper hand right where they are. Why would they waste it? You see how fast they shot down thirty-seven ships last month in the Bay of Biscay? They’ll be spread too thin if they try and make war crossings.”
    “Shut up,” Dowell said amiably, “and listen to your elders. I sat in the sailors’ bar last week in Lorient and heard them—bluffing, sure, but you listen underneath the talk and it sounds like there’s a U-boat being fitted up to make the shot all the way across.”
    “God, your lot gets away with murder.” Harriet stubbed out her cigarette.
    “Our lot?” Dowell quizzed.
    “Men,” she pronounced.
    “Ha.” Dowell pressed his shoulder against hers, and Frankie saw the two of them were on again. There’d be the three of them at breakfast in the flat tomorrow. “Because we’re better at getting the goods?”
    Harriet pushed his face away, lightly. “Because the sailors aren’t measuring the precise angle at which your breasts are sailing above the table.”
    Frankie sputtered.
    “You can be invisible, you can be a walking tape machine,” Harriet sighed. “And you can bury that sailor’s chat in your smile, while you file it for later.”
    “I know that smile.” Dowell grinned. “See, here it is.” And he smiled blandly, without any light in his eyes. “The censor’s special.”
    “The story beneath the story,” Pankhurst agreed.
    Frankie nodded. Bill Shirer wrote ten minutes of script for five minutes of airtime, and Murrow often finished every broadcast in a cold sweat, having orchestrated the news so that it went under the wire, his mind ahead of the censor’s, bending and swaying to the imagined cut. Early on, she’d learned what she could say she saw—a full moon could be described as a bomber’s moon—and how to seed the story without telling the Germans, who were listening, what they heard. It was a dare—a dance up to the line. It was the performance of what is, what isn’t.
    “I’ll bet I could get something through from over there,” Frankie mused.
    “I’ll bet you could, Beauty.”
    “Shut up,” she lobbed at Jim. “I’m serious.”
    “That’s two of us, then.” He smiled back.
    She tipped her glass against Dowell’s and finished her drink, watching the sweep of Harriet’s hair as she leaned forward into his hand cupping the match, her gold sweater soft against Jim’s jacket, the way she held her head to the side while she asked and answered, peppering him with questions about France. Though they were never going to be one of the boys, Frankie rather liked this no-man’s-land where she and Harriet reported from. She was a woman, sure. But this talk—the frank and curious talk of reporters, the drug of getting in there,