Free The Postmistress by Sarah Blake Page A

getting it down, getting it—skeined between all of them, man or woman.
    “You really think the Krauts will launch an attack on the States?” Frankie returned to Dowell’s point.
    Dowell drained the last of his whiskey sour. “I’m just telling you what I heard. Dimes to dollars, Dönitz’s boys will surface in New York Harbor one of these nights, do nothing, and come home smiling—an ace in the hole. And then a pack of them will follow”—he squinted into his empty glass—“by end of summer, ’forty-one.”
    “Is that a bet?”
    “Bet.” Dowell nodded. “That’s a bet.”
    “Sure they will,” Pankhurst snorted. “Hey, Reggie,” he called to the bartender, holding up Dowell’s glass. “The dreamer needs another.”
    At a table in the center of the room, Frankie watched one of the men lean over to his companion and say something in her ear. The girl tipped toward him, listening. Then she smiled. Frankie looked down and sipped her scotch. When she looked back up, a good-looking man sitting on one of the stools at the bar held her eye.
    “I’ll tell you what to place your bets on,” Harriet said quietly. “Whether immigration quotas back home are ever going to get lifted.”
    “For the German refugees?”
    Harriet nodded. “Twenty-seven thousand three hundred and seventy spots. That’s what we’ve got to offer. Twenty-seven thousand three hundred and seventy. What in the hell kind of number is that? And so far it won’t budge—hasn’t budged in two years—though there are floods of people waiting on visas. Stuck waiting for pieces of paper.”
    “There’s the worry of spies,” Pankhurst observed.
    “You know and I know these refugees are not Nazi spies,” Harriet retorted. “And though we are still reporting them as ‘refugees’—people washed out of their homes by the tide of war, and that kind of crap—they are Jews. Being moved. Being deported. Being given twenty minutes from the time a knock comes on the door until they are herded down the street. Twenty minutes to pack whatever they can grab. Told to get out. Get out of Germany. Of Austria. Europe. And the United States won’t allow you in unless you can prove you have means. So they’re stuck. And no matter how I phrase it—the indifference of bureaucracy, the refugee crisis—the stories don’t make it onto the front page. What’s happening to the Jews is getting buried in the middle of the newspapers. It’s being cast as a secondary story, that’s all.”
    “Someone ought to go over there and prove that. Paint the picture of the people who are trying to get out of Germany. Follow a family. Then it might be clear that it’s no accident the refugees are Jews. That’s the story to get,” said Pankhurst.
    Harriet shook her head. “Can’t be done. It’s already too dark to tell—there was a woman I met last week in the Marylebone refugee center who was separated from her husband at the border between Spain and France because of a clerical error. One n too few on her visa. And though she had her passport, which showed her proper name, and their marriage certificate, they held her for twenty hours before releasing her. And he had gone on. And all she knows is he was bound for Lisbon and from there to America. America , she said to me, as if somehow I’d know how to find him. They are utterly lost to each other, see? There is no hand to put the two together. She’s not where he thinks she is, and all she can say, over and over to whoever comes into the center: You are from America? America? It’s too grim. You might as well say God has dropped out of heaven. He’s gone. There’s the fucking story.”
    “Christ!” Frankie said. Reckless and itchy, she flicked at her glass with her fingernail. She shifted in her seat, wanting to stand up, wanting to move. “Christ almighty, I want to make some noise.”
    “Say there, Beauty, don’t you ever have any fun?”
    The man who had been watching her from the bar had