Wives at War by Jessica Stirling

a deep breath, she opened up the bag.
    *   *   *
    Polly said, ‘Look, whatever you want me to do for this mythical agency of yours, first you’re going to have to come clean. I was married to Dominic Manone for too many years still to be gullible. Even the US Government, profligate though it may be, doesn’t send freelance photographers chasing across the Atlantic just to chat with the wife of an Italian importer. What exactly are you, Mr Christy Cameron? State Department, military intelligence, or just a freebooter with an eye to the main chance?’
    â€˜I told you,’ Christy said, ‘I’m a photo journalist.’
    â€˜Why then are you working for a government agency?’
    â€˜My brother dragged me into it.’
    â€˜Ah! Ah-hah!’ said Polly. ‘So your brother’s to blame, is he?’
    â€˜He is in military intelligence. US Naval Intelligence to be exact. I really can’t tell you who he’s working with because I don’t know. You think I play it close to the chest – try getting information out of Jamie.’
    â€˜More,’ Polly gestured, curling her fingers. ‘Give me a little more.’
    â€˜All right, I’ll tell what I do know,’ Christy said, ‘some of it anyway. Franklin D. has established a whole new alphabet of bureaucratic offices. Franklin D. is well aware that sooner or later the United States will have to enter the war or the whole of Europe will go up in flames. The fall of France was a real blow. France cracked morally, you know what I mean?’
    Polly nodded. ‘Yes.’
    â€˜When that happened Roosevelt sent an unofficial envoy – a journalist, as it happens – to London to compile a first-hand report on the German victory. This journalist creamed up information from lots of his journalist friends, guys and women who’d seen the stuff happen and who knew the inside score in eight, ten European countries.’
    â€˜Were you included in this select group of information-gatherers?’
    â€˜He talked to me too, yeah.’
    â€˜If you and your newspaper friends have contacts in the occupied territories, I assume you’re still useful to this unofficial envoy?’
    â€˜Not dumb, are you?’ Christy said.
    â€˜Unlike my sister – no, I don’t bury my head in the sand.’
    â€˜The United States maintains diplomatic relations with the Vichy Government,’ Christy went on, ‘so we have agents and double agents planted all over France. Right now, though, we’re more interested in Italy. The journalist who’s cosy with Roosevelt has been appointed co-ordinator of a bunch of writers, actors and photographers, just useless Jewish scribblers according to some Washington high brass, and for my sins I’m part of that team.’
    â€˜You’re not Jewish.’
    â€˜No, I told you I’m out of the same can as you are.’
    â€˜What does all this Roosevelt stuff have to do with me?’
    â€˜So far military intelligence selects the agents, though that situation will change quite soon, I guess. My brother more-or-less blackmailed me into taking the job and I couldn’t turn the son of a bitch down.’
    â€˜What do you get out of it?’
    â€˜I get to sail with a convoy and take all the photographs I want with minimum restriction. Brockway’s is my employer. Brockway’s is also my cover. I’m “serviced”, for want of a better word, by Brockway’s London office.’
    â€˜You still haven’t explained how I fit into all this?’ Polly said.
    â€˜For years Mussolini’s secret police have been beating up the opponents of Italian Fascism into terrorised silence. But the opponents haven’t gone away. They’re hiding out in Rome, Turin, Milan, Genoa, all over the north. What you have in Italy, like what you have in France, is really a class war raging right under the Nazi