Chapter Twelve

CHAPTER TWELVE

JANUARY 1979

The swear jar on Constance Halliday’s desk is kept full by Natalie and Billie. Helen is too ladylike to let the profanity fly, and Mary Alice uses bad words like someone speaking a foreign language.

Under Miss Halliday’s tutelage, the four learn how to eat fish with two forks and sip from a soupspoon without making a noise. She teaches them how to exit a car without showing their underwear, to waltz like Viennese debutantes, and to hot-wire an automobile in under twenty seconds. They build bombs, decipher codes, learn how to shake a tail and how to kill. They master suffocation and stabbing, the intricacies of poison and garrote. Constance Halliday does not like military-grade weapons, finding them unsubtle and flashy, but she ensures the foursome are thoroughly grounded in firearms although she makes no secret of her preference for bare hands and improvised weapons. Ballpoint pens, jump ropes, sewing needles—they learn lethal uses for all of them.

And each develops her specialty. Natalie loves anything that makes a noise, bombs and grenades and the biggest guns she can get her tiny hands around. Mary Alice discovers an affinity for poisons, slipping harmless substances into the food Miss Halliday serves in order to practice her sleight of hand. Her spare time is spent mixing up enough toxic messes to immobilize an army. Helen, surprisingly, turns out to be a sharpshooter, her eye for detail serving her well as she marks changes in wind and estimated trajectories. She is so skilled, in fact, that Constance allows her to borrow her favorite weapon, a tidy little Colt .38 that has been fitted with a hammer shroud to keep it tucked neatly into a pocket. There are nicks on the handgrip, slash marks that they suspect are kill notches, but no one dares to ask.

But Billie Webster is a struggle for Constance Halliday. She is fair with a grenade and can handle a gun almost as well as Helen, but she doesn’t like it. Her attention wanders, and she takes to shooting wide of the targets just to see what else she can hit. When she takes out the eye of Constance Halliday’s favorite garden sculpture—an evil-looking iron rabbit—Miss Halliday raps her sharply on the shoulder with her stick.

“My office, Miss Webster. If you please.”

Billie mutters under her breath but follows. She has not been in the office since the day of their arrival and she soon realizes this is not a social visit. Miss Halliday doesn’t invite her to sit down, so Billie keeps to her feet, gaze fixed on the painting behind Constance’s desk—a nymph of some sort with stars in her hands and a regretful expression.

Miss Halliday doesn’t say anything for a long minute. She sits instead, tapping a letter opener on the desk and teaching Billie the power of silence.

Finally, Constance Halliday throws the letter opener on her desk. “Miss Webster,” she says with a sigh, “I begin to despair. You are not a bad recruit—”

“Thank you.”

She carries on as if Billie hasn’t spoken. “But you are very rapidly becoming a superfluous one. You shoot well, but not as well as Miss Randolph. You are good with languages, but not as fluent as Miss Tuttle. You are heedless of your personal safety to a degree that one might be tempted to call courageous, but you are not quite as indomitable as Miss Schuyler. In short, Miss Webster, I fail to see the point of you.”

She pauses, but there is nothing Billie can possibly say to that. Constance judges the pause perfectly, then continues on, her tone pleasant. It is the casual, matter-of-fact delivery that hurts more than the words.

“We do have a placement with a perfectly good secretarial college in London. We could send you there. I daresay you might be able to pick up shorthand or typewriting without too much trouble. They could find you a nice office job after you earn your certificate. Perhaps you’d like bookkeeping? That can be rather fulfilling, I’m told.”

Only the tiniest gleam in Constance Halliday’s eye tells Billie she is doing this on purpose, pushing her for a reaction. She doesn’t know what Constance is trying to kindle—anger? Denial? But she is determined not to give it to her.

Billie waits her out in silence and Constance finally gives in, smiling thinly. “It must be difficult for you. I understand.”

“Understand what?”

Constance has gotten her to talk, but she doesn’t gloat. She merely carries on in the same bland tone, tapping a file on her desk. “You’ve never had to work for it, have you? Never been tested, not really.”

Billie thinks about her childhood and tamps down the rising anger. “I don’t know what your little folder says, but I’m not like the rest of them, okay? I didn’t get the picket fence and the golden retriever.”

Constance shrugs. “I am not speaking of the trappings of a happy childhood, Miss Webster. I mean what happens inside—your intellect and what you’ve done with it. Or rather, what you haven’t done with it. Your records show exceptional intelligence and mediocre results. It’s a comfortable place, mediocrity. Never pushing oneself to the limit to see what you can take. Never staring down your fears, never reaching into yourself to find that last bit of courage. You don’t even know what it is that you are made of—and what’s more, you seem distinctly uninterested in finding out. You do just enough to get by, and frankly, I would rather have a dozen recruits with less potential and more heart, Miss Webster. I fear my brother has made a mistake.”

She continues to smile but this time there is pity in it.

“Bullshit!” The word erupts from Billie before she can stop it.

Constance gives a slow nod. “I appear to have struck a nerve there.” She pushes herself to her feet and gestures for Billie to come around the desk. She turns the girl by the shoulders and points to the painting with her stick. “I know you have not had the benefit of a Classical education, Miss Webster. Do you know who that is?”

Billie shrugs.

“Astraea. Have you ever heard the name?”

Billie looks at the slender figure in her gauzy white gown. She is drifting just above a landscape, her toes brushing the grass as she rises into the air. One hand is stretched out towards a group of weeping shepherds, offering them a gesture of farewell, while the other holds a pair of measuring scales to her chest. “I don’t think so. It sounds Greek.”

“Very good. Astraea was a goddess, the daughter of Dusk and Dawn, gifted by the gods with the tools of justice. She was the last immortal to live amongst mankind. But in the end, she despaired of our wickedness and she left, fleeing to the stars with her scales. She sits among the stars today as the constellation Virgo, the scales of Libra next to her. She waits, they say, for the day she will return.”

Billie looks closer at the goddess, at the expression of resigned sadness on her face as she regards the humans who are clearly pleading with her to stay.

Constance Halliday goes on. “All the great English poets wrote of her, Shakespeare, Milton, Browning. Historians compared Elizabeth I to her, and Catherine the Great. And Aphra Behn, Charles II’s playwright spy, used ‘Astraea’ as her code name in honor of her. She has always been there, in the shadows.”

Constance Halliday gestures again, pointing to the goddess’s feet. A narrow line of silver lies in the grass, almost obscured by the greenery, but just visible. Forgotten but not gone.

“Look closely. Astraea took her scales with her, but she left her sword behind—the sword that was given by the gods to administer justice. The question is, Miss Webster, will you pick it up?”

She doesn’t expect an answer. Instead she dismisses Billie and the girl goes to her room, where she stretches out on her bed, smoking contraband cigarettes and thinking until the sun sets and the room falls into shadow.

The next day, Billie tries. She oils her gun and rubs it down just as she has been taught. She loads it and lines up her sights, firing seven times. Six go wide. She knows Constance Halliday is standing behind her, but she does not turn to look. She tries again and it is a little better but not much. Her face is hot and she feels tears sitting behind her eyes. If she gives in, it would be an ugly cry, snotty and heaving. So she chokes down the disappointment that Constance Halliday is right. She is undisciplined and haphazard. And these qualities will get someone killed in the field.

To her surprise, Constance Halliday pokes her gently with her stick. “Everything alright there, Miss Webster?”

She closes her eyes and feels the heft of the gun in her hand. The weight of her embarrassment is heavy but she lets it sit on her shoulders, feeling the downward push of it. And then she has it. She opens her eyes and runs a finger down the side of the gleaming barrel. “I don’t like relying on something that can get taken away from me,” she tells her mentor.

Constance Halliday gives her a long, assessing look, then nods. “Well, your hands can’t be taken, can they?”

Billie waits to be thrown out of the program, shipped off to London with a steno pad and a pencil skirt. Instead, the next day she walks out to the training ground to find a man standing next to Constance Halliday. He is muscular and ugly as sin, wearing sweatpants and an expression like he has a better place to be and is doing her a favor.

Constance Halliday smiles thinly. “You may call him Mad Dog. And you will do what he tells you.”

Whatever he is missing out on to be there, he makes Billie pay for it because it turns out that Constance has brought him in just for her. While the other three work at perfecting their respective skills, he teaches Billie everything she doesn’t know about hand-to-hand combat. He throws her down a hundred times that first day, landing her squarely on her back and knocking the air out of her lungs every time.

After she is dismissed for the day, she realizes her legs will not support her and she crawls up the stairs on her hands and knees. The bedrooms are freezing, so the four girls have taken to meeting in the big linen cupboard where the pipes keep the temperature warm enough for the boxes of baby chicks Constance Halliday has ordered. It is a tight fit, but the girls spend their evenings in this tiny room with its warm air that smells of chicken shit and lavender. Billie is too sore to lift her arms, so Mary Alice feeds her while Nat fiddles with a set of lockpicks and a basket of locks and Helen cleans the soil out from under her fingernails. Everyone has chores at Benscombe, and Helen’s is weeding the kitchen garden between weapons drills. She is also a traveling drugstore and manages to get Billie some prescription painkillers while Nat filches half a bottle of wine from the pantry.

By the next day, the bruises have blossomed and Billie’s body is black and blue from neck to ankles, but she hauls herself out of bed and goes back for more. And this time Mad Dog only throws her fifty times.

Four weeks later, on a wet, miserable morning in the garden, Billie catches him below his center of gravity, levering him onto his stomach as she follows him down onto the soggy grass, landing hard on the small of his back with her knee and driving the air out of his lungs. He pops his head up, a reflex to draw in a breath, and when he does, Billie wraps her elbow around his throat. It would have been easy to jerk the head back towards her body, but she pulls him slowly, careful not to loosen her grip. His legs flail behind her, but this accomplishes nothing except to tire him out. He gets his knees under his body and pushes up, trying to throw her off, but she hangs on, jamming her knee into his kidneys. His face changes colors, pretty ones—pink, red, then purple. His nostrils flare white and he keeps opening and closing his mouth, searching for a breath that isn’t there.

He finally sags into surrender, tapping the ground as he collapses. Billie holds on a second longer just because she can, and then rolls off of him. He whoops air into his lungs, gasping and shaking. Billie stands astride him, feet planted wide apart, blood humming in her ears. Her hands are curled into fists and she is ready for him to go again. She wants him to get up and try again. But he lies there, beaten.

Billie looks up to see Constance Halliday watching them, a smile on her face, and she realizes she is smiling too.

“Finally, Miss Webster,” she says softly. “You understand. It isn’t your anger that will make you good at this job. It is your joy.”

The fighting that Mad Dog teaches Billie is not sporting or fair. It is down and dirty street brawling. He teaches her to go for the balls and the eyes, to drive the heel of her hand into an opponent’s nose until the cartilage crunches crisply, like celery. He teaches her how to ram the resulting mess into the brain to finish the job. He shows her on a chicken how to snap a neck with a quick and decisive twist and how to choke someone out using her thighs or the crook of her elbow.

When the training is finished, he has a pronounced limp and an ear that will never be the same, but Constance Halliday is satisfied. Her little flock of Sphinxes has come along nicely, far from what they were when her brother discovered them. Helen Randolph had been an easy choice. Her father had been a founding member of the OSS, and her grandfather a diplomat with a flair for secret negotiations. Clandestine service is in her blood.

Natalie Schuyler is also a legacy. Her grandmother is a child when her family is driven out of the Russian Empire in a storm of bullets and bombs. They settle in Holland, adopt a new name, and attempt to put the past behind them, but Natalie’s grandmother never forgets the sounds of war. When it comes again to Europe, she sends her infant son to America with her parents and stays behind, offering her services to the Dutch Resistance. The elderly Schuylers make inquiries for years afterwards, but no one ever tells them what became of her, and it is too heartbreaking to guess. But Major Richard Halliday knows. And the day he shows Natalie the file on her grandmother, she suddenly understands the impulse towards chaos which beats in her blood.

Mary Alice Tuttle is a more straightforward case. She is the youngest of three children, the bonus daughter after her parents have had one of each. She tears through childhood in a whirl of starched petticoats and blond curls as an afterthought, always knowing that her family was complete before she arrived. Until her brother goes to Vietnam and never comes back. His best friend is carried home in a coffin and Mary Alice’s sister, his fiancée, faints when she sees it. Her parents are broken, her sister destroyed, and it seems very simple to Mary Alice. Wars are fought by young men who don’t get to choose and that is wrong. Anything that can be done to stop the carnage is justifiable. She burns her acceptance letter to Juilliard and enrolls at Berkeley instead. She publishes an opinion piece in the student newspaper that is so inflammatory, a state representative calls for her to be arrested as a traitor. But it is this opinion piece which brings her to the attention of a Museum recruiter.

Like Mary Alice, Billie is recruited because of her idealism, her willingness to bloody her knuckles for a good fight. She has come the furthest in training, and Constance Halliday is reminded of other young women like her during the war. Her Furies. They were scarcely more than children when they were sent off to fight in a war they didn’t start. They were gallant, indomitable. And they died for that gallantry, she thinks bitterly. This way is better. The Sphinxes will use cunning and subterfuge; they will even the odds that have been stacked against them. And they will survive, she promises herself.

It has taken nine months of physical training to bring them into fighting shape. Then secretarial school in London to learn shorthand and typing and the rudiments of air hostessing—posing as secretaries or stewardesses is excellent cover. They have taken courses in cooking and health care should they have to pose as domestic servants or nurses. Driving school has given them the essentials of maintenance and evasive maneuvers. A first-aid intensive has schooled them in how to patch themselves up in the field. Courses in language and culture have refined them—French, Spanish, Arabic, opera, wines. A class in method acting has taught them how to develop cover characters and to cry on cue.

For the final touch, they have all been sent to Paris to be made over. Natalie’s curls have been smoothed into place, although she complains that this takes half her personality away. Mary Alice’s slightly gapped front teeth are capped to make her smile less memorable. Helen is so beautifully groomed there is not much for the consultants to do except trim her hair and give her a pair of glasses to emphasize her seriousness.

Billie lets them cut off her split ends, but when they consult a plastic surgeon to fix the scar above her lip, she walks out. Helen is disapproving, looking through her clear-lensed glasses with concern.

“We’re supposed to get rid of anything that makes us conspicuous,” she reminds Billie. “That scar is an identifying feature.”

“I like it,” Mary Alice puts in loyally.

“It’s not a matter of liking it,” Helen protests. “It could get Billie remembered and that is dangerous.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Billie tells her.

The truth is, Billie is scared. She has let enough of herself slip away already. Elocution lessons have rubbed the edges off her Texas drawl; the reading lists have improved her vocabulary. The art and history they have absorbed have broadened her world to a vastness she has never before imagined. She is not entirely certain who she is anymore. But if she puts a fingertip to the little ridge that sits just above her lip, she can remember herself.

Two weeks later, they are on a plane for Nice.