O.C. Writers

// Valparaiso, Republic of Chile – March 1942 

Because Chile was located in the Southern Hemisphere, March was an autumn month, saturated with fog in the early mornings, dry and hot during the rest of the day and cool in the evening when the temperature dropped sharply.

Right now, though, it wasn’t just adjusting to the inverted seasons that concerned Lynwood Ardent. Rather it was anticipating his clandestine meeting with a woman he did not know who had telephoned his hotel room and said she was German and had secret information she wanted the American government to have. 

The enigma of his hush-hush assignment, something that he felt unqualified to carry out and yet one that required his skills as a radio engineer, coupled with his recent arrival in Valparaiso, continued to bewilder him. His first time abroad, the city was far away and different than San Francisco, and yet after his first few days, perhaps not so different after all, both port cities with their climbing hills, lumbering trolley cars, and their perpetual embrace of the sea. But what concerned him most of all because of the nature of his assignment was the attitude of the people, the Porteños, as the people of Valparaiso were called, toward him, the gringo, and his inability to communicate at all with them that he found so troubling. And it was not just the Porteños, but amazingly also the Germans. It was something that astounded him for in Valparaiso, because so many had settled there, many still spoke only their native language.

The funicular in which he was riding, the ascensor, descended noisily down the very steep hill, offering him a startling, birds-eye view of the amphitheater-like city, its very wide bay and its sprawling harbor. The air was tinged with wisps of black smoke, the residue of the engine powering the funicular up and down the hill, the faraway smell of the sea which he had viewed for a few dazzling moments while descending the precipitous hill, the stairways and terraces, the maze of rusted roofs over colorful wooden houses, bungalows and chalets, the windows with their little white curtains, all of them tumbling down to the port, the water cold-looking and silvery. And from somewhere, for just a moment, a delightful whiff of baking bread before the miasma of automobile exhausts overcame it. When at last he was deposited with a thud at the bottom of one of Valparaiso’s forty-odd hills, he stepped out along with the others into the Pasaje Quillota and looked for the Pasteleria Palermo and Tea Salon, the place where she had said she wanted to meet.

It was a small, gritty narrow cobblestone place baked by the sun in a part of town he would have never imagined, with its common facades of two-story sculptured and weathered gray granite buildings lining both sides of the sloping street. Out on the sidewalk vendors were gesticulating with vigor, calling attention to their displays of fresh fruit grown in the fertile basins of the Aconcagua Valley: colorful varieties of plump table grapes, dark blueberries, yellowish pulp peaches, green pears, avocados and purple skin plums and, from the valley of Elqui, papaw and green cone-shaped cherimoyas displayed alongside the raisins and sun-dried peaches of Huasco. Further along a woman in a white apron peddled raw sugar from Paita. Animated, they all stood behind their wooden stalls waving their arms trying to catch the eyes of the strolling passers-by.

And as he moved down the sidewalk, skirting a boy selling tortillas, past an older black Studebaker parked at the curb and the narrow windows of one small establishment after another, his eyes were drawn to the garish riot of storefront signs: El Tarzan, El Pobre Pollo, Panaderia Espáñola, Bazar Pepino, Cucumber Bazar, and the Zapateria El Volcan Shoe Store. Ardent looked anxiously for the place where they had agreed to meet. Fearing he might have misunderstood her directions, while drawing nearer to the end of the street before it took a steep dive down to the harbor, he at last spotted the tea salon.

Ardent crossed the street and made his way into the warm and crowded large public room. It was suffused in welcoming chatter and laughter, the waiters holding up their trays while working their way through the room beneath the lazily spinning overhead fans, the dark wood blades hardly dissipating the blur of tobacco smoke which hovered overhead like a thunderous cloud. He hoped she would spot him first as he had no idea what she might look like. He was tall, and very American looking, he remembered the hotel’s smiling front desk clerk telling him in her tortured, stuttering English when he had checked in the other day.

In his new role as a clandestine operative Ardent was first and foremost a United States government official with the Federal Communications Commission. He was a senior investigator assigned to the new, and very secret, Radio Intelligence Division, headquartered in the Customs House Building, at 13th & Alice in downtown San Francisco. He had wanted to ensure he looked the part when he went to meet her, so he was wearing the better of the two suits he had brought with him.

Ardent was relieved when almost at once a thin, dark-haired woman toward the back of the room spotted him. Attired in a short sleeve loden green dress with a collar edged in black piping, distinctive square black buttons running down her front, her waist cinched with a wide black belt and holding a lit cigarette, she half stood and gave him a tight hand signal before slithering back down. He looked at her more closely as he approached, she middle-aged and not a Porteño as she had said but not really what he had imagined either, remembering the ridiculous montage he had constructed in his mind of what the average everyday German woman might look like in Valparaiso and wondering how she might resemble her.

He twisted and turned through the busy room and held his satchel up to avoid the men with coffee cups on their laps sprawled in worn brown wicker chairs spilled across his path, while edging around tightly bunched couples sitting at small, white stone-covered tabletops banded in brass, chatting, eating pastries and sipping tea. 

And now that he was here he wondered again how she had been so sure it was him she wanted to speak with, let alone how she might have known of his arrival and he had spent hours last evening and this morning wondering about it and turning over in his mind. Just arrived the other day on orders from Washington, his presence, he had been told, had been shared with the Chileans, the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, which included a contingent of FBI agents, and the consulate in town. Despite that it was underscored to him not to expect any assistance. His was a specialized, and highly technical operation and he was advised to “keep his head down” and watched whom he spoke to.

She said her name was Renata, and she had information she claimed was important for the United States to know about secret radio transmissions to Germany. That was the extent of it. And as he drew closer that afternoon he placed his concerns firmly aside determined to listen to whatever she might have to say, despite his worrying about how she could have known anything about him.