It was 1939. Europe was a mess. Helena Marianka was seriously pissed off about America's failure to get involved in stopping that asshole's quest for world domination. She had, in fact, gotten in trouble with the university's administration for mouthing off in class about it. Some idiot student had told a concerned parent, doubtless. Hysterical woman, some said. Disloyal, said others. Shut up, said pretty much everybody, including the people in charge of her paycheck. The message was loud and clear. She shut up temporarily and under protest, until she could figure out a way to sneak in the same information in a more subtle way while keeping herself fed. There weren't that many universities willing to hire a woman. Not in 1939. Not if she had a big mouth and a tendency not to respect anything just because it was wearing pants. Helena had a nice situation here. There had to be a way to get the message out without screwing up her life. But she was in a bad mood. And now this.
He came into her office as if he'd made an appointment, which he certainly hadn't. A pushy young journalist with no respect for his betters. Tom Harkness. Something like that. Helena wished that she could have booted him for a student, but her conferences were through for the day. What did he want to talk about? Just what had gotten her in trouble in the first place. And he'd walked around her desk in such a way that she couldn't get by him. And he actually perched on her desk, which was really beyond the pale. She'd never have let a student do it. And he never took off his hat when he came in, which anyone not raised in a barn should know a gentleman ought to do. And then he just peered at her from under the brim (it wasn't an unattractive hat, mind, it was just that its geographic location was inappropriate in the circumstances) and began to pepper her with questions about Europe. Intelligent questions, in fact. Questions bound to get her in even more hot water. Really, it just wasn't fair. It seemed to Helena that he was sitting far too close to her, that it was getting warm, and that every third query was directed to her legs rather than her face. She wondered if her seams were straight. Well, lord knew, she couldn't check now.
"Why do you want to know this?" she asked, quashing the nervousness. "Who do you think will print it?"
"Right now? Probably no one," he responded. "That doesn't mean it's not worth finding out what's going on."
She continued to eye him cautiously, "Why, if no one is going to print, are you doing this?"
"The truth is always worth pursuing."
With a sigh, Tom took off his hat and tossed it down on the desk. He ran his fingers through his hair and pulled a crumpled packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. Fishing one from the pack, he put it to his lips and lit it.
He took a long slow drag, absentmindedly twirling his pen across his knuckles. Then, with a long slow exhale, he began to explain.
"I worked for the San Francisco Examiner for three years, but they fired me when I started writing about topics that they didn't want to print."
The smoke curled up from his cigarette and he looked for a place to tap the ash and realized there was no ashtray in the office.
"Guess I should have asked, huh?" he said, walking to the window. He opened it, stubbed the cigarette out on the outside ledge and, with a deft flick, launched it down to the bushes below.
Turning, Tom realized that Helena's skirt had crept up her leg slightly as she swivelled her creaky, university-issue chair to follow his trajectory. He saw the seams on her stockings and his eyes travelled along the curve of her calves, almost causing him to lose his train of thought.
'Mercy, what a set of legs,' Tom reflected, and for a moment all he could think of was how good those legs would look stretched out on his couch. Or wrapped around his waist.
Forcing himself back to reality, he tried to remember what he'd been saying and wondered exactly how long he'd been staring. Was it just a second or was it longer? Had she noticed? He leaned against the window sill, trying to appear nonchalant, and continued.
"You see, you've been saying some things that have made you mighty unpopular. Unfortunately, I also think it's the truth. We have a population in this country that wants to ignore everything that happens in the rest of the world."
"There's a guy over in Germany right now who's rebuilding the military. He's already taken away the rights of Jews and now they're burning books. A couple of months ago, a plane called the Kamikaze landed in London. The company that built it is named Mitsubishi and it's obvious that this plane has no purpose other than warfare. Franco and the Spanish are still in a civil war and Italy is getting ready to erupt. And Stalin is killing everything that moves."
"So you ..." Helena began.
"On top of all that," Tom continued impetuously, cutting her off, "the British Empire is falling apart. They're losing control of India . They're overburdened in Africa. Hell, they're even having problems in Ireland.So you've got one empire being built and one crumbling. I don't know for sure where it's headed, but I sure don't like the look of it."
"Okay, but what's that got to do with me?" Helena interjected, speaking rapidly so as to get a chance to complete a sentence before Tom started talking again.
"You're one of the few people who sees what's happening."
"But that doesn't ..." she tried to respond.
"And, you're from Poland. Poland is sort of the key to the whole thing. They've got the Russians at the backdoor and the Germans at the front. If Poland falls one way or the other, we're going to see a war that will make the Great War look like a bake sale.You know it's coming and so do I. We have a chance to try to make people understand. We can try to stop it or we can sit here and do nothing like everybody else."
Helena sat, at a loss for words. It wasn't often that someone came in spouting more anti-patriotic sentiment than she was inclined to spout herself.
"You hungry?" Tom asked abruptly. "Why don't we talk about this over a sandwich?"
He put his hat on, pushing it forward on his brow and grabbed Helena's coat off the hook on the back of the door. He held it out.
Stunned, she looked at him for a moment, seemingly trying to decide whether to accompany him or just kick him out.
Finally, with a shrug, she stood and slipped her arms into her coat.
A sandwich couldn't hurt.
-----
No, a sandwich couldn't hurt, especially if someone else was buying. And this Harkness person, undercultivated though he was, had a certain animal charm. Even if he was much younger. More importantly (she dragged her mind back to those more important matters) he was right. In fact, he was voicing Helena's own concerns. Certainly worth a lunch. His hands lingered on the collar of her coat after she'd slipped her arms in for just a second too long, and she felt his fingers on the back of her neck before he let go. Helena shivered, just a little, yanking her thoughts back to the issue at hand. Really, it must be early senility or something. Her concentration used to be better than this. Tom was, of course, still talking. She didn't think he'd stopped, reflecting with a certain wry amusement that Tom talked almost as much as she did herself. Arguing for a living would do that to you. She supposed it was the common lot of journalists and academics both. They walked down the corridor, Helena's heels clicking on the wooden floor, and then out onto the sidewalk. She took his arm. He was quite a bit taller than she, and the arm felt hard and muscular under her hand.
Helena refused to think about it. "Figuring out what's true is will require something resembling concrete evidence, and then we need a respectable source to disseminate it. I take it that the idea is to put pressure on the powers that be?"
Tom slipped his arm around her waist to the small of her back as they crossed the street and she found herself leaning into his body in a distinctly unladylike way. Oh dear. What was getting into her?
Guiding her across the street, Tom steered them to a small diner. Times were still tough for a lot of folks. Many people still hadn't recovered from the big crash in '29. Entering the diner, he directed Helena to a table. Before sitting down, however, she excused herself.
Turning her back to him, Helena glanced over her shoulder. It took Tom a moment to realize that she was waiting for him to take her coat. He held the collar and she slipped out of the sleeves. The coat was more for looks than anything else. Fall in Los Angeles rarely necessitated any kind of wrap.
Tom folded Helena's coat over the back of the chair across from his and placed his hat on the seat. He watched her walk away. Though only a glimpse of her calves weas visible beneath the hem of her skirt, it still somehow bordered on the scandalous. He suspected thats she dressed like that intentionally to cause people to notice her and confront their own prejudices. Her skirt was also just tight enough to hug the curve of her waist and the gentle flare of her hips. And, despite his best intentions, Tom caught himself thinking things that had nothing to do with war or Europe or universities or newspapers. For the second time in a half an hour.
So he watched her walk away. Though petite, she cut a swath through the room -- head held high, confidence bordering on arrogance, unapologetically defiant.
He ordered a cup of coffee and leaned back to await her return.
As Tom looked over the notes he'd taken as he questioned Helena, he became aware that he'd written virtually nothing down. He was slightly embarrassed to realize that he didn't even remember very much of what she'd said. What he did remember from her office was the way her hair falls across her shoulders. He remembered the way her eyes challenged him. He was used to dealing with men and asserting dominance and, most often, those he questioned found themselves losing their composure. Helena hadn't. In fact, she seemed to relish the unspoken game they were playing, searching for the chink in one another's armor.
He heard the click of her heels on the floor and saw her returning. Standing, he pulled out the chair next to his own. She looked at the seat across from him, obviously thinking it would be more proper to sit across from him, but that seat was already strategically occupied by hat and coat.
So Helena sat, and Tom slid her chair in and sat down next to her. He noticed that her cheeks looked slightly flushed and wondered why. Could he have said something? Or did she, too, feel the same palpable and exquisite tension that so distracted him?
"So what do you intend to do?" he asked him bluntly.
