Ruth Ester 'Pucci' Lewis is a part-time agent of the OSS.
Her day job in these days of the Second World War is a pilot for the Women Air Force Service Pilots, aka the WASP. This highly skilled and eminently qualified plane jockey normally spends her work hours ferrying factory-fresh aircraft from their creation to wherever they will loaded onto ships or heading back to the factory for repairs.
That is when she is not responding to a request for far more clandestine work, what she refers to once as "the occasional home front undercover girl assignment".
When we meet her, she mentions having just been at "spy school" a month earlier. She had then been returned to her transiting duties only to get a call for an assignment. Her WASP boss, herself a skilled pilot, was less than thrill with it, mumbling that "those OSS boys playing right into [her] independent streak".
That attitude extends to her appearance. At one point she is having to explain yet again to her boss why she wore her hair in a short, shaggy style similar to Amelia Earhart's (it was more convenient when having to fly coast-to-coast wearing a required leather helmet) and why it was a tabby orange color (it's fun!).
Lewis is 25 years old. The odd nickname came from her fascination at a young age with the stories being the operats by Puccini. The daughter of a pastor who had spent a good deal of her teenage years thinking about learning to fly and then, at 18 and meeting a famous woman pilot, working hard to earn her pilot's license. When she discovered to her dismay that her dream of transporting passenger on commercial flights around the world was never going to happen because she was female, she opted a degree in journalism where she might be able to make a living writing for magazines about flying.
Then the War came to America and the need to female pilots to take on the ferrying duties. And after that, the unexpected offer to occasionally do something just a little different.
Good Lines:
- Thought by Pucci about walking away from a curious situation, "An intelligence operative who minds her own business would be a contradiction in terms".